Literary Stuff, Plotting, Rejections; A Bit of An Update

 Has it been 3, 4 days since I gave the last update for myself?

Thursday was one of those drowsy days. Friday I made it to group, talked to KH, and had a day of discomfort and weariness. Then I got a bit of research done by not being to sleep; I did my dishes about 3 AM today. I do not know if I got dehydrated but I got light-headed and slightly nauseous and decided I am not going to bed feeling like this.

I went nowhere today but the convenience store. I went through Google Scholar looking for articles for my research project while running Netflix alongside. That worked for three movies. Well most of three. The Northman was too weird for that kind of treatment.  

I went to sleep very early and just woke up again to work on the blog posts.  

7 Books That Blur the Boundary Between Fact and Fiction (Electric Literature ) - a series of books I have not heard of, one that I did, and nothing that I have read. from the mini-reviews, I think I have missed out.

Ten Postwar American Novels 

 Principles of Plotting Part III: Variation (Counter Craft). Lincoln Michel always makes me think about what I am writing, so you might want to subscribe to his Substack. I am waiting to see what happens to “After Making Landfall”. It may be the most ambitious thing I have written in a formal sense. I wanted to combine a quest and an Eastern staying put/Ursula K. Le Guin carrier bag theme; I used second-person, third-person, and first person points of view. The second-person was mostly rising action and the third person was mostly oscillation. It keeps getting rejected.

A second objection I’ve seen might be summed up as “Who cares if the plot is interesting? Maybe what matters is other elements of the story, like the voice or the character’s memories or the setting.” In both entries, I went out of my way to stress that I admire the infinite forms of fiction and that includes many “plotless” novels.5 Still, I think the question to ask yourself is why are you including a plot if you don’t find it interesting and/or don’t care to make it interesting on the page? If your story revolves around a mystery plot where a detective figure finds clues to try to solve a case, but you don’t care to make the mystery or its solving compelling… well, why is it there?

There might be a good reason! I’ve enjoyed some novels that deconstruct and subvert detective fiction. I love Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, where the detective seems ever further from solving the case as the confusing clues mass. Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company was my favorite TV show last year and it revolves around a character obsessing over solving a ridiculous “crime” and finding ever more ridiculous clues and conspiracies. Several Thomas Pynchon books could be added here. I would suggest that these authors still make their plots interesting, even if in absurd ways, and also that they undermine traditional detective stories for specific thematic, comedic, or narrative reasons. If your plot is thoughtlessly tacked on for no real reason except you think you need to cram one into your manuscript to sell it to publishers, well, readers will probably be as unenthused as you are about the plot.

When I read articles like this, there are paragraphs where the brain snags on the idea and asks if I am doing this.

There’s an old writing saw that goes “an ending should feel both inevitable and surprising.” You can apply this to every plot beat. A clever plot consistently feels both inevitable (or at least logical) and surprising (or at least fresh). We want to see the ideas tweaked and concepts twisted—but not so much that it feels disjointed and not so little that it feels repetitive. The reader wants to be both surprised and not so surprised. Yes, this is hard to do. Who said plotting was easy? 

In “After Making Landfall”, the first-person section feels more like a coda. The protagonist writer has decided the only way to fight impostor syndrome is to keep writing. Seeing the stymied passion between her boyfriend and an old girlfriend of his inspires her to not give up writing. But is that a surprise and inevitable? I am not so sure about the surprise, besides the reason she makes her decision. Too neurotic? It happens when I am not really writing.

Keeping reading, I hit another snag:

Part of why Variation is so important in any genre is that it provides the reader with another reason to turn the page. They aren’t just reading to find out what happens next. They are also reading to see how you can delight them with the unexpected.8

My protagonist overcame the derision and lack of belief on the part of friends and family about being a writer; her culture in a way. She finds a boyfriend, the need to make a living, as a block in her career; the boyfriend leaves her, the job gives her a wider experience, she meets a new lover who encourages her writing. She gets published, only to find herself as the final obstacle. She has fulfilled her quest to get published; she needs to find out where she goes next. I like to think that is sufficient variation.

 But then what about “Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town”? Driving KH nuts these past two years on how I keep altering my “Dead and Dying Stories” and too lazy to start over at the beginning, this is just a crazy experiment that only works with people from Indiana. So far, anyway.  Right now, the form is a novella with one long arc from the rise of a factory town (like an overture or a prologue) setting the importance of the factory to the town and the importance of its founder to the factory. Then there is the arc where the family sells out, the town thinks it will be a boon, while the kids pay the costs of the changes (abortions, broken hearts, lost ideals). There is an arc about a bisexual girl getting pregnant and the boys in her life; There is an arc about the conflict between the brother representing the old idea of the town's preeminent family and the sister who wants nothing of it. There is the failure of the new owners and the final collapse of the factory, with the different ways that people cope with the failures imposed from the outside. There are longer arcs between art and commerce; between the homegrown efforts to remake what was, between those who want to build upon what they have and those who want only what was to return. Marriages falter, suicides are attempted or succeed; there is persistence in the face of reality. There is the loss of heroic leaders only to find success in the face of democratic cooperation. Whether I have pulled all this off is far from clear. Success is escape until those left can only succeed by following a madman.

Continuing with with Lincoln Michel: Principles of Plotting Part IV: Intersection and Redirection.

One of the worst sins a plot-forward story can commit is to drop plot lines. It is far easier to generate interesting story ideas or mysterious elements than it is to finish them. So, there is often a temptation to pull a Lost and cut the plot lines you can’t finish and then walk away whistling, hoping the reader doesn’t notice. This is a mistake both for ongoing storylines and for elements that are signaled as significant to the reader. (This is the real meaning of “Chekhov’s Gun,” aka that a gun shown in the first act must go off in the third. That’s not because a play needs a murder—although it rarely hurts—but because a gun placed prominently on a stage is something a viewer will notice and expect to see have a payoff.4)  

Okay, I think I am good here with “After Making Landfall”  and not so sure about “Scenes”. The first really has only plotline. But the latter is a really a series of interconnected stories with interconnected characters. The same worry persists after reading this:

Still, completing storylines is only step one. The more powerful and difficult thing to achieve is to bring the storylines together in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable. This normally means that the storyline trajectories intersect—thus Intersection—and affect each other. The arcs and plots weave together to form a complete pattern or picture. The ideal is that each part feels necessary. If you removed one, it would untangle the whole thing.

There are parts that might be pulled and the plot, the action, might be able to continue. But the themes might take a hit. The distance between what was thought to be ideal and the reality of how those ideals are either no longer applicable or were always toxic is an important theme. It is meant to contrast with the craziness of originality, of creativity, that might just solve the problem of the town's future. This has me thinking, have I done enough to get these themse properly displayed? Display implicating plot for me.

While writing the previous paragraph, my mind went to the final scenes, I have a ghost tying up his story of ambition and failure and a love gone astray; I have a son justifying his faith in his father's art; but do I have the routing of the Bridges family? Then I went back to the essay, wondering what else I might find to help or to torment myself with.

There is a unique challenge presented to stories with several main storylines and different POVs. In such works, you might still want to have the character and plot arc of each character cross but you also need to have the various storylines collide. Potentially, this could be merely thematic but normally it is going to be more literal: your POV characters will appear in the same place and/or act in ways that affect the other storylines causing some level of chaos, closure, comedy, or tragedy.

Yep, I need to look at the ending again. Especially with this paragraph in mind:

Redirection might take the shape of shifting the story to a new plane that reorients everything that comes before. The blunt version of this is the twist ending. But there are subtle ways of twisting, such as how John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” and other means of redirecting to a new plane. You might shift focus, zooming in to highlight the most important element or else telescoping out to place the story in a wider view. Or you might do both at the same time, such as when Donald Barthelme’s “The School” shifts from a catalog of things that have died at the school over the course of a year to a philosophical debate about the meaning of death during one class.  

In “Scenes”, my redirection was one character's failure and another's revival after attempting suicide. I am not feeling that was clear enough. “After Making Landfall”, it is a defiance of impostor's syndrome. I feel good about that.

Why “Scenes” came forward is that I am looking at a possible submission; only I need to add about 10 pages. Reading Michel's articles leaves me convinced I have excluded important parts. Well, useful ones. 

I am so far from having anything worth the sending out of a query letter and Nathan Bransford's How to nail the last line of the plot description in a query letter is mostly a reminder of what I have still to do.

 

Rejections

7/8/2026 - “Agnes”

Thank you for submitting your work.  While we're not able to accept this piece for publication, we appreciated the opportunity to read your fiction and hope you'll try us again in the future.

Many thanks,

The Eds.

swamp pink

swamp-pink.cofc.edu

7/11/2026 - the April revision, so not a great disappointment.

Thank you for sending us "After Making Landfall." We're grateful to have had the chance to read and spend time with this piece, but unfortunately it was not selected for publication in Cagibi. We wish you all the best of luck placing it elsewhere and hope you will submit to us again.

Best wishes, 

Cagibi Editors

*

Cagibi on Facebook:  facebook.com/cagibilit

Cagibi on Instagram: instagram.com/cagibilit

 

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Pynchon - Against the Day, Frontiers, Love & Stuff Like That

 I read Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day in prison. I will repeat what I say in every post on this blog about Pynchon: his sense of humor and mine do not match; I recognize the work he has accomplished, but it leaves me cold.

Listening to the following video from Write Conscious, I had to disagree with most of what it contains. Then the presenter got onto the idea that our spiritual/social breakdown started with the loss of the frontier. The frontier gave us something spiritual to rub up against.

I have been thinking much on the division of the Northwest Territories into townships; where surveyors forced the land into grids. That was long before the frontier was gone. Even before the frontier left Indiana., surveyors were going forth to make the land fall into rationality. 

