Bad news this week for author Stephanie Meyer, who had previously distributed a few rough copies of the manuscript of her latest novel, Midnight Sun, and was disappointed to learn that … bum bum BUM! — you guessed it — somebody put one on the Internet.
The novel would have been the last installment of Meyer’s Twilight series, which, as far as I can tell, is basically Wuthering Heights set in the present … with vampires. This week, Meyer said she is too distraught to continue working on the project and that it is shelved indefinitely.
A few years ago, something similar happened to the Dave Matthews Band, who were at the time my favorite band (and who lost a member last month when saxophonist LeRoi Moore died of injuries from an ATV accident). The band was surprised to discover that a whole CD’s worth of new, un-mastered, un-polished material (now lovingly referred to by DMB fans as the Lillywhite Sessions) had dripped down producer Steve Lillywhite’s studio drain and polluted a substantial part of the Napster sewer system. There was no way of cleaning it up, really, so the band went back into the studio, polished the leaked songs, and arranged them onto a new CD, Busted Stuff, which I bought even though I already had the “rough drafts.”
So what can the Dave Matthews Band teach us about how an author should respond to the viral online distribution of her genre fiction?
First of all, that artists and writers often fail to remember two things: the vast indifference of most consumers, and the insatiable appetite of devoted fans. Right now, there’s a partial draft of Midnight Sun posted on Meyer’s website — but let’s be honest, most of us aren’t going to check that out, and not just because it’s full of teen/vampire melodrama (okay, partly because it’s full of teen/vampire melodrama). Even if our interest got piqued by the headlines about the leak and we’re thinking about writing a scholarly paper examining the Brontean influence on modern teen vampire literature (that’s my research paper — hands off!), we’ll wait for the indefinitely on-hold book version to drop.
Unless we’re fans.
If that’s the case, we’ve not only already devoured the partial draft, we’re hoping against hope she polishes and edits the thing and gets it out the door to the publisher. We’ll pre-order it. And even though we already know basically what happens and have been sitting on that bootlegged version for months, we’ll shell out for the finished product, too.
My point is that most of an artist’s audience won’t care — or even remember — that there was a leaked copy, and nothing will deter fans. If Meyer ever rolls that book out, she’s going to get paid.
And make no mistake, we can easily empathize with Meyer. She’s like a stage director whose star just dashed onstage early, a little confused and without makeup. Precise timing, after all, is as big a part of publishing as it is of theater.
But as they say in theater, and as the coven of Meyer’s fans seems to agree — and as the surviving members of the Dave Matthews Band (who performed an emotional concert at the Gorge Amphitheatre last week) surely know — the show must go on.
Tags: Commentaries
Welcome to a brand new feature of our blog, our List of the Week. This week, our staff would like to share some of the books they read over the summer of 2008. We welcome our readers’ own recommendations and reactions in the comments below!
1. Joan Acocella, 28 artists and two Saints
Joan Acocella’s collection features essays about writers, dancers, and saints which were originally published in the New Yorker over the last few years. Most of the writers are “writers’ writers” such as Maqrguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, and Dorothy Parker, and thus may be more interesting to litterateurs than to general readers. Some of the essays were originally written as book reviews, for example “The Frog and the Crocodile,” which reviews A Transatlantic Love Affair, a book of letters from Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren that she wrote in the late 40s and early 50s. De Beauvoir of course had fallen in love as a young woman with Jean-Paul Sartre, and over the rest of her life — even during her relatively brief affair with Algren — remained a virtual slave to the priest of existentialism. Her affair with Algren affected the writing of The Second Sex, the book that marked the beginning of the modern women’s movement. Acocella can be both amused and empathetic as she describes this woman who was at once a prophet of women’s liberation and at the same time enchained to Sartre, whose life was a boil of drink, amphetamine-taking and chasing girls, even after he went blind. Her letters to Algren are particularly entertaining in their depiction of the chaotic and sometimes silly life on the Left Bank, where the postwar intellectuals of France were dancing their delicate dance between capitalism and communism.
In all, Acocella’s collection is highly readable and leads one to want to learn more about writers like Joseph Roth and Italo Svevo and dancers like Jerome Robbins. –Speer Morgan
2. Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival
I got turned onto Frank Bidart by my thesis advisor, Liz Arnold, who was always trying to get us to imagine a new music beyond the iamb. I still don’t know if it’s possible, but I do know that I am in awe of Bidart’s musicality-here is just the first part of the first two lines: “Intricate to celebrate still-delicate/ raw spring…” I read this and it’s like I’m hearing violinists when they hold their bows and pluck the strings-internal rhymes, plosives, unexpected stresses! To me, Bidart’s use of words has the purposefulness of placing notes. My mother bought this book at Grolier’s Books in Cambridge, where the bookseller told me his favorite in the book is “To the Republic”-a great pick. Like Bidart’s other books, this one delivers re-imaginings of historical events and performances; it gives unflinching gravitas, a little shock, and mind-shifting insights that come from his steady look into the dark-depths of human motives, or into what betrays our hope to be good. This book will absorb you! –Katy Didden
3. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
My favorite novel of the summer was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The novel’s setting is Sitka, Alaska, and homeland to displaced World War II Jews-an alternate history in the tradition of a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy. It’s also a murder mystery. This novel brings to mind another literary genre-bender, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. (I confess, I’ve been a science fiction fan ever since I read L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a kid.) Other science fiction fans also found The Yiddish Policemen’s Union to their liking, recently bestowing it the Hugo award [http://www.thehugoawards.org/], science fiction’s highest honor. –Richard Sowienski
4. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
A memoir/travel journal/extended spiritual meditation. This is an easy, enjoyable read that I treated myself to this summer after taking my PhD comprehensive exam. The structure is well thought out — three sections for three countries: Italy, India, and Indonesia, and 108 brief writings divided equally among her experiences in each country. I loved Italy. It’s obvious she suffered tremendously during and after her divorce, and it was a privilege to accompany her as she ate and savored her way through Italy. India was intense, but rightfully so — it’s the most inward-seeking section of the book as she shares with the reader her deepest spiritual struggles. The Indonesia section wasn’t as strong as the other two. Here, the structure of the book might have forced her to focus on a part of her travels that didn’t need so much space. Much of her suffering has passed by the time she gets to Bali, and unfortunately, what makes for a good story is the pain. Of course I’m happy that she’s happy, but for the sake of the book, the happy ending went on a bit too long. Highly recommended. –Lania Knight
5. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking
I actually experienced Blink as an audiobook (it’s available at Audible.com), read by the author. Blink is just the right kind of audiobook for those commuting/exercising/dog-walking parts of the day; it is the kind of popular science writing that is engaging without requiring deep concentration, anchoring discursive chunks within entertaining narrative anecdotes. The subtitle makes Blink sound like a terrible self-help book, but the premise is far more compelling. Gladwell explores the idea that our brains and powers of perception are structured to make optimal snap judgments, extrapolating from tiny, specific, and often subconciously perceived details. Gladwell spends about half the book describing research (in the form of those winning little anecdotes) that shows how the powers of intuition can in an instant reach better conclusions than can long, logical reasoning processes. Then, for the second half of the book, Gladwell looks at the ways in which this same intuitive faculty can go wrong and deceive us.
Though its prime audience would seem to be “decision-makers,” Blink is actually quite an interesting read for creative writers. Not only does it explore some aspects of intution that are clearly part of the creative process, it also reinforces how much readers rely upon little details and subtle cues to draw quite large conclusions about characters and situations. Gladwell ultimately provides one of the best arguments for using immersive concrete detail in your writing that I’ve encountered. –Patrick Lane
6. Cormac McCarthy, The Road
I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I picked up because I was curious to read something by the author whose novel No Country for Old Men was turned into an Oscar-winning film last year. Its tone is relentlessly bleak, but with an undercurrent of hope, following a father and son who are trekking across America after something has happened to destroy civilization as we know it. What this “something” was is never explained, nor does it seem that the novel is interested in how the world destroyed itself, but is instead focused on the father and son and their desperate need to survive and keep their humanity in a world in which hunger has trumped morality. The book asks whether the father would have been more inclined to lose his humanity if not for his son, who is constantly questioning the decisions that his father makes, particularly when they seem callous. While the book can sometimes feel “heavy” — despite McCarthy’s spare style — especially with scenes that involve little more than the father scouting out houses, taking inventory of their contents, the father-son relationship keeps the story moving. All of these little inventories are about love, we come to realize, about trying to sustain what you care for. The Road is soon to be a movie starring Viggo Mortenson. While Mortenson seems well-cast, I’m curious as to whether the book will translate to the screen as well as No Country for Old Men, given that it is so bleak, and its beat-to-beat action not as dramatic. –Darren Pine
7. Alan Moore (author) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator), Watchmen
A very close friend of mine grew out his hair and beard over the summer, and by the middle of August his appearance had devolved into that of a caveman or bridge troll. He had become more hair than man.
“You look like Alan Moore,” I finally told him.
He tugged at his kinky beard. “Exactly,” he smiled.
Alan Moore has become an icon, “an eccentric genius,” whose comics and graphic novels (such as V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and so forth) have all become award-winning critical darlings and popular successes.
So having read so much Alan Moore over the years, why did I neglect to read Watchmen, his most acclaimed work of fiction, until this very summer? I saw Watchmen on my friends’ bookshelves and coffee tables and in their opium dens, propping up uneven candelabra.
I had read nothing but rave reviews about Watchmen. I was aware that it had won countless awards and was selected as one of Time’s “100 Best Novels” in 2005.
And yet I never read it until this summer. Such things have a way of slipping through the cracks, I suppose. Perhaps I avoided Watchmen much like I continue to avoid Moby Dick, daunted and slightly turned off by its reputation.
Given the hype, given the high expectations, I was afraid that I’d be let down.
As it happened, I cracked open Watchmen on a Sunday morning, read the first line — “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach” — and I couldn’t put it down until I had finished reading the entire fair-sized graphic novel through to the very end.
I was driven by the page-turning plot. I was stunned by the complex psychological profiles. I let my eyes linger over Dave Gibbons’ illustrations. I was haunted by the perennial and contemporary themes of war and the threat of global annihilation at human hands.
All this from a book about superheroes, or “costumed adventurers,” as they’re more accurately known in the text.
Before I sat down to read Watchmen, my caveman-like friend said to me: “Oh, you’ll love it. Alan Moore is like the James Joyce of the graphic novel. Watchmen is like his Ulysses.”
My friend is wrong on this point. Perhaps the sheer literary audacity and, yes, pretension that permeates Watchmen can be likened to Joyce (after all, Watchmen does quote Nietzsche), but Moore’s intricate style of storytelling and voluminous characterization reads much more like Charles Dickens.
[NOTE: If anyone deserves of the moniker, "the James Joyce of the graphic novel," then it's Chris Ware. Indeed, Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth can be considered his Ulysses.]
There is a revealing similarity between Moore and Dickens. One must recall that all of Dickens’ novels were originally published in serial installments. In a similar fashion, Watchmen was originally published by DC Comics as a monthly limited series from 1986 to 1987. Only later was it republished as a trade paperback or “graphic novel.”
I am hesitant to reveal anything about the plot or characters in Watchmen for fear of spoiling it for others. All I can say is: Drop everything and go read Watchmen. Don’t wait for the movie to come out next year. Read it first. Because despite Hollywood’s increasing success with transferring comic books to the big screen (think Iron Man and The Dark Knight), the film medium has yet to effectively capture Alan Moore (V for Vendetta was simply average and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was simply terrible).
In final, I do not believe that comic books or graphic novels need to be defended any longer for their abilities to penetrate the “adult intellect.” Such a debate is old hat. It should be accepted by now that graphic novels can deliver a poignant story with riveting characters immersed in themes both “literary” and “timeless.” –Eric A. Thomas
8. Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
This summer, I succumbed to my mother’s insistence and read a Jodi Picoult novel, My Sister’s Keeper. I’d heard of Picoult’s work before; her practice of taking hot contemporary topics — school shootings, Catholic sex scandals, teenage pregnancy, suicide pacts — has drawn the attention of readers across the nation, and several of her books have topped the bestseller’s list. For this reason I was skeptical when I first picked up her book. Her whole process seemed like a recipe to me, a gimmick that somehow worked over and over again: take a current issue, a pinch of characterization, throw in some different points-of-view, stir in a surprise ending, and let it boil. Just listing the topics of her sixteen novels will make you realize how improbable her whole operation is. How could an author possibly continue spinning big issues into fiction and still wow her readers? Aren’t they tired of this trick yet?
My Sister’s Keeper features a 13-year-old girl genetically engineered to be a donor for her leukemia-stricken sister — certainly another hot political issue. Yet as I read the novel, I couldn’t help but get invested in the characters. In the end, Picoult somehow manages to make their experiences the heart of the story, instead of letting the politics take over. There is a warmth and realism to the protagonist, Anna, and Picoult never lets her become more than she is: a confused teenager struggling to assert her individuality. I enjoyed the book, but I still wish that Picoult would branch out from her method of brainstorming plots — partly because I think she would fare well elsewhere, given her talent for characterization, and partly because I know there are stories with emotional and intellectual weight that she could tell without relying on these hot topics. –Brittany Barr
9. Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration
The most challenging book I read this summer (and this year, for that matter), is Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, the first part of his effort to bridge, in writing, the gap between numerous recent portrayals of the historical Jesus and the divine son of God who is the foundation of Christianity. The Pope’s thesis is not complicated: he acknowledges that Jesus the man lived in history and that a historical approach to understanding his ministry is valuable, but, he says, that’s not enough. What gets lost in the many historical readings of Jesus is that he was in communion with God, a communion that was his essence, “the true center of his personality.” It is not possible to make sense of Jesus, says Ratzinger, unless one understands that he was God and that his chief work — really, his only work — was to bring God to humanity. So far, things seem clear. But what does that mean, to bring God? In ten chapters that address ten critical aspects of Jesus’ ministry, the Pope does not so much elucidate as provide glimmers of what that means — or just as likely, my limited theological knowledge makes the illumination seem like glimmers. I found myself fascinated, nevertheless, by almost every insight, from his exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer (which includes a discussion of why in the words “Our Father” there is no corresponding feminine implication of the maternal) to his readings of several major parables. Literary type that I am, I was very interested in his argument for reading the parables on a level that goes beyond the generally understood allegorical correspondences. The parables, he says, are revelatory of the mystery of the Cross and must be read that way. Here, at least, I was on comfortable ground, and I found the light shed by Ratzinger’s interpretation to be consistent, welcoming and truly profound. –Evelyn Somers
10. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One
This summer, I read The Loved One at the recommendation of my former creative writing teacher, Marjorie Sandor. Marjorie and I both have a taste for macabre humor, and this short novel by Evelyn Waugh (of Brideshead Revisited fame) filled the bill. Set in the funeral industry in L.A., The Loved One tracks a love triangle between Aimee Thanatogenos, a cosmetologist for corpses at Whispering Glades funeral home; Mr. Joyboy (yes, really), the expert embalmer; and Dennis, a British expat and poet who works at the Happier Hunting Ground, a funeral home for pets that models itself on Whispering Glades.
Whispering Glades has developed a specialized vocabulary so that the grim facts of death and decay never enter the minds of its customers. In the world of Whispering Glades, corpses are Loved Ones, the owner of the funeral home is the Dreamer, funeral directors are Mortuary Hostesses, and bodies can be disposed of by inhumement, entombment, inurnment, immurement, and even insarcophagusment. They are never just buried.
Mr. Joyboy woos Aimee by ensuring that all of the corpses he sends her way have beatific smiles on their faces. He tells her, “Miss Thantogenos, for you the Loved Ones just naturally smile.” Other cosmetologists receive corpses with grave or studious expressions. Dennis seduces Aimee in a slightly less creepy way by sending her famous poetry he passes off as his own. For good reason, Aimee cannot decide between the two men, and turns for help to the Guru Brahmin, a newspaper advice columnist who is in reality a heavy drinker named Mr. Slump. As one might expect, Mr. Slump gives her awful advice, and what has so far been a comedy takes a turn toward tragedy. I won’t spoil the delightfully profane ending for you. Give this book a try. You can read it in a weekend, but it will stick with you for much longer. –Kate McIntyre
Next Week’s List: “Remembering 9/11″
Tags: List of the Week
Now that the Olympics are over and Michael Phelps with his eight gold medals is off on a victory lap of TV talkshows (look for him on SNL this weekend), we can take time to consider the proper pronunciation of the city “Beijing.”
In her blog “The Word” from The Boston Globe, Jan Freeman, takes on this subject.
Tags: Commentaries
Poets & Writers is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. I usually start with the classifieds and then make my way to the front. This month, in the Recent Winners section, I found two authors who have been published in The Missouri Review: fiction writer Paul Eggers and poet Jude Nutter.
Paul won The Missouri Review Peden Prize in 2006 with his longish short story, “This Way, Uncle, Into the Palace.” He recently won the 2008 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction for his collection, The Departure Lounge. When he came to Missouri in November, 2006, to accept the Peden Prize, Paul graciously granted me an interview, which you can listen to online here.
Jude Nutter’s poems were selected from among several hundred entries for first place in The Missouri Review 2007 Editors’ Prize Contest. According to Poets & Writers, she recently received a 2008 McKnight Artist Fellowship from the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, a $25,000 award.
Congrats to Paul and Jude, and kudos to The Missouri Review for continuing to publish excellent contemporary literature.
Tags: News
Yesterday in the NY Times books blog, Bob Harris posed the question of where one can find essays in 2008 on the order of the periodical essays of Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, De Quincey and other celebrated English essayists. And, he says, it’s definitely not happening in blogs.
There are a lot of answers to that question, depending on how you interpret it. If one asks, for instance, where are our Samuel Johnsons or William Hazlitts, the answer is not so obvious because essayists of that order are not writing the same kinds of essays—for a lot of reasons, partly cultural (the moralism of a Johnson would almost certainly not gain a broad popular following–among the intellectual set, at least–in 2008), partly aesthetic (the quaintness of a Lamb or a Hazlitt is by current standards . . . well, quaint). Broadcast media and now the Internet have created new venues for the types of commentary authored by the great Augustan and Enlightenment essayists, and with the arrival of each new venue, authors have molded their styles and subjects to fit (and, if possible, to bring in revenue. Surprise!)
If the vanished coffeehouse milieu of high-class gossip and literary inspiration that Harris remarks on has been replaced by the blogosphere, we can’t expect or demand that the blog be “like” the 18th-century essay. In an age when publication on a worldwide scale, via the Internet, is instantaneous, we can’t exactly turn our literary/journalistic clocks back to a day when mass periodical publication in print (“mass” meaning primarily the literate population of London ) was the innovation of the moment.
Articulate, even elegant, nonfiction is all around us: in commercial and literary magazines like The New Yorker, Harpers, the American Scholar, the Missouri Review and many others. In the regular columns of premiere journalists. In TV, film and video documentaries and radio essays. And yes, sometimes in the blog, which is a really exciting new “genre,” if you think about it. I mean, what can’t one say or do in a blog?
The personal essay has undergone an efflorescence in the past two decades. We can personally testify to that fact at TMR when we tally the daily essay submissions that outnumber probably by ten times what we used to get in a week. With the expansion of knowledge, the advancement of science and technology, increased specialization in every field and much greater cultural diversity, we will never again see great essays that much resemble those of centuries past (we might see bad ones that do, though). I think it’s kind of exciting to wonder whether, and how, the blog is going to evolve, and if it will ultimately become the vehicle that Harris says it isn’t now, and what that might look like.
Tags: Commentaries
First off, why the ? It’s because as a literary editor I’m employed to ask questions. This, after decades of spending hours upon hours tinkering with textual representations of other people’s imaginations, is how I’ve come to understand what I do. Someday I’ll blog about it, but today I’m more concerned with the evil home inspector.
We have been trying to sell a house that belongs to an elderly relative. It’s a sweet, small house, perfect for a family of one or two, and we were hopeful when we listed it and delighted when we had a contract within the first three weeks of its being on the market.
Then the evil home inspector came. Our agent had not warned us, exactly, but she had looked sober when the prospect of inspections was mentioned. It wasn’t “our” house she was worried about; it was houses, and sales, in general. Like me, the home inspector is paid to ask questions. Where I’m also employed to tinker and fix, though, the inspector gets paid only to locate problems or the spectre of problems. The fixing part is up to the buyer, and if the buyer doesn’t want to do it or to negotiate with the seller, or in any other way balks, the contract is, of course, null and void. One function of the home inspection is to unseal deals. That’s what happened to ours.
We got a copy of the inspection report. Nothing about it was so terrifying. There were no structural threats of disaster. He’d found a lot of possible concerns, such as vegetation growing too close to the back of the house, and a number of small inconsistencies with current local building code (the house was built twenty-two years ago). The only big issue was an aging roof—we would have negotiated on that one, but the buyer was done with us and had moved on.
I tend to think it’s the buyer’s loss, and I find myself wondering if she or the home inspector asked all the right questions. This is a values issue—or do I mean a philosophical one? Is a house a material investment/physical container for people, or is it a place to be?
In fact, the home inspector (who wasn’t really evil), did what he was supposed to do, and the buyer opted to be cautious. You can’t argue with common sense.
But I keep envisioning another kind of home inspection, where the inspector is focused on invisible things: Can you be happy here? All the sunlight in the kitchen and living room—will that lift your depression? Do you see yourself growing nicer or meaner from having lived in this place? Is it a problem that no one has ever had sex in this house? That’s kind of weird. There should have been sex or children. But when you walk in the front door, it really does feel like it’s its own house—it has integrity. This would be a good house to invite people to because it’s easy to find.
Do you like this house? Is it a satisfying place to be? I think so. Do you like it a lot? Let’s walk through it again. What do you think?
By the way, those are the kinds of questions I ask myself these days about submissions to TMR.
Tags: Commentaries
According to Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History, the word “biography” was not coined in English until the late seventeenth century (the word is a Greek concoction meaning “life depiction”). Until a hundred years ago biography was relegated to inferior status in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a sub-branch of literature devoted to the lives of individual men.” English departments are known for their ragbag of exotic subgenres, but only recently have a smattering of them added biography to their course curriculums. Hamilton credits the University of Hawaii with the only department devoted entirely to its study.
It takes a lot of willful ignorance not to read The Bell Jar, On the Road, Bright Lights, Big City or Tender is the Night as thinly veiled biographies. Rat out these novels to your students and suddenly they get interested; Sal and Dean and Carlo are more compelling to them as real people than as characters. When teaching On the Road, I invariably lapse into talking about Kerouac’s clan as if I know them, which to some extent I do. After reading Chartres’ and Brinkley’s exhaustive biographical works on the Beats, their lives are more familiar to me than my grandparents.
In fact, I like these novels more for their biographical borrowings than their fiction. This summer I lived on a steady diet of literary biographies, mostly for the gossipy bits of my favorite writers’ lives. The genre is my equivalent of Entertainment Tonight, minus Mary Hart’s seizure-inducing voice.
Perhaps I use these books to avoid thinking about my own troubles. More likely, nosiness has always been a part of my temperament. I delight in the steady unrest of real life as long, as it’s someone else’s. There are few things more exciting than a glimpse behind the facade of a perfect marriage or family to discover a disheveled and dysfunctional mess. And yet, there is the comfort in knowing before you even open the book that despite the personal obstacles of alcoholism, depression, infidelity, insanity, the writer succeeded in creating art (no art; no literary biography).
Two of my favorite summer reads are collections of biographical sketches: Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 and Joan Acocella’s Twenty-Seven Artists and Two Saints. Roiphe depicts the progressive relationships of H.G. Wells and Jane Wells, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry among others at their most volatile and vulnerable points. The portrayal of these brave couples as they tried, and mostly failed to recreate marriage to suit their own ideas and needs is pure opium for the literary biography lover.
In her collection of essays, most of them previously published in The New Yorker, Joan Acocella casts a wider net to include lesser known Jewish and English writers, dancers, and a couple of literal saints. Writers aren’t the only ones with stormy lives. In fact when compared to dancers and saints, they seem to suffer a lot less.
Next up, Francine Prose’s The Lives of the Muses.
Tags: Commentaries
Even though it’s only our second year sponsoring this competition, we already have more entries in hand than the same time last year. Also, our 18th Annual Editors’ Prize Competition is booming. Because both competitions have nearly the same deadline, we’ve decided to move the Audio/Video deadline back to Dec. 1, 2008. This will give us more time to judge the competition once it closes. We would also like to make sure that university programs are aware of the competition since we have a “best student entry” award, which a September 15 deadline makes difficult.
You can find complete submission guidelines for both of our contests at http://www.missourireview.com/contest/
Thanks to everyone who has submitted already, and we look forward to hearing and watching submissions from the rest of you!
Tags: Announcements
Cash Peters’ entertaining take on print-on-demand technology
Tags: Commentaries · News · Uncategorized
Yesterday after I had left the office and was standing outside waiting for my carpool ride, I felt something on my foot. I looked down. It was a big black ant, and it was heading up my leg. To stop it, I scraped at it with the sandal on the opposite foot, knocking it to the sidewalk.
At first I thought it was okay. It was moving. Then I saw that it was running in half circles; it looked like a dog sniffing at something—it would run this way for a couple of centimeters and then turn and go in the opposite direction.
I haven’t closely observed ant locomotion ever, but this ant wasn’t moving right. Its navigation system was down. After a minute or two it appeared to be widening the radius of the half-circle it kept traveling, but it wasn’t going to recover. I felt sad, though it was “only” an ant. That’s what I thought and felt, and at the same time I had turned on my mental video camera. “Get this down,” said a voice in my head.
Most writers have a built-in radar for those moments that are important to notice and record, mentally or on paper. The moment that says “notice me” is different for everyone, but for me, the deaths of animals, from gnats on up to horses, have always triggered the recording and writing reflex. (As evidence there is archived somewhere in a box of juvenilia my adolescent poem “Salute to a Dying Wasp.” I had sprayed the wasp with Raid and then repented as I watched its death throes, and my penance was an elegy. At least it didn’t rhyme, but I’m ashamed to admit it had something of the tone of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”)
My point is not about the ant, though I was even sadder when it just stopped, like a battery-powered toy running out of juice. It twitched a little, and then I had to get in the car. I took out my notebook and “got it down,” though writing in a car makes me sick.
There’s no substitute for those experiential “finds” writers harvest that give authenticity to a piece of fiction. Someday, in something I write, that ant will probably die again, just a sentence or two of ant death that will lend verisimilitude to a scene—or perhaps its death will carry some emotional weight also. And it will feel real because it was.
While proofing the issue one last time yesterday, I was struck by a passage of description from Andy Mozina’s forthcoming story. It had that aura of something actual, not invented, harvested from real life so that it would be preserved, and I’ve been charmed every time I read it:
. . . a street where trees don’t grow very tall. South Milwaukee. Small houses with complicated roof lines: dormers, additions, awnings and porches; an air conditioner punched out a window like a Pez in mid-dispense. Gutters sag, downspouts dangle, shingles grow moss. Inside, staircases with hairpin curves, dining rooms with old built-ins, upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, tiny closets shaped like mathematics problems.
One scrubbed kitchen smells from years of meat, a century of congealed gravy, coffee grounds, pill canisters. A candy thermometer has fallen between the stove and the cupboard, visible with a flashlight but essentially lost forever.
Tags: Commentaries
If you’re one of the millions who are suckers for brain candy and/or celebrity news, it’s an act of extreme willpower to ignore the daily onslaught of lists-of-things-not-worth-listing on MSN.
One such item recently caught my eye: “Hot and Dirty: Stars We Like Better Grimy,” said the headline. I could imagine who “we” liked better with some grime on: Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford. Really, there was no reason to click, and I didn’t. But for just a second I pondered whether there might be a cadre of literary grimeballs: “Writers We Like Better Grimy.” Cormack McCarthy came to mind, and Norman Mailer, but the latter has passed on, and it seemed disrespectful, so I let the thought go.
It continued to pop up at random moments, though—often enough that I came up with a thesis: American writers are good grimy, but British not. Annie Proulx, yes. Sherman Alexie, yes. Julian Barnes, no.
Until I thought about Robert Olen Butler and Joyce Carol Oates. They would not be so good dirty. But Ian McEwan would. And Zadie Smith. William Boyd. Yes.
A theory based on stereotypes is bound to be predictable—wrong. A piece of writing grounded in stereotype will be . . . bad. We expect our better writers to be thinkers. How else can they dodge predictability? They’re fundamentally mental types, and isn’t the exercise of one’s intellect antithetical to getting dirty? No, yes, maybe. It just depends.
Mentally griming your favorite author is a really, really stupid thing to spend any time thinking about, but it’s strangely addictive. Go to the article (I finally looked at it today). Look at the photos of Uma or Harrison (yes, he’s on the list) and then try to imagine, say, John Updike with the same film of greasy, yucky dirt. Look at Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, and try to picture J.K. Rowling, in a similarly dirty state. She was the highest-paid celebrity last year,by the way—but that’s another list.
Tags: Commentaries
This morning my husband startled me with one of those questions that because they are so odd and come out of nowhere can really alarm you: “If I had to have my eyes removed, what would you do?”
I almost asked him where the idea came from, but then decided I might not want to know. Instead I told him I thought it would be harder on him than on me: he’s very visual; I’m verbal. He likes to look at things; I like to think about things.
Still, I have fretted on occasion about losing my sight. How would I edit? Read? Write?
In recent years I’ve worred a lot less because technology offers so many solutions for the differently abled. I bought my first IPod recently so I could listen to books while I ride my exercise bike. If I couldn’t see, I’d just listen while I wasn’t biking, too.
I could even listen to TMR. We’re the only literary journal (to our knowledge) currently producing an audio version of the entire content of every issue. And to enhance our increasing commitment to literature in the audio format, we’re sponsoring our second annual audio competition, with categories for voice-only literature, narrative essay and documentary, and with a new video category this year. To find out more, click here.
Tags: Commentaries
At the first of the summer I had a terrorist cell of moles hiding out in my front yard. They were real professionals. Their ankle-high bunkers zig- zagged across my lawn. That was until I brought home a calico cat named Edie. She is more stealth than the Israeli assassins who revenged the murdered Munich Olympians. In three months, she has nabbed and play-tortured, eleven moles, and those are only the ones I know about.
For her, it’s all in the thrill of the hunt. Like a Zen master, she sits atop a rock in silent meditation, her head bowed, patiently waiting. I know the sound of success. When she trots in the house with her catch, she trills.
Edie typically releases her prey in the middle of my kitchen floor. Bored or simply self-satisfied with her ability to bring home fresh meat for her pride, she trots back out of the house, head and tail held high, more Pepé Le Pew than a huntress of the Serengeti.
I am the one left with the moral decision. Rather than kill, I chose to relocate them to an empty lot at the end of my street, a fact that I mistakenly revealed to my neighbor, Mr. Hardcore Gardener.
“You let them go?” he said after I had told him about catching one and then realizing that I was half-dressed. Running down the street to the corner lot in bra and panties was out of the question, so I tiptoed out my back door and tossed the little guy into my back yard.
“What would you have me do? Wring their tiny necks.”
He requested that I bring the next one to him and he would take care of it.
Well, he wasn’t exactly around this morning when Edie’s most recent capture scurried behind my refrigerator. While my husband was at the doctor, I sat on the kitchen floor for more than an hour, one eye on The New Yorker and the other on the slender line between refrigerator and tile.
Finally, when my husband came home, we had to do the unthinkable. I flushed the mole out with a yard stick and he brought a broom handle down squared on its head. He tossed its body into the trash, vetoing my request for a more dignified interment. (What’s with these men?)
I’d admire moles. A group of moles is called a “labor,” maybe because they work so damn hard digging and eating. Their streamlined, cylindrical bodies, tapered heads, and fleshy paddle hands are perfectly designed to travel their underground by-ways in search of worms and grubs. If you look closely, they have a devotional look about them as if their pinched, monkish faces and their gold, pin-sized eyes are the sacrifice of transcribing religious texts. Think about it, these workaholic, thumb-size rodents really move some earth. Perhaps we hate them because by comparison we are weak and lazy.
Of course, I would never say any of this to my neighbor. In fact, I told his wife that her husband would be proud of me. A particularly large mole had been taken out.
She told me that her husband was just talking tough. Last summer, he had killed a mole with a pitchfork and felt awful about it.
“When he walked in the house, I swear I saw a tear in his eye.”
Tags: Commentaries
The fall issue of TMR is about to go to press, and despite some last-minute changes, we’re running on time. Our broad ”theme” is Pick Your Poison: all of the selections deal in some way with damaging habits or traits or behaviors or other bad stuff. Obsession, sex, bad dogs, risk, impulse, bad professors and old-fashioned greed and vanity are some of the subjects you’ll read about. Come to think of it, the issue includes at least four of the deadly sins. The only one I’m sure we don’t have is sloth: there’s tons of energy in this surprising mix.
In our interview, pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) talks about how the Internet has wrecked interviewing. And consistent with our reputation as discoverers of new writers, there’s an engaging first published fiction by Maury Feinsilber.
Did you know it was possible for an English grad student to make $60K without working? Todd James Pierce writes about his very lucrative former career hunting bonus money from online gambling casinos. And Jillian Weise offers playful poems that take some chances with language–and one poem written in a motel room at the height of a scary incident that threatened her life. There’s a back-to-school review essay on academic satires by Charles Green. We even have celebrities: Charles Darwin makes an appearance in William Lychack’s short-short, and Carl Adamshick’s long historical poem features the voice of Amelia Earhart.
We’ve always been about quality and variety, and this issue proves it once again. Look for it next month.
Tags: Commentaries
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, apparently of heart failure, at age 89. When I saw the news last night and mentioned it to my husband, he said it was incredible that the author had lived so long, given that the average Russian lifespan must be shorter than ours (I looked it up; it’s about 67) and that Solzhenitsyn had endured harsh labor-camp conditions for so many years of his early life and survived cancer in his thirties. Almost miraculous that he’d lived so long, but it is even more incredible that out of the happenstance of being arrested and sentenced for writing a letter containing a few negative remarks about Stalin, a man who had not initially trained in the field of literature was launched into a career that would culminate in his Nobel Prize for literature. In between the arrest and the novels were years of forced labor—the experience that compelled him to write.
I’m ashamed to say that his short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is the only novel by Solzhenitsyn that I’ve read in its entirety. In the seventies, after The Gulag Archipelago was published in this country, I read substantial portions of that work and later a bit of The Cancer Ward. I was old enough to be interested but too young and self-absorbed for the things he was writing about to seem quite real or important to me, though I knew they ought to seem important. Moral vision is not something teenagers look for in their reading material. For whatever reason, after I got old enough to want it, I never went back and read either book. Maybe now I will.
Both those books—Gulag and Cancer Ward—were on my parents’ family room bookshelves. Book club editions? Probably. Or maybe they had been recommended by friends, or my dad had read reviews of them. My family was a reading and book-buying family but not necessarily a literary one, and there was a lot of forgettable popular fiction on those shelves, along with other, stronger works that have lasted.
It gives one hope, doesn’t it? Solzhenitsyn’s death will not dominate the popular media the way celebrities do, but at the height of the Cold War his name and vision dominated the literary scene, and his importance as a chronicler of totalitarianism will not evaporate with his death.
Tags: Commentaries
The June issue of Scientific American featured an article by Jessica Wapner, ”The Healthy Type,” (reprinted online as “Blogging–It’s Good for You,” describing recent research on the potential physiological benefits of blogging. Neuroscientists, psychologists and other medical researchers theorize that since expressive writing has been demonstrated to improve people’s health (it makes you sleep better, boosts the immune system, helps cancer patients feel better and even accelerates healing after surgery), blogging may be similarly good for you.
To my mind this falls into that category of “stuff we all knew without knowing we knew it.” It makes perfect sense: something bad happens to you–disaster or illness, whatever–you want to write about it. And having written about it, you feel better. And if you feel better, you probably will be better. Can most of us explain the medical science? No, but we can all cite examples of people coping or healing through writing. Everyone knows some eccentric case on the periphery of their life–uncle or aunt, neighbor, coworker–who is a pathetic mess of physical and emotional problems. And who writes. And who, presumably, is able to survive being a misfit in an unforgiving world by doing so. “Normal” people who have bad things happen to them also recover or heal by writing. The crisis memoir is a legitimate subgenre, as is the memoir of illness. Now we have the blog, which in its most intimate and personal manifestation allows the writer to engage in repeated and public catharsis of whatever is bugging or ailing them almost up to the minute. Why shouldn’t such public displays be as healthy as the journal you kept in a composition notebook when you were going through that particularly stressed-out period?
Not to downplay the health benefits of blogging for people who are gravely ill, but having recently returned to a novel after a long hiatus, during which I was raising (still am) three intense, gifted, incredibly difficult children, I am aware that a lot of what I’m doing under the guise of “art” is really just exhibitionist venting. Here’s a strange thing, though: I’m not embarrassed about it. “Writing is basically just complaining on paper,” I told my twelve-year-old last week. She looked surprised. I’ve been getting up early in the mornings to write, defending my right to the computer on weekends. She thought I was doing something serious. Now here I am telling her that I’m just airing grievances that I hope to eventually put out there for people’s consumption. It probably didn’t sound too much different to her than blogging–which of course doesn’t impress her because the whole world blogs.
I’m not embarrassed about my textual whining because it actually is helping me to blow off the onslaught of negativity that one must deal with day to day. If this were a personal blog, you’d be hearing the sordid details. But it’s not, and, good-for-me though that type of blogging might be, it’s more of a challenge, I think, to take all the specific instances of small-mindedness, oversight, dimness, cruelty, injustice, etc. that bother one and transpose them into invented elements: the engine of a story.
Is it healthy? Who cares? It’s a lot more interesting.
Tags: Commentaries
A few days ago, a news story out of Australia reported that pop songs have replaced hymns at funerals. One of the most popular songs is Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” a choice that made me wonder whether the people who selected it had in fact followed their bliss or sadly wished that they had. Or perhaps Frank Sinatra’s beloved in-your-face boast is simply the anthem of the self reliant GI generation that’s beginning to die off.
My stepfather picked the song for his funeral even though his life had been one of obligation to family and work. Like many men of the post–war generation, he deferred his needs for others. He had made a few bold moves in his life but ultimately died feeling, in his words, “as if he had missed the boat.” Knowing this, the song made me wish that he had been less self-denying, though by putting himself first my own life would have been considerably less comfortable.
Remember the opening scene from The Big Chill? At the end of a traditional service in an austere church, JoBeth Williams’ character takes her place at the organ to play the deceased’s favorite song. When the opening notes of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” fill the small sanctuary, his friends knowingly smile to themselves; the song about optimism and disillusionment capture the struggles of a life that has just ended in suicide.
As the church organ fades, an acoustic guitar and Mick Jagger’s raspy staccato vocals take over. His singing accompanies the funeral procession as it passes through a rural South Carolina landscape. The iconic scene of a group of Baby Boomers burying one of their own not only made pop songs funeral appropriate but also made selecting the perfect one paramount. Ever since, song has trumped sermon, casket and burial garb.
All week, while at the gym listening to my iPod, I’ve thought about my perfect funeral pop song. When I was a kid I loved Judy Garland and owned her albums, read every biography and ate off of Wizard of Oz limited-edition collector’s plates. But “Somewhere over the Rainbow” ranks up there with “My Way” in terms of popularity. You don’t want your last impression to be a cliché.
More difficult than selecting a funeral song is picking one for a political campaign. While Bill Clinton seemed to have gotten it right with Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” so many of them get it horribly wrong. In 2000 George W. Bush tried to use Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” Petty was not amused and threatened to sue. Apparently his feelings for Bush are akin to the Dixie Chicks’. John Mellencamp had a similar reaction when McCain tried to use “Our Country.” McCain must have missed the fact that Mellencamp was stumping for Obama in Indiana.
When Hillary let her supporters pick her song, they chose Celine Dion’s “You and I.” Toward the end of the primary as the media began their “death watch” and her former competition and political friends scurried on the Obama bandwagon, Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” seemed more appropriate.
Barack Obama might consider David Bowie’s “Changes.” Not because his campaign slogan and lately some of his policy opinions are as grand and amorphous as Bowie’s sexuality but because he has seemingly overnight transformed himself from a wide-eyed, anti-establishment idealist into a dour, standard-issue politician finger wagging at The New Yorker for their satirical antics.
If I were picking a ditty for McCain, I’d tweak the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Enough said.
Political campaigns aside, this is a long winded way of saying that after much thought, I’ve found my song—The Church’s "Under the Milky Way."
So now I’ve told you mine. What’s yours?
Tags: Commentaries
If you’re a skeptic in need of a reason to pick up our summer issue - and why not a subscription, while you’re at it? - trust me when I say just one word: “Bearskin.”
James A. McLaughlin’s novella is, simply put, a great story. A great, naturalistic, suspenseful story, complete with bees, a wizened mushroom hunter, vultures circling overhead, ATVs, guns held on hips, Forest Service employees running drugs and, of course, bears.
Not only is “Bearskin” a great story; it’s great in the most delightful way: it is less an intellectual exercise than a sensory experience. This is not to say it’s not a smart story, because it most definitely is. But here the intelligence does not flaunt itself metafictionally, instead manifesting in the traditional elements of plot, characterization and vivid description of setting.
The latter is my favorite aspect and is especially well-rendered, engaging all the senses, sometimes in a single sentence. I found myself completely immersed in the muggy Virginia heat in which the protagonist toils as a caretaker for a private nature preserve. What a great summer read! Near the air conditioner, I got all the feeling of the season without the pesky heat rash and bee stings.
Pick up a copy of TMR and let us know what you think about “Bearskin.” I’ll eat my Mac if you don’t like it. Seriously.
Tags: Commentaries
As a grad student intern at The Missouri Review, one of my duties besides reading manuscripts is to blog. But what? After a few false starts it finally hit me: keep it simple, stupid. Write what you know, or at least what you’re learning. Blog the day-to-day at TMR. Blog the bundle.
Now I imagine this endeavor could get boring, but I think it will serve at least one useful end: to demystify what goes on at McReynolds Hall, the place where many thousands of manila envelopes are delivered each year. Perhaps one is yours. This summer I will bike to McReynolds every Tuesday afternoon to meet with the other students enrolled in “Internship in Publishing” and then again on Wednesday to put in my office hours.
The first place we interns learned about was the mailroom, number 357 of a nondescript brick building on the northwestern edge of campus. Submissions to the magazine are delivered here and sorted by genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry). They are then logged into the computer and bundled with rubber bands into groups of ten. A packing list is included with each bundle of submissions. The intern/reader writes a brief note about each manuscript on this sheet of paper. More lengthy critique can also be written on the submission’s envelope. At any time In the mailroom there are stacks and stacks of bundles piled a foot high and sometimes six feet long. Scores of bundles, hundreds of submissions, all waiting to be read. When a bundle is checked out by a reader, he/she makes a copy of the packing list, signs it, and drops it into a bin. This indicates he/she has taken possession of the bundle.
You’re probably thinking this all sounds very bureaucratic and inartistic. I agree, but I guess banal systems are the only way to deal with mounds and mounds of paper without fast becoming overwhelmed. The eureka moment requires a lot of patient sifting - probably why they call it the “slush pile.” When a reader finds a good story, essay, or poem, he/she passes it off to another reader for a second opinion. This process continues until either a consensus is reached that the piece isn’t up to par or until it’s passed up the editorial chain to the senior editor, Speer Morgan, who has ultimate say over everything we publish. One of the goals of TMR is to discover new writers, and we do read everything you send us, whether or not you have an agent or a beefy list of publishing credits to your name.
But don’t fret too much if you get a rejection letter. We receive so many submissions, even superior pieces are bound to get rejected. I know this is easy for me as an intern to say; as a writer, I know the feeling of rejection, like someone has looked into my soul and said, “No thanks.” It’s really not that bad, though. Think of it more like a lottery. The stronger your writing, the more tickets you have, but your odds of winning are never going to be great. At any rate, you can’t catch a fish if your hook ain’t in the water.
That’s what I like about my work here so far: the off-hand chance that the next story I pull from a bundle will be an undiscovered gem, a new classic. The process makes me feel like a prospector. The bundle becomes my claim, my mountain stream, my sluiceful of ore. Send us some gold, people.
Tags: Commentaries
During an early scene in Roberto Rossellini’s 1953 film Voyage to Italy, Katherine Joyce sits in a canvas sling chair on a sundrenched veranda, eyes obscured behind stylish shades. Tempestuous Mt. Vesuvius looms in the distance as she tells her remote, work driven English husband Alex (George Sanders) about Charles Lewington, a former lover and poet who died two years before. The stark, romantic landscape evokes memories of Charles, though Katherine’s sad, rapturous voice suggests that his ghost has been with her all along.
“We got on terribly well together,” she says and then goes on to describe how the weak, frail man braved a high fever to be with her.
Her husband, languid and blasé, calls her dead lover a fool.
Rossellini re-tailors Gretta’s mournful reverie from the close of “The Dead” to suit Katherine’s sophistication and Europe’s post-war ennui. Still there are so many echoes that it stirs one’s passion for Joyce’s classic short story.
Katherine’s confession further irritates the couple’s troubles as does her spiritual pilgrimage to find Charles’ presence in the locations of his poetry. What if Gretta had had gone back to Galway in search of Michael Furey?
Gabriel transcends his jealousy to empathize with his wife’s loss, while Alex remains resentful and bitter. In the end, Rossellini reunites his couple during a scene so sudden and abbreviated that the viewer is left nervously off-balance while Joyce’s reader is awed by his hypnotic closing intimation of universal mortality.
Voyage to Italy’s themes, the miscomprehension that can happen between couples and the continued presence of the dead among the living, takes the reader back to the original text as does a much truer adaptation, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).
In the hands of an artist, literary borrowing is an exciting, creative endeavor. Updike was able to retell Hamlet from Gertrude’s and Claudius’ points of view. (In Updike’s tale, Hamlet is what my students would call a “girl-pants wearing emo boy” whose pathological recklessness leads to the downfall of the kingdom.). In Kate Moses’ Wintering , the last days of Sylvia Plath’s life are creatively imagined as she struggled in a cramped flat with two young children, her husband’s betrayal and one of London’s worst winters while writing the poems that would make her name. And, of course, Jean Rhys 1966 post colonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the tale of the first Mrs. Rochester, a white Creole woman who is transported from the Caribbean to England only to endure an unhappy marriage.
Tags: Commentaries
In the film adaptation of Brian Morton’s novel Starting Out in the Evening,retired professor Leonard Schiller’s (Frank Langella) monastic life is interrupted when Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious graduate student from Brown, wants to write her senior thesis about him and his out-of-print novels. He’s flattered but politely declines. He’s recently survived a heart attack. Time is precious and the writing is coming slowly. His fifth novel refuses to take shape. The characters, he says, don’t seem to want to do anything interesting.
I was so intrigued by this movie and its depiction of a mid-list writer in the twilight of his career that I showed it to my creative writing students, thinking that they might identify with, or at least admire, Heather’s boldness and tenaciousness as she efficiently bates and nets her prey. Not only does Leonard let her into his home, he also submits to her fierce personal questioning, an affront to his high decorum and his belief in New Formalism.
After an hour, I released the students who had “real” finals to study for and dorm rooms to pack, but I kept the movie playing for the four who stayed.
As Leonard and Heather’s relationship develops into a quirky, fragile May-December romance, one young woman I know to be squeamish about sex started fidgeting in her seat.
She erupted into a loud, barbaric “yuck” when Heather dips her fingers into a jar of honey and touches them to Leonard’s lips.
An argument about the appropriateness of the relationship was ignited. Two of the students were all for it. “It’s mostly just brain sex,” one said.
But all of them felt that Leonard was being manipulated. Though Heather has only published a brief essay on Stanley Elkin in a small literary journal, youth has conferred her with power. The old, too-long-ignored writer is putty in her hands. When he gives her a key to his apartment, my students groaned “oh no,” as if he’d signed his own death warrant.
Heather’s youthful arrogance angered me, too. Over tea, she accuses Leonard of using age as an excuse for not getting on with his work. She also wants to know whether sacrificing his personal life for his art has been worth it; after all, who is reading his books?
I’ve heard that during World War I when military men were given a few days furlough, they found the business-as-usual bustle of the Parisian streets befuddling. To them the city seemed untouched by war and they found few who could relate to their experiences on the battlefield. Writers feel a similar lack of empathy for what goes in their own private artistic trenches.
Writers are hard on each other. Even worse, they are hard on themselves and seldom feel the pride they deserve for confronting the blank page.
Few people worry themselves with the struggles of the imagination. I was reminded of this when I read Roddy Doyle’s story “The Bullfighter” recently published in The New Yorker. The protagonist is perfectly content with his life of nine-to-five work, wife and children, and weekly drinking buddies. Or perhaps this is simply a writer’s idealized depiction of the easy joy of a life more spectacularly ordinary than his own.
Tags: Commentaries
Lisa K. Buchanan, who was our first runner-up in the voice-only creative non-fiction category of our 2007 Audio Competition, can currently be heard on the KQED’s “The Writers’ Block” reading her winning entry to Opium Magazine’s 2007 “Bookmark Contest” in which authors had to submit a 250-word story that could be printed on a bookmark. You can listen to this episode of “The Writer’s Block” here.
You can also listen to Lisa’s winning entry in our audio competition on our podcast.
Tags: Links · Media · News
I was riding my electric bike through the neighborhood last evening at the quiet hour. No wind, no traffic, no hard pumping up the hills. A few people gardening in their front yards looked up and smiled as I tooled by. And what was I thinking about?
The meaning of the suffix “-ate.” Yes, that’s right. Riding my magic bicycle at the perfect hour of the perfect day of the year, I was thinking not about love, not about vacations, not about the price of real estate, but about suffixes, particularly the one deriving from the Latin that means to cause to happen-expectorate, recreate, congregate, stimulate, cogitate, fornicate, mediate, associate–one could go on forever with the -ates.
What a wonderful thing the mind is. It is as free flowing and unpredictable as the weather. If a hundred experts sat in a room working hard for a week, they could never guess what I was thinking about on my ride. Or if they did, they could certainly never guess both that and what I thought about next. And to guess three successive thoughts? No way, except with the help of Borges’s infinite library.
I think that’s why fiction and poetry are potentially more amazing than every other art form. It’s not a single moment, not a work of static art or of the awkwardness of moving pictures, powerful or not, but an unpredictable process of unfolding which a good story or poem can follow with the ease and naturalness of the miraculous weather of the mind.
Tags: Commentaries
