TRAVERSING Z

Roxane Gay

september

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Feeling blech today. Tired and sinus-y.

One week of work left and then I am left to my own devices, for better or worse.

Have started revising Talassio and making notes for a short story, but cannot get moving today. Also trying to get through the end of A Place of Greater Safety, but I am laden with foreboding and conflicted emotions. The book is making me sad. It also wields a veritable tool chest of writing strategems, which is inspiring when I have energy and daunting when I don’t. It would be interesting to see some academic takes on it, see someone get paid to pick apart the many mechanisms. Have to look into that.

Roxane Gay is reading on Wednesday and I will be there, sinuses willing. I even have an elephant for her. Practicing my swooning.

patterns & updates

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Important things first: there is a review of “Pursuit of the Whole is Called Love” up at Tangent.  Check it out!

I am finally, finally learning patience and mindfulness with the submission thing.  It has taken many lessons to get it through my head and I am only sorry that others have had to suffer through my learning process.  Especially with one story—I have never felt so bloody precious about a tale before.  Usually when a story is done I treat it like a breakup, I am emotionally done with it.  But not this one.

As of this morning, however, I looked at my list of what’s where and it makes sense, it’s all good, there are no possible complications or mixed signals on the horizon.  Lessons learned—?

Thanks to this blog, I have learned something else: that I always start off strong in spring, when work is slow, and by this time each year I am usually too crazed to do anything other than edit, finish, critique.  Talassio revisions.  The short story drafts that I have.  The pile of crits that I owe people.  I can’t do anything new, at this time, not with this day job.  Which is frustrating as there is at least one great submission call I would love to write to in the next few weeks.  But it probably won’t happen, and I’m passing through the frustration and heading towards the resignation stage now and that is good.

(I was reading Roxane Gay’s Tumblr this morning, so part of this blog post is to get her voice out of my head.  She has a distinct style.  She is a good example of style, actually.  I love a good style and I dig her work and her thought . . .

she is a fellow Libra and sometimes I read about her teaching and the town she is in and I think, that is how I might have turned out, had I stayed in academia . . .

and I really need to save her for after the morning writing.)

I will be spending the looming milestone birthday in Italy, in part to do some Talassio research and overcome my painful ignorance as to all things Italian.  At least when it came to Paris I had a fair amount of foreknowledge.  Italy, however, is a messy country and I have no language skills.  Hopefully I will be able to untangle some things.

I am trying not to think on how much this is all costing for a book that may never see the light of day but at least this time it’s also a proper vacation.  We would have gone somewhere, we just chose to go . . . to a very expensive European country.  And put off other things. Ahem.

My family often has more faith in me than I do, and I need to remember that.

from the tumblr site.

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because it is important.  and because, in these last days of polishing talassio‘s first draft, i am definitely suffering from trees-not-forest-itis.

roxanegay:

One of the more underreported stories recently, has been about Notre Dame players suspected of rape. Of course this is frustrating. But. The Notre Dame story is underreported but the reason it’s getting ANY attention at all is because Notre Dame just played in the BCS championship. Also being ignored are the stories of suspected rapists and their victims connected to most athletic teams from high school through professional teams. Let’s be outraged about this but let’s not act like the Notre Dame story is the only story that isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.
Do you ever feel like you are just drowning in the terribleness of rape? I do, in ways I can’t even explain without getting into my internal landscape at length but sometimes, I have to say nothing about the new set of stories we hear every day about how women and men, throughout the world, are violated, sexually, against their will.
Somedays, all I can carry is my own shit.

yes.  this.  drowning.  the latter sentiment is something i have been laboring under since the summer of gran torino / watching twelve year old boys watching shooter / dragon tattoo books, and kind of, um, losing my mind.  it was sensory overload; i saw what i too had been skimming over until then, i saw it everywhere and i saw that i had accepted it being everywhere.

and then plucking the 18th century out of the air, because i wanted to set the novel(s) back a ways, and i needed a period that was decadent and would tolerate weird creatures doing weird things on its back porch so to speak.  i chose the 18th century, starting in the regency in france, and i found that it all feels exactly the freakin’ same.  all of it. no means yes.  if she parties without a chaperone she’s asking for it.  she loved it in the end.  she should just lie back and enjoy it.

respected figures of our western political history, buying twelve year olds for mistresses and forcing themselves on women because they’re simply there.

though really, if i am honest, i have been laboring under this since i was a kid and the central park jogger case happened, because i was living in new york and it was almost hyperreal, how quickly the world went from reasonably safe to perpetually threatening. i felt blasted from all sides.  i feel blasted now.  somewhere in between i stopped feeling blasted, from apathy and the bubble of my little bay area life . . . part of the work, now, feels like atonement.