John Cage: The Excitements of Boredom

I love John Cage for his appreciation of boredom, if not his indulgence in it. Every artist must reckon with the lulls of life in his or her work, but most inject a variety of entertainments into a storyline, smoothing any bit of necessary banality with candy droppings of mindless flow, the promise of action rising. Ta da! Not Cage.

Once, before giving a lecture at Harvard (and a Cage lecture was never just a lecture, but a metaphysical performance), he unapologetically told the audience they were likely to be bored, but that they should view it as an opportunity.

He composed music with such disregard for audience expectations as well, and in so doing became the musical father of everything from punk to techno to minimalism.

In this age of twitches—people reaching for phones to check status updates, tweets, and emails—our lives are quite filled, yet somehow tend to be unfulfilled. Cage would say we need to listen to the emptiness instead of trying to fill it.

I just finished John Cage’s biography, Begin Again, so I’ve been pondering his definitions of sounds and silence and harmony and disharmony, his wonderful embrace of contradictions.

It’s rare that an artist’s work requires the retraining of one’s way of experiencing art itself, but Cage’s compositions not only jarred the public’s sensibilities in his time (the greater part of the 20th century), but still present a challenging dare decades later.

Cage cherished dissonance and happenstance, dramatizing the sounds that fill our lives in all of their random fecundity. His music was a philosophical statement, a confrontation, rather than a frolic or a diversion.

In his most famous piece, 4’33,’’ a pianist walks on stage to play a piece, sits erectly at the piano, adjusts the sheet music, and pauses for four minutes and 33 seconds. In that intense silence—which isn’t truly silence—sound is transformed. Each inhale and exhale, each mysterious scritch and scratch or stray car horn, becomes part of the musical experience. Expectations are flipped as we explore an absence that is also a presence. Mysteries abound.

By focusing on disruptions rather than the connective tissue of a narrative, he obviates the crescendos and diminuendos of music, and his work actually becomes an odd meditation on those spaces of narrative—traditional harmony—not present.

“I didn’t want the mind to be able to analyze rhythmic patterns,” Cage said of one piece. A patterned universe is one with promises of cohesion, a plan, after all.

Instead of the “intention” that drives most artists, Cage created by “non-intention,” relying on the chance guidance found in the I Ching to guide compositions and performances. At one performance, he even handed out programs with different descriptions so that everyone would view the performance through a different lens.

Dissonance held the most interesting beauty to him. With his famous “prepared pianos,” he twisted objects into piano strings so that each note would be a surprise, and the composition would never sound the same twice. To hell with tuning.

Although he conceded in the end that it was impossible not to have harmony, he defined his harmony as “anarchic harmony.”

“One could say that all sounds make love to one another, or at least they accept one another, in any combination,” Cage said.

All we do is music, in other words, but each sound plays off another in a continuing disjointed abeyance, irresolvable, yet beckoning and wondrous. “I want people to be mystified by what’s happening. The reality of our life is mystery,” he said.

I think that deep sense of mystery is what is most important for any artist to honor and revere. Forget the formula, the expectations that can too easily makes work palatable—and suffocate it as a result. In the end, an artist’s dare is what matters.

Some might view Cage’s work as subversive for the sake of subversion, nothing but the high-jinks of a confirmed Dadaist, but Cage religiously and methodically wove a fragmentary, relativist aesthetic with roots in Einstein’s declaration that “there are no fixed points in space.” Cage’s music truly spoke to a plurality of centers, which resonated with him primarily as a Buddhist notion.

Because of such a vast and ever-expanding notion of existence, Cage delved into the question every artist should reckon with: What does it mean to be a person of beginnings? Too many artists find comfort in their endings as they constantly riff on the same theme, which gets so boring to their audience if not themselves. (I heard Carrie Brownstein, formerly of Slater Kinney, say in an interview that the band knew what their next album would sound like before they made it, which is why they broke up—good show).

“I try over and over to begin all over again,” said Cage.

An artist needs no other mantra. Because all of life is finding wonder in the void. Each time I get annoyed by a car’s honking, I’ll now think of how Cage might smile at it, even find it playful.

The Ways Poetry Can Improve Your Prose

A few years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat.

Most writers are all too familiar with this feeling after a red-eyed reading of a draft. I needed a way to literally jar my narrative sensibility. I needed jazz, punk rock, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, something.

Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

I started reading poetry avidly and discovered that by focusing on the exquisite “slant” poetry offers, the “truth” I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.

So, in honor of National Poetry Month and Poem In Your Pocket Day, here are my 10 reasons prose writers should read—and hopefully write—poetry.

Mood: Many poems are almost incantations or prayers in the way they use techniques such as repetition and alliteration to establish atmosphere. Of the fiction writers who best use such techniques, I think most immediately of William Faulkner (who started out as a poet, and no, there’s no relation).

Mystery: In general, poetry is more focused on nuance, on the elusive gaps of life rather than on the objective connections that much prose is dedicated to. It’s easy for a prose writer to write toward linkages instead of writing toward the interludes where a different kind of tension resides.

Personification: Poetry gives life to inanimate objects in a way that fiction all too often doesn’t. Animating objects is a good exercise for any writer, but I think the applications for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism are endless.

Detail: Poets delight in specificity—in fact, you might say some poems’ narrative tension is formed around the drama of minutiae, forcing the reader to parse phrases as if reading with a microscope. As a writer who lacks Nabokov’s or Updike’s obsession with detail, poetry helps me pause and notice.

Sensory engagement: Poems are so often awash in sensory details, and details captured by all five senses, not just sight, which so many writers (including me!) can privilege. I cherish a good dose of synesthesia.

Brevity: Poetry is a craft of compression. Poems don’t have many pages to make a point, so their narratives tend to move through fragments rather than exposition. I love reading Kay Ryan’s miniatures or Basho’s haikus. Brevity inspires suspense.

Intensity: I think poems usually hit higher pitches than most prose, so fiction writers can benefit by studying how such intensity is created. I think of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath. What words, line breaks, rhythms, etc., produced a poem’s steeped moment? How can such intensity be captured in prose?

Exploration: I’ve never heard of a poet who uses an outline. I imagine poets to be more like jazz musicians, who wend their way through riffs to create, taking risks in their word choice and line breaks, and conceiving in the moment (like many Wrimos!). Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara write as if following their pen on a playful romp.

The art of play: Poetry, especially free verse, can be more playful than prose, which finds itself hemmed in by paragraphs and sentence structure. If you want outright surreal wackiness—to the point that every word in a poem surprises—check out Dean Young’s Elegy on a Toy Piano (the title tells it all).

Attention to language: It’s a cliché to say that poets paint with words, but they do. Poets strive to write against cliché—scrutinizing and challenging each word—and perhaps even creating new words, a la E. E. Cummings.

Tebowing: A Found Poem

Sometimes you don't know where a poem is going to come from. A poem can be such a mystical matter, after all. The poem below, a "found poem" that uses the text of several different news articles, holds its own mystical matter (if only because it is about the other worldly Tim Tebow), but it was actually written on a lark, an assignment/challenge from the esteemed Times editor Katherine Schulten based on a poetry prompt at the New York Learning Network blog.

