An interview with Téa Obreht

For a while now I haven't been cross-posting with the Writers At Cornell podcast blog that I maintain--W6 deserves its own posts, I decided. (As a result, you might have missed interviews with Paul Muldoon and Billy Collins, among others, so do stop by there.) But I want to make an exception today for my former student Téa Obreht, whose novel The Tiger's Wife is due out in the spring, and who is the youngest member of this year's New Yorker "20 Under 40" lineup. The interview is sort of embarrassingly informal--honestly, I am a little bit in awe of my ludicrously talented student--but I'm delighted to get to file an early dispatch from what will doubtless be a mini-industry in Téa Obreht media coverage. The interview is about 20 minutes long, and should already be waiting on your iTunes if you are a subscriber to the podcast.

In other news, blogging on the iPad is a PITA. Fetching an image alone is absurdly time-consuming, and when you come back to your tab in Safari, all the forms have been refreshed. Blogger needs a tablet interface, eh?

Cloud Atlas

People have been recommending this book to me for so long that it seemed inevitable that I would never get around to it. But then last fall my friend Edward forcibly lent me a copy--I found it in my mailbox at work--and, some months later, another friend spent twenty minutes of a car trip telling me how good it was. So I went to my office, got the book, and dug in.

The pleasures of this novel are many, as are my qualms about it. But the pleasures are great and the qualms are petty. It's really quite a masterful piece of work, with all of the qualifications that word suggests...an unusual project of an unusual writer.

In case you haven't had the pleasure, Cloud Atlas is essentially a series of nested novellas spanning several hundred years, from a recognizable past to a dystopian future. The novellas are connected in clever ways--primarily by theme, but also (successfully) by some interesting inter-textual shenanigans and (not so successfully) a series of identical birthmarks. Each novella is written in a drastically different style--there's a journal, a series of letters, a pulp mystery, a kind of neo-gothic comedy, a sci-fi story, and...well, I won't even bother trying to describe the last one. The stories are arranged in a kind of pyramid, each but the final one split into two, so that you get the first half of every story first, moving forward through time, and then the second half as you return to the past.

I tried to resist this novel: it is at times too didactic (especially the ending), too tricky, too virtuosic. But Mitchell is so good. I'm not terribly wild about the journal or mystery sections, but even those are executed with tremendous skill; the writer's ability to inhabit different characters, historical situations, and styles of language is simply incredible. Reading him, I kept hearing that line from Charles Baxter's "Gryphon," where the narrator is scolded by his friend for attempting to ape their wildly inventive teacher: "Don't you try to do it. You'll just sound like a jerk." It's hard for a writer to read this book--at times, Mitchell seems like a different species of creature entirely.

I guess my primary complaint with this novel is that it's all so arbitrary--the structure just seems like an excuse for Mitchell to show off his chops. But hell--I enjoyed pretty much every second of it, so who am I to complain? He's got a new one out, and a bunch of others I haven't read, so I'm going to dive in and see if Mitchell doesn't end up becoming my favorite new superhuman writer.

Ideas for the storage and display of books

First off, a quick note on my return from hiatus--my thanks to all of my friends, peers, students and colleagues at the Colgate Writers' Conference, especially W6 commenters Hope and Gallagher, who workshopped their novels-in-progress with me--it was great fun, and the talks especially were better than ever this year. (They should be hitting YouTube shortly and I will repost mine here.) Hope to see you all again in 2011.

So there you have it--Rhian's office is clean. Walking into it is like walking into an orderly mind--I am jealous, and now have to go back into my studioffice and pick up all the microphone cables and other crap the floor is covered with.

One thing we discovered as Rhian started putting away the many stacks of books that used to be sitting on her floor: we don't have enough bookcases. I don't know how this is possible, I just installed a new one last year, but it's already full. We do get rid of books now and again, and I bring some to my office at school, but honestly--we need some ideas for what to do with them all.

Generally we get our bookcases at the Unfinished Furniture Store on the west side. (I think it's called something else now actually.) But the house ends up with something of a college-dorm feel, as a result. I have been trolling the internet for ideas and come up with a few--building bookshelves into staircases, recessing walls and building shelves in between studs. In our old house, we had one room with a single bookshelf up above the window frames, going around three walls--that was cool, and maybe I can build something like it again here. I could also completely transform one windowed wall of my room, the one beside my desk.

This is particularly important to me now that I have read four or five books on the iPad and found the experience surprisingly lacking. It isn't the iPad, which is fairly pleasant to use. Rather, it is the apathetic, ham-handed execution of the ebook medium in the hands of major publishers. Ugly design, formatting errors, awkward layout...one senses that they are just tossing shit up there as fast as they can to cash in on the rush.

The tech is not mature, in other words. And the paper book still feels great. So let's hear your storage ideas.

Phonebook Names

So I'm actually cleaning my office. It's a huge undertaking: there's an unpacked box in the corner from our move three years ago, on top of which I've been mounding stuff that needs to be filed. And other stuff -- a paper glacier. So the office has never really been "clean." It feels pathological. When it's done I'm going to be a whole new person -- maybe someone who actually finishes writing the novels she starts!

Among other things, I found a list of excellent names. At first I thought I made them up, but no: I could not have invented such great names. I actually found them in the Missoula, MT, phonebook. I've always spent a lot of time reading phonebooks. One day, there won't be any phonebooks anymore, so we should celebrate them while we can!

James Snoozy
Vernon Slippy
Paul Tissue
Fern Tiger
Priscilla Wig
E. Warmflash
Amy Brokenleg
Boyd Booze
N. Eyepopper
Andrew Face
Ace Feek
Elaine Ee
E. T. Bob Sleem
Spanky Scrunchly

I still can't believe N. Eyepopper. Really, the Ithaca phonebook just can't compete.

Please share names you've found in phonebooks!

zOMG USB typewriter!

I gave up DIY electronics a couple years ago...it was eating up too much of my time. But I have been slowly getting sucked back in. Soldering a few cables here and there...and then a simple kit...and recently I found myself buying new batteries for my multimeter and thumbing droolingly through the Mouser catalog.

Well, here's a DIY project (via Engadget) that actually has something to do with my job for a change. Adding USB functuality to a manual typewriter.


$75 for the kit...wow, I am so doing it. We happen to have two identical Smith-Corona portables...I may try modding one, and if I fall back in love with it, will try to find somebody to service the other and get it working normally again. This appeals to me in the same way that sticking a lens from 1938 onto a digital camera from 2006 appeals to me. Not steampunk--just anti-obsolescence.

Electric Literature's iPad app

Hey, look--Electric Literature, the literary magazine I hyped here in the past for their new-media savvy (they offer a variety of formats, including print, pdf, and EPUB), has committed a profound act of nerudition: they've upgraded their free iPhone app for iPad. Needless to say, I downloaded it right quick.

The app is a mite half-baked so far--you of course still must pay to unlock the three (so far) issues of the magazine, and I can't quite yet figure out how to apply my paid subscription to this interface. But there is some cool free content, with plans to make the experience more multimedia. (One of EL's innovations is commissioning an arty video for every story the publish; these are currently available on their web site.) I've said here that I think the iPad will be a great way to read magazine content someday (especially once it inherits the new iPhone's insanely high-resolution display), and I'm glad to see EL getting out in front of this trend. (And not just because I've got a story, "Hibachi," coming out in I believe the next issue.)

Literary chick lit: it's real!

For a little while back in the nineties I had the same publisher as Jennifer Belle (or as her website puts it, "bestselling author Jennifer Belle"), and my then-editor sent me a copy of Going Down, her first book. This is before there really was a thing called chick lit, but my editor did that thing people do routinely now when they give each other volumes of the stuff--she kind of apologized for it.

No need for apologies--the book was funny, and cleverly written. It was about a college student earning money as a prostitute. I didn't pay much attention to Belle's career after that, but Rhian recently got her hands on the new one, The Seven-Year Bitch, which I think is the worst title in the history of ever--but Rhian loved it and went to the library for more. This led me to read her third novel, Little Stalker.

Little Stalker is--well, what can I say, it's a romance. But it's a two-blowjob romance, the first of which culminates with the protagonist vomiting on her boyfriend's penis; the second of which is performed on a man in his sixties by a 12-year-old girl. So, you know, Emma this is not. But the book is simply hilarious. Belle is wonderful at self-disgust, social awkwardness, and family dysfunction--she writes here about very familiar but never-written-about relationship nuances--the casual cruelties of people in love, the disgustingness of intimacy, and weird little rules couples invent for one another without even realizing they do it.

Our literate culture has more or less accepted the idea that a crime novel, or even a science fiction novel, might well be of lasting artistic value. But I don't think romance has enjoyed this relationship with readers yet. Maybe, generally speaking, it doesn't deserve it. But Belle is doing something different here, something odd, slightly gross, and slyly ambitious. The rest of the chick lit world (if there even is such a thing, outside of publishers' marketing departments) ought to pay attention.

Ward Six List of Ten Over 80

Ward Six is proud to announce its TEN OVER 80: WRITERS TO GO BACK AND READ list. All the following writers will turn 80 or more this year, and all have been kicking ass for longer than we have been alive:

JOHN BARTH: I read The End of the Road the summer I was 18. It made me understand how fully bizarre being an adult was going to be. Hurray! In the late 60's he wrote an article called "The Literature of Exhaustion," which kind of predicted the end of the novel. But then he found himself continuing to write novels. His latest book of fiction, The Development, a collection of linked stories, came out in 2008.

BEVERLY CLEARY: She is 94 and still writing! I can't decide if I like the Ralph the Mouse books or the Ramona ones better.

EVAN S. CONNELL: This guy is tragically under-read. Mrs. Bridge was republished earlier this year; it and Mr. Bridge are sad and funny character sketches. Also wonderful is The Connoisseur and his several collections of essays, including The White Lantern and A Long Desire.

J. P. DONLEAVY: Also under-read! And another author I read when I was a teenager. Donleavy is a little like an Irish-American Richard Brautigan, only better. Or maybe a bit like Barthelme. I keep his story collection Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule on my desk, and am still constantly surprised by what I find when I open it. Here's the first paragraph of "The Mad Molecule":

I woke on that terrible day and mixed the shredded apple in my raw porridge oats and poured on the cream. I know what's good for me. I put on the shoes with the golfer's soles, walked silently down the stairs and out into a great blue sky and along the river's warm sweet smell.

I wish more writers these days dared to be so weird.

PAULA FOX: I read Desperate Characters in the mid-nineties because Jonathan Franzen wrote about finding it at Yaddo and how it's a perfect short novel. It is. She's had an interesting life and has written two memoirs. Also, the daughter she gave up for adoption gave birth to Courtney Love.

WILLIAM GASS: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is a collection of five strange and linguistically brilliant short stories. Here's a bit from "Icicles":

Glick was holding a pen in his teeth like a pirate. It was a green pen and it made Fender think: pickle. Glick nodded briefly at Fender who was feeling his way now through an office unnaturally dark and full of lurking obstacles. Goodness but it's bright outside, he said, his voice false as a wig, which both surprised and annoyed him, since it was a small thing to have said, and he'd certainly meant it. The typewriter was repeating a letter -- likely x.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is the only thing I've read of his, but now I think I need to read the rest of his smallish oeuvre.

HARPER LEE: Well, you probably don't need to go back and read her, because she has to be the most thoroughly read writer in America. But I wanted to mention her, because she's still alive, and, unless she's been secretly storing away manuscripts, she's the Patron Saint of Blocked Writers. She wrote our motto: "It's better to be silent than to be a fool." God bless her.

ELMORE LEONARD: Did you know he's going to be 85 this year? I didn't. But I'm not going to say anything about him; JRL wrote about him here.

DORIS LESSING: I admit that The Golden Notebook was a bit much for me, but I loved The Summer Before the Dark, which is about a housewife who leaves her family and falls in with a group of strange younger people. Also, I liked The Fifth Child, which is about a family who gives birth to a kind of throw-back Neander-child. When I first read it, it was horrifying; having had a couple of boys myself since then, the kid in the book doesn't seem so bad. I love it that when was told she won the Nobel Prize, she apparently said, "Oh, Christ... I couldn't care less."

ALISON LURIE: Alison is my personal idol. Her books are all funny, sharp-eyed, and slightly wicked. She's hugely productive and writes every day. I want to be her.

Some of my favorites of hers are: The War Between the Tates, The Nowhere City, Real People, Truth and Consequences, and Familiar Spirits, her memoir about her friendship with David Jackson and James Merrill and their experimentation with the Ouija board.

Two small delights from the New York Times

First off, a small example of gratuitous literary flair from an unexpected source: a spokesman for the food conglomerate Cargill.

“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”

The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

I had to double-check the masthead to make sure I wasn't reading The Onion. Who is this guy? Could it be that this quote represents a creative repurposing of an MFA in creative writing? In any event, this fellow managed to enhance the flavor of an otherwise completely pointless article.

The other little surprise is that Verlyn Klinkenborg has an iPad, and is using it to read books. Who knew? One assumed that he sent his editorials in on bits of birch bark. Kidding aside, though, I think he's exactly right. I, too, am reading the new Stieg Larsson (that doesn't need a hyperlink, right?) on the iPad, and am noticing the same damned things about the experience that Klinkenborg does. As I see it, the e-book needs two things, both easily achievable (at least, technologically speaking): one, a new standard for .mobi and EPUB that will allow more elaborate and creative book design. I don't want all my books to look the same way. And two, the ability to lend. Say, for a week. You "give" your ebook to somebody else. During that time, it is not available in your account. A week later (or when your friend clicks the "return" button) it snaps back into your account. Simple.

I believe B&N's reader already has a version of this latter tech--anybody here got a Nook? Does the lending thing actually work?

New Franzen story

So what do you all think of this new Jonathan Franzen piece in the New Yorker? I assume it's a novel excerpt from his forthcoming (fall) book.

Personally, I like it a lot. I love the way Franzen infuses ordinariness with such nervous energy...the characters feel familiar and highly specific at the same time. He is very good at hapless people, people who are weird but not weird enough to get any kind of credit for it. And lately, perhaps because my kids are getting older, perhaps because of the time I spend teaching, I have really been enjoying reading and writing stories about teenagers.

There is a point to this post, though, and it's to complain about the one thing I don't like about this story. (Spoiler coming, so stop reading if you care.) As soon as the protagonist, Patty, is raped, and her mother reacts the way she does, the end of the story becomes a foregone conclusion. Patty is going to cave into her family's wishes and not press charges. I begged Franzen, in my head, to end the story differently, but no dice.

It isn't just that I wanted to see the girl fight--though that is certainly so. It's that this is such an overly familiar plot and character device: the character who chooses inaction, and whose emotions go unexpressed, only to emerge transformed somewhere else. Maybe this is why I favor crime fiction these days, even when it isn't written so well--to read about characters who do stuff. We literary writers rely heavily, too heavily I think, on the use of thwarted desires and suppressed impulses to move our characters. We populate our stories with losers, misfits, and weirdos. We encourage our readers to get their nerd on--and maybe that place is getting a little too comfortable for my generation of writers. Maybe we've wrung a little too much sympathy out of our readers.

I'm not trying to get on Franzen's case here, in part because this character is probably much more nuanced in the novel, in part because I do love to read his take on these emotions and situations. But, as I've said many times, the failings that bother me in other writers are always the ones I myself am most guilty of. That novel I junked last year didn't work mostly because the protagonist was a squirrely, thwarted, "lovable" dipshit. Franzen is good at this kind of character, but I've gotta move on.

Story party

Rhian had a really good idea a couple of months back--she would throw me a 40th birthday party, and insist that people bring, in lieu of gifts, a short anecdote to tell. The party was last night, and the stories were great. And luckily people brought booze, too.

The interesting thing was, only a handful of the people invited were writers, and all but two of them left before the stories got started. Almost everybody was a Narrative Nonprofessional. And the story hour was easily as riveting as a good episode of The Moth or This American Life. We had a guy hanging on for dear life all night on a sheer rock face while standing on one foot. We had an ornithologist lost in Alaska, mistaken for a lesbian, and reeking of gasoline. We had a summer job at a junkyard, a harrowing visit to Palestine, a rock star forgetting all his songs, and a Hungarian epistolary lunatic. Some of these people, you would ordinarily have to twist their arm to get three words out of them--yet, given the opportunity to tell a great story, they had no trouble at all.

I'm not going to make a case here for the universality of narrative, yada yada yada. Maybe I'm only attracted to potential friends who are good entertainment. But I am shocked at how much more interesting everyone is than they think they are.

Of course, it was a special occasion--asked to do this weekly, a lot of people would probably balk. But maybe this is something everyone ought to do every few years--go over somebody's house, get a little drunk, and testify. We recommend you try it.

Photo: Rhian cooked all the food, out of Andrew Sean Greer's guerilla party guide Cooking For The Criminally Insane. You can count on a future favorite-obscure-cookbook post from one of us.

Take a novel workshop with JRL

A quick post here, for quick consideration. There are still a couple of spaces open for the novel workshop I am teaching at this summer's Colgate Writers' Conference, June 20-26. If any W6 readers have a bit of extra dough, a decent-sized novel chunk, and a hankering for a fun week of litty shenanigans in the rolling hills of upstate New York, drop me an note, jrobertlennon at gmail, and I will refer you to the organizers. Thanks!

The shape of a career

At the moment I am simultaneously working on two magazine articles, each requiring me to assess not just a book, but (briefly) a writer's entire career. The writers in question are both prominent, both widely published, read, and appreciated. And yet neither, I think, enjoys a full appreciation of their career--its real scope, with all its twists and turns, its eccentricities intact.

In one case, the writer had one smash hit, and one notorious book everyone hates. In the other, the writer has somehow become known as the author of one really serious book that gets taught a lot in college classes, and a bunch of other stuff generally thought to be a little bit frivolous. But close readings of each (hell, not even that close) reveals these reputations to be woefully inadequate. Both writers are much more interesting than their hits and bombs would suggest. Indeed, the famous books aren't even the best ones, and the bombs are the most interesting of all. (We should all have such bombs.)

It's one thing to read, say, a novel closely. That's the least you should do. But you don't really understand a novel fully until you've examined its context--its place in a stream of developing themes, ideas, and stylistic motifs. I am actually a little bit embarrassed not to have already noticed what I'm noticing now about these writers. They are both better, broader, and stranger than I thought.

The tragedy of all this is that a writer has no control over any of it. It's bad enough that we can never quite get a novel right--try getting an entire life right! As for these two, they are still writing--quite vigorously, in fact--which complicates things even further. They are moving targets.

Perhaps the writer whose career can be neatly summarized, or already is, has already failed. Maybe it's the mystery and misdirection that makes them interesting. Or maybe that's just the thesis that will keep me writing about them.

image: "Book Cell" by Matej Krén. Click for link.

Free e-book: JRL's Video Game Hints, Tricks, And Cheats

OK, folks, here it is: version 1.0 of my e-book, Video Game Hints, Tricks, And Cheats: Essays, Exercises, Riffs, Gags, And Other Incidental Writings. You can download it at my website in either EPUB or pdf formats. I suspect the EPUB is only really suitable for iPad at the moment; I tried it on a couple of computer-based readers (Adobe Digital Editions and some Linux thing) and the formatting ranged from Almost Right to Not Right At All. But it looks good on the iPad for sure. To install it on iPad, download into your computer's e-books folder, drag into iTunes, and sync. The book will appear on your iBooks shelf. (You can't download EPUB directly from Safari to iBooks yet.)

The pdf, on the other hand, will look good on whatever will display a pdf, but you won't get to do the neat little webby shenanigans you can with EPUB, like changing the font and text size. Eventually I will buy InDesign CS5 and make the EPUB universally readable, but that's the future.

The book itself is a collection of random, mostly comic writing from the past dozen years, including pieces published in Harper's, Granta, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Most of the pieces here are available on the "Read Online" section of my website, but quite a few have never been seen before.

Enjoy!

The e-book and definitiveness

Okay, I'm coming pretty close now to having my free e-book ready to go. I've been grappling with the kind of stuff experienced copyeditors can do in their sleep--consistency of punctuation, formatting, and style--and if I know myself well, I know that soon I will have to just throw up my hands and put it out there.

This got me thinking, though. Unlike every other thing I have ever published in my entire life, what I put up for download doesn't have to be a definitive edition. Indeed, if a writer has sole control of a work, and the work can be updated and uploaded at will with a few mouse clicks, then is there really any justification for declaring it to be finished?

Well--sure. As I've written before (indeed, in an essay that will be in the e-book called "Limping To The Finish"), one declares things finished in order not to spend the rest of one's life agonizing over them. And readers, of course, don't want the novel they're reading to change as they read it (see Stanislaw Lem, "Vestrand's Extelopedia in 44 Magnetomes"); they want to enjoy a complete, fully realized work. At least most of them do. I do.

But as this work is a loose collection of incidental writing, a genre I intend to continue writing in, and which is unlikely to appeal to a print publisher, why should it be definitive? Indeed, it's as much like a piece of software as it is a book. I could update it occasionally in new editions--or I could update it constantly, with version numbers. If I want to keep thinking about it every day for the rest of my life, that is.

Which of course I don't. But I do like the version numbers idea. I doubt I am riding a wave that will destroy definitiveness forever, but I do think that some books, in this new format, will benefit from having looser standards for completion, perhaps mine among them.