An informal log of recent enthusiasms.

"Remarks aren't literature."--Gertrude Stein

"...criticism in and of itself, even when it is most rigorous and inspired, is unable to entirely account for the phenomenon of creation..."--Mario Vargas Llosa

 
This blog is on indefinite hiatus.

After close to five years of nearly continuous blogging, I'm throwing in the towel. I'm saying "hiatus" on the chance that I might be dying to start blogging again sometime in the near future. It would be kind of you to keep this blog on your RSS feeds for a while. Even if I don't add any posts, I'll leave the blog up for some time, though at some point I'll no doubt take it completely offline. For those who are interested, I've kept an archive of links to my favorite posts on a separate page. Links to the complete archives are on the sidebar to the left, as are links to my writing elsewhere on the web, and a few short story analyses.

There's not much to say besides what bloggers always say when they give it up--I want and need to spend my increasingly scarce time elsewhere. It seems to me that there is only so much one can say before it becomes repetitive. Not only do I feel like I've more than had my say with this blog, but I'm tired of having opinions about everything I read and watch and listen to. I think I'd like to be an open aperture for a while, just taking it all in.

Very soon after I started this blog I came to see it as a writing project, one among many. It's been fruitful and fun both, though in ways quite different than I anticipated when I started. The internet has great strengths and great weaknesses, and I have to admit that as time passed the weaknesses of the form came, for me, to outweigh its strengths. My time will be more satisfyingly spent on projects closer to my heart.

I want to thank all readers, past and present, and especially everyone who wrote to encourage me over the years. It's touching beyond words to have people like what you write well enough to tell you. Although all of these correspondents remained "virtual" rather than real, I got the feeling that given different circumstances some of you could have been good friends.

And what would be a blog post, even a last one, without a link sending you elsewhere? The night before I wrote this post back in the middle of December, I started to read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for the first time, a book I had been telling myself for years to read but never had. I'm glad I hadn't, because I don't think I would have understood it particularly well before now. It seems a fitting text for a last link; here's the full text of the Mitchell translation, and in true internet fashion I think it's probably a violation of someone's copyright, so enjoy it while you can. Better still, just go out and buy a copy. It doesn't cost much, the translator will get a piece of the action, and you can carry it with you anywhere in the world. In fact, I think the farther away you get from a computer when you read it, the closer to Rilke's spirit you will be.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

--Rilke, from Letter 1

posted by James at 7:15 PM

 
Into the Wild, a book by Jon Krakauer

I used to read Jon Krakauer's articles in Outside magazine years before he wrote book-lengthed pieces such as this book and Into Thin Air. His articles were always the highlight of whatever issue they appeared in, and I saved many of them in my overflowing file cabinet, including the article this book started life as. After watching Grizzly Man a few weeks ago, I got interested in Chris McCandless's story again, as both are accounts of possibly feckless, possibly heroic, certainly obsessed men from the lower 48 states trying to live in the Alaskan wilderness alone, though for very different reasons.

Into the Wild covers a remarkable amount of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual ground in only 200 pages. In addition to being brilliant at structuring his books to maximize suspense, Krakauer is able to call upon a broad and deep knowledge of what might be called American "Wilderness Literature:" Muir and Thoreau, of course, but also Roderick Nash, Wallace Stegner, and Edward Hoagland, to name a few. Additionally, he uses his own similar experiences as a young man in the wilderness, as well as letters by, and accounts of, the legendary wilderness traveller of the Southwestern deserts, Everett Ruess, to attempt a better understanding of McCandless's seemingly self-destructive attempt to live off the land in Alaska.

This book, though thrilling, is far more than just a thriller but is itself an important addition to that record of European culture and its overwhelming collision with the North American frontier.
posted by James at 6:45 PM

 
I'll be back the weekend before New Year's Day. I'm taking a little break. Merry Christmas to all Christmas people, and I hope everyone gets time off from their jobs and enjoys it.
posted by James at 7:57 PM

 
Politician = salesperson = fork-tongued devil

What vanishingly small esteem I ever held for politicians is all but non-existent at this point. Case in point: seven years of the corruption, incompetence, cronyism, ideological laissez faire handouts to the rich, and militaristic foreign policy of the right wing has possibly damaged an already damaged country beyond repair. No, I'm not talking about Iraq, I'm talking about America, but it applies to both countries.

Think the superficially "progressive" front-runners of the Democratic Party are going to fix things? Think again. Noam Scheiber writes:

This July, when the Democrats John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all proposed closing a tax loophole that saves hedge fund managers hundreds of millions of dollars each year, it wasn't immediately clear what to make of it. On the one hand, it was the sort of proposal you'd expect from the party of working people. On the other, these three presidential candidates had stayed silent on the issue for months--while raising gobs of money from wealthy financiers. Why would they turn on them now?

Only later did we get some hint of an explanation. The New York Times reported that Charles Schumer, the Senate's third-ranking Democrat, had spent June assuring Wall Street donors that the loophole would remain intact. This made the pronouncements a victory for everyone involved. The Democratic candidates could take the high road publicly, while their contributors could rest easy knowing those tax breaks were safe.

And this doesn't even mention Congress's failure to provide oversight of an Executive branch that has run amok on issues from civil liberties, to torture, to dangerous foreign policy extremism. The president and his administration have broken the law over and over again, and Congress has done nothing about it.

I used to think that America was burdened by lousy politicians, but as long as we keep being charmed by the charmers, conned by the con artists, and trust the words of people who have something to sell us, we deserve what we get. This is no way to elect a leader. As long as we keep rewarding business as usual, that's what we'll continue to get.
posted by James at 8:36 AM

 
Reading Hemingwayesque writing.

