Month: September 2003

Had one of those last night; woke me up around 3:30am. They don’t happen often, but MAN do they mess my head up.

… about spending 24 hours on The Fall of the Towers: it meant I stopped trying to read The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which simply isn’t a good book, 150 pages in. If you’re not going to write in a high literary style, then you better be an awfully good storyteller. Carter Beats the Devil works just great in that field, and Gould’s Book of Fish sorta manages to string those two modes together (to name two recent books I’ve read). But Chabon’s book is just dully written, with a story that’s failed to capture my interest twice now. And given that it’s about escape artistry, eastern European Jewish history, and comics, it shouldn’t be THAT tough to come up with something I’d like to read.

I’m still kinda bummed out about that bad drinking story from Friday night. I was physically fine, but it really is the first time I let drinking mess up something like this. On Saturday, I went into NYC to pick up my wallet from the home of Samuel R. Delany, an author and friend. By Sunday night, I realized that you can love a person and hate him at the same time. Love him as a friend, hate him as a procrastinating, dyslexic author.

I’ve worked with Delany (known as Chip) on a movie and several books, including a chapbook that nearly destroyed my life. I once proofread galleys of his essay collection Shorter Views in four days. No easy task, but he’s one of “my” authors, and I help him out when I can. Also, in the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve become pretty good friends (which, if I had more time this morning, would lead to a tangent about how Chip’s probably the first friend I have who’s utterly outside of my age range–about 30 years older than me–and how odd that fact struck me; next entry, I guess).

On Saturday, we shot the breeze for a little while after I got my wallet back (which, all of a sudden, makes me think of the second scene from my favorite movie, when Tom wakes up in a bar, hung over and missing his hat. He asks the bartender how he did at cards last night. The bartender replies: “What do you think? You are a millionaire, you are going to remember your friends?” Anyway), and Chip mentioned that he had still yet to read over the galleys for The Fall of the Towers.

“I finished this book [a series of three short novels] before I turned 22, Gil. I just can’t read it again…”

“When do they have to be back at Vintage?”

“Monday morning.”

“It’s not written like Dhalgren, right?”

“No. It’s very… simple prose.”

“How many pages?”

“450.”

“Hand it over, Chip. I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

So Saturday night (7:30pm-11:30pm) and Sunday (10am-6:45pm) was spent reading 450 pages of science fiction written by a very intelligent 20-to-22-year-old. Chip phoned when I was five pages from the end.

I told him I’d be done in a few minutes, and he had the temerity to ask, “So, um, I was just wondering: Does the story work for you?”

You can love someone and hate him at the same time.

Talk about embarrassing. I mean, beyond super-atomic Dudley Moore-level drunk, I actually got to the point of crashing at my friends’ apartment in NYC at 9:30pm, following a 5-hour mini-binge at the Hi Life Bar & Grill, woke up at 2:15am, picked up my briefcase and suitcase (don’t ask), and drove home before realizing that my wallet is still (I hope) at the friends’ apt.

Fortunately, I have cash at home, which will enable me to get back to the city and pick up the wallet tomorrow, but this is all pretty pathetic, because the original plan was to spend the evening with these Lubavitcher friends of mine for Rosh Hashana. Problem was, I got to the city WAY too early, and all my friends were unavailable. So I drank and chatted up the bartender-ess at the Hi Life, discussing the finer points of trashy ’80s pop music.

I really need to get these priorities in order.

Went down to Philly on Sunday to see a football game with my buddies Adam and John. Adam wanted to reward me for coming out to pick him up during the zombie plague/blackout that we had back in August (see that entry on the CHUDs). We had a tailgate party with some of the greatest soul food around, courtesy of Adam’s friend James, who’s a cook somewhere in the city. He and a friend feted us with grilled sea bass, jerk chicken, strip steak, shrimp, and the obligatory ribs. It was some of the best food I’ve ever eaten.

A good time was had, even though we got rained upon. Adam, ever prepared, wore a bathing suit under his shorts, so he could strip with impunity. And he did.

The Eagles were terrible, which made me feel good, as a Giants fan. However, the Giants got beaten last night, so I wasn’t THAT enthused. And I’m much more of a baskeball fan than a football fan anyway.

I’d write more, and more wittily, but I’m tired. I’m heading to bed soon. If you like me, you’ll go buy a copy of the new book I put out. It’d make me happy, or at least less stressed.

The books showed up! They look gorgeous! Fate has conspired to give me the means of catharsis-izing the mental trauma of 9.11.01! And on the anniversary, no less!

Order one now! Enable my catharsis! Bill Marx on Boston’s NPR thinks you should, and he put his case much more eloquently than the Village Voice’s editor did!

Forever Bummer
Paul West’s Novel Blends 9-11, Philosophy, and Nigella
by Ed Park
Village Voice
September 10 – 16, 2003

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11
By Paul West
Voyant, 231 pp., $23

What would a proper novelistic response be to the attacks of 9-11? If everyone knows the central story, what stories can be told? A writer I know said that 9-11 shut down her capacity for fiction. Months later, she drafted a dozen pages in pursuit of what seemed to be both a narratively compelling and brokenhearted take on the tragedy, before realizing she was rewriting Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

Most novelists are still tuning out the 9-11 frequency, with some exceptions: The father of the protagonist in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition went missing on 9-11; the murderer in Lawrence Block’s Small Town loses his daughter in the attacks, and his wife commits suicide in grief. In Paul West’s 23rd book of fiction, The Immensity of the Here and Now, the aftereffects of that day gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination–the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine. West’s complex narrative voice relates the story of friends Shrop and Quent, amnesiac patient and paraplegic shrink, former Cambridge philosopher and ex-military man–a Beckettian dyad that splits the ravages of mind and body. With nods to cultural figures from Plato to Nigella Lawson (perhaps her first fictional immortalization), and sentences that interrogate their own structure, Immensity’s generous helping of culture and language also exposes their inadequacy.

If the pair’s minutely rendered mental lives don’t always fascinate, at least West realizes failure as a theme. Shrop circles about his “lost philosophy,” throws (or imagines) a party for long-lost pals with names like “Lomar Antecedent,” and comes to recognize Oulipian Raymond Queneau’s formulation as his new and necessary creed: “How does one live in an absurd world? Absurdly.”

We regret to inform you that The Immensity of the Here and Now has not been selected for review.

-Forecasts
Publishers Weekly
360 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010

It’s been a busy week: a Labor Day drive down to Princeton to meet up with one of my best friends for lunch, a trip to Boston for a healthcare investor conference on Tuesday (where I stayed with another good friend in Worcester), a couple of late evenings in NYC (Thursday for a fiction reading by Adam Haslett, and Friday for a reading of The Designated Mourner by my buddy, John Castro), and now a party to celebrate a friend’s elopement.

There were a bunch of high points, including the moment of manic, mantic fire leaping from my pen as the idea for a novel struck me during lunch at PF Chang’s near Boston Common. More on that as it evolves.

But the peak, at least physically, had to be when I got back to the Four Seasons hotel after lunch. Standing at the counter to check in was one of the tallest men I’d ever seen. His back was to me, but it was relatively clear to this detective that he was a basketball player (nearly 7 feet tall, black, and checking into the Four Seasons). So I pretended to have to rearrange things in my briefcase until he left the counter and I could see who he was.

And that’s when I saw the face of the man alternately goofed on as “that big wooden Indian” and “that Easter Island statue-looking mo’fo'” by me and my friends for years. Yes, I was face-to-face (well, face-to-sternum, to be accurate) with Robert Parish, former center of the Boston Celtics. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend, so it made sense for him to come to Boston a few days early (the Hall is in Springfield, about 70 miles away).

Which makes me think of how much I hated the Celtics in the 1980s, when they were always battling the Lakers in the NBA finals, and how much I grew to respect them, once they all got old and started retiring. I’m saving my long piece on that for another novel about mythology and death. You’ll see.

Off to the elopement party. Wish the groom good fortune.