laggingindicators2-blog

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2018

in july 2016 on this tumblr i wrote:

i cannot be a writer until i have addressed the hangups and unthinkingness and rigidities of my larger person.

and here i am, at the end of 2018 having left my tech job (on the first day of google i/o at that), taken up a 4-month fellowship at an internet publication in NYC, and started an MFA+MA program outside of Chicago, apprenticing myself to a mentor whose work, mind, and ways of being in the world i deeply admire. i continue to be on the quest to dismantle unthinkingness and rigidity, to think my way through, around, and against dis-ease/disease.

too overwhelming to summarize the year, so here’s an aspirational bibliography instead. (on a sidenote: there’s nothing quite like three days of capitalist-consumerist culture at its most saturating — three days in genting highlands, appeasing the appetite and wonder of a 6-year-old at a theme park owned by a casino and built on the precepts of entrapment and insatiable desire — to awaken a hunger for intellectual substance/density and finally drive one to overcome perfectionism in order to blog.)

to ponder:

this provocative discussion on what the lyric essay means to queer writers and writers of color: https://www.essaydaily.org/2018/03/jennifer-s-cheng-april-freely-shamala.html

art experiences that have moved me—how should these feed into my work?

janet cardiff + george buress miller’s The Forty Part Motet, Fort Mason, CA

an my-lê’s exhibition at emily carr university of art and design, Vancouver, Canada

christian marclay’s The Clock, SFMOMA

want to read / watch:

interview with lauren berlant: https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/pleasure-won-conversation-lauren-berlant

I always have had respect for people’s desire for there to be a form that will solve the problem of living. America is one of those forms—the nation is one of those forms. And form can’t solve the problem of living. The constant disappointment at that fact is a lot like the constant repetition in a comic sequence of a slapstick event. Except the violence of the disappointment is not funny! And it has really bad, painful effects on people’s lives.

more lauren berlant: http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/public-feelings-salon-with-lauren-berlant/

a friend in the english dept sent me a link to this talk by paula moya on “race, close reading, and contemporary literary criticism”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfCGoOT12Mw

the paris review, fall 1992, featuring lorrie moore’s “Terrific Mother” and an interview with grace paley: https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/2033/terrific-mother-lorrie-moore

INTERVIEWER: How do stories begin for you? PALEY: A lot of them begin with a sentence—they all begin with language. It sounds dopey to say that, but it’s true. Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant. A story can begin with someone speaking. “I was popular in certain circles,” for example; an aunt of mine said that, and it hung around in my head for a long time. Eventually I wrote a story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” that began with that line, though it had nothing to do with my aunt. Another example: “There were two husbands disappointed by eggs,” which is the first sentence of “The Used-Boy Raisers.” I was at the house of a friend of mine, thirty-five years ago, and there were her two husbands complaining about the eggs. It was just right—so I went home and began the story, though I didn’t finish it for months. I’m almost invariably stuck after one page or one paragraph—at which point I have to begin thinking about what the story could possibly be about. I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

also paley: “There’s an idea that there’s this great mainstream, which may be wide but is kind of shallow and slow-moving. It’s the tributaries that seem to have the energy.”

queer game studies 101: http://ourglasslake.com/queer-game-studies-101/

fred moten’s The University and the Undercommons: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article/22/2%20(79)/101/32673/The-University-and-the-UndercommonsSEVEN-THESES

background on the framingham heart study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159698/

samuel delaney’s times square red, times square blue

Affect and Artificial Intelligence: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/WILAFF.html

pierre bordeau’s From Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste

currently listening to: 

The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint (2014), Ambrose Akinmusire

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Notes from Tin House Workshop 2017

Craft pointers

Witt: Go through each line and ask, “is this true?”

Witt: Reader needs to be able to trust an author’s structure quickly, to give the author the freedom to be lyric

Manual Gonzales: Concrete details give you the space to make abstractions work; build an architecture that gives the abstractions shape

E.g. Marie-Helene Bertino’s short story about a unicorn, which is actually an allegory about the things parents leave behind. When she got stuck with the story, she went back to the physical details (e.g. what it was like to try to stick a unicorn into the back of a Subaru) to avoid the metaphor/abstraction overwhelming the writer and the narrative

Gonzales: “Don’t write about death. Write about the hard pews, the body, the smell of incense coils which clashes with your aunt’s perfume.” Find moments that are shapeless and give them shape

Gonzales: How do you know you’re choosing the right details? Don’t overwrite—not trying to aim for exactitude, but to show details that are significant. “Don’t talk about the type of table if the table isn’t going to sprout wings and fly.” The goal isn’t to capture the world, it’s to create the world and people so that it seems real to the reader (fiction?)

If you’re having a problem with flow and logic, go back to chronology then figure out how you may or may not want to break it

Unexplained references can help contribute to a sense of localism but may not be understood

Sentence fragments can be a cheap way to create a mood

Agent panel

Query letter: Summarize work in a paragraph and your style 

Include bio: who you are, what you’ve been doing

Want to see intentionality in the book you want to write

Mention any genuine referrals/connections upfront

Personalize query letter: refer to something in the agent’s bio or other books

Where you want to be in the world, in conversation with the world and other books

When is the best time to approach an agent?

