Michael Tolkin's Blog

It's not easy trying to catch a reader's attention when the news offers so much diversion. And then there's the return of Twin Peaks tonight. On weekends now instead of reading in the afternoon I go to galleries to see new art, but that means driving around this sluggish city through perpetual rush hour. At least the art is worth seeing and I'm looking at it without trying to evaluate it by standards of quality that are the same as standards of economic value. It's enough to see what other artists are doing with the spirit of the times. I see wit, color, a refusal to take the grim world so seriously that the grim enters the work as the tone instead of as the inspiration to resist the grim. To this end, I'm not reading anything that has the same quality.

But it does end. It's just that the characters ... but... no I won't give it away.

I read at UC Riverside's Writers Week and was introduced by Susan Straight, the great novelist of the Inland Empire. There were about fifty people in the theater and after reading one a passage that I've read before, I said, "Y'know, it's easy for a writer to select the juicy bits, but why not throw it to you - let's see how this stands up if I read random pages numbers chosen by you." It's a strong way to test a book and it forces me to evaluate a section that I may not have thought about since the final copy edit.

We talked about how the news these days isn't just horrifying, it's also entertaining. How does a writer compete with that?

One young lad had the answer, "Write something that's more entertaining than the news."

So many evil corporations, so many heroes, so much fictional AI, but what catches the moment? That's why I wrote NK3. It's not the facts or the speculative plausibilities or the reasonable dramatizations of a philosophical idea... What I'm looking for is something that is not another symptom of the time. And heroes battling the evil corporations or governments... such stories.... generally... are incantations to summon the awful future.

And it looks like that side has succeeded, for now. A deeper recognition is needed.

We are our both organ grinder and monkey, a humble and noble position. It beats frustration. I drove this morning to Vroman's Books in Pasadena, then Skylight in Los Feliz, then to Book Soup in West Hollywood, signed about sixty books, not more. Sixty.
After the signing I stopped at a cafe and I had two poached eggs with dry rye toast and sliced tomatoes and then came home.
I'm not watching the Super Bowl today. I don't want that much noise, don't want to think about the skill of the commercials, don't want to be impressed by them, don't want to join in the celebration or condemnation of Lady Gaga's half-time show. I peeled carrots.

There is a problem with our evolution as a social animal. We submit too easily to leadership. We let our private hope for survival overwhelm the evidence of catastrophe. We prefer a lie that allows us to live with our own lies to a truth that requires a fresh humility.

It's too late to change the cover of NK3 but I should have published it with this heavy handed appeal to an in group.

Notice: this book abuses these terms:

Playa
The Man
Lamplighter Guild
Gift Economy
Radical self-expression
Center Camp
Burners

Or maybe left out Burners because it's a red flag for some people... although the ones who disdain it might like the book.

This is also on my FB fan? page.

I wanted something to read and pulled Mary McCarthy's "Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood" off the shelf. Her preface, many pages long, is in italics, so I kept expecting it to last another page instead of another twenty. When I was learning to read I thought italics leaned to the right to say that word they pointed to was more important than the word that pointed. So thirty pages of italics looks to me like a loud scream to get to the regular print. That said... she writes so beautifully, a modern English - fully recognizable vocabulary, but with deep imagery that comes, I imagine, from less distraction. By this I also mean that David Foster Wallace is in a race against distraction. Most everyone writing now is stuck with that problem, a noisy world crowding the desk with shiny junk, and the dilemma of readers who may start reading a book with excitement, but find after a hundred pages that no matter how compelling it is, Talkingpointsmemo is moreso.

I have a lot of books. I started all of them. Didn't finish all of them.