Category: Books

Charles Baxter, “Lush Life” craft lecture (Part 1)

baxterEarlier this week, C. Baxter came to the UNL English department to talk about style in fiction writing—specifically lushness. Those of you who read this blog who were at Bread Loaf this past summer (tally = 0?) heard this same lecture (and I believe the pretty stunning short story, “Mr. Scary”, he read later in the evening). For everyone else, here’s a recap as best my scribbly notes can give me.

C.B. began immediately by listing all the problems inherent in putting together a talk about lushness in art. He called it “nearly impossible” for a number of reasons:

  • most writers today are not interested in lush styles
  • the style as pretty much departed from the literary scene, unless some senior universally admired writer (DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy) does it
  • lushness gets vetoed in creative writing workshops, usually

Vis-a-vis the mention of McCarthy above, CB admitted that while he is often lush w/r/t violence in his books, he is spare and cold when it comes to “intimate emotions.”

So a stab at definition. Lushness is not romantic or embarrassing or manipulative or stupid. It is not showing off on the page. It’s not purple prose. It does seem to want something from you. “However,” CB argues, “every style wants something from you.” By way of definition, CB played S. Vaughn’s cover of B. Strayhorn’s blues tune “Lush Life”, an example of what CB called the “It’s 2am and I’m completely fucked” genre of music. Pinning down certain sounds of the music and vocals and certain passages of the lyrics, he came to three distinct features/elements of lushness:

  1. It comes from a fever, not a chill.
  2. It is the result of unstable self-dramatization
  3. the key one: it superimposes the past onto the present through lyric expansion.

Another musical example before the literary ones, this time from Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances”, which incorporates in its first movement an Eb alto saxophone—the first time Rach. used the instrument. CB passed out the sheet music to the piece, which was considerate of him, and we followed along as this very new instrument (the piece dates from the ’30s I think) played what felt like a very old-country melody. And it was a heartbreaking melody. And CB called it lush, pointing out that it was lush only when played on the sax; the effect of it being along the lines of “I’ve never been so lonely.” Later, when the melody is picked up by the entire string section, the lushness is diluted, resulting in a kind of absurd “We are all lonely in the exact same way.” This was maybe one of the keenest insights of the whole talk, this difference in emotional engagement we feel in solo v. group voices.

So it’s the old superimposed on the new, the past and the present blended together. Lushness is not nostalgia, nor does it require a nostalgic frame of mind to exist. Lushness is, however, the signature style of nostalgia; you cannot be nostalgic without it. The bulk of CB’s talk, then, turned to a close reading and analysis of ways writers can superimpose past on the present. First up was his own bad example, made bad because it is the default move every writer first makes when confronted with the following puzzle: How can you indicate that something in a scene is making a person think about the past?

The answer tomorrow, or soon.

Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and the Successes of Realist Fiction

mooreThis weekend N & I were in Oak Island, N.C., where my sister got married. I did the ceremony. You may as well prepare for a long post on all this. It was, maybe, a once-in-a-lifetime event: getting to the write the words that people listen to while they watch a couple ceremonially join their lives. People seemed to like what I came up with, and it was fun standing there and being in charge and just feeling only happiness when they kissed right in front of me, and then it was over.

Good food at the restaurant, which was right on the water and reserved, the whole place, just for all of us. The centerpieces consisted of orange candles and sand set in glass vases and were, anyone could tell, a little unfortunate. The tops of the candles extended beyond the rims of the vases. They looked awkward, like a kid in clothes he’s well outgrown. The colors on the cake ran and the edible shells melted and looked wrong. You could tell they were meant to be shells and many of them were but some weren’t.

I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just relaying a part of the experience of being at the wedding. I’m doing it wrong, though. Because, I mean, what are the options? When telling a story in whatever yer medium is, how do you render such details? TV gets it all wrong. TV puts stuff like this in shows called BRIDEZILLA and uses careful editing to create post-produced “drama” it couldn’t quite find on camera. On TV, an outsized candle or droopy marshmallow shell is the cause for life-stopping hell to be raised.

For the sake of brevity let’s skip all other media and go right to fiction. Even here you’ve got lots of options. The candle and the cake could be symbols for whatever theme on the state of things in the world yer trying to develop. They could be set dressing, rendered through a jack-knifed assembly of words no one has quite seen before—artful, stylized, “languagey”. But it feels a lot of times to me like a kind of lie to do either of these, because the fact of the candle, if it is a fact, is that it was fine, in the end. I mean, yeah, it was higher than the vase, but the sand inside was taken right from the very beach where the couple was wed, which made guests’ getting to take these centerpieces home all the more nice. Plus there was a ribbon tied plainly but attractively around the widest part of the vase. The misfortune of the candle was something anyone could notice and that everyone would forget about moments later.

