What’s your excuse for not writing today?

Christopher Hitchens, in the January issue of Vanity Fair:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Sit down at your desk. And get to it.

David Foster Wallace, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for syllabi

In Slate, Katie Roiphe directs her attention to a minor item in the David Foster Wallace archive at UT Austin: the syllabus from an English 102 class Wallace taught.

It is, as you would suspect, glorious.

An excerpt, for those with weak vision from reading too many books:

So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student’s in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

Of e-books, birthday gifts, and brown trout

In 47 days, the literary-nerd equivalent of Halley’s Comet will arrive: a new novel from Jeffrey Eugenides. He publishes about once a decade, so after this, we’ll probably next hear from him in the middle of the second Cory Booker administration.

I’ll have to snap up The Marriage Plot, then. Bits of it have already dribbled out, most recently in the New Yorker, but I’ve been waiting for it since the mid-90s, when I first met one of the three central characters in “Air Mail,” a story Eugenides placed in the Yale Review. (You can read the opening pages via the site for a terrific little anthology, The Beach Book.) It was a lodestar for me as an apprentice writer: “This is a story; this is what you want to do.”

But I don’t know if I’ll buy it as an e-book, even though it’s a great candidate–at 400+ pages, unwieldy for carting around on public transportation, and likely to cost $15 more for hardcover than as a download. Yes, if I go with the Google Edition, I can steer a few dollars to Changing Hands instead of Apple or Amazon. But if I do that, and it turns out to be a book I really love, I won’t actually be able to treat it like a book I love: no dog-eared pages, no scribbles in the margin, and no passing it along to a friend when I’m done.

That last element that’s lost with the e-book is what interests me most. For as solitary an activity as reading is, there’s that paradoxical capacity of a great book to matter deeply in a relationship. (I’m of course saying nothing new here; look no further than the opening lines of The Marriage Plot for a more elegant tribute to the emotional power of books.) And they matter most when you physically give them to another person. I remember the first novel Anne shared with me and the first book I gave to her. On a shelf in our living room is a signed copy of Gloomy Gus that I was looking at the other day; My parents gave it to me for Christmas in 1982, a few weeks after Walt Morey had visited my elementary school.

These days, a birthday gift that’s a coupon to the iBooks store? Nice, and not something I’d turn down, but a little… chilly. A hardbound copy of Why I Came West, beat up and wrapped in newspaper and masking tape? You have my heart.

•

One morning after my dad died last summer, I was upstairs at my parents’ house, in the room that doubles as their office and guest bedroom. Above the desk, my dad had mounted some bookshelves on the wall, I think four shelves, reaching almost to the ceiling. They were crammed full, and held all sorts of things–a few dozen issues of educational journals to which my dad subscribed, a bunch of children’s and adolescent literature, a box of old 3.5-inch floppy disks, a polished piece of a geode, made into a book-end.

On the second shelf up were ten or fifteen books of poetry, and I looked them over, pulled some down, and put a few in my backpack to bring home. They’re on a shelf in our bedroom now, and over the last year I’ve taken them down from time to time to read, sometimes when I’m missing my dad or turning over in my head some question about him, sometimes when I’m just looking for a change of pace. Sharon Olds and Pablo Neruda and Wendell Berry are good for that.

I took one other book, one that I need to return. It was A River Runs Through It, which, much as I love the writers of the West, I had never gotten around to reading. (There are an embarrassing number of holes like that one in my reading history. And each year, probably 200 new books are published that would be well worth my time. Ah, Sisyphus…)

It’s a delightful short book–three stories, the longest being the title novella. It’s rough–Maclean writes much more like what you would expect from a ranger for the Forest Service than does Aldo Leopold–but rough in an enjoyable, often surprising way; there are turns of phrase you would never have chosen yourself that turn out to be poetry.

