Counterbalance

I Was Bad at Book Alley

I've waxed poetic about Book Alley before. But they moved. And my life got crazy busy. And I haven't been there in a very long time. On Sunday, though, I woke with Daisy Mint on the brain (so scrumptious) and Book Alley is mere steps away. For a thai-loving book geek, I can't think of a better two-fer in Los Angeles. Daisy Mint for lunch. Book Alley for post-thai browsing.

I spent Sunday afternoon doing exactly this and I came away with some unexpected finds:

• A first edition of Lydia Millet's Omnivores, complete with a loose author photo (from Algonquin Books) tucked just inside the front cover. I've been looking for a hardcover version of this for some time, so I was delighted to find this gem tucked away in the M section.
• The beautifully appointed The Art of East Asia, a two-volume set from Koenemann. Not only are the contents fascinating and creatively invigorating, the way the book has been put together is stunning. The interior covers have a subtly printed paper that I caressed for at least ten minutes. The attention to detail in presenting the book as book -- as a beautiful thing to hold in one's hands and really relish -- reminded me a bit of Craig Mod's recent "Hack the Cover" piece about book design in a digital book world. This collection is worthy of its own post, so expect that forthcoming.
• Four books in the larger (how large?) collection of Masterworks of Ukiyo-e. These are also worthy of their own post.

All the art books will only be with me temporarily as they are gifts for a friend who does amazing traditional Japanese tattoo work and who will, I hope, draw much inspiration from all that is contained within their pages.

And yet. The books are in my care for a few more weeks and I plan to fully soak up all their hard-to-find goodness (I've also set alerts at every out-of-print specialist to wrangle copies of my own). I promise to do them justice by sharing their yumminess with all of you. Stay tuned.

Post de Zoet Waffling

Vacillation
I have finished David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

As with any Mitchell novel, it is a bummer when it ends. There won't be another for awhile.

I hate historical novels. I'm not really into war craft and ships and munitions and copper trading and bookkeeping. But I was into all of that in this novel. All of it. What does this tell you about Mitchell's storytelling prowess?

I was less into the Atwood-esque impregnate-nuns-against-their-will at the convent situation. And the ninja-style attempt to rescue them.

The other stuff was so good. Why add on to it?

The writing was so beautiful in parts it hurt. Literally hurt. 

But that convent-baby stuff was really killing my vibe.

Who can do what Mitchell has done? Each novel is entirely different in tone, in structure, in subject matter. It is mind-blowingly impressive and I adore him for it.

But...the baby stuff? It took me so far out of the story, so out of everything that was mesmerizing and fast-paced and oh-my-goodness-what-will-happen-next. It was not needed.

That British/Dutch/de Zoet not backing down stuff at the end was nuts. Brilliant the way you kept hoping that one thing (you know, with the 200 boats and the sails down and the maybe fire situation?) would actually materialize but it didn't and the anticipation of that was masterful storytelling. I fell for all of it. I loved every minute of falling for it. 

I even got all wrapped up in the do the right thing meme. I was rooting for small countries and republics and good people to prevail. I never go for that stuff, but I did. 

But. Yeah. That weirdo interlude at the convent distracted me something awful. And I still don't really even get it. Where did all the babies go? Huh?

Summation
It was not a perfect novel for me. I purposely did not read any reviews prior to reading the novel. I will do so now and will probably find that I'm the lone ass who simply didn't "get it" and that this is the most perfect novel ever written. I'm okay with that. It jumped all over the place, was disjointed, tried too hard to be filmic and other weird stuff I can't quite pin down just yet. I know Cloud Atlas was like that but...it had to be. That was the point of the story. Jacob de Zoet, on the other hand, was linear narrative that jumped and cut too much for me. The jump cuts didn't add to the storytelling for me, they distracted.I kept thinking "Oh look what he's doing there, he's taking us back to the crazy baby convent place...hopefully this will be brief so we can cut back to the story. Oh look, here we go..." Maybe I'm getting old.

As for Mitchell? I'll read whatever that man writes. Period. He's that good. 

How Suzanne Rivecca Awakened the Reader/Writer Within (Yes, Again)

 

Simple: a kick-ass short story collection. So kick-ass, I'm saying it's kick-ass before I've even finished it. 

Why is it so kick-ass? It is honest, funny, sad, painful, straight-up storytelling with awkward, messed-up, self-conscious characters at its core. No fancy deconstructions, no look-at-what-i'm-doing-there-right-there-in-that-chapter tomfoolery, no meta-themes and overarching themes and subgenre themes melding together to create the stuff of a thousand and one grad student papers gone bad. Instead, Rivecca offers characters who are honestly struggling, honestly telling it like they see it, honestly trying to sort their shit out. How refreshing after months of plowing through theory and meta, meta, meta lit.

Why does it matter? I've been on a non-blogging, non-reading, non-writing, non-loving-books-at-all jag. Again. For the umpteenth time. Call me a jaded reader. An unproductive writer. Whathaveyou. I'd lost the spark. Rex, while fascinating in many ways, felt like an exercise in what literature could be if we all tried very hard to make it so. A puzzle to deconstruct and re-make and discuss at dinner parties. Same with Shields (but that's a separate matter) after awhile. I wondered if it was me or what I was reading or both. Hell, Tinkers didn't move me. I kept skipping pages and pages thinking, I'm bored. Bored to tears with the Pulitzer prize-winning novel that all those I respect & admire have praised loudly, effusively. The only reading of any kind that has wowed me in any way since Maggie Nelson's excellent Bluets is the street-style photo compendium The Sartorialist by the fantastic Scott Schuman. Seriously.

So: For long-time readers, you know the drill. You get my gig. You are totally hip to this dip in readerly-writerly interest. I lose interest with the seasons (sometimes more often, on good years...less) and a book and a trip (thank you NYC) often conspire together to yank me right out of my complacency and place me firmly back on solid reading/writing ground. The most recent book to yank me out of my nonsense is Rivecca's debut short story collection Death Is Not an Option. Go check it out & let me know what you think. Would love to chat you up about it before I fall into another fashion blog coma.

If There is Something to Desire...

I'm falling a bit in love with poetry again. For the umpteenth time. Not sure if it's the amount of time I have, or if it is more that I want to immerse myself in language again - not just story. Could be the mad rush of reading I've just completed for this weekend's LA Times Festival of Books (I've got another post to link to on Graphic Novels, I'll do that tomorrow), but I'm feeling plotted out and structured out and, well, poetry just feels right. Right now. Here's what's healing me at the moment:

If There is Something to Desire
by Vera Pavlova
I discovered this book on a lark as I was perusing the poetry section, casting about for something to recast the overly structured, overly plotted world I've been immersed in. I'll be honest: the cover grabbed me. Being a type junkie has it's downfalls & I do like a nice cover. Yet, a nice cover doesn't always = nice contents, so I'm oh so happy to find that in this case, the cover was just the precursor to more greatness within.

While this is Pavlova's fifteenth book of poetry, it is her first in English and I find that utterly fascinating. The language is so spare, so perfectly economical while also evocative that I'm in awe & a bit delighted & a bit in love with language again. She conveys much with just a few simple words. Not overly vainglorious (ha!) words that shout "hey look at me using these massive words in a poem that only has three sentences"  - I hate that.

More than anything else, I find the poems in this collection to have just the balance of warmth, wit and wisdom I'm seeking right now. Not overly cynical, but a clear-eyed look at the world as it is, a desire to appreciate what we can, a nudge to enjoy life for what it is, a demand to make more out of it than we currently are. I might be heaping too much upon Pavlova, but that's what I'm getting out of this slim volume at the moment. I realize I may be projecting.

The Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda

Not mind-blowingly original, I know. Yet I find myself coming back to Neruda again and again. While I've read many of Neruda's poems throughout the years (and read more criticism and biographical works about his work), I've never taken up the infamous Book of Questions. My current need for spare language and big ideas seemed perfectly suited to the themes of this volume, to the big questions asked and not answered. Such as:

Is the sun the same as yesterday's
or is this fire different from that fire?

                   -and- 

Will our life not be a tunnel
between two vague clarities?

                   -and- 

And why did cheese decide
to perform heroic deeds in France?

What I've found so far is that this volume is less about poetry for me and far more about taking time - and creating the space - to think. Really think. Neruda's questions have slowed my pace and has somehow gotten me back to a more contemplative (if sometimes cheeky) mode...the very mode needed for writing longer fiction. So, yeah, I'm digging Neruda at the moment. Again.

Make Something from Nothing

Much as I try, I can't get this film out of my head.  It wasn't revolutionary. It wasn't well-shot. It wasn't a documentary that you tell friends about, pressing them to see it at once, because it will change their lives or their perspectives or their...something.  It isn't that kind of film.

Yet, it has changed my life, my perspective, and a lot of my somethings.

Beautiful Losers is intense, but is so quiet in its intensity that I suspect others may view it as nothing more than a film that highlights some now-well-known artists who were once underground but who made the art they wanted to make, despite all that it cost them in the early days...or in some cases, what it is still costing them to this day. It is perhaps even easy to dismiss some of these artists now - Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee - who have achieved such critical success that if you did not know their earlier work, did not follow them as they struggled, you might not get what they are about at all.

And that's fine. As a documentary about artists and how they got where they are today, it succeeds at the basic levels.

What moved me though, what shook me up, was how these artists that I've long admired really did do whatever they had to do so they could create. This is something I've struggled with a lot in my life.  I can even pinpoint certain decisions made long ago, specific moments when I had a choice between a more artistic life and a more commercial, stuff-filled one. At nearly every turn, I chose the professional opportunities & financial gain & really great shoes over my artistic endeavors. Much of my working life has even halted my artistic endeavors for painfully long stretches at a time. The whole of 2009 on this blog is but one obvious testament to that.

I'm not particularly proud of those decisions I made long ago, but I made them and here we are. They make up my truth. The one that was confronted in a very real way as I watched this film.  We each bring our own life experiences to any piece of art we see - a film, a painting, a novel - and my life experiences allowed me to see Beautiful Losers as one long series of questions directed at me: How much longer will you put off the writing? Will you be writing fiction at all in this life, or just focusing on unrelated work things? Because if you plan to focus only on work things and shoes and your clients, Callie, let's just call it a day.  The wavering isn't doing any of us any good. The pretending is painful to watch.

Longtime readers of this blog don't need me to rehash my work/writing balance struggle. This blog is called Counterbalance for a reason. It is for this reason. I want to write fiction, but I don't. The reasons are many and they reach a very long way back and are intermingled with fear and insecurity and so much baggage that I've stopped even trying.  Resigned myself, really.  Resigned myself to more work. I'm very good at what I do professionally, I've just left a work situation that stifled me, so I'm now able to focus more on doing, professionally, what I love.  

Beautiful Losers forced me to question where the writing might be in my newly created 2010 life. I don't yet know. All of my professional work won't prepare me for feeling my way through this writing thing for the umpteenth time. This can't be achieved with a marketing plan and carefully outlined strategies & tactics that will allow me to knock out a novel by year's end. I'm not able to map out all the success metrics I'll setup and track. There is no monthly reporting that will work here.  There is no social media campaign I can architect that will produce a brilliant literary novel in a few week's time. Google Adwords does not a novel make. It's easy to see why my working life is so satisfying - the results are swift and measurable. If something's not effective, it is easy to know exactly what it is and tweak accordingly.  Not so with the novel writing, not so.

Adding to the potency of Beautiful Losers is the terribly sad death of Margaret Kilgallen. She was so talented, lived a life that allowed her to create the art that she wanted to create, and just as she was gaining critical success, died of cancer a few weeks after giving birth to a baby girl.

If that is not a wake-up call, I don't know what is. Not sure what that means yet or what that looks like for me and the non-writing. I know I've written this post before. Many, many times before. But I'm writing it again, after seeing this film. That's something.

Oh yes.

 
Absolutely, 100%, with every fiber of my being, yes.  A swoon-worthy reading "room", no?

I've spent the morning admiring the gorgeous of work of another very talented Richard Powers (not Echo Maker, Galatea 2.2, The Gold Bug Variations Powers, but Federal NSW Australia, Havana, Kuala Lumpur Richard Powers) and I'm smitten & transported & thrilled. 

Wonder if the two have ever met? Wonder if I could write a whole story about men named Richard Powers?  Wonder if that sounds as nutty/cool to you as it does to me. No matter - breathtaking work that has my brain making other connections to other artists is always a good thing.

Photo above of Fire Canyon House in Santa Barbara, via Apartment Therapy.

Finding Inspiration in Unusual Places

It has been so long since I blogged properly (tweets don't count) that I didn't even know my login/password to Typepad.  That's a sad, sad state of affairs.  I'm still questioning many of the points raised in my post on loving books/being done with books - namely having something of value to add to the mix that isn't already being added by the vast number of those who blog about and report on books.  I've also been working my ass off, so there's that.  Mortgages, taxes, a family member with cancer, and neighbors with attorneys can seriously hamper your productivity.

What it all comes down to though is this - I need to be writing a book.  And the more time I spend writing about the writing of books, the less I write my book. Simple, you'd think. But oh so not. I believe there is something else I wish to do with it all - some site, some group blog, some channel that will take everything to the next level.  I don't know what that is yet (do you?) so I'm taking my inspiration where I can find it and remaining open to many creative/design influences. That "next level thing" is in me somewhere, I just need to tap into it.

Until said thing is located, here's what I've been inspired by lately:

  

(Loeffler Randall's Poppy Perforated Sandal, Man on Wire film, David Turbridge's stunning Floral Pendant, Amienne font by ascender fonts)

When a Book Brings It All Home, Literally

I put off reading Felicia Sullivan's The Sky Isn't Visible from Here for a long time. Which seemed odd to me. Very odd.

I know Felicia and was so excited about her book coming out that I'd pre-ordered it on Amazon months before it was available. Months. I was then so thrilled to see it at a local independent bookstore, that I picked it up, before my Amazon copy arrived.  Then, days later, the Amazon copy arrived.  This left me with two brand-spanking new copies of a book that I simply couldn't wait to read.  And they sat. And they sat. And they sat.

I read other things. Other books. Other articles. I even read "work" books on marketing strategy and being an influencer and how to have effective confrontations & crucial conversations. Really. I also cleaned my house in a way that it hasn't been cleaned in two years. I cleaned out my closet (I got rid of shoes!), I re-organized my kitchen drawers and I cleared away three-months worth of mail.  In short: I did the unthinkable to avoid Felicia's book.

Such a strong reaction - such an intense desire to avoid something - was curious and I'd like to say I didn't know why, but I damn well did: my mother (wow, here goes, I don't think I've ever said this here, among you) was an alcoholic. She died when I was 18. Cirrhosis of the liver.  Was my childhood dramatic in ways it shouldn't have been? Yes. Was I forced to be the adult when I was just a kid? Absolutely. I knew, knew, knew that Felicia's book would detail similar situations, would conjure up my own past as she examined hers. I tried to avoid it for as long as possible.

Then one day - two weeks ago - I got up the courage to just open it. "A page," I thought. "Just one. Maybe two. And then you can do a few more tomorrow.  Just start the thing already."  And so I read the first page. And the second. I was off and running.  I had to set the book down several times. I had to wipe away tears a few times.  I laughed. I nodded knowingly. I marveled at the things Felicia went through that were so outside my experience all I could do was admire her courage. But mostly? It felt wonderful to be in the company of someone who had figured out the very things I've been trying to figure out. I felt vindicated in a way I've not been vindicated before - even through years of very excellent therapy (which I highly recommend to all, alcoholic mother or not!) 

I was afraid to read this book for another reason as well: so much of my own struggle to complete a novel has centered around this issue for me - do I deal with my mother or don't I? Do I write the memoir and get it out of my system so I can move past it? Do I weave the experiences into fiction? Or do I ignore it entirely? Yet when I ignore it entirely, I get blocked. Stopped. Entirely flummoxed because I feel like a big chunk of my life experience and the many insights it has given me, are cut off, unavailable, not on-tap for me when I'm in my writing mode. As I look at the Writing folder on my computer desktop of stories and half-completed novels (yes, they're electronic, despite the fact that it seems every writer has their stuff neatly printed in a drawer - who are you, I ask?), 80% of them are either directly about my mother, tangentially about my mother, or they have gone off-kilter by trying to avoid my mother altogether.

It is safe to say that Felicia's book was akin to a ticking time bomb in my newly cleaned and organized home. I didn't want to read it until I was ready to revisit my past and how that past has colored the present.  Felicia's experiences are vastly different from my own. Yet, a few bigger themes, a few larger life conclusions resonated with me and have helped me move forward in a way I hadn't expected. Felicia's courage to face her own particular demons has inspired me to face a few of mine.

I cannot tell you what it would be like to read Felicia's book without this experience, as I wear different glasses than you. And you. And you. It is quite safe to say that these glasses are not rose-colored. I have read fine reviews of the book by those who have not had similar experiences (or at least those who have not yet confessed to them) and was thrilled to know her book has been met with such praise. 

What I can tell you is this: The Sky Isn't Visible from Here had an incredible effect on me. Felicia's writing - so witty and biting and bittersweet all at once - sings. It is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. In fact, I've got a copy to spare if you're so inclined...

These Are the Things...

...that are roiling around in my head.

Sicko made me angry.

Once made me cry and fall in love with Dublin and my old piano all over again. And my musician husband.

The final day of the Murakami show inspired a dozen designs and a dozen more stories.

I'm taking my influences where I can get them these days.

And my, it's refreshing to take them from a non-novel. 

When Other Artists Inspire You to Get Your S*!t Together

Saturday night we made our way to The Groundlings for the Groundlings Yearbook sketch comedy show to see a few friends perform and do their bit.  They each write their own sketches and perform them. Setting aside the fact that laughter is oh so important (and they delivered it in spades), I was struck by how good these people were at what they've chosen to do.  I was reminded of watching Tiger Woods win his first Masters. Of watching Mary Lou Retton (yes, I'm aging myself) nail her perfect 10 vault run/jump/flip. Of seeing John Goodman perform in any Shakespeare play.  These are people who are so good at what they do, you know you are watching greatness.  That you are observing someone doing precisely that thing they are meant to be doing above all other things. To be in the presence of that perfect union between passion and talent is...wow.

Last night we saw Snow Patrol at The Greek. Setting aside the natural beauty of my favorite outdoor LA theatre and setting aside the now-too-poppy music of a once-favorite band, I experienced the same divine moment where artistic passion meets talent. Frontman Gary Lightbody has one hell of a voice and while their new album has veered a bit into mainstream poppiness for my taste - my god does he mean it when he sings. And he enjoys it. Genuinely enjoys it.  The antics and ego you might expect are replaced with a joy to be performing, as his closed eyes, contorted flailing and smiling (and by smiling I mean huge grin) during every song seemed to attest.  Yes, that's right - smiling. As if he couldn't believe his good fortune to be singing the same old tunes again and again for a different crowd every night.  We walked slowly to our car last night and while we both agreed that we don't love their music wholesale, the heart with which they played mattered more. Most.

And so - as I attempt to juggle a hundred things (and in this I do not exaggerate, for once) while noticing that nary a one has been my writing, I feel I need to stop. Re-assess. Re-visit the priority list. Again. These lovely evenings of witnessing artists being artists has made me want to chuck my list of many things that must be done. Chuck it out the window, lock all the doors, and write and write and write.  Must tell the wedding caterer of my plans...