Susan Taylor Chehak

Last year, sometime in the middle of winter, I decided that I would take a year off from reading books. Of any kind (except student work, there was no getting around that). Just to see what happened. At first I thought this was a brilliant idea -- that if I wanted books, I'd have to write them for myself. I even calculated how much time I would save, how many extra hours I would have, if I didn't spend the time that I do, reading. But after a while, I began to doubt the intention behind this and revise the plan -- no books for six months, then no fiction for six months, then no fiction for three months... and so on until, somewhat disappointed in myself, I gave it up altogether.

When spring came, I came up with another plan: I would read all twelve of William Faulkner's novels, two per month, from July until December. I got the first Library of America compilation -- the novels from 1926 to 1929, which includes Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, and The Sound and the Fury -- and when I've finished with those, I'll get the rest. Yesterday I finished Soldier's Pay and today I move on to Mosquitoes.

When I announced on Facebook my intention to do this I got a great response -- one friend even offered to join me in the endeavor (but I haven't heard from him since then... I wonder if he's still up for it) and another, who is a Faulkner expert of sorts, was most encouraging. When I actually began the reading I made another announcement, and that time the response was quite different. One friend wrote to say that she tried to do this one summer and tried to enjoy it, but just couldn't. Another bemoaned her experience with Faulkner in high school and college, called it a drudge.

Not me. I'm in heaven. Reading Soldier's Pay, I didn't always get what was going on, but I just kept going, anyway. I didn't get the whole Januarius Jones business, and all the marrying not marrying seemed... what... antiquated and not very interesting. But Donald Mahon? And Gilligan and Mrs. Powers? And also the letters from Julian Lowe... wonderful storytelling, deep dark characters, love and death and time and space. But never mind any of that, what makes my heart pound, my head throb, is the language. I don't even care about the content, really. To me the content is just something to write about, in passages like this: "Day came after noon, became dusk and imminent evening: evening like a ship, with twilight-colored sails, dreamed down the world darkly toward darkness. And suddenly he found that he was passing from the dark world in which he had lived for a time he could not remember, again into a day that had long passed, that had already been spent by those who lived and wept and died, and so remembering it, this day, was his alone: the one trophy he had reft from Time and Space. Per ardua ad astra." That's Mahon, dying.

Or this: "And so April became May. There were fair days when the sun becoming warmer and warmer rising drank off the dew and flowers bloomed like girls ready for a ball, then drooped in the languorous fulsome heat like girls after a ball; when earth like a fat woman recklessly trying giddy hat after hat, trying a trimming of apple and pear and peach: threw it away, tried narcissus and jonquil and flag: threw it away -- so early flowers passed and later flowers bloomed to fade and fall, giving place to yet other ones."

"There was no sound in the kitchen save a clock. Life. death. life. death. forever and ever. (If I could only cry!) She could hear the dusty sound of sparrows and she imagined she could see the shadows growing longer across the grass. Soon it will be night, she thought, remembering that night long, long ago, the last time she had seen Donald, her Donald: not that one! and he had said Come here Emmy, and she had gone to him. Her Donald was dead long long ago... The clock went life. death. life. death. There was something frozen in her chest, like a dish-cloth in winter."

There are more... this feels rich to me. Maybe after all the terse snippets that come via email and web pages...

My friend Martha told me I should read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Yes. Exactly. That and You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier (inventor of Virtual Reality, who sat with his new bride, on the night of their wedding, at a table next to ours at Olivia's in Toronto several years ago -- they seemed very happy; I was agog).

Anyway, with Faulkner, at least in this book, it seems to be all about time and space and death and sex. And blood. And light. He's starting to fool around with point of view, too -- inner, subtextual musings are bracketed by parentheses, and are usually in direct contradiction to what is actually being said or done. Soon he'll abandon that convention and just mix it all up for us to figure out -- I think? (This, the drudge that made him so difficult to understand for my friend?)

Next up, Mosquitoes. "In spring, the sweet young spring, decked out with little green, necklaced braceleted with the song of idiotic birds, spurious and sweet and tawdry as a shopgirl in her cheap finery, like an idiot with money and no taste, they were little and young and trusting: you could kill them sometimes."

Ah, yes.

“A Kind of Vast Fiction” is an e-mail correspondence between David Gates and Jonathan Lethem, who was a participant in the 2010 PEN World Voices Festival. The entire exchange appears in PEN America 12: Correspondences.

---

From: Jonathan Lethem
To: David Gates
Subject: the old transmission

Hey, David. As I was saying to my 2,472 friends the other day, these certainly are strange times in the history of the boundary between the human persons and the written words. What (if anything) is your strategy—given your life as a teacher (I’m a teacher again; this question’s of more than mild interest), as a working journalist, as a witness to the digital quarantine-crumbling of all those distinctions between writer and reader, text and commentary, original and copy, private and public, book and computer, and so forth—for holding onto whatever it is we’re supposed to still be holding onto, as ‘literary’ writers? On my good days I think the old transaction, the old transmission, between a single writer and a single reader between hard covers (or ‘hard covers’, whatever) is still thrumming along nicely, perhaps worth more than it ever was precisely because of all the signal and noise rebounding around outside. But not every day’s a good day, I’ll admit here, though I try to keep up a brave face. Not to tempt you into any unwilling pontification, but are you able to find any encouraging words for your students (I know mine are baffled)? Or for me? And why aren’t you on Facebook?

READ MORE HERE:

http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/4930/prmID/1502

I'm walking around in the forest, listening to Daniel J. Siegel narrate his own book, "Mindsight" and toward the end of Part One of the audiobook, he has been telling us about an old man named Stuart who could not get in touch with his emotions, because his right brain was not functioning as well as his left, and it has become an issue of translating images and feelings (right brain stuff) into words (left brain stuff) -- "finding the words to accurately depict our wordless internal world." Ah, how often have I suggested to my students that people don't think in sentences, or even words... images, feelings, senses come first and then we translate them into words, language, sentences. We use our left brain to give name to what is going on in our right brain. (Of course, it's more complicated than that, but...)

And when we write (and read), especially when we write (and read) fiction, it gets even more complicated.

Here's what Siegel says: "We use the left hemisphere's packets to ask another person's left hemisphere a question about his experiences or feelings or to ask ourselves the same question. That person must decode those signals and send a message across the corpus collosum to activate the right hemisphere, which comes up with the nonverbal, somatic, sensory images that are the stuff of feelings. He then has to reverse the process, translating the right hemisphere's internal music back into the digital neural processors of the left hemisphere's language centers. Then, a sentence is spoken. Amazing!"

He goes on: "This was why it was important for Stuart to write in his journal and make it not only a record of his thoughts, but also the sensations, imagery and feelings that were entering his awareness.

"Using words to describe and label this internal world can actually be useful, not just for those like Stuart who have trouble accessing their emotions, but for those who need to find a way to bring balance to overactive feelings. Such people have an excess of right mode flow, without enough linkage to the left, versus Stuart's excess of left mode activity w/out enough linkage to the right, and may suffer from emotional disregulation and chaotic outbursts."

(Ah, yes.)

"They can become overwhelmed by fragmented and biographical images filled with bodily sensations, awash in emotions that overwhelm and confuse. For these people balance entails gaining some mental distance in the sanctuary of the left mode. Since the right hemisphere is more intimately linked to the emotion-generating subcortical areas, we can see why raw, spontaneous feeling is more fully and immediately felt in the right mode. And why it makes sense that linking the right and left modes through the left hemisphere function of language might bring about the necessary balance.

"And indeed studies done by my colleagues at UCLA have actually shown that naming an affect soothes limbic firing. Sometimes we need to name it to tame it. We can use the left language centers to calm the excessively firing right emotional areas."

The sanctuary of the left mode. The sanctuary of language. The sanctuary of fiction...

Richard Rhodes, in his How To Write: Advice and Reflections, gives a new (and better?) name to nonfiction: Verity. And this is what he has to say about the difference between fiction and verity...

"Considered as a craft, technically, the writing of fiction and the writing of verity are identical processes but for one significant difference: we expect information conveyed in verity to conform to verifiable external references, while the information conveyed in fiction need be only internally consistent...

"But there's a deeper sense than the technical in which the two kinds of writing, fiction and verity, are closer than we like to acknowledge: facts are always only provisional, subject to further verification and revision. Facts are constructed, in verity as in other forms of discourse, and their authority is based on conventions to which a greater or lesser number of people voluntarily agree. Readers assess works of verity by rules of credibility and internal consistency similar to implicit rules they use to assess works of fiction; in the case of works of verity, however, they expect confirmation from external references as well."