--Though I've read most of the stories elsewhere, many of them multiple times, I have never read Raymond Carver's own selection of his stories, Where I'm Calling from: Selected Stories, from start to finish before and have been meaning to for quite some time, especially after reading his finest student's finest work, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.

Last night I started with the first one in the collection, "Nobody Said Anything." I think I have read it before, but if so it was long time ago. Though not up to the level of his later work, this story has plenty of the dry humor of his more well-known stories, and it reminds me strongly of his literary influence Hemingway's early stories in his first collection, In Our Time, especially the two at the end, "Big Two-Hearted River: Part One" and "Big Two-Hearted River: Part Two." No doubt, that's why Carver placed "Nobody Said Anything" first. Though on it's surface it seems like a slight story about a boy playing hooky from school and going fishing, the size of the fish, the Solomonesque cutting in half of the fish in order to share it with the boy who helped him catch it, and the revulsion of his bickering parents over sight of the butchered fish, all lend this story an underplayed mythic element that could have too easily been clumsy in less expert hands.

--Several months ago I started the Iraq war memoir, The Last True Story I'll Every Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq by John Crawford, until it somehow got lost under the "in process" reading pile. This weekend I got back to it and gulped the last 150 or so pages in two sittings. It has the unsentimental point of view of the combat soldier, an eye to the absurdity of the war (all of them, as well as this one in particular) without being marred by self-pity, and a painful accounting of the price he himself paid for being sent to war, namely the loss of his young marriage and a seeming descent into multiple addictions. I've read uncountable articles and maybe a half dozen books on the Iraq war, and this one did the best job of presenting a grunt's point of view.
posted by James at 3:48 PM

 
The New Yorker loves Cat Power. First, Hilton Als profiled her in 2003, the article accompanied by the semi-infamous picture of her hiking her trousers down a bit (but not far enough). To see the Avedon picture, go here and scroll down.

Now, it's another writer's turn, and this article, too, has another fetching picture of the songstress, albeit more demure this time, befitting her improved stage manners, about which the article discusses.

I liked the Memphis soul of her last album, The Greatest, but it seems more like what an indie artist would think Memphis soul sounded like--cerebral, the idea of the sound rather than the sound itself. I like it and think it serves her songs well, but I think Shelby Lynne, on her eponymous album from a few years back, got the "feel" of the sound quite a bit better, but it will be interesting to see how both singers do with their upcoming albums revisiting similar territory, Cat Power with Jukebox and Shelby Lynne with her album of Dusty Springfield covers, Just A Little Lovin'.

Sometimes, keeping cool is not enough--you have to go the whole distance.
posted by James at 11:21 AM

 
Jonathan Rosenbaum writes:

The two most interesting movies I saw at press screenings last summer had their opening dates postponed, and it's not hard to imagine why. As Orson Welles experienced time and again, features that are fresh and unconventional are harder to gauge as commercial prospects than stale conventional ones--and thus they're harder to sell. This explains both the box-office success of Welles's relatively pedestrian The Stranger (1946) and the delayed and relatively unprofitable U.S. releases of many of his other features, starting with Citizen Kane and continuing through The Lady From Shanghai, Othello, and F for Fake, among others.

True enough, and the same can be said of books and music and any art.
posted by James at 1:14 PM

 
A meme: the first sentence of the month posted on this blog

I haven't done a meme in a while, but this one looked fun: list the first sentence you posted each month of this year. I've amended the rule to be a complete sentence, not a sentence fragment, or some of my entries would be totally nonsense. I was hoping for something both funnier and less didactic. I've been lecturing from this invisible podium for a long time...

January: "For the first time in something like half a year, my Favorite Posts page is up to date."

February: "I'm excited to hear about this show, "Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965," at the National Gallery of Art."

March: "Yesterday's post consisted of lists of fictional works that are, in some sense of the word, canonical."

April: "Saturday morning when I should have been writing I was culling books instead."

May: "All the bloggers have no doubt seen the article in the NY Times this morning, and have been talking about the vanishing of book review sections in newspapers for a lot longer, but it's still way cool to me to see Maud Newton, Return of the Reluctant, and Syntax of Things, among many other fine blogs, linked to in the article."

June: "I've been engaging in a slow-motion screening of early Godard films, and it occurred to me last night why it's been slow-motion rather than eager and swift."

July: "I haven't done one of these in a while, but my Bloglines queue was getting filled up."

August: "Leslie Pietrzyk has a long post on when to give up on a work in progress (link via Maud Newton)."

September: "But it's not all Hurricane Katrina related stuff around here."

October: "Reading is a more efficient means of conveying information that listening to a speaker or watching video."

November: "Back in February, Syntax of Things launched a ShoStoWriMo of its own."

December: "Whatever you might or might not think of the protagonist, Timothy Treadwell, this film may well be a masterpiece."
posted by James at 1:51 PM

 
Bernard-Henri Levy is in rare form on American accusations of French cultural decline. RTWT (via Arts and Letters), but this is good:

My feeling is that this article would not speak of the decline of French culture if it did not also speak of the fate of all dominant cultures, which at one time or another are condemned to watch their dominance decline. This article speaks truly of America and of what will happen to it on that day when the increasing power of Spanish, Chinese, or perhaps other Asian languages ensure that Anglo-American will no longer be the language of the formula and of universal translation. France as metaphor for America. Anti-French hostility as a displaced form of panic which dare not speak its name. Classic.

And it's not like American culture--dominated by Hollywood, publishing houses in search only of blockbusters, a visual arts scene of hucksters who compensate for their inability to draw by pointing video cameras and manipulating PhotoShop, and a music business that gets closer to the grave daily--is all that much to brag about in the first place. Just like American foreign policy would improve greatly by a concentrated attention on our own internal political problems rather than on catastrophic meddling in other peoples' affairs, so too would our culture benefit from sustained development of our own lacking literacy rather than by mocking the cultural accomplishments of other nations.
posted by James at 9:50 AM

 
Ian McShane in character as Al Swearengen of "Deadwood."


