Finished the (this) rewrite

About two weeks ago I finished the rewrite.  Since then I've been going through the draft mostly to catch up to the way I handle tenses ... the present of 2006 & 2007.  The past in moments of reflection.  I've also cleaned up some formatting.

Now I'll read through it again and hopefully tidy up some stuff.  I have left lots of comments and highlighted sections in the manuscript that I know I have to return to.  I don't know how other writers do it.  Do they force themselves to stay on a page, in a paragraph until that get the revision perfect?  Or do they plow ahead and hope a light bulb will go on sometime and the revision will be obvious when they return?  That's my method.  But it may lead to endless rewrites.

I think it is also time to resume sending off query letters to agents.

I gone through all my comments, deleted about 100 which were taken care of in the last couple of revisions.  I have ~200 left to consider.

More of the Richard Ford branch I pruned

Thursday, June 21

In Ford’s book now, Frank is sitting at a bar browsing the pages of a free advertising rag, “The Buyer’s Guide,” and comes across a framed box entitled “Profiles in Real Estate Courage.”  The story celebrates Frank Frantal getting back in the saddle selling real estate, a year after his son had been killed by a drunken snowmobiler in eastern PA.

In this strange state I for this moment find myself, and for reasons both trivial and circumstantial (the bar, the booze, the day, even Frank Frantal), my son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy’s sake, age nine) comes seeking an audience.[1]

It may go without saying, but when you have a child die—as I did nineteen years ago—you carry him with you forever and ever after.

I was with Ford here.

Though what has happened is that my life’s become alloyed with loss.  Ralph, and then Ralph being dead, long ago embedded in all my doings and behaviors.  And not like a disease you carry, that never gets better, but more the way being left-handed is ever your companion, or that you don’t like parsnips and never eat them, or that once there was a girl you loved for the very first time and you can’t help thinking of her—nonspecifically—every single day.  And while this may seem profane or untrue to say, the life it’s made has been and goes on being a much more than merely livable life.  It’s made a good life, this loss, one I don’t at all regret.  (The Frantals could not be expected to believe this, but maybe can in time.)

I was with the Frantals here, furious at the presumptuous words.

---

[1] Ibid., pg 344.

I had these excerpts in my memoir draft, because they were in my journal from 2007.  It was part of my unfolding life.  I was reading psychology and neurology books, that year, looking for an explanation.  I also read poems and novels.  Richard Ford wrote about losing a son; it resonated.  Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, resonated--a loved one gone crazy.

So why delete it?  This part is in June, towards the end of the book, and while it may depict my grief to the reader, I've already done quite a bit of that by now.  The reader will be looking for climax and denouement.  And I didn't have one ... Frank, his dead son Ralph, the Frantals didn't lead me to one ... and the reader might feel a bit jerked around if this late in my story I include these excerpts and then don't come back to them for any resolution whatsoever.

Now years later, I might write that alloyed with loss is an excellent way to describe my life after Jack was killed.  And perhaps after a full nineteen years I could echo Frank and say it's made a good life.

Deleted one stranded branch of my tree

Excerpts, now deleted, from my memoir.  (I do agree with Ford that some times simple words like surprised are the best we have.)

Sunday, June 11

After 200 pages I’m starting to relax into Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land.  I’m gradually lowering my guard.  I have a ton of respect for Ford.  I’ve read all his books.  He was the first author whose hardcover first editions I bought—at list price—wanting him to have the just proceeds of his work.  But I’m not willing yet to trust his judgment on the death of your child.

There are similarities between Frank’s life, Ford’s narrator, and my own.  Frank has lost a child.  Frank has had a marriage dissolve.  Frank has a daughter.  Frank lives in New Jersey.

Frank rejects the “ethical-cultural-response that catastrophe’s ‘a good thing for everybody,’ because “it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice-connected response to things is just made-up stuff anyway.[1]”

I couldn’t agree with Frank more.

The catastrophe in this case is that Frank’s second wife Sally has just come home from a weekend at her former in-laws, where she faced the surprising reappearance of her ex-husband, lost and presumed dead for thirty five years.  When Sally sat Frank down on the couch and gave him this news, Frank was as surprised as Sally that her long-lost first husband had appeared in her in-laws foyer.  “Sometimes simple words,” Franks reflects, like surprised, “are the best.”

In Sally’s behalf, Frank narrates, she was dazed.  She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost.  It’s the kind of shock that make you realize that life only happens to you, and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, and union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness.[2]

I was willing to trust Ford enough to see what happened next.

---

[1] Ford, Richard, The Lay of the Land, pg 222.

[2] Ibid., pg 227.

Finished May rewrite

It took me a long time to finish revising the month of April.  May went faster.  Now I start June.  The book will end in the middle of July with my "culminating" letter to Denise and a visit with Dr. Sadoff.

Certain things are wrapping up now (in May).

• The court case.
• The unsent letters--the conversation with the memory of Denise--the present, thankfully, crowding out the past.
• Libby's school year.
• My dreams seem to be building to a climax
• Reclaiming my complete self

Is that enough denouement to satisfy The Reader?

Certain things are taking over.

• Alcatel Lucent -- implicitly.  My job too boring to be too explicit.
• loneliness
• what I label it my fugue life--indulging in a fantasy search for a new woman/ mate/ partner/ companion

Does my loneliness and fugue state give the lie to "reclaiming my complete self?"  Particularly that word "complete?"  Or does it make it true?

Other things will start soon--the divorce and ultimately selling the house and moving.  These won't be in the book.

Each day when I approach the draft I have to nourish my mood.  My mood (motivation, energy) can collapse various ways:

• I start believing all my writing is shitty
• The content (anger at Denise, grieving Jack)
• And my own sense accomplishment, contribution.  Like Maria Popova writes of Flannery O'Connor, I am afflicted with time.
• And then the just utter bullshit things like:  is the stock market up or down?  how is USA or Holland or CONCACAF doing in the World Cup?

Hoagland on Glück

Glück's early poems are characterized by "imperial tone, and plain, relentless language. Glück issues forth her truth-statements with prosecutorial logic."  The Reader feels the "thrill of absolutism."

Hoagland quotes "Moonless Night:"

Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things.

In later work (Ararat) Glück explores the "paradox of certainty achieved at the cost of estrangement."

Hoagland on Hass

"Hass would like to avoid the regrettable crudity of being explicit; he would rather endlessly infer."  That sounds something like what I'm worried about in writing past truth.

"Hass would rather be a scribe than an oracle."

"Hass perceives the world as so stuck together, it can't be unstuck: out of the adhesion comes the poetry."  Hoagland can appreciate the "rippling resonance" of Hass's writing in a way most readers cannot. The Reader, like myself, who just meets the poem on the page and is not versed in Hass's personal biography will still recognize the extraordinary writing.

My memoir has coded language that someone who knows me will find more resonant.  While that must be true of any memoir, since "Dear Denise" is full of verbatim letters and email from 2006, private meanings particularly weigh down my book.

In my memoir I'm at April 16, 2007.  I'm fumbling through metaphors, on the page, for how I parent Jack.  Does blood transfusion work?  Is Jack a bank and I'm depositing money?  Pruning a tree? Training a long distance runner or swimmer?

I'm not sure there is a day of writing that passes that I don't recall Alice Truax's advice: intentionality.  I have to intend every word, image, feeling.  The Reader has to know I'm in control.

Since I'm revising from the calm distance of 2014, I should present the single best fully formed metaphor to The Reader.  Then there can be other writing, like the verbatim letters or cryptic notes from therapy sessions, that are fragmented and impressionistic, that will infer and not be explicit.  And the art, as Hoagland writes about Hass, is in "the arrangement of scale and variety."

Hoagland on Pinsky

I picked up Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun; I don't know why I ever put it down.  In Chapter 3 Hoagland gives Pinsky, Hass, Gluck as examples of how poets (great poets) develop over time.  He writes "the loss of innocence is inevitable, but one that has its compensations: skill, perspective and choice."

Pinsky develops from "explicator to gnostic namer ... one who ushers us toward Mystery."  Pinsky wants to render the kaleidoscope of experience, "to praise it, to invoke it and to provoke us to wonder."  He doesn't "strive toward intimacy with the reader."  The poem is a "dramatic performance" that offers "spectacle and sensation."

In an age that mistrusts language as never before, in which many poets take the inadequacy of speech as a central preoccupation, Pinsky is a rarity, the contemporary poet who has found language adequate, fruitful, and enlivening.

In "Ode to Meaning" Pinsky declares "You are the wound. You | be the medicine."

For my memoir I need to keep these words close: offer spectacle, be the namer, render sensation, provoke wonder and challenge Meaning to be the medicine.