I don’t know how far my dad read into the book. He was an amateur fly fisherman, and “A River Runs Through It,” that first story, is the one in the book about fishing. What I saw was that every few pages throughout it, my dad had made marks in the margins. He hadn’t written any words, just drawn faint lines with a pencil beside sentences that resonated to him for some reason. The notes stopped on the last page; maybe he was drawn away from the book, maybe the two stories that followed didn’t hold any attraction for him.

Even with such bare-bones marginalia, though, my dad’s notes colored my reading of “A River Runs Through It.” It felt, simply, like we were reading it together, which was wonderful. I watched his attention drawn to brief passages about the art of fishing:

Every different kind of trout is on a different speedometer, and the correct timing will vary also with the stream and even the weather and time of day.

And passages about family:

My father always felt shy when compelled to praise one of his family, and his family always felt shy when he praised them. My father said, “You are a fine fisherman.”

My brother said, “I’m pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish.”

And passages of pure fun:

“Izaak Walton,” he told us when my brother was thirteen or fourteen, “is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.”

And passages of pure glory, like those famous final two paragraphs:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Maclean’s acknowledgments are placed at the beginning of the book, and the very first sentences my dad marked were on the first page of the acknowledgements:

For one thing, writing makes everything bigger and longer; all those stories are much longer than is needed to achieve one of the primary ends of telling children stories–namely, that of putting children to sleep. However, the stories do give evidence of retaining another of those purposes–that of letting children know what kind of people their parents are or think they are or hope they are.

Later, my dad had noted the spot where Maclean precisely nailed my dad’s philosophy of life:

Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart–I don’t know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

Each time in the last fourteen months that I have learned something more about who my dad was and what his convictions and longings were–and that education has happened in a variety of ways–I’ve been flooded with gratitude. Obviously, when someone dies, the surprises can be terrible ones; what we learn after the fact can be devastating. But my dad was deeper, better than I knew.

I have to return the book to my mom, though. Or at the very least, I need to ask her if she would like it back. On the inside of the front cover I found the only words my dad wrote in the book:

from Pat
birthday 1999

That was twelve years ago today.

The First Day

Our daughter started kindergarten Monday. A big, wonderful moment; that’s probably all I need to say for now.

The occasion gave me reason, not that I ever need much, to re-read that breathtaking six-page story by Edward P. Jones, “The First Day,” from Lost in the City.

I’d happily quote the entire thing, but doing so might give you reason not to immediately go out and find the book. And I don’t want to stand in your way. You need Lost in the City on your nightstand. Tonight.

So instead of the entire story, here is the final paragraph. Oh, what a writer!

We go into the hall, where my mother kneels down to me. Her lips are quivering. “I’ll be back to pick you up at twelve o’clock. I don’t want you to go nowhere. You just wait right here. And listen to every word she say.” I touch her lips and press them together. It is an old, old game between us. She puts my hand down at my side, which is not part of the game. She stands and looks a second at the teacher, then she turns and walks away. I see where she has darned one of her socks the night before. Her shoes make loud sounds in the hall. She passes through the doors and I can still hear the loud sounds of her shoes. And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.

Don’t mess with Sherman

On June 4, Meghan Cox Gurdon took on graphic young-adult literature in the Journal:

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.

She doesn’t exactly say we should take a match to our S.E. Hinton stash, just that publishers shouldn’t touch it, librarians shouldn’t put it on the shelves, and parents should keep it out of their kids’ hands.

It took Sherman Alexie, attacked by Gurdon for the content of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, until yesterday to respond.

Here’s an excerpt:

Almost every day, my mailbox is filled with handwritten letters from students–teens and pre-teens–who have read my YA book and loved it. I have yet to receive a letter from a child somehow debilitated by the domestic violence, drug abuse, racism, poverty, sexuality, and murder contained in my book. To the contrary, kids as young as ten have sent me autobiographical letters written in crayon, complete with drawings inspired by my book, that are just as dark, terrifying, and redemptive as anything I’ve ever read.

