Until I Get to Page 400 Or So

All right, gather 'round, let's talk about John Irving. I said I would, and I'm going to.

I finished Until I Find You a few nights ago, before I began my Chuck Klosterman frenzy. To put this in perspective, I purchased Irving's last novel, The Fourth Hand, about two weeks after it came out in 2001, read it in three days, and have spent the four years in between waiting patiently for him to release his next one. Before that, I read A Widow for One Year in about three days within a week of its release in 1999 and had a two-year wait for the next one. It's true - I'd wait forever for this man to publish his summary of the phone book if that was my option for new Irving.

You see, I love John Irving more than I love any other author who has ever existed, and I suspect I always will. These are strong words, I'm aware, but I say them in all seriousness.

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, it fell to the underclassmen and -women to make sure all of the various left-behind junk in graduating seniors' dorm rooms was properly disposed of. I was put in charge of a room belonging to a girl named Mary Beth, a sarcastic, husky-voiced Southern girl who was pretty much the only person in the dorm whose relationship to me approximated friendship. She'd left the room a mess but told me I could take whatever I wanted out of it once she was gone. And under her bed was a paperback copy of The World According to Garp. I'd never heard of either the author or the book, but I knew that Mary Beth knew a lot about books (she was the head of the literary society I'd eventually be in charge of when I became a senior), and had generally good taste.

Ten years later, I've often thought about tracking Mary Beth down via our alumni network and thanking her for forgetting to take this book with her, because it was my gateway drug. Garp, I think, might be the best introduction to Irving you can get - it's alternately hilarious, strange, sad, and thought-provoking. It was as smart as anything I'd had to read for a class, but engaging in a way most 10th grade English Lit books aren't. (True, The Great Gatsby was an instant favorite, but Fitzgerald has always seemed a little bit detached to me. His work is the literary equivalent of the popular boy who's nice enough to the nerdy girl that she develops a crush on him, but not so nice that he'd actually date her.) Finishing the book took me exactly the length of my flight from Boston to Montana, and by the time I was done I not only wanted to write, I wanted to write a novel, and what's more, I wanted it to be this kind of novel.

That summer, I checked out The Cider House Rules from the public library and found The Hotel New Hampshire at a discount bookstore. My infatuation with Irving blossomed into true love.

That fall, I read A Prayer for Owen Meany, which hit me so hard that when I finished it, I just opened it back to the first page and read it again immediately. I estimate that in my lifetime, I have read that particular book at least 25 times, twice in German (because I figured I knew the book so well I could use it to improve my German reading comprehension). I wrote both my English Lit AP and my college entrance essay on it (not knowing when I sent my essays to Mount Holyoke that Irving had actually taught there at one point, so I imagine to the MHC admissions office I must have looked like I was really kissing ass. It must have worked, though, because that's where I wound up going). I can no longer choose one favorite book out of the hundreds in my apartment, but this one will always be in the top five, no matter how many other books I read.

Eventually I worked my way through all of them, even his first three, which are basically terrible. Aside from those, I've read all of them at least twice each. I planned a summer of backpacking in Europe around a visit to Vienna inspired by The Hotel New Hampshire. I have arranged to take the afternoon off from work so that I can go camp out in the Barnes and Noble where he'll be doing a reading/signing on August 18th. I actually saw Simon Birch more than once - in the theater. Such is the extent of my love for John Irving.

Obsessive? Maybe. But I'm a passionate person by nature, and really, this is a love reserved for only a very few things in my life, such as Elvis Costello and o-toro and the pajama pants I've had since I was 10. Besides, I want to draw you back to my earlier point, which is that Garp solidified my desire to be a novelist. Before that, I'd spent several months entertaining thoughts of going to a conservatory and becoming an orchestral tympanist (and maybe writing on the side). That's the last true vocation I considered before John Irving, and by extension writing, took over all of my other goals.

So back to the original impetus for this essay, which is Until I Find You. Overall, it's not bad. But it's not great, either.

The entire first half of the book chronicles the troubled childhood of Jack, the protagonist, whose tattoo-artist mother is doing her best to raise him single-handedly. Jack and his mother are plagued by the absence of Jack's church-organist father, a tattoo addict who allegedly disappeared before Jack was born. This would be sad enough for poor little jack, but also, every single female character in the book, apart from his mother, either molests him or wants to. Form the age of five up through high school, he's targeted by female pedophiles. After about 300 pages of this, I became a little desensitized to all the molestation (and the horrifying implication that half the time, Jack actually LIKES it), as well as the repeated mentions of Jack's penis. Keep in mind that Irving, as an author, managed to sell me on the incestuous relationship in The Hotel New Hampshire...but this...I just couldn't get behind it. And I couldn't make myself like any of the characters, least of all this poor kid who was at the center of it all. I couldn't like him precisely because everyone in the book seemed to, for varying reasons, and pretty much the only things they liked about him were his molestability. It almost made the prospect of feeling any sympathy for the kid seem creepy in and of itself.

Thankfully, once Jack graduates high school and moves out into the real world, the story picks up. It's hard to tell you exactly how this happens without giving away major plot points, but once Jack comes of age, things get interesting. Many of the characters we thought were good guys are bad guys, and vice versa. New motives are revealed that make you want to go back and experience the entire first two-thirds of the book again, knowing what you know now (ala The Sixth Sense or He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not or Rebecca). It's finally at that point that I started to like Jack, and identify with other characters. But it came too late for me to truly redeem the book. I just couldn't muster up enough affection for the characters even after the Big Twist turned all my perceptions on their ears.

As meh as I was about the book, I will concede that it's classic Irving. Nobody else could have written this. The book is rife with Irving in-jokes...at least I think they're in-jokes. Maybe "recurring theme" is a better description. At any rate, there are copious allusions to prep school, wrestling, freeing animals from zoos, seeming non-sequiturs as familial shorthand, oddly placed italics, and European prostitutes. And many others. Perhaps someday if I really have nothing better to do, like I break both my legs and this is the only book within arm's length, I might make a more comprehensive list.

Bottom line, I'm not sorry I bought the book, but it was ultimately a much less entertaining read than I had been waiting for these last four years. It's a little bit of a letdown. Of course it won't stop me from buying everything else the man ever writes for as long as he writes.

This is not to say that I don't still think the broken heart with "Until I Find You" emblazoned across it would make a really awesome tattoo. I'm just not sure it's for me. I hope someone out there loves the book enough to get it, though.

As for me, I still hope I'll get an Irving-themed tattoo at some point, but I can't think of what it would be. An armadillo maybe? I'm sure I can think of something better eventually. As it stands, I have two tattoos and plans for at least two more, so as much as I love Irving, a tattoo seems inevitable.

I pledge not to become one of the "full-body" types in Until I Find You, though.

