Re: Technicalities

While preparing for my hopeless defense of American Apparel I ran into "Technicalities" and thought I'd offer a quick response by way of "What am I reading now" (the "now" is redundant there, isn't it).

A week ago, I picked up The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass. I stole this particular copy from the ex-office of one Alan Singer, PhD, but had yet to get into it. In this book (the only Grass I've read) a man in a mental hospital recalls his German childhood (so far, as I'm only halfway thru). There is a technique Grass uses, where he transitions between the man speaking from the mental hospital and the story's main narrative. Over the course of a paragraph, the narrator steps into the background, and we simply see the action. I have no word but "fluid" to describe the process. At the beginning of a paragraph, the narrator is speaking and we see him. Four or five sentences later, we are in the past. And I mean in it. If it's cold in the story I shiver. I haven't been that physically involved in a story since I first read The Hobbit circa 1992. It's like Grass is drawing us into the narrator's mental eye. I call it fluid because we have no choice but to follow him, we are "carried along" as the cliche tells us. For a careful (read: anal) and painfully slow (read: dyslexic) reader like me, "finding" myself at the bottom of a page is startling. I have not been able to pin down the technique. It has something to do with the order in which information is given. To follow my jalopy metaphor, it's like Grass understands the way the reading mind works, the way it flows from idea to idea, and he throws information (visual, tactile, psychological) ahead of the current, so our mind catches up to it at the perfect moment.

Glancing over the pages I've read so far, it seems too much effort to come up with an exemplary passage, as the techniques vary so much from passage to passage. How lazy!

Technicalities

When I was a kid my parents had this notion that my proper place was outside. Anytime they noticed me in the house they'd tell me to "go outside and play." I would take whatever book I was reading at the time and go sit under a tree in the backyard. Really, this backyard exile probably just kept me from smelling all the weed they smoked and hearing them fuck and otherwise act like two not very smart people in their twenties. Whatever. The point is that I developed this intense habit of reading as an aid to forgetting how shitty my life was. My memories of all the different places we lived over the years begin and basically end with my reading/hiding spots. An attic. Up in a tree. A cornfield. Rocks next to a creek. Etc. Now that I have myself become an apparently not very smart person in my twenties, this habit of obsessive reading is the only thing that supports my otherwise obviously false conviction that I am very different from them.

This habit has asserted itself to a shocking extent of late. I have developed an impossibly complex system to manage the reading of as many as seven books at the same time. Two large books, a novel and a nonfiction (usually history), as well as one or two books of poetry at home. A book of stories and usually one but sometimes two books of poetry for carrying around the city for reading on subways, at lunch breaks, in coffee shops or any other opportune moment. At least one of these books, though preferably two, in Spanish. And no TV reading, meaning crime novels, cheap memoirs, pop non-fiction, or any other bullshit. I have a TV.

The fruits of this weird yet somehow functional system have led me to think a lot about technique lately, and the way that technique leads to form. Vague discussions annoy me, so let us proceed to the particulars of three books, and try to bring it all together to some extent at the end.

"Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz
I happened to find a cheap copy at a book stall downtown, so I bought it. I've read this many times, but it had been a while.

Schulz wrote little stories, some of them just a few hundred words. They're all set in a small town and involve a young boy and his family. Very little happens in any of these stories. They are not about plot so much as moment. Schulz's main skill as a writer is his ability to cast a very persuasive aesthetic. All of his stories, and there aren't many of them, cast a palpable mood. They literally enchant you. He's not trying to put you inside the boy's head. He's trying to turn you into the boy. They way he does this is with verbs. He assigns unlikely verbs to everything, especially inanimate objects. Houses sink, windows cling, night caresses, and everything in the story seems to have more agency than the boy does. He is the object of everything, observing it and experiencing it but with no ability to do anything to change or affect it.

Once Schulz has paired an unusual verb with an unlikely noun, he stretches the image out. His paragraphs usually begin with the houses sinking, then go on to draw a variety of usually visual metaphors from that verb/noun pairing, all of which are presented as though they were literally happening. When he does this over and over again in every story, haze lifts up from the text and a little while later you realize you've been a child in Poland for the last half an hour.

"The Melancholy of Resistance" by László Krasznahorkai.
A while back I read a book by this guy, "War and War" and it broke my heart. So I wrote him an email, which said, "László you broke my heart." He wrote me back and said, "I am sorry I broke your heart. With my next book I will try to heal you." Krasznahorkai is Hungarian, somewhere around 55 years old, and a goddamned genius. The two books I've read by him are the only ones that have been translated into English thus far. Another is in the works but a long way from done.

His technique has three main features.

