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Two days before they announce the winner of the 2016 Olympics, the IOC has apparently not yet decided on a city. I know, I’m sure it’s hard; billions of dollars are at stake, after all. Years of work and whole careers are on the line. Large, powerful corporations are in the mix. And so in the off-chance any members of the committee are sitting in a Copenhagan hotel room surfing the web in an 11th-hour grab at opinions far and wide, let me add the emphatic voice of a humble young non-expert novelist to the cacophony: IOC, please don’t choose Chicago. Please, please, please, for the love of God, don’t choose Chicago.

More specificially: We don’t have enough money, our schools could probably use several billion dollars, you will necessarily bulldoze/destroy/gentrify an enormous swath of our city, the funding of the proposed village seems impossible and made up, the Tribune’s poll says that we’re totally on the fence (who wants to be in a relationship like that?), and as far as we can tell, you will end up costing far more money than you will generate for our economy.

I will be the first one to admit to a faint and difficult-to-define happiness at the initial thought of Chicago’s national and international profile continuing to swell in the wake of Obama’s victory. The Olympics would focus the world’s eyes here for the next seven years, and to me, that seems like a good thing. Property values would go up, jobs would in fact be created. I personally like swimming and watching swimming. But it takes about five minutes of thinking and reading to realize that Olympic budgets always, every time, swell far beyond what they are supposed to be. Add Mayor Daley’s pledge of taxpayer money to any shortfall, and you’ve got yourself a hot mess in the city of broad shoulders.

Two months ago, my wife began coming home from work with horror stories of what happens when public funding runs out. She’s a social worker, and because of the Illinois budget crisis over the summer, she and all the other employees at the nonprofit community center where she worked (those who weren’t laid off) were forced to turn away mentally ill clients who’d been coming for treatment and care, every day, for twenty years. I understand that state budgets and city budgets are different things, and right now it’s somewhat difficult to point to direct links of causation between this money and those services, but the point I’m making is a general one: the debates are all well and good in the abstract, but when it comes down to it–and this is how it often seems to come down–the arrival of the Olympics in Chicago will be an economic boom for some people and a Herculean gut-punch for many others. By “others,” I mean the city’s already-marginalized populations.

Why do that? Why send your giant machine to us? Or maybe I should turn my head and say it to Chicago people instead: why do this?  Why ask for them to come? I just don’t get it. Professional sports are not underrepresented here; stadiums abound; despite being shamefully underrepresented in the media, hurdling is alive and well in our many local high schools. Just the other day I saw someone swimming in Lake Michigan; just the other day I saw someone do an interpretative gymnastic-dance routine on the corner of California and Diversey.

Maybe not the last thing, but still, IOC, I don’t get it. I don’t get you and what you want. This is a city, and on the streets of this city, people’s lives unfold. There are poor streets and there are rich streets, but they’re streets, and it’s a city. It’s not a playground.

via Some Chicago residents hoping Olympics bid a bust – Yahoo! News.

After myriad television appearances, radio shows and news conferences since his arrest on corruption charges, the seemingly omnipresent former Gov. Rod Blagojevich has made the case for his innocence again, this time in a 259-page memoir that offers small glimpses of both his rocky tenure and his upcoming criminal defense.

It sounds to me as though one of America’s weirder public sociopaths is in rare form throughout his upcoming memoir, The Governor, which I will not be reading but which I will most definitely pick up and handle and peruse next time I’m in a book store. When it comes down to it, I can’t deny my voyeuristic fascination with the man, and I admit that I would like to read some Rod Blagojevich prose (even though the book was probably ghostwritten); perhaps somewhere in the subtext or the syntax, here or there, barely visible, are some new clues regarding the mysteries of his shifty identity. Maybe–I can only hope–he can’t quite suppress the whispers of his uniquely splayed and unknowable worldview when he puts pen to paper.

Most Chicagoans came to know Blagojevich through images and sound, tube and radio: by looking at his boyish face, by hearing his Chicago voice. When I first moved here, it was through signage: Blagojevich, while governor, liked to put his name on every kind of state-controlled piece of property, and often used his control of the state’s infrastructure as a kind of subliminal, never-ending marketing tool. In 2005, when Chicago’s open-tolling system was first coming into existence, the massive sign above the highway told me that the new system was brought to me by governor Rod Blagojevich–and once I could sail through the tolls without stopping, I appreciated him for it. As a self-promoter, Blagojevich has always understood what qualities make him unique, and he’s always pushed them.  Hard. The act of just sounding out the man’s name, upon seeing the text, is interesting on its own. How about a few jokes about the dude’s weird hair? A good laugh. And suddenly you realize: I’ve been thinking about Rod Blagojevich for 20 seconds, and that’s why he does his hair that way.

