On occasion I ingest extreme amounts of caffeine, typically when under duress or financial strain--i.e., more and more often these days. Since I'm always writing, I amuse myself in reading what I've written in this machine-monster-mode. I imagine it like this, of course:
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.
Marinetti, 1909 (of course)
Rather than a rage in the belly of rogue locomotives (what an image), I produce a quiet fury of carefully constrained text devoid of much inspiration. It is the absolute inverse of my experience of writing after having had a few drinks (self-aggrandizing, sentimental, offensively saccharine, incoherent), but lacks the inchoate, free beauty I've been struggling to achieve.
For months, I've been at a loss, when it comes to what I'm writing. A week ago an older friend handed me a copy of Patrick Modiano (in translation). I continue to believe (and have believed for some time) that the greatest insights regarding one's chosen medium are to be had in other mediums (or modes) of art. If you write, consider music, painting, and especially sculpture, dance, and photography. Photography explains art: photographers are a conduit for image, and show us a particular perspective, a particular way of looking at something, of seeing someone or some place. This is what medium is to art: a space in which to fix a particular way of seeing.
Modiano, in afterimage (Chien de printemps in French, Bitch of a Spring/Goddamned Spring, which I prefer), takes us on an iconic walk through Paris: we visit Place de la Concorde, we walk into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, we stroll down the main boulevards, and in the company of a photographer (Jansen) and a teenager (unnamed). The photographer, in his youth adopted by Robert Capa (of all people), has now adopted our teenage narrator. I'll quote the passage:
A breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees, and their shade felt cool as Jansen and I walked along the main boulevards. We had come to Place de la Concorde. We went into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées. Jansen took pictures with his Rolleiflex, but I scarcely noticed. He cast a furtive eye on the viewfinder, level with his waist. And yet I knew that each of his photos was perfectly framed. One day, when I expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he'd told me you had to "approach things gently and quietly or they pull away."
This passage has been of incredible use, as I attempt to render the nearly indescribably beauty of a ride across the Manhattan Bridge, on the Q, hundreds of feet above the East River, the setting sun illuminating the harbor, the sky, the skyscrapers, and flickering lightly off cars crossing the Brooklyn Bridge: approach things gently and quietly or they pull away. Thank you, obscure relation! Thank you for providing me with the exact chisel I required to cut the nose, the eyes, the face, but might never have found on my own. Modiano's writing reminds me of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially L'Eclisse, The Passenger, and my favorite, L'Avventura. They're slow in pace--dull, almost--sumptuous, textured, layered, and highlight the glory and potential of the image. In L'Aventura, Monica Vitti beauty devastates. While we're on the subject, I want to quickly note a Godard that never fails to elate or animate (the trailer, that is, not the film): Vivre sa vie.
Of course, the other half of lovely writing is clever word-smithing, or sheer delight in the amusement and color and texture of language--as a writer one must exult in language. Take Miss Clack, for example, from Wilkie Collins' Moonstone, which, as you know, I finished just the other day:
I describe this aimless flitting about from one place of residence to another--this insatiate restlessness of body and appalling stagnation of soul--merely with the view to arriving at results.
Miss Clack will be important to this journal as I will use her name for the name of a troublesome aunt, sister of my mother, who had twins at fifty-two via artificial insemination. We're estranged. She is an utter pill, and accused my mother--her older sister, and remember, this Clack had twins at fifty-two--of attempting to breastfeed the children. This Clack is a doctor. Can you imagine? I talked to a producer recently and mentioned I'm accustomed to managing "big" personalities--"diplomatic, Marcel, unlike you," he said--ah, but it begins at home! Yes, one musn't neglect the important skills one has picked up at home.
When one can appropriately position "insatiate" in a sentence, can help the word to expose itself as it must--one has succeeded as a writer. This emerald of a sentence, tucked into the first third of the Moonstone, is the other half of "approach things gently and quietly or they pull away," when it comes to writing. The inability of most--if not all--contemporary writers to do this characterizes the deplorable state of modern fiction. In English, contemporary writers seem to have lost the ability to do either, and are equally incapable of exulting and softly approaching shade, place, or person. An embarrassing and ignominious predicament!
It's raining in New York. I haven't yet found a ticket to the Mariinsky at BAM--howl, howl, howl, howl! O I'll crack heaven wide open with my laments!
I wish it might snow rather than this endless grey rain.
Modiano, in afterimage (Chien de printemps in French, Bitch of a Spring/Goddamned Spring, which I prefer), takes us on an iconic walk through Paris: we visit Place de la Concorde, we walk into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, we stroll down the main boulevards, and in the company of a photographer (Jansen) and a teenager (unnamed). The photographer, in his youth adopted by Robert Capa (of all people), has now adopted our teenage narrator. I'll quote the passage:
A breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees, and their shade felt cool as Jansen and I walked along the main boulevards. We had come to Place de la Concorde. We went into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées. Jansen took pictures with his Rolleiflex, but I scarcely noticed. He cast a furtive eye on the viewfinder, level with his waist. And yet I knew that each of his photos was perfectly framed. One day, when I expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he'd told me you had to "approach things gently and quietly or they pull away."
This passage has been of incredible use, as I attempt to render the nearly indescribably beauty of a ride across the Manhattan Bridge, on the Q, hundreds of feet above the East River, the setting sun illuminating the harbor, the sky, the skyscrapers, and flickering lightly off cars crossing the Brooklyn Bridge: approach things gently and quietly or they pull away. Thank you, obscure relation! Thank you for providing me with the exact chisel I required to cut the nose, the eyes, the face, but might never have found on my own. Modiano's writing reminds me of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially L'Eclisse, The Passenger, and my favorite, L'Avventura. They're slow in pace--dull, almost--sumptuous, textured, layered, and highlight the glory and potential of the image. In L'Aventura, Monica Vitti beauty devastates. While we're on the subject, I want to quickly note a Godard that never fails to elate or animate (the trailer, that is, not the film): Vivre sa vie.
Of course, the other half of lovely writing is clever word-smithing, or sheer delight in the amusement and color and texture of language--as a writer one must exult in language. Take Miss Clack, for example, from Wilkie Collins' Moonstone, which, as you know, I finished just the other day:
I describe this aimless flitting about from one place of residence to another--this insatiate restlessness of body and appalling stagnation of soul--merely with the view to arriving at results.
Miss Clack will be important to this journal as I will use her name for the name of a troublesome aunt, sister of my mother, who had twins at fifty-two via artificial insemination. We're estranged. She is an utter pill, and accused my mother--her older sister, and remember, this Clack had twins at fifty-two--of attempting to breastfeed the children. This Clack is a doctor. Can you imagine? I talked to a producer recently and mentioned I'm accustomed to managing "big" personalities--"diplomatic, Marcel, unlike you," he said--ah, but it begins at home! Yes, one musn't neglect the important skills one has picked up at home.
When one can appropriately position "insatiate" in a sentence, can help the word to expose itself as it must--one has succeeded as a writer. This emerald of a sentence, tucked into the first third of the Moonstone, is the other half of "approach things gently and quietly or they pull away," when it comes to writing. The inability of most--if not all--contemporary writers to do this characterizes the deplorable state of modern fiction. In English, contemporary writers seem to have lost the ability to do either, and are equally incapable of exulting and softly approaching shade, place, or person. An embarrassing and ignominious predicament!
It's raining in New York. I haven't yet found a ticket to the Mariinsky at BAM--howl, howl, howl, howl! O I'll crack heaven wide open with my laments!
I wish it might snow rather than this endless grey rain.
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