My Housemate

(After J. David Stevens's "The Death of the Short Story," originally published in North American Review, collected in both Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories and Stevens's Mexico Is Missing, the latter of which appears to be available in its entirety on the Ohio State University Web site.)

The night I first met the short story it had just been beaten up pretty badly by a couple of these aggro publishing kids. You know the type: they had their own lit mag, they had distro and a blog, they had a tire iron and a bone to pick. What is it with these Young Turks, always needing to take a brick to the skull of one genre or another? A generation ago they nearly killed the short story and the chivalric romance in one fell swoop in a bar brawl up in Oregon somewhere. This time around, the kids tried a sucker punch, invited the story to a release party for some new anthology they'd put together, at a swank restaurant down on the Bowery, they said—except there was no anthology, no party, no restaurant, and that's where I found it, bleeding adverbs all over my stoop.

No, the short story is not dead; it is alive, and well, and shacked up in my living room, actually, in a kind of mother-in-law apartment situation I've set up for it. It's constantly hearing reports of its death, though, has been hearing them for forever—or at least since around the time Collier's closed up shop—which, in spite of how often it's been jumped, kicked, pummeled, and stomped, it finds perpetually surprising.

"Like Mark Twain reading his own obit," says the story.

"Word to that," I say.

Almost more troubling than the reports, past tense, of its recent death, are the predictions of its imminent demise. The story gets this horribly anxious look. I tell it not to worry. It's okay. These are just death prognostications, I say—it's not like they're death threats! That thought usually just makes the story feel worse—what's the difference between a prophecy and a fatwah, when you're at the receiving end?—but it always pulls itself together quickly. That's not naïve optimism, that's just science, just the nature of a ruthlessly efficient little body with a spine of infinite possibility running through it.

Is it dead? No. Unwell? Hardly! But is it feeling a little apathetic, a little resigned, about all the diagnoses and prognoses it gets, the perennial baseball bats to its plots? The story shrugs.

"I meet a lot of people," it says.

And it's true. Some of these meetings are as long as the frequent one-night stands the story has. Or weekend-long benders. (I don't even bother asking for it to call me to let me know it's not coming home; I know now how resilient the story is; whether it's off fighting a distant war, or holed up in some hotel with a hooker, a bottle, and a copy of Stephen King's On Writing, I know it'll be back soon.) Sometimes people only meet the story for as long as it takes for it to buy a pack of cigarettes at a deli. Or hold up a bank. Or sprout wings and fly out through the emergency roof exit of the crosstown bus. Or have a quiet epiphany—in the living room, at the county fair, over dinner—about its drunken father and the meaning of life. So many drunk, absent fathers the story has! A million damaged childhoods! So many sad mothers who had to abandon it in the dark of night on the doorstep of their local creative writing program!

And so many quiet epiphanies! It's fun, all these crises, all these realizations; although I have to admit it gets a little exhausting, emotionally speaking, just from crying so much. We both cry a lot.

And yes, sometimes I get confused, living with the short story; sometimes it seems like it's trying to prove something to me, or like it's reverting to some very juvenile stage, where it wants to be smarter and more difficult than it is, where it wants to obfuscate all meaning, all sense. Where it wants to be cool.

Like last night. We were hanging out, having a mellow evening, watching some television. The story always likes to watch these great half-hour dramas you get these days—they're its grandchildren, after all. It's very fond. The story got this funny look.

"I worked for Kristin," it said.

"What?" I said. "Who's Kristin?"

The look got even funnier, like it wanted me to understand what it was talking about, but couldn't, or wouldn't, explain it directly. The story looked the way it often does, like its compact little self was bursting at the seams with meaning.

"Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious," it said.

"Do I know Jeff?" I asked. "Do I know these people?"

The story shut up again.

"Are these people you know from a workshop?" I said.

It waved at me, as if to say, forget it, I'm done with explaining what I'm on about for now. Then it pointed at the television. Check it out, I think is what it was telling me. This is good stuff. There was an hour-long dramatic series coming on—one of these shows with multiple, interwoven plotlines playing out over the years, bloated and baggy, but beautiful, impossible not to watch.

Then the doorbell rang.

"That'll be the novel," said the story. "It doesn't have cable."

Who am I to say no? These old genres have enough problems.

I went to get the door.

