So True

From Michael Chabon: "[F]ailure instructs the writer. Every novel, in the moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written … Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes."

Reporting for duty!

72 Words About 72 Hours in So Cal

Relentless sunshine
Flat
Ocean swimming. Brrr.
Free
Friends who are happy
New
1967 light blue Corvette
Desert
Kelp and sharks look alike
Lifeguards
Surfers make me feel so uncool.
Fish tacos and beer in a dark bar on a sunny day
“Another beautiful day in San Diego”
Family
Borders on everything and nothing
So Cal is action. No Cal is thought.
The soul knows what it wants, but what does it need?

(The photo is from Manhattan Beach)

An Integrated Life is Worth Living

I bet many or even most of you already know about the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Apparently, there was some buzz that he was in the running for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, but it went to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I’m sure he deserved it too. But as for Murakami. Wow. With spare, clean writing, he tells stories of deep imagination and sensitivity. I was introduced to his writing by Meredith Cole, a writer and the wife of Peter Krebs, an artist Rob and I represented when we had our gallery. I will be forever grateful for that gift.

It would be impossible, I thought after reading his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to ever have anything in common with Murakami. Then I heard he was a long distance runner and published a book of his reflections on his sport and his writing: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I was going to buy it, but I forgot about it in the crush of life. Then I saw this book one night when I was working the closing shift at Barnes and Noble. My job that night was to straighten the right side of the store. And Murakami’s book was all akimbo in the Sports section on the right side of the store. I read the first page while no one was looking, reshelved it properly and bought it the next day. I would have bought it that night, but we had already closed the registers. I felt like I had discovered chocolate or beer or something equally as wonderful and sustaining and decadent.

Here is the first page:

“There is a wise saying that goes like this: A real gentleman never discusses women he’s broken up with or how much tax he’s paid. Actually this is a total lie. I just made it up. Sorry. But if there really were such a saying, I think one more condition for being a gentleman would be keeping quiet about what you do to stay healthy. A gentleman shouldn’t go on and on about what he does to stay fit. At least that’s how I see it.
As everybody knows, I’m no gentleman, so maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about this to begin with, but still I am a little hesitant about writing this book. This might come off sounding like a dodge, but this is a book about running, not a treatise on how to be healthy. I’m not trying to give advice like, “Okay everybody, let’s run everyday to stay healthy!” Instead this is a book in which I have gathered my thoughts about what running has meant to me as a person. Just a book in which I ponder various things and think out loud.”

Why did this capture me so? Well, three reasons: 1) the prose is magical - pointed and simple and effective, and it has a rhythm to it that you can feel, 2) I’m a runner (and a swimmer and a biker) and 3) I dislike people who obsess over their exercise routines and make it the focus of their conversations with you. So, I guess, Mr. Murakami had me at hello.

The book so far (I'm only at page 55 - but I was impatient to share) has lived up to its promise in my eyes. Murakami writes about running and writing and weaves the two together beautifully. It’s part biography - he introduces you to the journey of his life and the major changes in it - but mostly he explores himself and his art and what it means to be the kind of person he is. It’s not a memoir in the current style, where you had to have something awful happen to you so people who slow down at car wrecks will read it. No, it’s a quiet book. He writes about the solitude of running, the void. This, of course, is where a writer has to go if he or she wants to do anything real. It can be lonely, but for those of us suited to it (and by saying us, I am in no way whatsoever implying that I am the same caliber of writer with Mr. Murakami) it is rich with rewards and strange kinds of relationships. He says it best, of course:

“I can’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense it’s a conceptual type of human relationship, but I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life.”

This is why art is important; I felt a weight lifted off my chest when I read that. My mother always said that a person’s deepest emotional need is to be understood. Reading this book had affected me profoundly; I found understanding in it. He has helped tie the disparate strange parts of my solitary self into something. I am a writer. And a runner, too.

I hope desperately to make someone else feel understood by something I write, because I think these conceptual relationshsips (or virtual relationships, or even brief eye contact with a stranger over a shared experience) are incredibly valuable in a world where we have to interact so frequently with people we do not like or who do not understand us. I think it is possible for me to succeed, probably not on a level like Murakami, but not being able to be the best is never a reason to quit. So I’ll keep writing, keep running, keep swimming and biking. Keep trying to be a good friend to the people I care about. Keep trying to manage the demons. Keep trying to grow up. I think that is what everybody is doing if you stop and think about it. Some are just better at it than others.

You may feel differently. You may think running is stupid, or that conceptual relationships are stupid. You may be a flesh and blood person. And there is a writer out there who will make you feel understood. I know it.

Cooking and Writing

God, I love to cook. Wait, that’s not exactly true. I like to cook, but I love to eat. And I especially love to eat what I want when I want, made with ingredients I have selected. To get that, I have to cook. And as I said, I like cooking. It takes a lot of time and is tiring on the legs, but it is often a good way to rescue the day from wherever it went off course.

Two nights ago, I cooked my first meal from Molto Gusto, a cookbook by Mario Batali. Batali is a man with confidence, with the courage of his convictions. His recipes are easy to follow and none takes up more than a page of this small-ish cookbook. He assumes some intelligence and skill on the part of his reader. What some people call simple, I call good editing. He mixes flavor profiles I wouldn’t have thought of. Lemon marmalade and olive oil?