I have to say, however, there is something mystical about putting together a found poem. You're using others' words, and it can feel like an act of criminal plagiarism, yet other forces guide you. Perhaps that's the lesson I take away from this: Poetry is an engagement in a life that's sometimes not yours, an immersion in others' language and thoughts, and no matter the poem or the subject, it can open up mysteries to ponder.

Here's the poem:

Tebowing

What does it mean to be Tebowed?
To meet defeat by God’s grace on a clunk of an arm?

Somewhere within all our reptilian hearts
lurks an instinct for trial-by-combat

Tebow flounders, and it looks like the Living Water Bible Church
out on Route 17 is wrong about pretty much everything

Did a receiver drop a pass?
James Dobson just choked on a nacho.

Did Tim throw an interception?
Daniel Dennett just chest-bumped Richard Dawkins.

Tebow's ability to complete a 15-yard out pattern to Matt Willis
is a referendum on the Book of Deuteronomy

It means something for the blue knight to kill the green knight
only if God is moving the swords.

“Whatever gets more people over to the cross,” Tim says.
One nation under God.

You never know when you're in your fourth quarter,
when you're in your two-minute drill

Tebowing
Tebowing

A View Askew: Hotel Amerika

The Fall 2011 issue of Hotel Amerika starts with a dare. A teenage boy (or is it a girl?) slicks back his hair in a pose reminiscent of a 1950s rebel without a cause who is about to step into a fast car to find someone to rumble with, a dangerous love to wink at.

But upon closer look, one sees a camera sneaking from the darkness behind him, breaking the frame of naturalism as if to remind us that even gritty reality can be part of a carefully coiffed drama. We’re all actors, posing in some way, splitting ourselves as we create.

I’m always hooked by a good dare.

When I interviewed editor David Lazar for The Review Review, he mentioned the journal’s predilection for the aesthetic of a flaneur, so I decided to mirror that in my reading—meandering haphazardly, popping into pieces based on nothing more than the titles, the names of authors (all unknown to me), the superficial appearance of the text.

I started at the end, wondering if the last piece in a journal is placed there because it's the worst, the runt of the litter.

Au contraire. In this case, the last piece was one of my favorites. The excerpt of the late John Parker's Night Song Da Nang is categorized as an essay, but it reads more like fiction or a long prose poem. The story delivers an inter-textual, dreamy version of Marguerite Duras's The Lover combined with "Apocalypse Now" and "The Deer Hunter", juxtaposing a disjointed narrative from the steamy war zones of Vietnam with letters to “Ma Cherie”:

“Sorry for the period of incommunicado. I will clear this gulch of vermin and return to you by pony express. Skip the dime store cowboys for now and this mauvais quart d’heure will pass quicker than a comet. I have so many designs on your finely chiseled features. Don’t be cross with me. We’ll be thick as thieves after I count your coup. Book our room for hour honeymoon at Niagra Falls. Curfews have been clamped on the villages but they break them like Kewpie dolls. I long for some of your chic. Elvis is the King of Saigon.”

How could a story of love and war be anything but stitched-together shards, stray phrases, ripped pages—a startling collage of yearning and suffering?

Hotel Amerika structures itself for such driftings and juxtapositions. One of my favorite sections was Aphorisms—a section I've never seen in a literary magazine, but one that should become standard in more. I loved pondering Stephen Carter's “Human relationships might develop in very different ways if we substituted a gentle touch on the cheek for a strenuous handshake.” Or, consider John Klein’s twist on a well-hewn critique of capitalism: “Erudition is a conspicuous consumption of time.”

Such aphorisms invite new angles of reflection at the same time they smack of a certain triviality. Klein comments on the form quite appropriately with another aphorism:  “What stops an aphorism from becoming a philosophy is the next aphorism.” But, as an author who goes by the moniker “The Covert Comic” posits, “Once you're caught in the mousetrap, why not eat the cheese?”

Such a sense of playfulness mixed with a sense of the absurd laced through several pieces. One of my favorites was a prose poem by Sarah Blackman, “The 5 Strong Brothers” (which could have been included in Hotel Amerika's "TransGenre" section—a section that begs to be read in order to define what TransGenre is—yet in reading transgenre pieces, you can’t help but question the definition of genres in general).

“The 5 Strong Brothers” reads like a fairytale that explores a family's bonds—at once sweet, at once nightmarish. A mother takes her shears and cuts stray parts off of her sons—the tough skin of their elbows, the lobes of their ears—to fashion a daughter, who begins the story no bigger than a thumb. She narrates the tale with a loving tone, however, if only because she’s the baby of the family who looks up to her brothers, despite being a scarred creature whose mouth “could neither eat nor be silent.”

Blackman writes, “As an adult, I have been told I'm hard to love, but my brother kept me always at his hip like a luck note, a lone fricative sound. How would I describe my family now? We've all learned to look past the parts of us that are missing. Our mother was possessed with strange passions. She was taken by the smallest things. Half of the brown eggshell or a child's pearl tooth rolling anyhow—like a kernel of corn, like a beetle—over the door sill and into the yard.”

The poem, like a fairytale, creates a simple metaphor—that we’re all fashioned from missing parts, that we’re all creatures intrinsically lacking wholeness. The poem is at once a celebration of the glorious imperfections of life as the brothers take such loving care of their sister, and yet it's sad because in the end life tends to be about dispersals that don’t include reunions. Everyone goes their own way despite sharing parts of each other.

In my interview with Lazar, he offered the following advice for writers interested in submitting to Hotel Amerika: “I would not submit the kind of autobiographically narrative poems that you might be likely to see in a dozen other literary magazines. Something has to be different. I would not submit a piece of memoir unless it’s performing something so interesting, doing something with its language or form that it’s going to stop me in my tracks. We tend toward a more urban sensibility. Favor self-reflection. Flaneurs welcome.”

I found that advice to be generally enacted in the journal—most pieces challenged language and form in some way, and almost everything required a second reading, and a thoughtful one at that. For example, in Peter LaSalle’s story, “A Short Manual of Mirrors,” the story lists 19 instructions of how to approach a mirror, but the reflection only begets another reflection. “And while Borges is often attributed with having said all there is to say on mirrors, Borges himself would always be the first to argue otherwise.”

Some of the essays take a more conventional narrative approach, but the approach serves to tell jarring stories, such as Desirae Matherly’s lyrical exploration of the effects of her many LSD trips as she’s suffering from the side effects of the pill, and Shifra Sharlin’s confession of taking care of—and not taking care of—her dying brother in “Not Against Irony.” 

As the title of the journal itself speaks to, Hotel Amerika looks at a world with a slightly skewed spelling and challenges representations in its tellings.

Writing Residencies: A Chance to Write in One's Best Hours

One of the worst things about aging is the inevitable accumulation of responsibilities. That's particularly bad for a writer, who's inclined to not want any responsibilities at all, other than drifting through the vagaries of a tale that must be told.


It's in such a state that I live. I used to structure my life so that I wrote in my best hours, but now I tend to write in my worst hours, after the kids have gone to bed, after I've paid bills, after a couple of glasses of wine, when most sane people are reclining on a couch and watching Downton Abbey.

I try to crowd in my writing, but life tends to crowd out the imagination with muscular, pugnacious insistence. Which is why I started to dream about going to a writers residency in order to truly dream.

I just published an article in the March/April 2012 issue of Poets & Writers to guide writers seeking the idylls of simple peace and quiet: Applying to a Writers Residency: An Expert Breakdown of the Requirements.

