Nomad Scholar writes well at Inside Higher Ed on the surprising process of writing--an essay spurred by Shari Wilson's realization that certain of her students write better on in-class exam assignments than when they write essays at home on their computers. And she also links to a really fascinating essay by Daniel Chandler on "The Phenomenology of Writing by Hand."
I find these questions about process endlessly interesting. I want to teach a writing class again one of these days and delve back into issues in the classroom that I more usually now tackle one-on-one when I read manuscripts for students and colleagues and friends and so forth. (I've just finished reading Samuel R. Delany's book on writing, about which more shortly.)
I write almost everything by hand. I find it invaluable for keeping the sense of momentum, of something having a shape and forward movement as well as local interest. The two kinds of writing I do directly onto the computer, exceptions to this general rule, are lectures (i.e. what I write to deliver for my lecture classes, where I type notes up from the book I'm teaching and then fill in what I'm going to say around it) and blogging. Occasionally I write an academic talk in "lecture" mode--i.e. directly onto the computer (I did it for that Boswell-Johnson thing last week, since it was for a more general audience rather than strictly academic)--but it's rare.
More usually my academic writing proceeds through stages: read books and stick them full of post-its; type up those notes onto the computer; mark up all of my notes on primary and secondary sources with what's important, coding it into a messy one-page handwritten outline with a rather disorganized numbering system (maybe there are 20 different primary sources and 40 critical ones and the coding ends up all, like, 5.1 Insert Williams2); build an armature (that's the word I always think of, and I visualize it as something like the chicken-wire frame you'd build if you were going to make a massive papier-mache animal, a bull or a lion--you have to get that frame right so that as you do the fun part afterwards i.e. slap on the stuff & shape it how it is meant to be and later paint it and do general finishing it all works right) of quotations and footnotes (in an aside, I will say that I've seen the "my weird habits" meme around the place and thought--no doubt completely erroneously--"Oh, I don't think I can do that one, I may have weird habits but by definition they do not seem weird to myself so I do not really think I have any"--but perhaps it is one of my stranger habits that my footnotes are always perfect before I even start writing, all the bibliographic information and stuff is all filled in & in the right format and everything--I love footnotes, I find all that stuff enjoyable, but it's also a question of getting all the ducks in a row so that I can really have fun and write the first full draft fast). That's all been done on the computer; then I sit down with that very full outline/quotations thing all neatly printed out (maybe it's 30 single-spaced pages if it's for a book chapter) and write the chapter from start to finish with pen and paper, again marking inserts of the "3.1 to p. 7 draft" variety. Then I type it up (hard work because it's a mess), fixing up as I go along. Then I edit. Edit again. And again. And many times more. (Each stage also brings to light a few things I still need to go and read and sort out, but by late on in the process the library work required is only the odd "check this quotation" or whatever.) I find academic writing deeply enjoyable, it is exploratory and interesting but on the whole not very stressful because it comes so clear to me as I'm reading what I feel I will need to say about the things.
Writing fiction is much harder, because it involves letting yourself go & see where things take you; less planning, more discovery, in the terms of that "writing by hand" essay above (though really both kinds of writing involve lots of discovery and a certain amount of planning, if they didn't have the former they wouldn't be interesting to do & if they didn't have the latter they wouldn't be interesting to read). I write my drafts with pens--usually those really excellent Japanese gelly roll pens, which lay down a satisfyingly slug-like trail of gleaming ink--in little books, little so that your 1500 words or whatever the daily amount is covers 4 or 5 pages and makes you feel productive. Then type up a big swath of pages (maybe wait till it's a third of the way written, type up a bunch all at once), then lots more printing and editing. I have not yet written a novel that didn't involve the other kind of draft-writing, the "oh, six months later I can see it now needs another drastic edit"; "oh, it's six months later again and now I can still see how to make the book better"; etc. Which is one of the things that makes me amazed by but also slightly skeptical about the book-a-year writers, let alone by the multi-book-a-year ones. But this may just be a matter of individual difference.
When I was a young person I had a stage of a few years where I could only compose literary stuff on the typewriter or computer. Also (like reader of depressing books, who has what is surely one of the most distinctive voices of all the bloggers I read) I could only use lower-case letters, and in particular I was almost physically incapable of using an upper-case i. So I wrote a lot of poems and stories all in lower-case and then a few years later on I was not so depressed and grew out of the habit but there is no doubt that when you are feeling a certain way it is almost impossible to stake your place on the page with a capital I. (I also had a long time of really wrestling with the conventional use of quotation marks for speech, I was reading a lot of experimental stuff and it really seemed too deadening to have those ridiculous "" things all over the place, dashes seemed infinitely preferable. But at some point I realized that as a reader, I found most writers' attempts to invent new systems for handling this distracting rather than effective. There are exceptions, of course, but I basically just realized I had to accommodate myself to it & it wouldn't kill me after all.)
Saturday, February 04, 2006
A fabulous piece
(really, go and read it, and it's got enough pictures to show you exactly why you want to get the book as well), Peter Breedveld interviewing Charles Burns at Frontaal Naakt (the title, attractively: "I am not normal on the inside"). (Thanks to Backwards City for the link.) And here's the Amazon link for Black Hole. Just get it, of course some people will find it revolting and stomach-turning but it really is the most poignant and moving book about adolescence, which is after all one of the great topics of literature (it's my particular topic too, I think, at least in this stage of life).
Excellent literary stuff
in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Some of it's available online for free: Coetzee on Garcia Marquez, an excellent long essay by John Banville on Philip Larkin, a particularly good piece by Daniel Mendelsohn (definitely one of my favorite critics, his memoir The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity is a book I found immensely appealing) on Brokeback Mountain. Mendelsohn's central critique is of the reviewers' tendency to describe the film as a love story or a story of universal human emotions rather than as "a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the 'closet'—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it." The essay concludes with this paragraph:
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
Other good stuff too but not online, most notably a great essay by Luc Sante on the photography and the occult exhibit at the Met (which closed on Dec. 31, but Sante says what I thought too, which is that the pictures are on the whole better appreciated in the catalog than at the museum because of small image size and galleries evilly thronged with people).