The meal (mushroom and tallegio pizza with homemade crust, anchovies and fried bread with spring onions, and misticanza – a salad of arugula with radishes and fennel in a lemon vinaigrette) was amazing. Why? Because: 1) I gave myself enough time to do it all and 2) the recipes were excellent. They embodied the principle that less is more if you counted the number of ingredients. If you considered the flavors, the guiding principle was more is more.

When I think about my writing, I realize that is what I want to do: be minimal with the number of words but also maximize the power of each one.

Cooking and writing are both creative processes but the end result of both often involves sharing. I know you can write for yourself but not if you want to make a living at it. You can also cook for yourself, but really when it’s just me, I have an egg or a bowl of cereal. Writing and cooking are generous activities. I want whoever reads my words to enjoy them like I’m sure Batali wants people to enjoy his recipes. I write for my readers, whoever they are.

Getting Under Your Skin

Last Sunday, heaven equaled a rainy morning plus a Washington Post Arts & Style Section with a cover article about local artists and the books that inspired them. Art and books? Wowie – zowie! That’s the kind of news I like.

While I was slightly and unfairly disappointed that each profiled artist wasn’t transformed by a work of fiction, I was still thrilled that books of any flavor had inspired them and had affected their art. But it didn’t occur to me to consider which books had affected my art until I read the article on the next page about Kathryn Stockett. Stockett wrote The Help, a novel set in 1960s Mississippi and told through the viewpoint of a black maid. Stockett is white. And she has received some criticism for “stealing” the black voice and profiting from it.

The Help has sold nearly as many copies as Eat, Pray Love, or so it seems. I’m always happy to see a debut novel sell so well. I haven’t read it, but I plan to. Not so much because the story interests me, but because any book that has found its way into so many readers hands is one I can learn from.

Well, I should probably also read it because the main character in my book Scarred But Smarter has brown skin. Eden Tremay has a half black, half Native American father and a white Cajun mother. I am plain vanilla white, although I try to claim gypsy blood whenever I can work it into a conversation.

Why is Eden mixed-race? My answer has always been that is how she came to me in my imagination. That is just who she is. But why? And how can I dare to write about what I do not know? Well, it came to me after I digested those two articles. As a child, I read and was transfixed and apparently transformed by the book, Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin.

I was probably 12 or 13 when I read it in 1978 in Durham, North Carolina. The book was written almost twenty years earlier. Here’s the description from Amazon and Barnes and Noble (www.bn.com): “In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.”

Griffin didn’t just imagine what it was like to experience life in another person’s skin. He did it. I can’t. Or won’t. And many would say it is a different world now. It is. But Eden has dark skin because I want her to. Maybe I want to experience some of what Griffin did only through fiction. I think it will enhance my experience in writing the story and the reader’s experience in reading. Will I get criticism about appropriating a voice that is not my own? Maybe. Probably. I have also written a short story from a man’s point of view, and I got no criticism for that. Although it may be easier to imagine changing sex than race.

I want Eden to be an outsider. I want to give some power to a mixed-race woman. As multicultural and multiracial as America is becoming, the power and the money is still held mostly by white men. That’s what crime fiction does best in my opinion, tip the balance of power and fix the world for a little while.

I’m ready for the criticism. Race is not a huge part of my story, but it poked its head up occasionally. I tried to do the best I could when it did.

When the going gets tough, go harder.

In order to honor the blog's title, it's time for a swimming post. Late summer is the season for a lot of open water swim races around the world. And for just plain open water swims - where a swimmer with a support boat tackles a body of water by him or herself. No race. The English Channel (brrrr) is one such swim, as is the Catalina Channel (sharks!) in California. These days, the only seems to be a swimmers imagination and wallet.

The Daily News of Open Water Swimming posts daily news (yes, its title is quite appropriate) of the latest of these types of swims by some amazing people. I like visiting the site because of the inspiration it provides. And the videos. Any athletic or creative pursuit requires dogged determination and the ability to give the most when it hurts the most. For example, often when people who have completed the English Channel say some variant of: "Yeah, when I was about an hour from France, the captain of the support boat said I had to pick up the pace or the current would change and I'd never make land." So you've just been swimming for ten hours and someone tells you to swim faster? And you can? Wow. My hat is off to you.

Or maybe swimming freestyle is too boring and you want to do four laps of the San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge, one each of butterfly, backstroke, breastroke and freestyle? The Daily News of Open Water Swimming: Butter, Back, Breast And Free In The Open Water:

These are regular people, albeit talented and hardworking regular people. Not freaks. They are doing the possible, not the impossible. I'll think about all that the next time I want to quit. The next time I think that writing three pages is enough for the day or swimming one more lap would just be too hard.

Writing Advice, part 2

The editing process is equal parts joy and pain. That may be true of all writing, and possibly true of life in general, but that's too heady a subject for a Friday afternoon.

Lately, though, I've had help with editing, or at least with a certain facet of it. A voice sounds in my head whenever I am struggling with how to add something I need to a pararaph that seems full. I don't remember where I first read or heard it. So I am paraphrasing, but this is the essence of what the voice tells me:

"You always have to be willing to let a good sentence be murdered by a great sentence."

Isn't that great advice? It is full of action and violence and hope and victory. I love it.