A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
SARAH PERRY (she/they) is a memoirist and essayist who writes about
love, food culture, body image, trauma, gender-based violence,
queerness, and the power dynamics that influence those concerns. She is
the author of the memoir After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search,
which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets
& Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes and Noble Discover
Great New Writers pick; and Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover, a memoir in 100 short essays that came out in February 2025 from Mariner/HarperCollins.
My takeaways were two - that writing is a craft, and we need to work at it; and technique is a collection of tools.
Subplots - How to Write Better Subplots - is a lot shorter than reading Shakespeare, the king of subplots.
Southern Literature documentary | 1963–1999.
Let me say that this Yankee likes Southern writers. Just as about as much as I dislike the South. I do not know if there is a connection, or if it is a connection I do not want to acknowledge. I have been attached to, intimidated by, inspired by William Faulkner since I was 18-years old. Tennessee Williams was another Southern writer I knew of when I was younger. Thomas Wolfe overwhelmed me in my mid-twenties. Then I quit reading. That was what prison and your tax dollars let me do: read. I finally got acquainted with Eudora Welty, William Styron, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor. Following the cast of the documentary, I also read Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.
What I found in Faulkner was history. That seems to play through the genre. Of course, that history is how the South deals with the Civil War and its aftermath. In that, there is a thing I saw shared with the Midwest. Another was the religious aspect - rampant Protestantism (excluding O'Connor, of course). What I did not see in my Midwest was its history was the effects of capitalism and of winning the Civil War. What I resent is the overshadowing of the Midwest writers and writing - we are the region that gave the country four Nobel winners (Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison). However, The Southerners took their demoralization and turned it into art while the Midwesterners, more generally, turned it into sentimentality. One takeaway from the documentary I want to mention before ending this paragraph; the South seems to have been as accepting of people taking up writing in the same way they accepted musicians; neither was a notable feature in Midwestern culture (we would point out the need for a job first). A beat sheet for short stories:
Okay, if writers are supposed to be reading, and if I am going to stand up for my idea that American writers need to read foreign writers, then I need to post this video here. The most dangerous novel of all time? I cannot think of another novel quite as gruesome in its imagery and imagery that is put in service of its story. Perhaps, the Great American novel needs more metaphor and less realism?
Testing George Saunders' Universal Rules for Stories is a reason I rewrote the end of "Road Tripping" last night after taking a bath in the White River. It is one I am keeping around, it may be the sort of thing that will improve my short story writing.
Another item that YouTube's algorithm turned up for me is I'm an Editor. Here’s What I HONESTLY Think About Your Manuscripts. This one, though, I approached with trepidation. The title given it left me expecting nonsense. Um, whoever posted this video with this title did a disservice to the video. What is actually presented is far more interesting than the clickbait worthy headline. It is also more useful - at least, for me - than expected. What we get is an editor going over actual manuscripts. Yes, the manuscripts are not within a genre I would write in, and maybe not you, either, but listen to the advice given. She has me already understanding better what I need to do - and what I might actually be doing right.
Write Conscious has another overheated critique of Stephen King's On Writing. Larry Sweazy recommended the book to me around the turn of the century; of course, I do not read it until I was in prison. As I recall, the memoir section was skimmed (if not skipped over), and the advice seemed sound, but what I thought made the book for me was King including his revising of a story. When young, I thought the first draft could be the only version - the honesty in its immediacy being forefront in my mind. I did not know that the real work is in its revision. Revising possesses its own honesty; maybe its true artistic honesty. Take it on your terms.
Anthony Burgess interviewed gives me a wholly new view of the man. Working class background with an educated voice; a bit of dissonance. Some talking about writing, some about his novels; some about his life. From 1989, he was closing in on his end.
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 10/5/2025]
Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper., and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart, Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father's failure and weakness and even now he had still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbale. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbale was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.
p. 13
Being someone who killed his father off in a war while riding in a bus to his second grade class, that passage caught my attention. This passage also establishes the unpleasantness of Achebe's protagonist. What makes Achebe's novel is his writing, impressive is how he makes this unpleasant protagonist into a sympathetically tragic figure unable to face the changes imposed by colonialism, or to adapt to those changes. Very clever writing.
Zora Neale Hurston has ahold of me. I think now of the novelist as anthropologist. Or maybe I understand what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was going on about with his early novels like Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Some of this novelist-as-anthropologist came to mind while reading Things Fall Apart. This is even though Things Fall Apart is a historical novel - even as it takes place during the Victorian Era colonization of Nigeria. So how could I play anthropologist of east central Indiana? I must think on that?
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible also combines the anthropological and the historical. I need to think more on what I did with the short stories and will do with "One Dead Blonde".
Obsessing quite too much with "Perversion". I wonder with bemusement what will be the reaction to the preceding sentence. Surely someone will say too long, too much, of my life got caught up with perversion, or else why would I be in federal prison? I think the play is not bad as a literary effort and quite good as agitprop. I may even be on time, for a change! Reading the last 2 Acts tonight. Then I will impose on Russell for a technical critique. I hope to have it published by year's end. Yes, quite absorbed in it. Glad for the leisure time prison has given me for writing but also put out by having so much time to worry over the play.
sch
[10/5/2025: The play I was working on seems to have been lost, and 10 years later, I cannot recall its themes or plot! sch]
[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.
I really want to discuss Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (Harper Perennial, 1991). What an odd autobiography! What great writing! A monument to the fickleness of public taste and how talent can survive. I am glad to have found her. I think I am better for the experience.
Hurst mixes the folkish with something more formal. It pleases and impresses my Midwestern ears. We do try sounding not as uppity as Easterners, but do like it known we have had an education.
I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings, and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
Chapter 4: "The Inside Search"
I wish I had such wisdom, or wrote so well.
Nothing in Cold Mountain moved me enough to copy it down, as with these paragraphs from Dust Tracks on a Road:
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry seasons and rolling around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. people can be slave-ships in shoes.
Chapter 8: "Backstage and the Railroad"
***
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they at dwell therein.
Chapter 10: "Research"
Hurston spends more time on her anthropology career than her writing, or her marriages.
What Hurston wrote in the following paragraph I found applicable to me. It also applies to others I know. I never pursued writing, decades back when everyone thought I ought to be a writer and I thought everything was crap.
I wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish I could write it again. In fact, I regret all my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolsih for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no book would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhre in space whicdh commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. You have all heard of the Spartan youth with the fox under his cloak.
Chapter 11: "Books and Things"
I think that paragraph certainly applies to me, and it also applies to more things in life than writing.
Being white, I'm not so sure Hurston's comments on race issues circa 1941 are really within my ken for remarks. I do think her observations continue to have validity - especially since my imprisonment - but surely some things have changed since then. If nothing else, we have had James Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammed Ali, Prince, and Barack Obama. I would say there were/are millions of less public displays of change. It also seemed to me that she makes a point only recently recognized by whites: blacks are not a monolith. Read Dust Tracks on a Road. See what you think.
I finished typing the last major draft for "Cruising Down a Blind Alley." I did a read through of the first 21 pages with Joel. I want to rework the first sentence. Joel thinks it is much improved. This one really wears me out. I worry still over the last paragraph - that I mix too many metaphors. I think Joel finds the narrator/protagonist unpleasant. He is - depression has him in its grip. I think back on my own depression and the memory scares me. I am satisfied I have got him so far. But the whole remains as it was yesterday. Reading the Robin Williams obituaries made me remember a lot of what I had forgotten. Being told in the first person brings everything into the story as it is perceived by the narrator's diseased mind. Not so easy. I can say this is not creative writing workshop writing - or so I think. It may be I hurt myself by wanting these stories to be both part of a series and self-sustaining. I know where this one fits into my wider goal. That may hurt it on its own. For with the wider story is about the town and the town, the Bridges legacy, are characters in the broader story. The backdrop has a life of its own. And this story has about driven me crazy. I really have no idea what will become of these stories without Joel! Enough for now.
Englesberg Ideas provided me with the essay The lost art of chorography. I had never heard of chorography until this essay. This gave me some ideas for my work, especially "Chasing Ashes". I have to say that I was trying for the effects of chorography without knowing what I was doing - or doing very well - in the section I have written called "Road Tripping". I think parts of Raintree County made use of this technique - the swamp scenes are the ones that come to mind.
But is America a place? Years ago, I contemplated the idea of community service in the federal criminal justice sphere. Community seems very attenuated in the federal sense. No, a community seems smaller - a town, a city, a county. Not even a state seems anything more than a collection of communities. The federal government is a collection of a collection of communities. Therefore, is a national community only an idea, even an ideal, which runs counter to American reality?
If the answer to that question is yes, then how can I adopt the following descriptions of chorography to an American story?
Although nature and travel writing remain established forms, chorography has been largely, undeservedly forgotten in the literary landscape. Yet this protean form, deriving from the Greek choros (‘place’) and graphia (‘writing’), combining geography and topography, social and cultural history, antiquarianism and mythology, panegyric and lament, is a vital chapter in intellectual history. It was not just Shakespeare’s dramas that were profoundly influenced by chorography, but much of the literary culture of early modern England, including the work of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton and Thomas Hobbes. The story of chorography, though, begins in the ancient world.
Ptolemy’s Geography (c.149 AD) began by stating that ‘Geography is a representation in picture of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein,’ whereas ‘chorography, selecting certain places from the whole, treats more fully of the particulars […] even dealing with the smallest localities, such as harbours, farms, villages, river courses and such like’, ‘as if one were to paint only the eye or the ear by itself.’ Ptolemy thus frames chorography as an art of place. If geography has ‘need of mathematics’, he said, then ‘chorography needs an artist’. Classical thinkers tended to emphasise the illustrative and cartographic aspects and ‘visual literacy’ of the form. Later, medieval scholars began to realise more fully the etymology of chorography as ‘place-writing’.
Here it seems is a possible solution; frankly, because I am much a dullard to divorce geography from history.
Richard Helgerson writes in Forms of Nationhood (1992) that ‘Chorography […] is the genre devoted to place, as chronicle is the genre devoted to time.’ In practice, however, it was often difficult to separate history from geography and chorography. The royalist polemicist and historian Peter Heylyn wrote in Microcosmus (1621) that: ‘as Geography without History, hath life and motion, but at randome, and vnstable; so History without Geography, like a dead carkasse hath neither life nor motion at all’. Chorography, then, was not quite history, yet could not help verging onto the historical, because it dealt with the remains of the past – natural and human – that endured in the present, whether preserved intact or as ruins, ghosts, folk tales or the indexes of environmental change, such as erosion, clearance, reclamation and drainage.
***
In Re-Visioning the Earth (1996), Paul Devereux sought to revive the form: ‘chorography, not topography […] place as expressively potent, place as experience, place as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’. The counterpoint to Bouvier’s rapture is the cynicism of Iain Sinclair. London Orbital (2002) conducts an autopsy on London’s body politic as much as a perambulation of its hinterlands. ‘Hungry for place’, Sinclair is driven by ‘an urge to walk […] to the point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts’.
And then here are difficulties:
Chorography is one of English literature’s most eccentric and mercurial forms, mixing antiquarianism, history, poetry, and geography into a patriotic paean to the land and its people. Chorography’s synchronic rather than diachronic format – the precedence of place over a past or future unfolding in time – offers a window into a radical form of writing, different from history and fiction, then or now.
Paean is a "joyous song or hymn of praise, tribute, thanksgiving, or triumph." Oh, no. There are too many things in this land that are unworthy "of praise, tribute, thanksgiving, or triumph."
Then I tripped over the terms synchronic and diachronic.
GORE VIDAL: Well, isn’t it pretty clear that the dictatorship is in place? We’re not supposed to know certain things, and we’re not going to know them. They’re doing everything to remove our history, to—they’ve damaged the Freedom of Information Act. Bush managed to have a number of presidential papers, including those of his father, put out of reach of historians, or anybody, for a great length of time, during which they will probably be shredded, so they will never be available. And what I’ve always called jokingly the “United States of Amnesia” will be worse than an amnesiac; it will be—have suffered a lobotomy. There will be no functioning historical memory of our history.
Even places have a history. What is farmland was once woodlands, which were once upon a time a swamp where dinosaurs cavorted. My mind is not limber enough to forget the historical antecedents of a place. One point I make in "Road Tripping" involves a historical marker delineating the frontier between America and the Native Americans; only the United States now possesses both sides of the treaty.
All I can think to do right now is to juxtapose what is against its history.
This brings me back to the title of this piece, which I will restate as: is America, the United States, not a place but a collection of places?
