“Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.”
I finished The Sense of an Ending a few days ago. I keep thinking about it. Its shape. Its revelations. Its moral sense. That it has made me feel more empathic, which is the highest purpose of fiction. When they gave it the Booker Prize, it took the judges about 20 seconds to reach consensus on it as the winner, which seems about right. Gild the pages on this one.
Congrats to Vi Khi Nao!
Congrats go out to my friend Vi who just won three literary prizes from Brown!
Some of what the judges said: “Sensuous, comic, disturbing, compellingly imaginative prose, reminiscent of John Hawkes’ earliest work.”
“There are flashes and bursts of genius here, moments when language short-circuits or situations become exceedingly strange and even absurdly funny. But the writer’s authority always carries us onward.”
“Humorous, quirky writing — with an attention to formal considerations and playful perspectives.”
Read some of her poems online at elimae here and here. Buy her book here. Find her in the 2012 and 2011 editions of NOON. And hear her read three poems at Trigger Fish here, here, and here.
Also, I interviewed her on Monkfish Jowls. And Chris Higgs interviewed her at HTMLGiant.
And now you know everything about Vi Khi Nao.
“I have something to teach. Be like Sindbad. Venture forth! Embosom the waves, let your shoes be sucked from your feet and your very trousers enticed by the frothing deep. The ambiguous sea awaits, I told them, marry it!
There’s nothing out there, they said.
Wrong, I said, absolutely wrong. There are waltzes, sword canes, and sea wrack dazzling to the eyes.”
—Donald Barthelme
“Everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”—Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish.
Dear tumblr,
I hope you’ll indulge me one more post about my story Rainbow Fish.
1. The painting at the top of this post is Rainbow’s painting from the story, more or less. My first girlfriend/first love painted it for me. And she did cite The Little Prince on the back. She insisted that it was a heart. But…It does look like an upside-down tulip. (Ana says it’s a pink mouse and a leaf.)
2. Fish are weird to me. I grew up in the landlockingest part of Illinois and I swear for the first half of my life I thought of fish as those frozen, breaded rectangles that showed up during the Easter season.
3. When I was ten I wrote a “novel” about scientists and their crazy experiments.
4. I read a lot of comic books when I was young. I see their influence here. At the top of this post there’s an image from The MAXX #5, in which The Maxx is chased by his fears, all are named Dave, and he carries a bowl with a talking fish. Of course my story ends with a guy carrying a bowl with a talking fish—and I think the bowl might very well come from this comic, because the “hard sci-fi” thing to do, nay the sensible thing to do!, is to have the fish in a proper aquarium with filters and thermometers. The whole 10 yards. But this is “comic book sci-fi” (if it is sci-fi at all, that is). Another favorite comic of mine was Neil Gaiman’s Sandman with Delirium and her floating fish (which says to me, the fish, they are surreal, they are the stuff of dreams.) And I think the Babel Fish from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is in there a smidge as well. The idea that fish are concerned with communication.
5. Literary Influence: Frankenstein is referenced. So is Saint Exupery. I stole a line from Turgenev’s First Love. And a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish. You might think I took the whole thing from Bishop, but I didn’t read her poem until this weekend. (I’ll send $10 to whomever first finds the line from Turgenev or the one from Bishop.) (Not a joke.)
6. Drafts: There are three major versions of this story: The first draft from 2007. The MFA thesis draft in 2009. And this new version that I wrote over the past month.
6a. Before the new draft, I read The Art of Dramatic Writing by this crazy Hungarian named Lajos Egri. It’s written in a terrible 1940s American self-help style. It’s the book from which Andrew Stanton (director of Little Nemo) says he learned screenwriting. It helped me understand the main character’s motivations.
6b. I sent four different versions to Asymptote in the course of 4 weeks. Huge props to Asymptote editor Yew Leong Lee for putting up with this and commenting on all these drafts.
6c. I have posted the first draft online. It reads a little like Raymond Carver. The bad, early stuff from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Take a look if you want. It was the second story I workshopped as an MFA student. So compare the two drafts if you want to know what an MFA and a few years of reading and writing will do for you.
7. Playlist: Little Green by Joni Mitchell. Missing Persons by The Kinks. I Am the Cosmos by Chris Bell.
Gosh dang this journal is ambitious. Even after working on this project called Asymptote for a year and a half, I’m still amazed. I didn’t think it would hold together. I thought we should downsize. “Maybe we should just do poetry, fiction, and nonfiction,” I said after the first issue. But we press on: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, visual, criticism, and a rotating special feature. The whole thing is illustrated and the editors live on three different continents and never meet in person. I don’t know how the wheels haven’t come off.
And we give it away online. We’re insane.
