Exhalation

     How does writing done without literary intent, to make a living, shape the writer? Asked during a live Q&A if his job as an advertising copy writer had any influence on his literary works, Don DeLillo replied: "No." Next question. William Trevor once worked in advertising and wrote no odes to it. From the books of theirs I've read, I didn't detect a hint of their previous contact with the language of the corporate world. But it's hard to imagine any literary writer worth reading consciously and unreservedly adopting it as a crucial influence. With journalism, say, one is far less likely to encounter such denials and rejection among those who've worked in that field. Plenty of esteemed literary writers have been journalists, at all stages. There are those, too, who produce journalistic fiction, hardly straying from the conventions of journalism to venture boldly, furiously, strangely into fiction. 40 hours a week and the reinforcement of a paycheck, year after year, decade after decade, can become an obstacle if the goal is to be unconventional.

Ted Chiang, author of a pair of sci-fi short story collections, Stories of Your Life (2002) and Exhalation (2019),  is a technical writer. In college, during a temporary bout of pragmatism, I registered for a class in technical writing. One of the first things the professor said was that it's not "creative writing," warning anyone who was in "creative writing" it'd probably be a difficult transition. By the end of the lecture, the only one I attended, I understood what he meant. If you're writing an instruction manual or a funding proposal, anything other than dry formality of language can be distracting, inappropriate, unprofessional. Employers looking to hire a technical writer aren't asking for originality, for freakiness, for linguistic play or beauty. Quite the opposite. What they want is clear, sanitized, anonymous writing, malleable enough to fit whatever house style dictates, delivered on schedule. 

That's pretty much what Chiang's writing is like and, in the context of fiction, it's antiseptic. Put another way, he comes dangerously close to transporting the reader to work, specifically that horrible moment, sitting in a cubicle, face down at a desk, nowhere near the end of the day, GAH!, jumping out of your seat, running down the hallway, down several flights of stairs, past security, through the turnstiles, knocking down some executive, apologizing profusely, stepping over him, the front doors locked, beating frantically on the doors, frightened passersby, tackled by security, security piling on, and on, darkness, waking up at your desk in a cold sweat to find that maybe a minute has gone by. Gah. Not to say that these stories are without appeal. Every subject Chiang takes on, from time travel to raising AI animals, is delineated with care, fascinates and challenges, which is why I eagerly purchased the book. And every story nags at me for what's missing.

Exhalation, like his earlier collection, which I want to reread partly because now I'm not so sure it's as good as I recall, gathers stories written over the course of more than ten years. Their arrangement is roughly chronological, permitting the reader to track Chiang's development, however minimal, during this period.

The first three stories are first-person reports on a phenomenon. People, when speaking for themselves, employ a certain speech and rhythm, draw on a unique past, make personal references, (often inadvertently) display peculiarity, commit verbal blunders, digress, (knowingly or unknowingly) reveal themselves. With the exception of drawing on a past, and only because of the demands of a plot, Chiang's narrators, individuals belonging to totally different time periods or realities, are the same in possessing none of these basic human qualities. Or, since one isn't technically human, qualities expected of an entity that communicates thoughts and has an internal life. It's the storytellers, not the stories, I have trouble accepting. Who they are is secondary to what they observe, so while the subjects change, the problem of conspicuous absence is exacerbated by repetition. 

Years later comes the novella-length fourth, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which switches to third-person and tentatively depicts living, breathing people. It's the story about humans raising AI animals, the evolution of their relationships through the years, and the difficulty of protecting a software entity through technological advances and the vagaries of commerce. The least shocking part of it, and the entire book, is that the principal characters meet at work, at a tech company, and a significant portion of the story takes place there. Of all the stories in the collection, it comes closest to reading as though the events have been lived - ideas are debated among colleagues with their own views, users of a product convincingly discover ways to abuse it. Chiang achieves parity between human and creature, bonds firmly established on both sides, one no more or less alive than the other. The creatures have distinct voices, the rudiments of a background, genuine hopes, fears, and frustrations. The humans have indistinct voices but more background (by default), genuine hopes, fears, and frustrations, along with the thinnest layer of romantic tension to rest the story on.

"The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" is the weakest long story. On the surface, it would seem to be an attempt at a new form, shuttling back-and-forth between two stories, separated by centuries, on different continents, connected by the ways in which the mind is molded. It blends first- and third-person. Chiang maintains the same degree of emptiness in his characters but at a couple of points his fiction breaks down further. One of his strengths is taking an idea and acutely examining its implications before drawing a conclusion, satisfying in its completeness. However, he makes the too convenient choice to have a journalist narrator report on a piece of technology, the augmentation of the mind with a system that allows perfect recall of past events, changing memories from vague (and possibly suspect) fragments to searchable video evidence. Instead of letting the reader get lost in the experience, the narrator affords Chiang the opportunity to just openly speculate on the implications in pages that could be the story writer's notes:

It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn't capture the emotional dimension of events.

And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to her birth.

Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children's ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do about my imperfect, organic memories.

It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

For all this, in the end he doesn't even examine the full implications at all, coming to an abrupt conclusion that's untenable, absurd. Of course, people are capable of thinking little and coming to absurd conclusions they'll base their whole lives around. But the narrator is barely a person, so I don't care that he's reached it. What's left is an argument for a radically life-changing, seemingly virtuous decision that's easily dismantled and ridiculed.

The last story of the collection, "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom," is the most successful. Chiang doesn't manage to escape the carefully drawn lines of a plot but nevertheless it's the story that comes closest to achieving balance. Once more, a technological innovation: Computer access to yourself in an alternate timeline. Once more, his exhilarating ability to envision what happens next: for example, people cash in by selling content harvested from alternate timelines. Click to see what your favorite star is up to in another world. Click to see how a popular movie ended in another world. Then, on a smaller scale, there's a chance of profiting off someone's grief, another abuse of technology, and one woman's moral conflict. Unlike the ease with which he imagines humanity's actions on the broad scale, he stumbles imagining the source of an individual's actions. And once more: there's a degree of emptiness. But not so much that it prevents me from caring about what decision his character makes, which is a decision that matters in whatever timeline she belongs to.

There are writers that start with people and are such masters of presenting them authentically that one can take their existence for granted, as if passing them on the street without noticing them. Exhalation ends with Chiang's notes on the origins of his stories. I don't know why he's tasked with doing this when most every other story writer isn't, unless maybe for a career-spanning collection or reissue, but it's welcome and illuminating. Among other things, it confirms that for every story, he doesn't start with a person or a relationship but the abstract idea. I have no doubt that he'll come up with more. And the book, though colorless and bloodless, ends by suggesting that he can potentially correct in the future.

Mrs. Caliban

     Rachel Ingalls has been rediscovered to acclaim for incorporating elements into her books others might consider schlocky, fantastical and melodramatic elements such as those featured in B-movies. (She had a tolerable professional experience with Hollywood.) Reading a short story collection, the one book of hers available in the library system back in California, Times Like These (2005), I found the mode of storytelling at once reminiscent of Shakespeare and The Twilight Zone. Her approach isn't gimmicky, nor is she making a point of blending genres. Instead I sense it comes naturally, a weird product of style and love. My reaction to the collection overall was lukewarm but I was still curious to see what would happen when she applied her approach to a longer form, the short novel or novella. Mrs. Caliban (1982), which the library system here in New Jersey did have, is the book she's chiefly known for, the one I'd originally been seeking out. It's the story of a romance between a housewife and a monsterman. 

The sudden intrusion of this "monsterman," a 6-foot 7-inch humanoid frog creature named Larry, is what gets the plot rolling. As both torrid love affair and tale of a visitor to our world, however, the novel is predictable and rather dull. There's some human-on-monster sex, in case you were wondering, and if the notion is amusing or hot,  reading the one or two pages in total devoted to it doesn't add anything. Larry, meanwhile, whose people aren't individualized, doesn't have a personality. He likes avocadoes. But when it comes to cereal, he'd sooner eat the box. And that's about it. 

