JRL reading in NYC next Friday, 1/21

Hey readers--Rhian will be back with a real post tomorrow, but until then I thought I'd let you know I'm reading in New York a week from right this second, Friday January 21, 7pm, at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in Soho.  Here are the details.  I will be reading with the very funny Ben Greenman and stealth genius Lynne Tillman (whose magnificent freakout American Genius is not like any book I have ever read in my entire life), in an event dedicated to promoting the fifth issue of the excellent, excellent Electric Literature, the cover of which features a painting of some nude dude playing a video game.

This event is billed as "plus film and a DJ," so you never know, maybe there will be live dancing videogame nude dudes?  I certainly hope so.  Anyway, please come, and buy me nine drinks.  I dare you.

Great reading experiences

No, I'm not talking about your experiences reading your favorite books, but your favorite experiences reading books.  That is, the times you most enjoyed the act of reading.  I was thinking about this tonight because I've been wondering about the incredibly intense pleasure I feel reading thrillers, even when they're not especially good.  What's up with that?  I am already forgetting the one I read a couple of days ago (although the one I read yesterday will likely stick with me a while), but I get a delightful little chill thinking about the hours I spent lying on the sofa, in my pajamas, in the middle of the day, zooming through its mass-market pages before a roaring fire.  (Can you tell classes haven't started yet?)  I also recall the intense pleasure of hiding in our bedroom at our rental house at the Jersey shore one August, reading Black Dahlia Avenger.

Most of the books whose contents have stuck with me have become unmoored form the circumstances in which I read them.  Not all--Rhian pointed out that she has rather unpleasant memories of reading Anna Karenina: she was temping at the Teamsters' Union and reading at her desk.  I, on the other hand, read Anna K while sipping liquor in our friend's friend's log cabin (insofar as a four-bedroom rustic quasi-mansion with satellite dish and wet bar can be called a cabin) on the Madison River in southern Montana.  But I couldn't tell you what it was like reading, say, any Alice Munro story--the intensity of the fiction, I suppose, has overridden the real-world circumstances of my reading it.

I guess a book has to reach a certain threshold of quality before it can generate a memorable reading experience--one has to be into it, after all.  But in most circumstances, at least for me, it can't be too good, so good as to make the world around it disappear.  Aside from Anna K, I most strongly remember reading books that I read without much effort...the ones that seemed to flow into me.  Like, I suppose, sipping liquor in a log mansion.

Contrarianism

Here's something that's not going to go over well: I think it's just fine to take the n-word out of Huckleberry Finn. Not forever, not in the definitive version or the Norton edition or whatever -- but in a version for teaching in high schools: sure. Do it. The word's meaning has changed and become loaded with complicated baggage and what Twain meant is no longer obvious. The word gets too much attention, titillates some kids, shuts other kids down. Conversations about the book end up being about that word. Replace it with some asterisks and get on with it.

I taught school in my twenties, and I had classes that were 100% African-American, was sometimes the only white person in the room. Handing my students a text with that word in it would have made me feel sick, sad, and abusive. Sure, we could have talked about it, put it in its correct historical context, had a powerful conversation about who makes the language, who owns it, etc. But at the end of the day, what would the kids remember? Let's be realistic. Their teacher used the n-word.

It's possible that my views on the subject have to do with my unresolved, unexcavated, feelings about those teaching years. And maybe I don't think kids are ready for Mark Twain at all. Could be.

But I also don't think there's much wrong with "censorship" when it's done by an adult for children. I don't let my kids watch Quentin Tarantino, either. And no text is sacred. I mean, thought Jane Austen was sacred, but look: now it's full of zombies.

The groove and the slump

I had a mad, mad week of writing last week.  I've been working on a second draft of a novel-in-progress for some time, and figured I would complete this draft around the end of my winter break, which ends in two weeks.  My pace was steady and sure, and the work pretty much what I'd hoped it would be.

