“Most people’s interest in contemporary “literary” fiction, if they have any interest at all, is a matter of wanting to read the latest Big Novel while it’s still being talked about. If they like it, so much the better, but a sense of connection to their peers is what they’re really after. It would be wrong to think them gullible. They succumb to the loudest promotional campaign every year only because they recognize the recurring need for an “it” novel, something everyone can agree to read at about the same time.” — - B.R. Myers, who the Atlantic keeps paying to write stuff like this because every party needs an asshole, and the assholes’ interest in contemporary “literary” fiction, if they have any interest at all, is a matter of wanting to belittle the latest Big Novel while it’s still being talked about. If they dislike it, so much the better, but the lonely friction of making their peers feel stupid for loving The Art of Fielding — or Freedom or Tree of Smoke — is what they’re really after.
“… I walk past and also pass a girl who is reading; no use trying to begin a romance with the words: “What are you reading, miss?” — Robert Walser, 1907, in “The Park” from Berlin Stories
[video]
“I pretend that I have to cycle to work. I don’t, because my studio is in my garden. But I get on my bike and I do a circuit and come back. So I have cycled to work. If I don’t cycle to work, it’s so fixed in my head, I can’t go to work.” —
Fittingly, the writer with the fake commute shuns prose that sprints straight from bed to the garden studio. From the same interview:
For me, the pleasure is actually in the language and in what develops through the language. That, to me, is what literature is. If we don’t want it to be language, then let’s go and do something else. But if we’re only looking for the story, we can get that in many different media now. There’s nothing wrong with that. But language has its own particular, specific idiosyncratic pleasures and challenges. It is language. So much as I’m using language, I really don’t want to be told by anyone that it’s elitist if you use it in a particular way, or that it gets in the way of just telling a story. Why can’t we just go from A to B in a straight line? That’s not interesting to me. I’ve been a critic of the realist novel for a long time. I think very often in fact TV and film can do that better. Docu-drama is also very good. We do have other mediums to take that burden away.
“Nobody’s worried about whether you can watch Star Wars without having been a Jedi.” —
- Nathan Englander on the “really strange notion that gets put very specifically on literature with lots of Jews in it, or with lots of black people, or with lots of gay people.”
He continues:
That’s how I feel about [John] Cheever. Nobody in my family ever mixed a martini. That world is as foreign to me as a dybbuk is to someone else. And you know what, there’s no distance, I get everything. Nothing is lost on me. So yes, why would a Jewish world be less of a world, or too “other,” unless the writer has failed?
[video]
This post is example #397 of my (possibly excessive) fondness for those moments when two similar ideas pass in front of my eyes. This time the ideas come from Willa Cather’s 1920 “On the Art of Fiction” essay and Sarah Manguso’s 3/18/2012 appearance on the “Other People” podcast.
Here’s “Other People” host Brad Listi interviewing Manguso:
LISTI: So, four years to get to the 100 pages that you wanted. But how many pages total did you write?
MANGUSO: … It’s very rare for me to cut and save a piece of text. Like, I’ll just cut it. It’ll just be gone. And I know that’s horrifying and bad and blah blah blah. But I’m very easily overwhelmed by too much content, and so I just think if I delete a bunch of pages and I really need them, then they’ll come back. I’ll write them again in some better way. Or maybe in the same way. Who knows? So I really have no idea how many pages I cut along the way to get to this sort of tolerable hundred. Which is too bad because I love it when … novelists say “Oh, I cut 800 pages from that book.” It’s so thrilling that it’s OK to do that. It was less than 800. I’ll just say that.
In another part of the interview, Manguso said:
I enjoy the process of distillation. I enjoy compression. It’s fun for me. And so it’s just this thing that I like to do, to try to see how few words I can use to make or to try to make the reader feel what I want the reader to feel.
And here’s Cather from nintety-some years ago:
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal.
A writer can write “I was in denial” or a writer can write what Cheryl Strayed wrote in Wild:
People like my mother did not get cancer. The tests at the Mayo Clinic would prove that, refuting what the doctors in Duluth had said. I was certain of this. Who were those doctors in Duluth anyway?
What was Duluth? Duluth! Duluth was a freezing hick town where doctors who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about told forty-five-year-old vegetarian-ish, garlic-eating, natural-remedy-using nonsmokers that they had late-stage lung cancer, that’s what.
Fuck them.
That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem.
And yet, here was my mother at the Mayo Clinic getting worn out if she had to be on her feet for more than three minutes.
[video]
[video]
[video]
the most memorable use of anagram skills I encountered Sunday