Sketch of New York, August 2021 and That's Almost Everything I Can Remember About This Momentous Occasion

     On a recent trip to New York City, my first ever, as it happens, vaccinated months back yet still wearing two masks, I took my place among the masses, the famous New York, New York masses, walking shoulder to shoulder with the masked, the partially (or uselessly) masked, and the unmasked. Looking around, one would have no idea how the US regards the coronavirus, a lingering threat despite the vaccine if not enough people take it or, on a global scale, people don't have access to it. Indifference, confusion, but no palpable fear. Of course, I was out there too, taking a measure of risk for sightseeing purposes and to finally be able to say I'd seen it for myself. My brother Miguel was by my side or, because I walk fast and he walks slow, a few steps behind me, to my right, my left, somewhere nearby. The plan was to journey many blocks on foot, at my insistence, along 7th Avenue to a Whole Foods for discounted lunch products before exploring Central Park. Upon arriving home, I felt somewhat of an obligation to commemorate my first time in the city by writing about it but I must say, without meaning to sound glib and unimpressed, my memory - of faces, scenes, sights - is hazy, almost as if it made little impression somehow. Let's see, tall buildings, the crowd, the homelessness, the clamp of concrete and flesh. Whiff of exhaust here, whiff of garbage there. Starbucks, CVS. I'm familiar with San Francisco. But let's return to Penn Station. Standing in line at the bathroom, the man ahead of me entered a stall and immediately exited, shaking his head. I leaned forward to inspect the damage from a safe and noncommital distance: the toilet water was up to the lip of the bowl. One more flush and it'd flood. I waited and did my business elsewhere. Before leaving, I had to use the mirror to fix my hair. The heat makes it look like I've poked my finger into an electrical socket or as if I'm comically stressed out. I found Miguel and we left. Outside the station, near the top of the stairs, a man pointed a camera at those streaming in and out. To be expected, I thought, although I'm not sure if it was on. We crossed the street. This is the experience much of the world craves: People. Lots of them. Some masks aside, by all appearances doing the usual, pre-pandemic. Crosswalk signals regularly treated as optional, adding another change of rhythm besides differences of pace, stop and go or simply go. Spanish and Portugeuse in the air along with English. On several blocks people stood around wearing laminated signs. I finally studied one for a moment and the man wearing it started laughing. A Hare Krishna handed out beads. A man trailed another, saying, "Thief! He's a thief!" Miguel caught up to warn me about Times Square. He didn't elaborate but I had a vague recollection of its reputation as a tourist trap or worse. The Naked Cowboy posed for pictures. A ferris wheel. A side street: I couldn't escape someone's cigarette smoke, so we stopped to let him get far ahead. Someone asked us to walk around a taped-off area where filming was in progress. A statue of Christopher Columbus. We were in the right place, Miguel assured me, but we couldn't find the store. I took the phone from my backpack and located it nearby in a mall, at basement level. None of the malls I've ever been to on the West Coast have a grocery store in it. So if someone asks me about the difference between the Coasts, I now have a profoundly dull answer handy. A mother pushing a stroller spoke soothing words to a crying child riding next to her on a scooter. Crowded, mazelike store. I decided to have a falafel from a cart outside. After scanning the aisles, Miguel settled on the same. Elevator, street. Certainly not the first woman I noticed but the first that comes clearly to mind is the woman in the running outfit reflected in the stainless steel of the falafel cart - interesting. I took a Coke with my order, thank you. We set off for Central Park. Miguel informed me that the phone, once more stored in my backpack, was continuing to speak, providing directions. I was unprepared for what I found when we got there. An esoteric subject I intend to learn a thing or two about: city planning. An area designated as a park can be nothing more than a field, a bench, and a fountain. And the name "Central Park" doesn't exactly promise an imaginative use of space. Applause for the person or team that designed it: The park retains plenty of space. Enter and the clamp of the avenue is thrown off entirely. As we proceeded we found lengthy forking walking paths, sidewalks, benches, roads, bridges, a baseball diamond, open fields, a body of water, walls of trees for shade, privacy, mystery, music, sheer beauty. Ride a carriage, ride a bike, paddle a boat, run, walk, loll in a patch of grass - everyone, as far as I could tell, used it how they wanted and with plenty of room to do so. An exemplary park, worth the trip alone. And we only covered a fraction of it. Later I encountered a scene in the book I had with me in which a once-famous 19th century novelist goes on a carriage ride through Central Park, "a newly established oasis of calm in the bustling metropolis." Sitting down for lunch, an audacious squirrel took a seat beside me, poised to leap on whatever I left behind. We stared at each other. I shared my water with Miguel. On the move again, we spotted, through the greenery, "Trump" in gold lettering on a building. Miguel whispered of pissing on it. A troubador sang. We walked between a jazz band and the audience. Two friends posed for a selfie in the middle of a crosswalk. Broad smiles. A woman sat on top of a wall with legs outstretched - interesting. When we left the park behind the sun was still up. Back among the masses, this time walking along 8th Avenue. Stuck behind a slow walker, I'd get past her but pause at the crosswalk while she kept going, regaining her head start. Once across, I'd find myself stuck behind her again. This switching of lead position went on for blocks. Glancing over my shoulder at Miguel, I caught her eye and she gave me a hard look. But I was already looking past her at another woman who caught my eye, also going our way - interesting. In a small town, there's a good chance I'll see anyone and everyone within a day or a week. Familiar faces in a quiet environment. Tranquil and cozy. Translation: Sleepy. Predictable. Your movements tracked too closely. Your every facial expression duly noted. (Lichtenberg: "If only people were as little concerned with your affairs as they are with their own.") There are things to appreciate, I'm at home wherever I go, and so on, but I prefer a big city: Noisy. Unpredictable. The anonymity of the crowd. Someone gets suspicious, doesn't like your face, you're gone. So much to see! Maybe my eyes never settled, hindering memory. And with so many people, someone is bound to stand out. Although contact is fleeting. She turns a corner, disappears into the crowd. She steps around you, making nothing of your existence. You leave her in your dust as you move at a perfectly reasonable speed. And you probably won't even have the consolation prize of remembering her face. Such encounters are a pleasure all the same but I can see how the masses can make someone feel lonely and frustrated. A man was carried away on a stretcher. A woman across the street smiled. I can't say with confidence that it was because she found me interesting. (For the record: I found her interesting.) The man standing next to her, who looked like a relative, turned and pretended to lower her shirt to cover her exposed belly button. She laughed. I crossed my arms, adopted a stony demeanor, and turned my attention to traffic, to make clear that I am no ogler, sir. But it crumbled into shoegazing shyness as we passed each other. Nearing Madison Square Garden, I reminded Miguel that the Knicks play the Hawks on Christmas Day. Revenge game. For a moment I shivered in the middle of this heat remembering Ice Trae in the 2021 playoffs. Yo: After the Hawks secured victory in the last game of the series, he took a bow. New York City is a showbiz capital and that's what you do when the show is over, after all. Although our first NBA game in New York, I said again, should be in Brooklyn. ...And somewhere along the way I startled the people around me by suddenly sing-shouting, in R & B style, "ooh!" I do that occasionally throughout the day, sometimes with a snap of my fingers, though usually not in public. Tired and underhydrated. ...We arrived at Penn Station. The woman in front of me on the escalator with a tattoo on her right arm, interesting, a woman with lavender eye contacts? wheeling luggage behind her, interesting, but enough of that! for the rest of this sketch! We read the screen indicating arrivals and departures and not much else, then headed for a system map. Every train passes through our destination, Secaucus. But we were unsure if it'd be so easy. We took a seat on one train only to second-guess ourselves and get up soon after. A station agent appeared before us, standing between cars. In my hurry, thinking about our next move, I squeezed past him to get out without saying anything. So unlike me. "Excuse me," he said. Once on the platform, I lifted a hand and apologized. He shook his head, deeply disgusted by my conduct. We stepped aboard another train. After ten minutes, over the intercom, a few stops were announced. I didn't hear Secaucus station. Miguel stood to ask the station agent what was what. He said this train would be passing through Secaucus without stopping. Then the train doors closed. We ended up in Newark. One agent told Miguel we'd have to ride back to New York and start over. But studying the screen again, I pointed to the black line, New York-Secaucus, track 1. We'd just been burned by such seemingly obvious logic, though. With plenty of time, I headed downstairs to the lobby to confirm at Information. The agent, without hesitation, said head to track 5 or 6 for a train to Secaucus. I hurried back to Miguel. Before climbing the stairs to one of those platforms, he stopped to ask the same station agent at Information the same question I did, to be safe. She directed him to track 1. Back at our original spot, a couple became angry with each other. The woman went one way and the man went the other. The train arrived. We sat facing a woman on her phone, the seats so close I had to sit with my legs to one side. I pulled out my book and fell back into the fascinating story of Charlotte Brontë. I'd already spoken to Miguel, upon starting the book, about biography. How does one get a true sense of how the subject lived? Sometimes it's pure speculation. What's left to tell the story? Who's left? (Assuming anyone even cares to tell the story.) Once in Secaucus, Miguel asked me if I'd heard the conversation on our last train ride. "So boring," he said. "I didn't hear a word of it," I said. "Not a single word." Maybe that's when my day, though spent in thee New York City, began to lose texture. The page had already pulled me into another life.

Unfortunate Parting Words in an Otherwise Pretty Good Movie

     In the promising first film category I add Jill Sprecher's Clockwatchers (1997). A satire of corporate culture that doesn't spare the lowly temp, that mostly bypasses the broad gags and caricature of Office Space, the cult movie released a year or so after also featuring a Friends cast member, in favor of understatement and nuance. Clockwatchers never even rose to become a cult movie but has remained, according to the Criterion Collection, "lost." A woman starts a job at an office. She's the kind of mousy person who'll sit quietly, for hours, waiting to be rescued, rather than speak up to ask for help. A coworker eventually gives her the tour. Along the way, her breezy, subversive, seen-it-all-done-it-all attitude suggests ease and confidence the newcomer lacks. Drawn in, the two, joined by a couple of other coworkers, get together after work for drinks. The four women go on to socialize regularly. 

The movie is about the office: drudgery and absurdity, whole days sacrificed pretending to be working, constant demeaning reminders that everyone is replaceable and stability is a luxury. That's how office workplaces tend to be depicted. But Sprecher, it turns out, isn't telling a story about everyday heroes struggling as one against the system to maintain their humanity. Instead it's about fake friendships commonly bred at work, useful in the short term to avoid feeling or appearing to be totally alone, sometimes mistaken for real, and likely to dissolve completely, as if they never happened. And it's about lonely individuals, the alienating fear and desperation beneath the professional facade. The women laugh at their miserable jobs, so beneath them, trying to reassure themselves and others that the ideal position is on the horizon, yet more often than not, Sprecher observes, people scramble for the jobs they suffer and, once attained, cling to them for life. Which is to say: It's about the symptoms of a disease, the gradual undetected slide, the failure to maintain humanity within the corporate system. That's where the movie's sensitivity and potency lies and what separates Sprecher from the rest I've encountered.

Some scenes and images are overdone. But the one major flaw is arguably the ending or cure to the disease. The mousy woman, who by movie's close is making her escape having learned to stand tall, claims in voiceover: "Everyone wants to make a mark." That's not true of everyone, nor am I certain that it's a pressing concern for most, especially at a job they despise. Then the final shot, meant to convey defiance: Make your mark by literally (or figuratively) carving the words "I was here" into a desk. To heighten the power of the moment, she looks into the camera. I was here.

Weeks have passed and I still haven't decided who that's for.

She can't be so naive as to think she'll shame the CEOs of the world into acknowledging the humanity of their employees. Noam Chomsky wisely doesn't waste his time speaking truth to power. It'd be strange for her to be sending a stern message to the office drones she refuses to resemble. And as for the viewer, me, I'm not convinced that what she needs ultimately, based on everything presented for our consideration, is to make her presence known so we shall never forget the name of [character name]. Some workers join together to demand improvements to their shared situation. Or one may realize that life isn't necessarily a job, that it can be lived fully outside of those eight excruciating hours, no announcement required. 

Those were my initial thoughts, anyway. But a more generous interpretation is that she's simply telling anyone who'll listen that she's a person, with aspirations and a story, not a badge number mindlessly drifting through the machine. Whatever the case, Clockwatchers is worth at least one viewing.

An Anti-Romance Novel

     The first Elena Ferrante novel I read, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), third book of the celebrated, internationally popular Neapolitan Quartet, is noticeably misshapen. A conversation lasts about 75 pages, seven years pass within one. This may sound like carelessness of structure that distracts and obscures, dousing the material. But Ferrante tells the story of a relationship that doesn't fit snugly into a plot, one lasting from childhood to adulthood, in episodes and shards, whatever matters most as life proceeds. Form matches content, following along isn't a problem, and the material burns undiminished. The Lying Life of Adults (2019), Ferrante's latest novel, is about a girl named Giovanna, living in Naples, Italy in the early 1990s, and the years leading to her becoming a woman. First sentence, first lie: She overhears her father call her ugly. Actually, he says she has the face of his hated sister, her aunt, Vittoria. Giovanna, ashamed yet curious, eventually sets off to meet Vittoria. The novel unfolds neatly and chronologically, chapters broken up into numbered sections of about equal length, with no shifts in approach from one to the next.

Ferrante's conventional choice of structure conflicts with what brought me back to her work: the real, presented before a misguided sense of propriety can censor it. Uncomfortable details. Messy relationships. Seething and the ineluctable explosion. Giovanna passes over stretches of time too but it has no influence on the shape of the narrative. Alone, this might not even qualify as a minor criticism if structure serves the basic purpose of smoothing the reader's path. But form matches content, the twist, the revelation, the gasp-inducing moment occurring precisely when needed. For instance, Giovanna goes from guys occupying no mental space, hardly exploring her romantic or sexual feelings, to falling madly in love, at first sight, not with a boy but a man, and not just any man but precisely the man she shouldn't, which would cause more of a programmatic explosion. In addition to being handsome, he's remarkably intelligent and charismatic, we're told.

Giovanna has no distinct verbal stamp - no tics, no slang, no depth of lexicon, no particular gift for a memorable line. (The good reviews do not savor her voice.) She frequently refers to the difference between Italian and dialect but, possibly due to the difficulty of translating the difference, never goes further than pointing it out. What's more, the character's sense of self is narrowed to the drama of her family life. Even modest, passing references to what else is going on with her, who she is outside of it, what else she thinks, are few. Thus, in language and personality, Giovanna, the most fully drawn character, isn't.

The world of the novel is highly circumscribed. Given the paucity of anything to distinguish the time period, the 90s could have been the 70s or the 50s. It's not a novel of place. And though the book covers years of her life, external events never break into the narrative - no storm, no car accident, no change in the country's political makeup, no errant ball to the head. 

So what's left to involve the reader? What seems to come easiest to Ferrante, what I came for, her brand of the real. She's inconsistent with it. And after what devolves into a fatiguing wash of incidents, of rifts and reshuffled alliances and sudden changes of heart, they coalesce at the very end, with perhaps the best scene, a sexual encounter, brief, squalid, and farcical. After all the lies, the swerves, the sheer confusion, adults pulled one way or another by sexual desire, a declaration of freedom, an anti-romance novel.

