What I'm Reading

I do this: I read multiple books at one time, and I think I always have, or since university at least (and maybe that’s the genesis—reading various textbooks at once). I like the sense of freedom, and juxtaposition, how the books speak to each other, in a way, though it has to be said that in this case, each one is very distinct. It’s possible, too, that COVID is influencing my reading—well, I’m sure it is—or at the very least it forms a background against which the tone of each book is highlighted (for instance, I very specifically turned to Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning last week). Since the shut-down, I don’t actually have more time for reading, as the level of care-giving has risen, though it seems imperative, more than ever, to make the time. My initial restlessness and lack of concentration (or rather the concentration on many other things that were deeply important) has begun to be replaced by a desire to think, read and write. So this is my current (not quite finished) reading rotation.

Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity is a fascinating look at death practices around the globe, and in particular the corporeal aspects, as in what gets done with the body after someone has died (which also leads to the provoking question, in a few of the cultures she examines: does the body left behind in some way have life? I found this very interesting and unexpected, that the question of an afterlife in certain regions involves keeping the physical body in a kind of stasis, protected as much as possible from decay).

I found a used copy of Lewis Hyde’s classic The Gift a while back, long before COVID, and I’m utterly surprised by it, also. For those of you who’ve read it, you already know it’s a book about creativity, but also something more; it is an entirely unusual investigation of creativity. The first part of The Gift is a scholarly examination of gift practices, using the lens of folk and fairy tales, indigenous histories, and mythologies, to illuminate not simply the process of gift-giving or the why, but the energy and mechanics that enliven what passes from one person to another. He uncovers what is almost a set of rules for that energy, or if not rules exactly, tendencies. Hyde is setting up the reader to then understand creativity, which functions as a gift.

Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals is a bit of an echo of the times we’re in, as it’s set in a dystopian future (though the cause of the chaos and emotional isolations is environmental, rather than specifically viral). I’m enjoying it immensely (and there is a troubled character who is a contemporary dancer, who I can’t help but like). There is certainly something to be said for reading dystopian books during this particular moment in history.

I had started Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and somehow got pulled away from it. The good part of that, I suppose, is the re-discovery. In fact, it’s the sort of book to come back to and write about with some depth, which I think I will do. I loved her book Flights, which won the Booker International Prize (this is a prize for books in translation and each year the long-list is a bonanza of amazing, intelligent reading). Drive Your Plow was likewise nominated. It was published in Polish in 2009, and then translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018. I discovered, too, that there is a film adaptation of the book (called Pokot), though it seems unavailable for streaming at the moment; hopefully that will change. At any rate, the novel, which is a murder mystery that doesn’t play to the tropes, has me thinking a lot about the experience of reading layered, meaningful, intensely thoughtful work and how to describe the mystery—not the functional one in the story—that seems to be in the spaces and margins. And how vital that experience of reading work like this seems. The writers I love, and this applies certainly to Tokarczuk, do a lot of combining and drawing on disparate fields of study and thought, and there is the combining, too, of concrete and more nebulous aspects (in this case, death is a literal and recurring event), the lived world and the dream world, or aspects of the real that verge on dreams or something archetypal or mythological in feel. In Drive Your Plow, Tokarczuk folds into the narrative not only the question of who is murdering hunters, but also feminism, animal rights, astrology, the poetry of William Blake and ageism, to name a few of the larger aspects.

I’ve also re-read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, as many people are at the moment (among his wonderful observations of a time of terror, he touches on the psychology of not knowing when something will end, which speaks, in a small way, to our current situation) and Susan Sontag’s journal, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (this is a great book to read in the small hours of the night if I happen to wake up, as her entries are already fragmented within a continuous flow of her ideas and the content isn’t the Holocaust or a dystopian world).

Writing Acknowledgments

Last week was Thanksgiving, and I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude and expressions of it. Eckhart Tolle says, to paraphrase, that being grateful for something is to pay attention to it—the thankfulness can be wordless; the point is the quality of attention. Gratitude has definitely developed a public face and something people post about on Facebook or Instagram. I’ve seen various friends over the years with a daily gratitude practice that then becomes their social media update; it becomes clear that the posting of thanks is something deeply separate from the original practice and maybe even undermines it. Not to knock the saying of gratitude out loud, of course, and we all feel good when someone thanks us (don’t we?), especially when we weren’t expecting it (or demanding it on some subconscious level). But we all know true alignment when we see it, and genuine gratitude, too. Maybe thankfulness is best when it’s a somewhat private affair, spoken between two people or to no one in particular—or not spoken but felt—and maybe that’s when it has the chance to be the most powerful, and something like a wonderful secret. Maybe that’s when it’s more of a practice, something quiet and without agenda.

