July 3, 2009

infinite summer

IMG_2267David Foster Wallace’s 1079 page Infinite Jest has been in residence in my study for 13 years–since 1996. When I first heard about Infinite Summer, I glanced over at the large book on the bottom of my ToBeRead shelf, and I thought nooooo.

Then, after spending about an hour on the website, I got up and pulled the book out and dusted it off. I let it sit on my desk for a day. I was making friends with it.

The Challenge: Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

The next day I came into my study and there was the book right next to my computer and I thought if I’m not going to read it now with all these other people, I’m never going to read it. Then I thought well, I can at least start it and see how I like it.IMG_2088

Infinite Summer, as if summer, the feeling of lazy reading days and the salty ocean breeze, were to go on forever.

I started late, and so far I’ve been behind everyday. But I’m on track to catch up today. And that’s exciting. It’s so true that social networking has given this project a  “we’re all in this together” feeling. You can find Infinite Summer on facebook and twitter, as well as the website.

I started reading a week ago today, so it’s not to late to join the party. C’mon, is this book on your TBR shelf?

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July 1, 2009

the writer’s notebook

IMG_2027The Writer’s Notebook, with its title taken from the journals of Somerset Maugham, consists of 17 essays on the craft of writing. Some, but not all, are based on craft seminars given at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. I did not read them in order, but read the ones first that I thought might help me with a story I was working on called “Hidden Tracks.”

I’ve been working on this story off and on for years. The language is dream-like and more complicated than my normal writing. So the first essay that jumped off the Table of Contents was “When to Keep it Simple” by Rick Bass. “Your ideas can so easily become tangled in your words….begin breaking apart the truths…What is the one thing, the main thought, the simplest thought?” So I went through the story, breaking down sentences and deleting. Keep it simple, I told myself.

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the front of my t-shirt from 2004

People who’ve read this story in workshops kept saying, Why would she do this? So the next essay I read was “Character Motivation” by Aimee Bender. “I don’t always know what a character wants. I know some things about the character, but to know what he or she wants feels like the final answer, why I’m writing in the first place.” When I began writing the story, I didn’t know where it was going, but after I wrote the ending, I knew. What I had neglected to do was then to go back and set up the beginning.

I also have to admit that this is a weird story, as in doesn’t exactly follow the rules of this world, also unusual for me. Readers complained they didn’t know how to read the story. So, I thought Kate Bernheimer’s essay, “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,” might be useful. In a fairy tale, she wrote, “The day to day is collapsed with the wondrous.” The trick, it came to me while I was reading, was to somehow signal the reader that they were reading a sort of fairy tale where the rules would be different.

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the awesome back of my t-shirt from 2004

In “Performing Surgery Without Anesthesia,” Chris Offutt wrote, “I have one story with drafts that run back eighteen years–but it’s getting better.” Well, that certainly made me feel better about having such a hard time with my weird story.

I put off Susan Bell’s “Revisioning The Great Gatsby” because well, I loved The Great Gatsby, but what does that have to do with my writing in general or this story in particular. Wrong. Best essay of the bunch. Listen. “Although Gatsby needed to be enigmatic, his mysteriousness had to suggest something precise behind it, and Fitzgerald had to figure out what that was.”

This was the problem with my story. I was leaving it up to the reader to figure out something that I myself had not yet figured out. Which was precisely why the readers couldn’t figure it out. Well, I took my story, and I took a stand. I took hold of it, and we’ll see. I just sent it out to my writing group for yet another critique.

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June 29, 2009

how do you record?

In 1999, I started keeping a list of the books I read on an old computer program called Sidekick, which was amazing because you could create cardfiles and name the categories exactly what you wanted to. As the years went by, they did not update the program.  It became more and more unstable.

So two years ago, I managed to import all outlook michael cunninghammy data into a separate contacts file in MS Outlook. Each book is a separate contact, and hopefully on the fourth line you can see that this card is filed as Cunningham, Michael–author’s last name. There’s also a nice place to make notes, although this one is blank at the moment. Sometimes in the notes area, I will add if I borrowed the book from someone or if I gave it away or why I chose it to read.

