I’ve deleted two posts trying to write this down.  I’ve had trouble concentrating late at night and I have trouble sleeping–though the latter’s nothing new.  I feel like I’ve successfully compartmentalized myself.  I feel like I’m in a Murakami novel.  I’ve put my heart and brain away in jars and I take them down from the shelf when I need them and when I don’t the rest of me may as well be in formaldehyde, too.  I’m driven, I’m dedicated.  I do exactly what is necessary to go out in the late afternoon and write a day’s worth or more.  I eat and sleep and I am careful to use my brain for nothing so it’s fresh for those five or six hours.  If you were to ask me to cobble these days back together I’d be hard pressed to say more.  My memories are disjointed, tangential.  If you cut up a dodecahedron–if you lay it out a certain way– it can look like a Rorschach, or a mechanical butterfly; only one pentagon touching more than one other pentagon.  That’s how I remember, lately.  There are long walks and long moments where I’m about to cry and the few hours of In the Valley of Elah in which I’m taut enough to sing like fencewire.

It’s not that I’m numb or disconnected.  I’m where I want to be, given my means.  This is what I wanted.  I come alive on the page and otherwise I’m not invested.  My heart rests.  But that’s not true.  Broken up into these pieces, there are phases, moments, quadrants, in which I literally shake.  I feel so strongly about some things these days.  I’m up against a wall with one part of my life and with the others I grab at the thin air.  I feel surrounded by absurdity, by irony, by things so abstract I can’t discern any meaning and I see people relishing in them.  I’ve been rededicating myself.  I found myself searching for a kind of morality in Ohio and here I see its opposition.  I know what not to be.  I know where I stand and I know what’s below me.  We all walk on the bones of the dead.  It’s not something I’ll forget.

My field of vision narrows.  My interests dwindle.  I love the writing I’m doing.  I’m trying to read Notes from the Underground and I struggle because it’s so self-indulgent.  If it’s not a story of sacrifice and toil I am repulsed.  This is my Metamorphosis, except I wake up in bed to find myself a bitter old man.  But it’s good that some people write about other things, about themselves like I am now, about tripe like “the boundary between public and private”.  If everyone wrote something of moral import I’d have a much harder time getting noticed.

I’m trying to become more moral.  To live the way I write.  It’s a code I believe, it’s just not something I’ve been able to follow yet.  I find myself becoming a little harder again.  I don’t blame God for anything anymore.  I find myself becoming more religious.  I’ve asked him for something twice, recently, and I won’t deny it was selfish.  But I haven’t been confronted with anything I wanted that deeply in so long.  Ten years.  He didn’t grant me my wish and neither did the stars, and what does that mean?  That the alternative is better, I hope.  Not that it’s His plan, and He had it ordained this way, but that the compromise is too costly.

I feel best when I’m my own master, and I feel better knowing there’s nothing to lay blame on but myself.  I’m taking that weight.  The weight of the future, of the distance.   I have an idea of what’s to come.  The end isn’t clear but the path is worth it.  She’s worth it.  She and California, the distance to and from, the miles to Ohio.  When we started talking she had a path of her own, a long trip, and she told me she’d be better for me for having taken it.  It’s coming true of me, too.  I want to wear my bootsoles thin walking to her.  And if she’s not there I can still say I’ve gone those thousands of miles.

Taking a leap from the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, presented to me and you by 20SB, I give you my year in reading, approximately.  I say approximately because there’re a few here I can’t remember if I read in 2009 or the close of 2008.

• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.  The only non-fiction I read, discounting a little of Ernest Hemingway on Writing and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.  Egan does a wonderful job of bringing the Dust Bowl to life, and it is a world apart, let me tell you.  You can’t even imagine.  Comes with pictures that, if you’ve got any tie at all to the land, will chill you to the bone.
• Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen.  Pick two of the three novels this was formed from, and read those.  Damn good writing, but not worth retelling a story three times.
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.  Another book I’d choose parts to read and parts to leave behind.
• Twilight by William Gay.  You thought I meant something else, didn’t you?  His most disappointing work.
• A Mercy by Toni Morrison.  I don’t know why you’d call this a novel.  It’s a novella, tops.  Good, for how short it is.  Needed more meat to it, I thought.
• Secret Son by Laila Lalami.  Dickensian, in that Great Expectations sort of way, plus Morocco.
• Slouching Toward Nirvana by Charles Bukowski.  The first poetry I read this year.  A letdown from the superb Last Night of the Earth collection.
• News of the World by Philip Levine.  Really good, really heavy, dirty, depressing poetry.
• The Speed Limit of Clouds by Jon Veinberg.  Go read it, now.
• The Bell Jar by you oughta know who.  Didn’t like it.  Don’t get why others like it.
• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.  It’s not American Psycho, but it is as plotless.  Good for his first novel– Ellis’ prose was masterful right from the start.
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck.  Timshel.
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.  The only good noir I read this year.  Never read Mickey Spillane.  Just don’t do it.
• Double Indemnity by James M. Cain.  Not too bad?  Not very good.
• Reread Blood Meridian, Suttree, No Country, Islands in the Stream, Provinces of Night.

Though a reread, Islands in the Stream was my favorite for the year, I think.  It kept me company through some hard times this summer, and for a while turned my inner monologue Hemingway-flavored.  I doubt I’ll be able to pick it up again without thinking of the pool and the lounge chairs and the sound of the palms overhead.  It’s really a wonderful book.  The beginning is Hemingway at his best–simple, evocative, powerful.  Thomas Hudson is a painter living on the Isle of Bimini, and the novel opens just before his three sons come to visit.  The book involves drink, sport, and war–Papa’s holy trinity.  People don’t read his posthumous works enough.  I suggest you do.

Mostly a post of miscellany, but with this little kernel:  a long, long time ago I diagnosed myself with a deep need to appease the father figures in my life.  My dad was absent or lacking through a part of my childhood, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put these two things together*.  At present, there’s a lot to take from my father’s behavior, a lot to learn from, and a lot to mediate.  My dad, I assume, is one of the last of his kind–the old breed that has a helluva time talking about anything, would sooner take you out to kill animals than talk about feelings.  And that’s fine, I know how he feels, and I would sooner have him than the manchildren that pass as adults these days.

So, in an odd way I’ve been trying to teach myself how to be a man.  I don’t think I am one yet.  Occasionally someone will describe me as such, and I take it as a compliment.  But I’m bothered by my complacency, and if a real man is anything, complacent isn’t it.  I was on a balcony at school the other day and I saw a guy take a seat on some steps, peel open a pack of cigarettes, and let the wrapper drift away.  I wanted to yell at him, but I didn’t.  I thought, have I been blameless on this front?  Have I littered, or let friends litter?  And, yes, of course I have.  So it would be hypocritical to call him out on it.  But that’s not right, is it?  Your moral standing should not give you pause when you see an injustice.  It’s a luxury, hypocrisy.  We happy middle-class, we’re able to stay our action with political correctness, with our own position, and that shouldn’t be so.

Well, nevermind the miscellany.  I had some things to link you to, but I’ve forgotten them or didn’t save them.  Down the pike I think I’ll try to remember all the books I read this year (not many), as a lot of litblogs are doing that sort of thing.

You’ll note at right that I’ve linked to My Soul is a Butterfly, another one of those lovely, soulful blogs.  Hannah’s writing drips with the stuff of existence.  Also, I went and got a Twitter account, for god knows what reason.  You can find it here.  That’s it for today.

*I don’t know why you’d ask a rocket scientist to do that.

I walk a lot here.  I walk about two miles to the grocery for a few pieces of fruit and some bread and my housemates laugh when I come in and see the bags.  Gone for two hours for $10 worth of food.  I guess my time just isn’t worth much these days.  I have a lot of it and I have a lot to kill.

I’m so far in my head these days.  I write a lot, drink a lot of coffee.  My sleep suffers a little from that but when I wake up in the middle of the night it’s no inconvenience.  The quarter is nearly over and I have most of my work done.  Finish off a short story and a paper and I’ve got a while to do nothing, to prep for my reading and write more.  That’s what life is out here.  I thought I’d be okay with that, and largely I am, but I never gave it a thought that I’d be pulled so powerfully away.  At first she was supposed to be with me, a little magically.  We’d be living with Viking in the condo and laying out together or maybe trying to grill, or whatever, just living together.  Seeing what sort of a home we make.  When that didn’t come together it was that there was nothing, that I was supposed to forget, or to put her away.  Now we’re somewhere in the middle of that.  Thousands of miles away, across time zones and weather patterns.  But together, in our way, and happier for it.

I find myself writing as an escape, as much as anything.  It’s not suffering for it, but it is a distinct impetus.  I’m living in wait, trying not to count the days.  There are a lot of them.  I daydream of gray skies in a new city.  That should surprise you.  But I know that’s where I’ll find her.  Whether I come to her or she to me, it’ll be a new city, one I’ve never lived in, one that has rain.

I wrote a poem about a year ago that I put up for workshop a few weeks back, and I’ve been revising it and really considering its heart.  The whole premise is that I meet people, women, and fall in love with them, and what I remember and think of more than anything is the architecture of our relationship.  I think of the buildings we saw, the spaces we were in, what we sat on and what we drove through.  I’m not sure why that is.  It strikes me as something very masculine–not manly, but rather inherently male.  It may seem less romantic but when I think of her and what might be it’s a place that I may bring her, a home I can try to make again, streets that we can walk down.

I missed you powerfully last night.  It was a good night, fun, and even through that I wanted you.  I looked away often, up to the stars, sat back and listened for the things that they didn’t hear, things that even I didn’t hear; the sound of your voice, the passing of time.

To contrast my last post of substance:

Everyone thinks they can write a book.  They can’t.  Everyone thinks they’ve got a story in ‘em that’s worth telling.  They don’t.  Half of the people who’ve even taken steps to become a writer fall into this category.  Probably more than half.  And I don’t just mean get a book published.  I mean write one.  And not even a good one that goes unnoticed.  I mean just finish one.  A bad one.  Most of you won’t do it.

It’s one way or the other with folks, but often enough I think it’s both.  Writers are, as we’ve covered, mystical figures who ride unicorns and drink the moon’s laughter.  And at the same time, everyone thinks they can be one.  I met Billy Collins a couple years ago, and he had (very roughly) this to say:

I was introduced to an accountant at a party.  We exchanged pleasantries, names.  When he recognized mine the accountant said, ‘why, my nine year old daughter is a poet.  She writes poetry all the time!’ And I said, ‘you know, that’s funny.  My six year old is an accountant.  He was playing with change just the other day.

The truth of the matter is that dabbling in something doesn’t make you a professional.  I’m interested in physics, but I’m not about to call myself a physicist.  Just the same, entertaining the idea, even sitting down to begin a story, does not make you a writer.  There is no hard and fast definition, no certain point at which you can say you are one.  But you ought to know when you’ve crossed it.  And it’s not even necessarily when you’ve finished a book.  I’m comfortable with calling myself a writer after having spent three years at it, getting a few pieces published, and finishing two books while working on a third and going to school for writing.  If you took away any two of those things, I’d probably not call myself a writer.

My thesis is this: I like colons in blog posts.

My thesis is this: while writing is a job, even just a job, it is not something you can claim as a title simply because its definitions are so liquid.  Furthermore, with more accuracy than any weatherman, I can say that you aren’t a writer.  It’s gonna rain, and you aren’t a writer.  Put down your pen and grab an umbrella.  Everyone thinks they can write a book, a lot of people say they will someday, but only writers do.

I was hoping to generate some discourse with my last post, but it would seem the world according to five people other than myself agrees with me.  No one will stand up and defend Homer as a prophet, or as someone who shook the world?  Shakespeare was just doing his job, building the English language as we know it?  Okay.

In case this got by you, the Wall Street Journal for the past week or so has put out a couple great pieces: one, a bunch of writers let slip how they spend their day writing; and two, a killer interview with John Hillcoat, director of the festive and heartwarming holiday movie The Road and said loving tale’s author, Cormac McCarthy.  It’s mainly McCarthy’s show.

Remember how I had that post about William Gay?  Seriously, read him.  Here’s an long interview with Gay at Oxford American.  Better than the McCarthy interview.

