1. eBook Burning: Although E-Ink impressively replicates printed text, it does have its limitations—silly putty facsimiles, for instance. Consider Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (named for the temperature at which paper burns) and imagine how the reading experience would falter if it wasn’t read in its original paper form. In the interest of accuracy, I offer the following temperatures as replacement titles:
Fahrenheit 158: The maximum functioning temperature of an E Ink display.
Fahrenheit 361: The melting point of solder, at which point the components would loosen and leave a microchip as ineffectual as a toothless old coot.
Fahrenheit 1220: The temperature you’d need to melt the microchips and achieve the effect of a good old fashioned eBook bonfire.
2. A Lesson from Mark David Chapman: While e-readers give us the opportunity to carry an entire library of books, there is something to be said for discretion. Just imagine the company J. D. Salinger would have kept if Mark David Chapman or John Hinkley, Jr. had access to e-readers. In order to avoid implicating innocent books, one should only carry a select few with you.
3. That Old Fashioned Feel: When a young British rower by the name of Olly Hicks commenced (and later abandoned) a solo expedition around the globe, he had plenty of gadgetry to keep him company. Among his companions were a Sony Reader and 3 80GB iPods, including 100 days worth of audiobooks. But even in the cramped quarters of his vessel, The Flying Carrot, he managed to find space for a few paper books. “Have begun Don Quixote which is probably slightly harder work than rowing…at just under 1,000 pages it weighs the same as a small child,” wrote Hicks in a blog post, after his Sony Reader broke. In an email interview, Expedition Manager, George Olver, said “Olly likes the old fashioned feel of a book.”
4. Bathroom Reading: When I asked Harry “Sonny” Paul, jazz musician and proprietor of the quaint Pleasant Street Books in Woodstock, VT, about his thoughts on e-readers, he said that Lawrence Durrell discovered a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in a public restroom in Egypt; the book was an inspiration to Durrell and the catalyst for a strong, enduring friendship between the two writers. “That could never happen with a Kindle,” he noted.
5. On Behalf of Bookworms: It’s common knowledge that disturbing earth’s delicate ecosystems can be disastrous for the planet’s delicate creatures. With bookstores blinking out across the country and e-readers rising in popularity, what will become of the habitat of the noble bookworm? “Silverfish certainly have adapted to old book pages,” said Gary Hevel, from the Smithsonian Institute’s entomology department. He added that if books suddenly vanished “I trust [bookworms] would be reduced in population.”
–Benjamin Samuel is an Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, will begin an MFA at Brooklyn College this fall, and was voted by his high school as Most Likely to be Seen at the Diner.
Categories: thoughts | 
Tags: Benjamin Samuel, eBook Burning, Most Likely to be Seen at the Diner | 
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A river hog in the mid 1800’s, Northern Michigan
I’ve been poked at plenty all my life, born hairless and white as a cloud, but let me tell you straight that when I was out there driving sticks with the lumberjacks it wasn’t the fact of my skin or even my first name—Paddy, sounding like a name for any other Irishman come north to cut out and get out—but the fact that I couldn’t help crossing myself every time I ambled onto those logs.
I had my wits and I had my pride so you can bet I’d be the first jack out there for the spring drive, rigging the flyboom and passing out peaveys. And once the key log had been tagged and all the others came tumbling off the rollway, ice popping like old bones, snow swallowed into the cold, brown river, there wasn’t a moment to hesitate.
Except that I did. Every time. And not for lack of enthusiasm but instead for the fact that I didn’t know how to swim. Big Duck Creek was wheelin’ for Lake Michigan by springtime and even with my real Chippewa boots I felt certain the creek wanted to sink me whole, send me down the chutes and into the wide open jaws of a sturgeon.
That’s when I started crossing myself. One foot on the sticks, another on dry land; the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders. Then two feet, side by each, moving in slick circles as the logs rolled beneath my boots, hungry water biting at my heels. Let it be known that I never once drowned my peavey on the open waters. That I never once lost footing, the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders. That though I crossed myself at every bend in the river, I kept two eyes on the current. That on my first drive, I saw a man clamped halfway underwater in a jam, the entire river pressing logs into his guts. He begged me to shoot him, the arms of God be ‘round my shoulders, Heaven’s company upon my lips. I rolled on by, the logs grabbing at him like teeth.
Let it also be known that when our work was done, there would be walking, always the walking. Sometimes eight to ten miles back to the wanagan for chuck. By then the ground felt foreign beneath my boots. I refused its steadiness; walked with a bobbing motion for want of something that floated.
In the bunkhouse, my body was given to sleep no matter the circumstance. I dreamt I was an all white fish, pure muscle and fin. The logs formed a floating roof above my head, their groaning finally muted into soft sloshing. The steel tips of peaveys jabbed into the water like rusted bolts of lightning. An occasional boot heel dipped beneath the water’s surface. I muscled against the current, unstoppable, glowing, until I saw that man with his legs trapped beneath the water. The way he moved as if in slow motion, a horrible, silent dance; I saw him. The way he died, running nowhere.
