I survived to Friday, a long week of conferences and teaching, a long wet winter week, turgid hours, no hope of Spring, no uplifting signs of anything at all. Finally, the late afternoon class was over, and I closed the office door and laid on my couch and let the tapping of the rain at the window lull me to sleep.
The dream came quickly, impossibly vivid: I was on a landing in an ill-lit place full of shadowy figures and loud voices, a bar perhaps, or a performance in an old hall. An old woman with a kind, well-scrubbed face and curled hair came on me, knew me. “Michael!” she said, taking me by the arm, leaning hard—she was unsteady on her feet with age, with the place she found herself. “It has been so long. I have searched all about this place for you. I want to tell you, congratulations, I am so proud of you.”
I didn’t know her or what she was congratulating me for, but in the dream this somehow didn’t matter to me. It was as if her words themselves had the force to make all inconsistencies irrelevant; she knew me, that I was sure of, and she knew of what she spoke. In the dream, all I was worried about was her—it was late in this place, and she was frail and tired. And so I offered my arm, and slowly, slowly, I escorted her down the stairs to safety.
When I woke, I had been asleep only a few minutes, but I felt completely renewed, light, as if everything I carried had been released. I am no believer in ghosts, spirits, devils or deities, have no faith in the supernatural. But unlike most dreams, where the elements and impetus can be identified—this situation, this place, this person—this afternoon’s experience was unique, and profound in effect. I feel—good. And whether touched by an angel, or forgiven by my own conscience (I have been trying too hard for too long—what more can I do—and why can’t I be kinder to myself about it?), I believe it will be a very good weekend.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Shout-out
Curious-- I just found myself a part of the mission statement of a site called Fiction Daily, run by Millions editor David Backer. He quotes me as saying:
Commenting on a Mother Jones article called “The Death of Fiction,” Michael Copperman writes:
“The question is not whether print literary journals that are affiliated with universities are threatened today, their audiences dwindling and their funding threatened. That’s the situation that exists. The question is how literary journals can respond, who can innovate and demonstrate relevance…who can help us sift through so much content to find the best content. That will take new ways of thinking–”
Consider Fiction Daily an attempt to do this, following the enormously helpful model of Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com). Here, we select and aggregate content from the “independent” publishing world– the magazines, the websites, the small houses, the self-publishers–and put it into one place. Use this site to find stories to read, and to explore the myriad places that publish them (see our growing Literature list). Use it as a gateway to the vast sea of literature that’s being produced now in ways that the old industry can’t keep up with.
Mr. Backer's project, Fiction Daily, is interesting and innovative. You can find Fiction Daily here:
http://fictiondaily.org/
Commenting on a Mother Jones article called “The Death of Fiction,” Michael Copperman writes:
“The question is not whether print literary journals that are affiliated with universities are threatened today, their audiences dwindling and their funding threatened. That’s the situation that exists. The question is how literary journals can respond, who can innovate and demonstrate relevance…who can help us sift through so much content to find the best content. That will take new ways of thinking–”
Consider Fiction Daily an attempt to do this, following the enormously helpful model of Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com). Here, we select and aggregate content from the “independent” publishing world– the magazines, the websites, the small houses, the self-publishers–and put it into one place. Use this site to find stories to read, and to explore the myriad places that publish them (see our growing Literature list). Use it as a gateway to the vast sea of literature that’s being produced now in ways that the old industry can’t keep up with.
Mr. Backer's project, Fiction Daily, is interesting and innovative. You can find Fiction Daily here:
http://fictiondaily.org/
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Story
In everything, I make narrative, see narrative, find the story. That is how my mind works: I only understand things in causal relation to other things, in order, arranged unconsciously, unwinding in words. In fiction and poetry, much gets made today of the need to acknowledge the artifice, be true to sources, indicate what is reality and its reference points and its constructed nature, to find a way to indicate fracture, instability, ambiguity, the fundamental pastiche of it all. I am not that sort of writer mostly because that is not who I am or how I experience the world.
But I might be wrong. Certainly, I’ve come to recognize the way much of our lives are spent looking backward and forward from the current moment, and finding a narrative that is tenable. Ten years of suffering becomes the hard work necessary to moving beyond; a traumatic accident is made a turning point that suggested the fragility of life and the importance of living each day to the fullest, and so on and so on. The breakup becomes less of a blow that knocked you to your knees and more of a necessary release that told you what you do not ever want again. Narrative is a revision and a meaning making, perhaps a necessary forming. But what do we do with the irresolvable? Poet Cesar Vallejo phrases it this way:
“There are some blows so violent—I can’t answer!”
I am interested in such moments as a writer-- the violence that lays bare something profound and true and too often, terrible. But I also have to wonder about the process of narrative in general, about how I perpetually form everything happening to a form I can control and understand. Look at post-9/11 America, at all we did to make sense of the Twin Towers—we needed heroes and we needed enemies, we needed action, we needed…something. It sounds trivial, but look at all the CSI-style forensic shows that rose to popularity after 9/11. We imagined that there was some science that could tell us what happened, how, and to whom, that we could determine cause and guilt and assign final responsibility and punishment. We are still trying to, as even now Marines die in the Afghan offensive. We want the story to end well, so we can justify the muddled middle, the incomprehensible opening. The blow came first, and there may never be an adequate accounting, a resolution that comforts or explains. And if that’s the case, what if it’s almost always the case?
I’m not kowtowing to the post-modernists or the pompous idiots of literature departments who think what they and their theories say about art matters more than the art itself. I’m not really talking about art at all, in fact, but about how we live and go on, how we find a story we can live with. I often fear I have spent these years writing this book for nothing—that it will find no home or readership, that I will have come all this way for nothing. I also recognize that even if that is the case, I will reckon with that blow, make peace with it and keep writing, perhaps even write something more commercial that does go somewhere, and I will think of the disappointment and lost labor as a necessary rejection, a time when I was developing and only beginning to write.
But I am not so sure that will be true—I have put everything I have into this book, and though it may not be an easy or pretty book, it has merit. And what it will do to me will not be so easily resolved either. What if the narrative we want to tell can’t be made, before or after; what if these stories, these tenuous ribbons spun out and out, fray to nothing, contain nothing but the threads themselves?
These thoughts are diffuse. But then, that is the point.
But I might be wrong. Certainly, I’ve come to recognize the way much of our lives are spent looking backward and forward from the current moment, and finding a narrative that is tenable. Ten years of suffering becomes the hard work necessary to moving beyond; a traumatic accident is made a turning point that suggested the fragility of life and the importance of living each day to the fullest, and so on and so on. The breakup becomes less of a blow that knocked you to your knees and more of a necessary release that told you what you do not ever want again. Narrative is a revision and a meaning making, perhaps a necessary forming. But what do we do with the irresolvable? Poet Cesar Vallejo phrases it this way:
“There are some blows so violent—I can’t answer!”
I am interested in such moments as a writer-- the violence that lays bare something profound and true and too often, terrible. But I also have to wonder about the process of narrative in general, about how I perpetually form everything happening to a form I can control and understand. Look at post-9/11 America, at all we did to make sense of the Twin Towers—we needed heroes and we needed enemies, we needed action, we needed…something. It sounds trivial, but look at all the CSI-style forensic shows that rose to popularity after 9/11. We imagined that there was some science that could tell us what happened, how, and to whom, that we could determine cause and guilt and assign final responsibility and punishment. We are still trying to, as even now Marines die in the Afghan offensive. We want the story to end well, so we can justify the muddled middle, the incomprehensible opening. The blow came first, and there may never be an adequate accounting, a resolution that comforts or explains. And if that’s the case, what if it’s almost always the case?