Let me make a list of American literary places:
Hawthorne's Great Stone Face
Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables/Salem
James Fenimore Cooper's wildernesses
Washington Irving's New York
Melville's Nantucket
Twain's Mississippi
Twain's Hannibal, Missouri
Dreiser's Chicago
Booth Tarkington's Indianapolis
Upton Sinclair's Chicago Stockyards
Sinclair Lewis's Main Street
Sinclair Lewis' Cincinnati
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Long Island
Ernest Hemingway's Michigan
Faulkner's Mississippi
Edith Wharton's New York
Willa Cather's Nebraska
Willa Cather's New Mexico
Steinbeck's Monterey
Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco
Thomas Wolfe's Asheville, NC
Langston Hughes' Harlem
Zora Neale Hurston's Florida
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles
Nelson Algren's Chicago
Richard Wright's Chicago
Ralph Ellison's New York
Toni Morrison's Cincinnati & other parts of Ohio
Kurt Vonnegut's Ilium. NY
William Styron's Virginia
Ross Lockridge, Jr's Raintree County
Junot Diaz's New Jersey
Robert B. Parker's Boston
Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn
Gore Vidal's Washington, DC
There my memory ends.
I would add a caveat - that many places work as a dramatic setting. However, and if I may use Mr. Vidal again as an example, in 1876 he makes clear that his New York and his Washington have distinct personalities.
I really like pulp fiction - Hammett, Robert E. Howard - even the pulpiest heroes - Doc Savage, The Shadow - can be fun.
J.M. Coetzee is one writer who I have read less of (two novels, a couple of short stories) than who I found videos on YouTube:
Daphne du Maurier interested me because I have never understood Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". She wrote the story on which it is based.
I managed to read two Iain M. Banks's Culture novels while in prison. If you think you like science fiction, that you have read great science fiction, without reading Banks, then you are missing out. Seriously missing out.
Speaking of Iain Banks:
Michael Connelly is one who I found in prison, and I am still wondering where to place him. He is not a prose stylist, but it is hard not to get attached to his characters.
I have not read much of J.G. Ballard - did I get a novel of his read in prison? I have read much about him. Here is a documentary on him, hopeflly it will inspire you find his books:
Alasdair Gray on writing and painting:
Ross MacDonald:
Groucho, Capote, Ring Lardner:
Indiana represented:
Philip Roth at 70: Interview with David Remnick is not what what I heard on The New Yorker Radio Hour. It is more than that. Roth was one of my great discoveries while in prison. Yes, I knew about him when I was a teenager, but did not read him. I wish I had read him instead of Saul Bellow; Roth's world is far mre accessible to me than Bellows'.
sch 1/5–1/6
While in prison, I read an anthology of Russian fantasy and science fiction. I used the interlibrary loan program to get more current Russian writers; one was Victor Pelevin's A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia. What I picked up was the idea of using fantasy where social realism is insufficient to tell us about life. Why I am adding to this already too long post is that The Guardian published a long read on Pelevin: The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay.
On its face, this decision to write fiction rather than journalism might seem like a turn away from reality—a reality in which, by the time he started writing True Grit, Kennedy and X and King had all been murdered. But in Portis’s writing, and in True Grit especially, I see an Oklahoma of the mind in which these convulsions are powerfully resonant. True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety. And in staging this psychological fact, Portis’s novel echoes a contemporary novel not typically mentioned in the same breath: The Crying of Lot 49, which was published three years earlier. What’s implicit in Portis is explicit in Pynchon: both novels, I think, are attempts to represent a mind metabolizing the upheavals and anxieties of the era.
***
Similarly, the quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange. As Mattie travels further and further into the Choctaw Nation in search of Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, the reality of True Grit begins to warp. Psychological and moral ambiguity come with the territory: beyond the borders of the United States lies a lawless land of rumor, deception, and plain old oddity. Out here, names drift. Tom Chaney’s name, we learn, might actually be Chelmsford. The villainous Permalee brothers are named Darryl, Carroll, Farrell, and Harold, which has a rather Pynchonian mouthfeel. In this context, Mattie’s theological gloss seems more and more like a desperate insistence—not an attempt to describe order but to create it.
***
The quietly anarchic possibility of this gesture, in the context of the whole, made me feel certain that Portis’s subject matter wasn’t predestination itself, but rather the tendency of the human mind to seek refuge in rigid systems, in doctrines, but to do so imperfectly, incompletely, for the mind contains doubts and contradictions that doctrines simply do not. Mattie’s hopefulness is, for me, a final act of courage—grit, even—and although we can never know that LaBoeuf did, in fact, read those pages, we can hope.
Mr. Gelly may be onto something here that applies to Portis' other novels. This conflict between systems and the contradictions that reality imposes on those systems. That I agree with him on how Trump mangles reality with his lies does not affect my opinion on this reading of True Grit.
sch 1/11
Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston - it doe not mention any of her plays, but it does place her memoir high on the list. That is where I started with Hurston. Start, you will not mind going on.
Until today, outside of a handful of scholars, the world had not seen Zora Neale Hurston's final novel, The Life of Herod The Great.
Hurston, the accomplished Black writer, folklorist and anthropologist in the Harlem Renaissance era, worked for many years on the pages to The Life of Herod the Great until she died in Fort Pierce, Fla., in 1960 at the age of 69.
In this novel, Hurston looked to redefine the legacy of Herod, who reigned as king of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. In a 1953 letter to her editor Hurston wrote, "You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man. No matter who talks about him, friend or foe, Herod is a magnificent character."
And today's reading of the Gospel touched on Herod's slaughter of the innocents. I keep saying this, Hurston is very much worth reading. That she was forgotten for so long is a blot on America's literary conscience.
Gallardo: I wanted to talk about Jan. 7 when the novel debuts, which would have been Hurston's 134th birthday. What should the world remember about Hurston?
Plant: She loved life. And she loved humanity. And everything she did, her anthropological work, her work as a novelist, dramatist, her political activism, everything was about having us see one another as different variations of divine expression … We want to remember her as a humanitarian who was courageous in her effort to have us see ourselves, whole and complete. Undiminished.
Here are five reasons writing a story is possibly the most powerful act for good you will ever accomplish in your life.
And they are good reasons. They buoyed my feelings this morning of excruciating pain and disgust.
I came to Leonard Cohen late in life. Of Federico Garcia Lorca, I read his plays in prison. I offer “In love for life”: The poet who changed Leonard Cohen’s life by Callum MacHattie to point out the strange ways inspiration pollinates creativity.