Then, a week and a half ago, I fell into a groove of some kind and spent the better part of the week writing, in bed, more or less all day long.  Even when I wasn't writing, I felt as though my head was exploding.  I would bounce ideas off of Rhian, and she would volley with some more ideas, and I would go pouring them all into the manuscript (and coffee into my body) starting at five the next morning.  I wasn't getting enough sleep and drinking too much in the evening in order to achieve it.  It was a totally unsustainable state of being--I think the last time I experienced something like it was as long ago as 2002 or 2003, when I was writing my fourth novel.  The difference this time, of course, was that I knew about, and felt intensely the inevitability of, the crash to come.

I finished the draft Saturday morning and sent it out to my usual second-draft readers.  I have no idea if anything I just wrote is any good.  But man, am I in a slump now.  I did a month's worth of work in a week, and now I doubt I'll be able to do anything useful with the rest of the month I should have spent writing.

I wonder about these rhythms--if they're healthy to indulge, in the long run, or damaging to the kind of emotional equilibrium that a steady and productive writer needs for a fairly successful career.  I'm not a big believer in "inspiration"--or, rather, I doubt that it is nearly as valuable as it is generally given credit for.  Most of my best stuff, even if it was initially the product of inspiration, was only made readable through careful, calculated editing, done alone or with others' help.

At the moment, even in the depths of the slump, I can't say I really miss the intensity of last week.  Rather, I miss the sober, gradual progress of the week before that.  That's what I want back now.

Quitting is Good?

This post on Lifehacker -- "Create Better Things by Abandoning Crap and Focusing on the Good Stuff" -- might make a person feel slightly better about all the the unfinished work in her desk drawer. Ira Glass talks about how, in the making of his radio show, he has to sort through tons of ideas and try them out in order to find a single good one:



Killing the bad stuff, he says, is just as important as doing good stuff. I agree -- "quitting" is awfully stigmatized, but sometimes it's the right course. Sometimes your work is bad, and you're just wasting time pounding your head against its ugly hide.

However. As someone points out in the Lifehacker comments, giving up too soon really is a bigger problem for most artists. The trick is knowing what's worth finishing and what isn't. Ira Glass doesn't have to worry about that. It's not hard to tell when a radio story put together by a group of people isn't working. It's much harder to know when it's the novel you've been working on alone for five years. And sometimes you have to finish a thing before its true crappiness -- or greatness -- comes out.

And sometimes the crappiness of a project doesn't even matter. It's just the thing you have to do right now, and so you do it.

How do you know if your work is worth finishing?

The current state of self-publishing

Our friend Jason Lewis, an Iowa Workshop grad and author of the tech blog Stuff I Don't Need, recently wrote a post about his novel The Fourteenth Colony,

...that took me five years to write, and has been done since November 2009. And by done, I mean that I wrote six drafts of it (a few completely from scratch) and when I put the final period on the last draft, the book was the book that I wanted it to be, maybe not perfect, but the book I wanted to write.

He's got an agent, and the agent sent the book around, and it didn't sell.  And now he is asking himself the very reasonable question of whether it is time to self-publish.  Or, specifically,

in a world where the publishing industry is failing according to many and the means of production are available at a high level to everyone, should I release my book into the world to see how it fares and move on with my new projects, or is there a reason to keep pounding away at the traditional structure in the hopes of acceptance?

And that is a very good question.  I suspect that Jason has many novels in him, and eventually one of them is bound to find a home in the conventional publishing world.  What it comes down to, though, is whether the stigma of self-publication harms the future chances of a new writer in that world.

There was a time when one might confidently say that yes, it would.  But I'm not sure it does anymore, as the link between good writing and institutional stewardship of it grows weaker and weaker.  And it's becoming possible to question, quite reasonably, what value that world has in the current climate of enthusiastic DIY publication and distribution.  People are already getting used to the idea that small presses are as legitimate as their commerical counterparts; the major awards have been trending towards the indies for several years.  If small presses are the new big houses, then who's to say that going it alone might soon be the new small press?  We have a few readers who've been going it alone fairly successfully for some time...I wonder if any of you are thinking of following suit, and how you're choosing to do it.

Note: the photo is of Jason's last record as Sad Iron Music, available for download on his website--it's a good album, check it out.

Writing to Music

JRL and I are opposites in many, many ways. In practically every way, actually. One big difference is: I have to listen to music when I'm writing. He can't.

The main reason I listen to music is to block out ambient sounds. Like: cars rumbling past and potentially turning into our driveway. Mice in the walls. Other mice being chased by our cat, and in need of rescue. Family members saying interesting things on the phone. The heater turning on and off. Why does it do that? Wind slapping the screen door. Oh, anything.

But the other reason is just because music seems to calm my brain waves. I'm not sure there's anything to that, but you know.

I listen to music that has no words, or if it has words, is so familiar to me that I can ignore them. I like classical music a lot, Debussy, Satie, Mendelssohn, Scriabin, and Phillip Glass. One morning my clock radio alarm went off (on?) and began playing the third movement of Satie's Gnossiennes, and it infiltrated my dreams. That music ended up being the secret inner sound track to my novel. I didn't actually mention Satie in the book -- I really don't like it when writers put their inner soundtracks into their writing. That stuff is too personal.

Another time I was listening to an instrumental group called Tulsa Drone, and that inspired a half a novel. But then the book got too creepy and I abandoned it. I blame the music! (Not really. I still like them.)

Anyway, it seems like the music the writer is listening to while writing ends up in the work in all sorts of ways... but the reader never hears it or sees evidence of it. Which is kind of strange.

I'd love recommendations for good writing music.

C

Well, I read it, but I am not sure what to think.  For one thing, on the surface, it feels as though it couldn't possibly be written by the same guy.  But then again, there's no one else who could have written it.  It is, like Remainder, a strange book masquerading as a normal one.  Both books are about connections, metaphors, and the power of the mind to create its own worlds.  Both contain the smell of cordite, and narrators who fall into trances and mishear what other people are saying.

C is an episodic bildungsroman about Serge Carrefax, son of the founder of a school for the deaf, brother of a suicide, casual scientist, possible sociopath.  The episodes in question are variations on a theme, or rather on themes: networks, communication, the complexity and interplay among various human endeavors.  There is no plot, other than the wandering course of Serge's life: idyllic childhood, tragic loss, strange illness, war experience, fateful research trip.  What happens here isn't the point, though--the theme is what it's all about, and everything is about the theme.

McCarthy is riffing here, in other words.  This is something he can do--the writing is spectacular, for the most part.  The novel is spilling over with historical research about the technology of the early twentieth century; characters routinely predict the future of communication here, or traffic in the kind of metaphors we use today to describe computers and the internet.  The characters are, in the end, entirely subservient to these ideas and historical details; they're performers putting on a play about what Tom McCarthy is interested in.  (And yes--there is a play within this play, a pageant performed by the deaf chilrden who, in one of the book's central ironies, can't hear themselves speak.)

This might sound cold and pretentious; in fact the book is, at times, utterly absorbing and quite moving.  Certain scenes are evoked with uncanny beauty, as when the child Serge witnesses a sexual tryst that will color his erotic experiences for the rest of his life; or when his plane crashes in no man's land, and a plague of birds arrives to peck at the blasted remains of his compatriots; or when he and a lover screw upon a pile of mummies.  But the mode of writing is detached; point of view is fluid, and one feels as though the book does not belong to the characters, but to the writer and reader.

I never fully owned it, personally.  The last section is a true disappointment--it consists almost entirely of expository dialogue, and ends in a delirious virtuoso recapitulation of every symbol and metaphor in the novel--but nevertheless has a certain mad rigor.  It's impressively bizarre and not really successful, like most things that I admire.  I recommend the book with reservations, but have reservations about my reservations.  I will most certainly read the next one, and all the ones after that.

Metaphors

I love metaphors in fiction -- the funnier, the crazier, the more surprisingly apt, the better. For instance: in Elizabeth McCracken's story "Some Have Entertained Angels Unawares," a character is as "pale and bitter as aspirin," and another as "chinless and gloomy as a clarinet," and children sleep "beneath the clasped hands of the roof" (which I think I stole once; sorry, Elizabeth). In Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It, outlandish, perfect metaphors are everywhere. On a single half page I found a person who smelled "like a sickroom quilt that needed airing," and ice that makes "a sound like a nail being wrenched from a board," then breaks "like the surface of a vast aboriginal egg." (By metaphor I'm referring to similes and metaphors, just to be clear.)

There are people who don't like this kind of literary whimsy, but I don't understand that. However, a writer friend of ours recently said something that made me stop and think. A writer should make sure a metaphor does at least two things, he said. A metaphor that's just a metaphor, that just serves to compare a thing to another thing, is not good enough. Metaphors should really work. The chosen metaphor should carry out the theme, or refer to something in a character's past, or bring out something hidden, or something. Otherwise, they're distracting flotsam.

This, I think, is an example of a rule that could very well improve the writing, certainly make it more rigorous and disciplined. However, in the above examples, the aspirin, the clarinet, and the nail would all have to go. The clasped hands and the egg would probably get to stay, because they resonate with the works' themes.

But I like all of them, and in my ideal world they would all get to stay, even if aspirin really does nothing more than sit there being pale and bitter. But I like junk shops, I like things not to match, and I think fiction should be full of surprises.

Where do you stand? Any examples of good, or, even better, bad metaphors?

What happened to Borders?

I was in the local Borders the other day, helping my kids cash in some gift cards, and was kind of shocked at the state the place was in.  The inventory computers were grimy, old, and slow, and couldn't tell you if books were in stock.  A book we were looking for showed two on hand but the bookseller couldn't find it.  The CD shelves were almost completely empty, and the place was understaffed.

I worked at the Borders in Madison, Wisconsin in 1992.  It was great--in those days, the staff of a new store was hired before construction was finished, and the booksellers themselves assembled the shelves and unloaded the books from the trucks.  Everyone had a section they were the expert on (mine was cooking), so somebody could always, always find a book.

Nowadays, Borders is definitely number three, after Amazon and B&N--or four, really, if you count Wal-Mart.  They have the shittiest e-reader, and it looks like they're having liquidity problems.  So what happened?  Back in the day, they were the "cool" chain; B&N was busy seeming to overextend itself, and provided a much chillier, more generic experience.  Now, Borders feels like a chain on its way out.

In the end, I'm not invested in any of the chains...I do still prefer the small independent bookstore experience to a big box.  (If I want generic and commercial, I'd much rather order from Amazon, who will also sell me some camera lenses and a waffle maker, than drive down to the commercial strip for B&N or to the mall for Borders.)

But...what happened?  How'd Borders go wrong?

Reading Out Loud

Recently I've noticed we aren't reading out loud to our kids anymore. They still enjoy it, and we still have time, but I've kind of run out things I want to read them. The books we've read over the years are mostly ones I loved as a kid; the last one I chose was The Dark is Rising, which was my favorite when I was 11 or so. But you know what? I didn't like it this time around, and neither did my kids. It was a lot of atmospherics, and the story didn't really make sense. My kids are savvier than I was.

That last experience put me off a little bit, and I'm wondering whether the read-aloud era should come to an end, or if I should keep it going until the kids tell me to stop. When we're all really into the book, it's enormous fun. John had a good time with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels, and we all loved The True Meaning of Smekday, which I found at the bookstore and bought on a whim. So I know more good books are out there, though it does feel like we've read all the obvious ones. And it's just a nicer way to end the day than a session of Minecraft and Failblog.

I'm not a holy roller about the power of reading aloud. I know it's a good thing, but if the kids or parents don't enjoy it, I don't think anyone's doomed to a life of illiteracy and general unhappiness. And as it gets harder and harder to find a book that pleases the kid who doesn't like fantasy ("girls with winter coats and dragons laying eggs"), the one who likes only fantasy, and the overly-picky mother... I wonder if I should let the ritual go.

What do you think? Were you read to? Recommendations? Is it weird to read to teenagers, or what?

Who's using Scrivener?

Rhian's gonna kill me ("Not another tech post!") but I really am curious if any of our readers are using Scrivener, the dedicated word processor for fiction writers.  This used to be a Mac-only affair, but a Windows version is now in beta, and anyway I've switched to a Mac laptop for my writing.  (Sorry, Ubuntu, those were good years.)

My awareness of this app comes at a time when I have been quite vexed by the problem of re-organizing a book that contains dozens of small chapters, which I am doing now.  In a conventional word processor (in my case, OpenOffice.org), this is a really annoying task.  In Scrivener, you can assign each chapter a note card, on which you can type a summary of the chapter; then, on a "corkboard" screen, you can rearrange the cards at will.  When you're finished, you can export the whole thing as a unified .doc or .odt.

I think it's too late for this novel, but I may switch over for the next.  If any of you are Scrivenists, please share your thoughts.

Reading and Writing Resolutions

I love resolutions so much I make them twice a year: at New Year's, then again in June, on my birthday. Sometimes I keep them and sometimes I don't, and I often think I should give up the whole stupid idea of self-improvement, but I'm helplessly drawn to new goals and new visions of my life. So, this year I want to fill in some awkward gaps in my reading. I'm thinking of Jane Austen (I'm so tired of not getting the references) and War and Peace. People say that new translation is pretty great.

As for writing, I don't know. I've had trouble finishing things for a Very Long Time; a reasonable goal would be to finish anything. But -- is finishing anything really the point? Writing for the sake of writing -- why bother? If I don't have anything worth finishing, anything that drives me to finish it, maybe I should just shut up. It's not like there aren't enough books in the world. I've seen them!

So maybe a better goal would be something like, Find a story that makes me want to finish it. Good luck with that, I tell myself.

Anyway, do you do this?? What are your goals, resolutions, reasons for not doing resolutions, or what have you?

Concentration

I was trying to start reading a book the other night (Tom McCarthy's C, BTW, and so far it is excellent, and completely different from Remainder), and found that, over half an hour, I read the first few pages about eight times.  It isn't that it wasn't interesting, it was that I couldn't concentrate.  At all.

I didn't used to think this when I was younger, but I now believe that concentration is hard.  And I am not one of those people who think that the distractions of modern life etc etc blah blah.  I think human beings are naturally distractable.  And that the act of reading a novel requires skills that have to be acquired in life, and can be temporarily lost.

Think about what a novel is asking us for: to switch off all of our perceptive organs and give ourselves over, entirely, to the consciousness of imaginary people.  It is (as I suggested in the comments of the previous post) like sex.  And who can blame us for not always being in the mood?  Also like sex, it is a rare and transcendent pleasure, and one that gets all tangled up with our sense of ourselves.  It's complicated.

Sometimes, when I have something I really really really want to read, like this McCarthy book, or a new Alice Munro story in the New Yorker, I have to wait until the perfect moment to read it, so that I don't blow it--ruin my experience of it with inadequate concentration.  As a result, I occasionally forget to read these things entirely, while things I don't give a crap about, I dispatch right away.

And writing?  Forget about it.  These days, I can only write first thing in the morning.  Anything past 9am, my mind has turned to garbage.  Maybe someday I'll have to do my reading then, too.  Until that time, it's catch as catch can.

I ♥ Books

Thanks to WS reader Pale Ramon for this link to a Susan Orlean blog post about loving books -- all kinds of books, even or especially trashy thrillers that keep money moving in the book world. I agree with her. I love to see people reading -- reading anything. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in liking some books and hating others, and there's nothing wrong with that. But put me on the side of books in general.

Here's a link to more Andre Kertesz photographs of people reading.