Le cru et le cuit

Reading _Heart of Darkness_ alongside _The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency_ has left me with a funny reader's whiplash. The two books actually do some interesting work as a pair, because both depend on the old "Mother Africa" trope: Africa sentimentally imagined as the source of all goodness up until the moment that it ... uh ... is not. While Conrad is paranoiacally sure Mother A will revert to type any minute now, Smith counterphobically never stops reminding the reader that so long as everyone plays nice, we don't have to worry about that.

All fantasy, all the time. The post-colonially astute have already made the case for the spectrality of this place called "Africa" in the Western white imaginary. No need to rehearse that here. Besides, I am less interested in Conrad's mythologizing than in Smith's, because Smith's immense popularity is so mysterious, while his works are so weirdly immune to all but the gentlest criticism. Perhaps Smith's popularity depends only on what his primarily female readers make of his exceedingly beloved heroine, Mma Ramotswe, who sees and understands the problems of patriarchy everywhere, all the while going very far out of her way to forgive (and forgive, and forgive) the naughty boys in her life. It's not that she stands by her man -- when the series begins, she's single -- but that she seems like the ideal sort of best friend who is always available for a long bitch session, who would forgive you for staying with some cad without letting said cad off the hook in any way.

She lets all her cads off the hook, actually. Except, perhaps, for one exceptionally bad one -- who must remain unforgiven because someone has to be beyond the pale.

Good old structural anthropology worked much the same way, no? I mean, I have this feeling that behind all that surface charm, Smith's stuff is really retrograde.

I'm going to read some boring factual material now.

Am currently hip-deep in the literature, so to speak, on the (ab)use of creative writing and creative writers in the college writing classroom. It is most disheartening. The only conclusion one could reasonably draw is that English departments should simply be eliminated from the university, as a measure of compassion, to end the misery of all concerned.

Apparently creative writers are useless when it comes to enforcing writing standards of any kind, from mechanics to rhetoric, while literature professors are pedants who can't write their way out of the recycled paper bags on which they compose their unreadable scholarly monographs.

I've got a PhD and an MFA -- the worst of both worlds! At least the PhD isn't in English, though I doubt I would find a lot of support for my creative work in a history department.

Focus

Did you know that every single interruption -- phone call, greeting, check-in, dog-barking-crazily-at-nothing -- costs twenty minutes of productivity? It takes a couple of minutes to deal with the interruption, and then fifteen more to get back into flow.

"Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" suggests implementing "office hours," which seems like a great idea for a home office. Hope I can get everyone on board.

May they all be velvet.

Rx for Doubt

When in doubt, go back to the material.

Happy 10th Birthday to the Saint Ann's Review!

My story, "Eleven, The Spelunker," appears in the Saint Ann's Review's tenth anniversary issue, on sale now.

Conjunctions!

Thrilled to report that Conjunctions will publish my story "The Dwindling" this fall.



Pre-order your copy now at Amazon.

Advice

"Be a good steward of your gifts.
Protect your time.
Feed your inner life.
Avoid too much noise.
Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.
Be by yourself as often as you can.
Walk.
Take the phone off the hook.
Work regular hours."

-- Jane Kenyon

Something hard & glorious

"A first book is a treasure, and all these truths and quasi-truths I have written about publishing are finally ephemeral. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them which becomes a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer’s own blood, and with the occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes or longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk; and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work was not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow’s mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed." -- Andre Dubus

New fiction!

"I Was Sure I'd See You Someday," a short story about mothers and daughters, locks and locksmiths, and adventure stories copied onto 1970s-vintage ditto sheets, appears in the Spring 2010 issue of Folio, the literary magazine published by the MFA program at American University.

Divine comedy, or comic divinity?

Last week a friend and I had a minor disagreement, the sort that sheds new light on the self, the other, and the relationship. The trouble was, he'd made an off-the-cuff remark that I resembled, and not, I thought, in a good way. It's not his job to flatter me. But the resemblance was plain. He was speaking his truth about me, and about the relationship --or at least his view of these things. I disagreed, and felt honor-bound to speak up.

Flattery is one thing; insult, another. Between them, there are lots of possibilities. But the plain truth, from some omniscient third-person perspective, is rarely one of them. The conversation veered down an odd path: As we clarified our terms and positions, it became clear that we could not both be right. Each point of view excluded the other.

