Still in the phlegmy hell stage of this cold, but a train of thought this morning deserves a bit of meditation. Recently, a friend who is a writer did a really nice thing for me, and it made me realize that writers being nice to one another is often a sad exception to the rule that writers are usually ego-addled jerkfaces. The grandest evidence of this may be seen at any AWP conference (Kay Ryan captures this feeling perfectly in this essay), where people walk around parading their shitty attitudes in between panels where they show off their shitty attitudes. It’s because we are desperate beggars snatching at crumbs. Starvation makes us pathetically greedy. Just try getting a writer to provide a blurb for your first book: everyone will say no. I promise.

This is why it is surprisingly odd when writers are kind, generous, sympathetic. It shouldn’t be, especially for nonfiction and fiction writers who probe human identity and feelings in their work. How many times have you gone to a reading by someone whose work you admire and walked away feeling disappointed when they were perfunctory and rude to the audience? And why is it a rare evening when the opposite happens and you tell your friends, wow, such and such was so nice? Writers — especially male ones, sorry to say — will often argue away this behavior, saying that they have to spend so much time alone, protecting their art, that interacting with people is beyond their capacity.

I call bullshit on that. Interacting with people is our job. If human beings are our subject matter, we owe it to them to treat them with dignity. And I mean all of them, not just the two of three people who read our books. It would be nice to meet another writer and say, so and so is nice and kind and thoughtful… and not have it be a surprise. If we’re lucky enough to occasionally be a witness to grace, and we’re writing about that, we owe it to others to spread that around.

Never get smug about the fact that you never get sick. That’s the lesson I’m learning this chilly August. Before this virus arrived, it had been nearly three years since I’d gotten a flu or cold, but now I’m a snotty mess, wondering how much longer I’ll be wandering around the house leaving a trail of crusty tissues behind me. I wonder if not being in the classroom and constantly bombarded with germs my immune system went a little bit slack. In two weeks I’ll be back to teaching, so perhaps this is just nature’s way of telling me to spend some time lying on the sofa watching the terrible, trashy miniseries The Pillars of the Earth on my laptop and sucking down endless cups of tea. Still slogging through The Rest is Noise as well, which is a great book, wonderfully written, but just based on its subject matter is also justifiably long. Really long. I mean, he does have to cover an entire century.

If I ever finish this meme, it’ll be in chunks. Chunk 3 ahoy.

Day #8: Your favorite comedy

Generally I prefer the tragedies and histories to the comedies. Shakespeare was funny, but the problem is that the humor is often played so broadly and physically that the language gets lost. I do have some fondness for As You Like It, mostly because I enjoy the wordplay and the whole courting-in-drag homoerotic subtext at play there.
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy

If Hamlet’s my favorite play, then Lear has to be my favorite tragedy. I resisted Lear for many years, because I actually saw Kurosawa’s Ran before I managed to see a staging of Lear. When I finally saw it on stage, something clicked; this is the saddest play of all, but it’s also about finding one’s humanity, the most universal theme of all.
Day #10: Your favorite history

The Henry IV plays — although like everything else Shakespeare wrote they’re not historically accurate — probably have the most bang for your buck of all of the histories. When I was a kid and really fascinated by Joan of Arc, I was horrified to read Shakespeare’s version of her in Henry VI, but that trilogy was written really early in his career, and he was more of a propagandist at that point.
Day #11: Your least favorite play

Nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear that it’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fuck fucking Midsummer.
Day #12: Your favorite scene

This is where this meme starts to annoy me again. First it asks for favorite scene, then favorite romantic scene, then favorite fight scene. People, please. What about favorite person-in-drag scene? Favorite statue-coming-to-life scene? Anyway… favorite scene, ever, of all time? When Hamlet walks in on a praying Claudius and realizes he can’t stab him because Claudius would then go to heaven (although we as the audience know there’s no way God would want Claudius around). Moral complexity, great monologues, two characters interacting without being aware of one another.
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene

Much of the romance in Shakespeare’s plays is rather unconvincing, frankly. People get married for  all the wrong reasons, we’re supposed to root for couples who would never work out in the long run (for instance, when the Duke proposes to the nun in Measure for Measure and we all go… ewwww…). I think it’s in AW Nuttal’s Shakespeare the Thinker that he proposes that Lady and Mrs Maccers are the only hetero couple that actually have a sexual, functional relationship before it all goes to hell, and the first scene of them together with her reading the letter beforehand is actually pretty sexy… in spite of the series of events it sets off.

