God Has Given A Brave Fruit Vine

There is this gap

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Ira Glass

- J.

Like an unopened dewy beer can

“He sees his life as just beginning, on clear ground at last, now that he has a margin of resources, and the stifled terror that always made him restless has dulled down. He wants less. Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inner dwindling.”

***

“The smell of fresh coffee drifting to greet him as he walks still wet back from his swim; the kiss of morning fog through a rusted window screen; the sight of Janice with bare brown feet wearing the same tennis shorts and kid’s black T-shirt day after day; the blue jay switching stances on the porch rail; the smooth rose-veined rock holding shut the upstairs door that has lost its latch; the very texture of root-riddled mud and reeds where the fresh cedar dock pilings have been driven: he feels love for each phenomenon and not for the first time in his life seeks to bring himself into harmony with the intertwining simplicities that uphold him, that were woven into him at birth. There must be a good way to live.”

***

“When he was fifteen, forty-six would have seemed the end of the rainbow, he’d never get there, if a meaning of life was to show up, you’d think it would have by now.

Yet at moments it seems it has, there are just no words for it, it is not something you dig for but sits on top of the table like an unopened dewy beer can.”

***

“His nerves are stretched so nothing escapes his vision, the jutting stones of the two beaten reddish tracks that make the old road, the fringe of dried weeds each still bearing the form its green life assumed in the vanished summer, the peeling pumpkin-colored school bus husk…This is crazy. Run.

But, as with dying, there is a moment that must be pushed through, a slice of time more transparent than plate glass, it is in front of him and he takes the step…”

John Updike, Rabbit is Rich

-J.

Sinner, saint

“The day was ending in a fiery and glorious way. The ships on the Sound looked like paper silhouettes being sucked up into the sun.

I had two doubles and immediately it was as if I’d been dead forever, and was now finally awake.

I was in Pig Alley. It was directly on the harbor, built out over the waters on a rickety pier, with floors of carpeted plywood and a Formica bar. The cigarette smoke looked unearthly. The sun lowered itself through the roof of clouds, ignited the sea, and filled the big picture window with molten light, so that we did our dealing and dreaming in a brilliant fog. People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?”

***

“Also it was part of my job to touch people. The patients had nothing to do but stumble or wheel themselves through the wide halls in a hard. Traffic flowed in one direction only, those were the rules. I walked against the tide, according to my instructions, greeting everybody and grasping their hands or squeezing their shoulders, because they needed to be touched, and they didn’t get much of that. I always said hello to a grey-haired man in his early forties, vigorous and muscular, but completely senile. He’d take me by the shirtfront and say things like, ‘There’s a price to be paid for dreaming.’ I covered his fingers with my own. Nearby was a woman nearly falling out of her wheelchair and hollering, ‘Lord? Lord?’ Her feet pointed left, her head looked to the right, and her arms twisted around her like ribbons around a Maypole. I put my hands in her hair.”

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (“Happy Hour” and “Beverly Home,” specifically and respectively)

- J.

Somewhat against irony, part two

“Edginess can be a way of introducing energy and/or an appropriate tone of skepticism, a way of enlarging the frame, of accounting for the complications of real life. Are there fields of beautiful tulips in the world, through which two well-matched lovers stroll? You bet. But is the world an endless sequence of such fields? Ha. So, to underscore this, maybe we have a crop duster fly over the tulip field, and the pilot is listening to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’…

But I think one of the problems with the obligatory edgy is that it is a little impatient: it fails to account for the fact that this is an individual guy, not an emblem of something—there’s time and space in his life for him to be a lot of things. So maybe, today, he’s happy…

Sometimes when I read new fiction I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious—of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions—then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there. Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction?…Is there joy enough in what we’re doing because God knows, life is short, and if we don’t learn, by the end, to regard all this mess with joy, it seems to me we haven’t done our work properly.” 

George Saunders, in an interview with BOMB Magazine reprinted in Harper’s, July 2011.

- J.

Somewhat against irony, part one

“Irony in sixties art and culture started out the same way youth rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind this early postmodern irony…were still frankly idealistic: that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; that revelation of imprisonment yielded freedom.

So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony’s still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it, ‘Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.’ This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks…

And make no mistake: Irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I say.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying, ‘How very banal to ask what I mean.’ Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself…

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Bakcward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and the squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘How banal.’” 

“E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace

- J.

Together, Apart

“On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a child’s. He started up and came to her side.

‘Ellen! What madness! Why are you crying?…’ He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveled up like ghosts at sunrise. The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.”

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

***

“‘I don’t like to be without you,’ I tell her.

‘We needed ice,’ Jo says…

‘I mean I don’t ever like to be without you,’ I say.

Jo’s smile starts around her mouth, tentative, like I’ve caught her off-guard, then lifts her whole face and her fragile-looking eyes into an unexpected coughed laugh. ‘Since when?’ she says. ‘We’re apart all the time, we’ve been apart all our lives.’”

“The River,” Maile Meloy

- J.

I have two stories in WW this week:

In one, the most visible politician on two wheels in Portland tells the city’s elected officials to get off their asses. In the other, the owner of a local bike manufacturer explains why his company makes all its bikes out of wood.

(I also preview the S. Carey + White Denim shows. [S. Carey—don’t go; W. Denim—please do])

- J.