A modest addendum: would it kill the editors of this publication to assign a few pieces each week to female reviewers?!?
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
Other good stuff too but not online, most notably a great essay by Luc Sante on the photography and the occult exhibit at the Met (which closed on Dec. 31, but Sante says what I thought too, which is that the pictures are on the whole better appreciated in the catalog than at the museum because of small image size and galleries evilly thronged with people).
A modest addendum: would it kill the editors of this publication to assign a few pieces each week to female reviewers?!?
Friday, February 03, 2006
Really excellent literary stuff
at the London Review of Books online (no subscription required): Theo Tait on Michel Houellebecq (the only novel of his I've read is The Elementary Particles, which I absolutely loved, it is exactly my kind of novel); James Lasdun in a funny and perceptive essay on the writerly fantasy of the alternate career (in his case, 'living off the land'); and best of all a really fabulous piece by Colin Burrow on my beloved Anthony Burgess. I must get that Andrew Biswell biography.
Orwellian
Inside Higher Ed reports on Thailand blocking the Yale University Press website because of a highly critical forthcoming biography of that country's king, The King Never Smiles by Paul Handley.
This comment came from an official at the Thai Embassy: "He said it would be impossible for him to respond to any question involving a book with criticism of the king. 'All Thais revere the king and there is a law that he may not be criticized,' he said. 'You can't criticize the king because there is nothing to criticize him about.'"
This comment came from an official at the Thai Embassy: "He said it would be impossible for him to respond to any question involving a book with criticism of the king. 'All Thais revere the king and there is a law that he may not be criticized,' he said. 'You can't criticize the king because there is nothing to criticize him about.'"
Thursday, February 02, 2006
I am excited to see
Neil Gaiman mentioning the possibility of a collaboration with Roger Avary on a film adaptation of BLACK HOLE: "Roger and I explained what we would do if we were given Charles Burns' marvellous graphic novel BLACK HOLE to adapt into a film. We liked Alex and I think he liked us, and most importantly we seemed to be talking about the same film." Oh, god, that would be amazing. I was thinking as I was reading it the other day what an excellent movie it would make; it is steeped in the conventions of the 70s horror flick (teenagers! having sex! in the woods!) and is obviously highly cinematic in other ways as well a-la-early-Stephen-King.... You know, some kinds of art are just inspiring and that Burns novel & the idea of a high-quality film adaptation are among them, it makes me want to make things.... Actually I am pretty much already decided that there is going to be more of a horror-y component (for lack of a better term) in my next novel. For some reason that kind of thing is what's been getting me going recently.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
A strange and unsettling graphic novel
about being a teenager and stigma/outcast things and the nightmares of sexual transformation, Black Hole by Charles Burns. Very good, very creepy (I was reminded of the frightening transformation scenes in Alasdair Gray's Lanark).
(Thanks to Kevin for the recommendation.)
(Thanks to Kevin for the recommendation.)
One more for the road
I've just read an interesting and provocative book called So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid (attractively translated by Natasha Wimmer). My first impression was of it being a clever but also very disagreeable little book. Gradually, though, I was won over (partly as I realized that he’s got a very particular angle that has to do with publishing, really, rather than with writing or reading in themselves; so that the provocative and sometimes annoying remarks he makes about reading and writing are to be seen in that context).
Zaid’s central insight comes around the question of whether we should bemoan or celebrate (he thinks the second) the fact that so many books reach only a small readership:
Books are so cheap that, unlike newspapers, radio, or television, they can be published advertisement-free for a few thousand interested readers. To finance almost any book, it is enough to find three thousand readers willing to pay six hours worth of minimum-wage salary. Naturally, if thirty thousand readers could be reached, it would be possible to lower the price—by half, say. But it isn’t easy to reach thirty thousand readers. Not because the lower price is still too high, but for a reason we prefer to ignore: the majority of titles published are of no interest to thirty thousand people—you couldn’t even give away that many copies.
He’s very interesting on this conundrum, that books may seem more expensive than other media from the consumer’s point of view but that the real cost of reading is time rather than money:
Time is by far the most expensive aspect of reading, excepting time spent in certain circumstances: in transit, ill health, prison, or retirement. In a wealthy economy, time is worth more than things, and it is easier to buy things than to find the time to enjoy them. To purchase books that one will never read is understandable: we think we might read them one day, and in the meantime, they can be shown off to visitors or mentioned in convesation. Reading is a luxury of the poor, the sick, prisoners, retirees, students. As students become young executives with overcrowded schedules, and as their salaries rise, reading (if it is not required) becomes a luxury for them, too.
(You see the style: it’s that rather dandyish grand way of sweeping one’s opinions around the place that I associate in particular with French essayists.)
Another passage that I think the lit-bloggers will find interesting (and which those who know me will see both [a] why I’m struck by and [b] why I find irritating):
A person comes late to a convesation and believes that he can’t follow it, that he needs to be better informed: as if knowledge were something other than conversation itself, as if it were something to be acquired elsewhere first. Friends recommend that he take certain classes, which bore him; that he study handbooks, which bore him; that he read the classics, which also bore him. The truly enlightened thing would be to recommend that he have more confidence in his appetitte for conversation; to tell him that if he is interested in something he doesn’t understand, he should pay more attention, ask questions, reflect, consult dictionaries, manuals, classics, but all in the service of his desire to participate in the ongoing conversation. There is no point in recommending that he try to learn the dictionary from start to finish, systematically, from A to Z. The dictionary, like all study plans, is justified by its use as an aid to convesration, not by its own merits. Naturally, if upon looking up a word he discovers others that interest him, or if upon consulting a classic he finds that his interest goes beyond the matter at hand, he should allow himself to be carried away by curiosity, surprise, astonishment, enjoyment. The desire to follow a conversation that you don’t understand is a healthy sign, not an incidication of lack of preparation. Discipline is good in the service of desire, not in place of desire. Without desire, there is no living culture.
