Dani Shapiro, Hourglass

January 19, 2019 by Brian Fay in Reading

I can't talk well enough about this book. As with Deborah Levy's The Cost Of Living I just can't speak well beyond, "I love it." Both books are so beautiful, strong, and female that my talk feels like ridiculous mansplaining. However, I wrote Shapiro a letter and for lack of anything better share it here along with quotes I pulled from the book.

Just go read everything by Dani Shapiro, then let's get together to talk. And read Deborah Levy's The Cost Of Living to see if it doesn't change your life.

Dear Ms. Shapiro,

Having just finished Hourglass (and waiting on delivery of Inheritance) I am impressed by the vitality of your book which seemed as I read to become a living thing — a vulnerable, beautiful, graceful, living being. It was of course that the character you created of yourself was so true, but I kept feeling as if the paper book had a beating, anxious heart and I have not been so affected by a memoir in some time.

As someone with a stable job that provides benefits, pays the bills, and builds toward a retirement, I'm strangely envious of the life you described living with your husband, the two of you moving through uncertainty with courage. It's not that you set out to commit some act of bravery; you’ve simply committed to the writing and to a life together. Your book is a testament to bravery. It's not meant as a feel-good tale. No, it's simply true. That's what I admire about it and about you.

That truth is lending me courage to move forward. I'm too am fortunate enough to have a strong spouse who takes care of things. She is so good for me. Twenty four years.

As a teacher, I hear time to time that some student appreciated my class or think of me as having helped them. That's fine but what really matters to me is when a student remembers something they read or wrote that changed them. The best moments are when a student comes back realizing that their trajectory was altered half a degree and over time that has taken them to some new place they would not have otherwise found.

I loved your book and savored the artistry of your sentences. The structure of the book was graceful, intricate, poetic. That's all good, but the big thing is that your book shifted my trajectory. A subtle shift but I feel it for sure. I'm moving toward a new place I can’t yet find on the map, but I'm ready to explore.

Thank you for moving me. I look forward to reading Inheritance and continuing to be influenced by the power of your prose.

Sincerely yours,
Brian G. Fay

Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self.”

— Neitzsche, qtd in Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass (136)
(My answers: Writing, Music, Loving and Being Loved)

“I have been taken by surprise by the recent events of my life, but this can only be because I have not been alert to the signs that in retrospect intimate their directions. If I could tune in now, the future would be as legible as the past.” — Anne Truitt, qtd in Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass (140)

In crafting a work of fiction, at least in first draft, a writer’s got to have a kind of willful blindness to her own motivations. Why the knock at the door, the chance meeting, the near miss? The writer may not know, even as she proceeds. But when the self—not a fictional character—is the landscape of the story, we can’t afford to be blind to our own themes and the strands weaving through them. And so we must make a map, even aas the ground shifts beneath us.

This is, of course, not only a literary problem. (Hourglass, 33-34)

“You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information. (Hourglass, 127-128)

"I Used To Hurry A Lot, I Used To Worry A Lot"

January 19, 2019 by Brian Fay in Whatever Else

(I still worry but don't hurry so much)

Back when I had a forty-minute commute on I-81 South I used to drive really fast, pushing the car up past seventy and toward eighty, often going fast through terrible Upstate New York weather. I white-knuckled the wheel even in good conditions worrying that sirens and lights would appear in my mirror. The commute filled me with anxiety but each day I tried to shave a few seconds off the drive. It seemed necessary to get there fast and faster.

One day I did math in my head as I often do when I'm driving. How much time, I wondered, was I saving by going seventy-five instead of sixty-five? I thought about it from Lafayette to Tully, but the numbers were all wrong. I figured it again through the wind shear roaring across the flat straight-away in Preble, getting the same results but not believing them. I couldn't possibly be saving only six minutes. No way. That couldn't be right. At school I worked it out on paper, incorporating the fact that I'm not on the highway the whole time and found I was saving at most only four minutes. That was the sum total return on my anxiety and risk-taking.

I slowed down the next day.

Later I figured out that my car gets its best mileage around sixty miles an hour. I found the right lane and let traffic pass me by. The first day going slowly I had a thought which got me laughing: Why the hell am I hurrying to get to a job I don't like? I mean really. I asked the question out loud alone in the car and laughed for a mile. It was easy to go slowly after that.

Since my first teaching job I've come to school way early so I can enjoy peace and the quiet. I love being in school alone. Sometimes the hall lights aren't even on. I've kept to that tradition even though just walking into my school pulls my mood down no matter how buoyant I hope to be. It's not like I need to be there early or that I'm doing school work. Most times I'm writing or reading. There's no need to go in early and every reason to stay. This morning, despite anxiously feeling I was late, I sat on our couch, opened my book, and read for twenty minutes instead of going in early.

Like my slow drive, a question came that made me happy. This time I smiled instead of laughing because by I'm no longer shocked at the revelation: Why would I leave my book early for a job I don't like? I mean really.

I can't quit the job yet, but I can confine it to the smallest space necessary and lock it up. Driving fast and leaving home early allow the job to take up too many hours on the clock of my life. There are better ways to spend my precious time and invest in a better life.

Friday morning because I left "late" I was still on the couch reading Jeff Tweedy's memoir when one of my daughters came down to get ready for school. A sleepy teenager, she didn't have much to say, but I kissed her head and there's no way to measure the impact that had on my day. At the job I still felt the warmth of loving her carrying me through to quitting time.

Of late I'm asking how do I want to live this life and at what pace? Sometimes it amounts to almost nothing. Friday, I folded the blanket after reading on the couch. I enjoyed taking a moment to fold and slow down. I felt no need to hurry. Talk about being on time.

I don't want to be late to my own life just to arrive early at my job. There's time to slow, to read, and fold a blanket. There is time to kiss my daughter's head, to say good morning, to feel love in my life, and to go write about it.

Jeff Tweedy, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)

January 18, 2019 by Brian Fay in Reading

I picked up Jeff Tweedy's memoir on the advice of Austin Kleon. I was reading Robert Galbraith and then a YA book about the Holocaust and finishing those I looked at Tweedy but set it aside for Dani Shapiro's Hourglass (which is INCREDIBLE!!!) and thought I wouldn't end up reading Tweedy at all. What was a rock and roller going to tell me? Wasn't it probably ghost written anyway? I finished Hourglass and ended up picking up Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) to read myself to sleep until I could find something good.

I read 89 pages and was really tired the next morning, damn it. This book is good. It's really, really good.

Tweedy talks about addiction and music, but that's not what got me. He gets into being creative and how he works. He talks about how to be an artist, how he works on his own, how he has come to believe in himself, how he works with others, his compromises and things on which he won't compromise, the ways in which he balances family and a creative life, and on and on and on.

This book gave me hope and direction as a writer.

Oh, and he is funny too. There's one bit where he says he needs to kill and eat the heart of Dave Grohl that had me laughing for good little while.

Here are some excerpts that worked on me:

That moment was just as important as the day I finally pulled the neglected guitar out of the closet and forced myself to figure out how chords worked, or found the courage to walk onstage and sing in front of a basement full of strangers, or put words and notes together to make a song that hadn't existed before. For any of that to happen, I had to envision what it would feel like to be that person, to be somebody who had accomplished all of these things already. (42)

Learning how to play guitar is the one thing I always look back on with wonderment. I'm reminded of "What ifs?" every time I pick up a guitar. Where would I be? I have sort of a survivor's guilt about it that makes me want it for everyone. Not the "guitar" exactly, but something like it for everybody. Something that would love them back the more they love it. Something that would remind them of how far they've come and provide clear evidence that the future is always unfolding toward some small treasure worth waiting for. At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves. That's what I wish. That's what the guitar became for me that summer and is to me still. (65-66)

Too much ambition gets a bad rap in my line of work. If you grew up in the late twentieth century loving or wanting to be a part of the punk or indie rock scene, you were expected to at least give the appearance of not caring and giving the least possible amount of effort. Of course, it's a lie. Does anyone think Devo just happened with minimum effort?! The Ramones?! Pavement?! I'd be willing to bet every band you've ever heard of worked hard and had crazy ambition. Maybe it went away at some point or they got content to coast, but trust me, at some point they worked their asses off and dreamed grand and triumphant dreams. Listen, it's a cop-out to hid ambition and pretend aspirations are shameful. It's a way to protect yourself. Preemptive sour grapes.