And:

I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

There’s more. Go read it. Then I’ll let you supply the joke about what happened to George Custer out there east of Billings, Montana.

Katherine Larson in the Kenyon Review

In the March Kenyon Review, two of the poems from my friend Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Go read them now, then buy the book. Indiebound will help you find it.

Photo of the day: Sorry, we’re closed

That’s the late Jane Kenyon’s study, from an album of snapshots by the lovely, searing Jane Hirshfield. She took it on a 2006 visit to the home of Kenyon and Donald Hall.

I don’t think Hirshfield meant for these pictures to be public, but Google will be Google, and at least until she updates her privacy settings, my accidental discovery is yours to wander through. If propriety doesn’t keep you away, there’s also a funny little album of geniuses (Merwin, Ondaatje, etc.) eating quiche and drinking wine out of plastic cups. And another of Kay Ryan on a hike.

A good life, the writing life.

Chekhov, psychological inconsistency, and point of view

A couple of times a year, I re-read “The Lady with the Dog.” I like to be dazzled.

Whenever I sit down with the story, something different captures my attention. This last time, what I was trying to understand in the days after I read it was how Chekhov crafts Gurov’s psychological inconsistency–and balances the entire story on that inconsistency.

The achievement is rooted in the assured, intimate, but disinterested voice that launches the story. There’s the disembodied opening line–”It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front…” And then on the second page, there’s this devastating line about Gurov’s relationship with his wife:

[H]e secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home.

Is there anything more we need to know about this unappealing character? We suspect from the definitive tone that Gurov is doomed, that his cowardice and his cruelty will ruin him and whoever he encounters. Here’s one of his early reactions to Anna:

Gurov felt bored already, listening to her. He was irritated by the naive tone, by this remorse, so unexpected and inopportune; but for the tears in her eyes, he might have thought she was jesting or playing a part.

And now Chekhov has us where he wants us, believing that we know who we’re reading about. Gurov’s encounter with Anna in Yalta ends, he returns to Moscow, and… the Gurov our absolutely reliable narrator has introduced is upended. His detachment collapses, his fault-finding is overwhelmed, and he falls in love.

Something Chekhov understands, which so few writers do, is that to write a story with characters who are consistent is to write a story that isn’t true. We never know who we’re reading about–not completely. Human beings are endlessly self-contradictory and incoherent–brave and wise in one moment and utter fools in the next.

Something else Chekhov understands is that in selecting a point of view, the writer circumscribes what the reader can know about characters, and what the story can be about. Give narration of “The Lady with the Dog” to Gurov, and we don’t have the same Gurov, nor the same Anna; we don’t have “The Lady with the Dog” anymore. If he writes the same story from a thousand different points of view, he has a thousand different stories.

—

A tangent–

Back before Christmas, we reached out to some of the people who knew my father, and asked if they might want to share recollections about his life. We used a web service that pulls such projects together called 1000 Memories. A couple hundred photos, about forty stories, a few songs and videos–I think the site for my father came out well.

What I didn’t expect to discover, but should have, given my propensity to ramble on about point of view, is how much I didn’t know about my dad. We never know who we know–not completely. In the stories that family and friends posted, he was recognizable–easily so–but he was different. So today I know my dad better than on the day he died. For which I’m grateful and regretful at once. Yes, a portrait of psychological inconsistency.

Below, two of the little pieces I wrote for the site:

Peace March

Before we moved to Prescott, Arizona, our family lived in a little town in southern Oregon named Ashland. It was about as idyllic as it gets–a ski mountain just outside of town, a salmon river nearby, Lithia Park (a gorgeous expanse designed by the person who did Golden Gate Park) a world-renowned Shakespeare festival that operated year-round, a ban on the transport within the town limits of materials used in the nuclear industry. Why did we ever leave? That’s a different story. This story is one of those that couldn’t be shared at a memorial service, but it illustrates a side of my dad I want to be remembered.

