In Context, Out of Context

It strikes me that we set great store by context. We believe we understand, in general and in specific cases, what (the) context is. Ignoring or forgetting or misunderstanding the context is always something other people do, not us. And one of our favorite ways of dismissing what is otherwise the most compelling evidence against us is to allege that it has been 'taken out of context'. Never mind that quotations by their very nature are detached from their original contexts. (We'll see something similar in the Kiss epigraph [2.1] from Burroughs: 'All pictures are faked.')

So you may well think less of me when I shine the spotlight, however briefly, on two sentences in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me that run afoul of the conventions of context. I tweeted each of them recently, providing only the title of the novel and an ordering link--thus assuring that they would be read in a certain way, in a certain context, which is different from their original contexts in the novel.

Here are the two sentences, as they appear--in context--in Kiss.

'This wasn't a story about how things happened in the art world; it was a story, perhaps, about letting go' (chapter 9). The point of view is that of Mark, a journalist attempting to write honestly about changes in the life of an emerging painter who has cut his ties to certain parts of his previous life. Mark is justifying his failure to divulge his own role in the painter's early success (Mark provided the painter's introduction to the gallery that took him on); in fact, Mark's own detachment is compromised at best. (A more careful reading of the entire paragraph might focus on the words 'detachment', 'foreground' and 'background', and the problems they pose.)

'"My grandmother said it was really an American story"' (chapter 1). Jack Emery is explaining his need for someone to translate into English his grandmother's Paris diary, kept in French in the late 1920s; the imperative is one of the conditions posed by the grandmother herself before her death. Her family of origin was transplanted at least twice (from France to Quebec, from Quebec to the U.S.), as she subsequently was herself (to Paris and back); her words 'really an American story' may be puzzling until the reader knows much more about the eventual course of the grandmother's life and its possible significance for Jack.

You can see where this is going, especially if you've read the book. From the get-go, I wrote both sentences with the intent not only that they satisfy the immediate contextual needs of the passages in which they appear but also that they apply to the totality of the novel--that they suggest to the reader that A Kiss Before You Leave Me itself is more about 'letting go' than about 'how things happen in the art world'... and that it is 'really an American story'.

I've touched on some of the 'letting go' issues in a recent post about the title of the novel; readers may associate these issues with the final chapter and its playing off of 'letting go' against 'recovery'.

But it would be indiscreet to say much here about the Americanness of Kiss, except to predict that it may be clearer to international readers than to their American counterparts. In fact, this is how I sometimes explain my particular gratitude for international readers: among other things, they will be most able to read it as a novel 'about' the United States. They, precisely, may be the ones with the context in which to read it.

From Pablo Picasso: Epigraph 3.2 - That Worrisome Picnic

Since this is, in the U.S., a weekend for picnics--and since we all take our inspiration where we can--I thought this might be a good time to return to talking about the epigraphs that introduce sections of A Kiss Before You Leave Me and to focus on the one that refers to the real-life painting that anticipates (and perhaps triggers) so much in the plot of the novel.

Edouard Manet, 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' (1862-63)

The epigraph is surprisingly innocent, in part perhaps precisely because it warns rather than reassures. Its import is approximately: When I, Pablo Picasso, look at Manet's 'Luncheon on the Grass', I know that it will spell trouble for me down the road. This is the sense in which Picasso's French sentence is usually translated, and it is (correctly, I believe) taken as an admission by the Picasso of the 1930s of a certain 'anxiety of influence' that he would not resolve until he did his own (very Picasso-esque versions of) 'Luncheon on the Grass' decades later. When I was translating the sentence for use as an epigraph in my novel, I granted myself the translator's license of rendering Picasso's intuition more general, so that it could also apply to dangers awaiting (a) Manet and his famous model Victorine Meurent and (b) the fictitious artists and models in A Kiss Before You Leave Me who, like Picasso, go on picnics (in the 1920s and in the present, respectively) that are inspired by Manet's but take different turns. So the epigraph reads, 'When I see "Luncheon on the Grass", I think: there are trials and tribulations still to come.'

Today, I googled 'CMNF' and got 2 million hits. This may not prove unequivocally that images of clothed males with naked females are no longer taboo--but it does indicate a major shift since 1863, when Manet's painting was refused by the Paris Salon. It was one of the most controversial paintings of the 19th century--and is of course today considered one of the greatest.

I find myself in the familiar situation of being unable to spell out the connections between Manet's painting and my novel without giving away far too much. But let me note, just in passing, in addition to what I've said here and what is repeated everywhere about the painting, that (a) the group of figures in the foreground is a threesome and (b) there is a fourth figure in the background, whom we neglect at our peril.

Now! Enjoy your picnic!

Talking Titles: 'A Kiss Before You Leave Me'

When I put together a bundle of links (one super-link from which readers, mostly those who follow me on Twitter, could link further to a page for whatever edition of A Kiss Before You Leave Me interested them), I threw in a couple of additional links, to performances by Louis Armstrong and k. d. lang, respectively, of the song 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'--performances that I'd always drawn on in my attempts to propose a 'soundtrack' for A Kiss Before You Leave Me. I was gratified to see (these things are trackable) that many readers had linked to the bundle and from there to links to buy Kiss at various ebookstores around the world--but no one took the links to the Armstrong or lang performances. Is it because everyone knows them so well, or because they don't know them at all?

If you don't know the song, please listen to one of these performances if you can; otherwise, the lyrics are available all over the Internet. The song always was a favorite of mine, long before its lyrics provided the title for my first novel. Just kiss me before you go, they seem to be saying, and the memory of that kiss will fuel my fantasies long after you're gone. One unforgettable kiss, and separation and absence are transcended by the power of the imagination: this, at least, is the argument that pleads for the kiss: for the lyrics are, in a sense, all imperative, all rhetoric. This is true even at the level of subtext: I love you massively, love me at least a little....

