Ward Six

The End

2011-04-26T15:27:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends:

After more than four years, we have decided to shut down Ward Six.

Writing this blog, and reading your responses to our posts, has been a great experience, and we're going to miss it. But maintaining Ward Six has increasingly caused more anxiety than pleasure, and it's time for us to move on to other projects.

The primary reason for this decision, of course, is time. Our professional lives have become more demanding over these years, and we want to devote as much time as possible to our fiction, not to mention our family and friends. Something had to give.

There are other reasons, though--less important, perhaps, but more immediately compelling. For one: the longer we remain in the business of writing and publishing, the more people we know. The American literary world is like a big small town, spread across the country; stay in it long enough, and you end up connected to everyone. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to write anything that doesn't offend someone connected to us. Sometimes this manifests itself in the comments; sometimes via email. Of course this should be perfectly fine--shouldn't a literary blog offer a forum for spirited disagreement? Indeed, it should. But when those disagreements keep you up at night, when they result in emotional exhaustion, you have to wonder if it's worth it in the end.

In an ideal world, we writers could write about one another without concern for hurting anyone's feelings. Personally, we never read or respond to anything written about ourselves online--this seems like madness to us. It wasn't until last year that we even realized there is a thing called Google Alerts and that writers use it to find discussions about them; the result is that we live in a world where you can always hear when people are talking about you. There is one word for such a world: hell. It's hard to remain neutral in it.

There are other reasons we're shutting down, less connected to our emotions. John is writing more book reviews for print publications; this work is supposed to be free of any possible conflicts of interest. Carrying on dialogues with other writers here makes such impartiality hard to achieve. He will also, in the coming months, take over directorship of Cornell's creative writing program, and is increasingly conscious of the possibility that readers will interpret his remarks on Ward Six as representative, somehow, of the institution he works for.

But the main thing, aside from time, is that internet writing is stressful. We don't blame writers, in the end, for their passionate advocacy of their own work online; the publishing industry is forcing them to do so. Publicity and marketing budgets are down; writers are asked to promote themselves, ad nauseam, on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. This isn't a good thing, we don't think. Writers should never ask other writers for blurbs: that's what publishers are for. Writers shouldn't be responsible for what is said about them online. They should put their heads down and work on their art, without regard for the vicissitudes of commerce.

But that's not the way the wind is blowing. We receive many requests each month for quotes, and are sent a lot of galleys, and we find ourselves having to tell people over and over that Ward Six is not a promotional blog, but a labor of love.

Unfortunately, lately, it has become more labor than love. We are proud of the fact that we have never run an ad on this site, have never made a cent from it. But it's time for our labor to be directed elsewhere.

We've made a lot of friends here, and look forward to keeping in touch with them. And we won't be disappearing from the internet. So you'll be seeing us again before long.

Until then, you have our profound gratitude and affection.

Yours,
John and Rhian

"A life of their own"

2011-04-17T13:40:00.000-05:00

I got a question from a grad student yesterday regarding a paper he's writing, and I thought my answer to him would make a good blog post. So here you go. The question (thanks, Alex): "Writers (and I've heard this from poets, too, who are inhabiting an historical voice) claim that characters 'take on a life on their own' and act autonously, despite their ontological tether to the author himself. The character kind of becomes an 'other.' What's your experience of creating characters like? Do you feel this doubleness as actor/observer?"

My off-the-cuff reply was, "Yes, characters do seem to 'take on a life of their own,' but that phrase is sentimental and overplays the role of inspiration and loss of control in the writing of fiction. Personally, I always feel that I'm in control of my characters. But I also feel that they are manifestations of the self (that is, the author) that draw from parts of the personality (that is, our own) that we don't ordinarily have direct access to, which must be dug for with great effort, and generally are only uncovered in a state of deep concentration. The process of creating a character is a process of assembling emotions, memories, hypotheses, and the like, until they form a pleasing shape. And the more material one assembles, the more dots there are to connect, the more detailed a picture emerges.

"That isn't to say a character can be anything and all things--it's more like fractals, details concealed inside details. You might think of this process as being like formal limitation in poetry--instead of being able to look anywhere, we limit ourselves to those personalities possible within a set of initial parameters. And it is only inside these limitations that we're able to feel that we really know something. If the plot demands that our protagonist is going to be a fifty-year-old woman with three grown children, a two-pack-a-day smoking habit, an abiding love for the string quartets of Shostakovich, and, back in her past, a youthful stint as a game show host, then we already have somebody in mind. YOU have somebody in mind, right now. This woman opens her mouth and speaks: I am certain that you know what her voice sounds like. Because human beings are made to make broad judgements about people based upon small collections of data, and predict their future behavior according to those data.

"So this thing about characters taking over the story is, ultimately, silly nonsense. (Nabokov, for one, hated the notion.) But it is a pleasure for the writer, and one hopes the reader, to experience the illusion of same."

The quest vs. the meander

2011-04-11T18:14:00.000-05:00

I listen to a lot of nerd podcasts, including this one, which today included an interesting tangent about Pixar. You know, the animated film company everyone loves. The co-host, John Siracusa, had the previous week been comparing Pixar to Hayao Miyazaki, and finding the former inferior, for various reasons: all of them, in my view, very valid. This week, though, he pointed out that almost all Pixar movies feature male protagonists, and most of Miyazaki's feature female ones.

This in and of itself doesn't really concern me--I think children are perfectly able to identify with the other gender in a narrative, should their parents adequately encourage them to. But this got me thinking about what I do hate about Pixar: their storylines.

Don't get me wrong--I really quite enjoy these films, particularly The Incredibles and Ratatouille (which, if nothing else, provides the extraordinary spectacle of Patton Oswalt not swearing). They are visually stunning and often quite funny. But they depend, by and large, on the same dreary goal/motivation/conflict plotlines that Rhian criticized in this post. There is always some quest, or some search for self-actualization or self-improvement. There always has to be a moral, a life lesson. There always has to be a danger that forces people to embrace their better selves. The world must always prove, in the end, orderly and sensible.

I find myself thinking of this as a "masculine" storyline, though I'm not particularly eager to defend that characterization; I will say, though, that the primary way girls get to be the heroes of contemporary children's movies is by proving that they can do the same stupid shit boys can. Miyazaki, on the other hand, makes movies about intense, often directionless exploration. He is contemplative, and his films often remain movingly unresolved. Pixar movies look great, but the visuals are illustrative. In Miyazaki, the images are the movie. They make the story. I can't, for the life of me, remember the plot of Howl's Moving Castle--but I will never, never forget the sight of it. Is this perhaps a feminine ideal--that it is sometimes enough simply to be? In any event, it is a worthwhile ideal, gendered or not.

Is this "better"? It is to me. My middle career (and, I fear, accompanying slump in book sales) has been largely about an effort to abandon the kind of heavily directed plots I love to indulge in as a casual reader, and concentrate more on the enigmatic things that move me. I certainly haven't abandoned plot, nor have I become remotely experimental. But my forthcoming (late 2012 I suspect) novel is about a woman who gets horribly lost in an increasingly confusing spiral of impossible domestic events, against a backdrop of impossible sci-fi phenomena, and I had more fun writing it than anything I've done in ten years. It's the result of an obsession not with story, but with motif, situation, and emotion.

I dunno--I think we're stuck in this country in a plotline that's so familiar we can't even see it. We keep telling ourselves the same damned stories over and over, are comforted by them, and live our lives by them, when in fact they are bankrupt and getting us nowhere. We are never going to win the big game, or make people love us at last, or find what we're looking for. Friendship isn't going to conquer all, we are not going to find the treasure, and we aren't going to land the deal. If the worst thing that's going to happen to us is that we're just going to keep living for a while, we are in luck. There are a million ways to write about that experience, many of them profound and beautiful. Maybe we can do that now.

Performance

2011-04-07T08:39:00.000-05:00

I think I've posted about this before, but it's on my mind this week, for several reasons. Writers have a strange relationship to their, you know, physical existence. Like anyone whose satisfaction comes mostly from time spent in their own head, writers often find the actual world rather vexing to navigate, and have mixed feelings about presenting themselves to others. Even though, in theory, nothing could be more simple than giving a reading--you don't even have to memorize anything, you just stand there and read stuff off of a piece of paper--many of us find such events incredibly stressful. We are not accustomed to being in front of our readers--it's not in the contract. We're supposed to be able to be our worst selves on the page, without fear of embarrassment or misunderstanding. All we are is a pile of paper, a book, a digital file. We aren't supposed to have a five o'clock shadow, pit sweat, or PMS. It just isn't natural for a writer to perform.

Some people, though are so good at it. Margaret Atwood was here last week, and R. and I got to spend some quality time with her. Her reading was great, but her performance lasted the duration of her stay in Ithaca. She was on all day long, keeping up a hilarious and fascinating line of patter on her favorite subjects--genetics, the environment, the culture of writers and literature. (Sadly, no hockey.)

I'm giving a reading tonight, and I gave a reading last week, and I must admit I love giving readings. But my hands shake as I do it, sometimes visibly. The version of myself I'm willing to be while writing is not the version of myself I would naturally present to others in person. This creates a certain dissonance while teaching, too--as writers, we talk about sex, death, self-disgust, self-doubt. As teachers, we are supposed to be experts, flawlessly confident and assured, and keep a personal distance between ourselves and our students, even as we encourage them to reveal themselves in ways we might be reluctant to suggest even to our own spouses. The result is this bizarre stew of emotions, of concealment and revalation, of intimacy and detachment. I think this is one of the reasons creative writing classes are so popular, even with students for whom writing itself is not a great passion: they are a forum for deep personal expression, but with built-in limits and controls. They are an oblique form of self-analysis, for people who might otherwise be afraid to examine themselves too closely.

We went to see Th e Mountain Goats the other night, in Ithaca, and I was struck by the facility with which Darnielle and company presented the deeply intimate, even disturbing, material the band is known for. Sometimes I wish I could read or teach with Jon Wurster drumming behind me, and a guitar and amp to give my words something to ride on. Then again, the typical literary audience is a bit better groomed and doesn't shout requests. I'll take it.

Me and Lou Beach: The Great Zombini

2011-04-03T13:04:00.000-05:00

Lousy of me, I know, to come slouching in after a week of absence with a self-promotion post, but that's what I'm doing. Soon I will post about my busy week with some thoughts about performance, literary and otherwise. But for now, news.

I have collaborated on a new book with visual artist Lou Beach called The Great Zombini. It's a collection of 21 short stories inspired by 21 of Lou's hilarious and bizarre photocollages. The book contains the images and the stories, and it is an ebook only release. The link above is for the Kindle page, but it will soon propogate to your favorite ebookstore, including the B&N and Apple sites. For those of you who were at my reading with Amy Dickinson and Jaime Warburton yesterday, those stories were from this book.

What can I say about it? Lou and I have decided to be annoyingly cagey in our description: "Cautionary tales for adults, illustrated. You've been warned." Here's a sample.

And do us a favor, will you? If you read the thing, review it on Amazon, even if you didn't like it. Our publisher is an indie, Red Willow Digital Press, and they (and we) need all the publicity we can get. Blogward ho!

Literary blurb translation guide

2011-03-27T05:15:00.000-05:00

"luminous prose" = too many goddam words
"a tour-de-force" = threw it across the room
"a triumph" = huge advance
"a commanding new voice in fiction" = girlfriend's brother wrote it
"sublime" = didn't know what the hell was going on
"unflinching artistry" = lots of boobs and stabbing
"grabs you on page 1 and won't let go" = stuck reading it on long flight
"achingly beautiful" = really long sentences
"brilliant" = smarty-pants
"profound" = written by old person
"a story for the ages" = ripoff of Tolstoy
"taut" = limited vocabulary
"finely wrought" = namby-pamby
"best of the year" = only thing I've gotten around to reading
"deeply imagined" = makes no sense
"incredible range and breadth" = all over the place
"ingenious" = confusing
"radiant" = already been blurbed by people more famous than me
"lyrical grace" = either is girl or writes like one
"rich language" = not enough paragraph breaks
"devastating" = dropped it on my toe
"goes straight for the heart" = sappy
"trenchant satire" = poop jokes
"clever" = thinks it's being clever
"fiercely resonant" = author looks hot in publicity photo
"a small gem" = will sell five hundred copies, tops
"first-rate" = grad school pal
"bracing" = fits nicely in box headed for used bookstore
"tightly coiled and edgy" = contains fucking
"humane" = contains murdering
"you'll feel forever changed" = you will never get those hours of your life back
"transcends its genre" = stuck in its genre
"affirms the human spirit" = contains scene of winning big game
"searing...glorious...a fury of dazzling transcendence" = I'm just stringing random words together now

Please...add more.

Backstabbin'

2011-03-24T10:12:00.001-05:00

I just had a hissy fit on facebook but figure this is probably a better place for it. A friend remarked that today was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's birthday, and then quoted him: "Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back."

My response was as follows: "So, we are supposed to refuse what tiny, pathetic opportunities we have for publicizing our work, further restricting our already-meager options for finding new readers, to serve somebody else's anti-corporate agenda? As if anyone gives a rat's ass that a literary writer somewhere is taking a bold stance against some hairsplitting distinction that about nine people in the entire world even recognize. Ferlinghetti should try opening an independent bookstore in, say, Ohio or upstate New York, and see how much traction he gets. Personally, I feel stabbed in the back when I'm told how and where to sell my books by somebody I've never met."

Sorry, Corey, don't unfriend me. But really: as a corollary to the last post, I personally decline to feel bad about failing to sell my own work according to some impossible left-coast standard of moral purity. And though I love my local independent, and support it with my dollars, rhetoric, and what little authorial clout I possess, the fact is that indies have been a niche business for a long time and are only going to get nichier. People don't like them, they like Barnes & Noble. Or ebooks, for chrissake, which are selling like mad, and this is for reading on a device aesthetically akin to a home perm kit from 1983.

Physical books and independent bookstores are a fetish. I happen to embrace this fetish, personally, but I do not have the mental energy to proselytize about it, or to get all high and mighty about the method by which readers pay attention to what I do. Frankly, this amounts to stabbing readers in the back. "No--you're liking me wrong!" is the message Ferlinghetti is encouraging us to deliver to them. Honestly, their only reasonable response would be to give up liking us at all.

A writer wants to sell books

2011-03-22T05:12:00.000-05:00

Funny when you encounter the same unexpected thing twice in twelve hours. Last night I was sitting on the sofa reading an essay about Kurt Vonnegut in this Steve Almond collection (it's good, you should read it) and came across this quote: "It's what writers do, this shuck and jive, this nevous dance to balance the emotional needs of those you love against your own need for glory."

Almond goes on to talk, briefly, about the writer's need to be noticed, to have his books read, which he shares with Vonnegut. I didn't think much of it until I woke up and read this HuffPost piece by Julianna Baggott, which links to an Andre Codrescu piece (full disclosure: I didn't read that, as Codrescu makes me want to claw my eyeballs out) about facebook. And in it, Baggott says, "And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore."

I feel bad for anyone who has experienced even a moment of guilt for wanting people to buy her books. In fact, I think Baggott is lying--I don't think she's ever really felt guilty about this.

Because honestly, if we don't want to be read, what the hell are we doing? If we write and don't send out our stuff, it's because we're afraid of rejection. If we have writer's block, it's because we're afraid of failure. But not wanting to be read is not any writer's problem. If you don't want to be read, you're not a "writer." You're some other thing. A diarist, perhaps.

Now, as for Codrescu's complaint, if I am friends with you on facebook, and you use more than, say, 1 in 20 posts to promote your own work, then I find you annoying, and I have you hidden in my news feed. facebook is for being mildly amusing and posting links to videos of stampeding baby goats and pictures of your kids with ice cream on their faces. If you listen to your publicist and treat it like an advertising medium, then you're crapping in the pool.

But I sympathize: I want to be noticed, too. Everyone does. Am I not blogging right this minute? The thing is, the correct way to be noticed is not to ask people to notice you, it's to make more stuff for them to notice. If you want readers, write a lot, unshittily. Don't post ads on facebook, post content. (I have at least one friend, Lou Beach, who has a book coming out that consists entirely of short stories written there.) Same goes for twitter, and your blog. Listen carefully here, writers, because this is important. Content. Do not post reports on how many people came to your reading or what nice things book reviewers said about you. This is called bragging and it makes you look like an ass. People will read your books not because you're telling them how much people like you, but because your writing is worth reading. So, on the internet, give them more of that. Give people more of yourself.

And quit feeling guilty about wanting people to buy your books. It's like feeling guilty about wanting sex, or breakfast. And yes, there are people who feel guilty about those things, too. Take a good long look at those people. Do they look happy? No, they look hungry. And horny.

Desire readers. Then write.

Random poetry idea generator

2011-03-19T09:01:00.002-05:00

A quickie for you this morning: my undergraduate workshop was having trouble getting inspired to write poems, and asked me to give them some kind of exercise. So I made this.

It's pretty simple--just a bit of javascript that chooses one item apiece from three lists: an action, a subject, and a method. The interesting thing is, I was planning on stopping at fifty items per list, then couldn't stop. It's up to 273 each now, which means there are more than 20 million possible combinations. It got to feeling like writing, and I belatedly realized that's what it is. It's writing! I am just sacrificing control and sense for the pleasure of constant amusement and inspiration.

If you have some ideas, let me know, I'll add them in the next round of updates.

Also on the web, by the way: the young geniuses at Electric Literature have made a web app that allows you to record stories and pin them to a map. It's cool, check it out. And now that my former student Téa Obreht is super famous, you might want to listen to the interview I did with her last year, on the Writers At Cornell blog.

Gimme some happy

2011-03-17T16:25:00.000-05:00

On HTMLgiant the other day, Blake Butler asked, "What are some good books that have happy endings and don’t suck shit?"  Hey, yeah--good question. Commenters gave him plenty of answers: Jesus' Son, The Fermata, Ulysses (sort of), Stuart Little.  Well--that last is a kids' book, so of course it has a happy ending. But it doesn't suck. Neither, for that matter, does the ending of Little House In The Big Woods.  In fact, this latter is the only book ending that I start crying just thinking about: it might be the most beautiful ending of any book I've ever read.

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
     She thought to herself, "This is now."
     She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

A while back a relative told me that eventually everybody turns into a Republican--the older you get, the harder you get, the less you want to give away. Nope. I am getting softer by the day. And I like happy endings more and more. If you can write one, you are a badass. They are hard.  Our assumption, I think, is that happiness is empty. Misery is real, happiness is an illusion. Life will end in pain and fear, after all--why should our novels be any different?

Fuck that. Gimme some happy. Surprise me with it. Find a way to tell me that love matters, and everything that is temporary is beautiful. Show me that now is now and it can never be a long time ago. I dare you.

This new thing the kids are doing

2011-03-15T18:21:00.001-05:00

A student recommended Mary Miller's Big World to me the other day; we were at a bar and she brandished it like a pack of the best cigarettes anyone has ever smoked. It's about the size of a pack of cigarettes, too, and has an ashtray on the cover. I bought it and am reading it now, and it's pretty good.

It does this thing, though. Amelia Gray does it also, with mixed success, in her recent book that I reviewed in the NYTBR. And the student who recommended the book to me does it, and so do a couple guys in my recent undergraduate workshops. It's partially a McSweeney's thing, I think, although my student would probably bristle at that; she's not a fan of the mag. And it's also kind of neo-Carverian. It's minimalist, sort of, and sometimes it's selfconsciously odd. It employs serendipity and timely pop cultural references and short unadorned sentences.

I'm not sure I like it. I like some of it, of course--my student is very good at it, I think, and I liked parts of the Gray book and the Miller book. (Oddly, I like Gray's twitter feed better than most of her stories: her tweets are genuine non-sequiturs, intended as non-sequiturs, and are really funny.)

But what is it exactly? I think it's this: there's a new breed of minimalist writers who appear confident that passing something through their particular consciousness, however seemingly banal that thing is, will lend it sufficient weight to justify its inclusion in a story. Some of these Miller stories are nothing but that: rambling lists of banal acts and observations. And damned if she doesn't pull it off half the time. These things do take on weight in each other's presence, and rendered in her lazily precise prose.

The other half of the time, though, stories like this just seem precious, or random, like stuff you find in somebody's dead grandma's glovebox. You read them and you think, I guess you had to know grandma. Or they feel like a night spent smoking pot in your sister's apartment with her grad school friends. You know they're smart, and you know you're as smart as they are, but you don't understand a thing they're saying. It's not for you: it's an insider code. The context is missing.

It would seem that the key to doing this thing right would be to provide that context without appearing to do so: giving the reader the key on the sly. Letting the reader be inside and outside at once. A neat trick, if you can figure out how to do it.

Excellence by association

2011-03-14T10:20:00.000-05:00

Inspired by the abandoned novels post, we seem to have temporarily abandoned our blog. Sorry, life intervened!

Rhian showed me a surprising review by Tadzio Koelb in the NYTBR this weekend. What's surprising is how clearly and cogently it's written, and its willingness to take a step back and examine the context into which the book in question, Rebecca Hunt's Mr. Chartwell, is being published.

In short, Koelb calls the book "well-packaged chick lit" that "benefits from the reassuring aura of history." (Winston Churchill is one of its three main characters.) He compares it to another recent novel, Child 44, which he says "was in the running for two of Britain's most important literary awards." This comes as a surprise to me, because I read that novel and thought it was rather poor, even as a piece of genre fiction. In any event, Koelb contends that both books are mediocrities that the literary press has elevated by virtue of their subject matter, rather than their artistic value; he believes this is a trend in book reviewing.

I think he's right. I am still bewildered by the fact that nobody seems to have recognized Freedom as Jonathan Franzen's worst book; it's a lopsided domestic drama with a lot of timely and unnecessary sociopolitical nonsense slathered over it. (FWIW, I enjoyed it anyway--but it is not up to Franzen's usual standard.) In that book, we were seduced, I think, by its ambitious title, its environmental subplot, its political undertones.

While I am enjoying the democratization of literary discourse that the internet has brought us, the trend Koelb describes is a consequence of the decline of newspapers and print magazines--hardly anyone is being paid to recognize artistic value anymore. And so, I fear, hardly anyone is bothering.

Abandoned novels

2011-03-06T10:21:00.000-05:00

page one of King's book

I guess I'm a few days late on this topic, but I only just now read the Dan Kois piece in the Times about abandoned novels and thought I'd throw in. First off, my favorite line in it, as my Twitter followers have already seen, is Elizabeth McCracken's: “It hurt for maybe a week. And then I decided to be butch about it.” That is echt McCracken. And I was also delighted to learn that Stephen King had posted manuscript facsimiles of his abandoned novel, The Cannibals. Very cool! Though after reading a few pages I think he made the right decison.

I've got a couple myself: three complete novels, actually, that never went anywhere. The first, Telegraph Road, was about a rock band who has to drive a baby from Seattle to Philly in their van. Ann Patchett, my teacher at the time, said, "This is just a list of band names." Ouch. Too, too true. The second is a crime novel, Born Again, that I wrote in maybe 2004? I still kind of like it, but I am the only one, apparently, because many an editor passed. It was to have been only the first mystery featuring the overly tall, overly selfconscious campus-cop-turned-homicide-detective Malcolm Friend. (I still have two complete plot lines in reserve in case I take him up again someday.) And then there's 2009's The Document, a novel about an annoying person's every annoying thought, to which my agent said, "I'll send this to your editor if you really want. But I think you should shelve it." I shelved it, and wrote him a new one.

I hope Rhian weighs in--several of my favorite things she has ever written are abandoned novel bits. I don't think non-writers realize how difficult it can be to actually finish a coherent long-form narrative--even the very best concept can be utterly destroyed by a host of factors. The novel I just finished, Familiar, was an abandoned book for eight years before I took it up again--the problem, it turns out, had been that I'd chosen a topic I lacked the maturity and experience to properly explore at the time. And even now it took a couple of false starts and a major, major overhaul to crack it. (At least I think I cracked it: time will tell).

Let's hear what you've got in the orphanage.

Forbidden things you can do anyway

2011-03-02T10:52:00.001-05:00

I've been having kind of an amusing exchange with a friend on facebook, a fellow teacher, who presently is grappling with inexperienced writers' mistakes. She has been citing the mistakes, and then I have been firing back with examples of really good fiction that uses the "mistake" to greater ends. For instance, to "it was all a dream" I countered David Foster Wallace's "Oblivion." "Everyone dies in a car accident at the end" reminded me of Charles Baxter's "Saul And Patsy Are Getting Comfortable In Michigan" (although he did bring them back to life in a later story and novel). And when my friend complained that her students don't even know to start a new paragraph for dialogue from a new speaker, I threw down Stephen Dixon's Interstate.

Of course my friend is right: there are things that are almost impossible to do well, and other things that a beginner can wrap his head around more easily, and learn to do skillfully, in the three-and-a-half-month confines of an academic semester. But wow, it's hard to know how to tell them what's right and what's wrong. "Some writers have been able to use this technique effectively," you can say, "but it isn't working in your story." Or, "Traditionally, dialogue is formatted this way. You can format it another way, but you need to know the convention, and understand the consequences of breaking it."

If you ever wonder why creative writing classes often seem to be graded rather generously, this is the reason. Everything is a gray area. Nothing can be judged out of context. There are no things you can't do, and there are no things that always work. There are only...things. An infinite number. And they can be arranged in an infinite number of ways. It's enough to make me think my job might actually be...difficult.

Well--let's go with "complicated."

Books alone are not enough

2011-02-28T06:10:00.000-05:00

I'm down with e-books, I guess, if that's where we're headed. But this really depresses me.

“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “But it doesn’t mean that all brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back.”

A wide range of stores better known for their apparel, food and fishing reels have been adding books. The fashion designer Marc Jacobs opened Bookmarc in Manhattan in the fall. Anthropologie has increased the number of titles it carries to 125, up from 25 in 2003. Coldwater Creek, Lowe’s, Bass Pro Shops and even Cracker Barrel are adding new books. Some mass retailers, too, are diversifying — Target, for instance, is moving away from male-centered best sellers and adding more women’s and children’s titles this year.

Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrel. We have arrived, it appears, at a moment when a book is roughly equivalent to a roll of masking tape--a more or less interchangeable commodity that you can buy at any one of many retailers. But a place to immerse yourself fully in it? A place that curates it? A place where anybody knows anything about it? Nope.

If you had told me in the late nineties that Amazon customer comments would eventually be one of the only remaining sources of generalized literary expertise in the world, I would have laughed at you, then gotten a funny look on my face, then said oh my god, then retreated to a corner to whimper. But maybe that's where we're at.

Podcast: Nicholson Baker

2011-02-25T09:30:00.001-05:00

We had a great time yesterday with Nicholson Baker, who was visiting Cornell for a reading and to talk with students--he read from his most recent novel, The Anthologist, and followed up with an essay about giving public readings from The Size Of Thoughts. This interview is one of my favorites that I've ever done--we discussed the relationship between Nick's activist and formally experimental modes, his thoughts about literary fandom, how he arrives at the form and structure of his books (the answer quite surprised me), and the impermanence of literary texts. My thanks to the W6 readers who provided questions--I fit quite a few of them in!

We also talked, off-air, about his next book, due out in August, and I must say that it sounds like a doozy. If you liked Vox and The Fermata, this might be the one you've been waiting for.

A brief review of Scrivener 2

2011-02-23T10:16:00.000-05:00

I've had Scrivener 2 installed on my Macbook for a month or so now and thought I'd share my impressions of it. This is a perfect example of my tendency to buy something I don't really have a pressing need for, but which seems like it might open up new avenues of something-or-other, so I go ahead and drop 40 bucks and then immediately wish I hadn't and then, several weeks later, realize it was the right decision after all. Scrivener is appealing in theory, annoying in practice, then, finally, excellent in practice.

Let me explain. The idea behind this word processor is that it is designed for creative writers--it eschews those features of, say, Word, that are of no use to us, and adds a bunch that are. A Scrivener file is essentially a wrapper for a bunch of smaller files, which can include novel chapters and sections, notes, research materials, character and place sketches, and the like; one can view the text of a given file, or a cork board that shows note cards for each file, on which you can type descriptions of its contents. This is incredibly useful when you're writing a novel and can't remember where and when certain things happen; it also allows you to move material around by clicking and dragging the note cards. Files can be automatically backed up to a folder in your Dropbox--a great feature. When you want to print out your manuscript or send it to your agent or what have you, you compile it into a pdf, doc, or other file; this exported file includes only your primary text and not all your notes. In short, Scrivener is a writing organization system with a word processor at the center of it.

Perhaps the simplest and most delightful thing about it is the fullscreen mode, whereby all the auxiliary controls disappear and all you can see is your text, displayed as though on a piece of paper against a black background. I thought at first that this would be a minor advantage for me, but in fact writing with this minimal interface is an extraordinary pleasure. You can't see emails coming in, you can't see anything at all except your text.

Here's the annoying part. There are two separate sets of formatting tools in Scrivener: one that determines how the writing looks on the page while you're working on it, and another that determines how it looks once it's been compiled and exported. This of course is useful, if you actually want these things to be different. But I am wedded to the idea that what I am looking at is my manuscript. In other words, I don't like the notion that the text is one thing, the display of the text is another thing, and the exported appearance of the text is a third thing. I want to see, while working, that I am, say, on page 47, and I like that "page 47" to mean something definitive. In Scrivener, it doesn't. Furthermore, Scrivener's stock templates for composition and export look terrible, in my opinion. I hate Courier--it is fake, a skeuomorphic gesture, the typographical equivalent of the PT Cruiser. I don't want my name on every page of my manuscript, or centered page numbers, or a copyright notice at the end, or the like. I want my stuff to be clean and simple, and I want to compose and export it in Garamond Premier Pro or Bembo.

Luckily, all this is totally customizable. But the controls for customizing these functions are complex and unintuitive, and the method for customizing the composition screens is completely different from the method for customizing the compile settings. You have to learn how to do the same thing twice, and once you've learned it, you forget it all instantly.

I recently transferred my entire novel-in-progress into Scrivener (see screenshot), and the process nearly made me give up using it entirely. But I bore down and figured it out, and now I've got a couple of very useful templates and compile settings that satisfy me. The app's usefulness has already proved itself in spades--I've had to insert, delete, or move chapters, and have been able to do so without needing to select text or renumber those chapters. The note cards have enabled me to find stuff easily, and it is great to have all my research material close at hand.

But I don't necessarily recommend this app for people who need their work to look a certain way, or who are bothered by cutesy mimetic stuff like cork boards, or silly features like a character name generator. There is something to be said for the starkness of Word or OpenOffice, and I'll probably still use the latter for short stories. But for novels, the advantages of the app outweigh its irritating quirks, and I'll stick with it.

Christopher Higgs on experimental literature

2011-02-22T09:21:00.000-05:00

I wanted to take a moment to link to this impressive series of posts by Christopher Higgs on "experimental literature" on my current favorite litblog, HTMLGiant. I especially like the last one, on the notion of blankness--something I've been obsessed with myself from time to time.

This is the kind of thing I think a blog is good for, but it's also the kind of topic I tend to run like hell from, as I do not have the kind of brain made for defining and categorizing. (Case in point, the bit where Higgs makes a distinction between conceptual and experimental literature.) In general I am too aware of, perhaps too fond of, the tendency of distinctions to blur and categories to bleed; I admit the usefulness of holding them in mind, but never seem to be able to do so myself.

Anyway, these are rigorous and interesting posts, well-illustrated and interestingly commented upon. Give them a look.

Writers At Cornell is back

2011-02-21T20:05:00.000-05:00

A little cross-blog action here, as I inform you that the first interview podcast of the year is up over at the Writers At Cornell blog. It's with W6 friend Stewart O'Nan, author of many novels, including Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels, Wish You Were Here, and the forthcoming Emily, Alone. He gave a great reading the other night at Goldwin Smith (interrupted, with just one sentence to go, by a fire alarm); during this interview we talked about his prolificity and work habits, his research acumen, and his adventures chronicling the Red Sox with Stephen King. Click the link above, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

This Thursday I'm going to be interviewing one of my favorite writers, Nicholson Baker, and will post the results Thursday evening. Anything you'd like me to ask him? I've already gotten a lot of good suggestions from friends--honestly, I'd happily talk to Baker for an hour if I could.

Every bookcase in our house

2011-02-19T13:50:00.000-05:00

Are E-Book Readers a Transitional Medium?

2011-02-16T19:50:00.006-05:00

CAUTION: boring tech post ahead! I'm getting ready to review some small press books AND John Dufresne's book on writing a book in six months. Is it possible? Stay tuned!

The other day I was reading a blog -- somewhere -- in which a commenter prophesied that one day we would all have little e-readers in our pockets, like pocket calculators. It would be that normal.

Hm. I always had the idea that e-readers and phones/tablet computers would kind of merge. What's the point of having a dedicated technology for reading books, when you can have a thing that will let you read books AND do a ton of other things? Seems to me that the e-reader is a transitional technology, one that helps people give up paper books before doing all their reading on a regular screen. How necessary is the whole "e-ink" thing? Most people who seem really excited about the Kindle and other e-readers are, well, old: my age and the next generation up, the Boomers.

But what do you think? Will we all have cheap little dedicated e-readers in our pockets stocked with entire libraries of books? Or will that whole model fall aside, and we'll be reading on our phones, as well as ordering food, checking our glucose, and whatever?

(Apparently contrary to a lot of arguments I hear lately, I think the medium is important. Would the novel be what it is -- chapters, 300ish pages, with paragraphs, etc -- if the technology of the bound book weren't holding it together? I'm no so sure.)

Picture is of the MailStation, an e-mail-only device I used for about 6 months many years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Who the hell is Arcade Fire?: The Aftermath

2011-02-15T20:06:00.000-05:00

For those of us who like the band, Arcade Fire's Grammy win the other night was quite a treat--an unexpected bit of recognition for a good album. But, like many people, I was struck by the meta-story that quickly supplanted the good news: the story that there are lots of people out there who had no idea that Arcade Fire even existed.

This is related to my previous post about the new NYT bestseller list, which makes a distinction--an arbitrary one, I think--between physical and virtual books. Both items call attention to the weird divide between those people who get most of their information by reading it online, and those people who don't. That is, the divide between people for whom the virtual is not any less real than any other reality.

For people whose cultural knowledge comes from the internet, Arcade Fire is a famous band--indeed, for some of us, they're an overexposed band we're sick of hearing about. (Not me, btw, I still like 'em.) If you buy music on iTunes (or steal it from Mediafire, for that matter), learn about new music from YouTube, or read music blogs, you know Arcade Fire. For those who consume music in the more traditional ways--listening to the radio and buying CD's at record stores--you probably don't.

It's the former people, I think, who have also digested the idea that the ebook is roughly equivalent to the physical book (at least by quantitative, if not aesthetic, standards), and don't really get why the Times should separate the two. This isn't necessarily an age divide, or a political one, or even an educational one. It's cultural.

We've reached the point at which hip obscureness is large enough to no longer be hip or obscure--indeed, it's a new, parallel mainstream, one that Rosie O'Donnell didn't appear to know about. And was offended not to have been informed of. That she expressed this emotion via Twitter is an added complication I don't think I have the mental energy to even contemplate.

More bestsellers

2011-02-14T08:47:00.001-05:00

I don't suppose I'm the only person who gaped in horror when he opened up this week's NYTimes Book Review and saw this. It's the new and improved bestsellers, divided into physical books, e-books, and then recombined, along with special charts indicating the differences between the two.

I don't mind that the New York Times is compiling this data; after all, it is of some use to some people. Publishers, I guess. People who market and publicize books. Jeff Bezos. But am I mistaken in believing that most people who read the Book Review do so in order to read about the contents of books, not their sales patterns? And honestly, what normal reader cares what percentage of book sales are electronic? Unless you are a dedicated technophile or luddite, it's all the same. A certain number of Steig Larsson books have sold, a high number. That information alone is more than most of us need.

It reminds me a bit of the shock--shock!!--that pundits and congressional Republicans profess when polls show, again and again, that no normal people give a rat's ass about deficit spending. It's blindered insider baseball--people in authority mistaking their own concerns (or, in the case of the Republicans, feigned concerns) for those of the people they serve. I can't imagine that the Times has been suffering under the weight of letters from readers, demanding more lists indicating who is making the most money in the publishing industry. I didn't send one, anyway.

Two interesting things involving physical manuscripts

2011-02-11T06:11:00.001-05:00

The first is this retrograde-tech art project by Maria Fischer featuring "hyperlinked" text connected with pieces of thread. Wow:

To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams. [...] On five pages there are illustrations made out of thread. Their shape and colour relies on the key words on the opposite page. This way an abstract image of the dream about dreaming is generated.

That one is via Engadget, now the top legible tech blog that a sane person can actually read, in the wake of the horrid Gawker redesign. The second is this little piece by Andrew James Weatherhead at HTMLGiant about Emily Dickinson's dashes. That debate seems to have been settled (dash inclusion good, dash elimination bad), but Weatherhead notes that the actual character of Dickinson's actual dashes is quite variable, and that even post-dashgate editions differ in how they treat the dashes.

"This is kind of interesting right?" he asks. Yes, optional-bracketing-comma man, it is!

RIP, BSB

2011-02-10T18:29:00.000-05:00

Damn.

What seemed inconceivable for this college town just a few years ago is now a fact. There will no longer be an independently owned bookstore for new books in, not only Ithaca, but all of Tompkins County. After many years of hard work and much, much joy, I am sad to announce that I will be closing Buffalo Street Books. This has been an incredibly difficult decision to make, one that many of you know I've been forced to contemplate for quite a while. The positives and negatives of owning and operating an independent bricks-and-mortar bookstore are many with the perks far, far outweighing the bumps but for personal reasons and a rapidly diminishing bottom line, I finally have no choice.

This has been, I think, a long time coming--Gary Weissbrot, our friend, and the owner of the store, nearly closed before, and it's an extraordinary achievement to have kept the place going for five years. He deserves a lot of thanks for providing Ithaca with a wonderful environment for readers and writers, and we will miss the place.

This is the first time in my entire adult life that I will have lived in a town without a viable independent bookstore. We have a Borders (though not for long, I'm sure) and a B&N, along with the Cornell Store, which has a small, decent trade-book section (about one-third the size of the sweatshirt section). But really, I think this pretty much ends the period of my life when I go book shopping in bookstores, at least in my home town. I don't like the chains at all, not because they're chains, but because their aesthetic depresses and repels me. I'll be ordering from Amazon, either for delivery or download. And every few months I'll drive downstate and visit the Strand.

End of an era! Thanks, Gary, for giving it a little more life.

Bad Reviews

2011-02-08T20:02:00.005-05:00

I like this post on The Millions by Emily St. John Mandel. It brings to mind a few interesting questions: How important should feedback be to a writer? What's the point of a negative review?

We've talked a lot about feedback here recently. As for the point of negative reviews: I guess there are two valid raisons d'etre: as a kind of consumer warning ("Don't waste yer money!") or as a contribution to a larger discussion, both of which are mostly only relevant to big books. There's really no defending a negative review of a small press book by a non-famous writer -- ignoring that book, if you don't like it, is enough. Since so much of reviewing is a matter of taste, you risk sinking a person's nascent career because of your fickle whims. I don't approve.

Of course, the real reason for reviews is publicity... and if all of a publication's reviews are positive, that would undermine the validity of their reviews in general. A reviewing publicity organ needs to distribute a certain number of negative reviews in order to maintain its credibility. Kind of depressingly arbitrary, isn't it.

How much bummer is too much?

2011-02-06T10:10:00.000-05:00

I spent most of yesterday sitting in front of the fire, watching slush bucket from the sky and reading David Vann's new novel Caribou Island. I would say that I liked it, but this isn't really the kind of novel one can say one "liked." It was certainly absorbing, very psychologically astute, and elegantly, straightforwardly written. But it's hard to imagine a novel being more claustrophobic and depressing. It isn't just that it's about a couple in their fifties attempting to repair a failed marriage by building a tiny cabin together on a remote Alaskan island--it's that the emotions are so unrelievedly grim, so unrelentingly joyless, that you can forget, reading it, that happiness even exists in the world. The one character in the novel who gets to experience happiness, the married couple's son, is able to achieve it only by cutting everyone else in the novel out of his life. Another guy gets to have sex with a beautiful woman, but it's portrayed as shallow and morally repugnant, and the woman turns out to be an evil manipulator who makes him give her ten thousand dollars.

I was addicted to this book while I was reading it--I ate it up with the kind of abandon I can usually only achieve with a really good crime novel--but in the hours since I finished I've grown increasingly disenchanted. It is accomplished but, to my mind, unnuanced--it starts out in hell and just stays there. The two main players are a total asshole ("You're a monster," he is told, and he is) and an embittered nag ("You're a mean old bitch," she is told, and it's true), with a supporting cast of losers, stoners, and meanies. The only character we are capable of somewhat liking, the daughter, is last seen, on the book's final page, riding on a boat, in the snow, toward the horrifying revalations that will destroy what's left of her pathetic life.

It isn't that Vann's writing is humorless--it isn't. One can sense that the author stands outside this material, that he is intentionally creating an artifact of human misery outside his own experience. But it is also clear that he set out to write a Very Serious Novel, with a lot of hatred and disgust and really terrible weather, and Very Seriously is precisely how Caribou Island is being received.

More power to him, I suppose. But, to me, this book is too one-dimensional to feel serious. It isn't that I want redemption, exactly, and I'm certainly not looking for sweetness and light. I suppose I think that good ficiton ought to acknowledge that human existence is absurd, not just painful. I mean--I already know it's painful, of course it is. Life is pain. But it's other things along the way, and those things give the pain meaning. And those things are not in Caribou Island.

For all that, I sort of semi recommend it--it's a vigorous piece of work. Just be prepared, once you put it down, to cancel your Alaska travel plans.

Who Should Write a Memoir?

2011-02-04T20:04:00.005-05:00

Every once in a while the New York Times Book Review publishes a total trashing -- it's rare enough that it gets a good deal of attention when it happens. I'll never forget Lee Siegel's evisceration of Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon -- reading a review like that is like hearing about a friend's divorce: it makes you feel simultaneously sick and intrigued. How awful it happened to them! And Thank God it didn't happen to me.

The latest victims are three memoirs taken down by Neil Genzlinger in the most recent NYTBR. I haven't read them, so I'm not going to comment on them in particular (though I guess that hasn't stopped me in the past) but rather on a couple of things Genzlinger says in his piece. The first is something I agree with, that No one wants to relive your misery. Well, okay, *I* don't want to relive your misery. I mean, I don't think I want to. But somehow I feel compelled to. It's weird. A few years ago I read probably the most horrifying memoir EVER: Ten Degrees of Reckoning by Hester Rumberg. It's about a family who travel around the world in a boat until a huge tanker crashes into them. The mother of the family watches as each of her children and her husband sink beneath the waves. She somehow makes it to land and is never the same. OF COURSE. It's a memoir of such abject misery I honestly don't know why it was published, though I know why it was written.

I agree with Genzlinger when he says,

Say you get stuck under a rock and have to cut off your own arm to escape. If, as you’re using your remaining hand to write a memoir about the experience, your only purpose in doing so is to make readers feel the blade and scream in pain, you should stop. You’re a sadist, not a memoirist; you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.

Yet, as queasy as these sadistic memoirs are, I can't stop reading them. How awful it happened to them! And Thank God it didn't happen to me.

So I do disagree with Genzlinger: my disagreement is two-layered. First, I don't think the content of the life experience should determine whether a person writes a memoir at all. At all! People's lives don't vary much in terms of interestingness; what varies is how perceptive the writer is. If you're a terrible, blah writer, you could make being the first woman to open a rib joint on Mars sound stupid. On the other hand, someone like Alan Bennett makes his quiet life infinitely fascinating. Genzlinger implies you need either an interesting life or a talent for writing. I think you just have to be able to write.

Secondly, he blames writers for the flood of banal memoirs. But human beings have always written about their lives, for better or for worse, boring and silly or vicious or sadistic. That doesn't mean publishers have to publish it. Why do writers always get the blame for bad trends? Seriously, I don't know a single person who can crank out 300 pages of something they don't believe in. Every memoir out there had to be written -- someone had to memorialize her dog, or capture his traumatic disease, or remember a childhood.

But need does not necessarily translate to excellence. And it's the editor's job to notice that, in the end, isn't it? You can't blame a writer for lacking talent, but you sure can blame a publisher for pretending the subject will carry the day.

Suggested memes for eager trendseekers

2011-02-03T19:42:00.001-05:00

from patchworkunderground.com.
It turns out porno quilting
is a real thing.

I've got a lot of very fine ideas for hit nonfiction memoir/self-help titles, but am too lazy to write them. Would you like to? You don't even have to share the money with me, just thank me profusely in your acknowledgements section. Which, by law, must be at least three pages long.

Passive Daddy's Parenting Boot Camp

My Year Of Only Snacking

Vodka Buddha

1000 Prescriptions: My Harrowing Journey Through Hell To Purity

Fertility By Proxy: A Love Story

Baby Talk Saved Our Marriage

Kickball King: A 40-Year-Old Man Repeats Fifth Grade

Chimp Vs. Child: A Homeschooling Odyssey

Pill Pals

Bros Before Hoes: How Four Heterosexual Men Discovered Communal Gardening

The Hirsute Nearsighted Men's Midnight Samovar Society

The Videogame Organic Cola Cure

Hipster Tent City: Six Months In A Vacant Lot In Flatbush

The Power Of Clowning

Vow Of Silence

Canning Therapy

The Swap: How My Sister And I Traded Husbands And Why We're Not Switching Back

Laced: How I Overcame Drug Addiction Through Tatting

In The Margin: My Year Living In A Highway Median Strip

Kickboxing Librarian Sex Goddess Speaks

Philosopher Dogwalker

Mating Call Of The Thai Noodle Daddy

Cry Every Hour

The Booksellers' Noonday Forced Laughter Club

Krumping With Aunt Sue: How L.A. Street Dancing Healed My Family

Driving My Neighbor's Kid From Houston To Anchorage

The Lego Sex Life Solution

Par None: How I Found Myself Through Ironic Golf Playing

The Unemployed Academics' Five O'Clock Actors' Studio

My Year Of Muttonchops

Scavenge For Life

How I Found And Kept True Love Through Celibacy

The Netflix Marriage

My Year Of Buying Every Single Thing I Wanted

Multiple Orgasms Through Prayer

My Year Of Being Constantly Stoned

My Year Of Lies

Porno Quilter

The Ward Six Way

2011-02-02T19:08:00.000-05:00

You have seen, have you not, the hideousness that is AOL's leaked business plan? If the idea of clicking that link gives you a headache, that probably means that you already know what it says. The plan is essentially a blueprint for creating as much video-heavy, search-engine-optimized crap journalism as is humanly possible, as quickly as possible. If there is an opposite to literature, "The AOL Way" is it.

I did, however, enjoy Horace Dediu's response today on Asymco, his very well-written tech-industry blog. (Yes, I read such things, so sue me.) And I think "The Asymco Way" is germane not only to this blog, but to anyone who creates content on the internet. In short, Dediu says:

- Learn by writing. Teach by listening.
- Improve. Move the intellectual ball forward.
- Illuminate topics which are bereft of analysis.
- Be notable. [...] How likely is the idea to being widely re-published?
- Review. Encourage participation by reading all comments and reply to as many as possible.
- Repair. Declare and correct errors.
- Select. Publish only when the contribution is unique. Avoid redundancy, clutter and noise.

Yes to every one of those. And, if I were going to create a "Ward Six Way" I might add the following: Respect one's fellow writers not only with praise, but with constructive criticism, when warranted. Avoid cynicism. Substitute rigor for snark. Have a sense of humor. Educate yourself well on a topic before commenting on it.

And Dediu's closing remark could be seen as a golden rule for anyone seeking a career in writing or publishing. He writes: "What about the business model? I’m afraid there isn’t one. I’m still naive enough to think that if I build a great product then everything else will take care of itself."

Here's hoping we all stay naive, indefinitely.

What Happened to Harper's?

2011-02-01T20:36:00.007-05:00

I've subscribed to Harper's Magazine for at least 20 years, since I got out of college. I also subscribed to The Atlantic then, but I always liked Harper's better (all the fiction in The Atlantic, we used to joke, had to have priests, Irish people, or boats in it, if not all three) and then The Atlantic stopped publishing fiction, except for once a year, so I stopped reading it. Harper's stayed good, even great; the fiction was wild and unpredictable (even publishing a whacked-out novel in serial by some crazy guy) and the non-fiction always surprising and smart. I even enjoyed Lewis Lapham's loopy rants. If the mag seemed to be less totally wonderful lately, I chalked it up to the natural cycles of publishing: everyone has their ups and downs.

But could Harper's be... over? You probably heard about the trouble they've been having with their publisher, who is laying off several editors. What it looks like from the outside -- and I certainly have no inside knowledge -- is that the magazine doesn't want to make the compromises it has to make if it wants to survive in the same world as Huffington Post and Gawker and Talking Points Memo and all those other constantly updating, endlessly interesting, free sources of news and journalism and culturey stuff. Their publisher has publicly ranted against the Internet. But is it even possible to be a print-only, general interest magazine anymore?

Well, The Atlantic seems to be doing okay. It has a real, busy, packed-with-news website, lots of bloggers, and it's spiffed up its journalism -- lots of attention getting articles like Caitlin Flanagan's anti-school-gardens screed. That knee-jerk nay-saying stuff is annoying as heck, but it gives people something to argue about. Anyway, The Atlantic feels alive.

Should Harper's take a leaf from The Atlantic's pages? Should they modernize and hyperactivate? Or go down screaming?

Really, Steve? Really?

2011-01-31T17:31:00.002-05:00

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Wesley Smith buys an Amazon Kindle to keep his mind off his recent nasty breakup, but he finds that his version is no ordinary e-reading device. Smith's Kindle has a special Ur option, which reveals the future and all the works his favorite authors have written in parallel dimensions. However, when the Ur delivers news of terrible events on the way, Smith must decide if he should interfere in fate. While King can certainly spin a good story, the Amazon Kindle focus (the story was written exclusively for and can only be read on an Amazon Kindle) keeps this one feeling like an advertising gimmick.

Let's see--why, do you think? Maybe because...it is one? I mean, I like the Kindle and all, but this is really a step beyond that U2-branded iPod.

The funny thing is, my Kindle also has an Ur option, which enables me to predict exactly what kind of book Stephen King is going to write next. It's going to be about an educated guy in a creative profession, who nevertheless possesses considerable working-class street cred, and who discovers some kind of evil lurking in a small town, and must confront his own fears to defeat it.

Ah, I should leave the poor guy alone--he probably needed the dough.

Great Sentences?

2011-01-30T18:52:00.007-05:00

Thanks to Matt Tiffany at Condalmo for writing about this article on Slate: a little summary of Stanley Fish's new book, in which he "celebrates" some great sentences from several centuries of literature.

Here are a couple of the sentences he chose:

Jonathan Swift (from A Tale of a Tub, 1704): "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance for the worse."

Ford Madox Ford (from The Good Soldier, 1915): "And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars."

I wouldn't have chosen Fish's sentences; I don't like any of them at all, actually. The Swift, for instance, isn't particularly clever or sly or whatever -- it's just grotesque, and if that's his point, fine. But I don't have to like it. And the Ford Ford is really just too much: the wind as a polishing black flood? Wind being wind is enough, for me.

In college I learned that a perfect sentence is a line of iambic pentameter, that the English language strives toward that shape. And I like surprises, simplicity, and deadly accuracy in sentences. I don't collect sentences, but I think Nabokov wrote my favorites. Here's one from Pnin that's painted on the wall of the Cornell English department:

The brook in the gully behind the garden, a trembling trickle most of the time, was tonight a loud torrent that tumbled over itself in its avid truckling to gravity, as it carried through corridors of beech and spruce last year's leaves, and some leafless twigs, and a brand-new, unwanted soccer ball that had recently rolled into the water from the sloping lawn after Pnin disposed of it by defenestration.

Gawd, I love that sentence. Not, for sure, an iambic pentameter, but so vividly specific, and heartbreaking -- Pnin bought that soccer ball for the son he had never met, wildly guessing what a teenage boy would like.

What do you like in a sentence?

Chabon on blogging

2011-01-28T05:55:00.002-05:00

The author in less bloggy times.

OK, then, since Rhian likes it so much, here's a follow-up to that last post about engaging the world. Michael Chabon did some pinch-hitting over at The Atlantic this week, and departed with some reflections upon the experience.

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels [...] configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.

Then there's that whole business of the Comments.

The first thing that occurs to me, reading that, is that Chabon spent way too much time on that paragraph--you can tell he's new to writing for the internet. The second is that, of course, he's quite right--if you assume blogging to be a particular kind of thing. The thing he thinks it is, is, indeed, what it usually is. But one thing I like about litblogging, as opposed to, say, tech blogging, is that it specifically doesn't depend upon timeliness and close attention. It can be contemplative. One can write about things published thirty years ago, that nobody is making any money on. One can blog in reptile time, as he puts it.

The blog, like any technology, has many uses. Zen sandbox is one of them. Not that, say, responding to Anis Shivani posts is remotely zen--but engagement is a choice, level of engagement is a choice. One can ask a litblog to fit into one's writing life, to support and nurture it. Which I think this one has done for us. Otherwise we wouldn't have kept it going for (!) four years.

Recluse or gadfly?

2011-01-25T19:40:00.000-05:00

Image Source: The Internet

Sometimes, such as right now, I am given to wonder how important or useful it is for a writer to be engaged with, and alert to, his own culture. Is it better to sequester oneself, monklike, so as to avoid distractions and petty desires and dedicate oneself fully to one's work? Or is it preferable to fling oneself into the river of crap, in the hope of finding some choice flotsam?

This occured to me today because I just started reading Nabokov's Glory, and found I had to force myself through the first couple of pages. I love Nabokov and I'm sure I'll get into it soon enough, but I decided to go back and figure out what the problem was. And it was that the opening pages of this novel are written too narrowly for a particular time and culture (the Russian intelligensia of 1932). There are allusions, references, assumptions that the young Nabokov expected his readers would understand, and at the time they probably did. But I don't--not instinctively, anyway. The pages make sense, of course, but they leave a vague sense of obscureness, of exclusion.

You won't get this with Chekhov. As Rhian was saying yesterday, he holds up awfully well. One feels he was writing for the ages, not for his culture. The work is ostensibly about his culture, but its true subject is universal human emotion. You don't need a footnote in "The Lady With The Dog" to tell you that Yalta is where Muscovites went on vacation. It doesn't matter; we get it. What matters is the bit where the civil servant leans out of the carriage and tells Gurov that the sturgeon was a bit off, and Gurov is for some reason deeply wounded. He desires a certain kind of succor and instead is confronted by his alienation from other people and their petty concerns. This is universal--as long as people read short stories, this scene will make sense.

I can't help but feel as though all the September 11th novels we've seen so far will be forgotten very very soon. The novels of contemporary manners, the novels of urban snark and hip self-consciousness: they are too much about what we think we are, not what we actually are. When we immerse ourselves in the here and now, we lose sight of the fact that most of our daily worries are about things that will be gone in a century, if not next week. But it's hard to write about what will be left. Those are the things that hurt us the most, that make us feel the most helpless.

Which is not to say I'll soon be deleting my Twitter account. Life in 2011 is too damned much fun. I think I'll try to lock my cave door a little more often, though.

Rereading

2011-01-24T20:19:00.002-05:00

The are a few things I read over and over -- the stories of Alice Munro -- but for the most part I don't reread much. Lately, though, I haven't found anything new to read so I tried looking over some old favorites. MISTAKE! A novel I loved, loved, loved twenty years ago seems to have some big obvious flaws these days. A favorite kids' book is, somehow, mysteriously, boring.

But the stories of Anton Chekhov, the patron saint of this blog, are even better than I remember. Each story is also a little different from how I remember it: this time around, new details stand out, and different observations resonate with me. I have a copy of Lady With Lapdog that I first read in grad school. I underlined certain things. For example, I underlined the following from the story "Ward Six":

There was a pause. At that moment Darya came out of the kitchen and stopped in the doorway to listen, with an expression of mute grief, her face resting on her fist.

Why? Why that bit? I have no idea. It's a nice bit, but I have no idea what particularly struck me back in 1994.

This time, I underlined a new bit, from "Ariadne," which is a story I didn't remember well but might be my new favorite:

Ariadne wanted me to join her in Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright, warm day. It had been raining and the raindrops still hung on the trees.

Of course, I know what I like about it this time: first, I like the audacity with which Chekhov totally dispenses with the journey to Abbazzia. There's no buying the tickets, getting on the boat, being on the boat, blah blah blah. Instead, of all the details to choose to describe arriving in a new place, he picks that one little one about raindrops. And I know what he means. Sometimes you arrive in a new place where it has been raining, but it isn't anymore, it's sunny, and you can't even imagine what that place looks like in the rain. It's a detail about newness and alienation, but it's also beautiful and vivid. There's probably more packed in there, but who wants to pull it apart?

Sometimes a not-so-good piece of writing feels great -- and actually is great -- because it's the right thing for you at the right time. But other stories or novels or poems are so hugely great that they somehow manage to be always new, always surprising, and always just the right thing for whoever you've happened to turn into.

Do you ever reread? What books stand the test of time?

A hodgepodge

2011-01-23T20:32:00.000-05:00

There were all kinds of things I wanted to tell y'all about this weekend, in the form of web links. So here they all are:

Pics and blogging from the Electric Literature reading the other night in New York. Big thanks to Five Red Pandas and husband for coming! EL5 is out now, with a story by me and more by other people.

Here's a new interview with Ed Skoog, our sporadic co-bloggist.

I sort of liked this James Ryerson piece in the Times Book Review, but if you cross your eyes just a little, it starts to sound like every let's-make-up-a-category-of-novel-then-analyze-it essay you've ever read.

The chords to Robert Pollard's "Tight Globes." I have no idea what this song is about, but for some reason it gets me all choked up.

A terrific essay on Springsteen by Hope Jordan. Do you have to be her facebook friend to see it? I hope not, it should be public. Anyway, everyone should be her friend, too.

Via the great HTMLGIANT, a largely visual blog called Writers No One Reads.

And from the same place, a nice Kyle Minor piece on the sentences of Vladimir Nabokov, which of course were also very, very nice.

Some interesting thoughts about Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath on Montevidayo.

You can never re-read 27b/6 too many times.

Patton Oswalt goes to town on Geek Culture, and then Ed Champion reacts with the most words any human being will ever write about the new movie The Green Hornet. Also, Oswalt decided to make his 2000th tweet something really special.

W6 friend Rana Dasgupta has a new book out, and it looks great. Go listen to him on his US tour.

Finally, we are having some killer readings at Cornell this spring, which means some interesting new interviews, I hope, on the podcast blog. For some reason the schedule has not yet been posted, but look forward to Stewart O'Nan, Nicholson Baker, Laura Furman, Peter Balakian, and Margaret Atwood. (I think I'm leaving somebody out.)

Shake it like you just don't care

2011-01-20T15:17:00.001-05:00

I spent a lovely afternoon walking home from the office listening to The Dukes of Stratosphear's 1987 CD Chips From The Chocolate Fireball. This album combines the band's two releases, the EP 25 O'Clock and the album Psonic Psunspot, both pastiches of psychedelic rock in the style of, say, the Zombies or Jefferson Airplane, and both actually the work of the British new wave rock band XTC.

I don't know what XTC fans generally think of these records, but for my money, they're the best thing XTC has ever done. They are funny, inventive, catchy, and utterly lack self-importance, which, when XTC isn't so hot, is often the way they are not so hot. They employ all the familiar tricks and tropes of the era, including phased and modulated vocals, thick harmonies, combo organs, fake Indian chord progressions, acid-trip lyrics, hard panning of instruments, tape hiss, backwards guitar solos, and copious amounts of echo. Indeed, they court cliché, they toe the line so hard.

So why do they sound so inalienably like everything that is great about XTC? In part it's because this kind of music inspired the band in the first place. But mostly, I think, it's that this music was freeing for them--under a false name, and under the sway of artificial constraints, they didn't have to worry about making an XTC record. They just had to worry about having a good time.

When I think about which of my novels and stories and other things I like the best, and I try to remember what it was like to write them (as I often do when I don't like what I'm writing), I generally come to the conclusion that, at the time, I didn't care how it came out, and I assumed it would never be published. Mailman is a good example--it's my favorite of my books, and the whole time I was writing it I kept thinking, "Nobody is ever going to publish this thing. So why not write whatever the hell I want?"

Of course I was lying to myself, even then. Secretly, I very badly wanted those things to be published. But I somehow managed to lie to myself about lying to myself long enough to accomplish something.

It's not that I dislike the work that is the product of intense cogitation and self-conscious effort. Indeed, I've often said, here and elsewhere, that I don't believe in--or, more to the point, don't trust--inspiration. And the freewheeling stuff is always subject to multiple revisions, executed in a soberer mood, much later.

But I do think we're often our best selves when we forget ourselves. Perhaps this is why genre fiction so often appeals to literary writers--or metafiction, for that matter, or pastiche, or parody. We're such sniveling, self-pitying bastards; it's nice to step away from the mirror and be somebody else for a change.

Blame grad school

2011-01-18T15:48:00.000-05:00

Am I really going to write about this again? I suppose I am. I have remarked here, from time to time, about the embittered ravings of Anis Shivani, and his loathing of all things academic. But now here we go again, this time from Cathy Day, writing on themillions.com (via HTMLGIANT, again, thank you Kyle):

...most fiction workshop instructors use the short story—not the novel or the novella or the novel-in-stories—as the primary pedagogical tool in which to discuss the craft of fiction. Why is this so? Simply: the short story is a more manageable form, both for the instructor and the student, and I have been both. For the writer who teaches a full load of courses and is always mindful of balancing “prep” time with writing time, it’s easier to teach short stories than novels, and it’s easier to annotate and critique a work-in-progress that is 10 pages long as opposed to a story that is 300 pages long. It’s advantageous for students, too. Within the limited time frame of a semester, they gain the sense of accomplishment that comes with writing, submitting for discussion, revising, and perhaps even finishing (or publishing!) a short story. It’s a positively Aristotelian experience. Beginning. Middle. End. Badda bing, badda boom.

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say this: The short story is not experiencing a renaissance. Our current and much-discussed market glut of short fiction is not about any real dedication to the form. The situation exists because the many writers we train simply don’t know how to write anything but short stories. The academy—not the newsroom or the literary salon or the advertising firm—has assumed sole responsibility for incubating young writers.

Oh, for pete's sake. "Incubating?" This is not what we're doing, and for those of us who have been in MFA programs, this isn't what we felt was being done to us. That is, if we were bothering to do anything at all worthwhile. As students, we were writing whatever the hell we wanted to write, and as teachers, we are teaching according to whatever the hell our students are writing.

"The short story is a more manageable form." Perhaps. But you have to be a pretty shitty teacher to value manageability over artistic ambition. More than half of my current fiction grad students are writing novels, and some of my undergrads are, too. And I read them all, without hesitation. BECAUSE THAT'S MY JOB. Several of my recent grad students are publishing novels as well--good ones.

But how is this possible? Well, it's because grad students are not fucking idiots, that's why. They are able to give one another the proper context when they workshop novel excerpts. They read one another's novel manuscripts. When their peers workshop short stories, they are able to apply much of what they learned in this process to the process of writing and editing a novel. They also read lots of novels. And, at least at Cornell, we have craft-centered literature classes in which the structure, style, and purpose of novels are discussed.

The workshop model is not forcing anyone to write short stories, or any particular kind of short story. Undergrads like short stories because they're just starting out at fiction and want to give it a try on a smaller scale. And it's true, we are very ready to accomodate them. But these stories are not like processed meat, dumped out of a can. They are wildly different from one another. And we accomodate students' longer works too--and their memoirs, graphic novels, poem cycles, opera librettos, dance/literature hybrids, experimental film scripts, fine art printing projects, and collaborations with composers. And yes, I have seen all of these things in my five years at Cornell. And every time, I've said, "Awesome, let's do this." Is your writing program not like this? Then fix your writing program, because it sucks.

Furthermore, much of the work of a writing teacher happens not in workshop but during office hours, or at the coffee shop in the basement, or at a bar after workshop, or on the phone, or via email, or in the many years of professional and personal friendship that often follow a student's years in an MFA program. We do not run factories. We provide a place for students to figure out what they want, and then we help them achieve it. The idea that there is some rigid structure here, or that we are helpless in the face of it, is asinine.

If the publishing world appears to be drowning in a flood of mediocre short stories, that's because it is. It always was. Most writing is terrible, and there is a lot of it. I am tired of people declaring that this era is shittier than all the others, and then blaming me for it. In fact there is more good fiction being written now than I could read in eight lifetimes, and, much as I'd like to believe otherwise, that's not my fault either.

Lorrie Moore is Right

2011-01-17T19:54:00.004-05:00

This weekend the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Lorrie Moore on the Huck Finn n-word thing I posted about last week. She suggests that Huckleberry Finn isn't really appropriate for high schoolers and should be studied in college. Well, she's right, I think, and I was wrong. It's a great essay.

Of course, convincing high school teachers to change their curricula is probably more difficult than cutting a word from a book. And what should replace HF? I guess we can't answer that question until we figure out exactly what the goals are when we teach literature to high school students. Lorrie Moore suggests that a main goal is to get kids to like to read. That's a good goal, but I don't think it's enough. The fact is, for many kids, the books they read in their high school English classes will be the last novels they ever read, no matter how much those books cater to their tastes. Perhaps some of those books should challenge their tastes -- broaden them. The Scarlet Letter was the most difficult book I'd ever read back in 11th grade; I remember opening my bedroom window and leaning out into a snowstorm to try and stay awake through it. I hated every page of that stupid book. But I learned that I could actually read something hard, and understand it. (Later we read O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, which was about 900 pages of Norwegian immigrants trying to bury their dead children in the frozen prairie. OMG. I can't believe I read the whole thing. My English teacher was a genius.)

These days high school curricula are much more multi-cultural, which is good, and I suppose HF has hung on so long in part because of the difficult questions about race and history it raises. But what else is out there? Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which Moore mentions in her essay, is terrific and a perfect choice to teach to teenagers: it talks about identity, history, and culture, but is also very funny and brilliantly written.

Can you think of any other great books for a high school literature class?

Killing time

2011-01-16T18:30:00.000-05:00

photo from
http://www.drbrucewilson.com/

As an introduction to this post about Iambik, the indepdent audiobook publisher (Castle for five bucks, allow me to remind you), Kyle Minor at HTMLGiant shares an amusing story about his days as a traveling salesman of "eighth-rate university educations":

Even when I’m driving, I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. I once drove eight hours, from Pensacola to Lake Wales, Florida, while reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This horrified everyone who cared about me. This was before the days of education about texting and driving.

It's amazing to consider just how much of one's life is utterly wasted in the execution of necessary, time-consuming, and mentally empty tasks. Driving is the obvious one, of course. But then there's waiting in line at the post office or the bank, waiting for a children's birthday party to end, waiting for a child's music lesson to finish. In college I lived on the twentieth floor of a high rise with an interminably slow elevator. It took me months to realize I should always, always have a paperback in my pocket.

Of course the problem is there aren't many paperbacks that can be digested in a manner appropriate to the amounts of time you have to waste. There are only so many times you can read, say, Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, or, for that matter, my plundering of it. This is one of the major reasons I am in love with my phone--I've got all my favorite blogs, literary and otherwise, subscribed to an RSS feed that I view using Reeder; and if I'm in mid-novel on the Kindle, I can pick up where I left off on my phone, then return in the same place when I'm back home on the sofa.

One oft-mentioned side effect of this age of technological fetishism is that we are constantly distracted by our devices. It's true, we are. But we can also make use of time we used to have to kill by, in my case, obsessing over worthless shit. Today, thank heavens, it is more possible than ever to stuff worthwhile reading into every empty crevice in our lives.

Are You a Double-Spacer?

2011-01-15T19:12:00.007-05:00

image lifted from www.loneplacebo.com

You've probably seen this article in Slate: the author works up quite a lather about people who still put two spaces after a period. I was all set to defend the double space--sentimental old Luddite that I am--but then I looked at some writing I did recently and was vaguely surprised to see that I apparently dropped the double space a while ago. Maybe I knew at some level that computers do proportional spacing, so there isn't a need. Also, laziness.

What's most interesting about the article is the author's barely concealed rage. What's that all about? Hatred of the young for the old? Because most people really stuck in the double-space thing are older. Those of who took typing classes or had tough old English teachers or who worked as secretaries got the double space thrashed into us, and there's no one around to thrash it back out.

But yeah, who needs it anymore? Let's save a calorie or two and create manuscripts--or blog posts--that look like type-set type.

But again: what's with the anger? Who cares? Blogger, for example, apparently nixes the double space anyway, and certainly if you're writing for publication, the copy editor will take care of it, along with all your dumb mistakes. The average email is hardly a thing of beauty that will be marred by an extra space here and there.

(This is probably not the place to bring this up, but why is there so much misplaced anger these days? Tea Party, yeah, I mean you.)

I have a little more sympathy for people who obsess about grammar and usage: there's an argument to be made that persistent errors of usage actually degrade the language. But typography has never been the concern of writers. That's what printers are for.

Here's something to get mad about: word processing programs that automatically put a white space after every paragraph. THAT IS WRONG! AND BAD! Look at a novel--are there spaces after every paragraph? No, there are not. Sometimes there are white spaces, but those are deliberate and have meaning. Some kinds of non-fiction, I guess journalism, put a white space after each paragraph (I'm doing it now!), but why can't people who want it just hit the return key? Okay, that's enough of that.

JRL reading in NYC next Friday, 1/21

2011-01-14T20:32:00.000-05:00

Hey readers--Rhian will be back with a real post tomorrow, but until then I thought I'd let you know I'm reading in New York a week from right this second, Friday January 21, 7pm, at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in Soho. Here are the details. I will be reading with the very funny Ben Greenman and stealth genius Lynne Tillman (whose magnificent freakout American Genius is not like any book I have ever read in my entire life), in an event dedicated to promoting the fifth issue of the excellent, excellent Electric Literature, the cover of which features a painting of some nude dude playing a video game.

This event is billed as "plus film and a DJ," so you never know, maybe there will be live dancing videogame nude dudes? I certainly hope so. Anyway, please come, and buy me nine drinks. I dare you.

Great reading experiences

2011-01-13T18:56:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not talking about your experiences reading your favorite books, but your favorite experiences reading books. That is, the times you most enjoyed the act of reading. I was thinking about this tonight because I've been wondering about the incredibly intense pleasure I feel reading thrillers, even when they're not especially good. What's up with that? I am already forgetting the one I read a couple of days ago (although the one I read yesterday will likely stick with me a while), but I get a delightful little chill thinking about the hours I spent lying on the sofa, in my pajamas, in the middle of the day, zooming through its mass-market pages before a roaring fire. (Can you tell classes haven't started yet?) I also recall the intense pleasure of hiding in our bedroom at our rental house at the Jersey shore one August, reading Black Dahlia Avenger.

Most of the books whose contents have stuck with me have become unmoored form the circumstances in which I read them. Not all--Rhian pointed out that she has rather unpleasant memories of reading Anna Karenina: she was temping at the Teamsters' Union and reading at her desk. I, on the other hand, read Anna K while sipping liquor in our friend's friend's log cabin (insofar as a four-bedroom rustic quasi-mansion with satellite dish and wet bar can be called a cabin) on the Madison River in southern Montana. But I couldn't tell you what it was like reading, say, any Alice Munro story--the intensity of the fiction, I suppose, has overridden the real-world circumstances of my reading it.

I guess a book has to reach a certain threshold of quality before it can generate a memorable reading experience--one has to be into it, after all. But in most circumstances, at least for me, it can't be too good, so good as to make the world around it disappear. Aside from Anna K, I most strongly remember reading books that I read without much effort...the ones that seemed to flow into me. Like, I suppose, sipping liquor in a log mansion.

Contrarianism

2011-01-12T20:04:00.002-05:00

Here's something that's not going to go over well: I think it's just fine to take the n-word out of Huckleberry Finn. Not forever, not in the definitive version or the Norton edition or whatever -- but in a version for teaching in high schools: sure. Do it. The word's meaning has changed and become loaded with complicated baggage and what Twain meant is no longer obvious. The word gets too much attention, titillates some kids, shuts other kids down. Conversations about the book end up being about that word. Replace it with some asterisks and get on with it.

I taught school in my twenties, and I had classes that were 100% African-American, was sometimes the only white person in the room. Handing my students a text with that word in it would have made me feel sick, sad, and abusive. Sure, we could have talked about it, put it in its correct historical context, had a powerful conversation about who makes the language, who owns it, etc. But at the end of the day, what would the kids remember? Let's be realistic. Their teacher used the n-word.

It's possible that my views on the subject have to do with my unresolved, unexcavated, feelings about those teaching years. And maybe I don't think kids are ready for Mark Twain at all. Could be.

But I also don't think there's much wrong with "censorship" when it's done by an adult for children. I don't let my kids watch Quentin Tarantino, either. And no text is sacred. I mean, thought Jane Austen was sacred, but look: now it's full of zombies.

The groove and the slump

2011-01-11T17:04:00.000-05:00

I had a mad, mad week of writing last week. I've been working on a second draft of a novel-in-progress for some time, and figured I would complete this draft around the end of my winter break, which ends in two weeks. My pace was steady and sure, and the work pretty much what I'd hoped it would be.

Then, a week and a half ago, I fell into a groove of some kind and spent the better part of the week writing, in bed, more or less all day long. Even when I wasn't writing, I felt as though my head was exploding. I would bounce ideas off of Rhian, and she would volley with some more ideas, and I would go pouring them all into the manuscript (and coffee into my body) starting at five the next morning. I wasn't getting enough sleep and drinking too much in the evening in order to achieve it. It was a totally unsustainable state of being--I think the last time I experienced something like it was as long ago as 2002 or 2003, when I was writing my fourth novel. The difference this time, of course, was that I knew about, and felt intensely the inevitability of, the crash to come.

I finished the draft Saturday morning and sent it out to my usual second-draft readers. I have no idea if anything I just wrote is any good. But man, am I in a slump now. I did a month's worth of work in a week, and now I doubt I'll be able to do anything useful with the rest of the month I should have spent writing.

I wonder about these rhythms--if they're healthy to indulge, in the long run, or damaging to the kind of emotional equilibrium that a steady and productive writer needs for a fairly successful career. I'm not a big believer in "inspiration"--or, rather, I doubt that it is nearly as valuable as it is generally given credit for. Most of my best stuff, even if it was initially the product of inspiration, was only made readable through careful, calculated editing, done alone or with others' help.

At the moment, even in the depths of the slump, I can't say I really miss the intensity of last week. Rather, I miss the sober, gradual progress of the week before that. That's what I want back now.

Quitting is Good?

2011-01-10T18:30:00.005-05:00

This post on Lifehacker -- "Create Better Things by Abandoning Crap and Focusing on the Good Stuff" -- might make a person feel slightly better about all the the unfinished work in her desk drawer. Ira Glass talks about how, in the making of his radio show, he has to sort through tons of ideas and try them out in order to find a single good one:

Killing the bad stuff, he says, is just as important as doing good stuff. I agree -- "quitting" is awfully stigmatized, but sometimes it's the right course. Sometimes your work is bad, and you're just wasting time pounding your head against its ugly hide.

However. As someone points out in the Lifehacker comments, giving up too soon really is a bigger problem for most artists. The trick is knowing what's worth finishing and what isn't. Ira Glass doesn't have to worry about that. It's not hard to tell when a radio story put together by a group of people isn't working. It's much harder to know when it's the novel you've been working on alone for five years. And sometimes you have to finish a thing before its true crappiness -- or greatness -- comes out.

And sometimes the crappiness of a project doesn't even matter. It's just the thing you have to do right now, and so you do it.

How do you know if your work is worth finishing?

The current state of self-publishing

2011-01-09T09:51:00.000-05:00

Our friend Jason Lewis, an Iowa Workshop grad and author of the tech blog Stuff I Don't Need, recently wrote a post about his novel The Fourteenth Colony,

...that took me five years to write, and has been done since November 2009. And by done, I mean that I wrote six drafts of it (a few completely from scratch) and when I put the final period on the last draft, the book was the book that I wanted it to be, maybe not perfect, but the book I wanted to write.

He's got an agent, and the agent sent the book around, and it didn't sell. And now he is asking himself the very reasonable question of whether it is time to self-publish. Or, specifically,

in a world where the publishing industry is failing according to many and the means of production are available at a high level to everyone, should I release my book into the world to see how it fares and move on with my new projects, or is there a reason to keep pounding away at the traditional structure in the hopes of acceptance?

And that is a very good question. I suspect that Jason has many novels in him, and eventually one of them is bound to find a home in the conventional publishing world. What it comes down to, though, is whether the stigma of self-publication harms the future chances of a new writer in that world.

There was a time when one might confidently say that yes, it would. But I'm not sure it does anymore, as the link between good writing and institutional stewardship of it grows weaker and weaker. And it's becoming possible to question, quite reasonably, what value that world has in the current climate of enthusiastic DIY publication and distribution. People are already getting used to the idea that small presses are as legitimate as their commerical counterparts; the major awards have been trending towards the indies for several years. If small presses are the new big houses, then who's to say that going it alone might soon be the new small press? We have a few readers who've been going it alone fairly successfully for some time...I wonder if any of you are thinking of following suit, and how you're choosing to do it.

Note: the photo is of Jason's last record as Sad Iron Music, available for download on his website--it's a good album, check it out.

Writing to Music

2011-01-07T19:37:00.002-05:00

JRL and I are opposites in many, many ways. In practically every way, actually. One big difference is: I have to listen to music when I'm writing. He can't.

The main reason I listen to music is to block out ambient sounds. Like: cars rumbling past and potentially turning into our driveway. Mice in the walls. Other mice being chased by our cat, and in need of rescue. Family members saying interesting things on the phone. The heater turning on and off. Why does it do that? Wind slapping the screen door. Oh, anything.

But the other reason is just because music seems to calm my brain waves. I'm not sure there's anything to that, but you know.

I listen to music that has no words, or if it has words, is so familiar to me that I can ignore them. I like classical music a lot, Debussy, Satie, Mendelssohn, Scriabin, and Phillip Glass. One morning my clock radio alarm went off (on?) and began playing the third movement of Satie's Gnossiennes, and it infiltrated my dreams. That music ended up being the secret inner sound track to my novel. I didn't actually mention Satie in the book -- I really don't like it when writers put their inner soundtracks into their writing. That stuff is too personal.

Another time I was listening to an instrumental group called Tulsa Drone, and that inspired a half a novel. But then the book got too creepy and I abandoned it. I blame the music! (Not really. I still like them.)

Anyway, it seems like the music the writer is listening to while writing ends up in the work in all sorts of ways... but the reader never hears it or sees evidence of it. Which is kind of strange.

I'd love recommendations for good writing music.

C

2011-01-06T18:48:00.000-05:00

Well, I read it, but I am not sure what to think. For one thing, on the surface, it feels as though it couldn't possibly be written by the same guy. But then again, there's no one else who could have written it. It is, like Remainder, a strange book masquerading as a normal one. Both books are about connections, metaphors, and the power of the mind to create its own worlds. Both contain the smell of cordite, and narrators who fall into trances and mishear what other people are saying.

C is an episodic bildungsroman about Serge Carrefax, son of the founder of a school for the deaf, brother of a suicide, casual scientist, possible sociopath. The episodes in question are variations on a theme, or rather on themes: networks, communication, the complexity and interplay among various human endeavors. There is no plot, other than the wandering course of Serge's life: idyllic childhood, tragic loss, strange illness, war experience, fateful research trip. What happens here isn't the point, though--the theme is what it's all about, and everything is about the theme.

McCarthy is riffing here, in other words. This is something he can do--the writing is spectacular, for the most part. The novel is spilling over with historical research about the technology of the early twentieth century; characters routinely predict the future of communication here, or traffic in the kind of metaphors we use today to describe computers and the internet. The characters are, in the end, entirely subservient to these ideas and historical details; they're performers putting on a play about what Tom McCarthy is interested in. (And yes--there is a play within this play, a pageant performed by the deaf chilrden who, in one of the book's central ironies, can't hear themselves speak.)

This might sound cold and pretentious; in fact the book is, at times, utterly absorbing and quite moving. Certain scenes are evoked with uncanny beauty, as when the child Serge witnesses a sexual tryst that will color his erotic experiences for the rest of his life; or when his plane crashes in no man's land, and a plague of birds arrives to peck at the blasted remains of his compatriots; or when he and a lover screw upon a pile of mummies. But the mode of writing is detached; point of view is fluid, and one feels as though the book does not belong to the characters, but to the writer and reader.

I never fully owned it, personally. The last section is a true disappointment--it consists almost entirely of expository dialogue, and ends in a delirious virtuoso recapitulation of every symbol and metaphor in the novel--but nevertheless has a certain mad rigor. It's impressively bizarre and not really successful, like most things that I admire. I recommend the book with reservations, but have reservations about my reservations. I will most certainly read the next one, and all the ones after that.

Metaphors

2011-01-05T17:25:00.003-05:00

I love metaphors in fiction -- the funnier, the crazier, the more surprisingly apt, the better. For instance: in Elizabeth McCracken's story "Some Have Entertained Angels Unawares," a character is as "pale and bitter as aspirin," and another as "chinless and gloomy as a clarinet," and children sleep "beneath the clasped hands of the roof" (which I think I stole once; sorry, Elizabeth). In Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It, outlandish, perfect metaphors are everywhere. On a single half page I found a person who smelled "like a sickroom quilt that needed airing," and ice that makes "a sound like a nail being wrenched from a board," then breaks "like the surface of a vast aboriginal egg." (By metaphor I'm referring to similes and metaphors, just to be clear.)

There are people who don't like this kind of literary whimsy, but I don't understand that. However, a writer friend of ours recently said something that made me stop and think. A writer should make sure a metaphor does at least two things, he said. A metaphor that's just a metaphor, that just serves to compare a thing to another thing, is not good enough. Metaphors should really work. The chosen metaphor should carry out the theme, or refer to something in a character's past, or bring out something hidden, or something. Otherwise, they're distracting flotsam.

This, I think, is an example of a rule that could very well improve the writing, certainly make it more rigorous and disciplined. However, in the above examples, the aspirin, the clarinet, and the nail would all have to go. The clasped hands and the egg would probably get to stay, because they resonate with the works' themes.

But I like all of them, and in my ideal world they would all get to stay, even if aspirin really does nothing more than sit there being pale and bitter. But I like junk shops, I like things not to match, and I think fiction should be full of surprises.

Where do you stand? Any examples of good, or, even better, bad metaphors?

What happened to Borders?

2011-01-04T17:53:00.002-05:00

I was in the local Borders the other day, helping my kids cash in some gift cards, and was kind of shocked at the state the place was in. The inventory computers were grimy, old, and slow, and couldn't tell you if books were in stock. A book we were looking for showed two on hand but the bookseller couldn't find it. The CD shelves were almost completely empty, and the place was understaffed.

I worked at the Borders in Madison, Wisconsin in 1992. It was great--in those days, the staff of a new store was hired before construction was finished, and the booksellers themselves assembled the shelves and unloaded the books from the trucks. Everyone had a section they were the expert on (mine was cooking), so somebody could always, always find a book.

Nowadays, Borders is definitely number three, after Amazon and B&N--or four, really, if you count Wal-Mart. They have the shittiest e-reader, and it looks like they're having liquidity problems. So what happened? Back in the day, they were the "cool" chain; B&N was busy seeming to overextend itself, and provided a much chillier, more generic experience. Now, Borders feels like a chain on its way out.

In the end, I'm not invested in any of the chains...I do still prefer the small independent bookstore experience to a big box. (If I want generic and commercial, I'd much rather order from Amazon, who will also sell me some camera lenses and a waffle maker, than drive down to the commercial strip for B&N or to the mall for Borders.)

But...what happened? How'd Borders go wrong?

Reading Out Loud

2011-01-03T18:59:00.006-05:00

Recently I've noticed we aren't reading out loud to our kids anymore. They still enjoy it, and we still have time, but I've kind of run out things I want to read them. The books we've read over the years are mostly ones I loved as a kid; the last one I chose was The Dark is Rising, which was my favorite when I was 11 or so. But you know what? I didn't like it this time around, and neither did my kids. It was a lot of atmospherics, and the story didn't really make sense. My kids are savvier than I was.

That last experience put me off a little bit, and I'm wondering whether the read-aloud era should come to an end, or if I should keep it going until the kids tell me to stop. When we're all really into the book, it's enormous fun. John had a good time with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels, and we all loved The True Meaning of Smekday, which I found at the bookstore and bought on a whim. So I know more good books are out there, though it does feel like we've read all the obvious ones. And it's just a nicer way to end the day than a session of Minecraft and Failblog.

I'm not a holy roller about the power of reading aloud. I know it's a good thing, but if the kids or parents don't enjoy it, I don't think anyone's doomed to a life of illiteracy and general unhappiness. And as it gets harder and harder to find a book that pleases the kid who doesn't like fantasy ("girls with winter coats and dragons laying eggs"), the one who likes only fantasy, and the overly-picky mother... I wonder if I should let the ritual go.

What do you think? Were you read to? Recommendations? Is it weird to read to teenagers, or what?

Who's using Scrivener?

2011-01-02T18:53:00.000-05:00

Rhian's gonna kill me ("Not another tech post!") but I really am curious if any of our readers are using Scrivener, the dedicated word processor for fiction writers. This used to be a Mac-only affair, but a Windows version is now in beta, and anyway I've switched to a Mac laptop for my writing. (Sorry, Ubuntu, those were good years.)

My awareness of this app comes at a time when I have been quite vexed by the problem of re-organizing a book that contains dozens of small chapters, which I am doing now. In a conventional word processor (in my case, OpenOffice.org), this is a really annoying task. In Scrivener, you can assign each chapter a note card, on which you can type a summary of the chapter; then, on a "corkboard" screen, you can rearrange the cards at will. When you're finished, you can export the whole thing as a unified .doc or .odt.

I think it's too late for this novel, but I may switch over for the next. If any of you are Scrivenists, please share your thoughts.

Reading and Writing Resolutions

2011-01-01T18:59:00.005-05:00

I love resolutions so much I make them twice a year: at New Year's, then again in June, on my birthday. Sometimes I keep them and sometimes I don't, and I often think I should give up the whole stupid idea of self-improvement, but I'm helplessly drawn to new goals and new visions of my life. So, this year I want to fill in some awkward gaps in my reading. I'm thinking of Jane Austen (I'm so tired of not getting the references) and War and Peace. People say that new translation is pretty great.

As for writing, I don't know. I've had trouble finishing things for a Very Long Time; a reasonable goal would be to finish anything. But -- is finishing anything really the point? Writing for the sake of writing -- why bother? If I don't have anything worth finishing, anything that drives me to finish it, maybe I should just shut up. It's not like there aren't enough books in the world. I've seen them!

So maybe a better goal would be something like, Find a story that makes me want to finish it. Good luck with that, I tell myself.

Anyway, do you do this?? What are your goals, resolutions, reasons for not doing resolutions, or what have you?

Concentration

2010-12-30T17:12:00.000-05:00

I was trying to start reading a book the other night (Tom McCarthy's C, BTW, and so far it is excellent, and completely different from Remainder), and found that, over half an hour, I read the first few pages about eight times. It isn't that it wasn't interesting, it was that I couldn't concentrate. At all.

I didn't used to think this when I was younger, but I now believe that concentration is hard. And I am not one of those people who think that the distractions of modern life etc etc blah blah. I think human beings are naturally distractable. And that the act of reading a novel requires skills that have to be acquired in life, and can be temporarily lost.

Think about what a novel is asking us for: to switch off all of our perceptive organs and give ourselves over, entirely, to the consciousness of imaginary people. It is (as I suggested in the comments of the previous post) like sex. And who can blame us for not always being in the mood? Also like sex, it is a rare and transcendent pleasure, and one that gets all tangled up with our sense of ourselves. It's complicated.

Sometimes, when I have something I really really really want to read, like this McCarthy book, or a new Alice Munro story in the New Yorker, I have to wait until the perfect moment to read it, so that I don't blow it--ruin my experience of it with inadequate concentration. As a result, I occasionally forget to read these things entirely, while things I don't give a crap about, I dispatch right away.

And writing? Forget about it. These days, I can only write first thing in the morning. Anything past 9am, my mind has turned to garbage. Maybe someday I'll have to do my reading then, too. Until that time, it's catch as catch can.

I ♥ Books

2010-12-29T20:21:00.004-05:00

Thanks to WS reader Pale Ramon for this link to a Susan Orlean blog post about loving books -- all kinds of books, even or especially trashy thrillers that keep money moving in the book world. I agree with her. I love to see people reading -- reading anything. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in liking some books and hating others, and there's nothing wrong with that. But put me on the side of books in general.

Here's a link to more Andre Kertesz photographs of people reading.

End of an era?

2010-12-28T19:12:00.000-05:00

Rhian and I made a major decision today: the annual holiday card we send out tomorrow will be our last. Not our last holiday greeting, but our last physical card, that we actually mail to people. It was designed by our son Owen and me (he did the hilarious photoshop of himself and his brother looking sullen with Santa Claus), and was a huge pain in the ass to have printed. It was also expensive and wasteful (minimum order: 250) and necessitated a ten-minute wait in line at the post office for stamps, because the USPS took away the stamp vending machine.

The fact is, many of our closest friends have little or no physical presence in our lives. We love them via the phone, or by email, or (I admit it) on facebook. For many of these people--at least half of the address book on my phone--we have no street address. These aren't second-tier friends, not necessarily anyway--they are internet correspondents. This is its own particular, and honored, category.

And so next year, we're doing a web page and will email you a link. It won't just be a photo--we'll fancy it up, maybe stick a song on there, or a Flash animation (if Flash is still alive in late 2011, and Owen still knows how to code it), or bit of comic writing, or what have you. The fact is, the virtual world is more versatile and potentially entertaining for this sort of thing. Our crowning achievement in the paper arena was probably the board game we designed and sent out years ago--that was a corker. But last year's card (admittedly, it was lame: a broken-image gif on the front and a "404: card not found" error on the back), nobody even bothered to tell us they received. It was just another piece of junk mail.

The thing is, a holiday card is something you're only supposed to look at for about a minute. Then you throw it away. This is practically the definition of internet content. It isn't that a fine old tradition is dead: it's that the perfect technology for holiday greetings has finally arrived. We're gonna do it, but we're gonna do it for free. To our beloved physical-world friends, we thank you for your cards and letters (espcially Sung's and Dawn's, with all the adorable dog pix, and Bev, with the crazy-ass family photo and two-page newsy snark manifesto). But we're going virtual in 2011. And the USPS, sad to say, can suck it.

True Grit

2010-12-27T17:41:00.004-05:00

How often can you watch the movie of one of your favorite books and feel like justice was done? I'll tell you: not often. But the Coen brothers' new version of Charles Portis's True Grit was done with absolute respect for the novel. Almost all of the dialogue is taken verbatim, and the most of the changes are things left out (though there's an important change to the ending). Portis is a comic writer with a perfect ear, and True Grit was an obvious choice to make into a movie. The other Portis novel I've read, Dog of the South, is less so: while just as funny, its plot is crazy and all over the place. True Grit has a simple, arrow-straight plot. It's a perfect short novel, and the movie is perfect, too.

One long sentence

2010-12-26T11:17:00.001-05:00

Ed Park's piece in this week's Times Book Review is a carefully researched, clever little essay about the obscure phenomenon of the one-sentence novel, but I have to admit it kind of rubs me the wrong way. My irritation can be summed up in the line "Not many writers have had the nerve to go this route."

Nerve? Really? This is not the word I would use. I'll admit that, if I came up with an idea for a novel that could be best be expressed in a single book-length sentence, I would have to take a deep breath before diving in. But it seems to me that this is the kind of fake formal experimentation that a writer is more likely to use as cover for his incompetence than for any kind of genuine insight into character, situation, or language.

Of course you could dismiss any literary trick as a gimmick, but this one seems gimmickier to me than most, especially since the writer generally finds new ways to separate ideas and establish rhythm, and the reader quickly gets accustomed to them. That is, nobody's really being challenged here--it's all proof-of-concept. If you're going to break it up with conjunctions or semicolons or what have you, you might as well restore the periods, indentations, and chapter breaks, and devote more of your energy to evoking the wrinkles in grandma's forehead or the smell of jasmine wafting over the piazza.*

That said, I certainly haven't read 'em all. Prove me wrong, readers. Show me a book-length sentence that gives you that special kind of lovin' only breathless literary nerditude can provide.

* j/k. Please don't evoke those things.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T22:16:00.000-05:00

A merry Christmas to all W6 readers who celebrate it, and to those who don't, may you endure its excesses in peace. See you in a few days. In the meantime, let us know what books you got. And has anybody figured out an adequate way to wrap an ebook?

Speaking of linked stories: Patrick Somerville's new one

2010-12-23T19:11:00.002-05:00

This post is not going to do it justice, but I can't recommend highly enough Patrick Somerville's amazing new collection, The Universe In Miniature In Miniature. (I must disclose that 1, Patrick is a friend of mine; 2, I got a free galley from the publisher; and 3, I blurbed it. In fact, it resulted in the greatest blurb I have ever written, if I do say so myself.) This book indeed consists of linked stories, and it's one of those rare specimens of the species that succeed far better than they have any right to. I'm at a loss to describe the thing; it is quasi science-fictional (there's some stuff in Patrick's last book, The Cradle, that suggested he might eventually give full rein to his inner sci-fi nerd), mysterious, dark, comic, and thoroughly engaging. It contains, oh hell, marriage problems, and a supernatural power helmet, and a secret society, and aliens, and a mercenary. It is also beautifully illustrated by Rob Funderburk, which I didn't even realize when I wrote the blurb ("It's as if Optimus Prime has folded himself up into a story collection"), and which is actually kind of important to one of the stories.

Patrick is a rad dude and this book is incredibly adventurous and utterly unique. How often is it that somebody follows up their breakthrough book with a small-press collection of semi-sci-fi? Not often. Reward him by throwing down for this baby.

Another Way to Write Better

2010-12-22T21:17:00.006-05:00

When I'm feeling terribly uninspired, I remember some advice given to me by Pinckney Benedict, an old teacher of mine. He suggested that, when we have nothing we feel like writing, we sit down and type out a story by a writer we love, just to experience what it's like to write an excellent story. Have any of you ever done this?

I do it a lot. In fact, I started doing it in high school, long before I met Pinckney, in order to learn how to type. It is astounding to see someone else's awesome words arise from one's own typewriter, or to appear in one's own font. And you can learn things you might never learn otherwise. Type the sentence slowly, and guess what the next line will be. Are you right? Why did the writer make that choice? Was your choice better?

Lately I've been interested in the structure of paragraphs, so I've been typing paragraphs instead of whole stories. Two people who write great ones: Vladimir Nabokov and Denis Johnson. I cannot believe how far these guys can go in the space of a paragraph: across time and universes. Take a look!

The pitfalls of this technique are probably numerous. It can be a great way to waste time, typing other people's words for weeks on end. But as an isolated exercise, I think it's really useful. It can jolt you out of yourself and your invisible ways of thinking.

Try it and let me know what you think.

The Elements of Internet Style

2010-12-21T21:25:00.001-05:00

Speaking of style guides, maybe that's what we need--some standards for written English on the web. You'd assume that what's good for the page is good for the laptop, but new technologies mean new ways to screw up your writing.

Case in point, this excellent post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball, my favorite nerd blog, which post is about one thing and one thing only: "a long-standing irritation: poorly designed web page titles":

The title is the string of text in the HTML "title" element. This string manifests itself to the user in several ways. It is presented in the title bar of the web browser window on Mac and Windows. It is presented in the tab, if you’re using tabs in your browser. It is presented at the top of the screen in mobile web browsers. It is listed in the “Window” menu of your browser, listing all open browser windows. And, when you choose to bookmark a web page, the title string is used as the default name of the bookmark...An awful lot of websites use patterns for page titles that are ugly, hard-to-scan, and/or just plain stupid.

In the stupid department, Gruber writes, resides MSNBC's ridiculously long "Breaking News, Weather, Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Travel, Science, Technology, Local, US & World News - msnbc.com," which of course is far too long to read in your drop-down bookmarks menu or browser tab, let alone on your bookmarks bar. And of course since the actual name of the actual web site is at the end, nobody will ever, ever actually read it.

