January 2012
1 post
“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your...”
– David Foster Wallace, 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech
October 2011
1 post
Endings
3AM. Going home. Dew on the seat of my motorbike. The tangle of cables overhead, strung along uneven poles. Dogs dozing along residential streets; unwelcome behind unimpressive homes. Skirting around the periphery of the neighborhood. One side homes, the other an empty field, stalks green and long. A golden crescent of a moon, cliche in its perfectness.
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
10 posts
Found Objects →
Jennifer Egan, on writing
Opening Lines: So you were only 26 and already had published in The New Yorker. What effect did that have on your career?
Jennifer Egan: Well, you think, oh my god, then everything must have been easy, but it was in some ways a little too soon for that to happen to me because that story was by far the best thing I had done. Everything else I had was significantly less sophisticated. As inevitably happens if you’re a total unknown and publish in The New Yorker, a lot of people come forward and said, “Oh wow, what else have you got?” But when I would show them what else I had, they were actually not that interested. And at the time, there was no guarantee that I was going to do anything else especially interesting. That story really hung over me and cast a long shadow, and I felt that I would never even match it, much less top it. And that that was thing that everyone was interested in, not what I’d been doing before. So that was tough in a way, although these are the problems you want. You want to be publishing and making leaps.
Opening Lines: With all that pressure for a follow-up, what did you do next?
Jennifer Egan: At that point, I decided to take another crack at the horrific first novel I’d written because when I re-read it, which was very painful, I discovered that I’d done such a horrible job, I’d so utterly missed the mark, that in a way I felt like I hadn’t really touched the idea that I had wanted to deal with. It felt like I had just kind of aimed in the wrong direction and the target was still there and that made me want to give it another try. So I essentially threw that out. I can’t really say I rewrote it, because I didn’t save a single word, but there were certain basic impulses and plot moves that really fueled the next attempt, and they were the same as the first in some ways. And that is what ultimately became the first novel that I published, The Invisible Circus. It was a long evolution.
Opening Lines: Looking back now, what would you say was the toughest obstacle you faced in the years between when you first decided to pursue writing as a career and when you actually got your first book published?
Jennifer Egan: I think the toughest obstacle was the question of why I was doing it. Although in a certain way, it wasn’t that tough since I was compelled to do it, but there was no one telling me this was a good idea. I had gone to an expensive college and gotten a good education, and then gotten another degree with a scholarship in England, and now I was working as a temp? My parents and family were wondering what I was doing. So that part was hard. Just that question of why was this a valid thing to be doing. At the same time, I think that if you’re a person who is going to be stymied by questions like that, you’re probably not going to really keep writing, because in a way, it’s a crazy thing to do. So I would say, I think the hardest part was not getting so down that I just stopped. I just was down. I felt like life was passing me by.
Opening Lines: How did you prevent yourself from getting to that point where you might consider giving up on writing?
Jennifer Egan: I used certain little tricks. For example, I continued to send out a lot of stories. These were the days of sending stuff out in the mail with a self-addressed stamped envelope. As soon as I got back a rejection – which I did all the time because I would send out eight copies at once – I would immediately put it back in an envelope and send it out again because I knew that as soon as I’d put that envelope in the mail box, I started feeling hopeful again. So I tried to immediately turn disappointment into hope.
Opening Lines: Finally, what is the one piece of advice you wish you could have given yourself when you were starting out?
Jennifer Egan: The biggest advice would be don’t worry about the business. Forget who’s up and who’s down, it changes all the time. It feels huge, it feels immutable when you’re younger, and it’s really the most mutable thing. You just keep getting better, that’s all you have to worry about, and it’s so hard just to do that. You should just flush the rest of it out of your head. It’s literally nothing. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know it for sure. If I could get back the hours I spent worrying about who was who and who won what and why I didn’t get it – it was literally a complete and utter waste of my time, and you know time is the thing we don’t have enough of. Anything that’s wasting time and distracting you has got to go.
“‘There were times when my mother had come down and kept me company,...”
– “Year’s End” by Jhumpa Lahiri
So. freaking. cool. →
INTERVIEWER: The development of the American writer today most typically takes place within the university, in creative-writing programs. Did you consider that route?
FRANZEN: I got married instead to a tough reader with great taste. We had our own little round-the-clock M.F.A. program. This phase of our marriage went on for about six years, which is three times longer than the usual program. Plus, we didn’t have to deal with all the stupid responses to writing that workshops generate. We did actually apply to some programs one year, in hopes of getting a university to support us financially, and we were both accepted at Brown. But the money Brown offered wasn’t good enough. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t go, because it might have smoothed some kinks out of the work that were better not smoothed out. As a journalist, I’m always striving to become more professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain an amateur.
