Vicarious Choice-Making

Two thoughts on suspense:

Raymond Carver -- “I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.”

Cynthia Ozick -- “One of the great conventions – and also one of the virtues – of the old novel was its suspensefulness. Suspense seems to make us ask 'What will happen to Tess next?' but really it emerges from the writer's conviction of social or cosmic principle. Suspense occurs when the reader is about to learn something, not simply about the relationship of fictional characters, but about the writer's relationship to a set of ideas, or to the universe. Suspense is the product of teaching, and teaching is the product of mastery, and mastery is the product of seriousness, and seriousness springs not from ego or ambition or the workings of the subjective self, but from the amazing permutations of the objective world.”

Carver suggests the excitingness of fiction is physiologically good for us, Ozick that it's beneficial on a higher level. In line with the art-is-useful hypothesis, we might guess that, by vicariously identifying with fictional characters who are making important moral choices, we get better at making important moral choices ourselves.

Is anyone investigating this possibility? I read in “The Economist” once of an experiment where undergraduates were given some money and the choice of keeping it or sharing it with the other participating subjects: most undergraduates opted to share the money, with the exception of those majoring in economics, who invariably kept all the money themselves. Idea for a possible experiment – do people who have just read “A Christmas Carol” behave in a less miserly fashion than students who have just read Atlas Shrugged?

Does perusal of Jane Austen change the way women behave on online dating sites?

Derek Bickerton's Bastard Tongues

Bickerton is best known for making the case that the grammatical similarities between pidgin tongues around the world, and between Creole tongues around the world, reflect an innate human linguistic bioprogram. He believes that, whenever history isolates together a group of adults who have no language in common, these people develop a language with the grammatical structure of pidgin, and their children develop a language with the grammatical structure of Creole.

As he describes in Bastard Tongues, Bickerton hoped to test this prediction experimentally -- but the National Science Foundation denied permission for the experiment due to ethical concerns. Bickerton still hopes to see some form of this experiment conducted. The children involved could all be orphans from Third World countries, who in recompense for their role in the experiment would receive trust funds – to me this sounds like a good deal for a Third World orphan, but the idea makes some people uncomfortable. Link to Wikipedia on language bioprogram theory.

Besides providing fascinating evidence for this theory, Bastard Tongues is a highly-readable manual on how how to get things done – especially if you agree with Bickerton that the “serious business of life” is “finding out stuff.” One example -- the conventional wisdom used to be that there were no Creole languages in Latin America. Bickerton says he looked at a demographic atlas, figured out that the likeliest place to find Creole Spanish was near the Caribbean coast of Colombia, went to Barranquilla, asked if there was a nearby village where odd-sounding Spanish was spoken, and was directed to a Spanish-Creole-speaking village.

If doubting the conventional wisdom is one of Bickerton's life skills, getting around bureaucratic obstacles laid down by universities is another. I kind of want another memoir from him just to explain how he acquired these skills in the first place; he refers in passing to having worked on a farm, so maybe that has something to do with it – often the smartest people are those who grew up on farms, because they had to figure out how to make stuff for themselves... The dumbest people are those like myself who grew up in suburbs owning plenty of stuff, and when it broke down we just went and got over-charged to have it repaired...

Characteristically, Bickerton recommends you learn new languages from drunk people -- "Most of the Spanish I speak was learned from drunks in bars. In fact, drunks are the world's most underrated language teaching resource. The stereotypic drunk speaker slurs his speech to the point of unintelligibility, but in real life this happens only in the final, immediate-pre-collapse phase of drunkenness. Prior to that, drunks speak slowly and with exaggerated care, because they know they are drunk but don't want other people to know. Moreover, since they're already too drunk to remember what they just said, they repeat themselves over and over, and don't mind if you do the same. If you're gregarious and a drinker, it's by far the easiest way to learn a new language."

Some Bickertonisms to live by --

“... when you're trained to see things a certain way, it's amazing how blind you can be to the obvious. To really get to the heart of something, you can't have too little training.”

“The downside of higher education is that it gives you the confidence to maintain baseless fantasies in defiance of common sense. Ordinary folk are humble in the face of common sense; they have no agenda, and unlike academics, they know they don't know very much, so they act accordingly. But if you think you know a lot, and you've cemented that lot with a carapace of theory, you become immune to new facts and commonsense reasoning, and you have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that contradicts your agenda.”

Gresham's Law Doesn't Ultimately Apply to Books

“The main difficulty with the book business is that a book is two kinds of objects. You have, one the one hand, a thing that a reasonable and prudent man might decide is a book. You have on the other hand an object which looks very much like a book, feels very much like a book, but is in actuality a bucket of peanut butter covered with a thin layer of chocolate sauce. These things are sold in the same way. The latter seems to sell better, for some mysterious reason, than the former. A good example of this that I ran into recently is a book called The First Time, which apparently has to do with accounts of initial sexual experiences of either eminent or reasonably well-known people.” -- Donald Barthelme in 1975

I found this in Hiding Man, Tracy Daughterty's biography of Barthelme. Barthelme was restating the old idea that Gresham's Law applies to books. Gresham's Law – discovered by Tudor financier Sir Thomas Gresham -- says that good money drives out bad, when the two are legally equivalent. Good money is here defined as money whose nominal value – e.g. the face value of the coin – is similar to its commodity value – e.g. the value of the metal the coin is made of. Applied to books, the prediction is that books with spurious content will drive out the ones with substantial content – see Alfred Jay Nock's essay, “The Dangers of Literacy:”

“The average literate person being devoid of reflective power but capable of sensation, his literacy creates a demand for a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation; and this form of literature, being the worst in circulation, fixes the value of all the rest and tends to drive it out.”

Nock wrote that in 1934, so we needn't take it too personally.

One reason the analogy with Gresham's Law doesn't work is that it's easier today to find a volume of stories by Barthelme than a copy of The First Time. We often forget that a “bestseller” is defined, not as a book that sells a lot of copies period, but as a book that sells a lot of copies quickly. Here's literary agent Andrew Wylie on the marketing of literary authors --

"Literary authors, historians of quality, sublime poets, good books... are good business because they sell over time; and the longer and more broadly they sell, the lower the risk for the publisher, the higher the return, the more valuable the property for all involved."

"Thirty-one years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, 16 years after the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls -- but only one year before the first publication of Calvino's Il Barone rampante and Faulkner's The Town -- in 1956, in the United States, the bestselling writer by far was Grace Metalious. Her name is now barely known. She wrote a book called Peyton Place, which is badly written, out of style, out of date, out of print, valueless. Her publisher has disappeared."

"The publishers of Calvino, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner abide. Who made the better investment?"

In an interview Wylie said, "the key point in the business is that the investment is made in the wrong areas in the business, and I think that quality -- which is more valuable over time -- has been undervalued, and quantity -- which is less valuable over time -- has been overvalued."

Can one compare the traditional publishing industry's increasing focus on blockbusters to the growing obsession with short-term returns that led to the crash of the financial industry?

A Kind of Fiery Trial of Untruthfulness

Saul Bellow in a 1991 interview -- “Literature in my early days was still something you lived by; you absorbed it, you took it into your system. Not as a connoisseur, aesthete, lover of literature. No, it was something on which you formed your life, which you ingested so that it became part of your substance, your path to liberation and full freedom... I think the mood of enthusiasm and love for literature, widespread in the twenties, began to evaporate in the thirties.”

Doris Lessing in a lecture published as a monograph in 1999 -- “To regard literature as a serious matter, for people who took themselves seriously, was common, I would say, until about the end of the Fifties. I think the hedonism, the drugs... of the Sixties was responsible for a general lowering of standards, a barbarising.”

And so on... in the science fiction community, there's a saying that the Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen. Things were better in my day... Perhaps we remember how enthusiastic we were in our youth, and we forget how narrowly our enthusiasms were really shared.

Literature may be something which has “always already” died out. Here are some excerpts from Joseph Conrad's letters: to E. L. Sanderson in 1899, Conrad wrote of his book that was due to come out in the spring --

"If only five thousand copies of that could be sold! If only! But why dream of the wealth of the Indies? I am not the man for whom Pactolus flows and the mines of Golconda distill priceless jewels. (What an absurd style. Don't you think I am deteriorating?) Style or no style, -- I am not the man. And oh! dear Ted, it is a fool's business to write fiction for a living. It is indeed."

"It is strange. The unreality of it seems to enter one's real life, penetrate into the bones, make the very heartbeats pulsate illusions through the arteries. One's will becomes the slave of hallucinations, responds only to shadowy impulses, waits on imagination alone. A strange state, a trying experience, a kind of fiery trial of untruthfulness. And one goes through it with an exaltation as false as all the rest of it. one goes through it, -- and there's nothing to show at the end. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!"