Isn’t this, then, the effect one should go for in writing? Noticing and then forgetting? Being able to remember if you need to but not being forced to remember against your will?

The cake, well all I can say about it is that it was by needs gluten-free and tasted way better than the gluten-rich cake the restaurant provided for those unheedful of wheat in their diets.

I asked my sister whether she was upset and she seemed not to care too much. And then I kept looking for that part of her that was covering up the fact that this small part of her big day had been ruined, but I never found it. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t a big deal. There was so much else worth everyone’s concern.
Continue reading Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and the Successes of Realist Fiction

Good News, Everyone!

animal

The delay in posting has been long. Very sorry. I’ve been waiting jumpily until I could officially announce that my book, The Authentic Animal, has been picked up for publication by St Martin’s Press.

St. Martin’s Press!

I’m way too excited to be able to say much about it. Mostly I don’t know what to do with the news that St. Martin’s seems to love my strange taxidermy book so much. They love it! And it’s a great press, where lots of folks you’ve heard of got their starts (Dan Brown, Augusten Burroughs, Janet Evanovich), to say nothing of the prestige of the parent company and all its subsidiaries.

“Welcome to St. Martin’s Press,” my editor told me earlier this week, and it was like clouds parted and a million trumpets blasted that Macintosh-bootup sound. Except without the apocalyptic overtones.

More news as it comes. Now I just need to finish the book….

Octopus Magazine

octobeetleIt helps to have schtick when yer online, but Octopus Magazine’s schtick is handled better than one would expect. Every issue plays off the number eight in some way. Last time, or maybe the time before that, they had 88 poets featured in the journal, which is massive and great. This time they have only eight, but these eight are all introduced by eight other poets. Or people. Which I imagine would feel great if you were one of those featured eight. Like you’re in some kind of anthology.

There’s also reviews of other poets, one of which is written by yours truly. I’d never reviewed a poetry book before, and such is the result of a person reviewing a poetry book who reads maybe one poetry book a year. I shirked a lot of duties, I guess is what I’m saying.

Still and all: go read Octopus. It’s almost like the Internet was invented to increase poetry’s audience. Poems are so much more fun to read online than blog posts.

You can go grab just one and then get back to your other work.

Errant Reading

So I’ve been between novels for a long time now, since June, really, and the other day I grabbed a few things off the shelf to try out. I’ve got the rest of the summer ahead of me, and thought maybe about spending it with another long, long, long books. So I opened Gaddis’s The Recognitions which was slow going until the second page, where I found this paragraph:
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Caia Hagel’s Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables

hagelcover-borderI know it’s gauche to gush, as a small-press publisher, about the books you publish; best to let their brilliance stand representatively alone. But I want to take a minute to talk about how excited we were when Hagel’s story came to The Cupboard’s inbox, and to try to get you to understand why you need to read it.

First off: it’s a story about a new kind of superhero who sings in a cabaret act.

Second: isn’t this sort of a perfect reason not to read a piece of fiction?
Continue reading Caia Hagel’s Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables

Recent Book Roundup

I. Phillip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass
First, the significance of the titular object in this book is unclear, compared to the total mind-blowing weight of the Golden Compass and the Subtle Knife in the first two books. So this object enables the woman who is meant, in theory, to be the serpent of this revisionistic Eden to see Dust? Does she ever actually do anything with it, though? The one thing this book has going for it is its perfect example of what an anticlimax is: the death of The Authority, a.k.a God. Do, do, do read the first two books of this trilogy, but try yer hardest not to read book three. It’s a let-down.
Continue reading Recent Book Roundup

The Big Read

Is your community participating in The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts “to revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of its citizens.” Lincoln, Neb., doesn’t seem to be, though we also have One Book, One Lincoln going on (five books are right now under consideration for 2009, one of which is Eggers’s great What is the What), and, I think, “Nebraska Reads” which I just won’t bother linking to for no reason.
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(Sloppy) Idea Roundup

Some things:

I. His Dark Materials
It’s a trilogy that turns Harry-Potter grads into atheists, have you heard? The overarc(h)ing narrative is the quest to kill God. Here’s the thing: it’s so much more godly and Christian than any other book I’ve written. Even if God dies (spoiler alert) in a terribly anticlimactic scene, all three books insist the church is a huge terrifying force that must be fought at all cost. And angels are everywhere and basically it’s all Milton all the time. Oh, look! I wrote “written” instead of read. Who the H do I think I am?

II. Bill Callahan live at the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) Music Hall
Me seeing B.C. live is like certain friends seeing Gary Lutz read, or like Flannery O’Connor at a midnight mass. This is to say I’m devoted. The man drumming had a mincing fag’s approach to slapping the heads; he drummed like Snagglepuss holding two pieces of someone else’s poo. The reason this was perfect for a Bill Callahan show is the exact sort of thing that makes preaching the B.C. gospel so difficult. I was unsatisfied by so many repeats from the 2007 show in Omaha, but satisfied overall. (Pretty please follow the above B.C. link, and then pretty please buy me that guitar of his.)

III. The audience at same
I was dissatisfied by the audience at Bill Callahan live at the Williamsburg Music Hall. Is it a New York thing, or a Brooklyn thing, or a Williamsburg thing: this self-absorbed performing for other people in the audience? One woman “woo”‘d for five long seconds at one random moment and it killed. More laffs than at a Gallagher show. She won, I guess. Hipster of the Century.

IV. Poetry
Poetry is the most self-conscious of writing forms. This is not my (sloppy) idea. I like read it in a David Citino book it’s so everyday. Poetry is also the most associative of writing forms. This can be seen as contradictory. That this contradiction exists is what makes poetry simultaneously interesting, possible, and for many many people (not me! honest!) unreadable.

V. People v. Flowers
A line from a poetry book I need to re-read: “I love flowers / more than people.” It’s a sad, shameful, defeated admission. Writers, sure, have many jobs, but foremost among them has to be to remind people that other people are worth loving. Right?

VI. A fallacious argument that still needs a sound counterargument, the finding of which will I think make me a better teacher.
Liking to read and liking English classes is like being born with or somehow developing a taste for licorice, and that some people just don’t like licorice. And for some reason the world has decided that these people can hate licorice all they want but that they damn well better have an understanding of exactly what licorice tastes like if they want to get a degree, or want to be considered educated. And so, for two semesters or so they suck it up and choke down licorice twice/thrice weekly, all the while keeping their eyes on this lovely licorice-free prize they’ll enjoy as soon as they’re done with school.

VII. A possible counterargument I don’t really want to have to use.
Not enjoying English classes because there are no definite single answers (like, say, in most other academic courses) is like not enjoying beer because it tends to make one drunk.

VIII. Joanna Newsom may be precious, young, and may have left B.C. for Andy F-ing Samberg, but she’s incredibly talented and her first album remains great top to bottom, inclusive of the following lyric I finally paid attention to just yesterday on a nine-hour train trip from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Williamsburg, Virginia.
“Never get so attached to a poem you forget truth that lacks lyricism.”

Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball

samedi_the_deafnesslargeGiven what Ball had given The Cupboard, I’d assumed all this time this would be a language-driven book. Or if not a language-driven book, much like something written by a Lish devotee, than an image-driven one. A Ben Marcus novel, or maybe like a Djuna Barnes one.

Imagine my surprise to read this morning a plot-driven novel.

I was only going to breeze through a few pages as a way to get ready for the morning’s writing. And then, four hours later: Finished.

Samedi the Deafness is a mystery novel. Its back cover’s blurbs do a fine job of summing it up: Kafka meets Hitchcock, or Kafka meets Fleming. Take your pick. The latter(s) in that one day James Sim leaves the house and comes across a man who’s just been stabbed and “learns” of a possible plot to destroy mankind. Events progress well outside of his own control. The former in that in those events we never know whom to trust, what is the truth, or even if such exists. Hence those quote marks a few sentences back.
Continue reading Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball

Help Needed from Smarter People

I’m trying to come up with a list of what I’m belaboringly calling “deuteragonistic narrators”—i.e., first-person narrators who are not the protagonists in their own stories.

Some classic examples:

  • Nick in The Great Gatsby
  • Jim in My Ántonia
  • “we” in “A Rose for Emily”

And that’s all I can come up with. Sorta-kinda DNs can be found in Heart of Darkness, A Good Soldier, and Lolita, though whether all those narrators aren’t pretty much the protagonists of those novels is I think up for debate.

There has to be more. (There have to be more?) Can you help?