Also, my reading of the Desert Fathers was triggered. It can be said that they went out into the wilderness, the frontier in a way, to decrease the influence of the world on their spirituality. However, I take from the Desert Fathers that there is in all of us a spiritual frontier.

However, I agree with the argument about the need for spirituality in our literature. That agreement comes out of my experience with depression. That is a disease of the spirit as much as of physiology and psychology. The spirit has been neglected by the vast amount of American literature since Nathaniel Hawthorne, if not further back. I cannot think of anything in English or American literature comparable to Dostoevsky's The Brother Karamazov.

Using the Night  (n+1, Mark Iosifescu) has this to say about Pynchon, and Against the Day.

A growing comfort with sentimentality feels, too, like the primary carryover from Vineland into Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, even if much of the critical interest in those latter and longer novels was confined, at least initially, to rejoicing over the return they represented to the author’s vaunted maximalist epic mode. (T.C. Boyle re M&D in the NYTBR: “This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all.”) But beyond the page counts and the inducements to crowdsource a reference or cameo, the stories and styles—even Mason & Dixon’s giddy facsimile of 18th-century English—are deceptively simple, characterized by a mixture of sumptuous but irreverent historical action and naked emotion. Is there a more affecting entanglement with heartbreak in all of Pynchon than Charles Mason’s grief over his dead wife Rebekah? Is there a neater throughline across Against the Day’s multiversal infinities than the characters’ dogged, decades-spanning searches for lost loved ones?

There’s something instructive, as well, about these later books’ explicit turn toward the tropes and textures of genre fiction. If there were any remaining doubt about the insufficiency of the author’s reputation as a schematic and paranoid mystic-crank, this surge of goofy genre conventions ought to have finished the job. In addition to suggesting, gratifyingly, that Pynchon was finally allowing himself to indulge the pulpy forms he’s obviously loved since before V., his strategy of running Mason & Dixon and Against the Day’s historical and sociopolitical concerns (the Enlightenment’s colonial hypocrisies and mounting corporatocratic rule, the Gilded Age’s capitalist violence and doomed anarchist counterattacks) through the style filters of the popular fiction of their respective days (frame stories, Sternean comic novels, 19th-century boys’ adventure books, dimestore Westerns, etc. etc.) results in some rollickingly enjoyable vernacular storytelling. It also allows Pynchon to move away from the apparent omniscience of the classically maximalist voice, even to disempower it. These later novels contain no shortage of conspiratorial overtures and world-systems theorizing—but, having been unhesitatingly pastiche-ified and, as often, offloaded to characters who wear a conspicuous genre wackiness on their sleeves, those elements go down smooth, even as the plots they delineate multiply and interpenetrate beyond anything seen in the early novels.

I will put more on the difficulties of love than the loss of the frontier as the root of humankind's loss of Western civilization. Your mileage might vary.

I think I will schedule this for next month. There might be more to add, or second thoughts might come.

sch 11/19 

Writers: Advice; Thomas Mann & Colm Tóibín; Charles Portis; Chester Himes +

 Another collection of things I have read, watched, listened to recently about writing, or writers. I hope they help you with your writing, that they encourage you to write, or any combination of the two.

My Favorite Book About Writing is Not a Book About Writing 

Back in the late 1980s when I was younger and more impressionable, I was riveted by the PBS series The Power of Myth. For those who remember, it was simply journalist Bill Moyers and academic Joseph Campbell sitting in the Skywalker Ranch’s study-like setting, talking about ancient cultures and their beliefs. The graphics, what few there were, were amateurish by today’s standards. Campbell, who had only a year or so left to live, was prone to long, storytelling tangents. Moyers was a curious questioner, sometimes knowledgeable about the subject at hand, sometimes a neophyte, and always in awe of his interviewee. Not the kind of stuff one is likely to find these days.

The series was recently rebroadcast by my local PBS station (which may not survive much longer due to NEA budget cuts). It was based largely on Campbell’s book from 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Nearly 40 years later, and hopefully more mature in my ability to understand, I found it even more fascinating. The breadth of Campbell’s knowledge about myth—particularly cultural origin stories—was even more inspiring than I remembered. He knew and could recite stories from dozens of cultures.

***

Later on in the book Campbell discusses the concept of the annihilation of the ego, so important to The Hero’s Journey. That’s an aspect of the journey that is rarely followed these days. So much of our literature, and particularly motion picture making, is devoted to the exaltation of the ego rather than its sublimation. But that was a characteristic necessary for the survival of the culture, because its underlying message was that a hero is not an egotist—far from it. A hero was devoted to the welfare of the people. And the hero was one of the people. Contrast that to much of today’s “strongman” politics, or mainstream entertainment, in which heroes are not just heroes, they are superheroes, an entity none of us can become.2

***

1 Although most writers are familiar with the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, according to Wikipedia, Campbell’s original version contained seventeen steps, and was trimmed to twelve for screenwriting purposes by Christoper Vogler, a Hollywood executive. The Joseph Campbell Foundation website doesn’t list the journey as individual, chronological steps, but expresses it as a circular path of interrelated actions. This representation is more closely related to what is in the book.

