Nonsense Verse

Catching up

A review.

A related blog post.

An unrelated blog post.

Cheers.

On keeping a journal

I swear I’ve been writing, evidence to the contrary here notwithstanding. It’s just that I've been writing for school (and a bit for work), and that takes up its own kind of time. And I suppose I could have been posting some of my writing for school here, except that so much of it would sound out of context and, for many of you, boring as hell — a line-by-line analysis of summary vs. scene in Carver’s story “A Serious Talk”; a dissection of the point-of-view shifts in Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” — and so I have not. But the little paper I turned in the other week is probably more blog-appropriate, so I present it, with minor edits, below. (Context: Inspired by Janet Burroway’s journal-keeping advice in Writing Fiction, Chapter 1 — Whatever Works: The Writing Process.)

***
 
I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. My first attempt came when I was 7 years old. I know I was 7 without a doubt because of a treasure I found on my recent trip home to San Francisco. The day I arrived at my parents’ house, I went snooping around their attic and found a cardboard box that hadn’t been opened in 15 years. When I lifted its lid, it expelled a puff of dust. Inside were old drawings and writing assignments, penmanship tests, mini-essays from my first three years of elementary school. (The contents took up barely half the box, which meant gaps in the record: Why had my mother chosen to save these items, in particular, over others?) I found drawings of Garfield the cat that I’d made for my little brother, who went through a serious Garfield phase: Garfield bedsheets, Garfield lunchbox, Garfield stuffed animals and notepads and pencil cases. What phases had I gone through? A clue lay in this box as well: a tomato-red Hello Kitty diary, perhaps five inches long, four inches wide and one inch thick, held closed by a copper-colored clasp, the key to which still hung from the diary by a string.

I remember choosing this diary from the Sanrio store in Santa Rosa, Calif., at the big shopping mall where we used to buy all our school clothes. I wanted it badly — it was shiny, and it was red. I loved red, and I loved that it had a key, which in my 7-year-old imagination meant that anything put inside would be turned immediately into valuable treasure. I remember having to beg for it. My mother had looked at the price, then asked, “Will you really use it?” Yes! I said. I would write in it. Every day. I would tell it my secrets. I would feed it my dreams.

In truth, I had no idea what to write. I was 7 — any drama in my life was more likely to be processed through tears than through pages of angst-ridden prose. I remember opening my diary and, even then, hearing the voice of doubt in my head: You are 7 years old. Your life is mundane. Nothing exciting has happened to you — at least, nothing exciting enough to justify putting it here.

But fill the pages I did. The first dozen or so, in hot-pink ink. I seem to have reached instinctively for the Pillow Book method of journaling, first writing a list of “my favorite people,” and then writing short passages describing them. My social circle was rather small — “my favorite woman is my mama”; “my favorite man is my papa”; “my favorite brother [ed note: my only brother] is Jason”; “my favorite boy is ...” — but even in this spare list are found clues to the girl, then woman, I was to become. I liked my papa, I wrote, because “he brings us surprises, and sometimes those surprises are cookies!” I liked Jason because we “played stuffed animals.” I liked the boy because — well, because I was a boy-crazy little girl. I still use exclamation points when talking about cookies, I have loved my share of boys, I travel with a stuffed monkey. My favorite color is still red.

Flipping through it two weeks ago, I saw that the Hello Kitty diary was kept diligently for two weeks. Then (much to my dismay), the writing dropped off.

In the years since, I have bought with hard-earned money, and then barely used, an embarrassing number of attractive notebooks. I started a blog several years ago, hoping the pressure of an audience would spur me to write. I even blogged about acquiring a notebook, a Moleskine, and the novelty of writing longhand. That was in 2004:

The temptation of paper. … When I was in San Francisco this past weekend and in search of a journal, I was delighted to come upon a shelf of Moleskines. … Lined, squared, pocketed and blank pages. All in the telltale black leather with built-in ribbon bookmark and elastic band to keep the treasures inside safe and snug, just as Dervala [a blogger friend] had described. … I’ve rediscovered the satisfaction of putting pen — pen that leaves my fingers achy and inky — to paper, and creating something lasting and tangible. I’m so into it that I’m making a concerted effort to write legibly for once. This keyboard stuff has been death for my penmanship. But the Moleskine is bringing out the letter-artist in me. I’m having fun adding flourishes to my big, bold capital D’s and P’s, dotting my i’s just so — with real dots! Crossing my t’s singly or doubly, those sharp vertical lines begging for embellishment. This is w-r-i-t-i-n-g. This is my brain in print.

I filled one small Moleskine with words and pictures over the course of just a few months. But my journal-keeping, on paper and online, has lapsed again. I’ve bought other journals of different sizes and colors and redesigned my blog at least twice. Part of the problem is that life has gotten busier — although one might argue that this is exactly when one should begin journaling (the fuller life gets, the more there is to forget). Part of it is that I’m more wary these days about what I put online. But part of it has got to be a lack of discipline, too — that, or I possess some kind of anti-journaling gene, evident when I was 7 and persistent to this day. In this case, though, I’d rather take responsibility, chalk it up to writerly indolence. (I have to look at it that way, if there is to be any hope of my vanquishing bad habits.)

I left the Hello Kitty journal in the box in my parents’ attic, but I’m thinking that the next time I'm home, I ought to retrieve it and whisk it back to New York. I could finally fill the rest of its pages. Or perhaps it will become a talisman — something to place on my desk, to remind me of childhood, and lost time, and all the blank pages still to be filled.

Quote of the day 10.30

From "The Blind Assassin," by Margaret Atwood:

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

Virtuosity

In the two weeks I was in Europe I carried around one book: Rabbit Angstrom, the Everyman's Library edition of John Updike's great tetralogy. I'm currently in the middle of the third novel, and I'm trying to get through it as quickly as I can, before the fall school semester starts. But I had to interrupt my reading to share just one passage. There are many instances of virtuosity to be found throughout these books — which has made reading quickly even harder going, since so often I find myself wanting to go back and read again — but this may be the first sentence I read where I had to put the book down, step away from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that?

First, back up a tad: sentence. Now look below — this indented bit looks awfully long, does it not? In fact, it's more than 200 words long, long enough to require numerous breaths, and mental pauses, to absorb all that's happening and how it links up so seamlessly with what has come before, not only within this single sentence but within the past 843 pages. I'm not often a fan of never-ending sentences; so few authors can pull them off gracefully, and even when they do, the reader is often left wondering, All right, that was lovely, but — was it necessary? Here, though, at this major turning point in the characters' lives, it works. Updike wraps us in the moment and reminds us of the inside jokes and the many years of joy and pain and bitterness, and shows us the beauty and tragedy of the passage of time, just as his overwhelmed protagonist must have experienced it. (For those who haven’t read the Rabbit books, a little primer: Harry, aka Rabbit, is our antihero; Nellie is Nelson, his son, whom we first met when he was a toddler; and Mim, Harry's sister, we've also watched age through Rabbit's eyes, from 19-year-old ingénue to — well, you'll get the picture. Read it slowly:

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

Editing: Better than sex?

This Salon article by Gary Kamiya will provide answers to those of you who've said to me, "O.K., you're an editor -- but what is it that you do?"

It not only demystifies the process, but also makes a fine argument in favor of editing in the age of blogs. Enjoy.

So you think you can _____.

I am sitting, on a gray, rainy Sunday, in my neighborhood bar on the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue B. I’m in a booth in the back, in the darkest corner of the room. The glow from a fist-size lamp casts a meager light across my table. This booth has been witness to much boisterous drinking and blind swapping of spit on many a Saturday night, may very well have been the scene of just such amorous and savory activities mere hours before this, but it is empty now except for me. I have to my right, as I do on most Sundays, a stein of coffee dressed up with a shot of Bailey’s. And I have a deadline. So here I sit, sipping, thinking, staring into space, trying to figure out what to write.

But I don’t know what to write. And so instead, I read. And Haruki Murakami provides a sort of answer.

There’s a moment in Murakami’s After Dark when two characters, chatting over coffee and sandwiches in a diner, have what starts as a fairly pedestrian conversation about work and study. The female character, Mari, knows the male character, Takahashi, only through a couple of chance encounters. She knows that he plays the trombone. In a band. And so engaging in small talk, she asks if he plans to be a professional musician, to which he gives a baldly honest answer: “I could never make a living at it.”

“There’s a big difference,” he continues, “between playing well and playing creatively. I think I’m pretty good on my instrument. People say they like my playing, and I enjoy hearing that, but that’s as far as it goes.”

She then asks him what he means by “playing creatively.”

“Hmm, let’s see,” he says. “You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It’s giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.”

In the past weeks, months, years, I’ve had numerous people ask me why I don’t write more, whether I want to write, and if I do in fact have that impulse, why I don’t just sit down and get it done. But it’s not that easy.

Let’s begin by considering Takahashi and his trombone. I understand this Takahashi. What he says about music could apply to any art — to painting, to filmmaking, to dancing, to writing. These are interests at which many people play, whether the art presents a diversion or a more serious challenge. But eventually most of these people, like Takahashi, at some point simply stop, or at least put less stock in the pursuit, because they know they aren’t and never will be the ones for whom it produces “a kind of physical shift.”

Years ago, though, I was the anti-Takahashi: my art was dancing — specifically, ballet dancing — but I was not among the dabblers. I practiced because the dancing equaled nothing less than life. When art becomes life, when it is sent “deep enough into your heart,” it is something that changes you irrevocably. Even when you can no longer do it — if you’re a violinist with tendonitis in the elbow or a pianist with arthritis in the fingers or a dancer with fickle ankles — the tug of it does not relax. And so you are haunted by the feel of it, by the certainty that this is what you were meant to do. And once it is taken away, and you must figure out life anew, everything that comes afterward feels somehow not enough. Which raises the question: If the thing that comes next does not provoke that familiar physical shift, how can it possibly be worth taking up?

I don’t know yet if writing is enough — or if I’m enough for the writing. I have always had the technical capacity; “I’m pretty good on my instrument,” as Takahashi would say. But what of the magical moment — that “physical shift”? It’s a moment not unlike that mystical sensation of love at first sight, the one felt so deeply that its place within oneself is impossible to locate. It is not to be mistaken for the moment of lust at first sight — that electric connection sealed with heat behind the eyes and felt in the back of the head, and deep in the throat. Would-be artists struck with lust at first sight are those who in the end recognize that theirs is an intense though fleeting desire; and so when they walk away from it, like Takahashi, it is with the understanding that this infatuation was always destined to become but a fond memory.

But for those who have fallen in love with an art, walking away, or being forced away, creates an irreparable wound, not unlike that of the amputee haunted by phantom pain. The limb is gone, and the amputee, no matter the prosthetics applied, will never be what she once was: whole. The artist severed from her art may not suffer in the same physical sense, the pain may not be located in a specific place, but the ghostly ache is there and always will be.

This all may sound overly dramatic, and yet, the comparison is apt if one is to comprehend the difficulty with which the artist, having lost one art, can even begin to consider picking up and moving on to the next. The artist is haunted by pain. And so fear becomes part of the equation. A defense mechanism kicks in. For example: Take the person who has been separated from his lover, by force of animosity or simply by force. Imagine that the one gone away was the true love of this person’s life. That the departed love is the one who once inspired thoughts like “forever and ever,” and “for you, anything,” and “could not live without.” The pain at that love’s departure is greater than any pain the one left behind has experienced before. And the suffering takes years to dim. The one left behind cannot enter a certain park, because it contains the tree where the lovers once scrawled their initials into the bark. At a movie he cannot eat popcorn along with sour-sweet candy, because that combination was her favorite, and it now brings acid to his mouth. The one who has felt so deeply will be cautious about letting any person get that close to him again. And so it is for the artist whose first love has slipped away, and who must now choose whether to practice another in its place.

I have done it once already: put myself through it, ardently embraced it, clung to the art until I knew continuing to do so would mean the end of me. I danced through torn ligaments and shin splints and bruised ribs. I performed through bronchitis and asthma attacks, racked by coughing fits offstage while repeating over and over, “The show must go on.” I starved myself for the love of it until each of those bruised ribs could be counted by the people sitting in the front rows. I withered to 90 pounds, 85, 79, 78 … all the while still dancing. And then I put myself through worse than that, until it was clear: one day, it would kill me. And so I stopped. But unlike the lover who will not enter the park, I could not stay away. I kept going to the theater to be met by friends at the stage door, to get walked through the green room and the wings, through the orchestra to the back of the house, to take my place at the standing-room banister and watch my friends dance on. I cried every time. For two years. Practically on cue: as soon as the lights went down and the music began, and as soon as it entered my body and I felt that physical shift. The observer might ask why I went. Well. I couldn’t not be there. I didn’t know anything else.

Many years have passed since then, and over time, the intensity of the loss has diminished, though not the love. I can go to a show without crying. Sometimes. Distractions help — a distraction like a date who has never seen the ballet and is thus eager to be coached through it in whispers. But even then, I may sit in the dark and hear the overture and need to compose myself, to dig the thumbnail of one hand into my palm to divert the pain from the heart to the skin, before I can lean in to whisper, “Yes, I used to do that.”

But back to writing.

For the longest time I’ve made the excuse that writing is my Takahashi’s Trombone: it’s something I do pretty well, but which I could never do truly creatively. It could be that to tinker is my destiny, that this is something I ought to play at, but should never expect to really do. But is this honest? Or is it the mantra of one who has loved and lost, and is therefore afraid to try again? I cannot pretend to know. When it comes to writing, I find myself wondering about that “physical shift.” I have friends who’ve described writing much as I used to describe dancing: as a manic need, as something that has to be done in order to breathe. But that sort of compulsion has come only in fits and starts for me. Is it that writing simply doesn’t work that way? Or is it something that just takes more time? I would recognize it if it happened, I think — the physical shift — because I’ve had those moments before.

The first I remember: I was eight years old. My hair was curled into tight ringlets, and my face was coated in stage makeup, applied by some kindly woman who’d had me sit on a stool while she dabbed and powdered and painted, and brushed something rosy onto my lips. I wore pink tights and a mustard-colored dress with many layers of petticoats. I remember holding hands with the other ringleted ones waiting to go out on the stage, giggling softly, bursting to leave the wings. The moment had been preceded by weeks of rehearsals, each conducted with the utmost precision, hit this mark here, do this step in time to this music, smile, jump, tumble, run, stand up, bow, again from the top. But when I stepped into the lights, anything mechanical about the process vanished. There was a swirl of music and costumes and the sweet scent of baby powder (to ward off the sweat) and rosin and dust, and all sound except the music disappeared, and all conscious feeling left me except that physical shift, a shift I could feel within myself, as well as within the audience, and we achieved, as Murakami’s Takahashi would put it, that indescribable “shared state.” And that was it. Eight years old, and I knew what I would do for the rest of my life.

My mother would probably say that the moment came earlier. It was a moment she witnessed but which I cannot recall myself. I’d gone, at age five, to my first ballet class, as a favor to one of my little friend’s mothers. The friend’s name was Marnie, I think. She refused to go to ballet class without a friend by her side. And so her mother had asked my mother if I would go, and my mother said that was fine as long as she didn’t have to buy me anything special, like ballet slippers. “No, that’s all right,” Marnie’s mother told her. “She can just go in socks.” My mother dropped me off for the first class, which must have lasted all of half an hour, because that’s all you’re given when you’re five. I remember how slippery the floor felt under my socks. I remember running and jumping, and learning that “pas de chat” meant “step of the cat.” I remember the peace that came over me when I took “first position.” What I don’t remember is what happened immediately afterward, though my mother says she does. I came running out, as she likes to tell it, and said, “Can we come back tomorrow?” Marnie stayed for three classes, grew bored, and quit. I kept at it for thirteen years.

There were many subsequent shifts, of varying degrees, over that stretch of time, from the classes at age five, to the first performances of Nutcracker at age eight, to the first time I tied on pointe shoes at age ten. Dancing Clara, Sugar Plum Fairy, Cinderella. Performing at Stern Grove, the Palace of Fine Arts, the War Memorial Opera House, the Kennedy Center. The casting calls. The hours of rehearsals. The blisters. The pain. The getting it right. Perhaps these built each one upon the other into an endless series of layers — layers that, each time they are now peeled back, such as when I hear a particular strain of music from Cinderella or Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty, tear away like a piece of tape taking with it a scrap of skin, exposing the vulnerable parts underneath. It always stings. Whatever it is that shifted within me all those years ago, it has made me, for quite some time, loath to build on top of it again. I have tended to run rather than face it.

And that’s where I begin to wonder. Could it be that writing is not just another Takahashi’s Trombone? Could this be why the thought of it can thrill at one moment and bring waves of nausea at the next? Maybe that’s the truth in all this: that in the past I have chosen not to write not out of pragmatism, but out of (a not unreasonable) fear — fear of failing or, worse, fear of succeeding, or of coming close to success, only to fail again. Since I quit dancing, I have not allowed anything else I’ve done stick fast enough to sting. An observer might say that the thing that could stick and that should stick is write right in front of me. (And see? I read over that last sentence in the editing and found I had mistakenly typed “write.” Freudian slip?)

People say I should write — people who know me and people who don’t. Really? I say. “Yes!” they say. “We like your playing.” But perhaps now you’ll understand, having heard part of the back story: It’s not as simple as that.

Ed. Note: Parts of this post are slightly different from the original. This is a good thing — what happens when someone other than the insomniac does a close read.

