Writer’s Block

February 16, 2012
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For most of her career, Flannery O’Connor was functionally incapacitated, restricted to her home because of fatigue due to systematic lupus. At her diagnosis, she was given a life expectancy of five years. She made it fourteen.

During those years, O’Connor was unable, for the most part, to leave her ancestral home, except during brief stints as a lecturer on creative writing. She used her writing as a means to escape the doldrums of rural home life, using fiction and correspondence as her primary means of access to society. While it proved a great escape for her, the act of writing did not come easily. She had little else to do, but she still struggled to find the energy and motivation to write.

Boredom and frustration can be great motivators, but they are also the number one culprits of writer’s block. Writing, especially when one is writing with writer’s block, can be incredibly tedious and depressing. It is easier to write about experience than imagined experience, and after 1951, O’Connor was left to rely mostly on the imaginary.

The key for O’Connor was to always write, no matter what. She made it a point to write at least two hours every day, regardless of whether or not she felt inspired. It was this way that she managed the two novels and twenty-odd short stories written during her illness, among them A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Everything That Rises Must Converge, surely the best collections of her career.

There is always an excuse not to write. The point is to do it anyway.

Faulkner’s Forgettable Poetry: Vision in Spring

January 6, 2012
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When was the last time you read Faulkner’s poetry? Chances are that you never have because, like that of one other Modernist windbag James Joyce, Faulkner’s poetry is actually quite terrible. Let’s have a look, shall we? I’m pulling this from the lately recovered (by which I mean in 1984), and now out-of-print collection of fourteen love poems from 1921, Vision in Spring:

Dusk flows down, and row on row
A spring of lights blooms on a pale green sky,
Is blown from wall to wall and street to street;
Across a maze of feet
It weaves, across the smoke of pipe and cigarette.
Arm in arm we walk this refrain,
This thin elusive phantom in our brain
Which we cannot remember, or forget.

Let’s pause, shall we, before ripping this apart, and give some context and perhaps an explanation as to why this piece may seem, to even the most cursory reader of Faulkner, to be uncharacteristically unpolished and disconnected blather. The fact is that at this time, Faulkner rather was an unpolished, disconnected blatherer — a twenty-year-old college dropout who had as of yet written nothing significant, and was madly in love with a married woman (to whom the poems were composed and delivered), Estelle Oldham Franklin. The old girl was, in eight short years, to become his very own wife, and remain as such despite Faulkner’s assorted and prolonged extra-marital affairs (one of which, a rather long and involved one I might add, commenced in Sweden at the 1950 Nobel Prize ceremony).

The poems contained in Vision in Spring were composed during that fitful postwar summer of 1921, perhaps the first true summer of the modern world — the same summer (as Faulkner scholar Judith L. Sensibar stupidly points out) that T.S. Eliot would begin work on “The Wasteland.” Who cares, is my thought on the subject, but hey. Faulkner, anyway, typed the poems out and bound them by hand, presenting them to Estelle as a gift and token of his admiration. Apparently it worked to win her over, however with an undeniable time-delay effect.

Are these poems romantic? No, I don’t think so. At least not ostensibly. Are they by any means good? Certainly not. The stacked rhyme is the first of the passage’s many “no-nos” to catch my eye. The coupling of ‘refrain’ and ‘brain,’ while not without metaphorical significance, is a particularly nasty rhyme. ‘Street’ and ‘feet’ is straightforward enough, but that’s just what’s wrong with it. Anything that obvious should have at least more than a relationship of physical contiguity. Though you can almost just skip over it, unlike the poetical landmine of refrain/brain. The collection, however, is peppered with them, by which I mean awkward rhymes involving the word ‘brain.’

In the same poem we get:

Rythm of back and throat and gathered train.
A bursting moon, wheels spin in his brain.
What was that? The rushing of harsh rain?

Yikes is right. A few stanzas later pops up the sight rhyme of brain/again, which coupling pops up at least once more in the poem. I can go on, but I won’t. As a Faulkner devotee, I feel almost angry that this stuff has been published. I get the same feeling, I sense, that actual Rick Perry supporters (frightening as they may be) have been experiencing for the past few weeks:Can we just pretend he never did that?

The simple answer is that No, we cannot. The more respectable, powerful, and dangerous a figure is (and Faulkner is certainly all three; I’ll give the latter two to Perry) the more fascinating it is to watch them wriggle and fail. If you care enough about that sort of thing, you have to look. The very experience of reading the poetry is as gruesome as any moment from The Sound and the Fury. Jason Compton beating the horse, for instance. Or the revelation of Anse Bundren’s false teeth at the very end of As I Lay Dying. Or Quentin’s suicide…

Faulkner talks about having failed at poetry, the most difficult form of literature, and proceeding to fail at the next most difficult form, the short story, only to settle into that cheapest of arts, the novel. I think most readers can agree that Faulkner was hardly a failure as a short story writer. “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” have proven themselves again and again to be sources of extreme terror and delight. However, the point is well taken about the poetry.

But I sometimes like to think of Faulkner as a long-form poet rather than a novelist. Anytime I’ve tried to excerpt a short passage from one of his novels, I find that it is simply impossible. I realize I have to keep pulling the next clause, and the next clause, and the next clause. Faulkner works around the image, painting almost Impressionistically, allowing the prose to peak, reaching its true relevance and beauty only in the wake of the description its apex follows. Sure, you can pull gems from As I Lay Dying. “My mother is a fish” and that. You even get pretty solid chunks of The Sound and the Fury that quote easily: “Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced.” Chew on that one for awhile and see where it gets you.

A favorite of mine, from Absolom, Absolom! falls into the camp of unquotability. You get such dense, such protracted stream of consciousness that no idea is self-contained. You get a much cleaner fluidity than you do in Joyce. Even Molly Bloom’s soliloquy can be chopped; Joyce writes thoughts in spurts and spasms (I chose these words carefully), but Faulkner really draws it out. Here is the Faulkner bit (I’ve quoted it on this blog before):

“Even then he had that same alertness which he had to wear later day and night without changing or laying aside, like the clothing which he had to sleep in as well as live in, and in a country and among a people whose very language he had to learn—that unsleeping care which must have known that it could permit itself but one mistake; that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgment and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.”

As clear and resounding as any brief passage from Lawrence or Graves, but only when read as a whole. Faulkner seems to work that way. Sometimes it seems that the only way to read Faulkner is in a trance or academic stupor. They teach Faulkner to high schoolers these days, which I think has to be just a terrible idea. I first encountered Faulkner as a junior in high school, but it wasn’t a class assignment. The AP English class, which looking back I reallyshould have been in, was reading The Sound and the Fury. I chose to read As I Lay Dying twice that semester (perhaps out of spite or some sort of childish contempt), as well as a good survey of his short stories, and that was for me the experience you hear recounted so many times by literature folks: the first love. An awakening of not only my senses but my sensibilities (please pleaseplease pardon that allusion, but do read that book).

The faith and idealism imbued in Faulkner’s words was enough to assure me that I would spend the rest of my life loving literature. I’d been reading nonstop since my earliest memories, but As I Lay Dying was the first book that I felt I needed to keep on my bookshelf. Not just valuable for the experience of having read it, but something with physical weight and value. Something to stare at every once in awhile. Something to contemplate. Something that I couldn’t leave alone. Something that most certainly would not leave me alone.

For all of its faults, Vision in Spring has met that criteria. I found it on a shelf at the Great Overland bookstore in San Francisco’s Sunset district, and after reading it became rather disappointed in it and decided not to buy it. Every time for the next year that I went into that bookstore I contemplated it. I flipped through it and tried to find a reason to fall in love. Eventually it was the weirdness and the rarity of it that convinced me. It was a collector’s decision, not a reader’s. But as time has passed, and Vision in Spring has begun to gather dust on my bookshelf, I’ve begun to feel its tug again. A certain something in it screams to be read. That very quality, I suspect, that Faulkner saw in his own early work. That small light that convinced him to push on.

I’ll end this piece with a short passage from Vision in Spring that, while not comparable to his prose, does I believe show signs of the dimness and stark beauty of Faulkner’s later vision.

Here the sunset paints its wheeling gold
Where there is no breast to still in strife
Of joy and sadness, nor does any life
Flame the hills and vales grown thin and cold
And bare of sound.

Everybody’s got to start somewhere, don’t they?

An Ambivalent Argument on Poetry

December 9, 2011
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John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1824)

Sometimes the tragedy of our great personal disappointments is that they absolutely live up to their representations in popular art. Few are the dark experiences I’ve had that weren’t cheapened by my being able to find a comforting analog for them in literature. There is nothing that I can feel that someone else hasn’t already written about, in painstaking length and with acute precision, no less.