* * *
-Katey Schultz is Associate Editor of TRACHODON, a dinosaur of a little magazine. Her stories have appeared in Fiction Daily, Perigee, Driftwood, Writers’ Dojo, and more. Achievements include the Linda Flowers Literary Prize, Press 53 Open Award for Short Story, Whispering Prairie Press Prize for Flash Fiction, and 2nd place in the River Styx MicroFiction Contest. She will spend 2010-2012 attending writing residencies across the United States, working on a collection of short stories. Follow her travels here.
Image courtesy of http://ipoetry.us.
Categories: story | Tags: Katey Schultz, short short | 3 Comments »
My literary career is young but it’s never too early to begin painting the dilapidated façade of posterity. For the benefit of scholars and fans alike, I will use this space on The Outlet, on a semi-regular basis, to release a selection of my correspondence and other papers. Enjoy. (Universities interested in acquiring the complete Judson Merrill archive should contact me through my web site.)
Dear Professor Wentworth,
My name is Judson Merrill and I’m a novelist. I am currently at work on a new book. It will be a deeply human story about human frailty and human relationships. It’s called Only Human and it centers on Kyle Bouziez and his dying mother. I want the book to be true to the medicine at its core, which is why I’m writing to ask for your expertise as a medical professional, pre-eminent in your field. Also, I want the mother to be dying of something very rare and exotic. I was hoping you could give me a list of some super bizarre diseases. Feel free to note if any of the diseases have particularly literary symptoms, e.g. losing the ability to speak or forgetting what an allusion is or aging backwards or anything like that.
Prof. Wentworth,
Thanks so much for your list. Your brief descriptions of the diseases were captivating and almost all of them appeal as candidates for the book. In the end, though, it’s a no-brainer. (Not literally. That one was interesting, but how could a woman with no brain have and raise a child?) Kyle’s mother will have Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. You are totally right that in addition to being super rare, FOP is super literary. Imagine, muscles and ligaments turning into bones. (I’m thinking of changing the title to What Doesn’t Bend Breaks.) I feel like I just won the lottery! Can you introduce me to anyone who has the disease? Ideal, I guess, would be someone who might be on their last (stony) legs and if, God forbid, they died before I finished the book, I could dedicate it to them.
Prof. W.,
Thanks for sending your colleague’s paper on FOP. I read it with great interest. Alas, it’s pretty clinical and hardly the stuff of great literature. I’m having trouble using it as a springboard for 206 Bones and Counting. (New title. What do you think?) Would it be possible for you to summarize how a doctor might explain this disease to a patient, i.e. in plain English? And maybe write about yourself in the third person. As if you were an attractive female doctor treating an older woman with FOP and giving the diagnosis to her son. In fact, feel free to spend a few lines describing your physique as well as your intelligence. And your no-nonsense yet playful attitude. And your name should be Dr. Esmeralda Greene, for the purposes of this summary. And you have green eyes.
P-Went,
Got your description of Dr. Greene handing down her diagnosis. Some of your prose is a little purple (best to leave the metaphors to me), but the science is impressive and is helpful as I begin to really get to know these characters. I wonder if, from a scientific stance, you’d be willing to share your impressions of how Esmeralda might behave on a first date with Kyle. Perhaps with a special focus on the tension between the excitement of a new relationship and the cloud cast by Kyle’s slowly ossifying mother. Also, keep in mind my new working title, Medusa’s Children.
Dubs,
I certainly can tell you’re not a professional novelist, but thanks for sending along the date scene. It’s invaluable research as I develop characters and build the narrative of My Bony Mother. But I won’t bore you with the arcane details of my craft. Any idea what should happen next in the book? From a medical standpoint?
Professor,
I have to say it was with some dismay that I received your latest pages. While your scene is sort of compelling, why has your prose taken on this hard-boiled, noir feel? If Esmeralda is a hard-drinking loner, how are things going to get started with Kyle? Or should I say, what have you done with Kyle? In my draft he’s about to take Esmeralda to his high school reunion but you’ve got him separated from his mother since he was a small boy and possibly now a former mobster in witness protection. Is that right? Well, then why is Esmeralda trying to track him down and warn him that he might have FOP? How could he even catch the disease if he hasn’t seen his mother in so many years? It just makes no sense. (And p.s., I think your title suggestion leaves a lot to be desired.) Again, let’s stick to our specialties. You provide the science and I’ll write the novel. Speaking of which, what’s your medical opinion of high school reunions?
Dear Professor Wentworth,
Congratulations on the release—and surprisingly strong sales—of your new novel, Double-Barreled Diagnosis. I read the book with great interest. Unfortunately I could not miss some disturbing similarities to the novel I’ve been working on for some time, parts of which I have shared with you. Please find enclosed the filing papers for my copyright infringement lawsuit. Also, seriously, please get back to me about high school reunions. That scene has me super stumped.
* * *
Previously:
Judson Merrill sends Letters to his Editor, tucks copy of story under Editor’s daughter’s sheets.
Judson Merrill writes to his local Indie Bookstore.
-Judson Merrill lives and writes in Brooklyn. Some of his work, including his e-novella, The Pool, can be found at judsonmerrill.com.
Categories: thoughts | Tags: | 1 Comment »
Stephen O’Connor’s Here Comes Another Lesson offers a rare virtue among short story collections: if one story isn’t what you’re looking for, chances are the next one will be. The sheer variety of narratives offered in this collection is virtuosic. O’Connor writes from such a multiplicity of voices and with such a wide spectrum of concerns, running the gamut from a Minotaur awakening to his own angst to an actor playing himself in a movie based on his life to a graduate student struggling to finish her thesis in a disturbingly isolated house, that considering the collection as a whole becomes a rather dizzying task.
The recurring centerpieces of Here Comes Another Lesson are the adventures of Charles, an untenured Professor of Atheism. In each of the five stories devoted to him, Charles is ruthlessly thrown into a theological scenario that implicitly refutes everything Charles’s world view is based upon; the hopeless unbeliever takes a vacation to Eden and is visited by God and angels. Pretty clever gimmick, right? And in lesser hands, that is exactly what these stories would be: a gimmick. But what O’Connor does with the Professor of Atheism stories is much more complex and satisfying, the humor dark and twisted. What Charles eventually learns every time is not that he is wrong, but that, in a way, he is right. If God truly exists in this world, Charles discovers, then we are probably worse off for it. What could have been a series of casually cruel set pieces instead become the trials of a man grappling with an impossible ideal.
This unpredictability is true of most of the collection; O’Connor consistently zigs when you think he’s going to zag. Take “Disappearance and” for example, where an ornithologist learns the exact moment his death is going to occur. From the opening, where a soothsaying cormorant touches down on a plastic tablecloth, you could be forgiven for expecting the story that follows to be clever, to follow some path to self-defeat and irony, to end with the ornithologist’s death as some sort of punch line. Instead, what O’Connor eventually delivers is a quiet, lyrical meditation on a man struggling to be alert to his life during his final moments on earth.
O’Connor’s eventual purpose in these stories somewhere between the realist and the fantastic. At his most imaginative, O’Connor still manages to pull his fantastic creations back into a more recognizable emotional landscape. “I Think I’m Happier,” where a man is followed home by his dead father, is reminiscent of Donald Barthelme in both absurdity and tone, but O’Connor is softer than Barthelme, tender where Barthelme often relied on artifice. The result is both harrowing and touching. And at his most naturalistic, O’Connor can’t help but veer into the horrific, the odd and the unbelievable. “White Fire,” told from the perspective of a soldier fresh from Iraq, skirts around the war for as long as it can, the soldier using “like” and “you know” to avoid actually saying what needs to be said. But the flat, clipped conversational prose only continues to grow in resonance and weight until, hopelessly pulled by memory, the soldier finally reveals the horrors he’s seen. And once it’s been said, you wish it could be unsaid again. Not for your sake, but for his. And in “He Will Not Seeing Me Stopping Here,” a dinner between two old friends borders on a Lynchian nightmare without ever abandoning its realistic conceit. O’Connor seems to take just as much joy in revealing the peculiar quietness in the ordinary as he does in humanizing the strangest realms of his imagination.
Here Comes Another Lesson is a collection of people lost amidst a world stripped of meaning and purpose. Whether that world resembles our own or merely mirrors it, O’Connor manages to find the beauty, the brutality, and the sublime buried within and offers it all to his reader, unflinchingly.
Stephen O’Connor’s Here Comes Another Lesson is out today, Aug. 3rd, on Free Press.
- Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. You can find him here.
Categories: review | Tags: Free Press, review, Stephen Aubrey, Stephen O'Connor | 1 Comment »
Over dinner in a Chinese restaurant, before I began my third novel, I said to Frank Conroy, “Since I may be about to waste two years of my life, do you have any advice?”
“Go in with plenty of energy,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Bob Stone,” whose novel Dog Soldiers I worshiped and used as a model for the book I’d begun to call City of God, “says novels end once they’ve worn us out. Norman [Mailer] equates writing a novel with a prizefight. You have to train like a boxer trains. You have to be in shape. If you aren’t, entropy wins, you lose.”
Granted, Hemingway may have offered these dated, macho recommendations, but they spoke to one editor’s concern that I wouldn’t have the requisite energy and concentration to complete the novel. But given my previous winter’s experience when language no longer streamed through my mind but became as stagnant as a swamp, they also made sense. Depression and another semester of teaching freshman composition had smudged and worn down my imagination the way corrections on a handwritten page blacken and diminish a rubber eraser.
For my novel, I’d borrowed the conventions of a crime novel; my book began with a cop killing. But I didn’t want the novel to sound formulaic. A novel’s music is its meaning. So I made the details specific, yet slightly strange. When the boy, Ray, comes abreast of a patrol car parked on a deserted street, surrounded by condemned buildings:
“His gloved hands unsheathe the truncated rifle barrel strapped to his chest when the cop nearest him looks out, his eyes meeting Ray’s. They don’t pick up the gun at first. It’s just a simple turn of the head, a reaction to something stirring near the blurry edge of peripheral vision.
The first C-4-tipped shell hits the window and rocks the car, its passenger-side tires lifting off the ground. The plastic explosive in the cartridge bursts on impact, dappling the windows and doors with small bright stars and kicking back a shower of sparks. Holes open in the passenger window and Ray can hear shouting – panicked, angry, terrified – inside the vehicle. The second round rips through the interior of the car and blows out its far windows, glass leaping from the doorframes and fanning out over the street. This time no voices are heard under the clacking of metal as Ray reloads, just a deep, hoarse whining. He fires again, this blast taking off the steering wheel top. Then he realizes that the whining sound is the cop nearest him trying to breathe. As the gun’s report echoes down the street, it becomes quiet enough for Ray to realize that the guy is still trying, though just barely. The spooky thing is that the sound seems to be coming not from his mouth, but from his chest.
Ray peers into the car and sees that the man’s head has fallen back against the security grating behind him. His jaws are open, part of his throat torn away. What’s left is a thin, bloody, faintly pulsing stalk. His shirt ripped open, a fractured bone juts out from the skinless stump of shoulder, his flesh from sternum to ribs peeled away like a skinned onion. The man’s insides gleam, slick and reddish-black in the streetlight. For an instant, Ray thinks he sees the man’s heart dangling by a partially severed artery, beating arhythmically outside his ribs. His own heart clutches.”
The one-hundred-and-ten pages I wrote in Frank’s study the following summer generated enough momentum to carry me into the late fall, by which time I’d completed the book. But had my two years of work produced a good, publishable novel? “Good” in whose eyes, “publishable” according to what editorial board’s opinion? Also, would Frank approve of and perhaps even admire it? I had no idea. Once my fleeting elation over finishing the novel passed, I had five hundred and sixty-seven pages of prose, which needed editing.
But had my two years of work produced a good, publishable novel? “Good” in whose eyes, “publishable” according to what editorial board’s opinion? Also, would Frank approve of and perhaps even admire it? I had no idea. Once my fleeting elation passed, I had five hundred and sixty-seven pages of prose, which needed editing.
I borrowed a Mac classic computer from a student (I still owned a typewriter). Then my wife, Jody, and I drove to Key West. We’d rented a house with a dreary living room, but a large bedroom, a bright kitchen, and a deck outside of its French doors. Every morning, we walked to the Cuban café, ordered to-go cups filled with café con leche, returned to the house, and then worked, uninterrupted, for eight hours. Jody perched at the kitchen counter with the computer and keyboard, while I sat on the deck, pencil-edited the manuscript, and handed her corrected pages through the open doors. Then she entered the changes, I gave her additional changes, and, at dusk, we strolled to the marina’s bar, ordered drinks, and watched the sunset. In two weeks, we cut five hundred and sixty-seven pages to five hundred and ten pages. Shortly before Christmas, we took a day off, then returned to our stations and began to revise the next draft.
Working on the novel’s cleaner, sleeker draft, we trimmed five hundred and ten pages to four hundred and fifty-four in the following two weeks. I hated the book. But I printed the manuscript, mailed it to Frank, and waited.
Frank didn’t call before Jody and I left Key West, even though he must have had the manuscript for five days. Intellectually, I understood that despite snow, ice, and sub-zero temperatures Frank hadn’t planted himself on his front stoop to await its delivery. But emotionally, I pictured him standing on the sidewalk, wearing his bathrobe, hoping to spot the mail truck. And what I felt always trumped what I knew.
During our twenty-hour drive to Texas, Jody often slept, or pretended to sleep, in order to protect herself from my obsession with why hadn’t Frank called. Crossing Alabama, I debated — compulsively, yet silently — where, in Frank’s life, my manuscript resided. Leaning against the front door in its unopened envelope? Lying on his bedside table? Glued to his hands because he was too engrossed to put it down? Or hidden on a shelf, largely unread? Jody knew I’d begin my interrogation regarding Frank’s opinion the instant she opened one eye; I knew that, at some point, she had to wake up; and the moment she did, I said, “Why do you think Frank hasn’t called about the book?”
Barely conscious, she said, “He probably hasn’t read it yet.”
“But he will read it?”
“Yes, he’ll read it, when he has the time.”
“Why wouldn’t he have the time?” (I’d blocked out the workshop’s eight hundred application manuscripts.)
“Because he’s busy.”
I paused (on purpose). Then I said, “Should I call him?”
“No.”
“I mean when we get home?” (She knew I meant from the next gas station.)
“No.”
“But you’re sure he’ll read it?”
“Yes.”
“You think he’ll like it?”
“I don’t know.”
She slept through Mississippi and woke in Louisiana.
“What if he doesn’t like it?”
“He’ll tell you he doesn’t like it.”
“Why wouldn’t he like it?”
She napped again and regained consciousness in East Texas.
“Let’s just say…”
“He’ll love it, okay? He’ll love it. Satisfied?”
Once we reached our house – it remains impossible for me to call Texas “home” – I checked our answering machine. I heard several voices, but not the one voice I wanted to hear.
At the beginning of February I called Frank, prepared to hear his disappointment regarding my novel. I was also afraid that he’d think I’d lost my talent, my promise, and my mind. Three years had passed since we’d sold Season’s End. In light of its failure, had Frank decided to distance himself from the book and, therefore, distance himself from me? True, he’d spoken highly of me to Rust Hills and, once again, had invited me to teach at Iowa. But what if the new novel changed his feelings? I wanted to believe that his love was unconditional, rather contingent upon my literary success, but I wasn’t certain. So I called not only to ask about my novel but, indirectly, to ask about our future.
When he heard my voice, he said, “Professor Grimes!” – not “Hey, babe,” or “Tom!” Unintentionally, he’d demoted me from author to instructor.
“The novel’s that bad,” I said.
Surprised, he paused, then said, “To the contrary, my friend.”
“It’s good?”
“It’s better than good.”
Not everyone agreed, but after speaking to Frank and having my questions about the novel and his undiminished affection for me answered, I could no longer be wounded.
-Tom Grimes is the author of five novels, a play, and Mentor: A Memoir. He edited The Workshop: Seven Decades from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and he currently directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.
Mentor is available Aug 1st, 2010 from Tin House Books.
Categories: excerpt | Tags: Mentor, Novel Excerpt, Tin House Books, Tom Grimes | No Comments »
Editor’s Note: John Broening is a regular contributor. His column note:
I’m a lapsed member of the Church of Theory. I don’t believe in Theory anymore, but I do believe in criticism.
What is criticism? Criticism is a kind of trenchant social commentary, credo, and witty, freewheeling philosophizing exercise whose starting point is the individual work of art. This has been the m.o. of the great critics: Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, Clive James (Hell, let’s even throw Benjamin in there!).
What criticism means to most people, alas, and certainly to those who write on the Internet is a kind of consumer guide. Ever since the age of Reagan, the consumer guide—thumbs-up, thumbs-down, 4 out of 5 stars, cheers/jeers—is what most of the audience for art expects. Pace Eagleton, this isn’t commodifying the individual, but it is commodifying the work of art.
I’m conscious of not tailoring my style to this medium, of writing an archaic, overcomplicated literary prose for a medium that depends on a language whose meaning can be grasped instantaneously. But I have a problem with the language—with the sloppy, snarky, write-before-you-think dialect that has become the Internet’s lingua franca.
Here, among other things, I’ll explore my weakness for forgotten works of literature; even if they are barely worth revisiting, they often remind us of what we have lost in our culture.”
Two descriptions of John Berger. The first is from Kingsley Amis: Amis recalls seeing a violently animated Berger having a heated exchange with a Maitre d’ at a restaurant, his hands resembling ‘two airplanes in mid-dogfight.’ Amis tells us that he thought a scuffle was about to break out, but it turned out Berger was merely confirming a reservation.
We have every reason to mistrust Amis’s account, to believe he would go out of his way to make Berger look ridiculous: Berger—politically radical, artistically experimental, Anglophobe—represented everything the Blimpish Amis detested about intellectuals.
The second description comes from Berger himself, from the 1988 afterword to his first and best novel, A Painter of Our Time. Surprisingly, it goes a long way towards confirming the essential truth of Amis’s observation. In his afterword, Berger, an Englishman, writes about himself at the time Painter was published in 1958, and his adoption of the more open, emotive, and, one imagines, more gesticulatory manner of the Eastern European refugee painters who were the model for his engage hero, Janos Lavin:
There was a predilection on both sides, theirs and mine, a certain complicity..It was based upon our experience of the English and the English refusal of pain…Our complicity, our opposition, grew from the assumption that pain is at the source of human imagination, This didn’t make us solemn, but it did make us embrace, put our arms around one another, to the embarrassment of any watching Englishman….
There is the faintest acknowledgment, isn’t there, that the writer is not merely following his heart but also performing for an audience, and that what he is performing is a rejection as well as an impersonation.
The impersonation didn’t stop with Berger’s outward personal style: Berger’s Marxism is itself a continental style, and his writing can be viewed as a rejection of the English Establishment style and an embracing of the pan-European. For example, Berger’s art criticism: at the time Berger started publishing in the mid-Fifties, the typical English art critic was a connoisseur—so, Berger resolved to expose the capitalist roots of connoisseurship. The typical English critic wrote in an elevated, vaporizing style; Berger was concrete and dwelt on the specific materials and the specific challenges within the artist’s studio. The typical English critic spoke to an audience of his own class and background (as Denis Donoghue once observed about the prose of a certain English literary critic, there is an unspoken ‘of course’ at the end of each sentence); Berger hopefully addressed his art writings to the enlightened working class.
Seen from the outside, Berger’s life has been a series of public rejections: as a young conscript in WWII, he refused the officer’s commission that was his due in favor of life as an enlisted man; when he won the Booker Prize in 1972, he resolved in his notorious acceptance speech to ‘turn the prize against itself’ and fight the Booker-McConnell’s history of economic exploitation of the Caribbean by giving half his prize money to the London chapter of the Black Panthers; shortly afterwards, he rejected London and its cultural life for a farm in the French Alps (as is the case for every literary type from Tolstoy onward, being able to leave the farm six months out of the year is a precondition to finding truth and meaning in rural life).
What I’m describing is a kind of symbiotic relationship, one that benefits both the rebel and the Establishment (to borrow a term that was coined around the time Berger started appearing in print): the rebel uses the Establishment to negatively define himself—whatever it is, he is not. He uses the Establishment’s crimes and abuses of power to arouse the anger he needs in order to create, and he uses the Establishment’s inevitable retaliation as a way to both generate sympathy for his causes and to make a name for himself.
The Establishment, for its part, uses the rebel’s more extreme charges—that it is as fascistic and repressive as Nazi Germany, for example—to nullify less extreme charges that might have more truth to them; the Establishment uses the rebel’s attacks as a way to unify itself; and the Establishment points to the fact that it allows the rebel to publicly attack it as a sign that it actually supports the free society that it claims to believe in.
This dynamic can be seen in the careers of D.H. Lawrence, of Allen Ginsberg, and more recently, of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill.
It also describes some aspects of Berger’s career. But, to his credit, Berger has rebelled against his own rebellion. Now, I’m not implying for a second that Berger, as he has grown older, has succumbed to the inevitable rightward drift that marks the careers of so many former Lefties, writers like John Osborne, Christopher Hitchens and, yes, Kingsley Amis. Berger in recent years has been, if anything, more intransigently Hard Left in his politics.
Berger, though, has looked for another path through Marxism: as he said in a recent interview: “The problem with Marxism is there is no real space for ethics. Okay, there is plenty of space in it for the struggle of justice against injustice, but the notion that an act is good or bad in itself — there is no space for that. There is no space for that which is outside time or, if you wish, for the eternal…”
Berger has passionately argued against a kind of reductionist utilitarianism in Marxist writing (a tendency which Dylan Thomas memorably parodied in How to Be a Poet: “spring gay/ as the workers’ procession/to the newly opened gymnasium/look! the full employment of the blossoms!”). Much of his best work makes room for what is outside time, for the eternal. Very few writers have written in such a clear-eyed and moving way about what he calls ‘the shared subjectivity of sex’ or about the struggle to find something eternal in a love that is secular and time-bound:
The flower’s ovules
will be seeding still
When Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.
The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain
Berger has been compared to Shelley and Lawrence, for his very English combination of rebelliousness and mysticism, but his real peer is probably Ruskin. Like Ruskin, Berger has put his remarkable eye and prose at the service of a tragically unrealizable moral vision. Berger has dreamed that his writings would help bring about a plebeian industrial democracy—Ruskin imagined an art world that returned to preindustrial values. And Berger resembles Ruskin in the sad nature of his legacy: Ruskin directly inspired two of the ugliest art movements in history: the pre-Raphaelite and the Neo Gothic. Berger’s dream of a ‘radical art history,’ as one his best critics, Geoff Dyer, has pointed out, “was no sooner realized than betrayed’ in “numerous cultural studies departments…where second–rate Eagletons discoursed away in the confident belief that no one was paying attention.”
But we don’t judge a writer by his legacy: what we continue to value in a writer is that which is inimitably his own. No other writer could find hidden affinities between Francis Bacon’s paintings and Walt Disney’s cartoons, or could explain why Rodin’s insatiable need to dominate women fatally weakened his sculpture, or could show how Turner’s lifelong preoccupations in paint originated in the blood and water of his father’s barber shop, or could use a auto mechanic’s testimony to refute the unquestioned assumptions of a Surrealist painter, or, finally, could write so movingly about how the rise and fall of political hopes makes us see the same painting in such a different way.
—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.
Categories: author | Tags: John Berger, John Broening | 1 Comment »
Editor’s Note: This is the next installment in Wythe Marschall’s novella project. See his thoughts on the project here.
The Murderess
By Alexandros Papadiamantis
Translated by Peter Levi
New York Review of Books Classics, 2010
The Murderess does not look like a novella. Its central character—an old woman named Hadoula—is portrayed realistically; its structure is familiar—short, action-filled chapters; and it has an ending, which falls into place inexorably after several characters’ deaths.
The typical question (“what happened?”) seems either not to apply—too obvious; Hadoula is the titular killer—or to apply multivalently. From the first murder onward, many lines of flight unfold out of many centers of action.
But our character is a stock “lonely old woman.” All she does is wash clothes and complain and pray. Her son-in-law drinks at dawn each day; her sons have taken jobs on ships and will never return to Greece. In her stock-ness, Hadoula serves as an efficient means for the reader to experience the book’s dreamlike action, all of which unfolds from the single putting-into-effect of Hadoula’s ancient, nihilistic, mirror-glass version of Christianity:
Because “nothing is exactly what it seems… grief is joy and death is life and resurrection,” Hadoula kills a young girl, only a few weeks old—her own granddaughter.
This “what happened” leads to the killings of more girls, all young, none suspecting that Hadoula has made a final break with the ethics of her society.
The Murderess is at once difficult and easy to read. Its prose is lyrical and languid: Greece’s tiny islands come alive, and an impoverished, moral sense of community suffuses the lonely seaside cliffs and montane goat-runs where Hadoula wanders and—eventually, as her work is revealed for murder and not a series of grotesque accidents—where she hides. (Where “she carried her wound with her.”)
We all feel Hadoula’s inborn, human pain of self-blame, of looking-in-any-incident-for-a-story, looking-for-a-moral.
(Is this the pain of the novella?)
But The Murderess is hard to read when intellectualized:
As Bad Nature is a meditation on the hunt, set in a wonderfully absurd pocket-world within Mexico City that is created by the alchemical combination of Elvis and his sphere of handlers and his translator’s moral mistranslations;—as No Tomorrow is a meditation on desire, set in a pocket-world created by outright lies and an Epicurean commitment to play, to following an adventure through, enjoying a ramble into the unconscious, by both narrator and reader;—
—so is The Murderess a meditation on murder, on the compassionate act of release from the misogynistic brutality of coastal-urban life in Greece in the first years of the century of Hitler and Stalin.
This meditation is set in a real-feeling world that is continually elided in favor of mountain peaks so olive-lush, so remote, so dotted over with the cells of eremites that, in them, it seems not only immoral but impossible that Hadoula’s brazenness—pushing girls down a well only a few yards from the house where their dying mother lies asleep, dreaming of them; strangling the child of a goatherd who helps her avoid the “regulars,” the police sent to question her after a girl falls into a well—seems an affront both narrative and ontological.
…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…
With language such as this, we must flatten the olive trees onto the same painting as the murders. But Hadoula is the real link. We become complicit in her nihilism, and—because this is a novella—we never finally reach a resolution, even when Hadoula is forced into the reach of the law. She is finally not a character at all, but the narrative shadow of her actions—the gravity of murder, rolling through the idyllic island, distorting it, deepening a brutal, unseen dimension to which we cannot deny existence:
Would it not really be right, if only humans were not so blind, to assist the scourge that fluttered in the angels’ wings…? But look, the little angels take no sides and make no favours. They take away boys and girls alike into Paradise. In fact all the more boys. So many precious only sons who died utterly… Girls have seven lives, the old woman reflected.
The world is righteously hard for little girls, certainly in the Greece of the first years of the twentieth century. Here Papadiamantis’s book resembles a grim Realist version of A Modest Proposal. The Swiftian gag is Surreal (“more than real”), however, because Hadoula’s logic is not satire, and her invocations of deadly angels dredge up our own maltheism, or at least our Malthusianism.
Papadiamantis (1851-1911, “The greatest Modern Greek prose writer,” Milan Kundera) forces us to question and to affirm what is absolutely essential about life, and he does this cunningly, by forcing us into the consciousness of a woman for whom maltheism has become absolute, rigid.
But was she genuinely second-sighted? She whose dreams… had often foretold something… or left some strange impression. Even her lies when she told them became the truth against her will.
Lies, moral lies. We may want to test our moral positions by announcing or even acting on our convictions before we feel them. Perhaps the ultimate fear is that we will do so as does Hadoula.
-Wythe Marschall can be found here.
Categories: review | Tags: Alexandros Papadiamantis, novella, NYRB classics, Peter Levi, review, Wythe Marschall | 1 Comment »
The title of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s forthcoming story collection, The Woman with the Bouquet, sounds like it might refer to a painting, and there is a quality to Mr.Schmitt’s writing that takes one back to a time when photography had yet to make the painted portrait obsolete. With this particular portrait, Mr. Schmitt aims to depict a woman in love, a woman with a secret, a woman whose heart is a mystery of passion and longing, capable of great happiness and deep sorrow. That is no small task, and Mr. Schmitt acquits himself admirably, even if his style can, at times, feel too formal. One of Mr. Schmitt’s chief strengths is the ability to precisely chronicle the shifts in his characters’ mental and emotional states, a skill he employs to illuminate the changeable nature of the mind and heart. If his stories could be said to have antagonists, they would be intellectual and spiritual rigidity, intolerance, and, for lack of a better term, low self-esteem. This last afflicts at least three of his stories’ heroines at one or another time in their lives, with profound consequences, and while Mr. Schmitt treats some of them with more kindness than others, in the end each is able to see herself as beautiful. That this is invariably achieved with the help of a man’s love can, I suppose, be forgiven, as Mr. Schmitt’s intentions, like those of an earnest therapist or self-help guru, are clearly good. The collection’s subtitle might have been, “Woman, Love Thyself.” Indeed, the unmistakable feeling of tender affection for their subject that pervades these stories helps one overlook the often formulaic plot development (it would seem quite fresh were it written a century earlier) and the occasionally heavy-handed moral didacticism. The author seems to have deliberately chosen anachronistic, clunky narrative vehicles–which are, however, tried and true, and keep you reading even as you foresee their resolution–as a reflection of his sense that what’s truly important about these stories is not their plot twists, but the message of positivism (and the accompanying object lesson) they are intended to deliver. To his credit, in the end Mr. Schmitt does not presume to have unraveled every mystery of a woman’s heart. In the final, eponymous story, he gallantly acknowledges his helplessness before its secrets, and his awe at its fierce, boundless strength.
The Woman with the Bouquet is forthcoming from Europa Editions on August 31, 2010.
-Ilya Lyashevsky lives in Brooklyn, where he writes fiction and software. His current project, combining technology and literature, can be found here.
Categories: review | Tags: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Europa Editions, Ilya Lyashevsky, review, The Woman with the Bouquet | No Comments »
Editor’s Note: Wattpad is a thriving online community populated with largely genre and teen-oriented fiction and a youthful and excited audience of readers and writers. We asked Nina Lassam to discuss Wattpad’s success and the role of social media in the writer’s life.
When I talk to writers about using social networking and providing free content to encourage word of mouth advertising and to drive sales, by far the biggest concern that I hear is whether they will see a measurable return on their investment of time. If you know that you can get paid to write, it can be difficult to rationalize doing any type of writing for free.
It is important to remember though that online readers are also investing their time – to read what you’ve written, comment, respond, and often to recommend your work. Interacting with this community is a way to give back while also growing your fan base and developing reader loyalty.
In many ways, using Web 2.0 media to promote your fiction makes your online presence less about what you’ve written and more about you. That is why it can be so effective. The general rule is, whether you have spend time to write a chapter, a short story, or an entire novel, you should spend comparable time writing about yourself and interacting directly with readers.
One way to successfully reach out to your audience is to give readers an annotated edition of your story peppered with footnotes of your experiences as a writer, requests for feedback, and reasons for writing the story. Humanizing your work will not only draw people to the story but also increase loyalty online and in the bookstore.
On Wattpad, the eBook community where I work, Abigail Gibbs is serializing an as yet unfinished story that has been read almost 7M times. Because she solicits feedback and inserts details about her writing process and daily life, her eBook becomes as important to readers as the relationship they’ve established with her. Because we can relate to her, we become more interested in supporting the characters and plot she has created.
Alex Greenwood, author of Pilate’s Cross, posted a free short story on Wattpad to generate interest in his novel. With Twitter, Wattpad, and other web tools, he has created an expanding group of readers that, as author Jeremy Gordan explains when discussing his own social networking experience, expands his group of guaranteed customers out of his backyard.
Without your presence, your story or profile in a reading community is about as good as setting up a Facebook account and expecting to turn to your computer the next day to hundreds of friend requests. Posting something is only part of the job; writers who have successfully grown awareness of their work using social media tools have taken considerable time to do so, and readers have rewarded them by taking time to share with others. To connect with readers and encourage book sales, a writer should use social media for what it was designed: to let an audience know that she is actually there.
-Nina Lassam works at Wattpad.
Categories: thoughts | Tags: Abigail Gibbs, Alex Greenwood, Jeremy Gordan, Nina Lassam, wattpad | 7 Comments »
Three Pieces of Time
1.
A year ago, in a small town in the United States, I saw a beggar sitting beside a cardboard sign that read: “Help: my time machine is out of order. I need money for replacement parts, so I can go home to the year 2118.”
2.
To accept the assumption that God created the world less than six thousand years ago, one must accept the claim that He also created signs and traces of everything we assume happened before that: dinosaur skeletons, continental drift, cave paintings and so on. In one of his essays, Borges quotes Russell, who writes that one can argue in the same vein that the world, with its entire glorious past, was created a few minutes ago. A more radical idea is found in a Zen parable from which I copied the next lines: A teacher was asked by one of his students when the world was created. He answered, “Now.”
3.
The legend goes that Virgil wrote the Aeneid for ten years, no more than three lines each day. And at the end of his days he began subtracting from his poem: Among the lines he was satisfied to leave out was one of the tales of Aeneas, who wanders and wanders the streets of Carthage, until he comes to a square bustling with people. He pushes his way into the crowd and listens to a blind storyteller, who tells of the journeys and hardships of a man who cannot find the way home—Odysseus is his name. “But not even a single road leads out of Troy!” cries Aeneas, perhaps to the gods, perhaps to the storyteller, “We are doomed to march them all.”
The Book of Sleep
This story is somewhat familiar: On the seam of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Orientalist Antoine Galland translated The Thousand and One Nights into French, and wove in legends and tales of Scheherazade that he invented himself, or that he’d just heard during his travels in the East (like the one, for example, about Aladdin and the magic lamp). In Galland’s journals, by contrast, in an adaptation by the Argentine writer Bioy Casares, we encounter another story, which Galland actually neglected to include in his translation of The Thousand and One Nights: He states that at a market in Toulouse he obtains a tattered book said to have been written by a Gypsy. Whoever reads from this book from dawn until dusk, the bookseller instructs Galland, will fall asleep and awaken after one hundred years. Only then will he continue to read the book at the exact place he’d stopped, without knowing that the world outside is unrecognizably changed (again). Galland returns home and one morning begins to read the book as instructed. At night he falls asleep and awakens the next day: a lazy autumn in the south of France. The only thing that happened, he recalls through the curtain of waking, was that also in his dream he’d slept and awakened from another dream, and it isn’t clear to him which of the two dreams is real. Galland copies into his journal one of the opening lines from the book, “The god prayed. But to which god? Thus is the universe made,” and then places the fraudulent book in his library, and returns to the labors of translating The Thousand and One Nights. Elsewhere in his journal he remarks that perhaps it isn’t the man who sleeps for one hundred years, but the book.
Super Zאn
Like many superheroes, in her everyday life she works at a dreary job: as a clerk at the post office. But from time to time she has to use her special powers even from behind the counter. Once a thief entered her post office and pointed the gun in his trembling hand at her. She said, The Buddha’s heart was also not on the right side. Enlightenment was within reach.
—Alex Epstein was born in St. Petersburg in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels; Blue Has No South, his most recent collection of short-short stories, is available in English, from Clockroot Books.
—Becka Mara McKay is the author of the poetry collection A Meteorologist in the Promised Land and a translator from the Hebrew; her recent translations include Suzane Adam’s Laundry (Autumn Hill Books) and Alex Epstein’s Blue Has No South (Clockroot Books). She is currently a professor of creative writing and translation at Florida Atlantic University.
Categories: thoughts | Tags: Alex Epstein, Becka Mckay, Blue Has No South, micro-fiction, translated fiction | 4 Comments »
