Psychologists James Pennebaker and Shannon Wiltsey Stirman published some research on poet suicide in a 2001 “Psychosomatic Medicine” article you can read here.
Comparing the texts of suicidal and non-suicidal poets, they found the work of suicidal poets “contained more first-person singular self-references throughout their careers. That self-references do not increase over time indicates that the suicidal poets’ level of preoccupation with self is not due to a factor such as increasing levels of fame or recognition of their work over time. Additionally, the use of the first-person plural, which might indicate an awareness of and an integration in social and personal relationships, was lower in the suicide group’s poetry than it was in that of the nonsuicide group. Consistent with social integration theories of suicide, the direction of the effects for communication words (eg, talk, share, listen) indicates that the suicide group might have shown a decreased interest in social relationships as they approached the last years of their lives. The poets who ultimately committed suicide also used more words associated with death than did the nonsuicidal group. Surprisingly, though, the amount of negative or positive emotion did not vary significantly between the two groups.”
This makes some intuitive sense -- put the words “self-obsessed” and “poet” together, and names that immediately come to mind include John Berryman and Sylvia Plath... I even wonder if, when we get excited about self-destructive artists, it isn’t primarily the self-obsession we’re relating to, rather than the suicide? Wasn’t self-obsession equally the quality that America responded to in James Dean and Marilyn Monroe?
Regarding the writer suicides that most horrified me in 2008… while I always saw Thomas M. Disch as among the least self-obsessed of writers, towards the end he did start playing around with the conceit that he was God. In a satirical spirit, obviously, but perhaps it was still a symptom of self-preoccupation? Whereas David Foster Wallace’s way of being unhealthily obsessed with the self was to constantly preach against unhealthy obsession with the self.
I suspect self-obsession is a side-effect of depression rather than a cause of depression? Although once you've really gotten started it must be a vicious spiral...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
A Zing, Even
Thomas M. Disch wrote in The Castle of Indolence --
“Poets who have endorsed the public's estimate of their art by their own suicides, after long threatening such a stroke of poetic justice in their writing, generally seem to have made the most significant dent on the Collective Consciousness.”
This line became even more depressing to read after Disch himself joined the ranks of poet-suicides in 2008 -- the more so since I never detected any threat of such a thing in anything Disch himself wrote anything. But maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention?
In Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow offered an explanation for why Americans prefer their poets suicidal --
“This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet's testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say 'If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”
From Roberto Bolaño's 2666 --
“... the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers...”
Bolaño's grandest plots hinge on the search for vanished writers, and he had to die himself in order for us Anglophones to “discover” him.
From J. D. Salinger's “Seymour – an Introduction” --
“It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as person: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction -- extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness of opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards.”
OK, so he strikes a homophobic note towards the end there -- but you get the general idea. Tomorrow: how do you spot a suicidal poet?
“Poets who have endorsed the public's estimate of their art by their own suicides, after long threatening such a stroke of poetic justice in their writing, generally seem to have made the most significant dent on the Collective Consciousness.”
This line became even more depressing to read after Disch himself joined the ranks of poet-suicides in 2008 -- the more so since I never detected any threat of such a thing in anything Disch himself wrote anything. But maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention?
In Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow offered an explanation for why Americans prefer their poets suicidal --
“This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet's testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say 'If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”
From Roberto Bolaño's 2666 --
“... the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers...”
Bolaño's grandest plots hinge on the search for vanished writers, and he had to die himself in order for us Anglophones to “discover” him.
From J. D. Salinger's “Seymour – an Introduction” --
“It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as person: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction -- extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness of opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards.”
OK, so he strikes a homophobic note towards the end there -- but you get the general idea. Tomorrow: how do you spot a suicidal poet?
Monday, March 29, 2010
Fear of Failure
From Norman F. Dixon's On the Psychology of Military Incompetence -- “There are grounds for thinking that incompetent commanders tend to be those in whom the need to avoid failure exceeds the urge to succeed.” “... the person who fears failure prefers tasks which are either very easy or very difficult. If they are easy he is unlikely to fail; if very difficult then the disgrace attaching will be small, for no one really expected him to win.”
Dixon suggests Major General William Elphinstone's disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 as a case of someone “attempting tasks so difficult that no one expects one to succeed; hence little disgrace attaches to failure.” And he attributes Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival's disastrous failure to defend Singapore against the Japanese in 1942 to his trying “to avoid the unpleasant consequences of failure by not really trying.”
It's easy enough in retrospect to say how risk-averse somebody should have been: these may well be unfair verdicts on these particular officers. But if we do accept Dixon's verdicts, are there writerly equivalents?
One advantage writers have over generals is that, as Robert Cormier said, “The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” Again I recall Beckett's "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail."