I'm too busy to attend a residency this year, but I have hopes for next year. At least now I know the in's and out's of it all.

On David Milch: Writing with an Oceanic Sense

“Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous.”

If you listen to any interviews with the renowned producer David Milch, you'll likely hear him say this. I heard it first, however, from Laura Albert (better known as JT LeRoy), who I met quite by coincidence, and have now become writing partners with (perhaps an act of God?). She was a writer on Milch's Deadwood, so she often sends me links to his interviews or passes on his writerly advice.

One can view coincidence within the prism of mathematical probability, and it certainly has a place in such—in some ways we are just numbers, colliding or not colliding, etc.—but even as a bona fide atheist (with a highly mystical bent), I appreciate Milch's view of coincidence as an entrée into understanding our lives.

To view coincidences on such holy ground is to elevate acts, to see life as a grand quilt, all of us woven together—“together” being the key word. When coincidence happens, we must pause and reflect on the chain of events. We must interpret actions, size up who we are, what we want.

This isn't an essay about new age matters, however. It's an essay about being a writer. Being a writer is the most precise metaphor for being a human being that I know of. We are stories. We are revisions of stories. We are stories in the making. We are a series of coincidences that demand interpretation.

Milch is compelling as a raconteur, one who has the necessary distance to be both charmed and appalled and endlessly intrigued by some of the stories he's lived. Milch constantly calls upon the cosmic consciousness when he speaks of writing, something not only beyond the self, but something, a truth, that can only be reached by abdicating oneself. In this way, much of his perspective resonates with Buddhism, although he's more likely to quote the Bible.

When Nietzsche declared that God was dead well over 100 years ago, it began an age of existential isolation, perhaps especially for artists, who burrowed into their modernist cocoons. Milch disagrees with creation in isolation, however. “The modern situation is predicated upon the illusion of the self's isolation–that business of I'm alone, you're alone, but we can bullshit each other when we're fucking or whatever else, but the truth is we are alone. Right? Well, I believe that that is fundamentally an illusion,” he said in a 2005 profile in the New Yorker.

Such a belief puts an interesting frame on Deadwood, a show that places a crew of mostly heartless exiles together in a practically lawless place, all of them tied in one way or another to gold, hardly a substance that brings people together in loving connection. Milch says the show “is about individuals improvising their way to some sort of primitive structure.”

It's a fascinating narrative premise to portray the wild West in—quite the opposite of a writer like Cormac McCarthy, who writes in the vein of Milch's beloved William Faulkner, but accentuates how the wrath of violence trumps any civilizing urges.

I'm interested in how Milch comes out of the “primitive structure” of self to develop stories layered through the lenses of so many characters. He hearkens back to William James, not Henry, who said in The Variety of Religious Experiences that “every vision that ever came to anyone is prefaced by a sense of the dissolution of the self.” Milch says, “it's the fragmentation of ego that allows what he called the oceanic sense to flow in.”

I'll posit that this is impossible for most writers, who tend to write more and more with their egos, as if their egos are a prized fastball. Milch isn't always beyond such a state either, but he says that “what writing should be is a going out in spirit.”

Every writer reads about subtext and characterization, tone and point of view, dialogue and plot—but what about "going out in spirit"? I think of Hemingway's dictum to “write one true sentence.” Such a simple rule on the surface, but one that must be pondered like a zen koan. I've found as a writer that it's easier to write untrue sentences, just as it's easier to live an untrue life—imitating others rather than genuinely creating—no matter the toll on the soul. One must be highly attuned to the truth and quite brave to represent it and delve into it and live it.

In the case of Deadwood, Milch did the research, then suppressed his self and let the visions come. “Visions come to prepared spirits,” he says.

Milch writes his visions in a writing process that most writers can't do, in a roomful of a various people he's brought in for inspiration (a motley crew of rodeo cowboys and yahoos in the case of Deadwood) and he channels characters, dictating the story as he lies on the floor. The act of writing is literally a “going out in spirit,” for him.

“All I want to understand is the mind of God,” said Milch, quoting Einstein. “Now, I don't want to understand it; I want to testify to it. I believe that we are all literally part of the mind of God and that our sense of ourselves as separate is an illusion. And therefore when we communicate with each other as a function of and exchange of energy we understand not because of the inherent content of the words but because of how that energy flows.”

My best writing happens with such a sensibility—when I feel connected with others, when I am writing to and for others, with a sense of touching them, whether real or imagined, it doesn't matter. But it's more than the concept of audience—it is about the relinquishment of self. Like Milch, I believe that the self clouds or blinds vision, so becoming a good writer and becoming enlightened essentially go hand-in-hand. It's the ultimate feeling of opening up, giving oneself away, an act of generosity rather than the stinginess of ego.

That's what is key in writing for a muse—the acts of generosity and connection guide one's words. The writing isn't about the self so much as it is about a mystical spiritual connection, which has to be honored and revered as much as any God, for it is, in the end, a pathway to the sacred.

Writing in Fragments

Sometimes you can shape your life to the cadences of your creativity. Sometimes you have to shape the cadences of your creativity to your life.

When I first decided to become a writer, at the recklessly young age of 20, I embraced Hemingway's preferred writing rhythm: to wake early, write for two or three hours, until the writing juices were spent, and then not think about what you've written the rest of the day–a strategy to replenish those precious creative juices, to let thoughts percolate in the unconscious.

I constructed my life so that I could write in such a manner for several years (waiting tables at night so that my mornings were perfectly pristine for writing), and I loved that life. I'd love to live that life now, in fact, but I have children now, and I have to work 9-5 jobs, the kind with health insurance, so my time to write becomes ever more narrow and unpredictable, a matter of fragments, or even fragments within fragments.

Instead of writing in my best moments, I write mostly in my worst moments, late at night or during the intermission of a child's performance or in the five minutes I have before booting up the computer in the morning (I probably spend a little bit more time with my kids than Hemingway did).

This is all to say that I'm constantly scheming and rethinking my writing process, if not the actual products of writing itself.

I recently flipped through Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer in search of random writerly guidance and she commented how the best writers create their minor characters in just a few deft strokes. As an example, she showed how Jane Austen “speedily and almost offhandedly dispatches” Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood.

“He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather coldhearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was: he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;–more narrow minded and selfish.”

Capturing a character in just a few lines is a difficult thing to do, but it plays into a writing project I just started. In tandem with the literary journal I began earlier this year, 100 Word Story, I've been trying to write one 100-word story each day. It relieves the tension and frustration of not being able to truly delve into the writing life, but it also does a number of things:

• Makes me pause and notice things in a way that I ordinarily wouldn't because I have to conjure a new story each day;
• Makes me focus on a condensed, succinct piece of writing–no fluff, no extra words, no padding;
• Helps me keep the writing momentum going–and even develop future longer pieces (I look to some character sketches as the foundation for future NaNoWriMo novels);
• Allows me to have a number of prose poems and short shorts to be able to submit to magazines–so I can submit more frequently, instead of waiting months to finish a 20 or 25 page story (literary journals are more likely to publish shorter pieces anyway) or years to complete my novel.

I've been applying the Francine Prose quote to characters from stories I've written over the years to see how I can distill their characteristics into such a short space. I'm also occasionally taking characters from current longer pieces and writing miniature stories about them. Even if I never do anything with these pieces, they are a way to enrichen my longer stories and extend them in different directions.

