Taking Care of Your Work

The Newburyport Literary Festival was a wonderful occasion to sit and talk about books with friends and strangers, and my panel with Michelle Hoover and Steve Yarbrough went well. (Steve and I also got to talk about Mississippi Delta accents versus Tennessee mountain accents, and how both our families have Lena's, and that felt a bit like home.) A 9:00am talk brings out a certain kind of audience--a bright, listening audience, ready to go, and I like that. They asked good questions, mostly about process and publishing challenges. At the end, the three of us sat at a table and signed books--fielding more questions and listening to the struggles of the writers in the audience, trying had to find a place for their work, an agent, an editor, even a bit of attention.

During the talk, there was some discussion of how our (or maybe just my) work was repeatedly deemed "unpublishable" or "without an audience" or "difficult." Michelle warned against self-publishing because you are tired--tired of coming up against these walls, tired of rejection after rejection, most of them with no reason as to why you were rejected, you just were. It made me think about my own time fighting with the desire to self-publish, and subsequently getting the call from my agent that someone was interested and could I wait maybe two more weeks for them to make a decision.

This made me think of this trend toward e-self-publishing, or digital-self-publishing, or whatever they are calling it these days, as a way of twarting the difficulties of the Publishing Business, and maybe--maybe--making a quick buck. Lots of attention has been paid to this new model--sell on Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc, and charge 99 cents, and make a mint. The theory of microtransactions. But I want to say to authors considering this model: Know what your work is worth, and know that readers will follow your lead.

The other part of me--the more radical, lowlife, street rat part--feels like this is Scrooge-y and coming from a more knowledgeable place, and young writers (read: younger than me, and not that different from my limited experience) need to find audiences however they choose. Not publishing kills you inside, I know. But please don't rush to publication until you've thought a lot about what you want from it.

Publishing is difficult--it takes something very intimate and specific and blows it up into something that people will take as vague and "for their consideration." They'll say its autobiographical when it isn't, and fictitious when it's pure realness. They will write horrible things about you personally on Amazon.com and GoodReads and B&N.com, and other places where democracy is at its worst. They will write things like "I strongly recommend that you don't waste your time on this one" and "I kept thinking to myself, 'Who Cares.'" This is all if you're lucky.

Then, once you've been published and all these wonderful things start happening--and they do, really incredible, deeply fulfilling things do happen. The rewards are many, though mostly very personal and intangible. But the thing that happens after that, is that you have to figure out how to write for yourself again. Because suddenly, you're writing for the world, which, at least in my case, was never who I wanted to write for in the first place. You will have to figure out to make it back to the fearless place, to the courageous, invincible-and-vulnerable place that good art comes from.

All of this is only to say: take care with your work. Give it the right foundation, the best pathway to success, give it the most careful ushering into the world. Then you can rest and feel accomplished for about 24 days. And then immediately after that, start working on something else.

Doubling-Back

After Kip's birthday two weeks ago, a bunch of us ended up at Odessa, eating potato pancakes, kielbasa, and peirogis, and drinking beer. There were too many of us to sit at a single table, so we split into two, our table talking mostly about theater--shows we did and didn't like, the great performances of 2010, Patti vs. Bernadette. I think we bored Joe. Sorry, Joe. I thought to myself: Please let it be like this for the rest of my life. I really did think that.

It felt like old times. When I first moved to New York, my roommates and I always ended up at Odessa, or Veselka, or Kate's Joint, after having seen something (good or great or bad) at Theater for the New City, or PS122, or The Ontological-Hysteric. Or somewhere else. Then, the long--it seemed at the time--ride home on the F Train to Astoria. We felt like part of the culture. We were part of the culture.

I admit, I'm getting sentimental. Later the same week, I watched the Martin Scorsese documentary "Public Speaking," which is about Fran Lebowitz. Fran talked (among other brilliant things) about the richness of audiences back in the day--about how they demanded the best, every single time, because they had seen everything. In Patti Smith's "Just Kids," which I was also reading at the time, she writes about the opportunities artists had in the 60s and 70s. Opportunities that could never be now.

My tendency is to think that all this nostalgia is just, well, that. But then, we went to see the revival of "Angels in America," and during the intermissions of "Perestroika," the couple sitting next to us talked on and on about how the liked or didn't like the various choices that the characters were making. He said "I don't know any of these performers." His date (sister? friend? girlfriend?) said: "I hate plays like this where everyone is just talking." I felt a bit deflated.

It's a good thing that the play is a masterpiece. It lifted me back up. The Signature Theater's production is terribly, terribly good--even if one wonder's if Zoe Kazan's earthy strength is right for Harper, and why Christian Borle seemed to be playing everything so weird to me, or if, as my agent wrote, "why Joe seemed to be given the most unhappy ending. Well...besides Roy." Zachary Quinto's performance as Louis is nuanced and obvious at the same time--his technical skills are sometimes on the outside, and I liked that about it. The thing is, though, all these things make the play, the experience of being in the theater with a piece as fucking brilliant and difficult and striving as Kushner's, and actors as sharp and skillful as this ensemble, more exciting. It was really, truly fantastic.