The element of soap opera in all this is pronounced. Ferrante doesn't wildly escalate, into the realm of amnesia and evil twins (although there is a "magic" bracelet). But things happen at regular intervals because they must, to bring the viewer back for the next episode, to keep the book going. Soap opera in the guise of a diary: venting (controlled), honest and heated, narcissistic and tedious.

The Lying Life of Adults reads like a competent debut.

The Literary Life, 2

    I'm rummaging through my books looking for a book to counteract the effects of the book I'm reading. The idea is that I'll dutifully endure as many pages as I can of the one and switch to the other as needed but half the time I don't bother to switch back. I return with three, none of which I thought of before I retrieved them. The first is a thick volume, the collected stories and novels of Saki. According to the inscription, it was given as a gift to "Kate" in 1989. Set that aside for later. The next is a cult writer's essay collection, bought on impulse years ago. After sampling a few pages, it'll probably be donated. The last, also an impulse buy, is called Mortification (2003). It's an anthology of writings on the title theme. Nearly every one takes the reader to the dark side of the literary life.

The editor, Robin Robertson, came up with the idea thinking back on the day he was doing a poetry reading for an audience of six at a bookstore when he looked up to see some football hooligans (soccer enthusiasts) pressing their bare asses to the window. Inspired, he sent forth a request to writers to tell their own such stories, publicly, for inclusion in a book. Some replied. Of those who didn't, Robertson required no explanation.

The form I'm most interested in these days, as a writer, allows for a piecemeal read. I keep my favorites close at hand to page through upon waking, as a change of pace from another book, during meal preparations, in the bathroom. The entries in Mortification are the right length for it, as short as a couple of pages and no longer than seven, and while the book isn't essential, not what I'd keep closest at hand, I'd have it around to pick up now and then.

The benefit of multiple contributors is variety: voices (in Mortification, mostly Western European and North American white men and women), approaches, pain levels. The entries I placed an asterisk next to in the table of contents, to indicate the best, outnumber the entries I crossed out. And since almost everyone writes about real mental bruises and scars, the book isn't an empty or frivolous read.

Irvine Welsh, awarded an asterisk for what is by far the most revolting entry, tells two stories, with an important distinction tucked in between: 

This type of embarrassment is intense, but relatively routine. The big problem in trying to dredge up a really mortifying memory is that there are so many and you suspect that you've repressed the best (or worst) ones. 

Routine embarrassment and scalding, traumatizing embarrassment. The book contains both.

Common experiences can be gleaned. Interviewers on radio and TV shows who get the writer's name wrong, couldn't care less about the book being promoted, look past the writer to a worthy guest. Although William Boyd, a novelist, has one encounter that tickles rather than rankles me: 

He makes great play with the fact that I have the same name as the actor who was TV cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. He also uses me to introduce the ad breaks. "Do you like potato chips, William?" "I do," I confess, "but we call them 'crisps' in England." He repeats the word several times, rolling the "er." "Then I think you'd like these American potato chips, too." In the course of our interview I similarly endorse Shake 'n' Vac carpet cleaner ("Do your carpets ever get dirty, William?") and a brand of motor oil.

Maggie O'Farrell, on the other hand, has more tolerance than should be expected of anyone for a radio show host she overhears loudly complain about booking "bloody nobodies" like her. Leave, I scribbled in the margin. She stays and he demands to know where she is. Insult him, then leave. She stays and the producer asks weakly whether she's heard. She says uh huh and stays. Stay long enough to insult him on the air, then leave. The show starts. As he introduces her, the host gets her name wrong.

2021: Podcasts, hosted by readers and recorded for a niche audience of readers, have no doubt mercifully reduced such encounters. Also 2021: Social media and everything that comes with it, the least of which is mortification.

Then there are sparsely attended readings. The luckier ones, it seems, greet an audience composed entirely of a few friends and family members, a fan or two, a sympathizer. But it's the unlucky ones, like Paul Muldoon, who make me laugh most. He goes to the trouble of traveling to a remote university campus. The professor who scheduled his appearance, he discovers, isn't there, having been indisposed after a three-week bender. No one with any serious commitment to the guest has replaced him, so the promotion for the reading consists of a single flyer posted the day before it's to take place, already "obscured by an 'Anxious? Depressed? Suicidal?' poster." And though the university has booked him a hotel room, no arrangements have been made to pay him. Nevertheless, Muldoon forges on, gets lunch, and goes where the reading is to be held. Some students enter and take a seat at the back. The time for him to read arrives. Without introduction, he gets up and begins. His audience seems to like the first poem. He starts reading another poem when one of the students interrupts to ask how long he's going to be. It turns out his "audience" picked that room to study, thinking it was unoccupied. Muldoon travels some distance without getting paid to read for no one. And there's one more disaster awaiting him.

Naturally there are some words on alcohol. A poet named David Harsent most vividly illustrates why, telling the story of a day spent drinking, leading up to a group reading at a bookstore. Hammered, he orders everything on the menu at an Indian restaurant and consumes it all. Later on, after he finishes his reading, he takes a seat in the audience and quickly falls asleep, snoring. Then he rouses himself to fight through the audience to get to the only bathroom in the store. Harsent shows off his music producer's ear for the many sounds of vomiting:

There can, I know, be discreet upchucks of the cough-and-gob variety, or even the girlish whisper-and-slip. This is not either of those, nor is it the twenty-gauge-shuck-and-reload or even the storm-drain-rib-racker. No. This is volcanic. This is a fully orchestrated, bass-pedal-active, hog-hollerin', boot-soles-to-bog-bowl, ten-gallon tsunami.

Harsent is among the survivors. He continues drinking.

Because the book prompts one to reflect on personal mortifications, because the tone is casual, stories related as if over dinner, and out of fairness, I share some gems from my own archive.

After finishing the book, it now strikes me as odd that the last reading I did, close to a decade ago, seems downright triumphant by comparison. San Francisco. An audience of about thirty people, few of whom I knew, no one I knew well. The woman who informed me of when I was supposed to read didn't make eye contact as she spoke. Waiting, idly flipping through a book, listening to the chatter and clatter of the bar, I felt alone and awkward but no more than usual. It wasn't my first reading and, with preparation, public speaking isn't so bad. My introduction, improvised, more or less, got laughs. My piece got laughs. Afterward, I was told some of those in attendance actually wanted to read the rest of the little literary magazine we were promoting. Success. Well, I only had one drink.

Not so on the day I took the train to Berkeley to watch the latest Jim Jarmusch movie, Paterson, at the United Artists theater on Shattuck. It's about a poet living in the city of Paterson, in the state I now call home. I didn't like the movies of his I'd seen previously but I was intrigued that he made one about a poet, an unpublished poet at that. It was as good as the reviews made it out to be. Perhaps most of all I admired Jarmusch's skill at telling the potentially boring story of how a writer gets material from mundane surroundings and incidents. The mundane, for some synonymous with banality and vacuousness, can so easily blur past, unseen. One may come to believe that there's nothing of value in it, nothing to see, and nothing lived. That's a mistake. The real problem is whether one cares to see what's there to see or not. Life, the full scope of life, is within reach, thriving, and the mind is perfectly free to roam beyond the self and its perceived interior boundaries to graze. An astonishing gift. In Paterson, the viewer follows a writer as he uses that gift to transmute experience (which, with proper attention, becomes a message to decode) into humble lines. Without sentimentality, without romance. With affection, with mischievous humor. Feeling invigorated, I thought I'd extend my trip by stopping at a bar located a couple of blocks from the university for a drink before heading back to Castro Valley. As I settled on a stool, I remembered this was the place, years before, where I was having a conversation with my brother about literature. While speaking, I'd noticed a waitress and a bartender glancing at us, stepping closer, obviously eavesdropping. I became uncomfortable, worried about what I was saying. I stammered. The waitress and bartender exchanged dubious looks. The waitress crowed: "Oh, he's just drunk!" I hadn't taken a single sip of my drink. (Routine.) I ordered a beer and finished a long article about Albert Woodfox. A woman sat a couple of stools over. Soon a man walked up to her and introduced himself. He asked her what she was reading. This led to them revealing that they were both writers. Shakespeare came up because she was a playwright, I think. The man said, with excessive cheer, that he'd been working on his first novel for over twenty years. He proceeded to summarize the plot in detail. She listened patiently. Closing the magazine and finishing my drink, I thought: What lies behind this mundane scene? A continuation of the writing theme of my day, that much was clear. But what message was I receiving? Finally, the woman climbed off the stool and said she had to go. They exchanged farewells. I ordered another drink and started reading a novel. The bar was becoming more crowded. I sipped and thought about Paterson and Woodfox and writing. Twenty years. I doubted he'd ever finish. Maybe his novel existed merely as something to talk about. Putting my glass down, I spilled beer on the page of the novel I was trying to read. The bartender and I looked down at the huge brown drop. (Routine.) Time to go. I pressed a napkin to the wet spot, finished the rest of my drink, and headed for the station. To my credit: I had no trouble getting there and stepping aboard the correct train. I took a seat in the middle of the car and fell asleep clutching my backpack. I awoke with a jolt as the train neared my transfer point, Bay Fair. And I started vomiting on my backpack. So often Miguel and I had exchanged BART horror stories. Now I was the story! (Scalding!) The train came to a stop and I jogged out, my backpack held under my chin like a tray to catch any additional blown chunks. Across the platform, down the stairs, to the bathroom. And I blacked out again. I woke up to pounding on the door and a man's incoherent shouting. I was lying next to the toilet, in the fetal position, on the filthy floor of a BART station bathroom, with its flickering fluorescent light, clutching my vomit-covered backpack. By then I was lucid enough to realize this was a low point for me. (Traumatizing.) 

Another distinction: Earned mortification, such as when you overestimate your ability to handle strong drink and pay the price, and unearned mortification, a price paid for getting out of bed and facing the world. (Suddenly I remember the terse phrase "nothing comes free.") Discussing the book's subject at length with Miguel, he shared one of his gems. A high school kid spread his arms to hug a girl. As she approached, a seagull shit on his chest. The girl fled, screaming. I like to imagine he stood there for a while with his arms outspread. A symbol. But in the book, the embarrassments that come through no fault of one's own, that can't necessarily be anticipated, feel more like stabs. Bitterness is also common. The genre writer repeatedly looked down upon. The invitation to an event that turns out to be worse than a waste of time, a series of petty humiliations. And bitterness is magnified by what's expected. Some writers harbor thoughts of fame and fortune. Some, though, simply expect better, after the work put into writing the novel or stories or poems, than indifference or contempt. 

I felt sympathy but no shock. How many readers are there? And among those, how many are truly devoted to reading - reading more, reading deeper, reading with aesthetic appreciation, reading to refresh memory, reading to be shaped, reading to make the most of one's capacity for absorbing the world, reading because it's inextricable from the way they lead their lives? I've met a startling number of writers or people who aspire to be writers. I've met many people who find it notable or strange or unsettling that I read. I've met very few readers. And among those few who do build a life around reading, one inevitably runs into snobs, cavilers, creeps, touts, maniacs, and their worshippers, types that don't exactly fill one with confidence that they know how to read at all. So, presented with stories of indifference and contempt for the writer, not just bad writers or troublemaking writers but any writer, I think: Of course. That's closer to the rule than the exception. And the book doesn't cover other aspects of the literary life, like "creative writing" programs or the academy or publishing, each of which could have a book of mortifications.

On the other side: Hope. The writing matters, whether there's anyone in the audience or not. The reading matters even more. And there are and will be true readers. Sometimes they manage to find each other, on or off the page, and laugh.

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.