by Russ Parsons (2001)
The book describes the process by which fluid fills the particles of flour, by which chopped bits of zucchini evaporate in a skillet as the oil surrounding them turns them golden brown. Sauces and pie crusts, mayonnaise and breaded fried chicken crusts—Russ Parsons takes us into the abstract world of chemistry in order to set up a chess-like strategy for maximizing the flavor in all these recipes.
A few years back I started enrolling in the prerequisite courses I needed in order to become a registered nurse. I started with psychology, anatomy and basic chemistry. I found I had a talent especially for chemistry, for drawing out the fish skeleton diagrams that describe carbohydrate chains, for understanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions of the cell membranes that drive the process of life. I fell in love with the menagerie of two-dimensional and three dimensional diagrams used to describe molecules—balls and sticks, maps of benzene rings, computer generated images of proteins coiled and fan-folded into structures that allowed them to carry out essential functions of life.
The paradox: I found myself immersed in a Wonderland of facts and specialized knowledge, cryptic terminology and brain-twisting challenges, all of which I found extremely inspirational. But at the same time, I had basically no time to write creatively.
In hindsight, I can get all sly with my former self and ask whether it was really a lack of time that was holding me back, or whether it was a faulty conception of what the prerequisites are of being able to write something.
It’s so easy as a writer to be intimidated. There are so many writers who have come before, and so many of them have succeeded by giving the impression of a deep and encyclopedic knowledge of . . . nearly everything. Herman Melville and the life of the whalers. Thomas Pynchon and the history of Germany after the Second World War. Annie Proulx and rough, homespun culture of Newfoundland. One imagines the time these authors spent researching their subjects and comes away feeling eminently unqualified. Not only do I not know anything about whaling, post-war Gemany or Newfoundland, I don’t even know as much about my own surroundings as these authors knew about their exotic subjects.
The truth is that writing isn’t like that. Since my starting point here is Russ Parsons’s book about food, let me use that as a metaphor: if you want to make and sell a food product in the USA, there’s an established bureaucracy you have to deal with. There are standards, there are rules. If you’re selling lettuce that gives people salmonella, there are investigators that will track you down. When it comes to writing, the situation is different. Certainly, your work will be judged. If you want to get published, there are standards you have to meet. But the bureaucracy your dealing with is one far more mysterious.
I think every creative person at some point becomes familiar with the idea of the “inner critic.” The inner critic is a part of your brain that moves quickly to put a kibosh on any inspiration that we’re capable of coming up with. The inner critic is infuriatingly dynamic. Every day he sits in his little mental office and gathers new examples of why you aren’t qualified to do what you want to do. If you read a good book, the critic will tell you that your work will never be that good. If you read a crummy piece of work, the critic will tell you that it bears remarkable and damning similarities to your own work. The inner critic is ingenious and sadistically cunning. One of his specialties is to take what nourishes you and turn it into something that poisons you. Take advice for instance: there’s all sorts of advice for writers floating around out there. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write the truest sentence you can.” “Avoid adverbs.” “Write what you know.”
This last bit of advice in particular can be an extremely potent medicine and can quickly turn into a potent poison. It can be amazingly liberating, a personal emancipation proclamation when you suddenly realize that you’re able to use your own experience and forget all about emulating the style of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Hardy as you’ve fruitlessly been doing for the last few years. All of a sudden, it seems like you have a new treasure trove of subject matter. For a while, the inner critic is caught off guard. But he’s nothing if not adaptive. He begins to realize the restrictive potential of this maxim. “Write what you know.” That’s as much as saying “Don’t dare write what you don’t know. Don’t dare speculate. Don’t dare imagine.” Soon the inner critic has the statement crocheted and hung upon his office wall.
It’s easy to get caught up in the despair over how much or how little you know. Some authors can come away from a dinner party with every conversation stored verbatim in their memories. Some draw on their experiences of coming from one culture to another. Some have gone to the best possible schools, trained at the feet of the brightest possible geniuses. And here you are with apparently nothing to work with. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.
