JCO Quote #4

"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to 'overcome' doubt."

from this by Joyce Carol Oates

Truth ... And my given name

"As soon as a [writer] stops observing . . . he becomes an evangelist, a politician. A person with Opinions. . . . The [writer] must be on the side of life, willing to surrender his 'beliefs' even . . . When one believes he has the Truth, he is no longer an artist."



from this book by Joyce Carol Oates

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Yesterday I got an email from Mom telling me that she almost forgot how to spell my name, Kathleen, the name she gave to me 45 years ago. She wrote, "I guess that's what to be expected, but that doesn't make it any easier!"

Given that Mom has mid-stage Alzheimer's, I'm continually amazed at how aware she is of what she's losing.

As one geriatric specialist said, Mom is a smart, accomplished woman. Some people who are at her stage might be more debiltated; she might be losing a lot, but she still has a lot to work with.

That said, I'm trying not to obsess over every detail of her disease. Instead, I'm trying to enjoy every moment we have together. Tomorrow we'll go to my sister's house, eat pizza, and watch Idol. My nieces and nephew will be running around, and we'll embrace all we have. And we do have a lot: love, the present moment, and each other.

JCO Quote #2

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a 'logical consistency,' or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery."

from this book by Joyce Carol Oates

I like that. Art embraces and creates mystery, not explanation. It reminds me that as a writer (to paraphrase Foucault), I am freer than I think.

*

Oops, we forgot to turn out the lights last night. We were watching a movie and looked up and saw it was 8:50 p.m., only ten minutes left of Earth Hour.

Bad, bad earth stewards.

We are now off to atone with a hike in the redwoods. Of course we have to drive to get there.

Um. We put spiral flourescent lightbulbs in our lamps. Does that count?

JCO Quote #1

For the next few entries I'll be posting some juicy quotes from Joyce Carol Oates' journal that I liked, ones that got me thinking about my own choices as a writer.


"'Keeing busy' is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed."


This speaks to me. I know when I have more writing and thinking time--when I don't allow myself to be pulled into so many different directions--I go deeper with my writing.

Them

I'm reading them, the National Award-winning early novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It's oddly melodramatic (get a load of the cornball paperback cover), yet it's also mesmerizing.

In style and substance, it has a naturalist quality like novels by Zola and Frank Norris.

Since reading Oates' journal, I decided to tackle more of her fiction. I'm going to read probably about six or seven of her novels in chronological order to get a sense of her growth as a writer.

Here's a clip of JCO talking about novel writing. I like what she says about characters--as well as about perseverance.

Passings

"With the passing of its editor, Raymond J. Smith, Ontario Review itself will cease publication with the forthcoming Spring 2008 issue. Smith began Ontario Review in 1974 in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife Joyce Carol Oates as associate editor..."

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Yesterday I talked to my students a little bit about my process of writing poetry. I read aloud a few of my poems and almost read one about my father, but I decided against it because I wasn't sure I could make it through since (as I wrote in the last entry) yesterday was the one-year mark of my his death.

So I'll post it here, in his memory. (This poem appears in Like All We Love.)

What My Father Gives

The doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists come in
with vials and clipboards and white or black shoes, pushing

buttons like astronauts, speaking words I don’t know. My father’s
lungs are failing, they’ve been failing a long time, twenty-five

years of failing, and I’ve lived my whole life as though I’m not dying.
They’ve asked my mom to take off his wedding band, to pull it off

his finger after forty-seven years, her own fingers white as bone,
his as red as the crushed velvet bedspread on my growing-up bed,

in the room of our new house where my dad built the redwood decks
around the oaks to save them, the house where we had rules like draw

the drapes when the sun shines in the living room so the carpet
won’t fade, like take off your shoes in the entry so you don’t

track in dirt, and when that didn’t work, walk only on the plastic
runners. Those runners had little rubber prongs that dug into the

carpet to stay put, and sometimes I’d turn them over and walk on the
prongs barefoot for a pleasing pinch of the feet. My sister and I

had our own rooms with big windows that looked out onto blue oak
and manzanita and ghost pine. One night I woke to an owl sitting

on a limb at my window. I turned on my light to see her better, but
of course the window turned opaque. Raccoons and possums

fell into the pool, and my dad fished them out with the leaf skimmer,
its handle curving with dead weight. When he started coughing,

I can see now, he was still young, not much older than I am now.
He drove my sister and me to school, one of us folded in the backseat

of his sports car that didn’t really have a backseat. As he shifted gears,
spots of coffee would jump out of his ceramic mug, and the cold morning

air made his cough worse. Around then, the time of the blue sports car,
he started hooking up to a machine in the morning and again at night,

then lying on a slant board for my mom to pound his back and chest
so he’d cough up the phlegm his lungs refused to clear by themselves.

He wears flannel shirts and Birkenstocks, has a full head of dark
hair, just a little gray, and a handlebar mustache they shaved in the

hospital so they could tape still the tubes. When they pulled the tape away,
when he unexpectedly lived, we saw they had shaved only above the lip

so his handlebars remained, unanchored. He has crystal blue eyes that turn
bloodshot when he coughs and coughs, and with my mom on a trip, I’m the one

who pounds him, and when we finish, cleans the machine. I throw out
the fluids still warm from his body, clean the machine with dish soap. Then

I make him breakfast, and he asks for more strawberries or hotter coffee,
and a glass of water in a short glass, not tall. He knocks over the tall ones.

My mother has taken a group trip to the other side of the continent. My father
insists on coming to the airport to pick her up, even though it’s cold and late.

When she comes through the gate, her small folded body, her hair cloud-white,
I think she can see that nothing has changed, that my father still wheels his

oxygen, and they kiss. On the trip she met an eighty-three year old woman
who still teaches second grade and who lives in a Manhattan apartment,

and my mom is astonished that some people live their whole lives unlike us,
no backyards or garages or leaf-strewn decks. Ten years ago I fell in love

with a woman, and it seemed an apocalypse, like an atomic blast cremated
the house, incinerated the formal dining room. I was stubborn. There was no

middle ground. My parents grasped at me like the string of a kite in a fierce wind.
My love and I married this February, when the mayor of San Francisco decided

to break the law, and afterward my parents took us to dinner, held up glasses
of wine, rubied in gold candlelight. When we thought he was going to die,

when his breath was like a crack in a sidewalk, my father told my love
that she is like a daughter to him. I saw him holding onto that bed, dying

in his living as he has for years. I have lived as though death belongs to him.
He has owned it for me. That is what he wants, I now see, my immortality.

Novelistic

A small press is showing interest in one of my novels. An editor has asked me for some revisions, which I've been working on all day--and last night since I couldn't fall asleep (for reasons to be discussed in another entry, once I can share them).

On the reading front, I've been luxuriating in Joyce Carol Oates' journal. Here's an excerpt written in March 1975:

"The novelist is an empiricist, an observer of facts . . . objective and subjective 'reality' . . . he must guard against the demonic idea of imagining that he possesses or even can possess ultimate truth. . . . The person who completes a novel is not the person who began it. Hence the joy of creation, the unpredictable changes, transformations, some minute and some major. As soon as the novelist stops observing, however, he becomes something else--an evangelist, a politician. . . . When one believes he has the Truth, he is no longer an artist."

She often mentions in the journal her husband, Raymond Smith, founder of the Ontario Review. I just googled him and was stunned to find out he died two weeks ago. They had been married more than 45 years.