The invisible writer and the madness of art

Today, an excerpt from an essay adapted, I believe, from the PEN/Nabokov Award acceptance speech given by novelist Cynthia Ozick:

Writers’ invisibility has little or nothing to do with Fame, just as Fame has little or nothing to do with Literature. (Fame merits its capital F for its fickleness, Literature its capital L for its lastingness.) Thespians, celebrities and politicians, whose appetite for bottomless draughts of public acclaim, much of it manufactured, is beyond any normal measure, may feed hotly on Fame – but Fame is always a product of the present culture: topical and variable, hence ephemeral. Writers are made otherwise. What writers prize is simpler, quieter and more enduring than clamorous Fame: it is recognition. Fame, by and large, is an accountant’s category, tallied in Amazonian sales. Recognition, hushed and inherent in the silence of the page, is a reader’s category: its stealth is its wealth.


...

..we had better recall that celebrated Jamesian credo, a declaration of private panic mixed with prayerful intuition, which so many writers secretly keep tacked over their desks: “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.” The statement ends, memorably: “The rest is the madness of art.”

The madness of art? Maybe so. But more likely it is the logic of invisibility. James has it backwards. It’s not the social personality who is the ghost; it is the writer with shoulders bent over paper, the hazy simulacrum whom we will never personally know, the wraith who hides out in the dark while her palpable effigy walks abroad, talking and circulating and sometimes even flirting. Sightings of these ghost writers are rare and few and unreliable, but there is extant a small accumulation of paranormal glimpses which can guide us, at least a little, to a proper taxonomy. For instance: this blustering, arrogant, self-assured, muscularly disdainful writer who belittles and brushes you aside, what is he really? When illicitly spotted facing the lonely glow of his computer screen, he is no more than a frightened milquetoast paralysed by the prospect of having to begin a new sentence. And that apologetically obsequious, self-effacing, breathlessly diffident and deprecatory creature turns out, when in the trancelike grip of nocturnal ardour, to be a fiery furnace of unopposable authority and galloping certainty. Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.

What is the true meaning of “the madness of art”? Imposture, impersonation, fakery, make-believe – but not the imposture, impersonation, fakery or transporting make-believe of inventive story-telling. No: rather, art turns mad in pursuit of the false face of wishful distraction. The fraudulent writer is the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck. The fraudulent writer is like Bellow’s Henderson: I want, I want, I want.

If all this is so – and it is so – then how might a young would-be writer aspire to join the company of the passionately ghostly invisibles? Or, to put it another way, though all writers are now and again unavoidably compelled to become visible, how to maintain a coveted clandestine authentic invisibility? Don’t all young writers look to the precincts of visibility, where heated phalanxes of worn old writers march back and forth, fanning their brows with their favourable reviews? Isn’t that how it’s done, via models and mentors and the wise counsel of seasoned editors? “I beg you,” says Rilke, addressing one such young writer, “I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you to write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places in your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of the night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple ‘I must’, then build your life according to this ­necessity.”

Thus the poet Rilke, imploring the untried young to surrender all worldly reward, including the spur, and sometimes the romantic delusion, of Fame, in order to succumb to a career in ectoplasm. Note that he speaks of “the quietest hour of the night”, which is also the darkest, where we do what we can and give what we have. The madness of art – and again I willingly contradict Henry James – is not in the art, but in the madding and maddening crowd, where all manner of visibilities elbow one another, while the ghosts at their writing tables sit alone and write, and write, and write, as if the necessary transparency of their souls depended upon it.

I found it via a comment left at the article "Under All This Noise: On Reclusion, Writing, and Social Media" by Peter Orner, which is also worth reading.)

Elsewhere, I read that we humans write to get laid! ;-) I jest but read the article - is an interesting hypothesis.

In terms of sexual advantages, a tale well told can undoubtedly up the storyteller’s charm factor.  Tales aren’t bland renderings of narrative events; they are, at their best, colorful, brilliant, and poetically polished.   They get gussied up.  And when storytellers use ornament and plumage to draw attention to their tales they inevitably draw eyes themselves. .... Literary peacockery benefits the audience as well. When we read books, we enhance our vocabulary. We glean information about particle physics or virtual reality or Australian Aborigines that make us better conversationalists. We hone our metaphors, refine our wit.  From the elaborate plumage of the story the reader, too, makes off with a few feathers.  

The poorer silence now

More than a century ago, William Henry Davies, in his poem, Leisure rued the fact that there was "no time to stand and stare".

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

..

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Today, in similar vein, one could rue the absence of silence in our world. A recent article in the New York Time talked about NYC's  newest (and rarest) luxury item: silence.

“We’re at the breaking point"...  Silence has become a luxury in New York that only a scant few can truly afford, and cultural, technological and economic changes in recent years have added to the din everyone else must endure, creating not just one culprit, but many. 

And it is not merely a constant chatter of sounds that assaults our brains. Reflection and contemplation has also been sidelined thanks to the constant flood of information coming at us from all sides, especially the internet. We need to make a conscious attempt to tune off for some time at least and I for one suffer due to the inability of tuning off the internet. (And I don't even have a smart phone, which adds a whole new level of being continuously connected. The very annoying behavior of many people of continuously looking at their phones every few seconds is something all of us have experienced in the last few years. Let me distract you from this post by directing you to this video making the rounds just this week that cleverly highlights the ridiculousness of our lives. We have become dumb users of smart phones!)

Of course, it is not that we are naive users of these tools of modern life. There have been many studies and reports [1, 2, 3, 4 (video by Nicholas Carr, author of "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"), 5, 6, ...] about the negative impacts of digital distraction. Of course, as psychologist Kelly McGonigal suggested it's time to start treating the internet the same way you would a diet:

[W]e need to find ways to make [the internet] as nourishing as possible, as we try to do with our diets, and not just turn to what's easiest. Is your Twitter or Facebook nourishing or crushing your soul?

but like all bad habits and addictions, it is easier said than done. In fact, it has now been recognized as a systematic deficiency called an attention deficit trait, or ADT. "It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live," and is no doubt worsened by the digital lives we all live.

For anyone who hopes to be a writer, the perils of being distracted by the internet have been highlighted by many. There's a quotation attributed to the person who said a lot of things ("Anonymous") that I keep running into on the internet (ironic, huh!) about how the internet is the bane of any writer: "Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet." (The author Jonathan Franzen has said something similar but so have many other authors. Best to leave it attributed to Mr./Ms. Anonymous.) But, this is not something new. While probably not talking specifically about the internet, Philip Roth had this to say:

"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing."

Anyway, we all know this but sometimes find it hard to break a habit. For now, I'll leave you with a poem about silence, reproduced here in its entirety.

Silence
by Billy Collins
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

~*~

It's dark in there

I have not been blogging much nor have I been reading much of anything worthwhile in the last  few months but just last night I started with a book of essays by Margaret Atwood called "Negotiating With The Dead," based on a series of lectures, the Empson lectures,which gave at the University of Cambridge. In the introduction, she writes about the motivations for why writers write and ends it with this lovely paragraph that I thought worth transcribing and saving for future reference.

Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one’s way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision – these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing.

I was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior of the human body, forty years ago: "It's dark in there."

Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. This book is about that kind of darkness, and that kind of desire.

An incomprehensible series of apparently random preferences, revulsions, divagations, and evasions

That intriguing title comes from this excerpt from Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath by Helen Vendler and echo something Wordsworth wrote about the "terrors, pains, and early miseries, regrets, vexations, lassitudes, interfused within my mind."

To the young writer, the search for a style is inexpressibly urgent; it parallels, on the aesthetic plane, the individual’s psychological search for identity--that is, for an authentic selfhood and a fitting means for its unfolding. The human search for identity is conducted blindly; we find ourselves as adolescents suffering an incomprehensible series of apparently random preferences, revulsions, divagations, and evasions. We don’t at the time know why our feelings drift hither and yon on the waves of inexplicable compulsions, griefs, and admirations: it is only later that we may be prepared to acknowledge, with Wordsworth, how strange are the ways of identity-formation:

How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself!
(1850 Prelude, I, 344-350)

Wordsworth awakes after early miseries, regrets, and terrors to an adult identity, pursuing an existence which derives calm from its conscious awareness of its selfhood, no longer mystified by youth’s emotional vicissitudes.

