Excuse me, I need some adjustment here...

Theatrical release poster

One of the startling -- or perhaps, even comforting -- assumptions of this movie, The Adjustment Bureau based on Philip K. Dick's story Adjustment Team, is that all of us who are blessed with great ambition can be assuaged of such ambition simply by getting into an intimate and rewarding relationship!

Personally, I like this theory, and would like to use it to justify (rationalize, did I hear you say?) my raison d'être, "sit back and enjoy the world going by." After all, I do have the good fortune to be in a wonderful relationship, so why should I blame myself for not wanting to struggle.

But blame myself, I do. There's a compendium of short stories, waiting to be finished, or should I say, screaming to be finished. But the more it screams, the more I stay still. It is a surreal game of chicken in my mind.

In my less charitable moods, I often wonder, "why afflict the world with yet more words?" or "why do I write? To contribute or to seek glory?" When I lean zen-ward, I do, and don't ascribe meaning or project outcome -- the chicken-game protagonists suddenly finding themselves in different dimensions, discombobulated and purposeless -- it gives me a deep sense of fulfillment.

Back to the Adjustment Bureau, another assumption is that the more you struggle, the more you rewrite your "destiny" (the opposite of the Eastern notion of fatalism). More Prozac anyone?

Are you a writer?

zazzle.com

Conventional wisdom confidently dictates that only those who fearlessly stick the label onto their backs proclaiming their affiliation to the lofty group of "writers" (and for good measure of hopeful reminders, onto their hands and other appendages) stand a chance of being granted membership into that exclusive club.

After all, do we want hacks operating nuclear plants? Or our government (wait! maybe that was a bad analogy).

Oh, so you, the wanna-be writer, ponder. Is that what I am missing? In the face of my daily struggle with the keyboard that somehow only wants to inject sneer-worthy words onto the screen? And really, can I not be a writer also, as in "I fix cars but don't consider myself a mechanic?" Alas, no, declares Conventional Wisdom. Ask anyone who considers himself the paragon of that virtue, and you'll get the same response.

Somehow, they'd have you believe, by donning that robe, you transform yourself. From a hack to a pro. Just like that.

According to CW, by choosing to emphatically call yourself a writer, you have no recourse but to write. You have no back alley for your soul (and creative energy) to escape. No today-I-felt-like-being a voice-over-recording-artist. You're tied to that writing chair even if you can't pull a blessed word out your tired muse. No gallivanting to an office cube sinking your butt into a rocking, coffee-stained upholstered chair, enjoying being a PR wiz, pointy-headed engineer or programmer to the delight of your back-patting boss. After all, if you're a damn writer, you write, and the rest of the time, you grudge every minute away from your work. Your guy or girl comes home after a hard day's work and you don't lift your eyes off the screen. Maybe you greet them with, "Go fix your goddamn dinner yourself -- I am busy being a writer."

That's the way it works. CW knows it. Do you?

The Perils of Search

My mother's admonition "be careful what you wish for" continues to be true. In the last seven days, I've been working on a new novel. This has necessitated a series of online searches for a number of things, such as:

• -- cocktail recipes
• -- cowboy sayings
• -- names of anti-fungal medication
• -- definitions of the seven deadly sins

And:

-- natural performance enhancers for men

You should see the ads that now populate my search engine of choice.

Viagra anyone?

India..TMI..as they say

That's "Too (damn) Much Information" to the uninitiated, btw. The people, some hounding you baby in hand, to part with your money, the small stalls beseeching you to come buy their bangles, their saris, their jewelry, the bicycles, cycle rickshaws, little cars whizzing by, lumbering buses and the occasional ox-drawn carts all come at you from every direction. Your senses go numb, your negative responses automatic and your mind trained by the west to look for nuance, difference, unusual and abnormal, slumbers. Stories, poetry, art, how are these possible, I ask. More later.

I wonder...

about something we often do: write from the perspective of another person especially of someone who has lived a different cultural history. Say, I write from the perspective of a schoolboy from this country. From the reader's point of view, this will read even in the best of light, I suspect, as if some central element of the protagonist's life is diffusely portrayed even if the reader can't put her finger on it.

Maybe you object; you say that underlying all our cultural complexity is shared human understanding and experiences and that's what will connect the reader to the author! Harrumph!

But put yourself in my shoes: a cultural interloper trying to glean enough of an understanding of the life of natives, the roads they've walked on, the ditches they've been pushed into and the stores they've visited, just so I can pass of a character as credible. Is that portrayal something you would read? OK, maybe you'd read it to humor me, after all you're reading this blog, but what if I were a total stranger?

My point is that perhaps the most satisfying stories to read about, are from people who share one's same cultural history. Why? Because I can understand in a more subtle way the life of a protagonist described from such a perspective.

Example:

He pulled his lungi up and tied it around his thighs.

What does this signify to you? Nothing, I bet! For me, it would signify that this man is getting ready for some physical activity because the lungi (a sarong-like wraparound to clothe a man waist down), when not pulled up to above the wearer's knees gets in the way of efficient movement.

Without these shared understandings, would you trust the author?

From a postmodernist perspective perhaps, positing such an opinion says more about me: that I give greater value to cultural artifacts than shared emotional and intellectual experiences. Maybe I've started longing for the icing on the cake.

Inconvenient Napping

So we've decided that writing is a worthy pursuit: a great use of time and energy with high reward. A turn of phrase that captures the essence of an experience. A metaphor catapulting understanding. A description of place that transports readers out of their bodies, an astral projection of sorts.

Runners talk about the high they get, an endorphin rush that drives them forward and inspires them to hit the trail day after day. As writers we, too, sometimes can achieve that out-of-the-world experience, especially when we seem to transcribe words flowing from somewhere else. We move our fingers faster and faster to capture it all. And when it's done, we feel satisfied and spent.

Given the opportunities that writing offers - creative expression and surging joy - it is a mystery why it takes true force of will to sit down and get to it every day. We know the formula: Butt + Seat = Pages.

But my butt consistently tries to avoid the seat and cut straight to the satisfied-and-spent moment. An arms-over-head stretch. A yawning exhale.

What happened to my writing today?

Just a little inconvenient napping.

Talking to myself again...

So, as far as news, we have a brand spankin' new website: sbannethology.com

Other than that, I've been thinking about submitting a piece to The Kenyon Review, but you know what, they don't take multiple submissions and they'll do their best to look at your wretched piece within four months.

The Tin House has decided they want to do their bit for bookstores, so they want you, the submitter to go fetch them a receipt of a book you bought from one recently, otherwise explain to them in 100 words why you're such a bastard you don't do your part to save your noble, local besieged bookstore.

Will I get a prize for the best goddamn 100-word apology?

Sorry I am feeling punchy. Sure, it is a worthwhile cause and it will probably make a difference. But will it? Do we really need external saviors? White nights descending from the sky in their shiny armor and magical bullets to slay the cruel, modernistic army of "progress" marketing itself to a frothing populace, incapable of independent thought, slavish in their belief that if only they had things more shiny, more new and different, their miserable lives would be better and set apart as examples by their hitherto seemingly better-off neighbors.

Will it slay the Kindles, the iPads and the Nooks, the Amazons and the Googles of this world?

Really? If only we did our part, us aspiring writers, countless in number, invincible in strength, our wallets bulging with our day jobs' salaries, pouring our wealth into the local bookstores, then, only then, will we save them; only then will we grab the throats of the big boys of books, lift them off their feet and shake them from side to side like a dog with its chew-toy, and then slam them back to the ground.

Will we?

Like the supporters of Julian Assange doing their puny best against Amazon for denying their hero his space in Amazon's cloud?

Uh huh, sure, we will!