Based on his book-tour itinerary, he’s going to be getting plenty of TV time in the next month, but we can probably guess, with a high degree of accuracy, how each of those appearances will go: he’ll stick to his message of overall innocence and he won’t be knocked off of it; he’ll make some jokes that are a little funnier than you’d have predicted; he’ll blame other people for trying to sell the republic; he’ll be an amazing populist; and ultimately, he’ll do some serious damage to the pool of possible jurors for his criminal trial. It’s hard not to see this book as an important step in the long-term exit strategy Blagojevich began planning well before he awoke last year to find FBI agents pounding on his Ravenswood Manor door.  For starters, an omnipresent Blagojevich increases the chances that his jury will be stocked with people who neither read nor follow politics–in other words, it increases the chances that his charm will overcome arguments in the courtroom, and those are the best odds he’s going to get. Far better than his odds during his impeachment, voted on by a roomful of people deeply versed in insane Iago-ing of the Illinois government during his time in power. But secondly, and perhaps more paradoxical, is the money Blagojevich has and will continue to make from the promotion of his new unique characteristic–exposed political criminal and guy who might be in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

So here’s what I think is crazy: he’s going to end up with more money, vis a vis his explanation and denial of the crime he attempted to commit, than he would have had he actually committed the crime. Back when he was busted, it was widely reported Blagojevich was looking for a few hundred thousand dollars and a sweet sinecure in exchange for the Senate seat. “Six figures” was the phrase bandied about in the news last March, when Blagojevich sold the manuscript to Phoenix Books. And even though at first I thought the book would sell less copies than Ron Artest’s debut rap album, now I’m not so sure. Today, a week from its release-date, the book is #1 in Amazon’s “State and Local Government” category and sitting at #3340 overall. If his website and his public speaking and his Elvis covers add up to some dollars, he’s going to come out even. Maybe better.

In The Governor, not only does Blagojevich use the book as a platform to compare himself to King Lear, Othello, and Julius Caesar, but he also goes for the cycle with an “I’m a lot like the mythological figure Icarus” maneuver. He seems to stop short of comparing himself directly to a god, or God, but there will be more books for that, once he deals with the irritating legal system properly, frees himself from the shackles of Illinois martyrdom, and finally lands a daytime talkshow. (The CW would give him one, right? You know they would.) Using Icarus sounds just about right for Blagojevich’s rhetorical goals, but I think Proteus would have been the more honest comparison–a better representation of the entity known as Rod Blagojevich. Why? Because if I’m wrong, and justice is served, and someone who casually attempted to sell one of the more powerful political positions in the world does end up in prison, he’ll end up fine, too. He’ll write another book. It will be bad and ridiculous, and it will do quite well.

via Rod Blagojevich book blames others — chicagotribune.com.

A Wisconsin radio station is asking angry Packers fans to reconsider dumping their Brett Favre gear. Two talk show hosts at WTDY in Madison are collecting old Favre sportswear and donating it to the homeless.

Kudos to the hosts, though, for thinking about it for a few seconds beyond the knee-jerk fantasyland of the sport-world simulacra.

via Station donating Favre jerseys to homeless | StarTribune.com.

Brett Favre’s latest retirement lasted all of three weeks.

The three-time MVP has done about-face for the second time in as many years and will play for the Vikings this season.

Rolling around as I am on the west coast, I can’t quite write as much as I could, although the world of football writing has no doubt already seen enough Favre-babble to last for eons. For now, I’ll just say that I grew up with the man starting the games I attended 8 times a year–age 12-28–and right now, I only feel a strange detachment and indifference, combined with a vaguely numb curiosity of watching him run out onto the field at Lambeau dressed in his purples. Maybe it’s reading an article about a dude showing up to an Obama speech with an assault rifle, maybe it’s being cowed by the miraculous beauty of Oregon. Maybe it’s being very high on Aaron Rodgers? I’m not sure, but Woodson said it best: I don’t care.

via What retirement? Favre coming back with Vikings – Yahoo! News.

And it ended with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett lying in a pool of blood with a broken hand after he rushed to confront a pipe-wielding suspect officials described as a “vicious thug.”

via Man arrested in attack on Mayor Barrett – JSOnline.

One-Eyed-Willie's boat is about to emerge from the left of the frame

something called Castle Rock, a few hundred feet off the Oregon coast. Put it this way: I am in Goonies.

I’ll be on the Oregon coast for the next week and what I’ve learned is that it is not flat. Not at all.