Not the kind of thing you can put in a grant proposal, statement of purpose, or cover letter. The moral here of course is that writers make depressing pen pals.

Roberto Bolaño's "Irma Carrasco"

This is my favorite story in Nazi Literature of the Americas -- the one about the marriage between Irma Carrasco, a Mexican woman with Fascist sympathies, and Gabino Barreda, a Mexican man who starts out as a Communist. The prose is of Borgesian beauty and acuity -- like Borges, Bolaño never talks down to me emotionally, if you see what I'm saying...

One beauty of the story is that, although the reader knows Bolaño is a man of the left, within this relationship it's Irma who's oppressed by Gabino. This is entirely realistic -- there's no question that some Latin American leftists are tyrants to their wives. Irma's primary virtues, fidelity and self-discipline, are right-wing virtures; Gabino lacks these virtures but equally lacks the left-wing virtues of tolerance and empathy -- he's not even faithful to his cause, and by the end of the story thinks of himself more as a libertarian.

Irma's love of Gabino feeds off the same drive towards self-abasement as her love of Franco, and her love of Franco feeds Gabino's abuse of her. The couple first separate during the Spanish Civil War. After they reunite, what provokes Gabino to hit Irma again is her defending "the honor of Franco's regime." Later, we get this glorious summation of Irma's politics --

"'The only political system in which I have complete confidence,' she told an interviewer for the women's magazine 'Housework,' 'is theocracy, although Generalísimo Franco is doing a pretty good job too.’”

The brutal and pointless oscillations of power within this dysfunctional marriage mirror those between right and left in Latin America over the same time period.

Here's a link to a diagram of Bolaño's oeuvre that I do not understand -- by Javier Moreno, who also gives the history of the diagram, concedes that it should really be an animation, then cunningly rejects the entire exercise.

Brian Boyd Proves Art is Useful

Here's an elegant argument from Brian Boyd's new book On the Origin of Stories --

"As Richard Dawkins notes: 'natural selection is a predictive theory. The Darwinian can make the confident prediction that, if dams were a useless waste of time, rival beavers who refrained from building them would survive better and pass on genetic tendencies not to build.' Likewise with art: if and only if art were useless, more ruthlessly utilitarian and competitive realists with a lesser inclination to art would have survived and reproduced in greater numbers, and over evolutionary time their descendants would have supplanted those with a disposition to art. Societies without any inclination to create their own dress, song, and story would have ousted those that did have these things. Individuals and groups without art -- without shared songs and dance (including face-paint, scarification, tattoos, uniforms, emblems, flags, or monumental architecture), without shared stories and sayings (including myths, heroic legends, proverbs) -- would fare better than those with all these things, which art makes possible. But that seems never to have been the case. No human society lacks art, and the more successful societies have more art than ever before."

Does this argument prove that art is useful... or does it prove that arguments founded on evolutionary psychology can be used to prove anything...?

Note that logic identical to Boyd's can be used to prove that religion is useful.

What is art useful for? Boyd's line is that art fine-tunes our capacities for living -- it trains us, briefs us, prepares us...

The Ending of Philip Roth's The Humbling (Warning, Contains Spoilers)

Best not to read this blog post unless you've already read The Humbling and Indignation.

Simon Axler in The Humbling is an actor who, having lost his touch on stage, has an affair with a younger woman, a lesbian called Pegeen Mike Stapleford.

Humiliation is an important theme for Roth. The hero of Indignation dies in Korea as a direct consequence of a college panty raid. This plot twist alone wonderfully encapsulates the 1950s, and the details in Indignation – about kosher butchering, and about anti-Semitism at American colleges in the 1950s – are completely absorbing.

The Humbling hasn't been as well-received. Many reviewers found it less convincing than Roth's other novels, and a few even wondered if this effect was deliberate on Roth's part.

It's axiomatic that heterosexual male authors should avoid writing scenes where lesbian women have sex with heterosexual males. Roth is one of the few writers who might get away with breaking this rule -- taboos are meat and drink to him – but there are too many lines during the sex scenes in The Humbling that don't quite work, which I won't quote here because quoting the worst lines from a novel is a cheap trick of reviewers. I personally think that, with a bit more editing, the sex scenes in The Humbling could have worked okay.

