Punctuate This!

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Sun, 27 May 2012 14:37:52 -0700

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Tue, 15 May 2012 01:11:44 -0700

In the future I will not try to be happy. Sadness is already too much of a burden. I cannot add loss to it again.

I just discovered that I have a large number of messages in some sort of Tumblr-inbox. I cannot,...

Wed, 09 May 2012 01:55:34 -0700

I just discovered that I have a large number of messages in some sort of Tumblr-inbox. I cannot, however, seem to reply to any of them. Tumblr claims that I do not have access to the ability to reply to my own messages.

Please accept my apologies and please send me an email. I will respond.

Peace by Pieces

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:03:53 -0700

It struck him as somewhat maudlin, but he wished to himself that he had never written anything. He knew that she was out there, somewhere, disposing of the things that were now too hateful and heavy to keep around. He imagined her in different places, pushing memories into the sea, letting feeling deliquesce in the night, trying to let old and outmoded abstractions like love appear in her hands so that she could take them apart piece by piece.

But how do you take back a word that you’ve already written into the world? How do you let it die?

A reader recently dropped this in my inbox, noting that her...

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:57:00 -0800

A reader recently dropped this in my inbox, noting that her friend “mentioned printing it out and hanging it in his apartment. I did him one better, and made it a poster. I thought maybe you’d like to see it, so here you go.”

For any of you interested in one of your own, a high-resolution PDF can be found at: http://www.mediafire.com/?cx9wytz8824tsq9

Thanks Becki.

I have a twitter.

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:14:00 -0800

Talk to me.

Quitting

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:55:24 -0800

That is the fundamental problem with writing: If you want your words to have any life whatsoever they cannot be held onto. Writing is a private thing, and it is hard, but there comes a time when you must stop shielding your words from all of the terrible things the world will say about them and let them out into the air to breathe.

It Accumulates And Accumulates

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:33:45 -0800

Be suspicious of pretty words in pithy phrases.

Differing Degrees of Fine

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:33:43 -0800

“I have no interest in refining my tastes and affectations. I hope I never become one of those people who is in the business of teaching himself how to like things less. For my part, it would seem to me the greatest gift to be of no educated sensibility whatsoever, to spend the greater portion of my years teaching myself only how to confront my life in a manner that disturbs me the least.”

Craft Demands Conflict

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:03:00 -0800

There’s a reason the author is so pessimistic about love: The men he writes about are too capricious and unkind with the hearts of women who love them, the women are the same with their men, and the rarefied pair of star crossed lovers has aligned against them a jealous god, a cruel and contemptuous world, or a universe bent upon their destruction.

Very, very close to being done with a piece of original short fiction taken from a chapter of an in...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:13:59 -0800

Very, very close to being done with a piece of original short fiction taken from a chapter of an in progress novel.

How many of you out there in the wilderness of the Internet are from the Bay Area?

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:22:30 -0800

How many of you out there in the wilderness of the Internet are from the Bay Area?

Theory

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:38:54 -0700

Part of the challenge of choosing a life of letters is resigning yourself to the fact that your personal tragedies will never appear to you like those of your characters: sublimely articulated, perfectly plotted, and with evident methods of redress.

Remembering Remembering: The Inherent Danger of Giving a Eulogy

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 10:25:12 -0700

Up on The Atlantic at: http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/remembering-remembering-the-inherent-danger-of-giving-a-eulogy/245703/

On September 10 I attended a funeral service for a member of my family who was a mother of triplets, all aged sixteen. As a part of the traditional Catholic mass, her two sons, her daughter, and her husband each devoted a brief eulogy embracing the enduring vitality of love and esteem for a woman who was the pillar of their family. And as you might expect, each remembrance was quietly elegant, indemnified by its solemn poignancy to the hazards of inexperience, shock, and ineloquence. Yet, as mourners filed slowly out of the church, each pausing briefly to acknowledge the gravity and incalculable weight of death, I could not divest myself of a separate sadness that had nothing to do with her passing, and everything to do with trying to say a few words about the dead.

There is a certain indisputable respect owed to those people who engage the enormous task of paying tribute to the lives of those whom they have lost. It is a respect owed to them because the monumental importance of their task looms with little but the prospect of failure. On the one hand, it is so easy to not say it right, to leave something out, to fail — to ultimately succumb to the challenge of condensing the import, the magnitude of achievement, and the substance of a life into such a small space. But worse, perhaps, is the chance of success. Perhaps most terrible is the possibility of saying everything right and suggesting that that life was of a kind that could be abridged so easily. Even if we dismiss that inference, it is difficult to avoid the terrible implication of insignificance imparted to everything unmentioned at a funeral, to every moment lived by an individual that didn’t survive the cutting floor of his or her eulogy.

I decided to write on remembering the remembrance of September 11 after its tenth anniversary had passed. I made that decision because I had no desire to critique any effort made to pay respects to the dead. There is a noble impulse in all tributes to the fallen of September 11 that must go undisturbed and must be beyond reproach; deference to that impulse must exist apart from criticisms regarding any one memorial’s imperfections, or a mention of how easy it is to co-opt tragedy for the purposes of profit, if we are to preserve the integrity of remembrance in general.

But lost amid the flurry of retrospectives and features about 9/11 is the inclusion of one of the things that made that day so haunting: its silence. On that day there was an inexplicable terror in the disjoint between the tremendous roar of each tower coming down and the noiseless rise of the ensuing smoke; the way that sirens pierced the stillness; the sound of a landline going dead during a 9-1-1 call made just moments before collapse. The deafening quiet at the end of the towers’ fall was perhaps no better represented by the empty chatter that news media was forced to generate in response. For days on end, broadcast commentary was juxtaposed with an endless loop of images and video clips of the towers’ disintegration, often in the same frame. And without fail, words rarely seemed fit; pundits and journalists lost their place on air and silence lingered in newsrooms, as if the very sight of such inconceivable and instantaneous loss was itself an endless void that sucked the ability to speak down with it.

Artists, novelists, trauma theorists, and psychologists alike speculated that September 11 was an event that could not be spoken about and necessarily existed outside the functions of language. In that spirit, public gatherings across the country were punctuated by moments of silence, acknowledgments of the inadequacy of speech in a time of overwhelming grief and reverence for the expressiveness of life itself. To murmur, to even attempt to murmur, it seemed, was in many ways to offend and denigrate the tragic eloquence of steel meeting steel, bodies leaping from windows, and the composition of a mass grave out of the materials of a once triumphant financial center — as if those things could possibly find a home in words.

But a decade later the words come more easily. With the slow healing of a massive wound there has emerged an ability to speak about it with greater candor, openness, and profundity. In some respects, the ten-year anniversary of September 11 was observed — especially in the media — by means of an earnest effort to say things with a greater depth of feeling than anyone else. It was an anniversary seemingly marked by a contest to say things more insightfully, or artfully, or solemnly than the next, lest our day of observance be mistaken for a display of collective appreciation. And at the end of it all it was easily forgotten how readily our tributes and our eulogies fail us, especially for an event characterized by the awful scope of its tragedy. Little deference was paid to whether or not it was wise to try and speak, in a handful of sentences or paragraphs or pages, for the infinite cruelties inflicted upon those who never buried friends and family. Few asked if it was possible to be the voice for each voice lost.

This isn’t to say, of course, that there is no value in written or spoken tributes to the fallen of 9/11. Each offers new entrances into a place of comfort, and provides novel ways to make peace with or extract understanding from an apparently unintelligible and meaningless event. That is the implicit promise made by the in memoriam — a promise to compel September 11 to be something that makes more sense and hurts less. But to search for understanding in words is, in some ways, to deprive our national recollection of the way in which words didn’t suffice and understanding was so evasive. It is an effort at odds with the immediate aphasia thrust upon onlookers, with the experience of watching a monstrous and unknown species of fear settle into the fragile joints of New York, with the wretched muzzle that anxiety and dread put on spectators, rendered inarticulate as they were forced to watch jet fuel gnaw through the structural supports of each tower.

More than anything, though, the clamor to pay the best tribute to September 11 forgot that, when speeches and turns of phrase fell short that day, it was often only our private and unspoken languages of comfort that met with and quelled despair. These were the feelings, a thousand times more eloquent than words, that led to hope. These were the inner compromises made with pain that allowed friends to reach out to friends in need. And these were the interior convictions that facilitated perseverance. Ten years later it must be said that no one will ever be faulted for paying public tribute to September 11, and rightly so. There is nothing unwise in looking for ways to dispel this persistent sadness. Yet it must also be said that sometimes the most productive and meaningful sentiments are those that remain our own and remain unstated.

Before the funeral service for my cousin, I was asked if I wanted to share anything. I said no. My tools seemed very futile and feeble and too often in the noise of remembrance is a forgetting that some of the most authentic and profound displays of love and respect for those lost come in moments of silence. To that end I found myself satisfied with the prospect of finding, in the quiet, a moving on, and a letting go.

An effective strategy for relieving writer’s block (on the...

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:35:00 -0700

An effective strategy for relieving writer’s block (on the right).

I Have a Few Last Words on KQED

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:46:45 -0700

A reading of “I Have a Few Last Words” for KQED’s The Writer’s Block:

http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=68841

Produced for a reading of “I Have a Few Last Words.”

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:24:27 -0700

Produced for a reading of “I Have a Few Last Words.”

Intermission

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:08:17 -0700

Please pardon the intermission. Exciting things are happening.

The Damage to the Furniture in the Living Room

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 00:11:34 -0700

Always I am coming up with ways to forgive you. And always it comes so easy. I think that is enough evidence of love for me, thank you.

In Transit

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:59:49 -0700

Oh, how fast it becomes time to start again again.