Of the seven deadly sins, envy is probably the most common to writers. It's a condition that becomes particularly acute when one of us (usually young and cute) is anointed as the Next Big Thing in American Letters. Some recent examples: Jonathan Safran Foer, Curtis Sittenfeld, Marissa Pessl, Nell Freudenberger, the list goes on.
I don't remember much of this kind of griping, however, when David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was released in the mid-nineties. Certainly there were a lot of jokes about the book's heft, as well as critical debate about just how successful the book was as a whole (as there would be about every one of Wallace's books). Yet there was no denying the guy's talent line by line. There was certainly no denying his intelligence.
And of course, the humor. There have been many postmodern writers who've exploded their prose with pictures, quizzes, footnotes, and any manner of non-traditional stylistic devices. But few did it with such charm and acute comic timing as Wallace, who in the end, may not have produced as seminal a work as the masterpieces of his idol, Thomas Pynchon, yet whose writing was a hell of a lot more fun to read.
Only a week ago, I was teaching an excerpt from Wallace's well-known essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a satire of cruise ship culture, which embodied the best of Wallace's strengths (as enumerated above) as well as the worst of his weaknesses (chief among them, an almost pathological inability to restrain himself). In fact, reading Wallace's work is like being on a cruise: you can get pleasured to death. Or to use another metaphor I'm sure Wallace would have appreciated, immersing yourself in Wallace's work is like entering the Orgasmatron that nearly did in Jane Fonda in Barbarella. (Okay, I'll stop myself here. I could go on, but I'm not David Foster Wallace.)
I never met Wallace personally, but I've read him and heard him speak twice, and I couldn't help falling in love with the guy. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. He described our culture with a unique blend of devastating evisceration and disarming sweetness, as seen in his brilliant device in Infinite Jest of renaming years after consumer products, notably "The Year of the Depend Undergarment." Any other writer might have chosen a whole other array of products. Yet the choice of that diaper was exactly what made Wallace Wallace: absurd, mocking to the point of snickering, yet also somehow tender and sad. Wallace's voice, of which we are now so cruelly robbed, made you sit up and pay attention, made you think, made you laugh, and above all made you want to give him a hug and tell him, it's okay, there's still hope. Yes, American life has become increasingly coarse and ugly and dumb. But there's still love, and where there's love, there's still hope.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Joel Ivan Hamburger
I wanted to mark the recent death of my father, Joel Ivan Hamburger, who was 79 this year. But I don't know how. There are all kinds of rites and rituals that are possible, but none of them seem equal to the real and true experience of my late father and the facts of his going out of this world.
Perhaps the strangest part of it is the experience of death itself. It makes me think of being in New York during September 11th. While I was going through it, the truth and reality of the actual event kept me so grounded in the present, in every second of what was happening. And then immediately afterward, the memorialization of the event gilded the lily, transformed it from an experience to a narrative.
Lately I've been recounting the narrative of my father's death over and over, and each time I get more frustrated. "But this wasn't how it was," I want to say. The story is so puny next to the pain and sorrow of what I went through in life.
The first time I fell in love, I remember hearing a love song on the radio and thinking, "Oh, that's what they were talking about!" So too, with this, I now have a new understanding of what death means to the living who are left. It makes me hate war more than ever. It's horrific enough when someone dies of natural causes, but to plunge someone through this experience to make a political point is barbaric.
I also have a new appreciation for writers who can capture this rare, awful experience in their work. Lately I've been reading the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison, specifically his book Incomplete Knowledge, which delicately yet powerfully evokes the deaths of several friends and his brother. Perhaps poetry more than fiction is more suited to portraying the host of jumbled, jagged, and sometimes contradictory emotions called up by loss.
We'll see.
Perhaps the strangest part of it is the experience of death itself. It makes me think of being in New York during September 11th. While I was going through it, the truth and reality of the actual event kept me so grounded in the present, in every second of what was happening. And then immediately afterward, the memorialization of the event gilded the lily, transformed it from an experience to a narrative.
Lately I've been recounting the narrative of my father's death over and over, and each time I get more frustrated. "But this wasn't how it was," I want to say. The story is so puny next to the pain and sorrow of what I went through in life.
The first time I fell in love, I remember hearing a love song on the radio and thinking, "Oh, that's what they were talking about!" So too, with this, I now have a new understanding of what death means to the living who are left. It makes me hate war more than ever. It's horrific enough when someone dies of natural causes, but to plunge someone through this experience to make a political point is barbaric.
I also have a new appreciation for writers who can capture this rare, awful experience in their work. Lately I've been reading the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison, specifically his book Incomplete Knowledge, which delicately yet powerfully evokes the deaths of several friends and his brother. Perhaps poetry more than fiction is more suited to portraying the host of jumbled, jagged, and sometimes contradictory emotions called up by loss.
We'll see.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
The Truth about Short Stories
I was at a farewell party for an author-friend of mine, a short story writer who's leaving New York. While talking with his editor, the subject of short stories came up. "I love short stories," she said. "Everyone I know reads short stories. Why don't short stories sell?"
It's a refrain I've heard repeated all too often, not just recently, but ever since I came to New York and began meeting people who worked in publishing. Short stories don't sell. If you're going to try to write fiction, which is a silly idea to start with, at least try to write a novel. No one wants to read stories.
And in the meantime, some of the most notable books that have come out in the same period of time include Junot Diaz's Drown, Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, Adam Haslett's You are not a Stranger Here, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, several books by Alice Munro. The list goes on.
But short stories don't sell.
It's possible that the above are the exception to the rule. But I don't think so. I think the trouble publishers are having selling short stories is the same trouble they're having selling any type of fiction. Novels, novellas, story collections, no matter what the form, fiction itself isn't selling, with a few notable exceptions like Harry Potter or a few pop fiction sensations that you see at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Anyone who has looked at the numbers of copies sold by even some of our most prestigious authors knows that fiction is in a crisis in terms of sales.
As a friend of mine put it, "Fiction is the new poetry."
Why is this happening? The usual villains come to mind: the Internet and cell phones and DVD's for using up people's time that they might be spending in quiet reflection, the necessary state for reading. But I think there's more to it than that. We're living at a time when for some reason people do not want to stop and think and look and listen. Maybe it's the way we've been educated or coddled as consumers, but people are afraid to cut themselves off from the world and take a stance as a thoughtful observer rather than a commenting participant. Maybe that explains why even though the number of books sold keeps falling, the number of masters programs in creative writing keeps rising. We all want to be the star. But do we have what it takes to be a member of the audience?
It's a refrain I've heard repeated all too often, not just recently, but ever since I came to New York and began meeting people who worked in publishing. Short stories don't sell. If you're going to try to write fiction, which is a silly idea to start with, at least try to write a novel. No one wants to read stories.
And in the meantime, some of the most notable books that have come out in the same period of time include Junot Diaz's Drown, Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, Adam Haslett's You are not a Stranger Here, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, several books by Alice Munro. The list goes on.
But short stories don't sell.
It's possible that the above are the exception to the rule. But I don't think so. I think the trouble publishers are having selling short stories is the same trouble they're having selling any type of fiction. Novels, novellas, story collections, no matter what the form, fiction itself isn't selling, with a few notable exceptions like Harry Potter or a few pop fiction sensations that you see at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Anyone who has looked at the numbers of copies sold by even some of our most prestigious authors knows that fiction is in a crisis in terms of sales.
As a friend of mine put it, "Fiction is the new poetry."
Why is this happening? The usual villains come to mind: the Internet and cell phones and DVD's for using up people's time that they might be spending in quiet reflection, the necessary state for reading. But I think there's more to it than that. We're living at a time when for some reason people do not want to stop and think and look and listen. Maybe it's the way we've been educated or coddled as consumers, but people are afraid to cut themselves off from the world and take a stance as a thoughtful observer rather than a commenting participant. Maybe that explains why even though the number of books sold keeps falling, the number of masters programs in creative writing keeps rising. We all want to be the star. But do we have what it takes to be a member of the audience?
Friday, July 04, 2008
Recent Raves
I recently received a Barnes and Noble gift card for my birthday, so I went to a local branch to find the book Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. After searching all through the new fiction releases and not finding it, I went to ask for it at the information desk. The store did have the book, under "YA" or Young Adult fiction.
It's a bit incomprehensible to me that a writer of Cameron's stature should have his latest release shelved under "YA" rather than general fiction just because the narrator who's just out of high school. It's a bit like putting The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a book with a juvenile narrator, with the kiddie books.
But in fact, Cameron's publisher has put out the book through its YA division, and perhaps they feel that in today's shaky marketplace for fiction, this is the best economic strategy. A bit shortsighted in my opinion, because Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You is not only Peter Cameron's strongest book, but also one of the most compelling reads in contemporary fiction.
At the book's center is James Sveck, a shockingly self-aware and intelligent high school graduate who feels simultaneously above and left out of the mainstream world. With a minimum of fuss and a maximum of acute sensitivity for language, Cameron captures this young man's heartbreaking alienation with humor and depth. The result is the kind of book that disappoints in only one respect: it ends.
This is prime entertainment, not for kiddies, but for sentient and serious readers of literature. Miss this book at your own peril.
It's a bit incomprehensible to me that a writer of Cameron's stature should have his latest release shelved under "YA" rather than general fiction just because the narrator who's just out of high school. It's a bit like putting The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a book with a juvenile narrator, with the kiddie books.
But in fact, Cameron's publisher has put out the book through its YA division, and perhaps they feel that in today's shaky marketplace for fiction, this is the best economic strategy. A bit shortsighted in my opinion, because Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You is not only Peter Cameron's strongest book, but also one of the most compelling reads in contemporary fiction.
At the book's center is James Sveck, a shockingly self-aware and intelligent high school graduate who feels simultaneously above and left out of the mainstream world. With a minimum of fuss and a maximum of acute sensitivity for language, Cameron captures this young man's heartbreaking alienation with humor and depth. The result is the kind of book that disappoints in only one respect: it ends.
This is prime entertainment, not for kiddies, but for sentient and serious readers of literature. Miss this book at your own peril.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A Saintly Weekend
Just got back from a weekend festival of Queer Lit in New Orleans called Saints and Sinners. It's my third time there, and each time I come back with some new lens on literature, my own work, and myself.
A few impressions that stand out:
1. Sitting in Stephen McCauley's master class on character, in which he gave us some great exercises to flesh out a character you don't know well. Two of my favorites: A) describe your character's feet. and B) imagine yourself walking down a street and encountering your character. What's your impression?
2. Hearing Dorothy Allison full-throated no-holds-barred memories of her career and her fiery prescriptions of what needs to be done to the Bush administration.
3. Participating on a panel with novelists Brian Antoni and Paul Lisicky, who taught me about the importance of sticking it out as a writer, even when things look grim.
4. Having dinner with novelist Gary Zebrun, who told me not to let the current doldrums of the publishing business get me down, and encouraged me to believe in myself and above all to keep writing. "I tried to quit writing for eight years," he told me. "Those were eight of the most miserable years of my life."
Now back in New York, I'm sitting at my computer and ready to attack my work with a new verve. Thanks, Saints and Sinners!
A few impressions that stand out:
1. Sitting in Stephen McCauley's master class on character, in which he gave us some great exercises to flesh out a character you don't know well. Two of my favorites: A) describe your character's feet. and B) imagine yourself walking down a street and encountering your character. What's your impression?
2. Hearing Dorothy Allison full-throated no-holds-barred memories of her career and her fiery prescriptions of what needs to be done to the Bush administration.
3. Participating on a panel with novelists Brian Antoni and Paul Lisicky, who taught me about the importance of sticking it out as a writer, even when things look grim.
4. Having dinner with novelist Gary Zebrun, who told me not to let the current doldrums of the publishing business get me down, and encouraged me to believe in myself and above all to keep writing. "I tried to quit writing for eight years," he told me. "Those were eight of the most miserable years of my life."
Now back in New York, I'm sitting at my computer and ready to attack my work with a new verve. Thanks, Saints and Sinners!
Thursday, May 01, 2008
PEN World Voices
This weekend, I'll be blogging for the PEN World Voices Festival, featuring panels of writers from around the world. You can check out my comments and others by other writers on the PEN website, www.pen.org.
Here's my first post:
One of the most amusing moments for me during a panel called "Rewriting Family" was when the Hungarian-Romanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman announced, "As a writer, you have to get rid of your family." Dutch writer P. F. Thomese agreed, chiming in, "Yes, I agree, you have to destroy your family. You can't think, 'What would my mother think of that?' If that influences you, you'd never write anything of any meaning."
Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that in my own career, I have thought, "What would my father think of that?" and it has influenced me. As a young writer in my teens, my father played a very important role in my literary life. Whenever I needed a villain, he was always there for me. And so whenever he read my work, my father's response was usually along the lines of, "Why do I always have to be
the bad guy?"
As I sat down to write my first novel, I took my father's words to heart. Why is it that fathers are so often the villains in literature? In fact, during the discussion last night, Thomese brought this up when he said that his becoming a father taught him that he wasn't the center of the universe anymore. "Which was a huge discovery," he said, "since writers like to be the center of the universe." This is why, in Thomese's opinion, you see so many sons as heroes of novels while fathers play the role of villain.
While working on my novel Faith for Beginners, I decided I would defy the cliche and write a really nice dad. I made the father character in the book, Mr. Michaelson, vulnerable, caring, even slightly innocent in his concern for those around him. None of these are attributes anyone would ascribe to my father.
When he read the book, a few months before it was published, my father called me up and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. "Why am I always the bad guy in your writing?" he wanted to know.
Go figure.
Israeli writer Yael Hadaya said that the only person in her family she'd never write about is her brother, "because I'm scared of him. He's the only one in our family who can defend himself. My father is dead. My kids are helpless because they're little, and my mother can't read my work without falling asleep, so she's never read anything I wrote."
The truth is, however, that no character is exactly the same as its real-life model. "When you write about your family," said Hedaya, "you're not really writing about them. It's like a collage of various pieces, but it can't be exactly the same. So you're not really writing your family, you're disguising your family. But I have to write about them. I have to write about my child. I can't just write about another child. This is my child."
The trouble with writers and families, according to Thomese, is that in families, you can never be honest with each other, but in writing you always have to be honest, which leads to a natural conflict. And as D'Erasmo pointed out, in a way that's what makes for the juicy tension in writing about families, that the reader always knows there are secrets that haven't been aired.
The Hungarian-Romainian writer Dragoman brought up a funny story about family secrets related to his recent novel The White King. For his novel, he'd made up some family secrets for the characters, who bore some loose resemblances to his own family. After the book came out, his mother told him as long as he was making up secrets about people, she would tell him the real family secrets she'd kept buried for years. And in this way, fictional lies about family ended up revealing truths Dragoman would never have discovered otherwise.
The title of the panel is "Rewriting Family," and each of these writers has re-written the notion of family in their work or lives in some way. Moderator D'Erasmo's last novel A Seahorse Year features a same-sex couple whose child has gone missing. Hedaya is a single mother by choice who's currently raising three kids. For Dragoman, family was not an arena of rebellion or conflict, but actually the "last line of defense" in a totalitarian society, the one place where he could feel safe. Dutch writer Thomese, who is married to an Indonesian, switched gears from bitterly satiric fiction to a wrenching personal memoir about the death of his child.
"I had to write it," said Thomese. "Because my child was dead and if I didn't write it, I would be left with nothing."
Here's my first post:
One of the most amusing moments for me during a panel called "Rewriting Family" was when the Hungarian-Romanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman announced, "As a writer, you have to get rid of your family." Dutch writer P. F. Thomese agreed, chiming in, "Yes, I agree, you have to destroy your family. You can't think, 'What would my mother think of that?' If that influences you, you'd never write anything of any meaning."
Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that in my own career, I have thought, "What would my father think of that?" and it has influenced me. As a young writer in my teens, my father played a very important role in my literary life. Whenever I needed a villain, he was always there for me. And so whenever he read my work, my father's response was usually along the lines of, "Why do I always have to be
the bad guy?"
As I sat down to write my first novel, I took my father's words to heart. Why is it that fathers are so often the villains in literature? In fact, during the discussion last night, Thomese brought this up when he said that his becoming a father taught him that he wasn't the center of the universe anymore. "Which was a huge discovery," he said, "since writers like to be the center of the universe." This is why, in Thomese's opinion, you see so many sons as heroes of novels while fathers play the role of villain.
While working on my novel Faith for Beginners, I decided I would defy the cliche and write a really nice dad. I made the father character in the book, Mr. Michaelson, vulnerable, caring, even slightly innocent in his concern for those around him. None of these are attributes anyone would ascribe to my father.
When he read the book, a few months before it was published, my father called me up and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. "Why am I always the bad guy in your writing?" he wanted to know.
Go figure.
Israeli writer Yael Hadaya said that the only person in her family she'd never write about is her brother, "because I'm scared of him. He's the only one in our family who can defend himself. My father is dead. My kids are helpless because they're little, and my mother can't read my work without falling asleep, so she's never read anything I wrote."
The truth is, however, that no character is exactly the same as its real-life model. "When you write about your family," said Hedaya, "you're not really writing about them. It's like a collage of various pieces, but it can't be exactly the same. So you're not really writing your family, you're disguising your family. But I have to write about them. I have to write about my child. I can't just write about another child. This is my child."
The trouble with writers and families, according to Thomese, is that in families, you can never be honest with each other, but in writing you always have to be honest, which leads to a natural conflict. And as D'Erasmo pointed out, in a way that's what makes for the juicy tension in writing about families, that the reader always knows there are secrets that haven't been aired.
The Hungarian-Romainian writer Dragoman brought up a funny story about family secrets related to his recent novel The White King. For his novel, he'd made up some family secrets for the characters, who bore some loose resemblances to his own family. After the book came out, his mother told him as long as he was making up secrets about people, she would tell him the real family secrets she'd kept buried for years. And in this way, fictional lies about family ended up revealing truths Dragoman would never have discovered otherwise.
The title of the panel is "Rewriting Family," and each of these writers has re-written the notion of family in their work or lives in some way. Moderator D'Erasmo's last novel A Seahorse Year features a same-sex couple whose child has gone missing. Hedaya is a single mother by choice who's currently raising three kids. For Dragoman, family was not an arena of rebellion or conflict, but actually the "last line of defense" in a totalitarian society, the one place where he could feel safe. Dutch writer Thomese, who is married to an Indonesian, switched gears from bitterly satiric fiction to a wrenching personal memoir about the death of his child.