 While cleaning out, organizing my Watch Later list on YouTube, I found the following videos related to Thomas Mann.

There is this rather short documentary, which touches more on his personal life than delving into his writing:

 Colm Tóibín | The Magician is an hour-long discussion of Mann and Tóibín's novel about Mann:

 The Blog Of The South (Defector) discusses Portis's novel, Dog of The South. If you have not read Portis, you should. If you want to know why you should read Portis, then click on that link. No American writer is like Portis.

 Write Conscious brings together David Foster Wallace and David Pynchon, both writers who have left me bewildered.

 The Nation highlights the work of Chester Himes and his life in Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs; which sounds like it only touches on his Harlem police stories. Like the man, it is more than that. I read his Harlem novels when I was young; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, when I was in prison. No, he has not the grace of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, but he has his own bag - an imagination, an honesty, a certain sort of fine madness. Ignored for too long, America needs to face up to him. 

Lost Literature: On “Picket Line,” Elmore Leonard’s Remarkable, Long-Unpublished Novella (Crime Reads) - anybody who has not read Leonard should; I see him as one of those guys who straddle the genre/literary line. He writes great dialog.

sch 10/21 

 Not sure what I expected from a site calling itself The Art of Manliness hosting a podcast on Hemingway, but The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway does a very good job, steady on the writing, intelligent questions by the host.

Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage by Xiaolu Guo (Words Without Borders)

I conceived this film after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Since my film school years, I have deeply felt that the collaborative nature of filmmaking changes the notion of originality, as John Berger has stated in his Ways of Seeing. So when I read “The Death of the Author” by Barthes, I understand what he means when he says that in writing it is language that speaks, not the author. And it is important to realize that to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality. This is a perfect explanation behind both Borges’s and Kathy Acker’s retellings of Don Quixote. To write is to reach out, through a preexisting work.

Language is a superstructure, as Noam Chomsky said. It has a universal grammar that is beyond linguistic difference. Language is a system through which we writers move back and forth, travel within and beneath. But never truly beyond. Language is an infinitely vast code that cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with. A semiotic sabotage suggests that a certain narrative can be challenged, rewritten, and reconstructed, but it may not be replaced entirely. And the role of fiction, as radical it may be, is also inherently traditional and sentimental, therefore it is deeply humanistic.

Fiction is the art of narrative, it comprises the ever-changing human stories. It is the Dharma wheel that a Buddhist monk has to constantly turn, or a herd of deer in the wood that a Daoist would follow, wherever that path might take. Human life is spontaneous and risky; fictions have proved that. In that sense, all of us are warriors. We are at once saboteurs and builders, we destroy and we create anew.

Think about that. Read the entire essay. Think about these paragraphs some more. I am.

sch 10/23 

Something more practical, Free Talk: How Write a Satisfying Final Act for Your Novel (With Ley Taylor Johnson) from Authors Publish.

This video addresses one thing that has bothered me since getting out of prison - sensitivity warnings. The word anodyne is used in the video, and that seems to me to be a valid worry about our current literary output. It seems impossible to know what might set off an unknown person's sensitivity. Well, other than the obvious - sadism, brutality for the sake of brutality, racism and its related isms - which do not seem to be literary subjects in and of themselves. That they might be tools for a literary purpose is possible, but also damned tricky. See Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and its history, for how the unpleasant can be handled in a literary way, while showing the problems for such works.

David Foster Wallace on the uses of irony may seem like an unlikely video for me. I may have my doubts about his Infinite Jest, I have no doubts about his skill and respect for his ideas.

Writers on Writing (60 Minutes)

Well, this post is more than long enough. I hope these were of help and/or inspiration for you.

sch 10/25

 

 

From the Practical to The Philosophical

 Writing Resources: Wonderbook (Writing Forward)

Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook is not your average tome on the craft of writing. It’s more like a portal, and once you enter, writing becomes a strange and awesome adventure. Subtitled The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, the book addresses fiction in general but occasionally emphasizes speculative fiction; any writer will benefit from it, but there are extra morsels for science-fiction and fantasy authors.

Unlike most books on craft, this one’s packed with illustrations, photographs, and diagrams, which will inspire you and provide fresh perspectives on the concepts discussed in the book. The artwork is delightfully weird and certain to give your imagination a good workout. The primary artist is Jeremy Zerfoss, but the book includes a range of diverse artists and styles. One of my favorite pieces was a useful and creative diagram showing the life cycle of a story.

***

My favorite chapter in the book was the one on revision. Too often, books on storytelling fail to address the technical aspects of writing. In Wonderbook, the chapter on revision was one of the best chapters — this chapter alone makes the book worth purchasing for any writer. It also included elaborate advice on outlining and drafting as well as a handy chart that shares authors’ anecdotes on the revision process from experts like Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Patrick Rothfuss. 

I read one of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, Borne, and was very much impressed by him. I keep having too much to read to get back to him. However, because of having read that one novel, I suspect this book would be of help to any writer.

