The Paris Review

Annotations

1. After reading Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor last year, I internalized her (and Elizabeth Hardwick's) prohibition against allowing the same word to appear twice on a page, and my prose strains in places as a result. I wonder: did O'Connor read Muriel Spark? If so, confronted with such hilarious and inarguably brillliant repetitions—see, e.g., the sticks—how could she have continued to adhere to her rule? Also, how did Spark reuse words so imaginatively?  She built humor through the sameness but somehow made the descriptions fresh every time.  I wish she could revise this scene I'm getting ready to work on now, the one with the dogs in the car.
2. I'm especially fascinated by the section about the Bangladeshi-born, New York City-raised Muslim artist who was detained in June 2002 after returning from a residency program in Senegal, on suspicion that he'd fled the country on September 12, 2001, and left a bomb behind in a locker.  After being detained for questioning and then subjected to a six-month investigation that included nine polygraph tests administered in one day, the suspect launched The Orwell Project, which includes photos of and details about all the meals he eats, the urinals he uses, and the products he buys.  "His aim,” Kumar writes, “is to overwhelm those who have him under surveillance... With the information they need.”
3. I have no (conscious) belief that doing this will have any talismanic effect.
4. Maybe I'll be happy about all the plot points later, but right now the story is starting to feel cluttered—not to mention seeded with coincidences. Obviously Patty had some sort of relationship with the scientist whose wife was just murdered, and I have the feeling we're supposed to wonder if he is the father of her son.  Did he really have to be carrying on an affair with General Counsel for the Evil Energy Company, too?  And then there's all the drama with Rose and the “fellow support group member” who obviously has something to do with Frobisher and who's going to get her into bed. The FBI plot is fine, but it's getting buried amid all this other stuff.
5. I would like to think I would avoid using either in this formulation, but a quick run through old entries using Google might prove otherwise. Rather than worrying about this, I prefer to focus on the ancillary question of the double “l"; when did we stop writing “cancelled” or “travelled"? When did the single “l” become the default?
6. But you should read this essay, if you read this essay, for the part about the cat repeatedly showing up to terrify an old man in a bath. It reminds me a little bit of a piece Sven Birkerts read at the University of Pittsburgh in April about a tomcat that wandered into his apartment a few times Except Birkerts won his cat battle, while the bathing fellow just sat there in the water, paralyzed.
7. I'm a quarter of the way through the draft now and pushing to get to a third by next Wednesday. Mostly I'm filling in gaps and revising, but the last quarter remains to be written, so that's what I'll be doing, I hope, from late July through the end of the summer
8. It'll be a hybrid trip—part pleasure, part writing, part avoidance. (Max has spent the last several weeks planning and building a “human turntable"—although a couple days ago he started calling it a “rotating platform,” “because it sounds safer"—for a 3-D music video he's going to be shooting at our apartment. I will be impressed with the results, but I don't want to witness the hot dog being made.) I can't wait to see her. Our interactions probably seem a little downbeat to outsiders, but that's us, just being ourselves. The day after my grandmother's funeral we were driving through a pretty area of Nashville near my aunt's neighborhood, and as the rest of us admired the houses nestled back on their lush green lawns, my grandfather cleared his throat and frowned. “Sure would be a shame if a tornadah came through hear,” he said. My sister and I both try to anticipate disaster like that, too—except, as she points out, we also get it from our mother's side. She's a new nurse, and what with the trying to keep the psych patients from shitting on the floor while she's dealing with a stroke patient, doesn't have much reading time, but I hope she'll eventually get around to that copy of Memento Mori I sent her, if only so that we can laugh at our future selves.
9. I admired The History of Love and so far, just a few pages in, I'm interested in this book. The narrator's boyfriend has left her, and for weeks it storms outside, windows howling as she rushes around with a special tool to tighten their bolts.
10. The fantastical elements of the story are distracting me; I just don't believe the narrator.  Maybe the sightings seem less random and less self-consciously imaginative in the context of the overall story, but even after the narrative voice changes in the second section I'm not in the mood to continue. Instead, I decide to take a look at Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I have on my iPad, as an antidote and for ideas about structure.
11. I checked in with him about the draft at a couple stages because the piece is partly about the time, after the building had gone into bankruptcy and been abandoned again, that we decided to sneak up to Al Capone's old suite. I like to get the go-ahead before I write about friends.
12. Little do I know, seeing Sue Sylvester bossy and rageful in her track pants, that Sister and I will encounter the actress in person at the Woodstar when we're buying coffee on Monday.