Just read David Mitchell's Ghostwritten

... and as far as I'm concerned, the man can do no wrong.

Perhaps I will have more to say about the book later, but for now you'll have to excuse me because my mind reverberates still with aftershocks of having been BLOWN.

MUST DO.

1. NY helicopter tour.

2. NY trapeze school.

3. Bronx Zoo. (yes! Baby lions!!!)

4. Coney Aquarium.

5. Purl Patchwork, quilting shop.

6. bike ride along the Hudson.

7. booze cruise.

8. The Cloisters. (Yes. Finally done. It took forever to get there, and then we climbed the stupid hill and learned we could have taken a bus right to the top, but it was pretty freakin' awesome.)

9. Row-boating in Central Park, without falling in.

10. Central Park ravine (102-106th streets).

11. summer baseball.

12. Jackson Heights, exploring.

13. Roosevelt Island.

14. Koreatown karaoke.

15. Circle Island boat.

16. Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

17. See The Nutcracker danced by a NY company.

18. MTA Subway Museum.

19. This is stupid but see the TKTS booth that lights up red in times square.

20. The High Line.

21. Frank Lloyd Wright @ The Guggenheim. (Closed. Missed it. Fuck.)

22. City Museum of New York, exhibit about Old New York. (Closed. Missed it. Fuck.)

23. Govenor's Island.

24. Nuyorican Cafe. (Sweet. Thanks, Keith!)

25. Another stupid one, but see new Lego Superstore in Rock Center.

26. Top of the Rock. (Very touristy but I can't deny my desire.)

27. Charles Burchfield at The Whitney.

28. Bambu, at the Met.

29. Bambu, at the Met, but actually walk on the thing.

30. Kiki Smith @ Brooklyn Museum. (Aiyyaaa, I missed this one, too.)

31. Anything at BAM.

32. Bike ride to Red Hook.

33. Go on a picnic in a park.

34. Do a picnic with friends at one of those outdoor movie showings. (Check. Bryant Park, circa, oh, 2005?, and I forget the movie, but it was super fun.)

35. Brooklyn Flea. (I heart and I will miss.)

36. FELA! (SEXY MEN SHOW.)

37. See famous people. (YES. Like the time I made Alec Baldwin laugh meanly at me because I got excited to see him. And the time I drunkenly kept insisting that people take pictures of me and LVH at a party because Keanu Reeves was lurking waaayyy darkly in the shadows. To this day, that photo cracks me up because we are grinning like idiots but only we know why since KR doesn't actually show up in the frame. And many other gloriously deer-in-the-headlights moments when encoutering Fame.)

38. Georgia O'Keefe @ The Whitney

39. Tim Burton @ MoMA

Jan Benzel's "New York Send-Off."

Oh. Oh my. Longtime New Yorker Jan Benzel of the Times is being relocated to Paris and is reporting/blogging her last weeks in New York, as she tries to check off a list of things she believes every NYorker should do at least once. Here is the post where she explains the concept, and here are all the posts. Benzel writes:

"But now that I’m about to move, I suddenly realize how much there is in New York that every New Yorker should do that I haven’t yet done. Things I always meant to do but hadn’t gotten around to, because I figured they’d always be here. Things I love that I want to do again, once more before I go. If not now, when?"

Her list ticks off Must Dos such as "Ride the Circle Line. Visit the Frick. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Visit Wave Hill. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Have a hamburger at the original Shake Shack. Ride the roller coaster at Coney Island. See 'The Fantasticks.' Sip a martini in an appropriately swanky joint. Hear some jazz at the Blue Note. Attend a gospel service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Bicycle around Governors Island."

I can cross-off everything on her list except the Frick, Wave Hill, "The Fantasticks," and that baptist church--BUT THEN I REMEMBER: This is not about her list. It's about mine.

So, without further ado and without any real belief that I will be able to do most of this before leaving and without going broke, I will post next my NY lists, created over the last few years. You will notice I separate the all-important Must Eat from Must Do. (I will revisit and boldify things as I manage and then republish the entries.)

Coming of age is a dangerous sport.

Tonight, when sitting down to an intense To Do List topped by priority items involving my paid job (shhh, la la la, not listening!), what did I do? I pulled Alicia Erian's novel Towelhead from my overrun To Read Shelf, all 319 pages of it, and just plopped myself on the couch with it and a glass of water. I am gratified in this at least: I have proven that I still do have a decent attention span when a book so moves me to concentrate. Not that Towelhead moved me, exactly. It was awful (plot circumstances, not the writing). Unrelenting. Just your friendly little coming of age story about war and racism and molestation and rape and the invisibility and powerlessness of young women, especially young women who are also minorities. And to how many people they are invisible (nearly all of them). You know. That kind of book.

Still the protagonist (Jasira) was not whiny or melodramatic in her powerlessness. Erian avoided being overdramatic. I could learn from Erian's example (esp. for my novel in progress) if I could just pick apart what it was exactly that she did. Maybe it was that the hopelessness/powerlessness was more impactful when not underlined? As in this state (of powerlessness) was so ingrained in the character's mindset that she doesn't even acknowledge it in her self? I think also of the even more unrelenting Push by Sapphire or Nabokov's Lolita, and I believe the same holds true there. Interesting. I also liked that the authors played up the notion of "complicity"--not that the authors believed or intended the readers to believe that the abuse these young women endured was their fault but that these young women felt that way (Towelhead, Push) OR that they initiated some of the abuse (Lolita).