From 101 Creative Writing Exercises: Moral Dilemmas (Writing Forward) - do we really raise enough moral dilemmas, or do we try to avoid them? And how to raise their answers? I prefer not to offer pat answers - for the obvious reasons, and to avoid the boredom of sanctimony. Decades ago, I told a friend of mine who had confessed her resolution of a moral dilemma - an abortion or face certain death in childbirth that would separate her two children - that the hardest ethical problem is always between two bad choices. Those choices just need to be lived with. However, when, after returning home, I found her obituary, I noticed both daughters were with her when she died.

What is the Theme of a Story? (Writing Forward)

Theme is one of the most difficult story elements to understand. Often confused with plot, theme is actually a worldview, philosophy, message, moral, ethical question, or lesson. However, these labels, taken alone or together, don’t quite explain theme in fiction.

We can think of a theme as an underlying principle or concept, the topic at the center of the story.

Themes are often universal in nature. Some common universal themes are based on motifs of redemption, freedom, equality, sacrifice, betrayal, loyalty, greed, justice, oppression, revenge, and love. Themes can also be personal and part of the human condition. Such themes could explore issues surrounding loneliness, trust, commitment, or family.

However, a story’s theme is more than an idea that can be expressed in a single word. The concept of freedom can form the foundation of a story’s theme, which could be anything from “one should not sacrifice freedom for security” to “freedom is worth dying for.”

***

Some experts have suggested that authors shouldn’t think too much about theme until they’ve produced a draft, while others believe that theme is so integral that it should be present throughout story development. The approach you choose will depend on your writing process, storytelling style, and personal preference.

Theme could be considered the glue that holds a story together, the binding principle of the narrative. It is the deeper meaning, the truth that underscores the plot and characters. 

Theme interests me. Particularly, the ideas of what we know and of history in general. The article goes on to suggest making a list. I have noted that one in my mind.

Editor Insights: Drive Your Narrative with Cause & Effect (The Forever Workshop) gives the opportunity to see a work before revision and then after revision. Sorry, this is one of the subjects that excite me to get on a soapbox. One thing I did not know enough about when young was the work does not spring forth from the writer's mind into a draft and then into the published work. No, no, time has taught me I was a complete idiot. The whole thing is behind a paywall.

Reedsy videos - the three-act structure and a novel-writing Q & A.

I do not know William Vollmann, even by name, but Write Conscious has an interest in him and ties him with David Foster Wallace. One item I learned is that Vollman is from Indiana.

I have to agree that modern readers have a responsibility to be smarter, but what if the entire culture is now suffused by idiots?

Vollmann on Cormac McCartney:

Wikipedia has him graduating from a Bloomington, Indiana high school (without mentioning which one). He is about a year older than me, has written profusely, and I am wondering why I have not heard of him. Looking at his credits, probably because he started publishing about the time I was trying to set up a law practice to pay my student loans. 

WSJ published on Aug. 28, 2025 a profile of Vollman, The Last Untamed Writer in America, but that is behind a paywall.

The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an American Epic from The Metropolitan Review dates from March 21, 2025. It is very long. Maybe this is what it is like to read Vollmann - part profile, part history of publishing his forthcoming novel, part discussion of the publishing business, and I am left thinking we thought J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon are strange.

Slovak, somewhat allowing of Vollmann’s argument that his novels don’t earn any money, points out that The Dying Grass (2015), Vollmann’s 1,000-page historical novel about the Nez Perce War, received some of the best reviews of his career and, despite being released in a then-astonishing $55 hardcover, sold about 5,000 copies (no word on the what the paperback sold, whose covers are almost polka dotted with blurbs along the lines of, “The reading experience of a lifetime”). But 5,000 isn’t too bad, he suggests. Especially when the critical reception is so unanimous and glowing.

Alas, blurbs aren’t dollars, and nothing’s guaranteed.

“That sucks for Vollmann,” said Díaz, “and for anyone who cares about literature.”

A MODEST IMPERIALIST: William T. Vollmann (The Brooklyn Rail, 2010) is an interview.

I became an ardent fan of William T. Vollmann’s work after reading Europe Central (2005). It is an extraordinary accomplishment, a remarkable feat of re-imagining one of the most complex, and harrowing, events of the 20th century, the conflict between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Vollmann tells his many stories with dark humor, intelligence, and a great, measured respect for suffering and courage. This past fall, I read Imperial, Vollmann’s 1200-page nonfiction exploration of Imperial County, California, along the Mexico divide. Taking up all sorts of subjects on both sides of the border, Imperial is a great, consuming read. It is a crying shame that a work this deep, this smart and this unusual has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

I am too old for undertaking this one, but if there was time enough…. As Mr. Michel wrote below, read widely. So take the opportunity while you have time.

