Great Story: "A Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka

Every now and then I'll post a link to a short story I love -- in this case "Ein Hungerkünstler," in translation -- to try and spark a discussion about it. (I'll include links to all the "Great Story" blog posts on my homepage, in the hope of keeping the comments going for a while...)

Franz Kafka was the twentieth-century writer who spoke most directly to the human heart; this was one of the last stories he wrote; you are invited to (1) click on the link above to read or reread the story, and then (2) post comments if so moved. I'll post comments too.

Here's something I only just learned: in the twenty-five years or so since I first fell in love with "A Hunger Artist," I've assumed that the phenomenon of hunger artists was something Kafka made up, but according to this article, apparently not: fasting really used to be a spectator sport? What an amazing idea for a story! Oops, guess I'm eighty-five years too late...

Now read the story...

Do Happy Endings Work For You? (Warning, Contains Spoilers)

The age my daughter's at, it really got to her when, in the movie "Bolt," the girl is separated from her dog. I wasn't so heartbroken myself, having noticed a few decades ago that Disney movies always have happy endings. The screenwriters for "Bolt" had noticed the same thing, and even during the sad scenes, couldn't resist ironically referencing the fact there was nothing really to worry about.

(See what I mean about spoilers -- I already gave it away that Bolt and Penny get reunited by the end of "Bolt." More spoilers on the way regarding "Slumdog Millionaire" and Saturday.)

The ending of the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" worked for me, largely because I didn't see the happy ending coming. Because it didn't feel like a movie that was automatically going to have a happy ending, I experienced the way things turned out as life-affirming.

And I loved the conclusion of the novel Saturday, perhaps because an Ian McEwan novel is the last place I would have expected to find a happy ending. John Banville apparently found the book too tritely comforting. But surely McEwan has produced enough memorably downbeat moments in his oeuvre that he's earned the right to dream up a single day when things turn out somewhat all right? Saturday delivers that trademark McEwan effect, of events slowly and in horrific detail moving towards an appalling moment you know is coming even though you don't know exactly what it will be... and then presto, kindness prevails after all. Does the fact that I relished this surprise make me one of the "scum who want the cockles of their hearts warmed," as Brecht put it?

Let's say happy endings work if they're earned. But perhaps as one consumes more and more of them, the currency with which they must be earned becomes increasingly devalued? Playing devil's advocate here, will we reach a point where happy endings will simply not be worth the amount of trauma we'll have to endure to render them meaningful?

Why Doesn't Everybody Love Literature?

The neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, the main character in Ian McEwan's Saturday, is not a literary man. He has read Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, at his daughter Daisy's instigation, but got little out of them. "At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were just once so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation."

In his infamous review of Saturday, John Banville claimed to find Perowne's illiteracy implausible -- particularly the fact that Perowne has not heard of Matthew Arnold. I am quite sure there are neurosurgeons who have not heard of Arnold, just as there are literary critics who aren't sure what the amygdala is. A very successful computer programmer once told me that there was no reason to read Madame Bovary, now that societal attitudes towards divorce have changed. When I tried to protest, he said, "What, you're not going to say the book's really well written or something, are you?" I could only reply, "Well... um.. yes," and the programmer shook his head in distaste. A banker once told me Anna Karenina was boring, and was incredulous that anyone could dispute his verdict. All one can say here is that what I experience when reading those novels is not what the programmer and the banker experienced. I should stress that these are worthy, witty individuals, better able to support their children than I am, and so on -- one of the brilliancies of Saturday is that the thuggish Baxter proves more capable of appreciating Arnold's poetry than does the noble-spirited Perowne. Enjoying literature gives one no claim to the moral high ground.

Perowne is certainly right that Flaubert accumulated a lot of details. All the variants of Madame Bovary can now be consulted on this website, which contains not only the published text and images of the different drafts, but interactive controls which allow you to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers. What emerges from Flaubert's "steady, workmanlike accumulation," at least for those of us who enjoy Madame Bovary, is an overwhelmingly-convincing world.

James Wood writes in How Fiction Works, "The realist feels Flaubert breathing down his neck: Is it well written enough?" An uncomfortable image, but one that comes closer to my own experience of Flaubert than does the progammer's argument that the book has a single point to make and is now obsolete.

But there it is, Tolstoy hated Shakespeare, Banville hated Saturday... writing is like trying to design a program that has to run on hundreds of thousands of completely different operating systems -- every individual human brain being a different operating system. Under the circumstances, there's no way around the fact that, however good your program is, there'll be many operating systems on which it completely fails to work.

On Characters Changing

The narrator of Lolita has this to say, about the work of constructing selves for our friends:

"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the grand king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tears. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z every betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we learn of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has ever seen."

Is it normal to object this much to your friends changing, or is the fact he feels this way just one more sign that Humbert Humbert is a sociopath?

With this paragraph, Nabokov prepares us to encounter a minor character who's completely transformed himself since the death of his wife -- this being, in fact, an example of a time in somebody's life where self-reinvention is likely. The paradigmatic example of such a time is of course adolescence, and Robert Jay Lifton went so far as to hypothesize that "any adult change requires some reviving or perpetuating or recapturing of the tone of adolescence."

Writers of fiction understandably prefer characters who are undergoing changes. One might even propose it as part of the essence of a story that the protagonist is a different person at the end than at the beginning of the story, and that the story takes us through the process of the change.

The 'Interpreter Module' Located Somewhere in the Left Hemisphere

I'm interested in what neuroscience can tell us about reading. Here's a stimulating blog post by Jonah Lehrer on how "the brain is constantly trying to weave a narrative out of the cacophony of reality - it's desperate to make sense of the world. Interestingly, much of this narrative is written in reverse, as we brazenly re-write what just happened."

The post refers to experiments involving split-brain patients, patients whose hemispheres are disconnected. The results of these experiments strongly suggest to me that, in ordinary life, we unconsciously fabricate plausible-sounding explanations for our own past actions.

