One. With the death of Patrice O'Neal, I'm remembering my only story involving the guy. (Great comedian, btw, in the few places I saw him -- he was the flamer on Arrested Development, although I remember him as a regular on the earliest iteration of Politically Incorrect and Comedy Central Roasts.
I was at the Comedy Cellar with friends Karen and Viv, me not yet having moved out to New York but this being the official "Let's feel it out" tour, and we're standing outside the venue after the show and there he is, brown wide-brimmed hat matching brown three-piece suit and a tie that probably matched, but I cannot recall because I'm pretty sure I was floored by the three-suit.
I turned to my friends and said "Isn't that Ruben Stoddard?" Nobody knew who he was. My mislabel or Patrice.
Anyway, if you have a chance, watch some of his stuff. Good. It's a shame he wasn't bigger. Better known. I'm kicking myself for the bad word choice.
* * *
Two. While in conversation the question came up of how to teach someone to write like Raymond Carver, a name I hadn't really thought of since my last days of ruminating over the undergrad career.
My answer then, fumbling, somewhat boilerplate, was to allow the writer to commit as much down as possible, then edit it down to the choicest bits, the distillation of ideas and emotion. In other words, John Gardner's advice to Carver at Iowa: "Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, then read all the Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system."
But to really get at Carver requires a certain knowledge of subtext.
What Gardner was telling him was essentially to learn to write the beautiful, and the complex, then learn how to whittle it down to its component parts, using everything you learned in the process. That's how you find voice, motivations, the right words. And the right words are really what matter. Only and truly
* * *
I'm flagging. Sleep will happen soon.
Three. The last few bullets:
- Breaking in new snow boots is a pain. Breaking them in while baking in 50-degree December temperatures? Brings out the slight nihilistic streak.
- I had time to kill, and so started to read Tom Bissell on video games. His general choice for video brilliance, Dark Souls, I own and am currently playing. Nice game. Hard. The reviews seemed to frame it as an existential experience. I don't completely see it.
- This new Google interface? Not thrilled. And I say that knowing that updates are just change and not something to be feared. That feedback button keeps getting in the way and which is getting harder and harder not to depress.
- I have just finished a novel that I cannot recommend to anyone. Not because I didn't like -- on the contrary, it was Molecular Gastronomy brilliant, if I have to hone it to two words -- but I can't think of anyone who would want to touch the novel. The book: War & War. The author: Lazslo Krasznahorkai. It ends with a Banksy stunt, but it works perfectly for the theme of art reflecting continually back on the viewer to in the end create a new reality.
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And four: Last dots, a tease. I've been working on a piece, mainly to control the Krasznahorkai influence I'm getting. The first section is below:
When he saw the message, the office worker was just returning to his desk, his hands still wet and exuding the odor of gelled isoporyl from the provided hand sanitizer, and he sat on the swivel contour-backed chair and, scanning around him in a deliberate confirmation that the coast was clear, that nobody was either peering or approaching, unfastened the button on his pants and loosened the cinch of his belt to allow the ballooned bursting butcher stripes around his stomach to rest just so against the constraints of the leather. The floor was largely vacant, the coworkers partaking in the bi-weekly afternoon running club, he having shirked it for a turkey pesto wrap. A lone hydrangea sat aside his keyboard and he watered it. With his workstation emptied of the day’s boxes and marked-up printouts, and having responded to or deleted the last of the emails, he typed the address to a preferred video clip and, espying again neither the presence of visitors nor the impending expectation of any, he watched a few seconds before scrolling down to the comments, where nestled, beneath the few exclamatory respondents and the spam ads for cheap meds and male enhancement and Russian hot young wives, smothered and surrounded as it was to the point of imperceptibility (in fact, he had not seen it when he first went down the page), in the Trebuchant-digital flesh as it were, uncommented on and as a result vaguely unrealized, the question raged “Would you like to see the domicile of the last true believer?,” followed by a link, followed by empty space, followed by a stray period, living in the ether and just above the icons for responses, to like or dislike. The plant’s water dish was overflowing, and instead of attending to the stream inching on the surface and against his better judgment (but not so much that he didn’t have a tissue at the ready), he rested his pointer on the underlined text, and as the elevator opened and a few of the runners rejoined the office, sweaty under their button-down collars and stopping before their cubicles for a solitary stretch, he clicked it.
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