But that’s part of the truth you need to write about, the fact that nothing in this world is fair. None of us knows quite enough to get by, and none of us has quite the social skills to seek the complimentary knowledge from those who surround us. The truth is that I know that I’m inspired by chemistry, and I’m inspired by politics and world history, and I’m inspired by economics and I’ll never be authoritative enough in any of these subjects to write the sort of Pulitzer-Prize winning work that I’d like to, and that doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted, I could have taken a year after my nursing school and immersed myself in chemistry in the hopes that the study would have made me into an expert, would have given me an arsenal of expertise I could draw on for the rest of my adult life as a writer. I could write a book about the lives of chemists and physicists at the turn of the 19th century. All my facts would be correct. I would describe the ways in which methyl groups freewheel at the end of carbohydrate chains; I would describe the way that scientists like JJ Thompson used every day materials to set up brilliant experiments. I would describe the incomparable feeling of being present at the moment of a revolution in human knowledge. But probably the end result would be that I would always feel I had just one more text to read before I was prepared to start writing.
Recently I heard poet Kay Ryan speaking on the radio. She said that the best way to write about something is when you know almost nothing about it. I think this is especially useful information in our current culture, which values realism, polish and an appearance of expertise. Expertise is fascinating, certainly, but if you want to be creative, you need to rely on imagination rather than expertise. Imagination is not the rational irrigation system that supplies the rational fields of expertise—it’s the swamp water that gathers in the wetlands of ignorance.
What does this have to do with the book How to Read a French Fry? Not much, I’m afraid, except to say that this odd little hybrid of a book, not quite a cookbook but not quite a science text, is emblematic of the sort of hybrid knowledge I’m talking about. You won’t come away from it an expert in either chemistry or cuisine, but it may provide you with just the sort of disorienting intellectual spin you need to get yourself back into the dizzy state you need in order to get inspired.
Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales
Chosen and Edited by Gordon Jarvie. Illustrated by Barbara Brown. (1992/1997) Published by Penguin Popular Classics. 199 pages.
I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times, once to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. When I was there I was especially impressed by the simple beauty of some of the street names, like “Bread,” and “Home.”
I read this book several months ago. It took me two days to read. Just recently I sat down and gave myself the daunting task of writing a full-length play. As with any creative writing endeavor, this meant pitting myself against the worst, most closed-minded, most pessimistic parts of my own psyche. There’s a part of the brain that was determined to tell me, no, do NOT continue this project, you’ve chosen the wrong subject; you’re taking the wrong path.
For some reason, the memory of this book was especially helpful to me in conjuring up whatever magic spell I needed to keep the inspiration flowing.
We all know that there are epics. There’s a pantheon of Greek Gods out there, armed with complex arsenals of symbolism, laden down with overweening vanity and ambition which send mere mortals off to launch ten thousand stanzas of carefully metered verse to delineate the rise and falls of entire empires.
It’s important to remember that the mighty Zeus doesn’t have a monopoly on magic. There are kelpies and brownies, magic walking sticks and lonely giants out there. They come out of the dark shadows of the woods and interfere in the lives of the simplest of people. To me, fairy tales like these serve as reminders to never take magic for granted. Magic is whatever leads you off the path to grandma’s house and into the woods. If you’re a writer, don’t worry too much about whether the voice that’s beckoning to you from the shadows belongs to the mighty Apollo or a humble Milk-White Doo. If it’s an invitation to get you off the well-trodden path, take it.
I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times, once to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. When I was there I was especially impressed by the simple beauty of some of the street names, like “Bread,” and “Home.”
I read this book several months ago. It took me two days to read. Just recently I sat down and gave myself the daunting task of writing a full-length play. As with any creative writing endeavor, this meant pitting myself against the worst, most closed-minded, most pessimistic parts of my own psyche. There’s a part of the brain that was determined to tell me, no, do NOT continue this project, you’ve chosen the wrong subject; you’re taking the wrong path.
For some reason, the memory of this book was especially helpful to me in conjuring up whatever magic spell I needed to keep the inspiration flowing.
We all know that there are epics. There’s a pantheon of Greek Gods out there, armed with complex arsenals of symbolism, laden down with overweening vanity and ambition which send mere mortals off to launch ten thousand stanzas of carefully metered verse to delineate the rise and falls of entire empires.
It’s important to remember that the mighty Zeus doesn’t have a monopoly on magic. There are kelpies and brownies, magic walking sticks and lonely giants out there. They come out of the dark shadows of the woods and interfere in the lives of the simplest of people. To me, fairy tales like these serve as reminders to never take magic for granted. Magic is whatever leads you off the path to grandma’s house and into the woods. If you’re a writer, don’t worry too much about whether the voice that’s beckoning to you from the shadows belongs to the mighty Apollo or a humble Milk-White Doo. If it’s an invitation to get you off the well-trodden path, take it.
Wellen
by Eduard von Keyserling (1911) Published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. 173 pages.
My favorite passage of the book is the one where Lolo, a young woman who has discovered that her fiancé, Hilmar, doesn’t love her anymore, steps out into the Baltic sea one night and nearly drowns. At the beginning of the passage, we’re told that Lolo wants to make a sacrifice, and she sacrifices herself to the waves. There’s a religious connotation to the word “sacrifice” here (in German, Opfer)—but if the waves hold a religious function in this book, it’s as the centerpiece of a religion of default. The book centers not around a pilgrimage, but rather a rather routine summer vacation to the Baltic Sea, in which a passel of well-to-do folk visit, or perhaps invade, the world of taciturn Baltic fishermen. The goal of the vacation is a secular one of relaxation. People are gathering energy for the future. Generälin von Palikow is getting her family ready for her granddaughter Lolo’s wedding. The painter Hans Grill is taking a moment to relax and paint the waves before taking a new phase in his career—he’s not sure what he plans, but he wants to make his art more marketable, more commercially successful. In the meantime, he’s happy to spend some loose time with his new bride, Doralice, enjoying the treasure of freedom
Hans had devoted his life to freedom. At every turn he extols freedom. He seems to be in the process of developing an informal artistic treatise on the virtues of freedom, an ongoing discourse that serves as a compliment to his paintings. It was with his fiery talk of freedom that he seduced the beautiful Doralice away from her decrepit husband, count Köhne-Jasky. And now that Doralice is his, he bores her with the incessant talk of freedom. And as readers, we get the sense that Hans himself isn’t anywhere near ready for the actual challenges of being free. He desperately needs his wife Doralice. Now that he has her, he wants to settle down, to construct a nice, quiet, suburban life around her. And he’s afraid of her because he senses that she’s the one who’s actually free; he’s the philosopher of freedom. As an artist in pre-WWI Germany, he has an accepted role of being a little bit eccentric, a little bit visionary, a little bit crazed. But its his wife, with her beauty that distorts society by drawing all men toward her, who actually has the gift of freedom, the gift of always choosing a new path. Doralice has already broken out of one marriage, and now she’s approached by Hilmar, the young soldier, and she has the chance to break out of another one, and after that . . . who knows what suitor will come next?
Hans says that he now has only two subjects for his paintings, his wife Doralice and the waves. If the eccentric Hans plays the role of a shaman in this secular society, then he has defined a spirituality based on two idols, one a subject and the other a background. The subject is highly concentrated—a single life, a single life story, a point of focus, a concentration point for attention, an attainable object of conquest, infinitely desirable. The background is diffuse, eternal, indifferent to human struggle.
Like Count Köhne-Jasky, like Hans Grill, like Hilmar, Lolo is also infatuated by Doralice. And when the crowd of those who adores the subject becomes too much, she plunges herself into the background, goes into the water on a cold night and swims out as far as she humanly can, in a moment of unreasoning thought where free-will doesn’t seem to play a role. She’s abandoning human society because human society is unfair, because it arranges itself into games of favor and feverish devotion and there’s no reward for those like Lolo who are left out.
And after Lolo is recued and her family leaves the Baltic in high dudgeon, Generälin von Palikow, outraged, scolds Doralice for having gone too far. It’s okay to break society’s rules. Society’s rules are stupid. Doralice was right in escaping her first marriage, but she can’t go on infinitely breaking out of marriage after marriage after marriage. It’s a surprising moment. Up until this point, von Palikow had seemed to represent the most conservative element character in the book. It’s surprising to learn that her vision of life is much more subtle and wise, that she’s capable of stepping back from society and forming a vision that seems bold and pragmatic, a vision that society itself is something wavelike, that troughs of convention and restriction must be followed by peaks of rebellion, and that these peaks of rebellion themselves must come to an end.
After Palikow’s family leaves the beach and summer wanes, Doralice and her husband Hans are stuck together, and Doralice has little to do but wait for the moment when Hans will forgive her. Life seems limited to her now, broken. One day it seems he’s on the verge of giving her the resolution she craves. And then he goes out to sea in a shabby boat helmed by a drunken sailor, and the two get swallowed by the waves, and Doralice is abandoned with her poor conscience. As the book ends, we see that she’s taken up a strange, platonic relationship with a hunchback, Knospelius, who haunts the beach. Her days of romantic adventure seem to be behind her. The subject fades into the background.
