I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »

Maybe Nuremberg Needs One of These?

Der Klügere gibt nach.  (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying

A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.

The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away. Read more »

I had never heard of this brand until recently.

About a week ago, I spent a Saturday evening drinking scotch, telling stories and having some laughs with a small group of people who all happen to be smarter than I am. Our hosts had some music on in the background, and I recognized a particular piece. In my typical self-deprecating manner, I pointed out how I loved the piece (Ravel’s String Quartet in F major), but my primary association with it was that it signified the title sequence of The Royal Tenenbaums. So as opposed to, you know, being a genuinely cultured person and knowing specific compositions by name, I only recognized the piece because of a movie. I didn’t have to make that connection out loud for everyone– as I said, they’re smart people– so our host, being a good natured person, smiled at my idiocy and proceeded to tell us a bit about Ravel’s history, alluding to some criticism he’d received as a composer and telling us that he’d died a virgin. Which was cool– I love that she knows stuff like that.

When I think about the evening, I think about it in two ways. First, as I said, it was lovely, and I went home glad I’d chosen to go. It was warm and cozy, the conversation was good, I laughed a lot, and I got to know one of the people a little better. But now that I’m writing about it, it’s changed. That’s what happens, right? We make decisions about how to convey scenes. As I’m thinking about the night through the filter of the music conversation, I can point to the various moments that exemplify my opening comment about the others being more intelligent than me. Two people were bantering in Russian, someone alluded to their time teaching at an Ivy League school, someone quoted an obscure passage from a Vonnegut novel I’ve never read, so on and so forth. Now, that doesn’t mean there weren’t penis jokes– even classy people like those– but as I drove home, the moment of noticing the music, and particularly noticing why I noticed the music, caused my mind to travel down a little rabbit hole and land in a room where all I could think about was why I like the art and pop culture that I do.

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It’s 1986. Mickey Shaw is a thirty-five-year-old female New York cop who mostly works behind a desk, answering phones and filling out paperwork, processing masses of drug dealers, prostitutes, and domestic disturbers passing through. Being a woman, she is often asked to make coffee. She usually ignores the request. She is a compulsive knuckle cracker, and every morning before work she hits the gym; her favorite workout is boxing. She is a bit of a worry wart, always thinking, never shrugging anything off unless you count her husband, Stanley, who is a paper pusher but still earns more money than she does. She and Stanley have been married for fourteen years, and he isn’t as fun as he used to be, worn down by his job, plus he spends so much time alone in his office that he’s become increasingly clingy. He calls her several times a day, both at work and at her friend Olive’s apartment, where she spends one evening a week playing Trivial Pursuit with her high school friends. She quit drinking a few years ago and so is usually the only one of them fully sober, and often finds her friends heartless in their criticisms, but that’s just the way they are, and she accepts it. After all, she’s known them longer than she’s known her husband. She’s not one to throw friendships away. She walks with her hips wide, toes pointed slightly outward, shoulders square. She carries her gun in her purse at all times, though she’s never fired it outside a shooting range. As a kid she was addicted to Gunsmoke. She moves quickly, with purpose, but doesn’t always look where she’s going. Her effort/shape (a description of how she moves through space) is sinking, widening, out, bound, quick, strong, and indirect. She leads from her hips and her toes. Read more »

“Once someone passes away they’re open to interpretation.”

So says Daphne Williams Fox, the grand-daughter of William Carlos Williams, as she responds to the new Herbert Leibowitz book on her famed ancestor.   Leibowitz suggests that the Rutherford physician had an unconsummated affair with a Dadaist artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — and with names like these their mere introduction to one another probably sucked all the oxygen from the room.   And can you imagine what might have passed for flirtatious chatter between the two poets, The Mind’s Games?

If a man can say of his life or
any moment of his life, There is
nothing more to be desired!  his state
becomes like that told in the famous
double sonnet — but without the
sonnet’s restrictions.  Let him go look…

Looking, of course, is always an option, and Williams undoubtedly engaged in the activity a lot.  His optic nerve never grew tired.   A coastline?   “Today small waves are rippling…”   Tomatoes?  “Green/ in one basket and, in/ the other shining reds.”   Violets?   “Once in a while/ we’d find a patch… big blue/ ones in/ the cemetery woods…”   An old brownstone church?   “Among a group/ of modern office buildings…”   Look!  Look!  Look!   And finally–Look!

But what happens when someone looks back?   When the writer as observer or as imaginator becomes the one who is seen and known and, as Daphne admits, “open to interpretation”?   My sense is that creative writing, as a discipline, has no clear-cut answer.   Nor does the practice of crafting a simple declarative sentence that is true come with an operators‘ manual.   No safe place exists for us — not even the library, not even the local delicatessen.   Those people behind the reference desk are always watching.  Those slicing lunchmeat have built-in baloney-detectors.   And so, the conundrum that fascinates Leibowitz in telling the tale of William Carlos Williams is also the issue that Leibowitz himself may encounter some day.  (He can only hope!)
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard and/or read about Marie Calloway. But if by some miracle, you’ve been enjoying your life and ignoring sordid internet shitstorms, I’ll be your tour guide today. Put on your raingear and some goggles. Note: This whole thing began more than a month ago, which in internet time is approximately 1.7 million years. Even though I avoided reading it/writing about it for weeks, I’m doing so now mostly because I was bewildered by some of the comments made in a recent interview with the writer in question. But we’ll get to that.

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

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As an undergraduate, I knew a girl who liked to say that fiction writers have a god complex. She would make this decree in the snottiest voice possible, even when surrounded by fiction writers, each of whom could have (but never did) kicked her butt. She loved to dismiss us as control freaks, as if writing fiction were a character flaw.

I hate to agree with this girl on any level–if she were to tell me snow is white or grass is green, I’d be inclined to argue–but I’ve recently had to admit how much I like to control my own art. It’s not, as this girl might have suggested, that I like to rewrite reality by fictionalizing it, or that I get any sick pleasure from controlling my characters when the rest of the world is uncontrollable. It’s that as a writer (and this is true of poets and nonfictioners, too, except those few who somehow write books in pairs or by focus group/committee) I am the sole author of my work. Editors might come along and tweak things at certain points, but for better or worse, I am the one who writes my stories. I make all the choices, from sentence structure to plot points. If I want to cut a line, I can act unilaterally. My work is not a group project.

I have long taken my artistic autonomy for granted.

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“What makes an artist an artist? Artists are the people who have this little weird idea and they act on it, and they  keep acting on it, and regardless of the consequence or the outcome, something amazing unfolds.” 

I came across this video on the internet today. A couple, Judith and Richard Lang, make art out of discarded plastic they find at the beach. They go to Keyhole Bay in California and comb the beach for plastic. Then they take what they’ve found home and organize it in boxes so they can use it in sculpture or mixed-media art. They create some truly beautiful pieces and clean up the beach. It’s a beautiful win-win.

This got me thinking about what it is to salvage and collect things in order to use it for something larger or greater than the thing itself. This is like writing, I think. As a nonfiction writer, I observe the world around me and collect data in a notebook and store it for later use, like a topic or a piece of an essay. At least that’s the goal. Something, whether it is a bottle cap found on the ground or a random quote you heard in the line at the grocery store, can meld with another small something and a really interesting connection or product can be made. Collecting is an art and by that I mean that it’s not limited to material things. I’m not condoning hoarding of ideas or things, but we search for something and when we find it, something happens and we can’t let it be lost. If I didn’t carry a notebook, so many ideas, good and bad, would disappear from my memory, lost forever. And as an artist, as a writer, I can’t afford to let that happen.

There’s been some controversy over the new website Texts From Bennett.  Sam Edmunds was a big fan.  I’ll admit, I did not see what was so hilarious about them, and figured they were fake.  The Smoking Gun says they are fake.  But maybe they’re not fake after all.  This all got me thinking about what is fake, what is real, and I remember the first time I thought something was fake (fiction) and found out it was real (biopic).

A couple years ago, a good friend recommended watching the movie American Splendor.  Not realizing Harvey Pekar is a real person, and the movie is based on/inspired by true events, I was blown away.  How could anyone think up this meta-fiction movie narrative?  At some point, perhaps when the movie used clips from his appearance on a TV show, I wondered aloud, and my friend cleared up that little mystery.  And laughed at my ignorance.  I still thought it was a great movie.  But I would have been more impressed if Harvey Pekar had never existed, and the screenwriter had thought the whole thing up.

Usually, people are more interested if something is “based on a true story,” or “inspired by real events.”  Why did Frey say “A Million Little Pieces” was true?  Because no one would have bought it if it was sold as fiction.

At least for me, if Texts From Bennett is real, I guess it’s funny, I’m glad people are laughing, etc.  But if the guy is making them all up…well, now I’m a bit more impressed, though I’m still not really seeing the humor.