Literary Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Lincoln Michel, Counter Craft) needs to be read in full. Sorry, I feel that taking its paragraphs out of context undermines the argument and there are too many examples - many writers and philosophers I know only by reputation. All I can do is give you this paragraph:

When I was in college, the best literature course I took paired novels with philosophical texts. I really wish I’d kept the syllabus. But an example was pairing Don DeLillo’s White Noise with excerpts of Baudrillard.10 One day, I’d love to create my own version of this class to teach. I guess I have a start on a syllabus in this post, though as always I love to hear recommendations in the comments. Anyway, all this is just to say that philosophy and art do not have to be opposites at all. They can be mutually reinforcing and generative. As always, read widely.

Now, like Mr. Michel, I like reading philosophy. I almost had a minor in philosophy. And what themes I have are philosophical in nature.

Speaking of reading widely, listen to The 50 Greatest Modern Novels According to Time Magazine - Reaction:

I caught many that I had not read and many that I had, but what really stayed in my mind was his comparing Willa Cather with Thomas Hardy. The more I think about it, the more it seems a good comparison. I had never thought to think of her in comparison to any but American writers.

I do need to get back to writing something else than this blog.

Happy Thanksgiving!

sch 

Wednesday In Muncie With A Camera!

 What I Did This Morning and Into The Afternoon

Another morning where I did not want to get up, but I did. After breakfasting, I headed down to the convenience store for a pack of Luckies. The camera stayed home, and I think that was the first mistake of the day.

Back here, I worked through the emails and started on my submissions. Those wiped out the day until around 2 pm.

I called the dentist. They did not have my Humana card. I sent it to them, then I heard nothing further from them. They will be closed until Monday,

My submissions:

“Agnes” to Another Chicago Magazine,  Rumpus, The Hemlock Journal, and swamp pink

American Short Fiction, received “Heart’s Judgment Judged”

 To Pulp Asylum, Cold Caller, "The Revenger’s Tale"

Fiction on the Web  - “The Unintended Consequences of Art”

“Going For The Kid” went to Haven Spec Magazine - which I missed as being a duplicate! Moron.

 Peek behind the scenes at how Fiction on the Web chooses which stories to publish - I do not know if this helped still my worries about what happens to my stories after submission is still not clear in my mind.

 I also had running in the background Edward II - Ian McKellen - Timothy West - Diane Fletcher 1969 - Marlowe - Restored 2025 - 4K 

This I found preferable to my memory of the Jarman movie - mostly because of Ian McKellen.

 I also found another local blog: Hiding in Plain Sight (taking in Anderson and Muncie).

Out and About With My New Camera

After lunch and supper, I decided I was going to Minnetrista for an art show. This time I had my camera with me. I took the opportunity to experiment, so please bear with me. Some did not work ; I need to look at the instructions in more depth.

The view from the back of my apartment building:

The view to the north along Reserve:

Reserve looking south:

Muncie's Parking Patrol doing their best:

What I think is an interesting looking house and another failed experiment:

Coming up to Wheeling Avenue:

Crossing Wheeling Avenue to the Minnetrista area:

First stop was White River:

Yeah, there is a tint that was not actually there.

These are the buildings that were associated with the Ball family and remain standing; it is my understanding that these were the smaller buildings, that the larger ones went up in a fire.

There are barn owls in this area:

Then I came up to the Minnetrista Center itself (I believe on the way there, with the river below, I think I saw a kingfisher; only once before have I seen a kingfisher):

They are getting ready for the Luminarian:

And then I came upon the place itself:

These are the pieces I liked best:

From there I needed to take care of some business - my supply of Coke Zero for the rest of the day. This meant along to the convenience store on Wheeling. I cut across the Delaware County Fairgrounds. Here, I decided to more experiments - most of which I will not trouble you with tonight.

I made one stop before the convenience store:

One of Muncie's wonders.

The hands were too full on the way back for more photos. 

Back here around four pm, being gone for about 2 hours, I did the dishes and had dinner. One other blog post was written, about Thomas Pynchon, that is scheduled for the last half of next month. Then I started putting together this post.

Some videos for the day - Klimt, Socialism, Changing Language, King Arthur, Irish pranks, Louis Armstrong live, the doom of Ireland:

I talked to CC. She is supposed to come over. So far, not another peep out of her.

I did plan on a liturgy tomorrow morning, but that might not happen. I still need to get my novels and my mail. I would rather not be distracted by the world while at church.

This post is far too long. I will apologize for that and close out for the night. I might take to bed with Edna O'Brien.

sch

Joyce Carol Oates' We Were The Mulvaneys 3/27/2015

[ 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 10/14/2025]  

With having read so little Joyce Carol Oates, I think you might question the effect she has on me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy have also hit me as hard. She makes me wish I'd kept writing fiction — as does all the other three. At the same time, Oates makes me wonder if I can ever write as well as she does — like Marquez. Her tales of western New York surprise and encourage me. Surprising me by setting them not in the more glamorous cities, like Jonathan Franzen. But small towns like Hardy and William Faulkner. Encouraging me with my own stories of no — where Indiana. She chills how she handles the most horrible of events (here: the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl) without flinching or overplaying the event in melodrama. Is this not Art? Is not this steadiness to be found in Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina? Surprisingly, the prison's leisure library has more of her books (three, I seem to recall). I put them on the next reading list.

While reading We Were The Mulvaneys (Plume, 1997), I thought of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. There the gets raped, mutilated, and murdered; father executes his revenge. Therein lies the tragedy. In Oates' novel, the father cannot execute his revenge; society protects the rapist. The father and sons dwindle through impotence. The daughter, sent away, becomes figuratively mutilated and somewhat dead. The family splinters. Only when the father dies — away from the family but after reconciling with his daughter — does the family begin to heal. I see now what We Were The Mulvaneys shares with Franzen's The Corrections is the changing role and ineffectiveness of the American patriarch and the family. Oates has in her novel characters in some state of healing. Not a “Hollywood ending” but a hopeful one.

Tough, serious-minded, and the hardest novel I've read for a while. Oates made me think too much of my own life, my own family. I am actually looking forward to War and Peace. 

Why is there not the same touting of Joyce Carol Oates for the Nobel as there is for Philip Roth?

I want to leave with a sample of Oates' writing. The problem is one of selection — length, its durability as a quotation, are troublesome here. She packs tightly.

So in the end Mike did walk his ravaged old rubbery-legged dad up the filth-encrusted stairs to the furnished room above the Golden Pavilion Chinese Pavilion and Takeout. The pigsty room you wouldn't want to examine too closely. Poor Mike biting his lower lip, nostrils pinching. He pulled off his dad's laceless shoes, a few items of dirt-stiffened clothing, laid him onto the stained rumpled sheets where at once he began to snore, snort, wheeze, his head lolling like the head of a broken-necked goose. Waking a long time later to discover only six twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his pants pocket — a hundred twenty when he'd had a wild hope of five hundred at least. So the ravaged old man had humbled himself in the eyes of his eldest son and in his own eyes for so little, after all.

sch

[Checking out the internet for the information denied me in prison, I found the following items.

JCO has a Substack! Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal.

We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (Book Snob, 3/17/2011) has a different reaction than mine:

I could write more about what happens, but I can’t be bothered to, which sounds dreadful, but that’s how the book made me feel by the end. There was so much detail, so many interwoven stories…and it was all rather unbelievable. While there are precursors to what happens in the pasts of Corinne and Michael, from the way they are described at the beginning, their actions are just not convincing for their characters. I didn’t believe that the people they were described as being would possibly act in that way. Judd is a rather weak narrator; Oates doesn’t seem quite sure what she’s doing with him, and digs into the minds and hearts of other characters in a way Judd could not possibly have done. How could he know in minute and graphic detail, what his brother was feeling or thinking at a particular time, for example?

On top of that, it’s a heavy book, with allegorical and Biblical overtones; the setting in Mt Ephraim is, I’m sure, deliberate, and the failures of fathers and betrayals of sons and so on and so forth, as well as the frequent mentions of religion and forgiveness and atonement etc, all gave it a weight that the flimsy story could not carry. It started out very promisingly, but it ran away with itself and became far too complicated and convoluted. The essential themes of the rupturing of the myth of the all American family; the questioning of the appearance of perfection; the ease at which families can be torn apart, by any number of seemingly trivial reasons that trigger a fault line already there, under the surface, are all excellent, and intriguing, and promised a great deal. Ultimately, however, I felt Oates tried to be too clever; to introduce too many strands; to say too much. The trite, twee ending was the final nail in the coffin. To give her due credit, her writing is wonderful, and I stayed with the book regardless of my doubts because her prose is so good, and drew me in despite the weakness of the tale she was spinning. As such, I haven’t been put off trying her again, as other reviews suggest this is not her best work, and I’m sure another one of her books might strike a better chord with me. Has anyone got any recommendations?

There are 41 comments, I scanned several, and they are interesting.

booksnob is now a Substack.

Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys (John Pistelli, 2022) has interesting things to say.

The old questions: “How good is Joyce Carol Oates?” and, given an oeuvre so vast, “Where can you begin to find out?” These questions have been reinvigorated in recent years. Oates’s reputation had always been precarious, marred by a critical suspicion of her copiousness and of her bestseller-adjacent tastes and interests. It seems to have crested in the 1980s and ’90s—that Toni Morrison usurped Oates’s Nobel Prize was the opinion of even one distinguished black novelist, Charles Johnson—and then to have waned in the 2000s. But in the last decade, and especially in the last few months, thanks to the controversial film of her Marilyn Monroe novel and to a sideline in Twitter shitposting almost as accomplished as that of the former president she so abhors, Oates has seemed to stand at the apex of her vanishing generation. After the deaths of Updike, Roth, Morrison, and Didion, and amid the more sibylline reticence of her remaining peers (Ozick, McCarthy, DeLillo, Pynchon), isn’t she the last lioness of American literature?