Axler and Pegeen have a threesome with another woman, and then Pegeen leaves Axler -- Axler's reaction to this was my real problem with The Humbling. The last four paragraphs of the book felt wrong to me – that is, I didn't believe in Axler's suicide. But half an hour after finishing the book, I decided this quality of inauthenticity was intentional – Roth's point is that Axler has still not regained his touch. His suicide turns out to be as deeply flawed a performance as his failed portrayal of Macbeth earlier in the book. His death too is a piece of failed acting. If I'm right that this was the effect Roth was aiming for, that's something much harder for an author to bring off than two lesbians having sex with a man.

InsideStorytime IRAN

Tonight (Thursday November 19th, 6.30 -8.30 pm) -- InsideStorytime IRAN, at Cafe Royale, 800 Post Street. There are so many great Iranian-American authors in San Francisco that we're been urged to put on an Iranian-focused event. Reading tonight will be Shahrnush Parsipur (Women Without Men), Anita Amirrezvani (The Blood of Flowers), Mahbod Seraji (Rooftops of Tehran), Persis Karim (Let me Tell you Where I've Been), and Tissa Hami. Dorinda Vassigh will be our guest MC.

Proceeds will be donated to Amnesty International's Iran campaign.

The last time I blogged about Iran was five months ago. Remember when events in Iran took Andrew Sullivan's mind off Sarah Palin for a whole month? The news coming in from Iran is still astounding. I heard their soccer teams now have to play to empty stadiums -- because if spectators are allowed in, the government can't edit out the sound of their anti-Ahmadinejad protests from the televised matches. Here's another form of dissent the Iranian government doesn't have under control – protests expressed by writing slogans on rial banknotes. Thanks to Tissa Hami for Facebooking this link.

As these examples reflect, Iranians have freedoms in some areas of life, while being subject to extreme repression in others – this combination makes Iran very hard for us Westerners to understand. Hopefully I will learn more tonight.

Like an Animal Turning his Mill

From a letter Samuel R. Delany wrote to Robert S. Bravard in 1984 -- I'm excerpting it from a collection of Delany's letters titled 1984:

"Frank says to me, at least once a month, 'Chip, don't you ever think about anything except writing?' Well, the truth is, since I was a teenager, I haven't. Most of what I think about, I certainly think of in terms of writing, either directly or indirectly. Just to walk down the street means to me a series of visual, olfactory, and auditory experiences, some of which I know I can write about with a fair degree of accuracy and immediacy, and some of which I realize as I encounter them I'd have difficulty articulating. And the upsetting experiences, the ones I dwell on, the ones that obsess me, are not the dramatic ones in any sense, but simply the latter."

Notoriously, the question writers are most fed up of being asked is, "Where do you get your ideas from?" If story ideas are what you're most determined to find, you'll end up seeing the damn things everywhere you look -- they may finally even obstruct your vision of what else there is to see. The title of this blog post comes from the letter Claude Monet wrote to George Clemenceau, about the death of Monet's wife:

"One day, when I was at the death bed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself, my eyes fixed on her tragic forehead, in the act of mechanically analysing the succession of appropriate color gradations which death was imposing on her immobile face. Tones of blue, of yellow, of grey, what have you? This is the point I had reached. Certainly it was natural to wish to record the last image of a woman who was departing forever. But even before I had the idea of setting down the features to which I was so deeply attached, my organism automatically reacted to the color stimuli, and my reflexes caught me up in spite of myself, in an unconscious operation which was the daily course of my life -- just like an animal turning his mill."

Actors have such moments too, as do salespeople -- a salesperson told me once, "Everything in life is sales, getting a job, getting married, everything," and she seemed happy about this insight, even borderline triumphant. So I suppose we all have a mill to turn -- perhaps this woman will experience death as just another sale.

Electric Literature no. 2 (Autumn 2009)

I already blogged about Electric Literature no. 1 . Electric Literature no. 2 (Autumn 2009) is available now, with another five more stellar stories: Nick Liptak reviews the party that was thrown to celebrate this issue here.

Colson Whitehead's “The Comedian,” my favorite story in issue no. 2, probes the significance of observational comedy in contemporary culture: here is the Youtube preview.

Stephen O' Connor's “Love” is about a couple and a cabin near Mount Quiddagunk -- a fictional place, I think? Jealousy. Suspense.

Pasha Malla's “The Slough” asks what if we could shed our skins? Being writers, he seems to reply, do we have any choice?

Marisa Silver's “Three Girls” is a subtle tale of familial embarrassment. Single sentence animation here.

Lydia Davis's “The Cows” is like a story Ludwig Wittgenstein might have written about cows after first going insane.

Disclaimer: Electric Literature's blog The Outlet has stories on it too, one of which is by me.

Gillian Flynn's Dark Places

“Publisher's Weekly” took some flak for only including male authors in their list of ten best books of 2009. Of those ten books, I've so far only read Await Your Reply and The Lost City of Z. I don't know what the ten best books of 2009 are, and nor do you. However Dark Places is a novel, published by a woman this year, that I believe to be the best of all the books I mention in this blog post, all of which are good books. Dark Places is included in the “Publisher's Weekly” list of twenty works of fiction that appears immediately beneath the list of ten best books of 2009, as is Yiyun Li's The Vagrants.

A paragraph from Dark Places --

“They turned down some road, trees sucking them in, tunnel-like on all sides and he realized he had no idea where they were. He just hoped whatever was about to happen was over soon. He wanted a hamburger. His mom made crazy hamburgers, called them kitchen-sinkers, fattened up cheap ground meat with onions and macaroni and whatever else crap was about to go bad. One time he swore he found part of a banana, glopped over with ketchup – his mom thought ketchup made everything OK. It didn't, her cooking sucked, but he'd eat one of those hamburgers right now. He was thinking I'm so hungry I could eat a cow. And then, as if his food-prayer worked, he refocused his eyes from a gritty stain on the backseat to the outside and there were ten or twenty Herefords standing in the snow for no reason. There was a barn nearby but no sign of a house, and the cows were too dumb to walk back into the barn, so they stood like a bunch of fat assholes, blowing steam from their nostrils. Herefords were the ugliest cows around, giant, rusty, with white crinkled faces and pink-rimmed eyes. Jersey cows were sort of sweet looking, they had those big deer faces, but Herefords looked prehistoric, belligerent, mean. The things had furry thick waddles and curvy-sharp horns and when Trey pulled to a stop, Ben felt a flurry of nerves. Something bad was going to happen.”

And for those of you who object to books being well-written, the story's so perfectly constructed, the plot so engrossing, that you don't have to pay any attention to how vivid the language is if you don't feel like doing so.

Ethan Canin once said something about a book's popularity often correlating with how likeable the main character is -- but I find that thriller writers often make the mistake of including a character they try too hard to make likeable. Reliably, I don't like these characters! In the same way, if you're introducing me to someone and you want me to like them, you shouldn't tell me I'm going to like them – this automatically puts me against them. My advice to writers would be not to try and make the character likeable, but to make the character confident about who they are. Pull this off and the likeability somehow takes care of itself.

Where I'm going with this -- Flynn is an author who definitely cannot be accused of trying too hard to make her characters likeable. Although at least one character in the book is a saint, but her fate is so mind-blowingly horrible, nobody could possibly hold her likeability against her ... You thought In Cold Blood told you what's the matter with Kansas? Dark Places tells you what's the matter with Kansas.

Seriously, you gotta read this one... Hat tip to Michelle Gagnon for recommending it on Facebook.

On Being in Fact a Little Careless, or Rather Seeming to be

An 1875 notebook entry by Thomas Hardy, today's guest blogger --

“Read again Addison, Macaulay, Newman, Sterne, Defoe, Lamb, Gibbon, Burke, “Times” leaders etc., in a study of style. Am more and more confirmed in an idea I have long held, as a matter of common sense, long before I thought of any old aphorism bearing on the subject: 'Ars est celare artem.' The whole secret of a living style and the difference between it and a dead style, lies in not having too much style – being in fact a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there. It brings wonderful life into the writing:

A sweet disorder in the dress...
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Otherwise your style is like worn half-pence – all the fresh images rounded off by rubbing, and no crispness at all.”

Leonard Michaels said this when he was interviewed by “Paris Review” --

“Scholarship can infest writing – especially fiction – with a kind of self-satisfied modesty that comes out of the life itself, and with a propriety that gives a precious little smack to every single word. The writer who lives too deep in academe may think he makes a perfect choice, word by word, but it can be a perfection disgusting to normal readers.”

Reading Living Authors, Reading Dead Authors

Have you ever been reading someone... when suddenly they died? That is, were you ever halfway through reading someone's book when the news of their death reached you? I can only remember one time that's happened to me -- with Bruce Chatwin. Like many people, I read The Songlines first out of Chatwin's books, then went on to read the others. I was reading The Viceroy of Ouidah when my mother brought me a newspaper clipping of Chatwin's obituary. The immediate effect of this was that I stopped reading that excellent historical novel – although, years later, I started it again and read it all the way through, then reread it... it's as if Chatwin's being dead forced me to rethink my feelings about him before I could process that story.

This makes me wonder if we read living authors and dead authors differently: look at the weird way everyone rushes to reevaluate an author's significance as soon as he or she dies...

Some thoughts from Caitlin Podiak -- “... it's so much easier for me to lose myself in a book if the author is dead and his or her genius is well established. Because with the author's reputation as a safety net, I don't have to trust my own instincts. I have the validation of countless literary scholars. And since a dead author only exists on the page and in my imagination, he or she can't intrude on my reading experience. So it's a bit like masturbating. I'm relaxed and alone and comfortable and the orgasm comes quickly and easily.”

“But when the author is alive and I don't have years of critical context to fall back on, the experience is more challenging. I'm forced to confront the author's continued existence. He or she is out there in the world, being a person, just like I am a person. The author is looking over my shoulder as I read, which makes me feel awkward and self-conscious and pulls me out of the book. I have to like and respect and trust the author before I can relax enough to let myself go. So it's more like sex. Not so safe, not always so comfortable, especially when the author is new and unfamiliar. Things are more likely to go awry. Of course, when the chemistry is right, the experience is vastly more rewarding. But you have to take a risk.”

“So basically, what I'm saying is that canonical fiction is to masturbating as contemporary fiction is to sex.”

I disagree. Maybe we could say that the difference between reading an author you might theoretically one day have a conversation with and one you definitely won't – the author in question being dead -- logically resembles the difference between masturbating about someone you might theoretically one day have sex with and someone you definitely won't – that person being dead. But emotionally the difference isn't the same at all. In our ancestral environment, it was only possible to perpetuate someone's genes if that person was alive -- whereas it's always been possible to perpetuate the memes of someone dead.

So I'd rather say that reading a dead author is like sitting around the camp-fire hearing stories first told by one of the ancestors, whereas reading a living author is like sitting around the camp-fire hearing stories directly from a contemporary. Are we wired to process those two kinds of story differently?

Must Writers Know the Names of Trees?

Here's a scene from Isaac Babel's story “Awakening,” featuring a childhood encounter with an “Odessa News” proofreader --

“He pointed with his stick, at a tree with a reddish trunk and a low crown.
'What's that tree?'
I didn't know.
'What's growing on that bush?'
I didn't know this either. We walked together across the little square on the Alexandrovsky Prospect. The old man kept pointing his stick at trees; he would seize me by the shoulder when a bird flew past, and he made me listen to the various kinds of singing.
'What bird is that singing?'
I knew none of the answers. The names of trees and birds, their division into species, where birds fly away to, on which side the sun rises, when the dew falls thickest – all these things were unknown to me.
'And you dare to write! A man who doesn't live in nature, as a stone does or an animal, will never in all his life write two worthwhile lines. Your landscapes are like descriptions of stage props...'”

There's a story that Nabokov put a student at Cornell through a similar hazing ritual, telling him “You'll never be a writer,” because he couldn't identify a nearby tree. Sam Pickering says, “If you’re standing in front of a classroom trying to explain the meaning of life, and you don’t know the names of the trees in your backyard, you’re a fraud.”

Gene Wolfe put me on the spot in similar fashion at a kaffeeklatch at the 1997 San Antonio WorldCon. I'd already mentioned that I was born near Portsmouth, England, and that I lived near San Francisco, California. Wolfe asked me in a rather sly tone, “Are there more seagulls in Portsmouth or in San Francisco?” He went on to make the generalization that someone who couldn't sail a boat, couldn't ride a horse, and had never been shot at, couldn't possibly be a writer.

Nature and warfare – things a Cossack knows about that a Jew traditionally doesn't. Which is part of why Babel felt compelled to ride with Cossacks.

For the record, I still haven't a clue what the answer to the seagull question is.

The Dalai Lama Doesn't Drive, nor did Kingsley Amis

Something I heard Paul Ekman say during a Litquake panel was that the reason we can respond automatically, when we're driving and someone cuts into our lane, is that our ancestors had to be able to react when a large feral cat jumped in their direction. That's why we have instantaneous reactions that aren't under our control. Working with the Dalai Lama and other eminent Buddhists, Eklam has shown that, as a result of a lifetime's training, these people can control these physiological reactions – one consequence Ekman mentioned is that “none of them drive.”

There's also a saying that poets don't drive. I believe Martin Amis wrote that his father -- being a poet as well as a novelist -- didn't drive, whereas he himself -- being a novelist but not a poet -- did. Between the Dalai Lama and Kingsley Amis lie a fairly wide range of temperaments... could it be that many people have careers that impede their driving ability?

Personally I don't even find novel-writing to be terribly compatible with driving. Part of it's that the days when I have to do a lot of driving aren't the days when I have access to uninterrupted blocks of time, but there's more to it than that. Some vocations, stock trader Jim Cramer's for example, are about making instantaneous decisions, giving orders, exploding with anger at the person who failed to act quickly enough on your instructions... This seems intrinsically more compatible with having to drive than does a daily regimen of constantly reediting stuff...

When writing, I want to be in a state of mind somewhat closer to the Dalai Lama's than to Jim Cramer's. Actually, I might even prefer being a passenger in the Dalai Lama's car to letting Jim Cramer drive, but that probably just proves something's wrong with me. What do you think – is it possible that serious writing slows down your reflexes?

Are Consonants More Masculine Than Vowels?

From Otto Jespersen's Growth and Structure of the English Language, first published in 1938 -- “... there is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to me positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it. A great many things go together to produce and to confirm that impression, things phonetical, grammatical, and lexical, words and turns that are found, and words and turns that are not found, in the language.”

Of a passage in Hawaiian, Jespersen notes that “no single word ends in a consonant, and a group of two or more consonants is never found. Can any one be in doubt that even if such a language sound pleasantly and be full of music and harmony the total impression is childlike and effeminate? You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people speaking such a language..” The history of Polynesian warfare and maritime exploration count for little in the face of this damning excess of vowels.

The English don't overdo their consonants -- Jespersen notes that in the first ten stanzas of Tennyson's poem “Locksley Hall,” there are thirty-three words ending in two consonants and two words ending in three consonants: “Thus we may perhaps characterize English, phonetically speaking, as possessing male energy, but not brutal force.”

It's easy to mock these particular examples, and the chauvinistic assumptions they're wrapped up in -- but how much do we still subconsciously believe this kind of thing? Not knowing what the initials stood for, would you rather be taken into custody by the A.I.O.U or by the V.V.V.K? If you wrote a story with a masculine character and an effeminate character, which of them would you be more likely to give a name ending in, or beginning with, three consonants? Does naming an intergalactic warlord Zdragorn reinforce prejudices about people who speak language full of consonant clusters?

Perhaps more importantly, has anyone actually done an experiment to prove or disprove whether the ratio of vowels to consonants in your daily speech alters your levels of various sex hormones? All I'm saying is that it would be worth trying to do the experiment. The orthodoxy in linguistics is Saussure's postulate that “the sign is arbitrary” – hence no vowel or consonant can have any intrinsic meaning. Phonosemantics researcher Margaret Magnus has argued that this slogan “the sign is arbitrary” is “posted near the beginning of every introductory linguistics book as a sort of road block. 'Do not engage in a particular form of research.' And it works!”

But what if Saussure's position is too extreme? A laugh, a scream, a syllable chanted in meditation... each has some kind of meaning, and by uttering them we can alter our body chemistry... is the same never true of a phoneme?

Roadrunner Rules

Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times Of An Animated Cartoonist gives a set of rules that more-or-less govern the universe of Chuck Jones's Road Runner cartoons. This list strikes me as a rich source of insight into the workings of creativity and comedy --

"1. Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going 'beep, beep.' "

"2. No outside force can harm the coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products."

"3. The coyote could stop anytime -- if he was not a fanatic. (Repeat: 'A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.' -- George Santayana.) "

"4. No dialogue ever, except 'beep, beep.'"

"5. The road runner must stay on the road – otherwise, logically, he would not be called road runner."

"6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters -- the southwest American desert."

"7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation."

"8. Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote's greatest enemy."

"9. The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures."

Such lists of creativity-enhancing constraints could also be compiled for other worlds fashioned by comic geniuses, such as the Astérix cartoons scripted by René Goscinny, or the Don Camillo stories of Giovannino Guareschi, wherin the reader's expectations are always satisfyingly yet never-quite-predictably met.

The third rule's my favorite: other fanatics, in Santayana's sense, include Don Quixote, Captain Ahab, Basil Fawlty, Father Ted, and Doctor Doofenshmirtz...

Story as House

“Everyone knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people.” -- Alice Munro, “What is Real.”

In her introduction to Selected Short Stories, Munro extends this analogy --

”You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”

A house is “durable and freestanding.” It can also be be “luxurious and disorderly,” like the house in Munro's story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” It's a place where you finally get to sit down and think for a moment. A house brims over with signs of the person who made it, the person who decorated it, and it typically comes supplied with a kitchen sink, the symbol of one kind of realism.

But a house is also private, domestic, isolating: as Lydia Millet has written, in the context of an essay about Munro --

“If our deliberations about our personal lives, consisting of a near-infinite scrutiny of the tiny passages through which we move in relation to friends and lovers, constitute the best calling of art, must such self-scrutiny not also be our own highest calling and rightful task?”

“And if this self-scrutiny is the chief work of our lives, does the rest of existence not drop neatly away?”

Reading Munro sometimes makes me feel claustrophobic -- her stories tend to be excellent houses, but the stories I love the most seem to me not so much houses as entire worlds...

The Neuroscience of Changing Fonts

Editor Susan Bell recommends that, prior to printing out your manuscript for another edit, you change the font -- this could help you see the text with a fresh perspective. From Bell's book The Artful Edit -- “Jim Lewis discovered that going from Times Roman to Helvetica kicked the complacency out of his eye.”

A blog post from Jonah Lehrer provides some “rampant, reckless neuroscientific theorizing” in support of this approach. The lab of Stanislas Dehaene has distinguished between two reading pathways in the brain. Reading "routinized, familiar passages" activates an area of the brain known as the visual word form area -- Lehrer compares this to reading “on auto-pilot.”

But Dehaene and colleagues found that, when their experimental subjects read text that had been variously mutated and degraded, this activated another area of the brain, often described as part of the dorsal route, which has been linked to letter-by-letter processing in children who are learning to read. Reading using this other part of the brain, Lehrer conjectures, might force you to think more about what's on the page, with the result that you do a better editing job.

I'm currently in edit mode myself on a big project. Genuinely to reengage with my text, should I go for as outlandish a font as possible?

Lehrer's post attracted interesting comments about how a similar principle could apply in painting and programming, and also includes this funny quote from Zadie Smith -- “It's an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your novel is two years after it's published, ten minutes before you go on stage at a literary festival.”

Richard the Third, Act One Scene Two

John Lydon -- a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols – wrote in his autobiography No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs that his favorite Shakespeare plays when he was growing up were “Richard the Third” and “Macbeth.”

When I was an adolescent, those were my favorite Shakespeare plays too -- perhaps this should be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology? Aren't they the Shakespeare plays containing the information most essential to the survival of adolescent males? The starkest depictions of how power worked in our ancestral environment?

The scene that frightened me most in “Richard the Third” was always Act One Scene Two, because I couldn't understand why it was so convincing. How could a man, having killed a woman's husband, go on to seduce her in so few lines?

Yet even in a comparatively civilized society, there's abundant evidence that a woman will accept an abusive partner, if she feels her alternative is to receive no protection at all. Seen in a context of tribal warfare, in the absence of the judicial protections we take for granted, Lady Anne's predicament wouldn't seem at all surprising.

Still, I doubt anyone but Shakespeare could have made the scene work -- just because something's essentially true, doesn't mean you don't have to be a genius to write it down. Maybe it means you have to be even more of a genius...

Sacrifices in Chess and Plotting

Alex Yermolinsky, in The Road to Chess Improvement, writes about the role of intuition in deciding when to sacrifice pieces --

“I asked Alex Shabalov what criteria, if any, he uses when he customarily sends his games into wild spins of tactical mêlée. He said that his main concern lies in a variety of ideas present in the positions he can reach in his calculations. If he feels it grow, then it's a good sign and he can go on; if it begins to diminish with every move, then the warning light comes on, hopefully before Shabba has gone too far with his sacrificial strategy.”

This reminds me of storytelling. By killing off an important character, a writer can sometimes open up an energetic field of alternative plot lines, transforming the relationships between all the surviving characters, permitting the writer and hopefully the reader a pleasurable rush of recalculation. An example that comes to mind is the moment in George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones when Ned Stark gets killed.

For me, later volumes in the series A Song of Ice and Fire seem to illustrate the converse principle -- that sacrificing too many valuable pieces/ characters too early in the game may be counter-productive. But since the final volume in Martin's series has yet to appear, I'll reserve judgment until after the endgame.

While we're on the subject of chess, I can't resist this quote from Vladimir Nabokov's Poems and Problems -- “Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity.”