Wordsworth has recounted in this passage the normal course of individual human formation. But for a young writer, the stakes are doubled. The youthful writer cannot pursue an evolution to adulthood independent of an ongoing evolution of style. To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to get through this "normal course of human formation"... 
Elsewhere, Helen Vendler writes about Wordsworth and about poetry, in general:

 "To make poetry is one of the modes of living, one of the ways in which life manifests itself. For Wordsworth especially, to create is to live, to become that "sensitive being" and "creative soul" for whom the essence of living is responding and creating."

I have been neither responding nor creating, just dying a slow death then! And so it goes...

My Relations with Illusion & Reality

Perusing some of Philip Larkin's poems again, I started reading more about him via Google Books and found this quote, which I really liked.

"The real trouble with me is my relations with illusion & reality. Illusion is poetry, art, love, belief, confidence, and is what you are enthusiastic about. Reality is daily work, illness, death, money, sex, one's actions independent of one's beliefs or fancies, and is impossible to be enthusiastic about."

He also said: "Joy impregnates, sorrow brings forth; perhaps that is the explanation" ...on how his muse demanded that he be in a constant state of privation to be able to write. Or put another way, he said: "life, personally is unhappy: imperssonally it is happy."

Leave you with these lovely lines from Larkin's rather depressing poem, Aubade, which has been lauded as Larkin's almost perfect poem:

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood. 

A presumptuous taming of reality

Heard this excerpt from John Updike's memoir, Self-Consciousness on an old interview with Terry Gross (No transcript but there is a link to that interview from 1989 at this page on NPR, which is from when Updike died in Jan 2009.)

Writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy.

Been a fan of Updike's fiction from the first time I read it in 1995 and continue to be wow-ed by how he puts together sentences.

Why write?

Brilliant!

At one point, a public relations guy named Jay asks about the purpose of novels, and Grimes wonders: "What are novels for? Entertainment? Metaphysical inquiry? Chronicling one's times? Could I tell Jay that the world is chaos and an artful novel satisfies our human desire for order, or that the novel excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension? That a novel is a thing to be read upon a beach in July for pleasure, or that I was an Iowa Writers' Workshop student and writing a novel was my homework? Or that I never want to die and when I'm writing a novel I believe I never will?" 

That's something the author Tom Grimes wonders about in his recent memoir, Mentor, which is reviewed in the WaPo this month. Later..

For me, writing is a necessity. I exist in sentences. I forget my sense of failure. I forget time. I forget that I'm aging. I forget that one day I'll die. Revising sentences is an act of hope, and connecting with a reader is the only leap of faith I'll ever take.

And this from Grimes towards the end of the book:

I'm a failure as a writer because I've overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent. Yet I willingly accepted that risk.

How many of us can say that we had the chutzpah and the cajones to take that risk and step out an swing!

Attempts to flee from oneself

Paul Auster in an interview for Believer Magazine (talking with the author, Jonatham Lethem) about writing:

PA: You try to surprise yourself. You want to go against what you've done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project.Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past. Just say, that's done, now I'm tackling something else. It's certain that the world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.


JL: Anyway, your voice is going to be helplessly your own. And so the books will be united despite your attempts to ignore your own earlier work.


PA: Exactly, because all your attempts to flee from yourself are useless. All you discover is yourself and your old obsessions. All the maniacal repetitions of how you think. But you try. And I think there's some dignity in that attempt.


JL: I'm laughing, because now, as I'm about to begin a new novel at last, the only thing I'm certain of are the exclusions, the things I'll refuse to do again.

...

PA: Well, that's good. When you become aware of what your limits have been so far, then you;re able to expand them. And every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible. What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page you turn out chaos. Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

and a little later:

PA: "I think the glory of the novel is that you're open to everything and anything that exists or has existed in the world. I don't have any proscriptions. I don't say: "This is not allowed because..."

What is said about the process of writing above is true of the way we ought to lead our lives in general too, I think.

