Thursday, February 16, 2006
The last Shelter column
from Toni Schlesinger in the Voice. Thanks to The Dizzies for the link. Her book Five Flights Up (a collection of Shelter columns) will be published in May; I will have more to say about it elsewhere, so content myself for now with observing that if I were teaching a writing class next year, I'd use it as the textbook.
I spent the day
reading Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides With Samuel Johnson for a discussion this evening that was then canceled, leaving me with an unexpected chunk of light reading time. Boswell is rather delightful, though ("I was elated by the thought of having been able to entice such a man to this remote part of the world. A ludicrous, yet just, image presented itself to my mind, which I expressed to the company. I compared myself to a dog who has got hold of a large piece of meat, and runs away with it to a corner, where he may devour it in peace, without any fear of others taking it from him. 'In London, Reynolds, Beauclerk, and all of them, are contending who shall enjoy Dr. Johnson's conversation. We are feasting upon it, undisturbed, at Dunvegan'").
So I had an excursion to the bookstore (about which more shortly, it's a really nice store) and bought some stuff that seemed irresistible but really just ended up coming home and finishing a library book I had begun the night before, The Burning Girl by Mark Billingham. This book is of a kind I like but don't love--a very dark London police procedural series, of the mainstream rather than whacked-out indie kind (of course I secretly prefer the latter, I can't explain the difference other than to say you know it when you see it, the bestseller kind can be very good too but it is constrained by rules of decorum both stylistic and violence-wise and the indie ones aren't)--but I was marvelling throughout at what a good writer Billingham is. Really, really excellent writing here. I thought this was up to the standard of the very best few of Michael Connelly's Bosch books, in a similar vein only darker.
I have been smitten with Billingham's writing ever since I got his first one (I am 95% sure it was one of those 3-for-2 specials in the WH Smith shop at Kings Cross where I often drop in en route to the British Library, I remember at any rate reading it with dropped jaw & general enthrallment). It's a great book, but more particularly it's set in lots of parts of north London I know especially well. I think it's that one (or possibly the next one) that features multiple scenes in a place I know and hate, the Whittington Hospital just up the hill from the Archway tube station. My grandmother spent a lot of time there, it's got a Dickensian workhouse sort of Gustave Dore-type feel; I am sure the staff are all very good, but it is a chaotic and Kafkaesque place (I remember once racing round the hospital--it really could take you half an hour from one end or another--trying to find my grandmother, she was no longer where I had last seen her and not on the ward they subsequently sent me to and I was of course secretly convinced she had died and been whisked away elsewhere and when I finally found her--really perfectly OK--visiting hours were almost over and I could only stay for a few minutes...). And Billingham particularly well brings to life those seedier elements of the Kentish Town-Archway-Finsbury Park nexus. Book-biz readers will be interested to know that a number of important scenes in this one happen only minutes away from the Serpent's Tail offices.
So I had an excursion to the bookstore (about which more shortly, it's a really nice store) and bought some stuff that seemed irresistible but really just ended up coming home and finishing a library book I had begun the night before, The Burning Girl by Mark Billingham. This book is of a kind I like but don't love--a very dark London police procedural series, of the mainstream rather than whacked-out indie kind (of course I secretly prefer the latter, I can't explain the difference other than to say you know it when you see it, the bestseller kind can be very good too but it is constrained by rules of decorum both stylistic and violence-wise and the indie ones aren't)--but I was marvelling throughout at what a good writer Billingham is. Really, really excellent writing here. I thought this was up to the standard of the very best few of Michael Connelly's Bosch books, in a similar vein only darker.
I have been smitten with Billingham's writing ever since I got his first one (I am 95% sure it was one of those 3-for-2 specials in the WH Smith shop at Kings Cross where I often drop in en route to the British Library, I remember at any rate reading it with dropped jaw & general enthrallment). It's a great book, but more particularly it's set in lots of parts of north London I know especially well. I think it's that one (or possibly the next one) that features multiple scenes in a place I know and hate, the Whittington Hospital just up the hill from the Archway tube station. My grandmother spent a lot of time there, it's got a Dickensian workhouse sort of Gustave Dore-type feel; I am sure the staff are all very good, but it is a chaotic and Kafkaesque place (I remember once racing round the hospital--it really could take you half an hour from one end or another--trying to find my grandmother, she was no longer where I had last seen her and not on the ward they subsequently sent me to and I was of course secretly convinced she had died and been whisked away elsewhere and when I finally found her--really perfectly OK--visiting hours were almost over and I could only stay for a few minutes...). And Billingham particularly well brings to life those seedier elements of the Kentish Town-Archway-Finsbury Park nexus. Book-biz readers will be interested to know that a number of important scenes in this one happen only minutes away from the Serpent's Tail offices.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
A funny and rather appealingly bizarre essay
by William Leith in the Observer, on abs, the Atkins diet and relations between the sexes.
Larkin tapes discovered
The story's in the Guardian: "The tapes date to the early 1980s, when Larkin had lived in Hull for about 30 years. Born in Coventry, he retained an accentless 'received pronunciation' voice, with no trace of the broad Yorkshire vowels."
There really is something uncanny about the fact that we can listen to the voices of the dead.
There really is something uncanny about the fact that we can listen to the voices of the dead.
My heart was hardening
for the first half or so of Stephen Booth's The Dead Place; I read all of Booth's mystery novels in a fit of great enthusiasm a few years ago (before I was blogging I think), liked the characters and the high-quality writing and the good Derbyshire landscape stuff & recommended them to various friends including M. who recently loaned me this one. But somehow it didn't win me over at first--I found myself wondering whether it's weaker than the others, or if my tastes have changed & I wouldn't like the earlier ones now either, or if perhaps I have just hardened my heart in general against series crime fiction (like Tod Goldberg).
Two minor details symptomatic of my irritation, each given twice rather than once which drew my ire:
(1) "personal stereo." Yes, this book is written in fairly impersonal third-person narration, with two point-of-view characters we alternate between. But in this case (and of course there are always exceptions, this is just the basic rule) the language needs to be fairly close to the way the characters are perceiving things, and both of these two are, say, latish twenties or early thirties. "Personal stereo"--ah, that's completely out of date! Maybe it was once standard usage in England, surely it never was in America (you always would say walkman or discman even if it was the off-brand), and now wouldn't you say iPod or MP3 player or whatever? It is the way an older person might speak of something completely foreign to him, it is hardly the phrase a 28-year-old English cop uses to name/conceptualize the thing the teenager's got on his head or whatever. Dowdy.
(2) I am admittedly a hyphenation freak, I love hyphens and have inflexible theories as to how they should be used, but not only is the phrase fine-tooth comb a cliche, it should NEVER be given (especially not TWICE!) as "fine tooth-comb." That shows someone just not attending to the meaning of words.
And there are a few other continuity glitches of a kind that particularly annoy me (a woman's wearing jeans on one page, corduroys on the next, that sort of thing).
However I found the second half more gripping than the first, so perhaps it really was just my mood? Or perhaps the second half is a return to original form. We will never know, but other opinions on Booth are welcomed in the comments.
Two minor details symptomatic of my irritation, each given twice rather than once which drew my ire:
(1) "personal stereo." Yes, this book is written in fairly impersonal third-person narration, with two point-of-view characters we alternate between. But in this case (and of course there are always exceptions, this is just the basic rule) the language needs to be fairly close to the way the characters are perceiving things, and both of these two are, say, latish twenties or early thirties. "Personal stereo"--ah, that's completely out of date! Maybe it was once standard usage in England, surely it never was in America (you always would say walkman or discman even if it was the off-brand), and now wouldn't you say iPod or MP3 player or whatever? It is the way an older person might speak of something completely foreign to him, it is hardly the phrase a 28-year-old English cop uses to name/conceptualize the thing the teenager's got on his head or whatever. Dowdy.
(2) I am admittedly a hyphenation freak, I love hyphens and have inflexible theories as to how they should be used, but not only is the phrase fine-tooth comb a cliche, it should NEVER be given (especially not TWICE!) as "fine tooth-comb." That shows someone just not attending to the meaning of words.
And there are a few other continuity glitches of a kind that particularly annoy me (a woman's wearing jeans on one page, corduroys on the next, that sort of thing).
However I found the second half more gripping than the first, so perhaps it really was just my mood? Or perhaps the second half is a return to original form. We will never know, but other opinions on Booth are welcomed in the comments.
Monday, February 13, 2006
A fascinating table
of details about what various (romance) publishers pay, Show Me the Money! at Brenda Hiatt's site. (Thanks to Gwenda for the link.)
I have strong opinions
and this is a vice as well as a virtue; I had decided of this book (as I have of, oh, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas--though I keep on having second thoughts about that one too and feeling I must read it even if I am sure I won't like it) that it wasn't the kind of thing I would enjoy, these very cerebral-sounding novels never produce rabid drooling book-desire in me. And yet there I was in the bookstore & I idly picked this up and as soon as I saw how it actually looked and read the first few sentences I was absolutely hooked.
The book is Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman, and I completely loved it. It is a page-turner/novel-of-ideas hybrid and really highly readable and not nearly as pretentious as the title led me to imagine. (It's not the title I would have picked, especially as I'm not sure it's really apt either, for the reason sketched out below.) Here's Tyler Cabot's review for Esquire (via Powell's Review-a-Day, here's Keith Gessen absolutely hating it in New York Magazine, here are Daphne Merkin loving it in the Times and Kate Kellaway loving it even more in the Observer.
So I found the book pretty gripping, and it also gave me that great buzzing-in-the-back-of-the-head feeling I get when I read certain things (a little voice that's saying "oh, cool, i can't believe he did that this way, i bet i could do something sort of like that but even better--what if...." even as you're also completely immersed in the narrative). But almost everything I have the urge to say about the book is a criticism or cavil! I urge you to buy and read it if you like long philosophical thrillers at all. My reservations should not stop you, it really is an excellent book.
First off, things you might want to know as context for my list of complaints. (Not too many spoilers, I hope.) Seven sections narrated by seven different characters. Main story concerns Simon--obsessed ex-boyfriend of Anna, who is now married to Joe--kidnapping Anna and Joe's son Sam. Narrators (in some cases it's mainly transcriptions of conversations between the particular character and the shrink, etc., and in each case the addressee matters almost as much as the speaker): Alex Klima, Simon's psychiatrist and a central player in events (the "you" voice in which he addresses Simon in the opening chapters is particularly sinister and striking, I believe a version of this was published in Granta); thuggish stockbroker Joe; prostitute 'Angelique', farfetchedly (a) obsessed with Simon (b) sleeping with Joe for money (c) diagnosed with MS and (d) later love object of ....; Dennis Mitchell aka Mitch, a stock analyst who works with Joe; Simon himself; Anna; and Dr. Klima's grown-up daughter, who is in love with Sam.
1. I do not see why all these reviewers trumpet the Rashomon aspect! Frankly, these characters all understand things more or less the same way. We're not getting any of the thing that, say, Susan Howatch does so well, with interlocking perspectives that can't be reduced to a single narrative. (Howatch is better known in the UK than the US, deeply unfashionable I think for her Christianity, but really a superb novelist of character and point-of-view. Just an aside.) In any case, here it is always fairly clear what happened, and (see title for this post) I had no trouble deciding who was right and who was wrong and losing patience with the "oh, but those actions are justifiable if we approach them from another point of view" thing.
2. The voices also all really do sound pretty much the same; this wasn't a stumbling-block for me, for various reasons that have to do with Perlman's intelligence & unobtrusive prose style & the general satisfyingness of the book. It's more painful when it comes to the female characters, though; I thought he'd have been better off sticking with male voices.
3. Which leads me to my central objection. I absolutely hated Simon, and I found Alex almost equally offputting. Simon in particular comes across as creepy, unintelligent, self-satisfied, controlling, in short absolutely horrible. It is another one of these books where we are told of a character's charm (like Zadie Smith's Howard Belsey) without seeing it. It is true, I particularly hate this type of guy, and in that sense am not the ideal reader for book. But I couldn't stop wondering whether any of this ambiguity was calculated or whether really the text had spun out of Perlman's control. I feared the latter, obviously it is fruitless to speculate but I can't say I thought that Perlman would be very happy to hear what I thought of his dear Simon. The book also seems to let Simon completely off the hook. The man is a STALKER. And a KIDNAPPER. It seems absolutely implausible to me that Anna would not be ready to KILL him after that. (Anomalously confessional aside: I found myself at the receiving end of stalking-type behavior at one point and it was certainly the most unpleasant experience of my adult life, uniquely unpleasant in ways you cannot begin to imagine unless it has happened to you. So this seemed personal to me, this novel's failure to reckon with the creepiness of men stalking women in the manner of Simon's fixation on Anna.) I am not a huge fan of Ian McEwan's, but I thought Enduring Love really was an excellent depiction--much more psychologically plausible--of stalking from the point of view of the stalkee (in that case male on male); this novel has something of the feel of Enduring Love, only much larger in scale.
