Recently in literature Category
I just finished reading one of the most amazing books I've ever encountered, and by "amazing" I don't mean "somewhat remarkable" or "really very good," the way you might say "This is an amazing omelet." I mean that reading it, you enter into a new worlds—worlds, in fact—full of danger and staggering surprises and the profoundest possible mystery. What's that? Which book am I talking about already? Glad you asked. I"m talking about The Subtle Knife, the second in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.
I discovered the series through a piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote about the Harry Potter books. Hitchens hoped that kids who had enjoyed those would, as he said, "graduate" to the Pullman trilogy. I was intrigued by that: Hitchens is often cranky but rarely flat wrong about anything, and if he put it that way there had to be something going on with the books he mentioned. And to be honest, I'd always felt something missing in Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the series. Rowling is a clever writer, diligent, a master of craft, but really not an artist. She imagined a world with witches in it, certainly, but the core of her universe is a sort of joke: The witches are just like us. They're individuals with strengths and weaknesses, and they have institutions that are broadly outlined parodies of real-world ones. And witches can do magic, but there's no real mystery there. They just can, the way some people can wiggle their ears. I'd have to say that the world she imagined is really rather conventional, and she's not the most imaginative or ambitious writer you could think of.
Pullman is a different story. He drops you down in the middle of things and you have to figure out what's going on, and by the end of the second book it's obvious that he's in the ranks of the most ambitious storytellers in history—Tolkien, Milton, like that. In this series he takes the deepest mysteries of science and the deepest mysteries of religion and fuses them, the way parallel lines meet in infinity. And he makes you feel it—there really are times where you have to stop reading to recompose yourself. And it's scary—I've been careful about reading it late at night, or in certain dark moods.
That said, yeah, it's probably classifiable as "fantasy" and it's also classifiable as "young adult fiction," and if you turn up your nose at that fine, go read some Joyce Carol Oates or something, you stupid hopeless snob. But if you liked HP and you're ready for a much, much wilder ride, or if you're open to the fantasy genre in general or you're just looking for a hell of a well-written yarn by one of the most imaginative people living today then check out this trilogy, starting with The Golden Compass.
I discovered the series through a piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote about the Harry Potter books. Hitchens hoped that kids who had enjoyed those would, as he said, "graduate" to the Pullman trilogy. I was intrigued by that: Hitchens is often cranky but rarely flat wrong about anything, and if he put it that way there had to be something going on with the books he mentioned. And to be honest, I'd always felt something missing in Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the series. Rowling is a clever writer, diligent, a master of craft, but really not an artist. She imagined a world with witches in it, certainly, but the core of her universe is a sort of joke: The witches are just like us. They're individuals with strengths and weaknesses, and they have institutions that are broadly outlined parodies of real-world ones. And witches can do magic, but there's no real mystery there. They just can, the way some people can wiggle their ears. I'd have to say that the world she imagined is really rather conventional, and she's not the most imaginative or ambitious writer you could think of.
Pullman is a different story. He drops you down in the middle of things and you have to figure out what's going on, and by the end of the second book it's obvious that he's in the ranks of the most ambitious storytellers in history—Tolkien, Milton, like that. In this series he takes the deepest mysteries of science and the deepest mysteries of religion and fuses them, the way parallel lines meet in infinity. And he makes you feel it—there really are times where you have to stop reading to recompose yourself. And it's scary—I've been careful about reading it late at night, or in certain dark moods.
That said, yeah, it's probably classifiable as "fantasy" and it's also classifiable as "young adult fiction," and if you turn up your nose at that fine, go read some Joyce Carol Oates or something, you stupid hopeless snob. But if you liked HP and you're ready for a much, much wilder ride, or if you're open to the fantasy genre in general or you're just looking for a hell of a well-written yarn by one of the most imaginative people living today then check out this trilogy, starting with The Golden Compass.
Here's a nice little interview in which Billy Wilder flies a box kite and tells people once and for all that creative writing is goddamned hard work like any other kind of work. I was talking to a new friend, a scientist, about writing fiction last week and he said it must be liberating, his implication being that you're limited only by your imagination. The problem is that being limited only by your imagination is quite sufficient to make fiction writing a long day at the office. You imagine all kinds of things, and most of them are crap that won't ring true to anyone. (And let's not forget that you have to vividly describe the things that will ring true.) Writing and revising fiction is bastardly hard work. Period.
