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Affenlight didn’t hate David, not anymore. Not that he had much regard for the man, but he’d spent more time thinking about David in recent years than about anyone in the world besides Pella and Owen, and that kind of constant mindfulness, over time, could mellow into sympathy. He would never forgive David, but David had become a part of life, and Affenlight had achieved a grudging acknowledgment of the fact that David would continue to live and breathe whether he wanted him to or not.

- from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

I wrote a paragraph explaining why this passage speaks to me during this phase of my life, but it’s clumsily, uncomfortably personal. So I followed the advice you’ll read later in this post: I axed it.

Meanwhile, to distract you from my clumsily, uncomfortably personal disclosure that I wrote and deleted something clumsily, uncomfortably personal, here’s another striking quote from Harbach’s novel:

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes …


That last bit holds a healthy reminder for writers: Revising isn’t a burden; it’s a luxury.

So junk thousands of words. Start fresh. Be glad. And know that the shortstop whose game-deciding throw missed the first baseman’s glove by ten feet is deeply envious.

“

“You shouldn’t eat so much flour,” Owen said, taking a single pancake for himself. “Even when I’m stoned I don’t each much flour. The other reason, of course, is that I’m a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can’t help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There’s probably some sort of way in which that’s not a paradox. Maybe I believe in love. Maybe I just badly crave my mother’s approval. Hang on a sec.” Owen jogged back to the hot-food line, spatulaed up four more flapjacks, and slid them onto his plate. “Sorry to babble on like this, Henry. I think I’m immoderately stoned.”

After brunch they went to the union to play Ping-Pong. Owen, even immoderately stoned, proved to be a surprisingly good player.

- from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

A little like Owen, I have nothing but maybes to explain why I like this passage. Maybe it’s because I’ve stubbed my toe more than once on those “In practice, if not in theory” tree roots that lurk just below the tips of the grass blades when your spirit is more bold than your flesh. Or maybe I’ve just read “In theory, if not in practice” so very many times that I hallucinate a twisting backflip in Harbach’s “In practice, if not in theory.” 

Maybe the spelling of “spatulaed” looks so wrong that it’s just got to be right.

Maybe it’s as simple as being a sucker for a good Ping-Pong reference. Your serve, Mr. Nabokov.

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Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous.

- Nabokov, writing as John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in the foreword to Lolita

I love this sentence. There’s an Updike quote that often shows up on the covers of Nabokov books: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. does not write ecstatically. That, perversely, is why I love the sentence. I love it but forgot about it and only found it just now while searching my computer for something unrelated. I’d stashed the quote in Evernote and attached this reminder: “Lolita snippet for VWP (corn reference in Nebraska).”

VWP stands for Void Where Prohibited, my own version of a “put my first book into the drawer, and shut it” unpublished novel. The “(corn reference in Nebraska)” bit refers to these two paragraphs:

Morning in Nebraska is something I’d rather forget.  I had wanted to go looking for the real Nebraska — a place a journalist from Omaha once assured me really existed.  This is a place of sand dunes and true natural beauty, if my memory isn’t confusing that reporter with one of the hundreds of others who interviewed me over the years.

Interstate 80 breathes not a word of this secret paradise to the travelers who speed through, counting on something better in Colorado.  Having confined my drive to that deadening corridor, I can scarcely pass blanket judgment on the state.  An unchewed corn kernel bumming a ride aboard a piece of shit knows as much about the beauty of its digester as I do about the beauty of Nebraska.

Which is to say that my narrator’s casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. He admits as much.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit. There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks:

I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit.

There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

“

So my notion of poking fun at (Ayn Rand) evolved into an idea for a more sophisticated satire that would try to play fair with her philosophy, and present not just the bad and the ridiculous, but the good and the thought-provoking, and try to give some sense of where her ideas had come from and why they had such value to some people. And I also decided that I wanted to bring Rand herself into the story, so that she could defend herself, and so that I could give her her due.


And this idea would eventually become my second published novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric, which to me represents the point in my career when my dad’s influence caught up with my mom’s. Many of the elements in that book—the fantastical setting, the flashes of missionary zeal when my protagonist, Joan Fine, engages Rand in debate, the bicycle trip to heaven—these are things that I would associate with my mother. But the decision to treat Rand and her philosophy as more than just the butt of a joke—as a person, not a perversity—that’s Dad.

- from Seattle novelist Matt Ruff’s 2010 speech at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing, which I found tonight by a strange route.

Ruff’s words fit well with my favorite bit of that Camus quote I blogged in December: “true artists scorn nothing; they oblige themselves to understand rather than to judge.”*

Or, as Geraldine Brooks asked in that Best American Short Stories intro that I seem doomed to quote from at least once daily, “why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?”

More than just the butt of a joke. To understand rather than to judge. Not just a foil for humor. Ruff and Camus and Brooks aren’t saying exactly the same thing, but they’re singing in the same key.

I’ve typed and retyped and retyped this sentence. Every attempt ends up being about fiction I’ve written or fiction I hope to write and about how devoted I’ve become to the idea that I can’t be worth a damn as a writer unless I understand all my characters. Not admire all my characters. But understand, be able to step in and serve as their court-appointed defense attorney in a pinch.

I know what you’re thinking. Please, oh unpublished novelist, give me at least seven more paragraphs of your beliefs on this important topic. Tragically, I’m heading to bed.

——————

* This is my latest stab at improving on the official Nobel translation. I explained my thinking in the December post. If you understand French, you can decide for yourself. The original is “les vrais artistes ne méprisent rien ; ils s’obligent à comprendre au lieu de juger.”

“

Later, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, I had an editor named Paul Ingrassia, whose pet hate was to catch someone in his newsroom looking up something online. He would creep up to the terminal and bark: “The story’s not on Nexus. It’s on the street. Get out there!”


So, for whatever it is worth, I’m passing on this advice to the next generation of short story writers, those jeunesse dorée who will come to the form at what might be the most perfect time in its history—a golden age to rival and perhaps surpass the era of the popular weeklies.

- from guest editor Geraldine Brooks’ introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011

1) It’s Nexis; not Nexus.

2) Sometimes the story is on Nexis.

3) George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” is just sitting there waiting for some newsroom troubadour to create ”All My Ex’s Search on Nexis.”

4) Now that smartphones exist, I hope newsrooms are emptier than they were when I left my newspaper job in 2003. It always felt like such a wasted opportunity to have reporters start the day at their desks, making the phone calls that might scare up something newsy enough to justify leaving the building. If I ran a paper, I’d urge reporters to make those calls while walking around town — walking a beat, essentially, since familiarity makes it possible to detect change. Because change is news.

“

I couldn’t put it down, and when someone advertised the other seven titles in the series for sale, I convinced my parents to buy the lot. They were used hardbacks with lavishly illustrated dust jackets, plastic-covered, meticulously kept. I lined them up in order, and I started to feel … odd. I was breathing fast. My neck was flushed. There was a taste, buttery and warm, in the back of my throat. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was unfamiliar and I didn’t have a word for it. It would be six years before I felt that way again, in a very different context. And by then I knew the word.

Since that first encounter with lust, I have always thought of literature as a physical matter.

- from guest editor Geraldine Brooks’ introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011

the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list is two for two

On Saturday, I praised the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list but left myself the option of stomping back to the Internet and denouncing the list if the second half of The Fates Will Find Their Way turned to crap. The novel finished as strong as it started. So no stomping, no denunciations. I’ve now read two of the five books on the list. Both were terrific.

I’ve been talking up The Fates Will Find Their Way over the last couple of days. When I do, I make sure to tell people that the story is told in the first person plural — “we” and “us” and “our.” Here’s a sample of how novelist Hannah Pittard manages to make “we” and “us” and “our” work:

It was our mothers who broke the spell. One telephone number at a time, the phone tree was resurrected. Mrs. Zblowski called Mrs. Boyd, who called Mrs. Epstein. And our mothers, in turn, called us, dutiful as ever to the prescription of the passage of information.

“Did you see?” they asked.

“See what?” we might have said, determined as ever to feign indifference.

“The paper,” they said, impatient and unbelieving, the click of their nails audible as they struck one by one on their own kitchen tables. “Mr. Lindell.”

“Oh, that,” we might have said, our wives furrowing their brows, wondering the reason for that Sunday’s particular interruption. Perhaps we rolled our eyes at them or shook our heads. Perhaps we made chatty hands at them, suggesting our mothers’ unwillingess to stop talking. Perhaps, but what we did not do was let on, was let slip, let show our absolute concentration on that obituary, its content, and whatever new information our mothers might have called to divulge.

Our backs turned now towards our wives, we moved away from them, towards the foyer or the den or the basement even, and continued our conversation.

Michael Hingston, who writes Too Many Books In the Kitchen, sees this “we” and “us” and “our” differently than I do. He sees a “headstrong choir: it shifts and coalesces into several distinct shapes, each boy given small moments of individual mourning before slowly retreating into the anonymous blob.”

Maybe I’m being too literal, but I can’t accept the idea that this is a story sung by a “headstrong choir.” In a choir, the harmony — or dissonance — would come from one man singing “chatty hands” and another singing “roll my eyes” and another “shake my head.” But that’s not what happens. Instead, it’s an uncertain “Perhaps we rolled our eyes at them or shook our heads. Perhaps we made chatty hands …”

I sense a first-person narrator who simply refuses to show himself, who hides himself so thoroughly in the “we” of his lifelong peers that readers never know whether his mother is Mrs. Zblowski or Mrs. Boyd or Mrs. Epstein or someone else altogether who never gets mentioned in the story. I could be wildly wrong. Regardless, I recommend the novel.

- from Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way All credit and thanks go to the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list, unless the second half of Pittard’s engrossing novel collapses and I stomp back to the Internet to denounce the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list. Click for high-res photo

- from Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way

All credit and thanks go to the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list, unless the second half of Pittard’s engrossing novel collapses and I stomp back to the Internet to denounce the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list.

“
I would see him there with his friends and bodyguards. He wouldn’t notice me, he would be shining, each golden hair on his arms would be shining. I would go to the jukebox and put on “All I Need Is a Miracle.” This would give me confidence. I would sit at the bar and order a drink and I would begin to tell a yarn. A yarn is the kind of story that winds people in, like yarn around two hands. I would wind them in, the other people at the counter. There would be one part of the story that involved participation, something people would be compelled to chant at key moments. I haven’t thought of the story yet, but I would say, for example: “And again I knocked on the door and yelled,” and then everyone at the bar would chant: “Let me in! Let me in!” Eventually, all the people around me would be chanting this, and the circle of chanters would grow as they gathered in curiosity. Soon William would wonder what all the the fuss was about.

- from Miranda July’s “Majesty” in No One Belongs Here More Than You

Same story: “His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty, and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for a local nonprofit and spearheading their neighborhood earthquake-preparedness groups. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.”

I’m listening to the audiobook version — Miranda July reading her own stories. Two and a half stories in, it’s pretty great.

“
I’m so happy that you give a chance for Ben to come back because I would love for people to go out and buy his collected stories and to look at his work and for him to be acknowledged as a master of Irish literature. If there’s any one writer that I would like to sort of sing back into a good place, it would be Ben.

- novelist Colum McCann, speaking to New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman after reading Benedict Kiely’s “Bluebell Meadow” on the magazine’s monthly fiction podcast.

I can’t even say why exactly, but I’m particularly grateful for this bit of the story:

They hold hands regularly. Lofty can read palms, a variant reading every time. They have kissed occasionally, when the children who are always there have been distracted by a water-hen or rat or leaping fish or a broken branch or an iceberg of froth from the falls.

Skylight Books Author Reading Series

Since I just linked to a Skylight reading, I figured I’d post a link to Skylight’s podcast, where you can hear many more readings. Skylight is in L.A. I’m not. That I know about Skylight at all boosts my opinion of the Internet.

A writer I’d never heard of started following me on Twitter. I Googled the writer’s name and found a reading she’d done at Skylight. I listened to a podcast of the reading. Then, scanning the list of podcast episodes, I found recorded readings by some names I recognized: Emma Straub, Edan Lepucki, Janelle Brown. Seeing Janelle Brown’s name caused me to send the following email to my college roommate:

Um, did I know Janelle was a novelist? Her name, which I hadn’t thought of in ages, came up on a podcast I was listening to.

Janelle, you see, was last spotted (by me, at least) valiantly visiting the affront to the Uniform Building Code that I shared with the recipient of the above email. We called it “the shack.” It is the second-grossest place I’ve ever slept.