Like A Gargoyle

So I've started reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, that publishing industry noise/newsmaker that sold for $1.25 million and has unfortunately already dropped off the NY Times bestseller list after a run of only a few weeks.

Anyway, it really is a wonderful book, deep and dark and masterfully written. I'd have given the Mr. Davidson that big check, too. Since I've been blabbering about writing so much lately, I found this passage at the beginning of Gargoyle quite apt, because the unnamed narrator sounds an awful like Aaron, our protagonist in Swallowed, who, coincidentally, is 35 himself:

The most difficult thing about writing, I'm discovering, is not the act of constructing the sentences themselves. It's deciding what to put in, and where, and what to leave out. I'm constantly second-guessing myself. I chose the accident, but I could just as easily have started with any point in my thirty-five years before that.

I mean, yeah. At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, that's it, exactly, for Aaron, and for me.

Farewell, David Foster Wallace

I am broken-hearted.

DFW offed himself Friday, and though I was not a major fan—let’s face it, the man’s work wasn’t for book tourists or the easily daunted, and it was often challenging to process his dense thickets of prose, at least in a novel like Infinite Jest—I was glad he was in the world, writing like writing was all that mattered.

Because it was to him, and it is to me.

He was fucking funny, too, if you were in on the joke.

He will be missed, and mourned.

Here’s an entirely apt passage from “Good Old Neon,” from his story collection Oblivion:

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way – exponentially faster, unimaginably faster – when you're dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people's whole life flashing before their eyes as they're dying isn't all that far off – although the whole life here isn't really a sequential thing where first you're born and then you're in the crib and then you're up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that's what people usually mean when they say 'my whole life,' meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It's not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn't really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we're alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn't even close to what we think we're talking about when we say 'my life.' Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what's really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.

"…the whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it's only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you're really even aware there's an ocean at all. When you're up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you're just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don't think there's really an ocean at all. It's almost impossible to."

Fuck You, Gustav. Thank You, Edna.

Thank God. Nothing major broke. The evacuation went smoothly. And the storm was not as bad as predicted. Now we can worry about other things, like 17-year-old unmarried mothers and Republicans in general.

And writing.

Shoulda gotten more done this weekend, didn't, as I was distracted by the hurricane and the Last Day Of Summer. I'm feeling good about the work, though, and I know I'll be cranking hard soon. I'm instituting a daily word quota, just to see if I can force myself to pile up a bunch of pages quickly. Like, a whole chapter's worth, stat. Should be easy-peesey, right? Since I have the whole book outlined and researched and everything.

Au contraire.

I much prefer rewriting to initial writing. Initial writing is way too much like real work, and I agonize over it far more than I need to. I always feel like I'm screwing up the story, or just plain sucking, and then the internal editor kicks in and I catch myself redoing the same paragraph seven times and then I stop in frustration.

Rewriting is much more fun and a bit easier, though agony often remains. 

Writing is not for sissies.

I happened across a quote from the great Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of classics like Show Boat and Giant, which I thought perfectly conveyed that sentiment. The lady knows of what she speaks; she wrote a few dozen plays and novels and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, matching wits with contemporaries like Dorothy Parker.

Anyway, this is something she wrote in A Peculiar Treasure:

“Only amateurs write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain climbing, treadmill and childbirth. It may be absorbing, racking, relieving, but amusing, never.”

Well said, Edna.

I am definitely not amused.

God Bless And Godspeed, NOLA

Such a beautiful, beautiful town.

The first chapter of Swallowed is set in New Orleans, and I have been going down for Mardi Gras for the last five years (including the ugly one post-Katrina). I have several dear friends there, one of whom, a doctor, is riding out Gustav at the Tulane Medical Center. 

My heart is with him, and with NOLA and all its citizens, during this difficult time.