A writer meets another writer who's ten years younger and has a kin eye for people on the street, but a drowned mind. The writer sees a tennis player meeting another tennis player who's ten years younger, but has reached stardom. The writer meets his friend from childhood and wonders, what took you so long? All within a writer's day.
For inspiration and discipline, I sometimes create a collage portrait of my literary genealogy and it includes particular works as much as authors. Some of those works, the ones I consistently return to include:
Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch
Marguerite Duras’ Blue Eyes, Black Hair
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories
The poetry of Neruda and Rilke
"He turns on the hallway lights and I hear his steps approaching. He will come to hold me, to watch how I glow in the faint light. Sometimes he licks me just to watch his saliva glistening under that light. He beholds me as a lover, as a body reflecting an amber light that excites him. And sometimes he ejaculates all over me, spasmodic, a whiteness he admires for a short while before whipping it away. All in silence, in the absence of music. I feel violated then. And during the next practice session, I turn into a dissonant beast." --The lesser violin.
The House of Breath, by William Goyen, is a remarkably sophisticated book which invented a new form of the novel. In a 1975 interview for The Paris Review, the question of alignment with his contemporaries was raised:
INTERVIEWER
Do your contemporaries interest you now?
GOYEN
They really don’t interest me very much. I still feel apart and, well, I am apart from my contemporaries. And they don’t know what to do about me, or they ignore me. I am led to believe they ignore me.
Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University commented as follows: "Given all the travails and travesties of publishing in America, The House of Breath still remains a kind of fugitive, priceless, spangled fish, dating all alone amid the myriad, dull schools of books swimming in our sea, each with a price tag for a tail."
I am a writer, and sometimes I feel apart.
I.
I am.
I am water, a restless fluid, a voluminous self that goes as deep as the inverted mountains underneath. My body does not hold me; it liberates itself into gutters. I do not run, I flow. And my body joins with the creeks, the rivers, the seas. I am like a drip, a drip that slides until it crashes making a puddle at the end. I am water and I should dribble down the cliff and join with the sea below.
I am not a tangible Teaston.
I am oceanic.
(From THE BOOK OF I)
"Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar." --Pablo Neruda
"About doubt, much is known, but very little comprehended. When a finger lands on me, poking on a precise spot on my neck, I sense the intention, the very note he wants me to sing. But the smallest shift up towards the scroll of my head or down towards my belly, makes me think he is doubting. Either, he does not know what he wants, or even worse, he dares not listen to me, exploding, cracking the air on the third position of the E string. My E cord, grows out of nothing, now a penetrating truth." --The lesser violin
There is plot, but I’m always more interested in situations. Situations change and that’s a kind of plot. Language is a plot, too, and so are mix-ups and nonsense. Really any situation can be a plot because as it changes, time moves forward.
"Realist literature is, to me, the least realistic, because it eliminates what gives the human his reality, his mystery, his power of creation, of doubt, of dreaming, of thinking, of nightmare."
--Reinaldo Arenas
"Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, then rhythm comes into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have you." --Julio Cortazar