Finding Oneself in Flight. Or Not.

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 the same time.

It’s difficult to capture such a state in words without becoming too indulgent and losing the narrative thread of the novel, which was why I really enjoyed the coincidence of coming into contact with a film, Volo, that my old friend Jerome Carolfi has been working on. He calls the film “a meditation that blends travel and dreams, confronting travel as an escape from reality and dreams as signposts which reveal our deeper psyche.”

Those words don’t do the film justice, though. What I admire about the film is the way he’s captured the textures of such moments of estrangement and quest, a disjointedness of self in flight, through the layers of his collage of images. He’s truly created an arresting dreamscape.

It’s a reminder for me of the power of experimental film, which is more akin to poetry. As a viewer, you follow the mood rather than the action of a main character. The plot points become internal. The experience becomes the narrative. You drift, in short.

The only weakness of this film is my amateurish voiceover, but I was honored to be invited to contribute. Please watch.

Script Frenzy and Me

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 embarrassed to support the event. The basics are that you write a 100-page script in a month.

I wrote (or rewrote) a script about the ever dramatic, damnable, alcoholic, love-starved, and sex-starved Hart Crane. Who also wrote quite magical poetry.

The thing I learned in shooting this video (especially at a cafe after lunch) was how difficult it is to talk cogently to a camera. It requires practice. I have much more admiration now for every puffed-up, fluffed-up newscaster (yes, even you, Katie Couric).

Okay, let the rotten tomatoes be thrown...

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that Invites Manifestos

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 or intellectual dispute—and then inviting each other to dinner the following week for round two. But in the U.S., I’ve seen friendships break up over an artistic difference voiced only the slightest bit ardently—as if to talk passionately and argumentatively is bad manners. Kumbaya.

We’re a country of book clubs whose main purpose is to drink wine and chitchat about novels that go half-read and half-thought-about.

For God’s sake, let’s take our reading seriously and argue the hell out of it. Our books aim to represent life after all, metaphysically and phenomenologically. So…do you agree with an author’s take on reality or not?

That’s why I love the often pugilistic tone David Shields takes as he essentially puts up his dukes to the literary establishment in Reality Hunger. At the heart of Reality Hunger is Shields’s critique of the literary world’s rather stodgy proclivity to privilege the traditional realist novel as the mirror of reality—a representation of reality that has held firm since the 19th century despite all of the world’s changes.

What if Impressionism had continued as the dominant art form for the last 100-plus years, but just with different subject matter? What if Cubism still dominated the art world for that matter? Think of all of the exciting, compelling, challenging, wondrously disturbing (or disgustingly disturbing) art we would have been deprived of.

So Shields takes on this intractable monolith of realism, the novel, and exposes the form for its calcifications, limitations, and, well, its sometimes God awful boringness (Shields says he’d rather die than read Jonathon Franzen—oh, if there were a literary death match on TV, I’d love to see Shields vs. Franzen).

It’s all about a definition of reality in the end. “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art,” Shields writes (or does he write, because the book is an assemblage of short, aphoristic entries, many of which are plagiarized—with plagiarism operating as a premise of reality, so is it really plagiarism?).

There’s a disturbing complacency in how the majority of the reading public has come to unquestioningly accept the standards of literary fiction—usually written in the third person, adhering to Flauberts style indirect libre, removed from the heartbeat of reality that’s so immediate in a first person narrative of an essay or memoir that doesn’t adhere but explores, ventures, jaunts, and perhaps even fails.

Yes, fails.

Shields appreciates a text’s rawness—a messiness that is absent from much contemporary fiction and much of the real-life fiction foisted upon us in our lives, whether it takes the form of a politician, a newscaster, or an advertisement.

He prefers the essay—the attempt—to the polish of the three act plots that guide most novels. “My medium is prose, not the novel,” Shields writes.

By emphasizing prose, Shields neuters plot. To read in pursuit of the end, or at least the next, is one way to read, but Shields asserts the meaning of the moment, a narrative of pauses and drifts of dramatic tension (yes, dramatic tension that can occur without plot).

“The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention,” he writes (quoting John D’Agata and Deborah Tall).

On the other hand, novels tend to be written toward conclusions instead of questions.

“The novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential,” Shields says. “You can always feel the wheels grinding.”

What fun is it to read such a grind of authorial construction? Somewhere within that grind, you can almost feel an agent or editor looking over the author’s shoulder. The click of a stopwatch that says it’s now time for the reversal, now time for the denouement.

Think simply of most characters in realist novels, who generally operate around one or two contradictions or counterpoints—life represented as relatively neat and tidy in comparison to the many personas and doubling backs and strivings that form most of us.

Shields is after something without so much artifice, which is why he says that memoir and creative nonfiction are the most compelling genres of our age. Life not as it’s represented via authorial filtering, but as it’s lived.

“Not only is life mostly failure, but in one’s failures or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self,” says Shields.

But here’s where I stub my toe with Shields. I don’t buy that the best “fiction” is being written as nonfiction, although I appreciate how he emphasizes the fictionality of nonfiction.

If anything, I feel that we’re living in an age where memoir has become bloated. As Neil Genzlinger put it so perfectly in the “The Problem with Memoirs,” “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.”

I think what Shields is actually getting at is Camus’s thought that writing should be confession. “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”

To use Franzen as an example again (just because I love picking on him), his novels read with the wheels grinding, the studious craft of storytelling guiding every sentence. But his novels don’t read as anything close to confession. And that’s the problem. To write with a sense of confession brings writer and reader closer to a hungered for reality.

To strive for authenticity is different than striving for what is real—and this is the crux that dooms much realistic fiction. The literal truths (which Franzen aspires to capture in his socioeconomic approach to characterizaiton) aren’t as important as the poetic truths (which, say, Bolano or Kundera aspire to).

“You adulterate the truth as you write,” says Shields.

Forms must change.

“If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.”

And write manifestos. And break forms. And then write manifestos again. Here here.

The Notion of a Reader: Poet Jack Spicer

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 actual flesh and blood readers in mind.

I’m more and more convinced that great art and great creations in general (yes, I believe in greatness, at least unless it includes me) are in essence collaborations, even if unwittingly. Would there be a Patti Smith without a Robert Mapplethorpe? A Jack Kerouac without an Allen Ginsburg? A Sartre without a de Beauvoir? A Brad Pitt without an Angelina Jolie (kidding)? And vice versa in all cases.

Life at its best is a constant riff, one idea arising from another in a wild, jazzy ping-pong match where you lose track of whose idea is whom's. That’s art for me, even if you have to shuffle back to your hovel to record it all in mildewed solitude.

Such chemistry is rare, almost divine I’ll venture, whether it’s in the form of a true artistic collaboration or simply the good fortune of finding a trusted reader. But just what makes for a good reader is worth pondering.

Despite going to grad school for creative writing, I’ve had many more bad readers than good ones (hence the years of writing in solitude, I suppose). When John Updike was asked who his ideal reader was, he once spoke of a teenage boy in a library, walking the aisles and pulling books off the shelves, more or less randomly, looking for literary adventure.

But I challenge Updike. His teenage boy is a nice notion, but I don’t want such an abstraction—it seems useless to be so removed from a real person who can receive one’s words.

Likewise, Harold Bloom posits that great writers feel an “anxiety of influence,” that they’re writing in a spirited competition to outdo their literary heroes, dead or alive (yes, a very male competitive notion of creativity).

Again, while I certainly write with influences and voices in my head, they’re more friends than competitors (could this be why I’m not a great writer?).

If love is a desire to reveal and relinquish at the same time that it’s a desire to possess and understand, then a writer wants to find a reader in the same mold. A writer wants to hold another with his or her words, to have a sense that words flow into feelings, that a pause is struck upon another’s gaze of life, if not a transformation.

You might say that the writer’s audience is always a fiction, a projection—as most of life is, certainly—but that’s not to say it doesn’t exist. Again, to pick up the metaphor of the writer as lover, a writer writes for effect, to give pleasure and meaning, to pique interest. It’s only with a loving or inviting recipient in mind that such effects can be achieved.

So what do I want from a reader? I used to think that I wanted a biting critique, a certain regimen for self-improvement, but I don’t think that’s necessarily so valuable. In the end, I want someone who’s fundamentally interested, who I feel wants to read me in that pure energetic and curious way that one person wants to know another.

If I feel that, then I can write to move another. I’ll scrutinize each word, make sure I’ve challenged each scene. I’ll know whether I’ve succeeded just by the enthusiasm of the response, not through any workshop critique (most of which end up as, “I want to know more about….” and more and more and more—sorry to all who've received such bad reading from me, which I'll call "stuck in the workshop rut of response").

I’ll leave the teenage boys looking for books in libraries and the writerly workshop folks to others. The ideal reader is not someone who adores without question, but one who wants to love and be loved, which as anyone who has loved knows, can be a quite complicated scenario. I’d expect nothing less than complexity from any reader. I’d never want a lover who didn’t challenge, scrutinize, dare, and sometimes ignore.

So reader as friend, lover, source of generosity, curiosity, yet intelligent and critical and biting if necessary, or something along those lines. But a real person.

This is all a lead-in to a piece the Bay Area poet Jack Spicer wrote on audience—in the form of a letter to Lorca (an essay on audience with a dead poet in mind, you might say—but an audience nevertheless).

Dear Lorca,

When you had finished a poem what did it want you to do with it? Was it happy enough to merely exist or did it demand imperiously that you share it with somebody like the beauty of a beautiful person forces him to search the world for someone that can declare that beauty? And where did your poems find people?

Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody and anybody physically capable can receive them. They may be beautiful (we have both written some that were) but they are meretricious. From the moment of their conception they inform us in a dulcet voice that, thank you, they can take care of themselves. I swear that if one of them were hidden beneath my carpet, it would shout out and seduce somebody. The quiet poems are what I worry about—the ones that must be seduced. They could travel about with me for years and no one would notice them. And yet, properly wed, they are more beautiful than their whorish cousins.

But I am speaking of the first night, when I leave my apartment almost breathless, searching for someone to show the poem to. Often now there is no one. My fellow poets (those I showed poetry to ten years ago) are as little interested in my poetry as I am in theirs. We both compare the poems shown (unfavorably, of course) with the poems we were writing ten years ago when we could learn from each other. We are polite but it is as if we were trading snapshots of our children—old acquaintances who disapprove of each other’s wives. Or were you more generous, Garcia Lorca?

There are the young, of course. I have been reduced to them (or my poems have) lately. The advantage in them is that they haven’t yet decided what kind of poetry they are going to write tomorrow and are always looking for some device of yours to use. Yours, that’s the trouble. Yours and not the poem’s. They read the poem once to catch the marks of your style and then again, if they are at all pretty, to see if there is any reference to them in the poem. That’s all. I know. I used to do it myself.

When you are in love there is no real problem. The person you love is always interested because he knows that the poems are always about him. If only because each poem will someday be said to belong to the Miss X or Mr. Y period of the poet’s life. I may not be a better poet when I am in love, but I am a far less frustrated one. My poems have an audience.

Finally there are friends. There have only been two of them in my life who could read my poems and one of that two really prefers to put them in print so he can see them better. The other is far away.

All this is to explain why I dedicate each of my poems to someone.

Love,
Jack.

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

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 words on a spelling test even if you didn’t know their meaning. It wasn’t something that was practiced in a genuine way with any idea of, say, an audience, a reader who you might want to move or persuade.

In the hierarchy of school subjects, writing was just a notch above penmanship in elementary school. If you had the gumption to copy your research paper from a World Book Encyclopedia and put it in a nice cover, you usually got an A (I essentially learned how to write by plagiarizing, which isn’t a bad technique, but that’s another story). It was a variation of the same in high school. To write well, to write in a probing and expressive way, to wend through nuanced meanings or titillate with mellifluous flourishes—or just write for the simple joy of it—no.

I think alliteration might have been alluded to in a random reading of a poem in high school. I didn’t hear the phrase “vivid verb” until a twelve-year-old kid I tutored mentioned it to me—this was post-college.

In fact, I learned a lot about writing while standing in front of a classroom and teaching it as a marooned adjunct community college composition professor, scared as hell as I stared into students’ searching, scrutinizing eyes. I was afraid because I’d never been trained to teach such a thing (and teacher training, not to mention a teacher community, is quite valuable in such moments, trust me, because there are few things more frightening than being a teacher in a classroom and not knowing how to do it).

I don’t mean to unnecessarily disparage my teachers—I don’t think they were equipped or encouraged to teach writing. Perhaps they had the same feeling I did when I first opened a composition textbook and taught grammar as if a comma was something one took out of a kitchen drawer, the one right next to the drawer with the colons and semi-colons in it.

Which brings me to my point: the disturbing news that the National Writing Project lost its funding last week. The National Writing Project, where I’m employed, is one of the nation’s preeminent writing organizations because of its “teachers teaching teachers” model of professional development. Teachers attend NWP summer institutes at more than 200 sites across the U.S. each year and write—because you can’t teach writing without writing yourself—and examine, explore, and demonstrate effective classroom practices, whether they involve journals, blogs, wikis, or post-it notes (the ideas and the creative uses of various tools is just amazing). And then those teachers teach other teachers in their regions through their local sites.

It’s an organization that has proven to be very effective in its 37 years.

But why is writing important? Why shouldn’t it stay just a step above good penmanship?

Writing is thinking. It’s as simple as that for me. Try it out the next time you have a thought to explore. Pause and write it down and flesh it out and you’ll find yourself testing it, adding counterpoints and layers and details, and the thought will sink into your consciousness and anchor itself there in a way that it wouldn’t have otherwise. You might even change your whole thought in the process—and that’s the definition of thinking, isn’t it? Just like a scientist testing a theory in a laboratory and revising it depending on the outcomes.

Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, two scientists, explore a number of benefits of writing in their book Sparks of Genius, which analyzes the 13 thinking tools of the world’s most creative people (Robert Root-Bernstein, a professor of physiology at Michigan State was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” himself). Writing weaves its way through modes of thinking such as “recognizing patterns,” “analogizing,” and “synthesizing” that have produced Einsteins in all fields.

For example, the Root-Bernsteins say that writing is important across disciplines because it aids such important thought processes as observation and imaging—noticing the things that often go unnoticed and visualizing things from other realms. A thinker can model a theory through words, pen keen observations (think of Piaget constructing his theory of child development with his notebook in hand as he watched his children), or develop empathy for another by entering “into the person you are describing, into his very skin, and see the world through his eyes and feel it through his senses,” as Willa Cather put it.

Cather describes more than empathy, though; she’s really discussing the genesis of a  perspectivist mindset that goes beyond the narcissism of a child’s mind. To go into another’s skin, after all, is the first step in being able to hold various viewpoints in mind and see the world in its multifarious truths. (Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.")

Isn’t this the kind of sophistication we want from students? Isn’t this the foundation of such traits as tolerance, grace, humility, creativity, critical thinking, understanding, and problem-solving that a democratic society relies on to function? I’d venture to say that it even provides the foundation of a constructive bipartisan approach, God forbid, so perhaps our representatives in D.C. should take a break to write about what the other side might be thinking. Gosh, how transformative that might be.

Without good writing teachers, I don’t worry about kids like me so much. I was a strange kid because I would go to the stationery store and lovingly stare at the assortment of pens and notebooks like other kids might go to a candy store and drool over lollipops. I was fascinated by the instruments of writing, genetically inclined in a peculiar way. I owned my first diary (with a nifty and necessary lock) when I was only five or six. I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t write.

Still, what I would have given for one of the teachers I’ve met through the National Writing Project to actually teach me how to write at an early age—and without copying World Book Encyclopedia entries. To feel the passion and purpose of words. To rank writing at the top of the academic hierarchy.

So I worry about the students who don’t dote on fountain pens in their free time. The mathematicians who might think that math is only about numbers, or the scientists who think science happens only in test tubes, not to mention the kids who could open a door into their souls and understand themselves in this crazy world just a little bit by writing their stories.

The Root-Bernsteins wrote Sparks of Genius in part because “ever-increasing specialization is clearly leading to a fragmentation of knowledge” in our schools. We’re losing the benefits of the multiple approaches for true creative thinking. “Learning to think creatively in one discipline opens the door to understanding creative thinking in all disciplines. Educating this universal creative imagination is the key to producing lifelong learners capable of shaping the innovations of tomorrow,” they say.

I don’t think the keys to making the world a better place require much research. If everyone ventures into the world with a true desire to explore it and their place in it and tries to articulate their experience in a meaningful way that creates dialogue, I trust that we’ll be all right, no matter one's political persuasion.

Yesterday I walked into my son’s public school and watched the kids buoyantly dash around in their wondrous world of play and thought how the school should be a source of hope, but it’s not. I turned to see stressed-out, unsupported teachers and stressed-out, unsupported parents trying to keep all of the pieces in place. We’ve lost ground each year despite the energetic efforts of all of us who now show the ragged edges of our toil. Third-grade test scores are already being used to plan future prison capacity in the state. I’ll watch a boy dash to the swings and wonder who he’ll be running from ten years from now.

When I was in fifth grade I first encountered the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and I was fascinated by the arguments on each side—and still am. I’m afraid I argue much less fervently for the power of the pen these days, though. I’ve seen the sword in all of its various guises win too many times (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, etc., no matter who’s president).

The people with pens in their hands will be the ones making sense of it all in the end, however, whether they’re writing about climate change or writing apocalyptic novels. If the sword wins, I know those holding the swords will have to look to the scribes to understand the world they’ve created. They might even pick up a pen themselves.

So we shouldn’t sacrifice the teaching of writing. Now more than ever in our fast-paced world, we need to honor that mysterious pause that occurs when one sits down to type or write words. It’s in that pause that we discover the rudiments of thought itself, almost without even knowing it. So if you want to take out your pen and take on the swords, go to NWP Works to help out.

Tamping Down a New Path: PANK Magazine

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 invitation and ready to board a flight to Michigan to attend such a Pankish bash.

Enough of me. Here’s Matt.

What's behind the name PANK?


I teach at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan. I had a student, Megan Collier, working with me when I started the magazine. We needed a name. Megan suggested "pank." In the idiom of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, pank is a verb meaning to pack or tamp down, usually in regards to snow, to make a path. "I'm going to go pank down the path to the garage." It was also used in the mines to describe packing dynamite into blast holes. We liked both meanings. Bob Hicok wrote a poem about the word that we published a while back.



You publish experimental prose and poetry. What kind of experimental writing are you looking for?

PANK has been described as edgy and experimental. I'm always flattered by that, but I've never known exactly what it means, either. We definitely like work that has a little dirt under its nails, work that is adventurous, work that is trying to push at the margins of something. Beyond that, I'm not sure we know what we're looking for until it finds us. 




What kind of writing do you wish you saw more of?


All of it. We're gluttons for language. 



You mention on your website that you only accept 1% of the submissions that you receive. Do you receive a lot of bad stuff, or is it just not right for PANK? Or do you just receive way too many submissions? 


We received hundreds and hundreds of submission a month and we can only publish a fraction of the awesome. Our clown car is only so big. 



If you could publish any living writer, who would you pick?


That unknown writer who goes on to change the world with their work.



What does PANK think about Jonathon Franzen?

I'm not sure we have an official Franzen policy at PANK. I liked The Corrections, not so much the newest one, and while I'm not a fan of all the megalomania, I've never met the guy so the only things I know about him are gossip. 



If Lady Gaga sent you a story, would you publish it?

If it was good, we would.



Do you read other lit mags? Which are your favorite, including online and print?

Yes, obsessively. My favorite list would have to include H_NGM_N, Forklift Ohio, Lumberyard, Hobart, McSweeney's, Le Petite Zine, DIAGRAM, and Bateau.



Editing a magazine takes time away from your own writing. How do you deal with that?


Editing a magazine inspires my writing. It's like being in the most kick-ass writing workshop surrounded by the most kick-ass writers every day of my life. I produce so much more as an editor than I probably would if I were left to my own devices. Honestly, the busier I get in life (wife, kids, friends, family, teaching, editing, writing...), the more productive I get. Time-schmime. 



Describe one of PANK's parties.

Messy, embarrassing, and heartfelt. There will be a lot of slurring of words, a few misunderstandings, raised voices and loud laughter, several awkward make-out sessions, and at least one fight that ends in tears, hugs, and forgiveness. By 6am, we will have all shared a giant bottle of aspirin and a bunch of us will go out together for breakfast.



What was PANK's favorite movie of the past year?


Mine was Howl. Ginsberg, c'mon! Franco rules.

For more, see my profiles of Monkeybicycle and Frigg magazines.

Kierkegaard: A Believer's Disdain

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 words twisted from the very torques of his soul.

I also chose Kierkegaard because he demands so much of us. He’s a religious thinker, but he wants nothing to do with good Christians—at least in the conventional definition of a good Christian—but only those who live by the dare of their own truth. We all must be challenged.

Hence “fear and trembling.” The words define the gravity, the urgency, and the passion that Kierkegaard brought to his thought. Life isn’t meant to be a restful affair. Anything but. We’re torn apart as a condition of our being, and we reckon with the nature of that congenital fissure in each of our actions and decisions, at least if we’re truly conscious of who we are.

Although Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling” is the basis of his exploration of faith, I read him as much as artist as philosopher or theologian; he’s fundamentally defining a lonely and terrifying spiritual pursuit, the truth that if recognized, one must stridently and recklessly observe. In redefining what it meant to be a Christian, he redefined the sense of an individual’s place in the world.

“One is tempted to ask whether there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly,” Kierkegaard wrote.

The words “outrageous folly” are spoken with reverence. His respect for folly, for a life that provokes, flies in the face of reason, is one that he reveres because at the heart of his thought, even though he’s questing to articulate his faith, he’s drawn equally to the kind of folly that makes us most human. The risk we take to feel the truth. Kierkegaard’s risk was religion, or rather, how a person lives inwardly—a bravery greater than such external risks as climbing mountains or going to war.

That inward risk, whether religious or not, is one that we all must reckon with. Interestingly enough, I find that many of his quotes speak directly to our human condition now, even though he died in 1855 at the age of 42:

“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.”

Sound familiar?

“My principal thought was that in our age, because of the great increase of knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness signifies.”

Again, can anyone say that our inwardness isn't in jeopardy these days when so many of us live online in constant outwardness? Information has flooded our sense of self.

Kierkegaard is continually at war for the sake of the personal vs. the impersonal, so it’s easy to apply his thoughts to our contemporary war for self vs. media, advertising, science, etc. He naturally fought against Hegel’s conception of individuality as an illusion, the self moving in tandem with historical movements of thought and principles, determined by evolving group trends and conceptions. To Kierkegaard, the individual was diminished in such a scheme, a mere representative of the groupthink of his or her times.

Although a lot of contemporary scientific and psychological studies continue to show how much our peers influence if not determine us (overweight people tend to live near overweight people, smokers tend to be friends with smokers), Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity offers a salvation if one is brave enough to step away from the group.

“No man, none, dares say I,” Kierkegaard wrote. He compares people to ventriloquist’s dummies who say the phrases that others have put in their mouths—including Christian principles. Life for most bears no mark of a decision—it’s lived without passion or risk.

Above all he’s against those who live by default (e.g., if you’re born a Christian, you are a Christian). Christianity for him is an active commitment that requires ongoing probing and self-scrutiny. So Kierkegaard asks how we’ve decided our commitments. They should all require fear and trembling, of course—an individual passionate commitment that might even invite punishment, ostracism.

With Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity and its urgent focus on the decision modern day existentialism was born.  To say “I” with such a taunt and dare invites a determination of ethics, yet we can never be certain that we’ve chosen “the right values.” Anguish and dread are conditions of our existence—but they can be exciting conditions, right?

This is when Kierkegaard yanks the comfort out of faith. Faith resists elucidation. It’s a matter of passion, after all, not words or dictums or adhering to the behavioral expectations of others. Outrageous folly. Vertiginous thought. Faith requires an act that defies the rational, a sort of absurdity. The suspension of the ethical for religious reasons. A life of inwardness—not as contemplation or reflection, but as a commitment to one’s resolutions, no matter the punishments they entail from others.

Take Abraham, whose story of faith required distress. Abraham is required by God to sacrifice his only son, an act without possibility of justification, one that would be ethically condemned by all in his community no matter if he told others that God required it.

So Abraham raises the knife to kill, his passion for God trumping rationality. With our contemporary wariness of religious nuts, we might put Abraham in a similar zany category, but think of his act in a different way for just a moment. Perhaps Kierkegaard is saying that we must sometimes honor the irrational aspects of ourselves in the face of our rational secular selves that are so dedicated to the kind of ethical view that goes unquestioned.

Kierkegaard valued Jesus for his indirect communication. Everything Jesus said was meant to be unbalancing. The listener is forced to confront the paradox rather than simply acknowledge an easy truth (for example, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.”) Kierkegaard’s love of Christianity—hence life—is because of its essential paradox, its resistance to reason. No one gets passionate about 2 + 2 = 4. Religion has to be about passion. So religion (hence life) can’t be about common sense.

Abraham’s dilemma forces such unbalancing. Christianity is not something to be followed. It calls one with severity. His act means that we must trust our belief, our leap of faith as we define it, even if it means a transgression of common ethics.

Again, this brings up Kierkegaard’s essential disdain for the safe decision. Where there is objective certainty, there is safety, the lack of venture, and where there is nothing ventured, there can be no faith.

Sometimes I think of Kierkegaard as one of the only pure Christians. If only because his faith was his art. It was a terrifying affair.

Oddly enough, Kierkegaard displayed a certain discomfort with his own identity—or an acknowledgement of its multiple identities—because he wrote almost all of his works with pseudonyms, and humorous ones at that: “Johannes de silentio,” Johannes Climacus,” and “Nicolaus Notabene.” He makes himself into a fiction and watched the thoughts.

To further the irony, Kierkegaard’s name means cemetery—a joke of sorts, yet representative of the gravity of his thought. He wanted “The Individual” to be inscribed on his tombstone. I wonder if in the end he valued being an individual in disdain of God, despite his wrenching decisions of faith.

His assertion of individuality certainly led other philosophers to do so. In fact, we have Kierkegaard to thank for this interesting quality of disdain that is somehow necessary to be so true to oneself. How can we be ourselves without holding the expectations of others in a certain disdain?

For more existentialist writings, see my pensees on Camus and his embrace of contradiction in the act of falling.

FRiGG Magazine: Friggin' Good Reading

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 reading experience. I sometimes forget that I’m reading an online journal because my computer screen becomes suddenly textured, painted—and I’m not annoyed by extraneous links or ads or pulls to lit contests or blogs or, or, or other things.

I can read. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish online. And here’s the kicker: FRiGG’s style of presentation is matched by its quality of writing. Each author writes truth with a slant, as Emily Dickinson recommended.

Just in case you were wondering, Friggis the name of the Norse goddess who was married to Odin. She was the patron of marriage, but in some myths she supposedly had affairs with Odin’s brothers. So I guess this means that FRiGG might be full of love and deception. Or just doesn’t live by the rules.

What was the genesis of FRiGG?

I started FRiGG almost eight years ago with Sean Farragher (the poetry editor) and Al Faraone (the guy who does most of the artwork). I met both of them at the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, an online workshop for writers and artists. In fact, I’ve met a large number of writers, editors, artists, and photographers during my years at Zoetrope. The site has been hugely valuable to me as a place to workshop my own fiction writing, read other fiction writers’ work, and get exposure to the work of poets, artists, and photographers not only from all over the U.S. and Canada, but also from around the world.

One of the reasons I started FRiGG was that I saw some incredible work at Zoetrope and I was like, “My god, this work needs to be showcased.” Also, I liked the idea of displaying each poet and fiction writer with a work of original art that was meant not to distract the reader from the stories and poems displayed, or to overshadow the writing, but instead to function as a lure to bring the reader into the writing itself. Kind of like crooking one’s finger and going, “Oooh, cast your eyes this way.”

What kind of writing are you looking for?

I am looking for writing that I like. I like writing that is so honest that it’s startling—and perhaps, at times, so honest that we might want to look away, we might be a bit put off, but we feel that we must be brave enough to keep listening to the writer. I often like writing that is odd—but without being self-consciously “wacky.” This can be a fine line. I like to see all sorts of human relationships addressed, and perhaps looked at from angles that we’re not used to seeing.

Is FRiGG more for established writers, or are you interested in finding new talent?

I have no preference for “established writers” as opposed to “new talent,” and vice versa. I try to respond only to what’s on the page. I don’t care who the writer is, how old he or she is, how “experienced,” how many degrees he or she has amassed, how many contests he or she has won. Just let me look at the story, or let Sean Farragher look at the poem (and the associate editor Dennis Mahagin is very qualified to look at both poetry and literature), and we will respond honestly to what is on the page.

What literary magazines does FRiGG admire the most?

This is perhaps the hardest question for me to answer. I don’t want to name specific magazines. I admire any literary magazine staff that has the interest and the guts and the determination and the persistence to put together a written and visual product that presents fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and, in some cases, artwork and photography (or any combination thereof) that they believe should be given a platform.

I feel disheartened when I see some magazines try to use the “cult of personality” among fiction writers and poets (such as it is) in an effort to put their magazine above others, to perhaps imply that their content is worthier because it has been contributed by “famous” or “cool” writers.

Sometimes these magazines hold contests for which they charge reading fees that are not insignificant, and they get “famous” writers to be judges, and they urge submitters to put their work before the eyes of these judges, as if just getting your work in the proximity of one of these writers would be reason enough to submit to the contest (although I often wonder whether these judges even see much of the work that’s submitted; I suspect that most of it is waded through and rejected before it makes it to the judge).

What am I trying to say here? I guess I admire the literary magazines that are not “cool.” They might not hold contests. It’s okay if the writers they publish are not “famous.” They just like putting out a literary magazine. They just like putting up stories and poems in the hope that people might read some of the writing and go, I am lying on the floor after I read that.

In an ideal world, what place will Frigg occupy in 5 years? Do you want it to be a niche mag, an insider's mag, or do you want it to be mainstream and popular with a wide audience?

It will never be an ideal world, but whether it is or is not doesn’t really affect my answer, anyway. In five years, I hope FRiGG will still be FRiGG. As for what it will be, I guess I would ask: What is it now? Who likes it? I hope that the same people who like it now like it in the future, and that we have some more people who like it in the same way.

It will never be “mainstream and popular with a wide audience.” I don’t have any special aspirations for it. Is that terrible to admit? I just want to keep doing it. I love doing FRIGG. I love the writers in FRiGG. I love the stuff these writers say. I love the staff of FRiGG. I’m not saying all that’s in FRiGG and about FRiGG and everything having to do with FRiGG is the greatest shit ever. It’s not. I hate stuff that’s supposed to be the greatest shit ever. You look underneath it, and you go: it’s not.

What do you think the future of the literary magazine is?

I think there will always be a place for the literary magazine as long as we have people who want to read (and to write) writing that is honest, and interesting, and daring, and humane, and beautiful, and ugly, and startling, and mind-altering, and perhaps unclassifiable, and after people read it they go, I just need to lie down for a while.

For more see last week's profile of Monkeybicycle.

Riding the Monkeybicycle: The Art of Literary Miscellany

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 them, only slightly more utilitarian than making buggy whips or telegraph relays. It's the sort of arcane craft they assumed was kept alive only by a lost order of nuns in a remote mountain convent or by the Amish in some print shop in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.”

It’s an insightful article, but as I read it, I shook my head in disappointment and depression. At that point, I was beholden to lit mags like The Paris Review or the Georgia Review, not to mention the Allegheny Review and the Iowa Review (many Reviews!)—my daddy’s, if not my grandaddy’s lit mags, you might say.

Strangely enough, I hadn’t experienced the trail blazing, wild west of online lit mags. Neither had Ted Genoways, evidently.

Fiction is anything but dying online—more people are getting published in more different journals—and more people are reading their stories because of the broad access of the Web and the fact that Twitter and Facebook can instantaneously reach thousands of readers (more, say, than that dusty back shelf in your favorite bookstore).

So, this is all a long lead-in for a new series I’m doing to raise awareness of the many great online lit mags, starting with Monkeybicycle, one of my favorites. Here's what Steven Seighman, the founder and editor of Monkeybicycle, has to say about biking in the online lit space.

What was the genesis of Monkeybicycle?

Monkeybicycle is something that started in 2002 in Seattle when I was doing a bit of my own writing, but thought it would be more fun to provide some sort of vehicle for other, real writers. There were only a handful of small journals out then—McSweeney's, Pindeldyboz, Eyeshot, 3 A.M. Magazine, Little Engines, and probably a couple more—so it wasn't yet the crowded field that it's become over the past nine years.

We ran a local monthly reading series, put out an early print issue, and just tried to keep it going as best we could. Seeing those other places do it was really inspiring.

Why did you name it Monkeybicycle?

The name just kind of came out of thin air. I think it was inspired by an exterminator in the movie Schitzopolis, who just spouted off random words as his own language.

What separates Monkeybicycle from the other lit mags out there?

At this point, it's tough to separate from the masses since there are so many journals out there. Maybe the fact that we've been around for so long is what separates us. Many of those journals who inspired us in the beginning have closed their doors. I guess we're sort of like elder statesmen in the online lit journal world.

Is Monkeybicycle more for established writers, or are you interested in finding new talent?

We look for all kinds of writing. If it's good, we'll consider it. One of the things that we try not to do is paint ourselves into a corner by focusing on one specific type of work. We go through phases where we'll publish a lot of humor, and then we'll be relatively serious for a while. The print issues have at least ten poems in them each time, and we have a running series of one-sentence stories on the site. So, we're kind of all over the place because we like a lot of different things.

And as to new writers vs. more established ones: we've always tried to have close to an equal amount of both. Bigger names are going to sell books (or get web hits), but our hopes are that by putting newer voices alongside those folks, readers will stick around and discover some great new names that we think deserve just as much of an audience.

What literary magazines does Monkeybicycle admire the most and why?

Gosh, that's a tough one. Early on we were heavily influenced by Pindeldyboz and McSweeney's, but over the years so many great ones have shown up that it's nearly impossible to narrow down. Personally, I like journals that provide a lot of variety. The Collagist is a good example of that. So is Guernica. Those are the first two that come to mind, but there are dozens more.

If you could choose five contemporary writers to publish in your next issue, who would they be?

Again, a tough one. There are so many great writers doing amazing work out there right now. My quick answer (though my co-editors would surely have different folks in mind) would be: Jim Shepard, Matt Bell, Laura van den Berg, Stephen Elliott, and Benjamin Percy.

In an ideal world, what place will Monkeybicycle occupy in 5 years?

It's always been a goal of ours to make Monkeybicycle accessible to as many people as possible. That's part of why we try to diversify our content. We believe the more people we can get our books into the hands of (or the more visitors we can get to our site), the better off our contributors will be. Essentially, for us, it's all about the contributors. If we can turn new people onto their work and get them some fans, then our job is done. And if we can entertain as many people as possible, that's awesome too.

What do you think the future of the literary magazine is ?

I think literary magazines are just getting started. I'm a graphic designer at Dzanc Books and each year I work on their Best of the Web anthology. In that book is always an index of online journals in the back, and with each book we've done over the past four years, that index has grown and grown.

The one change I do see happening now is that web publication is becoming as sought after as print used to be. When we started Monkeybicycle everyone wanted to see their work in print. But now, with so many online journals appearing, I think it's validated the medium. And also, as technology grows, I think there are a lot of clever editors out there that are going to take advantage of new ways to get their publications to people.

It's actually a very exciting time for literature in my mind. Of course, as a book designer, the idea of print going away is kind of scary though. Not that it ever will completely.

Do your editors still manage to write their own stuff?

Just about everyone writes except me. My co-editor, Shya Scanlon, just released his first novel, Forecast. Our web editor, Jessa Marsh, has been in school while working with us, but still manages to turn out great stories whenever she can. Our poetry editor, Jacob Smith, is in grad school studying acting, so that's more of what he's focusing on. I imagine he's writing as well though. And Laura Carney, our copyeditor, is a full-time journalist and also writes personal essays.

As for me, I just try to find as much graphic design work as I can and update my blog on occasion.

I bet you make a lot of money and throw extravagant parties, right?

You have no idea. Our last issue made so much money that we rented a penthouse in SoHo and bought two white tigers. Which reminds me, I need to update our mailing address inside the next issue.

For more articles on lit mags, see The Used Furniture Review, Literary Magazines on the Make?, and The death of fiction...one more time.

Reading as Pausing: James Salter

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 bright in the greyness, there was the cemetery across the street and her own car, a foreign one, kept very clean, parked near the door, facing in the wrong direction. She always did that. She was a woman who lived a certain life. She knew how to give dinner parties, take care of dogs, enter restaurants. She had her way of answering invitations, of dressing, of being herself. Incomparable habits, you might call them. She was a woman who had read books, played golf, gone to weddings, whose legs were good, who had weathered storms, a fine woman whom no one now wanted."

This passage is a typical way that Salter characterizes people--in one simple paragraph at the beginning of a story or novel--and it includes nearly everything I like about Salter's way of writing. It's a list of sorts, and you feel like you're getting the particulars of a person's life, except it's actually without precise details. It's more about the flow, the accents of a person's life, as if he's skating over life's essences. He seems to be saying that the flow is what matters more than the specifics to understand who a person is.

She knows how to give dinner parties, enter restaurants--what mystery those phrases have. I have to stop and imagine a person who knows how to enter a restaurant. Is she someone who knows how to command attention when she enters a room, or just someone acquainted with the finer things and at ease with herself, or both? She's confident, refined, knows beauty, in herself and probably in others. Incomparable habits. We know that she's unique, perhaps even special, but other than knowing that she parks her car in the wrong direction, Salter won't provide specifics.

Despite the lack of anything that would qualify as a fine detail in our era of fulsome and microscopic writerly details (many contemporary writers would end up laboriously telling how she gives a dog a bath to show just how she knew how to take care of dogs, a "fetishization of detail," as James Wood calls it), each phrase is evocative, surprising. I see the arc of her life, this tragic patrician woman who's been abandoned to a memory and knowledge of beauty more than the practice of beauty.

I still find few men who can write about women, but Salter is among the few, I think because he adores them so much, is obsessed by the ways they do things (like Fitzgerald in this regard). As a result, he's able to capture something deeper and more fundamental with many of his female characters.

Interestingly enough, I read the story imagining this woman in her 60s or so, only to find out that she's 46 in the end. I wonder if that was intentional on his part--to throw the last bits of her "youth" into the stark relief of an older age, place her there prematurely. I don't think Salter is a feminist in this regard. He just understands the tragedy of how age can treat a woman unfairly, leave her at loose ends and alone in the dusk of her life.

As with many writers who have influenced me, I've tried to imitate Salter and failed. He writes with a simple elegance, sensual and erotic even when he's not writing about sex, that's difficult to match. This excerpt is not an easy thing to write.

For more, read James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime and James Salter: Burning the Days. For more of my diatribes on the "fetishization of detail," read Writerliness gone mad, the fetishization of detail.

2011 Reading Resolutions: I Aspire

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 journal, "I aspire," here's a brief rundown of my reading aspirations for 2011. Just because it's that time of year.

1) Desert, by J.M.G. LeClezio (because after reading two novels of his I'm doggedly trying to figure out why he won the Nobel)

2) Barthes by Barthes (and other Barthes because I like to revisit one thinker who's influenced me each year)

3) Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (because it's on my list every year and I know I'll never read it, so I want to be buried with the book in my hand)

4) Dusk by James Salter (Salter is one of those masters who is like a friend, so I have to get together with him regularly and relish his way of seeing the world)

5) Break It Down by Lydia Davis (as with Salter, I could read Lydia Davis for a lifetime just trying to figure out how to write the perfect short short story)

6) The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (I loved the Poetry Foundation's podcast on Koch featuring the brilliant, lively, spirted Dean Young)

7) Fear of Dreaming by Jim Carroll (because I have a strange affection for junkie literature)

8) 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Bolano, bien sur)

9) Just Kids by Patti Smith (two artists in NYC in the early '70s is irresistable)

10) Logicomix (a graphic novel with some serious thoughts at its core—I need cartoons to guide any intellectual endeavors)

11) Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis (essays about drinking meant to be read while drinking, which should be easy to accomodate)

12) The Curtain by Milan Kundera (just because I've read everything else by Kundera)

13) Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (death must be recognized, always)

I'll stop at 13--because of its fate as a number, and I'll be lucky to read even a book a month this year. Ah for the days of yore when I literally structured my daily life so that the best hours could be spent reading and writing. Then I turned 30.

One resolution that's not on my list is to explore a different literary magazine each week or so. I've discovered so many good new ones this year—all of them online mags, which seem more lively and interesting than the old standby print journals. Smokelong, Pank, Word Riot, Frigg, Used Furniture Review....

Let me know a few of your reading resolutions in the comments below.

Reading Camus: Falling into a Life of Contradictions

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 straightforward, without pretense or unnecessary contrivance, without aggrandizement yet with dramatic flair, nuance, and poetry—traits that many other writers from the existentialist all-star team don’t possess to such a degree.

For example, much of Sartre’s writing is fueled by a preening display of intellectual bravado, a showing off of labyrinthine reasoning made more obtuse by his predilection to write on amphetamines (some say Sartre started the tradition of philosophical obfuscation that culminated in the often impenetrable prose of postmodernists like Derrida).

Kierkegaard, despite the trembling depths of his passionate opposition to all conventions of group think, is still quite beholden to his God. And Nietzsche is wonderful in his “will to power,” “God is dead” way, but presents more of a call to arms than the life-long probing of truth and daily life that Camus offers.

When I was 16, my brother came home from college and gave me The Stranger for a Christmas present. In retrospect, it might have been one of the best Christmas presents I’ve ever received. I remember how exotic and confrontational the very title of the novel was. It immediately made me a bit of a stranger as a result.

As a 16-year-old it was easy to feel like a stranger. What I didn’t know was that the feeling would go through so many different modulations over the course of a lifetime. And that there would never be a way to quite ever not feel like a stranger.

But that’s the contradiction Camus writes so well within—one as stranger to oneself, one as stranger to others, one as stranger to institutions and culture. We’re inherently dual creatures (at minimum), forever estranged.

As he put it, “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” That’s a brilliant definition—akin to Fitzgerald’s famous quote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

The mere fact of watching ourselves think is a step into estrangement even as it is a step toward something like deliverance because estrangement is a necessary way to make meaning. Life is an attempt to reconcile contradictions, per Fitzgerald’s take, despite the knowledge that the contradictions might be irreconcilable.

You might say that’s the joy, although some have said that’s the damnation as well. It’s all in the execution.

“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool,” Camus wrote.

So we’re caught in a tangled skein of cowardice and foolishness. There’s no way out. Even the very premise of our existence comes with an oppositional force, a question. As he says in The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

Our very birth calls for a reckoning with our existence—not only how to exist, but whether to exist. We breathe the air of contradiction.

I recently read The Fall, which brought all of the above thoughts into dramatic relief. The novel is written in a manner that I rarely encounter today: a series of dramatic monologues, or confessions, by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a “judge-penitent”—perhaps the crucial phrase of the novel.

It’s interesting to me that I can’t think of a contemporary novel that uses confession as a narrative device in such an acute manner—it’s a technique that seems to have gone out of style. I wonder if it’s because we live in an age where we’re covering up the truth or manipulating it rather than confronting it—that is, writers are more skilled in the craft of writing narratives, whether it’s the contrivances of plot or the fulsome lyricism of detail, but less skilled in writing something so basic and straightforward as an exploration of truth.

The art of publishing has trumped the art of writing.

One could make the argument that memoirs function as confessions, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Although we’re certainly living in an age dominated by memoir, contemporary memoirs function more as tell-all stories—confrontational only in the sense of revealing shocking behavior (which isn’t even truly shocking anymore since shock has been exhausted), but not confrontational in the manner of a simple confession of the truth of one’s soul.

The confession at the heart of The Fall is what makes it still compelling 54 years after it was published (it was Camus’s last novel before he died in a car crash).

For one, the confession in The Fall implicates the reader. In fact, in addressing an undescribed listener, the reader acts as the “confessor.”

“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession,” Camus wrote.

All of Camus’s work operates as a confession, which is why his writing feels so much more honest than others to me. His guilt spawns his knowledge, his language.

However, in The Fall Clamence hasn’t done anything particularly bad. He’s a good man—or a man as good as most and better than many—but who because of his scrutiny, the power of his introspection, is stripped of action. The novel shows the self-damnation of thought in that we can’t escape our consciousness if we truly think about our actions. It’s a cautionary tale because Camus was above all a man of action—to read The Rebel is to be incited into action, in fact.

Clamence’s fall—evoking Adam’s fall—is that of knowledge, but a different kind of knowledge than Adam possessed from the simple disobedience of biting an apple. It is the knowledge of the fundamental nature of irreconcilable contradictions.

The story takes place in Amsterdam (below sea-level for a man who “never felt comfortable except in lofty places,” preferring buses to subways, open carriages to taxis, terraces to closed-in places, etc.) and in the red-light district, which used to be the Jewish quarter before World War II ("until our Hitlerian brethren spaced it out a bit. ... I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history"). Clamence has fled from lofty Paris to search out a place to resemble the situation of his soul.

Yes, he's a dramatic one.

He has good manners, fine speech, and is well educated, “but frequents sailor bars.” It’s in such places that he can better recognize himself—a contrast to the more lofty places where he’s lived in mastery of life, a defense lawyer who admirably defends the poor, yet indulges in the advantages that his charm and station in life afford him, especially in matters of love.

He suffers three crucial moments of recognition in the novel: once as he strolls past a bridge and hears a splash in the Seine, but doesn’t deign to inconvenience himself to jump in and see if someone tried to commit suicide; later as he passes another bridge at night and hears laughter, which he momentarily thinks is directed at him as judgment; and finally in a moment of minor road rage where he almost resorts to violence.

In these three easily forgettable moments, Clamence realizes he’s not the pure do-gooder he thinks himself to be, and it’s the recognition of his hypocrisy that causes his fall. If only everyone in the world were such a hypocrite! After all, he’s nothing more than a classic limousine liberal. I can walk down to the North Berkeley Peet’s and yank out many more damnable sorts, myself included.

It’s the acute and crippling self-analysis that makes the novel, though—we should all grapple with the nature of our contradictions in such a manner. And this is what makes me happy and reassures me when I read Camus—the answers to our problems, whether political or personal, don’t lie in clear, intractable solutions (hint, hint Sartre, with your communist panegyrics), but in a continual confession, an exploration of the inherent and inescapable contradictions we find ourselves in.

We are all judges, after all, laying down a truth, expectations, and laws of behaviors for ourselves and others. Yet we are also all doomed to a sort of original sin different from Adam’s—we don’t fall from God’s law, but our own. We can’t not be hypocrites. We live inside of a double negative.

Most of us are unable to jump in the river to save the one who might have committed suicide because the water is too cold, or save those who are hungry and poor in the world—we like our lattes too much, our designer jeans, our international trips, our ability to gather in cozy places and discuss the problems of the world with other like-minded, smart (hypocritical) people.

We’re creatures of temptation, imperfection, and a certain kind of damnation. Deliverance doesn’t come through correction, but an immersement and recognition of the inherent contradictions that make us human. This type of penitence is the only thing that balances and adds a soft nuance to the harshness of judgment (hint, hint righteous Tea Partiers, righteous anybody).

So stand up and say you’re a judge-penitent for God’s sake.

We’ll all be the happier for it. It’s one path to a life of acceptance after all, no matter how troubled that acceptance might be.

Hallucinatory Effects: Jim Carroll and the Art of Purity

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 more a matter of the fiction we live in, or the recognition that our lives are essentially fiction, that the cast of characters who fill our days—including ourselves (yes, in the plural)—are nothing more than a morphing vision, an interpretation, a shifting creation, bits of data assembled and reassembled.

I’m thinking of this especially because of Richard Hell’s review of Jim Carroll’s posthumous novel The Petting Zoo in The New York Times. (It’s so lovely when a rock star is also intelligent and articulate, and that’s not my fiction).

“There’s a parallel time and world inhabited by those who understand that all information is legend, that experience is show business,” Hell writes of Carroll. “He lived in his head. Doesn’t everyone? The difference is that he knew it.”

I’ll always have a tender spot in my heart for Carroll because when the angst of my teen years started forming, somehow his haunting song “People Who Died” made its way from the dark streets of New York City to Iowa radio stations and helped introduce me to a world that held quite different truths (indeed, images of New York City in the '70s still menace me). "Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old / Fell from the roof on east two-nine."

As a friend of mine said when she saw the album cover of Catholic Boy that showed Carroll, who looked like a gaunt, emaciated version of David Bowie, standing in a challenging pose with his very square parents, "That's too f#*cking rock star." His eyes held a threat to anyone who made even a gesture to a conventional life.

And then there’s Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, which has become a sort of companion piece to Kerouac’s On the Road for young aspiring writers (mainly men, it seems) who want to dash madly into the late night hours of the night to discover the nether worlds of all of the supposed glories of truths unseen.

Hell reminds us that the diaries contained a disclaimer, which was later removed by the publisher, that they were “as much fiction as biography. They were as much made up as they were lived out. It all happened. None of it happened. It was me. Now it’s you. ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted.’”

It’s a stunning intro, a con man's taunt—and after reading David Shield’s Reality Hunger, a manifesto that essentially spends 150 pages riffing on fiction vs. memoir vs. appropriation—it’s a prescient take on our contemporary notion of "truth" in the way of a Rimbaud-like prodigy that Carroll was often characterized as.

“He lived among the poets of history, of life, not the accountants or the police officers. He was a con man, but all artists know that, significantly, they are bedazzlers, masters of illusion. Beautiful poetry isn’t life, but it’s pretty to think so.”

So then what is life, truth? How to describe it accurately? Scientists have their approach, but I trust the descriptions of artists more simply because I don't believe in accuracy in such matters. Perhaps it’s better to be content with something that feels like purity. “Carroll wanted to be pure, and poetry is the definition of purity,” Hell writes.

The New Yorker also just published an interesting review of The Petting Zoo, which seems to be just an atrocious novel. But the reviews of Carroll's life are worth reading.

Carroll, like most beautiful creatures, was punished in the end. His search for purity became an exercise in consequence, sequestered in poverty, confined to a small apartment, the blaze in his eyes smothered out by a failing liver. But at least he sensed the possibility of a more beautiful life and tried to imagine it, tried to put words to such a truth.

The Used Furniture Review

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 just as, well, a choice piece of junk/high art that I find in a thrift store might.

For example, read Kim Chinquee’s dreamy, distorted short I Wanted to Believe This Was My Life. She lyrically captures what might be called quotidian disorientation—sounds, movements, memories moving against and through each other without the possibility of focus or answers.

“I felt on the verge of things. My payments, student papers, that report. A journal, asking for an essay. My dad, a never-ending question. My guy’s head, thinking he felt pressured.”

But Used Furniture also publishes great interviews with the likes of Rick Moody, who discusses how he took refuge in the horrors of monster movies as refuge from the horrors of domestic drama as a child, his tastes in music, his current favorite books, and perspectives on his writing process, among other things.

Here’s a bit of Moody’s wisdom:

On his authorial stance: “The movement in and out of autobiography is something dialectical for me. I am always somewhere on a continuum between the completely imaginary and the completely accurate. Of course, there can be neither.”

On revision: “Over the life of a piece you usually alter it less radically, as you go on, and that’s how you know it’s getting better. But there’s no done. There’s no complete. There’s no exhaustion. There are only provisional versions of texts for particular purposes.”

Used Furniture also has published interviews with authors such as Tom Perotta and Luis Alberto Urrea.

One great thing about new online reviews like Used Furniture is their potential. For example, they’re taking ideas for columns. If were a young literary whippersnapper, I’d submit an idea.

So buy some used furniture for God’s sake. My experience is that most used furniture is better than the new stuff, if only because it has more character.

C.P. Cavafy and His Histories of Desire

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 life
of his may bring him to a disastrous scandal.

The overwhelming thing that you take away from the poetry of Constatine Cavafy, a part-time clerk and Greek poet of the early 20th century, is desire. It’s his sustenance, nurturing him in the dark alleyways of Alexandria, where he lived for most of his life.

The impulse of his needs, skin on skin, human connection, is greater than all of the expected punishments of inevitable scandals. Dishwashers, tailor’s assistants, grocery boys briefly and passionately interrupt the loneliness of Cavafy’s nocturnal landscape. They’re the air he breathes.

But in the mix of these drives of desire are historical poems that trace through the old histories of the Hellenic period. Cavafy viewed himself as a poet-historian, which meant that he viewed all human conduct, his own included, through the lens of recorded time.

The juxtaposition of such intense personal narratives alongside the probings of Greek history create a unique commentary on life, brief sexual trysts in the shadows mixing with the grand, tragic sweeps of Greek history.

Cavafy was a man who lived in the background—even preferred obscurity as a simple clerk—so it’s no surprise that he’s drawn to the stories of the insignificant and uses “insignificance” as a backdrop and counterpoint to “significance,” altering the traditional notion of history.

When reading a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions he discovers “a tiny,/insignificant reference to King Caesarion”:

Ah, see, you came with your vague
fascination. In history only a few
lines are found about you,
and so I molded you more freely in my mind.
I molded you handsome and full of sentiment.
My art gives your features
a dreamy compassionate beauty.

It’s art, the ability to mold his desires, to transform life into something dreamy and compassionate, that saves Cavafy, even though its salvation is a lonely affair. Later in “Caesarion,” he imagines that Caesarion enters his room:

You seemed to stand before me as you must have been
In vanquished Alexandria,
Wan and weary, idealistic in your sorrow,
Still hoping that they would pity you,
The wicked—who murmured “Too many Caesars.”

As his desires wend through battles and conquests and downfalls, Cavafy almost celebrates human foibles in his recognition and identification of them. His poems force questions about the very record of history and how it so frequently leaves out the nuances of human imperfections and desires as a way to understand life.

Cavafy wrote unwaveringly about his homosexuality and embraced the possibility of scandal. It’s interesting how gay literature often puts our prim moral code in question these days—begging the question of why straight literature seems unable to do the same (there are no more Henry Millers, Charles Bukowskis, only middle-class domestic dramas).

Straight people, white straight people in particular, have to live vicariously through others’ decadence—truly “othering” such impulses—pretending, it seems so often, to possess no decadence of their own.

Shame on you Bill Clinton, shame on you Eliot Spitzer. It’s easy to bash our scandalous public figures, and although Clinton and Spitzer might not deserve any accolades for their transgressions, after reading Cavafy, I can imagine our contemporary history being written by a poet-historian in the far future, and perhaps the narrative will be of simple lost souls seeking a moment of tenderness, a connection between heart and life that’s forbidden—the part of the story left out of CNN's coverage.

Cavafy’s poetry has this effect of providing the subtext of history, of life, that all too often we don’t want to acknowledge or explore because it’s easier to damn (at least as a good American).

In his poem, “In a Famous Greek Colony, 200 B.C.,” Cavafy writes,

To be sure, and unfortunately, the Colony has many shortcomings.
However, is there anything human without imperfection?
And, after all, look, we are going forward.

In a culture that so often strives for perfection and chastises others for their “blemishes,” I wonder if we are going forward. Cavafy shows that a life lived within one’s imperfections instead of one’s perfections (if that’s the right way to put it) might be the more meaningful one.

Perfections tend to have a sharp, bright glare after all. There’s a peace to find with a life in the shadows. Nuances. A realization that we’re unable to see everything clearly. Humility. Even progress perhaps.

For in the end, our imperfections create a life of surprises, explorations, a life that is worth examining. In “Their Beginning,” Cavafy writes of two lovers rising from the mattress, walking furtively and uneasily on the street afterward, knowing that their “deviate, sensual delight/is done.”

But how the life of the artist has gained.
Tomorrow, the next day, years later, the vigorous verses
Will be composed that had their beginning here.

For more, check out Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation, C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems.