No ideas but in things

I'm the author of the chapbook "Call it a Window" (Midwest Writing Center, 2012). This is a collection of inspirations.

more If on a winter's night a traveler

  • Irnerio: Me? I don't read books!
  • Reader: What do you read, then?
  • Irnerio: Nothing. I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.

The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured -

“The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And there’s the work of Robert Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph. I don’t want to list names because lists are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”  — Don DeLillo

(Source: theparisreview.org)

  • INTERVIEWER: How do you imagine your audience?
  • DeLILLO: When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.
  • INTERVIEWER: I’ve read critics who say that your books are bound to make people feel uncomfortable.
  • DeLILLO: Well, that’s good to know. But this reader we’re talking about—he already feels uncomfortable. He’s very uncomfortable. And maybe what he needs is a book that will help him realize he’s not alone.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Murakami’s new book (1Q84), and it’s making me think that I haven’t spent enough time reading books this summer and fall. Or maybe it’s just that I always read more when it gets colder outside.

Here is a book list I’m making for myself, all books that I haven’t read yet:

  • Emma (Jane Austen - actually, I haven’t read anything by Austen, so I might just end up reading whatever the library has)
  • Middlemarch (George Eliot)
  • The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
  • The Bible
  • Seeing (Jose Saramago) 

What books would you recommend adding to the list?

There are worse ways to spend a day.

There are worse ways to spend a day.

Other stuff that happens.

For someone who is currently on an extended vacation, I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping busy, mostly by setting completely unrealistic goals and then working rather realistically towards them (I’m going to publish a book this summer! And run a half-marathon! Or at least I’ll try!). 

Of course there are setbacks. I was out of town for a few days, drank too much beer, and didn’t train (for the half-marathon), write/revise (my manuscript) or read more than, say, 10 pages of Underworld. Today I got back into the swing of things by going for a short run on the beach, and going to writers group where I worked on a poem.

But back to my goal of publishing: I’ve compiled a list of places to send poetry manuscripts (full-length and chapbook). The following is just the forthcoming June deadlines:

Read, revise, submit. Then read more and revise more. I think that this is applicable for many fields.