My favorite passage of the book is the one where Lolo, a young woman who has discovered that her fiancé, Hilmar, doesn’t love her anymore, steps out into the Baltic sea one night and nearly drowns. At the beginning of the passage, we’re told that Lolo wants to make a sacrifice, and she sacrifices herself to the waves. There’s a religious connotation to the word “sacrifice” here (in German, Opfer)—but if the waves hold a religious function in this book, it’s as the centerpiece of a religion of default. The book centers not around a pilgrimage, but rather a rather routine summer vacation to the Baltic Sea, in which a passel of well-to-do folk visit, or perhaps invade, the world of taciturn Baltic fishermen. The goal of the vacation is a secular one of relaxation. People are gathering energy for the future. Generälin von Palikow is getting her family ready for her granddaughter Lolo’s wedding. The painter Hans Grill is taking a moment to relax and paint the waves before taking a new phase in his career—he’s not sure what he plans, but he wants to make his art more marketable, more commercially successful. In the meantime, he’s happy to spend some loose time with his new bride, Doralice, enjoying the treasure of freedom
Hans had devoted his life to freedom. At every turn he extols freedom. He seems to be in the process of developing an informal artistic treatise on the virtues of freedom, an ongoing discourse that serves as a compliment to his paintings. It was with his fiery talk of freedom that he seduced the beautiful Doralice away from her decrepit husband, count Köhne-Jasky. And now that Doralice is his, he bores her with the incessant talk of freedom. And as readers, we get the sense that Hans himself isn’t anywhere near ready for the actual challenges of being free. He desperately needs his wife Doralice. Now that he has her, he wants to settle down, to construct a nice, quiet, suburban life around her. And he’s afraid of her because he senses that she’s the one who’s actually free; he’s the philosopher of freedom. As an artist in pre-WWI Germany, he has an accepted role of being a little bit eccentric, a little bit visionary, a little bit crazed. But its his wife, with her beauty that distorts society by drawing all men toward her, who actually has the gift of freedom, the gift of always choosing a new path. Doralice has already broken out of one marriage, and now she’s approached by Hilmar, the young soldier, and she has the chance to break out of another one, and after that . . . who knows what suitor will come next?
Hans says that he now has only two subjects for his paintings, his wife Doralice and the waves. If the eccentric Hans plays the role of a shaman in this secular society, then he has defined a spirituality based on two idols, one a subject and the other a background. The subject is highly concentrated—a single life, a single life story, a point of focus, a concentration point for attention, an attainable object of conquest, infinitely desirable. The background is diffuse, eternal, indifferent to human struggle.
Like Count Köhne-Jasky, like Hans Grill, like Hilmar, Lolo is also infatuated by Doralice. And when the crowd of those who adores the subject becomes too much, she plunges herself into the background, goes into the water on a cold night and swims out as far as she humanly can, in a moment of unreasoning thought where free-will doesn’t seem to play a role. She’s abandoning human society because human society is unfair, because it arranges itself into games of favor and feverish devotion and there’s no reward for those like Lolo who are left out.
And after Lolo is recued and her family leaves the Baltic in high dudgeon, Generälin von Palikow, outraged, scolds Doralice for having gone too far. It’s okay to break society’s rules. Society’s rules are stupid. Doralice was right in escaping her first marriage, but she can’t go on infinitely breaking out of marriage after marriage after marriage. It’s a surprising moment. Up until this point, von Palikow had seemed to represent the most conservative element character in the book. It’s surprising to learn that her vision of life is much more subtle and wise, that she’s capable of stepping back from society and forming a vision that seems bold and pragmatic, a vision that society itself is something wavelike, that troughs of convention and restriction must be followed by peaks of rebellion, and that these peaks of rebellion themselves must come to an end.
After Palikow’s family leaves the beach and summer wanes, Doralice and her husband Hans are stuck together, and Doralice has little to do but wait for the moment when Hans will forgive her. Life seems limited to her now, broken. One day it seems he’s on the verge of giving her the resolution she craves. And then he goes out to sea in a shabby boat helmed by a drunken sailor, and the two get swallowed by the waves, and Doralice is abandoned with her poor conscience. As the book ends, we see that she’s taken up a strange, platonic relationship with a hunchback, Knospelius, who haunts the beach. Her days of romantic adventure seem to be behind her. The subject fades into the background.