The rest of this story is about me noting how everything seems to be talking to itself. Novelists recognize this as a message from the universe that it's time to get serious. Or, at least, I do. This kind of doubling back, these overlapping strains of thought are your subconscious trying to tell you something about what you're thinking about. Your job is to translate that into the work. Not that it's easy.

The second novel has been such a struggle. Huge roller coaster emotions, false-starts, insecurities. It must be going just like the first one went, but I don't remember making the first one that much. Really. It just kind of came out of me, boom, like a sad, confused hustler bursting out of a party cake the shape of a rain-soaked New York City. (Lol?) And for the last three years before it was published, there was 250 pages of it--lots of clay, as it were. When I sat down to work with it, there was lots to work with. This new thing is still a mess, stretched out in too many directions, too many characters that don't know what their stories are. Sometimes I don't know how I'm going to do it. No, really. I feel like I might explode. I feel like I'm going crazy.

I try to feel buoyed up by the life around me. But we're so close to the edge of crazy, we're right on the other side of this thin membrane. I feel totally pressed against it sometimes. It's a good thing there are so many things to keep us, the collective us, together. Friends who, half-drunk, say things like "Would Arthur Laurents just go ahead and die already?" And Kip. And potato pancakes and vegan turkey sandwiches at Kate's. And the F-Train. And Fran Lebowitz and Tony Kushner. And Patti Smith. And Patti vs. Bernadette.

(Who are we kidding? Bernadette, all the way.)

Things I am Thinking About This Week

-Sorry it's been so long. Sometimes the world makes too difficult for me to compose my thoughts. Between gay bashings, gay torturings, Obama's idiocy regarding DOMA and DADT, Carl Paladino's iciocy, a brief bout with a seasonal cold, and what might be a touch of early seasonal-affective disorder or plain old creative comedown, I have felt too spread out to make any real sense.

-We saw La Bête on Broadway, which starred a very underused David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, being steamrolled over by the very good, but very exhausting and not particularly specifically-memorable, Mark Rylance. All the performances are quite lovely, but they are, sadly, weighted down by this play that, well, I just didn't want any part of after fifteen minutes. In writing circles, we might say "I am not the audience for this work."

-Delores Van Cartier, which is the name of the lounge-singer in disguise played by Whoopi Goldberg in "Sister Act," is the best name I've heard in a while.

-Is Sister Act ever really coming to Broadway?

-I found it fascinating that there was press regarding the fact that Jonathan Franzen's fantastic novel "Freedom" was not nominated for the National Book Award. (I found the book to be wholly-engrossing, purely pleasurable, and carefully, wisely written. Pretty fucking fantastic.) It was as if people couldn't stop talking about how they are ready to stop talking about it.

-Does anybody still order transcripts from television talk shows?

-Kip is sitting next to me on the couch, making us a White Tree of Gondor from aluminum armature and sculpey. I am the luckiest guy in the universe.

Who You Are

1.
On Sunday, some of us went to see Laurie Anderson's new show "Delusion" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I first encountered her work in high school, when ou theater class was looking at artists whose performances were some mix of sound, visual art, theater and "performance art," which still has a certain dreadful ring to it, I think, for most people. We were learning about boundaries in theater, or lack of boundaries. I loved what we studied. Some day, I thought, I will see Laurie Anderson in person. She will do what she does, and I will be who I am. A lot of my thinking back then had something to do with who I would be once that person emerged. Does everyone think this way in high school? That the real you is somewhere inside waiting to get out? Perhaps this feeling never ends for some people--but I feel, at my (I know) very young age of 32, that I am finally who I am. So, with that, I saw Laurie Anderson.

I was somewhat lost for the first half of the performance--not lost in that I wasn't following the story, which is not to say that her work is a linear story--but I felt that my experience of it wasn't as rich as it could have been. I was fussing with the seat, those awful balcony stools at the Harvey Theater, which surely were put there as some hideous last resort. I was distracted by the Werther's Original hard candy that my friend Jaime brought, and which was doing this incredibly thing to my taste buds, because I hadn't tasted a Werther's Original in many many years, and it was like a supersonic journey through time to the last time I tasted one as soon as it went into my mouth.

But then, she started talking about the moon. Specifically, she was talking about NASA's plan--a very long range plan, something along the lines of 5,000 years--to move all industry and manufacturing to the moon, thus leaving the Earth to repair herself without interference. Then she talked about how the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese were arguing about who owned the moon. Everyone claimed it.

After that, and until the end of the show, I was transfixed--absorbed into the music and the emotional waves pouring out of her and over the audience. I really felt like who I am.


2.
On Tuesday night some of us went to see James Franco play Allen Ginsburg in the new movie "Howl," which is based on the poem. I didn't know anything about the movie in advance--which is actually unlike me. Turns out, it's not the typical biopic where they show the hero going through his trials and then he finds success and becomes famous, etc. Or dies. This was something excitingly different.

At first the acting style seemed jarring--everyone seemed to be in on something, a very subtle wink at the audience, because we all know that Ginsburg was a genius and his work will probably live forever and ever and change lives of young poets and writers (and gay kids) for eternity. But eventually, between the animation and the interviews and the incredibly lucid language of Howl itself--you just get won over by the man himself...as played by James Franco. Basically, it's like 90 minutes of poet porn. Go.

After the movie, over beers and burgers and quesadillas and sweet potato fries at Trailer Park bar after the movie, Jenny Romaine and I were talking about muses. Who is yours, or what is yours? I told her I didn't believe in that kind of mysticism--that the work is just the work and I either don't know where it comes from, or don't want to know where it comes from. (I then proceeded to go on and on about Joan Didion and how everything I do is for her, or maybe because of her, I can't tell the difference...and Romaine asked me if I was sure I didn't have any muses.)

Then I thought maybe I was misunderstanding her.

So, things got late, and we kept talking, and talking, about what publishing has meant to me. (In sort: all great things you can never prepare for, and some uncomfortable things which change the relationship you have with your work...but mainly very, very good things.) And I decided that, since it was after 11:00pm, and all I wanted at that moment was to be in bed covered in cats and talk to my boyfriend about our days, I would take a cab home. And I decided that somewhere along the way, in the cab, I would figure out who or what the muse was. (If not Joan. Of course.)

Along Fourth Avenue, there was a building under construction--being built or being renovated, sometimes it's difficult to determine in this town--and it was covered by a large blue tarp, the basic blue tarp you can buy at any hardware store. The wind was blowing softly through the window of the cab when it stopped at the red light in front of the building. And this soft wind was making the tarp billow, curling out and back, brushing against the concrete, making the most delicious, satisfying, crisp, singular sound. It hit me: that's my muse. Not the building, not the tarp itself--but the sound of it.

Things can be that simple, which is what I couldn't articulate back at the Trailer Park bar. I am still learning things. It takes a long time to figure out who you are.

Being Present

I am thinking these days about presence. About what creates it. About what makes it real, or maybe palpable, since what is real and what is unreal, these days, I find difficult to decipher. (And, of course, the other huge question here is: Does real matter?) More specifically, I am thinking about how much energy it takes to be present. To respect another person's presence by showing up, by becoming present yourself.

I am first thinking of how being present can take everything out of you. As evidence: me standing on South 4th Street and Bedford Avenue, waiting on the blessed B62 (which, by the way, hasn't gotten better since the restructuring.) There was a man standing there as well, mid 50s maybe, something slightly off-kilter about his clothing. (But this is New York, and you never know anything about anyone, really.) I notice that he's looking at me. Not looking at me like one New Yorker looks at another New Yorker. He's trying to make eye contact. I get the feeling that he wants to ask me something. (This is natural at the bus stop. People often have logistical or directional questions at bus stops, and I, apparently, look like the kind of person who has the answers.) So, I take the bait, and look back at him.

"My wife died," he said. "Two weeks ago. She was 62 years old." "I'm sorry," I said. He said thank you, and we stood there a minute, quietly, waiting on the bus, with this fact suddenly between us.

For the rest of the day I carried all that around with me, and before I crawled into bed, I spent an hour playing thrashy folk songs on the guitar, maybe annoying the neighbors, until all that was out of me and I felt like myself again. He needed to say it out loud. He needed to give some of the weight to someone else so that he could go on with the motion of living. This makes sense to me. Sometimes saying something out loud can make it real. Or sometimes we say things out loud that aren't true at all, and it's a way of feeling the realness of them, if only an instant, like trying on a new pair of strange glasses, or like sliding your feet into a pair of your father's shoes. That guy just needed me to be present. Or, by default, my presence contributed his relief. Even if he made it all up, I was there, and we shared that weird, horrible, tragic conversation. And there was nothing to say afterward.

Second, I went to MoMA to see the Marina Abromovic retrospective. In addition to filling the 6th floor with lots of photos and videos, there are several recreations, or "reperformances" as Abromovic is calling them, by actors, dancers and other performance artists, of her previous work. Meanwhile, for the duration of the exhibit--about 700 hours that is--Abromovic herself will be seated at a table in the main atrium. Museum guests are invited to sit across from her for a duration of their choosing and do nothing but meet her gaze and feel whatever you feel, in a piece called "The Artist is Present." This is what it looks like, from the outside:



Sitting in a chair for an hour is difficult. Try it for 700 hours, all the while under the gaze of lights, viewers, the art world, critics, fans, people who hate you, etc. Marina ain't kidding, y'all. I've been thinking so much about presence after seeing this piece because of the way the reperformances failed to create the kind of excitement, mystery, emotion, verve--any of the things you feel when you see "The Artist is Present" in the Atrium.

So then what is creating that feeling? The situation is so simple, and other than blinking and the slight movement from her breathing, she didn't move at all for the half hour I stood watching her. So how can it be that the reperformances don't carry the same weight, if the actions are the same as in the original pieces? And Abromovic herself has been coaching and training the performers for the past several weeks. It begs the question, what is performance? Is it the sum of the actions, or is it the intention behind the actions? (I recall Yeats here and "how can we know the dancer from the dance?") And if the reperformers are supposed to be truly in the moment, and truly present, then why not call them performers? Why divide the past from the present, if what you are looking for--I think--is the magic of the moment?

In the new piece, Abromovic is basically doing everything at once, controlling every aspect, either directly or indirectly, by just being present. One museum-goer opted to sit across from her for about two hours. This made me angry--this person was taking up so much time, other people were waiting, how selfish! But what does that say about my sense of time? What does that say about my own selfishness? What does it say about what I think about the act of being present, and the limits, or extensions of it?

One of the things I like most about "The Artist is Present" is that the catalog copy calls the piece "generous." Such a rarity in art, I think. A kind of slow, meaningful present generosity.

Ugly in Art

This was posted in the mail area of an apartment building in Greenpoint.

500

Back in the summer of 2005, which was the last summer I spent sitting at a desk all day, answering the phone, filing appearance contracts and expense reports, searching for things on "The Google," as my boss called it--I wrote this, which is part of the first post on this blog:

In the last few months, I have been forced to think a lot about my relationship with my writing, and I discovered that my resistance had (really) more to do with a self-imposed division of what is meant only for me and what is to be read by others. A fake sacredness that I invented.

And I'm over it.

Thus, the work can be "the work." And thus, the work can suit the purpose, be it here, as viewed by me (and maybe two people plus my mother, if I'm lucky) or committed to actual paper and available at your favorite independent bookstore (if I'm luckier.) Whichever is most appropriate.

I hadn't actually learned that lesson when I wrote those paragraphs, that lesson about letting the work just be the work, but sometime between then and now--this is my 500th post for GrammarPiano--I did learn it. Writing is alchemy; you can make things true that aren't, or that aren't yet. This blog has, for the most part, especially in the years since I felt like a "real" writer, given me the relationship that I have with my work.

Blogging teaches you how to sit down with nothing and make something. It teaches you to put your work out into the universe and expect nothing back. Sometimes you do get small blips on the screen--emails, comments, references from friends in your actual real life conversations--all that is wonderful, and reminds you that people really are reading. But, in the end, blogging really teaches you that you do it for yourself. You do it because you have something to say and you need to figure out what it is.

This blog also helped me get over some pretty terrible events. It gave me a place for my grief, a place to turn that grief into something observed, something distant enough from my real self, something that wouldn't swallow me. It has given me creative, cerebral, often deeply touching relationships with other great writers like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one and this one. It has given me the confidence to write what I think is the most real, true, strong and meaningful, as well as the most strange, observational, small, re-county, daily, blah stuff that happens--and taught me (hopefully) try to make those things interesting to read.

All that...and I am getting luckier, just as I wished--Yield will be in bookstores in the fall of 2010.

I kind of think that my writing is who I am, and this is one of the places where the writing lives, and so, kind of, I live here, this is me, transposed. I have never felt more like myself, never had such a clear idea of who that self was. And, conversely, I don't take myself all that seriously. I'm more open, listening, curious. Forgiving. I hope.

Thank you to all my dear readers, known and unknown. I see your IP addresses....so I know you are out there.

What I'm Thinking About Lately

--I'm coming up on 500 blog posts. I guess maybe I should think about what the blog has done for me, and maybe what it hasn't. How it has changed the way I write, the way I think about writing, the way I think about what it means to make writing for free, and give it away for free. I find that even though I'm not particularly interested in marking certain passages--year marks, large round numbers--I am also compelled to mark them, as evidence. Of something.

--I am ambivalent about everything. Perhaps too much.

--Does supplemental material change the perception of a work of art? I'm thinking about this age of DVD commentary, bonus tracks, and so on. I think about Doris Salcedo's work "Shibboleth," which was at the Tate Modern in 2007. She wouldn't discuss how the crack was made--and that actually made the work less interesting to me. Perhaps because the feat of it was so startling. I'm with her, in some senses--the work stands alone. But...

--Antony Gormley's current work of art, in London, "One & Other." Basically, for 100 days, 2400 members of the public will stand on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour each. Watching the public use this moment--their 1 hour of a certain kind of fame--has been interesting. People are using it to raise awareness for a certain cause....or they are hanging out, taking pictures, having tea. It's interesting to me to think about use, and identity, and art, and how all these things are crammed in together with activism--which I never even thought about until the public started bringing signs and stuff with them to their hour on the plinth. This brings about the question of visibility, and what that means.

--I used to have a lot of sadness about finishing my novel--only in that you're essentially killing off people who have lived in your brain for so long, your friends in the loneliest of times. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to me that, actually, in finishing it--you're giving them life, forever. (Or, as least, as long as you remain in print.)

Some Angst

New York has been lovely of late. I've been doing a lot of nothing since we got back from Greece, taking my time before delving back into the novel for a few weeks (months? days? overnights?) of work to make it ready for publication. And, after that, of course, comes the waiting for it to appear on shelves. (Or, in remaindered boxes at the back of the store, which I have considered.)

I am both excited and anxious about re-entering it. Can I access that emotional place, that language, the energy that made the book what it is? This is the difference between inspiration and work, I keep thinking. Writing is so mysterious that I think we are often fearful that the magic won't take. It takes so much out of you, that it becomes to sacred. Of course, the big secret is that there is no magic, and nothing is sacred. And yet...

This business of art-making still eludes me. I realize more and more as I get older, that I am purely an instinctual writer. (Are there other kinds? Puzzle-y kinds? Character-y kinds?) I don't start with plots, or characters, or even "ideas." What always emerges first, are voices, and even more enigmatic forces, which I can only describe as "The Feelies." It's kind of like this: Say you are on a front porch somewhere, and miles away, the wind starts blowing, but you can feel it, even though it's not on you. You just know it. You just have to trust yourself more than you trust anything else. The wind will eventually reach you. Or something like that.

I can't put a finger on that distant knowledge-thing that creativity feels like. And, I guess the most ridiculous part is that I feel simultaneously compelled to understand it, (and to write about it in unclear metaphors about wind and porches) and also so completely indifferent to it.

Jean Gray, where are you to explain all this?

Exciting News!!!

As many of you know, I have this novel, Yield, which I started working on way way back in 1999. I was living in my very first New York apartment: three roommates, two cats, crooked walls, dramatically sloping floors, no air conditioning, bad carpet.

Every night I sat in my tiny bedroom, overlooking the corner of 36th Street and Broadway in Astoria, where the blue glare of the neon--"Quinn Funeral Home"--stretched the shadows of the spider plant across the wall. Finally, in 2005, two apartments and countless revisions and reconstructions later, it was finished.

A while ago, I submitted the novel to Project QueerLit, which is a contest held every two years celebrating authors who have yet to publish a full-length work of fiction, bringing visibility and recognition to good books. And Yield has just been honored as the top-rated manuscript of Project Queerlit 2008!!

Hooray!!

For more info, and for the previous winners, look here.

What I Learned in 2008

My parents were in New York this year for my 30th birthday. After two AMOK shows in Harlem we walked probably two miles along 125th Street from Madison Avenue all the way over to Broadway. It could have been a few blocks past Broadway. It was dark, there were hundreds of people out. I was cranky, hungry and dirty with glitter and circus grime. We ended up, about 15 of us, at a Cuban diner, late-ish, practically closing the place. Over dinner, Jennifer asked Jenny and I to talk about what plans, what resolutions, we might have for the coming year--it's Jenny's birthday too on 9/21; I could not ask for a more inspiring birthday twin.

I wasn't prepared to talk extemporaneously about my plans. I didn't have any. At that point, about 8 weeks into full-speed circus mode, I barely had time to plan a good breakfast, never mind reflect on the past year and the one ahead--and turning 30--this thing that everyone was asking me about. Jenny spoke eloquently about having attended a wedding and finding herself out of place, about being reminded of who you are, who you are not. We all nodded our heads; I felt humbled by the exactness, the clarity of her story. When it was my turn, I went on a few minutes about trying to live in the moment--whatever that means--and I wasn't exactly happy with the way it all came out. I knew that I was feeling so many other things, having so many other important, meaningful realizations, but that I felt unable to articulate the details at that time.

It's been a few months, and I think I've figured it out.

At Thanksgiving this year, we were asked to write down something we were thankful for on a strip of paper, and put it in a bowl. Everyone's papers were passed around, one thankful-for-thing was pulled out, read aloud anonymously, and the bowl was passed along. Here is what I wrote: "I am thankful for the realization that I am the only one who should define my career."

Somewhere along the way, 2008 taught me that what I want from the world, what I want from my life, is really nothing more than community. In my early 20s, I felt a pressure, partly from myself, partly from the outside world, to become a certain kind of writer. The benchmarks for this kind of writer are, I thought: a story about you in the New York Times Magazine, perhaps a scathing review, a glowing review, a mention that you are "one to watch." A member of the 20 under 20. Or the 30 under 30. (Is there a 40 under 40? Probably not.) I thought that this was the kind of writer I needed to be, even wanted to be. I picked up random books at the Barnes & Noble, read a few pages--clearly I was more "talented" than these writers. Clearly, I had more skills with language and more interest in making art than this schlocky waste of trees. Right?