The first is extremely long sentences. Like 500 words long in some cases. Whole pages of margin-to-margin text broken only with commas. These require ATTENTION. They can be tough to follow unless you're just poring over the book. The sentence demands a very high level of focus and because every sentence does that, the whole book does it. It opens you up to all the other things the book is doing, all the things it is saying. It also allows him to really dig into anything he might be talking about at a given moment.

The second point deals with how he structures his scenes. A scene begins with character A and character B involved in some action. At a certain point the scene will transition to a supplemental scene in which character B is telling other, anonymous characters about what happened between B and A. Then back to the scene in the "present." It's a short of shifting of tenses, inserting after-the-fact retrospection into the scene, then alternating between the present and a later remembrance of the same event. The narrative possibilities of this technique are incredible. László builds layers of impression, memory, misunderstanding, motivations and divergent perspectives. He can take apart the act of one character lying to another and break it down into all of its constituent parts and make them all dance and then put the whole scene back together and move the narrative along to the next scene.

The third thing is about choices. It gives away nothing for me to tell you that the next to last scene in "Melancholy" is a funeral. Now comes the last scene. The technique here largely consists in making the exact right choice about what comes next. In "Melancholy" the last scene is a long, detailed description of the decay of the body buried at the funeral, the way that substances already present in said body break it down into organic compounds that are then recycled into the environment. This goes on for several pages. When it ends, László has said everything he wanted to say, philosophically, and done it in a way that is so artful that it is literally chilling. And all of that happens because he stopped, thought it out, and made the exact right choice.

"Distant Star" by Roberto Bolaño
This is a little novella, 110 pages, of the sort Roberto cranked out throughout the '90's. If you read a few of these, you notice a definite formula. First person. Usually a narrator who was on the periphery of important, always Latin American, usually political events. Informal, oral tone.

This formula is exceptionally functional because it is variable. In the context of this formula the specific characters and story become very important to the individual book, but the book itself does not have to stand all on its own. Each of these books are linked, usually by the presence of Arturo Belano, and together they all add up to something which is more than the sum of its parts. In a certain sense Bolaño was taking a cue from Faulkner and García Marquéz, creating a free-standing area in which his fiction takes place, but Bolaño's is less a physical location than the collective mind set of his generation, Latin Americans born in the '50's. Every book adds another layer, but its the cumulative vision of ALL of the books that matters.


So what we have then is three writers who are each exercising themselves primarily on different overlapping aspects of the craft. Schulz: the word and the scene. Krasznahorkai: the scene and the book. Bolaño the book and the body of work.

What's my point? How am I supposed to know? Isn't it interesting?

Personally, a lot of my work is done in an ass-backwards fashion where I get an "idea" and then just write it out and then revise it and then move on. The idea, by which I usually mean the plot, is the main thing. That is not the case with any of the writers cited here, and maybe there's some sort of lesson in that. To take one's time and break that idea down all the way and then build it up again, taking time and care to make each of the millions of choices as well as one can, realizing that the words all matter, and so does everything else, all the way up the line.

You hear a lot of talk among writers these days about "language" and how "all stories are made out of language" and what not. True. But they're also made out of scenes, and characters, and plots or the lack of them (which is itself a sort of plot). And they also take place in time, like music and film. And they say things, even if all they say is that they have nothing to say (which itself a sort of statement).

All of these things matter. You've got to be in control of all of them and make them all work toward the larger goal, whatever that might be. As if this writing shit wasn't hard enough already, right? Still, if you're not going to really do it and do it all the way then what exactly is the fucking point?

accepted

though i hate nostalgia mongering in all of its forms, i will defend this local industry against entourage six ways to sunday. give me 72hrs; i've got to pull up my Ayn Rand marginalia from when i was 15 and had already assumed i was better than everyone around me.

yo, steve

I will set to work defending ENTOURAGE if you will give me a Defense of American Apparel.

Let's do this.

fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

Obviously the best book about or set in a sanatorium is "The Magic Mountain." Thomas Mann.

A sort of latter-day adaptation of the sanatorium, one employed often by Milan Kundera, is the "spa town." These are big in Central Europe. Little towns built over hot springs with chinzy psuedo-medical facilities and lots of naked bathing and promenades. My personal favorite spa town novel is "The Farewell Party" (aka "The Farewell Waltz") which features a fraud doctor specializing in the treatment of infertility. He's the best in the field, cures nearly everyone, and eventually you find out that all he's doing is injecting his unsuspecting patients with his own sperm. He spends one scene dreaming a future Czechoslovakia where everyone looks like him. Then half the characters eat poison.

I could use a sanatorium or a spa town or some poison myself right now. New York. Ugh. This last week I worked five days, 9 to 5 at the United Way, doing data entry. First of all New York rush hour, morning and evening, is an intensely psychologically brutalizing experience. There's really nothing I can compare it to. Every morning I watch grown men and women literally fight each other over the privilege of standing with their face in a stranger's arm pit. There are simply more people than space on the trains. I usually have to let two or three trains go without me being on them, all the while jockeying for position on the platform so that when the next one comes I'll be close enough to hold my own in the subsequent skirmish. Then you get to work, which is another matter entirely.

As far as I can tell, New York offices serve no legitimate purpose. They are not involved in the production (or destruction) of any object. They contribute in no way to anything. All they seem to do is to provide a place where people can roll their little rock up their respective hill (said rock often taking the form of incomprehensible digital data). Then you get paid, and can then pay your rent, bills, and go shopping. It reminds of that scene in the beginning of "City Lights" where you see a shot of all these people coming up from a subway station and over that image is quickly imposed an image of cattle being herded toward the killing floor in a slaughterhouse. Real fast, then the commuters are back and then it cuts and you're like, "Did I just see that?" Yes, you did. And that shit is real fucking life. I have been more or less against capitalism all my adult life. As a younger man I was literally a card carrying member of the Communist Party. I joined on the Internet, hoping to get placed on an FBI list. Then the Party started sending me newsletters telling me to vote for Gore, and emails addressed to Comrade Brandon which ended with the sign-off, "Yours in the Struggle, Comrade So-and-So." What I'm saying is I drifted away from Marxism for reasons that should be obvious. But being here, seeing the way New York City is essentially a giant labor camp, and living it like this, well let's just say it brings back memories and a burning sense of class rage.

I finished "The Brothers Karamazov" a few weeks ago. There is this incredible chapter in it where Ivan Karamazov talks to the Devil for a good long time, then a trial scene. The ending is very strange. I don't know if I have anything super intelligent to say about it. I'm still trying to get my head around that ending, which will probably require that I read the book again sometime in the next year. It all goes back to the Elder Zosima, and Jesus, but I'm not sure quite how.

Next I tried to read "Extinction" by Thomas Bernhard, which is basically an unremitting symphony of hatred. I loved it, but then Thanksgiving came and I was feeling so much hatred that then reading about hatred created this overload that began to push me into dark areas. So I set it aside, to be resumed soon. Bernhard is fucking great by the way. Austrian, '60's and 70's. "Frost" and "The Loser" being both excellent.

I just finished, about ten minutes ago, "The Dark Side of Camelot" by Seymour Hersh, who is a national treasure. Fucking great book. Portrait of the President as Caligula. It deals in equal depth with Kennedy's power trips, particularly successful assassinations of foreign leaders such as Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the DR, and Diem in Vietnam. And of course the Castro mania. Also corrupt dealing with the mob and the Soviets. Then there's the sex. Lots and lots of sex. At this point in history everyone knows Kennedy had affairs. But no. Constant sex, neverending fuckfests with two or three or four or a dozen hookers in the White House pool, with both his brothers and their friends present. According to someone quoted in the book, Kennedy once explained this behaviour by saying: "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass everyday."

Am I writing? Other than scrawling the word "fuck" repeatedly in a notebook, no, not at present, though there are some ideas kicking around. I'm translating CA Conrad into Spanish. It works really well because he's so linguistically intense, which means you can use Spanish words like APESTOSO, meaning incredibly smelly.

And finally, a response to Abbi's question: What is an author?
An author is a creature who was invented by writers a long time ago to try to pass off what they did with their time, namely writing, as something more respectable than it really is. This was a dishonest act on the part of said writers. Writing is not supposed to be respectable, and if it is you're probably not doing it right. (I leave the inevitable sexual analogy to the reader's own mind.) The author then became a device by which "successful" writers could differentiate themselves from novices, upstarts, amateurs and genuine talents. Think about it. What kind of a prick douchebag says "I am an author" in response to a banal "Whaddya doo" type question? Then the author got highjacked by French intellectuals who, after the Second World War, were busily attempting to make European culture commit suicide. To this end, they postulated all sorts of theories of who or what the author was. The author either didn't exist, or was guilty of some bad postmodern thing (such as being French). Roland Barthes was the principal offender here. Nowadays the author does not exist. The author does, however, appear. This occurs during Author Appearances at places like Barnes and Noble and the Library. It is part of the now mandatory push to promote the latest Best Book Ever during the short window of time that exists between said book's publication and everyone forgetting that it ever existed. The author, then, started life as a line of bullshit and to bullshit the author has returned. Ashes to ashes.