Category: Books

(An old one, found in a notepad I’ve since filled and checked to see what was throwawayable.)

• Taxidermy introduces you to an animal you’d never get to know otherwise.
• The New York Review of Books summaries books you’d never find the time to read.
• Nonfiction brings you closer to people you’d never meet face-to-face.

Each of the above involves some act of destruction:

• An animal dies.
• Your possible reading experience is tainted.
• People have their lives and words taken from them and appropriated.

Q: How does (or how can) NF assuage this damage/destruction?

(No.)

(Playing at magazine-cover headlines. Playing a game called “Be The Atlantic Monthly”.)

In the current (Summer [?!?] 2011) issue of Creative Nonfiction, Gutkind chats with Susan Orlean in a sushi restaurant in Greenwich Village, because why not do this? Here’s what she has to say about memoirs, the indisputable bread-and-butter of the CNF empire:

[A] lot of the people whom I teach don’t appreciate the idea of paying dues and starting small and making themselves useful. I think they picture themselves writing their memoirs, and they don’t even seem to walk logically through the idea: Why would someone want to run a 20,000-word piece of a memoir by a 22-year-old? They don’t seem as interested in the world around them as they are in themselves, and as a result, I don’t think they see how they can be useful as reporters. I do think the whole memoir mania has had a certain effect on that. People 20 years ago might have thought, “I want to write nonfiction, so I’ve got to learn about the world,” and now they’re thinking, “I really want to write nonfiction, and my memoir will be called….” Nobody I knew thought about writing a memoir when I was getting started. No one…. There was nothing appealing about it, even…. What people thought was, “If I get to be a writer, I’ll get to go to cool places and see cool things,” not, “I’ll get to detail how my boyfriend and I broke up.” When that’s what you’re writing about, I think what you’re doing is thinking someone will discover the wonderfulness of this thing you’ve written rather than thinking, “I’m part of an industry of learning and talking and communicating and writing; how can I find my way in that industry?” It’s a very different perspective.

Continue reading Does Susan Orlean Hate Memoirs/Memoirists?

I.
Two Fridays ago I got four wisdom teeth removed (this just two days after an artificial tooth I’ve always had fell out) and it essentially wiped a week out of my life. I mean I was alive and awake, but I spent it on a sofa in pain or a haze. I taught two classes somehow!

I’m coming out of it. A short-story collection, If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There, is overdue to my agent. It’s my own deadline. I’m not even sure she’s aware the thing exists.

The essay is a form that makes so much sense to me I don’t even think much about it. It’s to walking what the short story is to the quadrille. A writing-school grad is told and demonstrated more than perhaps is useful that the short story is a perfectable form. It is old enough and it has been taught and vivisected enough that everyone seems to know what to expect when confronted with one. And yet a short story that does properly what it’s supposed to isn’t anything anybody wants to read.

II.
A thing was posted on writing-blog HTMLGIANT today titled “Art’s a Fucking Mess”. That’s its argument; more explicitly it’s that good art disrupts the social order. See the animated GIF posted over there. I was the sort of kid who got paid for A’s and grounded for C’s. Being “good” to me is tied, I’m coming to realize, way too closely to being right. Or no: being proper. I like models a lot. A lot.

III.
I read a “bad” “review” today about my book. Quotes around the second word because it was an Amazon customer review, which tend not to be reviews so much as personal reactions. Quotes around the first word because the nature of the review makes whether it’s bad or not up for debate. Also a good friend of mine while overall liking a story I sent him for feedback pointed out today lots of specific problems with it, all of which are spot on. And so I’ve got some choices to make. What’s an artistic mess, and what’s hack work?

IV.
Here’s a line from Schnabel’s Basquiat that came to mind today, spoken by Michael Wincott’s Rene Ricard character:

When I speak, no one believes me. When I write it down, people know it’s true.

It’s delivered masterfully, at a moment when the power dynamic between Basquiat and this queer critic who discovered him is starting to shift. Schnabel’s not a critic. We know who we’re supposed to side with here. I’ve always wanted to be Rene Ricard.

V.
Rene Ricard’s a poet now. He lives in obscurity.

I finished Ulysses yesterday. It feels good, mostly to be able to now move on to other more engaging books. If you’ve been thinking about reading it, just know that it’s tough. I got very little visceral joy out of reading it. None of the feeling that I was with the story. It was more like the story was being read to me in a lecture hall with bad acoustics and I was way in the back row and the mic was out.

Paradoxically the book’s become my without-question desert-island book—solely because I know that it’s maybe the world’s densest novel and it would last over many, many re-readings.

So, kudos, Joyce. You wrote a novel that has more of the world itself in it maybe that is far more work than pleasure to read. I don’t necessarily need easy breezy writing. Or what my students often call “flow.” But come on.

I’ve been thinking today about book reviews. The Atlantic thinks they’re no longer as relevant as they once were, and everyone’s been complaining since the Nineties probably about diminishing pages of newspapers’ books sections.

Who cares where books get reviewed, right? And I used to care how thoroughly books got reviewed, like wordcount-wise, but I’ve stopped caring. Who cares how long a book review is?

Okay I still do. Most folks are doing it wrong. Bookslut’s reviews are longer than the site’s name is bad. Too long, I think, given the site’s layout. The Daily Beast’s features on books are perfectly lengthed, just under 1000 words, for the kind of reader I turn into when my laptop’s on my lap. A browser. A Web browser makes me a word browser, and call me petulant but I won’t sit and scroll through multiple pages while the TV is on.

Daily Beast’s straight reviews, though, are of no use. Under 150 words, lighter than the new Kirkus Reviews. More ad copy than review. NPR’s are quite good. I’m happy about NPR’s book coverage, especially because it prints an excerpt from the text right after the review.

I’m looking for more good online book reviews. I want to start writing them. Here are some axioms:

1. The purpose of a review is twofold: to assess a book’s success or failure with respect to its central aims, and to connect a book’s work to the work of all books before it.
2. Reviews serve a purpose to readers by informing them of books they may want to read.
3. Reviews should be published where readers will read them.
4. If readers are reading off computer screens more than the newsprint or gloss of periodicals then that’s where the reviews should be.
5. Reading online begets a different kind of reader, or the same-old reader with a different kind of attitude.
6. Writing reviews meant to be read online requires a different kind of writing process. (Corollary to this axiom is a feeling I have that most online reviews are composed in MS Word windows and not, say, .php blog-post input windows, and that this shows in the writing and is a chief problem.)
7. A book can be critically and thoroughly assessed in under 500 words.

Hell, let’s make it 400. Anyone able to point me to good under-500-word book reviews online is a new best friend of mine.

I don’t think I want my work to be as dense and lyric as that of Anne Carson, and I don’t think I want it to be as open and accessible as Johnny Carson.

On the Carson-Carson scale of literary accessibility I think I’m like a Rachel?

What is waiting for me on my doorstep when I get home from the bar?

Past the flannel planes and blacktop skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbriar, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in the morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Yes! From the New Oxford American Dictionary: “invaginate: be turned inside out or folded back on itself to form a cavity or pouch.” My weekend is full, folks. And then this is how they’ve presented the author bookflaply:

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion, and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award, and was appointed to the usage panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the Engligh Language. He died in 2008, leaving behind unpublished work of which The Pale King is a part.

Damn it! Damn it!

Here’s J. Robert Lennon, whose blog, Ward Six, written with his wife, Rhian Ellis, is a routine landing spot in my browsing:

Listen carefully here, writers, because this is important. Content. Do not post reports on how many people came to your reading or what nice things book reviewers said about you. This is called bragging and it makes you look like an ass. People will read your books not because you’re telling them how much people like you, but because your writing is worth reading. So, on the internet, give them more of that. Give people more of yourself.

It’s great advice, generally de rigeur at Ward Six. But it gets at something I’ve reconciled over the past months. Here’s what I’ve worried: Is this blogging and now Tweeting and Facebook updating not just a self-indulgent practice as a person, but also a waste of time and creativity as a writer? Or maybe it’s been more like: This kind of writing isn’t “real” writing, but is that a problem and should I stop it?

The answer for both I’ve come to is No.
Continue reading Tweeting as a Writer, and Blogging

From the 7 Feb 2011 New Yorker‘s Briefly Noted review section:

Bird Cloud, by Annie Proulx (Scribner; $26). Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know where things went wrong or even if they did go wrong,” she writes. Among the litany of setbacks: a “fishing room” must be combined with a laundry room; a floor is stained an undesirable shade of adobe; a mover packs boxes of manuscripts incorrectly. (If she sees this man again, she vows, “I would kill him.”) Proulx, who winters in Santa Fe and vacations in Capri, does not mask her contempt for the locals, many of whom go to astonishing lengths to indulge her whims. At certain moments—as when she casually drives into a five-foot snowdrift and has to be shovelled out—one imagines that the feeling is mutual.

Having once met Ms. Proulx I feel a nice accuracy in all that this review implies. That woman is something dire. A vulture.

From Richard Selzer’s Diary, on pain:

One purpose of these cries of pain, then, might be to summon help, to notify fellow members of the tribe of one’s predicament so that they will come running. But I think there is more to it than that. For the sufferer, these outcries have a kind of magical property of their own, offering not only an outlet for the emotion but a means of letting out the pain. Hollering, all by itself, gives a measure of relief. To cry out ow! or aiee! requires that the noise be carried away from the body on a cloud of warm, humid air that had been within the lungs of the sufferer. The expulsion of this air, and with it the sound, is an attempt to exteriorize the pain, to dispossess oneself of it, as though the vowels of pain were in some magical way the pain itself. It is not hard to see why the medieval church came to believe that a body writhing, racked, and uttering unearthly, primitive cries was possessed by devils. Faced with such a sufferer, authorities of the church deemed exorcism both necessary and compassionate. “Go ahead and holler,” says the nurse to patient. “You feel better. Don’t hold it in.” It is wise advice that has been passed down for millennia of human suffering.

Looking up stern this morning. Found this:

stern²
noun
the rearmost part of a ship or boat : he stood at the stern of the yacht.
• humorous a person’s bottom : my stern can’t take too much sun.

I’m still getting some writing done, so I won’t take a half-hour to come up with some ideas for what utterance could have prompted this latter one (“They’re holding tryouts for the Coppertone girl” is the first thing that comes to mind), but here you are. From my Mac’s New Oxford American.