brianrayfiction.com Blog

From Neverwhere. Rat-speaks for itself, I’d say:

They reminded Richard horridly of an exhibition of contemporary art Jessica had once taken him to: an exciting young artist had announced that he would break down all the Taboos of Art, and to this end, had embarked on a campaign of systematic grave robbery, displaying the thirty most interesting results of his depredations in glass cases. The exhibit was closed after the artist sold Stolen Cadaver Number 25 to an advertising agency for a six-figure sum, and the relatives of Stolen Cadaver Number 25, seeing a photo of the sculpture in the Sun, had sued both for a share of the proceeds and to change the name of the art piece to Edgar Fospring, 1919-1987 Loving Husband, Father and Uncle, Rest in Peace, Daddy.

Netlix’s “Watch Instantly” becomes my best friend in the slow weeks between May and June. Although I’ve stayed productive, I still manage to squeeze in a movie every day or so and yesterday saw the ‘07 adaptation of Harold Pinter’s play “Sleuth,” with Jude Law and Michael Caine – who plays a mystery writer a bit preoccupied with his estranged wife. So I’m thinking as I watch this: this mystery writer has a helluva nice house out in the country with tons of security cameras and a closet full of his wife’s $5,000 coats. Oh, he also owns a shiny string of bling-bling valued at a million pounds. So in many ways this movie should be included in the fantasy genre. Or should it? I remember being pretty stunned that author Don DeLillo – once one of the most obscure writers in America – now lives in the most expensive neighborhood in the US. (Of course, I think his wife’s a banker.) Now, I would do anything to find a house out in the country, or else just have enough cash to completely soundproof a room in my 1-bedroom apartment, or invent earplugs that block 100 percent of the sound coming from my ridiculous upstairs neighbors’ two pet dogs.

Booklist just notified my publisher and me that they’re giving Through the Pale Door a starred review. I’ve been called a “talent to watch.” To celebrate I’m going to drive up to New England and start looking for a summer cabin. But I can’t decide which $5,000 dinner jacket to put on my credit card. Or should I get a blazer, a smoking jacket? How about a writing jacket? Do they make those?

And before I forget, and to end on a less solipsistic note, here’s a link to a recent NPR interview with that reporter, Roxana Saberi, that was locked up in Iran for four months: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104612989&sc=fb&cc=fp. I’m glad she’s free now. Of course anybody would understand why she would want to return to Iran. But in her shoes I sure would think twice.

So with the opening of a recent NY Times article go my hopes of reading the rest of Marquez’s memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, which last I hard was supposed to come out in three volumes. I remember reading the first one almost straight through and reviewing it for the Free Times my last year in college. Marquez’s books are what you wish you’d written yourself but know you would’ve screwed up. Unfortunately, looks like his memory has started to erode and he can’t remember key parts of his own life without deferring to his official biographer (or maybe he was cracking a joke and the reporter didn’t catch it). Anyway, another book falls onto my wish list. I’m so glad this guy decided to condense his research into roughly 500 pages, because:

This intensive, assured, penetratingly analytical book will be the authoritative English-language study of Mr. García Márquez until Mr. Martin can complete an already 2,000-page, 6,000-footnote version “in a few more years, if life is kind.” He compressed that sprawling magnum opus into 545 pages (plus notes and index), a “brief, relatively compact narrative,” so it could be published “while the subject of this work, now a man past 80, is still alive and in a position to read it.” Both author and subject have been treated for lymphoma, Mr. Martin says.

It happens that I’m working on a 2,000-page biography of Chuck Norris. Other than Marquez, he might qualify as the only person worthy of so many pages. Did you know that Apple pays Chuck Norris 99 cents every time he listens to a song? Did you know that Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird? Did you know that Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because he only knows the element of surprise? Did you know that Chuck Norris wears a live rattlesnake as a condom? Well, that’s why I’m writing the biography.

David Desmond, for his novel The Misadventures of Oliver Booth. Not only did Desmond win in my category of the 2009 Indie Book Awards, he placed third over all. Desmond’s book has also won a slew of other awards that you’ll find listed on his website. He’s a neuropsychologist from Palm Beach who happens to be Donald Trump’s nephew. Not exactly your cutting image of Indie, I know. But if there is anyone qualified to satirize the rich and famous, it’s this guy.

A few days ago I posted a light-hearted note on Ruth Padel’s appointment to the Oxford Professor of Poetry position in the storm of resurfacing allegations against Derek Walcott. Well, turns out that Padel staged the “anonymous” campaign that she herself condemned. Now she’s resigned. First let me say something that I haven’t read elsewhere: Didn’t everyone already know about Walcott’s no-no’s? Why is this news to begin with? Anyway, who will be the next Oxford Poet? The picture should be clear, and all the talking heads now agree. We won’t find a decent poet with a moral compass. (Humor.)

So I move to nominate three candidates: my cousin Bert from Alaska, me, and a genetically engineered clone of Wordsworth.

Bert hails from the purest state on earth, home to Gov. Sarah Palin. He’s a religious poet and has only ever wanted to sleep with one person, his wife, and only for the sake of kids. And his poetry is pretty good, too! He does mostly experimental free-verse. In fact, it’s hard to read because most of it’s just words he likes thrown randomly on the page in different fonts and colors. But they do rhyme. He’s upstanding and moral. And this guy writes a lot. The guy produces a new poem every twenty minutes. (He types them into a blackberry and emails them to a list of 1,000 people.) This guy could write poetry while reading it. Plenty of people have already come out saying that this whole ordeal hurts literature and poetry, and I think Bert can restore dignity to this tarnished position, dragged through the mud for hundreds of years.

Many of us know, deep down, the unfortunate truth. Competitive schools-Ivy League or not-don’t want to pay the price for high moral standards. You can learn about the shady dealings of a dozen big name artists, writers, and scholars at big name schools in a five minute Internet search. That’s why I say fire them all and replace them with people like me. $11k a year for this Oxford job already falls within my currently salary range as a graduate student. Since the job only requires a few speaking events a year, I can do those over the Internet. I have a wonderful British accent. I’ve taken some poetry workshops, and I can learn the last thousand years of poetry on the job. The bottom line is that as a common person I’ve been trained not to do things like hit on students or run smear campaigns.

Which leads me to my third nomination: Wordsworth. Folks, this guy made his career writing about the common people. Remember that poem in your Brit Lit survey class, about the guy standing in the river with the leaches? That was Wordsworth. And Tintern Abbey. So I say dig him up, extract his DNA, and remake him. Homegrown Wordsworth can be psychologically conditioned to behave himself, and we can also give him superhuman powers. Nobody would have to worry about sexual harassment charges, because who wouldn’t want to be seduced by superhuman Wordsworth?

Here’s a link to a great interview with Neil Gaiman from a couple of weeks ago. He talks about the process of writing and filming Coraline and the 18-month loneliness of producing his gigantic novel American Gods. He describes the completion of that massive novel as a release from prison, ironic considering that’s exactly how the novel begins. “Barely said a word to anyone” during that time, he recalls, and had to relearn the art of conversation. Good to know.

Gaiman also talks here a fair bit about genre. Fascinating that the first editor Gaiman showed the manuscript to said the story was unpublishable on the grounds that it was a horror story written for a mixed audience of children and adults. Today we hear that and scoff – of course you can write for young and adult audiences at once. But Gaiman began writing Coraline in the early 90s, way before JK Rowling, as Gaiman points out, showed the world that much $$$ could result from that kind of genre mixing. Of course, I wonder if this idea that’s supposedly new to the publishing industry hadn’t been common knowledge for decades in Hollywood, where family films always rake in the big bucks. Just look at this Memorial Day weekend. Ben Stiller’s fluffy film about museum nightlife is squashing what I’d call a far superior piece of work in Terminator Salvation. Oh, well. Enjoy your Gaiman.

I’d heard so much about Bale’s rant the past several weeks but never got around to listening to it until now, right after marveling at his performance in the latest Terminator flick. A parking lot powwow after the film led to my social crew’s resolution to go home and watch said flip-out on youtube. I enjoyed it and it’s easy to see from the film’s intensity what happened. Bale isn’t the first actor or artist to go ape shit and, while it’s hard to believe, I’ve got more respect for him after hearing the incident and the apology on a local radio program. In fact, Bale spends about twice as much time and energy apologizing and contextualizing than he ever did “bullying.” In case anyone hasn’t heard that segment, here you go: Bale is so so sorry.

I was surprised to hear that a lot of people are staying away from this movie because of Bale’s melt down. Bale speaks to that in the apology. It’s a good film – about as good as T2 and probably the best action deal to hit theater’s this summer. At least better than Transformers, which I’m going to try to avoid.

Percival Everett’s new novel comes out in just a couple of days. This goes onto the summer reading list. Seems like everywhere I go, people are saying good things about Everett. At UNCG, he is one popular dude. I’ll jump on that bandwagon, and not just because he chose my book for the first SC First Novel Prize.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that my main decision to enter that contest owed to the fact that Percival Everett was judging. (There are good writers and then there are good writers on your wavelength. He voted for DeLillo’s Underworld in the ‘97 National Book Award, although Frazier’s Cold Mountain won.) Sometimes you enter a contest and realize that it’s a dice throw. This time, more than ever, I decided that if the novel didn’t win it had something fundamental to do with the quality and not a conflict of aesthetics. I was already teaching his novel Watershed in my Themes of American Literature class in the fall of ‘07 and would teach it again the next semester. There are, in my view, two or three great Thanksgiving dinner scenes in American Literature and one of them is in that book.

There’s a trend in this blog the past couple of weeks to talk about advice writers have for other writers. So I’ll go ahead and talk about Everett’s. He, too, came to USC one fall – same year as Walcott in fact. He sat on a panel, answering questions about the writing process, etc, and one especially vexed writer stood up and asked: I’ve got about six projects on the stove or in the closet right now between story collections, novels, folk culture projects, and anthologies – and I can’t finish any of them. Some are gathering dust. What do I do? Everett leaned into the microphone and told her, first, to close her eyes. Second, walk into the closet, bend down, and pick up something. Whatever that something was, finish it.

July could be the best month of my life. My book comes out, and Zak Smith’s new book comes out. Entitled We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings, this art book traces the Yale art grad’s other life as porn star Zak Sabbath. As he explains, his porn career owes somewhat to Thomas Pynchon and a certain chance encounter with a real life Benny Profane. Although I myself don’t watch anything approaching porn (lame, I know, but I’m squeamish unless involved), I’m a big fan of Zak Smith for not only being a bold and talented artist but also for the insane dedication of illustrating every page of Gravity’s Rainbow, a project which comprised his last book. (Also on display in the Whitney Museum’s Bicentennial Exhibit).

Zak visited USC a couple of years ago for a Yemassee/USC Arts Institute event. It was one helluva show. In fact, that was a turning point for me as a writer. Why? Someone happened to ask Zak about his work ethic after his slide presentation. I remember he said something along the lines of “Well, professional artists have to produce a lot in order to make some good work. If you make pizza fourteen hours a day, for example, that’s a lot of pizza.” He admitted to freely devoting 12 and 14 hours straight to whatever activity engaged him at the time – drawing, reading, or perhaps ahem, ahem… Previously I’d thought 12 hours of anything straight on a regular basis was a recipe for insanity, or internal bleeding, or an aneurysm, despite my own tendencies toward writing marathons. So some obsession doesn’t make you weird; if you can afford 10 hours to write, paint, sculpt, rehearse, or draw -then by god, do it if you want to. That’s why I’ve spent the last seven hours writing and am about to hit it again after this post goes up.

And finally, when I was revising my novel for the 50th time or so, I turned to Zak for advice on how to write from the POV of an artist. It was in June ‘08, and Mike Curtis had told me we could do more to make Sarah West, the protagonist, sound like a genuine artist. I’m always afraid of losing someone in jargon and didn’t quite know where to go despite having read and watched a fair deal about art and watching people sketch imitations of famous works in places like The Art Institute of Chicago. I was sure that trying too hard to plug in jargon would kill the voice and story. Zak’s advice (over email) was pretty level-headed: on the one hand I could use plenty of jargon if the end goal was to “reveal something about the character who is doing the looking”; on the other, if the goal is to make the reader see a particular piece of art, like Giacometti’s Woman with her Throat Cut, then I would need to go “way over the top, metaphorically or rhetorically.”

Maybe he knew this from an earlier conversation, but by chance he happened to reference by example two of my favorite books – Underworld and Lolita. Just goes to show that great minds think alike. This is humor. It remains to be seen whether my mind is all that great or just really, really twisted.

An adorable kitten needs a good home. Doesn’t eat, sleep, or do much besides stand in place and stare at you in a creepy, Tim Burton-esque pose. And yet, what a pose! Asking price, $12 million or so. At least that’s how much Sotheby’s hoped to rake in for this well-known sculpture by Giacometti recently. Actually, they aspired for $20 million and $12 million was the least they’d take. Come on, people. He made this sculpture in fond memory of his brother’s charismatic feline. Have you no hearts? All right. I’m officially taking up donations to buy the sculpture. If every US citizen gave me one dollar we’d snatch it easy. I promise, I’ll take really really good care of it.

Oh, and a Picasso orphan needs a home. That one didn’t sell, either. Frankly, though, I’m not ready for kids. First, a plant. Then you move up to a small pet. Then the kids. I’m definitely on the brink of the small pet phase.

Giacometti Doesn’t Sell