Rufi Cole

The Forever Nap

But How Do the Nazis Figure In?

When I was a little girl, I loved Lisa Frank products. I particularly liked the little erasers in the shape of unicorns, mostly because the plastic they were made from smelled faintly sweet, like candy. I would never, ever have used my unicorn eraser to actually erase something-- that would have sullied it, streaking the pure gleaming white of the unicorn's pelt. 

For those of you who don't remember Lisa Frank, her creations, which graced everything from lunch boxes to notebooks, looked something like this:

Except there were even more rainbows. Picture it more rainbowy even than that. As rainbowy as you possibly can.

The only thing that troubled me was... well, I couldn't figure out how the Nazis came into it. I had completely melded together the names Lisa Frank and Anne Frank and was under the impression they were one and the same person. 

Had Anne Frank doodled these colorful unicorns and generous spirited penguins in her famous diary?

Was she just that kind of girl? Thinking of her doodling puffins embracing as all the while her family were hunted by evil Nazis... well, even at 6, I worried it showed signs of a dangerous mental schism. 

I considered other possibilities:

It seemed possible that unicorns had conceivably aided in Hitler's downfall, either directly or indirectly. After all, felling an evil dictator seemed like something unicorns would be likely to do. As I looked down at my little eraser, no bigger than a silver dollar, I shivered, thinking of the tremendous violence and power within its tiny form.

And yet, there was a third and troubling possibility. I hated even to think about it. But I worried. What if... well, what if...?

 

Let's Make Out

As you may know, I have two dogs: an Australian Shepherd named Layla and a Pit Bull named Penelope. Layla is smart, well behaved, and highly neurotic. Penelope is... well, not. 

Penelope's favorite game is to snatch the kitchen scissors off the counter and then run around the apartment with them, thus forcing me to chase her, screaming, "Don't run with scissors! Don't you ever run with scissors!!!"

This makes Layla nervous. Shaking, cringing, whites-of-the-eye-rolling nervous. 

It would be easier for Layla if she had any sense of irony, but sadly she does not. 

This is about how things go:

And this is pretty much Penelope's response to everything. 

If she's just shat on the floor:

If I'm sobbing over a recent heartbreak/rejection letter/credit card statement:

If there is a strange, menacing figure at the door about to rob us:

It almost seems as though Penelope is incapable of any other kind of response. Which sometimes comes in really handy:

And sometimes... does not.

The Mystical Being That Is Deborah Eisenberg

My very first semester at UVA, I studied with the Mystical Being That Is Deborah Eisenberg. (She just won the Pen/Faulkner Award: http://tinyurl.com/46wcozc) I don't say she is a mystical being because she won the Pen/Faulkner Award. I have other evidence. Consider this:

1. She is tall and gorgeous, prone to skin-tight black clothing and oversize white men's shirts. Red lipstick is often involved. She wears insane and gorgeous high heels at all times, such that even when she walks barefoot around her apartment, her heels don't touch the floor because her Achilles tendon has shrunk. I'm not kidding; she walks barefoot entirely on the balls of her feet, with the adorable lilting gait of a toddler. 

2. She does not drive. I believe technically she has a license, but she prefers not to drive, and so, as her student, every once in a while I had the honor of chauffeuring her around on her grocery shopping in Charlottesville. Further evidence: she eats only fresh fruit and ravioli. These scant provisions have to be bought at three different stores. She also loves ginger cookies, the spicy kind that are thin and hard. As I helped her unpack the bags in her house she sighed, because, she said, "I love vegetables, but I don't know how to cook them." I did not know what this meant. In a pan? With olive oil? In a pot? With steam? How had she lived in this world so long without figuring out how to cook vegetables? Because she's a mystical being-- that's why. 

3. She was nice to me. I don't mean my other professors weren't nice; they all were, even Ann Beattie. (This may seem in contradiction of my earlier blog post about her, but it is not. Ann Beattie, besides telling me I should stop being a writer, also bought me a lovely hand-embroidered handkerchief and hugged me perhaps three times. I count that as nice.) But Deborah Eisenberg has a way of being nice that is vague and not directly aimed at you, but it is instead a kind of diffuse mist she exudes toward the world in general. She is prepared to be delighted by anything: a pigeon, a donut, rain, a checker in the grocery store. This attitude is common to people traveling in a foreign country: a readiness to be delighted with items that are commonplace to others, but strange to them. I felt the same way about the tiny silver ashtrays in India. In short, being on Earth at all, even in a car in traffic trying to make a difficult left turn, is novel and interesting to Deborah, and everyone around her is included in this benign curiosity and delight. Also, she knows what's important. When I wrote her asking for a recommendation for the Stegner fellowship, she never replied. When I wrote her asking for a book blurb, she never replied. When I wrote her asking the name of a brand of tea she had once served me that was shockingly delicious, she wrote back within two hours. 

All of Deborah's students adored her, but I would have to say this adoration was not truly pedagogically motivated. I'm actually pretty sure no one ever understood Deborah's critiques. I would ask them afterwards how their private meetings with her went, and they would say, "I'm not sure, but it was wonderful." The students worshipped her because just looking at her was mildly intoxicating. Even I, in my dogged way, worshipped her. I once asked her why they didn't teach craft at UVA. She said that if we wanted to learn that kind of thing, we could read books about it. And then she either directly said or heavily intimated that teaching craft was somehow "low." I believe she employed the use of the word "low," actually. To my earnest, faux-proletariat heart, this sentiment should have been unforgivable. But even this kind of snobbery was somehow elegant and dandy when coming from Deborah. 

I did learn one very important thing from Deborah, something I have wound up repeating to my own students, to fellow writers, to anyone who will listen. And despite her lack of interest in craft, this piece of advice is of particular use to sci-fi and fantasy writers. What she said was that a story can be mysterious, but never unclear. In other words, mystery itself is always precise. 

The difference between mystery and vagary is vital to the writer, especially at the beginning of a novel, where the author must reveal facts and characters, current situations and past backstory, with the unerring art of a burlesque performer. They must juggle what the character knows and will know, what the reader knows and will know, and what they as the author know and may not know yet. Whenever I teach young fantasy writers, I find they are prone to be oddly withholding with the reader. Something in their work will be unclear, and I will ask them about it. It inevitably turns out that the oddity I have pointed out is not a mistake, but a buried world of information that the author, for whatever reason, has decided the reader doesn't need to know yet. This problem, of what the reader does and doesn't need to know and when, seems to be a common one, and is indicative of a much broader problem of relating to the reader. 

Over and over again, my professors at UVA tried to impress upon me the idea that the reader must be allowed to be active. I had no idea what they meant. I was trying to write stories like little perfect boxes for God to read, where every truth I knew about the world was carefully etched into its surface. In other words, I was blind to the fact that in writing stories, I was creating experiences for the reader. That in fact, this was the main thing I was doing. From so much writing and rewriting, I had begun to view stories as static objects. I would mess with the end and mess with the beginning and could hold the whole object in my mind at once, and proceeded accordingly, as though every reader would know the end of the story as they were reading the beginning, just as I did. I seemed incapable of understanding that the reader would always be reading only, and strictly, from start to finish, in a linear fashion. Since I was so limited in my understanding of how stories worked, I was absolutely unable to hear my professors. The phrase "active reader" might as well have been in Swahili to me. 

But lately, considering the active reader, or more precisely, what activity I want the reader to be doing, has become central to my practice. As an example of what I mean, I was working with a student the other day, a painter, and we were talking about her project. She was doing portraits of modern day saints from a non-religious perspective and she found herself getting more and more political, wanting to paint Julian Assange, etc. Her professors had advised her against this, and she felt confused in trying to solve the problem: was she political? Was it wrong to be political? Was art a-political? These were all very important and interesting questions, but hard ones. So instead I asked her what she wanted the viewer to be doing with her paintings. Did she want them to not know who the saints were and not care, but only be responding to the eye contact of the subject? Or did she want them to be completely consumed with the game of guessing her intellectual agenda? It became rapidly clear that she wanted the viewer to be doing both, or to be able to do both, and so we decided she could paint as many stunning likeness of political figures as she liked, but that she would not name them in the titles of the pieces. In other words, she would be mysterious, but not unclear.