Fiction: when finished, but partial novel/collection in some exception cases. As polished as possible, preferably not while in career crisis

Nonfiction: as fully formed as possible, but much of nonfiction is still sold on proposals and sample chapters. A proposal is a “business prospectus” so that the publisher can fund you and your research. Note that memoirs tend to operate like .the novel in terms of publishing process.

Talk about: “This is who I am, my project, how I found the project, why it matters, what should it do in the world/where does it sit in the world.”

Divorce ego from the process

When is the best time to send work out? Not when you’re feeling creative (use that time to generate, to write) but when you’re feeling meticulous and business-like

Anthony Doerr: Lecture on similes

See Flannery O’ Connor’s consistent use of imagery “so that you don’t have to at the climactic moment”. E,g, - “line of trees like a gaping mouth”; “wind through the trees like a long satisfying insuck of breath”; “there was nothing but the woods around her”

Homeric similes:

Like _(simile)_ so _____

As a _____ so ______

Emily Witt: Homeric similes are so strange because there wasn’t photography / movies / social media to build a shared ecology of images. They have to do the hard work of explanation.

Successful similes apply pressure to a story with very few words

Effective, un-cliched similes: choose the right incongruity or unexpected bridging, and you will delight the reader. 

Rachel Cusk in “Outline” sends out multiple ferrymen across the river so that readers can have multiple visions.

Buluwayo stacks similes, opens up your brain to increase and intermingle what is said and what is implied

Similes should ferry us across the islands of our selves to others.

Margot Livesey’s lecture on dialogue

“Life-like” dialogue—cannot simply copy from life; we repeat ourselves, forget things, are often ineloquent. A reader would simply close the book out of frustration if written dialogues mirrored real life.

Dialogues are written in “fictional English”, pretending to be vague but often all teeth and meaning

Scenes slow things down, narration/prose speeds it up. Dialogue shows what cannot be told.

Nicholson Baker’s “Mezzanine”: example of digression and dialogue

Nuances to consider:

High or low diction?

Natural pattern of speech, or can we disrupt that pattern/rhythm?

Having characters respond precisely to each other feels too expository and can deaden the scene

How author’s own voices influence a character’s dialogues

Hilary Mantel: both narration and dialogue can create a single consciousness of how people in the 16th century thought and spoke

Panel on “useful landscapes”

Place: how you/characters respond to the physical world, not necessarily just about situating in a particular geography or environment

Not talking about setting can mean not talking about race or class, topics we’re squeamish about but have shared cultural signifiers

The idea of “not having enough talent to not use all the tools available, like place”

Natalie Diaz’s lecture: “Beyond the Kingdom of the Ear: A Wandering of the Wild Desert of Repetition”

Text on the page should not be treated as static; should treat as a body with physicality

Allan Iverson clip on “practice” (repetition)

Repetition traps us between the eye and the ear

Ocularcentrism: bias that ranks vision over other senses

Juhani Pallasmaa (Finnish architect): “Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space, making us mere spectators”

Once a thing occurs, energy has reorganized i.e. opportunity to infuse new energy every time a word is repeated, happening a new; possibility for violence, for tenderness

Definition of anaphora: the use of a word referring to or replacing a word used earlier in a sentence, to avoid repetition, such as do in I like it and so do they

Danger is taken out of repetition if we’re lulled by repetition. Need to re-engage all of our senses

Basketball analogy: Stephen Curry’s crossovers; does a similar thing each time but always fools his competitors

Repetition does not mean equivalence just because they visually resemble each other on the page. They are non-exchangeable, non-substitutable singularities

Diaz’s approach to poetry: Worry less about where it’s placed on the page, if she can feel it with her body. Look at the page in terms of disruption and possibility

Danielle Evans’ lecture on public and private selves

Interior life still best told in writing than in many other storytelling forms.

Ask what work we’re asking interiority we’re doing in our stories (ambivalence, competing desires)

Politics: the system of values where we get to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. In the context of the page, it takes the form of who we decide to depict on the page as fully human

One way to dehumanize people individually and structurally is by assuming that their interior lives are not as complex as other people’s

The gulf between who we are inside and how we present ourselves: can be about anxiety and insecurity and desire but it’s always about power

Who in the story has the power to make other people in the story perform for them? Or has to think of themselves not only as they see themselves, but as other people in the world see them. Who has to consider double-consciousness or an external gaze or some set of assumptions that has to be labored against?

How to play interiority off of action as a way of creating tension and meaning

Zolaria: Tension between childhood and adult selves that creates possibility and anxiety about what the guilt and regret might drive the character to do. Who the character wishes she had been and what she did.

To ask: Is the inconsistency in voice/language contextual? i.e. character code-switching in a different space in the story. 

