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.

Literary Magazines on the Make?

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 a writer and will spend ten bucks on a seemingly infinite number of how-to-write-fiction books written by previously unpublished authors (I’m currently working on book about how to buy how-to-write books…kidding, just in case some poor sob of an aspiring writer was getting ready to contact me for an advance copy).

(But if you did want to contact me about such a book, I’d love to talk with you about any number of ventures I have in mind, such as the funding I need for my “How to Write Like Grant Faulkner Workshop” that I have planned next summer in Paris.)

Don’t worry, this is all leading up to something….

Literary magazines have long been the tireless mules of publishing, except that unlike mules, lit mags breed like rabbits on Viagra. That’s a good thing (although they die like lemmings). Whether funded by universities or by grants or by love—or all three if they're lucky—lit journals have had the responsibility of slogging through submissions of every soon-to-be great author and every wanna-be poet. Thousands of them. Millions of them.

But really, who thanks them in the end? Answer: nobody.

So I don’t begrudge lit mags for trying to make ends meet or even to make a buck. But I’d like to see them do it in a legitimate way—e.g., people paying for the product they produce or the advertising in that product or the writing classes they put on or something that seems like a service.

Unfortunately, some lit mags are now focused on making a buck from the desperado writers (present company included) who keep the whole boat afloat by buying the how-to books, the novels, the lit magazines.

Take Narrative Magazine, which charges $20 for a prose submission, but for that fee you don’t know if they’ve read the first sentence, the first paragraph, or the first page. You don’t know that with any magazine, of course, but for $20, the magazine should include at least a single comment about one thing they’ve read. Otherwise, well, I’m not so sure that they’re just not publishing their friends or the writers they want to sleep with.

I’m sympathetic, yet suspicious.

Tin House has a much better approach. It requires “writers submitting unsolicited manuscripts to the magazine to include a receipt for a book purchased from a bookstore.” That’s a policy for the general good of publishing and doesn’t charge a writer for, well, writing.

Likewise many lit contests, such as the Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize, give a one-year subscription to the mag for the entry fee. Fair enough.

But I’m worried about a trend where those writers who are without the lit connections, MFA degrees, etc., pay to have their submissions read. These are the people who are likely funding the whole shebang. They’re desperados, beautiful hopeful souls who are easily suckered because they have a dream or an urgent (likely self-destructive) need to put life to words.

I’m one of them. So please don’t charge me $$ just for wanting to be a writer. Or at least give me something in return. A mug? A t-shirt?

The New Pages blog has some good perspectives on this as well.

Good luck 'ye of much faith.

Invisible City Audio Tour: A Surreal Oakland Adventure

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 explored.

What more do you want? Trapeze artists? I'll put in a vote for a ventriloquist and leave it at that.

Along with the audio component, the tour exhibits temporary, semi-temporary, and permanent visual art installations (I prefer semi-temporary installations to semi-permanent ones, although semi-absent ones are always the best, being so semi-ripe with semi-possibilities, but that's just me).

The event’s inspiration comes from Italo Calvino, who wrote in his book Invisible Cities, “And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”

Here’s the skinny on how to hear the invisible reasons that Oakland lives and bring it to life again (if Jerry Brown had only known):

• Download the audio tour along with the map onto an MP3 player or onto a CD for walkman.
• Refrain from listening to the tour until the happening.
• Come to the MacArthur BART station, and push play (preferably right as you dismount the train in the platform).
• Walk the tour, stop at the landmarks and buy souvenirs from the visual artists (bring $$ or be square).
• Stop at the Murmur and say hello (or be square)
• Come grab a pint at the Commonwealth Cafe and Pub (or be square)

Invisible City Audio Tours was founded in 2010 by the whirling creative dervish Tavia Stewart-Streit (Watchword Press, National Novel Writing Month, and certainly much more).

Emperor Franzen and the Jonathan Franzen Publicity Machine

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 the glorious novelist.

The cover of Time magazine? Great American novelist? What era are we living in?

I’m not happy. I haven’t read Freedom, but I fell for the hoopla around The Corrections, and, well…I thought it was an adequate, but not great, novel (the proof point being that it's receding from my memory, except for a troubling, acidic aftertaste). The Corrections was like going on a date with the popular girl in high school, kissing her, and then realizing you'd rather hang out with your ne'er-do-well friends.

So, like others, I’m wondering what is so special about Freedom. And I’m wondering if Franzen’s publicist is what is special about Freedom. And I hope his publicist is getting a big, fat raise.

Seriously, how many people do you hear still talking about The Corrections—the novel itself, not the hype or the Oprah drama around it?

