Category: Books

Two things about this reading from our visiting writer I feel so lucky to have scored my first year here:

• “There’s no such thing as formlessness.” — This as a kind of refrain toward the end of his reading “No Easy Task”. TSE (fortunate poetic initials; I’ve heard Thomas now twice make Prufrock jokes) read with James Middlename Louis/Lewis, a saxophonist, who played along. It was great, a performance more than a reading, esp. for this poem about performance. At any rate, I found it useful advice, particularly at a time when I’m wanting less control in my paragraphs, or I’m wanting to exert less control over my paragraphs.
• Poems don’t have a lock on poetry. — This in response to a person’s question about the pressures Ellis feels to progress as a poet, or with his poems. Poems are something we exchange or talk about in workshops, but poetry is something harder to grasp and something larger. Something regarding imagination, invention, and so on. I, self-absorbedly, tried to see if there’s a nonfiction equivalent. I think some would argue that essays don’t have a lock on essaying, and that’s true in a way I can’t do much with. It’s true that poets and fiction writers essay. I often like to say that memoirs don’t have a lock on nonfiction, but again—Ellis’s statement isn’t quibbling over subgenres’ ownership of the genre. I see it as a project: what art of nonfiction can the nonfictioneer practice beyond the page. What, that is, other than winning at pub trivia night, which I hope to do again this Thursday with my stellar team: Panda Express?

Perhaps what’s most exciting about Thomas being here this year at USF is that his latest book, Skin Inc., has a section titled “The Judges of Craft”. Here’s its epigraph:

Thanks for your note. We’re actually very interested in poems that address issues of race and racism and wish we could run more of them. Most of what we get in that regard is mere subject matter; that is, there’s not enough craft to carry to content (though this is certainly not the case with “Spike Lee at Harvard,” which I am sure you’ll place somewhere very good).

There’s enough to be said about “craft” as a concept and as a law in the instruction and proliferation of writing, but that’s another post. This one’s about this: yearlong visiting writers are such a valuable resource (potentially) to writing programs they should be granted a kind of tenure. It’s an incredible thing to have a well published, well respected member on the full faculty who’s leaving at the end of the year. Every program needs such a shake up.

The Schadchen^[†] was defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s protests. “I don’t care for the mother-in-law,” said the latter. “She’s a disagreeable, stupid person.” — “But after all you’re not marrying the mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter.” — “Yes, but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely a beauty.” — “No matter. If she’s neither young nor beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you.” — “And she hasn’t much money.” — “Who’s talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all it’s a wife that you want.” — “But she’s got a hunchback too.” — “Well, what do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?”

It’s not without tedium, the book, but not an unwelcome one to read alongside Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking (for teaching) and Barbara Walters’s How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything (for before bed, and for learning much about how to be a considerate person).

Herblock coined the term McCarthyism in an editorial cartoon he did for the Washington Post, my childhood home’s daily paper. He won multiple Pulitzers. In this house in Sonoma County N & I are staying at (its backyard pictured right) there’s a copy in one of the bedrooms of Don’t Call It Frisco, a collection of daily columns Herb Caen wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle (among others). It’s my new daily. Caen coined the term beatnik; his Pulitzer was honorary.

There’s a post to be written about what it means to begin my life in a city where one Herb combated political corruption and to end it (conceivably) in a city where another Herb spread gossip. But that’s not this post. This post is about two things I learned from reading Caen’s book this afternoon—half of which concerns Frisco^[1] movers-and-shakers of the 1950s and is thus chiefly unreadable.

FIRST THING: Narrative turns the merely uncanny into jokes

Greg Hobson, an aspiring artist who sells suits at Moore’s […], walk[ed] in Bernstein’s Fish Grotto and ask[ed] for a whole crab. When it was brought to him, he studied it carefully and then decided: “It’s the wrong color. Bring me another.”