I’ve been thinking of the last tasks of writing MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, all the signals that a book is coming together, and creating the acknowledgments is one of them; and so I had to come up against whatever feelings I have about public thank-yous. And it made me wonder if, at the same time that I sometimes enjoy reading the acknowledgments for a book (maybe because you can get another sense of the writer, one that you didn’t glimpse in the rest of the work), I’m a bit uncomfortable with long ones, especially at the end of novels where they can seem over-the-top and unhinged from the real. They can seem to have a competitive heart. Nonfiction is possibly the exception (and I seem to recall the acknowledgments for KNOW THE NIGHT as running to the longer side, in part because it was my first book; would I write it shorter now?)—there tend to be numerous sources to thank and point out, permissions people, even institutions. So maybe what I’m saying here applies more to fiction. 

When I see long acknowledgments, I sometimes wonder if what I’m seeing is really the immense pressure, unconsciously expressed, for status that’s driven by social media (nothing against social media per se; everything has a dualistic nature and a shadow side), something like a desire to protect oneself with a complexly-rendered shield of helpers. Or at least to give the appearance of it. #squadgoals. If I thought that the gratitude was simply gratitude—that is, without another intention behind it—I wouldn’t be writing this. And I would have to include my own experience here, which is that when I’m writing my gratitude I find it impossible to escape the social-construct aspect of it and that the enormous thankfulness I may feel (and most certainly do) and its nuances and surprises, how it is often aroused by very simple occurrences, has little to do with the expectations and social conformity of writing the acknowledgments page. At the same time, getting to that point feels like a privilege, something to be considered deeply and savoured... but then let go of. You say your thanks and hope it is enough. But for whom? The people you’re thanking, the readers, yourself, the cosmos? I noticed in Ali Smith’s latest novels that she simply makes a list of names and that’s it. No indication of what position the person behind the name fulfills, how they rendered help, or how close they are to her. There’s a very spare hierarchy in that it’s a list, but that’s all the hint you get. And I really, really like that. It seems a very Ali Smith thing to do, too. 

Anyway, in the end, to each their own. It would certainly be a shame if all acknowledgments could only be a few words (though using only a few words has become so decidedly unique, that it now seems radical) or had to be any particular way. If someone has really dug down and done their work and made a long acknowledgments that rings with whatever in them is genuine, then who am I to suggest they shouldn’t? It would be amazing, though, to see other, completely different expressions. What if the acknowledgments was just an image—maybe even an abstract one? 

When the day came that I sat down to write the acknowledgments for Molly, I decided to go toward the short, if not the bare list of names. I’ve been practicing metta (also called lovingkindness) meditation, and it suddenly came to mind and seemed appropriate. But whatever I wrote down is only a shade of the real experience. How do you say, once you’ve finished a book, everything there is to say about what goes into it and the people—not to mention chance opportunities, the sheer luck—who helped you along the way? 

Which is maybe exactly why many writers choose to devote pages and pages to it... 

Completing a Novel... Part Two

Photos for MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH

A space forms after a big project; small ones, too, actually. I’ve had this feeling after finishing short pieces, like a story or an essay, and it happens especially after finishing a book. And it happens in stages, because finishing happens in stages—you complete a round of edits and there it is: a space forming, or a pause that’s both bright and shadowy. The world had been full of words and then suddenly it isn’t. Or the words have changed, maybe, neglected ones coming to the surface, or maybe it’s images or sensations. Something, anyway, is different.

Some writers have the next book already queued up, so one project is simply exchanged for another in a seamless word fabric. When I finished my story collection, I was in that position, having already started MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH because it began, literally, as one of the stories before I understood it wanted to be something bigger and removed it. But I still took a pause, or rather the pause took me, and there was that space again, both welcome and uncomfortable. If you’re too hooked on doing, the space can be disconcerting. Somehow boundaries have shifted, gotten bigger and maybe unwieldy. New terrain, or old terrain that had gone unseen for a time. But I know better than to avoid spaces and pauses; they’re maybe the most important “thing,” for not being a thing.

Anyway, the photos above. They’re of Washington Square Park. Molly, my novel’s protagonist, is a contemporary dance choreographer who has a seizure on a sidewalk in Manhattan—right on the edge of WSP. Her seizure lasts seven minutes, which is the crux of the book, as she experiences a confluence of her past and her present, including her secrets, and the people who have gathered around her. WSP is the kind of smallish park that seems big in memory. It has an outsized history and presence and colour. The trees and plantings in it are wondrous. The people, too. The wanderers and settlers and chess hustlers. There’s an enormous English elm that’s perhaps 300 years old, and there are some 20,000 people buried beneath the park’s surface. Walkways weave through that are made of hexagonal pavers. There’s the fountain, of course, and the gleaming white arch, and the beginning of Fifth Avenue. It’s been the scene of untold protests and subversive gatherings, and you can feel that energy when you’re there, all the possibilities.

So, the photos. I took some of them in summer and some in winter. Naturally, the park changes dramatically and when the branches are bare and you can see the curving shapes of them against the sky, there’s a spookiness and atmosphere. Not unfriendly in the least, but certainly stopping. The photos I took are mostly very simple, and quiet, and I avoided shooting people or the arch or the fountain. I took numerous shots of the hexagons, and some of the chess pieces, and a couple of pigeons; also various bits of litter: an old crossword, a folded blue-lined paper, a crumpled napkin. A small delicate white feather. When I shot there in summer, I was with my husband, and the park was full of movement and people. I was busy, focused on my camera, with my gaze mostly to the ground, looking for interesting items. I missed, according to my husband, the bare-chested woman sunning herself on a bench very close to me. And no one paying much mind, this being New York.

Back to space. I realized the photos are a kind of space or pause. The mind can’t help making its interpretations, it has to come up with a story or a meaning of some kind when it sees a picture—it’s almost helpless to the process, I think—but at the same time the image in amongst prose forms a void, or it can. And that’s one of the reasons that I find images within novels and short stories so fetching. There’s a shift, even one that’s in a blink, and something opens up that feels, if you’re open to it, almost eternal. Or something like that.

What Does Fiction Do?

I love this, which was spoken by one of the characters in Vi Khi Nao’s wonderful Fish in Exile. The idea that we can contain in stories the suffering inherent in being human. I think what Vi Khi Nao is saying here (which is not to assume that a character says the thoughts of the author, of course, but I have a hunch that here, at least, she’s in cahoots with her character) is that the act of containing makes the hardness of this place more bearable. Maybe the containment is a transformer, too, and shows that the suffering can be beautiful in some way, or underscore beauty, or it can at least become interesting or useful if we have a small distance from it. We see the tragedy in a particular story and it becomes both ours and not ours.

A writer friend on Facebook the other day posted that she’s been having difficulty just being, that the weight of all the current political and environmental disasters is keeping her in bed; she wondered how other people were managing to carry on as if these things weren’t happening. She was both being accusing and seeking advice—how were they doing it? I think she was mistaking other people’s Facebook updates for actual happiness, but maybe that’s beside the point. It’s possible to suffer (acutely, even) and still take out the trash. Whether a particular tragedy is happening to us or happening on the other side of the globe, the suffering belongs to us in some way. Because we recognize it, because on some level we know. Because we’re all human.

I was listening to Russell Brand’s podcast (an absolute favorite of mine) the other day when he was interviewing the Turkish/British writer Elif Shafak, whose latest novel Ten Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World has been nominated for a Booker. I loved the interview so much, I went into the Youtube rabbit hole and watched a TED talk she gave where she talked about suffering and global political divisions, and that she sees fiction as a means to bridge the divide, that we can experience empathy or a kind of union through reading. I don’t know if she’s right—it’s not a new argument, I realize, as many others before her have offered fiction as a kind of moral or spiritual joiner—but I don’t know that she’s wrong either. I suppose it depends entirely on the reader and their particular openness. The Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon wrote in his essay collection, The Book of My Lives, about the discovery that his former mentor, a professor of literature, was actually a war criminal; he made clear that novels didn’t stop his mentor from becoming a monster. I take his point. I wonder, too, if we say things like “fiction creates empathy” because of an unconscious desire to bolster fiction’s reputation at a time when people seem to read less and less.

Having said all of that, I think the part of me that is cynical about fiction’s empathy-generating aspects (and also wonders why we can’t simply know that fiction is vital because it is vital, without having to defend its existence) has been affected by maybe a too-big dose of rationalism, and the part of me that likes the idea of fiction performing a kind of magic act has been energized by my growing interest in the things we can’t explain, the mystical side of our transactions with art (and people, too, for that matter). So I was reasonably swayed listening to Elif Shafak, who seems to be a wonderful voice at a compelling intersection of politics and mysticism (and I can’t wait for her book to arrive).