Where I’m Writing From:

The bed. The California king. In the master bedroom (not grand, but cozy, in the far bottom corner of the house). There’s nothing unseemly about the location; it just happens to be where I work these days—having to do with various developments: like, last winter I slipped on the ice in Vermont and broke my coccyx; like, my desk chair, which I’ve replaced with one of those enormous exercise balls, was lousy to begin with: but who can actually sit on a ball for any length of time (without bouncing—and bouncing isn’t actually conducive to reading or writing or thinking, not for me anyway); like, my college graduate has come home to L.A., so I can’t hole up in her room anymore. Long and short: if I were to open a fortune cookie? If it were to read, “You will finish an essay tomorrow”? Without affect, all joking aside, I’d be able to add in bed. Moreover, it turns out, though my husband is skeptical, this is as fine a place as any to get the job done. (Why is he skeptical? He’s afraid the work will interfere with my sleep, infect my dreams—and if only that were true; that’d be as good a reason as any to work here, right?) On the bed, I can spread out my papers every which way; if my feet get cold, my sock drawer is closeby; it’s quiet down here, and not dark exactly—more like a tree-house than a cave, thanks to the Chinese Elm that grows just outside the sliding glass doors—and the atmosphere, remote and isolated, promotes writerly/readerly immersion. Plus my office—my actual office—is just on the other side of the wall, if I happen to need a file or a book or an extra pencil.

But does it matter where we work? I think it must. It matters to me anyway, especially (though you might suppose it’d be the other way around) once I’m in the throes of whatever it is. This is not to say that whole paragraphs haven’t rushed me in Trader Joe’s, in line at the ATM, even at stoplights (the car is very good place to work, just ask Susan Straight, who’s written nine beautiful books, parked and waiting to pick up her daughters from here and there); goes without saying, of course, we should always carry a notebook, or, if we’re as put together (as dapper!) as New Yorker reporter Gay Talese, we might consider cutting cardboard into pieces to fit the interior breast pockets of our blazers. See and this is the sort of inside information that delights and inspires, right? Why didn’t I think to ask Aimee Bender, who read and spoke about writing to MPW students in Doheny library last Monday night, where exactly she spends that allotted two hours a day: would she be able to write those perfect stories just anywhere, or does she—like Virginia Woolf and me—need a room of her own?

“Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish,” wrote Mark Helprin earlier this week in an essay in The New York Times, celebrating not just his own work space, but the value of serendipity in a writer’s life. And last August Dani Shapiro blogged about “creating a narrative out of puzzle pieces…I have a feeling,” she went on to say, “that those of us who spend our days alone in our rooms working out stories on the page and in our heads obsess about the question of pattern and randomness.” Perhaps it’s because our work is mysterious and confounding in that way, that so many of us need the illusion, at least, of a safe, familiar reality, however impermanent it might turn out to be. And we have to believe, don’t we, that if we show up there with some regularity, we’re more likely to benefit from some wonderful ‘accident.’ Gay Talese says his “bunker,” his “subterranean think tank,” is where he can work “without any distractions.” Give yourself a treat and let him take you on a tour. And for more on where writers live and work, visit A. N. Devers’ wonderful site: http://writershouses.com/.

I’d like to write like ___… (fill in the blank)

Back in the 80s, when I lived in New York City, my sister and I went to see a De Kooning show at the Whitney Museum of Art. We played a game: Stood back from each canvas and guessed its title, delighting ourselves when we came close—when we saw what we were supposed to see—though no word or phrase of ours was as pungent or evocative as any of De Kooning’s: Here’s a sampling (in no particular order) from the vast retrospective on the sixth floor of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art through mid-January, 2012: The Cow Jumps Over the Moon; Landing in Boston; Door to the River; The Cat’s Meow; Conversation; Queen of Hearts; Excavation; Whose Name was Writ in Water… And my especial favorite?–title, I mean?–Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother: Talk about mixed genre; talk about emotionally loaded. And to think about: how can an artist—painter, musician, poet—focus the imagination of his audience with a title? Should a work of art speak for itself? Should we go ahead and interpret as we please? (Can we help it?) Or ought we to consider the creator’s intention? See, once we know the title of that drawing, and as we consider those two boys side by side—how not to be intrigued by the inner life of at least one of them?

Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother, completed in 1938, comes early in the current exhibition, which covers “seven eras”; De Kooning only stopped working a few years before his death at age 93. But though it wasn’t difficult to choose my favorite title, I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite decade—I couldn’t, in fact. For if they are wonderful one by one—each painting and each period—taken together, as evidence of a life in art, the effect is extraordinary.

But you can read any number of experts on De Kooning–including Holland Cotter, who wrote about this particular show when it opened last September: “Unfurling a Life of Creative Exuberance” reads the headline, which (speaking of the power of titles), by way of entry to his smart review, was just one more reason I couldn’t wait to get to MoMA when I was in New York a few weeks ago.

