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My writing isn’t experimental. When I’ve nodded to the reportoire of avant-garde effects, I took it for granted that the experiments in question were conducted by others, in the past. Now they’re part of the palette. A literary critic who puts the word “experimental” within a mile of my stuff is either in bad faith or ill-informed about a century including Oulipo, Language poetry, and, well, surrealism.

- a quote from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence that I like in spite of being so thoroughly “ill-informed about a century including Oulipo” that I don’t think I’d ever seen the word?/surname?/floor wax?/dessert topping? “Oulipo.”

Wikipedia’s list of “Oulipian constraints” includes:

Replace every noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. For example, “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago…” becomes “Call me islander. Some yeggs ago…”. Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used.

Youngling can always count on a murrain for a fancy proselyte stylist.

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UPDATE (moments later):

And now I’m questioning whether “you,” being a pronoun, should have been made into “youngling” or not. Never mind.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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* 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.”

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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.

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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
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Little makes me more uncomfortable than watching a new writer attempt a triple-triple lutz without sufficient control of language or grasp of form. That reading experience sometimes starts like this: second person (okay, that’s fine, sort of) on a prewedding trip to Barcelona; florid or jerky language and vast generalizations about gender (now “I” secretly prefer the leggy barista in a café with luminous cleavage to my willowy and controlling grad student fiancée); excessive description of the rain in Spain that overtly reflects “my” inner state (ugh); sudden switch to first or third person (uh-oh); cut to barista naked on top of “me” (and I’m out).

- Heidi Pitlor, series editor for The Best American Short Stories

The best part of trusting your readers to guess that a barista is in a café is that you can write “the leggy barista with luminous cleavage” instead of “the leggy barista in a café with luminous cleavage,” which suggests the café itself has cleavage.

If I seem hostile, it’s because I had to radically revise a short story after reading Pitlor’s words. It takes longer than I could have imagined to switch every Barcelona reference to a Madrid reference.

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Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship.

- from Amy Harmon’s “Navigating Love and Autism” on the front page of Monday’s NYT

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.

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… my visits chez Hitch were never quite as rollicking as they might have been - because his addiction kept us apart. But what struck me about alcohol and Hitch was that it was a kind of rocket fuel. What killed him was not the alcohol as such or the many years of smoking, but the force of will that simply didn’t rest, and seemed to punish his body with ludicrously brutal days and nights of sleepless drive.

- Andrew Sullivan

The post, which is strong for several reasons, is essential for writers or aspiring writers who found themselves thirsty after reading this passage by Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter:

Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.

Sullivan quotes and links to Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who wrote:

… those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking. … It makes me sad to see young writers cherishing their drinking bouts with him, and even his alcohol-fuelled displays of contempt for them (see Dave Zirin’s fond reminiscence of having Christopher spit at him) as if drink is what makes a great writer, and what makes a great writer a real man.

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… celui qui, souvent, a choisi son destin d’artiste parce qu’il se sentait différent apprend bien vite qu’il ne nourrira son art, et sa différence, qu’en avouant sa ressemblance avec tous. L’artiste se forge dans cet aller retour perpétuel de lui aux autres, à mi-chemin de la beauté dont il ne peut se passer et de la communauté à laquelle il ne peut s’arracher. C’est pourquoi les vrais artistes ne méprisent rien ; ils s’obligent à comprendre au lieu de juger.

- Albert Camus, accepting his Nobel Prize on 12/10/1957

Hear part of his speech here.

Translation, as provided by nobelprize.org:

… often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

The translation misses at least one nice phrase. Camus talks about the artist forging himself “dans cet aller retour perpetuel de lui aux autres,” which my atrophied French takes to mean that the artist forges himself “in this perpetual roundtrip from himself to others.” The translation of “s’arracher” as “tear himself away” is correct. But “arracher” is a great verb because it sounds like ripping. We lose that in English.

My favorite part, the part that made me post this, comes at the end of the quote: “true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.” And again, the French has a worthwhile twist: Rather than true artists who “are obliged to understand rather than to judge,” I read it as Camus talking about true artists “obliging themselves to understand rather than to judge.” It’s active. It’s a choice.

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And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library.

- from Ian McEwan’s “Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer, Brilliant Friend” in the NYT

(via Hal Espen)

Also this:

Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton.

Whenever people talk of Christopher’s journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Consider the mix. Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, Christopher’s head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line.

Do click here and read it all for yourself.

(this post was reblogged from halsf)