THE PORTRAIT OF A MIRROR

My novel’s announcement in Publisher’s Marketplace:

ARCADE FIRE IS OBSESSED WITH RECURSION, TOO

Occasionally I'll run into a cultural artifact that so perfectly combines my four themes that it's hard to know where to start with it. Arcade Fire's latest album, Everything Now, is one of those cultural artifacts.

No surprise: the album and Infinite Content tour alike open with the title track, an ultra-digestible disco-pop anthem of anti-consumerist consumer success. At the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC last night, gargantuan disco balls framed the center ring, staged like a boxing match, the band entering with a tongue-in-cheek announcement of their Grammy record and combined weight. A four-sided jumbotron hovered above it, infinitely scrolling recursive graphics superimposed over live footage of Win Butler &co oozing rock star glamour. My husband's hot take? "New Arcade Fire is ABBA with irony." "Everything Now" is Arcade Fire's first single to reach #1 on a Billboard chart. 

Recursion is not a new theme for Arcade Fire. Reflektor, their third studio album, was an echo chamber of mirrors ("Just a reflection, of a reflection / Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection"), but Everything Now is next-level. Leading up to the Album's release, the band created a fake corporation and a fake website, complete with a "Premature Premature [Self-]Evaluation"--a parody site of a parody site filled with embedded links to other meta-joke articles created by the band, pulling you into a click-circle of their "Infinite Content" that gets to the annular heart of the internet:

"We’ll probably spend at least a paragraph talking about the marketing campaign that has accompanied Everything Now—the logos, the corporate-speak, the Twitter account—saying that we get the joke, and maybe even noting that music sites and features like Premature Evaluation (and the new Premature Premature Evaluation) are all part of the same culture-marketing ecosystem."

That last link there is to a self-generated mock exposé of Everything Now's mock campaign, debunking self-perpetuated mock rumors such as, for example, Ben & Jerry's production of an Arcade Fire flavor. It's fake news blowing the whistle on fake news, like a billboard that blends into the background. 

Aside from "Infinite Content," which is a bit brash and annoyingly repetitive (the acoustic, almost bluegrassy reprise is better), the album is as good musically as it is conceptually. "Electric Blue" and "We Don't Deserve Love" are winners, featuring Régine Chassagne's voice at its most ethereal. My favorite song on the album, Creature Comfort, is a synthy little sermon, spouting what might be the mantra for selfie culture: "Saying God, make me famous / If you can't just make it painless / Just make it painless."

At the concert last night, they closed with "Everything Now (continued)" of course--just like on the album, where the first track bleeds into the last, forming an infinite loop. 

MIDWAY THROUGH THE JOURNEY OF…MY NOVEL

Dante Alighieri by Sandro Botticelli, 1495

I recently passed the halfway mark in the drafting process of my first novel—the primary project underlying my decision to create this website. My novel will, I hope, illustrate the fusion of my four pet themes—indeed, Recursion is my working title. It already contains many allusions to the extracts I’ve collected here, starting with the epigraph. Ideas right out of the journal have made it in too, though the journal's greater function has been as an alternative, non-novel writerly outlet for me on days when I am feeling frustrated or stuck.

Since today is one of those frustrating, sticky sorts of days, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts on the midway milestone and what I’ve learned to date in the writing process. None of this is intended as “advice,” which I feel entirely unqualified to give at this stage, perhaps even to myself. But there is something special about midpoints and between-ness, a literary reverence even, going back to Horace’s idea of plunging in medias res (“into the middle of things”) even from the beginning. Murky middles are where Dante gets lost:

“Midway through the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark forest,
Having wandered off the straightforward path.”

— Dante Alighieri | INFERNO

And where Eliot’s world ends with a whimper:

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom”

— T.S. Eliot | THE HOLLOW MEN

In conversations with friends and acquaintances about my novel, I’ve been really surprised by how many people are interested specifically in the process. Maybe I shouldn’t be—a lot of my friends are attorneys and consultants, and not everyone, as it turns out, is as obsessed with recursion as I am (yet). The questions I get most often are all process-oriented: how long have you been working on it? How many hours to do you write per day? Are you drafting chapters consecutively, or do you skip around? How, exactly, does it all work?

"I could never do it," people say confidently, often before I've responded, but I'm not sure that this is's true. They sound exactly like I sound when someone tells me they are training to run a marathon. Yes, I've used more of my brain writing the first half of Recursion than in any other endeavor—like when you start a new workout routine and discover muscles you never knew existed. And yes, I'm insanely fortunate to have been able to take a leave of absence from my day job to focus on it. But I'm also conscious of taking a pretty sizable risk, one that I have little assurance will ultimately work out in my favor, one that I think most people would not want to take the way I would not want to run a marathon. My gratitude is laced with performance anxiety, the searing desire to prove worthy of my opportunity. So for the most part I've tended to think about Recursion like real work—which, to be clear, it is. In many ways it is not so different from the consulting projects I've done for clients. There's planning, research, analysis, communications. The biggest downside of the process, and the one that blindsided me the most, is the loneliness. I'm used to working on a team, and I miss it dearly. 

The general idea for Recursion came to me in 2015 as a way to merge several discrete ideas for novels I’ve had over the years with my recurring thematic interests—recursion, mythology, innovation, and glamour. I developed a general outline of the entire novel around that time that has undergone moderate changes while drafting. But I did not have anything that could be called a manuscript until this past October, shortly after I went on leave. With the exception of November, I have been working on Recursion full-time for the eight months since, writing 40-60 hours per week (though not on a strictly-prescribed schedule; I'm a pretty flexible boss), and averaging two 2-3K word chapters per month. I currently have 48K words out of an anticipated 70-90K total. For reference, The Great Gatsby—about as short as a novel can be—is 47K words (any shorter and it would be a novella). On the other end, War and Peace is 587K. 

