Know what’s less fun when you’re not drinking?

Sigh

Everything.

It makes me happy that regardless of who this person was, he or she landed her, so that my recent post could tell them: Not really.

Absolutely mind-blowing when I was 15.

Don’t try to read it again if you have any self-consciousness about how ridiculous you were at 15.

The main issue of the assignment was the list: I was going to have to assess my own style and see how it stacks to others’. Which is also hard.

I reached back to early reading experiences, jumped forward to recent ones. As I compiled my rough list, it occurred to me that 1. Many of these pieces were dramatically different from one another, and 2. I was not sure if my own style was, actually, anything like those of the authors I was picking out.

Where to start? Jancee Dunn and David Sedaris show us how to tell stories gleefully, with humor and grace that informs but never feels like work. Reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad was an awed experience of what fiction can do, and how many ways it can do it. The Left Hand of Darkness gave me SF that was also sociology, that was also anthropology, that was also a really cool story about camping.* Then, of course, there were the Flannery O’Connor stories that showed me beginning, middle, ending, and mean, horrible people concluding in justly violent ways. Of course, I have a spate of small pieces that sound a lot like Barthleme from the month I was reading 40 Stories. Kurt Vonnegut. Sherman Alexie. Deborah Eisenberg. Sister Carrie. A Bridge to Terebithia. Dhalgren. Yes, Dhalgren changed my life. Don’t tell me that you hate Dhalgren.

Of course, how was I to say I was influenced by both Barthleme AND Dreiser? What do they have in common? How would you put together Samuel Delaney and Katherine Patterson and say they melded to create something coherent in your brain?

I wasn’t picking out the books that subconsciously made up my writing vocab. I was listing the books I loved. The ones that, whether or not they showed up in my inflection, themes, or non/use of quotation marks, had made me love books enough to want to make my own. Is that the same thing? No idea.

Anyone else? What’s your artistic DNA?

*Fun fact: I love stories about camping.

Least useful thing:
Rite Aid brand lactase enzyme pills. Didn’t do a durn thing to stop my stomach from ruining my cheese-eating life.

And now, after a 10-year hiatus, I’m finally leaving the country again. Paradoxically, the fact that I lived in New York for a decade (therefore lacked funds and motivation for travel) helped me make a whole slew of friends who live or work in other countries. So just a hop past the new year, I’m headed to France.  I’ve been boning up on my language skills:

Je ne peut pas avoir des produits laitiers.

…and stocking up on tiny bottles of shampoo. Cheeeyeck.

The biggest irony of the past two years is that, for the entirety of my 20s, I worked respectable 40-hour jobs, had no money, did no traveling, was angsty about it; while as soon as I re-entered the temp/food service/student life, I had better cash flow, produced more & better writing, am taking trips.  Still hogtied with anxiety from time to time, but hey, we all need a familiar ground state to fall back on.

So… if a person was spending two days in Paris, where would y’all suggest she eat and drink?

So last June I sent in a 1,000 word story to the New Millennium Writings summer contest, and I guess they liked it well enough. Here is the story, Bolero, on their website.  It will also be appearing in the print issue of NMW coming out in January.

So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, “Zone One,” features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar. He has my sympathy. I can see the disgruntled reviews on Amazon already: “I don’t get it. This book’s supposed to be about zombies, but the author spends pages and pages talking about all this other stuff I’m not interested in.” Broad-spectrum marketing will attract readers for whom having to look up “cathected” or “brisant” isn’t just an irritant but a moral affront.

He also (now pretty famously) opens with: “A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star.”

Well, ok.

Here I am, preparing a rant. Preparing a rant about being an Ivy League writing student with a passion for the post-apocalypse, who likes to think that sometimes genre conventions work for fiction writers like formal metrical schemes work for poets. Preparing to be insulted that Mr. Duncan equates an entire genre with pulp because pulp is produced under that genre’s umbrella.  Here I am, getting annoyed.

But then Stephen Elliot at The Rumpus does it for me:

“A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star.” … What does he mean? Can the porn star be an intellectual? What if an intellectual is dating another intellectual who is also a porn star? Let’s change the language and see how it sounds, “A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a poor black woman.” “A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating someone sexy who can’t read.”…Whoever is opposite the intellectual is not an intellectual as the genre novel is not a literary novel.

The strangest part of this review is that for all his prejudice against the supposed knuckle-draggers who like to read horror novels, Duncan’s overall reaction is favorable.  Yes, he says, the novel’s literary elements overcome its gorier and more prurient genre elements to make “a cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise.”

So… if you’re enjoying this combination, I repeat Stephen E.: Why all the hate? Is the opening sentence the literary novelist’s version of “no-homo”?