FieldReport

by Dewey on August 28, 2008

Hello, litfans!

If you’re interested in an online community where you can write as well as review other people’s writing, check out FieldReport, a site that gives cash prizes to what the community determines are its best writers.

What I like best, aside from the obvious possibility of winning thousands of dollars for writing a brief, personal anecdote, is that the site requires you to participate as both a writer and a reviewer. You can’t post your own writing there until you’ve reviewed at least a few other pieces. Details about how it works can be found at the Quick Start Guide.

I love this video: a postal worker won $20,000 while the site was still in beta.

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Write for BookCrazy - A Blog Writing Competition

by BookCrazy on August 28, 2008

I am hosting a unique blog writing competition where a not-so-ambitious prize will be awarded to the best entry. The post has to be about one of the 20 books. For further details visit the author’s site

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Not So Curious in a Long Time

by BookCrazy on August 27, 2008

I know I came to this late (The Curious Incident of the Dof in the Night Time by Mark Haddon), but I had my reasons. I have generally been weary of books that become too famous too soon, even with the people who have never read a book. This was one of those books. It was everywhere - streets, newspapers, magazines, and small talk between friends. Therefore, I dismissed without ever bothering to even find out what the book was all about…

Read the entire post at the author’s site”>

Lottie’s Wheel

by Jacob Russell on August 25, 2008

In 1988 I drove from Philadelphia to Spring Lake, Michigan for the last time. The year before, it had been my mother. Breast cancer. This time it was my father, who died a year and week to the day after my mother. I had noticed on the return trips, not far from where I would turn onto the Ohio Turnpike, off the to side of the highway in the front yard of a farmhouse, parts of disassembled carnival rides. On one of those long drives back I got to thinking about this--why were there carnival rides in a farm yard? How did they get there? By the time I got home, I had a story I was able write out almost in a single session.

It no longer represents what I want to do with my fiction--in some ways, it’s what I’m trying to avoid, to escape from, nevertheless, I like this story--for personal reasons, if nothing else: perhaps because of the circumstances, because there are qualities in Nelson drawn from my father, and because I have letters like those sent from Germany written by my father’s closest friend. While I no longer want to publish it, neither do I want to hide it away or destroy it. So I thought I would post it hear where, without pretending to be more than it is, it may find a few readers.

Read Lottie’s Wheel HERE

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Killing With Indifference

by BookCrazy on August 21, 2008

”I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Elie Wiesel in Night

When I read these lines in Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, I got goose bumps. I read it a number of times again and again and somewhere deep inside vowed to find out about all injustice happening around, and speak out at least against the ones of the higher magnitude. Then, with a great feeling of satisfaction, I closed the book and felt good about having read such a good book.

It has been a couple of months, and like many other, that resolve remains postponed to the uncertain future. Like many other profound ideas that never get converted to action. Then, today, while browsing from link to link, from one blog to another, I received another jolt…

Read the entire post at the author’s site

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Book Review: The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker

by Bluestocking on August 17, 2008

This story is for Amy Jane and the Lindorm. 

Bram Stoker has a thing for these supernatural thrillers.  This one was a little bit difficult to get through.  Mostly it was because the plot just moved soooo slow. 

The story begins with Adam Salton leaving his home in Australia to visit a grand uncle Richard ( the last of the Saltons) whom he had previously never met.  The nearby seat is Castra Regis which is owned by the Caswall family.  The Caswell family has an interesting history.  The family has not lived in the family abode for centuries.  As told by Sir Nathaniel de Salis (a friend of Richard Salton) over time, the Caswell family seems to have acquired some unusual mental abilities.  When Adam arrives, the region is quite excited because Edgar Caswell is returning to the family property. 

While on their way to Edgar’s welcome home party, the three men encounter Lady Arabella March who is the owner of Diana’s Grove.  She is always dress in rather form fitting white dresses wearing a stole about her neck covered in emeralds.  Her carriage wheel had broken during her trip.  Adam fixes it for her.  As he does so, he notices a lot of black snakes around the carriage.  As a result, he decides to purchase a mongoose. 

The plot becomes more curious.  Edgar Caswell clearly has some problems.  It appears that he is perpetrating some sort of mental attack upon Lilla Watford who is the cousin to the woman for whom Adam has feelings.  Edgar also creates a giant hawk shaped kite to keep the unusual migration of birds from destroying the crops.  In addition he has a servant named Oolanga who is clearly malevolent.  During this time, the mongoose that Adam purchases, tries to attack Lady Arabella, so she is forced to shoot it.  This is one of many strange occurrences around Diana’s Grove.  De Salis who is like Van Helsig in Dracula, tells Adam the myth of the White Worm, which he believes is in someway connected with Diana’s Grove.  It seems back in the primodial days of earth, larger than average creatures, including snakes lived.  As Man had not expanded throughout the earth, the giant serpent had lived for millenia.  Over time, the creature would have evolved intelligence plus in some myths these ancient creatures have the ability to change form. 

Both Adam and de Salis believe that Lady Arabella is the White Worm.  Of course they set out to stop her.  This is complicated by the fact that Lady Arabella seems determined to make Edgar Caswell her spouse.  She is constantly using her snake like ability to follow him, which s notice by Oolanga.  She also helps him with his psychic attack upon Lilla.  The only problem is that Mimi, Lilla’s cousin, possesses some inner strength that makes it impossible for Edgar to carry out his plan.  As a result, Lady Arabella decides Mimi must die.  Meanwhile, Oolange has decided to blackmail Lady Arabella into marrying him.  He is the first victim that gets eaten by the Worm.  Adam was present for this and witnessed Arabella dragging Oolanga down into the hole. 

Lady Arabella tried to play it off as though it was just the furry of motion that gave Adam the impression that she fell in the whole with Oolanga.  Of course, Adam knows what he saw and knows he cannot prove was she did.  Anyway, in order to save Mimi, Adam marries her and has decided to take her with him back to Australia.  Arabella gets wind of this and invites Adam, Mimi, and de Salis over for a disasterous tea.  Lady Arabella contrives to get Mimi to fall into the well; but Adam and de Salis whisk her away.  Arabella changes form and actually chases them to out at sea before turning back.  Her monster form is enormous. 

Anyway, the hunter becomes hunted.  Arabella tries to lure Adam back by offering to sell him Diana’s Grove.  Of course Adam purchases it determined to destroy the Lair, which he does by pouring sand and dynamite into the hole.  Meanwhile, Edgar psychically attacks Lilla again aided and abetted by Arabella.  Lilla began to succumb until Mimi comes for a visit.  Lilla is able to send Edgar packing, but the effort kills her.  Mimi visits Edgar and pretty much promises she will be sending him into the afterlife at some point in the near future.  As it turns out, Edgar possesses the Mesmer chest, and is trying to master the art of mesmerizing which is the forerunner to hypnosis.  What Mimi does not realize is that Lady Arabella followed her to Castra Regis.  She ran some metal wire that Edgar kept for his kite all the way back to Diana’s Grove and threw it into the well (apparently Lady Arabella likes the way sounding the well sounds).  Anyway, these created a dangerous situation because there was a huge thunderstorm approaching.  De Salis’ fear is that lightening will strike Edgar’s kit travel down and destroy the house and park of the surrounding village.  This doesn’t happen because Arabella runs the wire to the hole filled with dynamite.  To say that there is a band would be putting it mildly indeed.  Diana’s Grove is destroyed in entirety.  The well regurgitates the White Worm in pieces.  It was truly gruesome to read!!!!!!

The book was a little bit difficult to get through.  You really had to wait till the end for all the good stuff to happen.  Fortunately, the book was fairly short rather than being Dicken’s length.

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Murakami’s Magical Madness

by BookCrazy on August 11, 2008

It happens rarely, but when it does, all the effort that reading takes is justified ten times over. Less than 20 pages down while reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I knew I was in company of a mastermind - in all senses of the word.

Read the entire post at the author’s site.

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Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg

by Nicole on August 10, 2008

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
Memoir, 235 pages
Publisher: Other Press LLC
Publication Date: September 2008
Topics: Sally Greenberg, Manic Depressive Illness in Adolescents, Parents of Mentally Ill Children

Why I’m Reading
I got lucky and got this as an advanced reading copy over at LT Early Reviewers.  That this particular book would come to me was fascinating because recently I have been giving a lot of thought to some close friends and their experiences with mental illness.  Getting this book in the mail at this particular time definitely made me sit up and pay attention.  Earlier this year I read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, and while I appreciated her experience, her focus was mainly on broadly outlining the major episodes of her life, and using medication and monitoring to try to anticipate and manage bipolar disorder.  Her book left me with only a vague idea of her actual experiences during her psychotic episodes.  I was very interested to read an additional perspective.

The Skinny
Against the backdrop of alarming newspaper articles and reports, which he sees everywhere (Joel Steinberg’s arrest in the beating death of his daughter, Margaux Hemingway’s suicide, a pipe bomb at the Summer Olympics, and the doomed presidential candidacy of Bob Dole), Michael Greenberg relates the events of the summer that his 15 year old daughter, Sally, experiences a full psychotic episode due to an early manifestation of bipolar disorder, which usually occurs in early adulthood.  Over a period of roughly two and a half months he relates the details of Sally’s first “crackup”, stay on a psychiatric ward and subsequent reintroduction to society- just in time to begin 10th grade. Along the way we are introduced to several family members (including Greenberg’s mother- with whom his relationship is strained, his intensely artistic wife, his older brother Steve for whom he is responsible and is also mentally ill, and Sally’s mother, a Native New Yorker who has fled the city to enjoy the calmer environs of Vermont with her second husband), who must work through their differences in order to support Sally through her crisis.

My Thoughts
In crisp and engaging prose, Michael Greenberg presents an unflinching account of way he and his family struggled to cope with the sudden onset of mental illness and how it affects his family.  He “goes there”, as my mother is fond of saying, and asks tough questions of himself about his culpability in not recognizing the depths of the trouble brewing in his daughter.  He is unafraid to portray himself in a truthful if sometimes unflattering light as he struggles to deal with financial and marital problems, along with the mental health conditions of his daughter and of his middle-aged brother Steve.  Strong characterizations of his family, especially his mother, daughter, wife and brother had me riveted and turning the pages until I finished.

Passages That Got My Attention:
Describing his mother ~ “Her bright careful veneer calms us.  Everyday she arrives in a fresh outfit, stretching her wardrobe to the limit, not a hair out of place or a hint of summer wilt about her.  She enters the ward as if she’s stepping onto a stage, but it seems less a display of vanity than a tribute to order, to effort, to the way we must will things to be in the times of disaster.”

Describing his second wife, who is a vegetarian, and at this point not yet his second wife ~ “One night, I caught her sliding her fingers through the drippings of a leg of lamb I had prepared.  Bending forward so as not to stain her clothes, she sucked the crumbs of meat from her hand, blushing when she saw me, then withdrawing any hint of embarrassment as she grabbed her chopsticks and returned to her rooms in the back of the apartment, her chin shiny with pan grease.”

If You’re Anything Like Me:
You’ll be fascinated by this moving and honest account of how people deal with the sudden crisis and illness in their lives. I also really enjoyed the way he explained the details of the illness and drug treatments in a way which was accessible and easy to understand.  Bonus points for incorporating the stories of poet Robert Lowell and author, James Joyce.

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Found Things

by Jacob Russell on August 05, 2008

About Found Things: from The Psychoanalytic Field.
other-than-me-more-than-me-more-than-mine

Links to posts on other blogs and websites, these too, are found things. They do not come from me, they are other and more than what I’ve experienced or thought, and they are not mine. Precisely why I… and I would venture to say, why we post them.

There are degrees of “foundness.” A link that reinforces an opinion or idea I already entertain is only weakly “other;” dependent on style, freshness of expression, a change in perspective, a view from a different camera angle. Tainted by the role I’ve assigned it: “look at this, this is what I believe, this is my idea of things as well.”

I have a folder of “Found Things.” Scraps of paper with children’s drawings, enigmatic lists: a letter from a young man in prison to a younger friend, advice in urban black vernacular: this note written on an index card.

Lisa,
Clean the toilet and anything else you did not clean in the bath room you have my work number and I don’t understand why you could not call me at work to find out where the toilet brush is. Even still I don’t understand why you did not clean the outside of the toilet. You live here just like I do and since I don’t have a problem with cleaning up and doing other things pertaining to the apt. I should hope you would not either. You were home all day and I don’t understand why the bathroom is not completely clean.
Linda

Here is a fragment of two lives, charged with feeling: anger, disappointment, household resentment… and nothing to do with me. Entirely outside of my life. There is a kind… mystery would be the wrong word--too strong, the wrong associations… wonder… it sets my mind to wonder, launches me on courses that are never fixed, like a Kafka parable.

The Psychoanalytic Field is one of my favorite blogs. I looks forward to new posts--which I experience like “found things.” They don’t make me “think,” If I were a serious student of psychoanalytic theory, perhaps. Then I would be obligated to “think” about Abou-Rihan’s explication of Winnicott. More a kind of play. Following the synoptic circuits, the associations set loose by their reading… the kind of play that opens into my writing. And isn’t that what we hope for in imaginative writing… to pull out of ourselves something no longer me, more than me, no longer mine?

There it is. The pleasure of “getting it right.” When the work is complete, it no longer matters. As an object to market, as something we would like to use to gain the good opinion of others--all of that, yes--but not for what it is, what is was as we worked on it.

Not me. More than me. Not mine…

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Are Book-Blogger’s Killing Journal Reviewers?

by BookCrazy on August 05, 2008

Lisa Warren’s piece in Huffington Post has drawn the book-blogosphere into a debate as to whether they are replacing the book-reviewers from journals and magazines. The crux of her piece satirically titled “Will Blogs Save Books?” is that unprofessional, shabby, opinionated book-blogs are killing the book editors jobs as various newspapers are downsizing their book-review sections and laying them off. The piece also implies that this is a blow to literature and the literary culture.

Read the rest of the entry at the author’s site.”>Read the rest of the entry at the author’s site.

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Under the Net of Iris Murdoch

by BookCrazy on August 05, 2008

Iris Murdoch’s existential inclinations are well-known. It is my belief that the novel is a marvellous achievement in that respect. It is in the character of youth to be dazzled by the ever prominent struggle between action and ideas in life. Whereas all within feels profound, everything tangible is uninspiring. This gap that has prevented so many potentiatialities from being realized is so vague that to be able to describe it in a story as simlple as this one speaks volumes about not only the literary skills of the author but her clarity of thought.

Read the entire post at the author’s site.

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Politics, Realist Fiction, Propaganda

by Jacob Russell on August 01, 2008

Someone left a comment to an earlier post that, in effect, to suggest there might be a political dimension to this controversy between so-called “realist” fiction and whatever its alternatives might be… is comical.

Ha ha ha. He’d got my pupa!

... (sorry, almost finished with Ferdydurke… but this is something that deserves to be injected into universal common usage--American political campaigns are RUN by the impulse to grab the opponent by the pupa. Karl Rove is a Pimko master of the pupa!) A product of silly immature, or at the least, impossibly overcomplicated ideologically loaded way of reading.

Let me simplify. What is propaganda, but storytelling that obfuscates its methods? That pretends to offer an unmediated subject--that dances and prances and mims and mimes to concentrate the attention of the audience on the subject at hand--by slight of hand, dis-inviting awareness of the means?

A perfect distortion of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Every effort to produce work that perfects those means plays into the hands of the propagandists.

Of whatever persuasion.

The antidote?

Make the artifice part of the art.

Reveal the ropes and pulleys.

We are a generation at risk. And what we risk, may be all future generations.

Art and literature need not become explicitly political… but to ignore how politics uses the means we perfect, betrays at the deepest level, everything we make.

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Playing for the Real

by Jacob Russell on July 28, 2008

Nigel Beale, asks in a COMMENT to my post “Narrative Game Theory” --am I ...."criticizing realism because it doesn’t get the “intra” part right?”

Nigel believes that:

a novel replicates ‘real’ human experience...by building up and describing a personality...by connecting the reader to the character...the more involved the reader becomes, the more profound and affecting the reading experience.

I have to ask: “seeing the world differently than what?”

I see very little “reality” in what is commonly designated as such. Rather, a felt need to reinforce received illusions, and the pleasure of not being thrown out of one’s comfort zone.

What do you really mean by “seeing” the world differently? Is that a general, and largely unvetted metaphor, or can you break it down? Does it include thinking?

The “realism” problem is important because our very socialization--the highly complex civil, political, legal and social structures, cannot function without a wide range of “necessary delusions,” like the legal understanding of the relationship between knowledge of right and wrong, and free agency (interestingly, one of the recurrent themes in The Man With No Qualities… the Moosebrugger thread): only one element of the modernist agenda Josipovici complains we have left unfinished.

I am not on the side of an aesthetic in opposition to representation. My complaint with conventional realism is that it isn’t, that it is too narrowly real, too dependent on unexamined conventions, to rigidly dependent on those tropes that reinforce received notions. I should not have to suspend the better part of my critical faculties to find pleasure in a work of fiction. That to me is where aesthetics comes in. There is no possibility of pretending the action on stage in The Tempest is “realistic,” or in Kafka’s fiction. The pleasure is found in enjoying them first on a freely imaginative plane, for their aesthetic daring, and at the same time, feeling the wonderful tension between that fantasy and how it challenges--demands of us, that we relocate our notions of “reality” within these dramatic and fictive worlds.

I think that’s a very good definition of play--of what happens when a child plays, of where play comes from. Play is at the furthest remove from “entertainment,” which only exhausts our capacity to question (or to play--the real thing) that we may return to selling ourselves without protest to what or whoever seeks to use and exploit us.

In play, we not a turn away from reality, but freely enter the fantasy to find the reality we have lost, or yet to discover. I relate the pleasure I find in reading--and my motive to write--not primarily from the joy of reading and being read to as a child (though certainly that), but hours spent digging channels in the outlet of Bass Lake on the beech in Michigan--building a tree fort in my back yard in Chicago--the kind of play that left my muscles sore, my body exhausted and my mind reeling with the pleasure of yet uncataloged discoveries. That’s what I want when I read, and without which, I know as soon as the words are on the page that my writing will be dead dead dead.

A final thought: work, not entertainment, is the true extension of play. Work versus labor, as Hannah Arendt understood it.

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Figure and Ground: More Thinking Outloud

by Jacob Russell on July 25, 2008

Steven Beattie asked, in a post to my Thinking Outloud:

“I wonder, is there a way to reconcile the desire to view the reading of a novel as a purely aesthetic experience with the desire to engage in an act of interpretation? Should this even be an issue?”

Both of my posts are as much about writing as reading and interpretation--what I call the aesthetics of process. Writing is another form of reading--reading an unfixed text. Reading… drawing on the newspad, still in the dark.

Isn’t every interpretation an attempt to do just that? How could it not be? Because we have a split subject, aren’t we always talking about two things: the text or our own respose. We go wrong if we either forget that we are not involved and part of the subject, or overwhelm the text with a response that is not sufficiently engaged with it.

In the post quoted above I was thinking about painting--as though Emma and Mr. Knightley were figures on a ground in a painting and the question had to do distinguishing figure from ground.

to read the rest… go to Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog

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Watch out for The Rippers!

by the view from here magazine on July 25, 2008

Age guidance on children’s books is in the news a lot at the moment after a suggestion in April by the Publishers Association to put a reading age on all children’s books.

Philip Pullman and JK Rowling have both campaigned against the age stamps appearing on their novels. More than 700 writers have now put their names to a statement made by Philip Pullman on the site No to Age Banding.

“We are all agreed that the proposal to put an age-guidance figure on books for children is ill-conceived, damaging to the interests of young readers.”

Flash back thirty years ago:

A boy chooses Gerald Durrell’s A Family & Other Animals in his local WH Smith and heads off to the till with his pocket money. A young girl serves him.

“I’m sorry you can’t buy this book.”

“?”

“It’s not an appropriate book for you.”

“?”

His Mum steps in and explains the book is for children about Durrell as a child in Corfu.

So a case for age guidance? Or would the cover give you a clue? Did the shop assistant have a clue?

Flash forward thirty years from today to 2038:

An article in Wikipedia:

24th July 2038.
BOOK RIPPERS
(From Classification to Book Rippers. A History.)

2009: Age Guidance labels applied to Children’s Books.

2020: The age guidance for children’s books spreads into the adult market. Books which have long escaped the rating systems given to films or the warning labels on music have to be rated U, PG, 12,15 or 18. Ratings have to be applied by law to the back cover of every book. Many authors complained at the time that they were increasingly put under pressure from their publishers to remove scenes of a sexual or violent nature that would increase the ratings and damage sales.

2025: Bookemas
To cut back their Carbon Footprint only a few issues of selected new books are produced. To help with the growing demand for paper instead of electronic books Cinema buildings, closed during the collapse of the film industry, are reopened where a copy of these new books are left on each seat. Books were available to read at set times. Ratings were amended to add a “R” to allow children at any age to read a book rated 15R and under in these new Bookemas, as long as an adult accompanied them.

2027: Warning labels have to be applied to the front of books with a government warning.

2030: An act backed by the Publishing Industry but fought by authors, was passed that stated that all books had to be rated 15 or below. Bookemas audiences grew as a result.

2038: The Rippers
Yesterday came the announcement of The Rippers by the Government Publishing Agency.

The Rippers will be a unit operating under government guidelines and funded by The Bookemas Association that will filter through every book held in public libraries.

Any book prior to the 2030 Act that has scenes that contravene the max ceiling of a 15 rating will be “modified.” That is, pages that contain the offending prose will be ripped from the book. Government officials say, “This way we ensure the survival of classics that otherwise would have to be reprinted or lost to the public.” A spokesman for the public libraries stated that this was a clear move to close them down to remove any competition to The Bookemas chains.

Come back now before your brain explodes!

Right, you okay? Well it’s a strange, bizarre and slightly silly future I paint. But who knows where things lead to when left to develop over years? There’s always a pressure between commerce and art. Let’s hope we tread a healthy balance as we move into the future. And what’s wrong with using book covers to signal to buyers what lies beneath? I mean My Family & Other Animals: Cute animal pictures? A clue there?

Article first appeared in http://viewfromheremagazine.com

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Literary Magazine uses HP’s MagCloud

by the view from here magazine on July 20, 2008

Break out the champagne!

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“Literature”… is Saying What You Mean by Not Saying What You Mean

by Jacob Russell on July 18, 2008

I’ve been reading The Europeans. After Musil, quite a wonderful contrast. Not for better or worse, but for how language works. This is early-middle James. More early than middle. 1878. Same years as Daisy Miller--which points in a whole different direction. Or maybe not so different. James just hasn’t made the integration yet between what he could do in Daisy Miller, and what he will be able to do on a much higher level when he’s learned to perfect the language he needs to do it.

Miller’s concession to the market--and he did very well by it on that score… but in The Europeans, he’s resisting the temptation to please the audience. No happy marriage for Eugenia. I feel Robert Acton standing in to those expectations. He doesn’t meet the test. Better to be disappointed in love and true to what you are, what you are meant to do.

But this post was to be about language… how wonderfully repression enriches the possibilities of style! And by contrast, how difficult, how resistant to aesthetic manipulation, is so-called “plain speech.” Saying (ahem) “just what you mean.”

Of course, no one ever says quite what they mean. Not all of it. And the challenge in a time that pretends to believe that all things are permissible--unless they’re political, or racial, or almost anything but sexual, is to find a way to include what isn’t being said in that anti-puritanical (which is only the mirror image and imitation of what it would appear to reject), “directness.”

James shows what can be done with indirection--and in this novel, and in The Americans--just where he’s learned it. The Europeans are up on these Emersonian New Englanders, not by being more direct, but knowing it, by being more conscious of it, and knowing how, and using it to their great advantage. He was going to do this book over and over… The Americans, The Bostonians… until What Maisie Knew. There’s where James found his voice.

By far my favorite. Like the difference between the tearly impressionists Barnes collected and the later workings and reworkings you find in the Annenberg collection--after they’d become quite collectible. James found himself in Maisie. A bold stylistic experiment (he’s had to have learned something here from Flaubert)--a narrative that spins itself out, not on what happens, but on this child’s ever maturing discoveries of stuff that’s mostly already happened. And he pulls it off. And in doing so, gets himself out of the “Americans/Europeans etc rut, back on track with what he’d found in Porrait of a Lady--but now he’s got the voice, the language… that will turn out the late masterpieces, The Golden Bowl, Wings of a Dove. Those long, ever digressing imbricated (Cynthia Ozick’s word for them) periodic sentences.. that shimmer like fish scales in changing light.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, though I may not be the one to know how to formulate it. A knife that cuts two ways. Against those who believe too naively in the power of mimesis--of the realists--literature as imitation of “life,” and those who would give up what has always been the greatest strength of the so-called “realists:” their way of avoiding too direct an expression of what they wanted to represent, and so finding, in that necessary indirection, a way back into the power of language.

Read the rest at: HERE

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The Literary Cafe

by Donigan on July 17, 2008

I write in cafés, a habit going back at least twenty years. I don’t remember when this began, because I have been writing for well more than forty years. The first twenty years, there was no habitual work place; I wrote anywhere and everywhere; at some point early on in the next twenty, I became essentially unable to work seriously in what were a series of rather nice “home offices.” I found the quiet to be, oddly, debilitating, the lack of distraction to be stupefying. I am able—it is fair to say that I am only able—to produce concentrated creative work amid the human drama of a good café.

From about 1985, I worked in either McP’s Irish Pub or Clayton’s Café, both in Coronado, California. We left the States in 1991, but were unsettled and traveling for much of that period, before arriving in Slovakia in 1994. Until we left Slovakia at the end of 1999, when I worked at all (I was teaching philosophy full time during those years), my cafés were the Gemium Café, and more rarely, Maximillian Café, both located in Bratislava’s old town. I went often to nearby Vienna then, and my place there was the Café Griensteidl on Michaelerplatz. They had a no smoking section, meaning that except on the worst days I could go home after a couple of hours working and not have to wash the stink out of my hair and clothes.

During the years 2000 - 2002, we lived in South Africa. South Africa is not a café society; even if there were any sorts of traditional cafés, it wouldn’t be safe to try working in one. As a result, in those two years I managed write less than 100 pages of the manuscript that became Possessed by Shadows. I was stupefied in South Africa.

We pass through DC from time to time, language and training, between one post and the next, but seldom for long enough to bother trying to find a fitting café; the right café is not just any café. But we have lived in DC for the last two years now, and I work here in Café Bonaparte.

From February, 2003 until August, 2006, we lived in Berlin. I found my favorite café there, but not without a number of months trying to find the right one. I tried out the Café Bliebtreau and it worked all right until the owner, who was always present, figured out I was an American and I was instantly persona non grata. (These were not good times to be an American in Germany, to be an American anywhere, really.) Then I found a great student place across the street from the Berlin Technical University, Café Hardenberg. It could have become my place, except the food was mediocre and, unacceptably, the coffee was weak. One day, bending against a cold wind surging through the tunnel-like lane called Savignyplatz, I popped into Café Aedes for something hot and bracing: a caffé corretto (espresso corrected with grappa). It was perfect, the best, most honestly Italian coffee I had found in Berlin. So I kept going back for the coffee, then discovered the affordable and delicious tramezzinis, and began to notice that all the staff spoke Italian with each other, noticed that most of the other customers were regulars and frequently sat for long periods of time with a book, a magazine, a notebook. I sensed a fit.

During the subsequent two and a half years, I finished one book there and wrote well into another. I met my now good friend Ferdinand there. I became friendly enough with the owner, Giuseppe, who is originally from Sicily, that Holly and I have a standing invitation to stay with his family at their farm and olive orchard on the slope of Mt. Etna.

Café Aedes became a sort of home, and I still miss everything about it.

Should you find yourself in Berlin, be sure to stop by Café Aedes along Savignyplatz in the Charlottenburg area on the western side of the city. Look on the wall in the food preparation area, left of the bar, and there you will see a large framed photograph, a black & white copy of the same one that appears here. Say hello to Giuseppe. Tell him you are a friend of Donigan Merritt. I doubt if you will be able to pay for what you order. Be sure to have the fine caffé corretto, and bring a book.

Tell him I said that I continue to miss him and my café very much.

(There are photos at the original site post.)

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[poem] Tattoo

by Ayesha_91 on July 17, 2008

Give me your feedback!! I’d love to hear from you!!!

Blue marks on your Body
letters and eyes Deep holes,
numbers curled,
Frowning
where the skin has sagged;
hanging loose Like old cloth So pale
Underneath
the make up

I touch your hands (Almost lifeless I have never seen them so still)
And they are so
Warm; Wreathed
Signs; Some familiar Some not
Like the cobalt hands of Hollywood aliens

How long has it been?
Twen…
ty…
two years.
Days and weeks and months -Lightning flashes
For all I can see is you- your hands Bright white
Almost

girlish;

I loved them

What have you become

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The Art of Forgetting - The Amnesiac Reviewed

by The Buddha Smiled on July 15, 2008

Memory and the art of remembering is something that writers and philosophers choose to dwell on at great length - perhaps because in so many cases the creative process itself is a means of commemorating a past, and the act of creating a story is often the path to remembering something. Over the past two hundred years, authors ranging such as Kafka, Kundera, Borges and Murakami have spent a great deal of intellectual horsepower on what it means to remember, and what it means to forget.

Following this noble and illustrious line of storytelling is The Amnesiac, by Sam Taylor. The narrative opens in Amsterdam, where the protagonist, James Purdew, is recovering from a broken ankle. Living an apparently satisfactory life (he has a stable job, a loving girlfriend, an apartment in the heart of Amsterdam) his veneer of contentment is perpetually ruffled at the edges by premonitions of his past, and the fact that he has no memory of approximately three years of his life. What happened to him when he was a university student in the English town of H.? Why is he haunted by the strains of a tune that he cannot remember more than two lines of? And above all things, who is Anna?

Ankle healed, relationship with Dutch girlfriend Ingrid terminated, James returns to H. (why can’t we call it Hull and be done with?) to try to find out more about his past, and to (both figuratively and literally) find a key to unlock his past – because of all the diaries he’s ever kept throughout his life, the ones pertaining to the three years he cannot remember are in a locked black box, and he cannot find (or even remember) where the key is. From here on the novel begins its tortured tour through the past of a life that is at once fascinating and also equally dull and pointless. For Purdew’s life is very bourgeois, with all the trappings of a traditional English childhood in the seventies and eighties – the bad hairstyles, the quaint television shows on the BBC, the agony and the ecstasy of first love, sex and death. Add to this mix an ongoing renovation project that Purdew takes on (how could a novel so thoroughly English leave out the persistent English obsession with home equity?) and you have a classically English novel for our times. Through all these events, clues towards unlocking the past slowly accumulate; references (almost tongue in cheek) zip past as we hurtle along the narrative as the author throws in clues to the denouement.

Taylor does well in creating a haunting reality, almost Camus-like in his emphasis on duality; his one passage on how hope and fear, light and dark, are potentially merely two sides of the same emotion is very reminiscent of The Absurd. Taylor veers between different times and narratives, choosing to work in several voices (the hidden observer, the narrator, the first person) to move the story forward. Over the course of nearly four hundred pages, Taylor moves (sometimes smoothly, other times not) between genres, going from nihilistic twentieth century self-reflexive novel to Robin Cook-like medical thriller involving large sterile corridors and doctors with mind-altering chemicals speaking in hushed tones through to nineteenth century Victorian murder mystery, tracing its path through the narrow side alleys behind Waterloo.

But alas, that is where the good times end. The extended references to Borges are cute to start with but soon belabour the point, and there are sections where he insists on discussing philosophy that could have been handled with more subtlety; either readers will already know about solipsism, or they will have the good grace to find out; you don’t need to explain it a la Philosophy for Dummies. And perhaps most disappointingly, after all the build-up, the denouement is completely unsatisfactory; loose ends come together a little too neatly, the whodunit solved cleanly, all the pieces falling into place too well, but the overall conclusion is like the English football team (who also make an appearance, albeit tangentially, alongside Doctor Who) – just not good enough. And if you rely on Borges’ trick of nothing being as it seems, surely there was some way to keep the ending as engaging as Borges?

Despite its flaws, The Amnesiac is an engaging read; Taylor writes cleanly, albeit a little too consciously and cerebrally, and his prose is crisp and engaging. One has to acknowledge that despite the shortcomings, The Amnesiac is better than a lot of what passes as literary fiction these days, and Taylor knows how to dot his literary i’s and cross his cultural t’s; he just needs to do it with a little more aplomb. Maybe he’ll remember that for next time?

(The Amnesiac is published by Faber in the UK and Penguin the US)

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Bookstores

by Ruricolist on July 13, 2008

I wish I could preach bookstores. Everyone should read: reading is, for most ends, both the best and easiest form of thinking—a conjunction which makes it one of life’s kindnesses, not to be scorned. But most readers do not need bookstores: a library card and the occassional mail order suffice those who only read a little.

But those of us who read much are drawn to bookstores. Theirs is a different allure from that of a library; a different temptation from that of simply buying books (even secondhand). I go to bookstores to be surprised, which is not an indulgence. More books are worth reading than life has time to read. I could try to prioritize; but how to judge? My tastes are individual enough that I cannot rely on others’ rankings. My solution is the simplest possible: I leave much of my reading to chance. Of books that appeal to me, some I go out of my way for; but more I resign myself to read only should I come across them in person. And of books I read, most are books I chose in advance, but many are books that took me by surprise. Lovers of music, of movies, of food, of any other art form or humane delight, are proud of this kind of openness, and love to recount their discoveries; but some perversity (a holdover from school, perhaps) drives readers to planning out reading lists. Such a list, if it relies only on recommendation or reputation, can comprise only the famous and the new—and how many good books are neither famous nor new?

Libraries and recommendation engines cannot be relied on for these surprises. They aim for order; but a bookstore should be the paradigm of artful disorder. That is, if I want a particular book, I should be able to find it; but I should pick up a few books by mistake along the way. And if I do not, at least once, innocently pick up a book I would be embarrassed to be seen with, and have to glance shiftily before I slip it back onto the shelf; then I must despair, for neither shall I find a book which, not having known to look for, I should be embarrassed never to have heard of.

It would be extreme to consider 20 personal or 100 automatic recommendations in a day. But in an hour in a bookstore a thousand books may pass under my eyes—books judged not by their covers, but by the company they keep: as recognizing a friend among strangers makes the others less than strangers. Libraries sometimes afford such meetings, but that is not their purpose. I have been in large libraries so well organized that they made me restless: where, unable to wander with my eyes, I had to wander on foot. I cannot object to that in a library, but I encourage bookstores to avoid it. Large gardens need planning, lest they seem wilderness; but plants in small gardens must be allowed their wildness, or them seem decorations—to claim the space, they must overgrow and mix a little.

I implied at the start that I could not persuade anyone of the appeal of bookstores, but that is not because I have no good reasons; rather, someone who does not love bookstores is likely to be so different from me that I do not see what we could have to say to each other.

Certainly, there are people who love bookstores more than I do. I have never made a bookstore my haunt (as I read that city people do); I have never made a friend in or through a bookstore (which some seem to take for their purpose). But I remember, I think, every bookstore I have ever been in: little blond-wood, shiny-cover chain bookshops; carpeted, café-harboring shelf-mazes; a cement-floored, steel-rack paperback warehouse; an amphitheatrically rising by levels university bookstore; overstuffed, impossibly narrow bookstores in the French Quarter with wood floors creaking and squeaking like untuned instruments; a shadowy book-laden mansion in North Carolina; and others, and more. As an adult, my dreams are inflexible; long familiarity and deep feeling, are not enough to bring new places into them—my dreams are always recombining old places remembered through childhood; but bookstores have a way to slip through that barrier, a shift to enter dreams. Willing or not, I return to them all.

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Franchising Booksellers

by damongarr on July 06, 2008

I’m always thinking about ways to resurrect/save/reinvigorate the bookselling business. So, when I heard this week about Starbucks’ trouble (closing 600 company-owned stores), I begin to wonder about their troubles and translating it to another retail industry

I am one of those hypocrites who complains about the big-box bookstores killing the industry while simultaneously shopping there myself. There’s a Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet right now. There are maybe two main reasons people like us shop at these stories. First is their ubiquitousness. These stores are everywhere. Certainly much closer to me than my nearest (decent) independent bookstore. The second reason we frequent these sorts of places despite our moral qualms is that we know what to expect.

The retail franchise model supports these two explanations, but does something more. It puts the success or failure of the store in the hands of the franchisee. This is why I think it could succeed as new model for bookselling.

The corporate office in the franchise provides branding, which may be the most important element of what they do, but they also offer support. Support is much different than mandates. I’m not sure how much liberty the buyer at the local Borders has, but I’m relatively certain the books they chose to promote, what ends up on the stores displays, in their windows, are directed from some corporate office far, far away. An independent owner/operator, though, would have freedom to respond to his/her individual market, absent of corporate mandates.

Now, since the time my mind crossed this possibility, I’ve been imagining many different scenarios, many different ways the relationship between franchiser and franchisee could work.  I just want to put the thought out there.  I know little about the industry in detail, and my knowledge of the franchise set-up comes from my time as a manager at a pizza delivery chain.  So, I’m no expert, but maybe someone out there knows more and could help build the business case--or, tell me I’m just wrong.

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Musil on the Novel: The Break from Realist Fiction

by Jacob Russell on July 05, 2008

Here is Musil on the novel and realist narrative. Its ending note, an invitation to reach beyond 19th Century conventions of time and causality. In the network of human interaction there is not one, but countless butterflies, each beat of a wing sets in motion and alters the course of new migrations, wars, the generation redistribution and destruction of wealth and power, the vicissitudes of love, the shape of family life, the fate alike of individuals and generations. The novelist who sets out to find language for this, this relationship to reality, is compelled to move beyond the 19th Century tropes and their endless reiteration in establishment realist fiction.

From Volume I, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1, Vintage International. Translation by Sophie Wilkins. Chapter 122, Going Home. pp 708-709.

For the rest, go HERE

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Text Editor for Writers: JDarkRoom

by Jacob Russell on July 04, 2008

I’ve been looking for a text editor since having to give up WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS… I hate MS-Word. It’s a business application--not for writers. Certainly not for writers of very long documents. Add to that, how cluttered the Windows screen environment is. When the words are slow in coming, it too easy to be distracted--

CLICK, and I’m playing a game chess. CLICK and I’m checking the progress of Tropical Storm Bertha, CLICK and I’m seeking how many new visitors have been on my blog…

JDarkRoom is a simple full screen text editor. I mean, full screen. Even the bottom panel with the clock and Start and tiny icons--gone. Black screen. Green text (you can change fonts and font colors).

Nothing there but the words. And the dark screen is much easier on the eyes. A blessing for anyone with even a touch of ADD.

Takes 5 minutes to figure out the commands. (F5 gets you a help menu).

F1 for a new document

F6 change color/font

F7 or Ctrl-F for search

F9 - set margins.

Ctrl-L word/line count

Ctrl-S Save

And if you need to get to your browser, Alt-Tab will switch you to the Windows screen.

That’s it. You can use your mouse scroll to cruse the document.

And it’s free. (donation requested). Uses Java so works on all platforms: Mac, Windows, Linnex.

Have to save your file as .txt. But once the document is written you can open it in Word and format--since almost everyone insists you submit work as Word docs. Even simpler: Ctrl-C to copy your last session or days work, and paste it into Word.

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Robert Musil’s Analytic Metaphors

by Jacob Russell on July 03, 2008

‘ve been struck by the richness of figurative language in The Man Without Qualities. Musil comes up with a seemingly endless variety of metaphors and similes, unexpected, often humorous, often slightly off balance, hitting their target at oblique angles, yet perfect. Think of Twyla Tharp--how her dancers will land off center, choreographed stutter steps, flinging themselves at one and missing, and how absolutely right it feels.

I wish I’d begun to mark them from the beginning--to take notes. For more than 600 pages I’ve trying to understand how he uses metaphor, what it is that marks his style. Then on p. 634 there’s a paragraph about metaphors, the points here are repeated in the next chapter, which is a prolonged essay on metaphors (Musil uses the word essay in Montaigne’s sense; his protagonist, Ulrich, wants to make his life an essay, a trying out, an experiment as-you-go). Now I can account for the cerebral quality of these comparisons--the metaphor is for Musil the equivalent of a scientific instrument, an analytic tool he uses to take apart things (language, ideas, beliefs, illusions) and recombine them to see what happens. Ulrich himself is a meta-metaphor, a thing of language always in process--why he has no “qualities.”

Read the rest HERE

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An Old Man Writing Poetry…

by Jacob Russell on June 29, 2008

An Old Man Writing Poetry…

Maybe it’s reading George Oppen, though I think it’s a direction I’ve been heading for a long time. In poetry. Concentration, cutting excess--fighting to cut loose from the straight-jacket of the ‘sentence-poem.’ From the ‘personal-postcard’ poem… see my recent blog post on the Purple Gorilla.

Yesterday I only wrote 750 words--this was on my current novel. Didn’t spend more than 15 minutes actually typing. Did that in two quick spurts. A short chapter.

The rest of the time… you know the routine: making tea, inspect the garden ... la la la… but because I was writing, I couldn’t apply myself to anything else--could read, some… but no more than a few pages, but nothing else: lots of tasks at hand to keep me going: transcribing journals, studying, reading… useless.

And then the second part came to me. I knew what I had to do and ten minutes later, it was all typed up.

Today was like that, but I got no new words… I was searching. And then I came across that analysis of politics and critical theory on The Valve, and there it was--the next chapter. So tomorrow, I’m set.

I really, really want to write this novel to an end in the next month. There will be lots of revising and editing, I can work that into a schedule--do on demand.

New words aren’t like that. You have to ...that is, I have to, devote a gross excess of time for this. The real writing is...digression, and then you type.

I want so much to leave myself at least a month for poetry… reading and composing. I have a spiral notebook--take notes, scraps, lines… and if I keep going over them, thinking about them, scratching out and starting over, a new kind of poem (for me) begins to emerge.

Have a few recent ones I’m almost satisfied with.

I wrote my first poem when I was 12. In the sand on the beach, the western shore of Lake Michigan. And then I went back to my grandparents cottage and wrote it down… is there a metaphor in that?

I’m 67, and still trying to figure out how to do it…

And when a few lines come out right… it doesn’t make me 12 years old again (thank Fred) ... but I feel the same rush...even with nothing but a chaste future to contemplate.

---

Actually, the first poem I attempted, was in second grade. We were to write sentences. I started off… had this image before my mind’s eye. I wanted to put it in words. Something about a farmer at sunset coming back from a days work… only a shadow of himself. I flunked the assignment because I didn’t finish.. I still have it… The teacher sent it home as one more example of how I wasted all my “considerable potential” daydreaming… it wasn’t daydreaming. I got stuck on the word ‘silhouette.’ It was the word I wanted. It was what I saw. But I could not for the life of me figure out how to spell it. And I wouldn’t accept a substitute.

Goddamned French.

I’m thinking about that rush. At 12--those pre- and early adolescent attempts at poetry: it’s transfiguration of pleasures you know you can’t get.

In old age… sort of the same thing. But there’s a dawning understanding… no matter how unpleasent, how one might want to resist, to deny… that that rush… so many years ago… has never been surpassed.

And that’s having had some--shall we say, some damn good sex. Sexual Healing. The kind that awakens you to your bodily life and melts mind and body into a cosmic fusion… and yet?

That child--no longer a child--that rush on a deserted beach, writing words in sand--and knowing you were no more substantial than those scratched out figures waiting for the tide.

The Eternal Return…

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Interview with Preditors & Editors

by the view from here magazine on June 26, 2008

Preditors & Editors is a resource intended as a simple compendium for the serious writer, composer, game designer, or artist to consult for information, regardless of genre. Famous for daring to list publishers and agents that are just out to scam the writer, it is a valuable resource in a world that will bite you as soon as feed you. I speak to editor & founder, Dave Kuzminski, about the history of the site and how it is currently under threat.

Can you tell us how the idea for the site came about and how you made that into a reality?

Preditors & Editors came about after I agreed to moderate a writer’s forum years ago for Prodigy. There were lots of questions and many were wanting the same information, so I created a one-page website with the publishers I recommended. When writers then asked who to avoid, I realized that was critical information that no one was giving out. I chose to do so by listing those I didn’t recommend and the name for the site came about because of that. Because P&E operated on strict criteria, writers realized that they could rely upon P&E’s recommendations. Our integrity became very visible to everyone after we were threatened and refused to bow to outside demands to remove negative recommendations.

How do you decide on your listings, do you have “informants” that tip you off from within the industry and if so do you have to protect your sources?

Listings are chosen by what they offer. In other words, sites promoting a book are often not accepted for listings unless the site offers much more than that. The listings come about from tips, complaints, and surfing the net. So yes, we do use informants. Likewise, we do protect their names unless they don’t mind being attributed. Because of recent legal problems, P&E tends to not list their names because some of our legal adversaries have a tendency to retaliate against anyone associated with P&E.

You say on the site that you “believe strongly in the future of the Internet as the media of choice for future publishing.” Can you expand on that and what are your views of traditional publishing?

I believe that electronic publishing will become a part of the industry and has just as different media such as movies, radio, and television joined what was solely the province of newspapers, magazines, and books. It’s not a replacement, but it’s needed and will eventually be accepted all around. On the other hand, let’s be careful with the word “traditional.” It’s not actually a publishing industry term. It was invented by PublishAmerica’s management to distinguish themselves from other vanity publishers. Larry Clopper of PublishAmerica admitted that in an interview with The Washington Post. However, if you mean how will electronic publishing fit in with the existing publications, that’s what is being determined now. This is because it presents certain advantages that will become more evident as time goes on. Clearly, it’s less expensive to produce in massive quantities. With proper editing, it can be every bit as good as any printed book. At the same time, it’s a great training ground for new writers, provided publishers are willing to give those writers and their work enough exposure and promotion so that readers will know they exist.

See the full interview at The View From Here Magazine

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Wrestling with Form

by ellenhawley on June 23, 2008

I like to think I’m doing something natural when I work on a novel—writing something whose form and content both grow out of the life around me. This is, of course, complete bullshit, but we all need an illusion or three to keep ourselves going.

The novel feels natural to me because I’ve lived my life in a culture of stories that end when all the threads are brought together, when the problem’s solved, when the characters change either themselves or their circumstances, or when circumstances change the characters. They learn or refuse to learn. They conquer or are conquered. They move on. Or life moves on and they don’t, but that’s a resolution too. I can set the book down and say, yes, it’s finished. There’s nothing left to say, or ask, or wish for. I can turn off the light and go to sleep. And that is a totally artificial construct. Life doesn’t give us an ending. A person’s story resolves, but only for a moment. A mother is reunited with her long-lost daughter, but the next day she finds out that the kid’s older than she was when she was lost, and traumatized, and angry, and frightened, and silent, and the mother has no idea how to be a parent to this new version of her child, and she’s angry herself, and frightened. New story, or an extension of the old one. Where does any story end? Endings are artificial. If you want a happy ending, it ends with the reunion. If you want something more disquieting, more thoughtful, you give the reader a glimpse of the new landscape of their lives. Or maybe it begins there.

If life is a long strand of film, the writer has the scissors. Every story has to begin somewhere. It has to end somewhere. Unlike life. A story is, by its nature, artificial, and maybe the purpose of art is to by its falseness to make us think about the shape of our lives, because our lives themselves are shapeless, just one damn thing after another, as some sage once said. Any meaning we find is there only because we impose it, or pick it out from a swarm of detail. Another writer, another person living a similar life, would pick out another pattern and find it just as true. Or just as false.

I recently finished reading Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, which doesn’t follow any traditional pattern that I recognize, and although the writing’s fantastic and the story’s both fascinating and important, I was impatient with the book. It didn’t have the impact I thought it would have had if it had taken a more traditional form. I missed the rise and fall of the novel-as-I-know-it. I missed the sense that events were leading into each other, and building toward something. I wanted to lose myself in the story, and I couldn’t. Sure, I could mount an intellectual defense of why Ondaatje might want to break out of the traditional form, but it wouldn’t make me love his work.

Not long ago, an editor sent a novel manuscript back to me saying that a traumatic event at the beginning of the book needed to be present later on. What I’d done instead was let the characters patch their lives up as best they could and go on. People do that, the editor acknowledged, and maybe I should consider writing the story as memoir—if indeed it was one, she added with the wisdom of a post-Frey publishing world. As a novel, it just didn’t satisfy her.

Indeed, however, the story wasn’t anything close to a memoir, so that was out. I’d been aware, as I worked on the novel, of the power of that event looming over everything that followed and I’d wondered what to do with it. As I write this, I’m still wrestling with the question, and I’m torn. Why shouldn’t my characters shove the trauma aside and go on? We do, most of us, if we can. Emotional resolution is a myth of pop psychology and novels. We carry our ghosts with us, and we spend a lot of time asking them if they couldn’t please keep it down, we’re trying to sleep. But the novel, as a form, demands that we come back to this event, and do something with it.

So I find myself asking if form isn’t inherently false—satisfying, but false. Have I committed myself to writing a series of reassuring lies?

Initially, I wrote two scenes in response to the editor’s comment, in which my characters came to terms with what happened. They were neat and tidy and wrong.

But the form demands resolution.

It took me a while to realize that I was using “resolution” in two different ways: the pop-psych way, which demands that the characters resolve their issues and find some sort of peace, and the literary way, which demands only that the characters come back to the issues and that something change. It asks that they be affected by what’s happened, and that what’s under the surface be brought into the open. In real life we struggle long and hard to avoid that, so even though it’s artificial in fiction, it’s more than just a convention. What gives art its power is that it takes us outside our ordinary lives and our usual evasions and lets us see differently. See what? Anything. Ourselves, our lives, our deaths, our society, a field, a fireplug. If we look deeply enough at anything, we are changed by it.

As I write this, I’m struggling to bring my characters back to the event in a way that acknowledges how deeply it’s marked them and shows how they’ve chosen to carry that scar through their lives. Without the artificial demand of the form, I’d have missed that. Like my characters—like myself in real life—I’d have hidden from the pain that confrontation and discovery causes, and been the poorer for it.

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Writers Behaving Badly: An American Scoundrel’s Success

by Jamie Grove - How Not To Write on June 18, 2008

I happen to like scoundrels.  Most of the writers I have known or read were, at some point in their lives, the most terrible scoundrels.  I find their adventures and motivations interesting, shocking, and often amusing.

The Scoundrel Factor

One writer who is more than happy to share the depths of his scoundrelness is Chuck Palahniuk.  Mr. Palahniuk’s latest book Snuff received a scathing review in the New York Times by author Lucy Ellman:

What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.

So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer.

Mr. Palahniuk’s readers didn’t seem to mind though.  His book was #5 on the bestseller’s list the week Ms. Ellman’s review was published.

Of course, the history of the scoundrel in American letters is long and storied…

Read the rest on HNTW...

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Free Books for Summer: “Cost” by Roxana Robinson

by BudParr | MetaxuCafe on June 18, 2008

The week’s free book is Cost by Roxana Robinson. This time I won’t ask any arcane questions, so just drop a line to with Cost in the subject line and say something nice in the message and I’ll mail the book out to you. This book, by the way, is a very nice first edition hard cover.

Here’s the scoop on the book and be sure to check out Roxana’s journal: http://www.roxanarobinson.com/pgs/journal_frame.html

COST (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG, June 10; a Spring 2008 “Good Reads” Pick of the National Book Critics Circle) by Roxana Robinson (http://www.roxanarobinson.com)

Vanity Fair says, “COST artfully portrays a family transformed by the far-reaching consequences of a son’s heroin addiction.” And Jennifer Egan notes, “COST is a gritty portrait.... Roxana Robinson’s vivid, sensuous prose moves effortlessly among relationships and points of view, evoking a brutal war between familial love--in its infinite power and mystery--and the mechanical devastations of pathology.”

“Robinson paints a chilling portrait of addiction, depicting heroin junkies in particular as ruthless in pursuit of their highs and rehab as hardly more than a crapshoot.  There’s little solace here, except in the accumulation of wisdom and softening of old resentments as the appealing, astutely drawn characters come together.  We can’t always save each other, but there’s a kind of redemption in the fight.”—People Magazine ("People Pick,” ***1/2 stars out of 4)

“Roxana Robinson’s latest novel, Cost, is an emotionally incisive story about change—the permeable bonds between family members and an individual’s fluctuating sense of self… The language is strong—occasionally lyrical but always tight—and Robinson’s penchant for detail eventually pushes this messy family drama to a succinct point: Relationships define who we are, whether we like it or not.”—Time Out New York (four stars)

Roxana Robinson is the author of three earlier novels and three short-story collections, as well as a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories and Vogue, among others. She has received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches at the New School in New York.

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Interview with James Meek

by the view from here magazine on June 11, 2008

James Meek’s last book, The People’s Act of Love won the 2006 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, the 2006 Ondaatje Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. James has worked as a journalist since 1985 and his reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay won a number of British and international awards. In 2001 he reported for the Guardian Newspaper on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the liberation of Kabul. James new book is We Are Now Beginning Our Descent.

What’s your ideal night out/in?

I’m not sure, but it’s a good title for a short story. Like Charles Bukowski’s ‘Would You Recommend Writing As A Career?’

What is your favorite book?

Tristam Shandy.

How did you first make a break into getting your novels published?

I typed out the manuscript of my first full-length novel when I was eighteen, and sent it off to publishers, but they turned it down. I am glad about this now. I had a few short stories published in magazines and in one book when I was at university and, in 1988, when I was 25, I sent off another novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea,to a small Edinburgh publisher called Polygon. They liked it and, in 1989, published it. For this, my first published novel, I was paid four hundred pounds.

More at the view from here magazine.

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The future of reading is the future of writers

by Donigan on June 10, 2008

This excellent article is worth posting in hopes of generating some discussion about it here.

http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_future_of_reading.php

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Looking Back on Lolita

by Margaret Lazarus Dean on June 09, 2008

I first read Lolita when I was a teenager, much closer to Lolita‘s age than Humbert’s.
When I picked it up, all I knew was that Lolita was a dirty book, that it was a salacious account of a nasty old man’s lust for a young girl, a defense of his indefensible behavior. (Like many people of my generation, I got the false impression that Humbert was old from the song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police: “Just like the old man in that famous book by Nab-uh-koff.") So what I found was a revelation. Humbert is not old, and his behavior is never excused. The subject matter is treated with a complexity and a decency I had not been led to expect. The portrait of Lolita that seeps through Humbert’s narrative is nuanced and sympathetic, even as he objectifies her--we are left with an indelible image of her monkey toes, her sunny curls, her slangy speech, her harsh high voice. And, of course, the language: Humbert is pompous and showoffy, but within and around that excess Nabokov gives him a caustic precision I adored. Most surprising: Nabokov’s treatment of pedophilia was funny, not in a slapstick way but in a tragically revealing way. So my experience of this novel was an experience of being surprised continuously and variously-- maybe the ideal literary experience.

For anyone, to read Lolita is to be forced to look at a pubescent girl through a series of distorting lenses: she is reduced and amplified by Humbert’s lust for her, but also humanized by his developing tenderness, all of which is muddied by the haze of his recollection and by his knowledge that he will lose her. All this is refracted through the additional lens of the manuscript’s fictional editor, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D, who seems to feel a disturbing empathy for Humbert’s predilection for young girls. A reader might legitimately ask: is the book’s main character Humbert Humbert, or is it this series of frames and ciphers? We might assume that Lolita is a book about a man tormented by a girl-object; having so recently been such a girl-object, I felt certain the book was about the girl.

Lolita has very little power in this story, ruled completely as she is by people who do not love her--first her mother, then Humbert, then Quilty. Lolita reaches a certain age--nearly thirteen--and discovers a new power over men. Should it be any surprise that she starts having sex, or even that she initiates sexual contact with Humbert? Many readers feel that because it is Lolita who crawls toward Humbert in The Enchanted Hunters hotel bed that early morning, everything that follows is her doing, that Humbert is in fact a victim of sorts, as Lolita‘s act robs him of his last shred of self-control. In the dictionary, a ”Lolita” is not a victim of sexual abuse, but a sexually aggressive young girl. Anything that happens to her, it would follow, is her own fault.

But Lolita is not a sexual predator; she is a child, with a child’s need for attention and a child’s propensity toward selfishness and sweetness and goofiness, and one of the hallmarks of Nabokov’s genius is that we can see her as a child, even through the eyes of Humbert. No one has ever read my novel and said it was reminiscent of Lolita (nor would I expect anyone to), but my book is infected by that book, as if by a blood disease. My protagonist is a thirteen-year-old girl named Dolores, and her precocious sexuality is an expression of a gene planted by Dolores Haze, her ghostly great-aunt. My Dolores chooses to initiate sex with an older partner--hers is eighteen, less shocking that Humbert’s thirty-eight, but still quite illegal. Of course, the scene feels significantly different told from the point of view of the girl rather than the man: we can understand her motives and can only wonder at his, rather than the other way around. The novel does not spend a great deal of time on this sexual relationship--readers can expect to learn much more about the space shuttle program of the 1980s than about Dolores’s sexuality--yet I have heard from more readers about this scene than any other. I think the scene disturbs readers because, while Dolores does pay certain costs for having sex with an adult, she is not irrevocably changed by it as Lolita is. Seeing the scene from the girl’s point of view, we can see that she is not a predator, but a child with few other choices available to her. Yet it’s hard for some readers to see Dolores make this choice and get away with it. This is the form our prudishness takes now: a book containing such a scene will no longer be banned as pornography, but we want to see the girl punished for her choice. Like Lolita, Dolores is a child who has discovered this one power, this one loophole, but Dolores is spared the stigma of being a ”Lolita,” a girl reduced to the barest outlines of her body. Fifty years after the publication of Lolita, with younger and younger girls sexualized more and more, you would think this scene would have lost the power to shoc