4. Just to give a more general example of the awfulness of these two guys (so smug in their liberal-humanist anti-market-critique self-satisfiedness, their conviction that having good taste and reading William Empson and Allan Ginsberg and such makes up for completely nightmarish behavior in every other respect & feel a messianic urge to educate beautiful lower-middle-class young women & inculcate these tastes in them in ways that make them painfully insecure), I especially hated the scene where Alex and Simon talk about Empson and Derrida and deconstruction. This is obtuse, not intelligent; it reproduces a particularly annoying version of the liberal-humanist argument against deconstruction in a way that makes me actually hate both of these characters.
5. Perlman's writing strongly reminds me of George Eliot, for better and for worse. This novel would be readable by a nineteenth-century novelist even though the techniques (the multiple narrators, etc.) would be unfamiliar. It's got a grand social critique going, a sometimes slightly forced set of connections between the rise of the ideology of the market and a stock-trading plot about managed care that is heavy-handedly integrated with the personal fates of various characters major and minor and while I don't mind that, I'm also not convinced it's the best way to put things together. (I thought of Kurt Andersen's novel Turn of the Century for instance which I really liked but which had a slightly ephemeral or dated quality almost even as it was published.) George Eliot always sounds sort of the same even when she's talking about different characters--no, I'm not a philistine, I do really love George Eliot but there is something a bit deadening about the way her prose sort of plumps up the characters into the same stocky roundness. Perlman has some of this quality. Interesting, striking, stimulating; not perhaps altogether appealing.
I am told I have been blogging too prolifically recently! So will stop here, if you have made it so far. Plus one afterthought below. Don't let all this stop you from getting Perlman's book, though. It really is pretty great. Look how riled up it got me....
(I haven't read Empson's book of the same name since graduate school, but I did reread the appealingly titled Some Versions of Pastoral a few years ago and had the disconcerting experience of finding it not at all the same book I thought I remembered. In short, it is written in an idiolect so peculiar as to be almost surreal; while reading you are fully persuaded of its brilliance, and yet I found its insights exceptionally un-portable, which is to say they resisted me using them for my fell purposes which are of course altogether different from Empson's.)
The book is Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman, and I completely loved it. It is a page-turner/novel-of-ideas hybrid and really highly readable and not nearly as pretentious as the title led me to imagine. (It's not the title I would have picked, especially as I'm not sure it's really apt either, for the reason sketched out below.) Here's Tyler Cabot's review for Esquire (via Powell's Review-a-Day, here's Keith Gessen absolutely hating it in New York Magazine, here are Daphne Merkin loving it in the Times and Kate Kellaway loving it even more in the Observer.
So I found the book pretty gripping, and it also gave me that great buzzing-in-the-back-of-the-head feeling I get when I read certain things (a little voice that's saying "oh, cool, i can't believe he did that this way, i bet i could do something sort of like that but even better--what if...." even as you're also completely immersed in the narrative). But almost everything I have the urge to say about the book is a criticism or cavil! I urge you to buy and read it if you like long philosophical thrillers at all. My reservations should not stop you, it really is an excellent book.
First off, things you might want to know as context for my list of complaints. (Not too many spoilers, I hope.) Seven sections narrated by seven different characters. Main story concerns Simon--obsessed ex-boyfriend of Anna, who is now married to Joe--kidnapping Anna and Joe's son Sam. Narrators (in some cases it's mainly transcriptions of conversations between the particular character and the shrink, etc., and in each case the addressee matters almost as much as the speaker): Alex Klima, Simon's psychiatrist and a central player in events (the "you" voice in which he addresses Simon in the opening chapters is particularly sinister and striking, I believe a version of this was published in Granta); thuggish stockbroker Joe; prostitute 'Angelique', farfetchedly (a) obsessed with Simon (b) sleeping with Joe for money (c) diagnosed with MS and (d) later love object of ....; Dennis Mitchell aka Mitch, a stock analyst who works with Joe; Simon himself; Anna; and Dr. Klima's grown-up daughter, who is in love with Sam.
1. I do not see why all these reviewers trumpet the Rashomon aspect! Frankly, these characters all understand things more or less the same way. We're not getting any of the thing that, say, Susan Howatch does so well, with interlocking perspectives that can't be reduced to a single narrative. (Howatch is better known in the UK than the US, deeply unfashionable I think for her Christianity, but really a superb novelist of character and point-of-view. Just an aside.) In any case, here it is always fairly clear what happened, and (see title for this post) I had no trouble deciding who was right and who was wrong and losing patience with the "oh, but those actions are justifiable if we approach them from another point of view" thing.
2. The voices also all really do sound pretty much the same; this wasn't a stumbling-block for me, for various reasons that have to do with Perlman's intelligence & unobtrusive prose style & the general satisfyingness of the book. It's more painful when it comes to the female characters, though; I thought he'd have been better off sticking with male voices.
3. Which leads me to my central objection. I absolutely hated Simon, and I found Alex almost equally offputting. Simon in particular comes across as creepy, unintelligent, self-satisfied, controlling, in short absolutely horrible. It is another one of these books where we are told of a character's charm (like Zadie Smith's Howard Belsey) without seeing it. It is true, I particularly hate this type of guy, and in that sense am not the ideal reader for book. But I couldn't stop wondering whether any of this ambiguity was calculated or whether really the text had spun out of Perlman's control. I feared the latter, obviously it is fruitless to speculate but I can't say I thought that Perlman would be very happy to hear what I thought of his dear Simon. The book also seems to let Simon completely off the hook. The man is a STALKER. And a KIDNAPPER. It seems absolutely implausible to me that Anna would not be ready to KILL him after that. (Anomalously confessional aside: I found myself at the receiving end of stalking-type behavior at one point and it was certainly the most unpleasant experience of my adult life, uniquely unpleasant in ways you cannot begin to imagine unless it has happened to you. So this seemed personal to me, this novel's failure to reckon with the creepiness of men stalking women in the manner of Simon's fixation on Anna.) I am not a huge fan of Ian McEwan's, but I thought Enduring Love really was an excellent depiction--much more psychologically plausible--of stalking from the point of view of the stalkee (in that case male on male); this novel has something of the feel of Enduring Love, only much larger in scale.
4. Just to give a more general example of the awfulness of these two guys (so smug in their liberal-humanist anti-market-critique self-satisfiedness, their conviction that having good taste and reading William Empson and Allan Ginsberg and such makes up for completely nightmarish behavior in every other respect & feel a messianic urge to educate beautiful lower-middle-class young women & inculcate these tastes in them in ways that make them painfully insecure), I especially hated the scene where Alex and Simon talk about Empson and Derrida and deconstruction. This is obtuse, not intelligent; it reproduces a particularly annoying version of the liberal-humanist argument against deconstruction in a way that makes me actually hate both of these characters.
5. Perlman's writing strongly reminds me of George Eliot, for better and for worse. This novel would be readable by a nineteenth-century novelist even though the techniques (the multiple narrators, etc.) would be unfamiliar. It's got a grand social critique going, a sometimes slightly forced set of connections between the rise of the ideology of the market and a stock-trading plot about managed care that is heavy-handedly integrated with the personal fates of various characters major and minor and while I don't mind that, I'm also not convinced it's the best way to put things together. (I thought of Kurt Andersen's novel Turn of the Century for instance which I really liked but which had a slightly ephemeral or dated quality almost even as it was published.) George Eliot always sounds sort of the same even when she's talking about different characters--no, I'm not a philistine, I do really love George Eliot but there is something a bit deadening about the way her prose sort of plumps up the characters into the same stocky roundness. Perlman has some of this quality. Interesting, striking, stimulating; not perhaps altogether appealing.
I am told I have been blogging too prolifically recently! So will stop here, if you have made it so far. Plus one afterthought below. Don't let all this stop you from getting Perlman's book, though. It really is pretty great. Look how riled up it got me....
(I haven't read Empson's book of the same name since graduate school, but I did reread the appealingly titled Some Versions of Pastoral a few years ago and had the disconcerting experience of finding it not at all the same book I thought I remembered. In short, it is written in an idiolect so peculiar as to be almost surreal; while reading you are fully persuaded of its brilliance, and yet I found its insights exceptionally un-portable, which is to say they resisted me using them for my fell purposes which are of course altogether different from Empson's.)
Sunday, February 12, 2006
I dragged several companions with me
to see Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and while I'm not sure how much either of them liked it, I really loved it: it's fluff, sure, and Sterne's novel isn't at all my favorite of the eighteenth-century biggies, but the adaptation part is delightful and the Steve Coogan-Rob Brydon stuff is absolutely hilarious. (Alice has a better post than this one about the film's charms that includes a segue onto a particularly favorite topic of mine, the Ink and Incapability Blackadder episode, which I always show to the students in my "manners & morals in the 18th century" lecture course as a reward for their having seriously read the preface to Johnson's Dictionary.)
Just got back from an extremely good if in the end rather snowy (but I must have a several-months-moratorium-at-least on complaining about Amtrak, it was true the 7:15am train was delayed by almost 3 hours but I had a ticket on the 10:00am and was able to use it on the earlier-one-that-was-actually-now-leaving-at-the-time-I-expected and got back here around 4:15, very reasonable) few days in NY. Columbia stuff was very good, Rutgers workshop absolutely excellent (what a great place; there must have been eighty people all thrilled to be there to discuss Swift!).
I hit the excellent Barbara's Bestsellers kiosk/mini-store in South Station on the way down, which meant that I was lugging around more books than is really sensible but I enjoyed E. L. Konigsberg's The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place on the train ride down to NY (oh, and I see it is a sort of prequel, can't wait to read the one that came before--I am surely overdue a spending spree in a really good children's bookstore). Konigsberg is basically a total genius, I look back through the list of all her books & think I must have read my favorite four or five of them literally hundreds of times when I was a kid; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler remains the absolute classic (and a reason the name Claudia is a particular favorite of mine), but A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver was another favorite at one point and also About the B'Nai Bagels and most especially Father's Arcane Daughter, a genuinely haunting novel that every mystery writer would do well to read. It's her first-person voices that are really so exceptional, plus the fact that the children in the books are fully plausible (and intelligent) in a way that even many of my most-loved children's and young-adult's fiction can't live up to.
The other novel I got there has mesmerized me in every spare moment between Wednesday afternoon and right now when I've just finished it, and so it deserves its own post (above).
Just got back from an extremely good if in the end rather snowy (but I must have a several-months-moratorium-at-least on complaining about Amtrak, it was true the 7:15am train was delayed by almost 3 hours but I had a ticket on the 10:00am and was able to use it on the earlier-one-that-was-actually-now-leaving-at-the-time-I-expected and got back here around 4:15, very reasonable) few days in NY. Columbia stuff was very good, Rutgers workshop absolutely excellent (what a great place; there must have been eighty people all thrilled to be there to discuss Swift!).
I hit the excellent Barbara's Bestsellers kiosk/mini-store in South Station on the way down, which meant that I was lugging around more books than is really sensible but I enjoyed E. L. Konigsberg's The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place on the train ride down to NY (oh, and I see it is a sort of prequel, can't wait to read the one that came before--I am surely overdue a spending spree in a really good children's bookstore). Konigsberg is basically a total genius, I look back through the list of all her books & think I must have read my favorite four or five of them literally hundreds of times when I was a kid; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler remains the absolute classic (and a reason the name Claudia is a particular favorite of mine), but A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver was another favorite at one point and also About the B'Nai Bagels and most especially Father's Arcane Daughter, a genuinely haunting novel that every mystery writer would do well to read. It's her first-person voices that are really so exceptional, plus the fact that the children in the books are fully plausible (and intelligent) in a way that even many of my most-loved children's and young-adult's fiction can't live up to.
The other novel I got there has mesmerized me in every spare moment between Wednesday afternoon and right now when I've just finished it, and so it deserves its own post (above).
In the TLS
Daniel Karlin has a scathing but very funny (and also rather informative for the would-be historical novelist, these are questions I have thought about many a time...) essay in the TLS on D. J. Taylor's Victorian mystery, no subscription required. It concludes with this sentence: "The real mystery of this 'Victorian mystery' is - as Trollope might have said - Why Did He Do It?" (No sign of this book on US Amazon, I guess it is having UK release only for now?)
I must take issue
with this generally entertaining profile of Ayelet Waldman by Regis Behe: "When Waldman decided to quit her job as a public defender in Los Angeles in order to raise her children -- more evidence that she's not the evil mother as portrayed by her detractors -- she sought another outlet for her talents." So, uh, it is evil for a woman to have children and also a demanding full-time job?!? Some editor should have caught this, how awful.... (Thanks to Sarah for the link.)
More posts to follow later this evening.
More posts to follow later this evening.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Frenzy!
I've been working like a maniac, thus relative lack of posting round here; and I'm off shortly to New York for more work stuff, so no posts till Sunday evening.
Miscellaneous minor announcements:
I'm not sure this is exactly open to the public, but I'm speaking on Thursday evening at 7:30 at a small event sponsored by the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism (511 Philosophy, if you're a Columbia person inclined to stop by). My (half-joke, half-serious) title, whose provenance I will explain at the beginning of the evening: "Living the life of the mind--for sixty hours a week." Autobiography and advice for aspiring writers and critics.
On Friday I'm participating in a workshop at Rutgers (New Brunswick campus) (click on the link for details, it starts at 9:30--I'm actually on the morning panel rather than the afternoon one), open to the public as far as I know, that is a day-long discussion of one of my favorite works of English literature, Swift's Tale of a Tub.
Book recommendation of the week (I'm reviewing this elsewhere, so won't say more, but I am seriously planning on buying at least five copies of this for various people who I think must have it, it's really something exceptional & you should definitely preorder it or keep an eye out for its publication in April): Five Flights Up by Toni Schlesinger; it's a collection of her Shelter columns for the Village Voice.
One other book recommendation: I'm only half through it, but am absolutely loving a novel I saw recommended at Jeff VanderMeer's blog, London Revenant by Conrad Williams. It's very good indeed, a bit Neverwhereish but with a prose style more reminiscent of my absolute-favorite Iain Banks, sort of a horror-noir hybrid. (And on a related note, have you seen the Derelict London website? Link courtesy of Weekend Stubble.) I've got the attractive Do-Not Press edition; when I checked it out from the library the young woman at the desk did a double take as she stamped the book and spotted the words "The Do-Not Press, Fiercely Independent Publishing" on the facing page, it was pretty funny.
Miscellaneous minor announcements:
I'm not sure this is exactly open to the public, but I'm speaking on Thursday evening at 7:30 at a small event sponsored by the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism (511 Philosophy, if you're a Columbia person inclined to stop by). My (half-joke, half-serious) title, whose provenance I will explain at the beginning of the evening: "Living the life of the mind--for sixty hours a week." Autobiography and advice for aspiring writers and critics.
On Friday I'm participating in a workshop at Rutgers (New Brunswick campus) (click on the link for details, it starts at 9:30--I'm actually on the morning panel rather than the afternoon one), open to the public as far as I know, that is a day-long discussion of one of my favorite works of English literature, Swift's Tale of a Tub.
Book recommendation of the week (I'm reviewing this elsewhere, so won't say more, but I am seriously planning on buying at least five copies of this for various people who I think must have it, it's really something exceptional & you should definitely preorder it or keep an eye out for its publication in April): Five Flights Up by Toni Schlesinger; it's a collection of her Shelter columns for the Village Voice.
One other book recommendation: I'm only half through it, but am absolutely loving a novel I saw recommended at Jeff VanderMeer's blog, London Revenant by Conrad Williams. It's very good indeed, a bit Neverwhereish but with a prose style more reminiscent of my absolute-favorite Iain Banks, sort of a horror-noir hybrid. (And on a related note, have you seen the Derelict London website? Link courtesy of Weekend Stubble.) I've got the attractive Do-Not Press edition; when I checked it out from the library the young woman at the desk did a double take as she stamped the book and spotted the words "The Do-Not Press, Fiercely Independent Publishing" on the facing page, it was pretty funny.
Monday, February 06, 2006
This is gruesome and non-book-related
(except that I bet at least a dozen people are writing novels somewhere inspired by it, no?) but compelling: French Woman Shows Off Her New Face. I can't believe they actually have a picture!
Sunday, February 05, 2006
I am still not quite sure
what I really think about James Sallis. I just finished reading Eye of the Cricket (the fourth Lew Griffin novel, I believe? though it is difficult to tell their order; I'm just reading them by the dates on the spines of the library copies, I can't seem to find a chronological list).
Sallis must be one of only a handful of writers I can think of who write better second halves than first ones; the jumping-around-in-time in which Lew (narrator as well as protagonist) indulges is at the very least disorienting and sometimes quite maddening. But just as I'm most annoyed & feeling that the philosophical stuff is verging on pretentious (i.e. I've partially disassociated from the reading experience & am thinking too much "well, I like Sallis, this must be good" rather than actually feeling about the sentences I am reading that they are the thing gripping me) he totally turns it round; the last third or so of this novel is exceptionally good. There's a self-conscious chapter about this problem exactly (it's chapter 20, if you're curious, and includes the rather charming sentence "Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events"; inevitably the narrator gives up and calls it instead "a kind of temporal plaid"). And near the end Lew calls the book his autobiography and says he "quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures of [his] life into fiction": "Quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days." I still can't decide if this is a cheap trick (a way to avoid rewriting the manuscript!) or an entirely consistent narrative gambit for this particular narrator. A bit of both, I suppose: and will refrain from speculating about authorial intention and that sort of thing.
Sallis must be one of only a handful of writers I can think of who write better second halves than first ones; the jumping-around-in-time in which Lew (narrator as well as protagonist) indulges is at the very least disorienting and sometimes quite maddening. But just as I'm most annoyed & feeling that the philosophical stuff is verging on pretentious (i.e. I've partially disassociated from the reading experience & am thinking too much "well, I like Sallis, this must be good" rather than actually feeling about the sentences I am reading that they are the thing gripping me) he totally turns it round; the last third or so of this novel is exceptionally good. There's a self-conscious chapter about this problem exactly (it's chapter 20, if you're curious, and includes the rather charming sentence "Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events"; inevitably the narrator gives up and calls it instead "a kind of temporal plaid"). And near the end Lew calls the book his autobiography and says he "quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures of [his] life into fiction": "Quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days." I still can't decide if this is a cheap trick (a way to avoid rewriting the manuscript!) or an entirely consistent narrative gambit for this particular narrator. A bit of both, I suppose: and will refrain from speculating about authorial intention and that sort of thing.
Oh dear, I have had a failure of sensibility
Just finished Stona Fitch's Senseless. It seems to have been absolutely glowingly reviewed, it was sent to me by that brilliant man of impeccable taste Ken Bruen (who sends the best packages, full of good books and just plastered with cool Irish stamps--in this case a lot of Song Thrushes), cool premise about a man held hostage and deprived of his five senses one at a time by terrorists broadcasting the whole thing over the internet (vaguely Videodromesque only more about politics and the EEC and American economic imperialism and less about sex). And yet I found the whole thing overblown and humorless and silly! Actually it's--presumably inadvertently--pretty funny (best line: "Removing an eye is easy. All it takes is a confident man and a coffee spoon"). A goodish read, but not perhaps in quite the way intended.
Reading Delany on writing makes me more able to say what didn't work for me than I might have been otherwise. There's a very artificial flashback structure--man in captivity reflects back on his life story!--and the language is curiously abstract; the book's failure to provide particular detail thus makes the torture scenes silly instead of profound. My fact-checker-type brain objected, too, to the mechanics of several of the torture scenes. I don't think the cauterizing thing described here would really work to deprive a person completely of smell; I didn't believe that Fitch had really clearly thought through or visualized the physiological mechanics. Even if you're a torturer you don't pop the glass eye into the socket right after you've taken the eye out with a coffee spoon; you have to wait for it to heal a bit. This kind of distracting inconsistency detracts from the force of the would-be-Kafkaesque fable. It's not stylized enough to make you stop caring about accuracy. And perhaps the most serious problem: not much of a sense of the ridiculous on display here.