I’m not kowtowing to the post-modernists or the pompous idiots of literature departments who think what they and their theories say about art matters more than the art itself. I’m not really talking about art at all, in fact, but about how we live and go on, how we find a story we can live with. I often fear I have spent these years writing this book for nothing—that it will find no home or readership, that I will have come all this way for nothing. I also recognize that even if that is the case, I will reckon with that blow, make peace with it and keep writing, perhaps even write something more commercial that does go somewhere, and I will think of the disappointment and lost labor as a necessary rejection, a time when I was developing and only beginning to write.
But I am not so sure that will be true—I have put everything I have into this book, and though it may not be an easy or pretty book, it has merit. And what it will do to me will not be so easily resolved either. What if the narrative we want to tell can’t be made, before or after; what if these stories, these tenuous ribbons spun out and out, fray to nothing, contain nothing but the threads themselves?
These thoughts are diffuse. But then, that is the point.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
New Projects
Out the window of my 11th floor apartment the valley spreads in blocks of forest bounded by road. On the horizon, the Coburg hills, and in the sky beyond crook the three fingers of the Three Sisters. Rain renders it Gaussian blur, and what is nearer is equally indistinct: television muted on something trashy and dramatic, couch covered in books, sink full of unwashed dishes. The white walls about me, and on all sides the sleeping geriatrics (my building is full of the old) dreaming of youth. And me, wasting my youth—whatever I do next year, I will have spent my twenties in this apartment in Eugene, Oregon.
So much for the best years of my life.
This won’t be another blog lamenting the weather or the austerity of my bachelorhood. The first paragraph contained enough imagery of things contained to suffice—as I’ve said before, I tire of whining about my situation, of writing solipsistic foolishness to gentle the duration of this endurance. It is all a long persistence, that is my revelation of the week. Keep on keeping on. Do. Or, don’t.
This rewrite of Hamlet won’t be winning any prizes, regardless.
Instead, an update on a new project. You’ll see more here as it emerges, but my newest pursuit, in addition to the ongoing series of pieces for GOOD, has to do with the musician Leo London. My friend Justin King introduced me to Leo; he’s produced Leo’s album, which will be released sometime in Spring when Justin returns from South Africa. I have been hanging out with Leo and his girlfriend Laurie in occasional dive bars and coffee shops and even my apartment, where we attempted to drink enough Jameson to summon the volume to wake the neighbors (we failed—they sleep hard, or rather, are hard of hearing). He is a friend, which requires no justification at all, but he interests me for the originality of his music, the way his aesthetic somehow IS Leo London, son of heroin addicts, round-faced, flop-haired, perpetually unshaven, a twenty-four-year old man who sleeps on the floors of friends and in the basement of his grandparent’s house, where all about him are the guts of the Wurlitzers he spends his days restoring. Leo who loves the Beats, who listens to Dylan and Waits and the Kinks and sounds like all of them and none of them. Leo who confessed to me last week on his birthday, struggling from beneath a dozen drinks, that he never expected to make twenty-four, that it was, how do you say, perhaps an awful mistake and not a blessing at all, not really, not this life lived this way. Leo who wrote these last lines to the song about liking it at the bottom, cigarettes and rock and roll and little hope of heaven:
We’ve both seen some terrible things my love
And we both served our time the in the dark
But the things that hold our hearts in place
Are the things that have to tear us apart
Well do you think I could let it go
No, I know I know I’ll never let it let go
It’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real
And what’s real only under affliction
But something lately tells me it’s all the same
As your love comes in the form of a question
Is there some other place where we could speak like this
Is there someone out there who would listen
Who still likes rock and roll
Like I like rock and roll
Singing softly at the gates of Heaven.
There may be no other place he can speak like that, but right now I’m trying to find what it is that Leo has to say that I need to hear. I'm-- listening.
So much for the best years of my life.
This won’t be another blog lamenting the weather or the austerity of my bachelorhood. The first paragraph contained enough imagery of things contained to suffice—as I’ve said before, I tire of whining about my situation, of writing solipsistic foolishness to gentle the duration of this endurance. It is all a long persistence, that is my revelation of the week. Keep on keeping on. Do. Or, don’t.
This rewrite of Hamlet won’t be winning any prizes, regardless.
Instead, an update on a new project. You’ll see more here as it emerges, but my newest pursuit, in addition to the ongoing series of pieces for GOOD, has to do with the musician Leo London. My friend Justin King introduced me to Leo; he’s produced Leo’s album, which will be released sometime in Spring when Justin returns from South Africa. I have been hanging out with Leo and his girlfriend Laurie in occasional dive bars and coffee shops and even my apartment, where we attempted to drink enough Jameson to summon the volume to wake the neighbors (we failed—they sleep hard, or rather, are hard of hearing). He is a friend, which requires no justification at all, but he interests me for the originality of his music, the way his aesthetic somehow IS Leo London, son of heroin addicts, round-faced, flop-haired, perpetually unshaven, a twenty-four-year old man who sleeps on the floors of friends and in the basement of his grandparent’s house, where all about him are the guts of the Wurlitzers he spends his days restoring. Leo who loves the Beats, who listens to Dylan and Waits and the Kinks and sounds like all of them and none of them. Leo who confessed to me last week on his birthday, struggling from beneath a dozen drinks, that he never expected to make twenty-four, that it was, how do you say, perhaps an awful mistake and not a blessing at all, not really, not this life lived this way. Leo who wrote these last lines to the song about liking it at the bottom, cigarettes and rock and roll and little hope of heaven:
We’ve both seen some terrible things my love
And we both served our time the in the dark
But the things that hold our hearts in place
Are the things that have to tear us apart
Well do you think I could let it go
No, I know I know I’ll never let it let go
It’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real
And what’s real only under affliction
But something lately tells me it’s all the same
As your love comes in the form of a question
Is there some other place where we could speak like this
Is there someone out there who would listen
Who still likes rock and roll
Like I like rock and roll
Singing softly at the gates of Heaven.
There may be no other place he can speak like that, but right now I’m trying to find what it is that Leo has to say that I need to hear. I'm-- listening.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Luna Park
Today my essay, "Questions of Authenticity," went up at Luna Park. It lays out a position I've worked out after years of struggle concerning the ethics of writing. I discuss the resistance of editors to my dialect work and the work in my own voice that simultaneously 'failed to' and 'went too far in' dealing with representations of race.
That essay, and my GOOD piece, were also reviewed here on Fictionaut by Travis Kurowski, who said the following:
"This week on Luna Park, Michael Copperman writes what seems to me an original and thoughtful essay considering some aesthetic and political assumptions made about race in contemporary publishing. Possibly one of the most inspiring pieces we have published on LP, Copperman’s essay moves quickly from describing publishing obstacles onto the important reasons we read and write stories: “recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us.” Here’s from the beginning of the piece:
The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:
Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.
I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type…
"In non lit mag news: Copperman also has a similarly-themed brief essay in the latest GOOD magazine on education against the odds in an area of rural Mississippi just half-a-day’s drive from where Luna Park was once based. The sensitivity with which Copperman describes the schoolchildren will no doubt speak to the heart of any teacher or parent."
That essay, and my GOOD piece, were also reviewed here on Fictionaut by Travis Kurowski, who said the following:
"This week on Luna Park, Michael Copperman writes what seems to me an original and thoughtful essay considering some aesthetic and political assumptions made about race in contemporary publishing. Possibly one of the most inspiring pieces we have published on LP, Copperman’s essay moves quickly from describing publishing obstacles onto the important reasons we read and write stories: “recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us.” Here’s from the beginning of the piece:
The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:
Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.
I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type…
"In non lit mag news: Copperman also has a similarly-themed brief essay in the latest GOOD magazine on education against the odds in an area of rural Mississippi just half-a-day’s drive from where Luna Park was once based. The sensitivity with which Copperman describes the schoolchildren will no doubt speak to the heart of any teacher or parent."
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