If all novels are failures by definition anyway, is Bolaño right that novelists are struggling “against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench?" Or are we rather avoiding disgrace by "attempting tasks so difficult that no one expects one to succeed?"
Dixon suggests Major General William Elphinstone's disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 as a case of someone “attempting tasks so difficult that no one expects one to succeed; hence little disgrace attaches to failure.” And he attributes Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival's disastrous failure to defend Singapore against the Japanese in 1942 to his trying “to avoid the unpleasant consequences of failure by not really trying.”
It's easy enough in retrospect to say how risk-averse somebody should have been: these may well be unfair verdicts on these particular officers. But if we do accept Dixon's verdicts, are there writerly equivalents?
One advantage writers have over generals is that, as Robert Cormier said, “The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” Again I recall Beckett's "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail."
If all novels are failures by definition anyway, is Bolaño right that novelists are struggling “against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench?" Or are we rather avoiding disgrace by "attempting tasks so difficult that no one expects one to succeed?"
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Jamesian Windows
Henry James in The American Scene thought the new buildings of New York ugly, with too many windows -- “a condition never to be reconciled with any grace of building.”
Elsewhere he wrote of Compton Wyngate's “ivy-smothered brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs.”
This idea of windows as conscious is strikingly Jamesisan, suggesting a man fond of privacy, acutely aware of being observed -- a man constitutionally nervous around windows. Strether in The Ambassadors has a "sense of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination."
Windows are not only conscious but haunted. There's the idea of a story as a frame that affords a perspective -- James's feelings about windows tie in with his obsession with point of view.
Similar imagery crops up in the work of his brother William, who wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that “there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world.”
Elsewhere he wrote of Compton Wyngate's “ivy-smothered brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs.”
This idea of windows as conscious is strikingly Jamesisan, suggesting a man fond of privacy, acutely aware of being observed -- a man constitutionally nervous around windows. Strether in The Ambassadors has a "sense of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination."
Windows are not only conscious but haunted. There's the idea of a story as a frame that affords a perspective -- James's feelings about windows tie in with his obsession with point of view.
Similar imagery crops up in the work of his brother William, who wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that “there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world.”
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Clinophobia
From Diana Athill's memoir Somewhere Towards the End --
“Once we at André Deutsch brought out a coffee-table book about beds prefaced by an oddly inappropriate essay by Anthony Burgess. The book was supposed to be in praise of beds, but Burgess said he loathed them because he was afraid of going to sleep and needed to outwit his fear by letting sleep catch him unexpectedly in a chair or on the floor. Lying down on a bed, he felt, was like lying down on a bier from which, if he lost consciousness, he might never get up. (I did question this preface, but André's view was that no one bothered to read prefaces, what mattered was having the man's name on the book, not what he said – a bit of publisher-think which I deplored, but not strongly enough to make a stand.) I have read of people undergoing many things worse than this quirk of Burgess's, but of no ordeal that was harder for me to imagine sharing. Being forced to deny oneself one of the greatest pleasures of everyday life, the natural seal of happiness, the sure escape from sorrow or boredom, the domestication of mystery... What an affliction!”
Burgess and beds have come up before.
Once in Berkeley I met a writer who claimed he always slept in a leather armchair, instead of on a bed. This struck me as really weird -- so much so that my immediate fear was that I would wind up emulating him. Fortunately this has not come to pass, yet inexplicably, I still think of refusing to sleep on a bed as the sort of thing only a writer would do...
“Once we at André Deutsch brought out a coffee-table book about beds prefaced by an oddly inappropriate essay by Anthony Burgess. The book was supposed to be in praise of beds, but Burgess said he loathed them because he was afraid of going to sleep and needed to outwit his fear by letting sleep catch him unexpectedly in a chair or on the floor. Lying down on a bed, he felt, was like lying down on a bier from which, if he lost consciousness, he might never get up. (I did question this preface, but André's view was that no one bothered to read prefaces, what mattered was having the man's name on the book, not what he said – a bit of publisher-think which I deplored, but not strongly enough to make a stand.) I have read of people undergoing many things worse than this quirk of Burgess's, but of no ordeal that was harder for me to imagine sharing. Being forced to deny oneself one of the greatest pleasures of everyday life, the natural seal of happiness, the sure escape from sorrow or boredom, the domestication of mystery... What an affliction!”
Burgess and beds have come up before.
Once in Berkeley I met a writer who claimed he always slept in a leather armchair, instead of on a bed. This struck me as really weird -- so much so that my immediate fear was that I would wind up emulating him. Fortunately this has not come to pass, yet inexplicably, I still think of refusing to sleep on a bed as the sort of thing only a writer would do...
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Ridiculous Reasons
There's a scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield persuades a suspicious elevator boy to take him to the floor his parents live on. The boy tells him “You better wait in the lobby, fella,” but Holden replies “I'd like to – I really would. But I have a bad leg. I have to hold it in a certain position. I think I'd better sit down in the chair outside the door.”