I stretched all week to imagine his perspective. The hardest part, I discovered, was giving myself permission. Apparently, under certain circumstances, I experience curiosity as voyeurism. The sequelae are unsurprising: a degree of creative inhibition, a narrowing of perspective, a certain tongue-tied shyness. A lesson there: I could do with less of this. I could be bolder.

So, when I finally looked, what did I see? Well. Think of Robert Frost, who assiduously cultivated a persona marked by down-to-earth geniality -- and then, go read "Home Burial." There's a reason Leon Trilling found him terrifying. As for my friend: I am always surprised, I guess, when I discover a real, honest-to-God selva oscura in another person, in the course of an ordinary day.

Joseph Brodsky once said that American poetry is basically Vergilian or Horatian, in the sense that an American poet is one who sits, by definition, somewhere between these two poles. The Vergilian poet is phlegmatic, the damp cold of a winter in Providence; Wallace Stevens is a chief exemplar. The Horatian poet is melancholic, seeing much but through a world-weary lens, like the late, "American," Auden. Brodsky's division is heuristically interesting, and I think it is useful as far as it goes, not least because, in cutting through Frost's everyman persona to his underlying Vergilian quality -- a wild, if somewhat self-absorbed misery -- Brodsky makes sense of Frost's enduring (and to me, mysterious) popularity.

But in his systematization of American poetry, Brodsky misses its Ovidian quarter, the tumbling, rollicking transformations of Frank O'Hara, say, or Robert Creeley, or Geoffrey G. O'Brien, or what the hell, Bob Dylan.

It's easy enough to miss, I suppose. Ovid was not entirely appreciated in his lifetime, either. Dylan's tremendous poetic talent manifests in songwriting, a lesser art.

But this is where I feel most at home, with Ovid and his inheritors. My friend is not Ovidian. This is the news, the source of the tension between us. From his point of view, I imagine he wonders how I can possibly be so attached to, and enlivened by, novelty and transformation, as the oceans rise.

A bookstore event!

On Friday, August 20th, I'll be at Books on the Square, 471 Angell St. in Providence, to read, discuss and sign copies of THE ZODIAC OF PARIS. We'll begin at 7 pm. Hope to see you there!

Mystery

"It is not the resolution of difficulty that the ideal reader we imagine for ourselves is after, but the nature of the mysterious, mysteriousness itself." -- Jonathan Baumbach, from this interview

Rue is three-fourths of true.

"The market joyfully promotes worthless women writers as long as they reinforce the idea that ladies are dumb and sensitive.” -- Carmen Boullosa

We've Got A Long Way To Go Still, Baby

Amazon gives the following subcategories for "women's fiction": divorce, domestic life, friendship, mothers and children, single women, sisters.

What is not on the list: work, politics, sex.

Please vote for me!

"Unsolicited Advice (for Eliza Blair)" is up for a prize in 3QuarksDaily's contest. So are many other marvelous entries. Vote here.

Unsolicited Advice (for Eliza Blair)

Much moved today by the writer and scientist Eliza Blair's birthday post. At 25, Blair has already published award-winning science fiction while pursuing a dream to go to the moon. (Via.)

She's worried about the Amazon/Macmillan mess, and about the Obama administration's gutting of manned lunar missions.

I can't say much about the latter, except that it's disappointing. What I want to address is her concern that this most recent tempest in the publishing world's teapot is going to make it impossible for her to write "in a world where it is getting progressively harder to get paid" to do so.

Publishing is a big enmeshed family. Nobody knows for sure who's really dependent on what from whom. You might think writers, as the "content producers" at the very start of the supply chain are its most important part. This idea, while attractive, is not correct.

The most important part of publishing's supply chain, so to speak, is whatever you want to call this sacred and ornery mystery that once and a while bursts through the fog and confusion and incarnates in the form of a story on your page or screen.

It belongs to no one. This is as it should be. Sometimes the incarnated mystery sees the light of day, in the form of publication. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes it takes a long time. Blake had to wait for Rossetti. And so on.

I once did an informal survey of dates of first publication for modern novelists. Conclusions: For early success (before age 30) in writing, it helps to be white, male, and rich. Many, if not most, women writers published little to nothing until their 40s, after peak child-care years.

This survey was by no means definitive, but I took heart from it. I was 27, with three writing workshops under my belt, a handful of short stories on my hard drive and precious little else to recommend me to readers, not to mention editors and agents.

I made a spreadsheet and began to send stories out, keeping track of the responses. For every rejection that came back, I sent out another short story. For every rejection that came back with a personal note, usually scrawled across the form response, I made a note in my spreadsheet: This person likes my work. Eventually I started to publish, but I want to insist that this point is neither here nor there. With enough persistence, it's possible to publish a great deal, but you have to keep writing and sending stuff out.

What is a writer? By my lights, you are a writer if you write and you publish. But by my lights, publication includes sending "unpublished" material to editors and agents, who form, in essence, an early focus group for the work. Participating in workshops counts, too. For me, anyway.

My mother wrote short stories on her typewriter while my sister and I were at school. She participated vigorously in local writing workshops. Her stuff was really good. Due to living in a small town, I've met a few of her teachers, who have also been mine on occasion, and to a one, they remember and admire her talent. She could write short, which is a great gift, and she was funny. I am a different sort of writer -- more digressive, more interested in the possibilities of the sentence, and more open, I think, to mystery and ambiguity in my work. My mother's stories all ended the same way, with the evildoer, usually a younger woman who is first aided and then hampered by her disarming innocence, getting her comeuppance, often in a rather surprising way.

You can guess who the "evildoer" was, can't you? Like I said, she was funny. Often I felt like the person she was trying to reach with her stories was me, and the message she was trying to convey was: The world doesn't actually revolve around you, kiddo. You can see how the message could seem a little ambiguous, I hope. I struggled to write in her shadow; I still do. This struggle with shadows -- whatever form it takes in a writer's personal life -- is exactly the point.

It is easy to undermine writers with ideas about money, because so few writers make a living from their work. "None but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," is one of my nightmare refrains. But people do lots of things without a thought for recompense. Having children, for instance, is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Yes, you'll need to support yourself while you write; that's part of what it means, at this point in history, to be a writer. The other part is exposing yourself to a lot of rejection. Admittedly, sacrifice and rejection are awful, but that energy can be channeled usefully back into your writing. (This is why, when a rejection comes in the mail, you should send another piece of writing out as soon as possible.) Indifference helps. Armor helps. Experience helps.

My larger point: Amazon and Macmillan are a sideshow. If you miss it, don't worry: there will be another one just like it next month, or next week, or next year. I'm pretty sure it's safe to ignore, in favor of the other mysteries that are clamoring for your attention. Only you know what they are -- and people like me are out here, enthusiastically anticipating your new work.

Postscript: Writer and literary agent Nathan Bransford has collected some interesting responses from writers to the general problem addressed in this post: if you write, are you crazy?

The main thing is to make a fuss.

At The Rumpus, Elissa Bassist posts a hilarious, mostly imaginary interview with Elaine Showalter. The focus, as you might expect, is on women and writing, but like both, it is also so much more than that.

I often explain to my mother that to be a writer means to suffer mercilessly and experiment with prescription medication.

Go read. Just do it. It's that good.

Better

At The Millions, Sonya Chung posts a sane, smart response to Katie Roiphe's recent NYT essay, in which she complains about the tentative approach to sex preferred by four contemporary American novelists. (In Roiphe's essay, this handful of writers is taken quite wrongly to be somehow representative of the whole of current American fiction).

Chung's essay is worth reading in its entirety, not least because she generously includes a hilarious catalogue, with examples (!), of ways that eros goes all wrong on the page. More seriously, she draws the reader's attention to the under-recognized writing of James Salter, and rightly so, because he does get it right, and spectacularly so, in his novel A Sport and a Pastime.

Chung: "The first time I read A Sport and a Pastime, just two years ago, I knew I'd experienced something unusual, alive, difficult in its directness; not something to look upon 'fondly,' but a story that, like all great art, connected me more deeply and truthfully to my whole human self -- sans irony or 'cool.''

THE ZODIAC OF PARIS available at Amazon!

THE ZODIAC OF PARIS is now available for pre-order on Amazon!



"This book makes a major contribution to European scientific, intellectual, and cultural history. Buchwald and Josefowicz have wrested from oblivion a subject that no previous author, French or English, has analyzed in this form or breadth. The Zodiac of Paris not only embodies interdisciplinarity at its very best, but also exposes the nineteenth-century roots of many concerns of the twenty-first century." -- Darius A. Spieth, author of Napoleon's Sorcerers: The Sophisians