What Tony is reading

A couple of nights ago I finished The Hours. I was a little perplexed by its interwoven structure at first, but as I caught on and Michael Cunningham pulled the pieces together, I got it. The author's technical mastery in lifting themes in the subtext in the beginning of the book up to the surface as a meditation on death and life is something to behold. Another technical feature that I had heard Cunningham talk about in interviews when the book first came out was how he echoed Virginia Woolf's language. I haven’t read enough Woolf to know how well he succeeded. I find that Woolf says things that are so original and startlingly unique that an author would be hard put to say something Woolf-like. Confession time: I have not read Mrs. Dalloway. One of the curses of being an English major is you have to read the armloads of books you get assigned, leaving no time at all to read anything else--plus I fulfilled my 20th century requirements with Americans. One of my roommates in college told me he thought Virginia Woolf was the best novelist of the twentieth century and that Mrs. Dalloway was her best book. I do, at least, own a copy of it, and it has been on my list to get to for quite a while. As an aside, I read A Room of One's Own three times in 2005 and I bought my studio apartment in The Bronx shortly afterward. My personal life is still unsettled, but at least I've got the room-of-my-own part settled.

I am now reading an anthology of mystery stories, mostly by women authors who live with their husbands and dogs in Nebraska and have been finalists in mystery awards I have never heard of. I'm not a snob, but it isn't literature. I have nothing against plot-driven genre fiction; the fascinating thing for me is trying to figure out why this doesn't sound like literature. "Literature" does not require the use of highfalutin language, of course. Steinbeck used plain American English effectively. Literature requires telling details, original expression. In one typical story a man plots to kill his wife. Reasons are given, but no one in the story has an interior life--the focus is on the plot the man hatches and the twist of his wife turning the table on him. The one story in the group I've read so far that approaches has one other criterion that I apply to literature: The author takes a risk in his language. It isn't highfalutin language; what this author does is ratchet up the intensity of the descriptive language as a character tries to cope with a loss--not that we get a lot of insight into his interior life, but we sure get more than in than in the other stories.

As for my subway reading, I have temporarily put aside all prospect of pleasure and have been editing a chapter for one of the accounting books I edit at my day job. Specifically I am editing a 120-page manuscript concerning two official interpretations (FIN-45 and FIN-46R) that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued by the on its standards. These two interpretations and the standards they interpret have important implications for accounting by construction contractors and property developers. At the risk of understating, this is a truly mind-numbing topic. Fortunately, my author has done a decent job and my editing is not heavy.

I did finish Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat, which I enjoyed immensely. Corn's book neatly summarizes the development of prosody in English from Anglo-Saxon forms through the present day and the prevalence of unmetered poetry in our time. He draws parallels with Greek and Roman models and contrasts our system with systems that have developed in Romance languages.

The purpose of Heartbeat, or at least what I got out of it, is more or less summed up by something Corn says in his lead-in to his last chapter: "no one can write syllable-count verse well who is not also able to compose good unmetered poems. It's also possible to argue that no one in the contemporary period can write good metered poetry (poetry that, despite its regular meter, has the requisite fluidity and variety of conversational speech) who does not also understand the tradition of unmetered poetry that has been practiced now for just over a hundred years."

I haven't finished Michael Connolly's City of Bones, by the way. It got to an extremely climactic scene in the middle of the book, but it's a long book and by that time I felt I'd read enough detective fiction for a while and had to take a rest. I'll get back to it when I'm ready--after I read the mystery anthology for sure.

I keep a book about French with me at all times--sometimes you have to set FIN-45 and FIN-46R aside and apply a little linguistic CPR to your soul. I'm leaving The Berlitz Self-Teacher: French an home these days; and I'm not working on my accent because I'm still getting over my cold and my voice is still trashed. The Berlitz book is good because it focuses on fundamental features of French grammar and drills on basic useful vocabulary; however, that means there are a lot of examples along the lines of "Le chapeau noir est sur le sofa" (The black hat is on the sofa)--I mean a lot of sentences like that.

So, these days I carry New French Self Taught with me, which is only slightly more advanced than the Berlitz book except it's filled with examples such as "Je ne sais pas très bien m'expliquer en français." If understanding the grammar in that utterance eludes me, at least I could memorize that and actually use it.

What Tony is writing

I have become the worst sketch-writing student ever. In the beginning it was easy to hand in the two sketches a week. My writing got kick-started, which is wonderful; however, I'm writing everything except sketches. I finally--and with accelerating speed--got the seventh draft of my novel done, and I handed out copies to my writer friends for input. I think a couple more light revisions and that thing will be done.

