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Blog as Reading Notebook

I sometimes go on here about whether or not I should keep this blog. But I have realized that it has succeeded–for me, I'm not sure if anyone else cares–as a reading and viewing notebook. I read books more carefully if I'm going to comment on them publicly. In some ways, the way I'm approaching books won't be as meaningful to people, because I'm not reviewing them, I'm plundering their styles and strategies.  I'm reading Updike fiction–On The Farm–for the first time in a long time and it is really useful to note what he does well and less well. 

bel·low v. "to give a bull's loud roar"

I found the beautifully designed, electrically-bright new Paris Review Interviews in my stocking recently.  This, from Saul Bellow: "I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things i knew intimately.  Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable."  Earlier: "When I began to wrote Augie March, I took off many of these restraints. I think I took off too many, and went too far . . . "

For the record, I liked The Dangling Man a lot and couldn't get through The Victim. I also have never read Herzog and am now asking myself why. 

Dollars and Sensibility: Jane Austen and the American Class Snuggle

Jane Austen writes well about class because she writes about the scaffolding of class: money. She devotes the first pages of Sense and Sensibility to answering the question my trusts and estates professor used to ask repeatedly: who gets the cookies? She describes the process by which greed is painted over as need, when the step brother rationalizes his stinginess toward his family. She bothers to consider the logistics of giving and accepting gifts, as a horse is offered by a suitor.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not seeing a lot of talk of family money or its lack in modern American fiction, and I personally find it hard to write about those things.

I think the British are just more honest about class than we are. In America, we all like to think that we are essentially middle class. In some ways we are, but Jane Austen proves that even intramural class struggles are fraught. At the very least, there are the people at whom the buy-your-spouse-an-Audi-for Christmas commercials are targeted and the rest of us. There are people who enfeebled by money or embittered by its lack. But that's just the start of an complicated mess of delusion and nuance and irony. I’m not looking for agitprop but I would like to write in ways that reflected how money and its absence shape us.

Blogs and the Decline of the Private Journal: A Case Study of One

I have feared that blogging–I have to reiterate that I hate the word but using any other seems forced–would cut into time for what Leo Lerman calls "writing that illuminates," meaning fiction, personal essay, memoir, and other crafted personal writing. That has not proved to be true. I'm working on two books worth of material and started a new story this week.  I have rationalized that blogging simply takes the place  of the letters and  literary journalism which have always been a part of writers' lives.   That is also probably true.  But what I did not expect was that blogging would decimate my private journal writing. And that feels like a loss. Of course, a part of me thinks, "you're a middle-aged man; your self is not a work in progress as it was in your adolescence. The point of your life now is not to continue to sculpt a self but to be useful to others." And my essential self does feel solid. I basically know what I value and know what I want.  But just as it is with manuscripts, just when you think you're done, there's always another revision: a new set of possibilities, a new bucket of fears. When faced with these inevitable changes–parents failing, your own eventual obsolescence becoming less abstract–there is a kind of forgiveness, and thus a kind of freedom, that  only a truly private journal offers.. I miss that and I think I'll be making some time to get back to more private writing.   

It Isn't All About Meme: Our Far-Flung Inspirations

Moonlight Ambulette responded to my suggestion for a list of writerly strengths you admire with a thoughtful post. She also makes the point  that making a discrete list of practitioners we admire can be difficult. I know that my daily inspirations and nano-role-models arrive phrase by phrase, day be day. This week’s gleanings:

John Freeman in the Dallas Morning News via Powell's, on the appeal of Updike’s criticism:

“What makes Mr. Updike's essays worth reading and owning in hardback is the intimate, frighteningly articulate voice that holds them aloft.”

In the November 12 New Yorker review of No Country for Old Men, Anthony Lane asks why the Coen Brothers burdened Javier Bardem “with a helmetlike hair style that makes him look like the fifth Monkee."

This surprisingly precise image is unfortunately reduced on the web version to a “comical haircut. ”

A Meme of My Own: Writerly Strengths I Wish I Had

The your strengths as a writer meme  prompted the thought that, as an unpublished writer, the strengths I aspire to are more interesting than the strengths I can  claim.

The meme:  What five or ten writers’ strengths would you most like to appropriate?

I would like to swipe the ability . . .   

"Dear Mrs. Fenton, Kevin is getting much better at singing quietly": My Five Strengths As A Writer and Other Exercises in Wishful Thinking

Kate passed a meme onto me: identify your five strengths as a writer.  I'm not sure I have five strengths as a writer.  But here goes:

1. I perservere. There are sentences in Merit Badges that go back 18 years.  No one wants to admit to being a plodder, but I am one.

That's Not Writing, That's Blogging

Maybe because it's September, which is the month where my thoughts turn to productivity, but I have been wondering if this blog is really worth it.

Two questions: if you both blog and write (they're different things)  does blogging help or hurt your writing?   

If you read this blog, why? Do you find here that's worthwhile?  What do you find here that's a waste of time? 

Ultimately, I have to make this decision myself, but your thoughts might help me gain some clarity here.  I find that there's something weirdly rushed about blogging; it feels a little like performing; I don't know how much time it takes away from writing or if I'd just be watching more Sportscenter. 

Deathly

A recent New Republic discussed the psychology of Bush’s political success in 2002 and especially in 2004 (“The Shadow of Death: How Political Psychology Explains Bush’s Ghastly Success,” August 27, 2007)  An emerging discipline of political psychology is beginning to explain a tendency to vote for chauvinistic politicians with the concept of “death saliance.” In short, when we are reminded of our own death, we more aggressively defend what we view–in our bones, not our heads–as our culture. Anything from Osama bin Laden to the marriage of Adam and Steve which threatens that culture threaten us. We are more inclined to support the authoritarian, the pre-emptive, the militaristic, the traditional, the evangelical, the jingoistic.

For the purposes of this blog, I'm interested in the literary implications of death saliance. I suspect that a heightened awareness of death has a lot to do with the urge to commemorate which I feel in some writers' work. It would be interesting to poke around in the psyches of writers who seemed to struggle to preserve as much of their culture as they could—Faulkner, Cheever. I know from personal experience that it is very easy for grief in the heart to become nostalgia on the page.

Physical Graffiti: Notes On Really Short Term Memory

Late Friday morning I found myself in a mood that was good with a tincture of giddy: it was sunny and I was walking my dog; some kids were jumping up and down in a trampoline/fort with what looked like big Crayola turrets; a woman was zinging around on a Segway; and when I returned to the office, I discovered that someone I’ve worked with on a few projects is a member of a nationally ranked Rock, Paper, Scissors team.

But one email bothered me: a friend of mine who’d seen me the night before noticed that I looked stressed.  I responded that I wasn’t. But later it struck me: I had a physical this morning and every day before I have a physical I only realize I’m stressed when someone says something like “Did you mean to crush that pop can?”

The physical had gone well. I was happy because I was relieved.

I’m interested in this as a memoirist, because it illustrates how poorly we understand, or even perceive,  our own emotions even as we are experiencing them. Either that, or I’m psychotic.