The Elegant Variation

LA EVENT

On Monday, November 21 — 7:30–9:00 p.m. — the Quetzal Quill Imix Bookstore will sponsor an evening of entertainment and literature by hosting The Quetzal Quill, a national collective of poets and writers on a mission to promote and share their literary works.

The guest writers are:

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, is a former Jones Lecturer at Stanford. She has received the Rona Jaffe Women Writers' Award and the Bernard F. Cooper Prize from The Paris Review.

Reyna Grande is the author of the forthcoming novel Across A Hundred Mountains. She was born in Mexico, educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently lives in LA, working on her second novel.

Miguel Murphy, author of A Book Called Rats, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he received the Swarthout Award and the University Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books, most recently the story collection Devil Talk and the children's book Benjamin and the Word. He is a Los Angeles based attorney with the California Department of Justice.

Your Host: Rigoberto González. González, founder and curator of The Quetzal Quill, is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and professor of English and Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of four books, most recently the bilingual children's book, Antonio's Card.

The authors' books will be available for sale.

Venue: Imix Bookstore
Address: 5052 Eagle Rock Blvd. , Los Angeles,90041
Ages: All ages
Admission: Free!
For more information call: 323-257-2512
Or visit: www.imixbooks.com

RIDE THE WARHORSE

I recently gave my Novel II students at UCLA an in-class exercise. Here’s the setup: two people ending a relationship, any relationship — husband and wife; brother and sister; employer and employee; lovers; friends. The students were to compose a few paragraphs in longhand (leaving generous spaces between the lines), dropping the reader down into an ongoing scene. They were to record only what the characters did and said, and maybe a little sensory description. No thoughts, no memories, no speculation, no analysis. The dialogue had to be about something other than breaking up, but there should be no doubt that a breakup was the subtext. Student stories are often filled with lines like “She was so sad, tears rolled down her face,” and this exercise is meant to relieve them briefly of that crutch. It’s the old warhorse dictum: Show, Don’t Tell.

When they were finished, everyone read their work out loud. Some of the scenes were so good, I felt that if submitted to an agent or editor, along with a query letter, a request to see more of the manuscript was all but guaranteed.

The students didn’t believe me. They didn’t like the exercise. They didn’t think what they’d written was any good. They wanted — and badly — to put in those thoughts and feelings and memories and analysis.

That’s what the spaces between the lines were for. I had them go back and study their scenes carefully and find exactly the right place for a little telling, a place where the character's thoughts would resonate without duplicating what had already been conveyed by the action and dialogue.

THE CLOTHES MAKE THE DOPE

One of the reasons my husband and I moved back to LA was so that he, after 25 years of lugging armoires up three flights of stairs (he was a furniture finisher) could pursue a new career. And, yes, “new career” and “LA” in the same sentence can mean only one thing: showbiz.

V is mainly interested in voice-acting, and to that end, he’s taken a year’s worth of classes. The last few months, he’s been fiddling with his demo CD, a brief showcase of his various talents. V can do sensitive PSAs (public service announcements), seductive up-market commercials, motocross-style screeching, friendly down-home sales-pitches, intelligent documentary narration (think National Geographic), and promos — that growling portentous voice heard in almost all movie trailers. (A fellow named Don La Fontaine about has that market sewed up. You’ve heard him: “In a world where … only one man can …” All day long, La Fontaine travels from studio to studio in a limo, because it doesn’t pay him to waste time parking.)

V  has gotten jobs here and there, and we are cynically optimistic about future possibilities. Last week, he completed his first on-camera acting job. On-camera was never part of the plan, but who says no to work? The client is a business school, the product a video promoting their programs. V had to buy a suit for the shoot, as his old one doesn’t fit anymore. During the lunch break, he left a message on my cell: "The clothes make the dope." Apparently, everyone at this place was smiling at him and holding doors open and wanting to talk to him, etc. Maybe now he'll give up wearing that ripped Simpsons T-shirt with bug-eyed Homer on the front.

