After having so much fun interviewing the poet Mary Ruefle via typewriter, I thought it would be fun to do it again. This time I interview another poet who writes essays that knock me out: Elisa Gabbert.
The reader approaching middle age
I’m turning 40 in a few months and trying not to think too much of it, but I am getting my bearings a bit.
Yesterday Elisa Gabbert tweeted, “I think I liked magazines more as a kid because the writing was by people older and wiser than me, with different generational interests. Now it’s just, like, writing by my friends, or people who could be? I’m supposed to pay for this? Lol”
I had a good laugh at this. It made me think that a good move at this age might be to start reading the NYTimes for Kids (which I already do) or Teen Vogue or AARP.
This would be the publication equivalent to Kevin Kelly’s advice, “When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.”
I do feel kind of lucky right now, to be in the middle: I have my kids and their friends for youth spies and for an elder perspective, I ride bikes twice a week with a 75-year-old who is still mad that Dylan went electric.
Everything changes, always, but I’m enjoying this age at the moment.
Fire and focus
One purpose of good writing is to make you not take the things in your life for granted. Two of my favorite writers have recently written about fireplaces.
Elisa Gabbert wrote an essay about wanting a house with a fireplace, a longing she says is “a form of homesickness.”
I love looking at a fire. If there’s a TV on in a bar, I’ve noticed, and there almost always is, the movement pulls your eye to it, no matter how boring what’s on is. A fire is the same, but a fire is never boring. It’s mysterious that it isn’t. Or maybe it’s not mysterious. It’s this miracle life-giving thing you can build in your house, the same thing cave people built in their caves.
Alan Jacobs wrote about the fireplace as a focusing point in a home: “Focus is a Latin word that means hearth — the fireplace that was both literally and metaphorically the center of the Roman household.”
The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson often says that our evolutionary descent predisposes us to be fond of certain actions, like throwing objects at other objects and sitting around a fire telling tales. The latter impulse, he believes, draws us to the movie theater, where we gather in the darkness facing a bright light and enjoy stories — but while that provides a certain form (or simulacrum) of communal connection, it’s the television that becomes the replacement for the family hearth….
When I decided to put our TV over the fireplace, I didn’t realize the symbolic heft of my decision. But one evening, when I mused that it would be easier to show a fireplace video from YouTube than actually build a fire, all the ironies suddenly came home to me.
While I love our pizza and a movie Friday night ritual in front of the TV, there is nothing like a good, real fire.
January has been full of cold(er) weather and grandparent visits, and one of my very favorite parts of each visit was building a fire and sitting around it.
As Elisa writes, it is never boring. It somehow brings out the best I everyone. One night my 10-year-old and spent a whole hour carefully rolling up newspaper into long tubes and throwing them on the fire and watching them burn.
One time when we were sitting around a campfire out in west Texas with the clear star-filled sky above us, Jules, then five years old, exclaimed, “It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!”
Whether you tell stories around it or not, every fire is a kind of story — there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.
At the beginning: the anticipation, the starting, the possibility. (See: Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, about a man who starts a fire every morning and sits and thinks.)
In the middle: the excitement of the crack and whip of the flames.
At the end: I love how fire gets really good when the logs burn up and the flames die down and what’s left is the hot coals, perfect for s’mores. (In his book In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki writes, “Without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost and with it the pleasure of family gatherings round the fire.”)
We love fire and we love using fire as a metaphor. (Most recently: Fire of Love.)
We speak of “the fire inside.” I have had trouble focusing lately, and it occurs to me just now, at this very moment, that maybe the reason I haven’t been able to focus is that I don’t have a fire inside.
Sometimes a fire is forced on us from the outside, as with a housefire or a wildfire. (In the writer’s life: a personal tragedy or triumph, a chance encounter, or merely the need for sustenance will light a fire under one’s ass, so to speak.)
But more often than not, our fires inside have to be built. They have to be started, and fed, and maintained.
And you can’t just dump wood in a big pile and expect it to burn. You have to be mindful of the structure of the pieces, to give them proper space and air.
Perhaps, instead of worrying about focusing, I need to worry about building a good fire.
I suspect if the fire is there, the focus will come.
Relocate your darlings
Looking at this manuscript by Jean-Paul Sartre, I was reminded of the writing advice, “kill your darlings,” which is widely attributed to Faulkner, but can be traced to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s lecture, “On Style,” from On the Art of Writing:
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
You hear this murderous advice all over the place: Kill your darlings.
Stephen King, in On Writing:
kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how to “kill your darlings.”
It’s time to kill. And it’s time to enjoy the killing. Because by killing, you will make something else even better live. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.
This is a very important point — like with gardening, when you cut dead things back, you encourage new growth — which is echoed by Mary Karr, who routinely throws out hundreds of pages:
I’ve just pitched out 150 pgs it took 3 years to write: NORMAL!!! Some pieces may make it into the new draft but am basically starting over. The old pages stood in line for me to write them. So despite having 0 pages, I’m closer than before
Some writers like Diana Athill suggest a gentler but still ruthless approach:
You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)
The trouble with murdering your darlings, as with all editing, is knowing what to cut out and what to leave in. (Writers employ editors for the same reason doomed pet owners leave euthanizing to their veterinarians.)
“The hardest thing is to kill your darlings,” says Paula Uruburu. “But you have to.”
Or someone has to.
I think “kill your darlings” has done more good than damage in the world, but I’m a much bigger fan of this advice, which is easier on my heart: Relocate your darlings.
“One of the most difficult tasks is to rigorously delete what has no function,” writes Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes.
This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passage into another document and tell yourself you might use them later. For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back to where it might fit. Of course, it never happens — but it still works.
One of my favorite writers, Eliza Gabbert, has built a whole revision strategy around this idea, which she summarizes as: “Keep your best line (or image or idea) and trash the rest.”
She calls this the opposite of the murder your darlings advice, and suggests starting a whole new piece around your darling:
Start a whole new file. (Or, if you write longhand, turn to a new page.) In other words, don’t just keep making changes to the same version. You need to be able to see your darling in a new context. This will also help you start fresh without feeling like you’ve abandoned your other lines – they’re not deleted, they’re not dead, they’re just sleeping in another file. You can always go back to them. (I’ve actually used the same line or idea or image, if I was really in love with it, in multiple published poems. There’s no law against self-plagiarism!)
This advice has saved me over and over again, and it can also lead to new work. I’ve chopped a whole section of darlings from one book only to have them fit beautifully into another.
And what is a blog if not the perfect place to put your murdered darlings? (David Markson once referred to the internet as “that first-draft world.”)
I think of it this way: not murdering the darlings, but relocating them, so you might re-home them later.
Ideas spread like the plague
A passage from Ted Gioia’s How To Listen To Jazz:
Strange to say, new art forms are similar to the plague or a virulent flu in how they spread. Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both. Densely packed populations, many individuals coming and going via land and waterways, an overheated mixture of people recently arrived from different locales, informal settings where they intermingle in close contact, a culture and environment that emphasize communal activities and get-togethers—these are nightmare conditions for anyone trying to stop an epidemic, but they are the same ingredients that can spur world-changing artistic revolutions.
Jazz, for example, emerged in New Orleans, “one of the unhealthiest cities in the world.” “The first jazz records were released shortly after the 1918 flu epidemic decimated the city.” But before that, the Renaissance emerged around the time the Black Death was spreading through Florence. Plagues in London around Shakespeare’s time. “We talk nowadays of cultural memes going viral, but this isn’t just a poetic way of speaking.”
“Influence and influenza in fact have the same etymology,” notes Elisa Gabbert in her essay, “The Great Mortality,” collected in her forthcoming book, The Unreality of Memory:
“Pandemic” sounds to me like automatic hyperbole, like “pandemonium,” but it’s fairly well defined in epidemiology: Unlike an “outbreak,” which affects limited people in a limited area for a short time, or an “epidemic,” which affects a larger number of people in multiple areas at the same time, “pandemics affect many people in many parts of the world at the same time.”
(It would be interesting to map artistic movements to these terms.)
I’m thinking now of maps of scenius, the networks or scenes that lead to artistic movements, and how much they resemble the maps of viruses spreading:
(Clockwise from top left: a page from Show Your Work!, a MoMA map of modernism, a screenshot of a video game called Pandemic, a Harper’s diagram of the romantic and sexual activity in a midwestern high school.)
Here is a diagram of the spread of SARS, taken from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. And an example from the same book, the cover of Cubism and Abstract Art:
