New SARK book and Old Cowboy Song

Johnny Cash determined my life’s destiny in 1986. My father, then a senior editor at the San Francisco office of Harper and Row, was working with Cash on developing a book, and through some means of what I imagine was booze-induced networking, so popular for publishers in the 1980s, Dad landed backstage passes for Cash’s appearance at the Cow Palace in Oakland. 

I had been listening to the “Highwaymen” album, a collaboration among Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Waylen Jennings, and Willie Nelson, and had only just been allowed to move the needle on the player independently, since I tended to listen to the album front to back to front to back and Dad had gotten tired of having to reset the thing every twenty or so minutes. Endearingly devoted to me, my single, eligible father took me to the concert, instead of bringing a woman he could have certainly impressed into a second date or at least a one night stand.

The green room was actually white and Cash’s head was huge. So was his collar, which was cone-shaped, like the kind one sees on a dog after an invasive trip to the vet.
    I asked him what it was for.
    “Hairspray,” he said, and demonstrated by creating a dense cloud over his impressive pompadour, without soiling his starched white shirt. “So, Vanessa,” he said, now towering over me, the collar still standing at attention, “What song do you want to hear tonight?”
    I was not prepared for that question. I answered honestly. “I’d really like to hear ‘Jim I Wore a Tie Today.’”
    Johnny Cash chuckled with the kind of gravel in his throat that I thought God must have and he said, “Well now, honey, that’s a real sad song for such a little girl.”
    Indeed it was a cowboy’s funeral song. I told him I liked it. He agreed to play it, because that was as good a reason as any to play a sad song. I was validated somehow by this, and that is the year I started writing stories.
    

When I listen to it now, I make up all kinds of reasons why I might have liked “Jim I Wore a Tie Today.” They range from simple (it has a beautiful melody) to self-aggrandizing (I must have been emotionally precocious). The “real” reason is mostly lost except for a Proustian moment I have with this song lyric: "we did everything in the books, I guess/and a lot that they never thought up." The music lilts upward on an open chord progression that begs for resolution. But, it doesn’t get resolved. We never know what exactly these boys did together that made them so thoroughly inventive.

I wasn’t obsessed with cowboys, or the West, or even any of the Highwaymen as a pre-pubescent. So I have to conclude that I obsessed over “Jim I Wore a Tie Today” at least in part for this moment of opening, adventure, maybe even “badness,” that came through in the lament. There are things that even all the books haven't yet thought up, Cash was telling me. That astonishing reality comes through even in grief.

In 1986, I was overwhelmed with delight by what was in the books. I'd only been reading for three years. I was already two grades ahead of myself and started keeping a journal. That there could possibly be a frontier beyond the library, made of yet-un-thought material, made me feel something I struggle even now to articulate. I’m sure there’s a way to say it in German. Part thrill, part terror, part assurance. 

The first two are probably obvious: the grand scope of possibilities and the limited time people have to explore them before they die is thrilling and terrifying. The last feeling, of a kind of relaxed happiness that follows from the first two, is not obvious at all. In fact, many people I know and love do not share it with me. But it is something that I can access in yoga, in moments of relaxation, in moments of joy--an acceptance of the temporary and acknowledgment of the vast unknown territory just outside my current view. I learned it in part from years of reading SARK, and watching her navigate death, loss, change, success, surprise, and delight.

Tonight I talked to my Dad on the phone. He was chatting about a conference he just went to. He had more energy than me. Weirdly, this thought pushed up from my unconscious: he could have died on his way home from Nashville. I felt profoundly grateful that he hadn't. I realized, as I do every time someone dies or I think of someone dying, that I usually assume the people I love will live another day, and it's just not going to stay true forever. They may not stay healthy, they may not stay sane, they may not stay loving, they may not stay, period. I hate this. I also gravitate always towards people who are wiser than me in these areas. Apparently, I've been doing that since I was a small child.

SARK's new book, Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity is living in my bed right now. It's her 16th book, and an incredibly vulnerable, gorgeous tome full of tips for what she's dubbed "practical gladness." I'm so honored to be one of the featured portraits of Joy and Transformation at PlantSark.  The book is yet another window into this kind of joy/terror/assurance feeling that makes me feel happy to be a human being. 

I'd like to keep overturning the little narratives that I feel are so necessary to my life--perfectionism, in particular, is an important one lately. There are myriad ways to feel differently than we seem to think we must feel. I'm happily indebted to the cowboys and SARKs and blues singers and writers who remind me.  

Dragon, Pirate, Mountain, Dust

Burning Man 2010: dragon tail, pirate flag, mountains, and dust. There's a LOT going on here.

As a college freshman, I studied ancient Greek and Roman humanities at Reed. One of the assignments I remember being insulted by, and one of the only assignments I was ever insulted by, and also one of the only assignments I remember, was a sort of scavenger-hunt we were supposed to perform over the course of a week. The point was to collect as many references to ancient Greek gods and goddesses, characters from the Iliad, pieces of architecture that resembled columns of the Parthenon, and so on, that we could find in our daily lives. I was insulted by this assignment because it seemed like something I might have had to do in high school, had I gone to an okay high school instead of a desperately under-funded Los Angeles Unified school. The point is, I didn't feel like carrying my little list around everywhere and jotting down things like: "Goodyear tires logo: Hermes winged foot." I did do it, of course, because I am what's known as a "good student."


And what happened was that I found so many references to ancient Greece in my daily life I felt a little scared. I felt scared knowing that I had just been cruising through a visual media culture that made references I didn't know before, because that meant that the academic culture I was entering was going to make a thousand times more. And of course, it did.


Skip ahead some years later, to a very similar feeling that happened when I read Nabokov's Lolita for the first time. I read the novel very soon after I'd been first introduced to Derrida, and there was a sort of dizzying effect to Nabokov's text as I felt I could fall inside each page, and this was a physical sensation that never stopped after I taught the book 8 times, because Derrida had told me I was already bleeding in through the spaces between the words.


I am back in grad school, attending seminars with extremely smart abstract thinkers, finding myself awash in visual imagery and idiosyncratic connections that sometimes enhance the discourse and at other times make it jumbled and clunky. Tonight I watched a Miyazaki film called "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" for a class I'm taking on anime--and really, the way anime can be seen as a portal to a new relation to technology a la Heidegger. And I was heartened by the fact that someone out there has a brain that moves in lateral, brightly colored directions like mine.


If that meant nothing to you, know this: I cried many times during the film, as connections came slamming through me: this is America, this is the global political body, this is the demonized dream of environmentalism, this is the problem of the ivory tower, this is Anthony, this is my old cat Boots and my new adopted cat Bembo, this is me, this is the unbelievably beautiful piece of visual art that somehow got enough people and money behind it to get MADE. And I fell into the movie in the same way I fall into a page. And the depth of these connections, the allusions I felt moving backward (the film was made in 1984, but visually seemed to reference Burning Man 2010 and Star Wars: the Clone Wars), the sheer weight of connectivity I don't understand because I haven't, still haven't read enough books or seen enough film was almost too much.


I know that for some people, in fact, it IS too much. They give up and watch TV without thinking about what that TV might be referencing. They give up and do all kinds of things, with the general theme of ignorance, indifference, or disinterest. This is the condition that most troubles people who worry about "the postmodern." But for me, those glimpses into the rampant allusive-ness of the world are like a drug. I want to see more. I want to trace them. I don't pretend I'll find origins, really, but I want to find swarms and packs and pockets and concentric circles of connection. I want to peel off and paste on layer after layer of the collage.


At the Getty last weekend for my Mom's birthday, I looked at ancient Greek art that I'd studied at some point at Reed. I saw a bust I recognized from a book cover. I read and remembered, vaguely, certain customs, names of gods and goddesses, and as we strolled out into the garden, I tried to figure out why the Koi in the pond "worked" with everything else. Pure aesthetics? Some reference in Ovid? Some cultural exchange between the Greeks and elsewhere that I don't know about? The questions are pleasurable. They're worthwhile. They feel like practicing piano or going for a run--I may not get an instant return on this hour, but if I keep it up, someday I'll have a moment when that little "click" will turn over, that flush of recognition, and I'll grab the arm of the person I'm with and crazily try to explain it. Eventually, one day, I'll get a piece memorized, I'll notice a new shapeliness to my calves, I'll read something new and feel I can love it more because I understand that it is a piece of homage to another book I already love.


I'm pretty sure I'm not arguing art for art's sake, although it may seem that way. What ultimately drives this desire and pleasure is a humanist passion: the more connectivity I can discuss, the more I can show, the more others can feel, the less distanced and dehumanized and disembodied we will be together. I actually believe this is possible, as a life-praxis, not just an academic exercise.