I'll leave you tonight with my favorite paragraph from the book, spoken by a relatively minor character immediately after a fairly revelatory moment in Jack's quest to uncover his roots:

"I'll tell you what I believe about Hell...if you hurt people, if you know you're hurting them, you go to Hell. In Hell, you have to watch the people you hurt, the ones who are still alive. If two people you hurt ever get together, you have to watch everything they do very closely. But you can't hear them. Everyone in Hell is deaf. You just have to watch the people you hurt without knowing what they're talking about. Of course, Hell being Hell, you think they're talking about you - it's all you ever imagine, while you're just watching and watching."

If anything sticks with me from this book, it'll be that above all else. But it will be awhile before I know for sure how the book holds up as a whole.

(Note to John Irving and his lawyers: I realize that strictly speaking, this is probably a bigger chunk of quote than fair use would dictate I can have, but note all of the laudatory things I said about you above and take that into consideration before you slap me with a C&D letter. Thank you.)

Taco-tastic

Just a quickie alert to readers of this blog that my newest 2-hour set of programming for Coup D'Taco will be airing tonight at 10 p.m. EST. (Coup D'Taco, for the uninitiated, is a DJ collective that creates eclectic - and I do mean eclectic - 2-hour music blocks for your listening pleasure. I mostly use it as an outlet to relive my days in college radio.)

Click here for the direct link to the stream. If you'd rather download the podcast and listen to it at your leisure, you can do that too.

Get Back In Line

So I did in fact slip Chuck Klosterman my card, which I realized after the fact includes a link to a website featuring a blog where the very first entry one sees was titled "I Want To Have Approximately 8 Billion of Chuck Klosterman's Babies." And I want this guy to respect me as a literary presence enough to participate in my reading series? Smooth, Jess. Real smooth.

What's done is done, though, and my relentless worshipping-from-afar (and not so afar) of the inimitable Mr. Klosterman continued tonight as I made a complete giddy ass out of myself in front of him at his signing. Though I wouldn't put this up there with the time I ran into David Byrne in the Carnegie Hall elevator bank and proceeded to spend the next three minutes heaping mindless praise on him in one lengthy sentence that used the word "great" a lot of times, thereby almost causing him to stop the elevator and take the stairs, even though he had his bike with him, it was pretty close. What can I say? I get silly in the presence of greatness. Probably always will, even if I myself somehow managed to become great at some point.

The evening was awesome, though. He was sure to answer every single question people asked, even the totally inane ones that seemed to serve solely as a platform for the question-asker to display his/her talent for punditry and/or dispense useless trivia about themselves. (Yes, I may have some solipsistic tendencies, and yes, I may have wondered exactly where in Montana Chuck was when he had his revelation about his ex-girlfriends corresponding to past and present members of Kiss as described in Killing Yourself to Live, being that I myself grew up in Montana and would love to know if he stuck to the interstate or took Highway 2 across my old stomping grounds... but recognizing the global irrelevance of the question, I had the good sense to keep it to myself.)

Being that I have been a Chuck Klosterman fan for, oh, 72 hours now, I hadn't yet had the chance to pick up Killing Yourself to Live, and briefly pondered getting it at the signing. The managers herding us into the autograph line informed the crowd that they'd sold out of the book but would special-order copies if anybody else wanted one. Well, okay then, I thought. No book for me. That's cool, I have lots of books. I pulled my copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs out of my bag and headed through the row of seats toward the line. Then I tripped over something - a copy of Killing Yourself to Live that someone had stashed under a chair and abandoned. Clearly, this was a sign from the universe that I was meant to own this book. I devoured half of it on the subway ride home. Something about this man's writing makes me want to consume as much as I can as quickly as I can - I've been gorging myself on his words for the last three days. I can't seem to get enough.

And while the purchase of these two new books over the last four days is certainly feeding my brain and making me extremely happy, I can't ignore that it is feeding a larger problem, namely that the number of books I read in a given month is generally not as high as the number of books I acquire in a given month. Observe:
What you're looking at here is approximately half of all of the books in my apartment which I have been meaning to read but for some reason or another have not yet gotten to. Mostly they come from the dollar rack at the Strand and friends who work for book publishers, so it's not necessarily an issue of financial drain, but I still have no excuse to keep on buying new books when I clearly have a queue.

I used to date a guy who would read books not because he had lovingly chosen a particular title, but solely because he needed to get them off of his shelves and out of his apartment. At the time I did not have any friends who worked for book publishers, and I lacked both the funds and the upper-body strength to visit the dollar rack at the Strand the way I do now, and I used to be shocked at his cavalier reasoning for choosing a particular piece of recreational reading. While I hope I never take my books for granted, I'm starting to understand how he got to that point. I don't even remember why I have half of these, though I know I probably had good reasons at the time. It's no wonder I've Hoovered up the Klosterman books the second I got them rather than dipping into the reserves - I know why I wanted them (namely, my sudden and intense literary crush on Chuck Klosterman), and they're crying out to be read.

I'm sort of rambling now, I realize, so I'll just sum up: this is nothing more than a reminder to myself to stop buying new books and get through some of the backlog. Self, I don't care HOW awesome Chuck Klosterman is - you don't need to seek out the rest of his books until you've at least attempted to crack that Stephen Ambrose you bought last year. And who the hell knows? There's some great stuff in that pile - maybe I'll find myself similarly compelled to heap sycophantic praise on, like, Jay McInerney (though probably not, since my love for his fiction is almost completely negated by my lack of interest in his wine column in House & Garden, hence his novel has sat on my shelf unread for about 8 months).

Speaking of books I bought instead of reading the ones I already have, stay tuned: tomorrow I talk about John Irving. Finally. Girl scout's honor.

I Want to Have Approximately 8 Billion of Chuck Klosterman's Babies

I realize it's been a few days since I've updated ye olde litblog(e), and even longer since I've actually written something about, well, lit...this is not to say I haven't been pondering it, since it's pretty much all I ever think about, but I just haven't had the opportunity to sit down and compose all of my various ponderings into something coherent. Not that I really do now, understand. But I couldn't bear to think about my readership gradually losing interest and then falling away, after such a promising start to the bittysoda enterprise.

Someday when I'm a real writer with real fans, never let it be said I don't care about the fans. Or anybody who shows more than a passing interest in what I have to say, really.

That said, here's today's piece of literary sycophantism: the nicemodernism movement has found its writerly patron saint, and that man is Chuck Klosterman. Oddly enough, I had not heard much about this guy until this past week. The only thing I knew about him was that he had written for a few of the magazines that my company puts out, and that he was the subject of the most scathing review I have ever read about anything, which honestly should have made me more interested in reading him, but I think at the time this ran I could barely muster enthusiasm for books people were telling me I would enjoy, so I promptly forgot about it until this week, when three different people who do not know each other suddenly told me I needed to check him out.

And of course, now that I have, I wish I'd done it a long time ago. I finished Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman's recent collection of pop-culture essays, within 24 hours of opening the book (and it bears pointing out that I was actually on a date for most of this 24-hour interval). Ladies and gentlemen, this man is nicemodernism personified. He was nicemodernist before we coined the term. Despite being fairly unfamiliar with his oevure prior to this weekend, I get the painful feeling that I've been somehow subconsciously ripping him off these past few weeks whenever I wax rhapsodic about baking cookies and Journey and other things that demonstrate a conscious effort on my part to utterly transcend the cool-uncool continuum. Chuck Klosterman has been doing exactly this for years, and he knows better than I do what I'm trying to do in this blog. Reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I had the same weird feeling I did when I read Prep, where I had to pause for a second to wonder if I'd actually met the author at some point, because what was being said was so like something I myself have long wanted to express.

(I guess this all means I'd better get to writing the book I'm trying to write now before someone else beats me to it.)

Anyway, the Klosterman of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs seems very much like the sort of person I would be if I were a 33-year-old man. We both grew up in the same part of the country, and I can detect this very down-to-earth, westmidwestern sensibility beneath the hyperintellectual veneer. It's what makes his utter unpretentiousness so convincing to me, actually. Those of us who grew up intellectually-inclined in the pre-ironic lands where cool and uncool generally run parallel to lowbrow and highbrow got a much clearer picture of how meaningless any of these designations are. Culture is culture. If it's being consumed on a mass level, it's influencing you. (Now, granted, Klosterman's enthusiasm for some things that are objectively uncool coupled with his genuine and profound lack of pretense made the Mark Ames review of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs veritably brilliant in that it pushed all the right buttons. Sort of the same way I'm vaguely awed when someone makes a brilliant back-handed comment that hurts my feelings to the core. Sure, I'm insulted and injured, but I have to give props to them for knowing where to strike.)

If you're an aspiring nicemodernist, you need to read this book. Klosterman describes perfectly so many of the concepts I hadn't quite formed in my own head. He shows you that it's okay to dislike things, and be angry, and rant, and even be a little bit cynical, so long as you recognize that liking the things you like (or disliking the things you don't like) doesn't make you hip, square, ironic, or anything else, it just makes you a Person Who Likes Stuff, and really, that's not a bad thing at all. The designations of "cool" and "uncool" have nothing to do with "great" and "not great", which really should be self-evident but isn't.

This evening, I intend to be at the Borders in the Time Warner Center, where Klosterman will be reading and signing. It's been a few weeks since I've been to a really great reading/signing, so I'm pretty stoked. I intend to slip him my card in the hope that he'll be interested in reading at Barbes, because the pioneer of nicemodernism before nicemodernism was nicemodernism clearly needs to read at the nicemodernist reading series before all can be right in the universe.

It's worse than that - he's dead, Jim!

Today, Bitty Soda is saddened to report that James Doohan, aka Chief Engineer Scott on Star Trek, is dead at the age of 85.

I don't mind telling you all that Scotty was always my favorite character on the original series, and I don't even mind the implication that goes with that - namely, that I have watched enough Star Trek to formulate opinions on things like favorite characters. I've loved the franchise ever since the release of The Voyage Home, and Scotty was a big part of that. There was just something about his down-to-earth practicality, his loyalty, his warmth, his burr (incidentally, Doohan himself was actually Canadian, not Scottish) - I loved the guy. (I even think he was sort of hot circa 1968. I don't mind admitting this, either.)

And I can't even tell you how thrilled I was when I took my mother to the Empire State Building and we discovered that he was the star of the New York Skyride.

So today I felt the need to pay a small tribute to James Doohan. He will definitely be sorely missed.

Incidentally, I got to do a very brief and very bad Scotty imitation at Movieoke a couple of weeks ago, during a reenactment of Khan's death scene. I consider it one of my personal Movieoke highlights - certainly not up there with the Elle Driver/Budd scene from Kill Bill, Vol. 2, but pretty far up there nonetheless.

Tripping the Light Fantastic

Via ebay, I have acquired a DVD of the Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman in 1994 for a budget of about thirty-six cents. There are varying tales of why/how this movie came into being. As far as I can tell, there was a company who had the rights to make a movie featuring said characters, and their option was about to expire, so they very quickly threw a couple mil at Corman just so they could have a Fantastic Four movie on the books. It was never intended to be released, and rumor has it they even burned the negatives. But of course a few bootlegs got out, as they always do, and in this digital age where we're able to rip and burn a thousand illegal copies in the time it takes to say "it's clobberin' time," all it takes to get your hands on this little gem is a few mouse-clicks on ebay.

I wanted a copy because just the fact that it exists hits a lot of my buttons as far as things I love. Primarily, I've long had a minor obsession with products that didn't quite make it, fads that never caught on, scenes that hit the cutting room floor, and products that should have been released but weren't. Brilliant But Cancelled, which airs on Trio, was made for people like me. I bought all three Beatles Anthologies on the day they came out.

It's the same reason I'm such a fan of alternate history and spec-fic tales, actually. (One of my all-time favorite novels is Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, which speculates on what New York City would have been like had the South won the Civil War.) Not that I yearn for a world in which Crystal Pepsi is the number-one selling soft drink in America, but I think it's fun, in an odd way, to daydream about the road not taken.

Also, I finally have to come to terms with the fact that I actually do sort of like superhero comics. Not that you'll ever see me purchasing them, or knowing all of the minutiae of every origin story, timeline, sidekick, costume change, and archnemesis of every superhero in the Marvel and/or DC stable, but I recognize, finally, that superheroes are fun. I should probably stop pretending I hate comics in all their various forms. I spend way too much time in Brooklyn Superhero Supply for that to be believable, anyway. I've seen both Spider-Man movies, and all of the Superman movies, and they brought about warm fuzzy memories of being a very small child and getting four colors of cheap ink all over my grubby little paws. The Fantastic Four, in particular, were favorites when I was younger. I've had a crush on Reed Richards since I was old enough to find fictional characters attractive.

Combine these things with my love for low-budget cheese in all its various forms, as well as my fascination with the various quirks of American copyright law, and this was a film I definitely had to own.

My copy arrived yesterday, and I watched the first half-hour or so last night. Surprisingly (and I assure you, I say this in the purest nicemodernist spirit possible, without a trace of irony or sarcasm), it's legitimately entertaining. It's goofy and cartoonish, like the best superhero comics often are. The villains are larger-than-life caricatures, and the scenery and costumes look as though they've jumped right out of the Silver Age books in all their "pow! bam! thud!" glory. In places, it reminds me of the live-action-cartoon aesthetic of Power Rangers or the Ninja Turtle movies. And while the effects are as terrible as you'd expect from a movie with a budget of $1.5 million, the other aspects compensate to some degree - the score is fairly decent (and the fact that they used a real orchestra lends a touch of class), and the script is reasonably good, if cheesy.

Mainly, though, the entertainment factor comes from the fact that the movie isn't deliberately awful. Any irony in this movie has to be brought to it from outside. The idea that the actors and crew involved in The Fantastic Four had no idea it wasn't intended for release is kind of bittersweet. Cutely heartbreaking, if you will. You can see in their eyes that they're not phoning it in - they're a bunch of unknowns thinking that this might be the thing to make them known. Even though there were people who knew from the outset that this film would never see the light of day, they still managed to make it with the intent of entertaining someone.

Bottom line, if you were a little kid who spent your allowance money on frivolous superhero comics, you might have gone to see this movie and you'd probably have liked it. This movie absolutely appeals to my inner ten-year-old - ten-year-olds are old enough to follow a reasonably complicated plot, but not so old that they can always distinguish the high-quality entertainment from the low-quality cheap fun and routinely choose the former over the latter.

Unfortunately, there's not a place for this kind of comic-book movie in mainstream America anymore. The majority of comics consumers want to see the most literalistic, convoluted plots that explain the humanity of their superheroes as if the superheroes were real people. They want it both ways - they want it to resonate with the characters they grew up with, but they also want it smart, layered, and believable in our own realm. These are the same people who come out of every comic-book-based movie grousing about how it didn't follow the chronology exactly.

The way I see it, though, it isn't real. I don't want it to look real. That's not what comic books are about for me. I like them one-dimensional. My own love of superhero comics involves a certain suspension of disbelief that I actively embrace. I don't need to delve into Batman's psyche and then watch a full-scale epic battle that takes out half of Gotham City in spectacular pyrotechnic fashion - I'd rather see him beat up a bad guy (pow! bam! thud!) and scale a building using the Batarang and some string. I want spangles and spandex and bold primary colors. I want the purest black-and-white distillation of good versus evil. There's a certain joy in that.

If that's your bag, then I recommend the Corman DVD. If it's not, I hear Batman Begins is pretty decent.

But just about everyone in both camps seems to be roundly panning the NEW Fantastic Four movie, so you might want to hold off on that until it comes out on DVD. (Even though I hear that Ioan Gruffudd makes an extremely sexy Reed Richards.)

Strange but True

My eighth-grade English teacher was incredibly tough-but-fair, and I loved her dearly for it, except when it came to her estimation that good poetry was rhymed and metered. When she announced a citywide poetry contest that we would all be required to enter, I sardonically composed a deliberately awful piece of perfectly-metered saccharine in hopes that I could demonstrate my distaste for hard-and-fast rules when it came to art. Naturally, my poem won. The $25 prize felt like dirty money.

When I first moved to the city and was taking on whatever jobs I could to pay the rent, I got a temp gig selling Swiss Army luggage in Bloomingdale's. I gave away free knives to people for trying on a backpack. Obviously this was pre-9/11.

My 21-year-old cousin once spent an entire week wandering around the Montana State University campus dressed as a pirate. He says he didn't have to pay for a meal or a drink the entire time.

My hair has, at various points in my life, been blue, purple, green, pink, platinum blonde, and cherry red. Cherry red remains my favorite.

As a senior in college, I ran for class scribe, which entails compiling life updates from classmates for the alumnae magazine. I pledged, if elected, to get a large and conspicuous tattoo of our class mascot. Thankfully, I lost.

When my neighbor and her fiance broke up and he moved out, he forgot to have the address changed on his subscription to Playboy. Figuring they'd stop coming within a few months whenever the address change came through or the subscription ran out, my neighbor asked me if I wanted the new issues as they came in, since she wanted neither the magazine itself nor the reminder of her ex. That was three years ago. The magazine still arrives every month like clockwork.

Britney Spears and Kevin Federline attended my 18-year-old cousin's high school graduation.

When I was a junior in high school, right around the time of the 1996 primaries, I spent an evening in Manchester, New Hampshire, eating pizza in Pat Buchanan's campaign headquarters on his dime. This was a random result of a field trip for my high school's Practical Politics class, which I tagged along on despite not actually being enrolled in the class in question.

Whoa-oh, it's magic

My pal Adam was apparently on "Good Day New York" this morning, dressed as a Dementor, discussing the launch party he'll be, um, dementing later tonight.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you all know what comes out tomorrow.


My copy isn't arriving until Monday, because I have all my Amazon pre-orders shipped to my office. I can wait, though - I'm not finished with the Irving yet, and truthfully I was more excited about that one. It will be nice, though, if the Harry Potter book is not entirely about the penis, like Until I Find You sort of is. And not in a good way, either. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but it completely de-eroticizes sex due to its constant bashing-you-over-the-head-with-it. Less is more, Irving. Tittilation is what keeps 'em coming back for more!

So it'll be nice to get my hands on some good old-fashioned PG-rated family fun for awhile, even though I'm not particularly looking forward to having to hold a 1000-page hardcover in one hand while standing up in a crowded Q train at 8:30 a.m.

Because I am so very well-connected in the literary world, I have gotten my hands on some HUGE Harry Potter spoilers, which I will share with you now.

If you do not want to know what happens in the sixth Harry Potter book, you'd better stop reading now. I mean it. This is big.

Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you:

• Bad people try to take over Hogwart's.
  
• Using some sort of magic that is way more advanced than any teenager should be able to do, Harry will save the day and vanquish Voldemort, though only temporarily.
  
• Someone will play Quidditch. This is all I can tell you.
  
• Dumbledore will say something wise.
  
• Snape will be ambiguously creepy.
  
• Hermione will know a lot of obscure facts.
  
• Bruce Willis is actually dead.

For No Reason Whatsoever

(Image courtesy of Lileks.com, which is one of the best sites ever.)

Inches On the Reel-to-reel

I hope to write something later tonight, but I wanted to let you all know that in a few hours, barring any technical glitches, I'll make my debut as a regular DJ on Coup D'Taco, the coolest web-radio broadcast on the entire Internets. Previously I've done some very well-received guest sets, and it's just a fun time overall.

Obviously I'm not actually spinning anything live, being that I have a day job and all. It's a two-hour prerecorded set I prepared earlier in the week. It will broadcast twice today (at noon and 10 pm) and then at random intervals for the next few days. Click here to go directly to the stream.

I won't insult your intelligence by explicating the theme of the current set, which I have christened "Deja Vu All Over Again". Well, okay, maybe I will. It's the same sequence of 17 songs, played twice. The first time is the original (or most well-known) version of the song, and the second time someone else is doing it. There's a lot of bizarre stuff on here - some you know, some you probably don't. Look for Public Enemy, the Dead Kennedys, Elvis Costello (natch), Magnetic Fields, and Destiny's Child, among other great stuff. (Coup D'Taco's mission is to bring incongruity and eclecticism to listeners across the globe in new and creative ways. DJ Tacologic gets on my case for not including enough electronic stuff, but otherwise I think I'm doing okay so far.)