Tender is the Night
by F Scott Fitzgerald
Take a look at the beginning of this book about a love triangle. We have a young woman arriving at a beach, an out-of-the way French resort. We learn that the woman, Rosemary, is a movie starlet, fresh out of her first picture, Daddy’s Girl, a huge success. Her mother has brought her up ready to face a ruthless modern world where morality is something quaint and tragedies can be taken over.
We enter this novel, in a sense, at Rosemary’s side, walking beside her. If we’re capable of suspending our disbelief in the right way, we’re able to be her, to enjoy the story as if it’s ours. It’s a device for drawing the reader into the story. We stand in the shoes of a young girl who’s ready to be seduced, and the figure who seduces her is a man named Dick Diver.
Diver is a psychiatrist, a man whose job is to profile people, to understand their souls. His wife, Nicole, is in a sense, his patient. She’s a schizophrenic; her mind is deranged because her father raped her once, when she was a child. Somehow, the presence of Diver in her life proves therapeutic, and because of that Nicole’s family, the Warren family, which happens to be one of the wealthiest families in the United States, has seen fit to choose Dick Diver, to invest money in his career, to sponsor a sanatorium in Geneva in order to lend him an air of professional gravity.
Imagine this metaphor: Dick Diver is the author, the young novelist, and the beautiful young girl, Rosemary, is the reader, not so much any particular reader, but the ideal reader that any author imagines, a reader with a healthy, open, young mind that is waiting to be given a chord, a theme, a myth to live by. Rosemary meets Dick when he’s at the height of his prosperity. She falls in love with him, thinks the world of him . . . and because of Nicole’s wealth, Dick Diver is able to show Rosemary an enchanting world, a world of revelry punctuated by little fits of seamy intrigue. Dick gives Rosemary an adventure, the perfect adventure, an adventure that takes her right into the unique gaiety of the post-WWI era she’s growing up in. And she wants as much as she can get out of it. She wants Dick’s soul. She wants to seduce him away from his wife. And she almost does.
And then the rest of the story we see not from Rosemary’s perspective, but from Dick’s. Years have passed. His life has become dreary and professional. His wife’s recurring bouts of mental illness drain his energy. He sees Rosemary again, sleeps with her, but he can’t be the same man he was with her when he first met her.
Let me expand the metaphor again: Dick Diver is the author, Rosemary is the reader . . . and Nicole? Nicole is the subject, the story, a story that the author has chosen to marry himself to, a story that will change itself over time, just as real people change, but that will always remain thematically the same at its core.
I’m not trying to tell you that this is the secret meaning of Tender is the Night, that this is what F Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he actually wrote the book. To tell you the truth, this interpretation of the book just came to me as I was sitting here with my laptop trying to figure out what to write about this book. What I’m trying to do is to show you how I like to read books, to show you a way of engaging your imagination that has worked for me. Read Tender is the Night and try to use the artist-reader-subject metaphor as a skeleton key to open up its core meaning. There will be times when the skeleton key works for you, when it will seem brilliant. I guarantee, it will open up meanings that I didn’t notice when I read the book. And then there are times when the metaphor is a key that doesn’t fit into any lock at all. Don’t let that discourage you. Look for new explanations, see if you can develop your own imaginative key to unlocking the mysteries of the book. And look for those moments when the book needs no explanation, no symbolic code, when just the experience of reading it is pleasurable enough to sustain itself.
Take a look at the beginning of this book about a love triangle. We have a young woman arriving at a beach, an out-of-the way French resort. We learn that the woman, Rosemary, is a movie starlet, fresh out of her first picture, Daddy’s Girl, a huge success. Her mother has brought her up ready to face a ruthless modern world where morality is something quaint and tragedies can be taken over.
We enter this novel, in a sense, at Rosemary’s side, walking beside her. If we’re capable of suspending our disbelief in the right way, we’re able to be her, to enjoy the story as if it’s ours. It’s a device for drawing the reader into the story. We stand in the shoes of a young girl who’s ready to be seduced, and the figure who seduces her is a man named Dick Diver.
Diver is a psychiatrist, a man whose job is to profile people, to understand their souls. His wife, Nicole, is in a sense, his patient. She’s a schizophrenic; her mind is deranged because her father raped her once, when she was a child. Somehow, the presence of Diver in her life proves therapeutic, and because of that Nicole’s family, the Warren family, which happens to be one of the wealthiest families in the United States, has seen fit to choose Dick Diver, to invest money in his career, to sponsor a sanatorium in Geneva in order to lend him an air of professional gravity.