"I had to write it," said Thomese. "Because my child was dead and if I didn't write it, I would be left with nothing."
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Barack Obama: Guilty of Literary Crimes?
This election season has been a confusing one on many levels. I started out warily in support of Hillary Clinton because I was impressed by her strong performance in the early debates and the thoroughness of her knowledge of government. After Barack Obama's moving victory speech in Iowa, however, I started wondering if I was backing the wrong candidate. And then after watching the Clintons go after Obama with their Nixonian campaign tactics in South Carolina, I decided to make a change and now I'm firmly in Obama's camp.
In the end, the choice of Obama or Clinton probably doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of policy, since when they're elected, they'll probably do (or fail to do) many of the same things. As a gay voter, I haven't really had much choice in presidential elections, since the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are determined to offend me. Remember Bob Dole returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans? Remember George Bush and gay marriage?
The issue that has been more difficult for me is the charge of plagiarism leveled by the Clinton campaign against Obama, who the other weekend used a few lines from another politician's speech without attribution. I doubt that the Clinton campaign has made this charge out of their concern for intellectual property rights, but it is a charge that is no less serious for the spirit of opportunism from which it has been offered.
Even Senator Obama has admitted he should have attributed the lines he stole (let's call this crime by its proper name) to their author, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The question for me, though, is how serious is this crime? Petty larceny or high misdemeanor? How much is too much when it comes to using another author's words? And is that standard different for a speech than it is for a literary text?
Let's be fair here. Neither Obama nor Patrick attributed the lines "I have a dream" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to their original authors, nor did anyone suggest they needed to. Also, the bits of Patrick's speech that were original to him, "Just words?" were fairly short. I think what offended people was not so much the words being repeated, but the idea behind those words being repeated minus a simple, "As Deval Patrick said..." But then, don't politicians borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time? "No new taxes." "Universal health insurance." Has there ever been a political campaign where Republicans and Democrats respectively don't endorse these positions? Have I just committed plagiarism by using those words here on this blog?
Furthermore, we live in a culture in which "sampling" is all the rage, in music, in film. It's a kind of homage to use another person's work in your own, even without attribution. And often the work being "sampled" isn't very common at all. How many times have you heard a pop song from the 1970s and were shocked to hear a riff that you thought had been created for a hip-hop hit of the 1990's or our own decade? How does hearing those riffs in their original context make you feel when you recognize them? Thrilled or cheated?
I hate plagiarism and have little tolerance for plagiarists. The trouble is, I have a hard time defining what that term means these days. Right now I'm working on an essay about a novel written about Berlin in the 1990's. I and others have recently tried to find the author, J. S. Marcus, who hasn't published another book in over a decade, but without success. The situation reminded me of Christopher Isherwood looking for the real life model for Sally Bowles, who'd also disappeared. At the end of Berlin Stories, what is probably the definitive work on that city, Isherwood says, "When you read this, Sally--if you ever do--please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard."
And so I closed my essay with the following lines as a double homage, to link Marcus with Isherwood: "When you read this essay, J. S. Marcus—if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay. And write another book for us."
I did not add, awkwardly, "As Christopher Isherwood wrote at the end of 'Sally Bowles.'" My hope is that those who know the book (Marcus would be among them) will get the reference on their own, and would rightly sneer at the idea of wink-wink-nudge-nudging the reader to remind him or her of the source. It also strikes me that the lines themselves are not distinctive enough to warrant much concern about re-using. It isn't as if I had begun a novel about India or New York City with "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed," as Isherwood does at the beginning of 'A Berlin Diary.' Now that would be a problem, not only because the lines are so unique but also because I would be using them in a context that does not suggest its source, that in fact suggests that I, Aaron Hamburger, inspired by India or New York, so brilliantly thought up these lines all by my very self.
We all learned in grade school about the evils of plagiarism. What we did not learn is the difference between plagiarism and (to use a hot critical buzzword) "intertextuality," between copying and "sampling." Somewhere there is a line, but I think we have to draw it anew with each and every piece of writing we compose. My opinion is that Senator Obama just crossed that line by a step, maybe two. As for my essay, I think I'm well within safe boundaries, but I'm glad to hear if someone out there disagrees.
In the end, the choice of Obama or Clinton probably doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of policy, since when they're elected, they'll probably do (or fail to do) many of the same things. As a gay voter, I haven't really had much choice in presidential elections, since the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are determined to offend me. Remember Bob Dole returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans? Remember George Bush and gay marriage?
The issue that has been more difficult for me is the charge of plagiarism leveled by the Clinton campaign against Obama, who the other weekend used a few lines from another politician's speech without attribution. I doubt that the Clinton campaign has made this charge out of their concern for intellectual property rights, but it is a charge that is no less serious for the spirit of opportunism from which it has been offered.
Even Senator Obama has admitted he should have attributed the lines he stole (let's call this crime by its proper name) to their author, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The question for me, though, is how serious is this crime? Petty larceny or high misdemeanor? How much is too much when it comes to using another author's words? And is that standard different for a speech than it is for a literary text?
Let's be fair here. Neither Obama nor Patrick attributed the lines "I have a dream" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to their original authors, nor did anyone suggest they needed to. Also, the bits of Patrick's speech that were original to him, "Just words?" were fairly short. I think what offended people was not so much the words being repeated, but the idea behind those words being repeated minus a simple, "As Deval Patrick said..." But then, don't politicians borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time? "No new taxes." "Universal health insurance." Has there ever been a political campaign where Republicans and Democrats respectively don't endorse these positions? Have I just committed plagiarism by using those words here on this blog?
Furthermore, we live in a culture in which "sampling" is all the rage, in music, in film. It's a kind of homage to use another person's work in your own, even without attribution. And often the work being "sampled" isn't very common at all. How many times have you heard a pop song from the 1970s and were shocked to hear a riff that you thought had been created for a hip-hop hit of the 1990's or our own decade? How does hearing those riffs in their original context make you feel when you recognize them? Thrilled or cheated?
I hate plagiarism and have little tolerance for plagiarists. The trouble is, I have a hard time defining what that term means these days. Right now I'm working on an essay about a novel written about Berlin in the 1990's. I and others have recently tried to find the author, J. S. Marcus, who hasn't published another book in over a decade, but without success. The situation reminded me of Christopher Isherwood looking for the real life model for Sally Bowles, who'd also disappeared. At the end of Berlin Stories, what is probably the definitive work on that city, Isherwood says, "When you read this, Sally--if you ever do--please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard."
And so I closed my essay with the following lines as a double homage, to link Marcus with Isherwood: "When you read this essay, J. S. Marcus—if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay. And write another book for us."
I did not add, awkwardly, "As Christopher Isherwood wrote at the end of 'Sally Bowles.'" My hope is that those who know the book (Marcus would be among them) will get the reference on their own, and would rightly sneer at the idea of wink-wink-nudge-nudging the reader to remind him or her of the source. It also strikes me that the lines themselves are not distinctive enough to warrant much concern about re-using. It isn't as if I had begun a novel about India or New York City with "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed," as Isherwood does at the beginning of 'A Berlin Diary.' Now that would be a problem, not only because the lines are so unique but also because I would be using them in a context that does not suggest its source, that in fact suggests that I, Aaron Hamburger, inspired by India or New York, so brilliantly thought up these lines all by my very self.
We all learned in grade school about the evils of plagiarism. What we did not learn is the difference between plagiarism and (to use a hot critical buzzword) "intertextuality," between copying and "sampling." Somewhere there is a line, but I think we have to draw it anew with each and every piece of writing we compose. My opinion is that Senator Obama just crossed that line by a step, maybe two. As for my essay, I think I'm well within safe boundaries, but I'm glad to hear if someone out there disagrees.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Stuff I Recommend
This past month, I've been consumed with finishing this draft of my novel, but I have found time for a few other diversions. Like...
LADY ORACLE by Margaret Atwood. I've read two other books by Atwood, The Blind Assassin, which I loved, and Surfacing, which I couldn't get through. This book is like neither of those. It's the story of a Canadian poet/romantic novelist who while trying to erase herself tells her life story. What makes this novel such a hoot, however, isn't so much the story, which is a lot of fun, but the vibrance of Atwood's narrative voice. This is one novel in which every sentence, even every word counts, and tickles the reader with pleasure.
SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT by Leslea Newman. One of the things I like about Newman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while teaching with her for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine, is the way she claims the lesbian experience as a universal experience. When she write about a crush on a fellow passenger in "Flight of Fancy," she's not just letting you know what it is for a woman to desire another woman, but also for a person to desire another person in general. When she writes about a breast cancer scare in "Keeping a Breast," she uses a second person point of view that implicates the reader, whether male, female, straight, gay, or anything else, in the story of a woman confronting mortality. Reading these stories, you wonder why it's been assumed for so long that the straight white male experience is any more "universal" than any other.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD, film. I don't usually publicize movies on my blog since they get enough play in our culture already, but this one is special. The film's main character, Daniel Plainview, is as rich as any character I've come across in many works of contemporary fiction. It helps that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a rich performance that captures all of Plainview's profound virtues and flaws. At the end of this absorbing movie, I wasn't sure whether his character was more victim or villain, but I was so fascinated by his story that I didn't mind thinking it over for a good long while.