Okay, sort of. Maybe.

Something has shifted in me. Reviews would be nice. Press would be nice. Magazine covers would be a fun experience. (But do writers end up magazine covers anyway? Are reviews actually nice?) I realized somewhere that the only thing conventional publishing had to offer me is money. Money and perhaps a certain trajectory--and, of course, none of it is guaranteed. My interest in the "book" world has waned. I'm less interested in doing the work that it takes to get published. I'm less interested in doing any kind of work that's not fulfilling. And that kind of work is not fulfilling.

What is fulfilling: Writing. Sitting at home, alone with the words and the screen and the voices in my head. Sharing my work with the artists that make up my community. My circus community, my friends, my peers, other artists whose work I have learned from, explored, been slayed by. Should a book deal come sliding under my door tomorrow morning, you bet I'm signing it. But the enchantment of publishing has worn off for me. The idea that things come from it has worn off. Yes, they do--many things can come from it.

But then, what else is fulfilling: The work I've delved into in the last two or three years. Bringing vital, community-building theater, all for free, with queer visibility, to the people of New York City. Sharing in the amazing, taste-bud-exploding bounty of the earth with the joyful, the ornery, the elderly, the children, the people of all cultures and races, with farmers and farmer's daughters. To be squeezed into shape by the seasons, watching flakes drop out of the sky one at a time until the branches are covered and the world is quiet and white. To watch children, third graders, fifth grades, talk about a painting that they've never seen before, something complex and wonderful, and say to the teacher "I feel like I love this picture because it has in it everything that I feel every day."

The other idea here, the one that has just occurred to me is this: I am grateful. My writing has slowed--mostly due to lack of bandwidth, and partly due to the current project, which is long, extremely difficult, and often (I think) beyond my creative powers, as if my eyes were bigger than my stomach. None of this means that I am not writing, or won't write, or have given it up. It only means that I find myself so honored and grateful and empowered by the work that I am doing, that the writing sometimes too introspective, too contained, too idiosyncratic. The only times I am pulled toward it, are the times that I feel the need to hold myself closer, to hide the flame from the wind. As it were. Those moments still happen, of course. (One is happening now!)

As I write this, I am flying north from Charlotte to New York City, on my way home from being in Tennessee for a few days, visiting family, feeling bored and loved, feeling happy and fed. I wrote this in an email on the flight down -- and it sums up how I'm feeling now, too:

I wonder if people -- People with a capital P, the gyrating human mass -- are somehow bettered for having been offered this perspective. This morning, on CNN, I heard that at 8:00am there were already more than 1900 planes in the air above the United States. What sort of amazing release would that collective sigh create if all 20,000 or so people looked out their windows at the play of sunlight on the clouds? I wonder if we'd fall out of the sky. Or lift right on up through the layers into space itself. Beyond, toward the horizon, the sky fades from a darker blue into a thin strip of bright lightness. Beyond that is the ocean. I can't see it, but I trust that it's there.

Another thing I am thinking of--people on the ground should write messages on rooftops to people in the air. "Hang in there." "Good Luck." "We Believe in You."

Happy 2009!

Away in Chestertown, Part 2

Art-making is mysterious. It's not alchemy, it's work. But the moment that the work really becomes art is actually quite unknowable, or if it's not unknowable, it's always shifting, and with each new moment, new directions emerge. So nothing ever gets pinned down. All this is (I think, maybe) one of the reasons that writers are so cagey about talking about how the work gets done. We'll talk about what we need nearby, the music we listen to, our process. But those odd, magical weird moments where you finally have made something amazing--those we don't really understand. And we writers get to do the art-making all by ourselves, which is maybe why our implosions are felt less in the larger artistic communities.

Theater-making is even more mysterious. Everyone has to run on all cylinders at the same time, with the same intentions--basically--and eventually everyone on stage begins chasing that thing that you all made together. Weird.

Am I rambling? It's been a long day.

I'm home now, returned from Upstate with the circus. It took only about 4 hours to get from there to New York, and then we spent about an hour and half going around the space of about 5 city blocks, because of 1) the Holland Tunnel, and 2) Who knows what else. It was a fruitful, eventful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes maddening trip. Like art-making is.

Away in Chestertown, Part 1

I am sitting in the kitchen of the big house upstate, where Circus AMOK comes to put our show together every year. It's a flurry of work and conversations--work happening amid conversation, conversations about work, working through misunderstood conversations. I often forget, since most of the year our circus is a smaller team, just how many people it takes to get the thing on the road. Three, maybe four others arrive tomorrow--mainly "art people" which is our code for people who paint, sew, make things, design, or any combination of those skills. I'm not one of them.

We arrived on Thursday, after a horrendously long day of packing and travel--none of it was particularly impossible in any certain way, but everything took longer than we had planned (duh) and eventually, 14 hours after I woke up, we arrived at this beautiful barn, which they made into a house years ago. It feels like we've been here for a week--but it's only Saturday evening. The time is compressed--the same faces, the same images, the same geography. There is no "going to work" or "coming home," and in that way the entire week feels like a single experience. You don't move in different social circles up here, know what I mean? You are never invisible to the rest of the group.

After our afternoon work sessions, we go swimming in the lake, which is just cold enough. It's bracing, but welcome. I like how we sort of take over the small beach there, with our crazy gender-bending troupe and people of all ages. I see the locals watching us, unsure of who we are, what we are, what to make of us. Most of the time I think that, in the end, they think nothing that concrete.

I managed to talk our cook into letting me make a carrot thing tonight--she had the idea, and then I sort of knew a recipe that I thought would work out better--and so she let me go for it. Carrots, yogurt, olive oil, garlic, cumin, cilantro, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Oh, the carrots are steamed and then it all goes into the food processor. I don't know what the exact recipe is. Just everything to taste. The troupe sort of scoffed at it -- but it's all gone.

Now they're serving up the peach kuchen--plus a blueberry sauce made with the syrup that I lugged up here from the city. Work, in the right form, is so fulfilling.

Waterfalls / AMOK / Busy Busy Busy

--A few of us went yesterday to see Olafur Eliasson's "Waterfalls," which is a very large, very expensive public art installation on the East River. I decided earlier in the year, upon seeing a horrible but earnest dance performance, that I was going to see if I could spend 2008 not hating on other artist's work. But: I just don't see what's impressive about them. Firstly, they are, if you ask me, quite ugly. Scaffolding? Really? Eliasson says on the project's website that he used scaffolding because it is a "common part of New York City's landscape." OK, so it's part of our landscape, but it's also ugly. When the wind blows the water back through the scaffolding, that's when the work really starts to look cheap. Also, these oil-spill-style barriers at the base of each waterfall? I'm not feeling you, Olafur.

--Circus Amok is in full swing. At least my side of things. The shows run September 6-28, in fifteen different city parks throughout the boroughs. Do you fear for the health of your mortgage? Do you love Glinda the Good Witch? Do you ache for the pumping dimensions of disco? Are you party to particle physics? It's all here, baby. More updates soon....

--I'm busy with a few of projects that I hope to share with you soon. Some writing, some reading, a new idea for my old novel. It occurred to me that I'd like to give it some kind of life, whatever life it might be able to have. Look for that happening in the fall. There's also some September happenings, with my friend and fellow queer writer, Charlie Vazquez. And then more publishing ventures in November--two somehow opposing, and yet complimentary anthologies.

Apologies for the slowness of the updates. It's that time of year.

Eight Things About Me

I was tagged by the thoughtful blogger over at Leaf-Stitch-Word with this strange, boundless meme, in which you are supposed to write eight things about yourself. As far as I can tell, those are the only rules. Usually these things come with a set of constrictions--and thus you get to work within the form to find something interesting. This, however, is so freeing as to be impossible. So--here's my stab at it:

1) The first CD I bought was the Indigo Girls record "Nomads. Indians. Saints." It came in a long box, and I picked it out after having seen them on the Austin City Limits songwriter's special. This would have been 1990. The opening chords of "Hammer and a Nail" sounded so right, as if I'd never heard music so perfect before. They were from the South, they were out, they wrote about themselves with folky-abandonment. I still buy their records, nearly 20 years later.

2) If you ask my what my favorite movie is, I will tell you "Farewell My Concubine." This is not my favorite movie, but who has just one favorite movie? It is an important movie for me. What I want to say when someone asks about my favorite movie is: "Ask the question that you really want the answer to."

3) I don't like to eat apples without cutting them into pieces, and if then: Mutsu, Braeburn and Ginger Gold varieties.

4) I started writing a novel in the 6th grade called "Thomas and Herman's Incredible Adventure at the Bottom of the Sea." A turtle and a hermit crab go to the bottom of the sea and have incredible adventures. I was saving it on a black floppy disk, back when you did that sort of thing, and hiding the disk in the broken wall of the computer lab. When I moved on to the 7th grade, I abandoned it.

5) I love The Suze Orman Show. "Oh, Barbara, you are so denied, you do not have the money to buy this car, what are you thinking...?"

6) My kitchen looks clean, but it is not. Trust me.

7) I don't think there is such thing as good music or bad music. There is only music that you like and music that you don't.

8) Every day I fantasize about winning the lottery and having millions of dollars. With the money, I buy a huge building and create a center for artists and writers to work and live together rent-free. I support a small number of non-profit organizations. I hire my friend Keith to decorate my loft. I go to Iceland once a year, by myself. I buy a Prius and spend 6 months driving around the United States, visiting all my friends. I write a book about the travels. Trouble with all this is: I don't even play the lottery.