Having consumed so much art and literature as a child and adolescent (as we all do, in whatever form), I now regard each new emotion, which I inevitably recognize from some poem or other, as another blow to the individuality which I’ve spent much of my life cultivating. Every time I grow to finally relate with a story I’ve always loved, a little part of me that once believed in the transcendental quality of fiction dies. It’s all true — the good stuff anyway.

Now, none of this makes me human, as I used to believe. It just reminds me of the fact — and that, dear reader (I doubt you exist), is almost never a good thing. Somebody, a batty history professor of whose genius I am nearly certain, told me once that no one who believes that they too are human can accomplish anything great.

Does this mean that I should start calling bullshit (what a terrible phrase) on Yeats and Auden, to if nothing else differentiate my pathos from them and their multitudinous followings? Perhaps. When I grow old and find, as I feel that I almost inevitably will, that “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” will the realization that Yes, I must, make nonsense out of everything that preceded it? Probably, if I go on thinking this way.

Perhaps this sentiment is the exact reason that Yeats chose “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (the last lines of which I quoted in the previous paragraph) as the penultimate poem in his collected works. If so, that would explain the odd choice of “Politics,” a rather flat and dreamy piece, as the final offering in his long and distinguished poetical career:

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

Blech. Kind of makes you nostalgic for the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” doesn’t it? The former is strong, passionately deleterious, even stoic, while the latter is determinedly feminine, a concession rather than a declaration. A quietly fading genius rather than a fiery one, a little death (most certainly in the French sense — Google it, will you?) rather than a true one.

The poem reminds me of a bit from Pynchon’s odd-even-for-Pynchon novel Vineland. Zoyd, an aging hippy and the novel’s protagonist, recalls a moment from his wedding to his lover-turned-counter-operative-secret-agent Frenesi Gates. In one of the more lucid sections of the chapter, Zoyd and Frenesi step away from the reception to speak to one another:

“He smiled, squinting back, like a schoolmarm who still couldn’t believe her luck. A breeze had come up and begun to move the leaves of their tree…She gazed up at him from just under the brim of the hat. He thought, At least try to remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open…”

Zoyd, like the rest of us, wants the poetically beautiful memory of Frenesi to be most clear; He turns her into an oil painting before she can say anything, before she can ruin the moment. By saying what? We don’t know. It should be assumed that, whether intentionally or not, neither does Zoyd.

This is our (or should I say my?) great problem: The attachment of moments of pain and beauty to poetry that, rather than allowing us to transcend our human chains, reaffirms them, and empties our most meaningful experiences of everything but the nagging clanks of bondage and indifference.

If we let ourselves think about it, that is.

The Rum Diary: A Review

October 28, 2011
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The Rum Diary is a book that I find myself wishing wasn’t written by Hunter S. Thompson. Reason being that I actually like it quite a bit. Thompson’s cult status makes me wary of him, as I try to be (try being the operative word) of any writer who is painted as a sad saint in the wake of his suicide. David Foster Wallace is another one those — again, double emphasis on the predicate try.

It’s been seven or so years since I read the novel, but I remember it fondly, and several of its more ebullient (beautiful word, isn’t it?) descriptions still pop around in my head sometimes. One paragraph resonates particulalry, a description of Thompson’s ingenue (and manic pixie dream girl), Chenault. I’m thumbing for it now:

“She was wearing a white bikini and her hair fell down to her waist. There was nothing of the secretary about her now; she looked like a wild and sensual child who had never worn anything but two strips of white cloth and a warm smile. She was tiny, but the shape of her body made her seem larger ; not the thin, undeveloped build of most tiny girls, but a fleshy roundness that looked to be all hips and thighs and nipples and long haired warmth.”

Reading it now, it feels a bit childish and overly sexy, but I think that’s actually what I like about it. Amber Heard’s portrayal of Chenault bored me to death, but that’s hardly her fault. I blame either the editor, for reducing her to a merely peppered-in sexual object, or myself, for expecting her to be anything more than that.

As Paul Kemp, the novel’s protagonist, Depp broods a bit much for my taste, but the brooding gives him leverage to showcase Kemp’s youthful naivety, which he might not otherwise have the physicality to pull off. (What is he now, sixty?) He brings savage complexity to the role and he doesn’t over-sell it. For his previous role in Fear and Loathing, and his long-standing relationship with the late author, Depp has certainly achieved a sort of “Thompson tenure.” While Johnny Depp is alive, can anyone else really play Hunter S. Thompson?

In the novel, Kemp is, for Thompson at least, a rather un-Thompsonian character; He holds to ideals that seem innocent and honest, as though their author could, or might, actually believe in them. The novel was written when Thompson was a youngish man, and Kemp, at least ostensibly, is made to reflect the young Hunter S. You can certainly imagine the youthful and idealistic Kemp (who, don’t get me wrong, is still by anyone’s standards a violent alcoholic) maturing into the paranoid maniac Raoul Duke, of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Sure, we can tack it up to their both “being” Thompson, but let’s not be boring about it, shall we? If for nothing else, Thompson’s prose is meaningful as a cultural barometer; the character himself is stagnant. History moves around him, and profound cultural criticism sticks to him, just from his being there, as muck clings to an unmoving twig stuck in the bottom of a river bed. (Please, pardon the similie.)

I feel that I simply must mention that the film includes an almost obligatory LSD scene to remind the reader that Yes, this is a Hunter Thompson movie, though I’m fairly certain that the only drug in the novel is alcohol, and copious amounts of it. It feels a bit contrived, but hey, I like it. The director, Bruce Robinson gives us a splendid aural display, which effectively quells any of my criticism regarding the scene’s hokiness.

The movie itself is beautiful, and its tone and atmosphere are what sells it for me, at least in terms of its “living up to the book.” It would have been very easy to make the tropical paradise of San Juan into a Corona ad, but Bruce Robinson steers clear of that, giving us very few panoramic shots of expansive ocean and endless white sand. Too many hotels, I think is the point.

Instead of paradise we see dingy walls, sweaty tourists, and profoundly disgruntled locals. The unexpected awfulness of the locale is certainly romanticized, but it works. And, true to Thompson’s Gonzo philosophy, every scene makes the viewer want to be accomplice to the mayhem, to live with such unflagging ideals, and such blatant disregard for how perfectly impossible it is to actually stand for anything. If only we could all be so lucky.

THE DAY’S WAR

July 22, 2011
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Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1931)

I just found this post that I wrote a month ago, before I moved into my new apartment. It’s not that relevant now, but I still think there’s something worthwhile about it.

Ryan has this picture hanging in our apartment below the framed butterfly that I purchased for her at the craft fair in Fort Mason last fall. It (the picture) used to hang in her old apartment before we lived together, and it made the three-block move to our new apartment (a damp, pre-quake dungeon on the edge of the Tenderloin) in a large cardstock folio, or possibly — somehow, I suppose, less romantically — in just a regular manilla extra-heavyweight clasp envelope.

We discovered mold in the apartment yesterday, and, after several angry phone calls to our landlord, we’ve decided to move out as quickly as possible. The picture, along with the rest of our things, will have to be moved, and its functionality as an ornament reconsidered (probably as an afterthought) in conjunction with the almost assuredly limited aesthetic offerings of whatever space we occupy next. In Oakland maybe?

I suppose this means that I’m growing quite cynical about San Francisco living. I love this city, but I don’t know that I can make a home here. SF has the ability to constantly surprise me with the ordinary while numbing me to death with the peculiar. For instance, I have gotten incredibly used to and even bored with the woman who frantically pushes her cat around in a stroller — seriously though, strapped down to the fucking thing, garbed in a velour costume complete with little plastic bells — around my neighborhood every day. There used to be another cat but there isn’t anymore. Frankly, I’m almost certain that she ran it over. That’s how fast she moves the stroller, over curbs and cracks, and in front of cars. I don’t know if she’s homeless but I do know that we live in the same neighborhood. We are neighbors.

Kant, by way of Voltaire — and further by way of my own misappropriation — tells us the best way to deal with this sort of thing is to sleep a great deal, and, whenever not sleeping, to daydream. These seem like wise, friendly, and characteristically cheeky (referring to Voltaire, not Kant) words to live by. Rather bourgeois, yes, but for the inescapably bourgeois rather appropriate. The only reason that I mention Kant and don’t just go directly to the source is that Kant adds a third means by which to “counterbalance the many miseries of life”: laughter. Sleep, daydreaming (they use the word “hope”), and laughter.

But how do you learn to find the cat lady funny again? How do you go back to justifying the amount of rent you pay to live next to her? It is simple: You imagine that you are the cat, and that all of the difficult and humiliating things that you can’t change become the little plastic bells, or the leash, or — better yet — the velour costume, which, as a result of your own genetic makeup, you lack the digital dexterity to remove. These are your jobs, and your bells, and your leash, and your rent. This is your cage to decorate. Now laugh.

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