(Via NY Times, Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press)

On the extras disc for season 3, either writer/creator David Milch (a former protege of Robert Penn Warren--no lie--and someone who comes across as probably the smartest person in whatever room he's in) or McShane himself makes the observation that Swearengen and Seth Bullock are like surrogate father and son in that Swearengen is always fighting himself not to be a better man, and Bullock is always fighting himself not to be a worse man. Both have volcanic tempers. And they're both crazy, one of the reasons I love the show so much.
posted by James at 4:52 PM

 
Kids, it's Christmas music time of the year again. As I've mentioned here before, I used to disdain Christmas music, but there's actually quite a lot of good stuff available, often at pretty decent prices. All you have to do is keep a sense of humor and you'll be fine.

In the last couple of years I've added these to the set:

--Christmas, Chris Isaak, which has some really good originals, always a good sign of Christmas album quality.

And two Canadian nightingales:

--Wintersong, Sarah McLachlan
--Christmas Songs, Diana Krall, aka Mrs. Costello.

From previous years, these are the ones I've bought, along with my inimitable wise guy commentary.

--The Classic Christmas Album (from DG). I'll start with one that gives at least a sheen of respectability to the proceedings. Worth getting just to hear Pavarotti pronounce "Christ" like "Christ-a."
--Snowfall, Tony Bennett.
--If Every Day Was Christmas, Elvis Presley. Shouldn't it be "were"?
--Blue Yule. A collection of Christmas music sung by blues musicians. Mostly very good, but with one atrocious song by the pre-stardom Winter brothers.
--Come On Christmas, Dwight Yoakam. Still probably the best album of the bunch. His originals sound like long-time classics.
--Boogie Woogie Christmas, by the ever-bashful Brian Setzer.
--Mahalia Sings Songs of Christmas, Mahalia Jackson, of course.
--Jingle Bell Jazz (Columbia). Dex, McCoy, Duke, Hampton, Carmen McRae, Miles, Herbie, and others. Quite good.
--A Charlie Brown Christmas, Cyrus Chestnut. If, like me, you both like the Guaraldi tunes and are sick to death of them, Chestnut breathes new life into these old, uh, chestnuts.
--Crescent City Christmas, Wynton Marsalis. Also contains the obligatory endless, unreadable liner notes by Stanley Crouch.

What Christmas music list would be complete without Messiah? Mine is the Solti, with the Chicago Symphony and Kiri te Kanawa.

My strategy for listening this year is to load them all into my iPod as a "Christmas" playlist, put it on shuffle, and use it to drug myself into thinking I'm not really sitting in a cubicle farm.
posted by James at 1:07 PM

 
The New York Review of Books has lost another founder: Elizabeth Hardwick, RIP.
posted by James at 1:10 PM

 
The proprietress of Work-in-Progress had the excellent idea that it might be interesting to expand upon my comments regarding her "New Year's Resolutions for Writers." Imagine that--bloggers co-operating with, rather than attacking, one another! I like it.

Specifically, I suggested replacing "subscribe to literary journals" and added "Write only to please yourself. You might be surprised how good a writer you actually are." I'll take them one at a time, as I didn't intend for them to be related to one another.

For the moment, let's set aside the question of the quality of the fiction in literary journals; for our purposes we can assume that the fiction found there is worth our time.

Our time. That's what this issue is really about. Speaking for myself, I have no time to read literary journals. My full time job and my own writing leave me little enough time to read, and higher reading priorities abound. I need to read as much classic literature as I can, as it's far more productive to read, say, those hundreds of Chekhov's stories I still haven't gotten to than to read stories found in literary journals. I also need to read contemporary fiction. I read a lot of non-fiction, as I live in and write about a big world that keeps getting bigger and that I need to know more than a little about. I read the news. I subscribe to magazines: The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the "alt-country" music review No Depression, Poetry. (Earlier this year I cancelled half my subscriptions just to clear things out, and I still have these four left, one a weekly and another a very dense bi-weekly.) And I fail at all of these reading goals pretty badly. I constantly wonder why, oh why, I'm not reading more books. And this is just reading. A writer, in theory, also sends out manuscripts, applies for grants, searches for agents, and researches editors and their interests; as any writer can tell you, the business end of things itself takes more time than non-writers would ever dream possible. Imagine constantly applying for jobs and you will get the picture. Did I mention that I lead a life outside of work and literature, too? One that distracts (hopefully) from the former and nourishes (hopefully) the later. There is no room for literary journals in my life, and based on the enduring popularity of the annual anthologies, Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories, I'm not the only one who is hoping for some help in finding the best and ignoring the rest.

As for writing to please yourself, that's a cliche of creative writing instruction that is no less true for being a cliche. I once read, somewhere, Mary Gaitskill say that it wasn't until she gave up trying to please other unknown-to-her people with her fiction that she started writing the stories that she eventually and paradoxically went on to publish. It's not just writing for audiences or editors that can harm a writer's work. Writing to please that teacher from ten years ago, or writing for the sake of Literature, or writing to settle scores all implies doing it for the benefit of someone else, and we can never, ever know what someone else wants. As far as writing goes, one can't really please anyone, so why even bother? Besides, if you are at all serious about writing, I doubt you'll find a harder critic of your work than yourself, so just take it easy and turn it into a game.

Postscript (12-4-07): To round it out, I'll send you back to Work-in-Progress.
posted by James at 4:12 PM

 
Grizzly Man, a film by Werner Herzog

Whatever you might or might not think of the protagonist, Timothy Treadwell, this film may well be a masterpiece. Herzog expresses his admiration and fellow-feeling for Treadwell as a filmmaker--and undoubtedly as an obsessive--while maintaining a critical distance from his interaction with the bears he lived amongst. Though, after watching the film, I think Treadwell put himself, rather than the bears and foxes he evidently loved, as surely in the center of his universe as the tourists and the natural resource exploiters he despised, I think that without question he did the bears more harm than if he had stayed away from Alaska. But that's only a part of the story; though I don't agree with Herzog's view of the universe as an abyss of violence (that's only partly true), I do completely agree with his assessment of why Treadwell's story is significant, stated as a voiceover at the end of the film. Sorry, I won't give it away. This is a powerful and disturbing film, not the least of which is what it says about human beings, and not just those that are misfit quasi-lunatics.

A strange synchronicity. On Sunday mornings I sometimes listen to a local radio station's show of acoustic music, and yesterday I heard a beautiful Richard Thompson song. I have long admired Thompson without being familiar with more than just a small fraction of his huge output, and this song was new to me. Then, watching Grizzly Man last night, I saw from the credits that he did the soundtrack. Before I put the disc in the envelope to send it back to Netflix (for the next Herzog movie in the queue), I checked the extras and found that there is a 50 minute documentary on Thompson and the other musicians scoring the film! It opens with footage of Thompson playing the guitar, so needless to say I have to finish the extra tonight and won't mail it back until I do.
posted by James at 10:10 AM

 
Good news and bad news. National Short Story Writing Month, Day 29.

The good news is that I wrote a story with the intention of pleasing only myself, and I succeeded. There is no bad news.
posted by James at 7:48 PM

 
Lists. We do have lists.

--Work-in-Progress blog has a good list of "New Year's Resolutions for Writers." You should read the whole thing, as she comments on each extensively, but here are the salient points:

1. Read.

2. Buy the books you read.

3. Subscribe to literary journals.

4. Attend conferences and classes to improve your craft, NOT to get “discovered.”

5. Be generous.

6. Learn to say "no."

7. Give yourself a break.

I love items 1, 5, 6, and 7. Great advice even for non-writers. I like 2 and 4. I disagree with 3 for reasons I have stated before here. I would instead replace 3 with, "Write only to please yourself. You might be surprised how good a writer you actually are." Like I said, read the whole thing.

--I wouldn't dream of suggesting that the New York Times was the last word on book selections--no one in their right mind would. However, they have posted lists of their selected best books (roughly a dozen or so a year) and their "notable books" (100 a year) going back a ways, and this is an interesting archeological expedition, if nothing else, as it's interesting to see what the mainstream was thinking about books over the years. Plus, there are plenty of good books to be found there.

To see the top dozen or so for every year from 1981 to 1998, go here, and click the links along the top.

To see the top dozen or so for every year from 1997 to 2007, go here, and note the links along the left side of the page.

To see 100 notable books from 1997 to 2007, go here, and note the links along the left side of the page.
posted by James at 12:16 PM

 
My latest Netflix adventure has been to start watching the series My So-Called Life. For those of you who don't know about it, it was a short-lived mid-90s series starring Claire Danes (great even then, right out of the gate) about a fifteen year old girl and her high school travails, and about her mother coping with being a suburban mom. A side effect of watching is that I've started to menstruate.

But why, you might ask, would I be interested in such a girl show? Because if something's good, it's good, regardless of the Balkanizing intentions of media conglomerates and the army of identity group ideologues who would have us think that readers/viewers can only cope with their own story being told. You don't have to have grown up as a girl to be moved by her portrayal of a slightly out-of-it underachiever; some of us have even taken that act far into adulthood. Her Angela Chase speaks to the dreamy amongst us all, especially through the wonderfully written voiceovers the series employs. I'm no actor, but if I were, I would be taken to school by Danes's preternatural acting chops in this show. I've seen Danes in seven movies, and the only one she didn't make better was the amateurish William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. You've really got to learn how to enunciate Shakespeare if you're going to try playing one of his characters. More typical is her ability, as in Shopgirl, to make the characters she plays so sympathetic that her performance reveals all the smallnesses of the script (which were manifold in Shopgirl) to blinding light. Given the strength of the writing in My So-Called Life, Danes goes beyond creating a character to creating a living person.

One part of the writing I can't abide, however, is the character of Angela's mother. I don't know if it's the writing that makes her a hysteric or if it's Bess Armstrong's stagy performance that does--probably both--but she's hard to watch. Indeed, she makes the skin of all the other characters in the show crawl, so it's evidently an artistic choice, but the character is an annoying neurotic, the kind who, by forever acting out her own discomfort with herself, makes everyone around her needlessly miserable. Her husband's forbearance is either admirable or subtly destructive; it's obvious that the filmmakers intend for us to find it the former, but, after watching two episodes, I'm leaning towards the later.
posted by James at 3:06 PM

 
Sorry for the recent lack of posts. I have come into neither great fortune nor misfortune; instead, I seem to be recharging my blogging batteries a bit. Please stay tuned, and thank you for your patience.
posted by James at 11:07 AM

 
Louis Menand on Norman Mailer:

He was immodest about his failures and modest about his successes, which is a healthy trait for a writer and probably a healthy trait for life....He put himself, with all his talents and imperfections, before his audience. Not many writers have been so brave with themselves.

Though perhaps overly generous to Mailer, these words seem like something that any writer ought aspire to.
posted by James at 9:21 AM

 

(portrait of Benedetta Canals, photo via NY Times--Succession Picasso, 2007)

Jed Perl, author of New Art City, uses his review of the third volume of John Richardson's Picasso biography as a chance to write a well-considered essay on Picasso's art. It's hard to limit myself to excerpting only one paragraph:

Picasso's life is still recent history; he died little more than a generation ago. And when we explore his achievement we find ourselves confronting nearly all the essential dynamics of the modern century. Many of us can still remember a time when Cubism, viewed as a dazzlingly optimistic investigation of the essential nature of reality, was said to be the pinnacle, the gravitational center of Picasso's art. But in recent decades our sense of Picasso has shifted, sometimes dramatically. We can no longer see modernity as anything but darkly, dangerously heterogeneous, and so we are inclined to seek the key to Picasso's quintessentially modern art not in the scrupulously crafted perspectives of Cubism but in the sometimes almost bewildering pluralism of his huge production in the 1920s and '30s. Richardson's biography is very much a part of this developing story.

Sifting through the Times' archives, I found links to review of volume 1 and volume 2, as well as a review of the New York version of the Matisse Picasso show I was lucky enough to see during my first and only trip to Paris in 2002.


(photo via NY Times--Succession Picasso, 2007)
posted by James at 9:15 AM

 
The previous segments of "New York Publishing Houses Are More Like Hollywood Studios Than You Think". The final segment is included here.

New York Publishing Houses Are More Like Hollywood Studios Than You Think (Part 1 of 10)

A Taxonomy of Writing Styles (2 of 10)

A Survey of the American Field I (3 of 10)

A Survey of the American Field II (4 of 10)

A Survey of the American Field III (5 of 10)

Mid-Career "Superstars" (6 of 10)

Narratives of Immigration (7 of 10)

The Recent Nobel Laureates (8 of 10)

American Exceptions. Exceptional Americans (9 of 10)

The Publishing Situation (Part 10 of 10)

Both publishing and the cinema in America now follow the model of giving the audience what they think the audience wants, always a strategy sure to dumb things down, rather than trying to help develop a more sophisticated audience. It's the difference between plundering the audience and enriching it. This seems an especially short-sighted strategy in publishing, as the backlist is what makes a house both profitable and capable of identifying higher quality new work, as the success, both financial and artistic, of Farrar, Straus, Giroux attests to. For all the talk about the woeful state of the American film business and music business, I'm surprised that more isn't said about how the literary world is afflicted with a conservatism that similarly limits what is being published. When the subject of literary conservatism is broached at all, the blame is usually laid at the doorstep of MFA programs, which is a bit like the major leagues blaming the minor leagues for not staffing their own rosters with exciting players. MFA programs are filled with student writers, not mature professionals or self-assured artists, trying to find their way in a literary world--publishing, academic, critical, journalistic--nearly feudalistic in its reliance on spoils (grants, prizes, journeyman teaching positions) and favoritism. The effect is an atmosphere where the measure of excellence is what is being published by New York houses. This would not be the case if there were other ways of seeing print, but in practice there are none. The "little" magazines are often touted as the place for new voices, but as the large circulation magazines have, one by one, been dropping fiction from their pages, periodical short fiction (and serious poetry, too) has become colonized by academic departments that run the small circulation magazines that few read. With reason, I might add, as they are most often nothing more than reputation-gilding machines for academic careers both large and small. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I never found many and gave up looking. And while there are alternate venues for independent filmmakers and musicians and visual artists, whatever their ambitions, long form fiction writers are in an all or nothing world. The technology of self-publishing has improved to the point that high quality books can now be ordered for your own manuscript (footnote 21), but distribution is dominated by business-as-usual thinking, and publicity remains the domain of the press--whether print or "new media," it is the product of the New York houses that gets written about. As for posting literature on the web, my own experience as a blogger tells me that about the most attention you can get from all but a handful of readers is a few paragraphs, for the web is too wild and distracting a place for the attention and concentration required of more serious texts.

Even though the New York publishing houses produce books that amount to a particular genre akin to a slightly higher-toned version of the "Hollywood movie," I finished this essay with a greater appreciation for contemporary American fiction than I started it with. Even a minor literature can produce work of great ingenuity and interest. The strength of American letters in the decades after World War II will be seen as a high water mark of literature, and the literature that follows it cannot help but suffer by comparison. Writers with the experience of the two catastrophes of the Great Depression and World War II, not to mention the ideological conflict of the Cold War, had experienced personal hardship in ways that few writers born in the 50s, 60s, and 70s have (this writer included). Unless, of course, they are writers born in poor or warring countries.

In spite of its genteel self-image, publishing is a business. Though writers fight for meager institutional patronage to buy themselves time to write, book publishing itself, unlike the performing arts, is unsubsidized. (University presses may be subsidized, but they are a part of the same reputation-gilding apparatus as campus-affiliated "literary" magazines.) This is actually an advantageous condition, as commercial rough and tumble is an inoculant against the snobbery of an art treated by the wealthy as yet another item of their conspicuous consumption. Blaming mainstream writers and the journalistic book press for the comparative homogeneity of what the publishing houses produce is not only wrongheaded but in the long run self-defeating. It is often mentioned with chagrin that, due to the writing programs, there are more writers than ever, as if a multitude of sophisticated writers and readers were a bane rather than a blessing. Instead, imagine how many of those obscure writers might be producing work of high quality that does not fit into the mode of conventional realism and the narrow milieu that the publishing houses--and the complacent portion of the readership--believe is the only way that American writers can write. As that cadre of obscure writers continues to become as ethnically eclectic as America itself, the stories and novels and poems they produce will rival any national literature for variety, whether it is narrative, linguistic, experiential, political, social, or any other literary element imaginable. There are more subjects to write about in 21st century America than comic books, cruise ships, high school hijinks, and the victimhood detailed in too many "personal memoirs."

Discursive narratives of foreign origin, film or literary, are allowed greater leeway by American publishing houses, film distributors, critics, and audiences than are discursive narratives by American writers and filmmakers. Not for a minute do I believe that American artists do not produce challenging formalist narratives, only that such work is not afforded the same enthusiasm given similar work by artists working abroad. That these various American audiences are ready to engage with challenging work, provided it is foreign, appears to reside in an identification of "difficulty" with the exoticism of other cultures rather than as a characteristic of narrative art, regardless of its origin. It's as if American audiences think American culture is straightforward enough to warrant only linear narratives, as if complicated, contradictory lives are only lived by people in unfamiliar cultures. This is a perverse state of affairs, one that has radically narrowed our collective idea of contemporary American fiction in both subject matter and style. The vitality of our national literature demands that serious readers, writers, and critics put the New York publishing houses under the same fire for complacency that audiences and artists subject the Hollywood studios and the recording industry to.

Footnote:

21) "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There--Maybe" by A.C. Douglas, Sounds and Fury.
posted by James at 6:57 PM

 
Corset strings. National Short Story Writing Month, Day 15

I'm about 75 words short of the goal, and I'll have to get those tonight, as there was no writing this morning. In lieu of my own commentary, I offer you remarks from my writing cohort, for Day 5 and for Day 15. As the day 5 account abounds with imagery of pregnancy and corsets, it's probably worth noting that my writing cohort is of the female persuasion.

Day 5

After a discouraging writing day yesterday, this morning my writing started to glide. Words poured out. The paragraphs are baggy, but I can see the shape of the story in there. It's having to meet a word count which is making the labor to give birth to this story the easiest writing labor I've had in a long time. The bagginess of the paragraphs is something I experienced for the first time last year when doing NaNoWriMo. Normally I work hard, even when generating a first draft, to make my paragraphs taut. This seems to put a squeeze not just on the sentences but on my creativity. It isn't fun. How can you be comfortably pregnant while lacing yourself into a corset? Writing to a deadline made me loosen the corset strings, let it all hang out.

Day 15

Yesterday was a horrible slog, only I didn't slog for long, since I only wrote about 100 words and then was so bored with the story that I gave up. The writing felt flat and blah. This morning, when I woke up, I knew I had to write 1000 words to make it to our 7500 word finish line. And I did it. I did it, and strangely enough, I came to a real ending, even though the proper middle of the story isn't really there. But key ideas came out, and there was a definite sense of denouement.

posted by James at 2:22 PM

 
Dick Cavett, recounting the famous show when he had Mailer and Vidal on at the same time (and Janet Flanner, for good measure). This line made me laugh:

Vidal said his relationship with Mailer finally resolved itself into pretty much what it had been for decades: "We pass, and like two old whores on the street, say 'Still at it, Norm?' 'Yep. Still at it, Gore?'"

posted by James at 9:32 AM

 
As posting this essay in sections seemed to have stripped it of context, I thought I'd add links to each section here, for those who care to follow my argument from the beginning. After the links, you will find part 9.

New York Publishing Houses Are More Like Hollywood Studios Than You Think (Part 1 of 10)

A Taxonomy of Writing Styles (2 of 10)

A Survey of the American Field I (3 of 10)

A Survey of the American Field II (4 of 10)

A Survey of the American Field III (5 of 10)

Mid-Career "Superstars" (6 of 10)

Narratives of Immigration (7 of 10)

The Recent Nobel Laureates (8 of 10)

American Exceptions. Exceptional Americans. (9 of 10)

Not all American writers have seen their formalist ambitions defeated by the literary marketplace that the New York houses both shape and conform to. Perennial Nobel would-be winners Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy have, in very different ways, managed to write and publish books that are exceptions to the realist rule.

Roth gets away with writing formalist work for several reasons. First, he was a conventional realist early in his career, earning a National Book Award for his first book, the collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus, a work of both preternatural skill in the realist mode, as well as being an early work taking the subject of immigration, in his case as seen by the grandchildren of immigrants. By winning the NBA at the unreal age of 26, he was essentially spared a public apprenticeship. Second, he made a name for himself with the, to my mind, relatively trivial Portnoy's Complaint, its sales and notoriety buying enough good will from both his readership and his critics to allow him to take more risks in his writing, maybe in emulation of the Eastern European writers he championed in the 70s and 80s. Like Roth, Joseph Heller followed the tremendous success of his Catch-22, which as of 1999 had sold 10 million copies in the United States (footnote 19), with the stunning--if less than successful--formalism of Something Happened. It is hard to imagine any of today's touted mid-career writers risking such fame and fortune on literary daring-do, but maybe one of them will surprise us one day. Finally, Roth's late string of brilliant novels accomplish the thing that nearly all writers of narrative hope for, a formal complexity so accomplished that it can go unnoticed by those who would not be bothered by challenging fiction, coupled with outrageous, attention getting humor and involving plots. That his prose, though sharp, is of the variety that refuses poetic flamboyance only adds to the marketability of his writing, as does his frequently sexual subject matter.

Roth's late period of mastery can be dated from Operation Shylock (1993), and that novel may be the best of the lot. In a tour de force of comic invention Roth, as he does in all his work, plays with the notion of identity on too many levels to discuss in this survey, the sophistication of the narrative adding to the plot without distracting from it. By contrast, Sabbath's Theater (1995) seems nearly a conventionally realist account, albeit of a near grotesque character, except that Roth nearly invisibly turns the novel into a devilish critique of recovered memory syndrome. The first and third books of his late trilogy, American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000), return to the formalist approach to identity of Operation Shylock, each with the same first-person narrator who is a writer (one of Roth's several alter-egos, Nathan Zuckerman) imagining his way into third-person narratives. The Dying Animal (2001), though mostly known for its depiction of an old man's libido, is more startlingly a second-person narrative addressed to, well, you have to read it to find out. The very structure of the novel turns it into a page turner. The Plot Against America (2004) is an alternative history of the United States during World War II, a relatively conventional idea, yet often believed to be Roth's typically oblique artistic response to the attacks of 9-11.

A less strong case can be made for Cormac McCarthy as a formalist, especially as his best known novels, The Border Trilogy, are rather conventional romances disguised so well by the almost Beckett-like prose and philosophical rigor that the works themselves transcend their almost naive stories. I say naive because it is hard for this reader to see if the youthful protagonists' romanticism is intended to be shared by the reader, or if the writer is merely giving it its sad, lovely voice. McCarthy is the kind of writer whose prose nearly makes all formal questions without point. His sentences carry such force that, like Beckett's, they are themselves what the novels are about.

The famously independent McCarthy has probably not been better profiled than in the well-known New York Times Magazine piece from 1992 (footnote 20), printed on the cusp of his late career fame, finally brought on by publication of his commercial breakthrough, All the Pretty Horses. Two passages from that article capture McCarthy's early career:

It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent.

And:

McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. "We lived in total poverty," says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. "We were bathing in the lake," she says with some nostalgia. "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week."

A third passage shows that it took the strenuous efforts of a prestigious New York house to bring him that fame:

Knopf is revving up the publicity engines for a campaign that they hope will bring McCarthy his overdue recognition. Vintage will reissue "Suttree" and "Blood Meridian" next month, and the rest of his work shortly thereafter.

Until then, he had been a weak-selling MacArthur grant winner with praise from Saul Bellow and Shelby Foote. He had to publish cowboy romances before Knopf would make him famous among more than just other writers and a few thousand serious readers.

Footnotes:

19) "Joseph Heller, Darkly Surreal Novelist, Dies at 76" by Richard Severo and Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, December 14, 1999.

20) "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" by Richard B. Woodward, New York Times, April 19, 1992.
posted by James at 10:15 PM

 
A reader's question, about my multi-part essay, answered here.

Thanks for writing. I'm in kind of in a quandary, because although I make it a policy to answer readers' mail, I see you posted your message to me on your blog (the blog, Jacob Russell's Barking Dog), making our discussion public before it even started. As you noted there, I don't make space for comments on my own blog. Most of the reasons for that are probably more dull than you might think, but among them is that I think my posts should stand or fall on their own without me rushing to their defense and getting involved in circular arguments. As you know, it's hard anticipating every objection when writing about anything, let alone a subject that people obviously have a lot of passion for. My decision to post the essay in sections rather than in one long, inevitably unread post apparently stripped my argument of context. One of the many hazards of the web. Given I've already written close to 10,000 words on this subject, I'd rather let the essay speak for itself.

Having said that, in answer to your question, part 2 of the essay attempts to define the terms I'm using.
posted by James at 2:41 PM

 
Close. National Short Story Writing Month, Day 14

I'm about 75 words away from the target of 7,500 words by the end of the day on Thursday, the 15th. In truth, I think the "end" of the "story" happened a couple of thousand words ago, but I still suspect that the hardest part of this experiment will be the second fifteen days of the month, wherein I will try making something out of the rough draft from the first fifteen days.

Am I satisfied with the writing I've done so far? No. It has its moments, but I'm not sure there's a story in there. There are a bunch of events. And some characters. Some clever lines. Maybe I should add some footnotes to it.
posted by James at 8:49 AM

 
The Recent Nobel Laureates (8 of 10)

By contrast with the fiction published by American houses, international literary fiction is dominated by formalists, as even a cursory look at the Nobel prize winners demonstrates.

--2007: Doris Lessing--In Lessing's own words, the novel of hers specifically cited in the Nobel announcement, The Golden Notebook, is a work of formalism:

The "structure" was this. A short conventional novel, which can stand by itself, is interleaved with notebooks, diaries, comments about what went into it, in itself reflecting what many writers feel on finishing a novel: despair that their neat pattern of a novel excludes so much of the life that made it. (footnote 18)

--2006: Orhan Pamuk--A formalist.

--2005: Harold Pinter--A playwright whose work is some of the most strongly identified with formalist works of the 20th century.

--2004: Elfriede Jelinek--A formalist.

--2003: J. M. Coetzee--A writer whose work treads the line between realism (Disgrace and Age of Iron, but also the dystopic The Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians) and formalism (all of his most recent fiction).

--2002: Imre Kertész--No opinion.

--2001: V. S. Naipaul--This writer presents strong challenges to the critic who would regard the writer's literary output separately from the writer's political opinions, as Naipaul has written so much non-fiction, and as his personal pronouncements are so obviously calculated to provoke. However, it seems safe to conclude that his work is in the realist mode. The formalistic elements that enter into his fiction are from his combination of autobiographical and imaginative narratives.

--2000: Gao Xingjian--No opinion.

--1999: Gunter Grass--All of his work is marked strongly by formalism, even the relative narrative straightforwardness of his comic masterpiece, The Tin Drum.

--1998: Jose Saramago--A nearly pure formalist, is there is such a thing.

--1997: Dario Fo--No opinion.

--1996: Wislawa Szymborska--As a poet, irrelevant to this discussion.

--1995: Seamus Heaney--As a poet, irrelevant to this discussion.

--1994: Kenzaburo Oe--The work of his I have read has all been formalist.

--1993: Toni Morrison--The epigraph or dedication to her acknowledged masterpiece, Beloved, is calculatedly provocative. It reads, simply, "Sixty Million and more." I find it impossible to read this as anything other than a claim that slavery was ten times or more bloody than the Final Solution. Why would Morrison engage in such mendacious an exercise as placing one human catastrophe in competition with another? And why have I never read anyone else commenting on this dedication? I have to admit that those four words have been a formidable roadblock preventing me from ever having read Morrison, though I hope to get over it long enough to do so someday. By her critical reputation, she seems to be a realist with strong formalist elements.

--1992: Derek Walcott--As a poet, irrelevant to this discussion.

--1991: Nadine Gordimer--The short stories of hers that I have read are in the realist mode.

--1990: Octavio Paz--As a poet, irrelevant to this discussion.

Clearly the list of recent Nobel winners is dominated by formalists working in a wide range of styles and to many different ends. Even the lone American on the list, Morrison, has written formalist work.

Footnote:

18) "Guarded welcome" by Doris Lessing, The Guardian, January 27, 2007.
posted by James at 7:32 PM

 
A great post on a writer's need for endurance, from a speech by Joan Silber. RTWT here.

I would say an artist has to learn the uses of failure...breakage, ruptures, defeat, erasure, and the abandonment of old devices can turn out to be essential to going deeper, to entering the most significant precincts of the whole enterprise. An artist has to have a capacity for endurance. This is the part that no one else can exactly tell you how to manage. Every writer here will have to have her own resources, will have to design her own Plan B for dealing with adversity. Later people will congratulate the writer on her endurance and it will be a surprise to her and a number of other people as well that this pokey stubbornness is suddenly admirable.

posted by James at 3:05 PM

 
Narratives of Immigration (7 of 10)

One of the judges of Granta's most recent list of "Best Young American Novelists," Ian Jack, writes:

All of us judges agreed on one thing: ethnicity, migration and "abroad" had replaced social class as a source of tension, even though, as O'Rourke pointed out, that the gap between the wealthy and poor in the US is wider than ever. "In America all class analysis is forbidden," said White. "It's as if the conflict and alienation offered in, say, the British novel by encounters with members of other, lower social classes is replaced in America by contrasts of first and third world cultures." [emphasis mine] (footnote 16)

A contemporary peculiarity of the so-called liberal position in the United States is that the working class does not really register with it, even to the extent that older terms like "blue collar" and "working class" have been replaced with the euphemistic "middle class," presumably because the other terms are too left-wing sounding for American consumption. Why this is so would be the subject of an entirely different essay; I agree with Ian Jack and will take his assertion as my starting point.

As immigration has been the central social--if not political--force shaping American life since the passage of The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the single most far reaching, though perhaps least known, piece of major Great Society legislation, it follows that an American literature concerned with contemporary life would be preoccupied with stories of immigrants adjusting to living in the United States, and even of lives lived in various countries of origin. To an extent, New York publishing house literature reflects this interest in the educated readership that is its audience by publishing by such writers as the previously mentioned Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967), Junot Diaz (b. 1969), and Robert Olen Butler (b. 1945), as well as Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969), Don Lee (DOB unknown), Mary Yukari Waters (b. 1965), and Mohammed Naseehu Ali (b. 1971), to name a mere handful. Additionally, there are writers working in English who either live or have lived in the United States but whose fiction and careers are "transnational," such as Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956), Vikram Seth (b. 1952), Kiran Desai (b. 1971), her mother, Anita Desai (b. 1937), and even New York resident Salman Rushdie, though claiming Rushdie as a New Yorker is a bit like claiming John Lennon as a New Yorker--technically true, but artistically false.

Certainly as the Persian, Chinese, Korean, Somolian, Cuban, and Vietnamese writer children and grandchildren of post-1965 immigrants come of age, there are bound to be more stories from these communities to find print. I fully expect the Mexican-American community to be at least as literarily fecund as the Irish-American community has been, if not more so because it is a bilingual culture and hence that much richer a linguistic brew, though perhaps the residents of El Norte will instead be as heavy with theatrical types like singers, actors, and filmmakers as the Italian-American community has been. A complicating factor is that Mexican immigration has been mostly to the Western border states; if something doesn't happen in New York City, it barely registers in the publishing houses. For example, I find it telling that Diaz, one of the first Latin-American literary stars of the New York publishing world, is of Dominican birth, a nationality that is hugely important in New York City and environs but barely represented outside of the East Coast, rather than a Mexican-American writer, in spite of the fact that, according to the 2000 Census, Mexican-Americans make up 64% of the Hispanic population, whereas Dominican-Americans make up 2.8% of the Hispanic population. (footnote 17) I seriously doubt there are no youngish Mexican-American writers whose work would attract the same commercial and critical praise as any other mid-career writer working today, only that agents and editors are not looking for them hard enough. As far as the publishing houses are concerned, it doesn't matter what your ethnicity is, as long as you live a half day's train ride from Penn Station and that your writing is in the realist mode, as these writers work mostly is.

Footnotes:

16) "A very uncertain country: Ethnicity, migration and 'abroad' - Ian Jack on Granta's new list of Best of Young American Novelists," The Guardian, March 10, 2007.

17) U.S. Census Bureau.
posted by James at 5:22 PM

 
A Bracing Effect. National Short Story Writing Month, Day 12

Even though the word count requirement for this little experiment is far less than the 40,000 words of NaNoWriMo, I'm finding again this year that writing quickly has a bracing effect, that, left to my own devices, I can spiral downward into a perfectionism that persuades me that whatever project I am working on can never meet my own massive expectations. By writing through such doubts, pleasantly unexpected results can occur. More and more, I think of writing as an improvisatory act, that like the jazz musician the writer needs to be quick on his or her feet and take advantage of the unexpected, the mistake, the oddity, rather than continually trying to force "solutions" on a process that isn't about trying to figure out "problems" in the first place. Narratives aren't explanations. At their best, I think, they generate more questions than answers. Maybe free writing is just another tool the writer has to pry beneath the surface of things.
posted by James at 1:06 PM