(But please, if you enjoy, send us a tuppence. When clicking the donate links you can enter whatever amount you would like to donate.)
The April issue has my story Rainbow Fish (put down everything you’re doing and read it now, if you haven’t already!) in this issue’s Special Feature section, which is devoted to English fiction concerning the Unsaid.
I’m featured alongside my friend and teacher David Leavitt and his great, great story about a break-up, Route 80 (a short one! It won’t even take your entire coffee break.) This is a story that Asymptote’s head editor Yew Leong Lee has read hundreds of times and he feels it’s the story that most epitomizes the Unsaid.
Other things of note: I copy-edited the heck out of this translation of an interview with the editors Poetry Now, a journal from Taiwan. At the link you’ll find a slideshow to pages from Cross It Out, Cross It Out, Cross It Out, Poetry Now’s latest issue (and art gallery show!) of this eccentric journal. The gallery features poetry formed by crossing out newspaper pages, magazine articles, books, and even a sofa. It’s the most-read article in this issue so far, for good reason.
Other things of note: Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s story Like Bats; a play from Japanese writer Masataka Matsuda called Like a Butterfly, My Nostalgia; Lennox Raphael’s profile of Jens Olav Magnussen (a poet who doesn’t publish, only performs) has an infectious voice and is a joy to dip into and read a little of; and if you like poetry, this one is recommended by the new lit journal District and this set of three is the most read poetry in the issue so far.
Enjoy, Enjoy, Enjoy!
My story RAINBOW FISH in the new Asymptote.
If you’ve never read any of my stories before, this is a good place to start. If you have, this will remind you of why you like me.
I saw Amelia Gray read from THREATS last night at Prairie Lights in Iowa City. Afterwards she said, “You should come to this poetry reading, Anthony.” And after that she said, “You should come get drinks with us.” And after that, “Would you drive me to my hotel in Cedar Rapids?” And I said Yes, yes, yes! Anything Amelia told me to, I would do, like she’s Mary Poppins or Maria the governess. (Brown paper packages!)
Excerpt:
“The tape on the package was striped with waxed string. David dug his fingernails underneath the perimeter of the tape and clawed at it. He didn’t want to go to the kitchen for a knife, and he spent an extra piece of time examining the entire package to find the loose end that could be pulled up. Inside the package was a Styrofoam carton, sealed with another kind of thick tape. A receipt was attached to the top of the lid, noting a cremation charge of $795, a box charge of $25, and a shipping charge of $20.95.
“The package measured a few feet square. It was pockmarked with red stickers printed with the image of a broken wineglass. The return address was of a funeral home in town. David placed the package on the coffee table between Franny’s cooking magazines and a stack of old newspapers. Some of the crosswords in the newspapers had been completed weeks earlier, perhaps months. Franny would read the news, and David would complete the crosswords. David took the newspapers into the basement and stacked them in a far corner.” (First chapter of THREATS: A Novel)
“People will say Camus died too young; he did not have time to finish. But it is not How long, it is not How much; it is, simply What. When the door shut for him, he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death, is hoping to do: I was here. He was doing that, and perhaps in that bright second he even knew he had succeeded. What more could he want?” —William Faulkner in an obituary for Albert Camus who died in an automobile crash at the age of 46.
Quick Fiction has come to an end, sadly, and the editors are currently closing out their remaining issues for $4.00 each with free shipping. I just got my stack of issues in the mail. (And I have a story in numbers 17 and 18!!)
Above is a story called FLOWER by DIANE WILLIAMS from Issue 10. It’s one of my favorite “short shorts” or “flash fictions” or “short pieces” or “whisper tales” or “zip zingers” or whatever they might be called.
Warning: Don’t look at the above image if you don’t want to see a nipple.
The new issue of Asymptote is out! I was on the sidelines for this issue because I was working overtime when it was being put together, but I did work with a writer on this interesting piece that compares Vikram Seth’s 1400-page English novel A Suitable Boy to its Hindi translation, and the possible influence Bollywood had on the translation. (Hint: all the sex and the gays are gone.)
The real highlight is the special feature on Taiwan which our founder/lead editor Yew Leong Lee spent four months assembling on the ground in that country. The issue’s cover and the illustrations throughout are from Legend Hou Chun-Ming, an artist one on the editorial termed the “Taiwanese Keith Haring.” Perhaps if Keith Haring were from hell he’d make things like what you can see in this slideshow of Chun-Ming’s art based on Chinese religious symbolism.
In addition to that, there’s plenty of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama… and it even fits in your pocket*!
