Finished re-reading Didion’s Play It As It Lays last night and have some time before I have to re-read Fight Club for my Intro to Lit course and I don’t have to read Kingston’s last essay from her book Woman Warrior until Weds night–see what I mean when I say the brain of school has me–anyway so I have some time to read the stack of books that have been building. Books I want to read. So I have Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man on my desk, his book on Donald Barthelme. Only had enough energy to read the introduction called “the Lost Teacher” but found a great quote on failure and since this is a blog on failed writing I thought I would post it here. The quote made me feel good about my own failures and my own idea to create this fail blog. And after a week of personal and professional failures the quote caught me off guard. Inspired me. To approach each new draft with a sense of failure. Daugherty quotes Batheleme:

“What an artist does is fail. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition…there is no such thing as the successful artist.”

The brain of teaching and conferencing has me and I haven’t been able to revise or draft as much as I have been wanting. I hope to go back to the Highland Stories this weekend because I have been discussing Denis Johnson and Amy Hempel stories and I have been inspired to pair down those stories even moreso than I have before–I do feel with those stories less might be more since they are rougher and less plot driven…

The first time I heard of the ‘prose home movie’ I was in Will Hochman’s Major Authors course studying my beloved JD Salinger. I remember it was a seminar course and we sat round robin style and Will made fun of the white socks and black shoes I was wearing at the time. He admitted to me later he didn’t think I was a strong student from my first appearance. Maybe it was my oversized shirts with the cuffs that covered my hands or my winged tipped shoes I wore trying to be like my Uncle Jake or Kramer the hipster dufus from Seinfeld. But from that reading in his course I was taken with the concept.

And that term we read Franny and Zooey–along with every other collected and uncollected work by Salinger–and Buddy informs the readers that he is writing a prose home movie or a home movie in prose. And after I referred to all my writing that way, though I knew I had nothing similar. It would take me years to comeup with decent material–to take the time to wonder and speculate on my own family and the connections I had lost or yet to appreciate. I only had the talk of it. The questions for family. And now every single piece of writing since my MFA thesis defense has been consumed with family connections and imagings.

And more recently, since translating some home movies to play on my computer and playing with Windows Media Editor, I do feel as if my work on these little films has tried to give more intimate moments into the fictional Ortiz family. The family I write about that is very close to my family and my relatives…a way to blend non-fiction and fiction in more powerful ways. A way to blend the Jaramillo Family as the video is titled and the fictional Ortiz family. It has made the writing more clear and given me some sort of a understandable means of perception for not just one story but several projects. And I am finding such joy and wonder inventing the family tree.

Because I am a sad intellectual type I found myself listening to NPR today, specifically Dave Davies sitting in for Terry Gross. And if you anything about me you know how I feel about Terry Gross. Anyway, today, Davies interviewed Paul Giamatti who I loved in Sideways as the frustrated novelist. I like that his characters are frumpy and unkempt, like Harvey Picar in American Splendor and even his portrayal of John Adams felt frayed around the edges.

On the show Davies and Giamatti discussed the idea of Giamati being described as a ‘messy’ actor. And to explain his thought he brought up Thomas Pynchon and how his novels are kind of a mess. Here’s a bit of the transcript I found at NPR.org. He went on to explain: 

• “I like things being a little loose and baggy sometimes and not so on the nose all the time.”

He went on to say he hoped this was just not an excuse for crappy acting and for lacking discipline but it got me thinking about my style of writing and how I feel so sloppy and also messy. How I see this as a failure instead of as style. Mostly I think this because as a writer I also feel my writing is a mess. I mean I lose sections and I can’t organize them very well and I am undisciplined in my note taking and time management. I swhat I call style and what I see as style really a rhetorical flaw.

I guess I also related to this because I forget character names and have no idea of making my work appear anyway near ‘popular fiction’ I guess because of the Spanglish and looseness of plot–what I choose to write about. I tell my students sometimes like Richard Hugo in Triggering Town that there is no reader/audience. And I also say things like Sherwood Anderson–form is more important than plot. Maybe I am just upset about my lack of skill like Giamati says about sympathy for crappy acting. But I like broken down things–broken down narratives and people and also paragraphs at least plot wise. I know I repeat and I have a tendency to be redundant and I forget plot points but I like the free writing I put together right now and I feel that editing can come later. But in terms of plot development I like things unfolding in prose like a lawn chair. Things rarely happen in real life in understandable or decipherable means. Smooth transitions rarely happen in real life so why can’t they appear in prose.

Mostly what I am working on now is focused on family stories and finding those stories when you need them and imagining those stories inside of the prose. That seems more important than all of the threads tying up in the work I guess is what I am trying to say. Who cares if the prose isn’t neat or tight.

I mean I remember Keith Scribner describing Denis Johnson as writing ‘seemingly distracted and also ‘seemingly dismantled’ prose. Maybe this shows my love for Jesus’ Son and Angels which are two books I feel are loose–characters come in a and go away and we don’t have much closure in terms of plot. But they are always focused and patterned  like prose poetry rather than what I call panaramic or complete novels. No happy endings and sometimes not even satisfying endings. Like Giamati says, the work doesn’t have to be ‘on the nose’ all of the time. The aesthetic can embrace fractured narratives and fragmented story lines like the fractured and fragmented family stories I try to scrape together from family and photos and also imagine.

Not all stories need a topic sentence or satisfying conclusion giving everything to the reader and not leaving anything up to the intelligent and imaginative reader.

This morning–right before leaving for work–I found a story I wrote quite a while ago for Jenny Cornell’s Representation of Science in LIterature class. The story is called House of Two Bears and it is an exaggerated story based on something my Grandfather used to tell me.

The old man was a great story teller. He was very animated with these stories too–at least in my memory. He walked around and imitated voices and threw his arms andweight around as he spoke. He was also a very good liar–he could convince anyone of anything. He convinced me of quite a few things. But when I was a little moco and I used to wear his t-shirts to bed because I had no other clothes there at their house, he used to tell me stories. Kind of like fairy tales. And, of course, he was always the hero and he was always the one making the tough choices. I can picture this in my head. They lived on Routt in those days next to Bessemer School and before bed the old man would tell me his stories and get me drowsy and then he would watch his little black and white television. I remember he had a a poodle named Buttons in those days and the dog slept on the bed with us. I can’t remember so much of that time in my life but I remember those stories. The old man was very much a failed writer–maybe he could have been a writer if he would have gone on to school or if he were allowed to finish school instead of getting to work at such a young age–truck deliveries, peach picking and then carpenter work and then finally the steel mill, which was the last job he ever held in his life. Maybe if he would have gone to school he would’ve been a writer. I do think I am not exaggerating–the men would sit around the picnic table in the back and smoke and play cards and tell stories. War stories and mill stories and also stories from Huerfano County–stories of their youth.

The stories I remember the most were the fables–the stories of him riding a horse across the country and the stories of him finding ghosts andfinding troubles that always had to do with the bottle. The old man was some kind of a drinker too–which is something that kept those stories going. (Sort of like Tortilla Flat meets Big Fish if you’ve read that book or saw Tim Burton’s movie.) He also prefaced every story as happening before the war. That was always important. As if he were a better and more youthful and lively person before the war. The war gave him friends like Millburger and others but the war also gave him bad thoughts or at least I always thought of those stories and his reactions to telling those stories as being very tragic and important to him.

I tried to write down some of these stories: the one where he meets an Indian and they let him live with them–the lessons they taught him. The time he went weeks without real food and drink and had visions–had visions of his first wife and his sister who both died when he was young. And, of course, the drinking stories and the love affairs. And they were more than stories because he had physical evidence. The watch from California and the binoculars from New Mexico–the hat from Arizona–the work gloves from Utah. Every mark on those old physical things were sold as evidence of what had happened–every knick and mark to the leather or to the glass was evidence of the truth of those stories.

Of course, the Grandmother always called him a liar. Told me he was ‘full of it’ and was a liar. Told me he never left Colorado when he was young until the Army and not until he was drafted. But the stories were so convincing and so compelling to me. And I needed those stories too after a while–wanted them before bed and wanted them finished. Wanted to know what happened.

So today I reread “House of Two Bears” and wanted to return. At first I wanted to go back to this thing I was working on about the time I spent in New York State but I think I will work on the Grandfather’s stories next–the stories about being a cowboy and being a drinker as well as the stories about the old man dealing with ghosts.