what’s not in the book

Posted on July 22, 2010 | 5 comments

Today I received my class book for my upcoming ten-year Stanford reunion.  The book is a compilation of pages alumni from my graduating class made about their lives since college.  Since I am an absolute sucker for that kind of nostalgia, I tore it out of its envelope and spent the whole afternoon devouring its contents.  Nom nom nom nostalgia, you are so tasty.

After absorbing a few hundred pages of my fellow alumni, I did start to feel a bit inadequate.  After all, I had never dived the Great Barrier Reef, or built hospitals in Africa, or won an Olympic medal, or created my own start-up, or backpacked in Patagonia, or cut cancer out of grateful children.  Then I realized I was being utterly absurd.  Of course the pages would only feature the impressive achievements of seemingly well-adjusted people!  For my own page, I didn’t very well write about the two and half years of harrowing pain that had me in & out of hospitals, the surgeries, the creditors calling about medical bills, the conviction that I was slowly dying, the loneliness, the terror.  I mean, I didn’t want to be a bummer.

Once the book was closed I sat there wondering about all that was elided from those pages, about the people who didn’t send pages at all.  Then I thought how grand it would be if all the pivotal moments from people’s lives had been included, even the tawdry and painful ones.  Sentences like:

  • I destroyed my marriage when I slept with my boss.  I got promoted though.
  • Last year I finally reached my weight loss goal.  Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
  • …but after my second stint in San Quentin was when I really began to make some bad decisions.
  • This stifled suburban life makes me want to wedge a shotgun tightly under my chin and blow the back of my head off.
  • The condom broke.  I am expecting twins in August.
  • The worm they removed from my large intestine was over three feet long.
  • When my divorce finally came through, I rewarded myself by having a prostitute do all the things my wife wouldn’t.  But now that burning rash on my scrotum won’t go away no matter what I do.

But no no, I am being foolish.  Such things never happen to Stanford graduates.  We are all exemplary.  Everyone of us as beautiful and serene as the flower-heavy night wind rustling the palms on the main quad.

People who went to the Ivies though, they are fucked up.

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Dude, this is what the inside of my head looks like.

Posted on July 16, 2010 | 3 comments

While I was making the bed, Dragos Popescu, one of Andrei’s business associates, suddenly spoke to me.  He is even more unbelievably tactless than Andrei is; those bastards won’t lie to me, even when I may want them to.  Today Dragos came up behind me while I was noticing that some of the stains on the new sheets hadn’t come out in the wash, and snapped my garters (he is the kind of man who can snap your garters even when you’re not wearing any).  “That’s nice, the pink underthings,” he said, “did Andrei suggest them?”

“Why are you here?  You’re just a bit character.”

“You were asking why men like young women so much, I’m going to tell you.”

I don’t know where he got that from, I did no such thing.  I was going about my housewifely business.  But I let him go on anyway, it gave me something to do while I was trying to figure out which way the fitted sheet was supposed to go.  “It not so much the smooth skin and the taut flesh, though that is nice too.  What is so lovely about them is that they will take the shape of whatever you choose to put them in, like water.  A woman who has been around, who may have pushed people out of herself, who may have realized that the world does not end when there is no man in the house, that woman with lines on her face and hip bones that have been pushed apart by growing life will not go breathless with need to give me what I want.  The young ones are so good, my dear, because they will say: do you like me in this dress? Would you think me prettier blonde?  Shall I put bags of silicone in my breasts?  Shall I give you what little power I might have had?  Would this please you?  There is no limit to how much they will cut themselves to please you.  How grateful I am to all their papas for not loving them.”

“Dragos, seriously?  This is what the old come stains on the bed make you think of?”

“Yes, how soft they are, how much you can hurt them, those sweet girls.  You simply cannot hurt an older woman like that.  And yes, my dear, you ought to get a stain remover for those.”

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whence dude comes

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

I think we should re-institute the word whence.  Isn’t I don’t know whence this comes so much more elegant than I don’t know where this comes from?  Actually, let’s go whole hog: isn’t I know not whence this comes much nicer than I don’t know where this comes from?  When did English decide that stating something in the negative requires the addition of the verb to do?

Spoken like someone who reads a lot of old stuff.  I also think we should bring back shall.  What other word has a meaning so delicately poised between should and will?

Should I do this?            Shall I do this?            Will I do this?

Not to mention, I freaking love shan’t.

Okay, okay, since so much of what I write on this blog makes me sound like I was born during the Jackson administration, I will also share some of the movements I like in modern American English.  I love the word dude.  For my first dozen or so years in California, I manfully resisted this word.  I had the same moral objection to it as to the unchecked proliferation of the word like (which I still, like, don’t like, but like, live with).  Then one day I completely surrendered to dude, because it can be so expressive, and has so many applications.  For instance, witness this clip:

Isn’t dude awesome? (NB at some point I also surrendered to the word awesome.)

I also like when offensive words with nasty histories are re-appropriated.  Bitch used to mean “recalcitrant woman,” but now it rather means “whiny person.”  It’s being de-gendered, and I think that’s a good thing.  It always gives me a little subversive thrill to say that a man is being a bitch.  I also approve of what’s by and large happened to the word nigger, that it’s used as a form of address within the black community.  I’m a little puzzled by white people who complain they can’t use it–I mean, why would they want to?  Coming from a white person, this is a word of exclusion.  The whole point of its re-appropriation is turning it into a word of inclusion; that’s why it’s supposed to stay within the black community.  Of course, inclusion implies exclusion of someone else–I suppose that’s why it being a black word bothers some whites (this is the nicer interpretation, the less nice interpretation being that it signifies the lessening of their power as the privileged race).  But shit, when we live in a society where no one is being systematically oppressed because of how much melanin they have in their skin, then we can open up the use of that word.  Then we would see that that word, in a truly all-inclusive society, would be of no interest to anyone.  It would be as obsolete as the word reprobate in the Calvinist sense.  Would it turn into something like what reprobate means now?

No, I think it would do what is best.  I think it would simply and quietly disappear.

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Je suis derrière la porte.

Posted on July 11, 2010 | 6 comments

My big achievement for today was hiding a picture of myself behind the door on my “about me” page.  Trust me, considering my technological ineptitude, this is indeed an achievement.  I also made a little icon of my book cover for my sidebar that links directly to my novel’s Amazon page.  If I were truly virtuous, it would link to a page that read “be good and buy me from a struggling independent bookstore!”  But, I am not that virtuous.

Oh–I almost forgot: I also added my twitter feed to my sidebar.  Yes, I signed up for twitter.  My editor told me to, and because I am a befuddled virgin author, I acquiesced.  140 characters is bloody short.  It’s an interesting exercise in editing though.  So far I’ve managed to avoid using “2” for “to” or other internety abbreviations that raise my old, obsolete hackles.  I’ve also managed to avoid steering the horseless carriage as it frightens me and I do not enjoy it.  (Dude, I’m totally serious.  I don’t drive.  I’m sure at some point I will have to remedy this situation.  At some point.  But I am very gifted at procrastination.)

I continue on with my new novel, In the Red.  Although it appears that for every page I produce, I must delete two.  I have a plot, but I do not have a structure.  I also have a taciturn protagonist, who is a rather stark contrast from my dear, voluble Trevor.  It appears she will not disclose anything unless I ask her directly.  So, progress is slow.

I am also in the thick of reviewing typeset pages for 13 rue Thérèse.  They look really pretty, although in a lot of places the typesetter misunderstood my instructions so extravagantly that it makes me want to lie down and whimper softly to myself.  Sigh.  The galleys will contain the errors as there will not be enough time to correct them before they are printed.  Double sigh.

Typeset pages are a much different animal than manuscript pages.  For one thing, I must limit my editing as much as I can in order to make as little extra work as possible for the typesetter.  I’ve only changed one word here or there; the time for extensive edits is over.  I’m having a lot of conversations with myself that look like this:

“Oh that paragraph is terrible! We must delete it immediately.”

“Ssssshh calm yourself. Maybe no one will notice.”

“Well, I hope to God nobody quotes it in a review.”

A typeset text is literally set.  It’s like lava that’s solidified into rock.  If you want to change it you have to whip out a chisel, because the stage of flux has ended.  It’s hard to describe the transformation.  It’s not my manuscript anymore; it’s now part of the collective record.  Everything that went into the text is subsumed within it.  The people who inspired the characters are now gone from inside them; only the characters remain.  The sources are immortalized; the sources are expunged.  The text is dead; long live the text.

Sweep away the ash and lay your hand on rock that was once liquid and hot enough to burn you away into the barest wisp of nothing.  From red to black, the flow froze into these furrows and whorls you can follow with your finger.  Yes, if you like you can follow them up all the way to the dark gash whence they came.  If you like you can make yourself dizzy looking down into the fathomless deep, but be careful.  If the earth starts to tremble, you won’t have much time.

