Flash of colour

Life has been a bit grey lately. The details are generic, unremarkable, but there it is: grey. During a downswing I tend to become most frustrated by the feeling of anhedonia, probably since I'm a casual hedonist the rest of the time. Like, being 'depressed' while doing something that is objectively kinda depressing anyway (e.g. going to work) is less frustrating than being 'depressed' while doing something that I'd normally enjoy (e.g. weekend activities). Obvs, I guess--anyway, it's what I think about, when things are grey.

I was reading Stephen King's Just after Sunset, a collection of short stories published last year. I haven't read him in years; I raced through some of his classics in my early adolescence and I think I've re-read Misery, It, and the book with "The Langoliers" in it once or twice since. A few days ago I saw this collection on a book truck at work and I'd forgotten to bring the book I was reading from home, so I took it.

What I like about these stories, and Stephen King in general, is that the qualities which could place the work in either the 'horror' genre or the 'speculative fiction' genre are present because they are being used to express basic human experiences. He writes about the universal-human-condition stuff that most of us aim for, only he takes a few hop-skip-jumps away from the realism that we're used to which gives him more range for exploration. The weight of the story is rarely in the genre elements, I find, but rather in the themes (mental illness, fear of death, grief, etc) which are, in some ways, opened up by those very genre elements and the imaginative mindset they require. The realism parts sneak up on me when I'm swept away by the imaginative parts, and sometimes that gives them more power. Like my brain relaxes in a way, knowing that it's going to be thinking about ghosts or demons which it doesn't really believe in, and then boom! -- I find myself weeping over a short story about September 11th.

Which isn't quite the point of this post, but I'm getting there. The story's called "The Things They Left Behind" (an homage to The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, I assume). At the end of the book, King provides some liner notes for his Constant Reader, short explanations of the various origins of the stories. I'd taken to flipping to the end after finishing each story, and when I read the notes for this particular piece I found this:

... I was deeply and fundamentally affected by 9/11. Like a great many writers of fiction both literary and popular, I felt a reluctance to say anything about an event that has become as much as an American touchstone as Pearl Harbour or the assassination of John Kennedy ... I might still not have written it if I had not recalled a conversation I had with a Jewish editor over twenty-five years before. He was unhappy with me about a story called "Apt Pupil." It was wrong for me to write about the concentration camps, he said, because I was not a Jew. I replied that made writing the story all the more important--because writing is an act of willed understanding. (p. 363)

Writing is an act of willed understanding.

I've written some fiction myself, and the sense that some topics or characters or settings are out of bounds has arisen in me many times. The feeling that I have no right to try to describe something that I haven't come close to experiencing, especially when the thing is very meaningful to people that actually have. The idea of misappropriation.

And then today I read this little liner note, this idea put so concisely and sharply, and it just ... clicked. It doesn't mean I'm going jump into a first-person narrative about being a Jewish African-American gay man or anything (at least not tonight) but it's something to remember next time I feel that particular reservation while writing. There are a lot of reasons to go somewhere that feels out of bounds. This is the best one I've heard.

Which made me feel excited, cause I like it when something surprises me, opens up a door in my head, shifts my worldview a degree or two. When that hasn't been happening enough for me, things get kinda grey.

Reading List: May 2009

This post is inspired by Riese's "Stuff I've Been Reading" posts over at her blog, which I think were originally inspired by Nick Hornby's Believer column, which I bet was originally inspired by someone else who wrote about stuff they'd been reading. I'm planning on going into detail about one or two of my favorite books from a given month, and listing others I've read (& endorse, of course) as well.

1. Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston

A post on Bookslut led me to these short stories. I would like to recommend these stories to everyone because they are beautifully written and cut-throat and make your breath catch in your chest. They are about things like deserts, hunting, river rafting, and riding horses, none of which I have any particular attraction to, though I did while reading the book. But really they're about nature and love and sex and being female, all of which I have lots of interest in, so. Anyway, I am obsessed with Pam Houston now and I don't even like cowboys.

I will point out that there is not necessarily a lot of range in the stories, character-wise, but the thing they do is done so well that I don't care. Reading her essays (see next item) confirmed the twitchy ear-perking I get around 'autobiographical fiction' or whatever the fuck you want to call the writing people do that falls in a genre grey area, and that does explain the similarity amongst the stories somewhat. I say this with zero judgment, by the way.

(Digression, because this 'debate' will arise often if I'm going to write about reading and this is all I want to say about it: I don't care what label anyone puts on writing. I like to find out if 'fiction' is 'autobiographical' because it makes it interesting to me when the work itself is good. I am interested in where the writing and the thoughts and the feelings come from, whether the source is closer to reality ('reality') or imagination. Both interest me, but I don't put some moral value on the 'amount' of 'fiction' in your work, if you're really fucking awesome at writing short stories about your own life, in the sense that they speak truth about the universal human condition et cetera, I will admire that.

Also, I get writer crushes, so pretending that I know stuff about a writer's actual life is exciting for me, but that's a different topic. Also also, I should say I am more this kind of fiction writer than the imagination kind, probably because I'm really a nonfiction writer, so I am understanding.)

I would like to excerpt pretty much the whole book, but there are laws or something, so here:

Everything about sex, even the simplicity of an orgasm, seems to be made more complicated by all this gazing into each other's eyes. "High density" is a phrase I can't shake from my mind. (p. 132)

You wonder why there's no word for the opposite of lonely. You wonder if there's a difference between whatever might be truth and a performance that isn't a lie. In your life right now, you can't find one. (p. 151)

2. A Little More About Me by Pam Houston

So this is her nonfiction, mostly personal essay (yay!). The essays are loosely grouped by topic, in five sections: dogs, nature, men, women, travel. The topics, unsurprisingly, overlap quite a bit (and tend to elaborate upon) those covered in her short stories, though I get the sense that she can cut a little deeper, hit something more raw, with the stories than she can with the essays. Some essays are amazing and some are fine. I like nonfiction collections that show me how the writer's life changed over a period of months or years, and I like collections that riff on a couple of main themes, and this book does both of those things.

I loved this book not quite as much as Cowboys, I think because of the cutting-deeper thing, and probably also because I am a hypocritical person who writes nonfiction but loves fiction the mostest. However, I relate to the writing itself, as in the craft and process and what it means to have written personal essays, much much more--which counts for a lot. The tension of nonfiction absolutely fascinates me: the way writing down your life turns your life into a story; the way that version is only one version; the way that self-awareness and self-observation somehow, paradoxically (beautifully) coexist with the impossibility of objectivity. Which leads me to the next couple of items on the reading list.

3. Madness by Marya Hornbacher

Super intense memoir about having Type I rapid-cycle bipolar. There are so many articles about the connection between creativity and mental illness, and her writing certainly supports that hypothesis as far as I'm concerned. See previous rambling about the tensions of nonfiction.

4. A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin by Anais Nïn.

I read somewhat sporadically through Henry and June, Incest, and Fire. There is so much critical analysis of this work that I feel ill-equipped to comment much. I will say I was fascinated by the subjectivity of her diaries--which is ultimately the subjectivity any of us have regarding our own selves, our world and the people in it--as well as thinking about the idea of a 'diary' as literature, the performance/audience questions, that sort of thing.

5. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

I love good YA, always a fast read and likely to make me cry in a simple, not-t0o-heartachey way. I read about the plot of this one before reading it and wished I hadn't, so I won't describe anything! I loved the style and voice in this book, the dark humor, the depiction of pain without being too angsty.

6. The Progress of Love, 7. Open Secrets, and 8. Runaway by Alice Munro

I've read these before, for some reason I always re-read Alice Munro in the summer, a time when I often become solitary and contemplative. And so for me, her stories fit perfectly in a hot sunny day, lying in the grass, looking at the ocean. I am, as we all are, truly in awe of her.

9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Not as gimmicky as you'd think. Much like my relationship with actual Jane Austen novels, I thought it was rather brilliant and then I lost steam halfway through and didn't pick it up again.

I also re-read the first Dune trilogy (read them!) and a bunch of other library books I can't remember now, but if you made it all the way to the end of my short list I'm more than happy. What have you been reading?