However, decades before, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was forging the path upon which Cohen’s lyrics would follow. Lorca was a member of the ‘Generation of ‘27’, a collection of Spanish poets in the 1920s who spearheaded a movement that showcased romance and tragedy through surrealist imagery. While Cohen’s work has carved him an individual lane in contemporary music, he has often cited Lorca’s work as deeply formative in terms of his influence: “I was fifteen when I began to read Federico Garcia Lorca. His poems perhaps have had the greatest influence on my texts. He summoned up a world where I felt at home. His images were sensual and mysterious: ‘throw a fist full of ants to the sun.’ I wanted to be able to write something like that as well”.
Until today, I never heard of Kate Braverman. That I is due to The Paris Review posting her short story Histories of the Undead. I am thinking hard about my prose for "Chasing Ashes". I like Braverman's style - it has an energy that I think mine lacks.
She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.
The Paris Review also posted a link to Kate Braverman Is Dead by Leah Mensch. I like Ms. Mensch's prose, too.
In the photo, she stands in front of a shop window, naturally disinterested. “Beverly Hills,” the sign reads. It’s one of the only shots I’ve ever seen where she looks relaxed, her hands in her pockets. She wears a skirt long over her knees, pulled up to her waist, fastened with a belt. She’s thin, but her cheeks are full. She’s just published her first book of poetry, Milk Run, and her debut was a success: her friends at Momentum Press had underestimated the print demand. Open, all open the places. Never mind that she’s going to walk home through a dark and filthy LA alleyway. Never mind that afterward, she’ll heat speed over an open flame, because the world, for the first time, has made space for her. Los Angeles’s streets overflow with art and literature, and her mind, full of sex and rage and sprawling sentences, is not only tolerated, but, at last, celebrated. “She has,” a critic wrote, “come to a place on the narrow landscape of American poetry where her art and talents cannot be denied.”
For the next forty years, she’ll struggle to fit more than an arm and the backside of her torso into this space. She’ll try everything: Prozac, Lithium, hiding her breasts, pulling her shirt over her head on the Venice boardwalk. Her future efforts will be deemed too desperate, too ambitious, her fiction’s protagonists — double-fisting a syringe and a pen, leaving men behind, gasping for air — too intense and severe. Her rage and her obstinacy, which will drive her work, will trap her, too. “Girl child of the already decomposing streets of Los Angeles,” she’ll later call this 1977 self, with all her bursting naiveté.
From what I read about Braverman, another American writer ignored by America.
So much of her work was born from this: her desire to make a man sit down. Across four decades, she would publish twelve books — poems and short stories, novels and a memoir — all of which are populated with unorthodox women. A revulsion toward conventional womanhood drives the rage in her writing. Womanhood should, she believed, confer outlaw status; it should encompass everything from single motherhood to murder, creation to destruction, the full alphabet of human possibility. Central to her narratives are characters with addictions or criminal records, or who court instability — people who, like herself, have a penchant for danger, a penchant for pain. Sex, pain intermingling with pleasure, were regular subjects. Intimacy and sentimentality were not: “you never understood this man / or why you need him,” she wrote. “Surely another could have tied your wrists / and made your hidden parts open, glistening.” Elsewhere, she wrote about rejecting men’s company altogether: “by choice I sleep alone.”
And people wonder why women got angry at us men:
Like Palm Latitudes, Squandering the Blue failed to satisfy the publishing world. Though some of Braverman’s female contemporaries, like Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill, were gaining momentum, the ‘80s were still largely dedicated to literary men. “If I were male,” Braverman said, “[the writing] would be normal. But good girls don’t write about drugs, single motherhood, and rage.” That she had deliberately rejected fluency in the publishing industry’s language, choosing instead to stand on her own power and intellect, was a point of pride. She’d expected some reward for it, but instead — perhaps because of some convergence of her subject matter, her womanhood, and her temperament — Braverman struggled to regain a foothold. And it made her angry. Angry that she’d been left behind by the Ackers and Gaitskills, that she’d been rejected by their publishers. Angrier still that men like Bukowski, who was then publishing about a book a year, were celebrated and revered for their writing about addiction. Bukowski also, around this time, gave an on-camera interview during which he kicked his soon-to-be wife and called her a whore.
I sit here amazed by her story.
sch 1/13
Back in the archive, I posted about Lincoln Michel inveighing against novels slavishly imitating film. He posted a link to an earlier entry in this discussion, Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick. When I was filling the holes in my literary education during my prison stay, I began noticing the differences between Nineteenth Century novels and those of the Twentieth Century. I put this down to film coming into its own after 1915. Check out the difference between Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and James Jones's From Here to Eternity - in terms of themes, but as to the visuals contained in the stories. Jones's novel was filmed much more easily than ever has been the case of War and Peace. Hemingway and Hammett are much easier adapted to film.
The obsession with plot movement rendered through televisual scenes at the expense of other pleasures seems a very modern and very American attitude. I have to imagine much of it comes from the domination of Hollywood in American culture, which has passed down many “rules” of storytelling to other mediums. While I don’t necessarily agree with those rules for filmmaking anyway, they’re bizarre to apply to novels. Many of the film and TV rules for storytelling have to do with the basic constraints of filmmaking. Primarily, it costs a lot of money. And film is a visual medium where story is conveyed by actors moving and talking. But novels are not bound by production costs, fitting in commercial breaks, or the need to convey story only through actors’ actions and dialogue.
A novel should lean into the pleasures and possibilities of a novel, I say. The novel is an explosive, expansive, and exuberant form. It can encompass anything. Certainly early novels like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy knew this, as did modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Such writers leaned into the varied possibilities of fiction and were always willing, even eager, to shift form and style.
Deciding that I needed to do something useful since I did not go off to make money, I read Edwin Frank's What the Novels of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison Reveal About the Soul of America on LitHub. I am still working on "Chasing Ashes" in my mind, if not putting words on a page. The excursion was, I think, helpful. Please do not mind me sharing my notes.
But the deeper reason for Faulkner’s new prominence at this moment of triumphant American exceptionalism is that he spoke to America about something that America, if it aspired at all seriously to its role as world leader, could no longer afford not to consider, though it had long preferred not to: American racism. Faulkner’s South was a world defined not by victory, but by defeat, a world that had a history too complicated for simple reckoning, too dark to be put to rest, and as unforgivable as that of Europe. And this history was not just the history of the South—Faulkner made clear—it was America’s history.
It bore witness to the accommodation of slavery written into the American Constitution and to the racial and political division that had always afflicted the so-called United States, as well as to the devastation wrought by the Civil War, that first industrial war whose massive toll of death had so appalled Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in faraway Russia and had so inspired the generals of the world wars to come. America was the country of the future, ostensibly, but perhaps its only future, Faulkner’s work suggested, was one of degradation and destruction—this was the simple lesson of the enormously complex Absalom, Absalom!, in which the refusal of the self-made plantation owner Thomas Sutpen to acknowledge the darkness of his past and blackness of his progeny destroys both him and the generations to come. Perhaps the truth was that everything was already all over for the country that had dedicated itself from the start to the future; perhaps it always had been.
I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man while in prison. I do not know which is the best one-off American novelist - Ellison or Ross Lockridge, Jr. It may not matter. I will call them flip sides of the same coin. Therefore, I paid attention when I came to this paragraph:
he question the example of Faulkner (not so much his actual novels of the ’50s) posed to American readers—and it spoke to his Latin American readers too—relates to the central question of the post–World War II twentieth-century novel: How to go on after all that has gone on? In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison takes this question on with a vengeance.
I want to say this is a damned good synopsis of the novel:
Black and white are never simply descriptive of the look of things in Ellison’s novel; they are always charged, always symbolic, as everything in the world of the book reflects the crazy set of symbols that is American racism, under which lies the everyday reality of white violence, black oppression, and suppressed black rage. It is suicidal, we understand, when, at the critical turning point of the book, a young black political organizer punches out a cop and is promptly gunned down in front of the New York Public Library. That this should happen in front of a great, resplendent but also fortresslike repository of the world’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom is symbolic as well.
So the riot that breaks out at the end of the book (partly as a response to the killing) could seem like a long-awaited, necessary uprising, and yet, as it unfolds in the sweaty heat of a Harlem summer night, with the West Indian black nationalist Ras the Exhorter rallying the people from horseback and brandishing a lance like a medieval white knight, it becomes clear that even violence lacks authenticity in a world perverted through and through by racism. This is not an outbreak of restorative, revolutionary violence, but a “race riot,” a newsfeed, an event strategically connived by the so-called Brotherhood, as Ellison dubs the Communist Party, bent on exploiting the grievances of black Americans for its own, different priorities, not at all unlike a plantation master. And so it is at this point, with all the fury and falsity and futility the book has testified to now come to a head, that the narrator (disappearing with comic abruptness from the scene through a coalhole in the sidewalk) discovers the new role, the new reality, which he had announced in the book’s arresting first words: “I am an invisible man.”
I have tried to promote the marginalized American writers - the women and the non-whites - for the different perspectives they give us white male Americans on our shared country. Ellison is a prime example of this, maybe he even made me see this idea for the first time.
he truth about America, Ellison knows, is unspeakable, which is why we need new forms of speech, new and different novels to begin to understand it, just as from its beginning the twentieth-century novel has shaped and reshaped itself in response to a world of ongoing violent change. Another word that recurs throughout Invisible Man is absurd, and in the riot at the end of the book it is none other than Ras the black nationalist who seeks to string up the protagonist from a Harlem lamppost, just another part of “the absurdity of the whole night,” but equally of the absurdity of “the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fears and hates, that had brought me here still running.” Thanks to that, however, he at last knows “who I was and where I was and too that I no longer had to run” from the white and black preceptors and preempters who have driven him on his way, but “only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize”—and here we come full circle—“the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”
America as an absurdity pretty much undercuts the Trumpian slogan of Make America Great Again. Its greatness for good and evil has been intertwined since the slave owner Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Those who decry Jefferson's racism as undercutting the Declaration's equality of all persons run from America's absurdity as much as the MAGA crowd who ignore Jefferson's racism. White Americans lynched black Americans, and white Americans fought against lynching.
he truth about America, Ellison knows, is unspeakable, which is why we need new forms of speech, new and different novels to begin to understand it, just as from its beginning the twentieth-century novel has shaped and reshaped itself in response to a world of ongoing violent change. Another word that recurs throughout Invisible Man is absurd, and in the riot at the end of the book it is none other than Ras the black nationalist who seeks to string up the protagonist from a Harlem lamppost, just another part of “the absurdity of the whole night,” but equally of the absurdity of “the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fears and hates, that had brought me here still running.” Thanks to that, however, he at last knows “who I was and where I was and too that I no longer had to run” from the white and black preceptors and preempters who have driven him on his way, but “only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize”—and here we come full circle—“the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”
We should revel in our absurdity - it may be the root of American exceptionalism if not its apotheosis - but we do not. Americans want too simple a story - one in black and white, which is not a pun.
I had not thought of this, I did not get far in reading Emerson, but I did read Whitman. Walt Whitman (and, I have since learned, Poe to a certain extent) wanted us to have a native literature. Finding my own voice seems less formed in my mind than telling my own stories.
In writing Invisible Man, Ellison was as determined to escape the political and parochial slotting by which social exclusion, even as it is documented, is maintained; he was not going to write a “black novel,” much as D.H. Lawrence had no intention of being reduced to “a working-class writer.” He is not going to be put in his place. Or rather, the place of his novel will be to respond in his own way to the central imperative of the American novel, the Emersonian problem of fashioning an original voice, as much as his friend Bellow. He will respond to that legacy and redefine it by speaking in a voice that is original precisely because it is the American voice, the black voice, that America for most of its history not only silenced but has been premised on silencing. It will be a true American voice, which is to say a voice that is polyphonic, provisional, in communication with all the voices of literature near and far, while haunted too by all the voices that have not come through, epitomized by those silent stray objects strewn on the tar of the street. It will be a voice that respects their silence.
I have to think on this. Polyphonic may be beyond me. I can think of too many voices that have not come through. I can also think of the voices I think that have faded - Steinbeck's Okies, Hurston's black Floridians, Sinclair Lewis' Wisconsinites, Cather's immigrants, Upton Sinclair's workers - in favor of Leave It To Beaver suburbia. Today's twenty-somethings might find Taxi Driver as foreign as my generation found La Dolce Vita. (Or to continue the American theme: Tobacco Road.) Americans are all of these things.
As for the silence mentioned above, there are some things I can imagine left to themselves out of shame and others from reverence for noble causes that failed. Maybe I get a glimmer of meaning in Hemingway's dislike for talking too much. Talk cheapens some events.
Who knows what the future holds. I may be out of a job when my bank account can least afford it. We may be looking at the end of American democracy, or the fuel to refurbish it entirely. It seems to me that what Faulkner and Ellison teach us is that there has always been that danger of losing our freedom and the hope of fully gaining it. We can either run away from the danger or embrace the hope. I think both writers embraced hope. Otherwise, why would they have ever put a single word down on paper?
Consider this review from Public Books, A Novel of India’s Identity Crisis for what might done if Trump does become the authoritarian leader of America.
I started this yesterday, on Friday. By 9 pm I was too tired to finish. There was not much to report - just tired and tired of my left arm troubling me. I found out my sister made plans for next weekend, so she cannot help me move. She thought I was going to call her if I was not taking the new place. Typical poor communication on my part. Music was downloaded - examples follow. I crashed Chrome several times, and I did not diminish my email inbox by much. I started the pork shoulder in the slow cooker. The damage deposit was paid. Considering that I got home closer to 3 pm that seems a very unproductive day.
What follows are things picked up while I tried to stay awake.
Spry is a literary magazine I like the look of but have not submitted to, yet. I wanted to note it so you can take a look.
Senate Bill 205 proposes to allow small breweries to collaborate with other small breweries to utilize their unused equipment in order to meet demands and explore growth opportunities in the industry.
The bill passed in the Senate with a bipartisan vote of 39 to 9 and is now heading to the House to be considered for a vote.
"The key word in the bill is collaboration," Alting said.
Please read One by One the Lights Go Out by Vanessa Giraud; a daughter faced with a mother with Alzheimeir's hit me hard with its prose and its emotional accessibility. I kept thinking I am glad not to have had this problem with my parents.
Catching up with Nathan Bransford's blog where two posts got my attention.
Six reasons you’re confusing the reader: wherein I found myself thinking mostly about "The motivations and stakes are unclear" and "You’ve lost sight of what’s actually on the page". The last one because I had not really thought of it and it is an obvious problem for any piece of writing (and it is a problem I have with revising - I see what I think should be there, not what is).
...As writers, it’s nearly impossible to avoid projecting things onto the page that just aren’t there. Really ask yourself: Can I see what is and isn’t on the page?
Here’s a pretty simple formula you can use to stick the landing:
[PROTAGONIST(s)] must [DO X AND/OR Y AND/OR Z] in order to [GOAL/REWARDS] / or else [CONSEQUENCES].
I talked to KH tonight about politics. Neither of us can understand Trump's attraction. I was just reading The Article's Trump and the Tories: a warning when I reached the following which I mentioned to KH:
...The withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran confounded the other partners to the plan, left Iran with no check on upgrading its uranium and destroyed the credibility of those in Iran who had negotiated the deal, to the delight of the IRGC and harder liners who took power as a consequence. We are still paying the price.
The Iran deal should have told the country Donald J. Trump's art of the deal is at the level of a second-grader with crayons.
Maritime power is key to U.S. national security. With two decades of ground wars in the greater Middle East receding from the collective memory, it’s at sea that America will face many—if not most—of its security challenges. China, Russia, Iran, and other actors like Yemen’s Houthis all present threats to American interests. To be prepared to confront them, the U.S. should not put all its eggs into its familiar naval baskets. Variety will help produce the flexible Navy America needs.
I had never heard of the female philosopher Margaret Cavendish until The Millions newsletter came in today with Who Changed Their Lives. The article is an epistolary dialog, which makes excerpts difficult. However, there is an interesting question asked which I will pass along: why is pregnancy not the subject of philosophy? Imagining Nietzsche addressing that question amuses me.
Recently, I have been listening to and downloading a lot of Mink Deville, an old favorite who got away from me. A great soulful voice who is now dead. I first ran across him when I was in my own version of desperate days forty years ago.
Nonfiction predominates the thoughts of Kaulie Lewis Watson's Books I Wish I Wrote: On Writerly Jealousy. Still, she makes me wonder if there are books of which I am jealous. I cannot think so. For most of my life, I have found little profit in being jealous. It got me close to getting myself killed back in the summer of 1978. When she gets to the point where she discusses careers motivated by jealousy, I questioned whether this is why I never had a career and do not believe I will have a career as a writer. Too many I am in awe of, too much joy in discovering what I exiled myself from decades ago, for me to be jealous.
What I would like to do is write something that lifts up people's lives, adds to the joy, and detracts from the ugliness of this world.
Women Making Shakespeare, a new anthology from The Arden Shakespeare series edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan, illustrates both sides of this paradox. The anthology was designed as a tribute to Ann Thompson, the general editor of the Arden series, who edited the massive Arden volume of all three texts of Hamlet with Neil Taylor, and who throughout her career has broken new ground in feminist criticism of Shakespeare, especially with her 1997 anthology (with Sasha Roberts) Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900. Thompson has also, in her role as general editor of the Arden series, dramatically increased the number of women editors of Shakespeare’s plays. Her work and her influence are worth celebrating because even today’s statistics on the numbers of women editors and commentators of Shakespeare are as damning as the VIDA statistics.
The anthology contains short essays on anything related to women and Shakespeare — as characters, as actresses, as critics and scholars, as educators, as suffragists and feminists, and as readers — over the past 450 years. I would like to pose some questions that plumb the variety the anthology offers: what does reading Shakespeare mean for women? Was Shakespeare proto-feminist or patriarchal? Has anything changed in 450 years?
The discussion about Juliet is also a discussion of the censoring and dumbing down of Shakespeare. The kind of Shakespeare that is used to torture us in high school. I got lucky with a hand-me-down copy of Hamlet with the footnotes explaining all the naughty and rough bits. That was how I found Shakespeare more interesting than what I had been taught. Please do not give up on him. Life, that is Shakespeare, and is why I like how the essay closes:
...But the reason why we still read Shakespeare’s women, is that they are women. Goneril, Juliet, and Katherina are finally not ciphers. Whatever else they may be, they are true women, and they have true voices.
Rumpus: Your book is described as a cross of Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Márquez, so I’m curious what other writers influence your style and inspiration.
Gonzalez James: I’ve drawn a huge amount of inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, and I can feel their influence in my work. Probably Marilynne Robinson too. Vonnegut is so funny and fearless, and I think we share a similar sense of the absurd. Saunders is absurd, too, and I love that about his work. In his essays and lectures, he also emphasizes the importance of empathy when writing. When he’s revising, he always asks himself, “How can I love these characters more?” That’s something I try to emulate. And Robinson is such an erudite writer who’s highly influenced by her religious beliefs and her intellectual engagement with these beliefs. I do that a lot, too, not in any conscious way in which to copy her but just because I’m always thinking about religion and God and spirituality and because I think the big questions are the most important ones.
Confession: when I was young, I think I had a crush on Angela Davis. I have not read her, but I have listened to her talk and she is one very intelligent woman. She is now eighty; which I know only thanks to Seven Stories Press: Happy Birthday, Angela Davis, an interview.
In what way do you think that the black political biography plays a role within this tradition of American letters?
Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously, and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example, which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon, one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.
Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?
Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10 which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism, associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were published in TheAngelaY.DavisReader in 1998. IfTheyComeintheMorning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.
We can run from such sharp thinking. Of course, running proves the superiority of the argument and the runner's intellectual cowardice. Read her, and do what is the hardest thing for modern Americans: think.
Today: I must start packing and do my laundry and work on "Love Stinks" and Carlos Fuentes should go back to the library.
Tomorrow: Metropolitan Saba, head of the Antiochian church in America, will be at St. George's.
The cat disappeared for two days. He showed up at my door at 5 AM. Wherever he was, they must not have given him enough attention. He has eaten and is taking it easy. I thought he had died, that seems my default position for everything and everyone nowadays. Another confession: I worried about him and will miss him when I move.
And that is how I like it. It used to be that I thought time was short, I would be dying young (then it became youngish, and then it became I had out-lived my usefulness and should be going), and I wanted to experience all I could. That led me into strange places, meeting all sorts of people, and was pretty much a symptom of my depression.
When I failed in my self-destruction, I looked back on my life. Self-examination led me to choosing to not repeat myself. That what would have been my choice in an earlier period, was not to be chosen.
I also worked myself back to an earlier thinking, to the things I used to do and that I had abandoned. In that, I was helped by KH who suggested I go back to writing fiction. This I have done; albeit not to much public success. I also started keeping a journal - some of that is here.
No more crazy women; no more craziness, in general.
I went to the sheriff yesterday, as I do every Wednesday. I read a little of Carlos Fuentes there - I have a long wait for a bus, and it is quiet there. Instead of waiting for the 4pm bus, I walked over to Hoyt Avenue to catch the #12 back downtown. The weather was nice, the knee has not been the problem it was, and I got home around 4:30.
That included a stop off Dollar General - I had prepared nothing for dinner.
I did some reading and thinning out my email.
Somehow, I have attracted Russian readers. Hello! I have no idea why you are here, but if I get you to read Joyce Carols and/or Zora Neale Hurston, you are welcome.
The cat is not getting along with the black and white cat. I think he is not very fierce. He spent the night inside. I found he is not a great fan of ham.
I spent the last part of the night working on "Love Stinks". Although the plot and continuity are a mess thanks to the missing sections, the actual writing is not bad. It will take time. I see no reason to throw my hands up and quit. I would have done that 40 years ago.
Well, it is Sunday, and it is cold and I overslept. My ride to church will be coming soon. I need to catch up with my reports.
Friday: I ran spell check over my ten-minute play while waiting for KH, did some more downloading of music,I got the documents ready for court, and some reading.
When KH arrived, we went to Payless and lunch. Ninja of Japan is where we ate - every other place was closed. He was kind enough to accommodate my fasting and need to eat vegetarian, but the food was not all that impressive. We came back here and talked some more. We did a run through of the play. It is a little long. He laughed, so it works. When he left, the low level headache I had all day persisted, so I did no more writing. More reading online and a little of Carlos Fuentes.
14 English Words from Yiddish - some I knew, some I did not, but I have got to say it is proof the Jews have done more for us than ever has anti-Semitism.
While this grace might be termed secular, Wright says that it seems to “require another element or dimension” in order to make sense of it. Julia Baird, too, is mostly concerned with a non-religious understanding of grace, but rather than Wright’s cosmic bolt from the blue, it’s of a more ordinary, more quotidian variety.
This is grace as an expression of the best in humanity: forgiveness, kindness, openness to the sheer wonder of the natural world and to the gift of life. And there is still mystery to this version of grace because it cannot be measured in purely transactional terms.
I did manage to get a story submitted, "Running Away From the Dying and the Dead" to Belmont Story Review
Saturday: I was up early. The cleaning crew was expected, the cat needed to go out. I went back to Payless for tomatoes and manila envelopes. I prepared the documents I intended to file needed bigger envelopes. Then, I ran into a fellow from work who gave me a ride to the downtown post office, only it was closed. I walked over to the bus station, got my ride home. I had left around 9 and was back around 11. The rest of t of the day felt like an exercise in procrastination - especially if the goal was meant to be staring on again on "Love Stinks".
I did finally get to "Love Stinks" late in the day. Also, I wrote a long post on why America does not need a dictatorship that will see the light of day tomorrow. I downloaded more music, incurred more crashes, and got a few more things read.
I spent some time catching up with the Times Literary Supplement:
What
has happened in this story? Two people’s emotional lives have been
affected by a misplaced modifier. Though all three characters speak the
same language, and want to transact the same business, a single word
choice leaves two of them confused and self-doubting. Something has been
lost in the translation of life into language, a danger that Davis, a
translator of Proust and Flaubert, knows well. It is hard enough to move
effectively from one language to another – even harder to move from
experience to words.
Davis has made that difficulty, and the
graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving
ways in which it may be surmounted, her life’s work. Seen from a
distance, each of her collections of stories – there have been nine so
far, plus her novel, The End of the Story (1995), two collections of
essays and innumerable translations – looks much like any of the others.
Seen up close, however, they reflect different parts of her life. Her
first books feature more drinking and divorce than her later ones. Our
Strangers comes back more than once to ageing and loss. Davis’s process,
meanwhile, remains consistent: she publishes constantly, in an array of
outlets, large and small. Her acknowledgements sections are useful
guides in themselves to the variety of publications active in any given
decade since the 1970s. When she has between fifty and a hundred pieces
of work, either newly written or newly revised, she publishes them as a
book.
Since Sade’s works became more widely available in France in the 1960s,
readers and critics have unsurprisingly shown more interest in the books
that previous generations were told they could not, or should not,
read. What, after all, is the point of Sade if not to be shocking? The
kind of shock literary texts deliver, however, tends to be short-lived.
