Only three accomplishments to report of Friday: 1) I put in a day at the new job; 2) I signed off the documents in my dad's trust case; 3) I got supplies at Payless (but not the water jugs filled); and 3) I rewrote bits of "Road Tripping", but that did not happen until 9 pm and lasted until 1:30 AM. Before that, I fought the weariness that has been dogging me the last month or so.
No headaches for the past three days, but I stopped the Flonase.
I made a late night visit to McClure's for Coke Zero. The sky was clear and the moon full. I spent money on a small bottle of Coke Zero. Payless and McClure's lacking the two liter version. What is the sense of selling a small bottle for a dollar (or more) less than a two liter bottle?
I slept in this morning. Not that I was not up several times in the night, but I thought 10:20 was enough. I started on the email. Crashed Firefox twice. Wrote a blog post. Walked down to Dollar General for Coke Zero - changing diet, taking meds, trying to get more exercise I think is enough to justify not foregoing caffeine.
I got my first paycheck.
What I did not do is get to the Farmer's Market.
And I will put off the water jugs until Monday.
What I will do is stay here, work on my writing, do some more walking.
I found the website for the National Book Critics Circle this morning, and read Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks by J. Howard Rosier, of the three succinct paragraphs, I am quoting the second:
By Brooks’s own admission, the genesis of Seduced comes from his previous (and iconic) Reading for the Plot. That book dealt with the act of literature imbuing one’s life with a constant series of narrative actions; here, he shows the moral and intellectual rot that arises from depending on the wrong ones. (Or, to be frank, acquiring one’s worth based narrative at all.) Whether examining the politics of recounted stories (as in a chapter titled “The Epistemology of Narrative; or, How Can the Teller Know the Tale”), or the crucial nuances between spoken and written forms of information (“The Teller, the Told, the Difference It Makes”), Brooks is attuned to the responsibility of storytelling—how withholding or believing in certain narrative functions shade human actions. Literature isn’t a scourge; but it isn’t benign, either, and much of the author’s attention goes toward articulating how reading has value beyond the buzzwords of empathy and shared understanding.
Think about those who wish to ban books. To whose benefit is this done, and what is the nature of the benefit? I see it as those whose power is threatened by ideas. The benefit is retaining a power that does not serve the governed, their society, or humanity in general. Books pose a danger to that kind of power.
Over at The Nation, Jane Smiley's What Are the Book Banners Afraid Of? does a much better job of making my point:
I am guessing that Justine was banned because Sade’s depiction of the world around him was truthful and uncomfortable for those in charge (not only in the government but also in the church). And I am guessing that this is why most books are banned—because they tell the truth, and the truth is that humans are complicated and often cruel, and the more power they have, the more they are tempted to use it. Quills is explicit about this very thing—the cruelest character is Dr. Royer-Collard (played by Michael Caine), the official who is determined to shred all the copies of Justine that have been printed, and who is also determined to force himself on his very young wife. In the film, Sade uses writing to investigate himself and society, no matter how shocking such an investigation might be. His antagonist is willing to do anything to prevent that investigation.
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Books about sex aren’t the only ones being banned these days. At the top of the list are books about slavery (The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison), sexuality (Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe), personal crises (Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher), and the effects of historical American cruelty on various subcultures (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie). What are the book banners afraid of? Well, we all know: They are afraid of readers—especially young readers—learning the truth about humans, about American history, about, perhaps, their own lives. As Royer-Collard in Quills would tell you, “My cruelty isn’t your business.” And then he would whisper, “Try and stop me.”
What would I do if my sons were still in their early teens and I found them browsing pornographic websites (or reading old copies of Playboy)? I would talk to them about it—ask what they were looking for, what it felt like, and how it made them feel about themselves. There’s no certainty about how they would respond, but I would rather open the conversation than shut it down. And what about my daughters? They might have different reasons for doing the same thing, but it would be good to talk about those, too. We all know that by their late teens, our children are going to be surrounded by temptations—not only drugs, booze, and sex but also bullying, racism, and sexism. Better to recognize these sources of fear and anger in our society in an open way rather than in a secret way.
Effing commons sense, but that goes out the window when hysteria is induced and hyped.
While in prison, I read Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Its presence should indicate the strangeness of Fort Dix FCI's leisure library, its contents supplied by the prisoners. It was part of my writing education, and I still think I hit the jackpot. She has almost convinced me to read Sade (I tried decades ago and found him a bore). Her essay gave me an understanding of what the novel is supposed to do in language that enjoyable to read and accessible to the understanding. Book lovers, writers, find it and read it.
Blue Garret's review, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley, left me wanting to emphasis the quality of Smiley's book, and do think it is a better endorsement than mine:
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel also offers a model for a program of active, engaged reading that could become a daily practice or an intensive period of study for times in which you are stuck. I imagine a reader’s version of Julia Cameron’s morning pages: Pick a novel to study, preferably one that is outside of your typical range of reading, and try to pick apart how it works. How do these specific sets of words work together to create meaning? What effects are these words having on you, the reader? How does the author achieve these effects? This is active, pencil-in-hand reading. “For inspiration, keep reading novels,” Smiley tells us. “As you aim for perfection, don't forget that there is no perfect novel, that because every novel is built out of specifics, every novel offers some pleasures but does not offer some others, and while you can try to achieve as many pleasures as possible, some cancel out others.”
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is the book to turn to when you find yourself wondering why you are spending so much time and intellectual energy on this novel-writing business. Smiley points out that “at the base of every novel is an argument the author is making about why a novel is worth writing, selling, and reading.” To read one, then, is to be reassured that this game you are playing, this extended meditation you are creating, is important. As Smiley puts it, “It's worth knowing that serious thoughts are being thought, and also that serious fun is being made of fools everywhere. It's also worth knowing, in dangerous times, that dangers have come and gone and we still have these books.” We need to have your book among them.
I dropped in on Karen E. Osborne: Illuminating Journeys Through Powerful Fiction and Literary Generosity.
Still trying to improve my short stories, so I read (with some guilt at the hour and the work I am supposed to be doing on my own writing) The Art of Compression Conjuring a fiction out of almost nothing. by Richard Hughes Gibson from The Hedgehog Review. KH and I had a discussion last week about my "Dilemma of Basketball." He thought the story's ending predictable, that it went nowhere. What I was aiming at was a character study, where one's illusions fall away. My experience is that those moments are not accomplished with a bang. But our discussion made me think I had not quite pulled the trigger on the ethical crisis. I ha thought the reader would make the jump much easier until my friend's reading point out my error. In the last paragraph, I made more overt the narrator's breach of the law that if made public would ruin him and his own questions about the bargain made; in the first paragraph I modified a sentence to shade the dilemma more of the narrator than just his player. Anyway, I get the sense of the following, still not sure if I am pulling it off:
However, with my chosen text Davis outdoes herself in practicing the art of compression. Here the reader is given only the rudiments of a sentence (“for summer she needs / pretty dress cotton) followed by a series of rearrangement of the letters of “cotton.” One could legitimately ask—as you may be asking right now—whether these crumbs really amount to a story.
The question is fair, as Davis is overtly testing the minimal deposit required by the art of fiction. She has said so herself, writing of her first experiments with extreme austerity, “I wanted to see just how brief I could make a piece of writing and still have it mean something.” It is instructive to recall (as Davis notes) the legendary six-word short story—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”—attributed by the literary agent Peter Miller to Ernest Hemingway. Miller claimed that Hemingway won a bet from his fellow writers on the strength of the tale. Arthur C. Clarke wrote to a friend that he could not “think of it without crying.”
Why? The story’s success relies heavily on the reader’s contribution. First, the reader needs to recognize that “For sale” is a formula from the classifieds section of the newspaper (the part where ordinary people posted their wants and wares). Then the reader must account for why the baby shoes were never worn. Here Hemingway’s taste for the tragic influences our judgment: The baby must have died! (In fact, there are lots of other plausible scenarios such as the possibility that the baby has large feet.)
Some assembly is required by Davis’s story too. The title provides an interpretive key—call with Mom—with which to decipher what follows. At the same time, the interest of the story comes from the way in which the title breaks down. After the first two lines, the jottings are not aides-mémoire but meaningless anagrams. On my reading, they are failed attempts to stave off boredom (it is a long conversation after all). Here, then, we are not so much reading a story as using the artifact—a page torn out of the “narrator’s” notebook—to create a plot. The art of compression is the triumph of inference.
I read Lolita in prison. Nabokov is a writer who I admit is beyond me - he is a great writer, bloody clever, and he leaves me cold. Friends of mine loved the band Yes, they would rave about how great were the musicians. I preferred Wilson Picket, Cram and Jeff Beck. I have the same dichotomy with Nabokov - I would rather read Tom Robbins or Nelson Algren or Cormac McCarthy. Of all the characters in the novel, I recall only one with any appeal. I also read Reading Lolita in Tehran, a wonderful book, which left me thinking I have misunderstood Nabokov. Someday I will re-read the novel. Meanwhile, I read things like Anything But True Love Vladimir Nabokov’s Anti-Erotic Masterpiece by Talbot Brewer, which was published by The Hedgehog Array. I think here I found what explains my feeling of flatness in the novel:
...Eros, by contrast, is partisanship for a specific kind of change—change in the direction of the good. When directed at a human being, its gaze involves a permanent and creative dissonance—a stereoscopy that coincides with the fact that we become ourselves in time and never arrive at a time when we have finished doing so. What is seen in the other, as the aura of potentiality that lights up the other as beloved, is not a mere imposition of one’s own wishes, however benevolent they may be. It is a perception of the potentiality for emergence toward the good that resides in this particular one, and is there to be seen by the eye of the lover. I would not, then, characterize it as a mirage, but as a calling. And I would say that it does not merge with but shines forth from the beloved as the promise, the whither, that must be appreciated if the beloved is to be appreciated. Humbert cannot see this promise. His eye is not the eye of love.
Another writer I like, who I think is also brilliant, who does not leave me feeling foolish for reading him, is Peter Carey. A warm celebration of the enigma that is Peter Carey from The Brisbane Times is a good starter (in my not so humble opinion.)
I did not know Dennis Lehane had a new novel until I got the book reviews from The Brisbane Times' This crime fiction masterpiece is not for the faint-hearted.
Last night, I watched Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It was great. What kind of world would it be without Little Richard?
I can do more weeding of my email. I must do something else. However, considering what I wrote here about Nabokov and my posting about Martin Amis's death, I feel remiss in not noting The Artice's Chessmen of letters: Amis and Nabokov.
sch 4:06 pm
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