About a year ago I went through a phase of reading anyting I could find from the writer David Mitchell, a phase that only ended when I’d run through all of his novels. My route looked, chronologically, something like this: Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, Ghostwritten, and number9dream, which is backward with regard to his output vs. my input. And while I thought Cloud Atlas was the strangest, most complex, and probably most compelling, his most recent novel, the relatively quaint Black Swan Green, is the one I can’t get out of my mind.
I call the novel quaint because it doesn’t deal with the huge themes a reader might have expected following Cloud Atlas, which was frequently complimented by critics as “Nabokovian” because of its puzzle-like structure and its fancy wordplay. But instead of some grandiose, episodic “big book,” Mitchell went for a quiet story of a boy growing up in England in the 1980s, complete with a tacit divorce developing in the background, the minor dramas of young kids trying to figure out their place in the world, the first whispers of sex, and so on. A real bildungsroman, if you will.
Godard’s film is underlaid with violence throughout, and the easy acceptance of the abovementioned scenes almost certainly is related to the director’s “comment” on violence, particularly the American kind (Vietnam figures heavily on the minds of his young male characters). But that’s not what interests me here. It’s the nonsequitor, the dropped events and the ensuing effect of that event’s disappearance on my ability to enjoy the film, that I care about. Especially since the result is unexpected: both in the case of Mitchell and Godard, I enjoy the story/film all the more for the unease I feel.
I never intended for this post to turn into an essay, so I’m going to let myself off the hook for a moment and not chase the reasons for my enjoyment. Being that I won’t soon forget either of these pieces of art, I’m sure the ideas behind this post will continue to grow.
So here’s the question that this post won’t hope to answer: why is the seemingly frustrating act of leaving the reader/viewer “hanging” able to excite rather than depress the experience of coming into contact with the fiction/film?
Over predictably delicious food at The Tin Shed (excellent fare, bad website) with Sam Alexander, the two of us took a break from business discussions to talk music. Specifically, about lyrics, irony, and whether R.E.M. could be better if Stipe would only loosen the grip during these later stages. The answer, according to Mr Alexander, is yes.
A couple of quick notes that I’m taking away from this conversation:
First, that lyrics and delivery are important in different, and sometimes oppositional, ways. Let’s oversimplify our conversation, which was itself an oversimplificaiton of the issue: we’ll define a binary of “sincere vs. ironic” for both lyrics and delivery (voice). That being the case, a singer can deliver one of four ways: sincere lyrics and sincere voice; sincere lyrics and ironic voice; ironic lyrics with a sincere voice; and ironic lyrics with an ironic voice. Sam put Radiohead in the second camp, noting that the listener is hard pressed to tell when Yorke is singing about something that truly matters to him, whether he’s underplaying a true emotion, or whether he’s overplaying words that carry little weight.
The central question here being: how does a band (specifically a band in Portland in 2009) position itself on the earnest > ironic scale? The wink is already there, so does Sam’s band (No Kind of Rider) address the wink, the self-conscious late aughts knowledge that, for example, if their work is reviewed by an important arbiter of music cool like Pitchfork, it will likely be on intellectual and historical grounds rather than based on the quality of emotions evoked? Apparently there’s only one answer for Sam. Yes. The question should really be, “How does a band like No Kind of Rider address the wink?” Tough question.
Sam talks about drafting his work. The first output might be entirely personal, an outpouring of a subjective experience. But then the editor sets in. As a band with an expectation of being listened to by a specific audience, there’s a moment of self-reflection. How will this sound to our listenership? What of my feelings will come across as Trite? As we all know, it’s difficult to have unique experiences when coming up against the big things (losing love, feeling alone, etc.), and it’s usually the big things that get us writing in the first place. So there’s a natural editorial process, wherein the writer of songs tries to protect himself against Hokum. And good thing, too, because otherwise we’d have even more songs like Train’s “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me),” which makes me want to throw up in someone else’s mouth.
So the question I won’t try to answer here is, “What is the value of that imposed round of edits”? That’s for another day, another conversation.
Second, that musicians, owing to the fundamental importance of physical presence during a performance, have a pressing need to win attention and accolades early in their careers. Bands tend to break apart, especially if they have an extreme of success (very much or very little). And youth can play an important role in a band’s viability, especially to the show-going public.
I sometimes wish I felt more of that pressure to create something now and try some ideas in public rather than incubate those ideas and delude myself into thinking that it’s better to hold on and polish and wait until I can’t find a single expected or boring or trite thing in a certain piece. Of course, in such an instance I would wait forever and never publish a thing.
I guess in a way this post, which has taken me all of ten minutes to write (and probably reads like it) is one small step in the direction of getting a thought out there and seeing where it takes me. Good conversation. Until later, thank you for reading.
This week I’ve been thinking about Knut Hamsun and Jess Walter, two of my favorite writers. I continue to learn by reading Hamsun’s work, especially the incredible, strange, offputting little novel called Hunger; Walter is alive and well, his output growing stronger with every effort. For the purposes of this entry, I’ll focus on the most recent piece of advice he offered me.
So what’s the connection between a long-deceased, politically abhorent Nobel Lauriet from Norway and a living American writer who lives and works in Spokane, Washington? Mistakes, flubs, broken promises, and reversals. Not on the part of the writers themselves. No. It’s in the characters.
This may sound exceedingly obvious at first. And in a way, I agree. Of course characters in a novel need to screw up and go against their nature. And as a reader, I possess an innate hunger for that quality in a book. But as a writer I’ve had more difficulty 1) recognizing the need for my characters to possess a quality of going against their best interest or goals and 2) injecting that quality into the book.
And after my conversation with Jess, I realize why. For so long I’ve written and thought about my novel as if it were a mathematical proof. I have ideas about the characters, what they desire, how they want to navigate the trials I toss their way, and the writing itself becomes a way to make good on those characteristics. For example, if Anson thinks of himself as an academic, he’ll find a way into the basement reading room of the library. If he wants to be kind to his brother, he’ll be kind to his brother. Proof. Wham! See my characters? They’re just as promised.
It’s clear where this is going, so I’ll skip ahead one step: isn’t the intentional interjection of error, &c. just as mathematical and calculated as the opposite problem, which I’m trying to overcome? I don’t believe so, and I’ll tell you why (since you’ve asked so nicely): When the writer proves his characters motivations through action, there’s a limited scope of what can come to pass in the novel, and the reader can see what’s coming from a chapter away. If the character’s flaws drive much of the action, both the writer and the reader can remain surprised. Anson is headed to Marcus’s house to reconcile their recent fight, but he doesn’t make it there. Where does he end up instead? The error smacks of variation whereas the proof (Anson shows up and begs forgiveness) is flat, expected, preconceived.
Hamsun is a master at harnassing the vicissitudes of his characters. Take the scene in the third part of Hunger, in which the desperate, starving narrator receives a handful of money from the clerk of a grocery store who mistakenly (?) gives him change for a bill that wasn’t his. The entire novel up to this point is consumed with the narrator’s search for money and food, and here he’s given exactly what he’s wanted? And what does he do? Immediately purchases a steak his body can’t handle (“The food began to take effect, it gave me great pain and I wasn’t allowed to keep it for very long. I emptied my mouth in every dark corner I passed, struggling to suppress the nausea that was hollowing me out afresh…”)[1]. And after a series of episodes in which the money becomes an increasing burden, he finally smacks the remaining sum into the hand of a cake vendor with whom he’d previously had an unpleasant encounter. And to bring the series to fullness, the narrator finally revisits the kind grocer and absolutely lays into him, furiously berating him for what the reader could be excused for calling a kindness. Hunger is arresting and unforgettable work.
And here I am trying to write a book that proves its own thesis. Bleh.
I’ll close this entry by saying that my new efforts are very much guided by these two types of advice: one from a talented and generous living author, one from the work of a celebrated master. Here’s to the persistent disasters our fine characters must face.
so i’m having some difficulty getting this site fully functional, but in the interim i didn’t want to allow myself a laziness, a series of excuses. so up went the site.
but now i’m having trouble setting pages as i want them, so that people can read stories directly from the site itself.
tomorrow i will post a handful as pdfs that people can download, and we’ll go from there. no sense waiting around…
“to inspire ambition, to stimulate the imagination, to provide the inquiring mind with accurate information told in an interesting style, and thus lead into braoder fields of knowledge, such is the purpose of this book.”
So reads the introduction to the complete set of illustrated encyclopedias I just purchased at the “Community Warehouse” on Interstate Ave. This is no tepid attempt at objectivity. these are truly opinionated entries.
Take, for example, “BORNEO, The Vast and Savage Island of the Dyaks,” or “LATIN, The Mother Tongue of the Civilized World.”
There’s also the deep racism and ignorance of 1949 America, as evidenced by “JERUSALEM: The Sacred City of Two Faiths.” (I guess Islam doesn’t fully register at this time.) Or the now unbelievable entries on “NEGRO” and “INDIAN, AMERICAN.”
Found this image on the nyt today. Among the various late-Fifties ads in the slideshow, this one stuck out for its bizarre image in the bottom-right. Valium-fueled psychosis? Camera tremors? You decide.
today i learn how to associate my chosen content types (e.g., fiction, essay) with the pages on which they should appear.
the goal is to have four content types total: small opinions (in the form of a twitter feed); strong opinions (for single-draft opinions, reviews, &c.); essay (thinking things through); and fiction.