For a shape-shifting character, how do you know which voice is their real voice? Number of ways to think about the question - including the use of the second person: create an audience that can hear where the voice needs to move 

Desire is not that interesting in fiction, we want things all the time—it’s competing desires

Paul Lisicky’s lecture on simultaneity

Inspired by music (the sound of horn players on the subway platform): how do you get simultaneity on the page? Layers, point and counterpoint in music but only one voice at a time on the page

Parantheses (Woolf), footnotes (DFW), but still doesn’t have the grace of a fugue

My thought: Glenn Gould’s “The Idea of the North” on CBC - strange radio essay

E.M. Forster: the idea of emotional time vs. clock time

Simultaneity implied in the life not led?

Emily Witt’s lecture on reportage and self-inquiry

“The New Journalism” - Tom Wolfe. Fact-based reportage that reads like novels:

Scene by scene reconstruction

Realistic dialogue

Third-person POV as if in the character’s mind

Descriptive eye (subject’s manners, clothing, eating habits, as important to be documented as their words)

Kinetic nonfiction e.g. Jon Krakauer, Susan Orleans

“The New New Journalism” - wrote in the third person, postured as being politically neutral, fact-checkers, author erased from the narrative, no longer testing the limits of form

Writing without referring to the first person 

Proposal for “The New New New Journalism”: literary experimentation, factual accuracy and ethics, reportage as self-help

Creative nonfiction as a coordinate plane: 

y-axis (top: journalism; bottom: memoir)

x-axis: (left: novel; right: essay, criticism, history, biography)

“...Hypocrisies and faultlines of a culture resolve themselves in our personal stories and in our bodies,” and these writers uniquely identify these faultlines in themselves and are able to describe them in the world

[laggingindicators2-blog]

inspired by many essays and essayists, but coming out empty by way of production. took 8 weeks of mindfulness class every tuesday after work in palo alto.

i think about my years in college when Writing didn’t exist with a capital ‘W’; when it didn’t occur to me that being a Writer would be a specific professions or mode of being, a designation, a costume that one puts on; when writing was a means for communicating ideas, getting a job done. more than a decade later i’ve invested possibly too much meaning into this ideal: to be a writer is to be deeply literate, to be intellectually facile, expansive, and generous, to be attuned to craft, to be emotionally truthful, to be a better human being. the irony is that i cannot be a writer until i have addressed the hangups and unthinkingness and rigidities of my larger person. is this the work that i ought to be doing instead?

much time, energy, and mental space dedicated to my day job at the google self-driving car project in the past few months.

works that have inspired me recently:

rachel kaadzi ghansah, “when the light shut off: kendrick lamar and the decline of the black blues narrative”

rachel kaadzi ghansah, “if he hollers let him go”

zadie smith, "sweet charity"

tash aw, "a stranger at the family table"

emily singer, "mapping the brain to build better machines"

danyel smith, "when whitney hit the high note"

david foster wallace on roger federer (from 2006), "federer as religious experience"

mckinsey quarterly, interview with ed catmull on pixar

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a monthlong experiment living in palo alto gave us new-found confidence that we don’t necessarily have to live in san francisco; suburbia doesn’t necessarily shrivel our brains and wither our souls. 

we biked around the faculty ghetto and campus, walked the Dish, spent time with beloved friends whom we never usually see (megan, reuben, ey + family, zi and jen, lisa + family), went on culinary excursions, went to yoga, saw claudia rankine give a talk. there seemed to be more time and energy to connect with each other. i’ve often extolled the conveniences and serendipity of urban living, but didn’t realize how much cognitive overhead it also introduces; the chatter of restaurant-goers beneath my window, the drunk yells and overzealous hipster bands past midnight, the roar of aggro drivers beating the corner traffic light — when in the city, my subconscious and conscious take inventory of all this sensory input, subtracting resources from my already-fatigued, post-work, post-lengthy-commute brain. the quiet of suburbia — sometimes so quiet that it seems like the milky way is emanating a low-grade hum — comes as a relief, a balm, until i wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat; in the absence of distraction, my brain can do nothing else but be confronted with the anxious, existential, self. and maybe that is good.

some other going-ons: hunters point gallery open house, a jaunt to pescadero, a sunday in santa cruz, photography lecture at cca with an-my le, half-day class on statistical thinking at the big g (which piqued my interest for better grounding, and to better understand the different philosophies of frequentist vs. bayesian). 

“Statistics is the science of making decisions under uncertainty” - Savage, The Foundations of Statistics, 1954

“Statistics is about seeing some of the data, and making a statement about the rest” - Cassie K.

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notes from an-my le lecture

- questions to ask when deciding what project to embark on: what am i trying to find out? what personal issues am i trying to work out through this work? process of discovery, not setting out to find a specific answer.

- notion of the “sublime”: situation that is extraordinary that you don’t quite understand; you feel like you’re in danger but you’re really not (e.g. when she photographed this)

- some notion of not giving away too much; not being over the top in a photo, not being too obvious. 