It's safe to say that I will probably never again experience my “ideal writing life”–life is rarely so kind–but circumstances often unexpectedly lead one to a better place. I think of Lydia Davis, who decided that she couldn't possibly write a novel as a single mother, so she wrote all of the intriguing short shorts that made her name. Likewise, Toni Morrison, another single mother, finished her first novel by writing for 15 minutes each day after putting her children to bed.

Progress happens in the accumulation of increments. That's where I find my writing faith at the moment. I bow to small things and hope they lead to larger things.

Dean Young: Failing Better

I wish I could vote for poet laureate. I'd vote for Dean Young.

It's clear cut for me. He's simply the only living poet who truly gives voice to the tragic and ridiculous and tender and doomed existential meaning of life through his whimsical, searching verse. When I read one of his poems, I never know where it's going from word to word. I know I'm going to be surprised, but I don't know how I'm going to be surprised. It's likely that I'll laugh, but it's equally likely that I'll laugh and cry, or something else.

I'm not going to write an essay on Dean's poetry (I previously wrote a ditty on his book Skid). He'll never be voted poet laureate because he's a bit too dangerous, a bit too wild and unpredictable. Poet laureates need to clearly edifying in some ways--they need to serve, after all--and I doubt that Dean Young is clearly edifying to most, although he is to me.

I just wanted to pull out a couple of quotes from a recent interview with him in fail better, a mag I love, and one that's a natural for him if only because his latest collection is titled Fall Higher. If you're going to describe Dean's poetry in two words, "fall higher" might be the best two words.

For one, he not only honors imperfections, he seeks them out. Dean says, "I certainly don't believe in the making of art as a pursuit of perfection, rather the exploration of errors and stumbles, smudges and yelps."

When I read that quote, I think of Cassavetes' films, except with a few wiffle balls of Dada tossed in. He says that "art may be made carefully but it's never made by the careful." That's such good advice these days when so many artists have become more attuned to the selling of their art than to the recklessly inclined soul behind its creation.

Dean's interview appeared in fail better after he received a heart transplant earlier this year. It will be interesting to see how such an ordeal will affect his work. He's faced death. He's been given life. His words already traced indeterminacy, yet they were full of a gleeful plunging, a death-defying, exuberant vigor.

"I'm still searching and messing about, making wild forays I hope," he says. "Time is always running out for everyone although I'll admit everyone doesn't have such huge scars. But one thing's for sure. I don't only want to write from the prospective of those scars."

Even if he writes of his scars, I'm sure there will be a smirk, a "yippeee," an unexpected observation, someone dancing, a roller coaster, a worm, a lizard, a clown, a bordello, an astronaut, and more.

Revision Tip No. 2,043: The Art of Dancing to Guy Lombardo while Drumming to Mingus

I've often heard it said that writing is revising, and that's true in the sense that you're adding layers and nuances and telling details in revision that often aren't possible in the bustle or turmoil or excitement of a first draft. You're making a fine wine in revision, in other words, which takes time, finesse, and sagacity.

Because of this, revision is an art that requires constant scrutiny. You can't just muscle through a revision like you might a first draft. It needs to be a process of challenge, counterpoint, and exploration—all within the malleable structure you've put forth—yet I've found that revision can be the opposite of this. It can tend to become lazy, an exercise in reading more than an exercise in active change.

Here’s what often happens to me when I revise a piece (and I've heard similar tales from other writers). Author writes first draft of story. Author sits down to write second draft of story. Author reads story start to finish making editorial scritch-scratches in the margins. Author types in changes. Rinse. Repeat. Reload.

Hmmm…it's a little bit like dancing a waltz, following the same steps over and over again, feeling the nice rhythms of the music, but unable to add the sorts of flourishes, startling details, absurd moments, etc., that make a story special.

There are a good 2,042 tips about how to revise a piece so that you’re not just pushing a plow through an already plowed row, but I’ve come to like no. 2,043.

Here it is: Instead of reading your story start to finish, don’t read it. Don’t even have the story in the room with you. Don’t have your laptop either. Your dog or cat can stay along with your preferred beverage, but that's it.

The thing is to revise as if you’re still creating, not just refining (as important as refining is). My best moments of creativity happen when I’m not writing within a structure, but meandering—caught in a drift with only the faintest sense of purpose.

So here’s one way of doing that: I grab a few books of poetry, an art book or two, my describer’s dictionary, and I page through them randomly, with some Mingus or Sonic Youth or Calexico or Arvo Part on in the background, and think about my story through all of these influences. I drop in and out of poems, riff on a phrase or a word or whatever comes to mind.

I’m not really thinking of my story, yet I am. I’m tracing moods, dreaming, conjuring, whatever. I write little scenes, character descriptions, single words that I like. It’s all a collage, which for me is the word that defines the best sort of creativity. It’s playful. One thing layers upon another. It’s impossible to make a mistake.

And that’s the crux of a second or third draft—the tendency to want to preserve instead of explore. The curves of a creation are in place, after all, so it’s difficult to want to give them a different shape, which means that a story can tend more toward the rigidity of ossification.

I find when I work outside of the story in this manner, and especially in the slow ease of  longhand, that nothing I write has to make it into the story. Still, I usually create a piquant scene or two, a more lyrical description here and there, and even figure out how to cut some of the bad stuff out.

It’s like a new, exciting kid has just moved next door and I’ve got a fun playmate. We run through the neighborhood without supervision. We feel the sweat on our bodies as if for the first time. We lose our breath from running.

I know that there will be revisions and more revisions, of course—and that sometimes it’s necessary to stay in the rut of the story for refinement’s sake, just to smooth those uneven surfaces. But this is one fun way to challenge a story, hopefully bring it to life in a way that a more workmanlike effort can’t.

On to revision tip no. 2,044, "Taking an Exotic Foreign Vacation to Revise Your Story." I have to admit that this one is my favorite. Although 2,045 has its place: "Marrying Rich to Revise Your Story."

The 1,394 Word Sentence (Which Is a Story)

While it’s often said that few people read literary journals, especially the writers who want to get published in them (ahem), one great reason to read lit mags is to discover writers who you wouldn’t ordinarily read.

Think about it. When you go to the bookstore, at least if you’re like me, you’re either looking for the latest book that received buzz or you’re searching through the stacks for books that have been on your list anywhere from a week to years.

How often do you peruse the shelves to read even a few paragraphs by someone you’ve never heard of? Someone who doesn’t have a publicist, perhaps not an agent, and certainly not a marketing machine behind him or her.

When I read lit journals, however, I often avoid the name authors and only read the writers I’ve never heard of. Perhaps just because I’m suddenly in the world of my peers and I want to see who they are. It’s exciting.

So I’m grateful that I read Ted McLoof’s wild, long-ass, touching sentence/story in Monkeybicycle, “Space, Whether, and Why,” which totaled 1,394 words (seriously—top that).

McLoof’s sentence was not only an achievement of word length, but of storytelling.  Although I imagine a Guiness Book of World Records type of competition where people cram donuts in their mouths, except with authors stuffing words into a sentence, there was nothing extraneous or gorged about McLoof’s story—every word and comma felt necessary. The lack of a period felt intrinsic to the meaning of the piece.

