Writer Aleksandar Hemon

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Originally uploaded by franksutter.

Chicago-based writer Aleksandar Hemon came to California College of the Arts in San Francisco this past week to read his work and answer questions. He was kind enough to let me stick my tiny digital camera right in his face for this quick portrait; he even suggested turning towards the window to get better lighting.

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Vote John Kerry

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Originally uploaded by franksutter.

The San Francisco Fundraising HQ for the DNC is near my apartment. Walking by one day this week, I stopped inside to take this photo of a life-size John Kerry cut-out. A college-aged woman working there told me they had raised over $2 million out of that office alone--way more than their initial goal of $400,000. She tried hard to get me to give more for the cause, but I'm all tapped out. Vote Kerry!

Aleksandar Hemon in San Francisco

Tonight I saw the writer Aleksandar Hemon here in San Francisco. A Sarajevo native who now lives in Chicago, Hemon read from his two books "The Question of Bruno" and "Nowhere Man." After reading, he took questions. I wrote down some of his better quotes, taking the liberty of slightly paraphrasing here and there. Here are some of the things he said, possibly out of context, but hopefully still useful, along with some of the questions:

How did you decide on the structures for your stories in "The Question of Bruno"?

"Each story has its own structure. There are not templates of structures that you can use whenever you want. I tell my writing students you can't separate the story from its structure."

"There is no good writing, (there are) only good stories."

How do you start writing a story?

"I imagine a space where the story takes place (before imagining the characters or anything else)."

"I find the space that I want to spend time in."

What was it like when you first started writing in English?

"Early on in Chicago I wrote, and this is a good way to write, in complete anonymity."

Excerpts and tidbits:

"It's very, very hard to glamorize Chicago (comparing it to New York)."

"The two best American books of the 20th Century were "Lolita" and "The Adventures of Auggie March."

About writing now that he's had some success:

"It's always one story at a time (or one book at a time or one page at a time)."

Is your writing autobiographical?

"It is not autobiographical in a sense that it is not a concealed confession. I start with a personal space, but I like to think I transcend the personal space."

"I hate confessional memoir. It's pain without imagination. I embellish heavily."

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Poet Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

Gary Snyder gave a reading at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach earlier this week. He walked right by me, so I took this for posterity. His new book is called "Danger on Peaks" and he read a generous portion to his rapt audience.

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Pushing Forward Despite Obstacles

Not to sound melodramatic, but I'm feeling tinged with despair today (plus I woke up with a headache). I've got this day job working in an immigration law firm (I'm not a lawyer nor will I ever be one), and all I want to do is sit somewhere quiet and finish reading Aleksandar Hemon's stunning novel "Nowhere Man" before I attend his reading tomorrow night. Hemon's writing is so unique and freshly drawn, I both admire it and feel defeated by it. My life by comparison offers drama on a less "life and death" scale (he's from Bosnia). What fodder do I use for my own tales of woe and intrigue?

I updated my links earlier today. I was going to add a permanent link to "Doubletake" magazine, but they are currently no longer publishing (a link to their site is nonetheless provided below in this blog.) It seems terrible to me that a magnificent magazine like "Doubletake" can't sustain itself in our world. I love their use of photography and writing, something I'd like to do with my own work. Why is that not more popular, I often wonder? Anyway, I start writing a rough draft of a novel in six days for NaNoWriMo. My writing group met last night and I told them about my plans to go for the 50,000 word marathon, but for some reason I decided not to tell them what my "novel" will be about, not yet anyway (at least what I plan for it to be about so far).

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Writer-in-Training

I haven't mentioned that I'm a writer-in-training, or perhaps I should say a writer in mid-struggle. So this blog ultimately is supposed to be about me trying to find my way into print after graduating from one of those darned MFA programs for writers this past spring (no, not Iowa, but I learned a lot). I've recently submitted short stories to a number of literary contests. The Greensboro Review, alas, sent me a rejection already. However, there are plenty more entries still in play. The Indiana Review just sent me an acknowledgement e-mail. I have a good feeling about that one, but really, there is so much competition out there, one has to assume the worst and hope for a miracle.

For a great article about one of the best living short story writers, check out my link below to the Alice Munro article from this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. She is Canadian, and very modest, and very important to study if you want to be a short story writer.

Another thing I'm planning to do next month, this November, is participate in National Novel Writing Month, also called NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/). To be declared a "winner" you have to write 50,000 words from Nov. 1 - 30. I'm determined to make it to the finish line with a decent first draft of a novel.

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Sad Day

I just spoke with my friend Andrew, a philosophy student, who said what a sad day it was when he heard that Jacques Derrida had passed away. I wanted to add a link to this site, which is both a tribute to Derrida and a protest to the New York Times obituary that came out and was deemed somewhat derogatory or even dismissive of Deconstruction. Never underestimate the influence of Derrida!

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Well, in case anybody is wondering, we made it to Tahiti and Moorea, and we are back home in San Francisco (see previous post). I'm not going to talk about that right now though. We did have an amazing trip down there, and I highly recommend Moorea especially. Tahiti is a fun island to visit, but you don't want to spend your entire vacation on that island only because it is a bigger city and there are no good beaches. There are great offshore waves on one side of the island for you surfers. That's where many of the contests are held because they get the most perfect tubes.

I'm more concerned about other things right now, like the upcoming presidential election. I read a piece in The New Yorker today by Nicholas Lemann entitled "Remember the Alamo: How George W. Bush reinvented himself" that was particularly lucid and, frankly, terrifying, given how close the race is right now. Even before 9/11, Lemann reminds us, "Bush cut taxes to such an extent... that the surplus (of $236.4 billion that Clinton earmarked for Social Security and Medicare) was likely to evaporate (even without the war)." Before 9/11, Bush also "unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Kyoto accords on global warming, and he had signalled a desire to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the International Criminal Court."

These are just the highlights. Lemann further states, "Bush is already trying to make permanent some early tax cuts that were passed with expiration dates, and that would increase the deficit more." It seems clear that Bush has no problem with running up a huge deficit. During the recent debates, I never once heard him offer any desire to even quell some of the current rampant spending of his administration. He just doesn't seem to care! Not only that, he won't acknowledge that the way he went about "pre-emptively" striking in Iraq was half-cocked and poorly planned.

Anyway, I honestly don't understand how any person of conscience could possibly give "W" their vote. But I'm lecturing, and you don't even know me, so you are probably not being entertained. This relates back to the Jon Stewart appearance on "Crossfire" the other night. Video of it is being played all over the internet right now.

Finally, the philosopher Jacques Derrida died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74 in Paris on October 9. I had watched the film made about him, called "Derrida," and starring mostly the man himself with his incredible thick white hair, about four or five times on the Sundance Channel not long ago. I was completely mesmerized by his presence on the screen. It wasn't so much what he said, but what he didn't say. He refused to talk about love when the filmmaker tossed him an age-old, obvious question in philosophy about love. Then, when he and his wife were asked to discuss how they first met and fell in love, at first they told the story of going on the same ski trip together, but at a certain point they just stopped talking. Later, reviewing the footage, Derrida says he likes this moment precisely because they did not attempt to explain the unexplainable. I have since acquired several of his books, but delving into them requires very careful reading, and unfortunately my lifestyle has not been conducive at all lately to this kind of thoughtful, sober reading. I will now deliver a quote from Derrida's book "Acts of Literature" edited by Derek Attridge (and I realize there is irony in "quoting" Derrida out of context):

The terribly equivocal word fiction (which is sometimes misused as though it were coextensive with literature) says
something about this situation. Not all literature is of the genre or the type of "fiction," but there is fictionality in all
literature. We should find a word other than "fiction." And it is through this fictionality that we try to thematize the
"essence" or the "truth" of "language."

The more I know about Derrida and his ideas, the more valuable and empowering I think they are. For example, I am writing this blog about my so-called thoughts and even my life, but I haven't told you anything at all truly personal. There are large things in my personal life teeming and gathering strength under the surface somewhere, but I am simply unable to discuss them at this time. So what I have not told you, is, in essence, much more important than anything I have attempted to say.