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.
I did not read Katherine Mansfield until prison. I did not study her. Having now read Stories that simply unfold Katherine Mansfield’s place in the literary canon by Kirsty Gunn (Times Literary Supplement), I think I should have done so. But then I have always heavily discounted my own talents with the short story, while Mansfield seems to have been a great talent.
That sentiment, it is true, has been echoed by writers from William
Faulkner to Elizabeth Hardwick to Angela Carter – all of whom admired
the form of narrative that Mansfield had made her own, one that takes
the reader straight into the midst of a situation, a world, and simply
lets events play out there, as though in real time. (“Katherine
Mansfield liquefied the short story”, V. S. Pritchett said. “She cut out
the introductions, the ways and means which are simply barriers.”) But
has her influence ever been fully acknowledged? It’s that word “only”
again – like another Mansfield word, “little” – as though the sheer
brevity of her genre, the apparent inconsequentiality of her themes –
“little stories like birds in cages” is how she described her work at
the end of her life – hasn’t served her literary status at all well. “If
only I could learn to work in the right way”, she despaired, “to write
something that will be worthy.” Yet, as our own age reminds us, those
who have become used to describing themselves thus – not good enough,
not important enough, not “worthy” – are no less due our attention. So
how fitting it is that at a time in our cultural life when we have never
been more engaged by seeking to include and listen to those who’ve up
until now only ever been “only” – on the margins, at the edges, from
someplace other, a somewhere else – we might, in this year, the
centenary of Mansfield’s death, look afresh at what this writer has to
offer and why those “feminine” little stories, as Eliot called them,
might not be so little after all.
The subtitle of this book – a biography that is not, per se, a biography – conveys its key note. Risk is a fine word to include in the title of a literary study, especially in a publishing environment more often than not averse to it. It seems all too appropriate for Mansfield, who strove to keep testing the limits of her ability and eschewing traditional methods of storytelling. “Risk! Risk anything”, she wrote in her notebook. The results were significant. Harman shows in her attentive close readings how Mansfield risked representing otherness in “all sorts of lives”, well outside the charmed circle of Bloomsbury. “Je ne parle pas français”, for example, as Harman reminds us, is a creepy story of a failed writer with “his sexualised imagination”. Both Murry and her publisher wanted certain passages redacted, for fear of losing sales and prestige. Mansfield defended the story as a breakthrough in her creative method.
###
...To really think about what it might be to be marginalized or left behind
or ignored – to imagine so fully, as Mansfield does, what it is to be
inside and outside – is to see that risk exploding at the level of the
sentence. “Prelude” portrays a disillusioned wife and her blustering
patriarchal husband even as it portrays a woman with post-natal
depression and a man who only wants her to be happy. To show both, to
change, to let a story jump around in all kinds of directions so it’s
never “about”, but rather just “is” – that’s risk. In the end Claire
Harman’s book does that thing that all good literary biographies do. It
sends us straight back into the delicate, exhilarating, risking world of
Mansfield’s fiction and shows us how the greatest risk she took was in
letting something “little” do so much.
Therein the lies the madness, to create as well as one can on one's own terms. I gave up writing to make money. There was one who had faith enough in me to support me while I wrote, and I refused her offer, thinking she would resent it later on. After she left me, I gave up writing almost altogether, until I destroyed all I had tried to build up since her departure. Then I had no choice. I had nothing more to embarrass myself with. I suggest strongly that you who think you can, make the effort of doing. Have the backbone I did not have. Succumb to the madness of creation against the the universe's indifference to humanity's existence.
This dissatisfaction, Mansfield's letter concludes, is the result of
being spoilt by too much Shakespeare, drawing sharp relief between the
“rich” language of English, and the French, which she finds “hard to
stomach”.21 The word “kickshaw” itself derives from French (quelque-chose) and is defined as a “fancy but insubstantial cooked dish, especially one of foreign origin”.22 To Mansfield, literature is then a comestible object, but one which should not yield too easily to its consumer.23
It should satiate a voracious appetite with a robust, succulent, and
varied heartiness, not offer scanty titbits, attractive to the eye and
sliding down easily but ultimately failing to satisfy. The
discriminatory attitude towards the diminutive that is discernible here
would also carry through to Mansfield's view of the short story genre,
with her insecurities strengthened by the weighty authority of the
traditional literary canon.
Mansfield
led a reckless life in her teens and 20s, “going every sort of hog”, as
Virginia Woolf remarked disapprovingly, in a frantic quest for
experience. This resulted in unwanted pregnancies, illnesses and
rejection by her family and Mansfield’s stories are full of girls in
similar straits: impoverished, threatened or ostracised. Her decision to
write about sex and its perils was bold and hasn’t been given enough
attention. There are assaults and attempted rapes in Juliet, The Little
Governess and His Sister’s Keeper, but a particularly shocking instance
is in The Swing of the Pendulum, which appeared in Mansfield’s first
book, In a German Pension, in 1911. Mansfield’s earliest biographer,
Antony Alpers, found the story disturbing and excluded it from his 1984
collection on the grounds of “crudity”, so it hasn’t had much exposure
and I’ve never seen it discussed by scholars. But if there was ever a
#MeToo story a hundred years ahead of its time, it is this one: when
consensual flirting turns quickly to non-consensual sex, the girl in the
story shouts and struggles, only to be met with “an expression of the
most absurd determination” from her attacker; “he did not even look at
her – but rapped out in a sharp voice: ‘Keep quiet – keep quiet’.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy still exist and still operate today. But this is not about them.
Instead, it’s about how their playbook is the same playbook by those
who insisted on establishing the 1776 commission to spread lies about
American history.
It’s the playbook used by Moms for Liberty, who decided what is to be allowed in the hands of young people.
Who claim that schools are indoctrinating children — the ones they
are raising and the ones in which they want to instill their versions of
truth.
These Moms believe themselves authorities. They are purveyors of a
brand of white power and supremacy, making their names known as
“defenders of liberty” and “parental rights,” in the same exact manner
as the UDC and the “Lost Cause.” They believe they can determine books that are and are not appropriate, and they can write a lengthy blacklist using “evidence” they cherry pick.
Last night, I listened to a couple of stretches of Bill Maher's show. One of the guest's argued the American left, enamored of identity politics, knocked the America as being inherently racist. I agree that there are some off the mainstream do so. I do not know anyone of any sense who does not agree Americans have been racist. We have been. We have also worked against racism. That we do not acknowledge we have been both racist and anti-racist puts me off with those radicals. Meanwhile, the other side has sprouted up and tried to deny there was any racism. We cannot solve a problem by whitewashing it (literally), nor denying there is means of solving the problem because of inherent racism will not let us. Both are small-minded; the former are cowards, the latter are nihilistic; they are anti-American.
After having it out with CC last night, I looked up the disposition of her case. She omitted one thing from her report, counseling/treatment. Yeah, that is not going to work; which may explain why she said they set her up to fail. Whether I was not paying attention, or (more likely) too apathetic, to notice her displays of capability to do better with her life only accentuate her playing poor, poor pitiful me. She is still too blonde, too clever, not to think she can get away with her wild west kind of life. She told I had thought I could pick up where I had left off, when it was her. I came back to see to make my apologies for mistreating her, to see if there was the possibility of something better than what we were doing before my arrest. Soon as I saw where she was living, I knew that was not likely. But I gave her a chance. She took it and proved me right. Yes, it could be that if I had not been arrested, she would not be in the shape she is in. It is just as likely, I would have cut her off, as I am now. I had to give her the chance, now I have to think the ugly side of me was right about her in the days before my arrest. I would have liked to have seen doing something like Voices on Addiction: Want to Believe By Shelley Mann Hite. Too much work, I think, for her - compared to running the streets. Which at 53 is too for that.
Mansfield’s
latest biographer, Clare Harman, gives a balanced view of her life and
work. Choosing 10 of Mansfield’s stories she discusses each one in the
context of its time. Her sharp and lively commentary outlines the
circumstances in which they were written and the way in which each shows
its author’s growing mastery of the short story form.
As well as several little known works that give a sense of Mansfield’s trajectory, Harman discusses the black-comic artistry of Daughters of the Late Colonel, the gentler New Zealand stories, and the painful allegory of war, The Fly.
These
days Katherine Mansfield is not well known, so this intelligent and
engaging biography is doubly welcome. Mansfield’s comparative obscurity
makes me wonder if we are snobbish about literary forms, putting the
novel up on the top shelf and giving poetry its special distinction. The
short story, which may be the most exacting form of all, doesn’t rate.
There are exceptions – William Trevor is one - but on the whole a list
of Great Books is likely to be made up of novels, with a polite nod to
poetry.
Imagine
an interviewer of today fronting up to Katherine Mansfield. “And now,
Katherine, after those terrific stories of yours, when are we going to
have a novel from you?” What would she say? Read this new biography to
find out why short fiction was her unwavering choice. Better still, read
her stories.
I did get a chance to read her stories, they are that good. This I say as one who does not think he has the talent for the short story; it is a form that seems to me as having a form that must be respected more than the novel. This review made me wonder if part of the problem with the short story is many of its best practitioners are women (see Alice Munro) (But the devil's advocate in me says, Hemingway's short stories are better than his novels, and then there is Somerset Maugham.) I have written before about Mansfield.
My friend, Joel C, had a theory that TB can be found common among the great writers. Mansfield could be evidence for his theory.
I’ve just come back from Japan, where a huge literary event was
happening. People were queuing outside bookshops in a way we haven’t
seen since the heady days of Harry Potter. What were they so eager to buy at the stroke of midnight? The first novel from Haruki Murakami in six years.
Sadly,
my tour, which was excellent in other ways, didn’t take me to
bookshops. The only queues I saw outside shops were high-end consumers
waiting for their Rolex or Chanel fix. But even if I had bought The City and Its Uncertain Walls,
I wouldn’t have been able to read it. The English translation won’t be
available until later this year, but it’s bound to cause excitement.
Murakami is one of the few writers who enjoys worldwide success both as a
literary and as a popular author.
She goes on to report on newer Japanese writers, which probably should not interest American readers. We are not keen on translated works, but I found the three Japanese writers I have read the most (Murakami, Oe, and Mishima) to be accessible to my provincial Midwestern mind, to have a viewpoint that opened mine, and could give me ideas I could use. I agree with Ms. Sullivan's judgment:
Where can we find their books in English? There are several useful
online guides and too many authors to mention here, but if they have
anything in common, it’s a tendency to write about the dark and the
strange.
Dark and strange covers a lot of what I see around here.
I really like the Brisbane Times' book reviews, so I am going to quote this, so you can get it yourself: The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
Speaking of short story writers, Michael Martone will be a speaker at Midwest Writers Workshop 50th Conference, Wednesday, July 19 – Saturday, July 22, 2023. He is, in my not so humble opinion, a short story writer to read and the best living Indiana writer. Too bad, I will not be able to afford the registration fees.
The sun is shining. It is 8:40. I am thinking of doing some other posts from older notes. Dawn patrol is over. I need to get at the screenplay. The plan is to take a break after noon, get some milk and other things for the larder.
Well, no writing is perfect, but on recently rereading her story The Doll’s House,
I’m convinced it’s about as perfect as a short story can be. Everything
is there, clear and accessible, yet not obvious, in the shortest
possible space. It’s moving, even tragic, but it ends on a surprising
note of hope.
This year is the centenary of her death, and we’re
seeing an ongoing reappraisal of her work that began in the 1980s,
fuelled by feminism and the desire to liberate her from the colonial
bias against a writer from “a little land with no history”. My 1988
edition of Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer, by fellow Kiwi Gillian Boddy, describes this interest as “Mansfield mania”.
I have read her. She is remarkable enough to live up the hype. If I had time to really work at the short story, as if I had not wasted the past 40 years, I would read Mansfield, Alice Munro, Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, and George Saunders in depth.
I read A Modernist’s Modernist: On the Brilliance—and Influence—of Katherine Mansfield. It is Mansfield's centenary of her death, and much is coming forth about her. I have a post coming out on the 25th, but nothing in this article left me feeling I should incorporate it into that post. I read Mansfield in prison, I did like her short stories, and I suggest them to anyone who would be interested.
First, here’s a quick definition. These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture:
A sense of sameness pervades the creative world
The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful
Imitation of the conventional is rewarded
Movies,
music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on
financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having
little influence
Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible
Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus
Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible
Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago
Etc. etc. etc.
Those were provocation, what really scared me were the tweets included in the post. Especially, the last tweet, which twisted my insides.
Okay, back from taking a nap. Last was really lousy.
I finally got to the interview of Rawi Hage, a Lebanese writer living in Canada, on The Walrus. How photography intersected with his writing piqued my curiosity:
RAWI HAGE: Oh, well, good question.
Um, I think globally, I never thought in a local way. Uh, I think
probably I’m a transnational writer somehow more and more. I see things
are much more interconnected, but at this, this book, I think it’s has a
cosmopolitan feel because it of photography, the medium, the medium is
so universal and at same time it’s so versatile and so adaptable to many
cultures. Uh, I think every culture imposed its own aesthetics it’s own
agenda on it. It’s a very rich, medium, the very rich history. And I
think it’s one of those things that was used and abused. I mean, if I
looked at the spectrum goes from wedding photography all the way to
surveillance. So it’s a rich medium to write about
JESSICA JOHNSON: People who know you
know that you were a photographer before you went into writing, but not
everyone may know that. Can you talk a bit about how you made that
transition? Because they’re, in some ways related art forms, but another
way is completely different.
RAWI HAGE: Yeah. I think for a long
time, the intersection between photography and the written word was very
constrained. I, when I left, uh, Lebanon, I end up in New York for a
few years. I worked as, uh, my first job was to clean the dark room.
Then slowly I start printing. And the first time I, I saw photographs
image surface in the, in the liquid and the developer, I was, uh, I was
blown away and I, and I decided to become a photographer. Then I moved
here and I studied, I studied commercial photography. Then I, then I
went to, uh, Concordia. I did a bachelor degree in photography, but I
think at, at certain level, as much as I love photography, I thought
it’s a medium that has its limitation. And I fundamentally, I think I
wanted to tell the story of war that I experienced and somehow
photography always felt short. I, I think I wanted to be more lyrical
about it. I wanted to, you know, more longer interactive and I start
driving short stories. And I also, I felt at certain point I, I couldn’t
make it as a photographer. I couldn’t Pierce into the art scene. And I,
as a commercial photographer photographer, I was a disaster. So I, um,
consciously was subconsciously changed medium.
Here may be a fault of Midwesterners and Midwestern writers, we forget how big, how interconnected is the world. The Hage interview reminded of this. I do not know what I can do about it other than make another confession of my limitations.
Which reminded me I needed to have a conversation with my niece.
I reached the woman doing my novel and asked for the MS's return, and she is to check her calendar.
In 2017, the city’s parks and recreation department began a partnership with Centerstone,
a mental health and rehabilitation facility, to provide supportive
employment for those in need while also cleaning up parks. Two years
later, the program expanded to include the public works department,
which focuses on keeping downtown areas clean.
Adam Wason, director of public works,
said participants work around six to seven hours a day painting curbs,
picking up litter and removing weeds. He said the program is flexible,
letting participants work around therapy schedules, and pays the living
wage calculated for Bloomington, which is $15.29 an hour for 2023.
When I was a kid, there were these pamphlets put out by some evangelical Protestant group proving that Russia, Moscow, was the antichrist. They'd be shocked to know the Russian Orthodox Church thinks we represent the antichrist. Although the Orthodox do not have crusades, Putin may be on one. Just what will not bring peace is the Russians thinking they are defending the godly. Where am I getting all this? Apocalypse Delayed: Patriarch Kirill on Restraining the Antichrist in Ukraine.
Reading and thinking of doing a separate post for them:
I had a chat with my great-nephew and niece about photography. No communications with CC.
Podcasts do not hold much interest for me, I fear them as time wasters. I like listening to music while I work (I have problems with silence; I think when I am dead there will be more than enough silence), and when I am on the computer, I am working. I will pass along this page of podcasts from London magazine.
Very short conversation with CC, I could hear her shivering over the phone. I told her not to come up tomorrow. We are supposed to be having a lot of snow, no need for her to be out. She seems so frail nowadays.
I had a longish conversation with Paul S. Work to do tomorrow.
Upbeat, dancing Lou Reed, because I need an upbeat Lou Reed today.
I am working on my novel “One Dead Blonde” - mostly translating typewritten pages into a digital format. By the time, this is published, I hope to have moved onto starting “Chasing Ashes”.
One thing I will be doing is using the novelWriter software. So far, I have figured out how to input text; I still need to figure out how to format that text. It always for organizing characters, plot, and themes. How needs to be worked out, too. What I am thinking is it will help me better organize what I am writing. I cannot keep everything in my head. Time and the damage done won't let me do that any longer. I will let you know how it works. From its creator:
The idea to make novelWriter came about because most good software i could find for fiction writing seemed to focus its development on Windows and MacOS. Even those that had once supported Linux, had decided to drop the support.
As a Linux user for many years, this was very disappointing to me, so I started making my own editor, the way I imagined I wanted it. At that time I had mostly fallen back on writing my novel projects in LibreOffice Writer. While it is an excellent word processor that I still use often, it lacked many features I was looking for. I wanted an editor where I could split everything up into chapters or scenes, and move them about as I wanted. I also wanted to have all my notes in the same place, and be able to cross-reference them in my text.
Many writers discover that connecting the plot points of a story is far harder than identifying them. It’s easy enough to name the big turning points on a beat sheet, but when you sit down to write the pages that bridge those landmarks, the story can feel as if it’s stalling in the middle. The real challenge (and the true power of story structure) lies in shaping the in-between sections so they carry momentum. If you want to know how to keep your story moving between the big moments, it helps to look at those stretches as purposeful sequences that grow out of one turning point and drive the story to the next.
***
...We can often lose sight of the fact that the real magic of story structure isn’t in the beats, but in the way the sections around them build, shift, and propel us forward. Part of the reason we might fall into this dilemma is that it can be easy to think of a story’s beats/plot points as distinct from the surrounding scenes. The truth is that the beats must be part of a seamless chain of story events, each one building into the next. The beats are distinct simply in that they represent important nodes of transformation.
I may be doing some of the following, but am I doing them well?
“Who am I?” is the question that echoes beneath every character arc.
At the story’s Midpoint, that central query rises to the surface. This
central beat—this all-important Moment of Truth in story
structure—functions most symbolically as a moment of self-recognition.
It is a mirror held up to the protagonist, often by the antagonist, that
reveals both the Lie the Character Believes and the thematic Truth that
can no longer be ignored.
From the perspective of plot structure, the Midpoint functions as the central turning point.
Everything in the first half leads up to it, and it sets up all the
outcomes that happen in the second half. It is perhaps most potently a
moment of revelation. This is true practically in the external plot, in
which a Plot Revelation opens the protagonist’s eyes to the true nature of the conflict and what will be required to overcome its obstacles.
This is also true within the character arc, as the Midpoint’s Moment of Truth
deepens the character’s understanding of the inner conflict that is
both driving and driven by the character’s attempts at forward momentum
in the external plot. The Midpoint sets up a critical revelation in
which the character clearly sees the value of the story’s thematic Truth—the more effective and/or expanded perspective that will be required in order to finally achieve success.
Why? Because I am neurotic. Because I cannot always differentiate the trees and the forest. Because I worry so much about the content and style of my sentences. Which is why I read Are You Writing Effective Sentences? (Writing Forward). The sentences are trees that make up the forest.
In literature, language is what makes a piece of writing tick. The plot and characters move through time and space on their own accord, but the words you use to tell their story give it rhythm and clarity. That’s why writing effective sentences is paramount for any writer.
Choosing the right words to describe what’s happening in a piece of writing can be challenging. A writer might spend an hour looking for a word that accurately captures the sentiment that he or she is trying to convey. Sentence structure is even more critical. A weak word is like a missed beat, but a weak sentence is discord. It confuses readers, pulls them out of the story, and breaks the flow of the narrative.
***
Build your vocabulary: Nothing makes a sentence sing like words that are precise and vivid. Expand your arsenal by building your vocabulary. Read a lot and look up words you don’t know. Peruse the dictionary. Sign up for a word-of-the-day newsletter. Keep a log of vocabulary words and spend a minute or two each day adding to it and studying your new words. One of the best ways to master language and vocabulary is through poetry exercises.
Avoid repetition: Nothing deflates a piece of writing like the same descriptive word unnecessarily used over and over. She had a pretty smile. She wore a pretty dress. She lived in a pretty house. This kind of repetition robs a story of its imagery, making it flat and two-dimensional.
Use a thesaurus: A thesaurus will help you avoid unnecessary repetition. Many writers avoid thesauri, thinking that reliance on one constitutes some writerly weakness. But your job is not to be a dictionary or a word bank; it’s knowing how to find the perfect words and then use them when writing effective sentences.
Read drafts aloud to check the rhythm and flow: Reading aloud is great for catching mistakes and typos, but it can also help you with flow and rhythm. Take it a step further and record yourself reading an excerpt aloud. Does it flow naturally? If you keep tripping over your own sentences, there may be a problem with rhythm. Try alternating sentence lengths, breaking long sentences into shorter sentences, and joining sentences together to fix the flow.
Pay attention to word choice: Why refer to something as a loud noise when you can call it a roar, a din, or a commotion? The more specific you are in your writing, the more easily the reader will be able to visualize whatever you’re communicating. Choose words that are as precise, accurate, and detailed as possible.
Simplify: Run-on sentences and short sentences strung together with commas and conjunctions create a lot of dust and noise in a piece of writing. In most cases, simple, straightforward language helps bring the action of a story to center stage. Use the simple subject-verb-object sentence structure to keep the text flowing and prevent readers from getting confused.
Avoid filler words: I’ve gone back to this article several times since I first read it and have already passed it along to several writers I work with. In short, don’t tell the reader what the character is thinking, wondering, or feeling unless it’s essential to the narrative. Let the story’s action take its course and move the story forward.
Brush up on grammar: Nothing will clean up your writing more than using good, old-fashioned grammar. Pick up a grammar or style guide (a good starter is The Elements of Style) and spend some time mastering the rules. Yes, rules are made to be broken, but make sure you have a good reason when you break the rules, and make sure doing so doesn’t impede the readability of your work.
I ran across The Writer's Workout blog. I have linked to directly on the blog and have saved its RSS feed. Why? Because I feel this need to keep an eye on the basics.
I get the newsletter from Beyond Craft, Joe Ponepinto's Substack. I quote below from one of his posts. I recommend anyone interested in writing do the same.
Because here’s the truth: if you keep waiting for the perfect first draft—the perfect anything—you’ll wait forever.
There is no perfect first draft. There’s only the one you start.
Every
published novel began as something far messier than its author will
ever admit: tangled plots, flat characters, entire scenes that make zero
sense. But that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. A first draft isn’t
meant to shine—it’s meant to exist.
Perhaps,
in the shadow of so many stories told about Mansfield, Kimber did not
want to risk any falsehoods. Mansfield herself, by contrast, was
dedicated to a mix of truth and artifice. ‘I think the only way to live
as a writer is to draw upon one’s real familiar life,’ she told one
correspondent in 1922, a year before she died. Mansfield spent her last
few months in Fontainebleau, studying (along with Orage) under the
mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Long attracted to spiritualism, in
her dying days she was still restlessly seeking meaning – another story –
to give shape to her life.
One of the main pieces of advice Gonzales shared on campus was to step outside of the box.
“Read lots of different types of books, different genres for different ages,” Gonzales advises.
Gonzales's
exploration of genres can be displayed in the vast selection of her
work. Her novels The Red Umbrella, Concealed, and the graphic novel
Invisible are some of her most popular works that tend to resonate with
younger audiences.
“The excitement that they have over
stories is contagious. All of a sudden, you realize that your choice of
words and ideas can stimulate this reaction within people,” Gonzales
said.
I will close out with some videos I have been listening to, lately:
... The commercial publishing industry seems happy with the status quo in which social media marketing provides book sales, regardless of the quality of the writing. As long as a book sells it is a good book. It says something about our culture, however.
What can we as serious writers do about it? I am not particularly optimistic here. I know my opinions about marketing, self-promotion, and how the publishing industry ought to work are considered out of date and out of touch. I hold little hope that writers can organize and achieve a level of influence that publishing companies would have to take seriously.
Which led me to William Deresiewicz's How Art Lost Its Way (Persuasion), and back to where I started.
But the audience needs to cooperate. It needs to want to go beyond itself. And that it did, in the decades after World War II, in the midst of the “culture boom,” with the expanding and aspiring middle class. Sure, there was a lot of bullshit there—a lot of status-mongering, a lot of pretension, a lot of middlebrow “art appreciation.” But there was also a lot that was real: a real desire for expanded consciousness, for spiritual depth, for a world made new by art, especially among the young and especially in New York.
And that is what I don’t see anymore. I have no doubt that there is still strenuous art being made, and that it is being received with attention and written about with intelligence. But almost all of that activity, as far as I can tell, is happening in coteries, in social niches and geographic pockets: poets doing readings for other poets, art that isn’t seen outside of Bushwick, critics writing for specialized websites or personal Substacks. What’s gone missing, in a society that long ago excused itself from seriousness, is a broader sense that art is urgent business, that your life, in some sense, depends on it. With that goes the mass audience. With that goes not only the possibility of meaningful criticism, but also its point. No one needs help understanding White Lotus, or Amanda Gorman, or Sally Rooney. For such creations, we can make do with “cultural criticism”—moralistic agendas, topical talking points, biographical chitchat—which is not arts criticism but a simulacrum thereof, and which any self-respecting gender studies major can produce.
Two further losses should be tallied here. The first is that other mediating institution, college. That is where you were supposed to begin your apprenticeship to the idea that there are traditions of thought and expression that it is your obligation to make yourself worthy of. There used to be a teacher at Columbia, an instructor in the great books program, who was famous for including in his final a question that ran, more or less, “Which of the books that we read this year did you find the least interesting, and what failing in you does that reveal?” Now, of course, a work like Moby-Dick is brought into the classroom not to be learned from but hectored. Or would be, if it were even still taught, which it isn’t, because students won’t read it, becausethey can’t.
What led my thoughts when I was in the deepest throes of my depression was that nothing matter, nothing I did mattered, that the Universe was a grimy place and I went into some of its grimiest corners. What keeps me from going back, to fight against what fed my depression and its attendant nihilism, is the belief that I cannot cure anything, but I can stand against the grimy BS that threatens to swallow us whole. I can do my best to not make things worse.
You may want to take a look at Persuasion, Yascha Mounk's Substack, but that is for reasons beyond writing.
5. Solid over Florid Although many writers try to stand out with clever twists or showy vocabulary, neither can beat a solidly told story of sound structure. As there’s so many entries, there’s some measure of gratitude when coming across an easy-to-read, well-told, tightly written story which relies less on the unexpected (though it may include that as well) and more on solidity. Stories without wasted words, scenes, or characters are impressive for the writer’s skill and craft, and judges take notice.
sch 11/14
Ann Lamott, Writing As A Debt of Honor – a full-length talk by Anne Lamott (yes, another Lamott video because I think her Bird by Bird was one of the books that I found most helpful).
I went to Payless this morning for supplies. Back here, I finished revising “Blue Eyes Flashing Doom”. That had me working until just short of noon.
After noon and lunch, I did a blog post. Then there was a nap for an hour. I keep fighting off a sinus infection. What else have I done? A bit of reading of emails.
That led me to some items I will note here:
What Isn’t Intelligence?(Los Angeles Review of Books). Okay, a little confused on whether there is a difference between human intelligence and AI.
Life Finds an Investor (Los Angeles Review of Books) points the main fault (okay, “main” is my word) in de-extinction.
This denialist narrative is already spreading widely: de-extinction advocate Ben Jacob Novak (no affiliation with B. J. Novak from the sitcom The Office) has proposed that species should not be considered extinct while there exists frozen genetic material through which they could be potentially revived. Advocating for so-called de-extinction is a convenient nonsolution for accelerating species loss. It conceals the real cause of climate change—capitalist exploitation of the environment—and creates the illusion that climate destruction is reversible so long as the species that have been destroyed can be restored by a private company. De-extinction turns species loss into an investment opportunity through a speculative narrative.
Our Man in Marseille(Los Angeles Review of Books) is a bit of history has been told elsewhere and should be repeated (especially since it seems to be very well written).
Marseille 1940 helps set the record straight of a man who saved thousands when the United States was turning away those huddled masses yearning for freedom. In these reactionary times, when millions of refugees are at risk all across the world, Wittstock’s book ought to shame us all into action.
President Donald Trump is facing fresh allegations of attempting to corruptly profit from his office after The New York Timesreported Tuesday that the Republican is demanding that the US Department of Justice pay him about $230 million in taxpayer dollars for previous federal investigations into him, and his allies at the DOJ are expected to make the final decision.
Trump filed the administrative claims—which are submitted to the department for potential settlements to prevent lawsuits in federal court—before he returned to the White House earlier this year, people familiar with the matter told the newspaper. However, the president nodded to the legal battle in public comments at the White House last week.
The Golden Age of Sh*tposters(The Bulwark) - it is not just MAGA is riddled with Nazis, would-be Nazis, might-be Nazis, and those coddling the same mentalities, but that all of them have overdosed on stupidity and incompetence.
Let’s be clear: These enrollment declines are not about reduced demand. They reflect a lack of support for families who need child care to work as well as wage growth that continues to lag inflation. Families still need care, and in many parts of our state demand exceeds supply. But affordability remains a crisis point for Indiana’s working families at all income levels.
Rejections coming in today:
Thank you for letting us consider "Learning The Passion and Control Twist" for publication in the Missouri Review. We enjoyed reading your work, and though it doesn't quite fit our needs at this time, we wish you excellent luck with it and hope we will have the chance to read more of your writing in the future.
Thank you for sending us "No Ordinary Word." I greatly appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, this one doesn't wholly feel like a match for me as a reader and I am going to pass.
Thank you so much for your submission to the 20th issue of WayWords.
The editors have decided not to include your piece, "No Ordinary Word", in this issue. While they enjoyed your work, they felt the theme of messy wasn't as strong in this piece.
We appreciate the courage it takes to send your work into the world and invite you to explore other Writer's Workout opportunities:
Catch up on our free 2025 conference and prepare for 2026, March 23-29.
We wish you luck on your writing journey.
-The WayWords Team
Same story with revisions and different titles.
I retain a long time interest in Richard III and his nephews, so I have had What Really Became of the 'Princes in the Tower'? playing the background while working on this post. If nothing else, the presenter is a hoot.
A little late about Broad Ripple Review releasing its first number.
Another video listened to has been UNDERHYPED Authors we Should be talking about MORE!
Mostly genre writers, but so what? Good writing is good writing. And do check out the comments.
The stories she tells spill out of stories that spill out of other stories. She’s an inveterate flouter of chronology—a timeline for almost any of her books, including the quartet, would look like a manic Etch A Sketch scribble: Rather than plot or the forward sweep of the clock’s hands, it is Smith’s voice, her many voices, that propels the reader. As though on a whim, she’ll take an unexpected detour into art history or natural history or literary criticism. Finger-on-the-pulse backdrops are balanced by cultural or historical or scientific deep dives. Against the grim tidings of the day, news of pain inflicted by strangers on strangers, she pits, in Spring, the oddly charming tale of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spending several weeks in 1922 in the same small Swiss town—and never meeting. A hack screenwriter wants to rework that non-anecdote into an erotic TV costume drama, the two writers screwing in a swinging cable car high above a picturesque snowy valley. Appalled, the director he hopes to hire flees and ends up in the Scottish Highlands, where he crosses paths with the network of people dedicated to helping migrants.
Like every Smith novel, Spring is about human connection, how hard it is—how damned important it is—to acknowledge humanity in the other and embrace it. Yet Smith has talked about how she loves the spirit of alienation in Mansfield’s writing: “Distance, foreignness, knowing you’re out of place or in limbo … and however much you feel at home, you’re fooling yourself, and however strange you feel in the world … it’s natural, it’s the most natural thing.” Sometimes there simply is no connection. Force it, and you get schlock.
Yes!
When I asked Smith about the legion of ghosts in her fiction, she shrugged and said, “I just don’t think death makes that much difference.” Sounding like Gertrude Stein, she elaborated: “We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.”
***
Some early reviewers of Gliff have complained that it feels too “on the nose.” The book’s horrors—climate catastrophe, internment camps, genocidal wars, high-tech surveillance—are too familiar to serve as prophecy. Is it fair to complain that the future is almost already upon us? Who needs prophecy when dystopia is now? The novel thrums with Smith’s urgent need to tell a story about where our divided present could lead us. “We cannot look away at the moment,” she said to me. “We must not look away from the darkness. And if I didn’t look at the dark, what kind of a writer would I be?”
Yesterday, I finished Ross MacDonald's The Chill. I think he is being ignored, for all that Library of America has collected his works. He was a fine writer - he is still well worth reading, for readers and for writers.
Women’s best-sellers were wildly uneven in the 20th century. There was Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a novel about a one-night stand that ends brutally; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the famous novel that spawned the phrase “the zipless f*k”; and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which explores the effect of the Women’s Movement on an older married woman who returns to college and her fellow students.
###
... The canon expanded to include women, among them Virginia Woolf, Kate
Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Rhys, Nora Zeale Hurston, and
Toni Morrison. Quite seriously, there were no women writers taught in
the 20th-century literature classes when I first began at the
university.
When I decided that I needed to fill in the holes of my education regarding writing, I started reading. Thinking of myself as a writer marginalized by age and geography, I found myself not just reading the classics I had ignored, but also writers from South America and Eastern Europe and Japan and women. Of the list above, I have not read Jean Rhys. I would add to the list above, the following:
Joyce Carol Oates (friends will see that one coming)
I checked out a couple of literary magazines: Blanket Gravity and The Wild Umbrella. Maybe, if could get the blog under control and get back to writing fiction. However, I want to point this out about Blanket Gravity:
Blanket Gravity: Free online magazine with art and literature for people in mental health crisis, having a hard day or season, looking to feel connected with themselves or something outside themselves for a moment.
TM: When The Tortilla Curtain came out, some people attacked T.C. Boyle for appropriation, despite his sympathy and skill evoking the undocumented Mexican experience.
PA: Nobody owns the imagination. If we didn’t have the power to project ourselves into the minds and bodies of other people, people unlike us, I don’t think there would be such a thing as society. We wouldn’t be able to communicate. The whole idea of being a person is the fact that once you reach a certain level of mental and emotional maturity, you’re able to look at yourself from the outside. You’re able to see yourself as one person among many. Millions, in fact. Which then you take that one step further and you realize then you have to have the ability to project yourself onto others in order to try to understand them. Either sympathize with them, empathize with them, however you want to define it, but without that quality we wouldn’t be human beings. So, every time I hear someone get up and say: “You can only write novels about people exactly like yourself,” they’re saying that there is no such thing as the imagination. Which means people are not people [Laughs].
...Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” he told me, casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”
I should send this bit to KH who says he has no time for writing:
The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”
Speaking of time, I have now found another writer I do not have the time to read!
I do not see how I can finish the email today. I am getting tired of reading this computer screen. If I hurry, I might catch the bus home.
I keep writing about Virginian Woolf, hoping that people will take my advice and read her. My Woolf posts can be found here.
So here I go again.
Henry Oliver's Woolfish Perception (Liberties) takes a tack I like. For all the problems of Woolf, she deserves our attention. Perhaps, it was that they were male that I was taught Hemingway and Faulkner, that I read James Joyce and Marcel Proust. That he writes about The Common Reader, the first of Woolf's books I read, is another point in the essay's favor.
And she was personally unlikeable: racist, snobbish, uncharitable, snide, a malicious gossip. Perhaps her feminism rankled readers, but that her nastiness has put off a great many more is surely undeniable. This is the Virginia Woolf we think we know: hard to read, easy to hate. That is the image of her which has calcified in popular imagination. But the image of her is an artifact we have created, and the women, her books, and her world are stranger to contemporary readers than they have been to any previous ones. Her novels were written when our grandmothers or great grandmothers were in their cradles. If, on her centenary, we can cast off a century of accumulated interference, we might begin to see her less familiarly, less divided from us.
As you have likely heard by now, Mrs Dalloway has just turned one hundred. She keeps good company. 2025 is the one hundredth anniversary of Carry On Jeeves, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, and The Painted Veil. But Mrs Dalloway is not the Woolf book I have come to praise. This year is also the anniversary of her first collection of critical essays, The Common Reader. Woolf was the great critic of the twentieth century and The Common Reader deserves as much praise and celebration as all its fellow centenarians. In her essays, Woolf showed herself to have been deeply influenced by England’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson. She places herself in his tradition and claims it for her own.
***
The other tradition she breaks from is the Victorian mode of large ideas. She is not a Carlyle or an Arnold or a Wilde. She has no larger ideological scheme, nor much of a larger literary one. She is the student of Johnson, author of the Rambler, not Johnson the Shakespeare editor; she would never have produced, as he did, a PrefacetoShakespeare (that is still one of the great theories of Shakespeare’s work). She is, as Strachey was, resolutely impressionistic, imagistic, essayistic. She had no grand scheme. She chose to be herself, not the representative of any ideology.
And we are richer for it. In The Common Reader Woolf gave us all she could, all she had. She gave us all that criticism ought to be.
The full essay needs to be read, so does The Common Reader.
Just because we deny a traumatic event’s significance does not mean that we can escape from its effects. That is what Mrs Dalloway’s message is. ‘This late age of the world’s experience’, as Clarissa refers to the war in typically euphemistic terms, ‘bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.’ The scars of war are most visible in Mrs Dalloway when its characters try to hide them. As Alexandra Harris writes in her 2011 biography, Woolf is still sometimes ‘criticised for not facing directly enough the great conflicts of her time’, but ‘all her postwar novels are concerned with the indirections by which we come to understand our losses’.
A hundred years on from Mrs Dalloway’s publication, that concern with ‘indirections’ is as pertinent as ever. The lasting effects of Covid-19 and the lockdowns are all around us, every day. Loneliness. Ill-health. Contracting standards of living. But how often do we speak or read or write about 2020? All of it, pace Woolf, we have ‘already half forgotten’.
It is this enduring insight that makes Mrs Dalloway a masterpiece. Woolf wrote it quickly, in a burst of creative energy. The only roadblock came in January of 1923, when news reached England of Mansfield’s death at 34. When Woolf sat down to her manuscript, the next morning, there seemed all of a sudden to be ‘no point in writing’. No point anymore, because ‘Katherine won’t read it’.
I have not noticed much written about COVID. Being in prison, reading news reports about what life was like only sounded like what had been going on at Fort Dix FCI since my arrival in 2021. Coming out, I notice these little behaviors, all somewhat anti-social, from the ways people drive to how we talk (or do not) to one another. I have no idea if this related to COVID, or not.