I do note a reoccurring theme of White Woman as Savior, which I find too easy and a little bit icky--if also real. Maybe Jasira (Towelhead) and Precious (Push) wouldn't have reclaimed their femininity/sexuality (Towelhead) and voice (Push) without white women seeing how downtrodden they still are and swooping in to interfere. Maybe that's, you know, keeping it real. And maybe this brings up interesting debates about privilege and the long battle for women's rights and control over their own lives and bodies and sexuality, such that it's significant that literature trends toward this trope of "the white women's burden"--to lift up those still downtrodden, in the form of whatever minority is currently the most marginalized and demonized (post-9/11, Arab American and those of Muslim faith).

But this is why my mind always goes back to Lolita. Because she was a nasty little thing, "a piece of work" as they say, an unreliable and frankly unlikeable character. And perhaps we would only feel pity for her, but Nabokov was careful in his brushstrokes when it came to depicting her. Here was a girl of vulnerability, sure, but also of grit. She had agency. Even while being victimized by her own "dear stepfather," she was taking a cool look at her world and accepting that it was the way it was. No sense in dwelling. But she also saw that she could change it. And she did. All by herself. By getting herself into arguably worst scrapes, but doing so of her own free and stubborn and wild will that ultimately only SHE would determine her own destiny.

That's not to say that Sapphire or Alicia Erian "wrote it wrong." What this little diatribe has been about for me is not a critique of an author's writing or her realistic rendering of a character (both of which, by the way, I thought were excellently done) as much as a cross-analysis of different modes of coming of age. What each young woman was able to do with the set of circumstances, backstories, families, values, and personalities each was given by their author. A set that was likewise determined by the author's own set of circumstances, backstories, families, values, and personalities.

I want to be careful to say this, as I've often been privy to conversations about how a book should have been written a certain way, to which I can only say, OK, then you write that book. Erian, Nabokov, and Sapphire had it in them to write the books they did from the lives they've lead, and this is a beautiful thing because it means we can all sit around writing about the same set of subjects for as long as there are pens, paper, computers/iPads, tools of whatever sort, and we'll never really tell the same tale twice. Doesn't that make all you aspiring writers feel better?! Writing that here, so plainly, makes me feel much heartened.

From the Oldie but Goody Department.

Words just will not do.

Listification.

Things I will miss about New York: googleplexinfinity.

Things I've thought of in the last five seconds that I'll miss about Brooklyn: 5.

Things I've thought of in the last five seconds that I'm looking forward to about California: 10.

Of the latter, percentage involving food: 90%.

Items costing over $100 that I'd like to buy rightnow: 4.

Number of those I can actually buy because they are not ridiculous stupid purchases like new tattoos, dog portraits, self portraits, and new bookshelves: 0.

Items costing over $1000 that I'd like to buy right now: 2.

Number of those that I will actually buy because I totally have a couple cool thou lying around: 0.

Number of iTunes songs I binge-bought with gift certificates last night: 50.

Times I've checked my horoscope in the last few weeks: 2.

Number of sites checked each time I decide to check my horoscope: 3.

Times I agreed with the horoscopes: .5.

Times I cursed at the horoscopes: 2.5.

Times since hearing about our impending move that I've thought quite dramatically about Joan Didion's essay "Goodbye to All That": 15.

Times I felt despair that that beautiful essay, filled with all the feelings I feel, was already written, and written by Didion, and therefore I cannot write the same feelings better and shouldn't even try: 15.

Editing done in the last week: 0.

Frivolous reading of back issues of magazines ostensibly so I don't have to move them to California: 30.

Level of embarrassment about the above in light of my own self-discipline for working at home: 9 out of 10.

Pro and con lists made in the last week: 3.

To do lists made in the last week: 11.

Lists of lists made in the last week: 1.

Tastes like summer.

Skirt Steak with Watermelon and Red Onion Relish from Frank Stitt's Southern Table (from FreshDirect recipe database)

and

The Franks' (Falcinelli and Castronovo, of Frankies Spuntino and Prime Meats) Corn Salad combined with their Tomato, Avocado & Red Onion Salad

Sweet, sweet deadly caffeine.

Had a lovely Wife date yesterday: a ramen-and-fried-chicken lunch at Ippudo, followed by a "writing date" at Think Coffee. We totally ate up our ramen, drank our coffee, and talked and thought (sometimes even about writing), but between us only wrote a reminder to myself to let my JOB know that I was moving. Because I hadn't thought of it, and Wife reminded me. This is Reason No. 184855939020221674893920 to get yourself a Wife. (And I'll tell ya, it ain't no problem to make a pretty woman your wife. Look at mineses.)

By the time we got to Think, I was seriously flagging, so I broke the Golden Rule by which Mayumi is disallowed from caffeine after the hour of high noon. I was seriously awake till 4:30am this morning. But I'm going to tell you why it was (mostly) worth it. I had a Spanish latte. What the heck is that, you're probably asking. Well. It's a regular latte with a generous little helping of sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of the espresso. It was damned delicious, and I will definitely be replicating this drink at home with my trusty espresso machine from the too-generous Surfrunner, who pointed out that behind every great writer is an excellent coffee maker and then upgraded me on the occasion of my 30th birthday.

I will say, though, the fact that I was up till 4:30, slept only six hours, and then woke up still feeling espresso-awake helped me understand the smaller cups.

Why aren't there any kind cannibals? And other musings on The Road.

