Counterbalance

LA Times Book Prize First Fiction Surmising

 

LA Times Book Prize season is upon us & that means lots of conjecture & guesswork about personal and not-so-personal preferences. During this delightful season for book nerds like me, I'll be looking a bit closer at each category over at LAist. I've started with a look at the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Nominees. Go on over and check it out.  I'm quite sure you'll disagree with me on some points (I'm waiting for the wrath to rain down upon me from the American Rust-loving contingent) and I look forward to a vigorous conversation about it all if you're game.

The Future of Publishing

via youtube.com

I just spent the week in Austin at South by Southwest talking with publishers, authors and bookish folks of all types about how new media & smart marketing can make the difference. I'm working on many different related items at the moment, but this strikes a chord because right on the heels of this discussion, DK shows they are ready to play. (via Morgan Brown)

Posted via web from callie miller

Fire in Your Gut

"I, on the other hand, have always understood that life is an as-is, no-warranty arrangement; and if you want it to add up to anything, you'd better go at it with fire in your gut." 

      - Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

My Post-2666 World

I’ve been promising a post-2666 post for a while now. There have been many versions, many variations, many ways I tried to get at the heart of what 2666 did to me.  They are on the cutting room floor, in the trash bin, in the proverbial ether, never to materialize.

I wasn’t ready immediately after 2666 to write at length about it.  I needed distance, perspective.  Now that I have that distance, no tangible perspective has come other than this: nothing else I’ve read since has been 2666. No other book has done to me what 2666 did. And I’ve read some excellent books in the past few weeks. I just can’t move on.  So much so that I don’t even want to read more Bolano – I just want to sit with whatever this is for a bit longer.  As the TBR pile grows, as the opportunities to interview much-respected writers come up, as promised review deadlines loom, I really need to move on.

Yet, I feel as if I’m in a post-2666 haze.  It is similar to my post-Human Smoke haze.  What do these books have in common? A very high body count.  A true life body count, not a fictional one.  I suspect this is central in my inability to move forward.  I have always had a particular sensitivity to mass, senseless death.  Sounds nutty to say as I’m sure everyone does.  Yet  I’m so averse to such material that I faint in movie theaters. Get queasy during art exhibits. Shaky at certain museums and monuments that deal with these very issues. It is difficult for me to process – as it should be. 

"Part Four – The Part About The Crimes" was my “I’m about to faint” movie, my “I think I need to sit down” art exhibit.  I felt I was plodding through the murders of those women in Santa Teresa in a way that I knew I had to get through, had to try and understand, yet the body count was overwhelming. Each night I fought the impulse to skip the murder section, even a few pages, because I knew that to honor these deaths in the way Bolano intended meant that I needed to read the terrible details of each one.  It was difficult.  There were days I wasn’t up to it.  There were days I longed for the professors of Part I and their ridiculous (by comparison) intellectual concerns and love affairs. Alongside the carnage in Part Four, all other parts of the novel seem superfluous…but only after you’ve  made your way through the land mines of Part Four.

When people ask me if I liked 2666, I can’t say I did.  I did not enjoy it.  It was not a pleasure to read.  It was hard work.  I felt uncomfortable during most of it.  But do I recommend it? Oh yes. Setting aside all the hullabaloo about Bolano’s last book and is it unfinished and the oh my goodness what will we do hand-wringing, this is a novel that forced me to confront the things that upset me most in life and sit with that discomfort for 1,000 pages.

What is most interesting to me about this is my tongue-in-cheek post about the early parts of the book & my view that Bolano was chiding any reader who didn’t have the cojones to handle his work.  What I viewed early on as Bolano’s great caveat (my novel is big and messy, please excuse) I now see as something more potent.  Perhaps he really meant it – that there are those who could handle what was about to come and those who couldn’t.  Or at least, that what was to come required work, uneasy work.  An early warning to any reader to either take up the cause or move on so as not to waste your time or his.

There is more to say here. Much more.  I suspect this will continue to come in waves over the next few weeks. Possibly months.  I’ve not yet read any of the posts at what I’m sure is the excellent 2666 reading group.  I’ve not read anyone’s perspective on 2666 so I could be way out in left field.  This novel affected me in such a way that I felt I needed to stay in my own 2666 world long enough to fully understand my own reaction to it before I let the flood of other opinions in.  All in good time.

For now I’ll say this: if you haven’t read this book, please do. I’d really like to talk to you about it.

Lit Bits & A Bit About Brevity

I'm not typically one for brevity, but as I feel my way through my post-employment/striking out on my own world, I find that the longer posts I'd planned, or even the longer discussions I'd hoped to have with others in real life, are somehow usurped by my own monkey-mind that swirls and swirls to such a degree that keeping things brief, short, and to the point seems to be all I can manage at the moment. Not brilliant for a would-be novelist, although I have entertained the thought of using this short-term inability to speak at length to my advantage so I can dash off an achingly spare short story. Something I'm never able to do with when my usual over-sharing faculties are in good form. 

But I digress. A good sign?!?!

As I weigh my options, I find I'm swinging rather drastically between several different "wants":

• Wanting to do nothing other than read & write all day (for really, I've missed these things for two long years and I'm eager to dive wholeheartedly back in)
• Wanting to contribute in a far more significant way to the ongoing discussion about eBooks, eReaders, and digital publishing issues.  I've worked in brand strategy & online marketing for fifteen years & along with nearly five years of bookish blogging and a lifetime of observing the publishing industry from many sides, I should be able to do so intelligently.  The catch?  I've spent the past two years focused on client deliverables & crazy 80+ hour work weeks so I've not been part of the conversation.
• Wanting to get those two years back.
• Wanting to not feel so behind. As if I've been under a proverbial rock and am only now picking up where I left off. It's a terrible feeling. I have to trust that all I've learned in the interim has adequately prepared me for whatever is to come, though I may not see it just yet.

And so, in this wanting and flailing and swinging about, I'm not getting anything done. I have hatched ambitious projects, only to set them aside. I have conjured fantastic roundtable plans & literary salon at my loft type plans & various let's save LA's libraries plans.  Just today I began a faint outline of a Celebrate Small Presses Month plan. None have come to fruition. So far. And I'm learning to be okay with that. For now.

But the ideas are finally flowing after a long spell of being so pressed for time and so focused on work that there was no room...not even for new thoughts to percolate, let alone the space and time to let them bloom into something tangible, completed.

For now, I'll take percolating. Quite soon, however, I'm going to need to see results. But hey, if I can knock out Bolano's 2666 in a few weeks with all the other things I'm trying to do at the moment, I'm confident I'll hit my stride soon.  Oh so soon.