hello friday! (150417)

truth?  there is something so soothing about sitting and staring out at the ocean.  whenever i'm having a really hard time or going through a bout of really bad depression, i hie myself out to the ocean and just sit and sit until i start feeling like i can breathe a little easier.  i couldn't live anywhere that doesn't have easy access to an ocean.  

but books!  in bullet points this time just because.

• finished rebecca solnit's the faraway nearby (penguin, 2014, paperback) then immediately picked up a field guide to getting lost (penguin, 2006, paperback).  conclusion:  solnit is wonderful.  i'm going to pick up wanderlust:  a history of walking (penguin, 2001) next.
• started writing a post about the faraway nearby and losing my grandmother to alzheimer's, but then the post became an essay that also wove in my travels in japan (i went to japan a few weeks after my grandmother passed away) and the books i read there and about solitude and place and dislocation and memory.  as of now, i'm unsure what it'll be, but i think that's one of the cool things about writing (or about creating in general), that you have no clue where you'll end up.  you could have a destination point or an end goal in mind, but that doesn't mean you'll actually get there, but it's all right because you end up somewhere better, if only because the journey there is revealing and eye-opening.
• the 2015 pulitzers are announced on april 20, and i'm all ready to side-eye the hell out of it again.  (i've been side-eyeing the pulitzer since 2011.)  
  • who do i want to win the pulitzer?  marilynne robinson's lila (FSG, 2014)!
• speaking of whom -- i started reading housekeeping (FSG, 1980) on the subway (in an empty car, no less) today, and i'm enthralled with her descriptions.  like this passage:
  • "it is true that one is always aware of the lake in fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.  when the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same, sharp, watery smell."  (9)
  • there's something so rich and visceral in that -- you can just imagine the earth exhaling, the smell it gives off.
  • i don't know if other readers are like this, but i find myself reading debut novels (in this case, of long-established authors) with a slightly different eye.  i'm not sure how to describe how my reading eye is different, but maybe it's a little more probing, a little more examining, not in a critical way but in a way that seeks to see the places authors came from, where they originated, how their work has progressed through their body of work.  i love seeing growth, how authors have matured, and i think it's fun because it's usually a very organic progression because change is natural -- we're constantly growing, reshaping, metamorphosing as people, so, of course, that ought to be reflected in the writing.
  • and, of course, this is relevant here because i've read robinson's later novels and housekeeping was her debut.

have a good weekend, all!  happy reading!

hello friday! (150410)

hello hello!  it feels like it's been a long week, partly because i was away for two days and partly because i haven't been sleeping well, so i'm constantly tired.  it's been a great reading week, though, so i can't complain!

i finished reading the book of strange new things and picked up flannery o'connor's the complete stories -- and isn't it beautiful???  FSG recently reissued her books with these beautiful covers, and i want to collect them all.  and i want to know what happened with purity ... any beautiful cover art FSG releases now, and that's the first thing that pops into my head, "this is so gorgeous! ... whathappenedwithpurity."  it's going to be a Thing from 2015, maybe even the Thing!

instead of taking o'connor's the habit of being with me to hudson, i took catie disabato's the ghost network and devoured it in less than twelve hours.  i would have devoured it in one sitting, but i started reading around midnight and was bone-tired from not having slept much the night before and taking the train and walking around, so i had to succumb to sleep with fifty pages left to go, which i was loathe to do, but, sometimes, your body wins out.  the ghost network was loads of fun, though, and so well-written, and i loved all the stuff with guy debord and the situationists because i studied them in college and wrote about the society of the spectacle, so the book also stirred up all these nostalgic *feels* for my comp lit days -- but, anyway, nostalgia aside, the ghost network is fabulous, and i can't recommend it enough.  it's out next month from melville house, y'all!  go check it out!

in hudson, my friend and i went to check out the local bookstore (obviously) where i picked up rebecca solnit's the faraway nearby and promptly started scarfing it down before making myself slow down and take it morsel by morsel because, oh my god, it is so, so good.  i love her writing, and i love how she writes about writing because, here, read this:

writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.  or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them.  matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that i ordinarily can't imagine saying them to the people to whom i'm closest.  every once in a while i try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers.  said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading.  is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two?  is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

[...]

sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural english girl who would grow up to become a writer was told by a gypsy, "you will be loved by people you've never met."  this is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing.  you have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand.  like digging a hole to china and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.  it was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor.

