Slowness Fellowship-Tulane

Chris Drangle here, reporting back on a fantastic experience I had earlier this summer.  At some point during my career at Tulane I must have tricked someone into thinking that I deserved the Writer’s Residency Prize, an award given each year to a graduating senior in creative writing.  So in May I found myself in Avoyelles Parish at Slowness, the home of Rodney and Paige Rabalais, which also serves as organic garden, artists’ residence, and, I would say, four-star restaurant.

I stayed at Zen Cottage for a week, which is about a ninety second walk through the woods in the backyard, and is about nine-hundred square feet of perfect writing environment.  It’s quiet, it’s beautiful, it’s comfortable–I recommend putting on Chopin nocturnes late at night and sitting out on the porch trying to guess what animals you’re hearing scurry around in the leaves.  Then, obviously, write great poetry about the moon and death.

If you start feeling too isolated, that ninety second walk will bring you great wine, excellent food, and wonderful conversation, courtesy of Rodney, Paige, and friends.  I’m telling you, I just graduated from college and I couldn’t keep up with them–these people party every night (admittedly in a more refined way than I usually did as an undergrad–the real world is great!).  Prepare for the possibility of manual labor, in case they make you dig up your own food:

And so, as the inaugural Slowness Fellow, I must say to current and future Tulane creative writers:  start buttering up your professors (and working hard and writing well, of course).  The Writer’s Residency will help you get a ton of work done, and is a blast besides.  Much thanks to Paula for making the connection, and more to Rodney and Paige, who will get first copies of my future Pulitzer-winners.

Finals, Graduation, Life, Etc.

The academic year continues its drawn-out winding-down at Tulane.  Exams have been taken, portfolios have been turned in, theses have been defended.  Today was move-out day, except for those of us staying until graduation, who will be haunting campus for another week with vague concerns about this “real world” that everyone keeps mentioning.

Personally, I plan on taking my diploma either to a copywriting position in a marketing firm back home, or to the bar in Costa Rica where I will be waiting tables and growing a tropical goatee.  There’s no middle ground here, folks.  Maybe MFA next year?

As previously reported, our own Mark Clements and Philip Matthews will be embarking on their MFA careers, at Colorado State and Wash U, respectively.  Forgive the green tint of my skin–must be the light in here.

Whatever the case, college is done for now.  So long, undergraduate self!  Hello, alumnus self!  No more homework–now is the time for, well, real work I guess.

All About Us

This is PJKM here, unable to post myself for reasons mysterious and irritating. Before the semester fizzles into nothingness, please note: Tulane’s creative writing faculty are constantly in the news.

Peter Cooley is feted by the Times-Picayune; Paula Morris drones on to the New Wave; Tom Beller comments in the New York Observer. You can’t keep us quiet (or in town for the summer).

Over the summer, there’ll be fewer posts, but we’re hoping to lure some students, past and present, over here to talk about their great achievements – winning prizes, going to MFA programs, undertaking internships, embarking on glorious careers, publishing stories and poems, etc.

Also, next week we’ll be posting the names of this year’s Creative Writing prizes, including the winner/runners-up in the Academy of American Poets Contest – judged by this year’s Arons Poet, Nicole Cooley – and the Dale Edmonds Short Fiction Award, judged by Michigan-based novelist Rebecca Johns.

In the meantime, congratulations to Philip Matthews, who will take up a place on the MFA program at Hollins University in Virginia this fall, and to Mark Clements, who will be terrorizing his fellow fiction writers at the MFA program at Colorado State University.

Joan Didion reads at McAlister, Lit Event group sighs with relief

On Monday night, the event for which we have been slaving (planning, flyering, postering, bookmarking, calling, talking, ushering, greeting, etc.) finally occured, and went very well, I have to say.  Joan Didion read at McAlister, a bunch of people came, there were no fires, and only one or two inane questions.

There are more details about the event in (Times-Picayune Book Editor) Susan Larson’s blog, here, although I think her guess of 700 attendees is a little low.  Tulane creative writing senior Catherine Freshley’s article in the New Wave gets it closer:  there were over a thousand people.

I felt like I handed out about that many programs, or maybe four times that.  Jordan, who also handed out programs and greeted people as they arrived at McAlister, can attest to how unexpectedly hard a job it is.  Not to mention conflicting instructions from our boss, Literary Event Overlord Paula Morris–”Make sure you’re smiling and welcoming them”/”Stop scaring everyone with your freakish smiles.”  To be fair, I did notice that my voice for “Hello, welcome to Tulane, enjoy the reading” slipped uncontrollably, over the course of the hour I was handing out programs, from extremely pleasant to faintly sinister, until it sounded like I was trying to seduce everyone walking up the McAlister steps.

(Note: This is still not the worst job you can get.  Chocolate Kudos to Phil/Lianna/Hunter, who held up a Didion banner in a chilly windstorm, and endured multiple “Couldn’t they have got you some rope?”-comments.)

About the reading itself, I won’t say much.  The writer at joandidion.info (here) mentions seeing a Twitter from an attendee who described Didion’s “camel colored Uggs” and voice, “dry w/o emotion.”  I would say of Didion’s reading voice–admittedly somewhat monotone and slowly paced–that it actually matches her material very well.  That is to say, The Year of Magical Thinking is a book miraculously without sentimentality, analytical and intelligent, that somehow grinds its emotional impact into you osmotically.  The reading might not have been overtly exciting, but it was more than gripping.

The Uggs, on the other hand, are indefensible,  as Uggs usually are.  Stylish glasses, though.

-Chris

Joan Didion, Tonight, 7PM: McAlister Auditorium

This evening, April 6, Joan Didion will speak at Tulane University in McAlister Auditorium at 7pm. Her visit is expected to fill the venue and it’s highly recommended that those interested in attending the event arrive early. The doors will open at 6:00pm.

Personally, I’m enthused for the event to finally be underway. Her visit, and the work planning and leading up to it, has been the culmination of work of the Literary Event Management class and the greater Tulane faculty for months now. Posters have been tacked up throughout the city, local high schools in the community visited, radio announcements broadcasted, and newspaper advertisements published, each of which has presented their own unique set of challenges. So, by the way, if anyone has been confused by recent, conflicting advertisements in one of the publications we chose to advertise in: The event has NOT already occurred, in fact, it’s tonight at 7PM in McAllister Auditorium on Tulane’s campus.

Let me give directions:

If you’re headed from I-10W I suggest you take the Carlton Exit. Then follow Carlton until you hit St. Charles. If you’re not familiar with the city of New Orleans, then remember: do not over shoot St. Charles and take it too far to River Rd. Just turn left as soon as you cross over Streetcar tracks, or as soon as you pass La Madeleine on your left. Next, follow St. Charles all the way to Broadway St., Turn left and drive about ½ a mile until you reach Freret St. From here you will take a right turn and drive until you reach Willow. Then turn left and find the next available parking space. McAlister Auditorium will be on your right side.

If you’re driving from I-10E please follow the directions above once you exit onto Carlton.

If you’re a local New Orleans resident, I suggest you take Claiborne as traffic could be a problem. Once you reach Broadway turn onto the street driving towards the Tulane campus. You will drive until you reach Freret and then turn left following the street to Willow where you will make a left hand turn. McAllister Auditorium will be on your right, find parking as soon as possible.

Other suggested parking spots: Tulane Library, Audubon Blvd, Calhoun St (though it may be a walk).

Didion INFO:

In 2007, Didion was honored with the National Book Foundation’s prestigious Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, joining the ranks of literary legends like Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth and John Updike.

Didion’s visit is the third in Tulane’s annual Great Writer Series, sponsored by the Creative Writing Fund of the Department of English. Since its establishment in 2006, the Creative Writing Fund has enhanced literary programming both at Tulane and in New Orleans, hosting visits by Toni Morrison in 2007 and Salman Rushdie in 2008.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

I first discovered Joan Didion as a lowly Barnes and Noble employee, spending my high school afternoons shelving novels in a suburban branch of the bookstore. I happened upon the 2006 collection of her nonfiction writing We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, and because it was an impressive and lovely book, I spent my pennies on it. Non-fiction was what I had set my sights on and Joan Didion seemed a fit figure to emulate, and so I carried the book around as a model for my future. I didn’t open it, however, until the summer after my high school graduation, when I found myself pregnant, confused, and very far from the career aspirations that Didion had inspired. Nonetheless, at the most stressful of times, I’d open the gigantic collection and just read pages at random, submerging myself in her words. The book contained the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), and Where I was From (2003), and spanning Didion’s prolific career, stood as testament to the greatness of creative non-fiction. Prefacing Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion defined exactly how I felt when perusing her book, writing, “I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.” The collection offered me snapshots of how unromantic Haight-Ashbury really was in its heyday, the chill paranoia following the Manson murders, the US’s political puppetry of Latin America, the Cuban exodus into Miami, the Reagans as “actors on location,” the political theater of the 1990s, and a taste of the California Didion was trying to understand. In Didion’s musings were rooted my own, and through the turmoil that teenage pregnancy and childbirth instilled, the life of my mind continued, feeding upon her essays. After my son’s birth, I read him excerpts of the collection aloud, hoping to somehow instill the meaning of language into his infant mind. To me, the act of writing became the more relevant through the words of Joan Didion, perhaps America’s greatest non-fiction writer, whose career has also branched into fiction, journalism, autobiography, and screenwriting. The act of writing, of cataloguing one’s surroundings, is the act of writing history to be read as grains of truth by the generations to come.

Joan Didion will read excerpts from her work tonight at 7 pm in McAlister Auditorium at Tulane University. Doors open at 6 pm, and the event is free and open to the public. This event is part of Tulane University’s Great Writers Series, sponsored by the Creative Writing Fund, which previously brought Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison to the New Orleans campus.

First Lady of Prose to Speak at Tulane Tonight

Renowned essayist, memoirist, novelist, screenwriter Joan Didion will read selections from her work tonight at 7 pm in McAlister Auditorium at Tulane University. Doors open at 6 pm, and the event is free and open to the public.

I’ve recently read Didion’s The White Album, in which every essay is incredibly fresh and well-crafted. In the title piece, she progresses from her own psychological “alienation” experienced “shortly before [she] was named a Los Angeles Times ‘Woman of the Year,’” into her fascination with The Doors, particularly with Jim Morrison (14-15). As she admits, “on the whole my attention was only  minimally engaged by the preoccupations of rock-and-roll bands (I had already heard about acid as a transitional stage and also about the Maharishi and even about Universal Love, and after a while it all sounded like marmalade skies to me), but The Doors were different, The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation” (21).

Her connection to Morrison’s lyrics enhances the revelation of her own emotional solitude. One might expect a 60s narrative  to purport the benefits of acid as eye-flinging, presumption-wringing, fire-singing transport. Yet Didion rejects the “marmalade” sugar-coating reality, and presents The Doors as individuals with personal mental depth. When Morrison arrives late to a rehearsal, Didion notes that “the curious aspect of [his] arrival was this: no one acknowledged it” (24). This is not the “I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together” scene; instead, she zooms in upon an active force in the 60s counterculture, comprised of persons who maintain their individualities, but seem to struggle against their image as band; that is, their image as one entity. As Didion says, “there was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever. It would be some weeks before The Doors finished recording this album: I did not see it through” (25).

Didion advocates her own psychological privacy by subtly representing a group who records, tours, lives as a group, but remain separate in significant ways. And it seems that that contradiction between individuality and entity induce a certain level of madness, especially as Morrison “studies flame awhile and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowers it to the fly of his black vinyl pants” (25). It is as though Didion smirks to her readers, my life may have been “maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, etc, etc,” but at least I never pyro-ed my crotch (14).

Indeed, Didion successfully crafts her own inner contradicitons into a relevant cohesive Album. No where is this mastery more beautifully symbolized as in the fluidity of “Holy Water,” which details Didion’s “reverence” for water and its astounding mobility (59). As she affirms, “the water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is.” She goes on to visit “the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project” in Sacramento, where she learns that “so much water is moved around California by so many different agencies that maybe only the movers themselves known on any given day whose water is where” (60).

The metaphorical resonance of water’s proprietorship enhances the fluidity of Didion’s identity as writer: the diverse essays in this collection present Didion as mother, psychiatric patient, political journalist, wife, traveler, movie correspondent, funeral attendee, etc. Just as water is compartmentalized, claimed by different vendors in different locations, so, too, is “Didion” self-sectionalized— and it is her ability to flow effortlessly through a variety of selves that makes Joan Didion the widely-accomplished writer she is. Is it any wonder then that she “wanted to be the one, that day [in Sacramento], who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile?” —that she “want[s] it still? (66)”

Didion’s visit marks the continuation of the annual Great Writers Series, sponosered by the Creative Writing Fund of the Department of English. She is the Series’ third honoree, following Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison.

Deliciously Addicting: Didion’s Play It as It Lays

I began reading Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays over Spring Break with the idea that since I have already read so much of her nonfiction, I should sample one of her novels. To say I wasn’t prepared for the emotional onslaught is an understatement.

Her opening line intrigued me. “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.” The book’s main character, Maria, speaks those cryptic lines, foreshadowing the messy disintegration of lives we as readers are about to witness.

The book is comprised of short chapters, each from a particular character’s point of view. Much like my consumption of M&M’s, I found it impossible to stop at just one…or two…or… You get my point.

Play It as It Lays has been called a Hollywood novel, but it’s so much more than that. In fact, although they live in Hollywood and work in the film industry, most of the defining scenes are in the desert. Its blank expanse serves as a clear backdrop for the character’s larger-than-life egos and overbearing personalities.

Vegas also has a pointed appearance, but gambling and drugs certainly aren’t contained within its borders.

“You told me you’d come,” Carter said.
“What for.”
“I want you out there.”
“It’s all gone, you said so yourself.”
“All right,” Carter said. “Stay here and kill yourself.
Something interesting like that.”
Carter and BZ and Helene left for the desert. Maria
found a doctor who would give her barbiturates again,
and in the evenings she drove.

Every character has so many faults, it’s hard to find anyone to blame. They blame each other constantly, pointing fingers left and right. In the beginning Helene says, “She was always a very selfish girl, it was first last and always Maria.”

In many ways, this is true. But Maria certainly isn’t the only selfish one. Although each character’s actions deserve reproach, I was unable to identify the defining moment of condemnation.

All in all, I highly recommend anyone looking for a quick taste of Didion fiction to pick up Play It as It Lays and experience for yourself its delectable descent toward the point of no return.

Joan Didion will give a reading in McAlister Auditorium at Tulane University on Monday, April 6th, at 7 pm. The event is free and open to the public.
-CM

An Interview with Louise Hornby

As a part of the Joan Didion Reading Series, Professor Louise Hornby delivered her lecture on “Repetition, Time, and Loss in The Year of Magical Thinking.”   As one of Professor Hornby’s former students, I can assure you that the lecture was both engaging and thought-provoking.  If you were unable to attend the event, be sure to read the previous post entitled “Tulane English Professor Dissects Didion’s Philosophy,” where Professor Hornby’s lecture is analyzed in greater depth.

Recently, I was able to ask Professor Hornby some questions about her relationship with Didion’s work and her recent lecture, as well as her feelings about the literary programs Tulane offers.

David Kening: How did you become interested in Joan Didion’s work?

Professor Hornby: Joan Didion is well-known for her writing in California, and I began reading her work when I was in graduate school in Berkeley.  I returned to her recently after I moved from California to New Orleans and started by re-reading her first novel, Run River, which she wrote right after she moved from California to New York.