The categories don’t match up exactly.

Company=genre (novel, stories)

Job title=title

Business=year it was published

Home=year (or years) I read the book. This is an older entry, where I actually wrote out july. These days, I use 01 for January because it offers nice possibilities for sorting.

Callback=Not seen here because this is an older card, but where it says Business Fax, I now use callback, which = do I want to read this book again. And here I have 3 choices: yes, no, maybe.

I can see in two seconds if I’ve read a book before.

Last summer I added a card for each of  the other books on my shelves that I’d already read.

One of the recent comments: “I keep a tiny journal of all the books I read each year and the page numbers and the dates I read them.”

In a separate Note in Outlook, I also keep track of yearly totals. Do you keep track of the books you read? If so, what do you record and how?

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June 27, 2009

the story behind the post

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sharing experiences of writing

Tuesday night around 8:00 I got in my car to drive to the soccer field for registration. Most of the day, I had been sitting in front of my computer. My brain felt like it was off-duty.

It was starting to get dark as I pulled out of the driveway. The song “Wishful Thinking” by Wilco came on from my ipod. I was singing along,

what would we do without wishful thinking.

I wished I knew what CD of theirs this song was on, partly because that’s the way my brain works but also partly because I remembered a conversation I had with a friend that involved the same question. But because of the way my ipod is set up to work on my car’s CD player, I have to work off playlists. This was a Wilco playlist, not a certain CD.

Which led me to visualizing  album covers, Carol King’s “Tapestry”, Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender”, The Eagles’ “Hotel California”, “Abbey Road”. And I thought it was sad that we no longer got attached to individual CDs in the same way because really most of us used ipods, downloading music from itunes.

Which led to me thinking about the Kindle in my purse and then to

what would we do without books.

I pulled into a gas station. No, it was a convenience store with gas pumps. I pulled over to the side, put my car in park, pulled a pad from my purse and wrote the post down in about 5 minutes. It just poured out of me. Which is unusual. Usually I have to pull it out of me kicking and screaming.

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in my backyard yesterday

Yet, this is not the first time I’ve had to pull over to the side of the road to write. This is, in fact, how I started writing in 1995. I had majored in French and Linguistics, gone to law school, worked through 2 children. Something had to go with number 3. Number 4 was in a car seat in the back. He was two. I was just starting to be able to breathe again. That day, we were on our way to Atlanta to visit my grandmother who had had a stroke. We went every Tuesday. That was 14 years and a lot of words ago.

It was for Number 4 that I was driving to the soccer field Tuesday night. Next week he turns 16, and will begin to drive himself around.

[the post in question]

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June 24, 2009

are we losing our senses

In January, I went to lunch with a friend. She asked what my “coolest” Christmas gift was.

“My son gave me two Wilco CDs,” I said.

“Which ones?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just put them on my ipod.”

Are we losing our senses? Is the feel of life slipping away? Maybe even the sight and smell. Although taste and hearing appear to be safe for the moment.

Do you remember the cover of “Tapestry”? Carol King in jeans one knee up as she sat on the window seat with her cat.  The brick wall behind Neil Young on “After the Gold Rush”? The orange unicorn on the cover of The Catcher in the Rye?

Don’t get me wrong. The electronic revolution is doing a lot of good. My entire music collection is safe on my ipod—shelves and shelves boiled down tIMG_2140o a rectangle two inches by four. With my Kindle, I can be reading a book in seconds and take a gazillion books with me in my purse. These are good things.

“Well, what did the CDs look like?” my friend asked.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “One was white, I think.”

If we don’t need books anymore, we won’t need bookmarks. Will book stores go the way of record stores? No more cover art?

But there’s cover flow, you say. True enough.

IMG_2132No more breaking in a spine. No more face-down. No more cutting the corner off the book jacket to hide the price. “Thumbing through a book” will take its place alongside “rolling up your car window.”

I’m not saying we’re not living in a world of progress. We’ll be saving trees and creating less waste.