"Men and Women in Space" : Notes on a Reading by Don Delillo

We are waiting for Don Delillo to appear.

As usual for events of this sort, there are multiple introductions. Someone from the 92^nd St Y introduces the writer, Dana Spiota, whose job it is to introduce Delillo himself. The earnest reverence in Spiota's speech is both familiar and embarrassing. She praises his books as "the secret antidote to the depressing consumerist hum we all live with," but it's unclear whether she's suggesting that they stop the hum of consumerism or merely cure us of our depression, and, in either case, the claim sounds false. It might be true if you took out the word, "antidote." And what does she mean by "that particular American longing"? Is that an American quality? Is longing - longing itself, not the object of that longing – specific to a culture? No one asks these questions. There will be a time later for "select" questions, but the questions will be reserved for Delillo. In the ritual of the high literary reading, the introductions are only symbolic gestures; each is an incantation to transport the reader from the profane world at large into the sacred space of literature. The more introductions, one supposes, the deeper we go into the world of the book and the less we actually listen to the meta-language of praise.

The applause begins when she says his name.

Don Delillo is bigger in person, leggier, than what one expects. He's almost athletic as he walks to the podium. In his green buttoned-down shirt and brown pants, the author looks like a middle-aged man who has dressed himself. Maybe his wife tried to stop him – doesn't that look too earthy? – or maybe she's given up on trying to change his mind.

"There's a novel, and there is a reading," he says into the microphone. We are quiet. The audience has been awed by his books into a silence some of us believe is holy.

You think of the opening to Underworld: "He speaks in your voice American and there's a …" but he doesn't speak in your voice. His actual voice is not the voice that you heard in your head – why should it have been, when even your own voice doesn't match that sound? Don Delillo speaks in the voice of an old woman who's been smoking for so long that the years of ash and fumes have ravaged her vocal chords to something mannish, but underneath the velvet and gravel, there remains a fundamental womanliness. At times, you wonder if he has a lisp; there's a cottony thickness around some of his consonants, the word "troop" seems to have more letters, an extra 'h.' You hear it again in the end of the first chapter, which sounds stickier than when you read it by yourself: "Call or fold. Felt or baize."

He sniffles.

There is a novel, and there is a reading. The sentence sounds odd; it would be easier to hear if he'd used plurals. He tells the audience that he has reordered the novel for the reading, choosing two characters, Keith and Lianne, and following their stories chronologically, alternating back and forth.

It's surprising to hear people laughing. You never laugh reading his work. Nothing escapes that dire tone or your awareness of his work as the performance of a writer.

He pauses to drink. The microphone picks up and amplifies the fleshy, gurgling sound of a man swallowing. Smacking his lips. The way he might say "Pafko at the Wall."

He says "police" instead of "priest." He is the high priest of American letters, but he looks like the guy sitting across from you on the subway. He shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet as he fields questions from the moderator, questions written by the people in the audience on blank, white index cards that had been tucked into their pamphlets.

In response to one question, he says that he was not happy about the idea of including a terrorist in the novel. He says, "I felt I had to. I felt it would not be a fully responsible novel if I did not include a terrorist." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by the novel's responsibility, except to say that he had to try to understand the individual inside the structure, the individual "bonding with a group of more or less like-minded men…this blood connection that becomes more important than politics or religion finally." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by "finally."

When the moderator, that same boyish, bearded man from the 92^nd St Y who gave the first introduction, asks him a question about architecture, Delillo says that he thinks that his novels are more three-dimensional than others' are. It's hard to know how to take this, except in a literal sense as a joke, and he isn't joking. "I don't tend to feel as comfortable," he says, "with abstract thoughts as I am with men and women in space." This answer catches some people by surprise because it goes against the mainstream criticism of Delillo as a brilliant, heady writer more interested in cerebral dialogue and aphorism than in the way real people interact with real objects in the real world. A friend turns to you and arches his eyebrow. Of course, what makes Delillo feel comfortable is not necessarily what ends up in his books, and what ends up in his books rarely makes us feel comfortable. His books do not stop "the depressing … hum" of the present, but they make the white noise seem meaningful, and that is all the comfort we can hope for.

