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What Could Be Worse Than A Male Book Club?

2012-01-23T13:49:25-08:00

The most painful situation the writers of this Velveeta commercial could come up with was ... a male book club. That's right: talking about books with other men is equivalent to torture. Of course, the sidekicks are willing to suffer through such torture to win the Velveeta prize.

But who knows, perhaps this advertisement is particuarly effective among Velveeta's target demographic. After all, only illerate people would be stupid enough to eat radioactive-colored orange goo.

Aimee Bender's "Bad Return": A Sentence Analysis

2012-01-18T21:22:42-08:00

Here are the first two sentences of Aimee Bender's "Bad Return" in One Story #158:

"I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house in the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio."

Pay attention to the prepositions. Even in that first sentence, we have the double repetition of the preposition, "in." That repetition prepares you for the long string of prepositions in the second sentence, a total of six.

The traditional advice about prepositional clauses is not to string too many together in a row. This is on the whole good advice, the type of advice that beginning writers should obey. Nouns and verbs are the planetary cores of sentences and prepositions are but satellites. Prepositions belong with adverbs, in the category of allowable but only for judicious use.

But Bender doesn't obey this rule. She doesn't ignore the rule as much as transcend it, showing the power of a series of prepositions. By playing with a series of alternating prepositional clauses (in, of, in, of, in, of), she nails you down to a certain location. What's more, the sequence of the locations expands from macro to bird's eye, starting with the corner of the room and taking you all the way out to the view of the state.

It's not the most pyrotechnic sentence but it bears the mark of being well crafted, and its cascading rhythms tumble the reader into the short story. Also, the duality of its clauses prepares us for the duality of the story, which alternates between two main characters, the narrator and Arlene.

Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans"

2012-01-14T11:03:49-08:00

In a writing workshop, a friend of mine once criticized Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel "Never Let Me Go," which my friend claimed was a science fiction novel that refused to embrace its science fiction roots.

It's true that the science fiction conceits in "Never Let Me Go" are largely glossed over. Most of the book focuses on the characters and their love for each other, not the details of cloning and organ transplants.

But I think that my friend was mistaken in his criticism. Shouldn't we celebrate books that don't fit neatly into genre categories? Why isn't it possible to write a good novel that draws from genre conceits without fully embodying the genre's conventions? And what's wrong with a bit of subtlety when employing genre ideas?

Ishiguro's novel "When We Were Orphans," a lesser-known predecessor to the famous "Never Let Me Go," hits genre notes in a similar fashion. Instead of science fiction, Orphans plays on detective tropes. The protagonist is a detective, although hardly a Sherlock Holmes archetype. He's delusional, inflating his bumbling missteps into successes. The narrative doesn't progress with the cause and effect sequence associated with most detective novels, though; it has the digressionary structure of a literary novel, floating through the narrator's childhood memories in Proustian fashion.

"When We Were Orphans" has the genre connection to "Never Let Me Go," but its far closer connection in Ishiguro's oeuvre is "Remains of the Day." Both have polite, formal, unreliable narrators who love a woman but find themselves unable to demonstrate that love, and WWII political overtones of a good person unwittingly in cahoots with evil.

It's those unreliable narrators which every writer should admire. After reading Ishiguro's first person POVs, it seems impossible that any first person narrator is telling the truth. Ishiguro exposes how the "I" of any story necessarily skews the world, which not only provides layers of mystique for the reader to interpret, it only creates a complex character. Who is this person and is he lying to me, to others, or only to himself? Ishiguro is a master of liars who do not know they are lying.

Can the Kindle Do This?

2012-01-12T14:29:35-08:00

First Book Read in 2012

2012-01-01T23:33:11-08:00

Quiz Time: In this J.M. Coetzee novel, a professor interacts with a disadvantaged member of another race during the apartheid in South Africa.

If you guessed Disgrace, you can be forgiven. After all, the plot line is identical to this novel written nearly a decade before: Age of Iron.

The eerie similarities between the novels gave me pause during the initial pages, but Age of Iron soon veered into its own idiosyncracies that distinguished it from its more famous counterpart.

The most salient distinguishing feature is the way it graffitis its message in blunt and tumescent scrawl across the whole novel. While Disgrace manages to fold the critique of the apartheid inside the metaphor of a sexual predator, Age of Iron trumpets its attack through page-long diatribes from an academic.

It feels as though Age of Iron was a kind of warm-up for the triumph of Disgrace, as though Coetzee needed to whet his writing on a coarse block to get to a finely honed edge. This progression from blatant to subtle is usually the order of art, although in some cases it works the opposite way. Case in point: Jose Saramago, who went from the mysterious parable-like world of Blindness to the I-don't-want-you-to-miss-it-so-I'll-scream Seeing. It was a mistake to write that sequel (many sequels are a mistake, especially in Hollywood).

If you're not a hardcore Coetzee fan, this is likely a novel you should skip. Disgrace levitates above most modern novels but Age of Iron muddles about on ground level. But despite Iron's flaws, which in addition to the moralistic bludgeoning include the hackneyed premise of a professor writing about a professor, alms for the good-hearted homeless person, and an elderly woman dying of cancer, the novel is well executed. Coetzee has an ear for dialogue and all the right knacks for crafting a story.

That's it. A brief thought on the first novel I've read in 2012. I'm going to keep all these brief. My teaching load doesn't allow me much time to write, and what time I have left over I'm mostly marking for fiction writing. But a Happy New Year to everyone. May your 2012 reading be an axe for the frozen sea inside you.

New Issue of Confrontation

2011-12-10T14:22:19-08:00

The new issue of Confrontation is out, issue #110, with cover art by Claudio Bravo ("Red, Rose and Orange Paper"). It's a timely homage to the recently deceased Chilean painter. Inside the journal are a number of glossy full-color pages showcasing Bravo's other work.

Paul Zimerman's "Full Remittance," a kind of anti-Rakolnikovian story, is excellent, as well as a shortish story by Theodore Wheeler with the titillating title of "The First Night of My Down-and-Out Sex Life," which ends up being more somber than you'd expect.

Peter Levine's "Often Remembered" shows a man stumbling into three women he's had relationships with in the past, and the messiness of the intersections of memory and desire.

I've also got a story in this issue -- "Drive-by Horoscope" -- which began as a rumination on the strange messages on church sign boards (they are quite strange, are they not?). And what if -- what if! -- a man started using them as horoscopes?

Nobel Prize for Literature 2011

2011-10-03T23:52:38-07:00

Over the last decade the Nobel Prize for Literature has alternated between a proscriptive award and a descriptive one. A proscriptive award takes little known but worthy authors and presents them in a bow and wrapping to the world, telling everyone to read. A descriptive award honors the authors that have, to a large extent, already won the accolades and critical honor, and the Nobel is mere icing on an otherwise heavily iced career.

Look at the last ten winners. Six had already received international notoriety:

Mario Vargas Llosa (2010)
Doris Lessing (2007)
Orhan Pamuk (2006)
Harold Pinter (2005)
J.M. Coetzee (2003)
V.S. Naipaul (2001)

Anointing these writers meant that readers/critics had been right all along.

But the remaining four were relative unknowns:

Herta Müller (2009 -- a huge dark horse)
J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008 -- collective response from U.S. -- "who"?)
Elfriede Jelinek (2004 -- a head scratcher)
Imre Kertész (2002)

Anointing these writers meant that readers/critics still didn't have the lowdown on the truly valuable writers, and that the Nobel committee retained enough power to steer tastes.

I admire the variety of selection, even if I wish some perennially favorites would be crowned (Murakami especially). Most prizes use a singular mode of logic to determine who should receive the prize -- a judgment of quality -- but the Nobel committee seems to vary among a whole host of considerations, none of which ever remain predominant for any number of years.

Supposed considerations of the Nobel Committee?

They want to get a writer from a particular geographical region, usually Africa. There are never enough women laureates. There are too many fiction writers and not enough poets. It won't be an American because Americans are too "provincial, too isolated, too insular." They won't pick a European because Europeans have dominated the prize (now who's acting provincially, my Swedish friends?). They don't want someone who is spread too widely (I'm looking at you, Haruki Murakami). They want to capitalize on current events. (Arab Spring has been bandied about with enough frequency to make it seem as though an Arabic writer was guaranteed to win.)

All of these are nonsense. Or at least all of them are changed so frequently it does you no good to use them to narrow down your selection. There is only one common factor in the Nobel Prize for literature, and that is political engagement. If a writer hasn't been involved in political action, both personally and in their writing, they don't stand a chance. Which is why Thomas Pynchon always seems a far-fetched selection. Why would the committee ever choose a recluse?

writers or Writers: A Definition

2011-10-03T00:09:38-07:00

Is a writer merely defined as someone who writes or are there additional qualities required?

The way that creative writers use the term Writer, I've noticed, is limited to people who write creatively. They say "Writers" and exclude all those people whose expertise is in another field, the people who dip into writing only to communicate their ideas. Public figures, technical writers, and most academics don't qualify, even if they've written extensively.

At first that seems unfair. A writer should be anyone with the courage to put words on the page.

But I think the creative folks are getting at an important division between different types of writers. A Writer in the loftiest sense is someone who would write even if language was emptied of meaning. That type of Writer is someone who writes primarily because they love spleunking through the cavities and caverns of language, the soar and dip of sentences, and the tonal friction of words as they rub up against each other.

If written language was emptied of meaning, most non-creative writers would never write again. Hey, even most creative Writers would never write again. Or at least they'd be put off for some time. But I think many Writers would come back, drawn by the allure of letters mashed up against one another and the sounds created. The need for language, written language, is deeply embedded.

And I think that because of that attention to language, Writers believe that fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and playwriting are all the most difficult terrains to traverse in the writing world. It's not that it's easy to write anything else -- on the contrary. It's just that in those other forms of writing the difficulty is in thought and organization and presentation and clarity, not in the wild badlands of beautiful sentences, ambiguous language choice, and tropes of all shapes and sizes. For those who devote their entire life to writing, the uppercase Writer, the main difficulty is wrestling with language itself.

Poets and Writers' MFA Ranking Controversy

2011-09-16T11:03:09-07:00

In Slate, Scott Kenemore argues that the latest Poets and Writers' Rankings are a travesty, but his reasoning is self-centered and misleading.

Let's look at why Kenemore thinks that Columbia deserves to be ranked highly (in 2nd place behind Iowa):

Because the last rankings had them high.

As he says, "A few years ago, U.S. News and World Report ranked MFA writing programs, and put Columbia at No. 4.)" Except that was fourteen years ago, in 1997. That's not just a few years. Dozens of new MFA programs have sprung up since then. Huge swathes of faculty have changed university allegiances. And these meteoric rises and falls are not unheard of. Consider USC, ranked 44th in 1996 and ranked 23rd in 2011. So it's not inconceivable that Columbia's position has changed so radically.

Because funding doesn't matter to someone who will make big bucks upon graduating.

But I ask him: what percentage of students will make big bucks upon graduating? Starry-eyed prospective MFA students might believe that they will be the exception among their peers and actually land a book deal after graduating, but statistically, even in the very best programs, less than 50 percent will ever publish a book. In most programs that number is more like 5 or 10 percent. So that leaves a huge number of students who should, if they are realistic and pay attention to the numbers, choose an MFA that does not mire them in student loan debt.

Plus, many of those who do end up publishing a book do so four or seven or ten years after. That means they have to shoulder those loans for years before they finally land that first book deal (which might only be enough to pay back loan interest) and then for years more before they're able to land a faculty appointment. His logic leaves out all the students who don't experience instant success.

Kenemore, with six books published, is such a ridiculous exception to the MFA graduate he should not hold himself up for comparison. If the prospective MFA student is wise, funding should matter a great deal. Aside from the student, funding is a sign of the relationship between the university and the program. It's a sign that the university is not treating the MFA program like a cash register but is actually concerned about its students and wants to aid the program. All in all, Kenemore's advice that Columbia is "for people whose genitals still work," implying some kind of failure of masculinity or courage if you don't take on student loans that reach six figures, is the worst kind of bravura and absolutely foolhardy.

Columbia has great faculty.

And how many of the schools ranked above Columbia don't have great faculty? What's more, why should one all-star faculty member trump a number of good hardworking writers who care for students? In my experience, the all-star faculty members are there for marketing, and teach heavily reduced course loads and might or might not be available for thesis advisement. It's the grunt and file of faculty who are quietly toiling away making students into better writers. As Edward Delaney said in the Atlantic:

A single faculty-member writer who’s having a notable success often seems to trump a legion of others quietly publishing work that is respected but not widely celebrated. Columbia University’s Web site features its Nobel Prize–winning faculty member Orhan Pamuk, who began teaching last fall.

Orhan Pamuk is wonderful. I loved "Snow" and "My Name is Red." But star power alone should not be a reason why a student would go to a university.

I will admit that Kenemore's suggestion at the end of the article is an excellent one that Poets & Writers should adopt:

Poets & Writers should add a "manuscript placement" column to its yearly rankings spreadsheet, alongside fellowship placement and job placement. What percentage of fiction graduates secure a publishing contract worth at least four figures within 10 years of graduation? What percentage of poets win a prize that results in the publication of a book within 10 years of graduation?

That would be a helpful metric to judge the success of students exiting the program. It would take an enormous amount of research to track down all that information, but it also would be invaluable for prospective students. It would also be a way to judge the quality of the program in addition to the metrics we already possess to judge the financials of the institution.

UPDATE: Roxane Gay at HTML Giant takes Kenemore down a couple of notches with her snarky wit.

UPDATE: Twitter's been going crazy with rather derogatory remarks about the, um, literary quality of Kenemore's work.

Maud Newton's David Foster Wallace essay

2011-08-28T19:27:46-07:00

Maud Newton's essay on David Foster Wallace in the New York Times, suitably categorized under "riff," situates Wallace's idiosyncratic use of language inside a generational context while critiquing its extravagances.

But I found it notable that she only dealt with his older texts. Many of the stylistic distinctions that she brings up were abandoned (or at least tempered) in Wallace's "The Pale King." He certainly keeps the specialized language of a esoteric clan (in this case, IRS lingo), but has limited so much of the vast leaps between "high diction, childlike speech, [and] slacker lingo." Maybe it's true that Wallace will be remembered for his youthful extravagances rather than his more mature work -- it's certainly more fun to critique the wild language and ideas of his earlier essays and fiction -- but it's useful to note that the master of irony/sincerity and qualifiers and rhetorical posturing did strive, later in his life, to write in a more straightforward manner.

Also, I think Newton might afford too much credit to Wallace in this paragraph:

In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

It's not as though Wallace started a movement (although he certainly has had a sizable influence), but that he embodied a zeitgeist. So he didn't cause the slackerized syntax and diction as much as was the effect of it: he existed in a cultural moment fascinated with such linguistic mannerisms and he happened to codify them by presenting them with such erudition. Plus, perhaps this is just the lack of rhetorical skill among youth, and not symptomatic of a widespread imitation.

The Future of Bookstores

2011-08-21T15:08:49-07:00

John Hodgman on The Daily Show parses out the future of brick and mortar bookstores, recommending they go the way of curiosity shops, like Colonial Williamsburg.

The Daily Show - Borders Goes Out of Business
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Shenandoah Releases First Online Issue

2011-07-24T14:59:01-07:00

Sixty years into Shenandoah's august literary life, the literary journal has just launched its first online issue.

My short story "To Will One Thing" is one of the fiction selections. Please read it and tell me your thoughts.

The online version also features:

Local artwork by William Dunlap (full gallery of artwork)
R.T. Smith writes an elegaic editor's note about the supposedly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, implying that literary journals aren't dead yet. He also explains the new online features.
Tracy Richardson interviews Rebecca Makkai, famous for her four-year-streak of placing fiction in the Best American Short Stories series.

Other fiction selections include a short-short by Alyson Hagy, who's been praised on BookFox for her collection "Ghosts of Wyoming," and whose prose here displays the same fantastical flights:

"Where do they find these animals? The halt and the lame, the half-blind, the parboiled, the skeptical showered in the alkaloid mud of a corral hammered slant behind T. Murphy’s Snowmobile Shop."

Also, Devin Murphy writes about children witnessing a gruesome dead horse in "On the Mountain" and Katherine Conner's "Neshoba" deals with truth-fudging memoirs, corporeality, and missing family members.

The Writing Conference of the Summer

2011-07-23T17:47:12-07:00

I'm going to the Squaw Valley Writers conference in early August, and looking forward to the wonderful cast of aspirants and teachers.

If you're going as well, drop me a line and we'll make sure to talk while we're there.

I'll try to remember to give a run down on the blog once I return, since internet access will likely be spotty.

Short Story Research

2011-06-25T16:25:28-07:00

Hello Everyone,

Currently I'm in Xi'an, China, researching a short story. It's a story that I wrote four years ago but which never quite worked (likely because I wasn't good enough to accomplish the ambitious structure). Back then I read more than twenty books on the Cultural Revolution, and acheived a degree of versimilitude, but it wasn't quite enough.

So now I'm in the country. I hope the proximity to the smell of fish oil tofu and fried scorpions on sticks and having my internet access censored and the tiny police sheds on the corners of buildings with red and blue lights and the ridged corridors near steps for bikes and people burning trash and the elderly doing Tai Chi and the beds so hard they feel like boards with sheets over them will fertilize my imagination. I feel more fertile already.

Cormac McCarthy dismissed short stories, claiming that anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to the brink of suicide isn't worth doing, but as short story writers know, a lot of short stories take years and drive you to suicide.

So: What's the craziest research you've ever done for a short story? Sure, any length of research is acceptable for a novel, but I don't often hear about the extreme lengths people go for a single short story. Give me your wild extravagances.

American Masculine by Shann Ray

2011-06-19T09:16:48-07:00

The Bakeless Prize has rockstar taste. Last year they published Belle Boggs' "Mattaponi Queen," which went on to garner a bouquet of accolades, and this year they're publishing the astonishing "American Masculine" by Shann Ray, a frontrunner for my favorite book of the year.

"American Masculine" is the perfect title. The stories are rough and raw, though not without a strong dose of heart. There are Native American characters coming and going off the rez, with names like Elias Pretty Horse and and Benjamin Killsnight, and rodeo riders so tough they break the back of bulls, and violent fathers locking horns with stubborn sons, and suicides, many suicides. Yet despite this depressing subject material, or maybe because of it, the stories end on hopeful notes: the eagles in "How We Fall" serve as a metaphor for the characters that it is time to stop falling and start rising, father and son find forgiveness in "In the Half Light," and an alcoholic makes the right choice in "The Way Home."

Those endings, the way the stories arc up from the valleys of life into highlands of reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace, are one sign of a religious theme leavening these stories, but not the only one. Several bear epigraphs of Bible verses, and it seems that a half dozen characters are 33 years old. Boys are torn between fathers who want them to fight and scripture-quoting mothers encouraging them toward holiness. There are encounters with the holy as well, even in unexpected places like a snowy basketball court: "A sweet jumper finds the mark, he thought, a feeling of completion and the chance to be face-to-face not with the mundane but with the holy."

Many writers make me aware of their attention to the warp and weft of sentences, but Ray makes me pay attention to the shape of his paragraphs. He treats paragraphs with the same consistency and unity of purpose as a sentence, powering through with a single strong aim, making them cumulate in a fireball or orbit around a core feeling. His paragraphs feel whole, immutable, knapped into ideal shapes.

But his sentences are excellent as well. The cover blurb belongs to Dave Eggers, who likens Shann Ray's prose to Cormac McCarthy. The comparison actually covers the span of voices in the book. The first half of "American Masculine" leans toward the McCarthy of "Blood Meridian," while the second half leans more toward the plain-spoken "No Country for Old Men." In the first half of the book, polysyndetonic clauses cascade over each other, accumulating in strings until they become something larger than themselves. For instance, this excerpt:

"Weston, alone and in their father's car, sped from the edge of that highway in darkness and blew out the metal guardrail and warped the steel so it reached after the car like a strange hand through which the known world passes, the heavy dark Chevelle like a shot star, headlights that put beams in the night until the chassis turned and the car became an untethered creature that fell and broke itself on the valley floor. The moment sticks in Shale's mind, always has, no one having seen anything but the aftermath and silence, and down inside the wreckage a pale arm from the window, almost translucent, like a thread leading back to what was forsaken."

Just as McCarthy teeters on the edge of grandiloquence (as Michiko Kakutani notes), Ray uses grandiose language which that could be overdone, but I think this is a high-wire act without a misstep, as demonstrated by "The Great Divide":

"He works the train and travels to places he has not yet known, where day is buoyant and darkness gone, and when death comes seeking like the hand of an enemy he gives himself over, for it is death he desires, and death he welcomes, and the spirit of his good body is a vessel borne to the eternal."

Compare those examples to the terse, taciturn prose of "The Miracles of Vincent Van Gogh," the last story in the collection which won the Ruminate Short Story Prize:

"He woke, stumbled back to bed. Night sifting the sediment of dreams. Dark animal, solitary, full of speed. Light. Morning. Glass of water. Toast. No TV, no radio. No sound."

Despite the varieties of prose in these stories, they all adhere together. The sentence pacing is kinetic, whether stacattoed by periods or propelled by commas. The voice drums inside your head.

Given the sheer heft of his talent, Ray is underpublished. Yes, he's got belt notches from McSweeney's and Narrative, but most of these stories come from the byways and backways of the literary fiefdom, journals like Montana Quarterly, Big Sky Journal, Aethlon, Talking River Review, and South Dakota Review. Bet on seeing him in heavyweight journals in the future, although not frequently -- the stories here were published over a seven year span, starting in 2003, which means they were likely written over more than a decade. Speedy he's not, although it's easy to forgive him given the cut and carat of these stories.

These stories wreck me in the best way. They make me pity those who have drunk-driven their lives and mangled those they love, not pity them in a Nietzschean way because I see myself as better than them, but because I know I'm prone to the same tragedy of errors. This is a book that made me a better human being. I don't know of any higher praise.

Other Reviews: