1.
This is the equivalent of a card next to a painting that is determined to break out of a museum — or, depending on who you talk to, already has.
The need to edit The Reinventionists — to change my ticket for ‘first edition’ to ‘second’ — came about because of a particular habit. For me, a string of words isn’t a fastball coming down the plate — though plenty of this does appear out of nowhere — but a very large, slow object, something I can walk around, study, and admire.
Due to this, my sense was that even one paragraph of unshakable prose would be enough for a book. What’s more, I thought, I had plenty. This left gaps. They weren’t frequent or numerous, but they were enough to warrant a change. I had a situation that required me to step in, I’m currently doing that and — hopefully — that should be enough. I don’t want to ‘pull a Wordsworth’ — or was it Auden? — and constantly revise my works until my old age — until the dots of my dotage peter out like Russian nesting dolls taking a swipe at punctuation — let alone go over my allotted use of hyphens, which I think was set at three. I wrote the book with an intention in mind — I wrote it wildly and deliberately, expansively and minutely, and I did not want to betray that. I did not want to build a house on top of a simple hole in the roof. I don’t believe I have.
2.
Writing this went in stages — first, the whale, which appeared in 2002; then I realized it could be a book in 2004, and began writing in earnest, wrapping most of it up in the spring of ‘09. It’s fascinating to see things you don’t remember writing — i.e., the elephant/Hannibal t-shirt joke — and gulp when you realize that you’ve left someone with something of your 21 year-old self.
3.
The Reinventionists took a while to write, and two things happened while I was writing and after I’d finished generally carving the thing out that I thought might be worth sharing —
The first is that about a year after I wrote this —
By contrast, Thom writes scenes of dialogue on his desk, and likes to claim he started The Great Table Epic* in the cafeteria, where corresponding characters and scenes were found penciled in on a few of the tables by Suzie one morning, and then everyone spent the rest of the workday filling in and out what they could, calling across to fellow narrating-friends to ask them what they were in the middle of, what was happening to whom, and where they were planning to go with it. A few times deliberate misinformation was shared — the most obvious ones were knocked aside — ‘I thought Gerald was a man’ —, which was either for laughs, to challenge other writers to find a solution to the problem, or both. Most of us decided to work together, as the whatness of the tables as objects kept the conversation from swaying to the realm of whose story was whose and who owned it.
— I caught word of A Million Little Penguins, which was great fun to read.
And the second is that four years after I wrote this —
We have no library. This may come as a surprise to first-time narrators, but our solution is elegant and simple. All furniture is made of books, as are the cubicle walls. This is something that was requested by the toppers — Pinel Tuke, Houston Ottofrei, and Beria Rentvoly — and it’s something I’ve learned to like, along with their names. (Jesus!) They were installed over a six-day period by a group of Borgesians, who have always traditionally ended up next to the Calvinists at the yearly conferences, despite the alphabetical difference. It always happens, and no one knows how, but between reader and narrator, let it be said that the Borgesians do happen to have their share of a sense of humor.
— I read about this (and just for fun, there’s this, too) —
If you don’t want to follow through on the link, here’s the choice quote:
David Karoff welded the chair and attached the paperbacks: they have holes drilled though their insides and are slipped onto a hidden rebar frame. All of the materials are recycled - even the books, which are cast-offs from the Rochambeau Library Book Sales
4.
Back behind the curtain the “Wizard” goes.
Love,
Evan.