What if they held a reading and nobody read?

So those of you who were not there last night might be curious as to how my reading went last night.

Well, the short answer is: it didn't.

I don't really blame anybody - there seemed to be a lot of miscommunication as far as the Pianos management was concerned, and I really think Ned did all he could under the circumstances, but the thing is, rock shows never run smoothly. Sets always run overtime, technical glitches always come up, key individuals always disappear when you need them. So the mixture of rock and reading was a little volatile to begin with. Even the first set of readings started almost an hour late - nobody was there at 7 on the dot.

It was a good idea, I think, and I'm always thrilled whenever someone tries to instigate a melding of any two artistic media the way the Shakes are doing with their residency this month, but the execution was a little off. Maybe having all of the readers go first, THEN the bands, is the only way this would have worked.

If nothing else, it was a good object lesson for my own reading series this fall. No bands for this girl's series! And Ned, thank you for inviting me to participate, at any rate. I'll still read for anything you need me to, which is an offer that will hopefully become more valuable once I actually get something published. (And I'll call in that favor you owe me this fall when we get you to read at Barbes!)

By the way, the first set of readers went off without a hitch, and all three were massively talented. It was an honor just to be nominated to share stage space with them.

Besides, as Daryl pointed out, not getting to read only amps up my legendary status. I'm too punk rock to read at Pianos! Damn the man! Fight the power! Um, other inflammatory interjections! You'll all crowd in to my next reading because you'll want to know why no series can handle me! (This reminds me, oddly, of Mike Daisey's piece from last night, in which he talked about a stage production with a controversial scene that gets cut and then put back in, much to the alternating outrage and intrigue of the public.) I assure you, though, I'm not all that controversial, though I suppose it's not a bad thing if this is the mystique I wind up carrying.

So following the egregious clusterfuck that was the Summer Shakes Reading That Wasn't, a bunch of us went down the street to 138 and had a few drinks, and I got to chat with friends (new and old alike), a few of my would-be audience members, as well as fellow would-be reader Will Leitch of Black Table, one of my favorite websites ever. Will was massively cool, and I was glad to have met him after avidly reading his site for so long. I also made contact with several potential readers for this fall.

Overall, I was a little disappointed, but the evening wasn't a total waste, and I did get to spend a good amount of time with awesome people. Many, many thanks to everyone who came out to support me. I really do have the best friends a girl could ask for.

In other news, I am now up to about page 200 of Until I Find You. (The subway ride home from Union Square took about twice as long as it normally does last night, though I suppose that's what I get for staying out until 2 am on a weeknight.) It's engaging, multifaceted, quirky, and completely and utterly depraved. So in other words, it's Irving at the top of his game. I'm loving it, though whether I'm loving it enough to get Until I Find You-themed ink is still up in the air.

Finally - an entry that's not about not writing

What an opportune day to get published somewhere. Check me out, right below the fabulous Caren Lissner. I'm in good company over at Black List. Black Table isn't the Paris Review, of course, but I'm always thrilled and amazed that they'll print my blurbs nevertheless. I'll have to remember to throw some gratuitous praise in the general direction of Will Leitch tonight at the reading.

Oh, yeah, did I mention my reading yet? All the information you'll need is right here. Note that although the start time is 7, I don't go on until 9:45, which gives you plenty of time to hang out with me and see all the other stuff, or it gives you advance notice to show up later if you're only there to see me (which I highly discourage). In any case, if you come, please say hello. I'm the really tall girl with the short hair and bare shoulders who will most likely be curled up in a ball in the corner, quivering from stage fright. Come pet me and soothe my nerves.

As is becoming the tradition at readings, I had hoped to have cookies for you all tonight, but hot and humid weather does not make for good cookies. (My roommate thought they tasted okay, but agreed that they weren't exactly attractive.) The next time I'm reading will most likely be in mid-September, and hopefully things will have cooled off enough for me to do my annual Baking Day immediately prior.

Get Obsessed and Stay Obsessed

As many of you probably know, the new John Irving novel, Until I Find You, will be hitting stores tomorrow. So I made a few phone calls today to figure out how to get my grubby mitts on a copy at the earliest possible opportunity.

My first call was to The Strand, because, well, it's the Strand. Having an excuse to go there is never a bad thing. I'd live there if I could.

The kind folks at the Strand were very helpful, but informed me that if I really wanted to have the earliest possible copy, I should have called them about a month ago, because they typically get a number of advance copies of new books that customers can reserve if they call far enough in advance. As it stands now, there are 11 people on the waiting list for Until I Find You and they don't expect to have copies in tomorrow.

I'm such a Strand groupie that I feel incredibly sheepish not knowing this. But I certainly know it now, and will apply this knowledge to future anticipated novel purchases. I mean, obviously, for, like, Harry Potter books, this isn't going to work, but they said they generally get advance copies of nearly anything on the next highest rung of the literary pecking order.

As far as my immediate Irving cravings are concerned, the Barnes and Noble in the Citigroup Center, a mere half mile from my office, anticipates receiving 252 copies of Until I Find You, and will have the shelves fully stocked when they open at 7 a.m. tomorrow. It'll even be 20% off the cover price. I like my sleep, and I have a big reading coming up tomorrow, so I won't be there right at 7, but I'll certainly be there at 8:30ish.

Incidentally, I really hope this book is awesome, or at least better than The Fourth Hand, and not just because I don't want to think Irving is getting complacent, but also because the cover art would make a really cool tattoo.

Brooklyn's Newest Two-Wheeled Menace

It's barely noon and already today I have had two very distinctly "only in New York" moments.

This morning, I was up at the butt-crack of dawn to have breakfast up by Columbia University with two dear friends, D. and K., who are sadly leaving Metropolis in favor of Smallville this week. (You can read about their new adventures in home ownership and renovation at their co-blog, Revivalized.) While it was good to have one last hurrah with the two of them and say our goodbyes, the main purpose of the breakfast meeting was so that I could purchase and fetch D.'s bike, a lovely 18-speed mountain dealy with all sorts of gears and knobs that neither of us can identify or operate.

"Only in New York" moment #1 happened when we hit the bike shop on 96th and Broadway to air up the tires and pick up some necessary bicycle accoutrements. I now own a Kryptonite bike lock that cost me twice the price I paid for the bike itself. It's a sad fact, though, that this is a necessity in the city. Bike thieves can pretty much get around any other lock in existence. (Also, having carted the thing home in my backpack, I think the lock actually weighs more than the bike itself. My lower back is not happy with me right now.)

