Jet Stream

My short story Jet Stream is live and read out loud at the great podcast fiction mag: Bound Off.

(If you ever wondered what I sound like in the vocal flesh, give a listen.)

Time

Erg... where does the time go? Not so much a lament about my non-bloggieness, just that life always seems to jump and whip my butt - in the time dept.

Though, I do believe we have much more time than we think - we just fritter a lot of it away (guilty as freakin' charged). Things like employment get in the way a lot, and I really think it is high time we got back to having patrons support us artists and writers so that we don't have to waste so much time chasing the buck. Of course as a guy who makes a living drawing pictures, what the hell do I have to complain about?

I digress.

This post is about my recent read The God of Small Things by Arundat-i-will-never-remember-how-to-spell-your-first-name Roy. I have enjoyed the writing, I mean she did win a Booker for the novel, it should have a few decent sentences in it. But what is driving me crazy is all the withholding of information. Something bad happened in the past, or maybe in the future, or hell, maybe even in the present - and I will remind you of that every few pages, lest you lose interest in my characters and... did I tell you something bad happened? Etc.

Erg. And speaking of time. Just tell me what the fuck happened and lets take it from there. I mean, I only have so much time.

Story... life

I had to really resist not using some pun version of Raymond Carver titles for this post - What we write about when we write about blogs... or will you please type quietly please... or where I'm blogging from... or QUIT!

I've been reading Raymond Carver's Bio, A Writer's Life by Carol Skienicka. It's a thick tome full of seemingly every jot, tittle and knee scrape of Carver's life. And I'm loving it. Carver, along with DeLillo and Ford, has been an obsession. Okay, I can add some more writers to that list, but I am trying to focus.

I came across Carver fairly late in my reading life. I was given an audio set of Great American Stories, or some such title. It contained stories from Updike (including A and P) Cheever (including the Enormous Radio) and Carver - including most of the stories from Where I am Calling From. At first I found them kind of melancholy, but oddly fascinating. The guy who read them had an edgy, world weary voice - and I discovered that I couldn't listen to a lot of them in a row... because they made me feel depressed. I didn't pick up an actual Carver book for a couple of years, so I only knew his work from the tired guy's voice - which, incendentally I began to think of as Carver's voice. Much later, when I heard him in an archived radio interview, I thought, "that's not Carver!" He doesn't sound tired enough.

I found a collection of his in a second hand bookstore and read the stories I had up until that time only heard. As much as I liked the audio, I loved the printed versions. I guess it is like watching a movie you see the world, where on radio you create the theatre of the mind. And reading Carver was one step closer to his world.

Cathedral is still my favorite, though I have a fondness for Fat, Neighbours, and Elephant. A quote that sticks with me in Tobias Wolff talking about Cathedral. He said that reading the end of the story he felt himself actually levitate. I know exactly what he meant.

I'll blog again about the actual bio another time - just to say that I am levitating frequently.

Hard Labour

There should be a category of writers that go under: and why didn't anyone tell me about her/him?! Louise Erdrich is the latest. I had heard the name, and knew she was from the mid-west, but that was about it.

My bookclub pick of the month was Erdrich's The Plague of Doves. It was one of those rare reads that two pages in I knew I was going to love every page of the book - and I did. Beautiful prose, combined with quirky characters and a twisty plot that kept me flipping back to see if I understood everything. Some books that make me do that are annoying - can't the writer just lay it out straight? I know this will be something, as the lone writer in my club, that I will be defending. In Plague of Doves I actually liked flipping back and finding, and then connecting one character's backstory to another - having to do that as a reader paralleled the mystery within the storyline (who was related to who and who killed who?)

I remember a friend reading one of my stories quite a while ago. He said he had to go back and re-read parts to understand what was going on. I thought this was a criticism. But he replied, "Why wouldn't you be pleased that you made me read slower and more carefully? I like when a writer does that."

I think about that quote a lot.

And the other one from Don DeLillo (another writer that is challenging to read). Some interviewer asked why his books were hard to read. DeLillo replied, "The truth should be hard." Some might rankle and say what an arrogant s.o.b. But I know what he means. Writer's work at making all the lies they tell become the truth. And it is damn hard work - what's wrong with the reader carrying a bit of that load?

Love OK Go

Chances are, with 6 million hits, you have already seen this. But if you haven't you need to watch it.

I love these guys. Rube Goldberg is smiling somewhere.