Here's an aspirational thought I've had about what I do that kind of turns Chuck Close's quote inside out. Sometimes I think it's my job to be inspired. I work at it. That's what I do that most resembles work. It seems to me that the only wrong thing I could do with whatever gifts I've been given as a musician or an artist would be to let curiosity die. So I try to keep up with other people's creative output. I read and I listen. I'm lucky that's what I get to do with my time -- keeping myself excited about the world and not being discouraged when it loses its spark. By now I've been doing it long enough to say with some confidence that if you can remain open to it and you're not afraid to call it work sometimes, inspiration is limitless. (169-170)

A band in the nineties wanting to get any attention at all also had to make videos. I wasn't interested in being a visual artist or selling music that way, but I also wasn't a puritan who was adamant abut not selling music that way. The way I looked at it, Bob Dylan and other songwriters far more talented than me had done promotional videos. So who did I think I was, a fucking artist? My line in the sand over what I will and won't do has always been really instinctual, and I've tried to keep it separate from ideology. My goal was to not put any unnecessary impediments in the way of being heard. By refusing to do a video, you're basically telling the people trying to help your band be heard that they don't know what they're doing. From early on, we erred on the side of letting them do their job. As long as their job wasn't interfering with the music, we tried to trust them. We signed a contract to make records and deliver them, that was our job. And their end of the bargain was to sell them, that was theirs. If they were staying out of our way, why would we stand in theirs? (183-184)

(This has me wondering about my stance on social media. Tell you what, when a publisher tells me to get back on Twitter and Facebook to promote our publishing deal, I'll do it. Deal?)

The Thing We Love & The Edge

January 18, 2019 by Brian Fay in Writing

Learning how to play guitar is the one thing I always look back on with wonderment. I'm reminded of "What ifs?" every time I pick up a guitar. Where would I be? I have sort of a survivor's guilt about it that makes me want it for everyone. Not the "guitar" exactly, but something like it for everybody. Something that would love them back the more they love it. Something that would remind them of how far they've come and provide clear evidence that the future is always unfolding toward some small treasure worth waiting for. At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves. That's what I wish. That's what the guitar became for me that summer and is to me still.

—Jeff Tweedy, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), 65-66

I really like Jeff Tweedy's book for many of the same reasons I liked Springsteen's and each of Austin Kleon's. All have in common that they give me hope and push me to do more. I didn't feel like writing when I started this (I wanted to curlin a ball or bolt from school) but I've made it my job to do this work. There's no pay yet but I've set myself to creating at least one thing every day. Creating is a vehicle, like a bicycle I'm pedaling down the road. If I stop pedaling I get too comfortable and forget pedaling. Eventually the bike slows and I come to a stop by keeling over.

Last night I watched high school kids play instruments and sing. Really though I only watched one kid (mine) and listened for her voice. She loves to sing, loves it completely. During her chorus's second song she and another student who can project from here to Guam rocked me back. I could hear her voice within that group, hear it stand out and then blend in. Tweedy might say that her signing voice loves her back more even than she loves it.

Most students were still on-book but music comes easy to my girl. Dance comes slowly and is always difficult, but music is right there, low hanging fruit. Still, she has to work at it. She sings in chorus, in the musical, at home, and with a voice teacher. There are things she can't stand about how things are run in the department (I sympathize and agree) but her only question about her voice is what can we do next together?

Leo Babauta talks about practicing on the edge. I like that. To get better, to grow, I have to push myself out on the edge. There are limits but most practice should be on the edge. I write Morning Pages and in my Writer's Notebook but most of my practice of late is here, in public.

When I ask students to share I know they feel it's like dancing naked on the cafeteria table. It's vulnerable. No matter how many times we agree we're judging the writing not the writer, there's no denying who is on the table and the state of their undress.

But getting up on that table, tastefully dressed of course, is a must.

My daughter is moving out on the edge more and more. There was a time she was good enough to go easy and still stand out. Times have changed. She has to work and do more interesting stuff, things that stretch her and require learning new skills including how to work the complicated politics of a high school music/drama department.

It's not like she and I will master the edge. It keeps receding. To paraphrase Father John Misty, there are horizons that just forever recede. I'm doing alright with the blogging and building an audience. I'll keep working on that, but I'm moving toward the next edge now, feeling my way one word at a time. Tweedy might suggest that the pen loves me back the more I love it. Yeah, that sounds right. Now I want to find out just how far we can go. I'll get out on that edge and not worry too much about getting cut.