What Short Stories did you Read as a Kid?

I'd like to hear your answers to this question – my own experience is doubtless atypical. Short story writers I relished as a “tween” include P.G. Wodehouse, Saki, James Thurber, Roald Dahl, Giovannino Guareschi, John Wyndham... this was 1970s England that I was growing up in... I also remember stories by Bertrand Russell and by George Mikes. And I was much taken with the mysterious short stories of Robert Graves and Graham Greene.

By my late teens, I was ready for Borges. Although come to think of it, I actually read “The Circular Ruins” long before I knew who Borges was, in a pulp anthology of horror stories. There were other amazing stories I first saw in anthologies targeted to boys, “Hope” by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam for example.

Childhood influences cannot be completely shaken off. The short story tradition is so rich, however, that there are plenty of writers working today -- writers I admire -- who haven't read many stories by the authors I just mentioned, and whose influences are quite different. This diversity is good for the field.

It was because Borges praises Kipling and Stevenson that, in my twenties, I went on to read their stories -- it's rather odd that a British writer should discover those authors courtesy of an Argentine. Chesterton's stories I'd dipped into earlier, but it was only in my twenties that I really got into him. That was also when I began seriously to read science fiction – I now believe about half of the greatest twentieth-century short stories in the English language are science fiction, but as a kid I was prejudiced against the genre. Forced to pick a best twentieth-century U.S. short story writer, I might well go with Avram Davidson.

And I think the best living short story writers in the U.S. today are Mark Helprin and Gene Wolfe. But they're both Republicans. So sue me.

The Fate of TriQuarterly

We were all probably expecting this recession to snuff out some literary magazines.

But the news about TriQuarterly is disturbing and kind of weird. Here's the spin from Northwestern University. Celeste Ng reports here. Not all of us are upset that TriQuarterly is shifting from print to online publication. More troubling is that the editors have been fired, and the magazine will now be edited, presumably for free, by MFA students. So despite having the same name, it won't be the same magazine, or even the same kind of magazine. Many who knew that TriQuarterly's submission period opened on October 1st, and were planning to send them something that day, will now instead be waiting to see how things pan out.

The New Yorker's book blog comments that “this 'transition' is particularly troubling because it seems to highlight a harrowing trend in publishing and in academia: the replacement of experienced, paid professionals with under- (or un-) paid casual labor—whether bloggers, graduate students, or adjuncts who often receive neither benefits nor job security.”

Following that last post is an interesting comment from Subway Bookclub -- “In the legal field, many of the most important journals (the university-affiliated law reviews and certain specialty law journals) are entirely edited and managed by law students, but nonetheless put out consistently high levels of original scholarship by leading writers in the field, as well as offering a publishing avenue for talented law students. I wonder what differences might make student-run journals less prestigious or valuable in other fields.”

Howard Junker expresses ambivalence, asking if the new TriQ will “just be subsumed by the cloud?” HTML Giant places the blame on everyone who didn't subscribe to the old TriQ, raising the heated issue of why we don't buy more literary journals. That's a post that incited a lot of comments!

A hat tip to Sumanth Prabhaker for bringing this incident to my attention – I'm quite dependent on my Facebook friends for news nowadays.

How Does Description Work?

Samuel R. Delany, About Writing -- “During a recent conversation I was having with a friend, he picked up his well-read Vintage paperback of Ulysses, opened it to page 36, and said, 'Listen to this: “On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” Now, I love that sentence. But why is it better to write that than, say, “Sunlight fell on him through leaves?” Or even to omit it altogether and get on with the story, our day in Dublin?'”

Because you love the sentence, is Delany's reponse.

I'm reminded of Elaine Scarry's point, from Dreaming by the Book, that it's easier to imagine an object as solid if you simultaneously imagine a transparent surface passing over it. She suggests that this literary technique activates some of the psychological mechanisms by which we judge the solidity of objects in real life. She gives examples from Hardy and Proust -- Delany himself, in his own fiction, is a master of this kind of effect. Similarly dazzling images often occur at the start of movies.

Try this thought experiment of Scarry's --

“Imagine the face of a friend. Then on a separate occasion imagine the face of the same friend. But this time place the person at a table by the window where the shadows of an apple tree play across the person's face and shirt. And look at the precise pattern of the shadows. A leaf floats in the window. Let the friend put the leaf in one hand and a book in the other. Perhaps add a second book to the already weighted hand. Even better, have an already present friend verbally specify the sequencing and variations of these images as you produce them. See if it isn't the case that your imagined friend's face now appears more specified, vibrant, dense, mobile, and animate than when you had imagined it before. When I try this, the friend even starts laughing.”

Perhaps that worked better for some of you than for others. For some readers, “Sunlight fell on him through leaves,” is all Joyce's sentence conveys -- those readers presumably gravitate towards authors with prose styles sparser than Joyce's. But for others, the flickering impermanence of the dancing spangles is what makes them feel the solid durability of Mr. Deasy's shoulders, thus transporting them to Dublin in June 1904. As a writer, do you try to include enough detail for the second reader but not enough detail to alienate the first? Or must you pick one of those two readers and ignore the other?

Levi Asher comes across as a reader of the first type when he argues here that the opening image of William Vollman's Europe Central -- ”A squat black telephone, I mean an octopus, the god of our Signal Corps, owns a recess in Berlin (more probably Moscow, which one German general has named the core of the enemy's whole being.” -- could be shortened to “A telephone is on a desk, looking like an octopus.” Some of the commenters do a good job of disputing this verdict.

In Defense of “Like”

Few expressions are so often denounced as “like” - as in “Suppose we like, just turn that idea upside down...”

After I first moved to California, I started saying “like” a lot. I think it's unfortunate that spoken British English has no real equivalent. One British friend, after I started saying “like,” asked me in bemusement, “What exactly governs when a Californian says 'like'?” At the time I didn't have a clear answer.

Manfred Wolf writes in Almost a Foreign Country that “like” marks a shift from commentary to performance. After "like" --

“We get the direct quote rather than the indirect comment on it. Dialog is replayed rather than summarized. The story is not reported so much as it is rendered. Even speechlessness is mimed.”

“This kind of talk attempts to show rather than tell. Especially among young people, speech is turning toward performance. We're asked to hear, to experience, the speaker's astonishment.”

I think “like” can also send the signal “try to emotionally intuit what I'm getting at here, rather than pedantically pick my words apart.” Used this way, “like” facilitates creative conversation, by permitting you to float untested ideas -- something that's very hard to do with educated Brits, since they've been conditioned to seize on the weakest point of an argument and then sarcastically demolish it. That can be a helpful approach, but sometimes I want to say “this concept's still in alpha mode, and probably doesn't quite fly, but I suspect it's worth playing around with."

“Like" can convey all that... Perhaps, nowadays, I don't say it often enough...

Douglas Hofstadter on Translating Francoise Sagan

Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired me greatly when I was a teenager. Reading Hofstadter's essay "Translator, Trader," last night, I learned that I can still be blown away by Hofstadter's combination of vast enthusiasm and sheer intelligence.

In "Translator, Trader," Hofstadter describes having to "internalize" a book before translating it. Before translating Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," he memorized the poem in Russian, by way of making it his own.

At one point the heroine of Françoise Sagan's La Chamade says, "Pourquoi toutes ces questions?" Hofstadter rejects the literal translation "Why all these questions?" and instead goes with "Why the sudden third degree?" I think this is the right choice -- if a woman said to me, "Pourquoi toutes ces questions?" I'd feel that I was about to get crockery thrown at my head. The literal English equivalent just isn't as loaded. This illustrates how mysterious translation is, and prompts the inference that a good translator should have dodged a lot of crockery.

Hofstadter, an Artificial Intelligence visionary, is unimpressed by Google's mechanical translation engine. Rather than "literal" and "loose" translation, he prefers to talk of "cold" and "hot" translation -- but he makes the case that translation can never be completely "cold." Cooking changes the way a foodstuff tastes, and interpretation by a jazz master changes the way a tune sounds. So too, to translate a story is to transform it.

More on Citationism

Somewhat related to yesterday's post, Jonah Lehrer has a post up about musical mash-up as a model for the production of new ideas in working memory.

Which made me think about John Livingston Lowes's book The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, a study which traces phrases in Coleridge's poems to various books Coleridge had read.

Lowes saw Coleridge as a mash-up artist. Or in Lowes's own words, “the imagination is never more authentically creative than when it suffuses an object of present or bygone vision, in its integrity, with this inner light which is the effluence of past impressions...”

This site by Jonathan and Lisa Price uses Lowe's research to turn Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” fragment – the poem he wrote in an opium dream -- into hypertext. The idea is to click on any part of the poem to learn where it was “sampled” from.

New ideas are misremembered old ideas. Our minds are vibrant encyclopedias, constantly engaged in the task of corrupting themselves. Malcolm Gladwell quotes Bryony Lavery on writing plays -- “What happens when I write is that I find that I’m somehow zoning on a number of things. I find that I’ve cut things out of newspapers because the story or something in them is interesting to me, and seems to me to have a place onstage. Then it starts coagulating. It’s like the soup starts thickening. And then a story, which is also a structure, starts emerging...”

Damion Searls and Writing Like Someone Else

Soon after reading Damion Searls's short story collection What we Were Doing and Where we Were Going, I read his translation of Rilke's “Interiors,” in "Paris Review" 190, and felt some uneasiness. The voice in the translation was Rilke's, yet I felt it was also Damion Searls's voice.

Writing fiction can be a way of filtering one's own life experience through what one has learned as a reader. Along these lines, one could argue that all writing is a form of incredibly free, incredibly loose translation.

Searls has compiled a collection of stories evoked by other stories. “56 Water Street” transposes the not-unannoying narrator of André Gide's novella “Marshlands” to a more contemporary setting. There are more references to “Marshlands” here than any non-specialist reader can hope to catch. Certain words like “potamogeton,” which refers to a type of pondweed -- it's a great word – are carried from one story to the other. Later Searls says of “Marshlands” that “the literary object as such is indistinct, low-lying, in a narrow tonal range: pale blues and greens and browns. Writing isn't spectacle, it's a delicate gray thing; it doesn't stand out against a background, it is its ambience.” This mood, evocative of a writer's murky, fluid social existence, is another thing Gide's story and Searls's have in common.

“The Cubicles” presents a contemporary dreary job through the prism of a nineteenth-century dreary job, the one described in Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Custom-House.” A line from “The Cubicles” -- “In one form or another, this same change, or syndrome, came over everyone among the cubicles: I mean a certain loss, in an extent proportional to the strength or weakness of one's character, of the self-generative mobility which distinguishes us from the vegetable kingdom.”

Searls rather aggressively creates his own precursors, setting up associations for me between authors I would not otherwise have connected. One commonality between many of the stories he selects as models is their rather labored irony. In an interview with "The Believer," Searls has talked in terms of “the new citationism,” cf. Zadie Smith's reworking of E.M. Forster in "On Beauty."

In an interview with Shelfari, Searls has said, “Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer I've worked with and a good friend, once told me she thinks every writer should serve the cause of Literature before expecting anyone to read their own writing: serve as a teacher, a translator, an editor or publisher.” Reasonable enough, although I believe there are more than four ways to serve the cause. Searls also told Shelfari, “You do find your voice a lot more easily if you try to write like someone else than if you try to write like yourself: if your story is entirely introspective and self-regarding then it's probably going to sound a lot like all the other stories like that we've already read, but the farther you get outside yourself the more it'll sound like you.”

This is good advice for most writers, but I'm wondering if Searls, in his own fiction, has not already taken it far enough -- F.R Leavis said that probably most inspiration is unconscious reminiscence, a thought that may point to the limits of what conscious reminscence can achieve...

Some Signs of the Times

Last Friday I celebrated PARK(ing) day for the first time. This idea started in San Francisco and has since caught on worldwide. A friend of a friend rented some sod, enough to fill the parking place outside his store in North Beach -- these are apparently good times for the sod business, because when a house is foreclosed on there's an attendant obligation to keep the environs looking nice...

A fence, a tree, a flamingo lawn ornament and some deckchairs were set up, and a few of us hung out in the newly lawn-ified parking spot with our daughters. A chance to look at a parking place in a new way... well, maybe you had to be there. The first time I've ever formed the mental association: slower, more relaxed pace of life <-> San Francisco parking place. It was, however, an experience that used up many quarters.

Meanwhile Google have partnered with On Demand Books to make two million out-of-copyright digitized texts available on the Espresso Book Machine -- see Anthony Grafton's comments here. Maybe one day, machines of this type will be available on street corners -- one will just be able to go outside and buy any text one wants in book form? An earlier Grafton article about progress towards a universal digital library contains the estimate that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print. That reminds me of an estimate I once saw that about five to ten per cent of human beings who ever lived are currently alive.

Also last week, Andrew Sullivan blogged an appeal to his readers to subscribe to the print "Atlantic Monthly," thus supporting their decision to put his open letter to George W. Bush about torture on the front cover. It turns out this appeal was strikingly successful, this even though the open letter can also be read online.

More Perspectives on Publishing

Samuel Johnson's birthday today.

Here's a link to some thoughts from Daniel Menaker on the publishing industry, including "Publishing is often an extremely negative culture," and "Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors." Those are the cheeriest bits.

Mike Shatkin responds here, pointing out among other things that --

"Each new book today is competing with millions of other book choices quite accessible to the consumer; 20 years ago it competed with about 100,000 other books. Forty years ago it competed with fewer than 50,000. Used books are offered right alongside the new ones online — a development of the past 10 years — and will increasingly be in the stores over the next 10 years. The amount of shelf space available for books at retail is shrinking for the first time in our lifetimes, while the number of titles competing for space is mushrooming. Menaker says 150,000 titles are being published annually; counting by the new ISBNs each year, the number is actually two or three times that large. Industry output was about 10,000 titles annually in the 1960s... It’s not just in people’s imagination that the business is getting harder and it is also becoming more depressed. People in books are not as happy as they used to be, because success, as measured by dollars in over dollars out, is not as ubiquitous as it used to be... It is characteristic of an industry that is getting smaller after several hundred years of only getting bigger..."

Another Shatkin post contains this striking observations --

"Not one major publisher has different product descriptions for the trade than they do for the consumer. Not one. When you’re talking about a book to a consumer what you want to say is 'you need this book because…' When you’re talking about a book to a bookstore you need to say, 'X number of people need this book because…' It’s a different pitch, but we’re using the same content for each."

From the same source --

"...value moves to scarcity. This is immutable, you cannot change this. Content creation and distribution are no longer scarce. Anybody can do them. Distribution is not an issue. I can type something on my computer today, I can flip it to my website, it is distributed. Any body in the world, on the web, can get it. The problem is, will they know about it? That’s the problem. Marketing is the problem. Distribution is no longer the problem. And you’re going to do your marketing niche by niche, and nugget by nugget, and it does require scale. If you don’t have enough content, or clout in a community, you won’t be heard. If you don’t pay enough attention or put enough labor into a community, you won’t be able to command the attention of that community."

Six Months Have Flown + InsideStorytime EXILE

I've been doing this blog for six months now. Persistence furthers, says the I Ching. Here's a Viktor Shklovsky quote I found online:

"You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours—ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.”

“If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed."

And here's a Steve Dodson languagehat.com post to make one feel uneasy about the validity of English translations of Shklovsky. While it's too late to see Shklovsky lecture at St. Petersburg's Stray Dog cabaret, you might make it to tonight's InsideStorytime at San Francisco's Cafe Royale, 6.30-8.30 pm. Tell us you heard about the event from this blog, and we waive the customary $3 and up sliding scale cover charge. Tonight's readers are --

Kathryn Ma, author of All That Work and Still no Boys, apparently the first work by an Asian-American author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award

Irete Lazo, author of The Accidental Santera, the story of an agnostic SFSU professor who becomes a priestess in a Caribbean religion

L. E. Leone, author of a fine short story collection called Big Bend, who also writes the food column “Cheap Eats” and plays steel drums under the name of “Sister Exister”

Roger Pinnell, whose short story “Shave” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007, and who is also the former lead singer of Piglatin

Olga Zilberbourg, author of КофеInn, published in St. Petersburg in 2006. If you're not familiar with the St. Petersburg literary scene, you may know Olga as the person who comments on my blog as “the other Olga.” She's thinking of starting her own blog about narrative theory.

Works of Art Whose Agenda Doesn't Include Me

“And the grafitti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreign ideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda – is that the word I want? -- not include me. I don't want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all.” -- Denis Johnson, The Name of the World

A contemporary form of the nineteenth-century credo “art for art's sake?” Mere reluctance to be part of anyone's demographic target market? Perhaps an intuition that all art has, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, a function similar to that of grafitti tagging?

“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless.” -- grafitti artist Banksy

David Foster Wallace and “Clicks”

In an interview, David Foster Wallace told Larry McCaffery this --

“For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments 'mathematical experiences.' What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called 'the click of a well-made box.' Something like that. The word I always think of it as is 'click...'”

“... It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s 'The Balloon' and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click. In Don DeLillo’s stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It’s maybe the only way to describe writers I love. I hear the click in most Nabokov. In Donne, Hopkins, Larkin. In Puig and Cortázar. Puig clicks like a fucking Geiger counter. And none of these people write prose as pretty as Updike, and yet I don’t hear the click in Updike.”

I can't say I really grok what Wallace meant by a “click.” If only someone had hooked him up to an MRI or PET scanner while he was reading, and asked him to report the “clicks,” back when we had the chance...

Interesting Versus Believable

“The trite and the extravagant are the Scylla and Charybdis of writers who deal in fiction,” Coleridge wrote in 1794, in a review of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Thomas Hardy once made a similar point --

“The whole secret of fiction and the drama --in the constructional part -- lies in the adjustment of things unusual to the things eternal and universal. The writer who knows exactly how exceptional and how non-exceptional his events should be made, possesses the key to the art.”

Here's how Samuel R. Delany puts it in About Writing --

“Writers are always grappling with two problems: they must make the story interesting (to themselves, if no one else), yet keep it believable (because, somehow, when it ceases to be believable on some level, it ceases to be interesting).”

Delany goes on,”Keeping things interesting seems to be primarily the province of the conscious mind (which, from the literature available, we know far less about than the unconscious), while believability is something that is supplied, in the images it throws up into the mind's theater, primarily by the unconscious.”

I have often wondered why fiction is more believable than non-fiction, and I think Delany gives us the answer here -- more of fiction is supplied by the unconscious mind, which is where emotional certainty comes from, cf. my earlier posts about Robert Burton's On Being Certain, here and here. “Believability” in this context isn't about statistical probability, because your unconscious mind believes in a lot of things your conscious mind hopefully doesn't. Magic, for example -- otherwise fantasy novels wouldn't sell.

I heard Douglas Adams say on the radio once that you don't decide what you think about something, and then put it into a novel – rather you write a novel because that's the only way to find out what you think about something. Another comment that's stuck with me: interviewed about his story “Pity” in Best American Short Stories 1995, Avner Mandelman said that the way to write a story was to take something you think you believe and prove it wrong in a story.

Then writing fiction is a way to find out what you unconsciously believe...

Software Algorithms That Predict What Books You'll Like

Future-of-publishing experts believe these will come to be useful for purposes of selling books. So far I'm skeptical. The books Amazon predicts I'll like seem completely random, although that may be because such books as I've bought from Amazon are either very obscure and hard to find, or else gifts for overseas relatives. The last book Amazon recommended to me wasn't even in a language I recognized, and the one before that was about how to draw sports figures.

But it's true that a decade or so ago, I bought an Irish folk CD from Amazon and Amazon recommended to me a jazz piano CD I'd just bought elsewhere. So I guess a reasonable percentage of people who bought the one CD also bought the other – it would be fascinating to know why.

Pandora does a better job for music. Interestingly it sometimes tells you what logic it's following -- when I told it I liked Robyn Hitchcock, it told me that I like “music where the vocals are central to the mix.” A weird way of looking at it – I would say that I like songs where the lyrics are important. And if the lyrics are important, the recording engineer is more likely to make the vocals central to the mix. But who knows, maybe at some level I really do like the sound of vocals being central to the mix, and got interested in words as a side-effect of that... my daughter's attitude seems to be far more common – she told me, “I want songs to have words, but I don't want the words to be clear enough to understand.”

On what basis can we say that someone who likes Calvino might also like Cortázar? Is it possible, in principle, told my five favorite Calvino stories, to deduce my five favorite Cortázar stories and two favorite Philip K. Dick novels?

Incidentally, Google announced a while back that they've turned on an
"artificial intelligence" tasked-array system capable of designing its own webpage -- this does look like the webpage Wintermute from Neuromancer would design, if Wintermute was really into pandas.

The Ending of "The Singers"

Turgenev's “The Singers" is discussed here by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Mueenuddin comments “when writing short stories, the hardest part is the ending," and raises the question of why “The Singers” ends the way it does. Charles May suggests an answer here, adding, “I think just about any educated person can read a literary novel if he or she is willing to process the words and keep at it long enough. I am not convinced that any person, no matter how educated, can read a literary short story without some knowledge of the form’s techniques, conventions, and devices. Now that knowledge can come from a teacher or it can come from experience of reading lots and lots of short stories until the conventions and devices become internalized...”

Now accepting that to understand short stories you need a professor to explain them to you would be the same as accepting that the short story is not a vital popular art-form -- a conclusion that for emotional reasons I just can't accept. And isn't the knowledge of how to read a novel likewise honed by reading lots of novels? If I hadn't read short stories for pleasure when I was growing up, would I now need someone to explain them to me? How is is that I understood – at least on some level -- the first novels and short stories that I read?

In “The Singers” we get the description of a dreary village, then some character studies. The main action is a singing contest in a tavern, with a pot of beer as the stakes. All the singers are extremely eccentric in remarkably different ways. One of them wins the pot of beer. Up to this point the story's content is essentially journalistic, even though the tone is lyrical and despondent.

What happens next is such a change of mood as you might find in the final movement of a concerto. The hunter naps in a hayloft, wakes up feeling disoriented, observes how drunk the singers have become, and while leaving the village, overhears a faraway plaintive call and response between two brothers:

"‘Come here, devil! woo-od imp!’
‘What fo-or?’ replied the other, after a long interval.
‘Because dad wants to thrash you!’"

After which the other boy, strangely, does not reply... May's interpretation of this ending, broadly speaking, is that the yearning for artistic transcendence is short-circuited by an awareness of the inevitability of corporal punishment – a fair enough comment, but hardly exhaustive of the story's effect.

I don't agree that we know how to read this story because of our knowledge of “the form’s techniques, conventions, and devices,” for the simple reason that I can't think of another short story that has a structure analogous to “The Singers.” We know how to read this story because of our experience of drunkenness and summer evenings, childhood suffering, and so on.

Stories contain their own operating instructions. Throughout “The Singers,” voices respond to other voices. A hunter learns about birds by listening to their calls, and in the same way this hunter learns about people.

One thing he learns through the juxtaposed events in “The Singers” is that Russia is filled with tremendous unfocused yearning, but kept in line by physical force. Hanging in the night air is the question of where such a society is headed. Sketches from a Hunter's Album was widely read as an attack on serfdom, and not only by people with formal training in literary criticism. There are many reasons why the ending of “The Singers” is good -- if there weren't, it wouldn't be. But what comes first is its haunting effect – the story stays with us, as it stayed with Mueenuddin, compelling us to analyze it further and further.

Aliveness in Writing

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead -- “One of my university professors, who was also a poet, used to say that there was only one real question to be asked about any work, and that was – is it alive, or is it dead? I happen to agree, but in what does this aliveness or deadness consist? The biological definition would be that living things grow and change, and can have offspring, whereas dead things are inert. In what way can a text grow and change and have offspring? Only through its interaction with a reader, no matter how far away that reader may be from the writer in time and in space.”

Writing is alive if it begets more writing?

Raymond Chandler defined literature as “any sort of writing that glows with its own heat.” In the spirit of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, we might look for other ways our response to strong writing resembles our response to living things. If something's alive, there's the issue of longevity -- some writing feels alive to only one generation, or for only one decade, while the greatest writing we call “immortal.” Living works can be found even in dead languages. Then there's the concept of a literary ecosystem, as in this passage from Franco Moretti's Modern Epic:

“... more than three centuries ago, the Inquisition decided to forbid the sale of European novels in Latin America. An act of censorship with very clear intentions – and very strange consequences. Because, once the novel was eliminated, the result (other things being equal) was a literary system that, far from being poorer, was much richer than its European counterpart. An absurd result, at first sight: a subtraction producing an increase. But a bit less absurd if you think of literature as a kind of ecosystem, and of the novel, for its part, as the most fearsome predator of the last half millennium. In such a scenario, a world without novels certainly loses one narrative form: unlike Europe, however, it preserves all the other forms that the novel would otherwise have swept away. In particular, pre-realistic narrative forms survive (myths, legends, romances of chivalry); and hybrid forms, such as the cronica, where the boundary between invention and historical fact is unclear.”

Narrative as a Maze

My daughter loves the hay maze at Arata Pumpkin Farm near Half Moon Bay. We stumbled on it accidentally, driving back from Santa Cruz, and have since revisited it several times. The farm has been there since the 1930s. They build a new hay maze every year.

A good maze is one you should still be able to get lost in, even after you've found your way through it a few times. There's a ritual, spiritual quality involved. The pleasure is not mostly in getting to the end, but in losing yourself within a microcosm, secluded and fragrant. A story, too, is composed of twists and forking paths, and should make you lose your bearings for a while, only to find them again.

I've been thinking lately about difficulty as a necessary component of pleasure. People get it that a maze is no fun unless it's complicated. The idea that stories are like that too seems to be less popular. A story is not a maze or a puzzle, but it resembles one in that its designer has been there ahead of you, anticipating your reactions and then trying to second-guess you. Having a professor of hay mazes lead you through explaining everything would entirely ruin the experience. In which connection, here is William Deresiewicz in the Nation blaming academics for the decline in reading.

Operating Instructions

Olga Zilberbourg, a frequent commenter on this blog, has a post up about some things Jim Shepard said in workshops.

My favorite of her quotes from Shepard -- “Stories always provide their own operating instructions.”

The phrase “secret key of the story” is maybe unfortunate, as it could feed into the misconception that literary fiction is full of puzzles. Which I think is only true of such High Modernists as T. S. Eliot and the later Joyce.

Zilberbourg comments, “Personally, I am convinced that each story contains as many 'secret keys' as there are readers.”

I agree with the sentence as long as the word “secret” is taken out -- the operation instructions are provided in the story, there's nothing secret there. When you play a computer game that's any fun, you generally have to figure out the rules as you go along, and isn't it the same when you're reading?

Zilberbourg tells me what is meant by Shepard's "secret key" is “a way of turning something others might perceive as an inexperience or weakness in a writer's vocabulary into the first step of a revision process.”

The Case Against Travel

Michelle Gagnon raises the question of whether it's really necessary to visit places before setting fiction there. After all, to travel as much as Graham Greene did requires rather a lot of money and emotional detachment.

An example Gagnon gives is that Martin Cruz Smith only spent about a week in the Soviet Union prior to writing his excellent novel Gorky Park.

Ultimately Gagnon's question can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes all that's really needed for story purposes is enough scenic detail that the reader can suspend disbelief – details often best acquired through a combination of library research, distant memories, and pure confabulation.

Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows -- “There are things that are hard to photograph: guerilla warfare, the end of an era, the meaning of a place. And there are things it is nearly impossible to photograph: the subtle workings of the human heart, the wandering paths desire and fury take, the bonds of love and blood that tie people together, the decisions that tear them apart, the way that the most unprepossessing landscape can become home and thus speak of stories, traditions, gods that strangers cannot decipher from the rocks and streams.”

These things aren't easy to observe while traveling either but, with luck and effort, one can get at them somehow by reading and writing and redrafting and remembering/ transforming/ figuring out...

The Case Against Reading

Some paragraphs in Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You imagine what the conventional wisdom about reading might be, had computer games been invented first:

“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying – which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements – books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.”

“Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading experiences are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.”

And also this:

“But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control these narratives in any fashion – you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to 'follow the plot' instead of learning to read.”

Johnson is not endorsing these arguments, but encouraging us to be more open-minded about computer games. And yet I've heard people seriously express variants of all the above propositions. I once read, in a computer gaming magazine, the argument that a book's narrative linearity is somehow a flaw. Once, when I proposed that books are better than movies because there's so much more activity going on in my brain when I'm reading than when I'm watching a movie, a friend said he felt that for him it was the other way around.

That the conventional wisdom has become so pro-reading is a major reason to fear that too few people nowadays are addicted to this activity. Mikita Brottman, in her book The Solitary Vice, writes that in Victorian times, “too much reading was considered an impediment to living a full life; people believed that reading novels would fill your head with dreams, leaving you unprepared for the disappointing bleakness of the real world.”

Location Location Location

The artist and ultra-allusive High Modernist Welsh poet David Jones wrote that “of all artists ever, James Joyce was the most dependent on the particular, on place, site, locality.” I'm quoting from an essay in the December 1950 “Dublin Review,” that was reprinted in Jones's 1959 essay collection Epoch and Artist:

“For the Joycean achievement, his medium had to be English, because that language is the lingua franca of today. (Cf. Bismarck's awareness, eighty years ago, of the all-determining fact that New York spoke English.) But if the medium had to be English the cultural and mythological content had to be European, and West European, at that; which means that nothing less than a proper understanding of the Catholic mind would serve; including both an understanding of the dogmatic and scholastic modes of thought, together with an inward understanding of a traditional popular, rooted, vulgar, Catholic practice, sufficiently linked with the life of a land, of a specific countryside, and thus with the pre-Christian and immemorial thought-patterns of a genuine 'folk.' And all this again linked with, encroached upon, and largely corrupted by, a modern industrial slum-culture and a saloon-bar folk-lore; for preference that of a seaport and again for preference in a locality influenced to some measure both actually and traditionally by the New World beyond 'Brendan's herring pool.' Again, for preference, with a Celtic hinterland, because the Celtic deposits incorporated pre-Celtic ones and these together underlie the Germanic-Latin fusion and this whole amalgam is the West...”

This exercise of proving that Joyce had to be from Dublin continues for another paragraph or so, and feels perverse. How close is Jones here to committing some kind of fallacy of geographical determinism?

In a similar spirit, one might demonstrate the inevitability of V. S. Naipaul being from Trinidad, a place “not strictly of South America, and not strictly of the Caribbean,” as Naipaul remarked in his Nobel Lecture, hence providing unique points of imaginative access to each of those regions. That most Trinidadians are of African origin gave Naipaul a starting point for writing about Africa. Being from a family of poor brahmins, generations removed from India, gave him a unique perspective on India, and that some of Trinidad's Indians are Muslims may have been useful when writing about the Muslim world. That Naipaul was from a former plantation society helped make his book about the U.S. South illuminating, and so on. But when he was a struggling writer in 1950s London, who foresaw that origins in Trinidad might be of any use for becoming a world writer?

For writers, one's background is part of the puzzle one has to work on solving.

Inverse Platitudes

A quote from Bazarov, the Nihilist character in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons -- “... should you say that education is useful, you will be uttering a platitude: but should you say that education is harmful, you will be uttering an inverse platitude. The one is identical with the other, except that they differ a little in elegance of expression.”

Rather than “identical” we might say “isomorphic?”

Inverse platitudes are something I think we all have to watch out for. Someone who hates snobbery, for example, may well become an inverse snob – thus continuing to judge people by precisely the same criteria used by snobs. It's better to come up with new criteria altogether.

Same problem if you abandon Eurocentrism merely to adopt Europeripheralism. Once I heard a KALX DJ say on the air that she celebrated Patrick's Day because she was part-Irish and “that's the only culture my white ass is ever going to have.”

Her logic is clear. In the nineteenth century, cultured places were more or less defined as metropolises situated at the heart of empires. To distance herself from this world view, our Irish-American DJ insists on perceiving culture only in those regions that have the most history of political oppression from without. This attitude's weakness is that it perfectly preserves the structure of the original prejudice.