T. C. Boyle, "Sin Dolor"

A professional acquaintance of mine was warning me the other day of the dangers of overexposure. "You know," he said, "it's possible to publish too much." He must know me better than I thought he did, because this is a problem of mine--I want to be in every magazine, every month, forever. I don't want a single human being on earth to forget about me for one moment. Needless to say, this is not healthy, not for my psyche and definitely not for my career.

But for some reason it hasn't seemed to put a dent in T. C. Boyle's. Like Joyce Carol Oates in the eighties, he is everywhere, and his period of everywhereness seems to have extended longer than Oates's. He is absolutely a fixture--a writing addict.

Honestly, I don't mind. You can expect a certain quality of product from Boyle. I'm sure a hundred reviewers have called him a "master," and bully for him, but he's not. He is stunningly competent, though, and his stories are always enjoyable.

This one, from this week's otherwise-anemic New Yorker, is no exception. It's about a small-town Mexican doctor, a bit of a snob, who delivers a child incapable of feeling pain. He watches the boy grow, and grow more morose and desperate, as his father transforms him into a sideshow act. Terribly aged (though painlessly) at thirteen, the boy finally dies when he is challenged by some kids to jump off a building.

I like the narration of this story--it is free of the big overspiced mouthfuls of prose Boyle is sometimes prone to, and fizzes with a surprising and very appealing arrogance. The doctor's a bit of a prick, and is proud of it. But the problem with a Boyle story--and this one is no exception--is that you can see where it's going from a mile off. It's a beautiful, symmetrical construction, fitting as nicely into the literary landscape as a classic brownstone into a Manhattan street. This particular story comes off as a kind of Kafka lite, like "The Hunger Artist" except you'll never have an argument with anybody about it, like Marquez but somehow not as grand. The plot is smooth, the pieces fall gently together, and the dialogue sounds like it was taken from the movie that will someday be made of it. It's solid, and kind of disappointing.

This kind of flaw really stings me, because it's exactly the kind of thing I'm prone to--moral and emotional tidiness. So I'm likely to find greater fault with it than most people would. I sometimes feel like Boyle's shadow: the skinny bespectacled dude with an initial initial who writes too much, except I have a less adventurous hairdo and will always be less famous.

That said, Boyle is never going to flame out, and this is an enviable position to be in. I feel like his work is more inspiring to writers than it is to general readers--he makes you feel like writing is something you can do. He has always made me feel that way, anyhow, and that's worth being grateful for.

Hungry

Except for a few short stories, I haven't read any fiction since Exit Ghost. I just haven't felt like it. But about an hour ago I had a sudden craving -- I wanted to read a novel. Not just any novel, though. Like a food craving, this craving was for something specific: something quick, rich, funny, and maybe historical. (Weird, I hardly ever read historical fiction.) I caught a glimpse of it: some people laughing, rain on a window... Sigmund Freud. Yes! I want to read a novel about Sigmund Freud!

Where does such a craving come from? Maybe the sudden change in weather -- after days of bizarre heat and humidity, today it's chilly and raining -- makes me want to recreate the experience of first reading The World As I Found It, a quickly moving (though deliciously long), rich, funny, historical novel. And I've been thinking about Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box, a collection of essays about psychological experiments. It sounds so tasty: a novel like TWAIFI but about psychology. Has anyone written it??

I wonder how many people have written novels just because they had a particular craving to read something that didn't yet exist?

Autographs

Condalmo is posting today about Radiohead, and though that's not what this post is about, I wish to say that I downloaded (legally!) the new record today, and it's freakin' fantastic. Very intimate and low-key, with a lot of swampy reverb and crazy stereo imaging, and fuzzed-out bass, and string quartets, and super-dry, popcornesque drumming. And yes, the Radiohead model of selling the record (no label, right off of their website, for however much money you feel like paying) is terrific, and I'd love to do it, but you can only get away with it, at least right now, if you're the best band in the world. And I am not the best band in the world, let alone the best novelist.

But it's this post on Margaret Atwood I want to address. Condalmo doesn't like the Long Pen, comparing it to a photocopier. He writes:

I would never in a hundred years line up for a photocopy of a signature from any author. For an author to agree to participation in such a "author appearance" or "book signing" ("event", "reading", "respectful interaction with readers") makes me much less likely to feel any interest in that author's writing.

Like Rhian (see the comments of that thread), I disagree with him here--it's autographs themselves that are something of a scam, not the Long Pen. I'm not a terribly popular writer, and I'm always delighted when somebody actually is interested enough in my stuff to want me to sign it. But I have to say, even then, I don't really like doing it.

Most people ask a writer for an autograph because they liked the reading or book, and want to commemorate their having talked with the author. I've asked for lots of autographs this way, and people generally seem happy to to provide them and say hello.

But every medium-sized city on up has at least one Weird Dude (always a dude) who has like multiple copies of your book, with acrylic wrappers on the dust jackets, and wants you to sign them all. "Just your name," they say, with a tiny bit of desperation. As if, should you write, "To Weird Dude, good luck with your search for a girlfriend! Best wishes, J. Robert Lennon," you would ruin everything.

And you would, because they are not trying to commemorate a pleasant human interaction. They don't give a crap about your book. They barely look at you, in fact! No, they're squirreling away your stuff in the unlikely event you become super famous, and then they'll get to make a huge profit selling the signed editions on eBay.

The Weird Dude really brings to light the whole problem with autographs...the fact that a story is ephemeral, and takes a different shape in every reader's mind, and that this is the entire point. That a story is a seed for the individual imagination. That the physical book is not the important thing--let alone one's contact with the author.

Now, I don't mean to demean every autograph seeker, here--most people just like the book and think it's fun to meet the author. I'm one of those people. But I don't really ask for autographs anymore (the last one I asked for, and probably the last I will ever ask for, was Alice Munro's, beside the buffet table in the green room at the Toronto International Book Festival, because hell!, Alice Munro!!), because they seem a little bit gross to me now. The story should be enough. The story is enough. In fact, it's more than I have any right to ask for, and yet I get to have it anyway.

It isn't that Condalmo's wrong, per se, but he is missing the point that author autographs overall are just kind of pointless. And if you're as famous as Margaret Atwood, you could spend your whole damned life sitting at a pressboard buffet table gazing up in exhaustion at the Weird Dude, and why not make something that can obliterate that experience from your life?

It's Almost Novelember

I've done National Novel Writing Month -- an online challenge for participants to write an entire 200 page novel during the month of November -- for the last couple of years, and I plan on doing it again this year. I really love it. I love knocking out those pages and typing my daily wordcount into the website's graphing thing, etc. (Take a look at the website: it's really neato).

However, I'm not sure how useful it is to a person, such as myself, who takes writing perhaps a little too seriously and wants to do it well. In order to produce that many pages in a month, most of us have to wrestle our internal critic aside and just write anything. That can be a great relief and lots of fun for a person, such as myself, who has a bully for an internal critic, but how useful is it? Can it produce work worth reading? I'm not so sure. My first NaNoWriMo novel was pretty unintelligible; maybe one paragraph out of the 200 pages was something I'd want to keep (it described a character's losing an eye, haha). The second one had more decent stuff in it, but it, too, was as close to being a real novel as my latest grocery list.

It makes me question the whole idea of the "shitty first draft," the creative writing idea (Anne Lamott's, I think) that just getting words down on paper, any old words, is better than nothing, because then, at least, you have something to revise. But the work involved in polishing this "shit" is often much more overwhelming than writing a thoughtful draft in the first place.

Ugh -- but then again. It's true that you can come up with marvelous, inspired stuff if you're just counting pages and aren't too fixated on its being marvelous and inspired. And is it not true that my last NaNoNovel is the only thing I've come even close to finishing in a very long time?

Anyway, whether or not NaNoWriMo produces anything worthwhile is beside the point. Isn't it? If one takes writing too seriously, it's probably not for one.

Sibling Books

Posting has been light lately, because of houseguests--Rhian's sister and our neices came to stay for a couple of days. R. and her sis get on pretty well, as do I with my brother--but siblings are a fine subject for a book. I wrote a couple of sibling novels in a row, one funny, one grim; here are a few good ones I can think of.

Chris Offutt, The Good Brother. The first, and so far only, novel by this W6 chum (well--we haven't seen him in years, but still) is about a man from a Kentucky mountain clan who flees his community when he is expected to murder, in revenge for a previous killing, a member of another clan. He flees to Montana where, wouldn't you know it!, ends up entangled with a heavily armed separatist cult. Gripping and odd.

Maria Flook, My Sister Life. I'm ordinarily no fan of memoirs, but I really liked this strange story. Flook's sister disappeared at 14, and the two went on to live lives of depressing similarity; they later reunite in harrowing circumstances. Looking at that link, I see that Flook's got a story collection too--I didn't know that. Will have to give it a look.

I wasn't crazy about Donald Antrim's first book, when it came out, but there was something about it that I couldn't shake, and I've become a fan, especially ever since his memoir last year. (See, there I go again, liking a memoir.) My fandom began, though, with The Hundred Brothers, a novel that's about precisely what it sounds like it's about, and never ceases to be inventive and funny.

I think maybe the best sister novel ever is by the endlessly flabbergasting Kathryn Davis (my favorite of hers is The Walking Tour, but it doesn't fit the post)--her first novel, Labrador. It's a work of stunning imagination and sophistication; suffice it to say it's not about sisters getting together, drinking chamomile tea, discussing boyfriends, and crying on one another's shoulders.

Finally, I have to throw in a mention of the many sibling writers--the Brontes, the Jameses; A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble; and now we've got the Bender sisters, the Sedarises (Amy's entertaining book is funny enough to make you vomit), and aren't there a bunch of Minots?

Best American Essays 2007

Damn--this is a very fine anthology. I had stopped buying these, but this year has not only got me excited about the series, it's got me excited about the essay. I am actually thinking of writing a few.

Most of the credit can go to David Foster Wallce, this year's guest editor, whose terrific introduction tells me that most of the credit should not go to David Foster Wallace, actually, but to series editor Robert Atwan, whom Wallace envisions

as by now scarcely more than a vestigial support system for an eye-brain assembly, maybe like 5'8" and 90 lbs., living full-time in some kind of high-tech medical chair that automatically gimbels around at various angles to help prevent skin ulcers, nourishment and waste ferried by tubes, surrounded by full-spectrum lamps and stacks of magazines and journals, a special emergency beeper Velcroed to his arm in case he falls out of the chair, etc.

I love Wallace's stuff, and loved it even through the years when he was most hyped (as a result of Infinite Jest, ironically the one thing of his I never much got into), and I happen to think the essay is where he's at his most excellent. He says that just because you think somebody is a good writer, doesn't mean he's a good reader--but it turns out Wallace is, because these essays are great.

They're characterized by a distinct lack of navel-gazery, thank God; there is almost no memoir here at all. The essays are about stuff. Many are, inevitably, political, like Mark Danner's stunning Iraq piece, which I read when it came out in the NYRB; others are personal, but in strange, oblique ways (case in point: Jo Ann Beard's fictionish "Werner," and what a treat to see her stuff again after she seemed to drop off the face of the earth like ten years ago. If you haven't read her fictionessaywhatever book The Boys of My Youth, go get it immediately).

One thing that characterizes all of these, however, is absolute clarity; another is voice. They are all inalienably written by who they're written by. I think these qualities are the result of Wallace's winnowing, and I wish I could have him in software plugin form, to act as a filter for my book buying. Indeed, it is as a noise filter that he sees himself here.

One note though: I don't like what they've done to the covers of this series, this year. They should have stuck with the basic force-justified serif on nubbly matte paper they arrived at in the eighties; these days the series has moved to this smooth satin cover stock, a two-tone color theme, and what seem to be one-point lines just sort of stuck between the words. It's ugly, and a pointless adjustment to something that had been working just fine.