And Sade’s most extreme novels are anything but: hundreds of pages long,
they demand considerable stamina of their readers, and of their
readers’ capacity or desire to respond to the endless horrors they
describe. While some may become desensitized as they progress, others
may find that the violence becomes harder, rather than easier, to bear,
and may consequently grind to a halt. Either way, Sade at his most
shocking is not necessarily Sade at his most interesting. A novel such
as Justine (1791), which maintains a (porously thin) veneer of
respectability is, for example, a much more compelling text than the
no-holds-barred version of the same story that Sade later offered in his
much longer – and much more explicit – Nouvelle Justine (1799?).
For
the novels in this new edition the veneer was a necessity rather than a
choice. All three were written in the Charenton asylum to which Sade
had been condemned by Napoleon. While he had been granted permission to
write, his rooms were raided in 1807 by police who seized a manuscript
entitled Les Journées de Florbelle ou la nature dévoilée (The Days of
Florbelle or Nature Revealed), a work of libertinage that apparently
rivalled his most notorious works in its ambition. After this second
great loss – the first being the scroll of Les 120 journées de Sodome,
taken from his cell during the fall of the Bastille – Sade made no
further attempts to write the kind of fiction that had cemented his
scandalous reputation. If a “late style” can be discerned in works such
as La Marquise de Gange, Adélaïde de Brunswick and Isabelle de Bavière,
it was thus to a great extent imposed on him: to reach his readers he
first had to get past the censor. For many of his twentieth-century
devotees, he sacrificed too much in order to do so. Francine du Plessix
Gray describes the trio as “terribly proper little historical novels”,
while Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a pioneering editor and biographer of Sade,
evinces a sense not just of disappointment but almost of betrayal when
he pronounces: “The Marquise de Gange is of no interest other than for
indubitably being by Sade, and for the success with which he almost
entirely erased himself from it”.
Sade, it appears, fooled more
than just the censors. It seems baffling now that Pauvert could find no
trace of the author in La Marquise de Gange when it is arguably Sade’s
most playful and self-conscious novel....
A richly detailed reconstruction of the author’s life and Spain’s
fertile cultural landscape, Cervantes the Poet offers a bold
reassessment of the origin of the European novel. This is usually
theorized as an admixture of classical epic poetry and chivalric
romance, with Don Quijote standing as both the original and the best
example. Where Ponce-Hegenauer offers truly exciting new perspectives is
in her argument that lyric subjectivity and madness exert a greater
influence on the novel than epic or romance. “What is evident”, she
argues, is that Don Quijote, “by virtue of its continued relevance for
so many formulations of modernity, contains a consistently recognizable
figuration of the modern subject, a subject which remains mysterious”.
It is Alonso Quijano’s descent into insanity and his self-reinvention as
Don Quijote de la Mancha, in other words, rather than his wild
adventures and the multilayered textual complexities of Cervantes’s
narrative, that provides us with the blueprint for the modern novel and
keep us gazing into the quixotic inkblot.
I learned of Pascal from Nietzsche, and I read The Pensees in prison, and I felt I needed to read Winning the wager: Pascal talks to our own spiritual ennuiby Michael Moriarty. Pointed out something I have felt without really examining or naming.
This year France celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise
Pascal. He died aged 39, having invented a calculating machine,
produced pioneering work in mathematics and physics, and even designed a
bus service for Paris. For those who know him chiefly as a
mathematician and scientist, it might be surprising to learn that Pope
Francis marked the birthday in June with an Apostolic Letter. This
contained a biographical sketch of Pascal and an outline of his
religious thought. Even for those aware of Pascal as a religious writer,
this letter may have elicited a surprise. He was an adherent of the
movement within Catholicism called Jansenism, which to its critics came
dangerously close to Calvinism, and which was condemned in its time by
the papacy. Besides, Pope Francis is a Jesuit, and Pascal devoted a
fierce and sometimes very funny polemic, the Lettres provinciales
(1657), to the Society of Jesus, accusing it of watering down and even
distorting Christian morality.
***
It is in the
philosophical, not the spiritual or theological domain, that Pascal’s
originality lies. The key philosophical concept here is inquiétude,
disquiet or restlessness, more generally associated with Malebranche and
Locke. By “restlessness” Devillairs means the absence of an available
and determinate relationship to truth and the good, a condition in which
the desire for truth and happiness cannot be satisfied, but cannot be
altogether discarded.
In September the Associated Press reported on how supercomputers
powering AI research use an extraordinary quantity of water as coolant: a
series of questions posed to the large language model ChatGPT, run by
the firm OpenAI, uses up about half a litre. A reasonable person might
wonder whether that water would be better allocated to people and crops
than to language-generating machines. Engineers at the waterworks in
West Des Moines, Iowa – 6 per cent of whose reserves, in July 2022, went
to Microsoft supercomputers powering ChatGPT and programs like it –
wondered exactly that, arguing that future projects within its borders
would have to be less thirsty so the district’s human residents could be
assured of water.
A few weeks later the Silicon Valley venture
capitalist Marc Andreessen issued a “techno-optimist manifesto” in which
he defended artificial intelligence against its detractors, arguing
that reasoning like that of the West Des Moines water engineers was
tantamount to manslaughter, or worse: “We believe Artificial
Intelligence can save lives … We believe any deceleration of AI will
cost lives”. Andreessen averred that “deaths that were preventable by
the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder [sic]”. (If
that sentence went through an AI grammar checker, you can see that the
technology requires substantial further investment before we can trust
it with our lives.)
Scoffing at governments and universities in
favour of free markets, Andreessen staked a claim to the future, which
he apparently believes has a greater right to resources than the
present. He is not alone in this thinking, versions of which emanate
from his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires. They are not the first very
rich men to believe that disproportionate quantities of scarce
resources should, by right and reason, belong to them rather than to
their fellows. And they are not the first to declare that the least
interference with their investment schemes would be immoral or criminal.
They are perhaps unusual in the oddly apocalyptic tone of their
optimism, and in their success at getting themselves taken seriously by
universities and governments – perhaps because many of us feel we are
losing ground to machinery, in ways we cannot quite define.
In
The Handover David Runciman argues that we have long since given over
our world to artificial agents that are far more powerful than us, and
often indifferent to our welfare. For centuries they have roamed the
earth and divvied up its resources. They are called states and
corporations. People designed these machines to do what we ourselves
cannot: indefinitely remember, organize and endure.....
There was more read in other venues, that will need to wait to post. I need to get read y for church.
I leave with one more rejection of a story:
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