14 February 2012
I’m awfully glad to hear that Carrie Tiffany has a new novel out! (I wrote about her first novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, at The Second Pass, a couple years back.) It’s called Mateship With Birds and it’s been published by Picador. Read more about it in this interview with CT here.
I’d had a brief email exchange with Carrie Tiffany back in 2009; she said she was really struggling with the second book, and also not finding much time to write (children, full-time job, etc). That the book is being released now, in 2012, makes my heart pitter-patter (appropriately, on this Valentine’s Day?), because it means that this very talented woman, with as many life challenges as anyone to deal with, got down to it: she got it done, despite the obstacles. Three cheers!
Here’s what Tiffany herself says about her slow process (she wrote an entire novel that she ultimately threw away):
If you’re wondering why there were seven years between her novels, part of the answer is that she wrote another novel. Freud in the Bush grew out of that first short story about a snake. In reality, the great psychoanalyst sent a paper to an Australian conference in 1911. Tiffany imagined he attended to give a paper, On the Pouch, and took a train inland from Spencer Street Station. When the novel was finished she threw it away. ”I realised I was making fun of him,” she says. ”The more I read of Freud, the more I was convinced a great many of his discoveries were correct – that what we really want as adults is what we wanted as children, that dreams often point to repressed desires, that sexual repression manifests itself in the body in a variety of ways. I could no longer treat the subject with the irony I had intended.” [...]
Don’t expect another novel from Tiffany in a hurry. She has begun writing one, set in the 1970s. However, she says, ”People write too much. They write to prove they’re still writers”. She writes slowly and in the end, ”I hand in a postage stamp and the publisher says, ‘More, more!’ I’m definitely a miniaturist.”
I’m not sure where to find the novel at this point – it’s not yet on Amazon or Powell’s. But I’ll keep looking.
9 February 2012
So I am teaching myself to knit.
In this picture are three swatches — practice pieces for three different kinds of stitches. Hoorah! I can do three different kinds of stitches!
But that pile of yarn is the unraveled mess of a scarf I started. I was going along pretty good there for a while, maybe 1/4 of the way… then suddenly it all went wrong. I didn’t know what had happened or what had gone wrong, and the more I tried to figure it out, the worse it got. I’d unravel a section, then try to restart from that point forward, but then it became clear that I wasn’t restarting correctly, so the mess reiterated itself, and then I’d unravel a little more, etc. In other words, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to save what I’d done; I had to unravel the whole damn thing.
The writing analogy is a little frightening to consider.
That 1/4 scarf existed; I’m the only one who knows this, can verify it. Was it a “waste” of time? Well, at least I learned to slow down, and to pay attention. My next lesson will be teaching myself how to fix mistakes.
Unraveling takes seconds. The word is onomatopoetic, it slips off the tongue. When we make something, build something, stitch by stitch, word by word, it is definitely not raveling.
30 January 2012
This month, my Post-40′s Bloomers column at The Millions features Daniel Orozco, whose story collection Orientation will (in my humble opinion) both engage and inspire you.
21 January 2012
An exhibit at Tibor deNagy of Elizabeth Bishop‘s art — both her original art and art she collected — reminds me that the creative process is constant. Writing, painting, collecting too – these are all acts of seeing.
I love the inscription of “Happy Birthday” here – no one knows to whom Bishop wrote this, some speculate that she wrote/painted it for herself.
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43 King Street in NYC, where EB lived not too happily (for a year or so, I believe). She was never able to feel at home in New York. ”I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s about right for a poet’s sense of home.”
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EB did not have an easy life — she was adrift, suffered heartbreaks and isolation — but she made her own way, always finding ways to live where she wanted, and how she wanted (Maine, Key West, Brazil) — as an artist. A rare and beautiful thing.
11 January 2012
Two things: an essay and a blog post.
My essay on James Salter, “In the Light Where Art and Longing Meet: My Day With James Salter,” is in the current print issue of Tin House Magazine. I couldn’t be more tickled. The project began almost exactly two years ago(!) — with my piece at The Millions (on sex writing by “great” male writers), a stunning email from JS himself, and an ensuing correspondence over the following year. Other amazing authors in this issue, themed “Beauty” — Marilynne Robinson, Michel Houellebecq, Eric Puchner, Paul Willems, Michelle Widgen, Aimee Bender on artist Amy Cutler, and more.
I also have a blog post, “Living and Learning in Bookstores,” as part of Tin House‘s “Book Clubbing” blog series — wherein I describe the independent bookstores in NYC that I love, and the unassuming bookstore in Seattle where I embarked on my literary education, many lifetimes (although really not that many years) ago. Enjoy!
10 January 2011
We’ve been obsessed with the Republican primaries and debates here. I suppose that means I’m not as cynical as I thought I was; I keep looking for candidates to break through with a true voice, to stray from pre-packaged message message message. Newt and Dr. Ron are the ones to watch in this respect, although John Huntsman showed signs of life on Sunday in NH.
Romney‘s electability strategy is clear: I’ve run businesses, I’ve lived “in the real economy,” that Obama guy hasn’t. Another strategy that I imagine the Romneyans will pursue might go like this: I’m a doer, not a hand-wringer, we need real-world action; this isn’t a time for “nuanced thinking,” for professorial passivity.
Ugh.
With the departure of Obama’s Chief of Staff Bill Daley, this dichotomy of character comes up again: Rahm Emanuel was a “ball-buster,” a guy who “got things done.” Again, he wasn’t known as a thinker, a ponderer, but rather a guy with a short fuse and sharp, goal-oriented focus. This is apparently what a good Chief of Staff needs to be, what Daley wasn’t (not enough, anyway).
But what about in the rest of life? I wonder often if we’re all destined to be one or the other, in a final-accounting-of-your-life sort of way, i.e. thinkers or doers. People of process or people of results. An obvious answer is, “Of course not.” Weirdly, the older I get, the more I think (in an unnuanced way), maybe so…
15 December 2011
Can I just say how much I love the siesta concept, here in Latin America (and many places around the world)?
I’m using mine to catch up on… well, to catch up on everything at this point, but at the moment, catch up on blogs and literary periodicals. From Claire Messud‘s review of Michael Ondaatje‘s new novel, The Cat’s Table:
In a rare, distinctly essayistic moment in his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje articulates his position thus:
Recently I sat in on a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne. He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they: we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves…. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.
This view, almost an authorial ethics of representation, explains some aspects of Ondaatje’s literary style: his prose, while gorgeous, is on occasion quite oblique, and his narratives—as is true of The Cat’s Table—can be strikingly fragmented. (It is wonderful and, in these fundamentally homogenizing times, increasingly rare to encounter a writer who does not shape his art to a known and satisfying form, but instead fashions the form around his content.) His goal is to reach toward that elusive complex we might call experienced human reality, and in so doing, precisely to grant each of his characters his own wisdom and autonomy. In an Ondaatje novel, there is much that we do not directly know, much that we cannot know for certain.
I think often about what it means, in this current cultural moment, to be a “literary” writer; and if that terminology even matters anymore. There is a sense that it doesn’t; that it is an anachronistic, old fuddy-duddy kind of categorization; that you will die in dinosaur-like fashion if you hold too tightly to such high-art ideas. But something about Messud’s description of Ondaatje’s literary vision speaks to what I consider to be literary — to be art — in a way that matters. Uncertainty; unknowability; “experienced human reality” as elusive and complex; ultimately a reading experience that effects some discomfort and reminds us that life is a mysterious, unstreamlined business.
2 December 2011
The annual YEAR IN READING extravaganza is on at The Millions. See what writers have been reading (and loving) this year. Up today, Jennifer Egan and Ben Marcus.
1 December 2011
Lisa Peet, whose blog Like Fireyou should add to our blog feed, contributes to our “Post-40 Bloomers” series at The Millions with a terrific piece on Isak Dinesen.
