Category: NF

Taught Montaigne for the first time last night, and one thing we talked about was Montaigne’s comfortable doubt, which I got somewhat at in my last post. One student compared him with Tom Wolfe, interestingly. We read The Right Stuff last year, and she wanted to compare his style to Montaigne’s. No doubt there, she pointed out, and it’s true. Wolfe is so certain about his subjects, so emphatic. It’s like night and day.

We thought about other stylists (particularly Gay Talese in the Sinatra profile and Zadie Smith in her ), and there was a consensus that we accept certainty when people are writing about others or the world, but expect doubt when writing about the self. And that the opposite wouldn’t work. Isn’t it weird? You’d think that writing about the self—i.e., writing about the one thing you can claim to have absolute authority over compared to anyone else on the planet—would allow for certainty, but we seemed to think it was poor form.

It is poor form, but why? Was it that Talese has so much detail to deliver through observation, so much of the world he’s been inside to recreate on the page, that we treat his scene-building observation work as certainty and confidence? And thus Montaigne’s world he has to build is that of his mind, which is a murkier and less stable setting? Some students posited that it was a matter of interiority: when you have to re-create the inner thoughts of other people (a la Wolfe) it’s poor form to be unsure and doubtful about what they think and feel, whereas when you delve into yourself you have access to you own unsureness.

I wondered whether it was a result of bifurcating yourself. If you’re only a narrator, you’re a stable entity in your book, and that stability can lead to a steady, certain voice. But as soon as you appear also as a character in a scene, you become two simultaneous people for the reader, often separated by time, and in this splitting of the self that stability is out the window, and so too better be your certainty.

Pet theories to keep developing. Who’s a good uncertain reporter, and who’s a good certain memoirist? Is it possible?

Woke up this morning to find that the latest issue of DIAGRAM went live, putting my essay, “A Rapⁱ I Wroteⁱⁱ“, out into the world. It’s not the first piece I’ve published online, but it’s the best one. The essay’s about a real-life rap I really wrote back in college. I was especially glad DIAGRAM took the piece, not only because it’s maybe the best online magazine out there, but also due to the attention editor Ander Monson pays to diagrams, coding, and the physical form of digital texts.

You’ll see that the essay uses footnotes. I annotate the rap text and therein lies the essay’s bulk. Pale Fire on a smaller scale, but more importantly less narratively progressive. I’ve never been sure about this piece. When I’d read it through it felt paltry at the end. It doesn’t work very well as a piece to read through start to finish. I think it works best to read the rap as a whole, and then read it again, following to each footnote when it comes. Then back to text and back to footnote and on and on.

Endnotes would be the only way to get it to work on the page, in, say, an anthology. But endnotes that got their own page. Ideally, some whiz would code up a Flash-based thing wherein the footnotes would perform as pop-up windows, only one of which could appear at a time.

I can’t say that J. Nicholas Geist’s Infinity Blade review was an influence, but I will say I wish I’d’ve thought of its form, and that I’d like once again to write an essay that works better on the screen than on the page, that taps into the Internet’s absorptive powers, and not just its distractive ones.

It’s weird, this placement. In J-school you call it “feature writing” or “magazine writing” but in MFA school you call it “creative nonfiction” (CNF). Near the end (please!) of our house-hunting trip in San Francisco here, I’ve been prompted to think about this problem by Erika Dreifus’s blog post On the Teaching of Creative Nonfiction. “[O]ur reading lists reinforce an impression that creative nonfiction writers are inspired only by private memory,” she writes. Her subtitle is “Only a Few Have a Natural Talent for Nudity”.

It’s no surprise that I’m on the side of Dreifus re memoir’s overshadowing of other NF approaches in CNF instruction in the academy. One thing she doesn’t get at in her post, and which I want to get at quickly here, is this argument: memoir-heaviness is a factor of the current instructor landscape. In most MFA programs, NF isn’t taught by NF writers, but rather by people (usually fiction writers) who also write NF.

From Dreifus:

The discussion reminded me of similar ideas I’d had back when I was an MFA student myself. Remember that I attended a low-residency MFA program, and I was a fiction specialist. I was therefore provided cnf instruction only within the framework of the “gateway” seminars all of us attended, regardless of selected genre.

If your work consists of the building of scenes full of sensory detail to recreate an experience, naturally memoir is the thing you’ll select to read and practice. It’s fiction but true, all other rules apply.

There’s a number of schools with dedicated NF courses on the books taught by working NF writers, but they are the minority. This may very well change. More and more people seem to want to write NF and even spend time and money getting MFA degrees in same, meaning that administrators will (in a happy world) work to attract such students by hiring dedicated NF faculty members. Utah, Ohio, Missouri, etc. will continue to graduate PhD students who’ve read NF booklists for their comps and know a thing or two about essay theory, and thus be qualified to teach a broad scope of NF subgenres and approaches.

I don’t have a way out of this post. In procrastinating to find one, I changed my weather.gov bookmark to pull up the weather for San Francisco, where N & I live now. It was a silly exercise. Every day it wavers between 64 and 72, depending on whether the clouds are in or not. Usually they are. I packed one pair of jeans, another pair of paint-stained workjeans, a pair of khakis, and a pair of corduroys that no longer button around my waist after a summer of sitting in cars and drinking every night. The rest of my clothes won’t be getting here until mid-August, at which point it may get regularly warm enough to start wearing shorts.

Twitter tells me people on the east coast are hot.

I’m very glad The Essay Review exists. What I’ve found since I left graduate school and started teaching nonfiction is mostly a dearth of criticism on nonfiction, so yes: it’s time for us in the academy to put aside our CNF junk and argue smart things about how our genre operates and what makes it distinct. Lucky for us, smart arguments are themselves nonfiction, so it still feels like we’re getting real work done.

However, am I the only one who reads the following, printed in TER‘s first issue…

The essay, Montaignan [sic] or not, does not generally move into textual lecturing, does not become self-righteous, and does not budge from its original humble professorship or lose its ability to examine the quotidian with a careful eye. [. . .] The essay should maintain its power with virility and ardor.

…and wants to immediately start committing himself to essays that lecture, are self-righteous, that quit with examining the quotidian, and that seek never to establish any virile power?

I mean, it’s weird how everyone goes on and on about the essay as undefineable genre and then yet loves to pin down exactly what an essay should do in all its dumb glory. Let’s, yes, come up with a theory of how essays work. Some essays? Absolutely. All essays? Good luck. In the meantime, don’t tell me how my essays should behave.

Or, no: do. Do tell me. It’ll make me write something better out of spite.

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Thanks to Barry Grass for the heads-up on this new publication.

When will I tire of disparaging the essay and its etymology? Maybe about when I hit the bottom of this box of wine I bought last fall. In the treacly meantime I’ve got this new word found on Wikipedia while running a link chain off from opioids. From Wikipedia:

An assay is an investigative (analytic) procedure in laboratory medicine, pharmacology, environmental biology, and molecular biology for qualitatively assessing or quantitatively measuring the presence or amount or the functional activity of a target entity (the analyte)….

And from the OAD:

1. determine the content or quality of (a metal or ore).
• examine (something) in order to assess its nature: stepping inside, I quickly assayed the clientele

This is what I want to claim to write now, not essays but assays, in that I always feel more analytic than attemptful when I put nonfiction down on a page, and also that I should at last admit that despite my major in film studies and my minor in art history I’ve historically been far more excited and inspired by scientists than by artists; and despite being an artist myself and not a scientist I have this unscientific faith in the idea that the more I can do with my art what scientists do with their science the closer I’ll get to that god I keep not believing in.

At any rate, I don’t know heads or tails of what assaying means to, say, pharmacologists (and the general process as Wikipedia spells it out is a mess written by nerds who never learned parallel structures), but from what this half-drunk, moving-box-bleary idiot can tell it’s a matter of isolating the specific thing you want to analyze (i.e., the analyte) from its general environment or substance, and then activating or amplifying that thing’s essence in such a way as to measure or characterize it.

So how an assay might work is such:

1. Isolate the thing you intend to discuss (i.e., your analyte) from the things it is not, exactly.
2. List or describe what makes your analyte something worthy of your reader’s time and consideration.
3. Convert, as Wikipedia says, the quality of your analyte “into a detectable signal generally involving some method of signal amplification, so that it can be easily discriminated from noise.” Here’s the rub: how to convert a subject into some amplified signal, and how—as Wallace puzzled over in —to write somewhere outside of [total] noise? (The dull answer, I think, to this? Use your writerly voice.)

And as it is such, so also, as such, will it be unto you. And I know what some of you are thinking: this kind of open experimentation with form and structure is part and parcel of the plain-old essay, to which I say, “I know. I’m equally tired of talking about the essay’s black-holeish swallowing of all forms.”

Also what I’m tired of? Like: how come every time we essayists find an external form to use in the putting together of our stuff and ideas, we need to set that form front-and-center and make it somehow even titular? (Biss’s “The Pain Scale,” I’m looking in your direction. Ditto several Monson things I’ve run across.) It’s fun and often gloriously productive to find an external form to use in the drafting of one’s eassay, but must we always show our work?

To borrow from similar stuff my pal Seth has been tweeting today, writing your essay behind your found form is like masturbating in a park to show everyone how good you are at it.

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(BTW: Any for-reals scientists working occupationally on assaying who might be looking for a gleeful, passionate acolyte to ask a ton of interruptive questions about everyday things you take for granted, hit a brother up.)

Nonfiction’s older than the English language, but it’s when I go hunting for scholarship on book-length works of narrative nonfiction that I remember how—as far as the academy is concerned—the genre is young and new.

Check out how these two articles on The Right Stuff open. These are initial sentences.

From Charles S. Ross’s “The Rhetoric of The Right Stuff“, pub’d summer 1981 in The Journal of General Education:

Not to be confused with the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who borrowed the name of his most well-known book, Look Homeward, Angel, from Milton, Tom Wolfe is a New York journalist who has been publishing books with catchy titles since his Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby appeared in 1965.

And here’s Spencer Brown, reviewing TRS alongside three other NF books for The Sewanee Review in 1980:

If pressed to find a trait common to these four dissimilar writers, I should point to their sophistication, their being very With It.

It was The Right Stuff that lifted Tom Wolfe into his current station, but putting aside the “Lemme tell you about this weirdo of the moment you’ve probably never heard of” presumptions, there’s a kind of nervous hand here. Or an uncertainty of how to get going.

Every other week I’m shown links to articles online about how PhD school is worthless because no one gets tenure-track jobs. It’s untrue. People get these jobs every year. I’d say one bang-up plan for one’s doctoral studies would be some critical work on contemporary nonfiction, because like it’s easier finding sympathetic online reviews of Jonathan Franzen novels than it is anything anywhere on nonfiction books.

But then again: why would anyone bother studying this when there are fewer English departments in the country interested in hiring in this field than there are sufferable Jonathan Franzen memoir pieces in The New Yorker since, oh, the Clinton era?

Am I wrong? The novel died last year, and I think it died the year before that, too. Why isn’t the academy—and let’s not all piss on the academy, where many smart and hard-working people make their livings—moving on with the rest of us?

Sometimes it’s like O, CNF Nation, will I ever get on board?

I’m on board with the exercise memoirist Jill Talbot sketches out —forcing students to write a segmented autobiographical essay so as to then force them to fill in the spaces between segments they felt initially impelled to overlook. But either my stomach rolls or my eyes do at this:

While they wait, we read personal essays—artful renderings of vulnerability and honesty that create an intimate connection between a writer and the reader—essays that give us permission to be who we are…

Maybe artful renderings of vulnerability and honesty aren’t the last things I look for when reading a personal essay, but they rank somewhere after semicolons and defenses of Taylor Swift’s career. In CNF Nation, personal means emotionally raw and psychically vulnerable. We’ve got Lopate (quoted in Talbot’s thing) to thank:

The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is asked to forgive the essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor. Some vulnerability is essential to the personal essay. Unproblematically self-assured, self-contained, self-satisfied types, will not make good essayists.

That’s from The Art of the Personal Essay, and no one else’s introduced so exhaustive an anthology. What I hear: “Because it is honest and because it is personal, I will expect your sympathy while I write in a self-absorbed fashion.” It does way more to win me over.

In what environments are our students not being given permission to be who they are? Who is unable these days to find the time and space for writing about the self? There’s a urgent world out there of other more interesting people. Once, yes, we were connected to others via our navel, but we’re grown-ups now. How else?

Critics of nonfiction need to stop making the same bad choice, the same wrong presumptions. In the New York Times, Morris Dickstein (a new playground taunt I’m eager to try out) :

The personal essay has always been a stepchild of serious literature, seemingly formless, hard to classify. Lacking the tight construction of a short story or the narrative arc of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure without winning cultural respect. Written in a minor key, they could be slight and superficial, but their drawbacks could also be strengths. The style of the first-person essay tends to be conversational, tentative — in tune with our postmodern skepticism about absolutes, the trust we place in multiple perspectives. Few writers have pursued this more resourcefully than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994).

In this blog, I consider the essay:

The personal essay is among our oldest forms of literature, freely individualistic, resistant to simple classification. Eschewing the lockstep construction of a short story or the length of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure while also landing in our major anthologies. Written in a minor key, they are taught in virtually every English or writing classroom, but—like with every genre—the essay’s strengths come with some limitations. The style of the first-person essay, as written by its long-standing practitioners, tends to lead to absolutes and blowhardiness. Few writers have pursued this more careeristically than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994).

Any arguments against the latter I’m happy to turn against the former. But regardless of where you stand vis-a-vis Lopate (he’s not all bad, I’m only trying to make a point), critics should no longer be taken seriously after insisting that the essay—personal or otherwise, always older than newspapers themselves—is some kind of denigrated form.

