Unprintable Version

Lofty Thoughts: After Seeing Cheri Johnson and Bonnie Rough

I don’t get out as much as I’d like. We have a persuasive couch. But I just got back from seeing my friend Cheri Johnson read with Bonnie Rough at the Loft. Cheri writes wonderful fiction filled with the subtle sabotage of our minds and the vivid textures of the world. Bonnie Rough was a pleasant surprise: she uses research with a great generosity and deftness, so it’s a kind of extension of the imagination. There is also the wonderful uni-tasking of a reading: there is only you, listening to what is being read; the air, like the air in a good library, seems calmer and richer than normal air.  All of this—plus running into other MFA buddies–made me want to write.   

Tiny Elementary School Chairs and the Novel

"However appalling to consider, however tedious to exact, every novel requires FURNITURE, whether it be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing positions for the duration of the story. . . . These rules apply no matter how tangential the novel’s commitment to social realism, no matter how avant garde or capricious, no matter how revolutionary or bourgeois."

Jonathan Lethem, from a set of short essays based on “Key Words” the Villa Gillet elicited from participants in a forthcoming International Forum on the Novel, published in BookForum.

I would love this observation no matter when or where I read it.  But I especially appreciated it in the context of the surrounding mini-essays which went on about the abyss from which novels are dredged. Such seemingly glib despair sounded pompous to my mind, which is, admittedly, little more than an outpost of ESPN.

I also loved this observation because I recently spent a morning in an elementary school, which highlights anyone’s awareness of furniture. (See my King Kongish knee, towering above a  itty-bitty table.)

And I loved Lethem’s observation because I had been almost writing a scene in a novel for several days and I was prompted to write the scene. The question, “where does he sit?” focused the entire scene for me.    

Vanity Fair Ads Up

I am very pro-advertising but sometimes it's all just a little much: E picked up the "Hollywood" issue of Vanity Fair. Because she's hopping on a plane soon, she thought she might pull out the ads. She pulled out only those pages which have ads on both sides: 

Sometimes you just feel like a sitcom-watching, mall-haunting, videogame playing American rube.

Wendy Lesser writes in Book Forum of the Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa. “He seemed to have read everything, not only in Italian but also in French and English, and to a certain extent in German, Russian, and Spanish.  He and Lucy, who had dogs instead of children, spoke to each pet in a different language.”

Favorite Book Read in 2007

These year end judgments always seem so glib, but I love the discussions they start. One theme was interesting: most of my favorites this year were set in the midwest: two Willa Cather novels, Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter,  Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End, and my favorite book read this year, Richard Powers' The Echo Maker–for its incisively beautiful and intelligent prose about such things as the science of consciousness and Nebraska and dudes who drive pick ups and play video games. I have not gotten to Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

What was your favorite book this year (read, not published) ? 

To start the year, from Saul Bellow

"There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe."

R.I.P. Carol Bly

I’d meant to argue with her more. In our oblique local culture, Carol Bly was direct. I disagreed with her deepest assumptions about politics. She believed that conservatives were not simply wrong, but less evolved than liberals.  (On the other hand, I recently exclaimed, “Awesome! A Gerald Ford stamp!”) But Carol Bly’s insistence that the fiction we create should include politics has led me to think about what including politics in fiction might mean. I don’t think she would agree with the conclusions I’ve come to, that politics is almost always ironic in fiction, that it is undercut by the delusion and self-interest and instability and opacity and forgiveness that fiction explores. (Then again, that might just be the kind of sloppy opining that gives blogs a bad name.)

Her directness helped me in other ways. She was an early supporter of my literary magazine Two Cities, subscribing immediately and writing me notes about what I could do better. She critiqued a story of mine and told me that, if you write one story about someone, you always have to ask, “why this day?” The point may be obvious, but I didn’t know it then and always remember it now. She cared about writing and how it was taught and took on the workshop early.

She was less effective, and less celebrated, than she might otherwise have been because her natural mode was the lecture and to lecture is to condescend and to condescend is, in some small way, to make an enemy. Her weakness was not that she cared but that she seemed to assume that she was the only one who cared. 

Lecturers aren’t good listeners and she had, to my own imperfect ear, a tin ear which made her more personal pieces goofily endearing but which hobbled her more polemical pieces. 

She cared about outstate Minnesota and, in Letters From The Country,  treated seriously what others have treated sentimentally.  I hope this book lasts. The personal essay was her first and best form. The “personal” gave her writing detail and her voice humility. The “essay” honored her directness.   

The start of an essay I had left bookmarked for years until I picked up the book this morning: 

I have been thinking about the positive side of Minnesota blizzards. Another of the blessings is that extended-family occasions come to a halt. Thank goodness. The extended-family dinner is a threat to the pleasure and ease of the American farm family, yet it is hard to say so.

And this, about the small town in rural Minnesota where she lived with Robert Bly:

Before a storm, Madison is full of people excitedly laying in food stocks for the three-day blow. People lay in rather celebratory food, too. Organic-food parents get chocolate for their children; weight watchers lay in macaroni and Sara Lee cakes; recently-converted vegetarians backslide to T-bones. 

Unprintable Version and the Mission of Genius on Earth:

What is the duty of a literary blog to the books it considers? As a starting point, consider this quote from Rebecca West’s 1914 essay “the Duty of Harsh Criticism” which I stumbled across in Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics. 

“Just as it was the duty of the students of Kelvin the Mathematician to correct his errors in arithmetic, so it is the duty of critics to rebuke these hastinesses of great writers, lest the blurred impressions weaken the surrounding mental fabric and their rough transmissions  frustrate the mission of genius on earth.”

That seems to be still true in 2007, with these three caveats: 

1. The West quote doesn’t acknowledge the difference between arithmetic and literature. Adding 2+2 to arrive at 5 is a different kind of mistake than using the passive voice.

2. Nor does the West quote consider feelings: 

“Book reviews I think are the most difficult form for me. It’s easy in them to be flip and dismissive, to make jokes at the book expense, to sneer at the author; some papers think of this as being “controversial” or “readable.” But if you’re an author yourself, you know how much time and effort went into a bad book, and you can’t take it so lightly.”

Margaret Atwood, Introduction to her Second Words: Collected Criticism and Essays

Of course, there is a sense in which feelings, mine or yours, don’t matter. This isn’t a Montessori school.  But acknowledging the human being whose work is being criticized may improve the criticism. Someone once gave me advice about inserting catheters: do it as if you were doing it to yourself. This enforced precision on my part. Anything which slows down a blogger, even human decency, is probably a good thing.   

3. West also obviously didn’t know from blogs, which are kind of half-assed– self-published, unmediated, the Nestlé’s Quik of literature. It’s tempting to view oneself as a freelance superego but what I’m writing here is more a reading notebook than a set of reviews.  The purpose of a reading notebook is to figure out what books can teach me, not what I can teach them. 

I’m not trying to be comprehensive in my considerations or final in my judgments, but I owe it to the books I’m writing about to be fair and precise and, provided I can be bothered, to support my points with examples and honest about my limitations.

Can frowning be an isometric exercise?

Check out the picture of the Waugh family, especially Evelyn and wife.  The book looks interesting, too.

On Coolness and Chilling Effects

Both the possibilities and pitfalls–or pratfalls– of the “lifelogging” phenomenon fascinate me. While recording is not publishing, the possibility of publication squirms around in every record.

I think of Joe Queenan’s idea of the tyranny of good taste and of people who “act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.”

Consider this, in matter of the recent attempts to log every thing one has ever done:

I’m driving home from Kowalski’s. While the sticker on my back window says “The Current 89.3,” I am listening to a vintage Kassey Kassem on the Oldies station. A new song starts. I recognize it immediately. “Timothy” is a tale told by a young miner. He and two other young miners were trapped in a collapsed mine for days. His friend Joe mentions that he would kill “for a piece of meat” and the narrator points out “Timothy, Timothy, he was looking at you,” repeating “Timothy” because you can emote twice as much in six syllables. At this point, the narrator faints like a teenybopper at a David Cassidy concert. When he awakes, he sees light. He and Joe are rescued. Timothy is never heard from again and, weirdly, no one asks any questions. The song ends,  “Timothy, Timothy, God what did we do?” 

Why didn’t I change the station? Why did slightly more people buy this song than the Janis Joplin song which preceded it? God, what did we do?    

I think a certain amount of junk in one’s cultural diet is a good thing, just as a quorum of germs evidently keeps us healthy. As a writer, it might be worth noting that successful trash is doing something right and to try and figure out what it is. ("Timothy' has a hook, a story, and a sense of urgency.) But there’s also the “bad” art which is good but uncool  (Glen Campbell, Roger Miller) or good but not serious enough for the If it’s Not Kierkegaard, It’s Krap school (Batman Begins, the first Pirates of the Caribbean).

I also think I may need to reconsider my disdain for Joe Queenan. This essay rocks.