LADY ORACLE by Margaret Atwood. I've read two other books by Atwood, The Blind Assassin, which I loved, and Surfacing, which I couldn't get through. This book is like neither of those. It's the story of a Canadian poet/romantic novelist who while trying to erase herself tells her life story. What makes this novel such a hoot, however, isn't so much the story, which is a lot of fun, but the vibrance of Atwood's narrative voice. This is one novel in which every sentence, even every word counts, and tickles the reader with pleasure.
SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT by Leslea Newman. One of the things I like about Newman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while teaching with her for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine, is the way she claims the lesbian experience as a universal experience. When she write about a crush on a fellow passenger in "Flight of Fancy," she's not just letting you know what it is for a woman to desire another woman, but also for a person to desire another person in general. When she writes about a breast cancer scare in "Keeping a Breast," she uses a second person point of view that implicates the reader, whether male, female, straight, gay, or anything else, in the story of a woman confronting mortality. Reading these stories, you wonder why it's been assumed for so long that the straight white male experience is any more "universal" than any other.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD, film. I don't usually publicize movies on my blog since they get enough play in our culture already, but this one is special. The film's main character, Daniel Plainview, is as rich as any character I've come across in many works of contemporary fiction. It helps that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a rich performance that captures all of Plainview's profound virtues and flaws. At the end of this absorbing movie, I wasn't sure whether his character was more victim or villain, but I was so fascinated by his story that I didn't mind thinking it over for a good long while.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Thoughts for a New Year: War and Peace
As a holiday present (I'll leave you to guess which holiday), my partner bought me the new translation of War and Peace.
I read War and Peace when I was in high school, after my father told me that you couldn't be an educated person without having read War and Peace and Ulysses. At the time I was a bit daunted by the book's sheer heft as well as the thundering universality of its title. But as I read, I was amazed at what a page-turner it was, how exciting and passionate and wise.
Now, some 17 years later, I'm re-reading the book, and though I'm only up to page 774, I'm convinced pretty much everything you could ever want to know about writing, and much of what you might want to know about life, lies between its covers.
One of the book's big themes is that history and life are a result of a series of accidents, some lucky, even though in hindsight they appear planned or even foreordained. Also, the gap between the reality of chance and the fictions of control and/or fate we live by can lead to dangerous self-delusions.
If only some of our leaders had read and grasped what this book has to tell us. As much as we want to have power over our futures and steer the destiny of nations and peoples to suit our desires, the complexity of human nature has a way of defying even our best-laid plans. Or in our government's case, our worst-laid plans.
For example, I'm aware of a certain euphoria these days about the so-called "surge" in Iraq. It's true that the violence in that nation has been reduced from catastrophic to tragic. And I suppose that as long as we're willing to maintain the tragic levels of violence by paying for it with American blood, we will be able to do so. And yet, it must be asked, was that our goal in invading Iraq? To create a mildly chaotic power vacuum? More importantly, what do we want for that country's future? A theocracy? A corrupt oligarchy? A puppet dictatorship? No one seems to have any idea, least of all the cast of cartoon characters running for the American presidency.
Iraq is only one of a host of problems, including climate change, proliferation of nuclear weapons, economic turbulence that dwarf our ability as individuals to comprehend, let alone think of ways to solve. But Tolstoy can give us some hope here. It's not our responsibility to solve these problems, he tells us. In fact, even if we could think of solutions, the likelihood they might work or be carried out effectively is fairly small. The best thing we can do is to try to see clearly, to always strive to write and say the truth, to be kind and peaceful and unselfish (but not in a stupidly selfless way), to achieve balance.
Not an easy task. But Tolstoy and others like him can point the way. So turn off your computers, your video games, your TVs, for just a few minutes, take a little break, and get thee to a bookstore.
I read War and Peace when I was in high school, after my father told me that you couldn't be an educated person without having read War and Peace and Ulysses. At the time I was a bit daunted by the book's sheer heft as well as the thundering universality of its title. But as I read, I was amazed at what a page-turner it was, how exciting and passionate and wise.
Now, some 17 years later, I'm re-reading the book, and though I'm only up to page 774, I'm convinced pretty much everything you could ever want to know about writing, and much of what you might want to know about life, lies between its covers.
One of the book's big themes is that history and life are a result of a series of accidents, some lucky, even though in hindsight they appear planned or even foreordained. Also, the gap between the reality of chance and the fictions of control and/or fate we live by can lead to dangerous self-delusions.
If only some of our leaders had read and grasped what this book has to tell us. As much as we want to have power over our futures and steer the destiny of nations and peoples to suit our desires, the complexity of human nature has a way of defying even our best-laid plans. Or in our government's case, our worst-laid plans.
For example, I'm aware of a certain euphoria these days about the so-called "surge" in Iraq. It's true that the violence in that nation has been reduced from catastrophic to tragic. And I suppose that as long as we're willing to maintain the tragic levels of violence by paying for it with American blood, we will be able to do so. And yet, it must be asked, was that our goal in invading Iraq? To create a mildly chaotic power vacuum? More importantly, what do we want for that country's future? A theocracy? A corrupt oligarchy? A puppet dictatorship? No one seems to have any idea, least of all the cast of cartoon characters running for the American presidency.
Iraq is only one of a host of problems, including climate change, proliferation of nuclear weapons, economic turbulence that dwarf our ability as individuals to comprehend, let alone think of ways to solve. But Tolstoy can give us some hope here. It's not our responsibility to solve these problems, he tells us. In fact, even if we could think of solutions, the likelihood they might work or be carried out effectively is fairly small. The best thing we can do is to try to see clearly, to always strive to write and say the truth, to be kind and peaceful and unselfish (but not in a stupidly selfless way), to achieve balance.
Not an easy task. But Tolstoy and others like him can point the way. So turn off your computers, your video games, your TVs, for just a few minutes, take a little break, and get thee to a bookstore.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Lessons Learned from Recent Reading
As a teacher of writing, I often find myself envying my students. I often wish that instead of dispensing advice and criticism, I had someone to consult who could give me some answers when I'm working on a project that's frustrating me. I wonder, is there a creative writing class offered somewhere for teachers of creative writing? Not that I've found.
The closest thing to being in class that I've had since leaving school for the last time has been reading. And in this sense, over the past years, I've had an amazing array of teachers: E. M. Forster, Jean Stafford, L. Frank Baum, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Sholem Asch, Kazuo Ishiguro and now a few others I'd like to mention.
The first is Ha Jin, whose novel Waiting I finished in about two days. It's the kind of story that makes you ache to get to the end to find out how it will turn out. The title refers to a doctor in the Chinese army who can't get the required permission from his wife to get a divorce so he can marry his girlfriend, and so he must wait eighteen years, after which, according to Chinese law, he can get the divorce without permission. (Note: if you're squeamish about plot spoilers, skip the next paragraph.)
When the doctor's wait is rewarded and he's allowed to marry his girlfriend, she wears him out with her voracious sexual appetite. Be careful when you get what you wish for, the book seems to be saying, because you just may get it in a way you don't expect. That's the life lesson. The writerly lesson, for me anyway, was that to avoid predictable endings because the action seems inevitable, is not to change what happens, but rather to let the inevitable happen in terms of action, while surprising the reader with character.
It's a lesson that was reinforced for me (by a somewhat negative example) in the new novel The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. This new novel is as funny and compulsively readable as Perrotta's last book Little Children, and yet as it got to its inevitable ending (which I won't relate here), I felt let down. I almost wish Perrotta had continued the novel past the point where he stopped, the same way Ha Jin had, and then surprised us with what came next.
Another book that's taught me about managing predictable endings is Angela Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which recently I had the pleasure of finishing. Carter is known for taking fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast and re-telling them while amping up the sex and violence. Again, these are stories with endings we as readers can see coming a mile off. So why do we keep turning the pages so eagerly? I think because Carter gives us such a visceral tour of the castles and forests and cottages these fairy tale characters inhabit, which were always a bit nebulous in the stories we read in childhood. For example, who knew Beauty's Beast kept an S & M chamber in his castle? Who could have guessed Red Riding Hood's Wolf was so good in the sack?
The last book I'll mention, Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor, is actually a collection of lectures by this classic American writer, some from creative writing classes she'd taught. (So it's no surprise the book transported me back to being a student.) From her cantakerous yet brilliant essays, I get the sense I wouldn't have liked to be a student in one of her workshops, though I wouldn't have minded eavesdropping from the hallway. O'Connor herself would be the first one to acknowledge the inherent limitations of trying to teach writing, and warns her students to beware of any teacher who claims to have all the answers about how writing works, who "appear overenergetic."
Still, O'Connor's definition of what writing is about, the art of persuasion through the senses, seems as good as any I've ever come across. So is her description of the writing process, "during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay... It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." And yet she finds it also a hopeful act. "People without hope not only do not write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."
And maybe that's the best reason of all to read novels, especially in this Internet-text-messaging-video-game-playing age: as an act of hope.