("flight," 64-5)

her writing style isn't flowery or prose-y; it's simply plain good.  she isn't sentimental or outright funny, but there's this wonderful warmth to her writing that i find encouraging and reassuring, a wisdom that makes her feel like a mentor -- and the faraway nearby makes me think of selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed in that i derive a lot of comfort from them both because they make me feel less alone, place me in a world where there are other people, other writers, who are out there struggling with similar thoughts and similar passions and similar ambitions, the word "similar" used in very loose ways.  both books have been recent reminders that we read to feel less alone, that books are and/or contain companions, that we are somehow in this (whatever "this" is) together.

i also started reading amy rowland's the transcriptionist via oyster books, and i'm enjoying it thus far.  for some reason, i keep picturing an older setting, like the 1950s, 1960s, so i keep having to resituate myself in contemporary times, but, in this case, i wonder if that's a bad thing -- but let me continue reading this and ruminate upon what i mean by that some more.  (and see if i continue feeling so as i get deeper into the book.)

and, well, there's my week-in-review.  it's been a great reading week and a terrible writing week.  and, yes, i know, i still owe y'all a march recap, and it will be up by the end of the weekend, and i can actually say this in good faith this time because i was up until four a.m. this morning trying to finish it.  it's not quite as polished or thorough as i'd like, though, so i shall finish working on it and post it over the weekend!  thanks for being patient!

(sometimes, i wonder who i'm talking to here ... hi, readers!  or hi, myself?  have a great weekend!  i'm going to be eating all the chocolate i can find my hands on.  and do some spring cleaning, the konmari way!)

hello friday! (150403)

a week-in-review then, because i'd still like to post something on fridays and books are the most comfortable (and obvious) choice!

• i finished reading selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed (picador, 2015) today.  favorite essays were those by sigrid nunez, anna holmes, danielle henderson, jeanne safer, and elliott holt.
  • i would've loved to see an essay or two by people in their late-twenties/early-thirties because i think (or, at least, i like to think) that you can be in your late-twenties and early-thirties and have decided not to have kids -- some of us have known this about ourselves since we were young.  
  • someone (i'm pretty sure it was laura kipnis) on the panel of contributors at the event on tuesday said there seemed to be a preponderance of writers defending that they liked kids, and, having finished the collection, i agree that there is.  i don't doubt that they genuinely love children; sometimes, though, it did feel very defensive; and i admit it was refreshing to come across the writer who baldly said s/he didn't like kids.  (this was mostly personal, though; it's hard in general to come across someone who doesn't like children.)
• this week, i started doing a buddy read of michel faber's the book of strange new things (hogarth, 2014) with a friend on instagram.  this is one of the reasons i can't dismiss social media; i've had the pleasure of meeting some incredible people via the internet; and i love the fact that this friend (who lives in japan) and i can actively read a book together.
• speaking of the book of strange new things, faber writes with such ease, and his prose is natural and lovely.  his descriptions are vivid and alive, too -- i dreamt i was on oasis because i'd been reading right before going to sleep, and it felt so real, the humidity, the atmosphere, the colors, that i woke up feeling kind of disoriented, wondering, wait, that wasn't real?
• books i've been reading off-and-on the last few weeks (yes, weeks):  
  • cheryl strayed's tiny beautiful things (vintage, 2012):  when i was in LA, the illustrator friend and i went flipped through all the columns, and i haven't felt very inspired to go back and give them all a thorough reading.
  • rebecca solnit's men who explain things to me (haymarket books, 2014):  i'm thrilled this was reissued in hardback with new essays! 
  • joan didion's white album (FSG, 2009):  i love lingering over my didion, taking little morsels and letting them melt into me.  (i'm not quite sure how to credit these publication years ... right now, i'm going with when the edition i own was issued.)
  • kazuo ishiguro's an artist of the floating world (penguin, 2013):  there's such a lovely tension and unease simmering through this book that i'm afraid to find out what the narrator did during the war.  this is my book club's next selection, though, so i'll have to grit my teeth and find out!
  • catie disabato's the ghost network (melville house, 2015, forthcoming):  this is a cheat; i found this ARC at housing works on tuesday and was so very excited; so i had to share.

