If we are judged by the company we keep...

...now would be a good time to judge me.  I have an essay along with three of the other fantastic writers who took part in the 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminars.  It's at Fiction Writers Review and you can read it online here.

On Cameras and Seeing

The second most popular question I’ve been getting, after “how are you doing?” and the like, is some iteration of, “Do you have any photos?”  The answer is no, as I said in my previous post.  When I have photos, it’s because someone else has taken the photos and sends them to me, or links me to them on Facebook, or something like that.  I don’t have a camera.  The evolution of camera-carrying through my life is something like this:

1)     I didn’t have a camera because my parents did.

2)     I didn’t have a camera because I didn’t think of it.

3)     I had a camera and took many worthless photos with it.

4)    I had a camera and took only a few photos with it, still mostly worthless.

5)     I carried a camera, took no photos, felt guilty about it, and also worried it would get broken or stolen.

6)    I stopped carrying a camera.

I was going to write more about this topic, until I saw this , which said most of what I had to say, and in addition was funny (and a little cruel) about it.  The shorter version goes something like this: while I believe a camera helps some people to see, for me, in the vast majority of cases, it has the opposite effect.

Why I don't post pictures...

Because I don't have a camera.

Why I don't have a camera will be the subject of a future post.

Let’s pretend the MFA isn’t an unstoppable force and needs defending by me…

This review got me all in a tizzy.  I read it this morning and thought responding to it would be a great blog post, but then I started reading through it again, and there were just so many points I wanted to make, and I was having such a hard time sifting through which were the important ones and which not, and I also found myself defending ‘the writing program’ as an institution more than I wanted to, that I stopped with my detailed response (if you can believe it—there’s a detailed-response draft in a folder on my computer) and decided to write this instead.

Elif Batuman wrote a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, about, well, what the subtitle says.  It’s been well received and sounds interesting.  I’ve heard her interviewed, and she’s very personable and not shy about staking out her position.  She says in this review of The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl, that she wanted to be a writer and chose a PhD over an MFA.  She’s reviewing a book written by a PhD about the MFA phenomenon.  She not only analyzes the book, but also uses it as an opportunity to complain about MFA programs.  I tried in this post to separate those two different critiques—of the book, of what she calls “the writing programme” (its’ from the London Review of Books, hence the English spelling in any of her quotes) but what I’ll usually call “the MFA”—but it’s hard to know if I succeeded.

A Good Life's Day

I distinctly remember, during my first great self-improvement kick when I was (officially) unemployed (officially unemployed = the government sent me checks), catching myself one day thinking that I didn’t have enough time to do all the things I wanted, but that one day (when some nameable or unnameable thing or series of things, happened) I would.  Then I realized I was unemployed, I had essentially no external responsibilities; that, in fact, I would never have more time than I did at that moment, in that day, in that group of days.  What was it that I lacked time to do?  I don’t remember exactly, but as it was during one of my self-improvement kicks, it was something along the lines of learning a language, reading the collected works of Shakespeare, engaging in some kind of exercise regimen, or starting to eat healthier.  Something good for me.

When I am in the grip of a self-improvement kick, what happens is I add blocks of time to my schedule, piling them up one on top of another like legos, until—inevitably—a day can no longer support the edifice I have constructed.  Then entropy takes hold, sometimes violently—the whole thing topples—but more often slowly—blocks are removed outright or put off until tomorrow for so long that the urgency to do the thing is lost and eventually forgotten.  It is amidst these cycles made up of peaks of organization and troughs of entropy that I navigate through my life.  My moods often lag behind where you would expect them—it is often at the very lowest of my moods that I begin to organize my life (sick of moping, of being unproductive, or simply needing something to make the decision of what I should do when there is absolutely nothing I want to do) and often when I am happiest and most productive that I start to disregard the organization and let my life slip toward… not chaos, I don’t think, but impulse (if I am happy and productive, I trust myself to allow my feelings choose my activity).  Eventually, either the lack of structure leads to a change in mood, or maybe the melancholy returns because it is time for the melancholy to return.

The melancholy has been here of late. 

What the hell am I doing here?

I’ve been wanting to write/planning to write/putting off writing a blog post explaining the ostensible purpose of the blog: to let whoever cares know about what I’m up to currently.  If I really knew I probably would have done so already.  Rather than continuing not to do it, though, I’m going to lay out some of my thoughts now, and update as updates are required.

You probably know I’m in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Why did I come here? 

Why I like to read book reviews

Sometimes it seems I like to read book reviews more than I like to read books.  While this isn’t in the end true, there is a pinprick of truth to it.  It comes back to an essential character of my nature, which I am becoming more aware of as I muddle my way through this ad hoc life I continue to try to cobble together: that I find myself operating much more successfully when I have a framework within which to operate and also against which to rebel.  Two quick thoughts on that: a) This is probably not unique, and may not even be unusual, even for an artist; and b) it may seem counterintuitive to people who are familiar with the way I have chosen to lead my life, which consists of a large degree of freedom (freedoms from and freedoms to) compared to many or most people’s lives.  While this is interesting, and I may pursue it at a future point, I will leave it at that statement and continue on with my earlier thought, which was, that book reviews can occasionally make explicit what in a book is implicit—that certain books (and here I’m going to stick with fiction, as it’s what I do and what I am most familiar with), perhaps most obviously with a certain kind of ambitious novel, but I imagine with most successful novels (the definition of successful to be left unexplained), operate with certain underlying assumptions that function, in this way, as a framework.  So a quote from Sam Tanenhaus, a few sentences from the end of his long review of Jonathon Franzen’s Freedom:

In these pages, Walter, “a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks,” seizes hold of the novel, and Franzen makes us see, as the best writers always have, that the only pathway to freedom runs through the maze of the interior life.