Despite what its reputation may suggest, the title tells us whose book it is. Ingalls's use of ambiguity is what lifts it from being wholly forgettable, creating at least two different stories, depending on whether Larry exists or he's the imaginary lover of Dorothy, childless after one dies accidentally and another is lost in miscarriage, married only in legal terms, quietly stagnating. I have to disagree with readers who describe the book as comic or tragicomic, since I didn't laugh, really, and not because I think Ingalls tries to make me laugh and fails.  One version is tragic. The other isn't so easy to classify.

To escape a life of suffering, to have a chance of starting anew, one option, this other reading says, is to shatter it.

I don't remember "The Metamorphosis" merely for its premise. I remember the apple lodged in Gregor Samsa's bug flesh. And to remember it is to feel it. I remember Ingalls's fantasy but I don't feel it.

Slice of Cheese

     Lying in bed, in the dark. Staring and gesturing at the ceiling:

There are people who risk serious injury - and their very lives - to save lives. 

There are people who risk serious injury because they get paid millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to do so. 

Then there are people who risk serious injury to obtain a packet of colby jack cheese.

Early morning memory of the time I witnessed a manager of a grocery store balance on one foot on the handle of a step ladder to reach a product.

Rather than take the time to get the proper equipment to do the job, he appeared not to think twice about saving whole minutes with his dangerous workaround. The person he was assisting didn't bat an eye. Neither noticed the look on my face. And the fans in the refrigerator must have concealed my mutterings: What are you doing? What am I looking at right now? What is wrong with you? There's something I am never doing at this job, etc, but with more cursing. One little slip as he's taking his time to cut through plastic wrap and open a box, a momentary shift in his body weight, and he hits concrete, breaks his foot, breaks his leg, snaps his neck. For cheese.

I baffle him. Bereft of an explanation for me, he settles for: People sometimes. That's the way it goes. There are some real crazies out there. It is what it is. It's not what it's not. It wasn't what it wasn't and it's not going to be what it's not going to be. He sees the look on my face as he walks by and thinks: I hate him. 

Cheese.

That recording playing throughout the day is a lie. He couldn't care less about anyone's health or safety. See how much the authority figure cares about his own. I mean, cheese.

And with that, I leap carefully out of bed, air guitar, and start the day.

On Borges and Me, Plus Some Thoughts on Autobiography and Biography

     With last year's Borges and Me, by Jay Parini, about a road trip through Scotland with the great Argentine writer, excitement soon turned into suspicion. Parini's book reads more like invention than memoir of a period, the narrative smooth, without any sign of faltering memory fifty years after the events described. Suspicion mounted as it began to resemble a biopic, a film genre I generally don't care for: a book that wasn't written for the page, a book designed to be adapted. Script material. Pausing to read the biographical paragraph on the flap, I found that one of Parini's books was adapted into a movie. And the Afterword would confirm that Borges and Me had in fact began as a film project. I didn't wish to see Borges reduced to a string of "Oscar" moments. I didn't want him to get the David Foster Wallace treatment, a passing encounter inflated into life-altering, middling drama. I winced at a trailer forming in my head. You must...believe!

But, even before Borges steps onto the stage, I got caught up, enough to get past the book's deficiencies: the whiff of artificiality (and in one case, which I'll get to, I do emphasize "whiff"), Parini's occasionally trite reflections, the somewhat perfunctory use of his backstory. The tension is real. A young writer is uncertain about his future, desperate to avoid the war in Vietnam, just as desperate to escape home and mother. His answer is to continue his education abroad, in Scotland, though without much direction, draft notices and mother's letters chasing him there. Without irony, Parini might say things like: "I wanted to believe I had said something fresh, added something, however small, to the stock of English poetry." But he's also chummy, inviting. And he has a good ear for dialogue. I sat up with more interest once his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, appears. He is no stiff. Which is to say his is a distinct voice, with its own notes of self-assurance and mischief. He's an older poet, a former assistant to Robert Graves, who offers to read Parini's poems and give suggestions. He's a translator, too. One of the writers he's translated is Jorge Luis Borges, who arrives in Scotland to experience the country as an assiduous student of its literature and history and to meet an editor of Anglo-Saxon riddles. But there's an emergency. Reid must leave for London and it falls on Parini to chauffeur the blind writer in his absence.

