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mallorys_cameraProblem with not writing every day is that I forget how to write. Words no longer flow. I struggle with syntax and word choices. Simple things.
In that sense, writing here is very much like practicing scales might be for a musician.
Although in some larger sense, I’m associating my disinclination to write with Lucius’s death.
Lucius was a very good writer, and moreover a writer with an oeuvre of sorts. And a following.
“They’re not going to publish Lucius’s Central America book,” Ben told me mournfully when we did our road trip together at the beginning of August.
“Does Lucius’s Central America book even exist?” I chuckled.
“Oh, yes, it exists,” Ben said. “There are galleys. They even printed and distributed a few review copies. But then the publisher pulled the plug.”
“I suppose they thought that now that he’s dead, he doesn’t have an audience,” I said. “Or at least that his non-fiction doesn’t have an audience.”
I had thought that after he was dead, Lucius might turn into Phil K. Dick. That Hollywood would leap to film his stories – the charming, allegorical world of the Dragon Griaule; the futuristic battle zone of Life During Wartime.
But that hasn’t proven to be the case. The present tense has swallowed up all vestiges of Lucius like quicksand. Relics remain – dusty volumes on the sci fi/fantasy bookshelves of a few secondhand bookstores on seedy boulevards scattered across the country.
When those bookstores finally go under – which they will very soon – poof! Lucius will have vanished.
I confess that Lucius’s own fictional style was often not to my liking. I didn’t like it when he dressed up flimsy plotlines in ponderous, 19th century, elegiac prose.
But when he was good, he was very, very good. Life During Wartime – very, very good. The closing lines of The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter –
– very, very good.
I never read any of Lucius’s nonfiction. Ben tells me that it is also very, very good – although, of course, since Lucius and facts had an interesting relationship, his nonfiction can’t strictly be called investigative reporting any more than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or A Journal of the Plague Year can be called investigative reporting.
I’m told Lucius dedicated Two Trains Running to me. And I’ve never read it. Never even seen it – he didn’t think to give me a copy.
The Lucius rationale for not writing goes something like this: If nobody really cared about Lucius’s work, why would anyone would care about yours, which isn’t a microspeck as good?
Which is, of course, ridiculous. This is a journal. I write for myself. Or maybe for a great-great-grandchild, as yet unborn, who will stumble across these ramblings and take some sort of interest because they were once attached to a genetic code that – with certain artful manipulations and permutations – produced her.
Lucius was my teacher at Clarion, the celebrated writing workshop that quite literally changed my life because it was there that I met and fell in love with Ben.
He was a brilliant writing teacher. I’ve always had a flair for words, but Lucius helped me break any number of annoying habits and see that writing for an audience involves more than self-expression. It’s a message in a bottle. The trick is to communicate while remaining true to oneself
Lucius was a fun guy to get drunk with and hang out in sceazy bars, and as he thought I had genuine talent and a real shot at producing what he considered good work, we kept in touch. Lucius’s standards for many things were low, but his standards for writing were high.
In 2000, Lucius ran into Big Problemos with the IRS. He’d been making a comfortable amount of money from book sales, film options, and such, but he hadn’t paid federal income taxes in 20-odd years and the IRS had attached all his accounts.
So Ben and I talked it over, and came up with a plan: We would buy an old battered RV. We would park it in our driveway. And Lucius would live in it until he got himself together – which we figured would take about three months.
The RV turned out to be an impractical solution for many reasons – there are stories there, but I don’t have time to write them now – so Lucius ended up living in our house. For a year and a half.
I didn’t charge him rent. What the hell. I was gonna end up paying what I had to pay towards the house regardless of whether Lucius was living there or not, and he was clearly destitute. Such things balance themselves out over the long run, in this lifetime or the next.
It took Lucius a year and a half to write Valentine, his take on The Bridges of Madison County. Diana and Jeannie loved it; I thought it was a self-indulgent mess. Lucius himself was ambivalent. Diana and Jeannie were probably the target audience.
The Valentine advance got him out of debt, gave him the wherewithal to move back to Seattle.
Gulliver came to the wake Ellen Datlow threw for Lucius at the KGB bar.
Gulliver is Lucius’s son, raised by the wife who ditched Lucius shortly before he became a write. One might call Gulliver the anti-Lucius. He’s a handsome, personable man with a successful career in a profession about as far away from writing as one can get. He’s clearly very responsible. Which is not to say that Lucius had no effect on him. Clearly, Gulliver has expended a lot of energy on not being Lucius.
After we’d all had our turn at the mike telling funny Lucius stories, Gulliver stood up to say a few words.
“I’m blown away at the sheer number of you who took on the job of taking care of my father over the years,” said Gulliver. “He was obviously very bad at taking care of himself. Thank you for that. I guess.”
###
Nothing much has happened in the week that I haven’t been writing. I played high school English teacher with Summer who’s been reading Robert Frost –
“The darkest evening of the year… That’s a very specific date. What date do you think it is?”
Summer looked confused.
"Well, how are the seasons measured?”
Summer shook her head.
On a piece of notebook paper I wrote: Solstice. Equinox.
These were completely unfamiliar concepts to Summer even after I explained them. Is the Chinese calendar really so different?
“So you see 'the darkest evening of the year' is very specifically referencing December 21, the Winter Solstice!”
“Oh-h-h-h!” said Summer. I couldn’t tell whether she found this little anthropological digression amusing or boring.
“Bronze Age civilizations, of course, could never be sure that the days would get longer again. So the Winter Solstice is associated with death. It’s also the reason why there are so many Western holidays in the time around the Winter Solstice – originally these were ceremonies designed to lure the sun back.”
“Oh!” said Summer.
“So you see, the poem is really about death. The unnamed narrator is thinking about dying.”
“He is suicidal?” asked Summer, concerned.
“No! No. He says he has ‘miles to go before I sleep.’ He knows that. But the thought of dying is attractive to him.”
“He is depressed?” Summer asked.
“Not exactly,” I said.
I wasn’t sure whether it was Chinese cultural norms or millennial pragmatism I was up against here. But I don't think she got the poem at all.
###
The full moon shone so brightly that night that around two in the morning, I woke up. Looked out my window. Saw something I must have seen before but that I can’t ever remember seeing before:
Shadows.
The full moon casts shadows.
Ghastly shadows.
They made a riveting sight.
###
The next day Oliver Sacks – one of my favorite human beings on the planet – died.
I love this picture of Oliver Sacks more than I can say. Standing motionless, recording your thoughts, in the midst of a rapidly moving universe. Ah, yes, that’s what it means to bear testimony.
I can’t say I’ve read everything that Oliver Sacks published, but I’ve read a fair amount.
In that sense, writing here is very much like practicing scales might be for a musician.
Although in some larger sense, I’m associating my disinclination to write with Lucius’s death.
Lucius was a very good writer, and moreover a writer with an oeuvre of sorts. And a following.
“They’re not going to publish Lucius’s Central America book,” Ben told me mournfully when we did our road trip together at the beginning of August.
“Does Lucius’s Central America book even exist?” I chuckled.
“Oh, yes, it exists,” Ben said. “There are galleys. They even printed and distributed a few review copies. But then the publisher pulled the plug.”
“I suppose they thought that now that he’s dead, he doesn’t have an audience,” I said. “Or at least that his non-fiction doesn’t have an audience.”
I had thought that after he was dead, Lucius might turn into Phil K. Dick. That Hollywood would leap to film his stories – the charming, allegorical world of the Dragon Griaule; the futuristic battle zone of Life During Wartime.
But that hasn’t proven to be the case. The present tense has swallowed up all vestiges of Lucius like quicksand. Relics remain – dusty volumes on the sci fi/fantasy bookshelves of a few secondhand bookstores on seedy boulevards scattered across the country.
When those bookstores finally go under – which they will very soon – poof! Lucius will have vanished.
I confess that Lucius’s own fictional style was often not to my liking. I didn’t like it when he dressed up flimsy plotlines in ponderous, 19th century, elegiac prose.
But when he was good, he was very, very good. Life During Wartime – very, very good. The closing lines of The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter –
From that point on little is known of her other than the fact that she bore two sons and confined her writing to a journal that has gone unpublished. However, it is said of her—as is said of all those who perform similar acts of faith in the shadows of other dragons yet unearthed from beneath their hills of ordinary-seeming earth and grass, believing that their bond serves through gentle constancy to enhance and not further delimit the boundaries of this prison world—from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in between.
– very, very good.
I never read any of Lucius’s nonfiction. Ben tells me that it is also very, very good – although, of course, since Lucius and facts had an interesting relationship, his nonfiction can’t strictly be called investigative reporting any more than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or A Journal of the Plague Year can be called investigative reporting.
I’m told Lucius dedicated Two Trains Running to me. And I’ve never read it. Never even seen it – he didn’t think to give me a copy.
The Lucius rationale for not writing goes something like this: If nobody really cared about Lucius’s work, why would anyone would care about yours, which isn’t a microspeck as good?
