Don’t Mess With Mr In-Between

It’s Easter Monday, which means no classes at Tulane and no classes at McMain High School either. The street’s been very quiet today, which I like. Today was the first morning in a long time when I haven’t woken up feeling manic in some way. Maybe our long weekend in Oaxaca just wore me out: it was a stimulating place, especially with all the various Easter pageants and processions, and then there was the heat, and the dust, and the drinks. The delicious food.

And all the writer visits with which I’ve been embroiled this semester, in small and large ways, for better or for worse, are over: Francine Prose, Claire Messud, Billy Collins, Joan Didion. The Didion Reading Series of three events – two lectures and a round-table discussion, which involved much hand-wringing and bullying on my part – is over. There are still a few classes left, and presentations to assess, and portfolios to read. I have three honors students with theses to submit. My two classes will come over here for dinner; on another night, the three faculty will take all graduating seniors out, if I can get around to organizing this. This year I’ll only be able to work the first weekend of Jazz Fest, because on May 2, after our final salon for the spring (we’ll resume social activities in September), I fly back to New Zealand.

I’m conscious that this blog, of late, has been more about omissions rather than inclusions. It’s been a busy and difficult semester. Perhaps that’s the reason. I’ve been to Chicago and Boston and the U.K. and Mexico. I’ve spent too much time waiting to change planes in Houston and Washington DC. The writer visits have been inspiring and energizing, in different ways, but some have been extremely stressful too, because of the level of organization and planning involved. Just walking past McAlister Auditorium makes me slightly anxious these days: I start counting people. In my sleep I count programs.

It’s late afternoon now. Now that parade season is over, there are no band rehearsals in the schoolyard across the street. The students next door are lying low, though by dusk they’ll be out on the porch smoking and conducting loud conversations on their cell phones.

This is my favorite time of day for writing – after four PM. I’m a cocktail-hour writer, I told an interviewer once, and that’s true (unlike half the things I say in interviews, which fool nobody). The day seems to grow more quiet around now, as though the energy’s seeping from the day. When I worked in an office, I liked this time. Nobody wanted to have meetings; the phone wasn’t ringing so incessantly. Some people were getting ready to rush to catch trains, but I never had to rush to leave. That became a problem – the never rushing to leave – but it lent a certain calm to the late afternoon that I’ve carried with me to other places, other desks.

I really liked spending time with all our visiting writers, and I may never get over the thrill of driving Miss Didion. I liked drinking at The Columns with Claire Messud, gossiping over the racket at Cochon with Francine Prose, taking Billy Collins to see Fats Domino’s house in the Ninth Ward. I like getting the chance to ask lots of direct questions of these other writers when I got them alone in my car. I like the things they tell me that are not for publication, which is perhaps why I include nothing of their visits at all here. 

This blog isn’t of much use or interest to writers, in fact, though I hope it occasionally entertains my friends. (My students, of course, despite evidence to the contrary, don’t see me as a writer, just as someone there to crush their dreams and curtail their adverb usage.)

I’ve been feeling down about my writing of late, in a sort of vague and existential way. Writing the novel seems an overwhelming task at times, and I keep looking, without success, for ways to lessen the challenge – unsurprising, given that the challenge is the thing.

Visiting branches of Waterstones in the U.K. is not the pleasure it used to be: it’s all stationery and giftwrap, and tables piled with three-for-the-price-of-two paperbacks. To insist upon your own book as a contender, to demand space and attention for it, seems desperately narcissistic. Blind, and tone-deaf too. There are too many books; perhaps I’ve written too many already – four published since 2003, with the fifth coming out this August. A week ago, a video crew spent six hours filming me talking on and on about the new book. We filmed in my office at Tulane, and at Lafayette cemetery. The highlight of the day for me was, of course, getting my make-up done by the super-artful Kisha from The Make-Up Lab.

It’s easy on a blog like this, with its original purpose of self-promotion, to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. But that’s hardly the whole story for any writer. I’m delighted when Forbidden Cities is shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize in my bizarrely vast region (SE Asia/Pacific), and unsurprised that my short story collection is swept aside, inevitably, by one of the rampaging Australian mega-novelists: it’s still a disappointment, though, however expected. A rejection letter arrives from a journal almost a year after I mailed the story in question; this year Yaddo, which has waitlisted me for the past two years, simply says no. Someone at our salon tells me how much she loved Trendy But Casual, which she’d just finished and passed on to her son in New York; a friend emails me from London to say how much he’s enjoying the stories, noting that it’s the first time he’s ever seen an O-card mentioned in fiction. (That’s one for the record-company old-timers out there.) But none of this changes the fact that these books are not stacked three-for-the-price-of-two on any table north of the Equator.

Some good news from Geoff Walker at Penguin Books today: a book called Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction has just been published, and it features an essay on my second novel, Hibiscus Coast. Not only that, but the title is a quote from Hibiscus Coast. I knew it was coming, because one of the editors emailed me earlier this year about some bibliographical information, but I’d forgotten about it. I like the company Hibiscus Coast is keeping in that book. I like Hibiscus Coast, and I want more people to read it. People north of the equator, too. See, there’s the narcissism returning.

The amazing Grendel over at Earthgoat was asking me about the Scudder Road Circus recently, and I realized it could start earning its keep on this blog by giving travel tips. It could rival Fodor’s and the Rough Guide online, particularly as neither of those competitors are circuses.  Now travel tips: these I can write. Watch this space.

 

 

Comments

[Brando]

I'd definitely read a travelogue about Michigan's Upper Penisula and the really cool, funny people that live there.

[Vanda Symon]

Ah, Paula, it's great to hear from you, no matter how infrequent.

I saw the book of essays on Beattie's Book Blog this morning. It looks to be an interesting read.

Is Ruined going to be released in NZ?

You could write a travel book on how to survive the airports of the world.

[Paula Morris]

Scholastic has worldwide rights for "Ruined", so hopefully it will be published in NZ at some point.

My travel book would be called Welcome Home and it would be a catalogue of slights, resentments, and complaints. Compelling reading! A chapter on the UP of Michigan would be crucial, of course.

[TLB]

Notice Brando said "Penisula," not "Peninsula." Freudian slip, indeed!

[Jennifer]

I came upon your blog by googling "in vacant or in pensive mood" because I'm nearly always vacant or pensive, and loved what what I read so much that I went ahead and read all your recent articles (as listed in the sidebar, although the James Meek one is no longer available) and now feel like buying all your books. So if you started this blog for self promotion, alls I can say is well done. (feel free to trim my adverbs)