Monthly Archives: July 2010

Favorite Writing Quotes

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I turn to wisdom from renowned authors from time to time. You know—those moments when I’m stalled at the computer, my brain clawed open, unable to patch together the simplest thought, my inadequacy a tightening noose around my neck asphyxiating me to a painful spiritual death. We all need hope. We need to believe we’re not in this alone.

Here are some of my favorite words of inspiration.

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.  – Thomas Berger

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.  – Gene Fowler

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.  – Eugene Ionesco

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.  -Burton Rascoe

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.  -Thomas Mann

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.  -Robert A. Heinlein

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.  -Flannery O’Connor

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.  -W. Somerset Maugham

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.  -Augusten Burroughs

[To write] you most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. Prayer might work.  -Margaret Atwood

The first 12 years are the worst.  -Anne Enright

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.  -Richard Ford

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.  -Neil Gaiman

What Happens When Disaffected Youth Grow Up?

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I read Less Than Zero my senior year of high school.  Growing up in suburban Buffalo, NY, I knew about drugs, casual sex and absentee parents.  The parties and dive bars my friends and I went to had none of the glamour of Beverly Hills, but we claimed the book as the anthem of our generation—the surrender to materialism, the wizened disconnect from the world, the futility of caring.

When the movie came out, we took our jabs at it.  Andrew McCarthy injecting niceness into Clay?  (And what happened to his bisexuality?)  Jamie Gertz as Blair?  She came off as dumb instead of disaffected.  And Less Than Zero was not a love story!!  There wasn’t supposed to be redemption at the end.  Still I re-watched the movie every time it was on cable.  At least the stylized cinematography and the soundtrack translated.

Now, 25 years later, the sequel Imperial Bedrooms comes out.  I was immediately intrigued by the real- time lapse between the books.  I’d grown up since Less Than Zero.  Ellis had grown up.  How had his characters grown up?

More on that question in a sec.  The quick synopsis:   Clay, now a successful Hollywood screenwriter, returns to LA for the production of a film and is drawn to a beautiful but middling young actress and, soon enough, a ton of trouble.

So, what happens to a group of disaffected, morally ambivalent youth 25 years later?

According to Ellis, not much.  Julian has somehow survived heroin addiction and netherworld pimps though he’s still pissing people off and owing them money.  Blair is married to Trent, the guy in Less Than Zero who introduces his friends to snuff films, and she’s still mired in the soulless culture of the LA elite, now set squarely within the film industry.  Clay is still drifting through life anesthetized.  The drugs have changed—alcohol and Xanax have replaced cocaine and heroin—but the results are  the same.  The sexual relationships remain ambiguous.

In Less Than Zero, you could say Clay was feeling his way out of a postapocalyptic world of interpersonal exploitation.  In Imperial Bedrooms, the transactions have become ingrained in Clay.  He’s too psychologically detached to recognize it, but he’s as much a predator as any of the people around him.

This subtle shift had pluses and minuses for me.  In fact, I vacillated on how I felt about it every other page.  One on hand, Clay’s pathological narcissism is raw and gripping.  He thinks and does increasingly awful things.  Reading the book is like being an acrophobic strapped to a high speed roller coaster.   I felt stuck on his ride until the end.

But I stopped caring about Clay early on, and halfway through I was so desperate for empathy, I started pulling for everyone who stood against him.  I was rooting for the actress who was using him to get a part in his movie.  I was rooting for Julian, who sets Clay up in a really despicable way, but at least the guy had cleaned up his life a little.  I was even rooting for Rip who hires thugs to torture and murder people.  Anyone who would give Clay his comeuppance.

So maybe that was Easton’s point—to push the boundaries of Clay’s relatability, to ask the question:  what really matters?   The existentialism works well on an atmospheric level.  In several parts of the story, I was wondering—is this actually happening or is it all in Clay’s head?  Though I think Ellis did a better job with ambiguity/suspense in Lunar Park.

I think the problem is that as readers we’ve grown up.  We’ve answered most of our angsty questions, found some meaning in our lives, and a book about a guy who’s lost and remains lost, no matter how elegantly told, just isn’t as interesting as it used to be.

To take it further, there are more angsty questions now that we’re approaching 40 or over 40, but another problem is Imperial Bedrooms doesn’t have anything to say about these issues.  Clay’s not having a midlife crisis, he’s having a personality disorder.  You wouldn’t know he’d aged since LTZ except for a few references to a failed relationship a few years back.  Characters talk about his screenwriting credits, but it’s hard to believe he ever had the ability to write a script.

It pains me to criticize Bret Easton Ellis since I’ve picked up every book he’s written as soon as it came out.  I’d judge Imperial Bedrooms as his least successful novel, but for fans, it still has moments of brilliant lyricism and the disorienting anomie we’ve come to love.  Less Than Zero was tough to follow up.  Most of us thought that all of the characters would be dead by now.

Did Atlantis Exist?

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Here’s a shocking departure from my usual bloggerings.  In returning to my Stories from Atlantis series, I’ve had my source material on my mind and figured I’d share some thoughts about it here.

I’ve set aside the angel project.  My brain got wrapped around a street lamp, a plot and structure street lamp.  The manuscript is in the intensive care unit in critical condition.  That’s the last bad metaphor I’ll use and the last thing I’ll say about it.

Everyone thinks they know something about Atlantis—it sunk in the sea, its citizens took a space ship to another planet, or it’s protected beneath the ocean in a bubble.  Nowadays, Atlantis is regarded as myth and legend, but that wasn’t always the case.  In the 19th century and early 20th century, many respected archeologists and geologists believed they could find evidence of the ancient civilization.  In the 1930s, “psychic” Edgar Cayce told people he communicated with Atlanteans during hypnotic trances.  Cayce wrote a number of books about his paranormal conversations, and they were a lot less interesting than you might imagine.

Atlantis is part of our collective unconscious, a Jungian concept.  The collective unconscious is a cerebral storehouse for universal ideas, inherited over generations.  It’s the place for archetypes and myths, the flood story for example, or Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.   In modern terms, you could say it’s the source of urban legends.

Psychology and “hard” science have only become distinct relatively recently.  It was always a curiosity of mine how scientists sought to prove the veracity of Atlantis before the age of cold, rational science.

The classic source material comes from Plato who wrote about a technologically advanced society pre-dating the Greeks by 9,000 years.  His description placed the ancient continent west of the Pillars of Heracles (the Strait of Gibraltar), so Plato “purists” went looking for evidence in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa.  Some, like British archeologist Lewis Spence, argued that the Canary Islands are vestiges of a much larger land mass that sunk.  Only its highest mountain peaks remain above the water.

There’s a school of thought that says Plato was referring to the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea where pre-Greek Minoan civilization thrived for years until it was destroyed suddenly by a volcano.  Others have placed Atlantis in Indonesia or even North America.  Cayce was “told” that the Atlanteans used to live in the Caribbean—the Bimini Islands.

While Spence never produced much in the way of compelling evidence, he launched a cultural diffusion theory that was wonderfully evocative.  Comparing a host of ancient African, Central American and North American cultures, he noted a variety of similarities in language, religion and architecture (e.g. the pyramids).  How could this have happened when cultures were separated by the unpassable Atlantic Ocean?  Spence insists it was because there was a continent in the middle of the ocean facilitating travel.  Spence believed that bull sacrifice was an important Atlantean tradition that was passed on to many cultures, even evident today through the popularity of bull fighting.

I’m predisposed to doubt just about everything, but it’s tempting to believe that Atlantis was real.  If I was to believe, the most compelling explanation comes from geology.  By Plato’s account, Atlantis disappeared around 10,000 B.C.E.  That was the tail end of an ice age.  So, it’s possible to imagine that while much of Europe was covered in glacier, some people migrated south to warmer climes and traveled a land bridge from coastal Spain to an island.  There, with better terrain and an abundance of food, they developed a thriving society.  But with global warming, ocean levels rose.  The island was washed away.  Maybe there were survivors who brought their language and traditions to other parts of the world.  Maybe we’re all descendants of the Atlanteans.

For more about Lewis Spence, check out this.

Fire Island, 4th of July

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This past weekend, my partner and I went to Cherry Grove with a group of friends including our two German house guests, a couple.  We packed up the essentials—towels, a blanket, beach umbrellas, a cooler with water bottles, and a change of clothes, and took the drive down the center of Long Island then south to the Sayville Ferry.

We arrived ahead of schedule, but the dock was packed.  July 4th.  The busiest beach day of the year.  This was not an inconvenience though.  It was the beginning of a very colorful day.  We lined up for the boat with a parade of men in drag, their female admirers like gals out on the town for a bachelorette party, and nearly as many teacup Yorkies, Maltese and Chihuahuas as people.

Across the Great South Bay on the ferry and through the boardwalk paths, we found a spot on the beach beside a group of young, short-haired Asian women set up in a screen tent eating picnic lunch with chopsticks.  The group laid out in front of us was harder to reconcile.  There was a handsome guy with silver hair and a British accent and his decades-younger daughter? girlfriend?  wife?  The young woman tended occasionally to a naked toddler tottering around, and there was a restless young man making frequent trips to the ocean in a diver’s body suit.  Then, there was an exceedingly well-behaved ink black French Bulldog.  Group inter-relationships were inscrutable except the man and the dog.  They spooned beneath a sun tent for most of the afternoon.

By the ocean, men squeal at the impact of frigid three foot waves.  Bare-chested women play Kadima and toss footballs with locker room banter.

Wondering how the scene looked through foreign eyes, I asked one German friend how he liked this beach.  He said:  “This is more hetero than I expected.”  I inferred his meaning.  He would’ve liked to see more naked men.

The beach is a patchwork of racial and gender affinities and those sewn together by style of dress—the bold bikini bearers, the naturalists, the boys who look forward all year to the season they can wear sarongs.

We are a quilt panel of middle class Gen X’ers, not quite men of a certain age but we talk the part.  We’re outraged by inflation.  We rant about celebrities.  We have back pains and a hundred hypochondrias.  We lapse into silence, gazing at our younger, fitter counterparts.  Youth is wasted on the young.

But we are coupled (some of us), with careers, and wise, or if not wise at least resilient.

We go on to dinner and then a few drinks at the club.  We’re back on an earlier ferry than we used to take, and there are no outrageous stories to talk about the next morning.  Instead, there is laundry, an early afternoon matinee and shopping at Century 21.

We have edged up closer to the Future.  If we choose to leave the party early, it’s because we’d rather forgo the hangovers.

Dragging myself back to blogdom

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I’ve been a terrible procrastinator lately.  When I started this site 9 months ago, I made a commitment to post at least once per week, every Wednesday.

I had a good excuse last week.  We had friends in town from Germany, and it would’ve been pretty rude to shoo them out of the guest bedroom so I could get on the computer.   But they took a trip down to DC for most of this week.  My only excuse for neglecting my site (and my writing) is needing some time to warm up before I get back in the game.  My manuscript has also more or less collapsed and will need to be gutted and rebuilt from floor to ceiling.  I’m feeling a tad sorry for myself.

So while my prose is gummed up, I thought:  why not some poetry?  Here’s a piece I just wrote while thinking about my re-write, both thematically and I guess personally.

I am driftwood in the ocean,

Hostage to its welter and swell,

I lift with foolish hope on the crest of waves,

To drag back in a tractionless wake,

Caught in the Universe’s laws of motion,

An object at rest prefers to stay at rest.

 

I never had a problem swimming with the current,

A school of fish is a happy place,

The undertow can drown,

And sharks attack in open water,

I thought that I was bold,

But I never ventured further than I could swim to shore.

 

I did not choose to wallow here,

It was what I saw, what I heard that chose,

A startled witness,

I did not want to see, too late,

The truth scalds like alchemy,

Changing who you are from the inside out.

 

I’ve become now petrified wood,

The ocean cannot keep me,

I plummet like a depth charge, crushed by psi’s,

It may be safer on the ocean floor,

An object at rest in a primordial bath,

Waiting for an organic spark to re-emerge.