The Continuing Adventures of Editing Rewrites

It begins: having gone stir-crazy inside this bright room, with monsoon-typhoon rainstorms swishing their skirts over the skyscrapers outside, having been confined with a little roommate who screams maniacally every few hours, having been trapped with my own passions and procrastinations: it begins: I have been forced to do the unthinkable, and edit this (almost totally rewritten) work of fiction during my free time, and commit as many hours as possible to it—oh for eight hours a day!—and cannot simply push this labor away as I finish Anna Karenina and begin the Tolstoy biography by Henri Troyat, because it is like Harry Potter, and if I ignore the owls sending me letters my whole chimney will be flooded with them, my DNA will mutate, spontaneous psychokinesis will smash to powder every last bourgeois object in our apartment, and I will pace about like a black panther snarling back and forth along its ringing prison bars as the force gnaws down my bones and shows me ghosts pleading for justice with open arms and gaping skeletal jaws.

So I must give in, take out the fat manuscript from my backpack, settle into an uncomfortable chair, pull my shirt off my sweating belly, ignore the ache in my neck, and hunch over this piece of trash that is inferior to all that I love, this book without an audience, this waste of labor that will be ignored by everyone, these words that will achieve nothing, and gain me nothing but embarrassment and ridicule directed toward me from anyone with intelligence or culture or style—it is nothing but exploding spaceships, the characters are mere letters, the worthless story goes nowhere, it brims with cliches that would bore a child to tears—doubts assail me like a pack of black-wreathed specters—but I must read mentally with my quotidian mind that has read nothing but quotes everything, murmur to myself with dumb smacking lips, lift up the cheap Japanese pen, and attack!

Mr Browne

Mr Browne extended his open hand towards her and said to those who were near him in the manner of a showman introducing a prodigy to an audience:

—Miss Julia Morkan, my latest discovery!

James Joyce, Dubliners.

It’s strange how a person’s shadow can live on so long after that person’s death, how it gains a life of its own when a writer uses that shadow as the ink in his pen. Mr Browne’s shadow bristles his mustache, wrinkles his face with laughter, charms three young ladies, and somehow lives far more thoroughly than he ever did in the real world—the shadow possesses depth and color, it breathes, blood flushes the veins under his skin, and for a little while at least he manages to dance through the minds of anyone who reads this book, long after the body who gave birth to the shadow (and the golden light that illuminated the body) vanished away into nothing. There’s a certain repetition to his immortality—God help me, he will always say, smiling, it’s the doctors orders, always after a “trial sip” of whisky—but this shadow is a unique creation of every mind that reads about him, it’s composed of every individual reader’s constituent memories, which means that he is not only immortal, but a myriad, a twisting kaleidoscope.

Edward Said Versus V.S Naipaul

A long time ago Edward Said and his family sat down to dinner in their dining room.  It was a very pleasant dinner and everything was going splendidly until one of the servants accidentally dropped A House For Mr. Biswas in Edward Said’s tomato soup, splashing the face of the author of Orientalism.  He screamed himself into a rage, instantly fired the clumsy servant, and refused to calm down even as his kind wife sought to mollify him by wiping the soup from his dripping face, though he continued to scream at the top of his lungs and would not sit still.  Only later did she realize that his anger was not thanks to the soup, but thanks, instead, to the presence of V.S Naipaul in Edward Said’s own home.

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