So, what happens if we take these expectations for the difference between fiction and verity and we deliberately thwart them? As, for example, Nabokov does in Ada: Or Ardor, where the internal consistency of the fiction is purposefully subverted in order to show the unconscious at work (c.f. William Boyd in Nabokov's Ada). Same goes for Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, where fictional photographs are used as external documentation, although they aren't "external" at all.

Rhodes also has this to say about writing:

"Imagination is compassionate. Writing is a form of making, and making humanizes the world."

More on empathy and fiction, coming soon...

This, from the New Yorker (Apr. 26), an essay by Ken Auletta called "Publish or Perish" about the iPad vs. the Kindle, got me thinking (further) about authors and publishers and who needs whom? A couple of quotes from the essay:

"Tim O'Reilly...thinks that the old publishers' model is fundamentally flawed. 'They think their customer is the bookstore,' he says. 'Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.'"

In other words, publishers have been selling to bookstores, not to readers. Which, when bookstores were small and owned and staffed by readers, didn't really make much of a difference. But now? Costco? Wal-Mart?

"...readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books THE AUTHOR IS THE BRAND NAME." (emphasis, mine)

So, if this is true... what is the publisher for? Editing? Marketing? (not anymore) Distribution? (not anymore)

"Carolyn Reidy, of Simon & Schuster, said, 'In the digital world, it is possible for authors to publish without publishers. It is therefore incumbent on us to prove our worth to authors every day.' But publishers have been slow to take up new technologies that might help authors."

You're telling me...

"'The publishers are afraid of a retailer that can replace them,' [Jane] Friedman said. 'An author needs a publisher for nurturing, editing, distributing, and marketing. If the publishers are cutting back on marketing, which is the biggest complaint authors have, and Amazon stays at eighty per cent of the e-book market, why do you need the publisher?'"

Yes, that's what I'd like to know.

"Publishers maintain that digital companies don't understand the creative process of books. A major publisher said of Amazon, 'They don't know how authors think. It's not in their DNA.' Neither Amazon, Apple, nor Google has experience in recruiting, nurturing, editing, and marketing writers. The acknowledgments pages of books are an efficiency expert's nightmare; authors routinely thank editors and publishers for granting an extra year to complete a manuscript, for taking late-night phone calls, for the loan of a summer house. These kinds of gestures are unlikely to be welcomed in cultures built around engineering efficiencies."

True, that. But why can't authors step in and help each other out, with summer houses and late night phone calls and such? Or readers? The way I see it, publishers (and agents, too) understand less and less about how "authors think." It's authors who understand how authors think, isn't it? And readers? Now there's a coalition worth creating, for the benefit of all.

Read the whole essay here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta

This is what I've been talking about! Watch out, here comes another book from me: How Fiction Saved the World

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html?ref=science

I'm going to start posting some bits from the reading notebook that I keep, as I move on from writer to reader in my ongoing exploration of fiction. These are some notes that I took after reading Ken Kalfus's A Condition Peculiar to the Country last year...

The book has a sort of shallow darkness to it, and what seemed to me to be a sort of meanness behind it, too. A sort of "cool" (as in hip) modern sensibility of irony and pessimism -- dysfunction? -- that seems to be deliberate, though no less uncomfortable and off-putting for that.

A couple -- he works in the Trade Center Towers and just barely escapes the devastation on September 11th, while she's set to fly on the plane that hit the Pentagon -- each at first thinks the other is dead and each is happy about that. They're in the middle of a divorce -- a nasty one, which plays out through the novel and by the end has been accomplished -- but each is seriously less well off because of the split, which is not liberation as much as self-imposed deprivation. The parts turn out to be much less than what they made up as a whole.

Somehow this plays into the theme of the attacked Twin Towers and the subsequent war in Iraq and so on. But the whole sensibility of the work has what I found to be an irritating cuteness, is that it? A sort of show-offy negativity. Smarty-pants nihilism. These two characters are each glad that the other might be dead in the events of September 11th, and that selfish sensibility sometimes flies off into unbelievable extremes, as when the husband makes a bomb and straps it to himself, but it doesn't work and so together the couple fiddles with it. She helps him, with the children watching nearby, and nobody but the reader seems to care about that. This is a chilling scene, but not even slightly believable, so it comes off as a show-off sort of stunt on the part of the author. A Chuck Palahniuk kind of move, with not much to do with the reader or the book, more to do with the author who is the smart cynical guy who thought it up? As if the whole point were only to make everybody else feel uncomfortable?

The scene turns out to be a preparation for the ending, too, where we win the war and capture Bin Laden and everybody celebrates. But again, this seems to have nothing at all to do with the world or with the characters -- either the fictional world OR the real world, but really is only about the clever author, and it makes me also think about the editors who published it -- their own sort of sensibility, a sort of f-you agenda, it seems, and I wonder, is this a response to the death of the author, the death of the novel, which also seems to be calling for the death of the reader?

Lately I've been finding that many of the novels I'm reading have hidden narrators -- that is, we don't know who is telling the story until we get to the end, or close to it. Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, Richard Powers' Generosity, Phillip Dick's Valis. (Also Ian McEwan's Atonement, though I read that one a long time ago.) (And as it turns out, I've been doing the same thing with my own work -- The Great Disappointment.) Am I coming upon these by serendipity, or is it a trend? And if a trend, then what does that mean?

The latest version of the phenomenon comes in Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag. Here we have two diaries, one blue and one red. The blue one is the real one -- Irene keeps it hidden away in a safe deposit box where her husband, Gil, can't get to it. The red one is the fake one, left where he can find it, because she understands that he's been reading it and she writes it now as a response to what she sees as an invasion of her privacy. There's more to this, of course -- she loves him and hates him; he is obsessed with her. He's a painter; she's his subject; he has stolen her soul. They struggle with this through the book -- she wants him to leave but he won't and she can't. She uses the red diary to drive him crazy. It all ends badly. This is a sad book. A dark book. Evil, in a way, but also gripping.

(Whoa. Evil? Really? Yes, maybe because the story seems to be a fictional version of a true relationship -- between Louise Erdrich and her husband Michael Dorris -- which also ended badly, in real life.)

(More on this, soon: fiction and real life -- why some of my women friends can't abide a Quentin Tarantino film because of the violence -- one walked out after 1/2 hour of Inglourious Basterds -- but think The Hurt Locker is one of the finest films they've seen in a long time. Me? I love Tarantino -- I know that violence isn't real. But The Hurt Locker -- I couldn't watch it. Too painful. Too real. Because it IS real. Yes, more on this later...)

With the Erdrich book, there isn't really a sense that we are dealing with a hidden narrator until the end, and yet, there are clues. Early on I was stopped in my tracks while reading when I came upon a grammatical error that almost had me lying the book aside. Such an error, it was so blatant, I couldn't figure out, how could this be? Erdrich didn't see it? The editor missed it? The copy editor? Seems impossible, so it must be intentional, but why? The error, if you haven't guessed already, was an especially egregious misuse of the verb "to lie." A common error, people do it all the time in speech (my sister often says, "I was laying down" or "I'm going to go lay down for a while") and often in writing (I am forever correcting it in student work)usually using the transitive conjugation when it should be intransitive, but here? Here it was the opposite, using the intransitive for the transitive: "She lay her head on the table," or something like that.

I was ready to quit reading at that point. The book seemed so dismal anyway, and then such a careless error... but I just couldn't believe it was intentional... so... why? I know that Navajo blanket weavers purposely weave a flaw in the work, in order not to offend the gods with something that claims perfection, and I wondered... is this why? Leaving in a purposeful flaw to create a beautiful thing?

A good answer, maybe, but there's more to it than that. There is a hidden narrator at work, one who would be just the sort of writer to make that mistake in her text, and it's not until the end, when that narrator is revealed, that we understand what it is we have been reading. And then, knowing what we know, we have to go back and read the whole book all over again.

Honestly, I love when that happens.

No matter what you write, whether it’s for a college class on creative writing or for a novel you’ve finally found time to get around to, having some tools to make the process a little easier is always a welcome prospect. This list brings together a wealth of just those kind of resources, all found online and all free to use, so you can concentrate on being creative and producing the best writing you can.

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/03/100-free-and-useful-web-apps-for-writers/

E-Donnybrook

No matter who wins the battle between the Kindle and the iPad, it marks the return of machines as market-makers.
By Megan McArdle

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/edonnybrook/7985