two umbrellas

In the midst of NaNoWriMo, I’m still (barely) trying to keep up my reading, which – of course – is one of the reasons I write.

I fell in love with Wayne Koestenbaum’s direct style in Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and could not wait for Hotel Theory. I’ll admit it was a bit heady for me since I have been concentrating mostly on other things as of late; but, there were so many phrases that pulled me back and forced me into this book.

…and why I write: the ritual of composition kills consciousness at the same time as it revives a bleak, faithful attentiveness. Concentrating on my own sentences, converting intuition into phrases – this process feels like staring directly at time…every thought must be apotheosis…

Reading The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion has taught me once again how to write a paragraph.

I started Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique many, many months ago. I am still only half way through this classic. I have to put it on hold. It is very hard to read. I do not find Friedan’s style engaging or interesting – only the subject matter has kept my attention for over 300 pages. Unfortunately, as I read I am also finding that culture hasn’t quite progressed as far is it probably should have when this first published. I must say it is demoralizing to continue reading at this point but I may continue later. Of course I said that about The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and I still have not returned to that.

So I have skipped an update of Week 2 for no particular reason. Here is a post I started to write about a week ago:

A little bit of burn out. I wrote thousands of words over the weekend. I’m trying – quite unsuccessfully – to keep up that pace tonight. Maybe not thousands, but maybe a thousand would be nice. But I am tired. I am tired of speech and action…

But now I am worse off. I am stuck. I am bored with my story. I haven’t written since Friday. I am not even close to the word count’s halfway point. Here is about where I’m at right now:

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.
(from a NaNoWriMo Newsletter written by Neil Gaiman)

And so Week 3 begins…

This is my very first try at a novel and it’s as if I forgotten how a novel works. I try to think of all of the novels I have ever read and it’s as though they have vanished from my memory.

I’m still plugging away but the word count is very low. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I’m not quite sure why I’m writing this post – could it be procrastination?

I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pull this off; but only five days until the race against myself begins…

Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking is a beautifully designed cookbook. With lavish sushi presentations, action shots of Morimoto cooking, and numerous money shots of all of the dishes, the book is exquisite with its simple beauty. Many of the recipes are complicated and precise: Squid Ink-Salmon Gnocchi or Crispy Duck with Port Wine Reduction and Red Miso Sauce (this recipe requires making foie gras croissants). There is a section titled “Recipes to Contemplate” (with ingredients such as blowfish, abalone, and sea urchin) that hints at Morimoto’s sense of humor.

When I went to see Morimoto speak at the FLP, I was excited to walk into the auditorium and see a small kitchen station. He arrived on stage with his sous chef and immediately entertained. His fierce appearance in photographs seems to contradict his persona on stage. Every other line was a punch line and he is quite aware that he is there to promote is many products. He quickly got started with cooking. He prepared a Tuna Pizza, which looks like one of the more simpler recipes in his book. It took him only about ten minutes (with everything already prepped – we were at the library) and it looked good enough to eat. However, I can only hope that he gave the pizza to someone after the reading; it would be very disappointing to see a very expensive piece of tuna go to waste. He then took questions (with his chef de cuisine to help interpret) and I was surprised to hear his thoughts on TV, which he hates. Someone asked about Iron Chef, which he also hates and quickly added that he also loves. The show requires a lot of prep work and they only get so many hints about the secret ingredient. There is great pressure on the Iron Chefs to create new dishes for each show. At this point in his career, he added, he does not need to create new dishes so often.

Morimoto’s eponymous restaurant sits inconspicuously on Chestnut street. Once recognized, it’s smooth facade and translucent florescent green doors do begin to contrast the abandoned or reconstructed storefronts. There’s a deli or two on the block and a karate studio shares the building. I have yet to eat at Morimoto but I pass the restaurant almost everyday on my way to work and each time I do, those green doors tempt me to consider spending at least half of a paycheck on what I will assume would be one of the best meals I would ever have. Since I haven’t given into temptation (the sushi is always at market price – from Tokyo – and the wagyu is twenty dollars an ounce – with a six oz. minimum), I have to resort to the cheap version of food porn – the cookbook.

I’ve been taking a bit of a break from my traditional reading pattern, which is basically only reading fiction. However, somewhere during that reading I filled out those annoying little cards that fall from magazines and found myself buried in monthly and (too often) weekly publications arriving in my mailbox just waiting for me to feel guilty for not reading them – don’t worry, I’m not just talking to you, New Yorker. Here are a list of all of the magazines that come to my house – in no particular order:

New Yorker

New York Review of Books

New York Magazine

The New York Times

Bookforum

Bon Appetit

Playboy

Vanity Fair

n+1

Granta

Esquire

Harper’s

I’m almost sure that’s the complete list. (I almost forgot about Harper’s since I have been subscribing for so long.) I’ll admit that some of these publications I share with mr. twoumbrellas (I believe it may be obvious which ones); but I do read them. I find that men’s magazines have much more interesting articles then women’s. Vanity Fair, I believe, is one of the true unisex magazines that appeals on many levels (materialism to intelligence) equally to both men and women. In men’s magazines there seems to be a higher confidence and intelligence level (for the most part – there are certainly good arguments against the intelligence level of some of the features of Playboy; however, this month features an interview with Robert Redford and a story by Sam Lipsyte) that is assumed by the editors of its audience, but, that’s a whole other post entirely.

I think there are two reasons that I love reading magazines and why I seem to be drawn to them recently. First, I can’t read long articles on the computer. I know some magazines offer free content (thanks, Bookforum); but, I just can’t do it. It’s not comfortable and it feels like I am doing work. If I don’t subscribe to a magazine and there’s a long article, I usually print it out and that’s really quite a waste.

Second, I am beginning to find that what I am reading in these particular magazines (I know I’m missing out on a lot – I don’t subscribe to many literary magazines: no Paris Review, no Virginia Quarterly Review, no Tin House (though I am going to purchase the newest issue of women’s writing as soon as I can), etc. etc. etc.), I can’t get anywhere else. I really believe that Granta is the best literary magazine in print. Or, at least, it’s the best of what I want to read. I enjoy the not-always-mainstream-appreciated opinions of n+1. Sometimes it is good to argue and sometimes we can’t always be on the same page, so to speak. I like that it attempts originality and a hopefulness in a new, young (although a bit privileged), intellectualism – not that I always agree. The New York Review of Books always, always delivers the criticism that I never get from the NYTBR. It also provides good international articles that the New Yorker doesn’t quite capture. But then again, there was a terrifying Seymour Hersch article in last week’s NY regarding the current administration’s desire for striking Iran.

There is an immediacy to this material that arrives in my mailbox. If I don’t read it when it first arrives, it will never be read. Books can wait patiently on my bookshelf until the time is right.

The American Scholar has an essay titled “Wonder Bread” against some Brooklyn writers. I can’t help but agree that there is some arrested development in seemingly talented writers.

Here are a few excerpts:

…certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness.

…

According to Jeffrey Sharlet, a journalist/provocateur who helped inspire this essay, and Andi Mudd, a spectacularly unwondrous college student who assisted in researching it, The Lovely Bones and its ilk “deserve a public shaming.” That’s because BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

…

The nakedness of Kunkel’s desire to change the world and of Eggers’s angst has an appeal, but it’s simultaneously simple and disingenuous. Both are Salingers of our time. That’s because they embody critic Lionel Trilling’s famous dichotomy; they mistake sincerity for authenticity.

…

Not that everything that touches the splendid borough is piffle. Besides BBoWs, Brooklyn has given birth to books ranging from Hubert Selby’s morbid noir Last Exit to Brooklyn to Neil Gordon’s garrotte-tight thriller The Gunrunner’s Daughter. Jonathan Lethem provides a case in point because his imagination is deeply anchored in Brooklyn and he writes of adolescence, especially orphaned adolescence in Motherless Brooklyn, and his narratives are peppered with references to popular culture. However, all of this makes for a mimetic re-creation of genuine experience that he knew as a child on Dean Street rather than as a childish adult on Dean Street. Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes. Unless it’s Mr. Harvey in The Lovely Bones, no one smokes in BBoWs. They’d as soon smoke as fail to recycle. Also, a daring flight at the end crashes. Perhaps Lethem is striving for wonder, but he’s too smart to let it carry him away. He has, however, been carried away by his imitators. The BBoW authors have adopted Lethem as a surrogate father, and he ought to disinherit them.

…

Coddled and cosseted, they’re the first generation of novelists who grew up reading the young-adult pap that they’ve now regurgitated with a deconstructive gloss learned in college. Of course, such aspirations require equivalently high subject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enormity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ clothing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Philadelphia’s Fall Restaurant Week is approaching. mr. twoumbrellas and some friends and I will be dining at Lolita. It’s ‘bring your own tequila’ so good food and good times for all.

Guernica interviews Don DeLillo:

I’ve always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

I had just finished Drown before going to see Junot Diaz at the FLP. I had a similar feeling about Drown as I did about Drinking Coffee Elsewhere – there is so much life in Diaz’s writing. Most writers are very good at illuminating characters; but there are some that bring them to life. I can’t say I’ve had a favorite from this collection of short stories. They were all good. They were all vivid. And they were all real.

It’s been about a year since I lived in North Jersey. North Jersey is a region all unto itself.* There are great differences between the North and South. The South is small shore towns built on tourism. To the west there are farms and a little further north there is industry where the larger cities begin (along side a well-known neighboring city). North Jersey is one large suburb of New York, a place that is always unnamed, but always overshadowing. “The city” is seen with starry-eyed resentment. Most of the people that live in North Jersey (let me clarify and say the area where I lived – Bergen County) can afford to live in “the city” and yet they resent the fact that they don’t. There exists an awesome amount of wealth and privilege – a privilege that is devoid of any culture – that begins at an early age. Teenagers have credit cards and luxury cars I still can’t afford. There isn’t much to do other than shop along Route 17 – on a clear day you could see the Empire State Building off in the distance beckoning. Hop onto NJ Transit or the Path and you are there in less than an hour. But there is still that middle area that distinctly separates the North and South – Newark, Patterson, Perth Amboy, East/West Orange, and New Brunswick – that must become the buffer zone for the remainders that cannot fit into the North, the South, and “the city.” This is Junot Diaz’s New Jersey. The stories that take place in New Jersey have a sense of displacement. These places are holding zones until one can reach Nueva York. The remaining stories that take place in Santo Domingo have a sense of unrest – a waiting for the promises of a promised land.

When I saw Junot Diaz speak, I didn’t know what to expect. Although, who does know what to expect when attending a reading? Reading does create an imagined relationship with the text and thus a de facto relationship with the author; yet, it is easy and sometimes unwise to expect that person on the stage. However, in Junot Diaz that is exactly what I saw. He doesn’t seem much different than what was on the pages of his stories (I haven’t read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao yet – although there was an excerpt in The New Yorker Fiction Issue. It’s not online; but TNY does have a podcast of Edwidge Danticat discussing “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” from Drown.) Last Tuesday, he read from “Wildwood” (what was in The New Yorker), took some questions, and then read another excerpt from his novel. Despite the fact that he was on a stage at an elementary school, it felt like a conversation. He’s just a man who loves to read – but also knows how to tell a damn good story.

Diaz didn’t speak of much of New Jersey, although I wanted to ask him about it. (I try not to speak to famous authors anymore after an embarrassing incident with Jeanette Winterson.) Coming to New Jersey from Santo Domingo must have been a surreal experience – of course, that could be said of emigrating to anywhere. But after living there myself, I, too, felt like I moved to another country – one of stark economic extremes – and I have a great appreciation for the title Drown and its eponymous story. I know I often write about “American” storytellers. Diaz has the ability and perspective to be one of the great American storytellers.

aside After living there and having great friends that are from both North and South Jersey, I feel that I am somewhat justified in succumbing to a few New Jersey stereotypes.