Suitably helmeted and aired-up, I wished D. and K. all the best and headed for home via the wonderfully well-kept and scenic Hudson River Park bike paths. And it was everything I hoped it would be, though I'm going to have to enlist the help of my favorite bike nerd to show me how all these different gears and levers work so as to make the ride smoother. All was wonderful until right around the Javits Center, when I realized that I was a) not carrying any water, b) not wearing any sunscreen, and c) not in very good shape.

I stopped off at Chelsea Piers, still revelling in the newfound joys of bike ownership, and parked the bike outside their cafe. Unsure of how to work my schmancy new Kryptonite lock, I asked a woman sitting nearby with her toddler if she'd watch my bike for a moment while I went inside to get some water. Once hydrated, I thanked her profusely, got back on the bike, and pedalled off in a reverie of exhaustion and bike-love. I had gone about three blocks when it hit me why I immediately trusted her. No, it wasn't because she was well-dressed and had a kid with her. It was because she looked familiar, and this familiarity translated into "I know her, therefore she won't run off with my bike."

See, here's where "Only in New York" moment #2 comes in. I'm about 90% certain the woman I asked to watch my bike was Molly Shannon, of Saturday Night Live fame. Only in New York does one pass and interact with celebrities on a fairly regular basis without noticing or reacting. We just get an odd sense of deja vu until a few minutes afterward, when we realize we know them from television, then we shrug and go about our business.

I made it about halfway home - and hey, 6 miles is nothing to sneeze at - and caught the Q the rest of the way. I am now sunburned, achy, and strangely energized. I think the bike will prove to be a good investment - not only does it make travel within Brooklyn much more convenient, I just think of how great my ass will look after weeks of biking and it tickles me to no end.

Does the fact that a car has just cruised by my apartment with huge, tricked-out, megabassed stereo speakers blasting that well-known thug anthem, Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed," count as "only in New York" moment #3?

If your work's not what you love, then something isn't right

Today, Gawker reports on a junior staffer at a publishing house who got fired for saying catty things about her coworkers in her blog.

I'll admit it, there was once a time when I was not quite so judicious about what I posted about my workplace on the Internet. Back in the summer and fall of 2001, I painstakingly chronicled every single thing I hated about my job on a daily basis. This was even around the time of the MediaBistro "Bitch Box" scandal that got a Hearst EA fired. (Said former Hearst EA is now the editor-in-chief of Playgirl - proof that you always have an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and press on, I suppose.) I was lucky this did not get me in trouble. As I've become more media-savvy, and as blogs have taken off, I've taken a step back from talking about specific details about my professional life because I know what's good for me.

However, as a variation on the blogging-about-your-job theme, I'd like to take a moment to give my day job a little nicemodernist spin.

Full disclosure: I currently work in publishing. You've heard of my company. (Okay, most of you reading this know me, so you know damn well where I work. Hell, my coworkers read this.) It does have a bit of a reputation for cultivating an attitude of icy, heartless bitchery, but you should all know that on the whole, this has most definitely not been my experience.

My company, for all the negative press it gets, is surprisingly generous. I have an amazing benefits package and practically more vacation than I can use in a year, plus all sorts of perks like discounts and beauty sales and holiday party invites. My coworkers are incredibly smart (just ask all the people whose asses we've kicked at Tuesday Trivia) and, for the most part, awesome to work with.

As for the nature of the work itself, it's nothing to sneeze at either. It's not the most exciting job in the world, but I like it enough to have stayed on for two and a half years with no signs of quitting on the horizon. Hey, I get to make spreadsheets and wield a giant library stamp, and I've amused myself with less. It'll do until I sell the book, and if Neal Pollack's experience (which I know he documented for Salon.com once upon a time, but I can't find the article right now) is any indicator, I'll probably still be at this company long after I sell the book, being that not every novelist gets a Dan Brown-sized advance.

This is the last word I'll say in this blog about my job, but I figured it's about time the media industry got a little bit of good press.

"I've never seen such -- such beautiful shirts before."

Artists, as we all know, tend to have addictive personalities. My best guess is that it's because in order to create anything of significance you have to be rather addicted to the art itself. You sort of have to give yourself over to it in the same way that an alcoholic loses control of themselves.

I have thankfully managed to avoid substance abuse problems thus far in my artistic career, but that doesn't mean I'm free of addictions. Here's my latest:

(not pictured - the stripey one, which is in the laundry, and the pale blue one, which I'm, um, wearing right now.)

That's right, tank tops. Specifically, ribbed cotton tank tops of the sort that one might call "wifebeaters" except I don't have a wife and if I did I'm not all up in the domestic violence. They're about five bucks apiece at Old Navy, and every time I go in, they suck me in and I buy a couple more. I can't escape it - there's always a new sale, or a new color. It's most embarrassing when I go up to purchase them and realize that I am actually wearing one at the time of purchase. The clerks usually don't comment on it, but I know somewhere in the back of their minds it registers, and they know me for what I am.

But there are worse things to be hooked on, I suppose. These are comfortable, versatile, they look good, they last pretty well, and it saves me having to figure out what I'm going to wear on any given day. I have actually worn one of these things to work every day this week. I rather like the symmetry of them in my dresser drawer, all stacked up in neat identical piles.

Call it my nod to Jay Gatsby, albeit a very, very low-budget nod.

Selective Perspective

One of my favorite people ever, my good friend Daryl, returned last night from a week-long vacation in Seattle and the surrounding area. On the way out, he took a route that is well familiar to me - the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited (New York to Chicago) and Empire Builder (Chicago to Seattle) trains.

There was a period of time during my first two years of college when I'd been flying back and forth between New England and Montana 3 or 4 times a year, and I was getting sick of planes. I had a lot of down time for most of my vacations, my hometown of Havre has always been a major railroad hub, and it cost about the same amount of money as flying, so I took the train back and forth a few times. It's sort of like the difference between the subway and the bus - when you're at ground level and moving on a particular path, you can see everything you pass between your point of origin and your destination. You get a better sense of how much ground you're covering and precisely which ground. Taking the train cross-country is something I think everyone should do at least once, if only to give you a sense of exactly how vast things are, and how much they can vary from place to place along the route between where you start from and where you're going. We Americans don't generally take enough time to relish the journey over the destination.

Now, Daryl and I, fundamentally, have very similar temperaments - it's part of the reason we get along so well as friends. (Daryl is nicemodernism personified - in fact, he co-invented the concept.) We come from similar backgrounds, and we like to do many of the same things. But the objects and views he chose to document along the Empire Builder route are not often the things I would have chosen or expected. It's fascinating to me to see what caught another person's eye along a route that I know so well.

His photos, particularly the ones taken in and around my hometown, make me take new notice of things that it never occurred to me to notice, like the old dairy ads on the sides of buildings; the grain silos; the water towers with the town name emblazoned across the side; and the Northcentral Montana uniform of ball cap, tucked-in button-down shirt, and worn-out jeans that every male over the age of 15 wears every day of his life. Even my parents, who met Daryl's train for the 20-minute rest stop in Havre, look different through the lens of his camera.