This does the trick – Holden gets what he wants, and comments, “All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
Scott Adams talks about the same idea in his post on the power of ridiculous reasons -- “Guys tend to argue over who picks up the check after dinner. In cases where I know this situation is likely to arise, I prepare a ridiculous ‘because’ reason that I trot out when the moment is right. After allowing the other guy or guys to make their ceremonial attempt at paying, I say something like ‘I'll pay today because this is the seven month anniversary of when you bought your car. Congratulations.’ I'm exaggerating slightly, but it isn't hard to come up with some trivial reason why you should pay. The funny thing is that any reason you offer will settle the discussion. It works every time.”
The word “ceremonial” may be a tipoff that what Caulfield and Adams are offering, in these examples, are not so much explanations as rituals. Jonah Lehrer blogs here about a Kay, Moscovitch and Laurin study suggesting that “belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness...”
Explanations that make logical sense aren't always what we want -- sometimes we want explanations that make emotional sense. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead avoids arguing with atheists because “nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.” Logically speaking, this argument is not even an argument, but a pure cop-out – but it has emotional power. Robinson writes in her essay “Darwinism,” collected in The Death of Adam, that “religious people – by definition, I would say – do not look for proof of the existence of God or understand God in a way that makes his existence liable to proof or disproof.”
G.K. Chesterton -- “The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”
In our culture we segregate the areas of our lives where we want emotionally satisfying explanations from the areas of our lives where we want logically verifiable explanations. But if you rely wholly on the former kind of explanation, you're probably in a cult...
This does the trick – Holden gets what he wants, and comments, “All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
Scott Adams talks about the same idea in his post on the power of ridiculous reasons -- “Guys tend to argue over who picks up the check after dinner. In cases where I know this situation is likely to arise, I prepare a ridiculous ‘because’ reason that I trot out when the moment is right. After allowing the other guy or guys to make their ceremonial attempt at paying, I say something like ‘I'll pay today because this is the seven month anniversary of when you bought your car. Congratulations.’ I'm exaggerating slightly, but it isn't hard to come up with some trivial reason why you should pay. The funny thing is that any reason you offer will settle the discussion. It works every time.”
The word “ceremonial” may be a tipoff that what Caulfield and Adams are offering, in these examples, are not so much explanations as rituals. Jonah Lehrer blogs here about a Kay, Moscovitch and Laurin study suggesting that “belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness...”
Explanations that make logical sense aren't always what we want -- sometimes we want explanations that make emotional sense. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead avoids arguing with atheists because “nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.” Logically speaking, this argument is not even an argument, but a pure cop-out – but it has emotional power. Robinson writes in her essay “Darwinism,” collected in The Death of Adam, that “religious people – by definition, I would say – do not look for proof of the existence of God or understand God in a way that makes his existence liable to proof or disproof.”
G.K. Chesterton -- “The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”
In our culture we segregate the areas of our lives where we want emotionally satisfying explanations from the areas of our lives where we want logically verifiable explanations. But if you rely wholly on the former kind of explanation, you're probably in a cult...
Monday, March 22, 2010
Anna Wierzbicka's English: Meaning and Culture
In English: Meaning and Culture, Wierzbicka argues that such words as “fair,” “reasonable” and “right” are so specific to Anglophone culture that they can't be adequately translated into other languages. An example she gives from personal experience --
“... my daughters, growing up in Australia, used to say to me (in Polish), to nie fair ('that's not fair!'), and I used to reply, in exasperation, that I didn't think in such terms. These bilingual children, who were speaking both English and Polish every day and who were thinking in terms of the English word fair (a key concept of their dominant Anglo Australian culture), knew that there was no Polish word for fair, so they used the English word fair in their Polish sentence. And I, as a blilingual but culturally predominantly Polish person, knew that I found the concept of 'fair' both alien and (in a family situation) offensive and hurtful. One of my daughters used to say, with some resentment, 'You hate the word fair.' (This is a good example of how cultures clash in cross-cultural and bilingual families.)”
Contra Stephen Pinker and James Wilson, Wierzbicka claims that fairness is not a universal concept and cannot even be translated into non-English languages – the closest equivalent in most other European languages would be better translated as “just,” the implicit appeal made being to principles other than that of equality. This claim seemed very counter-intuitive to me – Wierzbicka says it seems counter-intuitive to most native English speakers – but I've asked a few friends who grew up speaking other languages, and their responses seem to provide some support for Wierzbicka. The ALTA blog has links to further perspectives on whether “fair” is translatable.
Wierzbicka makes an analagous claim about “reasonable” -- the French “raisonable” for example is apparently better translated as “justifiable.” Hence Wierzbicka denies that such crucial concepts as “fair trial” and “reasonable doubt” can be adequately translated into languages other than English. She believes such concepts flowered within the world of sport and games, then developed in tandem with England's common law tradition. She quotes from George Fletcher's Basic Concepts of Legal Thought -- "The English common law has flourished in countres where English is the language of legal discourse... There is no way to convey the connotations of 'due process,' 'reasonable doubt,' and 'malice aforethought' in any language except English.'"
Analyzing modern English words more pedantically than a native English speaker could probably manage, Wierzbicka argues that -- while other languages have equivalents of “good” and “bad,” and “true” and “false” -- only English has “right” and “wrong,” terms rooted in a more empirical and pragmatic epistemology. She traces these peculiarities of English to the influence of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and argues that anyone who learns English becomes in the process educated in “the tradition of British empiricism, of the emphasis on personal experience, on the limitations of one's knowledge, and on tolerance for diverse points of view and respect for everyone's 'personal opinion.'”
Some of her related points -- English has unusually many ways of expressing degrees of uncertainty; people speaking English say “I think” and “probably” more frequently than people speaking other languages use equivalent terms, and English has more terms to distinguish different levels of epistemological certainty. Also, the English verbs used for “forcing” or “requiring” or “getting” or “permitting” another person to do something tend to imply something about how the other person feels about it, which is often not true of the related verbs in other Germanic languages.
“... my daughters, growing up in Australia, used to say to me (in Polish), to nie fair ('that's not fair!'), and I used to reply, in exasperation, that I didn't think in such terms. These bilingual children, who were speaking both English and Polish every day and who were thinking in terms of the English word fair (a key concept of their dominant Anglo Australian culture), knew that there was no Polish word for fair, so they used the English word fair in their Polish sentence. And I, as a blilingual but culturally predominantly Polish person, knew that I found the concept of 'fair' both alien and (in a family situation) offensive and hurtful. One of my daughters used to say, with some resentment, 'You hate the word fair.' (This is a good example of how cultures clash in cross-cultural and bilingual families.)”
Contra Stephen Pinker and James Wilson, Wierzbicka claims that fairness is not a universal concept and cannot even be translated into non-English languages – the closest equivalent in most other European languages would be better translated as “just,” the implicit appeal made being to principles other than that of equality. This claim seemed very counter-intuitive to me – Wierzbicka says it seems counter-intuitive to most native English speakers – but I've asked a few friends who grew up speaking other languages, and their responses seem to provide some support for Wierzbicka. The ALTA blog has links to further perspectives on whether “fair” is translatable.
Wierzbicka makes an analagous claim about “reasonable” -- the French “raisonable” for example is apparently better translated as “justifiable.” Hence Wierzbicka denies that such crucial concepts as “fair trial” and “reasonable doubt” can be adequately translated into languages other than English. She believes such concepts flowered within the world of sport and games, then developed in tandem with England's common law tradition. She quotes from George Fletcher's Basic Concepts of Legal Thought -- "The English common law has flourished in countres where English is the language of legal discourse... There is no way to convey the connotations of 'due process,' 'reasonable doubt,' and 'malice aforethought' in any language except English.'"
Analyzing modern English words more pedantically than a native English speaker could probably manage, Wierzbicka argues that -- while other languages have equivalents of “good” and “bad,” and “true” and “false” -- only English has “right” and “wrong,” terms rooted in a more empirical and pragmatic epistemology. She traces these peculiarities of English to the influence of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and argues that anyone who learns English becomes in the process educated in “the tradition of British empiricism, of the emphasis on personal experience, on the limitations of one's knowledge, and on tolerance for diverse points of view and respect for everyone's 'personal opinion.'”
Some of her related points -- English has unusually many ways of expressing degrees of uncertainty; people speaking English say “I think” and “probably” more frequently than people speaking other languages use equivalent terms, and English has more terms to distinguish different levels of epistemological certainty. Also, the English verbs used for “forcing” or “requiring” or “getting” or “permitting” another person to do something tend to imply something about how the other person feels about it, which is often not true of the related verbs in other Germanic languages.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
InsideStorytime ENTANGLEMENT
“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.
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.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A Year of Blogging Dangerously
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."
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."
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Some Art-Languages
"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...
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...
Monday, March 15, 2010
Paul Auster's The Music of Chance
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.
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.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Promises and Prohibitions
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.”
”... 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.”
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Magical Contamination and Playing it Straight
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...
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...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Tell me About Your Childhood
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...
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...
Monday, March 8, 2010
Electric Literature no. 3 (Winter 2010)
"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.
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.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A Distant, Grudging, Even Uncomprehending Respect for Chiclets
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...
“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...
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Innokenty's Epiphany
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...
“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...
Monday, March 1, 2010
Innokenty's Phone Call
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.
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.
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