Day #14: Your favorite fight scene

Maccers versus Macduff. Damn, that’s a good one.

My essay on Dorothy Day, radical socialist/anarchist, single mother, writer, and founder of the Catholic Worker movement, just went up today at The Fanzine. If you’re interested in what I may or may not be writing about in the book I’m working on, this might give you a few clues.

Thanks as ever to Ben and Casey of the Fanzine for their help. Lots of fab writing at the site for you to peruse.

The next clump of questions all overlap, so let’s just answer them in one fell swoop.

Day #2: Your favorite character

Confusing wording here: “favorite character” vs. “favorite hero/villain/etc”? Anyway, I suppose by “character” you mean someone not heroic or villainous, so I guess I will go with Richard II. He’s rather an antihero, and has some of the best soliloquies in the histories. Also he’s a clear predecessor of Hamlet, and we all know how I feel about Hamlet…

Day #3: Your favorite hero

Well, it’s not Henry V, who’s rather a prick. As was his father, of course. I always saw Falstaff as a heroic figure, actually, and since he isn’t really a clown let’s use him here.
Day #4: Your favorite heroine

Beatrice kicks a lot of ass in Much Ado. I’d like to see a production where she beats she shit out of Benedick, who deserves it.
Day #5: Your favorite villain

Iago’s probably the GRE answer you’re looking for. Or Richard III. Richard III may be a creep. but he’s also funny and damned charming. And that’s enough for me. Richard FTW.
Day #6: Your favorite villainess

I was taking an acting class a few years ago with L. Peter Callendar, and he had one of the students do Constance’s monologue from King John. She immediately headed to the top of the lady villain list, where she sits comfortably beside Lear’s rotten daughters.
Day #7: Your favorite clown

I’m going with the clown in Lear. The early clowns are mostly annoying. I prefer the Robert Armin era fools (Touchstone, Feste, Lavatch) to the broader Will Kemp fools. Armin probably played the Fool in Lear, who is not really “funny” but more of a wry and occasionally sympathetic observer.

For a big chunk of the month thus far, I was on a silent retreat, meditating, writing, reading, walking, and eating a lot. I was gone when the Mesherle verdict came down, which may be a good thing; although my hometown didn’t burn, it did smolder a little. Dread the sentencing; the guy is maybe going to do two years max.

Am now roughly around the halfway point of the BiPcsP (book in progress currently sans publisher) and just finished another essay on top of it. I seem to have inadvertently become a kind of amateur feminist theologian, a line of inquiry with pretty awesome creative rewards and very minimal financial ones. Then again, indie don’t pay either. I’m broke as hell but banking soul points.

I am shit when it comes to completing memes but this one was right up my intellectual/summer job alley.

30 Days of Shakespeare

1. Your favorite play

This is an awful cliche, but I don’t think I’ve gone more than a day since I first read it (probably about age 12) without hearing some line from Hamlet whiz through my head. Just yesterday, it was “eyes purging thick amber and plum tree gum” when I saw my morning warped visage in the mirror; a few days before I was quoting Claudius: “my words fly up, my thoughts remain below.” In the show Slings and Arrows, Geoffrey tells the nervous cast that he considers Hamlet to be the “greatest work of Western civilization… so at least we’ve got that going for us.” I wouldn’t disagree.

For some reason Hamlet is rarely performed in the Bay Area while we’re gagging on Midsummer (fun fact from my research for Cal Shakes: last year there were 36 productions of Midsummer in the Bay Area alone; we need a moratorium on that play immediately), Twelfth Night (so…over…it…) and R&J (ugh), so I’ve actually only seen it on stage twice in my life. But I must have seen the Laurence Olivier film version a dozen or more times, and I’ll even sit through the Branaugh  though his mustache pains me. The recent BBC version with Doctor Who as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart (so sexy) as Claudius was quite good too. But, hey, Bay Area theatres… let’s have a kick ass Hamlet sometime soon, okay?

Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you’ve never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line

Had a dream that I was on a plane full of famous writers and the pilot kept making announcements about their accomplishments: “Colson Whitehead’s on this flight, and he’s got a MacArthur Genius Grant! Jhumpa Lahiri over there has a Pulitzer and she’s HOT… Richard Ford’s got a Pulitzer too… and Kaya Oakes just got on the plane and no one cares.”

Essentially, there are two kinds of writing one can do in this lifetime: writing that’s destined for publication, and writing that may wind up in limbo. These days, the former is becoming less and less probable for most of us. It is harder than ever to get published in magazines, because there are so few of them left, and it’s harder than ever to get a book deal, because publishers don’t want to touch anything that doesn’t have some sort of commercial appeal. And thus if you have an idea, you can write it, but there’s no guarantee anyone will ever read the damn thing.

This is not an earthshaking revelation, I know. But it does make me get up some days and wonder what the hell I’m doing, what the point of the hours spent researching and learning and drafting something really is. Envy is inevitable when you’re writing into a publication void: if you’re like me, you can see books by people you know prominently displayed in local bookstores, people you like and admire, who are good writers who work hard and change the world, and still experience the kind of teeth-gnashing jealousy you thought you last felt in junior high. And the jealously is about the same bottom line: why can’t I come up with a commercial idea like that? The junior high version: why am I not popular? Rejection these days is not about the quality of the work, but about the saleability of the concept. Publishers say things like “there’s no sales angle” instead of commenting that your writing just sucks. It’s not about the writing: it’s about how to pitch it. And that’s bleak, bleak, bleak.

I know, many of you are thinking, shit, lady, just put the damn thing on Lulu and self publish. Which is not a concept I reject; in fact, given the fact that commercial publishing seems to be flailing as hard as some of those oil-slicked Gulf dolphins, self publishing may be the only way for most of us. But you still have to pimp it harder than a motherfucker if you go that route, and the idea of that is so objectionable to me for so many reasons that I can’t handle it. Seriously, I have to deep breathe into a paper bag to read from my work to twenty drunk people in a bar; do you know how hard it is to beg people to buy my books? If I had the money, I would hire a publicist, but I don’t have the money. Are there grants for that?

This is the thing: for decades (I’m that old now) I wrote reams and reams never knowing if they were going to be published, and that was fine. And then there was a book, and another one, and I began to think, oh, maybe I am good enough. But then it comes down to numbers. And then the message is no, you are not good enough. And that’s a lot of pressure to contend with, the numbers pressure, the pressure to have a marketable idea. It’s rather antithetical to the creative process, isn’t it? Rather than thinking, this is a great idea, one has to think, this is a book a lot of people will pay for.  And there isn’t any such thing as a middle ground between those two, most of the time.

It’s a gray day in Oakland; please excuse the self pity. I will always write; I don’t have a choice about that. I’m just no longer sure whether anyone will get to read any of it beyond this blog. And that’s kind of scary.

Borrowed from the internet in general and several people I know, a book meme.

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Dunno; John Ashbery, maybe. Though I stopped buying new books by him after Girls on the Run.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

Shakespeare, if you count various editions and single play paperbacks from when I taught Renaissance seminars at St. Mary’s.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

Whatevs, dude.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

This is where you expect every woman to say Darcy, right? If we’re being honest, Mister Spock. Or Hamlet. But my first love was really Kermit the frog. I like cerebral guys with green tinges to their skin.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?

Shakespeare and/or the Bible.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

Something by C.S. Lewis, probably.

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

Beautiful Children by Chales Bock. Insanely overhyped.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

Oh gosh, I’m up to 40 odd books this year already and nothing’s blown my socks off.

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?