My ideation process is hugely non-linear, but I've been drafting sequentially, returning periodically to the beginning for rounds of interim editing, trying to polish it little by little. Ideation is constant; Recursion is always on my mind, and random scraps of raw material often present themselves at inopportune moments, getting captured however I can capture them—usually on my phone or in a notebook. When I am starting a new chapter, I will attempt to consolidate all the extant scraps I expect to be relevant and read through them before jotting out a more detailed outline of the chapter. This "strategy"-type work can be done in odd minutes, but when I sit down to compose in earnest, I want to know I'm going to have several uninterrupted hours. Composition—the "execution" step—is slow, laborious, and mostly linear, involving both the synthesis and revision of scraps as well as the generation of entirely new material. I never delete anything, pushing rejected bits of text even as small as four words down the page for potential use later. 

Over-iteration here is where I will sometimes get stuck. The metaphor another first-novel-writing friend and I like is of a Rubik's Cube—you get to this place with a chapter where everything you want to be there is there, but it's still all jumbled together; the colors aren't lining up quite right. This is more or less where I am right now with Chapter 18 (out of an anticipated 30 total chapters). What usually pulls me out of it is stepping away for a bit to write something else, like this. Only very, very occasionally do I toss a Rubik's Cube and start over. Ultimately, all unused scraps, big and small, get dumped into a terrifying Google Doc entitled "novel graveyard." It currently holds 85K odd words and has proved tremendously useful.

At first it was painful for me to show anything I'd written to anyone. Now at the end of a chapter, I force my husband to read it immediately while I lord over him and try to decipher his facial expressions. He does not like this at all. To be fair, I often do not like his savagely-honest criticism. But it's undeniably useful. I treat my other friends who have kindly agreed to be readers with far greater consideration. All of my readers' feedback has been enormously helpful—even when I choose not to take it. That is another thing that has gotten easier over time: knowing when to listen and when to overrule, when to wait for a second opinion, and when to trust myself. 

A few final midway through-type notes:

• The best description I've found for what it feels like to write a novel is David Foster Wallace's "The Nature of Fun." 
• What I'm reading affects what I write. The most helpful things for me to read are thematically relevant but stylistically different from what I'm writing. The very most helpful have been re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and Moby Dick. 
• I have to tell myself this all the time: only unwritten novels are perfect.

My favorite question people ask is whether I am definitely going to finish it. So long as I continue to exist, my commitment level to finishing Recursion falls somewhere between marriage in a Jane Austen novel and getting neck tattoo. Besides, I’m more than halfway there. 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MANUFACTURED NONCHALANCE

A friend sent me this article in the New Yorker today by Rachel Monroe about "the bohemian social media movement" #vanlife, yet another glamour-based aspirational lifestyle turned carefully-curated visual product. The foundational abstract idea of this particular strain is "freedom," but the exterior narrative follows the same inevitable trajectory as every other such phenomenon, ending in manufactured nonchalance. Monroe describes the #vanlife photo shoot process towards the end of the piece:

“Smith had a particular image in mind: King sprawled in the back of the van, reading a book about Ayurveda with Penny nestled next to her, and an “Outsiders” decal featured prominently on her laptop. As Smith shot from the front seat, King tried a few different positions—knees bent; legs propped up against the window—and pretended to read the book. “Sometimes it’s more spontaneous,” she said apologetically.

“It’s about storytelling, and when you’re telling a story it’s not always spontaneous,” Smith said. “Lift your head up a little bit more, look like you’re reading.””

Our cultural obsession with nonchalance and this particular breed of mythmaking long predates Instagram, as does the desire to manufacture it. You can trace the seeds of the idea back to the tale of Pygmalion in Ovid's Metamorphoses ("The best art, they say, / Is that which conceals art"), but the first explicit reference I'm aware of is in Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it goes by the name sprezzatura. His is still perhaps the best definition of manufactured nonchalance out there:

“I have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid above all other, and in all human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were some rough and dangerous reef; and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

Virginia Postrel refers to this same passage in The Power of Glamour and returns often to the impression of "effortlessness" as a central manifestation of glamorous visual communication. Building on Castiglione, she argues:

“Sprezzatura makes its possessor seem like a superior being and the observer feel momentarily transformed, enveloped in that aura of confidence and competence. Like the glamorously streamlined surfaces of the Chrysler Building, however, sprezzatura is a facade—a form of artifice that demands care to create and maintain.”

Manufactured nonchalance appears frequently in fiction as well. A neat little example from Anna Karenina:

“Anna had changed into a very simple cambric dress. Dolly looked attentively at this simple dress. She knew what such simplicity meant and what money was paid for it.”

In Ian McEwan's Atonement, Cecilia Tallis even more explicitly seeks the same effect:

“Relaxed was how she wanted to feel, and at the same time, self-contained. Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not give the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.”

Again and again, nonchalance is something we want to build with images but tear down with words. On some level we all understand it is an illusion, so why do we keep falling for it? 

Social media has created a more robust strain. Sprezzatura is no longer just for courtiers; the art which conceals art has been democratized and demographized, with a feed for whatever your subjective tastes require. It is a glamorous distraction, but it's also a personal expectation.

Check out this no-holds-barred exposé from Rachel Cusk's 2014 novel, Outline:

“He was, in effect, manufacturing an illusion, no matter what he did, the gap between illusion and reality could never be closed. Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.”

#vanlife is a metonymy of our culture, of our very world right now; we are all increasingly defined by our roles in this simulacra-based digital ecosystem. Disillusionment with it, the realization that "freedom," or whatever else you fetishize, is staged--this is the crisis of our time for people who aren't stuck in Syria.