I hang around with writers of all sorts, and The Corrections is never mentioned. Alice Munro is mentioned. Denis Johnson is mentioned. Junot Diaz is mentioned. Jonathan Lethem is mentioned. Roberto Bolagno is mentioned. (Sorry for the male heavy list, but that’s who I am).

The Corrections is not a cultural touchstone. I'm betting Freedom won't be either. I'd say that I'm going to read Freedom, but since my first date with Franzen was less than inspiring, I'll probably pass (unless I get a meeting with his publicist).

But there are two good things that come out of this hype. First, at least fiction is being discussed (maybe once a decade a writer makes the cover of Time magazine?). Second, the behind-the-scenes satire starts to eclipse the publicity machine.

Just check out Emperor Franzen and his battle with the women writers who are trying to take him down. Hilarious stuff. A great image of Emperor Franzen donning an evil cloak.

The lesson of all of this is the same: The writing universe will never be fair. A gaggle of critics all seem to owe Franzen money. Maybe he's just a really good poker player. And perhaps Sam Tanenhaus from the Times is a gambling addict. Otherwise, I don't know how to explain it all.

Writerliness Gone Mad, the Fetishization of Detail

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 what I call "writerliness"--a way of writing that seems akin to conversational bragging, the sort of unsubtle one upmanship that guarantees annoyance rather than accolades--and works against simple connection (which is what stories of any sort are for, right?).

Take this first paragraph from American Idol by Robert Baird, featured in the current edition of Narrative Magazine.

"On the far side of the footbridge, the sun threw stretched shadows across the mudflats. Karen lowered her backpack and sat down on the damp planks to wait for the bus back to Rio Canto. The breeze at her back fluttered the tongue of the handkerchief that held down her hair. She dropped her head, closed her eyes, and let her legs swing gently from the knees. As the blood worked its way back into her calves and heels she felt the stirrings of a valedictory ache. When she opened her eyes again they fell to a gray mutt who nosed among the pilings at her feet. She watched him chew several rotten banana peels down to the fibers before his attention turned to the sodden waste washed up under the bridgehead."

I'm fine with the sun throwing shadows, but the dribblings of excessive words begin with the breeze fluttering the tongue of the handkerchief that held down her hair (the tongue?). It culminates in the blood working its way back into her calves and heels and something called "the stirrings of a valedictory ache," which I assume happens in her capillaries.

I don't know if it's just me, but I rarely feel my blood working its way through my calves. Perhaps I'm sensorily deprived.

The first of Elmore Leonard's 10 Tricks for Good Writing is to never open a book with the weather. I think Baird's first paragraph--and so many others--is akin to opening a book with the weather. Over description, the assertion of writerliness, doesn't draw one into a story but toward the author and his or her dubious skills with high falutin' language.

It reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's warning about vocabulary. As a writer, be careful of the vocabulary you learn because you'll end up using all of the words you know, and those words might ironically do the story a disservice.

It's what James Wood calls the “fetishization of detail” in How Fiction Works. “Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye (There is so much detail in life that is not purely visual),” Wood writes.

I hope that contemporary fiction will start to fetishize dialogue, existential dilemmas, playfulness, anomalies, something else. I'd blame this tendency on MFA writing programs, but that just seems too easy.

Paul Strohm and the Art of the 100 Word Story

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 snapshot, a pivot that defines the act of memory in dashes of details, episodes rising with cinematic and often ribald ironies. While there is a certain trendy novelty to genres such as the six-word novel/memoir or Twitter stories, I find that these forms often rely too much on a joke, a gimmick, or just make little sense (although I like Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”)

With 100 words, Strohm manages to stretch out and truly evoke a moment, if not spin a yarn, while maintaining the nuanced hints that are crucial to such a short form.

Strohm is working on a series of 100 of the shorts, and having completed 99 of them, he published nine in the California College for the Arts lit journal Eleven Eleven.

Since the stories are short, I’ll quote the story “Meeting Girls” in its entirety:

My high school friends and I were afraid of girls but thought we should be meeting some. Wilbur (‘Stiff Sheet’) Coultis—a.k.a ‘Coitus’—claimed he knew how. Under his supervision, we went cruising every Friday night in Martin’s Nash Rambler. Seeing a girl walking, we’d slow the car so Coultis could roll down his window and shout ‘Yo, Snatch!’ before we sped away. Our friend Valentine pointed out after several weeks that this wasn’t working, and proposed ‘Hey, BeeBay!’ with no better results. Back at Martin’s we smoked cigarettes and complained about no luck. But that became Valentine’s nickname: ‘BeeBay.’”

Millions of words have been written about this topic, but what more do you need to know? Many a man has cherished such painful, anguished bonding (although mostly in retrospect), and we can only hope our techniques improve with age. But probably not much, as the story points out in the second, more tender, yet still misguided advance.