In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a single sentence until afterward, and then I traced back through it looking for a period.

I’d seen Monkebicycle’s one-sentence story feature before and considered how to write such a piece, but I admit that I conceived of it as a typical sentence—20 or 30 words or so, max.
So I asked myself, who the hell is this guy, Ted McLoof, who writes sentences longer than my granddaddy after his third bourbon? Let’s find out.

How did you decide to become a writer?

Short answer: I’ve never been good at anything else, really. In the same way that when a person loses one of his senses, the others get heightened, I think that, if I have anything to offer in the field of writing, it’s probably because I don’t have much to offer anywhere else. Oh, I’m pretty good at pool, too.

Longer answer: I basically grew up in front of a TV, and spent pretty much all of high school watching movies, so most of the time when I was a teenager I’d be writing screenplays instead of doing actual homework. These screenplays weren’t very good, but I loved writing them. But the thing about screenplays is, when you finish them, you’re really only done with the first leg of a much longer process. You still have to get them, you know, made.

Then I took a fiction workshop as an undergraduate, where we were made to write actual stories—not just journal entries or thinly-veiled recreations of our own lives, but real stories, with stakes and epiphanies and everything. As soon as I put the last period on the last sentence of my first story, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Why did you decide to write “Space, Whether, and Why” in such a long, single sentence?

I always prize interesting characters over interesting style. In other words, I’d never tell students to avoid writing interesting-characters-for-the-sake-of-interesting-characters, but style for the sake of style tends to be a real issue among younger writers. Usually it supplements story instead of complementing it. So if there’s an out-of-left-field choice (like a 1,394 word sentence), I always think it’s right to demand a reason.

In this case, the story’s about two people who are so stymied by a lack of space in their relationship that they never get to examine it properly. Each event piggybacks on the last one, and they never get the benefit of perspective, and that dooms them. I wanted the reader to have that same feeling of breathlessness, of an inability to pause even for the length of a period to reflect, because that’s a distance my characters weren’t allowed.

Do you hold the world record for the longest sentence for a short story?

I just Googled that; it was a half-hearted search. But without any concrete answers, let’s just say I do. It’ll make me feel good.

Your stories are interesting because your main characters are often unable to truly communicate with those around them—they’re connected to a community, yet alone, struggling to find a place of solidity in the world’s moral ambiguity. What’s your take on the existential situations you place your characters in?

I think there’s nothing sadder than someone who has something to say but who can’t articulate it, either because he lacks the vocabulary or because no one wants to listen. It’s a very lonely feeling, that kind of isolation—surrounded by people but still alone. I think maybe I write about those people because then, at least, their stories get told.

Since you write about families and have a nice touch with younger characters, have you ever thought of writing Young Adult fiction since it’s such a booming market?

I would totally write Young Adult fiction, mostly because I think that's a completely admirable audience to try and reach. As far as being part of the booming market you're talking about, I don't think I'd fit in. That market has gotten very cynical. It's all sexy pouting vampires and well-to-do upper East Side boarding school kids. They're easy to churn out because they're not very well written, and they're easy to sell because they're wish fulfillment.

My favorite kind of Young Adult fiction is the kind that happens to be about young adults, but is universal in its themes. I mean, Holden Caulfield was an upper East Side boarding school kid, right? It doesn't all have to be wish fulfillment.

What's the most important thing you've learned from a favorite author?

A really pretty wonderful piece of advice from an author came from Nicholas Montemarano, who visited my undergrad right before I left for grad school. He mentioned that the great advantage you have before you ever get published is that "no one is waiting for the next Ted McLoof story."

In other words, without an agent or a publisher or fans, even, you don't have the pressure to a) produce, and b) write in whatever milieu you've carved for yourself. Because you don't have one yet. So it's a good time to try new things, to stretch, to find a voice, which is something that surprisingly few young writers do, I think, in the rush to get published.

Are there any authors you've tried to imitate? Has it helped or hindered your craft? Or both?

I don't think there was a syllable I wrote in my first five years of writing that wasn't in some way trying to sound like Nick Hornby. I fell head over heels for him at sixteen, and that was partly a good thing. Mainly, it gave me an outlet: I had all these things I wanted to say, and aping his style gave voice to those somethings. But eventually the problem became that I was too successful at imitating him. What started out as an avenue to get my voice heard turned into the opposite. I couldn't say anything that wasn't drenched in a complete stranger's tone.

Eventually I broke out of it, but it would be appropriate to paraphrase Hornby from an essay in which he discusses his early love of Anne Tyler, and how he still doesn't feel he's expressed himself in his own writing as well as Tyler once did on his behalf. Hornby speaks to what I hesitate to admit is the real me, the me who reads High Fidelity every time I get dumped.

How do you choose where to submit your stories?

When I first started sending out, the standard was, Whoever Will Have Me. Now...well, it's pretty much the same. But I think what's changed is that I actually do my homework now (I read like twelve interviews from The Review Review to prep for this interview). For a while, the only journals receiving submissions from me were major cities with the word "review" after them, just 'cause I thought it sounded professional. Now, though, I surf duotrope.com regularly, and I make sure to read a journal's issue before sending, and to make sure the story I'm submitting matches their aesthetic.

Do you read lit journals regularly? If so, which are your favorites?

The only old standby I have is Tin House, I think because, for a major journal, it's kind of inspiring how you never know what to expect. And not in a McSweeney's, we're-so-quirky-you-don't-know-what-to-expect! kind of way, but just in a way where you totally buy that all they're really looking for is quality, and other than that it's fair game. Otherwise, I tend to read stories I like in end-of-year collections, and then read the journal they came out of. That's how I found Monkeybicycle, from a story in Best American Nonrequired Reading.

Have your stories been shaped by the editors you’ve dealt with?

Sure, if you expand the definition of "editors" to include "anyone who reads an early draft." Two of my mentors helped me a lot: James Hoch told me no one would ever read my stories twice if I didn't start surprising people with where they went, and Manuel Munoz advised me not to ignore going to my "dark side," which I think is good advice, even if my dark side is probably more boring than other people's.

My best editors, though, are the people from my hometown, about whom I write. My friend Melissa, who I've written about a great deal, is always very patient about that, and tells me whether I've been accurate while occupying space in her head.

How do you deal with editorial suggestions that you don’t agree with?

I have a lot of blind spots, but perhaps the biggest one is the editorial process. I'm simply a bad reader for my own work. When I first started out, every time someone criticized something I wrote, it was just, you know, "Fuck you. You don't know what you're talking about." And then later I'd read the piece with the suggestion in mind and, yup, they were right, of course.

Because of that, I'll listen to pretty much anyone I trust now, no matter how off-kilter the suggestion, so long as they seem to get what I'm doing.

You’ve published several stories now. Are you ready to publish a collection?

Are you offering?

I’ll have my people call your people. Short of that, do you enter contests? Do you have an agent, or are you looking for one? Do you go to writers’ conferences?

My manuscript when I finished grad school was a collection of seven stories. I've now published two of those seven, so my plan is to try and publish all seven, and then see if that garners any interest from an agency. I have zero idea whether this is a good plan.

What's the single most important thing you learned in your MFA program?

Well...we more or less lived at the bar. And the classroom is obviously the place where ideas get focused and contained, where you learn craft, and where there's some sort of order. But I think I've learned that it's the community itself that really feeds you material. Everything is looser at the bar, and your real opinions can run wild, and you can meet plenty of characters to write about. Maybe that's the Jersey boy in me talking.

