Attending your own funeral

Kevin Baker tells what it's like for an author to attend a book club scheduled to discuss his novel:

Soon someone cleared his throat, told us his name and said he was usually the club’s discussion moderator. But not tonight: “I just didn’t like this book that much, so it’s fine with me if somebody else wants to lead the discussion.”

Wait a minute. People were going to give it a thumbs up or down right from the beginning? Uh-oh. But so it went with the next person. And the next. And the next: “I didn’t really like it that much either.”

This was a disaster. And now it was my turn. I was embarrassed not only for myself but for the members of the club. How would they feel once they discovered the author they had just dissed was sitting right there? Everyone stared at me expectantly. I swallowed hard and did the only decent thing — I gave them the name of an old roommate. “I’m Richard Feeley,” I mumbled, eyes downcast, “and I rather liked it.”

Why you should major in English

Gerald Howard, writing in the Times, makes a convincing argument for majoring in English. After convincing his bosses at Penguin to pay an advance to Alice Adams to publish two of her novels, he has an epiphany:

However, as I went back to my office I experienced an instance of what the French call “stair wit.” I thought, wait a minute, I am putting that $7,500 to work. It’s an investment. The chain of activity I am putting in motion will give work to printers and shippers. It will provide bookstores (there were still bookstores) with tangible goods to sell at a profit. The revenue from those sales will help to pay my salary, my colleagues’ salaries, even our C.F.O.’s salary. Alice Adams will have some thousands of dollars in her pocket — maybe to invest in a C.D. All this and a few thousand people fewer than I put down on the P. & L. (I’d lied, of course) will have bought and enjoyed two excellent novels that deserved to be in print.

Whereas if we’d just put that money in the hands of a bank, they would just ... well, I was pretty hazy on what a bank would actually do with that money, but my general sense was that it would sit there in a vault microbially propagating itself and what good would that do anybody? Economically I was putting my shoulder — or Penguin’s shoulder — to the wheel! I came away with the conviction that I wasn’t useless anymore.

Ambrose Bierce in the Civil War

My most recent essay for the New York Times just came out. You can read about Ambrose Bierce and his service in the Civil War.

So you want to be a writer?

Are you ready to chuck your staid career to embark on a life as a novelist? Ready to switch your major from accounting to creative writing? Vanessa Barbara, writing in the Times, suggests that you understand what you're getting into:

Let me give you some personal numbers. I wrote a book in 2008 that won a literary prize and recently sold its 3,000th copy. The book retails for around $15, the author’s royalty rate is 5 percent, so I earned $0.75 from each copy. So for the book that took me one year to write and four more years to sell, I earned a total of around $2,250 (and a bout of depression). I’d have done better donating my body to science.

Although she is specifically describing her experience as a writer in Brazil, I can attest that circumstances are not much better for writers in America, so know what you're getting into if you'd like to be a writer!

Writing for money

Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer, once argued, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

I generally adhere to that idea (by declining to write for the local newspaper, for example), but I'm obviously violating Johnson's principle right now on this blog. Tim Kreider, writing in the Times, agrees with Johnson, too:

Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.

So I’m writing this not only in the hope that everyone will cross me off the list of writers to hit up for free content but, more important, to make a plea to my younger colleagues. As an older, more accomplished, equally unsuccessful artist, I beseech you, don’t give it away. As a matter of principle. Do it for your colleagues, your fellow artists, because if we all consistently say no they might, eventually, take the hint. It shouldn’t be professionally or socially acceptable — it isn’t right — for people to tell us, over and over, that our vocation is worthless.

Literary prizes?

Daniel Mendelsohn and Jennifer Szalai, writing in the Times, have an interesting debate about the value of literary prizes.They agree that the notion of giving an award for a work of art is a bit silly (especially since the valuation will always be subjective), but then Mendelsohn concludes that the process itself is valuable:

One thing is inarguable: that so many civilizations, over so many millenniums, have felt it crucial to award prizes to works of art — which is to say, to show that literature, art, theater and even criticism are prized. Whatever the names on the plaques and medals, the real winner, in the end, is culture itself.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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."

A slumgullion of new words

Kate Manning, writing in the Times, offers a plea for reinvigorating your voice by resurrecting archaic words:

By perusing period novels, magazines, advice books, letters, medical texts and sermons, contemporary novelists can conjure up a fresh narrative voice not only out of the vocabulary of bygone days, but from the rhythms of speech, the values of an era. A 19th-century “swell” is not going to speak the “secret language of crime,” but will have his own “vocabulum,” one that will reflect a worldview. 

Anyone for a lit crawl?

Now here's a brilliant idea: the Lit Crawl. I think I'll build my next vacation around the one in London:

Ms. Russo, who heads the Manhattan and Brooklyn crawls, is one such veteran. Another is Mette Risa, an organizer of last weekend’s London Lit Crawl, a slate of seven events sprinkled through Soho and Covent Garden. To Ms. Risa, the only question about a Lit Crawl in London was why it hadn’t happened before.

“I think it’s the most obvious city for a Lit Crawl,” she said. “People love pubs. People love books.”

After all, what's better than a pint of beer and arguing about your favorite authors?

Messy creativity?

The argument is that a messy environment is a better stimulus to creativity. A few novelists and poets that I've known have had neat and orderly offices, but most of them work in offices that should be condemned as health hazards: leftover food and half-drunk cups of coffee, stacks of books and reams of paper threatening to topple over, dog or cat hair floating through the air.

When people ask me why I never became the novelist that I wanted to be, I reply, "I realized that I had nothing to say."

Maybe the problem is that I can't stand to have anything out of place? That I literally can't concentrate if the books are out of order in my bookcase?

The rhythm method

Putting aside the fact that he admires two lousy writers (William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe), Roy Peter Clark makes a good point in today’s Times when he argues the power of short sentences to make a point. But it’s not short sentences in isolation that are effective. No, it’s when they are in contrast to longer sentences that, in effect, have worked to set them up. Like diamonds glistening upon black velvet, these short sentences then stand apart and leave lasting impressions on their readers. It’s the rhythm method.

I thought this question in the New York Times was interesting: Should a novelist write reviews? Zoe Heller and Adam Kirsch argue “yes” because such conversation about literature is a way to show that it matters. Kirsch adds:

For all these writers [Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Henry James], criticism was a way of understanding themselves, of discovering how they did and did not want to write. It was also a means of educating the public, preparing readers for the revolution in taste they wanted to sponsor. Perhaps a writer can’t be great without a touch of this kind of aggression, this intolerance of artistic error. At the very least, novelists who do risk writing criticism should know they’re in the best of company.

What's in a name?

A number of studies show that a bottle of wine priced at $100 will taste better than a bottle priced at $5, even if the contents are identical. Similarly, a painting by an acknowledged master will get tens of millions of dollars, but the same work by anonymous might warrant $1 at a garage sale.

Well, the same principle applies in writing since a novel by J. K. Rowling will sell tens of millions of copies, yet (as the Times points out) the same book by unknown author Robert Gailbraith sells only a few thousand copies.

Of course, Rowling had to start out as an unknown, too, so it’s not impossible to rise, but it has to feel discouraging for beginning novelists.

Will you please be quiet, please?

I can only do one thing at a time, and I can’t do anything if it’s not quiet. George Prochnik, in an essay in the Times, has some interesting thoughts on this topic. As he notes, “The findings [in one recent study] were clear: even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days.”