On being intimidated by a favorite writer’s work
February 7, 2010 | 22 Comments
I’m focused on my own writing right now, thus the dearth of longer posts, slowdown in reviewing, and trickle of remainders. I feel guilty about it, if that helps.
A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.
About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn. I was, as always, struggling with structure.
“I try to take comfort,” I told Rupert, in email, “in the knowledge that This Party is, what, your eighth or ninth book? Surely I’ll get better.”
He assured me:
[Y]es, you WILL get better. We all get better. I can definitely imagine being on my deathbed & thinking, ‘Oh, not now, please; I was just beginning to GET somewhere…’ Who was it who said that a writer’s biography is not the details of his life, but the story of his style. Nabokov maybe.
Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve been so overwhelmed with admiration for someone else’s work that I could barely stand to look at my own. I’m guessing the neurosis is a lifelong affliction — and, judging from conversations with friends, it’s a fairly common one.
Joan Didion suffered from an extreme case of awe-inspired paralysis. She told The Paris Review that, while Henry James was as formative as influence on her writing as Hemingway, she could no longer read him at all.
He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.
Can you imagine? The formidable Joan Didion, reduced to silence by her love of someone else’s words?
For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.
But see Dani Shapiro’s reaction, in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, to an acquaintance who said, “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
If you can relate — or if you can’t — I’m curious about your experiences and I’ve opened up comments.
Unfortunate vestige of being raised Charismatic
February 1, 2010 | Comments Off
Every time I pass this Carnegie Hall ad campaign, I think these happy people are praising God at an Oral Roberts revival.
Earbrass, LTD: Writers in search of reassignment?*
January 26, 2010 | 41 Comments
“First, try to be something, anything, else.” That’s the famous first line of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” and it’s funny because it’s true. Many writers do consider another path initially.
Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy, Kate Christensen a rock star, Joan Didion an actress. Chris Adrian went to medical school, and the seminary. Herman Melville was a sailor and Larry Brown a fireman. Faulkner did guv’ment work.
Jonathan Lethem once worked as a bookseller; if he weren’t a writer, he says he’d probably choose to be a film historian or curator.
Lately there’ve been layoffs at my day job. I seem to have escaped for now, but have been mulling over what to do if I get the axe. (I mean, apart from writing the things I want to write. I’ll always do that; I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I also have to eat.)
Top of the list is is Grasso & Neutron, the private eye firm Dana and I keep saying we’re going to start up. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy. We know what you did last night.)
Apparently this is a common writers’ fantasy. Also, espionage. (See, e.g., Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, above, and the writer as detective.)
I’d probably be reasonably happy doing genealogical research, which is sort of the same thing as detective work, except everyone is dead. I have a feeling there’s not a big demand for this kind of service in a recession, though.
How about you? If you write, did you go right into it? If not, what’d you do first, or want to do? And if writing what you love doesn’t pay the bills, what does (up to and including “layoff lit“)?
I’m genuinely curious and opening up comments. Anecdotes about favorite authors are welcome.
* Courtesy Ms. Carrie Frye.
Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop
January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
“My mother spoke to me once after she was dead.” That’s the first sentence of Rupert Thomson’s forthcoming memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, which I started reading last night and am loving and rationing. (I’m in lockdown at my sister’s place, getting some writing done; also, I’ve waited a long time for this book and don’t want to tear through it too quickly.)
The full first chapter is online at Granta, and Rupert reads a later section above. Unless you’re new to this site, you probably know that he’s one of my favorite writers — and, now, a friend.
Making your brain (and fingers) keep going
January 17, 2010 | Comments Off
A friend who just finished writing a(n excellent) book in a short period of time says you have to ignore your brain when it tells you it’s done for the day. You may think you can’t keep going, but if you push on, what comes out will be even better. The next day, do the same. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Also, no socializing. Apart from whatever job pays the bills, do nothing but sleep, eat, procrastinate, and write.
See also Peter Straub’s Twitter bio: “my profession obliges me to enjoy solitary confinement.”
Haitian (and U.S.) history: A 60-second tutorial
January 14, 2010 | Comments Off
On Rachel Maddow’s show, the Haitian Ambassador responds (above) to Pat Robertson’s revolting and infuriating, but not especially surprising, claim that the earthquake is a result of slaves’ “pact with the devil.” As Alex Balk says, this rebuttal is “direct, intelligent,” and “filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening.”
As you’ve no doubt heard, aid agencies are really struggling. Writer Edwidge Danticat spoke with CNN yesterday about the implications of the disaster.
It is a catastrophe beyond measure, because even when we’ve had mudslides or floods, it has overwhelmed the capacity of the country to handle it: to absorb the wounded, to help people find medical care. But this situation is something far beyond anything the country has ever experienced before.In Haiti, most people cannot afford basic medical care, so imagine now, the primary hospital in Port-au-Prince is said to have been severely damaged. It’s truly an extraordinary catastrophe for a country that’s already suffered so very, very much.
The sad thing is that the country seemed to have been on an upswing. There was the beginning of some tranquility.
Earlier Danticat said she could see “parts of my old neighborhood through this very large veil of fire.” (Via A.N. Devers and Joy Press.)
Give what you can. Doctors Without Borders is on the ground and working already, but lacking shelter and basic supplies like anesthesia, so that organization is a good place to start.
The education of Lynn Barber
January 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Lynn Barber’s An Education, which inspired the film of the same name, appears in the States this week and is an utter delight so far.
Barber famously withdrew last fall from a literary festival whose organizers objected to her author photo. “If a pic of me smoking is such a threat to the good burghers of Richmond,” she said, “imagine what my presence would do.”
In her writing as in life, Barber excels at this sort of piercing, slightly absurd wisecrack. From An Education:
[M]y father could never shake off his desperate childhood fear of poverty, and was eternally saving for ‘a rainy day’. (In the exceptionally wet winter of 2000, when their house was flooded to a depth of six inches, I cheerily remarked to my father, ‘Well it looks like your rainy day has finally come.’ Despite his being blind by this stage, in his mid-eighties, and handicapped by water lapping round his ankles, he still tried to wade across the room to hit me.) His great fear was ‘fecklessness,’ which seemed to mean fun in any form.
For more examples of her wit, turn to The Guardian, where you can read the excellent section that focuses on her teenage affair with a much older man.
Simon was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them. The extent to which I never asked him questions is astonishing in retrospect — I blame Albert Camus. My normal instinct was to bombard people with questions, to ask about every detail of their lives, even to intrude into the silences with ‘What are you thinking?’ But just around the time I met Simon I became an Existentialist, and one of the rules of Existentialism as practised by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions. Asking questions showed that you were naïve and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French.
I particularly like Barber’s notion, introduced in the first chapter of An Education, that her writing is one of the enduring effects of childhood elocution lessons. Her teacher was her mother, who also instructed shopgirls and other people’s children how to speak in a manner she believed was posh. The poems Barber had to recite (with gestures) are the ones “that flash into my mind unbidden — unwanted! — at odd moments of the day. ‘Dirty British steamer with a salt-caked smokestack,’ I mutter, crashing my trolley along the Waitrose aisles. ‘Is there anybody there, said the Traveller’ as I wait for the call centre to answer.”
Beyond that, though:
I am left with this terrible legacy — my accent. It is the classic elocution accent, homeless and inauthentic, suggestive neither of grouse moor nor shop floor, an accent that screams ‘phoney!’ the moment it opens its mouth. It is by far the most repulsive thing about me, and I notice that people meeting me for the first time are often taken aback. I have no idea what my natural accent should be — my father still speaks in broad Lancaster [earlier she mentions that he says "side the pots" for "clear the table"], my mother elocution. But perhaps it was because I so hated my voice that I chose to become a writer…
Barber is best known as a journalist; her sharp, sometimes combative interviews are legendary in the U.K. While I’m reading the rest of her book, and participating in ShThFuUpAnWoOnYrNo Month, you can, if you wish, judge her manner of speaking for yourself.
