Did not really turn out that way. I have a pile of papers to go through in the morning. The first problem came when the PO called and let me know he was coming up. In a way, that lit a fire under me, who had actually slept in. I ran out to get new windshield wipers for a friend. Back here, I got the bedroom into shape.
The PO showed up. He let me know that with the budget cuts/government shutdown, I might have to start paying for my polygraph exams. Well, that might put that silliness into a new perspective. I found he fished; I had always thought him a hunter. The usual silly questions about pathological issues that do not exist. He arrived around 1 pm and left a half hour later.
While waiting for him to show up, I started on my email. Then I started putting together this post.
More rejections for "No Ordinary Word";
Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "No Ordinary Word" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.
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checkout). For more subscription options, visit our "subscribe" page. Thanks again for sharing your work, and best of luck.
Sincerely,
***
At this time, the editors at Gordon Square Review have chosen not to publish "No Ordinary Word" in the next available issue of Gordon Square Review.
While "No Ordinary Word" was not selected for publication, please know that the editors carefully considered your piece.
With gratitude,
Katie Strine
Gordon Square Review
I fear that I have avoided The Walrus, even before my current (supposed) embargo on politics, but I do read the newsletter sent and see what is being published. When I saw the link to The Case for Reading Quebec’s Most Reclusive Author, I clicked.
Over fifty years ago, a young Québécois writer was staring at a small pile of rejection letters. His clutch of manuscripts had been turned down by all of the province’s publishing houses. They deemed his writing immature, illegible, and too enamoured with breaking convention. So the twenty-four-year-old tried a Hail Mary: he sent a manuscript to Gallimard, the goliath of Parisian publishing responsible for the careers of many of French literature’s great twentieth-century figures. The gamble paid off. Gallimard would publish Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés in 1966, as well as three more titles in quick succession
By the time Ducharme died on August 21, nine days after his seventy-sixth birthday, he was a myth. His nine novels, five plays, two screenplays, and songwriting collaborations are part of Quebec’s cultural psyche. Ducharme has earned “a place apart from the rest of Québécois letters, on account of his work, on account of the mystery that surrounded his life,” wrote La Presse book critic Josée Lapointe, after Ducharme’s death. For the rest of Canada, he is still very much a secret. His English Wikipedia page is exceedingly brief, all of six sentences. His French one is longer, yet nowhere near the length of his English Canadian counterparts, such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and Alice Munro. Yet as the winner of three Governor General’s Literary Awards, a finalist for France’s Prix Goncourt, and an officer of the Order of Canada since 2000, Ducharme is a French Canadian institution, widely taught in the province’s college and university curriculums.
***
It would be hard to overstate Ducharme’s revolutionary effect on Quebec writing. According to Annabelle Moreau, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Lettres québécoises, Ducharme “created a literature for the province centered around our use of the language, which by extension grew into our sense of culture and national identity.”
From the article, I get the reasons for reading him; I suggest you read that argument.
What I took away from the article were other things: the transitory nature of literary fame; the obscurity imposed by our education of other cultures, other writers; and, finally, and far from least for me, that regionalism need not be the pejorative it is always taken to be.
We all live in a place. What we write about has its roots in our places. Why aren't Joyce, or Proust, or Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann, or Alasdair Gray, or Zadie Smith, or Charles Dickens, or José Saramago, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Mishima, or Amos Oz, or Orhan Pamuk, or John Steinbeck, or Chinua Achebe, or Naguib Mahfouz, or Milan Kundera not a regional writer?
The region we need worry more about is the limits we put on our imaginations - curbing our imaginations is the truly dangerous regionalism.
I have had George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman (The New Yorker) playing in the background. Two brilliant people, two great writers; plenty to learn about the process of writing, and about books. Yes, I have a crush on Zadie Smith, but the root of that crush is her writing and her thoughts on writing.