One of the advertising taglines I've used for the book (whether totally seriously or not is one of those mysteries of the Internet) is 'Because every kiss is a kiss before you leave me'--meaning, as I sometimes gloss it: we live and love in the context of possible loss. What varies from person to person and love to love is how we deal with that potentiality and that eventuality. A Kiss Before You Leave Me explores different ways of holding on and letting go, of taking care of self and other--and explores some of the related rhetorics as well.

I'm told that some potential readers have given the book a miss, at least at first, because its title suggested to them that Kiss might be what is usually understood to be 'a love story', a romance novel: Love's Throbbing Sword or some such thing. One very legitimate issue, of course, is that from certain perspectives the novel itself seems like a love story, at least for a while. It seems like something of a 'guilty pleasure' before it becomes readable as a 'moral tale'. Miranda Kincaid, who at least appears to be the protagonist, thinks she's getting a second chance at love, thanks to the intervention of an unlikely matchmaker. When the reader finishes the novel, it's become clear that there are quite different things going on at the same time, and the conventional rhetoric of love (as found even in some of the epigraphs in the novel) is, I hope, rendered less seductive, more subject to... well, what I would call 'reading'....

30 Days Hath September

I've been away from you for longer than I like, and, with the help of some advice from my sifu (Anthony Korahais), I'm vowing to do better in this new month. In a number of our qigong classes, he's proposed that we make resolutions for the month of September, things that we vow to do every day for these 30 days. (You'll often hear that if you want to establish a new habit, it's a good idea to repeat the action in question every day for 21 days. Thirty days? All the better.)

So I'm vowing to blog every day this month--and to practice qigong every morning. The first vow is partly an experiment: to see not so much whether I can do it (after all, I have decades of journalling behind me) as what happens when I do.

It may seem like a strange way to begin, but I'd be remiss if I didn't write something about two ebooks that appeared this morning, one in the UK and the other internationally.

What I'm calling the UK ebook is the first English-language edition of Jo Nesbø's novel Headhunters. (The US edition will appear next week.) I've been singing Nesbø's praises for years, usually talking about the Harry Hole series (nine crime novels to date, of which The Snowman was most recently published in the US), which still seem to be the books for which he's most likely to be remembered. But only a handful of the Hole novels are available in the US, and the first two haven't been published in English anywhere. For readers who are ready for something very different, the standalone Headhunters may be the ideal choice. It's been called a 'caper' novel, and I always describe it as 'freewheeling'. The less one knows about the plot in advance the better--but I can say that the title refers to corporate headhunting, that surprising crimes are involved, and that this is one of those novels in which two adversaries face off repeatedly, through all the turns of a shifting game of cat and mouse. It's also an amazing book to have written--in its own very different way almost as daring as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Will you still be thinking about it a week after you finish it? Quite possibly not--for that, read the Harry Hole novels instead. (Not that you have to choose!)

It's also worth mentioning that all of Jo Nesbø's revenues from Headhunters (in Norway and internationally, from the novel and the films based on it) go to the Harry Hole Foundation, for reading and writing programs in the Third World.

More widely publicized is this morning's release, in the US and the UK, of Stephen King's eformat-only novella Mile 81. Again, it would hardly be the one work by Stephen King that I would recommend as a starting place--but with King fewer people are looking for a starting place than with Nesbø: people may not agree about Stephen King, but most people are comfortable with their own take on him, whether they love the entire corpus (and, in some cases, read little else), strongly prefer one phase or genre over another, or view him with considerable condescension. (For the record, I personally champion the King of the later short stories but find that we neglect any of him at our peril.) But if you consider yourself a King fan, you will likely enjoy Mile 81 (which plays both the automobile-horror and the childhood cards) and the appended preview of the next full-length King book, 11/22/63, which is due in November.

I'd like to note one (further?) milestone, as I see it, in the publication of Mile 81: it's an ebook-only publication but no one is harping on the fact. There's no illusion that the novella's eformattedness is news. We've come a long way since Riding the Bullet and The Plant....

A Little Bird Told Me: Twitter

I think it was almost a year ago, from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, in his Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, that I first got the recommendation that emerging authors use Twitter to reach more readers. Since then, Twitter usage has tripled, and even agents and 'legacy' (i.e., traditional) publishers are growing reluctant to work with new authors who don't use social media in general and Twitter in particular. But it was Jon F. Merz and his book How to Really Sell Ebooks that finally persuaded me to get on board.

I emitted my first tweet less than eight weeks ago, on 14 June, and I now have almost 700 followers, most of them added in the two weeks or so that I've been following Jon Merz's guidance. That number is modest if compared with the numbers following, say, Margaret Atwood (almost a quarter of a million) or Lady GaGa (almost 12.5 million), but it's 2.5 times my combined friends and fans numbers on Facebook after years there.

My weeks on Twitter have also seen the visitor numbers for this blog, Jascha Writes, more than triple.

I also like Twitter--for reasons I'm only beginning to understand, and that I hope to write about another day. And I appreciate my followers, and those I follow, beyond motives of PR and ebook sales.

Today I just want to welcome all my Twitter followers--past, present and future--to Jascha Writes and to promise to provide in future posts some fundamentals about myself and my work, starting with my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me. Of course, you can already use the search window in the extreme upper-left corner of this page, or the 'blog archive' listing at the foot of the right-hand column, or the 'labels cloud' a bit higher, to make your way around the posts that are here now. As always, I hope you like what you find, and that you'll want to return.

See you here, and see you on Twitter!