Which is, of course, ridiculous. This is a journal. I write for myself. Or maybe for a great-great-grandchild, as yet unborn, who will stumble across these ramblings and take some sort of interest because they were once attached to a genetic code that – with certain artful manipulations and permutations – produced her.
Lucius was my teacher at Clarion, the celebrated writing workshop that quite literally changed my life because it was there that I met and fell in love with Ben.
He was a brilliant writing teacher. I’ve always had a flair for words, but Lucius helped me break any number of annoying habits and see that writing for an audience involves more than self-expression. It’s a message in a bottle. The trick is to communicate while remaining true to oneself
Lucius was a fun guy to get drunk with and hang out in sceazy bars, and as he thought I had genuine talent and a real shot at producing what he considered good work, we kept in touch. Lucius’s standards for many things were low, but his standards for writing were high.
In 2000, Lucius ran into Big Problemos with the IRS. He’d been making a comfortable amount of money from book sales, film options, and such, but he hadn’t paid federal income taxes in 20-odd years and the IRS had attached all his accounts.
So Ben and I talked it over, and came up with a plan: We would buy an old battered RV. We would park it in our driveway. And Lucius would live in it until he got himself together – which we figured would take about three months.
The RV turned out to be an impractical solution for many reasons – there are stories there, but I don’t have time to write them now – so Lucius ended up living in our house. For a year and a half.
I didn’t charge him rent. What the hell. I was gonna end up paying what I had to pay towards the house regardless of whether Lucius was living there or not, and he was clearly destitute. Such things balance themselves out over the long run, in this lifetime or the next.
It took Lucius a year and a half to write Valentine, his take on The Bridges of Madison County. Diana and Jeannie loved it; I thought it was a self-indulgent mess. Lucius himself was ambivalent. Diana and Jeannie were probably the target audience.
The Valentine advance got him out of debt, gave him the wherewithal to move back to Seattle.
Gulliver came to the wake Ellen Datlow threw for Lucius at the KGB bar.
Gulliver is Lucius’s son, raised by the wife who ditched Lucius shortly before he became a write. One might call Gulliver the anti-Lucius. He’s a handsome, personable man with a successful career in a profession about as far away from writing as one can get. He’s clearly very responsible. Which is not to say that Lucius had no effect on him. Clearly, Gulliver has expended a lot of energy on not being Lucius.
After we’d all had our turn at the mike telling funny Lucius stories, Gulliver stood up to say a few words.
“I’m blown away at the sheer number of you who took on the job of taking care of my father over the years,” said Gulliver. “He was obviously very bad at taking care of himself. Thank you for that. I guess.”
###
Nothing much has happened in the week that I haven’t been writing. I played high school English teacher with Summer who’s been reading Robert Frost –
“The darkest evening of the year… That’s a very specific date. What date do you think it is?”
Summer looked confused.
"Well, how are the seasons measured?”
Summer shook her head.
On a piece of notebook paper I wrote: Solstice. Equinox.
These were completely unfamiliar concepts to Summer even after I explained them. Is the Chinese calendar really so different?
“So you see 'the darkest evening of the year' is very specifically referencing December 21, the Winter Solstice!”
“Oh-h-h-h!” said Summer. I couldn’t tell whether she found this little anthropological digression amusing or boring.
“Bronze Age civilizations, of course, could never be sure that the days would get longer again. So the Winter Solstice is associated with death. It’s also the reason why there are so many Western holidays in the time around the Winter Solstice – originally these were ceremonies designed to lure the sun back.”
“Oh!” said Summer.
“So you see, the poem is really about death. The unnamed narrator is thinking about dying.”
“He is suicidal?” asked Summer, concerned.
“No! No. He says he has ‘miles to go before I sleep.’ He knows that. But the thought of dying is attractive to him.”
“He is depressed?” Summer asked.
“Not exactly,” I said.
I wasn’t sure whether it was Chinese cultural norms or millennial pragmatism I was up against here. But I don't think she got the poem at all.
###
The full moon shone so brightly that night that around two in the morning, I woke up. Looked out my window. Saw something I must have seen before but that I can’t ever remember seeing before:
Shadows.
The full moon casts shadows.
Ghastly shadows.
They made a riveting sight.
###
The next day Oliver Sacks – one of my favorite human beings on the planet – died.
I love this picture of Oliver Sacks more than I can say. Standing motionless, recording your thoughts, in the midst of a rapidly moving universe. Ah, yes, that’s what it means to bear testimony.
I can’t say I’ve read everything that Oliver Sacks published, but I’ve read a fair amount.