The moderator, who has been sitting all this time at the edge of the stage in a little chair at a respectful remove from the "talent," thanks the author, and the crowd claps. Some stand in ovation, others gather their things to reach the book signing line first or to catch a cab home. Delillo disappears to the sound of applause, and the holy temple of literature falls apart, but those who leave believe they bear with them its sacred aura like a stone from the ruins.

"Help Me Get Home"

I sat in Washington Square reading Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, and thinking about the aura of genuineness created by all of those raw, rambling monologues, some of them purposefully inarticulate, others insane or visionary. The book wasn’t what I’d expected from all of the praise – from Susan Sontag, from John Banville, Francisco Goldman, Francine Prose, Der Spiegel, Les Inrockuptibles – it was something wilder, more varied, duller, looser, and funnier. I couldn’t read the book without thinking of what had been written about it, in part, because the book designers at FSG had put out an ugly yellow-and-black hornet of a book, striped with scribbled bands of praise, and, in part, because of the mystifying nature of that praise, in particular the puzzling, almost koan-esque blurb from Ignacio Echevarria that ran in El Pais, in which he heralded the book as “the novel Borges would have written.” You could sit on a mountain for twenty years drinking dew from the moss of your cave and meditate on that mantra; it might lead you to satori; it might leave you insane. Either way, it probably wouldn’t help your writing.

While I was reading, turning from that maddening dust jacket back to the chapter at hand, a blonde-haired boy sat down on the bench across from me, took out his guitar, and laid out a mat that said, “HELP ME GET HOME.” He was wearing a sleeveless concert t-shirt, a pair of blue scrubs, and a straw cowboy hat. He was barefoot.

I read while he sang a song about everything that was wrong in the world. Politicians lied. The military dropped bombs. People had to work too hard in miserable, unrewarding jobs. It wasn’t a very good song, and he wasn’t a very good singer. The chorus was something about waiting for love to set him free.

When he was done singing, no one clapped. In the relative silence of that small part of the park, you could tell that he had been expecting applause. In its absence, he struck up a conversation with a young girl reading, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. She was bored with Lawrence. He was in his gap year. Living on the streets in New York was easy, he said, if you didn’t mind sleeping on a little mat. The girl was impressed with his performance if not his singing. She closed her book. “It’s like camping, but everyone pays for your food and clothes,” he added. There was bravado in the way he smiled then. I looked back again at his bare feet. Love was not going to set him free, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that if he was dedicated enough to his art or to his own artful image of himself, the singing barefoot poet, that one day, when he was good and ravaged, he might write an ode to the stupid heroic self-destructive self-proclaiming sensual poetic bravado of his youth, a sprawling, nostalgic “Non, je ne regrette rien” epilogue to an old manifesto, which someone in their tearful exuberance might call “the novel that Borges would have written.”

Found Short Stories, Volume 3

(Found in an essay entitled "Political Commitment in the Past Two Decades of Swedish Poetry" written by Gunnar Harding and published in the "Art and Guns" issue of Poetry East)

A boy ran up to me
I ran up to my father
Your son is burning, I said
My son came up to me and said: I'm burning
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My father went up to me and said:
can't you see that the boy is burning?
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My son ran up to me and said:
a boy ran up to me and said:
I ran up to my father and said:
can't you see that your boy is burning?
My son is my father, a boy who is running
I no longer see anyone, I said: it's burning
We've got to put it out: you and I are disappearing

(translated by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will from the Swedish original, "Napalm," written by Bjorn Harkannsson)

Coincidence in the Novel

From William Logan's wild ride on the tails of Pynchon's Against the Day in the VQR:

The Novel as Juggernaut

A long novel is as difficult to shift from its course as an ocean liner; and Pynchon is no novice captain of the stout tug Coincidence, the favorite of every clumsy novelist since Thomas Hardy, if not long before. (The line of coincidence starts with Oedipus Rex—Shakespeare, Defoe, Charlotte Brontë, and many another have kept it alive.) Novels are famously more conservative in their social physics than in their propriety; random acts offend the reader’s expectation of a moral fate and undermine the Whig view of history on which much modern fiction is based. Novels that embrace the Mode of Perennial Accident—sometimes generated, like the productions of Oulipo, by chance method—often comment upon fiction in a meta-novelistic way. These are gestures of an art fatally uneasy with its means.

The Novel vs. The Short Story #1

A good portion of Elif Batuman's inflammatory essay in N+1 on the death of the short story seems unfounded, but this paragraph seems worth consideration:

Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, “I looked for x, and didn’t find it,” or, “I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.” A novel says, “I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.” The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself. The novel is a fundamentally ironic form; hence its power of self-regeneration. The short story is a fundamentally unironic form, and for this reason I think it is doomed.

In the Beginning #1:

From a Review by Richard Gehr of James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand :

This is how Don DeLillo's epic Underworld opens: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."

And this is the way The Cold Six Thousand, the second volume of what James Ellroy has called his "underworld U.S.A." series begins: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee."

Note the contrast.

Published in the Village Voice.

So You Want to Be a Writer

So this early Christian sect, the Syphileans, after life on the outskirts of the late Roman Empire had become completely unbearable, and they simply had to get out, the Syphileans wandered east—not unlike, they thought, the old Israelites in the desert—ending up, many years later, on a small island off the coast of India, a place where life was really, really miserable, in some ways even more miserable than it had been for them back when they'd been living under the thumb of Rome. The irony in all this was that, back in the old country, the Syphileans had been the strictest of any of the early Christians when it came to their religious laws; they stuck to the Bible's injunctions more rigorously than just about anybody. Remember, in that area at that time—I mean, the basic promised-land region—it was full of all sorts of different groups along the Jews-and-Jesus spectrum, who were all asking things like What do we do with this dead Jewish prophet guy? and What do we do now that there's no Temple? And they all had different answers, naturally; but the Syphileans were hard-core, so much so that when British anthropologists discovered the Syphileans a hundred years ago—having missed out on, you know, the Council of Nicea, Luther and his Theses, the Spanish Inquisition, whatnot—they were almost unrecognizable as Christians. They were like some old, beautiful, Middle Eastern fly, or flies, caught and preserved in amber. And one of the ways in which they were stuck in time was how throughly they were still sticking to all the laws about how to punish people who'd messed up. The trouble, though, was that the one copy of the Pentateuch that they'd been able to smuggle out of the old country with them had gotten sopping wet on the trip out to their new island home, and had partly rotted away in places, had completely fallen apart in others, and had had to get gently patched back together, with a little bit of educated guessing going into the patching, such that—and this was partly what was so confusing to the anthropologists—they still had all these strict laws, and they adhered to them strictly, but they'd gotten garbled up a bit. Did a man who sold doves for a living lie with his brother's wife after her monthly seclusion, but before she'd taken her ritual bath? Then they had to stone him to death. Did an angry woman drive her uncle's cattle to market and sell them for an unfair price to the priests? Then they had to mock her in the town square for three days, and then stone her to death. Did a man with a red or green boil on his skin forget to wash his clothes for a week before going to battle? Again—and, to be fair, this was how things usually played out in the original, pre-remix version, too—stoning. The great difficulty for the Syphileans was that, on this tiny little island in the Indian Ocean, there weren't any stones. And they couldn't find any adequate substitute either, like, say, coconuts, or a nice winter squash. Their island was all soft sand and dirt, and the trees were all rubbery, and the fruits and vegetables were all sort of pulpy, like ripe tomatoes. So what were they supposed to do? The priests all met to discuss the problem; after a while, they decided that, following the principle of an eye for an tooth, a tooth for an eye—some parts had just gotten slightly off—their god would accept a punishment that, even if it wasn't quite what was being asked for, was almost exactly as unpleasant. And they still had a knife they'd managed to bring along with them, and so when someone screwed up—carried burning food across running water, fondled his uncle on the Sabbath, and so on—after a brief trial, one of their judges would take the offender, cut open his stomach with the knife, and then gently slip into the incision one or two of the island's tiny, toothy, and highly irritable mongooses. Then the guy would get chased down the beach, around the outside of the island, by his family members—parents, ideally, if they were still around, but if not, siblings or children were okay, too—until, after this miserable, horrendous combination of the worst physical torture, and public humilation, and this high-school gym-class discomfort of exercise on top of all that, he died.

So you see what I mean? That is what writing should feel like. Otherwise, what the hell are you doing? Masturbating with a self-help book? Getting busy with a typewriter? That might be fun for a while with an old manual, like a classic Underwood or something, but definitely not an electric, no, because eventually, you come to the automatic carriage return, and then you'll know for sure you're not writing, because then, zip goes the platen, and, well, you're fucked.

