Embarrassed by Cynthia Ozick; Personality Tested; 2 Short Stories; Writing Advice

 I have a Cynthia Ozick novel somewhere in this apartment. Like all these books here, it remains unread. Too much online reading, is my only excuse. Hers was a name I had been hearing for a long time without either running into any of her books or being motivated enough to find them. The one I have, came to me by accident.

Guilt then led me to Story Evades Cogitation: An Interview with Cynthia Ozick (Jewish Review of Books)

SOCHER: Are you? I wonder, but let’s come back to that. Meanwhile, to which of your contemporaries do you still find yourself returning?

OZICK: Malamud and Bellow. Malamud as an antidote to ubiquitous cynicism, Bellow as a bracing reminder of ideas in fiction as vessels of emotion.

But my actual contemporaries (counting for the moment only Jewish writers) are not in the past, but writing vigorously right now, whether in fiction or non-fiction or both. There are backward-looking intervals, though, when I am tempted to wonder if time will bring counterparts to the extraordinary critical and creative fertility of the twentieth midcentury. Do Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Leslie Fiedler, and others of similar repute have their equals now, fifty years on? Are there biographers to rival Richard Ellmann on Joyce? The literary, cultural, and political thinker Adam Kirsch brings the versatile Howe to mind. And James Marcus, Richard Kopley, and Benjamin Balint, biographers of Emerson, Poe, and Bruno Schulz, respectively, may one day be seen to claim Ellmann’s mantle.

Yet what of the legacy of that unique (and reluctant) midcentury triumvirate, Bellow/Malamud/Roth? Together they stood as a promontory of literary inventiveness, a circumstance that may never come into being again—not merely because of the distinctiveness of each writer’s voice (and voice is the passion that assures lastingness). Still, it may be that Philip Roth especially is likely to leave little or nothing heritable, since he was the product and the purveyor of a sociological outlook; and his sociology is dead.

What marks the lastingness of a work of fiction—apart from the judgment of posterity—isn’t prominence in the present, or brilliance or ingenuity . . . but this is a sentence that can’t be completed.

What we can be sure of is that it will not be Bellovian or Malamudian or Rothian, or Alice Munrovian or Updikesque, but something different in kind at the marrow. A very few are already different in kind: Nabokov, for one, Percival Everett for another, Norman Manea for yet another (and him we have only in translation). Also Lara Vapnyar and André Aciman. Can it be because all but one are foreign-born and all carry history in their bones?

Yes, she is a woman. I hope that does not scare the male readers/writers. Yes, there are Jewish writers mentioned; hopefully, that does not scare you, either. Pay attention to what she says about the future of American writing, and the intelligence behind those words. The whole interview is a delight.

I went to the Open Door Clinic this morning. The problem is water retention. I am now taking a water pill a day - CVS had that in stock, but not the cream for the rash. Also, I am to keep my legs up, so I created a DIY footstool. A little awkward to use while typing.

During group, I did a personality test. I am a bit introverted. Not sure that anything shows me a danger to the wider world.

Back home, around 2 PM, I took a nap. That lasted until around 5. Since then, I did the email and listening to videos on writing. Still doing that. I have eaten, and decided against doing any writing except for the blog. Pain makes me uncreative.

I read two short stories, thinking that I needed to compare what is getting printed and my stuff. I recommend these from Wallstrait:

Shoulder Stars by M.C. Schmidt

My Remotest Winter by Elisha Emerson

What I found is that I am grimmer in tone and subject. I was impressed that death makes a cameo in the second story. I guess I am too old to be whimsical. I may need to work on that, but these do not seem like the days of whimsy.

A poem from “G A G” by Nicole Wilson (Another Chicago Magazine); not Indiana, but Geauga County, Ohio.

What happens on and off the page in your novel? (Nathan Bransford) has good advice, check it out.

One more video? Maybe, but calling it a night soon.

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