Watching The Road was not a relaxing or enjoyable end to our Friday evening. I guess I would have known that if I had actually watched a preview of it, or read a review, or read even a synopsis before renting the film, but oh well. And no, I haven't read the book. Want me to further horrify you? I am a writer, and I haven't read a single book of Cormac McCarthy's. I know. I'm fired.

But my god, the film is just relentless. Nearly two hours of the above color and mood palette. That is the color of ash and mud; the feeling of a glass half-empty with an idiot drinking it, hoping to quench a thirst. The plot follows an unnamed disaster, leading to a postapocalyptic world in which for some reason every animal* has died and people have had to become scavengers and in many cases cannibals. The point is to remain on the road** to the coast, try not to die, to try to remain "the good guys," and to keep clear in one's own head what the definition of "the good guys" are. We aren't given any inkling of what's on the coast that is so important to head for. Did fish survive the apocalypse? Is there a boat waiting to take them to another world? I haven't a clue! I hate having no answers! And I'm sorry but I want to know what the fricken apocalyptic disaster was in the first place. It isn't the point, you say, and okay, I hear ya, but it could kind of be the point. A world wiped out by our own stupidity (nuclear microwaving of the world; global warming to the max; etc.) is very different from, say, a vengeful god and the four horsemen of the actual Apocalypse, and would have different effects on the humanity of the remaining humankind.

Most of the film is from the POV of The Man; but after he dies, it shifts to The Boy.

Let's think through this plot point, too. Why have all the animals died and the humans lived? I guess it would make sense if there was some kind of nuclear disaster and all the people went into shelters but the animals did not, but the film doesn't spell it out for you. See? I just can't let it go. I want to know why the world as we know it ended. I must know.

And why do postapocalyptic movies always have to portray cannibals as maniacally cruel? Here's the thing: people are starving. There are no animals to kill, no crops to harvest. Why not eat what's around? That's what animals do when push comes to shove, and sometimes even before. Isn't that how one avoids, like, dying? But filmmakers respond to an audience need to clearly know that a line has been crossed, that these creatures are no longer people but cannibals. Is this what it means to lose humanity? Is what makes us human merely the eschewing of our brethren's flesh? I want to see a movie with the bravery to face the facts: death by starvation is not fun. In a world where you are out of options, how long do your brave ideals/values last? But can it be done kindly? Can it be done humanely? Can it be done with a modified set of values, created on the fly? I think of Shirley Jackson's classic short story, "The Lottery," in which people stone a selected neighbor to death after drawing their names from a pot. Clearly not ideal, but better than hunting people down and stalking around with sharper-looking teeth and blood on the maw.*** What if people organized themselves in the postapocalyptic world, drew names to see who would be dinner--although perhaps this should exclude women able and willing to reproduce and healthy children--because they make up the possibility of a different kind of future.

Now let's talk depiction of women. Ugh. Charlize Theron appears in flashback scenes as The Weak One--oh, shit, sorry, I meant The Woman. She is the wife of The Man and mother to The Boy. She is portrayed throughout as being miserable and depressive, though haunted and lovely. I have to say, where is the fucking rose-colored beautiful beforetime, though? She's so whiny and bitchy even in The Man's fond flashbacks that I wonder why he liked her in the first place. I guess we're supposed to find her cowardly. But despite what I'm supposed to see, I think she is clear-eyed. In the world into which they've been delivered, her chances on the road are different from The Man's: she could be overpowered more easily, and then raped and eaten. And The Man would have a harder time protecting himself were he having to defend both The Woman and The Boy. In fact, The Woman wants to kill herself and The Boy, to avoid them getting killed or eaten on the road. I can't say I would have done any different in her shoes. She is the only woman in the film who isn't shot down like a meal, kept captive to be eaten later, or about to eat someone else ... until, of course, we meet The Family at the end of the movie.

Oh, man, The Family. What the hell was up with The Family? And I don't even know what to say about that: The Family's woman's speech was one of the longest in the film, and I know we're supposed to be ending on a note of hope or something, but it was also to me one of the creepiest. "I'm so lucky to have found you," "We've been following you," et cetera. I'm sorry, but didn't Charlize Theron teach The Boy about strangers before she walked off into winter to freeze to death? Shouldn't she have given him some life lessons about survival? Anyway. Why is the woman lucky? She has two kids of her own. The Boy is the lucky one, unless The Family does end up eating him, which is not the feeling we're supposed to be left with but nonetheless the one that lingers in my mind. And "we've been following you" doesn't exactly engender warm fuzzies, either.

What is the metaphor we are supposed to take away? What is The Road? The best I can come up with is that in any life you must hold onto your values and remain in your own eyes "a good guy," no matter how else those around you define it, even those most close to you. Consider The Man's values vs. The Boy's: The Man ends up losing his humanity, his faith, and his life, in that order, but The Boy doesn't, somehow, because he can divorce his feelings from his father's. The Man loses his humanity in a more benevolent way (I guess) than the other characters who become inhuman by eating human flesh, but he loses it nonetheless because he becomes unable to see the suffering of others: he cannot share his cans of peaches; he cannot help the elderly; he cannot forgive petty theft from a man with a large knife who could've done a helluva lot worse. Again, we're supposed to shift our sympathies, see The Man as weak, but again I dovetail: I see him as the pragmatic one. What if The Man and The Boy had toodled along down the road giving away peaches every time someone looked hungry/old/vulnerable? I'll tell you what--they'd run out of fucking peaches. Or maybe I'm totally wrong, and McCarthy wanted me to feel this shifting of sympathies, this puzzling out of what to value and when. Interesting. I've almost talked myself into reading the book now, just to think that through further.

