Wow.

The past couple of weeks has been quite the whirlwind.  The launch of Bloom  has been wonderful—lots of enthusiasm and support, not to mention some choice press from the New Yorker, the LA Times, Flavorwire, and The Atlantic (coming soon: a bloggy thing on Bloom at the HuffPo).  Today I got a mini-orientation to the wonders of Twitter; which I sort of get, in theory, but only superficially at this point.  At any rate, Bloom  is at this point something between a magazine and a community, and it’s that community part that needs to engage at both Facebook and Twitter; and if you know me/have been reading my blog, you know that I’m, uh, not the best person to make that happen.  But we’ll figure it out.

All this to say that with editorial plates spinning, a novel in-progress, teaching, continuing to write for The Millions, and basic life-care; writing here with any regularity is The Thing That Has to Go.  I’ll be signing off for a little while; but I’ll  be back.  In some form or another.  Things have a way of continuing, even as they cease…

Peace out.

(p.s. I’ll keep up my Reading List page, mostly for my own visual record.)

Today, my brief look at “forced mobility,” i.e. exile, at The Common.  

With the displacement of so many during Hurricane Sandy—separation from home, identity, stability—my monthly reflection on mobility took me to various perspectives on exile, by writers who’ve lived it first-hand.  Roberto Bolano‘s position is especially interesting.

Also: today Bloom launches!  Come visit us at this new literary site and community.

Bolano image via jeansilver/flickr

It was Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that made me want to be writer. I mentioned this recently to a friend who studied with her at Wesleyan, and he confirmed two things I’ve often heard about her: she was a chain smoker most of her life, and she’s a generous person.

Revisiting The Maytrees, her last novel—”last” by Dillard’s own account, i.e. in an interview she said she was done with writing—I am reminded of what strikes me, again and again, about her writing: intelligence, humor, strangeness:

She was twenty-three.  She could not imagine that a brave man could shrink from risking one woman’s refusal.  She wanted only a lifelong look at his face and his long-legged, shambly self, broken by intervals of kissing.  After a while she might even, between kisses, look into his eyes.  No time soon.

The Maytrees is a beautiful story, well told.  What a privilege to read it again.

In his review of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt, John Banville writes:

The Dream of the Celt is, like its subject, stout-hearted, well-intentioned, tender, and somewhat naive. It is not in any real sense a novel, but is, rather, a biography overlaid with a light wash of novelistic speculation. It is an exoskeletal work, in that it wears its research on the outside. The author has read widely and diligently on his subject, but the material gathered, instead of being absorbed organically into the narrative, is presented to the reader in the form of raw data. The forays that Vargas Llosa makes into Casement’s thoughts and dreams, although warmly sympathetic, are less than inspired. The novelist has fallen in love with his subject, which is admirable, but his amatory approach does not help the novel.

Vargas Llosa would have done well to remember Henry James’s repeated injunction to himself in his notebooks: “Dramatize! Dramatize!” Yet Casement’s story is so absorbing, and the background against which it unfolds is so fascinating, that the reader will be swept along regardless of the novel’s flaws as a work of fiction. In The Dream of the Celt, for all its shortcomings, Mario Vargas Llosa has done an inestimable service to the memory of a great man.

I found this to be a strange conclusion to a review of a novel; Banville seems to forgive Llosa for writing an underwhelming novel, because he has delivered to us compelling historical information.

I was thinking about this in relation to ARGO, which I saw last week.  I enjoyed it, I recommend it; but I was also left thinking that the film could have been so much better.  The material was fascinating, and dramatic; the film delivered the action but gave us, I thought, very little character.  Since it was conceived as a narrative feature, not a documentary, I wanted to see artistry and history working together to create for the viewer an experience.  It sort of did that, but not fully.

I guess what I’m feeling is: if you’re going to work with the dramatic forms — narrative film, novels — then do it!  Your material alone won’t carry you.  A great concept is just half the hog.

As we get closer to election day, as we get ready to watch the candidates debate on TV one more time, I am reminded of one of my peeves: this habit of blaming the President for gas prices, on both sides.  A couple of articles (there are many more) to debunk that idea, which is among the cheapest of campaign strategies:

From a blog called The Moderate Voice

From the NY Times

It’s a fundamental problem of the democratic process, it seems to me — that the economy, and the workings of government, are more complex than the average citizen can get her head around.  We ascribe to the President powers he doesn’t have, and are ignorant of others that he does have (in the area of national security, for instance).  We hold the wrong people accountable.  We have short-term memories and short attention spans.  We are susceptible to performance over substance.  Uy.  It’s a weighty responsibility, this voting right of ours.  May we all work just a little harder, do just a little more fact-checking, every time we get ready to exercise it.