DK: Of all of her works in various genres, why did you choose to investigate The Year of Magical Thinking?

PH: I don’t really know — I suppose I felt I had something to say about it.  I have read it many times, and saw the theater adaptation performed by Vanessa Redgrave in New York.  I am interested in the idea of magical thinking — in the insane casting of mind over matter — and its relationship to Freud’s conception of grief.

DK: What from The Year of Magical Thinking did you find to be especially interesting?

PH: As I discussed in my talk,  am struck by the use of repetition in this work — by its insistent and pathological return to the narrative event of John Dunne’s death.

DK: What about Didion’s style do you think sets her apart from her peers?  Why is she able to be successful in so many genres when other writers tend to specialize in a specific form?

PH: She has a remarkable and distinct voice, both in her fiction and her non-fiction writing.  Her writing is an act of witnessing — of experiencing and observing — which is marked by a clear and acute subjectivity.

DK: How has Didion’s work influenced your own?  What do you try to emulate in your own writing?

PH: I am not a creative writer myself, so I would be hard pressed to say that she has influenced my writing.  Certainly, her careful prose is remarkable, and I have learned an enormous amount from looking at her sentences and her particular economy of language.

DK: What role do you think the Joan Didion reading Series plays in conjunction with the upcoming event in McAllister Auditorium at Tulane University? Do you the the series has been successful in this role?  Why, or why not?  How can the lecture series be improved in the future, when other writers of similar reputation visit Tulane and New Orleans?

PH: The lecture series provides an academic context and a public forum for Didion’s visit that goes beyond the reputation of the writer.  The series offers a forum for thinking seriously about her writing, generating a set of conversations about the writer’s work in anticipation of her April visit.  The series is an extraordinary opportunity for local high school students and Tulane students to learn more about a contemporary author.  I would love for more Tulane students to attend these talks.

DK: What are you most looking forward to when Joan Didion visits Tulane on April 6?

PH: I admire her work greatly, and am so pleased that she is coming to campus.

Joan Didion’s visit on Monday, April 6, is less than a week away.  Didion will read selections from her work at 7:00 PM in Tulane University’s McAllister Auditorium.  The event is free and open to the public, and doors open at 6:00 PM.  Didion follows Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrisson as an honoree of Tulane’s Great Writers Series, an annual event sponsored by the Creative Writing Fund of the Department of English.

David Kening

The White Album: Joan Didion on The 1960’s & 70’s,The Doors, Jaycees and music people

            Finishing Joan Didion’s collection of essays on the 1960’s and 70’s, “The White Album,” I’m reminded of why Didion is one of my, and America’s, favorite writers. Posted below are a few of my hundred-something favorite passages from her collection…

Didion on the bridge of the 1960’s and the 1970’s, California 

            “We put ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on the record player, and ‘Suzanne.’ We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of Jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows. I made a bolognaise for people who did not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’- this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it- was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969.” p.41

“I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife.” p.47

On The Doors:

            “The Doors were different, The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation. The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex. Break on through, their lyrics said, and Light my fire, and…” p.21

On the Jaycees: 

 ”There was a heavy jocularity, the baroque rhetoric of another generation entirely, a kind of poignant attempt to circumnavigate social conventions that had in fact broken down in the twenties. Wives were lovely and forbearing. Getting together for drinks was having a cocktail reception. Rain was liquid sunshine and the choice of a table for dinner was an executive decision. They knew this was a brave new word and they said so.” p.94

On “Music People”:

  “Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat…We would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty…we would go down to U.S.C to see the Living Theater if the limo came at the very moment when no one had just made a drink or a cigarette…First we wanted sushi for twenty, steamed clams, vegetable vindaloo and many rum drinks with gardenias for our hair. First we wanted a table for twelve, fourteen at the most, although there might be six or more, because music people did not travel in groups of ‘one’ or ‘two.’”p.26

Joan Didion will speak at Tulane University on Monday, April 6^th at McAlister Auditorium at 7 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

Jordan Braun