Tag: reading (Page 1 of 2)

Sanctuary

April 8, 2015 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

awproom
It’s that time of year. AWP 2015 has arrived; I’m writing this now from my third-floor hotel room, looking out over Washington Ave., in Minneapolis.

Emphasis not on Minneapolis, although it’s nice to be out of Indiana for a bit, or AWP, although that’s certainly the reason I’m here, or third-floor, even though it gives a bit of a view. No, emphasis on my.

When I was sixteen, my ever-indulgent parents got me a retreat for Christmas. Nothing extravagant, because I didn’t need extravagance; it was just five days at the Super 8 maybe twenty minutes from our house, but for me, with a brand new draft of a novel sitting in front of me, begging to be torn apart and reworked, it was a perfect writerly sanctuary. I stayed in my room with DO NOT DISTURB on the door, blinds drawn, music playing, and manuscript pages and maps and note cards splayed out all around me.

I drank alcohol-free merlot, ate tortillas with pesto, kept my own hours, and hermitted it up (although I think I reached out by text a few times for advice).

I’m not going to hermit in Minneapolis; I’m going to the conference, and to the book fair, and around the city. Still, I have a room, and it’s mine. Not in a permanent way—just in an exclusive one. My little hotel sanctuary.

This evening I took myself and a book to dinner at a restaurant across the street, Sanctuary. I’d read the menu online, and it looked exciting—and it was, but it was also much classier than I anticipated. (Seriously, look at the website. I feel like it was not an unreasonable assumption on my part.) I walked in and was seated by the very well-dressed host … and then looked around and realized that it wasn’t just the host—everyone was very well-dressed.

My first impulse was to apologize profusely—my jeans and Payless shoes and shirt with hops on it had tripped and fallen in here by accident, and I would get out of the way right now. Instead, though, I stayed; I lingered for two hours, over …

garlic, spinach, and parmesan artichoke tartlets, provincal olives, cornichons and a shot of white verjus

liquor 43 bread pudding with salted caramel ice cream and ristretto espresso crème anglaise

a quasi mojo—and absinthe mojito

and a cup of coffee

Not surprisingly, especially to anyone who looked at the menu, it was an expensive linger. Still, it was mine, whether or not I fit in.

Plus, part way through my meal, more conference types started to come in, and writers are a notoriously shabby lot. Suddenly I was not so out of place after all.

Sanctuary takes different forms, see?

A black belt, a black cat, and a black wing.

July 8, 2014 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

Writers are notorious for struggling with some things. For instance, we have to be reminded to kill our darlings, because sometimes we write that glorious sentence, better than anything we’ve ever written before, sparkling with artistry and multilayered in its brilliance … except that it’s totally out of place in its current location. Some writers I know keep a graveyard of darlings, a document where they can save those sentences and paragraphs that they just can’t move on from.

There’s one problem we often picture as intrinsic to writers, though, that I have more than conquered. I don’t mean to brag—it’s just a fact.

It’s a cliché, the insomniac writer, cursed with consciousness in the lonely, no-man’s-land hours after closing time and before the coffee shops have started their first pots. Maybe their haggard faces are lit by the glow of a computer screen; maybe they’re holding a half-drained bottle of gin in; maybe they’re lying spread-eagled in bed, staring at the ceiling, tired of counting sheep.

Not me, though. Popular wisdom says it takes the average person seven minutes to fall asleep. I can do it in three. I don’t need a pillow, or even a bed. Give me a chair to curl up in, or a wall to lean against, or even just a flat surface to lie on. Make it noisy, leave the lights on—I don’t care.

If sleep were a martial art, I’d be a black belt. I should have an honorary MFA in sleep performance from Juilliard. Researchers can’t use me in sleep studies, because I’d just skew the data.

I’m a sleep master. That’s what I’m saying.

It’s better than insomnia. Several of my close friends are insomniacs, and there’s nothing enviable about it. Still, my superhuman sleep skills can be inconvenient. When I was younger—before my powers developed—I would sit in bed and read for hours. Now, though, if I sit down to read, my sleepy sense starts tingle, and soon enough, bam, I’m reading the insides of my eyelids.

It’s a gift and a curse.

This summer, though, I’ve been trying to get back into reading for pleasure. I’ve been catching up on recommendations, and one thing I’ve found helpful is putting myself in positions where it would be inappropriate to fall asleep. I’ll go to a coffee shop or restaurant, or sit outside on the balcony, or at least choose an upright seat, without arms for easy slumping. It’s worked pretty well—I’ve made some progress on my to-read list (although given the length of that list, the progress seems negligible) and have enjoyed what I’ve read so far.

My fiction tastes are not pretentious, nor particularly limited. I read and enjoyed Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is sufficiently “high-brow,” I think, to be classified as capital-L Literature. (The Literary-vs.-genre-fiction conversation is a huge one, and one I’m interested in, but one whose place is not this post.) After that, and most recently, I read No Doors, No Windows, by Joe Schreiber. Compare them, just judging by the covers:

No Doors, No Windows does not pitch itself as Literature. I got it from the horror section in Borders (which should give you some clue as to how far behind I am on my to-read list).

Only here’s the thing. The Master and Margarita was certainly a worthwhile read—especially for someone like me, who is a sucker for black cats causing mayhem—and it had a sense of momentum. But No Doors, No Windows had momentum, movement like I haven’t experienced in a book in a long time. It features an old, eerie house, complete with a walled-off hallway, the haunted “black wing.” Disappearances and murderers and mysterious scratching sounds—what more does a ghost story need?

No doors, no windows, no time to stop and catch your breath, no good breaking point to put it down for a bit. No temptation to nod off. I read the book in two days. I did the majority of that reading curled up under a blanket, either on the couch or in bed. Even my preternatural sleeping was powerless against its pace.

We talk about how writers ought to read extensively, but I think the “genre-shaming” that goes on in some circles can restrict those extents. After all, every genre—every writer, really—privileges some qualities while disregarding others. Without variety in reading, we miss variety in exposure, which leaves us dangerously ignorant. Why? Because every super power has is limitations. Nothing, not even my capacity for sleep, is impervious to every attack.

Reading extensively is the best way to find your own Kryptonite. And, you know, techniques you might want to steal or whatever.

Dissonance, Part III: order in disorder

June 3, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 3 Comments

[part i]
[part ii]

Lately I have had Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night on the brain. I’ve talked about Festinger and Carlsmith’s tedium, Milgram’s volts … but not much about the book itself. So let’s move on to Das Reich der Zwei: the nation of two.

Some background, and my apologies if I mess up any details—I’m away from home at the moment, without my copy of the book, but I wanted to write this now:

Howard W. Campbell Jr. is born in the United States but spends most of his early life in Germany. He marries a German woman, Helga Noth, daughter of a police chief. He is a playwright; she, the lead actress in many productions. Together, they make up what he calls das Reich der Zwei. Together, they occupy a space uniquely theirs, sovereign and autonomous and separate from the rest of the world. Together, even as Germany descends into war and Howard becomes involved in the transmission of coded messages to US forces, they exist in a solitary, untouchable peace.

Observe a special sort of couple for any amount of time, and das Reich der Zwei becomes apparent. Between them, a culture will have developed. In a chaotic, dissonant world, they will have their own resonance. Their own lexicon and idioms and speech patterns, their own legends and mythologies, their own traditions and celebrations and solemn observances of tragedy. Try to make a home in their Reich der Zwei, and you will never move beyond resident alien status, will never be able to fully assimilate.

Such is the nature of the nation of two.

Helga meets an untimely end. Das Reich der Zwei crumbles. Howard is left at the mercy of other nations—Germany, the United States, Israel—snapping like hungry wolves for meat fresh from his bones.

Trying to emigrate from the nation of two, though, is as successful as trying to immigrate to it. That culture becomes part of you, and although you may adopt different customs, come to appreciate foreign cuisine and find the new language coming more and more easily, your heart will always belong to your nation of two.

Somehow, knowing that ein Reich like yours could exist makes it all the more difficult to survive in the bigger, noisier, messier world.

This is why, before the novel’s outset, Vonnegut says, “And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.”

Dissonance, Part II: shocking revelations

May 31, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

As previously mentioned, I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel, Mother Night. Protagonist Howard W. Campbell Jr. writes his memoirs for the Haifa Institute, awaiting his trial for war crimes committed while serving as an American spy, producing Nazi propaganda.

The Nazi story is an unsettling one. Howard confesses, when pressed, that if Germany had won the war, he would likely have gone along with it, American spy or no, and this is an unfortunate truth many of us would rather not face. We like to think we are secure in our values and moralities, that we are unaffected by situational factors.

A defense used over and over again was this: “I was just following orders.” How could so many people “just follow orders” to commit such atrocities? One theory, particularly popular with Americans, was the Culture and Personality Theory: essentially, traits inherent to the German culture fostered in the German people an “authoritarian personality,” meaning they were naturally predisposed to “just follow orders.” The appeal of this explanation is, of course, that Americans would never do that, because our culture fosters independence and free thought. A competing theory, Situational Theory, posited that situational factors (e.g., Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I and the ensuing depression combined with Hitler’s charisma, nationalism, and success) positioned people for that sort of obedience. The implications of this are much less comforting: what happened in Germany could happen anywhere, to anyone, given the right conditions.

In 1961, when the trials of Nazi war criminals were just beginning, Stanley Milgram devised a now-infamous experiment. He recruited subjects for what he called a study on learning. Subjects were taken into a room and told that they were to be the “teacher,” and on the other side of the wall was another subject, the “student”; the teacher would ask the student a question, and when the student answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to deliver a shock of increasing severity.

The settings on the device used for shocks were marked, ranging from mild to extremely dangerous, 450V. Inevitably, the students got questions wrong, and the teachers delivered the prescribed shocks. As the voltage got higher, though, students became distraught, eventually begging the teachers to stop, crying, and finally going silent. Whenever the teachers showed signs of hesitation, though, the researcher instructed them to continue. Sixty-five percent of participants administered the maximum shock.

The students were actually actors, and no real shocks were given. Milgram’s results, though, support the Situational Theory over the Culture and Personality Theory. His subjects were normal members of American society, but they “just followed orders” and did things most of us would consider unacceptable.

(There are many criticisms of Milgram’s study, and he is largely responsible for the heightened standards of the Human Subjects Review Committee for ethics, including the addition of an informed consent making subjects explicitly aware that they can stop participating at any time. The results may be imperfect, but they are still troubling.)

So what does this mean for Howard W. Campbell Jr., Nazi propagandist and American agent, known for fraternizing with Eichmann and openly condemning the United States and its Jewish overlords? What does it mean for the other war criminals awaiting trial? What does it mean for me, as a reader, on the opposite side of those pages?

We are not so different as we would like to think.

[to be continued]

Dissonance, Part I: it’s good for you.

May 19, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

Dissonance does funny things to people.

In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith set people at a tedious, seemingly pointless task for an hour. After the task was finished, some of the participants were sent on their way; the others were asked to do a favor: go to the waiting room and tell the next “participants” (actors) that the task was interesting. Half these people were offered $20 (~$150 today), and the other half were offered $1 (~$7.50). When asked to rate their own response to the task, participants given $1 tended to call it more interesting than those given $20.

Here’s the explanation posed by Festinger and Carlsmith.

The task was boring. One would be hard-pressed to see it otherwise. But the participants told others that it wasn’t. The ones given $20 could use that money as solid justification, could tell themselves, “I said that because hey—$20!” The others, though, had only a dollar’s excuse. So, they reasoned, since the incentive wasn’t that great, there must’ve been more than that behind their claim that the task was interesting—for instance, maybe the task actually was interesting. If it hadn’t been, after all, why would they have said so for just a dollar?

We want to align things in our minds. When a few dissonant notes are struck, we want them to resolve into a major chord. Sometimes that means changing our circumstances—e.g., if I start reading a book and dislike it, I can stop. Other times, though, that means changing our perspectives.

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The introduction begins …

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

… and concludes …

There’s another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you’re dead you’re dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

Vonnegut is known for his irreverence and the ubiquitous so it goes, but also—maybe most—for his dark humor. Jessica Hagy expresses it well:

Vonnegut, I would suggest, thrives on dissonance.