A P R I L 2 0 1 3
MONDAY
have to start a new document for this but will have
to paste it in here beforehand.
Interview with writer J P Jones
1. Prior
to writing anything I usually come up with a basic idea for a
book. (It has to be MY idea. When people suggest idea, I say nothing
but I have never thought "that's interesting.") I
then begin to write to find a story and flesh it out about
whatever beginning situation or, sometimes, a final outcome that
occurred to me. The Tunis book started with an idea about the initial
situation - a suicide in Tunis that gets blamed on local Jews. My
Vietnam book started out with me wondering what would have happened
to me had I gone to Vietnam. "Convictions" is
an exception. I started it with no idea of where it would begin or
go, other than it would be set in DC. "A Sense of
Loss" began with the idea of a town, such as
Cumberland, that has to rely on attracting foreign doctors - and
one is murdered. "Nothing is the Same" began with my very
disturbing experience on a DC jury.
Once
I have an idea about a story, the rest is just putting my butt in a
chair and continually asking myself what the characters would do or say next
and what would happen next. Early on, I taught myself to
abandon almost all irony in my stories. You probably have heard me
say before; "irony allows someone to say what he or she doesn't
believe, allowing them to avoid the question 'what do I think is true or
at least what do I believe.'" Irony, in other words,
allows the diffident to remain lazy. Writing fiction, in my opinion,
requires thinking through things and determining what the writer honestly
believes about how things in the story would work in the world that
has been created. Far too much work for most people!
Also, I've discovered that most people are VERY reluctant to reveal anything
that they believe about everything. That strikes me as
odd. I don't understand such pervasive, seemingly paralyzing fear, but
it's definitely out there. "Oooooh, if I write something I must be
criticized, so I'm not going to do that," I can almost hear when I'm
around people. When it comes to any kind of writing people say "I
can't do that" but what I nearly always hear is "I'm afraid to do
that."
2. I
compose at the computer, then re-write A LOT because the computer
allows me to do that with relative ease.
3.
I usually can write first-draft material about 4 to 6 hours a day,
although every now and then I will get on a roll about something and can go up
to 12 hours before exhausting myself. But the long stretches
are rate. I can rewrite/edit about 6-7 hours a day.
P
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I suppose
I could say if I do attempt to keep going with my Copenhagen novel that I will
do so just to find out how to answer all these questions in MY way. Too.
Bags
packed. Holding our breaths. Went to campus bookstore today to buy
two more hats for the Madrid kids.
whether they want them or not!
I asked
Phil if I could post his answers on my blog but maybe that is exactly what I
should no longer do---poach on everyone for my material instead of pulling
something out of my own gullet.
Better my own hairball than some other's cat's.
Should I
tweet that? That is good.
TUESDAY
almost noon. Good swim this
morning. Colder out. Windy. Glad we're not going to the MFA lecture tomorrow even though
we bought the tickets.
Finishing
Naked Singularity which is heartbreakingly good. And fine.
a book
that would read like a good swim---floating and zoning and then you wake up and
see 40 minutes have gone---
not the
orgasmic rise and climax of suspense and detective novels---like Naked
Singularity---which after all buries the whole plot in the gauze of wrappings
on the boxer's hands--
is that
what Sebald's works already are?
these reader free-swim swims in the pools of empty consciousness?
it might
have to be a book Phil would hate---or just not have much sympathy for--Phil
and everyone else---oh, well, the price you pay for not being anything much
5:45
pm Finished the novel about twenty
minutes ago, scanned some commentary on Conversational and then took a crap,
unusual time of day for such and somehow related---in terms of the old thinking
of the body approach.
Phil put
questions to me so here goes---I had put some to him
1. How
do you proceed when you paint? Do you start with an idea or work until an
idea emerges?
Both. Sometimes I want to try something out,
have an idea, or start by copying a piece by someone else or a detail of a
piece I've seen somewhere. Other
times I just paint and experiment, cover and start over, cover again. There was an art teacher here, an
abstract painter, and if you took his advanced painting courses there were
always only two assignments and you could choose only one for the semester:
start with a large canvas and keep covering over what you do for the semester;
or start with an image from somewhere and paint 75 or 80 versions of it. Lots of students would wait until the
last week and do the 75 in all nighters---like postponing term papers. But those are the two poles of the
process. When to stop is always
the question. Becomes a matter of
"a feel" for the whole thing.
2. Do
you start right in with paint or do a preliminary sketch?
Always? Sometimes? Never?
I never did
a sketch. Well, maybe once in a
while. I did try keeping a sketch
book of ideas sort of thing but could never get too enthused about it. Usually just love the mess of getting
into the paint.
3.
From the dates I see on paintings, it seems you work on them about a month
before they are finished. Is that true?
Don't think
so but never really gave it any thought.
Might be more a matter of the time between when I felt like putting a
photo up on the blog. I think when
paintings got done or were abandoned differed and sometimes they sit in the
studio and you go back to them months later and do something and then they are
finished or ruined or left in limbo again. What I enjoyed lots about having a pretty large space to
myself for a good while was that sense of parking unfinished works and
forgetting about them for a while---like the writer's desk drawer---give things
time to rest and re-perk, come back to later.
4. Is
there an aspect of your painting that I should be asking about, but am
missing here?
Well there's
all the talk about the physicality of the materials and colors. Paint, texture, brushes, feel of the
surface, line, or edges, or color play and then the feel of the surface or
whole piece. Sometimes you end up putting
too much paint on over a few weeks and the whole thing goes dead and can't be
saved. No matter what you try it
looks like a rotting piece of naugahyde and has to be thrown out. Oil and acrylic behave differently and
once I moved from oil to arylic there was a learning curve all over about the
materials and their nature. thin,
thick, to use gels and shellacs and all can get to be a thing itself.
5. I sat in
on a few art classes now and then but like you with the writing, I never could
sustain an interest in really doing the assignments or wanting to stay with the
course as it was set up by the teacher.
Could have been (for both of us?) a mid-life or adult sense of wanting
to get on with it and find out for ourselves how to figure things out, how to
re-discover what was going on.
Find out what worked or didn't work by our inner sense of it rather than
wanting someone else's approval from the start. Of course showing it to the right persons at the right time
does get involved. But there too I
wanted to either control that or surrender to that when it felt right rather
than have an external schedule.
-----------
Back to De La Pava's novel. Real sense of Over-ness haunting me
now. hanging on. Very powerful work. Might be better than Infinite
Jest. Too soon to say but it comes
to mind.
Weds
April 3
Paula came early this morning. Final packing things. Super bright and sunny but really cold
and still high winds.
Thinking about how thrilling De La Pava's book
is. Wonder if he took the use of
swords from Marîas's Your Face Tomorrow?
Vol 2. Even if not, he sure
knows what he's doing. If only
Salvatore's first novel had been this wonderful, this splendid and
spectacular. Both took ten years
to write.
Contrast ANS with the little book of Walser's that
I read a few weeks ago. Walser's
inimitable style and modes, yes, but still, early 20th C airy slightness, Peter
Panism, until I read a few more of his works to get a better take on them. Meanwhile, De La Pava's work is
certainly "after David Foster Wallace"--half a generation? after
it. But perhaps greater than
it. Huge books by young men out to
prove their moves. Pava's is so
much warmer and human. Infinite Jest I read so long ago that my
memory of it is not reliable, but what I do remember, and the remembered
experience of it, is that exhausting sense of brilliance at high pitch, the
exploding nebula of amazing brightness---and coldness. The best scene is where the Quebec
wheelchair terrorists put mirrors up across highway I-93 in the dark of night
to bewitch drivers. Of course that
stuck with me because I live close to the very scene and enjoyed the whole
local referentiality. No need to
go on trying to compare the works.
Better to just say that ANS does succeed in expanding itself outward and
the whole "deconstruction," to use an really old-fashioned word, of
what it started out to be---a legal thriller, a lawyer-esque detective work,
the spiraling explosion of genres, once we've lived through the incredibly
enjoyable and intense heist movements, keeps going upward into if not a sublime
then a contemporary version of exaltation where love land fear embrace to erase
victory and loss. Or maybe to
merge with all of those and all the other terms we can think of.
I read one commentary yesterday that said that
after the sword scenes the reader then felt let down by the remaining hundred
pages or so of the novel. But I
didn't and I don't think so. There
is a natural denouement after climax, yes, De La Pava follows the conventions
and he manages to break them open at the same time and the denouement moves
themselves become almost a new novella/epilogue in which resolution issues
morph into nearly new revelations of character and relationship and human
connectedness. We have family,
children, sister and mother, love, and fear of retribution which itself becomes
turned inside out into some indefinable cosmic embrace. And it is none of it as hokey as this
run-down surely makes it sound to someone who has not yet read the book.
At key places you can say to yourself, oh boy, is
Tarantino going to die to make this a movie and you also say, no, this is so
much better than what mess he would make of it because I am reading it and De
La Pava's implied narrator is pacing us through it in ways that only a supreme
writer can do.
Another lasting impression concerns the ways De La
Pava takes the risk of describing madness and near-madness and pulls it
off. Various sorts of distortions
of experience that we recognize and don't recognize, have felt ourselves or can
tell others have felt, De La Pava portrays those, conveys what they are like,
has his protagonist, Casi, live through them, live with them for a time, and we
find them credible and moving, especially in hindsight. As the story moves along we can look
back and recognize what that was, perhaps in ways that Casi himself cannot, and
yet, this might be a major achievement, our experience of these effects do not
seem to involve irony. At least
not in the ways that have become standard as "dramatic irony" or
"literary irony." Nor are
there the now standard "post-modern irony" or other such
effects. Instead the book hangs on
a few ordinary armatures---legal procedure, the history of boxing in the 80s,
crime, some violence, oh, and memorable characters, expansive, big, complex
characters, like Toom and Dane.
Casi's voice carries the rich brew. De La Pava's incredible mastery of
idiom, rhetoric, street talk, talk of every sort, rushes the book forward. Language rich to a breaking point,
never cute, never just clever, language handled so poetically it disappears,
taking us into the naked singularity of poetry. That title phrase is from physics and I assume the concept
gets used and explained clearly and astonishingly---assume, because everything
else I can judge gets handled that way.
The history of western philosophy, yep, in there, forgot to mention
that. Literary theory, even
television theory, of sorts, without extraneous chat about pop this or that,
and without superfluous big thoughts about politics or history, but they are
there too.
Melville hovers around the edges. One character named Ballena and bigger
than all get out. Confidence men,
ambiguities, uncertainties and shifting realities in which we wander enchanted
isles.
Philsophy, hence theology and spirituality. Character named
Aloyna. Hmm, Dostoyevsky. The list goes on.
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