Boning up in the boneyard.

Want to become a novelist? Live next to a graveyard.

So saith Allan Gurganus in the Times. Makes sense to me!

Irony marks?

For me, part of the appeal of irony is that some people are too dense to get the joke. I guess I like to feel superior.

But perhaps I’m in the minority, for Keith Houston, writing in the New Statesman, suggests that maybe we need “irony marks” in our text to clarify matters for the dense.

Fiction vs. nonfiction

I've met my share of people who self-righteously proclaim, "I don't have time to read fiction. It's just a waste of my time because I only want to read things that are real."

I don't bother arguing with such people, for smart people know that fiction can often reveal truths that nonfiction can't. Rivka Galchen and Pankaj Mishra explain.

Moreover, recent neurological research has shown the value of reading fiction.

The Sessions & Rust and Bone

Two recent movies, one American and one French, address the sensitive question of sexuality and physical disabilities. Both films feature superb acting and intelligent, moving scripts, and both movies, The Sessions and Rust and Bone, are worth your time.

The Sessions (2012), written and directed by Ben Lewin, tells the true story of Mark O'Brien, who was paralyzed from the neck down due to polio, and his determination to lose his virginity. (Interestingly, Lewin himself lost the use of his legs from polio, which is undoubtedly why the movie doesn't hit any false notes.) Mark decides to hire a sex surrogate, a professional therapist with a background in psychology, who can teach him intimacy. This surrogate, Cheryl, helps him learn to accept his body.

John Hawkes, one of the best character actors around, plays Mark, and he is simply extraordinary, especially since all he can use in this role are his eyes and his voice. He captures Mark's fear and excitement and joy as he meets Cheryl, played by Helen Hunt, and then undergoes a profound change. Hunt, too, is excellent as she plays a woman in a marriage clearly going off the rails who finds herself attracted to Mark but knows that she must keep the relationship purely professional.

In Rust and Bone (2012), Stephanie, a middle-aged whale trainer, becomes severely depressed after losing her lower legs in an accident at the theme park where she works. Her life before the accident had been only marginally happy, but the loss of her legs—and of her livelihood—make her nearly suicidal. Fortunately, though, she remembers a nightclub bouncer, Alain, who had driven her home months before and they strike up a friendship. In the end, her life, even without her legs, will perhaps be happier than it had been before the accident.

Marion Cotillard, playing Stephanie, brings a rare intensity to the role. Early in the film, as she refuses to be seen in public with stumps, she is heartbreaking. The new actor Matthias Schoenaerts, who plays Alain, is pure physicality, a man who lives for illegal kickboxing matches and sex without strings attached. The two of them complement each other and remind us that Plato was right: each of us is a half a soul longing for completion through another person, our soulmate.

Rust and Bone, directed by Jacques Audiard, who directed the terrific gangster film A Prophet, is probably the more complex of the two films as its story contains a few subplots involving the character of Alain, such as his relationship with his preschool-aged son, but I recommend The Sessions, too.

Ray Wheeler's new book

My friend Ray Wheeler has just published a new collection of short stories. Entitled Bar Talk and Tall Tales, it's available for $15 from Buffalo Commons Press, PO Box 15, St. Peter MN, 56082.

I've read some of these stories before (and so I can recommend the book), but I'll wait to say anything more substantial until I have a chance to write a full review.

Digging Dictionary Day

October 16 was Dictionary Day. Can you dig it?

The Great American Novel?

Jennifer Szalai and Mohsin Hamid, writing in the Times, ask, "Where are the best American novels written by women?"

Both writers evade the question by arguing that it's a flawed question.

Szalai, for example, turns the question by asking why we even debate it:

Instead of the Great American Novel, maybe we should be talking more about our Great American Fixation, the insistent desire to find the book that tells us who we are. How we define that search — what counts, what doesn’t — has said as much about “the American soul” as any novel that’s supposed to do the same.

Similarly, Hamid dismisses the question as simplistic:

The point of there being a notion of the Great American Novel is to elevate fiction. It’s a target for writers to aim at. It’s a mythological beast, an impossible mountaintop, a magical vale in the forest, a place to get storytellers dreaming of one day reaching. It keeps you warm when times are cold, and times in the world of writing for a living are mostly cold.