Anyway I am clearly in the minority on this, so don't let this stop you reading it if it sounds your cup of tea. (Yeah, yeah, I know I've just given a ton of "spoilers," but I couldn't help myself, I really am interested in the gory mechanics of this stuff. On which note, let me say that Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin has what is surely the best eye-gouging-and-glass-eye thing EVER.) It did remind me of Ian McEwan, it's just that I don't really like Ian McEwan; and it also reminded me (rather too much--they seem to have been published the same year, must have been the zeitgeist) of a novel by Rupert Thomson I sort of half-read and then had to return to the library (not very regretfully) before I could quite finish it, The Book of Revelation.
Reading Delany on writing makes me more able to say what didn't work for me than I might have been otherwise. There's a very artificial flashback structure--man in captivity reflects back on his life story!--and the language is curiously abstract; the book's failure to provide particular detail thus makes the torture scenes silly instead of profound. My fact-checker-type brain objected, too, to the mechanics of several of the torture scenes. I don't think the cauterizing thing described here would really work to deprive a person completely of smell; I didn't believe that Fitch had really clearly thought through or visualized the physiological mechanics. Even if you're a torturer you don't pop the glass eye into the socket right after you've taken the eye out with a coffee spoon; you have to wait for it to heal a bit. This kind of distracting inconsistency detracts from the force of the would-be-Kafkaesque fable. It's not stylized enough to make you stop caring about accuracy. And perhaps the most serious problem: not much of a sense of the ridiculous on display here.
Anyway I am clearly in the minority on this, so don't let this stop you reading it if it sounds your cup of tea. (Yeah, yeah, I know I've just given a ton of "spoilers," but I couldn't help myself, I really am interested in the gory mechanics of this stuff. On which note, let me say that Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin has what is surely the best eye-gouging-and-glass-eye thing EVER.) It did remind me of Ian McEwan, it's just that I don't really like Ian McEwan; and it also reminded me (rather too much--they seem to have been published the same year, must have been the zeitgeist) of a novel by Rupert Thomson I sort of half-read and then had to return to the library (not very regretfully) before I could quite finish it, The Book of Revelation.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Some thoughts on Samuel R. Delany's About Writing
Justine Larbalestier has posted several times recently about the excellence of Samuel R. Delany's About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews, and so I requested it from the library and began salivating at the thought of its arrival.
And then it came in at the library and I rushed there and picked it up and rushed home and sat down with it at once assuming that I would be immediately transported (I suppose I was vaguely thinking of Stephen King’s On Writing—which is very good indeed, a really gripping read, more memoir than manual).
Fifty pages in, though, I realized that not only was I not being transported, I was full of irritation.
At the book designer who thought it was a good idea to print the text in a small typeface with narrow margins and a non-standard page size that didn’t seem to me to augment the reading experience in any way.
At Delany for being undeniably brilliant but also far from concise (and actually, my advice is that while I think you will be well-advised to get this book and read it if you’re a fiction-writer of any ambition, there is no reason to start with the introduction and plough through the book from start to finish; you will be better off dipping in here and there and seeing what catches your eye, then going back to read the introduction afterwards). In other words, I didn’t sufficiently attend to the collection’s subtitle. Which makes it quite clear that this is a miscellany or hodgepodge or whatever you want to call it. Fair enough.
Most of all I was ready to kill the proofreader who fell down on the job. I quite see why Delany (I assume it’s his choice rather than just house style) would have wanted to print the dates of lifespan and/or publication after names of authors and books. I’ve done this myself in my academic writing, I think it makes a lot of sense. But once you make that choice, you set yourself up for a whole extra level of fact-checking that just didn’t happen here. I was fuming (I am a proof-reading maniac, my eye jumps to the error before I’ve even read the page; that said, my novel had a number of embarrassing typos that I can’t believe I didn’t catch, including the awful “deep-dried” for “deep-fried," so let me not imply I am immune from this awful problem, it is rampant among small-press publications and only really inexcusable in a big-budget corporate blockbuster which this is clearly not). Amy Hempel was not born in 1851. The last name of the novelist who edits The Believer is Julavits rather than Julawitz. Balzac’s first name is Honoré, not Henri. The last name of the author of the excellent High Cotton is Pinckney, not Pinkney. Beckett’s novel is Molloy, not Malloy. And so on and so forth.
However another fifty pages in, the book was bristling with post-its and I was in the grip of intellectual excitement and writerly stimulation of a kind that made me want to liken this to a favorite book of mine that is also invoked by Delany, another must-read: Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading. That book and Confucius to Cummings were my bibles when I was fifteen or so (a book having been published by New Directions was enough to make me buy it—the bookstore at my school weirdly had almost all their books & as they had been printed in most cases several decades earlier and I suppose just never returned to the publisher, the cover prices were remarkably low, indeed astonishingly and implausibly affordable).
So let me give you the lowdown on what really struck me here (the book is full of useful and interesting things and each person who reads it will have their own commonplace-book-like mini-anthology of wise observations).
Delany is very good on the three things most likely to afflict the beginning fiction-writer (clutter, thinness and cliché) and on the way that when a writer has internalized models enough to use them in his or her writing he/she doesn’t remember that model any more in terms of a particular example or text “but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of a tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another,” something experienced “through the body.”
He gives lots of appealing and irascible sound-bites, including a short and effective explanation of why reviewers shouldn’t use the rhetoric of “transcending the genre” when they discuss science fiction (or more broadly any kind of ‘genre’—Delany calls it “paraliterary”— fiction).
What I most appreciate is the strength of the case Delany makes for writers’ need to be wide-ranging readers. I am deeply devoted to this ideal, which seems to me generally ill-realized both among literary scholars in the academy and among contemporary fiction-writers and teachers of writing. I strongly identify with the readerly self on display here, and I have noted a number of Delany’s arguments for use the next time I get into an argument about this.
Delany says that “[i]t is only relatively wide-ranging readers who can respond to writerly talent, because they alone can experience what it is different from”: “People who read only mysteries, or, indeed, only eighteenth-century novels, are not likely to have much input into the contestatory dialogue about which contemporary works are worthwhile and which works aren’t.” YES! I can’t remember the last time I read something I so strongly agreed with.
And here’s his amplification of a related idea in another essay in which he explains what he means when he says he wants “to see academic critics approach the new and the old.” He doesn’t want works by, say, Walter Pater and Djuna Barnes and John Keene to be “judged by the same ‘objective’ standards”:
I want to learn, rather, what kind of education is necessary to form an aesthetic sensibility (or, what kind of political savvy it requires, should you be more comfortable with that idea: as I said, on the level I’m speaking about, they’re all but the same thing) that can appreciate, enjoy, and be deeply moved by all three. I think, today, I’m probably more likely than not to find this from a writer who has had some affiliation with the academy. As a reader, I’m probably going to be able to hear it a bit more easily from a writer who feels at least somewhat comfortable with the ideas, if not the rhetoric, of the theoretical developments in criticism since (arbitrarily) 1968 broadly called critical theory. But the fact is, I don’t find it with any regularity. And the academics who never sharpen their analytical teeth on a current work that speaks to them seem to me somehow to be shirking the full employment of the sheer power (constituted as largely by disinterest as by bias; by both blindness and insight) their position and their concomitant educations bestow.
He also gives the best description I have ever seen of what it feels like to revise a novel (this is actually uncannily close to the way I was formulating it to myself as I worked on the latest version of Dynamite No. 1, which involved some fairly substantial re-imagining of various plot and character points). I love the idea of writing as notation; it seems extraordinarily apt to me, and he amplifies the idea in several different places here:
When writers get (from readers or from themselves) criticism in the form “The story would be more believable if such and such happened” or “The story would be more interesting if such and such . . .” and they agree to make use of the criticism, they must translate it: “Is there any point in the story process I can go back to, and by examining my visualization more closely, catch something I missed before, which, when I notate it, will move the visualization/notation process forward again in this new way?” In other words, can the writers convince themselves that on some ideal level the story actually did happen (as opposed to “should have happened”) in the new way, and that it was their inaccuracy as a story-process practitioner that got it going on the wrong track at some given point?
...
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
Other highlights:
Best advice: “It is almost impossible to write a novel any better than the best novel you’ve read in the three to six months before you began your own. Thus, you must read excellent novels regularly.”
Funniest footnote (on a sentence in which Delany has used the construction “any writer faced with explanations to be gotten across in dialogue may find themselves in the midst of something like [the following]”): “The official term for the lack of agreement between the singular ‘writer’ and the plural ‘themselves’ is ‘the sexually aspecific demotic exemplary’—if anyone ever asks.”
Best description of writing one of his early novels: “Getting it down on paper was like pulling three of your own abscessed teeth at four on a February morning with nothing but a pair of pliers, a hammer, an ice pick, and a flashlight, using a shard or [sic] mirror nailed to an outhouse wall behind a barn.”
Most outrageous (but also apt) opinion: “All civilized people write poetry from time to time. Both its reading and its writing are necessary to a civilized mind. But, in most cases, we should be civilized enough to keep it—at least the writing part—to ourselves.”
Best critique: an absolutely scathing (but also very fair) account of why Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is “a bad book.” It includes all sorts of extremely-useful-to-the-novelist tips about detail and accuracy as well as an amazing and no doubt extremely controversial statement about identity politics:
Morrison’s novel aligns itself with the Fantasy Police. Reading it, I find myself asking: What’s wrong with wanting to be different from what you are? The assumption that wanting to be other than you are means that you hate yourself is pathological and patently absurd. A much clearer and more articulate argument might be posed that to desire effectively to be different, actually to expend energy to bring that difference about (to become surgically a woman if you are born a man; to become surgically a man if you are born a woman; to reconstruct your foreskin if you were circumcised before you could consent to it; to straighten your hair if you don’t like it kinky; to wear blue contact lenses if you have brown eyes and dark skin; to wear dreadlocks if you were born with straight blond hair; to pierce, or tattoo, or decorate your body in any way at all; to exercise or diet or contour your body toward whatever ideal you set yourself) requires much more self-confidence and a clear sense of who you are than those who never question or wish to adjust their bodily reality at all.
(On a related note he elsewhere offers a powerful demonstration of the problems with Helen Vendler’s reading of Rita Dove.)
The thing of which I am most immediately persuaded is that I must get hold of whatever’s the best translation of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale and reread it; I read it in French a long time ago, but perhaps for that reason it hasn’t stayed with me and Delany convinces me that it is absolutely essential.
And the other thing he’s persuaded me of is that I have been a complete idiot always to have thought so poorly of Walter Pater without having read him properly; Plato and Platonism sounds like an absolutely delightful book that I must also get and read at once.
Finally, it’s many years since I read one of Delany’s own novels; I was a great fan of his as a teenager, but haven’t picked one up since then. That must be remedied at once.
In sum, an extremely stimulating read. Highly recommended.
And then it came in at the library and I rushed there and picked it up and rushed home and sat down with it at once assuming that I would be immediately transported (I suppose I was vaguely thinking of Stephen King’s On Writing—which is very good indeed, a really gripping read, more memoir than manual).
Fifty pages in, though, I realized that not only was I not being transported, I was full of irritation.
At the book designer who thought it was a good idea to print the text in a small typeface with narrow margins and a non-standard page size that didn’t seem to me to augment the reading experience in any way.
At Delany for being undeniably brilliant but also far from concise (and actually, my advice is that while I think you will be well-advised to get this book and read it if you’re a fiction-writer of any ambition, there is no reason to start with the introduction and plough through the book from start to finish; you will be better off dipping in here and there and seeing what catches your eye, then going back to read the introduction afterwards). In other words, I didn’t sufficiently attend to the collection’s subtitle. Which makes it quite clear that this is a miscellany or hodgepodge or whatever you want to call it. Fair enough.
Most of all I was ready to kill the proofreader who fell down on the job. I quite see why Delany (I assume it’s his choice rather than just house style) would have wanted to print the dates of lifespan and/or publication after names of authors and books. I’ve done this myself in my academic writing, I think it makes a lot of sense. But once you make that choice, you set yourself up for a whole extra level of fact-checking that just didn’t happen here. I was fuming (I am a proof-reading maniac, my eye jumps to the error before I’ve even read the page; that said, my novel had a number of embarrassing typos that I can’t believe I didn’t catch, including the awful “deep-dried” for “deep-fried," so let me not imply I am immune from this awful problem, it is rampant among small-press publications and only really inexcusable in a big-budget corporate blockbuster which this is clearly not). Amy Hempel was not born in 1851. The last name of the novelist who edits The Believer is Julavits rather than Julawitz. Balzac’s first name is Honoré, not Henri. The last name of the author of the excellent High Cotton is Pinckney, not Pinkney. Beckett’s novel is Molloy, not Malloy. And so on and so forth.
However another fifty pages in, the book was bristling with post-its and I was in the grip of intellectual excitement and writerly stimulation of a kind that made me want to liken this to a favorite book of mine that is also invoked by Delany, another must-read: Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading. That book and Confucius to Cummings were my bibles when I was fifteen or so (a book having been published by New Directions was enough to make me buy it—the bookstore at my school weirdly had almost all their books & as they had been printed in most cases several decades earlier and I suppose just never returned to the publisher, the cover prices were remarkably low, indeed astonishingly and implausibly affordable).
So let me give you the lowdown on what really struck me here (the book is full of useful and interesting things and each person who reads it will have their own commonplace-book-like mini-anthology of wise observations).
Delany is very good on the three things most likely to afflict the beginning fiction-writer (clutter, thinness and cliché) and on the way that when a writer has internalized models enough to use them in his or her writing he/she doesn’t remember that model any more in terms of a particular example or text “but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of a tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another,” something experienced “through the body.”
He gives lots of appealing and irascible sound-bites, including a short and effective explanation of why reviewers shouldn’t use the rhetoric of “transcending the genre” when they discuss science fiction (or more broadly any kind of ‘genre’—Delany calls it “paraliterary”— fiction).
What I most appreciate is the strength of the case Delany makes for writers’ need to be wide-ranging readers. I am deeply devoted to this ideal, which seems to me generally ill-realized both among literary scholars in the academy and among contemporary fiction-writers and teachers of writing. I strongly identify with the readerly self on display here, and I have noted a number of Delany’s arguments for use the next time I get into an argument about this.
Delany says that “[i]t is only relatively wide-ranging readers who can respond to writerly talent, because they alone can experience what it is different from”: “People who read only mysteries, or, indeed, only eighteenth-century novels, are not likely to have much input into the contestatory dialogue about which contemporary works are worthwhile and which works aren’t.” YES! I can’t remember the last time I read something I so strongly agreed with.
And here’s his amplification of a related idea in another essay in which he explains what he means when he says he wants “to see academic critics approach the new and the old.” He doesn’t want works by, say, Walter Pater and Djuna Barnes and John Keene to be “judged by the same ‘objective’ standards”:
I want to learn, rather, what kind of education is necessary to form an aesthetic sensibility (or, what kind of political savvy it requires, should you be more comfortable with that idea: as I said, on the level I’m speaking about, they’re all but the same thing) that can appreciate, enjoy, and be deeply moved by all three. I think, today, I’m probably more likely than not to find this from a writer who has had some affiliation with the academy. As a reader, I’m probably going to be able to hear it a bit more easily from a writer who feels at least somewhat comfortable with the ideas, if not the rhetoric, of the theoretical developments in criticism since (arbitrarily) 1968 broadly called critical theory. But the fact is, I don’t find it with any regularity. And the academics who never sharpen their analytical teeth on a current work that speaks to them seem to me somehow to be shirking the full employment of the sheer power (constituted as largely by disinterest as by bias; by both blindness and insight) their position and their concomitant educations bestow.
He also gives the best description I have ever seen of what it feels like to revise a novel (this is actually uncannily close to the way I was formulating it to myself as I worked on the latest version of Dynamite No. 1, which involved some fairly substantial re-imagining of various plot and character points). I love the idea of writing as notation; it seems extraordinarily apt to me, and he amplifies the idea in several different places here:
When writers get (from readers or from themselves) criticism in the form “The story would be more believable if such and such happened” or “The story would be more interesting if such and such . . .” and they agree to make use of the criticism, they must translate it: “Is there any point in the story process I can go back to, and by examining my visualization more closely, catch something I missed before, which, when I notate it, will move the visualization/notation process forward again in this new way?” In other words, can the writers convince themselves that on some ideal level the story actually did happen (as opposed to “should have happened”) in the new way, and that it was their inaccuracy as a story-process practitioner that got it going on the wrong track at some given point?
...
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
Other highlights:
Best advice: “It is almost impossible to write a novel any better than the best novel you’ve read in the three to six months before you began your own. Thus, you must read excellent novels regularly.”
Funniest footnote (on a sentence in which Delany has used the construction “any writer faced with explanations to be gotten across in dialogue may find themselves in the midst of something like [the following]”): “The official term for the lack of agreement between the singular ‘writer’ and the plural ‘themselves’ is ‘the sexually aspecific demotic exemplary’—if anyone ever asks.”
Best description of writing one of his early novels: “Getting it down on paper was like pulling three of your own abscessed teeth at four on a February morning with nothing but a pair of pliers, a hammer, an ice pick, and a flashlight, using a shard or [sic] mirror nailed to an outhouse wall behind a barn.”
Most outrageous (but also apt) opinion: “All civilized people write poetry from time to time. Both its reading and its writing are necessary to a civilized mind. But, in most cases, we should be civilized enough to keep it—at least the writing part—to ourselves.”
Best critique: an absolutely scathing (but also very fair) account of why Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is “a bad book.” It includes all sorts of extremely-useful-to-the-novelist tips about detail and accuracy as well as an amazing and no doubt extremely controversial statement about identity politics:
Morrison’s novel aligns itself with the Fantasy Police. Reading it, I find myself asking: What’s wrong with wanting to be different from what you are? The assumption that wanting to be other than you are means that you hate yourself is pathological and patently absurd. A much clearer and more articulate argument might be posed that to desire effectively to be different, actually to expend energy to bring that difference about (to become surgically a woman if you are born a man; to become surgically a man if you are born a woman; to reconstruct your foreskin if you were circumcised before you could consent to it; to straighten your hair if you don’t like it kinky; to wear blue contact lenses if you have brown eyes and dark skin; to wear dreadlocks if you were born with straight blond hair; to pierce, or tattoo, or decorate your body in any way at all; to exercise or diet or contour your body toward whatever ideal you set yourself) requires much more self-confidence and a clear sense of who you are than those who never question or wish to adjust their bodily reality at all.
(On a related note he elsewhere offers a powerful demonstration of the problems with Helen Vendler’s reading of Rita Dove.)
The thing of which I am most immediately persuaded is that I must get hold of whatever’s the best translation of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale and reread it; I read it in French a long time ago, but perhaps for that reason it hasn’t stayed with me and Delany convinces me that it is absolutely essential.
And the other thing he’s persuaded me of is that I have been a complete idiot always to have thought so poorly of Walter Pater without having read him properly; Plato and Platonism sounds like an absolutely delightful book that I must also get and read at once.
Finally, it’s many years since I read one of Delany’s own novels; I was a great fan of his as a teenager, but haven’t picked one up since then. That must be remedied at once.
In sum, an extremely stimulating read. Highly recommended.
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