Last is an interview with Tobias Wolff, a really warm piece about the short story, state of publishing, MFA programs, that sort of thing.

I get most of these from reading the litblogs to the right, by the way.  You can cut out the middleman and read them, instead.

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me…What is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Nights Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did.” ~ William Faulkner

I have a problem with people calling writing anything other than exactly what it is: a person sitting down (or standing, whatever works) and writing to get an idea out of their head for others to have it.  It is not a prayer, it is not a scream, or howl.  Whatever torture it puts you through comes of your own self in a way that even the idea did not.  The idea came from your life.  The need to bleed for it is all you.  Whatever asceticism you subject yourself to is of your own doing, and if that is necessary for you to write, so be it.  But because you hang yourself on a cross every evening doesn’t mean you and I are saviors.  I pay $2.50 for coffee for every thousand words or so.  What, then, would you call me?  Whether you claw at your hair or pace grooves into your floor or you travel to a mountaintop or you sit quietly in your room, it is your work that makes you what you are.  It is not the action that produced the work.  The word is all.  I have as much respect for Marilynne Robinson as I do for Ernest Hemingway, and I do because they both wrote incredible pieces of literature.  To my knowledge, Robinson never served in any army, never drove an ambulance, never hunted or played at hunting U-boats in the Atlantic.  These are things that increase my esteem for Hemingway’s life separate from his body of work.  I would love The Sun Also Rises whether written by a hero or a coward.

And let’s not inflate what a writer is.  They are simply that.  Storytellers.  A good storyteller is obviously different from a bad storyteller but it’s the story that’s important.  You can blow smoke about writers being priests or prophets but everyone has something they can do well and only artists are given to the notion that they are particularly special.  When you get your car back from the mechanic and it runs you don’t spend time thinking about the  mechanic and what brought him to where he is.  You just drive.  You ought to think about the writer the same way you do the mechanic.  Each performs a service or creates a product and it is the quality of that thing which is important.  The only thing the writer ought to have of you is loyalty if he produces a quality product.  It’s delusional to ask for more and to think that a writer deserves it.  Embrace the work, love the work.  When I say I love McCarthy, I mean that I love McCarthy’s work.  He’s an interesting guy separate from that, but my interest in him arises primarily from my desire for him to write more books.  That’s how it ought to be.  It’s bad for the ego for you to think anything else.  And despite all of our metaphysical trappings, despite that our occupation itself is a unique one, we aren’t special.  We are certainly no more special than nurses or doctors, and certainly less deserving of praise than police officers, firefighters, and soldiers.

What a reader needs to take away from a book does not involve the writer.  I won’t delve any deeper in the Barthesian pool than to say that an ideal reading of any book begins with the first page of the text and ends with the last.  Any thoughts in between occur in the mind of the reader and nowhere else.  Don’t bring a dictionary, a biography, or Wikipedia to the party.  Ultimately no writer is going to quit fellating or cunniling-ing themself because I said they aren’t special.  It’s the truth, but it’s the reader I’m trying to reach, not the writer.  We’re a crazed lot to begin with.  But we’re not mystical, we’re not any more in tune with the universe because we put words on a page than anyone else.  It’s a unique occupation that’s not a little bit mysterious and more than a little attractive.  People like people who live on the edge, and whether it’s the edge of starvation, sanity, or megalomania, the edge is where writers tend to be.  But don’t love the writer.  Love the book.  If it’s good it is the best of the writer; blood, sweat, tears and all other precious bodily fluids distilled whether shed or not, into a story, a message.  Don’t ruin all our good work by wondering how dirty we got in the process.

Tune in next time for part 3, the anticlimax that I will call “In Defense of the Writer”.  Or some such stickuptheass nonsense.  Until then, here’s J. Tillman, telling it like it is.

A little late, but I just stumbled upon this article at Huffington Post, detailing the suppression of footage that followed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  You can find a video and smaller article from the author here.  The video is graphic.  Then there’s this photo series at the Denver Post, following a new soldier from enlistment to return from combat.