Best trivia fact: the Guinness Book of World Records says that the slowest-selling book in the history of print was “a translation from Coptic to Latin that Oxford University Press sold at a rate of 2.6 copies a year from 1716 to 1907.”
At any rate, it should be clear that it's well worth a look if you're interested in this kind of question.
Two further thoughts:
1. This is the first book I've seen published by Paul Dry Books. It's a physically attractive as well as stylistically appealing little volume, and I'll look forward to seeing more of theirs--I heard about this at the Modern Language Association conference a year ago when I ran into Sarah Dry (who was in my brothers' class when we were all in high school & then went to the same college I did), who was working for the company--I believe her father is the publisher. Go and look at their homepage, though; they've got really cool stuff.
2. Zaid’s very negative here about the possibility for e-readers, but I wonder whether his skepticism doesn’t already seem slightly out-of-date. I am actually dying of curiosity to see & try out one of those Sony Readers. (Imagine how convenient it would be if you could, say, put the images from Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online onto it and read the books that way rather than printing out huge swaths--though even here, since those books online were transferred from microfilm, you'd be losing a lot of quality compared to an actual printed book from the eighteenth century.) I like the idea of being able to go on a trip with five or six books in a lightweight format. But of course it really is different from the music-iPod thing; you don't need all your books with you in the same way you need (well, 'need') all your music.
The thing that I am surprised not to see more people linger on concerns costs. This seems to me the real issue. I was just thinking about it. Admittedly I read a great many more books than most people, but I depend on these sources for them, probably roughly in this order: (1) for the great majority of books, a university research library, including services like BorrowDirect and interlibrary loan (particularly for contemporary fiction of the small-press-from-another-country kind); (2) review copies from friends or publicists or whatever; (3) Amazon, i.e. online bookseller; (4) public library; (5) local independent bookstores (2-4 are all probably roughly equal in proportion); (6) train-station or airport bookstores; (7) used books, either from stores or from, you know, like that guy who has a table of excellent science fiction and crime stuff on Broadway in front of Milano Market. If you count work-related books, which I suppose we must, probably somewhere between 400 and 500 books enter my apartment every year and I read most or all of most or all of them. And let's say that one quarter to one third of those books are pretty new and the others are old, i.e. been out a while or possibly published early twentieth century or eighteenth century or whatever. I don't know how much money I spend on books in a year, probably rather more than $500 but less than $1000 (or am I completely lowballing it? hmm, better not think about that possibility...); it's nowhere near, though, what it would cost if I had to pay for everything I read. Probably 90% of the books I read are from the library.
But how are publishers going to deal with libraries as far as electronic texts go? The thing that makes me wary is that it sounds like a way of jacking up prices. It's as though you said to me, "You can keep on reading all the lovely new novels you want, but they will only be available in a $29.95 deluxe hardcover edition. Six novels: over $200. Isn't it great?" And this is why I cannot see eReaders ever really and effectively superseding the old-fashioned kind of book. Books are great partly because they're free, or virtually free, as we experience them in our lives.
Oh, this has just been a remarkably enjoyable couple hours of blogging, wouldn't be good to get in the habit but for now & then it seems intellectually enriching as well as just enjoyable, like a kind of five-finger-exercise for the brain....
Zaid’s central insight comes around the question of whether we should bemoan or celebrate (he thinks the second) the fact that so many books reach only a small readership:
Books are so cheap that, unlike newspapers, radio, or television, they can be published advertisement-free for a few thousand interested readers. To finance almost any book, it is enough to find three thousand readers willing to pay six hours worth of minimum-wage salary. Naturally, if thirty thousand readers could be reached, it would be possible to lower the price—by half, say. But it isn’t easy to reach thirty thousand readers. Not because the lower price is still too high, but for a reason we prefer to ignore: the majority of titles published are of no interest to thirty thousand people—you couldn’t even give away that many copies.
He’s very interesting on this conundrum, that books may seem more expensive than other media from the consumer’s point of view but that the real cost of reading is time rather than money:
Time is by far the most expensive aspect of reading, excepting time spent in certain circumstances: in transit, ill health, prison, or retirement. In a wealthy economy, time is worth more than things, and it is easier to buy things than to find the time to enjoy them. To purchase books that one will never read is understandable: we think we might read them one day, and in the meantime, they can be shown off to visitors or mentioned in convesation. Reading is a luxury of the poor, the sick, prisoners, retirees, students. As students become young executives with overcrowded schedules, and as their salaries rise, reading (if it is not required) becomes a luxury for them, too.
(You see the style: it’s that rather dandyish grand way of sweeping one’s opinions around the place that I associate in particular with French essayists.)
Another passage that I think the lit-bloggers will find interesting (and which those who know me will see both [a] why I’m struck by and [b] why I find irritating):
A person comes late to a convesation and believes that he can’t follow it, that he needs to be better informed: as if knowledge were something other than conversation itself, as if it were something to be acquired elsewhere first. Friends recommend that he take certain classes, which bore him; that he study handbooks, which bore him; that he read the classics, which also bore him. The truly enlightened thing would be to recommend that he have more confidence in his appetitte for conversation; to tell him that if he is interested in something he doesn’t understand, he should pay more attention, ask questions, reflect, consult dictionaries, manuals, classics, but all in the service of his desire to participate in the ongoing conversation. There is no point in recommending that he try to learn the dictionary from start to finish, systematically, from A to Z. The dictionary, like all study plans, is justified by its use as an aid to convesration, not by its own merits. Naturally, if upon looking up a word he discovers others that interest him, or if upon consulting a classic he finds that his interest goes beyond the matter at hand, he should allow himself to be carried away by curiosity, surprise, astonishment, enjoyment. The desire to follow a conversation that you don’t understand is a healthy sign, not an incidication of lack of preparation. Discipline is good in the service of desire, not in place of desire. Without desire, there is no living culture.
Best trivia fact: the Guinness Book of World Records says that the slowest-selling book in the history of print was “a translation from Coptic to Latin that Oxford University Press sold at a rate of 2.6 copies a year from 1716 to 1907.”
At any rate, it should be clear that it's well worth a look if you're interested in this kind of question.
Two further thoughts:
1. This is the first book I've seen published by Paul Dry Books. It's a physically attractive as well as stylistically appealing little volume, and I'll look forward to seeing more of theirs--I heard about this at the Modern Language Association conference a year ago when I ran into Sarah Dry (who was in my brothers' class when we were all in high school & then went to the same college I did), who was working for the company--I believe her father is the publisher. Go and look at their homepage, though; they've got really cool stuff.
2. Zaid’s very negative here about the possibility for e-readers, but I wonder whether his skepticism doesn’t already seem slightly out-of-date. I am actually dying of curiosity to see & try out one of those Sony Readers. (Imagine how convenient it would be if you could, say, put the images from Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online onto it and read the books that way rather than printing out huge swaths--though even here, since those books online were transferred from microfilm, you'd be losing a lot of quality compared to an actual printed book from the eighteenth century.) I like the idea of being able to go on a trip with five or six books in a lightweight format. But of course it really is different from the music-iPod thing; you don't need all your books with you in the same way you need (well, 'need') all your music.
The thing that I am surprised not to see more people linger on concerns costs. This seems to me the real issue. I was just thinking about it. Admittedly I read a great many more books than most people, but I depend on these sources for them, probably roughly in this order: (1) for the great majority of books, a university research library, including services like BorrowDirect and interlibrary loan (particularly for contemporary fiction of the small-press-from-another-country kind); (2) review copies from friends or publicists or whatever; (3) Amazon, i.e. online bookseller; (4) public library; (5) local independent bookstores (2-4 are all probably roughly equal in proportion); (6) train-station or airport bookstores; (7) used books, either from stores or from, you know, like that guy who has a table of excellent science fiction and crime stuff on Broadway in front of Milano Market. If you count work-related books, which I suppose we must, probably somewhere between 400 and 500 books enter my apartment every year and I read most or all of most or all of them. And let's say that one quarter to one third of those books are pretty new and the others are old, i.e. been out a while or possibly published early twentieth century or eighteenth century or whatever. I don't know how much money I spend on books in a year, probably rather more than $500 but less than $1000 (or am I completely lowballing it? hmm, better not think about that possibility...); it's nowhere near, though, what it would cost if I had to pay for everything I read. Probably 90% of the books I read are from the library.
But how are publishers going to deal with libraries as far as electronic texts go? The thing that makes me wary is that it sounds like a way of jacking up prices. It's as though you said to me, "You can keep on reading all the lovely new novels you want, but they will only be available in a $29.95 deluxe hardcover edition. Six novels: over $200. Isn't it great?" And this is why I cannot see eReaders ever really and effectively superseding the old-fashioned kind of book. Books are great partly because they're free, or virtually free, as we experience them in our lives.
Oh, this has just been a remarkably enjoyable couple hours of blogging, wouldn't be good to get in the habit but for now & then it seems intellectually enriching as well as just enjoyable, like a kind of five-finger-exercise for the brain....
Strong opinions
Various thoughts on the "100 best lines from novels" (according to the American Book Review, that is); a.k.a. life inside Jenny Davidson's brain for half an hour on a snowy Tuesday afternoon in January 2006. Violent disagreement and warm endorsement both welcomed below in the comments.
(Thanks to Kermit for the link.)
1. I hate, hate, hate the obviousness of the super-famous first lines. Predictably, the first and second ones given here are "Call me Ishmael" and "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." No fault of Austen or Melville, those are two fabulously good books, but it is very annoying to hear them quoted so often out of context, isn't it?
2. Authors whose names remind me of my teenage self, in a nostalgic rather than retroactively self-despising way: Pynchon, Nabokov, Woolf (the Woolf of Orlando--mentioned here--and Flush--not mentioned here--rather than the Woolf of my not-favorite Mrs. Dalloway).
3. Author I loved as a teenager and still love (1984 is a great novel!): Orwell.
4. Authors whose novels are bizarrely overrepresented on this list: Pynchon, Morrison.
5. I must get and reread The Stranger. James Sallis made me think of this, his Lew Griffin has an obsession with that book.
6. Why the weird attempt to represent a handful of foreign-language titles? It just draws attention to the English-language-ness of the list as a whole.
7. I did not like Ha Jin's Waiting and the opening sentence seems flat and affected in this context also. What I want to read is someone's little speculative essay about the principles of selection beyond the obvious--what do you think are the agendas of these list-makers? I must go and take a look at the rest of the site and see what I can discover.
8. Sylvia Plath is a great poet but The Bell Jar is an interesting & a historically important rather than actually a great novel. Sorry to say this, I have a minor obsession with Plath, but I reread it a couple years ago along with a lot of the journals (which are GREAT) and poems and I am not going to change my mind on this.
9. Other favorite novels of mine here: Katherine Dunn, Geek Love; Robert Graves, I, Claudius (and that really is one of the great opening sentences of English literature); David Copperfield (and I forgot that Catcher in the Rye was so explicit about its Copperfieldness ... hmmm...).
10. Eighteenth-century literature is well represented here. As it should be! The first sentence of Robinson Crusoe really is brilliant, more so in my opinion than the rather flashier Sterne Tristram Shandy also given here. (Oh, of course that one's great too, no reason to take sides...)
11. I am not sure I ever really liked One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was very much in fashion in the 1980s and you sort of had to like it. I liked some things about it. But I have absolutely no desire to ever read it again.
12. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (William Gibson, Neuromancer). Now that's an opening sentence I wish I'd written myself. Must go and reread lots of early cyberpunk to get myself in the mood for the next (possible extracurricular, I don't really know where I'm going to fit this in because not only is it not my academic book it's also not the projected sequel to the novel I've just written but rather something completely different) novel I am burning to write.
13. "It was the day my grandmother exploded" (Iain Banks--mistakenly given the M. middle initial here, which I think is wrong--The Crow Road). Another one I'd like very much to have written myself. I love Banks although I find his science fiction novels for the most part virtually unreadable.
14. "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress" - George Eliot's heroines are as annoying as they are worthy.