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Cheez Doodles for my ego

Posted on June 23, 2010 | 3 comments

“13 RUE THERESE is a puzzle-novel and gave me the same fizzy satisfaction as completing a Sunday crossword.  It will light up your brain and your heart.”
–David Ebershoff, author of THE 19TH WIFE

Pretty spiff, no?  This here is my first blurb.  I hadn’t even known the publisher was gathering them when I received this, since galleys aren’t out yet.  I will get typset pages  at the end of next week; I’ll have three weeks to turn them around like I did the copyedits.  Then the galleys will materialize on August 6, and the book will start to look like a book!  There will be much squeeing.

Other good news: the London Book Fair has borne fruit.  13 rue Thérèse sold in Russia, Poland, and France.  On top of the previous UK and Italy sales, that is five foreign markets so far.  Sweet.  I hope more are forthcoming; I love the idea of having a nice stack of the same book differently iterated, as I love the idea of not being able to read my own transmogrified prose.

A special Godspeed goes out to the French translator, who will have to translate my translations of French letters that are reproduced in the text.  Good luck with that.  Since a lot of the metafiction in the novel happens in the way Trevor chooses to edit and translate those letters, the French version of the novel will present a huge tension.  The target language will be the same as the original, making the changes especially naked, and also making it obvious that Trevor himself was translated back.  This will make the translator extremely and unusually visible.  I am not opposed to the translator playing around with this bizarre situation, like maybe adding his own set of weird footnotes.  We’ll have to see.  It makes my brain tremble to fathom it.

Speaking of translation, did you know that in England, book blurbs are called “puffs?”  I find that word both apt and adorable.  Plus it makes me kind of hungry, it makes me think of Cheez Doodles.  Nom nom.  Cheez Doodles for my ego.  More please.

Meanwhile I’ve been telling my husband that I’m going to bust some heads if no critic calls my prose “luminous.”   Ooooh, let me tell you one of my most depraved fantasies…  It is to write a terrible book, I mean horrid–the vilest excrescence my suffering body could ever push from itself–and then have it printed with ink expressed from firefly abdomens so that the prose would quite literally be luminous.  Aaaaah I am so perverted.  Maybe in a previous life I knew Huysmans.  Maybe in a previous life I was Huysmans.  Did you know that towards the end of his life, he became a huge Catholic?  That too, I find both apt and adorable.

Huysmans would approve of this. It is definitely in the decadent spirit.

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three hilarious things I saw today

Posted on June 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

(1) My husband and I have always surmised that face wash would be very difficult to market to men (eg “X-FOLIATOR!  It will punch your face clean!”) yet, this morning, I discovered that such a product actually exists.  It is called Facial Fuel.  It comes in a blue bottle with a picture of a biplane on it.  The smell also aspires to manliness.  I expected it to have a sort of musky flavor like Old Spice or shaving cream for dudes (which is generally blue, and seldom comes in mango or passion flower scents), but it went in a surprisingly briny direction.  Because a metrosexual product like face wash cannot smell even remotely pleasant, or it might as well come in a pink bottle that reads “you are gay.”

The copy on the bottle did make sure to let me know that the contents are not “gentle” or “exfoliating” like those lady face washes; they are “energizing.”  By “energizing,” the copy means, “burns the skin slightly on contact.”  Really.  See?  This is a manly product, because its use is physically uncomfortable.

Facial Fuel made my whole morning by reminding me how hilarious all marketing is, especially when it is gendered.  If you need a good laugh in the shower, I recommend it.

(2) My husband and I stopped on the street corner, trying to figure out where we were relative to the Museum of Modern Art.  Before we could even pull up our location on our iphone, a guy stopped by and said, “hey, where are you going?”  It took us a moment to realize that he was talking to us, and another moment to understand that he was offering his help.  “Oh, um, MoMA,” my husband sputtered.  “How come it took you so long to get that out?” our new friend asked, before he gave us the directions.  He was being a spontaneous good samaritan, but he simply couldn’t do something nice without being a dick about it.  We thought his fine mélange of helpfulness and douchiness captured something essential about the New York spirit.

(3) There were two kinds of art works at the MoMA.  For one kind, the placards were unnecessary because the pieces spoke for themselves.  For the other kind, the placards made me laugh my ass off.  For example: a gigantic white canvas with a big dark blue smear on it.  The placard explained that the artist had theme parties during which he had a nude model soaked in a shade of blue paint he’d named after himself roll around on a piece of canvas.  He served blue cocktails, and congratulated himself on “not having to get his fingers dirty” to produce art.  Magnificent, no?

My favorite piece, however, was a chair covered in plates, cutlery, and leftover food glued sideways onto a wall.  The placard explained that the artist had been inspired while watching his paramour eat breakfast.  He glued her meal’s discards to the chair where she’d left them, and epoxied the whole deal up onto the wall.  That was his work for the day.  This piece is now in the Museum of Modern Art.  Tell me this guy wasn’t (a) Loki, God of Mischief (b) a marketing genius (c) a huge pain in the ass to live with.

Look for my next art installation forthcoming at the MoMA.  It will feature such pieces as “Husband’s Shirts Mixed with Concrete, Poured over Marital Bed,” “Husband Asleep with my Underwear Glued to his Face,” and my personal favorite, “Infuriated Cat Rocketing through Museum, Covered in Crisco and Flecks of Tissue Paper.”

See? I wasn't kidding about the biplane.

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The cell phone is dead; long live the cell phone.

Posted on June 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

This week I found my cell phone in the bottom of my purse clutching a tiny empty bottle of Valium and displaying the text message GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD.  Rest in peace, valiant purple Motorola flip phone, and feast well in Valhalla.

So, I have to get a new cell phone, and I am facing a dilemma.  I know that the days of having a plain flip phone with number keys are over, because people keep texting me, and texting them back takes me like twenty minutes without access to a keyboard.  I am always tempted to call people back when they text me to expedite the proceedings, but then I never do, on the off chance that they are messaging me from a movie theater or a funeral.  So, I surrender.  I need a phone with letter keys.  Really, I should get an iphone.  Yet I pause at the threshold of such an acquisition, like a tremulous virgin unsure whether the man to whom she is about to give herself is the right one.

The iphone is a wondrous invention.  Ever since my husband acquired one, his patience knows no bounds.  Because of this thing, he can sit in perfect calm while I agonize for twenty minutes over whether I want the blue dress or the red one, while I get fidgety when he does the same thing with USB drives at Fry’s.  He says I should get an iphone for the tranquility of our marriage, and I agree.  So, why so much anguish and hand wringing?  I do have a reason, but it makes me sound about 200 years old.  Please loosen my corset, I feel I am about to suffer a paroxysm of the vapors.

When I am at home, I am almost never separated from the electronic teat that is my laptop.  I keep it by me even when I watch television, should I want to look something up on google or read a funny article during a commercial break.  The only time I am apart from the world’s sum of knowledge in aether form is when I leave the house.  If I get an iphone, I will lose this last disconnect.  The aether will literally be on me at all times, inescapable.  Frankly, I fear this.  There is a crotchety old lady inside me who insists that occasional boredom is good for the soul.  Perhaps she is not entirely wrong.  Why would I ever stare dreamily out the train window when I could have my nose in some engrossing app?  My husband says that an iphone would be good for my writing because I could take notes whenever and wherever an idea strikes me.  My response: but an idea will never strike me again!  I will be too busy looking at LOLcats!

So, you see my quandary.  But what quandary is that?  My fate is inevitable.  The aether reaches for me and already I feel myself swoon.

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Humanist SMASH

Posted on June 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

So, this simplistic, poorly written tripe by David Brooks has been making the rounds among humanists lately.  The humanities are rightfully concerned about being waning relics in our modern world; academics who study all forms of art constantly have to defend their existence, have to convince the funding forces that be that they are not obsolete.  This is sad.  Sadder still would be to read the column linked above and propagate it as an endorsement of the humanities.  It’s awful.  Get off my side, Brooks!

First, there is that cringe-worthy “Big Shaggy” thing.  Clearly, his knowledge of Herodotus has not endowed him with a “wealth of analogies,” at least none that aren’t laughable.   Plus we already have a word for this thing he’s trying to get at, it’s called the Id.  Plus stating that no discipline outside the humanities tries to explain human drives is patently ridiculous, as is his observation that the humanities have no “system of thought.”  Plus his assertion that the humanities are useful because they help us be more effective corporate whores makes me want to eat his smug face.  Personally, I think there is no better way to live than “removed from the market.”  It makes it easier to sleep at night.

Brooks’s blather is not an endorsement.  Rather it is symptomatic of the pervasive devaluation of the arts & humanities in our hypercapitalist society–a society so bloody afraid of anything that cannot be handily productized.  The tone of his whole column made me feel as if I were being offered a pity fuck by the most repellent douche bag imaginable.   Yuck–no thank you, sir, I do not need your validation, and your advances make me need to take a shower.  But, before I go crouch weeping in a hissing blast of scalding water, gently rocking and mumbling to myself that I must get clean–when will I ever get clean?–I will tell you what the arts & humanities are for, and why we need them.  It’s very simple:

The arts & humanities give us the inner resources not to get swept up by the unremitting shitstorm of lies inflicted on us by all forms of media and advertising.  They remind us that life is not money, and life is not products.  When the arts & humanities die, so will we.  That is all.

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nice and insecure

Posted on June 6, 2010 | 3 comments

I write an elder writer the following e-mail with the subject line I am an arrogant asshole, but I am really bad at it:

When I write I pretty much labor under a giant neon sign that reads YOU SUCK.  I spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy fretting about how awful my work is. Then I have a bunch of people read it and basically say, “it’s fine,” and I wonder, how can that be?  When I was a young spark, I thought that if I ever got good at this writing thing, the YOU SUCK sign would go away, yet here it remains unchanged.  Today I realized why that is: I am not holding up what I write against the work of my peers in workshops.  I am not even holding it up against most of the stuff that’s out on the market today.  I am holding it up against Gustave fucking Flaubert.  No wonder I always feel like crap!  Immediately I also realized what a hilariously arrogant thing that is to do, and then I thought–wait, don’t arrogant people think that they are awesome?  Yet I somehow figured out how to be arrogant while also feeling like shit all the time.  You have to admit that is a display of ineptitude bordering on the magnificent.

She replies:

“If there is an alarming object in this world it is a writer delighted with something he has just written.  There is no worse sign.”
–William Maxwell
I am puzzled:
But, does such a writer exist?  Trying to understand such a person is like trying to visualize Peace on Earth.  My brain just shuts down.
She tells it like it is:
Oh, I encounter plenty of them.  Except, of course, they’re not real writers.  I’ve seldom met a real writer delighted with anything to do with his work.  In other words, don’t stop comparing yourself to Flaubert.  That’s the goal; not acing it in a workshop.  And it’ll keep you nice and insecure.
I love her:
!!!

You are my new mommy.

Exeunt.

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a great gift for your little savage

Posted on June 2, 2010 | 4 comments

Tomorrow is my last day of school.  I’m finishing up 22nd grade, and in all likelihood I will only enter a classroom again on the teacher side of the desk.  Weird, no?

I will have to pick up my last paycheck, surrender my keys, and go to the registrar’s office to make sure they mail me my diploma once it’s printed.  Another master’s degree!  One thing that is certain about the life of a person with two master’s degrees: at some point, a plan was changed.  One does not get two of these things on purpose.

When my husband & I get a roomier place to live, we should put up a Wall o’ Degrees, everything from high school on.  Between the two of us, that will be eight of them.  Adding up to 46 years of schooling.  Yes, that’s right, FORTY SIX YEARS.  If our combined schooling were a person, it would be in the thick of its midlife crisis right now.

I don’t think I mentioned yet on this blog that I have a teaching gig for next Fall: an online fiction workshop for UC Davis Extension.  I will try out the teaching creative writing thing.  Meanwhile, I am looking into joining a writing group in San Francisco this summer.  I am hoping it will give me (1) deadlines and (2) human contact, otherwise I am likely to turn into a smelly grunting hermit who has been working on the same paragraph for weeks on end.  For the sake of my sanity and my marriage, I will try to avoid that.

(The biggest threat to my productivity right now is Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii.  What a fun–and graphically stunning–video game!  I love Yoshi so much.  If only I could eat my enemies whole and shit them back out as candy in real life…)

The last of the copyediting stuff for 13 rue Thérèse happened last week.  I am not quite sure what happens next.  I’m guessing I’ll get to see sample pages of the layout?  As a publishing virgin, this whole process is very mysterious.  I will say this: making a book is more work than you can possibly imagine.  Writing the damn thing, as much of your blood as you pour into it, is totally the easy part.  Submitting it is the worst part.  What happens after someone buys it is a very peculiar process.  Your dream gets fashioned into a product.  Your reclusive, naked forest child is scrubbed clean; taught to speak, smile, and shake hands; given a haircut, a nice suit, a pitch; then sent out into the world to sell himself.  It is a great gift for your little savage, but also a great act of violence against him.

I guess anything worth doing is like that; anything worth doing makes you into a different person.

Why is Yoshi always spoken of as male? Doesn't he have to be female? He lays eggs. Discuss.

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