New Story (5/5)

This is my blog, but also, secretly, this is a novel. (Or, if you’re reading this in novel form: this is a novel, but also, secretly, a blog!) Also, just so those of you in my real life know, I am going to start using real names from here on out. I was convinced by Bob Glück in his essay “Fame,” part 10. He writes

With real names and true stories, what could the reader observe?

a. I could draw different conclusions from those the writer makes. This proposes an openness of meaning, is against omniscience. It establishes a point of view that allows unfairness—lets fairness be an issue. Kathy Acker’s letters from Rosa in Great Expectations are exemplary in their injustice. 

Again, openness of meaning allows for different points of view—not irony with its proliferating points of view that all exist on one plane, but social spaces constructed differently.

b. I could meet these characters, establish relations, stories of my own. For instance, an ad that appeared in the Coming Up personals began “Part Fawn, Part Desperado.” The man advertising himself said two favorite authors were John Berger and Robert Glück—he turned out to be Jack from Jack the Modernist! Why not call him up?

c. The story is partly controlling the narrator, and the narrator is only partly controlling the story—chance exerts its influence. 

d. The story is ongoing—even if a character dies there would be more to discover.

e. The characters are produced, ready to go, generated by the world and their own histories—are ready-made images, people as ready-mades.

f. Insofar as personality is an illusion, using real names wants to make the illusion of the book coextend with illusion in the world. For example, I want people to represent themselves in my work. I take conversations from letters, and ask people to rewrite their own dialogue, so the fiction of personality can enter.

g. Since the story actually happened, I am not invited into events transparently—I am excluded as a documentary excludes, or as a photograph, which documents, along with its subject matter, my lack of participation. But I can register how events tally with my own experience. The story excludes like a documentary, but invites another relationship, like earth sculpture, where we measure ourselves against some actual arrangement of space and scale.

h. Using real names promotes a different relation between the writer and myself that carries some risk, a sacrificial relation like some performance art. What I witness is always the same: any story hides and then reveals the body.

(We take it as our due that if our skin breaks, it heals. The pleasure of horror writers, like Jim Thompson and Poe, or writers of pornography, is that they exacerbate an itchy sore. They are like Sad ein that their lack of forgiveness is a form integrity. Are they angy at the characters for being merely human, merely animals, only words? We find in them teh novelist’s—and the daydreamers—desire to give their characters every combination of sexual or violent contact in order to reveal the body.)

i. The characters are not “universal,” yet there is a second source of awe (the first being the body, hidden and brought forth)--they may “live forever, defeat time,” like the man from Sardis in Alcman’s fragment (not marble nor the gilded monuments). In fact there is something eerie about making representations of people, something uncanny. “Objects that were useful in life did not function in death, objects that simply ‘modeled’ life on earth became functional in the world of the dead”--Han Tomb catalogue description. 

j. As a reader, I have come to think of Bruce Boone’s description of me in My Walk with Bob as an actual memory—yet I don’t remember it. “It’s easy enough to imagine Bob asking me, Bruce, how can you get a moral edge on the void . . . When I say the word void I imagine Bob picking out cucumbers at the produce counter of the Noe Valley market, anxiously smiling of course, weighing prices against textures against looks in the shipment of the day.” It’s like a story told about me when I was a child that I have come to remember and even use to ascertain who I am. So this description can be taken as a demand—the demand, in fact, of any writing—a magic spell turning me into it. There is also something sickening in seeing my name there—me and not me, because it is myself in Bruce’s psychic life, the me in relation. A bob who acts too much like himself, revealing the made-up nature of who he is.

I don’t even know Bob. But I feel I almost do. Enough about Bob. (Have you seen What About Bob?)

I will add that using real names will favor less-than-perfect writing: I don’t want to be all-convincing, I just want to be convincing when I’m right, and I’m not sure I’m right yet. (In fact, I think I’m especially good at being confused.

I can only say this about myself because it is a compliment I received yesterday. By L. on the phone. Which I’m about to say more about. But first, why is it that using real names will favor less-than-perfect writing? Are the dead or fake the only characters in perfect writing?)

When L. called me yesterday, I was walking in the park (Prospect) with the dogs, I was trying to put on my headphones, it took long enough that the call went to voicemail, but I could still press the green button for go—they had started hearing the voicemail message, but hadn’t started leaving one yet. When we had landlines and tape recorded voice messaging systems (and in fact even after it went to digital) this used to happen — you might, perhaps, be arriving home as someone was leaving a message, which you were hearing in real time—and you could pick the phone up and catch them before they were done—but this stopped happening with cell phones— for years it hasn’t happened—until now— I guess this feature was recently reintroduced. It’s a particular feeling, to catch someone leaving a message for you, or to be caught leaving a message for someone. L. mentioned that on Marco Polo, a video messaging app, this can happen—you can be leaving a video message for someone, and they can start watching the message before you’re done with the video. But I think in this case, they start from the beginning—so you aren’t in real time together, exactly. This could be happening now, with my blog—someone may be reading this as I’m writing it. But I’m pretty sure there would be a little anonymous avatar up in the right hand corner signaling this were the case. As of now, I’m pretty sure it’s just me. But there’s you too, of course—you’re just not here yet.

Something that was recently introduced: video messages (left as the voicemails of facetime). My nephew and sister have left me a few so far.