Eileen Myles reading at Athica: a few thoughts...

Earlier tonight we went to hear Eileen Myles do a reading from her recent novel, Inferno. I haven't finished the novel, but read a few chapters and have thoroughly enjoyed it so far. The book itself is beautiful, even as a paperback.

Our house is full of books that I should read, that I want to read, and this one is a new addition which wouldn't have been able to demand my attention normally. Not because I didn't want to read it, but because I didn't really know too much about it and have other things which I've been promising myself i would indulge in first. But the cover was pretty and it had managed to maintain a prominent position on the side-table beside the rocking chair in the reading corner. Taunting me daily and knowing that this reading was coming up, I was finally unable to ignore it the other day when the unseasonably warm weather begged me to sit on the porch and read. A light book with stylized flames on the cover, written by a poet, seemed appropriate. So I sat in the sun on the steps of the porch and dove in.

I zipped through a few short chapters and found myself thoroughly charmed. 'Zipped' might be a bit misleading. I moved quickly through it because I felt pulled along, not because it wasn't substantial. The writing is lovely and also witty, but not in a self-conscious, show-off kind of way. It bounces around and cuts jarringly from one moment to another and from detailed descriptive moments to stream of consciousness inner dialogues, but it is so far exceptionably readable. Oh, that such could be said of all books...

It made me want to write, which I consider high praise for a book. Why was I sitting on the porch reading when I should be writing? Because I was and for no other reason. Actually that isn't true; there were lot's of reasons. Until it is profitable and at a time when I'm not doing anything else which is profitable, writing seems somehow luxurious, a waste of time that could be spent looking for a real job or doing something productive like cleaning the house to reaffirm that I am useful. Sitting in the sunshine, inspired and feeling like I should write more, reading about a narrator whose economic situation has her considering a proposition from another girl to prostitute herself as the second half of a double date with a couple of Italian handbag salesmen, thinking about how direly I need to find work. All in all a fine afternoon.

As we sat down in Athica, I realized I had to pee terribly and that it would be a long time before I possibly could. Before Eileen Myles got up to speak tonight, there were two women who did introductions. They both spoke well and gave nice introductions that went on forever. While they were talking, I had a clear view of Ms. Myles in the front row. I recognized her from a picture on the poster announcing the event, but in that photo she seemed rather gruff and unfriendly. In person she was quite beautiful, in a more handsome than pretty way (kind of like Jaime Lee Curtis, but dressed like Sleater-Kinney). Instead of the stand-offish person I imagined from the photo, she seemed to like being there and open and pleased to connect with the crowd.

Before she began reading, she spoke rather quickly and seemed to jump around trying to decide where to start with her reading. She spoke clearly and without the slightest hint of any accent, but the second she opened her book and started to read... the Boston fell out. The accent became stronger at moments and disappeared at others.

When she read a poem as an encore, the accent again retreated except for occasional flashes where it peeked through.

While reading from the novel, she explained some backstory for a section she was going to read where she had met the female partner (who was an artist) of a very famous male artist and ended up living on their 70-acre farm for a while and writing. We speculated amongst ourselves whether perhaps this could have been Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, but wasn't their farm on Long Island? This one was in Pennsylvania.

Afterwards, Ben was getting his copy of Inferno signed and forgot to ask her who this couple was because he accidentally kicked over her water. I had been outside and when I came in and asked him if he got the book signed, he replied, "Yes, she signed one of the poems in the book for me, but I think she hates me." I think he is mistaken. Her open water bottle was sitting on the floor beside a stool; I watched someone else kick it over again and then wipe up water with paper towels.

Now I have to finish the novel. I'll read a chapter a day, on the porch, only on warm, sunny days. I would probably finish it in one night if I read it in bed, but that somehow doesn't appeal to me.

relocation...

I've been constantly on the move the last few years, dividing my time between New York and Hawaii and Alaska with a few side trips here and there. I've got to finish a contract out in Hawaii, but home base has shifted southward from Brooklyn to Athens, GA. Ben is going back for his ph.d and I'm going along for the ride. My writing has been sporadic in all this flux and I'm feeling the insanity that accompanies failing to process the world around me on the page, so I'm gonna try to get back in the habit again. More to come...

Nightwood and Giovanni's Room: the dangers of the search for hidden messages in recommended fiction...

Language is meant to communicate, to get a point across. Perhaps also sometimes just to get something out, to express, to release some of that steam that builds up behind our eyes. We can be utilitarian in our language, try to say exactly what we mean in direct tones with simple meaning, but more often than not our feelings are more complicated than that. This is where we get into art and language and communication can get refined, yet also garbled. As we shape and express what we mean through whatever medium our art finds its expression in, it isn't usually just a simple single meaning that comes out. Had we meant a simple single meaning, why bother with art? Just make a sign and hang your message where the target will read it, or just say it straight out. As our intentions and feelings become more complex than just simple cause and effect, so too our forms of expression necessarily communicate complex feelings and messages. Of course, once it leaves our mind and enters the corporeal world, it isn't only up to the artist as to the meaning. We put what we can into something we create, but then the person who comes upon it takes from it according to what they see and what they've brought. It isn't only the creation of the art which completes it, it is also in the viewing. Finding a receptive audience is a talent in and of itself.

I'm prone to forget that everyone in an audience doesn't see the same work. Reading a book that hits on something I've felt but not known how to express always makes me want to share it with friends. I want to share what I've found, I want to discuss it with others, I want to dig in deeper. Some of this is just wanting to compare what we find and trying to see through different eyes. Some of it is just social and wanting to share things. Of course, sometimes there is the feeling that someone has communicated something that I couldn't or hadn't been able to before and sharing a reading feels like a way to let me make more sense to others: if they read this, they will understand what I mean, how I feel!

But we all read differently and each text has many messages. Coming from different directions, relating to different characters, we do not always find the same clarity in the same texts as our friends. Why am I reflecting on this now? Because I just read Nightwood.

There is something intriguing in the title, and I love the author's name. Djuna Barnes. I seem to have a certain predilection for names beginning with "Dj". I really wish I knew some Djunas and Djangos. I'm getting off track, just saying that there has been something compelling about the book that would have eventually pulled me to it, but I read it on recommendation. Ben had told me about it before and I had meant to pick it up and hadn't, so I finally decided to grab it off the shelf to be part of the traveling library that helps make this floating incarceration feel productive and less like a prison sentence. It was finally the right time to read it.

That it was the right time to read it was made all the more clear by Ben looking for it on the shelf and growling when he realized that I had taken it when he wanted to double check his remembrance of a passage for some of his commentary in his Facebook "25 things". Not that the right time to read it was when someone else wanted it (I'm not that spiteful, really) but rather that having read his comments on it and realizing how big an impact it had made on him brought it to the front of my mind and made it something that I wanted to read now. It was already in my mind and he had asked me to read it before; now the time was right to read it.

I think this also set me up for a certain confusion. Going into a book looking for someone you already know is a mission fraught with danger. We end up putting too much of our friends into the characters or too much of the characters into our friends and sometimes if we aren't careful we can distort and damage our reading.

This is particularly difficult for me. I'm an avid reader, but a brutal one. Even as I hated book reports in school, I've grown up doing one after another as a hobby. As anyone who has read much at all of what I write here knows, I've got strong opinions and a tendency to share them. I tend towards gushing or demolishing as my whims take me and often enough both about different aspects of the same thing. This is all good and well when it is just me talking about my experience with a piece of art, but what about when this is a thing you approached because it is emblematic for someone you love?

At the moment, I feel as if I am sort of through the looking glass, looking at the reverse of a scene I've been in before. On the other side of the mirror, I'm the one presenting the book which meant so much to me, so colored my world outlook that I felt compelled to share it and then eagerly awaited for it to be read and find myself understood and closer than ever. Of course, this is not how it worked out. I handed Ben Giovanni's Room, as I had handed it to friends before and as it had been handed to me. I devoured it in one night when I got it, reading as the remnants of a hurricane blew past where I waited it out in a safe inland retreat, crying tears openly (which is no great feat now, as I've become a little looser with my emotions and like a good cry anytime a book or movie warrants it, but then I was an uptight control freak who refused such silly human indulgences) and feeling destroyed and devastated by the book, but also hopeful. The book could be so tragic because there was this beautiful love story, that even if this love was doomed, the fact that it could exist, that it could be written down, that this story could make people cry was breathtaking to me. I felt like it was giving me permission to fall in love if I found it. Mason and Liz had made me read it, and I had made Michael read it (don't tell Liz, he still has her copy. I had to find an identical edition to replace it for her.) and made John read it and I don't know how many other people I forced it on. But we were all friends, in various states of tortured love (or not love). When I handed it to Ben, I handed it to someone I was in love with, who I was dating.

You may not know this, but significant others don't always take away the same thing from a tortured love story that you did when you read it years ago and lonely and single. The story told my younger self of the possibility for love and passion; to someone already in love it warns of tragedy and hopelessness. So when he finally read it, Ben seemed somewhat horrified. Why did I want him to read that story? What was I trying to say? I was so flabbergasted that I didn't really know how to respond. Wasn't it beautiful? He said it was sad. Of course it was sad, and beautiful too, but because it wasn't just a book he was reading, rather a message from me, he couldn't just breathe in the beautiful. He went into it looking for me and probably also himself in relation to me and then he finds two people destroyed by each other and the society around them. They fall profoundly in love, and one becomes more jealous and desperate and falls to pieces before being executed and the other retreats in fear and grasps for traditional roles before falling haunted into exile. Was this what I saw as an ideal relationship? Was this how I saw us?

No and no, of course, but it is impossible to take in something brought to us by someone singing its praises and saying how much it has influenced who they are without looking for them in it, and also perhaps a little of what this says about how we fit into their life. So now it is my turn, and I try to look back through and remember his bafflement and then mine too.

At the beginning, I really liked Nightwood. The descriptions are incredibly rich and there is this strangely detailed breakneck pace racing your through a bizarre, but detailed background. You fly straight through one generation in no time. In an odd way, the laying of the groundwork reminded me of Amelie.

I shouldn't have said "At the beginning." I liked the book, when I backed away from my personal quest of finding Ben and I in it. It is a beautiful book and the characters are vivid and compelling. But I've a vicious critic of books and characters. I always have been and not in a particularly generous or forgiving way. When my mother would watch soap operas when I was a kid, I remember thinking how stupid everyone it is was. If they would just explain themselves instead of weaving these complicated lies their lives would be so much easier. I've gotten a little more understanding as I've aged, but only a little bit. And as much as I relish giggling at drama in real life, I've got a low tolerance for feeling like it has been cultivated, in real life or written worlds. I suppose this was my great intolerance with soap operas: there wasn't actually any drama except what was actively cultivated by all these vapid people. They had no real problems, just made some and carefully coached them along.

I don't mean to be so dismissive; Nightwood was certainly not Days of Our Lives. The writing is lush, the characters compelling and vivid and believable. Still, there is a certain flavor of tortured love that I don't really love that you can find in here. Doomed love, I can handle, but just plain old tortured love doesn't really do it for me. There is this feeling that to a certain extent the tortured want their love to tortured, that by traumatizing it that it becomes more real or something. This doesn't inspire sympathy in me, it makes me want to pull my hair out and scowl.

If you've read this book, you are probably scowling at me now, wondering why I'm so dismissive and hostile. As I said earlier, Nightwood is not a soap opera, it is a beautiful book. The characters tug and tear at one another and talk over each other trying to make themselves heard, and there is a terrible lucidity in it all. Just reading the book, unburdened by personal association, I'd see that. I'd be more forgiving and gentle to each of the characters, because I wouldn't assume at the start that I was any of them. If Ben found himself in this book, then wouldn't I also be there too, because surely I'm in any story he is in, right? I rail against silly romanticism muddling the thinking and blurring meanings, but damn if I'm not guilty of the crimes I accuse.

It is still difficult not to ask who in the book am I when Ben reads it. If-we-were-who-would-we-be is my favorite game anyway. It just gets loaded when you think someone else has played it already and sees you hiding somewhere in a text. Who am I when I read it and do we think the other person sees us the same person? Who are they? And do we see them as that person because we like that character or is this an indictment?

I assume that there are two choices for who we are, since in the book there are two main lovers: Nora and Robin. There is also the interloper, Jenny, but we'll assume as a given that neither of us could be this character; the implications would just be too ugly to contemplate. I'd assume that Ben sees himself as Nora, but I have a hard time imagining that he sees me as Robin, even if I do like going out drinking and wandering through the night. Of course, comparing yourself to characters is an imperfect game. And only a game. I, nor you, are the the characters in the stories we read.

I assume this is the same mistake he made when he read us in Giovanni's Room. I didn't love the book because I thought I was either David or Giovanni. I love the whole book, the whole story, and listening in on their conversations and the indictments cast against them by other characters, I found things explained that helped me understand better what I was feeling and how to navigate in the world. I didn't look to it as a plan for success or what my ideal love life would look like. It informed my world view; it didn't replace it. I wonder that that was the miscommunication when I shared this with Ben: he went in looking for us or a message from me to him.

Now I find myself fighting this same instinct with Nightwood. Even knowing this is a mistake and not why Ben told me about the book and wanted me to read it, I still couldn't help looking for us in it and being irrationally critical of the characters, thinking "I would never do that!" So I back up a little, relax, try again.

The writing is so beautiful it leaves me jealous. Even not imagining myself as the characters, they still irritate me somewhat, though flashes of brilliance shine through in their speeches. The character of the doctor is of particular interest (had this book not been recommended by a lover, he is the character I would have picked as myself: meddlesome, know-it-all, talkative). Interestingly enough, both of our emblematic books are set in Paris amongst gay expatriates and in roughly the same time period.

Perhaps I've written in enough circles about all this. I've just had to coach myself out of this trap and back into (somewhat) objective readership.

Trying to write...

I write to think. As I subject thoughts to the textual exercise, I'm able to hone down ideas and get to sharp crisp points and shiny bright edges. Until I start writing, I'll get caught in loops and trip over ideas and things stay in a big gloppy mess.

More and more, and perhaps somewhat disturbingly, I write to converse. Is talking to yourself any less ridiculous when you write it down? Actually, even though I might be the only person who ever reads much of what I write, I always assume a greater audience. This isn't just for things published on the internet, but even things I never publish or share. This doesn't necessarily mean it is any less pathological than talking to yourself; when I talk to myself, I also assume a wider audience than just me. I'm not talking about being overheard, but I assume that conversations in my head are between a multitude, not just the back and forth of one mind playing with itself.

But now I've turned down a dark road. Up til now, I've contented myself with writing simply about whatever catches my fancy. I start with something I'm excited about or confused about or pissed off by and then just tear through it. You begin with a framework and each addition builds off that. There is a set territory and you've got only so much space that you have to wriggle around in to make (or find) your point. For some reason I'm leaving this happy countryside and staring at blank pages daring me to write something. Why couldn't I leave well enough alone and leave fiction out of it? I suppose it had to happen sometime. But the blank page is a daunting devil to dance with. Even with a loose idea of what I want to write. I've got concepts and ideas and even a few characters laid out, but how to begin refuses to cooperate. That blank expanse screams and dares me to step in and being the cautious coward that I am, I'd back away quietly if I had a choice. But there is an idea, the seed of a story that seems to have lodged itself in me and it is too late to turn back. I couldn't back away from the blank page and leave well enough alone: it would follow me taunting and daring.

I can't promise that I'll get somewhere beautiful on the other side. What comes of it might not even make it as far as this blog, much less a printed page, but as in all things I don't step into it without grandiose plans. Wish me luck.

so much I will miss in New York...

...but the best thing about being trapped on a boat is all the books I get to read when there is no phone that can ring, no email that can be checked, no happy hour calling my name.

And I promise to write more this go round.

Phoenix rising

(Written sometime in October, somewhere in the Bering Sea)

I might try my hand again at fiction in November. Why then? Not exactly sure, but it seems a good month for such an undertaking. November has always been my ill-placed month of rebirth. October scours me clean and in November I rise anew. Why these months over any others? Wouldn't it makes sense for my rebirth to be at New Year's, particularly since I've made a cult of it's celebration? Or maybe in the spring when new life springs forth or summer when it grows? Why be built fresh in the season of dying, with leaves falling and days shortening and temperatures falling?

If I had been consulted in the matter, I might have chosen differently but my rhythms seem to have been mostly preset. As to this one in particular, I grow restless in the fall. As soon as the summer starts to cool even a little bit, I get hit with wave after wave of ecstatic wanderlust. At first there is mostly wonder and joy in this feeling, calling me out to explore and enjoy. If, as I am doing now, I can heed this call and take flight and explore, then the feeling can keep some of the joy about it and I just flit about like a kid in a museum for the first time, all big wide eyes and gaping smiles. If I can't, the feeling turns dire and I feel like there is a freight train continually slamming against the inside of my skull, violently and persistently screaming for me to move. I have a hard time sitting still. I have a hard time dealing with other people and retreat deeper and deeper in myself and catch myself wanting to scream out loud or smash things. I do neither; I'm not the type to give into such whims, but I might manage better if I occasionally did. I find myself wanting to force away every familiar thing around me and start over completely. There were more than a few years where it was speculated that any relationship I was in could not survive October unless I was completely sequestered away from my beloved. This was both true and not: October doesn't inspire me to just destroy anything in my reach, it simply refuses illusions. Without illusion, many things fall apart.

Anyway, the point is that this time of year is when I'm rattled to the core. Pleasant or otherwise, every loose thing is shaken loose and all the joints and bends tested to see what will hold and what needs to be repaired or removed. Then comes November, whose main significance to me seems to lie in following October. And so I begin again...

tragedy...

Shortly after leaving land the last time, my computer cord decided to go kaput. So no solitaire, no watching movies in my bunk, and most tragically no writing. So my blog output, already sparse, will for the time being be even more limited. Power cables are hard to come by in backwater locals such as this. Hopefully there will be one waiting for me when I return.

The upside of this is that I have been drawing. Doodling might be the better term, but instead of the trippy pages of color that I normally produce I'm actually making pictures and some sort of narrative this time. I got these beautiful, simple notebooks at Muji a while back, and am slowly filling one with a sort of fantasy travelogue. In theory, when I am digitally capable again, I'll be sharing some of this on here. Sort of a continuation of my attempt to make this more than just a record of political rage.

the written word

I like to think that I'm well-spoken. I know that I can be. I'm aware of my voice and tone and attempt(and often fail) to be careful with my words. But more and more I feel like I can't truely get points across until I can write it down. Not just that I can't say it, but that I almost can't fully form thoughts without the written component to hammer them out.

I wonder what my mind would be like without the gift of computers and word processers. My handwriting is miserable. I've made peace with this, and thank you very much, no, trying harder won't won't make it any better. And besides being hard to read, I write slowly. I want to believe I write quickly, but I don't. And the faster my mind moves, the slower that pencil moves. The only things that I can really enjoy composing by hand are songs and poems, with their shorter stretches and the mental exercises which make their construction slower, at a pace my pen can manage (yes, I write poems and songs. The songs might see the light of day; the poems rarely do.). I enjoy these mediums, but they aren't the main ways I sort my thoughts, though I think they might be if I was unable to type. If I didn't have this way to write, I'd most likely be a very different person and I'm not inclined to think it would be an improvement.

I'm thinking about this as I'm arguing with myself about whether or not to write about my trip to New Orleans. Whether to dig into trauma or bury it. Ultimately, we all know that buring things often encourages them to grow, while putting them through a written harvest let's you glean something from even the most uncomfortable of crops...