She wants her cup of stars.

In Carlos Fuentes' Aura there's a scene in the middle of the book in which the second person narrator--so, "you,"--looks out the window and sees that "five, six, seven cats...are all twined together, all writhing in flames and giving off a dense smoke that reeks of burnt fur." And then you go back into the house and head down the hallway to fuck your boss's niece and the scene is never explained or referenced again. Well, that's magical realism for you.

This week, I think I edged closer to comprehending the complexities of gatos en fuego. I turned on my oven to roast some pecans. Suddenly, one of my foster kittens, Azuki, came bolting from behind the stove like the proverbial Chiroptera out of hell. I didn't even know there was a hidey-hole back there for him to get into. He was covered all over with a fine dusting of black stuff. "What did you get into?" I scolded. "Meow," he said.

When I brushed him off, I realized he hadn't gotten into something; the black stuff was the outer layer of fur burned to a crisp down his back. He had a slightly...sizzled odor.

So we all learned a valuable lesson. I now do headcounts when I turn on the oven, and Azuki, I suspect, will never venture near a stove again.
( are you gonna eat me? )

1. drawgirl is here. WOOT. Bring on the Mexican martinis.

2. New Janet Frame story--posthumous of course--in the New Yorker. It's incredible.

3. Muppet Show soundtrack on repeat in my vehicle.

4.

Suddenly, in the middle of Powells, weighted down by the books in my basket, everything re-aligned itself and I was left to marvel at how much stress can make you forget yourself. Most the reading I'd been doing in the previous months, since the upheaval and uprooting and reschooling, had served the absolutely linked functions of survival and distraction. The fiction had impacted thinly, the reading a function of habit more than devotion. Which was not to say the reading had been poor, or wasted; but I was suddenly recalled to the bottomless passions the best fiction opened to me when I was awake enough to let it.

Yes I know this is overwrought. I'm reading Ann Radcliffe right now. Cut me some slack.

...is making the rounds again! decemberthirty was kind enough to throw the interview questions my way this time.

And here we go!



All right: the meme propagates, as ever, when anyone who is interested asks me to ask you five questions. I'll do so, and you post the answers (and the same offer I just made) in your own blog. Cheers!     

Children are Civilians Too is a collection of Heinrich Böll's earliest short stories, set either during or after the second World War. On the back of my copy is a quote from Joseph Heller: “ Böll combines mammoth intelligence with a literary outlook that is masterful and unique.” The quote itself is bland, but the connection between Heller and Böll is an interesting one. More than anything, what links the two men is a profound understanding of not just the horror and misery of war, but of its fundamental absurdities.

Böll is at his best when detailing the struggles of civilians after the war is over. There's a lyrical simplicity to the best of these stories that steers away from the obvious pain and pathos available at every turn when describing a people ravaged by war. Rather,  Böll steps away from that pathos and towards the simple fact of making-do that occupies his characters. Amongst the strongest in the collection is “The Man With the Knives,” about a man whose friend makes a living during a knife show: “Perhaps one of them, just one, will go home and not forget me. 'That man with the knife, for Christ's sake, he wasn't scared, and I'm scared all the time, for Christ's sake,' maybe that's what he'll say because they're all scared, all the time. They trail their fear behind them like a heavy shadow, and it makes me happy if they can forget about it and laugh a little.” And of course, by the end of the story, the protagonist is in the show, knives flying at his head: without fear for just one moment. In another story a man takes a job counting people crossing a bridge, for the statisticians, but he sabotages his numbers by refusing to count a beautiful young woman every day, a tiny rebellion against numbers and commodification. And in the story “Black Sheep,” a man fulfills his destiny as a useless slacker, one of the few people in the family not bent to mindless productivity.  Everywhere amongst people with dreary, painful jobs and lives, there are tiny moments of beauty, strength, and humanity.

Other stories describe soldiers killing boredom with drunken meanderings, men dying in ditches and tiny shacks, men tucked away in prison camps. One incredible story, “Stranger, Bear Word to the Spartans We...” depicts a man brought to a high school that's been converted to a wartime surgery, and too late recognizing it as the high school he departed only months earlier as the doctors remove his leg.

By and large the stories are beautiful, and felt timely, given the constant news of a far-off war we don't always see the fall-out of. There are a few places where  Böll's careful tone slips towards the sentimental, particularly in a few of the war stories; that said, erring on the side of pathos over detachment feels the right literary choice in a book about eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds losing their lives to the hubris and foolishness of their elders. To anyone interested in an intellectual and yet touching account of man at war, I certainly recommend this particular book.

Deborah Eisenberg was one of the writers I tried most fervently to emulate when I was younger. When I was eighteen I read an article in Harpers' by Francine Prose, about the set of expectations readers bring to female writers of fiction. Prose mentioned a number of contemporary women who write savage, intelligent, complex fiction (as opposed to the aching domestic novels that Prose claims many people think of when the phrase "woman writer" enters a conversation). Two of those writers, Mary Gaitskill and Deborah Eisenberg, have been incredibly important to me over the years in different ways.

My emulations were pretty feeble, honestly. This is because Eisenberg writes some of the most complicated short stories I have ever read. They're long, they're densely layered, and plot typically fades into the background of something more nuanced. One of the blurbs on the back of her newest book, Twilight of the Superheroes, says this: "Ms. Eisenberg writes big, risky, quick but thickly textured fiction that has the energy, breadth, and social imagination we associate with large seriocomic novels." A pompous way to say it, but it's true. Her short fiction is as ambitious, as rich, as, say, Franzen's Corrections or Moody's Ice Storm. In my opinion, this is absolutely no exaggeration.

Her stories don't work the same way most short stories do; for one thing they're incredibly long, some almost sixty pages. This means you can't consider the story a flirtation, a brief affair. Most short stories are appealing because you can read them in a sitting, while waiting for the bus or on a lunch break or what have you. You really have to clear your schedule for Eisenberg's (and it's worth it). There's never some easy to swallow "epiphany" at the end; the fiction is much more interested in experience than some kind of moral lesson or unveiling or pat bow-tied ending. The stories in Twilight of the Superheroes come from different angles: one charts the internal territory of a man whose love for his schizophrenic sister contorts his feelings about family in general. In another, a group of young New Yorkers are about to lose their sublet (an extravagent penthouse that, only a few years earlier, became an image of hell looming directly over the Twin Towers). The story explores the diminishments of maturity, the struggle of youth meeting a world that doesn't match expectations. In "Window," a young woman recalls her intense relationship with a gun-peddler who lived in a cabin, both the intense glittering highs of their relationship, and the brutal culmination.

Describing the subject matter seems to deny her work justice. At heart, what works in an Eisenberg story is the way the internal world collides with the external. It's sometimes funny and sometimes horrible and sometimes very sad. Innocents are abroad in her stories, and not-so-innocents as well. We don't watch her characters or follow them so much as sink directly into them, like it or not.

She's a hard damn person to do a brief critique on. If you're a fan of Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, or Jennifer Egan, some of the same things that I love in all those writers are things I love here. But then too there's something just intensely specific about Eisenberg, some idiosyncracy that's hard to touch upon but that makes her fiction incandescent.

Last night I went to a lecture by Suzan-Lori Parks, playwright and author of the novel Getting Mother's Body. It wasn't a very formal lecture--she mostly talked about her creative processes--but it was fun. She was incredibly kind and funny and generous and real, and I bet you anything she's a kickass teacher.

The thing she said that stayed with me the most was something she said she learned from James Baldwin, whom she studied with at Mount Holyoke. She said the thing she learned that was the most important was how to behave in the presence of the spirit. That you treat the spirit like you treat an honored guest, invite it in and offer it something to drink. You treat it like a lover, with gentleness and appreciation. That you treat it like a volcano, as a thing unpredictable and mighty. That you don't question the form it picks--that however ludicrous or banal or whatever you shut up and listen to what it's doing. I'm paraphrasing a lot here. But essentially, what she was saying was that you have to entertain all your most far-out ideas, that you can't dismiss any of those voices that come to you. Or that you shouldn't.

This is something I've learned from writers like Haruki Murakami or Aimee Bender or David Foster Wallace or Mary Gaitskill. The idea that you tell the story that's living the most vividly on the inside of your eyelids, and don't worry about who is going to care about urban fetishists or junkies or child tennis prodigies or who is going to believe in a thing like a cat flute or a boy with a pumpkin for a head. Your job isn't to worry about that, at least not on the first go-round. Your job is to shut the fuck up, and listen to the spirit. You can worry about the people who will be listening to you later.

So tell me: how do you entertain the spirit? How do you all invite it in, with a welcome mat or a red light outside your door or with a big open house barbecue? Let's drop the metaphor. When do you feel most in sync with your creative selves? How do you get to that place where you feel like this is really, really happening?