This week, on the Colorado Review blog, the lovely Lauren Gullion asks me some questions about writing.
Meanwhile, helpful husband and Victorian novel evangelist wants to know why I didn't mention Thomas Hardy, so I'm mentioning him now. Yes, it's true. The great man of Wessex has taught me much about doomed love and landscapes...
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Because I always need one more thing to do, I've recently become an assistant editor at Barrelhouse, the awesome DC-based journal of fiction, poetry, pop flotsam, and cultural jetsam. This means I get to bring my spidey-sense to the great adventure that is the submissions queue. As a submitter of fiction myself, I have to say I'm really appreciating the role reversal. But don't worry, fellow writers, I know: with great power comes great responsibility.
Finally saw Olivier Assayas's five-and-a-half hour Carlos, a researched but fictionalized account of the life and deeds of Carlos the Jackal. While I enjoyed the mini-series quality of watching it on three different nights, each time looking forward to the next, I have to admit I found the film just a wee bit overhyped.
The eminent Kirk Michael gives a lovely defense in his best of 2010 round-up -- and he's right that Edgar Ramirez is dazzling to watch -- but in the end I think I like what Kirk says about the movie better than what the movie says about the movie. There were just too many stock speeches about this or that terrorist's commitment to the internationalist revolution and too many procedural scenes that felt taken straight from witness testimony. The film does offer an interesting look at the geopolitics of the 1970s and the ways in which governments and terrorists interacted. And you definitely feel the shift in global ideology as Carlos finds himself cast out of Europe -- in the end only Sudan will have him -- becoming ever more the pampered fat cat he supposedly abhors. But for all the lingering of Assayas's camera on Ramirez's naked frame (and a fine frame it is -- at least initially), the film rarely lingers on the man behind the passion. While it's true that extremists might not have much use for introspection, cinema certainly does, and it was a shame not to get more of it here -- or at some acknowledgment of its frustrating absence. At the risk of defending Jonathan Franzen more than he deserves -- because really, Freedom has some serious flaws -- I've got to admit that Gabriel Brownstein's thoughtful essay in The Millions got me thinking about the book again. In "The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman and 'The Great American Novel,'" Brownstein compares Freedom and Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, both critically-acclaimed, thoroughly absorbing social realist novels about affluent families in the big picture of contemporary America. And as he points out, the books really do have some striking similarities, in their concern with national and global politics, with the environment and technology, and with religion, beauty, and art. Brownstein's question is why, given that the novels are so similar, and that they were released in the very same year, was Franzen's considered a Great American Novel and Goodman's "just another good book by Allegra Goodman."
She felt somehow very like him--the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room. Had I made it to the Kelly Writers House for yesterday's marathon reading of Mrs. Dalloway in time for my assigned 5:50 slot, I would've gotten one of the many exquisite party passages, but not the party passage, which came to me at 6:10. As it was, I had to fidget a little too noticeable as the woman before me pressed beyond her 10-minute slot to say, "Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought," clearly knowing the treasure that lay ahead -- the climax of the entire book. But thanks to Max McKenna and the good people of the KWH, I got to pick up with the Bradshaws, and what business they had to talk of death at Clarissa's party, and it really was the perfect way to end the week. My Historian, when he finds himself suddenly awake in the middle of the night, likes to smack the radio on his bedside table with the hope that whatever sounds come out of it will somehow lull him back to sleep. When those sounds are the weather and traffic, his strategy works fairly well. But when, as happened the other night, he finds himself actually responding to an event or story, he only lies awake longer, listening, evaluating, and pulling the covers away from my deeply sleeping back, trying to remember and interpret every detail so that he can narrate it all back to me the moment my eyes open in the morning.
Fortunately for My Historian and me, Studio 360 puts their content online. So today, sitting on the couch with My Historian and his laptop, I got to hear the full story of My Poet/My Novelist as told by the poet, Averill Curdy, and the novelist, Naeem Murr, themselves. A wonderful piece. (Though, admittedly, My Historian had summed it up pretty well already -- footnotes still to come.) Thanks to a certain online literary magazine, I think about Samuel Beckett's epigram on failure a little too often. But familiarity hasn't dulled these words; these words are ever sharp.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho Listen to the man, Hill. He knows what he's talking about. Because I couldn't resist, here are word clouds of two of my recent stories:
"The Work Boyfriend" "Waste Management" Hmm. At first glance it looks like I need to cut back on a few of those similes! But then I remembered that both leading ladies have things to say about what they like and don't like. Too bad we can't disambiguate further. And how about a word cloud of my novel's prologue as it currently stands? (Yes, friends, this is as close as I get to sharing it at this stage...Imagine what you will.) You saw right. One of those words is a naughty one. While it's most fun to word cloud political speeches -- as many commentators in search of hidden meaning will no doubt do to Obama's State of the Union address tonight -- it can also be fun to word cloud fiction. Here's Hemingway's famous story, "Hills Like White Elephants," in which two characters sit around a train station bar discussing a potential abortion without ever saying it outright. Why this book? Because I finished it this week. And also because it's wonderful (thank you, Will Kuby). Amy and Isabelle is Elizabeth Strout's 1998 novel and it's even better than her later, Pulitzer Prize-winning story cycle Olive Kitteridge. (Much as I love Adventures in Babysitting, I imagine it's also better than the Oprah TV movie adaptation with Elisabeth Shue.) The novel opens in Shirley Falls, a college-mill town in Maine, circa 1970. Amy is the sheltered, rule-following daughter of Isabelle, herself a rule-following single mom who works as a secretary at the local mill. They are different from everyone else in Shirley Falls -- not Carrie different, just somewhat outside the various social circles of the town -- bound together in their odd little family of two. But Amy is a teenager now, with undeniably beautiful hair, and the older she gets, the looser their bond becomes. |
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June 2014
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