march reading recap will be up by the end of the weekend!  have a great weekend, all!

hello friday! (150327)

you know, i'm still so unsure about this friday post.  i've typed out several posts, but i delete them at the last moment, and i've considered just giving up on this friday post altogether or maybe making it a collection of author quotes on writing or ... i don't know.  it seemed like a great idea when i first thought of it, but i'm surprisingly finding it incredibly difficult to write, which maybe in itself is a manifestation of some of things about writing that i wanted to post about -- how it requires so much vulnerability and contains so much fear and doubt because that's one reason i end up deleting these posts i start writing -- i find myself questioning the things i write, asking myself, do i really want to put this out there?  am i qualified to put this out there?, though how one would be qualified to do so is unclear.

it's been a good writing week, though, and i am so grateful for it.  i ended up getting frustrated with a story i'm working on, so i printed it out, cut it up, and played it like a puzzle, rearranging sections and trying out different sequences and filling in the spaces that needed to be added to cushion out the story.  i enjoy the tactile demands of writing sometimes because i find that different stories require different things -- sometimes, i need to write longhand or glue a story, one section per page, into a notebook or black out sections in a story with a permanent marker -- and this is one of the ways writing reminds me that it's a living, breathing thing, that it's not just some static, lifeless document, but that it has a sort of life of its own.

which sounds kind of hokey written down like this, i know, but what can i say?

---

so, anyway, there's that, and here's another author on writing.  have a great weekend, all!

the stories that recognize people as they really are -- the books whose characters are at once sympathetic subjects and dubious objects -- are the ones capable of reaching across cultures and generations.  this is why we still read kafka.  (122-3)

&

the situation is never static, of course.  reading and writing fiction is a form of active social engagement, of conversation and competition.  it's a way of being and becoming.  somehow, at the right moment, when i'm feeling particularly lost and forlorn, there's always a new friend to be made, an old friend to distance myself from, an old enemy to be forgiven, a new enemy to be identified.  (124)

&

... it's a prejudice of mine that literature cannot be a mere performance:  that unless the writer is personally at risk -- unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance -- it's not worth reading.  or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing.  (130)

jonathan franzen, farther away, "on autobiographical fiction" (FSG, 2012)

hello friday! (150320)

when i decided to start this friday writing post last week, i had all these ideas about the things i'd write about, but i've been sitting here staring at my blinking cursor for the last hour or so.

it's been a bad night.  the truth is that it's been a rough few months and i've been flailing a tremendous amount.  and i suppose i could continue sitting here, trying to force out thoughts or words, but none of it would be very sincere at the moment, and i have no desire to be inauthentic here.

so, for this week, i must apologize and leave you with a few quotes i loved from hilary mantel's art of fiction interview in the new issue of the paris review.  i will plan better for next week, so please don't give up on this yet!

you have no right to assume that you'll be able to write because you could write yesterday  on the other hand, when there are dark times, you can say, i've faced this before.  you learn that you will always have to mark time, that you shouldn't rush, that if you wait, the book will come to you.  but you only build up this knowledge through long experience.  your daily work is very much about the line, the paragraph.  it's not about the grand design of your career.  (59)

&

among writers themselves, the question is not who influences you, but which writers give you courage.  (62)

&

sometimes there just isn't a tudor word for what you want, and then you have to think hard -- if no word, could they have had the thought?  boredom, for example, that doesn't seem right.  were they never bored?  but tedium, they know.  and somehow ennui seems fine.  sometimes words play tricks, change their meaning.  let doesn't mean "allow," it means "forbid."  they call a doll a "baby," often as not.  they call a clever man "witty."  it doesn't mean he makes jokes.  so you can't be slavishly literal.  you can try to be authentic.  (68)

and here's one from lydia davis' interview from the same issue:

just because a story uses material from the writer's life, i don't think you can say that it's her life, or that the narrator is her.  as soon as you select the material from your life, and arrange it and write it in a stylized manner, it's no longer really identical to that life and that person.  (171)

have a great weekend!