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June 12, 2006
Breakfast is a Nervous Affair
What do you say over coffee to the guy across the table who, by the way, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry? What about the bald guy who's won two PEN/Faulkners and a National Book Award?
Another poet read aloud from the International Herald Tribune about Guantanamo. The only thing that occurred to my groggy mind was how the IHT seemed to have gained an appreciation for the interaction between Congress and the White House at the same time that Sheryl Stolberg switched beats from the former to the latter, replacing the snarky Elisabeth Bumiller. Perhaps needless to say, I didn't bring this up. Meanwhile, there was a subtle oneupmanship going on that I didn't even see until I was participating. To the writer who brought Rilke to the breakfast table, I brought, uh, Dashiell Hammett to the classroom. No one noticed.
This afternoon we got a tour of the villa's extensive gardens from its head gardener. Lest this sound like a paltry position, NYU is on a 10-year campaign to restore the gardens to their neo-Renaissance (1930s) state. The estate is 57 acres, some of which has been used as farmland since then, so it's a significant project.
The gardener was a philosophical guy. He said that his interest in gardening comes from being in touch with nature--since we are all, of course, animals. But what separates us from animals is, of course, art--and this is where gardening came in. Shaping hedges, laying out plants in a certain geometry, cutting a hole in the hedges so that a marble vase appears to cup the Duomo, in the distance, like an egg holder. Working to put form to the wilds of nature. I scoffed, but only once, and quietly: He was as passionate about the scheme as most of the writers here are about their craft. And their projects are not really so different.
This morning's first talk led off with the idea that we ought to use "material knowledge to manage the howling contingencies" of the world. The moments of formal exactness in a piece, the writer said, are just fictions a writer has to create. (Break out the hedge clippers.) Music, not painting, he pointed out, is the real analogue of narrative: Form in sequence over time. These are the kind of glib writerly thoughts that prove useful, at least to some writers, at least for a time, at which point they must be abandoned. And then we are left with little but practice and hard work.
Our teacher's example of his kind of artifice is Menzel's painting of Friedrich II visiting the painter Pense. (1861) His unpacking of John McPhee's piece on Los Angeles geology, which once prompted someone to remark "sometimes a line break is just a line break," will be familiar to some of you.
The discussion turned to Ian Frazier and his freedom with language within the formal rigor of his stories. My own favorite example is in the film Stop Making Sense, whose title, I realized only today, is pretty ironic. It's a Talking Heads concert film that opens with a tightly choreographed assembly of the band, the set and backdrop. But as the show goes on, the musicians, particularly David Byrne, become irrepressibly expressive. Within the structure, he can act out quite a great deal and still call it art.
The next step down this path comes in asking who imposes the structure. Sometimes the subject suggests it: There's a straightforward way to proceed through the writing of a biography. Elsewhere, a writer can establish a thematic structure in which the narrative events may not even be in chronological order. Since the choice of what to include or leave out ultimately falls to the writer, the question is always: Did things happen this way, or were they ordered? When the guy on my right said of Virginia Woolf, "I could dig it," I noticed that the kid to my left was dotting his Is with circles. These are the serious questions we're wrestling with here.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at June 12, 2006 10:47 PM