The Elegant Variation

A BRIEF RANT

Pet peeves are, by their nature, disproportionate responses to often trivial offenses.  Fine.  Fair enough.  But when did it become acceptable for airline after airline to make "last and final" boarding announcement?  Help us fight this insidious circumlocution by clipping and sending the email below to your airline of choice:

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Dear [Offending Airline}:

Recently, while waiting to board your flight number [FLIGHT NUMBER] at [YOUR AIRPORT], I was startled to hear your gate attendant use the phrase "last and final boarding call" on several occasions.

I assume you realize that your attendant is calling for a "last and last" boarding call.

Since you demonstrate no real understanding of redundancy, and redundancy is a key safety factor in modern aviation, I feel obligated to take my business to [NAME OF THEIR COMPETITOR] for my own well-being.

I urge you to fix and rectify this situation at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

[YOUR NAME]

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We'll save the rant about people unable to rise from an airplane seat without leaning on the seat in front of them - invariably our seat - for another time.  Yes, we're safely in Melbourne.

REQUIRED READING

For those who are curious, these are some of the texts I'm using for my Melbourne class on starting your first novel ...

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Well, folks, I am taking to the skies once again, heading first to Melbourne, Australia to participate in the Melbourne Writers Festival (where, among other things, I will be teaching a sold out Master Class on starting your first novel).  Then it's off to Christchurch, NZ for The Press Christchurch Literary Festival to do a number of panels there as well.

Updates will be erratic over the next two weeks, though I will do my best to bring highlights from these great international festivals - photos, accounts, some impromptu interviews.  There's also another installment of The Summer of Roth.  And I have a number of interesting things lined up for this space when I return, so do keep checking in, but please be patient if there's a bit more downtime than normal.  In the interim, any and all of the excellent blogs to the left can keep you entertained and informed.

Next dispatches from down under!  G'day all ...

Zachary Amendt on Short Fiction

We're busy unpacking, even as we prep for our departure to Australia, New Zealand, Amsterdam, Paris and New York on the next leg of the Harry Conquers the Globe tour.  So for today, we leave things in the hands of Zachary Amendt, 25, the author of "Casa de Serenidad," which originally appeared in Underground Voices Magazine and was later reissued in Best of the Web.  He is one of several writers around the web today blogging in support of Dzanc's Best of the Web 2008 anthology.  We'll see you in these parts tomorrow.  Now, heeeeeere's Zachary:

Most of what I say is non-linear.

When people ask what I'm trying to push in my fiction, I want to say there's an urgent underlying philosophy that propels me – and I believe there is and that when I've matured to access that quadrant of my mind where these themes are housed, I'll be able to explain and flesh it out. But until then, anything I say on the subject is tantamount to bullshit.

I know this: I sometimes struggle to unplug myself from this age. And I think the secret to disconnectedness is using the most primitive of the available technologies – old cell phones, secondhand laptops – devices that still have a little magic left in them.

There is fine work, much finer than my own, being issued these days online. But from what I have read of my contemporaries, I think it's evident that young authors these days don't smoke enough cigars.

I write in the hopes that one day a practitioner of short fiction I deeply admire – James Salter, Jim Harrison – will contact me through one of my editors with a note that says, "Nicely done, Amendt." It would be like John Berryman lighting Yeats' cigarette. Immortality would be mine.

Zachary Amendt on Rural California

I don't want to write about anything else. I can't, really. When I try it goes flat – I wind up talking about threshing and the coming harvest.

I've had spells in Omaha, in Brooklyn, young and going broke – but of all the writers I know, I'm probably the most minor, the most regional. And if I do anything right in my stories – this goes for narrative, dialogue, the works – it's entirely by accident.

I'm interested in complex people, in peasants, in old tractors and irrigation canals. In local politics and folks who are wary of outsiders. Of towns where two or three families own the water rights.

I like to lose myself in mountains, to frolic drunkenly in open fields.

There is a point to all this, if you haven't guessed it already: California is mostly my religion.

Zachary Amendt on Short Fiction II

I’m still debating the significance of things.

I forget how old I was when I finally realized how strange it was that my grandparents slept on opposite sides of the house.

I once knew a woman who was like Billie Holliday in her trying to cut back on the booze – in that she was not cutting back.

Whenever I hear it asked, “Where is the next Hemingway, the next Fitzgerald?” the narcissist in me says, “Look no farther.” But that’s only when the writing’s going well.

What I’ve been writing lately sounds like it was written on a laptop, by a laptop.

One of the best young writers in America is an electrician on the U.S.S. Rhode Island. Another is studying winemaking at UC Davis.

We will be present at the revival of American letters. We will have been on the ground floor for the longest time.

Zachary Amendt on Coachella

Last night I rifled through Xeroxes of my old letters for good descriptions of Coachella.

It's difficult to think about home, the plans I made. It seems like nothing can be scripted.

I found nothing in my letters worth saying again.

Driving through Coachella in my Dodge it was not uncommon to get stuck behind a train or a cement truck.

Also I miss driving to Blythe and lunching in Chiriaco Summit.

The other half of my heart is in Watsonville, which is by the sea.

My only known signed author photograph is hanging from behind the Budweiser tap at Dawson’s, a saloon in Dixon, Calif.

It seems I am in a perpetual state of homesickness.

Zachary Amendt on Performance

I’m at work on this novel, Performance – trying to wrest control of it. When I’m blocked and the driving range and the bourbon isn’t helping, I start counting like sheep all of the most gorgeous things I have ever seen. Rauschenberg’s Bed. Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life. Elvis Perkins playing at the Troubadour.

I can’t say it helps. But it does remind me that nothing is decided, that it is good to gravitate toward art that has a quality of salvation to it.

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

It will be weeks before things here are normal again but we can no longer shirk our duties to you all, and so, herewith, an accumulation of some literary news of interest:  What he said ... In a lovely post, a visit to Willa Cather's grave, followed by a production of Our Town, prompts Terry Teachout to wax rhapsodic on "the little resurrection that is memory" ... The descendant of Lord Lytton (the namesake of the famous bad writing contest) defends his ancestor ... Random House has come under growing fire for cancelling the publication of The Jewel of Medina ... Speaking of cancelled books, The Pink Lotus, a Spanish version of the Tintin tale The Blue Lotus - a version which features Tintin in his 30s and having lots of sex (which, actually, sounds very much like Frederic Tuten's wonderful Tintin in the New World) - has been pulled at the behest of the Herge estate (A dear friend - you know who are - has a cache of Tintin porn but we're too squeamish to look) ... Zyzzyva gets a kind write up in the L.A. Times, with a photo of Mr. Onward himself, if you're curious.  (We were) ... London is the world's top literary destination.  Los Angeles, home of Chandler and Mann and Bret Easton Ellis*, does not make the list ...  They're not worthy, but Sir Walter Scott's last two works are finally set to see the light of day ... Tom Piazza gets some deserved attention ... In case you were wondering about the value of university presses - and we can't imagine any TEV reader would  - the Dallas Morning News explains in a roundup of Texas college presses ... Richard Eder considers the excellent Daniel Mendelsohn collection, as does David Haglund (We're with DM 100% on the question of Tarantino) ... As was widely noted in our absence, the legendary Rust Hills passed away ... There's a nice grace note at the Kenyon Review ... We always liked Mario Vargas Llosa ... Until we can get some time to look at John Berger's new book, you can see what the Independent has to say ... You've all got that list of authors you haven't read but keep hearing about and suspect you should, right?  We have that list.  Damon Galgut is on it, for sure ... Make. Him. Stop. ... Joseph O'Connor remembers learning a great deal by copying out a John McGahern story: "McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: to see the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities the words are gesturing towards." ... and finally, no, this is not why we left Pacific Palisades - although it's a great reminder to wish our dear friends at Vermin on the Mount a happy fourth anniversary!

* OK, which of these does not belong?

THINKING ABOUT ROTH II

A handful of random Roth thoughts, having now finished Indignation. (No, I'm not going to tell you what I thought, at least not yet.)

1) In the novel, the Newark-born Jewish protagonist (sound familiar) heads out to the sticks, attending college in Winesburg, Ohio. Now, we can all assume that Roth makes no decisions – especially one so obvious – lightly, so it seems to me that in order to properly read Indignation, one needs to read Winesburg, Ohio. Which I haven't. But I am now. This is how I work my reviews. One book invariably leads to another. It's part of the fun, undoubtedly, but can also exponentially increase the work involved.

2) In recent interviews, Peter Carey and Andrew Sean Greer complained about reviews that betrayed a key secret of their respective novels. Well, Indignation affords a similar opportunity for betrayal – there's a key story element/twist, and it will be interesting to see how other reviewers, as well as I, deal with it. The problem is you can contort a review into coy knots to avoid revealing these things, but you end up, I think, with a review that doesn't really engage with the book. It speaks, I suppose, to what kind of review one is writing – a mere consumer report (buy or don't buy), in which case, one should preserve secrets as much as possible; or a thoughtful engagement with a piece of work, which, it seems to me, simply can't be done when you're forever holding one closed palm behind your back. I'm not entirely sure what I will do here, other than announce load and clear that a major spoiler is coming if I chose to reveal something.

3) Thinking about Roth's familiar touches, motifs repeated, things like that, I thought that an instructive comparison might be made to Picasso. Besides a lifelong fascination with sex (with a dose of terrified mortality thrown in near the end), the symbols of Picasso's art were always personal, almost narcissistic: His lovers, his family, his personal iconography – bulls, harlequins, matadors – put a personal stamp on his body of work that bears some resemblance to Roth's own concerns. The so-called political The Plot Against America – of which Roth has disavowed political readings – can be instructively compared to Guernica which, despite its inspiration, is a resolutely personal work. (Something, incidentally, Picasso has been criticized for.)  Just a connection noted.