As a teacher, I resent the idea that I would force anybody not enrolled in one of my courses to read anything.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

Bob Dylan.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

I haven’t liked a book-into-film adaptation since Wonder Boys, and that’s the odd case where I liked the film better than the book.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Watchmen... oh, wait.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

Seeing as that I barely remember my dreams, this is hard to answer. When I worked at a bookstore hosting a pretty prestigious reading series, I met a lot of famous writers and ended up having nightmares about most of them.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

I read shitty trash books on vacation, usually chick lit or fluffy YA. Twilight is probably as terrible as I’ve gotten through.

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

Foucault, maybe? I did manage to get through Finnegan’s Wake. Difficult fiction is easier for me than difficult literary theory, which is boooorrrrring. That’s why I don’t have a PhD.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?

Two Noble Kinsmen, Berkeley Shakespeare, 1985 and Henry VIII at Ashland sometime in the 80s. Pericles at Cal Shakes a couple of seasons back. I’m still waiting to see live productions of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and the Henry VI plays, ahem, Cal Shakes. And I’d be curious about seeing the disputed plays, too.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Tolstoy, bitches!

18) Roth or Updike?

Ugh, neither.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

Ugh, neither. And why are they paired together? Is the next question going to ask me to choose between Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and Jonathan Safran Foer? (for the record: none of ‘em, Franzen had it and imploded)

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

SHAKESPEARE

21) Austen or Eliot?

Eliot. Again, why are these two paired? They have nothing in common.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

French novelists, probably. I’ve never read Flaubert or Proust. A friend of mine was listening to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (I do speak and read French, very badly) on audiobook and described it as a child laying in bed waiting for his mommy to come in… for three hours of audiobook time. But I do live the Monty Python All England Summarize Proust competition skit.

23) What is your favorite novel?

I’m rather fond of David Lodge’s Changing Places, if only for the nostalgia factor of a time when UC Berkeley had money and prestige instead of just prestige.

24) Play?

Hamlet and Lear. I never, ever need to see Midsummer, Twelfth Night, or Romeo and Juliet again.

25) Poem?

John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and/or the Shakespeare sonnets and/or John Berryman’s Dream Songs.

26) Essay?

I’m a huge advocate of creative nonfiction, a genre I practice, but I don’t have a favorite essay.

27) Short story?

Something by Richard Brautigan. Probably “1/3 1/3 1/3″.

28) Work of nonfiction?

Thomas Merton’s books, at the moment.

29) Who is your favorite writer?

Har dee har har… now you ask?

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Someone mentioned above.

31) What is your desert island book?

Shakespeare, I guess. Though I really don’t like desert islands. Why don’t memes ever ask what you’d read in the Nunavut ice fields?

32) And . . . what are you reading right now?

What Happened at Vatican II, John O’Malley; New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard; The Winter Sun, Fanny Howe.

Had a good time at the very, very hot (I mean literally — 90+ degrees in Oakland yesterday) East Bay on the Brain reading last night with my buddy Sam Hurwitt and a host of other readers. Kudos to Lauren for getting a successful reading series together. I ran one for a while, and it’s a pain in the ass but worth the effort. The night before, I did my first talk of the season at Cal Shakes, which meant two public speaking gigs back-to-back, and this after a different and pretty major public speaking gig a couple of weeks back. I was just leaving for a book tour around this time last year, which means that K.O. inc. has developed a habit of talking a lot in front of people in the summer. Which is one of many reasons why I am going on an eight day silent meditation retreat in July. I did a three day warmup retreat in January, and it was a revelation; not only is it a total relief not to speak, but being among a whole mess of people who are also not speaking, and thus being relieved of the burden of small talk, you are actually able to think.

As a person of Irish origin, my extreme verbosity is probably a given (my late father would be nodding at this idea, while talking — and cursing — a lot), but because I teach, and therefore talk to people for a living, and seem to have inadvertently developed a secondary career also involving talking, I get pretty sick of my own voice. Thus the idea that one can go days, weeks, even in some cases months and years in a nonverbal setting becomes rather appealing. Of course, the flip side to not talking is the need to express oneself otherwise, which in my case means writing, which means… more words. That’s the catch-22, I suppose. Without words, more words. And more and more and more.