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.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
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?
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Start it and When it's Over, Finish It
The other day, I had the pleasure of interviewing Irish writer Colm Toibin for a profile I'm doing for Out Magazine. In person, Toibin turned out to be charming and witty, overflowing with wise and funny observations about life and writing, and in fact, I couldn't fit them all into the piece I wrote.
One thing he said has stuck with me. He was talking about a story he wanted to write and trying to figure out how to structure it. Finally, after two years of struggling, he came up with the following. "I thought fuck it, start the story at the beginning of the story and when it's over, just end it. Tell the fucking thing. No framing shit. No Calvino, no Borges, no being told by two different narrators, almost no flashbacks... and I do think I got it right for once."
Writers today are under a subtle but perceptible pressure to develop some kind of narrative gimmick, a telling trademark style that makes their writing unique and immediately identifiable. David Foster Wallace? He's the guy with the clever footnotes. Rick Moody? He writes long sentences punctuated with italics that pop up seemingly for no reason. Jonathan Safran Foer? He makes experimental writing reader-friendly, even poignant. The list goes on.
If you don't have a stylistic gimmick, it's helpful to have some kind of personal story to make your mark. Who can forget J. T. Leroy's shyness about public appearances? Or the fact that Zadie Smith was ONLY 23 when she wrote her first novel, or that Nick McDonnell was ONLY 17 when he wrote his novel Twelve, etc., etc.
These kinds of considerations have everything to do with publicity but very little to do with the business of writing, which is simply to choose your story that you need to tell and figure out the best way to tell it. The author as a person is free to vanish within the text, and it's perfectly acceptable, even honorable, for the author's hand to seem almost invisible.
Recently I've been reading the work of Jean Stafford (a former student gave me a book of her stories as a gift). What's remarkable to me about these radiant stories is the use of adjectives, the precision with word choice, and the intensity of the pain faintly palpable underneath the highly-polished surface of Stafford's writing. It's interesting to note that Stafford was married to the poet Robert Lowell and suffered from disease and depression most of her life, but it doesn't change the quality of her writing, which doesn't need pictures or footnotes or italics or words in capital letters to be powerful.
I wish that the people in our media who decide which books get attention and which books don't would start thinking more seriously about what makes for a groundbreaking work of literature. Today it seems that it isn't enough for a book to be well-written; a book has to also signal to readers and reviewers that it is well-written with a host of post-modern devices that in many cases are so showy that the book turns out to be less well-written as a direct result. But what about those writers who don't feel the need to imitate Calvino or Kafka or the latest spawn of literary imitators of W. G. Sebald? I love David Foster Wallace as much as anyone. But what about writers who commit the radical act of telling a story simply, starting at the start and finishing when it's over, with words instead of punctuation marks and graphics, with calm, steady voices instead of shrieking? They deserve a little attention too.
One thing he said has stuck with me. He was talking about a story he wanted to write and trying to figure out how to structure it. Finally, after two years of struggling, he came up with the following. "I thought fuck it, start the story at the beginning of the story and when it's over, just end it. Tell the fucking thing. No framing shit. No Calvino, no Borges, no being told by two different narrators, almost no flashbacks... and I do think I got it right for once."
Writers today are under a subtle but perceptible pressure to develop some kind of narrative gimmick, a telling trademark style that makes their writing unique and immediately identifiable. David Foster Wallace? He's the guy with the clever footnotes. Rick Moody? He writes long sentences punctuated with italics that pop up seemingly for no reason. Jonathan Safran Foer? He makes experimental writing reader-friendly, even poignant. The list goes on.
If you don't have a stylistic gimmick, it's helpful to have some kind of personal story to make your mark. Who can forget J. T. Leroy's shyness about public appearances? Or the fact that Zadie Smith was ONLY 23 when she wrote her first novel, or that Nick McDonnell was ONLY 17 when he wrote his novel Twelve, etc., etc.
These kinds of considerations have everything to do with publicity but very little to do with the business of writing, which is simply to choose your story that you need to tell and figure out the best way to tell it. The author as a person is free to vanish within the text, and it's perfectly acceptable, even honorable, for the author's hand to seem almost invisible.
Recently I've been reading the work of Jean Stafford (a former student gave me a book of her stories as a gift). What's remarkable to me about these radiant stories is the use of adjectives, the precision with word choice, and the intensity of the pain faintly palpable underneath the highly-polished surface of Stafford's writing. It's interesting to note that Stafford was married to the poet Robert Lowell and suffered from disease and depression most of her life, but it doesn't change the quality of her writing, which doesn't need pictures or footnotes or italics or words in capital letters to be powerful.
I wish that the people in our media who decide which books get attention and which books don't would start thinking more seriously about what makes for a groundbreaking work of literature. Today it seems that it isn't enough for a book to be well-written; a book has to also signal to readers and reviewers that it is well-written with a host of post-modern devices that in many cases are so showy that the book turns out to be less well-written as a direct result. But what about those writers who don't feel the need to imitate Calvino or Kafka or the latest spawn of literary imitators of W. G. Sebald? I love David Foster Wallace as much as anyone. But what about writers who commit the radical act of telling a story simply, starting at the start and finishing when it's over, with words instead of punctuation marks and graphics, with calm, steady voices instead of shrieking? They deserve a little attention too.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Martin Luther King Day Thoughts
For many of us it's an extra day off work or school. For our politicians, it's a chance to score some easy flattering news coverage by uttering the usual noble messages about racism. And for a few of us, Martin Luther King Day is a holiday with meaning.
My own view is that it's a shame we as a nation have missed the chance to make more of this holiday than we do. Somehow we have this notion that race is an issue that affects only black people, gender is for females, sexual orientation for gays and lesbians, ethnicity for Latinos and perhaps Asians, and the list goes on.
But of course, white people do have a race, males have a gender, Christians have a religion, and straight people have a sexual orientation. The culture of the majority may be more visible to the minority, but it's still there, and worth more attention than we usually pay these matters.
Furthermore, as the newly-elected Lieutenant Governor of New York pointed out today, racism is a white problem, just as sexual discrimination is a male problem, and religious discrimination is a Christian problem. When we needlessly marginalize anyone in our society, we miss out on the contributions that person may have made to our community, had he or she been allowed to become a full member.
Nowhere in literature is this lesson more powerfully evoked than in a novel I tend to advocate reading every few months or so, called Three Cities by Sholem Asch. In what is probably the definitive look at the Russian Revolution, Asch describes (through a fictional narrative) how a variety of regimes missed out on a chance to reform the Russian empire into a fair and thriving country for all its citizens because the suggestions of a few smart, capable people who happened to be Jewish were ignored.
For more on the dangers of needlessly marginalizing people for reasons of religion, nationality, or politics, we need look no further than our own present regime's conduct of the war in Iraq. As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reported on MSNBC, potential candidates for participating in the reconstruction of Iraq were asked, "Do you support Roe vs. Wade?" Why a person's stance on abortion has anything to do with their capability to help rebuild Iraq makes no more sense than why (under this administration) several of our few fluent Arabic speakers in the military were removed from their jobs because they happened to be gay. Nor does it make any sense to disallow companies from countries who did not participate in the invasion of Iraq from participating in the reconstruction, simply by virtue of nationality.
We may never know if our current misadventure in Iraq may have been less of a disaster if our administration had included the best people for the job at each stage of the invasion and reconstruction, rather than the people who seemed most likely to hold views and/or come from backgrounds most similar to the people in the executive branch of our government. What we do know for sure is that the current cast of characters in charge do not seem to have learned any lessons from their mistakes. Then again, have any of us learned any lessons about tolerance from history? What are we doing in our own lives, not just on Martin Luther King Day, but every day, to see people clearly as they are instead of as the preconceived stereotypes we seem to prefer them to be.
My own view is that it's a shame we as a nation have missed the chance to make more of this holiday than we do. Somehow we have this notion that race is an issue that affects only black people, gender is for females, sexual orientation for gays and lesbians, ethnicity for Latinos and perhaps Asians, and the list goes on.
But of course, white people do have a race, males have a gender, Christians have a religion, and straight people have a sexual orientation. The culture of the majority may be more visible to the minority, but it's still there, and worth more attention than we usually pay these matters.
Furthermore, as the newly-elected Lieutenant Governor of New York pointed out today, racism is a white problem, just as sexual discrimination is a male problem, and religious discrimination is a Christian problem. When we needlessly marginalize anyone in our society, we miss out on the contributions that person may have made to our community, had he or she been allowed to become a full member.
Nowhere in literature is this lesson more powerfully evoked than in a novel I tend to advocate reading every few months or so, called Three Cities by Sholem Asch. In what is probably the definitive look at the Russian Revolution, Asch describes (through a fictional narrative) how a variety of regimes missed out on a chance to reform the Russian empire into a fair and thriving country for all its citizens because the suggestions of a few smart, capable people who happened to be Jewish were ignored.
For more on the dangers of needlessly marginalizing people for reasons of religion, nationality, or politics, we need look no further than our own present regime's conduct of the war in Iraq. As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reported on MSNBC, potential candidates for participating in the reconstruction of Iraq were asked, "Do you support Roe vs. Wade?" Why a person's stance on abortion has anything to do with their capability to help rebuild Iraq makes no more sense than why (under this administration) several of our few fluent Arabic speakers in the military were removed from their jobs because they happened to be gay. Nor does it make any sense to disallow companies from countries who did not participate in the invasion of Iraq from participating in the reconstruction, simply by virtue of nationality.
