Friday, February 03, 2012
Akathisia
Not online (I will link to it directly if it goes up later on), but my review of Sarah Manguso's The Guardians can be found in the current issue of Bookforum.
The black cat club
This might be the best thing I ever saw in my life!
My cold is on the mend, after three nights of sleeping for about 12 hours a pop. Light reading around the edges: the first and second installments of Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, because young-adult fantasy is by far the best genre to read when ill; before that, Arne Dahl's Misterioso which I enjoyed quite a bit but found very odd in a way that could not clearly be attributed to translator or to original author but that puzzled me considerably (weird switches in POV, slightly surreal transitions, etc. - I wasn't convinced that they were deliberate); and Joshilyn Jackson's excellent A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. It really speaks to an injustice in the reviewing/prestige market in our country that Jackson's books aren't getting full-page treatment in the NYTBR....
My cold is on the mend, after three nights of sleeping for about 12 hours a pop. Light reading around the edges: the first and second installments of Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, because young-adult fantasy is by far the best genre to read when ill; before that, Arne Dahl's Misterioso which I enjoyed quite a bit but found very odd in a way that could not clearly be attributed to translator or to original author but that puzzled me considerably (weird switches in POV, slightly surreal transitions, etc. - I wasn't convinced that they were deliberate); and Joshilyn Jackson's excellent A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. It really speaks to an injustice in the reviewing/prestige market in our country that Jackson's books aren't getting full-page treatment in the NYTBR....
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Going underwater
Sheila Heti interviews Joan Didion for the Believer. (And I hesitate to link to it, since I think much of it is preposterous, but I did find that Caitlin Flanagan's piece on Didion in the Atlantic held my attention....)
The Flatt Prize will award $1000 to the winner of its short-story competition.
I have a minor but unpleasant cold; hoping to make a bit of headway this afternoon with the second half of the novel revisions (I sent a new version of the first half to my editor on Tuesday, which was good). February is going to be a demanding month, and so is March, and April always is because of structural things about the shape of the school year, so I am endeavoring to push hard but also to pace myself for what is essentially an ongoing challenge that runs through the middle of May!
The Flatt Prize will award $1000 to the winner of its short-story competition.
I have a minor but unpleasant cold; hoping to make a bit of headway this afternoon with the second half of the novel revisions (I sent a new version of the first half to my editor on Tuesday, which was good). February is going to be a demanding month, and so is March, and April always is because of structural things about the shape of the school year, so I am endeavoring to push hard but also to pace myself for what is essentially an ongoing challenge that runs through the middle of May!
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Better late than never
Colleen Mondor's blog Chasing Ray has been a pleasure of mine for many years now, and Colleen herself a wonderful correspondent and internet friend. Her book The Map of My Dead Pilots, about the years she spent working in the aviation business in Alaska, came out several months ago, but I'm only just catching up with it here. In the end I asked Colleen a single question, and she was kind enough to give a very rich and full answer....
JMD: I read The
Map of My Dead Pilots in a few sittings at the end of
December, and it’s stayed very much with me in subsequent
weeks. I loved the piece you wrote for John Scalzi's Big Idea column about what it means to write a
story about real things that happened to real people;
I’ve
been interested in this question for a long time, and I think
your discussion there would be of particular interest to a
writer in the early stages of a project where it hadn’t yet
emerged whether the book was going to be written as fiction or
nonfiction (the sort of question one might ask in a creative
writing class where one read Tim O’Brien, Mary Karr, etc.). I wanted to ask you a quite different
question, though. I was struck and
moved, as I read the book, by how much it turns out to be a
book about your father. Did you know,
when you started writing about flying in Alaska, that this
would be such an important component of the book in its final
version? Or was it largely a surprise?
CM: Honestly, when I started writing I never intended to write anything
other than Alaska stories. The first one I wrote was about the pilot
who crashed on the ice off the coast of Nome. I had interviewed him
when I was in grad school and that accident impressed me a great
deal - it was so close to being a national tragedy. That was what I
thought the book would be about though, the guys I knew, the
accidents and incidents I was familiar with and what day to day life
at the Company was like.
The turning point came when I wrote about the summer of 1999. Several of my friends were aware I was writing the book and over the years they had asked why I still thought about it all so very much. We have all moved on in many ways (if not physically from AK then professionally and personally with new jobs and children, etc.) and yet for me there is much about the Company that remains very close. I couldn't explain why though until I sat down to write about the day at the bar when I interviewed the pilot who had known my friend "Luke" and was there when he crashed into the mountain while chasing wolves. I wanted to write about our conversation because it was so surreal and it tied directly into my ongoing struggle to absolve Luke of all blame in that accident. But I couldn't write honestly about that summer without explaining what I was going through and that meant writing also about Bryce, the Company pilot who died in the Yukon River in June of '99. And writing about Bryce's death meant writing about where I was when I heard and that was in Florida where I was preparing for my own father's funeral.
Just like that, in careful precise steps, my father entered the story. The chapter radically changed from what I had planned although Luke remained a big part of it. Ultimately though, in writing about that summer I came to understand just how my father, who never visited Alaska, was nevertheless critical to my Alaska experiences. The summer of 1999 is always, and always will be, all about losing him and because of that everyone else who was part of it - Bryce and Luke and all the interviews with all the pilots I did that summer for my thesis - are part of his death as well. And the grief that my brother and I felt so strongly then has not diminished over the years. Thus it will always be the summer of just five minutes ago and all of those young men will be with me in a way that I never expected nor could ever have imagined.
MAP was supposed to be about flying in Alaska but it became a book about why stories matter and how, in that particular place and time, stories took on an unexpected power. My brother and I tell our children stories about our father all the time; they are the only way we have now to make him real for them. We are trying to make a man they never had the chance to know still be unforgettable. It is, we believe, nothing less than what he deserves. I really and truly did not want to write about my father - I thought it would hurt too much - but in a lot of unexpected ways, writing about him in MAP was the best thing I could have done. And thus when I went back to the Company and stood on the now empty ramp, I understood why all of it meant so much. When I was at the Company - when we were all there - my father was alive and well in Florida. It's a snapshot in time I would give anything to have back, for obvious reasons. Just like that, a book on Alaska flying becomes just as much a book about mourning a parent. Writers, I learned, do not write (or live) in a vacuum nor are Alaska and Florida really that far apart.
I set out to write only about Alaska flying and ended up writing also about the beach in Florida. The connection is obvious to me now but it wasn't until I wrote it that I knew it existed. Isn't that crazy?
The turning point came when I wrote about the summer of 1999. Several of my friends were aware I was writing the book and over the years they had asked why I still thought about it all so very much. We have all moved on in many ways (if not physically from AK then professionally and personally with new jobs and children, etc.) and yet for me there is much about the Company that remains very close. I couldn't explain why though until I sat down to write about the day at the bar when I interviewed the pilot who had known my friend "Luke" and was there when he crashed into the mountain while chasing wolves. I wanted to write about our conversation because it was so surreal and it tied directly into my ongoing struggle to absolve Luke of all blame in that accident. But I couldn't write honestly about that summer without explaining what I was going through and that meant writing also about Bryce, the Company pilot who died in the Yukon River in June of '99. And writing about Bryce's death meant writing about where I was when I heard and that was in Florida where I was preparing for my own father's funeral.
Just like that, in careful precise steps, my father entered the story. The chapter radically changed from what I had planned although Luke remained a big part of it. Ultimately though, in writing about that summer I came to understand just how my father, who never visited Alaska, was nevertheless critical to my Alaska experiences. The summer of 1999 is always, and always will be, all about losing him and because of that everyone else who was part of it - Bryce and Luke and all the interviews with all the pilots I did that summer for my thesis - are part of his death as well. And the grief that my brother and I felt so strongly then has not diminished over the years. Thus it will always be the summer of just five minutes ago and all of those young men will be with me in a way that I never expected nor could ever have imagined.
MAP was supposed to be about flying in Alaska but it became a book about why stories matter and how, in that particular place and time, stories took on an unexpected power. My brother and I tell our children stories about our father all the time; they are the only way we have now to make him real for them. We are trying to make a man they never had the chance to know still be unforgettable. It is, we believe, nothing less than what he deserves. I really and truly did not want to write about my father - I thought it would hurt too much - but in a lot of unexpected ways, writing about him in MAP was the best thing I could have done. And thus when I went back to the Company and stood on the now empty ramp, I understood why all of it meant so much. When I was at the Company - when we were all there - my father was alive and well in Florida. It's a snapshot in time I would give anything to have back, for obvious reasons. Just like that, a book on Alaska flying becomes just as much a book about mourning a parent. Writers, I learned, do not write (or live) in a vacuum nor are Alaska and Florida really that far apart.
I set out to write only about Alaska flying and ended up writing also about the beach in Florida. The connection is obvious to me now but it wasn't until I wrote it that I knew it existed. Isn't that crazy?
Friday, January 27, 2012
End-of-week update
These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.
I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long! He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in. You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .
(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)
The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time. However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...
Miscellaneous links:
Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.
And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!
I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long! He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in. You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .
(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)
The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time. However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...
Miscellaneous links:
Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.
And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Commitment strategies
I'm now full of regret that I didn't push harder on novel revisions over the winter break, as it is indeed very difficult to get work done steadily once the semester starts and with the additional commitment to a demanding fitness regimen! I am trying to remember that I was working as hard as I could manage through a spell of rather low spirits and the accumulated tiredness of the fall semester, but still - this is now exactly the sort of work overload situation that I am trying to avoid in order not to find myself so wiped out in the first place!...
I think I have to be done with this revision before the week of Feb. 13 (that week I've got a book review due, a guest lecture at the New School and a dissertation defense, and I'm giving a talk out of town the following week, so it's pretty much a guarantee of no mental or practical space for my own writing for the whole middle stretch of the month). I want to be able to get one more round of editorial feedback and also let the new draft sit and gel for a few weeks before I come back to it for a good final round of revision over my spring break in March. If I say here that I intend this, it will help make it happen....
I've got a few interesting books to read for additional fillips of research and thinking. Ken Wark kindly sent me a copy of his book Gamer Theory, and I plucked the classic Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational from a shelf in Butler the other evening (it was nearly adjacent to this volume which I could not resist checking out as well, though I am not sure when I'll get around to reading it).
I think I have to be done with this revision before the week of Feb. 13 (that week I've got a book review due, a guest lecture at the New School and a dissertation defense, and I'm giving a talk out of town the following week, so it's pretty much a guarantee of no mental or practical space for my own writing for the whole middle stretch of the month). I want to be able to get one more round of editorial feedback and also let the new draft sit and gel for a few weeks before I come back to it for a good final round of revision over my spring break in March. If I say here that I intend this, it will help make it happen....
I've got a few interesting books to read for additional fillips of research and thinking. Ken Wark kindly sent me a copy of his book Gamer Theory, and I plucked the classic Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational from a shelf in Butler the other evening (it was nearly adjacent to this volume which I could not resist checking out as well, though I am not sure when I'll get around to reading it).
Simulacron-3
World of Wires was great (comic and innovative use of cans of Pringles!), and we had a very good dinner afterwards too at La Lunchonette, which I walk by all the time (it's on my route home from Chelsea Piers to the subway) but which I ate at for the first time only recently when Liz and I needed a place to repair the nutritional inroads of a long workout. I had mentally noted that it would likely appeal to theater companion G., and indeed it was just the right place to go on a snowy January night; we both started with French onion soup, then I had sauteed scallops (at a certain sort of restaurant, this is an entree likely to leave you still hungry, but here it was a copious portion with green beans and a large helping of nutritionally unsound scalloped potatoes) and tarte tatin. G. had the cassoulet, a dish I am not enthusiastic about but that I think so much sums up the virtues of the winter version of this sort of French country cooking that I was very glad someone ordered it!
Friday, January 20, 2012
Air chrysalis
Dennis Lim's Bookforum piece on Haruki Murakami gives a good sense of why 1Q84 was my favorite novel of 2011....
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Mid-week update
The music is nothing to write home about, but I will link to it anyway because the best word I learned in fourth grade was dendrochronology... (Via BoingBoing.) This reminds me of my friend Beth Lyman's work on unorthodox play scripts and indeterminacy in scripts and scores.
In other news, I am struck but not really surprised at how many piles of books and papers can accumulate after only one day's teaching....
In other news, I am struck but not really surprised at how many piles of books and papers can accumulate after only one day's teaching....
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
The view from the trenches
Undoubted air of faculty glumness in Philosophy Hall today, the first day of classes!
Those of you who are my 'friends' on Facebook will have already heard me bemoan the fact that Village Copier does not seem to have kept the original master for my History of the Novel I course reader, and as I seem to have had call to say frequently in recent weeks, desperate situations call for desperate remedies: the only thing to do was clean out my office....
(I got tenure two and a half years ago, and it was thus in the nature of life timelines that I was given a new office and a new apartment within a matter of weeks. I devoted all my attention to packing and settling in at the new apartment, which is underfurnished but tidy; the new office, on the other hand, pretty much stayed in boxes, so this massive unpacking and cleaning is overdue by at least two years.)
I haven't found the missing master - I think they really must have thrown it away as they said - but I have found the marked-up old lecture notes and two copies of the bound course reader, one with teaching notes in it and one clean one that I can disassemble and use to scan a new master. I think I may experiment for the first time this semester with providing critical readings online rather than in xeroxed form: for a seminar, I hold to the old-school method, because I want students to have a physical copy of the readings in class to look at while we discuss them and because student print quotas and notions of ecological soundness do not encourage generous use of paper, but I think in the lecture course I can afford to try it the other way.
(Have thrown away three or four contractor's bags of paper, mostly printouts of PDFs from ECCO and clean and marked-up drafts of my last academic book. NB I am in need of another massive project like that one: something that will make me scan and engulf a huge new body of material that I'm not already acquainted with. My most recent two book projects - style, BOMH - are both relatively small-scale, something that has disadvantages as well as benefits. Also NB if you leave papers in boxes for a pretty long time, they become very easy to throw away once they are opened back up again....)
Not much to report otherwise. Still ploughing through the novels of George R. R. Martin, which really are not enough to my taste (too much lopping and cropping, stylistic infelicities, switching back and forth between multiple viewpoint characters frustrating - I would rather have a whole novel following one character, then a whole novel following the other) but which are making the time pass.
Those of you who are my 'friends' on Facebook will have already heard me bemoan the fact that Village Copier does not seem to have kept the original master for my History of the Novel I course reader, and as I seem to have had call to say frequently in recent weeks, desperate situations call for desperate remedies: the only thing to do was clean out my office....
(I got tenure two and a half years ago, and it was thus in the nature of life timelines that I was given a new office and a new apartment within a matter of weeks. I devoted all my attention to packing and settling in at the new apartment, which is underfurnished but tidy; the new office, on the other hand, pretty much stayed in boxes, so this massive unpacking and cleaning is overdue by at least two years.)
I haven't found the missing master - I think they really must have thrown it away as they said - but I have found the marked-up old lecture notes and two copies of the bound course reader, one with teaching notes in it and one clean one that I can disassemble and use to scan a new master. I think I may experiment for the first time this semester with providing critical readings online rather than in xeroxed form: for a seminar, I hold to the old-school method, because I want students to have a physical copy of the readings in class to look at while we discuss them and because student print quotas and notions of ecological soundness do not encourage generous use of paper, but I think in the lecture course I can afford to try it the other way.
(Have thrown away three or four contractor's bags of paper, mostly printouts of PDFs from ECCO and clean and marked-up drafts of my last academic book. NB I am in need of another massive project like that one: something that will make me scan and engulf a huge new body of material that I'm not already acquainted with. My most recent two book projects - style, BOMH - are both relatively small-scale, something that has disadvantages as well as benefits. Also NB if you leave papers in boxes for a pretty long time, they become very easy to throw away once they are opened back up again....)
Not much to report otherwise. Still ploughing through the novels of George R. R. Martin, which really are not enough to my taste (too much lopping and cropping, stylistic infelicities, switching back and forth between multiple viewpoint characters frustrating - I would rather have a whole novel following one character, then a whole novel following the other) but which are making the time pass.
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