David Sedaris - "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls: Essays, Etc."

In the intro to this book, Sedaris explains what the "Etc." part of the subtitle means, which refers to the six monologues he wrote from other perspectives as a departure from his first-person essays. These etceteras typically expose the character for a bigoted, small- and/or close-minded, selfish, and foolish individual. These characters are quite disimilar from Sedaris himself, who although not without his readily admitted faults, fail to have a sense of objectivity about their own shortcomings.

We all know people like this and may sometimes recognize ourselves exhibiting these attributes from time to time. What makes Sedaris a generally adept writer is his ability to turn his faults into some sort of lesson or awakening, a cautionary tale, or at the very least, an interesting anecdote that keeps you turning pages and snickering, chuckling, and even, on occasion, laughing out loud.

Unfortunately in his essay about China, '#2 To Go' (originally titled 'Chicken Toenails, Anyone?') Sedaris comes across as one of these characters that he was originally making fun of; his view on the country comes off as ignorant as the comments of a Shanghaiist article. He admits never to liking the food, in Raleigh, in Chicago, in New York. So I won't fault him for hating the food in China (holding back from a "even though that opinion is wrong" comment...oh shit, there it goes!). But it's the way he talks about the people. How he compares them to the Japanese and how pure and virtuous they are, whereas the Chinese are just disgusting and weird and barbarous. And yet, he's the one who pissed in a children's sandbox at 35 years old and holed up in the women's room of an Amtrak after the bar closed to smoke pot and get wasted with a stranger.

Did You Like That Picture?

Did you like that picture? I sent it to you not to show off. I sent it to you to remind you of the god-damned man-made majestic beauty of our world. Of this perfectly primary-colored edge of our world, edge of our country. The perfect golden-red; the cocksure azure water, crisp as the air that breathes ocean mist onto my skin; the typical colored sand: because we no longer need to describe what color sand is (unless it's atypical), because I think about how much sharper writers of the past had to be with their words. But now, we all experience everything from the seats of our desks, and what we used to seek at the top of the world, we seek at the top of our laps. So: typical is what this sand remains. 

I remember being impressed by Kerouac for painting the entirety of America in one simple pamphlet-tome. Now I am the one, within a span of a few months, who has ventured from statues of freedom, arches of note, and finally this bridge, the summation of this country, the end and the beginning of this country, our country, our world. I've heard the blues in Memphis, I've heard the blues in Chicago, I've heard the blues in Austin. And I've seen the blues in all these cities and I see the blues before me: the sky, the waves, my shoes. And I hope this picture finds you back home to help you escape your blues. 

I am wearing a shirt that portrays a sketch of a sewer, a Chicago manhole cover. Our art is about the dirt, the filth, the overlooked, the dispirited, the dispossessed, the disposed, the disks that cover up our dirt, our filth, our waste. Our city works. Our workers make it work. Our civic pride is tied into the fabric of where we deposit our waste, our filth. We recognize the beauty of the sewer system and we're not ashamed to put our names on it. 

Albertine Sarrazin - 'L'Astragal'

Walking through City Lights in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I told myself: "don't over-do it." For one, new books require $$$. For two, I'd already purchased about a half dozen books at other bookstores and space was limited in my backpack. But being at the ground zero of Beat literature, I knew I had to purchase something here. My plan was to buy a book published by City Lights itself (which I did). But I didn't expect to find French writer Albertine Sarrazin's 1965 auto-biographical novel L'Astragal.

"The sky had lifted at least thirty feet." So the book begins, with our anti-heroine Anne escaping from prison, breaking her ankle (the astragal of the title) as she leaps from the prison wall. Sarrazin writes poetically. "The shock must have cracked the pavement" and she equates every passing second to that of a century in agony. The healing process lasts nearly the entire first half of the novel: "where the explosions in my toes are less frequent," and later: "my leg frozen into a painful rigidity."

Hopelessness and hope, fog, suffering, distrust, neglect. Waiting. Sleep that doesn't come. Restlessness and restiveness. Emerging themes and the ones that Patti Smith, who wrote the introduction for the 2013 edition of this translation, found so evocative to give her her own strength, boldness, and identity, wandering through the Greenwich Village in late 60s New York City. Smith's praise: "A female Genet? She is herself. She possesses a unique highbrow poet-detective deadpan style."

Coffee. Smoking. Drinking. Mascara. Anne's life on the lam. Our anti-heroine is almost glamorous. But she is still a criminal. Why are we so attracted to her? "When it comes to drinking, I'm always for it." She's troubled, this Anne, this Albertine (this Smith, this reader). We must remember: she's not to be idolized anyway. Not in the way most heroes are. But she can be in the way that the faults we see in her are the ones we see in ourselves. You don't have to smoke or drink or wear mascara to relate to her feelings about neglect, distrust, or hopelessness.

Literary Chicago - Jennifer Egan, 'Emerald City and Other Stories'

From 'Emerald City':

"So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he'd never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn't count)."

From 'The Watch Trick':

"They'd been hearing the story for years in various forms - from the Hawaiian tour guide Sonny fell in love with while gazing at the view from Kaala Peak, threatening to jump unless she agreed to come back to Chicago with him;"

"Sonny would squire them from one Chicago nightclub to the next, and each time they went inside she felt they were expected, that the party could really begin now that they had arrived."

From 'Puerto Vallarta:'

"While her father was in Australia, Ellen went with her friend Renata to Mama Santos, a Mexican restaurant in Glencoe. It was a train ride outside Chicago, but Renata's brother, Eric, was a bartender there and had promised to serve the alcohol."

"Her father explained that Ed had owned a company in Chicago that went bankrupt three years before. Now he was being sued by his former investors."

...For The Time Being

This phrase. "For the time being."

It's all over literature. I first noticed it from the book A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki a couple years ago. Ever since, I think I've come across this phrase in nearly every book I've read. I thought this was just a coincidence at first. But it's almost like the real version of Stranger Than Fiction's "little did he know." As Hoffman's character wrote papers and taught a class on "little did he know," so too will I conquest to create a tundra-like database of "for the time being." There's so much I've lost. But I might as well start now, if not never.

Martin Amis - The Information

"Her mother was still around for the time being, fat and falling apart and still mountainously pretty somehow, in a bed somewhere."

So. Much like my Literary Chicago project, I'm going to try to keep track of this phrase being used and how authors use it. Do they actually reference what their 'for the time being' foreshadows? Or is it a throw away? A red herring?

Speaking of that other project, this novel is ripe with Chicago references. For a taste:

"He reread:

To recap: The itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

Denver. Why Denver?"

Literary Chicago - Jesse Ball, 'The Way Through Doors'

(via Calumet 412)

"Her fame grew. Her drawings sat upon walls of the Metropolitan Museum, of the MoMA, of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern, the Musee d'Orsay, the National Gallery, the Museo Nactional del Prado, the Smithsonian."

Considering Mr. Ball teaches at this school, this feels a bit obligatory. But for a surreal tale that keeps settings and timelines and much else vague, it's nice to see this little bit thrown in here with such a prestigious crew. 

And on the different topic of coincidences: I recently read the short story 'Lush' by Bradford Morrow in the 2003 O Henry Prize Stories collection. The story is about an alcoholic couple. The woman in the couple is named Margaret. The man, James, nicknames her Margot, after one of their favorite reds, Chateau Margaux. At a restaurant in The Way Through Doors, two characters drink a bottle of wine from Chez Margot in a Tunisian restaurant. I read 'Lush' on the way to San Francisco last week, and bought Ball's novel at Alley Cat Books in the Mission. An interesting coincidence, I couldn't help but notice.

Now to find a bottle of the stuff for myself. 

STL : MEM : ATX

This is a few weeks overdue, but I (semi-)recently took a road trip from Chicago to Austin with my girlfriend. Along the way, we made a few stops, of various lengths, in various cities, for various reasons.

I didn't want to write a series of posts about how great Austin is or the freedom of being on the road and away from work. You already know these things. Austin is just as great as everyone says it is. I'd love to go back. At the same time, it's not quite correct to say this was a vacation. I had too much on my mind to call it a vacation. The trip was thought-provoking in ways I did and did not expect.

At nearly 17 hours of driving, it'd be damn near impossible, and unnecessarily exhausting to reach Austin from Chicago in a day. We decided to rent a room in Memphis, TN for a night; folks in Memphis seemed used to the fact that many visitors were "just passing through." Along the way we stopped in Springfield, IL for gas, coffee, and to take a selfie in front of the Capitol building; we stopped in St. Louis, MO, for a more important reason.

We stopped in St. Louis, MO because I wanted to go to a bookstore. 

On Writing, On Fiction

Here are a couple quotes I saw recently about writing and what makes fiction work.

The first is from Lauren Groff, the editor of the most recent edition of Ploughshares (which I wrote a bit about here already). She rehashes the age-old idea of the lonely, pain-filled writer, with a bit of twist in her words.

"Writers are perennially lonely, and a writer's longing to connect is what fills her work with urgency." 

Key words: longing, connect, urgency. Of course, the other side of the debate, and one I struggle with, is how much importance do I place on making a "connection?" Isn't it more about just getting the story out there that I believe needs to be told, and to express myself in the artful medium I chose (or chose me if you want to get all whimsical about it)? You can read more about Groff and her writing process on Ploughshares ("She writes early drafts by hand, on legal pads. Once she has a complete draft of a novel, she throws the pages away, and begins again, writing the new draft (again by hand) from memory.").

Literary Chicago: Ploughshares Summer 2015

Ploughshares, the collection of fiction and poetry put out three times a year by Emerson College (of which Denis Leary is a council member of the non-profit publication), was capaciously endowed with scenes from a Literary Chicago. Four stories mentioned this city, and at least three of the authors in the collection have called Chicago home at one point or another (Osama Alomar, Jesse Ball, Rebecca Makkai, and Alex Shakar). One story mentioning Chicago in a collection isn't particularly noticeable, but seeing the name of this city in four out of eighteen stories called for some attention, even if just a coincidence. Here's how a few contemporary writers fictionalized Chicago:

"That fall, she was starting graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago. "Chicago," I said later that night, after our date. We were in bed; we'd just had sex. "You know, I've been a Cubs fan since I could stand on first base.""

"Later, we joked that the only reason I came to Chicago was because she needed someone to carry her paintings."

- Kevin A Gonzalez, Palau

"My racial color code as established by the Chicago Bank of Life is white...When I am donating to the Chicago Bank of Life, I do not think of her." 

- Fiona Maazel, Dad's Just a Number

Rachel Kushner - 'Telex From Cuba'

First thing I've read by Kushner. It was highly acclaimed in 2008 when it was released and a finalist for the National Book Award. Naturally, I was skeptical, but every bit of praise for this book is well deserved. The story follows multiple characters in Cuba leading up to the revolution of 1959 which found the US backed Batista overthrown by Fidel Castro. The book reveals tensions between the Cubans that worked in the sugar cane fields run by US expats...sorry, US *immigrants*. Much of the perspectives are through the children of these wealthy families, often having fled the US for various legal reasons, or have lived a life in limbo throughout various Latin and Central American countries.

Kushner's writing fulfills all of the senses. Not a scene passes without her describing the various smells and sounds of the country and its people, about the myriad colors that lend themselves to the landscape. There are lyrical flourishes on every page, such as "the wind gusted like a personality" or "it was an afternoon of time outside of time."

But these subtle flourishes don't allow themselves to dominate the story either. Each character, whether the naive children, drunk housewives, a cabaret dancer, Cuban militants, or a secretive French agitator, are fully formed with reflective, philosophical thoughts bubbling throughout the narrative. Of course, some characters are more receptive to these philosophical inquiries than others that would rather deny the painful truths, and the impending revolution about to take place.