I learned all this driving Deborah Eisenberg around in my frighteningly dirty car to buy tangerines. Because that's the kind of mystical being she is. 

On Ann Beattie And How Details are Free of Charge in Fiction

I got my MFA in fiction at the University of Virginia, which meant I spent my last semester working one on one with Ann Beattie. This was achieved in her living room, where the light was always golden, bathing the  hundreds of animal figurines that crouched in frozen poses on every surface. There was even a life-sized stuffed black Labrador retriever that stared at us with glassy eyes, as we, mostly, fought with each other, in strained, overly polite, female tones. I was not a good student. I was rebellious, resistant to any and all forms of advice, cocky and on a hair trigger. Explaining why this was so would take a lot of time, but suffice it to say: I was not Ann Beattie's favorite. 

Some of my favorite Ann Beattie quotes: "How did you think it was okay to write this sentence down? I mean really, you actually sat there and wrote this, and thought: this is a good sentence?"

"I'm just baffled. I don't understand how you even got to this point in your career. You have no talent, and not only that, but no skill. I suggest you find something you're better at."

"Your fiction needs to be more interesting than sitting in a chair and staring at a wall. Right now, I would rather stare at the wall."

Which caused me to say things like: "You are being unbelievably condescending right now, are you aware of that?"

Which caused her to say things like: "What, I'm the teacher, you don't want me to find flaws in your work?"

Much of what she and I said to each other was useless, and I thank God there was no one there to hear but all those deaf figurines. For the record, I wasn't the only one who had trouble in that living room. One of the other students had a plan to take a dump on her lawn on one of his morning runs. Several students gave up writing entirely because she told them they were talentless. On top of this, she had these insane, long, pointy fingernails that she would use to stab at the page when she was particularly displeased. Every time I would go to her house, my stomach was a mass of heaving knots, and I was sure I would york all over her pretty oak floors.

But Ann Beattie did say one thing to me that was worth her weight in gold. She doesn't weigh very much, I could easily have picked her up and tossed her across the room, which did occur to me to do on multiple occasions, but, slight as she is-- that's still a lot of gold. 

So I will tell it to you, this one, beautiful, helpful, infinitely wise thing that Ann Beattie told me. She said: details are free. 

This needs a bit of explaining. At the time she said it, I think she was saying she didn't like that my characters were eating tuna sandwiches. In my traditional, hostile way, I said something to the effect of: what's wrong with tuna sandwiches and what does it matter anyway!?! But she explained that fiction was not made up of themes or ideas or even words, so much as it was made up of details. In every detail, we are creating the world of the story. Whether the sandwich is tuna or peanut butter is everything, means everything. Not only this: but you can change them for free. It costs nothing. You simply keep on subbing different kinds of sandwiches until you get the effect you want, because, you don't have to make a real sandwich, you just get to say: "peanut butter" and wham-- the story is changed. 

Now, as to the importance of sandwiches in themselves, I am not qualified to speak. But I do have to say, this idea, that fiction is really made up solely of details, an idea already of interest to me from Nabokov's excellent essay, "Good Readers and Good Writers," took root, and the insight, moreover, that there was no cost to me, no effort even, in tinkering with and replacing these details, struck me like a lighting bolt. It's an obvious enough insight, in a way. But never before had it hit home to me how absolutely phantasmagorical fiction itself is. How utterly free I was in its creation. How perfectly MINE my words ought to be. 

I never was able to get my fiction to the point that Ann Beattie would rather read it than stare at a wall. But then again, my cats have the same feeling about my writing, and I don't let that get me down any. Staring at a wall, when you really think about it, is one of the great experiences in life. Who am I to mess with that?