The Happiness Project

Now there are two ways to save at Sundance Seattle

ORCA Card Mondays: Only $5 per ticket when you show us your ORCA card at the box office.

Girls Movie Night Out Tuesdays: Only $5 per ticket every Tuesday night for groups of two or more ladies. 

I ride the bus. I hear the first step is admitting you have a problem. It isn't the bus, per se, I like its progressiveness, its humanity, and the economics. But it does cramp my style. Maybe ORCA night out at Sundance is where I'll find my support group.

Friends out there: would you go out on a date with someone who walks you in the Seattle drizzle to a bus stop?

How does the light get in?

Since I'm between projects ... i.e. I'm not writing ... I'm able to read and, by blogging, think. There is a nice patch of grass between Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and Teresita Fernández's commencement address (curated by Maria Popova for Brain Pickings). The sun is out there. The bugs are under control. I have something chilled in the cooler beside where I lie and look up at the sky.

The kanji for Tsukuru could be one of two words: create or make. Tsukuru's father chooses the make or build word. It takes Tsukuru the whole book to find out that whether he is colorless or not isn't really the point, the point is he needs to build a place (like a train station) that will attract others to visit--perhaps his girlfriend Sara will come and decide to stay forever.

Tsukuru's epiphany:

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

(A lot of echoes in Naomi Shihab Nye's Kindness.) "Feel the future dissolve in a moment."

Eri is talking to Tsukuru:

"We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty.Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect."

Tsukuru:

Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape. I guess. As a container, but there's nothing inside. I just can't see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she'll choose to distance herself from me.

Eri shook her head slowly. "It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually building the station. Right? Otherwise trains won't stop there.

Build "the kind of station where trains want to stop, even if they have no reason to do so."

Tsukuru:

Yet it was this pain, this sense of being choked, that he needed. It was exactly what he had to acknowledge, what he had to confront. From now on he had to make that cold core melt, bit by bit. It might take a long time, but it was what he had to do. But his own body heat wasn't enough to melt that frozen soil. He needed someone else's warmth.

A reply from Teresita Fernández:

A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to “to patch with gold”. Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to “good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl’s unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself.

Patching with gold ... isn't that like Richard Ford's "alloyed with loss" metaphor?

"The specific is harder to name than the general." (Fernandez is driving at the specific, the unique, the individual.)

"Artists always start from nothing."

"Make your unknown known." (borrowed from Georgia O'Keefe)

"There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in." (borrowed from Leonoard Cohen)

A tea pot has a lid and a spout. A train station has entrances ... for the trains and for the people ascending or descending stairs, escalators, elevators. If the station is Paddington or Gare d'Orsay, it has lots of windows.

Finished Subtle Bodies

I heard Norman Rush read the early airplane scene from Subtle Bodies … mostly Nina’s voice … at Princeton a couple of years back. I’d been a fan since Rush’s Mating. Who doesn’t love a love story set in the Kalahari savannah with lions?

I picked it up--the smoked turkey between two slices of Murakami. I’d finished the three 1Q84 books and had Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki waiting. So I was viewing Subtle Bodies through the prism of Murakami’s kindness, empathy, generosity to his characters. SB leads with edge. Warmth and empathy is missing in my writing and I was on the lookout for more.

It is a very funny drawing room drama. (And it turns out to be kind as well.)

For example, at the end of chapter 39:

She said, “Sitting here in the gloaming. It’s nice.”
“It isn’t gloaming yet,” Ned said.

Expiating the title:

Ned was having a particularly strong reaction to the idea of Joris leaving.  Partly it was selfish because he hadn’t finished the task of putting together what they had all been, with what they were now. And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that … that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be …

This is about what you loved in a friend as a friend…. Maybe there was a window in life and then it closed. … there was that window, before anybody had accomplished anything to speak of, when the ingredients, by which he meant the subtle bodies, shown their light.

Rush (through Ned) is saying friendship is between subtle bodies before walls built by experiences, disappointments, achievements shut the blinds and isolate our interior selves from the world.

Then at the climax, the funeral, when Ned finds his eulogy at page 847 of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and reads out loud to the deceased and to the deceased's mourners about cultivating happiness:

One moment's being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, til there is a large port of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship.  We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.

Looking Like Yourself as Seen by Others

To get started, here's a poem from John Burnside:

II Self Portrait

The one thing you want to portray
is the one thing it lacks.

Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:
a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,

or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen
for longer than you had expected.

You do this again and again, as if your life
depended on nothing,

light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound
of shoppers and that constant sense you have

of some place less than half a mile from here,
a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone's bed,

the place you could be right now, with snow coming down
through neon, or that baize light on your hands

that makes you think of summers long ago,
the 'water's edge', the 'faint breeze in the pines',

those girls you really loved, before this patient
look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.

Burnside reads this poem towards the end of this Start the Week podcast. Burns explains that the "look-alike" is the poet looking like himself as seen by others.

From near the end of Dear Denise:

Saturday, June 30

This afternoon I visit the Frick Collection off Central Park East. Another destination to pull me into the city and out of my neighborhood. The promise of a nice dinner. Maybe I meet someone. Better chance at a restaurant than in my house watching Tivo’d reruns of House.

I’m sitting on a bench in the West Gallery staring at the Rembrandt self-portrait. A girl sits beside me. I’m writing my memoir , I want to say.

“I need to work on the backstory. The main part, the flow from the big tragedy until now, until the legal resolution and ultimate divorce, is pretty natural. Any reader will have no problem staying with that narrative.”