The Diets of the Novelists (A Roman/Pompeston Collaboration)

We writers are all familiar, from our days of rote memorization back when we were apprentices just starting out in MFA programs, with the list of those legendary novelists who would, and did, consume everything under the sun. The canon of the gourmands starts with Rabelais and moves on down to Cervantes, L'Abbé Prévost, and, not the least among them, Defoe. Who can forget how our writing instructors drilled these giants into our minds? Who doesn't remember their names on the chalkboards, their images raised up before us as icons, beacons of how we, too, should grow up to write everything and eat everything, our words spilling off the page like our fatty soups, our bellies gorgeously bursting the confines of our pants?

For writers, we are taught, excess is second nature. We devour the whole enchilada; we disgorge the kitchen sink; we admire most those novelists who set the bar of superabundance high. But in our private moments, we worry: Can any of us novices ever really be Dos Passos, eating everything and vomiting it all back out again on the page? Why bother aspiring to models like Melville, when it is now not just inadvisable but actually illegal to eat whaling ships in their entirety, from the hard tack to the sea anchor to the first mate to the mizzen? We throw up our hands; we cry out: We will never be Bellow!—consuming great platters spilling over with feasts of blood and offal, fabulously obese widows and skinny young shop girls, juice-soaked copies of The Forward and the Declaration of Independence—and so we hide in our basements, jotting down self-loathing haiku in pencil, weeping softly, nibbling on leftover matzo.

But the truth! The truth liberates. And time reveals all. So many of the models our writing programs hold up for us—these spectacular, all-devouring gods of the world of letters—were, in reality, we discover much later, considerably more human than the myths that have been built up around them. Young writers all know that Joyce's hunger was legendary—but are any of them ever taught that his taste was limited, quite literally, to the scatological? Tanizaki liked vast, seven-course meals prepared for him by gangs of prostitutes, it's true; but as scholars have recently discovered, he only ate the appetizers. Alas, if only more young writers knew that, although Kerouac indeed did swallow all the road kill he could find from New York to San Francisco, he didn't chew, more of them might still be around to tell the tale! Balzac claimed that he ate, drank, smoked, slept with dozens of women, and wrote—all at once—for sixteen hours a day, but almost all of his ninety-seven novels, as recent biographies have pointed out, were outsourced to Bulgarian temp agencies. Are any young writers ever taught that Hemingway, in all his many adventures around the world, only ever ate dry toast? And Dickens—magnificent Dickens!—ate anything he could find lying about in the streets of London, or abandoned in the gutters, or stuck to the insides of his chamber pot—but only if it was thinly spread on a sliced-open half of a muffin.

And what of the less omnivorous novelists? The picky eaters, the allergics in the attic, the vegetarians squirreled away in their garrets? These careers—the lives and diets that do not humble us into inaction—are even less well known. If only our writing programs would make mention of, say, the life of Fielding, who ate a reasonable three square meals a day, or Sterne, whose only dietary sin was a minor addiction to mercury! Then there's Diderot, who abused nothing but oyster shells, or Rousseau, who occasionally ate small parts of himself. Writing teachers! Don't you see that we are all of us particular in our sins, each of us unique in word, deed, and food? Thomas Wolfe smoked banana peels, had a thing for French girls wearing paper bags on their heads, and never did like the taste of anise seed; Wallace Stegner loved turned milk, smoked Gauloises from the age of six, and all his life insisted that his mother cut the edges off his sandwiches. Steinbeck was a lifelong virgin who bit the heads off ducks; Iris Murdoch painted Communist slogans on the flanks of cows as they slept in their fields; Conrad couldn't get enough of his beloved Mexican-jumping-bean-and-French-fry stew. Willa Cather led a double life as a born-again traveling icebox saleswoman with four husbands in three states and a fondness for opium; Flaubert started each day with whiskey on his corn flakes; Edith Wharton repeatedly contracted bad cases of the clap from shared bottles of near beer.

