six words for a hat

Tokyo versus Mississippi: 2 falls out of 3

2012-02-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

So far it's only round one of this contest but Faulkner is seriously putting the hurt on Yoshimoto. Banana may be carried out of the ring on a stretcher.

What in God's name am I talking about? Last week I read Banana Yoshimoto's novella Kitchen because I've encountered little snippets here and there and my pal Davin Malasarn admires the book so it seemed high time I finally read it. This week I'm reading William Faulkner's Sanctuary for the first time. Before the Yoshimoto I read Vladimir Nabokov's novel Invitation to a Beheading. Got all that?

Perhaps reading Kitchen between books by Nabokov and Faulkner was unfair, because the latter writers are amazing prose stylists and Banana is--at least in this translation--a writer of fairly flat, style-free sentences. When the writing takes aim at being imaginative it usually fails, stumbling into cliche or silliness. Nabokov and Faulkner, on the other hand, had rich control over their prose and forged new trails through language. Tonight, maybe, I'll do a compare-and-contrast.

I'm not sure if I'm writing this to express my disappointment in Kitchen, which I really wanted to like but didn't (it's only 150 pages long but it seemed to drag forever and say nothing except hey, you know, stop grieving and get on with things; it also reads like a college student's journal, with self-conscious "profundities" that are really commonplaces), or to express my surprise and delight about Sanctuary which, at only 30-odd pages in, is already deep and layered and beautiful and grotesque and alive in a way the Yoshimoto never managed. Again, I see no reason to compare the books but I end up doing it anyway.

This was supposed to be the year where I read nothing but Chekhov, Nabokov and Shakespeare, but there are just too many other delicacies lying about. Will my next read be Volume 6 of Tales of Chekhov, or will it be something by Camus? I'll know when I get there.

Also, Chapter 8 of the work-in-progress is now underway. It will be a busy chapter, I think. It threatens to be very talky, but I'm battling that threat. I hope I remember that I want to do something with contrasts between being enclosed in dark places and being out in the open under a tremendous sky. Possibly a trip in an aeroplane is neccessary. Possibly.

In and Out of the Castle with Vladimir

2012-02-08T09:35:00.000-08:00

There's a sequence in Nabokov's Invitation To A Beheading where the protagonist, Cincinnatus C., crawls through a tunnel in an attempt to go from a fellow prisoner's cell back to his own, but instead finds a way out of the castle in which he's being held. He scrambles into the early evening light and looks around at the beautiful world, the sky deepening into purple to the west, the river and its bridge hazy and shadowed at the foot of the mountain and, beyond the bridge, the city where Cincinnatus lived unhappily free. It's a very nice, quiet moment in an otherwise frenetic narrative.

I was imagining that Cincinnatus would sit on the mountainside, his back to the oppressive prison tower, and consider his life, possibly living through significant events again and fantasizing about his future as a man escaped from the clutches of a tyrannical government. Naturally there is no place in the world for Cincinnatus and, I imagined, after some time he'd resign himself to his fate and crawl back into the tunnel and find his cell, there to await his execution.

That's not what happens, because this isn't that sort of novel, and Cincinnatus isn't that sort of character. Nabokov's people in this book are all symbols; not one of them has blood or a heart. Invitation to a Beheading is a novel about ideas, not a novel about people. Repressive regimes are horrific farces staged by men who rarely show their true faces, who bend truth to fit the fairy tale of institutional happiness, who claim to own Progress while leading nations into barbarism, &cet &cet &cet. Yes, we know this. And yes, the novel's power lies in showing us this horrific farce, but the lack of people (as opposed to puppets) is leaving me with an empty feeling. So a good book, certainly (and if I had to choose between this and, say, Gulag Archipelago, I'd pick Nabokov nine times out of ten), but Beheading is probably a minor novel. It's no Lolita, that's for sure. Maybe if Nabokov had given Cincinnatus a sense of humor or at least an awareness of irony, I'd be enjoying this more.

Anyway, the book where the prisoner escapes from prison, reflects on his past and supposes his future and then returns to the prison? I might write that one myself, unless I have stolen the premise from someone and just can't remember who.

The Red Tophat

2012-02-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

or, uncollected thoughts about Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.

1. Why is the protagonist named Cincinnatus? Is he a noble protector of the republic (which has clearly been lost in the future world of the novel)? Can one be noble when one is trying to hide one's true self? I doubt that. What's in a name? I don't know in this case.

2. Does Nabokov expect us to read the preface? I think he does. If he doesn't think that his novel is informed by the repression in the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, why does he make a point of telling us he wrote Beheading after having experienced some of that repression? VN is disingenuous. Again.

3. Why is the prison cell painted yellow?

4. This novel is a farce, a circus ring full of murderous clowns. Reality, escapist daydreaming and metaphor all merge into one. It's self-contradictory in subtle, important ways. It's sloppy, too. Funny and grim and Kafkaesque though Nabby points out that when he wrote this, he hadn't as yet read any Kafka but he doesn't mind the comparison.

5. Oh, comparisons to other writers; aren't you funny with your Sebastian Knight joke, Mr N? Though apparently he was no fan of George Meredith.

What else? Loads, but I've no time at present. I wonder what my next Nabokov read will be.

Out of the blue, and into the black

2012-02-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

Anton Chekhov, one of the greatest writers of fiction, never wrote a novel. He tried, and even published some long works that he thought would one day become a proper novel in the vein of Tolstoy, but Chekhov never managed to figure out how to structure a novel-length work. He moans about it in letters to his publisher and promises one month to finish and the next month he throws up his hands and declares the novel an impossible form. Some people, maybe, are best left off as miniaturists. Which is fine. Chopin wrote no symphonies, and a great deal of the best music of the “classical” period is the chamber music writ by guys best known for their orchestral works. So small is nothing to be ashamed of. The short story is a form that continues to confound me, after all. This preamble is all to say that some people shouldn’t write novels.

Edgar Allen Poe, possibly, is one of those people. His short novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, while certainly influential over everyone from Melville to Twain and beyond, is not a very good book. Formally, it’s a hash. The three sections have little to do with each other and the ending is abrupt (though the endnote by Poe is amusing and points to one possible interpretation of the final act of the story), and there has been considerable critical noise to the effect that Poe simply abandoned the novel when he realized he had no ending. A good case can be made for Pym being an artistic failure. And nobody can tell you what Poe was getting at with this book; what—if any—the overarching themes are is an unanswerable question though plenty of critics have given it a go. The last footnote in the text is quite long and really funny; if I had the book to hand I’d quote it, for it lists about fifty ways Pym has been interpreted, as everything from promotion of the “hollow-earth” theory to a wish-fulfillment fantasy of Poe’s having to do with his hated foster father. A great deal of evidence supports the idea that the third act, at least, is a shrill warning to the South that the Northern states with their abolitionists are going to stir up a bloody rebellion among the black slaves and the white race ought to be wary because you cannot trust the North and you certainly cannot trust the black race. Poe was writing in 1837 and lots of critics have pointed out all of the white=good/black=evil images in Pym. See also, I suppose, Mat Johnson’s recent novel Pym, which I have not read but I’ve read about, and which book actually got me to read the Poe, for I plan to read Mr Johnson’s novel this year some time.

So not a good book, as I say, a total mess that takes forever to get anywhere and may at its heart carry a frightened racist message. Still, one can’t help but see how Pym has influenced other writers. Moby-Dick is Poe’s novel writ much larger, Melville showing Poe how it ought to be done. Everyone should know that Moby-Dick is a masterpiece even though it is a leisurely stroll with many nonfiction digressions and a pretty abrupt ending, just like Poe’s book. You can see ripples of Pym in Moby-Dick, and you might see other ripples in Huck Finn, though the message about race is turned on its head by Twain. Certainly you can also draw comparisons between Pym and Heart of Darkness, with Conrad hewing pretty closely to Poe's symbolism and possible fear of a black planet. Hmm. Conrad wrote in 1899. Twain in 1884. Melville in 1851. I don't know what any of those dates really mean regarding theme and interpretation or why I added them to this post, but there they are for the curious.

There’s more to be said about Poe’s only novel, but I’m too scattered, too whelmed with deadlines at the office, and too much not the right guy to speak intelligently about literature to say more than I have. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is an odd little failure of a book, but I’m glad I read it. I am sure that there are many novels that fail as novels yet are still worth reading.

About Style

2012-01-31T14:44:00.001-08:00

"In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique — you have to have a place to make the choices from. If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents."

--Phillip Glass

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, etc

2012-01-30T10:30:00.001-08:00

I am reading Edgar Allen Poe's gothic horror seafaring/Antarctica adventure novella, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. It's not a great book, I sadly must admit. Not Poe's best work by far, but I'll be glad to have read it when I write my own seafaring/Antarctica adventure novella next year or so. I think one of my characters will have read the Poe and will subscribe to the hollow earth theory despite the real-life expeditions that have gone to the continent. That might be fun. He could claim that Scott lied or was mistaken, etc. That Shackleton is a con man or something. I could enjoy that sort of thing.

But Mister Poe's prose strains my readerly sensibilities and I'm halfway through the narrative and very little has actually happened. I can see where such folks as Lovecraft got a sense of atmospheric writing and I admire the way Poe plundered his nonfiction sources, stealing factual detail to give a semblance of plausibility to his story. I recognize that technique, all right. Still, I'll be happier having read this than I am reading it.

Chekhov, meanwhile, is preparing for his Sakhalin trip. That'll be interesting.

Metanarratives For Fun and Profit

2012-01-27T10:38:00.000-08:00

I am reading a critical edition of Edgar Allen Poe's novella The Narrative of Artur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in which the preface, footnotes and appendices outweigh Poe's text by nearly two-to-one. It's fabulous and fascinating and thought-provoking. Everything one wants from a critical edition.

I have recently read Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, which is structured as a poem by a fictitious poet named John Shade published posthumously in a critical edition with an introduction and notes by Shade's colleague Charles Kinbote. The introduction and notes form a story of their own, as Kinbote riffs on elements of the poem and streams his consciousness through his own mighty ego and personal history. There's the possibility that the poem also comments on the personal history of Kinbote, and some readers have advanced the idea that the whole book (poem, notes, fictional(?) Kinbote backstory, etc) are all projections through the poet of a story being told from beyond the grave by Shade's daughter. I don't know about that last idea, but some folks like it. Anyway, Pale Fire is a multilayered story where the primary narrative (the poem) is expanded/commented upon by a second narrator (Kinbote) through the critical notes.

Having just read the Nabokov, I have to keep fighting against the idea that this critical edition of Pym is the same sort of book. I have to keep reminding myself that the copious footnotes do not tell a story about the editor, that the Poe narrative is not a veiled account of a conflict with the editor, who is using the notes to cast doubt upon any possible "reality" of the narrative, because the editor has something to cover up and the only way he can do that is to try to make Poe look insane or dishonest, and that if I read closely enough, I'll see all the holes in the editor's story, the cracks in his logic, etc, and then I'll know what really happened. Of course, none of this is going on in this book. But what if it was? That could be interesting. Maybe, I think, I should write something like this. I'd give the primary author a chance to write an afterword, too, where he comments on the footnotes. Then I'd let the editor (who would be a guy named Scott Bailey, I think) insert notes into the primary text itself, written after the author's afterword was written. Etc. There would be all sorts of layers and denials and accusations being made, but none of them overtly. Different type faces, etc. That could be great fun. Possibly too derivative of Nabokov, though.

The Hearth and the Salamander

2012-01-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but--what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon...

and this

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and steel of the faintly trembling beast.

and also this

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what the religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.

All of this is from Ray Bradbury's 1952 novella Fahrenheit 451, a 50th anniversary copy of which Mighty Reader gifted me this last Christmas, bless her. I read this book when I was 15 or 16--which is to say thirty-some years ago. I was on a Bradbury kick, reading everything of his that my school library held. The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man and probably more. I read them, I think, for their sheer weirdness, their unlikeness to anything I'd ever encountered. I read all I could over the course of a couple of months and when the library's stock of Bradbury was exhausted, I moved on to some other author and thought no more of Mr Bradbury.

And yet, thirty-odd years later, when I read his prose I see things of which I was unaware during those adolescent readings. I see how active and unsettled the writing is, how the words fight against each other on the page and refuse to let the reader's imagination rest. I see how like Hemingway it is, how like DH Lawrence, too. Fahrenheit 451 has its moments of heavy-handed preaching, surely, but by God, Ray Bradbury could write. And all these decades later, I see in my own prose the possible traces, the faded fingerprints perhaps, of his influence. I'm going to read The Martian Chronicles again, too.

But for now I'm reading The Coxon Fund, a comic novella by good old Henry James. It's hysterical, and I'm glad Melville House is reissuing such fine old novellas as this. When I'm done with James, I'm going after Nabokov.

Modernist, Schmodernist, Postschmodernist

2012-01-17T14:25:00.001-08:00

Or: what I'm not doing with my novels.

Lately I've been reading and re-reading more postmodernist novels. Some of them are pretty straightforward (Waterland or The Fates Will Find Their Way or anything by AS Byatt) while some of them are not (Pale Fire or Life of Insects or the stories of Borges or even New York Trilogy). I have been feeling a sort of guilt, for lack of a better term, that I'm not playing more formal games with my own narratives. That I'm not experimenting or in any real way pushing the boundaries of the narrative frame. Magical realist elements, I have read lately, are all the rage in American literary fiction. Why am I not incorporating elements of magical realism into my novels? After all, I like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass, don't I? Sure I do.

I realize that this post is little more than an apology I'm making to myself for being in reality less cutting edge than I imagine myself to be. Having realized that I should just stop now, delete all I've written here and move on with my life as the writer I am. That would be healthy, right? But for whatever reason, I continue being my own apologist when there is in fact no accuser. What the fuck? Yet I still go on.

The focus of my work as a writer is, and always has been, the English language. I love the English language. I love what's been done with it and what can be done with it. Whole worlds can be pulled out of nothing, out of the vacuum, out of the aether, and built up with nothing but words, sentences, paragraphs. Good prose is something a guy like me can roll around in, wallow and rejoice and lose my inhibitions and get drunk upon, again and again never to be sated. I am a sucker for beautiful or startling language. For me the worth of a novel rests primarily on the power of the prose. Weak writing cannot be redeemed by anything. Powerful writing can carry a lot of narrative shortcomings a long way, in my book. Read Shakespeare and you don't care about the preposterous transvestite mistaken identities. Read Dickens and you don't care about the moralizing and the propaganda. It's all gorgeous.

Certainly I'm a modernist. Woolf. Beckett. Joyce. Chekhov (I claim him as the first real Modernist writer). Bulgakov. Conrad. Eliot. O'Connor. Faulkner. Forster. Hemingway. Kafka. Porter. Lawrence. &cet &cet &cet. All of them have given me a path to follow, blazing a trail across the narrative into the heart of character.

Not so much Borges or Nabokov. Not so much Burroughs or Pynchon or Calvino or Barthelme or Gaddis or Bolano or Murakami or Wallace or Huellebecq. Some of their irony and playfulness is appealing to me as a reader, but when I sit down to write a story, none of their narrative concerns has a place at my table. Which, as I say, surprises me. Apparently I don't think postmodern concerns are important. Or possibly I don't see them as a way of exploring character. I think, maybe, that postmodernism is often about the nature of socially-constructed reality, if one can speak of that sort of "aboutness" in a meaningful sense. The nature of reality, the epistemological/ontological underpinnings of a great deal of newer fiction, isn't particularly interesting to me as a subject. The nature of character is, and I guess I don't think that postmodernism (which I am sure I am oversimplifying here) shows a way to get closer to character than modernism does. I don't see postmodernism as adding anything useful to my toolkit.

I am not attempting to bewilder so much as to beguile and bedazzle. I understand the urge to bewilder, to show how bewildering the world has become, or simply to play around with the idea of what a narrative can be or do. But I'm not ready to privilege form the way I do character and language yet. Apparently I am searching in my fiction for some kind of formal certitude, which I must tell you surprises me quite a bit. I guess the puzzle that's always nagged at me--the meaning of the word "story"--continues to nag at me and so I'm still formally trying to hem story in rather than expand/explode it. Possibly I'll never move far beyond that.

Perhaps I'm comfortable with the cliches I've inherited from my realist and modernist mentors. Or perhaps I'm just not aware that what I'm doing is riddled with cliches. One of my current preoccupations is to eliminate all cliche from my narratives; not just because cliches are a hallmark of lazy writing, but because I don't believe that cliches in language or character development or plot reflect the way real life happens. I'm reading Great Expectations right now and, while I adore a lot of what Dickens is doing, his plots are big creaky machines that telegraph all the punches and no longer have the power to surprise. Surely Dickens' plot devices were fresh enough in his day, but I can't let myself trade in the sort of coincidence and improbable revelations Charles ran past his readers on a regular basis.

Anyway, enough of all this. Possibly some day I can write about writing without a) exposing how little I actually know about the history of literature, and b) talking about nothing but myself. The odds are against both of those possibilities, however.

Excerpt from Chapter Seven

2012-01-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

Wolstencroft was a dachshund, a black dog tinted redbrown at the paws and nose, with a white pointed tip to her tail and a bristly white whorl of hair on her upper chest. She had the deep, echoing bark of a much larger dog, a bloodhound perhaps, even if she stood only ten inches or so at the shoulder. Wolstencroft was David's dog, though he told everyone who saw him walk her around the block that the dachshund belonged to Violet. To be a tall man of fifty, dragging a tiny black lizard of a dog behind him on a lead, her heavy claws clicking on the pavement and her white-tipped tail wagging like an uncoiled spring, was one more of life's embarrassments. David had no respect for small dogs and whenever he pictured himself taking Wolstencroft for a spin through the neighborhood, he gritted his teeth and shuddered. A fucking dachshund.

He'd wanted a proper dog: a German shepherd, a collie, a golden retriever maybe. A dog built in proportion to its owner. Violet and Penny, who'd been only four when the family dog was acquired, had lobbied hard for a series of absurd miniature beasts. Teacup poodles. Chihuahuas. Pugs, even. Awful little fucking dogs of the sort that aged widows kept imprisoned with them in apartments or that an empty-headed heiress might dress in a diamond collar and pink angora sweater. Yappy little dogs that David refused to consider.

I'd rather not have a dog at all than bring one of those rats home, he said more than once.

All the usual caveats about this being a rough draft, etc.

What Larks, Pip!

2012-01-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Today at lunch I made a more detailed outline of Chapter 7 for the WIP, expanding my single sentence outline to about 400 words, including snatches of dialogue, some internal monologue, and the final image of the chapter—the point to which I’ll be moving while writing.

This book’s chapters have so far all been about 5,000 words long and more or less in the shape of freestanding short stories. I continue my habit of giving chapters a three-act structure, because that makes them easier to write and—I think—to read. Hopefully I can knock out Chapter 7 by the end of next week.

I noticed a chapter or so back that the point of view is subtly different in the odd numbered chapters than the even numbered chapters. The odd numbers (so far) center around David Molloy, and the point of view in David’s chapters is a limited third-person. You never see the inner thoughts of anyone but David. The even numbered (so far) center around Catherine Lark, but those chapters are written in an omniscient point of view, where the inner thoughts of any character I like can enter the narrative. I’m not sure what will happen in Chapter 9 or 10 when David’s storyline merges with Catherine’s.

The reason I’m using omniscient in Catherine’s chapters is because I found that the limited third-person of David's felt constricting and claustrophobic after a while. I wanted the narrative to relax in tone and to be more inclusive, to breathe and to feel as if it held the entire world within it, not just a single person. There are also thematic reasons behind this decision, but I’ll leave those for critics and readers to sort out.

The point of view choices I’m using might make the story seem to belong more to David than it does to Catherine, so possibly I’m making a tactical blunder here. I’m not convinced of that, though. When I’m writing Catherine’s chapters, she is clearly the protagonist of the book. When I write David’s chapters, the book clearly is about him. As I say, it will be interesting when the two meet at the midpoint of the novel. I’ll have an interesting formal/aesthetic problem to solve. Though perhaps not. Of course I already have ideas.

Meanwhile, I'm about 100 pages into Great Expectations. Dickens keeps using the following method to introduce new characters:

1. Pip meets stranger.
2. Stranger behaves in unaccountably strange manner.
3. Pip learns that stranger's behavior is explicable when backstory revealed.
4. Strangers with backstory become important to narrative.

However:

5. First stranger introduced (escapee from prison ship) continues to behave strangely and we can assume he'll continue to poke his head into the narrative every 60 pages or so. I expect his backstory will come in the third act and his identity will have a great impact on the course of Pip's life. It's a Dickens novel, after all.

Miss Havisham, I note, is a great idea for a character. She could not exist in real life, but she's fabulous on the page.

Yes, you are bored with Chekhov

2012-01-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Well, I can't blame you. All I do is go on and on about this Chekhov guy and what a genius he was and how you should read his stories & cetera. You don't want to read those posts from me. You don't want to read Chekhov. What you really want is to hear about the book I'm currently writing. Yes, I know you do.

Go Home, Miss America is currently an incomplete rough draft. Today at lunch (I had a spinach salad, ta awfully) I completed Chapter 6, and I think it's a fine chapter. I'm not sure about the final line but I can delete that. It pulls the story forward, I think, but possibly it does so in a cliche manner and I am expending a great deal of energy avoiding/stamping out cliches in this manuscript. Which, of course, will make it even less marketable but one can't stop sacrificing for one's art, can one? No, one can't. Or shouldn't.

Anyway, Chapter Six done. Wordcount approximately 30,000. I think I'm about 1/3 of the way through this draft, if I stick to my vague outline and if my vague outline is anything like accurate. This weekend I told Mighty Reader that I'm shooting to have the first draft complete and, you know, possibly even revised once or twice by the end of July. We'll see.

Chapter Six had some good stuff about beards. Chapter Seven will have some good stuff about surgery and temptation, according to my vague outline. Chapter Eight will have some good stuff about Sisyphean tasks and possibly there will be a clear statement of one of the book's themes, though I'm not sure. I'll know when I get there, maybe.

to abandon myself entirely to passion

2012-01-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

I know what I am going to lecture about, but I don't know how I am going to lecture, where I am going to begin or with what I am going to end. I haven't a single sentence ready in my head. But I have only to look round the lecture-hall (it is built in the form of an amphitheatre) and utter the stereotyped phrase, "Last lecture we stopped at . . ." when sentences spring up from my soul in a long string, and I am carried away by my own eloquence. I speak with irresistible rapidity and passion, and it seems as though there were no force which could check the flow of my words. To lecture well -- that is, with profit to the listeners and without boring them -- one must have, besides talent, experience and a special knack; one must possess a clear conception of one's own powers, of the audience to which one is lecturing, and of the subject of one's lecture. Moreover, one must be a man who knows what he is doing; one must keep a sharp lookout, and not for one second lose sight of what lies before one.

A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, makes a motion sideways, first to the drum then to the wind-instruments, and so on. I do just the same when I lecture. Before me a hundred and fifty faces, all unlike one another; three hundred eyes all looking straight into my face. My object is to dominate this many-headed monster. If every moment as I lecture I have a clear vision of the degree of its attention and its power of comprehension, it is in my power. The other foe I have to overcome is in myself. It is the infinite variety of forms, phenomena, laws, and the multitude of ideas of my own and other people's conditioned by them. Every moment I must have the skill to snatch out of that vast mass of material what is most important and necessary, and, as rapidly as my words flow, clothe my thought in a form in which it can be grasped by the monster's intelligence, and may arouse its attention, and at the same time one must keep a sharp lookout that one's thoughts are conveyed, not just as they come, but in a certain order, essential for the correct composition of the picture I wish to sketch. Further, I endeavour to make my diction literary, my definitions brief and precise, my wording, as far as possible, simple and eloquent. Every minute I have to pull myself up and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, one has one's work cut out. At one and the same minute one has to play the part of savant and teacher and orator, and it's a bad thing if the orator gets the upper hand of the savant or of the teacher in one, or vice versa.

You lecture for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour, when you notice that the students are beginning to look at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatyevitch; one is feeling for his handkerchief, another shifts in his seat, another smiles at his thoughts. . . . That means that their attention is flagging. Something must be done. Taking advantage of the first opportunity, I make some pun. A broad grin comes on to a hundred and fifty faces, the eyes shine brightly, the sound of the sea is audible for a brief moment. . . . I laugh too. Their attention is refreshed, and I can go on.

No kind of sport, no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.

That was in old times. Now at lectures I feel nothing but torture. Before half an hour is over I am conscious of an overwhelming weakness in my legs and my shoulders. I sit down in my chair, but I am not accustomed to lecture sitting down; a minute later I get up and go on standing, then sit down again. There is a dryness in my mouth, my voice grows husky, my head begins to go round. . . . To conceal my condition from my audience I continually drink water, cough, often blow my nose as though I were hindered by a cold, make puns inappropriately, and in the end break off earlier than I ought to. But above all I am ashamed.

My conscience and my intelligence tell me that the very best thing I could do now would be to deliver a farewell lecture to the boys, to say my last word to them, to bless them, and give up my post to a man younger and stronger than me. But, God, be my judge, I have not manly courage enough to act according to my conscience.

Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know perfectly well that I cannot live more than another six months; it might be supposed that I ought now to be chiefly concerned with the question of the shadowy life beyond the grave, and the visions that will visit my slumbers in the tomb. But for some reason my soul refuses to recognize these questions, though my mind is fully alive to their importance. Just as twenty, thirty years ago, so now, on the threshold of death, I am interested in nothing but science. As I yield up my last breath I shall still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man; that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature. This faith is perhaps naive and may rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I believe that and nothing else; I cannot overcome in myself this belief.

But that is not the point. I only ask people to be indulgent to my weakness, and to realize that to tear from the lecture-theatre and his pupils a man who is more interested in the history of the development of the bone medulla than in the final object of creation would be equivalent to taking him and nailing him up in his coffin without waiting for him to be dead.

Sleeplessness and the consequent strain of combating increasing weakness leads to something strange in me. In the middle of my lecture tears suddenly rise in my throat, my eyes begin to smart, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch out my hands before me and break into loud lamentation. I want to cry out in a loud voice that I, a famous man, have been sentenced by fate to the death penalty, that within some six months another man will be in control here in the lecture-theatre. I want to shriek that I am poisoned; new ideas such as I have not known before have poisoned the last days of my life, and are still stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at that moment my position seems to me so awful that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to leap up from their seats and to rush in panic terror, with desperate screams, to the exit.

It is not easy to get through such moments.

This is all absolutely gorgeous writing (in Constance Garnett's translation). Chekhov (of course it's Chekhov) is in complete control of his material and the passage has a lot of energy, a lot of forward movement despite the fact that none of this has anything to do directly with the through-action of the story (whatever that is). The change in tone from the nearly ecstatic opening to the understated resignation of "It is not easy to get through such moments" is masterfully done.

I'm beginning to wonder how much of Chekhov's prose Samuel Beckett read. The overall tone and the black humor of "A Dreary Story" (which is what I'm quoting here) seem to be precursors to Beckett's "Molloy" trilogy. But of course I am likely drawing lines of influence where none exist, imagining a web of literary causation that exists nowhere but in my own head. I suppose we all do this, and I don't suppose it's a bad thing. Probably I can make some sort of use of my association of Chekhov with Beckett, and my associations of Beckett with Joyce and on and on like that, but I don't know what use that would be. No use, Beckett would tell me. And he'd be right.

Anton Chekhov, "The Grasshopper"

2012-01-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

Apparently, by the middle of the winter Dymov began to suspect that he was being deceived. As though his conscience was not clear, he could not look his wife straight in the face, did not smile with delight when he met her, and to avoid being left alone with her, he often brought in to dinner his colleague, Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with his right hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about the fact that a displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were talking of medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being silent -- that is, of not lying.

[. . .]

Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct of late. Every morning she woke up in a very bad humour and with the thought that she no longer cared for Ryabovsky, and that, thank God, it was all over now. But as she drank her coffee she reflected that Ryabovsky had robbed her of her husband, and that now she was left with neither her husband nor Ryabovsky; then she remembered talks she had heard among her acquaintances of a picture Ryabovsky was preparing for the exhibition, something striking, a mixture of genre and landscape, in the style of Polyenov, about which every one who had been into his studio went into raptures; and this, of course, she mused, he had created under her influence, and altogether, thanks to her influence, he had greatly changed for the better. Her influence was so beneficent and essential that if she were to leave him he might perhaps go to ruin.

Olga and Ryabovsky remind me of Beckett's "pseudo-couples" as discussed yesterday in Jim Murdoch's post here. They are somehow inseparable but they cannot remain together. Olga and Dymov are of course another pseudo-couple. All of this fits well with Chekhov's maxim that all you need for a story is a man, a woman, and a reason for them to be unhappy. "The Grasshopper" presents two such groupings, with Olga in both groups. A situation in which a character attempts to fit into one of two groups, vacillating between them, is also common in Chekhov. One interesting thing going on in "The Grasshopper" is that the husband, Dymov, does not attempt to fit into the group of artists who gravitate around his wife Olga. He knows he has no place with them and is fine with that.

Anton Chekhov's "The Wife"

2012-01-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

My wife, standing still, watched my movements, looking out of the corner of her eyes without turning her head. She looked as though she thought I had a sharp knife or a revolver in my pocket.

If you was redeemed, I wouldn't want to be

2012-01-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

About 22 years ago, I started writing my first novel. It was a very dark Christian allegory about a man attempting to escape his religious background, and it was full of cruelty, sex, misunderstanding and murder. It was also dreadfully earnest, self-conscious and pretty darned awful. While I was writing this book (which was called The Jack Of Hearts Remembers Me for obscure reasons), my friend Carl mentioned that it sounded a lot like Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which is a dark Christian allegory about a man attempting to escape from his religious background and it’s full of cruelty, sex, misunderstanding and murder.

I read the O’Connor and I didn’t get the joke, didn’t realize that it was a comedy and didn’t realize that Hazel Motes is noble in O’Connor’s eyes precisely because he can’t get rid of Jesus. I completely misunderstood that book and I apparently made an effort to forget as much as I could about it as quickly as I could, because all I remembered of it, two decades later, was that it was finely written (I do recall admiring how elegantly O’Connor wrote about simple actions, which are damned hard to get onto the page, actually) and that there were some vivid images. I did not remember how funny it is, nor what the plot was, nor much of anything.

Possibly I tried to completely forget O’Connor’s novel because it’s so much better than what I was writing; she handled her themes and materials in a way I didn’t even understand, and I see now that my own novel would’ve been much better had I made it a farce. Hazel Motes in Wise Blood is not a madman, and my novel traded heavily on the sad old tropes of the narrator being insane and telling his story after a stay in a state-run mental institution. For the first time I see how it could be possible to revise The Jack of Hearts Remembers Me and make it into what it properly ought to be, but I won’t because Flannery O’Connor got there before I was born and I no longer feel passionate about the life of my protagonist, Henry Jackhart. I find that I'm still writing about faith and doubt, but the subjects present themselves to me in different ways now that I'm older and I'm fine with those approaches. That might be personal growth, or it might just be exhaustion; I can't say.

This little essay is clearly less about Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood than it is about me re-reading Wise Blood and thinking about my own writing, thinking about my limitations as a writer and how those limitations are only visible once enough time has passed to allow some critical distance. I cannot tell you what my current limitations are (aside from the usual arrogance, that is) and I am not at all sure I’ll enjoy finding out when the time comes where I’ll be able to recognize them. I am certain that I'm not writing perfect novels.

Wise Blood is not a perfect novel either. O’Connor was not a perfect writer. But she was a pretty damned good writer, and Wise Blood rises above its occasional flaws, which is more than you get from most novels. I'm happy to report that this re-read is being a success, and I look forward to reading the rest of O'Connor's works (which all showed up under the Christmas tree this year, nicely enough).

Reading on Buses

2012-01-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

This morning during my commute I saw a university student reading Charles Portis' novel Masters of Atlantis. Nice to see Portis being read, especially by someone who wasn't even born when the book came out. Another guy was reading Michael Chabon's new story collection Werewolves in Their Youth. I was reading Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood. A few folks had Kindlenooky things, so I can't report on what they were reading. An older man was doing crosswords at lightning speed, but they were odd crossword puzzles: instead of lists of clues, there were lists of words, grouped by length. I've never seen the like. The man doing the crosswords had a way of stopping what he was doing every few minutes and looking around the bus, moving his head with a quick jerky motion from side to side and staring unblinking at the other passengers. Very much like a bird, I thought. One other older guy was playing mah-jongg on an iPad. I see him almost every morning. His lower lip looks like a fat, veiny worm when he's concentrating, so I try to sit where I can't see his face.

Books Read, 2011 Edition

2011-12-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

Michelle Davidson Argyle Thirds
Michael Bond Paddington Helps Out
Kate Bernheimer (ed.) My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
Hannah Pittard The Fates Will Find Their Way
Jaimy Gordon Lord of Misrule
Samuel Beckett Molloy
Samuel Beckett Malone Dies
Antonia Byatt Possession
Albert Camus The Stranger
Agatha Christie The Murder on the Links
Phillip Morledge The Technique of the Mystery Story
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
Louise & Yuan Hsi Kuo Chinese Folk Tales
Louis de Bernieres Birds Without Wings
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway
David Mamet Writing In Restaurants
David Kyvig Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940
Cleveland Amory Who Killed Society?
Graham Swift Waterland
Theodora Kroeber The Inland Whale
E.M. Forster Aspects of the Novel
Davin Malasarn The Wild Grass
Albert Hourani A History of the Arab Peoples
Henry James The Ambassadors
William Mumford Africans Learn to Be French
Anton Chekhov Forty Stories
Alfred Jarry The Ubu Plays
William Shakespeare Macbeth
Troy Nethercott How To Disappear Completely
Anton Chekhov Tales of Chekhov, Volume 1
Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Anton Chekhov Tales of Chekhov, Volume 2
Tara Maya Conmergence
Agatha Christie The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Anton Chekhov Tales of Chekhov, Volume 3
Alina Bronsky The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine
Dashiell Hammett The Thin Man
Apuleius The Golden Ass
Anton Chekhov Tales of Chekhov, Volume 4
Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda
Jose Maria de Eca de Quieros The Illustrious House of Ramires
Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber
JRR Tolkien The Hobbit
Thomas Mann Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
Victor Pelevin The Life of Insects
Charles Portis True Grit
Kate Chopin The Awakening
G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday
William Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra
Paul Auster The New York Trilogy
Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
Samuel Beckett The Unnamable
Harper Lee To Kill A Mockingbird

Plus a bunch of nonfiction that I just don't keep track of properly, mostly read as research for the novels I've been writing and I'll spare you all of that, mercifully. In 2012, my aim is to read a bunch more Chekhov, a bunch of Nabokov and Camus and Faulkner and O'Connor, a bunch more Shakespeare than I managed to fit in during 2011, and I will continue to look for living American authors that I enjoy as much as I enjoy dead European authors. Competition has not been exactly fierce. I also would like to read more from Jose Maria de Eca de Quieros (another dead European), who was one of this year's glorious new finds. Possibly there will be some Joyce and Melville and Stendahl on the list as well; who knows?

"you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on"

2011-12-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is of course the last line of Samuel Beckett's novella The Unnamable, which I finished reading yesterday. Beckett puts on quite a performance in this piece, and while I'm not sure I can say I read it--because somehow one doesn't quite engage with The Unnamable the way one does with most texts; one sort of exposes oneself to Beckett exposing himself rather than one properly reads a narrative--I can say I let myself experience the novella as much and as well as I could. Admittedly there was some drifting on my part due to the way Beckett's short phrases so easily fell into a repetitive and partially numbing rhythm, but I certainly didn't sleep through it and gosh, but there's some powerful stuff in there.

Of course it's all about the futility of effort and the meaninglessness of speech or action, typical Beckett fare, but what do you do right after reading Beckett? Jump up and clean the house or start an exercise program? How do you transition from the absolute bleakness of The Unnamable back into your daily life? Me, I had a cookie and then typed up Chapter Five of my own novel in progress. After Beckett, my cruelties to my protagonist seemed charming and harmless in comparison. Well, it's early days yet in that novel (I'm at about 25,000 words or so, which is nothing).

What do you read after Beckett? If you've just finished Waiting For Godot, you can move on to anything, can't you? Godot is slapstick comedy even if it's serious subject matter. Nobody sheds a tear for Vladimir. I was tempted to pick up Shakespeare, and then Faulkner, and then I wavered at the stack of O'Connor I got for Christmas and then thought vaguely of fluffier stuff and of course I mean to read Moby-Dick again either next year or in 2013...Finally I gave the bookshelves a good looking over and picked up Harper Lee. I've been meaning to read To Kill a Mockingbird all year, and I've just got enough time to meet that goal. It's been decades since I read it and it's quite fine. Better, frankly, than I remembered it being.

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah. My next post will finally be about Lydia Davis' short stories and then I'm going to quote some of the best bits from Beckett's Molloy trilogy. See if I don't. After that, maybe, I'll beazle and prolix about the letters of young Anton Chekhov, who promises not to bore his correspondents with talk about his published stories and plays and then writes page after page about his published stories and plays. I did not see myself in that bad habit. No, I did not.

My 2011 "Advent Ghosts" Story

2011-12-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

The smell reached the old man as he chained the barn door: his wife roasting the last of the deer meat. Now they'd no food but grain, though he’d see about that.

He returned to the cabin, shaking snow from his coat.

How are they?

Wild, he answered. Forgotten all language. They still sing: noises not even words but I recognize the melodies.

Terrible. Our children.

They’re animals, he said. Never human. I trained them to build things, now they hide in the dead forest and sing. I found thirteen; the rest starved or froze. There’s fresh water and grain in the barn. That roast smells good.

What will we do? Can you retrain them?

He shook his head. They’ve gone feral. Won’t let me near them, don’t wear clothes and they’re covered with fur. Never saw such a thing.

He sat down, picking up knife and fork. I’ll fatten them up. We’ve slaughtered all the deer.

Oh Papa, the old woman said.

They aren’t human, Mama.

This story is my contribution to Loren Eaton's "Advent Ghosts" annual storywriting collaborative. You can read the rest of the stories at his blog here. Loren is very cool to host this year after year. Thanks, Loren!

The rules are to write a 100-word spooky story for Christmas Eve reading. I have cheated a bit here, coming in at 167 words. My first try was about 300 words. If I found the right angle I could probably get to 100 words, but I'm both happy with the story as it is and a very lazy old man, so I abandon my editing at this stage. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Epistemology with Samuel Beckett

2011-12-23T09:54:00.000-08:00

I'm reading the third book in Samuel Beckett's "Molloy" trilogy, The Unnameable. What can I possibly say about a book with no plot, no characters, no conflict to be resolved except that it's a great book?

The Unnameable is a first-person monologue given by a voice, possibly disembodied, possibly deceased, possibly enshrined in a funerary urn in a graveyard or possibly somewhere else. Possibly this is the afterlife musings of an author, for the narrator mentions characters encountered in the first two books of the trilogy, and implies that they are fictitious characters. Though it's impossible to say for sure what's "fiction" and what's "real" here.

This is an epistemological novel. The narrator is compelled to speak, because he has the power to speak (indeed, possibly he must speak because he is the creation of language), but what can he say? How does he know what is true? How does he know what he knows? Does he trust the evidence of his senses, and if so, why?

This is also an ontological novel. The narrator attempts to define categories of things but abandons the attempt over and over. How can he be sure of any of it? Almost all the things he "knows" are in the form of received wisdom and he's seen how many of the truths learned in school turn out to be lies, so why trust any of it? How can you trust any of it?

This is a philosophical novel. The narrator tells you what he remembers, tries to assign meaning to those events, and then realizes that in the end he has no real idea what any of it signified, if any of it mattered beyond the moment.

So what is the narrative like? Most of it is in the form of a single unbroken paragraph that carries the narrator's thoughts from subject to subject, looping back after digressions to the subjects he's trying to think about, but there is nothing more important in his primary subjects than in his digressions and he knows it. Everything is equally unimportant. Being and nothingness, God and godlessness, life and death: it's all the same in the end. As Tom Stoppard might say, for all the points of the compass there is but one destination and you end up, after all the fuss, dead in a box. What can you possibly say about that?

The only way Beckett (or anyone) could carry this off, this existentialist stream of consciousness, is by leavening the bleak realization that there is nothing to say because there is nothing worth saying, with a healthy stream of humor. Like Chekhov and Kafka, Beckett realizes that the absurdity of existence isn't just tragic, it's funny as well. Or perhaps it's like Byron said: "If I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I shall not weep." Hard to say.

On knowledge:

To tell the truth, let us be honest at least, it is some considerable time since I last knew what I was talking about.

On God:

My master then, assuming he is solitary, in my image, wishes me well, poor devil, wishes my good, and if he does not seem to do very much in order not to be disappointed it is because there is not very much to be done or, better still, because there is nothing to be done, otherwise he would have done it, my great and good master, that must be it, long ago, poor devil. [...] A little more explicitness on his part, since the initiative belongs to him, might be a help, as well from his point of view as from the one he attributes to me. [...] Let him enlighten me, that's all I ask, so that I may at least have the satisfaction of knowing in what sense I leave to be desired.

That's good stuff, if you're me anyway. Through a glass darkly, with a sense of humor. There is no "story." But the prose is surprising, alternately absurdist and beautiful. If Modernism is your thing and you've never read Beckett, get thee to a bookstore. I'm reading the 1997 Everyman's Library edition, which is a gorgeous volume that I got last Christmas.

Pale Fire: A Novel I Can't Tell You About

2011-12-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

I am nearly finished with Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire, and I will admit now that about 70 pages back I stopped thinking about this book as a puzzle to be "solved." This is my third time with this book and while I think this is the best read I've managed to give it so far, I still must throw up my hands and surrender to the author. I don't know what's going on here, not quite. I have my suspicions about Kinbote and Shade, of course, and I naturally suspect that the whole of the book is Nabokov talking about Nabokov (because--and let's be honest--when is Nabokov not talking about Nabokov?), but really I can't do any better than suspicions and vague ideas about the possible "reality" upon which the telling is based. And I'm fine with that, because it's been a splendid ride. Nabokov shakes your head up in a way nothing else can. If nothing else, I'm no longer angry at old Vladimir for being so much smarter than I am.

Because old V is so much smarter than I am, I find that I can't really say anything worth reading about Pale Fire. I recommend it to everyone but don't come running to me with your questions about it. Five minutes with Google will gain you far more scholarship than I can pretend to offer. Not just because Pale Fire is a book that's smarter than this reader, but also because, I'm coming to realize, I don't actually know how to talk about reading.

I'm a far brighter person when I sit down to write fiction than I am when I sit down to write about fiction. I think I'm at my absolute best--intellectually, that is--when I am writing a story. This weekend I did a lot of work on my piece for the Literary Lab's "Variations on a Theme" anthology, and there are passages of shining brilliance there that I'll never equal in writing outside of a story. I'm good at fiction. I'm not so good at this, what I'm doing now: talking about fiction.

But I can write well enough to say that even though Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire might leave you as baffled as it leaves me, you should get yourself a copy of it and read the damned thing. It's short, it's funny as hell, it will make you think in ways you probably don't usually think, and it's full of surprises and pathos and no, I don't remember how it ends (I have 40 or so pages to go) but good readers don't read for the endings, they read for the experience of having been in contact with the narrative. Or whatever. I don't know why good readers read, but it has nothing to do with discovering how the plot works out. Note that I use the phrase "good readers" to mean "people like me." I make no apology for that.

Anyway, there's this from page 272 of the Vintage trade paper edition:

If I correctly understand this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Misreading "Pale Fire"

2011-12-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me (and likely others have gotten here long ago before me) that Charles Kinbote, when he looks at John Shade's poem "Pale Fire" and sees it filled with references to his own life, is not necessarily doing anything more than any other reader of poetry or prose. Possibly part of Nabokov's project in Pale Fire (the novel, not the poem within the novel) is to suggest that every reader who feels he has "connected" to a text is at least partly misreading the text, projecting himself onto and into the work, interpolating his own ideas with those of the innocent author. Which means that perhaps Kinbote isn't as mad as he seems (though he's quite mad, of course), and you and I are more mad than we might like to think. When I read the poem (or the commentary on the poem) and misunderstand an allusion (and doubtless I've done this), how much am I twisting the intended meaning of the text? Is my misreading an invalid reading, or--as semioticians might claim--am I making a new reading that's just as valid as what Nabokov intended? And if that's so, why not claim that "Pale Fire" isn't about John Shade's relationship to the idea of his approaching death, but is in fact nothing more or less than a poem about the last king of Zembla?

Also, this:

Which is a blurry photo of Mighty Reader and me riding the Christmas Carousel downtown, at about 8:00 PM last night. It was quite a fine time.

(Help me, Will! Pale Fire)

2011-12-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

I'll example you with thievery:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From gen'ral excrement- each thing's a thief.

--William Shakespeare, "Timon of Athens" Act IV, Scene III

I hadn't yet read Timon of Athens the first two times I read Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, so I didn't get the reference. The parallels between Kinbote and Timon are clear now, too. Oh, Vladimir, you are so clever. There's more than Shakespeare references in the 999-line poem that is allegedly the centerpiece of this novel. There's "Hurricane Lolita," and Zembla of course, which is possibly the setting for the nonsense tale by O. Henry, though neither prisoners nor Zembla are named in that tale. I am nearly infinitely charmed by Mr Nabokov. Which is what always happens when I read his books. At some point I'll wish to hurl the volume as hard as I can into a wall or a fireplace, but I'm not there yet.

Anyway, I'm about five pages into the "commentary" section of the novel. I have ignored Kinbote's advice to read the comments before reading the poem and I'm reading the book in the order it's printed. The poem, which I never liked before, seems quite fine this time around, though once again all of the shaving imagery is a bit off-putting. Is there some connection between "shave" and "shade?" I don't know.

If you've never read the book and wonder what I'm yammering about, I tell you that a poem titled "Pale Fire," the final and possibly incomplete work of a poet named John Shade, is discussed at some length by a Professor Charles Kinbote, who moved into the rental house next door to Shade a few months before the poet's death. Both Shade and Kinbote lecture at a university in the fictional town of New Wye, Appalachia. Kinbote claims to have been asked by Shade to take the poem and have it published, Shade being sure he was close to death. Possibly Kinbote stole the manuscript and forged a letter giving him power of attorney over the work. In any case, as we begin to learn from the second page of the introduction onward, Kinbote is off his nut and is not to be trusted.

The poem itself is a rumination on death as written by an old man. He thinks back over his life as a poet, over the unhappy life and early death (possibly a suicide) of his daughter, and he thinks over his long marriage to Sybil. The whole poem is written to Sybil; she is the "you" to whom Shade constantly directs his thoughts. "Pale Fire" is a fine poem, too. It's not just a prop to support the games of the novel.

Kinbote's introduction, where he justifies his having edited, published and commented upon Shade's poem, is about 15 pages long. The poem itself takes another 33 pages, and the rest of the novel is 225 pages of Kinbote's commentary, allegedly about the poem but actually about himself. There's also a 10-page index to the work, put together by Kinbote, which is a marvel of egotistical psychopathy. Or psychopathic egotism; take your choice. In any case, Kinbote is an utter solipsist and he steals the fire of Shade's poem (Shade/shave/Shakespeare? I don't know) to glorify himself and what are probably his delusions of grandeur. Have I said too much? All the wrong things? No idea. Pale Fire is a brilliant short novel and if you haven't read it, why haven't you?

burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator

2011-12-12T09:54:00.000-08:00

There was so much frost this morning that when I first glanced out the bedroom window, I thought it had snowed during the night. The lawn, the parking strip and the lids of the curbside recycling bins were all white, glowing hazily under the streetlamp. Alas, not snow. Not yet. It was also warmer than I thought it would be. I walked down the hill and only thought to put on my gloves when I arrived at the bus stop and began to wait for an express coach. Along the way I’d glanced up to see the moon setting in the west, clear and hard white like bone against the indigo sky. A heron passed overhead, huge and silent and improbable, his long legs trailing behind him, his wings beating with slow deliberation. What’s he doing up at that hour? The fishes must all be asleep still, deep down in the riverbed.

I am reading, again, Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, which book features my favorite of Nabokov’s unreliable narrators, Charles Kinbote. I’d forgotten how much fun Kinbote’s madness is, and how Nabokov lets that madness crack through the academic façade of Kinbote’s narrative. I’ve forgotten much about this book, I’m sure. Only a few pages in, I can tell you that the prose is wonderful ("ecstatic" is the word used in Updike’s back cover blurb) and the humor is pure Nabokov: the author and the reader share jokes that the narrator isn’t in on. What fun there is in store for me.

Last night Mighty Reader and I watched "It’s a Wonderful Life." Jimmy Stewart was a fabulous actor. I always forget that and I’m always surprised, year after year. What any of this has to do with anything else in this mess of an essay, I’ve no idea.

Auster In A Locked Room

2011-12-08T13:20:00.001-08:00

I am pushing to finish reading "The Locked Room," the final story in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. I hope that by the time my evening bus commute is done, I'll have seen the end of this book. While a lot of what Auster does in these stories is clever and fun, I just have to say that by the time "The Locked Room" is underway it's clear that Paul is not, as the kids say, bringing it. If the kids still say that, or if they ever did. This story is not brilliant work.

Admittedly I'm not getting all of the references Auster has woven into the narrative, and I suppose that there could be whole levels of meaning that I'm too ignorant to even see in this trilogy. But the main problem with "The Locked Room" is that the story itself is not compelling and the prose is sort of flat. Auster attempts to create suspense with the cliche of his narrator announcing, "It was then that I should have seen what was to come" or "Little did I know then that I was living in denial" and cetera, in order to prick up our ears and fill us with expectation. Alas, too much of this stuff (like, more than zero instances) is just a boy crying wolf, and by the time Auster's protagonist claims "I was going to find him and I was going to kill him," I am merely yawning. Whatever, Mr Narrator. Maybe the point of all this meaningless action is that action has no meaning, but at least put some effort into your presentation. I'm doing all the work here, and it's not worth the time or labor.

Well, I have one more chapter to go. It'd best be one hell of a chapter. Next up, I'm reading either Beckett or Nabokov.

Edited on 12/9/11 to add: I just don't think the final chapter spun the whole trilogy into shape the way I guess it was intended to, but the last couple of pages were quite fine and I like the image Auster leaves the reader with. So my verdict is that The New York Trilogy is, as my friend Carl says, "a fine first novel" but it doesn't live up to the reviews it got at the time. As I said in my last post, that probably says a lot more about reviews and reviewers than it says about Auster or his book. There were big swaths of these stories that I liked a lot, but I just can't make myself unreservedly recommend them. The stories concern themselves primarily with the relationship of writers to writing, with the author to the work, but in the end the narratives aren't actually self-referential in what seems a meaningful way; there's no real center, no fixed point. I get that the lack of a fixed point is part of Auster's theme, but I just don't think he really got there with this set of stories. Though I think that writers would find them valuable studies. Certainly I've gotten some interesting ideas by mulling over what Auster did and didn't do here. I will likely read more of his books, because I'd like to see what Auster can do with his looping postmodernism when he's not writing about writing.

Nabokafka With Paul Auster

2011-12-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

I am reading Paul Auster's 1986 debut novel The New York Trilogy, which is actually a collection of three novellas (City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room) that bear some superficial resemblance to detective stories. This is one of those books I've read about but never read until now, and I am not sure exactly what I'd come to expect from Mr Auster but reviews routinely call the collection "genre-bending," "brilliant," "remarkable" and "innovative." And they're not; not quite, not if you've read Nabokov or Kafka or Borges.

These stories are about identity, in that the loss of the protagonist's personal identity is the primary dramatic action of the stories (I admit that I haven't read The Locked Room yet but I assume--possibly wrongly--that it generally follows the large-scale pattern of the other two stories). City of Glass concerns a writer, Daniel Quinn, who--under the pen name William Wilson (which is also the name of a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story)--writes books about a detective named Max Work ("max work" is one possible translation of the Latin "magnum opus," so this is, like, a funny joke). Quinn lives a solitary live, with no friends or direct contact with his publisher or agent or family (his wife and son died a few years before the story begins). He feels close to nobody except his fictional detective.

One evening Quinn gets a phone call asking for the Paul Auster Detective Agency. "There's no Paul Auster here," Quinn says. After a few more of these calls, Quinn decides to pretend to be Auster and he takes the case of Peter Stillman, whose father (also named Peter Stillman) is about to be released from prison. Stillman Jr is afraid Stillman Sr is going to kill him. So Quinn, telling himself to act like detective Max Work, pretends to be Auster and begins to spy on Stillman Sr in order to protect Stillman Jr. The case goes nowhere and nothing seems to have any meaning or purpose and Quinn becomes frustrated and obsessed and loses himself in the search for patterns in the behavior of others--which is of course the work of a detective. At his wit's end, Quinn finally goes to the apartment of Paul Auster, whose address Quinn finds in the phone book. Auster, of course, is not a detective. He's a writer, working for now on a book about Don Quixote and Cervantes' relationship to the work. Or possibly Quixote's relationship to the work, if Don Quixote is a true story as it claims itself to be. Who wrote Don Quixote, Cervantes or Quixote? Who is writing City of Glass? Paul Auster? "Paul Auster?" Who is the unnamed narrator who bursts into the narrative on the final page, the friend of "Paul Auster" who is apparently investigating the disappearance of Daniel Quinn? Et cetera. There's loads more stuff going on, and lots of pairing of character and action and image that may or may not supposedly mean something.

So Auster presents us with layer upon layer of identity (or perhaps not layers so much as colliding theories or a soup of commentary about theories), implying that the relationship between an author and his work (or a father and his son, or God and his creations, or a man and himself) is mysterious and possibly unknowable. Or so it might seem. On the surface.

Which is my problem with the two stories I've read of this trilogy so far: it's all merely taking place on the surface. It's all playing games with homonyms and names and duplication of actions, but there's no true exploration of identity other than the claim that your name is not your identity and that your name is just a word and the meanings of words change and therefore your identity itself is subject to change. Some shadow play about the nature of language also being the nature of reality, which is a nice image if you're a writer, but really there's not much of any depth here. There's not much beyond the surface games.

Granted, the surface is highly attractive and enjoyable. The stories remind me a lot of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," which is a dandy play and a rollicking fine film was made of it but of course beneath all Stoppard's word games and references there isn't really anything there. It's pretty and clever and witty but hollow, and that's what I tend to feel about The New York Trilogy. It's a well-made and entertaining shiny hollow ball, but it's still hollow. Auster has crafted a dazzling collection of interesting gestures, and has borrowed some ties and shoes from the closets of Nabokov and Kafka and Borges, but he hasn't really said anything with all of it. Ghosts seems to comment upon City of Glass, but does it comment on the latter, or does it merely borrow images from it?

I'm enjoying the collection--hell, this morning I almost missed my stop because I was so caught up in the writing--but at the same time I feel let down because there's just not more to The New York Trilogy than the cleverness of the forms and allusions. Possibly I'm being unfair to Auster, though. The writer, I mean, not the detective. This is a better book than most and if I'd read it after The Man Who Was Thursday instead of after Antony and Cleopatra, I'd probably be gushing about it instead of dissecting it. I'm a difficult audience and I know it. I keep trying to come up with a positive sentiment with which to end this post, but I keep running into the difficulty that no matter what I want to say about The New York Trilogy (and really, I think it's worth reading so go read it), I am compelled to temper my praise and I realize that what I'm actually objecting to is not Mr Auster's novellas, but to the critical reception of those novellas. The problem isn't that Auster has failed in any way (he says himself, in his guise as Paul Auster, fictional novelist in City of Glass, that the primary duty of a novel is to entertain, and the primary goal of a novelist is to see how much he can get away with in the way of telling tales), but that the reviews I've read of the novel have been written by people who aren't familiar with the works from which Auster is deriving his stories; if you've never read Nabokov or Kafka or Borges, Auster can seem like a magician. If I hadn't read any of the reviews before reading the book, I'd be enjoying myself more than I am. I should rewrite this little essay and turn it into a review of reviews, but I won't because time is short and I am lazy.

this story irritates the hell out of me

2011-11-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is from the notes to myself that I made last week regarding the fifth chapter of the new novel. In truth, this story irritates me. It fills me with great discomfort and I am tempted often to walk away from it and work on something else, which I take as a sign that I'm on the track of something good here and I should keep writing this book. My best work--by which I of course mean my favorite work--has always come out of my areas of discomfort, because I'm picking away at something of real meaning to me. Very likely this irritation is also felt by the reader, which is why I am not a published author. But still, it's what I do so I'll keep doing it.

I'm not working at any great pace on the new book; I think I'm getting about 500 or so words a day onto the page is all. But last night's 500 words are pretty good. They're almost all dialogue, which is one of my strong suits. I credit my facility with speakybits to having read all that Shakespeare. When all you have is dialogue, you have to do everything with it: mood, backstory, plot, character, and all the rest. Likely all my reading of Shakespeare also explains why my novels are such talky things.

I recently read somewhere about a young writer who hates dialogue. I forget her name, but I have to say I think she's being a dope. She needs to read more Shakespeare, and some Chekhov wouldn't come amiss either.

G.K. Chesterton: And Then I Woke Up

2011-11-28T08:33:00.001-08:00

I read a lot this weekend, which is My Kind Of Weekend. I finished Kate Chopin's The Awakening (which had a satisfyingly unsettling tragic ending and it's a shame Chopin only wrote the one novel), read fifty pages or so of Lydia Davis short stories (uneven in both length and quality but when she's good, Ms Davis is great), and read the entirety of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (a nightmare). This is the only Chesteron I've ever read, and I am now chary of picking up anything else by him, though possibly TMWWT is an anomaly.

The thing about this book is that the first two thirds of it are pretty great, but the ending (despite Chesterton's warning in the subtitle) is a cheat, I think. Here's the story, in brief: a "philosopher detective" from Scotland Yard infiltrates a worldwide anarchist organization, getting elected by the local anarchist branch to a seat on the president's council. There are seven members of the council, and the council members go by the names of the days of the week. Our hero is Thursday, hence the title of the book. The president of the anarchists, a Moriarty-like arch criminal, takes the name of Sunday. They are planning, as a first step toward world anarchy, to blow up the President of France and the Czar of Russia (the novel was written in 1908). Intrigue and hilarity ensues, including various unmaskings to reveal surprise secret identities, flight across the Channel and pursuit by an anarchist army, a duel fought with swords and oh, so much more. There is a lot of funny metafictional stuff about police work and detection and the ongoing discussion of who would really benefit from the pulling down of government is very lively and possibly timely as well ("The poor will resent that they are governed wrongly, but the rich will resent that they are governed at all").

Chesterton is funny and the wordplay is very very good, harking back to the comedies of Shakespeare. The protagonist's riffing about which words should be included in a secret code is priceless, as he argues in favor of terms that are poetic and have a beautiful sound, rather than for words that might actually apply to the case at hand. There's a later bit where he plans a dialogue between himself and an enemy, writing down the 43 verbal exchanges he assumes will come to pass. Alas, at the crisis moment he is forced to improvise.

So this is all great stuff, and plotwise Chesterton turns the spy story on its head and his reader has no idea why anything is happening or who Sunday really is or how the story will all work out and things build to a fever pitch and then...[SPOILER]...we are presented with a fairy tale Christian allegory centered around the week of Creation (hence the days of the week trope) and we learn that the whole thing was a dream and on the last page of the novel, the protagonist wakes up. I cry foul, I do. Deus ex machina most foul. Horrible, horrible, most horrible. You get the idea. But before someone tells me that Chesterton had the right to craft whatever story he wanted to, I will say that the most foulness was that the last chapter was not well written. Had not Chesterton lost all his sense of fun and playful language, I might accept his bait-and-switch. But he did, so I don't.

Right now I'm reading Shakespeare. There is no bad Shakespeare.

True Grit: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

2011-11-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

“Who is the best marshal they have?'

The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'

I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”

According to the New York Times, “Charles Portis, the reclusive author of the 1968 novel True Grit, is a cult writer's cult writer, cherished by a small but devoted following.” Portis is not exactly a household name. I saw the original “True Grit” film when it first came out in 1969. I was a wee lad and my family was packed into a station wagon to watch the film at a drive-in. Possibly it was the first movie I ever saw at a theater of any kind, and as such holds a special place in my heart, though I believe I’ve only watched it once as an adult, maybe 20 years ago. Anyway, if I have a point with all this rambling, it’s that from the time I saw the movie as a kid until Portis was awarded The Oxford American's Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literature in April of 2010, I never once thought of there actually being a novel on which the film was based, and so I never once gave a thought to a novelist named Charles Portis. And that’s my loss.

True Grit is a pretty good novel, and I say this as someone who doesn’t read westerns. The prose pulled me in right away; the story is told by Mattie, the teenage daughter of Frank Ross who was shot down in cold blood by “the coward Tom Chaney” and Mattie’s voice is stern and formal, lacking in contractions and chiding the reader who disagrees with her opinions, pointing to scripture to support her views and digressing here and there into the partisan politics of Arkansas.

I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father's death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious "claptrap." My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33. ["The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs..."]

It’s a ripping yarn, as they say, and it’s damned funny. The comedy is almost always ironic and subtle, a lot of it coming out of dialogue. I’d quote some here, but the way Portis sets up the jokes is by carefully crafting scenes where the meaning of facts is batted back and forth between two verbal combatants and the punch lines would make no sense out of context. But the three or four pages where Mattie settles with the horse trader who sold her father six ponies is brilliant, as is the testimony of Marshal Cogburn at the trial of a man whose father and several brothers were shot dead by the marshal during his arrest:

MR.GOUDY: I believe you testified that you backed away from Aaron Wharton.
MR.COGBURN: That is right.
MR.GOUDY: You were backing away?
MR.COGBURN: Yes sir. He had that ax raised.
MR.GOUDY: Which direction were you going?
MR.COGBURN: I always go backwards when I am backing up.

My only problem with this book might be that I don’t necessarily believe Mattie Ross is a 14 year-old girl. Certainly there could be (and maybe there are) 14 year-olds with the business acumen to outwit a horse trader and the ramrod spine to outtalk and bully a 40 year-old Federal marshal who spent four years in the Confederate army and more years after that as a highwayman, but the only reason we believe Mattie is a girl is because Portis has her say she’s one. Otherwise, True Grit is sort of your basic story of men on an adventure. If you make Mattie into a 14 year-old boy, you don’t have to change more than a few dozen words in the book. Certainly you don’t have to make any changes in Mattie’s character. I do not know what conclusions to draw from this observation. I also can’t say that there are any differences between 14 year-old boys and 14 year-old girls that aren’t entirely learned behavior so maybe Mr Portis is a wiser man than I am. If anyone has read the novel and has an opinion about this, do tell. Especially if you also have direct experience with/as a 14 year-old person.

Portis' other novels look pretty good. I plan to read Norwood sometime soon.

This weekend I also read the short novel The Life of Insects, by Victor Pelevin. It’s a postmodern or whatever comic novel about Gorbachov-era USSR, where the characters are presented as either insects or humans or some vacillating state in between. The dung beetles claim that every insect (and therefore every person) is a dung beetle even if he doesn’t know it, and that there is no difference between the dung and the beetle. That might serve as Pelevin’s statement of theme. The moths fly into the light, but there is no point to it. The mosquitoes suck the blood of whoever’s around, but their avarice gets them no happiness and it’s a dangerous game. A lot of this feels like Beckett in Waiting For Godot, but while the action is plenty violent, the humor is perhaps more gentle than in Beckett. Anyway, it’s good that TLoI is just a novella, because Pelevin’s idea just about overstayed its welcome at 176 pages. Though the chapter towards the end about the cicada was really gorgeous and sad.

I haven't decided if I'm going to read Pelevin's novel Omon Ra, which is apparently about a cosmonaut in a training program that bears a strong resemblance to Kafka's castle.

Enough of That, Mister Mann

2011-11-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

I'm nearly finished with Death In Venice and Seven Other Stories, the collection of Thomas Mann works I've been reading. This is my first exposure to Mann, and I have to admit that the stories are pretty uneven. "Disorder and Early Sorrow" may be the best thing I've ever read, but it's hard to say because I read it in the context of other Thomas Mann stories so critical distance isn't perfect. But it's a damned fine story. "Death in Venice" is a technical marvel, showing absolute control over the formal elements of the narrative and for a few hours after finishing it, I was sure it was the best thing I'd ever read. "Tonio Kroger," "The Blood of the Walsungs" and "Felix Krull" fare less well, being not as focused on character or possibly they're just too self-consciously symbolic and pedantic for my tastes. "Mario and the Magician" is a violent, mean-spirited tale that made me laugh all the way through it. "Tristan" is sad and quite fine. "A Man and His Dog" should be required reading for all students of writing, as a teaching tool for how to properly write a digressive story and how to write about nature.

Anyway, if you are interested in reading some Thomas Mann, the stories I recommend are "Death In Venice," "A Man and His Dog," and "Disorder and Early Sorrow." They are all on the longish side. Did I mention that Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature? Some day I'll read The Magic Mountain or Doktor Faustus.

I hope that this exposure to Mann has an influence on my own writing. Certainly I feel the urge to make my prose more like his, though really what I like about Mann is his observing eye and the way he lingers over expressive details. I'd like to steal that, though Mann knew a lot more natural history than I do.

Even so, I'll be glad to put the volume back on the shelf this evening and pick up something else. God knows what that will be. I have a surfeit of unread books at home and every time I look in their direction I am convinced that I have nothing to read. Possibly some Faulkner, though. Or some Camus. Or MacMurty. Or the last book of Beckett's "Malloy" trilogy. Or some Paddington Bear stories. Or I could start making an effort on my Variations on a Theme story, now that I've got a (fabulous postmodern) idea for it. Time will tell, etc.

It Won't Write Itself

2011-11-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

It suddenly strikes me that this is November, NaNoWriMonth and all, and while there are thousands (or tens of thousands) of folks feverishly churning out novels, I'm not so much pushing as hard as I could on my current work in progress. Which is fine, actually, because even though I'm not ratcheting up the word count on a daily basis, I've been thinking a lot about the story and I count that as writing time and effort. All of which is a long wind-up to the pitch, which is that I worked my way through a tricky passage at lunchtime today, and my heroine is back in the DR Congo after a detour through a confessional at St. James' cathedral. What larks for Miss Lark! By the end of the week I will have this chapter finished, by gum. Because if I don't do it, who will?

Recently I've given thought to a couple of ideas regarding my writing. First, it becomes ever more clear that each of my novels is going to be quite a bit different from whatever I've written before, and I doubt very much that I'll settle down and write a particular type of book in a particular way. That would be dull, I think. I'm less interested in showing what I can do with a novel than I am in discovering what's to be done with one, if you see the distinction.

I've also been thinking about the idea I have that what I attempt in novels is to say something true (though not necessarily factual, if you see the difference). I begin to wonder if, like Flannery O'Connor, I am limiting my observations to a certain narrow field of truths and if, having recognized that, it is incumbent upon me to broaden my horizons in some way, and if so, I wonder how and how much. I don't have any answers to that one. My plan is to let the answers arise through the course of the writing, while I continue to doggedly pursue whatever ideas interest me and attempt to say nothing dishonest. If nothing else, it's a plan.

A Weekend In Books

2011-11-14T10:08:00.001-08:00

I'm a little over halfway through Death In Venice and Other Stories, the Thomas Mann collection I'm reading. "A Man and His Dog" is the current story, and it's pretty good. I'm not sure where all the symbolism is leading (some stuff about expectations versus reality and reality being pretty fine even if it falls short of expert opinion), but I like it so far. The stories here are a bit uneven in quality, by which I mean that sometimes Mann could be pedantic and that's not so enjoyable for this reader. "Death in Venice" is a well-crafted story but I think that it's become a standard text because of Mann's (perfect) formal control over the narrative elements, not because it necessarily is his most beautiful or human effort. Because it's not. "Disorder and Early Sorrow" gets my vote for that, today at least. It is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever read, and I was tempted to quote passages of it but really you must read the whole thing because every line of it is sympathetic and lovely and true. "Tonio Kroger" started out as a heartfelt character study but degenerated into a long series of monologues about Art and I was glad to be shut of it. "Mario and the Magician" proves that Mann had a healthy sense of humor and could laugh at himself. The bits about the protagonist and his family facing off with the locals is hysterically funny. I'll be interested to read the rest of the stories in the collection. Will I go on to read Mann's novels? I haven't decided yet.

I interrupted my reading of Mann for an impulse reading of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, which I've not laid eyes on since about 1978. I just wanted to read something escapist, you know? Anyway, what surprised me again and again was how good the book is. The writing is pretty solid and even knowing, actually, and I was struck by the fact that Tolkien's protagonists aren't forced to carry out the climax action of the principal conflict. That is to say, Bilbo doesn't kill the dragon (and in LOTR, Frodo doesn't destroy the Ring). You could not get away with that in today's publishing marketplace. I amuse myself with imagined conversations between Tolkien and his agent.

Some books also somehow found their way into our house: Nabokov's Pale Fire to be reread sometime in 2012, a couple of Camus titles (The Fall which I love and which was the first Camus I read, decades ago; and another novel I've not read yet and whose title escapes me), The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier because it got good reviews and has an interesting premise (the dead enjoy afterlives only as long as they are remembered by living people on Earth and so souls will eventually fade away from Heaven or wherever it is and dead folks are desperate to be remembered; all of which sounds very sad so Right Up My Alley). An armload of new books from Mighty Reader's employer, as well. I also recently bought Marina Neary's historical novel Brendan Malone, The Last Fenian because it's about an Irishman and because Ms Neary emailed me and told me I might like her books. So we'll see, Ms Neary. I hope I do like it.

I made no progress on the first draft of Go Home, Miss America but I did have a great idea for the middle section of the upcoming Antarctica novel that's got me very excited. Now I need a great idea for the third section of that same novel. This week I plan to finish Chapter 4 of Go Home, Miss America and begin work on Chapter 5. That should put me about 25% of the way through the first draft, I think. I'm not sure how long the middle of the book will be. It depends on if I want to include the Violet chapter, which will maybe be something like the Addie episode in As I Lay Dying or maybe something like the Molly Bloom chapter in Ulysses. I have not decided yet, but it seems like an attractive idea for now.

Also, I should say something about how my agent and I have parted ways, and that seems sufficient enough for now.

Very Dull Status Update

2011-11-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Because I use this blog as a sort of diary, I note that I'm making good progress on Chapter 4 now that I've got a loose outline for the entire book. Yesterday I read through the first three chapters (something I never do when drafting) and holy hell, this is the best stuff I've ever written. I'm really excited about the novel and I hope I can make it all work; there are some formal tricks I've never tried before so I'm interested to see how well I can pull those things off. Hopefully readers will be similarly interested. Anyway, I'm at about 18,000 words and by the time I finish chapter 4 I'll be past 20,000 words (maybe more like 25K), which is always the first real milestone on a first draft. At 20,000 words I know if I've got a real story or not.

Also, Weronika promises to get her notes on The Last Guest back to me by this Thursday. I am all a-quiver with anticipation.

Michelle, Davin and MoT: copies of the MS are on their way to you. Patience, please!

V Nabokov and H James in Venice

2011-11-07T15:21:00.000-08:00

Last night I read Thomas Mann's long short story Death In Venice. I admit to having never read any Thomas Mann before. I can't account for it, but it's true. Anyway, DiV last night.

It's the story of an aging German writer named Aschenbach, famous and beloved since his youngest days, who gets the sudden idea (planted in his imagination by Death, who appears thrice in the tale in different guises but always played by a thin man with a snub nose*) to travel in an effort to reinvigorate his passion for writing. Our hero has loads of technique but no longer really has the fire in his blood. Aschenbach ends up in Venice, where the authorities are keeping a cholera outbreak as secret as they can so that the tourist industry won't be harmed.

In the dining room of his immense beach side hotel, Aschenbach sees a Polish family. They have two daughters and a son, named Tadzio. Tadzio is a perfect specimen of European male youth, a little carven Greek god come to life. Aschenbach, who has long abandoned sentiment and irony and the passions of youth for a deliberate and careful classicism, a regimented art and life, finds himself drawn to Tadzio. So drawn to him that he begins to stalk him on the beach and on family outings in the city. A few days of this and Aschenbach wants to speak to the boy, wants the boy to speak to him, and our hero realizes that he's in love, and not in a purely aesthetic way either. Things progress from there.

About halfway into the story I got the strong impression that I was reading a sketch of Lolita as written by Henry James. An old writer lusting after a youth, with layer upon layer of symbolism and irony. The entire story is a symbol for itself, a large irony about irony, a reckless joke about art not being life which is pulled off by art becoming lifelike. It's a fabulous machine, at once self-conscious and proud of its artifice while also being both bigger than and more subtle than all the formal and symbolic games. A nice piece of work, in other words. Not at all what I was expecting. Much much better.

* Each of Death's appearances mocks Aschenbach by being an exaggerated and comic version of our hero. In fact, everything in this story is a mocking, ironic symbol of one sort or another.

Sweet Mother Goose in Her Bordello

2011-11-04T08:42:00.000-07:00

I'm halfway through Angela Carter's short collection of revised fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber. For a while, after a startling paragraph in the title story, I was worried that the collection would go off into The Story of O territory, but Carter followed the premises and characters and let the eroticism simmer in the background rather than boil over as the primary design.

A couple of things about these tales (which, by the way, I recommend):

1. You can see how people like Kate Bernheimer build on Carter's work, unless there was already a tradition of fairy tale detournement, if I'm spelling that correctly and I see that I am. Take that, Situationists Internationale! Where?

2. The first three stories in the collection concern virginal young girls being sold off or otherwise traded like commodities. Each time, however, the young girl takes control of the situation and comes out happier in the end.

3. Carter's language is constantly surprising, even at this late date. My favorite phrase right now is "tintinabulation of cut-glass chandeliers." It works just as well for tinkling glass as it does for bells bells bells. You'd think nobody could get away with "tintinabulation" after Edgar, but you'd be wrong.

4. These stories are more about the promise of violence than about actual violence. Carter isn't out to shock you so much as to twist you up in tension and then let you go, a little careworn and exhausted and maybe more wary than you were. But there's not so much blood in The Bloody Chamber. Though perhaps why these are considered to be feminist stories is that the promises of violence are made about young women, and the voice promising sexual violence is the loudest voice in the room. There is actually a lot to be said about the threat of rape in this collection, but others have addressed that with more intelligence and patience than I've got. And then, see point Number 2.

5. Also regarding point Number 2, I have to say that each of the stories I've read so far ends pretty sweetly for the protagonist and her allies. They are clearly more the tales of Perrault charged with sexuality, than they are the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Mother Goose as madame in a swank Parisian bordello. There is almost, I dare say, a gentleness to these tales: below the blood, below the threat of violence, below the sexuality, below the threat of sexual violence. A layer of honey that Carter gradually exposes is possibly a weak metaphor I can use here. Yes, I seem to have done.

It's fine that I don't find these stories shocking, and that once I saw what Carter was doing I found the stories pretty and sweet. I didn't come to Angela Carter to be shocked or to be taught a lesson in the power of women over the hoary old tropes of male-dominated culture or for titillation. I picked up the book because I had heard that Ms Carter was a good writer, and I'd been peripherally aware of the collection for a good while and it seemed like it was time to read it. And I'm happy I am. Angela Carter is a good writer. Her sentences are gorgeous pieces of ornate jewelry, brilliant and hard and glittering away, and no matter how bizarre the sets and costumes in the tales, no matter how many beasts and perverts, you see after a short while that Carter is writing about humanity and vulnerability and how good it is, after all, to be good and brave and pure at heart. Which is, come to think of it, exactly what Mother Goose was trying to tell us in the first place.

Illustrious House of Ramires Part 3

2011-11-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished Jose Maria de Eça de Queirós' novel The Illustrious House of Ramires. It's not a great novel, but it's a darned fine novel and the more I think about the third act, the better I think the book is. The third act essentially turns all of the symbolism and characterization of the first two acts on its head; you realize that you've been marvelously set up. The Tower, which represents the ancient authority and strength of the family? Forget about it. The election? The novel? Whatever you thought they stood for, you were right and you were wrong.

This is a moral book, and while it has a message or two at the end, it's not a book with a moral and Eça de Queirós isn't moralizing. What I mean by that is that the author has a definite point of view, definite opinions about people and society and politics, but he doesn't editorialize. So I'm fine with him ending on a sweet and sentimental note. It's not quite Chekhov though some of the humor is there; maybe it's more like Cervantes but I only grasp at Cervantes. Certainly it's not like Thomas Hardy (hurrah for that). By which perhaps I mean The Illustrious House of Ramires keeps a grip on Romanticism while resisting a lot of the grittiness of Naturalism. Eça de Queirós' wealthy landowners are not D.H. Lawrence's wealthy landowners, either.

What am I saying? I don't know. If you like your stories to have dirt under their fingernails and to offer up a believable everyday reality, this is not the book for you. But then neither is Shakespeare, so you can fuck off. This is a good book, and I had a blast reading it. It's well crafted and funny and sad and the final chapter is very interesting from a formal perspective, especially considering that it was written in 1900. If this was an English-language novel, literary historians would be pointing to this final chapter and calling it a precursor of Modernism, maybe.

Also, The Illustrious House of Ramires has a book-within-the-book, and I really like the way Eça de Queirós handled the transitions into and out of that interior novel. Also also, I clearly don't know how to talk about books except as a writer; I focus on technique and so you aren't getting a feel for why I think this book was worth my time and why you should go read it. But it was, and you should. Honest.

The Bloody Chamber and the Bloody Chapter

2011-11-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

This morning I started Angela Carter's collection of rewritten fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber. Carter's work is--it probably doesn't need to be said--quite different from what I just finished reading, Jose Maria de Eça de Queirós' novel The Illustrious House of Ramires.

Ramires is a 19th century novel, a traditional 3-act hero's journey story which ends on a sweet and sympathetic note despite the fact that the big reversal at the end of Act 2 is so violent and bloody. I plan to read more Eça de Queirós in the future.

But let's get back to Ms Carter. I got well into the title story of the collection on the bus this morning. It was clear from a few pages in that this is a retelling of Bluebeard's Castle, and so of course I'm wondering now if Carter will take the story in one of the two traditional paths trod by rewriters of this tale (the wife either becomes her husband's next victim or she somehow takes control over him in a surprising twist). Hopefully Carter is going to surprise me and do neither of these things. Really, though, how she ends the story is the least important thing. I don't read for plot.

Carter's prose, possibly because it's so different from that of Eça de Queirós, is exhausting me. Maybe I'm just in that "getting to know you" phase through which I always labor whenever I begin reading a book and things will settle down after another couple of pages. Maybe not. Bloody Chamber is so far told almost entirely in summary, by which I mean that there are no dramatized scenes. The writing is rich and the language is alive with imagery, but it's all held at a distance; we are never inside the story even though it's a first-person narrative. Carter has a lot of ground to cover so her use of summary makes sense, but I'm hoping that she puts me into the story present soon. I hope the entire book isn't written at this narrative distance.

Carter's prose also exhausts me because it is so thick and imagistic. The sexual metaphors come constantly: the train's "pumping pistons," the husband's "leathery scent," the causeway "rising from the sea," et cetera. Those are the least of them. Try this excerpt:

Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said "Yes," still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.

I should quote Carter about the collection's dark eroticism: "I was taking ... the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual."

I had no idea when I picked up this book that "violently sexual" retellings of fairy tales had become Carter's thing and that "The Bloody Chamber" is taught in almost every modern fiction class in the English-speaking world. And possibly because of my deeply-ingrained prudery I wouldn't have purchased the book had I known all this, so it's good that I was ignorant in the store and all I thought when I saw the row of her books on the shelf was, "Hey, she's supposed to be a pretty good writer. Isn't she dead or something?"

But enough about Angela Carter. Maybe more tomorrow; maybe not. I also wanted to say that I'm continuing, with some difficulty, to write the first draft of my new book and the absolute disorganization of what I'm putting onto the page is driving me mad. It's all coming out of any order and for the life of me I can't figure out what goes where, so I'm just for now trying to capture all of it, throw it all up onto the canvas as it were, with the hope that I'll be able to make sense of it later. I don't like working this way. I like to have a more deliberate process, even during a first draft. This book is not cooperating. It's much harder work than I like.

Illustrious House of Ramires Part 2

2011-10-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm a little more than halfway through Jose Maria de Eça de Queirós' novel The Illustrious House of Ramires, first published (in Portuguese) in 1900. It's a hoot-and-a-half, as Harold Bloom would say. I'm reading it in English because I am an American philistine.*

Ramires is a witty social novel dealing primarily with the vapidity and egotism of the Portuguese ruling class at the end of the 19th century. It's full of fun being poked at the protagonist (Gonçalo Ramires) and his social circle, who vie for money, power and prestige. Every character is fully aware of his/her place within the social fabric though every character seems to believe that he/she is somehow superior to everyone above and below them. Portugal in 1900 or so seems to have been a feudal society on the brink of collapse brought about by representative democracy, though the elected officials all seem to have gotten their positions through nepotism and cronyism.

Our hero Gonçalo is an unemployed member of the landowning class. He's just inherited the Ramires estates (including the noble tower that's stood for a thousand years) from his father but he craves a political career. The first half of Ramires shows Gonçalo working on his plan to achieve notoriety via scholarship and literature: he is writing a novella dramatizing an event from his illustrious family history, to be published by friends of his who are involved in conservative politics (the Regenerator party). Gonçalo has written a couple of chapters of this novella, based heavily upon a poem written by his uncle Duarte (there was a funny passage about plagiarism and who "owns" history) and padded with actual historical research and some odd bits of Walter Scot. The passages about writing historical fiction ring too true and made me laugh out loud.

Interrupting this literary adventure is Gonçalo's enemy, Cavaleiro. Cavaleiro dumped Gonçalo's sister after courting her for a very long time. She has since married a nice fellow who has no idea that Cavaleiro once pursued his wife or that Cavaliero is now again pursuing her to make her his mistress. But Gonçalo knows, and he is enraged. He dreams of marshalling his feudal armies and burning down the house and estates of Cavaleiro, "in the manner of his illustrious ancestors." Alas that the law, the lack of a feudal army and Cavaleiro's sudden willingness to offer Gonçalo a political post with the liberals put the kibosh on this righteous act of revenge!

Will Gonçalo abandon his conservative Regenerator allies and join the forces of Cavaleiro's liberal Historicals? Will he sell out his own sister for political gain? Will he write the novella about his illustrious ancestors and send it off for publication by his conservative pals? Will they publish it if he's part of Cavaleiro's liberal machine? Et cetera. There are more plot threads than this, and it's hugely funny to watch Gonçalo squirm and bluster his way from situation to situation. Gonçalo Ramires and his fellows aren't particularly honest and Gonçalo lacks self awareness but he has--beneath his cowardice, self-doubt and almost crippling pride--a core of kindness. So we'll see.

* I hear that Philistia is actually a nice place.

Off It Goes

2011-10-25T22:38:00.000-07:00

I have just this minute emailed the MS for my philosophical detective novel, The Last Guest, to my fabulous and charming agent Ms. Weronika Janczuk. Soon I will be sleeping the sleep of the righteous, or the self-righteous maybe, or maybe just the sleep of the exhausted writer who is pleased with the rewrite of Chapter 10. Tomorrow I can think properly about my new novel, Go Home, Miss America. Yes, that all sounds fine.

A Small, Good Thing

2011-10-25T11:38:00.001-07:00

Last night, after a fine dinner of butternut squash soup with hominy bread, I finished rewriting Chapter 10 of my philosophical detective novel, The Last Guest. It was a bit of a chore, and an unexpected one at that. I've put more effort into one long passage in this chapter than I have anywhere else in the novel. I hope that it works now. Tonight I'll type up all my changes (which means edits/revisions to the whole book, not just the new version of Chapter 10) into the master document and then, if I'm feeling up to it, I'll print out the revised Chapter 10 and read through it again to see how it feels now. The hope is that it will feel grand, and I'll finally send the MS off to my patient agent.

One temptation I am resisting is, of course, to rewrite the whole book from first to last. I've got a bunch of new ideas about how a narrative should be shaped and how certain types of details should function within the narrative, and I'm dying to try them out. However, a wise writer would save that for the new book he's trying to write, and just let the perfectly fine detective novel stand on its own. I don't need to remake it according to this week's idea about the perfect narrative. That will make it a different book, but not necessarily a better book. So I resist, as I say, yet another round of serious revisions. No, I'm done with my rewrites and I must ship it off to Manhattan as quickly as I can so that I might turn my attentions to Go Home, Miss America, wherein I can do as much experimentation as I want.

Illustrious House of Ramires

2011-10-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

I have been planning to read Illustrious House of Ramires by Eça de Queirós as part of the Wuthering Expectations Portuguese novel reading fest. A coworker claimed to have a copy, and further claimed that I'd be able to borrow it. After weeks of gentle reminders I learned that my coworker can't put his hands on the volume. Meanwhile, October wanes alarmingly. So it was with some relief that I picked up a new copy of the novel this afternoon at the University Bookstore, whose staff were happy (oh, so happy) to special order it on my behalf.

I'm only a few hours away from finishing up my current read, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (a sort of exploration of Pascal's Wager, among other things), which means that I might start Illustrious House tomorrow, and actually manage to read a Portuguese novel during October. There are no penalties for failing this challenge, but the book looks amusing and well-written and I never participate in these online reading things so I'd like to have managed this one.

Oscar and Lucinda is quite fab, too, so I'm glad I had time to squeeze that in. Should I say something about that book? It won the Booker in 1988 (when the Booker still meant something) and it's much better than the film (what isn't?). It's a tragedy, and I'm in that part of the tragedy where you can see the machinery of fate grinding the characters between gear teeth and perhaps Mr Carey is going a little bit over the top with tragic imagery. Perhaps also his very large Dickensian cast could be a bit better managed (a few of the characters are too similar to each other, and one character in particular does not seem at all, at his reappearance in the story, like the man we are first introduced to) and the later parts of the second act have not had a proper edit (some alarming repetition where it looks like Carey couldn't decide where to place a couple of bits of exposition so he put it in two chapters in a row and neglected to cut one of the instances). But every good, adventurous novel has its flaws. A flawless narrative is not a brave narrative, and Oscar and Lucinda is a brave narrative.

Speaking of narratives, I report that I haven't yet sent the latest MS to my agent. I decided to rewrite Chapter 10, thanks to an offhand comment Mighty Reader made about Bizet's Carmen that had nothing to do with my book but still managed to illuminate the problem with Chapter 10 that's gnawed at me (but not clearly identified itself) since I wrote the damned thing. Hopefully I'll finish the revision tonight, type up all my changes tomorrow night and send the book off to my agent, who promises to read it right away.

"Carmen" the Singing Shark

2011-10-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

On Saturday evening Mighty Reader and I attended Georges Bizet's Carmen as performed by Seattle Opera. It was swell. Who doesn't love bel canto opera? Well, lots of people but I ignore them for now.

Carmen is a popular work because it's got great tunes and a tragic storyline about misplaced affection. It's also not really about the character Carmen so much as it's about one of her short-term lovers, Don Jose. Carmen is to Carmen what the shark is to Jaws: not the protagonist, but a single-minded predator wrecking destruction all around her. But that's not important; one doesn't attend opera for the stories, one goes for the music and the spectacle and Seattle Opera doesn't disappoint.

Mighty Reader and I sat way way up in the upper balcony (we had great orchestra seats for Porgy and Bess and I worried that sitting 100 feet up would make everything--the cast, the sets, the sound--seem tiny and distant) but McCaw Hall has wonderful acoustics and the orchestra and cast (except perhaps the Toreador, whose singing was often lost in the sound of the orchestra) projected up into the not-really-all-that-cheap-seats. The dance sequences are great, especially the dream sequence that opens Act III. So it was a good time, and we're looking forward to Verdi's Attila in January and Gluck's Orpheus in March. We remain undecided about the Puccini, but probably I'll get a pair of tickets at some point, because who doesn't want to hear Madama Butterfly live?

A word about McCaw Hall, though: someone (anyone) needs to redesign the public areas. The performance hall is fine. The building itself is very fine from the outside (note Space Needle peeking over top of the Hall):

But the galleries are really frightful. Whose idea was it to use these thick acrylic toilet lids as bistro tables:

Exciting For Me, at Least

2011-10-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

I just emailed my fabulous agent to tell her that she'll see the MS for The Last Guest in her inbox any day now, as soon as I finish typing up some changes into the Word document. This is one of the nicer things I get to say about being a writer.

I also just emailed some critique notes to a young writer about a first novel. I tried to be nice but I had some hard things to say about the way the story is structured. This is one of the less nice things I get to say about being a writer.

So I dwell on the nervous excitement of sending off a new book to my agent. Because that's a nicer feeling. This is a very stupid post, but it's what I got, kids.

Action and Desire and Character

2011-10-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

The structure of my work-in-progress is, at least so far, chapters which alternate between the male lead character (David) and the female lead character (Catherine). David works at a university in Seattle, Washington. Catherine is currently doing missionary work along the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Catherine gets the even-numbered chapters, and I'm now facing off against Chapter 4. With me so far?

During Chapter 2, I realized, we learned very little about Catherine. The setting is so rich and the characters are so particular that we mostly see Catherine as a person surrounded by interesting things and people, though Stuff Happens and Catherine takes a couple of strong positions. Taking a strong position is a form of action; ask Aristotle if you don't believe me.

But her strong positions aren't enough in the way of action to carry a story or even tell me what happens in Chapter 4, which means that I needed to have Catherine doing something in Africa for a reason. Not the missionary work with the nuns, but the purpose behind that. As my old agent used to say, "Your protagonist has to want something." Luckily for me, there were already clues about that in Chapter 2 where Catherine took a stand. No more about that, though (spoilers). Suffice it to say that my female lead has a particular desire which will color her actions and so define her character.

I am pleased with who Catherine is turning out to be. She's a complex character and I'll have lots of things to do with her purposefulness and this purpose might, maybe, show me how to have her story mesh with David's story somewhere in the future when their plots intersect. So that's good.

Reading all that Chekhov has been good for me; the appropriate groupings of character traits and contradictions were more readily apparent for this character than they've been for anyone else I've written. Mr Chekhov was all about grouping narrative elements properly. It's a pity he didn't write more about writing.

Philosophical Detective Story, Revised

2011-10-13T10:55:00.001-07:00

Mighty Reader has finished reading the MS of my transcendental mystery novel The Last Guest and, you know, she really disliked the ending. Which news upset me not a little bit, I must say.

"It comes out of nowhere," she said.

"No, it doesn't," I insisted. "There's foreshadowing for that ending all through the book. It's inevitable."

"No, it isn't."

Well, of course Mighty Reader was right. Darn it. And as I said at the time, fixing it isn't an emotional trial or anything; it's just a matter of craft, which is something I'm fine with. It gives me something to do.

And so I've written a new ending, or a new final three pages to be precise, and I'm happy to find that I like the new ending better than I liked the original ending I had. We'll see if I continue to like it.

Work In Progress, Very Rough

2011-10-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Chapter 3:

It was a warm morning, the sky mostly clear except for a haze in the west that would burn off when the sun rose a little higher. The bus was ten minutes late and crowded. There were no empty seats and David stood in the aisle packed in between a short bald man whose hard leather briefcase knocked repeatedly against David’s shin, and a large young woman wearing a lot of perfume. The bus ride was forty minutes and David hung onto an overhead strap, suppressing a sneeze and trying to dodge the hard edge of the bald man’s briefcase. At one point David pushed hard against the briefcase with his knee and the bald man turned and smiled. Sorry, he said. Crowded bus today. Yeah, David said. A minute later the bus lurched in traffic and the briefcase banged against David’s shin again.

Fuck, he thought. I should beat this asshole over the head with his fucking briefcase. When did people stop caring about personal space? When did it become all right to hit a total stranger with your fucking luggage? What if I elbowed Shorty in the back of his ugly bald head? Would that be okay?

David imagined a fistfight with the bald man, saw himself punching the stupid smiling face right off the stupid bald head, standing victorious over his enemy who rolled into a ball and whimpered like a dog. David hadn’t been in a fight since fifth grade, but he had always been tall, the kind of guy people didn’t mess with. Nobody ever fucked with me when I was young, David thought. I should just let this idiot have it. I’m still the kind of guy nobody fucks with, right?

Instead he turned sideways in the aisle, moving his shinbone out of the way of the briefcase. The large young woman wearing too much perfume gave him an unpleasant look. David smiled at her. Sorry, he said. Crowded bus today.

Anyway, it's that sort of thing. All the usual caveats about this being a first draft and all. I've got three chapters, about 15,000 words so far. I don't know how long this book will be. Longish, I think. Not Ulysses long, but longer than most of the stuff I write. Possibly that's because the prose seems a bit more rambly, a bit looser than usual. Not sure yet. I'm also working on what I think is a novella, a sort of SF-ish existentialist thing. We'll see.

Adult Themes and Language

2011-10-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

The book I'm writing now is set in the current day and concerns adult American people who think and talk like adult Americans. Where I live (and the novel is largely set where I live, ta awfully), that means people use adult language. When I first started writing the narrative, I was fine using a little bit of profanity in the male protagonist's thoughts. He's the sort of guy who'll say "fuck," if only to himself. The thing is, this character is also obsessed in an unhealthy way with women and women's bodies. Which puts me in the position of having to relate this guy's thoughts about women, and he wouldn't be delicate in the privacy of his own thoughts. Which means, I have decided, that certain passages of my new novel are going to be larded with profanity. Words that your humble author doesn't use in his own life will make their way into this narrative.

Is it just me, or was profanity more interesting and colorful in the past? I had a lot of fun with obscene slang in my book set in 1749, but current profanity is just sort of dull. However, it would be untrue to my character to skirt around it, to euphemize* somehow, and after wrestling with euphemisms for a few days, I also realized that it was resulting in some pretty silly prose. Don't ask, because I'm not telling.

I also realized that there are still some words I just won't use. No, I won't.

* Why isn't this a real word?

Of Course; It's Chekhov

2011-10-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

I have committed to my next project, the literary fiction piece currently titled Go Home, Miss America. Enough screwing around already, yes? Today at lunch I wrote a good 500 words, finishing up the sex scene that begins Chapter 3. It's a good scene, I think, almost all internal action and you get to see a little bit about Violet (the lead male's wife) and a couple of neighbors are possibly introduced as well. As I was working on the scene I realized that the way the characters' emotions evolved along the way seemed familiar and then I thought, "Of course; it's Chekhov." Of course. It's Chekhov. Once more I wonder why I read anything else. Pity he never wrote any real novels.

Anyway, this is a Serious Novel but after I've wrestled it to the ground, I'll write a piece of genre fiction, I think. Either another philosophical detective novel or a sort of sci-fi novel. Or, maybe, that Antarctica book at long last. Or that one about Haydn and the builder's wife. Or that one about the devil in Baltimore in 1910. Or the one about Tolstoy and the unicorn. Or the one about...

Chekhov and Oates

2011-10-03T16:22:00.000-07:00

Last night I read Joyce Carol Oates' story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" It's amazing and the story developed along lines I didn't see coming. The changes of characterization are very skillfully done and the ending, well. You just have to read it.

Today I'm reading Anton Chekhov's story "The Party." I cannot help but compare and contrast the first two chapters of this story with the party that makes up the last third or so of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway is much more in control of her surroundings than is Olga, the protagonist of the Chekhov tale. The general type of party is the same, but the moods of the hostesses are radically different. We know that Virginia Woolf read Chekhov.

In Chapter III, Olga's guests have taken to boats and are heading out to an island for tea and snacks. It is around six in the evening. I cannot help but compare this to the similar party/boating scene in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. David Lawrence also read Chekhov; you can see it in Lawrence's plays.

Do I gain anything with all of this comparison and contrast? Probably not, but it happens independent of my intention. I claim no responsibility for the operations of my brain. Reading is an interesting experience, nicht wahr?

The Golden Ass and the Fall of the Roman Empire

2011-10-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

I am not a historian and my knowledge of Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass is very thin indeed. I know that he was a Roman citizen from north Africa (Algeria or thereabouts) and that Latin was not his first language. He lived between 125 and 180 AD (or CE). He studied philosophy in Carthage and Athens. His family was wealthy and Apuleius was a priest in several cults and widely traveled as an adult. He was interested in magic, religion, law and politics. I get all of this from the introduction to my copy of The Golden Ass. I don't know how accurate it is.

Anyway, this weekend I finished Apuleius' novel (the only surviving novel-length story from the Roman empire). The final chapter is a bit dull and over-long, being Lucius' metamorphosis back from an ass to a man (which is not a spoiler because all through the narrative Lucius refers to "when I was an ass" and "before I was transformed back to a man") when Isis grants his prayer for release, and his subsequent indoctrination into the mysteries of the cults of Isis and Osiris. More on that in a minute.

The strengths of The Golden Ass are many: Apuleius is funny and insightful into the wickedness of man, his language is colorful and surprising (and that's not just Jack Lindsay's translation; Lindsay in the introduction gives plenty of examples (in Latin) of Apuleius' word games, his coining of new terms, his alliteration and use of cognates, etc), and while the frame story of Lucius-turned-into-an-ass is amusing by itself, the stories-within-the-story are also good stuff. The centerpiece of the narrative is a long version of "Psyche and Cupid" that served as inspiration for too many later authors to list.

The Golden Ass is a picaresque novel that points mostly at the decline of the Roman empire, illustrating how the local Roman governments have become ineffective and corrupt as banditry goes unchecked and populations descend into barbarity. What also interested me, especially in the otherwise dull final chapter, is how the local deities, especially those of ancient Egypt, are more important than any of the official Roman gods. The provinces, by the latter half of the second century at least, were all going native again. This sort of stuff fascinates me in first-hand historical accounts, and it's all by the way from Apuleius. Possibly I'm only fascinated by this because I lack any real historical knowledge of the era.

Anyway, I'm done with Apuleius and Lucius and declared myself happy last night to be free to return to Mr Chekhov. I'm reading "The Party" right now. It's excellent. When I get my hands on Illustrious House of Ramires, I'll lay Mr Chekhov aside for a bit.

CBC

2011-09-30T16:07:00.001-07:00

Looks pretty good to me.

Writing Toward the First Line

2011-09-28T14:55:00.001-07:00

Today at lunch, I forced myself to pick up a pen and push onward into Chapter 3 of Go Home, Miss America, the work-in-progress. After scribbling down a few hundred words in the space of an hour, I stumbled over what should be the first line of the chapter, which gave me the image that will open the scene and recur through it. I am simultaneously proud of myself, humbled by good fortune, and annoyed that I seem to have forgotten one of my basic tenets of the fictional art: write in scenes.

I see that I was having such difficulty getting on in this chapter because what I was writing was a bunch of character observations about my leading male and his wife, but there was nothing happening. There was no context, no action, no scene. The comments about who these people are were just sort of floating in space, disconnected from the story. Once I actually began to write about the husband and wife in motion, actually doing something, it all fell into place and I can see the next few thousand words of story. With a little more thinking, this whole chapter should fall into place fairly quickly now that I've remembered to write dramatically rather than thematically. So that's all cool, kids.

And so in a week I'll be fretting about Chapter 4, which concerns the leading female character. I have at most three sentences worth of material for this upcoming chapter, and no idea at all what sort of scenes will flesh out those meager sentences. But hopefully I'll at least remember that I am looking for scenes, not character attributes. Some days I'm a real dope.

This is how the first draft of the book is going to be, I think. Since I'm not outlining it, since I have no idea how it ends or even what the second half of the book will contain, I have only the barest faintest inkling of what I'm doing as I go along, and that means that I discover it as I write it, day by day. This does not make me happy as a method, but the resulting prose seems, so far, to be acceptable. I can't say how successful the story I'm building is yet. And despite my promise not to plan the book ahead of time, I really really (really) hope I figure out the ending before not much longer because I am operating far outside of my comfort zone and I am having to work much harder than I'd like.

Anyway, Chapter 3 of Go Home, Miss America is underway and I am no longer tempted by all the other story ideas floating around in my head.

A Plague of New Ideas

2011-09-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

Today at lunch I had two (2) exciting ideas for possible novels. I also have been thinking about the Antarctica novel I have outlined, as well as the abandoned written-on-the-blog-a-paragraph-at-a-time novel I was writing earlier this year, and on top of that there are ideas spinning and congealing that have to do with the possible sequel to the transcendental/philosophical detective novel I've just finished. All of these ideas are a fog descending upon my brain, a curse, a plague.

Why so grim about my overactive muse? Because I know that I'm only thinking so much about all the novels I could be writing as a way to avoid the one novel I should be writing, the novel I've got 11,000+ words of already, the one that stops after the first paragraph of Chapter 3, the one that I carry around with me in my briefcase, swearing that I'll work on it during lunch or on the bus ride home. Yes, I am avoiding that particular novel. Why? Because it's hard work, that's why. It's labor and I know that to actually commit to this book is to commit to a lot of serious thinking and to chain myself to an exhausting project for God knows how long. Maybe I'd be playing avoidance games no matter what novel I was pretending to write? Maybe I'm just enjoying not writing, enjoying the freedom to read as much as I want during my designated writing hours. Well, that can't last. A writer writes, et cetera ad nauseum. And I should be writing. I need to find a joke around which to build the first scene in Chapter 3. Jokes are always helpful when imagining scenes.

As Mighty Reader's nephew would say, "First World problems." I disparage my whining. But I don't--you may well note--delete it.

The Golden Ass

2011-09-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

I am reading The Golden Ass, a picaresque novel from the end of the 2nd century CE (or AD for you old-school types), written by an Algerian Roman citizen named Apuleius. The proper name for this work is The Metamorphosis but I prefer Augustine's title because when I think of The Metamorphosis I am put in mind of Kafka (or Ovid) and I don't need the confusion. Where was I?

Oh, Apuleius and the story of Lucius, a randy little traveler who runs foul of possessed wine skins, a witch, a gang of robbers and others. What larks, I tell you. This is one of those books that I know by excerpts or allusions, and I'm finally getting around to reading the whole thing and gosh, it's a lot of fun. A lot of bawdy fun and the farther along I get in the narrative, the more I suspect that this ancient tale was known to a great many other authors I've read. Certainly Laurence Sterne knew it, and Cervantes steals the assault on the wine skins scene for Quixote, and the general tone and sexual punning of James Branch Cabell's "Poictesme" books comes straight from Apuleius. Voltaire doubtless read The Golden Ass. Did Kafka? I wonder.

Right now, poor Lucius is tied up outside the robbers' cave, listening to the tales of one gang of thieves as related to another gang. (Yes, it's one of those books that contains a lot of shorter tales, but at least in this one, the frame story is interesting all on its own.) Lucius has been in the guise of an ass for a few days now. Who among us hasn't?

The Thin Man: Asta is a Girl!

2011-09-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

I have an interest in classic detective fiction and so in July I picked up a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man. I’ve never read any Hammett but like everyone else, I like the films that were made of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. Hammett, by the way, did not have anything to do with the sequels to The Thin Man. But that’s all by the way.

For someone who’s seen the movie but not read the book, there are surprises: Nick Charles is Greek! Asta is a girl! Nora doesn’t give Nick a pistol for Christmas! It’s a good bet that Nick is drunk if he’s awake! Though he also manages Nora’s inherited business, buying stock in gold mines and selling off failing companies. All of which is a load of fun.

The narrative is almost entirely dialogue and what action there is comes across as stage direction, so it reads like a play. A breathless, very talky play with clever banter and a lot of sass. The Thin Man is a classic two-corpse murder mystery, beginning with the discovery of one body and a second stiff to be produced toward the end of the second act. I’ve seen the movie plenty of times and so far it seems to hew pretty closely to the plot of the novel, so of course I know who the murderer is already. This lets me look at how the mystery and detection thereof is structured in the book. I can tell you that almost all of the action is nothing but misdirection. Here and there the actual murderer does something subtle that in no way points to guilt, but that’s in the background, behind a colorful and very active parade of bickering and suspicious activity by a large cast of loud and angry extras. Nick Charles, who repeatedly declares that he’s not investigating anything, asks a lot of questions and has dinner and drinks cocktails and sleeps very late, having breakfast while the rest of the world lunches, and thinks about the crime. He is not the sort of detective to visit a crime scene and scrabble about on hands and knees, searching for clues that have eluded the police. No, he wonders about motivations and character and asks Nora to mix another shaker of martinis. He does not appear to be working, nor particularly interested in solving the mystery. It’s a real page-turner and I expect to finish reading it tonight after work.

I am also reading The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which is a lot of fun. Greek tales of transformation and magic, mostly revolved around sexual relationships between men and women who haven’t been formally introduced. What larks. I’m reading the 1960 Jack Lindsay translation. Next week I’ll read some Portuguese literature.

Also, I just saw this about a remake of The Thin Man starring Johnny Depp. I am not sanguine about this affair.

Wuthering Anniversary

2011-09-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite blogs, Wuthering Expectations, is four years old today. I admit that I've not followed Amateur Reader's explorations of 19th-century literature for more that the last 10 months or so, but in that short span of time I've become rather addicted to the daily (mostly) musings about the reading life. I've also had some great fun going back through the archives at Wuthering Expectations, where there are all sorts of gems to be unearthed.

Wuthering Expectations isn't so much writing about books as it is writing about the experience of reading. There's a sort of way of life one might have that puts books pretty high on the list of priorities, and a sort of way of thinking about books one gets when reading good books is a central activity in life. Authors and people who write about books are always talking about good books you've never read (or never heard of) and so there is a lifetime of discovery and exploration open to a good reader. Over time a good reader becomes entangled in a large and ever-expanding web of connected literature, influences and responses all around him and the world of the imagination becomes a truly immense place filled with and by other smart and imaginative people. Or something. I'm just rambling and trying to give a sense, in my own poor way, of the sort of thing Wuthering Expectations does. I'm not doing a very good job of it.

Here's the thing: some people read good books and write about what that's like. Some people do it better than others. Amateur Reader will, in his charming and self-effacing way, deny that he writes well or even coherently about the reading life, but you must ignore those lies. Wuthering Expectations is a cool blog and I hope it lasts at least another four years.

Chekhov and Turgenev

2011-09-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

From "An Anonymous Story":

"Turgenev teaches us in his novels that every exalted, noble-minded girl should follow the man she loves to the ends of the earth, and should serve his idea," said Orlov, screwing up his eyes ironically. "The ends of the earth are poetic license; the earth and all its ends can be reduced to the flat of the man she loves. . . . And so not to live in the same flat with the woman who loves you is to deny her her exalted vocation and to refuse to share her ideals. Yes, my dear fellow, Turgenev wrote, and I have to suffer for it."

"What Turgenev has got to do with it I don't understand," said Gruzin softly, and he shrugged his shoulders. "Do you remember, George, how in 'Three Meetings' he is walking late in the evening somewhere in Italy, and suddenly hears, 'Vieni pensando a me segretamente,'" Gruzin hummed. "It's fine."

But she hasn't come to settle with you by force," said Pekarsky. "It was your own wish."

"What next! Far from wishing it, I never imagined that this would ever happen. When she said she was coming to live with me, I thought it was a charming joke on her part."

Everybody laughed.

"I couldn't have wished for such a thing," said Orlov in the tone of a man compelled to justify himself. "I am not a Turgenev hero, and if I ever wanted to free Bulgaria I shouldn't need a lady's company. I look upon love primarily as a necessity of my physical nature, degrading and antagonistic to my spirit; it must either be satisfied with discretion or renounced altogether, otherwise it will bring into one's life elements as unclean as itself. For it to be an enjoyment and not a torment, I will try to make it beautiful and to surround it with a mass of illusions. I should never go and see a woman unless I were sure beforehand that she would be beautiful and fascinating; and I should never go unless I were in the mood. And it is only in that way that we succeed in deceiving one another, and fancying that we are in love and happy. But can I wish for copper saucepans and untidy hair, or like to be seen myself when I am unwashed or out of humour? Zinaida Fyodorovna in the simplicity of her heart wants me to love what I have been shunning all my life. She wants my flat to smell of cooking and washing up; she wants all the fuss of moving into another flat, of driving about with her own horses; she wants to count over my linen and to look after my health; she wants to meddle in my personal life at every instant, and to watch over every step; and at the same time she assures me genuinely that my habits and my freedom will be untouched. She is persuaded that, like a young couple, we shall very soon go for a honeymoon -- that is, she wants to be with me all the time in trains and hotels, while I like to read on the journey and cannot endure talking in trains."

An example of so-called "double coding" here is the phrase, "if I ever wanted to free Bulgaria I shouldn't need a lady's company." which is a reference to Turgenev's novel On The Eve. I will confess that I don't understand how "double coding" is postmodernism, since literary allusions have been going on for a very long time. And so, frankly, has postmodernism. Don't get me started on literary theory today.

Transcendental Revisions, Part 3

2011-09-18T09:56:00.001-07:00

Late last night, or possibly very very early this morning, I finished the second pass at revisions on The Last Guest. As usual, the confidence in the book that I lost during the middle of the revisions (when everything I've written no longer resembles any Earthly language) returned by the final section and I think, kids, that it's a pretty good book.

I'm currently in the middle of Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair At Styles. Reading Agatha Christie was a big influence on me, one of the reasons I wrote my own detective novel. I look at what Ms Christie has written and I compare it to what I've written and I don't see a lot of similarity (except for the trope of a detective solving a murder, that is). That could worry me, but it doesn't. My book is a lot more clear about what's actually going on during the investigation than Ms Christie's is. Possibly I tip my hand too early, but I don't think my book is about "who did it" so much as it's about what the hell my detective thinks she's doing. There's too much Nabokov, Woolf and--possibly now--Murakami in my head to write a truly straightforward whodunit. Is that good or bad? I've no idea.

What is bad is that my next task is to sit down and type all of my changes into the master document. I really really really (really) hate that step. It's the sort of thing I enjoy not doing, and I will probably stretch the work out over at least a week. After that I get to read the whole book again, hurrah! My eyes are crossed in anticipation of yet another read through.

I'm also thinking about my interrupted work in progress, Go Home Miss America. I have a pretty good idea of what the next chapter will be like. The chapter after that is still vague. Somewhere I've got two or three sentences scribbled down about it, but that's not much help. I think there's a goat, and a trip to a village, and then some automatic weaponry. Maybe.

This is a very dull post, but I like to keep track of this stuff and a blog is, if nothing else, a handy sort of diary.

Chekhov's "Volodya" and Point-of-View

2011-09-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of "Volodya," Chekhov's short story about adolescent suicide, the protagonist finds a revolver in his neighbor's room. Volodya can't name the parts of a gun, nor does he have much idea about how a pistol actually works. Here's how Chekhov describes Volodya exploring the pistol:

Volodya put the muzzle of the revolver to his mouth, felt something like a trigger or spring, and pressed it with his finger...Then felt something else projecting, and once more pressed it. Taking the muzzle out of his mouth, he wiped it with the lapel of his coat, looked at the lock. He had never in his life taken a weapon in his hand before...

Aside from the sad creepiness of the moment (an unhappy teenage boy who feels completely cut off from the world and is putting the barrel of a gun into his mouth), this is a wonderfully written passage. As omniscient narrator Chekhov could give us a precise description of what Volodya's doing, but instead we move a step closer to the character and share his ignorance of firearms. "something like a trigger or spring" he says. Volodya's heard the word "trigger" and the word "spring" but he can't directly apply those terms to the object in his hand. A minute later Volodya "pressed something with his fingers" but he doesn't know the name or function of it; he's just pushing and pulling at the revolver and trying to make it fire.

I'm generally a proponent of precise language, of using the proper names of objects (though not in an obsessive David Foster Wallace way), but I also believe in the power of vagueness, of obscurity. Sometimes characters don't know what they're doing. Sometimes real people have moments where they sort of float above or alongside reality and language fails to connect with the moment. That disconnect can be captured in prose (Chekhov captures it by leaving out detail, by inserting ignorance into the narrative). The lack of concrete language in Volodya's consideration of the pistol reflects his separation from the real, solid world around him. The voice of the narrative has shifted and taken on the characteristics of the protagonist's mood, which is excellent writing.

Monarch, by Michelle Davidson Argyle

2011-09-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

My friend (and Literary Lab co-host) Michelle Davidson Argyle's thriller Monarch pubs today. I am not supposed to be envious, but I am. I can't be happier for Michelle, and I hope she sells a bunch of copies. Fans of suspense stories and action-packed romances should run out and buy the book!

Links and stuff:

You can find all book and author info here.

You can sign up for Michelle's newsletter. She's giving away bookmarks and posters and a free matte cover copy of Monarch, signed. Go here.

To see Michelle's current newsletter announcing the giveaways, make with the clicky right here.

Reading Agatha Christie

2011-09-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

When Mighty Reader and I were in Victoria, I bought a copy of Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It's the first novel Christie ever published, the first Hercule Poirot novel, and also a book I've never read. It also has a cool cover and I am, admittedly, swayed by nice artwork. I am tempted to pick up all of the Poirot mysteries in these new Harper UK editions because they're so attractive.

Anyway, it occurred to me last night that the secret to the middle of a classic detective novel is to present every single thing the detective sees or touches as A Clue. You just bury the reader in Clues for 100 pages. "There was a blade of grass on his left shoe." That sort of thing. "His tie was askew." "There were two cups in the sink, though Jones claimed he'd been alone for breakfast" (it turns out later that Jones used one cup to drink coffee and the other to water a houseplant while having his coffee; "the cup was right there, so why not use it?"). And so on. None of these clues are differentiated, though it's helpful to have someone insist that certain of these Clues are Very Important. The less they have to do with the actual crime, the more important someone should insist they are. If the detective waggles his eyebrows over a particularly slight discovery ("Look: the cat has shed on the bedspread!"), all the better.

The middles of classic detective novels often annoy me because they are generally little more than lists of nonessential information. The stories grind to a halt and a weird sense of stasis settles over the narrative. I grit my teeth and push forward, hoping for something exciting like a second victim. Christie sometimes breaks up the monotony of building the pile of clues with passages about gardens or architecture or whatever that are usually pretty entertaining and well written. But most of the time the middle of a detective story simply irritates me.

In my philosophical detective story, I have attempted to avoid this "These Are All Important Clues So Pay Attention" technique, and have focused instead on the characters and their relationships. I decided to write a story that happens to be a mystery, not a mystery that includes a story, if you see the difference. Even so, it's tempting to go back through my manuscript and add a deluge of Clues, not because I think that will increase the enjoyability/challenge of the mystery, but because it looks like a lot of devilish good fun. I mean, I can see what Christie is doing with her second acts full of useless detail; it's interesting work to come up with and plant useless clues. You have to make it believable to the reader that there was a tire iron in the dining room and a shard of broken mirror under the sofa in the parlor. You can't just throw in props at random.

Why is the cat shedding on the bedspread significant? Because the owner of the bed is allergic to cats. What's that have to do with anything? Well, it turns out that the allergy is a lie. Is the liar guilty of murder? No, he's actually just afraid of cats but can't admit that so he made up the allergy. He's trying to impress a girl and thinks his fear of cats isn't impressive. See? It's all misdirection but it all has to make real-world sense, or something close.

The secret to reading a classic detective novel is to ignore, to the best of your ability, all of the alleged Clues the detective presents and instead focus your attention on what happens with the characters who move about in the background. That's where all the real action is.

Transcendental Revisions, part 2

2011-09-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

I have finished the first round of revisions to my philosophical detective novel, The Last Guest. I added about 5,000 words and cut about 2,300 others and so now the MS is just a little over 71,000 words. Not a long novel, but 71,000 words is a fine length for a first mystery. This weekend I managed to finish the hateful task of typing up all of my changes into the Word(tm) document, and today I've printed out that revised document and over the coming week I'll read through the MS again to see what I think of it. This draft should come pretty quickly, as I think the narrative's pretty solid as it is. I plan to add one new scene, featuring the redoubtable Captain Mayhew, USMC. This might necessitate altering a scene late in the book; we'll see when we get there. Anyway, I'm getting very close to the day when I can have my Three Trusted Readers(tm) have a look at the book before I send it off to my One Trusted Agent(tm).

Though it's certainly jumping the gun a considerable bit, I've been making notes for what could be a sequel to this book. It looks interesting so far, and I'll get to do all sorts of further research, which is always exciting. Working title for the idea-in-progress is The Circus in the Dust. C'est tres Faulkner, non?

I also had what might be a good couple of ideas for the literary fiction piece I've put on the back burner while revising the detective novel, and it'll be fun to get back to that book in, say, October. Not having an outline from which to work is allowing me to ask more "what if" questions about the story than I normally would ask, maybe, and so I've hit upon some interesting possibilities for the book. It'll be nice to get back to that one. I miss the African goats.

Conmergence by Tara Maya

2011-09-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

I interrupted my reading of Chekhov stories this weekend to (finally) read Tara Maya's story collection, Conmergence. Yes, she published it some time ago and it's been sitting on my bookshelf at work looking at me sidelong for all this while and I kept forgetting to read it.

Conmergence presents a solid batch of stories that are crafted to a high standard. Tara Maya's prose is quite fine, and I forgot right away that I was reading a collection of science fiction stories (I am, after all, a literary fiction snob) and settled in to enjoy some well-written tales. They range from 2-page "flash" pieces to longer stories that verge on being novellas. The longer pieces were my favorites, possibly because they were more character-based stories. A couple of the shorter pieces were clearly more idea-based and that's not really my thing, but "Tomorrow We Dance," the penultimate story in the collection, is really really cool.

One of the things I'm impressed with in Tara Maya's writing is the way she creates new terms. Most of her stories take place in fictional worlds, and her characters are using fictional objects to do fictional activities. A lot of SF breaks down at the prose level when the author is confronted with the task of naming imaginary items and actions. Tara Maya has come up with a lot of believable new words, which fit into the sounds of English pretty well. Her new words are either Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, or at least have the sounds of Latinate or Anglo-Saxon words. It was really cool to come across these invented words and Tara's work here deepens the reading experience. Again I say that it's really cool and I'm really impressed. "Delighted" is probably the word I'm looking for here. I'm a big fan of detailed craftsmanship, you know.

Anyway, I don't really review books but Conmergence has been out for a while and I've been remiss about actually reading it and it is a good book. I do not mean, "good for SF." I mean it's plain old good writing. I don't know why Ms Maya doesn't have a publishing contract already. I don't know why her novels aren't on the shelves at your local book store. I really don't. Because she can really write.

Opera!

2011-09-09T10:26:00.001-07:00

I have just purchased a subscription to the new Seattle Opera season. Mighty Reader and I will be seeing Bizet's Carmen, Verdi's Attila and Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Hurrah! I'm undecided about Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, but we can add that one later if we want to.

This will be our first season of opera. We saw Porgy and Bess not too long ago and it was fabulous, so we've decided to throw our money at the arts and wallow in more Western European Kultur. Yes, Carmen and M. Butterfly are more-or-less old warhorses, but they're excellent old warhorses and I won't be shy about saying that I love the music. I've never heard Attila but who doesn't like Verdi? I'd pay good money to see a production of his Otello, I would. Some of the best writing for operatic bass ever.

It would be cool if Seattle Opera would put on some more modern works, by folks like Janacek or Berg (I'd pay a good chunk to see Lulu or Wozzeck if you're listening, Seattle Opera). Mighty Reader has a fondness for 20th Century music. Which is why I need to look seriously at the calendars for Meany Performance Hall (the Emersons are coming again this year, and it's all Mozart which delights me more than I can possibly say. No Berg or Webern this year in the whole series, and only one Haydn trio, alas. How will I get my Haydn fix? How will Mighty Reader get her Webern fix? Why would I pay $34 to hear the Carpe Diem Quartet play Monti's Czardas when I can play that piece? WTF, CDQ? Though they're doing a Piazolla piece so props to them for that.

Where was I? Oh, opera. I think it'll be a good time.

Meanwhile, revisions to The Last Guest continue apace. I am considering a new scene in the middle which will aid in breaking up a long passage in Chapter 10 (because I'll move half of that long passage into the new scene, if I write it). I am also considering adding another red herring to the story, and then I've got to ask myself if the actions of the detective in the third act are plot manipulation or if she's just a damned clever detective. Hard to say. We'll just see, won't we?

Transcendental Revisions, Part 1

2011-09-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

It seems like every time I turn around, I’ve got a novel to revise. This week I began work on The Last Guest, which is what I’m calling my philosophical detective novel for now. I am fond of the title but Mighty Reader gives it a shrug. She prefers The Transcendental Detective but I, happily, get the only vote at this stage. I digress.

So I’m revising yet another novel. I have decided to work on this one in discrete stages. Stage One, which is where I am now, is essentially just a read-through to see how the book feels as a whole. Certainly I’m doing edits as I go along, to beautify and clarify the prose, but I’m not doing any real work yet. I printed the full manuscript out on letter-sized pages, single space with a 1” left margin and a 3” right margin. 12-point TNR type, I believe. The 3” margin is so that I have room to make extensive notes to myself about the work I might want to do in the way of a serious revision. Mostly, so far, it’s pretty clean, but some pages look like this:

I’ve written a couple of thousand additional words already, mostly to expand scenes and add action I think the story needs. I’ll add some unknown number of scenes during the revisions; unless I am inspired to write the new scene immediately, I’m just making notes and moving on. I’m also looking for places to insert the ideas I had while writing the first draft, ideas that I scribbled onto note cards rather than working into the narrative. My rule this time around was to always go forward until the first draft was complete; stopping and rewriting was not allowed.

Today I reached the halfway point through this read-through. I figure I’ll be finished with this stage in another week easily, and then I’ll sit down, type in all the edits and then write out all of the new scenes or expansions of existing scenes. That will take another week or two, and probably I’ll type them into the master document as I go along (though they’ll be written longhand because that’s how I work). After that, I’ll have a finished second draft that I’ll print out once again in the same format as this version. There’ll be another read-through, marking up as I go along, but hopefully I won’t have a lot of big changes to make at that stage. The finished third draft will be offered to a select few readers for comments and then there will be either more revisions or not (likely there will) and then, oh then, off the completed novel will go to my fabulous agent. How long will all of this take? I don’t know. I’d like to think that the book is solid enough now that I can be rid of it by Halloween. We’ll see.

All Over The Place With Murakami

2011-09-01T11:35:00.001-07:00

I am 464 pages into Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. For about 325 pages I didn't like this book but I kept reading it because Davin Malasarn said it was good. On or about page 325 I realized that I was reading it the wrong way, insisting it make sense and obey my aesthetics of form. What I really needed to do was just read along and enjoy the sense of being uprooted, accept the unlikely events and just see how Murakami would surprise me. A little over a year of story-time has gone by now and very little of the events in the book are clear to me, and I have almost no idea what the dramatic purpose of any of the characters is. Which is all fine. The first half of the book is told in essentially first-person by Okada, the protagonist, but in the second half Murakami introduces a third-person narrative about one of the new characters (Cinnamon, son of Nutmeg). It's possible that this third-person account is actually given by Okada, but there's no way of knowing at this point. He's also introduced a series of letters written by one of the secondary characters to the protagonist, which seem to be essentially statements of theme, or maybe arguments in support of Murakami's storytelling strategems. I'm not sure at all what's going on. But I am sure that I'm enjoying the book now (despite the ongoing clunkiness of the prose here and there for which I blame the translator) and I'm enjoying the constant sense of surprise I get from the narrative.

Reading this book while working on a novel of my own has started me thinking about the idea of surprise in a story. I think I have a tendency to write sort of overdetermined stories, where the primary movement is almost implacably in a single direction, the narrative broken up by comic relief and short diversions here and there, but essentially the plots are one thing. I have decided, possibly thanks to Murakami but likely more thanks to Davin Malasarn, that my plots should be more surprising. The stories should feel free to change direction radically in the middle.

I don't know if this is a good thing at all, or if it's just something I'm choosing arbitrarily. After all, Graham Swift's novel Waterland was certainly multilayered and memorable, but the action in each of the three timelines pretty much all aimed itself the same direction and I had no problem with that. The same with Louis deBernieres' Birds Without Wings. So I don't know. To tell the truth, nothing about my writing has been quite the same after I read Virgina Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. My ideas about point-of-view and narrative distance all went out the window. Possibly I have an as-yet-unformed Idea in my head and I'm just casting about trying to give it a name before I've seen it clearly in the light of day. Very likely that's it. But the idea of the Unexpected seems to be calling to me in a very very very loud voice and I think I'll try to find out what it wants to say to me.

Victoria, R.I.

2011-08-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

Mighty Reader and I spent a long weekend in Victoria, British Columbia. There was a lot to see and do and I felt, by 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, that I'd been seen and done out. "What do you want to do now?" Mighty Reader asked. "More than anything else, I'd like to get out of this fucking country," I said. Nothing against my Canadian friends, but I was tired and I wanted to go home. We spent yesterday in our own back yard with our cat and our laundry on the line and our flowers encircling us and cocktails and books and warm summer sunlight and that was a fine time indeed and I'm glad to be back home.

Home, where I will soon begin revisions to my philosophical detective novel's first draft. I have no idea how long that will take, but I'm guessing a couple of months. It would be nice to have Draft Number Three ready by, say, Halloween, but that might be too ambitious. I haven't read the full draft yet, so I can't pretend to know what sort of work it really needs. Some, though. I already have a stack of notes.

I'm also 11,000+ words into yet another new novel, which I'll be setting aside while I work on the revisions to the aforementioned detective book. I think the new new novel is going to be pretty cool if it all works out. It's already got some of my best bits ever.

I also have a new long-range project of reading all of Chekhov's short stories. Mighty Reader was kind enough to purchase the Ecco 13-volume set for me (birthdays can be wonderful, I admit) and so I'll add those volumes to the ongoing mix of old novels, new novels, Shakespeare plays and nonfiction. During our trip to Victoria I read Volume 1, which ends with the novella "Three Years." I was unfamiliar with this novella and I must say that it's one of the best things I've ever read. The more I read of Chekhov (I think I've read about a fourth of his stories; maybe fewer), the more I wonder why I read anything else. The guy was absolutely brilliant.

Also, this was our favorite piece of public art in Victoria:

7% of Me, Some 25% of Murakami

2011-08-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

I continue to read Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I'm a little over 200 pages in right now, and I'd say the first act has ended. The protagonist's wife has disappeared; the protagonist has been told by the missing wife's brother to get a divorce; the protagonist has heard bits of a story possibly involving paranormal activity in Mongolia (including the notion that something mysterious remains buried near a river out there); the protagonist has become involved with a psychic prostitute. The protagonist has come to realize that he's been adrift for the last six years of his life, but he's just stood up to the overbearing brother in law and stated a sort of revolutionary manifesto. Et cetera. So this appears to be a sort of magical-realist mystery story that nods to Kafka, Garcia-Marquez and Camus. I expect it to turn into a hero's quest any page now. I'm not exactly enjoying it.

Oh, it's better than Sputnik Sweetheart, the only other Murakami novel I've read. Sputnik is a badly-written total waste of time, frankly, which confuses obscurity with profundity. There was almost nothing to that novel. My fear is that, when I get to the end of Wind-Up Bird, I'll have that same feeling that all the buildup and running around was there to hide the fact that there really aren't any solid ideas behind the book.

I continue reading, mostly, to see if Murakami can bring the goods. I'm not actually invested in any of the characters or situations. I don't care what happens because I'm pretty sure nothing will happen. Mostly, despite the clunky and repetitious language, it's easy to read on my morning commute. Non-challenging, we'll say. The reader has no work to do because if you didn't understand some subtlety of the narrative, Murakami will restate it for you. A few times. And then once more in case you forgot. No wonder this book is 750 pages long. I don't understand all the hue and cry over Murakami. The blurbs on the book jacket proclaim him a genius, but I don't see it. Someone needs to explain to me the attraction of reading this pretty long pretty nothing of a story.

Meanwhile, I'm 7533 words into my own new novel. 3000 words from now I'll be done with Chapter 2, I think. I still have to write about HIV treatments and children running after goats. The lead female character is going to get a nickname. And then it's back to the lead male character.

I've been trying to decide if reading Murakami is doing anything to my own writing. I don't think it is. I really wanted to love Murakami, especially Wind-Up Bird because so many people I know loved it, but I'm having a hard time seeing past the postmodernist cliches. Murakami is certainly not mainstream fiction, but he's not possessed of the vision of those writers he imitates.

Well, who of us is? The list of writers I admire but am not equal to is as long as my arm. Longer, truth to tell. There's still plenty of time for Haruki to wow me, so I'll keep reading.

No Known Direction of Travel

2011-08-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

My work in progress is confusing me. I've figured out the story arc for the first eight chapters (or, rather, I've figured out how to structure each of the two main storylines' first four chapters and have decided to alternate them chapter-by-chapter so that adds up to eight, right?). I've got a good idea about who/what/where is going on for each of the main characters. But what I lack is any idea at all about where everything goes after that. Yes, I said I was going to write this book without an outline, without figuring out the ending in advance. I plan to find it all as I go along. A grand voyage of discovery, eh? A wander through my subconscious and my guideless research. An adventure!

I hate it. I have things that might be symbols, but if I don't know what the story is, what the themes are, what's going to happen, how do I go about building the symbolic framework of the novel the way I always do? How do I know what's important at this point? How do I know how to introduce subjects? Are they metaphors? Are they just themselves? I don't know what any of the parts do, how they connect, what their function is. It's all just a bunch of stuff. It bears a passing resemblance to a novel in progress, but I'm not sure it really is one, or will add up to one when I'm done. It frustrates the hell out of me, kids, it really does.

But that, perhaps, might be the point. I am attempting this grand farce of a process in order, hopefully, to learn something new about writing and the only way I can do that, I assume, is to see it through to the end. Which means that I will keep at this fucking novel, one word at a time, and it'll be a protracted fistfight. Yay. I can only assume that I'll be quoting Nietzsche about that which doesn't kill me for the next year or so. Hurrah.

Possibly I can get into the mindset where I tell myself that I'm making a big clay sculpture and I'll just keep adding more clay, moving bits around and tearing off handfuls here and there until the shape makes itself apparent and then I'll start refining it. Seems like a damned messy way to make art. I'm used to preparatory sketches and reams of preproduction notes. Storyboards, even (the finale of my novel Killing Hamlet was first "written" as a little cartoon that I still have pinned to the wall by my desk at home). Anyway, this writing without a net or a known direction of travel pisses me off but I'll keep at it.

Edit to add:
Because someone says roosters can lead you astray, I give you here the first page of Chapter 2. All the usual caveats about it being rough, etc.

An hour before sunrise, the rooster was already crowing. His cry was loud but querelous, as if he was unsure of his right to announce the coming dawn. Er-err? Er-err? he crowed, strutting along the top of the fence, his black feathers invisible in the dark. Er-err? The world did not respond to his vague calls, the sun did not rise above the eastern hills and the rooster put his head under his wing and went back to sleep.

The rooster's name was Augustine. The nuns had named him after the saint. Most of the animals on the farm were named after saints. The bull was Luke, of course. The goats were Sebastian and Theresa. The cow was Martha. The nuns hadn't told the bishop that they'd named the animals for saints. The bishop would not have approved. The bishop seemed to be a man lacking entirely in humor but he was very old and the nuns prayed for a friendlier man once God saw fit to bring the current bishop home to Heaven.

The farm sat on the western edge of the village, at the foot of a line of low hills. There was a barn, a chicken coop, a small fenced yard, a storage shed and the farm house. The house was built of unpainted concrete blocks and had a roof of corrugated tin. The barn and the shed were unpainted wooden structures roofed with thatch. The nuns were saving money to replace the thatch with sheets of tin. Inside the house there was a stove, an open pantry, a plain wooden table and six plain wooden chairs, a small wooden bookshelf, a kerosene lamp, a brass crucifix and a small shrine to the Virgin. There was only one room. In one corner of this room there was a steel trapdoor that was locked from below with a heavy padlock. Beneath the trapdoor was the underground chamber where the four nuns slept on narrow wooden bunk beds, and where the visiting female missionaries also slept.

3% Solution

2011-08-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

Today I surprised myself by adding a new supporting character to my novel. He's a fictional version of one of my favorite associate deans. I'm giving him all the best bits of dialogue. It might worry me that this is turning into another one of those novels that takes place largely on a university campus, but them's the breaks. Inspiration comes from whence it comes and I have no control over that. Probably it was inevitable that I'd write about university life when I decided that I was going to set my next novel in the present day. What else was I going to write about? At least it's about administrators and not about professors. Professors are so passe.

It's also worth noting that even though my lead male character is not likeable, the novel looks like it could be a lot of fun to write. Hopefully that will translate into it being a good read, though I don't mean to say that this is a comic novel. It's just a novel. And I still have no real idea what will happen in it. Once the female lead shows up I might have a better idea.

Oh, and about the title of this post: if the new novel's first draft is to be 100,000 words long, then I'm about 3% into it.

I Must Have Structure, Apparently

2011-08-15T09:20:00.001-07:00

My current writing project vexes me a bit. One of the challenges I've set for myself this time around is to write a novel without either an outline or any idea of what will happen as the story goes along. I am doing this one by the seat of my pants, just to see how it goes. Every day I resist the urge to sit down and hack out a rough three-act structure; instead of pouring my ideas into a formula I want the ideas to find their own shape.

The problem with that method is that I don't know what I'm writing. I don't have a direction and without a direction I'm not moved to put pen to paper. Which means that, once I finished the segment for which I had a strong idea, I stopped writing. Last night, in fact, I quite distinctly thought, "I'm going to have to let this project go; I can't write it." Perversely, the very next thing that came to mind was an idea for a loose structure that will allow me to write the first arc of the novel. Irony is busy everywhere, as Shelly never said.

Anyway, some part of my mind realized that what my character needed, in order to be written about and examined in any sort of depth, was an activity. I need David (the lead male) to be in motion, moving through the world of the story, which means that he needs to be doing something even if that something isn't necessarily related to the primary conflict. The beautiful thing, of course, is that when the primary conflict of a novel is internal, everything your characters do is related to that conflict, because everything they do will be informed by that conflict. So it all works out and David will be running some errands to prepare for his 10th wedding anniversary. Not exactly throwing the One Ring into the Fires of Mordor, but I can poke fun at the idea of the hero's transformative journey if I like. Which wasn't the idea, but now I see the possibility so why not, eh?

I am also considering that this novel might be best written out-of-order, by which I mean that I'll just scribble out the ideas as I have them and attempt at some point after producing a lot of material to cobble together some sort of ordered draft from the bits of scattered prose. Might not. We'll see. I am no friend to disorder and there is so much chaos in this new method already that I'm quite put out of sorts enough. Possibly I'm hoping that at some point a strong storyline complete with ending will occur to me. I am being very mindful about the plot, though. I have rejected almost every idea that's occurred to me already because they're all sort of cliche. I've decided that a relatively uneventful storyline is better than an active-but-predictable one, and so I turn my back on all of the hoary old tropes. I admit that might just send me into the arms of other hoary old tropes that I won't recognize for hoary old tropes. One does what one can, though.

Also, writing about the writing process (and really, who cares about that?) without giving away too much of the actual prose is damned difficult. And I can't dismiss the possibility that this new writing project is simply something I'm doing to take my mind off the finished MS that I'm letting marinate for a month or so before I begin to revise it. I might, that is, simply be filling in time and giving my imagination something to work on that's not the philosophical detective story. I have a great capacity for self-deception, you know. Ask anyone.

Almost There

2011-08-10T16:14:00.001-07:00

I am something like 300-500 words away from finishing the first draft of my philosophical detective story, which is either called The Last Guest, The Transcendental Detective, or something else. I think I know my final sentence and I think I know how to get from the last sentence I've written to that sentence. I also think that I can bridge that gap of 300-500 words this evening, on the bus that takes me to a fine pizza and beer place. If I manage to finish the book tonight, I'll be a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, which a Virgo will always find pleasing. A lot of ifs, I know. Writing the final scene of a novel always makes me twitchy, and I'm twitchy now and no mistaking. But I'm very very close. Very close.

Reading Lydia Davis

2011-08-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

I am reading Lydia Davis' Collected Stories, a 750+ page book of Ms. Davis' short (sometimes only a sentence under a title) works of prose fiction. I bought it at the airport a few months ago because our flight was delayed and our bags were already checked and I like the cover. Also, Lydia Davis. I mean really.

Her stories are so short, she claims, because she's reacting against the long sentences of Proust, whom Davis translated to great acclaim. I'm not sure if this is flash fiction per se, but in many cases it really works because Davis' idea of "story" isn't the same as mine and so some of her pieces are six pages long and strike me more as character sketches or something. But some of them are amazing despite (because of?) their brevity. Here is "Fish" in its entirety:

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her--there is on one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

That's great stuff. And there are, as I say, 750 more pages of stuff like it. "Break it Down," much longer, is amazing. So go buy and read, kids.

The Chapter Titles Refuse to Cooperate

2011-08-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

My last two novels had chapter titles. Killing Hamlet's titles were pulled from the text of each chapter and I found them while I was writing the first draft. Cocke & Bull's titles were there before the book was written (my original one-page outline of the story was little more than a list of chapter titles). The current book, a philosophical detective story with the working title The Last Guest, has no chapter titles. For some reason they're just not presenting themselves this time around. I was tempted for a while to give them functional titles like those in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, which outline Poirot's investigation step-by-step and also delimit the structure of a 3-act mystery and I find that quite droll on Mrs. Christie's part, but that didn't work for me. So no chapter titles this time around. Mighty Reader has expressed her disappointment and suggests that perhaps I'll become inspired during revisions. Perhaps.

The Purpose of the Novel

2011-08-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

"the story is told . . . for the sake of some study of the difference between human beings"

--G.K. Chesterton

Transcendental Detection on the Beach

2011-08-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

Chapter 11 of twelve chapters is finished, hurrah hurrah hurrah. Possibly the action is a bit rushed because I wanted to get to the final scene in the chapter before I forgot the image I wanted to present to the reader. I'm not sure and likely I'll stretch things out during revisions. Anyway, the murderer has been named and pursued and things end on a beach. It's a sunny afternoon and birds are singing all around. I remain pleased with my two policemen. Chapter 12 comes next, where we have a wrap up of loose ends, some, and one last twist. The discovery and reading of letters (all but one) will occur. Lots of fun because I really don't like denouement.

Current word count is about 65K. I already have a long list of things I need to do to the MS during revisions. Last night I was thumbing through a volume of Aristophanes, looking for the play in which a judge extemporizes poetically about birds. It turned out, of course, to be the lawyer character in the play "Birds." I also reacquainted myself with the Biblical story of Jephtha and his daughter.

I dreamed last night of the brief but intense little scene where Banquo is murdered by the three assassins hired by Macbeth. That must be indicative of something. Possibly only that I shouldn't read Shakespeare just before bed.

Reading About Books

2011-08-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

Of the blogs I read about books, most of them are maintained by people who read fiction but don't write it. Writers tend to write about writing, not about what's been written, and most of the time writers writing about writing is pretty dull stuff. Your humble author includes himself in that pretty dull group. So mostly I read about books on blogs written by readers (some of whom are professors of literature and some of whom are "just readers"), and that's much more fun.

One trend, or meme, or whatever that's been seemingly making the rounds of the book-blogging world is the "how best should one review books" question. Readers are questioning their role as writers, as reporters, as cultural arbiters. Whom do they serve (the writer, the reader, themselves)? What is appropriate and acceptable (negative reviews, gushing recommendations, amateur deconstruction)? That sort of thing.

I think this sort of thinking is putting it all the wrong way 'round, frankly. The best writing about fiction out there is not coming in the form of a review. Seeking the optimal review template is not the path to good writing.

My advice (for what nothing it's worth) is:

1. If you don't enjoy reading about books, you should not be writing about books. Find something else to blog about, even if you read 5,000 books a year. Be a fan of your medium, not just your subject matter, because what you will be doing is working in that medium, not reading books.

2. Write about what is interesting about what you're reading. Don't have a checklist of topics you should bring up for each book you read. Yawn. Honestly, yaaaaawn.

If nothing about the book you're reading is particularly interesting, the odds are slim that anything you write about it will be interesting. So don't feel obliged to write about every book you read. "'Royal Schism' is a dull book," is dull writing, and not very helpful. If you don't know what to say about a book (or about books), maybe you shouldn't say anything.

3. Write in a manner that interests you. Some people I read have very dense, academic styles and others have more conversational, informal and witty styles. What's most comfortable and familiar to the writer will likely result in the most engaging prose.

And that's really the point. Your writing should be engaging, it should be writing you'd enjoy reading yourself. Don't put on some sort of prosy journalistic hat that's not your size just because you're writing about professional writing. Write something you'd want to read in a way you'd want to read it. Don't think about the "needs of the reader," and think instead about writing something that's interesting and engaging. My bet is that this road will lead you to talking about books in a way that's actually more useful and honest than you'll achieve by hewing to a formal schema* designed to satisfy some hypothetical book buyer.

*how often do you get to say "hewing to a formal schema" in real life?

A Clean, Well-Lighted Tragedy

2011-08-04T11:18:00.000-07:00

Reading "Macbeth" of course makes me think of other Shakespearean tragedies, particularly "Hamlet." "Hamlet" dates from 1601, the year Shakespeare's father died, the year Essex unsuccessfully rebeled against Elizabeth, a year in which the succession to the English crown was on the minds of a great many nervous people. "Hamlet" is a dark, dense and claustrophobic play. Yet it's interesting to note that while a lot of corpses pile up onstage, it's not a particularly gory play. Most of the murders are committed with poison, after all.

"Macbeth," on the other hand, is a bloody play indeed (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are covered in blood during one memorable scene, and the images of blood on the hands continues through the rest of the play) but it's set often out-of-doors and the characters don't come across as prisoners to their environment. "Macbeth" has three grotesque witches but their scenes confront and amaze, rather than back us into a corner the way the ghost of Hamlet's father does. For a tragedy, "Macbeth" is, for want of a better phrase, an open and airy thing.

"Macbeth" was written several years after "Hamlet", with a couple of comedies and a run of tragedies ("Othello" and "King Lear") coming in between. None of Shakespeare's tragedies is as gloomy and closed-in as "Hamlet"; "King Lear" takes on madness and harrowing loneliness as major themes but even it fails to imprison the reader the way the Dane's tale does. It's got nothing to do with the ghost of Hamlet's father, either. It's in the language, "Hamlet" being full of eyes and ears and spying and prisons and evil portents and graveyards. "Hamlet" always makes me feel boxed in.

I keep making attempts to describe the difference I'm feeling between "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" in terms of level of claustrophobia and it must--it absolutely must--be in the prose, because there's nothing else but prose in the plays. Though maybe it's not; maybe it's in the action. Macbeth and his wife are murdering in secret, but they do it in full view of the audience. There's no question as to what they're doing, or why. "Hamlet" is, on the other hand, a sort of detective story, where we're not really sure who's telling the truth or who is allied to whom. Those things are all made clear to us in "Macbeth." Every character is onstage as himself, and while the story is more overtly brutal, it's also less murky than that of "Hamlet." It's a clean, well-lighted sort of play. Maybe it's that Macbeth is a happier guy than Hamlet Junior, and Hamlet's moods of moroseness color all the action in his story. I don't know. I think it's deeper than that. I wonder about the mood the author was in when he wrote "Hamlet." But I don't want to go looking into that, because I want to compare the works themselves, not speculate about Dead Billy S.

This is all a hash, an unorganized and poorly thought out stab at something I can't articulate. Tone, maybe, is the thing I should talk about. Well, I'll think about this some more.

Philosophical Detective Meets the Police

2011-08-03T17:18:00.000-07:00

When writing a classic detective story, I am certain that the proper way to do it is that as you get closer to the climax, the more you focus on the plot and the less you focus on messy intangibles like theme and character. Only, I'm not...really...doing...that. I'm cutting it the other way, as Paddington Bear would say. And while I'm certain that this isn't the expected direction to take, it certainly feels right.

Some details: We are now well into Chapter 11, the penultimate chapter wherein the murderer is revealed and the mystery mostly demystified. A couple of policemen are entering the fray from an oblique angle and I'm very happy with them. Likely I should've introduced them earlier so they'd be, like, Chekhov's policemen or something, but I have not done that because there was no place for them earlier in the story. So they come in, fully-formed as though birthed from the head of a Greek god, on the opening pages of Chapter 11. Their introduction also serves a legitimate structural purpose that can be found in works going back to Shakespeare, so I like my policemen coming in where they do.

Also sandpipers, crows, Wobblies, unrelated unsolved crimes and other cool stuff!

Ubu, Thane of Glamis

2011-08-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

“We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well.”

I'm reading Alfred Jarry's "Ubu" plays right now (they're short and I read all three of Ubu Rex, Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu Enchained on Sunday afternoon, but I'm reading them each a couple of times because they're just that much fun), and because Ubu Rex is a twisted version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," I'm reading that play, too.

"Macbeth" is a real page-turner, and has some of Shakespeare's best lines. Macbeth himself is a wonderful character, convinced that he's fated (through no conscious desire of his own) to be king of Scotland but not quite willing to be an assassin in order to reach that end. Oh, he admits that he'd do the deed if it were easy and there were no repercussions. He'd do it if it were merely fulfilling neutral destiny and not murdering his cousin, his liege. Well, we all know his hesitation doesn't last.

Lady Macbeth is wonderful, too. She recognizes that her husband is "too full of the milk of human kindness" to bring about his fated kingship on his own, so she'll take charge of the mission if you don't mind, ta awfully much. She'll "unsex" herself (that is, stop being a woman because to be violent is to be a man) and do what's necessary. Anyway, it's all been fated so nobody, really, is to blame personally, right? Besides, she loves her husband and the two of them are each other's confidantes, something you see nowhere else in Shakespearean marriages.

Pere Ubu, the hero of Jarry's plays, is a vile and selfish creature, lacking in depth but more than making up for it in creative obscenity and comic violence. He wants in Ubu Rex to be king mostly, I think, for the fancy clothes. There are some hysterical bits about finance (or Phynance, as Ubu would say), especially the part where Ubu hands out gold to the peasants so they can afford to pay their taxes. Just like real life! Alas, Ubu seems forever doomed to failure, losing his kingdom in the end, despite having prayed a bear to death and saving his surviving Palcontents (who betray him! but then don't!).

Ubu Cuckolded is more "Timon of Athens" than "Macbeth," maybe, but it's also frighteningly side-splitting. What can be said of a play where the main character keeps his conscience in a suitcase and only speaks to it when it tells him what he wants to hear? The best bit (aside from the scary resemblance of the three Palcontents to Dr. Seuss's Thing 1 and Thing 2) comes when Ubu accuses the innocent Rebontier of having cuckolded him (the irony is that Ubu has been cuckolded, but by someone else). Pa Ubu declares of infidelity:

"Basically, we are of the opinion that cuckoldry implies marriage and therefore a marriage without cuckoldry has no validity. But for form's sake we have decided to punish him severely. Palcontents, knock him down for me!"

And there you have Ubu in a nutshell: if you don't cuckold him, you imply that his marriage is a sham and you insult him. If his marriage isn't a sham, he must have been cuckolded and he's obliged to execute the offender. It's that sort of logic that keeps the trains running on time, you know.

I've read a few articles which talk about the Ubu plays and having written this brief bit I realize that there's no way, really, to describe the works. What are they? Well, extreme theater of the absurd that mocks power and cruelty. But there's more to it than that, because they're funny and horrible as Pa Ubu is, once you've met him you wonder how you ever did without him. You wonder how you can gather your own small group of palcontents. You worry about being disembrained.

And also, you can't read "Macbeth" quite the same way ever again.

A Metaphor For Today's Writing

2011-08-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

Driving too fast in a car with faulty steering and no brakes along a cliffside road that overlooks the ocean. Between the trees that blur past my window I get glimpses of high waves smashing against sharp rocks far far below. Also, it's raining and the wipers don't function and I've never been on this road before. But there is, at least, a battered steel guardrail most of the time. If I get to the bottom and climb out of the car I'll look back up at the winding steep road and tell myself I was lucky to make it and I'll be exhilarated and impressed with myself but I won't want to make the drive again.

Philosophical Detective Update

2011-07-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

Boring for you, but I want to make a note of it: Chapter 9 is finished, which means I have but three more chapters to write of this first draft. Wordcount is 56,621 so I should be at right around 70K when I finish. I always draft a bit short and things expand during rewrites, but 70K will be pretty healthy, I think. I can work with that so no worries, as the kids say. The writing was awfully difficult these last couple of days but the prose is good. Tonight's bit, about the secret life of the Irish chambermaid, was very good indeed. I feel like John Cheever, running from room to room and shouting about kings riding elephants. Which is a nice way to feel. Some nice jokes earlier in the chapter, too. All in all, I am pleased with what I've got so far. I should have this first draft all written before the end of August, which is Right On Schedule.

Man Booker Prize 2011 Longlist

2011-07-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

The Man Booker Prize 2011 Longlist has just been announced:

Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
Sebastian Barry - On Canaan's Side (Faber)
Carol Birch - Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt - The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan - Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile)
Yvvette Edwards - A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness - The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller - Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick - Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers - The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor - Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

I admit that I've not read a one of these novels yet and I have only heard of the deWitt book. Half Blood Blues looks interesting after a few minutes with Google.

Still With Chekhov

2011-07-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

I continue to read Chekhov short stories. Last night before bed it was "Gusev" and I wanted to phone everyone I knew and read them the last two pages because they are glorious and beautiful and all the things that literature aspires to be. A wondrous thing indeed. In about 1889 Chekhov began to write longer stories of greater indeterminacy and greater beauty and perhaps, if I believed in an interventionist God, I would point to the existence of Anton Chekhov as proof of that God. Goodness, what a fucking genius he was. I've read "Gusev" several times over the last 20 years or so, and every damned time I am swept up, or away, or slain maybe, by those last two pages. Brilliance.

Where's this brilliance coming from? Partially from beauty of language, sure. The images are so lush and intense and startling and piled one atop the other that your breath is snatched right from your lungs, but what gives these later Chekhov stories their real power is, I must say, their lack of a focused ending. It's not that they fade out or don't know where they're going, it's more that where they go is a very specific point in space/time that doesn't in any way resolve or analyze what has come before. The ending doesn't "justify" the beginning and middle, it throws the whole thing into the air where it spreads out, is blown to the four winds and parts of your soul are caught on bits of the scattering tale and carried away with it and you don't know what it means but your knowledge of the life of the mind (of your very own mind) has been expanded in a way you can't define but is nonetheless real. Yes, that's sort of what it's like.

I shall have to look around and find out if Seamus Heaney has read Chekhov (odds are) and what he has to say about it, because there is a similarity between their works that I have just decided to have seen. I know he wrote one poem explicitly about Chekhov. Maybe I make up this link, but I think it's real. We'll see. Like I have time to read Heaney now and look for Chekhovian influence. Like I have time for anything.

Final Thoughts: Henry James' "The Ambassadors"

2011-07-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

Some scattered afterthoughts on reading Henry James’ The Ambassadors:

Henry was a very subtle writer, sometimes so subtle that his meaning was no doubt lost on this reader. But all along the course of the narrative he threw out little clues about his characters’ behaviors and during the last few chapters Henry pulled tight on all the threads he’d left laying about and wove a surprising but inevitable conclusion which was dramatically satisfying but annoying in a “I can’t believe what people are like” sort of way. Which is, you know, the stuff I like in literature.

The longer I think about where Lambert Strether ends up at the novel’s conclusion, the more I realize that he lacks real self-awareness, despite his opinion otherwise. He’s also got something of a martyr complex, which explains his life as toady to the rich and powerful. As the novel progresses, James does an excellent job of contrasting Strether’s self-image as Important Man and Paternal Figure with the image of him held by everyone who knows him, which is sort of a sad old underbutler character. People feel sorry for him, and Strether doesn’t quite see that. The reader doesn’t see it at first either, but James lets the realization come slowly, a word at a time here or there over many chapters. When the Pococks show up from America, at first you wonder why Strether’s been pushed aside and left out of all the family maneuverings but soon after you understand that, well, Strether is more family dog than family and he was never really part of any of the decision making. Poor Strether.

The chapter where Strether is wasting time waiting for someone to tell him what’s actually going on and so spends a day out in the countryside is absolutely gorgeous and possibly the finest prose to ever come from Henry James’ pen.

E.M. Forster, as I’ve said before, is wrong wrong wrong about James’ books being devoid of humanity for the sake of formal and prose concerns. This is a very felt book. I think a lot of readers find James’ delicacy of expression to be too emotionally distant (especially in this day of "voice-driven" and "high concept" writing), but all the emotional lives of the characters are right there, on the page. James’ prose is more cumulative than immediate, like a long hot bath maybe. A better simile will hopefully come to me.

Anyway, that's all I've got about The Ambassadors. I won't bother with plot summaries or any of that, because you don't care and I'm lousy with that sort of thing. Mighty Reader and I, last night, were laughing at how we both thought this book was about international diplomacy because of the title. It's not, of course, and "ambassadors" is an apt metaphor and it's a book well worth reading.

Now I'm on a happy binge of Chekhov stories, reeling around like a drunk. After that, I believe, I will finally read the Ubu plays.

Transcendental Detective Update (redux)

2011-07-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

I have finally written Chapter Eight ("The Grieving Widow") of my detective novel. It was touch-and-go there for a while. Last week I wrote about 1000 words that I ended up cutting and rewriting because the final scene in the chapter just wasn't working. My story needed to go due west but the writing was going north-northeast and, while it was interesting stuff, it was the wrong stuff. So snip snip snip out it went. Happily, on Saturday morning Mighty Reader listened to me whinging about the trouble I was having and made a simple suggestion that allowed me to work it all out properly. Such is the brilliance of Mighty Reader, such is her way with Gordian knots, etc. Anyway, last night I sat me down with my notebook and pen and rewrote the reimagined scene and even though it needs a bit of work still, and will require some work in earlier passages of the story (but what doesn't at this stage?), I'm ready to move onward to Chapter Nine, where a Second Corpse will be proclaimed! Hurrah! About time!

Is it cheating to present the detective's thoughts to the reader but not explain them? Does that violate Chesterton's rules of engagement? I don't think so. Misdirection, as they say, is good.

Anyway, I'm at about 50,000 words right now. I imagine that the first draft will roll in at about 70,000 words, and will bulk up somewhat during revisions. We'll see. Blah blah blah boring work-in-progress blah blah blah apologies.

In more interesting (possibly) news, I am close to finishing Henry James' The Ambassadors. Poor Strether has been kicked to the curb by his fiancee, though he admits now to several people that really it was never about love and was a lot about status and money but that's all gone away now. Strether has no real skills and no real job aside from being factotum to the wealthy Mrs Newsome. Which puts him on the street, basically, with no prospects. How he'll work that out will be interesting to see. The Pococks from Woollett have delivered the message of disapprobation from America and are leaving Paris. Chad Newsome is expected to follow them back to Massachusetts, but he's announced to Stether that he has no intention of leaving his beloved Madame Violette. The thing about Chad, though, is that you never really know what he's thinking. He's very much about appearances, very much like his mother in that way. He could disappoint the Paris contingent in the end. We'll see. I can't wait to read more over lunch.

Reading Chekhov in the Rain

2011-07-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

I have laid Henry James' The Ambassadors aside today (but just for today, I tell you) in order to read some Chekhov stories. I have a business purpose behind reading Chekhov just now, but one should read him on a regular basis anyway. There's a thirteen-volume set of his complete stories that I might like for Christmas, if anyone I live with is reading this post. Just saying, as the kids say.

Where was I? Oh, my Anton. So far today I've read "Death of a Government Clerk," "Sergeant Prishibeyev," "Kashtanka" and the first part of "The Grasshopper." They are all different, they are all quite good, they are all Chekhov. I am not familiar enough with his work to know how his style developed over the years and over the course of his writing 1,000 or so stories so I can't say if the folktale quality of the first three of these stories has to do with them being from a particular period of his life. Certainly Chekhov rarely strayed far from the ironical voice of a self-aware and self-mocking 19th-century Russian, and that ironical self-mocking and loving but critical eye cast upon the Russian character is one of the enduring charms of reading Chekhov.

But some of his stories are more serious in tone, maybe more urbane, for lack of the actual word I want, than others. "The Lady With the Little Dog" is ironic without being ironical; the humor is more gentle, the beating heart of the characters more delicately and sympathetically exposed. In "The Grasshopper," Olga Ivanovna is a type, certainly, and you know right away that because she is weak and vain and self-absorbed she will do wicked things, but Chekhov uses some of his most gorgeous prose to tell her story:

On a still moonlit night in July Olga Ivanovna was standing on the deck of a Volga steamer and looking alternately at the water and at the picturesque banks. Beside her was Ryabovsky, telling her that the black shadows on the water were not shadows, but a dream, that it would be sweet to sink into forgetfulness, to die, to become a memory in the sight of that enchanted water with the fantastic glimmer, in sight of the fathomless sky and the mournful, dreamy shores that told of the vanity of our life and of the existence of something higher, blessed, and eternal. The past was vulgar and uninteresting, the future was trivial, and that marvellous night, unique in a lifetime, would soon be over, would blend with eternity; then, why live?

And Olga Ivanovna listened alternately to Ryabovsky's voice and the silence of the night, and she thought of being immortal and never dying. The turquoise colour of the water, such as she had never seen before, the sky, the river-banks, the black shadows, and the unaccountable joy that flooded her soul, all told her that she would make a great artist, and that somewhere in the distance, in the infinite space beyond the moonlight, success, glory, the love of the people, lay awaiting her. . . . When she gazed steadily without blinking into the distance, she seemed to see crowds of people and lights, to hear triumphant strains of music, cries of enthusiasm; she saw herself in a white dress as flowers showered upon her from all sides. She thought, too, that beside her, leaning with his elbows on the rail of the steamer, there was standing a real great man, a genius, one of God's elect. . . . All that he had created up to the present was fine, new, and extraordinary, but what he would create in time, when with maturity his rare talent reached its full development, would be astounding, immeasurably sublime; and that could be seen by his face, by his manner of expressing himself and his attitude to nature. He talked of shadows, of the tones of evening, of the moonlight, in a special way, in a language of his own, so that one could not help feeling the fascination of his power over nature. He was very handsome, original, and his life, free, independent, aloof from all common cares, was like the life of a bird.

That, kids, is great stuff and no mistaking. Another thing about Chekhov that makes him worth returning to often is that no matter how naive the surface of his stories, no matter how simple his characters (Olenka, the protagonist in "The Darling" sweeps to mind), there is something more--usually several layers of something more--waiting under the surface for the reader. I don't want to sound like too much of a cranky old man, but a lot of today's short fiction writers could do well to spend some time with Mr Chekhov. Certainly I should. The pleasures of reading Anton Chekhov's stories are superior to the pleasures of reading almost anyone's short stories since his (I except, of course, the stories of Cheever and my pal Davin Malasarn, which amaze and annoy me with their superiority).

Anyway, go read Chekhov to see how it's done. Don't just read one story; the benefits accumulate quickly if you read them in groups of half a dozen or so. One cannot be a writer and remain unimproved after exposure to Anton's tales.

The Americans Are Disobeying

2011-07-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

I continue to read Henry James' The Ambassadors. I used to read much more quickly when I was younger. I've been with this book (a mere 320ish pages) for weeks now. But I am still with it, and I'm still enjoying the novel.

Alas for the protagonist, Lewis Strether, though. The Pococks from Woollett, Massachusetts (Jim, Sarah and Mamie) have arrived to drag young Chad back to America, Stether having been judged useless at the task. He's spent months in Paris, it's true, and he's lost all interest in doing the bidding of his financee (and patroness), Mrs Newsome. So the trio of Woollettites have arrived in Paris and none of them are behaving themselves. Jim could care less what happens with Chad as long as he personally has a good time in the City of Lights. Jim's wife Sarah appears to have become taken with Strether's friend Waymarsh. Shame, Sarah Pocock. Mamie Pocock, the young woman who is intended to be the future bride of Chad Newsome, is apparently coming under the sway of an American expatriate artist called Bilham. Mamie and Sarah have worked quickly, I must say. Mrs Newsome would be quite put out by all of this frufrura. She didn't send her daughter and inlaws to Paris in order that they amuse themselves and engage in foreign infidelities. No, she did not. Meanwhile, the French contingent who desire Chad to remain in Europe are making strategic errors and are running a bit panicked. Lewis Strether sees the danger but is being pushed out of the circle of people able to influence matters. Oh, it's a shambles. When it all falls apart for everyone, I won't feel sorry for anyone.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and Me

2011-07-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

I hate to admit it, but Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars" books were an important part of my youth. I read a lot of scientifiction in those days, and I didn't realize it at the time but early SF was anything but sexy (I'm looking at you, Asimov and Heinlein and Verne and the rest). I didn't know, frankly, that books could be sexy until I read A Princess of Mars (or was it John Carter, Warlord of Mars?). Dejah Thoris? Oy vay Maria, boys. Especially with the Boris Vallejo covers.

It puzzles me that nobody's made these books into films yet (they're 100 years old next year, for God's sake), but that, at long last, is changing. Disney (I know, but still) is making a trilogy of films, the first one to be released in 2012. I should be cool and intellectual and indifferent, but I'm not: I'm really excited. I could totally geek out over this. I really hope the films aren't just pure crap (like, you know, almost every movie made is pure crap) because I really don't want to be disappointed. Not that, mind you, I even remember much about the books. I just know that I loved them when I was a kid and I might be in the mood for something cheesy come the fall.

I am tempted to read one of these books, to run out to the used shops and find an old copy, just to see how much of ERB's pulpy style has influenced my ideas of narrative design and characterization and plot and writing in general. I hesitate because I don't want to know. One likes to maintain at least a pretense of sophistication.

The Noumenon Diet

2011-07-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

From: The Librarian
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 10:33 AM
To: Scott Bailey
Subject: lunch?

Lunch?

Lunch at Saigon Deli?

Lunch at Hillside Quickie? (A word about this place: probably the most distinctive sandwiches in town, but very greasy and usually I leave with a ~slightly~ upset stomach -- but it's worth it, in my opinion. Oh, and it's 100% vegan. It's a place you either love or hate.)

From: Scott Bailey
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 10:39 AM
To: The Librarian
Subject: lunch?

Yes! If after 12:15. I am intrigued by "the most distinctive sandwiches in town." That's a phrase which could mean nearly anything. Greasy is good.

From: The Librarian
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 11:17 AM
To: Scott Bailey
Subject: RE: lunch?

Their website has accurate photos of these "distinctive sandwiches."

As for the name, "Hillside Quickie," well, in the world of phenomena, just forget the quickie part, as this place takes a very long time to produce a sandwich. The stoners that work there appear to be straddling a noumenon of some sort, and it slows them down, I don't think they realize...

From: Scott Bailey
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 11:21 AM
To: The Librarian
Subject: lunch?

Speed is relative, of course. Possibly the noumenal world doesn't contain linear time and it only appears as if the stoners at HQ move slowly. We have only our sense data, which we cannot trust, but perhaps our speculative reason allows us to postulate a noumenal wherein we have already eaten lunch. My stomach argues against the idea. "That Kant be true," it says.

From: The Librarian
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 11:32 AM
To: Scott Bailey
Subject: RE: lunch?

I think we have uncovered a get-rich scheme: the new diet craze: The Noumenon Diet. Inhabit the world where you are not hungry. You make the world yourself. If someone fails and finds him or her self eating a quart of ice cream, it's his/her own fault. This will leave them guilty and crawling back for more. We will have them hooked. We will purchase waterfront property and buy jet skis, home theaters and Audi automobiles etc etc.

From: Scott Bailey
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 11:42 AM
To: The Librarian
Subject: lunch?

There is not a single flaw in that plan. We will rule everything. I'm hungry now. Is that a failure of my reasoning?

E. M. Forster = Big Fat Dope

2011-07-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

Last week I re-read E.M. Forster's classic set of lectures on literature, Aspects of the Novel. In general, I like what Forster had to say about writing. But he talks, in his chapter on "Rhythm and Pattern," at some length about Henry James (using as his example the very James novel I'm reading now, The Ambassadors). Forster says that he admires James' use of language and James' formal control over his story, but James' novels always leave him cold because they are so controlled that they become almost inhuman, all about the form and the language and there's no beating heart under it all. Forster claims that, in order to read a Henry James novel, you must first accept that all human life has been removed from the narrative. When I was reading Forster's book, I was almost convinced he was right and that I should put away my James lest it poison my delicate artistic sensibilities.

Today at lunch I spent more time with The Ambassadors. And you know what? E.M. Forster was an idiot. The chapter I just read was amazing and human and funny and warm and is what a good novel should be. You can see a real emotional crisis about to explode for the protagonist, and you know that he can't see it coming. That's dramatic tension, right at the hinge between the second and third act. Just like you get in any E. M. Forster novel. So. There we are. Hurrah for art. I might also add that all of James' short stories and novellas are fabulous and rich and perhaps Forster just had no patience for James' long strands of fine observation. But Forster's impatience does not make Henry James cold and inhuman. It's worth noting that Forster admires D.H. Lawrence, and his novels were clearly influenced by the novels of Henry James (Forster claims Melville as Lawrence's primary influence, which is interesting but I think mistaken). I also pause to note that Virginia Woolf (whom I quite adore) couldn't stand Henry James, but her "interior" novels come hard on the heels of what James was doing. Woolf's problem (and, I think, Forster's as well) has to do with a dislike of the lower classes. Neither Woolf nor Forster understood the working classes or the poor, and while both of them were deeply interested in the life of the mind, I think they had definite ideas about what the mind contained, whereas James had more curiosity than preconceived notions. James' curiousness, his centipede-burrowing-through-a-dictionary way with words and his constantly provisional characterizations all probably meant nothing to his English critics.

That Nice Fellow Jay Gatsby

2011-07-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a post by Roger Ebert that likely most of you have seen by now. I'm happy to not be the only curmudgeonly old man on the internet.

Anyway, there is no good to be done by paraphrasing great works of literature, because the work itself is the point. Fitzgerald's vibrant, provocative language is at least half of the experience of Gatsby. When the paraphrase changes/misses the essential meaning of the original work, we're no longer even talking about that work, are we? So what't the point of it? They are not equivalent at all. Approaching apoplexy now. Must stop.

Transcendental Detective Update

2011-07-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

Yawn, you say. Another one of those "wordcount" posts. Sorry, but that's what I got and I do after all use this blog to track this kind of stuff.

Anyway, I did a lot of typing this weekend (as well as a lot of other, non-bookish stuff) and I've finally caught the Word(tm) document up to the handwritten manuscript so I can say with some authority (sorry) that I've got 46,735 words of detective novel written. I'm at the start of Chapter 8 now. The detective has just made a public accusation of murder. Very, very exciting stuff.

The plan was for Chapter 7 to end with "You are the murderer!" and for Chapter 8 to take up the scene in the following moment, with all the resultant action opening the new chapter. But I realized that I can actually skip the whole scene. Yes, I can, because for important reasons, the detective must discuss the scene again later with another character and why play it all through twice for the reader? So we only get the recap and a discussion of the (moral and ethical) consequences of the accusation, but not the action post-accusal. Which is a better way to handle this. It also allows me to put in a couple of jokes and to display some important things about character which otherwise wouldn't get in there. So well done, me.

There was a moment (a long moment that stretched for a couple of weeks, to be honest) where I had absolutely no idea how I was going to structure this part of the book and I thought that All Was Lost. But things are falling together pretty well and I'm nicely excited to get on with the last third of the novel. The plot is complicating itself and generating all sorts of misdirection under its own power. I call that success. I think I'll have a look at the Second Act during revisions and see if I can stir in even more misdirection, which is very ironic of me but I won't bother to say why, not just yet. Possibly when I've finished with the novel and sent if off to my agent I'll be willing to talk about the shell game that is a detective novel. But not yet.

Anyway, 46,735 words. Take that, Malasarn!

Also, courtesy of Mighty Reader, a Monetesque view of the flower beds:

A Digression About Digressions

2011-06-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

When I was writing the very first words of my philosophical detective story, I knew that I wanted the narrative to be more than a murder mystery. I knew that I wanted the detective story to act as a loose frame, an open-weave basket to hold a load of digressions. These digressions come in the form of episodes focused on the individual characters found in my story; they are half character sketch and half short story that examine, from the point of view of a single person, one or more of the ideas about the world I want to talk about. For example, there’s an elderly man named Mr Taylor. After the murder is committed (it’s a murder mystery after all, so there must be a crime, a victim and a murderer), Mr Taylor sits alone in the formal garden of the hotel where the story takes place. Mr Taylor is unaware that there’s been a murder. He’s sitting under an apple tree with a book on philosophy, thinking about his sick wife. This little interlude of Taylor alone examines one possible way that couples are when they grow toward the end of life, the end of the relationship which happens against their will. Stages and ways of relationships is one of the themes running through the novel. What I’m doing is writing a bunch of these interludes and examining courtship, romance, love, marriage, happiness and unhappiness through an armload of couples instead of through the life story of a single couple. Because I’m not so much interested in the long-range actions of particular relationships (that is, I don’t want to write just now about the history of Mr and Mrs Taylor, for example) so much as I’m interested in the way there exists concurrently a large range of feeling about relationships and how those feelings are informed by the age of the participants and the current length of the relationship. Possibly all of this is tiresome cliché. Possibly all of this has been written before, by more insightful writers. It seems fresh and alive to me, so I keep at it. What I don’t know is how the balance is, between the detective story (my detective, at least, steals every scene; she’s a real hoot-and-a-half) and the digressive interludes about the characters.

I might be worried that, as I go forward into the narrative, these digressions seem to be getting longer. The ones that appear early in the narrative are a couple of paragraphs long. The one I’m working on in chapter 8 is over 1,000 words and I’m nowhere near finished with it. I don’t want to rush, but I also don’t want to write a lot of pointless filler or meandering exposition. None of it feels like exposition, though. It feels like story, and that’s good. It all moves. All of it pleases me. I just hope that when I’m done my hybrid of detective story and stream-of-consciousness domestic novel hangs together and feels like an organic whole. I think it does, but I haven’t read it yet so who knows?

How much digression is too much? There's no answer to that. It all depends on the entirety of the narrative (and, to a lesser extent, on the reader). I'm trying something new here, new for me if not for a long list of Modernists, and I'm interested to see how it turns out. Sometimes it's almost as if I'm not writing a novel and instead I'm watching a guy named Bailey write a novel and I worry he doesn't really know what he's doing. But it's exciting.

I’ve said all of this before. What I haven’t said is that reading Henry James makes one think one should write in as oblique, as indirect a manner as one can. I manfully resist and some of the newest bits are writ in such simple, pure language and have an emotional directness that I want to read them to everyone I know but I will not. You’ll have to wait.

Also, I was in a bookstore yesterday afternoon and I happened across a display of William S. Burroughs' novels. I picked up a copy of The Place of Dead Roads and opened it to the middle and read a page. You know what? The guy could write. I read half a dozen or so of his books in the 1990s and haven't looked at him since then, but I think maybe it's time to find my copies of Nova Express and Naked Lunch.

Henry James' "The Ambassadors" Plot Thickens

2011-06-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

"I've come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you'll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!"—Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone.

Strether had the next minute proceeded as roundly as if with an advantage to follow up. "Of course I'm a busybody, if you want to fight the case to the death; but after all mainly in the sense of having known you and having given you such attention as you kindly permitted when you were in jackets and knickerbockers. Yes—it was knickerbockers, I'm busybody enough to remember that; and that you had, for your age—I speak of the first far-away time—tremendously stout legs. Well, we want you to break. Your mother's heart's passionately set upon it, but she has above and beyond that excellent arguments and reasons. I've not put them into her head—I needn't remind you how little she's a person who needs that. But they exist—you must take it from me as a friend both of hers and yours—for myself as well. I didn't invent them, I didn't originally work them out; but I understand them, I think I can explain them—by which I mean make you actively do them justice; and that's why you see me here. You had better know the worst at once. It's a question of an immediate rupture and an immediate return. I've been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill. I take at any rate the greatest interest in the question. I took it already before I left home, and I don't mind telling you that, altered as you are, I take it still more now that I've seen you. You're older and—I don't know what to call it!—more of a handful; but you're by so much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose."

"Your engagement to my mother has become then what they call here a fait accompli?"

"Yes," he said brightly, "it was on the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see therefore to what tune I'm in your family. Moreover," he added, "I've been supposing you'd suppose it."

"Oh I've been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps me to understand that you should want to do something. To do something, I mean," said Chad, "to commemorate an event so—what do they call it?—so auspicious. I see you make out, and not unnaturally," he continued, "that bringing me home in triumph as a sort of wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything else. You want to make a bonfire in fact," he laughed, "and you pitch me on. Thank you, thank you!" he laughed again.

And so, finally, after about 100 pages (in the Dover edition I'm reading) Henry James comes straight out and tells the reader exactly what Lewis Strether is doing in Paris, chasing after Chad Newsome. Chad's mother, the Widow Newsome, has been earlier introduced as Stether's patron and employer, more-or-less, but it has been subtly revealed that Stether and Mrs Newsome are in fact engaged. Oh, Strether, you just don't see anything beyond your uptight rural Massachusetts morality, do you? Well, Stether is having his horizons broadened in Paris, let me tell you. One gets the sense that Mrs Newsome is not going to be pleased at all by the outcome of her fiance's experiences in the City of Lights. "Oh, America," the cosmopolitan James says. "You are missing so much of life! You went all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to make money and to forget how to have fun."

It took 100 pages for Strether to find Chad. And frankly, Stether wasn't really looking so much as he was wandering around, enjoying Paris (and, one suspects, enjoying the physical distance from Mrs Newsome though Strether also seems to--if not enjoy, exactly--relax into the familiar yoke of bondage when reading Mrs Newsome's long and frequent letters) and telling himself that he'd begin the search in earnest...tomorrow. It was up to Chad to locate Strether, at the theater. Strether makes himself out in this passage to be a dedicated and energetic agent, but honestly he drifts more than he steers a course. This is also a good passage to demonstrate Stether-in-flux, with his aggressive yet servile posture toward the son of his patroness/fiancee ("I am here on business! We have demands!" and "I've known you since you were a young whippersnapper and I will be your father-in-law soon enough, therefore I have behind me the iron will of your terrifying mother so please, I beg of you, don't make a fuss!").

(Note: I have edited the above-quoted passage down, cutting a lot of exposition that won't make sense without the previous three books.)

About Philosophical Detective Work

2011-06-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

From the novel in progress:

“I remind you of the four categories of understanding: we have first the a priori judgments, in analytic and synthetic form. We also have the a posteriori judgments, equally in analytic and synthetic forms. No other category of knowledge is possible, yes?”

“I don’t quite—”

“No, no, Monsieur. A moment, please. Of these four categories of understanding, the analytic a posteriori judgment is of course impossible, as you cannot be both experienced and ignorant relative to a phenomenon. That is childishly apparent, is it not? The synthetic a posteriori judgment is, as I have said, merely the useless impressions of the senses, and it also has no place in the establishment of a criminal’s identity.”

“But—”

“No, no, Monsieur. I see your objection but you are mistaken. It is of course in the a priori judgment that understanding takes place. Attend: the analytic a priori judgments are true statements about theoreticals made without experience of the theoretical objects. Wondrous, is it not, that such knowledge exists! These judgments are what most people believe philosophy to be, but you and I, Monsieur, are aware that this is a terrific misunderstanding of philosophy, of course.”

“Of course.”

Patience was speaking in a rapid flow of words, her face and hands moving animatedly. She threw drops of water and flakes of cigarette ash here and there and her accent had thickened to the point where James was unsure if he heard everything correctly. Some of Patience’s words—a lot of them, James thought—meant nothing to him in any language.

“It is that final category of understanding,” Patience said, “that of the synthetic a priori judgment, which concerns us. The empiricists claim that such knowledge is impossible: true statements about objects within the living world made with no direct experience of the things themselves. This is metaphysics, Monsieur, and also religion if you allow the physical reality of the supernatural. It is as well, I need not tell you, the realm of the transcendental detective.”

Patience looked at James, her eyes bright with a triumph that was quite beyond him. Had she been talking about police work or not?

“Wait,” he said after a moment. “You’re saying that—I think—experiments and research don’t lead to knowing things. You’re throwing away science, then?”

“Oh, science.” Patience pronounced the word as a long, sibilant slur, as if it was an evil thing on her tongue. “Kant demonstrated most cleverly that what we experience empirically is never the thing itself, but is instead merely the sense impression—the passing mental representation—of the thing. We have awareness of what our poor senses report, but never of actual reality. Though we receive the reports from our fingertips when we touch our lover’s hand, we do not ever know our lover’s real hand. We know only what our fingertips whisper to our brains.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

Neil Gaiman Reads Aloud

2011-06-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

Last night Mighty Reader and I (along with 800 or so other Seattle folks) went to Town Hall where Neil Gaiman read from and was interviewed about his latest release, the 10th Anniversary edition of American Gods. It's the "author's preferred text," which means that Mr Gaiman's publisher gave him the opportunity to add in all the stuff his original editor made him cut a decade ago, plus make whatever other changes he wanted to. The current edition, if I understand Mr Gaiman correctly, now clocks in at better than 200,000 words.

I'll come clean right up front and say that I am not a huge fan of Mr Gaiman's writing, though I enjoyed Neverwhere and I've read all the Sandman comics and I follow Mr Gaiman's blog. He's very charming and funny and he seems like a Really Nice Guy and I wanted to go last night because a) Mighty Reader is a NG fan and she bought the tickets, and b) Mr Gaiman has attained nearly legendary status as a fabulous reader and I wanted to see what that was all about. Plus, you know, he's funny.

It was well worth attending, and my advice to you is that if you ever get the chance to see Mr Gaiman in person, go see him. He reads aloud, frankly, beautifully. The biggest lesson to learn from Mr Gaiman's reading? Read Slowly And Distinctly. When he began I thought, "Gosh, he's moving at a snail's pace" but after a minute you fall into his rhythm and maybe it's his dreamy English accent or the dreamlike mood of the piece he read, but time really did stand still. The second bit he read was more dialogue-heavy and he did American accents for the characters and he also read slowly to great effect. I should note that these were pretty long excerpts he read, too. He could have skipped the interview and the questions from the audience and just read all night and that would've been fine with Mighty Reader and me.

Except, of course, Mr Gaiman's reading all night would've deprived us of his "advice to a novice fantasy writer." That was good stuff, and I'll paraphrase for you. First, his general advice to writers: "Write. Finish what you write." More specifically, his advice to genre writers: "Write. Stop reading your genre; read everything else and become influenced by the whole world of fiction. If you are interested in a specific mythology/religion/time period/alternate reality, then read primary sources, not other genre fiction about it. Read the Book of Kells or the Vedas or Homer or Dante or the stuff that Bram Stoker read when he was researching Dracula. Don't be one of those people who fall in love with Lord of the Rings and then decide to write Lord of the Rings, because Lord of the Rings has already been written, a lot better than you could ever write it. Tell the stories only you can tell." There was more, and it was all funnier than I relate it, but in sum Mr Gaiman gives good advice. Write a lot. Finish what you write. Read widely. Rinse and repeat.

Mr Gaiman, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley are apparently going to be together in Seattle, back at Town Hall, on 11/11/11 for a Big Event of some kind. Mr Gaiman and his wife, pop chanteuse Amanda Palmer (ex-Dresden Dolls) are maybe going to do some kind of tag-team tour up the west coast between Halloween and November 11th, so for those of you who live along the Pacific Ocean, there'll likely be another chance to hear Neil Gaiman read aloud. You should go.

Halfway Point

2011-06-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

This is one of those very lame "writing progress" posts that I put up primarily as a form of diary entry as I assume it will be of interest to nobody but me. Whatevs and apologies, kids.

Yesterday, at about 5:45 PM PST, I arrived at the halfway point in the first draft, the end of Chapter 6 (of 12 chapters, natch). My transcendental philosophical detective announces, "I know who the murderer is!" It's all very exciting. It's a big turning point in the story because there's just been a major reveal, not to mention a discussion of Kantian metaphysics. "I am a transcendental detective, Monsieur." Good stuff.

Word count? About 40K I think. It's hard to say because I haven't typed chapter 6 into the Word doc yet and I've also written out a couple of additional scenes for chapters 1 and 2 that add up to around 3,000 words or so. But I'll call it about 40K, so I seem to be on track for a novel-length work of fiction and that's always good news.

This book is going to have chapter titles, I think, but I'm not really paying attention to them during the drafting phase. There appears to be a tendency for my first drafts to be a bit looser these days, with the understanding that a lot can change during revisions and so my real job is to just get the biggest chunks of story onto the page. I continue to amass side notes on index cards, things I want to possibly add in during rewrites. Stuff to expand or think about. There are a couple of themes having to do with the approach of WWII that I haven't even begun to deal with, and there are themes about otherness and trust and all sorts of things. And, you know, I have to make sure that the mechanics of the mystery work out. So this draft is pretty rough overall but I think the shape of the landscape is all going to be there, the emotions and moods and the characters.

Anyway, halfway done and possibly a full draft will exist in a couple of months and that'll be nice for me.

Nice Writer Fiction

2011-06-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

The worst writing isn't incompetent writing; the worst writing is easy, familiar writing, writing that begs for obvious emotions, writing that flatters the reader.