Lit Matters

On David Milch: Writing with an Oceanic Sense

2012-01-19T21:33:00.000-08:00

“Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous.” If you listen to any interviews with the renowned producer David Milch, you'll likely hear him say this. I heard it first, however, from Laura Albert (better known as JT LeRoy), who I met quite by coincidence, and have now become writing partners with (perhaps an act of God?). She was a writer on Milch's Deadwood, so she often sends me links to

Writing in Fragments

2011-12-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you can shape your life to the cadences of your creativity. Sometimes you have to shape the cadences of your creativity to your life. When I first decided to become a writer, at the recklessly young age of 20, I embraced Hemingway's preferred writing rhythm: to wake early, write for two or three hours, until the writing juices were spent, and then not think about what you've written

Dean Young: Failing Better

2011-11-23T20:10:00.001-08:00

_uacct = "UA-3899301-1"; urchinTracker(); I wish I could vote for poet laureate. I'd vote for Dean Young. It's clear cut for me. He's simply the only living poet who truly gives voice to the tragic and ridiculous and tender and doomed existential meaning of life through his whimsical, searching verse. When I read one of his poems, I never know where it's going from word to word. I know

Revision Tip No. 2,043: The Art of Dancing to Guy Lombardo while Drumming to Mingus

2011-11-21T22:43:00.001-08:00

_uacct = "UA-3899301-1"; urchinTracker(); I've often heard it said that writing is revising, and that's true in the sense that you're adding layers and nuances and telling details in revision that often aren't possible in the bustle or turmoil or excitement of a first draft. You're making a fine wine in revision, in other words, which takes time, finesse, and sagacity. Because of this,

The 1,394 Word Sentence (Which Is a Story)

2011-09-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

While it’s often said that few people read literary journals, especially the writers who want to get published in them (ahem), one great reason to read lit mags is to discover writers who you wouldn’t ordinarily read. Think about it. When you go to the bookstore, at least if you’re like me, you’re either looking for the latest book that received buzz or you’re searching through the

The Things I Like About 100 Word Story

2011-08-31T20:55:00.000-07:00

The second issue of 100 Word Story is out, and there’s much to love. Here’s a list of my favorites: I love that the poet Myra Sclarew was drawn to write 100-word stories because by condensing her poems, she can “get to the white heat of experience." I love how Tsering Wangmo Dhompa uses the word “pulchritude” in “The Self in One Part.” I love that Patrick Williams wrote a 98-word song

The Short, Short Story: 100 Word Story Magazine

2011-06-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

This review should only be 100 words long. Most things should only be 100 words long. After all, we live in an age where even the approximation of totality can seem exhausting. We inhabit glimpses. We remember shadows. We listen to a snippet of a song, then watch a flash of a movie. Now there’s a literary journal, started right here in the Bay Area, that aims to capture such a fragmentary

Hotel Amerika's Take on Great American Literature

2011-06-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

You know to expect something different from Hotel Amerika just from its name. It’s going to take you elsewhere, or if not, it will give you a decidedly different take on the place you call home. In an interview with editor David Lazar, words like “disorienting,” “radical,” “transgenre,” and “flaneur” are used like others might say, “write what you know.” Let’s just say that Hotel Amerika

Laura Albert and JT LeRoy: Mask as Muse

2011-06-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

When I came across the Greek maxim “Know thyself” in my college freshman humanities class, I thought it was the key to life. Then a couple of years later, I decided to become a fiction writer and discovered Hemingway’s dictum to “write what you know.” Such a thing seemed simple, but it took me another 20 years or so to realize just how difficult it is to “know thyself” or “write what you

J.M.G. Le Clezio: Loss in the Foreign Lands of Ourselves

2011-06-05T20:56:00.000-07:00

One way to judge the significance of a book is by how much its mood affects you afterward. Such criteria doesn’t fit into any academic critical framework, but it’s the one that matters to a reader in the end. As Roland Barthes said in The Pleasure of the Text, “The pleasure of the text is not necessarily of a triumphant, heroic, muscular type. No need to throw out one’s chest. My pleasure

Finding Oneself in Flight. Or Not.

2011-05-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

I like searches that lead to other searches. Existence that lacks resolution. A drift of self that becomes a strange sort of home after a while. These are the themes I’ve been writing about for the past eight years in a novel titled Elsewhere. I’m fascinated by a placelessness of identity that can overtake, if not guide one, especially in travel. A diaspora of self that afflicts and enlivens at

Script Frenzy and Me

2011-05-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

What's a blog for if not self-promotion? Or self sabotage. The latter is more likely the case here, but since this is one of my few onscreen forays, I figured what the hell, I might as well share the video. And I loved participating in Script Frenzy--an event put on by the local Office of Letters and Light, which also puts on the famous National Novel Writing Month--so I'm willing to be

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that Invites Manifestos

2011-04-15T19:33:00.000-07:00

It’s odd to say, but I have a soft spot in my heart for manifestos. Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be overly polite, especially when it comes to the arts. Go to France and England and you’ll find people practically dueling over an aesthetic

The Notion of a Reader: Poet Jack Spicer

2011-03-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

After an odd, misguided lifetime of writing mainly in solitude, I’ve started to share my writing with others. Sometimes just for the hell of it, sometimes to have another simply witness my writing, sometimes with the idea of receiving useful, intelligent feedback—and sometimes for all of the above. The whole experience has given rise to thoughts about what it means to think of writing with

To Write or Not to Write. To Be or Not to Be.

2011-03-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

I never had a good writing teacher, or at least not until I actually attended grad school in creative writing. I actually don’t even recall being taught to write. It was more like a checklist. Topic sentence. Check. Thesis. Check. Conclusion. Check. With some grammar tossed in. Learning how to write was an exercise similar to memorizing facts in my schools, akin to knowing how to spell the

Tamping Down a New Path: PANK Magazine

2011-03-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

_uacct = "UA-3899301-1"; urchinTracker(); In part three of my ongoing (and hopefully never ending) series of profiles of online lit mags, Matt Seigel, founder of PANK magazine, discusses the magazine’s taste for writing that has a “little dirt under its nails” and PANK parties where there a few “awkward make-out sessions, and at least one fight that ends in tears.” Yes, I’m clamoring for an

Kierkegaard: A Believer's Disdain

2011-02-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

I can sum up why I like Kierkegaard in three words: “fear and trembling.” Each year I revisit a thinker from the past who has influenced me, and Kierkegaard was my guy for 2010. I chose him because I remembered the beautiful, riveting contortions of his thought when I first read him as a college boy, the wild rushes of passion that flowed through even his most obdurate writing, as if his

FRiGG Magazine: Friggin' Good Reading

2011-02-15T08:56:00.000-08:00

In the second part of my ongoing series to explore and celebrate online lit mags, Ellen Parker, founder and editor of FRiGG magazine, answers a few questions about spirit and soul of FRiGG. The first thing you’ll notice about FRiGG is its riveting artwork. In fact, I think of it as much an online art journal as it is a literary journal. Art flows into stories and poems to provide a sumptuous

Riding the Monkeybicycle: The Art of Literary Miscellany

2011-02-04T15:09:00.001-08:00

Just a year ago, Ted Genoways, the once revered editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, wrote one of those incendiary, eschatological articles, The Death of Fiction?, aimed to get every fiction writer’s and editor’s feathers ruffled. He begins the essay by saying that when he tells people at dinner parties that he edits a literary journal, “the idea of editing a literary magazine seems, to

Reading as Pausing: James Salter

2011-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

_uacct = "UA-3899301-1";urchinTracker();One exercise I'm doing in order to pause is to identify passages I like and write them down. It's a good thing to do--especially by hand--in order to pay attention to each word and consider the author's approach. Here's a selection from James Salter's story Dusk, which I'm rereading after discovering the book and Salter in 1988."The small neon sign was very

2011 Reading Resolutions: I Aspire

2010-12-28T13:03:00.000-08:00

Like most hopeful and ambitious readers, I always have a teetering stack of books that I'm either reading or planning to read. The stack operates as an ongoing reading resolution throughout the year—and a reminder that life is exciting with infinite possibilities that are damnably constricted by too little time. That said, to echo the motto Truman Capote jotted in his boyhood

Reading Camus: Falling into a Life of Contradictions

2010-12-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine once told me that she read Camus because he made her happy. I loved that statement because it’s not the obvious answer for reading a thinker known for plumbing the darkest of the dark states of human existence. But reading Camus makes me happy as well—or if not happy, then reassured somehow—simply because he writes with such dead-on truth, unflinching and

Hallucinatory Effects: Jim Carroll and the Art of Purity

2010-12-12T10:17:00.001-08:00

What constitutes truth and then how to express it are two of the most interesting, elusive—and too frequently ignored—problems that confront us. We prefer to think that truth is self-evident. Life is easier that way. It goes beyond the structural blind spot we have in our eye where the optic nerves come together to carry messages to the brain where they’re assembled into “reality.” It’s

The Used Furniture Review

2010-12-07T21:59:00.001-08:00

As a genetically inclined junk collector and ragpicker—literally and literarily—I have to disclose that I was initially attracted to the new online journal Used Furniture Review simply because of its name.Fortunately it lived up to what I expected of it—a journal that holds surprises, if only because unlike many print journals, it’s publishing a truly eclectic mix of authors who surprise me

C.P. Cavafy and His Histories of Desire

2010-10-09T17:03:00.001-07:00

His mind has grown sick from lust.The kisses have stayed on his mouth.All his flesh suffers from the persistent desire.The touch of that body is over him.He longs for union with him again.Naturally he tries not to betray himself.But sometimes he is almost indifferent.Besides, he knows to what he is exposing himself,he has made up his mind. It is not unlikely that this lifeof his may bring him

Literary Magazines on the Make?

2010-10-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

Writers tend to be a gullible, desperate lot. They’re easy to pinch for a few bucks even if they’re broke. At least when it comes to the prospect of getting published. Or finding out how to get published. Or paying for the idea that their work might, just might, be considered for publication.Just look at the writing section in any bookstore. It seems as if everyone on the planet wants to be

Invisible City Audio Tour: A Surreal Oakland Adventure

2010-09-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

Want to go on a surreal geography tour of Oakland?Check out Invisible City Audio Tours and its self-guided audio walking tour, Heliography, this Friday, Oct. 1, from 5 p.m. until dark.Each tour is available as a free download along with a map and features emerging authors, curators, composers, musicians, performers, designers, cartographers, and artists local to the neighborhood

Emperor Franzen and the Jonathan Franzen Publicity Machine

2010-09-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

As a white male author, perhaps I should be happy about the extravagant attention Jonathon Franzen has received for his novel Freedom. Perhaps I should take it as a sign that I too can receive the preferred treatment of yore--as if a sort of contemporary Mad Men scene is going on in the publishing industry, and I and other guy writers can still drink it up, expect to live a Hemingwayesque life of

Writerliness Gone Mad, the Fetishization of Detail

2010-08-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

I don't like to bash writers (oh, there are plenty others who deserve bashing, but not poor writers making such noble, unheralded attempts to articulate this crazy world).That said (sorry), one of my peeves with contemporary fiction (especially that of the critically esteemed ilk) is its tendency to use overly detailed description, description further crippled by forced lyricism, to assert

Paul Strohm and the Art of the 100 Word Story

2010-03-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

If you want to know about masculinity, music, and aging (and more), then Paul Strohm is the guy to turn to.The Bay Area scholar, author, wit, and bon vivant has just published a series of exquisite shorts—stories of 100 words that perfectly capture the telling turns of his life, whether it’s styling his childhood friend Billy’s “carroty hair” or partying with the Pixies.Each story acts as a

Writing Tip No. 647: Never Try to Please the Boss

2010-03-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

I guess one can consult the Greek oracle on this one. Know thyself. Sounds easy, but most of us spend a lifetime reaching and dodging and jumping through hoops and doing deep breath exercises and throwing the occasional punch (if not tantrum) in pursuit of such solid ground. Becoming a good writer is akin to becoming a good human being in so many ways, after all. So here's a good quote from

Writing tips. And more writing tips...

2010-02-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote a post about Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. I also wrote a piece on How Not to Write About Sex.For those still looking for more rules (how to and how not to), here are some more splendid writing tips from the Guardian from the likes of Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Anne Enright and more--because, seriously, who can get enough rules for writing?

Writing tip no. 3,046: Sam Shepherd and voices and cowboy mouths

2010-02-18T21:55:00.000-08:00

Voice. How to hear it, how to speak it, how to write it? Some are lucky in that voice or voices seem to possess them in such an overwhelming (yet perhaps unforgiving) way. Think Rimbaud, Kerouac, Virginia Wolf, William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry—all of the mad caps of literature. But whether voice possessed them like a poltergeist or not, they had to honor the voice, listen to it, give it form

Literary Drunks and Addicts and Scourges

2010-02-16T21:47:00.001-08:00

What do William Burroughs, Ayn Rand, James Baldwin, Jim Carroll, and Louisa May Alcott have in common? They all enjoyed substances, whether alcohol, amphetamines, or absinthe (or all of the above). LIFE Magazine has put together a slideshow collecting portraits of some of history’s most notorious literary dabblers in all varieties of substances (and some of the photos are even for sale,

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzhaler

2010-02-06T17:27:00.001-08:00

_uacct = "UA-3899301-1";urchinTracker();All reviews are a reckoning of expectations. In this case, my expectations were perhaps too high for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by San Francisco poet August Kleinzhaler.One, there’s Kleinzhaler, who was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Sleeping it Off in Rapid City—a must-read book for me after reading the reviews.Then

The Eternal Life of Holden Caulfield

2010-01-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, since everyone is writing about J.D. Salinger, I have to as well. Little known fact: The “J” stands for Jerome. Would anyone have read Catcher in the Rye if it had been written by Jerome Salinger? Sometimes it's all in a name. But seriously, one thing that interests me is the literary legacy of Holden Caulfield. He’s like the strange alpha male of teen angst protagonists—characters

How Fiction Works by James Wood

2010-01-22T20:34:00.000-08:00

I’m a sucker for each new, hyped book about how to write fiction. You’d think I was in my twenties, not my forties. Several years ago it was Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Then James Wood’s How Fiction Works came along. Yesterday I wrote about the death of fiction (at least for literary journals). Conversely, the one thing that isn’t dying—and is thriving—is the publishing industry’s

The death of fiction...one more time

2010-01-21T21:17:00.000-08:00

As much as I loath "death of fiction" articles, I'm compelled by them. I guess it's the watching a train wreck thing. Except that it's watching the wreck of the train I'm traveling in. Damn. The "death of fiction" is actually a new and thriving genre. By the time fiction actually dies, each and every reputable journal, magazine, and newspaper (and, um, blog and website and wiki and other doodads

How Not to Write about Sex

2010-01-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

Since Katie Roiphe's recent article in the Times a couple of weeks ago has sparked conversations among the lit set about sex scenes (or the absence thereof) in novels past and present, I thought I'd pass on this list of how not to write about sex--cribbed from Sonya Chung's thoughtful response to Roiphe on the www.themillions.comIt's a list that every MFA program should consider distributing--day

The Naked and the Conflicted by Katie Roiphe

2010-01-14T22:32:00.000-08:00

Roiphe's Sexual Continuum: A Phallic Narrative The great thing about Katie Roiphe’s recent essay in the Times, The Naked and the Conflicted, a historical analysis of male authors' approach to sex scenes (or lack thereof in the case of contemporary

Elmore Leornard's writing tips

2010-01-13T21:58:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled across this article of Elmore Leonard's "10 tricks for good writing." As fun and interesting as the series of Paris Review author interviews is, I don't think one needs to go much further than this, at least for starters. 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the

Reading Resolutions

2010-01-12T22:12:00.001-08:00

This is about the time of the month where New Year's resolutions start to tail off, right? After struggling through the first 10 pages, or perhaps the first 10 sentences, of Finnegan's Wake, you decide to read the cloaks and daggers and symbology of the latest Dan Brown novel instead. Your salad first turns into a chicken salad, and then into a cheeseburger. So, here's a fresh look at resolutions

Ian McEwan and the Art of Suspense

2009-09-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve always thought of Ian McEwan as a sort of modern day Graham Greene. It’s not about their subject matter or their style, but the discipline, the concise and unwasteful approach they take to their narratives.All of Greene’s novels seem to be more or less the same length, as do McEwan’s. Likewise, Greene and McEwan share an appreciation for a straightforward story, carefully plotted, with a

How to Write? The Definition of an Author

2009-08-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

I'm reading James Wood's How Fiction Works. It's a somewhat masochistic task. No fault to James Wood, who, after 25 mildly interesting pages, provides a perfectly adept and writerly dissection of the free indirect style--the kind of analysis I literally ate up in my 20s, when I was trying to figure out how to write.Except that I can't imagine that anyone can truly learn to write while reading

King Dork vs. Catcher in the Rye

2009-06-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

Beware high school English teachers: If Catcher in the Rye is a standby of yours, King Dork challenges what’s become the sacred text of teen angst in the past—let’s say it—60 years (ouch!).Part social satire, part mystery, and part tribute to ye olde Catcher, King Dork starts like any good adolescent taunt—or outright defacement, rather—sporting a dust jacket with the cover of Catcher scratched

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

2009-02-19T21:25:00.001-08:00

There have been so many novels and movies about the vacuous nature of suburban life, the biting angst that dooms just about anyone who wears Dockers and lives in a subdivision or at the end of a cul-de-sac and, gosh, God forbid, works hard to earn a living for the family, that it’s perhaps the most tired and clichéd storyline of our times.At the same time, this pernicious confrontation between

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

2009-01-29T22:07:00.000-08:00

My, what a lot of fanfare this novel received. After I read the reviews, I expected a stunning classic. A daring style. Wisdom. Maybe more.The Emperor’s Children didn’t meet my expectations, which isn’t to say that it isn’t a good read (navigating a double negative might sum it up). It’s competent and well constructed—in the way an aristocrat ties his cravat—and surprisingly fun at times. In fact

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse: Adolescent Reading, Adult Reading

2008-12-14T13:45:00.001-08:00

I reread Steppenwolf as part of a little project to revisit some of the novels that swept me away when I was in high school.The danger of a project like this is that the stories won’t measure up to my estimations of the time and ruin my beloved memories of yore—Steppenwolf certainly didn’t. That said, it’s interesting to view such books through a different lens and think about why a book like

Lionel Trilling: Fiction and Politics

2008-11-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

Every fiction writer or critic has to eventually face the question, "Why write?"Fiction, whether great or mediocre or downright bad, might be nothing more than entertainment for many, or a trophy on a book shelf for others (how many people read Infinite Jest is something I want to know).And how many novels do we need, anyway? Couldn't there be a 20 year hiatus, or perhaps strict limitations on

Lit Folks, Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously

2008-11-10T20:24:00.000-08:00

It's always good to make fun of even the most serious of matters, especially when they have to do with art.Take a look at this contest of repackaged book covers highlighted on Book Ninja, of which the cover of Blood Meridian is one.As much as I love Cormac McCarthy--and his overwrought prose--he deserves a good send up.McCarthy almost lends himself to looking as cheap as the satirical cover in an

Buster Keaton: Go West Young Man

2008-11-09T20:10:00.000-08:00

We saw Buster Keaton’s Go West at the Pacific Film Archive, and the movie was not only funny, but a surprising existential commentary on our capitalist life of supposed progress and survival that rings true today.Buster Keaton, who plays the character Friendless, turns the convention of the lone, stoic Western hero on its head—remarkably before the advent of the genre of Westerns in Hollywood (Go

On the Subject of Plot: Marilynne Robinson

2008-11-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

Since I wrote a bit about the monstrous subject of plot yesterday--and seem to always be wrangling with it in one way or another--I thought I'd follow up with a good quote from Marilynne Robinson that helps alleviate the plot pressure an author can feel, especially if he or she is an inadequate plotter like myself."I don't like plot very much--please contain your surprise. It becomes a big

The Concept of Plot

2008-11-07T22:03:00.000-08:00

It's difficult to know if the ability to plot a good story is something that is genetically endowed or whether it can be learned.What's certain is that it's difficult to tell a good story.Many can draw a compelling character, paint words into scenes that ring in your thoughts for days, or snap through the back and forth of expert dialogue.But all of this still needs a storyline, even a loose

Literary Genius: The Ugliness of It All

2008-11-06T17:06:00.000-08:00

I recently read a good definition of literary genius.Adam Kirsch refers to Proust's definition in a review of Roberto Bolano's Slouching Toward Santa Teresa. The irony is that our first reaction to a great contemporary work is that it doesn't strike us as beautiful, but as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is;

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop: A Love Affair of Letters

2008-11-05T20:10:00.000-08:00

I used to love to write letters.I think letters were my genre. I wrote better letters than I wrote short stories or poems or novels or scripts or journal entries.I thought of my friendships through letters. I dashed to the mailbox each day with anticipation. I wrote letters that passed through days and weeks--full of confessions, observations, pretensions, aspirations.But I no longer write

American Fiction: The Suicide of Detail

2008-08-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've read several scathing reviews of James Wood's new book, How Fiction Works. It seems that Wood's views aren't working for many reviewers--to the point that I wonder whether he's just pissed them off at cocktail parties or slept with their partners, but that's speculation.Several reviews have been so bad, especially the entertaining and illuminating one by the ever entertaining and

Emily Dickinson: Truth at a Slant

2008-08-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” This was Emily Dickinson’s credo.Walker Evans applied a similar aesthetic approach to photography—a preference to take photos when the sun’s light was slanting, toward evening or in the early morning.The approach begs the question of whether life should be represented in full illumination. What does it mean to represent something or someone in full light?

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

2008-08-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

I wanted to like the Piano Tuner.Okay, I kind of liked the Piano Tuner. I liked it like I might like a blind date who’s nice, kind of pretty, sort of intelligent, dresses well—nothing wrong with her—but I know I’m not going to call her. No offense.Here’s the skinny of the plot, cribbed from Powell’s Books. In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he

Persepolis: The Value of a Child's Point of View

2008-08-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

It’s an odd thing to say that a work situated in a war-torn country with an oppressive regime is fun to read, but Persepolis is fun, among other things. Sure, it’s a fun read because it’s a well-drawn graphic novel, but it’s really the lively and mischievous point of view of its heroine, Marjane, a precocious and preternaturally rebellious child, that gives the book its singular force.The story

The Last of the Big Beards: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2008-08-04T14:23:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons to mourn the passing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died today in Moscow, but I think the most important one might be that he was the last living author who could carry off the big, grizzly, ponderous, “don’t mess with me” beard.He could go toe-to-toe with Tolstoy in this department, something no great American author can even attempt. Philip Roth donning a big ass beard?

Writing--Or Not Writing--About Work

2008-07-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

We're in the midst of a slew of novels about the place we spend the most time: work.Is it a trend? A new genre? A conspiracy?Not quite. First there was Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to an End, and now there is Ed Park's well-reviewed Personal Days. The list essentially stops there.The New York Time's review of Personal Days notes a subject I've occasionally chewed on: why isn't the workplace a

T.S. Eliot and Portishead: Never Doubt That T.S. Eliot Is Cool

2008-07-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

Here's T.S. Eliot reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock with an accompaniment by Portishead.An unlikely pairing?Listen to it and you'll think otherwise. This kind of juxtaposition accentuates how contemporary and edgy and mysterious a poem like Prufrock is. In fact, Portishead (this must be a late '90s or early 2000 song?) sounds more dated than Eliot. It's always a revelation how great art

Henry Green: Loving

2008-06-22T22:58:00.001-07:00

It’s always fascinating to read a book and be completely at odds with other major critics. The questions span from “Am I simply the wrong reader for this book?” to “Do I have too many kids and soccer games going on to thoughtfully assess this book?” to “Did this critic have too many damn kids and activities to decently evaluate the book?”The problem with the last question is that the answer is

Dean Young: Skid

2008-05-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

Dean Young is an easy poet for me to like. His congenital, sometimes twisted, joie de vivre leaps off the page. He’s a prankster, a Dadaist, a writer whose words and images juke, jab, dash, pirouette, and jump—just when you think you know where one of his poems is going, it changes course like a dare.He’s one of the few writers who can surprise with each phrase, if not each word, tossing

James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime

2008-04-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

“An opaline vision of Americans in France.”“Lyricizes the flesh and France with the same ardent intensity.”“A voyeur of the imagination.”I snatched the above phrases from a 1967 New York Times book review of A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter’s unabashed and poetic erotic novel.Because I’m quite taken with Salter—by the impressionistic sweep of his sentences, by his sharp, yet lovely

Romantic Comedy: The Curse of a Popular Genre

2008-04-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

Why is it so difficult to create a decent romantic comedy?The key word here is decent, not great. The genre by its very definition doesn't demand any attempts at greatness--audiences want palatable fare, a few yuks, some suspense, and a little enlightenment about the thorny world of love. The genre isn't designed to change anyone's life, or even their relationship. A happy ending is guaranteed

James Salter: Burning the Days

2008-03-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

James Salter’s reputation is of a curious kind. He’s written great books, yet many lovers of literary fiction would be hard pressed to name one—or perhaps even recognize his name (I feel quite lonely as a fan).Salter is said to be a writer’s writer, and that is one way to view him. He’s a stylist—preferring the moment over the plot—which might count for a lot, but for some reason it doesn’t in

The Discomfort of Strangers

2008-02-27T09:14:00.000-08:00

I read The Comfort of Strangers, by Ian McEwan, as part of my exploration of travel/expat fiction; I'm interested in the overwhelming tendency of these novels to put the main character in peril because he or she is abroad. The inherent premise of the "genre" is that one somehow loses an important bit of equilibrium when traveling, or that a new country's otherness is fundamentally threatening—so

Shortcomings - Adrian Tomine

2008-02-17T22:52:00.000-08:00

I've never been a comic book guy. Perhaps I was brainwashed by trappings of "high culture," the elite traditions of an English major, or perhaps I just never trusted anything that wasn't so dense with words that it had to provide deeper meaning.When I was waiting tables way back in the early '90s, a scrubby cook who looked as if he'd walked straight out of a comic book—bushy red hair, skin and

"Tree of Smoke" Flames Out

2008-02-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

The New York Times' review of Tree of Smoke says that it "is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop."Not. On all accounts.I think I'm Denis Johnson's ideal reader in some ways--

Bugs Bunny, Postmodernism, Sadism, Nabakov, Characterization--Duck Amuck

2007-12-15T21:15:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits of parenthood is getting to revisit films, cartoons, and stories that have been long forgotten from childhood.Today, we saw a matinee of Bugs Bunny cartoons, and I was struck by the variety of postmodern sensibility (that's a high falutin' word for this fare, and yet it's accurate).There's an authorial consciousness and meta narrative that's noticeably at play in many of the

Wes Anderson: Prop as Character

2007-12-03T22:34:00.000-08:00

What interests me most about Wes Anderson is that his stories seem to originate from his props—the story serves the prop, in other words, instead of the prop serving the story, as is the usual tendency.It’s an interesting place to begin a story. Kundera admired Broch’s definition of character through gesture, but this is entirely different: the definition of character through obsessive attachment

Edward Albee: Peter and Jerry

2007-11-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

I just saw Edward Albee’s “Peter and Jerry at Second Stage in New York City. The play pairs “The Zoo Story,” his first play (written in 1958), with “Homelife,” a companion piece written six years ago.Two phrases struck me from the New York Times review of the play. Albee chronicles “the feral soul beneath civilized skins,” and he is “a chronicler of life as erosion.” It’s the feral soul beneath

Denis Johnson--All the Writing Advice You Need

2007-11-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

Denis Johnson says it all in this brief interview after being nominated for the National Book Award.What a lovely way to describe his process--"I don't have much interest whether any of my books work or not." If only more writers wrote with such disregard toward their audience, and such regard for the truth of the material.Here's an excerpt from the interview....BAJ: Were there moments

Writing without Passion

2007-10-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

It seems that people have tired of writing about the death of the novel. Now they're picking on the poor, defenseless short story.Stephen King has written the latest obituary in the September 30 New York Times Book Review. "The American short story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were true," he writes.He first vividly makes the case that lit magazines have

Malcolm Lowry—Death by Misadventure

2007-09-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

Since The Voyage That Never Ends, a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s writing just came out, I have to pause to pay a tribute to one of the best writers ever, and certainly the best alcoholic writer ever (Lowry’s drinking makes Fitzgerald or Hemingway seem like weekend party boys at best).Here’s Lowry on alcoholism and writing: “With a bad hangover your thoughts are often incredibly brilliant but you

Gilead...Pulitzer?

2007-09-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

I should have trusted my instincts. When I first read the excerpt from Gilead in The New Yorker, I was bored out of my skull. Still, Marilynne Robinson was one of my favorites contemporary authors—I’ve probably bought more copies of Housekeeping for friends than any other book.And then there were all of the rave reviews for Gilead. And then, of course, the Pulitzer. It’s pretty damn hard to argue

Lydia Davis: Break It Down

2007-06-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

You might be tempted to read Lydia Davis's stories in passing, to treat them as quirky, funny entertainments. They are so short, after all, and you can page through one piece after another almost as if you're reading a joke book.But the quirky facade is deceptive, and even the humor often causes a chill of tragic recognition.Take "Break It Down," the story that gives the title to her 1976

Steal This Plot

2007-04-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

There are so many basic plots—ready to simply snatch as I’ve recently learned—but I’ll be damned if I can write a good one.I’m not sure why I try. It’s a pity we’re not living in a more nouvelle roman era—since I specialize in what might be called the meandering existential novel, sans epiphany, sans much of anything but a lot of moping about—but we’re living in the age of increasingly short

Death in Venice: Death in Expat Novels

2007-04-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

I recently read Death in Venice because I’m interested in the reasons why it seems like all protagonists in travel/expat novels die.The consul is murdered in Under the Volcano. Port dies of an illness in The Sheltering Sky. Kurtz dies in The Heart of Darkness, and you might even say that Marlow has died a kind of death as well. Although a character like Dick Diver isn't physically killed in

Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose

2007-01-17T22:12:00.000-08:00

“Can creative writing be taught?” That's the question Francine Prose starts with in her recent book, Reading Like a Writer.The question, which is so often a taunt--a menace to the hundreds (thousands?) of creative writing programs across the nation--often looms in my mind. I suspect the answer is no. Talent can at best be refined and nurtured, but the true creative numen, that which startles, is

Ian McEwan's Supposed Plagiarism

2006-12-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

Hurray for Charles Isherwood's astute piece in the New York Times on all of the fuss about Ian McEwan "plagiarizing" bits of Atonement from a memoir he'd used in his research.With each plagiarism scandal, I've wondered what constitutes plagiarism, especially with a novel. Should a novel include footnotes? My, that would ruin the reading experience--make it much harder to suspend disbelief, as all

Milan Kundera -- The Art of the Novel

2006-10-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

After just writing about Walter Kirn's fumblings and rumblings on how the novel can handle the "new" nature of our lives in our global, tech-connected village, it was refreshing to read Milan Kundera's essay "What Is a Novelist" in the October 9 New Yorker (no link to the article is available, unfortunately).Kundera provides a stern and unflinching definition of a great novelist, much akin to his

The Future of the Future of Fiction

2006-10-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

I wonder if someone should write a book of criticisim on the plethora of articles that have appeared in the last few years on the future of fiction (Slate has published the latest piece). The future of fiction just might rely on these future-of-fiction pieces, which usually combine doses of eschatological alarmism with breathy eulogies and condescension of anything truly new.It's too bad that

On Susan Sontag...On Photography...Again

2006-09-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

A collection of quotes and thoughts upon randomly picking up On Photography one evening while killing time…On being a freak"The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village," Sontag writes. "Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman's democratic vista), everybody

Antonya Nelson

2006-09-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

In Antonya Nelson's collection of short stories, Female Trouble, characters are often firmly placed within families or marriages despite the disconnection, if not active rebellion, they feel toward these emotional settings. No surprise the title, I suppose.The trouble her characters get into is as much against themselves as it is against others. They thirst for love, but they're usually unable

The Novel Is Dead, Of Course

2006-09-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

Walter Kirn made a great point recently in his New York Times book review of Cynthia Ozick's latest book of literary essays, The Cannon as Cannon. It doesn't matter whether the novel is dead or not, he contends, because if it is, no one has noticed."The form's latest self-styled guardian is Cynthia Ozick, an accomplished novelist herself and a high-ranking literary critic who, along with so many

Notes on Saturday, by Ian McEwan

2006-09-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

Although Henry Perowne appears to be a successful and enviable individual in most ways, with his solid career, loving marriage, gifted children, and elegant house in Central London, Ian McEwan, like any good author, wouldn’t dare construct a main character without giving him faults that not only make him real, but which spawn the narrative tension in the book.Perowne, despite possessing the

Susan Sontag

2006-09-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

The excerpts of Susan Sontag's journals in last Sunday's Times revealed two interesting things about her: a tendency for self-loathing mixed with flashes of insight, especially on the nature of being a writer.I suppose I know why self-loathing is such a frequent character trait of "greatness," at least if I play the role of an armchair psychologist. Susan Sontag obviously possessed such a

Nelson Algren

2006-09-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

When I was getting my Masters in Creative Writing at San Franciso State, I approached the chair of the department, Frances Mayes, for what I thought would be a perfunctory signature on a form allowing me to do my thesis on Nelson Algren.I had always admired Algren's gritty grotesques, and I especially wanted to analyze how he unflinchingly represented a part of America that few authors bothered

Finally, the Great American Novel

2006-03-03T21:52:00.000-08:00

It’s fascinating to me how the unmasking of JT LeRoy has elicited such a predictable stream of outrage. I’ve read a constant screech of betrayal—from readers, but also from the rich and famous stars, editors, writers, and literary agents who gave their hearts and souls to the young, afflicted “Jeremy Terminator.” They just wanted to help ol’ JT. They never wanted nuthin’ back. And, yes, I