Joshua Harmon

"Everybody loves street"

2012-01-05T08:17:00.004-05:00

The new issue of Gently Read Literature features Poppy Samuels's review of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie:

Unlike the backwards-looking Baudelaire, the poems in Harmon's collection do not seem to track the speaker-poet as a social misfit incapable of transcendence; rather he's a pseudo-naïve participant cast into trance, spellbound into visions, willing to voyage wherever the trip takes him. However, I'm not suggesting that this is a poetry concerned with transcendence or whatever. It's not. No, the speaker-poet still shares his work with the voyeur, the stroller, the lounger, keeping himself at a remove. (Remember, we're always reminded of the frame.) But what's compelling here is the force and determination of his spell. The poems interest themselves in something closer to the friction-joy that comes from walking around and looking: the imagination working so hard it smokes!

"slow-release revelations"

2011-12-07T08:27:00.004-05:00

Dora Malech reviews Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie as part of On the Seawall's annual fall feature, Twenty Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles: "[T]hough this is not a book that fetishizes poverty or decay," Malech writes, "it constantly asks us to reexamine the imperfect and the transient":

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie reads like an elegiac mosaic. Refusing to culminate in solace, the terminus of a classical elegy’s arc, this collection “is context / not event,” as it accretes moment upon moment of mourning and consolation, taking the reader not to a tourist destination, but inside a life lived and a place observed. We inhabit the “absentminded particulars of ruin” in this post-industrial American city, paradoxically universal in its specificity.

the aesthete's point of view, pt. 2

2011-11-21T07:28:00.004-05:00

Two recent reviews (and one not-so-recent review) of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie:

Donna Stonecipher, in Rain Taxi:

In Joshua Harmon’s second book of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, there is an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in surfaces: the book is an enactment of Geertz’s aesthetic perspective on life as applied to the ugly—degraded, impure, deeply compromised—surfaces of Poughkeepsie, New York. Beauty, every aesthete’s object of desire, is an exhausted property in Poughkeepsie, a small American city...compromised by the assaults of 20th-century material culture’s relentless pursuit of profit in all its forms. But whereas in the 1840s Charles Baudelaire wrote Le Spleen de Paris in stripped-down prose poems that served, in Walter Benjamin’s estimation, as a tacit acknowledgment of the end of the lyric, Harmon’s spleen goes in the opposite direction; in both free-verse and prose poem forms, he uses lyric’s heightened capacity for beauty to detail Poughkeepsie’s ugliness in defiantly beautiful formulations (e.g., “a diminishment / of light scrolls upward / like a screen flickering from overload or vast / swirls of starlings, errant e-mails caught in / a bramble of downed wires”).

Djelloul Marbrook, in Chronogram's fall poetry roundup:

“Spleen” has at least five meanings in French and English, and [Joshua] Harmon explores them all, keeping Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in mind, while describing the ineffable loneliness of a hard-luck city...

Charlotte Seley, at the Vernacular Literary Blog:

[Harmon] addresses the city perhaps as no one else has in Poughkeepsie’s history. A city that suffers from failed attempts of gentrification and revitalization (“Can we imagine another world? Pity keeps it going.”), there has not yet been a solid solution nor has anyone acknowledged the morsels of obscured beauty lodged in its make-up. The solution may always have been to speak to the city itself...

And a recent review of Scape, by Ezekiel Black in iO:

The book, like the speaker who attempts to travel the drift lines, those paths of least resistance, despite the snow, walks terra incognita, and thus, Harmon is a cartographer trying to reconcile the known and unknown land, trying to answer the question “Whither are we bound?”

Poughkeepsie during the reign:

2011-05-05T21:47:00.008-04:00

"Hooker Avenue Serenade," one of the poems from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, was featured on Verse Daily yesterday.

[Images courtesy Google Maps and the notebook in which I wrote the notes and drafts for Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie]

two reviews of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

2011-04-11T10:20:00.003-04:00

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie has been reviewed by Anya Groner at The Rumpus and by Nick Sturm at Barn Owl Review.

Groner warns that the book is "oppressive," but adds that

[t]his harsh, post-industrial landscape is mitigated by gorgeous lyricism. Using a combination of prose poems and harshly enjambed verse, Harmon creates hypnotic rhythms and occasionally lapses into delightful sound play: “in lawful ground, last / leaf-lace, light of flat / screen.” The tension produced is tremendous. Harmon’s images paint Poughkeepsie as a sort of measured hell, while his lyricism betrays begrudged tenderness, an unwanted nostalgia.

Sturm, like Groner, puts the book "[i]n dialogue with Baudelaire, who was appalled by the intensification of the inhuman forces of modernization, especially by its effects on the poor," and adds that

Harmon is witness to the shocking aftereffects of what it means to forget that we are human, and that our ability to ruin the environment and ourselves can so easily escape our control. Through Harmon’s precise, charged enjambments and attention to syntax, these poems blur class, nature, language, technology, and the remnants of mercy into a post-pastoral fight for survival.

As ever, I am thrilled by such careful and generous readings.

The Poughkeepsiad

2010-12-16T11:14:00.004-05:00

My chapbook, The Poughkeepsiad, containing the title poem and some of the "Tableaux Poughkeepsiens" from the full series in Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, is just out from The Greying Ghost Press. I can highly recommend the other Greying Ghost books, too.

advance comment on Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

2010-12-09T00:27:00.003-05:00

Perhaps it will come to pass that Poughkeepsie, the small city on the Hudson, will be known as the capital of the 21st century. For Joshua Harmon, it has provided a terrain of nearly unbearable enjambment, where nature twines with the present ghosts of a humanity living amid the ruins of material culture. Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is a relentlessly affecting, brilliantly observed, beautiful and sober inventory of modernity's ragged edge.

—Ann Lauterbach

"If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy": Joshua Harmon's gorgeous language enacts visionary social space, asks us to live, and more than that, asks us to be willing to live "on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life." Here we are, with a brilliant guide who teaches us that "our own kingdom goes, / unaccountably" and that we are "no one / but singular / soul's monologues / spit over salt." Harmon calls his vision "a memoir of disintegration," but it is much more than that. It is necessary. American poetry needs this voice. American poetry needs this book.

—Joseph Lease

Joshua Harmon is the flâneur of Poughkeepsie, and Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is what happened after the crowds dispersed, and those that were left in the basements, on the front porches, and in the aisles of convenience stores couldn’t figure out anywhere else to go. Disgusted, Baudelaire wanted to be “anywhere out of the world.” To which Harmon asks, “Can we imagine another world?” leaving the question dangling in the dirty air. For him, “the insufferable inching toward wreckage” is proof enough that we haven’t yet hit bottom, and perhaps that is all one needs to know to keep going. This is a book of particulars, of looking at (and remembering) everything, from “The quiet streets of meth / dispensaries closed / for the holiday / weekend” to “the blood on the billboard.” The brilliance is in the details.

—John Yau

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie pre-orders

2010-11-25T11:55:00.003-05:00

Discounted pre-orders for Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie are now available at Amazon, for both the simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions.

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

2010-08-06T10:06:00.004-04:00

My next book of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, has been awarded the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize by judge G.C. Waldrep, who wrote the following about the book:

A tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America's benighted post-industrial heartland. Harmon's Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition. "If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy," Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out "the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one...on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life." Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else "alone," where "the noise of beauty" is a cop's bullet polishing off a "traffic-struck doe," where "five dollars takes you anywhere in this town / except out of it." Harmon seeks not so much to locate aesthetic value within this terrain of loss and longing as to implicate the reader's sentimental collusion with a landscape forever slipping away from its own inhabitants, where even the trees are "evasions." His superb eye catches the telling moments we might otherwise miss, "the lack of affect in an oversized raccoon / examining the ruin," the "abandoned / railway bridge spanning...value / and use," "the doorway another woman / ducks into to fix a flame to the end / of a cigarette like all the misunderstood pleasures / of color."

Some poems from the collection have appeared online here, here, here, here, here, and here. A chapbook of some of the poems is also forthcoming from the awesome Greying Ghost Press.

two more on Scape

2010-04-02T08:52:00.000-04:00

The new issue of Gently Read Literature features Zach Savich's review of Scape:

Despite their hospitality to some interpretation, Harmon’s poems don’t ask for close reading but for re-reading. They reward it with clarity that reduces nothing, shimmering between types of focus, so you can see how “snow snooze-buttons // the day” (4); “a furl limns tips split, a sleaving” (51); and “Ten leaves amidden mast the hammering / yaws. Ware wind their color: florid stipple, / trebly grain.” Such mouthful phrases are vivid, strong as a shark on your line, and mindful of the “origin” within the “original.” They give a dream of language that is inseparable from sensory perception, even as its syntax and reasoning veer between receiving the world and transforming it into human speech.

And the new issue of Word for / Word includes an interview conducted by Andrew Topel.

on artifice & simple stories

2010-03-31T17:43:00.007-04:00

Although the title of Roxanne Gay's post today at the often-frustrating HTML Giant notes that it consists of "ramblings," and so anticipates and/or deflects some of my response, there are so many unconsidered assumptions, generalizations, and undefined terms in her post that I feel a need to react to several of her assertions.

Gay begins by saying that her thoughts are not a "condemnation of experimentation," and I don't take them as such—but her second paragraph—

My favorite story (though I enjoy all kinds of writing) is told simply and without artifice, one where I turn the page and can’t wait to see what happens next, where the characters are interesting and well-developed and where I am invested emotionally. I love reading something so great that I want to find everything that person has ever written immediately

—makes me wonder exactly what sort of story she believes is told "without artifice." The meaning of that term has, of course, evolved from its initial sense of a thing made by a human being rather than a thing occurring in nature, and certainly carries pejorative connotations concerning sleight-of-hand, ingenuity, and deception. Still, to pretend that "simplicity" (or other here-undefined, relative terms such as "interesting," "well-developed," and "invested emotionally") is not simply another sort of artifice strikes me, particularly in our ongoing political moment, as either a conservative stance or a naïve one, and, in either case, as a dangerous one. In 2010, no one should confuse realism with the real; nor should anyone who doesn't get the news from Fox claim that an aw-shucks "good story, plainly told[,] [w]ith nothing else in the way" and "completely stripped of any bullshit" is possible. That Hemingway and Carver (or choose whomever you prefer) are as mannered and full of artifice as Woolf or Joyce is a commonplace. Language is neither plain nor transparent; it is always in its own way.

The present vogue in fiction for what Gay terms "anti-narratives and intensely language-y work" is, I agree, exhausting, though no more so than the everpresent vogue for narratives and intensely character-y work. Gay's veneration of the Little House on the Prairie books is interesting in that it locates her nostalgia for the "simple story":

I remember how Pa would take Laura and her sisters outside to pour maple syrup into the snow for a winter treat and how Almanzo Wilder picked Laura up from the rural school where she taught every single weekend to bring her home to see her family because she was so lonely and miserable sleeping on a narrow cot in the back room of the district superintendent’s house. I remember how Laura and Almanzo planted a grove of trees when they got their own homestead and how Laura would set out a blanket for herself and their baby Rose to watch “Manny” work and how when the Ingalls family lived in town, they kept themselves warm around the wood stove in the kitchen. I remember these details vividly, without having picked the books up in recent memory.

What Gay overlooks here is that her memories of these things were formed by black marks on a white page, and that it was Ingalls Wilder's artifice that kept the young Gay reading, and—apparently through what the fiction workshop would term well-observed concrete details, themselves an artificial rendering of the real—the older Gay remembering. "Storytelling is an art," Gay continues. "To tell a good story, you have to understand pace; you have to know when to tell your audience what and you have to find a way to keep your audience interested and wanting to know more." Not only would this advice fit, say, in E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927: "The element of surprise or mystery...is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence") or in John Gardner's The Art of Fiction (1983: "Suspenseful delay is enjoyable, but...[i]f the reader is not to waken from the fictional dream, it can be useful to anticipate the reader's feeling and channel it back into the story") or in any other fiction handbook that posits "story" (especially "good story") and "audience" as generally stable categories that the reader of said advice would understand tacitly, it describes a technique—building suspense through delay, withholding, and revelation—that is, of course, pure narrative artifice. And yet elsewhere in her post Gay writes that "any writing that willfully (to my mind) obscures meaning does, on some level, have a beef with readers. If writing makes me think, 'What the fuck is going on here,' in a this is nonsense on the page way, I feel like the writer hates me" (italics in the original). The writer's creation of suspense involves a willful obfuscation of meaning—consider one entire genre of literature, the detective story—and also involves artifice in its most "deceptive" connotation; the writer of any (and I intend the word in its broadest sense) mystery is guilty of messing with her writers, if only to keep them reading.

A nostalgia for an apparently simple narrative in which "characters" "seem" "real" (sorry, but you know what I mean; as William Gass has written, also some time ago, "theories of character are not absurd in the way representational theories are; they are absurd in a grander way, for the belief in Hamlet (which audiences often seem to have) is like the belief in God—incomprehensible to reason") is both forgivable and understandable; everyone knows the pleasure of such stories. What I find less so is the idea that there is a pure, naturally occuring form of narrative and, opposed to it in some way, an artificial one, given the competing, overlapping, multiplying narratives to which we are continually subjected in our everyday lives. (Indeed, I'm sure that more people currently understand and/or use the word "narrative" as synonymous with political or marketing discourse—as "spin"—than as an obviously fictional story about fictional characters.) The narrative that masquerades as guileless, as plain and simple and direct, is all too often artifice in the service of some other insidious cultural nostalgia. How many political speeches or corporate press releases willfully obscure meaning, or express/imply hostility to their audiences? What narrative act isn't in some way hostile, an attempt to control and shape events or facts to suit the author's desire?

"where the branches of its language break": another review of Scape

2010-03-17T09:48:00.003-04:00

In the new issue of Harp & Altar, Patrick Morrissey reads Scape (and Rob Schlegel's The Lesser Fields, a book I've been meaning to get) not as examples of ecopoetics but as "postmodern pastorals," "a kind of self-aware 'nature poetry': personal lyrics that present the charged relationship between the poetic speaker and the natural world as alive with the possibility for both renewal and negation":

In Scape, Harmon’s linguistic maps take a variety of forms: from the deftly handled short line and double-jointed syntax of “Whither” to the longer line and more stable syntax of this first section of “Landscape”; from the delicate projective spread of the twenty-third section of “Landscape” to the prose blocks that appear at intervals throughout the book. In all of these poems, Harmon sustains a characteristic diction and tone (a disarming blend of naturalist description, intellectual code, and slangy directness), and at its strongest (as in the passage from “Whither” quoted above or lines from “Landscape” like “slushy gray, tire-tracked: / bring back / this busted even- / ing, the hilly town / ditched,” the coincidence of the scoured, tightly coiled language with careful attention to physical detail indeed recalls Zukofsky or, at times, Basil Bunting.

Listening, pt. 5

2010-03-12T09:14:00.003-05:00

But if I hear a tune with understanding, doesn't something special go on in me—which does not go on if I hear it without understanding? And what?—No answer comes; or anything that occurs to me is insipid. I may indeed say: "Now I've understood it," and perhaps talk about it, play it, compare it with others, etc. Signs of understanding may accompany hearing.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (tr. G.E.M. Anscombe)

Unconventional approaches

2010-01-18T22:27:00.006-05:00

John Domini, at The Quarterly Conversation, offers the first half of his essay "Against the 'Impossible to Explain': The Postmodern Novel and Society":

In the millennial U.S., for those who venture an unconventional approach to booklength fiction, criticism just hasn’t been doing its job. ...[W]hen American booklength fiction strays from straightforward realism and structure...and when one of the major review outlets gives it attention, the write-up will be vicious. It’ll look as if the author has wandered into Sniper’s Alley. Over half a century ago, Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel traced recent developments in the artform, but those trying for similar innovation on this side of the Atlantic have come under repeated attack, in our most prominent critical forums. “Postmodern” sits comfortably with other media, whether a Danger Mouse mashup or Angels in America. But when it comes to novels, the term’s a dirty word, even for a lot of novelists.

This essay follows on the heels of Nick Ripatrazone's engaging essay on William Gass, John Gardner, and "The Pedersen Kid"; I'm really excited by the quality of the work The Quarterly Conversation is publishing lately.

another review of Quinnehtukqut

2009-12-05T08:23:00.003-05:00

Reconfigurations has just run a long, very generous review of Quinnehtukqut some two years after the book's publication. I'm perpetually surprised, grateful, and humbled by the reviews this novel has received. Here's part of a paragraph from Michael Tod Edgerton's review:

One of Harmon’s key strategies is to undermine his own reliability as a narrator, to fragment his narration like memory and history. Here identity is so many floes of Antarctic sea ice, and the vast terrain of that which lies inaccessible beneath the currents haunts every page and gives the book a richness around which its surface whorls. The powerful and unsentimental affective force of this novel lies in the palpability of absence, loss, and mystery it places at the center of its skillfully drawn figures. It inflects the very sentences and paragraphs themselves as much as it does the larger formal strategies. Like the lyrical prose of a Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, William H. Gass, or Carole Maso, Harmon’s writing is sensual both with the melancholic clarity of this absence and the rich-dark loam of a presence—the rhythm of this present moment, this body, this place—that hums through the language to (in)form its music. Quinnehtukqut is a gorgeous, intelligent, and extensively researched historical novel that far transcends the limits of any such generic designation (at least as the book-selling market tends to think of it today).

upcoming readings

2009-10-19T09:15:00.003-04:00

I will be trekking across Pennsylvania (via New York) with poet Andrew Zawacki this coming week: please see the list of future readings at right for more details, and please come if you're able...

upcoming reading

2009-10-11T17:56:00.002-04:00

another review of Scape

2009-09-07T15:21:00.000-04:00

The first two paragraphs from Andy Frazee's review in The Quarterly Conversation:

Joshua Harmon’s first book of poetry, Scape, comes two years after the publication of his debut novel, Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone, 2007), a difficult and often brilliant text that draws on the work of William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett in equal measure (not to mention John Ashbery and Susan Howe) to form a complex weave of narratives about a town in the wilderness of late 19th- and early 20th-century New Hampshire. In the novel, Harmon writes of “how a man’s head cannot begin to take in the places he has been, or the people, each word spoken a line somewhere in the land.” Following this notion, Quinnehtukqut not only takes up a meditation on local history and geography (or, as we are told, “a story of lost dreams and places now vanished”) but is also an investigation of narrative and language itself, and of how those two things—location and locution—relate.

If Quinnehtukqut is, like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a story about telling stories, Scape’s six sections ("Whither," "Landscape," "Inscape," "Escape," "Summer Letters," and "Summer’s Tenants") are in a similar sense poems about making poems. At the same time, these poems blend in larger concerns: the nature of the self, the possibility or impossibility of communication, the insecurities of being in the world. While Harmon does draw from Language poetry—a line from Bob Perelman forms an epigraph to the “Landscape” section—the work here balances, as does much of the finest contemporary practice, linguistic inquiry with a strong lyrical instinct, making for readings both fascinating and challenging in the best sense.

review of Scape

2009-09-04T08:40:00.004-04:00

In a forest, it’s impossible to take in a lone tree, to trace its branches through the tangle of leaves, competitors, choking vines; it’s like that with the subjects and language of Harmon’s collection Scape. The language of the book is dense and strange: a tangle of branches or roots poking through snow, like the “alliance of branches and leaves” Harmon evokes on the final page.

[...]

The more time you spend with Scape, the more time you want to spend with it. It’s not the most inviting book on first approach (though Black Ocean’s design is up to its usual high standards), but it rewards re-reading. As in the New England woods, you feel lost at first, then fascinated.

Open Letters Monthly reviews Scape, along with Farrah Field's Rising, in the September issue.

current reading, pt. 3 (on fragments, pt. 10)

2009-09-01T08:33:00.004-04:00

Coach House Books is a press I've long admired—they understand the book as physical object better than just about any publisher, and their poetry (bpNichol, Christian Bök, Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery, and many others) is consistently among the most interesting in North America. I picked up Kyle Buckley's book The Laundromat Essay earlier this year in part because of its title, in part because of its well-set Bembo type on laid paper, and in part because of its cover, a drawing of rickety wooden stairs, stage lighting, and other less obvious constructions.

The book is described on its back cover as a "narrative essay that continually dissects a never-finished conversation, ...annotated with fragments of poems that were maybe never written about a childhood that maybe never took place" and as "a spiralling poem about the pathology of failure and of forgetting." Structurally, The Laundromat Essay recalls for me Jenny Boully's first book, The Body, recently republished by Essay Press, which was written as a series of "footnotes to a non-existent text" (and which I reviewed in 2003), since almost every one of its two-page spreads consists of a prose block on the recto page in which one or more words are bolded, with dotted lines connecting these words to brief annotations (some of which are themselves annotated) on the verso page of the spread. Also like Boully's book, or the work of writers such as Brian Lennon and John D'Agata, The Laundromat Essay makes explicit a link between poetry and the essay, especially in the latter word's connotations of something attempted, or a thought process pursued.

None of this is to imply that The Laundromat Essay is anything but its own thing. The scaffold of the cover image is invoked almost immediately when the speaker of this essay notes that "A conversation starts with what Ashbery calls 'brittle, useless architecture' that affords a high but teetering, scaffold-like vantage point of the action." The essay offers a recounting of the conversation between the speaker and the "owner of the laundromat," as well as the speaker and an unnamed "you," and also enacts such concerns about scaffolding and architecture through the dialogue between each verso / recto spread. But such scaffolding is always transforming itself: "(I've taken beams down from the ceiling to build a staircase right down to the street, or a table, I'm not sure which.)"

The speaker's acknowledgment of the transformative possibilities—

...I feel I can draw you a map of what it is like to have something to tell you. I can tell you about trying to get back to you, trying to get to the airport, trying to get home, waiting for you. I can tell you in different ways, following these different maps. I think of all these as great possibilities and yet still as subtle, beautiful failures. I wrote you out a map titled 'Variations on getting out to or getting back from the airport.' I have this much to tell you.

—of this recursive, always-interrupted metanarrative makes it an engaging read; its language is precise, almost clinical (despite the fact that it often describes "memor[ies] of hopeless beauty"), and its fragmented, self-analytical qualities are perfect for its concerns with searching, explaining, and remembering.

Petals of Zero Petals of One

2009-08-25T22:47:00.005-04:00

Andrew Wessels reviews Andrew Zawacki's new collection, Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House) at A Compulsive Reader:

The reuses of phonemes...for different purposes turns the poem into a delightful obstacle course, one the reader is required to pick through and consider closely each word and even each syllable. The importance of each detail in language becomes heightened. Zawacki seems to be also rebelling against the notion that when we read our brain can ‘recognize’ a word within a sentence in its first syllable, presenting us with example after example of situations where we can do [no] such thing, where we must wait patiently for the word to complete itself.

I share Wessels's enthusiasm for Zawacki's work—indeed, enough so that I will be embarking on a reading tour of the northeast with him this October. Further details to come.

teaching creative writing

2009-08-21T14:50:00.019-04:00

As the increasing number of administrative e-mails appearing in my inbox suggests, another academic year is upon me—in fact, some of my colleagues elsewhere have already begun theirs. I'm currently re-reading Pound's ABC of Reading, and reading for the first time Ron Padgett's Creative Reading (now out of print, though one can find a digital scan of a rather low-res photocopy here), both of which I may excerpt for my creative writing students this semester—even if only to quote an aphorism or two from the former, or to enact a strategy or two from the latter.

When I began teaching creative writing in 1997—thirty years after the formation of the organization now called the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, and the same year that US News & World Report first published its rankings of MFA programs—such classes were, of course, already a huge draw among students, and in the decade since, after further popular cinematic versions of writing workshops and ever-increasing demand for spots in (and sound-and-fury about) MFA programs (see Seth Abramson's long-running blog, which has already spun off an MFA handbook and, more recently, a much-commented-upon consulting firm), creative writing workshops have come to seem as much a part of the entitled academic landscape as dorm wi-fi, espresso bars, and professional-sports-team-quality gyms. I don't know what percentage of students currently attending liberal arts colleges such as the one at which I teach take one or more creative writing courses, but I would imagine it is very high; last spring, more than two-thirds of the students in the two creative writing courses I taught were not English majors (who can count creative writing courses toward their major requirements), but were taking my course as an elective.

Earlier this summer, Louis Menand, in a review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, wrote about the teaching of creative writing in the New Yorker. Menand's essay invokes many of the usual writing workshop tropes (the question of whether writing "can be taught," the workshop as "a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers," the hard-drinking writing professor, etc.), before mellowing into a sentimental conclusion about his own undergraduate experiences in creative writing classes, but I'm interested in this passage:

...a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

Menand's understanding here seems limited to the historical (and/or cinematic) version of the creative-writing classroom (and what classroom isn't, to some extent, an "unscripted performance space"?). Reading, apart from the manuscripts of one's peers, does not seem to be part of this description of the writing workshop, though it's interesting that he mentions the act of writing as part of what the workshop enforces, as generally the act of writing has been understood as something entirely apart from the venue of workshop.

Too often, students asked to name a few favorite writers or books on the first day of a creative writing course can cite only books assigned in other courses, or movies. I share Frank O'Hara's belief about the "forced feeding" of poetry ("Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes..."), though of course feel that any student interested in writing will be interested in reading as well (Barbara Guest: "To be a poet requires that one also be a reader"): ideally, I'm less involved in manufacturing that interest than in directing it in ways helpful to a particular student. And while Pound's pronouncements in ABC of Reading about learning from the masters are rigid and proscriptive in a way that seems mostly quaint in 2009, certainly many beginning students need some models for writing, if only to learn a broader range of possibilities for their own work.

In the typical studio art course, students spend hours of class time during the semester actively painting, sketching, and making art, as well as critiquing the resulting efforts; of course, much of this fact is due to issues of materials, equipment, and the physical space required, e.g., to paint in oils, or to make prints, but I still think it important that the writing workshop duplicate the studio art course's attention to the act of making something during class time. Some framework for writing—and the transmission of some practical knowledge—should always have been part of the "curricular script" in a writing workshop.

Students electing my introductory creative writing course this fall will be reading these books—hopefully none of them qualifies as meat and potatoes—during the semester:

Paige Ackerson-Kiely: In No One's Land (Ahsahta).
Geoff Bouvier: Living Room (Copper Canyon).
Kyle Buckley: The Laundromat Essay (Coach House).
Barbara Guest: The Countess of Minneapolis (Burning Deck).
Harryette Mullen: Recyclopedia (Graywolf).
Frank O'Hara: Lunch Poems (City Lights).
Zachary Schomburg: The Man Suit (Black Ocean).
Charles Simic: The World Doesn't End (Harcourt).
Allison Titus: Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State UP).

"issues of verisimilitude"

2009-08-13T10:47:00.003-04:00

Tim O'Brien, in his essay "Telling Tails" (from The Atlantic's summer fiction issue), nails the primary problem with fiction workshops (and with a great deal of contemporary fiction):

In general, the topic is born out of writing workshops, in which I’ve noticed, almost always to my alarm, that classroom discussion seems to revolve almost exclusively around issues of verisimilitude. Declarations such as these abound: I didn’t believe in that character. I need to know more about that character’s background. I can’t see that character’s face. I don’t understand why that character would behave so insipidly (or violently, or whatever).

These are legitimate questions. But for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I would believe in the story, perhaps, but I would still hate it.

The future of fiction

2009-08-03T17:19:00.005-04:00

Some thirteen years after the Review of Contemporary Fiction posed the question, the American Book Review asks writers about "the future of fiction" (in the forms of "words, sentences, quotes") and then allows some writers further elaborations.

The responses range from polite deflections to all-caps howls of despair, and I'm guessing that many writers would respond with different levels of optimism depending on the particular day on which they were asked the question. (Or, as Charles Bernstein puts it in "State of the Art" [from A Poetics]: "There is of course no state of American poetry, but states, moods, agitations, dissipations, renunciations, depressions, acquiescences, elations, angers, ecstasies....")

I'm certainly in agreement with Jonathan Baumbach's reading that "recent evidence suggests that the most interesting future of fiction will be featured in small independent presses," as well as Vanessa Place's statement that, "[w]hile conceptual poetry has been staking its claims and counter-claims in the avant community for a number of years, conceptual fiction has barely begun." I share Michael Griffith's "hope, not a prediction" that

...I’d love to see fiction that concentrates on the things fiction does uniquely well—chief among these the inhabiting of thought, the mapping of consciousness—rather than chasing vainly after more popular art forms.

As I was reading through Haze, Mark Wallace's 2004 book of "essays, poems, prose" yesterday, I lingered on a question he asked, which I'll edit slightly into this statement: "poetry is, ...I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity in language, complexity which is elsewhere denied them...."

One of my own hopes for the future of fiction might include fictions that reclaim such linguistic complexities, and a readership eager to reclaim such complexities as well.

the radiation of writerly confidence

2009-06-18T12:51:00.005-04:00

I pay so little attention to the book reviews (and the books reviewed) in the NYT these days that I can't be sure if Janet Maslin is simply playing an elaborate joke on her readers in today's review.

This review, of Ron Currie Jr.'s second novel, praises Currie's exuberant style and natural talent: Currie is a "startlingly talented writer" who possesses, Maslin claims, "a daring yet polished style," "whose book [pays] no heed to ordinary narrative conventions," who uses "fresh, joltingly funny imagery," and, "[a]bove all, [whose novel] radiates writerly confidence."

As citation of Currie's "tenderly mordant voice of his own," Maslin's review offers us, among others, these sentences from the book:

"Chicago is not the ideal place to go when you've recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside."

"You could not be more shocked if Amy suddenly sloughed off her human disguise and revealed herself to be a six-limbed insectoid extraterrestrial."

"[Y]our life is so blue it looks like a James Cameron movie."

Now, Maslin does offer the caution that "Currie is not a traditionally trained writer"—leaving aside the question of how a writer is "traditionally" trained, though we understand her implication about MFA writing programs. Training matters nothing to me, but prose style certainly does, and the first sentence I've quoted above startles me only in that it uses four clichés: "not the ideal place to go," "lost your mind," "curl up in the bottom of a bottle," "having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body." These first-draft, shorthand descriptions are beyond exhausted and trite, and I fail to see how someone who reads as many novels a year as Maslin does can see anything redeeming in them, however much they may transgress the sorts of descriptions that too often emerge from the great leveller of the MFA fiction workshop.

The other two sentences suggest the real market for this novel; even Maslin can't help but note that the book "parallels historical events with perilous Forrest Gumpish quirkiness."

Should you care to read more, the NYT provides another excerpt of the novel here.

on the future of higher-ed-subsidized literary magazines

2009-06-12T18:24:00.000-04:00

Ronald Liebowitz, the president of Middlebury College, offers some thoughts about the possible future of the New England Review "[g]iven current financial circumstances." I have published fiction and nonfiction in New England Review, so do have a biased opinion on this matter, but one wonders how President Liebowitz will comment when many other university presses and journals—Louisiana State University Press, and the Southern Review, as Liebowitz notes, are also endangered—having lost their subsidies from their host institutions, fold. (Since Liebowitz's argument appears to be based on the idea of, in his own words, "direct benefits" to students, as well as the fact that "other people are doing it," I'll continue in that vein.)

In this era of the corporatized university—and the era of the death of the newspaper—one can easily imagine the absence of literary and scholarly journals, and unversity presses—which Leibowitz correctly indentifies as niche markets—and yet, without them, academic publishing (and one assumes that institutional subventions will be yet another item on the chopping block at many endowment-anxious schools*), such as it is, will vanish, and many of the professors at Middlebury (and elsewhere) will be unable to publish their scholarship. One wonders whether the scholarship and publication by Middlebury's professors offers Middlebury's students a "direct benefit"—since, indeed, such scholarship presumably "serves a very small slice of the general population and is known only to a handful of Middlebury students" despite any acclaim it might earn elsewhere. Will President Leibowitz suggest that Middlebury's criteria for tenure and promotion thus be relaxed, "[g]iven current financial circumstances"?

Indeed, it seems very strange that the president of a college which, in the first sentence of its promotional description on its website, is advertised as one of the country's top liberal arts colleges, speaks in terms of "direct benefits" to students at all—since that term suggests a tangible, specific outcome that seems in direct conflict with the mission of the liberal arts.

* See here for an article about Middlebury's endowment, "which weighed in at $885 million last June, [but] shed $200 million in the last six months of [2008]."

The poetry hype machine

2009-05-27T17:35:00.003-04:00

At Coldfront, DJ Dolack responds to "the producers and arbiters of taste" and the Dickman brothers phenomenon.

brief review of Scape

2009-05-02T13:30:00.002-04:00

Chronogram, the Hudson Valley's arts & culture monthly, reviews Scape (along with two other new books of poetry) in this month's issue.

on Scape

2009-04-14T23:58:00.002-04:00

Compulsive Reader has just reviewed Scape:

Harmon’s collection of poems is stark and revealing. His language somehow both meanders through his meditations and sticks in the reader’s gut like a sharp punch with his surprising moments of humor and striking view of the contemporary world. His view of nature is an exploration of past perspectives of nature, yet with the purpose of seeing how we, currently living, can and should see nature...

...on the way

2009-03-22T11:02:00.007-04:00

"Let it die," should not, however, refer to my attitude toward this blog. Spring-break lassitude has delayed a post about Kyle Buckley's engaging The Laundromat Essay, about which more shortly. In the meantime, Daniel Handler, whom I noted in this space a while back, calls our attention to Mary Robison's new novel, One D.O.A., One on the Way, for which I'm grateful. Handler's description notes the less interesting aspects of the novel—

Eve is married to Adam (uh-huh), who has an "utterly identical" twin brother. Eve has some trouble telling them apart and also, occasionally, favors the one to whom she isn't married over the one to whom she is. They all hang out together in a mansion along with the twins' parents, who hate Eve; and Eve's sister, who is prone to crazed violence; and a young niece who asks too many questions

—though the plots of much of Robison's work, and particularly her novels, could be described in similarly preposterous terms; in any case, Robison's work is far less about plot than about language and tone. (In a 2003 review of Robison, I noted her "trademarks" as "sharp dialogue, one-liners, unerring details, exact—and often exacting—language.") Handler's other descriptions of the novel—"Eve...spends most of the book in her car, driving around, ranting out loud" or the book's "166 pages, 225 numbered segments"—recall Robison's best novel, Why Did I Ever, as Handler notes.

Handler suggests that in this new book Robison "doesn't expand her palette but widens her gaze," and claims that "Mary Robison's work has always felt like a glorious amenity, but One D.O.A., One on the Way is a powerful necessity." I certainly look forward to reading this novel.

"Let it die"

2009-02-16T09:50:00.010-05:00

In the current Harper's, Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay "The Last Book Party" outlines very briefly the well-known origins of the current crisis in trade publishing:

Publishing used to be a business of leisured gentlemen happy to make a profit of 3 or 5 percent. They came from money and often didn't need much more of it, especially the sort that might be gained through the sale of things. What they did instead was to turn their parents' financial capital into cultural capital. Then media consolidation arrived, and by the 1990s almost every big publisher was owned by a giant conglomerate.... These giant publicly traded companies were insulted by margins of 5 percent. CEOs pressured editors to buy big bestsellers, which developed into the form of mutual assured destruction that is the book auction, a sales device that leads to insupportable advances and thus to virtually inevitable disappointments, followed by even larger advances and larger disappointments. As publishers are squeezed from one direction by their corporate overseers, they are gouged from the other by Barnes & Noble and Amazon, whose increasing domination of the retail market means they can demand ever deeper wholesale discounts and extort additional concessions for prime bookstore and home-page placement. At the same time, book sales are down, newspaper coverage of books is diminished, people like to waste their time on the Internet, and so on. Thus it augurs total collapse when, in an economic downturn, publishers are forced to shutter whole imprints, as Random House did in December; freeze acquisitions, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has; or lay people off, or cancel holiday parties, or fetter expense accounts.

But the problem with this standard story is that it refuses to ask what, exactly, is at stake. It assumes that decline and loss are self-evidently defined. It takes for granted that the mid-twentieth-century good fortune of publishing, held aloft by a peculiarly luxuriant middlebrow culture (and "middlebrow" is here employed in the most appreciative way), was natural, or was even somehow a necessary condition for the book's survival.

These assumptions that Lewis-Kraus points out are worth considering; they are the assumptions of a narrative about which I cannot feel particularly sorry. At the just-concluded AWP conference in Chicago, there were, despite the current economy, three hundred conference events, but as most AWP-goers understand, the real action is to be found at the "offsite events," where various presses often showcase their new and recent books through group readings. Each night, after the AWP bookfair closed at 5:30 PM, people scattered to bars, galleries, and bookstores across Chicago for readings that sometimes went as long as three hours. And because these events are often held in bars, there is generally a much more festive feel than the reading intoned into a microphone in a lecture hall before undergraduates who get course credit for attending, or the reading at a bookstore in front of two or three dozen people while uninterested customers wander through the background. Though I'd ascribe it less to alcohol than to enthusiasm, at the poetry reading in which I took part, I heard, between poems, spontaneous applause and whoops from the crowd of nearly two hundred people (for example, when Johannes Göransson read in both Swedish and English from his translation of Aase Berg's With Deer, or when Kevin Holden read his poems involving math and fractals)—the forms of appreciation one would hear were a band onstage instead of a poet. As Göransson notes on his blog, "While the room full of big booths was largely empty and while the dull panels mostly discussed 'american hybrids' and other ultra-canonical, very US-centered stuff, the youngsters were busy reading Swedish grotesqueries from a very small press table run by a former undertaker."

Dean Young began his reading with a brief reference to the many recent media obituaries for publishing. Surveying the crowded room, Young noted quite correctly that poetry (and I'll extend this point to include small-press fiction as well, since both forms are sustained by what Young called "tribes," rather than by what Lewis-Kraus calls "the wishful insistence—for it is a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people—that [writers are] going to be rich") is not dying; only corporate publishing is dying. "Let it die," he said—and indeed, the reading offered an entirely new business model, one borrowed, perhaps, from the DIY independent music world on which so many writers forty-ish or younger were raised: small presses financed not with inheritances and trust funds, but hard work and credit cards; books sold from a merch table, rather than the rented end-caps of a megastore aisle; writing that perhaps doesn't fit familiar publishing niches but that, as Matt Hart said about Dean Young's work, makes us "feel less insane"—by which, of course, Hart meant less alone in a literary culture where quality is generally equated with sales, and in which mediocrity is routinely celebrated.

Artist Brice Marden, quoted in the current issue of New York, makes much the same point: "[A] recession is always good for art. It's not the art that's suffering, it's the market that's suffering. They don't have anything to do with each other."

The writing that matters to me, and to many of my peer writers, seems to be doing just fine in the marketplace that that writing inhabits: what's "at stake" in such writing is not the profit margin of some minor component of a multinational media corporation, but the pleasure in a repurposed word, an elegant phrase, or a perfect sentence—in language used not as another commodity, but as part of the complicated communication between speaker and listener.

[An addendum, from Conversational Reading.]

Chicago

2009-02-11T09:38:00.005-05:00

More AWP offsite events here.

the sentences of Gordon Lish, Gary Lutz, and Christine Schutt

2009-01-30T11:29:00.004-05:00

My friend and colleague Amitava Kumar pointed me to Gary Lutz's talk in the current issue of The Believer, which offers both an autobiographical account of how Lutz "came to language only late and only peculiarly," as well as a discussion of how Lutz reconsidered his idea of the sentence based on the remaindered Knopf books Lish edited (this same category of literature was also an influence on my work). From that point, Lutz offers an inspired craft lesson on sentences (and anyone who's read Lutz knows that his sentences are masterful):

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words.

In N1BR, the new online book review of n+1 magazine, Carla Blumenkranz reviews Christine Schutt's new novel, again focusing on language and Lish's inheritance, but concluding that "[Schutt's] language...has changed. There is the same obsessive labor over the sounds and rhythms of sentences, but with Schutt's narrator further removed, they no longer have such a strenuous feel to them."

more on book clubs

2009-01-30T11:24:00.004-05:00

Andrew Scott has posted some thoughts in response to my earlier post about his book club. I've appended a further comment to his post, should anyone be interested.

Scape pre-order offer

2009-01-29T09:12:00.002-05:00

Since yesterday's post mentioned the promotional possibilities of blogs, I should note that Black Ocean is offering a special pre-publication price on Scape: $10 (the cover price is $12.95) including free shipping on orders received by the start of the AWP conference on February 11th.

Another Book Club

2009-01-28T17:25:00.009-05:00

A longtime reader of this space pointed me toward the blog "Andrew's Book Club" today; this book club seems to want to do what the late Lit-Blog Co-op sought to do: provide a platform for discussing books online. Here's blog author Andrew Scott explaining the basics of what his book club entails:

Each month, I select two short story collections that readers and writers of short stories should support. The idea is simple. We should buy short story collections and support this important art form, especially if we’re writers and ever hope to publish our own books of short stories. But if I buy Antonya Nelson’s new collection and you buy the new Jim Shepard book of stories, and our friend Sally buys Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock (soon in paperback!) and your mom buys Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter, then the publishing numbers are scattered all over the place.

Scott goes on to explain that each month he "will select two short story collections to be released that month, give or take a few weeks. One will be from a NYC publisher, while a second selection will spotlight a book from an indie or university press. Buy at least one of these books each month. 12 books a year (24 if you buy both selections) is not too much to ask."

One unanswered question here is the imperative "should support"—why are these two collections worthy of our support, instead of others? Another unanswered question might be "not too much to ask of whom?"

In the case of the latter question, presumably Scott believes he's addressing a literate readership—and, if so, I can't imagine that those readers don't already buy at least two dozen books a year (though it's certainly doubtful that they buy two dozen collections of short fiction a year). Even during a recession, his maximum of twenty-four books perhaps aims a bit low. Can one imagine starting, say, a film club, and suggesting that the cinephiles who join it watch only two films each month?

The populist approach of his appeal—a tongue-in-cheek request for Oprah and her book club to "move over," a series of "rules" for Andrew's Book Club modeled on the infamous rules of Fight Club, Scott's "polite request" that the readers of his blog "please tell five of your friends about the [Facebook] group/blog"—suggests that he wants to do a service for literary publishing as well as to become a tastemaker. And indeed, he's selected a short fiction collection from a fine small press—OV Books, now an imprint of Dzanc—as his first "indie" selection, as well as a book from Hyperion as his "big house pick." Still, the one major / one minor approach ultimately seems arbitrary at best, and given that the authors and titles he references in his explanation are all high-profile, middle-of-the-road examples—books that will receive plenty of attention regardless of his efforts—one wonders about the sort of book Scott wants to promote, and why we "readers and writers of short stories should support" his selections.

I don't want to discourage anyone from reading, certainly, and I also don't particularly want to criticize what seems a well-intentioned if underconceived gesture. And, as someone who regularly discusses his own work in this space, I understand the promotional possibility of blogs—and since it seems that Andrew Scott has plenty of ambition for his project, I don't doubt that it will be successful.

That said, I see a fundamental problem with Scott's approach: by explicitly arguing against a "scattered" approach to book-buying in favor of the "One Book" model popularized by Oprah's Book Club and various city libraries, he encourages the already messed-up economics of the trade publishing industry by deliberately seeking to focus sales solely on two books per month, rather than offering his readers a wider sampling of disparate books they might buy. The trade publishing industry is predicated on such bulk purchases; one hyped or high-profile book will cover the unearned advances of many other books—and also based around promoting the blockbuster to the detriment of these other books. (Years ago, when I reviewed fiction for a news & arts weekly, I remember—to cite but one example—asking a "publicist" at a prestigious trade house for information about an author I was reviewing—e.g., Would the author's book tour bring her to our area anytime soon, so we could time the publication of the review, or include an interview?—and receiving no helpful information; the next day, the author called me herself to tell me she would indeed be reading in our area in the immediate future.)

It seems a shame for a medium such as a blog—isn't "democratic" the cliché generally invoked in this case?—to replicate trade publishing's sales model. Given that publishers now pay bookstores for the privilege of having their books placed strategically on tables, or that the big-box chain bookstores can dictate cover designs, focusing the book-reading public's attention ever more narrowly seems the wrong strategy to encourage reading. As someone who teaches reading and writing for a living, I well understand the importance of the community reading experience, but I also understand how excited my students generally are when I inform them, at the beginning of the semester, that one of our course credos will be Greil Marcus's statement that "College is for finding out about stuff one wouldn’t find out about otherwise," and then try to offer them as much of that "stuff" as I can.

one more on Scape

2009-01-15T15:19:00.000-05:00

A bit more advance praise for Scape:

Scape—suggesting inscape, escape, landscape—and not unrelated to escapade. Donne used the word to indicate evasion; Milton, to imply error. Which brings us to the errant, to the wandering that seeks to free. In Harmon's care, scape engenders an errant vocabulary that accrues meaning by liberating it, nurturing ambiguities and encouraging multi-valence, and all with a stunning command of sound that makes every line crystalline. A brilliant, thirst-quenching book.

—Cole Swensen

"the literary assumptions of yore" (on historical fiction, pt. 2)

2009-01-15T13:33:00.001-05:00

As I wrote in July, I think the term "historical fiction" is, in our current literary culture, often misused or misapplied—though, as the term's become less a critical marker of genre than simply another way of packaging and selling a product (if there's even a distinction there), I should probably let it go: in any event, I feel the term no longer applies, if it ever did, to a number of novels that treat history or that are set in the past, but that are less interested in fetishizing the details of that past than in undertaking some other project.

In a post at The Reading Experience a few days back, Daniel Green notes a review of a dull-sounding Alan Cheuse novel by way of offering some thoughts about historical fiction:

[I]n a period when "serious" novelists are turning to historical fictions in what seems to me unprecedented numbers (all five of the 2008 National Book Award fiction nominees could arguably be called historical novels), recreating the historical past in this way has increasingly become a privileged strategy among both writers and critics, garnering many critical plaudits and prestigious prizes. It is apparently one of the most recognizably "novel-like" things a writer might attempt these days.

But this is so only because most historical novels...invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a "novel" is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story—enhanced by the broader arc of historical "story" that such novels want to expropriate—on "character" as embodied in "real people," on staged scenes dominated by "realistic" dialogue, all wrapped up in a transparent prose style occasionally colored by poetic flourishes and applications of "psychological realism." This approach threatens to recalcify fiction in its own historically contingent, now thoroughly reductive form. A "novel" becomes simply a narrative of events modeled on the writing of history, except that the characters can be made up and the story tweaked here and there. If the true purpose of the historical novel is to return us not just to the recounted days but also the literary assumptions of yore, then I guess its practicioners are to some extent succeeding.

Green goes on to name such novels the "earnest brand of historical fiction"—thus perhaps exempting the novels I named in my post in July. Still, I think Green looks at history—what he calls "the historical past"—too narrowly in his critique of such novels because, again, many novels published now have some interest in treating the past, whether that past is decades back or the proverbial five-minutes-ago: the tropes Green describes in the paragraphs above apply not only to those novels marketed as historical fiction, but also to the vast majority of novels. A novel imagining the interior life of Muhammad Atta, or that of Laura Bush, is as much fictionalized history as a novel set in some previous century if the novel's main project is, as I wrote in July, "obsessive cultural-historical documentation." Jonathan Franzen, in his well-known 1996 Harper's essay, "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels," asserted that "[a]lthough good novelists don't deliberately seek out trends, they do feel a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day," and glorified what he called the "culturally engaged novel" even as he wrestled with the question of how much "news" the novel should bring its readers.

What bores me about so much current fiction, whether its publishers would label it historical or not, is that, to quote Green again, "most...novels...invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a 'novel' is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story." To this I would add that the conventional idea of the novel as bringing the reader information—what Franzen, in the same essay, calls "those things-in-the-world that impinge on the enterprise of fiction writing"—also bores me to the point that I find it nearly impossible to read novels that appear designed mainly to do so: in an era of far too much information-peddling (most of it beyond useless), I am far more interested in reading a well-crafted sentence, or enjoying a paragraph of musical prose, than in reading any novel that purports to offer me some top-down sense of how things are—as if I didn't already know, as if I weren't already drowning in the awareness of such things, as if our entire culture hasn't been built on the packaging and distribution of such imposed narratives.

Postscript: I began writing this post two days ago, but Daniel Green's updated his blog today with a newer post wondering how useful the term "novel" remains; much of what he writes here applies, I think, equally well to the term "historical fiction":

Devotees of "exploratory" prose would not have to contend, or would have to contend less, with objections that a particular work of experimental fiction is not "really" a novel, because it would indeed not be such and could perhaps be more honestly assessed according to criteria appropriate to what it is rather than what it is not....

Such a dispensation would have the added benefit of eliminating obtrusive discussions of "art" where the novel is concerned, since whatever art it would still be granted would be confined to minor variations on pre-established methods, and everyone still reading novels would be able to concentrate their attention on the "ideas" they supposedly express, the political efficacy they're claimed to have, the sociological observations they're said to make, or just the nice stories they're counted on to tell, all of which, as far as I can tell, are of much greater interest to readers of conventional novels than aesthetic values or formal ingenuity.

current reading, pt. 2

2009-01-14T10:28:00.000-05:00

I've just received a copy of Torch Lake & Other Poems (published by Del Sol Press), the first book of poems by Brian Johnson—a book I've been waiting to read for some time now, ever since asking Johnson to send some poems to an issue of a literary magazine I was editing c. 2000, and since reading his chapbook Self-Portrait (on Quale Press).

The poems in Torch Lake are set mostly in prose (Johnson was an editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal—the magazine that helped, probably more than any other, to feed the 1990s prose poem craze still going strong). The poems range from miniature narratives (some of them in the neighborhood of Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End) to more fractured, paratactic fragments or propositions, sometimes stitched together by commas or em dashes. Johnson's poems often possess a wry, understated, simultaneously observant and introspective quality:

...the house, I made a doorway for the house, you came in the house and lay in the sun, these days, yourself, themselves, these days of yours, lying in the sun at three, you and the sun, the light that, of which, I know, an object to complete you, when I see you, half-dressed, in the sun at three, unconscious of myself, those days being pushed from the house...

(from "doorway for the house")

Or:

Size, I mean a thing like Chicago's politics or Churchill's appetites, is a rare quantity. I have a big nose, which Freud thought a sign of sexual well-being, and big ears, which the Japanese attribute to wise men. But I am really a little man, anxious, and easily disturbed. I may publish little poems in little magazines, hoping to build stature, but I know my days of inferiority cannot be numbered.

(from "Sizing")

Or:

Sadly, and so like a man, jumping from one square to the next, I can see you, but I can't express it. An awful lot of young partridges and young doves will say it.

(from "The Fig-Trees of Italy")

Except for a very few poems that could be read as either verse or prose (a series of single-sentence paragraphs, none of which attains the right hand margin), the only verse in this book occurs in the long, central sequence "'He Lived in Exile for Many Years...'"—a series which, based on my initial read, connects the interrelated themes of travel, storytelling/mythologizing, and self-examination (especially in terms of self-presentation) that exist throughout the first and third sections bookending this one. As always in Johnson's work, I find much to enjoy and to admire here, particularly in the quiet-but-insistent voice speaking throughout these pages.

current reading

2009-01-11T13:28:00.005-05:00

In the current Harper's, one favorite writer, William Gass, on another, Katherine Anne Porter; there is much here of interest, particularly when Gass quotes one of Porter's contemporaneous critics on Porter's "style," and offers a useful protest:

In [1945], Gertrude Buckman wrote this about “The Leaning Tower” for the Partisan Review: “It has for a long time been apparent that Katherine Anne Porter consistently writes a luminous prose, of an exactness of choice and suggestiveness of phrasing, which is altogether extraordinary. Miss Porter’s work has probably been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that most writers hardly dare to hope for, rarely achieve, and can almost never withstand. That Miss Porter can bear such careful reading proves her much more than simply an excellent stylist.” This praise is well meant, but it is also withdrawn as quickly as it is offered. For most critics, the presence of “style” requires assurance that there is also “substance.” Style is wrapping paper and ribbon, scented tag and loving inscription. If you are careful, the tissue can be reused for a birthday or another Christmas. My aunt ironed such paper as she fancied and stored it like linen napkins in folded flat stacks beneath her bed.

Style, I should like to protest, is the result of that “exactness of choice” that Porter exhibits. Whether unconsciously or by intent, the writer chooses subjects, adopts a tone, considers an order for the release of meaning, arrives at the rhythm, selects a series of appropriate sounds, determines the diction and measures the pace, turns the referents of certain words into symbols, establishes connections with companionable paragraphs, sizes up each sentence’s intended significance, and, if granted good fortune because each decision might have been otherwise, achieves not just this or that bit of luminosity or suggestiveness but her own unique lines of language, lines that produce the desired restitution of the self.

Also, in the current Atlantic, my friend and colleague Hua Hsu's essay, "The End of White America?"

At the moment, we can call this the triumph of multiculturalism, or post-racialism. But just as whiteness has no inherent meaning—it is a vessel we fill with our hopes and anxieties—these terms may prove equally empty in the long run. Does being post-racial mean that we are past race completely, or merely that race is no longer essential to how we identify ourselves? Karl Carter, of Atlanta’s youth-oriented GTM Inc. (Guerrilla Tactics Media), suggests that marketers and advertisers would be better off focusing on matrices like “lifestyle” or “culture” rather than race or ethnicity. “You’ll have crazy in-depth studies of the white consumer or the Latino consumer,” he complains. “But how do skaters feel? How do hip-hoppers feel?”

The logic of online social networking points in a similar direction. The New York University sociologist Dalton Conley has written of a “network nation,” in which applications like Facebook and MySpace create “crosscutting social groups” and new, flexible identities that only vaguely overlap with racial identities. Perhaps this is where the future of identity after whiteness lies—in a dramatic departure from the racial logic that has defined American culture from the very beginning. What Conley, Carter, and others are describing isn’t merely the displacement of whiteness from our cultural center; they’re describing a social structure that treats race as just one of a seemingly infinite number of possible self-identifications.

Scape

2008-12-27T14:16:00.001-05:00

I probably should have announced this news earlier, but among the dull reasons that kept the additions to this space dismayingly low in number this fall was one reason very interesting, at least to me: the wonderful Black Ocean will be publishing my book of poems, Scape, in a few months. You can read an announcement about Black Ocean's forthcoming titles here—a list of which I'm thrilled to be a part—and see the book's cover and description here.

Here are three blurbs for the book:

In Scape, Joshua Harmon reaches deep into the resources of our rich English, renewing the language and creating from it a physical and emotional world completely his own: his incisive and richly musical stanzas have an ever-returning vigor and freshness.

—Lydia Davis

"An inspected geography" indeed. The landscapes that Joshua Harmon explores are not static or flat but alive and mobile, constantly interrupting the viewer as if to say ‘we compose this scene together, just listen!’ The reader is similarly engaged to wander in Harmon’s code-shifting, phoneme-blasting phrases that combine folksy Americana ("I’m not fixin’ to get rowdy”) with an almost Hopkins-like faith in natural sacrament (“the staid dust bunnies of belief”). Scape holds up the mirror to a nature that refuses to stand still. It is an astounding accomplishment.

—Michael Davidson

The stalk of a flower. The shaft of an insect's antenna. An architectural column. Scapes: the means to beauty, navigation, and fancy, doing all the heavy lifting without trumpets. And the escape? The landscape? And the inscape? What happens when all ancillary definitions are sounded at once? When the background becomes its opposite? This is the metaphysical, alliterative music vivifying Joshua Harmon's Scape. This is harmonious discord, which is not a paradox, but "[a] homeless cadence." Listen up: "slo-mo / pleasures shaken from troubled instruments."

—Noah Eli Gordon

on fragments, pt. 9

2008-12-22T10:18:00.002-05:00

"The fragments. Like any man, is himself, that collector, that center round which: such fly."

—Robert Creeley, letter to Cid Corman, Tuesday (Nov. 15, 1950) (reprinted in The Gist of Origin, 1951–1971, an Anthology)

Inaugural poetry (on difficulty, pt. 8)

2008-12-16T18:42:00.010-05:00

At the Huffington Post this week, John Lundberg wonders "who will be Obama's inaugural poet?" After the New York Times's weeks-long series profiling potential Obama nominees for other, more important positions, the question is still of interest. Lundberg cites names mentioned in an AP article ("Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, current poet laureate Kay Ryan, and Philip Levine"), and then argues that

Levine might be the most poignant choice, given the country's current economic struggles. Raised in a blue collar family in Detroit, Levine writes poetry that champions the working man. ...If Obama is concerned about the inauguration taking on a tone that's too ethereal for these tough economic circumstances, Levine's unpretentious writing might prove an effective foil.

Forget such bland, safe choices—anyway, none of them possesses anything close to the president-elect's verbal skills—and ignore appeals to a false sense of populism ("the working man"? I'm exhausted by the cynical uses to which this construct has been subjected by our politicians; must our poets now invoke it too?).

Instead, how about our poet who's perhaps more invested in the idea of America and American history than any other working today (Paul Metcalf, r.i.p., would have been another), and whose work continually demonstrates language's complexities and provisionalities—Susan Howe?

Lundberg's conservative notion that "tough economic circumstances" mean we should abandon linguistic flair and skill suggests that his euphemistic tough times can be neither represented by nor conveyed in any register but the plainspoken and the direct. After the simplistic rhetoric our political leaders have (ab)used in recent memory, I for one would welcome the signal that "ethereal," pretentious (by which I assume Lundberg means not immediately apprehensible by "the working man," i.e., difficult) poetry spoken ceremonially would send: first, that the government will no longer condescend to the polis, but more significantly, that a political era of binaries and absolutes is ending in favor of one engaged with the idea of complexity in all its forms—in which, as Howe writes in the poem "Thorow" (from her 1990 book Singularities), "[w]ork...traverses multiplicities," or in which, as she writes in her essay "Incloser" (from her 1993 book The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American History), "A poem can prevent onrushing light going out," and "[i]nexplicable acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and sanctification."

On nomenclature

2008-12-10T15:39:00.007-05:00

The end of semester has arrived—and with that sense of liberation, perhaps, I'd like to offer what I expect will be a one-time digression. (Anyone who'd prefer to read my usual variety of musings is free to substitute the words "experimental fiction" whenever you encounter the words "dog," "breed," or "pit bull," and this posting will probably still make some sense.)

Although I try to keep this space mostly free from the personal unless it also pertains to writing, this afternoon I was forwarded this CNN video. It's not "news" except in the slowest-day sense, but I found it interesting for several reasons.

For almost four years, I've owned a rescued pit bull who came from Albany's terrific organization Out of the Pits. My wife and I were especially interested in owning a pit bull—because of our experience with friends' pit bulls, because the breed is in crisis, and because of the vast misinformation that exists about the breed based on media and popular narratives that responsible pit bull owners have had a difficult time countering. We wanted to help a dog that could use some help, and to offer whatever correctives we could to the dominant narratives about pit bulls. The very name "pit bull"—which I use here deliberately rather than the less forthright "American Staffordshire Terrier"—is almost always invoked when the media wishes to report on a dog attack, sometimes even when the dog in question is not a pit bull at all. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Michael Vick dogfighting case, for me, was the manner in which the media reporting that story often preferred the word "dog" to the term "pit bull"—perhaps because, in this instance, the dogs were seen as victims. (Here is one story about what happened to Vick's seized dogs; Malcom Gladwell's 2006 New Yorker essay about pit bulls and profiling is another interesting read that makes many of the points pit bull owners have long understood; and this recent NYT article should demonstrate at least some of the ways in which we are displacing our own pathologies onto a specific kind of dog.)

In the video above, the dog is clearly a pit bull, though neither the family nor the journalist refers to it as such. Presumably the family members don't need to mediate their relationship to their pet with specific language. As for the journalist's failure to invoke the words "pit bull" given the opportunity, perhaps this is a case of this dog being subject to another term now so larded with political opportunism and pop-cultural baggage as to be almost worthless ("hero"). Still, I can't help but feel that the KWTV reporter is missing other, more complex stories—about the breed, about the people and families who own such dogs (and who are often, in my opinion, the tacit subjects of breed-specific legislation), and most of all about the assumptions our terminology makes—a dog is the same dog whether we call it a pit bull, an American Staffordshire Terrier, or a dog, but our attitudes toward the names we might give that dog are not the same; if the dogs that many television news-watchers imagine attack people without provocation are "pit bulls," then the dogs that take bullets for their owners should be "pit bulls" as well, so that we might begin to reclaim and redeem that name. And lest anyone think that the behavior of the pit bull in Oklahoma is unusual, please read the story of Weela the pit bull.

"shuffling the terms"

2008-12-04T09:06:00.005-05:00

John Latta, at Isola di Rifiuti, offers an appreciative review of C.S. Giscombe's new collection, Prairie Style, and traces echoes of Stevens, Olson, Ammons, and Mackey through the book—the sort of reading and writing I wish I had the time for myself, right now.

With so much to write about—the acquisitions freeze at Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, the dullness of the annual "Notable Books" and "Best Books" lists from the New York Times, Daniel Green's recent post about print and online literary magazines at The Reading Experience—I hope to post more of my thoughts in this space soon. I've spent most of my blogging time this fall—happily and productively—with my creative writing students, as well as a good deal of time working on something that's noted in my profile, and that I'll note here in a more public way at some point soon.

"Fall Back"

2008-11-02T18:17:00.004-05:00

In the middle I find myself dispirited slightly whenever the sun resists staying up. I can't keep it straight between day and night. It's hard to explain how difficult being here is, especially when you seem to lack apparently for nothing. I was really full of sleep the moment I left home.

—Stephen Rodefer, from "Stray Wood" in Passing Duration (Burning Deck, 1991)

shocking entertainments (on literary fiction, pt. 5)

2008-10-16T10:42:00.006-04:00

I've read none of the novels on this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist, but was very interested in the criteria for the shortlist, at least as expressed by Michael Portillo, "the chairman of this year's panel of judges," who, according to the New York Times, saw this year's shortlist as "a series of 'extraordinarily readable page-turners.'" Aravind Adiga's novel The White Tiger won the prize, according to Portillo, "because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure."

at "the margins of our literary culture" (elitism, pt. 2)

2008-10-05T10:33:00.009-04:00

"Both [David Foster Wallace and John Barth]," writes Dwight Garner in today's NYT Book Review, "employed a fierce and often satirical intelligence, and both had an abiding fondness for metafictional fripperies like footnotes and disclaimers. Barth has, over the decades, been pushed more to the margins of our literary culture. But there was a time, in the 1960s, when he occupied part of the book world’s red-hot center. Barth even placed a novel on the Times best-seller list."

The last statement implies such amazement and disbelief that it seems worth a brief comment. The occasion of Garner's meditation here seems to be the coincidence of Sven Birkerts's review of Barth's new book of stories and the appearance of Infinite Jest on the paperback bestseller list ("the first time one of [Wallace's] books has made the Times list," notes Garner).

We might read Garner's statement as suggesting that Barth's absence from the "red-hot center" is due to a dearth of recent books, though Barth continues to publish regularly both novels and collections of stories. We also might read Garner's statement as suggesting that, despite such literary successors as David Foster Wallace, Barth's work has for whatever reason become seen as culturally irrelevant. (A conservative novelist and book reviewer who recently visited the college campus at which I work read a passage from his novel in which a bookstore employee, described in terms of his tattoos, piercings, and slackerish attitude, is mocked for heavily annotating a thousand-page tome which the novelist visitor acknowledged was intended to be Infinite Jest, so I gather that for many Wallace's work, like tattoos and piercings and presumably slackers in general, has been relegated to some dustbin of cheap 1990s nostalgia from which the dull writers of 2008 might draw for easy laughter in their insipid, unambitious fictions. If Wallace is viewed in this way, I can't imagine that Barth's body of work even registers.) But given that nearly every eulogy of Wallace that appeared in the aftermath of his suicide appended an apology for not finishing or not having read Infinite Jest—despite wanting to, or really, really intending to—I wonder what the ultimate cultural relevance of all these recently sold copies of that novel will be, or how many of them will be read from the first page to the last, or whether those that will be read will be read as fiction instead of as a view into a troubled personality.

Garner quotes from Robert Scholes's "ecstatic" review of Giles Goat-Boy, the Barth book that did appear on the bestseller list, noting that this assessment of Barth's work "may put you in mind of the late, great Wallace":

Barth makes few concessions to the dull or the uneducated—to the "plain reader." He demands a fancy reader, in fact. To those with the right intellectual and emotional equipment, he is prepared to deliver more in the way of both plain and fancy literary refreshment than any novelist writing today. His audience must be that same audience whose capacities have been extended and prepared by Joyce, Proust, Mann, and Faulkner.

Perhaps it's only me, but I cannot imagine, in 2008, any review that appears in any major print book review suggesting that a book requires its audience to be thus "extended" or "prepared," or that any audience large enough to purchase a book in such numbers as to register on the NYT Bestseller List is in fact equipped in the ways Scholes expects a fair number of readers to have been equipped in 1966. (Even the idea of finding "refreshment" in a novel seems odd; these days we read novels to escape.) If Wallace's books have failed to sell in the quantities necessary to appear on the bestseller list until his suicide, I do not like the implications for our reading culture. (I regret that our readings—and published reviews—of books these days too often begin with how we might relate the books to our own lives, and that we seem to find books most interesting when we think they act as mirrors.)

In this week where the most prominent uses of public language have been "you betcha" and "darn it" (and in which this language redeemed a national political candidate in the view of many observers), and in an era where public expressions of intelligence, thoughtfulness, or consideration too often bring charges of elitism and the vast constellation of associations that word has acquired over the last forty years, it is beyond obvious that books such as Barth's—or Wallace's—do not, and will not, register in our collective national consciousness; it is a wonder that any books do. To modify Garner's phrasing, we might say that thoughtfulness (not to mention adventurousness) has, over the decades, been pushed more to the margins of our literary culture as well.

B.S. Johnson

2008-08-23T09:57:00.005-04:00

It's exciting to see that not only has B.S. Johnson's 1969 novel The Unfortunates been republished by New Directions—and months ago, which shows how well I've been paying attention—but that it's also received a full-page review in tomorrow's NYTBR:

Handsomely reconstitued by New Directions from the scarce original editions, The Unfortunates comes in a box of 27 unbound chapters (plus the novelist Jonathan Coe's invaluable introduction). The "First" and "Last" chapters are designated as such. The intervening 25, ranging from 12 pages to a single paragraph, are to be read in any order we choose. Far from some modernist stunt, the form of the book dovetails beautifully with Johnson's subject—the accidental yet persistent nature of memory.

Though I greatly admire Johnson's later novel House Mother Normal (and used to teach it in an advanced fiction writing seminar), I've never read The Unfortunates, in part because the original copies are fairly to very expensive and/or difficult to track down. I will certainly be buying this edition.

Charles Taylor's review of the novel might be more exciting if Taylor did not feel the need to assure "readers—those sometimes forgotten creatures who quite rightly don't care much about form, preferring to invest themselves in narrative, emotion, and character—[that] The Unfortunates, despite its unorthodox presentation, offers exactly that." I'm sorry that Taylor felt the need to include this assurance for this mythic "reader" the publishing industry still wants to believe exists; this reader is far more "invested" in the form of any sort of writing, and nearly exhausted by recitations of narrative, emotions, characters.

(Is it possible to offer a book review of a work of fiction in which praise for the language and the form of the book was not mere afterthought, a list of details offered as "proof" of a story's believability, authenticity, urgency, etc.? In which banal language and inherited, thoughtless forms were not taken as givens but instead dealt the critical lashings they deserve? In which a description of the novel's plot and/or main character does not constitute the majority of the review?)

"History of Cold Seasons"

2008-08-10T11:08:00.004-04:00

The Starcherone Books blog is currently running short works by Starcherone authors, including a very old example of my short fiction here.

"having perpetually to begin"

2008-07-29T15:13:00.001-04:00

October 16 [1921]. Sunday. The misery of having perpetually to begin, the lack of the illusion that anything is more than, or even as much as, a beginning, the foolishness of those who do not know this and play football, for example, in order at last "to advance the ball," one's own foolishness buried within one as if in a coffin, the foolishness of those who think they see a real coffin here, hence a coffin that one can transport, open, destroy, exchange.

October 18 [1921]. ...It is entirely conceivable that life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fulness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

November 2 [1921]. Vague hope, vague confidence.

An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Ocassionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. "You are reserved for a great Monday!" Fine, but Sunday will never end.

November 7 [1921]. This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observes me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

—Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod (Schocken Books, 1949; tr. Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt)

"to look for [the] innovative" (on short prose)

2008-07-24T01:04:00.001-04:00

The writer "LML" at Aching Face (to which I was tipped off after LML responded to an entry in this space) has a recent post about what s/he calls the "borderland" of poetry and prose:

The borderland where fiction and poetry meet seems to me a promising area to look for innovative work. It is my impression, though, that this borderland is much more comprehensible to mainstream poets than to mainstream fiction writers....It is my feeling that fiction writers today don't tend to have an informing context for discussing prose work whose emphasis is not on character, plot, and place. Prose narratives the size of a typical poem, moreover, seem especially to elude the normal categories of evaluation. This may be one reason why the hybrid prose poem/flash fiction genre feels less exhausted than either the traditional lyric or traditional character-based fiction.

I wish I could share LML's sense of promise—though at one point, now about fifteen years ago, I did. The outside evaluator to my undergraduate thesis—which, in part, treated very short prose—suggested that I had fallen under the influence of a "modish" form. Years later, I can see his point, for indeed short texts do seduce both writer and reader, especially when they combine the parataxis and grittiness of some of Hemingway's "interchapters," the essayistic hypothesizing of Kafka's shorter parables, the flânerie of Baudelaire's "miracle[s] of poetic prose," the playfulness of Stein's Tender Buttons, the ecstatic strangeness of Rimbaud's Illuminations, the snapshot narratives of Toomer—plus various aspects of Mallarmé, Jacob, Char, Ponge, Borges, Cortázar, Kawabata, Walser, Bernhard, et. al.—and then filter that through the diverse revisions of what we might think of as the second and third waves of practitioners—Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Michael Benedikt, countless L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers (Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer, Michael Davidson, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, et. al.; see Ron Silliman's title essay and "Towards Prose" in his book The New Sentence for a useful background), the Margaret Atwood of Murder in the Dark (and Good Bones), the early Jayne Anne Phillips, Diane Williams, Gary Young, Charles Simic, James Tate, Harryette Mullen, dozens of writers published regularly in Gordon Lish's The Quarterly, and on and on and on.

In the lengthy "Afterwords" of a genre-defining collection, Sudden Fiction (1986—"Celebrating an Explosive New Literary Form"), more than one commentator remarked on how "easy" the form was to teach, to write, and to read. And as this anthology appeared in the era in which the MFA boom really took off, it's also easy to see how seductive are not only the voices and styles of the various writers I've listed above (and they all are), but also how seductive is a form that can be written, read, discussed, critiqued, and revised in the weekly time slots and scheduling constraints of the writing workshop. By the mid-1990s, when I was an MFA student, it seemed impossible to pick up a literary journal without at least a handful of prose poems or "short-shorts" therein, and anthologies of the prose poem (including Models of the Universe [1995], The Party Train [1996], as well as Peter Johnson's The Prose Poem: An International Journal [1992–2000, with the final volume being a 250-page "best of" selection]) and of the short-short story (including Sudden Fiction International [1989], Flash Fiction [1992], Sudden Fiction (Continued) [1996], and Micro Fiction [1996]) appeared regularly. Several book-length critical studies also appeared, including Stephen Fredman's Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (1983; 1990), Jonathan Monroe's A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (1987), Margueritte Murphy's A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (1992), Marvin Richards's Without Rhyme or Reason: Gaspard de la Nuit and the Dialectic of the Prose Poem (1998), and Michel Delville's The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (1998) (consider what's made explicit in several of these subtitles). In the current decade, we've had David Lehman's Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Starcherone Books' PP/FF, Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and probably more I'm forgetting; the evangelism of recent converts, such as Dave Eggers; and a number of new genre-specific literary magazines. Every single one of these anthologies includes at least one introduction in which the editors and/or a guest writer lay out generic names, claims, and traits (though Peter Conners's introductory essay in PP/FF eschews definitions and notes that "Genre is easier to sell, to teach, to quantify and review, but what does it have to do with creating new art? ...Each piece creates its own rules"), and/or trace their history of the form through whichever literary precursors—rarely a wide or representative range—they deem important.

Overnight, what once might have been mildly dangerous and sexy (and perhaps "innovative") swiftly evolved its own staid tropes and conventions and rhetoric—and was hemmed by even further attempts at trivial territorializing, such as the brief essay ("We suggest simply calling these pieces 'Shorts' and giving them a home in this anthology," write Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones in In Short [1996—"Welcome to the first anthology to identify and celebrate a new nonfiction form"], the first of what's now a series of three volumes) or the poetry/nonfiction borderland "lyric essay" purveyed by John D'Agata, or the various word counts that tell you whether you're reading a micro (250 or fewer words, if I recall correctly), flash (750), or sudden fiction (1500), but which of course instead suggest arbitrary editorial requirements and serve as brand trademarks. (And though many of these editors viewed short prose, in terms of literary politics, as subversive and resistant, their language at this time was that of discovery, conquest, and colonization.) The various accounts of prose poetry's (or short-short fiction's...or both, depending on where you feel like drawing/not drawing genre lines) struggle for legitimacy, the endless self-advocacy, the hand-wringing about boundaries and margins and transgressions as though writers were redrawing Europe—all did nothing so much as dull and demystify a form that often is at its best when unexpected and strange. Of course I do not mean to imply that the form should not be studied and/or read critically (in fact, I have for more than a decade taught a first-year writing course focused on doing just that), but do think that the desire in certain quarters to promote a specific version of the prose poem or the short-short story, etc.—and to have such works legitimized by the academy and/or the literary sphere—did far more harm than good to the form and to those practicing it. The two writers LML specifically cites, Lydia Davis and Russell Edson—both of whose work I admire greatly, for different reasons, and both of whom have over the last dozen years achieved the recognition they long deserved—have by now had their distinctive styles so assimilated and copied that versions of contests such as this or this can't be too far off.

As a longtime admirer of both short prose work and innovative work, I can't agree with LML that the "borderland" of prose and poetry is necessarily any more or less "promising" for innovation than any other literary form, or that it "elude[s] the normal categories of evaluation" (though this is simply a matter of what one considers "normal categories of evaluation"). I would also argue that in some ways, the short prose form is very much as "exhausted" as the lyric poem or the plot- and character-based narrative story, if only from its current overexposure. Is a half-page justified block of paratactic sentences truly strange, anymore? (To my first-year students, yes; to most writers, no.) And while there are many exciting writers who've been working in the short prose form since the mid-1990s (I'll try to avoid favoring or disfavoring any of my peers with a citation or an omission), there are far, far more writers following, if only unconsciously, forumulae as banal as those expounded in George R. Clay's 1997 AWP Writer's Chronicle article "How to Make a Short-Short Story Work":

Of the 175 short-shorts I read for this essay, three out of four set up...oscillations between habitually incompatible ways of perceiving. ...to write an effective short-short story, you don't have to set up an oscillation between normality and insanity. Your two incompatible ways of perceiving can be much more subtle, dealing not with tricky concepts...but with ordinary feelings, personal values, situations that are private rather than public.

