“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.

Permalink

These are images from the website for the Infinity Burial Project, which was created by Jae Rhim Lee. She’s creating a burial method that encourages natural decomposition through the use of mushrooms. This is in contrast to normal contemporary funerary methods that either release toxins through cremation (all the mercury from dental fillings winds up in the sky) or by attempts to preserve the body with formaldehyde and other poisons. (There is a Ted Talk with her on the subject here.)

I’m excited about this for two reasons. One is that when I was younger I decided that such a method would be akin to reincarnation—that we came from living matter (top soil) and that we could return to that state, to be born again as something else. 

The other is that I’m becoming fervently opposed to the monoculture and the homogenization of society. Not only does it produce boring people and boring art, but it’s also damaging to the planet (and ourselves) since the things that they succeed in selling us to replace our local foods and traditions (formaldehyde-stuffed corpses; corn-fed beef [and high-fructose-corn-syrup-filled food]) are terrible. 

I had a crisis over the past year over what to write (ie which direction, if any, to take my art), but recently it’s been settled. I was given a large book by eco-anarchists to read a few months ago. Its conclusion is that all civilization needs to end and that humans need to return to indigenous, hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The book was against traditional environmentalists who believe that the planet can be saved through legislation and cooperation. Instead war (literal war led by an underground) should be waged on industrial society, until it’s destroyed and everyone is living as man lived 10,000 years ago, with some axes and spears. Which is, they think, “our only hope for survival”. 

This was daffy to me, although I liked the boldness of the idea. It’s not often that one, after 33 years of reading, can come upon something quite so radical. But it’s impractical. 64% of the world’s population has access to clean water and ‘improved sanitation’ (toilets of some sort) according to water.org. I suspect many more rely on agriculture to some degree (if not completely). Both farms and water works are basics of civilization. I don’t think very many who rely on either are going to give them up just so they can live as hunter-gatherers. So I think any such anarchist movement will be squashed by either the government or by the people that make up civilization themselves. (This eco-anarchism also allows the eco-anarchist to feel superior to other environmentalists, since who can trump them in purity? Certainly not Al Gore who wishes for us to be able to keep our lifestyles.)

But still, I was challenged and appalled by all the corn and soybeans being grown in the world when there are so many other things that could be grown (eg. fruits and vegetables that are “outrageously called ‘specialty crops’”). There’s also so many different things that we could be eating. When I became a vegetarian years ago I was able to reject meat because I had a very narrow view of it, one filled with turkey sandwich and McDonald’s cheeseburgers. I was 20-something at the time and I decided that I could legitimately live without those things since they had been done to death. Later, when I picked up a French cookbook filled with offal (mmm, brains) and oysters and steak tartare, I realized that I was missing more than I thought I was, and that there was more in the world than I had been sold. 

So I’ve decided if I’m going to do anything with my life or in my art, it’s going to be striving after the death of the monoculture, because that’s one thing I can do. Is it the most ideal path for saving the planet or our society? Probably not, but who wants to be in that race? But listen, blessed are those who are not buying into the status quo, who reject the messages of the advertisers and the managerial class, those who build mushroom death suits, for within them lies the antidote to the mass human. 

Permalink

VKN said: “You disappeared off your blog for awhile.”

Okay! Here’s an email I was writing (but didn’t finish or send [but which I’m finishing now to you, dear blog reader]) to my friend Kevin yesterday about American novels: 

I.

Have you read anything good from the US lately? I’m despairing. Yesterday I read the first two pages of the new Dennis Cooper—whom I’ve never read before (but have heard much about from the HTMLGiant camp)—which of course Blake Butler and Ken Baumann went gaga for, and which the product page for it has a Justin Taylor blurb (“a mindbending masterpiece”). But I found the beginning to be filled with inane bantering:

 ”Chateau Étage, as a corroded iron plaque leads the unsuspecting to believe, lies a multi-hour car ride from my loft in the Marais and near a small town whose hyphenated name I keep forgetting.

“The wooded property is vast enough to hold a hill of slight historical value and the makings of a river where the older son of  the chateau’s prior owner appears to have slipped, bashed his inebriated head against a rock, and drowned.

“It was seeing this boy’s picture and obituary in Le Monde that led me to case the home originally, and, according to a subtext, an alleged sighting of his ghost that caused his superstitious parents to put it on the market.” (The Marbled Swan, first page)

A lot here reminds me of shit I was writing at Florida [“hill of slight historical value“—so clever!] and other bits are borderline nonsense [“according to a subtext”? What does that mean?] Also what does the corroded iron plaque say? The name? That it’s multi-hour? (And why multi-hour? It’s not like the trip length would vary. Why not 2 hour? 3 hour?) Why are the readers of the plaque unsuspecting? It’s all language that’s supposed to sound neat but doesn’t mean anything…

II. 

I also picked up a book called Luminarium, which has good blurbs (“dizzyingly smart and provocative” –Dave Eggers!) that made it sound like the kind of philosophical novel I tend to enjoy (see: Tinkers) about a man dealing with his twin brother being in a coma. (Blurb: “”A strikingly metaphysical novel that never dematerializes into misty cliches” –Washington Post) But as soon as I got it I knew it probably wasn’t good since it’s a billion pages long, which might be okay, but the writing is like this: 

“Visiting hours ended at ten, after which, not ready to go back to Brooklyn, Fred retraced what may or may not have been George’s route that night, zigzagging south and west, spending a noticeable percentage of his net worth on a vegetable-covered pizza slice on Second Avenue, trying not to think about the hydrogenated oils and preservatives and pesticides working their way into him. He passed by the Zeckendorf, of course, alert for short, vivacious blondes, and made the embarrassing mistake of nodding hello to the familiar-looking heft man in the blue security jacket, who was just then clocking out for the day.”

Who thinks about hydrogenated oils preservatives and pesticides working into them? When is “nodding hello” ever an embarrassing mistake? Is this book really about humans, I wonder? Both of these also seem overly gossipy to me—enraptured with details that don’t really matter (That damn hill of modest historical worth. That silly “noticeable percentage of his net worth”). 

III. 

Compare these with the beginning of the French novel The Truth About Marie: 

“Later on, thinking back on the last few hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain moment in the night—during a sudden heat wave in Paris, for three straight days the temperature reached thirty-eight centigrade and fell no lower than thirty—Marie and I were making love in Paris in two apartments a mere half mile apart, as the crow flies. We couldn’t have imagined at the night’s start, or later, or at any time for that matter, it was simply inconceivable, that we’d see each other that night, that before sunrise we’d be together, even for a brief moment in each other’s arms in the dark, staggering hallway of our apartment.” 

There’s no games or tricks here. The apartments are half a mile apart, not “a multi-minute walk” apart. Toussaint says what he means instead of forcing the reader to figure it out (no “according to a subtext” here). There’s no details given for the sake of stuffing in details (“in her apartment in which Jean Genet once wrote one of his plays and cost a considerable amount of her net income each month”) or sentences trying to be fancy or clever. 

Well, that’s two random American novels. Surely there’s something good by an American out there. My friend Ana suggested that I read Jonathan Franzen (whose fiction I’ve been avoiding). I kind of want to read Tezuka comics and Aldous Huxley books forever though. I’m welcome to any recommendations, either at monkfishjowls@gmail.com or via web here. 

Permalink