Monthly Archives: March 2010

bigger than a kitty cat

Posted on March 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

Remember when you were a student and you had dreams of showing up to class with no pants or being unable to answer any of the questions on the final exam? Let me reassure you that teachers experience exactly the same thing from the other side. Several times I had dreams of showing up to class without a lesson plan, or being unable to find the room where I was supposed to teach on the first day, or some such. These are the standard frets of your unconscious when something is expected of you in daily life.

Last night I had the first such dream in a writerly framework: I dreamed that I kept receiving e-mails from various editors asking me to rewrite and change stuff in my forthcoming novel that wasn’t good enough. It was in a much different tone than the dreams I used to have about writing, which were usually about heartrending failure, and sometimes spectacular success–that is when they weren’t some kind of hallucinatory peyote-type experience. This dream was normal, low-level performance anxiety. I woke up slightly irritated and vaguely amused: this must mean I am officially a professional novelist now.

Still, even when fiction writing becomes one of those daily things that is expected of you, it can never be quite tame. At least not for me. I would say teaching is kind of like having a kitty cat in your apartment: it is sweet, and you love it, and you have to maintain it and feed it. Sometimes if you really piss it off it might scratch you or leave a turd inside your shoe. But, barring some spectacular freak accident, it will remain unable to kill you. Writing, on the other hand, is like having a much, much larger animal in your apartment. You don’t know quite what that animal is because you can only see it in flashes out of the corner of your eye. You think it sleeps in the closet under the stairs because you’ve found matted hair and the gutted carcasses of whatever it eats in there, but you’ve never been able to surprise the beast itself in its lair. Sometimes you will glimpse a pair of yellow eyes beholding you with millennial patience, the graceful slither of a tail disappearing around a corner. You will hear a hiss under your bed, a low rumble behind a wall. A moist jungle smell, sweet and perhaps decaying. You live with the knowledge that this animal can festoon the carpet with your innards whenever it feels like, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t feel like. Maybe it likes the scent of you; maybe it likes to listen to your heartbeat while you sleep. All things considered you rather like it too: when it’s gone you rather miss the thrill of its presence.

in the words of a girl who doesn’t exist

Posted on March 23, 2010 | 3 comments

So, I am starting a new novel. The hardest part at the beginning is finding a good voice, the voice in which the story needs to be told. There will be starts and stops, lots of frustration. Probably a good dose of gut-wrenching terror, especially since this book wants to be in the first person which I find incredibly uncomfortable. But I don’t care if writing this whole damn thing feels like wearing an itchy sweater, as long as it works in the end.

Something else that is likely to be a challenge is that a lot of this book is going to be about scorching sexual chemistry. There was a bit of that in the last book and there will be more in this one. When sexy prose works, it is really really good. When it doesn’t, it is positively disastrous. Sex is possibly the hardest thing there is to write, one wrong word choice can render a steamy scene totally laughable. While polishing up the last book I had a whole exchange with my editor about the word “cunt.” She had concerns that it would be too jarring for some readers. I wrote back the following:

I kind of avoided naming female genitalia with circumlocutions like “inside her” and stuff like that, but eventually you just have to name the thing you’re talking about. “Vagina” is not hot, it’s too doctor’s office. “Pussy” has the disadvantage of being both too cute and too porny. I decided to go all out and use “cunt,” after all this is not a shy book. But I didn’t just throw it around willy nilly, I saved it for one or two special occasions.

The argument boiled down to: dude, sorry, but this is just a cunt kind of book. And the argument worked, because it was.

Now that I am back at square one with a new novel, I have to ask myself: is this one a cunt kind of book? The narrator is a very stark person, oftentimes unflinching. But she is also very young, and sex is in many ways her softest spot. Figuring out what language she would use, what she would say and not say, is going to tax my skills. Everything has to match up with who she is; the silences have to be just as telling as the graphic detail. At this point I still don’t know what word she would use to talk about her ladyflower (probably not “ladyflower” though), and if I had to guess I would say she herself would have a devil of a time choosing a word that fits her. Part of what I may have to portray with the text is her struggle to find words for an experience so powerful and puzzling, one that is both ineffable and thoroughly embodied. (This is part of the reason why I think first person may kick my ass: having the language still flow while also trying to render its troubles attempting to find a flow… Christ on a cracker, this is the sort of thing that may make me chicken back out into third person!)

One thing at a time though. Before I find out what words she would use to talk about making love, I have to find out what words she would use to talk about her morning commute, her cat, the dreams that wake her up in the middle of the night.

3 Comments

Posted in sex, writing

Tagged In the Red, ladyflower, sex, writing

one

Posted on March 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

five

You first came to me one morning long ago, while I was working at the bank. Your voice simply announced, I am not a child of America, and suddenly I felt your presence in my body like a vaporous specter. You were standing where I was standing and performing the same mechanical tasks I was performing but you were not me. You were superimposed over me, like a drawing of a girl overlaying a drawing of a slightly different girl. When I was granted my lunch break I went upstairs into an empty office where I knew there was an abandoned typewriter and spilled out a paragraph or two of your voice.

That year I was the same age as my students are now. That year I fell disastrously in love for the first time. You had a different name then.

four

You liked to let him paint your face. You liked the feel of the plush brush against your skin; you liked the expectation in his eyes. You laid out your lipsticks for him in a neat row and asked, “what color do you want my mouth?” He picked a plum shade which would shortly be smeared all over him. You didn’t know why it made him hard for you to do this, yet you felt the blood rise to your cheeks to meet the powder blush he was applying there. Pink on pink, impossible to tell the real arousal apart from the cosmetic mimicking it.

When he lined your eyes, your lids didn’t even quiver. Not because you trusted him not to hurt you with the pencil–his hand was, after all, trembling slightly–but because a hurt inflicted by his hand was the best hurt of all.

three

You came to me again some years later. I wrote a whole novel about you that time. Unfortunately, it was no good. At least, you met him then, the man who liked to paint your face. And you gave me your name, Irina. When I saw how closely it mirrored my own, I laughed, and thought, all right, we’ll go with that then.

two

My last protagonist, Louise, made mischief with the impish glee one might expect. You are strange; you make mischief with something like grim determination. It must be some kind of Eastern European thing. Whenever I ask you why you do anything, you say, why not? What else is there to do? and I have, of course, nothing to answer.

You are a violinist playing chamber music on the sinking Titanic. You are a thief who steals even when what he pockets has no value. You are a man who still neatly parts his hair and cleans his fingernails on the morning he is to be executed. You are a futile gesture of humanity in the face of oblivion.

Last class for now…

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 2 comments

So, I taught my last class at UC Davis yesterday. The students gave me an ovation and I got all misty-eyed. I will miss this job very much. Honestly, it was easy to shed the identity of an academic. I thought it would be trickier, but basically it entailed no longer performing textual analysis for my superiors and no longer writing articles in a language that is completely unnatural to me. It turns out I can manage that quite well! So well that I can only understand in the dimmest way that I’m still supposed to take an examination next quarter; it no longer quite seems real.

No longer teaching literature is going to be a lot harder though. That really worked its way into my heart. I am a total crackhead for that look of dawning understanding on my students’ faces. Best thing ever. Sometimes I wonder if and how they will remember me. I wrote the following about teaching in a short story once:

The Egyptians had no hell. The punishment for the wicked was oblivion; there was nothing worse than not existing.

The students absorb this piece of information quietly. Probably some of them even write it down. They are very sweet, in many ways still children. In many ways they do not understand yet what I tell them. Certainly they will forget everything I say before they are old enough for it to really sink in, but sometimes I wonder if I leave a trace. Any trace at all. I wonder if they will recognize something that is happening to them slightly sooner because I told them to expect it.

You cannot really tell someone something they don’t already know. Teaching is not about filling blank minds. It is about inducing a flicker of recognition.

The protagonist of that story was an adjunct who couldn’t stomach finishing the PhD (I wrote it over a year ago–prescient, no?). I will try to get some kind of contract teaching work after I get my MA, maybe with the UC extension. After the book comes out, maybe I will get a job in a Creative Writing department? Quizás. It still seems far away. For now I have to access the totally feral, slightly unhinged head space I get into while writing a novel. But I’ll be back in the classroom eventually–if only to have a reason to get dressed in the morning! Writerly isolation can do unfortunate things to your psyche after too long.

This week, I also had to clear my desk in my office in Sproul Hall (they didn’t waste any time reclaiming my space!). It was a melancholy endeavor, despite the fact that Sproul is an utter dump no sane person should miss. My desk was a bleak-looking gray plastic-and-pressboard affair no bigger than a coffee table, lodged in a completely naked train-car-shaped room that gets broiling hot the instant the sun so much as kisses the roof. One time I tried to open the window in there and the whole pane fell off. Fell right the fuck off the side of the building, only kept from tumbling nine floors and ending the life of a passerby by the rusty latch, which did not open. There also has been a weird and unpleasant smell emanating from the wall in the corner of my office where the lone eldtrich computer resides (I swear that machine dates from the Clinton administration) that has not been resolved in all the three years I’ve been there. And that expiring groan the elevator makes when it grinds to a stop at the ninth floor freaks me the hell out; I always wonder if this is the time the whole contraption is going to let go and and plummet down into the basement, where my mashed flesh will mingle with the poorly-written student papers in my satchel. Plus Sproul Hall is never, ever cleaned. I think some of the dust bunnies in my office have evolved sentience, plus there is a green Skittle® on the floor in the staircase that has been there for so long I believe it has tenure by now. It began its life between the fifth and sixth floors, and when I didn’t see it for a while I surmised that perhaps whatever is making the weird smell in my office wall might have eaten it–but then I was relieved to find it crushed into the second floor landing. I will miss you, green Skittle®; don’t ever change.