I am now devoting all of my energy to a memoir I'm cowriting with my sister. We have decided we want a good solid first draft done by midsummer, which is when she starts graduate school. I expect that my first draft will be 300pp and that the second draft will mostly involve deleting 150pp of that. I am writing things now that I know I will delete later--but I never censor myself in a first draft. It all goes down on the page in the first unreeling of the narrative. My sister is writing her half now too. We went over our drafts this summer (I only had 60pp then and I felt guilty for dragging my feet). Our material was surprisingly in synch--integrating our two narratives should be a natural process, which I'm not sure when we'll do, but I suspect it will be after I have trimmed my material down to 150pp.

I need to stop taking writing classes--I'm so busy writing I don't have time to do the class work. I have ideas for the next four books I'd like to write--all novels. I also have three unfinished novels that maybe I should take a look at again and think about finishing.

Cellophane flowers . . .

. . . of yellow and green did not tower over my head as I made my up 6th through the stream of people on my way to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy a measuring cup to replace the one I’d broke, the sun low and lighting up people’s faces with its yellow glow on my lunch hour, but I was overcome by the sight of the Blue Valley Deli & Grocery, seized by this realization: “We have delis and groceries!”

Guys were sitting in the window on vinyl-covered stools eating lunch, holding big hamburgers with one hand and talking with each other. Cooks thrashed away at fuming grills, a ribbon of grease smeared on the front window, a veil of steam condensing at the top of the glass. The world was revealing one of its secrets to me, like opening the back of a watch and seeing its works turning, this window a clockwork of hamburgers and hands and happy-faced men and puffing steam and flashing steel utensils, silent from my distance. Here was all as it should be in the middle of a pretty day in the middle of New York City, with its plenitude from the gum on the sidewalk to people hurrying by in their dun coats to the fading blue paint of the front door of the Blue Valley Deli & Grocery, a vision as sharp before me as a knife edge scraping against the whorls of my thumbprint. Picture yourself getting back today from a combat tour in Iraq and happening upon this impossible scene.

Wherever you are . . .

. . . it's the starting point for someplace else. Or is it? I write this blog called "i don't know how to be me," something that I feel to literally be true. I have this idea--a hope--that many posts from now this could turn out to have been the narrative of how I learned to be me. Last night, as I wondered whether this is the story that would take shape in my life it struck me that I am at my most me when I feel the most intensely that I don't know how to be me. It is only the narrative I can think of, not whether there will be any result, such as arriving anywhere.

I do go on . . .

. . . but the Stickerbook show on Wednesday was this fun!

Unbreakable

This is a beautiful photograph. If you know the actress in this portrait, this picture says it all. If you don't, and you don't know her story, I'd like to describe its context and what this picture looked like to me the first time I saw it. Not very many people read this blog, but to shield her privacy, I will avoid using her name.

You might not be able to tell from this picture that this improv actress is funny and pretty and smart. I should also add that when she performs she is quite sunny. As you step out into the night after one of her shows, some of her sunniness is still with you and you're glad you came. That is certainly the impression she and her team left me with when I saw their show at The PIT on October 29.

It was the next evening that she was walking along Herald Square with an actor and the two of them were struck by a car and ended up in Bellevue with broken legs. She was actually propelled through a store window suffered head trauma. The emergency room nurses told her that with the plate glass crashing upon on her she was lucky to be alive.

This photograph didn’t have to be lit this way, but the choice is probably a reflection of how she felt at that stage of her recovery. This is a portrait of stillness and she looks sad--look at the redness in her face. This dark picture reminds me of those Ad Reinhardt black-on-black abstracts, whose distinguishing shades hover around the threshold of perception--museum-goers who don't pause to look might think those pictures are all black. Like those paintings, this is not a picture of pure darkness. Look at what emerges from the shadows. We can't see her eyes, but if you know her, you might recognize her just from her hair, its curls catching the light. Her nose aligns with her arm below, with the highlight of a fingernail appearing at the center: She is resting her chin on the tops of her fingers--and curving away beneath is the top of her cane. Her right hip, with her right hand resting on it, where the most detail in the picture is, looks solid--you wouldn't know that her right leg is the one in the brace.

I want her to get better--as fast as possible--and I'm glad to say that I saw her onstage on Saturday, complete with leg brace and cane. Her picture is a reminder to me that it takes a lot of strength to document a personal low point--but she has also documented her strength. This is a beautiful picture--and I should have added "strong" to my earlier list about how she is funny and pretty and smart.

And her latest picture on MySpace is the sunny one of her from before all this happened.