*smartphone required
In 2010 Mark Baumer walked across the entire United States (from Georgia to California) which he documented on his tumblr, The Baumer. This year he’s writing 50 novels. On Sunday he asked Tom Hanks for $50,000 dollars to cover costs for that project. Tom Hanks declined. So now he’s asking the rest of us for $50,000 on Kickstarter. He sent me this exclusive excerpt from his novel I Only Hang Out With International Couples, which is one of the fifty, to share with you.
The heat in Richard’s bedroom turned everything brown. He put on a beige raincoat and walked to a tanning salon.
Richard did not feel comfortable going inside the tanning salon so he pressed his face on the tanning salon and looked inside. His breath fogged up the window. Richard drew on the glass with his finger. The drawing began to wrinkle and bubble. A woman came out of the tanning salon and told Richard not to breathe on the windows. She had nice fingernails.
A bus stopped near the tanning salon. A man and a blond woman climbed off the bus. The man pulled a piece of gum out of his arm pit. The blond woman was already chewing gum. The two of them chewed each other’s gum for a few minutes until the man said, “I have to pee.” The blond woman said, “You should pee on that man in the beige raincoat.” The man asked Richard if he could pee on him. Richard shrugged and looked away while the man peed on his beige raincoat.
The man who peed on Richard ended up going to the movies with the blond woman. Richard followed them and watched their faces be tender to each other inside the movie theater. After the movie the man and the blonde woman went to an amusement park and played inside a room filled with the thought of children laughing until they made bad smells. Richard ate some cotton candy and watched the man and the blond woman make bad smells inside the thought of children’s laughter. When the man and the blond woman got home they ate hummus and sat on the couch. They watched the evening news, three episodes of an old sitcom, and a television court drama before they went in the bedroom. When they were both naked the man pointed at Richard who was standing outside their bedroom window, breathing on the glass. The man opened the bedroom window. Richard began to crawl inside, but the man peed on him so Richard stopped climbing in the window and went home.
A few weeks later Richard saw the blond woman at the fitness center. He waved at her. She was touching a machine that Richard didn’t know how to use. The blond woman stopped touching the machine Richard didn’t know how to use and walked over to where Richard had been laying on the ground doing his stomach movements. The blond woman said her name was Jenny and that she was married to a patent attorney who liked to pee on other men. Richard apologized for standing outside of her bedroom window while he husband was peeing. Jenny laughed and said, “My husband probably wouldn’t like it if he knew I was talking to you.” Richard tried to think of something funny to say, but couldn’t so he said, “I would like to eat your husband’s vegetables.”
When they got to Jenny’s house she said her husband would be home late and showed Richard a green pepper that her husband probably would have eaten. Richard asked if he could wash it off before eating it. Jenny pointed at the kitchen sink. Richard washed the green pepper and then went in the living room. He took off all his clothes and sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet while he ate the green pepper. Some of the green pepper seeds fell on the floor. Richard asked Jenny if her husband would be mad when he found green pepper seeds in the living room. She ignored his question and asked why he was so pale. He didn’t say anything and put his clothes back on. Jenny asked Richard if he wanted to see her husband’s collection of mannequins. Richard said he didn’t because he was tired and wanted to go home.
Postcard to Padgett Powell.
My year in books
I found quite a few books to be earthshakingly good this year, many more so than usual. I don’t know if this means it was the books that were better or if it was I who had become a better reader. I am of the perhaps mistaken notion that it is the reader that creates the book through reading, so I would be inclined to say that I had evolved in the past year, and that after one-third of a century I’m finally realizing how amazing a book can be.
The best new novel I read was the Dalkey Archive’s translation of The Truth About Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. There is an excerpt and a review of this book in the latest issue of Asymptote (here: http://bit.ly/uFyuno). The excerpt is stunning.
The freshly reissued The Train by Georges Simenon (Melville House), is one that I have given away two copies of so far. This short French novel tells the story of an unexpected love affair on a train full of people fleeing their hometowns as Nazi tanks encroach.
I first read The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa (Pantheon) this spring and it has firmly affixed its place as one of my two or three favorite novels of all time. Di Lampedusa writes with incredible humor and insight, which makes the story of a dying 19th century Italian aristocracy alluring even today.
I just finished reading a 700 page manga by Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka titled Ayako (Vertical). Tezuka’s work ethic (like Simenon’s) had very few peers and it’s easy to get lost in the enormous worlds he created. Ayako is a family drama set in post-WWII Japan that skirts the line of the perverse.
There were three great non-fiction books that came out this year that I had a chance to read. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon) provided some much-needed context for our information-based society.
Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland (Atlas), a well-written biography of the media theorist, tread on similar ground while revealing a surprisingly spiritual side to McLuhan.
And Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster) was a worthy read and may convince you of the value of psychedelics, intuition, and following your own path.
