street artist: approaching the blank page

I found him in Berlin.  I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page.  A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry.  It was that easy.

Today the fog lifts slowly.  I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week.  We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates.  We'll wade through definitions.  We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff. 

And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.

Read more...

New York Diaries: 1609-2009, ed. Teresa Carpenter/Reflections

I should be writing up my study guide for The Duke of Deception, the Geoffrey Wolff memoir my Penn students are reading.  And I will.  I should be going past paragraph three of the annual report I started writing at 4 AM this morning.  And I'll get there, too.

But right now, right before I leave for church, I want to share these few words from New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter, a book Dwight Garner heralded a few days ago in The New York Times.  I went off to buy Diaries just hours after reading the review, picking up American Gods and The Fault in Our Stars in the process.  I started reading it before I got home.  We're working on journals in class, among other things.  I felt the book could be significant.  It is.

Garner describes the book as "the most convivial and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across."  Garner continues, "This book's editor, Teresa Carpenter, a longtime Village Voice writer, has had the ingenious idea to comb through hundreds of diaries, written by the famous and the unknown in New York, and to liberate these chronicles of their crunchiest and most humane bits."

The book is thick but doesn't feel that way. Voices appear again and again—enchanting refrains.  Dawn Powell, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Simone de Beauvoir.  Andy Warhol.  Small bits.  Big bits.  Love reached for.  Love cast off.  The dying of a cat.  9/11.

What makes a good journal entry?  It's a question we'll be asking and answering on Tuesday, after we discuss Joan Didion's "On Keeping a Notebook."

What made me love many of these passages in Diaries, and skip over others?

It's this:  I want to believe and trust that someone took the time to make a sentence new and fresh, which is to say:  I lean toward those who approach this life with their senses wide open.

Here's Dawn Powell in a room in 1942.  It is September 28:

Old battered furniture looks very startled and terrible here but I will not give in to this place and pleasure it with that white decoration sort of thing—the bare tasteful simplicity of the places meant for the bare, tastefully bleak personalities.

If you can see a room this way, you are one step closer toward becoming a writer.

And if you can trust language to move like Chad the Minx trusts language, shortly after the twin towers fell, well, then: There's room for you here.

this evening (downtown): still bright, still barely cloudy, still moving, still whispering my name with a look.

Read more...

House of Prayer No. 2 and The Duke of Deception: A Literary Pairing

The worst part about teaching at Penn is the decision-making part.  As in:  I have to study my swollen, swaying, triple-stacked wall of memoirs and decide which few (only a few!) to put on the syllabus.  Sure, we're reading all semester long—theory, excerpts, slices of things.  But which memoirs will we read, cover to cover?  Which books will my students carry forward, in their own libraries?

I have, just now, made at least one pairing decision:  House of Prayer No. 2 (Mark Richard) and The Duke of Deception (Geoffrey Wolff).  I cannot wait to read both these books again.

Read more...

The Duke of Deception/Geoffrey Wolff: Reflections on one of the best memoirs I've ever read

I could go on about this; I won't.  The Duke of Deception is one of the best memoirs I've ever read.

I speak as one whose shelves are overflowing with the form, as one who has attempted the beast more than a few times herself, as one who teaches this dastardly, presumptive first-person art, begging emerging writers to think harder about scenes, longer about story, more purposefully about what any of it means.  Leave the right things in, take the right things out, be scrupulously honest without ever being dull, learn and let the reader learn with you, do not summarize your past, evoke it, avoid the scold and the didactic and the exhibitionism, be only yourself, grant your work the possibility of reach and stretch, write for the right reasons.... It's all here, all the lessons I've ever laid out, urged toward.

Duke is a father-son story.  It's a forgiveness story.  It's an adventure.  It's a lesson.  Geoffrey Wolff's father hardly ever told the truth, and he was a wreck, and he wrecked things, and he was a shameful disappointment, and he died ignoble, and yet every word in this breathtaking book is written from a place of love.  Like this:

I was harder on my father after I had the goods on him than he had ever been on me.  He had always had the goods on me.  And he never made cruel use of them.

Like, also, this:

My father's vocabulary was a schoolboy's vocabulary because among us he was among schoolboys.  He was a chameleon.  He gave his clients what he thought they wanted:  companies got his constipated management jargon, headmasters got piety, car salesmen got bank references, car mechanics got engineering lore.  He was a lie, through and through.  There was nothing to him but lies, and love.

No excuses.  Read it.

Read more...

Let's be honest with each other, at least for a moment

We avoid landmines out here—so many of us (I'm guilty, too) do.  Don't say things that might be said, don't help guide a friend toward a new understanding, don't disagree, don't attempt to back another away from an exaggeration or a misappropriation, don't ask for a righting of the balance, because, well, the possibility of a ruckus is just too much to bear.  So that we are silent or we are passive; we let things slide.  This, in time, leads to dissonance and distance.  Another kind of fracture.

I was thinking about this while reading Geoffrey Wolff's remarkable The Duke of Deception, his memoir about his fraught relationship with his father.  I'll be writing more about this book in the days to come, but for now it's this page 10 moment that I share.  It's the honesty of Wolff's friend that caught my eye.  His willingness to state what he believed to be the truth.  More than that:  Wolff's willingness to listen.

Writing to a friend about this book, I said that I would not now for anything have had my father be other than what he was, except happier, and that most of the time he was happy enough, cheered on by imaginary successes.  He gave me a great deal, and not merely life, and I didn't want to bellyache; I wanted, I told my friend, to thumb my nose on his behalf at everyone who had limited him.  My friend was shrewd, though, and said that he didn't believe me, that I couldn't mean such a thing, that if I followed out its implications I would be led to a kind of ripe sentimentality, and to mere piety.  Perhaps, he wrote me, you would not have wished him to life to himself, to life about being a Jew.  Perhaps you would have him fool others but not so deeply trick himself.  "In writing about a father," my friend wrote me about our fathers, "one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them decently is never clearly decided."

So I will try here to be exact....

Read more...