What’s your take on Rimbaud’s dictum that writers should undergo a “immense and rational derangement of all the senses”?

Well, Rimbaud was a poet. I'm pret-ty far from being a poet. When I think of poetry and fiction I always come back to Roddy Doyle's thing about jazz and soul music, respectively, in The Commitments. Jazz is free-form, it's experimental, you can rehearse a thousand times and then, bang, mid-show someone busts out a twenty-minute solo. Soul music has corners, it's the working-man's music. If you have the heart, you can learn it and play it.

That's like poetry and fiction to me: both totally noble pursuits, but if you're writing the kind of plain, clear prose I read, you're probably not all that concerned with deranging your senses. It's much more about keeping your wits about ya in our business.

What do you think of the maxim that writers should “write what they know”?

It's pretty hard to avoid, and why should you? I think the only trouble is figuring out why you're writing what you know. It can't simply be for lack of imagination. Too often I'll get fiction students who take that phrase literally, and turn in meta-fiction or autobiographical stuff. Like, a student from the "University of Schmarizona" goes to a party, gets drunk, and has to put the pieces together the next morning. It's more about writing the emotional truth, writing what you know.

How do you make sure that you’re always taking risks with your writing and stretching yourself?

Usually, I just get in moods. I'll go on a kick, I'll read a story that connects with me but that has a sensibility I've never even thought of approaching before, and then I'll read a bunch of novels by that author, and I'll just say to myself: okay. Here's something new. Here's something you've never tried. How can I keep the stuff that makes me me, while blanketing my story with what that guy just did? It's a tough balancing act, one I haven't really perfected at all yet, but if I can come close, I think that'll be a satisfying enough career.

The Things I Like About 100 Word Story

The second issue of 100 Word Story is out, and there’s much to love.

Here’s a list of my favorites:

I love that the poet Myra Sclarew was drawn to write 100-word stories because by condensing her poems, she can “get to the white heat of experience."

I love how Tsering Wangmo Dhompa uses the word “pulchritude” in “The Self in One Part.”

I love that Patrick Williams wrote a 98-word song to his photo of that crazy blue 70s car—the photo that inspired so many stories in our monthly photo prompt.

I love how Roxanne Barber’s story shows how a scar is not just a scar, but a possible window to salvation in her story "Scarred."

I love how Jim Fisher captures the damnation of “Wrath’s centrifugal force” in "Ezekial"—I feel the world’s righteous churning with such a force.

But thank God there’s some good, hot sex in R. Neal Bonser’s “Seasoning.” Thank God for hot sex.

And even though sex (or love, rather) might be wanting in R-Chi London’s “Good for Business,” there’s something comforting about the self-sufficiency she shows in a romantic woman who sees a different path to fulfillment.

But the thing I most like about 100 Word Story is how it’s opened doors to an artistic community for me, Monsieur Lonely Writer. I’m not only in contact and publishing old writer friends and professors, but I’m encountering so many new wonderful writers and artists, such as Joel Brouwer and Liz Steketee—our featured author and photographer for the next issue. Both of them inspire me so much, and that’s all I want to be, inspired.

I also want to give thanks to the many wonderful submissions we receive. Unfortunately, we can only publish a small percentage of what we receive. As a writer, I learn from each piece I’ve read. It’s a sign to me that none of us go it alone. It’s a sign that what matters is the making, not the getting published.

The Short, Short Story: 100 Word Story Magazine

This review should only be 100 words long. Most things should only be 100 words long. After all, we live in an age where even the approximation of totality can seem exhausting. We inhabit glimpses. We remember shadows. We listen to a snippet of a song, then watch a flash of a movie.

Now there’s a literary journal, started right here in the Bay Area, that aims to capture such a fragmentary nature of life: 100 Word Story (full disclosure: I’m one of the founding editors).

If you’re still reading (after 80 or so words), consider this journal within an ever-evolving American obsession with the art of brevity, in both a literary and a cultural sense.

Hemingway started the trend with his famous six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You could say that the sensibility behind those six words led to our Twittering culture itself.

Such a short, short story isn’t about the word count, though—it’s about what’s left out. Remember that Hemingway’s famous dictum of writing was that a story should be an iceberg: only ten percent of it should be visible.

The 100-word format whittles that figure down to one percent. Traditional “flash fiction” is generally defined as being between 300 and 1,000 words, so a 100-word story becomes more akin to a narrative haiku.

It’s “a limit that inspires compositional creativity,” says Paul Strohm, who sparked the whole idea with his stories in Eleven Eleven. After I read Strohm’s stories, I started writing and swapping stories with a friend and was quite taken by the genre. So I decided that the last gaping hole among lit journals was a mag dedicated to 100-word stories.

The genre is a narrative snapshot, which is why we offer a photo prompt every month and a theme to write to.

In practical matters, if you have writer’s block or are the type of writer who procrastinates before diving into a longer work, the 100-word format is a perfect warm-up, a way to capture a single intense moment within a longer piece, or condense that essay or story you might never quite have the time for.

Other than that, we have great t-shirts and mugs and trucker hats for sale. And more.

Read. Write. Submit. Buy. Repeat.

Hotel Amerika's Take on Great American Literature

You know to expect something different from Hotel Amerika just from its name. It’s going to take you elsewhere, or if not, it will give you a decidedly different take on the place you call home.

In an interview with editor David Lazar, words like “disorienting,” “radical,” “transgenre,” and “flaneur” are used like others might say, “write what you know.”

Let’s just say that Hotel Amerika publishes a distinctly Amerikan prose, and it’s a journal with its own democratic sensibilities.

Tell me the story behind the name Hotel Amerika—especially since there's a real Hotel Amerika in Denmark.

I’ve always wanted to stay at Hotel Amerika. Apparently, they bring you eggs and The Trial. I think our name is disorienting, but metaphorically apt. We’re a hotel: we have somewhat continental affinities, room for different sensibilities.

You say your editors favor “work with a quirky, unconventional edge.” What do you mean by “quirky” and “unconventional”?

We like work that looks different, that tests generic boundaries, work willing to say things radically, say radical things. That said, we also like work, especially nonfiction, that is beautifully confident of his generic history, and can perform, say, the essay, in ways that are confident, originally voiced, and stylistic rare. We like sentences.

What distinguishes Hotel Amerika from other literary journals?

Fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency. I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else.
I think the magazine looks rather lovely. I think the combinations of prose, poetry, transgeneric writing—which we now include as a permanent category in our contents—and fiction continue to be surprising—at least, I hope they are. We’re utterly open to writers at all stages of their careers. We take a lot of material from over the transom, along with solicited work, and continue to publish first-time writers, and highly rewarded, well-known writers.

What percentage of the submissions you receive do you publish?

I couldn’t tell you, and wouldn’t want to research this. Not a high one. But that’s true everywhere.

Tell me about the submission and review process.

There is a first line of readers, which consists of Adam McOmber, my managing and associate Editor, and the assistant editors, Jennifer Tatum-Cotamagana and Micah McCrary, and several student readers and other writers who serve as readers, and Garnet Kilberg-Cohen, who is fiction editor. I read much of the nonfiction, and have final say on all acceptances.

