Falling Short in the Names Department

Martin Amis wrote this in The Moronic Inferno --

"The way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world -- to his reality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and freakish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maas and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or elsewhere, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?)."

Talk about names, and instantly you're talking about social class. The human brain may not be able to tell much about people from their names, but it believes it can. Often the process by which we decide what someone's like -- regardless of whether they're someone we're about to meet or a fictional character -- begins with our response to their name, a response deriving from our prior experience of other people's names.

Alan Bennett wrote this in Telling Tales --

"Years later when I came to read Proust, I found a great deal about names and their intrinsic flavour. The names that intrigued the young Marcel, though, were ancient names: Robert de Saint Loup en Bray, or the various names and titles of Guermantes family, lichened in history and tradition. It was a far cry from Dino Galvani (of ITMA) or J. Mouland Begbie (leader of the BBC Scottish Orchestra) or that stalwart of the BBC Repertory Company and voice of Tammy Troot, Moultrie R. Kelsall. These are the names I remember. I had not yet begun to write at that time and so this falling short in the names department was another deterrent, a reminder that to write one had to have something to write out of, and my names like my memories didn't come up to scratch."

Children in Failed Nation-States Begging for Books -- Some Perspective

In Doris Lessing's essay collection Time Bites, she describes visiting an refugee camp for Afghan women and children, in Pakistan in 1986. She writes that the boys begged foreign visitors for books, pens, paper. But all they ever got taught was to recite the Koran, and the girls received no education at all. Lessing's sense is that, given access to books, those boys might not have grown up to be the Taliban.

Lessing notes that children in Zimbabwe – the country where Lessing spent most of her own childhood -- incessantly beg foreign visitors for books. “A survey was made in the villages, and it turned out that what these book-starved people yearn for are romances, detective stories, poetry, adventures, biography, novels of all kinds, short stories. Exactly what a survey in this country would reveal... that is, among people who still read.”

She reports that the most popular book in Zimbabwe is Animal Farm, which kind of figures.

“A box of even elementary books may transform a village. A box of books may be, often is, greeted with tears. One man complained, 'They taught us how to read, but now there are no books.' Three years ago a Penguin classic cost more than a month's wages. But even with books that were so far from what was originally dreamed of in no time study classes began, literary classes, maths lessons, citizenship classes. The appearance of a box of released (will release again?) astonishing energies. A village sunk in apathy will come to life overnight. This is not a people who wait for handouts; a little encouragement, help, sets them off on all kinds of project. This week (January 2003) I heard from one of the Book Team. 'I was out this week. I was talking about books to people who haven't eaten for three days.'”

Lydia Millet and the Devastating Loss of the Divine

My interview with Lydia Millet just went up on Identity Theory. She talks about the ways our society treats the profane as the sacred and vice versa, and why she revels in being a dry-nosed primate.

Her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys is just out from Soft Skull.

Millet told me that ambitious macrosocial writing isn't being published as boldly as it should be. More on Millet's definition of “macrosocial” here – discussing Lynne Tillman, Millet has written that in most contemporary fiction “the self is understood as a social being for whom the greatest meaning, and the truest answers to life’s questions, resides in dynamics with family, friends, and sexual partners. That the best fiction articulates not just a view of this microsocial self but also a view of the macrosocial self, the self in relation to the larger mysteries of the world, is often either forgotten or actively repudiated.”

Millet also works for the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson. In an interview for The Rumpus, Millet told Olivier Lamm, “My writing and my day job come from the same place: a love of the beasts and growths and forms of this stunning and irreplaceable world, a belief that humans are, in fact, not the sun around which the other planets revolve but mere planets themselves, which rotate ceaselessly around a flaming core of being they can’t understand.”

I've heard that, tired of being referred to as a “nature writer,” Gary Nabhan retorted that there are two types of writing -- writing, and urban dysfunctional writing. Lydia Millet's project lately has been to fuse both types of writing into a meaningful whole. Reading her, after reading lots of urban dysfunctional writing, is like getting out of the city long enough to remember what real air is supposed to feel like.

Here's an animated version by Luca DiPierro of the first sentence of Lydia Millet's story “Sir Henry,” brought to you by Electric Literature.

Books are Hard to Sell, do Texts Want to be Free?

Managing the toys-and-books stand at my daughter's school carnival, I noticed that hardly anyone, children or adults, even looked at the books. There were many excellent books on display, and many bestsellers, all at bargain prices, and the parents at the school in question are a bohemian bunch, and most everything else on display was a plastic toy of minimal intrinsic value... yet about the only book I sold was one set of three Cormac McCarthy novels, for a dollar. A used bookstore might have given me two or three dollars. For purposes of comparison, I sold plenty of Pokémon cards.

As an undergraduate back in the old country, I was rather puzzled that not every shop was a bookshop – I wondered what besides books anyone would voluntarily spend money on? Nowadays I'm less naïve, but it's still a sobering thought that, by selling an excellent-condition, beautifully-illustrated edition of The Origin of Species, one of the fundamental classics produced by our civilization, to a reputable bookseller, one can barely bring in enough cash for a cheap Chinese meal. And trying to unload books on eBay, I've learned that even the most hyped of bestsellers can barely be sold for a price that covers the cost of shipping it to the highest bidder, plus fees.

What makes an object valuable is its rarity, and the authors of books do not, on the whole, want them to become rare. This is from Thomas M. Disch's The Castle of Indolence -- “A poet's relation to the marketplace is full of ironies, none crueler than the fact that the less one is read, the higher the prices one's books may command. Perhaps in the computer age now dawning that cruelty can be diminished, for with the technology already existing it should be able to create a central data bank of out-of-print poetry, thereby liberating the art from its present subjection to antiquarian booksellers and literary estates that possess copyright whose value is comparable to Confederate money.”

The Castle of Indolence was published in 1995, a year before Google was founded -- it's noteworthy that Disch saw the prospect of a central data bank of out-of-print works as a liberation. Were texts simply never meant to be trapped inside books?

In his novel Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinski touches on the practice of kula among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, as studied by Bronislaw Malinowski. Kula is the ritualized and seemingly pointless exchange of highly-prized necklaces and armbands. Berlinski compares this to the collecting of rare books, noting the existence of “editions so precious they cannot be touched or read” and “books valuable precisely because the pages have never been cut and therefore cannot be read.”

Should e-publishing be touted as a way of drawing attention away from the fetishistic qualities of a book, and towards the redemptive properties of its content?

Stories About Jews Killing Nazis

Irwin Shaw's “The Inhabitants of Venus” is a story mostly set in a crowded téléférique -- an aerial cable-car or gondala lift -- at a postwar Swiss ski resort. The hero, Robert – born a French Jew, but now a U.S. citizen -- hears a German insulting some American women. He resolves to punch the German, once they reach the top of the ski slope. But the stakes are raised when Robert catches a glimpse of his adversary's face, recognizing him as a man who once tried to kill him for being Jewish.

Because they're in a téléférique, Robert cannot at first see the German and, when he recognizes his face, cannot fight him immediately. This creates suspense, and also allows for the final twist: when the passengers get off the cable car, it turns out the Nazi has lost a leg during the war. Robert's code of honor will not let him kill a one-legged man, and symbolically, Germany is shown as unrepentant but also maimed and absurd, no longer dangerous. Robert watches the Nazi ski away on one leg, reflecting “there was nothing more to be done, nothing more to wait for, except a cold, hopeless, everlasting forgiveness.”

The story wouldn't have worked if Robert had actually killed the Nazi. Avner Mandelman's “Pity” is another fine story where the Jew winds up not killing the Nazi -- I'm wondering if it's even possible to write a good story about a Jew killing a Nazi? Perhaps the psychological mechanism at work in such a story would be so transparent, the story would inevitably fail?

I think of the penultimate chapter in Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, “Vanadium,” which tells a true story. The company Levi worked for was doing business with a German company, and Levi realized that one of the German chemists involved, Dr. Müller, was an official Levi had encountered while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz. Levi wrote a letter to Dr. Müller, who sent him a reply which Levi felt to be inept and only half-sincere. Later Levi heard that Dr. Müller had killed himself.

At some level “Vanadium” wants to be read as a story of revenge. It's as if Levi's contacting Dr. Müller was in itself confrontation enough to destroy him. But Levi's tone is calm and measured throughout, and a buried need for revenge is expressed through the structure of the story alone. We're confronted here with the limits of what storytelling can accomplish.

Some Irwin Shaw Stories

A few years back I enjoyed reading Short Stories: Five Decades, a collection of sixty-four stories by Irwin Shaw. Shaw was a successful author of radio plays, bestselling novels, nonfiction, and much else. His parents were Russian Jews who emigrated to the Bronx, and his stories from this volume that have stayed with me tend to be those that deal with the twentieth-century Jewish experience.

“Retreat,” for instance, occurs soon before the Germans withdraw from Paris. A German major sits down at a café table with a Parisian Jewish saxophonist who by force of his wits has barely survived the Occupation. The German vainly seeks forgiveness. When he argues that the worst things that have happened in Paris are not the fault of the German army but of the Gestapo, the Jew replies, “I do not recall seeing the Gestapo in Paris until after the German army came in...” It's a good line in the way Bogart's lines talking back to the Gestapo in “Casablanca” are good... uplifting, but not ultimately believable, which may be why the story feels more commercial than literary...

“The Passion of Lance Corporal Hawkins” is told from the viewpoint of a British soldier who helped liberate Belsen but is now fighting to keep Jews from landing in the British Mandate of Palestine. The problem here is that Shaw's own Zionist views come across so overwhelmingly that Hawkins's own thought processes never become credible. The story might have worked better if Shaw had simply gone with an Israeli viewpoint character.

But he may not have felt this was an option – my sense is that Shaw wanted always to write as an American first, and as a Jew second. I think of something Cynthia Ozick wrote about Isaac Babel, comparing Babel's stories with his 1920 Diary -- the stories edit out not all, but most, of the Jewish suffering that pervades the Diary. As Ozick puts it, only six of thirty-five stories in Babel's The Red Cavalry touch on the suffering of Jews, a theme which entirely pervades the Diary.

Shaw may have exercised an equal restraint. His story “Act of Faith” deals with the fear of a Jewish-American soldier, returning from World War Two, that his family's lives will be threatened by anti-Semitism in the U.S. At the end of the story, the soldier's faith in America and in his Army comrades wins out. When I compare the story with another story by a second-generation American -- Philip Roth's “Defender of the Faith,” about an American Jew who takes advantage of his Jewishness to avoid pulling his weight in the U.S. Army – I realize that none of Shaw's stories contain an unsympathetic Jewish character. And why should they, he might have asked? Haven't the Jews been libeled enough?

But while the stories “Act of Faith” and “Defender of the Faith” are driven by the same anxiety about the future of the Jews, Roth's story is stronger. Roth has always been willing to write things that will make people dislike him, and that may be part of his greatness.

Hazlitt and Naipaul on Drowning

William Hazlitt's “My First Acquaintance with Poets" contains a story featured in many books about Hazlitt – Tom Paulin's The Day-Star of Liberty being one of my favorite of these books. The incident occurred while Hazlitt and Coleridge were walking and talking together. It served to strengthen Hazlitt in his belief that men are not naturally selfish.

“A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him at the risk of their own lives. He said 'he did not know how it was that they had ventured, but, Sir, we have a nature towards one another.'”

This impressed Hazlitt as evidence for William Godwin's conviction that, under ideal social conditions, we are naturally altruistic. I always found it an uplifting story, so it was with some dismay that I learned from Patrick French's biography of V.S Naipaul, The World is What it is, that Naipaul, as a boy, had a diametrically opposed experience, which Naipaul wrote about to his first wife --

“When I was twelve, I went to the seaside. Three people – a brother & 2 sisters – had been drowned. They could have been saved, but the fishermen had wanted to know how much they would be paid! Oh, the terror I felt then. The fishermen pulled in the seine and brought in the bodies and caught an extraordinary number of catfish, always anxious to get at the helpless. The three bodies relaxed in the sand. The sun going down. And, from a cheap beach café, a gramophone: Bésame mucho” -- Kiss me often, my darling, and say that you'll always be mine. I don't know what people of 12 feel, but I have never forgotten that.”

Writing as Engineering

Primo Levi wrote this, in The Periodic Table, after describing the molecular structure of alloxan --

“It is a pretty structure, isn't it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that 'beautiful' edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals or the arches of bridges. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical: to say 'beautiful' is to say 'desirable,' and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most durable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward.”

We're naturally driven to make things that are well-made – to make something well-made brings us satisfaction. Levi suggests here that all creative actions can be explained in terms of our innate preference for efficiency.