We could go on—we might mention the secret dinner parties thrown by James, Proust, Mann, and Woolf, where the four greats ate and drank nothing but air; or the cookie recipes swapped back and forth between Nabokov and O'Connor, their ingredient lists limited to ground chickpeas, sand, and the shorn wings of insects. But we'll stop here. Perhaps knowing the truth could give you some comfort; perhaps these examples could offer the young writer shoes that his or her human feet might actually fit? Perhaps this realistic glimpse of mortal, restrained, dietetic lives might provide some of you with solace—as it has done for us.

Dire Warnings #5

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all of our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. All things swim and glitter.

Emerson, "Experience."

Exempli Gratia (A Blogger Labels, Google Maps, and Mac Stickies Improvisation)

It was fall, and I was on vacation in Kansas City, riding my scooters around town. I own more than one scooter, and when I go on vacation I like to bring them all. Comparing the relative merits of different conveyances in new places is one of life's great pleasures.

As I buzzed about, I searched my electronic map for a good place to get pizza. The town was new to me; how was I supposed to know where to find a decent pie? Perhaps I could have asked one of the many locals I kept wheeling past, but I prefer computers—the anonymity of a screen, the honesty of cold data—to actual human interaction. This is my way. I like to think that it's the way of the future.

I hadn't had an acceptable slice since my last vacation, when I was in San Francisco, staying in a hotel down on Market Street. There's a fantastic pizzeria there—at 10 Market St., specifically, if you ever happen to be in town, and the place still exists, whenever it might be that you read this. Isn't that one of the funny things about writing, that it can outlive its subject? Just ask any of those Greek and Roman guys, or other historians from other empires that no longer exist that you learned about once, either in school or on the Internet.

Anyway, all I wanted to do was find a business, some business that sold pizza to its customers, but this was proving somewhat difficult as I whizzed up and down the narrow roads and twisting alleys of the fine Midwestern city in which I found myself on this particular vacation, even more difficult than the proverbially onerous task of finding a good hotel near LAX—which is, really, the needle in the haystack of the online generation. I know one—I mean, I know a really, really excellent place to stay near the Los Angeles airport—but I don't hand out free advice to just anyone; I like to play my cards close to the vest.

My trouble in Kansas City was, in part, logistical. I had to keep one hand on the scooter's handlebars, hold in my other hand the digital map device on which I was performing my search, and, on top of all that, keep the widget in my ear from falling out, the widget connected to the telephone I was using to call Lou. Lou is my friend with the answers. He also happens to have the most unmemorable telephone number ever: 555-7361. It's a number I always have to jot down, no matter what. Lou is my answer guy, when the non-human networks fail me. He's the guy I call when I need to connect the dots—like, say, when I want to understand why Seattle and ZIP code 98109 are not perfectly coterminous, and how exactly to get from one to another—if it's even possible to get directions from some place to a place inside it—or when I need to figure out what JFK was doing at 350 5th Ave. in New York City the day before he was assassinated. That sort of thing.

Lou, I said on my portable telephone, what does a modern, digital, scooter-driving fellow like myself need to do to get some repectable pizza on his fall vacation in Kansas City?

You need ingredients—e.g., eggs, maybe milk, Lou said.

And then? I asked.

And then you need to figure it out from there, said Lou. That's as far as I can take you. Or as far as I want to take you, he said.

Eggs and milk, I said. Very helpful examples! You're a good friend, Lou, I said, in so many ways; e.g., your always dependable advice.

No problem, said Lou. Anytime. You know the number.

Eggs, milk—good stuff, I said. I'll write myself a note.

Dire Warnings #4:

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because in whatever way we define the concept of civilization it is a certain fact that all things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ch 2, (p 38 in the 1989 WW Norton Edition, translated by James Strachey)

Dire Warnings #3:

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Journals, May 24, 1847, written on the eve of Emerson's forty-forth birthday. According to the footnote (Vol XVII, p.277) Emerson considered it one of his best sentences, but had no memory of writing it.

Dire Warnings #2

For External Use Only.

Dire Warnings #1

From The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

It's as though I was going steadily downhill when I imagined I was going up.

