More Life

Man, it's been so long since I had to read a depressing Holocaust novel! What is it now, a whole week? Jeepers, time to bring it back! It's the motherfucking leitmotif, y'all.

Okay, so Lost in Translation is about a girl whose /parents/ survived the aforementioned, and thus the book's not as blargh as If This Is A Man, which I had severe teaching-issues with.*

Eva Hoffman is a Polish-born immigrant writing a memoir about her coming of age in America, and it's a testament to her skill as a writer that the book's not Immigrant Suffer Porn. If you went through a writing program/have seen the American bestseller list, you know what I mean. It's Frank McCourt's sixth Poor-and-Irish, Amy Tan's endless renditions of My Mother is Asian, and the 57th short story you've read this semester which seeks to debunk an overly-sanguine, old-fashioned narrative of immigration which has by now been so thoroughly unseated that the process of debunking it has itself become predictable, comfortable and smug. 'It's harsh to be an immigrant--OR DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?!?!'

It trades a bit in that market, but it's classier about it. The prose is uniformly /very/ good.

My issue with it is the structure. Hoffman opts for disjointed fragments, presumably out of discomfort with the too-neat archetypal immigrant narrative, with its smooth formula of struggle-and-success. This, however, keeps me from feeling as connected as I should to her as a narrator. I cannot tell whether the boy she's going out with in this section is the boy she was considering marrying a paragraph ago--these little vignettes provide color without continuity of feeling.

And that's a fine gesture of po-mo distrust in The Narrative--and this /is/, after all, nonfiction rather than a novel, which is an important gradient my class often fails to comment on--but it does keep me from investing in the story/narrator. The conceptual/emotional matter, while intriguing, gets a bit derailed at times by this. The vague chronology of periods of her life gives some form of scaffolding, but in lieu of a time-frame I feel we should have some thematic organizing transitions, or that she should think harder about what she gains vs. loses out of this more atypical structure. Do anything you want to, structurally, experimentally, but have some good reasons.

The ending, because it's a chunky grouping of revelations, feels a bit too faux-profound? Too 'my story ends here, complications wrapped up, in its way/to the extent they can be' for a novel about the impossibility of wrapping up/the on-going project of the immigrant self, the eternal internal revolution. And it seems, structurally, as though her complications are resolved rather conveniently near the time she's writing--not because of the writing, or any obvious provocation, just gradually, coalescing at the life-stage that an American-born writer might feel a settling into comfortable middle-age (and I wonder if that's not unconnected to her sense of having arrived).

Some interesting ideas I'll carry along, despite some twitchy craft issues that kept it from flowering into a truly astounding book.

* In class we approached it as a novel rather than as non-fiction, and furthermore as a Descent Into Hell closely modeled on Dante. We'd spent some time on Dante as a Christian writer (vs. Virgil and Homer), and the fact that Levi would have a fundamentally different relationship to Hell, as someone raised in a Jewish theological tradition, was not touched on. Idk, I felt the entire thing was about as poorly handled as I'd thought it was going to be. Legit teaching issues with the reduction of the Holocaust to the safe, teachable, conveniently-packaged and safely-in-the-past Disney Genocide that happened to innocent white people, which we use to demonstrate the unembodied Evil of Man, which whitewashes the of subjectivity of the victims and functions as a means of not becoming involved/morally implicated in modern, potentially-ongoing genocidal action ('never again' vs. What Rwanda/Killing Fields/Armenians/never-taught-tragedies?): I haz them.

*If anyone needs me, facebook or lj me, as my phone's died and I can't find the charger*


When you edit something, any creative writing work, there's Hard Edit and Smooth Edit. Hard Edit does the rip-the-guts-up work, where you get under the project and just fuck around down there like you're a bored Latino mechanic toying with an El Camino on cinderblocks that will never run run again anyway, with that kind of skilled wanton desire to rip the shit out of the frame and shove something that will turn over in there. Smooth edit is when you come in the day after than and Emily Post it so that all it's little rough edges are soothed down and the writing is toped with pink bows, which people notice because they're bows, usually not getting that the real work that makes everything function is something below that, which is fine because good writing is so impregnable that it's hard to figure out exactly why it's working.

I edited a nonfic piece Mexican Mechanic style tonight, after a workshop in which I droped the ball, and it felt good. It went from two pages to six, but that's okay. I cut things and gave it the thematic equivalent of whitewall tires and a door that does not open out, but slides up on rails.

Molly, Therese and I got the first half of Vaguely in the scripted form we're handing out to workshoppers.This is vital, because in order for Therese to start paneling the script has to be adamantium solid. I almost want to finish writing the comic before sending out the first issue, to avoid continuity issues of any kind, but it's not practicable, and besides, should the comic even be moderatly sucessful that kind of thing can be knit together in re-issue without the world ending.

Sam suggested 'Circus' for tonight's sonnet topic (Project One Sonnet A Day goes excellently, 10 new ones so far (I missed three days with new classes and am catching up on that still by two a day-ing, which is kind of demanding). Thanks to Sam, because I'm really happy with it. It's about the death of a trapeze artist named Elise because her partner purposefully didn't catch her. I'm thinking of doing several that have a narative thread which focus on a circus. That's a little Meghan Donner, but I think we have different enough voices and theme-interests for me to avoid treading her ground.

First Spanish class was easy, and I felt like a shit. Am meeting with the department head tomorrow morning to transfer into intermediate one if possible. Then I'll finish intermediate one and two during the summer, take conversation classes during the year, and pick up my Spanish minor like a charm. STFU mom, once I have two minors you can't bitch about me droping history. If I end up doing that. Yeah...

Productivity. Maaaaaaaaaah.