from an Interview with Janette Turner Hospital

I have been championing Janette Turner Hospital for years. I finally, after mentioning five-thousand times, got Mario to read Due Preparations for the Plague, which I've also mentioned here on the blog five-thousand times. A person doesn't really get another person to read a novel, though. As Alex said once, "Only a novel can get someone to read it."

Robert Birnbaum's interviews are wonderfully smart and entertaining. He manages to have an actual conversation with the writers, which is certainly refreshing. There's other good ones at the website with Chip Kidd, Dorothy Allison, Amy Bloom, Sarah Vowell and Donna Tartt, among others.

This, from the interview with Janette:

Robert Birnbaum: You have compared terrorism to the Plague?

JTH: It seems to me a very apt metaphor. As was the case with the Black Death, one cannot ultimately protect oneself from attack. No matter what precautions you take, extra airport security, extra visa requirements for people, not letting travelers leave transit lounges, ultimately there is not any way to protect yourself. A determined terrorist or suicide bomber will get around all those things. As with the plague, too, for different reasons. In medieval times people didn't know what caused the plague or how to protect themselves.

RB: There are people who are put off by contemporary American fiction, complaining that it is too writing school, writing for other writers.

JTH: Well, a lot of it is rather tedious and self-indulgent. But there is also some very exciting contemporary writing going on. I do always make my graduate students read non-American fiction. Because I do think the confines of current American fiction are really narrow. I have them read Kenzbro Oe, Alessandro Barricco, the Italian, and also French novelists. Just really to say, the novel is anything that novelists have made it. And this is something I reproach my graduate students with—students in France, even undergraduate students are far more familiar with contemporary American literature and with other European literatures than American students are with anything outside America. It's a consequence of being so huge as a culture and dominating publishing.

Quote of the Week

Greenmarket customer: "This maple candy is so addictive. It's like crack."

Lee: "It's much better than crack."

Greenmarket customer: "Because you don't have to heat it."

Here's What I Think

1) Blake never wanted to win. And I wonder if he's got a soul in there somewhere.

2) Jordin sealed the deal when she wrung out those tears. And they were real tears, which is what the show is all about. Cinda-fuckin'-rella.

3) I don't care about the records, but when Melinda comes to town doing her Tina Turner/Bettye LaVette thing at Irving Plaza, or wherever, I'm so there.

Creative Comedown and Particle Physics

I had this thought: that perhaps what we know as "creative comedown" -- that semi-long-ish period of sadness and meloncholy (and nostalgia) that follows a huge artistic push -- has something to do with the unifying theory of the cosmos.

But seriously.

I can't put all the pieces together. There are too many; they are too fragile. They seem unrelated.

So here's the scoop, in a roundabout, unfinished way:

--My friend Manuel's second book of stories has just come out, and I wondered how it might feel to have so many people suddenly reading your work at the same time, particularly in a rather contained geographic area. Whereas before a book is out, it's a smaller group of readers: short story journal subscribers, your mom, close friends you trust--spread out over a large geographic area.

--I asked Manuel what he thought of this cracked idea, and he wrote to me: Creative comedown coming from work that was finished long ago...sounds more like the true nature of starlight and its speed to you while you're looking up at a night sky from the backyard. It's been over since before you got there.

--Then I was reading this article in the New Yorker, about the world's largest (at least so far) particle accelerator. And it opened this idea that what if creative work--music, art, writing, film--could be thought of as an actual beam of particles sent in a conscious stream from the artist, out into the universe.

--That beam of particles is then received by the "audience."

--A note for the new novel: "time is not linear, it is not a circle. time is a fog, existing all around you all at once, with no visible end or beginning."

--"Light pollution," says another note. I keep coming back to it.

Last Chance for Tickets!

Circus Amok is hosting a fantabulous, extravagentistic, glamourlicious, glittertastic benefit at PS122 on Monday, May 21, 2007. Tickets are flying out the door, and we totally are going to sell out. So.....Run for your Lives!! And buy tickets HERE.

Mistress of Ceremonies, Carmelita Tropicana!

Performances by Justin Bond, Peggy Shaw, Basil Twist,
The Dazzle Dancers, the Swiss Misses, and Dirty Martini!

Live music by The Circus Amok Band with special guest Frank London!

Silent Auction featuring work and goodies by Inner Princess,
Nautica, Babeland, Liz Bear, Town Shop, Yogasana Center,
Mikey’s HookUp & more, more, more.

Notes to Self

I have a habit of calling my landline back at the apartment while I'm out running around the city, and leaving ideas, sentences, things to research, questions. The machine fills up a lot, because I also like to save all the amazing messages that were left there years ago: Sean calling to say 'I love you,' my mother calling to thank me for a mix CD I made and sent, Mario calling from the beach in North Carolina just so I could hear the sound of the ocean. I don't keep pictures like some people do--but rather notes, objects, letters and messages; those carry my memories.

I was surprised to find a message from myself I had forgotten. It was about the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade--me calling to remind myself to blog about watching it on television. More specifically, about watching it on television and regretting that I was watching, not actually in it.

"Talk about how you don't have that thing where you're afraid to leave the party," I say in the message. "I always say," my voice mumbles into the room, "what could happen?" Then, after a pause--I can hear myself thinking in the pause, I know this is how I work--I say: "Maybe give some examples, tell some experiences." Then, finally: "About how you like a story sometimes better than the actual happening." If someone say, removes her clothes and performs an increasingly more difficult limbo while drunk at a party (this is an actual example, by the way,) someone telling me story afterwards, depending on the teller, can be more entertaining than the actual event.

I don't regret not performing anymore--even when I see some theater that's thrilling, complicated, hilarious, I don't miss it. New York 1, our 24-hour local news channel, was televising the Parade, running moronic commentary under the whole thing. There were a lot of George W's, a lot of little boy Spider-Men. (In 2003, there were dozens of Siegfried and Roys, bloody-mouthed white tigers attached to Roy's gored neck--a smart idea, but clearly unoriginal.)

Yes, the parade has become something other than what it originally was. But who cares? New York is something other than what it originally was. A hundred years ago, fifty years ago, ten years ago. And a hundred years from now.

But I regretted not being there. Not donning a blonde wig, funeral dress, black gloves and black umbrella--like many of us, dozens of us did to mourn the loss of Matthew Shepard back in 1998. Not leading a pack of snarling, long-haired hippie volunteers with Insurrection Flags with the Bread & Puppet contingent. Not passing precariously underneath the stilt dancers. Not gathering up the angels and demons. Not getting smashed into the pavement by the bats on rollerskates.

It's a Boy!!

My new nephew, Graden Eliot Houck, was born today just after 3:30pm. 8 lbs, 14 oz. HOORAY!

He is perfect and happy, and everyone is doing well. And he has red hair. "Of all things," as my dad said to me.


Updated: My brother, two days later, adds: "You'll need to make a retraction on your blog. Graden's hair is actually blond."

Your Only Directive

The first sentence spoken today on NPR, after my alarm went off: "Your only directive is to tell the story to the best of your abilities." I lay there wondering how many writers were avoiding their work by napping and waking up to NPR, only to discover that it too was telling you that you're need to get back on track.

At a BBQ in Bushwick this afternoon--technically a "grill party," as there was food cooked for short amounts of time over direct heat as opposed to actual BBQ, which is food cooked for long amounts of time with indirect heat--I found myself in the middle of telling a bunch of strangers what my novel was "about." It's a fair question--it's the first thing non-writers will ask you. I am always surprised at what comes out of my mouth. It's never quite the same "about" and it's always slightly skewed depending on the audience. In this case, the audience was a bunch of people I'd just met, all of them straight (as far as I could tell.)

Some advice: If you find yourself at a party with a writer who's finished a novel, instead of asking "What's it about?" say something like "What can you tell me about it."

Kip and I saw Spider Man 3 today--and so did the whole world, apparently. It took in somewhere in the ballpark of $148 million. But if you ask me: Spider Man 3 = Boring as hell.

The Martian Child

About five years ago I was strolling through The Strand, and I came up on a book by David Gerrold, called The Martian Child. They've now made the book into movie starring John Cusack as David, and directed by Menno Meyjes, who among other things, also wrote the screenplay for "The Color Purple."

The trailer is out now. I watched it the other night at Kip's house, wondering how they'd make this lovely, small, quiet-with-big-impact semi-memoir into a mainstream film. It's about a single gay man who adpots a kid who thinks he's from Mars. And not like, he pretends to be from Mars. He actually believes it. Much to the dismay of social workers and David's friends, of course. No dismay to David, naturally. Well--some dismay, but you get the idea.

The trivia section for the The Martian Child's IMDB listing, explains this:

In David Gerrold's semi-autobiographical book The Martian Child, the character that was eventually played by John Cusack in this movie was, like Gerrold himself, a gay single father of an adopted son. The producers of the movie insisted that audiences would not accept the main character as a gay man and changed him to a heterosexual widower. Gerrold lobbied (unsuccessfully) for the character to remain gay, but ultimately he decided that it was more important that a film promoting adoption, foster parenthood, and attention to neglected children get made than to disallow the whole project on the basis of the main character's sexual orientation.

Doesn't that make you want to puke?

I wonder sometimes if audiences would "accept the main character as a gay man" if they saw a lot more gay men on screen. If, for example, gay men weren't just witty sidekicks, hairdressers and serial killers. (Okay, so I like the whole lesbian-serial-killer thing, but whatever.) I wonder if, in my lifetime, all the old, fat, rich, white, assholes who run Hollywood will finally just die already, and a newer, younger generation of producers and film studio heads will actually want to make movies about real people doing real things--regardless of the arrangement of their sexual behavior.

What they really mean when they say "accept the main character as a gay man" is that the audience would disagree with the idea that gay people can be parents, are worth making films about, scream pedofilia, ask for their money back and tell their friends not to see this liberal piece of commie trash. Well, isn't that what they'd say? More or less?