The analogy to fiction writing is obvious - the person telling the story is as important as the story itself. Point of view has always been my favorite thing to play with and ponder.

Shifting POV is the reason I can't get enough of Jodi Picoult's books (even though I'm aware that the plots often employ very similar devices from book to book), and the reason As I Lay Dying remains one of my favorite books, and the reason one of my favorite films is Laetitia Colombani's He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which tells the same story twice, back to back, from two different points of view.

As I was finally digging into the really meaty parts of the story I'm trying to tell now, I realized that certain segments would be much better served if told from a different point of view, to deliver the immediacy of an incident one character wasn't present for. For awhile, I pondered writing the whole thing in third-person, but I want not just the immediacy, but the limitations and biases that come from one perspective at a time. The particular challenge with this, and the reason very few people do it well, is in using this device to really demonstrate the different things different people would notice about a situation, and the different things they'd be willing to reveal to a reader. You have to crawl into a lot of different skins almost simultaneously. You practically have to write out the entire story as many times as you have narrators.

Needless to say, it is a colossal pain in my ass. But in a good way, given that I'm actually doing it. Any time I'm putting words on paper is time well spent.

Clearly, Daryl, you don't need to take me out to dinner in return for feeding your cat while you were gone, because you've definitely given me more than enough food for thought.

Maturity Knocks

I kind of fell off the antisnark wagon for a few minutes recently, and I'm not particularly proud of my fall from nicemodernism.

It was a combination of things. Recently, I've run into a whole metric pantload of media (and other) mentions of various alums of my high school - they're sending a cheery update to the alumni magazine (which I unwisely did not toss in the trash the second it arrived), writing in a faux-friendly tone to ask me for a donation they'll never get, working in other divisions of my company, showing up in model agency catalogs that cross my desk, appearing in various reality shows. Combine that with recently reading Prep, which was basically a nearly event-for-event account of my high school experience, and it's no wonder I suddenly found myself transported back to ten years, fifty pounds, two tattoos, and several therapists ago, when I was a nervous, self-loathing, universally gauche teenager who was in absolutely the wrongest possible school environment but wouldn't admit it to her parents or anybody, out of sheer unwillingness to admit she was wrong about something.

That inner sixteen-year-old is the part of me that wanted to RSVP to my five-year reunion with merely a photograph of myself flipping the bird. (Thankfully, my adult self talked me out of it.) That inner sixteen-year-old is the creature who keeps me from writing half the time, because she points out that everyone at St. Paul's told me I wasn't any good at it. It took me half of college to realize that I could, in fact, write after all, and the other half to decide I was going to try to do something with it. And it's the inner sixteen-year-old that's used her quick, nasty wit as a defense mechanism, from the second I was remotely confident enough to speak up to anybody. It's taken me the four years after college to realize that taking the low road of cutting people down in creative and funny ways to make me feel better about my own abilities isn't going to produce great writing any more than shutting up and taking the teenage cruelty to heart would.

It's why I see this whole nicemodernism thing as the ideal. I want to be comfortable enough with myself not to drag other people down, comfortable enough with myself to like the things and people I like without apology, and comfortable enough with myself to not have to go for the obvious joke.

Sometimes I succeed at that, sometimes I'm nowhere close. Hopefully the outer twenty-five-year-old will eventually take the helm on a permanent basis.

Looking Out for Number One

A long time ago, when I was pondering law school, I read a book which cautioned me that in some law schools, the competition to be the top-ranked student was so vicious that students were known to hoard books from the law library, or even rip out pages they knew other students would need.

We writers are much less direct about it, but I think there's an element of that in our circles as well. I've been cautioned to be very careful when looking at classes or masters' programs, because so many of them are full of instructors and fellow students who want to break down rather than build up.

And even out in the real world, those of us who are trying to produce something meaningful sometimes struggle to give credit to the meaningfulness of others' work, or give honest congratulations to someone who's produced something, especially if it bears any resemblance to that writer's own artistic vision.

When Curtis Sittenfeld gave a scathing review of Melissa Bank's new book in the New York Times, I think this might have been a little bit of what was going on. Not that I'm any big fan of Melissa Bank (personally, I do think Sittenfeld writes circles around her) but the castigation of Bank's work as "chick-lit" coming from someone whose book cover was pink and green does seem needlessly harsh. But I understand, if not condone, it. (Not that Curtis Sittenfeld needs me to condone anything she does, or that I'm any sort of authority on how writers should and shouldn't behave.) The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing managed to get good press from both the literary and the chick-lit camps. If you're a reader, Melissa Bank is a name you know - a proven entity. Curtis Sittenfeld is almost there. So what easier way to ascend to the pantheon than to demonstrate that your own literary mojo is more potent than the preexisting proven entity?

Speaking of chick-lit versus literary, as an aside, I've always been bothered by the fact that every book has to fall into a niche. Case in point: I recently finished Move Under Ground by my friend-via-blogging, the fabulous Nick Mamatas, whom I know has struggled a lot with the idea of having to be classified as a "genre" writer. Clearly, Nick's work has horror overtones, but objectively speaking, it's a good friggin' book by any standards, and there's as much Kerouac as Lovecraft in it. Still, it's like one drop of Lovecraft paints the entire work as horror fiction. Black cover, back-wall-of-the-bookstore horror fiction. Why is it that you have to have a touch of nerd in you to appreciate the literary merit of these sorts of things? You shouldn't. Good books is good books. Anyway.

There is no such thing as a free exchange of ideas. Even I'm not naive enough to believe that. Everyone's got an agenda, and more often than not, when surrounded by people with the same agenda, the tendency is to act out of a feeling of being threatened. We know there's a finite number of editorial energy, paper, shelf space, critical acclaim, what have you, and other people's work getting some of that takes away from what you could have, especially if what you write is similar in genre or tone.

It is human, and understandable, to be jealous. I've felt that way myself, and I'll freely admit it. (Needless to say, this is not very nicemodernist.) Whenever I'm talking to someone and they label themselves as a writer, rather than feeling kinship, I involuntarily feel my hackles raise. And hell, I'm not even really a writer, just some hack with a day job who occasionally does gratis work for various websites. Come to think of it, this is probably why I feel threatened, and probably why others do, too. We know we could always be doing more, and that someone out there is working harder than we are, or has more talent than we do. (And, most likely, someone out there has more raw talent than we do AND is working harder.) And if we're not ever vigilant and defensive, someone else will be more alert, and better able to reach out and grab our brass ring.

Despite this tendency, though, I've always held onto this ridiculous hope that if you're really good, and you're willing to do something about it, you can't hide it forever. And that's even if someone who writes almost exactly the way you do is doing well with it. So you have to keep your eyes on your own work, and your own prize. In those situations, the key is to focus the energy inward when these feelings come up, and let them work FOR us rather than AGAINST everyone else. I need to let myself be inspired by others rather than look for their flaws. We all should.