We may never know if our current misadventure in Iraq may have been less of a disaster if our administration had included the best people for the job at each stage of the invasion and reconstruction, rather than the people who seemed most likely to hold views and/or come from backgrounds most similar to the people in the executive branch of our government. What we do know for sure is that the current cast of characters in charge do not seem to have learned any lessons from their mistakes. Then again, have any of us learned any lessons about tolerance from history? What are we doing in our own lives, not just on Martin Luther King Day, but every day, to see people clearly as they are instead of as the preconceived stereotypes we seem to prefer them to be.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Top Ten Lists
It's that dreary time of year when magazines and newspapers get into the business of ranking works of art. Imagine applying such a system to nature. "That tree is the best one I've seen all year!" "I really liked that river, but it wasn't as good as the one I saw last month." "Gee, that sky is such a disaster. It's the worst one I've ever been under."
To me, talking about a movie or a book in this way is equally absurd. When I go to a theater or museum or when I open a book, I don't think to myself, "Now, where will I rank this on my year-end list of reading or viewing experiences?" And if Pedro Almodovar's last movie was the best or the worst movie I saw between the dates of January 1 and December 31 2006, who cares? And five years from now, who will remember? I read, watch, and listen because I want to have an intense experience that will leave an impression. Excellence? I suppose that's nice, but I don't mind a movie or painting with flaws, as long as they're interesting flaws.
This list-making business reaches unparalleled heights of stupidity when it comes to books because there simply aren't enough days in the year to read all the books that come out in one year. Supposing you read a book a week all year long. That would mean you'd tackled fifty books out of all the ones that had been published that year (assuming that you hadn't read any books that came out earlier than the current year). Supposing you read two books a week. You'd have one hundred. Now think of how many books come out in a calendar year (a number that's somewhere in the thousands). How can anyone with a straight face claim to have read all these thousands and from these have culled a list of the Top Ten?
So rather than give you my top ten of 2006, I'm going to list here, in no particular order, some books I've read this past year that made their mark on me for one reason or another, listed in no particular order. I have no idea where The Radetzky March ranks in relation to The Mayor of Casterbridge or Veronica, but I won't forget any of these three books or the others below any time soon:
The Leopard by Tommaso di Lampedusa: I was (understandably) on a bit of an Italian lit kick this year, and this novel, about an aristocratic family on the decline in Sicily, is a classic that doesn't feel the least bit musty.
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia: Continuing my Sicilian tour, I turned to this gripping novella about the mafia, fascism, and the culture of corruption.
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth: A moving evocation of an Austrian dynasty trying to cling to old values while the world is changing all around them. One of the great works of European literature.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: This book begins smashingly, with a man selling his wife and child because they're getting on his nerves (a practice that apparently was not uncommon in early nineteenth century England). Does this guy know how to tell a story or what?
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: Gaitskill uses language with the precision of a stonecutter. An intense and moving experience.
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez: This is a fascinating read about the sixties, sex, and class. Written as a faux-memoir, this book has the immediacy of non-fiction with all the craft we expect of a great novel.
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart: Funny, smart, and supremely necessary for our times.
Never Let Me Go, An Artist in the Floating World, A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro: Reading a bunch of this guy's work at once made me realize that Ishiguro baasically only does one thing in his fiction, but what a thing that he does! I can't think of another writer who uses unreliable narration with such confidence and deftness. These books made me want to run to my notebook and get to work.
The Captain's Fire by J. S. Marcus: A brilliant book you may not have heard of. If you like experimental fiction on historical themes like W. G. Sebald's books, this novel is for you.
Twelve Caesers by Petronius: I never thought I'd be interested in Roman history, but this chatty, gossipy, downright bitchy book had me enthralled. These guys make George W. Bush seem like a saint. I'll never forget the emperor who lost his grip on power because he stopped to tie his shoelace.
There's a start. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten to mention. Feel free to chime in with your recommendations.
To me, talking about a movie or a book in this way is equally absurd. When I go to a theater or museum or when I open a book, I don't think to myself, "Now, where will I rank this on my year-end list of reading or viewing experiences?" And if Pedro Almodovar's last movie was the best or the worst movie I saw between the dates of January 1 and December 31 2006, who cares? And five years from now, who will remember? I read, watch, and listen because I want to have an intense experience that will leave an impression. Excellence? I suppose that's nice, but I don't mind a movie or painting with flaws, as long as they're interesting flaws.
This list-making business reaches unparalleled heights of stupidity when it comes to books because there simply aren't enough days in the year to read all the books that come out in one year. Supposing you read a book a week all year long. That would mean you'd tackled fifty books out of all the ones that had been published that year (assuming that you hadn't read any books that came out earlier than the current year). Supposing you read two books a week. You'd have one hundred. Now think of how many books come out in a calendar year (a number that's somewhere in the thousands). How can anyone with a straight face claim to have read all these thousands and from these have culled a list of the Top Ten?
So rather than give you my top ten of 2006, I'm going to list here, in no particular order, some books I've read this past year that made their mark on me for one reason or another, listed in no particular order. I have no idea where The Radetzky March ranks in relation to The Mayor of Casterbridge or Veronica, but I won't forget any of these three books or the others below any time soon:
The Leopard by Tommaso di Lampedusa: I was (understandably) on a bit of an Italian lit kick this year, and this novel, about an aristocratic family on the decline in Sicily, is a classic that doesn't feel the least bit musty.
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia: Continuing my Sicilian tour, I turned to this gripping novella about the mafia, fascism, and the culture of corruption.
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth: A moving evocation of an Austrian dynasty trying to cling to old values while the world is changing all around them. One of the great works of European literature.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: This book begins smashingly, with a man selling his wife and child because they're getting on his nerves (a practice that apparently was not uncommon in early nineteenth century England). Does this guy know how to tell a story or what?
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: Gaitskill uses language with the precision of a stonecutter. An intense and moving experience.
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez: This is a fascinating read about the sixties, sex, and class. Written as a faux-memoir, this book has the immediacy of non-fiction with all the craft we expect of a great novel.
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart: Funny, smart, and supremely necessary for our times.
Never Let Me Go, An Artist in the Floating World, A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro: Reading a bunch of this guy's work at once made me realize that Ishiguro baasically only does one thing in his fiction, but what a thing that he does! I can't think of another writer who uses unreliable narration with such confidence and deftness. These books made me want to run to my notebook and get to work.
The Captain's Fire by J. S. Marcus: A brilliant book you may not have heard of. If you like experimental fiction on historical themes like W. G. Sebald's books, this novel is for you.
Twelve Caesers by Petronius: I never thought I'd be interested in Roman history, but this chatty, gossipy, downright bitchy book had me enthralled. These guys make George W. Bush seem like a saint. I'll never forget the emperor who lost his grip on power because he stopped to tie his shoelace.
There's a start. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten to mention. Feel free to chime in with your recommendations.
Friday, December 15, 2006
A Few Burning Questions from Students
Earlier this week, I went to visit a creative writing class taught by my friend and highly-esteemed colleague Lauren Grodstein. Her students had read my novel Faith for Beginners, and I came to talk to them about the process of becoming a writer and writing that book.
The students came up with some interesting questions for me to answer. Two of them were questions I often get asked by readers, and yet each time I'm asked those questions, I feel somewhat surprised.
The first of these was, "How much of your book is autobiographical." (To find out the answer, you can go to the "bio" section of my site.) The thing that always strikes me about that question is that these days, the first question we ask a non-fiction writer, particularly if he or she has written a memoir, is "How much of your book is true?" It's as if we expect our non-fiction writers to be writing lies and our fiction writers to be writing the truth. In other words, we think that all writers are liars.
Of course, if Pablo Picasso is to be believed, all artists are liars, but it's been said that Picasso himself was a notorious fibber, so now we're getting all Star Trekky...
The other question was, "I don't know much about the Jewish faith, so I'm not sure if I'm getting everything in this book that I'm supposed to get." I've heard a number of readers, not just of my work but of fiction in general, say that to understand a work of fiction it should be universal or specific to their experience. To me it seems that the first condition is impossible, the second undesirable.
There is no universal experience. We all our individuated by our races, religions, nationalities, class levels, etc. However, many of us believe that to have a race, you must be black. Begin white means not having a race, which is therefore "universal." To have a religion, you must belong to a non-Christian religion. Being Christian is "universal." Being American, straight, and middle class, are all also universal. (I've heard that in a recent poll of Americans, 95% said they belonged to the middle class.) Being male is universal. Being female means you have a gender.
However, I wouldn't want to read fiction about the universal experience, which would seem to shave all the interesting edges off stories that make them unique. I also don't want to read fiction specific to my own experience all the time. When I read a book, one of the many things I hope for is the chance to get to know a world that isn't entirely mine. And yet somehow, by reading about the specifics of a world that is not my own, I find a way to relate to it, to imagine how my life compares to this new one I'm encountering on the page. That's why I love reading fiction that is set in such unfamiliar moonscapes as 1850s London (Bleak House by Dickens) early nineteenth century Russia (War and Peace by Tolstoy) or even imperial Rome (The Twelve Ceasers by Suetanious). I love finding out that I have more in common with British orphans, Russian aristocrats, and Roman emperors than I would ever have guessed before reading the books above.
As the student herself put it, "I'm not Jewish, but my grandmother, who's Catholic, worries about the same things as that character Helen in your book, so I could relate."
Exactly.
Another burning question I got this week, from a student in one of my own creative writing classes, was "Is writing a matter of hard work or talent?" This is a fantastic question, worthy of a blog in itself. I've never been a fan of the idea of talent because I've seen how much hard work goes into writing. Certainly I have never felt divinely inspired as I go along. I feel more like a coal miner, slowly hacking away at the page for years. However, I have also seen people diligently going about their work for years and get more and more frustrated with their writing, unable to produce work they're proud of. So what's the difference between someone who works for three years and then produces a book that gets published, and someone else who works a while and comes up with a manuscript to put in the back of a drawer?
I have no idea if you need talent, or if writing is something that can be mastered through hard work and study. But I do know that a number of talented people go nowhere because they don't put enough effort into their work and careers. So maybe the only thing to say about this question is, "Does it make any difference?" If you want to be a writer badly enough, in spite of all the difficulties of this career--and there are many--then go for it, and don't worry about talent. If it exists, it's out of your control whether you have it. But what is in your control is how hard you work to maximize the gifts you were born with, assuming that anyone is indeed born with any gifts. So work as hard as you can. Expect no rewards. Because no one should write for rewards. (The rewards you get for writing aren't worth it, except if you're Stephen King or John Grisham or Dan Brown, and we're not them.) You should write because you care so much about words and are so fascinated by the world of literature that you want to get into the game too, even when doing so seems difficult and discouraging and hopeless.
The students came up with some interesting questions for me to answer. Two of them were questions I often get asked by readers, and yet each time I'm asked those questions, I feel somewhat surprised.
The first of these was, "How much of your book is autobiographical." (To find out the answer, you can go to the "bio" section of my site.) The thing that always strikes me about that question is that these days, the first question we ask a non-fiction writer, particularly if he or she has written a memoir, is "How much of your book is true?" It's as if we expect our non-fiction writers to be writing lies and our fiction writers to be writing the truth. In other words, we think that all writers are liars.
Of course, if Pablo Picasso is to be believed, all artists are liars, but it's been said that Picasso himself was a notorious fibber, so now we're getting all Star Trekky...
The other question was, "I don't know much about the Jewish faith, so I'm not sure if I'm getting everything in this book that I'm supposed to get." I've heard a number of readers, not just of my work but of fiction in general, say that to understand a work of fiction it should be universal or specific to their experience. To me it seems that the first condition is impossible, the second undesirable.
There is no universal experience. We all our individuated by our races, religions, nationalities, class levels, etc. However, many of us believe that to have a race, you must be black. Begin white means not having a race, which is therefore "universal." To have a religion, you must belong to a non-Christian religion. Being Christian is "universal." Being American, straight, and middle class, are all also universal. (I've heard that in a recent poll of Americans, 95% said they belonged to the middle class.) Being male is universal. Being female means you have a gender.
However, I wouldn't want to read fiction about the universal experience, which would seem to shave all the interesting edges off stories that make them unique. I also don't want to read fiction specific to my own experience all the time. When I read a book, one of the many things I hope for is the chance to get to know a world that isn't entirely mine. And yet somehow, by reading about the specifics of a world that is not my own, I find a way to relate to it, to imagine how my life compares to this new one I'm encountering on the page. That's why I love reading fiction that is set in such unfamiliar moonscapes as 1850s London (Bleak House by Dickens) early nineteenth century Russia (War and Peace by Tolstoy) or even imperial Rome (The Twelve Ceasers by Suetanious). I love finding out that I have more in common with British orphans, Russian aristocrats, and Roman emperors than I would ever have guessed before reading the books above.
As the student herself put it, "I'm not Jewish, but my grandmother, who's Catholic, worries about the same things as that character Helen in your book, so I could relate."
Exactly.
Another burning question I got this week, from a student in one of my own creative writing classes, was "Is writing a matter of hard work or talent?" This is a fantastic question, worthy of a blog in itself. I've never been a fan of the idea of talent because I've seen how much hard work goes into writing. Certainly I have never felt divinely inspired as I go along. I feel more like a coal miner, slowly hacking away at the page for years. However, I have also seen people diligently going about their work for years and get more and more frustrated with their writing, unable to produce work they're proud of. So what's the difference between someone who works for three years and then produces a book that gets published, and someone else who works a while and comes up with a manuscript to put in the back of a drawer?
I have no idea if you need talent, or if writing is something that can be mastered through hard work and study. But I do know that a number of talented people go nowhere because they don't put enough effort into their work and careers. So maybe the only thing to say about this question is, "Does it make any difference?" If you want to be a writer badly enough, in spite of all the difficulties of this career--and there are many--then go for it, and don't worry about talent. If it exists, it's out of your control whether you have it. But what is in your control is how hard you work to maximize the gifts you were born with, assuming that anyone is indeed born with any gifts. So work as hard as you can. Expect no rewards. Because no one should write for rewards. (The rewards you get for writing aren't worth it, except if you're Stephen King or John Grisham or Dan Brown, and we're not them.) You should write because you care so much about words and are so fascinated by the world of literature that you want to get into the game too, even when doing so seems difficult and discouraging and hopeless.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Bursting with Books
Last night as I was cleaning out my closet, my book tower fell over.
I love books. I always have. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time going into a bookstore and walking out empty-handed. As I've begun to publish, I have more friends who write books and publish as well, and so I feel it's important to support their work by buying their books. I also believe strongly that independent bookstores are a great resource on the endangered species list, so every time I go into one of those, I almost always buy something as well.
The result of all this is that almost every square inch of surface area in my apartment is packed with books. My bookshelves, of course, but also my desk, my nightstand, the floor beside my desk, are all taken up by books. For some years, I used to save every book I've ever acquired, even ones I didn't like. After moving several times, I began to wonder whether it was such a good idea to continue carting around that thousand-page copy of Iain Pairs's An Instance at the Fingerpost, a book that sat on my shelves for four years unread. Did I really need to save Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, despite its rave review in the New York Times and beautiful gold spine? (Owned for six years, never opened once.) Or how about Jim McGreevey's Confession, or The Nanny Diaries, books I acquired for cheap, out of curiosity? My curiosity has now been satisfied. I'm ready to move on.
So every once in a while, I add a book to a tower of Babel that grows and grows in my closet until it reaches an absurd height, and then I remove the books from the apartment, sell them or donate them or give them away. The trouble is, the tower seems to grow ever more rapidly, and it's all I can do to keep up.
Still, it's hard to let go of a book. Maybe I will find time for Gould's fish after all. And maybe I'll want to refer to those Nanny Diaries for a scene to share with a creative writing class. (About how to write a fast-paced but ultimately shallow satire of a shallow subculture of upper crust New York with a deeply unsatisfying anticlimactic ending?) Tastes change. Maybe I'll regret letting of Mr. McGreevey. If I just squeezed those books together a bit more tightly on the shelf, there'd be room for one or two more...
So what do you do with books once you've read them? Keep them all? Some? How do you decide? I'd be interested to hear.
I love books. I always have. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time going into a bookstore and walking out empty-handed. As I've begun to publish, I have more friends who write books and publish as well, and so I feel it's important to support their work by buying their books. I also believe strongly that independent bookstores are a great resource on the endangered species list, so every time I go into one of those, I almost always buy something as well.
The result of all this is that almost every square inch of surface area in my apartment is packed with books. My bookshelves, of course, but also my desk, my nightstand, the floor beside my desk, are all taken up by books. For some years, I used to save every book I've ever acquired, even ones I didn't like. After moving several times, I began to wonder whether it was such a good idea to continue carting around that thousand-page copy of Iain Pairs's An Instance at the Fingerpost, a book that sat on my shelves for four years unread. Did I really need to save Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, despite its rave review in the New York Times and beautiful gold spine? (Owned for six years, never opened once.) Or how about Jim McGreevey's Confession, or The Nanny Diaries, books I acquired for cheap, out of curiosity? My curiosity has now been satisfied. I'm ready to move on.
So every once in a while, I add a book to a tower of Babel that grows and grows in my closet until it reaches an absurd height, and then I remove the books from the apartment, sell them or donate them or give them away. The trouble is, the tower seems to grow ever more rapidly, and it's all I can do to keep up.
Still, it's hard to let go of a book. Maybe I will find time for Gould's fish after all. And maybe I'll want to refer to those Nanny Diaries for a scene to share with a creative writing class. (About how to write a fast-paced but ultimately shallow satire of a shallow subculture of upper crust New York with a deeply unsatisfying anticlimactic ending?) Tastes change. Maybe I'll regret letting of Mr. McGreevey. If I just squeezed those books together a bit more tightly on the shelf, there'd be room for one or two more...
So what do you do with books once you've read them? Keep them all? Some? How do you decide? I'd be interested to hear.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Return to Oz
For my current project, which features a Wizard of Oz fan as its main character, I've been rereading several books in the Oz series written by L. Frank Baum. (Baum wrote thirteen sequels to his bestselling hit novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After his death, the series was continued by a few other authors. Even today, many hopefuls to the title Royal Historian of Oz continue to pen Oz sequels.)
One of the wonderful things about re-reading these books, which were written over a span of twenty years from 1900 until the author's death in 1919, is seeing the development of a writer over time, emotionally as well as stylistically. The first book was never intended to launch a series. Indeed, Baum wrote other stories about magical two-letter lands, like The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi or Ix. Yet somehow the lands of Mo and Ix never made the same mark on the culture as Oz.
When Baum began writing his sequels to the original book, he tried to get around the problem of returning to the same territory by setting several of his books outside the land of Oz, telling stories about characters who traveled through other magical lands (including another two-letter country, Ev) to get to Oz. Finally, in 1910, with his sixth entry in the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum announced that the land of Oz was forever cut off with the rest of the world and so he could no longer receive news of the latest Oz happenings to report in future Oz books. The series was therefore concluded.
For a few years, Baum wrote other fairy tale books, none of which approached the success of the Oz books in terms of sales, even when he tried to import a couple of Oz characters into his non-Oz stories. So in 1913, he "discovered" that he could resume communication with the land of Oz via the telegraph, and he wrote one Oz book a year from then on.
What accounts for these books' enduring charm? Baum certainly has his moments as a writer, particularly in the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, in which his masterful interweaving of plot, character, setting, and word choice is as good as anything ever produced in American letters. Baum also has his weaker moments when he relies on a series of literary tics that get increasingly annoying with their repetition in each new book. Food is often "smoking hot." Trees are always "stately." Rooms in fairy castles are often scented with sprays of perfume and lit with a soft glow from an unknown source. He tends to do much better when he's tackling the flat landscape of Kansas than the enchanted halls of castles in the Emerald City and beyond. His characters can also seem to lack much variation. They're usually a combination of lucky girls like Dorothy, vain, silly, arrogant talking cats and villainous queens, good-hearted idiot savants like the beloved Scarecrow, resourceful, calm, unruffled boys, and villains whose silliness always seems more genuine than their cruelty.
At the same time, Baum tells his stories with remarkable sincerity, so much so that it's hard to believe that Oz is not a real place. He writes about his favorite characters as if they're good friends, and describes magical encounters with genuine wonder, as if they'd occurred to him rather than been invented by him. As a child reading these books, I used to dream of finding just the write cyclone to whisk me away to Oz. As an adult going back to them, I was surprised by how quickly the same longing recurred and how difficult it was for me to shake it off.
One of the wonderful things about re-reading these books, which were written over a span of twenty years from 1900 until the author's death in 1919, is seeing the development of a writer over time, emotionally as well as stylistically. The first book was never intended to launch a series. Indeed, Baum wrote other stories about magical two-letter lands, like The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi or Ix. Yet somehow the lands of Mo and Ix never made the same mark on the culture as Oz.
When Baum began writing his sequels to the original book, he tried to get around the problem of returning to the same territory by setting several of his books outside the land of Oz, telling stories about characters who traveled through other magical lands (including another two-letter country, Ev) to get to Oz. Finally, in 1910, with his sixth entry in the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum announced that the land of Oz was forever cut off with the rest of the world and so he could no longer receive news of the latest Oz happenings to report in future Oz books. The series was therefore concluded.
For a few years, Baum wrote other fairy tale books, none of which approached the success of the Oz books in terms of sales, even when he tried to import a couple of Oz characters into his non-Oz stories. So in 1913, he "discovered" that he could resume communication with the land of Oz via the telegraph, and he wrote one Oz book a year from then on.
What accounts for these books' enduring charm? Baum certainly has his moments as a writer, particularly in the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, in which his masterful interweaving of plot, character, setting, and word choice is as good as anything ever produced in American letters. Baum also has his weaker moments when he relies on a series of literary tics that get increasingly annoying with their repetition in each new book. Food is often "smoking hot." Trees are always "stately." Rooms in fairy castles are often scented with sprays of perfume and lit with a soft glow from an unknown source. He tends to do much better when he's tackling the flat landscape of Kansas than the enchanted halls of castles in the Emerald City and beyond. His characters can also seem to lack much variation. They're usually a combination of lucky girls like Dorothy, vain, silly, arrogant talking cats and villainous queens, good-hearted idiot savants like the beloved Scarecrow, resourceful, calm, unruffled boys, and villains whose silliness always seems more genuine than their cruelty.
At the same time, Baum tells his stories with remarkable sincerity, so much so that it's hard to believe that Oz is not a real place. He writes about his favorite characters as if they're good friends, and describes magical encounters with genuine wonder, as if they'd occurred to him rather than been invented by him. As a child reading these books, I used to dream of finding just the write cyclone to whisk me away to Oz. As an adult going back to them, I was surprised by how quickly the same longing recurred and how difficult it was for me to shake it off.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Good and Bad
This week I've asked my creative writing students to give me some feedback on how their work is progressing and how the class is going for them. I've gotten some very thoughtful and interesting responses. For example, I was surprised (and gratified to learn) how interested many of them were in the fine art of line-editing.
One thing that's stuck with me from these responses and others I've heard from students in the past is their desire to know what makes for "good" writing and what makes for "bad" writing. When I used to teach poetry, for example, one student asked me to bring in a good poem and a bad poem, explain to the class what made one good and the other bad, and then hand out a list of rules so that students could follow them and write only good poems in the future.
It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to know, and if anyone out there could provide me with rules of "good" and "bad," I'd be grateful to hear about them so I could pass this information on to others. For myself, I no longer can claim to know what "good" and "bad" mean anymore, and increasingly I find that I no longer care.
I think that Zadie Smith's recent novel On Beauty is a textbook example of a "bad" book. In fact I think it represents some of the worst tendencies in contemporary literature and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of E. M. Forster's Howards End, the book that Smith claims inspired her own novel. The New York Times Book Review, however, names it as one of the top ten books of the previous year. They think it is a "good" book. Good for them, good for me. I have my opinion, and they have theirs.
I also think rum raisin ice cream is an example of "bad" ice cream. What if I said that the New York Times sang the praises of rum raisin ice cream? Would you care? Would I change my opinion of rum raisin?
For me, the only opinions about literature that mean anything are ones that engage with the essential qualities of the text. We can talk about characters and word choices and plot structure and setting and the use of time. We can talk about how tired we ought to be as readers of books detailing (yet again) the petty tempests in academic teapots, or the cloying contemporary fetish for "updating" plots of classic novels by transplanting them roots and all from the past to the present, ever so cutely substituting "emails" for "letters," for example. Then we can have a real discussion about the validity of these specific decisions.
As for what's good and what's bad, I can only say what I like. But you, reader, are equally entitled to like what you like. But by simply exchanging our opinions about good and bad, we immediately end the discussion because we can go no further. Because as much as I hate rum raisin, you'll still go on eating it, and as much as you want me to switch from cookie dough, I'm sticking to that too.
One thing that's stuck with me from these responses and others I've heard from students in the past is their desire to know what makes for "good" writing and what makes for "bad" writing. When I used to teach poetry, for example, one student asked me to bring in a good poem and a bad poem, explain to the class what made one good and the other bad, and then hand out a list of rules so that students could follow them and write only good poems in the future.
It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to know, and if anyone out there could provide me with rules of "good" and "bad," I'd be grateful to hear about them so I could pass this information on to others. For myself, I no longer can claim to know what "good" and "bad" mean anymore, and increasingly I find that I no longer care.
I think that Zadie Smith's recent novel On Beauty is a textbook example of a "bad" book. In fact I think it represents some of the worst tendencies in contemporary literature and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of E. M. Forster's Howards End, the book that Smith claims inspired her own novel. The New York Times Book Review, however, names it as one of the top ten books of the previous year. They think it is a "good" book. Good for them, good for me. I have my opinion, and they have theirs.
I also think rum raisin ice cream is an example of "bad" ice cream. What if I said that the New York Times sang the praises of rum raisin ice cream? Would you care? Would I change my opinion of rum raisin?
For me, the only opinions about literature that mean anything are ones that engage with the essential qualities of the text. We can talk about characters and word choices and plot structure and setting and the use of time. We can talk about how tired we ought to be as readers of books detailing (yet again) the petty tempests in academic teapots, or the cloying contemporary fetish for "updating" plots of classic novels by transplanting them roots and all from the past to the present, ever so cutely substituting "emails" for "letters," for example. Then we can have a real discussion about the validity of these specific decisions.
As for what's good and what's bad, I can only say what I like. But you, reader, are equally entitled to like what you like. But by simply exchanging our opinions about good and bad, we immediately end the discussion because we can go no further. Because as much as I hate rum raisin, you'll still go on eating it, and as much as you want me to switch from cookie dough, I'm sticking to that too.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Straight to Hell
Research has taken me to some unsual places: a gay cruising park in Jerusalem, an institute for physics research in Berlin, a Cantonese class in Chinatown, a Communist bookstore off Fifth Avenue. But last weekend was a first: a research trip to hell.
First, a little background. I'm starting a new novel that features a number of evangelical Christians as main characters. The past couple of weeks I've done some digging to learn more about evangelical communities and what makes them tick. My great worry with this book is that I'll only portray these people satirically or superficially, because I know so little about them, and I'd really like to get at a deeper, more human rendering.
To that end, I've been doing some reading on the evangelical movement and keeping my eye out for anything related to it in the media. Then last week, an article on "Hell Houses" happened to catch my eye.
Halloween is not a very popular holiday among evangelicals (nor among religious Jews either) because of its pagan origins (though the Christmas tree has pagan origins too) and its association with witches and the like. As an alternative to staged haunted houses for Halloween, churches have begun organizing "hell houses," which feature the potrayal of various sins. On your tour of a hell house, you're likely to encounter a suicide or two (big no-no), a date rape, some drugs, STD's, a gay wedding, and most certainly, a very bloody abortion.
To set up your own hell house, the best way to go about it is to pay $300 for a hell house kit from Pastor Keenan Roberts. His handy manual will give you tips on everything from sound effects, staging, dialogue, to how to simulate an aborted child using meat products. For an extra $45 bucks a pop, you can purchase DVDs of various scenes that particularly interest you.
I was wondering how I would ever get to see one of these houses, when I learned that there was one available right here in this den of sin where I live. A local theater company, Les Freres Corbusier, has decided to stage an authentic haunted house in Dumbo. They've paid their $300, assembled the house according to official kit instructions, and stuck to the original text as provided by the good pastor. There was no choice for me. I had to go to hell.
My tour of hell house began with greetings from a devil dressed in makeup that resembled one of the bad guys from Star Wars. Mr. Devil took us to our first tableau, a rave at which a young woman takes a drug and passes out on the floor, at which point, a man yells, "She's out! Let's rape her!" (Why is it that tasteful art and evangelical Christianity are such unlikely bedfellows?) Other sins included a spectacularly bloody abortion scene, with the red stuff spurting from the womb of a hapless cheerleader. Tools included a rather nasty looking pair of forceps and a vacuum cleaner with a large hose. We also entered a womb where an actor sucking her thumb and cooing, "Gurgle, gurgle" was plucked from the scene by two giant wooden beams covered in aluminum foil. One of my favorite parts was the hallway of sinners, which included a Muslim terrorist, a pothead, and (incongruously) an effete man in a tuxedo warbling show tunes to his heart's content.
In case you were worried, at the end of the tour, we were all saved from Satan by an angel who took us to a white room where Jesus himself offered us salvation. (My friend who came with me was more interested in Jesus's chest hair.) Then we were led to a Christian hoedown, with folk music, powdered donuts, and watery punch.
Perhaps the scariest thing of all about Hell House is that Pastor Roberts claims it has a 33% success rate in converting people to the faith.
First, a little background. I'm starting a new novel that features a number of evangelical Christians as main characters. The past couple of weeks I've done some digging to learn more about evangelical communities and what makes them tick. My great worry with this book is that I'll only portray these people satirically or superficially, because I know so little about them, and I'd really like to get at a deeper, more human rendering.
To that end, I've been doing some reading on the evangelical movement and keeping my eye out for anything related to it in the media. Then last week, an article on "Hell Houses" happened to catch my eye.
Halloween is not a very popular holiday among evangelicals (nor among religious Jews either) because of its pagan origins (though the Christmas tree has pagan origins too) and its association with witches and the like. As an alternative to staged haunted houses for Halloween, churches have begun organizing "hell houses," which feature the potrayal of various sins. On your tour of a hell house, you're likely to encounter a suicide or two (big no-no), a date rape, some drugs, STD's, a gay wedding, and most certainly, a very bloody abortion.
To set up your own hell house, the best way to go about it is to pay $300 for a hell house kit from Pastor Keenan Roberts. His handy manual will give you tips on everything from sound effects, staging, dialogue, to how to simulate an aborted child using meat products. For an extra $45 bucks a pop, you can purchase DVDs of various scenes that particularly interest you.
I was wondering how I would ever get to see one of these houses, when I learned that there was one available right here in this den of sin where I live. A local theater company, Les Freres Corbusier, has decided to stage an authentic haunted house in Dumbo. They've paid their $300, assembled the house according to official kit instructions, and stuck to the original text as provided by the good pastor. There was no choice for me. I had to go to hell.
My tour of hell house began with greetings from a devil dressed in makeup that resembled one of the bad guys from Star Wars. Mr. Devil took us to our first tableau, a rave at which a young woman takes a drug and passes out on the floor, at which point, a man yells, "She's out! Let's rape her!" (Why is it that tasteful art and evangelical Christianity are such unlikely bedfellows?) Other sins included a spectacularly bloody abortion scene, with the red stuff spurting from the womb of a hapless cheerleader. Tools included a rather nasty looking pair of forceps and a vacuum cleaner with a large hose. We also entered a womb where an actor sucking her thumb and cooing, "Gurgle, gurgle" was plucked from the scene by two giant wooden beams covered in aluminum foil. One of my favorite parts was the hallway of sinners, which included a Muslim terrorist, a pothead, and (incongruously) an effete man in a tuxedo warbling show tunes to his heart's content.
In case you were worried, at the end of the tour, we were all saved from Satan by an angel who took us to a white room where Jesus himself offered us salvation. (My friend who came with me was more interested in Jesus's chest hair.) Then we were led to a Christian hoedown, with folk music, powdered donuts, and watery punch.
Perhaps the scariest thing of all about Hell House is that Pastor Roberts claims it has a 33% success rate in converting people to the faith.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Thoughts on Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur may just be the most literary of Jewish holidays. Yes, there's Simchat Torah, a celebration dedicated the five books of Moses, but most of the Simchat Torah festivities are marked by drinking, singing, and dancing rather than an exploration of the words on the page. (If you ever want to see Orthodox boys gone wild, visit a synagogue on the eve of Simchat Torah.)
Yom Kippur, by contrast, is a day dedicated to the brain, and especially to words. It's a day to remove yourself from everyday concerns like eating or drinking or working or getting dressed up in your fanciest clothes (which is why you'll see Jews in suits with tennis shoes). And it's a day to reflect on stories of atonement and loss. The Yom Kippur service is filled with stories of martyrdom from the days of the first rabbis down to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. It's also filled with stories of the high priests purifying their bodies and minds to atone for the sins of their people.
One of the creepiest of these stories is that of Aaron, the first high priest, brother of Moses, (yes, my namesake), whose two sons died on the spot for daring to enter the holiest part of the temple without God's permission. The Torah dispenses with them in half a sentence.
I'm also fascinated by an explanation I once heard for why the story of how the high priests used to prepare for Yom Kippur is filled with such drama. During the late years of the Second Temple, the post of High Priest was sold to the highest bidder, often to men who were far from holy and sometimes completely ignorant of religious practice. And yet on Yom Kippur this so-called High Priest had to learn how represent the entire community of Hebrews to God and to carry out the rituals without one mistake.
One of my favorite parts of the service is a recounting of a prophecy by Isaiah, in which he talks about people who went through the rituals of fasting and mourning but without reflecting on the meaning behind those rituals. "Is this the kind of fast that God wants?" Isaiah demands. (I'm paraphrasing here.)
These three stories illustrate how difficult faith was and is. There's a tendency among religious fanatics to think nostalgically of the good old days from the Bible, and to see our own time as one of horrific iniquity. They wish we could behave more like the characters of the Bible, in a time when questions of gay marriage or legalizing abortion didn't exist.
Yes, those were the good old days all right, when upstanding men like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob engaged in polygamy, kept slaves, cheated, lied, and swindled. In our time, we believe that each person should have a free choice about the kind of sexual relationship he or she wants to have, as long as that choice doesn't interfere with someone else's choice. But, no, it was far better in the old days, when women were bartered like cattle.
At the same time, we shouldn't indulge ourselves in the illusion that we are entirely more enlightened than we used to be. Isaiah's harangue about people who go through the motions of faith still rings true to us today for a reason. Sure, it's easy to point out the flaws of any number of characters from the Bible. But how many of us have the courage Abraham had, to abandon his homeland, his family, and the beliefs he'd been brought up with, in order to follow his ideals?
I don't have that kind of courage, and lately, I don't have that kind of faith, either. This morning, as I sat in synagogue, and read responsively, and stood, and sat, and even reflected, I found my attention drifting out the windows, at boats gliding across the river, and the miracle of a helicopter swooping down on Manhattan. And just outside of the large room where we prayed and wept as our stomachs rumbled, three construction workers stretched themselves out in the sun and enjoyed their lunch.
Yom Kippur, by contrast, is a day dedicated to the brain, and especially to words. It's a day to remove yourself from everyday concerns like eating or drinking or working or getting dressed up in your fanciest clothes (which is why you'll see Jews in suits with tennis shoes). And it's a day to reflect on stories of atonement and loss. The Yom Kippur service is filled with stories of martyrdom from the days of the first rabbis down to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. It's also filled with stories of the high priests purifying their bodies and minds to atone for the sins of their people.
One of the creepiest of these stories is that of Aaron, the first high priest, brother of Moses, (yes, my namesake), whose two sons died on the spot for daring to enter the holiest part of the temple without God's permission. The Torah dispenses with them in half a sentence.
I'm also fascinated by an explanation I once heard for why the story of how the high priests used to prepare for Yom Kippur is filled with such drama. During the late years of the Second Temple, the post of High Priest was sold to the highest bidder, often to men who were far from holy and sometimes completely ignorant of religious practice. And yet on Yom Kippur this so-called High Priest had to learn how represent the entire community of Hebrews to God and to carry out the rituals without one mistake.
One of my favorite parts of the service is a recounting of a prophecy by Isaiah, in which he talks about people who went through the rituals of fasting and mourning but without reflecting on the meaning behind those rituals. "Is this the kind of fast that God wants?" Isaiah demands. (I'm paraphrasing here.)
These three stories illustrate how difficult faith was and is. There's a tendency among religious fanatics to think nostalgically of the good old days from the Bible, and to see our own time as one of horrific iniquity. They wish we could behave more like the characters of the Bible, in a time when questions of gay marriage or legalizing abortion didn't exist.
Yes, those were the good old days all right, when upstanding men like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob engaged in polygamy, kept slaves, cheated, lied, and swindled. In our time, we believe that each person should have a free choice about the kind of sexual relationship he or she wants to have, as long as that choice doesn't interfere with someone else's choice. But, no, it was far better in the old days, when women were bartered like cattle.
At the same time, we shouldn't indulge ourselves in the illusion that we are entirely more enlightened than we used to be. Isaiah's harangue about people who go through the motions of faith still rings true to us today for a reason. Sure, it's easy to point out the flaws of any number of characters from the Bible. But how many of us have the courage Abraham had, to abandon his homeland, his family, and the beliefs he'd been brought up with, in order to follow his ideals?
I don't have that kind of courage, and lately, I don't have that kind of faith, either. This morning, as I sat in synagogue, and read responsively, and stood, and sat, and even reflected, I found my attention drifting out the windows, at boats gliding across the river, and the miracle of a helicopter swooping down on Manhattan. And just outside of the large room where we prayed and wept as our stomachs rumbled, three construction workers stretched themselves out in the sun and enjoyed their lunch.
Friday, September 22, 2006
What's in a Name?
Recently in my creative writing classes, we've been considering the issue of names. The temptation for an author when trying to pick out a name for a character is to play the Dickens card. For example, if your character's a good guy, you want to call him "Mr. Goodman." Get it? This kind of cuteness becomes very au courant if you're one of those wink-nod po-mo type of writers for whom the whole thing's a joke anyway, so what's one more cheap ploy?
For me, the question of naming goes back to a fundamental issue of character: choice. We learn about characters from the choices they make. One thing that we as people have absolutely no choice over is the name our parents give us at birth. Also, at birth, our parents have no idea what kind of person we're going to be. We're just wet pink blobs. Therefore, using a name to signal some kind of trait about a character simply isn't true to life.
And yet, as one of my students pointed out, we as readers do get a kind of feeling for characters because of the names their authors (rather than their parents, since we as authors really are their parents) gave them. He pointed to the detective "Jack Bauer" on the program 24. Would Jack Bauer cut such a convincing figure as a detective if his name were "Worthington"? And as I mentioned in class, are we really prepared to accept a nuclear physicist named Tiffany?
Yes, argued a student who met with me later in office hours. Why not have a physicist named Tiffany? Why go the usual route and give her an intellectual-sounding name like Ernestine? Play with convention a little, and surprise your reader.
Jack or Worthington, Tiffany or Ernestine, either way naming comes back to the same core issue: we don't get to pick our names, so our names (by themselves) cannot tell us very much about the choices we'd make. Names can tell us gender, ethnicity, family heritage, sometimes age group, sometimes the type of family you grew up with (is your name John Marshall Scott III or Moonbeam Applebaum?). They can also tell us a lot about our parents, about the hopes they have for us, the way they go about choosing a name, the relatives they're honoring by naming us after them. But that's about it.
However, there is an important way in which names can tell us about character, which is, what is your character's relationship to his or her name? Does your character like her name? How does he feel when he hears it read aloud, on a class attendance list, for example? Does your character go by a nickname, and who chose that name? Does your character prefer the full version of his name, like Thomas, or does he go by Tom or Tommy for short? Does your character fantasize about changing his or her name? Does the name have a special meaning or story attached and does your character know it and tell it readily? This is all rich, fertile territory for name games.
If you happen to be a writer and still feel the Dickensian itch to get all cutsey with names then do me a favor. Give your character a nickname. Since the character's the one choosing it, you can go crazy. Think of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for example. (What is it about a grown man who goes by the moniker "Scooter"?)
As for Tiffany the physicist, well, I'm still deciding...
For me, the question of naming goes back to a fundamental issue of character: choice. We learn about characters from the choices they make. One thing that we as people have absolutely no choice over is the name our parents give us at birth. Also, at birth, our parents have no idea what kind of person we're going to be. We're just wet pink blobs. Therefore, using a name to signal some kind of trait about a character simply isn't true to life.
And yet, as one of my students pointed out, we as readers do get a kind of feeling for characters because of the names their authors (rather than their parents, since we as authors really are their parents) gave them. He pointed to the detective "Jack Bauer" on the program 24. Would Jack Bauer cut such a convincing figure as a detective if his name were "Worthington"? And as I mentioned in class, are we really prepared to accept a nuclear physicist named Tiffany?
Yes, argued a student who met with me later in office hours. Why not have a physicist named Tiffany? Why go the usual route and give her an intellectual-sounding name like Ernestine? Play with convention a little, and surprise your reader.
Jack or Worthington, Tiffany or Ernestine, either way naming comes back to the same core issue: we don't get to pick our names, so our names (by themselves) cannot tell us very much about the choices we'd make. Names can tell us gender, ethnicity, family heritage, sometimes age group, sometimes the type of family you grew up with (is your name John Marshall Scott III or Moonbeam Applebaum?). They can also tell us a lot about our parents, about the hopes they have for us, the way they go about choosing a name, the relatives they're honoring by naming us after them. But that's about it.
However, there is an important way in which names can tell us about character, which is, what is your character's relationship to his or her name? Does your character like her name? How does he feel when he hears it read aloud, on a class attendance list, for example? Does your character go by a nickname, and who chose that name? Does your character prefer the full version of his name, like Thomas, or does he go by Tom or Tommy for short? Does your character fantasize about changing his or her name? Does the name have a special meaning or story attached and does your character know it and tell it readily? This is all rich, fertile territory for name games.
If you happen to be a writer and still feel the Dickensian itch to get all cutsey with names then do me a favor. Give your character a nickname. Since the character's the one choosing it, you can go crazy. Think of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for example. (What is it about a grown man who goes by the moniker "Scooter"?)
As for Tiffany the physicist, well, I'm still deciding...
Saturday, September 02, 2006
A Comma Obsession
Yesterday I took a one-day cooking class to learn how to make a birthday cake. As part of the class, we learned how to wish someone a happy birthday in chocolate drizzle on top of a layer of buttercream frosting. Our teacher advised us to start with "Birthday" across the center of the cake, then to add "Happy" above that, and finally the person's name underneath.
In other words:
Happy
Birthday
Aaron
The one thing she didn't tell us to do was to insert a comma between "Birthday" and the person's name. I admit, it would certainly seem odd to come across a birthday cake that read:
Happy
Birthday,
Aaron
But the rules of grammar require a comma there, and not simply for the sake of fussiness. Consider the following two lines of dialogue:
1. "Leave Mom!"
2. "Leave, Mom!"
Without the rule about inserting a comma when a person is addressed by name in speech, how would we ever know if Mom was being asked to leave, or if someone else was being asked to leave his mother. Or try these two:
1. "Kill ducks!"
2. "Kill, ducks!"
Here the comma is a matter of life and death. In the first example, the ducks are about to become dead meat. In the second, the ducks become the killers.
I first learned about this comma (sometimes known as the comma of address) in an undergraduate fiction workshop I took at the University of Michigan with the writer Tish Ezekiel. Since then, I've become fairly religious about using it. I've also become unusually sensitive to its ever-increasing absence in other people's work, especially with work that's been published. An omitted comma of address strikes me as a sign that the writer doesn't care enough about her craft to learn the rules of grammar, doesn't care enough about the comfort of her readers to make the cadences of her dialogue absolutely clear.
True, these little commas are probably not the most egregious error a writer could make. Many times, we can guess pretty easily what the writer had in mind. "Hi Mom" instead of "Hi, Mom," doesn't seem like a huge mental leap. So why do I get so bothered when I see "Hi Mom"?
Because the comma is probably the most difficult of all punctuation marks to deploy correctly. In fact, there are some rules of comma usage that seem pretty much a matter of taste, without hard and fast rules to follow. So when there is a perfectly good hard and fast rule for using a comma, like the rule about commas of address, why not stick to it?
In other words:
Happy
Birthday
Aaron
The one thing she didn't tell us to do was to insert a comma between "Birthday" and the person's name. I admit, it would certainly seem odd to come across a birthday cake that read:
Happy
Birthday,
Aaron
But the rules of grammar require a comma there, and not simply for the sake of fussiness. Consider the following two lines of dialogue:
1. "Leave Mom!"
2. "Leave, Mom!"
Without the rule about inserting a comma when a person is addressed by name in speech, how would we ever know if Mom was being asked to leave, or if someone else was being asked to leave his mother. Or try these two:
1. "Kill ducks!"
2. "Kill, ducks!"
Here the comma is a matter of life and death. In the first example, the ducks are about to become dead meat. In the second, the ducks become the killers.
I first learned about this comma (sometimes known as the comma of address) in an undergraduate fiction workshop I took at the University of Michigan with the writer Tish Ezekiel. Since then, I've become fairly religious about using it. I've also become unusually sensitive to its ever-increasing absence in other people's work, especially with work that's been published. An omitted comma of address strikes me as a sign that the writer doesn't care enough about her craft to learn the rules of grammar, doesn't care enough about the comfort of her readers to make the cadences of her dialogue absolutely clear.
True, these little commas are probably not the most egregious error a writer could make. Many times, we can guess pretty easily what the writer had in mind. "Hi Mom" instead of "Hi, Mom," doesn't seem like a huge mental leap. So why do I get so bothered when I see "Hi Mom"?
Because the comma is probably the most difficult of all punctuation marks to deploy correctly. In fact, there are some rules of comma usage that seem pretty much a matter of taste, without hard and fast rules to follow. So when there is a perfectly good hard and fast rule for using a comma, like the rule about commas of address, why not stick to it?
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
A Few Thoughts about Plot
I'm getting together lesson plans for two courses on fiction writing I'm teaching this fall, and right now I'm thinking hard about "plot." Various writers have grappled with this term and tried to pin it down. I've always liked E. M. Forster's summation, which goes roughly: The king died and then the queen died--that's a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief--that's a plot.
One important distinction I think is important to make between plot and action is that action is a more rambling list of events that happen in a story, while plot is a succinct summation of what's important. Here's a quick mini-test to see how comfortable you are with the notion of plot. How do you typically answer the question, "What did you do yesterday?" If you're like me, you start from the second the alarm goes off, describe the way the window shade snaps up, linger over the bowl of cereal in the kitchen, until the person you're talking to screams, "Get to the point!" To which I always say, "But I want you to get the feeling of what my day was like!"
The trouble with plot for writers is that the activity of writing a story is all about these little details. You're spending most of your time mired in bits and details that you're trying to make vivid for the reader. But there's nothing more boring than listening to a writer trying to answer the question, "What's your book about?" if he or she hasn't prepared a twenty-five word or less standard description of it.
When people first asked me about the novel I'm writing now, I used to say, "Well, it's about this young woman who moves to Berlin with her new husband to get away from her old life, but then she finds the new one isn't all that she'd hoped for either, and the marriage isn't going that well, and she wants to have a baby, but she and her husband are having bedroom trouble, and then one day she meets this Russian immigrant by chance and forms a bond with him, and then she's..." By which point, my conversational partner's eyes have thoroughly glazed over.
These days I've learned to say, "It's about a love triangle set in contemporary Berlin." If I'm feeling frisky, I might add," involving a married couple from America and a Russian immigrant."
Now that's plot.
One important distinction I think is important to make between plot and action is that action is a more rambling list of events that happen in a story, while plot is a succinct summation of what's important. Here's a quick mini-test to see how comfortable you are with the notion of plot. How do you typically answer the question, "What did you do yesterday?" If you're like me, you start from the second the alarm goes off, describe the way the window shade snaps up, linger over the bowl of cereal in the kitchen, until the person you're talking to screams, "Get to the point!" To which I always say, "But I want you to get the feeling of what my day was like!"
The trouble with plot for writers is that the activity of writing a story is all about these little details. You're spending most of your time mired in bits and details that you're trying to make vivid for the reader. But there's nothing more boring than listening to a writer trying to answer the question, "What's your book about?" if he or she hasn't prepared a twenty-five word or less standard description of it.
When people first asked me about the novel I'm writing now, I used to say, "Well, it's about this young woman who moves to Berlin with her new husband to get away from her old life, but then she finds the new one isn't all that she'd hoped for either, and the marriage isn't going that well, and she wants to have a baby, but she and her husband are having bedroom trouble, and then one day she meets this Russian immigrant by chance and forms a bond with him, and then she's..." By which point, my conversational partner's eyes have thoroughly glazed over.
These days I've learned to say, "It's about a love triangle set in contemporary Berlin." If I'm feeling frisky, I might add," involving a married couple from America and a Russian immigrant."
Now that's plot.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Bad Behavior
Last week I was scolded for my bad behavior at a reading. Well, not me personally. I was part of an audience who shared the collective blame. Our crime? To laugh at a passage read aloud by its author who hadn't intended her words to be funny.
The passage in question was a short story about psychoanalysts during the 1950's by author Sarah Schulman. Much of the dialogue was so loaded with psychological jargon that we as members of the audience had only two possible interpretations of it: either the author had a tin ear for realistic dialogue or the author was trying to make a joke. Being in a generous mood, we went for the latter option, and laughed.
When Schulman finished reading, we gave her a hearty round of applause, for which she thanked us with an indignant reprimand. "That story wasn't funny," she informed us, as if the reaction of a crowd of one hundred reasonably intelligent listeners could not have counted for as much as the author's opinion, since the author always knows best. Schulman went on to explain that the jargon that made us laugh came out of an impulse for positive change and healing and that our nervous laughter showed how inept and uncomfortable we as cynical modern people were at hearing that kind of language. In other words, we laughed because we were shallow, or at least, not as enlightened as Schulman presumably was.
Schulman's claim to authorial supremacy strikes me as quite astounding in an age when the "death of the author" has been proclaimed often and loudly. We've had schools of critics who've analyzed texts with complete disregard for the author's background, instead focusing only on the words on the page. We've had other schools of critics claim that the individual author is merely a function of complex social phenomena and therefore doesn't even exist. And yet here is Schluman demanding, almost like Stalin or Mao, that there is only one true path, the author's path, and that for a reader to take any other is heresy.
As an author, I'm often surprised by the reactions of readers, who sometimes miss what I was trying to say but often pick up on meanings that I hadn't consciously intended. I feel that as long as readers can point to places in the text that back up their response, their response is valid. But then I grew up in an educational system that promoted this same point of view. Schulman, who seems a little older than I am, may have been educated in a different way. Also, I am writing my work at a time when I am relatively free to write about gay subject matter and to be up front about my identity. This freedom is thanks to the pioneering efforts of writers like Schulman, who wrote about queer themes at a time when such writing was not so commonplace. Perhaps she found it necessary to develop a certain stridency of character, an "I'm right and all of you are wrong" philosophy, in order to simply do her work.
Whatever the reason for Schulman's beef with her audience last week, she could have reacted to the situation in any number of ways. She could have said, "I'm glad you enjoyed the story, but actually, it wasn't my intention to be funny. Here's what I was trying to do in this story..." She could have laughed at her own failure to convey her intended message that evening and hoped for better audiences in the future. She could have gone home and complained to her girlfriend, her therapist, or her dog. She could have realized that an author is often the person who understands her work least. She could have done nothing.
Instead Schulman told the crowd who had taken time from their busy lives to listen to her words and applaud her efforts that they were not smart enough to understand her work. Fair enough. Since I'm not smart enough, I won't bother making the attempt ever again.
P.S. Since I originally published this post, Sarah Schulman herself was kind enough to comment on it, as you'll see below. She says that she was simply surprised by the audience's reaction and didn't mean to come off a scold. Thank you, Sarah, for putting in your two cents. I'm happy to give our author-reader relationship another chance.
The passage in question was a short story about psychoanalysts during the 1950's by author Sarah Schulman. Much of the dialogue was so loaded with psychological jargon that we as members of the audience had only two possible interpretations of it: either the author had a tin ear for realistic dialogue or the author was trying to make a joke. Being in a generous mood, we went for the latter option, and laughed.
When Schulman finished reading, we gave her a hearty round of applause, for which she thanked us with an indignant reprimand. "That story wasn't funny," she informed us, as if the reaction of a crowd of one hundred reasonably intelligent listeners could not have counted for as much as the author's opinion, since the author always knows best. Schulman went on to explain that the jargon that made us laugh came out of an impulse for positive change and healing and that our nervous laughter showed how inept and uncomfortable we as cynical modern people were at hearing that kind of language. In other words, we laughed because we were shallow, or at least, not as enlightened as Schulman presumably was.
Schulman's claim to authorial supremacy strikes me as quite astounding in an age when the "death of the author" has been proclaimed often and loudly. We've had schools of critics who've analyzed texts with complete disregard for the author's background, instead focusing only on the words on the page. We've had other schools of critics claim that the individual author is merely a function of complex social phenomena and therefore doesn't even exist. And yet here is Schluman demanding, almost like Stalin or Mao, that there is only one true path, the author's path, and that for a reader to take any other is heresy.
As an author, I'm often surprised by the reactions of readers, who sometimes miss what I was trying to say but often pick up on meanings that I hadn't consciously intended. I feel that as long as readers can point to places in the text that back up their response, their response is valid. But then I grew up in an educational system that promoted this same point of view. Schulman, who seems a little older than I am, may have been educated in a different way. Also, I am writing my work at a time when I am relatively free to write about gay subject matter and to be up front about my identity. This freedom is thanks to the pioneering efforts of writers like Schulman, who wrote about queer themes at a time when such writing was not so commonplace. Perhaps she found it necessary to develop a certain stridency of character, an "I'm right and all of you are wrong" philosophy, in order to simply do her work.
Whatever the reason for Schulman's beef with her audience last week, she could have reacted to the situation in any number of ways. She could have said, "I'm glad you enjoyed the story, but actually, it wasn't my intention to be funny. Here's what I was trying to do in this story..." She could have laughed at her own failure to convey her intended message that evening and hoped for better audiences in the future. She could have gone home and complained to her girlfriend, her therapist, or her dog. She could have realized that an author is often the person who understands her work least. She could have done nothing.
Instead Schulman told the crowd who had taken time from their busy lives to listen to her words and applaud her efforts that they were not smart enough to understand her work. Fair enough. Since I'm not smart enough, I won't bother making the attempt ever again.
P.S. Since I originally published this post, Sarah Schulman herself was kind enough to comment on it, as you'll see below. She says that she was simply surprised by the audience's reaction and didn't mean to come off a scold. Thank you, Sarah, for putting in your two cents. I'm happy to give our author-reader relationship another chance.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Passivity in American Letters
In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, author Benjamin Kunkel complained that the problem with today's memoirs isn't that they're untruthful but that their protagonists are too passive. Without citing specific examples (except for a quote from Running with Scissors), Kunkel argued that today's memoirs feature main characters whose only accomplishment is to have endured suffering and survived.