Also last week, V’s sister's husband was in town, visiting from Dallas. J (the brother-in-law) does some kind of corporate consulting and Bono is a client. J was supposed to get us tickets to their concert, but it didn't work out. My husband did get to meet Bono, though. I asked him what Bono said, and V said, "He said, Nice to meet you." And what did you say? I asked, and V said, "U 2."

FRIVOLOUS FRIDAY

This drawing is the opening frame of a 20-second cartoon. Click and it should play.

My fantastic younger daughter emailed it to me. She's the Navy cryptographer — have I told you about her? No? What about the older girl, the brilliant law student in DC? No? Well, another time, perhaps …

SUBMISSION SEASON

Fall is traditionally the time of year when the grants and awards section of Poets & Writers is thick with opportunities to be recognized for your work. Some people feel that these things are a waste of time and/or money (if there’s an entry fee), but I’ve had good luck with them, and have even been known to encourage students to apply. I’ve also spent time on the dark side, serving as a judge for various contests and awards.

Here’s a little advice for y’all that is WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD: If the guidelines call for a maximum 20-page submission, choose your best 16-page story or chapter and give them that. If a proposal or synopsis is requested and the guidelines say to submit up to 5 pages, edit ruthlessly until yours is 2 pages or less.* You will earn your reader’s undying gratitude, which, from the supplicant’s point of view, is an excellent frame of mind for a judge.

*My editor once told me that the good sense implied by an intelligent 3-sentence proposal vaults the author to the top of the pile.

FESTIVAL OF GOLDBERGS

Speaking of Tod, he and brother Lee are appearing at 7:30 this evening in Santa Monica, at the Barnes and Noble on the 3rd Street Promenade. (Mark has already made note of this event, but if you can’t pimp your friends when given the opportunity, what’s the point of living?) Tod’s going to be reading from his excellent short-story collection, Simplify, Lee from his well-reviewed mystery, The Man with the Iron-on Badge. There will undoubtedly be additional shenanigans of one kind or another, so if you're in the neighborhood, do stop by and say hello.

TITLING YOUR MASTERPIECE

My pal Tod Goldberg has a good post up about titling his new novel, how hard it is to hit on the right one, and how the wrong one is sometimes right for the writer — an associative tool to help you through the actual composition.

I can relate. All Saints was initially called Chicken Little. (Weird coincidence: the casting director for Disney animation is one of my students this quarter, and she’s been urging us all to go see the film Chicken Little.) CL was a truly terrible title for a novel set in 1950s New Orleans, but it worked during the writing: the main character is a man who ruins his life because of a mistaken notion. The novel went out to publishers as CL and circulated for a year, collecting rejections, then I pulled it and revised for another few months, and then it was resubmitted with a new title, All Saints. Within a couple of weeks, I had two offers.

My second book Border Dogs, was originally called Crosscut. Again, as the protagonist was a conflicted half Anglo, half Mexican-American border agent, the associations the word conjured helped me write the book. It was bought with that title, but my editor hated it and kept urging me to come up with something else. At the eleventh hour — galleys were going to press — he made me free-associate on the word border. Border This, Border That. Dogs was fairly low on the list, almost a joke. But he liked it, and, well, there it is. (“There it is” is my favorite line from Amadeus, Emperor Franz Josef so blithely summing up the obvious.)

Anyone out there with a titling anecdote to share (as they say in both preschool and therapy)?

SMILEY EXPOUNDS

No, not le Carre’s George, but Jane. I’ve been reading her tome 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. The book is a sort-of combination memoir/critique, with a first half that analyzes the history and psychology of the novel and its different forms (as she categorizes them: travel, history, biography, tale, joke, gossip, diary/letter, confession, polemic, essay, epic, and romance), and a second half that records Smiley’s responses to 101 works, idiosyncratically selected — there's not much here in the way of world literature — and all read in the wake of 9/11, when she was stumped by her 11th novel, Good Faith.

Old Jane, as I’m tempted to call her, à la Holden Caulfield, has always interesting, if sometimes odd, ideas. Here are a few random tidbits — or tit-bits, as I swear I’ve heard some people say, along with pundint and lacksadaisical.

On A Thousand Acres, her Pulitzer Prize winning and most popular novel: “I don’t find it lovable, or even very relate-to-able. I sometimes suspected that to love it is to reveal something unfortunate about oneself.”

On starting a novel of your own: “Chances are, no one wants you to write your novel — if they say they do, they are just meaning that you should get it over with or get on with it.”

On her conversion from agnosticism to a faith that combines Christianity with elements of Eastern religions: “The essential premise … is that God did not create the world and that the apparent mixture in the world of good and evil is an illusion … all physical manifestations are illusory, an agreed-upon conceit that is useful for learning what is true and real, but otherwise a form of dreaming — bad dreaming …. All elements of the universe, and all dimensions, including time, are a mental construct … the Mind or the Source preexists matter and is connected to itself all the time and in every way.”

Smiley's definition of inspiration: “Inspiration is emotional memories lingering in the limbic system becoming suddenly activated and asking the frontal lobe to organize and thereby understand them.”

On Anna Karenina: “There is no satisfactory solution [here] to the requirement that time must pass in some way. If it passes in a routine, intimate way, the reader may wonder why she is bothering to read such a dull novel, and if it passes in a consistently dramatic way, the reader may wonder what relevance this has to her own rather routine life.”

On P.J. Wodehouse: Enough Wodehouse is enough after a while, but some Wodehouse is essential to a happy literary life.

On Grendel: “… in the end the problem with Grendel is that it is long enough to explore its ideas but not dense enough to be a really good story.”

On Moby Dick: “Those who think it the best novel ever written in English are those who relish the double strangeness of Melville’s vision — the exotic locale and the visionary ideas — above every other joy that novels can afford.”

Audio links to Dorian Devins' lively interview with Smiley can be found at Ass Backwards.

RESTING — YOU KNOW, LIKE A ROAST

I didn't take that photograph just for the blog. I’ve recently started work on a new novel, you see, a story set here in town, and as some of the events take place in this particular location, I like to stare at pics of my hill and daydream (sometimes in lieu of actual typing).

This new project will be book #4 — #5, if you count the first, unpublished one, and I do. What about #3/#4, you say? (For the two readers who remember my previous guest stints, this is the first-person narrative that's been giving me fits.) Well, I finally finished a reasonable draft — did everything I could with it — and, after reading through the manuscript in one painful sitting, extremely sorry to say, it still doesn’t work. Time to set the damn thing aside. This is not the same as giving up. Those who cook will recognize that here’s where the roast metaphor comes in: it’ll be easier to slice into later if it sits.

Meanwhile, that hill in Silverlake is my madeleine.

HARD-HITTING LIT NEWS ON HOLD

Mark is off to Tucson for his 109-mile bicycle race, so the more confessional stylings of moi (where did TEV get the idea that I’d be on point?) will occupy this space for the next couple of days.

Yesterday’s post about M’s last bit of training before the event made me think that I need to exercise more — a walk around the block after dinner just isn’t enough. Once upon a time, though, I was a fit young lass. Years spent climbing the hill in this photo is why.

It’s also why I didn’t own a bicycle till I was 16. My childhood home was way up there at the top, right where the trees converge. The pic doesn’t quite convey how steep this hill is: it’s actually 3 drops in succession, a half mile from top to bottom, deadending into Sunset Blvd.

The bike was a Xmas present, a Schwinn 10-speed, and I had it for about a year, during which time I ran through a set of brake pads each week. I commuted on it to high school in Hollywood, out to the beach with friends, and to my job at the Farmer’s Market. But it was strictly transportation. In those years the air in LA was worse than it is now, and city riding wasn’t all that pleasant. Besides, I was saving my worker-bee pennies to buy a car. Which I eventually did, a used Volkswagon squareback. For a week, I parked the VW across from the house; for a week, I neglected to turn the wheels to the curb. You see where this is going, yes?

One afternoon, the emergency brake failed and the car rolled down the hill and smashed into a parked vehicle. The VW was totaled, but I was very lucky no one was killed. I can’t imagine I’d ever have gotten over it. I suppose I might then have gone on to write about characters wounded by the past, marked indelibly by their own foolishness and stupidity, instead of writing about … oops … never mind.