That Extra Hour

I just slept through my extra hour. I got up around eight, as usual, only it was really nine. So that's that. Wasted days and wasted nights.

I took this photo last night. Blackmail on South Congress still had its amazing Day of the Dead window up. There appeared to be a common theme with nearby Turquoise Door so maybe they worked on this together. It rocks.

We were on South Congress for my one Book Festival event. We went to a cattle call (or more like 'author call') cocktail party on Congress at a friend's "house" and drove the author Maxine Swann to the impossibly uncomfortable Continental Club gallery venue for an event billed as "Lit Smackdown: Fiction vs. Nonfiction." Maxine was very cordial considering the high confusion of this very Austin event. She said she at first thought the house was a restaurant. Easy mistake to make about that place. She was on a panel with Andrew Helfer, Eric Martin, Emily Rapp, George Saunders, Wesley Stace, Vendela Vida, and Amanda Eyre Ward. And the emcee was Owen Egerton who was hilarious. I would go read the work of all these people if, you know, I wasn't lodged on page 502 of Ulysses. I know FFP will be buying Maxine's work, though, and I now vaguely recall reading a review of her Flower Children. Because, of course, I read lots of reviews of books. But many fewer books.

I enjoyed listening to the writers talk even though as we all know (or those who try to write anyway) there is nothing so true as some fiction and nothing so false as our perception on any given day. They took some questions from the audience but the audience was a little feisty. It was hot, we had chairs that had been reserved for drivers but many were standing or on the floor, there was a huge crowd. So I didn't ask the questions that occurred to me. Like "Have you ever written something and then found out that it really happened?" Wesley Stace answered this during the discussion in a way. That kind of odd intersection of reality and something that just popped into someone's head as possible blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction. I was thinking of the guy in Iowa whose dog shot him. I mean you could write that. You could imagine it. And maybe it's happened before the other day. But I mean, if you read that, you'd think "that's out there." I was also thinking of asking if editing (especially rearranging and leaving things out) didn't make all writing biased if not fiction. But they kind of answered that, too.

I was also thinking about how I was reading a Larry McMurtry novel, I think it was The Desert Rose, one time long ago and Larry mentioned a store, Neiman Marcus, which exists. This was in Las Vegas. I was brought up short wondering if there was a Neiman's in Vegas. Certainly it was OK to set fiction in a real place. And to use a real store. But only if that real store was in that real place? I never found out if the store existed. This was the '80's when he wrote this so the presence of one there today means nothing. Even as I had this conversation with myself while reading I realized it was utterly petty. What if the store was a made-up one in a real city? Is that better. I thought, yes, somehow it is. But why?

The other thing that kept running through my head was dialog. How certain plays are made by a "playwright" taking transcripts of hundreds of actual conversations and using it as dialog by editing, rearranging and maybe directing the actors to have certain poses, costumes or tones.

My attempts at fiction, as I think I've said in this space before, have a "problem with the truth." I fret over times and places and real people and how things really are and get buried in that. That's probably why I'm meant to be a writer of memoirs (or just blogging) where I qualify everything with "I think he said" and "I believe I saw" and the like. BORING.

Maybe the truth is that there is no fiction in the world but there are many things that feel true.