I had never planned to write about this film. I didn't like it. I suffered for the whole almost two hours and kept trying to see if Dave wanted to turn it off. And I'm somewhat chagrined to find myself here, writing so vehemently about this film that I so disliked, because of the recent thinking I've been doing about literary criticism. Is any press good press? Does it not say something that at least this film struck such a hard chord within me that it made me sit here and write about it for almost an hour? I mean, there have been films I liked okay, and films I even liked quite a bit, but you don't find me blogging about them. That says something, but it says it in a foreign language, so I'm not sure what. All I can do is continue to try to puzzle this all out.

That said, for a postapocalyptic movie I would recommend, turn to The Book of Eli. There are cruel inhumane cannibals there, too (so there's a criticism!); and another dream of reaching a coast (postapocalyptic worlds are SO coast-centric!); but to me the ways of thinking through what makes us human and how we create societies and why we do and the good and bad things about doing so were so much more carefully explored. I also enjoyed the notion, though not exactly new, about the iconic power of The Book Object and words themselves: that a social construct can completely alter society, for the good or for the bad.

---

* Every animal except one dog? Why did ONE DOG make it? And what was the significance of that? To call into question just how much this world has actually ended? Are we meant to add together the one bug we see in the film with the dog and the single surviving nuclear family that hasn't eaten their kids or had them eaten and realize that the world is beginning anew? That to them, humanity is starving nobly, because they held so staunchly to their values that they'd never eat their kids, or each other, or even their pet dog--they'd rather die than cross that line? That there is hope or something?

** Or is it off the road? The Man has been trying to stay on the road for almost the whole film till he dies, and then The Boy meets the man of The Family who tells him to either come with The Family or stay off the road and fend for himself.

*** Why do cannibals always have shark-like teeth? Does human flesh change the structure of teeth/bone? Also, why must they have blood on their mouths? Did napkins go extinct, too? I want to see an elegant cannibal, with polished silverware, tucked in at a dressed table, with a linen napkin, and some candles lit. I mean, if you have to go there, cross that line, why not try to make it the best situation possible? It's still not fun to eat your kind, even if you're forced to do it to survive, so why not try to trick yourself, to maintain the trappings of humanity in other ways? Also, why not compassionate killing? Why not the prey being somehow chosen in an organized way to die, and then the least painful death possible? Like, I don't know, blunt force trauma to the head? Or a quick sever of the jugular?

It's Official: We're moving back to the Bay!

Today I held the Official Notice in my hands: the hubby and I are moving back to the SF bay area, sometime in late September/early October. Woo-hoo/Waaahh!

Funny ... for the first time in over two and a half years, May in the Bay will actually be back in the bay.

Uh oh. I see where this week is headed.

I resist book series as best I can, because I know what will happen. I was disparaging that anyone would read Twilight, but then I saw one movie and 72 hours later had read all four books. 72 hours for that many pages would be impressive, except it happened because I gave up sleeping. My addiction to the Drake Sisters novels was tempered only by the fact that I had to wait for each to come out. I dare not attempt the Harry Potter books for fear of losing a week of my life to it. So when Wife handed me the first eight books of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, I knew enough to resist. I was in the middle of a MFA. I didn't have time to read without sleeping. I had to function the next morning! Then I had to get AA out on time, and then HWJ!

Sucka just ran out of excuses.

AHHHHHHH! I started reading them last night, finished the second shortly after midnight, and am fully hooked. I had some reservations going into book: ehhh, the writing isn't bad but it isn't spectacular either; ehhh, all this first-person introspection is starting to remind me of Bella Swan and I hate her; ehhhh ... And then we hit sex scene number one.

It's like Twilight with more reasons to like the vampires. It's like Twilight with less sparkles, less heavy petting, and more actual sex, thankgawd. It's like Twilight except less lame, because Sookie is always described by others as hot and most of the time she realizes she's a pretty little blonde; she's more self-confident in a lot of ways, less mopey and emo; and while human, she has her own special power. So, it's like Twilight but better.

Although it is Twilight minus the sexy Native American wolf pack, so like Twilight but not as good.

There goes the rest of the week ... onward to book 3!

Quote of the day: How to write by Rilke (via Marie Howe).

Rilke said a great thing in his letters about Cezanne that he wrote to his wife. Rilke is living in Paris and he's working for Rodin, and his wife Clara is somewhere else, and he's writing to her about being in Paris. Part of what he's writing about is seeing Cezanne's pictures, which are beginning to be shown for the first time in Paris. So he goes and looks, and he goes and looks again, he goes and looks again. He can't get over these pictures, and he's writing to Clara about it, the blue, the apples, the blue and the apples, and I'm not going to get this right, but the spirit of it is, he said, "Cezanne doesn't say, ' look how much I love the apples' in his paintings. He uses his love to paint the apples, so that when you see them, you love them." That's it, isn't it? It's not, look how much I love the apples, or look how well I can paint these apples. It's forging his talent. First he has this talent, then his accuracy and everything he loves about the natural world is forged to the physical apples so that he makes them so when you see them on the blue cloth you say, "oh my god, look at those apples." --An Interview with Marie Howe, by Christian Teresi (The Writer's Chronicle 42(6):10-11).

Writers, celebrate sending out that query letter with Merit Badger.

Because, really, for how often we get rejected, we do deserve a prize for all that vulnerability. For being so brave. For being just this side of egotistical enough to be healthy, such that we don't give up, we keep ripping out our hearts and mailing them into the world, rejection letters be damned!