On the opposite end of my literary faves is Thomas Pynchon. He fascinates me because I am not as enamored of him as seems to be the norm for American critics. Richard Beck's Thomas Pynchon Is Angry (The Yale Review) uses the phrase "stoner humor" that might explain my finding Pynchon tiresome. I was never a stoner, never appreciated stoner humor for all the Cheech and Chong movies I've seen. However, Mr. Beck finally has me understanding how Pynchon is relevant to my own ideas.
The one thing everyone knows about Thomas Pynchon’s novels is that they are paranoid. We’ll get to that later. The other thing everyone knows about them is that they are overstuffed. Packed with a manic variety of subplots, original song lyrics, scientific arcana (both real and invented), pop-cultural detritus, zany character names, and stoner jokes, Pynchon’s books often feel as if they are on the verge of exploding under the pressure of their own contents.
Yet if any one Pynchon novel can seem chaotic and ramshackle, Pynchon’s body of work is among the most unified in postwar American fiction: all of his novels deal with Americans’ inability or unwillingness to understand the historical forces that built and continue to shape the world they inhabit. This has been Pynchon’s great subject from the beginning....
Thinking over the Pynchon novel's I have read - Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Against The Day - this does make sense.
Nor did I pay any attention to Pynchon's take on nostalgia being the same as mine - a variety of self-delusion:
This reverie, this “fantasy of old-time Milwaukee,” continues for quite a bit longer. The first time I read it, I thought that Pynchon was dragging on, that he had piled detail upon detail until the larger picture collapsed under the weight of its constituent parts. The second time I read it, I came to believe that it’s McTaggart’s longing that is excessive, not Pynchon’s rendering of it. Remember what Pynchon wrote in V.—that people situated at the bottom of history’s folds console themselves with “a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were.” That’s what McTaggart is doing here. The rosy urban landscape McTaggart paints for himself in no way corresponds to the Milwaukee that would actually be waiting for him back home, a city at the economic nadir of the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce, organized crime is running amok, and terror bombings are a regular occurrence. Life in the U.S. may not be as grim as it is in Hungary, but it is still pretty miserable. McTaggart’s nostalgia is not just misplaced; he is lying to himself.
And complete agreement with America's dislike of history; albeit, I acquired this idea from Gore Vidal.
Pynchon isn’t just writing about McTaggart here. Though his novels are filled with fantastical hijinks and science-fictional elements, Pynchon is genuinely a writer of historical fiction, one who has spent his life investigating how certain historical moments came to be. What gives this project a political valence is the fact that many Americans are—and always have been—committed to remaining ignorant of the way their country’s wealth, culture, and geopolitical strength were, and are, founded on violence carried out in defense of capital accumulation and white supremacy. Pynchon has previously written characters who could be duped or bewildered by history without losing their author’s sympathies (Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind), but in his depiction of the blank stupidity that one finds just behind the screen of Hicks McTaggart’s energetic charm, one detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.
A stray thought, sparked by the following paragraph, concerned Dashiell Hammett:
When he says to Boynt Crosstown, his boss back at the PI offices, that he can’t believe the feds would bring up the old days like that, Crosstown’s response is scathing. “Of course they’re trying to turn you,” he says. “Back to what you never stopped being. . . . You think you’re reformed now. Not just a normal tough guy but a saintly one. . . . But he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.” Talking to a mobster-turned-anarchist-bombmaker in the course of an investigation, McTaggart says he wouldn’t be interested in going to Italy, due to its being “a Fascist dictatorship.” “What makes you private dicks any different?” the bombmaker replies. “Study your history, gabadost, you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys.” Even in Europe, McTaggart can’t find anyone who will lend him a sympathetic ear. “Have you ever really looked at your employment history?” an Interpol agent asks him. “One high-risk orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s greed or fear?”
The Pinkerton Detective Agency employed Hammett. They made big bucks breaking strikes; whether Hammett was a strikebreaker seems to be unclear. However, it is not unclear that Hammett's Red Harvest shows the after effects of strikebreaking and the costs of being ignorant about history. History is a record of humanity's character.
I still have a problem with the big slabs of books rampaging off into the wilds, the stoner humor mentioned above. That bias when combined with a fleeting comparison with Theodore Dreiser and the stoner humor comment made me spend a few seconds considering what Dreiser might have done if he smoked a few spliffs.
(Regarding Dreiser, I found these items: Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site and The mystery of Theodore Dreiser by Joseph Epstein, which opens with this:
I begin by borrowing a line from Theodore Dreiser, the master himself, before setting out to consider the first of many issues that Dreiser’s extraordinary career poses—that of the relationship of style to art. It was his friend and early champion H. L. Mencken who once remarked that Dreiser had “an incurable antipathy to the mot juste” but that ain’t the half of it. Theodore Dreiser also had an aluminum ear (one down from tin), an unfailing penchant for the purple, an oafish wit, and the literary tact and lightness of touch of a rhinoceros. Who but Dreiser, in Sister Carrie, could cap a brief description of workers returning home on a winter’s night in Chicago by saying that the crowd was “a spectacle of warm-blooded humanity”? Only Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, had the innate klutziness to write, “The death house of this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity for which no one was primarily responsible.” No one except Dreiser, in The “Genius,” could roll off this squib of dialogue: “‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ laughed Suzanne.” For the gracious descriptive touch, there is this from The Bulwark: “Most of them were becomingly gowned in long frocks of every hue.” By now readers who have not read Dreiser and for whom style in literature is decisive are likely to join in the sentiment of Eugene Witla, the autobiographical hero of The “Genius”: “‘Nothing doing,’ he exclaimed, in the slang of the day.” But I would caution them, before giving up on Dreiser, with a line of snappy dialogue from Jennie Gerhardt: “‘Aw, you hush up,’ was her displeased rejoinder.”
But then it is a good deal easier to make fun of Theodore Dreiser’s prose style than it is to account for his genius. A genius he was, of that there ought not to be any serious doubt. He may not always have been able to write a careful sentence or a well-shaped paragraph, but this did not stand in the way of his turning out powerful novels. To put my cards on the table early in the game, let me say that Theodore Dreiser, in my opinion, is America’s greatest novelist. Herman Melville may have written the greatest single American novel, Henry James plumped deeper into the subtleties of human motivation, Mark Twain written more lyrically about this country, but Theodore Dreiser, that clod, bumbler, yokel, creep, wrote the novels that tell more in the way of elemental truth about American life and character, and tell it in a consistently persuasive and powerful manner, than those of any other American writer before or since his time.
***
The best students react well to the novels of Dreiser. They sense that there are big things going on in his pages. And even the very best students have the advantage that, at eighteen, they have very little sense of prose style, and hence no snobbery about it. I am not arguing for the superior wisdom of the young, but rather that the shallow sophistication of the not-so-young can present its own obstacles. Saul Bellow, who has long written and spoken admiringly of Dreiser’s novels, puts the point best: “I often think the criticism of Dreiser as a stylist at times betrays a resistance to the feelings he causes readers to suffer. If they say he can’t write, they need not experience these feelings.”
What are these feelings? I should say that any comprehensive list of them would include humiliation and fear of failure, the craving for respectability, every kind of longing, and the desolation that accompanies an unutterable loneliness in the face of a (probably) uncaring universe. In teaching Dreiser I have always wanted to begin—perhaps some day I shall begin—by saying, “What you must understand about Theodore Dreiser is that he was born poor and homely and raised in ignorance and filled with desire. Write that down and remember it. Now get out of here and go home and read the book again.”
I cannot say I ever approached Dreiser with joy, but in those two paragraphs I think is what makes Dreiser worth reading. Power. You go along with him, grumbling and even resisting a little, until you realize that he has grabbed hold of you, and you cannot go along with him to the end.)
About Hammett, a recording of a conference presentation: Dashiell Hammett and the Detective Story (42 minutes)
I am not so sure what to make of Fantasy, Pedantry, and Painting: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the Novels of De Chirico (Public Books). The title intrigued, and the opening seemed to merit further reading of the translators' interview:
Giorgio de Chirico is famous as a visual artist, but less well known is his prolific career as a writer. Considered the godfather of surrealism, his trajectory as an artist proved lastingly controversial.
