Oliver Sacks, David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max, Joyce Carol Oates, C.K. Williams: A morning spent reading

I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"—worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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Desperate Characters/Paula Fox: Reflections

I read four books while I was away (beyond all that I read about Berlin). I reported on the first—If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black's crisp and smart debut short story collection—here. I'll be reporting on the others (The Paris Wife (hmmmmm) and The Coffins of Little Hope (a marvel!)) in days to come.

But this very early morning, I'm reflecting on the scouring brilliance of Paula Fox's Desperate Characters. It's a book I'd always meant to read, an author whose story I have followed.  That doesn't mean that I was prepared for the hard, bright smack of Fox's sentences, the relentless disintegration of a domestic arrangement that may or may not hold. We have Jonathan Franzen to thank for helping to bring Desperate Characters back into print and wide circulation. We have, in the Norton edition, his essay that suggests that the book is, "on a first reading," "a novel of suspense."

As the novel opens, Sophie Brentwood is bitten by a stray cat; Sophie's hand swells. Sophie should have the hand checked, but she is afraid.  She can imagine dire consequences—rabies, even death—but other underlying fears persist and complicate.  Three days will go by, and the wound will keep molting, oozing, disfiguring, haunting, and this is the running tension—this cat bite, this not knowing, this unwillingness to find out, this false hope that comforts lie elsewhere (in drink, in friendship, in secrets, in lashing out).  Into this strange, unsettling frame Fox inserts the fractures of a marriage in naked near stasis. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are childless.  Otto is abandoning a business partnership with a long-time friend, Charlie—bating him, hating him, feeling abandoned and abused by him. Brooklyn, finally, is scathing and scabrous and ill-equipped, in these late 1960s, to wrap this couple in a numbing sheen.

Sophie and Otto know too much. They see too much. They both despise excessively and love forlornly.  Is this all that marriage is? All it offers? Is there refuge among the refuse? In whose arms can one trustingly take shelter? Desperate Characters is a brutal book, a lacerating book, and if that makes it a hard book to read, it also makes it an impossible book to put down. I, for one, read the bulk of it while being jostled about during a long wait at the Berlin airport.

There are easy books, and there are hard books, and I will be honest: I prefer the latter.  I want to be tested.  I want to think.  I want to study a book and ask, in awe, How in the world was this made?  Desperate Characters has me asking.

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Not perfection (and Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace)

This is not my yard.  This is the perfect lawn of Chanticleer Gardens, where two of my books take place and many of my other books have been considered.  This is the lawn children tumble down, the lawn my own Chanticleer students once traversed as they made their way from prose poems to villanelles.

This is also not my life—this quiet, green perfection.  My life is more like last night—those 45 minutes of sleep that I finally got—or more like this morning, when, after deciding that further sleep was not an option, I turned on my computer only to experience a three-hour computer crash.  My email files have now been restored, thank you very much.  But it's 11:20 AM, and I have not dressed for the day.

What I have done, while wading through no sleep and no connectivity is to read and blurb a book, to talk to my father, and to read Jonathan Franzen's essay, "Farther Away," in last week's The New Yorker.  This is the piece my dear student brought to me on Tuesday.  This is the quality of work she finds inspiring.  And no wonder.  I share with you now the passage my student read aloud to me, on that gray day, in that dark and too-cold room, her voice the warmth, her presence the light.  It's Franzen reflecting on David Foster Wallace:

People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul.  A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure.  Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn't "belong" to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of people closest to him.

What we learn from our students.  What they yield.

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Must writers be likable? Does it help if they are? And who the heck am I?

Ask anyone who knows me well:  I have my flaws.  Here I am, for example, with my impatient face on, waiting for a berry to ripen.  Not any old berry, mind you, but the berry I want, which is taking its time in the sun.  (I may indeed be insulting the berry for its stubbornness, quietly, beneath my snappish tongue.)

Would my handful of very kind readers read me less (to continue) if they knew that:

• I combine the impossible traits of seeking perfection, impatiently?
• I write long books that become short books because so many of my original sentences are preposterously bad?
• I want to be writing, I want to be finished writing, I want to be writing again?
• (to be clear:  I'm inconsistent)?
• I fall asleep during the runway portion of every single "Project Runway" show?
• I create bullet lists pummeled by non-sequiturs (but not when clients are watching)?
• I love animals and own no animals, which is to say:  I'm a neat freak who remains inconsistent?
• I am mindlessly and heedlessly improperly punctuating this bullet list of flaws, because I think — no, perhaps I presume — that since it's my blog I have a right to do so?

These are among the issues that Jennie Yabroff does not exactly hit on in her Newsweek essay, "The Man We Knew Too Much," her thought-provoking essay on Jonathan Frazen, a man, she writes, who has critics praising his new book, Freedom, "without letting their feelings about the seemingly insufferably self-important writer color their views."  Will readers, she wonders, be as kind?

... the Internet has exposed writers to a level of personal scrutiny formerly reserved for pop stars and teen idols, making it difficult to separate how you feel about an author's personal life from how you respond to his work, despite your best efforts to read the writing, not the writer.  Gawker opines on which writers are "book hot," while publishing blogs report not just on how much authors receive for their books but also how they spend the money.

Yabroff is right, of course—it is difficult not to see, or to try to parse, the cults of personality now growing up among big-name, big-ticket writers—not just Franzen, but Gaiman, Green, Foer, Collins, and Rowling, to name but a few.  I remain, of course, under the radar, my flaws not subject to widespread discussion, my life not the stuff of Time cover stories or Huffington newsflashes.  But this question is interesting, and I present it to you:  Does what you know about who authors are influence your reading of their books?

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Writing out of Loneliness

Memorialized this past week at New York University, David Foster Wallace, who recently died of an apparent suicide at the age of 46, was brought to fleeting life once more by those who knew him best—those who had received from him, learned from him, studied him, been sustained by him.

There is this line in the New York Times coverage that stopped me just now: "Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”

I hold to that, too. I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.

Your fiction is with you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/books/24wallace.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

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