November 2008 Archives

Sigh. It's true. Thanksgiving, that somehow quintessential American holiday (toast a fiction, stuff yourself with plenty, drink a bunch) is now digesting. Much like various projects which remain so fictional that they don't even exist. Ups and downs, fallow periods and rich, bugger all. It's a queer space I'm in: little in the way of output, much in the way of slack. I'm rather tired of being my own worst nagger, so I'm just trying to relax with it and stop feeling like I'm going to die next week and thus have only a few days to produce every awesome idea I've ever had. This effort is meeting with mixed success.

On the other hand, the dinner I made (and I did make it, in its entirety, all the main bits and the sides up to and including the whipped cream) was fab and smashing and done just right, with the requisite huge pile of leftovers remaining for noshing on over the next few days.

So I've got that going for me.

It's all merriment and japery until some twittling pratt bumbles onstage with a cured ham and staggers about until he trips and puts his head through a flat. Then the rest of us have to move downstage engaging in ridiculous pantomime while the stagehands try to extract his great knobby cranium, an effort made decidedly more difficult by the great lout's enraged sheep-like bleating and the lead's increasingly obvious inebriation. As God's my witness, the only thing that redeemed this production was the ample package of the villain, which drew standing crowds every evening until he fell ill with the grippe. The riot following the announcement of his replacement by the understudy made the front page of the Times theater section, which constituted the best coverage received by the show for the duration of its run.

So I make my way across the continent with collapsible bicycle in tow, to hang out in the city with my bestest friend and ride the streets as in days of yore, and also to make a pilgrimage to the cathedral, and instead I spend nearly the entire time doubled over puking and unable to leave the apartment because I got infected with some nameless breed of gut-buggering beasties. Got one ride into town on Friday night, and by 3 AM I was getting better acquainted with the faintly chlorine scent of urban bowl water and the contents of my digestive tract.

Super.

I've just arrived back home after a two-leg flight made tolerable only by Immodium. All-day travel is not at all the same as rest, so tomorrow I am going to stay home and recuperate further and, if I'm fully improved by the dinner hour, I'm going to go buy myself a fat shank of prime rib and a basket of onion rings somewhere because I'm tired of this nonsense.

Don't tell anyone, but...the novel.  It's happening again. 1,300 shiny new words, many of which start the work of addressing the Big Big Problems that ground everything to a halt months ago. Shh!

Most of the book takes place in a certain eastern city,  so I'll be there later this week, taking pictures and doing "setting research" to spiff up my recollections of the place. Apparently it'll be raining most of the time I'm there, but that won't stop me from riding around on my bike (yes, I have one that fits in a big purple suitcase, so I'm bringing it along). There will be a visit to the cathedral, perhaps the local clandestine deviant rendezvous spot if it's not all muddied up (for research, not sex), a swing through the queer part of town to observe the natives, and maybe a drink at a particular bar of note if I can manage it, because sometimes I'm nostalgic for events that occurred before I was a blastula.

But really, the best part of this is the energy...creaking creative conduits beginning to flow with idea-juice, or some other overwrought metaphor about actually paying attention to what I intend to do with my life and putting renewed effort into it. Fab!

I will for now ignore the looming Terror of the Middle. I will also take heart from Malcolm Gladwell's piece in last month's New Yorker, titled Late Bloomers.

When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions--before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain's trial-and-error method: "His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again." Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on "Huckleberry Finn" so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Not that I am equating myself with Cézanne or Twain, of course. But there's a great deal of comfort in knowing that people who pay attention to this sort of thing have noted that there's more than one kind of creative process, and that I needn't feel like an abject failure just because I haven't yet hit my stride as I approach the beginning of my fourth decade on the planet.