LUCY CORIN

My artist friend Leonid Tsvetkov made this video of me reading a couple of apocalypses.  I am so excited about this book coming out.  Copy edits kicked my ass but I think the book may be executed perfectly, the best it could be, being what it is.

thinking about writing this first draft of the last chapter of the swank hotel– I think I have a sense of what the swank hotel is, conceptually at this point– not sure how much to nail down in my thinking about it yet– right now a sense is I think enough and more could kill it– similarly these ideas about ending– because it was so freaking shiny and beautiful this weekend, you know how aspen leaves are shiny on one side well every single thing looked like that in the light this weekend– and I write in the mornings, feel hulky in the brain by 2– so I pulled the metal grate shade over my window b/c the scene takes place at night and darkness is important for cutting things out– I think an ending is about slowing leaving things off so moments become increasingly singular– you just let things drop off/fall away as pages accumulate sometimes– so thinking about Joy Williams saying writers are always writing in the dark, and EL Doctorow about driving at night through mountains with just what the headlights illuminate– and how a house in the night is lit up, the light sort of contained– the reflective light of celestial spheres, the perforations in the lit house– and how can you choose an ending if you can’t choose a dream house?  these are still related.

another idea that repeatedly flits through and I would like to pin down if only to kill– that the nature of personification is at state b/c of global warming.

a man met his architect at a cafe and plunked a stack of cash on the table.  The architect, a small man dressed in shades of gray and cutting edge spectacles, shrunk from the money, then pulled himself together and said, “keep that brick to yourself, please.”

is the act of throwing someone or something out the window.  the peremptory removal of an adversary, often breaking window in process.  term rooted in st. bartholomew’s day massacre.  a lot of things go in and out of windows in my stuff.

I think the form of the novel– the largest level– is really manifesting.  It’s sort of echo, or shadow– it’s kinds of doubles, but the relationship between the doubles is in consistent and evolving motion.  The characters are in pairs, they follow each other, or spy, or exist in conscious comparative relation.  One of them when he launches into a story he always tells one story to tell another- but the “another” is stated, never told.  I am also starting to be able to chuck the anxious aspects of the collaging that has been bothering me.  Not totally chuck, but let the bottom fall out so there’s just this layer of it sometimes.  I want this sense of roiling underneath everything, that the story is like oil swirling on an ocean filled with animals we will never understand because they are too much.  That is not Hemingway’s iceberg.  It’s related, but it is totally not his iceberg.

Did my “shoptalk” for the community here– read the rome part of the book– this little intro chapter-story– along with an older section that, while preparing to read, I found I could understand how to streamline.  reading does not always work for me the way it has here the various times I’ve done it officially or to a few people in a studio.  a lot of times I read or prepare to read and I don’t learn anything.  but here it has been utterly clarifying. sometimes b/c I can feel the difference between what I can defend when I’m by myself writing, what might “work” in my own head, and what I just feel unembarrassed to present to these people.  That simple line– do I cringe at myself or not– is really uncomplicated here.  A lucky or earned balance of respect and lack of fear of the people around me, I think.  very excited to get back to work and apply what I think I know now.

in florence one of the best things was purgatory and hell in cappella struzzi in santa maria nouvella.  it is enormous, it is faded, there are words in a language I don’t know, you can barely see it or take it in in real life let alone take a picture (or find one on the internet) that even suggests what it is like or might have been like back when.  this is akin I think to the territory of fiction in a visual world, the sense of having to be there, the inability to record.  I am thinking sloppily b/c my senses are fried from the daytrip yesterday.  there is also a relationship to another visual/fiction moment from a daytrip a couple of weeks ago to an archeological site.  the rooms in the tomb had been stripped of its frescoes– they had been removed to a museum (or looted or some blurry line between, I forget) but what was so interesting to me was that they’d placed on an easel a number of laminated images that were meant to let you know what had been there.  But the images were not of what had been there, or reconstructions of what what had been there looked like or might have looked like, but this, below–an artist in the group said it look like 1930′s illustration– but seems to show what *figures* were there and what they were *doing* but not have any interest in showing what they might have *looked like* or *been like* like.  I was astonished and also confused by being the only one there who seemed astonished.  I said to my favorite archaeologist:  but it seems like they think style doesn’t matter? and she said that’s right.  I just can’t get over it, it is so bizarre to me. P.S. you can see a little of the original decoration on the ceiling beam at the top of the photo.

someone was saying the other day that they remember being so blown away by White Noise back in the day but that it hasn’t aged well.  I sat with that a little– I could see the point, but I taught it just a couple years ago and didn’t think that.  But now I remember teaching it as a book of its time– about what it was like to be disoriented by the infiltration of the self by corporate narratives– and how normalized that relationship to the world has become.  It seems to me now that the book is doing one thing a great book can do, which is to be of its time in its time and then teach people about their own assumptions by so wholly depicting/getting them to experience the world other-wise.  this is not unrelated to stuff I’m trying to think thru in my book about the constant feeling of being outdated that is part of the texture of current culture, and also part of the texture of middle age.  technocorpses everywhere.

something about being very deep in writing, I feel deadish or jangly when I’m in public.  enhanced right now I think by writing about personas and unreadable assertions of what you think might be authentic but you’re just playing authentic, being reactionary.  I don’t want to return the phone calls of any of the people I love.  like drugs, so self indulgent, but it’s art, so I keep trying to get away with pursuing it.  tried to institute a policy of taking real breath/moment before going from study to shared space but I forget and come back to my study with my coffee not sure who I was out there to people, whirling with what I can/can’t/want to/don’t want to control.  a writer friend calls it “spooky writer face.”   I don’t know what I look like but that’s how I feel.