We Live Here Now, I Guess
We Live Here Now, I Guess
Hello! I am still arranging the furniture around here, so everything is probably going to be a bit weird until I do. But here I am, and here you are, so we may as well enjoy ourselves. I'm doing a terrible job of letting anyone know that I'm writing ruminative emails again, but if you would like to let anyone know, by all means do that thing. I might not have furniture yet, but I do have a small stack of paper cups, so the option is available to us to make this thing a party. (Not doing this is also fine, don't worry. My plan is still to be quiet for a bit before being loud.)
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I do actually have book news this time! It is that the paperback edition of The Dark Between The Trees is officially out on October 10th (US)/October 12th (UK)! That's really soon!
To celebrate the occasion, I am building a fort in my living room from my newly arrived and extremely pretty copies, and waggling my eyebrows at a few local bookshops. Everyone on this mailing list at the moment has read it already, so let's skip the sales pitch and go straight to the high five. Literature in the World!
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Last October, one week before the hardback edition of TDBTT came out, I unexpectedly lost my job when my beloved weird old cinema, the Edinburgh Filmhouse, closed its doors. A cinema is a great place for a writer to spend a lot of time, and over five years it provided me with a weird and wonderful diet of stories - successful and unsuccessful, firmly on and firmly off the beaten track - as well as a collection of really interesting people to talk to, listen to, soak up the opinions of, argue with. The timing of its unexpected closure was very weird for me personally - there are a whole lot of emotions running pretty high when your debut novel comes out, even without the sudden disappearance of a personally beloved artistic and cultural institution/income source! - and I know I'm not the only person who has had a lot of Feelings to sort through out of the end of it.
A year on from that, nearly, and it looks like some of the former staff have a pretty good shot at opening it back up. Bring on the feelings! If they can get it off the ground, this would be so fantastic. You don't know what you're missing until you find it, and sometimes you find it in a tiny screening of a film you'd never heard of until an hour ago, with three other people at 1pm on a Thursday. This is an experience I wish for as many people as possible.
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A serious strategist's take on the Barbie film. Because taking silly things seriously is one of the best things you can do with art.
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To make a bizarre segue from that, I've been thinking recently about the things you can do with art. What's thrown it into focus is this, which is Spanish novelist Javier Marías talking about Vladimir Nabokov:
He [Nabokov] got annoyed with people who praised art that was 'sincere and simple', or who believed that the quality of art depended on its simplicity and sincerity. For him, everything was artifice, including the most authentic and deeply felt emotions, to which he himself was not immune.
That's from Marías's book Written Lives, translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa in 2006.
So. Back up. I love reading writers having Opinions about other writers, and Written Lives is a super example of it - a series of short essays on the lives of some of Marías's favourite writers. He's catty about a few of them ("Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced of his own importance, which is an agreeable way to go through life for those who manage to believe such a thing"), and a lot of the time he just seems to be delighted by the bonkers way some creative people have lived their lives. (He also - last parenthesis for a bit I promise - talked me into reading some Isak Dineson, which I am currently doing and who, with love in my heart, is so far off her rocker she's practically in orbit.)
But we're talking about Nabokov, and how much I disagree with him, which is usually quite a bit, and today is even more than usual. I'm chewing over something about verisimilitude in art, which no doubt I'll throw at you in email form at some point in the next few months, but for now I think where I'm sitting with it is: of course good art can be baroque, it can be big and complicated and expansive and messy. Of course it doesn't have to be sincere and simple and try to describe the world exactly as it is, in as clean strokes as possible. Of course fiction is in some way artifice - the sort of thing we sometimes tongue-in-cheek describe as "lying for money", although artifice and lies aren't the same thing. But when I think about all the art I've loved - written fiction or anything else - and all the stuff that's resonated with me, the thing it all has in common is something I can only describe as an observational quality. It's trying to describe something true - even if it's doing it obliquely, even if it's heavily metaphorical, even if the truth is not in the situation but in the characters, the emotions, the understanding of what it is like to be somewhere like that.
Which is to say, fiction is artifice, but I always find myself thinking of it as trying to describe something outwith itself, something that already exists.
Which (I think) is to say, its success depends on a bedrock foundation of sincerity.
I am not immune to authentic and deeply-held emotions either. This is all very much a matter of personal taste.
Where were we? Taking silly things seriously, because it's a good thing to do with art. Freezing self-consciously and questioning our own taste because Vladimir Nabokov understands that it's not real, man, you don't understand, it's all made up. Like bitcoin, and the Holy Spirit, and Tuesday. (This is all shameless character assassination, because Nabokov died in 1977 and can't argue back. He lives only in Artifice now.) My point is that sincerity is actually a great thing to do with art, and when the sincerity isn't there you - Audience You - can smell it like horses can smell indecision. My other point is that sincerity and artifice are not opposite, and that deploying artifice in support of something sincere or true is also good actually.
I read Pale Fire in June. Peak fuckin artifice, is what it is: a 1000-line poem in iambic pentameter, and 150 pages of increasingly deranged footnotes, so that you're flipping back and forth between pages the whole time, reading between the lines in several different ways as Nabokov nests lies inside euphemisms on top of deliberate omissions. But it feels, it feels, like you feel when you're reading multiple accounts of history. It feels like you feel when, I don't know, you watch the director's commentary of a pretty good film and the director is completely out of their tree and also thought they were making a totally different film. You need multiple bookmarks for Pale Fire. You stick your fingers in the pages and flip back and forth. There's an index at the back and it's wild and passive-aggressive and it also leaves bits out. This is not a book for choosing the Kindle edition. But it captures that extremely obscure feeling perfectly - and if the deepest, most foundational point of art isn't to be able to capture obscure feelings, then I'd like to know what it is.
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That's about how I get into stories, though. I was talking to a friend a while back, a writer friend, and I said that some people seem to talk about either plot or character being their way into a story. False dichotomy, I always think, but some people like that sort of thing. And then there are the Wildcard Types who insist that their way in is the fundamental ideas they want to explore - your classic "I write to find out what I think", or my favourite variation on that which is - I'm paraphrasing here - Octavia Butler saying she knew what she thought, but she wrote to find out if there were any circumstances where she might be wrong.
What about you? I asked him. What's your way in? And he said, more or less, that mostly he liked to put a guy in a situation and see what happened.
That's art-from-artifice, I suppose, isn't it? Whereas I definitely conceive of telling stories as trying to describe or contextualise a feeling or an atmosphere or a reaction that already exists outside of me.
Either way, I think we would both agree that taking silly things seriously is a great use of time and imaginative capability.
The Barbie film was fun, and Ken would have done much better with his revolution if he had built up a secret police, or at least taken basic advantage of an informer network. Here endeth the Nabokov Wank.
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I put the Book News up top because I'm excited about it, so there's no more down here! You made it! Here's a picture of my cat making a polite suggestion.
Barnett over and out.