ethan feuer // new work
well, it’s christmas eve. i feel terrible. i started a project called liminal. you should check it out. i’ll be adding to it as i damn well please. (that is, desperately often, in a brazen attempt to defer beginning the third draft of metabolism. ) really lousy.
so long, new jersey. you’ve been good to me (for the most part).
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these are some of my new (old) rules for existence. also known as ‘make more things, like yourself, like other people’. right click and ‘open in new tab’ to view images at a higher resolution.
these days i’m doing a lot of reading and a lot of writing. in the months before i head back to europe, i’ve set it as my goal to get at least one manuscript written and hopefully a second started. by the time i come back, i will have twenty or thirty pages drawn, inked, etc in addition to a complete draft text. armed with these, the idea is to convince a publisher who, in the words of neil gaiman, “publishes the kind of stuff [you] write” to, um, publish the stuff i write. if possible, i’ll have previews for both novels, but i’m going to focus on one (the older one) for now.
when i’m not writing (the other 16ish hours of the day), i’ve been chipping away at several different books. i reread twain’s huckleberry finn and have made various piecemeal inroads on john gardner’s very-nearly-but-not-quite-insufferably-pretentious on becoming a novelist and as well on janet burroway’s guide to narrative craft which is a little bit more to the point than either gardner or dorothea brande. instead of brande, i’m getting my 19th century on with good ol’ leo tolstoy, whose anna karenina has somehow actually managed to live up to its hype. one of my favorite passages is reproduced below. it’s not that i find barbs like this, which appear on virtually every page, representative of the degree of hyperrealism he’s often accused of–it’s more that i think they’re incredibly deft instances of characterization. he’s like the guys in the 1950s who handled uranium isotopes through all these long, spindly tools. only he never dropped it. the passage:
“He saw out of the window how she went up to her brother, put her arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt annoyed.”
next up on the reading list are nabokov’s lolita, david mitchell’s cloud atlas, something by chekhov because they were clearly badasses, and that stupid copy of ghost world that i managed to acquire despite my feelings toward daniel clowes. and goodbye, chunky rice. and also good-bye.