And that's mostly what's on tap today—got an introductory chapter to do a fourth revision on and a critiquing group session tonight. Anyway, here's Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond:
OK, it seems that events past and present, global and local have worked together to produce a situation in which I'm rather like a shipwrecked sailor. I've dragged myself out of the punishing surf, crawled up on the wet sand, got up on my hands and knees, retching and spitting out sea water, and then dragged myself to the dry sand and stood up, shaking a little.
There's a wall of thorny brush in front of me. I look up the beach—an endless highway of sand. I turn my head—the same desolation. I'm on a desert island.
No water. No food. And utterly, utterly alone. Despair closes in on me, a loathsome spider whose fangs bring oblivion.
Except for one thing—I've read Robinson Crusoe.
Written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1719, it's considered the first English novel. I read it once, when I was a kid, probably in adapted form, and it's unforgettable. Crusoe is shipwrecked, drags himself onto the beach of a desert island, and despairs. For a while. Then he gets supplies off the sinking ship (everyone else dies) and starts gettin' all resourceful wit it. He improvises clothes and shelter, he develops food and water sources, he finds a friend (well, sort of a servant too, but the relationship is at least symbiotic). He survives and thrives, and eventually goes home rich.
I'm sure the book has been roundly condemned by academics for racism, colonialism, capitalism, all that. Not my concern here. I"m concerned with how stories can encode knowledge that's vitally useful in given situations. Stories were humanity's first method of preserving and transmitting information, and they work as well as they ever did. Lots of people are wondering, what with the economy and all, how they're going to survive. Well, we've known for a while now, haven't we? First thing is to get off the floor and grin like a barroom fighter, a tough bastard who was down for a moment but by no means out. You tell the world that it can't beat you until it kills you. And you mean it.
Then you find hidden resources, you adapt and improvise, you find people to help you. Survive. Thrive. You can do it. And so can I.
We'd have sort of known that anyway, I think. But Daniel Defoe broke it down in steps for us. The story has been dwelling in our culture for nearly three centuries, and been dwelling in me since childhood. It's a good story to know.
There's a wall of thorny brush in front of me. I look up the beach—an endless highway of sand. I turn my head—the same desolation. I'm on a desert island.
No water. No food. And utterly, utterly alone. Despair closes in on me, a loathsome spider whose fangs bring oblivion.
Except for one thing—I've read Robinson Crusoe.
Written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1719, it's considered the first English novel. I read it once, when I was a kid, probably in adapted form, and it's unforgettable. Crusoe is shipwrecked, drags himself onto the beach of a desert island, and despairs. For a while. Then he gets supplies off the sinking ship (everyone else dies) and starts gettin' all resourceful wit it. He improvises clothes and shelter, he develops food and water sources, he finds a friend (well, sort of a servant too, but the relationship is at least symbiotic). He survives and thrives, and eventually goes home rich.
I'm sure the book has been roundly condemned by academics for racism, colonialism, capitalism, all that. Not my concern here. I"m concerned with how stories can encode knowledge that's vitally useful in given situations. Stories were humanity's first method of preserving and transmitting information, and they work as well as they ever did. Lots of people are wondering, what with the economy and all, how they're going to survive. Well, we've known for a while now, haven't we? First thing is to get off the floor and grin like a barroom fighter, a tough bastard who was down for a moment but by no means out. You tell the world that it can't beat you until it kills you. And you mean it.
Then you find hidden resources, you adapt and improvise, you find people to help you. Survive. Thrive. You can do it. And so can I.
We'd have sort of known that anyway, I think. But Daniel Defoe broke it down in steps for us. The story has been dwelling in our culture for nearly three centuries, and been dwelling in me since childhood. It's a good story to know.
Just discovered this today—a passage from the The Gulistan of Saadi by Sheikh Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi. It was written in 1259, by the way:
Personally I have problems and cares aplenty and mortal goods are only part of it, but I'm going on a fishing trip in less than a week to a faraway tropic isle. I don't know if hyacinths grow there, but I suppose they very well might. I'll carry on hoping so, at any rate.
If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one and from the dole,
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.
Personally I have problems and cares aplenty and mortal goods are only part of it, but I'm going on a fishing trip in less than a week to a faraway tropic isle. I don't know if hyacinths grow there, but I suppose they very well might. I'll carry on hoping so, at any rate.
Happened to be reading about the film Casablanca, and was struck by this:
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a pretty good example of this seriousness. It was written two years after Casablanca, and Epstein and Beckett were contemporaries. And surely Epstein was aware of this and similar works, and thought his own was corny by comparison.
Me, I try to straddle these views. I happen to be an agnostic existentialist myself: I don't think there's any meaning to life other than the meaning we assign to it. But I reject the idea that virtues flow only from religious belief, that life without God leads only to madness and amorality. Beckett risked his life in the French Resistance. If he had been caught, and he nearly was, he would have in all likelihood been tortured to death. You can't ask more from anyone than that.
I don't know what set of influences made him able to do that. But cooperation and self-sacrifice is hardwired into most social animals. A bear will defend her cubs quite enthusiastically without ever having read the Bible, and a dog will protect a member of its pack against a stronger opponent—it's just how they are. People are more complex, of course. But we've got that sense in our psyches. The greater complexity, however, means we need more sophisticated models for our behavior, and it's been long noted that stories can help people remember and act upon a society's ideals. For all its cynical winking at the ways of the world, Casablanca strongly suggests that meaning of a kind can be found in serving others. It's not philosophically sophisticated. It's much more about the ideal than the real. But as Beckett's contrasting life and work show us, and the daily lives of most people who strive to be decent also show, the real and the ideal, despair and hope, cynicism and cheerfulness are inextricably intertwined. The one movie undoubtedly called "corny" more often than any other is also a dark vision of how bleak life can be. And it's widely shown at the end of every year, because it also cheers people up, to the point that they cry for happiness. Casablanca is not philosophically rigorous, as we've noted, but the damn thing makes you feel good. In a crisis, it might help you act with more altruism and nobility, remembering the characters. Maybe every story that gives you hope is by definition corny. But I pity people who can't derive hope and inspiration from a story. If it's corn, okay, it's corn. But if it works, I think I'm with Julius on this one—there's nothing better.
Oh, and sorry for the long post. I've been asked to do a brief presentation, just a filler really, on some thoughts I've had about literary charm, and this seemed a propos so I wanted to sketch it out. Later!
[Co-writer] Julius Epstein would later note the screenplay contained "more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there's nothing better."Hmm! When corn works, there's nothing better. Very interesting idea. When I googled the quote, I got a number of pages about ethanol and such, and Mr. Epstein is not currently available for further interviewing, so I'm going to guess at what he meant. To me the movie recalls Kurt Vonnegut's description of another work as "a sugar pill with a bitter coating." It features cheerfully cynical, amoral characters who nevertheless fall all over themselves to act nobly in a crisis, risking their lives for causes and each other. This is a bit at odds with one of the main themes of so-called "serious" art of the modern period: that human life is bleak and hopeless, that each human is alone in a hostile and meaningless universe.
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a pretty good example of this seriousness. It was written two years after Casablanca, and Epstein and Beckett were contemporaries. And surely Epstein was aware of this and similar works, and thought his own was corny by comparison.
Me, I try to straddle these views. I happen to be an agnostic existentialist myself: I don't think there's any meaning to life other than the meaning we assign to it. But I reject the idea that virtues flow only from religious belief, that life without God leads only to madness and amorality. Beckett risked his life in the French Resistance. If he had been caught, and he nearly was, he would have in all likelihood been tortured to death. You can't ask more from anyone than that.
I don't know what set of influences made him able to do that. But cooperation and self-sacrifice is hardwired into most social animals. A bear will defend her cubs quite enthusiastically without ever having read the Bible, and a dog will protect a member of its pack against a stronger opponent—it's just how they are. People are more complex, of course. But we've got that sense in our psyches. The greater complexity, however, means we need more sophisticated models for our behavior, and it's been long noted that stories can help people remember and act upon a society's ideals. For all its cynical winking at the ways of the world, Casablanca strongly suggests that meaning of a kind can be found in serving others. It's not philosophically sophisticated. It's much more about the ideal than the real. But as Beckett's contrasting life and work show us, and the daily lives of most people who strive to be decent also show, the real and the ideal, despair and hope, cynicism and cheerfulness are inextricably intertwined. The one movie undoubtedly called "corny" more often than any other is also a dark vision of how bleak life can be. And it's widely shown at the end of every year, because it also cheers people up, to the point that they cry for happiness. Casablanca is not philosophically rigorous, as we've noted, but the damn thing makes you feel good. In a crisis, it might help you act with more altruism and nobility, remembering the characters. Maybe every story that gives you hope is by definition corny. But I pity people who can't derive hope and inspiration from a story. If it's corn, okay, it's corn. But if it works, I think I'm with Julius on this one—there's nothing better.
Oh, and sorry for the long post. I've been asked to do a brief presentation, just a filler really, on some thoughts I've had about literary charm, and this seemed a propos so I wanted to sketch it out. Later!
Just read a pretty good article in The New York Times that sums up what role self-publishing can play these days. Basically, if there's a demand for your book that doesn't quite get a traditional publishing house revved up, then self-publishing is a way to go. And it's a way to get noticed if your book has hitherto unnoticed merit and can do something if it's out there.
That said, it's still necessary to ask yourself who besides you and your mom will want to take a second look at that book. You either articulate who the book will appeal to and why, or you're like MIniver Cheevy—born too late, railing that things aren't the way they should be. Personally I would love it if reading books were the only way people could entertain themselves with stories, because it would be a hell of a lot easier to get books published, but it hasn't been that way since Marconi.
Sigh.
But if you want me to grind a bit of peppery optimism on your sorrow salad, I'll add that the article pointed to a National Endowment of the Arts study that said overall literary reading is going up, after a long decline. So in conclusion, let's sum up by saying —uh—whatever!
A few years ago I finished a 50,000-word book as part of the National Novel Writing Month, which is just what it sounds like. This outfit Lulu offered to print it up for free if you got to the finish line, and in due course I got a cheesy-looking pamphlet with the story printed in agate type, which is 5 and a half points, the tiny size used for legal notices and sports statistics. Which I suppose means that self-gratification can, in certain situations, actually end up being bad for your eyesight, like they used to say.
That said, it's still necessary to ask yourself who besides you and your mom will want to take a second look at that book. You either articulate who the book will appeal to and why, or you're like MIniver Cheevy—born too late, railing that things aren't the way they should be. Personally I would love it if reading books were the only way people could entertain themselves with stories, because it would be a hell of a lot easier to get books published, but it hasn't been that way since Marconi.
Sigh.
But if you want me to grind a bit of peppery optimism on your sorrow salad, I'll add that the article pointed to a National Endowment of the Arts study that said overall literary reading is going up, after a long decline. So in conclusion, let's sum up by saying —uh—whatever!
A few years ago I finished a 50,000-word book as part of the National Novel Writing Month, which is just what it sounds like. This outfit Lulu offered to print it up for free if you got to the finish line, and in due course I got a cheesy-looking pamphlet with the story printed in agate type, which is 5 and a half points, the tiny size used for legal notices and sports statistics. Which I suppose means that self-gratification can, in certain situations, actually end up being bad for your eyesight, like they used to say.
From Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, after heavily armed Cuban revolutionaries have hijacked Harry Morgan's boat and ordered him to take them across the straits of Florida:
He had abandoned anger, hatred and any dignity as luxuries, now, and had started to plan.
Because of a certain name that's been in the news lately, the Times resurrected a two-year-old piece by my hero Calvin Trillin lamenting the rise of several politicians whose names are not amenable to use in verse. That's because among the other things he does with comprehensive awesomeness and seemingly effortless aplomb, Trillin writes "deadline verse" about news events for The Nation. (He says he is "partial to politicians with iambic names that rhyme with a lot of disparaging words.") I'm happy to say he was up to the formidable task and disposed of Mr. Blagojevich with that same aplomb I mentioned earlier. But when I read about his concern over rhyming the name, I thought maybe I'd try myself. It's a fools-rush-in sort of thing, I guess. At any rate, here's my attempt to imitate the master:
Poetic Muse! Assist me now! I pine! I've lost the joy of which
I once did sing, because I cannot rhyme the name "Blagojevich."
My need is great! The crimes are vile, and yet it's odd, the boy of which
we speak might not be tarred in verse 'cause he's named Rod Blagojevich.
He's far from coy, this governor, but God! the far-from-coy of which
he stands accused will ne'er be limned in verse! That Rod Blagojevich.
A friend and I were having a talk today about the need to enjoy and be knowledgeable about a literary genre you're working in if you care about ancillary, secondary things like being successful. Like f'rinstance, I've got a romance novel written during National Novel Writing Month, and it observes the romance novel genre rules and I think has a bit of potential, but it's not exactly a confession to say that at this point I've written one more romance novel than I've actually read.
I have an annoying habit of being able to think of exceptions to almost any rule, so I mentioned to my friend a literary sensation from 1969 titled Naked Came the Stranger. A newspaper columnist looked at the current bestselling novels and decided that things had come to a pretty pass, and to prove it he collaborated with a couple of dozen other newspaper types to produce a deliberately awful novel with lots of sex in it. The plot, if plot it be, involves a woman
who revenges herself for her husband's infidelity by becoming even more of an infidel than he is. The writers gave themselves a collective name—"Penelope Ashe," which I think is like the Best. Pseudonym. Ever.—and of course the book became a huge hit.
My own romance book has some sizzling sex scenes itself, as sizzling as a nerdy guy's imagination can provide. Plus it's about pirates and whores! Oodles of fun for the whole family. I've been mulling my own pseudonym—"Lacey Lustgarten" seems to have possiblities—but I haven't settled on that. It's pretty important to get it right. As far as being trashy enough to succeed, I do have some fears. These days, 1969 looks like Boston in 1669—my evidence? The prosecution has one exhibit, your honor. There's no doubt, we live in a golden age of skank, but hey, bloom where you're planted, right?
I'm currently reading a book by Marion Winik titled The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and so far it's more fun than it might sound. Admittedly, it's about scores of people the author once knew who are no longer with us. But it's by no means gloomy. In fact, I was struck at how its mood differed from an impression I'd gotten in my childhood reading. Like most kids in history, I was given books to instruct and uplift, books about individuals who struggled to achieve great things. Usually the books would dwell on the period of work and crisis and final achievement and then gallop through the rest of the individual's life. Often this was an oddly rushed, uncomfortable denouement, as if the biographers were quietly embarrassed at what came next. Family tragedy, sickness, decay, neglect—the triumphant phase of life would often devolve into a sad collapse, it seemed. I didn't find it chilling, exactly—I was a child, after all—but it was like a sudden cold breeze on an otherwise warm autumn afternoon, a hint of things to come.
But Wink's book isn't about famous people whose lives necessarily faded; it's about everday people with only two shared characteristics: She knew them, and they're dead. The sketches I've read so far have been sometimes poignant but more just matter-of-fact, affectionate, clear-eyed memories of people in the round. In an author's note, Winik says the writing process "never seemed morbid or depressing to me. ... Writing this book has been a chance to hang out with my friends." It's signed "Marion Winik, Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, February 2008," because Glen Rock, of course, is where the author lives.
My copy was sent to me by a mutual friend of Winik's and mine, and when I started reading it, I saw Winik had inscribed it with my name and the phrase, "To life!" Many people will recognize this as a translation of a Jewish toast, L'chaim. But it's also a little hint about the book's subject. When I was reading those biographies years ago, I lived the most vivid parts of the subjects' lives with them, and then watched in dismay as their decay happened in a shocking rush. But the characters in Glen Rock are people I never would have heard of, never became attached or sympathetic to from afar or at all, and the fact of their death is a precondition to our meeting. Winik presents them as miniatures, and their decay or sudden end seem somehow not to matter: they have death in common, so what distinguishes them, what sets them apart from each other, is their life. And that's what stands out. They're in their graves, yes, but also tenderly preserved in a charming little snow globe of memory and art.
As it happens, I saw a local theater group do an adaptation of A Christmas Carol this weekend. And now that I think about it, the Dickens story also acknowledges death without being in the least morbid or lugubrious. So there you are. Memento mori, right? And carpe diem. And while we're on the subject, l'chaim.
But Wink's book isn't about famous people whose lives necessarily faded; it's about everday people with only two shared characteristics: She knew them, and they're dead. The sketches I've read so far have been sometimes poignant but more just matter-of-fact, affectionate, clear-eyed memories of people in the round. In an author's note, Winik says the writing process "never seemed morbid or depressing to me. ... Writing this book has been a chance to hang out with my friends." It's signed "Marion Winik, Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, February 2008," because Glen Rock, of course, is where the author lives.
My copy was sent to me by a mutual friend of Winik's and mine, and when I started reading it, I saw Winik had inscribed it with my name and the phrase, "To life!" Many people will recognize this as a translation of a Jewish toast, L'chaim. But it's also a little hint about the book's subject. When I was reading those biographies years ago, I lived the most vivid parts of the subjects' lives with them, and then watched in dismay as their decay happened in a shocking rush. But the characters in Glen Rock are people I never would have heard of, never became attached or sympathetic to from afar or at all, and the fact of their death is a precondition to our meeting. Winik presents them as miniatures, and their decay or sudden end seem somehow not to matter: they have death in common, so what distinguishes them, what sets them apart from each other, is their life. And that's what stands out. They're in their graves, yes, but also tenderly preserved in a charming little snow globe of memory and art.
As it happens, I saw a local theater group do an adaptation of A Christmas Carol this weekend. And now that I think about it, the Dickens story also acknowledges death without being in the least morbid or lugubrious. So there you are. Memento mori, right? And carpe diem. And while we're on the subject, l'chaim.