Last weekend, memoirist Mary Karr responded, in a letter to the Book Review, by referring Kunkel to his own novel Indecision, whose hero has so much trouble making up his mind about anything that he does just about nothing for about two hundred pages. Finally, after taking drugs and having sex in South America, Kunkel's hero decides to do something: he goes to his old prep school and delivers a lecture about something called "democratic socialism." Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat plot.
Passive heroes are not unique to memoirs. You can find plenty of passivity on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide. I agree with Kunkel's complaint (and said something similar in my own essay on memoirs in Poets and Writers) that too often American memoirists write about bad childhoods, abuse, drug addiction, surviving a fatal disease, any affliction you can name. However, a survey of American fiction turns up much the same thing.
Want to read about surviving child abuse? Try Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Surviving slavery? Start with Toni Morrison's Beloved or The Bluest Eye and then keep on going. Surviving the boss from hell? Try The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada. From award winners to best-selling fluff, our fiction is filled with heroes and heroines who survive rather than act.
Why is this happening? For one thing, during the `90s, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and the increasing popularity of ethnic and gender studies, we became surrounded by the victim narrative. On TV, in school, in the movies, newspapers, and magazines, stories of manly straight white men doing bold deeds were replaced by tales of noble sufferers (often victims of those manly white men) whose act of courage was to tell a story that had not yet been told.
I also think the passive hero syndrome is a side effect of the growth in the teaching of creative writing. It's hard to make up stories and at the same time to make them believable. As a result, many creative writing teachers exhort students to "write what you know" (without adding, "or else, know about what you write.") And since most people who take creative writing classes in America are not rocket scientists, brain surgeons, or astronauts, the world that they know may not seem immense. They may not recognize the drama of everyday events like work, family, and love, but rather feel tempted to reach for that one awful time in their lives when everything seemed to go wrong.
One more thing. Our lives today in America can seem so easy and well-ordered. Anything we could want can be found in a moment on the Internet. We walk into a restaurant and within minutes we are served a tasty meal fusing tastes and spices from a variety of sources, Asian, Mexican, African, French, all in one bite. Credit cards arrive every day in the mail promising us more free money to shop with. In such a climate, maybe we enjoy the thrill of watching things go wrong instead of right so often.
Whatever the cause, all this passivity in American writing can't be good for us because the picture it paints is false. As Americans, we enjoy a position of privilege and power unmatched on the planet since the time of the Roman empire. And yet we turn a blind eye to the things that go on in our name around the globe and instead cry over re-runs of talk shows because we too were not hugged enough by our fathers or we too have trouble managing our alcohol intake. When will our writers stop re-enforcing our penchant for self-pity and start exhorting us to wake up, and act up?
Last weekend, memoirist Mary Karr responded, in a letter to the Book Review, by referring Kunkel to his own novel Indecision, whose hero has so much trouble making up his mind about anything that he does just about nothing for about two hundred pages. Finally, after taking drugs and having sex in South America, Kunkel's hero decides to do something: he goes to his old prep school and delivers a lecture about something called "democratic socialism." Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat plot.
Passive heroes are not unique to memoirs. You can find plenty of passivity on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide. I agree with Kunkel's complaint (and said something similar in my own essay on memoirs in Poets and Writers) that too often American memoirists write about bad childhoods, abuse, drug addiction, surviving a fatal disease, any affliction you can name. However, a survey of American fiction turns up much the same thing.
Want to read about surviving child abuse? Try Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Surviving slavery? Start with Toni Morrison's Beloved or The Bluest Eye and then keep on going. Surviving the boss from hell? Try The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada. From award winners to best-selling fluff, our fiction is filled with heroes and heroines who survive rather than act.
Why is this happening? For one thing, during the `90s, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and the increasing popularity of ethnic and gender studies, we became surrounded by the victim narrative. On TV, in school, in the movies, newspapers, and magazines, stories of manly straight white men doing bold deeds were replaced by tales of noble sufferers (often victims of those manly white men) whose act of courage was to tell a story that had not yet been told.
I also think the passive hero syndrome is a side effect of the growth in the teaching of creative writing. It's hard to make up stories and at the same time to make them believable. As a result, many creative writing teachers exhort students to "write what you know" (without adding, "or else, know about what you write.") And since most people who take creative writing classes in America are not rocket scientists, brain surgeons, or astronauts, the world that they know may not seem immense. They may not recognize the drama of everyday events like work, family, and love, but rather feel tempted to reach for that one awful time in their lives when everything seemed to go wrong.
One more thing. Our lives today in America can seem so easy and well-ordered. Anything we could want can be found in a moment on the Internet. We walk into a restaurant and within minutes we are served a tasty meal fusing tastes and spices from a variety of sources, Asian, Mexican, African, French, all in one bite. Credit cards arrive every day in the mail promising us more free money to shop with. In such a climate, maybe we enjoy the thrill of watching things go wrong instead of right so often.
Whatever the cause, all this passivity in American writing can't be good for us because the picture it paints is false. As Americans, we enjoy a position of privilege and power unmatched on the planet since the time of the Roman empire. And yet we turn a blind eye to the things that go on in our name around the globe and instead cry over re-runs of talk shows because we too were not hugged enough by our fathers or we too have trouble managing our alcohol intake. When will our writers stop re-enforcing our penchant for self-pity and start exhorting us to wake up, and act up?
Sunday, July 16, 2006
How's Your Book Going?
At some point, every writer has probably had to answer the question "How's your book going?" I wonder, however, if other writers have had as much difficulty as I have in coming up with an honest answer.
For me the process of writing a book begins some time shortly after birth. It is the direct result of my collected life experiences, some large and meaningful, others seemingly insignificant, which together point me toward an interest in arcane subject matter. Sprinkle in some day dreaming and extended periods of self doubt. Then write. Read what you've written. Try not to throw up. Rewrite. Read again, preferably after hiding all sharp objects in the vicinity. Repeat this process one hundred times and you might end up with a first draft.
What is a first draft, anyway? Or more precisely, what is a draft? When I write a novel, I try to move logically from point A to point B and somehow always get waylaid at point Q and a half. I attempt to flesh out one character, only to discover that as I learn more about who she is, I learn that her interactions with my only fully realized character in the novel make absolutely no sense. And just how many rooms does Mrs. Hinckel's apartment have? Was the picture in her living room of a landscape or a naked woman straddling a unicorn? What does the interior of the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin look like? What magazines would you find in the waiting room at a German doctor's office? Answering burning questions like these, that's the romantic life of a writer.
Right now, I've written and re-written the novel I'm working on so many times I've lost count of all the pages I've typed and torn up. My main character has gone from the age of 37 to 23. Her husband has changed careers several times (he's now an international lawyer specializing in real estate, and let's hope he sticks to it). Her boyfriend has changed nationalities several times and gone back to his original origins as of this writing. The book's length has gone from 160 (handwritten) to 350, streamlined down to 200 (a bit of a starvation diet), and now is hovering at a reasonable 250, where I hope it will linger.
It's a fine piece of work, but I'm the last person to know anything about it. Now is the stage when I begin passing it around to critics I trust so they can tell me about the holes I can't see because I've had my nose rubbed into this story for too long. I'm waiting for the advice I desperately need to bring this book home.
"I'm closer to the end than to the beginning," that's how my book is going. How much closer, I'm not sure yet.
For me the process of writing a book begins some time shortly after birth. It is the direct result of my collected life experiences, some large and meaningful, others seemingly insignificant, which together point me toward an interest in arcane subject matter. Sprinkle in some day dreaming and extended periods of self doubt. Then write. Read what you've written. Try not to throw up. Rewrite. Read again, preferably after hiding all sharp objects in the vicinity. Repeat this process one hundred times and you might end up with a first draft.
What is a first draft, anyway? Or more precisely, what is a draft? When I write a novel, I try to move logically from point A to point B and somehow always get waylaid at point Q and a half. I attempt to flesh out one character, only to discover that as I learn more about who she is, I learn that her interactions with my only fully realized character in the novel make absolutely no sense. And just how many rooms does Mrs. Hinckel's apartment have? Was the picture in her living room of a landscape or a naked woman straddling a unicorn? What does the interior of the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin look like? What magazines would you find in the waiting room at a German doctor's office? Answering burning questions like these, that's the romantic life of a writer.
Right now, I've written and re-written the novel I'm working on so many times I've lost count of all the pages I've typed and torn up. My main character has gone from the age of 37 to 23. Her husband has changed careers several times (he's now an international lawyer specializing in real estate, and let's hope he sticks to it). Her boyfriend has changed nationalities several times and gone back to his original origins as of this writing. The book's length has gone from 160 (handwritten) to 350, streamlined down to 200 (a bit of a starvation diet), and now is hovering at a reasonable 250, where I hope it will linger.
It's a fine piece of work, but I'm the last person to know anything about it. Now is the stage when I begin passing it around to critics I trust so they can tell me about the holes I can't see because I've had my nose rubbed into this story for too long. I'm waiting for the advice I desperately need to bring this book home.
"I'm closer to the end than to the beginning," that's how my book is going. How much closer, I'm not sure yet.
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