The word is: impatience.

Many of my friends (and me too) are dealing with the difficulties of life after an MFA program. (And if you think we’re alone, read this). One of the main problems is that you go from a world of time, focus, and support to a world in which you have at best a couple of hours a day to spend on what you consider your life’s work. (And if you think I’m exaggerating the cultural force of this phenomenon, read this). This is frustrating, and perhaps the most frustrating thing about it is the Catch 22-ishness of the situation: if only you had more time and money (or, well, time bought by money) you’d be able to finish writing your first book. But you can’t get that time and money (in the form of a decent teaching job or most of the better residencies or, if you’re really lucky, a book advance) unless you finish your book and publish it first.

Ha ha! Great joke, world!

I’ve already been through most of the permutations of despair associated with this situation, and have settled into a routine where I write in the mornings and on the weekends, and then spend most of my day working a (luckily well-paid) 9-5 job. It’s not ideal, but it’s working. And yet.

And yet. I still struggle with feelings of impatience related to my writing, and find myself frequently in the position of questioning whether I should just take advantage of the momentum from those feelings (can impatience be a good thing?) or try and talk myself down. After all, writing is not a race. It’s a conversation with ideas, situations, and characters. It’s one long, lived dream. But I do want to eventually finish my novel, and write the other novels I’ve been thinking about. I want to revise some stories. I want to have more time to work on the graphic novel I’ve been mulling and sketching for (remind me, gentle readers, to someday post some character sketches).

Dave and I talked last night over dinner about how both of us has been working ourselves a little close to the bone lately. We have 9-5 jobs, and then we have these immense projects that consume what would be, for normal people, our resting hours. Viewed from the outside, our lives could look a little bit unhealthy. But do you know what we decided? To just say screw it. These are important things, and we think that – through hard work brought on in part by a little impatience – we might actually finish them. So (to put my finger on the cultural button of this idea) we are both going to continue letting ourselves lean in to our impatience. Or should I say ambition? Our goals, the worlds we want to live in.

Let us hope this doesn’t result in ulcers.

For example: look out for words or phrases that you use as crutches, and work tirelessly to eradicate them. (It’s not without a sense of irony that I’ve used three adverbs in the past two paragraphs.) Why is that so fiddly? Because it’s a micro-level awareness that comes to permeate the macro-work of my writing. No more am I able to type a single sentence without checking myself against the use of “of course” or “as [x] as [y]” or “something/anything/sometime/anytime” or “that” or “it” or…well, the list goes on.

However, that’s not a complaint, it’s just an observation. I’ve always been a prose-meddler: I can’t really write a fast draft to try and get the shape of a story out, I am forever re-crafting each line. But it’s a funny thing to have your tics pointed out to you, and then feel them ticking.

This week has been emotional in small ways and large ways, lots of little barbs and sudden happinesses, and more often than not what I’ve wanted was to lie in a sensory deprivation chamber so my body and spirit can recalibrate a little without any further input. (Apparently that’s a thing you can really do. In Scottsdale, of all places.)

A cryptic claim. But true. Small tics are ticking in my writing and in my life, and I choose to believe that the final outcome of both will be a greater awareness, a cleaner sound, a better connection.

In un-cryptic internet news, here are some places to visit:
- Dexter Booth’s poems in the new issue of Blackbird (and then the rest of the issue, which is great)
- What happens when you reverse the gendering on the covers of books written by men and women. Pretty striking. And funny. And then sad.
- Alissa Nutting’s piece in the New England Review
- Adding monsters to thrift store paintings. Because why not?

I’ve been writing a fair amount lately, which is good for my state of mind, but bad for my motivation vis-a-vis contributing anything too meaningful here.

So instead, please enjoy:

The new issue of Lemon Hound

The new issue of Yew

and, better than anything else, ever, anywhere,

These photos of Tippe Degré and her animal family.

Because of this timing – another year gone, things changing, so on, so forth – I should probably use this space to talk about something more consequential than Mad Men. But I can’t help it. The heart wants what the heart wants.

My feelings on the current season have been making me think about the nature of storytelling: what are a story’s needs? What keeps us interested, other than the simple passage of time, experience of events? Whatever it is, this season (so far) seems to be missing it.

Here’s what I think: one of the most important pieces of a good piece of art is the mystery in it. That doesn’t mean it needs a whodunnit plot – god knows, I said art, not literature specifically. This applies to poetry, it applies to painting, it applies to an arrow, chalked on the sidewalk on a sunny day, pointing to nowhere. A good piece of art is both familiar and utterly strange, and it’s this strangeness that resonates most deeply with us as viewers/listeners/participants.

(Because we do not understand our lives. We do not understand death. We don’t understand any of it. Being able to recognize this uncanny sensation in something manmade is comforting, and unsettling, and this is the engine that moves the art forward. (Yes, ok, now I’m borrowing heavily from the Kantian notion of the sublime.))

A mystery makes us ask many questions, and in fiction, one of those questions is a simple one: What Happens Next? But the phrasing here is important – we must ask the question, not the story. When only the story asks, the question ceases to matter.

Now, wasn’t I talking about Mad Men? Yes. To start, let’s agree that Don Draper is the heart of the show. (Not the character with the best heart, just its beating center.) In previous seasons, he was also its mystery – what is going on in his mind? What will make him change? How will he evolve?

But now, I feel like those questions have all been answered. He is self-loathing, psychologically schismatic, lonely, and confused. Nothing will make him change. He will not evolve. I was started down this path of thinking by a great review by Nelle Engoron, but she suggests that the mystery now is what will ruin Don, what will make him implode? I’m not even sure that can be expected. The themes this season set up early suggest a sort of eternal return (Roger: “…you realize that’s all there are: doors! And windows and bridges and gates. And they all open the same way. And they all close behind you.”), and Don is certainly playing that out, with his new affair and his attendant cruelty to Megan – it’s terribly reminiscent of how he treated Betty, blaming her for what he did wrong (and this time we don’t have as much reason to dislike the victim, and so we just sour on Don).

So: I don’t wonder what will happen anymore. It’s a shame. I almost think the show should have ended last season, with the Don’s return to form just hinted at but not played out in all its monotonous glory.

The only thing that gives me some hope for change (other than the fact that this is TV, so they are going to have to dramatize something – though that’s really relying on the story to ask the question) is the fact that Don is in some ways more miserable now than ever. He is worse at his job. He is cheating on a woman he loves, and even seems to know it’s self-destructive. And at the beginning of the season, he was reading The Divine Comedy. So maybe this is just his descent into hell – the beginning.

But it’s hard to see him ever coming out in heaven. It’s hard not to believe that he’s in some kind of Purgatory, with doors that only lead to more doors, and more doors, and more doors.

That said, my life is going fine.

Oh, and there happens to be free shipping available right now (through April 14th) from the site that sells my tshirts, in case you like that kind of thing.

Now! More common than shilling merch, in this space, is the posting of literary links & essays & thoughts on whatever is going through my mind. Like this: apparently the man who founded Arcosanti: The City of the Future passed away yesterday. Sad, because he was a human being willing to pursue a somewhat mad but beautiful dream. The world will miss you, Paolo Soleri.

(And if you live anywhere near Arizona, you should most definitely visit Arcosanti. It’s open to the public, lovely, and bizarre.)

Finally, I’ve been reading and re-reading Pnin. In the past, I’ve always been more of a Pale Fire girl, as Nabokov-novels-that-are-not-Lolita goes, but Pnin is the book that I see the most passing references to when artists & writers are asked about their influences. I hadn’t re-read it since college, so I picked it back up for a recent trip.

Here’s what happens, in a nutshell: we follow a somewhat daffy Russian emigre, who teaches at an American small liberal arts college and has seen a great deal of personal disappointment. He gives a talk. He visits friends. He moves, because it’s difficult for him to concentrate. He remembers.

The book is interesting, because the main tension comes not from any single event to which we, as readers, are witness. Instead it slides in subtlely, through the cloaked hostility and monomania of the narrator. For most of the book, we are given little (though not no) reason to even view the narrator as a separate character, but by the end we learn that he has popped up periodically in Pnin’s life, and is a malign influence. A liar. A memory thief. Once we know this, it’s impossible not to revisit the pages we’ve already read – many of which are tender, even loving towards Pnin (but many of which are mocking) – and wonder how much of what we read there would line up with Pnin’s view of his own life.

In the end, Pnin flees, and we see no more of him. Nabokov is known to have said (well, that is I remember hearing that he said this, but I’m not sure where to find a quote) that Pnin is one of only two characters of his who escaped, and whom he (Nabokov) respects. (The other is Lolita.)

This is heartbreaking twice. Once, because we have come to love Pnin, and see that we are complicit in one more instance of his life being wrested from his control. And twice, because it’s impossible not to read the book as a statement on the tyranny of narrators generally – meaning that Nabokov knew he was doing harm to Pnin, and did it anyway. (So maybe it’s heartbreaking, in fact x3, because we that last bit is sad both for Pnin and Nabokov.)

It’s complicated to explain why I find that so wrenching – I don’t believe, not for one instant, that writers have a moral obligation not to hurt their characters. That would be so boring! It would give us so much less! I’m glad Nabokov wrote this book, glad he did this to Pnin. But forces us to confront the fact that in our own lives we are all tyrannical narrators, revising our interactions with others and reframing their (those others’) existences to fit in with the narrative we’re devising. And that’s sad. And that’s life.

The funny thing is that this thievery is not meant to be sad – it’s how we try to get close to one another: by putting another person’s experience into terms we can understand. Our own terms. But no one else thinks quite in our terms! So we are always changing reality to suit our own ends. Oh well for all of us.

One last thought: Pnin actually bears a strong resemblance to Charles Kinbote, the mad narrator of Pale Fire (as you’ll recall, my other favorite). Kinbote, too, is a sad and misunderstood emigre teaching at a small liberal arts college. But even though he actually narrates much of Pale Fire, he never escapes Nabokov’s grasp. Everything we know about him comes through someone else’s lens.

It was the last question of the evening, and at first blush seemed like the most obnoxious and self-flattering. Decide for yourself. The query was: “Is it good for people to read fiction?”

(I would have been very impressed if McEwan had just said “No” and then wished us good evening.)

The reason I find the question a little irritating is that it has a flavor of “What-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” about it. But it’s also a nice divergence from the usual Q&A fodder of “How do you get your ideas?” and “Can you describe your writing process?” The Prove Your Worth question at least offers something to bite into, a vehicle for airing one’s philosophical positions or getting righteously annoyed, depending on how you want to play it.

McEwan addressed the issue from the point of view of morality, assuming the questioner was asking if reading fiction makes us better people. His answer included a nod to the Nazi concentration camps wherein prisoner-bands were forced to play achingly gorgeous classical music, showing once and for all (as McEwan said) that an appreciation of art does not necessarily save or improve us.

I take this point. However, I also think there is something limiting to the idea that, just because an SS guardsman’s appreciation of Mozart failed to move him into freeing all the Jews in Buchenwald, music is not transformative. Perhaps art doesn’t improve us, per se. It may still deepen us.

Complexity and perfection are two different ideals. To me, art celebrates and investigates the deep passages of the human animal – the ones that criss and cross and dive and never, never, reach an end point. In this view, it’s quite possible that a German soldier might crack open the skull of a woman for stealing a bit of bread in the morning, and still enter into a serious study of Bach cantatas at night – music that causes him to dream in new colors, and call his father, weeping with strange insight.

Does that make said German soldier good? No. But it means that he is capable of growing – as we all are – in all directions. Not just up.

So to me, art (in general) and literature (specifically) are still good. They are just not guarantees.

Tomorrow I’m flying to New York for work, where I will hunker down in a trendy loft space in Brooklyn for two days or so. I wish I could say that I will have time for exciting literary events while I’m there, but it is far more likely that I will have dinner with a friend and then fall asleep somewhat early in my hotel. These are the excitements. I may also re-read Pnin.

(Which I am actually quite excited about. The dinner/friends, too.)

(The work should be fine. But not so fine as Pnin!)

At any rate, it is a bit late for me to be entirely as quippy (I’ve been listening to Game of Thrones on tape while walking Paul and – incidentally – drawing these comics, and the one thing I don’t really like about it is how every time Tyrion or Little Finger says anything it’s followed by “he quipped.” The dialogue tags! I could talk at length about them) or erudite as one might wish. Instead, I leave you with a few links that I fully intend to read myself tomorrow (if I have in-flight internet), or whenever (I do end up having internet).

First, I read these two interviews on the same day, and I think they make for an interesting pair:
- Aleksander Hemon in Guernica
- Tomas Dobozy in The Rumpus

And, a bunch of stories (George Saunders! Amy Hempel! Borges!) you can read online, courtesy of Flavorwire.

Oh, and while we’re at it, also Lauren Groff in Guernica. Why not?!

There was more, but I lost track. That’s enough, don’t you think? If you read the stories. I do (think).

my dear friend’s new apartment by the sea

biking a long path by old stone houses

in the other room working on my novel

swimming.

But I am here, and going about my life as a person must, doing the things that keep me afloat. (Example from later today: my taxes.) Things that I am in the middle of that are good:

writing my novel

Carole Maso’s Defiance

this coffee

anything spoken in the voice of Jeanette Winterson. 

(“Sometimes your life is the least real thing to you.” j.w.)

I could recap the entire conference, but Brian Oliu already did it here, so you could just read his. (Though probably that is a recap that best serves those who were actually present at the conference.) Suffice to say: I spent a lot of time at the VIDA booth, and it was a great pleasure and privilege to meet all the women involved in that project. We experienced so much good will, so much manic dancing (at the Prom!), so many opportunities to talk about why it’s important to pay attention to the Count numbers. Thank you to everyone who came up and asked me, brightly, for more information.

On to business. I no longer remember what I wanted to talk about today, because THEY ARE GOING TO MAKE A VERONICA MARS MOVIE IF ONLY WE FULLY FUND THEIR KICKSTARTER. I am a story nerd – I fall in love with characters, and hate to see them go. Veronica Mars is no exception. Even though the last season of the show was perhaps less keen, less tightly-wound than the first, I want this movie to happen. Every time I see the numbers go up, I get excited. So if you ever wanted to buy me a pretty affordable present, kick ten bucks the way of this project.*

And for literature: here is the longlist for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). If the VIDA Count has gotten you thinking, started you wishing to read more excellent books by women, well this is not a shabby place to start.

*Note: I am a little bit worried that film studios are going to start demanding this kind of campaign for all cult movies. But Kickstarter seems like a great fit for Veronica Mars, and since Foucault has taught me there is great danger in all actions, and you cannot anticipate which of your choices will result in long-term good or ill, I am just going to throw my support behind this project, because even hearing the VM theme song brings me close to joyful, ridiculous tears. As the Onion AV Club said: “If we can’t fund a Veronica Mars movie, what is the internet even for?”