Lily Hoang
https://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/lhoang.html
Lily Hoang has published some books and won some awards. She is Director of the MFA in Writing at UC San Diego.
Constrain me, baby.
People, it seems, want to hear about constraints.
In grad school, I did an independent study with Steve Tomasula on the OuLiPo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop of potential literature. I’d read Calvino and Perec before and had a rough idea about what they were about, but yeah, it was a pretty amazing semester. So here’s the simple version of OuLiPo: The OuLiPo is a group of writers and mathematicians who believe that writing reaches its truest potential when constraints are put on the writer during the process of writing. A few obvious examples: Perec wrote a novel without using the letter e. In French. The OuLiPo came up with all sorts of constraints, whether lipograms, palindromes, N+7, or so on. You can look these up, if you want.
Games
I love chess. It’s a beautiful game of war. The pieces move with order, so much so that computers can beat humans.
Even more than chess though, I love Go. I started playing Go in college. My friend Michael introduced me to the game. We used to play chess for hours, drinking coffee manically, smoking cigarettes manically (or at least I did), Michael would eat bean and chess tacos. Michael read books about chess, and was in general a much stronger player. He won most of the games. Then, one day, he brought in a Go board. The rules are simple, much simpler than chess: a gridded board, black and white stones, it’s a game of domination. But the point, unlike chess, is to gather territory. It’s a different way of conceptualizing the board. It’s less about taking pieces and gaining points (if you’re a point-counter in chess, which I am, always counting, though I’ll gladly sacrifice a 10-point piece for a pawn. This is probably why I lose so often. Also, my end game is a wreck.) and more about visualizing territory.
Writing is a game to me, my books are games. The books I enjoy most are games, which is why I read so much OuLiPo stuff. I have no point to make. I just like games, that’s all.
The Spectacle of Spectacles: A Response to Perec’s “On Spectacles”
I.
In fifth grade, a little girl whose name I don’t remember called me tacky—and I was, good god back then I was the oddest confluence of patterns and colors, bowed skirts with striped t’s, without a hint of the irony hipsters today sport—and so my older brother took me shopping. I didn’t need glasses back then, but he needed a new pair so we stopped at a little spectacle boutique, and I tried on the cutest pair of specs, equipped with rounded tortoise-shell frames, practically wire thin, that hooked around the ears. Back in 1992, I wished my vision would go awry, just so I could look intelligent and stylish. Keep in mind my distorted sense of fashion, which I have yet to shake.
Three years later, I needed glasses, my vision had completely deteriorated, though I hadn’t noticed, except that I began falling down arbitrarily, a habit that’s stretched my ankles beyond repair, and to this day, I fulfill a prophecy of falling down annually. It’s embarrassing and painful and debilitating. But when it came time to get those glasses I’d wanted so badly before, it was sister who took me, and although she’s quite fashionable, I ended up with the most hideous glasses—to large, disc-shaped, odd colors—or at least I thought they were and never wore them, such is a story of first glasses.
In high school, late high school, I got my first pair of square plastic frames, tortoise-shell, and despite my very flat bridge, I found the right pair and style. Now, when I was seventeen, I don’t remember square frames as being “hip.” None of my friends had them, preferring instead oval wire frames, usually colored, but this past January, I gave a reading in Amherst, and I stopped in a coffee shop to do “work” (and meet the very cool Jedidiah Berry), and I looked around. Hot damn, there were twelve people there, including me, ten of which had on square plastic glasses (the other two didn’t wear them), eight people had silver Mac Book Pros (two had black Mac Books), I counted three people reading Foucault and five people with Moleskines displayed in some way. And I think back to &Now or AWP, somehow glasses becoming the sign of intelligensia and creativity, commodified, like Apple products, easy, and I’ve fallen for the trick.
Lily Hoang—
For fiction, I read the Introduction after I’ve finished the book. They should go afterwards, like an Afterword. That way, I read the book fresh. That way, my reading isn’t tainted by someone else’s interpretation.
18
What you’re doing tonight if you’re where I’m not
I’m jealous of all you New Yorkers who have the chance to hear the dazzling Josh Cohen read from WITZ tonight at the National Arts Club. 8pm. Go. Enjoy. Revel.
Composition Space without Exposition
I used to be in a writing group, there were three of us (I’ll name one F and the other K because they may or may not want me writing about them publicly), all women, professors in our mid-twenties to early thirties, with at least one book published, and drastically different writing styles, and it was the radical range in style that made our group function: there was no secret animosity, no competition, we read and respected each other’s writing, worked towards doing what we wanted to be doing. This group functioned how a writing group ought to function, at least to me. Then, of course, as things go with the academy, we scattered. K got a TT job. F and I stayed put in South Bend. But the group dynamic wasn’t the same, since we lost 1/3 of our membership, and eventually, I left too: up north, with my partner, who’s here for grad school, and I’ll start grad school in the fall too, in Geography, a move away from writing entirely.
But back to my story, I tend to wander: We used writing group time to “workshop,” absolutely, but between stories, we’d talk about process. Both K and F write primarily by computer, though they always have a notebook handy, in case they get ideas. Maybe, let’s call it, a hybrid type of writing, relying mostly on laptop. I write by hand, usually a whole draft or most of a draft, but I transfer to computer every day or three. We talked about that for a while, the difference between these two modes of composition, and—I’m getting to my point, slowly, but I assure you, I’m getting there—then, we talked about paper.
We all write in Moleskines, typical, cliché, we can admit that. Here’s the difference though: F writes on blank paper, K on lined, and I write on graph paper.
No more, please
Not just Dennis Hopper, but also Leslie Scalapino, she was a marvel.
The Ellipsis
A couple nights ago, I went to this experimental improv music thing in Toronto, which was all sorts of interesting, but that’s really neither here nor there. During intermission, this irrelevant artist was showing off to a friend of mine about his most recent publication, which was about, get this: the ellipsis.
He made the argument that the ellipsis gives readers authority over both text and author, they can “fill in” what the writer “left out.” Unfortunately, he didn’t think I was “anyone,” so he never engaged me in conversation, more or less just looked at me like I was a moron, if anything. But he made an impassioned argument to my friend about the ellipsis gives the reader control, let’s them take back the text from the author-narrator, that anything can happen within those three little dots.
Whereas I didn’t pick a fight with this guy then—I was tired, it was hot, the show was in an old church for Christ’s sake—I can pick one with him now, online, where I’m safe.
Ellipsis: The omission of one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or fully to express the sense (OED).