Blog’s back. Backyard’s bullying me.

I’ve made this blog public again, and will be adding material now and then. I’ll also be working on the design, so it might get a little buggy, but hopefully not for long.

My summer’s overloaded with projects. I need to write a script for a documentary about Daniel Defoe, write an article, also about Daniel Defoe. The documentary’s about punishment, the article’s about trauma, so, all pretty heavy stuff.

The picture to the right shows Defoe in the pillory. He was sentenced to stand there four times after his 1703 arrest for seditious libel. The pillory was often a violent punishment, with crowds throwing things at the person being punished. Rumor has it that Defoe’s bookseller came and sold his texts, and people threw flowers instead of brickbats.

The big, physical project is my backyard. It’s been a pile of weeds for ages. Hopefully in about two weeks it’ll be a usable space. I’ll document the progress of that in pictures. Here’s one to show what a mess it is now.

“You look like that movie star! Whatisname?!?”

I worked hard to dredge some thoughts about Crime and Punishment out of my students today. I threw some Bakhtin at them, I showed them how the voice of the narrator changes notably when we get to the funeral meal for poor, poor, Marmeladov, and tried to get a talk going about the multiple voices in the text.

But the reading, she wasn’t done. I didn’t do a pop quiz, but I stared into their eyes and saw few looks of recognition. When I pointed out that some guy threw a bottle and  hit the landlady by mistake I saw surprise. I hope they’ll go back over those pages after hearing that.

Instead, I got what I’ve gotten about a thousand times now. Except this time they didn’t just not know Dostoevsky, they didn’t know Kevin Bacon. We were walking down the stairs and one guy asked if I watched college sports.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know the coach of the Florida Gators? What’s his name?”

“Billy Donovan.”

“Yeah. You look like him.”

No, I don’t, and I told him so. I especially don’t want to look like him because he beat my UCLA Bruins twice in the Final Four.

Then another student said: “No, he looks like that movie star.” She turned to me and said. “You know, that movie star. Who do you look like?”

Like I said … I’ve heard this a thousand times. I’ve given up the fight. So I said: “Kevin Bacon, apparently.”

“Yeah!” she said, to the guy who thought I was a Billy Donovan lookalike. They all agreed among themselves, and just walked away without even thanking me for steering them clear to my separated-at-birth twin, he of the six degrees of separation. (Now that I’ve been compared to him 1,000 times (at least), I think I get to win that game if it ever comes around again. I used to argue that I was just one degree away, since I went to high school with Sarah Jessica Parker, and she was in Footloose with Kevin Bacon. Now I think I just get to be the default winner.)

A professor of mine once compared me to Guy Pearce, and I think that’s a closer lookalike. Not in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I couldn’t pull off drag like that. More like in L.A. Confidential, where he’s an asshole cop, or The King’s Speech, where he’s unfit to rule England and has to let Colin Firth take over. But, whatever. I just want those students to read their Dostoevsky for next class.

Novel breakthrough

I’ve been stuck, but now found a way through. The novel got to 60,000 words with lots of complications since it’s a thriller, after all. But a few issues were getting in the way.

First of all, it was hard to see why the protagonist was chasing the leads he was chasing. He didn’t seem to care enough.

Second, there was mystification where there could have just been plain lying. It’s nice to give your characters permission to lie.

Third and finally, too many people were randomly connected. They’d just bumped into each other in Paris. Having spent more than a year in Paris, I know that can happen in real life. I enjoyed that random bumping into people a lot. But in a book, you get plot holes when you do that. Especially when you’re trying to tie Paris, New York, Libya, and Rome together. So I simplified. It’s fine if some people went to high school or university together.

All of which is to say that the book was stuck, and now it’s unstuck. I owe it all to Dostoevsky. I’m teaching Crime and Punishment to a class of non-literature majors, and we’re having a lot of fun with it. Characters get emotional. Irrational things happen. My book’s very plot-driven, but now I see ways in which my plot-serving characters need to be people, or at least characters, rather than devices. I didn’t turn my thriller hero into Raskolnikov. But I made him get pissed off and drunk, for very good reasons.

Work and writing

My friend Khanh Ho asks a good question in a piece today in the Huffington Post. How do you balance “work” and “writing.” 