Can you point to a piece or two that are quintessential Hotel Amerika stories or poems?

I’d say our special issues were very defining: the Transgenre issue, our recent Aphorisms issue. There are writers we have ongoing relationships with, such as Peter Lasalle, Mary Capello, Cynthia Hogue, Brian Teare, Alice Jones, Colette Inez, and others.

What advice would you give to a writer submitting to Hotel Amerika?

I would not submit the kind of autobiographically narrative poems that you might be likely to see in a dozen other literary magazines. Something has to be different.

I would not submit a piece of memoir unless it’s performing something so interesting, doing something with its language or form that it’s going to stop me in my tracks.

We tend toward a more urban sensibility. Favor self-reflection. Flaneurs welcome.

If you could publish any living writer, who would you pick?

W.G. Sebald.

Oops.

O.K., Max Beerbohm.

You’re mainly a print publication. Do you have any plans to put issues online?

Yes. Of course. It’s simply necessary.

As a writer, how does editing a literary journal affect your writing?

Well, it takes time away, for one thing. Which is a harrowing idea every writer-editor thinks about. But, it also hones your instincts. Continually sharpens them. It’s a bit of a deal with the devil.

Does Hotel Amerika throw publishing parties? What are they like?

They’re raucous, but also slightly melancholy, filled with a combination of readers huddled in the corners singing Doo Wop, despite the malfunctioning mist machine, and senior editors pathetically trying their hands at Gangsta Rap. We serve jello with fruit and ladyfingers.

Strictly BYOB. But we’re all teetotalers, except for . . . well, I’m just too discrete for that.

David Lazar's books include The Body of Brooklyn (Iowa), Truth in Nonfiction: Essays (Iowa), Michael Powell:  Interviews and Conmversations with M.F.K. FISHER (both Mississippi).  His prose poems and essays have appeared in The Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Best of the Prose Poem, Gulf Coast, Sentence, Southern Humanities Review and many other journals and magazines.  He is the director of the nonfiction program at Columbia College Chicago, and the editor of Hotel Amerika.

Laura Albert and JT LeRoy: Mask as Muse

When I came across the Greek maxim “Know thyself” in my college freshman humanities class, I thought it was the key to life.

Then a couple of years later, I decided to become a fiction writer and discovered Hemingway’s dictum to “write what you know.”

Such a thing seemed simple, but it took me another 20 years or so to realize just how difficult it is to “know thyself” or “write what you know”—we’re elusive creatures by design, always changing, seeking, and fleeing.  Writing what you know becomes something like a pilgrimage, a chase scene, a dreamscape, a meditation, and a scientific experiment all in one.

In fact, according to the Suda, a 10th Century encyclopedia of Greek Knowledge, “Know thyself” has contradictory meanings. On one hand, the proverb is applied to those whose boasts exceed what they are, but on the other, it is a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitudes.

I’m traipsing through such thoughts because I’ve been revisiting that crazy, fantastic, compelling “hoax” of JT LeRoy since Laura Albert (aka JT) contacted me when she stumbled on a blog piece (Finally, the Great American Novel) I wrote when the whole scandal went down five years ago.

In case you missed it, JT LeRoy was a young truck-stop prostitute who had escaped rural West Virginia for the life of a homeless San Francisco drug addict. Laura Albert and her boyfriend Geoffrey Knoop rescued JT and helped him get treatment by a psychologist. Then, with the help of literary luminaries such as Mary Gaitskill and Dennis Cooper and others, JT wrote critically acclaimed works of fiction noted for their stark portrayal of child prostitution and drug use.

Shy, wounded, reclusive, yet riveting, JT attracted a swirling flock of celebrities like Winona Ryder and Courtney Love—except it turned out that JT was Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop's half sister, who wore a wig, sunglasses, and a hat in “his” few public appearances. And Laura Albert penned all of JT’s books.

Looking at the photos again, it wasn’t as if JT was disguised with any CIA type of sophistication. Yet people believed that JT was JT, perhaps against their better judgment, for reasons that might tell a larger story (what did they see in JT that they needed to see?).

When New York Magazine and The New York Times uncovered the true story of JT LeRoy, the story turned into a scathing public drama that was the literary world’s equivalent of the press chasing O.J. as he tried to escape in his SUV (except without any blood), with many of JT’s one-time supporters caterwauling, “Shame, shame!” in outrage.

I don’t truly know Laura Albert, but from our recent correspondence I like her as a risk taker who is genuinely trying to represent a “truth” in the world—the task every serious writer takes on. She pursues such a truth more in the vein of Werner Herzog’s notion of “ecstatic truth”—a truth that is the enemy of factual truth in its aim of capturing something more sublime. Herzog says that “to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.” And much of our narrow-minded, prudish literary establishment.

I’m not so concerned about the rich and powerful being scammed for what is the equivalent of loose change to them, or whether they had their feelings hurt. What interests me is the nature of writing with such a mask on, and I appreciate the moxie it took to put on such a performance.

“Performance” is the key word here. I like to think of JT’s novels not as just novels, but as part of a larger performance piece—one that put a wispy, vulnerable figure who looked like one part Andy Warhol, one part Michael Jackson, and one part blank slate on stage.

Instead of viewing it all as a swindle, I view it as an act of creation that grew in wild and unexpected ways and became far bigger than could have been imagined. I say “act of creation” because creation seemed to be at the root of it—a rollicking, gleeful, daring, probing, and carnivalesque exploration that in the end reflected our culture in a way that few acts have (I’d trade several National Book Award winners for it all).

And in the end, the fundamental question remains: If you liked the novels when they were written by JT LeRoy, why should you esteem them less when you find out they were written by Laura Albert? Perhaps the work should even grow in stature.

Just read the blurbs for the novel Sarah—blurbs that aren’t your ordinary blurbs churned out for marketing purposes. The authors who blurbed the book—Chuck Palahniuk, Jerry Stahl, Suzanne Vega, etc.—wrote truly imaginative, energetic assessments. They loved JT.

“JT LeRoy’s Sarah is a revelation,” writes Dennis Cooper. “It makes you realize how overused words like original and inspired have become. LeRoy’s writing has a passion, economy, emotional depth, and lyric beauty so authentic that it seems to bypass every shopworn standard we’ve learned to expect of contemporary fiction. This is a novel gripped by an intense, gorgeous, yet strangely refined imagination, and its experience is unforgettable.”

Laura—who might still be one part JT despite the obvious forcefulness of her personality—sent me a video of her recent appearance at The Moth (see below), where she gives her side of the story. It’s interesting to hear how her path to becoming JT wasn’t full of the calculation the press seared into its headlines, but was a mask that opened up a path to a story—a mask created from her own past as an abused child and the tales of others she took in.

Most, if not all, good writers write via a mask of some sort, whether named or unnamed, acknowledged or not. The notion of a single, pure self is antiquated (even the Greeks knew as much in their aphorism). We know ourselves principally through the eyes of others and the ways we seek to be seen. So writers put on guises, code switch, mimic, and dramatize themselves to find the story—and then the reader does the same in seeking to see himself/herself in the text.

Knowledge is a game of storytelling, as akin to fiction as nonfiction. Tell yourself you’re a victim, and you’ll get one storyline and one set of “facts”; tell yourself you’re a hero, and you’ll get another. 

