The Project for a New Mythology

We Like to move-it, move-it

2011-07-04T11:32:00.000-05:00

I have moved to Wordpress with a new blog that has a slightly different intent. A Wandering Road will be a little more focused on literary issues rather than what has begun to feel like random ramblings and rantings here.

Also, The Project for A New Mythology is officially dead - as a magazine and an entity. The official website at www.pfanm.com will be maintained, for as long as I own the domain, as an archive. As always, you can find me at www.jquinnmalott.com if you need me.

This blog, and its contents will be taken down on September 8th. I haven’t decided if any posts from this site will be transferred over.

Best of luck to you, and remember: “For, let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first - the holy books say that it was created in words – and all that happens in it, happens in language first.” - Dzevad Karahasan Sarajevo: Exodus of A City.

Write a better world.

Moving

2011-06-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

Moving to a new blog.
The Project for A New Mythology is finished.

The First Something I Gestured At

2011-05-31T22:00:00.000-05:00

“The demands of the publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms.”

- Italo Calvino "Six Memos for The Next Millennium"

Every time I write a post like Gestures at Something I get a comment from an old friend and self-avowed “cham-peen” of Genre Fiction telling me that what I’m looking for is being done in the Genre world. It usually annoys the hell out of me because I can’t decide if she’s just not fully reading what I’ve written, or if she thinks I’m denigrating her favorite Genres, or if she somehow thinks I’m closed minded and incurious.

The fact is, if Genre Fiction were doing what I say I want to see done, I’d be reading it already. Despite the ghettoized, insider quality of most Genre fiction, I’m not opposed to its existence, nor opposed to reading it myself. I am a big fan of Genre mixing, blurring, and theft. But, Genre fiction - science fiction, fantasy, even mystery - just doesn’t fill the space I want filled. Sorry, Jenn, but get over it (as an olive branch, however, get in touch with Professor Carol Franko at Kansas State University, she’s a sci-fi scholar. You two can start a movement).

Even if the entire publishing world were to drop this weird fetish for Genre categorization, I still would prefer novels set within my lifetime, or earlier (my parent’s lifetimes, or my grandparent’s lifetimes, and so on), and novels that surprise me with their use of various genre tropes, rather than announcing them from across the room (yes, in the modern publishing world you CAN judge a book by its cover). Aside from the occasional “alternative history” novel, or the “first contact” novels like Carl Sagan’s Contact, science fiction currently, just doesn’t fit for me. Fantasy does it even less so.

In that first “Gestures” post, I mentioned that Young Adult literature represented a middle way - accessible, thoughtful, literature that entertains, wrestles with serious contemporary issues, and respects the reader’s intelligence - but that I wanted this middle way for “grown ups.” I’d like to expand on that idea.

First, the publishing world has fetishized Genre so deeply that, sometimes, it seems publishers are like those anal-retentive kids who pitch a fit if the different foods on their plate touch. If Michael Chabon had started off his career with The Yiddish Policeman’s Union he’d be trapped in Sci-fi land - that is if anyone had found the stones to publish that book. Daring, cross genre work is often baffling to publishers unless the writer has an established reputation they can cling to, like a life-raft in a flood.

However, within this highly fetishized world, the one “Genre” that, in microcosm, presages the potential salvation of the Literary Novel, is Young Adult. As a former bookseller, when it came time to shelve those YA books were almost never shelved by Genre (except sometimes if the subject matter was sex or sexual orientation then they would be called “Teen”), but by the recommended age level of the reader. In that universe, YA teen girl spy stories sit next to YA fantasy stories and to YA western stories. The functional genre of the book doesn’t matter in YA - the story does and story can take place in space or on a ranch or in ancient Rome or any number of places and times.

In the world of “grown-up” Literature, story, at times, seems to take a back seat to Genre conventions, and/or extreme arty-ness. There are times I like arty-ness - love it, in fact. I am a fan of the English language, and of thinking, so I sometimes get off on a well turned phrase, or a devastating, poetic image. But that’s just gravy on top of a meaty, engaging story that trusts me to imagine things for myself, to fill in the purposeful gaps, and to converse with the subtext and context of the story. That kind of story begins with respecting my intelligence and then encouraging me to expand it.

In the kid lit world, if a writer insults the reader’s intelligence, or condescends to the reader, that writer’s book will die a fast and ruthless death. This doesn’t seem to happen in the world of grown-up fiction (this is both a blessing and curse). Dan Brown makes millions of dollars insulting the intelligence of his readers (The house was entirely uninhabited. Upstairs too). David Foster Wallace is revered for cramming more esoteric philosophical concepts into one novel than most average readers are aware of, me included. Jonathan Franzen seems so deeply invested in an ironic tone that I can’t read more than a paragraph without being overwhelmed with disgust for his characters and for him (Great American Novelist my right nut).

Now, I’m not opposed to deeply intelligent writing. I’m not opposed to intellectualism, or to wrestling with ideas and concepts that don’t, at first, make sense to me. I’m also not opposed to avant-garde or experimental literature, or science fiction and fantasy, or mysteries and thrillers, or horror and romance (they are to me, oddly similar). Having at least a passing knowledge of all forms of literature is, to me, essential for doing my job as a novelist. What is also essential for doing my job as a novelist is knowing my audience, and respecting my audience.

As a reader, I am an adult audience, and as a writer, adults are my audience, but there are two major problems: one, by the time my potential audience has finished high school, most have been abused into disliking Literature (with a big L), and two, publishing has so fetishized Genre to the point that the various tropes and conventions of a Genre seem to take precedence over more basic literary mechanics, like plot in Literary novels, or fully developed characters in Thrillers and so, as a reader, I feel my options are limited or uninteresting.

Of course, that’s not an entirely bad thing. One of the many complex and intertwined reasons people become writers is because they have a hard time finding the kinds of stories they want to read.

Gestures at Something

2011-05-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

When I first arrived at Naropa University, I felt deeply out -of-place. One of the first lectures I attended during the Summer Writing Program was one by Thalia Field (I’d give you a link, but for all her avant-garde-ness she doesn’t seem to have her own web presence outside interviews on other people’s and institution’s websites). She was discussing her first book Point and Line and, as she whirled about in increasing philosophical and theoretical lines and circles, I wrote in my journal that my acceptance to graduate school had been a fluke, and that I didn’t belong. I didn’t understand a single thing she was saying, and more over, I wanted just to raise my hand and ask the simplest question ever: “What is your story about?”

Years later, after finishing grad school, but still several years before I sold my first novel, I picked up my then-girlfriend’s copy of Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” because it had been on the bestseller’s list for nearly three years and I figured I would see what the deal was. I was shocked at how easily and frequently he insulted the reader’s intelligence.

Now, sure, I may have been a bit overly sensitive because I’m not your “average” reader. I don’t mean that ironically, or snobbishly, it’s simply that I have a BA in Creative Writing, and an MFA in Writing & Poetics and I’ve spent years studying novels and short stories and how they are put together, how certain effects are achieved and so on. Now, since I still don’t have a clue what Thalia Field was talking about that day, maybe I don’t know as much as I sometimes like to think I do. But here’s a subtle truth that I am very certain of: the only difference, really, between writers and reader is that writers know the names of the tools and the tricks. Readers know, even if they can’t say exactly what it is they know or why they know it, when they are being jerked around by a writer, or when they are being insulted. Some rightfully get angry about it, but some, I think, sigh and accept it, believing perhaps that they are, indeed as dumb as some writers think they are.

See, I believe that the average reader is an emotionally and psychologically abused person. I believe this abuse is the reason that the readership for literary works is declining (here’s a link to the 2004 NEA survey that has started all the recent handwringing about the future of the novel).

On one side, there are the writers of “Literary” works (note the capital L) who range in popularity and renown like Thalia Field, David Shields, Jonathan Franzen, Tom McCarthy, and the late David Foster Wallace, to name just a few. These are writers with a lot of education, some of it in what amounts to hardcore philosophy in addition to literature. These writers, at times, seem to be in love with irony, so much so that in seeps into and permeates their writing so deeply that it can be almost impossible to tease out anything that they really care honestly about except being ironic. These writers love the avant garde, and metafiction, and, in some cases, plagiarism - like David Shields. They see the decline of literary readership, and think that in order to compete TV, movies, video games, and the internet’s user-generated-content they need to write about that particular angst, wrestle with narrative identity, or create radical forms no one has ever seen before. Confronted with the seemingly endless variability of video games, the old idea of story, they seem to say, is lost to us and so we need something wildly different to win back readers and save the novel.

The average reader runs away from such work because they assume, and possibly rightly so, that it is way beyond their ability to grasp. The kind of novels written by the Literary elite have become geared for an audience of the literary elite. A writer writing a piece of fiction with the intent of challenging, upending, or altering the readers ideas about the “form and function” of narrative isn’t writing for the average reader. A writer creating a fiction that seeks to awaken us to the blurring of fact and fiction, and how that effect our sense of reality isn’t writing for the average reader. Sorry, they just aren’t. They’re writing for people like them, people like me with degrees in writing or literature, or philosophy.

They aren’t writing for a nurse with a couple of days off between three 12 hr shifts. They aren’t writing for an Engineer on a flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. An intrepid nurse or engineer might give them a shot and might even like the book in the end, but on their next day off, or next flight, they’ll probably go with someone from the next category.

On the other side, there are the writers of “sub-literary” works who have almost no concern for avant-garde angst, or philosophical dilemmas, or even, really, “the future of the novel” because, frankly, they’re making a shit-load of money right now and the future looks bright for their type of book. I’m talking about your writers of “popular” fiction, like Dan Brown, or Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, or James Patterson. They could care less about challenges to form and would never torture their publisher with demands that text be printed vertically on the page just to change how the reader must “approach the text.” These types of writers are perfectly fine with the form of the novel as it has existed for the last several hundred years. The last major changes they adopted were the fetish for “realism” and the short (or shortish-long) declarative sentence. The problem is that their lack of interest in form has lead to their embrace of the formula and a complete denuding of any societal, emotional, or spiritual subtext or context to their work. There might be some echoes of life as we know it, some gestures in the direction of things we readers are wrestling with in the real world, but there is no true confrontation with those issues, except via violence or some other stunning, thrilling improbability. Another thing the formula lends itself too is dependence upon over-repetitive qualification.

For example: in Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” , a character arrives in a house that has, for all intents been previously described in detail - all two stories and secret basement of it. The character, we are told, searches the house, which leads to my favorite two sentences in the whole of Brown’s book. “The house was entirely uninhabited. Upstairs too.” -- as if the writer isn’t sure the reader will understand what the word “entirely” means. Whether this is a result of the writer being unsure of his powers of description, or the writer’s assumption that the reader is stupid is hard to say. Either way, it has the same result: the reader acquires a kind of learned helplessness. After a long enough period of being talked down to in this fashion, they come to rely upon it and when a writer doesn’t over-explain, they give up and claim the book is too difficult to read.

One group refuses to tell them a story, but give them a bunch of elitist attitude, and the other group tells them a story but treats them like they’re stupid. No wonder people prefer movies, TV, video games and the internet to reading a book.

Now, there is a middle way. The problem is that right now the only people practicing this middle way are writing Young Adult novels. Here are books with compelling stories, compelling characters, and, more over, wrestle with serious issues that are connected to the world that we readers actually live in. Some of them even make interesting formal choices.

My question is, why aren’t there writers writing stories like that for grown-ups? Or, more to the point, where are they?

Indy Bookstores Sell eBooks Too, Homey. OR Would you read my novel if it only cost you a quarter?

2011-05-21T12:22:00.000-05:00

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple aren’t the only game in town when it comes to getting your eBooks. If you’re local, independent bookstore is a member of the American Booksellers Association (search for your nearest indy bookstore here), chances are they’re selling Google eBooks, which can be easily loaded into your Barnes & Noble Nook, your Sony eReader, your Apple iPad or just about any other e-reader device that uses the ePub format. You can even download the Adobe Digital Editions software for your Mac or PC and read ebooks on your desktop or laptop.

Now, here’s the fun part, and the part where you can help me out. My publisher, Unbridled Books, has teamed up with The American Booksellers Association to offer 25 ebooks for .25¢ each for three days only on June 9th through the 11th (Read the full press release here). You can buy my book alone, or all 25 Unbridled eBooks for $6.25 (that’s less than a single eBook at full price).

Three of my favorite Indy bookstores are participating: Watermark Books in Wichita, KS (my hometown indy), The Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, CO (I lived in Boulder for 5 years during and after graduate school), and The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO (we both turn 40 this year).

So, if you’ve been thinking about reading my book, but just haven’t felt like spending ten to fifteen dollars, buy it for a quarter. Give it a read. If you like it, tell a friend. If you don’t like it....you can just keep that shit to yourself.

You're Wrong ( So am I)

2011-04-21T23:02:00.000-05:00

All Things Shining - Sans Joseph Campbell

2011-03-08T06:00:00.001-06:00

I am in the middle of reading All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. Normally, to say that the reading is going slowly would be a bad thing, but in this case it should be taken as a deep positive. It is one of the few books I have read in a while where I’ve felt compelled to scrawl notes and comments in the margins. Most of the time I jot things down in a handy notebook with page numbers. I feel like I should have a conversation with this book, so marginalia.

For the most part, Dreyfus and Kelly are proselytizing to the converted. Their basic premise, that the books we read can be vehicles of deep meaning and significance in our daily lives, is something I’ve been convinced of for years (if you’re interested, check out An Argument for Moral Art). It seems I’ve always looked to literature for meaning and so never thought there was a reason to do what Dreyfus and Kelly are doing in this book, which is, essentially, to convince general readers of this notion. My arguments have always been focused on how writers should take responsibility for the kind of meaning they imbed in their stories.

However, the people who, I think, most need to be taught how literature, even entertaining literature, can give meaning to their lives aren’t reading David Foster Wallace or even Elizabeth Gilbert on their own, much less the western classics like Homer and Dante. So, these people aren’t likely to pick up and read All Things Shining. That’s a bit disappointing; however, for high school English teachers and college English professors this book will be a great teaching tool, if they are able to apply what they learn from it to the more modern classics, and almost-classics that are taught in English classes.

Unfortunately, I feel like there’s something missing. Where’s Joseph Campbell in all of this?

Now, I know that a big segment of the reading public probably only knows Joseph Campbell from the over-marketed phrase “Follow your bliss,” which, according to my girlfriend, was a big Oprah Winfrey mantra for a while (and we have a magnet on our dishwasher bearing that phrase). Frankly, it’s a shame that the great depth and wisdom of Joseph Campbell’s work has been reduced to such a simplistic, and almost trite phrase. By itself it is almost meaningless, giving people license to do whatever makes them happy regardless of their action’s effects on others. Essentially, “Follow your bliss” has been turned into the Hippy version of America’s self-serving reductionist version of Ayn Rand’s ethical self-interest.

However, “follow your bliss” is just one small segment of Campbell’s work. Like Joseph Campbell, and perhaps Professors Dreyfus and Kelly, I believe that humans are a storytelling and story-listening species. I believe it is evolutionarily encoded into our DNA to tell stories and to find meaning in those stories. Stories are our unique and delicate light against the vast darkness of the universe. There is no one I know of who spent more time, and intellectual energy, trying to understand and explain how we give our lives meaning through stories than Joseph Campbell, and he is completely missing from All Things Shining (his name doesn’t appear in the index and I’ve not come across any reference to him so far in my reading, but remember, I’m not quite finished yet).

I can’t imagine these two very learned men haven’t read or considered Joseph Campbell, so I would be very interested to hear why there seems to be no mention of Campbell in this otherwise fascinating argument for the importance of literature in creating a meaningful life.

The End of The Project

2011-03-07T20:57:00.000-06:00

By the end of this year, The Project for A New Mythology will be finished. I have one more issue to get out, and that will be it as far as an annual journal goes.

The very last issue of The Project for A New Mythology will be called Volume 5: Anthology. The plan is to select a few representative pieces from the first six print issues, and put them together as an eBook, in both the ePub and Kindle formats, and make the ebook available through various online outlets, including The Project for A New Mythology website.

This project represents the final step in my rather drawn out progression toward starting a for-profit publishing business in 2012. The very quietly self-released ebook of my essay “An Argument for Moral Art” was the first step. Volume 5: Anthology is the second.

When The Project for A New Mythology started out, I decided that it would last only as long as I felt it was relevant, and as long as it was able to feed and sustain a community. As I’ve struggled to manage writing, a full-time job, family and relationship obligations, and other things, this journal has fallen to a much lower priority for me, especially since it doesn’t seem to generate anything but more self-imposed work and deadlines.

Rather than simply fading out, I’ve decided to put together an anthology of those early, hand-crafted days, and go out in a blaze of nostalgia.

Who knows what will happen then.

Gender Gap: My take on the Vida Count and a couple of the responses. (Part Two)

2011-02-12T11:37:00.000-06:00

I first learned of the VIDA Count from a friend on Facebook. The first article I read about it was Laura Miller’s Salon piece about how men aren’t paying attention to women writers.

My first response to her was that I feel like I live in a world dominated by women. I was estranged from my father, who is now dead. My closest male friends are all married with kids and live in other towns. Most of my immediate friends are women. I live with my girlfriend. I pay attention to women all the time; therefore I prefer male writers because it is one of the few times I get to hear a male voice that I feel is worth listening to (other male voices - politicians, libertarian businessmen, athletes, aren’t worth listening to and I don’t value or pay attention to them). Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Alexs D. Pate, Laird Hunt, James Tate, Stephen Dunn, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and lots of other male writers are my masculine, authorial role models because there are so few in my day-to-day life.

That being said, two of my closest writing friends from graduate school, whose work I read and consistently publish in The Project for a New Mythology are women: Laura Hawley and Jenn Zukowski-Boughn. And although I value all of my writing teachers throughout the years, the one I cherish the most is Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

I am full of women’s voices. I have worked for more women than men. I have worked with more women than men. I have had little choice but to listen to women. So, although there may be some men out there who choose to ignore women, I believe they are a minority and I resent such a blanket accusation from Ms. Miller that men aren’t interested in what women have to say.

As I said in my previous post on this topic, I don’t think my situation is that unique among writers, editors, and readers younger than 40. We men 40 and younger have spent our lives watching the rise of women to the point now where more women go to college than men, more women finish college than men. More women get advanced degrees than men. More women are becoming the primary breadwinners for their families while men’s earning potential decreases and their unemployment numbers go up. More women start small businesses than me. To me, that means that by the time the Baby Boomers have been flushed out of the workforce, the economic Patriarchy that those boomers grew up with and fought against through their adulthood will be dead. That doesn’t mean there won’t be other vestiges of patriarchy, like Male Privilege, nor does it mean there won’t be a division of labor in families based upon gender. What it means is that the physical and economic world will finally be dominated by women.

Happy ladies? Let’s go for another long walk.

This also means that the physical world will finally reflect our internal, mystical, mythological, and biological world. Patriarchy, although very real in the day-to-day lives of people for many generations, is a well maintained, nearly impenetrable illusion. Men only rule the world at the pleasure of Women. From Mother Nature to your Mother in the kitchen, the world is feminine and governed my feminine power. In mythology, it is the tangible, physical world that is given the feminine aspect, and it is the unreachable and distant sky that is given the masculine aspect: Mother Earth, Father Sky. It is out of the womb of the earth that our species was born just as it is out of the womb of women that we as individuals are born. It takes a massive dose of testosterone to turn a fetus male, and if that dose isn’t high enough or never comes, that fetus will (or try to) default to its base setting of female.

Masculinity, maleness, is a fragile, and risky business engaged in as defiance of the feminine,and, at times, it is much more difficult to define. More importantly, whether the feminists like this suggestion or not, the social factors that make up manhood depends upon what women find acceptable. For the hundredth time now I’m going to quote Rebecca Walker from her introduction to her anthology What Makes A Man:

“If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference, and stop saying we want a man who can talk about his feelings, only to marry the strong, silent type who ‘just so happens’ to be a good provider.”

If women didn’t reward men who take charge, men wouldn’t take charge. If women didn’t reward men who command attention in a room, men wouldn’t command attention in a room.

So, the VIDA Count is useful in that it serves to help identify where the old Patriarchs might still be hiding out so that behavior modification can begin. Now, if there is a male editor out there who rejects women writers out of hand, yeah, stop submitting to him, and encourage your male writer friends to stop submitting to him. But be careful, a lack of women writers in a magazine doesn’t always mean the editor is a chauvinist, and not every magazine that has an imbalance of male to female writers is the lair of a hold-out patriarchal dragon that needs to be slain. I’m pro-woman, even if I’d never call myself a feminist. I can’t watch “A League of the Their Own” and NOT cry at the end; I think women should be playing baseball with the men instead of softball by themselves. However, my magazine is still male heavy, even though I have published every woman who submitted (except for the one who wrote rhymed free verse poetry because I hate rhymed free verse whether it’s written by man, woman or purple martian space dog). And at least one of those women I published I had to coax into submitting.

I’m not so sure the gap between the number of women and men getting published has anything to do with a preponderance of close-minded male editors. Also, if I’m not mistaken, aren’t the majority of agents and editors women? The VIDA stats, and Ms. Millers’ ancedotal quiz of readers, do show that women are more omnivorous readers. I can’t argue with that, but doesn’t that then suggest that the problem of this gender gap in publishing is not, in fact, the result of men ignoring women, but of women ignoring women?

If fewer men read, and fewer men are in the publishing industry as the gatekeepers, then the industry is heavily controlled by these omnivorous women readers. And the question then becomes why aren’t women publishing more women? It can’t be because they don’t want to listen to women’s voices. It can’t be because women editors are self-destructively chauvinistic. I think it seriously has to do with literary publishers and editors simply seeing more manuscripts from men than they do from women. This leads me to a couple of very interesting questions;

1) Why do men appear to publish so much, but read so little?
2) Why do women appear to read so much, but publish so little.
3) If a publisher makes an effort to balance the press’s list along gender lines, how many worthy male writers are rejected and how many unworthy female writers are accepted?

I don’t believe that any publisher would publish a poorly written book by a woman over a well written book by a man just to achieve gender parity. What I mean to suggest by that last question is this: I believe that of the women writers who do submit their manuscripts for publication, as a group, submit more publishable manuscripts. Men, who submit more manuscripts than women, have a higher ratio of piss-poor manuscripts. It’s like buying oranges: buy 5 oranges from a small grower at the farmers market, and you’ll get 5 good oranges. Buy 10 oranges from the grocery store and chances are only 5 out of 10 will be any good.

I think there are, essentially, two things going on here:

1) Women are like the Democratic Party. Among women there has always been and will always be a plurality, a multitude of voices wrestling with each other and they will fight amongst each other as readily as they’ll fight against men and patriarchy (or even in defense of patriarchy). Some sing “Stand by Your Man” some will sing “I Will Survive” and some will sing “32 Flavors” and some will sing “Bitch”. It is widely accepted as public wisdom that the answer to the old Freudian question “What do women want?” is as varied as women themselves and that each woman is a unique and empowered individual. Men, on the other hand, are seen in the world as roughly interchangeable parts, universally interested in the same three or four things, even if they’re gay: Sex, Sports, expensive toys, and competition - and anything that seems to be an anomaly is merely a ploy for sex. which leads me to the second thing that might be going on when men get literary work published more frequently.

2) Men, when they write literary works, are giving voice to a silence that most men never break. They are dropping the armor as it were, and revealing something our society tells us they are incapable of: empathy, intuition, revelry at beauty, a nuanced understanding of human nature, and it does two things - it piques women’s curiosity at there being a male inner life that is equally as rich as women’s, but not easily accessed if all we see of men is the athlete, or video gamer, or bar hoping lounge lizard. It also provides a silent reassurance to male readers that they aren’t alone and that they aren’t the domestically bumbling, sex obsessed, brutes mass media seems to always tell us we are.

I don’t want to suggest that women don’t have a rich inner life. Part of the post Feminine Mystique era is the acknowledgement of women’s internal lives and how those lives were suffocated by patriarchy. Consequently, so much of our culture now acknowledges women’s inner lives and the important of those inner lives to their personal fulfillment. What I’m getting at here is this idea, part sociological and part biological, that the outsider feeling that often drives people to write might be short circuited by women’s empowerment. That, in turn, narrows the pool of possible women writers to those who have the right kind of lesions on their temporal lobes (see The Midnight Disease studies show that writers tend to have similar brain lesions to temporal lobe epileptics who often suffer from logorrhea).

That is, of course wild speculation, but I think you see where I’m going, especially if you throw in women’s multitasking obsession.

Unfortunately, the side effect of all that women’s inner life coming to the foreground, was to assume that because men had dominated society their inner lives were not at odds with their external lives - that they were, in fact, the same. But I would argue that alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, and abuse are all the result of men struggling to suppress (or accept and justify in the case of artists) their inner lives. This is why so many of them turn to the self-expression of writing - and why so many of them submit so frequently.

In other words, I believe that verbal self-expression among women is common, therefore the urge to engage in the act of writing stories and trying to publish them is weak. I believe that verbal self-expression among men is uncommon and therefore, the urge to do it and try to make it available to the world to be seen is strong.

Gender Gap: My take on the Vida Count and a couple of the responses. (Part One)

2011-02-12T11:32:00.003-06:00

I think I live in a generational borderland.

Above me are the Gender Warriors, ready to do battle with men and society in order to break down the barriers of patriarchy, male privilege, pay inequality and the host of other things that make up that good old “glass ceiling.”

Below me, are the Gender Peacemakers, who look out at our economic landscape, at each other, and at the Gender Warriors and don’t see Patriarchy as some towering monolith. What they see is that more of their female cohorts are going to college than their male cohorts, they see a landscape where women now make up the majority of the workforce and where men are more chronically unemployed than women.

I live in a generation that is a mix of the two, that’s why I say I live in a generational borderland. In my twenty plus years in the workforce, I’ve had more women managers than men. I’ve had more women teachers than men teachers. I’ve worked side-by-side with more women than men. - And yet two of my oldest male friends both support multiple kids and stay-at-home wives. So, when VIDA comes out with its annual count of women in publishing, and writers like Becky Tuch, and Laura Miller come out with their testimonial articles attempting to confirm the validity of the numbers with anecdotal sincerity, telling my how my male cohorts are so chauvinistic and patriarchal that they don’t “listen” to women, I get a bit frustrated - more so with the likes of Ms. Tuch than Ms Miller, so I’ll start with Ms. Tuch.

First, I can’t argue with the numbers. Men do get published more often than women in the magazines referenced by VIDA. But the idea that it is the result of a gender bias, of discriminatory, sexist publishers who try to reduce an accomplished woman editor and writer to a reference guide for a potential panty raid is near sighted and disrespectful of the majority of editors who do nothing of the sort. Ms. Tuch doesn’t like the answer that women just need to submit more. She takes a Gender Warrior stance that I don’t think applies as neatly now as it may have once applied twenty, thirty or forty years ago (especially among the budding granny memoir set). It is an easy, pat, and ultimately incorrect assumption to cast women as the victims of an oppressive, monolithic Patriarchal editorial system that seeks to repress women writer’s voices.

The monolithic patriarchy doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, there’s still a Patriarchy, but for people younger than I am, “the patriarchy” is old, tired, and like the Baby Boomers, ready to shuffle off into retirement - even if it still squeals and kicks and screams from time to time. Despite a residual “male privilege” women have more advantages and choices than men do these days.

The notion presented by the women editors mentioned in Ms. Tuch’s article that women just need to submit more is probably an accurate one, but I don’t think anyone is digging deep enough to explain why and so it’s being left out there as a kind of argumentative McGuffin. The Gender Warrior takes that comment about women needing to submit more and, like Becky Tuch does, fires back that women aren’t submitting more because the social deck is stacked against them. She seems to be arguing that if only there weren’t poor single mothers, or if only a working woman’s Alpha male, type-A personality chauvinistic husband would do a little more house work then, by god, there’d be a veritable Renaissance of women’s literature.

I think the problem is deeper but less insidious than Ms Tuch, and VIDA, thinks. Of course women are writers too, but are all of them submitters?

Stick with me here, it might be a long walk.

We can trot out anecdotes and so on, women confronted with pig-ish male editors, and we can trot out anecdotes about publishers that make an effort to balance their lists, but no one ever wins a “war of anecdotes” because someone always knows someone who has a story that can counter any anecdote that someone else knows. So, let’s try to focus on this two part question: First, how many of the women who got published in those magazines are trying to be the primary breadwinners for themselves and their families by working as full-time writers? How many of the men? Second, how many of the men who got published in those magazines are being supported by a more economically successful wife (a lawyer, a doctor, a small business owner)? How many of the women are supported by high earning husbands?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say there are more male writers trying to be the primary breadwinners for themselves and their families by writing than there are women trying to do the same thing. In other words, my argument is this: Men get published more because they submit more and they submit more because men are still judged by what they do and how much they earn from doing it - and writing is no exception. Despite the dying patriarchy, we still live in a society where it is more acceptable for a woman to be supported, in part or in whole, by her husband while men are still expected, as a gender, to work outside the home. Those men who play stay-at-home-dad are not as rare now as they were when the movie Mr. Mom came out, but they are still a distinctly microscopic minority compared to the number of traditional, stay-at-home moms (We can get into why stay at home dad status is still generally unappealing later).

Ms Tuch hints at this when she quotes John Berger on how men’s and women’s social worth is determined, and she has the beginning of a point here. Yes, men are socialized to do and women and are socialized to be. She rightfully acknowledges that this is a drawback for women, but she doesn’t seem to go deep enough to satisfy me. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge how this dynamic might also damage men. What’s also odd, is that she trots out this Berger quote, but it seems completely disconnected from her own earlier realization that society and women themselves put a lot of pressure on themselves to “DO” a lot of things in order to “BE” a women - women spread themselves thin and run themselves ragged trying to be good mothers, good wives, good lovers, good employees, good bosses, and good writers. This is the social hangover from Peggy Lee and Enjoli feminism, and man, seriously, it sucks for women.

Ever since I was an undergrad I’ve been hearing how much better women are at multitasking, but after listening to Peggy Lee and Becky Tuch go on about everything a woman does, and has to do in order to be - I’d like to voice my support for male monotasking, even if it does mean we end up sacrificing family, relationships, and clean clothes on the alter of writing and publication. My response to Ms. Tuch, if indeed her argument is that women have too many expectations placed upon them to also be expected to submit as frequently as men, is to say give up something. Resist the social demand to have-be-do everything, and focus on writing and publishing. Writers are supposed to be good at living outside the demands of society.

Here are some statistics I’d like to see come out of VIDA to give a more detailed and accurate picture of this gender gap in publishing:

1) The number of male writers freelancing to support a family vs. the number of female writers freelancing to support a family.

2) The number of single, unmarried, childless male writers supporting themselves by freelancing vs. the number of single, unmarried, childless female writers supporting themselves by freelancing.

3) The number of single parent writers by gender (we can get into the “why” of single parenthood, especially for women, at another time).

4) The number of male vs. female writers who have full time day jobs not associated with their writing and how many are married and unmarried.

5) The number of writing couples and which one submits more, and which one is more widely read.

6) The number of male writers financially supported by high earning wives, vs the number of female writers financially supported by high earning husbands - and how frequently do the supported male writers submit their work compared to how frequently the female writers submit their work.

7) What is the average age of women writers who submit most frequently, and what is the average age of their children - if they have any?

Here’s my hypothesis (if someone with a research budget would like to take it up): I suspect the imbalances might happen most in areas associated with question 1 and 6 with men dominating in question 1 while women dominate in question 6. I suspect that parity will appear among single writers, with a slight increase in the number of single mother writers (questions 2 & 3 & 4). Question number 5 will be the most interesting, and I have no idea how it’ll turn out. And, to return to question six, I’ll bet the male writers, even balancing kids on one knee and sweeping the floor with the other, will submit more. Question 7 indirectly gets at the underlying issue in question 3. I think that older women with older children will be submitting as frequently as men of all ages because, damn it all to hell, we can’t get around the narrow biological window where women can give birth without serious problems.

Again, that comes down to sacrifice, to monotasking. I’m 40, and I am still putting off starting a family in order to pursue writing. If I were a woman, I’d be in the potential Down Syndrome baby phase of my child bearing years and unlikely to have kids of my own. How many women writers are willing to make that sacrifice? How many are angry at me right now for telling them they have to make the choice? How many want to tell me that men are lucky they get to father children until they’re seventy and CAN put off making the decision.

Not many. A lot. All of them.

Essentially, what I’m getting at here is that, if Ms Tuch is right and there are too many expectations on women and it’s because of those expectations that women aren’t getting published and not submitting enough then the problem boils down to the thing that always plagues women - their vaunted multitasking ability. It’s become this shibboleth of womanhood in America that they can do six things at once, and yes, it saps women’s energy and health. It sucks to run around trying to juggle 6 different things, and to assume that everyone around them will fall apart if this one juggling woman doesn’t do everything all these other people expect of her. Part of this feeling women have comes from being told they aren’t a “woman” if they don’t work, breed, fuck, and bake with equal skill and passion. Another part of it come from society embracing the pissy, reverse-sexist idea that men are somehow these high earning, economic powerhouses who act like cultural gatekeepers closing out women, but at the same time are so domestically incompetent they can’t boil water or wash their whites separately from their darks.

Women writers, I’m going to give you a bit of advice - be a little selfish with your writing. If writing, being a mom, a wife, a lover, an active church member or socialite are all equally important to you and therefore deserve equal attention, well, men are going to continue to get published more often than you because men, for better or worse refuse to spread myself around as thinly as women. I have left girlfriends, cut off family, and generally acted like a baby when my already squeezed and narrow writing time has been encroached upon. Writing is important enough to me that I’m a never married, childless man of 40 with a girlfriend ten years younger than I am who makes about 5K more a year than I do - and I’m the one who washes the dishes and cleans the house, plus I do my own laundry (white and darks separate).

Now if it turns out that women are submitting on par with men, then maybe there is something to Ms Miller’s argument that men don’t listen to or care about women’s voices. But even that has some caveats. That will be the next post.

Experimenting

2011-01-29T19:42:00.000-06:00

I have been doing a lot of thinking about starting a for-profit publishing endeavor. In support of that I’ve been puttering around with the making of an ebook.

Now, I finally think I’ve got it ready enough to show to people. It’s an ebook of a long essay I wrote called “An Argument for Moral Art” and I’m distributing it for free from the Project for a New Mythology website. It can be downloaded as an ePub file for those with iPads, or Nooks, or some other eReader that using the ePub format. It can also be downloaded as a Mobipocket file, which is read by the Kindle reader.

Since I don’t yet have a dedicated eReader of my own, I’ve had some associates who have iPads and Kindles test the file and they didn’t seem to have any issues. If you also don’t have an eReader, never fear. The ePub file can be read by theStanza reader for Mac and PC, the Adobe Digital Editions reader for Mac and PC, and the Kindle reader for Mac and PC. I’ve got all three and a few others loaded on my Mac and Vaio, and everything looks good.

The free ebook is distributed with a Creative Commons license, so you are free to copy and distribute the ebook all over the place as long as you acknowledge me as the author.

Give it a whirl. Then discuss.

Mark Twain, Alan Gribben and the Sanitizing of Huck Finn: or Is there enough room on this bandwagon for me?

2011-01-05T18:01:00.000-06:00

        Honestly, I don’t know where to start on this one.
        Everyone, I’m sure, has heard about Alan Gribben at Auburn editing a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and removing every single instance of the word “nigger” (and the word “injun”) (If not, here) because use of the words, even within the limited context of a work of fiction, makes white people so squeamish that they have stopped reading the book.
        Do I start with the bastardization of one of the most important works of American Literature, possibly the closest thing we have to a Great American Novel?
        Do I start with the apparent loss of literary nuance represented by the readers (not Gribben) who can’t seem to understand the novel within the simple literary context of a first person, fictional narrative, or even the more simplistic context of a story set in antebellum America, when slavery was still legal?
        Do I start with the American media’s utterly ridiculous reliance upon the phrase “The N-word” as if even the utterance of the word “nigger” within a discussion of the use of the word means they’ve called every African-American within earshot a “nigger”?
        I guess I’ll start with what no one ever seems to start with: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in the first person.
        To me, that’s all that needs to be said in defense of the use of the word “nigger” in the novel, but judging by the big media storm swirling over this, that doesn’t have the same amount of impact for other people, including a supposed Mark Twain scholar. Maybe Professor Gribben never really studied that much creative writing after all.
        A writer (in this case Mr. Samuel Clemens - staunch anti-racist curmudgeon) who writes a piece of fiction in the first person engages in the process of mimesis, which is the assumption, or mimicry, of the character who then tells the story (telling a story is diegesis) (in this case one Huck Finn, bratty, insensitive, racist runaway). This is, in essence, “acting” on the page. Sam Clemens, as Mark Twain (in the early 1880’s), pretends to be Huck Finn, a boy who uses the word nigger frequently because he is a southerner in pre-Civil War America. What other word would a boy like Huck Finn use to describe Jim?
        That’s what gets lost, in my opinion, in all of the stink raised when anyone complains about the word “nigger” in Huck Finn. It’s what gets lost any time someone gets offended by any word used by any character in a fictional work. The moment the offended person calls for the book or movie to be boycotted, censored, or shunned I want to drag them into a creative writing classroom, or an acting classroom, and show them how, in order to accurately portray certain characters a writer or actor has to actually use the words that character would use - even if they are insensitive, mean, or racist words. It would be comical (and dishonest) for an actor portraying a racist character to edit the dialogue to avoid saying a bad word: imagine the movie Mississippi Burning with the word “nigger” removed from script.
         And then I’d retell the story I once heard about a little old lady confronting Ernest Hemingway about the “foul” language he used in one of his stories and Hemingway said he was only telling the truth about how men talk on Saturday morning in the barber shop.
        “I’ve been in the barber shop on a Saturday morning and they never talk that way,” the woman said.
        “I was writing about the Saturday you weren’t there,” Hemingway replied.
        Removing this one word - nigger - from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not only fundamentally rewrites Twain’s text, it alters the character of Huck Finn himself. It alters the characters whose dialogue is reported by Huck Finn. And to what end? To keep a bunch of squeamish white people from feeling icky every time they have to read the book?
        Ridiculous.
        One of the many reasons the issue of Race in America is so hard to talk about is because people, apparently ones like Gribben, can’t seem to separate the act of talking about a word like “nigger” from actually calling another human being a “nigger.” Instead, we get euphemisms and the comical over-use of the phrase “the N-word.” Well, F-word that, you B-word, S-word for brains, R-word, M-F-word.

        But on a positive note, think about how far we’ve come as a society. The word “nigger” was once so ubiquitous and accepted that is was plastered on consumer products (see this fake commercial from the movie Confederate States of America for a real product distributed until the 1950’s), and now, some white people can’t even get the word out of their mouths in a conversation about the word. Must mean racism is dead, right?

Hardly.

Tardy with The Resolutions

2011-01-05T06:20:00.002-06:00

I have a few resolutions.

Getting in shape is the only one I’ll really chatter about. For X-mas my family is helping me get a YMCA membership because I’m a starving, under employed writer with massive graduate school debt and I can’t pay for it on my own. I told my girlfriend that the plan was to have Ryan Reynolds’ body by the time I turn 40.

She laughed at me. Look, I know it’s not very likely that I’ll get that kind of physique, but at least I can avoid looking like Jack Black (sorry, Jack, I think you’re great but . . .)

Granted, the cape is fabulous, but still.

There are a lot of other resolutions, but I’m trying out this thing where I don’t talk about them.

First Draft of The Palace of Winds is finished.

2010-12-28T18:15:00.000-06:00

Yes, it is nearly an entire ream of paper. Roughly 491 pages in this draft (no pages breaks for chapters yet), and checking in at 123,958 words.

I expect to chop it down by a third, at least. Then build it back up. Then chop it down.

Hope it doesn't take as long to revise as it did to write.

Worth Watching

2010-12-27T20:40:00.000-06:00

A Collection of Thoughts I've Not Had Time to Write Out Completely

2010-12-17T06:33:00.000-06:00

1) I finished the first draft of my next novel. I’ve tried an alternate title, for a day, and then went back to what I originally had: The Palace of Winds.
It is planned as the first book in a trilogy.

2) I’ve started work on the second book.

3) I believe that being “tolerant” does not mean I have to give up the right to be angry at intolerant people, and tell them to go fuck themselves, or stop their intolerance from effecting other people. There have been a number of times where I have stumbled into discussions with some anti-whatever schmuck who finally trotted out some completely obnoxious gem that was designed to be a “nuclear option” to the argument (designed to cow me into submission by its shear ludicrousness and offensiveness), and I cut them off. At that moment, the schmuck trotted out the nugget “Oh, I see how it is. What happened to your liberal tolerance, huh?” To the schmuck, that was checkmate. At that point I would, in the schmuck’s view, have to surrender the validity of my argument for tolerance because I got angry and showed intolerance towards the schmuck’s vile assertion and put a limit upon the level of intolerant bile I was willing tolerate. If I were as “tolerant” as the schmuck seemed to want me to be, then, as a liberal, I would have to “tolerate” things like the extermination of the Jews, or the lynching of black people, or the execution of gay people, because to be intolerant of those actions would make me no better than those people displaying their intolerance of Jews, blacks, or homosexuals.

4) The persecuted hegemon: the link goes to an illustration of the term, but heres’ the capsule definition from the same post: “those who claim the privilege that in their view pertains to being a dominant ethnic or sectarian majority while simultaneously posturing as a persecuted and put-upon minority.”

5) The documentary “Lord Save Us From Your Followers” is worth a watch. If you have Netflix, it’s available as an instant play. The documentarian is a Christian by the way, so it does come across as generous to Christianity (Rick Santorum is taken seriously), but it also is extremely critical of the public face evangelicalism has put on and the thoughtlessness it promotes. The mock “Family Feud” segment where the producer hosts a game show between teams of “agnostics” and “Christians” is highly entertaining and incredibly shocking.

That’s all I have time for this morning.

Refuting a Single Sentence.

2010-12-07T19:39:00.001-06:00

I’ve been wrestling with the ending of my new story for perhaps the last four or five weeks.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I have in my head this image I want to get to. The image has been hanging around out there since I started the story, even as the intent of the story has changed. The problem is that it continues to stay at a certain distance even as I have begun to feel that the story has reached the last lunge to the finish. Perhaps the image is something I simply need to let go, throw out, or destroy.

Struggling like this used to make me panic. I would figure the whole story was junk, or that it had reached a dead end, and so I would throw it out. Of course, a lot of the time I had only written a few pages, maybe a hundred or so and would simply give up. Now I have somewhere around 450 pages. If it was going to dead end, it would have done so a long time ago. No, what I’ve got here is a case of bad story-time management.

It has proven tough to cram a decade worth of a character’s life into a 500 page novel: especially when that decade is the 1930’s. There was so much that happened in America between 1929 and 1940. So much that, to me, it has the cast of epic mythology to it, and yet, it seems to be completely overshadowed by the grandly epic event our country seems preternaturally obsessed with: WW II.

On one level, World War II is easy to grasp for us Americans. We get to cast ourselves as the good guys, fighting the good fight against the evil Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. There’s a bright, clear line to be drawn between what is right and what is wrong and what should be done about it. It’s the Nazis or the Japanese who kill people for not being Christian, or launch unprovoked wars. Americans don’t do those things.

The Great Depression doesn’t seem to offer that kind of clear separation between an evil other and a good us. We are both in that story. Looking at the Great Depression we have to confront the fact that we, ourselves, are one day the homeless, out-of-work person with his hat in his hand, standing at the back porch asking for a little something to eat, and the next day the scoundrel who punches the destitute for blocking our way, and yet, on another day, we are the kindly person who places a sandwich in the outstretched hand at our back door, or invites the person in to share our own meal for the day.

In my research I read stories of tremendous charity and generosity - of lonely, desperate people being aided by shop owners or grocery store owners, or more often by someone who was only a little less lonely and desperate. I also read stories of incredible meanness and cruelty, of farm owners promising transients looking for work a meal in exchange for a day’s labor only to give the already hungry and now exhausted transients rotten, or maggot infested food. I read of entire towns turning their backs on sick men and, instead of taking them to a hospital, driving these men outside of town and dropping them by the side of the road to make their own ways.

It seems at times that we are, still today, fighting the ideological wars of the American Depression. On one side, Hoover’s and the Republican’s belief that personal industry, personal charity and volunteerism would carry America through the hard times. On the other, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the safety net of social security, unemployment insurance, and direct government intervention. Neither is entirely wrong, even though it seems that in or current age we are required to pick just one.

Personal industry and personal charity is admirable, but it has its limitations. Before the 1932 election there were several cities, most notably Philadelphia, where the city’s wealthy banded together to fund a private relief organization to aide those who’d been put out of work and couldn’t find jobs. If I remember correctly, it lasted about a year before the demand grew so great that the wealthy funders all backed out, leaving those in need completely destitute. In those days, there was no safety net: no unemployment insurance, no food stamps, no medicare. So, when the man of the house lost his job it was only a matter of time before the entire family was reduced to begging on the street. Kick a worker to the curb, leave that worker unable to pay for even the basics of food and shelter, and as the Great Depression showed, the whole economy crashes.

It wasn’t until Roosevelt was elected that there started to be some improvement. But not everything Roosevelt and the New Dealers tried worked. The National Recovery Administration didn’t last long, and was, in fact, had major parts of its functions deemed unconstitutional. Roosevelt, for all his popularity, was decidedly weak in his support of labor unions, in effect allowing a farm workers union in the south to be killed so effectively that it has never resurfaced. Roosevelt’s agencies also destroyed rancher’s and farmer’s herds and crops in order to stabilize market prices and, in some cases, forcing those ranchers and farmers onto to government dole. But things like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration were tremendously beneficial to people and society (the access and services to our National Parks was increased, rural electrification was started, dams, flood control projects, and countless other public works were built by agencies like the CCC, the TVA, and so on. The Federal Writers Project not only gave us the fabulous WPA state guides, but along with the other Arts project created a deep, vibrant historical record of our country as it was before the mass homogenization project that TV culture has proven to be. Moreover, these organizations gave people jobs, got them out of the soup kitchens and bread lines, off the trains and highways, put some money in their pockets so they could buy their meals rather than beg for them. And there is, I believe, nothing that compares to the basic human dignity of not having to beg.

All of that, somehow, has to fit into this 500 page story in some fashion and then, gracefully, slip itself into this image I’m writing towards - an image that is oddly personal, mythic, and prophetic all at once.

Once I get that done it’s time to revise.

Art Is Not Meaningless, Mr Lethem

2010-11-08T18:43:00.000-06:00

Monday at work I was listening to the “Reality” episode of To The Best of Our Knowledge and heard an exchange between Jonathan Lethem and Jim Fleming that reminded me why, despite being published, I live in defiance of the observation that Brain Evenson once made during my first Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. He’d observed that unpublished writers tend to cling to their aesthetic because it is the only thing that justifies their claim to being a writer to their friends and family. Having had my first novel published, I find that I still cling to my aesthetic not because it justifies my existence as a writer, but because it justifies the continued existence and relevance of my profession as a whole to the great forward thrust of society.

Lethem, essentially, argued that art is “peculiar” in that it’s not very productive because it doesn’t “generate wealth” in the way that say, oil exploration does, it doesn’t feed or dress people, - and mostly shockingly to me - doesn’t “improve things” and it “doesn’t educate as well as education does” and that it’s just a “thing.” He goes on to say that he likes art’s resistance to usefulness, and that he just wants to make something that people can be amused by. When Jim Fleming asks him if writing can help people to make sense of life, Lethem comes back with “Well that’s a very nice kinda productive Protestant work ethic excuse for art that you’re offering me, but I actually think that it’s not that, it’s that it’s to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one, and maybe also to remember and embody, sit inside, abide with your own experiences more deeply in a more conscious way, but not to explain them, because it couldn’t possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it?”

The last line he delivered to Fleming with, quite possibly, the most condescending tone I’ve ever heard in my life: as if to ask Jim Fleming if he really is that naive about “art” to think that it means anything at all. The condescension seemed to so fluster Fleming that he stumbled into asking Lethem to read (When I ranted to my sister in New York about it, she downloaded and listened to the podcast. She later sent me a text message that read “Oh sweet jeebus almost 9 mins in & he sure does sound like a Park Slope hipster tool.” - I love my sister.).

But it was more than his tone that irked me. It was his whole stand on the general uselessness of his profession and product as a writer for anything more than amusement and self-referential navel gazing.

It’s kind of hard to argue that books aren’t lacking a certain amount of utilitarianism in the world. Obviously Art isn’t as immediately useful as a hammer, or a step ladder, in building a house, or a cathedral; however, there should be no doubt that a book stands behind the grand and symbolically moving architecture of a cathedral while little more than classroom practicality and self-indulgent displays of wealth stand behind most homes built today.

I also find it disheartening to hear people describe “wealth” only in monetary terms. In a very narrow way, Lethem is right when he argues that writing does not generate a lot of monetary wealth considering the number of people who write professionally. I’m certainly no richer than I was before selling my book, and neither is my publisher. By that narrow definition of wealth, both me and my publisher should give up and become plumbers: by Lethem’s definition that would be both more useful and financially rewarding for us. But in a world already so deeply impoverished that someone like “The Situation” is both wealthier and more well known than even Jonathan Lethem, I think we need to reevaluate this idea of wealth. For me, wealth would be a comfortable life, but not extravagant, a life where I earn enough money that I do not need to worry about paying my bills every month the way I do now, or dying of a curable disease, and where I can write more than I currently do. But, more than that, I consider the books I have collected and read and value deeply to be a form of wealth: my experience and understanding of the world, I believe, would be incredibly impoverished if I’d never read “The Alexandria Quartet,” or “The English Patient,” or “The Sun Also Rises,” or “On The Road,” or “To The Wedding” (oh, how poor my life would be without that one). This form of wealth, this richness, should not be diminished because it does not generate cash the way coal mining does - but that seems to be exactly what Lethem is claiming.

It is that richness of experience that brings me finally to the most confusing part of Lethem’s snipe - at least for me.

After Lethem made his statements that art doesn’t educate us as well as utilitarian classroom exercises, Jim Fleming tried to defend art by arguing that it has a utility, that through it we make the imaginative leap into understanding a world that we could not have acquired through our own, direct experience. What Fleming was getting at was empathetic imagination - the ability to imagine for ourselves what it is like to be The Other. Lethem seems to shoot that down, but it also seems that he doesn’t quite get what he is talking about.

Lethem said: “I actually think that it’s not that [to help us make sense out of life], it’s to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one, and maybe also to remember and embody, sit inside, abide with your own experiences more deeply in a more conscious way, but not to explain them, because it couldn’t possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it?”

So let’s see if I can reconstruct the train of thought: according to Lethem, art doesn’t teach us anything, it makes us experience something, but doesn’t explain it, it gives us a new experience which is also supposed to make us remember our experiences and abide with our experiences in a more conscious way, but not explain them. In other words, Art doesn’t teach, it just makes us experience something that may or may not be new and if it’s not new then it references our past experiences, which we are supposed to dwell on with our conscious mind but not understand.

Got it? Yeah, neither do I.

First off, let me throw out an old aphorism: Experience is the greatest teacher.

It is the experience of something that best teaches us how to cope with the vagaries of life, correct? Sometimes the experience comes to us first hand, sometimes, it comes to us second hand. Or, to put it another way, some of us learn not to touch fire by getting burned; some of us learn not to touch fire by seeing someone else, or something else, get burned by fire. Art is, at its most basic, second hand experience; however, transcendent art contains a certain mimetic quality - that empathetic imagination I mention before - that can act like first hand experience, and wake us up to things in the world that we could not have otherwise learned.

For years I have held the belief that the stories we tell can and do have an effect on the world. And it’s not just my naive, midwestern, Lutheran upbringing now semi-Buddhist leanings, that gave me those ideas. The same ideas are held by the likes of Dzevad Karahasan, a Bosnian Muslim writer who weathered the siege of Sarajevo, and which he expressed in his book “Sarajevo: Exodus of a City.” Lethem’s argument to Jim Fleming seems to me to embody what Karahasan and I would call “Art for Art’s Sake” - a self-referential game that is unconcerned with the rest of the world: a piece of fluff asserting its meaninglessness upon us. The problem with art that asserts its meaninglessness is that by providing this particular kind of “experience” of meaninglessness, it teaches us that anything we experience is meaningless. I have found that such nihilism makes a person susceptible to the kind of manipulation at the hands of demagogues who promise to provide that missing meaning if only we’ll do as they command.

My Thoughts on Smoking Bans

2010-10-21T20:54:00.000-05:00

        Recently, the Kansas Legislature passed a state-wide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. And, of course, the debate is rancorous. The smokers are upset and argue that their right to smoke is being restricted, bar owners are upset and claim that the ban on smoking will hurt their business because smokers will choose to stay away. And, of course, the law itself is flawed by the hypocrisy of the state allowing smoking in state owned casinos – because the state fears losing revenue when the smokers decide they can’t gamble without smoking a cigarette.

            Personally, I’m glad for the ban. I’ve struggled to remain a non-smoker for the last ten years. When I lived in Boulder, CO, it was easy: there were lots of bars and a smoking ban for bars and restaurants, so I was able to go out, drink and not be surrounded by cigarette smoke and the temptation to light up a cigarette for myself. Until the smoking ban hit Wichita, if I wanted to go out with friends for a beer, I didn’t have many choices for non-smoking places to go – especially since a lot of my friends smoke. It wouldn’t do any good to go and drink at my friend’s homes – again, because they smoke, and they weren’t keen on coming to my place because they’d have to smoke outside. They old saying is that there is no one more aggressively anti-smoking as a former smoker (or as anti-drinking as a former drinker, etc), so keep in mind that I am a person who, 98% of the time, is a non-smoker. The other 2% of the time is when I’m around my smoking friends.

        So, It is to my smoking friends that I address this piece.

        I think my smoking friends and I can all agree that smoking is dangerous. We can also agree that second hand smoke is dangerous. Recently, there have been studies on what is colloquially called “third hand smoke.” Scientists are finding that because you can smell cigarettes long after they’ve been put out, it means that there are still dangerous toxins present to be breathed in (There’s 250 poisonous toxins in cigarette smoke including lead, cyanide, and arsenic). That means a non-smoking mother who goes to a smokey bar with her friends, doesn’t just put herself at risk, she could, potentially, put her child at risk when she slips into the child’s room to kiss him goodnight because those toxins are still being emitted from her clothes and hair.

            Now my stand begins with the assumption that a) smoke-free breathing is the universal baseline: we don’t smoke when we sleep, we didn’t pop out of the womb with a cigarette in our mouths, and b) smoking is optional, people choose to begin smoking. Because not-smoking is the basic human state, breathing takes precedent over smoking. This is why smoking in airplanes is prohibited, it’s why smoking in confined spaces with newborns is frowned upon.

            Furthermore, a society has the right, if not the duty, to control and place restrictions upon activity that is harmful to people who participate in that activity, but especially so when such an activity might be harmful to those nearby who are not directly participating in the hazardous activity. Take traffic laws, or football, for example.

            I think we can all agree that football is a dangerous activity. Just in the last week or so, there have been several serious injuries, including a young college player who was paralyzed from the neck down. Those who participate in football do so of their own free will, like those who choose to smoke, and they are aware of and accept the dangers associated with participating in that activity. However, we don’t allow football players to play football in a room full of bridge players, even bridge players who are football fans. We don’t allow football players to randomly tackle people on the streets. Football is restricted to football fields, and even then there are further rules and restrictions meant to confine the risk associated with playing football localized to a specific set of participants. Football plays don’t take place in the stands among the fans where a heavily armored, fast moving player can endanger a slow, unarmored observer. And although the players and coaches on the sidelines accept a certain level of risk by being close to the hazardous action, play stops when the players leave the defined field of play and enter the sideline. Play also stops if a non-player enters the field of play. Of course that doesn’t mean the non-player won’t be hurt by one of the players (or despised or ridiculed or hated) but, those who have entered into the contract to play football stop to remove the non-player who, despite their sudden appearance, has not fully entered into the contract.

            We would find it ridiculous and unreasonable if, when we went to a football game we were told that, even though we were non-players, we were required to stand on the field and be part of the action, and that we must accept the risk of being treated like a football player and allow the players to make contact with us even though we aren’t football players. We would find if doubly unreasonable then, if we protested and were told that if we don’t want to accept this risk, we shouldn’t come to watch a football game.

            This is the basic attitude held by smokers. The smoker’s choice to risk their health takes primacy over the baseline universal within the confines of a bar. I have heard smokers make the argument that by choosing to enter a bar, a non-smoker must accept the risks of smoking even though they do not choose to light a cigarette, or stay at home. Once upon a time, when I was a full-fledged smoker, I probably made the same argument. But now I wonder why should the price of going out with my friends for a drink be my health? Or to put it another way, why do my smoking friends insist that in order to be friends with them, I must choose to be a second hand smoker?

        I don’t know how many times in the years before the smoking ban was in place here that I or one of my friends would try to quit smoking. We’d do all right on our own, we’d do okay if our smoking friends came to our houses, or joined us at a movie theatre. But, even if we managed to avoid lighting a cigarette when we visited our smoking friend’s homes, we would, essentially, spend the night second hand smoking. To quit smoking, to make the choice to return to our baseline, non-smoking condition, especially with smoking friends, can often mean having to choose between our giving up our health or giving up our friends. Giving up our dangerous friends for our health might be the best choice, but it doesn’t feel very good.

            We would not go to football games if we were told we would have to passively stand on the field, waiting to be hit by an armored player. We would not long be friends with someone who demanded that each time we saw them we had to viciously smack ourselves on the head with a two-by-four. And yet, with smoking and our smoking friends, we non-smokers are asked to do just that.

        Now, as much as I would wish that my smoking friends, and my smoking sister in particular, would give up smoking, I’m not going to continuously beat them over the head about it. This essay will be the last of it. If they choose to smoke, fine, I’m not going to pull the cigarette out from between their lips and throw their packs in the toilet. But I am going to start asking why they have to smoke when I’m around, and that if they want me around, they should not smoke when I am around. Although I may voluntarily visit their homes, it seems to me only the good manners of a host for them to be mindful of my decision to not smoke. Think of it as if I were Jewish, and cigarettes were pork. No one with any amount of consideration would invite a Jewish friend over and serve that Jewish friend ham, purposefully, and then be so rude as to tell their Jewish friend to leave if they don’t want to eat the ham.

First Remix on PFANM VOL 4

2010-10-14T23:04:00.000-05:00

Got the first remix of a story posted at the magazine. Check it out here.

Workshop Blues

2010-10-12T22:02:00.000-05:00

        So, lately I’ve been wanting to start up a workshop group of some sort. I am desperate to get some feedback on my new project, and equally desperate to exercise my own critical muscles. Of course the other thing I’d like to do is be able to sit down and talk with other serious prose writers on regular basis.
        None of those things are happening for me right now.
        I did consider having some kind of on-line workshop, but for me I just don’t think it would work. Unless everyone is set up to video conference, we’d then be reduced to emails, write-ups, and no spontaneous conversation.
        No, what I want is a face-to-face, in person workshop. Such a thing would force me to read the submitted manuscripts, plus it would get me out of the house - or at least get other people into my house.
        The only problem is I can’t seem to scare up some mutually interested writers in these parts. Of the prose writers I know, one has a travel heavy day job, one is already in a workshop and the workshop is an ad-hoc online endeavor, two others seem to think I’m too square or otherwise unhip, another is just plain uninterested and I can’t tell if it is out of insecurity or some kind of intellectual snobbishness, still another is a professor of creative writing who also seems completely uninterested in me the few times we’ve met, and the last two I know write kid lit for the preteen set.
        I’ve been told that I just need to get out more, which makes sense only on the surface level. Outside of the academic setting most working writers have day jobs and aren’t out doing a lot of socializing in their spare time.... they’re off somewhere writing. And if they’re anything like me then they’ll pass pretty innocuously through most social events.
        This all leaves me in a pretty dismal and isolated position.

New Issue is Up

2010-10-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

The new issue of The Project for A New Mythology is up.

Volume 4: Remix is waiting for your participation.

A Case Against Ideologically Based Genres In Fiction

2010-09-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

Lately, one of my side projects has been kicking around the idea of organizing a literary festival here in Wichita. The general thinking is that since I’m not having much luck (or maybe more to the point I’m not pressing my luck) at getting relocated somewhere more friendly to creative, generally unemployable people like me, then I should quit bitching about how dismal it is to be a non-academically employed literary writer in Wichita and do something about it. In essence, try to bring the fun to me if I can’t get to the fun. Still means I’ll be dirt poor and on the verge of bankruptcy (I can feel the concrete of mom’s basement beneath my feet already), but what the hell.

In pursuit of that I’ve been chatting with people who have done this sort of thing before here in Kansas. In one of the recent conversations, which took place in the midst of a busy book festival, I was told that I should include “Christian writers” because there are some people doing some good work in the Christian fiction genre. My response was immediate and visceral. No. If we had been in a kid-free zone, I would have said “Fuck no.”

Anyway, we were interrupted then and never really got to finish our talk about this matter. I was going to send an email to the person, explaining myself further, but the email got a bit long winded so I decided it would be best as a blog post.

First, let me say that I’m not opposed to writers who happen to be Christian, nor am I opposed to a book about the Christian “experience”: however, I am opposed to any genre of fiction that has as its central requirement the adoption of, or an adherence to, a certain ideology. And I feel this way about any and all ideologies, even my favored ones (Buddhism, socialism, etc). An ideologically based genre is prone to producing, and legitimizing, what I call Dogmatic Literature. Dogmatic literature, either fiction or non-fiction, is the source material for nearly every major, man-made societal tragedy and horror I can think of. In Dogmatic literature, the characters seem to be motivated by a sound, internal logic, and, at first, they seem like well rounded characters. However, by the end of the book, they have either subjugated their personhood in favor of the author’s ideology and been rewarded, or they’ve rejected the author’s favored ideology and are utterly destroyed. By the end of the book, these once logically constructed characters stop doing the things they do because they are human beings and instead do them because they are good Christians or good Socialists. Examples of this type of literature are books like “The Turner Diaries,” or “Atlas Shrugged,” or the entire “Left Behind” series of books.

Much like the old war-time propaganda tactic of dehumanizing the enemy to maintain passion for the war effort, and a willingness to kill, Dogmatic literature acts upon the fundamentally pedagogical and emotionally influential nature of storytelling to reinforce people’s misperceptions of others who do not share their belief in the ideology professed in the story. When Jenkins and LaHaye offer up cold, sensationalistic descriptions of the horrible, gruesome deaths of non-Christians in the Left Behind series, essentially reveling in their proxy revenge on those horrible secular humanists they see as persecuting good Christians, they are taking the stand that people not willing to accept Jesus Christ as their savior deserve whatever horrible, inhumane things happen to them.

The best analysis of the hypocrisy, and heartlessness of the Left Behind series is done by The Slacktivist (a liberal evangelical Christian who likes to write using the language of secular humanists). By tackling the biggest selling Christian Fiction books of all time, he also, by default, tackles what is wrong with Dogmatic Literature in general. This is especially important since Jenkins has slapped his name all over the “Christian Writers Guild” where one of the endorsers, Francine Rivers, is quoted on the CWG website as suggesting that if people join and learn from this guild, God will “take back” the arts. Other endorsers also use such militaristic language.

How can “Christians,” who, according to census results, make up 80% or more of the American population, not already have control of the so-called “secular” marketplace? Well, to answer my own question, the do it by believing that the number is a lie and that not everyone who calls himself a Christian is a Real-True-Christian, and that they, the RTC’s, are threatened and endangered unless they get all militant and “take back” the arts/the government/the military/the media/whatever.

Such language, the language of a group that believes itself to be a victimized minority when it clearly isn’t, is the language adopted by the writers of Dogmatic Literature. The most stark example of this is from the Bosnian War and its aftermath. Despite the Bosnian Serbs receiving military support from Serbia proper (tanks, helicopters, and manpower), despite having control of the majority of the equipment left in Bosnia by the Yugoslav National Army after Bosnia & Herzegovina declared its independence, despite the Bosnian Serbs being the ones who surrounded every single besieged city in Bosnia, and despite the fact that the Bosnian Serbs were the ones who put up internment camps that reminded the world of concentration camps, the Bosnian Serbs and the Serb Nationalists who supported them, still say that they were the victims and that the Bosniaks were the aggressors out to commit genocide against the Serbs.

Essentially, this is why I am opposed to inviting anyone to participate in a literary festival who writes fiction pushing a specific ideology - but especially in our current social climate, a “Christian” ideology. Now, I can hear the rumblings already: “What happened to your so-called liberal ideal of tolerance, huh?” Well, let me ask you this: if I invite a Christian fiction author who fervently believes that I have a sickness and am going to hell for being a Buddhist, should I also invite the author of “The Turner Diaries” or some other representative of white supremacist fiction who fervently believes that my friend Alexs D. Pate should be enslaved or killed because he’s black? When I look at the ideology of writers like Jerry Jenkins and his cohort Tim LaHaye, what I see is an ideology that embraces the elimination of those they deem non-believers, and that is the same style of ideology expressed by the author of The Turner Diaries against non-whites.

I will not grant white supremacists my tacit approval by inviting them to participate in otherwise legitimate, polite society, and I will not grant tacit legitimization of a Christian Dominionism marked by its often violent rhetoric (and occasional paroxysms of actual violence), towards non-Christians, homosexuals, and others who fall outside their circle off acceptance.

If writers of “Christian Fiction” want to attend any literary festival that I organize, they are welcome to. They’re even welcome to open a discussion of their belief that “secular art” needs to be “taken back” by God. However, I will not offer any kind of tacit approval or sympathy for their cause by giving them an official platform from which to disseminate their odoriferous ideas about writing and art as a means to proselytize a belief system that encourages the dehumanizing of nonbelievers. That will only lead to suffering.

They can start their own literary festival. I’ll be quite happy to ignore them and not to attend.

The Kid Who Never Grew Up.

2010-09-19T15:16:00.000-05:00

        When The Corrections came out, and there was the little Oprah spat, I became quite interested in the book and picked up a copy in hardcover. At the time I didn’t have a very kind disposition toward Oprah’s book club, so I was very interested to read something by a writer who seemed to also feel that Oprah’s book club was a little questionable.

        When I finally sat down to read The Corrections, I read the first page and a half and then threw it on the floor as if I were trying to use it to break up concrete. There was something fundamentally annoying about the writing that, for the longest time, I was only ever capable of describing as irony. I heard the same ironic tone when Franzen was on Fresh Air and read a few passages from his new book, Freedom. My big problem with saying anything more is that I simply don’t have the stamina to read an entire Franzen novel, not when the tone I encounter in the first couple of pages is annoying enough that I feel the need turn the book into a sledge hammer.

        But then I found this review by B. R. Myers in a recent issues of The Atlantic. I’ll let B. R. Myers’ review provide the fireworks against Franzen’s work, but I would like to quote a bit from the review:

        [...] although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriage sucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.
Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically.

        This indiscriminate and directionless irony, created by what fundamentally amounts to poor word choice, was exactly what I was sensing when I attempted to read Franzen all those years ago. It really baffles me why so many critics comment on Freedom as being some kind of full maturation of Franzen’s abilities when, in truth, it seems he’s just doing the same old thing.

        Myers’ line, “The language a writer uses to create a world is that world” seems to me to be one of those fundamental and obvious truths about being a writer. However, it may be something that those who do not practice poetry don’t easily understand. It also echoes with the Dzevad Karahasan quote that seems to inform nearly everything I try to do as a writer: “For, let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first” (the full quote is at the top of my blog). I won’t try to hazard a guess at the kind of world Franzen’s language creates, but for those who can stomach him long enough to read him, I would suggest that you go and pick up the book To The Wedding by John Berger, or In The Skin of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje and pay attention to the language used to create those worlds.

        The quality I hope people see in those books, and that I hope exists in my own, is one of deep generosity for the characters. And then I’d like those people to try to imagine how poor those stories would become if they were written with the poetry stripped out and replaced with the baser family of words like “sucked” or “fuck,” or even the colloquial phrases like “being into someone.”

        When I used to teach composition, one of the earliest lessons I gave my students was to avoid cliches and colloquialisms. I told them that such things were essentially emotional shorthand, and only meant something to the writer and to the people who know the writer best, like the writer’s family. I can tell you I was “mad as hell,” but you won’t understand exactly how mad that is in the way that my mother, or my sister, understands it. In order for you to understand exactly how mad something made me, I’d have to describe, in detail and with precise language, what I felt, said, or did to express that anger. Take my description of how I reacted to the first page and a half of The Corrections. That is a visceral image (I hope). It’s certainly more precise than saying “I threw it across the room.”

        Our characters can use those words because that may, in fact, be how they speak to each other. But writers, the world builders, we should choose our words more carefully. We should shun emotional shorthand of every variety when we write of our characters. We should endeavor to find the poetry of their pain, of their joy, of their shame and self-loathing, of their pride and passion, and render it to our readers with as much compassion and generosity as we can marshal to our cause - we should not describe them with the same base words they might use to describe themselves.

        Think about all the times we describe ourselves to others. How often do we use sarcasm, irony, black humor, or understatement because we don’t want to seem arrogant or full of ourselves? People who aren’t at least a little self-effacing generally shunned. But if we begin effacing someone else, we literally, as the word suggests, wipe them out. We make them smaller than even they believe themselves to be. In the real world, that can be countered by other people who know that person. In the fictional world we create, those characters we create with a too heavy dose of sarcasm and irony, whose passions and desires we describe with inappropriately base terms, will be too diminished to elicit any emotion from readers except scorn. And it’s only a matter of time before the scorn we learn to feel for made up people translates into feeling scorn for the real life people around us.

Volume 4 of The Project for A New Mythology

2010-09-12T15:38:00.000-05:00

I’m at work on the next issue of the Project for a New Mythology. I’ve also been busy writing the next novel, so it often seems as if my days are full of nothing but computer screens and black text.

For those who might be finding the magazine website or this blog lately, I need to get you caught up on what the next issue is going to be like. (Here are some earlier blog posts about the idea from June 7th #1, June 7th #2, June 9th, and June 12th).

Essentially, The Project for a New Mythology is trying out an experiment in User Generated Content, via the Creative Commons License program. I have 7 recruits, plus myself, who have agreed to provide “seed stories” for the website. The stories are each registered under their own Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike Creative Commons license and will be available for users to download and remix. All that PFANM asks, is the users abide by the CC license and let us know when their remixes are posted (or they can send their remix to me and I’ll post it to www.pfanm.com).

I, and my fellow writers hope it will be a smashing success. Now, back to work on the website so it’ll be ready by the first week of October.