While I Have Not Yet Read Rachel Cusk, She Intrigues Me

 So, I took some time to read her interview of Ira Sachs, I’m Only Interested in the Real: A Conversation Between Rachel Cusk and Ira Sachs. Only it was Sachs who made go "Oh, yeah."

I think what hurts is often the encounter with capitalism and all its tangents, in the sense that you’re making something that’s deeply personal, and then it arrives and it becomes a commodity, and that’s by nature painful. Specifically, it’s like encountering two bodies—you have the critical body and you have the industry body, and both of them can hurt you and also make your future less certain as an artist. That’s what you encounter as you release something into the audience and into the world.

I have such reverence for the novel, and I appreciate you seeing in the work an aesthetic that is maybe grounded in the novel, because I would say my education as an artist began with the novel. The novel has been more important to me than any other art form—particularly when I was really young. But I’m always interested in how I fail to achieve certain things that a novel can do and that writers do.

The difference is between film and the novel, but can failures be more instructive than successes? 

sch 5/5

Is Indiana Improving Its High Schools?

 I am not so sure after reading Consider this curmudgeon confused on latest diploma move by Niki Kelly. Here is what our General Assembly has done:

But diplomas have been specialized and complicated in recent decades. In some ways, the Indiana Department of Education’s move to streamline Indiana’s diploma system will alleviate some of that.

The state would move from four or five types of diplomas to two: Indiana GPS Diploma and GPS Diploma Plus.

State officials and stakeholders also want more kids taking more college classes and getting workplace credentials. It seems Indiana students are having trouble completing high school coursework proficiently and yet we are pushing them to do even more.

But the formula to earn a diploma would still be complex, involving words like pathways, work-based learning and apprenticeships. And slowly, education seems more about training workers than teaching students.

But I thought that was the purpose of Indiana's education system - turning out bodies willing to take a wage that barely gives them purchasing power. 

I had to agree with Ms. Kelly in the following, just as they gave rise to a question:

I also don’t know why, suddenly, young adults can’t seem to handle basic tasks. Or at least that’s what employers are saying. Going to school itself taught me about showing up on time, completing my work, communicating with others on projects and the consequences of a bad grade when I slacked off. All those things translate into the workforce.

But if they didn’t, that’s why we had part-time jobs. For me, it was dipping ice cream and ringing up gas sales at a convenience store or selling CDs and, gasp, vinyl records at a music store in the mall.

Why, suddenly, does that need to be part of my diploma?

Could it be the kids know they are being slotted for a life of dead-end jobs?

sch 5/5 

MFA Programs Killing Creative Writing?

 Bill Morris' Does School Kill Writing? made me laugh and feel my continued efforts were not wholly without merit.

In a dazzling essay in the London Review of Books called “Get A Real Degree,” the brainiac Elif Batuman deftly fillets McGurl’s claim. “According to the internet,” she writes, “writers have, in fact, been going to college for hundreds of years.”  In a footnote she lists dozens of writers, from Balzac to Joyce to Graham Greene, and the universities they attended.  She concludes: “I have been able to find only a handful of famous novelists who, like Hemingway, avoided university in favour of journalism.”  She names Defoe, Dickens and Twain.  (The deftness of this filleting job is greatly enhanced by “according to the internet” – sly shorthand for “as any high school sophomore with a laptop could have found out.”) 

Batuman, a Harvard grad with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford, argues persuasively that the problem is not that virtually all American fiction writers go to college and that growing numbers of them then go on to grad school; the problem is that they study the wrong things.  She comes down squarely in favor of writers studying literature as opposed to studying how to make fiction.  After conceding that the creative writing program is equally incapable of ruining a good writer or transforming a bad one, she asks: “Why can’t the programme be better than it is?  Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves?”

***

So I’m dubious when people fret that school is killing writing – that college boys ruined newspapers and the growing horde of creative writing MFAs is ruining American fiction today.  Flannery O’Connor graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent some time at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and neither experience bleached the color, the humor, the horror – the felt life – from her fiction.  Sometime in the early 1960s she wrote: “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers.  My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.  There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher…  In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story.  In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.  We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly.  What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

sch 5/4 

 

I've got a 30-minute walk ahead of me and I really have not had dinner.

I got the email down to three. No phone calls made, and it is 8:49 PM.

The reading I did that I thought worth making a note of follows.

 Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov - JStor

Tim Hortons Is Brewing an Idea of Canada That No Longer Exists

Why I would like Disney+: Doctor Who Season 14's Opening Scene Is Hard To Watch If You're Already A Fan.

I checked out a couple of literary magazines: Blanket Gravity and The Wild Umbrella. Maybe, if could get the blog under control and get back to writing fiction. However, I want to point this out about Blanket Gravity:

Blanket Gravity: Free online magazine with art and literature for people in mental health crisis, having a hard day or season, looking to feel connected with themselves or something outside themselves for a moment.

From Public Orthodoxy: The Orthodox Church of Finland and the War in Ukraine 

A post I forgot from this past weekend: Doing My Time Saturday Afternoon - Paul Auster, César Aira

I skimmed Free Speech Is a Black-and-White Issue: The Millions Interviews Paul Auster, an archives release.

TM: When The Tortilla Curtain came out, some people attacked T.C. Boyle for appropriation, despite his sympathy and skill evoking the undocumented Mexican experience.

PA: Nobody owns the imagination. If we didn’t have the power to project ourselves into the minds and bodies of other people, people unlike us, I don’t think there would be such a thing as society. We wouldn’t be able to communicate. The whole idea of being a person is the fact that once you reach a certain level of mental and emotional maturity, you’re able to look at yourself from the outside. You’re able to see yourself as one person among many. Millions, in fact. Which then you take that one step further and you realize then you have to have the ability to project yourself onto others in order to try to understand them. Either sympathize with them, empathize with them, however you want to define it, but without that quality we wouldn’t be human beings. So, every time I hear someone get up and say: “You can only write novels about people exactly like yourself,” they’re saying that there is no such thing as the imagination. Which means people are not people [Laughs].

I can agree with imagination meaning human.

 César Aira must have a better memory than I have now, that was my first thought reading César Aira’s unreal magic: how the eccentric author took over Latin American literature.

...Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” he told me, casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

I should send this bit to KH who says he has no time for writing: 

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Speaking of time, I have now found another writer I do not have the time to read! 

I do not see how I can finish the email today. I am getting tired of reading this computer screen. If I hurry, I might catch the bus home.

3:19 PM 5/11

And here I leave you,

sch 5/13

Thinking of Just Deleting All My Email

 Yesterday was a long day. Church in the morning, a nap when I got back, and then I did laundry. I decided around 6 pm to come over to Ball State to get online. 

CC had slept most of the day, so I was left to my own devices. That means I tried ripping through my email. No luck in getting to the end, so I am thinking of just deleting even more of my emails.

I read Archaeologists find new clues about North Carolina’s ‘Lost Colony’ from the 16th century because this topic has fascinated me since I was a kid.

Excavations in March 2024 followed discoveries in the summer of 2023, when archaeologists from The First Colony Foundation uncovered what they believe are tantalizing clues. They dug up shards of Algonquian pottery dating back to the 1500s, along with a ring of copper wire they believe could have been an earring once worn by a warrior from an Indigenous tribe.

Two three posts were written, but they will not be published for another week, or more.

 Tired, looking at getting up at 4 AM, and confronted with a crash with Chrome, I walked back home. No caffeine in the house, so left the laptop at my place and went down The Village Pantry.

It was a little after 9 Pm when I left Bracken Library and almost midnight when I finally fell asleep.

I must have worked on the play before I went to Ball State. I think that is done.

This morning, I ate some oatmeal and tried working on a new short story. The mouse went out, and the keyboard went a little nuts, so I quit that even before I had to leave for work.

A long morning at work, I caught up with today's work and Friday's leftovers by 10 AM. I was getting grouchy by the time I left, I had to get my counseling appointment.

I was early to the counselor. Good session, he keeps me moving forward. We talked about what worries me with the group sessions, that it will not keep going forward but will want to go back over ground I think is well-tilled.

CC could not join me for dinner, so I stopped at Jimmy Johns on my way to Bracken Library. I am here now — 5:57 pm — and looking back, I do not know of any accomplishments being made today. Let us see what happens in the next 3 hours.

sch

Settings - The Symbolic and The Archetypcial

It is a poor day when you do not learn something new. Today it was from K.M. Weiland's How to Use Symbolic and Archetypal Settings in Your Story. 

There is much overlap between symbolic and archetypal settings. The distinction lies in contrasting their respective scope and significance.

A symbol is a specific object, image, or element that represents a broader, often abstract idea, theme, or concept. It carries meaning beyond its literal interpretation and can evoke emotions or convey complex notions within the context of a story. Symbols are versatile and can vary in interpretation across different cultures and contexts.

On the other hand, an archetype is a recurring pattern, character, theme, or setting that embodies universal symbols and resonates similarly across cultures and time. Archetypes are deeply rooted in collective human experiences and myths, representing fundamental aspects of the human psyche. They serve as timeless, recognizable molds that shape characters, narratives, and settings, providing a shared framework for how we understand and interact with stories.

I have not done enough of either. I used an Indiana factory town for "The Dead and The Dying", but considering the reaction to those stories, I do not seem to have impressed anyone. And I have yet to get to "Chasing Ashes" where I do mean to use three cities symbolically.

Ms. WEiland provides examples - check it out and think about it.

sch 5/4

Third-Person Prose

 I find myself writing more third-person than first-person. KH thinks no one can write third-person any longer. Maybe I cannot; the rejections keep liking my stuff for a lot, other than publication.

Adam O’Fallon Price's In Defense of Third Person may bolster KH's position, as well as explain my problems with first-person. He also raises a problem that would never have come otherwise to my brain.

That this is the age of first person seems undeniable.  Essay and memoir are—have been for some time—culturally ascendant, with the lines between fiction and essay increasingly blurred (I’ve written about this here).  In its less exalted form, first person dominates our national discourse in many guises:  the tell-all, the blog post, the reality confessional booth, the carefully curated social media account, the reckless tweets of our demented president.  We are surrounded by a multitude of first person narratives, vying for our time and attention, and we respond to them, in our work, and increasingly in our art, in first person.

My impression, as a writer and teacher, is that over the last 10 or 15 years there has been a paradigmatic move toward first person as the default mode of storytelling.  In a workshop of 20 student pieces, I’m now surprised if more than a third are written in third person.  When I flip open a story collection or literary magazine, my eye expects to settle on a paragraph liberally girded with that little pillar of self.

Perhaps for KH and myself there is that Midwestern (Protestant?) ethic of not talking about one's self. That is a bit harder when the narrator becomes "I".

And it’s true that in a very real sense, third person is not the narrative mode of our time.  A Henry James novel is essentially the anti-tweet.  Its aesthetic roots are in a more contemplative era, an era with fewer distractions and, simultaneously, more incentive to consider one’s place in the larger social context of a world that was rapidly expanding.  Now that the world has expanded to its seeming limits, we see an urge to put the blinders on and retreat into the relative safety of personal narrative.  This impulse should be resisted.  We need to engage with our world and one another, making use of the most sensitive instruments of understanding we have at our disposal.

 (Henry James may just now reflect Midwestern thinking - which probably has him spinning in his grave like a turbine.)

As for why I am not keen on first-person is caught below:

First person, however, contains a contrivance central to its character that third person does not: audience.  In first person, someone is addressing someone else, but absent narrative framing to position these someones—a la Holden Caulfield directing his speech to a ghostly doctor—we find ourselves in an inherently ambiguous space: to whom, exactly, is this person talking, and why?  The uncertainty of this space, I would argue, is largely filled, intentionally or not, by the voice of the narrator, its presence and authority.  Even if this narrator declaims her own uncertainty, she declaims it with certainty, and she declaims it toward an imagined audience, in a speaker/listener relationship.  There are no competing voices, no opportunity for the objective telescoping of third person, and so the reader essentially become a jurist listening to a lawyer’s closing argument.

In this sense, all first-person narration is unreliable, or placeable on a continuum of unreliability.  It isn’t accidental that the greatest examples of the first-person novel—Lolita, The Good Soldier, Tristram Shandy—make ample use of unreliability and/or intricate frame narration.  The best examples of the form lean as heavily as possible on first person’s audience-related pretenses.  Third-person narration, in contrast, contains no similar inherent claim to authority, and therefore tends toward a version of the world that is more essentially descriptive in character.  A third-person narrative, whether in the form of a short story or War and Peace, is a thing to be inspected by the reader.  It is, in a sense, a closed system, a ship in bottle, and the reader can hold it up to the light to see how closely it resembles a real ship.  If it does, part of the reading experience is to imagine it as the real thing; but it can be assumed, in a kind of contract on the part of intelligent writers and readers, that the shipbuilder is not pretending his model is fit for actual seafaring.

With "Love Stinks" I made a decision about 6 years ago to alternate between third-person and first-person for my two lead characters. The first-person's dialog was to an unseen audience, or, rather, one that is her head. I meant for this to show her emotional attachment to the past, and, perhaps, to make her a little crazy (I prefer emotional). I do not know who will catch onto there being an audience, or who the audience is, or how she reconciles her past. All the same, she will continue talking to herself, herself now being the audience.

And here is what I find useful in a third-party narrator, albeit I may come at it from a different angle:

In other words, the existence of a third-person narrator—that artificial authority Sebald found intolerable—signals the act of storytelling, and in doing so, encodes a structural uncertainty that first person lacks.  Third-person narrators no longer walk onstage and deliver monologues, a la Jane Austen, but we still understand them to be devices in service of telling a story—a contrivance that announces itself as such.  They are the artifice that enables the art, and they are truthful as to their own untruthfulness, or perhaps better, their truthlessness.  Compared to the explicit machinery of third-person narration, first person’s artifice seems covert, a clandestine operation.  This is not necessarily an argument against first-person narration—in able hands, this concealment can be a means of exposing greater truths about the subject of the writing or its writer—but it is an argument against the proposition that first person is somehow more transparent or “honest” than third.

KH thinks our defaulting to third-person may relate to what we were taught - I do not know of a first-person Hemingway short story. I have also read maybe too many plays, and third-party lets me play stage manager/director.

And for the problem unseen by me, and which may be even more important for us to think about:

It worries me that we may be slowly losing the cultural ability or inclination to tell stories in third person.  Why does this matter?  Because, I believe, third-person narration is the greatest artistic tool humans have devised to tell the story of what it means to be human.

While I may be taking this further than the original writer, does the first-person make us more empathetic? I never cared much for Humbert Humbert or for Holden Caulfied, but I did feel for Jay Gatsby and Francis Macomber. 

sch 5/4