The girl might ask what happened? What was the tragedy? But if she didn’t, I’d just continue. “There’s a natural suspense. What happens to Denise? Is Libby going to be ok? Someone close to me is saying I have to flesh out the backstory. I have to make my life before clear. Early days with Denise. The first kiss. The wedding. Then our family. Our perfect life together. Even up to the last night: Jack shoulder to shoulder with me on his bed. We each read our own book.”

The Frick has many portraits, El Greco, Vermeer, van Dyck. Portraits of women by Lawrence and Gainsborough. I sit with the Rembrandt in front of me. “I lived in Holland. Many, many times I’ve been to the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh. I have history with the Dutch masters.” I take another tack. “Self-portrait is memoir. At first glance Rembrandt seems fatigued. You can see his eyes, his life has known sorrow.” He is not showing a reflection of the past; he is showing his present. He had known fatigue but he is not tired in portrait. He is calm, resolute. “Like the painter, who looks for himself on the canvas, I write this memoir.” His oriental robe, red sash, is ostentatious. Is the portrait true to his self? Is it a purely private truth or did he try to make it visible to his audience?

“When Jack was just a baby,” I continue, “he was ugly. His face was all scrunched up. Big head. Looked just like a pug, or like Winston Churchill. Big head, big brain, we said. And at about eight months, the ugly duckling turned. He became Adonis. We loved him ugly. We loved him handsome and beautiful.”

“But love,” I would ask the woman, tacking upwind. “What do you think about love?” My voice would challenge. “You think love is always wonderful, always benign, always a good thing?” She’d be silent in the force of my questions. “Denise loved him too much .”

I wouldn’t be saying this. I wouldn’t be talking about Jack that way. Not to someone I didn’t know. Not to someone I just met.

₪

In Burnside's poem the problem with self portrait (introspection) is that it isolates the Self from the Others.To address this, Burnside layers in the outside world (observed and remembered): snow falling, the sound of shoppers or a piano.... We are social creatures. Without the outside world we are only partially ourselves, even as we strive to emulate the Self seen by others.

If our Self is defined by others, mine started with my parents, my sisters. Over time my others switch to Denise (behind Denise my colleagues at Lucent) and to Libby and Jack. In the memoir, I've lost Jack. I am breaking free of Denise and a yearning for new Others. In this scene I discuss Rembrandt and my memoir with an imagined woman.

In my memoir, I include letters to Denise. She is one reader, one Other. I hope you will be another. Even at the time, I knew those letters would make the backbone of my memoir. I knew they would stand watch against all the portraying and enacting in the narrative that surround them.

Book Fatigue

I'm in the last 30 days of the book and I'm tired.  If the "art" of my book is depicting my grief, then I've read one too many fragmented emails to my daughter or to friends.  I don't know whether my fatigue matches the Reader's, and I should pay editorial attention to it.  Or is it just that I've been at these two rewrites for a year?

Since the clear conventional wisdom says I have too many words, when in doubt, cut.

I'll try the incremental approach--much like I do everything else. First I'll prune the bush. As close as I can to the trunk. What dies will eventually fall to the ground.  A strategy.  One that keeps me in it until The End.

In my session today, my therapist John, said he'd read my memoir as if it was a novel. Rick Rofihe, one my fiction workshop teachers, said I used "novelistic" techniques to tell my story. I guess my new agent query letter should reflect something of this. In one of the many ways this memoir is unconventional, the narrator (I) tells a story, with a protagonist and an antagonist, a beginning, middle and end covering a specific period of time, the year after Jack was killed.

Book Length

My word count is ~150,000. A quick survey of blog posts recommends 110,000 as the top end that I should shoot for. That seems consistent with guidelines from a couple of book contests I'm looking at--a maximum 400 pages. Check out Blue's indefeasible blog for example word counts, for example, on PEN/Faulkner Award winners.  Coincidentally, this 2008 post from Blue seems like her final post.

If I cut the epilogue, my word count is 148,292.

If I were to do some book-wide deletions, among areas to consider are:

• all email (Libby/lawyers ...)
• fugue ... no I think the sensual/physical companionship is important
• all excerpts from books (Damasio ...)
• dramatic cuts redundancy and chit chat from letters
• Sadoff visit
• long letters on the Dad's and on anger
• Lucent stuff ... Craig said interesting
• rework the "long" stuff ... when I read it it feels like a slog even to me
• Houston Law Review article
• bail argument
• Munchhausen

Here is one argument for self-publishing.  I can make a Director's cut.  I can rage war on my manuscript to submit it to contests, and then add content back in.  It won't be a complete waste of time. I'm sure that forcing myself to 70 pages would yield some very good ideas.

Distracted

Last Wednesday the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords offered a workshop on self-publishing: I Typed "The End." Now What? How to Turn Your Manuscript Into a Book. This was as disruptive to my revision process as Tony Hoagland's workshop where he insisted our journal writing should be in complete sentences.  Tony is not someone one can ignore.

One of the first things I had to do was go through my manuscript and delete the double spaces at the ends of sentences. And learn to compose new sentences without them.

This morning I've been trying to decide what size book I should publish: 5 1/4 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, or 6 x 9.

Yesterday I activated the Kindle app on my phone and laptop. I downloaded calibre.

I can't stop pouring over the Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer blog.

I've barely noticed the S&P 500's decline (not true). Why am I doing these things instead of writing? I'm returning to Beth Jusino's self-publishing workshop Wednesday night in Ballard for Selling Your Self-Published Book: Getting Your E-Book in Front of Readers.  Will I see you there?