Levi told Philip Roth, in an interview recorded in Roth's book Shop Talk, “I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal...” Levi added that, for him, “work is identical with 'problem solving.'”

From John Updike's Bech: A Book -- “... Bech talked of fiction as an equivalent of reality, and described how the point of it, the justification, seemed to lie in those moments when a set of successive images locked and then one more image arrived and, as it were, superlocked, creating a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality, e.g. the lightning ladder of chemical changes in the body cell that translates fear into action or, say, the implosion of mathematics consuming the heart of a star.”

Who You Want to be, Who You’re Afraid You Are

James Ellroy, interviewed in “Paris Review” 190 (Fall 2009), explains why he prefers Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler:

“Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed.”

It’s true that Philip Marlowe is, perhaps almost to the same degree as Bertie Wooster, implausibly devoted to his own code of honor, a gallant knight in a world where all others are Machiavellians…

I'm interested -- should your hero be the person you want to be, or the person you’re afraid you are? Couldn’t one make a case either way? Some heroes are a mixture of the two. Series heroes perhaps tend to be the former -- Jack Reacher seems to be the man Lee Child wants to be, John Rain the man Barry Eisler wants to be, and so on.

But it’s important for a writer to remember that nobody’s incorruptible... what do you think? Tell me about heroes you have created...

Literary Reproductive Strategies

I quoted Margaret Atwood on “aliveness” in writing -- an image that ties in with Thomas Hardy's sense of a story as an organism -- and her proposal that all writing is motivated by a desire to bring something back from the dead.

Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost also develops the idea of writing as birthing:

“Even now I have a horror of someone standing behind my desk and looking over my shoulder as the words appear on the screen. There is a place, a gap, a hiatus, between the hatching words, flinching and raw, and those that are ready to take their place in the world, words that are ready to stand up and fight.”

From later in Mantel’s memoir --

“At one time, I was plagued by a spate of dreams in which I was a midwife who had let a child die; but when I got my first book on track again, and when, after many years in limbo, it was published at last, those dreams ceased. But time goes on, you think of more and more books you should have written, stories half-fledged and left in the file called 'Work in Progress.' I know some of these narratives will never be finished. I dream of half-formed, fetal beings, left abandoned on a cold floor. Sometimes they are blackened, like frozen corpses.”

A cold thought indeed. When we look back and compare Dickens to a seahorse, are we fantasizing about a lost age when high fecundity, low parental investment was a viable literary-reproductive strategy? Do we have a regretful feeling that the ecosystem we live in now forces us towards a strategy of higher parental investment, lower fecundity -- in other words, more marketing, less writing? Mantel describes having not only to hatch a work but also patiently to raise it, pull a strings on its behalf… not just midwife but foster-parent… we may fear that our adopted progeny are in danger or stillborn, that the oceans of fiction are dying…

Then again, the jury’s still out -- maybe Mantel will end up publishing more novels than Dickens did.

Did the Lit Crawl Cause the Decline of the Roman Empire?

Tonight (Friday October 16th) at 8 p.m., “Underground Exposed: A Zine Retrospective,” at Chrome Bags, 580 4th St. Panels will feature some of the city’s best zinesters.

And tomorrow (Saturday October 17th) the Crawl! Full schedule here. This year there will be food vendors. Seek street parking at your peril -- it's always impossible to park in the Mission during the Lit Crawl, and this year, Valencia Street is under construction. Taking BART instead will be better for your peace of mind.

Access your printable Crawl map here!

Follow us on twitter@litcrawl to find out which events have standing room!

The many Crawl events this year will include an InsideStorytime, Mced by me, at the Marsh café, featuring readings by sex worker authors featured in the Soft Skull anthology
Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex. Readers will include the book's editors, David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin, Jr., as well as three other contributors, Diana Morgaine, Juliet November, and Juliana Piccillo.

Is being in the Mission during the Lit Crawl like spending a night in Augustan Rome? Check out this Tony Perrottet essay in "The Believer" about Roman recitationes. Perrottet writes, “The craze for literary readings in Rome was sudden and overwhelming: It occurred during that unique historical moment when Rome made the transition from a Republic to an Empire...”

Jerome Carcopino claimed in Daily Life in Ancient Rome that literary readings were a cancer that ate away at the moral and intellectual fabric of the Roman Empire. Perrottet -- “'Examining the contemporary literature,' Jerome Carcopino sums up, 'we soon get the impression that everyone was reading something, no matter what, aloud in public, all the time, morning and evening, winter and summer.' Even Pliny the Younger—obviously no slouch with his own marathon readings—complained that the number of recitationes was becoming a wearisome burden. Every day there would be yet another invitation.”

Perrottet mentions that, at one of the Emperor Nero's recitals, an audience member was obliged to feign death in order to go use the bathroom. I promise this will not happen at the Lit Crawl! As Tom Lehrer sang in another context, “It's only for a week so have no fear. Be grateful that it doesn't last all year.” Perhaps the Romans made the mistake of living as if it was Litquake all year long...

Survival of the Fittest

Surviving Litquake okay? Tonight I'll be at Varnish Fine Art, 77 Natoma Street, at 7 p.m., listening to original short stories on the theme of “Survival of the Fittest.” Litquake brings you this event in conjunction with Evolve 2009, a celebration of Charles Darwin’s two hundredth birthday and of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

Tonight's authors will be Cornelia Nixon, Chelsea Martin, Russell Hill, Sylvia Brownrigg, Kathryn Ma, and Lori Ostlund.

Since survival of the fittest is the topic, here are some Literary Darwinist thoughts of the day.

From Ian McEwan''s essay in The Literary Animal -- “If one reads accounts of the systematic non-instrusive observations of troops of bonobo -- bonobos and chimps rather than baboons are our closest relatives -- one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English nineteenth century novel: alliances made and broken, individuals rising while others fall, plots hatched, revenge, gratitude, injured pride, successful and unsuccessful courtship, bereavement and mourning.”

And here's an essay by Jonathan Gottschall about how literary criticism can become more scientific. Gottschall is the author of a study that found “female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies.” In this essay he also claims to have scientifically disproved Roland Barthes's claim that the author is dead.

Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon

On my way to the Litquake Book Ball last Friday, I managed to catch the question period following Dan Chaon's reading at Books Inc. I learned that Dan Chaon has a laugh like an engine that won't start properly. I heard him say that, when he was an MFA student, he was influenced by writers like Shirley Jackson and Peter Straub, but his teachers admonished him not to write genre fiction.

The author who Await Your Reply most reminds me of is actually Tim Powers. Both authors are drawn to the edge between reality and fantasy, a fertile breeding place for conspiracies. Both write fiction strongly rooted in the emotions of everyday life, even though the details tend towards the fantastic. Both create haunted worlds where more is going on than is at first apparent. However – and this is perhaps the enviable part – Chaon achieves this effect without having to do as much research as Tim Powers does.

But I don't know how many Tim Powers fans will read Await Your Reply. The borders between genres are sometimes very arbitrary.

Await Your Reply is about the scary side of a society where everyone's free to keep reinventing themselves, and how fragile our sense of identity is --

“And yet, there were times when his calm began to abandon him, brief moments – an unexplained IM, a suspicious clerk at the DMV, a credit card charge abruptly denied – and suddenly he'd feel that old panic crackling across the back of his neck, a shadow had been trailing after him all along, and suddenly he knew that if he turned to look over his shoulder, there it would be.”

Chaon told Bookslut that the story started as some Hitchcockian images in his head. The way the novel's three plot lines eventually combine is ingenious, and melancholy, and I believe rather technically original.

Dan Chaon has a long book tour ahead of him. I hope he isn't feeling too lonely out there. I hope nobody steals his identity. America is a dangerous place to send authors touring through – do they never fall through the cracks into imaginary dimensions? What if they start running into their own characters out there? Wait a minute... how do we even know that this guy claiming to be Dan Chaon is really Dan Chaon?

Where the Mind Meets the Brain

What is the relationship between mind and body? Is consciousness an accidental byproduct of neuronal complexity? Tonight (Tuesday October 13th, 2009, 6-7 p.m.), Joe Quirk will be posing questions like these, only funnier, to this impressive array of panelists --

Paul Ekman, world authority on facial expressions.

Robert Burton, a writer and neurologist who has suggested that, rather than think of consciousness and unconsciousness as fundamentally different, we see cognition as a single entity that is subdivided into various ways of being experienced.

Alva Noë, a philosopher who argues consciousness is not something that happens inside us, but rather something we do.

Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, whose work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences is featured in the last Dan Brown novel.

The event takes place at the Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post Street, famous for being the San Francisco library it's hardest to find parking near. Tonight, however, you should be able to leave your car at home and swim there. It will apparently be a good event at which to meet “brainiac singles," as well as an opportunity to return some of those overdue books.

I personally feel the mind is like an operating system – I keep opening more and more windows about unrelated topics, it gets harder and harder to find the one I'm supposed to be dealing with, and finally the whole system crashes, kerblam. Well, maybe it's just as well I'm not one of tonight's panelists.

And tomorrow (Wednesday, October 14^th 2009, 8 p.m.) -- the Amy Tan roast at the Opera House!)

Gimme Something Better

Litquake and Porchlight collaborate tonight -- Monday, October 12th, 2009, 8 p.m., at Broadway Studios, 435 Broadway, San Francisco -- to bring you true tales of punk-rock anarchy excess. This is a launch for the new book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day, compiled by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor.

Gabe Meline writes, “Gimme Something Better has it all: dead dogs, statutory rape, skinhead fights, the origins of the term 'emo,' promoters accidentally taking acid in jail, M-80s, soup lines, people falling through skylights, people getting torched with flamethrowers, teenagers on meth squatting in empty beer vats, exhumed bodies, laundromats, Ford Pintos, murderers and millionaires.”

“There are also some parts about bands.”

Here is a sample quote from Jesse Michaels -- “Upon reflection I regret in any way popularizing fucking with people's yards. Some things aren't meant to go beyond the handful of idiots who do them.” Words to live by.

Featured in the event will be Penelope Houston, Lynn Breedlove, Oran Canfield, John Geek, Chicken John, Jesse Luscious, Kareim McKnight, Hank Rank, Rozz Rezabek, Bucky Sinister, Anna Joy Springer, and Johnny Strike. Weather predictions for tonight are for 40 m.p.h winds and heavy rain, so please plan accordingly.

LQX Begins Today!

Although the news of Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is getting more media attention, San Francisco's tenth annual Litquake festival kicks off today. Speaking as a Litquake committee member, I'm amazed how many meetings, e-mails, phone calls etc. it takes to make a literary festival happen.

Well, the hour's finally come... Here is 7x7's guide to Litquake 2009. Tonight, October 9th, while Blue Angels soar overhead in celebration oif Fleet Week, Litquake kicks off with the Book Ball, 8 pm, Green Room, second floor of the Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Avenue. The kind of event William Hazlitt might have been thinking of when he wrote the following -- “Like children, our step-mother Nature holds us up to see the raree-show of the universe, and then, as if we were a burden to her to support, lets us fall down again. Yet what brave sublunary things does not this pageant present, like a ball or fete of the universe!”

I'll be at the raree-show tonight, and on Sunday October 11th I'll attend the Barely Published Authors event, one of my favorite parts of Litquake, MCed by the dashing Ransom Stephens. 7 pm, Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd Street.

Next week I'll blog about Litquake some more, but now I have to go look for some clothes that don't have holes in them... The dress code for tonight was described to me as "either classy with a hint of eccentric or eccentric with a hint of classy," and with some effort I might be able to pull off the second of these...

Prize Artefacts

The Nobel Literature Prize went to Herta Müller today. These are the odds Ladbrokes were giving out yesterday. A fascinating cultural artefact, that list of odds, it raises so many questions -- e.g. why was Bob Dylan thought four times more likely to win the Prize than were Michel Tournier or Paul Auster?

M.A. Orthofer predicted Müller's win, having noticed her odds climbing from 50/1 to 3/1. He blogs “One lesson to be taken from this: the Swedish Academy has a big leak, and someone made a mint placing money on Müller at 50/1.” Orthofer's post also has links to more info about Müller.

Here's another cultural artefact -- Ted Gioia's provocative alternative list of Nobel Literature Prize winners for the last century or so. In some cases I prefer Gioia's choice to the actual winner, but in other cases not... generally his alternative list is way too biased towards those who write in English. But then how many people are both fluent and well-read in hundreds of different languages?

Hilary Mantel is quoted as saying, of the Booker Prize she won earlier this week, “It buys time. That's what an author wants." How terrifyingly true. Note that this is the first time ever that the winners of the Nobel Literature Prize and Man Booker Prize have had the same first and last initial. Imagine the odds you could have gotten from Ladbroke's on that...

What Kind of Fish is Nick Hornby?

Nick Hornby notes here, “One of my favourite literary facts is that Dickens is estimated to have created thirteen thousand characters, an astounding number – the population of Ely! – that’s always taken as evidence of his extraordinary energy and indefatigable imagination. Every now and again, though, you start to wonder whether it’s not some form of incontinence. For example, he introduces fourteen new characters between pages 209 and 214 of my Penguin edition of Great Expectations – fifteen if you count Mrs Pocket’s deceased father, who gets a couple of pages more or less to himself anyway. Do the Pockets have to have seven children? And two nurses? And two lodgers? And a quirky next-door neighbour? There’s something almost animal about this level of production – this is Dickens as seahorse, popping out tiny creatures apparently uncontrollably, and with very little effort. It’s not his best passage of writing, understandably, those six pages. Maybe someone should have taken him discreetly aside and told him what precautions were available for great novelists.”

Surely Hornby's estimate of how many characters Dickens is way too high – Hornby is talking about Ely, Cambridgeshire, but I find it hard to believe there are enough Dickens characters even to populate Ely, Nevada – but this hardly matters because the image of Dickens as a seahorse is so perfect!

The image of novelist as sea creature is also frequently employed by P.G. Wodehouse, e.g. --

“Ideally, of course, authors ought to be like the male codfish, and many of them are, at any rate as far as looks are concerned. I know a dozen novelists whose appearance will admit them to an Old Home Week of codfish and no questions asked.”

“But I am thinking more of the male codfish after his union has been blessed and he has become a father of three million little codfish, for when this happens he conscientiously resolves to love them all alike and have no favourites. And this ought to be the spirit in which an author regards his books.”

I'm leaving the “u” in words like “favourite” today, and Noah Webster be damned. But if Dickens is a seahorse and Wodehouse a codfish, what kind of fish is Nick Hornby? Please let me know.

And now the newsflash -- there will be a screening tonight (Wednesday, October 7, 2009) at 8:30 p.m. at Embarcadero Center Cinemas, of the movie “An Education,” written and produced by Hornby, which won the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. You can buy tickets here. The price also includes a copy of Hornby's Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, his collected books column from “The Believer.” There will be a Q&A with Hornby after the screening, and here are his tips on how to process any life advice he may give you.

Is Writing a Type of Sympathetic Magic?

Ferrel Moore blogs, “Writers are magicians. They turn nothing into something. From swirling dark archetypes of the subconscious they pull fragments and potentialities and craft them into an imaginary world peopled with characters more real than themselves. Writers are the God of their created world. From the dust of their lives, they bring forth protagonists and antagonists and breathe life into them.”

In Negotiating With the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesizes that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”

In my current mood, I don't like where all this is going... squeezing out the final few plot twists of another narrative, I wonder if writing is not an inherently foolhardy pursuit, akin to the endeavors of the more ill-fated sorcerers in the works of H.P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. Might this recycling of scraps of memory into what feel like real characters and landscapes and worlds and conflicts not amount to what the Goddess in Margaret Atwood's poem “Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War”euphemistically calls “wishful thinking?” Here is a stanza of Atwood channeling Sekhmet --

“I just sit where I'm put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
and caress you into darkness and paradise.”

Repetition Repetition Repetition

From Rick Moody's Rumpus column -- “I’m not sure why repetition is pleasing, but I know what I like. Whether it’s Rothko’s overpowering sequences of 'windows' (or, to give a more recent example, Maureen Gallace’s innumerable paintings of houses), or Steve Reich’s pulses, or the minute gradations of rhythm in Beckett’s last works, repetition slows down movement and makes it more comprehensible. And much more beautiful.”

Gerda Smets did an experiment – the summary that follows is from E. O. Wilson's In Search of Nature -- where she “measured the degree of physiological arousal in adults caused by geometric designs of various degrees of complexity. The measure she used was alpha wave blockage, generally interpreted to be an index of arousal even when unaccompanied by conscious awareness. A sharp peak of maximum response was obtained with computer-generated figures at 20 percent redundancy, the amount found, for example, in a maze with between 10 and 20 angles. Less redundancy and more redundancy were far less stimulating. It does not seem coincidental that 20 percent is approximately the amount of complexity in logotypes, ideographs, frieze design, grille work, and other designs chosen for instant recognition and aesthetic pleasure. In other words, the development of art and written language may be strongly influenced by an innate constraint in cognition...”

In Consilience, Wilson adds that Smets's high-arousal figures “are also close in order and complexity to the pictographs of written Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Tamil, Bengali, and other Asian languages of diverse origin, as well as the glyphs of the ancient Egyptians and Mayans. Finally, it seems likely that some of the most esteemed products of modern abstract art fall near the same optimal level of order, as illustrated in Mondrian’s oeuvre. Although this connection of neurobiology to the arts is tenuous, it offers a promising cue to the aesthetic instinct, one that has not to my knowledge been explored systematically by either scientists or interpreters of the arts.”

How much of the beauty and coherence of a literary style is due to subtly repetitive patterns of syntax and vocabulary? Is this something that could ever be quantified?

I think of the many repetitions of the word “shingle” in Iain McEwan's On Chesil Beach -- the word first appears in the assonant phrase “infinite shingle,” evoking a pattern of recurrence that extends far beyond the confines of the text... A shingle beach is itself a monument to Nature's inexorable sorting of objects into patterns, patterns we may be innately constrained to admire...

Gary Lutz on Sentences

I just read this speech by Gary Lutz, which was printed in “The Believer” earlier this year. Lutz describes the feeling of writing a sentence --

“Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community.”

Lutz records that he became a keen reader relatively late in his childhood, and this may have something to do with his extreme sensitivity to the impact of a sentence. Here's more --

“In Christine Schutt’s two-clause formation 'her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,' the second half of a sentence from the short story 'Young,' the conspicuous content words are lips, stuck, licked, and talk. These four words are not all that varied consonantically. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common—we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a k that has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminal k (talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don’t appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i and c that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the k are side-by-side at last -- coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.”

“Close reading” isn't even an adequate term for what Lutz is doing here – I find myself expecting him to start telling us which synapses are firing, and how they're interacting with each other. Which is to say that his analysis strikes me as consistent with a neural networks approach to the reading process, whereby phoneme recognition, sentence comprehension, and so on, are explained as effects of the computational properties of large networks of neurons.

Lutz also notes, “Granted, there can be a downside to the kinds of isolative attentions to the sentence I have been advocating. Such a fixation on the individual sentence might threaten the enclosive forces of the larger structure in which the sentences reside. Psychiatrists use the term weak central coherence to pinpoint the difficulty of certain autistic persons to get the big picture, to see the forest instead of the trees.” And indeed that danger exists – it might be argued James Joyce's problem was that he finally got so good at writing sentences that his books ceased to be readable...

Anthony Burgess on the Short Story

I believe all novelists should also write short stories. Anthony Burgess had this feeling too, even though he himself largely stopped writing short stories quite early in his career -- there's a piece he wrote about the short story, in "Les Cahiers de la nouvelle" #2, January 1984, that raises a lot of important issues. Burgess subjectively dated “the twilight of the short story as a commercial form” to around 1959 – fifty years ago as I write this blog post. He wrote --

“So if you take the short stories of Joyce and try to read them aloud to an audience which is inured to a different kind of short story, the sort of short story that Roald Dahl now practices, you'll find that the response sometimes is a response of great disappointment. They expect the short story shall contain action, that it shall contain events, shall contain a dénouement, things of change, but all they find in these short stories of Joyce is the possibility of change, the possibility of a new perception, a slight revelation.”

Burgess continued --

“We can only publish the Joycean kind of short story now in a subsidized magazine. The commercialized short story is the short story that people understand and that people regard as a mere truncated form of the novel.”

On the other hand, today the Amazon Sales Rank of Dubliners is #24,719, and that of Tales of the Unexpected #86,989.

My own basic position is that we need the commercial short story as much as we need the literary story, and that unless there's cross-pollination between the the two, neither strain will prosper. For as Polixenes says in “The Winter's Tale” --

“... You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race...”

Literary stories are more delectable, but commercial short stories are more vigorous -- for optimal results, genetic material must be exchanged between the two. If the commercial short story ever goes completely extinct, it will be a lot later than twilight for the subsidized short story.