“…Conroy suggests that writers imagine their readers carrying a backpack up...”
– Bret Anthony Johnston
The problem
is that I want to be rich and I want to be normal and I want to be unique. I want to be exceptional, and I’m always judging myself against everyone else. I’m tired of it and yet I can’t escape it. It’s probably why I went into writing, but even then I wasn’t thinking clearly, otherwise I would have known that this enterprise, which seems to be diminishing against the...
The weather here in Thailand is just so
brutal. And to be honest, I wasn’t exactly slumming it during my two months in Seoul. Korea is nice and I got accustomed to all the nice things so it’s been a shock, this mess, the snarls of motorbike traffic around campus. The general slow-pokey backwardness of it all.
But it feels like home, like a place where I can fit back into the rhythms of things and not be distracted by all...
May 2011
1 post
Two things
1) I started working on my portfolio again. I feel really into it, in a way that I haven’t felt in such a long time. It’s a good feeling; I just need it to last.
2) I’m leaving Seoul on Sunday. Not sure how feel; not great. Don’t want to go even though I’m not having that much fun.
April 2011
2 posts
Last Monday I had my backpack stolen. In it were my Macbook Pro, a book with $400 USD, a few small notebooks, keys to my apartment in Thailand, and a Korean textbook.
It sucks, but it happens. I guess it was my turn?
So,
I made a whopping total of two posts while I was in Thailand. Now I’m in Korea for my summer break, then back to Thailand for another nine months.
September 2010
3 posts
Blame it on the heat, or something
A month or so ago, girl fell off a highrise in Midtown Manhattan. Apparently she fell while drunkenly attempting to take a photo from a window ledge. A sad but objectively unremarkable story, I nonetheless found myself thinking about it much longer than I usually do when I’m making my daily round through local and foreign media sources. There were a few points of interest: she was the...
February 2010
1 post
The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J....
agrammar:
Yesterday I posted a fairly peeved note concerning Jessica Hopper’s Chicago Reader article about Vampire Weekend. (She’s responded to that note, very graciously, on her blog, but that seems to have vanished.) My note led to a spike in traffic, which was unexpected: if I’d realized it’d catch much attention, I might have explained myself more carefully. The essay below is an attempt to...
December 2009
1 post
November 2009
1 post
Rabbit Heart.
October 2009
1 post
“Understand that your cat is a whore and can’t help you. She takes on love with...”
September 2009
3 posts
From "Bored to Death"
Jonathan Ames: Do you think we drink too much?
George Christopher: No, no we don't drink too much. Men face reality. Women don't. That's why men need to drink.
“…I would have traded
places with anyone raised on love,
but how would...”
– Sharon Olds, from “Wonder”
When I read a story I want it to break my heart.
“Cold men destroy women… They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its...
August 2009
5 posts
top five.
Air France - GBG Belongs to Us
jj - Things Will Never Be the Same
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - A Teenager in Love
Phoenix - Lisztomania
Beirut - No Dice
GBG belongs to us.
Nam Le is brilliant →
Late that night, I plugged in the Smith Corona*. It hummed with promise. I grabbed the bottle of Scotch from under the desk and poured myself a double. Fuck it, I thought. I had two and a half days left. I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. It was a good story. It was a fucking great story. I fed in a sheet of blank paper. At the top of the page, I typed “ETHNIC...
Once in a Lifetime →
One of my favorite stories by Jhumpa Lahiri is “Year’s End”, which appears in Unaccustomed Earth. The story is the middle of three linked narratives. In it we see the protagonist, a college student named Kaushik, struggle to reconcile the memory of his dead mother with the sudden and unwanted addition of a stepmother and two stepsisters. There is a high level of drama maintained...
July 2009
18 posts
Leave it to a Portlander to wax poetically about...
Stories I love, in no particular order.
“Or Else” - Antonya Nelson “The Littoral Zone” - Andrea Barrett “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera” - Ben Fountain “The Afterlife” - Amy Hempel “Year’s End” - Jhumpa Lahiri “Killings” - Andre Dubus “Lostronaut” - Jonathan Lethem
“I can understand the desire to commit to one thing or another. Our society is...”
Me: Pete. I wanna look at the stars, look at how they shine for me and all the things I do.
Pete: heh. it's all yellow though
Me: yeah, yellow or not, at least they are viewable in oregon
Pete: ahaha
June 2009
11 posts
“The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles ripped...”
– Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle