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THE BLURB #21: This Is Your Brain—on Books, on Screens

Thomas Larson — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:00:15 +0000

Will the ironies that plague the demise of print never end? Just as neuroscience arrives to explain how the brain evolved our reading and writing abilities, which took their furthest leap forward with the advent of Gutenberg’s press, the once-stable relationship between discrete book and private reader is being recast by new digital text platforms: Web page, eBook, and iPhone.

What’s more, publishing on paper, linear thinking, literary hierarchies, metanarrative legitimacy, not to mention the humanist claims of literacy and democracy, all are being remade. Only five hundred years into movable type and the Enlightenment/Romantic/Modern culture it begat—and suddenly we are blinded by how brief our dwelling in the kingdom of print will be.

One way to situate this monumental change is to understand reading from the brain’s perspective. Two current books stand out: Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. According to Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, our brains were built to read, but each person has to learn how. Reading is not innate; it’s cognitive.

What’s more, humans have just begun to read and write. “The invention of reading,” he says, “is far too recent for our genome to have adapted to it.” Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, notes that the brain integrates a series of component functions—geared for visual, auditory, and associative activity—that “light up,” or purposefully integrate, during the act of reading. A brain reading is a collage of active substrates and multi-level neuronal fireworks.

Dehaene, who is more philosophically attuned than Wolf—though Wolf is the more elegant author—unravels the chief mystery: how our brains combined spoken language with written symbols and evolved the inscription of words “to fit” our cerebral cortex. “How did humans discover,” he asks, “that their visual cortex could be turned into a text comprehension device?”

You can almost hear the answer in the question. Five thousand years ago, our brains began to shape inscription with expressive constructions like cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and Chinese ideograms. With us as toolmakers, the brain regularized these inventions, eventually universalizing them into alphabets. All this was done to (a) simplify eye-text recognition; (b) coordinate the brain’s many paths of perception, all highly participatory; and (c) push us to write, or to contemplate ideas more conscientiously for ourselves and, in the process, develop original thought.

The brain has not yet programmed reading into the species because both reading and the species are still in their childhood, in largely “modifiable” states. As our culture invents new platforms with which to read and process information, the brain, Dehaene notes, will adapt its “ancient neuronal circuits” to “new cultural objects, selected because they are useful to humans and stable enough to proliferate from brain to brain.” The brain absorbs the iPad and its protocols in a matter of weeks or months. Happily for Apple, no change in the genome is required.

Brain and text make a chummy pair. When we read words we know, we get them in a flash. Adding a new word to an invariable syntax (poetry is often an exception) may slow us down, but we adapt: We say a new word aloud, look it up, or understand it in context. By contrast, our senses (the lizard or pre-literate brain) are innate. Every generation does not “learn to smell,” but every generation does learn to read—from scratch. Or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, we “grow” into language.

There is also evidence that reading evolved to engender physical/mental pleasure in the brain. It embraced the letter’s symbolic nature, which over time humans simplified from pictographs to letters, making reading comprehensive and economical. Our twenty-six-letter phonetic alphabet (start date: Greece, 750 B.C.E.) allows for millions of combinations, though its basic representations are mere “fragments of sound and meaning.”

The alphabet’s mosaic cast reminds us that reading is experiential, an interplay: From the fragments of text-sound we encounter, we “defragment,” that is, reorganize and recombine, ideas, images, and emotions. Every time the brain connects the visual cortex to other regions where text stirs sense and memory, neuronal activity doubles or triples. Reading brings new thought, and new thought, it is believed, heightens consciousness and expands the mind. That’s why the bookish are “brainy.”

***

Wolf’s and Dehaene’s studies offer three core postulates about the brain and language. First, the brain’s organizational efficiency determined what we would read. Dehaene describes how script is composed of simple two-, three-, and four-lined shapes, which symbolize sound and image (S is snake-like and sounds itself in shhh or shiver). Alphabets are highly adaptive; they are easy to process and recall because letters are few, their sounds limited and distinct. Dehaene calls the brain’s specialized region that recognizes writing the “letterbox.” The letterbox, located in the left hemisphere, or “the seat of language,” organizes and disperses the bits of what we read to the temporal and frontal lobes where sound and meaning are encoded. There the text is deciphered, which—if it wasn’t written by Jacques Derrida—happens in one-fifth of a second.

Second, the brain integrated several brain functions to facilitate high levels of comprehension. An fMRI scan of a reader reveals visual, auditory, syntactic, and semantic areas alive with activity. Text recognition is electric, energetic, holistic, whether the content is “She sells seashells down by the seashore” or Wittgenstein’s gem, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Words and concepts must make sense, and sense, as Dehaene puts it, “requires multiple cerebral systems to agree on an unambiguous interpretation of [the] visual input.” The fact that English contains “bear” as noun and verb, as animal and burden, is proof that the brain is encoded to receive, parse, and solve language conundrums.

Third, reading and writing combine with personal memory in the brain to produce the most lasting effect: meaning. Here’s a topic neuroscientists have only begun to explore. Meaning involves collaboration between text and reader, between reader and memory. I admire Wolf’s assertion that “the secret at the heart of reading [is] the time it frees for the brain” to develop deep thoughts; but in her study I see neither proof (how might this be tested?) nor adequate discussion that deep thought originates from the exchange between reading and contemplation. I do agree reading intensifies our engagement with the world. As a nonfiction writer, I bounce from reading others’ texts to creating my own. This bi-lateral movement is the essence of literacy. I can’t imagine one without the other.

But meaning takes time; its voyages are global. Like the brain’s plasticity, meaning is highly modifiable. Poems, paintings, films, music—all strike us differently as individuals and at different times in our lives. Meaning crosses and integrates brain functions, stimulating uncertainties language loves to field but brain science seems ill-equipped to study: How might science account for wit, irony, black humor, postmodernism in the brain? Such tropes bypass the limbic system, the pathways of emotion and memory, and register confusion. But on second thought, the tropes pass through the limbic and steam the pots of ambiguity. In “The Idea of Order in Key West,” Wallace Stevens’ recondite language sidles its way through our doubt, our curiosity, our love of wordplay and revelation, a course as much emotional as intellectual.

To date, neuroscientists have scanned the brains only of text/book readers, those raised on stable forms like the Bible or the short story. How will new text-digitizing devices, the big cloud of hypertext, and the “field” display of Web pages and phone screens reinvent reading? Will screens alter content, redirect meaning? Will they, despite allowing more people to read, make reading (and us) superficial? And if we don’t read as immersively as we did before, does that mean we’ll be less “brainy”?

***

This is the noisy debate we get from Nicholas Carr and Kevin Kelly, a pair of cultural and lexical polemicists. Carr’s overview, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a book about the Net and its distractions, is rife with worry: “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” That something is his reading composure, dislocated by the Net just in the last three years.

Online today, Carr can’t sit still—the Internet’s disruptiveness begets suffering. “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Ditto for most everyone online, he says. As a knowledge base, print has fallen into fourth place, behind TV, computer, and radio. Carr cites colleagues who have abandoned books and long articles entirely in favor of blips of text, or text sculpted into acoustic and visual space. Some believe this a boon: one former magazine writer says the Net has made him smarter: “More connections to documents, artifacts, and people mean more external influences on my thinking and thus on my writing.”

Reading a Web page is unlike reading print. Call the former “digital immersion,” which drops linearity in favor of diversion as readers scan and scroll over one page and skip to other pages. Such users are online hunters, not rapt readers. Studies show that only one-sixth of the text on a Web page is actually read. Carr says the Net’s cognitive meddling and rewiring is making us stupider, and his scientific evidence is impressive. (Though he doesn’t seem any stupider for writing his book, despite being a good example of an online hunter.)

The Shallows’ major flaw is that Carr does not distinguish types of readers: The devourer of books is the only type offered. There’s little—from any of these books—about the different goals readers have when they approach text and hypertext; indeed, many digital enthusiasts are becalmed by the Web’s total access. I, for one, am glad that the dizzying microfiche reader has gone the way of the dodo.

Here are three easily deflatable assumptions about the Reader: that a person becomes a “deep” reader only via “high” literature; that an individual’s online and offline reading are measurably equivalent; and that textual immersion leads to intelligence. The knowingness of athletes, jazz musicians, and birders are wildly different from one another—and none relies much on the skill of reading.

For Kelly, a founding editor of Wired, interacting with screens (already some 4.5 billion are up) will, like the printing press, change the way we read and write for the better. The “interconnected cool, thin displays” of screens have “launched an epidemic of writing that continues to swell.” Since Web pages privilege text—still the dominant form of communication, in part because text is easy to store and requires comparatively little bandwidth—they are now proliferating at the rate of several million a day. Screens are “very visual, merging words with moving images.” Though our eyes are taxed, our bodies are engaged. Fingers, hands, voice, brain, all are enlivened by the sensorium of a finely hypertexted page.

Building on the bi-directionality of the Internet, screens will soon “follow our eyes” and attach us to “where we gaze.” The screen and its links will absorb us more—and will absorb more of us—as we scroll, glance, read. What’s more, Kelly states, “books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking.” If contemplation recalls deep reading, utilitarian reading is driven, like a Geiger counter, to find the glowing chunks. New modes of reading means our minds are indexing info in real time. The benefit for Kelly: “In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own truth from pieces.”

As yet we don’t know the cognitive differences between a concentrating reader of the page and an indexing reader of the screen. It may be that the traditional written/oral narrative evolved as a structure, which the brain selected for and directed back at its users, in essence, to test the brain’s linear processing ability across multiple cognitive levels. Such forms are not innate; they are the brain’s evolved strategy for stabilizing attention, and publishers’ accustomed way of delivering economically viable structures to audiences.

Carr and Kelly agree on one thing that the academics Wolf and Dehaene mostly avoid: Reading has civilized us. But I’m not so sure I agree with them, especially when I recall those Brahms-loving guards at Auschwitz. Better put, I think our wiring allows just enough plasticity to ensure brain, as opposed to human, progress.

“When a new cultural invention finds its neuronal niche,” Dehaene writes, “it can multiply rapidly and invade an entire human group.” As for civilization, minds will believe anything they read or hear or see because variability, our evolutionary necessity to be altered, is innate; on the other hand, our ability to detect the deceptions of the worst of people is—how shall I put this?—less innate. It seems our so-called civilizing traits are both learned and unlearned.

A final thought: If the brain adapted the inscription of words on tablets into a reading system that we learned with exponential quickness and ever-deepening comprehension, then why won’t the brain adapt the frenzy of the Net into a sensory system that we will learn with equally exponential quickness and ever-deepening comprehension?

The Blurb #20: Joy Is a Job

Kevin Evers — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:01:41 +0000

I am, like you, a rabid reader of good books.

There are times, though, when I am not so feral. Reading is mostly a bust. Books fail. They fail to pinch my nerve.

Reading requires conviction. I try to find a spark that sets my brain ablaze. I fail, mostly.

A few weeks ago my energy had waned. I needed a shot in the arm, a book that would affirm my effort and push me forth. Good books lead to a good life. That is what I needed to hear, again. I yearned to feel the swell, again.

I turned to David Ulin, no stranger to the slog. The title of his new book, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, provoked me. By reading it I hoped to regain my mojo. Ulin, a book critic by trade, is like me a lover of literature, but the advent of digital culture, he says, has affected all of us in a particular way: Close reading has become difficult.

Ulin’s teenaged son Noah thinks books are dead. He is reading The Great Gatsby and isn’t jazzed about it. Ulin, understandably, is concerned for both himself and his kin. He laments the loss of silence in our lives. I understand. There are days when I dream of a chair in an otherwise empty room. Some of the best moments of my life have been spent alone.

Like me, Ulin was a devoted reader as a teenager. Books filled him with wonder, made him feel like “the world had opened up in the palm of [his] hands. It is this that draws us to books in the first place, their nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives.” Though Ulin is old enough to be my dad, I can sympathize with his nostalgia. What a time, my teenaged years! I, too, consumed books at a fast clip. But that pace shows why some perspective is necessary. When I was a teen, fried food, Tom Clancy, and sweatpants were amazing. My penis, keep in mind, was in a constant state of erection.

Why is youth held in such high regard? Youth represents in our memories a time when joy was free of work. We were—and this is Ulin quoting Frank Conroy—“free to drift into fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than [our] own.” The wrong word here is free. “Free” can just as easily mean free of taste. Free of values. Free of effort. Free of those damn clunky things that ruin our damn reading experiences.

Ulin’s urge to return to the time when he “read quickly and without interruption” concerns me. He seems to lament not silence but swiftness. I, too, want to feel a buzz, but I have no illusions. It takes big effort. Reading good books requires discipline. And by “good books” I don’t mean “good plots” or “good times.” Good books challenge us, and like all things important they require work. Serendipity is a crock of shit.

Look no further than professional sports. Occasionally, an athlete will break protocol and complain about the slog. Really? we ask. You make the long dollar, millions at that, and you have the gall to bitch about a game as I sit here in my cube working on a data presentation? But an athlete’s high, realize, is much higher than the high you feel when trotting around the bases in your company’s softball league. Herein lies the problem: In order to feel that joy, athletes must train. It takes conviction. Joy never precedes work—it is the result of work. After they feel that big joy, the work can seem like a grind, a slog. Joy appears, it fleets, its return date is unknown. Routine is the enemy of spontaneity. But as any great improviser knows, there is no jazz without practice. Joy is a job.

David Ulin

Distraction, as many have noted, is easier. Hyperlinks are fussing with our brain syntax. In the near future books will smell not of sap but alloy. Some philistines already prefer gadgets to God. A distracted clan we are, moving from screen to screen, filling our domes with facts and data, as good books lie dead or dying.

Distraction, some say, is adaptive, a product of evolution. Brains developed the ability to improvise. If you were, say, a hunter, it was best to keep one eye out for grizzly bears. Response to stimuli saves lives, especially when we are minding a toddler or carrying a firearm. Every so often it’s best to be alert.

But books aren’t bears. They rarely attack.

Ulin nails the need for contemplation, but he misses the mark about technology. A jones for gossip is, at its core, no different than a zeal for good books. In this context our mass consumption of information seems a rational act. Media of all sorts provide quantity. We consume facts and tidbits because we are curious. Information satisfies an innate urge. Technology, then, is not a crime but an alibi. Easy access allows for easy plunder. Control is ours. But it’s curiosity at a bargain price.

Ulin, thankfully, knows that quality lies not in the medium but the message. A grainy video of a performance by Björk could make my skull feel soft, whereas a book about bears, though fascinating, would not make my heart twitch.

It isn’t about technology—it’s about conviction.

Goods books aren’t rad. That, simply, is why people do not read them. They are difficult. A little bit of learning, said Alexander Pope, is a dangerous thing. The danger here is that once you feel the ecstatic, you want to feel it more and more. You want to feel undead, again. But if language has ever made your knees buckle, you know it takes big effort. Say you are reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. At first the syntax perplexes you. The words are heavy with modernist portent. All those dependent clauses impede the flow. Commas, you think, are overrated. Take a look. In this passage, a young boy, James, awaits his family’s trip to a lighthouse:

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition was bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsey, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy.

Virginia Woolf

The words are, at first, a trod. The first sentence wants to push forth but the commas stall the progress. The end, it seems, is “within touch” but the sentence keeps us waiting. But James, with his gnarled feelings, is waiting too. The next sentence finds its eloquence and sprawls. The point of view shifts indirectly to the mother. These are her feelings. And then there’s that last sentence, the claptrap that snaps the tongue: “It was fringed with joy.” Those five words, as Emily Dickinson would say, Deal-One-Imperial-Thunderbolt. It was fringed with joy. Those five words make my brain go goo.

Virginia Woolf is my wife and my foe. I love her for these types of sentences—but I hate her, for in her light all else pales. She stalks me. At times I wish we’d never met. The pictures have been burned. I’ve hidden Mrs. Dalloway in the stacks, only to find The Waves staring back at me. She taunts me. Her sentences—they tap at my brain. That fine English lady refuses to hear my pleas. She won’t quit me.

I don’t know how to explain the sensation. Here’s Ulin on the time he visited the place where Malcolm Lowry set Under the Volcano:

This is how good Lowry was, I remember thinking, and this is what language, at its most acute, can do. It can collapse the distances, bring us into not just the thoughts but also the perceptions of a writer, allow us, however fleetingly, to inhabit, literally, his or her eyes.

That doesn’t cut it for me. The first part is agreeable but the rest seems too easy. Language is mentioned but never explored. Reading appears, in turn, as a passive experience, absent of art and genius. There’s no mention of craft, the shaper of our consciousness. It’s all experience.

Reading rarely delivers. As Samuel Beckett wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Ulin gets the buzz and the joy, sure, but he leaves out the rigor: “The best we can hope for are a few transcendent moments, in which we bridge the gap of our loneliness and come together with another human being.” I agree with the transcendent bit but disagree with the connection part. Books are not people. They are no friends of mine. When I first read Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace, whom Ulin and I both count as favorites, I felt unbalanced. I felt influenced, yes, but in a punch drunk sort of way. I don’t want to be swayed too easily.

Reading is not an “excavation of the inner world.” It’s a lonely plunge into the unsaid. There’s no doubt that we want to enrich our lives with something. Books, though, will not “blur the boundaries that divide us, that keep us separate or apart.” Sure, we all want to feel connected in every sense of the word. We all want to feel the buzz. But we can’t have both the sensation and the shoptalk. In between, compromise lurks.

As William James wrote:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest experience is utter chaos.

Conviction is selective interest. The more I attend to good books the less I have to say. That is why good books transcend most experiences. They are private, in the truest sense of the word.

Reading is, to me, a faithful pursuit of an abstract essence. Joy, then, is a rare emotion.

I plod through the nothing new hoping to see a flash that shocks me still.

I want to live in the space between a weep and a scream.

I want to love something with all my bones.

I want to feel my brain go goo.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

If only I could tell you the rest.

THE BLURB #19: The Complete Thing

Edward Schwarzschild — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 05:01:25 +0000

A long meditation on poetry, love, time, pain, and finishing the novel:

April 2010. I’m in Wassenaar, Holland, at one end of the long desk I share with my wife, Elisa. She scored a writer-in-residence fellowship here at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and managed to coattail me in, so we’ve been spending time at this desk since early February, working every day to push forward on our new novels. We face two five-foot tall windows we’ve had to decorate with yellow Post-its to keep the busy Dutch birds from trying to fly in on us. When we look away from our computer screens, we can see spring slowly arriving: On the ground, brown flowers into green and, above that, the sun heats the steel gray sky until it turns a deep, bright blue.

There are occasional days of rain and cold, but there’s no doubt about spring. I feel far less certain about my new novel. There are other large projects that feel uncertain, too. Elisa and I have been together for five years and we have a fourteen-month-old son, and though we want nothing more than to be good partners and good parents, we sometimes fail. Failing, of course, is to be expected. We simply need, as Beckett says, to fail better. But even that can feel elusive.

The other night we fought and I walked alone to this office in the dark. My plan was to sleep on the office couch and hope the morning would bring some clarity.

A copy of Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb is in my backpack. Reading Nick Flynn has helped me through moments like this before. Crossing paths with him hasn’t hurt, either. I suppose this essay is my way of trying to thank him. I like to believe he’ll understand.

November 2002. Before Elisa, I almost married a poet who is a close friend of Nick Flynn’s. The poet and I re-met at our twentieth high school reunion, outside of Philadelphia. I was thirty-eight, single, and for the last year and a half I’d been living in Albany, New York, where my social life felt barren and hopeless. I didn’t show up at the reunion with a specific plan, but any chance to meet people outside of New York’s lonely capital felt promising. Plus, I got a nice jolt from the idea of meeting someone I’d known as a teenager. Many of my friends had married in their early twenties and over the years I’d watched them develop a kind of intimacy with their partners I feared I’d never have—or wouldn’t discover until my mid-fifties, if I started right away. Maybe if I fell in love with an old classmate, we’d find a shortcut to that intimacy I’d admired from afar.

As I stepped away from the registration desk, one of my best friends (married with three kids) rushed over to tell me about a woman I needed to talk with immediately. “She writes poetry now,” he said. “I told her you actually read that stuff.” The name he mentioned called forth the image of an attractive, quiet girl with a wall of curly brown hair who sat near me in Mrs. Bintner’s English class one year. I never bothered trying to talk with her back then. I was not in her league. In high school, I was too low in the social standings to be in any league at all.

Over by the bar, I discovered that her wall of hair had been trimmed back. She was wearing black boots, tights, and a short skirt. I couldn’t help feeling she was still out of my league, but I sipped my whiskey and reminded myself that it was 2002 and I’d recently signed a two-book deal for a novel and a collection of stories and I had a tenure-track job and stayed in decent shape and wasn’t yet completely bald and had never been married. It wasn’t necessarily hopeless.

We talked about poetry and had a nice conversation about Mark Doty and Provincetown. I learned she and her bee-stung lips lived in New York City these days and I told her I tried to flee Albany for Manhattan as often as I could. We exchanged e-mail addresses before walking off separately to continue our reunioning.

It may or may not have been because of that shared English class twenty years earlier, but we did move toward intimacy with exciting speed. There was a flurry of e-mail followed by a long, winding stroll through the Upper West Side. We wanted to plan another date right away, but winter break was coming and I was heading west to hole up in my uncle and aunt’s cabin north of San Francisco to write. I casually invited the poet to join me for a week or two. Within twenty-four hours she’d shocked us both by purchasing non-refundable tickets. In the same e-mail that contained news of the tickets, she included Jane Kenyon’s poem, “The Suitor,” which she’d spied on the subway. I kept re-reading the final lines:

Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months the feeling
has been coming close, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.

April 2010. At this long desk by these big windows I’m writing a novel that, as far as I can tell, has something to do with fatherhood and something to do with torture. Two of the books I’m reading, hoping they’ll help with the work, are Philip Gourevitch’s Standard Operating Procedure and Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb. Both books are absorbing and disturbing, for different, albeit related, reasons. It’s not until I’m far along in Nick’s book—a harrowing, gorgeous nonfiction exploration of fatherhood and torture—that I discover he’s already read the Gourevitch. This discovery is comforting (I’m on the right track), but also unsettling (I’m trailing after Nick again).

Nick became a father in 2008. I became a father in 2009. Elisa gave birth to our son, Miller, in the bathtub of our Brooklyn apartment. For a long time, there were four of us in the candlelit bathroom: Elisa, myself, a midwife, and a doula. The labor lasted about thirteen hours and even though I was right there I’ll never understand how Elisa did it. But suddenly there were five of us, Miller turning from blue to pink in Elisa’s arms. The midwife and doula helped clean us off and ushered us to bed. They fed us and beamed with us and told us we’d be fine and then they were gone, leaving our new family, the three of us, alone together.

Elisa drifted off into a deep sleep. Miller slept as well, his mouth against her breast, still in rhythm with her, the two of them absolutely stunning and miraculous. Curled up next to them, exhausted, I was also ready for sleep, but I felt a sparkling in my lungs I’d never felt before, like a box of matches slowly lighting up inside me with each breath. When I tried to close my eyes, more matches flared and it was almost blinding. Is this what people mean when they talk about a “third eye” opening? Is this what Nick means when he invokes bewilderment as the way to enter each day? If so, maybe becoming a father means becoming bewildered for the rest of your life.

I don’t know what Nick’s first few months of fatherhood were like, but mine were tough. I remained joyfully bewildered. I also came to feel terribly lost. When Nick speaks of what it means to be lost (as he does powerfully in Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking Is the Bomb) he occasionally cites a line from D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.” He shares some lines from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, as well: “Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the familiar appearing….”

As those early days blurred into early weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight; he’d just arrived and already he was disappearing. It felt like a complete disaster. Elisa and I had devoted a lot of time to preparing for the homebirth. As the pregnancy went on, it became increasingly important to both of us to give our child a peaceful, natural entrance into the world. Some combination of superstition, cluelessness, and exhaustion, however, led us to devote surprisingly little time to preparing for the days after the birth. Then we woke up to find Elisa’s breasts engorged and our son unable to nurse effectively. One pediatrician called him, alternately, a “lousy sucker” and a “poor sucker.” Another assured us it was normal for a newborn’s weight to decrease a little, for a little while. Fine, but what constitutes “a little” and “a little while”? More important, how could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? We were failing him from the very beginning.

In stressful moments, I tend to withdraw. Elisa tends to crank up the volume. She wants to jump and shout and I want to sit and think. As Miller lost weight, I silently struggled to figure out what to do, while Elisa detailed everything that was going wrong. Where was our midwife now? Why did every lactation consultant tell us something completely different? Where were our extended families? Why, in the middle of this enormous city, were we so isolated? We’d worked so hard for something natural, but this was not natural—to be so alone, just the two of us and a crying, starving baby. It was barbaric. It was idiotic. It was dangerous. These were not the conditions for a new life. We needed help. We were doomed. We’d always been doomed.

December 2002. Those first days with the poet in my uncle and aunt’s cabin felt magical, at once familiar and thrillingly new. At the same time, it didn’t take me long to feel surprised by how much the poet wanted to talk, how much, it seemed to me, she needed to talk.

From that quiet cabin you can drive out Coleman Valley Road, up into the hills, where the winter landscape is almost lunar, wind blasting over boulders and brown grass and hardscrabble farms. The road is narrow, as if the crew that made it wanted to finish the job quickly so they could move on to greener, kinder terrain. But if you follow the path of those tough-luck laborers long enough, you’ll eventually crest the final hill and start winding your way down to Highway 1, right along the Pacific, just a few miles from Goat Rock Park, where the Russian River flows out into the ocean.

Edward Schwarzschild

I’d told the poet that my plan was to hole up in the cabin and write, and I meant what I said. Based on a 90-page fragment, I’d signed a contract to turn in a complete novel by a date that already felt far too close; so, for better or worse, I was more motivated than usual. Of course, there was time to take daily walks, drive down to Goat Rock, linger over meals, lounge around in bed watching the sunset give way to a star-filled sky. But I also wanted to work, quietly, for a bunch of hours everyday.

By the second day, the poet had started making phone calls while I worked. She reached out to friends for what she called “minis.” She explained them to me as, essentially, a chance for one person to talk, to say whatever she’s feeling, for five minutes, uninterrupted, with the knowledge that she is being heard. You ease into it gently and exit the same way. There’s no summing up or request for comment. It’s not a discussion.

I come from a pretty stiff-lipped family. A shorthand history: My parents didn’t go to college; right after high school they took jobs they’ve kept their whole lives so my brothers and I could go to college, and they expected the three of us to move the whole family forward, steadily, single-mindedly, without complaint or complex feelings. With my limited frame of reference, the poet’s minis sounded to me like controlled rants, and it was odd to be present across the room while they were taking place. I tried to focus on what was going to happen next in my imaginary world, but I kept wondering about those intense phone calls. Who was she talking to? I wasn’t ready to date someone who was already in a relationship. I understood the minis were simply a form of therapy, or connected somehow to therapy—the poet’s shorthand history: she came from a family of therapists, her parents, her older sister, a brother-in-law, all in the profession—but I couldn’t imagine talking that way to someone I wasn’t in a relationship with. Back then, I couldn’t really imagine talking that way at all.

I wasn’t listening carefully—listening carefully wasn’t my strong suit—but I think several of the mini calls went out to a guy named Nick.

February, 2010. We’ve been in Wassenaar less than three weeks and we’re struggling to settle in. I wander into the new library in the heart of the village and, searching through the small collection of DVDs, I find a copy of Darwin’s Nightmare, a documentary I’ve wanted to see for a while. Nick Flynn has some connection to it—“field poet,” the credits say—and I already have Nick Flynn on the brain, so I pick it up and bike back to our temporary home. I can’t read the description on the case—I have no Dutch—but I think I remember hearing what the film is about: Lake Victoria is being fished empty to feed people outside of Africa while people along its shores and throughout Africa starve. Planes fly into Africa full of weapons and fly back to Europe full of fish.

Wassenaar in Winter

For the last two years, Elisa and I haven’t lived anywhere for more than a few months at a time. It’s a consequence of good fortune—a semester in Spain on a Fulbright, extended trips with family and friends over summer and winter breaks, her apartment in Brooklyn and my house in Albany—and we’re always seeking opportunities to get on the road. We don’t always do well with transition, however. Our joke: Sometimes we’re a road family, sometimes we’re a road-kill family.

Miller has a stubborn cold he caught on the plane and he’s teething, and Elisa wonders about the wisdom of our having traveled to this flat, gray, cold, wet country. On this particular night, after we put Miller to bed and before we can begin to watch the film, our heat cuts off. Then Miller starts crying and fights going back to sleep. We’re all exhausted. And then Elisa starts crying, too. Somehow, it helps her. It doesn’t help me, though, and such moments push me toward my own dark thoughts. I have a headache and I wonder how I got into a situation where everyone is crying except me and we’re in the goddamn Netherlands where I know no doctors and no heating specialists and I want nothing more than to soothe everyone back to sleep.

I decide it’s probably not the best time for Darwin’s Nightmare.

Eventually, Miller quiets down and when he wakes, early in the morning, I boil water for his oatmeal. I also boil a few pots full of water to pour in the bathtub so Elisa can at least give herself a sponge bath before she has to head off to Amsterdam for a busy day. She is touched and grateful.

2003. Albany is two and half hours north of New York City, if you travel by Amtrak and Amtrak runs on time, and seven hours east of San Francisco, if you travel by plane and get lucky with your connections. I wish I lived in New York City. Before moving to Albany, I lived in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world so far. I’d prefer Albany, California (just outside Berkeley) to Albany, New York, but writers and academics often have to take the jobs they get. The poet can occasionally see the considerable charm of Albany, NY, but like me she prefers New York City. Unlike me, she lives in New York City and has lived there for fifteen years. Before long, our sweet-spontaneous-cross-country-rendezvous relationship runs into the reality of Albany. I’m not likely to get a tenure-track job in New York City (or, alas, San Francisco), and I’d be unlikely to get tenure at Albany if I were commuting from NYC, so for the next few years at least, I’ll be living most of my life in Albany.

The poet wants to find a way to accept that. Friends would help. One day a friend of hers who is, also, to some degree, an ex—the details are unclear to me: she says they quickly realized it wouldn’t work between them, but doesn’t say how quickly, or what occasioned the realization, and I don’t push it—comes to visit. His name is Nick Flynn and he’s traveling with his current girlfriend, a playwright he met in Italy. I give them a tour of my neighborhood with its blocks of 1880s brownstones and the Fredrick Law Olmsted-inspired Washington Park. I tell them if they have a few beers and squint they’ll almost be able to imagine themselves in Brooklyn. After a while, we wander away from the brownstones to Empire Plaza, the fascist-inflected, concrete Brasilia imposed upon the city center by Nelson Rockefeller. We walk over to the performance space called “The Egg,” an ovoid building made of poured concrete that seems to float just above the Plaza like a flying saucer forever struggling to lift off. I’m happy to watch the poet enjoying this Albany afternoon. As we stroll around the city, she stays close to Nick while I talk with the playwright.

2000. Before the poet, I planned a wedding. The invitations proclaimed it would take place on September 9, 2000, in Truro, Massachusetts. (I had a month to swim in a pond in Truro, writes Nick, describing a rare halcyon moment in his life.) I had a few busy days driving around Truro, meeting with a rabbi, setting a menu, picking the spot high on a hill with a view of the ocean where we would speak our vows.

I’d met my fiancée on a blind date while I was in the writing program at Boston University. She was a cardiologist working at the VA hospital, living with her parents, putting her life back together after a divorce. A few minutes before I rushed out to meet her for our second date, I received a phone call from Eavan Boland at Stanford University telling me I’d been awarded a Stegner Fellowship. I applied for Stegners the way I went on blind dates: It was something I felt I should do, but I always assumed it wouldn’t work out. Now I would be moving to my dream city (San Francisco) to study at my dream university (Stanford) with my dream teacher (Tobias Wolff).

And the second date was fantastic. By our calculations, it went on for a while, since we spent every night together for the next month. (I do, apparently, have a tendency to move from intense solitude to instant relationship.) Our third date lasted even longer, and in middle of it she asked when we should start talking about marriage. Before long we were living together in the Bay Area. She took a job at a different VA hospital and I commuted back and forth to Stanford. Soon after we arrived, a doctor visiting from Hilo, Hawaii approached the cardiologist about joining his practice. Would I consider moving to Hawaii, she wanted to know? It was an absurd question and I laughed at the prospect of yet another dream coming true.

We decided to spend the summer in Hilo so she could make sure she’d like working there. We sent out our wedding invitations and joked with friends that our weeks on the Big Island would be our practice honeymoon.

Then the run of good fortune ended. We learned that her mother, a breast cancer survivor, now had pancreatic cancer, and there would be no surviving that. Though I like to think of myself as relatively sensitive and compassionate, I was my parents’ son; and up until then I’d been lucky enough never to have someone close to me die. I’m not proud of how I handled this tragic news. I stayed willfully ignorant, trying to convince both of us that her mother might survive for years. I cut short conversations about what was happening, suggesting that her mother would want us to go on with our lives, not wallow in self-pity. I worked hard to write my pages every day.

Still, we flew to Hilo. Our second day there, she came home to the outrageous house we’d rented and told me she needed to cancel the wedding and she wanted me to leave. I apologized for all that I’d done wrong. I pleaded for us to get counseling, begged her to use the word postpone instead of cancel, promised to learn to be a better, more caring partner. But she was adamant and certain, as doctors can be. So much for our practice honeymoon.

The last time I saw the cardiologist—at least I had my heart broken by a professional became a favorite joke—was when we drove around the Big Island to pick up the box of cancellation notes we’d had printed, then spent an hour or two addressing envelopes. Then I was at the airport, going up the escalator, looking down to watch her turn her back and walk outside to the car. Not long after that, she invited a guy I knew to fly over for a visit. It turned out that sometimes, when I wasn’t home, they talked on the phone for hours. Less than a year later, while the cardiologist’s mother was still alive, they married.

Throughout The Ticking Is the Bomb, Nick refers to the two women he is in love with, and the book, in part, chronicles how he chose one and not the other. To re-word Winnicott: It is joy to be chosen, but disaster to be un-chosen.

April 2010. I don’t know why our fourteen-month-old loves clocks, but it’s been going on for a while. He points his finger when he sees one on the wall, finds them immediately on the pages of his favorite books, tugs at the leather band on my wrist. “Tick-tock,” he says. “Tick-tock.”

He’s a chubby, breast-fed boy (eventually we found a fantastic lactation consultant) who also loves birds and trucks and dogs and apples and peek-a-boo. Breakfast time remains guy time, and when I try to wipe his mouth with a dishtowel, he takes it from me and covers his face, giggling beneath the towel as I call for him. Has anyone seen Miller? It’s still dark out, sunrise an hour or two away. He’ll hide again and again, laughing louder each time he reveals himself. I’ll stay at the table, finding him, for as long as he wants. No disasters permitted here.

His name comes from my mother’s mother, Mildred, another tough, tight-lipped ancestor, but Elisa and I also like the association with those writer Millers, Arthur and Henry. We decide not to worry about the beer and the Miller-time jokes bound to come his way.

When we looked up the standard origin of the name, we found that it’s Old English and that it refers to a mill worker, a grinder of grain. I like that, too, since it fits with how I aspire to exist in the world: work hard, persevere, be useful, stay steady and true.

I’ve read some Beckett, but not yet Endgame, from which Nick takes his epigraph for The Ticking Is the Bomb: “Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.”

2004. I’m entering year three on the job at SUNY Albany, and who knows if it will last? I need to publish a book and then another book to get tenure and I’m still revising my first novel. I’ve lived forty years without tenure, so clearly I can survive not having it. The same could be said of having children, something I’ve been thinking about more than usual since my recent break-up with the poet, who seemed like my last best chance.

Nick Flynn

A few months after the break-up, Nick visits our campus to give a reading. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City has just been published. Due to some bizarre scheduling, Chuck Palahniuk is visiting campus the same day. I’m teaching a large upper-level undergraduate course on contemporary literature and a large introduction to creative writing workshop. In both classes I assign Nick’s poetry collection, Some Ether, as well as excerpts from Another Bullshit Night. I’ve been on college campuses most of my adult life, attended hundreds of readings, and I’ve never seen students more excited about a writer than these students are about Palahniuk. They own his books and can’t wait to see him in person. Maybe I should engage this interest of theirs, embrace this odd pedagogical opportunity, but with the shocking Abu Ghraib images still in the headlines and with torture the hot new narrative device on 24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and other shows, I have no desire to examine Palahniuk’s obsessive exploration of violence. I assign nothing of his to my students and do my best to compel them to attend Nick’s event. He’s given a small room with lousy ventilation and an afternoon time slot. Palahniuk gets the evening slot and one of the largest rooms on campus.

I am Nick’s host for the day. I’m nervous, in part because I don’t like playing host—delivering the introduction, directing the post-reading Q&A, making sure everything runs on time. At such moments, I’d almost always rather be alone in a cabin somewhere. But I’m also nervous because I don’t know if Nick has done any recent minis with the poet. Ours wasn’t the most amiable break-up. Yet more shorthand: I traveled to China for a few weeks and we were going to use my time away to think. So I thought. And decided we should split up. She thought and decided we should live our lives together and when I returned from my trip I didn’t see any point in meeting up to talk more about our different conclusions. For better or worse, I wanted to talk less, not more. I wanted to believe that I’d learned a lot from my heartbreak with the cardiologist. I wanted to believe that I’d moved from one extreme to another—from a woman who kept everything hidden to a woman who didn’t want anything ever to be hidden. I told myself I needed to find a woman somewhere in the middle.

So there’s one poet in the room (Nick), another poet not in the room (our shared ex), and Palahniuk getting ready in a room nearby. After Nick’s electric, inspiring reading, it’s my duty to drag him to Palahniuk’s pre-event dinner. We arrive late, perch at the edge of the table, and talk quietly about how creepy the guy seems. Meanwhile, Palahniuk entertains the small group of administrators and professors, boasting about how many people faint at his readings; sometimes they faint during the reading itself, other times they lose consciousness when he tosses ghoulish plastic severed limbs into the crowd during his Q&A. He hopes to watch a few more go down tonight. Nick and I scarf our food and bolt.

Back on campus, 45 minutes before the reading, Palahniuk’s room is at capacity and a line of revved-up students snakes around the building. Most of these students have never attended a reading before and most of them will be turned away. The ones who know me ask if I can get them a seat. I’d gladly give them my seat if could, but I don’t tell them that. I try not to be cynical. I shake my head, apologize.

It’s my job to go in and at least make an appearance. Nick comes along because he’s supposed to meet someone inside. It’s a madhouse, packed, and I imagine anyone remotely claustrophobic might faint before Palahniuk even takes the stage. I show Nick to one of the reserved seats and then excuse myself because I see a friend of mine, the poor guy I somehow convinced to introduce Palahniuk, sweating near the front of the room. I want to wish him luck. When I return to Nick, I find a young woman sitting as close to him as she can get.

Soon after the reading begins, Nick whispers that he’s taking off. I follow him and the young woman, escorting them back outside, trying to be a good host. Normally I would offer to take them out for a nightcap or coffee and dessert, something to close out the visit, but they seem to have other plans. I linger in front of the building for a while, watching them walk away. Nick and I had spent a bunch of nice hours together, more or less just the two of us, but neither of us had mentioned the poet. By the time I peer back inside, Palahniuk is slinging those fake bloody limbs into the cheering crowd. I call it a night and head for home.

Albany's Center Square in Snow

May 2010. I don’t know Nick Flynn well—I barely know him at all. I haven’t seen him since that visit to Albany, though I hope to arrange another visit around the new book. This fall I’ll be back at SUNY Albany, where I’ve been tenured for a few years now. I’m happy to say that the poet and I have been in touch. She’s met Elisa and Miller a few times. In fact, despite all her talk about the perils of leaving Manhattan, she now lives upstate, in a town just south of Albany. The second time she met Elisa, I wasn’t there. They ran into each other at a reading in Brooklyn and the poet reacted strangely. Elisa didn’t understand what was going on. Later, the poet explained she’d mistaken Elisa for Nick’s Italian playwright. They both have dark hair.

I don’t know Nick well, but somehow our lives have crossed and I don’t think it’s only in my head. I could keep detailing more tangential connections—his friends that are my friends; our shared interest in Evan Connell and others; the way we both wrote the books our fathers could not write—but I don’t know what these tenuous connections prove.

I should be working on my damn novel, at this very moment! I’m well aware—maybe even too aware—that our time at this long desk is limited and that it might be years before we’re gifted again (if ever) with such an extraordinary opportunity to write, in such a peaceful place, free from the responsibilities of teaching. Of course, that’s how I felt during that Stegner year, too, when I had no time to comfort the cardiologist. My mind still moves in the same way, I suppose, though I hope I’m more conscious of that movement than I once was.

I hardly know Nick at all, and yet I’m spending day after day here trying to figure out why knowing him this way means so much to me at this moment. When I search for the words to describe the experience of reading The Ticking Is the Bomb, and re-reading his earlier books, I recall a few lines from Walt Whitman, the very first poet I cared about. He once described “the process of reading” as “not a half-sleep, but, in the highest sense,

“an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle… the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.”

Maybe it’s that simple: After reading and re-reading Nick, after struggling to make sense of how his work touches me, I feel more like a “complete thing.”

Like Nick, I can’t help wondering if I could be a better son, if I have it in me to be a good father. Nick’s life is not my life, despite the crisscrossing connections, but his questions help me recognize my own questions, which strikes me as a good way to describe one of the things we seek from books, from reading, and from the people we love. Who can truly take good enough care of his parents? Who is truly prepared to be a parent? How do we stay connected in love here in this deeply flawed world? These are also Elisa’s questions, and it remains an incredible thrill to seek answers together. It’s no surprise that she’s now hooked on Nick’s books, too.

During our fight, Elisa was upset because she wanted us to talk more; she wanted to feel closer to me. I genuinely strive to talk more and I want nothing more than to be close to her—and though I try my best I was still, apparently, failing, which made me feel hopeless. It was a lousy night and I wouldn’t want to go through it again. But as I made the long, cold walk to that office with its long desk, I figured I should at least learn from what was happening. Elisa was hoping to break through some of my protective layers, to get past some of the ways I’ve sequestered myself for years.

By the time I reached the office, I was ready to try apologizing, ready to say again that I want, always, to be a better partner. Still, I gave myself more time to think and calm down. I sat on the threadbare couch and re-read the end of The Ticking Is the Bomb. I read some lines near the end so often that I wound up writing myself into them:

“That Elisa and I keep figuring it out—to be together, to be with our son, that it’s all a daily practice—this is the only miracle. It’s so simple—sometimes we just need to be held….”

An hour later, I called home. We both apologized. I headed back outside. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, but as I walked toward our house, I was warm.

The next day, in the office, while our distinguished colleagues up and down the hall prepared for lunch, the two of us drew the curtains across the enormous windows. We locked the door, stripped off our clothes, and quietly made love on the threadbare red couch that, fortunately, I hadn’t had to sleep on the night before.

June 2010. After finishing The Ticking Is the Bomb again, I make a note to myself to read Beckett’s Endgame soon. In the meantime, as I struggle to finish this essay, or appreciation, or whatever the hell it is, I look up the Beckett quote I kept centered on my bulletin board a few years ago as I was finishing my first book, a novel about fathers and sons.

“Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.”

One shade, another shade—both, I like to think, seeking light.

I’m eager to get back to work on my new novel, but that can wait until tomorrow. Right now there are a few things I want to talk over with my beautiful wife. And I think Miller has found another picture of a clock in one of his books. I can hear him in the next room, reminding us in his new language that all this time we have together is precious and holy.

“Tick-tock,” he says. “Tick-tock.”

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

THE BLURB #18: The Long Haul

Stacey DErasmo — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:01:11 +0000

“Though I have doubted my talent, I’ve never doubted my conviction that this was the path I had to be on. Writing is like my Siamese twin: freakish, alive, weighty, uncanny. Were we to be separated, I doubt that I could survive it.”

At a certain point, the writer asks herself, How do I keep doing this? It’s book three, maybe book four or five, and the question is a not unkind whisper, a murmur, a constant hum. How do I keep doing this?

You might think, well, James. Bergman. Duras. O’Keeffe. Bob Dylan. Sure. Okay. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been quite successful, more or less successful, a disaster, a frantic player, a surly underdog. I know a lot of writers. This is what we all say to ourselves, once we’re past the life-or-death Rocky-esque movie of the first book or so: How do I keep doing this?

And the related question, Why? Not the easy, self-loathing, adolescent why? but the why? of the artist who knows only too well when she is telling the truth in her work and when she is lying, however beautifully or with what technical finesse. Why go there, why put myself through that? Wasn’t it painful enough the first few times around? The contempt one has, early on, for the “made” writers who phone it in while happily cashing the checks changes over time to a rueful sympathy: It’s very hard to keep doing this. And to do it for real, to write from the marrow? Only a college student would self-righteously insist on that sort of purity. Even Tina Turner still sings “Proud Mary.”

But how does the writer make the long haul? As I go on through the gates of novel three, novel four, I find that I am increasingly interested in this question. Something changes. Something shifts: How do I keep doing this? I don’t suffer from an excess of self-confidence, nor rage, nor purity of spirit. Doors have opened for me, but other doors have remained closed. I have had as many reasons to stop as I have had to continue. Yet I always chose the latter, without hesitation. This may be a matter of temperament, astrological alignments, a warp in my DNA, psychology, race, class, the weather on a certain day in 1974—who knows? But, though I have certainly doubted my talent and my ability to pull off what I am trying to do, I have never doubted my conviction that the pursuit itself, the vocation, was the path I had to be on. This business of making sentences, images, scenes—it is so constitutive of my being that I hardly know who I would be without it. Writing is like my Siamese twin: freakish, alive, weighty, uncanny. Were we to be separated, I doubt that I could survive it.

Still, will only takes you so far; faith only takes you so far, for that matter. I have begun asking other artists—dancers, filmmakers, photographers, composers—how they do it, how they keep doing it. No one says: Because I know I am a genius. Even the ones who I suspect secretly think that they are geniuses do not seem especially sustained by this knowledge. A dancer I met recently, whose body is beginning to move him out of performing and into choreography, said, “Well, I think you just have to accept that the spark will come and go.” A filmmaker friend said, “It’s how I know I’m alive.” Another friend, a photographer, continually pushes herself into uncharted territory in a battle not to collapse into a prettiness, a commercial appeal, that comes all too easily to her. Lorca tells us, “The true fight is with the duende”; everything else is wallpaper, more or less.

Over the long haul, the writer draws on these qualities—the fickleness of eros, the steep and exhilarating drop of risk, demons that can be relied upon to put up a fight—but I have also begun to believe that the writer who continues to write, and to write well, to write deeply, often finds that she quietly, year by year, constructs a system of values that is by nature resistant. It’s not that one sets out to do this, exactly; but it happens, it accretes, as the choices the world offers inevitably arise. It may begin as an uncomfortable awareness, a prickling, even a sinking feeling. But you know it. You see the deal. You hesitate, almost wishing you didn’t know what you know, which is something along these lines: You cannot continue to write well if you believe that money is the measure of a person’s worth. You cannot continue to write well if you believe that critical consensus is the measure of an artist’s worth. You cannot continue to write well if you are protecting your family, your children, your community, or your social position. You cannot continue to write well if you don’t believe in the value of art as such—as itself—not in the service of some greater cause or system or set of beliefs, whether those beliefs fall to the right or the left or rise to the more spiritual realms above. You can write well without money, without praise, without social or political approval—you might not be that happy or look that great, but you can do it—but if your writing is essentially obedient to any of these powerful forces, its light will slowly flicker and then go out.

Does this sound harsh? Did you think I was going to say that the secret to the long haul is a loving partner, a great agent, a meditation practice, a reasonable publishing climate, a vital overall artistic culture, eating right? All true, of course. I wish them for myself, I wish them for all my fellow writers and artists. I take my fish oil every day. But over nearly twenty years of doing this, writing about it, observing other writers, and now teaching, what I see in the people who make it over the long haul—though many of us are past masters at concealing it—is an obdurate, willful, sometimes contrary set of values that insists, silently or loudly, on the importance of doing this strange and wayward thing.

It helps if you’re already outside the social norms for whatever reason and have some experience making a path where there isn’t one. John F. Kennedy, Jr., say, probably wouldn’t have been a very interesting writer. James Baldwin was a great one. We don’t teach this to our students—we can’t. What would we say? Be a freak, or at least have the courage of one? I mean, sometimes we do say that… but since we usually say it while standing in a university classroom—and the university is the patron of the arts of our time; we’d be toast without it—the context tends to belie the message: Be a freak, but meet with my institutionally validated approval.

Nevertheless, this is what I see. Over the long haul, whether you ever intended to or not, you find yourself building a system of values that supports your art as much as, if not more than, any of your grants, publishers, prizes, editors, or good reviews. And to see this is also to see that what I have created over the years is a sort of double life, split between two communities. There is my public community at the university where I work, at all the universities and other institutions where I’ve worked. But there is also a more fluid, polyglot, polymorphous, rambling, private community of writers, artists, rent boys, intellectuals, musicians, dancers, activists, and freaks of various stripes which is where I live, and who are part of that mysterious community in my mind of the living and the dead, friends, lovers, and admired strangers, to whom I write. Michael and Maud and Chris and Alice are in there, along with Elizabeth Bowen, and Joni Mitchell, and every man or woman I’ve ever loved. My public community is where I speak, where I listen, and where, hopefully, I create an environment in which people can learn how to make good prose. My private community is where I dream, where I feel most deeply that I can be known, where I am bowled over, where I am changed, where I break down, where I break through; it’s where I sweat, and who I sweat with.

It seems to me no accident that this community, a community of outsiders in one way or another, has sustained me over the long haul. But both of these communities, the public one and the private one, share the belief that to make art, to make something new in this world any which way you can, rewarded or not, is of transcendent value. I need them both and feel lucky to have them. Without them, and without the values that we share, I would have gone under a long time ago. I’m brave enough, but I’m not bulletproof.

James Baldwin

Let me just be clear that I am describing—not, as we are warned not to do in workshop, prescribing. Some people don’t need much community of any kind, don’t need to feel that their values are shared with more than one or two others, or anyone else at all. They would rather be on their own. I’m always struck by how the Dadas, for instance, were not only few in number but also often geographically distant from one another. They seem to have been connected by a galactic vibe more than by daily interaction. Some people are quite well-nourished by leading conventional lives; their art thrives. For me, the gently unconventional path, and access to various unconventional worlds, have been crucial to my work as well as to my life. I don’t know why, honestly. But somehow they’re linked, they flow into one another. I need one side of the box to remain open. And, of course, this is who I seem to have been most interested in writing about: the folks who live a little (or more than a little) outside, the artists, the wannabe artists, the queers, the dreamers, the thieves, the in-betweeners, the modern restless ones. I light to that. I find it heroic, even when it doesn’t work out. I suppose I am more interested in freedom than in greatness; the story of what people do with their freedom compels me more than whether they win or lose the big game. I’m sure that gender, for one thing, has something to do with this. Female freedom still generally comes at a price. We write the stories we both wish for and fear.

Or maybe I just like having company, as a dear writer friend once said. I always want to know: How do you do it? And how about you? How do you keep doing it? In seeking out people of whom to ask this question, I seem to have built myself a life. This is the long haul, it ends up. It is rare, and precious.

THE BLURB #17: The Poet Never Affirmeth

Travis Kurowski — Wed, 26 May 2010 07:01:36 +0000

Are there rules that govern the representation of the “real world” in fiction? How much should fiction writers be allowed to misrepresent history before being called out for it?

A brief note: I had been trying, off and on, for nearly a year to finish this essay on historical fiction, when one morning I read an article by television writer/producer David Simon about his new post-Katrina series Treme that codifies everything I had been debating for so long. Here’s the main thrust of what Simon wrote:

If we are true to ourselves as dramatists, we will cheat and lie and pile one fraud upon the next, given that with every scene, we make fictional characters say and do things that were never said and done. And yet, if we are respectful of the historical reality of post-Katrina New Orleans, there are facts that must be referenced accurately as well. Some things, you just don’t make up… Admittedly, it’s delicate. And we are likely to be at our best in those instances in which we are entirely aware of our deceits, just as we are likely to fail when we proceed in ignorance of the facts…. But Treme is drama, and therefore artifice. It is not journalism. It is not documentary. It is a fictional representation set in a real time and place, replete with moments of inside humor, local celebrity and galloping, unrestrained meta. At moments, if we do our jobs correctly, it may feel real.

Simon also mentions elsewhere in the article—regarding a scene that features Hubig’s Pies, and critics’ comments that Hubig’s wasn’t yet back in business at that time: “The pie in Janette DeSautel’s purse is a Magic Hubig’s…”

In Malcolm Jones’s Newsweek review of Glen David Gold’s 2009 novel, Sunnyside—which dramatizes the life of Charlie Chaplin and the creation of the first movie stars—Jones criticizes the book in light of various factual inaccuracies. Here is what Jones says about Chaplin’s affair with screenwriter Frances Marion, which Gold deals with early in the novel:

The only thing wrong is that it probably never happened. It could have. Chaplin and Marion were contemporaries in the small community of early Hollywood. But we can only conclude, from the intimacy of the scene and the copious dialogue, that this is all Gold’s imagining. That’s all right, surely. This is a novel, with characters called Charlie Chaplin and Frances Marion, and Gold calling the shots. The problem—and it’s a problem whether your name is Doctorow, Mailer or DeLillo—is that once a novelist invites reality into his story, he can’t tell it when to leave. On every page, he has to tacitly ask the reader to suspend not disbelief but belief… But at every turn, reality comes knocking on the back door of our awareness, raising the question of what is real and what is made up.

Jones later examines a section that involves Chaplin’s mother, Hannah:

The Chaplin in the novel sends his lunatic mother back to England. The real Chaplin did not. Is there a point here? It’s hard to say. Gold is so clever and assured that he makes his readers think twice before accusing him of mere bungling. Instead, we second-guess ourselves for quibbling.

Reading this, all I could think was: Why the big concern? I mean, it’s fiction after all.

Nonetheless, since reading Jones’s review I have been thinking an awful lot about the consequences of fiction that bends, and sometimes breaks, the historical record. Are there tasteful rules governing representations of the “real world” in fiction? To put it more bluntly, just how much should fiction writers be allowed to misrepresent the world before being called out for it?

I Googled a bit, asked around, wandered some bookstores, and soon found I was far from alone thinking about all this. Some others who have been concerned, in no particular order:

Plato, Steven Millhauser, Andrea Barrett, Jim Shepard, E. L. Doctorow, David Shields, Michael Chabon, Nam Le, Tamas Dobozy, Homer, Charles Dickens, Laura van den Berg, Colum McCann, David Leavitt, Samantha Hunt, T. C. Boyle, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Henry James, Umberto Eco, Andrew Foster Altschul, Susan Choi, Curtis Sittenfeld, Julie Orringer, David Shields, Georg Lukacs, Philip Sidney, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Philip K. Dick, Quentin Tarantino, Ha Jin, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Ho Davies, Eric Foner, Allan Gurganus, Ursula Hegi, Jill Lepore, Peter Matthiessen, Barry Unsworth, Gore Vidal, John Wray, Russell Banks, Madison Smartt Bell, Alan Cheuse, Francisco Goldman, William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, William Shakespeare…

And then, a few months ago, my wife was reading a review of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel about Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell—and turned to me and said, “Wow, historical fiction seems to be really hot these days.” I Googled once again and came up with the following:

• Four of the last ten Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction have been historical.
• Two of the five National Book Award finalists in 2009 were, as well.
• Of the last four novels discussed at length in The New Yorker (during 2009), two were historical fictions, and the other two were given very poor reviews.
• Just this year, the literary journal Conjunctions published a “Hybrid Histories” issue, including historical fiction from Francine Prose, William H. Gass, Stephen Marché, Paul West, Matt Bell, and many others.

Then, of course, there are the countless historical films and television shows: Pearl Harbor, The Pacific, Treme, The Wire, Young Victoria, An Education, The Queen, Seabiscuit, Titanic, 300, Public Enemies, Amelia, W., Milk, Frost/Nixon, and so on.

History and fiction have long been a team. The fictional transformation of historical fact has been going on since literature’s beginnings—I am thinking particularly of Gilgamesh and The Iliad, both about historical kings their authors never met, battles they never witnessed. And historical accuracy has always been a bit, well, uneven—short story pioneer Washington Irving never visited the Catskill mountains until after he wrote about them in “Rip Van Winkle”; and Homer didn’t fact-check the Trojan War before composing a 16,000-line poem about it. Luke Slattery argues in The Australian, “To the extent that Homer’s Troy exists at all, it exists in the imagination.”

On the other hand, some storytellers are more rigorous. Hillary Mantel is hyper-conscious about historical accuracy in her novels, and argues strongly for historical realism in fiction. In a recent discussion of Showtime’s Renaissance drama, The Tudors, Mantel said:

Every time they take one decision that’s contrary to the way things really happened, there’s a cascade of consequences, and in the end, the story becomes complete nonsense. Perhaps you’ve left out a vital character, or you’ve given someone a different name because you don’t trust the viewer’s or the reader’s intelligence. The most crass example was that Henry VIII had two sisters, and they decided to roll them into one, but once you take that kind of decision it ripples through everything you’re going to write thereafter.

Such tension between the historical record and fictional liberty exists in any story—the relaxing of this tension is an essential part of a reader’s suspension of disbelief. Some writers, such as Morrison and Doctorow, wear such tension on their sleeves, going so far as to make it a major part of the conflict they try to dramatize in novels such as Beloved, Ragtime, and The Book of Daniel. As critic Matthew Henry explains, “Where Doctorow differs from traditional historical novelists… is in the intentional confusion he sets up between documented historical events (‘facts’) and invented ones (‘fictions’).”

Again, this tension stretches far back into literary history, at least to Plato and his desire to excise poets—the novelists of their day—from the Republic for offering “phantoms, not realities.” Such a worry about literary misinformation is what led Philip Sidney to write his Defense of Poesy, an effort to defend literature against accusations that it distorts the real world:

For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writeth. He citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention; in troth, not laboring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be.

E. L. Doctorow

The poet never affirmeth. Rather than simply affirm or record history, many fiction writers use the historical record as a painter uses a palette—a spectrum of realities from which to choose. In a 2009 interview on Bookworm, Glen David Gold goes so far as to say that he doesn’t like historical fiction, instead describing the use of history in his fiction as “the same way people use character [and] emotion.” The same was true for perhaps the most successful storyteller in the history of the English language. “As usual when he dealt with English history,” wrote Harvard professor Herschel Baker, “Shakespeare did not tie himself to the facts.”

For a more modern example, when asked if his stories were true, David Sedaris once answered that they were “true enough.” Much like character, setting, and symbolism, history is simply an element of the writing, and the only verification the writer must make for any element is if it “rings true” within the realm of the story, not that of reality.

The above of course begs the question: At what point is the storyteller allowed to let the story they are telling take over the story that exists in the history books? In an interview on Identity Theory, Jim Shepard—whose short stories are more often than not based around historical events—says:

On the one hand, you don’t come to fiction for the exact same thing you come to history for… But on the other hand, writers do tend to forget just how many of fiction’s pleasures for the reader do have non-fiction components. Read [Hemingway’s] “Big Two-Hearted River” and you think, “Well, I am learning about fly fishing.” Or read The Great Gatsby and part of the pleasure is thinking you are learning a little bit about the upper crust in Long Island at a certain point.

Fiction most often—perhaps always—exists in that middle ground between the real and the imaginary. Regarding the act of writing itself, Shepard adds:

At some point you have to say to yourself, “It’s not about what really happened. It’s about what I am about to invent.”

In short, the entire thing seems so much more complicated than Jones makes it out to be in his review of Sunnyside. When we are comparing artifice to the world, talking about where it and the world connect and overlap, I think that to simply say, “The only thing wrong is that it probably never happened,” is to oversimplify and undercut what may be the fundamental magic by which good fiction is powered.

THE BLURB #16: Hungrier, More Successful, a Bit Ruthless

Eric B. Martin — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:01:19 +0000

A review of David Goodwillie’s American Subversive that veers off into some really important and complicated and basically unanswerable questions about literature, literary reviews, overstimulation, secret weapons, and 21st century life.

Part I: Four reasons why you should read American Subversive.

1. Why don’t real lefties bomb and kill? Unless you count the Unabomber—and how can you really?—the white American left hasn’t really blown anything up since the 1970s, when the Weather Underground, who feature prominently in American Subversive, David Goodwillie’s first novel, bombed two dozen government buildings in protest of the Vietnam War. In an excellent, eponymous 2004 documentary about the ‘70s radical group, former members try to explain: “The Vietnam War made us crazy,” says one; another describes how the images from that war and what it meant about America was “knowledge that we just couldn’t handle; it was too big. We didn’t know what to do.” So why hasn’t that happened again? What would it take to turn the white left into hardcore bombers today?

American Subversive is the latest book to take on this interesting question, appealing to a progressive desire for vengeance in the wake of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Cheney revolution. Where were—and where are—the Robin Hoods, the Avengers, the vigilantes of the left? Are progressives just a bunch of pussies? Goodwillie’s novel offers the dirty thrill of imagining that the radical left could be as armed and dangerous as the radical right. It’s not that the book wants outraged progressives to bomb stuff, but it has to ask: What’s it gonna take—and what are you gonna do instead?

Good question.

David Goodwillie (photo credit Alexandra Rowley)

2. Parties. Good parties are one of the great joys of Western literature, and particularly of novels that take place in white New York society. The Age of Innocence and The Great Gatsby have them, as do Bright Lights, Big City, Bonfire of the Vanities, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Underworld, and on and on and on.

American Subversive opens with such a party and hosts others along the way. All of them are fun, as the novel breathes deep and easy, running its long fingers through the 30-something world of media/gossip blogger Aidan Cole, who has entered, as he calls it, “the second stage of city living.”

These days we checked our watches, wary of the critical difference between one and three in the morning. These days we agreed with each other more than we used to… And these days we betrayed each other, too. With women, with men, with work. Our close friends—from childhood, from college, from those first anxious years in New York—had moved away or melted into marriage. Our new friends were hungrier, more successful, a bit ruthless. We’d all been here a long time now.

This is the New York City of American Subversive. Welcome to the party.

3. It’s a book about you. Maybe you were at one of these parties. If so, there are references that seem decodable—a Nick Denton here, a Susan Cernek there, some Andres Santo sprinkled in between—or at least so true to type that you can find them, or yourself, or loved and loathed ones, represented. This is one of the essential thrills of the memoir genre—Look who’s on page 43!—that works doubly well in a novel (Wait, is that some cross between me and Daniel Jones?). If so, this book is about you, was written for you, and should be fun.

If you weren’t at that party, you may be the second kind of person the novel is interested in: the white American radical, either a chimera like the novel’s Paige Broderick, who builds bombs, or a member of the broader, very real progressive community driven half-raving mad by American politics over the last few decades, mad and frustrated and ready to do something, anything, to try to reclaim the progressive dream and take our nation back. If that sounds familiar, then this book is about you and was written for you, too.

4. The chapters end well. These chapters are mostly eight or ten pages long, which is an excellent length for a chapter, especially when each chapter makes you want to read the next one. And these do. In fact, they work so well that it gives American Subversive the flavor of a genre thriller, which it is not.

The first chapter ends: “This is Paige Broderick. She’s the one responsible.”

The second chapter: “And before I knew what I was doing or why, I said: yes, I’d like that very much.”

Third chapter: “The line went dead, but her last word hung in the air. As if it didn’t belong.”

Someone is responsible. Someone says yes. Something doesn’t belong. These are all good reasons to keep reading and reasons American Subversive is a swift and effortless read.

Part II: Why write anything other than completely positive reviews

for non-blockbuster books?

Walter Kirn’s recent total diss of Ian McEwan’s Solar is an example of vicious but fair game: Literary stars like McEwan represent the battleground for our larger debate about what literature is, isn’t, should be, shouldn’t. But what’s the point of writing anything but a glowing review of books that blip much smaller on the radar screen? Don’t people know how hard it is to write good books, let alone great ones? Smaller books don’t need complicated musings. They need help competing with Michael Lewis and Rock Band and Fleshbot and Mad Men and Joyce Carol Oates.

The point is that, if we think literature is still worth talking about, every book is part of that debate, which is why reviews of non-blockbuster books should do one of two things: either convincingly shout to the hilltops, “Read this book!” or, in explaining why there’s no shouting, try to find larger truths about literature in a book’s strengths and flaws. Real reviews should be essays—not gladiator thumbs-up/thumbs-down, not stroke jobs or hack jobs on the writers themselves. And that’s the point, a point easily forgotten amidst what it takes to break through the noise in today’s literary marketplace: Literature is not about the writer. It’s about the book, it’s about art, it’s about life.

Part III: Two reasons why a novel like American Subversive

is in trouble in 2010.

1. Non-fiction killed the realist novel. Balzac, Dickens, and Dreiser walked a different beat from today’s novelist. Much of the work that is done today by nonfiction was routinely done by fiction in their day; readers not only accepted that, but were thrilled that they were getting such an “authentic” peek into an absinthe-addled slum or a curio shop in London. But today the work of straightforward realism is done by non-fiction writers. We no longer need Crane to take us into war or Zola to take us into the slum because we have memoirists and documentary filmmakers who can tell their own stories in Jarhead or Straight out of Hunters Point. And that shit is real, in an age where authenticity is under siege but still more precious than ever; where readers have become more sophisticated and suspicious; where there is more competition for their attention than ever before.

American Subversive is a realist novel in a world where the realist novel is under siege from every direction; it’s the very rare contemporary realist novel like Clockers or The Poisonwood Bible that can compete with non-fiction—or with fictional film and TV that co-opts nonfiction authenticity, such as The Hurt Locker or The Wire—and such books require a supercollision of linguistic, storytelling, and research virtuosity that even virtuosos like Price and Kingsolver do not consistently have.

A secret weapon?

2. The 21st century novel needs a secret weapon. American Subversive is ambitious. It wants to tease out ideas in full view like an essay, entertain at a thriller’s pace, engage us deeply with its characters like a play, critique like crackling satire, collide the stark language of cinema with moments of unfurled poetry, document hard reality like sharp nonfiction—all within the fairly traditional storytelling form of the social-realist novel. A novel can do all that, but very few do, and most of these have a secret weapon or two: a postmodern play on genre like The Blind Assassin or The Intuitionist, a funny satirical edge like Money or A Man in Full, a narrator’s voice so unique it simply knocks us back five paces like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Motherless Brooklyn—something, in other words, that makes it a not-totally-realist novel anymore and gives it a chance to do the things that no other literary form can do.

It needs this not only because of what has happened with nonfiction and narrative and art but because the competition for our attention is brutal. Books do not exist in a vacuum; the fact that a book is pretty good is no longer a good enough reason to read it. Because when you choose to read one book, you are choosing not to read thousands of other books, not to watch a hundred other movies, nor skim a million other blog posts and articles. You need a reason to do that. Maybe you like novels about radicals and violence, about New York media parties, books about you. Maybe you liked Goodwillie’s memoir; maybe people you know are reading his novel. Maybe all of the above—if so, American Subversive has a secret weapon.

If not, you must decide: With millions of books in the world, and hundreds of thousands being published every year, and so many other forms of storytelling out there, is this novel a better choice than something similar that’s more thrillery, like Little Drummer Girl or 24; more edgy, like Fight Club or American Psycho; more genre bending, like What is the What or Cloud Atlas; more virtuoso-level, like American Pastoral or Black Sunday; more New York-royale like Bonfire or Bright Lights, Big City; more real, like Weather Underground or “The Insurgent’s Tale”; more classic, like The Monkey Wrench Gang or Crime and Punishment; more imaginative, like Oryx and Crake or “The Golden Monica”; more insightful, like The Ticking Is the Bomb or “Why Terrorism Doesn’t Work”; more funny, like Pastoralia or Home Land; or some other novel equipped with some other secret weapon?

Eric B. Martin

As a narrative form, the novel is barreling through a crossroads where it’s choices are to go either bigger or smaller or more genre-oriented than does American Subversive. Bigger, and it veers off into the wild possibilities of fiction that no nonfiction or film can match, but runs a very high risk of seeming like a gimmicky failure (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle versus Special Topics in Calamity Physics?); smaller, and the writer turns poetically inward, burrowing deeper into character and language than other narrative can go, thereby risking irrelevance and lacking a hook for radio interviews but standing a better chance at literature along the lines of Alice Munro. More genre-oriented, and the novel can follow rules—thriller, sci-fi, romance—that restrict it but also guarantee certain expectations, deliverables, pleasures, audiences, etc., while still striving for the LeCarre or Lehane level of good writing. The middle ground is a trap. A novel must be truly great to survive here and compete with all the other media it finds itself up against. That’s why the novel must increasingly ask itself what it can do that nothing else can, or risk the fate that has befallen it: a glut of pretty good but unextraordinary literary books that want it all but struggle to compete with all the other printed media, with film, with art, with games, with life.

This is not anyone’s fault. This is just the way things are. Writers must keep striving to write the ambitious, great books they dream in their mind’s eye when they sit down to write, but they must be prepared to be disappointed when, in the madding crowd of narrative, it turns out the big world doesn’t really need a book if it’s not great enough to be truly important, specialized enough to find its niche, or equipped with a secret weapon. When that happens—and it happens far more often than not—it is time for writers to think about what we want out of writing, out of publishing, out of their lives, and make our decisions accordingly.

THE BLURB #15: The Monster Impulse

Reese Okyong Kwon — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 07:01:17 +0000

A crop of young writers turns to mythic and fearsome creatures as a way of coping with the danger and unpredictability of the real world.

***

That the rise of the so-called realistic novel coincided with the Age of Reason may be no accident. When, in 1740, Samuel Richardson published Pamela, which some consider to be the first novel, he explained that he wanted to “introduce a new species of writing” that would omit the “improbable and marvelous.” Down with the dragons and griffins, was his message, and up with virtuous young ladies.

For the most part, realism has held sway ever since, making it easy to forget that a devotion to verisimilitude is still a relatively modern development in the history of the story. From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Homer to Milton, in myths, fables, and religious narratives, monsters and gods are everywhere, the supernatural is real, and the natural world terrifies. If it’s true that storytelling has its origins with those forebears who crouched around fires and told tales to try to make sense of the dark, wild world, then maybe realism’s reign is tied to the fact that we have lived in a more predictable world than did our predecessors. Even when it’s dark outside, we don’t believe in monsters anymore.

Or do we? After the misrule of our last president, after Kyoto, after Copenhagen, after our national barbarisms and colossal, global mistakes, in a warming and divided world, it appears that we are living, once again, on an Earth that might well extinguish us. Is it a coincidence that nonhuman animals and fantastical monsters have been making a comeback in the fiction of imaginative younger writers? In short-story collections published in the last five years by writers as varied as Rebecca Curtis and Karen Russell, Hannah Tinti and Michael Czyzniejewski—and, most recently, Laura van den Berg and Lydia Peelle—unlikely creatures abound. A man brings home an elephant (Czyzniejewski). A dangerous wolf-man is at the door (Curtis). A museum’s stuffed black bear comes to life (Tinti). A family needs to choose which of its members it will feed to a monster (Curtis again). A young girl wrestles alligators (Russell).

In the work of these otherwise heterogeneous writers, there are some shared tendencies: the monsters and animals intrude upon more or less realistic fictional worlds. Underlying conflicts between human characters are dramatized via creaturely metaphors. (The man with the elephant has a wife who fails to notice the pachyderm’s presence in the bedroom; the museum bear haunts a young woman whose artist father is dying; the alligator-wrestler has a troubled older sister; et cetera.) People speak less to one another; when they do, they say less of what they mean to say. There is little confrontation and less blame. Shying away from fighting with their human antagonists, they tussle instead with wolf-men and hungry monsters. Much like the monster under the anxious child’s bed, the creatures in these stories tend to be menacing. (Monsters, of course, are no more than exaggerated versions of more familiar animals.)

Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and Lydia Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing are the most prominent recent manifestations of the impulse—let us call it the monster impulse—toward the nonhuman and non-confrontational. Full of imagined creatures, diverse beasts, and fearful people, these debut collections help demonstrate the fascinations, and the possible traps, of using other species to articulate all-too-human troubles.

***

In van den Berg’s excellent collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, personal disaster is omnipresent and inescapable. A husband vanishes. A lover is soon to die of cancer. A mother is losing her mind. People die by drowning, by fire, by snakebite. Much of the evil that befalls the characters is worse than banal: it is circumstantial. Often, there is no one specific to blame. When there is someone to whom fault might be assigned—an uncommunicative husband, a neglectful mother—the character escapes confrontation and instead obsesses over more global concerns: the husband frets about riots in Paris, the mother devotes herself to environmental problems and forces instructional videos on her daughter’s friends. They excuse themselves from blame—and, to some degree, are excused—by their larger worries. Dear John: It’s not you, it’s global warming.

In clumsier hands, the absence of clear antagonists could cause these stories to float into bland, solipsistic, would-be Beckettian territory. Van den Berg, however, is a disciplined and inventive writer, and has directed the attention of her characters, victims and perpetrators alike, away from their navels and toward a parade of strange, fantastical creatures. There are mythical monsters: Bigfoot; the Loch Ness Monster; a dread Congolese monster called the mokele-mbembe; and the mishegenabeg, a monster suspected of lurking in Lake Michigan. There are unusual and exotic animals: the mapinguary, a giant primate; the Amazonian coral snake; and lemurs in Madagascar. It is as though, left behind with their loss and no one to blame, the survivors seek out the monstrous and the strange to find something that might measure up to—might even make some sense of—their outsized sorrows.

In “The Rain Season,” for example, a woman named Catherine has come as a missionary to the Congo while grieving the loss of her husband, who died in a house fire. Catherine befriends a young boy whose parents are dying, possibly from AIDS, and as the country veers toward war and everyone who can flee does, Catherine lingers. She gives the boy food and makes note of villagers’ reports of the mokele-mbembe, a sauropod thought to have “inky eyes, skin the color of rust, a body thick with muscle and scales.” It is said to live near the village in Lake Tele, which it leaves only to abduct villagers and frighten Americans. To keep the monster at bay, villagers repetitively draw its image in the dirt and keep watch for its enormous footprints. They cannot control the ravages of illness or ward off the impending civil war, but they can at least try to keep the mokele-mbembe in the lake. Catherine hardly believes in God—the Lord is her dead husband’s deity, and she is not sure why she came to the Congo at all—but now she feels that she belongs here. Her husband died in a fire because of malfunctioning electrical wiring; how much better, really, to be able to assign fault to a monster than to circuitry.

“Up High in the Air” features another woman grieving a loss while thinking of monsters—this time, in the form of the mishegenabeg, an aquatic monster thought to live in Lake Michigan. The woman, Diane, is mourning the death of her father, who drowned in a boating accident. Given the circumstances, it’s no wonder that she’s preoccupied by water: “All bodies of water look the same to me now,” she says. “Places to get lost in.” What is more surprising is that her obsession has spilled over to her husband, a scientist who recently left his job and is now working for a small stipend as an “expeditions manager” for the Mishegenabeg Discovery Group. He whiles his time away on the absurd search for the monster, which is reported to be either “at least fifty feet long and the color of moss” or “like an overturned boat floating in the water.” Diane, a university professor, is understandably frustrated with her husband’s sudden devotion to his not-quite-job, yet the characters of this story are Houdinis of difficult conversation, skilled in the art of slipping past their interlocutors. Her evasions, and those of her husband, attain new heights when her husband discovers that she has been sleeping with one of her undergrads. She says she can apologize in a number of different languages; he says he’s not interested in the languages she speaks. And then they listen to an audio recording of what he says could be the mishegenabeg.

***

If van den Berg’s collection focuses on what seem to be the victims, the accomplished stories in Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing center on the perpetrators. Peelle’s protagonists are destructive, irresponsible, reckless—people who are themselves the monsters they most fear. Again and again, characters forget and betray themselves, their bodies, their lives, a wife, a husband, an employer, a beloved. The most pitiable victims of her collection, however, are wordless—not because they shun confrontation but because they are not human. The real victims are the animals and plants, the very oxygen, so misfortunate as to have to share the earth with Peelle’s two-legged wastrels.

In one story, a man who finds work at a goat farm and robs his hardworking boss finds himself, months later, sorrowing over having left the farm—not because he regrets the theft but because he forgot entirely about the crippled kid goat he was hand-raising, in secret. It must have died without him, he realizes. In another story, a disappointed and aging divorcé lives in a town in which there is a rash of sightings of a phantom panther, “a pale shiver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees.” That the man, Jack, is by profession a taxidermist provides a neat contrast to the improbability of the panther’s existence so close to the same humans who have made the land inhospitable to its kind.

The implications of man’s negligence are made more explicit in the last and perhaps the strongest story, “Shadow of the Weary Land,” in which three men—the narrator, the Musician, and a Revelations-quoting quack visionary who claims to channel the ghost of Jesse James—search for buried treasure. The Tennessee terrain they canvass is cheap farming land ridged by three-hundred-year-old trees. Developers, of course, are on their way.

Once again, the narrator’s own destructiveness parallels the imminent destruction of the natural world: He exists in the aftermath of a stroke brought on by years of excessive drug use. “My mind, before I ruined it,” he says, “was a beautiful thing. As an old man I can say this without vanity or pride. The brilliance was like the light of late day over Joe Guy’s back field, but now the light is gone.” Later, he says that if he had the wherewithal he would buy back the threatened land and “save it for the coyote, the heron, the possum, the bobcat, the kestrel, the broad-winged hawk.” A pleasant enough sentiment, to be sure, but of course it’s made impossible by his utter lack of wherewithal and by the damage he has wrought. As another of Peelle’s haunted protagonists recognizes, the world may well be ending, and they—we—have done it to ourselves:

And a few more decades down the road, he thinks, at the rate we’re screwing it all up, what will it even matter? The water poisoned, the air ruined, too many damn people and more every day—what is it that we all want to hang around for, anyway?

***

What is startling and right about the best of Peelle’s and van den Berg’s stories is that even at their most fantastical and animal-centric, these stories address a central reality of our real, human world—there are so many malefactors at large that there’s no one in particular to blame. The panic that pervades these stories arises from a shared consciousness that there is too much cause for fear and worry. Who, exactly, is to be held responsible for the deteriorating environment? What, precisely, causes terrorism? Most importantly, what ought we to do? Enter the bugbears and scapegoats, enter a reliance on metaphor to say what can’t be confidently said. If there is a monster under the child’s bed, it can be avoided or destroyed. If there is a mokele-mbembe in the Congo, it can be tracked. If a kid goat is in danger, it can be succored; if it is neglected and died, it can be mourned. Focusing on the mokele-mbembe keeps Catherine from wallowing in self-pity or self-blame. The panther sightings add interest to the taxidermist’s otherwise flat, regretted life. Freed from self-regard, these characters can turn their attention to the more dynamic world around them.

And yet, as I read these stories, I began to long for more interactions between perpetrators and victims of the same species. (It’s worth noting that van den Berg’s monsters appear only in the characters’ imaginations.) After all, fiction’s particular province may lie in the exquisite possibility of inhabiting others’ minds—of trying to understand that which is not the self. By eschewing confrontations with the only kind of animal that can understand and talk back, by refusing to engage with human wrongdoing, by escaping painful self-examination, van den Berg’s and Peelle’s characters are, in some ways, giving up this fight.

“The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. A capital / Negation destroyed him in his tenement / And, with him, many blue phenomena,” said Wallace Stevens. As substitutes for Satan, the inventive van den Berg and Peelle offer the mokele-mbembe, Bigfoot, phantom panthers, a mishegenabeg, and kid goats. Even while it gives rise to such delights, the monster impulse is a risky one, as so much evasion between characters can make for frustrating fiction. That these writers so often succeed in their storytelling is an indication of their considerable talent.

The Blurb #14: The Land of Underwater Birds

Eric Puchner — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:01:06 +0000

What makes a good title? What makes a bad one?

And how do you know when you’ve found the right one?

These questions come up occasionally in the creative writing classes I teach, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have any easy answers. The honest truth is I struggle with titles myself. On the one hand, they seem like the least important part of the writing process: Shouldn’t the story or novel speak for itself? On the other, they’re the first words anyone reads, and in some respect the most important words of all—what we sniff before ordering the bottle. I can’t tell you how many times students have thanked me for assigning a short story they wouldn’t have read on their own because they hated the title. “Sea Oak,” by George Saunders, seems to fall into this camp: a fine title, if you’ve read the story, but which in the uninitiated stirs up visions of 17th century frigates.

I once desperately wanted to call a story “Frozen Dog.” I had only the vaguest idea of the plot, based on an anecdote a friend had told me about someone who kept their dead spaniel in the freezer, but I thought the title would catapult me (and the story) to greatness. How could you see a title like that and not put down everything you were doing—ordering a latte, scoring some drugs, operating an air traffic control tower—to read it? Months later, the finished story was accepted by a respected literary magazine, but they demanded I change the title. Since a frozen dog was a central image in the story, both literally and figuratively, they felt it was heavy-handed. I was incensed. The raison d’etre of the story!

They were right, of course, and I eventually came up with another title. The point is, though, when it comes to the writing process, sometimes a bad title can help you more than a good one. In their book Deepening Fiction, Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren talk about the idea of creative beginnings versus actual beginnings: Even if we end up cutting the original “creative beginning” of a novel or short story—the part of the novel or story, often, that we’re most attached to—this doesn’t mean it’s not an essential part of the writing process. In some ways, it’s the most essential. The same goes for titles, I think. I’ve heard students tell me they come up with their titles first, before they have the slightest notion of a plot. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as they’re willing to give up their “creative title” when it no longer serves the story.