- want an aesthetic experience that is complicated and layered in meaning, which may take a while to decipher. doesn’t have the thing that explains all things clearly, not neatly packaged.

- a desired attribute of her work: to see a photo from far away and walk close and not be disappointed at all, something to be gained from every level of observation.

- appreciation for the idea of a body of work, a suite of images — not a single photo depicts the full complexity.

- when first arrive in a new environment to photograph, need to get past the initial “tourist pictures” that one is tempted to take.

- instagram culture: image culture that is vicarious, digestable in a split second. there’s a vitality in this, but also believe that there is also room for complicated pictures that require a hard reading.

- want photography that argues against generalization.

- on being a “straight”-photographer (versus conceptual): work that argues for the medium: commit yourself to the medium, find the boundaries and push them. notably did not start by trying to argue against the medium.

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months since i’ve written, much less engaged with the literary. i miss the feeling of my frontal cortex absorbing, chewing on, grappling, interrogating, circling, focusing. the summer in bullet points:

- lighthouse writer’s workshop in denver with meghan daum. - unseasonably warm san francisco beach evenings. - work. lots of work. lots of time commuting and working and being drained and tired and too evacuated of motivation or verve at the end of the day to extend myself to the world — physically or intellectually. - austin for work (also warm). hours spent in our test vehicles driving around, which precipitated a sense of urgency to be in bipedal motion; two hours of walking to barton springs and back, sweating furiously under the texan sun.

books: maggie nelson’s the argonauts, speaking to my brain and soul. it improbably straddles the carnal and the cerebral, probably the only book i have encountered which exemplifies an examined (queer) life. movies: mosquita y mari, which stayed with me the day after, with its suffused lighting and quiet, earnest truths of being a teenager. aya, the oscar live action short entry from israel; i admire its mastery of the form, and most of all, its ambitiousness for telling a story that is a few degrees off from what we’ve been primed to expect from the movies.

this has been a summer of miranda july. lots of her. i saw her thrice — once at her mind-bending, tightly choreographed yet chaos-admitting, participatory play, new society; twice at city arts and lectures, notably the most recent interview with thao nguyen and sheila heti. during audience q&a, i mustered the courage to ask a question: if either of them had advice for the second-shift artist, the second-shift writer; those of us who spend most of our hours doing something else, before coming back to our art. i felt uncertain about asking the question. to my knowledge, miranda july and sheila heti had always been artists — it seemed to me that art, for them, is never a second shift. to my surprise, the question elicited a thoughtful, sincere answer, the kind excavated from the depths of experience and genuine struggle:

Miranda: It’s easy to say, “I’ll make my art when it’s easier,” (whether it’s a financially or emotionally easier time) but the truth is most of us humans are in some sort of bind, and that’s why we need art. It’s important to write from that place, that position, the second shift, and that’s the hardest thing but that’s where “it” goes, and it’s the rightful match, it’s not a misplaced thing. You hope it retains some of that blood. (Pause.) Good luck.

Sheila: The morning is a good time to work, even for half an hour. When you have energy.

Miranda: It could even be the one sentence that you come back to later.

Sheila: Before you look at your phone!

(special thanks to phoebe who scribbled notes frantically while all i could do is attempt to capture the moment in my head).

perhaps i had also been narrow in my conception of the second shift. for many parents, having a personal and professional life is the perpetual second shift.

a few other nuggets from the interview:

- on social media: ‘tis a dangerous thing. sharing often takes that edge away from that hunger. the hunger that is needed to actually make art. you have to make something worthy of that connection. - on consuming media: to curate what you consume, to cultivate a feeling that might be suitable for a project. to think of them as ingredients (one part this, two part that). not from a fear of imitating/being influenced by someone else; you can’t be something new. and (by definition), you can’t actually be like the person you’re imitating anyway. - on projects: to have many. so that when you procrastinate on one, you are directing your energies to another (as opposed to nothing).

when encountering miranda july, i think often of my friend, sarah. in many ways, the strangeness and truths of miranda july’s turn of mind remind me of sarah’s, and remind me of the one tattered, ancient piece of correspondence that she sent me eons ago, now stashed away among two boxes of college nostalgia, which i have lugged around to every apartment in which i’ve ever lived. periodically, i unearth this piece of correspondence, read it all the way through from tattered paper to tattered paper, and feel a renewed kinship with those for whom art is vital to living. 

If you’re like me, and I think you are in this way, you don’t worry about the future as much as you ought to because you’re fairly certain that art will save you. Art will save me. Somehow. If I can just live in art, make art, play with art, go to the ocean and shuck art, go to the fields and husk art, go to the orchards and mill art, go to the factories and stamp art, go to the sofa and sink into art, go to the dentist and get my cavities filled with art.

I want it! I want it! I want it!

to close this update: a piece of prose from sheila heti that is breathtaking because it is so precisely crafted, so dense and yet so wonderfully plain-speaking and untortured. 

How Should A Person Be? (excerpt)

by Sheila Heti -----

How should a person be? For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too. I noticed the way people dressed, the way they treated their lovers—in everyone, there was something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose? How can you say, I’d rather be responsible like Misha than irresponsible like Margaux ? Responsibility looks so good on Misha, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux. How could I know which would look best on me?

I admired all the great personalities down through time, like Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde. They seemed to be so perfectly themselves in every way. I didn’t think, Those are great souls , but I did think, Those are some great personalities for our age . Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein—they did things, but they were things.

I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there’s just temperature. So how do you build your soul? At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work you’re required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. To worry too much about Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol is just a lot of vanity.

[laggingindicators2-blog]

post after a long hiatus!

flew to nyc a few weekends ago to attend “stalking the essay″ conference at columbia university. took the opportunity to power through on very little sleep to see friends and check out the newly reopened cooper-hewitt design museum. 

last friday: an impressive, revelatory concert with the australian chamber orchestra at stanford’s bing hall. first, the energy of a chamber orchestra performing on their feet -- as though purely by standing itself they derive a more dynamic, expressive tone than makes full orchestras seem like sleepy, lumbering dinosaurs. but particularly the vision of the aco: their fresh interpretations of oft-recognizable haydn’s “the hen” and the mozart symphony in g minor make me hear these works anew; it didn’t occur to me that you could phrase the opening that way, or articulate that long staccato passage in an unorthodox way, etc.  there are no back-bench sleepers in this group -- every member appears vital, handpicked, each bringing his or her charisma into a sublimely cohesive sound. later on, i realize what it means to be a true artist: 1) to be able to draw out things that we, the audience, hasn’t seen or heard or experienced before even in the established and hackneyed; 2) to achieve this through independence. i am reminded of hilary hahn’s observation: 

Like many people, once I’d finished my formal training, there came a point when I realized I was going to have to decide everything myself — in my case, everything from how to phrase the music, to what repertoire to learn next, to general career decisions, to how to shape my own self-image, to the details of taking care of myself. It’s not that I was unable to think independently at that time; it was that I no longer had the reassurance that someone more experienced would step in. I gathered advice, of course, but ultimately, the decisions were my responsibility. I think this is a common experience when transitioning out of life as a student, and it’s a really important one.

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scrappy notes from “stalking the essay 2″

the new essay: leslie jamison, lia purpura, meghan daum, moderated by amy benson

- “taking a line for a walk” - paul klee - journalism as a spiritual fact checker, an essay is a quest, not just reporting - writing as a way of metabolizing external experiences. the feel of a particular mind on a page, intimately constructed ways of saying - use sensibility to guide you to another level of interpretation - do the fieldwork demanded by an intellectually curious essay. - the role of impersonality: life events not as the subject of an essay, not attracted by spectacle - the reading life is part of one’s lived life, whatever one is reading makes its way into an essay - essay = quality of mind + how language sustains an idea - a few works mentioned to revisit: colson whitehead’s colossus of new york, helen macdonald’s h is for hawk, leslie jamison’s piece on sri lanka - the job of an essayist: be generous with our ideas, give readers something worth their time. e.g. when you go all the way across town to see a friend, it feels like a betrayal of your friendship if your friend doesn’t offer up their honest, authentic selves. similarly, a curated response is a betrayal of the interaction between writer and reader. - suggestion: write against the form (self-note: dfw and remember the lobster for the gourmet magazine?) - challenges of being an essayist: 1) being a chronic pleaser, 2) the associative tyranny when suddenly everything that happens to you relates to the piece you’re writing (”the manic headlamp”). need the editorial sensibility to push back against all those filaments that seem to connect the world to what you’re writing about.  - need to keep the space for that corrupting moment in personal experience which may or may not fit into your work - craft pointers: 0) establish a contract with the reader: what sort of piece is this going to be? is it performative? an extended riff?  1) set out your relationship to the subject in the essay. 2) let your reader into your discovery process, not just plunking down the facts. determine where one’s ignorance ends and the journey begins. 3) consider how many different kinds of narratives can be used for a piece, try them out: “is this gesture something you’re interested in? is this how you want the reader to respond?” maybe it doesn’t have to be a memoir; could be a profile of someone else that reflects on the topic. if you feel a strain, an energy in the piece that isn’t yet fully expressed, you may be hamstrung by form or convention. 4) acquaint yourself with what you feel you responsibly need to know as you write your piece; be open to what the world offers. 5) turn the thing that crumples you into strengths - idea: comments on the web now replace man-on-the-street interview?

book-length essays: wayne koestenbaum, geoff dyer, laura kipnis (moderated by margo jefferson)

- interesting recommendations: margo jefferson’s “i’m michael jackson”, geoff dyer “out of sheer rage”, terry castle’s “the professor”, milan kundera’s “testaments betrayed”, LRB “against self criticism”, raymond chandler, james baldwin’s “fire next time”, jamaica kincaid’s essays, david shields’ “reality hunger”, nora ephron’s essays. - essence of the essay: provisionality and tentativeness. like jazz standards, topics for essays exist in order to be able to do it again (e.g. didion’s “goodbye to all that”). it’s inquiry in progress — not after the fact; it’s the stylistic hum of a mind at work, pondering and mulling. - “I” as a hegemonic pronoun? anthology of essays edited by daum, “selfish, self-absorbing, ...” - kipnis: critical essays in the sontag’s tradition. the etymology of nitpicking: mother gorillas picking baby fur clean. - novelistic essay: learn to unclench, dilate, expand in the terrain. abeyance from the clutter of specificity; the importance of negative space (away from historical or biographical details).

essayists/novelists/critics: marilynne robinson, jonathan lethem, hilton als (moderated by richard locke)

- als: writers are inconsolable, their trauma is about language - difference between commissioned work vs. independent work - lethem constructs a fictional character that tells the story of the topic on which he wrote the essay. generally: do we, in fact, concoct a speaker/alter ego before we begin writing the essay. we are still answerable to this alter ego. - robinson: essays as a response to historical amnesia, against important models of reality that are untrue. a project of cultural rescue. e.g. people don’t know about the idealism and self-sufficiency of the midwest, without reliance in slavery. not a cultural dead-zone. - quote from r.schumann: composing is remembering a song that no one has heard. - essay claims energy from being uncloseted from the imagination.  - an essayistic spirit can encompass the novel. e.g. Tolstoy. - pointer from als: find one or two trusted readers who will not behave badly with a piece you wrote.

the essay in other media: the essay in other media - roz chast, maira kalman, jeff porter

- kalman: the impossibility of february, images as starting points, kalman + nico muhly. start from a point of not knowing, looking at ephemera. e.g. kalman imagining herself as abe lincoln’s girlfriend. (self-note: reminds me of doretta lau’s awesome short story about dating glen gould). - typography: an immediacy of hand through painting. type can communicate a sense of whimsy.  - kalman’s piece on toscanini: an example of getting at memoiristic bits through toscanini (”we’ll meet at toscanini (bust)” and the toscanini auction). - decisions —both the mundane and the monumental — are around you. - roz chast: cartoons and essays share a sense of compression. - cartoons used to be called “idea drawings” by the new yorker. - jeff porter and his thesis on the radio essay: sound makes the essay more radical; there is a real voice (i.e. vocalization), vs. the voice of a writer in text. - examples: edward merle + CBS and immersion reporting (”this is england”). jean shepard “a voice in the night” monologs (mcluhan called shepard “the montaigne of the airwaves”), susan stamberg on all things considered, the first female radio broadcaster. npr then stood for an antagonist to power and sobriety (very different position from today). they looked for radio essayists with different voices and accents. today: public radio exudes an ethos of candor that excludes irony. (self-note: what about alastair cooke’s pieces?) - cbc and glen gould radio piece, “the idea of north”: employed cross-talk, fugue-like contrapuntal structure. an extended essay in radical acoustic territory; he expected his listeners to follow the threads, as though reading james joyce’s ulysses. demands serious listen, can’t listen casually in the car, so when npr heard his stuff, was determined not “radio-friendly.” - radio storytelling eventually replaced by the tv. - now suddenly the renaissance of radio documentaries, at the same time that there is a resurgence of the essay. is the culture embracing a strange kind of candor? - podcast as an alternative medium because there is no place for a new kind od sound art/radio essay on public radio. - at the heart of it, sorrow and loss as a bedrock and counterpoint.

[laggingindicators2-blog]

took a break from work on friday to attend a safety driver course at sonoma raceway — a ton of fun learning how to handle skids, lane changes at 60mph, and generally feel the limits of the car. work is tough but engaging; the technical complexity of the stack is invigorating, and it's easy to get behind the vision of transforming transportation.

saturdays. the heart and soul of a weekend; sunday, its neighbor, is too transitional and too fleeting to count. it has been a weekend of piano practice and litquake events. my fingers return easily to the muscle memory of pieces played when i was young —  debussy, telemann, chopin. i can close my eyes and listen to the sound without worrying about how a score is translated to the topography of the keyboard. 

some notes from the past week's litquake events below:

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"state of (dis)union: culture, education, and politics"

- panel with rebecca solnit, astra taylor, roxanna dunbar-ortiz, and lewis buzzbee. - a hodge-podge panel covering the vast expanse of education, marginalization of indigenous minorities (or america's "founding genocide", as dunbar-ortiz calls it), feminism/patriarchy, and technology. - solnit calls the internet a "hell of patriarchy" and silicon valley as a place run by "white libertarian guys" — environments that are not conducive for promoting public good and civil society. my take: given the current turn of events with the tech bus protests earlier in the year and misogynistic threats in the gamer community and twittersphere, there is a lot to solnit's observation. but taking a blanket activist's anti-technologist stance and failing to ask deeper questions detracts from the discussion (questions i would have liked to hear discussed: why is this happening? who are the perpetrators? what is to be done when the internet's anonymity, openness and transparency facilitate greater freedoms as they do greater tyrannies?)  - in our chat afterwards, solnit is curious about prevalent use of the phrase "drinking the kool-aid" by my generation, and how it is appropriated/desensitized from its original context of the jonestown massacre. she says she might write a piece about that. - factoid from buzzbee: san francisco purportedly has the fewest children per capita than other major cities in the united states. - "empathy is an imaginative act" - afterwards in the lobby, had a nice chat with astra taylor, whose documentary "examined life" i had watched several years ago. we talked in turns about her work and what i'm trying to do in the balance of my time outside of work, about the philosopher ruth chang whose work on incomparability and incommensurability i find interesting, especially in the space of making hard choices (thanks for the pointer, alice, wherever you are).

art of the short story

- this panel was moderated by namwali serpell, who read an excerpt from her humorous and salient "book of faces." - i had heard about molly antopol's anthology at last year's litquake stegner fellow panel — pretty cool to see her book published a year later and up for the national book circles award. - find a character that comes to the field with the most complicated point of view; possibly more interesting: character who does something to someone else (not the one being meted upon). - vivian gornick: point of view originates in the nervous sysetm. never let anyone read your early drafts if they are not on your side. there is an art to giving feedback. a few references mentioned at the panel: liz lerman's framework for critique, carol bly's "beyond the writer's workshop." find readers who can read from the consciousness of your piece. - different kinds of loneliness when it comes to writing: the vacuum of selfl-loathing when you're about to write but you're not in flow; delicious loneliness when you are deep in work with momentum. - recommendations from panel: "a report to an academy" by kafka, "want" and "long distance runner" by grace paley, edward p. jones' short stories, "bullet in the brain" by tobias wolf.

art of the novel

- fantastic panel with lots of pointers; yiyun li, kathryn ma, angela pneuman, richard kadrey, moderated by joshua mohr.  - started off the panel with encouraging aspiring writers to tap into each of our "unique system of thinking", not popular pressures. - think about what it means to have an active audience, one that is happy to do the work to rise to meet you.  - the opening of a good novel can teach you how to read it. (personal note: think julian barnes and "a sense of an ending." or kazuo ishiguro's "remains of the day") - draft 1 is often about working quickly through something to see what you had to work with. "outrunning the thinking part of one's brain", "stab around for a vein [...] until i know where the veins are." - try switching writing methods when you're stuck (computer > by hand and vice-versa) - some questions: who's going to tell the story? what's the tone and diction of the piece? - some writers write instinctively, some sketch out the scaffolding of the piece - might be helpful to think about the time span of the novel (not the length of the novel). - think about point of view (e.g. first person that talks right at you, vs. third person who is more distanced). - most of writing is failing.  - what about psychology and back story? - back story that shuts a story down vs. one that opens it up. a backstory that shuts down a story is one that creates a rigid, deterministic relationship between the past and present and clamps down on complexity, e.g. he is that way because of this one defining trauma of childhood. personal note: reminds me of the andre gide quote: "tyranny is the absence of complexity." - a back story should never completely explain a character — it would be too reductive. - flashbacks can give too much weight to the back story.  - but back story can also be weaved into the present. if back stories are important, they are in the present, not just in the past. this is what makes characters psychologically rich/complex. but you need to do this without a "big bolus of explanation." - personal note: what about the back stories in "orange is the new black"? are they too reductive? do they add psychological complexity or do they shut a story down? - every one on the panel has a different approach to consuming books when they are in the thick of a novel. some shut out work that is too similar to their voice and style for fear of aping another writer's voice. some re-read for inspiration and guidance to see how another writer has solved a particular problem. when you find out how another writer has brilliantly solved a problem, steal the technique. find ways to apply it to your own story. - fine line between relatability vs. likeability. - fine line between revision vs. dismantling. - a compelling book is one for which "you're willing to mortgage your real future to find out what's going to happen in the book" (i.e. stay up all night even though you have to wake up at 6am to go to work). - the danger of MFA programs: the notion of a "perfect" book, one that is formulaic in craft and technique. would rather aspire to have rough edges and be flawed, but be brilliant and imaginative.  - recommendations from the panel: "we the animals", hitchcock films, william trevor's short stories. - chatted with yiyun li afterwards about how she switched from being a scientist (she was studying for a phd in immunology) to a writer.

[laggingindicators2-blog]

Biking by Mountain View Park near Google's offices on Thursday, I saw a hawk suddenly take off with a squirrel — a still, brown body — in its talons. A few yards away, a man with large muffs over his ears paused the grass cutting machine, gesticulated at me from atop the driver's seat, then tracked the path of the swooping hawk with an outstretched finger. We seemed like two mutes: Look at that, he said wordlessly, as he continued to point and I continued to stare. Our complementary gestures seemed amplified and poignant; for a brief moment we had witnessed an event out of the ordinary, and were glad to not be alone in the witnessing.

[laggingindicators2-blog]

on the caltrain: a woman wears a silver necklace with a 1-point scrabble E as pendant; she holds a folded tabloid sheet, turned to the crossword page. the man next to me is color-correcting his photos on a Macbook Pro. warm sunlight filters through the windows, mottled with murky droplets of condensation like frozen gray rain on plexiglass. 

this past week:

- a week wholly immersed in work; establishing process, preparing for a demo, starting to get into the details of UI flows. i'm easing a bit more into my new work. perhaps for the first time in the past three weeks i feel stunned, thrilled to be working on something i wouldn't have envisioned as a kid: cars + robotics software. chj gives me a copy of adele wachman's book (they are related by marriage) and mentions an article in the atavist. it feels gratifying to be seen as both a technologist and an aspiring writer.

- while driving to work today (a brief saturday duty at the office), i listened to bits of minnie driver talking about her jazz album; two great fragments: "someone told me once that karaoke means a version of empty orchestra." 

Well, the story went that my - when my father first saw my mother, as she walked into a restaurant, and he watched her come in out of the rain in London and was flustered and late. And she made her way across the restaurant, actually to the table that he was at, and "Fly Me To The Moon" was playing when he watched her walk across this room. And they always told me this story and I always - it was such a beautiful title. I always had this idea of how the song sounded. And they told me that story from when I was very young. And probably when I was about 13 or 14 I actually heard "Fly Me To The Moon," the Sinatra version, which it was, and I remember being - well, not really horrified but surprised that there was a kind of swinging, gin-soaked song [...] 

It wasn't this - how I imagined when a man is watching a woman and falling in love with her. So actually, this version that I do is, I think, the idea of the song that I had in my head when I was little, which was this stripped down, sort of haunting ballad

- on the drive back, i listened to jennifer egan on writers and company — for a brief moment amidst a meditative state, i had a brief collision of ideas that seems ripe for exploring via writing. those ideas vanished, evaporated after several minutes, and i spent the rest of my drive somewhat in grief. perhaps i should take a walk and re-listen to egan — though walking, fundamentally a different form of motion, primes a different mental state than that which is created by that strange confluence of physical actions that we, as a civilization, have invented, internalized, and actuated repeatedly; a series of actions passed down from one generation to another in the timeless rituals of learning how to drive, earning parental trust and being bestowed the family car, and eventually buying our own.

- reading, but still haven't been writing. i'm excited about recordings of this year's bbc short story prize nominees for the commute down. on the cinematic storytelling front, my interest has been piqued by two teasers: an innovative rendition of hamlet by the royal shakespeare company, and the opening five minutes of bob fosse's all that jazz:

[laggingindicators2-blog]

since i jumped headlong into the thick of work on a new team/project, i've been terribly remiss at writing; one of a myriad of tiny daily failures that accrete - failure of the blank page, failure of the dangling participle, failure of starting to write. more than ever i need a scrappy personal blog to motivate the self and document writerly inspirations, hence an extension to my original sabbatical blog. 

in the past 7 days:

- went to the "women in clothes" book launch in the mission with mm. we are each reminded of the other half of ourselves who need art in our lives, outside of our passion/dedication to our day jobs. i asked heidi julavits about pitching the book to the publisher and the mfa, sheila heiti about her next project, and leanne shapton about whether some of the responses they received from the interviews felt performative.

- i've started to read james baldwin's collection of essays in "notes of a native son." i'm drawn to a particular turn of phrase from last night's attempt at reading, which i will kidnap from its original context; it articulates the kind of hedging i usually do — "the wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping." baldwin is formidable at a sentence level, every sentence has been worked and reworked to a smooth, measured lyricism that propels the reader through his arguments and anesthetizes us to flaws in logic, if any.

- read a paris review interview with john edgar wideman, whose work i am just beginning to acquaint myself with. on stories that some of his family members told:

The stories were performances. It was how somebody told it, not the content. Just to reproduce what was actually said wouldn’t do it at all. There isn’t the energy, there isn’t the call and response. They are not set pieces, but folk art, folk performance.

he also points out something that i'm missing in my current writerly education; the vital richness of an older generation's voice from my own culture:  

So there I was a little kid and I was around every age bracket and not only seeing them, but hearing them talk—being taken around the neighborhood by my grandfather and meeting his cronies. It was very rich in that way.

- watched "a single man" a weekend ago. it's lush, generous, a visual indulgence, and a poignant portrait of what it means to lose someone, set against the backdrop of homophobia. christopher isherwood's novel, in contrast, from what i can tell, is somewhat glib in narration but not emotionally exposed at the outset. in deciding to open with an intimate view of grief and the details of the tragedy at the outset, tom ford succeeds in setting up context in short order and establishing empathy for the protagonist george falconer. beautiful art direction with hints of high production value fashion/perfume ad (and yet it works). colin firth's performance is incredibly moving. 

- p sent over some design reading that seems rich for mining. made my way through fragments of "art and fear: observations on the perils and rewards of artmaking." some of the passages apply equally to art as it does to my work in tech. (e.g. finding a balance between unworkable fantasies and constantly generating to-do lists). "a finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution."