Of Cranky Lists and Listing Cranks

When I posted a link on Facebook to Anis Shivani’s Huffington Post piece on the "15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers'" www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_672974.html, I worried a bit about the karmic chain: how would such a reiteration return to bite me in the ass? Let’s remember that the purpose of any such list ought to be to, essentially, for us to disagree, and to make our own lists. Most of us, however, will chose, to make positive lists: favorites, or underrated writers, such as Mr. Shivani himself has promised but not yet released.

Two of Mr. Shivani’s points regarding MFA programs are very easily dismissed. For a wise and more measured dismissal than I will offer here, please see Bill Roorbach’s response here: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/

Mr. Shivani says that MFA programs produce “cookie-cutter” writing. I’m not sure what this assertion is based on, but I think it’s similar to the argument that crops ups every so often against “New Yorker fiction.” There may have once been such a thing as “New Yorker fiction,” but presently the notion can easily be dispelled by picking up any four issues of the magazine and reading the fiction: much diversity there (oh I forgot, diversity as a value in fiction is not an aesthetic Mr. Shivani appreciates very much). But diversity abounds in MFA programs; I see it every day.

Mr. Shivani believes that imitation is an important pedagogical practice in MFA programs. It isn’t. Perhaps he is really talking about literary influence. In which case, I’m not sure how MFA students could be said to be unduly influenced by what they read. (Note to self: be influenced more by Nabokov.) That is: how are MFA writers more influenced by what they read than other writers? We are all consciously and unconsciously influenced by our reading. Mr. Shivani seems to think that MFA programs conspire to produce imitators. Please.

His other easily dismissed point about MFA programs also seems to suffer from some bizarre, if not paranoid, sense that MFA programs have incestuous ties to the publishing world. I’d love to know more! Where do I sign up? As Bill points out, the publishing world has bigger issues at the moment, mainly that it seems to be disappearing. This is not due to long-time non-existent collusion with MFA programs. More likely due to a long-time collusion with the almighty dollar.

The point that Mr. Shivani makes that I find most interesting, and, I admit, worrisome, is that somehow MFA programs have led to a loss of critical thinking and reading. I worry about how much we can do with a student’s course of study in a two or three year period in a program for which the single most important criteria for admission is writing ability. I have to remind myself that three years is not very long, that an MFA is not a PhD, and that like all hard-earned rewards, critical thinking and reading come from a life-long commitment. While Mr. Shivani claims that MFA programs have somehow contributed to the decline of critical thinking, in actuality this is yet another prong of his argument for which he himself has provided no evidence. And yet his own poor argumentative skills apparently were not learned in an MFA program.

Yet I sympathize with the view that we all really ought to read more and read with a more critical eye. Of course we do.

A few notes on his selections. I haven’t read many of them, so cannot comment. But I did wonder how much of their work Mr. Shivani himself had read. William Vollman's literary crime seems to be that he has written too much. For all his words, I’m not sure Vollman has enough readers to be overrated.

Vendler and Kakutani have too much power. Okay. The power pie probably ought to be sliced up differently. Big deal. Vendler is taken to task for championing Jorie Graham. And the fact that they are both presently at Harvard, Mr. Shivani implies, is . . . conspiratorial. (Note: Mr. Shivani claims some sort of connection to Harvard, but it’s very diplomatically written, so as to be nearly meaningless). But Shivani ought to know—Harvard affiliation or not–that Vendler’s appreciation for Graham’s work began before joined Harvard’s faculty full-time, and that Graham’s appointment there came much later. (Note to Mr. Shivani: this is how the world works. When you apply for a job, someone on the hiring committee must champion your value and convince other member of the committee of it.)

Mr. Shivani thinks Jonathan Safran Foer is overrated, more or less neglecting his brilliant first book, Everything is Illuminated, written when he was practically a teenager. His critique of Denis Johnson seems, again, ignorant of the work, and, okay I admit, I love Johnson’s work, and I guess that Harold Bloom is a moron for loving it also. Antonya Nelson? Hard-working, sharp-eyed, under-read Antonya Nelson? How can someone so undeservingly under-read make an overrated list? I don’t get it. Could it be that she lives in Houston, where Mr. Shivani lives, and deep down (though not too deeply) Mr. Shivani is simply jealous?

So, why did I post this article on my Facebook page? Well, it made me think. It alerted me to possible attacks on the MFA, an institution in which I believe. Work against whatever grain of truth those breathless assertions might contain. It’s good to be reminded there ought to be no sacred literary cows, eh? Surely some writers are indeed overrated, if not these, who? All he’s really said is: I don’t think these writers are as good as other people do. There’s no harm in saying that. He’s stirred the pot a bit, and let’s face it, that’s exactly what he was trying to do.

Read more. Think critically. Be better conversant in the literary conversation.

Welcome to the Dreamtime

(A reconstruction of my welcome notes to the UAA MFA Summer Residency 2010, July 10, 2010)

Although I know that Jessica Graves (third-year nonfiction student) likes to refer to the residency as the “geekfest,” I tend to see it a tad differently. I’ve been thinking a lot about this residency and how the time spent here seems to operate according to a different set of rules than non-residency time, or ordinary life.

We are entering a kind of dreamtime.

Peter Weir’s 1977 film, The Last Wave, opens with these words of contextualization:
"Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the 'dreamtime', more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime."

Here we are in the dreamtime.

Robert Schumann, the 19th century German composer, made music that creates for its listeners a sense of delirious time. It is said that Schuman wrote all his music in a trance.

Writers and the peculiar kind of double life we live: the oft-repeated theory that story is always greater than the writer. Let me try to explain how that works.

You probably know persons who have been consumed by reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the other two extant books in the series. Or, more likely, you are such person yourself. I loved Charles McGrath’s article on Steig Larsson a few months ago in the Sunday NY Times magazine. As is now fairly well known, Larsson was a first time novelist who had stockpiled the three books before submitting them to a publisher. Before the first one came out Larsson died at the age of 52, without having learned what a worldwide publishing phenomenon his work was about to become.

What struck me most about the article was the disbelief a number of his friends possessed as to whether he actually wrote the books. They simply couldn’t believe that this guy, never a prose stylist, who had devoted his working life to writing about working class causes, was capable of such a tour de force as the books had become.

But something in me said that these people were exactly wrong. That, in fact, what Larsson had done is what the artist must do: he had transcended himself.

Throughout his work, Thoreau makes many observations about the doubled self, such as: “However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.” One way I have of making sense of this doubling is that one of these lives is the writing life. Even if the work is “mean,” i.e. average, it’s still better than we are.

My friend Dan Mancilla was teaching the great Stuart Dybek story “Hot Ice,” when a student, a freshman, observed that water in its liquid, frozen and gaseous states in “Hot Ice” represents the Holy Trinity. According to Dan she said it was so obvious that she was almost too embarrassed to voice it. Was she right? Of course, it’s obvious onceit's been pointed out (note: it’s not obvious). Did Dybek intend it? Doubtful. Dan will ask him soon, if he hasn’t already. But it works brilliantly with the story’s thematic concerns. What can we know, anyway, of writers’ intentions when they don’t voice them, when we don’t have them to ask? It’s art, it’s better than the writer.

Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse comes up with a somewhat puzzling diagram of the participants in “a narrative communication situation.” In between the “real author” and the narrator is the mysterious “implied author.” Of this implied author, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan say: “its relation to the real author is admitted to be of great psychological complexity and has rarely been analyzed except to suggest that implied authors are often far superior in intelligence and moral standards to the actual men and women who are real authors.”

I was reading a blog entry that Heather Lende (third-year fiction student) wrote describing a public reading of from her new book Take Care of the Garden and the Dogs. She describes this incredible moment of being moved by her own work in a way that she hadn’t been when she wrote the piece. Events had happened between writing the book and that reading that made her see her words in a new light. “Writing,” Heather said, “has a way of happening.”

Probably the most famous literary exercise on this is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Borges and I.” It begins: “It’s to the other man, to Borges, that things happen.” And in about 400 words, concludes, thusly: “Which of us is writing this page I don’t know.”

Now, as we enter the residency, the dreamtime, the trance, I am wishing for you the kind of happiness Henry James spoke of in Roderick Hudson:

“True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.”

And if true happiness must remain outside our grasp, I am at least, confident that we have set before us an absorbing errand.

(Illustration from René Daumal’s Mt. Analogue)

The Olivetti lettera 32

Yet another material burden I relieved myself of when we moved was typewriters. I had two: an electric Brother, which was state-of the art on the eve of computer world-dominance. and even had a clumsy little memory. I also had a garage sale portable that I thought of as an objet-d’art.

I had previously jettisoned my rebuilt Remington on which I typed some of my undergraduate essays. It had a big dent in the carriage that I covered with an epigraph from Dylan’s Idiot Wind “Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts.” (Had I to do over I might choose from the same song: “You’re an idiot, babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”) I plucked the letters off the keys with a pair of pliers before I let it go.

Last week I plucked an Olivetti lettera 32 out of the trash. Oh man, I always wanted one of these. (Would now be a good time to confess that I can’t even actually type? I can process words with two fingers, which is fine because I can do that about as fast as I think (in other words not very fast) and then revise the heck out of it).

An Olivetti lettera 32 is a beautiful machine. Cormac McCarthy typed every one of his novels on one and then auctioned his off for the startling price of $254,000. Then he bought another one, but in better condition. I read that he paid a little over 300 for it.

When I needed Eddie, the main character in my novel, to buy a typewriter in Mexico City 1974, he bought himself an Olivetti lettera 32. Thus, he owned one before I did. He could also type better than I can, though I don't think I mentioned this in the book.

Last week I was watching the film version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. And sure enough, when Tom forges letters on Dickie’s typewriter to provide a paper trail suggesting Dickie is alive (and not dead, at Tom’s hands) he types them on Dickie’s lettera 32. However, the lettera 32 was not produced until 1963 and The Talented Mr. Ripley is set in the late fifties. Thus the movie was sloppy and totally unrealistic. Just kidding, it’s a terrific film.

But 1963 was an auspicious year: it’s said that every war correspondent writing from Viet Nam did so on an Olivetti lettera 32.

I’m going to order some ribbons for it. Then, after the apocalypse, when the grid has collapsed and word processors can’t be powered up because everyone only has a tiny bit of power that they have to save so they can blend up a pitcher of margaritas, I’ll sit on an orange crate in the market typing up letters and legal documents for hire. I’ll do yours for free, so long as you’re not in a hurry.

Report from Kachemak Bay Writers Conference 1

First: hats off to Carol Swartz and all, particularly the splendid Michael Cunningham, who set the tone, for three great days. I put the number one after my title to blackmail myself to write up more on the conference later. Meanwhile:

Why I Am Who I Am* (and also ***)

An exercise** prompted by Dinty W. Moore

My grandmother’s hands were strong; she needed them to be so to wrangle 50 pound sacks of flour in her bakery. When I think of the phrase “work your fingers to the bone,” I think of her hands.

And, then, of course, as I grew and she began to shrink, so did her hands. Her knuckles swelled and her veins rose to the surface. Liver spots.

She ended her days bedridden in a nursing home. There, my aunt painted her fingernails almost daily, a luxury she had not known in her working life.

By the time I was born, the Rouge had been polluted by a hundred years of sewage and industrial waste. Some days its odor rose up out of the woods like an invisible fog, a distinct odor, but of what? Sulphur, rotten gas, vague chemicals, dead fish, the bodies of carp rotting in evaporating pools where earlier in the spring the river had spilled over its banks. None of this quite captures the river’s peculiar foulness, which to us was natural: it was just the Rouge.

Rouge River
Asian Carp
Approaching thunderstorms
Felician nuns
Pagan babies
Humidity
Sputnik
Red peril
Bomb shelters
Homemade popsicles
Tornado warnings
Fire drills.

The modesty of my childhood might be measured by the relative tameness of the phrases we were forbidden by our parents to speak.

Considering them now, I see that they are really both saying the same thing:

“So what?”
and
“I don’t care.”

Ironically, “I don’t care” often meant something like “yes, but you decide,” or “yes, but I don’t wish to appear greedy.”

“So what?” was pure insolence, and was understood as if intended to make my father’s head explode.

In our house, where there wasn’t much of anything, everything mattered.

†††††


* The four prompts for this exercise were given to us by Dinty, then we shuffled them into a random order, and only then were we told the title to the piece we had just composed.

** This was a great exercise, from a pedagogical point-of-view. I’d put it into my can‘t-miss-magic-hat-of-exercises, for sure. That is, students write very well for twenty minutes. Meaning: students were happy with what they wrote. Meaning: what the students wrote was pretty damned good . . . for an exercise. Mine was about average and wouldn’t have distinguished itself from the students who read theirs aloud. An odd thing I noticed was that all the people who read who were about my age (most of them!) read an exercise that had a lot of common elements, as if we shared some national collective childhood. So, we were tapped into something. But, what I couldn’t help noticing was that exercises (in general, even at their best) have a glass-ceiling: the writing has a long way to go to rise out of the stature of exercise to the status of something aspiring to the condition of literature. Many of us can do a nice push-up, but that ain’t playing the game.

*** A note on the title: jeez, I think my childhood was a lot happier than what follows the title! But of course (great deconstructive move, Dinty) the title follows the text, in its composition, at least. And yet, as Borges has noted: great writing (not mine) is often about darker subjects: happiness is its own reward! Look: I've used exclamation points: I am becoming retarded.

Lost and Found

My current living situation is this: about three fourths of the books I own are stored in boxes in my garage. This is due, mostly, to having moved from a very large house in the rural midwest to a very modest-sized house in Anchorage.

I went out to the garage the other day searching for an anthology in which appears Michael Cunningham’s terrific story “White Angel.” This shouldn’t be so much a needle-in-the-haystack affair: there should be a whole box of anthologies. But I have not seen the box since we arrived here in Anchorage.

What I found instead was my collection of Canadian Alpine Journals, Dougal Haston and Peter Gillman’s, Direttisima, which I forgot I even owned, and which would have been invaluable a few months back when I was writing an essay on Haston. I also found one copy of my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1970). I really like the 1970 edition because that’s the year I started paying attention to words. I actually have another copy of the same edition, so I can have one at my office and one at home. Thus: the other copy of the dictionary is missing. However, on the plus side, I located the third edition of the same dictionary, from 1992. This is my second favorite dictionary. Comparing definitions from these two dictionaries, published 22 years apart, is the best evidence I know to demonstrate that language is fluid, evolving (or, as some would have it, devolving). However, the largest book I own, or once owned, the Oxford English Dictionary, remains missing. I have the magnifying glass, though. I am trusting that it, and the duplicate American Heritage, are out there, along with my vintage Icelandic to English dictionary, which I love purely as an object in the world.

On the plus side I retrieved my mostly unread copy of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, as well as the 20th anniversary edition of Boulevard, which belongs at the office with the rest of the Boulevards. Finally, here is the long-lost Illustrated Guide to Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue by Tyson and Cleland which has the best drawings for making and attaching prussic slings, a task which for me never seems to become second nature and which I will be needing very soon for a Byron Peak attempt.

The only books I know for certain are lost were mailed here: one box arrived opened and half-empty. It had been filled with American Alpine Journals and now my collection has holes. The rest of the missing books aren’t really missing, I have faith in their presence out there among the rest of the human detritus for which there is no room indoors: bicycles, skis, wicker furniture, plastic tubs filled with random household goods, studded winter tires, including a set of four for a car we don’t even own. It’s a sad state of affairs, but temporary.

Oh, and I never found my “White Angel.” I found (miraculously) a copy in the library, but what I didn’t find in the library is another story, longer and sadder.

Memorial

My mother’s father, Jack Flynn, is the only veteran I know of in my family history. And the only Memorial Day in my childhood that I can remember being celebrated in a traditional way was a singular visit to the cemetery outside of Capac, Michigan where he was laid to rest. I can’t say that I know too much about him, except for the fact that after returning from World War I he finished studies at Detroit College of Law , but never practiced. In fact, never worked, at all. My mother, and her sister, rarely spoke of him—a fact they don’t quite acknowledge, even now. Every year I find out another fact, or two, about him, for example, this year I learned he wore spatz every day. Spatz.

In an early Jules Verne story, space travelers expel a dead dog from their “rocket ship,” only to find that the dog, named “Satellite,” remains with the ship as it hurtles toward the moon through empty space. In this way, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us, in his book, The Dominion of the Dead, the dead “like to stay close to the living.” I, too, feel that they are never far from us.

So Memorial Day, I think no more nor less of the dead that any other day. I do however think of the past. It’s really the first day of summer. The smell of mown lawn and motor oil. Ernie Harwell’s voice (Godpseed, Ernie!) describing Al Kaline fouling off pitch after pitch until he finds just the one to line into the gap. Strohs, fire brewed for flavor, preferably in long-necked bottles, recapped so many times that they’re gone grey around the edges. Or Faygo Rock and Rye. Vernors. The last days of grade school, the promise of summer upon us exactly like . . . the promise of summer.

Biting the Hand That Doesn’t Feed You

I’m not sure if it’s the word itself: blog (which is graceless) or the concept that I find so unappealing. The unappealing aspect of the concept, I suppose, is its not so subtle apparent aim of self-promotion. But one does not want to look too closely at this, since ultimately, you can arrive at the question of what makes blogging different from other forms of writing? In which case, we find self-promotion lurking always somewhere beneath the surface. I suppose one of the criteria for good writing is subtlety, ¬the self-promoting angle must appear to be non-existent.

Further, what could be more obvious than that I was not made to blog? Blogging is about speed and the appearance of spontaneity. I don’t even consider myself a writer; more accurately, I am a re-writer. I revise grocery lists. My first drafts are ugly; with work I can make them serviceable, and with some more work, and luck, occasionally elegant. Thoreau said, “It goes too fast.” I love how he, and Emerson too, seemed to get away with using pronouns for which there is no discoverable referent. “It” here, I concluded means “life.” But the internet moves even faster.

The other objectionable aspect of the internet writing is that anyone can do it. Why does that “scare” me? Ahhh, it must be related to that same ego which doesn’t wish to appear self-promoting, but is nonetheless. If anyone can do it, why would I bother? The trick, of course, is to do it well. You set your own bar, as always.

Still, I tend to believe as shitmydadsays: “YOU, a published writer? Internet don’t count. Anyone can throw shit up there.” By the way shitmydadsays will soon be a television program. The book is advertised as “The memoir that came from twitter.” I check in on facebook and it’s one funny line after another. The lines are funny enough that they make me wonder, how exactly, they find a narrative line that magically turns them into a memoir. But, I can’t say I’m curious enough that I’ll buy the book.

I remember the old (now) metaphor to describe deconstruction: a person is sitting on a tree limb sawing the branch on which he sits. The idea, I think it was Jonathan Culler’s image, is that those theorists used language to describe how meaning derived from language is arbitrary or, unknowable. They were chopping down the tree of language with an axe made of language. A little like the person who announces,” I am a liar.” Or not. Anyway, I am using a blog to interrogate blogging. Now I am finished and vow to never use the word blog again.