So. Give yourself a merit badge, writers.

(Thanks to Nathan Bransford for the tip.)

Quote of the day: Anaïs Nin on writing.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin

The Yawp: A gentle, playful reminder that writing is meant to be savored by all, not just those with a MFA.

Too often people see Poetry (and Literary Fiction and Creative Nonfiction) as something dusty and obscure, as something that takes the uppercase, something you need a MFA to read and understand.

Fighting this misconception, Emma Bolden has launched a fabulous new public poetry project: The Yawp. She writes, "The Yawp seeks poetry by the people, for the people, of the people. The Yawp seeks to unscrew the locks from the doors, the doors from their jambs, the pages of books from their spines, and the words from the pages themselves." (She also writes a ton of other smart stuff on The Yawp project and, over at A Century of Nerve, about the writing life.) With The Yawp, Emma reminds us that writing is Art but it is also art--art with a lowercase, art without always being highbrow and exclusive, art from our childhoods, when chalk and sidewalks and crayons and scissors and construction paper were the tools with which we rendered the world as we saw it, when art was play, when art was fun and inclusive. When no one said no. Not even ourselves.

I thank Emma generally for creating The Yawp as a gentle reminder of all this, always for being her inspirational, thought ful, incredible self, and today for featuring my Yawp on her site--wherein my tattoo got famous!

I encourage all of you to submit your own Yawps: "Chalk poems on the sidewalk. Write poems on Post-Its and leave them in booths at fast-food restaurants. Mail poems to your closest friends. Mail poems to people you barely know. Shout poems from the rooftops. Sing them from the mountains like Maria. Be brave, be creative, be poetic!" but also "Stay legal, stay safe, and stay sane."

Also, this public project goes beyond poetry. Any genre of writing is game.

How to Review: A Primer from John Updike.

Asks Anis Shivani on The Huffington Post on August 7, 2010: "Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity?"

Shivani then goes on to launch ad hominem attacks on some of the big names of "Literary Fiction" (and Poetry). Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Aimee Bender, Marilynne Robinson, Sharon Olds, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Louise Gluck, Michael Cunningham (just to name a few)--none are spared his scornful dismissal.

He then proposes that part of the problem is the increasing prevalence of MFA programs, the growing population of MFA graduates, and the sort of nasty incestuousness into which the two feed. The MFA programs churn out the graduates, who go on to write books, and write reviews for each others books, and teach new MFA candidates rules of craft and thus propagate a MFA aesthetic, and then become the people awarding the prizes, which they give to people who follow the aesthetic. Shivani writes, "The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable." Two reactions here: First, really--is it easy? And second, inspiration hardly occurs in a vacuum, and writers have often been proud to name their literary lineage, the authors who came before and influenced them. As for the churning machine, well, I suppose I'm too recent a cog to comment.

And my question for Shivani is: Are these the things to ask? I say so gently, and with much blushing, because of course I've found myself questioning how to critically review a book I didn't like or didn't understand on this very site.

In her articulate and astute response to Shivani, Kerri Arsenault cites John Updike's rules of reviewing. You should absolutely go read her whole blog entry, especially if Shivani's original post irritated you as much as it irritated me, but for now I want to borrow her succinct rephrasing of Updike's rules so that I can have them here on my blog and refer back to them then next time I hold someone else's work in my hands and take it upon myself to judge.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

Fabulous. So well-said. Go, Updike, and go Arsenault for that savvy response to Shivani.

I add to this the words of a friend who wrote to say: "I believe it was Lionel Trilling who remarked that he didn't critique works he didn't like because it was so much more valuable to use his time enriching the reading experience by discussing works he did like."

I think it's important to remember that the writing life is about risk, adventure, experiment. Sometimes the critics will consider a work failed; sometimes the public will, too. And despite all the earnest, shiny new MFAs being churned out (myself among them), the room in which we all sit is still small, and we all need to learn to play well with others. This is not to say if you disagree, shut up, but that critique should always be focused on what is on the page, not what is not, and on the work, not the person who wrote it. I just wonder at all the energy Shivani expended to dismiss others' artistic efforts? If I listen to my former advisor Philip Graham (and I ALWAYS DO), all artistic efforts are a process of constantly failing anyway, but failing better the next time, and learning something from the process.

Harvest.

(Writing inspired by the prompt, "Harvest," for an online writing group I am in, as well as the dream I've had the last two nights.)

The leaves have gone yellow. You are knee-deep in silty water, your hands thrusting through the mud. You feel the cold rush of the mountain stream as it swirls at your ankles and then flows on to the lower patch. There is the sharp pinprickle of crawfish skittering over your toes. You reach for the root of the mature plants, careful not to disturb the keiki, still growing. According to the creation chants, Wakea (sky father) and Papa (earth mother) birthed a daughter, Ho’ohokulani, with whom Wakea then had incestual relations, producing a son, Haloa-naka, stillborn and thus buried. His body produced the plant that was the lifeblood of your people. As you work tenderly to unearth the corms, you wonder about the lesson. That we are all connected, the before-generations and the unborn ones? That we are all dependent upon each other? That fucked-up shit happens even in our most mythical, founding families? That new life is possible, even when you hold a small dead body in your hands? But you quiet your mind and return to tending the kalo. Corm after corm, you watch for the yellow leaves and feel your way around the largeness of tuber, then you pull skyward. Kalo leaves, cooked, become lu’au leaves, good for wrapping meat before cooking underground. Kalo tuber can be cooked and served in chunks; cooked and mixed with coconut milk and flakes to form kulolo; cooked and then pounded into poi. This plant will feed your family. This plant you can harvest and sell to put a roof over their heads. This plant you will harvest, and then check on the keiki, and then uproot any weeds that have settled into the patch. The sun hot on your back. Salt of sweat and seabreeze settling in white crystals on your skin. The trades ruffle the velvet-green leaves, like the flapping of startled wings. Pull skyward, and pull, and pull. You do it in a rhythm, but the muddy sloshes of root coming free from mud take on a less watery sound, each pull start to sound tinny and higher in pitch, and …

BLEEP. BLEEP. BLEEP.