Quick preview of the Walker Percy documentary
January 7, 2010 | Comments Off
This trailer for Win Riley’s Walker Percy documentary announces that the film is coming soon. The New Orleans launch and screening are scheduled for March 10, at Loyola’s Walker Percy Center. (Via.) Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, is one of my favorites.
See, previously: Walker Percy kept his accent, and in defense of Big Ideas in fiction.
Suggested writers’ agenda for January
January 5, 2010 | Comments Off
I’ve been thinking about Saul Bellow’s notion that “art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.”
Coincidentally, Colson Whitehead has declared this ShThFuUpAnWoOnYrNo (Shut the fuck up and work on your novel) Month. And why not? It’s winter, you’re going to be miserable anyway. What better things do you have going on?
I’m sure I’ll be around, just not consistently.
Goodbye, aughts. Hello… space age?
December 30, 2009 | Comments Off
Happy New Year from frigid (but no longer snowy) Brooklyn.
Wishing you all good things in 2010.
A curmudgeon’s literary paraphernalia
December 30, 2009 | Comments Off
It has not always been so, but few aspects of online aspiring-writer culture are more irritating to me nowadays than “literary lifestyle” tips and paraphernalia. (Library-scented perfume. Dictionary wallpaper. Moleskines. Bookshelves fashioned of reference books pulled from library dumpsters. The onslaught is maddening.)
But every curmudgeon is at least something of a hypocrite, and I am no exception. I visit writers’ houses, read their recipes, and sometimes stop in at the White Horse Tavern, a bar that has nothing to recommend it apart from the fact that Dylan Thomas was served his last drink there. Last night A.N. Devers gave me a replica of Mark Twain’s pen knife. It’s sitting here on my desk next to — ahem — the Poe figurine.
And now I am going to recommend a book for your coffee table.
My friend Dwight Garner’s Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, a revealing cultural history marketed as a novelty book, collects one hundred years of book ads, from the creatively manipulative to the hilariously misguided. Read Me shows, more effectively than any treatise could, how pitches to book-buyers evolved in the last century, and also that the marketing arm of the publishing industry has always had the capacity to be more than a little tone-deaf (as in the perky ad for Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, below).
It’s the perfect thing to pass around and read aloud from after holiday meals, while everyone is still drunk and merry and not wanting to contemplate the moment they’ll have to head back out into the cold.
And the Rand played on: A view from I-95 South
December 23, 2009 | Comments Off
Ayn Rand’s selfishness-meets-the-free-market doctrines may be odious, but she must be taken seriously, argues Scott McLemee, if only for her influence.
[T]he Rand market has never been anything but robust in the years since her death in 1982. Every year, her melodramatic novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1958) have sold at least 100,000 copies each. Rand’s other fiction remains in print; so do her ventures into philosophical speculation and political commentary. From time to time, an opinion poll in the United States will show that she is among the most influential writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Intellectual historians do not recognise this, but then her influence is on the lower levels of the culture, where they seldom venture.All of this might be construed as an American peculiarity, like miniature golf or the bacon cheeseburger. But that is too narrow a view: Rand’s perspective is not nationalistic, and her philosophy has a properly cosmic dimension. To put her in perspective it is helpful to consult, of all things, The Communist Manifesto. When Marx and Engels describe the world-churning dynamism of unfettered capitalism – its capacity to unmake and remake the world in its own image – they write with a verve and vividness that make recent paeans to globalisation seem timid. It is fitting that they might have some prophetic insight into the author of The Virtue of Selfishness…
But … Marx and Engels overestimate just how much reality the human psyche can bear – and they certainly underestimate Ayn Rand. Her fiction is a sustained effort to create for capitalism a grand mythology that is too solid ever to melt into air. Her approach to doing so was sui generis and even, in its way, avant garde – most conspicuously in Atlas Shrugged, her final novel, in which didacticism and tempestuousness combine in a truly epic work of propaganda.
Indeed. My friend Allison saw this billboard (above) while heading south on I-95 through Georgia yesterday. Then she found a photo (in pHlow’s Flickr stream) and some background.
See also: a Brooklynite’s insane Randian diatribe; what Howard Roark might have brought to Williamsburg; Atlas Shrugged, updated for the current financial crisis; and Americans’ efforts to weather the recession by seeking financial advice from the Bible.
A pitch for Girls Write Now at the holidays
December 22, 2009 | Comments Off
Last year I joined the board of Girls Write Now, a nonprofit organization that pairs at-risk teen girls with professional writers who support them. The pairs meet regularly, alone and in groups, and the girls who finish the program all go on to college.
Amalie, for instance, broke down a little in her first reading (until the other mentees rushed in — video below), sailed through the second (also below), and has just finished her first semester at Smith College.
Girls Write Now has continued to flourish this year despite an economic climate that is as challenging for nonprofits as it is for everyone else. In November, our director, Maya Nussbaum, traveled to Washington, D.C., with third-year mentee Tina Gao to receive the Coming Up Taller Award from First Lady Michelle Obama. (Video above.)
But most of our support comes in small increments from individuals like you. Right now we’re just a little bit short of our $50,000 holiday fundraising goal. I know things are tight all over, but if you have a little to give, please do. And a million thanks to all who’ve donated in the past.
A star, a star! Was Jesus a Gemini?: Xmas miscellany
December 21, 2009 | Comments Off
- Some astronomers believe that Jesus was actually born around June 17, 2 B.C., when a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter would have made the planets appear as a single “beacon of light” — the star the Wise Men followed to the stable.
- Good will toward men, and biometric fingerprinting: Today’s border agencies would not have let the Magi in. (See UK Border Agency’s holiday card, above, and this 2005 London Underground service announcement.)
- When Dickens’ A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, the holiday was “a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter.” See NPR’s excerpt from Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas.
- More seasonal Dickens: Morgan Meis on the real charms of A Christmas Carol; online views of the author’s corrected manuscript, which is on display at the Morgan through January 10; morbid Charles Dickens; and notes following my visit to his only surviving London home.
- In “a cross between the nativity and one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories,” Jeanette Winterson reimagines the nativity story from the donkey’s perspective.
- Finally, here are a couple gifts that are no longer available to holiday shoppers: a mouse toy that allegedly sings “pedophile, pedophile” rather than “Jingle Bells,” and whiskey toothpaste.
What line could represent your favorite novel?
December 17, 2009 | 25 Comments
Electric Literature produces videos for some of the fiction that appears in the magazine. A handful are trailers of one kind or another, but most are “single-sentence animations” consisting of brief clips inspired by a contributor’s favorite sentence from his or her own story.
The one above — my favorite so far — centers on a line from Michael Cunningham’s novel-in-progress: “Peter tried to murder his brother only once…”
Watching them got me thinking about my own favorite lines from novels; in general they tend to be more representative of theme than of plot. I can recite whole paragraphs from The End of the Affair, but none of the sentences I could remember seemed to evoke the book as a whole in a concrete way. Still, there’s that great bit in Beloved about the ghost as the embodiment of “sin moving in on the house, unleashed and sassy.” And, from a Padgett Powell story: “There was no such thing as falling-down insurance, an actuarial nicety that flabbergasted and enraged Mrs. Schuping.”
Never one to pass up an opportunity to fritter away time I’d planned to spend writing, I started pulling books off the shelf, trying to decide what I’d choose for Moby-Dick, The Sea, The Sea, Crime and Punishment, Giovanni’s Room, Frankenstein, The Power and the Glory, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or Chromos…
What sentences would you choose for your own favorites, and how would you illustrate them? If you have any ideas — or are skeptical of the whole enterprise — I’ve decided to open up comments on this post for a couple days.