three literary epiphanies that have really happened to me in the past and that i have now expanded upon for the purposes of this post

1.

i will publish my short story collection and then write eight more twenty to thirty page short stories that will all be magic realist-y, like judy budnitz or aimee bender or kelly link—only better, only perfect

i will do these magic realist stories quickly, within six months, and have a lot of fun doing it, and in the daytime i will feel whimsical and be a pleasant person to be around and at night i will still be whimsical but a darker sort of whimsical, with curse words, and i will be even more pleasant of a person to be around (at night) because i will be at once mysterious, exciting, vulgar, and pleasant

2.

i will quickly publish my short novel and then write a two thousand page novel that will not be uneven or tiresome or have stream of consciousness or a large cast of characters but will just be over two thousand pages and shocking and unheard-of and a little bit impossible but also inevitable (critics will agree) and beautiful and perfect

this will be easy and will just require time and patience

after the thing is published no one will write any novels or stories or anything anymore but just dabble, a bit too earnestly—in a laugh-nervously-when-caught-doing-it, secretly-doing-it-in-the-middle-of-the-night-with-beads-of-sweat-on-the-forehead way—in crayon drawing, steel-drum playing, collage-making, druid-figure-type-things-making-with-twigs-and-leaves-from-the-backyard, ransom-note-making-by-pasting-different-letters-from-different-sources-together, and other marginalized arts and forms of expression

3.

i will publish a small book of poetry in which every poem is about feeling depressed and lonely

there will be no variety and no nature poems or poems expressing gratitude or salvation but just poems expressing loneliness, sadness, anxiety, fear, and doom

i will publish this with a small press and it will sell unexpectedly well and then extraordinarily well and then my face will appear on time magazine

in interviews, i will sound so freakishly and startlingly depressed and lonely and misanthropic and pessimistic that people will respect me for it instead of calling me solipsistic, self-indulgent, and self-obsessed, three descriptives of which i will use against myself constantly during interviews because of being so self-loathing and pessimistic and depressed and genuinely doomed

i am going to post one sentence per day of the novel i am currently working on; this will be happening on another blog that i created tonight

here

i'm not sure if this is a good idea

already, i feel less legitimate

but i also feel something else

i feel more honest and serene

i feel an airiness

i feel a little bit like i'm on tylenol cold

that kind of vague, cottony, low-level, luxury retirement-home nihilism

a minor but lucid mollification of the space behind my eyes

or something

i feel more ungreedy, unegotistic, and unfame-wanting

i feel like i have made a kind of anti-progress

which is good, which is what i want

i think taoism is good

and buddhism

they are the most literary of religions (that i know of)

'literary'

i shouldn't use that word

i think bands that are taoist and buddhist in a way are nofx, leftover crack, morning glory, against me!

they don't want to be cash money all stars or have fame and power

do i want to have cash and be famous?

i mean, do i want to want to have cash and be famous?

ideally, no

like i already said

so i think doing this is a good idea

i must sabotage myself

i am serious about this

people think i'm being ironic or cute or pretentious

i'm not

think of all the hundreds of years that have passed by, everyone writing stuff, writing philosophy and novels and non-fiction and whatever and having their stuff read, struggling, networking, getting good reviews, bad reviews, winning awards, dying, suffering, whining, feeling lonely, betrayed, angry, getting obituaries in the new york times, always wanting to have more power and influence and be better respected and feeling that they aren't respected enough or whatever, feeling not at peace with their ouvre, feeling inadequate, unfulfilled, etc.

something must happen to change these things so that these things do not exist anymore for anyone ever again

is that too immature of an idea?

i mean, can't we all at least just try new things each day instead of the same?

am i being immature right now?

i am

i really think that i am

of course, people for hundreds of years have also felt that things needed to change

i'm going to be specific, though, right now

i think things--some kind of system of laws and freedom and undeath or something--from outside of this universe need to come into the universe, like cut through a dimension somehow, and enter all our brains and change us

but not even that

i'm sure someone has thought of that before

i think what i just want to say is that it is not immature to see that the world is wrong, is so strange and wrong

i mean the laws of it and death and things

gravity

no one knows what gravity is

for instance

i'm going to stop myself right now from continuing that kind of thinking

though it is all relevant to this post and therefore this blog (focus...)

because the novel will 'think' at this level

the level of this post

but also it will be human and comprehensible

not 'will,' but 'is'

okay

one sentence per day

there's already three sentences there starting today because i cheated and changed the time stamp for the other two sentences

i wanted it to have a kind of built-in momentum

notes i've made about the novel i'm writing that i'm almost more interested in than the novel itself

PRINT THIS OUT AND ORGANIZE IT

The Top-heaviness of feeling sad.

CUT OUT CHELSEA, HAVE HER JUST BE A SHORT STORY (?)

Novel of ideas / save the 'moving' stuff for stories.

Don't try AT ALL to be sensitive or moving, but just odd and interesting.

He needed a girlfriend. A girlfriend would solve all his problems. For about a month, he'd have no problems.

People averted their eyes from someone else to you, and you felt appreciative for that.

Wait ... I've Had This Epiphany Before

MATTER OF SEMANTICS BECOMES A RUNNING JOKE - EVERYTHING BECOMES A MATTER OF FUCKING SEMANTICS.

someone should organize all that into a poem and then submit it simultaneously to fifteen online literary magazines as an experiment in... something

i thought about deleting the sentence directly above this one, then left it there and wrote this sentence instead; that's like the opposite of revision

not the opposite, but you know what i mean

i made it worse instead of improving it

what else

um

i indented every other 'note' to make it look pretty

but instead it just looks bad

it looks so bad

i don't like how it looks at all

i don't know how to fix it

i don't like that i put it all in bold

that's way too much bold

i also hate that i said ' ... FUCKING SEMANTICS'

feels affected

feels immature, in a bad way

there's two kinds of immature

one where it's like you're a fourteen year-old

another where it's like you're a five year-old

someone should pay me for thinking that up

it feels original

it feels useful

like you can use it when someone calls you immature

be like, 'there's two kinds...'

yeah

this is the worst blog posting ever

i want to be attacked in the comments section

i want people to make personal attacks

i'll probably attack myself in the comments section

actually, i promise to do that

i look forward to it

jean rhys

jean rhys wrote good morning, midnight

in good morning, midnight, the main character says she hasn't eaten for three weeks

then she giggles

then the guy she's with gets in a cab and the cab leaves and she is standing there

and she says

And did I mind? Not at all, not at all. If you think I minded, then you've never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-up of human nature - isn't it worth something?

i like that only the trees are alive

i like plunged in a dream

those seem original and sad and beautiful to me

in my first post about good morning, midnight, i didn't say anything about good morning, midnight

i couldn't think of anything

i wish they made us read good morning, midnight in middle school instead of the great gatsby

jean rhys didn't like f. scott fitzgerald

i read that from jean rhys' letters to other people

i'm not affected by the great gatsby

the green light at the end makes me feel tired and bored and a little bit melodramatic and false

the same with the eyeglasses

in good morning, midnight the main character is lucidly, clear-sightedly, though also dreamily aware of her own hopelessness, the world's hopelessness, and her own hopelessness inside of the world's hopelessness, like a game, a house that is a game, and she is inside the house, and the game inside the house isn't that fun; but it is just a game, after all, and it is everything, the game, because the house is all there is, and a game, and so no matter how awful, just still a game, and what does it matter if it is a game?

i have a low tolerance for melodrama

unexplained, unacknowledged (by the author or by a character) yet obvious 'schemed-up' metaphors, to me, are melodramatic

the green light at the end of the great gatsby is melodramatic to me

the title 'the great gatsby' is melodramatic to me

anything unoriginal, any 'stock phrase' or cliche is melodramatic to me

playing a game is not melodramatic to me if you don't care about winning because the prize is worthless

life is a game and i like people who cheat and laugh, and in scrabble, if they're losing badly, mess up all the tiles and run away and make me angry a moment but also dispel my false and melodramatic thinking by showing me the worthlessness and falseness of the prize

to me, making progress is a form of winning

is a form of melodrama

there is no prize

stop pretending

there is death; but we all get it

in good morning, midnight, the main character says

This is a game - a game played in the snow for a worthless prize

i think that that is beautiful and sad and i feel connected to jean rhys and feel like we are feeding the same lake

the world is snow and here is a game

in good morning, midnight it is cold and there is a stupid, worthless prize for the winner

but it is all a game, still, too

and i think jean rhys and i could have some fun together

i don't think f. scott and i could have any fun together because he is not odd but always macho and prideful in a low-level way and he wants that prize and to him it is not worthless

jean rhys said she never had fun in her life; that, even as a child, she never had fun

jean rhys hated the world

i don't like pride

i think pride may be selfish

people say self-pity is selfish

what is that feeling, when you are in a crowd, waving a flag, united against some abstract otherness that is out there somewhere and that is necessitating this unitedness?

it's called pride?

but i don't know that feeling

i don't understand it

it is a lie to me

pride is meaningless to me

i like pity

pity for others, for self

pity for self is the same as pity for others

five minutes ago you are not the same as you are now

five feet from you is another person; five minutes from you is also another person

two different people

pity for yourself is always pity for some other person, even if that person is yourself a few seconds ago

it's all practice

for being conscious of your surroundings

for being aware

for not leaving toilet seats up if they were down before...

all jean rhys' novels are autobiographical except for the last one

the last one was in 1966, almost 30 years after her previous book, and it won some prizes

if not for that book, the last, prize-winning one, jean rhys would probably be unknown today

frederick barthelme likes jean rhys

frederick barthelme is kind of unknown

his books are in print mostly

jean rhys' books were out of print for almost 30 years before her last one won some prizes

in good morning, midnight the main character says,

All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have these eyes - others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the background, terrifies me. . . . And the arms wave to the accompaniment of music and of song. Like this: 'Hotcha - hotcha - hotcha. . . .' And I know the music; I can sing the song.

good morning, midnight was published in 1939

good morning, midnight is not in second-person but goes into second-person sometimes

the main character talks about being sane, about being 'quite sane' and not drunk

lorrie moore uses second-person sometimes in third-person stories

lorrie moore's characters talk about being either sane or insane

lorrie moore was born in 1957

i've never heard or read of lorrie moore ever saying anything about jean rhys

or about joy williams, who was born in 1944

lorrie moore talks about alice munro a lot, though

joy williams likes to quote jean rhys

jean rhys was born in 1890

jean rhys said,

All of writing is a huge lake. There are rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

she said it in an interview for the paris review, by david plante, who said that when jean rhys said that it made him cry a little

david plante was born in 1940

david plante wrote a memoir about his experiences with three women, one of which was jean rhys

in the memoir he visits jean rhys in a hotel, where jean rhys is living (jean rhys is in her 80's), and he, david plante, leaves the toilet seat up after pissing and because of that jean rhys falls into the toilet and, after a time (of struggle, i guess), calls for help; plante goes and helps her; there is piss and water on the bathroom floor; plante brings her back into the bedroom, to the bed, all wet, and jean rhys is in her 80's and all in make-up because she spends hours on make-up each day (she says her morale depends on how she looks; she says that she needs new dresses all the time for her morale; not good dresses, but new ones) and she is a little drunk and very old and alone and david plante is here in the hotel where she lives at the end of her life to help her write her memoir; but in his own memoir he says that he does not even admire jean rhys' novels and that he does not know why he is helping her and that it may be for selfish reasons (later he writes this memoir; is that the selfish reason?) and she, jean rhys, is in her 80's and wearing make-up and smiling and crying and smearing make-up all over her face and crying and saying that no one understands and drinking and then smiling again and david plante says, 'i need to piss,' and goes to piss and leaves the toilet seat up and then jean rhys, in her own hotel room, goes in the bathroom herself to piss and falls into the toilet because the seat is up and it wasn't up before and she didn't expect it to be up and she struggles, quietly, for a time, to get out by her own, her dress all wet with piss and water, and she is in her eighties and in make-up and a pretty dress for her morale and will be dead very soon, and she tries herself to get out of the toilet, and fix things up, though how could she, as there is piss everywhere, and her dress is all wet, and she can't--she can't, anyway, even get out of the toilet, which would be the first step to fixing things, drying her dress, drying the floor, etc., and so she calls out meekly for david plante, who has not been drinking all the while that afternoon that jean rhys has (has been drinking) and who is here for selfish reasons possibly (he isn't sure; though he is sure that he does not even like jean rhys' novels; he knows that, at least) and jean rhys, after struggling quietly, finally calls out for david plante, who left the toilet seat up in the hotel room of a woman in her 80's and who now, in his memoir, notes that jean rhys is calling out meekly to him and that he is now going into the bathroom and seeing that there is piss and water everywhere and that he left the toilet seat up and that is why jean rhys is half inside of the toilet, and now david plante, he says, himself, in his memoir, is helping jean rhys back into the bedroom and setting her on the bed and she is wet with piss and water and david plante looks at her and leaves

interview with elizabeth spiers and the unphilosophizability (undefinibility?) of 'existing morally,' the word 'morally,' and the word 'harmful'

before i do something 'illegal,' 'abnormal,' or 'risky' i will almost always think if it will hurt anyone

i don't think that what i am about to, right now, in this post, will actually hurt anyone

except for me

and i have mixed feelings about hurting myself

i have this thinking; philosophy, or whatever

that if i can somehow learn to enjoy distress, wretchedness, feelings of hopelessness, feelings of 'being doomed,' sadness, loneliness, failure, etc., then i can become sort of invulnerable

this is a bit complex

by 'enjoy,' i don't actually mean 'enjoy'

what i mean is that if i can view times of distress, hopelessness, sadness, etc. as a sort of credit towards a future contentment, future happiness; future tranquility, fulfillment, etc., then i can live my life like a pyramid scheme

which is sort of perfect

because the only flaw i know of that a pyramid scheme has is that it will run out of participants; it cannot continue forever; because time is infinite and people (credit) are not, the pyramid scheme will always lose

but if i can view my own life as a pyramid scheme (each failure or moment of wretchedness acting as a sort of credit towards a future reward) then i have this thing, death, that will solve for me the problem that i just presented above (...cannot continue forever...)

so

what i do is i delay gratification, keep feeling like shit and wretched and whatever, and keep delaying gratification--and, in this delaying, there is a pleasure; a sort of once-removed, changed pleasure, a once-removed experience of that something that is in the future, unspent and good and, with each moment of present discontentment or discomfort, increasing, there, in the future--and keep delaying gratification and keep delaying gratification until i die

because normal, 'progress' pleasure, in the form of fulfilling one's desires, is a sort of drug; it does not last long, it climaxes; and when it is over, you feel noticeably down, and you want it again, and each time you need more to get the same (which is, in itself, a kind of wretchedness...?)

but there is also another kind of pleasure, i think; described above, and here, now

in this second pleasure, you delay the fulfillment of your desires; you get all your desires together and put them all in a garbage bag and then you throw that garbage bag over a wall, and that wall is death; and so, in a way, then, you have no desires (they do not exist); but in another way, you do, still, have desires, just abstractly (they exist as possibility, by way of being undisprovable): none that you will ever fulfill; and in this way, you use death to your advantage

and this second pleasure is the less harmful of the two; in this second pleasure you are apathetic, you do not believe in 'progress,' you do not scheme or hurt other people or animals (you do not need to, because you do not believe in 'progress,' you do not put 'value' in 'getting ahead'); you are considerate and in control; you are not a drug fiend of drugs produced by your own body

so

(a few weeks ago)

on july 30th, sitting at work, i e-mail Elizabeth Spiers, the first writer for Gawker and current Editor-in-chief of Mediabistro

i ask her about Galleycat, the book blog; the only (i think) book blog that pays a salary; $1000 a month or $550 a month plus benefits

i ask if i can have that job

i notice that nathalie hasn't been posting, i say

and include in the e-mail a link to this site, reader of depressing books

she e-mails me back:

From: Elizabeth Spiers
To: Tao Lin
Date: Jul 31, 2005 6:06 PM
Subject: RE: something about galleycat...
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Hi Tao -

Well, you're in luck because I'm presently interviewing potential Galleycat writers for a fall relaunch. Why don't we grab coffee sometime this week and chat. What's your schedule like?

i e-mail back:

From: Tao Lin
Reply-To: Tao Lin
To: Elizabeth Spiers
Date: Jul 31, 2005 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: something about galleycat...
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Hi, Elizabeth,

I'm available all day Wed. Other days between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Or I can make some other times become available if those times don't work. Wed. is best. Let me know.

Thanks!

Tao

she e-mails back:

From: Elizabeth Spiers
To: Tao Lin
Date: Jul 31, 2005 6:29 PM
Subject: RE: something about galleycat...
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How about wednesday at 4pm? why don't you drop by the office - we're at 494 broadway (& broome), 4th floor...

on wednesday i go there

we go into a room

i try to express how much i want the job and how good i will be at it

but instead i express something else; mostly that i am hyper-inarticulate on blogs, unable to back up anything i say with real examples from the real world, and unable to sincerely express how much i want the job and how good i will be at it without seeming insincere, depressed, and mean

someone comes and stands in the doorway and stares at me and says to elizabeth that he needs the room

they talk back and forth a while, about who needs the room more

during this time, i go 'post-modern'

we go to another room

i am now very 'post-modern'

instead of saying what i want to say

instead of even thinking of what i want to say

instead of even thinking, 'how do i get my brain to think of what i want to say'

i think (i swear that this is true), 'i am right now thinking about how to get my brain to think of what i want to say'

earlier, before the man stared at me and made us change rooms, i was, i said 'hyper-inarticulate'

now i am 'hyper-inarticulate' removed a few 'steps'

my brain's brain's brain is 'hyper-inarticulate,' or something

regardless, she tells me the plan

she tells me to create six sample posts

we stand up

'when should i do the sample posts by?' i say, at the door

'as soon as possible,' she says, 'so that if that works out, you can then guest blog for a week, which you'll be paid for; and then we can give you a one-year contract'

i go make six sample posts

next day, i send this e-mail:

From: Tao Lin
Reply-To: Tao Lin
To: Elizabeth Spiers
Date: Aug 4, 2005 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: something about galleycat...
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Hi, Elizabeth,

I noticed that Nathalie posted a lot today. I hope the job is still open. Here's the link to six sample posts: http://tao.typepad.com/tao/

These are longer posts. I'd also post very short posts on deals and current events in publishing, which I did not do here. I have also made a list of people that I would keep track of. If anything here is not what you wanted, or if you want more of something, I'd be happy to do whatever is needed.

Thanks,

Tao

i get no reply

typepad's counter shows that she has not visited the site; i am 98% sure of this, that she has not visited the site

next day, i send her this e-mail:

From: Tao Lin
Reply-To: Tao Lin
To: Elizabeth Spiers
Date: Aug 5, 2005 11:54 AM
Subject: sample posts / galleycat
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Hi, Elizabeth,

Sorry to bother you, but gmail sometimes doesn't send things for me. So I am not sure if you recieved the link to the sample posts that I sent yesterday.

Here it is again: http://tao.typepad.com/tao

Please let me know if you get this email. I'm enthusiastic and
excited about this job, and really want it.

Thanks,

Tao

no reply

sunday, she still has not visited the site

monday, i call her on the phone, in real life

i write down what i want to say so that i can just read it, like a machine, instead of having to think

and i call her

she picks up immediately, before the first ring ends

'elizabeth,' she says

'hi, this is tao lin; we talked about galleycat last week; i'm calling to check if you recieved my e-mails'

'yes; actually i did recieve them; but haven't had a chance to look at them yet; i'll let you know when i do'

a pause

i say, 'so the job is still available?'

'yes'

another pause

'okay, thanks'

'no problem'

end of conversation

few days later, i read her piece on peter jennings, in which she says

I remember telling a couple of friends later that I thought Jennings was a "really, really nice guy" and it sounds so trite, but normally when you're covering these things, you get a couple of minutes, max, to talk to people, and in this case, he kept talking well after the PR people were giving me dirty looks, my tape recorder had been turned off and he'd been reminded multiple times that "Mr. Cronkite" was waiting to speak to him. He genuinely wanted to help.

a week later; she still has not visited the site with the six sample posts, of which i have worked on almost every day, adding things, messing around with photos, editing; and have by now perfected, and cannot look at anymore, as one would perfect six pieces of short fiction or poetry and then not be able to look at them anymore

i e-mail her:

From: Tao Lin
To: Elizabeth Spiers
Date: Aug 14, 2005 6:10 PM
Subject: One question about Galleycat...
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Hi, Elizabeth,

I'm sorry to bother you again. Can you give me a quick note to say if I am a candidate for Galleycat, and maybe a time-frame sort of thing? Because if not, then I should probably try to plan my future somehow--get a full-time job, or something. I'd very much appreciate a really quick, small note. Thanks.

Tao Lin

i see that she still has not visited the site, with the sample posts

the site, that i created six sample posts on, has 19 hits, all 19 of which are from me, tao lin

next day she e-mails me:

From: Elizabeth Spiers
To: Tao Lin
Date: Aug 15, 2005 4:08 PM
Subject: RE: One question about Galleycat...
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Hi Tao - Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. I have a guest blogger starting on August 29 as a sort of tryout. (She's written for Publisher's Lunch, sat on a couple of panels at BookExpo and has some experience covering the industry.) Depending on how that goes, we may add additional contributors. But I won't really know until mid-September or so, so if I were in your shoes, I'd continue looking. (It's a part-time job anyway, and you'd have to have additional employment regardless...)

But I'll keep you in mind and check back.

Best,
Elizabeth

i check the site counter

i see that she still has not visited

few days later--after earlier having read zadie smith's interview with ian mcewan in the believer and stopping after two pages because of feeling like i am wasting my life--i am thinking about posting something about ian mcewan and chang rae-lee and about how almost every bestseller 'literary' writer is, it seems to me, oblivious to language, oblivious to the meanings of the words that they are using, oblivious to the questions one might ask--questions like 'why?' like 'is that even true?'--in response to the seemingly unironic rhetoric in their sentences; oblivious to the actual, literal meanings of the words of the sentences that they write and publish and then give interviews where they say that they care about language and pay close attention to it and so on

thinking that, i go to take a shower

and while in the shower

i get the idea of this post

and i feel excited

(i feel not unlike how i feel when i write, in fiction, a true, original, insightful sentence; something new, into the world, something that i have let into this world from some other, better world)

i feel excited

which is rare for me

and so i feel that i must do this

i think, 'maybe i shouldn't do this'

i think, 'because that i thought maybe i shouldn't do this i am now required to do this'

if not morally, then existentially

and the existential supercedes the moral, doesn't it?

i ask myself that, as an aside

i think, 'meaningless'

i think, 'will doing this hurt anyone?'

i think, 'if a thing has happened, has factually, really, happened... then isn't it always best to just say it, to let it out into the world? isn't that a kind of honesty?'

i think all that stuff in the beginning of this post about the 'two kinds of pleasures'

i think, 'doing this will move the world, however minutely, toward the second kind of pleasure'

i think, 'but wait; doing this will probably get me more readers, which is something of the first kind of pleasure'

'progress,' etc.

i realize that i have already been planning in my brain to e-mail this post to Gawker, etc. in order to get more readers

i realize that i am harming both myself (and the world) by aligning myself with the first 'drug-fiend' kind of pleasure, the kind in which you seek a stronger, more comprehensive connection with the world, in which you make 'progress' by exposing the information of your 'identity' to as many people as possible in order to gain the means with which to expose the information associated with or of your identity to even more people in order to gain the means with which... etc.

i realize that harming myself--of which i am right now, in real life, in this post, doing ('harming myself')--by way of aligning myself with the first kind of pleasure is something that i can use in order to align myself with the second, less harmful-to-others, less self-indulgent, more-friendly-and-considerate, undrug-fiendish kind of pleasure... is, actually, in itself--this harming of myself; because i am knowingly 'harming' myself--an alignment with the second kind of pleasure, really

but i feel wrong; i feel that the logic of that last statement is wrong, or else impossible; but really, i don't feel wrong, just confused; a little blank and funny and true

joy williams

the entire front page of this site is now about joy williams

it's going to stay like this for a long time, so what i want is for everyone to make comments and then for everyone to talk about joy williams and have discussions about her

there's a chance that most of what i wrote is unoriginal, uninsightful, boring, and incomprehensible

i'm not sure what happened

i felt this dread the entire time writing these posts

like i should be doing something else...

also, the entire time when i was trying to say something, i had these feelings that i wasn't really saying what i wanted to say; and that i wouldn't ever be able to say what i wanted to say; and that i hadn't been, in whatever thing i had just wrote, saying what i wanted to say

this is not my fault

it's a universal thing; all people suffer from this

so keep that in mind when you're reading and realizing that i'm not making sense

i feel tired of myself

i feel like there is this theme park called JOY WILLIAMS where i am only allowed to go on each ride once; and that i just went on all the rides, one after another, in a row, without actually enjoying anything

i also feel like no one even likes joy williams

no one gives a shit about her, i feel; not even me anymore

okay

um

the first post is on her fiction, the second her non-fiction

the third post is on some other things

the fourth post * is an essay she wrote that can't be found anywhere on the internet except for here

* in the comments section of which are links to other places on the internet that have joy williams; and also a thing about joy williams giving a student a C in writing workshop and the student feeling wronged and betrayed:

Joy was downright insulting on my second story. Now, as it had elicited a variety of responses from my classmates, which were not unanimously negative, I didn't think it was all that horribly written. She pointed out two sentences she liked and said I could chuck the rest of the story. Then someone said, "Oh, here's another good one." She responded, "Great! Now we have three!"

[...]

She added that the only way I could've gotten a B was if everyone else had gotten As.

joy williams (fiction)

there's an article from canada that's called

Writer not as bent as her characters

in it it says,

When novelist Thomas McGuane met fellow writer Joy Williams his parting comment was, "I thought you would be more twisted."

"I was heartbroken I had disappointed him," Williams recalls. "I thought I should have been more twisted at our meeting." In fact, Williams, who reads from her latest short story collection, Escapes, tonight at 8 at the Premiere Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay W., is an extremely pleasant individual, without a hint of any major psychological disorders.

i like joy williams because she is funny

i don't really expect anymore to learn anything about existence from reading or from anything really

i don't 'trust' any writer who has aspirations to 'teach' anyone or to 'prove' anything

i think joy williams has gotten less rhetorical and more funny over time

she has changed, over time, book to book, like a real person

State of Grace (novel, 1973)

her first novel was nominated for the national book award

it felt to me like something written straight through without any revisions

i got to page two hundred something and couldn't focus anymore and gave it i think to the housing works, in a bag, with some other books i didn't finish

The Changeling (novel, 1978)

i haven't read this

i want to

but i think it went immediately out of print or something (because of bad reviews maybe, see below) and so i can't find it, have never seen it in any used bookstore (the only books by joy williams i've seen in unused bookstores are The Quick and the Dead and Honored Guest)

Her worst experience was the reception of her second novel, a work termed "startlingly bad" by a reviewer [i think anatole broyard] for the New York Times.

"That book was just destroyed. It was an awful experience. I continued to write stories, but it took me a long time before I ventured out with a novel again. I felt at the time that some of the reviewers wanted me to die. They just wanted me to stop writing. They were saying, 'We have other writers out there who we have to deal with and all the writers yet unborn, so please go away.'"

Taking Care (stories, 1982)

half the stories still feel State of Grace-y in an unrevised way

the other half of the stories are colloquial (in a loose, childish, unpretentious way), are funny and strange; have clear scenes with dialogue; and some even end in sort of epiphanies, but a kind of epiphany where so little--nothing, pretty much--is realized that that, the blankness and vaguness of realization, itself is the epiphany: that actually there will be no more epiphanies, ever, in the future, starting now

the only story she ever gets in the new yorker, Summer, is in here

i think the new yorker is afraid of joy williams

Breaking and Entering (novel, 1988)

she started to 'allow' herself to be funny with this novel, i think

or rather started to allow herself even more to be funny

ignore these last two sentences, i think

she gets further away from her State of Grace abstractness/dreaminess here; almost the entire novel is told in a conversational, unmetaphorical, unabstract prose

the second to last story in Taking Care, Breakfast, is inside of this novel, near the beginning, revised a little

here's some of that story, a part i think is funny and typical of joy williams:

[Liberty's mother phones Liberty early one morning]

"I had a terrible dream about penguins tonight, Liberty."

"Penguins are nice, Mother. They don't do anyone any harm."

"There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little aprons."

[...]

"That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful."

"They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand."

Escapes (stories, 1990)

the stories in here were written during the time that the 'kmart realists,' or 'minimalists' were, it seemed, 'in power'

five of these stories were in best american short stories ('78 '85 '86 '87 '90), chosen by ann beattie, raymond carver, anne tyler, someone else, and i think richard ford

one, 'rot,' won an o'henry prize ('88)

they are almost all about death and are almost all funny

they are written in odd, sometimes awkward, and sometimes even ungrammatical (but endearingly so), childlike prose

michiko kakutani said:

"Several of the stories in ''Escapes'' awkwardly strain to find a metaphor for their characters' lives: a rusting, rotting car becomes a symbol for a couple's deteriorating marriage in ''Rot''; and in ''Health'' an adolescent girl's glimpse of a menacing stranger becomes a symbol of all the frightening realities she will soon face in grown-up life."

* for an entire thing on 'kmart realism' that i wrote (that continues from the above kakutani quote) and then deleted, scroll down to the end of this post; it's there, along with another footnote-y thing

The Quick and the Dead (novel, 2000)

this was nominated for the pulitzer prize, michael chabon won

joy williams changes here again

the language is now childlike, colloquial, affected, and metaphorical

there is also the old State of Grace denseness of prose here, but now it is less dense than just dense-with-meaning; and now there is always a scene that is happening; a location, characters talking, moving around

[the following quotes are from bookworm, the radio show, 1/01, where michael silverblatt talks to joy williams about The Quick and the Dead]

on after both her parents died, when she was fifty, before she wrote The Quick and the Dead:

my faith, it wasn't tested, so much, as uh, it was, uh--everything dropped away, and i seemed to be living a very--i saw everything the way it was, uh, for quite some time, and the way everything is is terrifically depressing, if not horrifying... uhm... death is supposed to, for a person of faith, ehm... one can accomodate it, i mean Tolstoy in his, his what--in his readings and reflections on life, and god, and death, saying that death--that dead people DON'T go away

on (if the novel is supposed to ask the question, 'how do we live?') if there is any one figure in the novel who knows better than anyone else:

well, i don't think there is one, and think maybe that is why people feel uneasy about the going on--the goings on here

this is her funniest book, i think

this and her next one

Honored Guest (stories, 2004)

the language in here is simple and childlike and concrete, this is her funniest book to me, and i reread it the most

death is given no more 'weight' or 'importance' than anything else

people often call joy williams odd, strange, bizarre

but really joy williams is just seeing things clearly, as they are, without preconception (as a child does; as someone who enters the world from another world would); without distraction; without politics, culture, religion, identity, race, nationality, taboo, beliefs, opinions, appearances, etc.

[the following quote is from bookworm, 2/05; where they talk about Honored Guest]

i somehow want fiction to stand up and do more, but i guess all fiction can do is to just show the anamalous in life, and, uh, startle--startle the reader into realizing that life isn't as simple as it seems

...at about 20:45 into the interview michael silverblatt cuts off joy williams as she is talking; it's blatant and embarrassing

and even while joy williams--expecting silverblatt to realize that he is cutting her off, i guess--continues to talk, herself now trailing off a little, michael silverblatt remains oblivious and keeps on talking loudly and embarrassing everyone

but then joy williams cuts michael silverblatt off at about 21:05 to make a joke about kant going to a nightclub

then later she makes a joke and they both laugh and then later both she and michael silverblatt laugh really loudly and for a noticeably long time about how she, joy williams, does not know the rules of the game or how to play the game, the game being 'writing'

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* people who 'don't get' joy williams or raymond carver or frederick barthelme or amy hempel or whoever, i've noticed, usually interpret the things that happen in stories firstly, and most importantly, as metaphorical or symbolic, as representative of something else, something that the author is trying to say, like a message, or theme

i think that most or all of the 'kmart realists' have said, or will say, if you ask them, that their stories do not have messages, themes, or symbols; that they just are what they are; which is similar (not in a bad way; not in a good way) to the way someone might tell a friend a story, in real life

i wonder if those who 'don't get it' (including Madison Smartt Bell, who wrote an essay 'against' 'minimalists') also interpret things in real life as metaphorical or symbolic or thematic

sometimes i tell someone a story that i think is funny or amusing and that really happened and they say 'i don't get it' or 'what's the point?' and i think that these may be the same people who 'don't get' joy williams, carver, etc.

do some people think about their day, their actual day in real life, and say to themselves things like, 'i ate two hamburgers to symbolize my two years in jail, and then to continue the theme of two, i stayed up until 2 a.m., and the digital clock that i didn't purchase at the store (that has no name because i refuse to date my real life) was a metaphor: i was shunning the idea of technology...'

to answer myself, yes; some people do do that, i think that is okay

i have never read an essay in which a 'kmart realist' criticizes and devalues and dismisses the work of a writer who uses symbols, who is a 'maximalist,' allegorist, etc., or any other kind of writer

and among the writers who have criticized, devalued, etc. the 'kmart realists' (** see the end of this post for quotes of 'kmart realists' 'defending themselves') are tom wolfe, frederick busch, cynthia ozick ("Less remains less. I feel very deprived. So many short-story writers are depriving themselves of the amplitude of language - both intellectually and lyrically. I don't know whether it's minimalism or incapacity. There is so little on the page that you can't make the judgment. It's data. It's menu prose. There's no wit in it, no joy in it, there's no sympathy."), madison smartt bell, and some others i think

which shows, to me, that cynthia ozick, etc, lack a certain kind of understanding (that people are different), and lacking this kind of understanding is harmful; is, really, a lack of tolerance for other ways of thinking, a prejudice, a kind of ongoing and strengthening untruth that is what many of the 'kmart realists' (uncertain, not-so confident, low self-esteem, would never say something like this) aren't, which is partly why i like them, i think

saying 'less is less' is saying 'what it is is what it is' is saying '10,000 words is 10,000 words'

so take a collection of stories by frederick barthelme that is 200 pages, then take 200 pages of infinite jest

according to cynthia ozick, these two are the same; they are what they are

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** Ann Beattie: Why should we have pretended that K-Mart didn't exist? Why should I have pretended that no one in Vermont owns a bong?

Ann Beattie (from this):

Remember that the painters who were minimalists had a philosophy that what you see is what you get: no more, no less. But this has nothing to do with the so-called minimalist writers. Frederick Barthelme clearly believes that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And the reader who understands that something is unstated--sometimes tragically unstated--between the characters would have to realize the connotations, the implied complexities. Also, Frederick Barthelme is funny. Bobbie Ann Mason can be quite funny. The minimalist painters were not funny. Minimalism in painting was a term of approval. It was a way to discuss a movement that was a responsive movement to a previous movement in art: Abstract Expressionism. When critics began to talk about literature in these terms, they were using it in a pejorative sense, saying that there were empty spaces. Bad empty spaces, not good empty spaces.

Bobbie Ann Mason: The people I write about are serious about their lives. If they go to a Marty Robbins concert and stand in line to get his autograph - there are more people who do things like that than not.

Frederick Barthelme: I don't make spareness the god of all things, but it seems to me that if you intentionally understate things, you have a chance of allowing the reader's imagination to come into play.

joy williams (non-fiction)

she has two non-fiction books out

The Florida Keys: A History and Guide (1986 for the first edition?)

i have not read this

it's a travel guide--she wrote a travel guide--the latest edition of which is 10th

i'm not sure if joy williams wrote all 10 editions

or if at some point the original author died, and then they somehow chose joy williams to continue, at, say, the 7th edition

this edition's front cover... look at it

"A magnificent, tragi-comic guide," says Condé Nast Traveler

Ill Nature (2001)

collection of essays, most of which are about humankind's knowing, self-conscious apathy; knowing, self-conscious obliviousness, and knowing, self-conscious inconsiderateness in regards to its knowing, self-conscious annihilation of nature, the environment, and animals

almost every essay has a different tone

some are deadpan/sarcastic, some Lucy-Ellmann-ish (conventionally italicized words in all caps instead of italics), some black-comedy/absurdist, some detached, some resigned, some almost wistful and lamenting

from 'Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp,'

You are driving with a stranger in the car, and it is the stranger who is behind the wheel. In the backseat are your pals for many years now--DO WHAT YOU LIKE and his swilling sidekick, WHY NOT. A deer, or some emblematic animal [...]

from 'Safariland,'

In the morning the groups split and meet their guides. Group B's guide's name is Chunk, say. All guides can't be called Ian or Gavin or Colin. [...] They will constantly be fishing around in the cooler for cans of Coke or beer or apple juice or club soda. [...] They will stop at a village and take pictures of huts constructed out of mud, and Coke, beer, apple juice, and club soda cans.

from 'The Case against Babies,'

Hundreds of them popping out every minute. Earth's human population has more than tripled in the last century. Ninety-seven million of them each year. While legions of other biological life forms go extinct (or, in the creepy phrase of ecologists, "wink out"), human life bustles self-importantly on. [...] Overpopulation poses the greatest threat to all life on earth, but most organizations concerned with this problem don't like to limit their suggestions to the most obvious one--DON'T HAVE A BABY!--because it sounds so negative.

here's what she herself says about her non-fiction(she says this in her last essay, which is an essay about writing; see below):

When I began writing essays. I developed a certain style for them that was unlike the style of my stories--it was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided. They were meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers, at least the kind of readers who write letters to the editors of magazines, half nuts with rage and disdain. The letter writers frequently mocked my name. Not only didn't they like my way with words, my reasoning, my philosophy, they didn't believe my name.

the last essay in here is about writing, and is at once inspiring, dispiriting, funny, nihilistic, depressing, motivating (will motivate you), and insightful; ninety-nine out of a hundred mid-list to famous literary writers, i think, would not be able to defend--using their ouevre, religion, and worldview--their own existence against this essay (the other one out of the hundred would cite some kind of quantum physics theory of the soul, or something, i'm sure):

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because hs is not whole: he has a wound, he writes to heal it. But who cares if the writer is not whole?

[...]

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

[...]

The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life.

[...]

The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writers to serve...something. Somethingness.

[...]

Why do I write? Writing has never given me any pleasure. I am not being disingenuous here.

[...]

Writing has never done anyone or anything any good at all, as far as I can tell.

[...]

And:

There is a little tale about man's fate, and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with parted jaws. The man looks above and sees a little honey trickling down the tree, and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situation. But the mice gnaw through the tree and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pursues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man.

This little tale with its broad and beasty strokes seems to approximate man's dilemma quite charmingly [...] This is the story, then, pretty much the story, with considerable latitude to be had in describing those mice, those terrifying mice. But it is not for the writer to have any part in providing the honey--the passing world does that. The writer can't do better than that. What the writer wants to be is the consciousness of the story, he doesn't want to be part of the distraction; to distract is ignoble, to distract is to admit defeat, to serve a lesser god. The story is not a simple one. It is syncretistic and strange and unhappy, and it all must be told beautifully, even the horrible parts, particularly the horrible parts. The telling of the story can never end, not because the writer doesn't like the way it must end but because there is no end to the awareness of the story, which the writer has only the dimmest, most fragmentary knowledge of.

And then:

In the months before my mother died, and she was so sick and at home, a home that meant everything and nothing to her now, she said that she would lie awake through the nights and plan the things she would do during the day when it came--she would walk the dog and buy some more pansies, and she would make herself a nice little breakfast, something that would taste good, a poached egg and some toast--and then the day would come and she could do none of these things, she could not even get out the broom and sweep a little. She was in such depression and such pain and she would cry, If I could do a little sweeping, just that... To sweep with a good broom, a lovely thing, such a simple, satisfying thing, and she yearned to do it and could not. And her daughter, the writer, who would be the good broom quick in her hands if only she were able, could not help her in any way. Nothing the daughter, the writer, had ever written or could ever write could help my mother who named me.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

joy williams (other things; quotes, blurbs, she drives a bronco, etc.)

most of these quotes i found from newspaper or magazine articles

i used LexisNexis, which i get for free at work

In serious fiction, one must remain aloof, playful, ironic; one mustn't really care. In the genre of the crime novel, the writer just has fun and makes money.

funny; but why must one remain aloof, playful, and ironic? because, i guess (i am guessing right now), in fiction you are god (you just are; you create everything and have no restrictions) and joy williams believes that in real life god is aloof, playful, and ironic; and so in fiction, then, because one is god, one--in order to be analogous (in the SAT way) in one's relation to one's fiction as in god's relation to his fiction, which is our real life--must be aloof, playful, and ironic

All art is about nothingness: our apprehension of it, our fear of it, its approach... [from Best American Short Stories, 1995; talking about her own story, Honored Guest.]

here she is being a little... pretentious, or something, i think

because she is defining the word 'art' and the word 'nothinginness' in the same sentence, and if you do that, then you can say anything

one could just as easily say that all art is about candy: our fear of it, its approach...

though i guess i know what she means, that if you keep asking questions, you will find that all art--everything, maybe--is about death

for example, if you ask someone why they drew a picture, and they say 'to impress my friend,' and you ask, 'why do you want to do that,' and they say, 'to get them to like me,' and you ask 'why do you want that'

then finally, if they keep answering you, they will be forced to say something like, 'because i'm going to die one day; so, because of relativity, then, everything before death has a sort of value; because of death, there is the opposite of death, which is life'

reality

I believe you can only perceive reality, as such, very briefly. Otherwise it is very frightening for us.

so that explains it; i just need to stop perceiving reality (i am not being sarcastic right now, but making a sort of point, that perceiving reality, reading literary fiction, actually, objectively, does not do anything 'good' for yourself; five-year olds don't read literary fiction, and are happy; and meanwhile everyone dies, anyway--and i am not being immature; this 'problem,' of whether or not it is 'better' to distract oneself or immerse oneself, in regards to literature, and keeping in mind that we will die, has never been explored as far as i know)

self-promotion

If you do believe that our perceptions of life are very limited, for the sake of our self-preservation, the short story form allows you to dwell on those instances.

read her short stories if you can't handle her novels, she says

dialogue

joy williams being funny:

"I used to be terrified of dialogue," Ms. Williams said in a recent telephone interview from a house she owns in Sarasota, Fla. "I was shy. I felt I didn't know people. Then, at some point, I realized you could make your characters say the most wonderful things."

short stories

being funny again:

"A window opens for a moment," Ms. Williams said of her characters, "and they are able to see and say things that they couldn't before. Then the window shuts again."

joy williams on other people's books

"A great American road-trip novel—improbable, scary, and transcendent." (On Winslow in Love, by Kevin Canty, her former student.)

"Reality is not the perception of humankind alone but of all creatures. The White Bone is a brilliant precursor of the novel of the future--a realization of the novel of noble and tragic lives not our own. This sorrowful novel does holy work because it engages us in the holiest of acts--empathy." (On The White Bone, by Barbara Gowdy, a bestseller in Canada.)

[and compare that to Alice Munro's blurb for the same book: "Inspired imagination and research have created a marvel of a book. In The White Bone, the language social structure, intellectual and spiritual world of elephants are as real as the fabric of human life. Absolutely compelling."

for Munro, Gowdy has done a good job convincing her that elephants perceive and feel just like humans.

for Williams, Gowdy has done a good job because of accepting it as a truth that elephants perceive and feel just like humans.

also, in Munro, there is a kind of meaninglessness to what she is talking about; exemplified by the cliche: "...fabric of human life." The bedsheet of human life... yeah, that's... accurate, thoughtful, insightful, original, etc.]

"Cool, clean, and devastating all-American realism." (On A Stranger in This World, by Kevin Canty, her former student.)

"This is a swift, smart, sharply self-aware account of a woman who loves love." (On Making Love, A Romance, non-fiction by Lucretia Stewart.)

"Part tract, part travelogue, Lynas's smart, hip, and factual book wakes us up and guides us to action. High Tide is a lively, instructive primer for awareness and change." (On High Tide, The Truth About Our Climate Crisis, non-fiction by Mark Lynas.)

joy williams drives a bronco...

should i defend joy williams?

is she a hypocrite?

what does this mean, that she drives a bronco, yet writes a non-fiction book attacking people for destroying the environment and being oblivious and inconsiderate?

it means that joy williams, on a scale of 1-100 of saving the world is probably a 70 or something

100 would be balancing it out perfectly so that the amount of 'world' that you save is exactly the maximum amount that one person can accomplish theoritically (this is really complex; for example, you can kill yourself and not cause any harm, but also not save any world; or you can kill yourself and ten people (terrorism) and possibly prevent eleven people from causing harm; or you can write books to change people's thinking so that they will cause less harm to the world, and while writing those books drive a bronco to keep yourself happy so that you can think better and write more books to save more world; and then there's the question of what is good, what 'save' means, what 'world' means: is life good, or bad; if good then someone needs to find out if the universe will stop expanding and return to a big-bang state, and then find out how to stop that; if good, then stopping the universe from contracting would be 'saving the world')

it's just too complex to say anything about

and especially to say anything about in an interview, where you don't get any time to think, which is what happened to joy williams here; i copied and pasted the entire article from LexisNexis:

February 18, 2001 Sunday
Correction Appended
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 6; Column 1; Magazine Desk; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 613 words

HEADLINE: The Way We Live Now: 2-18-01: Questions for Joy Williams; Up a Tree

BYLINE: By David Rakoff

BODY:

Q: Tell me about your book of essays, "Ill Nature." It has a certain scorched-earth tone.

Well, why not? It's a very environmentally focused book. I'm sure readers will be indignant. They'll throw the book across the room. I hope the book will jolt people simply through the aggression of the language to view afresh their own attitudes toward the way they live and treat animals and the environment.

How specifically would you want Americans to re-view the way they live?

I know this all sounds incredibly naive -- just for them to think about their actions.

If we all just wondered what on earth we're doing here, the thought, if we could face it, would transform our life immensely. I'm really quite the pessimist, though. I don't have any great hope that this will happen.

Must environmentalists cop to the contradictions in their own lives, come clean?

That's preposterous -- nothing could ever be written. I drive a Bronco. It's an old, large car, and I love my Bronco. I drive all across the country in it. And so I can be immediately assailed on this front. A lot of people who are trying to help and do things and live in certain ways get bogged down in this immediate attack upon certain aspects of their lifestyle. It's easy to attack any environmentalist. One should attempt to have as much integrity as one can in a very difficult, technological, complex time.

So how do you change people's minds?

I'm not interested at all in the mild and polite, or having to be so courteous and responsible. It's not as though I'm up for a cabinet post or anything.

Speaking of cabinet positions and the environment, what do you think about Ralph Nader's contention that the environmental policies of the new administration will be so horrible that they will merely galvanize people to action?

Oh, Nader! I won't speak to people in Florida who voted for Nader ever again. I think that's totally preposterous. I can't imagine someone actually swallowing that line. He did a great disservice. It's going to be worse thanour worst nightmare.

So then where do you go in terms of Hippocratically doing the least harm?

This is what all my friends say in Key West: "But where will you go?" That sort of resignation is truly horrible and unacceptable. That's fine for the They -- you know, the They who feel that since you really can't change anything, why do anything? I mean, just try to do the small things.

But who are the They? I eat meat. I'm wearing a leather belt, I live in a toxic American city. I am alive only because of drugs that were developed through animal research. I'm thrilled they killed all those animals for my benefit. I am the They.

That's a false moral equivalent. It's like that famous National Lampoon cover that showed a dog with a revolver pointed at its head: "Buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog."

If our presence in nature is by definition denuding and corrupting, wouldn't it follow that the truly moral alternative would be to live in New York City?

Oh, definitely. Wouldn't that be wonderful, if there were just these gorgeous cities, and then everything else was a preserve? I don't have to see a place. The thought that it exists and that extraordinary animals can live and sustain themselves in an extraordinary landscape that could be destroyed just because of an administration that's going to be out in four years is so upsetting. That's why I'm so annoyed at Nader and the people he influenced and snowed. And we seem to be powerless before it. It's going to be a very bad time. No, it's just nice to think about the gorgeous city on a hill.

But then what do we eat?

Well, eating is so overrated. Here, have a mint, they're delicious. -- David Rakoff

joy williams (shifting things)

here's an essay that joy williams wrote

i can't find anymore where this essay is from; some kind of anthology that also had, i remember, anne tyler in it; googling it does nothing (google is useless for once)

i typed it one or two years ago so that the writing workshop i was in then could read it

here it is:

Shifting Things

My father is a congregational minister. My grandfather was a minister. My family is Welsh. I grew up, an only child, in Maine. This is not a paragraph from one of my stories. It is a paragraph from my life. My real life.

I was fascinated by the words in the Bible, and the stories. The stories aren’t comforting or sentimental, they’re tremendous and ruthless, and the words—horses and fish, blind men and dead men—all those words meant something other than what they appeared to mean, they were representations of other things, things I could and couldn’t imagine. Water wasn’t water, seeds weren’t seeds. This thrilled me. Everything, as image, was totally something else. There were levels of meanings in images, in sentences, in stories.

*

I wanted to write.

*

The year I went to college I received three copies of Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling for Christmas. It was as though my loved ones were saying—So you want to be a writer! Well, it took this woman seventeen years to write this book which is about the search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It’s pretty much unreadable but it’s supposed to be a work of art. We guess this is how it’s done and it’s by a woman too so... good luck.

*

I wrote to Flannery O’Connor’s mother once. I said I really liked her daughter’s stories and could I have a picture of her. Meaning her daughter, of course. She wrote back and said I sure could not.

*

At the time I didn’t realize what it was, the true nature of the peculiar gift the writer gives the reader.

*

I like the short story as a form. The intensity of it, the swiftness. Assemble the ambulances. Something is going to happen.

*

More can probably be found out about a writer from a single paragraph of work than from any interview or essay. Gertrude Stein said that paragraphs are emotional whereas sentences are not. She also said that the American way of writing was the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something. She suggested that something was always floating above the American paragraph—the well-done American paragraph—something detached from what it said and what it did.

*

Here is a paragraph of mine. Turnupseed lived on the mainland in a little cement block house on land sucked senseless by the phosphate interests. Every time he tried to plant a tree in the queer, floppy soil, it perished. What does that tell you about me? It tells you that I sometimes find safety in the comic, because really there is a pit, a panic beneath everything and the comic is a safety net there to keep from falling further. It swings there kindly and yet it should be removed, really. Don’t count on the net. Fall further.

*

I write out of a sense of guilt. I believe in guilt. There’s not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

*

A woman recently told me that after reading my first novel, State of Grace, she kept dreaming that her house was burning down. I was charmed by this of course. At the same time, I suspected it had been said before about someone else. Words, you know. They’re around. They’ve been used a lot.

*

I don’t dream much. I know this is not a good signifier. Writers are supposed to dream and keep diaries. Woman writers are supposed to, that is. Men don’t have to necessarily. I frequently have nightmares. They take two inarticulatable forms. There are no images in them at all. They are pure fear and dismay, a sense of the tremendous strength of the dark, a sense that I have not done what it was I knew I should have done.

*

What I can conjure up in the daylight hours when I close my eyes tight are the faces of people. They are all totally unique, people I have never seen before or written about, blooming and fading one after another behind my shut lids. I don’t understand it. They come in the bright Florida sunlight. I would prefer them to be in the shape of animals... other things. But they are the faces of people. Strangers, very clear, but without their stories.

*

The writer has to maintain a curious disassociation with the world. The act of writing in itself is a highly self-conscious retreat from the world. I live in beautiful places but I have to stay cooped up in a small, almost dark room if I’m ever going to get anything done. And I have to stay there for hours and hours, day after day, making this thing, setting this created, unreal thing in motion, a story. The literal isn’t interesting, but the literal must be perfectly, surprisingly rendered because the search is always to see things in a new way. That is essential.

*

And then it just seems preposterous. There I am, choosing my words so carefully, trying to build this pure, unanalyzable, transparent, honest thing in this dim room with the shades drawn and out there is the world, indecent, cruel, apathetic, a world where the seas are being trashed, the desert bladed, the wolves shot, the eagles poisoned, where people show up at planning and zoning meetings waving signs that say My Family Can’t Eat the Environment. That sentence is ill, it is a virus of a sentence, and as a writer, I should be able to defeat it and its defenders handily. With the perfect words, I should be able to point out, reasonably, that in fact the individual’s family is eating the environment, that they are consuming it with sprawl and greed and materialistic hungers and turning it into—shit. But perfect words fail me. I don’t want my words. I want to throttle this person, beat him over the head with his stupid sign.

*

I think what happens to many writers is that they reach a certain age and they look around and think, My God, what an indulgence this writing is—stories! I mean, really—and then they go out and involve themselves in a more active way with the world. Writers must never engage the world in their stories. The writer must write stories. Or get out in the world and beat people over the head with their stupid signs.

*

Oh thou lord of life, send my roots rain, Hopkins wrote. Some writers write too much. The rain doesn’t come, but they write still. And they are wilting while pretending they are a tree in bloom. Sometimes the literary establishment encourages them in this belief.

*

I was once at lunch with a well-known writer and his family. It was our first meeting. Other people were there as well. It was a beautiful winter day in Key West. There I was, being friendly, drinking my eleven martinis or what have you, hair brushed as well as possible, napkin in lap, nibbling and chatting away, only to have the well-known writer remark later—“I expected her to be more twisted.”

*

Jean Rhys once said that to be a writer you have to be a demon or a fraud. I don’t feel myself to be particularly demonic and in person I am an absolute fraud. Everything rests on the awareness that a hidden life exists.

*

There’s a lot of flash in the story form these days. A lot of dazzle and dependence upon the net. Houdini said that of all his tricks the most difficult to perform was the wet sheet escape. The wet sheet treatment was used in lunatic asylums to restrain violent patients. It was very difficult to escape from being bound in a wet sheet. But this escape was not popular with the audiences. They wanted him to escape from chains and dead whales and water-filled safes. These things were easier to do than they appeared. A lot of fiction is stagey now—the equivalent of making an elephant disappear—right before your eyes. It’s easy to make an elephant disappear. The farmers of Zimbabwe are doing it every day.

*

The equivalent of the wet sheet escape in fiction, perhaps, would be to create a character who gets out of life having lived it, having truly spectacularly lived it, used it all up. This would have to be done with words of course.

*

The surface of a good story is severely simple. Clean and treacherous as new ice. Below the surface is accident, chaos, uncertainty—beautiful, shifting things. I believe in the mystery of things, their spiritual rhythm. I am not interested in man-woman things much. In-out. Or love. I am interested in loneliness, obsession, desperation. Well, perhaps I am interested in love. I am not interested in woman-woman matters much. Feminist matters. Support and consolation matters. Transformation is what I’m interested in the most. What it is that is beyond and beneath things. Moments, the levels in moments.

*

None of this is what I long to say. I long to say other things. I write stories in my attempt to say them.

joy williams post coming really soon

it will be in four parts; four posts at once

1. her fiction (quotes, commentary, digression about kmart realism, etc.)

2. her non-fiction (long quoted passages, commentary, etc.)

3. her blurbs of other people's books, various things she's said (that i found using LexisNexis), and an interview with david rakoff where she says she drives a bronco

4. her ungooglable (i don't even know what anthology it's from anymore) essay on writing, 'shifting things,' of which a year ago i checked out the book (some anthology) in which it appears in and then typed it out and e-mailed it to myself and my then-writing workshop (to divert discussion and attention away from ZZ Packer, Anthony Doerr, and Jhumpa Lahiri) and will now copy and paste here illegally; i think illegally

also, out of the seven hundred or so people who came here from bookslut yesterday, i recieved over forty e-mails of joy williams anecdotes and interesting facts! Yes!

actually, out of the seven hundred or so people who came here from bookslut yesterday, i recieved zero e-mails about joy williams

k-mart, k-mart realism; the rise, struggle, decline of

the rise

1977-1980

• S.S. Kresge Co. changes its name to Kmart Corp.
• John Gardner, teacher of Raymond Carver, publishes On Moral Fiction, a sort of attack on Postmodernism.
• Raymond Carver stops drinking with the help of alcoholics anonymous, publishes Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Writes What we Talk About When we Talk About Love.
• Mary Robison recieves a Masters degree from John Hopkins, publishes her first story collection, Days.
• Ann Beattie plays a waitress in the movie of her own novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which is released twice.

1981-1987

• Kmart opens its 2000th store. There are Kmart stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Probably other places too.
• Bobbie Ann Mason publishes Shiloh and Other Stories, wins the PEN/Hemingway Award. Raymond Carver says, "These stories will last."
• Frederick Barthelme publishes his first story collection, Moon Deluxe, 13 stories of which (out of 17) appeared previously in the New Yorker.
• Joy Williams publishes Taking Care, her first story collection. Raymond Carver says, "Joy Williams is simply a wonder." Ann Beattie says, "One of our most remarkable storytellers."
• Raymond Carver publishes Cathedral.
• Kmart starts relationship with Martha Stewart as spokeswoman and consultant.

the struggle

1988-1993

• Raymond Carver dies of Lung Cancer.
• Joy Williams publishes Escapes. Four of the stories appeared previously in Best American Short Stories. One won an O'Henry Prize. But one story is bizarre. It is called "Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State," and is literally that, and is ignored by all reviewers. Zoe Heller says, " ... the market is flooded with laconic little slices of life [...] Joy Williams is undoubtably part of the factory team."
• "Less is Less," Madison Smartt Bell's anti Kmart realism essay, previously published in Harper's, is translated into Japanese and published in Switch.
• Kmart buys stake in OfficeMax, The Sports Authority. Buys Borders, the book chain.

the decline

1993-1999

• Kmart sells its stake in The Sports Authority and OfficeMax.
• Mary Robison divorces her second husband, Jim.
• Frederick Barthelme publishes a story in Ploughshares. Has not published a story in The New Yorker since sometime before 1992; will not publish another story in the New Yorker ever.
• Kmart realism attacked by Frederick Busch, Tom Wolfe.

2000-2002

• Kmart buys its BlueLight.com Internet service.
• Joy Williams publishes The Quick and the Dead, a novel with wild, abstract, and affected language; a ghost who comes back to haunt and make-fun of its husband; and strange, self-concious, postmodern-y sort of introductions to each section of the book. Blurbed by Don Delillo, Bret Easton Ellis.
• Mary Robison publishes Why Did I Ever, a novel told in over 500 fragments, of which she says can pretty much be read in any order.
• Ann Beattie publishes an essay in the New York Times, reminiscing about how at readings people used to talk to her about Joy Williams and Raymond Carver. Complaining about how now at readings people just ask her "specious questions to ellicit amusing answers."
• Kmart files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

three asian-american writers who are obsessed with racial identity; compulsively obsessed, secondarily obsessed, and enlightenedly obsessed

compulsive

marie myung-ok lee, article on mobylives

[...] a sea of white faces.

I was disappointed to find myself at yet another all–white literary event. However, born and raised in white–and–blond northern Minnesota, I felt eerily at home.

As an Asian [...]

secondary

change-rae lee, interview

And this yearning for a national and cultural identity – that also appealed to me but that was secondary, frankly because it was really mostly the language.

enlightened

don lee, (quote 1) about his book, Country of Origin (quote 2) from his book, Country of Origin

If you try to base identity on geography or nationality or even race and ethnicity, perhaps that's just another artifice.

She was never black enough, or Oriental enough, or white enough [...]