Excellent, and impossible question. First of all, what is work? Is it teaching? Of course it is, as Khanh makes clear. He loves it and won’t give it up. But writing is our work as well. Those of us who go into books and ideas for a living don’t ever want to stop writing. We teach miserably if we just teach the last the thing we heard in graduate school, no matter how good the graduate school was. (And ours was damn good.)

But time management’s such a huge issue. I can write a book every year. Or I can teach 6 classes every year and go to a lot of meetings. But can I do both? Not yet, apparently.

The book’s moving along, and I’m happy with it. The teaching’s getting into shape. I have a couple of lilac shirts that should make an impression while I’m teaching why Conrad’s Heart of Darkness  can be seen as both racist and anti-imperialist. As the French would say, c’est compliqué, quoi? And they’d say it rightly.

But half of me wants to teach Conrad. The other half wants to write about Libya, Paris, 2011, the Arab Spring, and make it cool and fun. That’s the “writing.”

My favorite thing in Khanh’s post is that he didn’t say “teaching” and “work.” In academia, you often hear that distinction. Your teaching is something you have to do, your research is your real “work.” Nothing could be further from the truth for a real thinker. It’s all work. I like “work” and “writing” as a dichotomy. The people I hung out with at the Daniel Defoe Conference this weekend would get that completely. Teachers, thinkers, writers. They all taught me a lot, and they understood the centrality of teaching. But there’s writing to do, and tomorrow we get back to it.

Keep up with Khanh’s successes and travails here: http://www.losangelesmystery.com/

Hush puppies

Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. It’s been a hectic, bad and good summer. Great times in London and Paris, bad times with losing my father and my good friend Adam. But when you’re an academic, the summer has a way of putting a coda to things, and you go back to the day-to-day life that keeps you going.

I’m not there yet. I go to a conference about Daniel Defoe tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll be interviewing Defoe scholars for a film I’m making, and giving a paper that doesn’t really need to be given, but there it is. The idea of the paper warrants something, and that’s what conferences are for. We air our early ideas, and then we turn them into something more valuable, and hopefully publishable. Mine is about Defoe, punishment, the pillory, prison, and forged money. That list of things makes it sound better than it will on Friday, but let’s not quibble.

The “hush puppies” of the title are really a joke. I bought some, picture above to the right, and am going to wear them to feel silly, while I speak. It’s my equivalent of viewing the audience naked in order to beat down the nerves.

The novel’s been limping, but I’ve gotten some great ideas for it. A reader told me the main character seemed too emotionally detached. My last girlfriend told me the same thing, so … maybe I’m writing me there without knowing it. It’s hard to write an extrovert hero when you’re an introvert. But I value his critique. He read the character well. It’s time to make him more exciting. I’ve read a Robert Ludlum novel or two (maybe two), and know that they’re best when people are actively doing things.

So I’ll move to that soon. Tomorrow, I’m off to the Defoe Conference, where I get to catch up with old friends and colleagues, interview some very smart people, and get the footage I need for my current academic project.

Process – the cork board approach

I’ve recently gone to visual aids for my writing. As I’ve written recently, Austin Kleon turned me on to the idea of an “analog station” in the work room. Mine is up and running. It’s not perfect. Space is always an issue. There’s space for the desk, for the books, but then the trombone and the Roland keyboard want to be in there, and the writing room becomes a semi-music room, and …

This isn’t a functional model. We don’t all live in houses where we can have a designated space for every thing we do.

But writing needs to have its corner. It can be a desk, a nook, a 4×4 cell. Put a table in a closet with a light.

But back to the analog station. I’ve been enjoying posting cards and photos, thinking how characters might look, seeing how settings really do look since I’m writing something that takes place almost now, in a space that’s very vivid.

Inspiration takes a hand

Today was an inspiration day, or rather tonight, this morning, I woke up with an idea I’ve been needing. I firmly believe that the ratio of inspiration to perspiration in creative work is small, very small. But little moments come when problems we’ve been wrestling with become clear, and ideas start to flow. And now and then inspiration, like destiny in the film Casablanca, takes a hand.

With me, it all starts with the Paris Métro between Porte de Bagnolet and Gambetta. Line No. 3.

It’s a five-, maybe five and a half-block ride. No one would take it. You get on at Porte de Bagnolet and go at least to Père Lachaise, down the hill of Menilmontant, if not further. You get on at Gambetta and go to the end of the line, Gallieni, or you just walk.

But in my book I had a guy going that one stop and couldn’t quite explain it to myself. Tonight, I figured it out, while sleeping, so I’m up writing it down and writing this post. I’m not going to explain it here, for obvious reasons, but I know.

The breakthrough might have come because I started pinning things to the wall. Pictures, maps, cards with plans, more cards with questions. I pinned these two guys up there. They’re both real people. The one to the right is someone on Twitter, Farid ARAB, a Parisian with Algerian roots, maybe Algerian born, mostly into tech things, as far as I can tell from his feed. The one below is an Egyptian film director, Ibrahim El Batout. I chose them for their faces. I need to visualize what one of my characters might look like, and one is pretty similar to one of these guys, or an amalgam of both. He’s involved in the Métros and the one-stop ride. There’s some running in the streets. These two actual people have nothing to do with the book. They’re just visual inspiration. I’m trying to imagine a character, the one who runs the several blocks because of something to do with his best friend, and get to how he thinks and feels by looking into his face, that’s all. But it’s a lot. And these guys have pretty interesting faces, you have to give them that.

This is all stuff that has to be worked out. It’s just nice to have it come alive in my head so now I can work it into the pages. It’ll come into the book in several places, and only become clear near the end.

And now the morning doves are cooing, so I have to get back to sleep. Paris was a few weeks ago. It’s good to remember the Gambetta Métro station has at least five entrances/exits, and that the Porte de Bagnolet one has only three. And that CCTV didn’t exist in the Paris Métro in 2011.

I’ll write this out in the morning. I’ve got a page full of notes written in purple marker (the only thing at hand), and a subway map. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s writing.

Bonne fête nationale à tous/Happy Bastille Day

A younger Siobhán shows the way to Le Place de la Concorde

I took a walking tour of Paris a couple of years ago, and when we got to the Place de la Concorde the guide made a big point of telling us we shouldn’t call July 14 “Bastille Day.” He said the holiday came about on July 14, 1790, was originally called the Fête de la Fédération, and focused on the new nation and reconciliation, not the storming of the Bastille on the same date in 1789.

From that, we get Le Place de la Concorde. The picture at the right with a little Siobhán will show you the way there.

I was there this past week but I didn’t take any photos. I was scoping out the U.S. Embassy, Thomas Jefferson’s former house, for some scenes in my novel in progress, and didn’t think I should take pictures while looking suspiciously at the place. The gendarmes were everywhere, as were cameras. I noticed that you can’t walk by the embassy because of security, but you can drive past it. Interesting.

But back to France and “Bastille Day.”

I was in France for American Independence Day, and now I’m in the U.S. for Bastille Day. Don’t know what to make of that, but it’s made me think of my relationship to two of the three countries I visit most: France and England (the third is Ireland, my own true love). I teach British literature, but I’m no Anglophile. I like and dislike British things just about as rationally as I like and dislike American things. I’m the same way with France. I love speaking French. I love walking around Paris. But I can’t go crazy over French food, which I find bland, and have just as complex a set of relationships with French people as I do with Americans. I like some, dislike some, and don’t find generalizations easy.

The Flynn Connection to The French Connection

One of Hemingway’s six-toed cats, daring you to type.

I’m well into the first draft of a book that’s going to kill me, unless I kill it first. Masculine approach to writing, I know. I don’t go at it like that every day. Yesterday evening I worked on putting up corkboard for index cards, arranging colored markers, printing out pictures of places … Very analog, let’s get along, playful, not the angry Hemingway pounding the typewriter approach to writing.

Although – to be briefly tangential – I have a typewriter in my analog section of the writing room. But that’s another post. Back to the topic.

Two good days in Brittany

I had two excellent days in Brittany, checking out the lighthouses and the coast. I watched fishing boats crawl into port after a day of work, and had an excellent dinner at a “gite,” or B&B, where our hosts, Hélène and Daniel, along with a bunch of Italians, sat down to eat with us for hours. Langostinas, which are like little crawfish, white wine, red wine, cheese, crêpes, Scotch. My room was very close to where we ate, fortunately.