Cat lady rocks!
13 04 2009Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Music, risk, talent
Categories : Review
Doesn’t anyone stay in one place, anymore (pt II)
9 04 2009She grilled me for about 20 minutes, then requested—or was it offered?—to read my second novel.
I hesitated. She’s not sure if she buys the premise, namely, that of a young woman who leaves home and doesn’t look back, not once.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Really? She never gets in touch them?’
Nope.
‘I can’t believe that.’
At this point C. chimed up and said, Oh yeah, I could believe that. Who hasn’t dreamed about just walking away from everyone? (Besides this co-worker, apparently.)
Thus, part two of the whole social networking/past/new life gig. Only this time it’s about writing.
This second novel isn’t bad. My first novel wasn’t bad, but it has all the defects of a first novel, not least of which is too much explanation going on in the dialogue.
I’ve cut that back on this one, way back. I’m less interested in directing the reader in her interpretation of events; rather, I lay out a scene, let her eavesdrop, and then decide for herself what’s going on. There’s no ‘she retorted hotly’ or ‘he smiled in confidence at his abilities.’ Nope. ‘She responded.’ ‘He smiled.’ Plain text, with, perhaps, unplain meanings.
I’m still working out what I want to do in my novels, but the more I’ve written, the more adamant I’ve become in not poking into the characters’ minds and spilling it out on to the page. Yes, when a character is alone, the reader may have access to her thoughts, but I don’t, as the writer, tell you what she’s feeling. She has to decide for herself what she thinks and feels, and it’s up to the reader to decide if the character is right or is full of it or whatever. (And yeah, maybe you’re right or full of it or whatever, too.)
You, the reader, are the witness to the events, neither the confidant to a first-person narrator nor the one who apprehends her true self. The character is her own, and the only privilege granted to the reader is that of witnessing aspects of the story not always available to the other characters. That’s it.
But that’s not why I’m hesitant to show the novel to my co-worker; hell, either the style works or it doesn’t. I guess I’m protective as well of the undercurrent of the novel, which is that allegedly big things happen to ordinary people, and they deal with them.
A daughter leaves her family, and life goes on.
Someone has an abortion, and it’s not traumatic.
There’s a car accident, and marriage difficulties, and births and deaths, and none of it is epic. It’s all just. . . life, and the characters mourn and adjust and move on. That’s it: Here are these characters, and here are their lives.
The co-worker, at the mention of the abortion, reacted as if I’d outlined a ‘Lifetime Movie Event’ or set up some kind of schema of which buttons to push. As if abortions and car accidents and marriage difficulties never happened in real life.
I’m particularly touchy about this kind of reaction precisely because I don’t have any kind of outline for my stories. I set up a situation, and let it spin out. Did I know ahead of time that a character would have an abortion? Nope. Car accidents, marriage difficulties? Nope, nope. They come up, the characters deal with them.
Now, if the characters aren’t real to you, none of this will work. And that would bother me, but that would also seem like a legitimate criticism: I wanted to create real characters, and failed.
But the notion that if something big—out of the supposed ordinary—happens, then it’s not real, well, I disagree. Strongly.
Making all cuts clean and all memories unclouded, providing closure and wrapping everything up in a nice psychologically-convenient bow—that’s what’s not real. Yes, there can be regrets and reconciliations, but the force of the regret can mutate and attempts at reconciliation can fail.
These characters have their own lives, their own integrity—at least, that’s what I want for them. And no, I don’t always understand what they do, either.
This is why I hesitate in sending my novel to my co-worker: There’s no agenda, and I don’t like the notion that there must be one, and that it must be ‘right’.
That’s the delight of the writing: Even as I lay down the words, they take off on their own.
And no, they don’t look back.
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Tags: characters, integrity, life, novel, past, writing
Categories : Musing
Doesn’t anyone stay in one place, anymore (pt I)
6 04 2009‘Not all social networking stuff is bad, you know.’
C. may have even raised her eyebrows as she said it.
‘I know,’ I mumbled. ‘Hey, I blog, don’t I?’
Still.
Two things lead me to this point. One was this post by Meghan O’Rourke at XX Factor, how those of us old enough to have a past can be thrown off by the jumbling of time when one is friended by a memory. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. Sure, there are class reunions and gossip through whatever thin vines are left connecting one back to the old days, but reunions are fixed in time, recognizable as the artifacts they are.
But a poke from the past? As cool as I find quantum mechanics (what I can understand of it, I mean), I am utterly turned-off by the wormhole aspect of Facebook. It’s not that I hate everyone, or even anyone, from my past; it is that I am content for the past to remain so.
Yes, I rootch around in it, and sometimes memories come, unbidden, but I am ever aware of that distance between then and now—and of the panoply of feelings around that distance. Sometimes I am sad, sometimes relieved, or confused, or embarassed, remorseful, and sometimes I feel nothing other than I am not who I was.
There can be a poignance to this recognition. I am mortal, and will lose and gain and change as I move through this life, until there is nothing left of me at all. I can’t gather all my life in, live simultaneously as the happy third-grader or shattered teenager or tentative new adult. There are people I knew then who I don’t know now; what would it be to have them here, with me, now?