15. I have never heard of Raymond Federman and the opening sentence of Double or Nothing does not make me want to read it at all.
16. I have never read Gilbert Sorrentino but must remedy the situation before many months pass. Quite alluring sample here.
17. Novelists whose charms I am altogether blind to and that though I'm skeptical about the 'great literature'/schlock distinction would put firmly on the side of schlock: Anne Tyler, Anita Brookner.
18. Novelists who I am convinced history will deem wildly overrated and near unreadable due to baroque excess: John Barth, John Hawkes.
19. I wouldn't mind rereading The Tin Drum, what an exceptional novel (and it makes Midnight's Children look rather less extraordinary because somewhat derivative--don't get me wrong, that's a very good novel too, but perhaps not quite on the order of the former).
20. Other novelists I want to read or reread: Beckett, Perec (not on the list), Walter Abish.
21. Last but not least, my own personal favorite on the list (well, Defoe and Dickens are up there too): "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" (Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle). A novel that everyone should read if they have not already. It is fabulously perfect. Just perfect.
(Thanks to Kermit for the link.)
1. I hate, hate, hate the obviousness of the super-famous first lines. Predictably, the first and second ones given here are "Call me Ishmael" and "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." No fault of Austen or Melville, those are two fabulously good books, but it is very annoying to hear them quoted so often out of context, isn't it?
2. Authors whose names remind me of my teenage self, in a nostalgic rather than retroactively self-despising way: Pynchon, Nabokov, Woolf (the Woolf of Orlando--mentioned here--and Flush--not mentioned here--rather than the Woolf of my not-favorite Mrs. Dalloway).
3. Author I loved as a teenager and still love (1984 is a great novel!): Orwell.
4. Authors whose novels are bizarrely overrepresented on this list: Pynchon, Morrison.
5. I must get and reread The Stranger. James Sallis made me think of this, his Lew Griffin has an obsession with that book.
6. Why the weird attempt to represent a handful of foreign-language titles? It just draws attention to the English-language-ness of the list as a whole.
7. I did not like Ha Jin's Waiting and the opening sentence seems flat and affected in this context also. What I want to read is someone's little speculative essay about the principles of selection beyond the obvious--what do you think are the agendas of these list-makers? I must go and take a look at the rest of the site and see what I can discover.
8. Sylvia Plath is a great poet but The Bell Jar is an interesting & a historically important rather than actually a great novel. Sorry to say this, I have a minor obsession with Plath, but I reread it a couple years ago along with a lot of the journals (which are GREAT) and poems and I am not going to change my mind on this.
9. Other favorite novels of mine here: Katherine Dunn, Geek Love; Robert Graves, I, Claudius (and that really is one of the great opening sentences of English literature); David Copperfield (and I forgot that Catcher in the Rye was so explicit about its Copperfieldness ... hmmm...).
10. Eighteenth-century literature is well represented here. As it should be! The first sentence of Robinson Crusoe really is brilliant, more so in my opinion than the rather flashier Sterne Tristram Shandy also given here. (Oh, of course that one's great too, no reason to take sides...)
11. I am not sure I ever really liked One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was very much in fashion in the 1980s and you sort of had to like it. I liked some things about it. But I have absolutely no desire to ever read it again.
12. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (William Gibson, Neuromancer). Now that's an opening sentence I wish I'd written myself. Must go and reread lots of early cyberpunk to get myself in the mood for the next (possible extracurricular, I don't really know where I'm going to fit this in because not only is it not my academic book it's also not the projected sequel to the novel I've just written but rather something completely different) novel I am burning to write.
13. "It was the day my grandmother exploded" (Iain Banks--mistakenly given the M. middle initial here, which I think is wrong--The Crow Road). Another one I'd like very much to have written myself. I love Banks although I find his science fiction novels for the most part virtually unreadable.
14. "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress" - George Eliot's heroines are as annoying as they are worthy.
15. I have never heard of Raymond Federman and the opening sentence of Double or Nothing does not make me want to read it at all.
16. I have never read Gilbert Sorrentino but must remedy the situation before many months pass. Quite alluring sample here.
17. Novelists whose charms I am altogether blind to and that though I'm skeptical about the 'great literature'/schlock distinction would put firmly on the side of schlock: Anne Tyler, Anita Brookner.
18. Novelists who I am convinced history will deem wildly overrated and near unreadable due to baroque excess: John Barth, John Hawkes.
19. I wouldn't mind rereading The Tin Drum, what an exceptional novel (and it makes Midnight's Children look rather less extraordinary because somewhat derivative--don't get me wrong, that's a very good novel too, but perhaps not quite on the order of the former).
20. Other novelists I want to read or reread: Beckett, Perec (not on the list), Walter Abish.
21. Last but not least, my own personal favorite on the list (well, Defoe and Dickens are up there too): "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" (Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle). A novel that everyone should read if they have not already. It is fabulously perfect. Just perfect.
I am decadently and self-indulgently
blogging in the middle of the day, I meant to do a couple of posts last night but it was too late by the time I finished working. And since I find myself chock-full of stored-up blog energy I think I will discharge some of it before returning to work this afternoon. (My beloved grandmother was the one who voiced the thing that girls of her generation and class were taught, which was that it was virtually immoral to read a novel during the daytime, particularly before lunch. If she'd finished all the things she really needed to do she would dig out some clothes that needed ironing or water the plants or whatever--anything that counted as work. And when she moved into the old folks' home she hated the way she felt so idle, it really made her very annoyed; and she ended up doing all the laundry and ironing for an elderly gentleman who also lived at the home, a former schoolmaster known semi-satirically to her as Mr. Chips. I don't iron anybody's clothes, including my own, but I take her point about needing to feel useful.) I am not so scrupulous as she was about daytime novel-reading but daylight blogging--at least the more-than-a-one-sentence-comment-on-something-on-line kind of blogging--does indeed feel luxurious. So here goes.
Two interesting novels, both by authors I like very much writing in each case at perhaps 90% of their best but with so much talent that their flawed books are preferable to more perfectly crafted ones by less talented authors:
The first was one I've been meaning to get for a while and finally procured from the library, The Field of Blood (has this mysteriously lost the definite article in its American version?) by Denise Mina. Mina's Garnethill trilogy was certainly one of the most striking--astonishing--things I have read in the last few years. It more than lived up to the hype--if you haven't read these books, I highly recommend them, female noir set in working-class Glasgow and with lots of really heavy stuff about families and sexual abuse and alcohol-related troubles--in short, absolutely lovely! They are clumsier in the writing than I expected, but the central character is so strong and all of the characters and settings and stories so vividly realized that you frankly don't care. Her next published novel was Deception (a.k.a. Sanctum in UK), which I didn't care for. But this one is much more my cup of tea. It's Glasgow, the early 80s, and the main character is a working-class Catholic girl called Paddy Meehan who wants more than anything to be a journalist, in part because of the story of her namesake (who was unjustly arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, then freed by a crusading journalist). The inclusion of the first Paddy Meehan's story seems to me an interesting idea but on the whole it doesn't work; yet the kind of reach and ambition that the attempt shows is part of what makes me like Mina's writing so much. In sum, I thought this one was excellent; the painful details of Paddy's struggle with what it means to be a woman in that time and place and yet someone who also wants a demanding and satisfying job is particularly well done.
The other one I've just finished reading was also very good, though for the first half rather hard to follow (or perhaps it was just me, I was reading it in New Haven with my mind rather on Boswell): Moth by the brilliant James Sallis. I really, really love the Sallis aesthetic, I've only read three or four of his but must get all the others. His books are steeped for one thing in Chester Himes who is an extreme short-list favorite of mine (here's the Amazon link for Sallis's biography of Himes, and if you only read one book by Himes--oh, god, everyone should read a LOT of his books though--it must be Cotton Comes to Harlem). Beautiful intellectual noir, anyway; occasionally a bit pretentious, occasionally a bit scattered or confusing in its back-and-forth-ing (but one thing I like about this Lew Griffin series is the narrator's unusual orientation towards time, it's not common--and the narrative effects are extremely interesting--to have a knowing present-time narrator who tells his story constantly jutting forward or allowing intrusive back- and fore-knowledge into the story he's telling); but really altogether great, including a very appealing digression on Raymond Queneau that reminded me how fond I once was of the French new novel and its even more experimental aftermath. Must go and read some of that stuff again.
(Actually what I've really been thinking has something to do with short stories. I never have resolutions--in my opinion you either want to do something and do it, or don't really want to and idly toy with the idea but won't act on it--expressing resolutions is therefore pointless and potentially even rather annoying. But I realize that it makes me crazy to only write one novel every 2-3 years and then spent 2 years revising it. I must write new fiction more regularly, and yet I also have many academic things I feel called to write. I think short stories are potentially a solution to this. Like if I wrote one every month, it would stave off the fiction-withdrawal pangs. I'm not fond of the conventional literary short story, but I have a real passion for what I always think of as tales of the uncanny--i.e. most fantasy/SF kinds of story would fit into this category, the classic ones are obviously the Conan Doyle/Robert Louis Stevenson thing but childhood favorites include Joan Aiken and those early SF guys and of course nowadays there are lots of amazing short-story writers like Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link and so forth. Resolution: stories. And that connects up with the nouveau roman thing because the last time I regularly wrote short stories was the same time I was obsessed with Beckett and Robbe-Grillet and so forth, I was seventeen or eighteen years old & I actually wrote some pretty funny stories that I might try and dig out of the old computer files if they are still in any sense available or readable. Actually I think they're not, that was PRE-COMPUTER! Not pre-computers existing, obviously, but pre-me having one of my own. Might have to wait till I can get to the old paper files and scan a few funny things. I remember a story called "Rice Torture," for instance....)
Two interesting novels, both by authors I like very much writing in each case at perhaps 90% of their best but with so much talent that their flawed books are preferable to more perfectly crafted ones by less talented authors:
The first was one I've been meaning to get for a while and finally procured from the library, The Field of Blood (has this mysteriously lost the definite article in its American version?) by Denise Mina. Mina's Garnethill trilogy was certainly one of the most striking--astonishing--things I have read in the last few years. It more than lived up to the hype--if you haven't read these books, I highly recommend them, female noir set in working-class Glasgow and with lots of really heavy stuff about families and sexual abuse and alcohol-related troubles--in short, absolutely lovely! They are clumsier in the writing than I expected, but the central character is so strong and all of the characters and settings and stories so vividly realized that you frankly don't care. Her next published novel was Deception (a.k.a. Sanctum in UK), which I didn't care for. But this one is much more my cup of tea. It's Glasgow, the early 80s, and the main character is a working-class Catholic girl called Paddy Meehan who wants more than anything to be a journalist, in part because of the story of her namesake (who was unjustly arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, then freed by a crusading journalist). The inclusion of the first Paddy Meehan's story seems to me an interesting idea but on the whole it doesn't work; yet the kind of reach and ambition that the attempt shows is part of what makes me like Mina's writing so much. In sum, I thought this one was excellent; the painful details of Paddy's struggle with what it means to be a woman in that time and place and yet someone who also wants a demanding and satisfying job is particularly well done.
The other one I've just finished reading was also very good, though for the first half rather hard to follow (or perhaps it was just me, I was reading it in New Haven with my mind rather on Boswell): Moth by the brilliant James Sallis. I really, really love the Sallis aesthetic, I've only read three or four of his but must get all the others. His books are steeped for one thing in Chester Himes who is an extreme short-list favorite of mine (here's the Amazon link for Sallis's biography of Himes, and if you only read one book by Himes--oh, god, everyone should read a LOT of his books though--it must be Cotton Comes to Harlem). Beautiful intellectual noir, anyway; occasionally a bit pretentious, occasionally a bit scattered or confusing in its back-and-forth-ing (but one thing I like about this Lew Griffin series is the narrator's unusual orientation towards time, it's not common--and the narrative effects are extremely interesting--to have a knowing present-time narrator who tells his story constantly jutting forward or allowing intrusive back- and fore-knowledge into the story he's telling); but really altogether great, including a very appealing digression on Raymond Queneau that reminded me how fond I once was of the French new novel and its even more experimental aftermath. Must go and read some of that stuff again.
(Actually what I've really been thinking has something to do with short stories. I never have resolutions--in my opinion you either want to do something and do it, or don't really want to and idly toy with the idea but won't act on it--expressing resolutions is therefore pointless and potentially even rather annoying. But I realize that it makes me crazy to only write one novel every 2-3 years and then spent 2 years revising it. I must write new fiction more regularly, and yet I also have many academic things I feel called to write. I think short stories are potentially a solution to this. Like if I wrote one every month, it would stave off the fiction-withdrawal pangs. I'm not fond of the conventional literary short story, but I have a real passion for what I always think of as tales of the uncanny--i.e. most fantasy/SF kinds of story would fit into this category, the classic ones are obviously the Conan Doyle/Robert Louis Stevenson thing but childhood favorites include Joan Aiken and those early SF guys and of course nowadays there are lots of amazing short-story writers like Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link and so forth. Resolution: stories. And that connects up with the nouveau roman thing because the last time I regularly wrote short stories was the same time I was obsessed with Beckett and Robbe-Grillet and so forth, I was seventeen or eighteen years old & I actually wrote some pretty funny stories that I might try and dig out of the old computer files if they are still in any sense available or readable. Actually I think they're not, that was PRE-COMPUTER! Not pre-computers existing, obviously, but pre-me having one of my own. Might have to wait till I can get to the old paper files and scan a few funny things. I remember a story called "Rice Torture," for instance....)
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Augusten Burroughs
interviewed in the Independent. It's a nice piece, too; I love Burroughs, I thought that Running with Scissors and Dry were both absolutely excellent. I bought them in the bookstore in the middle of South Station a couple of years ago when I was coming back to NY from (what was it? American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, most likely) some sort of conference, and just devoured them on Amtrak--I think I was finishing the second as the train pulled into Penn Station. Very enjoyable and also thought-provoking reading.
(Thanks to Sarah for the link.)
(Thanks to Sarah for the link.)
Saturday, January 28, 2006
And if this doesn't persuade you
that Boswell's Life of Johnson is worth a look, I don't know what will.
In 1769 Boswell accompanies Johnson home to tea and meets one of the many indigent housemates he supports, in this case a blind woman with an irritable temper called Mrs. Williams. Here is Boswell's description of how she makes the tea:
Mrs. Williams made it with sufficient dexterity, notwithstanding her blindness, though her manner of satisfying herself that the cups were full enough appeared to me a little aukward; for I fancied she put her finger down a certain way, till she felt the tea touch it.
In subsequent editions Boswell politely retracted the claim, adding this footnote: he had been told instead that “she had acquired such a niceness of touch, as to know, by the feeling on the outside of the cup, how near it was to being full.”
But Hester Thrale Piozzi, who knew Johnson well, wrote this in her copy of the 1816 edition of the Life: “Not She poor Soul; the 1st Story is the truest.”
Anyway the conference was great, I saw lots of old friends & had a lavish dinner at the Union League Cafe (including a tuna carpaccio appetizer that was pretty much the perfect food, I would eat that every day for dinner if I could) and stayed in the rather fancy Omni Hotel which has truly spectacular views out over New Haven. That Yale gothic style has never been much to my taste, the general impression is rather dark and heavy and oppressive (you know, the gym that looks like a cathedral, that sort of thing). But when you see it from a high-up window on a sunny day, it is rather ludicrously romantic, very Gormenghasty; even more spectacular with that massive red cliff that is East Rock lowering over the scene.
In 1769 Boswell accompanies Johnson home to tea and meets one of the many indigent housemates he supports, in this case a blind woman with an irritable temper called Mrs. Williams. Here is Boswell's description of how she makes the tea:
Mrs. Williams made it with sufficient dexterity, notwithstanding her blindness, though her manner of satisfying herself that the cups were full enough appeared to me a little aukward; for I fancied she put her finger down a certain way, till she felt the tea touch it.
In subsequent editions Boswell politely retracted the claim, adding this footnote: he had been told instead that “she had acquired such a niceness of touch, as to know, by the feeling on the outside of the cup, how near it was to being full.”
But Hester Thrale Piozzi, who knew Johnson well, wrote this in her copy of the 1816 edition of the Life: “Not She poor Soul; the 1st Story is the truest.”
Anyway the conference was great, I saw lots of old friends & had a lavish dinner at the Union League Cafe (including a tuna carpaccio appetizer that was pretty much the perfect food, I would eat that every day for dinner if I could) and stayed in the rather fancy Omni Hotel which has truly spectacular views out over New Haven. That Yale gothic style has never been much to my taste, the general impression is rather dark and heavy and oppressive (you know, the gym that looks like a cathedral, that sort of thing). But when you see it from a high-up window on a sunny day, it is rather ludicrously romantic, very Gormenghasty; even more spectacular with that massive red cliff that is East Rock lowering over the scene.
There is a novel by Diana Wynne Jones
(all right, this really isn't the main point, but I'm going to link to it anyway because it's great, it's The Magicians of Caprona) in which two children are lured away by a witch whose spells in this case are cast in the form of the most alluring story-books imaginable; the protagonist reads his in a daze (it's one of those perfect books about, you know, a child just like you who is somehow having exciting magical adventures and saving the world) without realizing he's in the grip of an evil spell, it's a very vividly done scene & of course encapsulates the novel-reading experience in general. On Thursday afternoon I was consumed by a book in just this way, it was quite extraordinary and I highly recommend that you read it as soon as it is officially published (not till the end of March; but that's not to stop you from preordering at Amazon if you have any affinity for this kind of book).
Even when I very first heard about this one I could tell it was EXACTLY my kind of thing. Then I read Justine Larbalestier's post at the beginning of the month and started going totally crazy. I HAD TO HAVE THIS BOOK. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. But it wasn't being published till MARCH.
So I e-mailed The Grand Dizzy with a plea that was basically along the lines of "books like this are like CRACK as far as I am concerned, will you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE send it to me AT ONCE and sorry for being so importunate but I can't help myself" and he obliged me in the kindest possible manner.
Usually I have no self-control about light reading but really this past week and a half I have been absolutely steeped in Johnson & Boswell and with many thousands of pages to read for work I had to resist its lure & sensible mind for once triumphed over yearning matter. It was a small paperback that I could see was perfectly suited to being train reading on my way to New Haven for the conference, that was the thing, and then it would also be my reward for having worked round the clock on those eighteenth-century guys. (Who I love. But it's not the same thing.)
And then it was Thursday & a sunny afternoon & I was high on satisfying-work-accomplishment-and-lack-of-sleep-and-being-on-my-way-out-of-town & the book was everything I expected and more. Truly, truly delightful. If you like fantasy or historical fiction at all, you must read it! But actually if you just want to read an excellent piece of popular fiction get hold of it anyway and see what you think, even if you more usually read crime novels or whatever.
Why is it taking me so long to get to the point? (I think I am working myself up into the same state of frenzied & agonized yearning that I was in when I actually got to it. Deferred gratification, intense release.)
The book: His Majesty's Dragon, first volume in the Temeraire trilogy by Naomi Novik (who happens to be married to Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime). Oh, it is so good! It can be described most simply as Anne McCaffrey meets Patrick O'Brian--the Napoleonic Wars with dragons. (Like the old Reese's commercials: your chocolate, my peanut-butter.) And there's a bit of WWI flying-ace feel because of the aerial battles, and of course any novel of this kind is tinctured with Georgette Heyer. But it's not like any other book, either, and Novik is an amazingly good writer. Very warm & persuasive on character stuff; clean understated sentences with not the tiniest hint of either the pompous habits that we all tend to fall into when we write pastichey old-fashioned stuff or of overly Heyeresque affectations which are also difficult to avoid; the dragon stuff is EXCELLENT and immensely appealing (the dragon Temeraire is the kind of guy, if I may use the word, who if he wasn't living in the early nineteenth century would be fond of listening to audiobooks while he was in the air); Novik has cunningly avoided McCaffreyesque silliness (don't get me wrong, I LOVED those books when I was a teenager, still like some of them a lot) by having the dragons actually be able to talk instead of communicating telepathically; and the thing I was perhaps most impressed with, because it is rare & because it is a gift I absolutely don't have myself, the storytelling is absolutely masterful. The pacing, the rhythm, the movement--oh, and they have cunningly and crack-withdrawal-y decided to publish the whole big thing not as one long novel but in three volumes (mass-market paperback) to be released in March, April and May 2006. This is going to be HUGE.
I MUST HAVE THE SEQUELS. As soon as possible. I am going to go right now & e-mail the publicist and see what can be done....
Even when I very first heard about this one I could tell it was EXACTLY my kind of thing. Then I read Justine Larbalestier's post at the beginning of the month and started going totally crazy. I HAD TO HAVE THIS BOOK. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. But it wasn't being published till MARCH.
So I e-mailed The Grand Dizzy with a plea that was basically along the lines of "books like this are like CRACK as far as I am concerned, will you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE send it to me AT ONCE and sorry for being so importunate but I can't help myself" and he obliged me in the kindest possible manner.
Usually I have no self-control about light reading but really this past week and a half I have been absolutely steeped in Johnson & Boswell and with many thousands of pages to read for work I had to resist its lure & sensible mind for once triumphed over yearning matter. It was a small paperback that I could see was perfectly suited to being train reading on my way to New Haven for the conference, that was the thing, and then it would also be my reward for having worked round the clock on those eighteenth-century guys. (Who I love. But it's not the same thing.)
And then it was Thursday & a sunny afternoon & I was high on satisfying-work-accomplishment-and-lack-of-sleep-and-being-on-my-way-out-of-town & the book was everything I expected and more. Truly, truly delightful. If you like fantasy or historical fiction at all, you must read it! But actually if you just want to read an excellent piece of popular fiction get hold of it anyway and see what you think, even if you more usually read crime novels or whatever.
Why is it taking me so long to get to the point? (I think I am working myself up into the same state of frenzied & agonized yearning that I was in when I actually got to it. Deferred gratification, intense release.)
The book: His Majesty's Dragon, first volume in the Temeraire trilogy by Naomi Novik (who happens to be married to Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime). Oh, it is so good! It can be described most simply as Anne McCaffrey meets Patrick O'Brian--the Napoleonic Wars with dragons. (Like the old Reese's commercials: your chocolate, my peanut-butter.) And there's a bit of WWI flying-ace feel because of the aerial battles, and of course any novel of this kind is tinctured with Georgette Heyer. But it's not like any other book, either, and Novik is an amazingly good writer. Very warm & persuasive on character stuff; clean understated sentences with not the tiniest hint of either the pompous habits that we all tend to fall into when we write pastichey old-fashioned stuff or of overly Heyeresque affectations which are also difficult to avoid; the dragon stuff is EXCELLENT and immensely appealing (the dragon Temeraire is the kind of guy, if I may use the word, who if he wasn't living in the early nineteenth century would be fond of listening to audiobooks while he was in the air); Novik has cunningly avoided McCaffreyesque silliness (don't get me wrong, I LOVED those books when I was a teenager, still like some of them a lot) by having the dragons actually be able to talk instead of communicating telepathically; and the thing I was perhaps most impressed with, because it is rare & because it is a gift I absolutely don't have myself, the storytelling is absolutely masterful. The pacing, the rhythm, the movement--oh, and they have cunningly and crack-withdrawal-y decided to publish the whole big thing not as one long novel but in three volumes (mass-market paperback) to be released in March, April and May 2006. This is going to be HUGE.
I MUST HAVE THE SEQUELS. As soon as possible. I am going to go right now & e-mail the publicist and see what can be done....
Two juicy exposes
The Secret Life of a Letter to the Editor (Flanagan redux); Navahoax
(Thanks to A.D. and J.S. respectively for the links.)
(Thanks to A.D. and J.S. respectively for the links.)
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