Lehrer gives this example of an experiment conducted by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients. "The scientists mischievously flashed different sets of pictures to each eye, which meant each hemisphere was getting a different set of inputs. For example, they would flash a picture of a chicken claw to the right eye and a picture of a snowy driveway to the left eye. The patient was then shown a variety of images and asked to pick out the image that was most closely associated with what they had seen. In a tragicomic display of indecisiveness, the split-brain patient's two different hands pointed to two different objects. The right hand pointed to a chicken (this matched the chicken claw that the left hemisphere witnessed), while the left hand pointed to a shovel (the right hemisphere wanted to shovel the snow.) When the scientists asked the patient to explain his contradictory responses, he immediately generated a plausible story. 'Oh, that's easy,' he said. 'The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed." Instead of admitting that his brain was hopelessly confused, he wove his confusion into a neat explanation."

Since I first learned about such experiments, it's seemed probable to me that similarily fabricated-yet-plausible-sounding explanations constitute a large part of our own daily mental experience.

Jonah Lehrer blogs, "I like to think of these confabulations as necessary half-truths to preserve the unity of the self. At any given moment, our mind is overstuffed with disparate sensations and fleeting thoughts; our different hemispheres want different things and distinct blobs of brain pump out distinct emotions. Why, then, do we feel like a unified person? Why do I feel like 'Jonah' and not like a collection of random and stray neural emanations? Because we tell ourselves a story. Just as a novelist creates a narrative, we create a sense of being. The self, in this sense, is our work of art, a fiction created by the mind in order to make sense of its own fragments."

This makes me think of a film review Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the movie "Citizen Kane" back in 1941:

"Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him. Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a place that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity; the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances... In a story by Chesterton -- 'The Head of Caesar,' I think - the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth."

Here's another translation of this review, with comments: Glenn Anders is not slow to assert that the review has the same qualities it attributes to the movie. While attempting to assemble Kane from the fragments on offer, Borges seems also to be at work assembling his own authorial persona -- perhaps using the same same part of the brain that we use every day to build a coherent picture of the people around us.

Should Writers be Suffering More?

Flaubert didn't have to work for a living. Nor did Proust. Nor did Tolstoy.

Whereas Dostoevsky struggled. The Czarist government put him in front of a firing squad in Siberia at one point, and pretended they were going to execute him -- no wonder the guy got a bit intense sometimes. Dostoevsky always had bills to pay, and as George Steiner points out in Tolstoy or Doestoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, this economic gulf between the two writers makes it understandable that Dostoevsky's prose is less polished than Tolstoy's -- he simply didn't have the time to write as many drafts -- although by way of compensation, depending on your taste, Doestoevsky can take us further into the darker reaches of the human mind. Solzhenitsyn had it even worse -- the gulag, exile to Vermont (well maybe that part doesn't sound so bad), then the final indignity of having his TV show in Russia cancelled because the ratings weren't high enough.

What would be your ideal balance? A traumatic childhood that will inspire you for the rest of your life and make you rich, like Dickens? Having an office job and drawing perverse inspiration from it for your writing, like Kafka? Turning your back on privilege and seeking out the gritty and the nitty-gritty, like Orwell? Would you prefer to experience wretched suffering in moderation or in immoderation? Your answers on a postcard please.

How Fictional Are Our Politicians?

There's cognitive dissonance involved in imagining a member of the Bush family as an ultimate object of desire, like the guy who stands in for W in Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, or W's father in Lydia Millet's George Bush, Dark Prince of Love.

Then again, I can see Darcy from Pride and Prejudice becoming a Tory Minister in later life. Joanne Rendell compares Darcy to Barack Obama, but that's just random. While Gordon Brown apparently imagines himself as Heathcliff -- say what?

Which fictional characters would you vote for, if they were running for office? Which fictional characters would you go on a date with? And when you love or hate a political figure, Obama say or Sarah Palin, how different is the process by which you formed this emotional identification from the process whereby you identify with the heroes or villains in a novel?

American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld

American Wife asks -- what's it like to lie awake at night, beside a snoring George W. Bush, and wonder where it all went wrong? Well, we've all been there.

Would you sacrifice your own political convictions for the man you love? The story is narrated by a Midwestern girl with Democratic leanings who marries the most aimless member of a Republican political dynasty, a genial clown for whose family of glib plutocrats Sittenfeld clearly feels a Fitzgeraldian fascination. When our heroine tries to get a separation from her husband, he reacts by becoming born again, going off the bottle, and stumbling into history.

In a characteristic joke, Charlie Blackwell claims he runs for office "for the same reason a dog licks his balls -- because I can." Although Blackwell is a product of Wisconsin and Princeton, rather than of Connecticut/Texas and Yale, we're forced to visualise him as George W. Bush when Sittenfeld writes "he was rattled that I hadn't immediately accepted his invitation -- I could tell by the way the corners of his smile collapsed a little," or describes him looking "surprised but still not entirely serious." Those of us who lived through the last eight years won't be able to erase from memory the slow, sickly decay of Dubya's smirk -- but as readers we can hope that the character of Charlie Blackwell will be remembered long after Bush himself becomes as obscure a figure as Rutherford B. Hayes.

American Wife is as full of expert twists as a Lionel Shriver novel. Making Charlie Blackwell afraid of the dark is a touch of genius on Sittenfeld's part, and the image of him twisting to "Twist and Shout" seems a delibrate echo of the tour de force moment in Alan Hollingshurst's The Line of Beauty where Margaret Thatcher dances to "Get Off of my Cloud." Another cool motif is that Alice Blackwell, a former librarian, is preoccupied with children's books throughout the novel, although for some reason we never get to see Charlie Blackwell reading "The Pet Goat" on 9/11.

Sittenfeld writes, "Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable?" Words that should be included in everyone's wedding ceremony -- or even better the following: "I had the fleeting thought that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate."

As Joyce Carol Oates said in her review of the book, "American Wife might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the 'American wife' is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections." Any marriage, like any Presidency, will wind up landing you in situations you didn't sign up for. Sittenfeld allows us to feel how artificially the public identitiy of a first lady is constructed -- what it's like when even your household pet was chosen by a poll, and you have to suffer the indignity of being told to get a facelift by someone with a face like Karl Rove's. Alice Blackwell challenges us, "I did not contradict myself; I live a life that contains contradictions. Don't you?" and asks, "Isn't your legacy not the one or two exceptional gestures of your life but the way you conducted yourself every day, year after year?" Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner? Either way, this one's a keeper.

The End of Total Immersion?

Steven Johnson just wrote an article about how the e-book will change the way we read. He reports that he started to read an e-book about business and technology on a Kindle, then got bored and started to read Zadie Smith's On Beauty as an e-book instead. Apparently, this means there has been a massive sociocultural paradigm shift, and that the era of paying attention is over, yada yada yada. "I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, of the author's ideas -- will be compromised."

This makes no sense. The reason Steven Johnson stopped reading the business and technology e-book was precisely that he wasn't totally immersed in it. Whoever's fault that is, it's not the Kindle's fault.

From a letter Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Anne Stevenson -- "What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration." Perhaps this capacity for concentration evolved because our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and subsequently became useful or useless for other tasks, as in W.H. Auden's paean

"to the first flaker of flints
who forgot his dinner,"

"the first collector of sea-shells
to remain celibate."

We've inherited this capacity -- not from the sea-shell collector, but from the other guy! -- and we won't lose it just because of some new gadgetry. That I was completely immersed in On Beauty when I read it had something to do with the text and something to do with my brain, but very little to do with the ink and paper involved. Wouldn't a more logical conclusion to draw from Steven Johnson's experience be that e-books will facilitate getting away from texts that don't suck us in, and facilitate finding texts that do suck us in? Why not deduce that e-books will make it easier to achieve the state of total literary immersion, helping people to achieve such states more frequently?

Steven Johnson goes on to raise the horrifying possibility that "entire books will be written with search engines in mind." I can't see this happening, since anyone could figure out that such books would be unreadable. And anyway, changes as to which search engine phrases are popular occur too quickly.

A best-selling author did tell me recently that word of mouth nowadays boils down to "which books your book is next to electronically," i.e. on Amazon's "customers who bought this item also bought" feature, but that's another topic.

Video Games Inspired by Italo Calvino

I was happy to find this Brandon Boyer post about Calvino-inspired video games -- apparently there are at least two. I think this development would have pleased Calvino.

From Levi Buchanan on Dan Benmergui's game I Wish I Were the Moon -- "an experimental game that deals in real abstracts: unspoken narrative, love, and the yearning heart. It's based on Italian writer Italo Calvino's story 'The Distance of the Moon,' about a time when the moon passed close enough to the earth that people could row across the ocean and climb up to it with a ladder... Depending on the sequences you choose, you can find nine different 'endings'-- and not all of them are happy."

From Chris Dahlen's review of Jonathan Blow's game Braid -- "By the time you reach the final castle, the fragments of text that introduce the levels -- inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities -- put the whole experience in sharp relief. Your journey isn't about the girl, it's about your understanding -- and misunderstanding -- of yourself. This isn't a game about time, it's about memories, and how they can be repeated and eventually rewritten. And understanding this isn't meant to make you feel like a hero, so much as a liar."

How beautiful, if a game can really deliver that kind of understanding! It's fun thinking of reasons Calvino might be a good inspiration for game designers -- such as his essential playfulness, use of powerful fairy-tale imagery, and penchant for alternative forking plotlines, stark premises from which endless possiblities proliferate. Like a game designer, Calvino creates grotesque worlds where people nonetheless have practical tasks to perform -- worlds rather like our own.

In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino based an aesthetic programme on the qualities of lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude, visibility and consistency -- I can imagine a creator of computer games finding inspiration here. I'm not saying that playing such games could ever substitute for the experience of reading Calvino, but I can imagine it complementing the experience.

Now why not go further, and suggest that reading Calvino can teach us how to experience gameplaying? My daughter sometimes insists I play Skywire with her, a game where three ebullient children take a cable car ride through a world inhabited by murderous, monstrous toy animals. When I find myself imaging the story Calvino might have written set in this world, the experience takes on unexpected additional resonances.

A Stab at an Obituary for JG Ballard

JG Ballard died yesterday. If you're looking for more information about him, the Modern Word has many links, as does Simon Sellars' Ballardian site. It's an indication of the scope of Ballard's achievement that there's even an online JG Ballard concordance.

Not long ago I read his autobiography, Miracles of Life, which Ballard wrote after being informed he had an incurable form of cancer. He grew up in 1930s Shanghai, described in his autobiography as "a media city before its time," a place of casinos and terrorist bombings, famine and film premieres, cocktails and warlords. Once the city fell to the Japanese, the show of British authority disintegrated, and the young Ballard was interned with his family -- the experience that inspired the most popular of his novels, Empire of the Sun.

These experiences of estrangement and artificiality permanently impacted Ballard's imagination, permeating his entire oeuvre with the violent clash of cultures and technologies. Looking back across his writing career, he noted, "The trademark images that I had sent out over the previous thirty years -- the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers -- could all be traced back to wartime Shanghai. For a long time I resisted this, but I accept now that it is almost certainly true. The memories of Shanghai that I had tried to repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet, and had slipped quietly into my fiction."

Rebelling against the stuffy self-delusion of post-war England, Ballard became, along with his friend Michael Moorcock, one of the key writers associated with New Wave science fiction. After his first wife died, Ballard raised his children as a single father -- a rare phenonemon in Shepperton, Surrey in the 1960s -- and ensured that their childhoods were less disturbing than his own. In Miracles of Life he wrote, "I still think that my children brought me up, perhaps as an incidental activity to rearing themselves."

His characteristic style a kind of surreal fusion of H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, he created post-colonial, postmodern landscapes of climate change and social alienation. Paul McAuley calls him "one of the few people to fully understand the second half of the twentieth century, and how it continues to shape the future." Crooked Timber says, "We all live in the decaying aftermath of the Space Age that he, better perhaps than anyone else. described... There are bits of the world (and not-unimportant ones) that are Ballardian – if you’ve read him, you experience the shock of recognition when you see them." Here's an obituary in the Guardian by David Pringle, another one of Ballard's many devoted fans -- who while he was editor of Interzone published some of Ballard's finest later short stories. Like many science fiction writers, Ballard was probably at his best with the short story form.

Here is a not-atypical Ballardian sentence:

"In a few thrilling minutes I vandalized her car, aerosolling bizarre hieroglyphs over the doors and windscreen in what I imagined was an interplanetary language."

Miracles of Life reported, "I went to the world s-f convention held in London in 1957, but the Americans were hard to take, and most of the British fans were worse. In Paris science fiction was popular among leading writers and film-makers like Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, and I assumed that I would find their counterparts in London, a huge error. Today's s-f enthusiasts are an entirely different breed, however. Many have university degrees, have read Joyce and Nabokov and seen Alphaville, and can place science fiction within a larger literary context. Yet curiously, science fiction itself is now in steep decline, and there may well be a moral there."

On Characters Coming Alive

What does it mean when a character in a novel or short story comes alive?

I imagine the following: some part of the human brain has the function of understanding other people we know, in order to assess their likely future behavior, figure out how to get on their good side, and so on.

When you're reading and writing, these interpretative and predictive functions are hijacked. If you're engrossed in a story, the neural networks activated in your brain are probably some of the same neural networks activated when you're trying to understand the people you interact with in your own life, and where their lives might be going. This last statement could be empirically tested, and perhaps has been -- right now I can only say that I believe it to be true, based on my own experience as a reader and a writer.

If someone we know does something that perfectly illustrates our idea of who they are, we delightedly share the story with our peers -- this is essentially the same joy that we take in the behavior of fictional characters. And when a character in a story I'm writing comes alive for me, that hopefully increases the likelihood that some percentage of my potential future readers might feel the same way. Here's Wilde on Balzac:

"A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself."

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair has an excellent passage about the irritation of a writer unable to coax his brain into fully engaging with a character:

"Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive. There is nothing psychologically false about him, but he sticks, he has to be pushed around, words have to be found for him, all the technical skill I have acquired through the laborious years have to be employed in making him appear alive to my readers. Sometimes I get a sour satisfaction when a reviewer praises him as the best-drawn character in the story: if he has not been drawn he has certainly been dragged. He lies heavily on my mind whether I start to work like an ill-digested meal on the stomach, robbing me of the pleasure of creation in any scene where he is present. He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders."

"And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of nonexistence. We are intextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will."

Canonization and personality cults are attempts to make many people fall in love with someone they don't really know: this is the same effect we writers strive to achieve with our protagonists,. Perhaps this helps explain the following Harold Bloom quote:

"Novels require more readers than poems do, a statement so odd that it puzzles me, even as I agree with it."

Perhaps novels require more readers because we novelists want people to know the characters we've created, just as when we meet somebody interesting, we wish to introduce them to our circle of friends? Whereas poems concern more private, less character-driven experiences, hence stimulating a less socially-oriented part of the brain?

Periodicals of Yesteryear: the Last Issue of The Nose

Edited by Jack Boulware, long before he cofounded San Francisco's Litquake festival, The Nose ran (sorry) on a roughly bi-monthly schedule from 1989 to 1995. You can read Boulware's history of this periodical here -- he reminisces that The Nose also sold roadkill calendars, that each issue was launched with a crazy themed party, and that "there was lots and lots of drinking," a claim I have little reason to doubt.

Boulware writes, "At the time I was obsessed with the magazines of Robert Harrison from the late 40s and early 50s, titles like Confidential and Whisper. The graphics were bold and outrageous, and the language was tight, tales about fighting animals and VD in the Navy, and Frank Sinatra eating Wheaties to keep up his stamina during a weekend tryst. And yet in the day, these were the most popular magazines in America."

Suavely dysfunctional, obsessed with monstrosities, conspiracy theories, and alternativeness-for-its-own-sake, The Nose's kink-themed issue #26 is very San Francisco. Reading it transports me back to 1995, a now-remote era characterized by reality TV and Newt Gingrich. (Although for some reason, those phenomena are still around.)

From issue #26 I learn that in 1995, a couple in the Bay Area could book a flight in a single-engine plane, for the purpose of having sex while airbourne, for only $275. One shudders to think how much you would be set back financially by a similar experience today. Commendably, all of page 18 is devoted to exposing the fact that many stories published in Story magazine in the mid-1990s featured oral sex.

Comedian Patton Oswalt writes about the phenomenon of giantess erotica, and especially about Ed Lundt, who he describes as the "Emile Zola of Brobdingnagian porn." Regarding male fantasies of being crushed by giant women, Oswalt comments, "In this age of cynicism, bipartisanship and personal cowardice, it's refreshing to find a group of people willing to die for what they believe."

Not a sentiment you encounter much nowadays. Issue #26 also features naked breasts, retrospectively poignant ads for San Francisco businesses that have since folded, Jeb Bush cocaine rumors, remarkably laid-back contributor bios, and a feature on the Museum of Menstruation in Harry Finley's basement in Maryland, which I hear has since closed for public safety reasons. All in all, this is an invaluable cultural document, a sort of alternative men's magazine perpetuating San Francisco's image as the natural home of workaholic slackers. In keeping with the long-standing tradition established by last week's piece on Might, I will send my copy of The Nose #26 to whoever first requests it from me at jameswarner@identitytheory.com.

more #Amazonfail + InsideStorytime BRAINWAVES

Some more takes on #Amazonfail -- Mary Hodder makes the case that, even if what happened last weekend was an accident, it still shows Amazon's book classification system is homophobic. Here's her conclusion -- "I would suggest that the company, because of its position in the market and power over both authors and publishers, as well as users and the intellectual marketplace of idea, ought to be doing a complete and public review of their classification and algorithm assumptions. Publishers and authors should push for it, and so should users."

I agree with this. Emphasis on "public." Not holding my breath.

The attitude that pro-gay books are "adult," wheras anti-gay books are "family values," is not specific to Amazon - it pervades the wider culture. Publishing categories enable consumers to dismiss a lot of books out of hand. I was talking to a friend about this the other night, with respect to the categories printed on the cover of Justin Chin's Gutted -- something like "Asian studies," "LGBT," and "poetry." Such categories seem to me to target an unncessarily narrow audience for the book. I'm more interested in knowing that Gutted is funny and clever and touching. One could argue that to classify is already to censor.

Clay Shirky reflects that he of all people should have recognized #Amazonfail as a technological problem. His current position -- "If we wanted to deny Amazon all benefit of the doubt, and to construct the maximum case against them, it would go something like this: it was stupid to have a categorization system that would allow LGBT-themed books to be de-ranked en masse; it was stupid to have a technological system that would allow that to happen easily and globally; it was stupid to remove sales rank from sexually explicit works, rather than adding 'Safe Search' options; it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters; it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out."

***********************

And now for something completely different, a quick plug for tonight's (April 16th) InsideStorytime event at San Francisco's Cafe Royale, from 6.30pm to 8.30 pm. On the bill we have --

• Robert Burton, not the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, but rather the author-neurologist who wrote On Being Certain, a book about why we tend to imagine we know what we're doing, as well as several novels. He also writes the “Mind Reader” column for Salon.com

• Sybil Lockhart, author of the memoir Mother in the Middle and the founder of Literary Mama magazine

• Holger Berndt, hedge fund manager and author of the novel Hedge Fund

• Pireeni Sundaralingam, poet, violinist, and cognitive scientist

• author Michael Boehm, who still owes me a bio
  

Tell me your heard about the event through this blog and I'll waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge. Since Pireeeni Sundaralingam just contacted me to say she may not be able to make it, we might need a stand-in -- so if you'd like to read for ten minutes, bring your material along and introduce yourself to me. We're a cosy reading event where you can meet some authors and have a few drinks, while reflecting on what an amazing number of writers there are in San Francisco.

Regarding the #AmazonFail Incident

Over Easter weekend, a number of authors noticed that Amazon no longer showed a sales ranking for their books. Mark R. Probst, who posted about the incident on his blog, received the following message from Amazon:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Amazon's official position, which Mark R. Probst says he now accepts, is that this was a cataloguing error that impacted 57, 310 listings. These books have now reportedly had their Amazon sales rank restored -- although one gay author I know tells me that when his book's ranking reappeared, its rank had sunk, perhaps because a period of invisibility had cost him some marketing momentum.

According to this report, #AmazonFail was the leading topic on Twitter that weekend, and many Amazon employees had to forego their holiday weekend in order to work on the problem.

Over the last few days I saw indignation and horror expressed by writers whose books were deranked. It's concerning that a secret algorithm is used to generate a number that can impact whether or not an author's next book finds a publisher. The Future Publishing blog goes into some detail about how Amazon sales ranking is believed to work, concluding:

"Perhaps someday the arcane calculations within the sales rank algorithm will be exposed. Until then, authors, publishers and curious onlookers will have to examine the nuanced correlations between book sales and sales rank and speculate about the algorithm’s internal machinations. And of course Amazon will continue to adjust the parameters, weightings and equations, resetting the analysis and frustrating the cognoscenti. A corporate powerhouse, using secret code administered by a techno priesthood to strike fear (and sometimes exhilaration) into an anxious population of authors/publishers -- the whole thing has the makings of a good techno conspiracy thriller."

I try to avoid conspiracy theories on this blog, being inclined to agree with the hero of Darwin's Blade, a fine novel by Dan Simmons, that "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity." At this point it seems plausible to me that #AmazonFail was essentially an accident. But writers should certainly be worried about the inordinate influence exerted by whoever's job it is to tweak the Amazon sales rank algorithm.

Novels and Timing the Market

Norman Mailer had some paragraphs about this in The Spooky Art:

"Large literary success is so often a matter of fortuitous publication. The Naked and the Dead had the luckiest timing of my career. By 1946, people were no longer that interested in novels about the Second World War. But The Naked and the Dead didn't come out until 1948, and by then readers were ready. If it had appeared earlier, I don't know that it would have had equal impact."

"On the other hand, when I wrote Ancient Evenings (and that novel took eleven years), I ended up wishing I had been a bit more productive on a few of those working days and so could have come out twelve months earlier. That might have offered me a following breeze. There was large interest in the Egyptian dynasties just the year before. New York had had a massive museum exhibit at the Metropolitan that then proceeded to travel all over the country. By the time Ancient Evenings appeared, I was in the wake. The curious had, for the most part, lost interest."

"Something of the same happened with Harlot's Ghost, When it was published in 1992, the Cold War was over. Much direct attention was gone. When I'd begun seven years earlier, people were still fascinated (as I certainly was) by the CIA. My point is, don't write a book with the idea people are going to be attracted by the subject and therefore you have a good chance to do well with your sales. The situation is bound to be different by the time the work is ready to show itself. No need to calculate. It's a crapshoot."

I loved Harlot's Ghost, although I'm not sure where I'd find time to read a book that long nowadays. What I remembered from the passage quoted above was what Mailer wrote about World War Two and The Naked and The Dead, and the Cold War and Harlot's Ghost. Until I went to look this up, I'd completely forgotten about the exhibit at the Met, which doesn't seem to me like the sort of phenomenon that should impact the reception of a novel -- I guess even Ancient Egypt becomes briefly high concept at cyclical intervals.

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 didn't come out until 1961, which I find sort of encouraging.

A Great Time to be a Reader

Someone once told me a story that stuck in my mind -- when Thomas Aquinas accidentally came across a piece of paper with some words on it, he was overjoyed! The discovery made him rejoice! That's how rare reading material used to be...

This is a great time to to be a reader: nowadays our main problem is how to find the works of literature we like amongst everything else that's out there.

Reading the fifty queries Nathan Bransford posted in today's "be an agent for a day" contest, I can't help wondering, what would a completely-saturated market for books look like? Here are the rules again -- Bransford posted fifty queries today, and you have a week to pick the five winners. Queries somehow make any manuscript sound peculiarly unappetizing. And the existing system seems better at screening out writers who are bad at marketing than at screening out writers who are bad at writing.

Still, for a writer these problems are surely compensated for by the advantages of having a super-abundance of reading material available, online and elsewhere. There's no reason ever to run out of literary inspiration! Then rejoice!

On High Concept

The Waxman Literary Agency blog explains this idea here -- essentially it's the same idea referenced in my last post, of being able to sum something up in a sentence or two so that it sounds catchy.

Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase probably doesn't exemplify high concept, since when I recommend it, I often find myself saying, "I won't tell you anything about the plot, because then you'll just think it's some weird book only I would like. But just take my word for it, you just have to read it!" Back when I used to try and explain the plot, people just stared at me in bafflement. Not a problem for Murakami -- he'd acquired a devoted celebrity following long before he wrote this masterpiece, and didn't need me on his sales force.

A book I like that might actually be high concept is Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw. This is the only novel I can think of that, when I insist people read it, I actually quote from the blurb: "A Victorian novel of manners in which all the characters are dragons and eat each other." I guess if you quote from the blurb to get people to read something, it must be high concept?

Books in the first category may ultimately be more rewarding to reread. But since it's axiomatic that books sell by word of mouth, publishers will understandably tend to prefer books that are easily promotable by word of mouth. Hence, if you're an unknown author, trying to get publishers to take a look at a book in the second category is less likely to turn all your hair grey.

But as the Grateful Dead would have it, "Oh Well, a Touch of Grey Kind of Suits You Anyway." The obvious defect of the high concept approach is that it leads to a proliferation of nonbooks, having hardly anything to recommend them beyond the premise's initial gimmick.

A guy I met a few weeks back told me that, in his experience, really successful people tend to be people who are doing what they genuinely want to be doing. This man wasn't a writer, but he had perceptive things to say about Robert Frost and Alice Munro -- maybe his thoughts on life were perceptive too. As against which, I would have to add that really unsuccessful people also tend to be people who are doing what they genuinely want to be doing. Unless doing what you genuinely want to be doing is a kind of success in and of itself?

On Queries and Nathan Bransford's "Be an Agent for a Day" Contest

America's leading management theorist, Scott Adams, has claimed that you have to be popular first before you can start being any good. His examples are mostly TV shows. His argument is that even a really good show will probably be cancelled, unless people can sum up what it's about in a sentence that makes other people curious to watch it.

The analagous problem for works of literature is the problem of pitching. Novice authors imagine publishers will read their books, then publish them if they're good. But the supply of books by novice writers is so large that agents and publishers don't have time to read most of them. So typically, unless you're already somewhat established, agents will decide whether to take a look at your manuscript based on whether its one-or-two-sentence description sounds catchy.

Adams writes, "I have a twofold test for whether something can obtain instant popularity and thus have time to achieve quality: 1. You must be able to describe it in a few words. 2. When people hear about it, they ask questions." From the comments on Adams' blog, it's clear screenwriters don't think this is news.

At a conference recently, a writer friend told me, "I could make up an idea for a book in a minute that I could pitch to agents, and I know it would be a more interesting pitch from their point of view than the pitch I'm actually able to make, for this memoir I really care about that I've been slaving on for years!"

It's always instructive to compare the view from both sides of the gate, so kudos to San Francisco agent Nathan Bransford who will be holding a "Be an Agent for a Day" contest on Monday. On Monday he'll post fifty queries and you have to put yourself in Nathan's shoes and pick the five that'll keep him in business -- there may be a prize for picking the right five.

Periodicals of Yesteryear: the Last Issue of Might

Yesterday I saw this post from Pete Mulvihill's bookseller blog, about cool used books that will never sell, offering to give away After Dinner Science and the last issue of Might magazine to whoever asked for them first.

I was too late for After Dinner Science, but I did score the last issue of Might, published in the summer of 1997. This was the magazine Dave Eggers produced before he became famous, and that Eggers voice is recognizable more or less throughout, both in pieces written by Eggers himself and in those written by people under his influence:

"Winter begets spring, night ushers in the dawn, and loss sows the seeds of renewal. It is, of course, easy to say these things, just as it is easy to, say, watch a lot of television."

Arch knowingness, semi-apologized for, masks a kind of angry sincerity. The ads try desperately to be as hip as the content. The phenomenon of animal-on-animal violence is bemoaned, and Alan Greenspan is "outed" as gay. Perhaps no last issue of a magazine has ever contained more sarcastic jokes about the magazine going out of business, for example the following item from a list of "corrections."

"In our last issue and all issues previous, we put Might together pretty much exactly the way we weanted to, publishing stuff we thought people would want to read, and not publishing stuff we thought was dopey or dishonest or irrelevant -- all the while thinking that everyone, particularly advertisers and distributors and wealthy people with itchy check-signing fingers, would pat us on the back for it. That was pretty dumb."

Eggers must have learned a lot from producing this magazine -- the first issue of McSweeney's appeared a year later, and it seems like every Eggers project since has been a big publishing success story. He's made a huge contribution to revitalizing the San Francisco literary scene. The cultural memes present in Might, somewhat refined in Eggers's subsequent projects, have proliferated very widely. This issue contains poignant photos of gay men with their female prom dates -- images evocative both of the draw of pop culture and of its ultimate failure to satisfy -- and a Ted Rall piece about Sherwood Anderson. E-mail me at jameswarner@identitytheory.com if you'd like me to send you this magazine, and I'll throw in my copy of Investigating Science With Nails by Laurence B. White, Jr. Best sentence from Laurence B. White, Jr's author bio:

"Besides his ability to use an ordinary nail to explain the mystery of magnetism, Laurence B. White, Jr. is also a master builder of paper architecture and a serious collector of rubber bands."

Opening paragraph of Investigating Science With Nails:

"Everyone lives in a different world. This is what makes life so interesting. It is why some people become butchers, others become barbers, or teachers, or scientists. We all learn about the things that interest us most and we build our own personal world around them."

Robinson Crusoe Through the Looking-Glass

Quick theology quiz: the doctrine of the Holy Trinity teaches the substantive unity of which three beings?

a) Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, and UFOs
b) electrocution addiction, girls who skateboard, and the Playmates of 1976
c) both a) and b)

If you answered c), you must be Peter Rock, recently interviewed by me for Identity Theory, and by Kaui Hart Hemmings for the Rumpus, on the occasion of the publication of his latest novel, My Abandonment.

Like Robinson Crusoe, My Abandonment was inspired by a true story about someone coping in the wild. One might situate it in a tradition that includes the early American captivity narratives as well as Thoreau's Walden, although this would tell you little about the actual experience of reading it. Here's a great sample sentence:

“Sometimes when you're sleeping someone presses on your chest or the flat of your back with their hand and when you wake up no one is there but you can tell in the dark air in the room that someone has been talking to you."

I saw Rock read from this book at Green Apple Books last week. He said he doesn't like it when people ask him about the true story that inspired the book, instead of asking him about the book. But since everyone always does ask about the true story anyway, there was a veteran who lived in a hidden camp in Portland's Forest Park for years with his daughter. He home schooled his daughter, using old encyclopedias – the encyclopedias are a detail Rock naturally keeps -- and when tested, the girl's reading level proved to be five levels above her public school grade level. Then they were found and resettled, and then they escaped again, and if they ever surface again, the girl will probably win a Nobel Prize.

Incidentally, people often ask me, if I find something in a book I'm reading, and photograph the thing I've found, is there a website where I can send the photograph? Okay, nobody's ever asked me that, but the answer is, here.

Henry James versus Historical Fiction

In a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, in 1901, Henry James inveighed against historical fiction:

"You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like -- the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its essence the whole effect is as nought. . . You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman, -- or rather fifty -- whose own thinking was intensely-otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force -- & even then it’s all humbug."

The flaw in this argument is that there is no "real thing," if by this James means something like perfect fidelity to the zeitgeist. That "real thing" is always out of reach, even in writing about one's own time.

When writing a contemporary novel that alludes to current social and political events, one draws to some extent on journalistic sources -- perhaps the same sources that a novelist a hundred years from now might use to recreate our own era. That future novelist will make mistakes we wouldn't have made, but will also have a perspective on our own time that we can't have. Writing contemporary fiction, one sees more of the trees -- writing about the past or an alternate past or the future, one sees more of the wood.

Understanding this, readers don't expect Andrew Sean Greer's 1953 to have the same flavor as Richard Wright's 1953.

Nobody, after reading Patrick O' Brian's Master and Commander, thinks O'Brian would have done better to write about the late 1960s, the time when he produced that work. No occupation could more thoroughly test a man's character than captaining a ship during the Napoleonic wars, and this provides the prefect setting for O'Brian to explore whether it's possible to be a good man, while fighting against nature and external enemies, although one's own society is corrupt. The astonishing contrast in values and attitudes between the late twentieth-century England O'Brian knows and the early nineteenth-century England he envisions only adds to the book's power.

Even those who set out to evoke their childhood in a memoir soon run out of facts, and find themselves tying their material together with webs of conjecture, just as if they were trying to bring to life an earlier period in history. Literature can't help being about what was, and about what might have been, and about what is to come.

Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage

This story is set in 1953. The heroine and her husband live in new housing built for returning soldiers, close to Ocean Beach, in the only district of San Francisco then expected to survive a direct nuclear hit on downtown. Greer deliberately reconstructs a San Francisco that's unfamiliar, pre-gay-pride and pre-counterculture, the locals traumatized and uncommunicative. To be a conscientious objector is shameful. This place gives us a shock of non-recognition, consistent with the book's insistence on the unknowability of those we love.

The Story of a Marriage has a plot that springs a big surprise about every forty pages, and shares with Ian McEwan's Atonement a vision of the past as a nest of betrayals. There's also an aftertaste of film noir -- all surfaces are illusory, and the characters' underlying desires are so intense, one can credit the elaborate indirectness of the schemes they hatch to pursue them. I hereby nominate Orson Welles to direct the movie version, while simultaneously playing the role of Buzz, who according to taste can be seen either as the villain or as the hero of the piece.

For Greer, the figure most emblematic of 1953 is Ethel Rosenberg, whose crime was not to suspect the treachery of the one she loved. It's a crime of which most of the book's characters are guilty. Pearlie, our heroine, learns that "nobody is strong or wise or good or faithful, not really. It turns out everyone is faking it as best they can."

John Updike was perhaps in a territorial mood when he concluded his review of this book dismissively -- for a novelist under forty to evoke a suburban Cold War marriage must have seemed a form of trespassing. Tomorrow I plan to blog in defense of historical fiction generally, but for now I will just note that Greer has succeeded, for me anyway, in imaginatively colonizing the Outer Sunset. That part of San Francisco used to feel somehow ahistorical to me, with its street names like Taraval, seemingly more appropriate to a fantasy kingdom.

But henceforth, on that side of town it will be forever 1953.

Is "Literary Blog" An Oxymoron?

In my last post I denied that the Internet is making you dumber. The works of Henry James are online -- if you're looking at pet videos instead, how's that the Internet's fault?

Scott Brown thinks the Internet is making you funnier, which I also doubt.

A 2007 post by Adam Kirsch contains another version of the "Internet is dumb" argument -- blogging is fundamentally, necessarily antithetical to the spirit of literary culture. Some of his points:

"Often isolated and inexperienced, usually longing to break into print themselves, bloggers — even the influential bloggers who are courted by publishers — tend to consider themselves disenfranchised. As a result, they are naturally ready to see ethical violations and conspiracies everywhere in the literary world."

There's something to this -- even as successful a writer-blogger as Andrew Sullivan has harsh things to say about the publishing industry. Then again, some bloggers are publishers. And nowadays I know writers who blog primarily because their publishers want them to, for promotional purposes. Literary bloggers are a disparate group, perhaps increasingly so.

"... those who can, do, while those who can't, blog."

It's a fair cop, guv.

"... bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve."

James Wood's How Fiction Works is structured as a series of numbered, discrete chunks of bitesized commentary. Many of the chunks are about the length of a blog post. Suppose Wood had chosen to release these ideas into the world as blog posts -- the experience of reading such a blog might have been like reading a raw first draft of the book, but with the advantage of being able to post comments. I find it easy to conceive of the first draft of a serious work of criticism being fashioned in this way, and I imagine that literary blogging is in its infancy.

"But there's no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end."

From this more recent piece, I see that Adam Kirsch's horror of blogging has only increased -- his chain of thought here is hard for me to follow, but he seems now to view blogging as a threat to Western civilization. If I read him correctly, by starting a blog I have abandoned the field of literature entirely, and possibly surrendered my individuality to some form of millennial cult -- not quite what I signed up for.

Nota bene: I'm planning to blog six days a week from now on. As a blogger, I will henceforth observe either the Muslim, Jewish, or the Christian Sabbath, depending on how my week's going.

Internet Make Us Stupid?

Complaints about the Internet remind me of complaints about America. In First Things, Last Things, the admirable Eric Hoffer responded to laments by intellectuals about the quality of American life:

"What is there in America that prevents an educated person from shaping his life, from making the most of his in-born endowments? With all its faults and blemishes, this country gives a man elbow room to do what is nearest to his heart. It is incredible how easy it is here to cut oneself off from vulgarity, conformity, speciousness and other corrupting influences and infections."

The point isn't that the corrupting influences and infections aren't there -- rather that no one is forcing them on you. I feel the same way about the Internet: it's easy to avoid the stupid parts.

Nicholas Carr argued last summer that spending too much time online is rewiring our neural circuitry in a way that makes us less capable of reading deeply. It's a well-written article, but I'm not convinced: I just don't believe one can forget how to read deeply, any more than one can forget how to ride a bicycle.

Carr writes, "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas." I'm with him on this, except that the word "printed" and the word "book" are misleading here -- the same text read on the screen of an electronic device will set off the same "intellectual vibrations..."

If you're not reading enough lengthy works of fiction or non-fiction, don't blame the Internet. As Tobias Wolff said in an interview, "time is your enemy and everything else is your friend." The Internet is your friend, but know when it's time to log off.

My Favorite Anecdote About the Short Story Submission Process

I heard this from someone who heard it from the writer involved. Since I haven't independently verified the story, I won't use their real names.

Just think of this as a koan.

A writer who'd just published a dazzling short story collection met the editor of a top literary magazine. The editor said, "I loved your story collection. Why didn't you submit any of those stories to my magazine?"

The writer said, "I submitted all those stories to you, and you rejected all of them."

The editor said, "Well... I don't remember that... anyways, send me your next story!"

The writer duly submitted his next story to the editor. It came back with a form rejection slip on which the editor had written, Now I remember.

How To Read Rejection Letters

I once spent a while staring at a rejection slip from the Michigan Quarterly Review, trying to work out whether the handwritten part said "sorry, we can't use this," or "sorry we can't use this." Was the pen mark after "sorry" a comma or just an accidental blot? This seemed significant because I thought "sorry we can't use this" implied genuine regret at having to pass on the story, while in "sorry, we can't use this," the "sorry" was clearly pro forma...

This level of attention to commas is sometimes appropriate, as when reading Samuel Beckett:

"I can't go on, I'll go on."

Before reading the delightful Beckett's Dying Words by Christopher Ricks, I wouldn't have noticed that the punctuation marks in that sentence each contradict the preceding phrase. The comma means "I'll go on." The period means, "I'll stop," and even presages death.

The punctuation marks in rejection letters, however, are quite devoid of import. So generally are the words. A rejection letter means "I have many stories to choose from, and my gut feeling is that I don't want this one." Since writers are so touchy, this is translated into clauses of disclaimerese: While we appreciate your sending us this, it does not meet our particular needs, but we wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. Please note that the magazines you submit to have no obligation to send you constructive feedback!

It helps to think of it as a numbers game. If you're expecting forty rejections, forty rejections won't bother you. Sometimes people read all my stories that are posted on online magazines, then let me know me which ones they liked most -- and my most popular stories with readers are seemingly not the same stories that received the fewest rejections.

Nowadays, when I receive a rejection letter on a short story, it impacts my mood for seconds rather than minutes. Sometimes the experience is even strangely affirmative -- I had the determination to send them this! And they were civilized enough to respond! Within two years! This is what being a writer means! So I'm doing it right!

Most writers have to learn to thrive on rejection. Beckett again:

"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail."

I used to think this sentence was about some fancy metaphorical kind of failure. It is not.

Ursula LeGuin posted on her site this rejection letter she received on her great novel The Left Hand of Darkness. I suspect whoever wrote the letter just meant "we're not that into you," and would have done better not to try and rationalize things.

Don't misunderstand me: nothing I just said about embracing rejection means we don't also have the obligation to strive constantly to become better writers!