It’s not that there must have been a Reason for us to have parted; time and physical distance are as good an explanation as anything. We simply lost touch with one another, that’s all.
So why not get back in touch? I am, after all, still friends with two women who I’ve known since kindergarten, some others from high school, college, grad school, post-grad. . . if I can hang on to these people, why not throw another knotted rope to the past, in hopes of enticing the others to grab on?
I don’t know, really, that I have a good answer to that; I think it’s a why/why not choice, that is, one made less through reason than a shrug.
Perhaps I can only justify my choice after-the-fact, to say that this is what seems appropriate to me, what works for me. I need to have a sense of time, and to remind myself of the inevitability of loss inherent in time. It’s not about despair—some of what was lost deserved to be shed, and I am the stronger and saner for it—but about understanding, making sense of the trajectory of my life.
Would friending someone I knew in, say, 10th grade foul up that sense? I do wonder about some people, about KB and CM and SP and how and who they are, today, and have even thought about trying to get in touch with them.
But then what? We were tight then, and now we’re not. I am curious, but do I miss them? I miss what we had, but would we have it again? I don’t think so.
So why not take the chance, track down the old running buddies and confidants to see if there is still something there? Am I afraid?
Again, I don’t think so. It’s more that my life is here, today, in New York City in 2009, and I need to make my life stick here, today, in New York City in 2009. Time spent with those I’ve lost is time not spent with those I’ve hung on to (and who’ve hung on to me), and those I’ve found.
And the people here matter. I like them and getting to know them, and letting them getting to know me. We can’t take anything for granted, can’t call up a shared past or a ‘remember when’ as we huddle over our beers. I have that with some people, but with these new friends, there is the frisson of wondering what to reveal and what will be revealed, of risk and anxiety and the delight in discovering that, yes, there is more than mere proximity to our relationships, that we are, in fact, friends.
O’Rourke noted that Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels. I understand that longing, I do. I also understand the necessity of bearing such longing, and remembering that not all can be reconciled.
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Tags: Facebook, friends, life, Meghan O'Rourke, memory, mortality, risk
Categories : Musing
Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
5 04 2009Spring is here. Crap.
I have nothing against spring, save that it presages summer—and I don’t like summer.
Let me rephrase that: I hate summer.
Actually, many summer days are fine. Warm, sunny, blah blah. Inoffensive and manageable.
But then there are the days—and weeks—when weather turns vicious, the sun baleful and the air viscuous. I feel hunted by the sun and trapped by humidity, darting from one shadowed space to another, trying and always failing to avoid the heat rays from above.
Plus, I don’t like sticky.
And no, I don’t own an air conditioner, although every year I think, Hm, maybe this year. Now that I’m finally settled in to my own apartment, I think, Hm, maybe this year.
As much as I despair of the heat, I don’t like air conditioning. I appreciate AC, am grateful for it in the workplace, but I tend to think of it as wasteful for my home. And even though air conditioners today are much more energy efficient, and the units themselves fairly small, when I think of a box AC I think of the behemoths of old, rattling away as they suck electricity from the socket and money from my pocket.
When friends from the south would tell me they didn’t like indoor heat, I thought What?!!! How could you NOT like central heating? It’s what makes winter worthwhile: coming in from the cold, face chapped from the wind, and the reassuring hiss of the radiator letting me know I’m home.
I was less summer-phobic (and winter-philic) as a kid, but I like to remember a particular tradition from those winters: My parents’ house had forced-air heating, so in the mornings my sister and I would fight over who would fit her nightgown over the heat vents, the flannel billowing out with rush of warm air. Some mornings we’d rush my brother’s room and all three of us would crowd around his (more powerful) vent until the furnace had had enough.
And no, we did not have AC in the house.
Perhaps my southern friends had their own, fond, memories of coming in from the heat, faces red from the sun, and cooling themselves down in front of AC or vents. I remember comfort; they remember relief.
But as much as the weather can affect the temperature inside, it’s really an outdoors phenomenon. Crazy cold temps are tough to manage, but they are, in the end, manageable. Long underwear, heavy boots, heavy coats, scarves, hats, mittens—they’re the armor one wears to battle the cold, to move through the streets and one’s own life. (And winters in New York City rarely require heavy defense: a decent jacket, hat, and gloves will usually do. In fact, winters here are sufficiently mild that I kind of miss the intensity of the cold of Grad- and FelineCities, tho’ not its duration.)
How can one protect oneself against the heat? Sunglasses, sunscreen, but most hats will simply leave one sweatier than before. And while I can load up against the cold, there’s a limit to how far I can strip down. Naked in New York? No thank you.
I do like the sun. That’s why I hate the summer. In the fall, sun sneaks through the trees and leaves and dapples the ground; in the winter, it coaxes faces skyward, to catch a bit of warmth. But she turns mean in the summer, even sadistic. As much as I welcome her into my home during the other seasons, I avoid her June-August, cursing her relentlessness, her omnipresence.
Leave me alone! I have actually whimpered at the forecast of sunny summer days.
Trapped. Even if I do get AC this summer, saving myself from the oppression of humidity, I’ll still feel trapped, restricted to an oasis of cool.
Summer is my enemy. I dread its approach.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: life, New York City, sticky, summer, winter
Categories : Musing
AbsurdBeats 