Pulling into the wrong station.

Yesterday, I blogged about the lovely Philip Roth Paris Review Interview from the 80s. There are many more lovely excerpts from it that I would love to transcribe here -- entire pages of it -- but for now, a few more paragraphs will have to do.

You're asking me about the relationship between art and life? It's like the relationship between the eight hundred or so hours that it took to be psychoanalyzed, and the eight or so hours that it would take to read Portnoy's Complaint loud. Life is long and art is shorter.

Also:

The thing about Zuckerman that interests me is that everbody's split, but few so openly as this. Everybody is full of cracks and fissures, but usually we see people trying very hard to hide the places where they're split. Most people desperately want to heal their lesions, and keep trying to. Hiding them is sometimes taken for healing them (or for not having them).

Later...talking about a tough time in his life after his marriage broke down:

The image that teased me during those years was of a train that had been shunted onto the wrong track. In my early twenties, I had been zipping right along there, you know - on schedule, express stops only, final destination clearly in mind; and then suddenly I was on the wrong track, speeding off into the wilds. I'd ask myself, "How the hell do you get this thing back on the right track?" Well, you can't. I've continued to be surprised, over the years, whenever I discover myself, late at night, pulling into the wrong station.

And so it goes....

Fiction vs. Reality

In his 1961 essay in Commentary about writing "American Fiction", Philip Roth writes that it grows harder every day to write fiction in America. For when reality itself is so bizarre, writing fiction and creating "the willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge) becomes a challenge for the writer.

"The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's ...meager imagination. The actually is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."

Gleaned above lines from the book Philip Roth by Derek Parker Royal (page 136).

In talking about this essay during his Paris Review interview in 1984, Philip Roth had this to say:

Alienated in America, a stranger to its pleasures and preoccupations - that was how many young people like me saw their situation in the fifties. It was a perfectly honorable stance, I think, shaped by our literary aspirations and modernist enthusiasms, the high-minded of the second post-immigrant generation coming into conflict with the first great eruption of postwar media garbage. Little did we know that some twenty years later the philistine ignorance on which we would have liked to turn our backs would infect the country like Camus's plague. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prohetic sentry, just where Orwell failed; he would have seen that the grotesquerie to be visited upon the English-speaking world would not be an extension of the repressive Eatern totatitarian nightmare but a proliferation of the Western farce of media stupidity and cynical commercialism - American-style philistinism run amok. It wasn't Big Brother who'd be watching us from the screen, but we who'd be watching a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap opera grandmother, the values of a civic-minded Beverly Hills Cadillac dealer, and the historical background and intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical.

Twenty years later, I wonder what Roth would have to say about writing fiction in America - assaulted as we were these past few years by daily news of the Bush-Cheny led misadventures in Iraq  and their own versions of reality of "progress" being made there on the one hand and the shenanigans of so-deemed "reality" TV celebrities, on the other.

I'll have to go read The Plot Against America, Everyman and other recent novels and also some recent Roth interviews soon!

Every dog has its day - 2

And this one found his way back home!

Family finds dog lost during Hurricane Ike 10 months ago

Daizy the dog reunited with Clear Lake family

Looking for trouble

After finishing John Ashberry's Paris Review Interview, I debated which of the two Philips -  Philip Larkin and Philip Roth - I should read next. I figured instead of another poet, I'll pick the author first. And what a pleasure this interview with Roth has been so far.

Here's the start!

Interviewer (Hermione Lee): How do you get started on a new book:
Roth: Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it - that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book. I'll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I'll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn't come to more than one page, but if I'm lucky, that's the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

I: How much of a book is in your mind before you start?
Roth: What matters most isn't there at all. I don't mean solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You're looking, as you begin, for what's going to resist you. You're looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn't difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I:  Must you have a beginnig? Would you ever begin with an ending?
Roth: For all I know I am begininning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.

I: What happens to those hundred or so pages that you have left over? Do you save them up?
Roth: I generally prefer never to see them again.

...

I: Does your reading affect what you write?
Roth: It's a way of keeping the circuits open. It's a way of thinking about my line of work while getting a little rest from the work at hand. It helps inasmuch as it fuels the overall obsession.

And so on... lovely interview. Unfortunately, I just realized that the entire interview is not at the link above.  (I am reading this in a book as I find it very tedious to read long articles/interviews online.) Parts of the interview are available here (p 162), thanks to Google Books, if you are really interested in some more excerpts.

The sobbing mess

Reading the Paris Review interview with poet, John Ashberry, I came upon these wonderful lines by W. H. Auden, from a poem, 'In War Time'.

Abruptly mounting her ramshackle wheel,
Fortune has pedalled furiously away;
The sobbing mess is on our hands today.

The sobbing mess indeed! Sigh!

P.S. Loved these lines too by Ashberry, when asked about the connection between life and poetry.

I have always been averse to talking about myself and so I don't write about my life the way the confessional poets do. I don't want to bore people with experiences of mine that are simply versions of what everybody goes through. For me, poetry starts after that point. I write with experience in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

 And this when asked to expalain the paradox between ambiguity and certitude...

The idea of relief from pain has something to do with ambiguity. Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.

..

Things are in a continual state of motion and evolution, and if we come to a point where we say, with certitude, right here, this is the end of the universe, then of course we must deal with everything that goes on after that, whereas ambiguity seems to take further developments into account. We must realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won't in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.

Links to some other interviews with John Ashberry: 1 (1985), 2 (1989), 3 (2005), 4 (2008).

Woof Woof

What can I say but... Woof!

Dog translator transforms barks into words 

Japanese inventors have come up with a device they claim can detect a dog's emotion from its bark. The gadget focuses on the detection of six emotions including sadness, joy and frustration, alongside a recorded repertoire of spoken phrases

Photo © AFP

The desire and the obstacle

Reading about the Spanish director, Luis Buñuel at Jai Arjun's fabulous blog, I was led to these words from an older post in which he writes about a conversation he had with Jean-Claude Carriere, the celebrated French author, playwright and scriptwriter, who had collaborated with Buñuel.

Jai Arjun quotes Carriere:

 "The advice I give students who are just starting out and want to know how to develop a story – or at least get the starting point for it –– is: take a person or a group of people, make them desire something, and then introduce an obstacle to that desire," he says. "Some of the world's greatest stories have been built on these simple elements: the desire and the obstacle."

Indeed! For life is like that -- a continuous struggle between out desires and obstacles. And to capture the heart-break and also the ecstacy of occasionally winning this struggle is what good story writers do well. Think, Alice Munro.

It's a dog's world - 12

Seems..

A woman from Ghana has tied the knot with her 18-month-old dog, insisting that it possesses qualities not seen in men since her late father.

This is a new twist on the "Man bites dog" news headline! OTOH, maybe this is indeed a commentary on the choices some women have in some parts of the world! For the woman had this to say about her strange choice:

"I've been in relationships with so many men here, and they are all the same — skirt-chasers and cheaters. My dog is kind, and loyal to me and he treats me with so much respect."

And so it goes...

(Hat-tip, Bhaskar, whose blog is full of piquant salty humor. Any time you want a few laughs, head on to his blog!)

A (false) promise of delicacy

What a lovely start to this week's New Yorker short story by Lorrie Moore

The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people’s yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of warmth. I was looking for a babysitting job. I was a student and needed money, so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry neighborhoods, past the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground, dun gray and stricken—though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken—until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week, startlingly, the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had happened to them. Or, rather, that is an expression—of politeness, a false promise of delicacy—for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes for miles down along the Illinois state line.

Its called Childcare. Go read it in its entirety here. (If really interested, you can also read 3 other recent short stories by Moore at the New Yorker site.)

Lorrie Moore is, of course, a great exponent of the short story art. I remember reading and liking many of the stories from her debut collection Self-Help (NYT Review) last year. Here is a lovely excerpt from a story from that collection called "How to Become a Writer":

"First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She'll say: 'How about emptying the dishwasher?' Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Acccidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters."

"This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters." Lovely, no? Short crisp sentence that pierce right to the heart!

I was introduced to Lorrie Moore's short stories at the writing workshop I took last summer (which, incidentally, instead of inspiring me to write, duly crushed any last vestiges of delusions I had that I could write!) where one of her stories was introduced as an example of how to write a story in the 2nd person -- something that is rarely done (but done more often than you and I might think!). When done right, as Moore shows how, it can be quite delectable to read. The particular story discussed is called "How to be the other woman". Exquisite (and much celebrated) work by Moore it is!

Maybe one of these days I will get the Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore and read some more of her work.

The places that we have known, The people we have been

 

That is me...cropped image from a picture taken of my 2nd grade/standard class -- circa 1977.

Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death." - Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

Or to quote Marcel Proust (from Swann's Way), it is....

...as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality.

And yet it is different; remembered now more through photographs than any actual memory of those times.

To quote Proust again:

The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

And so it goes...