I'll tag: Aaron, Mario, How History Feels, and Amanda.

from An Evening with Quentin Crisp

In the late 1970s, Crisp began performing his one-man show in New York City, in which he would recount his personal autobiography in the first act, and in the second act, he would take questions from the audience. If you can catch this on VHS--it exists--or on CD, do. It's a delight. For example:

Q: What advice to you have for aspiring writers.

A: Never read. This is very important. if you read books in order to improve your writing style, you will find yourself trying to write literature, instead of saying what you really mean. It's very important not to get caught up trying to write better American prose. Don't do any such thing. Just try to think, Am I saying what I mean? Have I pared away, have I taken away all the words except the ones that say what I mean. And then your writing will be fine. You have the most wonderful writers in America, really great stylists, people like Damon Runyon, and there's no floweriness, no literary effect, in the work of Damon Runyon, he is as neat as he can possibly be. One of his stories begins 'Some parties who do not wish him well have put Maury in some quicklime.'

Grace Paley

Grace Paley died this week. She was 84.

In the summer of 1998 I was working in Vermont at the Bread & Puppet Theater, when I looked over to my left to discover that Grace was operating the giant head puppet with me. I had a certain kind of starstruck--the surprise of her suddenly next to me, involved in the same activity. And yet, why shouldn't she? The puppet was cumbersome, heavy, and required many small movements coordinated by four or five people, all choreographed by sound cues that included, among others, listen for the banjo-playing goats to emerge from the woods--forty yards away. "This is hard," she said.

There is a certain kind of pressure, cosmic perhaps, that you feel when a person like Grace Paley dies, if you see yourself as the kind of person with similar interests in politics, art, and personal responsibility--and if you, like me, see the lines between those three divisions as negligible, blurred possibilities, not actual divisions. She said in an interview once: "Whatever your calling is, whether it's as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there's a litte more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it."

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.

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.

Rereading Holleran

One of my copies--I have two, of course--of Andrew Holleran's debut novel Dancer from the Dance bears an inscription which reads: "To Ray and Mark, Christmas 1978. From Curt & Jim." It's one of my favorite books, as objects go, for the love, the intimacy that shines through it--from one gay couple to another, written in the year that I was born. I wonder about those four men sometimes, about their togetherness and maybe their breakups. I wonder if they are even still alive.

I was inspired to re-read the novel, having recommended it to a friend in Paris, and later realizing that I hardly remembered it, save for the general direction of the plot, and the notion that it was perhaps the first book that I read after I moved to New York, and now, nearly ten years later, perhaps it was time to see how things might have changed.

I've written my own novel now, about processing violence in a culture where you feel like the prey--where you are the prey--and, ultimately, about learning to recognize yourself. So when I started reading Dancer from the Dance again, I was surprised, shocked rather, to see how much the novel had informed my early work on the book, my thinking about it, and maybe even--dare I say it--shades of character, and narrative.

Take this, from the opening pages:

Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don't want to know WHAT THEY DO.....And the story of a boy's love for a boy will never capture the world's heart as the story of a boy's love for a girl. (Or a boy's love for his DOG--if you could tell that story again, this country would make you rich as Croesus!)

And a few sentences later:

"So (a) people would puke over a novel about men who suck dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would demand it be ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give in to them?

I must have taken this as a challenge, an immediate directive. Because I've now written a violent and/or tragic novel of men who do Other Things, and when asked by friends and boyfriends what I really planned to do with my novel, as uncommercial as it is, I basically recounted this same speech about a boy's love for a girl. And lord knows (somehow) the goddamn Marley and Me sold plenty of copies.

(None of these speeches actually answered their question. But what else can one say, except: I wrote this thing. It came out of me. I had no choice in the matter.)

It's fascinating to read a gay novel about desire--is there any other kind?--that takes place before AIDS. But something about the novel isn't sitting right with me.

I have, on another shelf, Larry Kramer's Faggots, published in the same year. Kramer's view of homosexuals in NYC at the time is far less romantic, and yet how is it that I still believe Kramer loves gay men more than Holleran does. That he loves being gay, everything about it, the beauty, the tragedy, the mundane. Take this, from a speech he gave in November 2004: "I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all these things." 'Nuff said.

But sometimes, when I look at all of Holleran's work together, the novels stacked against each other on my shelf, as beautiful, as important, and as singularly enjoyable as they are....they all feel somewhat like an apology. I can't help but feel the regret in between the lines. With Grief, Holleran's most recent novel, I think he finally shakes off that pity, that sad world of loss in which all the other of his books float. Ironically, the book is about loss and death and sadness.

I can't remember how Dancer ends, except I know what is given to the reader on the first few pages: that the narrator is going to clean out Malone's Fire Island apartment after he has died. Or disappeared.

So, I read on.