According to Taylor, “…De Kooning…wanted to open everything up, to bring—to squeeze—everything into art: high, low; old, new; savagery, grace… And so he did, in a laborious, pieced-together, piled-up, revision-intensive way…”
The critic then explains the artist’s process: “Typically he would start with a drawing, add paint, draw on top of the paint, scrape the surface down, draw more images traced and transferred from elsewhere, add paint to them, and on and on.”

Sound familiar? Sound like writing and revising? (and revising, and revising again) I thought so. I hoped so. And I couldn’t wait to see for myself.

Then, not long after I’d made reservations online, a status update on Facebook caught my eye: “I want to write the way De Kooning painted,” wrote Susan Cheever. At least that’s what I thought she’d written–that’s what I remembered when I checked with her after seeing the show, to ask about quoting her post. Susan referred me to an essay she’d published at The Fix, which was enough to send me back to Facebook to find her post all over again. Turned out I’d been hasty—I’d heard what I wanted to hear. Susan’s actual status? “I want to write the way De Kooning painted in 1981–those last precious years.” And in her good essay, she asserts that De Kooning’s best work was created after he got sober at age 74. “Can only a fellow ex-alcoholic get it?” she asks.

Maybe so. But how to reconcile Cheever and Cotter? Cheever and me? Not that Cotter doesn’t love the later paintings (and I do, too), but not more than the others; and while Cheever characterizes the early work as “frantic and uncontrolled,” he tells us just the opposite: the artist, he says, “was a deliberator,” and, “Every painting was a controlled experiment.”

On top of which, in the exhibition itself, one of De Kooning’s students is quoted as saying that his teacher worked relentlessly, month after month after month on a single piece, to achieve the feeling that the paint had been “blown” onto the canvas. So, whether or not the artist was a drunk, here’s my take: I’d like to write like De Kooning painted; with that kind of focus, absorption, commitment, and passion, year after year, decade after decade; I’d like to accumulate a body of work that honestly reflects who I am and who I’m becoming; I’d hope to acquire experience, insight, and fluency that informs my craft and content; and I’d like to think my perspective–as it changes and deepens–will continue to inform and transform me and my sentences.

De Kooning inspires me—just me—not because he sobered up, but rather because he was never content to repeat himself; and, as far as I can tell, he never got stuck. Or if he did, I guess he stuck with it until he wasn’t stuck anymore. Besides which, those earlier paintings are gorgeous in my view, full of movement and color and humor and joy and pathos and mystery; and I’d like to write like that, yeah.

So: All kinds of questions raised here, by three—only three!—responses to art: Is it true that we are what we do? How much must we know about the artist to understand and appreciate his work? Can the audience, reader or viewer or listener, help but project and endow? Is there any such thing as objectivity on either side of the equation? And does it matter what moves us, so long as we are moved?

Chime in and tell me what you think…

“Smoke”: A Movie for Writers

I recently taught the 1995 Paul Auster/Wayne Wang film, Smoke, as part of my “Creating Compelling Characters Across Disciplines” class in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. Smoke is a movie that resonates with writers because it’s filled with characters who use fiction–the art of storytelling–as a means of connection, safety, and even survival.

An imaginative shopkeeper, a grieving novelist, a wayward teen, a distressed mother, and a duped auto mechanic revolve around a Brooklyn smoke shop as big themes–such as (1.) the question of what “truth” is and (2.)  identity as it relates to the self and to the idea of “family”–spin around them. Slowly, they all inch closer to self-definition.

Since Wayne Wang directed the film from a script by fiction phenom Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, by the way, is stunning), Smoke is appropriately literate, funny, and deeply affecting. Those of you familiar with Auster’s work will notice that he lifted some of his prose and inserted it into the screenplay, but those words just leap off the screen with vitality due to the uniformly excellent cast, which includes Harvey Keitel (who absolutely does not get better than this), the ever-reliable William Hurt, Lost‘s Harold Perrineau, Stockard Channing (sporting an unexplained eye patch), and Forest Whitaker (who will break your heart).

The movie–which is appropriately divided into chapter headings–climaxes with Keitel’s breathtaking nine-minute monologue (delivered in a single shot), in which he tells William Hurt’s character what he claims to be “the best Christmas story you ever heard.” It ain’t far from the truth. (The story is actually adapted from a piece that Auster wrote for The New York Times in 1990.) Alas, the trailer:

As a side note, Wang and Auster had so much fun on set that they made a second movie together, Blue in the Face, an entertaining and light series of improvised scenes featuring a bizarre collection of actors, musicians, and personalities (Lou Reed, Lily Tomlin, Madonna, etc.) It’s not the masterpiece that Smoke is, but is a perfectly acceptable way to pass the time.