It’s just your alarm. You wake six stories high, with the salt and silt of Hawaii still under your fingernails. During the night, the reconditioned air has sent you back under covers, shivering. You have no family to feed. You have no land to tend. There is no sea, no salt, no kindly sun. Still you feel an inexplicable ache throughout your body when you wake, as if perhaps you were not the one pulling, but the one being pulled.

Inscription.

This morning, I found myself clicking through New York Magazine's and thumbing through The Best Things to Do in New York: 1,001 Ideas in anticipation of not one, but two, dinners out with old friends. (Incidentally, if you live in or are planning a visit to New York, buy The Best Things...! It is co-authored by my friend and fellow VCFA graduate, Caitlin Leffel, and it is fucking brilliant. I've lived here off and on for a number of years, but that book surprises me with new, fun, and often affordable things to do every time I open it.)

Places were suggested, and the debating continues, but meanwhile, I happened to see that the book was inscribed. In general, I'm a big fan of inscribing books. This surprises some people, who think as an aspiring writer I might hold the book as a precious artifact that should not be violated. But I don't think of the book that way at all. I love highlights and underlines and post-its stuck to pages. I don't dogear, but I like the idea of dogears. I like the opacity and mystery of margin notes. Like dad by the river. That article you read last week! Surfaces vs. Depths. So I especially love inscriptions, because they, too, collaborate on the book object, create a one-of-a-kind piece of art. If you receive an inscribed book, when you read or re-read an inscription, you'll be whooshed through time to a moment with a person who may not still be in your life, or may not be in the same capacity. And if you obtain a used book with an old inscription, you have a chance to peer intimately into someone else's life--which, as a fiction writer, to me is FASCINATING. (Check out The Book Inscription Project and see what I mean.)

But back to The Best Things to Do in New York. I bought it new, for myself, and had no recollection of inscribing it. Which is pretty weird, anyway, but evidently I did it. Thirty. I tell ya. It's all downhill. I need to start doing crosswords and sudoku to keep the brain from atrophying further. Anyway, this is what it read:

Dear Self,

On the teetering edge of 2009/2010 and all the changes to come . . . again . . . I urge you to live this time left wildly, fully, completely. Embrace it.

You may never live here again.

Then again, if history has taught us anything, you never know.

--Mayumi, December 19, 2009

This seems awfully prophetic now, glancing in the rearview mirror, because looksee, we didn't leave, after all.

Awfully prophetic, and actually awfully fucking funny. My inscription is so dramatic. Everything is teetering and wild and full of nevers. Life holds you by your collar at its whim; the sooner you learn that, the better. What can you do but learn to laugh?

I love that I left that there for my future self to find. I was one person when I wrote the inscription, and I was another this morning when I found and read it. And the distance between the two is only eight months and several drafts of my Self. I love the reminder, the backwards glance. I think I'm going to start leaving notes to myself everywhere.

Hmmm.

So. I added a Google Search toolbar, but in testing it, it does not seem to actually pull up all the results it should.

For example: putting "tambourine girl" into the search box should bring up at least three hits, but it only brings up the two most recent ones.

TECH-SAVVY, PEEPS: ANY IDEAS?

Quote of the day: Picasso on learning.

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." --Pablo Picasso

Trumpets are required--for I have written a truly short short story.

... and you can read it since the gentlemen over at Frontier Psychiatrist have been so kind as to publish it.

You should take a jaunt on over to frontpsych.com, regardless of my story. Music reviews, bike rides, food and drink recipes, and short prose ... what more could you want? Follow 'em on Facebook and Twitter, too.

That Nathan Bransford sure is smart.

"In other words, all you're learning about when you ask "Do I like this?" as you read a book is yourself," he wrote on July 27.

Today, he went on to clarify: "What I meant by last week's post is not that every popular book is written phenomenally well, but a popular book is doing SOMETHING very well, and it's far more valuable to try to pinpoint what that writer is succeeding at rather than simply dismissing a book as being horribly written just because you don't like it or just because the prose isn't top notch."

This succinctly captures why I have a hard time entering any serious debates with others about the Twilight books or films as well as Eat, Pray, Love. I can call up a list of things that didn't work, I can think about the books and films all very deeply and seriously and get my hackles up as a feminist, etc., BUT the fact of the matter is something kept me reading and watching. I also think Bransford's careful phrasing of being good at storytelling versus being good at writing is a helpful distinction to make, and one I've been thinking and writing around without coming to such a simple, smart explanation.

The face is not a place for disease.

Does anyone in New York love their dermatologist? Because here's my problem: I hate dermatologists. They treat skin as a compendium of possible problems--diseases almost.

What I want is a dermatologist who pampers like an aesthetician. I want someone who's going to hold my face careful in her hands and tell me she has just the thing: an organic, sustainable version of Proactiv, made from virgin rainwater and the inner peel of a tangerine that grows only deep in the Amazon forest. Is that too much to ask?

When I go to the dermatologist--and I've gone to several--there is no tender face holding, no warmed towels and saran wrap on the face, no soothing masks and cooling cucumbers on my eyes. Dermatologists take a careful, clinical glance and say: Your problems are hormonal. You should be on birth control or another prescription for hormones. And by the way, you have a big zit, did you want me to zap that for you?

All I want is the Amazon crushed to my face. A tender touch. Some crunchy, organic facelove.

What to do after you've finished your MFA.

Here's what just struck me: being post-MFA doesn't mean not being a student but, rather, entering a sort of independent-study program. Having written that now, it seems embarrassingly obvious. Give me a break, though, with two deadlines overhead, I haven't had much time till now for post-MFA ruminations.

But it is exciting, isn't it? For example. I just cleaned off my bedside table of the unruly pile of books I kept not getting around to: a craft book by a VCFA prof, a book of poetry I bought two years ago after a reading, a really intimidating volume of collected stories by a very prolific author that makes me wonder if I will ever actually reach the end of the book.

I have placed there instead a well-behaved collection. Philip Graham's The Moon Come to Earth and Sue Silverman's craft book Fearless Confessions, so I can continue learning about and thinking through CNF as I keep trying to write it (my newest experiments in creativity). I almost put Trini Dalton's Sweet Tomb, but then decided no, not yet, not until I want to try again at my novella project. Instead, I picked up the Flash Fiction anthology I bought and left untouched for two years, because a writing friend encouraged a few of my short-shorts and I'm now working feverishly to revise one for publication.

(yay!)

Pause a moment with me. ME. FLASH FICTION. That means short. Is it Opposite Day? Did we fall out of this universe and into another while we slept? All quite possible...

What is flash fiction anyway, right? Well, the editors of Flash Fiction tells us their intention/interpretation of what it is: basically, stories that fit on one page, for which "we can actually see beginning and end at the same time ... no enforced pause in the reader's concentration, no break in [their] field of vision. [Stories that can] be apprehended all at once" (p. 12). Then, they got to layout and realized how bleak and monotonous their book of 72 single-page stories would appear, and so let the stories more organically spill onto one, two, or three pages, according to length.

Speaking of length: We are talking stories between 250-750 words. Related to, but shorter than "sudden fiction" (which allows for another 1,000 words). These are very short fictions, especially for this writer who's much more comfortable with the 9,000+ word range.

But as with any art form, it appears both worthwhile and necessary to ask the questions of what constitutes the form. Modern artists paint white canvases white and get their canvases hung in MoMa (a point on which I am rather fixated and stupefied). Poets can take a Sharpie or white-out or the rubber end of a pencil to the poems of others and call it "Erasure Poetry." Jazz musicians can scat entire songs and later we find ourselves sipping our wine, preparing dinner, and recreating the "lyrics." All this shit fucks with your mind, man.

And so with fiction/prose, with the telling of a story. Prose has gotten this incorrect rep that it's got to be a certain length, right, to tell a story, otherwise what is it? It's probably a prose poem, right? Wrong, say the editors. Instead, they prompt "How short can a story be and still truly be a story?" and hope not to come up with a textbook answer as much as provide 72 examples that speak around possible answers.

So, how short can a story be? As short as still gets the job done.

Well, that was cryptic.

I don't know what that means. I'll let you know when I get there.

I clearly have ADD: A meditation on Justin Cronin's Mary and O'Neil and other assorted shiz.

Reviewing a book is just like waking from a dream. If you don't have the paper and pen on your bedside table when you wake, the whole thing fades--or, if you've seen Inception,* collapses in on itself. And even with the pen at the ready, you can't quite convey the vivid colors, the surreal textures, the improbable architecture of that world. The magic shimmers as you reach the last line and already it is dissipating as you let the back flap relax back into perpendicularity to its spine.

So, having finished Justin Cronin's spectacular Mary and O'Neil** last night at the hour of midnight, right before entering my own dreamlands, it is all I can do to grasp at the pastel portrait left to me some fourteen hours (and perhaps more, in dreamtime) later.

Let me first say this is the best book I've read since early reviewing Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin last spring.

That seems incredible and hasty. Let me pause a moment and think that through.

Actually, it's true. I've read a lot of books since then, and liked them too, but none of them have made me fall in love since McCann's ... not until Mary and O'Neil.

Side note here ... Much has been made of the way the Internet is rewiring our brains (see here and here for great examples),*** and I, for one, definitely see the changes in my own. Before I got so addicted to the Internets, I read books in single sittings--sometimes even multiple books. And I was a better reader, then, too: I didn't get distracted by checking my Gmail every hour. I could allow words I didn't know to exist on the page without going to the online dictionary to get them defined, which then led me down a vortex of word origin till I found myself reading about the schematics of how a greenhouse works, and the Greenhouse effect, and that the be-bop standard "Hot House" shares the same melodic structure as Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love" before I came to my senses. My husband wanted to get me an iPad for a graduation gift, and I said no, vehemently so, despite the wonderful endorsements and all the thrilled hype.**** I'm old school, what can I say. I'll always take the paper and pen over the keyboard, the Franklin Planner pages over the Palm Pilot, the good ole weathered pages over a backlit screen any day. All I need is something else on a screen to read, and more pointedly an Internet-enabled screen. I'd never finish reading another book! This is to say nothing of the texture and particular heft of a book: you can tell how well you've loved a book in the same way the Velveteen Rabbit came to be loved, the wear and tear of use. I like the conversation your fingers have with pages, bending them, thumbing them, the page becoming slightly oiled by your skin, your skin becoming slightly mottled with print. I like how a book shares your life--is caught, dampened, in the same rainstorms; is sanded and bleached by the same beach days; drinks of the same sweating water bottle in the bottom of your tote bag. And so forth. Give me the book itself, my soul cries, don't give me the simulacrum of it--yet another object that has been scanned and subsumed into my unescapable computer screen.*****

So, I would have to say it is amazing that Mary and O'Neil stays with me even now, despite having taken something ridiculous like a month to finish reading it. Even with two work deadlines interfering, which means some 400 printed pages of assorted anthropology, reviews, obituaries, fiction, essay, body image, women rawwwrrr power, etc. taking up space in my brain. That's 400 pages without even counting all the blogs, articles, recipes, and magazines I read for pleasure--and without counting the fact that I've been devouring Sue Silverman's craft book, Fearless Confessions, as I try to figure out where to even begin in terms of writing creative nonfiction.

The point is--for I think I have one, somewhere around here--it takes an awfully good book to spin you so far out of this here and now (which is so here and now it has rewired our brains) that you remain in its world despite the here and now.

Mary and O'Neil is that awfully good book.

I love the conceit of the novel formed by short stories, because I think that is how the tightest, most well-constructed novels are written, anyway. In my two years at VCFA, I became a short story writer. I hadn't been one before: I was always much more comfortable with novel-length projects. The way I saw them previously: novels provided the author room to maneuver. You created a full world and had the time to explore its every little niche. You didn't have to reinvent every time you sat down, sketching out cities and lumping together mountains, building houses and planting trees, peopling the streets. You told your story in the full-throated, pull-up-a-pillow-cushion-because-you're-gonna-be-here-a-while, might-as-well-get-a-drink-before-I-start, and yes-later-i'll-let-you-take-a-bathroom-break kind of way.

Some of that remains true, I guess, but not all of it. Not certainly that last point. Each of Cronin's chapters is a wholly contained, and--let it be said--utterly exquisite, short story. On the one hand, no chapter requires the others, but, on the other hand, once you have finished the book, you will be moved and grateful that Cronin saw these people, this world, through this novel's arc.

Some poet was telling me the conceit behind a poetry collection--that in any book of poetry, the final poem is the book itself, those chosen poems in that particular order. I think that's the exactly right way to think about/with/through Mary and O'Neil.

That's also the exact way I want to think about longer forms--when ever it is I choose to return to them. For now, I am more challenged by learning from the shorter form. The tightness of the prose. The economy of plot, motivation, and "at stakeness," to paraphrase VCFA faculty Laurie Alberts. A world in a grain of sand.

---

* I have. And although I am not as passionate a film critic as everyone who's been vociferously loving and hating the film, and defending their right to love or hate the film--Google "Inception reviews" if you haven't seen the fierce debates--I enjoyed the film as a blend of Matrix, What Dreams May Come, Minority Report, Vanilla Sky-esque "thunking" movies. It was the perfect thing to follow up by sneaking into Salt, starring the delicious Angelina Jolie and requiring no thunking whatsoever.

** Props to Khaliah Williams--a dear, writerly friend and fellow blogger over at Writes, Reads, Knits-- for recommending the book. It would have been condemned to one of my interminably long "Books To Read" lists--yes, I have more than one list, and they are all ridiculously long--had she not raved about the novel, thereby bumping it up to a Priority Read, rather than a mere Interesting/ Curious About This Read.

*** You see? Even reading this blog entry, ostensibly a review of a book, makes you click on five other things, which break your attention. Even writing this review is becoming an Odyssey for my ADD-riddled brain, which is beginning to suspect this writing is taking wayyy too long.

**** For more torn meditations on the benefits of Books versus the iPad, check out Phil Graham's blog entry "In the Blink of a Book."

***** I say somewhat ironically. As I sit here. Blogging. Obviously, on my computer.

Where are you going, where have you been?

Unfortunately, my answers are not as fascinating as Joyce Carol Oates's. But inspired--as I often am--by Emma Bolden's metaphor of caring for our ideas as much as we would a new seedling, here we are. In the interest of moving forward into the writing life, of writing more often (I can't bring myself to say daily, not yet), here we are.

Where we are going is nowhere fast. The move is on a permafreeze. This depresses me, but I soldier on through deadlines and debt and a scorcher of a NY summer, with now also the dreadful promise of a NY winter ahead. Susan Miller says work shizz is about to hit the fan, and I think, really? It's going to get worse? What was July, then? Candy from a fucking baby? Free Will says some cryptic shit about whales and eating small, tasty things, but basically I read this as life's going to be chockfull, and you better learn to discern what is necessary--fair enough. Astrobarry reads me like a book, saying stop worrying so far to the future and live in the day to day, but he doesn't have a much better outlook for me, saying there are big changes afoot--next year. (Ohhh, the WAITING, it KILLS me.) They all think I should get out of the house and exercise more. They're probably right in that.

Where we have been is simple. The reason I (and for that matter, the great Jennifer Meleana Hee) have ceased to blog is because our entire brains are getting sucked dry, like Bunnicula to the carrot, by Hawaii Women's Journal. I use suck mostly as an affectionate verb, except in a few choice cases. The good news is we've both also got some writing (CNF) coming out in Issue 3, due to the presses of the World Wide Web on August 15. There's a teaser for ya ...

And that's all I've got for now.