From Gazzaniga et al.’s Psychological Sciences:

When memories for past events are retrieved, those memories can be affected by new circumstances, so that the newly reconsolidated memories may differ from their original versions.

This happens, or can happen, chemically. Remembering a thing or event is done via the same neurons that captured and consolidated that memory in the first place. What of your memories is from that initial firing and what is from subsequent recollection-directed refirings is difficult if not impossible to discern.

!!!

From Joey Franklin’s “Essaying ‘The Thing'” in this month’s Writer’s Chronicle, which seeks, peculiarly, to understand “masters of the form” of the lyric essay by reading their work alongside Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:

Like the Imagiste poet seeking algebraic complexity distilled into a single image, the lyric essayist seeks complexity in a single, short fragment. And like the Imagiste poet, the lyric essayist expects reader participation. David Shields practically quoted Pound [. . .] when he said that short-short prose reminded him “of algebraic equations or geometry proofs.” And in that same sentence, Shields alludes to reader participation when he also refers to short-shorts as “lab experiments or jigsaw puzzles or carom shots or very cruel jokes. They’re magic tricks, with meaning.” The reader is the Petri [sic] dish in which the lyric essay foments [. . .] or the unwitting butt of that cruel joke, pulled in briefly by the trickster only to be left sitting on the curb wondering what happened to his wallet. A successful lyric essay and a successful magic trick (and a successful Imagiste poem for that matter) depend in large measure on the same thing: the audience’s willingness to go along with the conceit, to ask “how did she do that?”

Has there ever been a more thorough argument of the lyric essay as showoff piece? For what else is the magic trick but a performance to passively watch, removed as we are from the stage and (more importantly) what’s behind it, what’s up the performer’s sleeve, only the wait for the tada that leaves us gape-mouthed in wonder?

Showoff pieces are great in art. “Flight of the Bumblebee”. Maria Bamford’s world geography bit. Andy’s Eight Elvises. But I’m not sure they’re great for the essay—especially if what one wants from the essay is Atwan’s proverbial mind at work. That there is two things: a(nother) mind, and the workings of that mind. If there’s any form of truth I want from NF it’s an honesty about its author’s mind’s workings, because where else am I going to get it?^[*] But Franklin’s understanding of the lyric essay makes it rely on so much sleight-of-hand. Conceit has the same root as deceive. It means to take, to ensnare.

For the essay, lyric or otherwise, to see its reader as a petri dish or a butt is to expect not participation from her but duly granted object status. Abject status, even. It desires a rube-y audience to make go “Gee whiz!” I don’t think the essays Franklin’s reading operate like this, because why would a form so intimate and personal, so ripe for direct communication, want to treat its reader this way?

For my part, I want to leave readers full of words, not at a loss for them.

The Quarterly Conversation, as a quarterly, is late to the D’Agata/Fingal/facts conversation of Winter 2012 (my contributions were themselves already late), but one of the luxuries of being late is letting the NY daily/weekly blowhards have their short-sighted say, and then come later and sweep up all the mess.

Mark Lane—who is sharp, and the sort of critic of nonfiction everyone writing in the genre should be giddily excited to have working on it—does just such a service in his review of The Lifespan of a Fact. I was going to share this review as a Very Good Paragraph, but too much of it is quotable. Lane nails precisely how D’Agata, in About a Mountain, does such careful work relaying the extent and the mess of the factual record surrounding Yucca Mountain and Lee Presley’s suicide that, in Lane’s words, we “trust him to fabricate the right things.” What D’Agata also works really, really hard to show (emphasis because no one before Lane has bothered to point out how hard a job D’Agata does, preferring to pass off his approach to the factual record as lazy, as if finding a fact and reporting it as found takes either time or effort), Lane points out, is that the factual record is a thing we are fool to trust blindly:

Those we elect or appoint to act on our behalf decide that we, the general public, want comfort rather than truth. So they give us facts.

It would be naïve, as D’Agata knows, to suggest that in place of facts art gives us truth. But it at least makes the effort.

Here’s what Mark Lane’s win shows: quarterlies have a certain luxury anyone hoping to write criticism should drool over. Tortoise criticism, let’s call it. Because it’s great being the hare, rocketing yourself into the race, but smart criticism takes time. You have to do a lot more reading around the text your critiquing. The tortoise critic can read not just Lifespan but also About a Mountain and most importantly everyone’s blowhard hare-critic comments.

Well, speaking of being a blowhard: it’s called “having the last word”, Dave, and everyone knows it’s great. No need for this belabored tortoise-hare analogy.