A whirlwind tour of the Internets

Laura Kipnis on why Anthony Weiner did what he did:

According to psychiatrist Robert Stoller's Observing the Erotic Imagination, which explores the aesthetics of erotic fantasy, every erection tells a story—by erection he means both male and female arousal, by the way. (Women are capable of acting out sexually, too.) An erection isn't a physiological fact alone; it's a narrative event. It's the culmination of a fantasy, comprised of "meanings, scripts, interpretations, tales, myths, memories, beliefs, melodramas, and built like a playwright's plot, with exquisite care, no matter how casual and spontaneous the product appears." Nothing is left to chance: "[E]very detail counts." Even when it seems unplanned or spur-of-the-moment, erotic excitement is a series of aesthetic choices, and we return to them again and again, like a habit.

A weird, funny video by H. Jon Benjamin. I don't want to spoil it for you, but don't watch it at work. Or probably with family.

Parts one, two, three and four of the AV Club's epic episode-by-episode interview with Dan Harmon, creator of Community. It's not my favorite show, but it is pretty good, and Harmon's frankness in its discussion is pretty fascinating. Writers working under constraints are always good to know more about, and television is of course terribly constraining.

I have a very strange story in the newest PANK called "Robot Christ." This one has taken me a long time to place, I think in part because of its typographical oddities and then in part because of its others. In any case, I'm proud of it, glad PANK chose to publish it, and I hope you'll give it a read.

Ned Resnikoff on the unending nightmare that is the life of a superhero:

For the umpteenth time, young Bruce Wayne will be forced to watch the murder of his parents. Krypton will going to blow up again, killing billions more. Harvey Dent will get yet another fistful of acid right in the face. The unending nightmare that is these characters’ lives will just start over from the beginning, and I give DC less than a decade before the mythology gets back to being so convoluted that they need to do another world-spanning Crisis event just to set things straight and kill off all of the extraneous characters (plus maybe one that people actually like, just because).

F*ck

Tracy and I listen to comedy albums when we drive, which means that recently we've been listening to a lot of comedy albums -- or, more accurately, a handful of them, but quite often. I know both of Mike Birbiglia's comedy albums back to front, at this point. We use him often because he is an amiable but still genuinely funny guy. It's not important to us that he's generally seen as a "clean comic," but it doesn't hurt -- I prefer a gentler sort of humor when I'm in hour 5 of a cross-country drive.

Sometimes I do wonder about the "clean comic" label, not because I consider Birbiglia anything else in particular but because so few who bear the title really seem, on close examination, all that pure. In his album My Secret Public Journal, he makes reference to sex, pornography, rape, cancer, poop, frog piss, colonoscopies, a class clown who used to whip people with his dick, Hell, child molestation, blindness, alcoholism, the Iraq war, sectarian conflict, assassination, and probably other potentially upsetting or offensive things I am forgetting. These things do not make me angry or upset me, but they seem to be at least potentially very upsetting. It's not really news that comedy generally requires the discussion of delicate subjects, even if you're trying to be basically nice about it, which Birbiglia certainly is.

What confuses me every time I listen to it is the bleeping. When Birbiglia describes the class clown hitting people with his dick, he prefaces it by saying "Not to be crude," and perhaps this is part of why his editors choose not to bleep out the word. However, in the climactic joke, he reports Dennis Eckersley saying the words "Fuck him." He repeats this again later. Both times, the editors elect to bleep the word, or rather to mute the middle letter. "F*ck him." But of course the actual effect is even less than that: you can hear the beginning of the u in the f and you can hear its end in the ck. So it's more like, "fu-uck him." There is, in other words, no question of what he said, which is good, because if there were it would f*ck up the joke. But that makes the decision to bleep it rather mysterious, doesn't it?

There's a sense in which the institution of his label is protecting his image, and there's a sense in which that's impossible because as a major label they are presumably responsible for all manner of filth. We could say that they're protecting Birbiglia's image as a clean comic, but bleeping him actually has the opposite effect for me: swearing never seems so sordid as when someone draws my attention to it by pretending to hide it. And it's especially strange as a strategy because Birbiglia isn't even really responsible for the obscenity -- he's only reporting what Eckersley said, and Eckersley doesn't come out of the story smelling of roses.

The way we hide obscenity in plain sight has always fascinated me. On the radio, where I guess the FCC is less aggressive, you can bleep by cutting out a very small part of the vowel sound. (It's always the vowel that goes -- who knows why that part is considered especially shameful.) On live or "live" television the context is included such that you can tell what was said, but more of the sound itself is generally removed, and sometimes you really can't be sure. Comics, even those that traditionally work quite blue, are coached on how to clean up their jokes for television.

In TV dramas, meanwhile, the limits of language are so extreme that it places the characters in a sort of alternate universe. If they can't say f*ck, then it's nearly impossible to imagine them f*cking. That's not how they live. And yet it is how we live. And we want to see f*cking, and stories that revolve around f*cking. So you end up with shows like CSI, where on the one hand you have these depraved criminals who love nothing more than f*cking, and then on the other side of the law these even crazier-seeming detectives who, judging from their revolted responses to the f*cking, have never so much as f*ngered somebody. They wouldn't even think of it, because to do so would require thinking a dirty word, which they can't possibly allow themselves to do. Even when they're ostensibly having sex, I can never believe it, and I can really never accept that they're enjoying themselves, that they're doing anything healthy or fun.

Movies are allowed sex, but perversely this leads to their focusing on violence, as sex screws up your ratings faster, and seems a smaller issue when you're actually allowed it. As a result, the only worlds that look and feel remotely real are often HBO shows, where essentially anything goes, and so the limits become what we are willing to see, or what we want, or what we need.

I never swore as a teenager, and I still try not to in the company of my elders or my family, or in most professional contexts. But I learned fairly quickly, when I was young, that to write good prose without access to obscenity would be basically impossible -- especially novels. You can't do it. You can't write a great novel unless you're at least willing to consider including sex, violence, filth, grotesquery, misery, joy, etc. It can't be done. I accepted this, and I started learning to swear. Now I'm really quite f*cking casual about it.

Pacazo, eventually (Part 1)

These last couple weeks have been a time of interviews, a time of sleeping on a dark red recliner, a time of holding the ladder while my youngest brother paints the house, a time of eating our middle brother's maple salmon (delicious). It has been a time of watching most of The Venture Brothers over again. It has been a time of reading, for the first time in seven years, only exactly what I want to read.

This began with catching up on my purchases from the last several months. I had Brian Evenson's Fugue State, so I read that. Perhaps another blog post for that one (feels hard to say anything after Blake Butler blogged every story individually). Then I read the second half of Blake Butler's There Is No Year. I thought I might read Robert Lopez's Asunder next (it has an excerpt from my review of his excellent Kamby Bolongo Mean River in it!) but I didn't feel quite like a short story collection so soon after the Evenson and I saw my brother had Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire. Honestly Moore is slightly tough going, a modular novel with a series of first-person narrators. The two I've read so far have felt a little stiff, not entirely successful, but I'm planning to return and digest further.

But because Voice of the Fire hasn't been reaching me quite the way I wanted, I decided to go ahead and let myself buy a new book. I had wanted for months to read Roy Kesey's Pacazo, about which I knew almost nothing: I liked the cover, the book looked ambitious (i.e., thick), Dzanc was its publisher, and it had been reviewed well (I had not actually read the reviews). That was cause enough for me to pick it up. (Well, cause enough to put it on my Kindle and then pick that up.)

I'm enjoying it! It's the sort of absorbing, richly textured experience I was hoping for right now. I wanted a novel to live with for a while and we are happily living together -- as of this moment, I've read about 60%, both in hour-long sittings and brief snatches. I feel like I know the characters and at the same time I feel like they could do nearly anything at any moment, like they are always capable of surprising me, and this is a good way to feel about a cast of characters.

I'd had some sense of the premise -- there was mention on the Amazon page, before I reminded myself to stop reading reviews, of the protagonist-narrator's wife, her brutal murder, his declining sanity as a result thereof. It starts out looking very much like a revenge novel, a category in which I have become more interested over the last several years. The protagonist is mourning his wife, and though he has imperfect information (a vague memory of her probable kidnapper's face, the first letter and last numbers of his taxi's license plate) he plans to kill the man on sight, even as he realizes he will never be sure that he's killed the right man. He's always searching, at least through the corner of his eye, for this man. He watches taxis. He returns to the place where her body was found again and again, picking up any scrap of paper or weirdly bent branch that might provide a clue. He knows the futility. He does it anyway.

There's terrific tension at all times, even (sometimes especially) when things seem calm, because you're sure that at any minute he'll see what he thinks is the right man and break his neck. Occasionally things do seem to head in that direction, with his friend Reynaldo pulling him back from the brink each time.

Pacazo also derives a lot of energy from its setting of Peru. Here I might resort to citing the author's biography if I cared -- probably he has spent some time abroad, but whether or not the novel is authentic it is certainly persuasive, authoritative, interesting. The characters are currently surviving El Niño, and this is fascinating. I find it also fascinating when they eat and argue about Peruvian cuisine, when I glimpse the workings of the economy, of the government. 

The narrator is a historian (or something of that nature) who originally came to Peru to complete his dissertation, and so his narration is initially interrupted frequently by reflection on stories of the region's past. There is another kind of energy in this, in the way he transitions without warning, in the quiet math required to link present action to past. His mind seems to quiet as the novel progresses, and this tendency seems to weaken. Other things demand his attention.

One surprising thing about the way Pacazo has progressed is that it seems to be more a narrative of healing than one of revenge, at least at this point. I have little doubt that his need to murder the taxista will assert dominance again before the novel is over, but I'm no longer entirely certain he'll kill anyone at all. His self-destructive streak has been fading, little by little. I don't know where it's all going. I'll let you know how I feel when I've finished the novel. The way I generally write things is that everything gets progressively worse, even as they sometimes seem to get better. This is also the way my favorite stories tend to work. So far, at least, Pacazo is doing something else -- and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

There are other pleasures to discuss as well. The protagonist's very-young daughter has been especially fun to read about. Maybe I'll discuss her more next time.

Books, Journeys, & Meh

Like Mike and Tracy, I'm moving across the country.  I'm moving to Portland and I'm traveling by Amtrak for a little while first.  I have everything I own in my three bags, two rubbermaid totes and one plastic dresser.  The two totes and the dresser are with my parents who are going to ship those to me when I get to Portland.  On the trip I brought way too many books.  I have a kindle and I still brought too many books.  I even bought a book along the way and left a different one on a train.

One book was non-fiction about moving to Portland from Houston, but once I got to New Orleans I couldn't take his constant discussion of the desert.  It's also very hopeful and then I got to Tuscaloosa and saw this:

So then I started reading Distant Star.  Much more appropriate.

I'm going to be in Chicago tomorrow and this is going on:

The Danny’s Reading Series

At Danny’s Tavern

Wednesday, June 8th

7:30PM sharp.

Featuring readings by Abraham Smith and Steve Timm.

[via]

Here's Abe Smith:

Wish I could go, but I'm bound for further down the tracks.  Would be very fitting to see Abe on this trip though.

Why do people quit writing?  That's what I want to know cause that's sorta what I want to do.  Lots of journey ahead still.  Lots of country.  Lots of reading.

Links to Things

Marcia Angell on the mounting evidence that antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs don't do what they're supposed to do.

John Campbell and his comic.

Matt Yglesias explains why Magneto is right.

What a cute little Super Nintendo.

"Advanced penis recognition heuristics."

Too bad this Mario will be on the 3DS.

Some uses of art.

This is a subject I've written on a few times before, but I don't think here, so allow me to polish off some old ideas of mine. Alyssa Rosenberg argues persuasively at her excellent new Think Progress blog that art and morality/politics can get along just fine, and I wanted to offer some further thoughts on this subject.

Often I feel "uncool" as a writer because I see my work as basically political -- not in the sense that my work advances any one party's interests intentionally, though I am at this point an unapologetic party-line voter and would certainly like to persuade you to vote the way I do. To the extent that the other writers I know see themselves in a similar way, the often seem to approach politics in an essentially academic way; most of us, it would seem, are working on "the problem" of "the other." (Sorry for all the scare quotes, I will try not to use too many more here.) This sort of writing is fine, though often a bit didactic, a bit predictable, a bit color by numbers: the opinion of humanist liberal writers is that the other is fine, or even totally awesome, and has been for some time. I'm bored of that argument (because it is so easily won), but it's most of what the self-consciously political set is up to.

Rosenberg writes:

To my mind, there are three broad categories of that work: to help us approach and understand our history and the conditions of our present; to frame positions in the debates of the day; and to provide space to play with policy and political ideas, an underlooked element in a rigidified political process that is deeply suspicious of error and evolution.

This strikes me as true, but I would also suggest that stories are really best at intervening in two particular concerns. One is how we know, and the other is how we empathize with each other. These things are of course related (our knowledge of a person determines a lot about our ability to empathize, even if that knowledge is thin or conjectural). Ultimately, stories rarely persuade us to believe in one policy over another, and they rarely convince us that one thing is wrong or another is right.

However, fiction has historically seemed to be successful in helping us to consider how we came to the beliefs that we hold. The Wire was noted for its success in portraying the institutions (both legal and illegal) that lead people to make the choices they do, and how they structure our lives. Fundamentally, this was what made the show successful as political fiction. There were also arguments about what sort of police-work and reporting and sentencing and so on might lead to better outcomes, and the creators of the show have been very vocal on this point, but before any of this could persuade anyone, it had to help people see the way other people saw. The show was anti-drugs, but it did a better job of explaining why its characters would turn to the drug trade than anything to come before it. D'Angelo explains chess to the kids he's teaching to deal using the metaphor of their gang's structure, and simultaneously explains their gang's structure to the audience using the metaphor of chess. We're learning to know the way that they know, and this allows us to extend our understanding to the least sympathetic characters even at their worst.

Some people think of this as revealing the internal lives of characters, but I think that misses the point a little: The Wire is so successful because it reveals the external structures that create human lives. 

This understanding is so valuable in part because it can help us to extend empathy. I've long felt that this is the best use of art, or at least in moral and political terms the most important. If we look back at history we see that the greatest force for good has been the expansion of each person's circle of empathy to include more people. It's conceivable that art has some ability to intervene in this process, to help it along. There are instances -- I've written recently about Uncle Tom's Cabin as an example -- wherein it seems possible that a book has genuinely helped this process along. It may also be that art merely manifests and makes official what the culture already feels (we may attempt to create art that goes further, but it will only find a significant audience if it's in tune with artistic expectations). We hear what we are ready to here.

When it comes to questions of whether material or cultural causes are primary in our lives, I tend to favor material explanations. I don't think that art ultimately accomplishes much in the way of genuine intervention. I think that art probably serves as a lagging indicator of what our culture is, and what it is becoming. But I like to know those things, and I would like to serve as a lagging indicator. I would like to create something that reflects the best in us, the beauty, such as it is. I don't particularly want to be an "unacknowledged legislator."

And in writing this post, I have thought of a third use of stories: they allow us to measure desire. By entertaining us, by giving us what we want, art allows us to see and to know what we want. When we feel pleasure, we learn what brings us pleasure. This is sometimes exciting to learn. It is sometimes very upsetting. Often, I wish I did not know. Either way, it is productive. It's good to know what might make you happy. It's good to know what might feel good that you wish would not.

Visualizing Infinite Jest, and Other Texts

I was pretty excited to discover, by way of a link from my friend Ned, a blog devoted to bringing "some kind of visual life to the fictional filmmaker's body of work, as well as the world of Infinite Jest. The project has mostly focused on creating posters for the James O. Incandenza, which are interesting in themselves (I like the way blogmaster Chris Ayers uses these posters to bring attention to different easily missed aspects of Incandenza's filmography, noting subtler resonances in his double-fictional works) but I'll admit I'm more into designs like the one above, which seems to make concrete a more ordinary object of the novel's world. I'd kill (figuratively!) to see models of Teleputers, cartridges, and etc. Perhaps a vision of the samizdat itself.

When it comes to projects like this, part of the fun is just seeing people sharing their enthusiasm for novels. You see fanart and fanfiction for film and television all the time, but less often for fiction -- especially the sorts of fiction I tend to like best. This may have something to do with the fact that so many writers are the sort of ninnies that respond to works of devotion with carping about copyright. Anyway, the fanart aspect of it is a lot of fun.

But I think also there's a way in which this blog highlights one of the great powers of fiction, especially novels. You would have objects like this in a movie, of course -- if it had a proper budget, there would be scads and scads. If there is ever an Infinite Jest film, hundreds of people will work to build its world, to make art for it, to make posters and packages for food, and props, and costumes and what-have-you. And these things might be beautiful in their way, but once you get them together and make the film it can be sort of limiting.

The world of movies is shrunk by the fact of its explicit plenty. When you're watching a movie you of course exercise imagination -- you fill in blanks, you project the arcs of characters both onscreen and off, and you infer a sort of world around the rooms you see.

And yet there isn't enough time or enough mind to imagine very far or deep. Especially in visually rich films, we spend so much time and effort simply observing what's on the screen that it's unlikely we ever get too far beyond it.

With fiction, there is always room for something else. We can receive language and reflect on it at the same time. We can extend the language, imagine alternatives, revise, create our own additions. We populate the world. Not only because we have the opportunity while we read, but because we have opportunities between reading. I feel like a lot of people talk about finishing books in one sitting as if it was a good thing, and often it does suggest at least enthusiasm, but I've always found that the breaks I take between reading sessions are as productive as the reading itself -- you mull what you've read, you grow it, you enrich it, and when you come back, the novel's bigger, more solid, more beautiful for your contribution. It takes time to build those things.

Of course they're usually more ghostly than the designs Ayers is posting. You don't render the whole object. You half-build it. It's still more word than image, more container than content. But the collective weight of those ghosts can often be far greater than the harder realities of other forms.

Verse Daily & Poetry Daily: Poetry Aggregators

When I was in college, I was a devoted reader of Poetry Daily. It was an easy and casual way for me to read new poets and new poems outside of my workshop classes, as I wasn't really too aware of online lit journals and didn't have enough money to subscribe to print journals. I kept up with it for awhile after I graduated, too, but eventually I started to find the poems boring. My tastes changed, I guess, and I wanted to read poems that were somehow different than the ones I kept seeing.

I switched to reading Verse Daily. Verse tends to have poems I like just a bit more, poems that are more vibrant, more interesting, more unusual. Less of the typical poetic conflation of physical landscape and personal state of mind, more of poems that felt real, voiced, and tangible. That said, Verse Daily certainly doesn't pop out a amazing poem every single day (oh, and I don't read every single day anymore, either. I have it in my bookmarks, but Google Reader slowly solidifies it's hold over my Internet life. It just occurs to me as I write this that I could subscribe to Verse Daily's RSS feed and read it in my Google Reader, but that's another post about how set I am in my Internet habits, maybe) and I find myself reading it less and less. I'm wondering if these sites, which aggregate mainly from book collections and print journals, are becoming or will become less relevant when there is such a wide variety of well-edited, aesthetically-diverse and completely badass online journals to choose from.

That said and on the other hand, I like that the sites are updated daily and that they only feature one poem per day. It's easy, not overwhelming, you don't have to wade through a poorly-designed website or click on an author's name without knowing if the work you're going to read is poetry or fiction. You know it's a poem, you know what it's called and who it's by and if you don't like it, there will be another poem for you to read the next day. It's simple. Oh, and the archives are always well-organized and easy to get lost in if you're in a poetry-reading kinda mood.

The sites are clear, however, that they are not literary journals. Poetry Daily bills itself as an "anthology of contemporary poetry," and Verse Daily uses the word "republishing." Both websites are good resources for finding out about new work and getting an idea of the kind of work being written. In the past month, Verse has published poems from the latest books of Laura Kasischke, Alice Notley, and Matthew Rohrer. Poetry Daily has featured Kim Addonizio, Kevin Prufer,  Fanny Howe, and Tom Sleigh. I perceive some aesthetic differences in the editing of the sites, which is interesting due to the fact that both Verse Daily and Poetry Daily are essentially aggregators, although clearly not random ones.

On Withholding, Gratification, and Friday Night Lights

A few years back, I took a form and technique class over short story cycles or novels-in-stories taught by Robert Boswell, right before he left New Mexico State. In the middle of the semester, when people started to report that they were feeling a little daunted and that their stories were stalling, Boz decided to alter our assignment for the week to focus on developing plot. Other assignments had been based primarily on language, on metaphor, on character interaction, on event, but this one would be designed to serve as practice in making things happen--particularly things that would complicate and escalate the relationships between characters. As he explained the new assignment, he hit briefly on the difficulty of withholding information in a plot structure--on deciding when and how, but most importantly, how long to let important exposition unwind. As I recall, he didn't offer any maxims--just that it was important not to hold information back from the reader just for the sake of creating drama, and that withholding information should be used as a way to structure the tension in a story, not create it. In other words, if there is no drama between the characters until it's revealed that someone's pregnant, that someone's sick, that someone's cheating, that someone else has found out, then you've got a dead story. Likewise if someone's magic, if someone's in the mafia, if someone's dead, though Boz typically would not have encouraged such premises to begin with.

I struggle with this, though not quite in the way that Boz hypothesized. When I write, my problem tends not to be that the reader doesn't know all the crazy truths about this character that would make his or her actions matter. My problem tends to be that the character is doing things that really, really seem to matter, but that are rarely confirmed or supported by that one crystal-clear moment of exposition. More recently I've tried to get around the problem by not withholding information at all--by making the premises explicit, the tensions delineated, the stakes well-quantified. I have gotten better and braver at writing declarative sentences. But the fact is that having important things withheld does increase drama, and it does create a heightened sense of tension or dread or longing or excitement, and as such it's one of the more important tools a writer has to work with.

For the past month or so, while we've been moving, Mike and I have been catching up on Friday Night Lights, which anyone will tell you is one of the best-written shows on television. We're late to the game, but we're moving through quickly, which also means that we're not experiencing the kind of anticipation that fans of a franchise feel when they have to wait 7 days, or a whole season, to find out what happens next; we simply hit "Next episode." But what's been interesting to me is that the show doesn't really seem to structure itself around that kind of audience response. Rarely are there true cliffhangers of the kind we're trained to expect from TV dramas. The outcomes of the characters' actions are very quickly made clear. Major choices and decisions are usually made within minutes of when they arise. Football games nearly always end the same episode in which they begun. The characters are very rarely in a state of prolonged indecision or reflection (at least in terms of time on screen). Events are set up, and then they are seen through to conclusion. Rarely are we wondering what a character is going to do or say or see or learn. But we're still wondering what's going to happen to them next. 

This to me is an impressive answer to the problem of how long to withhold information in order to build drama. At the end of an episode of Friday Night Lights, I'm usually left with questions of how this will work out: how this will change the character, or how it will affect others. These are long-term questions where TV generally sets up short-term ones. Rather than building drama on the back of withholding, and teasing me with promises of unexpected endings, the writers are creating in me the anticipation of seeing the series through to completion, and then going back and adding up in my head how this all came to be, how it gestated and evolved, how the characters are at once the same as they always were and utterly unrecognizeable. I have this last problem with Julie--on one hand, I have constantly had this sort of primal maternal fear for her, this low-level dread for her propensity to make mistakes. I worry in nearly every episode that the next mistake she makes will utterly ruin her life. And yet I feel like she's changed immensely, and matured, and that I can trust her a lot more to handle things than I could even a season ago. The ability to create consistency of character amid constant change is one of the great accomplishments of the show, I think. The writers seem to know well which characteristics to keep foundational even as circumstances and personalities shift.

And maybe something like this is the key to withholding information well. Maybe it's not so much a matter of withholding knowledge of how a character will act and react--withholding the gratification that comes with knowing what people will initiate and what they will receive, the gratification of inevitability, of justice. Maybe there's just as workable a form of drama that comes from creating someone precious and not knowing what will become of them after they've done what they've done. A drama of parenthood; a drama not of inevitability, but of the unknown.

It's Friday: Party

and also this Ben's and Ben's poetry shit if you're in NY.  (why didn't one of these two poets come up with a mercedes pun?)

Why novels should fail

I said something during my thesis defense (now several months past) that surprised me at the time, and which still to some extent surprises me now, though I think I have always been dimly aware I believed this. I am waiting for my wife to finish an interview. I am unhappy that the blog did not have any updates yesterday (we were driving again). And so I think I'll mull this publicly.

What I said was that I believed novels should fail. This surprised me because it was the goal of my defense to persuade my committee that I had succeeded. Not in making a perfect book, of course -- no one who teaches writing or reading could be that naive -- but in making a book that was, on some fundamental level, complete. Naturally I implied that I had done the opposite. My perverse need to say the opposite of what the moment requires is what gets me into so much trouble sometimes (but it's also where my books come from, so I can hardly quash it).

What I meant was this: a great novel should be so ambitious that it is literally and clearly beyond the powers of its author. It's fine to write something you know you can write, but I rarely care to do it. My preference has always been to write things I didn't believe I could actually do, whether because they were too stupid to be good (my novel about the murder of a unicorn investigated by the Atlanta Snuff Films Unit) or because they were too good for somebody as stupid as me (my novel about the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy as people). And these are the books I prefer to read: the ones where you can see the author has clearly run well off the cliff, and now the question is how far through empty air his legs can take him. The inevitable fall is as good as the running.

My best example of this is Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, a favorite of mine, which attempts something that it very clearly knows cannot be done. Solaris is best known as the story of how a husband (portrayed once by George Clooney) comes to a space station where, due perhaps to the mysterious planet below, his long-dead wife is revived. They try to live together again. This happens, but the novel is really and finally about the challenge of imagining another mind: that of another person (this isn't too hard) or that of an alien being (in this case, a planet or an ocean: quite difficult). The revived wife is maybe, possibly, probably a way of attempting communication, the planet's best attempt at speaking to the husband.

There are figures for the mystery of others from the novel's outset -- an African queen, for instance, who roams the station mostly naked. She's a thoroughly imaginary figure, stereotypical and yet ineffable, and we never know how she came to be: by the planet's power, presumably, but the man she was made for is dead. Why would he want her? Why did this image hold such power for him? We'll never know. There is also the man who lives with what is very probably his dead son, and another who lives with some reminder of a terrible crime. We never know the crime. We never see the reminder.

What makes these figures so beguiling is partly our ability to chart the trajectory by which one might arrive at them. We don't know how one becomes obsessed with an imaginary African queen, but we know what one is, and we can certainly imagine several explanations that begin to bridge the gap. We have some idea what it would be to mourn a son, even if we've never had one. And as for crimes, we may never learn about this particular character's crime, but we know what they are, as a category. We know how they feel. We know, more or less, what might lead us to commit one.

So there is one level of mystery. And this is more or less manageable, as a project: people have written about loss, about the eroticism of racism, about mourning, about criminality, before, to varying degrees of success. The book would be good (quite possibly great, with some additional pressure) from these elements alone. But then there is the planet beneath. And this is where it gets really wild. 

The book knows that when it comes to living planets or oceans, we are supremely unlikely to ever figure them out. In the face of that much difference, communication becomes seemingly impossible. And yet the novel has to portray the living ocean or planet. It has to understand it well enough to write it as a sort of character. It approaches this problem by several strategies -- by the analogy of trying to understand other people, by the use of in-text essays about the planet by fictional figures, and by showing the planet's behavior. The protagonist cannot understand the strange sculptures the planet offers, cannot even know if these are really meant to communicate. Nor can, presumably, the planet understand the protagonist. And yet they keep trying. And the novel does its best to make it all persuasive, real, beautiful, through pages of description and strangeness and horror. You could call it a failure. But you can't deny its beauty.

I want to make something like that.

What is your favorite failure? Your own, or someone else's?

Library Review: Orlando Main Location

Today I went to the library. I decided to do this because our landlord requested to show the apartment to a prospective renter's mother, who would decide whether her daughter would take over this place after Sarah and I leave. I could have stayed in the apartment but who wants to sit around drinking coffee while a stranger shows another stranger the hallway, the bathroom, the dining room without a table, especially when that second strangers is not even the person who will inhabit the space? Weird. Anyway, I had just paid off my eight-dollar library fine, which wasn't enough to keep me from checking out books but was enough to earn me a talking-to from whatever librarian happened to swipe my card, and now there was no threat of browbeating, lecturing.

So I went to the library, feeling sad about my pretty, expansive, noisy, hot, strangely colored apartment, and about the city around my apartment, which could adopt those same adjectives, and I decided to write about the downtown library, and then I decided to review it.

SADNESS: The only library I've been in that hasn't squelched with sadness is the Rod Library on the University of Northern Iowa's campus. It is made of four floors, each appearing to exist in a separate slice of time, so that you start in the burnt-orange fuzziness of the basement and climb a set of stairs or ride one of the tiny shaking elevators up to the glass and polished wood of the fourth floor. People sleep everywhere, and they look peaceful doing it, and nobody hassles them. People flirt across work tables. Even the people shoving carts of hardbacks look happy.

But most libraries are sadder places, and Orlando's main branch is no exception. You approach on a sunshot street noisy with traffic and the library's bulk hulks ahead, gray and matte against the blue sky, and you think, that's not so bad, and then you turn and you think, It's a bunker.

It's an attractive bunker, at least, in an attractive part of town. A wide domino of concrete juts out over the main doors, and it is usually festooned with a gaudy advertisement. Last year the library and an artist put patrons up on the awning to read their favorite books into microphones, to the passersby and to those with nowhere to go who wait in the awning's shadow. I considered applying to read Candide and then imagined myself up there at 9 in the morning, waving to Sarah, Take the picture!

But it is a sad bunker, too, and the sidewalk beneath and the spaces inside are filled with backpacked people who look like they would like to rest somewhere more comfortable than at the library. The water faucets operate with unpredictable force, and the computer area is clotted always with users. The colors of everything are comfortable, but not too comfortable, in the way the walls of a grandparent's house are inviting but not too inviting, not enough to make you want to stay. The furniture is such that after an hour of reading I was ready to get up and move. As at any library, books lurk everywhere, long untouched.

So there is a fairly steady creep of melancholy in this library, sometimes undetectable but all the more sinister for its stealth.

EXTRA STUFF: Some libraries give themselves over wholly to their books, and others devote space and time to instruction, meetings, shows. Our city's main branch seems devoted to reaching into the community, pulling people in. A few minutes ago someone from the library tweeted in interest in finding local bands to play, presumably on this stage:

There are rooms in which you can vote when it's voting time, and rooms in which you can see authors speak. (I saw Laura van den Berg read from What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us here, in a room inexplicably lined with caricatured beer steins.) There are classes, but with titles like eBay Buying and eBay Selling. My favorite feature of this location is a small café, just off the lobby, in which you can buy a one-dollar coffee to drink while reading your books and trying not to spill all over them. You can buy a fairly cheap bagel or a salad or a breakfast sandwich and try not to crumb up the pages of your hardback. The walls are lined with blown-up comics featuring coffee. Some of the walls are flimsy pieces draped between the tables and the main collections table, the observation of which horrified me at first, as if at any moment a raving librarian may burst through, Kool-Aid Man style. I wanted to take some pictures in this café today but the place was full of people who may have been concerned about a fairly disheveled man taking shots from the corner.

COLLECTION: It is weird. The collection here is weirder than at anywhere else I've been. It is usually unlikely that a book you come for will be in, even if it was supposed to be in (most books not listed in the online catalog as checked out are listed not as available but as check shelves, which may as well read maybe), but it is likely that a book you didn't know you wanted or that you'd forgotten you wanted will be there. Today I found Ben Percy's novel, which is not so weird, but I think of him as up in Iowa (he teaches now where I went to grad school) and didn't expect his name on these shelves. I also looked for an Arthur Phillips novel and found this instead:

"One man knows the location of the Ark of the Covenant!" This seemed much more exciting and silly when I took the photo.

I intended to complain here about the music collection, as its shelves are even more unpredictable than those that house the books, with CDs just gone, seemingly forever, and with everything jumbled together by first letter, so that you will never, never find anything in a precise or even close-to-precise alphabetical order, will never find Mi after Me after Ma, but today a library employee was finally fixing this problem, and talking to herself while she did it, and to me, and to anyone else around. Last time I tried to pick up a few albums I was stymied by a guy with a basket who seemed bent on filling it indiscriminately, click click click, scoop, rearrange, and today there was a woman cleaning things up! It was amazing! I still couldn't find any of the discs I'd hoped for, but still: hope.