Parini has no idea who he is, a promising comic situation that also, it turns out, doubles as an opportunity for the natural development of a bond between the two, largely free of the barrier of mystique, a bond between blind man and guide, old man and young man, master and novice, haunted lover and aspiring lover. The book is part introduction, providing an overview of Borges's life through the course of their conversations, the major events and obsessions, part glimpse of the man in person. He recites poetry in Scottish as the inspiration strikes, relishes a verbal technique in English unavailable to the writer deploying Spanish, confesses, probes, provokes, and casually dazzles, constantly drawing from a lifetime of reading that amounts to a massive library located at the fore of his thoughts. Parini begins to realize, without even having read his work, that an exemplary, sagacious literary mind is clutching his arm, urging him to use his nascent poetic skills to create Scotland in words, for his benefit but also Parini's. The boldest stroke of the book, the best evidence of Parini's ear for dialogue, is that he successfully presents Borges's voice directly through much of their time together, the voice of a man as deeply read as anyone who's ever lived and whose first language isn't English. (Listening to a radio interview with Parini, I wasn't taken aback that he does a sort of Borges impression.) 

"Tell me the truth about yourself," said Borges.

"I was unsure about my vocation. It's the only truth."

"How long have you been a priest?"

"Forty-two years and three months."

"So you persist! This is all we ask. You made a choice, and continued in the faith. Felicidades! The stream gabbles along. You are the burn, the blaze of water on the landscape, a blister of love. You remain true to the Word."

The priest shuddered, then smiled. "Thank you for saying this." 

Borges reached for him, and the priest dipped his head forward. With his hands on the forehead of Father Burns, Borges intoned, "Si quaesieritis eum, invenietur a vobis; si autem dereliqueritis eum, derelinquet vos." If you don't abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. Borges had given the priest a blessing.

Parini doesn't adopt a pious tone in hindsight. Initially, he finds this whole business of acting as a guide a bothersome distraction. To him, Borges is just some writer, in odd tie and musty suit, eating a lot of bacon, licking books in a public library, and periodically making trouble, like when he suddenly steps out of the car into the rain and tumbles to the ground, causing him an injury that forces him to spend the night in the hospital. Reader gets both legend and ordinary, elderly, eccentric man. 

That's the intent, anyway. However, reflecting on the book in the days after finishing, it occurred to me that a reader may think Parini, by repeatedly mentioning Borges's bathroom habits and making light of them, for instance, is indiscreet. A mental alarm belatedly went off: Parini, who's taken on the responsibility of portraying a real historical figure even if the book isn't strictly biography, may seem to display bad manners. Maybe he's even dirtying up his object of interest, a sweet man whose chief offense, based on the evidence here, is being a legendary writer. 

Overall, Parini is undoubtedly paying tribute to Borges, the man and the writer. If he insists on including unpleasant facts of their encounter for rude laphs, I wouldn't object so long as he's being truthful and he holds himself to the same standard (and, you know, they're funny). Borges, after all, pays for their meals and lodging and treats Parini as an equal, which is partly why the young writer is slow to recognize his stature. During one scene, Parini shares a poem of his. When he's finished, Borges notes a common sentiment in it. Wounded, Parini says what he thinks Borges means: it's a cliché. But Borges isn't dismissing him. He clarifies: He's written the exact same poem.

Parini, however, doesn't quite do the same, airing plenty about Borges's sometimes crude or inconvenient personal habits (again, he's blind and in his 70s) without much recording any comparable shortcomings of his own in what is, after all, a personal story, what he describes as a "novelistic memoir." In this sense, it's one-sided. Parini temporarily leaves Borges to visit another writer in Orkney, taking a boat ride with a woman he's just met to get there. The water is too rough for him, he gets nauseous and vomits on himself. And he has no change of clothes. Consequently, for the rest of the trip, he reeks. Now, this is a one-time occurrence under conditions that anyone who wasn't born on the sea would react unfavorably to, not a habit, so it doesn't come close to how he's depicted Borges in his less flattering moments. Then Parini stretches credulity: The woman who's accompanied him makes no reference to his accident and, without Parini showering or cleaning his clothes, shares her bed with him. I've never claimed to be an expert in romance, but I have a feeling if I polled a thousand women who are sexually attracted to men, few would say they'd enthusiastically have sex with a man who (a) they've recently seen vomit on himself (b) hasn't changed out of the clothes he vomited upon, some evidence presumably still visible (c) smells like he's been "rolling around in the shit," as Borges sagely observes after the ladies's man Parini has supposedly had sex (and been a "good fuck" his first time, no less). Yes, there's more novel than memoir at work here, methinks. Another imbalance. The reason I enjoyed reading the book anyway, I suppose, is because I thought of Sherlock Holmes, who's so good he demonstrates it sometimes in spite of Watson.

Not long afterward, I rewatched the Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan and the rise of the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance. Though popular, it has since been the target of a twofold backlash. There are those, from critics to Ken Burns, who've fairly expressed doubts about how evenhanded the documentary is, given that Jordan's production company was involved in the making. Or point to glaring omissions, such as the absence of any direct mention of his life as a father and husband or an examination of the economics and politics of the game. Verdict: Doesn't go far enough. Really, can't go far enough with the subject as a participant in its creation. Then there are former teammates like Scottie Pippen who go so far as to say it's an embarrassing portrayal of Jordan. Verdict: Too far! 

The documentary falls short of greatness but I still find it impressive in its structure, handling a wealth of material, and highly entertaining through every one of its ten episodes, each nearly an hour. What's more, basketball fans are given the gift of a permanent joke about taking things personally. In the brief time I've spent delving deeper into the game, a lifelong fascination, I've already encountered some self-serving storytelling that bypasses anything awkward or questionable to preserve the brand and avoid "embarrassment" in a league that highly values "respect" - which makes for hardly a story at all. Michael Jordan could have approved the same kind of document. Instead, the filmmakers reveal something of the man. Several players admit that he was difficult to put up with. Steve Kerr tells a story about a time when Jordan, who was pushing him around during practice, finally punched him in the face. The skeptic might say: one of the most renowned sports figures ever, referred to as the "alpha-alpha," could too easily be forgiven or even applauded for being a bully. Then the bully, in the middle of addressing the accusation, pausing to absorb the uncomfortable thought that his teammates didn't much enjoy being on a team with him, nearly breaks down, turns his head from the camera. End of episode. Jordan doesn't embarrass himself in that moment, reacting emotionally to a touchy subject. He reveals, there and elsewhere, what should be common knowledge: He's human, not superhuman.

And that fallibility is precisely what some would prefer not to reveal.

Bolaño, living up to his own standard in The Savage Detectives, his celebrated total novel, what many consider one of his two masterworks, fictionalizes the "problems of a sexual nature" he once alluded to in an interview. Whether he's faithful to every particular doesn't matter. He knew very well how easy it is for someone, especially a writer, to self-mythologize and let people construct a monument. His choice is to knock it down by writing about a character named Belano who shares Bolaño's background and who once had a limp dick. (Borges to Parini on impotence: "I do not like this word.") Whether biography or autobiography, in fiction or outside it, an honest portrait inevitably includes embarrassing and shameful facts because they're indisputably part of any real life. To avoid them is to pretend they never happened and to sell a fantasy - an especially ignoble evasion if one reads about lives seeking the full scope and spends any time attacking and criticizing others. 

Conscientious reading and dirt-seeking are incompatible. I didn't read about Parini's Borges or watch Michael Jordan for the insights of the grocery store tabloid. Nor did I blush. It's because autobiography and biography done right can also prepare the reader to face their own lapses, failings, bodily imperfections, and blots and to reflect on what part they play in the whole story. 

Do not fear that I'm poised to conclude: Who am I to judge? Sounds so nice, so agreeable on the face of it. But I will judge a Capitol rioter. I will judge someone who blithely or irritably ignores the threat of the coronavirus and the measures taken to prevent its spread. I will judge a racist and a misogynist and an utter dope and many more accordingly. If these people refuse to be honest about who they are, I'll gladly remind them. In turn, I accept that I'll be judged for things I say and do. So we're absolutely clear: I advocate the cultivation of such discernment to keep evil at bay.

I will, however, conclude with Christopher Hitchens, whose estate, as of now, will not be cooperating with the writer of a biography and has discouraged others from doing so as well. I don't demand, of course, but I'd be among the first to read a scrupulous one should it ever come out, devouring a hundred pages per sitting. Knowing something of his feelings about the deeply personal aspect of biography, my sheer delight would probably induce him to heave a sigh. But he also didn't offer leniency and didn't expect it in return. In the meantime, I head to YouTube to enjoy a favorite Hitchens response, given near the end of his life, losing hair and weight as he was dying of cancer. It provides a clue for how he'd respond to an unscrupulous book on his life. A 60 Minutes interviewer reads him the words of a former friend: "self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical, contrarian." First Hitchens says: "Well, I don't know what's wrong with that." He came to regret the title of one of his books, Letters to a Young Contrarian, having acknowledged the rather obvious problems with contrarianism as a way of life. Yet here he is being the contrarian and cheerfully embracing it, momentarily perhaps. This part of his reply serves to communicate insouciance and helps mainly to buy time for the memorable second part: "Though he should see my ass now." If you're counting, that's a two-for-one, self-humor and swat.

A Recent Run of Bad Luck with Novels

     It isn't always my job or snow or guitar or nap or walk or movie or meditation or pushups or basketball highlights or internet browsing or Animal Crossing mayoral responsibilities or the waiting that's key to my artistic approach or this video of a professional musician in the middle of a performance sneezing into his trombone that prevents me from offering a few words. Sometimes it's the luck of the draw, a book I can't bring myself to write about, if I finished at all. Part of literature is chance. Usually if one book doesn't work out, I have another in reach ready to dispel the aftereffects. But lately I've gone from one unsatisfying novel to the next, leaving me feeling undernourished, lethargic, uneasy, mildly ill.

There's the novel that barely qualifies as fiction.

There's the novel that's barely more than political tract.

There's the novel that I had to put down once an animate future world gives way to inanimate characters.

There's the novel celebrated as a classic that I've started maybe four times through the years. I like it. Still not what I'm looking for.

There's the novel that's won a major award. It's twee and lacks rigor of form.

There's the best seller from a Nobel Prize winner. I'm not the kind of reader (or writer) who can't tolerate and see past a simple sentence. One of the few memorable pieces of writing advice I've heard comes from Raymond Carver: If it's quotable, cut it. Language as a vehicle for substance. Structure and force, comedy and weirdness are not dependent on style. It can liberate the writer who obsesses so much over word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence perfection that the elementary ability to unspool a thought is lost. Lichtenberg can be referring to the trap when he says one goes from the bad to the good to a kind of bad one thinks better than good. The problem with the best seller is that its language is a simple vehicle for paltry substance.

I've gained a better understanding of what I don't like. I try to keep this in mind. But the real cure for what ails me is to find the right book. It doesn't necessarily need to be a book worthy of claiming a permanent place on my shelves, either. At a minimum it must keep me reading til the last page, generate some heat, even if it is ostensibly cold. My luck will change, my condition will improve, so long as the search continues.