Saturday, August 27, 2005

sigh I find I no longer have any interest whatever in The Sopranos, no longer care that much for coffee drinks as pleasure food, don’t even get me started on popcorn. I couldn’t find a long dress and so I have stayed instead in plaid flannel pajama bottoms and lightweight cotton cardigan. Other than an hour or so with Brian discussing, among other things, the nature of time--that is, what year it is, what month it is, what day it is, how old he is, how old I am, how old Apple is, and when will there be another birthday party--and 30 minutes on the phone with my Sacramento friend talking about the writing of Wallace Shawn (“The Fever made me want to join the Peace Corps”; “Oh no! It’s supposed to make you want to become a Communist!”), I have stayed with books and keyboard all day. Not selling--reading, studying. Because now I find that sufficient time spent adhering to initially odious disciplines--dawn waking, sunset sleeping, vegetable broth, ginger tea, tofu smoothies, and study study study--transforms them into pleasures, a perverse sort of hedonism: one feels guilty because one isn't swilling iced coffees or even rums-and-Coke in front of the TV. And such pleasure. I alternate memorizing code out of Web Design in a Nutshell with a Janet Malcolm article on Gertrude Stein in an old New Yorker, with occasional lapses into Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, which explains just about everything. Heaven. And see, even this is such a pleasure now, this writing, this feral. I stopped when the receiving silence brought home to me blogging’s futility as a precursor to some lucrative future income. But whether anyone bothers to read it, and whether those who do read it respond, are no longer the point, I find (although they add enormously to the satisfaction). What has come to matter most in writing feral is my need to write it. The ongoing pleasure in satisfying that. Gertrude Stein was an idol of mine before and during and for a few years after college. I even dreamed once, back around 1985, that a detailed tattoo of her portrait spontaneously appeared on my chest one morning. I stopped reading her when I realized I’d absorbed so much of her hypersimplisticism and monotonous rhythms and gerunds that they infected everything I wrote. (For a similar reason--their styles' infectiousness--I had stopped reading Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.) How was I to evolve if I was so damned malleable? Because I still revere Stein in some part of me (a framed photo of her still hangs alongside other personal literary icons on my bedroom wall), some passages in Malcolm’s article resonated for me, sometimes disturbingly, as I read them this afternoon. One is a quote from Stein’s The Making of Americans, where the novel’s author agonizes about her inability to write fiction: I have not any dramatic imagination for action in them, I can only know about action in them from knowing action they have been doing any of them. … I cannot ever construct action for them to be doing. “In other words,” Malcolm explains, “she cannot invent. She can write only what has actually happened to people she knows.” Exactly!, I think. The Spalding Gray line “I can't make stuff up” long has been my defining creative attribute/deficit. But Malcolm continues: And yet she is hardly doing what other writers do who lack dramatic imagination--journalists, biographers, memoirists. If her characters do not resemble the characters of fiction …, neither do they resemble the characters of biography, memoir, reportage. (emphasis mine) “Lack dramatic imagination....” Then, “Stein seems to be transcribing rather than transforming thought as she writes, making a kind of literal translation of what is going on in her mind.” and (quoting Leon Katz) “Stein's first four years in Paris … were ‘a period of the most relentless despair, surrender of ambition and psychological disorientation. She became passive, cynical, she was moved to do nothing.’” and “The notebooks are the record of a peevish soul trying to break out of a trap.” and (Katz again) “ ‘ …the portentous subject, the effort to achieve the grand manner, even the terms of formal discourse are all discarded, and her writing settles into a life-long, smiling, personal pageantry of the nearby and the trivial … her unique art subsequently emerged as an endless full hymn of pleasure in the actual, a nonselective tribute to the uniform pleasures of existence. ’” … Perhaps the one (lack of dramatic imagination) inevitably prefigures the other. I hope so. If I could develop a “unique art” (or at least a peculiar one), a “hymn of pleasure in the actual,” I (at least) could consider all this to have been a very worthwhile endeavor. My vacation continues: Supper (green chili omelettes). Dessert (applesauce and cream). Quantum physics. Dancing in my pajamas. Tortoise shelter. Llama hay. Sunset gazing. Sleep. 6:33:14 PM    comment []