A Smart Man, A Good Book

In the grand reading room of the public library, writers and researchers sit beside less experienced students of the English language. Yesterday, in a moment of frustration I found myself reading over the shoulder of the Korean girl beside me. It was a beginner’s English text book, the kind designed to give an unstuffy introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary. “Look!” it announced:

A PEN ....................... A BLUE PEN
A MAN ........................ A SMART MAN
A BOOK ....................... A GOOD BOOK

I was using a black pen, but I wanted very badly for everything else to be true. Only at that moment it didn’t seem to be a very book that I was writing – and had been writing for years now – it seemed like a mediocre book that I was incapable of finishing. Maybe if I were a smart man, I thought. A smart man could write a good book.
Further down the page, there was an even darker omen:

Do you have a bad teacher?
A stupid teacher?
A bad book?
A big apartment?

For once, I took comfort in the fact that I do not have a big apartment. Maybe there was still hope.

The Art of Survival #4: Worker's Comp

Another entry in the art of survival, this one drawn an old email from a old friend, who is now a businessman:

I had dinner with Aline last night, and she said, “writers don’t die of strokes.” This fine observation came from her real life experience of seeing her boss collapse in the middle of a meeting, and probably in the middle of a sentence earlier that day.

Pathology of the writer: suicide, nervous breakdown, alcohol-related diseases, venereal diseases, boredom, bad luck, TB, dictatorship, drugs.

Pathology of the businessman: stroke, murder, plane crash, drunkenness, exotic holidays, dodgy partners, failure of the heart, failure.

At least there is some choice.

S

The Art of Survival #3: How'd They Do It?

« Comment les roses de la littérature peuvent-elles naître sur le fumier de l'alcoolisme ? »

Thanks to a coincidence of the Dewey Decimal System and the university library’s idiosyncratic purchasing department, the volumes of Writers at Work published by The Paris Review were placed on the shelf next to a book called,Les Ecrivains et L’Alcool, a book which, according to its author, Michel Convin, began as an attempt to answer the question: comment font-ils pour continuer d’écrire en buvant autant? It’s a question for the ages, and one that the interviewers from the Paris Review failed to ask when they had the chance. Convin does not exhaust the mystery of how so many great writers were able to continue writing so well while drinking so much, and he doesn’t take himself that seriously (His epigraph comes from Blondin: “He had officially quit drinking, allowing himself only a few vermouths under a pseudonym.”). Convin is best, however, when he sounds serious, such as when he informs his idle readers, that “Chez Bukowski, le vomissement n’est pas un motif moral.”

The Art of Survival #2

The Department of the Army Field Manual FM 21-76 - which "describes and clearly illustrates a vast array of topics and teaches you how to... make polluted water potable... construct a solar water still... capture amphibians and reptiles... make an Ojibwa bird snare... clean a snake... signal to aircraft with your body... AND MUCH MORE!" - provides this warning to the solitary writer:

Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook...

To overcome the first danger - the desire for comfort - you need to change the way you think of comfort. And the key to changing is reasoning: You compare your present discomfort with the discomfort you will face if captured. Your present discomfort is a temporary problem; as a prisoner your discomfort would probably continue indefinitely and be more intense. Knowing how much discomfort you can take and understanding your demand for comfort will help you carry on. Comfort is not essential!

To overcome the second danger - the passive outlook - you should know what can bring it on.

Some physical conditions contribute to the passive outlook. They include exhaustion due to prolonged exposure to cold, excessive loss of boy fluids (dehydration), excessive fatigue, weakness, and illness. You can avoid these conditions by proper planning and sound decisions.

Lack of will to keep trying can also result in a passive outlook. Lethargy, mental numbness, and indifference creep in slowly, but they can suddenly take over and leave you helpless.

Recognizing the onset of a passive outlook in a companion is important. The first signs are an air of resignation, quietness, lack of communication, loss of appetite, and withdrawal from the group. The best way to deal with such an outlook is to stop or counter the physical and mental stresses that produce it.

Following are the enemies of survival... pain, cold, heat, thirst, hunger, fatigue, boredom, loneliness.

You can increase your self-sufficiency - your ability to function competently on your own - with practice. You have opportunities to do so each day of your life: Make your own decisions and rely on yourself; explore new situations and solve problems. You must learn to accept the reality of a new situation or of an emergency and then take suitable action. This is one of the most important psychological requirements for survival. Do not sit down and worry. Stay busy!

The Art of Survival #1

When Kapuscinski was still alive, Rushdie asked him how he had survived being condemned to death so many times.

"I make myself unimportant," Kapuscinski said. "I make myself seem unworthy of the assassin's bullet."