Yesterday, my wife and I drove north up 101, from Depoe Bay to Arch Cape. We shot up through the mountains with the coastal waters of the Pacific on our left, looking right at the green and left at the blue, silently amazed that a country could be these many different things. Chicago and the Midwest trains us to expect a linear horizon and lulls us; I say this knowing we haven’t even made it to the gorge yet, which I remember as one of the more astounding landscapes I have ever seen. And there’s more! Two days ago I got a chance to fulfill a miniature version of my Deadliest Catch fetish/fantasy when I went crabbing for Dungeness. Far safer, far lower stakes, but I’ll tell you, the crab taste mighty good when you’re the one who hauled ‘em up.

Since I have little internet access this week, I’m posting the keynote address I gave last week at Northwestern University’s Summer Writing Conference. I’ve always been afraid of codifying my thinking about creative writing or dabbling in any kind of ars poetica situations, but it was interesting to think things through a bit more and get them down on the page. The address is called “What and Why.” If you’re a person who likes to write but are feeling like it’s too hard, give it a whirl…

What and Why

Now I don’t say this at the outset to butter you up, but I can’t imagine a collection of human beings I’d feel more warmly toward, fond of, or sympathetic to, than a group of people who’ve decided to take a few days away from their regular lives—lives that are no doubt busy, stressful, and extraordinarily complicated—in order to explore not only the big questions, but the nooks and crannies of creating literature in the modern world. I try to hold off on using too much militaristic figurative language in pretty much every context, but I’m having trouble not thinking of you all as some kind of army.  Granted, you’re a bizarro army, and almost everything about you is inverted: You march on the metaphysical plane, not at all in lock-step with one another.  You are terribly disorganized and essentially self-trained.  Your ideologies are all over the map.  You demand no resources, destroy nothing in your paths, pillage nothing and in fact leave people with more wealth and happiness than they had before you arrived.  You use invisible, harmless weapons that nobody understands and that you’ve invented yourselves, usually by stitching together the little bits and pieces of your existences.  You never really win, you never really have a clear goal (although that’s true for many real armies as well), and when it comes down to it, your interest in writing probably corresponds to never, ever listening, ignoring orders from your superiors, if such people exist, and consistently dismissing what others tell you to do, regardless of how well you fake it during workshop.

In other words, you are people I like.  I respect you for the self-possesion it requires to say to somebody who doesn’t write at all, and has no idea why you’re interested in such things, and seems to be stifling a giggle or smile whenever you bring up the topic at a social gathering, or whenever your spouse brings it up in a totally inappropriate context, “Yes, I’ll be spending three days at a writer’s conference working on my book.”

“Oh really,” the other person may say, eyebrow raised in sadistic glee, for you have made yourself vulnerable.  And latched to that really is every word you’ve ever heard about why your goal is stupid.  Why it’s so unreachable and so impossible that in order to maintain your reputation as a reasonable adult human being, what you really should be doing is giving up immediately, and concentrating on what you’re good at, which is mowing the lawn, cleaning kitchen appliances, checking the air in your tires and adding air if the air is low, sleeping, going to work, managing your finances, making coffee, exercising, looking after your children, planning weekends, shopping, and watching television—if you’re not too tired to work the remote.

The first prerequisite to locating something worthy and true in your own writing is cultivating a strong resistance to that supercilious really that people love to throw around.  This resistance I’m talking about, though, is idiosyncratic.  It’s not a numbness or blindness, because you have to see yourself clearly, and see your work clearly, and be able to nod your head and say to yourself, in the privacy of your study, alone with your work, “No, this is not good, what I’ve just written.  This is not up to my own standards.”  Don’t be numb and blind because you won’t be able to properly say that to yourself; your standards have to be higher than the standards of anyone else.  Think of the villain who feels no pain—first you think of him as invulnerable and therefore omnipotent, but as the story goes on, his weakness, in the end, is that he feels nothing, and that he can’t tell what the hell is going on when someone hits him in the back of the head with a 2×4.

What I’m advising is not a resistance of angry defiance, either.  If you scream back at your hypothetical hater, “I will write my book!  If you don’t like it, you’re a shallow, little bourgeoisie moron, you think only of sports and Entertainment Tonight, you doesn’t appreciate the ARTS”—well, I like your fire, but I’m a little worried the anger might get in the way of your fine tuning.  Imagine a watchmaker, while inserting a tiny spring into a tiny pocketwatch with a tiny little tweezers, suddenly clenching his fist into a tight ball when he momentarily imagines how his mother never thought it was a good idea for him to go into watchmaking in the first place, and how he probably should have looked into law school instead.  Imagine the crackling sound of the parts breaking.  This watch would not end up working.

No.  The resistance I advocate is a patient one, a shrugging one, a humble one, and a committed one.  It’s a resistance that’s actually no big deal—you’re not in this to get back at anybody—making art is never an act of revenge, and if it becomes so, you have instead created propaganda.  Hidden agendas break stories and ruin style—a good reader can detect it right away.  I like the idea of hearing some cruel person’s really and raising my own eyebrows, agreeing, nodding with respect at the daunting task, at my own ridiculousness, and saying back, “Yes, really.  I know.  I’m crazy.  But I’m gonna check it out.  It’s something I want to do.”

In other words, an attitude that exposes that skeptical really for what it actually is: someone else’s baggage about how they failed to look into what they were passionate about, probably a long, long time ago.

I apologize.  I didn’t mean to get into blustering advice so quickly—when you’re a teacher, you tend to get a excited when someone says to you, “No, you’re the keynote speaker, it’s okay to talk directly at them for far too long.”  And like I said, this is a danger of starting out with metaphors about armies—it’s only a matter of time before you then begin discussing acts of resistance, and soon you’ve lost all perspective.

Here’s Rilke’s famous quote about writing, and why you should do it (This quote is now tattooed on Lady Gaga’s arm, in case anyone missed the news): ‘In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?’ As popular and inspiring as this quote is, I’ve always had a problem with it.  I think it trivializes death and trivializes the resiliency of the human heart.  But I’ll come back to that.

When I was asked to welcome you all here for the festival, two topics immediately came to mind—both are very general, and both are questions, I’ve since realized, that some part of my mind has been grinding against for the last decade.  The two questions are, “What is it?” and “Why do it?”  The “it” is storytelling.

I have no answers, of course, but I have a few anecdotes and thoughts I’ve collected in my weird history as a teacher, and as a writer, and my hope is that they’ll be of some use to you—the implication being that I think most writers benefit by asking these two questions now and again—at the very least, checking in with them every couple of years, like a second-cousin you’ve always liked who unfortunately lives on the other side of the country and who doesn’t like email.  And since so many of the panels, talks, and discussions offered here in the next few days seek to unpack very specific aspects of craft—the nooks and crannies, if you will—I am, for once, comfortable with the broad strokes.  I’m not sure why I think these questions are important questions.  Certainly, there have been plenty of writers who’ve spent little or no time considering them, and their work didn’t suffer for it.  And there have been plenty of writers who have deeply articulated their own aesthetic and philosophical outlooks who have then gone on to produce whole mountain ranges of terrible, awful writing.  People are different and when it comes to writing, each rule is reinvented and reshaped for each individual.  Maybe that’s the very reason the questions are important.

It never occurred to me to ask myself what a story is until I was nearly through with college.  This either speaks very highly of childhood or very poorly of college, because the moment I began wondering about that question was the moment I stopped being an unadulterated audience-member.  You have to lose that to be a writer, I guess, but it’s never a good thing to lose touch with magic of any kind.  This was my senior year.  I was in a very annoying, inflexible intellectual phase that I’ve since realized many young secular people of my generation, without religion and desperate for a little ontological certainty, go through: namely, my “evolutionary psychology” phase.  This meant that after reading a couple of books and taking a course called “The Biology of Mind” and a course about Artificial Intelligence, I was one of the country’s leading experts on the ways in which our evolutionary history explains—fully—everything about being human.  This includes our desire to tell and hear stories.  You see it’s all very simple: 40,000 years ago, the human mind took an impressive cognitive leap, and one new tool available to the species was an impressive imagination.  It evolved as a danger-prediction mechanism, a kind of personal laboratory in which our ancestors were able to render hypothetical situations, play them through very quickly, and guess, ahead-of-time, whether, say, jumping out of a tree and onto the back of a galloping rhinoceros would in fact be a wise idea.  Over time, we came to realize that, like language, this mechanism was far more sophisticated than its original functionality, and thus we began to use our imaginations to fantasize about totally unattainable sexual partners dating larger, more attractive, and cooler members of our hunter-gatherer groups.  Someone then had the idea to say one of these fantasies out loud, and it turned out that the same “imaginings” were rendered in the minds of the listeners, and thus, storytelling was born. Lying was invented shortly thereafter, when someone realized you didn’t have to tell people you were storytelling before you started.

Using evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to study literature is not really this ridiculous, mind you, and in fact, I find it to be pretty interesting—a subcategory of what often gets called ‘Darwinian aesthetics’ in academia—and if anyone’s interested, I’d recommend a book called On the Origin of Storytelling by Brian Boyd.  However, back when I was in college, I came to realize that my amateur obsession with evolutionary psychology was both dogmatic and oddly meaningless relative to my desire to write fiction.  I was also greatly disturbed by the dark legacy of social Darwinism, and the ways in which this sort of explanatory approach about the world very quickly becomes, in the hands of those with nefarious political agendas, a means of repression and a prescription for behavior that is either “right and natural” or “wrong and unnatural.”  From what I can tell, evolutionary psychology is still trying to navigate this treacherous path.  For me, back then, the ambiguity wasn’t very appealing, so I eventually moved on.

A graduate student I knew put me onto something wholly different by recommending to me a book called An Apology for Poetry by Sir Philip Sydney, a 16th century Englishman.  Sensing I would inadvertently reveal myself to be stupid by asking why this man thought his poetry was so terrible it required an upfront apology, I kept my mouth shut, nodded and headed for the library.  It turned out that Sydney’s defense of literature pivoted on culture instead of biology, and to me, this was a welcome relief.  I had trouble understanding some of the fine points of the text, written as it was in Renaissance-speak, but the essential lesson I walked away with was this: literature’s function is to teach and to delight—literature dresses up our greatest insights, unified and synthesized, into a package not only palatable but pleasurable.  Or, as Mary Poppins might say, “A spoonful of sugar makes the sum of all human wisdom and knowledge go down.”

As you can probably guess, my superficial understanding of Sir Philip Sydney satisfied me for another few months, deep into the spring of my senior year, but in the end it didn’t last.  And I have more stories like this from my twenties, several for every year, and I probably will generate more in the future, but they’re all variations on the same theme, so I’ll spare you the specifics and just tell you what it looks like to me now—young person, somewhat lost, desperate for a definitive answer because he thinks that having the answer to the question, “What is literature and what is it for?” will somehow help him to write it.  I know now that the answer doesn’t make a difference.  In the end, there are way too many answers because we use it for too many things—in fact, we use it for everything.  So instead I think of moments like this:, I think of the time I was in Montana, on a fishing trip with my father, some of his friends, and some of their kids.  The trip took us out into the Bob Marshall Wildnerness, a truly dense and wild region north of Missoula.  We went on horseback, with a guide and a few wranglers whose job it was to drive the small mule-train and set up camp.  One night I was out in a field, talking to one of the other kids.  I was about 13, and the other kid and I were looking up at the stars, which were amazing, and this wrangler came up and said hello.  Somehow we knew that this wrangler had been in Vietnam, and the other kid asked him about it, and he nodded and said yes, he’d been there.  And I asked him what, to me—ignorant and encased within my suburban, desensitized fluffbrain of privileged adolescence—was the obvious question: did you ever kill anyone while you were there?  He looked at me for a second, then looked at the totally cloudless sky, and said, “It might rain tomorrow,” then said nothing else.  I felt funny but said nothing.  Creeping on the edge of my perception was the sense I’d gone too far, made some kind of crucial error, but he was being kind to me, even so.  Of course the other kid, who also wanted to know the answer to my question, thought the man had simply not heard me, and so he said, “Did you ever kill anyone in Vietnam?”  And the wrangler looked at him square in the eyes and said, “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” then walked away, back to his bivouac.

I think about this moment more than it makes sense for me to think about this moment.  I can never quite shake the feeling that the mysteries of storytelling—of subtext, of saying something and meaning something else, of implication, of the way people communicate—were on display for me there, in that field.  But just for an instant.  And I haven’t the faintest idea what I saw, or what his story was.

The other question I’m always asking—and this is far less abstract—is, “Why spend the time to write in the first place?”  Without getting too hyperbolic or romantic—or worse, self-pitying—I think it’s safe to say that there’s some pain involved, so it makes sense to ask, “Why expose yourself to pain?  On purpose?”  We’ve already discussed dealing with the really people.  But there are other pressing problems: money, for example.  The last time I scrolled through the classifieds, I did not see: Needed: An exceptionally slow, preferably neurotic and uncompromising producer of dense literary fiction.  Competitive salary and full benefits offered.  The truth is, there’s not much money in writing, despite the wild success of a handful of contemporary writers.  No writer I know—successful or not—can support his or herself solely with writing.  Maybe this means I haven’t met the appropriate writers.  Maybe not, although I’ve met quite a few writers.

Questions about money, though, are really questions about time, so I’ll rephrase this objection: “Why would I give up so much of my time—time alone, time resting, time relaxing, time with my family and the people I love—in order to pursue something so ephemeral?  Especially when there are so many wonderful books already, more than I could possibly read in a lifetime?”