And in an ideal world, we wouldn't see the flaws in the first place, and we wouldn't compare our output to our neighbor's...we'd just love the great things in their work and celebrate them as much as we would our own. It's something to aspire to, anyway.

Still Willing to Brisket

(I'm never afraid to serve up a top round of meat puns, even if it means you'll chuck things at me. Ahem. Sorry.)

I spent the long weekend attempting to be as decadent as possible without actually being in Las Vegas. Over the course of four parties (three attended, one hosted), I managed to commit six of seven deadly sins (I was too busy with "sloth" on Monday to get around to "wrath"). Lest you worry that the deadly sins have deadly consequences via divine lightning bolt, let me reassure you that the deadly sins are not actually mentioned anywhere in the Bible. They're part of Catholic dogma, and I'm Lutheran, so every so often I can get away with such things. Much love for grace over good works.

It wouldn't be very nicemodernist of me to go into major specifics over how exactly each sin was committed, but I do feel it necessary to brag about the fact that Friday night, I took second place in a meat-eating contest at Churrascaria Plataforma. While I did not claim the top prize, I did out-steak my pal Danny, and given that the original terms of our bet involved Danny and me in a head-to-head steakoff, I'm happy with the silver medal. And everyone involved put in a solid effort, so there really were no losers, except maybe Churrascaria Plataforma, who had to have lost money on us.

(Speaking of dead cow, my favorite song ever about steak appears on Peter Himmelman's "Stage Diving" album. If you go here, and scroll down a bit, you can give it a listen.)

Because this is an attempt to be a serious writer-blog, here's an update on that, even though it's a bit of a non-update. I was too busy committing sloth (it is my favorite, after all) to get very much writing done, but in my head things are gelling quite nicely, and I think I'll actually be able to make some huge strides this week. Namely, I realized that I was getting too bogged down in out-and-out narration and wasn't focusing on the really meaty things that were the things I wanted to get at when I started this project. In a talk he gave right after Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close came out, my number one literary crush object Jonathan Safran Foer said, "it's not the rock, it's the ripple." More ripple, less rock. This is a good formula to keep in mind.

(I wish Jonathan Safran Foer was single. And I also wish I didn't have such a devastating crush on a man who looks so much like Harry Potter.)

Finally, I must return to my self-promotional efforts by reminding you all that my reading is coming up just one week from today. I attempted to send an announceatory email to everyone from my spiffy new bittysoda email account, but it hasn't as yet cooperated. How will my coterie of sycophants know to go to Pianos next week if I can't spam them about it?

Chateaubriand: it's not just what's for dinner.

Last night, Sharon and I hit up my soon-to-be second home, Barbes, to see Paul Auster read from the works of Chateaubriand and some other French guys whose names I didn't quite catch. This is particularly unfortunate in light of the fact that I wanted to repeat what one of them wrote right here, about how when you're writing, if you already know the last word, it makes it much harder to write the first word. But since I can't properly attribute it, I'll have to go a different direction here.

The first reader of the night was a French novelist named Celine Curiol, whom I'm told is very talented but I can't vouch for that firsthand being that what she read was entirely in French, which I do not speak. It was, however, an enlightening thing to see someone reading and have to focus on how they're reading rather than what they're saying, and it certainly gave me a new perspective on that.

And then after a brief and unexpected musical interlude by the incredibly awesome lit-geek band One Ring Zero, there was Paul Auster. He seems like the kind of writer you could have a beer with - he's got a lot of personality, and a lot of love for what he does, and he clearly knows a lot about a lot of different things. You can immediately tell that there's a lot going on in his head just because there is and not because he necessarily cares whether that's how he comes across or not. It's a little bit nicemodernistic, in a way, though I'm not sure the nicemodernist movement has a patron saint of authors yet.

(It's not going to be me. I am far too flawed. Much like doubt is the essence of faith, I have to actively work to keep myself on the straight and narrow path of antisnark and avoid the traps and foils of snarkery, which is just so easy to do!)

But I'm very stuck on something Auster said in his memoir, Hand to Mouth: "You don't choose (writing) so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hardroad for the rest of your days."

I used to feel that way. These days, it's been hard to get at it. It makes me feel like something of a fraud because I could probably go on like this for the rest of my life - get up, go to work, blog, play pub trivia, play the guitar badly, kickbox, drink diet coke, rent my living space, bitch about not dating - and it wouldn't be a great existence, but I could reach old age on the low road. If my entire being isn't consumed by having to get a story on paper, what if that means I'm not a writer?

And I've never been the type to actively let other people's revelations about themselves define who I am, but I know what he's talking about and I think he's right, and I know I don't have it now and maybe I never will.

(Someone emailed me the other day and told me I should publish my blog as a book. Not this one, obviously, but the other one on the slightly more interactive, inarticulate-teenager-heavy site. I understand the good intentions behind the statement, and I did take it as a compliment, but it's still ridiculous. Blogs are not substance. If I sell a book, it had damn well better be a Serious Work Of Literary Substance. Not to be confused with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But I digress.)

And although I'm trying really hard not to make this blog into a blog about not writing, that fear that maybe this isn't the thing I'm cut out for, and that I've chosen it instead of allowing it to choose me, paralyzes me just as much as the other things that paralyze me - the fear that I might pour everything I've got into something that winds up not being very good, and the fear that all of these people who think I do have talent will be terribly disappointed by my eventual output.

I mean, if this is what I'm supposed to be, this should be an absolute feeling, right? And right now, I'll be honest, it's not the sole thing driving me and keeping me going, though it definitely has some share of the copiloting duties.

But here's the part where I do a little bit of a 180 to tell you that this blog can't be strictly a blog about not writing because last night I DID write. SEVEN pages, biatches. I rushed home on the good old B68 so I could start putting words on paper (or, in this case, flash drive).

Granted, most of this is ideas and not actual prose, but hey, pages is pages. I'm not picky now that my imagination has finally woken up again and sort of blinked at me all, "Oh, you needed me to do something for you? (yawn) Okay, I guess." I imagine my imagination (heh) as a surly teenager.

Perhaps if every reading I go to makes me dash home and start writing more, all I have to do is keep going to a lot of readings and little by little I'll somehow continue to absorb the literary mojo of others and regurgitate something of my own.

(Incidentally, Paul's daughter, Sophie, is one of the musical acts performing at the same Summershakes event at Piano's where I'll be reading on July 12. He played a little bit of her album for us at last night's reading, and I must say she's got quite the chops for someone so young. In fact, I'm going to be reading directly after her set. The idea that he might possibly be there has crossed my mind, and I've spent the last few days praying that if he does show up, he'll duck out the instant she's finished.)