Imagine this metaphor: Dick Diver is the author, the young novelist, and the beautiful young girl, Rosemary, is the reader, not so much any particular reader, but the ideal reader that any author imagines, a reader with a healthy, open, young mind that is waiting to be given a chord, a theme, a myth to live by. Rosemary meets Dick when he’s at the height of his prosperity. She falls in love with him, thinks the world of him . . . and because of Nicole’s wealth, Dick Diver is able to show Rosemary an enchanting world, a world of revelry punctuated by little fits of seamy intrigue. Dick gives Rosemary an adventure, the perfect adventure, an adventure that takes her right into the unique gaiety of the post-WWI era she’s growing up in. And she wants as much as she can get out of it. She wants Dick’s soul. She wants to seduce him away from his wife. And she almost does.
And then the rest of the story we see not from Rosemary’s perspective, but from Dick’s. Years have passed. His life has become dreary and professional. His wife’s recurring bouts of mental illness drain his energy. He sees Rosemary again, sleeps with her, but he can’t be the same man he was with her when he first met her.
Let me expand the metaphor again: Dick Diver is the author, Rosemary is the reader . . . and Nicole? Nicole is the subject, the story, a story that the author has chosen to marry himself to, a story that will change itself over time, just as real people change, but that will always remain thematically the same at its core.
I’m not trying to tell you that this is the secret meaning of Tender is the Night, that this is what F Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he actually wrote the book. To tell you the truth, this interpretation of the book just came to me as I was sitting here with my laptop trying to figure out what to write about this book. What I’m trying to do is to show you how I like to read books, to show you a way of engaging your imagination that has worked for me. Read Tender is the Night and try to use the artist-reader-subject metaphor as a skeleton key to open up its core meaning. There will be times when the skeleton key works for you, when it will seem brilliant. I guarantee, it will open up meanings that I didn’t notice when I read the book. And then there are times when the metaphor is a key that doesn’t fit into any lock at all. Don’t let that discourage you. Look for new explanations, see if you can develop your own imaginative key to unlocking the mysteries of the book. And look for those moments when the book needs no explanation, no symbolic code, when just the experience of reading it is pleasurable enough to sustain itself.
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• “He Was A Cultural Bridge Builder. He Shall Be Missed.” An Emotional Retrospective by Mahmud Ahmadinejad
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Palestine—The Special Edition
Palestine—The Special Edition by Joe Sacco (originally serialized 1993-1995. This edition published 2007) Fantagraphic Books. 285 pages.
I can’t read poetry or fiction without trying to see it from the author’s perspective. I like the way that Joe Sacco puts himself into his comic book story about Palestine. He puts himself into the story in a wonderfully unselfish way. As an artist, he moves from gross caricatures at the start of the book to realistic portraiture at the end of the book, but all along the depiction of himself remains the same—a caricature of a bespectacled man who’s in way over his head, who’s busy gathering notes for an unorthodox comic book documentary about one of the grimmest political situations in the world. The caricature of Joe Sacco keeps falling into dreams of making it big, of winning Pulitzer Prizes and changing the world through comic books, only to be reminded moments later of his own weaknesses.
I remember recently overhearing a discussion. Someone I knew had recently returned from Israel and was holding forth about his own experiences. His story rambled a lot, but he kept coming back to the assertion that “the Israeli Arabs are smart.” As opposed to the Palestinians, who, presumably, he believes are stupid. It reminded me of a friend of my grandmothers, an old guy who used to run textile factories, and who would have conversations about how amazed he was at the intelligence and articulateness of “African blacks,” as opposed to African Americans. “You can have a conversation with the ones from Africa. The blacks in America, you can’t talk to them.” That was years ago, at a dinner party at my parents’ house, and I flew off the handle about it, castigated the guy for being a racist creep, and then in turn was scolded by the rest of my family for being rude to a guest. Not that the rest of my family really supported the guy; I don’t think that they were listening to him. Basically, there was just an unspoken rule that everyone else regarded him as an old, crotchety fool in these situations, and that he was to be allowed to drone on and on.
It’s an important memory in my life, so I’ll go into it a little bit more:
I told the old droner to “shut up.” Not a comment that I really premeditated at length, but it came from the heart.