Still, the fact remains that there are many more bad titles than good ones. I’ve seen some jaw-droppingly awful titles, often from very gifted writers. And I’m not just talking about my students: The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel. An early version of Portnoy’s Complaint was called A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. At various times, Catch-22 was called Catch-18, Catch-11, Catch-14, and Catch-17. And some classic novels have stood the test of time, despite having terrible titles. (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, never fails to make me giggle.)

In short, there seems to be very little correlation between producing something brilliant and the ability to come up with a half-decent name for it. Perhaps it’s a different skill set entirely. I sometimes think there should be professional titlers: Just as we wouldn’t ask a carpenter to tar the roof of our house, we shouldn’t expect writers to work outside their métier. But even if the perfect title is destined to elude us, I do think it’s possible to identify a bad one—even, I think, to lay out some basic ground rules for what to steer clear of.

So, based on years of teaching, I’ve compiled the following list of Titles to Avoid. (Note: Some of the examples below are real titles, from good stories.)

The Faux Poetic but Authentically Meaningless (“Hunt the Mist Slowly”)
The Purely Descriptive (“One Early Morning in Topeka at Dawn”)
The Lofty Abstraction, a.k.a. the Bad Kundera (“The Lonely Shackles of Mortality”)
The Hardy Boys Special (“The Hike from Hell”)
The Grammatically Complete Sentence (“Gladys Pemberton Strikes It Rich”)
The Inspirational Cliché (“Dreams of Rebirth”)
The Uninspirational Cliché (“Losing My Marbles”)
The Alliterative Tongue Twister (“Peripatetic Papa”)
The Allusion to Another, Much More Famous Work of Literature (“The Story of Christ”)
The It-Doesn’t-Get-Any-Cuter-Than-This (“Runaway Grandma”)
The Melodramatic Image (“Blood Dries Brown”)
The My-Life-Changed-Unexpectedly-and-I’m-Going-to-Tell-You-About-It (“Epiphany in a Tattoo Parlor”)
The Bad McSweeney (“How We Lie to the Moon, and How the Moon Lies to Us”)
The Scratch ‘n Sniff, a.k.a. But-It-Will-Make-Such-a-Lovely-Cover-Someday (“In the Valley of the Gardenia Blossoms”)

And a good title? Much harder to quantify, but I have some theories: It doesn’t make a spectacle of itself. It doesn’t try too hard, but is original nonetheless. It makes sense on a literal level but deepens metaphorically as we read—deepens, in the finest cases, our understanding of the story or novel itself. The Remains of the Day, “Good Country People,” Disgrace, “Friend of My Youth.”

A tall order, I know, and I don’t claim to be any better at titles than my students. My novel, for instance, about a downwardly mobile family in Southern California, went through various identities: It was The Cost of Living for a while, and enjoyed a brief stint as This World Is Not Your Home (yes, I know, rule #5). It was a friend who finally suggested its current title, Model Home. It’s not flashy—I would even say it’s humble, the shy title at the dance —but in ways both literal and figurative, it’s perfect.

And yet I didn’t take to it at first. I had a different title in mind, one that seemed to make people either burst out laughing or (worse) gasp over its poetic splendor. The title I had in mind makes no sense whatsoever if you haven’t read the book. It’s trying too hard and probably a bit pretentious. But I’m still attached to it. I’m not quite ready to march it over to the title graveyard, to join the Trimalchios and their Dreams of Rebirth. So I gave it to this essay instead.

Also by Eric Puchner: I Married a Novelist

THE BLURB #13: The Anxiety of Influence

Joshua Mohr — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:00:54 +0000

I’ve been trying to write a book review of Ron Currie’s Everything Matters! for the last few weeks. I’ve been trying and failing splendidly.

In fact, more than writing anything, I’ve been doing a sort of literary circuit training—pacing around my apartment and slugging absurd quantities of coffee and snarling to myself about slinging postmodern bullshit all over the page when all I was trying to do was talk about Everything Matters! which, by the way, no matter how far I stray off topic, is a really good book and you should read it. Phew, at least that’s on the record.

Guess what I’m saying is this: Why does peer review suddenly feel like a total violation?

Ever since my first novel came out a couple months back, I’ve been having a hard time seeing why I’d want to publish something that might impede another writer’s ability to find the biggest audience that she/he can. So that leaves me only a couple options:

1. Only review books I love and will therefore write glowing things about (seems sort of boring).
2. Don’t review books.

Problem is, I like book reviews. I like the dialogue they have the potential to incite; I like the idea that they help people weed through the glut of material that exists in the marketplace. We need responsible sources—publications that have proven themselves over time to be thoughtful, forthright, and fair—to inform the public about new books.

Since this all started with an attempt to discuss Currie’s Everything Matters! I decided to contact him directly, despite the fact we don’t know each other, and ask what he thought constituted a good book review.

“A review should discuss whether or not a book succeeds at what it set out to accomplish,” he said, “and then explain why it did or did not.”

I like Currie’s idea that a review should be an organic response to the narrative itself, the reviewer attempts to decode the book’s conceits, its subtext and “message.” In doing so, she/he might hopefully use direct evidence from the text to bolster an argument on the successes and failures of the author’s execution.

This was a helpful point, but because I agreed with him, my confusion morphed a bit. It isn’t that I’m against deconstructing the tactics a writer has chosen to use; my concern is more about the legacies of publishing such a discourse. I’d hate to think that my words might dissuade a potential reader from engaging with a writer’s work herself/himself.

So that was my next question to Currie: Why would one writer want to openly criticize another writer’s book?

Currie: “Often I think it manifests as professional jealousy… Writers tend also to be sophisticated and, by definition, good with words, and so are able to wrap this jealousy in the sheep’s clothing of protecting the language or standing guard at the gates of the canon.”

The obvious caveat here is that I’m asking Ron Currie, a total stranger, to comment on an abstraction, the motivation for peer review, an issue that of course has a multiplicity of answers. There are hordes of reviewers, all with different reasons and values and rules for doing what we do. So I recognize I’m asking him to comment on something he really can’t comment upon: my very personal crisis regarding peer criticism.

Currie mentions jealousy—but for me, that isn’t quite it. Certainly, I come across phrases or sentences, scenes and chapters that others have so beautifully written that I wish I’d penned. But I don’t want to “punish” the writer by lambasting her/him in a review. If anything, I want to make sure more people find out about these accomplishments by helping in any way that I can. I want there to be camaraderie among authors, peer support, not peer dissension.

Thus, my problem comes from the other side of the spectrum (I think). I’m not worried about envy, I’m worried about putting obstacles between an author and an audience. The old adage feels true to me: If I don’t have anything nice to say, I should probably just shut up. At the end of the day, what’s the point of hurtling epithets at another writer’s book?

Yes, I like to read book reviews, and in the past I’ve enjoyed writing them. Right now, though—and who knows if it will change—it feels like a violation, a petty way to throw a wrench into someone else’s artistic career. A publishing career is hard enough without people who should be on the same team wielding criticism like a weapon.

Joshua Mohr

Other writers and reviewers will disagree with me—and, obviously, that’s fine. I just think it’s interesting that only since my novel has come out I do feel intimidated and ashamed and malicious at the prospect of peer review. The best reviews are neither hatchet jobs nor blow jobs—the best ones talk about a book’s strengths and weaknesses (every book has both). And after a thoughtful analysis, the readers of a review can make an informed decision about whether they want to spend the money to experience the ride for themselves. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

Currie gets the last word: He says that reviewers are “contributing to what should be a serious conversation about a particular book’s importance, its place, if any, in American literature. No mean task, and one that should be approached with care and fellow-feeling.”

The Blurb #12: On Disturbance

Susan Steinberg — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:25:25 +0000

The deciders of the Publishers Weekly Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things, you can maybe make those things go away.

A few days ago, my colleague D. A. Powell’s book, Chronic, landed on Publishers Weekly’s list of the Best 100 Books of 2009, and though I don’t generally look at the “best of” lists, can’t even wrap my mind around the notion of “best” as a valid category in the arts, I was happy because my colleague kicks total ass, and his book kicks total ass.

I went to the Publishers Weekly website so I could forward the link to our other colleagues, but I couldn’t at first find their Best 100 list and found, instead, their Best 10 list (a new PW feature)—and then I was depressed, because the Best 10 list was comprised entirely of books written by men.

One could argue (and several have) that perhaps the editors just liked these books best. Or that, perhaps, one could argue (and too many have), it was yet another “bad year” for women writers. Though perhaps it was something else entirely. The PW editor explains in her short accompanying text that the deciders of the Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things—like how I sometimes try to ignore the homeless guy who blocks my path when I’m walking to work, because it’s just too much to deal with in the morning—you can maybe make those things go away. But the problem is it only works for a second, because there I am again the next morning walking to work, and there’s the homeless guy saying good morning, and there I am ignoring him again, and how long before I have to face him and say good morning back?

Which is to say, the real problem may be more about why we ignore what we ignore. And really. Did the PW editors ignore gender? Or did they ignore female? (And did they ignore genre? Or was it poetry? And how exactly does one choose “best” between a volume of poetry and a biography, anyway?)

Best Writers of 2009?

The editor goes on to say, a few lines later, “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.” Now, “disturbed” is a strong word. For me, it’s one notch stronger than “ignore.” When I’m disturbed by something it usually means I can no longer ignore it. When I’m disturbed by something, I know I have to make a change. I’m disturbed, for instance, by the Black Sabbath cover band that practices every Thursday night in the garage behind my building. I’m disturbed because the cover band is relentless and because it won’t let me ignore it. I bought earplugs, but earplugs, as it turns out, will not effectively block out a shit cover band. The only thing I can do now is make a real change. Either embrace Black Sabbath. Or sleep out on Thursday nights. Or have a talk with the band. Or a drink. But I don’t have to sit there being disturbed.

When the PW committee realized they were collectively disturbed that their Best 10 list was comprised entirely of male writers, instead of accepting the list, they could have reconsidered hundreds of books by women writers. Why would they choose to put out a list that disturbs them? Wouldn’t it also disturb others? Were they trying to send a message? I’m just saying a remedy for the disturbance may have been to call their list into question. A next step may have been to call their criteria into question. A next step may have been to stop consciously “ignoring gender” if an all male list was disturbing. “Ignoring gender,” after all, often results in the all-male list. We’ve seen how this works, and it’s certainly not limited to the literary world. And they did select women writers—like Jayne Anne Phillips and Heather McHugh, to name two of only twenty-nine—for the Best 11-through-100. Would it have upset the winnowing process to revisit the books by women which they already agreed were among the “best”? Besides, the editor says their committee’s process had already provoked “kicking and screaming.” Was not one scream or kick in defense of a book by a woman?

Jayne Anne Phillips

At turns out, it was not a bad year for women writers. Because—speaking of quality only (certainly not of quantity, certainly not of treatment, certainly not of exposure)—was there ever a bad year for women writers? If so, what year was that? Perhaps women writers haven’t always gotten the same attention as male writers, and perhaps one has to dig a little to find the books, and perhaps a lot of other shit that tends to happen when one stops ignoring. But the writing is right there. It’s always been there. Even good writing. Even in 2009. I decided to bring the issue to WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts), a new organization for and about women writers, co-founded by poets Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin. And after a lengthy discussion about the market, the tedium, the predictability, we evenly, with no kicking nor screaming, decided to generate a list of books by women writers, published in 2009, which were possibly ignored by PW. We list a range of books. We don’t agree on them all. We’re not ranking them. We’re not calling anything the best. We’re open to additions. It’s a growing list. It’s a reminder. And if PW’s Best 10 is an annual thing, we hope they, too, will be a bit more inclusive. It could result in a list that’s a bit less disturbing.

painting by Roger W. Carlson

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