Something to strive for

From my Garner's Usage Tip of the Day:

"A master of the art of transition begins and ends each paragraph so as to make it grow out of the last and into the next; he moves so easily and naturally that the reader follows without being aware of the steps he is taking."

Adams Sherman Hill, The Principles of Rhetoric 239 (rev. ed. 1896).

On being gratuitous

"Since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces that do not interest me, whatever I do reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel."
-- Joan Didion, Preface, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

I have felt for a long time now an inability to conjure prose, to piece it together in a way sufficient for others to lay eyes on. And yet there is the urge to write. This feeling that not to do so is somehow a corruption. Some knowledge deep in my belly that this is one of those things I am supposed to do, never mind the momentary lapses in personality, in confidence, in a willingness to face life. I love words. I love the way they make me feel when they rub up against each other just so. I have a desire to play back with them, to put them into juxtapositions from which, by some magic, a song may rise. I search for beauty in books, in journals and other clippings. And when these things are beautiful, I want to eat them, to squeeze out their pulpy juices, to feast upon them course by delicious course. I know the mechanics of writing, the right and the wrong, but I have never felt deserving enough of the words. A major handicap has been the firm belief that no matter what I say, no one will want to hear it. The things that interest me, no one will care to know. The world as seen through these eyes -- why? The world has been there, done that. But then I read that quote up there by Joan Didion, and I think, Yes. All right. That’s the attitude. I’m no Joan Didion, but I can spin a line or two. And so what if there’s a good deal of me in there. Maybe all that me won’t be such a bad thing. I have ideas, so many ideas, every day, walking to work, waiting for the subway, riding the subway, staring into my drink, waiting, hours, to fall asleep. And yet most of this has not led anywhere. Yet. I am hoping that this school business can help me finally escape the waiting room into which I have sequestered myself. For so long, I have felt inadequate to the task. But there comes a point when such feelings must be put away, tucked in beneath sheets and sweaters and closed into a dark box. Click of the lock. I see it now, within reach: the courage to toss the key.

In the mood for...

You know how I want to write? I want to write the way Wong Kar Wai makes movies. So far I've seen only two of his movies, but even if none of his other movies look like these two movies, that's O.K. These are enough. You might have seen them too? In the Mood for Love, and its quasi-sequel (as the reviewers called it), 2046.

I saw 2046 first. Last year. Sitting in my apartment, in the dark. It didn't all make sense, but no problem -- it was more about the mood than the content. All that mattered was that there were these extraordinary creatures moving, often slowly, across my screen. Or sometimes not even moving. No, they were often inclined to pause, to linger, to breathe as the camera breathed them in. They wanted each other, or they only thought they wanted each other when really they wanted something that the other couldn't provide, and all this wanting made me want to be with them. It made me want to join the cast, to be the shadow around the corner listening through the walls, to be the fly on the wall or perched atop the rim of a bowl of noodle soup.

I finally saw In the Mood for Love, the quasi-prequel, last night. It was a different movie, less surreal, slightly less unsettling, and yet just as powerfully emotional and heart-palpitatingly beautiful. Perhaps more so. Again, there were the gorgeous creatures, or at times just shots of their slippered feet or lissome arms or elbows peeking out of doors. There was sparse but strategic use of slow-mo. There were coincidences and missed opportunities too numerous to count. Fingers that brushed furtively against each other, and bodies that slid past each other in narrow, winding stairways. There was waiting in the rain. There was voyeuristic indulgence, peeks through keyholes and phone calls ripe for the eavesdropping. There were so many empty words spoken as the characters reached for things to say, anything as long as it wasn’t what they were actually feeling. There was much aching, and much longing, and again, I wanted to be there.

I can’t explain it, exactly. It’s just something about the filmmaker’s touch -- his ability to evoke intense flavor through a spectacular, otherworldly palette of colors, costumes and 60s mood lighting. In watching the film, you can sense it all, the moist steam dancing across a face, the pressure of skin on skin, the taste of sticky rice lingering on the tongue. The scenes are so vivid, and yet -- there’s something off. Time, in real life, doesn’t move this way. Or does it? Scenes are cut together, they run together, and as days go by, the only way the viewer can tell is that Maggie Cheung is wearing yet another phenomenal dress. But then, as Maggie or Tony Leung wait for the phone to ring, for a knock on the door, for a voice to answer, time slows to a crawl, and it’s pure agony. And maybe that’s the magic -- the earth moves as quickly or as slowly as our desires allow, and here Wong is, with his movies, to show us, and to let us all know that we’re not the only ones.