2 Comments

Posted in academia, teaching

Tagged academia, farewell, skittles, teaching

In Valhalla there are no rejection slips.

Posted on March 9, 2010 | 4 comments

So, a while back my agent sent a pdf of my novel to The New Yorker with selected passages highlighted she thought could be used in the magazine. Unsurprisingly given my fresh fish status, the NYer editor did not bite, but sent my agent the nicest possible rejection notice. I will go ahead and include it:

Shapiro is incredibly talented and this is quite a debut, but we didn’t see any way to excerpt from it, unfortunately—the pieces you suggested are strong but fragmentary—and we felt that she wasn’t quite ready for the top-20 list, though she’ll in all likelihood make it there eventually! Thanks, anyway, for sending it over; it was a pleasure to read. Stay in touch if she writes any stories—or if anyone else crosses your mind for this issue (or any other).

This is a stage in a writer’s career: flattering personalized rejections with an invitation to submit again. This is, in itself, an achievement. As far as I can tell, a writer’s career looks something like this:

Stage 1: uncontrolled production of thousands of pages of crap. The afflicted asks herself, “why am I doing this? I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 2: some small moment of recognition. The afflicted may be told by a writing instructor that she is good, or get into an MFA program. The afflicted begins to submit work places, receiving a veritable avalanche of rejection slips that have been xeroxed so many times that the type on them is actually degrading. The slips are literally slips, as the writer is not yet worth the expense of an entire sheet of paper–that is when the submission is ever acknowledged at all. Often silence is deemed a sufficient rejection. The afflicted may sometimes doubt her own existence, and asks herself, “why am I doing this? I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 3: repeated near-misses. The afflicted may impress a writing instructor who will ask her to submit a story to his new literary magazine, which he is starting with a big-name editor who will subsequently not like the work in question. The afflicted may start seeing hand-scrawled notes on rejection slips that read “good work” or “submit again.” She may get requests from agents to see her full manuscript, which will inevitably get turned down after months of anxious fretting–but sometimes the agents may say something nice about it. This cycle of crazed hope/crestfallen disappointment may last for years, and the afflicted will ask herself, “why am I doing this? I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 4: someone says yes. The sky is ripped open, angels sing; the afflicted is elated that she hasn’t spent the last few years/decades/epochs talking to herself like a ranting homeless person. At some point she actually said something, and someone heard. This in no way means the cessation of impersonal rejection slips, which make the one acquiescence seem like some sort of perverse fluke. The afflicted will then worry endlessly about being unable to make the magic happen again, and will ask herself, “why am I doing this? I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 5: in Valhalla there are no rejection slips.

Through all these stages, the afflicted keeps writing anyway, though she is too close to her own stories to be able to see that, in their slow way, they are getting better. Improvement is like erosion: you can’t see anything happen, but if you take a measurement ten years later you have an inkling that, maybe, something did.

4 Comments

Posted in publishing, writing

Tagged phases of the writing career, publishing, The New Yorker, Valhalla, writing

shards of the past week

Posted on March 7, 2010 | 1 comment

My laptop is emitting a rhythmic chirrup that sounds as if it is housing crickets. I google the problem, and the fix-it suggestion is to hit the bottom of the computer, hard, with a closed fist. It works. Sometimes the most complex modern technologies require the most ancient forms of maintenance.

—

On my walk from work to the train station in the gathering dark, I am accosted by a lass who spills forth a frantic story about having just been rendered homeless this very night, about needing money to get back to her mother’s in San Diego. She bursts into tears, hiccups, “this is so embarrassing.” I do not know whether the story is true, but her distress is genuine. Her young face is known to me; there are many such faces in my classroom. I heave a big sigh and take a twenty out of my wallet.

—

I watch Polanski’s movie version of The Pianist. It is moving and harrowing, but in some places disconcertingly boring. Sometimes films cannot do what literature can do. Watching a man hidden in an apartment starve to death is not nearly as interesting as reading his thoughts about what it felt like.

—

I am missing someone cruelly; his absence is like a pall over my life. It seems to dim color, dampen taste, restrict breath. 13 rue Thérèse has a French title–never mind that the English title is also a French title! The title is Pensées de l’absent. Sometimes I think that would be an apt title for everything I write.

—

My office mate asks me whether I know that the MLA has changed its format for citations. I consider this news for a moment, then burst into laughter. “I don’t care!” I realize this at the same time as I say it. I am hit with a rush of gleeful freedom. At the same time I am disoriented and scared. It’s like being dropped in the middle of the ocean. Cold and filled with unfathomable life all the way to its lightless depths.