Moved Again!

I got all excited by wordpress, so the blog is now moved to guytiphane.wordpress.com

Puzzle

There he is, dead, alone
You cannot disturb him any more
And you think that’s how he wanted it
And you think your puzzle is incomplete.

You look above for signs of an angel
Taking away his soul
As in the image in catechism.
As in the image in catechism
You remember the angel busy cleaning your soul
But yours had cracks in it
Caused by a fall
Caused by you
Causing eternal pain
Causing unmanly tears retained

Your head bounces on an aluminum locker
Your head spins about unsaid words and questions
Locked in for eternity
Another mystery, as they had many
You had to take for granted

Your finger ventures its back
On a one-day beard
Your lips prohibited long ago
On the freshly shaven cheek
Reserved for a good housewife
Now watching your gesture

And you withdraw deeper
Into a mound of puzzle pieces
That will never come together.

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

I live on the other side of the bay from San Francisco, so I listen to KALW radio. That's how I heard his name, and his voice I think. So when I stood in front of his book at Moe's one Sunday afternoon, an autographed copy, I thought I might be missing something if I stopped at the suggestion of the title: it would be a boring story of some successful marriage by perfect people.

I read the first page, and thought this might be good.

"We think we know the ones we love."

Okay, whatever, it's still a happy marriage story.

"Our husbands, our wives. We know them -- we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them."

I was ready to put it back on the shelf. I think I did. I took a walk to the literary remainders, you know, the $6 Everyman Library classic that you'll get to replace the paperback version you have. "Give it one more chance," I thought.

"We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know."

Take a chance. Those are beautiful sentences. Get that ATM unit out and pay the nice guy at the register who will even put the penny you don't want into the donation pot for books in prisons.

I started reading, and didn't stop until my eyes could no longer stay open. This doesn't occur that often with me. The thought of going to see a movie will get me back on my feet if one sentence speaks less than enchanting words. It didn't happen. The days after that I couldn't wait to have time to read more. At the end, when I read the last word, I needed to share this incredible experience of spending a few hours with Pearlie, the narrator of this story, the more than just a wife person I would like to have here, now.

You'll find the story elsewhere, on other web sites. After a few pages, I thought, "I bet the husband is gay," and he was. But that was in the 1950's when that was hardly an option. And then they're black, and the beautiful man is white, almost stereotypically German and successful. There's Ethel Rosenberg being killed by the state because she was a good wife. There's the hysteria that makes everyone be a good citizen and follow orders (a bit like now). And there's Love, especially the one nobody talks about, with secret encounters with someone you know will never be your lover. It's amazing how the transposed heart metaphor resonates over and over in this novel.

"Perhaps you cannot see a marriage." I'm still on page one. "Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it." I don't know, this book is full of sentences like that. I want to reproach it that the last page doesn't have them, as if the author had decided that since you were going to close the book right then, he'd no longer talk to you. He gave you that moment when you wanted to cry for whom? A fictitious character? Ha! I wanted to. I was in Pearlie's head all the time. For nearly two hundred pages I wanted to be Pearlie, because she was a beautiful lady.

I thought, maybe I could contact that author and he'd come to my writers group, maybe even for free. Fat chance: he'll be at City Arts and Lectures with Michael Chabon. That's how good he is.

On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach: A Novel by Ian McEwan

I love it, first because I could read it in two seatings (big novels are, how can I put it, intimidating, and lose me in the middle). OK, seriously: this is the second McEwan that I read (the other was Saturday), and every time I am enchanted by his craft, i.e. the way he forms sentences that flow and go back deep in the train of thought of his characters to tell you how they ever got where they are now. So, would anyone say, how can he keep you reading this story about the failure to have sex on the night of one's honeymoon?

For one, it talks about a huge myth, the one that makes people hang soiled sheets at the honeymooners' window in Sicily. While reading it, I thought, "shouldn't they just relax about it and talk, maybe see a counselor?" And that is what people don't do. People assume they're deficient. They build tension on trifles just because Love was suddenly distilled to intercourse and everyone has a degree of discomfort with that.

But at the end of the day, this novel is about intense love, the one that is trivialized now but that is the foundation of oneself. At the end of the day, it isn't how much sex you've had, it's about how you connected, and how you experience this abstraction called Love. When you reach the last pages of the book, that is where the author has taken you, and nothing else. There's no moral, no lesson learned, just the hint that you too, could have been so close to that ideal. I just love books like that.

Becoming a Writer

I'll participate in a panel at Montreal's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival called "Becoming a Writer," in which I should talk about my experience with self-publishing and all the steps of the seemingly infinite ladder towards making one's name emerge in a very crowded and noisy market.

Of course, I'll talk about having the book on lulu.com, more as something anyone should do if they're not going through getting their work torn apart at an MFA program to shake them out of their bad habits. We always question that, we, the beginners. We don't like to have our egos deflated as an exercise. Perhaps that distinguishes the hobbyists from the wannabe professionals.

All the same, I feel that with the Internet and people's changing habits, an Internet presence is necessary if you want to be an author and it doesn't seem you're in line any time soon for major recognition. Anyone can start a blog like this one on any free service currently available (if you don't like google, try wordpress). The harder part is to figure out how to integrate audio and perhaps video into the equation. People download lots of mp3 (even to their cars, I gather), and it would make sense to get your work in that format.

Just today I found this article in the San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook section about a writer who records his stories into free podcasts, hoping that he'll have enough of a following to get them to buy actual books. It may work. By the way, he's a graduate of the Iowa program, and I was surprised that he didn't get an automatic book deal out of that.

Here is the article:

Take my book. It's free.
Giving away books as podcasts is new way to promote sales


One also needs to get his name (and especially his web address) out there to get people's interest. That may even be a healthier lifestyle than that of the typical writer hiding in his chamber with a raven. Perhaps it means you get your name out there by writing (part-time) where it will be recognized.

sharing in the writer's market

OK, I'm probably not reporting anything new by telling you about newpages.com because if you just google "literary magazines" or "online literary magazines" it shows up at the top of the results. I may even have heard about newpages.com, and it may even be in my browser's bookmarks for what I know. Except that today, faced with another rejection letter and faithful to my promise to just keep submitting the same story to other magazines, I felt overwhelmed by the number of literary magazines out there. It became even more overwhelming once I found the lists at newpages.com

A few days ago, I thought: I'll start my own! I know how to make websites, and since I even own the web site, litbazaar.com, I might as well use it. That will take a long time. And there are so many out there! How many writers can there be? Some of the most obscure (to me until now) online magazines already post "no more submissions for now, please," and it feels like arriving in a town where there's a big convention going on and no rooms in even the dingiest motel. You rent a car, because you have to go out of town and seek the "Vacancy" sign. Then you try one and they look at you and tell you they don't really have a bed for you. You don't take it personally, because the motel wants to attract a kind of clientele that does not include you.

Now if I look too deeply at a magazine I selected for its name, I find out it's based in the south, and tell myself they'd never be interested in a story that talks about a kid being stuck in a snow bank. Or would they? Maybe that qualifies as novelty.

So, seriously, what do I do?

- start my own magazine. Being its editor, I'd slip in my writing here and there
- become a novelist and withdraw for a few years until I come up with the novel that someone will surely want to publish
- look around me and find an open mic so I'll keep writing poetry with the only goal of "publishing" it at the open mic (and then on this blog). I read somewhere that people my age are past their prime as poets (an issue with the fossilization of one's language, I think), but then wouldn't it be an antidote to aging?

A decision will come soon.

Oh! newpages.com also lists independent bookshops in your town! Go there, then review the store on Yelp.

issues of the day

Wow, I keep forgetting that the rest of the U.S. out there is really strange. They keep thinking whoever isn't like them, i.e. ignorant, is dangerous. It reminds me of what we learn about the Middle Ages, and frankly the U.S. has been plunging into something like its own version of the Middle Ages for a while now. It's amazing that today, with technology that would allow anyone to get a proper education, we can hear them.

There's the case of Sally Kern, a State Rep from Oklahoma spreading her message of hate and bigotry
http://www.victoryfund.org/files/listening.html

And then, much more to worry about the loss of civil liberties that is now an institution, a University professor in Florida was arrested and jailed because he's Palestinian, lost his job, has been in prison for no reason for five years...

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/21/al_arian_enters_19th_day_of

This is so much bigger than it seems. We see the tip of the iceberg, and we do nothing because we think Obama or Hillary will fix it. But I'm pessimistic.