Play Dead—so that your eyes will stay open

To die your whole life [he is quoting Kafka]. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly.

Jeffrey Eugenides offered this pearl of wisdom in a speech give to the 2012 Whiting Award winners.  It's printed in the New Yorker and well worth a read.  He was talking to up-and-coming writers.  Writers who have been published, are young and probably have a long life ahead of them.  Musicians, actors, directors of all ages could also benefit from what he has to say.   

Don't listen to what others tell you. Don't let it cloud your creativity. Write for yourself.  Create as if you were dead or dying.  You wouldn't care what anyone thought at that point.  Kennedy Center Honorees Led Zeppelin and David Letterman have followed this path.  Do you think Zeppelin or Letterman care what others think of their art?  I don't and that is what makes them great.  Dance all you want to a different drummer. 

Eugenides closes with the line that should be in the forefront of every creative person's head:
Play dead—so that your eyes will stay open.

A Modern Marriage Plot

College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

That sums up my college years. I graduated a year after the characters in this book. Instead of dropping the names of obscure authors as they do (probably my only criticism of the book), we were citing bands like Protex and The Beat. To further that, Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t mention much music, but when he does it’s obscure: there was a guy wearing a Plasmatics T-shirt.

The marriage plot was the framework for the novels of Jane Austen and writers of her time. In most cases it would involve a very smart woman, usually too smart for most men, a love interest who maybe all wrong for the character although he/she is in love with that person, madness, the search for spirituality and some family secret that changes a person(s).

Eugenides hits the mark on his modern Marriage Plot. In this case the heroine is actually Mitchell. He’s the one with the most sense, whose heart is longing for Madeleine. She of course is in love with Leonard, the womanizing member of her semiotics class. Leonard has a past that haunts him. Jane would be proud.

The Marriage Plot is a joy as it’s so well written. I don’t know first hand what it’s like to deal with a manic-depressive person but Eugenides uses language that put me in the head and heart of his character.

The solitude was extreme because it wasn’t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.

After reading that I felt a sense of isolation and the struggle of swimming against the tide. The author gets you there. Authors of most of the current fiction I have been reading do not take the time to develop their characters. Plots are lacking and novels are more situation driven. I was thrilled that this book did not go there.

As much as I wanted to shake some sense into Madeleine at times, Leonard is not a complete bad guy. In an interview with Leonard Lopate, Eugenides said originally Leonard Bankhead was the bad boy and then he started sympathizing with him.

It’s amazing to me how well Eugenides got the early 80’s college experience so right. There is a lot of searching and a lot of questioning. For me there was a lot more music, good friends and trips off campus also.

As in a good marriage plot, his characters flirt, fall in love, are in denial and then there’s a revelation. That’s why I liked them so much.

The Low Energy of The Writer's Writer

I've been an avid reader of the New Yorker for years and finally made it to an event at this past weekend's New Yorker Festival.  The Writer's Writer featured three authors whose works I have read and enjoyed: Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex), Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) and Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth).



The eye opener from the evening was Jhumpi's comments on an author's first piece.  “Everybody writes their first book with a certain innocence, a purity of vision.”  There are no guidelines when writing a first book, no pressures to write a certain way or to answer to your publisher, editor or PR person.  She believes a writer's writer keeps that purity of vision throughout his/her career.

Her comments would ring very true for lots of recording artists, especially now, as musicians can make records for and by themselves.  I've heard some musicians say "I only had one record in me."  A song writing paralysis sets in when more is demanded of them.  There is a sense of innocence that is lost.  Does that mean that writers (and musicians) who can hang on to that innocence and purity end up in obscurity? Not necessarily, but the writers did seem to think that more times than not, the writer's writer is not selling a lot of books.  I think of a musician's musician as one who can play anything with anyone.  More times than not, that person is usually a side musician, not the one selling millions of records. They are making a really good living, but not in the limelight.  Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker and the moderator of the panel relayed a description she once heard of a writer's write as "someone who lives at or below the poverty line."  This elicited a chuckle from the audience.

An audience member asked how does an author deal with having either a screenwriter or a director take his/her work and morph it into something else.  Jeffrey said you have to realize that they are going to make it their own.  He said a director was true to his writing (Virgin Suicides) and another used the first 20 minutes of the movie as the basis of his story and then went from there. He said that was necessary as he wrote a short story (Baster) and they continued it. 

With the exception of Jeffrey, the night was low on energy.  It could be the late start time of 9:30pm. If it were a concert, the time would have made sense, but for writers discussing  writers, it's late.  Deborah Treisman could have moved the evening along a little faster, but she was courteous in letting the authors complete their thoughts.  I also think the topic did not lend itself to elaborating.  Once an authors stated their definition of a writer's writer and listed their favorite authors (each panelist read from their favorite author) , there wasn't much to play off of.

I've seen plenty of authors speak about their own works and it's been very engaging.  Maybe when authors speak of others works, it doesn't resonate the same way.

Of Note: Jeffrey's new book, The Marriage Plot which comes out  on the 11th, has a publisher who decided a Times Square Billboard was necessary.