On Being "Late to Trend"

I've always been what marketing people call a "late adopter." My Marxist phase didn't begin until 1987, I didn't buy an Internet stock until 1999.... the fact that I now have a blog makes me wonder whether blogs aren't already becoming obsolete...

In which context, I want to note that I'm reading a lot of novels on my computer lately, on Scribd, and also that my Kindle just arrived in the mail. Which should mean that, if Amazon go out of business in the next few months, I'll be able to make a good living from companies paying me not to adopt their new products!

Or perhaps I'm finally getting ahead of the curve... Although I still think of books as being easier to lug around than electronic devices, I'm noticing that many books I own are in fact significantly heavier than a Kindle. Perhaps, if I live to see the disappearance of literary-works-incarnated-as-physical-objects, it's their aromas that I'll miss... I still distinctly recall inhaling from the pages of a 1930s Louis MacNeice poetry volume in a library in Edinburgh -- resinous, still largely uncut, musty and heady with the glue used to hold it together.

Nota bene: I'm going to simplify my blogging schedule; henceforward I plan just to blog five days a week, so I can get more work done on the weekends.

Little Book of Days, by Nona Caspers

This book could be thought of as a diary, a commonplace book, a writer's notebook, or as an assortment of prose poems.... Caspers keeps track of what it feels like living in an apartment overlooking a specific intersection in San Francisco's Mission district -- see map -- a space she preserves for us in rather the same way that a part of Sei Shonagon's life is forever preserved in The Pillow Book.

"The truth about romantic love is that it has little to do with peace or security. Security is illusion, everyone knows. Peace comes from inside." -- Little Book of Days

We get the colors of passing cars, transcriptions of overheard street conversations, assorted facts about pigeon and squirrel biology, the noises made by upstairs neighbors, memories and confessions, the sounds of the city. Sometimes monks pass. There are references to relationships that are over and, towards the end, one that may be starting, but that's about it for plot -- Caspers seeks here to do justice to the richness of the present moment, the incoherence of consciousness that constantly gives rise to unexpected or contradictory meanings.

"There is something new in my body. A new sound, a buzzing. Like a refrigerator motor. There it is. No, it's gone now." -- Little Book of Days

Caspers tries to do yoga while cars honk outside. She does some people watching. She buys a rug, experiences aches and pains: what she's after is the feeling of dailiness... If I'd been in a different mood, this might not have been the book I wanted, but in the mood I happened to be in, it was. It reminded me that the ordinary is so strange that we generally forget to notice it. Onnesha Roychouldhuri also wrote about this book for the Rumpus.

"Arctic ground squirrels dream. Scientists know this. They wake up because they dream. What do they dream about? Topsoil? Sun? Arctic wolves galloping towards them? -- Little Book of Days

Epistolary Novels

In Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees, I find the statistic that, of all British novels published in 1776, seventy one percent were epistolary novels, i.e. novels in the form of letters, mimicking correspondence.

Imagine, if you were a Grub Street writer in 1776, the pressure to produce an epistolary novel! It must have been worse than the pressure nowadays to churn out a young adult zombie book...

For most of the late eighteenth century, the epistolary novel was the dominant literary form -- but it seems the only ones we read today are by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and, if you're an academic, Samuel Richardson. (Quick, name five other authors of epistolary novels...)

Richardson I suppose was sort of the Tolkien of this genre -- he popularized the form, then, much later, everybody else got on board...

Two contemporary novels in letters are We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, and The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. In each case, the correspondence is one-sided, there being no reasonable prospect of a reply. In each case, it's easy to forget the novel is epistolary. The action always feels on-scene; it's just that each chapter begins with some form of "dear x" and ends with some form of "yours, y," There's little attempt to imitate the style of contemporary letter writing, and how could there be, when we no longer write letters? Yet in each case, the silence of the addressee does a tremendous job of increasing the book's emotional resonance: this effect really works for me, for reasons I'll have to contemplate further...

Why do Art Forms Get Old?

Viktor Skhlovsky -- "Each art form travels down the inevitable road from birth to death; from seeing and sensory perception, when every detail in the object is savoured and relished, to mere recognition, when form becomes a dull epigone which our senses register mechanically, a piece of merchandise not visible even to the buyer."

I found this Skhlovsky quote in Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. Moretti comments, "This journey 'down the inevitable road from birth to death' can however also be explained by focusing, not so much on the relationship between the 'young' and the 'old' versions of the same form but rather on that between the form and its historical context: a genre exhausts its potentialities -- and the time comes to give a competitor a chance -- when its inner form is no longer capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality. At which point, either the genre loses its form under the impact of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it turns it back to reality in the name of form, becoming a 'dull epigone' indeed."

An example Moretti gives is the dominance of Gothic novels in the 1790s and the early 1800s, after which readers suddenly lost interest in them, and historical novels became massively popular instead. ".,, a historical novel written in 1800, such as Castle Rackrent (or in 1805, like Waverley's abandoned first draft) simply didn't have the incredible opportunity to reshape the literary field that the collapse of the gothic offered Waverley in 1814." Are we tempted to try and explain this -- or, for example, why science fiction was "bigger" in the 1970s, horror in the 1980s, and fantasy in the 1990s -- by reference to world-historical events of the time?

The Real Clash

"In a first-rate piece of fiction, the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world." -- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I made a note somewhere of a reference to this quote by Brian Boyd, an alarmingly-devoted Nabokovian, whose book Nabokov's "Pale Fire": The Magic of Artistic Discovery opens more cans of worms than any other study of a single novel I can think of. Boyd's comment was that, in an interview, Nabokov claimed he really meant to say, not "between the author and the world," but "between the author and the reader." (Naturally, I'd rather go with “world” -- since, for the duration of the reading experience, the author and the reader have to be somewhat on the same side, even if this is but a short-term alliance of convenience.)

Someone said of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim -- I think it was Alan Watkins in Brief Lives -- that it was a book that said, it's not like that, it's like this. Isn't this statement true of any novel that works? Novelists are always writing against -- claiming, this is more true than the last thing you read, at least for now, and not just for me. Even if literary novelists from Henry James on tend not so much to be saying this is how the world works as this is how the world feels, they're still saying, this is how the world is. Readers who would rather be told how the world works, we perhaps lose early on to Robert Heinlein or Ayn Rand...

Maybe I'm saying that the real clash is not between the author and the world, but between the author and the author's perception of the received idea of the world. Oh dear, that's not a terribly catchy formulation... perhaps my gentle readers can do better...

A Partisan's Daughter, by Louis de Bernieres

In his saddest novel so far, or perhaps just his least life-affirming, De Bernières depicts England in the 1970s as a depressingly pathetic place, a nation of plonkers.

De Bernières excels at depicting catastrophically-doomed countries with fiery national temperaments -- England therefore is not an easy setting for him, even though he includes a Serbian character in the mix. The author himself does not seem entirely convinced yet that 1970s England is worth writing about... and the Yugoslav politics we get didn't feel to me fully assimilated into the story.

"Mrs. Thatcher came to power, and everyone was wondering what was going to happen. I wasn't sorry to see the end of Callaghan. I don't think anyone was. It was all very well having a nice man in charge, but he hadn't really been in charge. The most memorable thing he did was to sing 'My Wife Won't Let Me' at a conference. Roza didn't care one way or the other. Her only political concern was whether or not Tito was going to die."

De Bernières is also good at quiet stories of love gone sadly wrong, and on this level, A Partisan's Daughter delivers -- it's just a pity there isn't also a civil war in the book. Should the United Kingdom ever go through a lengthy period of internecine fighting and ethnic cleansing, De Bernières will be perfectly positioned to write a contemporary English novel. Or maybe he's gearing up to right a new kind of book, something more autobiographical, and this was a sort of trial run?

I await his next book eagerly. I enjoyed this one, but if you haven't read De Bernières yet, you're more likely to want to begin with something like the excellent Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which is also I think his most popular novel, probably because, of all them, it's set in the country with the most tourist appeal. Birds Without Wings is amazing too, and has an interestingly pro-Ottoman bias.

The first three quarters of the first novel in his Colombian trilogy are brilliant. The last quarter of The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts didn't convince me, but maybe it's one of those books powerful enough that the ending simply cannot afford to be true to the rest of the book. Conrad's Lord Jim is another case in point. A novelist who ended such a book realistically might simply not make it through the ensuing psychological crisis, just as Thomas Hardy never wrote another novel after Jude The Obscure.

More Industry Forecasts

Back in the time of glasnost, Soviet news announcers would proclaim, "And now for a daily roundup of attacks on statues of Lenin." In the same spirit, I will sometimes link to articles about the future of publishing. Here's one by Boris Kachka from last fall's New York magazine.

"'Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter,' says one powerful agent. Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them. Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers -- those who read every night -- and that the number was dropping by half every decade. Others vehemently disagree. But who really knows? Focused consumer research is almost nonexistent in publishing."

Here's a humorous take by Steve Hely that appeared in the Rumpus last month.

And here's some analysis from agent Richard Curtis.

"I have spent years advocating the abandonment of the consignment system. For one thing, it is a horrifying waste of paper and other resources. For another, it has forced all of us into negative, defensive, and ofttimes bizarre ways of speaking and thinking about books. Nobody talks about how many copies of a book were sold, but rather how many did not get returned. Royalty statements are designed to deceive by the omission of critical information. Returns data are buried in a column called 'Cumulative Net Sales,' and the concept of holding back royalties against returns is so inflammatory to authors that publishers have built their royalty statements around hiding that information."

Curtis argues against huge author advances, and against books being fully returnable by bookstores to publishers. Read his piece all the way through, and you'll find that it ends with a shocking revelation.

More on Authorial Omniscience + InsideStorytime STUMBLING

Henry James, in an 1897 letter to Grace Noron, lamented that there is in Kipling “almost nothing of the complicated soul or of the female form or of any question of shades – which latter constitutes, to my sense, the real formative literary discipline.” He accuses Kipling of having descended “from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws.”

A narrator as confident as Kipling or Jack London can write from the point of view of a quadruped while also delivering a comprehensive, coherent view of the world. Part of the problem, of course, is that this magisterial approach is resonant of political tendencies we wish to distance ourself from. Although in fairness to Kipling, his Anglo-Indians, natives, Tommies, etc. actually do have complicated souls. Kipling recommends that “all men count with you, but none too much” -- keep sight of the big picture.

To write from an animal's viewpoint, you have to really feel you know how the world works. For James, the individual point of view is what counts – he gets inside a character, finds a subtle take on what's happened, rejects this for an even subtler take on what's happened... this anxious plumbing of ever-greater depths of subjectivity has its own satisfactions and frustrations. It's hard to imagine James writing from the viewpoint of a dog. He disliked the over-simplification required for feigned authorial omniscience -- and literary fiction to a considerable extent turned its back on Kipling and followed James. We might say that genre fiction was left to pick up the slack.

Tonight: InsideStorytime STUMBLING at San Francisco's Cafe Royale. Tonight Catherine Brady will be reading from her story collection The Mechanics of Falling, Nona Caspers from Little Book of Days, and Maria Espinosa from Dying Unfinished. Also reading will be Jarret Rosenblatt and William Ayers. With MC Ransom Stephens. Tell us you learned about the reading from this blog, and we waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge.

Do we Miss Authorial Omniscience?

I just read Jack London's The Call of the Wild. I'm struck, considering that London is here mostly writing in the close third person viewpoint of a dog, at how good he also is at being omniscient. Any time a new dog, moose, or man appears in the story, London sizes up their fitness to survive -- and his estimates, of course, are invariably borne out by subsequent events. One character, Hal, and his brother-in-law are marked for an early death by Hal's ostentatious belt “that fairly bristled with cartridges” --

"This belt was the most salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness – a callowness sheer and unutterable. Both men were manifestly out of place, and why such as they should adventure the North is part of the mystery of things that passes understanding.”

This is very satisfying. A bad writer couldn't bring Hal off -- he's every bit as alive and three-dimensional a character as he needs to be, but now a whit more. And we can see his belt so vividly. Sure enough, he turns out to be the kind of greenhorn who ignores the locals when they warn him the ice is about to crack.

London is at his most Kiplingesque in The Call of the Wild, a book that tells you, this is how the world works, here's everything you need to know. There are a few movies that deliver this kind of life's like this comprehensive certainty -- “The Seven Samurai” and “The Godfather” come to mind. One can perhaps think of these movies as having omniscient directors?

A hundred years ago or so, writers of literary fiction began distancing themselves from this kind of effect, so that it's now found only in genre fiction. Patrick O' Brian has the kind of authorial authority I'm talking about, as does Lee Child. But while nobody would accuse Vladimir Nabokov or Mark Helprin of being insufficiently opinionated, or of lacking conviction, the worlds they deal in are nonetheless built up of multiple incommensurate radical subjectivities. They don't try to simplify reality, or to make it seem more understandable than it is -- this refusal has come to be part of what we mean by being literary.

Part of the attraction of Jane Austen is that she deals in truths universally acknowledged. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jackie Collins also deals in such truths, as does Sex and the City, a collection of dating columns by Candace Bushnell, wherein it is a truth universally acknowleged that a woman living in Manhattan will only have sex with a man if he makes over $200,000 a year, and that he won't call her the next day. The Call of the Wild and Sex and the City provide a similar sort of vicarious experience, of being forced into subjection, obliged to learn the rules of a harsh, immutable realm. Many readers go for that sort of thing. Universally acknowleged truths are hokum, but fun.

Aroma Tea 2

When I need to revise an entire draft of a novel, I want to go somewhere with stellar tea -- the kind of tea that I can feel adding twenty points to my IQ,

They stock tea that good at Aroma Tea 2 on Polk Street -- their original branch is in the Richmond. Hayman, the wired, entrepreneurial proprietor -- think "the Todd Zuniga of tea?" -- just got back from Fujien province with some fresh product.

In the seventeen years I've been living in the Bay Area, shops that only sell tea never seem to survive more than a few years. Tea is kind of like literary fiction, in fact -- essential to civilization, but there's never enough demand for it. So go to Aroma and keep them in business. If they shut down, I'll have to trek all the way to Samovar, who have some good tea too, but charge through the roof.

Aroma Tea has great traditional teas, but Hayman is also an innovator. Condensed-milk-flavored teas -- big in Taiwan apparently, and worth it for the smell alone. The chilli-flavored oolong blows my mind. Even coffee-flavored tea -- if that's what it takes to get Americans to start buying tea, so be it. An old biography of William Hazlitt I once read ascribed his death to tea drinking. Something like this -- "He was chiefly, I think, a casualty to tea, which he drank in inconceivable quantities of prodigious strength." I'm not entirely convinced by this forensic verdict, but if you can die that way, it's the way I hope to go.

More Evidence This is a Watershed Year in Publishing

Scribd, a Silicon Valley company, began selling content today. E-books bought from their online store can be read on multiple electronic platforms.

Kemble Scott has an article up in Publisher's Weekly about why he and other professional writers are making their latest novels available on Scribd, for prices as low as $2. Here's a video premiering some of these works, including new novels by Tamim Ansary and Joe Quirk.

Flexible pricing. No book returns. No incomprehensible royalty statements. Chances are other well-known writers will soon be adopting this new business model.

Great Story: "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

I well remember the first time I read "The Cask of Amontillado," maybe fifteen years ago. It was my lunchbreak, and I'd staggered out of my office, desperate for mental sustenance. I wandered into a bookstore, and opened Poe's collected works... Reading this story, like reading any great story, was a life-transforming experience. What does it do for you?

Apparently the story was first published in Godey's Lady's Book (Vol. XXIII, no. 5), November 1846, 33: 216-218. Other excerpts from Godey's Lady's Book here -- most of the stories they published seem to have contained practical moral instruction, which was not Poe's forte. According to Wikipedia, their main editor was Sara Josepha Hale, author of "Mary had a Little Lamb," and their issues contained sewing patterns. Incongrously, they also published quite a lot of Poe.

The 1840s were interesting times politically, desperate ones economically. Poe died three years after this story was published. Some decades later, he was discovered by the French. More comments later.

Are Bloggers too Strident or too Tentative?

Mark Helprin, in Digital Barbarism, portrays bloggers as people who cut and paste instead of thinking, a furious, unreflective mob.

But maybe blogging is actually rather conducive to the expression of tentative opinions. Here's Johann Hari on Andrew Sullivan -- "He pioneered blogging as a form where a writer can 'think out loud.' He believes it suits an Oakeshottian temperament: like his favorite philosopher, it is radically provisional, always aware of its own limits in time and space, and always poised to have to correct itself in light of new evidence."

The writer of op-eds may feel obliged to finish on a note of resounding conviction, exuding certainty. A blog post is more like a newspaper column. As Manfred Wolf writes in the introduction to Almost a Foreign Country, a collection of his columns from the West Portal Monthly and elsewhere, “Far from the column being only a forum for opinions, it's actually a showcase for a certain presentation of self and outlook. At best, it allows writers to talk uninhibitedly on paper, allowing them to assume a persona, a voice of the author but not necessarily the only one. Thus opinions and attitudes are tested rather than proclaimed, offering the trial balloon of an idea, or the logical consequence of a thought the writer does not wholly endorse.”

That's what I think blog posts are like. Colby Buzzell is a writer who first became known as a blogger, and something I like in his work, both in his blog posts about his tour of duty in Iraq, and in his subsequent pieces for Esquire -- this one was a classic -- is his reluctance to go too far beyond his immediate experience. Buzzell lets you know what he sees, and what draws him to feel one way about it, and what draws him to feel the other way, and he stays entrenched in experience instead of bolting for the moral high ground.

Frederick Crews -- “... we do not have things to say. We acquire them in the process of working on definite problems that catch our attention.”

Substance and Style

When Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities first came out, didn't it have a sort of manifesto-like introduction? That introduction doesn't seem to be in the copies of the book that are now being printed. But somewhere or other -- I'll source this in a comment later if I can track it down -- I remember Wolfe writing about the difference between being a twentysomething and a fortysomething writer, mocking his twentysomething self because his writerly ambition was for his prose to be "crystalline," which he laughs off as a totally meaingless goal. I would counter that the idea of "crystalline" prose is perfectly intelligible -- it implies clearness and also the hope of planting something that will grow. (Perhaps even resonance although that might be getting a bit New Age.) As the child is father to the man, the wide-eyed Wolfe who wanted his prose to be "crystalline" was a necessary stage on the way to the pragmatic mature Wolfe who poses as a sourge of pretension.

The other thing I remember Wolfe writing was something like, I doubt if there's a writer over forty who doesn't think the relative importance of what you have to say and how you say it is something like sixty percent substance, forty percent style. In my twenties I wanted to reply, more like sixty percent style, forty percent substance. But now I am over forty, I guess I more or less agree with Wolfe. Any other thoughts on this? Is it naturally to be expected that young writers are more obsessed with developing their style, while middle-aged writers have figured that side of things out, and can concentrate on setting down their ideas?

A Reverie About the Short Story Market in the 1880s

Arthur Conan Doyle sold one of his early stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement," to Cornhill Magazine for twenty-nine guineas -- enough to pay most of Conan Doyle's rent for the year, according to Russell Miller's recent biography.

This somewhat distracted adventure tale, influenced by Poe and Stevenson, features a series of ghastly maritime disasters, a negro supervillain, and a "powerful talisman which appeals to the whole dark race."

One short story sale to a magazine. Most of his rent for that year. Those were the days. Miller adds that Conan Doyle's subsequent submissions to Cornhill, including the first Sherlock Holmes story, were all summarily rejected -- so not everything has changed.

Digital Barbarism, by Mark Helprin

My adoration for Helprin's prose is so extreme that I was unable physically to restrain myself from paying full price for the hardcover edition of this work. Ostensibly, Digital Barbarism is an argument for extending copyright protection a few more years, but being by Helprin, it's also a lyrical and bombastic defense of Western civilization, worth the cover price for its cranky asides on the human condition alone.

If you haven't read any Helprin, maybe start with Winter's Tale. My own very favorite of his novels is Memoir from Antproof Case, and I love his story collection The Pacific And Other Stories even more, but all his books are masterpieces.

Here's the original op-ed by Helprin, that gave rise to the widespread online criticism that encouraged Helprin to write Digital Barbarism. The New York Times did Helprin a disservice by giving the op-ed a headline that implied Helprin wants copyright protection extended in perpetuity, which is not what he actually argues for in the op-ed. Most writers can only wish, incidentally -- with regard to that image Helprin uses to evoke their financial plight -- that they had the financial security of a seal in the Central Park Zoo,

Digital Barbarism also caricatures and rains scorn on the blogosphere, although in Helprin's defense, the blogosphere does not seem to have responded very subtly to his op-ed. And he does include one sentence to the effect that some bloggers are okay.

I'm not going to take a position on copyright today, beyond noting that in one sense great literature is everyone's spiritual inheritance, and in another sense the money made by a particular few works may be the sole actual inheritance of a writer's descendants. I read most of this book beside the path from the Warming Hut, in the Presidio, up to the Golden Gate Bridge, while my daughter and her friend collected insects. The seals in the bay have even less financial security than those in the zoo.

Franco Magnani and JG Ballard

Franco Magnani was the subject of a fascinating essay in Oliver Sacks's An Anthropologist on Mars. Magnani grew up in the Tuscan village of Pontito, from which he and all the other villagers were evicted by the Nazis in 1943.

Later in life, while working as a cook in San Francisco's North Beach, Magnani had a neurological crisis and began obessively to produce paintings of Pontito.

I thought of one of these paintings, "Pontito Preserved for Eternity in Infinite Space," when I read about Bessel A. van der Kolk’s characterisation of traumatic memories as “unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences," in Paul Crosthwaite's essay on war trauma and narrative organisation in Ballard's fiction.

Today, Magnani still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and still makes Pontito the subject of many of his paintings. This is his website. Sacks wrote of Magnani's work, "There us something of a desolate, a postnuclear, quality, But there is also a deeper, more spiritual stillness. One cannot help feeling that something is strange here, that what is being recalled is not the actuality of childhood, as with Proust, but a denying and transfiguring vision of childhood."

I want to connect this with the use JG Ballard makes in his fiction of Lunghua camp, where he was interned by the Japanese. Sacks calls Magnani's Pontito "a Pontito at peace, suspended in a timeless 'once,' the 'once' of allegory, fantasy, myth and fairy tale," and asks of Magnani, "What was it that served to transform his memories - to remove them from the sphere of the personal, the trial, the temporal, and bring them into the realm of the universal, the sacred?"

Memorists may seek to fit their past and their present into a story arc, but sometimes the past resists assimilation. You can't go home again -- or to quote the title of a young adult novel by S.E. Hinton that I read when I was a young adult, That Was Then, This is Now -- or in the words of Ratz the barman, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, "Night City is not a place one returns to, artiste."

Is Narrative Always a Product of Trauma?

I was commissioned to write this piece on JG Ballard for openDemocracy: I conclude, "I am struck by how adept we writers are at developing our early traumas into accounts of how the world really is - not because we are helpless to do otherwise, but because this is often the most productive way for a writer to proceed."

There are events in our lives we just can't make sense of, and these are precisely the events that, as writers, we have to try and make sense from. The fall of China to the Japanese mysteriously pervades Ballard's work -- as the failure of the Prague Spring does Milan Kundera's, or the 1973 coup d'état in Chile does Roberto Bolaño's.

As a boy, Charles Dickens nearly fell out of the middle class into the working class -- his parents ran into financial difficulties, and he had to work in a factory at the age of twelve. Victorian factories were truly horrifying places. Almost every Dickens novel has at its heart a child whose place in the class structure is uncertain -- David Copperfield, Pip, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit... Dickens's early anxiety about his place in Victorian society was a big part of the reason he excelled at bringing that society so riotously and wonderfully to life.

Franco Moretti, in his delightful Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900, diagrams Jane Austen's novels and, if I remember correctly, discovers that all her plots begin and end inland, while the central plot complication happens in a coastal town. From Claire Tomalin's insightful biography of Jane Austen, I recall that Austen received one marriage proposal, in Portsmouth, which she initially accepted, then after thinking it through overnight, changed her mind the next morning. I propose that marriage proposals, and all the nightmarish rituals of courtship in English coastal resorts, functioned for Jane Austen the way being interned by the Japanese did for JG Ballard -- as a sort of unhealable wound that could be used as a window onto reality.

Yiyun Li's The Vagrants

Yiyun Li is a writer who was born in Beijing, and cites William Trevor as her foremost influence. I just interviewed her for Identity Theory. She currently lives in Oakland.

The Vagrants shows a fictional provincial Chinese community enduring interesting times -- the uncertain interlude after the death of Mao and before Deng consolidated his power. Very harsh events, delicately explored. Here's Beverly Parayno's interview with Yiyun Li for the Rumpus.

I wouldn't have spotted the Trevor influence, had Li not pointed it out. I find the influence of Lu Xun on The Vagrants more apparent. Often a writer has the experience of rereading something he or she read long ago, and realizing uneasily how much he or she unconsciously owes to that writer. Yiyun Li appears to have had this experience with Lu Xun, a writer I'm enthusiastic about -- although if I'd been forced to read him in school by the Chinese Communist Party, maybe I wouldn't be. Had Lu Xun lived a few years longer, I believe that he would have wound up being put to death by the Communists, and would not be taught in Chinese schools.

Incidentally, is it only writers who have unconscious influences? It seems to me that musicians are perfectly conscious of who all their influences are. I'll have to think some more about that.

Lu Xun disdained all Chinese influences, claiming all his influences were Western, and so interestingly enough does Yiyun Li. The most sympathetic character in The Vagrants is Teacher Gu. As the novel begins, his daughter, a former Red Guard, is about to be executed as a counter-revolutionary. Of Gu, Li writes, "He tried not to think about what had happened outside his home -- the only way to live on, he had know for most of his adulthood, was to focus on the small patch of life in front of his eyes."

The Illusion of Getting What you pay for

Jonah Lehrer reports on an experiment:

"Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford, supplied a group of people with Sobe Adrenaline Rush, an 'energy; drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. (The drink contained a potent brew of sugar and caffeine which, the bottle promised, would impart 'superior functionality.') Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. The participants were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. Shiv found that people who paid discounted prices consistently solved about thirty percent fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price for the drinks."

Marketing people will tell you that people value things more if they pay more for them -- here's proof that this illusion can actually enhance intellectual performance.

Based on this, one might predict that someone who pays for an anthology of short stories will get more out of the stories -- he or she will understand more deeply what's going on in them, the cascade of pleasure explosions he or she experiences will have profounder life-changing import -- than would have been the case if he or she had read the same anthology free of charge. This too could be tested experimentally -- have people rank books A and B on a scale of one to ten, one group would pay full price for A and get B free, another group would get A free and pay full price for B, there could also be a sort of examination afterwards to quantify how deeply subjects had engaged with the books...

When people say they achieve a deeper immersion experience reading offline than reading online, how much of that's attibutable to the Sobe Adrenaline Rush effect? What are the implications here for the business models of literary webzines?

Geoff Dyer has the Greatest Titles

I just finished reading Geoff Dyer's book Yoga for People who Can't be Bothered to do it, which is sort of a travel book. Or is it the antithesis of a travel book? Dyer passes himself off as someone who obviously lacks the attention span to write books, even though he keeps writing books -- somehow a likeable pose.

In this book he portrays himself traveling all over the world, mostly in order to hang out and be sardonically clever in an English sort of way. Most people have probably lost a cherished pair of sunglasses, or wandered around Amsterdam trying to remember where their hotel is. Dyer makes experiences like the focus of his book. He makes me wonder if maybe the extreme futility of traveling is actually the point of it. Any potential epiphany is short-circuited before it can begin, for example:

"... for the first time ever I was bored by what I was interested in. I didn't fight it."

He has this style of writing down. Is ironic British self-deprecation actually elitist?

Robert Birnbaum interviewed Dyer about this book for Identity Theory six years back. I just started reading Dyer's new novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi -- more on that later. Meanwhile here's a link to an art opening I will be at on Friday, featuring photography and sculptures by Chris Farris, another virtuoso of living in the moment.

And here's G. K. Chesterton, summarizing a letter he read in a newspaper -- "A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy."

Rewriting and Destroying

Norman Mailer in The Spooky Art -- "Rewriting is where your working experience over the years has its day. There comes a time when you know how to get the maximum out of what you've done. The only way to accelerate this skill when you are young is to have the courage to look at it when you're about ready to destroy it. If something still comes through, then it may well have the merit to be worked upon further. It is also not bad to read things at the top of your feelings in order to get a sense of what the maximum might be. If nothing else, all this will give you a tolerance for the extraordinary range of reaction you can receive in the classroom. You realize that the people who don't like your work aren't necessarily evil and the people who love your stuff don't have to be altogether illustrious."

I was in a band once where, at one rehearsal, we'd sound great, so we'd show up for the next rehearsal with incredibly high expectations and, to our disappointment, sound pretty chaotic. Then we'd came back the next week with lower expectations, and our sound seemed perfect again. Before we could escape that cycle, I fell out with the frontman, and was thrown out of the band - maybe they found it easier to solve the problem without me.

Editing can be blissful. Excising a single line can make a whole page seem startlingly better-written. Replacing one verb with another verb can make the author appear exponentially more observant.

Other drafts bring less satisfaction. An old sculptor once advised the young Auguste Rodin that, if one's work isn't going right, one should try dropping it on the floor and see how it looks then. Ths advice is tricky to apply to novels, but the principle of getting rid of anything that sticks out too much might still be a sound one.

On Revising a Manuscript I Wasn't Expecting Still to be Revising by Now

There's a quote about how at first, when you're writing a novel, it feels like you're crawling, then later it feels like you're walking, then finally it feels like you're flying. Anyone have the correct attribution for this line? (If I find out, I'll add the attribution in a comment.)

With the last few drafts of this particular novel, for a while I felt like I was trapped in concrete, far underground... but now it feels like I'm a comet shooting through space. I don't know if that's a sign that I shouldn't be working on this project any more, or a sign that I should...

Those Moments When Ideas Come Along

Writers often get asked, "How long do you write every day?"

But some of the most important things that happen when I'm writing happen when I'm not at my writing desk. The next crucial plot twist, a fundamental insight into a character's past, a stunning sentence that only this particular character could have uttered... these crucial developments or revelations don't usually arrive when I'm actually writing. More likely they come when I'm washing up, or dog-walking, or even sitting in a cubicle in what might otherwise appear to be a state of brain death, as far as can be imagined from a state of Romantic inspiration.

But for those gifts to come to me, I do have to be able to devote a certain number of hours of the day to consciously poring over the manuscript in question. Without this conscious toil, my subconscious will not be sufficiently exercised by the material to come up with the needed goods. Alas, the subconscious knows nothing of deadlines. It may give me the middle of the story years after it gives me the beginning. And if it never gives me the ending, I may end up having to fake it...