And the old guy took offense, said that I was infringing on his right of free speech. He resumed the conversation with a change of subject: now he was talking not about race, but about his own personal history. Like my own family, he used to live in the Russian settlements in China that existed before the advent of Chinese communism and Chairman Mao. In retrospect, he felt that the Russian settlements had been a haven for liberties that had never existed in Russia either under Czarist or under Communist rule.
“We enjoyed free speech there,” he said, and then paused. “Unlike at this table.”
What did I learn in that conversation? I don’t want to draw a conclusion yet. Maybe not ever. Conclusions can be a wrecking ball to a story. I haven’t changed my opinion of the guy: he was a racist and a jerk, at least a lot of the time. But I also am very careful to avoid people to shut up. I become sphinx-like. I let people express their own views. Which sometimes means allowing them to give themselves enough rope to hang themselves.
The guy who was talking about his trip to Israel was a physician I sometimes work with. A little while later in the conversation someone asked him his opinions about torture. “Waterboarding’s not torture,” he said. “Waterboarding’s a walk in the park.”
There are a lot of testimonials in Palestine from the point of view of Palestinians who’ve been tortured. It’s easy to read (because it’s a comic) and hard to digest. I have a natural tendency to sympathize with the Palestinians, as with anyone who winds up the underdog. I also have a deep love for Judaic culture and history and even for a lot of the early Zionist thinkers, whose essays I studied in Bruce Thompson’s Jewish Studies course at UCSC.
Ten years ago I told a dinner guest to shut up about his racist views. He didn’t shut up, and my outrage has done little to curb racism on a global scale. My outrage about the oppression of the Palestinians is not going to make a decisive change in the course of history. There will be no Onion-like headline saying “Local man has strong opinion regarding Middle East.” Even if the situation in Israel were to resolve itself into a peaceful two-state solution by the end of 2009, it won’t mean an end to oppression and repression as a part of US history.
Read Palestine, is my recommendation. Read Palestine and come away conflicted. A state of internal conflict is a great condition for a creative mind.
I can’t read poetry or fiction without trying to see it from the author’s perspective. I like the way that Joe Sacco puts himself into his comic book story about Palestine. He puts himself into the story in a wonderfully unselfish way. As an artist, he moves from gross caricatures at the start of the book to realistic portraiture at the end of the book, but all along the depiction of himself remains the same—a caricature of a bespectacled man who’s in way over his head, who’s busy gathering notes for an unorthodox comic book documentary about one of the grimmest political situations in the world. The caricature of Joe Sacco keeps falling into dreams of making it big, of winning Pulitzer Prizes and changing the world through comic books, only to be reminded moments later of his own weaknesses.
I remember recently overhearing a discussion. Someone I knew had recently returned from Israel and was holding forth about his own experiences. His story rambled a lot, but he kept coming back to the assertion that “the Israeli Arabs are smart.” As opposed to the Palestinians, who, presumably, he believes are stupid. It reminded me of a friend of my grandmothers, an old guy who used to run textile factories, and who would have conversations about how amazed he was at the intelligence and articulateness of “African blacks,” as opposed to African Americans. “You can have a conversation with the ones from Africa. The blacks in America, you can’t talk to them.” That was years ago, at a dinner party at my parents’ house, and I flew off the handle about it, castigated the guy for being a racist creep, and then in turn was scolded by the rest of my family for being rude to a guest. Not that the rest of my family really supported the guy; I don’t think that they were listening to him. Basically, there was just an unspoken rule that everyone else regarded him as an old, crotchety fool in these situations, and that he was to be allowed to drone on and on.
It’s an important memory in my life, so I’ll go into it a little bit more:
I told the old droner to “shut up.” Not a comment that I really premeditated at length, but it came from the heart.
And the old guy took offense, said that I was infringing on his right of free speech. He resumed the conversation with a change of subject: now he was talking not about race, but about his own personal history. Like my own family, he used to live in the Russian settlements in China that existed before the advent of Chinese communism and Chairman Mao. In retrospect, he felt that the Russian settlements had been a haven for liberties that had never existed in Russia either under Czarist or under Communist rule.
“We enjoyed free speech there,” he said, and then paused. “Unlike at this table.”
What did I learn in that conversation? I don’t want to draw a conclusion yet. Maybe not ever. Conclusions can be a wrecking ball to a story. I haven’t changed my opinion of the guy: he was a racist and a jerk, at least a lot of the time. But I also am very careful to avoid people to shut up. I become sphinx-like. I let people express their own views. Which sometimes means allowing them to give themselves enough rope to hang themselves.
The guy who was talking about his trip to Israel was a physician I sometimes work with. A little while later in the conversation someone asked him his opinions about torture. “Waterboarding’s not torture,” he said. “Waterboarding’s a walk in the park.”
There are a lot of testimonials in Palestine from the point of view of Palestinians who’ve been tortured. It’s easy to read (because it’s a comic) and hard to digest. I have a natural tendency to sympathize with the Palestinians, as with anyone who winds up the underdog. I also have a deep love for Judaic culture and history and even for a lot of the early Zionist thinkers, whose essays I studied in Bruce Thompson’s Jewish Studies course at UCSC.
Ten years ago I told a dinner guest to shut up about his racist views. He didn’t shut up, and my outrage has done little to curb racism on a global scale. My outrage about the oppression of the Palestinians is not going to make a decisive change in the course of history. There will be no Onion-like headline saying “Local man has strong opinion regarding Middle East.” Even if the situation in Israel were to resolve itself into a peaceful two-state solution by the end of 2009, it won’t mean an end to oppression and repression as a part of US history.
Read Palestine, is my recommendation. Read Palestine and come away conflicted. A state of internal conflict is a great condition for a creative mind.
A Note About the Blog
One thing I’ve learned is that writing straightforward book reviews is getting boring for me, and it’s distracting from my work as a writer. This summer I went to the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Valdez, AK. I presented a couple of my plays there, did some acting, and met a lot of incredible creative people. I thought a lot about the creative process. I discovered a couple of things about my own style and method. Improvisation seems to me an integral part of writing. A lot of my favorite books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers) bear clear traces of having been improvised; other favorites of mine (Shipping News, for instance, or Mating) come off as much more polished, beautifully planned and researched books where the form seems well under control.
If there’s a grand unification theory of my own creative process, it’s that I have to overpower my own intellect in order to make good use of my own imagination. I’m at my best when there’s a level of uncertainty at play in my writing, when I’m not completely sure where I’m going, or I think I know, but there’s always the threat that the creative part of my mind is going to jump the tracks and go off in some odd direction.
I don’t think I have a lot more to contribute in the sense of traditional-style book reviews of the sort that you’d read in the New Yorker or hear from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. I love this sort of review, where you get a beautiful, essential synopsis of the book and then the reviewer segues seamlessly into an op-ed about the book’s faults and merits. But I am more in love with reading itself, and with the odd and paradoxical ways in which it feeds my own creativity.
I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go with this blog, but it’s going to veer more toward stream-of-consciousness. I’m still going to use the books I’m reading or have read as the backbone, the departure point, but the meat of the essays I write will have much more to do with my mental associations as I read the books or after I read them than it will summarizing the book and giving it a tumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll write with the assumption that my reader is already familiar with the book in question, or is resourceful enough to track down a summary of the book down and read it.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m going to start doing something that may produce utter crap from now on, but it’s more interesting to me than what I’ve been doing. Enjoy.
If there’s a grand unification theory of my own creative process, it’s that I have to overpower my own intellect in order to make good use of my own imagination. I’m at my best when there’s a level of uncertainty at play in my writing, when I’m not completely sure where I’m going, or I think I know, but there’s always the threat that the creative part of my mind is going to jump the tracks and go off in some odd direction.
I don’t think I have a lot more to contribute in the sense of traditional-style book reviews of the sort that you’d read in the New Yorker or hear from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. I love this sort of review, where you get a beautiful, essential synopsis of the book and then the reviewer segues seamlessly into an op-ed about the book’s faults and merits. But I am more in love with reading itself, and with the odd and paradoxical ways in which it feeds my own creativity.
I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go with this blog, but it’s going to veer more toward stream-of-consciousness. I’m still going to use the books I’m reading or have read as the backbone, the departure point, but the meat of the essays I write will have much more to do with my mental associations as I read the books or after I read them than it will summarizing the book and giving it a tumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll write with the assumption that my reader is already familiar with the book in question, or is resourceful enough to track down a summary of the book down and read it.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m going to start doing something that may produce utter crap from now on, but it’s more interesting to me than what I’ve been doing. Enjoy.
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