When fiction and news collide. . .

What do you do when the novel you’ve been writing for years is suddenly rendered irrelevant by current events? As Michael David Lukas says, writing in the Times, do you accept the new reality, which might even mean scrapping the work you’ve done, or do you ignore what’s changed and continuing writing a novel that's now set in the past?

 There’s no one “correct” answer, of course.

Bending Time

One of my favorite writers (and the subject of my fourth book), Charles Johnson, has just published a children’s book that he co-authored with his daughter, Elisheba. Bending Time: The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder tells the story of a fifth grade genius who has discovered the secret of time travel. Emery’s best friend, his classmate Gabby, helps him as he travels back to the age of dinosaurs.

This book will be a good one for children, for it is not only suspenseful and quite funny but it also introduces some basic concepts of science, such as the properties of positrons and Einstein’s theories of relativity. More importantly, though, the story teaches the value of friendship and the importance of perseverance through adversity.

A nice bonus in Bending Time is that Charles has illustrated it himself. Although he is most famous today as an award-winning novelist and recipient of a McArthur “genius” grant, Charles actually began his career as a cartoonist and illustrator. His style might seem simple at first, but subtle details in the backgrounds of the pictures often add another layer of wit.

I recommend Bending Time for anyone who likes to read with his kids. It will make the perfect Christmas present!

Kerouac's Mexico

While I'm not really a fan of Jack Kerouac's work, I enjoyed this New York Times article about his Mexican hangouts. Damien Cave writes:

My best friends in Mazatlán, whom I had met only a day earlier, were behind me arguing and laughing. But with a beer in hand and my own perfect view of daylight’s final yawn, I was too blissed out to talk. The crashing waves sounded like drums, and everyone in the water seemed to be dancing: a tangle of teenagers splashed around and flirted, their wiry limbs shimmering like lures, then came a dazzling woman wearing a bathing suit of rainbow stripes, her bare feet catching the surf, her long hair waving in the breeze.

Maybe I'll get to visit soon!

Skulls

One of my favorite writers of non-fiction is Simon Winchester, the author of The Professor and the Madman (about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary), A Crack in the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), and Krakatoa (about the 1883 volcanic explosion). His latest book is Skulls.

Skulls is an iPad app that explores, in great detail, the various skulls in Alan Dudley’s house. Dudley’s collection, one of the finest in private hands, ranges from the hippopotamus (largest) to the smooth newt (smallest) and also includes such oddities as a two-headed cow. Winchester’s supplementary text explains how Dudley, an Englishman who makes his living by creating fine wooden interiors for luxury cars, collected each specimen. Occasional digressions in the book, such as a brief essay about skull images in Renaissance art and an examination of the skull iconography associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead, provide breaks from zoology.

You can view the skulls in 3-D, zoom in on their features, and rotate them 360 degrees. Links lead you to additional information, such as photographs of the animal and zoological details such as average species size and life span. In addition to a number of video and audio interviews with Dudley, a switch turns on Winchester’s text narration so that the app becomes an audio book.

Skulls is a gorgeous app, one well worth $3.99, so check it out.

Live By Night

I heard Dennis Lehane talk about his new novel, Live By Night, while I was in Boston in late May. Since its story sounded interesting, and since I liked the movies based on his earlier novels (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, Shutter Island), I thought I’d read his latest novel. Unfortunately, it’s not very good.

The novel, set in Boston during Prohibition, is about the son of a cop who rebels by associating with Irish mobsters. Joe then rises in this underworld until he challenges for control of the lucrative liquor-smuggling business. I can’t imagine that it ends well for him.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that the previous sentence is inconclusive, as if I’m writing this review without having finished the novel. That’s true.

Since I’m a big fan of gangster films set in the 1920s, as well as the current HBO series Boardwalk Empire, this should be a story that I enjoy reading, but I found the characters wooden and one-dimensional, the writing trite, and the plot predictable. There’s simply no depth anywhere, no complexity. Perhaps I’ve simply seen too many gangster films, or perhaps the genre is exhausted, but I couldn’t get past the mid-point of this novel.

And since life’s too short to read boring novels, I put Live By Night in some cement shoes and then made a midnight visit to the nearest lake.

Do clothes make the man?

Lee Siegel, writing in the Times, has some interesting observations about how fiction writers can reveal character through the clothes that they give to their creations. But after citing many examples from classic literature (from The Illiad to Ulysses), he argues that fashion doesn't seem as vital to contemporary novelists. As he points out:

A world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald’s very deliberate portrait of Gatsby wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan’s casual description of a character dressed in “black cords and a white button-up shirt” in her brilliant novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Gatsby is wearing the novel’s themes: white as the fantasy of self-remaking without the blemishes of the past; silver and gold the currency-tinged colors of an impossible happiness. Egan’s character is simply wearing clothes.

He concludes that today’s fiction is a reflection of today’s society: Just as we often pay little attention to the clothes that we wear in real life as we buy them off the rack from chain stores, our novelists pay little attention to the clothes that their characters wear.

Siegel's essay reminds me of what Mark Twain had to say on this topic:

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

No god but God

Before the controversies over his most recent book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), Reza Aslan was best known for his book about the other major monotheistic world religion, Islam, which happens to be his own faith. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) is an essential primer into the history of Islam.

The first chapter provides a background to the religion's formation by describing the paganism of Arabia before 600 C.E., which included the major god Allah (the name is a contraction of the phrase al-ilah, meaning "the god") and hundreds of minor gods. Innumerable jinns (also spelled genies) and other spirits also supposedly inhabited Arabia. Mecca, with its Ka'ba (a shrine holding 360 idols), was at the center of this paganism, and all of these gods co-existed in a hierarchy, although Allah was generally accepted as the most important. To understand the rise of Islam, Aslan argues, it is important to understand this social context:

All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality.

In short, without this pagan background, which is often ignored in biographies of Mohammad, Islam could not have arisen.

After this provocative first chapter, Aslan then sets the stage for the sudden rise of Islam by pointing to the increasing social inequality in Mecca due to the influence of a powerful tribe that controlled the city’s economy and trade. The disenfranchised and poor, he argues, were extremely receptive to Mohammed's message, which the prophet insisted was straight from Allah, that all believers should be treated with respect and dignity. In fact, after the first "pillar of faith," which is that Allah should be worshipped as the sole deity in the universe ("There is no god but God and Mohammad is his Messenger"), showing charity towards the poor and taking care of the weak are central to Islamic belief. It's no surprise, then, that when Mohammad came down from Mount Hira in 610 C.E., where he had been fasting, to tell of his visions expressing the will of Allah, he found a receptive audience.

(Incidentally, Aslan essentially makes the same argument to explain the rapid spread of Christianity: Like Islam, its promise was to cure the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and protect the weak. There was one additional promise to the Jews, however: To expel the Romans from the Holy Land.)

Subsequent chapters trace the growth of Islam, from the first mosque in Medina to its global impact today. One lengthy chapter explains the schism between the Sunni and Shia that puzzles most non-Muslims, while other chapters discuss the tradition of hijab, the definition of jihad, the nature of the Koran (the book is not simply the words of Allah but is Allah himself), and other tenets of Islam. One particularly fascinating chapter explores the Sufi, a mystical sect of Islam based on love and asceticism. Aslan seems particularly sympathetic to this sect, which is loathed as heretical by orthodox Sunnis.

While No god but God isn't going to make you into an expert in Islam, it will give you a basic understanding into the religion, and as such, you'll find it invaluable reading.

Pet words

Brad Leithauser has an entertaining essay on The New Yorker’s blog site about pet words. As he points out, a writer’s pet words can reveal a great deal about his mind works. In Joseph Conrad’s fiction, for example, the word “impenetrable” crops up again and again, which makes sense because, for Conrad, much about human nature remained inexplicable.

For Leithauser, one of his own pet words is “level”:

The word “level” belongs on the own list of my twenty favorite words. I love it because it so fittingly embodies its own definition. Could any word possibly look more level than “level”? It’s not merely a palindrome. It’s also all but bilaterally symmetrical—legibly itself if written on a pane of glass and read from the other side. In its perfection, it’s hard to believe it was arrived at through the random evolution of everyday speech and wasn’t an architect or engineer’s construction: it’s a Logos that might serve, in its balanced stolidity, as a firm foundation for a philosophical system, and I felt that I was off to an auspicious start when I snuck “level” into the first paragraph of this essay.

I suppose one of my own pet words is “undoubtedly,” which seems to give some certainty in an uncertain world. Or maybe I’m just especially conscious of this word because, for years, I confused it with “undoubtably.”

At any rate, I use it frequently. Undoubtedly.

Read more great literature!

Two recent articles focus on the benefits of reading great literature.

The first, published in The Guardian, argues that "bibliotherapy" can offer palliative effects that pharmaceuticals can't:

A tall order, but Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin would agree; as colleagues of de Botton at the School of Life in Bloomsbury their belief in the curative powers of the novel has led them to set up a formal bibliotherapy service "for life's ailments." They prescribe only fiction ("the purest and best form of bibliotherapy"), and apart from occasional excursions into the classics, concentrate on books written within the last couple of centuries. The Novel Cure is the distillation of those recommendations. "Our apothecary contains Balzacian balms and Tolstoyan tourniquets," they tell us in their introduction, "the salves of Saramago and the purges of Perec and Proust."

Some of the advice is tongue in cheek (the cure for being a shopaholic is Bret Easton Ellis's American Pyscho?), but some of the recommendations make sense.

The second article, in the Times, points out that a recent study found classic fiction teaches its readers important social skills, including empathy.

It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

“Frankly, I agree with the study,” said Albert Wendland, who directs a master’s program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”

Many questions still need to be answered (How long does the effect last?), but the research is promising. In the meantime, why risk being a social zero? Read more great literature!

The sexiest book you've ever read? Come again?

As a follow up to its poll, the Times asked some writers, "What's the most erotic book you've ever read?'

Francine Prose replies, "The King James Bible."

She explains:

I have no idea how I learned to decode the language of the King James Bible, but somehow I understood what it meant when Potiphar’s wife tells Joseph, “Lie with me.” Or when David sees Bathsheba bathing. Or when Abraham “went in unto” Hagar and she conceived. I was mystified by Noah’s sons covering his nakedness, and by the Sodomites asking Lot to bring out the visiting angels so they could “know” them. But I knew it was hot.

Read more writers on sex in another article.

What was your first sexy book?

What was the first sexy book that you read? The New York Times would like to know.

For me, I think it was one of Henry Miller's novels that I picked up in 1973 when I was eleven. At least, I can't remember an earlier one.

I do remember, however, that a few years earlier I had asked my mother what a word meant:

"Mom, what's this word?" I asked. "Orgies?"

She looked shocked and asked for the book. After looking at the title and then reading the paragraph, she handed it back and said the word meant "a celebration."

The book was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Well, then, pretty soon all hands got to talking about the diseased again, and how good he was, and what a loss he was, and all that; and before long a big iron-jawed man worked himself in there from outside, and stood a-listening and looking, and not saying anything; and nobody saying anything to him either, because the king was talking and they was all busy listening. The king was saying -- in the middle of something he'd started in on --

"-- they bein' partickler friends o' the diseased. That's why they're invited here this evenin'; but tomorrow we want ALL to come -- everybody; for he respected everybody, he liked everybody, and so it's fitten that his funeral orgies sh'd be public."

And so he went a-mooning on and on, liking to hear himself talk, and every little while he fetched in his funeral orgies again, till the duke he couldn't stand it no more; so he writes on a little scrap of paper, "OBSEQUIES, you old fool," and folds it up, and goes to goo-gooing and reaching it over people's heads to him. The king he reads it and puts it in his pocket, and says:

"Poor William, afflicted as he is, his HEART'S aluz right. Asks me to invite everybody to come to the funeral -- wants me to make 'em all welcome. But he needn't a worried -- it was jest what I was at."

Then he weaves along again, perfectly ca'm, and goes to dropping in his funeral orgies again every now and then, just like he done before. And when he done it the third time he says:

"I say orgies, not because it's the common term, because it ain't -- obsequies bein' the common term -- but because orgies is the right term. Obsequies ain't used in England no more now -- it's gone out. We say orgies now in England. Orgies is better, because it means the thing you're after more exact. It's a word that's made up out'n the Greek ORGO, outside, open, abroad; and the Hebrew JEESUM, to plant, cover up; hence inTER. So, you see, funeral orgies is an open er public funeral."