End of Days
Today is my last post for 60 Pages, and it feels like the end of basketball season in high school: you’re relieved you don’t have to go to practice anymore, but then you feel a little empty when you walk by the gym, hungry for a ball in your hands. Last night Eva (former 60 Pages blogger) and I were discussing the radical noticing that happens with daily posts: how attuned we grow to our worlds as we write. Yesterday, for example, while walking by the tiny license plate offices on Jüterborgerstrasse, I racked my brain for what they reminded me of until I landed on Thomas Demand’s models. That was it. Then I could keep walking, satisfied, storing the comparison away for possible further exploration in a blog entry. Or today, seeing kids playing soccer in the early dark with flashlights. There’s nothing particularly striking about either of these observations, but having to come up with material for the past 60 days, I’ve learned to trust such moments tugging on my sleeve, clearing their throats, asking me to stare and consider. As a fiction writer, I should be doing this all the time, walking around and scrawling furiously into my notebook, Harriet-the-Spy style, but it’s often easier to fade into the narrative than to construct a new one or analyze a structure already in place.
My friend Katharina just forwarded me Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize remarks, which Munro conducted via film interview in Canada since she was too frail to attend the ceremony. The Swedish interviewer is a sorry oaf, who keeps asking her about female readers and her womanly perspective. Each time, Munro gently corrects him by replacing “women” with “people” in her answers. As if that weren’t bad enough, the interviewer later informs her that she has a simple view on things. If I were in the room I would have thrown a vase at his head, but Munro takes it in stride. I admire her private honesty: how she both declares that she has “worked in a way that comforted and pleased herself” even as she describes how you “go over the story and realize how bad it is… then you have to go to work on it.” And she insists, importantly, that these failures have always been her fault, as opposed to the “story’s fault.” That it was up to her to give the characters a chance, and find out what the story was truly about. More than a gift, she says, she has seen writing as “trying hard enough.”
That’s as good a place as any to conclude. 60 Pages helped me try hard enough for the past two months. Thanks very, very much for reading. And check out Alice Munro below; she knows what’s up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgKC_SDhOKk