***

But this summary of male violence and female victimization makes the novel sound more agenda-driven than it is, when in fact it is less didactic than Roth’s book. In Oates’s fiction as on her notorious Twitter feed, we encounter an exoteric politics at odds with an esoteric aesthetics. She is officially a feminist, but her criticism hints that she finds the classic female domestic novel insipid, is bored by the enlightened domestics Austen and Eliot, and considers herself the heir to fanatic, fascistic Dostoevsky and Lawrence. As in Dostoevsky, her characters seethe and roil, actuated by unconscious manias and half-uttered desires; as in Lawrence, she sets the human drama in its natural frame, amid animal heat, stony cliffs, sucking bogs, killing winds, as if to say that we are a part of nature—of its hideous violence as of its pastoral beauty or poetic sublimity—and shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise. One of Judd’s earliest visions is of a doe chased by a pack of hounds: rape rising right out of the earth. 

***

Why, then, the controversy about whether or not she’s a good writer—even leaving aside the irrelevant question of how much she writes or of the popular-feminine genres she often favors? Bluntly put, the relevant problem is the prose. We find no fine writing, no will-to-style, no singular voice in Oates (neither in this book nor in any other work of hers that I’ve read): nothing like Updike’s lyric pointillism, Roth’s eloquent rage, Morrison’s scriptural orature, DeLillo’s mediatic staccato, McCarthy’s Biblical cadence, Didion’s knowing minimalism. Instead, there are clichés and imprecisions and redundancies, my favorite being an early reference to “animals and fowl,” as if the latter category were not included in the former. There are exclamation points, italics, interjections, sentence fragments, strangely-deployed quotation marks—all adding up to an urgent anti-style. I am ungenerously reminded of the apocryphal line about the similarly astylistic Dreiser: he had no talent, only genius. It is in retrospect bizarre—truly an instance of racial ideology—that anyone suspected the Swedish Academy of choosing Morrison over Oates for the 1993 Nobel Prize on the grounds of “political correctness” when I imagine that even a Swedish translation must convey which of the two writers is the exceptional stylist, the poet of prose.

Oates accomplishes her fiction’s very real emotional effect with sheer accretion and insistence; the novel is like the wind that batters High Point Farm, a constant unglamorous roar insinuating itself through the walls of your mind. Her major characters—in this novel, the fluttery and formidable Corinne, “Protestant to her fingertips,” is a particularly glorious creation—seem hacked with a claw hammer out of stone. This, too, is an inheritance of Dostoevsky and Lawrence, as well as of Charlotte Brontë, one of the few writers named in this impressively un-literary novel. I think it is a legitimate way to write fiction, if superficially less commanding than the line-by-line vigor of a Morrison. For these anti-poetic writers, the novelist uses language to surpass language, to strike through to the core of reality—psychological, natural, and spiritual reality—over which language decorously draws its ornamented veil. 

 I would not draw a comparison to Dreiser. There is a point here that I did not see ten years ago: the effects created by sheer accretion. But Oates works more nimbly than Dreiser — in my opinion, and you determine the worth of that. I like Dreiser — even though I fear his style adhering to my own. He lacks the cutthroat eye of Oates. Well, maybe not in An American Tragedy. This feels like quibbling, so I will go on.

Review: We Were the Mulvaneys  (The Literary Omnivore, 2009) makes a point I had not seen elsewhere, one that I do not recall, but may need to be added here. I do recall one character's arc, the son, did seem dull.

Oates’ aggressively leisurely pace can drag at times, but it’s also useful for playing up suspense, mostly in the parts of the novel dealing with Marianne. It can be hard to care about Judd, our narrator, when the stories of the rest of his family are much more interesting–the lion’s share of his involvement in the main story is intertwined with Patrick’s story. Oates, like the best of mothers, devotes equal time to all the Mulvaneys. I will readily admit to flipping ahead to check where Marianne or Patrick were at any given point.

And there I will close out this post.

sch 10/14/2025.] 

What Was To Be A Day Away From The Computer But Writing Kept Me Here

 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.

We're all writers too at Sequestrum and appreciate how hard this process can be. So we want to say thanks for trusting us with your work. As a token of respect, feel free to take advantage of 75% off our usual subscription price. That's not something we advertise, but it's something we try and offer writers when possible. As a potential contributor, subscribing means more than just access to great literature: It's the best way to get an idea of our current editorial focus; as an added bonus, subscribers can make free general submissions (limit one pending at a time).  Please feel no obligation. If Sequestrum is a home for literature you enjoy, we'd love to have you.

To fulfill a discounted subscription, use the coupon code "LitWriter" on any checkout page (https://www.sequestrum.org/checkout). For more subscription options, visit our "subscribe" page.

Thanks again for sharing your work, and best of luck.

Sincerely,

Sequestrum

***

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

gordonsquarereview.org 

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.

I have not read enough of Thomas Mann, and Doctor Faustus is one of those i have not read. Ignorance of the novel does not mean I lack curiosity. Which is why why I spent time this afternoon with Jeffrey Meyers and his Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. The opening whetted my interest.

 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:

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 It is 7:47. I have been on this computer long enough. Edna O'Brien calls to me.

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