Once a month in Ashland, my parents took all three of us kids on a march. It started at the city library, and ended at “The Plaza”–what was essentially the base and entrance of Lithia Park. The Plaza was, if memory serves, a rather small, oblong bit of land, bounded by a couple of roads that curled around, and at one end, the main street through town–called Main Street, I think. There was a gazebo, a patch of grass, and several drinking fountains guaranteed to surprise the tourists–they spouted Lithia Water, the foul-tasting mineral water for which the park was named.

The marchers, maybe fifty or sixty of us, were not an unusual bunch for Ashland: a few hippies, and a bunch of others who were what my dad called “hippie sympathizers”–professors and churchgoers and leaders of the teacher’s union, many with their kids in tow. We walked down the hill from the library toting signs, and one big banner in the front, and when we got to the Plaza, we had a period of silence. It was probably about ten minutes, but felt like a decade. We kids tried to escape and play tag on the grass by the gazebo, and occasionally we had enough self-control to do so silently, a feat for which we were rewarded by not receiving a cease-and-desist stare from our parents. That was the Peace March.

Almost all of the Peace Marches blend together in my mind, and that makes sense. It was a long time ago, they always lasted longer than my attention span, and almost always, they were… peaceful. But it doesn’t matter that my memory of them has a lot of holes; they made enough of an impression that I grew up knowing, “We are a family that went to the Peace March when we lived in Ashland.” That knowledge was a little bit of bedrock for me in high school, enabling me to feel excited (and probably a little self-righteous) going to a couple of the marches protesting the start of the Gulf War. That knowledge was a spur in grad school, when Anne and I went to several of the marches protesting the start of the Iraq War. Whatever they might or might not have accomplished in the southern Oregon public-policy arena, the Peace March made an at least occasional peace marcher out of me. So I think it worked.

I remember one Peace March individually. Really, I only remember the end of it. We were done with the walk from the library to the Plaza, we were done playing tag, and we were done with the ten minutes of silence. I have a recollection that there was a bell, or perhaps a small gong, to signal that time was up. The bell had been rung, and our family, peaceful and/or tired from running around, was ready to head home. We would have to walk back to the library to get to our car, and that meant passing by the Sweet Shoppe, which meant that maybe we were going to get an ice-cream cone. Mine was always bubble-gum–it was the only time I got to have anything other than Trident sugar-free. The end of the Peace March was really exciting.

We probably had only taken a step off the curb to cross from the Plaza to the sidewalk that led up to the library. A car came whipping around the end of Plaza and roared past our family. Ashland was a little town, this was a little street, and my sisters were little. It really upset my dad. “Slow down, asshole!” he shouted.

I know it had to have embarrassed my mom, but it thrilled me. Profanity was one thing–and exciting. But profanity in front of my sisters, and directed at strangers, and at the Peace March, right after the ten minutes of silence–it was one of the best things ever. The moment is crystal-clear, twenty-five years later.

Part of what people love about my dad is how committed he was to building a more just world. His habits of simplicity, his conscious, personal stewardship of the planet, his willingness to take public stands, his unwillingness to let arguments end without some step forward in mutual understanding… that was a lot of his life, and it made a real difference. He taught people, he inspired people, sometimes he annoyed people, but I guarantee there was nobody who ever knew him who doubted his commitment to making peace. He was a walking, talking, 61-year-long Peace March.

I love that about my dad, too. I love it more and more deeply the longer I’m without him, and there are days when I feel miserably guilty for the times I didn’t recognize how rare in this world such a person is.

But just as much, I love that part of my dad that he showed on that evening we stepped off the curb and almost got squished by a teenager in a hot rod. I love that my dad defended us. I love that he wasn’t afraid to do so. I love that he lost his temper. I love that right after the ten minutes of silence, at the end of a march for peace, he bellowed, “Slow down, asshole!” with all the fury a father protecting his family ought to have.

The Weight

I don’t usually like it when the symbolic imagery in a story is completely straightforward, but now and then, real life lines up that way. I probably shouldn’t stay mum just because the metaphor is easy to grasp. So here’s a vignette from our family’s first hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

The first time our family hiked the Canyon was in the first year we lived in Arizona. (Or maybe it was the second year. I really should have kept a journal like my dad suggested; things wouldn’t be so cloudy now in recollection.) In our first year in Arizona, I was a seventh grader, Clare was a fourth grader, and Esther was a second grader. I guess the draw of the Canyon was strong for my parents. A nine-mile hike straight down? Sure–the eight-year-old can handle it.

Straight down sounds easy, but it turns out, it’s not. Four or five miles down the South Kaibab Trail, your legs are shaking with every step. The muscle stress from keeping yourself at a walking pace can be much tougher than climbing out of the Canyon a step at a time. My sisters and I dealt with this by running down each straightaway, something that in retrospect seems frighteningly reckless, given the dropoffs at almost every switchback. My parents’ self-discipline in letting us discover the world without too much intervention was amazing.

Near the bottom of the Canyon, with about 500 feet of rapid descent to go before we reached the Colorado River bridge, that stress of going downhill got to be too much for my mom. She had been having knee pain for a while from the weight she was carrying, and now it was getting really bad–so bad that she had to stop and shed her pack. She didn’t think she could put it back on.

So, for the last mile and a half of the hike in to Bright Angel Campground, my dad carried her pack as well as his own. He had his on his back, and held hers in front of him, hugging it to his chest. We kids ran ahead. Slowly, one switchback at a time, my mom and dad completed the hike together.

That was the first of at least a couple dozen Canyon hikes our family undertook (more of them without me than with me, I’m sorry to say). And that hike was a precursor to the long summertime hikes my parents took along the Pacific Crest Trail after we kids were grown and out of the house. My mom and dad both trained for all the rest of the hikes, enough so that only rarely did their joints get in the way of walking. As far as I know, my dad never again had to take up what my mom was carrying.

Not literally, anyway.

I was still reading lots of comic books in seventh grade, and my dad carrying his and my mom’s pack down the trail during that Canyon trip made him seem like a superhero to me. What strength he had! Many times over the three and a half years that my dad was on his journey with melanoma, I would think of that image, and think about my dad’s strength, that tremendous strength flowing from his tremendous love for my mom and for all of us. And I would think about my mom’s strength, that tremendous strength flowing from her tremendous love for my dad and for all of us. Through a terrible, terrible nightmare, she carried his burdens like a superhero.

In the months and then years after my dad’s diagnosis, in my mind I promised, over and over again, that I would be strong, that I would help my parents and my sisters and the rest of our family carry the weight. Once, in the first year after metastasis, my dad talked with me out in his garage about his worry that my mom would need a lot of help if he didn’t beat his cancer. I promised I would be there to help. And at his hospital bedside, a few days before he died, trying to assure him that it was okay to let go, that we would be all right, I promised again that I would take care of my mom. I’m trying to do that, although I think all the time that I ought to be doing more.

In response to which, I suspect, my dad, if he were here, would warn me against trying to be perfect, remind me of how strong my mom is, and tell me to

Love, love without ceasing, for that gives us the strength to bear each other’s loads.

It’s an overused aphorism, I know, but maybe, like some blatant metaphors, it still deserves to be given voice.

Against Owl Criticism

If Charlie Baxter started publishing a new essay on writing each week, every bus stop, bordello, and board room would be overrun with terrific writers in a year’s time. Here’s his AWP talk, reprinted in Fiction Writers Review.

Bausch & Bass

Richard Bausch and Rick Bass were two of my teachers–the former at Mason, the latter as the first still-living literary model I set my sights on as a 20 year-old. As of this morning, they’re both finalists for the LA Times Book Prize. (Yes, of course) Franzen’s nominated, too.