I’ve always been a solitary writer, to my disadvantage. Recently, though, in the act of sharing my writing and writing with readers in mind, I’ve discovered how the context of writing (the cloak of self-mythology you write in, who you want to be seen as) informs and changes the text.

I think of Roland Barthes and his concept of the jouissance, the play, the erotics that occurs between writer and reader. “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me,” he writes in The Pleasure of the Text, claiming that writing is “the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra.”

The writer seeks a reader, seeks ways to reveal and touch, and will put on any guise available to accomplish those ends, like a good lover. There are many different ways to tell a story (“various blisses of language”), which makes the notion of “write what you know” quite complicated. We write through the “anxieties of influence” of past authors, as Harold Bloom has famously noted, but we also write through the masks we create in pursuit of self.

An outlaw’s attitude is essential. “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies,” William Faulkner said.

So I invite you to watch the video below and ask yourself whether Laura Albert is a “fake fiction writer,” as she has been called? Is she an outlaw? A charlatan? Does it matter who JT LeRoy is? Who are you when you write? Who do you want to be?

J.M.G. Le Clezio: Loss in the Foreign Lands of Ourselves

One way to judge the significance of a book is by how much its mood affects you afterward. Such criteria doesn’t fit into any academic critical framework, but it’s the one that matters to a reader in the end.

As Roland Barthes said in The Pleasure of the Text, “The pleasure of the text is not necessarily of a triumphant, heroic, muscular type. No need to throw out one’s chest. My pleasure can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever, by dint of seeming driven about by language’s illusions, seductions, and intimidations, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss that binds me to the text (to the world).”

Such is the way I’ve learned to read J.M.G. Le Clezio: with an appreciation of drifting, if not an indulgence in it.

I hadn’t heard of Le Clezio when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008, but when I read the comparisons of him to Paul Bowles, another author best read with the sensibility of drifting, I was eager to read him.

First I read The Interrogation, his first novel, which he now calls “close to a joke.” He’s right. It reads like a noveau roman written by a young writer bursting with adventurous and daring, if not ridiculous, pretensions. It put him on the literary map in 1963, though, and because of his chiseled good looks, he became known as the French Steve McQueen (his photos, especially the ones by Henri Cartier-Bresson, are indeed quite compelling in a cinematic sort of way).

Then I read The Prospector, which gave me a sense of Le Clezio’s art as drifting, but I wasn’t taken by the novel, and in fact, I questioned his Nobel.

I rarely give an author a second, not to mention a third, chance, but then, finally and fortunately, I read Desert, which is magnificent, memorable, moody. Not Paul Bowles, but there won’t be another Paul Bowles. And Le Clezio has a markedly different sensibility—he’s less interested in seeing the danger and estrangement in others and other cultures than seeing a purity of being in the elsewheres he writes about, a truth that can’t quite be reclaimed.

Desert tells of the diaspora caused by the French colonial army in North Africa when they defeated the nomadic Tuareg, the indigo-robed Blue Men. It’s a narrative of two characters: Noura, who in 1909 migrated north across the Western Sahara in a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy orphan named Lalla, who escapes the shany towns of Tangier (Paul Bowles’s territory) to move to Marseille.

The novel moves in a time that is almost lifelike: slowly, without the drive of plot. The rhythm is set by the swirling sands of the desert, the pulse of the sun, jagged rocks, and blistering heat. The caravan plods for hundreds, thousands of miles, and you feel each of their painful steps as they leave a home and look for another one far away.

Meanwhile Lalla searches for that lost home in a more mystical sense, escaping the harsh realities of life through her communion with an outcast named al-Ser, the spirit of the blue man warrior who serves as a guide to the natural world.

The desert is the main character of the novel, however. Despite all of the harshness it delivers, Le Clezio sees in it a primordial grace, a numen that deserves reverence.

The idea of loss is at the center of Le Clezio’s work—people banished from their paradise by the hostile forces of civilization. But he portrays this loss in a complexity in which there are no winners.

As he puts it in Mexican Dream, a collection of essays on the conquest of Mexico, “In destroying Amerindian cultures, the conqueror also destroyed a part of himself, a part he will undoubtedly never find again.”

As an author, he writes as one listening to the music, a witness rather than one imposing his will upon the narrative. His characters often seem to move with the wind itself. In tracing the connections between the modern industrial world and the world that existed before it, he has likened himself to a spider, “touching threads to see where the vibrations come from.”

Perhaps LeClezio has such a talent because he grew up as a child in strange lands, born in France to a family that had lived for generations in Mauritius, and of a British father who was a doctor in Nigeria. He was fascinated by the alien landscapes he lived in, the differences between his western heritage and the manners of a more ancient culture.

He’s now a dual Franco-Mauritian citizen (who resides in New Mexico). “I’ve always felt very much from a mixed culture—mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything’s had its influence on me,” he said.

The Prospector, in particular, captures his sense of the lost idyll in its rather simplistic plot of Alexis L’Etang, a dispossessed son, who escapes from a dreary job to go treasure hunting. But it’s not so much literal treasure that he seeks, but the memory of his childhood and his father.

The characters in The Prospector aren’t particularly individualized; they’re almost flat, moving through life through their senses rather than the logic of their thoughts. The desire is simple: to be at one with the world’s rhythms, its seasons—an impossibility with civilization.

“I am as adrift in this lonely valley as I was on the vast ocean,” Alexis observes, but that isn’t a complaint. Drifting is an aspiration, an idyll.

You could say that he’s guilty of overly romanticizing the primitive (anything barefooted is celebrated), but a sense of utter loss hangs over it all, and there’s really no return. Although Alexis is driven at once by a traditional quest/adventure narrative—to return to a state of being “utter savages”—he’s at the same time undermined by a more postmodern sense of a world fragmented and lost.

In fact, that’s what LeClezio is about: loss. He’s not arguing for a return to a better kind of life, he’s just saying that it’s gone.

In a life haunted by loss, it’s not the quest for what’s lost that can deliver us, but an embrace of our essential alienation. As Le Clezio says about his predilection to seek new places to live, “you have to get rid of old habits, change your points of view, adapt. It gives you a kind of youth, which is good for writing."

Finding Oneself in Flight. Or Not.

I like searches that lead to other searches. Existence that lacks resolution. A drift of self that becomes a strange sort of home after a while.

These are the themes I’ve been writing about for the past eight years in a novel titled Elsewhere. I’m fascinated by a placelessness of identity that can overtake, if not guide one, especially in travel. A diaspora of self that afflicts and enlivens at the same time.

It’s difficult to capture such a state in words without becoming too indulgent and losing the narrative thread of the novel, which was why I really enjoyed the coincidence of coming into contact with a film, Volo, that my old friend Jerome Carolfi has been working on. He calls the film “a meditation that blends travel and dreams, confronting travel as an escape from reality and dreams as signposts which reveal our deeper psyche.”

Those words don’t do the film justice, though. What I admire about the film is the way he’s captured the textures of such moments of estrangement and quest, a disjointedness of self in flight, through the layers of his collage of images. He’s truly created an arresting dreamscape.

It’s a reminder for me of the power of experimental film, which is more akin to poetry. As a viewer, you follow the mood rather than the action of a main character. The plot points become internal. The experience becomes the narrative. You drift, in short.

The only weakness of this film is my amateurish voiceover, but I was honored to be invited to contribute. Please watch.