A Guide to Being Born

The thing about this pregnancy isn’t sickness, cravings, bloating, or exhaustion. Yet. I’ve been fortunate, I know. The thing about this pregnancy is that my appetite for language has dwindled dramatically, seems near nil. I am all id, craving the material world, exercise, temperature, food. The pool. A very ripe strawberry. An hour or two in front of the air conditioner watching season one of Deadwood. Reading essays/ fiction (even writers who I adore and can usually bring me back into the fold with a turn of the page) as well as writing are exercises in lassitude, sleep-walking-in-circles. I wonder if other women experience this? Sometimes I fall asleep in front of the computer trying to get a sentence down. What I’m writing is that dull!

It’s been a few days now since I’ve finished Ramona Ausubel’s collection of short stories, A Guide to Being Born. Every story in the collection left me awestruck. More interesting than the fact that the stories are categorized (a little arbitrarily?) into life cycle stages (e.g., Birth, Gestation, Conception, Love) were the stories themselves. These were surrealist fables of parents loving their severely disabled daughter (Poppyseed), a grandmother accepting and embracing death (Safe Passage), a child playing catch with what could have been the ghost of a civil war soldier (Catch and Release), the grief of a child over a dead pet (Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations), recognition of a child from a mother who expected to give birth to an animal (Atria), acceptance of a man's weird deformity by his lover (Chest of Drawers), the gentle wooing of two former supermarket clerks. Each story was suffused with magic, demonstrated the enormity of heart reminiscent of early George Saunders stories, and was written in plain language that verged, at times, on poetry. It reminded me of why I like to read, namely to feel possibility, love, tenderness even in the most unfair of situations. The stories were a lesson in joy, which is something that feels particularly precious at this moment in time.

 Also read: A Sport and a Pastime, Salter

reading for my life

A friend asked me recently who my lifestyle heroes were. I was at a loss, stupefied, scrambling to think of any single person’s life that I wanted for my own. Of course there are people whose lives I admire, aspire to in pieces, but I hadn’t ever given any thought to where to source pieces of an ideal life from. And that seemed a bad thing; failing to decode what my personal brand of success looks like and how it’s paid for by the hour. I've always tried to fit pieces of what I love into existing jobs, no matter that the value of the whole seems to degrade under the weight of a single clock, ticking. Anyways. My friend’s question was a Pandora’s box about living a unified life; and much later I sent a feeble text message listing various writers whose writing habits I admire. Not a great answer to a question that bugs me, still.

I was in Hudson, NY recently. If reading Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life hadn’t killed my appetite for disappearing into the country, with my aspirations packed for relocation, then the visit did. John Leonard wrote of popular culture (but he could have been talking about Hudson supplanting Brooklyn) as, “where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd…The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after awhile, the repetition is a bummer.” The bummer hit me fully after entering a bookstore and perusing the shelves only to find a perfect collection, not a stray book present, and know that our escape to the region was (long long ago) found.

Maybe it’s the addictive nature of how we pick and choose from a variety of pre-existing options to create a daily uniform that’s necessarily recognizable and thus key to success. Andrew O’Hagan writes of self-invention in the extreme when reviewing the new movie, The Bling Ring (LRB):

“If real fame is a mask that eats into the face, then pseudo-fame, the current kind, might be a decoy that eats into the brain. You often meet those people in California, people who have forgotten that you are real, that you watch the news, that you know who they really are, that you know where the money is coming from. They begin to lie to journalists and themselves with the same grim hope: if I say this and no one contradicts me it might be true. A sense of entitlement stands in for personal values. They don’t mind if they’re fooling you and fooling themselves, so long as they can keep the show on the road.”

What’s more frightening than the delusion described, is the realization that most professional successes are variations on a theme. It reminds me of what another friend complained of recently, that the myth of professional success as the only success continues to dominate and shouldn’t. The question about lifestyle seems an appropriate counter then, though remains discomfiting as lifestyle and professional life seem to mean the same thing, as seen in the extremes of emulation described in Bling Ring. In other words, it’s the repetition in creative culture that chills the heart a little.

Thank goodness then for John Leonard’s aptly titled reading for my life, in which Leonard finds an antidote to a shrinking world in, where else, books. He quotes Kafka as describing a book as ‘an ax for the frozen sea in us.” “Books,” Leonard writes, “are where we go to complicate ourselves.”

Read: A Charmed Life, Mary McCarthy; The Country Girl Trilogy and Epilogue, Edna O’Brien

Briefly

"Musil coined a term ... “essayism” (Essayismus in German) and he called those who live by it “possibilitarians” (Möglichkeitsmenschen). This mode is defined by contingency and trying things out digressively, following this or that forking path, feeling around life without a specific ambition: not for discovery’s sake, not for conquest’s sake, not for proof’s sake, but simply for the sake of trying...

Without the meditative aspect, essayism tends toward empty egotism and an unwillingness or incapacity to commit, a timid deferral of the moment of choice. Our often unreflective quickness means that little time is spent interrogating things we’ve touched upon. The experiences are simply had and then abandoned. The true essayist prefers a more cumulative approach; nothing is ever really left behind, only put aside temporarily until her digressive mind summons it up again, turning it this way and that in a different light, seeing what sense it makes. She offers a model of humanism that isn’t about profit or progress and does not propose a solution to life but rather puts endless questions to it....

The essay, like this one, is a form for trying out the heretofore untried. Its spirit resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the world’s inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be."

Beautiful writing by Christy Wampole, The Essayification of Everything, NYT 5/26/2013

Marvels

It’s been quiet here. A few months of attending to nothing but the most physical of matters. These haven’t been good months for thinking, reading, or writing. The physical matters include awe and exhaustion related to…pregnancy (!). Totally joyful news. Such big news to become accustomed to that it easily eclipses things not food, sleep, wondering whether it's safe to run/ bike/ take hot showers/ etc. In other words, I started so many books and lost interest. Pages of great writing fell, a bundle of syllables and punctuation, to mean as much noise and sense as a plastic knife scratching up a plate. My mind was elsewhere – often, honestly, asleep.

Still, I managed to finish Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, which may have been ambitious in its riff on Bluebeard but seemed dissonant, disturbing, and at times, downright nonsensical to me. I made it to a James Salter reading, which is one of the best things I’ve done in a long time. I was expecting the auditorium to be packed full but it wasn't. It didn't matter anyways, because there was older, magnificent Salter reading aloud from his new book, behind a lectern in a blue blazer and shined, beautiful, shoes. I also finished John Williams’ Stoner. Of all the books I’ve started and stopped in this interim (Roth, Karen Russell, Elissa Shappell, Taiye Selasi, Hawthorne's and Lispector’s short stories, pregnancy books), I could not put Stoner aside. It is a marvel. It is a restrained, evocative story of a man whose life adds up to failure. Reminiscent of Cather in its spare tone, Stoner is a perfectly rendered portrait of a man whose failures seem so unjust and inevitable that his resignation  moves even the most absentminded reader to fling the book down upon completion, convinced she'd read  a perfect novel, indeed!

Line and Sinker

David Sheilds describes Renata Adler's tone in Speedboat as panic that is 'beautifully modulated' and bittersweet. I recently read it and I wonder. Is the affect, that stubbornly cool hyper-style that makes a character from observations about events that cohere in no meaningful way, really moving? I felt like I was looking at a Tumblr feed reading the book. Pacific image after pacific image and a nervous current of posturing under it all. I've read a slew of women writers lately and I'm a bit panicked myself, really, to think that panic lies at the heart of so many (celebrated) women's creative endeavors. A friend mentioned Girls and Lena Dunham as a kind of analog to Speedboat, eg voices of a generation, and both disaffected in different ways/ most affected by interior life. What way out? Another friend recommends Virgina Woolf as antidote.

Also read: Emily Carter's Glory Goes and Gets Some (unfinished, not an antidote); Barbara Browning's The Correspondence Artist; Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil; Cara Hoffman's so much pretty.

Am casting about for the next great read...

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

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We had some friends over for a dinner party last night; ten adults, two small children. Gnocchi and meatballs in tomato sauce, a green salad, Hemingway’s favorite dessert. Not enough chairs. The kids, after warming up (at different speeds) ran amok, investigating surfaces, climbing on furniture, one parent always hot on their heels. During dessert, the mothers broke away to join their kids in the living room to read and play with toys. Both mothers are artists, one a painter and the other an animator. Casually, I expressed admiration in their abilities to parent and produce art work. “I’m not going to lie,” our friend said. “It’s not easy.” Her gaze drifted over to her daughter who sat by her side, flipping through a picture book. “It’s not impossible," she said, "but it’s not easy.” I was silent but I wish I that I knew her better to ask what she meant, what the calculus looked like, what a great instance of time management felt like, what kinds of frustrations she experiences trying to make time work in her favor. Not being very close friends, I had hesitated to ask. Balancing babies with personal ambitions seems obviously challenging but it’s the kind of challenge personal, and in which the solution is not obvious at all. The moment passed, the kids were off! and conversation at the dinner table drew our attention away.

I just finished reading Kate Atkinson’s 1995 book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. The book follows the matriarchal line of a family over four generations; charting each individual's struggle to marry family life with individual ambition. The book is mostly narrated by a preternaturally insightful child, Ruby Lennox, who gleans the existence of a family secret just well enough to give the reader the sense that Ruby is woefully unaware of some terrible fact about her life. (It’s not until the end of the book that Ruby – now a volatile teenager – and the reader uncover the secret.) Atkinson writes in a trippingly blithe narrative voice, even when the unfolding story is the dark stuff of betrayals, death, disappointments in marriage, in children, and resulting brittleness in middle age. Shot through various stories of domestic discontent is Ruby’s vitality, her cleverness and loneliness. Leaving a particularly stormy family vacation to Scotland, Ruby spies a stag in the road. Scotland has proved far from the place that Ruby imagined. And then she sees the stag. She is “astonished to see the head and shoulders of an heraldric beast emerging from the mist like a trophy on a wall…I must be dreaming. Somewhere just beyond the mist, there’s our real Scottish holiday – and perhaps all the other holidays we never had as well…” Ruby's observations can be acid but she is no cynic. The last line of the book is (not a spoiler), “I am Ruby Lennox,” a testament to her self preservation not in spite of, but because of, the inescapable legacy of family.

As someone contemplating the time crunch of personal and professional ambitions, I suddenly can't get enough of hearing what anyone has to say about how to solve this puzzle. Many of my childless friends claim they've heard from that parenthood makes creative ambitions easier; that time is an imperative that can no longer be squandered on an hour or two of Netflix streaming, on internet surfing that yields washed out pictures of spare and beautiful living spaces, that non-essential time wasting goes out the window. I've heard this claim proffered too by people speculating on whether it's easier or harder to have a nine to five job whose success is independent of creative vitality. Easier is not the word I'd use. Still, maybe there's no great mystery beyond the simple act of work. Difficult, our friend said, but not impossible.

We read Telex from Cuba

Recently, a (new) reading group: Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba. Discussed: that no character was accessible; that all characters acted as prisms to see Cuba on the brink of revolution; that the structure loosely constructed so as to convey the many textures of action that make political moments revolutionary. And why not follow children and wives and supporting cast rather than the actors themselves? Why not create a work of historical fiction that feels fabricated? Also some comparison to Tom McCarthy and the rigor with which he writes from multiple perspectives and the difference between that style and Kushner's, which can seem (frustratingly) too neutral. A gender thing? Eaten: rosemary nuts, chocolate cookies melted from the oven, black bean hummus, slices of salty, fatty, ham. Drunk: water and wine.

In an interview about her book, Kushner observes that novels work not by rules of logic but by rules of aesthetics.

I stopped reading the Orphan Master’s Son after 100 pages. No good reason why.