The Elegant Variation

TEV 2.0 - Launch of the newsletter edition

At its height, The Elegant Variation had over 50,000 daily readers. It gave me the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of books I loved, like Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit, and it engendered many stimulating, international conversations between thoughtful, well-read readers and writers. After my daughter was born and my first book came out, I had to make some decisions about allocating my time, and TEV went fallow, though I've kept the page and its archives available. But I've missed the immersion in literary topics and the connections and discussions that the blog made possible.

The conversation seems to have moved on from blogs to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and the rest. Blogs now feel very Web 1.0 But I've been attracted to and inspired by the intimacy and samizdat feel of the newsletter form, and thought I'd try a little experiment. I'm leaving the form open to revision (and feedback - please), but I envision an email digest (perhaps weekly, perhaps bi-weekly) for my friends, former students and perhaps interested strangers, of literary matters that interest or excite me. I've long said that successful blogs were, first and foremost, a record of their proprietor's enthusiasms and were driven by voice; and in TEV 2.0 (the newsletter edition), I'll continue to share my enthusiasms - what to read, books to buy, readings to attend - in my now-familiar (though slightly tempered with age and exhaustion) voice. Maybe it will catch on, maybe it won't. But to paraphrase Charles Foster Kane, I think it would be fun to run a newsletter. 

If you'd like to go ahead and sign up, the link is here.  The first issue is already on deck and waiting to go out, and includes Joseph O'Neill's THE DOG, Calvino, LA readings and "Life getting in the way" of writing time.

2015 PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship now accepting applications!

I cannot think of a more beneficial fellowship for a writer to apply for than the PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship.  It's a yearlong intensive for new writers who lack access that includes close mentoring, exposure to literary events, classes at the UCLA Writers Program and much, much more.  I have had students who have been Fellows, students who have gone on to become Fellows; I know the people who run the program and I cannot sing its praises highly enough.

The application period is now open and runs through August 11, so get busy and apply!

Literary LA: Must-See Events

Two major events in the days ahead, both essential and not-to-be-missed.  First up, there's Donald Antrim and Karl Ove Knausgaard tomorrow night at the Hammer.  And next week there's Edward St. Aubyn at LAPL's ALOUD series.  

The summer is getting interesting around here ... Go, go, GO!

John Banville reads in Los Angeles

In all the years I have been reading Banville, he's only made one Los Angeles area appearance.  This week he makes his second, as part of the excellent Writers Bloc series.  He's in town - appropriately enough - to discuss his (or, rather, Benjamin Black's) new take on Marlowe:

In Black’s new book, The Black-Eyed Blonde, Philip Marlowe resurfaces so clearly, so visibly, that you can feel his alienation at the wealthy heiress’ mansion on the beach. You are dropped straight into old LA’s Barney’s Beanery, where Marlowe fishes for information about the blonde’s missing boyfriend. The story: a guy goes missing. The wealthy blonde girlfriend wants to find him. But of course that’s only the very first part of the tale. It’s in the complications, the nature of the character and the conflict that we realize that Benjamin Black’s great Dublin character, Quirke, is not unlike Raymond Chandler’s rumpled Los Angeles Marlowe. In Black’s most capable hands, our Marlowe lives and breathes as if Raymond Chandler himself willed him to life. Being a Dubliner, Black alludes to Dublin and to Ireland, lending authenticity to his re-creation. Philip Marlowe has finally met his dopelganger.

Hope to see you there!

My Top 10 Banned Literary Essay List

I have not ranted in a good long while, so:

Herewith this date, any further essays on the following topics are banned, due to my colossal lack of interest:

• Anything that mentions The Great American Novel.
• The whole literary vs genre pissing contest (or anything that mentions Jennifer Weiner).
• Too many male reviewers and/or novelists (or anything that mentions Jennifer Weiner).
• The ressentiment of the Internet/The evils of Twitter.
• The Internet has killed civility/print/attention spans.
• Democratized Self Publishing vs. Gatekeeping Traditional Publishers.
• The Ebook as a harbinger of End Days.
• The Ebook as the savior of publishing and writers.
• Why MFA programs suck.
• Why MFA programs are awesome.

Please don't get me wrong.  I think that many, if not all, of these topics are of genuine importance. But I have already read your essay.  I read it last year.  I read it the year before.  I've been reading it for the last decade.  And it wasn't interesting or original then, either.  So, editors, if you're thinking of assigning any of these chestnuts, seriously rethink it.  And writers, if you really feel the need to wade in yet again, you sure as shit better bring something new to the discussion.  Because the Internet is starting to feel like Groundhog Day on steroids. 

Nota Bene: Dept. of Speculation

"When we visit his parents, my daughter tries to learn to swin at the indoor pool.  I watch her serious, scrunched-up face, eyes closed, counting one stroke, two strokes. A few days later, she is up to fifty.  Then my husband arrives from Brooklyn and she insists we rush him straight from the airport to the pool.  But when we get there, she won't do it.  I am tight-lipped, resentful of all the fuss she has required to be made, the great anticlimax of it.  My husband falls asleep in a deck chair as we are deliberating.  He has been up all night, spraying poison.  His mother, bright-eyed, gentles her through the water.  'Once a swimmer, always a swimmer,' she says.

- Jenny Offil, Dept. of Speculation

(Yes, it's been a while, people.  Been busy writing novels and shit.  And I've promised myself in 2014 to try to use social media to share my enthusiams, and not to carp and complain.  This is the first novel in quite a while that I've felt compelled to bring to your attention.  Consider yourselves on notice.)

Novel Revision Techniques at the Writers Studio

Hey all, there are still a few seats left in my upcoming Novel Revision Techniques class at the Writers Studio with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

For those who don't know about the Writers Studio, it's an amazing four-day intensive held every February. And my revision class is really the only class of its kind that I am aware of anywhere, one that takes a close, hands-on look at how to attack revising a novel. (There are lots of first novel classes out there but they only get you to the first draft.) It's a great combination of lecture and craft work, using the transformation of Trimalchio into The Great Gatsby as its focus. Last year's students loved the course, and I'm looking forward to teaching it again in a few weeks.

You can read a lot more here: http://writers.uclaextension.edu/programs-services/writers-studio/

Updated L.A. readings calendar ...

Click on through and check out the updated listing of L.A. readings, including Nicholson Baker, Aimee Bender, Cathleen Schine and more!

Andrew Sean Greer reads at Vroman's tonight

The only thing that could keep me away from Andrew Sean Greer's Pasadena reading this evening is teaching, and unfortunately I have a class tonight.  But otherwise I would make the trek for Greer's only L.A. appearance to hear him read from his latest novel, "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells."  

I am a longtime fan of Greer's fiction - he was my first author interview here at TEV all those years ago - and I'm eager to crack open the covers on this one.  (We've also appeared together at LAPL ALOUD, and he was kind enough to blurb my first novel.)  

He's an engaging reader, and is very much worth making the trip for.  I hope you'll head out to Pasadena this evening, and support a tremendous novelist and a fine independent bookstore.  What could be better, right?

“No one tells the secrets of the human heart more bravely or eloquently than Andrew Sean Greer. He has been called our Proust, our Nabokov, but with this novel he transcends all comparison. This is a genius-stroke of a book. Read it and weep.”

— Julie Orringer

First Trailer for "The Sea"

Many thanks to Keith Arsenault who knows my Banville obsession all too well and alerted me to the first trailer for the forthcoming adaptation of John Banville's Booker-prize winning "The Sea" ... 

A Twitter Project: Unpacking the Library

Tonight I officially begin unpacking my library yet again.

Along the way, I thought I might grab some select titles and tweet the opening sentence or 140 characters of the opening sentence, whichever comes first.  Nothing more.  No titles, authors.  Just sentences.  A sort of cubist collage of my library.

You can follow the progress on my Twitter feed for as long as your (and my) interest is sustained.  

Banville's marginalia (vs. my own)

I am forever urging my students to mark up their books, to scribble, deface and decode.  It's only by interacting with the books we admire at the sentence level that writers can begin to unlock the secrets of how one's heroes have accomplished their magic.  (I should add this need came painfully to me, as I do have the collector's gene, courtesy of my father, and am always aware of the value of objects.  But in the end, I forced myself to pick up a pen, and I've never looked back.)

So I'm especially interested today, for a number of reasons, to see this item from The Guardian, in which John Banville has annotated a copy of The Sea.  One of the nine screencaps is below:

The annotations are called out on the website, and I found this one most interesting and amusing:

p.88 [on 'succubus'] 'Really should get hold of a dictionary. I'll be interested to see if he/she got to the end of the book before selling it to the second-hand shop. Could have exchanged it for a Chambers or a Shorter Oxford.'

The notion of Banville with a dictionary should resonate for anyone who has read him.  I was also struck by this one:

p.244 'Never noticed before the pre-echo of p.264. K[afka] is right, one works in deepest darkness.'

It always fascinates me when writers detect their influences after the fact.  In contrast, I suppose I should confess that my second novel is heavily indebted to Banville's own The Book of Evidence - nothing after the fact there.  I recently worked my way through the book, taking it apart, trying to figure out how he could break so many rules and still have the book succeed marvelously.  Here's a sample of my own, far messier, marginalia:

I cannot figure out why this keeps posting on its side, but you get the general idea. I will leave it to future readers to determine how well I've internalized the lessons of this novel but I remain devoted to my idea that if you are a writer and there is a book you adore, there is no better exercise than stripping the thing down to its foundations to see what it's made of.  

A TEV Facelift

I'm working at classing up the joint a little bit, streamlining, that sort of thing.  A grand revival is being planned.  

REVIEW: MASTERMIND

My review of Maria Konnikov's MASTERMIND: HOW TO THINK LIKE SHERLOCK HOLMES went live over at the Barnes and Noble Review while I was away for the Jerusalem International Book Fair:

"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" is the observation that launched a thousand films, sequels, and imitators. The first words (after "How are you?") that Holmes says upon meeting Watson in A Study in Scarlet have become the template for all that follows: A display of extraordinary, apparently superhuman deduction, seemingly arbitrary but, upon closer inspection, the result of the methodical assemblage of a handful of details. Other men see; Holmes observes. And who among his fans has not, even briefly, imagined that we, too, might observe as Holmes does?

Maria Konnikova takes this impulse and gives us hope in her first book, Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes, although the book might be more accurately titled How Sherlock Holmes Thinks like Sherlock Holmes. Readers looking for a prescriptive program to turn them into Holmesian cogitation machines may come away disappointed. But those seeking to understand the neurological and psychological underpinnings of the great detective's mind will find a knowledgeable guide in Konnikova.

Readings list update

I've updated the Worthy Readings sidebar, so if you're reading this via RSS or email, please do click on through and check out Marisa Silver, Luis Alberto Urrea and more!

Five authors to watch in 2013

The Telegraph looks at five young authors to watch in 2013.  TEV favorite Sheila Heti is on the list, but I'm especially intrigued by Owen Martell's novel Intermission:

A slim, rigourously nuanced book, Intermission tells the story of how [Bill] Evans’s family try to support him in 1961 when he is devastated by the accidental death of Scott LaFaro, bass player in his celebrated trio. His protective elder brother Harry knows he is a drug addict and fears the worst.

Jazz novels are always so hard to pull off (Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter succeeds; Morrison's Jazz does not), but I've always been so intrigued by the Evans/LaFaro relationship.  LaFaro was a prodigy, killed obscenely young, whose influence is still felt among jazz bassists.  It sounds like a fascinating read.

"My parents were born old" - John Banville on parenthood & dotage

In a long and uncharacterstically personal essay in the Daily Mail, John Banville reflects on old age - his own and his parents':

Thinking back on the lives of one's parents and making comparisons with one's own life can be a dizzying exercise. It startles me to realise that when my father was the age I am now, past my mid-60s, he was long retired and preparing with more or less ­equanimity for his dotage.

The essay includes a remarkable photo of an eight-year-old Banville.  You can read it all here.

Daniel Mendelsohn at LAPL **Highly Recommended**

Daniel Mendelsohn, one of my favorite critics working today, will be at LAPL next month as part of the ALOUD series, in conversation with Jonathan Lethem.  Not to be missed.  Reserve a spot for the November 8 event, which is free, here.  

"They give the culture a new face."

Like many others, I lamented the passing of the mighty Jacques Barzun, one of the last in a line of scholars still interested in addressing a general public, as he did most memorably in his justly celebrated From Dawn to Decadence.  Here's a brief passage that's characteristic of Barzun's style:

The Modern Era begins, characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation, but the train of events starting early in the 16C and ending-if indeed it has ended-more than a century later has all the features of a revolution. I take these to be: the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea.

We have got into the habit of calling too many things revolutions. Given a new device or practice that changes our homely habits, we exclaim: "revolutionary!" But revolutions change more than personal habits or a widespread practice. They give culture a new face. Between the great upheaval of the 1500s and the present, only three later ones are of the same order. True, the history books give the name to a dozen or more such violent events, but in these uprisings it was only the violence that was great. They were but local aftershocks of one or other of the four main quakes: the 16C religious revolution; the 17C monarchical revolution; the liberal, individualist "French" revolution that straddles the 18th and 19th; and the 20C "Russian," social and collectivist.

The quotation marks around French and Russian are meant to show that those names are only conventional. The whole western world was brooding over the Idea of each before it exploded into war, and the usual dates 1789 and 1917 mark only the trigger incidents. It took decades for the four to work out their first intention and side effects-and their ruling ideas have not ceased to act.

You can read a longer portion of this excerpt here.  

 

Literary Death Match at the Hammer

I'm a proud alum of LDM and will be among those checking out tomorrow's installment at the Hammer Museum.  Participants include Henry Rollins and Rex Pickett, and it's free, which is my favorite number.

Details here.  See you there.

LETTERS TO KURT REVIEW

A classic example of counter-programming:  My review of Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt is now live at the excellent Los Angeles Review of Books.

I include this anecdote not to parade my musical taste (or lack of it) before you, but to illustrate how possible it was, in that pre-Internet era, to willfully opt out of the zeitgeist. (It's still possible, but the shame is harder to escape, and generally requires secluded cabins in remote woods.) As grunge was roaring out of Seattle to hypnotize and unsettle a nation, my 30-year-old self was including Blue Swede on mixtapes. The only meaningful impact the movement had on my life was the sudden robust availability of high quality messenger bags. I missed all of it. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Kurt and Courtney.

Of course, the era didn't pass me by entirely: the headlines were inescapable, especially Cobain's Hemingwayesque coda, and Love's ongoing, embarrassing theatrics. But I must admit that, prior to picking up Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt, I had never listened to a Hole, or even a Nirvana, album all the way through. Yet I was intrigued by the book's format: a sincere preface followed by 52 almost impressionistic sketches that displayed, at first glance, a certain lightness of touch, a (perhaps unsurprising) musicality in the prose.  Erlandson, present at the creation as Love's co-founder of Hole, seemed a promising guide to all I'd missed, even if he was guilty of occasionally overstating his place in the grand scheme. (He can sometimes read a bit like the actor in Shakespeare in Love who summarizes Romeo & Juliet as being "about a nurse.") Something about Erlandson's disarmingly earnest tone initially engaged me more than I expected: "All those fallen female archetypes. Little girls wearing mother's heels and apron." I began to consider the possibility that this book might have value as something other than a post-grunge artifact, yet another piece of the true cross for Cobain obsessives to fetishize. Perhaps, coming to the work unburdened by the albatross of Cobain's martyrdom, I was uniquely well placed to consider its purely literary value. A small reward for missing a cultural moment, it turns out, and harder to accomplish than I imagined.

The Previously Unexplained Chess-Writing Link ...

I've been a chess obsessive for years but it's only thanks to the great Charles Simic that I can begin to justify all the wasted hours ... 

There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

Panel Appearance Saturday

I will be appearing on a blogging panel at the 2012 conference of the Biographers International Organization. I'm still not completely certain why biographers would like to hear from me, but they asked, I was free, and so here we go.  Isn't blogging pretty 1.0 by this point?

Worthy Readings Sidebar Updated!

The Worthy Readings sidebar has been updated through July with a slew of new readings ranging from Richard Ford to Dana Spiotta to Charles Yu to ... Steve Almond.  You read that right.  Click through and check out all the updates.

Ben Fountain Reading At Vromans - Recommended!

Ben Fountain is in town this evening to read from his long awaited novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. You can find all the details about the reading here.  Adam Langer's glowing review can be found here.

The book's not merely good; it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good, so much so that readers might find themselves wishing it had been published last year so that the Pulitzer committee could have saved themselves the bother of a hung jury, and just given its damn award to Fountain.

SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT - Irony, Self-Awareness and Troy Patterson

In his review of John Leonard's greatest hits collection, Troy Patterson - without a shred of irony or apparent self-knowledge - approvingly quotes the master:

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” 

Patterson, it should be remembered, turned in a review of my novel that so was vicious that Gawker - Gawker - was prompted to ask "what's up with that."  How preposterous do you have to be for Gawker to call you "mean-spirited"?

I'd have higher hopes for the new Slate project if it wasn't deploying television critics to review real books ... 

FACT CHECKING GRAHAM GREENE

Apropos l'affaire D'Agata, I came across this amusing and illuminating bit in John McPhee's paean to fact checkers, Checkpoints, collected in the superb Silk Parachutes (FSG 2010):

In "The Third Man," in the immortal Ferris-wheel scene high above postwar Vienna, Orson Welles as Henry Lime implies that he has been selling diluted penicillin to Viennese hospitals but asks his lifelong friend Joseph Cotten if one of those little moving dots down there (one of those human beings) could really matter in the long scheme of things.  On the ground, he adds:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce?  The cuckoo clock.

I learned, or Richard learned - we've forgotten who learned - that Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay of "The Third Man," only later published ther preliminary treatment as a novella, and the cuckoo-clock speech does not appear either in the novella or in the original screenplay.  Greene did not write it.  Orson Welles thought it up and said it.

I'm essentially unsympathetic to D'Agata's argument, as I've been to those who came before and forced the rubric "Creative Nonfiction" upon us, which continues to encourage writers to take all sorts of questionable liberties with the facts.  If you want to make it up, as I've always said, write a novel.  On the other hand don't - I don't need the competition.

ANATOMY OF A TWEET: Deconstructing the awesomeness of Bret Easton Ellis

I'm a quick study ...

L.A. EVENT - CLAIRE BIDWELL SMITH

If you're in the Santa Monica area Thursday night (or even if you're not), do stop by the Barnes and Noble where Claire Bidwell Smith will be reading from her lauded memoir The Rules of Inheritance.

INSIDE THE CLASSROOM: RANDOM READING

I tried a new exercise with my Novel IV students a few weeks ago.

I brought a dozen books to class, pretty randomly selected from the titles that arrive every month.  I did limit the selection to novels, and tried to weed out any obviously awful candidates, but for the most part these were books I knew little or nothing about.  I recognized some authors, had dipped a few pages into some of them, but I did try to be as random as possible.  

I put the books out on my desk and I invited my students to come up and quickly grab a book.  I told them not to try to match their taste, not to look for authors they knew - in fact, to avoid looking at the book altogether if possible.  Just grab one.

They took them back to their desks and I asked them all to read the title they'd drawn for our next class. The request was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, until I began to explain the idea behind the experiment.

I told them that we all - myself included - can easily become victims of our readerly prejudices.  (I wonder how many great books I've missed, insisting that I don't care for historical fiction.  Wolf Hall?)  I also said in the age of Amazon, which thinks it's a good idea to pair every book you buy with other books just like it, we increasingly risk falling into a narrow little echo chamber.  It's great that everyone is reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, but how many lesser known titles get lost every year in that rush toward the One Big Thing.

I reminded them that Paula Fox enjoyed a remarkable renaissance simply because Jonathan Franzen had randomly plucked her book from the shelves at Yaddo.  And I told them that every serious writer I knew was open and experimental and willing to take a chance on any number of books - not just the things we know we like. 

Surprise, surprise.  More than one student came back admitting they'd loved a book they'd otherwise never read.  And one student didn't like a book she fully expected to love, but she had immersed herself in solving the problem of why the book did not work for her, and closed in on what she took to be the inauthenticity of the voice.  In order words, she was thinking like a writer.

WHY I CAVED

After years of resisting the tide, I officially started using my long-dormant Twitter account today.  I have some mixed feelings about this event.  On the one hand, my attention span feels fractured enough already, and I'm reluctant to deform it any further.  I'm also worried about my well-documented obsessive tendencies - I've never met a rabbit hole I couldn't happily fall down.  But I've had the increasing sense that there was a potentially scintillating conversation taking place elsewhere, so I've heeded the advice of my dear friend Lauren Cerand and waded in.  

Flash in the pan?  Life-changing moment?  Remains to be seen.  Follow my account and see for yourself.

L.A. EVENT - EDWARD St. AUBYN **HIGHLY RECOMMENDED**

Not sure how this one escaped my notice - when in doubt, I now blame everything on the kid - but there's a must-see reading this Sunday.  Edward St. Aubyn, whose Patrick Melrose novels have been rapturously received from likes of Zadie Smith and Francine Prose, will be at Skylight Books at 5 p.m.  Here's what Prose had to say last Sunday:

St. Aubyn’s books are at once extremely dark and extremely funny. In “Bad News,” Patrick visits New York, where his father has just died. “It was late May, it was hot, and he really ought to take off his overcoat, but his overcoat was his defense against the thin shards of glass that passers-­by slipped casually under his skin, not to mention the slow-motion explosion of shop windows, the bone-rattling thunder of subway trains and the heartbreaking passage of each second, like a grain of sand trickling through the hourglass of his body. No, he would not take off his overcoat. Do you ask a lobster to disrobe?” In “At Last,” a minor character is described as having three drawbacks as a guest: “She was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.” Meanwhile, the humor is deepened by our sense that the dazzling pyrotechnics of Patrick’s banter have become a source of pain. In his own witticisms, he now hears echoes of the “pure contempt” of his father’s mocking humor.

I'm actually considered stamping my passport and making the trek from the Palisades.  Details here. Even I can't get there, you should most definitely go.

HERE WE GO AGAIN

It is my very own lost cause.

Time after time I've taken to these pages to decry the idiocy of Elmore Leonard's inexplicably lauded 10 Rules of Writing, to absolutely no avail.  No decent interval can pass before someone out there notes them approvingly, and I'm forced back to the keyboard to object.

The latest offender is Olen Steinhauer, who says the following in his recent review of Leonard's latest novel, Raylan:

In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught.

It's actually a silly, empty rule.  If I were to put that rule in front of my students, here's what I'd tell them:  That it's one of those bits of seemingly clever writing that, upon actual closer examination, says nothing at all.  First of all, what - exactly - is "writing that sounds like writing"?  Does Shakespeare sound like writing?  Does Ondaatje? Does Zadie Smith?  Does Faulkner?  Does Pynchon?  It is a useless measure.

What one presumes Leonard is saying, given the other dumbed-down rules on his list, is that he eschews what we commonly refer to, for want of a better term, as lyrical prose.  One imagines he would have John Banville, Joseph O'Neill and Teju Cole busily erasing their manuscripts.  On the other hand, if he doesn't mean that, perhaps he means writing that, because it fails - because it is, essentially bad writing - feels "written".  So, basically, fix bad writing.  Thanks a whole heap, Elmo.

The  point, of course, is that these kind of lists, while sometimes amusing, rarely have anything to do with the real work of writing.  (I prefer to paraphrase Deborah Eisenberg to my students - you can do anything you want, provided you can do it.)  And it's dispiriting to see people who should know better trot these rules out yet again as some touchstone of great writing.  They aren't.  As the TLS so wisely pointed out about this list when it first appeared:

The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to "stop and get the dictionary" - as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he "never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary"). And what is meant by "leave out the part that readers tend to skip"? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find "remarked", "answered", "interposed", "almost groaned", "wonderingly asked", "said simply", "sagely risked" and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into "said"?

So what do you say, gang?  Let's give the rules a rest for the rest of 2012?  Because I have, you know, shit to do.  I can't be here schooling you every time out.  Peace out.

IN CASE YOU THOUGHT I'D FORGOTTEN

The Worthy Readings sidebar is now current.  Ish.

INSIDE THE CLASSROOM: THE CRITIC AS TEACHER

I've never cared much for David Gates's criticism.  His intelligence is obvious but his reviews tend to be hobbled by smugness or self-regard - how I have longed to reach out and pop the "I" key from his keyboard - and his attempts at humor have always felt strained to this reader.

However, I thought his review on Sunday of Elliot Perlman's novel The Street Sweeper, despite its cruelty, was exceedingly instructive, and would serve my Novel IV students as a handy precis of what to avoid in their fiction. Gates's lessons, highlighted in two particular paragraphs, should probably hang above the desk of any beginning novelist (a category of which I still consider myself a member).

Novel IV is an advanced class, so it's primarly workshopping.  The weekly lessons of Novel I-III are dispensed with in favor of sustained, detailed examinations of weekly submissions.  But I took time out at the beginning of class to walk through Gates's review.  This was the first of the two essential paragraphs:

... no decent writer should have to repeat variants of the line “Tell everyone what happened here” 12 times in two pages of a scene at Auschwitz; it takes on the robotic affect of the People’s Microphone at an Occupy rally, and it loses force with each use. The Auschwitz scenes, based on the testimony of real-life survivors, will break the stoniest heart — how could they not? — but even here Perlman can’t let ill enough alone. Two women about to be hanged for resisting the Nazis are described as “wingless sparrows,” as if the genuine pathos needed to be amped up with a sentimental image. Near the beginning of the novel, Perlman can’t resist framing the nightmarish murder of Emmett Till, and of the four black girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, as a literal bad dream, experienced by his untenured Columbia historian. The well-read Perlman may have had in mind Stephen Dedalus’s line in “Ulysses” about history’s being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, but will any reader find this dream plausible rather than just thematically convenient?

In this advanced workshop, I have taken to advising my students to be as thorough and detailed as they possibly can; to banish the word "nitpick" from their vocabulary; and to understand that if they fail to bring a rigorous, thoughtful sensibility to these critiques, there is surely someone waiting out there who will feel no similar reluctance.  And it's  sad day for the author if that person happens to be a Times reviewer.   This first paragraph contains any number of amateur traps I warn my students about, particularly the last one - to beware of moments that exist solely to serve authorial convenience.  But it's the second paragraph that is a gold mine of "Don'ts":

But the writing of fiction has its own forms of morality. Its code takes a hard line against such silly devices as the historian’s inner conversations with the girlfriend he abjured: “ ‘Adam, . . . you’re trying to turn your fear of the future, your panic about parenthood and professional failure into something noble that you’ve done for me. I never bought it.’ ‘Diana, it’s possible at the one time both to be afraid and to act nobly for another person.’ ” It evenhandedly forbids kitschy generic ingénues — “With dark eyes for falling into and jet-black hair, she could be both serious and funny, often at the same time” — and ciphers like “a charming, delightful woman in her 80s.” It demands that the writer clean up toxic spills of syntax: “A single guest at weddings, couples would admire her appearance almost excessively and, in so doing, embarrass her, never for a moment dreaming she might know loneliness every bit as well, every bit as sharp, as they ever had.” It calls for the renunciation of verbal pomp: “He was overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing, panic and a sense of loss that, in staccato bursts, flushed the air from his lungs till the moisture in his sleep-starved eyes formed a vitreous glaze that mercifully blurred his reflection in the mirror.” As the Book of John puts it, Jesus wept. All these passages suggest a writer who, whether through inattention or inability, hasn’t engaged effectively with his characters or his language, who won’t or can’t take the work of fiction seriously.

I do warn my students against taking too dogmatic an approach to reading and writing, and I do caution that all rules can be broken.  That said, this paragraph is a brilliant and efficient summary of things to avoid, things I see all the time:  expository dialogue, particularly awful when it's unpacking emotional states; cliches both of language and character; lazy undescriptive descriptions (paraprhasing All The President's Men, I call these non-description descriptions); tangled, inept sentence work and unhinged prose.  It's a bravura paragraph that I will keep close as I continue on the second novel.

I pointed out that Gates is very careful to provide specific examples of all his objections, though we also acknowledged that nearly any sentence can be taken out of context and made to look foolish.  That said, it's hard to imagine any context in which the sentences noted above would work.  (I do think the review's one failing - aside from the current of mean-spiritedness that seems to animate it - is there isn't a single, sustained quotation from the novel to really allow a reader to hear Perlman's voice.)

But that's a quibble and, as I told my students, even the nastiness is instructive and, in its way, salutary - every writer must take the maximum possible care with his or her prose, because when you play in the NFL, the hard knocks are out there.  They are no fun to receive, as I can tell you, but no less instructive for the pain.

CHEERS, HITCH

I find myself immensely and unexpectedly saddened today at the passing of Christopher Hitchens. We sat up late last night watching video clips on C-Span and Youtube, and downed a surprisingly tearful Lagavullin (neat) in his honor. It seemed the thing to do.

In the light of day, I am trying to understand my intense emotional reaction to the news, reminiscent of what I felt when Tony Judt, another great thinker and writer I did not know, died too soon. And yet, like so many others, I felt as if I knew him. He was always essential reading, even when he infuriated me, as he did often. More than once, I let him have it in these pages, to what point I was never certain – a mouse roaring, surely.

He could be maddening; his writing, at times, hobbled by excess self-regard; a rigidity approaching the sort of fanaticism he decried; and a brilliant rhetoric that sometimes masked weak underpinnings. The last two traits were most prominently on display in his support of the Iraq War, which alienated many, including myself. I was disappointed, but not surprised – his stance seemed utterly consistent with his absolute loathing for the thought police, be they on the left or right.

And yet. These were the same traits that made me love him. Although I share his atheism, I felt his anti-God arguments lacked a certain nuance. Yet I deeply admired his refusal to seek the consolation of a deathbed conversion. I also loved his refusal to renounce his louche ways, his devotion to pleasures both high and low, despite their ultimate cost. And I was in awe of his brilliance, his learning, his instant (it seemed) recall, his stunning wit. I don’t, as a rule, talk much about non-fiction, but I was effusive in my praise for Hitch-22 when I recommended it on NPR’s On Point. 

But of the many Hitches (how many of us claimed the right to call him that, the unearned familiarity?), the polemicist, the political commentator, the contrarian, I think my favorite was the literary critic. Of his all books, my favorite, the one I return to time and again, is Unacknowledged Legislation: writers in the public sphere. If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself favor and add it to your shelves. People will probably remember him for Vanity Fair, but I preferred the remarkable book criticism he wrote for The Atlantic. When the political baggage was left at the door, he was as incisive and insightful a book reviewer as we had. Here he is on Philip Larkin, earlier this year.

Finally, though, I think the reason for my sorrow, for my tears, is simply this: There was great comfort in the fact that his voice was always there. Reliably combative, occasionally wrongheaded, always bracing, issuing a challenge that it was up to us to take up. I don’t believe one life is necessarily more worthy than any other, but he was a man who clearly made the absolute most of his time here, squeezed out every bit of experience. He never disengaged. It seems grotesquely unfair that he is gone, that silence remains. That is, I think, worthy of tears.

His friend Andrew Sullivan has been heroically posting tributes all day. They are worth a look.

Cheers, Hitch. Perhaps you and Yahweh are sharing a final chuckle together. Either way, I drink to you.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: WHAT OUR LIBRARIES SAY ABOUT US

From this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Leah Price on "The Subconscious Shelf":

The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin began “The Physiology of Taste” (1825) by declaring, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” You are also what you read — or, perhaps, what you own. In my college dorm, a volume of Sartre was casually spread-­eagled across the futon when I expected callers. We display spines that we’ll never crack; we hide the books that we thumb to death. Emily Post disapproved: her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.”

To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self. The artist Buzz Spector’s 1994 installation “Unpacking My Library” consisted of all the books in his library, arranged “in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest, on a single shelf in a room large enough to hold them.” Shortly after the 2008 election, a bookstore in New York set out 50-odd books to which Barack Obama had alluded in memoirs, speeches and interviews. The resulting collection revealed more about the president-elect than did any number of other displays of books by and about him.

 

From the November 7 New Yorker, James Wood's "Shelf Life" column on his father-in-law's library:

And in this way, I began to think, our libraries perhaps say nothing very particular about us at all.  Each brick in the wall of a library is a borrowed brick: several thousand people, perhaps several hundred thousand, own books by F.E. Peters.  If I were led into Edmund Wilson’s library in Talcotville, would I know that it was Edmund Wilson’s library, and not Alfred Kazin’s or F.W. Dupee’s?  We tend to venerate libraries once we know whose they are, like admiring a famous philosopher’s eyes or a ballet dancer’s foot.  Pushkin had about a thousand non-Russian books in his library, and the editor of “Pushkin on Literature” helpfully lists all those foreign books, from Balzac and Stendahl to Shakespeare and Voltaire.  She confidently announces that “much can be learnt of a man from his choice of books,” and then unwittingly contradicts herself by adding that Pushkin, like many other Russians of his class, read mostly in French: “The ancient classics, the Bible, Dante, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Leibnitz, Byron … all are predominantly in French.”  This sounds like the library of an extremely well-read Russian gentleman, circa 1830 – the kind of reading that Pushkin gave to this standard-issue Russian romantic, Eugene Onegin.  But what is especially Pushkinian about the library?  What does it tell us about his mind?

CROSSBONES REVIEW

My review of Nurrudin Farah's Crossbones has been published over at the Barnes and Noble Review.  It starts thus:

Most Americans, if they think of Somalia at all, know it only from Black Hawk Down, the 2001 film adaptation of Mark Bowden's 1999 account of the bloody Battle of Mogadishu. Tragic though those events were, they represent a mere sliver of the decades of internal strife that have left Somalia one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. Moving from Communist rule to dictatorship to civil war, there has been no functioning central government for twenty years. Warlords and clan factions have given way to militant Islam, and pirates terrorize the coastal waters. "That unfortunate country, cursed with those dreadful clanspeople, forever killing one another and everyone around them," is the bleak précis offered by one of Nuruddin Farah's characters. It's to this unpromisingly harrowing milieu that Farah has tirelessly devoted himself for eleven novels that paint a more nuanced picture of the country's woes than one is likely to find on CNN.

STEVEN CORBIN REDUX

Some years back, I wrote a brief reminiscence of my friend and writing teacher Steven Corbin.  I've revised and expanded that essay as part of the Los Angeles Review of Books' Writers on Teacher series, and it's now online.  An excerpt:

He looked at me from across the table, realizing that I hadn’t yet known (he thought he’d told me already); and he said, “I’ve shocked you.” I remember mumbling something non-committal but before I could absorb the news, Steven began talking with his familiar enthusiasm about how he was confident of his chances of beating it, that he was healthy, his t-cell count was good, that he was going to beat it. I nodded and was supportive but later that day in my journal, I wrote one sentence: “Steven is going to die.”

L.A. EVENT - NORMAN RUSH - ***DO NOT MISS!***

Folks, seriously - do not miss this one.

The great Norman Rush is making an altogther too rare appearance in the L.A. area, where he will be in conversation with Mona Simpson at the Hammer on Tuesday evening.  It's the first time that I am cursing the fact that I teach that evening, and I'm tempted to shuttle my Novel III students over to the event.  

For those of you who don't know Rush's work, you can read what James Wood has to say about the superb novel Mortals here.  To wit:

In the way of all powerfully narrated first-person monologues, Mating occasionally breeds in the reader the desire to escape the constant intensity and interest of the language, as houseguests sometimes want to escape their over-vivid hosts. It is the price that the writer pays for the immediacy of first-person access. Mortals is told in the conventional third person, so that it distributes its effects more spaciously and calmly, as is proper for such a massive work. But Rush has not lost his interest in spoken language; indeed, he has intensified his study, at once funny and brilliant, of what happens to language when brainy Americans get mixed up with it. Mortals is many things, and does many things beautifully, but its central achievement has to be the fidelity with which it represents consciousness, the way in which it tracks the mind's own language. This concern with the insides of our minds makes Rush almost an original in contemporary American writing.

You can also read Rush's Paris Review interview here, in which he says:

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live. No doubt this is because the novel is the rude pretender who stepped into the place of that long-reigning narrative, the religious bedtime story, which, before Darwin and Lyell and those guys, was the only narrative in town. As I write a novel, I’m aware that I’m struggling against the “obligation” to solace. But I want my books to reach only the conclusions that are implicit in the trajectories of their characters. As it happens, bothMating and Mortals have sad outcomes—but optimistic codas. So sue me.

A related question is, when should novels end? I must love big novels, because that’s what I’ve written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe. I also like long exchanges, because plots so often turn on nuances in the ways characters understand each other. In moments of madness, I’ve had the fantasy of simultaneously publishing my novels in two versions, Regular and Jumbo. In the book I’m working on now, though, I’m trying to keep everything shorter: shorter scenes, fewer plots, general brevity. But a shorter novel goes against some of my deepest instincts. Dostoyevsky died still intending to write another volume of The Brothers Karamazov. It’s like a knife in my heart that he didn’t.

Go.  Drink it all in.  Send me dispatches.  The details are all here.

UPDATE:  Well, it all works out in the end - I will, in fact, be taking my students tonight.  And the Los Angeles Review of Books posted this fine appreciation yesterday.