I don’t think I thought about my uncle nearly enough today.  He passed several months ago after a titanic struggle with cancer–outlasting by over a year the predictions of his doctor.  I wouldn’t have any basis for my writing without him.  I did thank one of my best friends, who served.   One of the only ways I can justify not enlisting is that the people who came before did so I wouldn’t have to.  Otherwise, I feel like a coward.  That’s not up for discussion.

The loftiest thoughts I get about writing, about mine, are that maybe I’ll get it into someone’s head, down the line, that war doesn’t even have to turn you into a monster; it can make you a better man, and even as that better man it is  not worth it.  The only way we can justify a war now is to stop a war later, one our sons and daughters would have to fight.  If you’re not sparing the innocence of another, you are not just.

This post will be one in a two or three parter, provided I feel like following through with it, on the capital letter issues of writing.  Truth and big W writers. Maybe a little Beauty thrown in for good measure.

Being in an MFA program, surrounded by writers, some of us are bound to get a little lofty, a bit high-fallutin’, a tad too big for our britches.  A few days ago one of my profs was trying to inspire us, I think, by telling us that writers are like priests.  We’re ascetics, like no other profession in the world.  Who else locks themselves up in a room for hours on end to make money–and that only if we’re lucky?  We close ourselves off in order to create, spend hours and hours observing, making notes, waiting for inspiration.  When you get on a train of thought like this, you inevitably get a little misty-eyed, a little mystic, and you think of muses.  It’s a subject we dance around, for the most part.  No one wants to out and out say they’re receiving messages from some divine source, right?  Idn’t that a little hokey?

While that’s rhetorical, the answer is yes.  And despite that, people do say they’re tuned into otherworldly channels.  And it’s a channel with a lot of viewers.  I submit to you two stories of disparate success:  The first is Alicia Ostriker, whose book of poetry The Volcano Sequence was channeled to her by a volcano after a period of writer’s block.  Ms. Ostriker is published, many times over, and is, I guess, considered a success.  I got the chance to hear her read.  She wasn’t any good, in my opinion.  I’m backed up by other opinions, but apparently it’s the minority opinion.  Nevertheless, this woman had a book of poems beamed into her head by a volcano.  There’s one end.

On the other is a girl from way back.  I told this story on my old blog, so if you’re an old reader you can skip on down.  Beginning Creative Writing, we’re discussing the muses, the possibility thereof, opinions thereon.  This girl pipes up, says, “yeah, you know, sometimes it’s just like someone is speaking to me, the words just flow”.  You wouldn’t question this if it came from the mouth of Marilynne Robinson.  But this girl’s contribution to world literature is a story about making out with her boyfriend “like a wild hyena”, while Disney’s The Lion King played in the background.  Whatever you’re plugged into, I don’t want to be party to it.

The higher you get in the writer echelons, the less you hear about inspiration, about muses.  People talk more theoretically about what it is that’s fueling them.  My money is on the subconscious/unconscious.  I can tell you exactly when I’m getting inspired, because I can feel it.  You, observing me, can see it.  I zone out, clam up, stare off.  There’s nothing mystic about it.  It’s cool as hell, sure.  But it’s not mystical.

Washing your hands of the muse is a good thing for all of us.  There’s no reason for the occupation of writer to be so mystified, unless by proxy there is reverence for the text.  I’ll never be a guitar god, but that doesn’t mean I think Jimi Hendrix was anything more than highly skilled.  Killing the muse is good for the writer, too.  I doubt you’d ever come across a professional writer who waits to be inspired.  (I could cite sources, if you like.)  With inspiration in and on your head, you do what all the pros do: treat it like work.  It’s a grind like any other.  Some of us hate it, oddly enough.  But they say they have to do it.  Feel bad for them.

So, man.  I wrote a lot and said very little.  I’m sorry you’re exposed to such diarrhea of the mind but at least it’s not getting put down elsewhere.  What I wanted this to do, in part, was attack the notion of the muse as an external force, knock down some stilts writer’s might be standing on, and build a foundation for a post down the line on big W writers.   Notice it was Shelley, not Byron, that said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  Byron was too busy getting laid and saving Greece to say something as self-serving as that.

I mostly said that to piss off the Shelley fans.  But I’ve got a little point hidden in there, and I’ll write about it later.