Unprintable Version

Mosquito Buzz

“Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. . . .   Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favor of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of the villian . . . .” 

And with these words from Virginia Woolf’s On Being lll in mind, I ‘ve been reading Alex Lemon’s Mosquito, a collection of poems inspired by brain surgery. There seems to be an honest attempt at writing so accurate it feels experimental.

I’m not going to say more now, because poetry exposes my amateurism here and I have a very loose institutional connection with Lemon, who graduated from the U of M MFA program a few years before me. 

The Live Version

Link: Bryant Lake Bowl - Cabaret Theater Calendar - Mosquito Release Party.

The Paper House II: Literature and Compulsion

Books assign reading. Like The Tango Hunter (which I read earlier this year), The Paper House is Borges-haunted, which means I’m going to have to read something by him other than a barely remembered story in an anthology.

Both The Tango Hunter and The Paper House are quests. In its worst patches, The Paper House isn’t quite obsessive enough; it goes about its errand without either condensing or entering its story. 

But when you do get to the novel’s destination, there is real strangeness, a willingness to imaginatively pursue what someone addicted to books might become, that makes it worth the trip. 

Picture Book: The Paper House

When I ripped open the brown amazon mailer containing The Paper House by the Urugayuan novelist Carlos Maria Dominquez, the book surprised me with its compact delicacy, as if it had just been precipitated in my hand by a magician. The book’s magical qualities were reinforced by Peter Sis’s pale delicate illustration and the glossy paper which I associate with children’s books. The Paper House is also short, just over 100 pages, and small enough to palm. As I began to read, I realized that, because The Paper House is about the power of books, the design wasn't simply cool; it served Dominquez’s theme.

And the design can say what prose can’t. When writers go on about the magic of books, they seem self-congratulatory and redundant: doesn’t anyone who picks up a serious novel already acknowledge the transforming, transporting power of books? 

Sound and Pictures: iPod images

How much time have I spent pulling jpgs off the web and placing them in the new jukebox feature of itunes, which allows you to riffle through your albums? And how closely is this related to the dorky reverence of an eight year old collecting baseball cards? And why I can’t I undue the move which landed “The Latin Side of Vince Guaraldi” in the slot meant for Michael Penn’s “March?”   

Quibbling Like A Writer

Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer includes an appendix titled “Books To Read Immediately.” When I flipped to it, I was surprised that the dozens of books which are essential to one’s education as a writer included Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City but no Faulkner and no Bellow. They included Virginia Woolf’s surprisingly clueless essay “On Being Ill” but not her masterpieces To the Lighthouse or The Waves. Then as I began reading Reading Like A Writer (like a writer) I realized that the list catalogs the books she mentions and quotes.  That list doesn’t merit the breathlessness of "read immediately.”

Ironic Prose

Fittingly enough, Francine Prose reminds us that fiction is prose. Again, this an obvious point but one that’s been suppressed by Gardner’s lingering insistence that, with some marginalized exceptions, fiction is a dream in which the authorial presence must always effaced.  Reading Like A Writer begins with chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs. She generously quotes several writers in each chapter and implicitly reminds us that sentences are both building blocks and pleasures in their own right. Complete transparency is boring; I, at least, read for the texture of the words and the tincture of the author’s mind. 

Exemplary: Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer

Francine Prose’s comments about the absurdity of workshopping Kafka, which were quoted in a review of her book, don’t represent her views about workshops or about teaching writing. She has good sensible things to say about that subject: in her creative writing classes, she learned how to line edit and she learned how to use audience reactions to improve her work.  (Pre photocopy, students read their work outloud.) But Reading Like A Writer makes a more interesting, more positive point: any approach to teaching–or learning–writing which relies too exclusively on reactions to a manuscript or on a book of rules is a very limited way to learn writing. You learn writing by consciously studying and unconsciously absorbing examples of great writing.  It may seem obvious, but the texts on writing–other than David Lodge’s neglected The Art of Fiction–don’t reflect this commonsense advice. 

Novels and Novelty: Two New Ways of Presenting Fiction

See the links below for information about Gatz, a play which incorporates the entire text of the Great gatsby into a sixish hour performance, and a new weekly serial novel published by Penguin UK.   

Link: Elevator Repair Service.