Because it does take time to get good—loads and loads of time.  So much time that it’s somewhat disturbing to consider.  My father recently told me about a book he’d read that claims any complex skill takes about a decade to develop and master.  A decade of full-time work.  Grace Paley, in her later years as a teacher, came up with a simple maxim for deciding whether or not students could get into her class.  She wanted to work with advanced students, so her requirement was that the person had written 1000 pages of fiction.  Either way, the math is daunting.

The dread of finding out that your very best is not quite as good as you imagined it to be is another challenge to the question of Why?  Say you do go at it for ten or twenty years, say you do make all those sacrifices, say you do write those one-thousand “practice” pages.  I’m being completely honest when I say that there will never come a point when I hold up something I’ve written alongside “The Bear” by William Faulkner or To the Lighthouse and think to myself, “Same ballpark.”  It’s one thing to finagle your way into the one-percentile…it’s another thing entirely to finagle your way into the one percentile of the one percentile.

To that fear, however, and to the quantified fears of money and time, my simple response is the same: “So what?”  I think I’m speaking to the right audience for that answer to be satisfying, and this is one of the rare cases when I hope that I’m preaching to the choir.  “I don’t know” is about the best answer I can give to “Why?”  I would be foolish to assume that most people become interested in writing because they desire immortalization in the canon or crave glorious wealth—my time as a teacher tells me otherwise.  The answer is bound up in personal satisfaction, a desire to explore mystery, and fundamentally, the need we all share to communicate.  Communicate what?  It doesn’t really matter.  Communicate how?  It doesn’t really matter.  Just communicate.  That’s about as far as I can get with an answer to the question of Why.

The Why portion of this address is motivated, in large part, by something that happened to me at a reading in Ithaca, New York, a couple years ago—a moment I’ve never quite been able to shake.  Cornell’s English Department had invited me back for an event; I spoke about writing, read for a bit, and then took question.  During my rambling, chatty introduction—nothing so concise and focused as this address—I said a few words about a dark period of time I had just after my first book, Trouble, had come out.  I worked hard on a first novel for quite some time, but ultimately, after about two years, gave up on it—something in the back of my head just kept saying that it was flawed in some unknowable, unfixable way, and that no matter how many revisions I made, it was never going to be right.  So I was bummed; I spent some months convinced that novels, as opposed to short stories, were simply too hard to write; that there was something about my disposition or my mind that prohibited me from putting together a longer story.  And with this recurring thought, alongside being amazingly broke, I started to think seriously about giving up writing and finding a career that could bring a little more stability into my life.  The big swings up and down and the unpredictability of what I was going to produce were wearing on me.

This anecdote was a preamble to the story of writing The Cradle, my first novel, and my point was about the need to let go, from time to time, in order to open up enough space to really write what you want to write.  However, right at the end of the Q&A session after my reading, just when I thought it was over, a young girl, 20 or 21, in the very back of the auditorium raised her hand.  I called on her and she said, “Why didn’t you quit?”  She didn’t preface it with anything and didn’t follow herself up.  That’s all she said.

“Why didn’t I quit writing?” I asked.  “You mean during that dark time I mentioned?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “What stopped you.”

There was obviously a palpable desperation in her voice and on her face.  I looked back at her for a long time, trying to think of something inspirational and positive I could say, something that might help her keep going.  She seemed so young.  On the other hand, it was almost as if she were asking permission to stop writing, too.

Finally I just said, “I don’t know.”  She just stared at me.  And the Q&A came to an end.

So to sum up: over the course of this address I’ve raised two questions: What is literature and Why write literature?  I have failed to come close to answering either question, and in fact, I have provided several contradictory answers.  You maybe arrived with more clarity about these questions; you’ll maybe leave with less.  If this is so, then I feel as though I’ve done my job welcoming you here.  The deeply unsatisfactory answer I provided to the melancholy young woman in the audience at Cornell turns out to be the best that I can do: I Can’t articulate the reason to “not stop” and can only counter that mystery by saying I’m equally unable to articulate an answer to the inverse of the question: why stop?  I should have just asked her that in response.  It seems to me that those two conundrums balance themselves out quite well, leaving room to continue forward with whatever impulse got you going in the first place.  It was probably a good feeling.

Let me read the famous Rilke quote one more time.

‘In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?’

As I said, I don’t think it does justice to either death or the heart.  The heart’s roots will protest, but they’ll grow around unrealized dreams, and you’ll go forward on a new path if the first one doesn’t quite work out.  And as for death, I just have to think about that wrangler in Montana, who, 25 years after he pulled the trigger and killed a soldier from the other side, was living a quiet life in the mountains, very aware, still, of the actual horror of killing somebody.  Death is what’s at stake in war, and in sickness, but as I said, you’re the bizarre army, working to create.  There’s no AWOL here and no court-martials.  You won’t die if you don’t write.  You’ll probably be less happy, although a few may be more happy.  Either way, it won’t kill you.

To me, though, the unknown strangeness of the personal stakes of writing remains tremendously exciting.  I mentioned losing magic before.  Well, there’s a little, still.  That’s plenty.  There’s knowledge to find and there are insights to reach for.  There’s the possibility of making something new that is nevertheless beautiful, a very old thing.  And maybe most important for you all here, in the next couple of days, is the possibility of new friendship and companionship as you share your work and thoughts with the people all around you, who’ve all come to Evanston for the same reason.  So welcome.  Make friends, enjoy yourselves, and above all, communicate.  Those are good answers to almost any question we can ask.

Image via Wikipedia

Somewhere between the conclusion of Mad Men’s second season and early August, 2009, AMC’s flagship drama has gone from semi-obscure to national phenomenon. The show always got great reviews, but last year I found myself more often than not paraphrasing the show’s approach and premise than geeking out with others about what secrets had emerged. Those days, however, seem to be long gone. Hearing Wilbon and Kornheiser talk about it on PTI yesterday shattered whatever lingering perception I had that Draper was lurking on the outskirts.

Laura Miller’s got a cool piece up at Salon that digs into the historical context of advertising in the early 60s that’s a nice fix for those of us sitting around, waiting for Sunday night to show up. For all the intricacies of Mad Men’s character arcs and the ways in which the writers ingeniously mine new pockets of interpersonal drama, I can never quite avoid thinking that the truly unique and powerful engine behind the show’s particular vibe is in fact its very specific and idiosyncratic representation of the work these people do. So often, the jobs of characters is a tertiary concern, at best, and yet in Mad Men, the particulars of accounts and the intrigues of the office are always rivaling the love-stories and hidden secrets–not only rivaling, but interacting with. And thus the tone of the show is unique.

Here’s a chunk from Miller’s article:

For a glimpse of the craziness about to descend on Weiner’s creations, hunt down a used copy of Jerry Della Femina’s “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches From the Advertising Wars,” a memoir of sorts. “Of sorts” because it reads more like the transcript of a tape made at a bar or cocktail party with the recorder propped up next to the raconteur at the center of the crowd. Della Femina launches directly into a cheeky rant (about how advertising is not “all very Tony Randall” — presumably a reference to early-’60s sex comedies starring that “suave” actor as an ad man) and then segues into one indiscreet anecdote and riff right after another, such as the time TWA encouraged several agencies to spring for substantial presentations when they weren’t seriously considering any of them. (A variation of this behavior scuppered the career of Duck on “Mad Men.”) If you’d like to find out who exactly Della Femina is, where he comes from and why he’s telling you all this — the basic meat and potatoes of autobiography — I suggest you visit Wikipedia, though god only knows how the digitally deprived readers who made Della Femina’s book a bestseller when it was first published in 1969 managed to orient themselves.

The other day I found myself saying to a group of writer-friends that Mad Men was in fact a better show than The Wire.  I was immediately shushed, and upon reflection, I suppose I didn’t end up believing myself, either. The Wire’s particular ideological goals and nuanced understanding of social justice, not to mention its sheer scope, is sort of hard to compete with, but then again, so is Don Draper’s character. I can think of few fictional men, in literature or on television, who have been developed so expertly that I would believe are capable of literally anything. At this realization, the creative writing teacher in me immediately thinks of E.M. Forster’s definition of round characters, which is a direct echo of the definition of good drama: a round character is a character who can surprise the audience, but in a way we ultimately believe, despite our shock. I’ve heard lots of people complain about McNulty’s behavior in The Wire’s final season as somehow going “too far”.  Even though I didn’t have that same complaint, Mad Men has yet stretch our credulity in this way, to its credit.

Still, it’s only the third season. If Draper lands on the moon in 1969, I’ll have to revise my thinking.

via Will the swinging ’60s crush our “Mad Men”? | Salon Books.

Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polfus, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.” But he picked up harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing with country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio broadcasts on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard of Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.

via Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

The curling script on her left arm is a souvenir from a midnight session at a tattoo parlor in Osaka, Japan.

“It says ‘In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?’” she said.

The quote, in German, comes from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she described as her “favorite philosopher.”

via Lady Gaga shows off tattoo during Asia tour – Yahoo! News.

Cover of The Girl Who Played with Fire

Last week, I found myself doing something I almost never do: putting my name in at my local bookstore and asking to be called when my book arrived. I was worried that it would sell out the day of its release, and I didn’t want to have to wait around for a copy I ordered online. The book? Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Maybe no big deal, but this is unusual for me for two entirely distinct reasons. The first is the paradox of most book-lovers who’ve (dangerously) become adults and have not only their own money to spend on books, but their own space to put them: too many unread books in the first place.

Somewhere in my mid-teens, probably coincident with a litany of brand new, powerful, fantasy-driven ambitions, I developed a frenzy for purchasing books. But carrying that same enthusiasm past college and into adult life creates problems. I know for a fact that at age 14, I could come home from Waldenbooks with a Dark Sun novel and have it finished in just a few days. (You heard me.) This remained true, even, during graduate school, and in fact I believe I even went out and purchased books, during that time, with the specific goal of not reading other books, those I’d been forced to purchase or told to read. It’s reality (the opposite of graduate school) and the land of work that creates the toughest problems. Between being married and making a living…well, there’s a stack on my bedside table 20 high and I’m not sure I’ll ever actually read these books. I can’t even imagine what it will be like when the little people arrive.

Hence books, along with the old joys, engender a certain kind of anxiety. This anxiety doesn’t ruin reading, nor is it strong enough to be more than an annoyance, but it’s there. For those whose identities were and are particularly caught up in the consumption of, analysis of, and/or production of literature, a subtle shift in life’s outlook comes along with it. A certain simplicity is suddenly absent. And I think this is especially true for a writer: There’s nothing quite like the feeling of looking at an unread book–one you definitely planned to have read by now, and one you would have read by now if you were 22. It’s like looking at a better version of yourself. This better you looks back at you and says, “This is not who you are, btw. You are lazy and chose to watch Sneakers on Showtime 3 for the 19th time. Sorry, Professor!”

Back to Stieg Larsson. There’s a long, interesting article in this Sunday’s Daily Mail that does a fine job exploring the ephemera around Larsson’s amazingly successful trilogy. The piece covers the basics of Larsson’s early death and the increasing insanity around his work, so if you’re interested in him, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is that greenish/yellow book you see all over every single goddamned store in every airport, check it out.

‘It’s like a Harry Potter for adults,’ one bookseller told me. ‘I’ve never seen so many people so desperate to get their hands on the latest book in a series.

‘They then all want to try to read it at a single sitting to find out what happens next. This is a phenomenon.’

Yes. Sounds familiar. I missed Harry Potter, although I may go back and familiarize myself after asking a question in class and finding that 27 of 29 undergraduates in my Advanced American Lit class had read the entire Harry Potter series. But I like this quote from the bookseller, because it reminds me of that same berserk energy I remember from my salad days of reading, ages 13-20, when I would do things like cry if my teacher were to confiscate my paperback novel.

There’s something about these Larsson books that brings me back to that feeling, too, although I’m not entirely sure what’s at work. The prose is fine, but not particularly special. The two protagonists are unique and interesting, but then again I feel a little embarassed whenever an article or review starts going on about Lisbeth Salander being some sort of revolutionary new never-before-seen character because she has a pierced labia. (Speaking of embarassing, check out some of the love scenes in The Girl Who Played with Fire, or spend some time with the blond giant.) In other words, these books, to me, are good, but they’re mortal. Yet they still evoke a certain reader-fever. One thing that’s absolutely wonderful is the respect Larsson has for the intelligence of his readers. Yes, there’s some exposition, and yes, some awkward moments when unfamiliar or complicated information gets repeated for us, just to be sure, but for the most part, Larsson’s intellectual interests are wide-ranging and his assumption of his audience is a lot closer to, “You are smart enough to handle this,” than, “You are a moron, probably, and I’m going to make this as mediocre as possible just so I don’t lose you and hence lose my market-share.” Treating your audience with respect is the ultimate rhetorical goldmine.

It reminds me of The Wire, actually. Not the storytelling, per se, but the storyteller’s refusal to get stupid for the sake of commercial interests, and to hence flatter everyone who’s still around. I doubt Stieg Larsson ever thought much about such things, and I have a sad suspicion that some of this has to do with the buying-public in Sweden vs. the buying-public in America, but I’m happy to be reminded of the old feeling of being pulled toward a book instead of pushed to it, by either myself or a teacher. I’ve found that for me, book-lust waxes and wanes over time, and it always takes a certain book or handful of books to make the sine wave turn. I always appreciate a nudge in the right direction.

via Stockholm, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium and the city at the centre of a literary phenomenon | Mail Online.