Everything Unfinished

InsideStorytime ENTANGLEMENT

2010-03-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

“The Onion” reports -- “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text.”

In other news, quantum entanglement is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart -- even if the individual objects are spatially separated in a spacelike manner.

Ransom Stephens might claim the readers at tonight's (Thursday March 18th 2010, 6.30 - 8.30 pm) InsideStorytime ENTANGLEMENT at Cafe Royale are too large to be similarly entangled -- but what does he know? While any one of the readers is in a reading state, none of the others will be, even if their search for a parking space has transported them to the far end of the universe, so that classical mechanics would not permit information to be exchanged between them. This Einstein called “action at a distance.”

Jillian Weise is the author of The Amputee's Guide to Sex, a bold investigation of disability and sexuality.

Alvin Orloff, a veteran of the San Francisco reading series, author of Gutter Boys and I Married an Earthling, returns to InsideStorytime reading from a new work.

Anne Raeff is the author of Clara Mondschein's Melancholia, a Holocaust novel.

Jesus Angel Garcia is the author of badbadbad, a multimedia novel.

Writer and cartoonist Aimee Valentine will read from a work-in-progress.

Please note that John Somerville will not after all be participating, as he has to go to Australia to accept a Fellowship of Australian Writers Award. However, despite their physical separation, tonight's entangled authors will continue to act as a single quantum object. Mention you heard about the event from this blog and we will waive the $3 to $5 cover charge.

A Year of Blogging Dangerously

2010-03-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

This is the one-year anniversary of my first ever blog post.

As Tamim Ansary wrote a few years back, "At last count (about a year ago) there were some 64 million blogs... I have to wonder: what do these 64 million people do for day jobs?"

Who knows how many blogs there are now? Mark Helprin in Digital Barbarism evokes how much more peaceful it must have been in Edwardian times, when correspondence routinely took weeks to arrive. There's much to be said for having less information to sift through.

But there are also advantages to the practice of formulating and broadcasting a few thoughts during the course of a chaotic week. Can the whole of a blog be more than the sum of its parts? Generally I'm overcome with gratitude that life affords me any time at all to write stories and novels -- blogging feels like a way of giving back. Which I agree makes no sense. But even so... this feels sometimes like a sort of cosmic debt repaid.

So happy Saint Patrick's Day, and what are you reading a blog by a limey for anyway? Go read Julian Gough on the state of Irish literature instead. Money quote -- "I must be a real bastard for translators, because increasingly I like to back-engineer scenes so that a crucial line of narrative, thrown up by the action, is also a line of poetry by Yeats, or a line of dialogue is also a line of Joyce, or Kafka, or is made out of Radiohead song titles."

Some Art-Languages

2010-03-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real," J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a letter. “But it is true." See Helge Kåre Fauskanger's site on Tolkien's art-languages.

Maybe I do believe him... In his lecture “A Secret Vice," Tolkien suggested, “I might fling out the view that for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant... The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology.”

In a footnote to “English and Welsh,” Tolkien says of The Lord of the Rings that “the names of persons and places in this story were mainly composed on patterns deliberately modeled on those of Welsh (closely similar but not identical). This element in the tale has given perhaps more pleasure to more readers than anything else in it.” That last sentence was probably not true even in 1955 -- and today, people who have read The Lord of the Rings doubtless outnumber those with any knowledge of Welsh, a language into which The Lord of the Rings has apparently still not been translated.

James Keilty was another writer for whom a big part of the attraction of creating a world lay in creating its language. Introducing a utopian science fiction anthology called The New Improved Sun, Thomas M. Disch singled out Keilty's utopia as one he would consider moving to.

"The People of Prashad" places Prashad somewhere between Russia, China, Afghanistan, and India. The people live in communal homes that somewhat remind me of Tamim Ansary's childhood. The sexuality and educational arrangements of the people of Prashad are what one might expect from a utopia hatched in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Keilty also provides architectural diagrams and a fairly Middle-Eastern-looking alphabet.

Poignantly, the anthology supplies an address in North Beach where, at the time the book was published, you could have applied to Keilty to learn Prashadsim. Alas, while some of Keilty's plays in Prashadim were produced in San Francisco, I doubt you will find that language spoken here today. Some more info, from Samuel R. Delany's About Writing --

“James Keilty was a San Francisco city planner on the edge of a circle of fifties, sixties and seventies writers that included Robert Duncan and Richard Brautigan, many of whom were of an experimental bent. A frighteningly literate gay aesthete, he died of lung cancer in the early nineties. More obsessive than most, however, Keilty went so far as to invent his own language, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary, as well as an imaginary country and a culture to go with it. He wrote stories and folk plays in his invented language, Prashad. He began a lengthy novel in the language.”

Does it seem surprising or unsurprising, that so many new art-languages were invented in an age when so many old natural languages are dying out? Are the two facts connected?

For the movie “Avatar,” director James Cameron hired linguist Paul Frommer, an expert on Farsi grammar among other things, to create the Na'vi tongue. Was this the first time a movie director subcontracted the development of an art-language to a professor? Julian Sancton interviews Frommer for Vanity Fair here, and here is some more info about Na'vi from Frommer, and a link to Sebastian Wolff's Learn Navi site. The Internet, while being no help at all to real endangered languages, may help preserve new art-languages from disappearing like Keilty's...

Paul Auster's The Music of Chance

2010-03-15T13:09:00.000-07:00

This novel was first recommended to me by a stranger at a party in the early 1990s. It's probably best to learn about this book in as random a way as possible, since it's kind of a paean to randomness.

It opens with incredible speed. A terrifying psychological transformation is compressed into the first few paragraphs -- Nashe’s wife leaves him, his daughter is adopted by his sister, he inherits about $200,000 from a father he doesn’t know, he becomes addicted to pointless coast-to-coast driving, and we’re still just a few pages in.

Even our readerly assumption that Nashe’s life was relatively settled before the story begins turns out to be misleading – apparently it's just as much an accident that he became a fireman in the first place. Is The Music of Chance the only novel ever written that doesn’t confuse correlation with causation, that confronts how much our lives are truly governed by happenstance?

I think of Stephen Jay Gould’s observation that if you ran the tape of evolutionary history a second time, you’d come out somewhere different. Auster here pulls off the trick of providing a completely immersive high-stakes reading experience where nothing seems fated. The Music of Chance delivers the intensity of myth without any of the determinism.

And yet, as usually occurs both in myth and in life, freedom quickly becomes captivity. Flower and Stone, the novel’s overlords of capital, are compared before we meet them to Laurel and Hardy, Mutt and Jeff, Ernie and Bert. They are petty, childish men, full of concealed animosity, who on the turn of a card become Nashe’s masters.

He is set to constructing a twentieth-century wall from the ruins of a fifteenth-century castle, using a child’s wagon to haul the stones – on reflection this feels like an elaborate metaphor for the bleak labor of the contemporary novelist, although this way of looking at it is only occuring to me now after multiple rereadings.

Building the wall is a meaningless task but Nashe finds meaning in it, or puts meaning into it. Like Camus in The Stranger, Auster seems to suggest we should take resposibility for our lives despite their contingency. Finishing this book always leaves me feeling more alive.

Promises and Prohibitions

2010-03-11T07:40:00.000-08:00

This is from an essay called “The Politics of Gentleness” by theologian Stanley Hauerwas:

”... we live in a time when people believe they have no story except the story they chose when they thought they had no story. That's 'freedom' in a society shaped by liberal political theory. If you don't believe that's true of you, just ask yourself whether you believe someone should be held responsible for a decision they made when they didn't know what they were doing. Most of us don't; this ethos of freedom is deep in our souls. We believe we should be held responsible only for the things we freely chose when we know what we were doing.”

“The problem with this way of thinking is that it makes marriage unintelligible. How do we ever know what we are doing when we promise lifelong monogamous fidelity? Christians are required to marry before witnesses in church so we can hold them to the promises they made when they didn't know what they were doing. If marriage renders this understanding of freedom unintelligible, try having children. You never get the ones you wanted. Yet we still feel extraordinary pressure to raise our children in such a way that they will not have to suffer for our convictions. Otherwise, we think they would not be 'free.' But this just reveals that we do not know why we're having children. And this has everything to do with the deep assumptions about freedom that now shape our lives. We believe that we should produce people who have no story except the story they chose when they had no story. So our children grow up thinking that freedom is the choice between a Sony and a Panasonic.”

Think how many fairy-stories feature decisions made by people who don't know what they're doing. In “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien notes that the point of the story of the princess and frog lies “in the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences) that, together with observing prohibitions, runs through all of Fairyland. This is one of the notes of the horns of Elfland, and not a dim note.”

In the old stories, promises must be kept even if they were made uncomprehendingly, even if their consequences are intolerable. This makes me think of a claim from Writing the Breakout Novel by literary agent Donald Maass, regarding what kind of stories sell -- “there are two character qualities that leave a deeper, more lasting and powerful impression of a character than any other: Forgiveness and self-sacrifice.”

Magical Contamination and Playing it Straight

2010-03-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

I just read Stephen Kessler's The Mental Traveler, a pellucid fictionalization of a mental breakdown during the late 1960s -- the time of the moon landing and Charlie Manson, when as Kessler writes, “the air itself carried invisible streams of hallucinogenic potential.”

Since that era's still the stereotypic moment in twentieth-century Californian cultural history, it's curious how little our culture's general interpretation of it has changed over the last forty-odd years. For example, Joan Didion's essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” was written while the summer of love was still in progress, yet as an account of those events has yet to be surpassed in cynicism.

How do the late 1960s appear now, retrospectively, to those who were there and have since matured? Since the hero of The Mental Traveler is alienated, Jewish, fairly well-off, and working at UC Berkeley, his involvement in the counterculture seems over-determined. Yet he feels alienated from the counterculture too. His friends are very conscious of the moment's historic potential, but unclear how to seize it. The hero's paranoid schizophrenia feels like a recapitulation, on the level of the individual, of what his subculture and generation are undergoing.

“This is the way the world was spinning, intricate swirls of interconnection, no individual detail without its web of associations, a natural continuity yet dangerous too in its revolutionary resonance, multiple waves of implication spreading with every beat, with every note, with every word and image, and we were in and of it, riding this wild world's allusive waves, up to our wits in history, in fiction. Everything burned with meaning, glowed, radiated risk and urgency, a kind of magical contamination.”

I remember feeling the same way when I was twenty, but in late 1980s England there wasn't much encouragement for this attitude. Perhaps I got off lightly.

Kessler – now a distinguished poet, translator, and essayist – reports on how it was to feel intensely alive and intensely lost.

“Ever since Altamont I'd felt my life was being guided by superior powers, that gods of the revolution were secretly directing my trip through this mythic dimension suffused with meaning most people were forced to ignore because they couldn't use the information, they'd be overwhelmed, but I had been selected and was acting out for the collective welfare some model scenario of new consciousness.”

The songs titles on a Mose Allison album are a series of instructions from the cosmos. After reading Robert Bly's poem “Anarchists Fainting,” the mental traveler hits on the tactic of being crazy on the inside, rather than on the outside.

He learns to play it straight, while continuing his trip in the realm of creativity. This part, he almost makes sound easy...

Tell me About Your Childhood

2010-03-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

In a café in Marin last weekend, I met up with a friend who'd just read a draft of a novel of mine. A couple of readers have asked me to make the main female character in said novel “more likeable,” and since “main female character needs to be more likeable” is very much the sort of phrase that crops up in rejection letters, that's an issue I've been trying to address.

Hence a lot of our café conversation focused on our understanding of this particular character... we agreed that, as a rule of thumb, the better an author understands a character, the more sympathetic that character will be...

Our conversation must have set some subterranean train of thought in motion, since as I drove back to San Francisco, I suddenly realized something important – even obvious-seeming -- about this character's background. Indeed, anyone who reads future drafts of the novel will probably assume it was integral to my original concept of the character – as, on some subconscious level, it may well have been. It just wasn't yet on the page where it needed to be.

Little connection-explosions of this kind – cf. Robert Burton's description -- can be among the most gratifying moments in a novel's development, yet they're also exhausting and humbling.

Something that worries me, on an epistemological level: stories are built out of connections that just feel right, in a parts-fitting-together kind of way... which is disturbingly unscientific. The detective in Michael Chabon's The Final Solution considers that “as doctors, no doubt, psychiatrists left something to be desired, but they often made fine detectives,” and I suspect the rationale for this is that fictional detectives think the same way writers and psychiatrists and shamans think, and not the same way scientists think...

Electric Literature no. 3 (Winter 2010)

2010-03-08T18:09:00.000-08:00

"Electric Literature" is now three quarters of the way to being a bona fide quarterly publication, and is available “in every viable medium: paperback, Kindle, iPhone, audiobook, and eBook.”

Aimee Bender’s “The Red Ribbon” is about a woman who starts charging for sex and then for other things. An exploration of the mysteries of commodification... Jason Sommer at Bark blogs that he "finished the story thinking about illusion and entitlement and emptiness.”

Matt Sumell’s “Little Things” contains a splattering of dark events. Of the technique of this story, John Matthew Fox at BookFox comments, “By surrounding the story of the mother's death with the violent, odd, and melancholy ephemera heard on the news or happened to friends, the normally isolated event of death is seen with a wide-angle perspective, a single star in a constellation of pain.”

Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters” was first published in the form of tweets, “as a three-day experiment in micro-serialization.” I was originally somewhat skeptical about how this would work out -- but it proved to be the story from this issue that got deepest under my skin. The challenge here was to design a story that would be most effectively told as a series of tweets – Moody successfully rises to this challenge, describing a date/hookup from alternating points of view.

Patrick deWitt’s “Reed & Dinnerstein Moving” is about two guys starting a moving company -- a funny, destabilizing story that made me feel we live in a world of enigma and violence, where all boundaries are constantly shifting.

Jenny Offill’s “The Tunnel” is a slightly quieter and more traditional story, perhaps the issue's most lifelike. A man visits his dying ex-wife in hospital, frequently running into one of her friends with whom he has a tense relationship. His current significant other is resentful about all this. It snows tentatively, on and off. According to our emergent typology of short stories, "The Tunnel" is as much a house as a worm: stop me if I'm being too idiosyncratic here. Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote a story called “The Tunnel” too, but then by now we must be running out of original one-word or two-word titles for short stories -- we ought to set up some kind of title registry...

Here’s a link to my post about the previous issue of Electric Literature.

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop

2010-03-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

The Bookshop is set in 1959-1960, and was published in 1978. A woman opens a bookshop in an East Anglian village, and things go about as swimmingly as they might if, say, Jude the Obscure opened a bookshop...

Some of the problems the heroine faces are realistic – the villagers are mostly uninterested in books not about royalty or World War Two, although Lolita also sells well. Other difficulties seem less plausible – a member of the local establishment goes so far as to have an Act of Parliament passed to get the shop shut down. Were the gentry still that overbearing by 1959? Maybe my question is naïve. Valentine Cunningham notes that the characters “have the ring of terrible local truth about them” -- I like the implication there that "local truth" is not quite the same as the metropolitan variety...

The bookshop also has a “rapper” -- a charming Suffolk term for a poltergeist. This mainly serves to provide foreshadowing and is not all that bad for trade. Here is a representative joke --

“The house agent was in no way legally bound to mention the poltergeist, though he perhaps alluded to it in the phrase unusual period atmosphere.”

According to Fitzgerald's interview with Kerry Fried, there really was a poltergeist in a bookshop she once worked in. Fitzgerald notes that “poltergeists seem to be attracted by adolescent children, let's say between the ages of 11 and 13,” which would explain a lot. Although according to Julian Barnes, Fitzgerald frequently lied to interviewers.

The bookshop assistant, Christine Gipping, is ten when the story begins. This enables Fitzgerald, among her other targets, to take a well-aimed swipe at the “eleven plus” exams that used so drastically to determine British children's futures. Something that really comes across -- England used to be a place where one got patronized a lot.

A Distant, Grudging, Even Uncomprehending Respect for Chiclets

2010-03-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

All the Samuel R. Delany letters quoted in this post are from the collection 1984. In a letter to John P. Mueller dated August 21st, 1984, Delany writes --

“Yesterday, I got hold of a book of short stories by Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. They're very nice, very short, and Carver has a very precise eye for the way people in a state of despair try to pretend they're feeling something else entirely. And he lets the language flop about and clunk a bit, not just in the way that real people talk (which clever writers have been doing since back in Rome with Patronius Arbiter), but in the way real people might even, now and again, write about their own situations if someone asked them to put down what happened. And that's kind of interesting. But even so, you'd really have to work to write a duller bunch of tales.”

“Like I say, it's the problem of being a professional. You end up reading lots of stuff that you respect, but very little you honestly enjoy.”

Yet two months later Delany appears to be hooked on Carver. Here he is writing to Robert S. Bravard on October 16th 1984 about a science fiction convention --

“For the most part, indeed, I stayed in my hotel room whenever I could get way with it and read Raymond Carver short story after short story. (I brought three volumes of them with me.) Carver is not a writer whom I like; but I respect him more and more. And his tales go down like chiclets – the point being, of course, that you are not supposed to swallow your chiclet; just chew it. Yet sometimes you do.”

Delany has more thoughts on “respect” in a letter to Camilla Decarnin dated September 1st, 1984 --

“Writing of Camus, Susan Sontag once said that the most dangerous emotions a writer's texts can evoke from the reader is love. That's because, she went on, when we fall out of love with a writer, we feel betrayed; we feel that, indeed, we were fools ever to have been taken in by them in the first place. A writer is much more likely to endure if he (Sontag wrote 'his' and 'he') earns from us a distant, grudging, even uncomprehending respect. That's the writer who, years later, we take down again, read more carefully this time – suddenly to have our begrudging respect open up into a far deeper aesthetic appreciation.”

Not an easy idea to convey to one's publicist or blurb writer. Advance praise: this book will earn your distant, begrudging respect. But as usual Delany's onto something. He continues --

“(That's another reason why 'greatness' may be a more socially valuable 'aura' in the end than the subjective experience of either 'sophisticated' or 'unsophisticated' enjoyment.) But once we are through with a writer whose work we once honestly and directly loved, we really are through. If we do go back to those texts, it's only to explore the more or less painful (or, indeed, sometimes charming; but always, ultimately, unsatisfactory) traces of our earlier vulnerability, naïveté, and immaturity. And that writer's new works, to the extent they have not grown as fast (or in the same direction) as we have, return us to all the torture of our own earlier failings and blindnesses.”

I don't know if I've ever fallen completely out of love with a writer I once loved... Here's a link to a Sontag essay on Camus that may be the one Delany is thinking of. If so she doesn't exactly say what Delany remembers her saying, but she does say this --

“Kafka arouses pity and terror, Joyce admiration, Proust and Gide respect, but no modern writer that I can think of, except Camus, has aroused love.”

“Perhaps it is always dangerous for a writer to inspire gratitude in his readers...”

IMHO, Kafka does too arouse love...

Innokenty's Epiphany

2010-03-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

It was interesting which scenes stuck in my mind for twenty-five years until I came to read the unexpurgated translation of Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle. One surely-unforgettable image comes when Innokenty has just been thrown into the Lubyanka, and receives a cup to drink from:

“The mug's capacity was three hundred grams; it was enameled, greenish, with a strange picture of a cat wearing glasses, pretending to read a book, but furtively eyeing a cheeky bird hopping around nearby.”

“They couldn't, surely, have chosen this picture especially for the Lubyanka? But how apt it was!”

The line from the book that stuck in my memory word for word was “the pit was calling its children home,” The Willetts translation has “the abyss was calling its children home,” but the older version still gives me more goosebumps.

Here's something that wasn't in the old, expurgated version --

“The lecturer had revived. He rose to his feet and, brandishing his big fist, demolished with ease the gimcrack formal logic created by Aristotle and the medieval scholastics, which now felt the full force of Marxist dialectic.”

“Marfino, by exception, received current American journals, and Rubin had recently translated for the Acoustics Laboratory at large an article that Roitman and several other officers had read on the new science of cybernetics. It was based on precisely those thrice-obsolete procedures of formal logic: 'Yes' means yes, 'no' means no, and Tertium non datur. (John Bull's Two-Digit Algebraic Logic had appeared in the same year as The Communist Manifesto, only nobody had noticed it.)”

Does anyone know if John Bull's Two-Digit Algebraic Logic was a real book? Its citation here seems to tie in with Solzhenitsyn's theme that the dialectic is spurious, that what we really need are binary concepts of good and evil... although Solzhenitsyn believes a man must be imprisoned to achieve such clarity -- “for Innokenty, good and evil were now distinct entities, visibly separated by that light gray door, those olive green walls, and that first night in prison.” Maybe the point of the reference to two-digit algebraic logic is that the future belongs to cybernetics rather than Marxism...

Innokenty's Phone Call

2010-03-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

I just sort of reread Alexsandr Solzhenitysn's In The First Circle. Sort of reread because the English version I read as a teenager was an expurgated version called The First Circle – the only version available then. So I'm comparing different translations of different drafts of the novel...

The plot's set in motion when Innokenty, a Soviet diplomat, makes a rash phone call to the West. In the expurgated version, the purpose of Innokenty's call is to warn a colleague not to give some medicine to some foreigners. In the unexpurgated version, the purpose of the call is to prevent a Soviet agent receiving technical information about the atom bomb. Innokenty's hasty plea, and the drunken confusion of the speaker at the other end of the line, suggest that Solzhenitsyn himself is desperately trying to transmit a message to a decadent, uncomprehending West.

After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in Russia, Solzhenitsyn edited down In The First Circle in the hope of getting it published there too. Besides the nuclear context, he also cut a scene where Innokenty visits a desecrated church, a scene where Innokenty's wife implores him to beat her, and the idea that Stalin may have been a Tsarist double-agent. The logic of the cuts is not always obvious – in retrospect the book seems so comprehensively anti-Soviet, it's hard to see how its publication in the USSR ever seemed to be a possibility. But I guess after Khrushchev allowed Ivan Denisovich to be published, all bets were off for a while...

To develop the voice recognition technology necessary for Innokenty's capture, the Soviet government harnesses the efforts of some engineers imprisonsed in a “sharashka” -- a special prison camp for engineers, like one in which Solzhenitsyn had himself done some time. When I was a teenager, what most impressed me about The First Circle was how noble Solzhenitsyn makes the “zeks” (prisoners) seem --

“The mugs outside did not have immortal souls. Zeks earned them the hard way, serving their never-ending sentences. Outside, men used the liberty allowed them selfishly and stupidly, mired in their petty schemes and futile endeavors.”

Today it strikes me that the engineers in the gulag are remarkably like other engineers I've known: some scenes where technologically-minded zeks deride the apparatchiks they work under eerily recall the world of “Dilbert.”

Does reintroducing the nuclear non-proliferation element actually improve the plot? The restored text did not appear in English until 2009, a year after Solzhenitsyn's death. By then a line like “If the Communists got the atom bomb, the planet was doomed” was somewhat nostalgia-inducing -- however this long delay is hardly Solzhenitsyn's fault. Here's a Daniel Kalder interview from Publishing Perspectives with Solzhenitsyn’s son Ignat, about why it took so long for a complete version of In The First Circle to appear in English, and about the distressing absence of plans for an English translation of The Red Wheel cycle or Solzhenitsyn's other late works.

Kinds of Reading

2010-02-25T15:45:00.000-08:00

From Derek Bickerton's Bastard Tongues -- “Most students read passively. They see themselves as vessels waiting to be filled. They have awe and respect for the printed word. I don't. I want to catch the authors out. I assume, correctly, that part of the stuff, maybe most of it, will be wrong. And I'm going to figure out which part it is. Even if you know nothing about a subject you can spot self-contradictions, and if you read two authors on the same topic you can spot regular contradictions. They can't both be right. (They could both be wrong, though.)”

“Most students hit their heads on brick walls. They're given a text to read, and somewhere in Chapter 1 or 2 they bog down completely. But they persevere, oh do they persevere! (That's unless they decide to drop out completely.) They feel if they don't absorb Chapter 2 to its very last syllable, they'll be totally lost when they get to Chapter 3. So they keep slugging away until their eyes glaze, trying to force understanding. Finally they sleep on it and start over again the next day.”

“What I do is skim through the text looking for anything I understand. Sometimes at first it's as little as the introduction and a couple of paragraphs here and there. No matter. I store that in my mind and do something else. Read stuff about the subject that I do understand, stop again the moment it gets to be hard work. Then after a week or two, I come back to the first text, skim it again for anything that makes sense. There will be more this time. I guarantee it. Maybe not much, but a little more will start to make sense. There will be more this time. I guarantee it. Maybe not much, but a little more will start to make sense. Repeat the process. You'll probably find you're getting patches all over the book. Okay, fine. The patches spread like inkblots; eventually they'll link up. Suddenly, what a few weeks before was a trek into impenetrable jungle becomes a stroll through the park.”

“You see, evolution has been programming brains for half a billion years, It has been programming them to sort incoming data and make sense out of it. A life-or-death matter: only those who can do it well survive. The brain doesn't care what kind of data. Whistles and roars on the savanna or words on a printed page – it just sorts, interprets, and soars, whether you're conscious of it or not.”

Some books are most rewarding when ransacked in this way – but obviously we need a different approach for, say, poetry. The word “reading” is used to cover a wide range of different activities. Compare for example the kind of reading Bickerton is talking about with the kind Gary Lutz describes. High literary reading owes a lot to religious reading, where the text is treated as sacred. The difference could have something to do with the two separate reading pathways in the brain distinguished by Stanislas Dehaene.

But there aren’t only two types of reading. Sometimes we read just for plot -- we may be fully aware that the author has bungled the background setting, and that his prose is dead, but still keep turning the pages to see what happens.

And rarely, we experience all these kinds of readerly satisfaction at once, penetrating the zone Nabakov described -- “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.”

“Cousin Teresa” by Saki

2010-02-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

The story can be found here.

On one level, Saki (H. H. Munro) was clearly reproaching the British for being less concerned with the maintenance of their Empire than with the domains of popular entertainment and dogs – and who can blame them really? Expanding an empire is a thankless task.

“Cousin Teresa” also makes the point that, in the eyes of the world, solid achievements will always count for less than fluff. “It’s immense,” is how Lucas characterizes his idea for a dance routine -- and indeed it’s still the sort of idea that passes for “big” within the culture industry. Andrew Lloyd Webber should really come up with a tune for it.

Saki’s own nature was somewhat split between Lucas and Basset – how seriously after all can we take a colonial administrator named Basset? In Britain itself, the tendency to prefer Lucas over Basset has since played out most of the way to its logical conclusion.

Still... basset or borzoi... Saki may have felt that either way the country was going to the dogs. I wonder if the story was ever the subject of an Edwardian sermon.

Allow me to note that "Cousin Teresa" contains the following great sentence --

“’Literature,’ explained the Minister.”

Quite so.

Some info about Saki here. Other stories from his 1914 collection Beasts and Super-Beasts here.

Smeary Covers

2010-02-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

Stephen King complained about the way Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork was marketed --

“Fieldwork's cover is a green smear (probably jungle) and a gray smear (probably sky). It communicates nothing.”

“Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it? Why should this book go to waste?”

Lori Ostlund’s The Bigness of the World also has a smeary cover, suggestive of some kind of landscape. There's nothing smeary about Berlinski’s or Ostlund’s writing – both authors portray the world precisely, even starkly... so what's the deal here? Is smeariness supposed to communicate literariness? When the writing doesn’t lack focus, why should the cover photo?

One theory -- maybe the effect supposed to be conveyed is that of a saccadic eye movement? Literary fiction is supposed to be more three-dimensional -- and have more going on -- so reading it requires constant refocusing: is this what the blur signifies?

Reading is impossible without saccadic eye movements, so I guess it would make a deranged kind of sense.

Here's a classic Jessa Crispin piece on how to judge a book by its cover, containing the following words to live by --

"Some images to avoid are laughing children (demented looking children are okay), birds, pictures of ranch land, and angels. You should be okay with most other animals (especially fish for some reason) except for horses." Why fish should be better than birds I can't say, yet I know what she means...

Balm in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

2010-02-22T11:17:00.001-08:00

Gilead takes us into the consciousness of a humble provincial minister preparing to die. It seems at first a peaceful, slow-moving book, but it contains a terrible wisdom.

The Reverend John Ames’s thoughts are precise yet spacious. Regarding the practice of watching baseball on TV, he notes that it “seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.” Of religious rhetoric – “the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.” A thought that might serve as his epitaph -- “It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.”

A big part of what makes the Reverend John Ames sympathetic is his integrity -- this thought struck me as surprising at first, but now I wonder if this isn’t actually a crucial quality in all characters we find sympathetic...

Once I got sucked in, Gilead turned out to have plenty of plot. Robinson traces the history of three generations of Midwestern preachers from the buildup to the Civil War, through the First World War and the Great Depression, all the way up to 1950s anti-miscegenation laws. Ames’s grandfather was a fiery abolitionist, a vision-prone militant Christian soldier of the stamp of John Brown. Ames’s father became a pacifist and finally abandoned his preacher’s vocation. Ames in the 1950s is still preaching in Gilead, Iowa, but doubts his young son will want to stay or take up the family trade. Gilead takes the form of a one-sided epistolary novel, the whole book being presented as a journal Ames intends his son to read when he grows up. Marilynne Robinson told Powells.com, "I've never loved epistolary novels; I was surprised to find myself writing one."

In her “Paris Review” interview, she explained why she thinks of religion as a framing mechanism, and why she gets nervous giving sermons -- “You’re talking within a congregation. They know the genre. There are many things that the sermon has to resonate with besides the specific text that is the subject of the sermon. In my tradition, there’s a certain posture of graciousness you have to answer to no matter what the main subject matter of the sermon is.” Gilead is likewise resonant and gracious, and apparently one of Barack Obama's favorite books.

InsideStorytime COSMOS

2010-02-18T11:13:00.000-08:00

Werner Herzog told Katja Nicodemus in a recent interview that "all the most important trends of the last century come from California: the collective dreams in cinemas round the world. The fact that homosexuals are recognised as an integral part of society. The computer technology. All the Internet innovations. And also idiocies like hippies and New Age. There are only two exceptions. The green movement is more of a Scandinavian thing. And Islamic fundamentalism does not come from California either."

Attempting to milk this legacy of universal significance, tonight (Thursday February 18^th, 6.30 - 8.30 pm) we bring you InsideStorytime COSMOS at Cafe Royale. Some real cultural heavyweights will be reading:

Lori Ostlund is the author of the Flannery O'Connor award winning collection The Bigness of the World.

Tony DuShane, a stalwart of the Mission literary scene, is the author of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk.

Alta Ifland is the author of Elegy for a Fabulous World -- according to Sven Birkerts her "uncanny tales merge the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth."

Stephen Kessler is the author of the poetry collection Burning Daylight and the essay collection Moving Targets, and the translator of works by many illustrious foreign authors including the sonnets of Borges.

Genie Gratto posts intoxicating fiction at 100 Proof Stories.

Galaxies nowadays aren't forming new stars as quickly as galaxies did billions of years ago: a recent study shows this is because there isn't as much raw material available for star formation -- cf. the paper, "High molecular gas fractions in normal massive star-forming galaxies in the young universe," in the February 11^th 2010 issue of “Nature." But our little cultural galaxy seems to be churning out new stars faster than ever before. Tell us you heard about the event from this blog, and we'll waive the customary $3 - $5 cover charge.

Avoiding Words of Foreign Origin

2010-02-17T18:24:00.000-08:00

Consider Orwell's famous rendering, from “Politics and the English Language,” of a verse from the King James version of Ecclesiastes --

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

-- into the language of 1940s bureaucrats --

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

One reason Orwell's ironic “translation” lacks the sincere tone of the original is that it has fewer monosyllables. Another is that it contains more words of Latin and Greek origin.

Because “Politics and the English Language” expresses a preference for words of Anglo-Saxon origin, some have charged Orwell with racism. This is surely unfair – it just happens that, for historical reasons, the Anglo-Saxon words in English tend to be the ones with the simplest connotations. Nicholas Ostler notes in Empires of the Word that “much of a language's flavour comes purely by association” -- an example Ostler gives is that for the first few centuries after written Greek literature began, each genre had to be written in the dialect of its first practitioners. “So epic poetry had to be written in Homer's mixture of Ionic an Aeolic, lyric poetry in Doric, history at first in Ionic, tragedy in Attic.”

Of course, once such associations are set, they may tend to reinforce regional stereotypes. And excluding foreign words may also mean excluding new ideas. Dmitri Sologdin, a character in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, disciplines himself into avoiding words of foreign origin --

“I make a mark here every time I use a foreign word in Russian when it isn't unavoidable, The number of such marks is the measure of my imperfection. This one is for the word 'capitalism,' which I would have replaced with 'moneygrubbing' if I'd had my wits about me. 'Surveillance' in my slovenly haste I failed to replace with 'watchkeeping.' So I've given myself two bad marks.”

That's the Harry Willetts translation. The old Michael Guybon translation has --

“I make these ticks every time I use a foreign word without any real need. The total numbers of ticks show how far I am from my goal. When I used the word 'capitalism' just now, for instance, instead of 'the rule of usury,' or when in the heat of the moment I was too lazy to use 'tale-bearing' instead of 'informing,' I gave myself two ticks.”

Sologdin's examples are very politically charged. Maybe without the importation of foreign words and ideas into Russia, the Revolution couldn't have happened. On the other hand, the terms "the rule of usury” and “moneygrubbing” seem more ideologically loaded than the term “capitalism...”

Parts Fitting Together

2010-02-16T18:30:00.000-08:00

Every event that occurs in a novel sheds light on all the novel's other events. This annoys Thomas Kurton, the scientist character in Generosity by Richard Powers --

“... fiction's perpetual mistaking of correlation for causation drives Kurton nuts. Even Camus can't help deploying bits of his characters' histories as if they explained all subsequent behaviors and beliefs.”

What Kurton sees as spurious correlation, Marshall Gregory in Shaped by Stories sees as a big part of fiction's appeal --

“Too much of my life – and yours – gives us the sense that the parts don't fit together. In contrast, the analogies of fiction and other narratives provide us with points of comparison that let us see what greater focus, organization, and unity our lives might possess.”

It's in our nature to look for patterns; when it comes to spotting connections, a false positive is likely to be less hazardous than a false negative... at least until you become clinically paranoid...

How much of our enjoyment of fiction stems from its providing more opportunities for connection-spotting than our real lives do?

Housman's Razor

2010-02-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

Robert Graves -- "A. E. Housman's test of a true poem was simple and practical; does it make the hairs at one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving."

According to Graves, "The reason why the hairs stand on end, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright or lust -- the female spider of the queen-bee whose embrace is death." I wouldn't want to go all the way with Graves on this one, but it interests me that certain poems induce horripilation and related physiological effects.

Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the classic example. If the following lines cross my mind while I'm following a road across a moor in the dark, my pace reliably accelerates --

"Like one, that on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on
And turns no more his head:
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."

The generations of poets immediately rebelling against Housman also give me goosebumps sometimes. Eliot does it --

"There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

So does Auden --

"'O where are you going?' said reader to rider,
That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

But I think not many poets in the last half-century have aimed for this kind of effect. For late-twentieth-century examples, one might have to look not to poetry but to the lyrics of rock songs?

We're Sorry. This Book is too Well Written for us.

2010-02-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

Steve Almond has a future-of-publishing piece up on the Rumpus, touching on what it's like dealing with an agent who says your novel is “too literary” for today’s market, and on why he self-published his collection This Won't Take a Minute, Honey --

“I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want the book to be an artifact that commemorates a particular human gathering, not a commodity.”

Recently I read Josh Lukin's “Minnesota Review” interview with Samuel R. Delany, Asked why he advises younger authors nowadays to consider self-publishing, Delany provides some perspective on the collapse of the publishing industry --

“When there was a greater variety of commercial publishers and more economic competition between them, self-publishing was a way to avoid competition. It announced that you couldn't take the heat. That's why I advised against it, back then. At that point, nobody really took self-published writers seriously. Self-publishing was for books such as Thoughts of God, by John Francis, Forty Years a Backwoods Doctor, or (the title is Auden's) A Poultry Lover's Jottings.”

“Today, the collapse not only means that there's no real economic competition, but the kinds of things that publishers are looking for have changed. Commercial publishers today are far more distrustful of good writing than they have ever been before, and usually won't consider it unless it comes with some sort of ready-made reputation or gimmick. In the last half dozen years, writers have shown me rejection letters from publishers such as Harcourt Brace that actually say, under the letterhead, 'We're sorry. This book is too well written for us.' This means that competition is of an entirely different order than it was, say, thirty years ago, when such a letter simply would not have been written.”

I find this state of affairs easier to accept intellectually than I do emotionally – which I guess just goes to show that taboos die hard. Delany notes in About Writing that Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane, Raymond Roussel, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all self-published notable works -- “But that is only to say that, for them, the competition began after publication, not before.” Which is part of why it's disingenuous of Almond to deny that This Won't Take a Minute, Honey is a commodity.

I'll be reading at Why There Are Words tonight (Thursday February 11th 2010) at Studio 333, 333 Caledonia Street, Sacramento, along with Stephen Elliott, Joan Frank, Tanya Egan Gibson, Lauren Becker, and Judy French.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth

2010-02-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

Sacred Hunger is set a few decades before the American Revolution or French Revolution -- but we feel them brewing in the novel's every line.

Unsworth makes the eighteenth century play itself out in microcosm as the story of a single slave-ship. The captain, Saul Thurso, is the ship's absolute despot, savagely superstitious and insane. He's authority made flesh, having “reduced the world to a dominant principle and wrenched his moral frame to accommodate it” -- the dominant principle being the “sacred hunger” for profit to which the title alludes. Matthew Paris is the ship's doctor, a radical free-thinker, a man of science and compassion whose actions help spark a mutiny.

Rereading Sacred Hunger, I was struck by the consistently felicitous word choices, the “distraught cries of lapwings plunging in the wind,” the “cruising jaws of crocodiles,” a snake “dandified as only the very venomous can be, in bands of red and black and yellow...” I think of something G.K. Chesterton wrote about Robert Louis Stevenson -- “Everybody who has been at the seaside has noted how sharp and highly coloured, like painted caricatures, appear even the most ordinary figures as they pass in profile to and fro against the blue dado of the sea. There is something also of that hard light that falls full and pale upon ships and open shores; and even more, it need not be said, of a certain salt and acrid clearness in the air. But it is notably the case in the outlines of these maritime figures. They are all edges and they stand by the sea, that is the edge of the world.”

“This is but a rough experimental method; but it will be found useful to make the experiment, of calling up all the Stevensonian scenes that recur most readily to the memory; and noting this bright hard quality in shape and hue.”

Sacred Hunger is Stevensonian in its verbal precision, precision somehow contributing to a bright hard maritime quality of light that pervades the book. After mutinying, the surviving crew members -- many of them press-ganged and scarcely freer than the slaves -- band together with the surviving slaves to settle in the swamps of Florida.

We do not see this society functioning until Part Nine of the novel. There's an interesting structural observation to be made here. Sacred Hunger opens with a second-hand account of a mulatto's childhood memories of an inter-racial paradise. The plot builds up to the moment of revolution that leads to this utopia -- then we skip forward twelve years, for a detailed account of the machinations to destroy the utopia. Accordingly when in Part Nine we experience the quasi-Rousseauist alternative society, we know it's a world about to be destroyed from without – while Unsworth simultaneously shows us that it contains the seeds of its own internal destruction. For a novelist working around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it took a lot of craft to imagine a utopia.

The Way Forward Into Light

2010-02-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead -- “Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one's way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision – these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing.”

Images of passing from darkness into light are common in fiction. In Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, Deakin's childhood escape from the shed where his father locked him up is the last thing he thinks of before dying in Africa -- “That light, that enlargement had been destination enough. He had never found it again, he had run ever since between narrowing walls, under lowering skies.” Unsworth uses a similar image for Paris's emergence from the slave-ship's festering hold onto its deck, immediately before instigating a mutiny -- “In all the years of his life remaining, Paris was to carry the impression of that emergence into light and space.”

Joseph Conrad wrote in “Henry James, an Appreciation” -- “Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phrases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values – the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, 'take me out of myself!' meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness.”

Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed my Life – “It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light. Perhaps this only becomes clear when one watches a child do it.”

Fiction as Moral Technology

2010-02-08T14:41:00.000-08:00

Richard Hughes, Fiction or Truth -- “... for most of us Fiction in one form or another offers our only way of experiencing the identity of others. This identity is the necessary ground of Ethics.”

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid -- “This period of childhood provides the foundation for one of the most important social, emotional and cognitive skills a human being can learn: the ability to take on someone else's perspective.”

Stephen Pinker talking to Rebecca Goldstein in an interview for “The Seed" -- “We are getting less cruel, and the question is… why did it happen? What stretched our innate capacity for empathy? And one answer is mediums that force us to take other people’s perspectives, such as journalism, history, and realistic fiction.”

The word “realistic” here seems problematic to me – I think that, for reasons touched on earlier, it would be better to substitute the word “lifelike.” But I like Pinker's argument that “fiction can be a kind of moral technology," one of the ways simulated experience can be useful.

In this interview, Pinker's stress is on how fiction can help us identify with people from other ethnic backgrounds. Learning to identify with a fictional black person can make white readers more compassionate towards real black people -- Pinker gives the example of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

However as evidence that compassion for fictional characters can easily co-exist with indifference towards actual people, I call to the witness stand Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye --

“The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kind-hearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.”

Generalizations About Thin Women

2010-02-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

"She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women." -- Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays

It's part of the job of novelists or their characters occasionally to throw out such over-generalizations. Ideally they ring somewhat true, or at least tell us something about the narrator.

From David Foster Wallace's story "Westard the Course of the Empire Takes its Way" --

"D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of her she'd extend to the space around her. Thin the way mean nuns are thin."

Maybe Wallace encountered thin mean nuns at some point in his life, but I suspect he drew this image from the well of his television-watching experience.

Claims about thin women tend to strike me as ideologically suspect.

From Betsy Lerner's Food and Loathing -- "A high school friend's father once said that losing weight was merely a matter of vanity. Thin people, he said, were more vain and cared more about their looks. The comment has stayed with me. I've searched my soul and I promise you: I'm vain. I'm Carly Simon vain. If it were just about vanity, I'd be Kate Moss."