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2017
I’m sure people have written about this. Sociologists, anyway. That once upon a time, a generation of children at a particular time and geographic area were stamped psychologically by their family: by their parents and their siblings. How they spoke and thought: the rhythms of their speech, whether they like certain forms of sarcasm or not. And so on. This was stamped into them by their parents and other adults around them. And by their peer group too—during adolescence, anyway. But not anymore (that’s what sociologists should be telling us, with sadness in their eyes): now children are stamped psychologically by the media they experience. And crucially, by that media that they experience when they’re children. Or so I fear. I was stamped that way: I was part of the first generation, nearly enough, to be stamped by advertisements and media. My mind was stamped on by television. (As it were.) So, when I have nightmares, when primitive ancient fears stalk me during my dreams, it’s Yogi Bear and Tony the Tiger and Charlie the Tuna and Bugs Bunny in drag. Which is embarrassing, when you think about it, it’s really really embarrassing. Once upon a time, children woke up screaming because they were dreaming about Grendel. Or giants that ate people. Or by trolls that were kidnapping them.
Call it “Syntactic Realism”: writing that captures the way particular characters speak, even if what’s put on the page wrenches grammar or good taste, or makes us feel that the author was immoral or incompetent by writing in the narrator’s voice this way. Some people, for example, when they speak, are tedious. And this can be sad if the reason they’re tedious is because something terrible has happened to them—a cerebral accident of some sort. If you (an author) write a story in the voice of a character like that you can’t make it entertaining and sparkling. We (the readers) lose touch with reality if you do that. The point of some stories, of course, is to lose touch with reality. Some stories, of course.
This story is a follow-up of another story I wrote about the same two characters, niece and uncle, where the uncle is trying to tell a story to his niece, but in the first story he never manages to get to the story he’s trying to tell. In this story, the published one, he does get there.
I guess maybe this is why this story, and not the other one, got published—although this is always hard to be sure about. But it’s true: Most of us want our stories to have endings because endings tell us things, because endings encode moral messages, and because endings can settle scores too. None of this usually happens in real life: endings in real life are sloppy, probably because they’re not really endings at all since things always continue beyond any of them …. And so, sometimes, we need to get the messages and the score settlements from the passage to an ending and not from the ending itself. In fact, often there isn’t even an ending just an eternal meandering, and we have to get the message—at least a message, if nothing more—from the sheer eternal meandering.
I intended to write more of these stories, of the niece trying to find out her family history, her roots, from her uncle (who is the only person in her family she can trust to tell her the truth), but I couldn’t. I got too sad.
2016
I guess this is my worry, my horror nightmare, my Stephen King fear: That the subconscious mechanisms that control us are really really stupid. You know, the mechanisms that trigger who we lust after, or what we want to eat. We’re hoping (I’m hoping) that these mechanisms are sophisticated: that if I’m attracted to something, something in me that’s pretty intelligent is sizing that something up, deciding that the something is worth it, it’s figuring out subconsciously exactly why it’s worthwhile that I be attracted to that something. I don’t want subconscious mechanisms in me that go: oh wow, look at that curve in space, let’s turn on all the desire-motors of this creature (Jody) that we’re operating here. But look around, notice what people normally desire. It can’t be that something in there (in each of us) that turns on the desire machine, knows what it’s doing. It’s clear that whatever’s running us has no idea what it’s doing. Isn’t that horror? Doesn’t that fit the horror genre perfectly? It ought to.
I keep saying: I don’t write science fiction. And people keep saying: I don’t believe you. But really, this stuff isn’t me speculating. This is just around the corner. Or: kind of right here. I don’t do outer space either — because that isn’t just around the corner. (There’s nothing much up there that we can get to very easily. Or it’s all violent radiation and really mean curvatures in spacetime that don’t treat us very well.) The trick is figuring out what’s going to change while noticing what isn’t going to change. (Which, of course, is really really hard.) Futurists write what they think is non-fiction. (And sometimes they fool other people too.) I’m officially writing fiction (and I’m praying it stays fiction, although it isn’t science fiction). Vampires, zombies, all that stuff, is lots of fun. It makes great entertainment. Because it isn’t real. Let’s keep it that way.
2014
I wrote this in the summer of 2007. I was thrilled when the editors of the journal all liked the story, and told me so. I’d began to lose hope for this story — so many of the stories I’d written around the same time had appeared in print, and somehow this one eluded that particular success. Maybe it’s a little sad. Perhaps it’s a little hard to get into the head that’s being depicted — although it’s our kind of head; I swear. More accurately, I guess, it depicts the circumstances in which heads like ours evolved. That’s what I’m trying to do, anyway. Guess my way back there. (Like we all have to do with various forms of childhood that we’ve lived through.) What evidence we have are like memories. A bit untrustworthy. Symptoms more than genuine evidence, actually.
2013
“Um, I say.” I have to be careful. Writers hit on ways of putting things — that they find cute. Or maybe they find them in someone else’s work, and borrow them. (Maybe I borrowed this one from one of Vonnegut’s novels; maybe not.) But the danger always is that one gets emotionally attached to a clever bit of phrasing, and keeps using it. (You start to parody yourself, as it’s often put cruelly about an older writer who has apparently failed to learn new tricks.)
But this is always the problem. Emotional attachment. This is why it’s so dangerous to use autobiographical material. It’s not just that you’re in danger of trying to settle scores with a bunch of ghosts who could care less. It’s that you weigh episodes, ways of putting things, phrases, narrative distance, all wrongly. You dwell on what should be rushed by, or rush by what should be dwelt on. You need your emotions to guide writing, because — after all — emotion is what it’s all about. And yet, your emotions mislead you badly when you borrow from your own life.
So that’s the challenge. Of course, you can just make it all up from scratch — write it all to look as if it’s autobiography when it’s not. Maybe that’s best. There are many ways to get the right distance and detachment.
Relationships are unique. That’s how it looks to me, anyway. You can say general things about them: it’s a sibling relationship, there’s envy, etc… But this is always abstract. It’s the details that matter, that make what’s going on unique. And that’s one reason why (if you want to) there’s always something fresh to write about. If you’re writing about humans, I mean. And their relationships.
You might ask (I have): What’s wrong with sentimentality? Well, there are two things that dovetail together. The first is that it isn’t fresh, it isn’t original. Mom and Dad want to give their children that they love a Christmas they’ll remember. (And the children, of course, will remember this because, after all, they love their parents too.) And somehow, there are some trials and tribulations to get through (but it all ends happily by Christmas Eve).
We’ve read something like this a dozen times, and if we’re not too busy tearing up and wallowing in our own emotion, we’ll notice it and get annoyed.
But the other thing, of course, is that this kind of depiction is deeply false. It’s not that parents don’t love their children (and vice versa); it’s that it’s the details that matter. What is it about these people that make them what they are. What is it about these people that force their lives to have the trajectories they have?
I guess it comes down to this. People read for very different reasons.
2009
February 15, 2012.
I’m obviously worried about the future. (I’m hardly the only one, I think.) Not all the time, because there’s always the here and now to get through, and it’s really intrusive on most days. But when I do worry about the future, I end up writing stories like this.
Maybe I’m not really writing about the future—this just occurred to me. Maybe I’m writing about the present from a projected future point. That’s more my concern, now that I think about it. It’s not sci-fi, this story, it’s a prediction about the ways we’ll be nostalgic, what we’ll regret, what we’ll remember.
All mythology. Because there’s no predicting this any more than predicting anything else. Anxiety is always blindly present-tense; no matter what it looks like.
I wrote the story in the summer of 2007. Alaska Quarterly Review published it in 2009. It was the first story I got into Alaska Quarterly Review after twenty years of trying. Really. I published my first story with them in 1989. So it was a kind of anniversary.
2002
So it’s 1993. My first philosophy book is about to be published, and I think: Hey, I’m secure. I won’t lose my job. Why not write another novel? I’ve written one already—but not quite the way I want to, not totally the way I want to. All dialogue, goddammit! No description: no indication of who’s talking. If you do the voices right, anyone can tell who’s talking without the novel having to be explicit about it. Make the people who are talking comicbook characters. Then it’s even easier to tell who’s talking. (Call the novel, for example, Superman. Because he’s a comicbook character if anyone is.)
I was obsessed with dialogue. (I kind of still am.) I was listening all the time—hearing voices everywhere. (Well, no surprise—everywhere you go people are talking, have you noticed that?) I’d sit at parties, listening and writing stuff down. (That can really freak people out: some guy transcribing stuff onto paper while other—illegal—stuff is being passed around.) And I’m recording conversations, on the phone, with friends at dinner, and then later transcribing those conversations onto paper by hand. With permission, of course. You’d be surprised how fast everyone forgets they’re being recorded. So the conversation goes totally natural after only a few minutes.
Have you noticed? The ordinary dialogue form is totally artificial. Real people talk to each other simultaneously. Their comments to each other overlap. They don’t take turns. They don’t have to. They talk and process at the same time; they respond to questions at the same time they’re processing the questions—at the same time the questions are being asked. I noticed this because when I’d transcribe what I’d recorded, I had to keep running the tape over and over to get exactly what was being said. Two people (or more) speaking at the same time run interference with each other on tape. Makes it hard to hear what anyone has said.
So now I’m being tortured by the artificiality of the ordinary dialogue form. One person’s words in quotes, new line, then another person’s words in quotes. That’s not what it’s like. Or like in some of Shaw’s plays, putting each voice in its own column with the statement: said simultaneously. That’s artificial too.
I wanted real. After all, dialogue is a whole lot more subtle than it can be depicted as being in these literary forms. There are patterns to how people interrupt each other. Some interruptions are aggressive; others aren’t. People can clash just in how they overlap. Or they can be harmonious about it. I wanted to be able to show all of this on paper.
And then it hits me. I remember where I was. Sitting up in bed thinking about this. When I should have been sleeping. Or sleeping with someone. Music. You have each instrument with its own line next to the lines of the other instruments, and you can see at a glance when they overlap and when they don’t. Do the same thing with dialogue.
So I invented a new literary form. (How often does that happen?) I dedicated an entire chapter of Superman to that form. Call it synchronous prose. Some people were into it. Christopher Sorrentino really like it. Jonathan Lethem really liked the novel; but I can’t remember if he particularly singled out that chapter. I think he didn’t. Some people complained: I have to keep moving my eyes up and down—it’s really annoying. Other people said: It’s really swift and natural—ordinary dialogue just looks fake after reading this.
And it does. It makes the ordinary dialogue form look really fake. I was hooked on synchronous prose for years. Jonathan Lethem had connected me to a literary agent. (Jonathan is such a nice generous guy: he really pushed my work on other people for a couple of years there.) The literary agent was interested but uncomfortable representing the novel I’d already written. It was way too experimental. Write another one, she suggested. I am, I told her, I’m working on it right now. It’s a detective novel. Good, good, she said. I told her some of the plot. Good, good, she said. And then I told her how I was writing it. The entire thing. In synchronous prose. Please don’t do that, she told me. And she was sincere. I could hear the sadness in her voice.
I understood. I sympathized. But I was addicted. The mid-nineties were a good period for me in terms of meeting people. I met a lot of writers. In Brooklyn. At parties. At cafes. In bars. For real. And I met agents and even publishers. But none of this was going to help me if all I could write was synchronous prose. And that was all I could write. For years. I wrote the detective novel that I had intended to write entirely in synchronous prose. I called it “Ambivalent Carnivores.” It’s still called “Ambivalent Carnivores,” by the way. Jonathan Lethem read it. Um, I don’t think so, he told me. That other novel you wrote, he told me, that’s a great novel. Try to get that published. Do more of that. (This was in 1996.)
But I can’t do anything twice. It’s a real problem for me. Maybe it’s my episodic memory that doesn’t work so well (so I can’t remember what I’ve already done). Maybe it’s something deep in me that rebels because it thinks it’s being punished if it has to do something twice. (Writing things repeatedly was a punishment when I was in grammar school. Something in me refuses to forget that.)
In 1997 I finally awoke from synchronous prose like from a nightmare. Or from a stroke. Or from a binge. Or from Buddhism. Something. I took up ordinary prose forms tentatively—trying to talk again, and then write. “Hello,” I’d say to people. And then I’d pause meaningfully. Wait my turn. Quietly.
In 2001, I excerpted the beginning of “Ambivalent Carnivores,” and rewrote it slightly so that it would work self-containedly as a short story. Wisconsin Review liked it, and published it in 2002. Sometimes I think about writing more synchronous prose. Maybe a short story. And then the fear comes over me. I start to hear voices again. All at once.
The characters in the story are talking on landlines. Which don’t really exist anymore. But maybe that’s not crucial. They’re also talking about white pages and phone books. Are there still white pages and phone books? Outside of museums, I mean? I think we need a new kind of museum. Not for art—because who needs a museum for art anymore? We need museums for extinct things. Landline phones, for example. Or vacuum tubes. (Have you ever seen a vacuum tube? I think I have once.) And televisions. The old ones, I mean. Television stations too. (Soon, very soon.) And for people too, let’s admit it. People like me, for example. So that whatever’s going to be around soon can all go to the museum together. Maybe whatever’s still around will still have families, maybe whatever’s still around will still use the word “Mommy,” as in “Mommy? what’s that?” And the Mommy (whatever “Mommies” actually are soon) can say: “That’s a Jody.” And the kind of child that’s still around will be really puzzled (this is what I predict), “What’s a Jody?” that child’s going to ask. (Okay, I know you think I’m exaggerating, you really do. But just you wait.)