The Elegant Variation

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.

RIFFING ON DFW

I can't imagine at this late stage of the game that anyone needs me to direct them to Maud Newton's New York Times Magazine Riff on David Foster Wallace's influence on writing on the net, which has been lighting up Twitter, Facebook and the blogs.  But in case you've been as hunkered down as I've been, I send it along, with a hearty endorsement of Newton's take.  (I took another ill-fated crack at Infinite Jest a few months ago but foundered yet again. I fear I will fall into the Geoff Dyer camp on this one.)

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.

Still, I will continue to try and grapple with DFW.  His shadow is too long to ignore.  I am not done yet.  

WHY SO SILENT, YOU?

Been on a bit of a late summer tear, reading-wise, hence the silence around here.  Expect some long overdue updates to the Recommended sidebar later this month.  As for the books that have caught my eye, though, and should catch yours as well, a sampling:  Harold Bloom's The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible is just fascinating, brilliant and reliably Bloomsian ... Michael Ondaatje's latest, The Cat's Table (October) is a lovely coming of age tale ... I've finally dipped into Bruce Chatwin, checking out his novel Utz and his justly celebrated travelogue In Patagonia ... Kundera's latest essay collection, Encounter, should be read by any novelist, published or un, and it sent me back to The Curtain, which I'd never read ... I'm finally reading Nuruddin Farah, who has forever been on my radar and comes highly recommended ... Dipping into Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, which are set to make a splash on these shores next year if Zadie Smith has anything to say about it ... and have been enjoying Georges Bernanos' 1937 classic, The Diary of a Country Priest.  With much more to come.  I'd love to hear how my readers spent their summer reading time ... 

UNPACKING THE SHELVES: AESTHETICS

I've finally gotten all the fiction put away, and have got the next three groupings staged and ready to unpack. First is my collection of writers' journals and letters, in which I've always had a slightly prurient interest; then my literary criticism; and then poetry.  That will bring me to about the two-thirds mark, and then I'll pause to just enjoy them for a while.  

My latest conundrum came yesterday as I struggled over what to do with my series of New York Review titles.  It's one of several wonderful series I keep, including others from Hesperus, Penguin and Canongate.  If I were truly anal retentive, I suppose I would place each book where it belongs alphabetically.  Zweig's Beware of Pity would go with the rest of my Zweig.  But I confess a fondness for the look of those beautifully designed books all lined up so neatly on my shelves, and so I made one decision based on aesthetics alone and kept them together.  I also have a near photographic memory for the books I own, so I'm confident, for example, that I won't forget that my copy of Simenon's Tropic Moon will be found amid its NYRB brethren.

I anticipate the opprobrium of the purists.  Lord knows, I feel it myself ... 

BIRNBAUM v. B&B (BANVILLE & BLACK)

My pal Robert Birnbaum has a nice chat up with John Banville to ease us into the autumn ... 

RB: Do the Banville books get more rigorous editing?

JB: No, the Banville books are not edited at all.

RB: Who, ostensibly, is your editor? Sonny Mehta?

JB: Yeah. He would make some suggestions, which I would take or leave. I’ve been working two to five years on this thing. There is nothing that anybody can tell me about it that I don’t already know.

RB: You’re honest with yourself?

JB: Of course. You couldn’t write if you weren’t honest. That’s what makes art so valuable. No matter how dreadful the person, the art is always honest. Art can’t be made dishonestly. It just can’t. I mean, you can do it but it will be bad art.

The latest Black, A Death in Summer, is right here on my desk, but it's queued up behind a few others. It's been a bit of a late summer reading binge around here, about which more presently. 

AUTUMN EVENTS ADDED

It's going to be a busy season in L.A., with the like of Michael Ondaatje, Norman Rush, Anne Enright and many others coming to town.  Check out the Worthy Readings sidebar on the left for all the latest updates.

EAST COAST WISHES

To my friends, loved ones and readers back east, I am thinking of you all tonight.  Be careful, stay safe, be well.

UCLA WRITERS FAIRE

After a blissful two semester hiatus, I will return to teaching this fall at UCLA, repeating my Novel III class (now open for registration), and then teaching Novel IV in the winter.  In advance of those classes, I will be appearing on a pair of panels this Sunday at the Writers' Program's annual Writers Faire at UCLA, so you can come kick the tires before signing up for a class. 

At 1:30 I will be participating in Making it to "The End": Story Staying Power for Novelists and at 2:20 I will be part of the Getting Your Fiction Published panel.  Since I've already got a number of students who have successfully finished drafts, I'd say my thoughts on the former are worth hearing out.  I'm a bit less enthused about the second panel, in that my feeling - grotesquely oversimplified - is that if you are thinking about getting your work published, you're thinking about the wrong thing.  I tell my students time and again that the only thing any of them need to be thinking about is writing the best possible manuscript. Period.  I'll say as much on Sunday.

If you can't make it in person, UCLA does plan to stream things this year.  And I will be noodling around in the morning, taking in a few other panels, including my friend, author and fellow instructor Darcy Cosper who will be talking about Writing Your First Novel (11 am) and Writing With A Day Job (11:50 am).  There will also be great exhibitors including the Writers Junction and 826LA, so do come out for a fine literary Sunday at UCLA.  It's all free.  Hope to see you there.

POSSIBILITIES

My UK publisher Jamie Byng - who I imagine must be pretty tired of the enfant terrible label - talks to British GQ.

The possibilities have never been greater, but that doesn't make it easier. E-books do involve lower costs, but only in manufacturing and distribution. Publishing is also about finding new talent, rigorous editing, championing the books you believe in, and all that doesn't just disappear with digital books.

FROM FIRST TO LAST

David Kipen, whose lending library Libros Schmibros comes to the westside with a pop-up at the Hammer Museum later this month, writes about the closing night of Village Books in the Palisades, in which your humble host makes a cameo:

To keep my mind off the temptation to weep uncontrollably, I asked myself which book would make the most fitting final purchase. The buzzards had long since started circling, so the remaining books were already huddling toward the middle shelves, hemmed in by vacant plywood on all sides. When I hit Mark Sarvas up for a suggestion, that sly blogger at the Elegant Variation — with unnerving speed, as if he'd already somehow had the question leaked to him — pointed discreetly toward a copy of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. Then he resumed fulminating darkly about the evening's events: "Where were all these people six months ago?"

I'm still fulminating darkly, too angry to put down my own thoughts about the closing.  Everything I have to say will likely get me kicked out of my neighborhood.  So you have Kipen's frankly superior musings in my place.  Check them out.  And for those wondering, my final purchases at Village Books were At Swim-Two-Birds, Pictures from an Institution, The Lonely Passion of Judth Hearne and Kate Christensen's latest, The Astral.

WRITERS JUNCTION SUMMER LITERARY MARATHON

The Writers Junction, the groovy writing space where I toil away, is holding its Second Summer Literary Marathon this Friday.  Unlike last time, it's not a 24-hour marathon but it's still impressive and entertaining.  And I will be appearing at 7:50 p.m. to read a brief section from my mysterious and long-in-the-works second novel.  Here is the official write up, and the modest admission goes to a good cause, The Young Storytellers Foundation.  Hope to see you on Friday evening!  (For you Facebook types, go here.)

Friday, August 12, 2011
7pm-2am
at The Writers Junction
1001 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica 90401
Tickets $8 here

Or roll the dice at the door for your admission price – literally.

 Revisit last year’s wildly popular 24-hour literary marathon with new & returning stars.  This event will feature some of the literary, entertainment, & music world's best & brightest including:

 -Inside The Writer's Room: A Panel – get the inside scoop on a television writers room with showrunners & staff writers including: Liz Tigelaar (LIFE UNEXPECTED, ONCE UPON A TIME), Bruce Miller (EUREKA, MEDIUM), Deirdre Shaw (LIFE UNEXPECTED, JANE BY DESIGN) & more!

-Neal Brennan* co-creator of Comedy Central's CHAPPELLE'S SHOW

-Jillian Lauren author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

-Drew Droege comedian & 2010 Outfest Award for Emerging Talent

-Brad Listi author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder

-Mark Sarvas* author of Harry, Revised

-Mark Rizzo* TV/film writer & storytelling veteran

-Ben Weber* actor, writer, Geico Caveman

-Ashaki Jackson* poet

-And many more special guests!

Performances will be going for 7 (not 24!) hours straight, as will the food, drinks, & revelry.  There will be a silent auction, giveaways, & you can check out the amazing workspace that is The Writers Junction.  We will donate a portion of the evening's proceeds to The Young Storytellers Foundation. 

* denotes Writers Junction member

 

TRUST ME, JUST WATCH

I know, right?  Wow. Astonishingly entertaining. And, apparently, he's here in L.A. for local readers to check out (though three and a half minutes does seem the perfect length for this sort of thing.) Via.

WEEKEND READ - ALAN BENNETT ON LIBRARIES

In truth, I'd read Alan Bennett on pretty much anything, but when the subject is libraries, who can resist?

There were other perils to reading, but it was only when I hit middle age that I became aware of them. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn’t contain my usual scene of someone baffled at a bookcase the sense of being outfaced by books is a good description of what the play is about. ‘Hopkins,’ I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, ‘Hopkins was never without a book. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without a book.’ Books as badges, books as shields; one doesn’t think of libraries as perilous places where you can come to harm. Still, they do carry their own risks.

L.A. EVENT - SHEILA HETI & TRAMPOLINE HALL ***HIGHLY RECOMMENDED***

Longtime readers of this blog (if any remain) will know that I'm a huge fan of Sheila Heti, whose marvelous novel Ticknor (see sidebar) was the first book I reviewed for a print outlet.

Sheila will be making a too-rare L.A. appearance this week, when she combines two purposes into one: On Wednesday night, she will bring her renowned Trampoline Hall to town, and the event will double as a launch for The Chairs are Where People Go, her latest collaboration with Trampoline Hall host Misha Glouberman.

For those who don't know what Trampoline Hall is, it's a lecture series in which people lecture on subjects of their own choosing, but outside their area of expertise, followed by questions from the audience. This time around, Busy Philipps will be talking about "Is Monogamy a Trick?" and Ezra Buzzington will be talking "The Impostor Syndrome."  And Sheila and Misha will be reading from the new book.

You can learn more and get tickets here.  it's just another of a growing number of excellent reasons to head downtown.  Hope to see you there.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: ARTHUR THROUGH THE AGES

For as long I can remember, like many others, I've been captivated by the Arthurian legends.  I've consumed more versions that I can remember, from Steinbeck to White to Camelot 3000.  But I'm still always excited and interested when a new one pops up.  And when it comes with a pedigree like Peter Ackroyd's, I can't help but take notice, despite a lukewarm appraisal in the Guardian.

Viking's The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend (November 2011) is the latest attempt to bring the stories "to life with contemporary prose."  Steinbeck has a similar mission statement.  In the introduction to his The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, he wrote that he wanted to "set them down in plain present-day speech for my own young sons," an effort he did not live to complete.  And so I thought I might place the famous paragraph, in which Arthur draws the sword from the son, side by side in three iterations for you to compare and contrast.  

For those who don't know the setup, Arthur's foster brother Kay is on his way to the joust when he realizes he has (conveniently) left his sword behind.  He asks Arthur to go fetch it for him.

First, the original Malory:  (From Malory Works, Oxford University Press, 1971)

"I wyll wel," said Arthur, and rode fast after the swerd.

And whan he cam home the lady and al were out to see the joustyng.  Thenne was Arthur wroth and saide to hymself, "I will ryde to the chircheyard and take the swerd that stycketh in the stone, for my broder sir Kay shall not be without a swerd this day."  So whan he cam to the chircheyard sir Arthur alight and tayed his hors to the style, and so he wente to the tent and found no knyghtes there, for they were atte justying.  And so he handled the swerd by the handels, and lightly and fiersly pulled it out of the stone, and took his hors and rode his way untyll he came to his broder sir Kay and delyvered hym the swerd.

Now Steinbeck:

"I will do it gladly," said Arthur, and he turned his horse and galloped back to bring his foster brother's sword to him.  But when he came to the lodging he found it empty and locked up, for everyone had gone out to see the jousting.

Then Arthur was angry and he said to himself, "Very well, I will ride to the churchyard and take the sword that is sticking in the stone there.  I do not want my brother, Sir Kay, to be without a sword today."

When he came to the churchyard, Arthur dismounted and tied his horse to the stile and walked to the tent, and found no guardian knights there, for they too had gone to the jousting.  Then Arthur grasped the sword by its handle and easily and fiercely drew it from the anvil and the stone, and he mounted his horse and rode quickly until he overtook Sir Kay and gave him the sword.

Finally, Ackroyd:

"Of course, brother.  I will be back in a moment."  When he arrived at the house he found that all the servants had gone to the joust, and that the doors were locked.  In great annoyance he said to himself, "I will ride into the churchyard, and take the sword that is sticking in the stone.  My brother must not be without his weapon on this day."  He came into the churchyard, tied his horse to the stile, and walked into the tent where the ten knights were supposed to watch over the stone.  But they, too, had gone to the joust.

So he went over to the stone and, taking the hilt with both hands, lightly and easily took out the sword. Then he galloped back to Smithfield and gave the sword to Kay.

I've always been amused by Kay's initial willingness to claim the sword (and the throne) as his own, and how quickly he confesses the truth.

I'm inclined to award this exchange to Steinbeck.  He takes some liberties and makes some additions but his Arthur - angry, instead of annoyed, and overtaking instead of merely galloping - comports nicely with the Arthur of my imaginings.  I also enjoy the opposition of Malory's original "lightly and fiersly" which Steinbeck preserves but Ackroyd irons out.  And it's interesting that Ackroyd, whose version is billed as "abridged", chooses to remind readers of the purpose of the guards around the stone.  Whereas Ackroyd's "both hands" is both a nice visual and seems consistent with the use of "handels" in the Malory.

Anyway, I could do this stuff all day.  I look forward to having Arthur as my companion this summer, and will report back in more detail as we progress.  

D'OH

One of Andrew Sullivan's guest bloggers makes the mistake of taking Shalom Auslander at face value.

AS IF ...

... I didn't have enough things keeping me from writing and blogging.  Le Tour is upon us.

Contador may well be unbeatable but I am going to be pulling for Andy Schleck.  And I can't wait for the team time trial.  If you've never seen one, they are positively balletic, and we don't get enough of them.

VILLAGE BOOKS CLOSING PARTY

I've tried numerous times to write about the imminent closing of my neighborhood independent bookstore Village Books but I can't seem to get past my anger and my heartbreak to say anything that doesn't risk getting me ejected from the neighborhood.  I will weigh on this later but for now I'll settle for saying that closures like this kill the soul.  It's a measure of the cultural, intellectual and civic disengagement of a neighborhood that buys BMWs for their kids but can't support a store like Village Books.

Anyway, enough spleen.  If you're in the area, come by tomorrow evening at 8:30 to wish the best to the store's wonderful staff:

You are invited to a reception in honor of Katie O'Laughlin and the amazing Village Books staff as we celebrate 14 years of Village Books in Pacific Palisades. The reception will be held at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore Avenue, Pacific Palisdes, at 8:30 PM. It will begin immediately after the book signing by Sugar Ray Leonard, Honorary Mayor of Pacific Palisades, of his new book The Big Fight: My Life in and Out of the Ring, written with former Palisadian, Michael Arkush. There will be light refreshments and champagne to thank Katie, Mia, Connie, Jessica, Andrea, Barbara, Danielle, Liz, Ed, Amy and all who have worked at Village Books over the years for their contribution to Pacific Palisades and to celebrate the launch of the new business "Village Books To Go!" The reception is hosted by Pauletta Walsh and Bill Bruns. We hope you can join us!

McMORE

My posts on unpacking my library continue to generate the most (and most interesting) emails.  Regarding my conundrum in my prior post about where to place my books authored by the Mc's, one of my readers kindly writes in:

 ...just to let you know that the "mc and mac" rule is not set in stone. The branch of the county library where I work follows by alphabetic sequence - so much easier and less fussy.

She then went on to comb through the ALA wiki and sent me this link to their filing rules, which sort of seems to play it both ways, although one of the two validates my choice:

In the ALA Filing Rules, names beginning with M', Mc, and Mac are filed alphabetically as spelled. (letter-by-letter)

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

KINGSLEY AMIS INTERVIEW

 

One of the many things drawing my attention these days, this old interview with Amis pere.

UNPACKING THE SHELVES: J-N

Unpacking of the library has resumed, after an interruption of several months to accommodate the completion of Part One of my novel (about which, more anon), and to do some home rearranging to add bookcase space.  I'm now back at it and have unpacked another two shelves of my fiction collection, pictured below, in the course of which some random thoughts and observations arose.

First, I don't think there's another single volume in my collection about which I have as much critical commentary as I do about Ulysses.  (Second place goes to The Magic Mountain but it's not even close. Actually, while unpacking I became utterly engrossed with Doctor Faustus, which will probably get a re-read quite soon now.) I have several companions, including the great Hugh Kenner's, as well as a double-CD set of lectures on the novel.  I'm sure there are plenty of other books which have a similarly deep well of critical accompaniment, and I suspect it probably says more of my own interest in Ulysses than anything else. Still, no other single title in my library claims so much space in quite the same way.

(Yes, I'm aware that Tony Judt is not a novelist, but there are a few writers I revere who I feel write non-fiction with a novelist's grace, and so I imprecisely include them here.)

Speaking of imprecision, I grappled with another librarian problem when I got to the letter "M" which, incidentally, is the largest stretch of letters so far, taking up nearly five shelves.  What to do with the McWriters?  I have quite a lot of McEwan and McGahern, and I've always struggled with where to put them.  I remember being taught as a child that when alphabetizing names, Mc came before Ma, but that feels antiquated and just plain wrong.  Certainly, my iTunes doesn't put McCartney before Marvin Gaye. Nor do I.  And so, McEwan follows Markson.  My grade school librarian is rolling in her grave.

I also noticed that the large bulk of my Hungarian novelists emerged in this series of letters - Kertesz, Konrad, Marai and Nadas.  Absolutely nothing insightful or scientific to note here, just kind of amusing to be swarmed by so many Hungarians at once.  (Part Two of my novel is largely set in Budapest, so I suppose I do have Hungary a bit on the brain these days.)

Then came the the question of what to do with my James Bond collection.  I have a series of boxed reprints of the original Jonathan Cape editions, which are quite splendid but take up a ton of shelf space. When I first unpacked the "F"s, I was worried about that and so I did not unpack the Flemings, although I admit now that there might have been a bit of snobbery afoot.  Seemed odd to place Casino Royale next to A Sentimental Education.  But I recently came across the box of reissues and was struck again by how handsome they are, and so I decided to unpack them, along with a few vintage hardcovers, and set them atop the "F" bookcase (the space below long having been filled up).  It seemed a suitable compromise:

And yes, that's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the far right. 

Finally, I have a whole lot of Nabokov.  Which is entirely as it should be.  Ondaatje waits in the wings, including my beloved hard cover copy of In the Skin of the Lion.  But it's time to begin Part Two, so who knows when the rest of the alphabet will see the light of day?

WHERE WE GO NEXT (PLUS, OF COURSE, BANVILLE)

What is to become of TEV?

I’m not entirely sure yet. The benign neglect that has characterized the last year or so might well be an indication that it’s time to pack things in. Yet there’s something in me that stops me from pulling the plug. I continue to value the intelligent discussion with smart, committed and opinionated readers and, despite the overwhelming number of book-related sites, I continue to find that sort of dialogue in strangely short supply.

In recent weeks I’ve read a number of posts at lauded sites, sites I admire, written by folks I like, and I’ve been, well, dismayed at how lousy they can be. But that’s nothing, in and of itself – we all have our off days, we’ve all written things we probably would like to take back.

What I found more troubling was the chorus of commenters who would invariably leap in after each post declaiming its virtues. And I’ve come to believe that perhaps the problem with the internet isn’t that it gives voice to every crank with a keyboard and a broadband connection. No, it may be that the insidious thing is the insularity of the waiting chorus of those who champion mediocrity, who validate self-indulgence or unoriginal thinking.

So, what I can say is that the days of daily updates of literary news are probably over. That sort of thing is crazy time-consuming but, more importantly, I’m just not as interested in this prize and that obituary as I once was. Plus I have some considerable life changes to navigate, not to mention a novel to finish.

What I will continue to do is to run interviews with authors of note; to point out books I think are worthy of your attention and to wave you off the overrated ones; to take this piss out of the occasional blowhard; to draw your attention to especially thoughtful essays and discussions online; to continue to post about teaching and share some of my writing lessons; to post longer, random train of thought essays (like this one) and to discuss second novel travails. (A new post on that subject is in the works.)

And, of course, I will continue to advise you on all matters Banville-related.

Speaking of which, I’ve been asked several times about my failure to discuss Banville’s latest novel The Infinites. Some people have taken my relative silence to be somehow damning. Not the case. There are three reasons why I haven’t talked as much about the novel as I might.

First, I’ve come to realize that there is an assumption among my readers that a Banville novel is a pre-sold quantity to me. I’m not sure that’s entirely inaccurate, but at a minimum, I suspect no TEV reader would have been much surprised to see me endorse the novel. (Which, incidentally, I do.)

Second, many of you are likely to remember that Banville was kind enough to blurb Harry, Revised. And so I found myself perhaps a bit oversensitive to accusations of logrolling and the like. On the one hand, I’ve seen enough about the ecology of blurbs that I’ve come to understand they are, as often as not, gestures of friendship as they are of critical respect. (Think of the familiar round-robin of names that routinely surfaces on the back of any novel by Believer alumni.) On the other, a good book is a good book, whether written by a friend or foe, and I’ve come to see it seems excessively fastidious not to say so. Still, I continue to pick up books hopefully, gambling each time against experience that a blurb will be meaningful, and so I’ve been a bit reluctant to further undermine an already debased form.

Finally, and most relevant, I hadn’t actually read the book until last month.

How on earth is that possible? Let me explain. MOTEV called me some weeks ago to inform me that her book group had turned to The Infinities, and she was loving it. She was eager to discuss it with me, when I had to shamefacedly admit I hadn’t read it yet. I had started it when it came out, but I’d set it aside and now I couldn’t remember the reason. The last year really has been tumultuous, and amid my personal travails and focus on my novel, much has fallen by wayside.

So I picked up the book and began it again, and was thrilled anew as I always am by Banville’s prose. After a dozen pages or so, I remembered why I’d put it down. My novel is, among other things, about a character dealing with the death of his father. Which is one of the main themes of The Infinities. I decided that I wanted to avoid any additional Banville influence – as it is, anyone who has read The Book of Evidence will immediately see that my book is a rip-off, um, homage to this earlier work. So I decided to wait.

Unfortunately, Novel 2 has taken much longer than planned – subject of the future post – and I realized at this rate, it might be years before I could read it. And I remembered something Joseph O’Neill said when I interviewed him:

TEV: Do you read fiction while you are writing fiction?

Joseph O’Neill: I do. And I might do a couple of quick laps, and that’s it. It depends. Obviously, I can’t go seven years without reading a book. If I’m stuck for juice, I will go back to certain writers or investigate new writers and find out what’s going on.

TEV: Will there be any risk of seepage when that happens?

Joseph O’Neill: I hope so. I mean, you want a little bit of that. You know, you’ve got be grown up about influences. I think you’ve either got it or you haven’t. By ‘it’ I mean the knack of writing something valuable that’s your own. So if you are worried about being influenced, it’s almost a pointless worry. Either you’re going to be influenced or you’re not going to be influenced—it doesn’t change anything, it’s all about whether you have the knack. Anyway, the alternative is to not read anything. And no one can be a writer without being familiar with other writers.

And so I decided to bring it, and I’m glad I did. The Infinites is superb, and O’Neill is right, it makes a difference. Which makes it a timely moment for Harold Bloom’s latest to land on my desk. About which I intend to say more in the future. For now, I leave things here in a state of fragile equipoise, and I assure you posting here will continue, as the form struggles to make itself known to me.

BANVILLE, MEET KAFKA

However sporadic my posting might be these days, you can always count on me for a Banville Bulletin - he's won the Kafka Prize.

An international jury which included German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and British publishder John Calder selected Banville for the prize, which is awarded annually and includes $10,000.

 

INSERT VIRAGO PUN HERE

I've had my head down the last week or so cleaning up the first half of my novel, so I managed to miss the news of both Philip Roth's winning of the Man Booker Prize, and Carmen Callil's absolutely idiotic comments in the wake of that victory. 

 "I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine. Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine . . .Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?

I mean, yes, OK, The Humbling - embarrassing.  But come on.

Putting my head back down.  Nice to see you all survived the Rapture.

L.A. EVENT: SCOTT O'CONNOR AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS

Scott O'Connor first came across my radar with his sharp little 2004 novella Among Wolves. Since then, we've become pals - he's acknowledged in Harry, Revised for assisting me in the mechanics of throwing a punch - and I'm terribly excited to read his debut novel Untouchable.  It's described thusly:

It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby’s unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley – an 11 year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid – hasn’t spoken since his mother’s death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining.

His publisher has set up a nice page which includes a trailer and a first chapter download, but I'm writing to advise you he's reading at Skylight this Tuesday evening, and although I am sick as a dog, I'll be there spreading my germs through the crowd, and hope you can come by and check it out as well.  Scott is an engaging reader, smart and witty and a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

SECOND NOVEL WOES

I am, understandably, obsessed with tales of second novelhood, like this one in Slate.  (Thanks to Katherine Taylor, who bested me!)

My first novel had gotten good reviews and sold, for a first novel, reasonably well; I wanted to do better this time. At the very least, I wanted not to go backward. This novel's success would also impact my next book deal—hell, it might determine whether there would be a next one. And then there was Deborah. She works as a high-level editor at a major magazine; I didn't want to put her in the position of walking into the office the wife of second-rate novelist. The prospect of embarrassing her—of being anything less than a husband she might feel the urge to brag about—was even worse than the prospect of embarrassing myself.

The unfortunate use of impact as a verb notwithstanding, it's worth a read.

A LATTERDAY GRAND TOUR

John Banville reviews James Attlee's Nocturne for the Guardian.

Nocturne – a term taken over by Chopin from the Irish composer John Field, but frequently employed by painters, too, particularly Whistler – is written in the relaxed, ambulatory tone of an 18th-century rambler's tale. Attlee conducts us on a latterday grand tour that takes in, among many other places, Turner's Thames, Basho's Japan, Pliny's Vesuvius and Rudolf Hess's solitary cell in Spandau prison. We learn little about the author, not necessarily a bad thing in these confessional times, although he does throw us hints as to his predilections and anathemas; for instance, he has a keen interest in painters – Samuel Palmer, Joseph Wright of Derby, the aforementioned Whistler – and in Japanese poetry; he deplores the seemingly unstoppable spread of light pollution yet considers Las Vegas at night one of the wonders of the world; he is not too happy about noise pollution, either – "Why aren't we ever content to just shut the fuck up?" – and declares "a particular hatred for wind chimes, hanging bells and all such paraphernalia".

CAN WRITING BE TAUGHT?

The Guardian rounds up several notables to address this apparently undying question.

Will Self: I'm still not convinced creative writing can be taught. Perhaps you can take a mediocre novelist and make them into a slightly better one, but a course can't make someone into a good writer. Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguru both did the UEA MA, but they were both innately good anyway. Some people swear by creative writing courses. I say, go and get a job, a fairly menial one instead. Otherwise what are you going to write about? Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can't work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.

As my students at UCLA already know is, my answer - maddening as always:  It depends.

ERNEST SABATO DIES

Ernest Sábato, one of the giants of Spanish-language literature, died on April 30.

Over subsequent decades “el Maestro”, as his compatriots came to refer to him, wrote thousands of influential essays, short stories and magazine articles. But he published only three novels. Those were enough, though, to win him the Cervantes Prize, the most coveted award among Spanish-language writers, in 1984. His lack of published output, he explained, was because he had a tendency to burn in the afternoon what he had written in the morning – it was not that he was making a point of “being existentialist”. He suffered from depression – nothing really mattered, good or bad. “It may be because I considered that all my work was imperfect, impure, and I found that fire was purifying,” he once said.

GOING MANE-STREAM

There's nothing quite like a photo feature on "writers' unruly manes" to directly feed one's own insecurity about thinning hair ... assuming, you know, one suffered from such an insecurity.

(One does.)

 

CREATION OF A MONSTER

Daniel Mendelsohn deconstructs Julie Taymor's Spider-Man musical, untangling threads of modern comics and ancient myths (an approach sure to burst blood vessels in Dale Peck's very small brain).

But these are merely symptoms. If Taymor’s show is a failure, it fails for interesting reasons—as it were, for genetic reasons. For the show itself is a grotesque hybrid. At the heart of the Spider-Man disaster is the essential incompatibility of those two visions of physical transformation—the ancient and the modern, the redemptive and the punitive, visions that Taymor tried, heroically but futilely, to reconcile. As happens so often in both myth and comic books, the attempt to fuse two species resulted in the creation of a monster.

(Spider-Man was the only comic I collected as a child, but I collected it assiduously.  Marvel Tales, Peter Parker, you name it, I had them.  For me, the series reached its high point with the death of Captain Stacy and its nadir with the Hobgoblin saga.  I wish I knew what became of all those comics; no doubt they were the victim of some long ago purge.  Even with all that, I can report precisely zero interest in the Taymor/U2 collaboration.)

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

During my prolonged hibernation, the Los Angeles Review of Books (of which I am a contributing editor, with a promised essay on Tintin on the endless To Do list) has unveiled its temporary home.  Of particular note is Kathryn Schulz's take on Saran Bakewell's marvelous and engaging How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

EVENTS: PEN'S PALE KING & LATFOB

A couple of events of note this week.  First, there's PEN Center USA's Pale King event at the Saban Theater Thursday night.  It's hosted by David Ulin and features monologues read by Henry Rollins, Josh Radnor, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, and many more.  You can learn more and buy tickets here.

Then this weekend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books kicks off at its new location down at USC.  It's got the usual mix of literary worthies and celebrity banalities, and you can find more details here.

SALTER MONTH

A number of my friends and readers, ever attentive to my obsessions, have written in to advise that it's James Salter Month over at The Paris Review.  Get thee hence.

(A real highlight is the outline of Light Years.  I never tire of snooping into the working methods of novelists I admire.)

I've been given permission to reproduce the introductory essay from the recent Salter tribute by PEN, and I do promise to get it up for you in the next ... well ... soon.