Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Quota
It has been quiet round here this week, I know, mostly because I am in a productive spell of writing and triathlon training and light reading...
I have just finished writing what I commonly think of as quota for the day; quota is measured differently for different projects (if I'm drafting fiction, it's usually 1500 words, and if I'm writing academic stuff or non-fiction it's more conceived of as something like 5-6 coherent consecutive paragraphs in fully realized prose), but it can usually be produced in 2-3 hours, sometimes less if I'm on a roll, and is deliberately set below the maximum that could be written in a day: this so that it remains easy to write the next day as well.
(I have reached the final essay in the little book on style; it should be that I have a rough draft - the introduction is still patchy and needs some more reading and thinking before I can properly finish it - in three or four days, and I'm sort of shooting to send the entire book to my agent at the end of the first week of April.)
Light reading: Jacqueline Carey's first Kushiel trilogy, which I really loved (less complex than Dunnett, and a first-person voice that owes more to Renault than to Walter Scott, but in certain respects surprisingly similar in its themes and geographies - and check out the seriousness of the books' fans!) - thanks to Charlie Jane for the recommendation; David Levien, Where the Dead Lay (excellent); M. R. Hall, The Coroner (not bad, but hewing to a well-worn set of conventions); Martin Edwards, Take My Breath Away (interesting, wholly implausible but well-written); Liz Rigbey, Summertime (very good, but not quite as good as her first, and with a clumsy couple of pages in the middle that ridiculously transparently give away the plot twist - it does not spoil the book for me, I like knowing the ending in advance, but I am not a guesser-of-endings and it was nonetheless crystal clear from this point what was going to happen - a couple of details too pseudo-carelessly noted); Deon Meyer, Dead Before Dying (also quite farfetched in its plotting but very appealingly rendered - I'll look forward to reading the rest of the series).
The major cloud on the horizon: my beloved cat Blackie is suffering a recurrence of the fibrosarcoma that was surgically removed in December. The fact that it's come back so quickly tells me something that I hate to hear. He's spending this sabbatical year at my mother's house (it is cat heaven there!), but I'm going to bring him back here for the next month or two while I'm still in New York so that I can get some time with him while he's still in pretty good fettle. I'd already decided in December that I wouldn't have another round of surgery for him; it took him weeks to get over the anesthesia and surgery the first time, and he is almost seventeen years old, a good honorable old age for a cat. This is hard, though: he has been my constant companion since 1993...
I have just finished writing what I commonly think of as quota for the day; quota is measured differently for different projects (if I'm drafting fiction, it's usually 1500 words, and if I'm writing academic stuff or non-fiction it's more conceived of as something like 5-6 coherent consecutive paragraphs in fully realized prose), but it can usually be produced in 2-3 hours, sometimes less if I'm on a roll, and is deliberately set below the maximum that could be written in a day: this so that it remains easy to write the next day as well.
(I have reached the final essay in the little book on style; it should be that I have a rough draft - the introduction is still patchy and needs some more reading and thinking before I can properly finish it - in three or four days, and I'm sort of shooting to send the entire book to my agent at the end of the first week of April.)
Light reading: Jacqueline Carey's first Kushiel trilogy, which I really loved (less complex than Dunnett, and a first-person voice that owes more to Renault than to Walter Scott, but in certain respects surprisingly similar in its themes and geographies - and check out the seriousness of the books' fans!) - thanks to Charlie Jane for the recommendation; David Levien, Where the Dead Lay (excellent); M. R. Hall, The Coroner (not bad, but hewing to a well-worn set of conventions); Martin Edwards, Take My Breath Away (interesting, wholly implausible but well-written); Liz Rigbey, Summertime (very good, but not quite as good as her first, and with a clumsy couple of pages in the middle that ridiculously transparently give away the plot twist - it does not spoil the book for me, I like knowing the ending in advance, but I am not a guesser-of-endings and it was nonetheless crystal clear from this point what was going to happen - a couple of details too pseudo-carelessly noted); Deon Meyer, Dead Before Dying (also quite farfetched in its plotting but very appealingly rendered - I'll look forward to reading the rest of the series).
The major cloud on the horizon: my beloved cat Blackie is suffering a recurrence of the fibrosarcoma that was surgically removed in December. The fact that it's come back so quickly tells me something that I hate to hear. He's spending this sabbatical year at my mother's house (it is cat heaven there!), but I'm going to bring him back here for the next month or two while I'm still in New York so that I can get some time with him while he's still in pretty good fettle. I'd already decided in December that I wouldn't have another round of surgery for him; it took him weeks to get over the anesthesia and surgery the first time, and he is almost seventeen years old, a good honorable old age for a cat. This is hard, though: he has been my constant companion since 1993...
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Linkage
It is a minor stroke of genius for the TLS to assign Ian McEwan's novel to M. John Harrison for review. Interesting and thought-provoking review, too - the irk is kept relatively well in check!
Maggie Gee's new memoir sounds highly worthwhile.
The Denisova Child would make a great name for a novel...
Maggie Gee's new memoir sounds highly worthwhile.
The Denisova Child would make a great name for a novel...
$85 in time and materials
At GQ, Bruno Maddox's lament for old-school pornography. (Link courtesy of Alexandra.)
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Lilliputian lounge access
From Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection:
[T]here may be an actual phenomenological correlation between the experience of scale and the experience of duration. In a recent experiment conducted by the School of Architecture at the University of Tennessee, researchers had adult subjects observe scale-model environments 1/6, 1/12, and 1/24 of full size. The environments represented lounges and included chipboard furniture as well as scale figures. The subjects were asked to move the scale figures through the environment, to imagine humans to be that scale, and to identify activities appropriate for that space. Then they were asked to imagine themselves to be of "lounge scale" and picture themselves engaging in activities in the lounge. Finally, they were asked to tell the researchers when they felt that they had been engaged in such activities for 30 minutes. The experiment showed that "the experience of temporal duration is compressed relative to the clock in the same proportion as scale-model environments being observed are compressed relative to the full-sized environment."
Parlor games
From Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard:
The index of a text, then, is not only an instrument of reference; it is itself a text, a second text which is the relief (remainder and asperity) of the first: what is wandering (interrupted) in the rationality of the sentences.
Monday, March 22, 2010
A random thought
In graduate school, I spent (wasted!) much time trying to prepare and send out articles to academic journals. I'm not saying I didn't learn anything doing this, I'm sure I did, and I did publish a couple of articles by the way, but it was not till the end of graduate school or perhaps even the beginning of my professional teaching career that I really understood the difference between a publishable article and a highly competent, even potentially interesting and original article-length piece that is nonetheless not an article and will be very unlikely to be accepted as such.
It has been very much the same thing for other kinds of book, only with a much longer and shallower learning curve. At age 38 I now feel I suddenly understand what makes a really viable commercial book proposal or book project, something I truly haven't felt in the bones until quite recently. I think that while reading and writing are a very good (the only!) way to learn craft (sentences, paragraphs, storytelling), the editors and agents are likely to learn much earlier in their careers than the writers what makes for a good pitch, in the serious rather than the trivial sense.
(But then their job is to recognize them, not so much to produce them themselves; it's just a different skill set, that's the long and the short of it.)
I have always been the kind of person who assumes that I will never know more in future than I know at the present time. (I am not sure if this is pessimism or over-confidence.) It is nice to know that I am capable of learning new things...
[ED. AFTERTHOUGHT. This sent me off to see if I could find a version of my first real published article online, and indeed it is here, at least the abstract and opening paragraphs. But in fact this piece was based on the senior thesis I wrote as an undergraduate - this one! - and the other two articles I published in graduate school were taken from dissertation chapters, not from seminar papers. What I learned from this: it is relatively unlikely that a paper one writes for an actual class is going to turn into something publishable, because its argument is almost always constructed within the professor's framework, and would necessitate wholesale re-framing in order to be suitable for publication, even if such a thing were possible, which it is usually not. Publishable work is much more likely to come out of the context of an independent project - this is why I am often suggesting to graduate students in the humanities that while publication is quite important, it makes more sense to wait until you've drafted some chapters and then see what couple pieces should come out of those and go out to journals rather than spending a lot of time polishing seminar papers when it really would be more valuable to make tracks on the original work of the dissertation.]
It has been very much the same thing for other kinds of book, only with a much longer and shallower learning curve. At age 38 I now feel I suddenly understand what makes a really viable commercial book proposal or book project, something I truly haven't felt in the bones until quite recently. I think that while reading and writing are a very good (the only!) way to learn craft (sentences, paragraphs, storytelling), the editors and agents are likely to learn much earlier in their careers than the writers what makes for a good pitch, in the serious rather than the trivial sense.
(But then their job is to recognize them, not so much to produce them themselves; it's just a different skill set, that's the long and the short of it.)
I have always been the kind of person who assumes that I will never know more in future than I know at the present time. (I am not sure if this is pessimism or over-confidence.) It is nice to know that I am capable of learning new things...
[ED. AFTERTHOUGHT. This sent me off to see if I could find a version of my first real published article online, and indeed it is here, at least the abstract and opening paragraphs. But in fact this piece was based on the senior thesis I wrote as an undergraduate - this one! - and the other two articles I published in graduate school were taken from dissertation chapters, not from seminar papers. What I learned from this: it is relatively unlikely that a paper one writes for an actual class is going to turn into something publishable, because its argument is almost always constructed within the professor's framework, and would necessitate wholesale re-framing in order to be suitable for publication, even if such a thing were possible, which it is usually not. Publishable work is much more likely to come out of the context of an independent project - this is why I am often suggesting to graduate students in the humanities that while publication is quite important, it makes more sense to wait until you've drafted some chapters and then see what couple pieces should come out of those and go out to journals rather than spending a lot of time polishing seminar papers when it really would be more valuable to make tracks on the original work of the dissertation.]
3 other influential books
These three made a huge impression on me starting when I was seven or eight through about eleven or so - I was a precocious reader, but they were topics of serious interest to me! In those days I thought I would be a primatologist when I grew up. Only later did I realize that the most interesting and complex primate is the human being...
1. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man. I read it again and again, and knew the chimpanzee genealogies by heart.
2. Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron. The discussions of language in this book burst upon me like an explosion.
3. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.
Other influential books at this age, excluding fiction: the D'Aulaires' books of Greek and Norse myths; David Macaulay's castle and cathedral books.
1. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man. I read it again and again, and knew the chimpanzee genealogies by heart.
2. Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron. The discussions of language in this book burst upon me like an explosion.
3. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.
Other influential books at this age, excluding fiction: the D'Aulaires' books of Greek and Norse myths; David Macaulay's castle and cathedral books.
Monday miscellany
A rainy day in New York...
Andrew explores a delightful index ("Eggs, correct handling of") and links to an old piece by Philip Hensher on the pleasures and perils of indexing (via Marginal Revolution).
Jo Walton on why professional writers have to be particularly careful what they write online about other books
Former student Ellen Bar's film NY Export: Opus Jazz has its PBS premiere this Wednesday at 8pm.
Last and least: publicity! (The picture was taken in the reading room at Butler Library - our main concern was to minimize disruption to sleeping undergraduates...)
(Also on the topic of publicity, it sounds as though I will most likely be signing advance copies of Invisible Things at Book Expo on the afternoon of May 26, and will hope to see some of you there.)
Andrew explores a delightful index ("Eggs, correct handling of") and links to an old piece by Philip Hensher on the pleasures and perils of indexing (via Marginal Revolution).
Jo Walton on why professional writers have to be particularly careful what they write online about other books
Former student Ellen Bar's film NY Export: Opus Jazz has its PBS premiere this Wednesday at 8pm.
Last and least: publicity! (The picture was taken in the reading room at Butler Library - our main concern was to minimize disruption to sleeping undergraduates...)
(Also on the topic of publicity, it sounds as though I will most likely be signing advance copies of Invisible Things at Book Expo on the afternoon of May 26, and will hope to see some of you there.)
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Rabbits redux
At the FT, Angus Watson walks Watership Down (site registration required).
I must confess that I absolutely adored Watership Down as a child - I read it again and again, and found the scenes of rabbit warfare unutterably moving! I was just thinking a few days ago of Richard Adams - I was reading the first installment of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series and was very much reminded of Adams' novel Maia, a favorite of mine when I was a teenager.
In the late 70s and early 80s, Adams seemed absolutely central to the (my?) literary landscape - The Girl in a Swing made a huge impression on me as a Young Person, and I was again thinking recently that I should obtain a copy and read it again. But one does not seem to hear of him so much these days - his reputation might be due for a revival...
I must confess that I absolutely adored Watership Down as a child - I read it again and again, and found the scenes of rabbit warfare unutterably moving! I was just thinking a few days ago of Richard Adams - I was reading the first installment of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series and was very much reminded of Adams' novel Maia, a favorite of mine when I was a teenager.
In the late 70s and early 80s, Adams seemed absolutely central to the (my?) literary landscape - The Girl in a Swing made a huge impression on me as a Young Person, and I was again thinking recently that I should obtain a copy and read it again. But one does not seem to hear of him so much these days - his reputation might be due for a revival...
Friday, March 19, 2010
La disparition/A Void
The French original is by Georges Perec; the translation is Gilbert Adair's.
Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’assit dans son lit, s’appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, il l’ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot dont il ignorait la signification.
Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
10 books
Following Tyler Cowen, a list off the top of my head of the 10 books that have most influenced me, more or less in the order I encountered them.
(I'm sticking to non-fiction because I have much more often done lists of top-ten favorite novels, many of which may well have influenced me as much or more deeply as any of the books on this list.)
1. Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels. A book that sent me, at age 15 or so, to read the 99 novels that Burgess (highly idiosyncratically) deemed the best published in English since 1945, thus introducing me to Pynchon, Ballard and a host of others.
2. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. I can't remember who recommended this to me - some high-school English teacher, possibly Deborah Dempsey, must have put it into my hands, and I was certainly an enthusiastic reader of British WWI poetry and memoirs - and I haven't revisited it in adulthood, so I have no idea how it would stand up to adult levels of professional scrutiny, but this may have been the first book I ever read (excluding books by Anthony Burgess!) which showed me that the ways of reading I was already interested in exploring on my own might actually be constituted as something like an actual professional field in the world at large.
3. Orwell's essays. I first read them my senior year of high school, and fell absolutely in love with the voice and the mode of analysis. This has never worn off. I associate bits of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars with this period of reading, and both are things I continue to come back to in my reading, teaching and research.
4. Roland Barthes, S/Z. Not at all my favorite work by Barthes (that would be Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, or some of the essays), but the book I plucked off the shelf at my friend Sara's house the summer after we both graduated from high school (her stepmother had done a master's degree in literature) and read, utterly entranced, when I should have been having a sociable sleepover!
5. Roman Jakobson, "Two Types of Aphasia and Two Types of Linguistic Disturbances" - an essay rather than a book, but it stands here as the perfect instantiation of a kind of structuralism that I absolutely love and that I think I am about to devote myself to reviving in the world. A cluster of other essays also make me think of the intellectual excitement of undergraduate days studying literary criticism: Derrida's "Signature Event Context," bits of Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, Genette and Todorov.
6. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties, Unwarranted Speculations. Again, not my favorite book of his, but the one he'd published most recently when I took a life-changing class with him on reading and writing narrative history. In fact, making this list has made me contemplate the extent to which it's my teachers who have influenced me the most (Elaine Scarry, for instance, more by way of herself in person than by way of The Body in Pain - or even Harold Bloom, though I was just one of the masses in that case, not a student with a real working relationship with the prof!) rather than the books per se.
7. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices. I actually can't remember when I first read this - possibly not until graduate school - but as an undergraduate I took Shklar's class on political obligation in order to fill the so-called "moral reasoning" core requirement they had in those days at Harvard. It was an excellent class, and I particularly remember her readings of Shakespeare's Richard II and Kleist's Friedrich von Homburgh. The essay on hypocrisy was extremely important for my dissertation/first book.
8. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. A choice I explained more fully some time ago at Normblog. More generally, the graduate seminar on Burke that I took with David Bromwich in my second year of graduate school had a huge influence on subsequent choices about ways of reading, thinking and teaching.
9. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons. A book that showed me how philosophy (the only other major philosophical work I feel this way about is Hume's Treatise of Human Nature) can have not just the intellectual heft but also much of the playfulness and magical qualities of a significant novel.
10. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Nothing to say here except that #9 and this one are possibly the two most intellectually charismatic and lively works of recent(ish) years that I can think of; both this one and Reasons and Persons cause me to ache with pain at not having written such a book myself.
(I'm sticking to non-fiction because I have much more often done lists of top-ten favorite novels, many of which may well have influenced me as much or more deeply as any of the books on this list.)
1. Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels. A book that sent me, at age 15 or so, to read the 99 novels that Burgess (highly idiosyncratically) deemed the best published in English since 1945, thus introducing me to Pynchon, Ballard and a host of others.
2. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. I can't remember who recommended this to me - some high-school English teacher, possibly Deborah Dempsey, must have put it into my hands, and I was certainly an enthusiastic reader of British WWI poetry and memoirs - and I haven't revisited it in adulthood, so I have no idea how it would stand up to adult levels of professional scrutiny, but this may have been the first book I ever read (excluding books by Anthony Burgess!) which showed me that the ways of reading I was already interested in exploring on my own might actually be constituted as something like an actual professional field in the world at large.
3. Orwell's essays. I first read them my senior year of high school, and fell absolutely in love with the voice and the mode of analysis. This has never worn off. I associate bits of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars with this period of reading, and both are things I continue to come back to in my reading, teaching and research.
4. Roland Barthes, S/Z. Not at all my favorite work by Barthes (that would be Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, or some of the essays), but the book I plucked off the shelf at my friend Sara's house the summer after we both graduated from high school (her stepmother had done a master's degree in literature) and read, utterly entranced, when I should have been having a sociable sleepover!
5. Roman Jakobson, "Two Types of Aphasia and Two Types of Linguistic Disturbances" - an essay rather than a book, but it stands here as the perfect instantiation of a kind of structuralism that I absolutely love and that I think I am about to devote myself to reviving in the world. A cluster of other essays also make me think of the intellectual excitement of undergraduate days studying literary criticism: Derrida's "Signature Event Context," bits of Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, Genette and Todorov.
6. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties, Unwarranted Speculations. Again, not my favorite book of his, but the one he'd published most recently when I took a life-changing class with him on reading and writing narrative history. In fact, making this list has made me contemplate the extent to which it's my teachers who have influenced me the most (Elaine Scarry, for instance, more by way of herself in person than by way of The Body in Pain - or even Harold Bloom, though I was just one of the masses in that case, not a student with a real working relationship with the prof!) rather than the books per se.
7. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices. I actually can't remember when I first read this - possibly not until graduate school - but as an undergraduate I took Shklar's class on political obligation in order to fill the so-called "moral reasoning" core requirement they had in those days at Harvard. It was an excellent class, and I particularly remember her readings of Shakespeare's Richard II and Kleist's Friedrich von Homburgh. The essay on hypocrisy was extremely important for my dissertation/first book.
8. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. A choice I explained more fully some time ago at Normblog. More generally, the graduate seminar on Burke that I took with David Bromwich in my second year of graduate school had a huge influence on subsequent choices about ways of reading, thinking and teaching.
9. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons. A book that showed me how philosophy (the only other major philosophical work I feel this way about is Hume's Treatise of Human Nature) can have not just the intellectual heft but also much of the playfulness and magical qualities of a significant novel.
10. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Nothing to say here except that #9 and this one are possibly the two most intellectually charismatic and lively works of recent(ish) years that I can think of; both this one and Reasons and Persons cause me to ache with pain at not having written such a book myself.
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