Well, they thought he was a little peculiar, to say the least, but they brought him another. This one was O.K. […]

As you’ve guessed by now, Hobson wanted the crab for painting, not eating, And after he’d done the crab’s portrait, his fellow workers at Moore’s admired the canvas so much that it was hung in the suit department.

A few days later, a suit customer walked in, saw the painting of the crab, and said: “I’d like to buy that to hang in my office.” Which he did. The purchaser: George Skaff, then manager of Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.

Greg Hobson’s crab was home again.

I can think of a tweet or a Fun Fact: The painted crab at Bernstein’s was actually bought at Bernstein’s. Wacky, huh? Only in New York!^[2] Backing up, starting from the top, delaying the end—now you’re on your way to a joke.

SECOND THING: Perspective matters a lot and it’s hard to get out of your own

I won’t blockquote the whole thing because it’s not that good, but Caen talks about some reportage misfires, one being the car that never moved. He got a call from a woman about this car that had been parked across the street from her house for more than five years, but the weird thing was that the license plates got updated and the tires were always full of air. Who would bother with such a car? Caen called up the neighbors. Got no answer from the very house where the car was parked, but was told a similar story by the guy next door. Every day, same car, same position.

Caen wrote it up in the column the next day. Then he got a phonecall from the car’s bewildered owner: he worked every night from 11 to 7 (and I guess back in the 1950s it was possible to leave all night and find your same parking spot waiting for you). “It was simply that the three neighbors I had checked had never talked to him, and had never seen him drive the car,” writes Caen.

I was reminded of a thing that happened in grad school. I had four different offices on the third floor of Andrews Hall over the seven years that I worked there, and throughout that time there was a certain member of the faculty who, it seemed, was always in the men’s room when I went to the men’s room. Every time. Somehow this came up in conversation with my friend Tyrone. “He’s gotta piss like seventeen times a day,” I said. “I mean, he’s always in there.”

“You see him so often,” Tyrone said, “maybe he’s saying the same thing about you.”

I couldn’t’ve been given a better lesson in POV had they bothered to design a whole course around it.

From the OAD’s entry on rap (n):

• a person or thing’s reputation, typically a bad one: there’s no reason why drag queens should get a bad rap.

Post-AWP, blogs are getting filled with post-AWP entries. AWP stands, originally, for Associated Writing Programs. It’s like MLA for writers. Or the APA. Or whatever it is historians have. The organization throws an annual conference where, originally, other writers in the academy would hold panels on writing and the teaching of writing.

AWP now stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, so’s to open up its membership to writers not affiliated with a university. This was a sound decision financially, I imagine. Maybe also it helped drain the moat a bit surrounding the ivory tower. But when it comes to books and writing, literature or commerce, it’s not as though the ivory tower has ever had some kind of tight, enviable purchase. Publishers having the business models they now have, the academy’s become the way the US subsidizes its writers, but if you are a reader and not a writer, odds are you read the work of writers not affiliated with universities. You read the work of writers who don’t have teaching salaries to fall back on, and thus have to produce a book every year or two to pay the bills.

In terms of sales and reviews, it might be an enviable position. In terms of health insurance and retirement accounts, I imagine not.

What I’m saying is that the only way I in nine years of attending this conference have found a way to make it palatable is to remember that this is an academic conference organized by and for academics. It’s not a place to find an agent, or to network. There’s a whole bookfair, filled mostly with tables of small journals that make nobody any money, and while stopping by such tables will give you a sense of the very real people who publish writing, it’s not going to launch your career.

Because it’s not Book Expo America. It’s not the Frankfurter Buchmesse.^[1] In the post-AWP blog posts I’ve read, the absence of Big Publishing has been lamented. Strategies for networking have been shared. They’re symptoms of a confused conference with a confusing acronym. Inviting writers like Don DeLillo to speak doesn’t help clarify matters. You can comment below if your experience of AWP is otherwise, but for me the conference is a chance to talk with other teaching writers about the teaching of writing. It’s a weekend for me to catch up with the writing friends I made while in a graduate writing program together. It’s a place to subscribe to the journals (academic in form and feel if not strictly in content) I’ve meant to subscribe to, while putting faces and voices to people who’ve previously been just names on a masthead.

But of course, George Saunders was there.^[2] And, weirdly but delightfully, Mike Birbiglia. Ditto a lot of teaching writers with heavy Twitter followings. It gets people excited, the proximity to seeming fame and success. Or maybe it gets prose writers so excited. If you go to AWP, and you don’t have a list of old gradschool friends to drink with, go with and spend time with poets. The finest ten minutes of my entire weekend in Boston had to’ve been watching my friend Mathias read his poems to a room full of rapt people in the back room of an Irish bar in Somerville. I was proud and swoony. I was made to laugh and feel. Mathias killed, stole the whole evening of 13 readers. It will do nothing for his career, is what this whole post is trying to come to terms with, but I’ll get to hold those ten minutes close for the rest of my life.

Thanks, Mathias.

Here’s Lionel Trilling on Walker Evans’s, from his review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Evans’ [sic] pictures are photographic in the sense that people mean when they say “merely photographic.”

I’m being sincere about my post title. Trilling means this as praise, and it’s the exact sort of thing I would swoon to hear about my nonfiction.

This is awesome. Way longer and sexier than mine. Now I have a new goal: write a book that engenders such a document from its copy editors.

I.
Spend enough time in a creative writing program and you’ll pick up the idea that Middlemarch is consistently chosen (by those who choose) as the greatest novel ever written. It’s not true. My favorite thing that Jane Smiley wrote in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is that Middlemarch is merely the “most novelish of novels.”

II.
Merely is a poor choice of adverb there, in that being the most novelish of novels is no mere feat. What it means, what everyone points to when they talk about Middlemarch‘s greatness, is the way its plot’s engine is driven by the ever-developing interrelationships among a set of people in a specific place. I have only a vague recollection of the workings of this. Though my records show I wrote a brief but thoughtful paper on the novel almost six years ago to the day, too little of it’s stuck with me after finishing.
Continue reading George Eliot, George Eliot – On Moral Writing

Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is a city wealthy enough or containing enough wealthy local businesses to support a number of free, glossy monthlies you can grab at any Hy-Vee. Here’s the beginning of an article in June’s etc. for her:

On the twentieth of this fine month the sun will do its annual dance along the Tropic of Cancer marking the summer solstice. That’s the day when we here in the northern hemisphere are tilting as far toward the sun as we can. Along with the warm summer breezes, June brings with it the deep-seeded [sic]^[1] need to throw a backyard party. Nothing too crazy, just a couple dozen of your closest friends and a whole bunch of food and beverages. I can give you a little advice on the eats and drinks, but when it comes to finding friends, you’re on your own.

It’s unreadable. It reminded me immediately of rule 9 in Strunk & White’s fifth chapter: “Do not affect a breezy manner.” Say what you will about these guys’ unhelpful prescriptivism when it comes to learning how to write, but here they’re (or White? isn’t he understood to be singly responsible for this book’s final section?) on to something:

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter [. . .] an aging collegian who writes something like this:

Well, guys, here I am again dishing the dirt about your disorderly classmates, after pa$$ing a weekend in the Big Apple trying to catch the Columbia hoops tilt and then a cab-ride from hell through the West Side casbah. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few primo items this way?

I write like this all the time. All the time. It is a form of insecurity, the same that kept poor Paul Valéry from writing a novel because he couldn’t bear to claim as his own such workhorse sentences as “The marquise went out at five o’clock.” It’s a fear that the words I put down as a writer will not be unique enough, that they’ll carry no punch at the level of every sentence. So any time I lay down everyday diction within a chatty conversational syntax I then delete and hold my head in my hands and chastise myself for being the world’s terriblest writer.

These attitudes are coming from the fact that I’m writing a novel this summer, in the middle of starting research on a nonfiction book about standup. Am I feeling rushed? When in my drafting^[2] I delete “His problem wasn’t much of a problem,” and revise it to “This wan crisis would lead nowhere dangerous or illicit,” I’m suffering from something I’ll call lyric conviction.

Part of lyric conviction involves what White points to in ripping apart the above passage, where that author “obviously has nothing to say, [and] he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself,” but there’s more to it. I called it an insecurity—and it is, an anxiety that boring sentences cannot be an element of good writing—but I think what’s going on is a kind of certainty.

It’s the certainty that whatever good writing may be, it will be found only at the sentence level—not that of the paragraph, say, or in the overall accumulation of sentences, the beauty of the work’s whole shape. It is post-postmodern, this attitude, in that it bespeaks a total absorption of the postmodern dictum that transparent prose (prose serving as unshowy content-delivery mechanism) is an oxymoron, the stain of amateurism.

In short, it’s form-over-content, on a relentless level. This is writing for some reader who pores over my words with the same intensity and scrutiny as I do. Perhaps this is why White calls it the work of an egocentric.

—

One thing I’ve always wanted to own or receive as a gift is the 23 Sept 1967 issue of Saturday Evening Post, so’s to hold in my hands the thing where Didion’s (for me) seminal essay was first printed. I imagine it’s on eBay somewhere, but I never took the time or find or bid on it. Last week, though, I went on a kind of hunt for uncollected 60s/70s Didiona, and in trying to figure out where in my library to go to I emailed my department’s research librarian. Her name is Jennifer McClure and if this world were just and true she’d make what Saban makes.

There’s this thing on our libraries’ homepage called Scout, which is meant to be the sort of user-friendly interface that scours everything to give students what they’re looking for. It’s been my experience, though, that you find lots of stuff you don’t want and little of what you do. Scout is good for people who don’t know what they want. The classic catalog is for those of us needing quick call numbers. But Jennifer pointed me to Scout and how searchable it is by date and author name, and within a few clicks I had a full scan of “Slouching” from the pages of SEP.

For me this is amazing. I don’t want to violate any copyright business so I’ll just post here the cover to the 9/23/67 SEP (a far cry from Normal Rockwell) and one half of the title page spread from Didion’s piece.

Sometimes I wish this was the way anthologies reprinted work. I know this is foolish. I read eBooks happily. Books are not their packaging. But still: give me magazine spreads with 10 Color Photographs.

Because Zadie Smith told me to, I followed up my reading of Netherland with Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Here’s a passage from a paragraph late in the latter novel. The protagonist (or Enactor, in Smith’s reading) is musing on hearing in an actual performance what one of his employees has spoken to him numerous times in rehearsals:

I’d listened to him speak those same words countless times already, in rehearsals. I’d scripted them myself; I’d told him to say exactly those ones, to repeat the word “arriving” and replace “it’s” with “the van’s” in the second half, although the “it” already was the van. I’d heard them over and over, spoken in exactly the same tone, at the same speed, volume and pitch—but now the words were different. During our rehearsals, they’d been accurate—accurate in that we’d had the replica van turn up and park in the replica road as the re-enactor practised [sic] speaking them. Now, though they were more than accurate: they were true.

It’s a progression or hierarchy I probably subscribe to.

Happily. Readily.
Continue reading Facts, Accuracy, the Truth, & Art

I read this weekend Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and came across a scene with a structure I’ve been noticing a lot lately. Or a kind of structural move I for whatever reason am these days more attuned to. It’s about 23 percent of the way through the novel (thanks, Kindle!). Hans is on a train up to Albany on business, and he opens the gift that Chuck sent him after their initial introduction. It’s a book of old Dutch children’s songs. One gets printed in full, in Dutch. Then this:

Adapting the melody of the St. Nicholas song that every Dutch child hungrily learns […] I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.

End of scene. Right? Hans has been living for a while now across the ocean from his wife and child, and this scene comes at the tail end of a summary of how that time has been spent. It hasn’t been easy, but nor has it been traumatic. Still, the image here, the imagined time spent with his son, is precisely the sort of thing we work toward in our scenes.

Except O’Neill doesn’t end the scene there. The scene shifts to flashback:

The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvelously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. “‘Ook, ‘ook!” he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turnup, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and—I knew this because I had dressed him—his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spider-Man shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.

Blocks of color stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.

Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany-Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.

It reminded me of a passage in Tessa Hadley’s The London Train which I finished a couple weeks ago and had meant, while reading it, to blog about, but on looking back at the passage I couldn’t recall my original point or interest in it. Continue reading Old Moves, New to Me

Who? O.B. Hardison, Jr., former head of the Folger Library who for a long time had a poetry prize named for him. Who knew he was so smart when it came to the essay? That he was so spot-on re the essay’s history, style, approach, and reach? To wit:

[T]he early essay [of Montaigne and Bacon] substitutes one kind of rhetoric for another. Since the new kind of rhetoric is unconventional and thus unfamiliar, it means … that the early essay seeks to give the impression of novelty. And since the impression of novelty depends on the use of formulas that are unfamiliar and therefore not obvious to the reader, it means … that the early essay seems to create the illusion of being unstudied and spontaneous. It pretends to spring either from the freely associating imagination of the author or from the Draconian grammar of the world of things.

There is a formula for such a style: … art that conceals art. Montaigne announces: “The way of speaking that I like is a simple and natural speech, the same on paper as on the lips…, far removed from affectation, free, loose, and bold.” The statement is charming, but it is demonstrably false. Both Montaigne and Bacon revised their essays over and over again. The lack of artifice is an illusion created by years of effort. (15-16)

Given the fact that neither of these guys “could let an essay alone once it had been written,” Hardison argues they proceeded to “muck up” the form they helped invent. “The constant revision implies a change in the concept of the essay from the enactment of a process to something that suspiciously resembles literature,” he writes. Then:

To turn the essay into literature is to domesticate it.… To turn the essay into literature is also to encourage authors to display beautiful—or delicately anguished, or nostalgic, or ironic, or outraged, or extroverted, or misanthropic—souls or, alternatively, to create prose confections, oxymorons of languid rhythms and fevered images. (22-23)

In other words, it’s to bring the poor thing into the academy and make it act like a short story (hence memoir) or a poem (hence lyric essay).
Continue reading Hardison, O.B. “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay”. Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Alexander J. Butrym, ed. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989. 11-28.

From the end of the fall term until last week, I read 1Q84 (pronounced, right?, /kyoo-teen/ eighty-four?), and I regret the time spent on it. It’s 925 pages. By the end I felt I’d wasted a lot of good hours on a book that should have been 325 pages. Is it a problem with late-career writers, nobody editing them back to decent lengths? I couldn’t finish the last Stephen King book I picked up—Lacey’s Story, was it? Lisey’s?—because after a couple hundred pages I wasn’t halfway through.

Look: I like long novels. I liked Infinite Jest, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady. I’d like to read Moby Dick. I’d like to read Proust. I’d never argue these novels need to be shorter than they were (because of course history would immediately prove me wrong, as who knows maybe it will with the Murakami). I’m trying to find a solid way to show that the above novels justify their lengths (a tricky task given what we know of Dickens and pay-rates) in ways that 1Q84 does not, and I’m coming up empty.

Or maybe it’s this: if your novel is about one familyless man and one familyless woman and how they come to fall in love, and if you don’t move around in time or space much, and if your secondary characters could all fit comfortably in a Ford Excursion, you don’t have a 900-page novel in front of you. I don’t care how many air chrysalises are being built. I don’t care how swiftly your publisher hires Chip Kidd to turn your overwrought story into a design experience. No debut writer would ever be allowed to get away with this, and why isn’t that more of a problem?