The Long Pen

This is just craziness: Alice Munro in a futuristic metallic blouse singing the praises of the LongPen, that Margaret Atwood-designed electronic doodad that allows writers to sign books over the internets. Clearly, she thinks the whole idea is a gas, if a tiny bit absurd. All the benefits of a book tour, but no carbon emissions! Oh, yeah, and the writer can stay home in her slippers.

For a long time I thought the LongPen was actually an ironic invention designed to undercut the whole idea of book-signings. Now I think sly old Atwood is for real. And you know, she's won me over. Reclusive writers can remain reclusive, publishers can put more money into other marketing, readers get their signed copies and a video-enabled face-to-face chatlet, and the environment wins, too. As Munro says, "I can't think of any drawbacks."

Will fans feel cheated? Would they rather press some flesh than see their favorite writer on teevee? Eh. With some notable exceptions, writers don't fare so well in person, anyway, and the LongPen seems like a rather satisfactory way for a writer to take back some personal space while still giving a little of themselves. Anyway, I'm happy with the fan-letter model of writer-reader interaction. I have a letter from Alice Munro hanging over my desk, signed with a short pen.

(Thanks to Doug Mitchell for the link!)

Tessa Hadley's "Married Love"

There's a lot to like about this Tessa Hadley story in the latest New Yorker (the one that landed in my mailbox with the sickening thud that indicated another utterly horrifying piece of Sy Hersh reportage)--she is a highly skillful composer of sentences, and arranger of sentences into paragraphs. The story is about a young woman of 19 who marries a man 45 years older than she (and who is also already married); and about (more about, really) her large family and its reaction to the match. The wedding goes off, the couple has three kids, and the girl is ultimately disappointed and embittered, but only a little bit.

A few choice lines. About the protagonist's father: "He was...stocky, densely and neatly made, with a wrinkled, ugly, interesting head." About her angry mother, seen by her brother: "His mother's high heels scraped fiercely in the empty street as she crossed to the car." Later, the poor girl "never recovered her neat boxy little figure, or that dreamily submissive phase of her personality." Overall, the story is sophisticated, compact, and nicely fitted together, and it is more or less a pleasure to read.

So why is my jaw so tight as I think about it? It isn't Hadley the prose stylist I object to--and that is usually my first objection to just about any writer--but rather Hadley the observer of humanity. Taken as collections of individual details, these characters are lively and well drawn, but taken together they reflect a certain class smugness, a lack of perspective, a lack of humility. They are very, very clever--they bicker, but they do so in well-prepared exchanges, as though they're reading from a beautifully crafted script. Their foibles are offset by interesting and precious careers--violinist, teacher of "special-needs kids," composer, English teacher, student. Such people exist, of course, and many of them are nice to be around. It isn't who they are that bothers me--it's the way I fear that Hadley feels about who they are. They are never made to confront anything truly upsetting about themselves or each other. They are comfortable. They belong.

I am not eager to give the impression that I fundamentally dislike stories about privileged people. But the ones here don't really think about their station in life at all--it is as though privilege, to them, is the default state of human existence. Congratulations to anyone for whom it is, in fact, the default--but I don't really need to read a story about people so cozy in their own skin. Hadley's mind is interesting, but, to judge from this piece, there is a disconcerting smoothness to her worldview. I would love to see her lay down the paintbrush and pick up the knife.

Black Books

After a long day of reading books, writing books, blogging about books, and teaching and/or selling books, sometimes a person just needs to kick back and watch a television show about books. Black Books is an incredibly silly British comedy about a London bookshop whose cranky Irish owner, played by Dylan Moran, has no interest in selling books at all, and spends the bulk of every episode reading, drinking, smoking, and shouting at people.

Customer: Those books, how much?
Bernard: Hmm?
Customer: Those books. Leather-bound ones.
Bernard: Yes, Dickens. The collected works of Charles Dickens.
Customer: They real leather?
Bernard: They're real Dickens.
Customer: I have to know if they're real leather because they have to go with a
sofa. Everything else in my house is real. I'll give you two hundred for them.
Bernard: Two hundred what?
Customer: Two hundred pounds...
Bernard: Are they leather-bound pounds?
Customer: No...
Bernard: Sorry, I need leather-bound pounds to go with my wallet. Next!

Of course it's not much like a real bookstore, and there's no discussion of books, and books are flung, torn, put in the refrigerator, and stomped on more than they're sold. There's something cathartic about it, actually.

The show ran from 2001 to 2004, but you can rent them on disk. And of course, Youtube has excerpts from the episodes, probably enough of them so you could patch together the entire run of the series. Is that even legal? Here's a terrific bit about Bernard getting a rejection letter for his novel.

Stephen King, Get Over It Already

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Many of you have probably read this morning's editorial in the Times Book Review by Stephen King. It's pretty much a ripoff of his own introduction to the new Best American Short Stories, and is about his favorite topic: how Ivy League intellectual snobs have ruined literature.

You'd think that, in the wake of his complete acceptance by the "literary establishment" that he for so long was convinced disdained him, King would no longer feel it necessary to write pretentious little screeds like this; but if you think that, you don't know King. This is the most outrageously class-obsessed writer in the world, the guy who trots out his working class cred at every available opportunity, and there was no way something like winning the actual admiration of powerful people would put a stop to it.

The essay in question is structured as an imaginary big-box store visit, where King discovers that the literary magazines are expensive, and you have to bend over to read them. He uses these observations to assert that the audience for serious fiction has dwindled. And then he says that this audience

happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and the New Yorker, of course...) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn't real reading, the kind where you just can't wait to find out what happens next... It's more like copping-a-feel reading. There's something yucky about it.

Got that? If you're a young writer, and you're reading that New Yorker story, and think you find it entertaining, sorry, you're mistaken. Actually, you're a pervert. And a calculating snob/loser/poseur. And if you claim that you are able to enjoy a story that operates by means other than event-driven narrative linearity, you are lying.

What a bunch of fucking bullshit. King is certainly right about the limited audience for literary fiction. He's right that most fiction sucks, too. But most fiction has always sucked. You can't name the shitty writers of 1923, not because they didn't exist, but because they didn't last. Bad fiction is usually bad in ways that reveal the vanities of its era, and I won't argue that the vanities of this era don't indeed include intellectual pretension, MFA-fueled obfuscatory mediocrity, and emotional detachment.

But dude: get over it. King seems to need, very badly, to believe that everyone in the world is a fake but him. One story in the new B.A.S.S. anthology so perfectly encapsulates the King paranoia that he might have written it himself. In it, a good ol' honest-to-god salt-of-the-earth auto parts salesman tells the story of his brother, a famous "intellectual" writer who mistreats women, humiliates his family, looks down on everyone, and dies miserable. It's a piece of such breathtaking reverse snobbery, classist wish fulfillment, and emotional fakery that I could barely believe my eyes. Like King's essay today, it brims, embarrassingly, with bitterness and jealousy.

I've read pretty much everything King has written, and like a lot of literary writers of my generation, I count him as an influence, in spite of his flaws. But wow, there is no pleasing the guy. The best-selling, wealthiest, most prolific, most loved writer of his generation, enjoyed by readers from all socioeconomic strata and education levels, and he still thinks the phonies are out to get him.

Well, fuck you, man. We literary whipper-snappers are not reading magazines to advance our careers, we're reading them because we like them. Just like you pretend to. You begged and begged to be admitted into the elite, highly selective, and completely imaginary company of the literati, and finally they gave in. And as soon as you strolled through the nonexistent door into their illusory super special secret smart people's club you told 'em they were heartless lame-o's. "I certainly don't want some fraidy-cat's writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called 'the true meaning of a pear'."

Guess what, Steve--neither do the rest of us. And enough quoting of Dylan and Springsteen, as part of your endless effort to prove once and for all how very down to earth and populist you are. If there's a hell for snobs, you will reside there for eternity, reading over and over the collected works of Barthes, Derrida, and Baudrillard.

And I'm still going to read your next book.

Eye-Fishing: Best American Poetry, 2007

I always feel insecure opening my piehole on the subject of poetry, because I'm only a sporadic reader of it. Plus, if it's funny I'm almost guaranteed to like it, so I suspect my taste is immature.

That said, I think this year's collection is an excellent one. It's edited by Heather McHugh, for whom I confess a soft spot: she contributed a really good poem to our little 'zine years ago. This volume is a pure reflection of McHugh's aesthetic (I thik I can say that): it's all about the language -- surprising, strange, funny, awkward language. The poems are beautiful in their interestingness, not because of beautiful subject matter. There are no poems about cattails or meadows.

When I read poetry, I let my eye jiggle over the page until my eye is caught on something, then I read that thing, read its line, go back to the beginning of the poem and read carefully. This is probably a bad way to read poetry, but since no one's paying me to do it, I'll just keep on doing it this way, thank you. Anyway, it sort of works. I find stuff I like, though I certainly miss things, too. Here are some of the poems that caught my eye in Best Am Po, '07:

Jeannette Allee's "Crimble of Staines," which is full of Britishy English and includes the lines: "Jolly ol' brims with againstness/"Anti-clockwise" -- "ante-natal if you will -- /"The crumbling masonry" of/ Your "anti-relationship structure" you once called it before/you went away."

Matthew Byrne's "Let Me Count the Ways," about loving and missing a mountain (I think I know exactly which mountain, too): "...how I wanted to conquer/ the mountain, scale the mountain, whether to hike it/ or jog it, whether to sleep on it, whether to shoot its fauna/ with camera or gun ... be the agent of the mountain, the lobbyist, the sculptor,/ the detractor, sermonizer, liege, jester, or militia,/ the one who unequivocally explains the mountain..."

Macgregor Card's haunted and dreamy "Duties of an English Foreign Secretary," which contains Wallacey Stevensy lines like, "Here's your forest, visitor/ -- soft pssst of the oar -- / will you hear a bird parlando/ necking at your door..." except maybe Stevens never wrote about necking.

Alan Shapiro's funny/tragic "Country Western Singer" which starts like this: "I used to feel like a new man/ After the day's first brew./ But then the new man I became/ Would need a tall one too." And this marvelous couplet: "I'll teach you salvation's just/ Salivation without the I."

Matthea Harvey's "From 'The Future of Terror/Terror of the Future' Series" is the poem (or two poems) I can least remove from my head -- post-apocalypse poetry that amid surreal images still manages to hold onto the thinnest of narrative threads: "From the gable window, we shot/ at what was left: gargoyles and garden gnomes" it begins. I will have to track down her other work.

Oh, shoot, there are too many, and as usual I start these posts too late. More later.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and New Stuff on the Litlab

Over at the Writers At Cornell Blog, you'll find an interview I conducted today with poet Gabrielle Calvocaressi, author of the collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she has been both a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She lives in Los Angeles. We discussed the long, apelike shadow of Wallace Stevens, porno drive-ins, and what precisely a prose poem thinks it's supposed to be. Gabby is funny as hell, and gave a great reading this afternoon--stop by and give it a look.

In addition, The Litlab is really cooking, with new weird stuff from William Walsh, Sharma Shields, Evan Sobel, Tim Reynolds, Adalena Kavanagh, and Dana Koster.

Roberto Bolaño: The Insufferable Gaucho

I like this New Yorker story--not new, but newly translated--by the author of The Savage Detectives; it has a lot in common with the book I'm trying to rewrite, and is sophisticated but simply told. I'm embarrassed to admit this is the only thing I've read of Bolaño's; now I will have to go get that novel.

In the story, a retired judge from Buenos Aires falls into idleness, and then, in the wake of the Argentinian economic collapse, retreats to the abandoned family ranch far off in the pampas. On the train ride there, the judge observes through the window a quartet of rabbits as it chases, catches, and eviscerates a fifth rabbit. The rabbits become a running theme, as the judge attempts to make a life for himself in the middle of nowhere; they are all that's left now that nobody is bothering to raise any cattle.

The judge forgets how to be urban and begins to lose his mind. At one point, his son, a writer, brings some friends to visit, including a book publisher. The judge and the publisher take a ride out to visit a cluster of decrepit buildings:

For two hours, the publisher held forth in praise of the idyllic, unspoiled life led, as he saw it, by the inhabitants of Capitan Jourdan. When he spotted the first of the ruined houses, he broke into a gallop, but it was much farther away than he had thought, and before he got there a rabbit leaped up and bit him on the neck.

Really?!!? Awesome. Bolaño's story is profoundly odd, but amiably presents itself as perfectly normal, unwrapping its peculiar pleasures dispassionately, in the language of a fairy tale. The judge eventually goes back to the city to see to his house, and briefly considers staying for good--but when a cocaine-addled weirdo accosts him in a cafe, the judge, instead of ignoring the man, stabs him in the groin, and soon decides to return to the ranch.

Bolaño is a pro at the slightly-strange detail, like a strip of rabbit jerky "literally seething with protein," or a meal "which they ate in a room full of old photographs." The story is like a painting with almost nothing on it, which by its sparseness magnifies what little is there.

Why It's a Bad Idea to Be a Writer

You will no doubt come to a bad and possibly picturesque end.

At his farewell cocktail party, [Sherwood] Anderson unknowingly swallowed a toothpick hidden within an hors d'oeuvre. The author sailed on, but the toothpick didn't, penetrating his intestines and causing peritonitis. Anderson became ill aboard ship and later died in a Panama hospital.

...

In 1925, while working at a restaurant in Washington D.C., [Langston] Hughes tucked a few of his poems under the dinner plate of then-reigning poet Vachel Lindsay. Lindsay shared the poems during his reading that night, and in the morning, Hughes was crowned Lindsay's new discovery, the "busboy poet."

Hughes went on to become one of America's most prolific authors. Lindsay, however, died six years later after drinking a bottle of Lysol.

From an article in Mental Floss (how I loathe that name) via CNN.com.

Writer Bars

I like drinking. Not drinking drinking--it didn't take many nights of that to convince me to swear it off for eternity, and besides, I can never stay up late enough to accomplish it--but the kind of drinking that is generally euphemized "social drinking," which I think means doing it with a bunch of other people and yukking it up.

Today a student of mine turned in a poem about my favorite bar in town, and as inspiration for his revision I offered him Richard Hugo's poem "The Only Bar In Dixon," which contains the great passage

This is home because some people
go to Perma and come back
from Perma saying Perma
is no fun.

Back in the day, Rhian and I and a few other people made the pilgrimage to Dixon--in fact, out to Perma and then back to Dixon--and enjoyed a can of some swill or other at the Dixon Bar. The story went that Hugo, James Welch, and J. D. Reed all went on an ice fishing trip, and stopped in Dixon on the way home, and visited the bar; each of them wrote a poem, and they were all published together in the New Yorker in 1970.

We didn't dig the only bar in Dixon, mostly because they didn't dig us there. The regulars knew why we were there and seemed eager to return to the slow work of killing themselves. Better was Al's and Vic's in Missoula, which, at the time we lived there, always seemed to contain mostly writers and football players. Not sure how that happened. We have fond memories of playing video poker, talking to our friends Fran and Lila who worked behind the bar, dodging the crazy dude who tried to bite that one guy's nose off that one time, and the dissipated remains of Miss Minnesota 1964. By the time we returned to Missoula for a visit in 2002, the writers seemed to have moved to The Union Club, four blocks away--a gentler place, with better food.

Ithaca doesn't really have a writer bar, maybe because most of the writers aren't really drinkers. It's kind of not in vogue. I am not sure where my students go, when they go out.

The thing I really fear is that the coffee shop has replaced the writers' bar. Yes, it's healthier (though only marginally, here, ever since New York state put the kibosh on smoking in bars), and more cheerful, and there are plenty of places to plug in your Macbook. And here in Ithaca we get to have the glorious Gimme to congregate at, in addition to The Great Satan--and far be it from me to denigrate the drink I most adore, the mighty joe.

BUT. Give me a double of Maker's, a grubby notebook, dim lighting, and a bunch of drunks humiliating themselves all around me, and I will give you a short story by closing time. Give me instead a cappuccino, a scone, and broad daylight, and I got nothin' but a shaky hand, a mild headache, and a need to pee.