When I got home from lunch that day, I dug through my drawers of CDs until I found the two new ones. The one I remembered as white was actually grey with a broken egg shell on it. “A Ghost is Born.” The other one had a single bird, an eagle maybe, flying on a white sky—“Sky Blue Sky.”

My favorite alIMG_2144bum covers hang in frames on my wall. Do you think…? Surely not. But just in case, we should try to remember the details. So we can tell our great-grandchildren. A book was heavy in our hands, we’ll say. The paper and ink together smelled like a new book. No, that won’t work anymore.

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June 23, 2009

I’ve found a book

IMG_2033 At the beginning of The Northern Clemency, a novel by English writer Philip Hensher, Francis is nine. His father announces that he’s found a house. “‘I’ve found a book,’ Francis wanted to say to complete everyone’s happiness.”

Late in the novel, an older Francis is packing for a trip. As I do, he spends more time on choosing what books he will take than on choosing his clothes. He has, as you will see, also become a writer, and in more ways than one. This quote mentions many of the issues in recent posts, including favorite pens, whether or not we separate the books we’ve read from the books we haven’t, as well as a unique approach to the books we have yet to read.

“Most of the books on the shelves were old ones, favourites from his childhood…But others were fat books he’d read, had always meant to read, had been saying to himself so long he had read them that he believed they had actually been read. He packed The Idiot; he packed Dead Souls…Francis took out the half-finished bulk of his own book, eight inches thick, an A4 notebook with black binding and three green Pentel pens. He’d always used those Pentel pens; he liked the flow of the ink-soaked ball under pressure.IMG_2031

The book was the third novel Francis had written. He had sent the first out; he had sent the second out; he rather thought he would finish this one and put it back into his drawer.”

The Northern Clemency is about two English families who, shortly after the novel begins, live across the street from each other in a small neighborhood outside London. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Each of its 597 pages is compelling because of Hensher’s ability to go deep into the ways families operate:

“Everyone did their best to be cheerful, talking around rather than to Sandra, and by the time they had finished [eating], they could look directly at her.”

“She [Jane] didn’t mind being told things more than once: it was a signal that everything was all right in the world.”

At least part of the reason he’s able to go deep into the lives of these families is that he goes deep into the life of each member of the families. Also, he takes his time with each moment in the story. Notice his attention to detail.

“She [Alice] sat in the warm pool of light cast by the green-shaded Tiffany lamp over the green-topped leather desk in the spare room. With her father’s fountain pen, on the heavy embossed Italian writing paper Francis had given her last Christmas, both saved for special occasions such as a letter to Sandra, she went on writing, perseveringly.”

Philip Hensher does not have a writing room, nor does he want one. He usually writes on the arm of a sofa, in a hardback A4 notebook, just as his character Francis does.

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June 21, 2009

not writing books but writing in books

IMG_2115We’ve been having a discussion about writing in books. If you’re interested, check out the comments to Some People Buy Shoes (a prequel). I buy books. One thing leading to another, I mentioned that I had a slight problem with making more use of the library because I wouldn’t be able to write in my books.

This is the great thing about comments. I discovered that a lot (okay, most) of the people commenting do not, and would not dream of, writing in their books. So if you’re out there and you do, I’d love to hear from you.

As I said in one of my comments, I cannot read a book without a pen or a pencil in my hand. Cannot. I’m afraid something will be lost to me forever. It’s kind of like “catching days.” Writing in a book is my net for catching what means something to me in the book–the lines, the recurring images, the metaphors, the echos from page to pageIMG_2114.

I am in no way trying to persuade anyone to cross over. I’m just trying to explain myself to myself. Which is, at the moment, becoming difficult. Because the more I think about it, the more it’s out of character for me to write in books. I do want things in general to be perfect, and so many things I can’t bear to use for that very reason–journals for one thing. I don’t like to write in them because I’m afraid I’ll mess them up. Instead I “save” my journals and make notes on index cards and in spiral notebooks, where mistakes can be easilyIMG_2118 discarded.

I do see that journals are made to be written in and books are not.

Writing in books is the way I bond with them, and everyone bonds differently with books. Are there any other unique bonding methods out there?