I read the above interview with Auster and many other great interviews with writers in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers in January and February this year. In addition to Paul Auster, I read interviews with John Banville, Haruki Murakami, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, Ian McEwan, Tobias Wolff, and part of the interview with Joan Didion. The book is a delightful treasure trove and different of 24 interviews, with the interviewer also being a writer, sometimes a now famous name like Zadie Smith (who interviews McEwan). Definitely a book worth buying! (I am a big fan of Paris Review's collections of interviews with authors and poets and I'd put this collection right up there with those books.)

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!

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 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.

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.

Waiting for the fish to come in

Famous movie director (or as wiki describes him: "film director, screenwriter, producer, painter, cartoonist, composer, video and performance artist"), David Lynch, asked about encountering dead ends when he is developing new ideas and how he deals with them, had this to say:

" You go out fishing and you do happen to catch a fish that you love. And that fish is an idea - so you write it down. Now, you have something more to focus on - just besides a desire for an idea. Now you have a little fish - more bait. So, you go and you drop the line in again. But there is no more fish coming right then. So, you move to another part of the lake or sea and try there. And that one fish -- you wrote it down, you put it in a box. Now later - sometimes its very good to go through the box. You might see that fish later and boom - it's a new day, many many many fish will swim in and join to it and something will emerge. But for the time being its a dead end."

Note: Words as transcribed by me listening to video here.

(This is true of any creative enterprise but I'm tagging it under writing.)

Like bricks onto a wall

Neil Gaiman's Advice to Writer: "Read a lot and live..... Go do stuff. Go get your heart broken and then come back and write some more"



Go listen to the sentence about "like bricks onto a wall" too... pretty basic stuff but so tough to do, no?

Also, listen to this 2006 speech he gave in Berkeley on a book tour for Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders....

..and his recent interview on Colbert Nation:

Neil Gaiman

Incidentally, I have not read any of Gaiman's work though I have heard many friends rave. Maybe one of these days, I'll start.

Also, see this lovely short clip for Blueberry Girl, written and read by Neil Gaiman.
 

Lovely! He apparently wrote this for or Tash, Tori Amos's daughter (who is also Gaiman's god-daughter).

Poetry has its balms

Loved these lines about poetry by Kay Ryan, who was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008, in an interview in Paris Review.

Interviewer: Do you feel that part of the laureate job is to convince the reading public that poetry is useful?

KR: It's poetry's uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this tal of usefulness makes me feel I've suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it's paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.

And so it goes. My daily poetry tweets over on twitter are anything but useful but now I know they serve a purpose - they are a balm which help me make room within myself. 

From later in the interview, this lovely excerpt:

I: Why do you think writing attracted you?

KR: It's a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it's hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinkng is creating the language. If I don't write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.

I: How do you find the subject in a poem

KR: I don't know if I'm interested in combating an idea or just loosening it up. You have to make some room for your mind. You have to open something up. And you can't just slam it from the other side. You can't say, That's not right. This is right. You start fluffing it. You open up the picture, so you can know two things at once.

I love reading interviews with writers and poets! Love the way they think. Love the way they phrase answers. Delectable bits abound! (I flitted between "Poetry has its balms" to "poetry a great accelerator of the mind" to "know two things at once" for this post title!) 

Go pick up the Winter 2008 Paris Review issue and read the interview. Or, if you cannot get your hands on that issue, go to the Paris Review Interview Archive Index and enjoy interviews with the masters of the past. (Past interviews are archived for free as pdf files. (Thank you, Paris Review, for sharing these gems for free.)

Sifting the leavings

One of my favorite authors, John Updike, writes about the challenges facing an aging writer:

I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity. You are not yet typecast. You can take a cold view of the entire literary scene. You are full of material -- your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation -- when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. By the age of 40, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings ...

A few images, a few memorable acquaintances, a few cherished phrases, circle around the aging writer's head like gnats as he strolls through the summertime woods at gloaming. He sits down before the word processor's humming, expectant screen, facing the strong possibility that he has already expressed what he is struggling to express again ...

With ominous frequency, I can't think of the right word. I know that there is a word; I can visualize the exact shape it occupies in the jigsaw puzzle of the English language. But the word itself, with its precise edges and unique tint of meaning, hangs on the misty rim of consciousness ...

When, against my better judgment, I glance back at my prose from 20 or 30 years ago, the quality I admire and fear to have lost is its carefree bounce, its snap, its exuberant air of slight excess. The author, in his boyish innocence, is calling, like the sorcerer's apprentice, upon unseen powers -- the prodigious potential of this flexible language's vast vocabulary. Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling into your ear.

An aging writer wonders if he has lost the ability to visualize a completed work, in its complex spatial relations ...

If only I could write like this...at any age!

Never respect tradition above your intuitive self

Read some essays from Amy Lowell's book of essays, Poetry and Poets. Some of the interesting ones can be read online for free (see links below) and so I will not excerpt from them but here is an excerpt from an essay called: The process of making poetry.

Amy Lowell, in writing about the process of making poetry and the role of the (sub)conscious arrival of the poem ("It came to me") writes:

Sometimes the external stimulus which has produced a poem is known or can be traced. It may be a sight, a sound, a thought, or an emotion. Sometimes the consciousness has no record of the initial impulse, which has either been forgotten or springs from a deep, unrealized memory. But whatever it is, emotion, apprehended or hidden, is a part of it, for only emotion can rouse the subconscious into action.

...

The subconscious is, however, a most temperamental ally. Often he will strike work at some critical point and not another word is to be got out of him. Here is where the conscious training of the poet comes in, for he must fill in what the subconscious has left, and fill it in as much in the key of the rest as possible. ...

Sometimes the sly subconscious partner will take pity on the struggling poet and return to his assistance; sometimes he will have nothing to do with that particular passage again. This is the reason that a poet must be both born and made. He must be born with a subconscious factory always working for him or he can never be a poet at all, and he must have knowledge and talent enouogh to 'putty' up his holes - to use Mr. Grave's expression. Let no one undervalue this process of puttying; it is a condition of good poetry.

I do believe that a poet should know all he can. No subject is alien to him, and the profounder his knowledge in any direction, the more depth will there be to his poetry. I believe he should be thoroughly grounded in both the old and the new poetic forms, but I am firmly convinced that he must never respect tradition above his intuitive self. Let him be sure of his own sincerity above all, let him bow to no public acclaim, however alluring, and then let him write with all the courage what his subconscious mind suggests to him.

There is much else to treasure in the essays, some of which can be read here.

A Character with Complexity

Marilynne Robinson, whose recent novel Home made the 2008 National Book Award Finalists list last week talks about the development of character in writing in an interview in The Paris Review this month.

In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

And this later in the interview:

I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.

Couple more excerpts:

In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?


ROBINSON: I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

....*.....

Ames says that in our everyday world there is “more beauty than our eyes can bear.” He’s living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?

ROBINSON: You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

Forcing it by original means

More from the aforementioned interview with Jesse Ball and his wife, Þórdís Björnsdóttir:

Ball: I also favour forcefulness in writing. You have to be able to present your work with strength and hope. Some people think of poetry as being some fancy, delicate rhyme thing that doesn’t have a lot to do with them. And that is all wrong. Poetry is the most forceful and powerful use of language, if you want to write a poem and get to how you feel, getting it down, forcing it away by original means, that’s poetry. Cynicism, however, is… probably the saddest trait of our society right now. And it’s rampant.

Q: You’re waging a war on cynicism?
Ball: All cynicism does is subtract. It doesn’t add. Every single genuine endeavour goes forth despite cynicism. Even something like punk, which presents a lot of cynical ideas, is inherently hopeful, it has a deep strong hope in it’s core, and a strong spirit. As I see it, being disaffected is one thing, that’s actually hard not to be in this day and age. But being cynical is a step too far.

The interview is full of much wisdom (also see this post) -- the poet/writer Jesse Ball is not only creative but also seems wise beyond his years!

It stupefies, It sickens, It infuriates

So, what is a writer's job when he puts pen to paper? Phillip Roth said it best in an interview with Paris Review in Fall 1984

The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.

But sometimes, like Roth himself wrote in a 1961 essay, Writing American Fiction, literature falls short.

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 actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

Indeed! I have lost count of the number of times I have wondered in recent days if some news item was satire from The Onion or real news! Reality makes satire and parody almost redundant. Life itself is a parody, no?

P.S. Sorry... both links in this post are subscription-only articles, which even I have not read. The quotes, which I found elsewhere, are interesting though and so I thought of blogging about them.