Strohm is most known for his scholarship. He’s Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has published books such as Social Chaucer. But let’s hope we see the other ninety 100 word stories from him soon.

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

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 Chuck Palahnuik, he of The Fight Club (because it's all a fight).

As a writer, I felt compelled to toe the publishing line until I realized I was flushing away all my free time. I was starting to really hate writing. It looked like just another f---ing job where I was trying to please some boss. There had to be a way for writing to be fun.

So he wrote The Fight Club.

It sounds so simple, huh? Be playful. Know thyself. Don't answer to anyone. Write like a kid, a madman, a dancer, a clown. Search for meaning on your own terms.

It doesn't matter if you're writing Moby Dick, Waiting for Godot, or Jack and Jill. It's the same tip. Never try to please the boss. Kick the boss out of the house.

Put up your dukes.

Writing tips. And more writing tips...

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?

Especially if one is avoiding writing by studying the rules for writing--and neglecting the first rule: just do it (apologies for the Nike tie-in).

Margaret Atwood on plot

Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Anne Enright on persistence

The first 12 years are the worst.

Richard Ford on the writing life

Don't have children.

Jonathan Franzen on the Web

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Zadie Smith on revision

When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Jeannette Winterson on ambition

Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

Neil Gaman on readers' critiques

Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

These aren't the best excerpts. In fact, Anne Enright's are worth executing in their entirety. "Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity."

And, as a final tip, be assured that you'll be able to return to this blog for more wrting tips. And even more tips after those.

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

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. The voice didn’t just speak itself.

This is all to say that I don’t think writers should be too mystical about voice. I don’t think Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses” is the path, just a path. One might seize upon voice through prayer, or, I don’t know, jogging, crocheting, sipping tea.

Voice is a commitment. To hear it you simply have to privilege listening to it over the din of the other noises in your life.

I’m thinking about voice because I just read the profile of Sam Shepherd in the Feb. 8 New Yorker. It’s always interesting when someone like Shepherd emerges out of nowhere, literally stepping off a bus in New York City in 1963, unread, unschooled, unconnected, and then he writes such a tangle of compelling stories, seemingly without the tortured ambition and wrangling with revisions that others muscle through.

He’s one of those blessed (or cursed) naturals. Because he listened.

“I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said.

Is there any better definition of the first powerful impulse to be a writer?

“There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer….There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.”

Shepherd’s plays grow out of a certain beat tradition, the words, characters, and structures spawning from his trust in the more intuitive forces of creation.

“You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come,” he says.

Such a raw trust in voice seems absent in most of the stuff I read these days (with the exception of Roberto Bolano). I suppose the easy answer is that we’re living in the age of MFA programs and social networking and email. Authors are well-read and schooled and connected. Our age of writing is very practiced, very intentioned. Stories tend to be neat, not messy. It takes a very brave writer to trust in the voice more than the structure, the sale, the marketing, etc.

I don’t know if that’s right or wrong.

The article includes so many of Shepherds voices as he chronicles “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America.”

People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth.”

Shepherd also provides a nice angle on characterization: “I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable.”

An author shouldn’t answer for a character’s behavior, in other words, or at least not entirely. These are the people we’re compelled by in real life—the ones that don’t fit into our expectations. The ones who trouble us.

It fits with a quote I remember reading from Shepherd over 20 years ago: “Always write within a contradiction.”

Voices colliding…

Literary Drunks and Addicts and Scourges

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, for those who like to hang drunken authors on their walls).

We love our literary addicts, don't we? It's almost a shame the tradition is dying. I certainly don't want to be an advocate for addiction, but there's something a bit dismaying about the image of contemporary writers at 24 Hour Fitness, keeping a calorie count on the elliptical, dallying over organic salads afterward, turning down a second glass of wine at the weekend's dinner party.

There's a magnificent photo of Dorothy Parker (one of my favorite artistes of the drunken barb), as she bangs away at a typewriter, her eyes and jowels all full of the bags of a weary, joyous life of revelry and damnation--and then there's a wonderful view of the countryside behind her, a man who looks like Rock Hudson lounging in the next room. But she's writing, writing and writing and writing.

James Baldwin's eyes pop out in the livliest, most electrified way.

Jean Cocteau is being lifted to heaven (or taking a roundabout way to hell).

You've gotta live, right? Or you've gotta die to write.

Consider thes quotes--which might be more magnificent (or downright disturbing) than the photos:

You just got to see that junk is just another nine-to-five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined toward shadows. -- Basketball Diaries

I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death."

-- Jack Kerouac

To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.

-- Jean Cocteau

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."

--Charles Bukowski

I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

--Truman Capote

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.

--Raymond Chandler

We'll leave the drinking right there. With all of the clothes off. Drama shall ensue.

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzhaler

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 there’s his tantalizing title for the collection, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, that promises a skewed, evanescent, shady vision of our lives in motion and a probing of what travel means.

And finally, and most importantly, there’s the gripping first poem that’s eponymous with the title of the collection.

The markets never rest

Always they are somewhere in agitation

Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat

Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons

Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes

Across the firmament

Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets

As they make their nightlong journeys

Across the oceans and steppes

I might venture to say that this short stanza defines the movements and machinations of the world as accurately and evocatively as any 50 words could.

Kleinzhaler combines the words of commerce, capitalism, technology, and nature in such a criss-cross of restless movement that it makes me feel life as a strange force—both mechanistic and natural—beyond our understanding (and this was before the economic crisis of the last year—he easily could have sprinkled in “mortgage derivatives,” etc. to signal another wild weave of the pattern).

The poem goes on to relate the life of our strivings, our production, to nature itself in its metaphors— “Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information,” and “Like an enormous cloud of starlings”—while still evincing the essential loneliness one can experience in such a world through a simple image: “The lights of the airport pulse in the morning darkness.”

I wanted every poem in the collection to riff on these themes, to rise in a crescendo—or perhaps a swarm—of similar startling and telling images. Alas, I don’t think any of the rest of the poems in the collection are nearly as good, which isn’t to say that they aren’t good.

“The Old Poet, Dying,” touches on a different kind of travel—the fadings in and out of one leaning toward the grave. Fragments. Memories. Bodily functions. Strange TV shows. Stories and nurses.

Kleinzhaler is best when he’s focused as a witness, either to another’s story or as an observer of the world; his poems become less compelling the more personal they are.

In “Citronella and Yellow Wasps,” he’s fortunately on the road again, much as he is in “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep,” and he patches together images of I-35, Austin into a fragmented blur of the crazy yet sometimes disturbing beauty of the American road, whether it’s methamphetamine, NASCAR, or Jesus.

Before the heat and after

The little pink beeper ship and the flamingo

In the logo

Same color as the icing on the cookies inside

And the votive candles that heal bad sprains

Also, the billboards overhead

Through the dusty branches

Big square decals mounted against sky

A bit of nose here, some lettering

Jesus or barbecue

Exit 205

Cobalt blue background cut out of sky

Kleinzhaler writes without judgment; his poems are at once critique and appreciation. America’s kooky, yet sometimes menacing road images become totems of a traveler’s appreciation in “An Englishman Abroad.” Our talk radio hosts go with “coral pink” sunsets in a way that no other country can match.

In such travels, a placelessness can ensue. As he says in “On Waking in a Room and Not Knowing Where One Is,”

Cities each have a kind of light,

a color even,

or set of undertones

determined by the river or hills

as well as by the stone

of their countless buildings.

I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.

It must be close to dawn.

The book closes with a bang—or more than a bang actually. The definition of travel shifts to those marauding bands of yesteryear, “attached to their ponies like centaurs,” and the strange hours they keep are spent in a similar pattern as the opening poem, except they’re pillaging places, destroying buildings they never aspire to live in. It’s a vicious poem, full of “Ripping the ears off of hussars and pissing in the wounds.”

We’re born with an urge to pillage, to travel. Creative destruction. Destructive creation.

Perhaps I liked the book more than I thought I did.

Watch video of Kleinzhaler reading:

The Eternal Life of Holden Caulfield

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 just keep flowing and flowing from him as if he’s reproducing everywhere.

As Michiko Kakutani said in the Times, Catcher in the Rye is “a book that intimately articulates what it is to be young and sensitive and precociously existential.”

For one, consider the recent young adult novel King Dork, which is a ribald update of Catcher. How about James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. Heck, even Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

Salinger nailed the Holden type—the kind of teen that, well, practically every teen identifies with in some way. Even jocks. Even phonies. Reading Catcher was—and perhaps still is—a rite of passage. The struggle between phoniness and authenticity is a lifelong challenge, and it sadly always will be.

Which is why that Holden crosses generations: He can be a punk rocker, a hippie, a drama nerd, a skateboarder, hell, a skinny kid holding an iPhone and texting.

So here’s the challenge: Name all of the characters in literature, in pulp fiction, in movies, in song, etc., that owe a debt to Holden Caulfield.

Think Jesse Eisenberg as Walt Berkman in the Squid and the Whale. Think Juno in Juno. Think Belle and Sebastian’s "Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie."

In the meantime, join the phonies mourning J.D. Salinger. Salinger wouldn't have it any other way--would he?