Gruber, predicably, favors the short and clear, just like Strunk and White. (One imagines E. B. White would have been simultaneously appalled and mesmerized by the internet, like any thinking person is.) I agree. The fact is, half my reading is done on a computer these days--books are books and may they always be, but much of my life consists of incidental reading, which ultimately is as important to me as any other.

Somebody oughta write a style guide. Ellis & Lennon, perhaps?

How to Write Better

2010-12-20T17:46:00.005-05:00

Once you're an adult, and you've been writing for a while and teachers and workshops are long behind you, how can you become a better writer? I mean besides the obvious, which is writing a lot, reading a lot, and sharing your work with good readers. How can you improve your prose? Are there any techniques, like Hanon exercises for pianists or running sprints for marathoners?

I'd like to know because I think the years of following Anne Lamott's "shitty first draft" advice have done a number on my prose style. For those unfamiliar: Lamott suggests that writers -- especially new or blocked writers -- should not worry about quality in the first draft, but just get it all down and make it better in the revision process. It seems like good advice: I know I couldn't have written a single paper in college if I didn't do it that way. But I'm wondering if it's so great for fiction. Fiction lives in the words on the page, not in the outline. Lately I've found that I don't like what I write. Is it because I'm just throwing down any old thang in order to have something to revise later? The problem seems to be that I have no motivation to revise if the prose is crap. I can't work up any love for the shitty first draft.

So: how to get better without obsessing over every sentence? I had exactly one idea about this (and hope you have more): read Strunk and White again.

First revelation: so many ideas I thought were my own turn out to be things I stole from S&W! Second: a lot things here are not obvious. For instance: Do Not Inject Opinion. Sometimes we feel like it's all about opinion. But no.

Funny thing about Strunk and White: this sentence: "By the time this paragraph sees print, uptight, ripoff, rap, dude, vibes, copout, and funky will be the words of yesteryear..."

(Neither Strunk nor White would have anything good to say about my colonophilia, I know.)

Franzen in the Paris Review: the good and the bad

2010-12-19T19:24:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed this new interview with Jonathan Franzen in the Paris Review, but I dunno. I think he's got a wrong idea about himself. Or perhaps the interviewer, Stephen Burn, does. There's an unquestioned assumption here that Franzen has been getting steadily better throughout his career, and Freedom is his best book. I don't think that's so. I rank it as being about as good as his first novel (which is to say pretty good), but not as good as The Corrections and certainly not as good as Franzen's masterpiece (IMHO), the tragically under-read Strong Motion. Nerdy, intense, eccentric, and disquieting, Strong Motion seems to have grown from a difficult phase of the writer's life:

Strong Motion was a novel written by a person to whom things were happening as he wrote it. It was a third party in the relationship [ie., Franzen's marriage]...I honestly have a poor recollection of how I wrote that book. It was bad time.

This makes sense to me--the book feels as though it was written by somebody who had no idea what he was doing. And that's why it's great. Freedom, and, to a lesser extent, The Corrections, seem to me lesser works, more controlled, more composed. The new book in particular is a disappointment to me; it seems massively, if expertly, calculated. Franzen's life needs order, but I think his work needs chaos. He shouldn't believe the hype: Freedom is a smart, hugely entertaining book, but I'd like him to leave a corner of his heart and mind untended.

One thing I really dig in this interview, though, is a quote about American writing:

The people at the Swedish Academy [...] recently confessed their thoroughgoing lack of interest in American literary production. They say we're too insular [...] we're only writing about ourselves. Given how Americanized the world has become, I think they're probably wrong about this [...] but even if they're right, I don't think our insularity is necessarily a bad thing. [...] Maybe that very insularity, that feeling of living in a complete but not quite universal world, creates certain kinds of literary possibility.

He's right. It does. This is a strong case, I think, for specific detail over broad theme, and it's a lesson Franzen ought to listen to himself. The least interesting things about Freedom are the things that are about, frankly, freedom. It's when he forgets he's an important writer, and notices the hell out of the smallest things, that Franzen is at his best.

Linked Stories , Part 2

2010-12-18T21:36:00.002-05:00

Some more thoughts on linked stories. Publishers like them, I think, because they can pose as novels, but are not as hard to get right as novels are. It's really difficult to take the same set of characters through 300+ pages of a single story. In a set of linked stories, the writer essentially has 10 or a dozen fresh starts -- all new characters, new ideas -- and can shake off whatever started to get tricky and bogged down in the last section. But for the very same reason, readers usually don't like them as much as novels. Instead of working through the tricky stuff in a surprising, satisfying way, the writer of linked stories gets to throw it all behind her and start on something new. And linked stories aren't even usually as good as regular stand-alone short stories, because they depend a little on the weight of what's around them. A lot of time, a linked story is really just a vignette.

Not that I think all collections of linked stories are awful, but I do resent publishers disguising them as novels -- they aren't. Fans of the genre should read Laura Hendrie's Stygo, an old favorite of mine.

Extra Lives

2010-12-17T08:25:00.001-05:00

My apologies, I missed the boat on our pre-New-Year's daily-posting resolution: I was out of town. But on the way home, on the bus, I finally got around to reading Tom Bissell's terrific Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Tom is a superb and versatile writer, and he's the perfect one to have written on this subject for a popular audience--it's funny and self-deprecating, yet it investigates something very important: the fundamental nature of our relationship to narrative.

Though the book is a bit rambling--many chapters feel as though they were written to stand alone elsewhere--Bissell never strays very far from this thesis, which is that narrative is gaming's biggest problem. Not that the narratives aren't good enough--which, if you'd played even the very best military shooters, you'd agree they probably aren't--but that they're narratives borrowed from other forms of art, particularly Hollywood films. Video games, Bissell argues, need to find their own kind of stories, based not in authored narrative but in the mechanics of play. Through interviews with industry thinkers and detailed descriptions of games, he makes a great case for games as art, even as he proves that they haven't yet really figured out how to be art.

There's also some great memoir-y stuff, including a chapter that describes Bissell's cocaine-fueled devouring of Grand Theft Auto IV, and many very fine descriptions of the places where games are made and the characters who make them.

It's almost enough to make me want to go out and buy an Xbox 360. But I think I'll stay married instead.

Linked Stories

2010-12-15T20:33:00.002-05:00

This is nuts: we're hardly posting at all these days. Time for changes! We're going back to daily posts. Why not? It's winter and there are no weeds to pull or chaise longues to lounge upon.

I started reading Tom Rachman's novel The Imperfectionists a couple of days ago, with great excitement: I really liked the first chapter, and the writing is top-notch. But then I discovered -- NOOOO! -- that it isn't technically a novel, but a collection of linked stories. Oh, despair! Betrayal! My book club had the same reaction when I made them read Olive Kitteridge.

But why? What's wrong with linked stories? In a way, the idea is awesome: all these stories that accumulate into something larger. But if you're expecting a novel, and you like what you're reading, discovering that you're reading a bunch of stories instead is crushing. Because the wonderful thing about a nice, thick novel is how complex and full it is. A short story is one thing -- it's an episode with reverberations -- but a novel keeps going and going and changing and evolving. I was really bummed that the character in the first chapter, a washed-up journalist named Lloyd Burko, was OVER after one chapter. I was so invested! He and his story were so interesting! It feels like Rachman didn't know how good his characters were, and felt like he needed to start fresh after a single episode. To me, linked short stories feel like an artifact of insecurity. (Though Rachman is probably as secure as anyone, and just had a concept he wanted to work through. Fair enough! The book is still excellent. I just wish it were a novel.)

I am probably deeply suspicious of collections of linked stories because I've so often wanted to write one. A writer of such a collection gets the satisfaction of finishing something -- stand-alone story you can send out somewhere! -- while still struggling along on the trail of the big kahuna, a NOVEL. Everyone loves a novel. Publishers, especially, love a novel. Which is why you almost never see the words "linked short stories" on a book jacket.

Anyway, I don't mean to imply that structural experimentation is no good, or that every work of fiction should adhere to a set of rules. No! But I do think that the novel is king for a reason. It is delicious and long and satisfying and is the perfect vehicle for exploring character.

(So why are my two favorite writers -- Alice Munro and Lydia Davis -- masters of the short story? I don't know. Don't ask!)

So what do we think about Google Editions?

2010-12-01T09:10:00.001-05:00

Google's ebooks venture, Google Editions, appears poised to launch within the next month, and in theory, I like it. I've been begging anybody who would listen to please make my out-of-print books available, cheaply, in electronic editions, but for a midlist, non-genre writer, this is just not a doable thing. It appears that, if you own the rights to your work, you'll be able to sell copies through Google at whatever price you like.

One thing that's confusing me is this line: "To sell the Google Edition of a book, you must hold the electronic rights to that book, including all images and other book content." Does this mean that a writer needs to own the rights to, say, the cover? The layout? The design? Becuase I'm not sure that any of us do, at least those of us whose books have already been published and are now out of print. I do now hold the rights to my first three novels, but not, I'd imagine, the visual elements designed and executed by my former publishers.

Anyway, this will presumably all be clear next month. I find the whole thing unnerving, of course, and still doubt that Google will ever pay me anything, for any reason. (Where, by the way, is my Authors' Guild Settlement check, eh?) But if this is the way the wind is blowing, I suppose I will let myself be carried along with everybody else.

Wood on Moon

2010-11-27T09:09:00.000-05:00

I'd like to poke my head out of my lit cave for a moment to praise James Wood's article in the New Yorker this week on, of all people, Keith Moon. The phenomenon of literary writers moonlighting as rock and roll nerds is not unusual in my age bracket, but James Wood? A drummer? Really? Who knew! My initial distaste for Wood's criticism (I think it's his ambivalence about David Foster Wallace that got me thinking of myself, initially, as anti-Woodian) long ago evaporated, and these days I like him a lot.

This article in particular. Wood actually tries to explain, to the New Yorker audience, why Moon was awesome, and he largely succeeds. At times, of course, he sounds hopelessly dorky, as in this passage about John Bonham: "His superb but tightly limited breaks on the snare and his famously rapid double strokes on the bass drum are constantly played against the unvarying solidity of his high hat, which keeps a steady single beat throughout the bars." Which I think we can all agree is not what generally occurs to us while we're blasting Led Zep in the car.

But this passage about the Moon of "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Behind Blue Eyes" is right on the money:

...you can hear him do something that was instinctive, probably, but which is hardly ever done in ordinary rock drumming: breaking for a fill, Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjambment.

For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I feel the same way. I think the connection, among writers of my generation (guys mostly, I think, but not entirely), between literary fiction and rock has gone largely unexplored; here, Wood is getting at the kind of controlled exuberance that I find most moving both in popular music and literature, and he manages to do so without coming off like a total dipshit. That is quite an accomplishment, in my book.

Temping

2010-11-14T07:40:00.001-05:00

Rhian and I got talking last night about all our temp jobs. At the time, this work--reception work, phone answering, bank tellering, low-grade editing--seemed pretty empty and dull. Now, it seems somehow important. We got a lot of work done at our temp jobs--literary work, that is--and learned something about the era when we came of age.

I took pretty much all my notes on The Funnies while working as a bank teller at about half a dozen banks in Missoula, Montana. This would have been around 1995. I stood there in the drive-up window in my knit tie, adding new note cards to my rubber-banded stack, and by the time I got a real job I was ready to start writing the thing. (Indeed, I drafted it, largely, at that real job, which was as a museum receptionist.) The two of us did so much temping that we became honorary staff at the Manpower office; often one or the other of us would man the front desk for Debbie, the sardonic, put-upon manager. It was here that I read Stephen Dixon's collected stories and wrote him a long letter telling him why the book had restored my faith in the form. We're still in touch. Rhian once won a camera by unscrambling a word in an AM radio contest, which she entered daily from her temp position at the Teamsters' Union; I later stole this and stuck it in Mailman.

Temping was a nineties rite of passage. It was the Clinton-era boom: everybody thought they needed to hire. But if you lived in a town without much going on, everybody was wrong. Temping, for us, was the experience of sitting idly by while other people failed to make money. The gears of life were turning, grinding around us. So much of lived life, it turned out, consisted of waiting to start living life. There was something depressing about the people who hired us, but also something inspiring. Human beings were awkward and inept and incapable of making good decisions. And yet they soldiered on. In this context, fiction writing seemed no more or less important than correcting scanned legal documents or administering parts-sorting aptitude tests; it seemed like something we might be able to actually do.

My relationship to my work has grown deeper and more complicated, of course, but sometimes it's possible to evoke those early days of newness and possibility--the sense that starting a new story was no big deal, that there were plenty more out there if this one failed. Temping prepared us well for fiction writing, really: it gave us a taste for work that is uncertain, not very lucrative, and different every day. There are worse ways to make a living, to be sure.

You'd be surprised at how long it took to find that old-school Manpower logo.

Help me out: Crime Stories

2010-11-02T18:33:00.000-05:00

W6 readers, give me a hand with something, will you? I'm designing a new Cornell class, a First-Year Seminar called Crime Stories. It will be a survey of crime fiction since the dawn of time, with written critical responses. (I always allow at least one creative one, too.)

I have a few things I will definitely use: The Big Sleep. Sjowall and Wahloo's The Laughing Policeman. One heist novel, probably one of Richard Stark's Parker novels. One genre-buster, perhaps Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music or China Mieville's recent The City And The City. I will of course use a Poe story and a Conan Doyle story.

But what else? I'd like more women (besides Maj Sjowall). Dorothy Sayers? Patricia Highsmith? (Maybe Strangers On A Train.) I wouldn't mind using Tana French's The Likeness, but it's rather long. Ruth Rendell / Barbara Vine? She writes great crime novels but I don't know what I'd say about them in a college class. Karin Fossum perhaps? Can a case be made for Shirley Jackson? I am thinking of We Have Always Lived In The Castle.

Or writers of color--Walter Mosley? I'd like to get a couple more pre-war writers maybe. It's a 14-week semester and each week will be either one or two short stories, or a short novel, or half a long novel. Would love your ideas. Especially if you are a Cornell freshman who happens to be registered for the class.

I Love This Blog

2010-11-01T10:25:00.000-05:00

No, not this one, that one. Those of you whose minds are always in the gutter, which is to say probably all of you, will dig it.

This reminds me of one of my favorite dirty-mind stories...when the kids were little they had one of those Winnie-The-Pooh travesty Disney spinoff books with the strip of sound effects down the side, and when you pressed the Tigger button you heard Tigger say, "THAT is what Tiggers do best!"

But at one point we realized it sounded like it was saying "FUCK is what Tiggers do best!" And after that, it was impossible to un-hear it. Imagine sitting around with one's parents hearing this phrase over and over, nodding and grinning as though nothing untoward is going on.

Leaving It All Behind

2010-10-27T10:37:00.000-05:00

I was talking to a colleague of mine at a grad student reading last week (nice work, BTW, Aisha and Alex) about a family story of mine that I once told him: a great-uncle, Tony Moran, was a semi-famous mobster who ran a gambling machine empire in Reading, Pennsylvania during the thirties and forties, and was eventually knocked off in a bar by a rival. It's a good story, full of colorful characters and funny twists and turns. And my colleague said, "So when are you gonna write about this?"

Believe me, I've thought about it. Why wouldn't I? Nothing would get me an interview with Terri Gross quicker than a novel about my family's shady past in organized crime. But the fact is, I'm never going to do it.

Why not? Rhian supplied the answer for me the other night: writing, for me, is about leaving it all behind. My home town, that is (not Reading, but nearby Phillipsburg, New Jersey), and all its lowlifes, wiseguys, and weirdos. Don't get me wrong, I love visiting home, and hearing my family tell stories about growing up in the area. But back when I was in my late teens, all I wanted to do was get away from all that and do my own thing. Indeed, all my early short stories were about the self-actualization of quirky young people. I've moved on, thank God, but still can't conceive of writing the kind of stories I love hearing from my family--those serve a different purpose. Fiction, for me, is self-invention--the "wooing of distant parts of myself," as an Alice Munro character once put it.

People often talk about, or try to talk about, where their writing comes from. But I wonder--what is your writing trying to escape?

Photo from here.

iambik.com

2010-10-20T11:15:00.000-05:00

Okay, I admit it, this constitutes self-promotion. But I'm quite excited about it. Today, iambik.com went live. They sell audiobooks. For five dollars. The first wave of offerings includes me, Lydia Millet, Gordon Lish, and the ridiculously brilliant Lynne Tillman.

From the site: "Iambik makes audio of books we love. Iambik is a bit different from traditional audiobook publishers, though. We partner with print publishers and authors, and work with a collective of skilled independent audiobook makers around the world. We record new books and old ones, great books that have been overlooked by traditional audio publishers. We work almost exclusively on a revenue-share basis, with narrators, publishers/authors, and iambik all sharing in successful audiobooks. Our prices are low. We don’t have any digital rights management (DRM)."

Doesn't this just make you want to weep with gratitude? This seems to me a superb business model for literary fiction, and if you agree, head on over there and buy some stuff. Like, you know, for instance Castle.

What happened to "Men In Space"?

2010-10-18T04:40:00.000-05:00

So. I'm re-reading Tom McCarty's Remainder for my graduate seminar, and am reminded how amazing this novel is--I think it's going to be considered an extraordinarily important book when all's said and done, and in any event it is hugely entertaining and a major influence on the book I'm trying to write right now. And I've got McCarthy's new one, C, waiting in the queue for the moment the semester ends.

But what happened to Men In Space? This novel is not listed in the opening pages of C, and wasn't mentioned in the recent NYTBR review. If I'm not mistaken the reviewer referred to C as McCarthy's second book. Men In Space only seemed to come out in the UK, and at the moment (see link) it is listed as out of stock on Amazon.co.uk.

Out of stock? Really? Published in 2007, by a major author with a new novel out, and it's out of stock? I have a copy that I ordered from England, and must confess that I didn't get through it--at least not on my first sortie. But it is definitely the same guy--it employs the same photo as Remainder.

I shouldn't be confused--I am a guy who had a book that only came out in the UK myself, and that kind of disappeared in the wilds of lit obscura for a while, until it finally came out here last year. But McCarthy is different--he wrote a Big Book. You'd think this second novel would have come out here by now, one way or another.

Any insights, keepers of Lit Arcana?

iA Writer, plus, my talk.

2010-10-12T09:53:00.001-05:00

Here's a brief review of a new iPad app, Writer, by iA. I had assumed, shortly after getting started with my iPad, that it really wouldn't be a viable writing tool--indeed, I must say that I still don't like blogging on it. Pages, the standard Apple word processor, is irritating in a lot of ways, offering only the most meager collection of options, and making them difficult to access. (Why, for instance, are you forced to go into a menu to get strikethrough? There is ample room on the toolbar.)

But Writer is conceptually different. It is VERY simple, eschewing all formatting options entirely, so that you can concentrate only on the writing itself. It features an extended keyboard with--at last!--left and right cursor arrows, AND "word" keys that allow you to navigate through a document word by word. It has its own custom-designed font, which is extremely pleasing to read. It will automatically sync what you're working on to your Dropbox, so that you can continue your work on another computer, and saves in .txt format for full compatibility. There's a special "focus" mode as well, that only shows you the last three lines you were working on--an unnecessary limitation, in my book, but perhaps useful to some. I have already written a couple of letters on it and believe I could write a story as well.

I'd like to see one concession to formatting, though: tabs. I don't like paragraphing using white spaces, except in a business letter. But this is easily accomplished "in post," as it were. A really nice app, and it's just five bucks.

I also thought I'd share this: the talk I gave at the Colgate Writers' Conference this past June. It's called "In the Presence of Absence: or, Thanks, Blanks!" and is an appreciation of negative space in fiction (and in other forms, for that matter).

"1000 True Fans" for writers?

2010-10-02T06:32:00.000-05:00

This seems like a good opportunity to link to a favorite blog of mine, The Online Photographer. If you're into photography and are a bit of a gear nerd, this blog is an excellent mix of artistic philosophy and technical discussion, with a very fine stable of regular writers.

I've been reading lately from a series of articles by artist and printer Ctein that are in reaction to this much-discussed article by Kevin Kelly, about the possibilities, in today's media market, for artists to support themselves through their work. The idea is that all you need is 1000 "true fans," and enough time and energy to keep them interested in you. Here's the latest installment from Ctein; he links to the previous posts as well.

All this sounds good to me, but every time I think about it I can't help but consider how poorly placed writers are to benefit from such a system. Artists are selling physical artifacts, and can charge a fair amount for each; what we do is ephemeral, the kind of thing people are accustomed to being able to acquire for free. This is true of musicians, too, of course, but as I've said before here, musicians can tour. It seems to me that we're more wedded to commercial publishing than other kinds of artists are to their respective supporting apparatus. Even Kelly, in his original piece, puts us last on the list.

Maybe everyone thinks they've got it worst, though. I know that a few W6 readers (like Jon Frankel) have had some thoughts about this, and I would love to have them weigh in. What do you think, can writers make a go of it on their own, without first becoming famous through conventional means (e.g., Radiohead)? Or are we destined to write for free and make our living some other way?

An Interview with Lydia Davis

2010-09-30T14:48:00.003-05:00

I am delighted to get to pass on this link to my interview with Lydia Davis for the Writers at Cornell podcast. Davis is in town for a reading, but she was kind enough to talk with me about the complexities of translating Proust and Flaubert, using economic language to convey strong emotion, the evolution of her literary style, and the value of self-limitation.

Davis's Collected Stories has just come out in paperback, and her new translation of Madame Bovary in hardcover; snap them up after you've had a listen. (And thanks to Gallagher for the question about constraints.)

Every single day. Also, questions for Lydia Davis

2010-09-27T10:12:00.005-05:00

There's another aspect of my current novel revision that I didn't mention in the previous post, but which has come to seem very important to me over the past ten (bloggingless) days. In the past, especially when I have been teaching, I have tended to revise in four-hour blocks of time only on days when I could set four hours aside. This generally equated to three days a week of rather fast-paced work, which I accomplished in the service of some deadline (usually arbitrary) that I imposed upon myself.

This time around, I have changed two things. One, I have no deadline ("sometime next year" is all I have told anyone) for finishing. And two, I am working every single day. This includes, say, Tuesdays, when I have, ideally, six hours to make real progress, as well as Wednesdays, when I get up at 5 and have perhaps a single hour.

What I am finding is that the one-hour sessions might well be as important as the six-hour ones--sometimes more so, even if very little (or even no) writing gets done. The key seems to be to do something every day, to keep my mind from straying too far from the book. I've written here before about the difficulty of holding an entire novel in one's head at once--it is possible for some people, and I feel I've been able to do it every now and then. But it is hard, and the more time you spend away from the thing, the more you need to recover when you return.

This method--work daily, even if it's only time enough to stare at the screen and think--is quite revalatory. I feel more connected to the book, even when I'm not really accomplishing anything substantive. We shall see if it pans out in the end.

Finally, the great Lydia Davis is coming to Cornell this week, and I will be posting my podcast interview with her here on Thursday. If there's anything you're dying to ask her, post it in the comments, and I will try to throw it into my interview.

photo: raccoons watching me work the other day.

How do you revise?

2010-09-16T08:39:00.004-05:00

I had an interesting talk with my graduate seminar yesterday on this topic--how different writers approach the task of revision. My own feelings about revision have evolved over the years, and far from having arrived at some kind of tried-and-true method, I have come to find that I am less certain about the process than ever, and feel more lost in it than at any time in my entire life.

I think (read, "hope") that this is a good thing. A couple of days ago I started revising the novel I drafted earlier this year, based on the notes I took during a couple of editorial meetings with Rhian. This is a very sketchy draft, composed in haste, and it probably needs more work than any first draft of anything I've written. But there is something exciting about the uncertainty, the possibility, that the situation has provided.

Early in my career--as I have written here before--I was a big novel outliner, and my first drafts generally bore a close resemblance to what they would eventually become. Over the years, my outlines have gotten shorter and shorter, my first drafts more uncertain. This novel, I didn't outline at all. I didn't make character sketches, or do research, or even think about any ideas I'd cooked up for more than a day or two. I just wrote it. Quickly and sloppily. It's about parenthood, and has a science-fictional conceit, and I'm only now beginning to figure out what it's about and what I ought to do with it. I find it intimidating, actually--I am a little afraid of it. And a lot of that fear comes from not having enough solid first-draft material to know how to revise.

At the moment, I am just adding stuff--going through my notes, looking for things I know are missing, and patching them in, roughly. I will probably spend a month or two on this, just spackling the thing. Then I'll go back in and start sanding and painting--trying to make it feel less like an awkward patchwork of crap. I will probably have to rip stuff out along the way and replace it. Certain characters will serve new purposes, be de-emphasized or eliminated, or get bulked up and foregrounded. I can already feel characters' fundamental motivations changing, their relationships with other characters changing.

Maybe this is familiar to most of you, but it's kind of new to me. I have always been fond of telling students that, if you know what you're doing, then don't bother doing it. But like a lot of my favorite advice, I find it hard to accept in my own work. I like to think I'm always doing something original, but it's likely that, all too often, I am secretly dressing up the familiar in vestments of the new, to trick myself into thinking I'm setting new challenges. When what I'm really doing is making myself comfortable.

I'm curious how people approach their revisions--how much of your first drafts actually make it into your final drafts, how much time is spent revising (compared to the time spent composing), how many drafts you go through, how attached you are to the permanence of a day's work. And how your thoughts about these things have changed over time.

Photo from here

Who are we writing for?

2010-09-06T05:11:00.003-05:00

Last week, a good discussion almost broke out in my graduate seminar (it would have, if we weren't already deep in another one) when a student used the word "elitist" to describe a novel's frame of reference. The book, he felt, was too insular--the product of intellectual squirreliness, an egghead speaking in code to the ivory tower.

He has a point, and so we're going to throw this topic on the floor in the coming week's class: why are we doing this? And who is it for? I have a ready answer for the second question, which I sent to the students as part of a little epistolary manifesto (manifistle?) which I hope will serve as a jumping-off point for class:

We are writing for other smart people. Now, it may be that the vast majority of these smart people are, in fact, formally educated. But I know from experience that many, many of them aren't. The people I meet on book tours and at university readings continue to surprise me. They are all over the map.

However, the thing is, I don't give a rat's ass. The reason is that I don't consider one "class" of reader to be of greater value than any other. Nor do I value one kind of human experience over another. The suffering of a university dean is no less real than the suffering of a starving child thousands of miles from here. The latter may suffer more, but his suffering is not more legitimate as a human experience. The pleasure of a cold beer on a summer afternoon is not more legitimate than the pleasure of solving a tricky equation. A good writer can communicate all kinds of human experience to all kinds of people--should be able to show an intelligent but uneducated reader what it feels like to solve that equation, to be that dean.

The trouble with thinking about audience is that literary writers are usually wrong about who their audience is. Or, as Rhian put it to me, channeling a mentor of hers, "It's none of our goddam business."

As for the first question, I think I know less now about why I write than I did when I started. Because I can't stop? Because I need it to feel alive? Because I want people to love me? (If all I wanted was to be loved, I could have picked a more lovable genre, I suppose.) The one thing I do know is that it's dangerous to connect the first question to the second. To assume you know who you're writing is for, and to write it for them. Because before you know it you're writing down to them. If you need to feel you have a specific audience, do what one writer once told me to do if I was nervous at a reading: pick somebody at random from the audience and read the whole thing to them. My random audience members are Rhian and Skoog, still today. Will this amuse them? Move them? Occasionally I have written something, shown it to one of the two, then shelved it. And that was enough for me.

Anyway, the questions of purpose and audience always get tangled up in discussions of class and privilege. That's as it should be. A novel, say, can't contain the whole universe: you need to assume your reader knows certain things. And so it is inherently for insiders. With every word you choose, you choose to include or eliminate somebody from the people who will "get it."

Can we know who we're including and who we're not? Not really. But we can go into our work with honesty and openness and do our best to be inclusive without alienating the already initiated. For my part, I try to err on the side of inclusion: when push comes to shove, the initiated can suck it.

But readers, I find, will give you more space than you think. They'll forgive you for explaining too much, or for talking over your head, if you give them a way to feel comfortable and interested. A compelling voice. Moral complexity. Good characters.

As for my seminar, well...this is quite the can of worms. If you don't hear from my students and me after Wednesday, know that we sacrificed ourselves for a good cause.

Photo: our son found that button on the street!

O. Henry Prize Stories, Then and Now

2010-08-29T14:06:00.006-05:00

I recently got the new O. Henry Prize collection and read the whole thing, cover to cover. I liked some of the stories, very much unliked others, but there was one thing I couldn't help but notice: pretty much every story has a death in it. The first one in the collection, which is by Annie Proulx, is about some 19th century western pioneers who die (miserably), the Wendell Berry story has people dying left and right, the William Trevor has a murder, the Daniel Alarcon has blind people falling to their deaths off a bridge, Peter Cameron's story (maybe my favorite in the collection) has another fatal fall, etc. One story is actually in the form of an obituary.

It got me thinking about a potential blog post! Because if I remember my favorite stories of years past, none of them were about death. Were they? I mean, Charles Baxter's "Gryphon" or "Saul and Patsy are Getting Comfortable in Michigan" didn't hinge on grief, nor did all those Ann Beattie stories full of yuppies and Cuisinarts (I love Ann Beattie, but it's true: so many of her stories have people making salads or pesto), or most of Raymond Carver's stories (the execrable "A Small Good Thing" being a notable exception), etc. So then I (re)read the O. Henry from 1989 (don't have the 1990) and guess what? Yeah, there are just as many dead people in those stories as in today's.

So -- feh. I guess killing off characters to give your story emotional weight is a long-standing tradition, not just some post-9-11 tic, or whatever. Not that I haven't done it myself (in practically everything I've written, ha ha) or that it's necessarily bad. It isn't. The deaths of other people are life-altering, powerful experiences, so of course we want to write and read about them. But it got so that by the time I was 2/3 of the way through the 2010 collection, I could feel the death coming up. And in some stories the ghoulish death scene feels tacked on, as if the writers and editors thought that a nice juicy death could turn a regular story into Literature.

So, did I come to any actual conclusions after reading all these stories? Not really. It's hard to compare old O. Henry stories with new ones, because the old ones were chosen by a single old guy, William Abrahams, who had a pretty conservative sensibility. It could have been at least partly his personal taste that make the 1989 stories seem sort of less colorful -- more intellectual and upper west-sidey -- than the new stories, which are, of course, more multi-culti. One of the 1989 stories that stands out is "Here and There" by David Foster Wallace. It's the best story in the collection by about 1000 times (and no dead people). Rick Bass's "The Watch" is also in that collection -- not a perfect story but an interesting one. It got me thinking about how around that time there began a flood of cartoony-realist stories, like those of T. C. Boyle, George Saunders, and Ralph Lombreglia, though Rick Bass himself went in the Western Regionalism direction soon thereafter.

I should probably say something more, though, about multi-culturalism, which is the most obvious difference between the stories of today and twenty years ago. Around half the stories in the newer edition are about non-American people. There is definitely a sense, these days, that we've come close to exhausting the literary possibilities American culture offers, and that it's time to pay more attention to other cultures. True enough! I do think, though, that some writers depend too heavily on novelty and write stories that teach us about other cultures/cuisines/climates but don't say much about the inner lives of other people. My main complaint about some of "other culture" stories in the 2010 anthology is that the writers stand too far outside their characters. Of course, plenty of American stories are the same, especially stories about Southerners, poor people, or outsiders. And plenty of other culture stories do inner lives brilliantly.

Because that's what it's all about, for me: the inner lives of human beings. Is that what it's all about for you? Or am I weird?

sigh

2010-08-23T19:29:00.004-05:00

Pardon the hiatus, there, but what can I say, it's August. Rhian read my novel draft and spent two days telling me what's wrong with it--that deserves a ten-day blogging break, right? Actually, she saved the thing--I was going to feed it to the hens. She is now preparing a monster post on something or other, brace yourselves.

Meanwhile, the forces of gadgetism were out in strength. Our old advocate for arbitrary, profit-generating change, Nicholas Negroponte, gave the physical book five years to live.

One rolls one's eyes. One palms one's face. But seriously now--could he be right? I myself personally have bought about half a dozen e-books this year, and despite my ongoing love affair with the iPad, the experience was inferior to that of reading a paper book in pretty much every way. Maybe I'm weird, though. The only Kindle I've logged any time with didn't impress me either, though I did see a lot of them at the Jersey Shore this year. (I am tempted to drop a benjamin and a couple of tommyjeffs on the new edition, Just To See.) Maybe people are really digging this stuff. I don't buy CDs anymore--perhaps books are like CDs, for most people.

And furthermore, even if he is right, do we care? The writer in me doesn't, but the reader in me certainly does. Rhian's guess: hardcovers and textbooks will die, paperbacks will soldier on indefinitely. Vinyl, after all, is still readily available, and I'm even still shooting film (or will be when I get around to ordering more stop bath).

The one thing I am certain I would like to see die is the public declaring of the impending death of stuff. But that's one thing I suspect is immortal.

Embracing the tweet

2010-08-12T05:41:00.004-05:00

Well, as usual, I contradict myself. I thought Twitter was stupid. Remember this? I should have known better than to blame the tool when people misuse it. No, Twitter is awesome. Not as a forum for extended narrative--as a mojo-restoring tonic. It turns out you can get a fair amount of short story into 140 characters, if you try real hard.

A woman leaves her purse at a restaurant. She returns for it, and finds a note inside that reads "I hate you." The handwriting is her own.

Deep in a bunker in the mountains of Colorado, a general accesses defense secrets that could destroy the world. The password is "ravioli."

Woman pines for famous actor over many years. Wins contest to have dinner with him. During meal he says, "You remind me of my yard man."

Talking dogs, walking upright, explore Cincinnati.

OK, these aren't going to win any awards, but surely any one of them could make a person's bus ride infinitessimally better? And can one ask any more than that of the form?

Share your 140-character stories, if you will. And a link to your lit tweets.

If you like this, you are wrong

2010-08-10T05:21:00.009-05:00

I don't think I'm going to bother commenting much on, and I'm certainly not going to link to, Anis Shivani's dumbass list of overrated writers on Huffingtonpost. Oh, I am not a fan of every writer on that list, to be sure. But the notion that my admiration for Lydia Davis or Marilynne Robinson, who have written some of the most brilliant, moving, and inimitably human books I have ever read, is little more than the result of having been told once by a college professor that they are good, or that their writing is "easy enough to copy," as opposed to actually having read them and enjoyed them multiple times myself, is depressingly stupid. This is the worst kind of argument there is--the kind where somebody doesn't understand something and is so utterly narcissistic and insecure that he can't allow the possibility that others might understand it better. And so he invents an explanation that renders his ignorance virtuous and others' understanding fatuous. He sounds like a guy who was just denied tenure.

If you want to criticize a writer, go right ahead. But just for once, could we have a critical debate that doesn't involve declaring opposing viewpoints morally bankrupt? Can I please like John Ashbery without being labeled a pompous, self-deceiving ivory-tower snob? Can I please be permitted the courtesy of knowing my own personal motivations, instead of having them dictated to me by some dude on the internet? It's a shame, because some of Shivani's actual literary analysis of some of his overrated writers is in fact quite good. I wish he could have just said what he thought without first having to invalidate what I think, based upon my status as a college professor in an MFA program.

At least he deserves congratulations for one thing--creating the first top-whatever literary list in years with more women on it than men. Sweet!

Oh--wait.

The Passage

2010-07-28T08:21:00.005-05:00

I don't think I've ever had a book recommended to me more times than this one. Justin Cronin used to teach at Colgate, and all my friends at the conference there are friends of his, and this year The Passage was all anybody talked about. They all know I've got a thing for sci-fi and post-apocalypse stuff, so the conversations generally went like this:

Them: "You gotta read Justin's book!!!"
Me: "But isn't it about...vampires?"
Them: "They're not regular vampires."

Well, I read it. And I need to say right off the bat that I almost didn't make it through the first 25 pages, which are about a hooker with a heart of gold who gets horribly victimized by an evil college student. Ah, class war! The adorable, stuffed-animal clutching Innocent Beautiful Daughter didn't help matters, nor did the friendly nun into whose arms she flees.

But if this sounds awful to you, bear with it. The Passage is kind of awesome, and it's true what they say--they're not regular vampires.

I have long looked for a book that I could enjoy the way I enjoyed The Stand at 15: with total absorption and an utter lack of critical judgement. The Stand itself certainly isn't that book; I gave it another try a few years ago, and couldn't make it past the Improbably Old Magical Black Lady. And even though Cronin manages to employ not one, but two Improbably Old Magical Black Ladies in this novel, this is exactly the book I wanted. With Rhian and the kids out of town for the weekend, I set myself up on the sofa and didn't move until all the coffee and bourbon were gone.

The story, as I'm sure you know, is that military scientists inadvertently create bloodthirsty, and apparently immortal, monsters which are let loose upon the land. Flash forward a century: humanity is fucked, and the last few people left alive are trying to survive. Some intrepid adventurers set off on a road trip through the terrible hinterlands, in an effort to...well, it's never really clear what they're trying to achieve. But no matter. What happens to them is a total delight.

Cronin's former reputation is as a writer of literary short stories, but the weird thing here is that the most literary sections are the least successful. He relies far too heavily on characters' past suffering as a motivation for their present actions. Rape, abuse, murder, orphanhood--everyone is driven by wrongs that have been done to them. None of it is convincing, or necessary. The book could lose 150 pages, easy.

But oh boy, the other 650 really fly. Cronin has found his calling as a writer of popular fiction--in scenes of suspense and action, he is right on the money, and he is quite good at showing character in there here and now, without explanations. The monsters are really spectacular, too--scary, but weirdly sympathetic. Our innocent little girl from the first section has come back, see--she got the vampire virus, but it has made her immortal without turning her monstrous, and she can talk to the vampires with her mind. She knows who they used to be, and what it feels like to be them. With this device, Cronin manages to explore what it means to be human, what it means to survive, and in so doing trumps The Stand, with its good v. evil nuclear showdown. There's no evil in The Passage, only human error and human striving. There are even a couple of pretty good love stories, including a moment so heartbreaking I actually screamed. (He makes up for it later, don't worry.)

It bugged me a bit that the book basically starts over on page 210, by which time everyone you have met and gotten invested in is dead. And the middle section starts slowly. But stick to it, this is the real story, the one we will probably still be reading through the two announced sequels.

Yeah, sequels--the ending promises much, much more of the same. I have to confess, I am doubtful. Much of the fun here is the fun of discovery--having mysteries solved, being shown amazing things. The sequels? Well, one of the characters actually asks about this, in the penultimate chapter: "Now what?" she says. The reply is ominous. "Now we go to war."

Oh. My fear, of course, is that we are heading for season 3 of Lost: no more smoke monster, lots of torture. Time will tell if Cronin can avoid this trap. I'm guardedly optimistic, though. He sure knows how to show a guy a fun weekend--let's see how he does with a long-term relationship.

Old notebooks

2010-07-25T11:19:00.007-05:00

Rhian will be mad, as she is preparing a post herself. But it'll keep. I have this strange and incorrect idea about myself that I don't take enough notes or have enough notebooks. Obviously this is nonsense--the house is littered with the things. I had been neglecting my personal archives for about five years, and they got pretty mouse-eaten and water-damaged...recently I moved them to my office at work, which I should have done a long time ago. Today I uploaded some photos of them to my flickr.

I used to use those big black sketchbooks, the kind with the hard covers--I kept one for years during college--a few shots of it are at that link. In grad school, I discovered the amazing National 43-581 chemistry lab notebook, with its blue hard covers, stitched binding, and green narrow-lined paper, which Missoula legend said was the notebook Richard Hugo favored for his poems. The photo above is one, containing the beginning of a lousy short story. I actually ordered a few of the smaller size today, the 43-571. In the pre-Moleskine era, these were as sweet as it got. I have also been using a Moleskine-knockoff hardcover notebook for music for about six years now, though the binding is shot and the elastic band is completely dead. There's a pic of it in that set.

I actually quite like the Moleskine notebooks these days, trendy as they are. Not many manufacturers line their notebooks narrowly enough for me, but those little brown Moleskine journals hit the sweet spot.

As for these photos, I love the serendipitous beauty of handwritten notes--but, paging through these, it was sometimes obvious that I was trying to make them look beautiful, and thus they looked stupid. Maybe it's my own former innocence I find appealing, who knows. Anyway--post some notebook shots, if you got 'em.

Murzban throws down

2010-07-20T15:14:00.008-05:00

Zaaang! W6 friend Murzban Shroff (who recently scored a win in his fight against obscenity charges in India) emailed me today to let me know about this Huffington Post interview, wherein (in the context of much praise for American writers and writing, including me (thanks, Murzban)) he has the following to say:

The biggest weakness of American literary culture is the academia that has crept in--the golden rules of creative writing, which present a sort of ready reckoner for evaluation. There are too many people trying to be writers and trying to make a story out of their lives. As a result, there is a certain degree of sameness in the writing: in not just the choice of themes (parents' divorce, death, sexual abuse, etc), but in the narrative arc, in the way the whole thing drums out. This happens mostly at the university level, where filters can be imposed in the creative writing programs, making entry-level barriers more rigorous, more discerning.

My response to this is my usual eye-roll, I'm afraid: I honestly do not blame academia for any of this. It is true that the academy has succeeded in making competent, mediocre writers out of people who perhaps shouldn't bother. But nobody is forcing this stuff to be published. If there's a failure here, it is in the risk-aversion and excessive chumminess of commercial publishing. For my part, as a teacher of writing, I am not trying to churn out new young literary phenoms. I am trying to help intelligent, passionate people discover and cultivate the best parts of themselves--and when this results in work of genuine promise, to encourage and help shape it.

I generally don't strive for consensus in my classes, and when I apply filters, as I sometimes must, it is for the purpose of filtering out the conventional and uninspired. I do strive to lure weirdos into my classes and make them weirder still. So don't blame me, dammit! I'm doin' my best. But I don't think I'm just trying to justify my existence when I say that, when it comes to undergraduate writing classes, the more the merrier. It's about more than creating great writing, at least for me. It is about creating better people through literary art. When we get our hands on a live one, of course, we are delighted; and our graduate program does set the bar for entry very high. But when my lower-level classes fill up, I tend not to cull.

I think Murzban's work is the exception that proves the rule about the conventionality of American publishing. We are big on Indian fiction here, but not enough editors and marketers are willing to think very far beyond incense and arranged marriages. Then again, that is what people seem to like. Indeed, maybe it isn't the conventionality of publishing that is the problem, but the conventionality of human beings. Nobody's ever going to thank you for being eccentric--and if anyone does, befriend them for life.

As for our friend Murzban, read the whole interview; it's excellent. And read his book.

My Index Of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

2010-07-19T15:31:00.004-05:00

Well now, here's a man after my own heart. At times, in this terrific collection of poems, Paul Guest seems to be channeling my very thoughts, or at least their velocity. After hanging out with a bunch of poets at the Colgate conference, I came home with a verse jones, and found myself with Rhian last week at the Strand in New York, where, while wearing pants one size too small (don't ask) vowed not to leave the poetry aisle until I'd found at least two excellent new books by people I'd never heard of.

I didn't quite make it--this is the only one I found. (I bought another, but it was by somebody I'd heard of.) These poems are earnest and manic and a little bit inscrutable, which is precisely what I like. Sometimes they remind me of Dean Young; they mostly remind me of Ed Skoog. And at their extremes they evoke the recent John Ashbery, who has been a bedside companion for weeks.

The title poem, which stands at the book's center like a drain, is a stone cold classic that I will be xeroxing and mailing to people for years to come. It's one of those crazy tours-de-force that fixes the deeply personal into a firmament of wild American randomness, like Whitman (note: one letter away from hit man) or Ginsburg. It's funny and painful. You get "sweet, sweet Crisco / coursing the byways of my broken heart," a boldly corny riff if I ever read one. Or "Strangers who stopped me in the street / or paid for my lunch / or wept over their dead son / or asked how many miles / in my wheelchair I could go. / The twenty-five miles in five hours / that would take me nowhere / except the car plant or pet food factory / the wind at night / would bring to everyone."

Man, I love that. Guest has a couple other collections and a recent memoir, check him out.

Daniel Clowes and Harvey Pekar

2010-07-13T08:15:00.005-05:00

I have always been vaguely fond of Daniel Clowes' young-loser heroes and heroines, and enough a fan of his deadpan draftsmanship to pick up a new book whenever it came out. But in the end, I've always come around to thinking that he tends to pull his punches, that he always stops just short of genuine pathos. David Boring is a good example--there, Clowes seemed to be relying too heavily on his strengths, and on the prevailing tastes of his genre.

But I love this new book Wilson. A novel-in-vignettes that spans a long, sad life, it sees Clowes experimenting with narrative and visual style, and digging deeply into aspects of human character he'd previously explored only glancingly. Wilson, a single man, is pathologically unpleasant, narcissistic, and paranoid; he vaccillates wildly between knowing himself all too well and seeming not to know himself at all. He is pathetic and mean, loving and loathesome--and weirdly appealing nevertheless. Clowes renders him in a variety of comic styles, morphing him according to subject and mood; the vignettes are laid out as Sunday funnies, of a sort you'd never see in the paper, with deeply depressing punch lines in the final panel. The book is a real achievement for Clowes, and has moved me firmly into the category of dedicated fan.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't add here to the chorus of praise for the brilliant, uncategorizable Harvey Pekar, who died this week at 70. We loved his work and will miss it.

An interview with Téa Obreht

2010-07-11T08:46:00.003-05:00

For a while now I haven't been cross-posting with the Writers At Cornell podcast blog that I maintain--W6 deserves its own posts, I decided. (As a result, you might have missed interviews with Paul Muldoon and Billy Collins, among others, so do stop by there.) But I want to make an exception today for my former student Téa Obreht, whose novel The Tiger's Wife is due out in the spring, and who is the youngest member of this year's New Yorker "20 Under 40" lineup. The interview is sort of embarrassingly informal--honestly, I am a little bit in awe of my ludicrously talented student--but I'm delighted to get to file an early dispatch from what will doubtless be a mini-industry in Téa Obreht media coverage. The interview is about 20 minutes long, and should already be waiting on your iTunes if you are a subscriber to the podcast.

In other news, blogging on the iPad is a PITA. Fetching an image alone is absurdly time-consuming, and when you come back to your tab in Safari, all the forms have been refreshed. Blogger needs a tablet interface, eh?

Cloud Atlas

2010-07-10T06:15:00.006-05:00

People have been recommending this book to me for so long that it seemed inevitable that I would never get around to it. But then last fall my friend Edward forcibly lent me a copy--I found it in my mailbox at work--and, some months later, another friend spent twenty minutes of a car trip telling me how good it was. So I went to my office, got the book, and dug in.

The pleasures of this novel are many, as are my qualms about it. But the pleasures are great and the qualms are petty. It's really quite a masterful piece of work, with all of the qualifications that word suggests...an unusual project of an unusual writer.

In case you haven't had the pleasure, Cloud Atlas is essentially a series of nested novellas spanning several hundred years, from a recognizable past to a dystopian future. The novellas are connected in clever ways--primarily by theme, but also (successfully) by some interesting inter-textual shenanigans and (not so successfully) a series of identical birthmarks. Each novella is written in a drastically different style--there's a journal, a series of letters, a pulp mystery, a kind of neo-gothic comedy, a sci-fi story, and...well, I won't even bother trying to describe the last one. The stories are arranged in a kind of pyramid, each but the final one split into two, so that you get the first half of every story first, moving forward through time, and then the second half as you return to the past.

I tried to resist this novel: it is at times too didactic (especially the ending), too tricky, too virtuosic. But Mitchell is so good. I'm not terribly wild about the journal or mystery sections, but even those are executed with tremendous skill; the writer's ability to inhabit different characters, historical situations, and styles of language is simply incredible. Reading him, I kept hearing that line from Charles Baxter's "Gryphon," where the narrator is scolded by his friend for attempting to ape their wildly inventive teacher: "Don't you try to do it. You'll just sound like a jerk." It's hard for a writer to read this book--at times, Mitchell seems like a different species of creature entirely.

I guess my primary complaint with this novel is that it's all so arbitrary--the structure just seems like an excuse for Mitchell to show off his chops. But hell--I enjoyed pretty much every second of it, so who am I to complain? He's got a new one out, and a bunch of others I haven't read, so I'm going to dive in and see if Mitchell doesn't end up becoming my favorite new superhuman writer.

Ideas for the storage and display of books

2010-07-02T14:39:00.005-05:00

First off, a quick note on my return from hiatus--my thanks to all of my friends, peers, students and colleagues at the Colgate Writers' Conference, especially W6 commenters Hope and Gallagher, who workshopped their novels-in-progress with me--it was great fun, and the talks especially were better than ever this year. (They should be hitting YouTube shortly and I will repost mine here.) Hope to see you all again in 2011.

So there you have it--Rhian's office is clean. Walking into it is like walking into an orderly mind--I am jealous, and now have to go back into my studioffice and pick up all the microphone cables and other crap the floor is covered with.

One thing we discovered as Rhian started putting away the many stacks of books that used to be sitting on her floor: we don't have enough bookcases. I don't know how this is possible, I just installed a new one last year, but it's already full. We do get rid of books now and again, and I bring some to my office at school, but honestly--we need some ideas for what to do with them all.

Generally we get our bookcases at the Unfinished Furniture Store on the west side. (I think it's called something else now actually.) But the house ends up with something of a college-dorm feel, as a result. I have been trolling the internet for ideas and come up with a few--building bookshelves into staircases, recessing walls and building shelves in between studs. In our old house, we had one room with a single bookshelf up above the window frames, going around three walls--that was cool, and maybe I can build something like it again here. I could also completely transform one windowed wall of my room, the one beside my desk.

This is particularly important to me now that I have read four or five books on the iPad and found the experience surprisingly lacking. It isn't the iPad, which is fairly pleasant to use. Rather, it is the apathetic, ham-handed execution of the ebook medium in the hands of major publishers. Ugly design, formatting errors, awkward layout...one senses that they are just tossing shit up there as fast as they can to cash in on the rush.

The tech is not mature, in other words. And the paper book still feels great. So let's hear your storage ideas.

Phonebook Names

2010-06-27T12:51:00.006-05:00

So I'm actually cleaning my office. It's a huge undertaking: there's an unpacked box in the corner from our move three years ago, on top of which I've been mounding stuff that needs to be filed. And other stuff -- a paper glacier. So the office has never really been "clean." It feels pathological. When it's done I'm going to be a whole new person -- maybe someone who actually finishes writing the novels she starts!

Among other things, I found a list of excellent names. At first I thought I made them up, but no: I could not have invented such great names. I actually found them in the Missoula, MT, phonebook. I've always spent a lot of time reading phonebooks. One day, there won't be any phonebooks anymore, so we should celebrate them while we can!

James Snoozy
Vernon Slippy
Paul Tissue
Fern Tiger
Priscilla Wig
E. Warmflash
Amy Brokenleg
Boyd Booze
N. Eyepopper
Andrew Face
Ace Feek
Elaine Ee
E. T. Bob Sleem
Spanky Scrunchly

I still can't believe N. Eyepopper. Really, the Ithaca phonebook just can't compete.

Please share names you've found in phonebooks!

zOMG USB typewriter!

2010-06-14T06:24:00.003-05:00

I gave up DIY electronics a couple years ago...it was eating up too much of my time. But I have been slowly getting sucked back in. Soldering a few cables here and there...and then a simple kit...and recently I found myself buying new batteries for my multimeter and thumbing droolingly through the Mouser catalog.

Well, here's a DIY project (via Engadget) that actually has something to do with my job for a change. Adding USB functuality to a manual typewriter.

$75 for the kit...wow, I am so doing it. We happen to have two identical Smith-Corona portables...I may try modding one, and if I fall back in love with it, will try to find somebody to service the other and get it working normally again. This appeals to me in the same way that sticking a lens from 1938 onto a digital camera from 2006 appeals to me. Not steampunk--just anti-obsolescence.

Electric Literature's iPad app

2010-06-08T20:43:00.004-05:00

Hey, look--Electric Literature, the literary magazine I hyped here in the past for their new-media savvy (they offer a variety of formats, including print, pdf, and EPUB), has committed a profound act of nerudition: they've upgraded their free iPhone app for iPad. Needless to say, I downloaded it right quick.

The app is a mite half-baked so far--you of course still must pay to unlock the three (so far) issues of the magazine, and I can't quite yet figure out how to apply my paid subscription to this interface. But there is some cool free content, with plans to make the experience more multimedia. (One of EL's innovations is commissioning an arty video for every story the publish; these are currently available on their web site.) I've said here that I think the iPad will be a great way to read magazine content someday (especially once it inherits the new iPhone's insanely high-resolution display), and I'm glad to see EL getting out in front of this trend. (And not just because I've got a story, "Hibachi," coming out in I believe the next issue.)

Literary chick lit: it's real!

2010-06-06T11:46:00.005-05:00

For a little while back in the nineties I had the same publisher as Jennifer Belle (or as her website puts it, "bestselling author Jennifer Belle"), and my then-editor sent me a copy of Going Down, her first book. This is before there really was a thing called chick lit, but my editor did that thing people do routinely now when they give each other volumes of the stuff--she kind of apologized for it.

No need for apologies--the book was funny, and cleverly written. It was about a college student earning money as a prostitute. I didn't pay much attention to Belle's career after that, but Rhian recently got her hands on the new one, The Seven-Year Bitch, which I think is the worst title in the history of ever--but Rhian loved it and went to the library for more. This led me to read her third novel, Little Stalker.

Little Stalker is--well, what can I say, it's a romance. But it's a two-blowjob romance, the first of which culminates with the protagonist vomiting on her boyfriend's penis; the second of which is performed on a man in his sixties by a 12-year-old girl. So, you know, Emma this is not. But the book is simply hilarious. Belle is wonderful at self-disgust, social awkwardness, and family dysfunction--she writes here about very familiar but never-written-about relationship nuances--the casual cruelties of people in love, the disgustingness of intimacy, and weird little rules couples invent for one another without even realizing they do it.

Our literate culture has more or less accepted the idea that a crime novel, or even a science fiction novel, might well be of lasting artistic value. But I don't think romance has enjoyed this relationship with readers yet. Maybe, generally speaking, it doesn't deserve it. But Belle is doing something different here, something odd, slightly gross, and slyly ambitious. The rest of the chick lit world (if there even is such a thing, outside of publishers' marketing departments) ought to pay attention.

Ward Six List of Ten Over 80

2010-06-03T09:48:00.010-05:00

Ward Six is proud to announce its TEN OVER 80: WRITERS TO GO BACK AND READ list. All the following writers will turn 80 or more this year, and all have been kicking ass for longer than we have been alive:

JOHN BARTH: I read The End of the Road the summer I was 18. It made me understand how fully bizarre being an adult was going to be. Hurray! In the late 60's he wrote an article called "The Literature of Exhaustion," which kind of predicted the end of the novel. But then he found himself continuing to write novels. His latest book of fiction, The Development, a collection of linked stories, came out in 2008.

BEVERLY CLEARY: She is 94 and still writing! I can't decide if I like the Ralph the Mouse books or the Ramona ones better.

EVAN S. CONNELL: This guy is tragically under-read. Mrs. Bridge was republished earlier this year; it and Mr. Bridge are sad and funny character sketches. Also wonderful is The Connoisseur and his several collections of essays, including The White Lantern and A Long Desire.

J. P. DONLEAVY: Also under-read! And another author I read when I was a teenager. Donleavy is a little like an Irish-American Richard Brautigan, only better. Or maybe a bit like Barthelme. I keep his story collection Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule on my desk, and am still constantly surprised by what I find when I open it. Here's the first paragraph of "The Mad Molecule":

I woke on that terrible day and mixed the shredded apple in my raw porridge oats and poured on the cream. I know what's good for me. I put on the shoes with the golfer's soles, walked silently down the stairs and out into a great blue sky and along the river's warm sweet smell.

I wish more writers these days dared to be so weird.

PAULA FOX: I read Desperate Characters in the mid-nineties because Jonathan Franzen wrote about finding it at Yaddo and how it's a perfect short novel. It is. She's had an interesting life and has written two memoirs. Also, the daughter she gave up for adoption gave birth to Courtney Love.

WILLIAM GASS: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is a collection of five strange and linguistically brilliant short stories. Here's a bit from "Icicles":

Glick was holding a pen in his teeth like a pirate. It was a green pen and it made Fender think: pickle. Glick nodded briefly at Fender who was feeling his way now through an office unnaturally dark and full of lurking obstacles. Goodness but it's bright outside, he said, his voice false as a wig, which both surprised and annoyed him, since it was a small thing to have said, and he'd certainly meant it. The typewriter was repeating a letter -- likely x.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is the only thing I've read of his, but now I think I need to read the rest of his smallish oeuvre.

HARPER LEE: Well, you probably don't need to go back and read her, because she has to be the most thoroughly read writer in America. But I wanted to mention her, because she's still alive, and, unless she's been secretly storing away manuscripts, she's the Patron Saint of Blocked Writers. She wrote our motto: "It's better to be silent than to be a fool." God bless her.

ELMORE LEONARD: Did you know he's going to be 85 this year? I didn't. But I'm not going to say anything about him; JRL wrote about him here.

DORIS LESSING: I admit that The Golden Notebook was a bit much for me, but I loved The Summer Before the Dark, which is about a housewife who leaves her family and falls in with a group of strange younger people. Also, I liked The Fifth Child, which is about a family who gives birth to a kind of throw-back Neander-child. When I first read it, it was horrifying; having had a couple of boys myself since then, the kid in the book doesn't seem so bad. I love it that when was told she won the Nobel Prize, she apparently said, "Oh, Christ... I couldn't care less."

ALISON LURIE: Alison is my personal idol. Her books are all funny, sharp-eyed, and slightly wicked. She's hugely productive and writes every day. I want to be her.

Some of my favorites of hers are: The War Between the Tates, The Nowhere City, Real People, Truth and Consequences, and Familiar Spirits, her memoir about her friendship with David Jackson and James Merrill and their experimentation with the Ouija board.