The biggest barrier to it is the ego. Wanting to feel like I already know what someone is going to say or show to me. Wanting to feel that triumph in argument, wanting to above all not lose face in front of people whose admiration I crave. When I am able to stop seeing through the ego-lens, I don't become a relativist or a confused little baby lost in the fog. I become even more convinced that creative moments of connection, collaboration, and realization of creative impulse is the way out. The way through, the way in, the way toward a moment in which the Dragon (spirit-body), the Pirate (the people's power to resist and organize), the Mountain (wisdom), and the Dust (the everyday made extraordinary) not only coexist in a lucky photo, but ARE together in my body and my body of work.

...And We're Back!

What happened here? 
I'll tell you what. I went to Burning Man, I turned 31, I started a PhD program in Comparative Literature at UC Riverside, and my novel came out.


That's right, folks. Remember a few months ago when I was writing
about how I think self-publishing is a potential vanguard movement for fiction writers? Well, click here and visit A Crack in Everything at Amazon.com. I hope you're inspired to support me when you do.


If you live anywhere near LA, come join me at the book events!


I've been going a little crazy reading heavy lit theory for many hours of the day, and then spending my "free time" trying to do marketing. I've designed purple underwear with "There is A Crack in Everything" printed on the butt. I've made custom condoms with the phrase "Even though there's A Crack in Everything" printed on them. (The novel is about a sex educator). I've bought a huge mounted poster of the cover to set in an easel at events. It's nuts, really, how much time, money, and energy can go into a project like this--I could be promoting full time, if I wanted to. Instead, I'm going to cut and paste the back cover copy of the book here and then write about the problem of "autobiographical fiction."


So here's what the back of the book says: 


Twenty-five-year-old Tamina is a sharp-witted Jersey girl living in Hollywood with a near-phobic response to mismatching colors, an addiction to pedicures, and a hectic job teaching comprehensive sex education to urban youth. Suffering the consequences of a violent assault, Tam looks for relief in romance and LA's underground erotic entertainment scene. However, when Tam's young attacker unexpectedly resurfaces among a crowd of drag queens, porn stars, and musicians, Tam finally must make real choices. Fear or confrontation. Cynicism or curiosity. Silence or honesty. It would be surreal, if it wasn't LA.

Nearly everyone who's read the novel so far has wondered, "How much of Tamina is you?" and I'd like to answer this question once and for all.


Some. Some of her is me. Most of her is not me.


The truth is, I had a lot more in common with Tamina, in temperament, when I began the book. Her politics are my politics. Her experiences are not really my experiences. Her life is fiction. Her emotional problems resonate with me, and that's why I wrote them. Beginning six years ago.


Tamina is stressed out. She's anxious a lot of the time. She has a hard time telling people the abject honest truth about how she feels because she's afraid of being rejected. I used to feel this way a lot more often than I do now. It was freeing to me to write this character, because once I'd exposed some of these emotional realities I was more able to address them. Granted, they haven't gone away. But I don't worry as much about how people are perceiving me, and I would like to thank Tamina for that. She took some of the burden from me, I think.


In addition, this is a sexy novel--there's a very erotic scene about 2/3 of the way through, in addition to sexual tension between many of the characters, and I've already been fielding questions about whether the sex scene came from my imagination or my experience. So I'll answer that question, too. Both.


I think that Americans are obsessed with historicity, memoir, and "what really happened." I'm bored by the constant pursuit of an objective past truth or a pure memory, when it comes to literature. I believe that the desire to figure out the exact inspiration for any piece of fiction is a deadly moment--it's a way to kill the creative potential in reading. It's a way to fix a book in a particular point, instead of allowing it a spinning, fluid, expansive life of inspiring people. Sometimes authors have fantastically exciting stories about the origin of a book. But often the reading of a book is a truly creative act on the part of the reader, and too much interference from an author can be restrictive, I think.


I'm actually lucky that I'm self-publishing in an age when authors have to be visible. I'm young, I'm blonde, and I'm extroverted. There was a time when those things would not matter nearly as much as they do now. If I were shy this whole business would be more stressful than an MRI for a claustrophobic.

So I rumble along, trying to figure out the machinery of promotion. I try not to be too insanely attached to any particular outcome for A Crack in Everything, and just be grateful that its got a physical form. Because holding it in my hands, after all this time, is a pleasure of nearly transcendent character.