I always write my initials and the year and month I read a book on the back page. Do the people who don’t write in books write your name in your books? Do you write in books you give as gifts?

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June 19, 2009

apropos

IMG_2110Some of you may have noticed that on the Reading List page, I’ve been adding how I chose the book or books I’m currently reading. Well, the story of how I chose Abigail Thomas’ Thinking About Memoir seemed too long to add on that page.

Talk about one thing leading to another….

Because of listening to the CD that came with The Writer’s Notebook , I wanted to know if I was at Tin House when they recorded the panel. So I got out my notes. And yes, I have notes from that panel in 2005. I think it was during that panel that Abigail Thomas was sitting right behind me. But that would be too coincidental. Memory is so weird. Anyway, she was at Tin House either that year or the year before, or both.

When I was there in 2004, I was taking a workshop with Dorothy Allison. In class, Dorothy had us do one of Abigail Thomas’ writing exercises (which happens to be in this book). So rereading my notes, I had Abigail on the brain. I went to her website and saw that she had a new book out. I’ve read her three novels and one other memoir by her.

A few hours later, I was in Barnes & Noble buying summer reading for my 15-year-old (I wanted to). When I turned around, Abigail’s adorable little book was staring at me. I picked it up and it felt just right in my hands at 7 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches and a 1/2 inch thick.

This chain of events meant I was supposed to buy it, right?

Anyway, I’m on page 52, and it’s great. More of substance later.

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June 18, 2009

some people buy shoes (a prequel)

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my latest purchases

I buy books.

I used to feel guilty that I didn’t use the library, but no longer. I look at it this way. By buying a book I’m supporting a writer. If I buy from an independent bookstore, I’m supporting them as well. It’s an investment in what I believe in, with something in it for me.

The thrill of opening a package from Powell’s or Amazon. Or just bringing a bag home from Barnes and Noble, our only local bookstore–reaching in to pull out the books. I run my hand over the smooth cover, breathe in the smell of paper and ink, flip through the carefully printed and as yet unmarked pages.

In March I had to change planes in Paris on my way to Positano, Italy, for the Sirenland Writers Conference. I was sitting next to a 10-year-old boy. As we circled Paris preparing to land, we caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower (which I’ve seen many times since I lived in France for a year), but I don’t know who was more excited–the little boy or me. Every time I see the Eiffel Tower, I’m as excited as I was the first time. That’s the way it is with a new book.

Hence the problem of shelving.

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June 15, 2009

how do you shelve?

Some people shelve their IMG_1455books by color. I wish I were that creative. Instead my books sit on the shelves in boring alphabetical order–by author’s last name. When I first organized them years ago, I tried not to squish them so I would have room to add more. Eventually, though, the shelves became full. Then I began to lay books horizontally across the place they should be. Every few years, I dust, add the horizontal books, and expand forward onto a new shelf.

Only books I’ve read go on the built-in shelves. The ones I haven’t yet read used to go on the floor, but now go on this very cool skinny bookshelf from Design Within Reach. It’s free-standing, and the books go on it horizontally. For a picture, look on my Reading List page. I tell myself I can’t buy any new books unless there’s a place to put them on this bookshelf, which currently holds 87 books and is full.

As I look around my study now, the horizontal spaces are almost full as well. It’s getting to be that time, but I’m running out of “new shelves.” So not only is it that time, it’s also time to weed/cull/purge.IMG_2093

Last November in The Well-Tended Bookshelf, Laura Miller wrote that there were “two general schools of thought on which books to keep”: you are what you’ve read or you are what you will read. Either way, the bookshelf serves as some sort of self-portrait. Anna Quindlen wrote, “The purse is the mirror of the soul.” Yes, so also is my bookshelf.

If only long ago, I had only kept books

  • that I wanted to reread
  • that were signed
  • that were special because of who gave them to me, and
  • for favorite authors only, all their books

Really? I ask myself. Maybe.

On Bibliobuffet, I found a link to a blog about bookshelves. Bibliobuffet also lists 17 organizations where you can send books you no longer need or want in your libraries. You can also exchange books on BookMooch.

How do you shelve? Do you keep all your books?

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