The closest thing to being in class that I've had since leaving school for the last time has been reading. And in this sense, over the past years, I've had an amazing array of teachers: E. M. Forster, Jean Stafford, L. Frank Baum, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Sholem Asch, Kazuo Ishiguro and now a few others I'd like to mention.
The first is Ha Jin, whose novel Waiting I finished in about two days. It's the kind of story that makes you ache to get to the end to find out how it will turn out. The title refers to a doctor in the Chinese army who can't get the required permission from his wife to get a divorce so he can marry his girlfriend, and so he must wait eighteen years, after which, according to Chinese law, he can get the divorce without permission. (Note: if you're squeamish about plot spoilers, skip the next paragraph.)
When the doctor's wait is rewarded and he's allowed to marry his girlfriend, she wears him out with her voracious sexual appetite. Be careful when you get what you wish for, the book seems to be saying, because you just may get it in a way you don't expect. That's the life lesson. The writerly lesson, for me anyway, was that to avoid predictable endings because the action seems inevitable, is not to change what happens, but rather to let the inevitable happen in terms of action, while surprising the reader with character.
It's a lesson that was reinforced for me (by a somewhat negative example) in the new novel The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. This new novel is as funny and compulsively readable as Perrotta's last book Little Children, and yet as it got to its inevitable ending (which I won't relate here), I felt let down. I almost wish Perrotta had continued the novel past the point where he stopped, the same way Ha Jin had, and then surprised us with what came next.
Another book that's taught me about managing predictable endings is Angela Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which recently I had the pleasure of finishing. Carter is known for taking fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast and re-telling them while amping up the sex and violence. Again, these are stories with endings we as readers can see coming a mile off. So why do we keep turning the pages so eagerly? I think because Carter gives us such a visceral tour of the castles and forests and cottages these fairy tale characters inhabit, which were always a bit nebulous in the stories we read in childhood. For example, who knew Beauty's Beast kept an S & M chamber in his castle? Who could have guessed Red Riding Hood's Wolf was so good in the sack?
The last book I'll mention, Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor, is actually a collection of lectures by this classic American writer, some from creative writing classes she'd taught. (So it's no surprise the book transported me back to being a student.) From her cantakerous yet brilliant essays, I get the sense I wouldn't have liked to be a student in one of her workshops, though I wouldn't have minded eavesdropping from the hallway. O'Connor herself would be the first one to acknowledge the inherent limitations of trying to teach writing, and warns her students to beware of any teacher who claims to have all the answers about how writing works, who "appear overenergetic."
Still, O'Connor's definition of what writing is about, the art of persuasion through the senses, seems as good as any I've ever come across. So is her description of the writing process, "during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay... It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." And yet she finds it also a hopeful act. "People without hope not only do not write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."
And maybe that's the best reason of all to read novels, especially in this Internet-text-messaging-video-game-playing age: as an act of hope.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Back to Work
Summer is ending. Tomorrow, my roster of fall classes begins. I'll be teaching a creative writing class at Columbia, three ESL classes at NYU, and working with graduate students in Columbia's MFA program as well as the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine (by correspondence).
At the same time, I'll be keeping up my freelance writing and working on a new draft of my novel (yes, the Berlin one). Somewhere in there, I hope to have a life.
This past year has been one of the more difficult ones for me as a writer. I think one of the hardest lessons I've had to come to terms with is that you have to keep growing and moving forward with your work, and yet it's not a good idea to try to do something that you're not suited to either. Knowing where that line lies is not intuitive, at least not for me anyway.
Maybe the greatest lesson I've had to learn is humility. It's nice when you produce a book or a story or an essay, but sometimes the work you do may not result in some product you can share with the world. And that's part of being a writer too. As a writer, your job is to do the work. The hard part is that you don't know for sure what your work really is. I never understood before how it could take some writers years to produce a book. I'd think, just write the thing. Now I get it. They were writing, for all that time. For writers there are different kinds of success. This past year I've been very successful at getting myself to my desk and doing work. What's eluded me so far is another kind of success, and whether I can attain it is not something I know how to control or predict.
At the same time, I'll be keeping up my freelance writing and working on a new draft of my novel (yes, the Berlin one). Somewhere in there, I hope to have a life.
This past year has been one of the more difficult ones for me as a writer. I think one of the hardest lessons I've had to come to terms with is that you have to keep growing and moving forward with your work, and yet it's not a good idea to try to do something that you're not suited to either. Knowing where that line lies is not intuitive, at least not for me anyway.
Maybe the greatest lesson I've had to learn is humility. It's nice when you produce a book or a story or an essay, but sometimes the work you do may not result in some product you can share with the world. And that's part of being a writer too. As a writer, your job is to do the work. The hard part is that you don't know for sure what your work really is. I never understood before how it could take some writers years to produce a book. I'd think, just write the thing. Now I get it. They were writing, for all that time. For writers there are different kinds of success. This past year I've been very successful at getting myself to my desk and doing work. What's eluded me so far is another kind of success, and whether I can attain it is not something I know how to control or predict.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
A Break
Those of you who check this site regularly may have noticed I haven't been posting the past month. The reason is that I'm working very hard on wrapping up a novel and I just can't think of anything else to say lately!
Anyway, enjoy your summer, and please check back here in September, when I will also be back in cyberspace.
Best,
Aaron
Anyway, enjoy your summer, and please check back here in September, when I will also be back in cyberspace.
Best,
Aaron
Friday, June 01, 2007
The Aesthetics and Economics of Sexuality
I'm the kind of writer who likes to work on two books at once, so I've been playing around with the beginnings of my fourth book, while finishing my third. One of the decisions I've been recently struggling with is whether to make the protagonist of the book gay.
My first book, a collection of stories, had roughly half gay main characters, half straight, a ratio that apparently made the entire book gay because it was larger than the ratio of gay to straight people in the population as a whole. My second book, a novel, had two protagonists, one gay male and one straight female. Again, the book was considered "gay" and not "straight" or "female" for similar reasons.
I'm not complaining, though it is a bit silly to think of a book as having a sexuality or a religion or an ethnicity. No one says, "Oh, Chekhov, that's just for Russians." I love to read Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, and Jean Stafford. Does that mean I love "women's writing"? I thought the point of literature was to expand the range of what we know, not to confirm what we already think we know.
But I've been wrong. If a book is identified as "gay" or "Jewish" or "black" or "female," chances are readers who pick it up will fit into one of those categories. Therefore, if I make the protagonist of my new novel gay, I need to be aware that this is the audience I'm most likely going to be writing for. And given the number of straight people out there and the number of gay people out there, this may not be the wisest decision in terms of marketing.
It also may not be the wisest decision for me technically as a writer. I've done my fair share of gay protagonists, and straight female ones too. Shouldn't I (gasp) attempt the unthinkable, and branch out a bit by trying to write a straight man?
Then again, no one says to Philip Roth, shouldn't you try to branch out a bit and try to write about the goyim? What is it that people find so "limiting" about writing about gay people, but for any other identity group you're "finding the universal through the lens of the particular"?
Anyway, thinking about the economics of book publishing in this climate is like counting grains of rice. What's the point?
I haven't made up my mind about Davey, the main character of my new novel, who might be straight or might be gay or something in between. (In any case, I see him as a guy who doesn't get it on very often, with either sex.) The funny thing is, I thought I was going to end this blog with a ringing endorsement for exploring new themes in gay literature, which is only in its infanthood, and has plenty of new territory left to explore. Yet as I get to this point, I keep wondering, "What would happen if...?" Who knows? Maybe I'd just better write the damned thing both ways and figure out which works best.
My first book, a collection of stories, had roughly half gay main characters, half straight, a ratio that apparently made the entire book gay because it was larger than the ratio of gay to straight people in the population as a whole. My second book, a novel, had two protagonists, one gay male and one straight female. Again, the book was considered "gay" and not "straight" or "female" for similar reasons.
I'm not complaining, though it is a bit silly to think of a book as having a sexuality or a religion or an ethnicity. No one says, "Oh, Chekhov, that's just for Russians." I love to read Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, and Jean Stafford. Does that mean I love "women's writing"? I thought the point of literature was to expand the range of what we know, not to confirm what we already think we know.
But I've been wrong. If a book is identified as "gay" or "Jewish" or "black" or "female," chances are readers who pick it up will fit into one of those categories. Therefore, if I make the protagonist of my new novel gay, I need to be aware that this is the audience I'm most likely going to be writing for. And given the number of straight people out there and the number of gay people out there, this may not be the wisest decision in terms of marketing.
It also may not be the wisest decision for me technically as a writer. I've done my fair share of gay protagonists, and straight female ones too. Shouldn't I (gasp) attempt the unthinkable, and branch out a bit by trying to write a straight man?
Then again, no one says to Philip Roth, shouldn't you try to branch out a bit and try to write about the goyim? What is it that people find so "limiting" about writing about gay people, but for any other identity group you're "finding the universal through the lens of the particular"?
Anyway, thinking about the economics of book publishing in this climate is like counting grains of rice. What's the point?
I haven't made up my mind about Davey, the main character of my new novel, who might be straight or might be gay or something in between. (In any case, I see him as a guy who doesn't get it on very often, with either sex.) The funny thing is, I thought I was going to end this blog with a ringing endorsement for exploring new themes in gay literature, which is only in its infanthood, and has plenty of new territory left to explore. Yet as I get to this point, I keep wondering, "What would happen if...?" Who knows? Maybe I'd just better write the damned thing both ways and figure out which works best.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Saints and Sinners
This past weekend, I attended my second Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. The chief topic on most of our minds was not literature, however, but the state of the city post-Katrina. It's nice to see that much of the French Quarter and other areas frequented by tourists are in good shape and look as if relatively little affected by the hurricane. However, there are other areas of the city, where tourists don't go (except on specially organized "Katrina tours") where the full extent of the damage is still visible and still fully felt, even two years later.
One of the biggest changes in New Orleans (besides the signs advertising buildings for sale everywhere) is the lack of tourists. During my stay, I noticed a significant drop in the crowds that used to throng Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. It's easy to walk right in and get a table at high-end restaurants that used to require a reservation made weeks in advance just to look at you. At one very toney restaurant, a customer sitting next to me turned to me and said, "Thank you for visiting our city." I heard the same refrain repeated everywhere.
One wonders why our president has not taken advantage of the famous "bully pulpit" our leaders are supposed to be so fond of, and does not exhort Americans to visit New Orleans and bring their tourist dollars. In his place, let me offer a plea to anyone who happens to read this blog. Please try to visit New Orleans, not just for them, but also for you. It's still a beautiful and special city where you can have a great time, and now is a great time to see it before the hordes of tourists inevitably (one hopes) return.
On a happier note, the Saints and Sinners festival was its old fun and inspirational self. Besides meeting and renewing acquaintances with other queer writers, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the panels I went to. One highlight was a talk on creating character through the senses by novelist Jim Grimsley, who is always erudite on fiction and prose. He referred us all to two essential essays by Flannery O'Connor from the collection Mystery and Manners, which I ran out and bought. In it, O'Connor argues that fiction depends on recreating specific sensory impressions to convey experience and meaning to a reader.
I asked Grimsley, who teaches writing at Emory, what he might say to students who argue that they don't want to create a specific character or use specific language in their work. "That's just dumb!" he said. "When you eat a bowl of soup, you don't want it to taste like dishwater. You want it to taste like something, not nothing."
I'll be sure to remember that one for a long time.
One of the biggest changes in New Orleans (besides the signs advertising buildings for sale everywhere) is the lack of tourists. During my stay, I noticed a significant drop in the crowds that used to throng Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. It's easy to walk right in and get a table at high-end restaurants that used to require a reservation made weeks in advance just to look at you. At one very toney restaurant, a customer sitting next to me turned to me and said, "Thank you for visiting our city." I heard the same refrain repeated everywhere.
One wonders why our president has not taken advantage of the famous "bully pulpit" our leaders are supposed to be so fond of, and does not exhort Americans to visit New Orleans and bring their tourist dollars. In his place, let me offer a plea to anyone who happens to read this blog. Please try to visit New Orleans, not just for them, but also for you. It's still a beautiful and special city where you can have a great time, and now is a great time to see it before the hordes of tourists inevitably (one hopes) return.
On a happier note, the Saints and Sinners festival was its old fun and inspirational self. Besides meeting and renewing acquaintances with other queer writers, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the panels I went to. One highlight was a talk on creating character through the senses by novelist Jim Grimsley, who is always erudite on fiction and prose. He referred us all to two essential essays by Flannery O'Connor from the collection Mystery and Manners, which I ran out and bought. In it, O'Connor argues that fiction depends on recreating specific sensory impressions to convey experience and meaning to a reader.
I asked Grimsley, who teaches writing at Emory, what he might say to students who argue that they don't want to create a specific character or use specific language in their work. "That's just dumb!" he said. "When you eat a bowl of soup, you don't want it to taste like dishwater. You want it to taste like something, not nothing."
I'll be sure to remember that one for a long time.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
PEN'd out
Dear Readers,
For the past week or so, I've been a guest blogger for the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival. For this entry, I'm inviting you to check out my thoughts on some of the panels I attended, including conversations on travel writing, immigration and Europe, and the state of Iraq.
These can all be found at: http://www.pen.org/MemberBlog.php/prmProfileID/19249
Happy Reading!
Best,
Aaron
For the past week or so, I've been a guest blogger for the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival. For this entry, I'm inviting you to check out my thoughts on some of the panels I attended, including conversations on travel writing, immigration and Europe, and the state of Iraq.
These can all be found at: http://www.pen.org/MemberBlog.php/prmProfileID/19249
Happy Reading!
Best,
Aaron
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Why Books?
Things aren't looking good.
Book sales are down, down, down. Book review coverage in magazines and newspaper is down. More and more books are being written, put on the front shelves of the stores for a month or two, shuffled to the back, then returned to the publishers for eventual pulping.
Is anyone reading out there?
I've been trying to do my part. Recently when I was going my taxes, I added up all my receipts for book purchases last year, and, well, it was a lot. And these aren't from used bookstores, either. I make it a point to buy new. So much for books bought.
But as for the number of books I've read recently, that number is going down. With everything I have going on in my life these days, with teaching, with writing my own work, with trying to find time for my partner, for my friends, for the gym, for my soul, I've been finding that reading books has been working its way to the bottom of my list of things to do. These days, if I pick up a book and it doesn't demand my attention pretty quickly, I'll think of almost any excuse not to go on reading it. These excuses include watching Golden Girls re-runs and playing solitaire on my mini iPod.
Maybe books have outlived their usefulness as a cultural object. Maybe with all the phone calls and emails and Internet sites there are to check and return and write, taking the time to wall off the world with the covers of a book doesn't make sense anymore. I recently saw an interview with Philip Roth in which he predicted the novel would be dead within fifteen years.
Still, I can't help hoping he's wrong. Another way to see things is that we're living in a time of transition, in which we're trying to figure out how to live in this bravest of brave new worlds. When the dust settles, maybe we'll find our lives somewhat emptier than we would like. And then we'll turn back to books, just as we've turned away from them recently, to look for a way into our souls.
This isn't just Pollyanna talk. I've seen evidence of it in my own life. A student of mine recently gave me a copy of a wonderful story called "Boys" by Rick Moody. I was in the middle of a thousand other things, but the words of that story forced me to stop what I was doing, sit down, and pay close attention. "Listen to me," it whispered. "Shut out the rest and just listen to me for a little while." So that's what I did.
Book sales are down, down, down. Book review coverage in magazines and newspaper is down. More and more books are being written, put on the front shelves of the stores for a month or two, shuffled to the back, then returned to the publishers for eventual pulping.
Is anyone reading out there?
I've been trying to do my part. Recently when I was going my taxes, I added up all my receipts for book purchases last year, and, well, it was a lot. And these aren't from used bookstores, either. I make it a point to buy new. So much for books bought.
But as for the number of books I've read recently, that number is going down. With everything I have going on in my life these days, with teaching, with writing my own work, with trying to find time for my partner, for my friends, for the gym, for my soul, I've been finding that reading books has been working its way to the bottom of my list of things to do. These days, if I pick up a book and it doesn't demand my attention pretty quickly, I'll think of almost any excuse not to go on reading it. These excuses include watching Golden Girls re-runs and playing solitaire on my mini iPod.
Maybe books have outlived their usefulness as a cultural object. Maybe with all the phone calls and emails and Internet sites there are to check and return and write, taking the time to wall off the world with the covers of a book doesn't make sense anymore. I recently saw an interview with Philip Roth in which he predicted the novel would be dead within fifteen years.
Still, I can't help hoping he's wrong. Another way to see things is that we're living in a time of transition, in which we're trying to figure out how to live in this bravest of brave new worlds. When the dust settles, maybe we'll find our lives somewhat emptier than we would like. And then we'll turn back to books, just as we've turned away from them recently, to look for a way into our souls.
This isn't just Pollyanna talk. I've seen evidence of it in my own life. A student of mine recently gave me a copy of a wonderful story called "Boys" by Rick Moody. I was in the middle of a thousand other things, but the words of that story forced me to stop what I was doing, sit down, and pay close attention. "Listen to me," it whispered. "Shut out the rest and just listen to me for a little while." So that's what I did.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Why Should I Call You By My Name?
A new first novel, titled Call Me By Your Name, has been getting some attention lately because of its frank and highly erotic sex scenes between two men. That a novel features two men having hot sex isn't shocking. But that this trenchant portrait of consuming homosexual desire was written by a man who is married and has children, as its author Andre Aciman is and does, may come as a bit of a surprise.
The structure and style of the novel can't help but invite autobiographical thoughts. The narration is in a heavy, breathy first person. The tone is memoiristic, suffused with nostalgia for lost desire. The book's lovestruck narrator is an Italian man looking back at when he was a teenager and had an affair with a slightly older American guest who'd come to stay with his family for the summer. Much of the book consists of the young narrator's fantasies about the things he'd like to do or have done to him while in the loving company of his American friend. When the narrator's desires are consumated, (one memorable scene involves a peach flavored with an unusual marinade) the scenes are recounted in the kind of intimate detail that seemingly you'd have to have lived to know about.
"How can a straight man have written THAT?" As I began reading the book, this was also the question I kept asking myself. It's only natural. We live in an age in which we suspect our non-fiction writers of lying and our fiction writers of telling the truth.
Having just finished the book, I have no way of knowing whether Aciman is gay, straight, bi, or Martian. I do know that Aciman has convincingly captured moments of homosexual desire, but this in itself does not signify that the author shares the feelings he writes about. Haven't there been women who've written convincingly of men's sexual desires and vice versa? Whatever happened to the concept of the empathetic imagination? It's possible for a man to write from the point of view of a woman without being accused of being a woman himself. So why is it that when heterosexual writers write from the point of view of homosexual characters, (or for that matter when heterosexual actors play homosexual characters) we don't call these people talented artists, but instead closet cases?
What troubled me about Aciman's novel was not the sexuality of its author, but the unacknowledged psychosis of its main character. Aciman wants us to believe that his narrator is haunted by his brief teenager summer affair for years after it took place. Fine. What I'm not willing to buy into is that we as readers should somehow celebrate an adult who clings to an adolescent romantic fantasy version of reality (in this case, a short but sweet infatuation fulfilled) to a point that goes beyond obsession to psychological dysfunction. Many people have intense physical or spiritual relationships that ended. Occasionally we look back at them and feel regret, even loss. And then we go on with our lives. If we can't let go of the past, it isn't because the past was so wonderful. It's because there's something wrong with who we are in the present, and so we feel the need to assign a value to the past that it doesn't have. Our lives are more than our lost loves, or even our lost lusts. This is the insight that I found troublingly absent in Aciman's highly-charged but ultimately sentimental novel.
It's interesting that in this novel, Aciman references Wuthering Heights, a classic of romantic literature that featured as its hero and heroine a couple of good candidates for the loony bin. The fact that Bronte shows us that Heathcliff and Catherine were not in full command of their senses doesn't make their love story less powerful, but more. By contrast, the hero of Call Me By Your Name's lifelong obsession with his first fuck seems not only disproportionate but also worthy of dissection by a qualified shrink, rather than the lovingly detailed tribute that Aciman has created.
The structure and style of the novel can't help but invite autobiographical thoughts. The narration is in a heavy, breathy first person. The tone is memoiristic, suffused with nostalgia for lost desire. The book's lovestruck narrator is an Italian man looking back at when he was a teenager and had an affair with a slightly older American guest who'd come to stay with his family for the summer. Much of the book consists of the young narrator's fantasies about the things he'd like to do or have done to him while in the loving company of his American friend. When the narrator's desires are consumated, (one memorable scene involves a peach flavored with an unusual marinade) the scenes are recounted in the kind of intimate detail that seemingly you'd have to have lived to know about.
"How can a straight man have written THAT?" As I began reading the book, this was also the question I kept asking myself. It's only natural. We live in an age in which we suspect our non-fiction writers of lying and our fiction writers of telling the truth.
Having just finished the book, I have no way of knowing whether Aciman is gay, straight, bi, or Martian. I do know that Aciman has convincingly captured moments of homosexual desire, but this in itself does not signify that the author shares the feelings he writes about. Haven't there been women who've written convincingly of men's sexual desires and vice versa? Whatever happened to the concept of the empathetic imagination? It's possible for a man to write from the point of view of a woman without being accused of being a woman himself. So why is it that when heterosexual writers write from the point of view of homosexual characters, (or for that matter when heterosexual actors play homosexual characters) we don't call these people talented artists, but instead closet cases?
What troubled me about Aciman's novel was not the sexuality of its author, but the unacknowledged psychosis of its main character. Aciman wants us to believe that his narrator is haunted by his brief teenager summer affair for years after it took place. Fine. What I'm not willing to buy into is that we as readers should somehow celebrate an adult who clings to an adolescent romantic fantasy version of reality (in this case, a short but sweet infatuation fulfilled) to a point that goes beyond obsession to psychological dysfunction. Many people have intense physical or spiritual relationships that ended. Occasionally we look back at them and feel regret, even loss. And then we go on with our lives. If we can't let go of the past, it isn't because the past was so wonderful. It's because there's something wrong with who we are in the present, and so we feel the need to assign a value to the past that it doesn't have. Our lives are more than our lost loves, or even our lost lusts. This is the insight that I found troublingly absent in Aciman's highly-charged but ultimately sentimental novel.
It's interesting that in this novel, Aciman references Wuthering Heights, a classic of romantic literature that featured as its hero and heroine a couple of good candidates for the loony bin. The fact that Bronte shows us that Heathcliff and Catherine were not in full command of their senses doesn't make their love story less powerful, but more. By contrast, the hero of Call Me By Your Name's lifelong obsession with his first fuck seems not only disproportionate but also worthy of dissection by a qualified shrink, rather than the lovingly detailed tribute that Aciman has created.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Gossip or Critical Debate?
Recently I was at a panel about literary gossip, and one of the examples brought up was l'affaire Freudenberger, about a young short story writer working at the New Yorker who managed to publish a story in the magazine, and then earn a six-figure contract for an as-then unwritten story collection. The scandal? That Freudenberger's work wasn't really all that good.
Sure, a lot of the sniping in that case was motivated by jealousy. But some of it was also motivated by genuine distaste for Freudenberger's style. Isn't that allowed? Which leads to my question, is a discussion of the merits of a writer's work just jealous gossip, or is it a discussion worth having? Especially in public?
Writers can be quite frank with each other about whose work they admire and whose stinks. But always with the stipulation (often not necessary to spell out explicity) that their opinions are not meant to be shared with others, particularly not in print.
Indeed, writers will often decline to review a book they've read and hated rather than write a slam review. I won't do it because books get so little attention these days that it seems pointless to point out the flaws of a work that probably won't sell more than five thousand copies anyway. But I know a number of writers who feel writing a completely negative review is bad karma, that it could earn them an enemy for life, and for what? The hundred dollars they might be paid for writing the thing?
Still, there are so many books out there that get praised for the wrong reasons while others get overlooked, it seems like a discussion of what deserves praise and what doesn't isn't just "snarky" gossip between friends. Debating the merits of different books is an important, even necessary part of literary life. It reminds that there are literary standards and what they are supposed to be about. As long as the discussion is about aesthetic merit, not book advances or top ten lists or other silly and reductive nonsense. I think it is also helpful to bear in mind the context of the work you're talking about. If it's a book from a tiny press that put it out as labor of love and that few people are going to notice anyway, is it necessary to pile on by slamming it? If it's a book that's made a big splash, is it necessary to snipe out of resentment?
My feeling is taking down a book, even in public, isn't necessarily bad form. The question is can you do it to make a larger and necessary point about literature in general?
Sure, a lot of the sniping in that case was motivated by jealousy. But some of it was also motivated by genuine distaste for Freudenberger's style. Isn't that allowed? Which leads to my question, is a discussion of the merits of a writer's work just jealous gossip, or is it a discussion worth having? Especially in public?
Writers can be quite frank with each other about whose work they admire and whose stinks. But always with the stipulation (often not necessary to spell out explicity) that their opinions are not meant to be shared with others, particularly not in print.
Indeed, writers will often decline to review a book they've read and hated rather than write a slam review. I won't do it because books get so little attention these days that it seems pointless to point out the flaws of a work that probably won't sell more than five thousand copies anyway. But I know a number of writers who feel writing a completely negative review is bad karma, that it could earn them an enemy for life, and for what? The hundred dollars they might be paid for writing the thing?
Still, there are so many books out there that get praised for the wrong reasons while others get overlooked, it seems like a discussion of what deserves praise and what doesn't isn't just "snarky" gossip between friends. Debating the merits of different books is an important, even necessary part of literary life. It reminds that there are literary standards and what they are supposed to be about. As long as the discussion is about aesthetic merit, not book advances or top ten lists or other silly and reductive nonsense. I think it is also helpful to bear in mind the context of the work you're talking about. If it's a book from a tiny press that put it out as labor of love and that few people are going to notice anyway, is it necessary to pile on by slamming it? If it's a book that's made a big splash, is it necessary to snipe out of resentment?
My feeling is taking down a book, even in public, isn't necessarily bad form. The question is can you do it to make a larger and necessary point about literature in general?
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Barbaric AWP!
I'm a little delinquent in posting this week because I've just come back from a weekend conference of writers, writing teachers, and writing students in Atlanta. The conference, run by AWP (Associated Writing Programs), meets once a year, and features panels, a book fair, and much schmoozing.
When I was a writing student, it never would have occurred to me to go to a conference like this one, but among the roughly 5000 attendees of this conference (which is probably also the number of people who regularly buy and read literary fiction in America these days) there were throngs of not only MFA grad students who aspired to be writers, but also laypeople who aspired to become MFA grad students.
Indeed, as the number of MFA programs seems to increase every year while the number of books sold decreases every year, you have to wonder, what are all these programs for? Even if every graduate of an MFA program were guaranteed a publishing contract, there simply aren't enough readers out there to buy all these books. And since the only direct career path that an MFA degree might be useful for is a job teaching creative writing to other creative writing aspirants, the question emerges (as it did many times this weekend), do all these programs exist merely to breed more teachers to work in more programs that breed more teachers to work in more programs and so on?
At a couple of programs I went to, I sensed a real sense of resentment and anger on the part of MFA students who kept asking questions along the lines of, "What am I supposed to do with this expensive, useless degree?" One answer is quite simple: write. You get an MFA degree because you want to be a writer, a career with few guarantees of anything. But the real question these students were probably asking was, "Why did your program agree to admit me and take my tuition dollars knowing that even when I got out, the chances of my succeeding at this were pretty small?" My answer is Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. If you decide to get an MFA to become a writer (and there are still many other ways of becoming one), you ought to do your homework in advance about what kind of programs you're applying to and if they might suit your needs. An MFA is no guarantee of publishing anything, so I wouldn't go by how many published writers a given program has churned out, but rather whether its faculty and courses seem to be the kind of thing that might help you grow as a writer and reader.
Related and not related to these matters, the theme I heard repeated most often over the weekend was: "Embrace Failure!" One panelist told an anecdote about how the company 3M requires its scientists to spend ten percent of their time on experiments that they think probably won't work. That's how the post-it note was developed (an invention I couldn't live without). The larger message of all this is that the surest way to fail at something is to do all that you can to avoid failing at it. "A bad draft is better than a good idea," another panelist said.
Here's another way of looking at failure. Compared to Shakespeare or Tolstoy, we're all failures. We can only hope to, as Beckett said, "fail better." The question isn't should I get an MFA or what should I do with it if I get a degree and not a publishing contract, but rather how can I pursue my dream as boldly as possible?
When I was a writing student, it never would have occurred to me to go to a conference like this one, but among the roughly 5000 attendees of this conference (which is probably also the number of people who regularly buy and read literary fiction in America these days) there were throngs of not only MFA grad students who aspired to be writers, but also laypeople who aspired to become MFA grad students.
Indeed, as the number of MFA programs seems to increase every year while the number of books sold decreases every year, you have to wonder, what are all these programs for? Even if every graduate of an MFA program were guaranteed a publishing contract, there simply aren't enough readers out there to buy all these books. And since the only direct career path that an MFA degree might be useful for is a job teaching creative writing to other creative writing aspirants, the question emerges (as it did many times this weekend), do all these programs exist merely to breed more teachers to work in more programs that breed more teachers to work in more programs and so on?
At a couple of programs I went to, I sensed a real sense of resentment and anger on the part of MFA students who kept asking questions along the lines of, "What am I supposed to do with this expensive, useless degree?" One answer is quite simple: write. You get an MFA degree because you want to be a writer, a career with few guarantees of anything. But the real question these students were probably asking was, "Why did your program agree to admit me and take my tuition dollars knowing that even when I got out, the chances of my succeeding at this were pretty small?" My answer is Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. If you decide to get an MFA to become a writer (and there are still many other ways of becoming one), you ought to do your homework in advance about what kind of programs you're applying to and if they might suit your needs. An MFA is no guarantee of publishing anything, so I wouldn't go by how many published writers a given program has churned out, but rather whether its faculty and courses seem to be the kind of thing that might help you grow as a writer and reader.
Related and not related to these matters, the theme I heard repeated most often over the weekend was: "Embrace Failure!" One panelist told an anecdote about how the company 3M requires its scientists to spend ten percent of their time on experiments that they think probably won't work. That's how the post-it note was developed (an invention I couldn't live without). The larger message of all this is that the surest way to fail at something is to do all that you can to avoid failing at it. "A bad draft is better than a good idea," another panelist said.
Here's another way of looking at failure. Compared to Shakespeare or Tolstoy, we're all failures. We can only hope to, as Beckett said, "fail better." The question isn't should I get an MFA or what should I do with it if I get a degree and not a publishing contract, but rather how can I pursue my dream as boldly as possible?
Thursday, February 15, 2007
An American Story
This semester I'm teaching two ESL classes at New York University in addition to my creative writing class at Columbia. One of the classes is a seminar in which students practice their English skills by talking about different subjects related to American culture. After surveying the students to see which aspects of our culture they wanted to learn about, I was surprised and gratified to find out that the subject they were most interested in tackling was American literature.
With that in mind, I surveyed my bookshelves to find a short story for us to read together. The decision wasn't an easy one. I wanted to pick something interesting and thought-provoking, as well as something short enough to cover in a classroom setting and not too riddled with idioms or specialized vocabulary. In the end, I chose a story called "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver.
There once was a time when it was impossible to study creative writing and not read a Raymond Carver story. (That time was in the early 90s, when I was a student of writing.) The reason? Probably because his deceptively minimal style seemed easy enough to teach for writing professors as well as to emulate for writing students. Carver's use of clipped, everyday language and his narrow focus on small moments of action (a waitress serving a fat man in a restaurant; a couple receiving a visit from a blind friend) can seem so organic as to require almost no background in classic literature or literary devices. Also, at a time when deconstructionism was all the rage in academia, Carver's intimate, off-the-cuff bits of prose made for too tiny a target for an ambitious grad student to shoot down for inevitable "ism" violations: nationalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, capitalism, etc.
And yet for all of Carver's seeming "smallness," as I reread the seven-page story "Neighbors," I realized that I'd have been hard-pressed to find a better fit for a class about American culture. At a time when we're getting more and more overstuffed novels decorated with pictures, graphs, funny typefaces, manic stick-figures substituted for finely-observed characters, it's worth taking a look at the breadth of Carver's achievement in a small space to remind ourselves how truly fine writing can do much with little.
On the surface, "Neighbors" is about two couples who live across the hall from each other. One of the couples, the Millers, frequently housesit for the other couple, who frequently go on vacation. Underneath this central conceit, however, Carver illustrates the allure of the American promise of upward mobility, and the deep disappointment for those who haven't quite managed to fulfill that promise. As the Millers go back and forth between their apartment and the seemingly magical apartment of their slightly better-off neighbors, they feel the cheap thrill of an exhiliration that seems like freedom, but is actually a trap. The Millers begin to indulge themselves in sex and drink but also sexual and even violent fantasies that few Americans would be willing to admit to, until in their excitement, they make a costly mistake.
It's all very Anna Nicole Smith, without the cartoonishness.
Sometimes it seems as if Americans come in two varieties. There are the uber-patriot red-state nationalists who in public go around trumpeting our country as the best place on Earth, the fulfillment of God's dream for mankind, while in private these same God-fearers cruise the Internet for porn like everyone else. Then there are the cynical snickerers, equally holier-than-thou, who point out that all religious and nationalist idealism is a lie, that there is no escape from the bonds of cold hard facts like global warming and corporate greed. What Carver shows us in his tiny, frail compositions is the sin that both of these types commit: the sin of certitude. In reality, we Americans are a frail, confused, and hapless lot, all the more ineffectual for all our nation's economic and military power.
But then, what's wrong with being frail or confused? Isn't that what it is to be human?
With that in mind, I surveyed my bookshelves to find a short story for us to read together. The decision wasn't an easy one. I wanted to pick something interesting and thought-provoking, as well as something short enough to cover in a classroom setting and not too riddled with idioms or specialized vocabulary. In the end, I chose a story called "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver.
There once was a time when it was impossible to study creative writing and not read a Raymond Carver story. (That time was in the early 90s, when I was a student of writing.) The reason? Probably because his deceptively minimal style seemed easy enough to teach for writing professors as well as to emulate for writing students. Carver's use of clipped, everyday language and his narrow focus on small moments of action (a waitress serving a fat man in a restaurant; a couple receiving a visit from a blind friend) can seem so organic as to require almost no background in classic literature or literary devices. Also, at a time when deconstructionism was all the rage in academia, Carver's intimate, off-the-cuff bits of prose made for too tiny a target for an ambitious grad student to shoot down for inevitable "ism" violations: nationalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, capitalism, etc.
And yet for all of Carver's seeming "smallness," as I reread the seven-page story "Neighbors," I realized that I'd have been hard-pressed to find a better fit for a class about American culture. At a time when we're getting more and more overstuffed novels decorated with pictures, graphs, funny typefaces, manic stick-figures substituted for finely-observed characters, it's worth taking a look at the breadth of Carver's achievement in a small space to remind ourselves how truly fine writing can do much with little.
On the surface, "Neighbors" is about two couples who live across the hall from each other. One of the couples, the Millers, frequently housesit for the other couple, who frequently go on vacation. Underneath this central conceit, however, Carver illustrates the allure of the American promise of upward mobility, and the deep disappointment for those who haven't quite managed to fulfill that promise. As the Millers go back and forth between their apartment and the seemingly magical apartment of their slightly better-off neighbors, they feel the cheap thrill of an exhiliration that seems like freedom, but is actually a trap. The Millers begin to indulge themselves in sex and drink but also sexual and even violent fantasies that few Americans would be willing to admit to, until in their excitement, they make a costly mistake.
It's all very Anna Nicole Smith, without the cartoonishness.
Sometimes it seems as if Americans come in two varieties. There are the uber-patriot red-state nationalists who in public go around trumpeting our country as the best place on Earth, the fulfillment of God's dream for mankind, while in private these same God-fearers cruise the Internet for porn like everyone else. Then there are the cynical snickerers, equally holier-than-thou, who point out that all religious and nationalist idealism is a lie, that there is no escape from the bonds of cold hard facts like global warming and corporate greed. What Carver shows us in his tiny, frail compositions is the sin that both of these types commit: the sin of certitude. In reality, we Americans are a frail, confused, and hapless lot, all the more ineffectual for all our nation's economic and military power.
But then, what's wrong with being frail or confused? Isn't that what it is to be human?
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