I.
I got lost trying to find Washington Square Park. I can’t count how many times I’ve walked under that white arch, but this time, when I got off the subway, I circled the area for an hour before spotting it.

How did I get lost? I’m not sure if it was the unfamiliar origin, or if maybe it was the rows of summer-green trees exploding throughout the Village. We shaded our eyes against the sun, and somehow I couldn’t find a single familiar thing. I wondered if we were still in New York.

But there was something strangely beautiful in being lost. Every new street looked more real; as I rounded each corner, I slowly built up a mental map from the world around me.

II.
“I am quick to disappear when I walk; my thoughts wander until they cease to seem to be my thoughts, until, mercifully, I cease to think of myself primarily as myself for a few moments.” I read this in a stunning Harvard Book Review essay. The writer goes on to wonder “why I’m so tempted to read the world around me when I walk — especially since I would be so much better served by just paying attention to where I was going and how I was getting there.”

We make our lives out of what we see. Anything we do not see shapes our lives by its absence.

III.
Before I moved to New York once and for all, I read Teju Cole’s Open City. I had been to New York many, many times and did not think of it as a city in which one lost oneself. But every space has its crevices: Teju Cole’s narrator finds himself locked on a fire escape, looking down an unlit side of Carnegie Hall. After his despair passes, he looks up, “and much to my surprise, there were stars. Stars! ... the sky was like a roof shot through with light, and heaven itself shimmered. Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that their true nature was the persisting visual echo of something that was already in the past.”

When I moved to New York, it was through an airport; I did not arrive at Grand Central Station, which had always been my port of arrival. But then I took a train out, and as I crossed the main concourse, I looked up for the first time in four years. Above me was a sea-green heaven, with golden constellations dotting the ceiling. I forgot the station momentarily, mesmerized by that slice of the sky.

Do we let ourselves get lost to see what we have forgotten, to witness and retain what we have refused to let ourselves see before?

IV.
I once tried to escape the Midwest by reading Dead Europe. The book, by Australian author Christos Tsiolkas, took three weeks to make its way from the Antipodes to America. And then I read about a photographer who, trying to dig into the wreckage of his family’s and his own past, travels from Australia to Greece and then across Europe.

In Paris, he is taken to the city tourists never see: “a harsh place, a tough, crumbling, decaying, stinking, dirty city ... But the act of adjusting the camera lens, the act of focusing on an image, seemed to alleviate my anxiety.” Photography is only another form of looking, of mapping the things that otherwise would remain terra incognita.

V.
Of course I found the park, but by that time I didn’t particularly want to be there. I had been looking for something else all along, I suppose. So I unfurled the map in my head and followed it away.

image credit: flickr.com/photos/deepersea

Image: Rene Magritte's Perspicacity (1936), all-art.org

Since it turns out that writers aren't all that influenced by past writers, what goes into novels then? The author's own life? I realized that every author was getting asked the same thing, and I started worrying about the assumptions behind the question, “Is your fiction autobiographical?”

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom, gave an eloquent, but direct reply in The Guardian, looking at the relationship between actual, real events and how much his writing relates to the things he’s seen:

In 30 years, I don't think I've published more than 20 or 30 pages of scenes drawn directly from real-life events that I participated in...What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There is an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the smaller its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become impediments to deliberate dreaming.

And this is why writing good fiction is almost never easy.

It’s a good answer, but Franzen’s colluding with the interviewer. Both of them are propagating the idea that fiction is necessarily rooted in the visible world, and that once the relationship between experience and fiction is established, then anybody can put a pen to paper and make a masterpiece.

But fiction is not always based on the world we see around us. Sometimes things have to just be made up wholesale—with more logic than a dream. Genre fiction in particular depends on this fact: science fiction and historical fiction fixate on details that for the authors only exist in the imagination. A recent bestseller in France, Hate: A Romance, is about two men during the AIDS epidemic, and was written by a man born during the last years of the political activism related to that. Tristan Garcia’s book landed like a hand grenade amid the piles of monotonous French autobiographical fiction. And when asked why he didn’t write from his own life and experience, he said:

I wanted to write about something far removed from myself, which has nothing to do with my existence, even my nature—I’m too well-behaved, my soul is too well-adapted to the world, in a sense.Autofiction doesn’t interest me, and I’m not very interested in myself either. For a time, it was believed that because people were writing to tell their stories—as if to a psychoanalyst or a confessor—literature was self-expression, first and foremost, and, sometimes, the fictional expression of self: speech, a voice, the voice of the person writing. For me, it is the contrary. Writing is a refined form of empathy through which man extends his ability to be an Other, to feel what someone else feels, to trade his sensibility and voice with others without losing his soul.

There you have it. Fiction as a form of negative capability. This is why the question “Is your fiction autobiographical?” is so useless. When you have to imagine someone else’s life, you do so by ignoring the details of your own life. A correlation between the two is simply a coincidence. And, as we all know, correlation does not imply causation.

It’s best, really, not to worry about the parallels between fiction and life; the author writes to keep his soul whole. He’s not a memoirist. Those writers pay dearly for aestheticizing their lives, as in the case of Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian author of the record-breaking bestseller My Struggle. He openly admits:

I wrote this in a kind of autistic mood. Just me and my computer in a room, by myself. It never occurred to me that it might cause problems – I was just telling the truth, wasn't I? But I was also being very naïve. I sent a copy to everyone involved before the first volume was published, and then I discovered how difficult this was going to be. It was like hell ... I couldn't have done it any other way. I will never do anything like this again, though, for sure. I have given away my soul.

A recent Brain Pickings post on Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published children’s book, To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, has sent me on a journey to nonsense. Or rather, it has revived a kind of determination to spread an enthusiasm for reading with your guts and heart, not just your head.

In a press release for her first children’s book, Stein wrote something that could just as easily be applied to her grownup fiction:

Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words.

Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster. If you

have any trouble, read faster and faster until you don’t.

While it’s easier to calibrate your expectations of deliberately nonsensical writing, e.g. Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, reading for purposes other than understanding gets tricky in other areas. At least, in my mind, readers often resist writing that doesn't immediately make sense, that proceeds with a certain tension-filled ambiguity.

Last week, I came across an htmlgiant post that might be useful in terms of articulating a purpose for reading other than understanding. Before recommending five works of theory (touching upon such topics as "interassemblage haecceities"), Christopher Higgs writes:   

I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction,

which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate...

I read theory and fiction and poetry to experience, to consider, to become

other, to shift, to mutate, to change. I most certainly do not read those things

to understand them.

I was reminded of the first time I encountered Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan in an undergraduate literary theory course (which yes, meant that I was reading in order to understand what was being written). Part of my absolute joy at reading theory was the complete tizzy my head went through in its attempts to grasp or even contain the expanse of the ideas written down. The joy, for me, was the experience of reading it. At times I barely thought my feet were touching ground. In the end, I believe I understood less. And this is wonderful.

My point is not to bash understanding or encourage everyone to smoke pot and listen to whale sounds. I mean, go ahead and all, but what I’d like to promote here is an experience of reading that doesn’t insist on pinning something down. Do not be afraid. Try not to read with the goal of saying “Aha! I get it!” when you’re finished. Allow for uncertainty, for ambiguity, for mystery that resonates beyond the page. Let your senses experience a truth your mind can't get a handle on.

This is also not to encourage laziness; quite the contrary. This is to encourage a kind of pleasure in the sound of words and the power of words to bring you to an unrecognized place.

Don't bother about the commas.

image: guardian.co.uk

I don't know whether Maurice Sendak ever explicitly said that imagination should never be limited by false notions of absurdity or risk, but as a kid sprawled out on the floor reading and rereading his books, especially In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are, this is what he taught me. The internet does tell me he said the following: “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

I had enough unsentimental adults orbiting my childhood that one of them very well could have told me this. It would have gone over my head at age six or seven. But when you watch a drunk make an ass of himself, hear the laughter elicited by a joke that shouldn’t have been told, or through thin walls hear moans of pleasure that you are years off from appreciating, what you do come to understand, though you cannot yet articulate it, is that life ain't all Green Eggs and Ham.

I’m grateful for coming to this realization early on, thanks to the lovingly irreverent family and family friends who shaped me and allowed me to appreciate Sendak’s stories in all their naked, doughy, beastly glory. As these books make clear, adults can be jerks, escape beats confinement, and "Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!" (The latter was quoted by Art Spiegelman in a 1993 New Yorker strip.)  They speak to a truth that the child me did not realize I’d been lied to about yet. I wasn’t old enough to go out anywhere further than the yard, and in truth I never actually wanted to run away. But losing myself in my thoughts and delusions, I could see that this was normal and healthy, something that shouldn't be thought of as a waste of time but a crucial part of being alive.

Like most adults, I still daydream like a kid, though I sometimes wish those mental escapes did not end so abruptly thanks to some adult obligation. But that bullshit is a real part of life, the same as trying to imagine it away. Maurice Sendak’s best work exists in that space between the two worlds, an alchemy of the real and imaginary, which is why it resonates with so many of us.

Image: collider.com

Image via fanpop.com

When I was seven, I got Norton Juster's brainy adventure YA The Phantom Tollbooth as a present. I skipped past the maps to the first Jules Feiffer illustration of Milo. Then all of a sudden this unquestioning boy was piloting a toy car past a tollbooth and stopping in front of a Whether Man, debating whether there'll be weather.

I was hooked. I loved the idea of another world. I had dreams about watching Chroma's orchestra putting color into the world. And of course I'd be able to spell hard words like "vegetable" just as fast as the Spelling Bee.

I even liked the film version. (I know. I know.)

There's a really cool scene where Milo goes back and forth in the tollbooth, switching from human to cartoon to human. That was when I started seriously wondering what I would look like if I was cartoonified.

I told my dad about this idea while we were eating pie at Tippin's. And then my dad, the nuclear engineer, turned my world upside down: he told me to read Flatland. We went to the library, and my jaw dropped as I saw this picture of a sphere moving through a two-dimensional world:

Now over a century old, Flatland is the story of a Square living in a two-dimensional world: houses are their blueprints, and women, being lines, are required to hum as they move so that polygonal men aren't accidentally run through in their silence. The Square meets a Sphere one day, perceiving the three-dimensional being at first as a circle that expands and contracts at frightening speeds. Once the Square finally understands the third dimension, he tries in vain to convince the Sphere that there may be even higher ones.

It was a Copernican revolution of my mind. I imagined what an amoeba floating on the surface of a pool would see as an Olympic diver broke that surface: ten circles for fingers joining into two arms, a third circle for the head joining with the arms into an elongated torso...and then, my brain shifting in the opposite direction, I tried to imagine the fourth dimension.

Which I couldn't do. I saw drawings of hypercubes, and realized that they were exactly as useless as one-dimensional drawings of cubes. I couldn't get my head around the dimension extending outward from our world. My excitement faded. I didn't want to be cartoonified anymore.

I went back to The Phantom Tollbooth. In the end, Milo rescues the twin princesses Rhyme and Reason from the Castle in the Air. Then the entourage comes back and there's a great big festival before Milo heads back to his real world, no worse for the wear. It wasn't until much later that I laughed; I finally understood that even the three-dimensional world would make no sense without rhyme or reason.

Image: Alec Bings, the boy who sees through things, drawn by Jules Feiffer

Everybody knows Israelis are sexy. They’re all buff from years in the military, they can curse fluently in Hebrew and Arabic and English, and to top it off, they’re impossibly tan from living under the Mediterranean sun. I’m jealous of my friends who go to Tel Aviv in the summers and lounge on the beach with great eye candy, some Goldstar beer, and a few Israeli books.

Yep, books. Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular, which came out in Israel two years ago and is out in English now, had me turning the pages, wondering what sort of scandal might be going on under the protagonist’s nose.

The author is an Israeli Arab—a sizeable minority living in Israel—and it’s no surprise that his characters are similarly marginalized. When a rising Arab lawyer who has successfully become Israeli discovers a love letter from his wife to someone he doesn’t know (in a used bookstore, no less), he sets out to discover who the addressee is, and how this has all been happening without his knowledge. Needless to say, Israel’s a country that struggles withits identity and its survival, and the descriptions of the rift between Arab and Jewish cultures by one who straddles the divide are illuminating, frighteningly accurate, and deeply moving.

I kept thinking of an evening in college: I got to talking with a fellow freshman who had a hookah in his room and said he was from Jerusalem. When my friends and I walked out of his room that night, we saw the sign on his door with his name—just like the signs the freshman counselors had put on all the other doors—and his hometown. It said East Jerusalem, Palestine, but I paused when I saw he’d crossed out the Palestine and scrawled Israelunder it. From my side of the fence, I hadn't ever thought about the feelings Palestinians might have about this ongoing struggle.

Every so often I hear about bombings in Israel or Palestine or the territories in between (and, to put this in context, I hear about this just as often as I hear about murders or violent crimes on the local news). It's true that there are deep-rooted historical arguments for the divide between Jews and Arabs, between Israel and Palestine, but there's more to the story. In fact, they already do work together in spite of the ongoing conflict, making reality far less black-and-white than either side's rhetoric might suggest.

There’s a mystery to be unraveled in Second Person Singular, many mysteries in fact, but the biggest questions remain unanswered in the book’s pages. If I ever go back to Israel, I’ll go to Bat Yam with my surfboardand my eyes open. Behind those superficially shiny bodies are some astonishingly forceful sentiments about Israel, Palestine, and the people trapped in between.

image credit:flickr.com

Let's face it, book tours are weird and (sometimes) boring. On the Awl, nine authors and publicists talked about the best and the worst of the requisite book tour. Their consensus: there's something wrong with the whole setup. So step aside, dudes and dudettes. I'm not like regular authors. This is what I would do if I was on a book tour.

1.

If I was on a book tour, I would wear the same sophisticated, refined Yves St. Laurent suit to every reading. The same way I wear my Clockwork Orange costume for Halloween every year. (I probably wouldn’t stuff a sock down my pants for a book reading, though.)

2.

If I was on a book tour, I would only read the parts of my book with sex orhigh-speed car chases. Anybody can think about philosophical problems on their own. Sex and high-speed car chases, however, are best enjoyed ascommunal experiences. Also, one of my friends got lucky at a Literary Death Match event (probably one that Black Balloon publisher Elizabeth Koch ran, although she's not telling). All it took was a smile, a few literary allusions, and a round of vodka and Red Bull. That’s got to be a good sign.

3.

If I was on a book tour, I would interrupt discussions about my work to dish out Dear Sugar-style advice to the audience:

“Mr. Author, my marriage isn’t going so great. I’m reading your books like my wife told me to so that we have something to talk about when I come home from work. I don’t think it’s working. What should I do?”

“Have you tried stuffing a sock down your pants?”

4.

If I was on a book tour, I would drink a Tom Collins before I got in front of the audience (for the stage fright), and then I’d leave right after the signing for the nearest dive bar (for the non-stage fright). This one time, I met a bartender who was reading Ulysses when he wasn’t pouring shots. He was in the middle of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and managed to concoct an industrial-grade mojito while reading aloud her words—“What do they find to gabber about all night squandering money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water”—and laughing the whole way through.

5.

If I was on a book tour, I would bribe my friends to come and be extremely attractive backup readers. They wouldn’t actually read though. They’d just stand around, being wonderful supportive friends. I’d tell them, “You can just stand up in front with me while I read about sex and high-speed car chases. You’ll probably get laid."

Come to think of it, maybe I'd stuff a sock down my pants after all. You never know what the audience is really there for.

image credit: leedsfestival.com. I would probably have a classier outfit.

The Hunger Games landed the number three spot on the recently released American Library Association’s Top Ten List of Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2011. Um, hello? Complainers? My mom totally just read that book. My mom.

Maybe you think I’m being cute with the whole hunger-kitchen-mom title, perhaps playing the ol' wink-and-nod game, hinting at literary depravity and motherhood, so let me just stop all this conjecture right here and now. I am quite serious. My mom totally read The Hunger Games in the kitchen this weekend. Plus, if I were to imply any wink-and-nod business, I’d sound kind of sexist. Hell, you’re probably the sexist one.

For those zealots who might not immediately understand the implications of "my mom," let me provide a brief characterization. Elementary school teacher for over thirty years. Hates peanut butter. Also hates movies. Hates violence probably more than she hates movies. A major player on the social justice scene, pathologically invested in a Minneapolis Peace Garden.

That’s right. A peacenik school teacher with an aversion to nuts. DevouredThe Hunger Games in one sitting.

But how does my mom reading The Hunger Games have anything to do with you? When I asked her why she’d purchased the book, she said, “There are just some things you do for popular culture.” I don’t understand what this means. Some things you just have to accept without too many questions (like hating peanut butter). The day before I found The Hunger Games in the kitchen, my mother said she was going to “the labyrinth” and when I asked what “the labyrinth” was she started explaining what a labyrinth is rather than provide any concrete information about a physical place. She’s never even done drugs. Why would I think questions are useful?

Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to assume the following:

1. Rather than that idiotic No Child Left Behind bullshit of constant standardized testing, schools will start requiring demonstrations of physical prowess. Childhood obesity solved.
2. Popular culture will dictate moral standards. Oh wait, it already does.
3. The generation of nimble children raised by obese adults will inevitably take over. Our National Anthem will be replaced by Miley Cyrus humming.
4. I will find a Japanese horror film to write as a novel and make one million dollars.
5. Everyone will write a novel with the word "Game" in the title and make one million dollars.

Image: hungergamesmovie.org

Sure, the internet has tons of advice on how to go about being a writer. But last week, the internet had advice I have just now acted on and can retrospectively congratulate myself for. Without meaning to, I have followed The Awl’s suggestion to move out of Brooklyn in order to write the great American novel.

I have left Brooklyn for the Midwest! I have totally done so! My reason for doing so? Not too far a cry from trying to actually write the great American novel!

My aims are slightly less grandiose; I hope to simply write, every day. Could I do this in Brooklyn? Not as easily. Most literary types are familiar with Virginia Woolf’s whole idea of a room of one’s own, and a room of my own, in Brooklyn, was certainly more than I could afford. I’ve only been in the Midwest for a week, but I know I can realistically obtain such luxurious space here. I can fantasize about—and soon make a reality—pimping my new place with such classic writerly touches as cork-lined walls and plot outlines penciled above the bed (cf. Apartment Therapy's excellent post, "Literary Style: 15 Writers' Bedrooms").

Of course, such space is not merely physical but psychological in nature. I find that, for me, the best writing gets done when I am able to achieve a particular mental state, one that scientific studies have shown can be brought on, one might even say enhanced, by the consumption of alcohol. In all truthfulness, I do perform better on Mr. Writing Machine the more oblivious I am to external stimuli. Brooklyn was a gigantic swarm of distraction and anxiety—blissful and dearly missed in some cases, but incalculably hard to retreat from.

For the past week, I’ve maintained an almost constant state of mild distraction from my immediate circumstance. It’s so easy here to loll about, I can’t even describe it without maybe sounding kind of high, or at least drunk. Which I am not...yet. Because New Scientist says only a small amount of alcohol aids in creative problem solving, and therefore I have only consumed a small amount of alcohol in preparation for this blog post. What can I say?

It’s a little too soon to tell whether I’ve made a terrible mistake or I can become a mildly alcoholic, abundantly prolific and happy-in-my-dirt-cheap-luxuriously-spacious-Midwest-apartment writer. But it looks like the internet is telling me yes, such ecstasies as a small efficiency with a single window, a bed and a desk that I can afford, plus Jameson that costs half what it did in the city, might just make all my dreams come true.

Image: ApartmentTherapy.com

[The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard is out today from the Library of America. In homage to his singular writing, I’ve decided to create an “I Remember” of my own.]

I remember picking apples at Eckert’s orchards.

I remember waking up in the wrong bed entirely.

I remember trying on hats with my sister.

I remember reading Joe Brainard for the first time. I thought I Rememberwas a joke at first, then a wistful way to look at the world, then the only way I should look at my life.

I remember tearing a marigold out of our garden because I thought it was just a weed. My mother was so upset with me, even though she knew it was a mistake.

I remember when I got into college. There was a thin envelope, and the words didn’t say “we regret,” so I couldn’t understand it and I had to give it to someone who could read it to me.

I remember the first real date I went on. The first real date, when neither of us were trying to be grown-up or impress each other. Three hours later, I didn’t want it to ever end.

I remember learning how to make crêpes.

I remember making them far too often after that until everybody was tired of eating them.

I remember my first and my last cigarette. I got bored and gave it back to the friend who had let me try it.

I remember flipping the light switch up and down until I was able to hold it at exactly the point to make the whole room very dim but still lit.

I remember when I figured out that I’d never had Brussels sprouts in my life, ever. Then I told my mother that was one thing she had done right.

I remember watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with my little brother on Halloween weekend: him petrified as the suspenseful music rose and rose, and me bored as I couldn’t hear it.

I remember setting the hands into the face of a clock I’d made out of wood. It’s still on the wall at home, ticking away.

I remember all six warts I had on my fingers (three on my left pointer finger alone).

I remember learning that Lucian Freud had died and recalling first that one of my close friends called him her favorite portraitist ever, and second that he had offered to sketch the actress Joan Collins about which she wrote, many years later: “To my great regret, I said sorry, no, as I had to get back to my afternoon studies.”

I remember a ten-foot-high inflatable globe that I stepped into. I couldn’t find any of the countries because I was looking at the world inside-out.

I remember watching the first season of Lost on DVD, and realizing three days and twenty-five episodes later that I was completely hooked.

I remember every house I moved out of.

I remember, I do remember.

Image credit: joebrainard.org