March 24, 2007
Okay, I’m back. Don’t know for how long. Just to see. I went away to claw closer to the end of a new novel, and I’m almost there, now, safely into that antsy, alternately brooding and giddy (but mostly brooding) stretch of weeks that always comes for me a few months before the finish, once I realize I really am going to finish. When I know there’s nothing left anymore to keep me from getting to the last page except that creeping doubt that arises, oh, no more than six-seven times an hour. That I’m wasting my time. That I did it wrong.
When I started this dubious blogging thing, I promised myself two things: that I wasn’t going to waste time talking about my own life because who cares; and that I wasn’t ever going to take time away from what I considered real writing–that is, fiction. I’m definitely holding true to tenet #2. As for #1, well, it’s been a hard year, lot of dying going on, and I’m in the mood for chatting but don’t want to be on the phone. So we’ll see.
Let’s start with Stuff Glen Likes. Homebase.
If there’s anyone still out there other than the stock quote and buy-vagasil-cheap and cows-with-big-boobs sites flooding the comment page on this blog with spam, and there’s anything you want me to be sure to write about here at some point, please do get in touch. It’s good to hear from you.
Been reading a ton of poetry. New stuff and old. Dont know why. Never could write it. One of the things I remember best about the girl I dated for the first two years of college is a single line she wrote in a poem she started. I only heard it, never saw the line breaks, but it went: “I ask mom was uncle Joe a Nazi, and she says Argentina, dancing the rhumba…”
There’s a leap there, right between “says” and “Argentina,” that I don’t make when I write. A gap in the story. Was it Frank O’Hara who said poems were one half of an overheard telephone conversation?
Of course, he also said, when asked what a poem was, “If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife, you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up.’ I was a track star for Mineola prep.”
Me, I’ve been reading for rhythm. To fill my head with phrases and half-conversations and tangles of language to unpick as I climb rocks with my kiddies and swallow my doubts and row, so slow, toward the end of one more something that might be nothing but also might be something. You never know.
Four things, this morning, to start:
1. James Elroy Flecker.
Old pal.
Used his most famous lines in a story of mine that maybe doesn’t work, “Transitway,” though there are things in that story I kind of love. “For lust of knowing what should not be known.” That’s pretty much his subject. He died at 26, I think, or 28. British. Traveler. Sickly. Obsessed with a Boy’s Own version of travel in the Orient, but he captured the longing buried in that dream more evocatively than almost any I know. I’ve been drinking deep from his “Gates of Damascus”:
“Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing. Have you heard/That silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?”
If he’s juvenile, he’s my kind of juvenile, and if he’s headed off again to Saadabad or Samarkand, I’m coming, too:
“Lie a little to your mother: tell her you must out to pray/And we’ll slink along the alleys, thieves of all a summer day/Down to the worn old watersteps, and then, my love, away/O my cypress, waving cypress, let us go to Saadabad.”
2. Rae Armantrout–Up to Speed
As with music, my taste tends to run to the experimental, toward the margins, which is odd since I’m so in love with narrative, with the direct line to the heart if one can still find it, to wanderlust if there’s anywhere left to go. But in contemporary poetry, I find myself hungering for linguistic play, those language tangles to pick like berries along the way to either of the above. My friend Darcie Dennigan, who just won the Fordham First Book prize and the Discovery/Nation, and of whom you will be hearing much–those of you who hear anything about poets, anyway–has it in spades.
So does Rae Armantrout. What I love in her is the apparent simplicity, the direct lines that go not to the heart but a closet nearby to rummage around, come up with treasures and then bury them again. I love the phrases that seem so plain, speak so plainly, and yet get away: “Vagueness is personal.” Or,
“It’s all this:
The paleness of representation,
the understanding,
the fond sadness it causes…”
3-4. And finally…
Here are two terrific sources for finding contemporary poets:
ronsilliman.blogspot.com
Silliman’s blog is among the most passionate and wide-ranging and lovingly critical of its subject that I’ve seen. It may be the reason that I’m back here, trying again.
And…
galatearesurrection5.blogspot.com
Galatearesurrection is just a bunch of smart people talking smartly and joyfully about poetry.
Okay. I’ve dropped the penny down the well. We’ll see if there’s an echo.
Hope you’ve all been well.
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November 22, 2006
Just a quick, uncharacteristically commercial note today to let everyone know that the nifty souvenirs from this year’s Rolling Darkness Revue tour are now available via my website at www.glenhirshberg.com. Chapbooks with original stories from Peter Atkins, Norman Partridge, Dennis Etchison, Clay McLeod Chapman, Lisa Morton, and me, a CD featuring a complete studio performance of a show from the 2005 tour and readings by Pete, Dennis, and me, plus of course snazzy commemorative shot glasses.
If you have any interest, please do stop by and check everything out.
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November 1, 2006
This year’s Rolling Darkness Revue tour proved the most pleasant yet. And there were real, live people (not a one wearing pumpkin-colored lipstick) at every show. See how far one can come? Turns out all of this is an inspirational story. Just you wait and see.
And now…the end of Landry… (again, if you’re coming into the middle, well, you’re in the middle. Scroll down to the part that says part one. Then come on back.)
2003
“Got any pictures? Of your kids?” The blank man asked next, in his blank voice with the wind and snow in it.
I was in such a daze by this point that I actually started reaching into my backpack. Stopped with my hands on the little envelope in which I toted around my childrens’ sweet little faces. I had a vision, suddenly, of what this man’s next question was going to be.
So. Author guy. Want to know what really happened to the Oakland County Child Killer’s kids?
(I should probably mention here that my first novel, though not really a horror or detective story, uses the all too real and terrible events surrounding the Oakland County Child Killer case that ripped all new wounds in Detroit in the mid-seventies as a backdrop. The Killer has never been identified.)
Blank Man did not actually say that. What he did do was start snuffling. A lot. At some point, he came around the table and stood very close to me for a while. Eventually, he bought two books, asked me to sign them. “For my Godchildren.”
I didn’t shudder. Tried smiling. Saw the shadows of knit-cap kids massing just outside the door of the shop. Checked for Cousin Bella, who was kneeling in the Meditation section, fingering her pearls. Signed the books. From somewhere in his pockets, Blank Man snatched out a disposable camera and snapped pictures of me while I did it.
“Action shots,” he said. Snuffled. And left.
I had one more visitor. Right as I was standing to leave, a twenty-something in a machine-shop jacket that said Rick and an old Tigers cap sidled up. “Hey,” he said, in an ordinary, shy voice, no wind or snow in it.
“Hey,” I answered.
“You’re the guy who wrote that book, right? About the Child Killer?”
I started packing up. “Well, it’s not really about–”
“Right, I know, it’s about the kids, right? I mean, not the dead kids, the kids who lived, the kids who’ve had to live with that as part of their childhoods?”
I stopped packing, tried to meet Rick’s eye. He wouldn’t meet mine. “Right,” I said, thinking furiously. Was this someone’s brother? Was he old enough to have lived here then? The idea that he’d just come because he’d heard about and might be interested in my book never occurred to me.
Over the next fifteen minutes, though, without ever once meeting my gaze, Rick asked a series of the best questions I’ve ever received about anything I’ve written, and that book in particular. How I balanced the very real anguish of real people with the needs of the fictional story that spilled out. How much of the narrator was me (less than people think), and how much of the place in the book was actual Detroit (only the foundation from which I’ve built the Detroit-myth I’ve carried with me all my life: sad, torn-apart place. Snow-swept and gray, violent and lonely, fascinating and grounded, sweet and defiant. Home, where I can no longer go and apparently am no longer welcome).
At the end, in the midst of what had sounded like one more question, Rick nodded abruptly, said, “Okay. Thanks a lot,” and started away.
I like selling books as much as the next wheedling, desperate young writer. But I’m not the huckstering kind. Just no good at it. Uncomfortable doing it. But this guy…It wasn’t the sale. I wanted to sign something for him. I was so glad and honored and amazed that he’d come. I would have bought him one, if he’d asked.
“Hey,” I called out. “Do you want a book? I mean…it would be an honor to sign one for you.”
Rick turned around, and for the first time all night, looked at me. For a split second. Ordinary, gentle face. A little sad. Older than I’d thought, but not much. A little older than me.
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t read much.” And he walked away.
Somehow, that seemed the perfect cap to the whole experience. I stood there nodding a few seconds. Pumpkin-lady came by and suggested I sign the stock. I told her she might have trouble returning the books if I did that. She said that was okay. I smiled gratefully, and signed. Packed up my bag. Folded up the folding chair and leaned it against a display table. Started calling my cousin. “Okay, Bella, I’m ready to–”
Bang.
It wasn’t just me. Pumpkin Lady, Bella, everyone in the store leapt off the ground all together, landed, froze, glancing around wildly.
Then Pumpkin Lady clapped. “Oh, shit!” she said. And clapped, as whirling red light swept her face. All our faces.
I turned. Pressed against the outside window, as though preparing to give us all little-boy fish kisses, were the faces of five of the knit-cap kids. The policemen in the process of cuffing them were doing so pretty harshly. Jerking arms back. Wrenching wrists through the cuffs. All of them out there were swearing. A sixth kid lay face down on the black, freezing sidewalk. A cop was kneeling on his back, chanting rights, holding a gun at the base of the kid’s neck with one hand while locking the cuffs home with the other.
“Think there’s a Starbucks around?” said Bella at my elbow, and I turned and stared at her. She was smiling. The red light sweeping over the rest of the store and everyone in it seemed to roll around rather than over her, as though she were a rock at the center of a cove where waves smash in.
“Um…I’m betting no.”
“Oh, honey, there’s always a Starbucks.”
In the end, we went to the Food Court in the mall. My idea, believe it or not. The rationale went something like this: the cops had just finished raiding the place. There might not be a safer location in all of Landry than right here, for the next forty-five minutes or so. Also, strangely enough, I was suddenly pretty tired.
The Food Court had exactly one open establisment, a Sbarro. The Sbarro had exactly two available items: the dregs of the coffee pot, and a single piece of pizza curling up at the edges on its heating tray like an old record jacket left somewhere wet. Cousin Bella seemed delighted to find pizza. I took the coffee.
We were ten minutes into catching up when a flurry of furious footsteps sent us cringing back, whipping our heads around. We were just in time to see another cop take a T.J. Hooker-like flying leap, land squarely on the back of another, very tall knit-cap kid and drop him. The kid got led away a few moments later, bleeding where he’d hit his nose.
And there you have it. From Landry, at the Borders at the edge of reality. The only reading in my life so far at which there were more arrests than sales.
Cousin Bella still wears faux-fur and lives in the Detroit area. She thought the Landry mall had “atmosphere,” and claims to have returned to shop there several times. Landry, I hear, has had a resurgence. I hope a successful one. Your ‘umble narrator hasn’t been back to Detroit since, but still longs to go.
And Rick…if by some wild chance you’re out there, and reading this…drop me a line some time, huh?
October 24, 2006
Didn’t mean to disappear on you. But, well, I’ve been touring. Takes up time, you know?
Now then, where were we? Oh, yes. Pumpkin Lady. Landry. Snow. Knit-head teens. If you need more reminder, just scroll on down…
2003
“You’re our second-ever author,” the pumpkin woman said. I can’t remember if she actually clapped. It was all starting to feel a little surreal, by then. As though I’d stepped into one of those moats the brain creates between your present and your memories. Or into some alternative Detroit at once cheerier and more terrifying than the one I remembered.
I glanced around the store, mumbled something like, “Really? Is the store pretty new?”
“Oh, no,” the Pumpkin Woman assured me. “We’ve been here several years. Now. Do you need anything?”
I glanced around again, tried to rally my brain. This was a question I could answer, right? I was a professional, right? Landry author #2, after all? After a few seconds of that, I realized I did have at least one answer. “Um. How about a chair?”
“Right,” said Pumpkin Woman, and this time she definitely clapped, and hurried to the back of the store to bring me one. After considering for a few moments, she brought out a little folding table, too.
“Should we set up some more?” I asked, offering to go back to the storeroom myself. “Do you want me to do a reading or anything?”
“Oh!” said Pumpkin Woman. “Do you do that?”
If it sounds as though I’m making fun of this woman or this store, I’m not. Her question is not as silly as it might seem. Every bookstore seems to have a different protocol about what they expect writers to do for an event there. And this bookstore had had very few events.
On the other hand, I couldn’t help noticing the poster. Glen Hirshberg. Reading and signing….
“Well, I can,” I said. “If anyone wants me to. I don’t have to.” I hadn’t yet been told the less-than-three-people-in-attendance/take-them-to-a-bar-to-chat-instead rule. Not that there was a bar around. Or even one person not affiliated with the bookstore.
“Wellll,” said the woman, and she leaned against the table she’d brought and smiled gently, apologetically at me. “You’re probably not going to sell many books tonight. I mean, mostly, we sell self-help and true crime. That’s our community customer base.”
“Oh,” I said. I assured her I hadn’t sold all that many books at any particular event thus far, which was true enough. I suggested I just sit down at the table for a half-hour, hour, see what happened. She seemed delighted with that, clapped some more, and went about her business.
I sat. At the fourteen minute mark, a couple in their twenties, wearing dark jeans and heavy jackets and scarves, picked my book off the pile on the front table, read the back, passed it back and forth a couple times, glanced my way. I smiled back, trying not to look too hopeful. Then I decided to go whole hog and look hopeful.
“You wrote this?” the woman asked, waving my book.
MY book, in someone else’s hands…still so strange…so alarming…so good…
“Yep,” I said. Shyly. Proudly.
“Cool,” said the woman, dropped the book on the pile, and led her man back out into the snow.
At the eighteen minute mark, Cousin Bella arrived.
Cousin Bella. Where to begin?
I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, and recognized her instantly. A distant relation, one of the most sweet-tempered people I’ve ever met. Hair that must have gone white before she’d turned 30, because even when I’d known her when I was a child, her hair was a glorious, blinding blaze. Tiniest voice, like a newborn kitten. My brother and I had always liked going to her house, playing with her very smart kids, though our families had not been in touch much in the decades since we left Michigan.
I hadn’t told her I was coming.
She walked into the Borders in faux-fur and real pearls. My first thought was, Good God, you’re never going to get out of the mall.
My second was less a thought than an overwhelming wave of gratitude. I have no idea how she heard about my showing up. Assuming her house was still the one I remembered, she lived nowhere near Landry. And then there was the blizzard, and the ice all over the roads…
We talked a good while. I kept offering her my chair. She kept fingering her pearls and turning them into the light, just in case any of the knit-cap kids lurking in the shadows right outside the bookstore door had missed them on her way in. Finally, she asked if maybe we should continue the conversation afterward.
“We’ll go around the corner and get a coffee,” she said.
“There’s somewhere around the corner to get coffee?”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d know.”
“Oh,” I said. Stared, as she wandered away to browse the self-help shelves, pearls winking. Turned, and almost bumped noses with the red-eyed man who’d somehow appeared behind me.
The only way I can describe his face is…blank. Other than the redness around his pupils, I couldn’t tell you a single thing. He wasn’t wearing a hat, didn’t have much hair. But somehow, the rest of his face seemed draped in its own permanent, private shadow. He looked maybe sixty years old, and didn’t quite meet my gaze.
“So,” he asked, in a half-whisper a whole lot like wind with snow in it. “You got kids?”
Up next…The thrilling confusion…Honest…
October 10, 2006
Or, a (not-as-brief-as-I-intended-but-it’s-a-Hirshberg-story, what-did-you-expect) continuing detour through the everyday road life of the eager young writer for the purposes of expectation adjustment–as in my own, for the upcoming Rolling Dark/American Morons events–plus some bloggy winter entertainment for you, faithful readers:
(present day)
This past weekend saw yet another installment in the glamorous and glory-strewn road that is the writer’s wont. I coasted into San Francisco after a delightful 2+ hours communing with fellow travelers from the closed windows of our carbon monoxide-choked cars on the Bay Bridge (at the end of a six hour drive from L.A.), hurtled around the Mission district cursing those stupid half-curbs the city of San Francisco built to sucker people into thinking one can park there, stumbled into Borderlands Books with eight minutes to spare before my signing…
And then spent a delightful ninety minutes hanging out with the warm and welcoming staff. I got to pat Ripley, the Borderlands hairless cat, for quite a long time. I signed some of the remaning stock of my books, just in case some of the people who didn’t show for the reading got a sudden urge for an autographed edition later on. Then I drove home.
Long day. Ain’t got nothing on Landry, though. And so…
(2003)
When we last left me, I was dragging my car blindly through the Michigan slush, skidding into a parking place before the only lighted building within three miles, to sign for all those eager Landry readers awaiting my appearance. (If you need a more detailed account of part one, feel free to scroll down and read it; this is a blog and cool like dat.)
The most amazing part is that I didn’t notice the second I stepped into the mall. That is, I saw the flourescents twitching, the blank store entrances with those chain doors pulled down and locked tight. But I’d been skating down the black ice of the Woodward Corridor for hours, and I had to go to the bathroom, and I wanted to call my wife. So I ducked down the first service hallway I found and did those things. Roughly ten minutes later, I emerged from the hallway back into the mall proper. If there’d been any hairs left on my leather jacket, I’m pretty sure those would have stood right up along with every other hair I possess.
Out of, I don’t know, sixty spaces in this mall where stores could go, I saw maybe ten that had inhabitants. Of those, there were three that I counted that didn’t have the chain-mail doors locked down so that no one could get in or out.
And yet, there were teenagers in the mall. Dozens of them.
What I remember most about them is their headgear. They all wore black knit wool hats, yanked down so low on their brows that their heads seemed to have changed shape. They looked to be sixteen, seventeen, maybe twenty, all male, none of them uttering even a single word. Mostly, they leaned against the walls and clicked lighters at me when I went by. One or two swung off their perches and dropped into line behind me as I walked. They followed, at exactly my pace. No iPods. No music from anywhere. No noise except my squelchy feet and their all but silent ones on the filthy floor.
I walked faster. They walked faster.
I passed a lone security guard. He stared at me. Ignored what was following me.
And then it was there. Like an oasis. A mirage. A Borders.
It looked…like a Borders. Bright, bland, beige, carpeted. And…there. Right in the window. A picture of my book. And my name. Glen Hirshberg. Reading and signing A Snowman’s Children. Which seemed more than close enough (I mean, heck, they spelled my name right, which is more than we can say for, oh, I don’t know, Bookslut, cough-cough).
I fairly danced through the doors, resisted the urge to glance triumphantly over my shoulder at the black-hats who probably weren’t planning to jump me. Probably.
I had a jolt of renewed confidence. It still felt so good, so alien and unbelievable and good, to see anything of mine in a bookstore window, on a table. To think that anyone might care enough to read a word I’d written, maybe even come talk to me. I strolled right on up to the information counter, stuck out my hand.
“I’m Glen,” I announced, and I’ll admit it, not unproudly. The woman behind the counter wore way too much orange lipstick, and she’d missed some of her mouth, which made her look half-pumpkin. But she smiled brightly, warmly. Blankly.
“Hirshberg,” I added after a few seconds. And gestured toward the table.
The orangey blankness stayed on the woman’s face for a few seconds longer. And then, abruptly, she burst into a grin. “Oh my God, I can’t believe they actually sent you,” she chirped, and trotted out from behind the counter to shake my hand.
We’ll leave me there for one more post. Hang around for the payoff. It’s worth it…
October 2, 2006
A second post of the day.
Couple recs for your reading and listening pleasure:
1. Hiding the Elephant, by Jim Steinmeyer
I’ve always taught my students that magic–the blue collar, birthday party tophats and rabbits kind–has a whole lot in common with the essential work of storytelling. Both are tiny, essential parts inspiration and then a whole lot of mechanics. Both are at least in part about getting the viewer/reader to watch the hand that isn’t the one doing the deed, or telling the story. And both, at their root, are about the incomparable joy of creating and feeling wonder.
This is a book about that. It’s nonfiction. The subtitle is How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. It’s about the evolution both in technology and mindset that led to Houdini’s making an elephant disappear on the stage of the Hippodrome. And the fact that no one particularly cared, because Houdini was a better spectacle himself than he was a magician (i.e., storyteller). Most of all, it’s about the ongoing tension in magicians’ circles between the importance of keeping the secrets versus connecting with an audience. About the tale itself, or the art of telling.
Like writing. Like I said.
Terrific book.
In My CD Player:
Tinariwen– Amassakoul
Naturally, in the God-help-us global society, it takes a band of wandering Tuareg musicians to make the most electrifying blues-Malian-Algerian-hip-hop hybrid I’ve heard all year. Or ever. Eerie and dusty and beautiful and thrilling.
The Delays– You and Me
Opening track of their second CD, a soaring, whitebread, shamelessly gorgeous slice of tunecraft, with lyrics that hint at politically grounded exhaustion (”We could lay low tonight/No I don’t have the will to fight/ my president or his designs…”) without actually expressing any.
Alt-Journey, anyone?
First of all, my apologies for going silent these past couple weeks. This whole Rolling Darkness Revue thing…it takes up time, you know? (As opposed to the parenting thing, the earning-a-living thing, that whole writing novels thing…)
We’ll return to writing and teaching discussions shortly. But for today, just sit back, relax, enjoy the following. I did. Kind of.
This Saturday, at Borderlands in San Francisco, I will make my first official appearance in support of my new book, American Morons.
Appearance. Sounds glamorous, doesn’t it? Like an illusion I’m going to pull. An opportunity for writer and readers alike.
Seems only right, on the eve of both my first set of Morons events and this year’s Rolling Darkness Revue, to share with you my favorite appearance I’ve so far made in my literary life. It’s a cautionary tale, I suppose. And a plea for any of you out there who might have the slightest interest to drop by the shop next weekend. It’s also far and away my favorite thing that has happened to me on tour thus far. Because it’s the best story.
And now:
An American Moron Goes Home, or How I Gave a Reading at Which There Were More Arrests Than Books Sold, Part One.
Ready?
February. 2003. Detroit, Michigan. Blizzard.
I really had been planning to go home to Detroit, city of my birth and childhood, ever since The Snowman’s Children, my first novel, got bought. I didn’t imagine tickertape parades. I didn’t imagine crowds of well-wishers welcoming me back. Especially after the savaging my book got in the local paper–far and away the worst review I’ve ever received for anything in my life, a weirdly personal diatribe that–
Nope. Nope. Not going to do that. See previous posting about being read.
On with the story.
Like most first authors–most authors, period–I had set up almost all my appearances on my own. But the ferociously overworked, good-hearted PR person at my publisher did get one for me. She called very excited one day and told me that a store in Detroit had called her, begging for me to come there. I got excited right back, asked which store.
“A Borders,” she said. “In Landry.” (NB–The names of places have been changed to protect the innocent. And the author.)
Landry?
I spent a good while trying to remember where that was. Then I decided it didn’t matter. It was Detroit. Old elementary friends I hadn’t seen in decades would show up. We’d recognize each other instantly, fall into delicious conversations of our lives that were and might have been, hurtle off down to Greektown together (one of the thousand good reasons to go to Detroit, despite what you’ve heard). I called the last few friends I had in the city.
“Landry?” they said. And told me they’d drop by my Ann Arbor reading instead.
In the event, they didn’t do that, either. The blizzard hit a couple hours before that appearance. If I’d snowshoed to Ann Arbor, I’d probably have gotten there faster. Certainly, I’d have been safer. The only people who appeared other than me were the floor staff of the bookstore. They felt bad for me. One of them felt so bad he actually bought a book.
Which brings us to the next night. And Landry.
I started out around 3:30 for my 6 o’clock appearance. Right about dusk, in other words, Michigan-in-February Standard Time. Snow still flying around, though most of it was whipping out of the drifts on the ground rather than plummeting from the air. It took more than ninety minutes for the 18 mile trip from my friend’s house, because the drive had more in common with dogsled-mushing than motoring through the Motor City.
Also, I was mesmerized. Everything I remembered–everything the movies and murderously inaccurate myths about Detroit had so cruelly mythologized–was suddenly on display. The second I nosed across Nine Mile Road, the streetlights went out. Windowglass disappeared out of the window holes in some of the buildings. I passed my first empty car in the middle of the street a few miles later. Maybe it had just stalled there. Surely, the abandoned cars that pock the streets of downtown–I was told once, by the guy I was staying with, that Detroit is the only city in the country with a specific department of the police force (the ABAN Detail) assigned solely to patrolling abandoned vehicles–could not have spread this far from the center of town.
I hope with all my heart that that ABAN thing is not true. I still love Detroit dearly, have never been sorry that I’m from there, would rather be from that deeply troubled, hard-working, half-strangled, desperately resillient place than any of the other thousand places I’ve been.
But as for trying to go back…
Okay. Landry.
This story actually has little to do with the real Landry (that is, the real place I’m calling Landry). I hear it’s a proud and tightly knit community that has fought through it all.
I never even saw the real Landry. I saw holes in the dark my headlights scratched. I saw three more cars hunkered, dead still, in the center of lanes.
And then I saw the mall. Where my Borders was.
And I’ll leave me there until next post. Which I PROMISE will be soon. ‘Cause it’s parenting time again in Hirshbergland…
September 7, 2006
Yesterday marked my first day with my new students. As always, I came into the room punchy from not sleeping (which is the preferable of the two options I seem to have for the last night of summer, the other being actually sleeping and having dreams so terrifyingly pedestrian– we’re talking walking-into-room-without-pants obvious, here–that I wake up not only dreading teaching but convinced I really have been faking or imagining my writing life, because no one with dreams that prosaic can possibly have a story worth hearing in him).
(Is that the longest parenthetical aside in the short history of this blog? I think it is, and I congratulate myself.)
Nine and a half blurred, complicated, goofy, warm, challenging hours later, the new students were officially just my students, I was their teacher, I already had good new pieces of theirs to work on with them, and all had returned to tilted normalcy around here. There’s even the student e-mail I woke to this morning, which reminded me why I am feeling just a bit edgier this year. And why teaching writing is hard, but being taught writing is harder. And why writing is a tonic for virtually anyone’s life, and sharing what you write often a poison. A sweet and necessary one. But one that will kill you, sooner or later.
The e-mail was remarkable primarily for being heartfelt. The student called herself “a math-science girl,” expressed genuine enthusiasm for learning to write, and then went on to express just how overwhelming the thought of my class seemed. The girl very much wanted to get better. But the thought of sharing something she knew was not good (according to her own standards)…might not ever be quite right…
Perhaps this note hit me particularly hard because of the moment in which it arrives. These weeks–the last four or so before a new book bearing my name surfaces, however briefly, on the overcrowded, Amazonian surface of at least a couple tiny tributaries of the reading world–are among the most surreal I have known. I can’t quite get myself used or inured to them.
The thing is, the reviews are coming.
When The Snowman’s Children came out, I decided I wasn’t going to read my reviews. What good, I reasoned, could they do me? If marvelous, they’d disrupt whatever delicate creative mechanism I have in me, filling my brain with ideas about what I should try to repeat or equal. If awful, they might crush me or make me spiteful (both potentially fatal experiences), or, worse, they might make me believe them.
I also felt a lot like my student. Any writer who’s any good at all knows nothing he’s published is as good as it can be…because nothing, frankly, that’s ever been written is as good as it can be. For God’s sake, Bleak House, which I really think might be the most satisfying reading experience produced by an English language novelist in the history of the form, has a protagonist– the DOMINANT character in the book– who doesn’t work at all. She’s yet another of Dickens’ cardboard, colorless, smotheringly good young waifs.
And you’ll pardon me for saying so, Mr. Hirshberg, but you’re no Dickens.
And yet…
On the practical side–for me, and for my student–there is the reality of the world. I need to keep track of the reviews, and use them in any way I can, because no one else is likely to do it for me. And writing fills me so deeply that I want to pursue it every available non-teaching working moment. Therefore, I need to hand what I do over to the world, in the hopes that someone might convince someone else to spend money to read it, thus buying me another few previous hours.
The desire to write well has also possessed my student to the point that she’s going to brave my class, and the possibly useless or painful feedback her peers and I may be able to give her, because she’s recognized this simple fact:
Writing is an act of communication. Period.
Communications can be garbled. They can be misconstrued and misunderstood and come back to bite you. Hard. But no matter how much writers talk about writing for themselves–and it’s true, you have to, because you’re the only one who has even a chance of completely understanding what you’re on about, anyway–there is no such a thing as a piece of writing that is finished before somebody else reads it.
Readers tell you–inaccurately, sometimes, or bruisingly, or (just as dangerous) even flatteringly–what it is that has spilled from you. All I can tell my student, in the end, is the same thing I tell myself: what anyone else says matters less than they think. Definitely less than you think.
But the only way to look your own work squarely in its eye is to try to make sense of its reflection in the eyes of other people. Because from where you’re standing, you can’t see it.
August 24, 2006
Some strong recs for the end of your summer:
1. The first 45 minutes of the new (to these shores) film “The Descent” are among the most discomforting, atmospheric, (semi-)pleasantly unpleasant minutes I have spent in a theater in a long time. This is straight B all the way, in the classic sense. That is, this movie doesn’t try to be more than it is, and isn’t out to do anything more than rattle and just maybe move you a bit. Real caves help. A lot. Also a magnetic supporting performance from Alex Reid as the inevitable loyal friend character. Also the fact that while I have no idea whether any of these women can actually climb, the filmmakers took the time to make it look like they can climb.
Too bad about the monsters, which reminded me most of Mickey from Mickey in the Night Kitchen after he gets poured out of the milk bottle.
And as for the American ending…close your eyes, pretend it isn’t there, go home, punch up youtube.com, and watch the real ending, which is so good that it almost redeems the second half of the movie.
2. The Hookmen, by Timothy Hillmer
A first novel from 1994, and as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a second one, but what a lovely, not-quite-great surprise this is. The setting is the Kern River near Bakersfield, Ca.–previously an area right there with the Superfund sites on my list of places to spend time–and the title refers to the job picked up early in the novel by the protagonist, dragging the rapids for bodies of drowning victims. There are two love stories in here–one of them a very good one–and some quietly exquisite atmosphere drawing. The story’s a little Ernest for me, though it never completely succumbs to detached-males-coming-of-age cliches. But Mr. Hillmer both tells a good story and cares deeply about his characters, and that’s more than enough to make me hope he’s got another story in him (or–as I’m concerned is the more likely case–that someone’s willing to take a chance on publishing another one, even though this one apparently didn’t sell much).
3. Dark Harvest, by Norman Partridge
I blurbed this for its Cemetery Dance premier, so I won’t repeat myself here. But the book’s a blast, and a great October read. Bloody, funny, brutal, and kind. That last word is not a joke, by the way.
4. In my CD player: “The Guest,” by Wes McDonald
“What About Your Friends,” the epic that closes this rollicking, rocking, slyly edgy disc stirs up all kinds of unsettling feelings without ever ending a line in anything but a question mark. The other ten songs range from punchy-catchy to soaring and great. I went back and checked out McDonald’s first band, The Ohms. Nothing there suggests he could do this…
5. “The Illusionist”
Yes, of course the Steven Millhauser story is better. Millhauser’s among the best there is when he’s good (which, for me, is pretty much all the time he’s not writing novels), and the essentially philosophical underpinnings make his stuff particularly challenging to film.
The movie avoids the challenge by simply doing away with the underpinnings, focusing instead on the wonder, romantic intensity, and sheer storytelling skill that are also Millhauser hallmarks. And it gets all of those.
So atmospheric it almost made me want to visit Vienna.
Well, Chuck Palahniuk is out, citing new scheduling conflicts.
But Aimee Bender, it appears, is in, and will be joining us for the October 14th show at Mystery and Imagination in Glendale.
AND–from the East Coast and his own Pumpkin Pie Show comes Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Miss Corpus and Rest Area. One of the reviewer comments on Amazon for Corpus is headed Compelling, Disgusting, and Uniquely Satisfying, yet several others point out Mr. Chapman’s pervasive compassion.
Let’s see. Compelling. Disgusting. Compassionate. Sounds like a Rolling Darker to me. We’re excited to have him.
The dates and line-ups as of today:
October 14th
Mystery and Imagination, Glendale
Peter Atkins
Aimee Bender
Lisa Morton
Me
with music by Jonas Yip and Rex Flowers
October 21st
Borderlands, San Francisco
Pete
Norman Partridge (whose outstanding new novella, Dark Harvest, I had the honor of blurbing. It’s out either very shortly or right now from Cemetery Dance).
Me
with music by Pets Gone Wild
October 25th
Warwick’s, La Jolla
Pete
Clay McLeod Chapman
Dennis Etchison
Me
with music by Jonas Yip and Rex Flowers
October 27th
Changing Hands, Phoenix
Pete
Clay
Me
musical guests TBA
An all new, fancier chapbook of stories performed on this year’s tour–and featuring brand new pieces by Pete, Norm, Lisa, and me, plus (possibly new) contributions from Clay and Dennis– will be sold at the shows and afterward via my website and the Earthling website.
In addition, Pete, Nancy Holder, Jonas, Rex and I are working on a studio version of last year’s show, which we are hoping to have on CD and available both on tour and through my website by the time the tour starts.
So. Hope you’ll come. We’d love to see you there.
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