It is hard to overstate the influence of his early artistic phase—of so-called metaphysical aesthetics—upon 20th-century modernism. In the early 20th century, we read again and again that the two pillars of modernism were on the one hand Picasso and on the other de Chirico. De Chirico was taken up and lionized and became in many ways the touchstone for surrealist paintings. The paintings of Magritte and Dalí, with which we’re so familiar, were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes, particularly deserted cityscapes, of which MoMA is the biggest owner in the world.
But other than the following section, I found little that struck my fancy:
SH: To respond super quickly to de Chirico’s bilious and cantankerous bits, I want to mention that one thing that is quite strikingly different between the two novels is the structure of these screeds.
I’m so glad you mentioned the Memoirs because this gets at another way he plays with form. In both novels de Chirico ends up making what I find to be a documentary move. The documentary practice of taking research materials or tangible language from elsewhere and putting it into a creative text is super vibrant in poetry currently and a pretty radical thing to do at the time. People often locate its roots in 1930s leftist movements, with writers like Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Reznikoff.
There’s a single moment like this in Hebdomeros where he drops in language from political posters. In Mr. Dudron, he weaves his own writing with extensive quoting from an existing 19th-century tract on painting. The structure of the novel incorporates this kind of external material, and I started noticing how when he does this in Dudron the formal move is happening in the same moment that he’s talking about material in visual art. He uses the documentary move to highlight, in a different form, what he is critiquing about the lack of materiality in painting. In both cases I think maybe he wants to underscore the physical and tangible.
Some of the stuff he’s mad about is definitely bonkers, but some of it is quite moving and convincing—like that people have moved away from working with their hands and they’re not making their tools with their hands and so they’ve lost a relationship with the materiality of that which they make.
This feels echoed in the double voice you mention. He has this interlocutor named Isabella Far which is also the name of his second wife, or the name that he gave her, and he makes her a character in this novel and he calls her “she of the philosophical spirit.” She’s the greatest thinker about art and he places his own screeds in her mouth.
Dudron, who’s the autobiographical character is sitting around when she walks in. He asks her questions, and she lectures him. Then, in real life, in his 1945 essay collection Commedia dell’arte moderna, he publishes some of these very same essays that are quoted in the novel under her name, even though we now know that he wrote them.
YMMV.
It’s unusual for an author to create a great novel and then, fearing readers would not understand it, to write another book that explains it. Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of a Novel (1949) describes how he composed Doctor Faustus (1947) and provides valuable insights into that difficult book. After working on Joseph and His Brothers for 16 years, the 69-year-old author finally completed that tetralogy in January 1944. He first thought of finishing his early satiric novel Confessions of Felix Krull (1922), but decided to take up the challenge of writing the far more ambitious Faust novel.
***
The musical, military, pathological and political themes magnificently merge at the end of the novel as the four stages of Adrian’s disease—migraines, infection, remission and collapse—tragically fuse with Germany’s predisposition to Reformation-inspired demonology, deliberate choice of Nazism, decade of military conquest and apocalyptic destruction.
Jeffrey Meyers published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014).
"Thomas Kemp" received another rejection:
Thank you for submitting your story to Electric Spec. Unfortunately, your story does not meet our needs at this time. Yours is one of many high-quality submissions we received, and we encourage you to try us again if you have another story that you think would be a good fit.
Grayson Towler, Editor
www.electricspec.com
electricspec.blogspot.com
I cannot help myself but submitting my stuff to magazines.
"Coming Home" went back to For Page & Screen; new submissions to Conjunctions, Strange Pilgrims, Banshee, ServiceScape Short Story Award 2025 and The Baltimore Review.
Song for the day from John Mellencamp, Freedom of Speech:
It is 7:47. I have been on this computer long enough. Edna O'Brien calls to me.
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