"fantasist nostalgia" (on historical fiction)

2008-07-20T19:13:00.004-04:00

I recently stumbled across (courtesy of a link from Three Percent) the website of a fairly new publisher of short fiction, England's Comma Press, at which I found the following interesting clause in the press's "editorial policy":

Comma will not consider or publish any story set before the start of the 20th century. Comma is a publisher of contemporary fiction, and fiction that speaks to readers now – that is to say, stories that relate experiences set in the present (or in futures based on the present), or within 'living family history'. We do not publish period drama nor fantasist nostalgia.

The phrase "fiction that speaks to readers now," appearing in an editorial policy, seems especially presumptuous, given that many publishers, small and large, appear to have little idea just what sort of fiction does "speak to" readers, though the entire passage is so short-sighted as to be laughable. Comma Press also includes policies against work that may require securing permissions (e.g., to quote from another work); against work that is not "100% fiction," including "semi-fictionalised versions of real events"; and against "anything that could be deemed libellous in character, or offensive to any individual or group of individuals." This entire set of policies makes me wonder how Comma Press has managed to publish anything at all, and the quantification of fictionality is as troubling as the 100% true memoir backlash. And why would a press devoted to publishing short fiction enforce editorial decisions that would have prevented one of the last century's most distinguished practitioners of short fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, from appearing in their list?

This policy also resonated with me because Quinnehtukqut has been referred to as "historical fiction" (including on the back cover of the book itself), an identifier that, while it correctly indicates the time period in which the novel takes place, does not otherwise seem to me particularly accurate.* I've always considered the term "historical fiction" a pejorative that suggests something less than a serious engagement with the culture, a shirking (in the heroic, big-book novelist mode) of the novel's presumed obligation to report on life as we know it.

"Historical fiction" generally seems code for work that does indeed traffic in nostalgia—books for readers who want to imagine the sailing ships of Patrick O'Brian, or cross-class romance in Victorian England, or murder mysteries in medieval Europe. As such, it seems but a bit of generic narrowing from what would once have simply been called "adventure novels," "romance novels," and "mystery novels," respectively. Taken further, the term describes books that often indulge in slavish adherence to historical details, especially historical technologies, or which perhaps reimagine historical events or personages. Historical fiction, it seems, offers readers the pleasures of a costume-drama or of escaping one's current cultural moment for some other presumably more romantic (and offers amateur historians the pleasure of discovering anachronisms). I imagine—since I haven't, and most likely never will, read them—that novels such as Ragtime or The Alienist simply combine these pleasures with the "seriousness" of "literary fiction."

That said, we might consider historical fiction to include John Updike's most famous novels, the Rabbit books, each of which plumbed the up-to-the-moment minutiae of American life, from politics to automobile advertising to sexual practices, and each of which offered its immediate readers (as well as some of those readers who came to the novels later, though I'm certain many of today's younger readers would require Google) some thrill in recognizing their own cultural artifacts, and each of which now seems a time capsule from a vanished era:

...after nine, on Carol Burnett, she and Gomer Pyle do an actually pretty funny skit about the Lone Ranger. ...In this skit the Lone Ranger has a wife. She stamps around a cabin saying how she hates housework, hates her lonely life. "You're never home," she says, "you keep disappearing in a cloud of dust with a hearty 'Heigh-ho, Silver.'" The unseen audience laughs, Rabbit laughs, Nelson doesn't see what's so funny.

...Rabbit notices that the old posters of Brooks Robinson and Orlando Cepeda and Steve McQueen on a motorcycle have been removed from the boy's walls.

"And now, the Number One Hit coast to coast, 'Hot Stuff,' by the Queen of Disco, Donna Summer!" ...Rabbit likes the chorus where the girls in the background chime in, you can picture them standing around some steamy city corner chewing gum and who knows what else...

The angel who has replaced Farrah Fawcett-Majors gets out of her crumpled Malibu and tosses her hair: this becomes a freeze-frame.

They pass the view of the viaduct and then the shopping center where the four-theatre complex advertises AGATHA MANHATTAN MEATBALLS AMITYVILLE HORROR.

...the Today show is doing its last recap of the news and weather. Willard Scott, beamed in from Nome, Alaska, has Jane and Bryant in stitches.

Etc., etc. The latter three of these books, at least, seem to me historical fiction in its nostalgic sense, even though they are set essentially at the time at which they were published, since one of the primary outcomes of each (and part of the project of each, it would seem as well) is an obsessive cultural-historical documentation—and here the novelist, like the historian, writes a narrative attempting to make sense of a cultural moment that has passed or is passing, a narrative which, in its acts of recovery and representation, objectifies certain aspects of this cultural moment.

Thus we might also consider a novel such as Andre Dubus III's recent book, though it is set in contemporary times and concerns contemporary events, to be "historical fiction," since it shares the concerns of Updike's Rabbit books on matters of historical accuracy, historical chronology, and the verifying detail. I would in fact suggest that this sort of novel indulges a "fantasist nostalgia" as much as any "Novel of the Reign of Edward II" or fictional identification of Mona Lisa; "history," in this case, is closer to the present, but still fixed (and still mourned).

But what are we to make of—to choose one of countless examples—books such as Faulkner's Snopes trilogy (begun in 1925, The Hamlet was published in 1940, and The Town and The Mansion published in 1957 and 1959; the events of the books are deeply invested in sharecropping economics of the post-Reconstruction era, and are set in the 1890s, later revised to the early 1900s to better fit Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha chronology). Certainly we might categorize The Hamlet, with its appreciation of "true" local lore (upon which many of its events are based) and the historical detail, and its setting in the past, under the heading "historical fiction," but as in almost all Faulkner, the history here is one shrouded amid conflicting versions and lost to myth (simply read the opening description of the "Old Frenchman place"), and the project of the Snopes novels is not to document the technology of Ratliff's buckboard or to explore the details of one-room schoolhouses in rural Mississippi. The economic and social transactions of The Hamlet seem more relevant to our current cultural climate—or, at least, speak to me in a way far more relevant—than any contemporary novel I can think of.

As John Barth writes in his essay "Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness" (collected in The Friday Book),

Both [LETTERS and The Sot-Weed Factor] are more or less "historical fiction," and for both I did a respectable amount of homework on the historical periods involved. But it was a novelist's homework, not a historian's, and novelists are the opposite of icebergs: Eight-ninths of what I once knew about this region's history, and have since forgotten, is in plain view on the surface of those two novels, where it serves its fictive purposes without making the author any sort of authority. Since The Sot-Weed Factor isn't finally "about" Colonial Maryland at all, any more than LETTERS is really "about" the burning of Washington in 1814 or the burning of Cambridge in 1967, I'm already uncertain which of their historical details are real and which I dreamed up.

"[F]ictive purposes," I might suggest (or preferably "fictive outcomes," disparate and reader-dependent), are far more crucial in my evaluation of a work of fiction than the distance between a novel's date of publication and the date of its setting. One would hope that a reader—if not a small press—would be willing to examine each book by whatever criteria the book proposes.

* In the case of my own novel, though I obviously researched various historical matters, I was mainly interested in the idea of storytelling (and in history being one primary form of storytelling), and certainly not in offering a note-perfect reproduction of early twentieth-century rural life. (And as I am well capable of nostalgia for yesterday, any nostalgia in my writing is probably less historical than constitutional.)

"At this moment I am writing"

2008-07-17T14:56:00.003-04:00

"I write." This statement is the one and only real "datum" a writer can start from. "At this moment I am writing." Which is also the same as saying: "You who are reading are obliged to believe only one thing: that what you are reading is something that at some previous time someone has written; what you are reading takes place in one particular world, that of the written word. It may be that likenesses can be established between the world of the written word and other worlds of experience, and that you will be called on to judge upon these likenesses, but your judgment would in any case be wrong if while reading you hoped to enter into a direct relationship with the experience of worlds other than that of the written word."

—Italo Calvino, "Levels of Reality in Literature" (The Uses of Literature, tr. Patrick Creagh, 1986)

elitism (on literary fiction, pt. 4)

2008-07-10T07:48:00.000-04:00

When the semiliterates have organized themselves even more thoroughly than they already have at the publishing houses and the magazines, phrasemakers such as I will be the first to go, and a small platoon we will be, disdained by book editors who cannot spell and magazine editors who equate literature with gossip or the facetious.... I envision the death of the elite by, say, 2020, though it may come before. As I have said many times already, those of us who taught at the university level have much to answer for, now that the mediocrities to whom we gave Bs inherit the earth. We should have failed them when we had the chance."

—Paul West, "The End of an Elite," 1996

on literary fiction, pt. 3

2008-07-10T07:44:00.003-04:00

Tacked onto these chauvinistic subplots is the storyline involving Bassam, a strip club customer who eventually flies a plane into one of the Twin Towers. There is a special crassness in the way that Dubus exploits 9/11 to inflate his novel with purported significance. You sense, in fact, that he really just wanted to write about victimized strippers, but added the 9/11 terrorist in an attempt to transform a pulp porno-thriller into relevant Literature. ...Throughout these scenes, the reader vainly searches for reasons why they exist apart from the naked marketability of the subject.

The above passage (italics in the original) comes from Sharon Fulton's review of Andre Dubus III's "awful" and "saggy" new novel. The early notice on this book included no fewer than three lengthy NYT features and reviews discussing such matters as the author wrestling with the ethics of spending his Guggenheim on "research" at strip clubs, and this tidbit on the book's genesis, in which Dubus III manages to invoke both his fictional exploration/appropriation of The Other and the romantic cliché of a writer not choosing the material, as well as a wad of cash that almost certainly had nothing to do with Oprah's Book Club:

“In the beginning this was not a novel I wanted to write,” Mr. Dubus said. “I wanted nothing to do with 9/11. But it sort of forced itself on me.” The novel began, he recalled, with a single image: a wad of cash on top of a bureau. “Then it occurred to me that it was a few days after 9/11, and the cash belonged to a stripper,” he said. “And that she was one of the strippers who danced for those guys. What would it be like to be that stripper? That was how I started.”

Even more forcefully than Janet Maslin before her, Sharon Fulton gives this facile "literary fiction" the response it deserves.

on literary fiction, pt. 2

2008-07-09T11:42:00.005-04:00

Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-opened eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it...

—William Gass, "Pulitzer: The People's Prize" (Finding a Form, 1996)

A commenter to my previous post sent me to the bookshelf for this essay. I deleted a paragraph from yesterday's post about how the term "literary fiction" involves more than a bit of readerly wishful thinking, especially if we trace the rise of the novel and its readers to a literate middle class with leisure time and a desire to see itself (and its concerns) represented in the pages of novels. Gass says the same thing better here anyway.

lazy entertainments (on literary fiction)

2008-07-08T13:52:00.018-04:00

Before the holiday weekend, I'd started drafting a response to one of Daniel Green's posts at The Reading Experience. I was interested in Green's take on the "experimental novel" (in response to some of Dalkey Archive editor Steven Moore's thoughts about it), as well as his thoughts about readerly laziness, the "democratic, middle-class" novel (the quote is Moore's), and "the distinction between 'popular fiction' and 'literary fiction.'"

Writerly laziness (at least as far as blogging goes) kept me from finishing the response, in which I wanted to agree with Green on the useful generalization, true in my own experience as well, that many readers have a "fundamental suspicion of anything that isn't useful in a readily apparent way" (which to my mind points to—again, speaking generally—the prominence of nonfiction over fiction, or of the plainspoken over the ornate), and to take him to task a bit for what seems to me an at-best tenuous distinction between "popular" and "literary," given that most current so-called literary novels are implicitly screenplays, and that what was once known as the midlist—books which editors supposed would not sell a large number of copies, but which would bring a publishing house a certain amount of cultural prestige—no longer really exists (or it now seems to exist mainly at the small presses, where it's the frontlist, though I don't know about the cultural prestige part).

That said, following the holiday weekend, I saw Green's most recent post, a reading of

yet another mediocre novel that unaccountably has sent reviewers into raptures of praise, larding it with adjectives such as "beautiful," "stunning," and "exquisite." Such praise for a thoroughly drab, utterly undistinguished work of complacent realism, a novel that reinforces the most retrograde notions of what a "serious" novel should be like, leaves one lamenting not just the persistence of the kind of formulaic "literary fiction" this novel represents, but also the inability of so many critics to evaluate this fiction in other than the most vapid, critically submissive terms.

This excerpt of Green's review, particularly the reference to "formulaic 'literary fiction,'" expresses much of what I'd been writing in the draft of my post. I'd argue that all "literary fiction" is formulaic, even though, as a descriptive term, "literary fiction" gestures more at the reader and his/her tastes and assumptions (and his/her class and/or education) than it offers an avenue into what a book might be like. "Literary fiction" is a genre as much as "romance fiction" or "science fiction" or "detective fiction"; as with those other genres, it mainly sticks to a set of generic markers which on occasion it distorts or subverts (and which distortions or subversions, repeated a few times, then become generic markers themselves). In the case of literary fiction, the tropes are pretty well-known at this point, and the reason it's referred to as "literary fiction" rather than "suburban domestic malaise fiction" or "urban ennui fiction" or "warmed-over nineteenth-century 'realist' fiction" is that the term gained real currency simultaneous with the 1980s boom in MFA programs for writers—many of whom, thus certified, became professors teaching other writers (n.b.: I am both an MFA graduate and a teacher of writing). Given the socioeconomic stakes for these writers and their academic production, literary fiction seems to me simply a way of distinguishing approved works as serious, high-minded, and worthy of academic study (and thus academic tenure), which is why the term is such a darling of conservative organizations such as the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (n.b.: of which I am a member).

In fact, a quick search of the archives of The Writer's Chronicle, AWP's publication, indicates that as far back as the May 1994 issue claims were being made as to the differences between (and artistic superiority of) "Literary Fiction Versus Popular Fiction," as an article by Jonathan Penner has it. (I'd link here, but the archives are subscriber-only.) Penner asserts that "Every work of literary fiction seeks to be like none other; every work of genre fiction seeks to be like many others. Genre fiction works for effects on which the reader knows he or she may rely. Literary fiction always tries to see the world freshly." I don't recall such distinctions having much merit fourteen years ago, though they probably have even less now; I certainly don't see how it's possible to argue that "every work of literary fiction seeks to be like none other." Would that it were so.

The Oxford English Dictionary's primary non-obsolete definition of "literary" is "Pertaining to books and written compositions; also, in a narrower sense, pertaining to, or having the characteristics of that kind of written composition which has value on account of its qualities of form," and certainly when the adjective is applied to fiction it is the "narrower sense" of the word which is intended. But all value judgments are influenced by a host of variables (again, I'd argue, particularly class and education), and "qualities of form" is so vague as to be nearly useless.

An editor who edits mostly (entirely?) literary fiction for a large New York house once told me—and I doubt this statement's factual accuracy, if not its spirit—that I was "one of a hundred people" who'd bought Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String when it was originally published by Knopf. I had asked why editors were reluctant to acquire fiction that appeared (or in fact was) unlike the other fiction they acquired, since Marcus's book had by then been reprinted by Dalkey Archive and his second book appeared from Vintage. The editor's response was by way of explanation as to why he was turning down my own work. As long as editors (and thus writers who write with editors in mind) still forecast their acquisitions primarily in terms of sales, and as long as editors and writers both, in Green's words, "deny...the novel['s] possibilities," "literary fiction" is not a redeemable term.

on fragments, pt. 8

2008-06-26T10:24:00.002-04:00

"Fragments are the only forms I trust."

—Donald Barthelme, "See the Moon?" (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, 1968)

imperfection (on fragments, pt. 7)

2008-06-24T16:57:00.002-04:00

In a brief discussion of Roberto Bolaño's forthcoming (in English) novel 2666, Scott Esposito confesses

I'm a big fan of imperfection in literature. Although I can admire the tautly constructed small novel for the endless arguability and interpretability offered by its enigmatic clarity—think of The Metamorphosis, for instance—I like the imperfect, large novels for the very reason that I can feel things getting lost and going awry within them. It's these detached or misshapen pieces that often become the most compelling moments in the novel for me.

In this paragraph, Esposito reinforces a for-me tiresome fallacy—that only "large novels" offer the pleasures of "imperfection" (which I'm reading as a kind of code word for digressiveness—i.e., some moment of excess or tangency, a site in a book where narrative energy breaks down or "go[es] awry.") To be sure, from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman or Moby-Dick, or The Whale on down to less appealing contemporary avatars of the "loose and baggy monster," we have countless examples of long, digressive, "imperfect" novels. And it is beyond obvious that a book's length permits (or inhibits) the number of imperfections or the amount of digressiveness possible. Still, perhaps Esposito has forgotten books such as Invisible Cities, or Jacob's Room, or Why Did I Ever, or Coming Through Slaughter, or Reader's Block, or Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, not one of which exceeds two hundred pages.

All of the books I've just cited—after a quick glance at the shelves behind me—are very much "constructed" (I'll leave open the question of the "tautness" of these constructions), with various formal elements often determining the constructions, and so I may well be misreading Esposito's use of the term "imperfection." Still, I'd argue that each of the novels on my list offers moments of narrative breakdown, digressiveness, "lost things," missteps (deliberate or otherwise), excess, "detached...pieces," etc. Perhaps most importantly, each of these novels consists of fragments of some sort—so it may be that the fragmentary narrative offers readers some sense of imperfection simply because fragments are themselves imperfect, incomplete. (Or, as the fragment implies some larger whole, perhaps the short, fragmentary narrative implies a longer narrative.)

on description

2008-06-24T14:47:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about description lately, in part because I'm currently writing a novel filled with description, but prompted mainly by reading several lazy and tiresome book reviews (no, I'm not going to cite them here) in which the reviewers, although they discuss apparently quite mundane (and, from the excerpts provided in the reviews, quite mundanely-written) books, spend much of their space praising the descriptive capabilities of the writers being reviewed while offering no sense of the criteria by which these reviewers judge "good" "description."

John Gardner, in his (in)famous treatise The Art of Fiction, considers it the task of the writer of realist fiction to

present, moment by moment, concrete images drawn from a careful observation of how people behave; and [s/he] must render the connections between moments, the exact gestures, facial expressions, or turns of speech that, within any given scene, move human beings from emotion to emotion, from one instant in time to the next.

Gardner, of course, termed this method the "vivid, continuous dream," in which the writer must above all convince the reader (through "proofs—in the form of closely observed details") while doing nothing to rupture the "dream" created by the fiction—i.e., that we are somehow experiencing what we read. "[O]ne of the chief mistakes a writer can make is to allow or force the reader's mind to be distracted, even momentarily, from the fictional dream," Gardner observes. Despite the naivete of this description, and Gardner's apparent conflation of "human beings" with "fictional characters" or "linguistic constructs," his instruction remains the essential template for so-called realist fiction. In fact, it's basically a restatement of Poe's comments on Hawthorne:

A skillful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very first sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then in his very first step has he committed a blunder. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.

William Gass, friend and frequent antagonist of Gardner's positions on fiction (particularly Gardner's ideas about morality and fiction), was asked, during a 1978 debate with Gardner, his thoughts about, as the moderator put it, "this vivid and continuous dream." Gass's reply:

It's rather imaginary. In music, let's say, the motion of the work comes from the performance. That's also true in the theater. So if there's an interruption, or your mind goes blank or someone rattles a bag, you miss something and that's too bad, it's lost. In reading fiction, however, the motion that moves the text comes from the reader. Now the writer can indicate or try to indicate how that motion should go and at what rate. But I don't think that anyone writes a book now supposing that the reader will sit down and read two hundred pages in a dream. He's going to, in fact, stop, brush a fly off his nose, go back to the first page, read it over, skip, look around for the juicy parts. The book is more like a building which you're trying to get someone to go through the way you want them to.*

Later in the exchange, Gardner claims

I think language exists to make a beautiful and powerful apparition. [Gass] thinks you can make pretty colored walls with it. That's unfair. But what I think is beautiful, he would think is not yet sufficiently ornate. The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.

Gass replies, "There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying."

It's easy to dismiss Gardner's metaphor of prose taking flight, and obvious to say that narrative, as Gass points out, is an act of illusion (or of ruining those illusions). I'll simply note that Gass's own descriptions are of course the sort that make readers pause, that rupture any dreams the fiction may encourage as they read, whether the language of the description is simple (I recall an old MFA cohort pointing out to me that "The Pedersen Kid" contained almost no words over two syllables) or ornate. Gardner's desire for an essentially passive reading experience hinges on the idea (again, from Poe) that description must serve a very specific singular function; Gass's observations about readerly agency suggest that any orchestration is a matter of a reader's docility in being led. (To be fair, most readers these days are, it seems, much happier taking the scripted tour than in exploring the "building" of a book themselves.)

But in returning to the question the lazy reviews prompted for me about description, and "good" description in particular, I have to agree with Gass; the lines of books that stay with me are always of the dream-rupturing variety, those over which I pause in my reading—to work out an image, to enjoy a rhythm or sound, to marvel at diction. Given the prose cited as impressive in the reviews, as well as my own experiences with editors and other readers, most people, even though they prefer the passive Gardner model of reading, still like some minor verbal thrills as they read; the question thus becomes one of degree, and taste, with a sort of middle-class (or Puritan, or WASP, or whatever social group you like) disdain of too much showing-off. And someone such as Updike or Bellow (i.e., someone telling a straightforward narrative with occasional linguistic flourishes) seems far more likely to be granted leniency in these matters than, e.g., Gass or Christine Schutt or Noy Holland, in all of whose work narrative is often anything but straightforward.

*(Gass elaborated on this architectural metaphor of reading in a 1979 interview with G.A.M. Jannsens: "...in reading I don't go continuously, I break off, I take up the book a week later, I go back and forth. I am like I would be when I went through a building: I am putting the pieces together to compose the building which exists ontologically all at the same time, and which I can only know experientially one at the time, and therefore I can only conceive or conceptualize the way it actually exists; I can have an idea of how this house exists.")

upcoming reading

2008-06-10T11:26:00.003-04:00

Those of you in Boston may want to come out to this event on Sunday:

The Dirty Water Reading Series, which Black Ocean/Handsome hosts with Quick Fiction, Fringe, and Redivider, presents "Who's Your Daddy," a Father's Day-themed reading at the Grub Street Headquarters on Sunday, June 15. The reading will feature authors Chris Siteman, Elisa Gabbert, Christen Enos, and Joshua Harmon. As with other installments of the Dirty Water Reading Series, the event promises to be more than your typical reading. There will be audience-participation mad-libs of famed Daddy poems, raffle prizes, an ugly tie contest, free food and drinks, and much more!

Who's Your Daddy: A Father's Day Reading
FREE ADMISSION / FREE BOOZE
Sunday, June 15
7:00 p.m.
Grub Street
160 Boylston, 4th floor
Boston, MA

remembering

2008-05-30T11:53:00.004-04:00

When you think you will not remember something, you write it down, either in a notebook or on a handy piece of paper. You have many pieces of paper all over the house and in all sorts of pockets and bags with things written on them that you either don't remember or also remember—either do not have in your mind also or do have in your mind also. So the pieces of paper with writing on them supplement the living tissue of your memory, as though your usable, active memory goes beyond the bounds of your head out onto these pieces of paper.

—Lydia Davis, "Remember the Van Wagenens"

This description captures well not only the usual appearance of my desk (buried in scraps of paper) but also my own process of remembering things I want to write later (or, rather, want to write at a certain moment but feel I don't have time to write at that moment, or perhaps want to consider further before writing), and posits the conjoined acts of writing and remembering as fueled by anxiety: the anxiety of not being able to write at that moment and thus needing a note to preserve a thought; the anxiety of forgetting that thought; and, later, the anxiety of losing the slip of paper, the supplemental memory. (I am intimate with such anxieties: I once accidentally kicked a loosely-plugged power cord to my computer and, in the half-second the screen went blank before the machine rebooted itself, lost a day's work from that other virtual form of memory.)

Yet returning to writing after some time away (a semester, say), I need the supplemental memory to recall my place, not unlike picking up a book after some interval and having to reread sentences and passages to locate myself.

"engaged readers": a new review of Quinnehtukqut

2008-05-23T11:53:00.010-04:00

My editor at Starcherone Books is fond of quoting Emerson's famous dictum "Never read a book that is not a year old" (despite the fact that the passage from which this quotation is taken—the chapter "Books" in Society and Solitude—mostly offers an argument for the literary canon rather than an appreciation for the overlooked or idiosyncratic). In any case, now that Quinnehtukqut is a year old, I remain grateful that new readers continue to find it. In the current issue of ForeWord, Todd Mercer discusses Quinnehtukqut in an essay-review of first novels, including Salvatore Scibona's The End, Nilita Vachani’s HomeSpun, and several others in translation. Mercer compares Quinnehtukqut to Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, and concludes his review with this sentence:

Exceptionally well-designed and fully realized, this gorgeous literary novel is postmodern in the most smoothed-out sense, and one of the best out this year from any size publisher.

The full review is available online at the ForeWord website (or use this link for a PDF version).

And as I wrote in this space a year ago, the long school year has now ended, so expect more regular updates in this space again.

Quinnehtukqut a finalist

2008-04-28T17:56:00.003-04:00

Apologies for the lack of recent posts—I've been teaching a six-week course on three Faulkner novels, which has both kept me busy and kept me from having much to say about books or writing in the face of that prose, those sentences.

This morning I received a press release informing me that Quinnehtukqut has been named one of three finalists for the VCU First Novelist Award from Virginia Commonwealth University; the other finalists were published under the Random House corporate umbrella, so I'm pleased to be representing the small presses.

driving into Pittsburg

2008-03-08T10:48:00.003-05:00

Here in far northern New Hampshire, just a few miles from Quebec, the site of the onetime Indian Stream Republic seemed an appropriate place to take the Nissan Rogue. In 1832, the locals exhibited some roguish behavior by declaring themselves a sovereign nation, having grown frustrated by a 60-year dispute over the boundary of the United States and Canada.

In tomorrow's "Automobiles" section of the New York Times, Cheryl Jensen heads "onto Indian Stream Road into what a sign called God's Country."

the first person

2008-03-04T11:03:00.009-05:00

At The Reading Experience today, Daniel Green writes the following in a review of Justin Courter's novel Skunk: A Love Story:

One of the reasons I liked this book is precisely its skillful use of first-person narration. I have more or less come to the conclusion that the only way an otherwise conventional narrative (and Skunk is, depite its unconventional subject and eccentric characters, essentially a narrative-driven novel, without much in the way of purely formal experimentation) can succeed, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, is through first-person narrative. The third-person central-consciousnes mode of narration (sometimes called the "free indirect style"), which has become the default mode of storytelling, providing us with both story and "pyschological realism," is now so worn out and tepid, at least for me, that only first-person narratives can poke through the narrative haze emitted by so many indifferently-related stories to capture my attention in the first place. Much can be done with first-person narrative, starting but not ending with the manipulation of the reader's trust in the story being told.

While I admittedly don't keep nearly as current on books as Green does, I have a hard time believing that free indirect discourse has become "the default mode of storytelling." For years, it's seemed to me that the first-person voice has ruled all contemporary fiction, especially in our continuing age of testimony and witness (related to the still tiresomely-dominant addiction/trauma/recovery narrative that Green describes in Skunk). In my experience as a student and then a teacher of fiction writing, the first-person viewpoint has always completely outpaced the field. It seems a commonplace that after modernism (and postmodernism), the third-person perspective had some serious explaining to do (and for many decades now no one’s cared about Henry James's contention that long-form first-person was "barbaric"), but I'd submit that it still has its uses, and its pleasures, for both readers and writers.

We live in a literary age, I'd suggest, in which authenticity (or at least its illusion) is everything for the reader, and sometimes for the writer as well—and in which such authenticity is most often achieved through the confiding first-person narrative voice. (Whether or not the betrayal of said confidences will lead to a class-action lawsuit from readers, a mass recall from publishers, or brief fame followed by lengthy psychological dissections is another point entirely; while Green enjoys the manipulations of the first-person voice, he may be part of a shrinking group of readers that feels this way.)

The first-person narrative offers an apparent intimacy despite its inherent unreliability (whether or not the narrator of such a tale deliberately "manipulat[es]...the reader's trust," as Green suggests is one benefit of the first person). There are innumerable cultural and political reasons for the rise of the first-person voice probably obvious enough not to bear mentioning, but which have over the last forty-odd years become entirely conventional. So, when Green writes that the use of the first-person point-of-view redeems an "otherwise conventional" novel, I have trouble understanding how the first-person voice itself cannot be considered part of said novel's convention.

I am one of those readers who shares Green's fondness for novels that "manipulate a reader's trust in the story," though unlike him I don't think such manipulation requires the first-person voice or is even, necessarily, best accomplished in the first-person voice. The third-person narrator has a detachment from the narrative that allows all manner of indeterminacy, doubt, and certainly manipulation of the reader’s trust to enter the narrative. Opening to a random page of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), I read:

But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and, somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the chimneys and the coast guard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by anyone make one remember the overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be?

It is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our pane of glass. To escape is vain.
But whether this is the right interpretation of Jacob’s gloom as he sat naked, in the sun, looking at the Land’s End, it is impossible to say; for he never spoke a word.

Here Woolf modulates perspective and what John Gardner termed “psychic distance,” and while perhaps not explicitly manipulating what the reader believes or trusts, this third-person narrator admits incomplete knowledge despite the narrator’s apparently omniscient perspective elsewhere.

Another example, a little less old, from William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck (1966):

O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all—at least it’s proved. Between dead and living there’s no difference but the one has whiter bones. Furber rose, the mosquitoes swarming around him, and ran inside.

It was six, surely. Counting from the moment when he took a spoon to his melon and looked along the row of faces, lips wrinkling, jaws in gentle motion, all in greeting, it was seven; so six from the night at the stone was correct. Andy Pike didn’t put up the church as she stands, of course, Brother Rush did that; some of us think the original location was a little west of where it is now, Mossy and me mainly, I guess—you’ll meet Mossteller later, first-rate fellow, he was sorry he couldn’t make it—but people around here call it Pike’s Peak just the same, on account of the steeple, out of love for his memory, you know, not disrespect . . . Fly near the butter. Mossy and me. Me and Mossy. If I tip my cup I may get a peek at the maker. Would he look like a lichen? Nice shape to the bowls, they’re feathery; my fingers show through them. Oh God must what be eaten in Your name—not counting Yourself. That steeple didn’t look any more than elm high to me and just a little shovel-nosed. Now that Brother Pike has rotted out his clothes and ghosts to the let of his halter, he’s old Andy to this bung-mouth. I’m to see his grave too. What bores the dead are.

This passage comes fairly early in the long section of the novel titled “The Reverend Jethro Furber’s Change of Heart,” in which, like Woolf's narrator, Gass's narrator uses free indirect discourse to range between descriptions of Furber’s exterior and interior, though his interior thoughts are so long-winded, rambling, and freely associative that despite the narrator’s impeccable control in describing them, the reader is likely to become as lost in them at times as Furber seems himself.

These two passages of free indirect discourse—chosen from two of my very favorite novels, one modern and one postmodern—cannot be said to qualify as “indifferently related,” nor to to bleed together into a “narrative haze.” I might suggest that the haze Daniel Green traces to the third-person narrators in contemporary fiction is less a result of narrative perspective than of the skills of the contemporary writers Green has been reading. (I’d also note that when a novel relates a conventional story conventionally, merely dressing itself up with “unconventional subject [matter] and eccentric characters,” it is a conventional novel. At one time, not so long ago, readers found, e.g., Updike's descriptions of sex "unconventional.")

More charitably, I might suggest that Green’s “narrative haze” is also possibly a deliberate flattening of affect certain writers use—perhaps in imitation of an 80s minimalism, perhaps to voice a more current post-ironic sense of "whatevs." The detachment of the third-person perspective that I mentioned earlier can in this way be a liability, if that detachment is used only to express something approaching disinterest, though this sort of disinterested narration is hardly exclusive to the third-person narrator.

reading in Boston

2008-02-29T10:22:00.002-05:00

I'll be in Boston this weekend to read as part of Open Letters Monthly's first anniversary party. Here's the notice that I received from Open Letters Monthly:

Open Letters Monthly is throwing a one-year anniversary party and celebrating with a reading featuring three of the finest young writers in America. Joshua Harmon, Sommer Browning, and Adam Golaski will read selections from their work at the Lily Pad Gallery in Inman Square on Saturday, March 1st at 7:30pm. We'll have refreshments, information about the magazine, and readings from some of the best poetry, fiction, and translation we've seen.

Joshua Harmon will read from his debut novel Quinnehtukqut. From our November issue: "Harmon is a brave writer, and one of the novel's great strengths is its daring mix of narrative styles: from a straight third-person which easily shuttles back and forth through time, to haunting impressionistic monologues, to jagged, folkloric nuggets and parallel narratives that creep alongside one another on the page." Come by next Saturday to pick up your own copy of the best novel I read last year.

We publish a single poem per month at Open Letters, and Sommer Browning remains the only poet we couldn't help but publish twice. First in May, and then July. Her work is fun, moving, and wise. And as now as whatever you just did. Just then.

Rounding the bill will be Adam Golaski, whose innovative new translation, Green, miraculously contemporizes the buzz and thwack of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, seamlessly easing the poem into the locus of everyday speech and so making it still more strange.

come join us!

Saturday March 1st, 2008
Open Letters Monthly 1st Anniversary Party & Reading
Joshua Harmon, Sommer Browning, Adam Golaski
Lily Pad Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street (Inman Square), Cambridge MA

on fragments, pt. 6

2008-02-27T13:20:00.001-05:00

"The fragmented narrative can be said to function as a kind of lure—given the constraints, anything else would be beyond its scope."

—Walter Abish, 99: The New Meaning (Burning Deck, 1990)

the aesthete's point of view

2008-02-23T12:26:00.003-05:00

It is no secret that I am an avid fan of the writing of Mary Caponegro (and even more so of the woman herself), and I was pleased that she came to Vassar Thursday to meet with Michael Joyce's "Studies in Genre" seminar, and to read to a campus audience that night. Michael asked me to introduce the reading, and I'll offer an excerpt of my remarks here:

Mary Caponegro’s language is never anything but utterly precise, caressed, elegant. In an essay that persuaded me to send her a fan letter, she wrote that “The bottom line is I’m in love with the line, for God’s sake. Every sentence probably takes me a week to write. The tension of a finely crafted sentence—one which I attempt to fashion or one which I consume—offers me all the adventure I need.”

About that fan letter. In the mid-1990s, shortly after the exact moment when the internet achieved mass consciousness, and when its implications for writing and publishing seemed either liberating or terrifying, depending on one’s point of view, The Review of Contemporary Fiction published an issue titled “The Future of Fiction” in which Mary Caponegro offered her “Impressions of a Paranoid Optimist.” In the midst of a lot of hand-wringing about whether and how literature would survive, and celebrations of how the new technologies would set us free, Mary’s observations, as is typical of her work, considered the complexities of fiction and its primary medium, the page, while envisioning a cautious hope about what might happen to fiction, regardless of publishing conglomerates and the sorry state of the market. “[L]anguage is up to something plenty provocative,” she wrote, “and in the same old places it always was, on the page, as well as above/beyond.”

As a graduate student in fiction writing, living in what we called the “centrally isolated” Finger Lakes region upstate, I was moved to contact Mary—in part because her essay articulated ideas I was, in my less coherent way, mulling over; in part because I knew she was essentially a neighbor, living on the next lake. I reviewed that letter last night, and it might be boiled down to this statement: “It’s nice to see someone stick up for the aesthete’s point of view.” Mary, who, I soon realized, is incredibly kind and generous, replied, saying that she imagined “there may be a few more of us ‘aesthetes’ in various closets.”

For an aesthetician such as Mary, I’d suggest, the beautiful is found in the idea of indeterminacy. “When the ambiguities shimmer, I’m intrigued,” she wrote as the Paranoid Optimist, and her essay advocated a poetics of negative space, of ambiguity and play, all of which the very titles of her works explicitly address: “Addressing the Negative.” “Five Doubts.” “The Complexities of Intimacy.” “Doubt Uncertainty Possibility Desire.”

Mary’s work has always been transgressive in spirit—she is a steadfast writer of short fictions and novellas in a marketplace defined by the novel; a stylist and formalist in a culture that values story and information above all; and a fabulist in an era when readers form class-action lawsuits in pursuit of literary truth. She frequently appropriates disparate texts—medical journals, Italian fashion magazines, the Notebooks of Da Vinci—to use in her fiction. Her work emerges from the innovative (and transgressive) tradition of such writers as John Hawkes, William Gass, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis, though it is thoroughly original and entirely her own. That said, her work, since its earliest incarnations, has also engaged the idea of transgression at its most literal level. Her first published collection of fiction, a slender volume called Addressing the Negative, includes the following sentences in the title story: “Someone went all the way to Vienna to play your favorite tune on Beethoven’s piano, and I find it rather touching to hear the dusty hammers ping and ping all out of tune. But we can hear beyond that, you and I, transcend the rickety metallic all the way into the master’s mind.” And the narrator of the second story in The Complexities of Intimacy, Mary’s most recent collection, notes “How much we wish to peel away the membrane separating beauty from beholder. And is there obstacle? No greater than there was to opening the door.”

Mary read from her forthcoming collection: "Junior Achievement," which appeared in Conjunctions issue no. 40, and two excerpts from "Last Resort Retreat" (Conjunctions issue no. 37, ending with a magnificent moment involving the Finger Lakes' famed white deer.

Here is a podcast of Mary's interview with KCRW's "Bookworm" show from several years back.

new review of Quinnehtukqut

2008-02-16T14:21:00.004-05:00

If, as is often said, every book finds its own audience, I've been extremely lucky to have the audience that Quinnehtukqut has found. Another thoughtful, detailed, and lengthy review of the novel, written by Danielle Alexander, has just appeared in a new-to-me literary journal called Marginalia. I haven't seen the issue yet, but have received a copy of the review. In it, Alexander treats all four sections of the novel in depth, and in fact offers a convincing reading that "the book is balanced on quadruples"; she suggests that, in the novel, "the biological course of human lifetimes and the geological course of planetary lifetimes are placed in contrapuntal patterns that form a stark, piquant architecture of a world new and ancient, plastic and unyielding, vulnerable and sly."

Here are three excerpts—one from the beginning of Alexander's review, and two from the ending:

"Joshua Harmon's elegiac and formally innovative fiction Quinnehtukqut evokes the historical, mythical, and physical topography of northern New Hampshire in terms readers have compared to a musical score. The comparison is apt, not only because of the restrained lyricism of Harmon's language but also because it accounts for one of the novel's most striking features. Its architecture is generated by two primary time-signatures: the plastic time of human narrative and the clock-time of the material."

"In Quinnehtukqut, knowledge is partial, time-bound, and ultimately, like friable earth, subject to collapse. However, its friability is inevitable and thus benign. In short, here time's arrow has been squashed and made to describe a territory rather than a progression. In fact, the novel's closest literary cousin may be some of the work of Susan Howe, whose poem 'Thorow' Harmon has excerpted for the novel's epigraph."

"The novel does not so much hesitate as encircle, fall, rise, reverse itself, and find itself working against and yet trapped by and in love with the slow planetary movement that makes generations seem to flash by like gestures instead of lives. In a strange instantiation of Aristotelian unities, the novel disengages ordinary temporal sense (that is, the time we feel with our bodies, which is related to metabolism) and connects us instead with the mysterious non-time of rock. Even weather seems lapidary, and its effect on human being and suffering divorced from the romantic. Yet this is a profoundly romantic novel in its preoccupation with desire and separation and, more deeply, with the unrehearsable encounter with proportion and the phenomenal: what is large may be small, depending upon the landscape, and the narrative consciousness in the novel is various yet always balanced over time and space. Insofar as this novel is a performance of time, its mimesis is perfect."

Baldwin's Store for sale: $250,000

2008-01-30T22:39:00.000-05:00

This old Eastern Illustrating & Publishing, Inc., photo postcard was briefly in the running to accompany "The Legend of Jimmy Frye" in Quinnehtukqut:

Here is an updated photo of Baldwin's Store, shot—intentionally?—from almost exactly the same angle:

From the realtor:

"PRICED TO SELL!! One of Pittsburgs finest buildings, presently with 6 apartment units, heated lg 2 bay garage over 3000 sq.ft. of commercial space that is currently leased to retail/restaurant business ($800 p/mos). Could be used later for your own business venture. Make a move to a small quiet community, enjoy the relaxation. Great visibility."

From "Farmhouse in a Fold of Fields":

The new restaurant beside Baldwin’s store; the few new homes—cramped and close, each looking to her as if it had been both erected and inhabited within two weeks, and had remained in a perpetual state of unfulfilled progress ever since—between the town hall and Baldwin’s. It could be, she thinks, any one of the small villages she has passed through on this side of the mountains: a scattering of shabby homes, an auto garage and a general store and a post office, a saw mill or lumberyard perhaps, a hollow used as a dump where last year’s leavings are picked through by the bears and crows, all of it circled by a screen of dark trees and guarded by close gray skies. But now she is already here...

upcoming reading at AWP

2008-01-30T18:30:00.000-05:00

I'll be reading with some other Starcherone Books authors at KGB this Saturday evening, as part of the AWP conference in New York. I'll also be signing copies of Quinnehtukqut at the Starcherone table (#94) at the AWP bookfair starting at 2 PM on Saturday afternoon. Admission to the bookfair is free & open to the public on this day only—and, since it's the last day of the conference, there should be some good deals on a lot of books.

Apologies to anyone who showed up at the 440 Gallery expecting to hear me read two weekends ago; I had to re-schedule at the last minute, and will now be reading there February 17th.

on fragments, pt. 5

2008-01-30T17:10:00.000-05:00

Fragments are written as unfinished separations. Their incompletion, their insufficiency, the disappointment at work in them, is their aimless drift, the indication that, neither unifiable nor consistent, they accomodate a certain array of marks—the marks with which thought (in decline and declining itself) represents the furtive groupings that fictively open and close the absence of totality. Not that thought ever stops, decisively fascinated, at the absence; always it is carried on, by the watch, the ever-uninterrupted wake. Whence the impossibility of saying there is an interval. For fragments, destined partly to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them, or what makes them await their prolongation—what has already prolonged them, causing them to persist on account of their incompletion. And thus are they always ready to let themselves be worked upon by indefatigable reason, instead of remaining as fallen utterances, left aside, the secret void of mystery which no elaboration could ever fill.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (tr. Ann Smock)

upcoming readings this weekend

2008-01-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

This Saturday at 2 PM I'll be reading with Jennifer Wai-Lan Huang and Maryrose Larkin at Anne Gorrick's Cadmium Text Series at R&F Paints in Kingston (arrive early for a tour of the encaustic studio or to check out the work in the gallery). I hope those of you in the Hudson Valley can come—Anne always hosts a great event.

Then on Sunday I'm down in Brooklyn for a 4:30 PM reading at the 440 Gallery, part of the series hosted there by Brooke Shaffner. I'll be reading with Kate Greenstreet and Sommer Browning.

on book reviews, pt 2.

2008-01-02T11:28:00.000-05:00

At The Reading Experience today, Daniel Green has an interesting post about book reviewers and "realism." I'm tempted to quote the whole thing, since he makes some sharp observations about reviewers' (and, by extension, many readers') expectations about fiction, and their too-frequently unquestioned conflation of "realistic" linear narrative and the real. I will instead cite a few lines of particular interest:

There is no necessary connection between "story" and "realism," although narrative in literary fiction has been used so often as a way of nominally depicting "real life" that most reviewers--and many readers--assume that they are inseparable, that real life can only be presented to us through a summarizable "story."

"Realism" thoroughly applied, in fact, would almost certainly reject "story" as itself an artificial imposition on the real (or at least on fiction's attempt to approximate the real, since in the final analysis "realism" is just another kind of fantasy we are willing to accept, an illusion created to deflect our attention away from the fact that there's really nothing real or unreal about works of fiction--they're just verbal compositions, words on a page).

[Reviewers] actually believe that "realist narratives" are what fiction is supposed to provide. Anything else, any serious challenge to the hegemony of such narratives, just doesn't get the reward of their attention.

Earlier this morning, I was re-reading/skimming Barthes' Mythologies (tr. Annette Lavers) for possible inclusion in an upcoming literary nonfiction course, and came across the following, in "Blind and Dumb Criticism" (though Barthes is referencing critics of theory or philosophy rather than fiction, his comment still seems appropriate here):

Why do critics...proclaim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty.... All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.

literacy & orality (on difficulty, pt. 7)

2007-12-25T17:17:00.000-05:00

From Caleb Crain's essay/review "Twilight of the Books" in the current fiction issue of The New Yorker):

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and "enthusiastic description of physical violence." Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different than the current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

another new review of Quinnehtukqut

2007-12-17T16:51:00.000-05:00

Apologies for yet another in a series of self-indulgent posts, but the grading season has arrived, and there's not time for much else. However, my copy of Rain Taxi came in today's mail; in it, Jeff Hansen calls Quinnehtukqut a "formally and stylistically wide-ranging first novel," and also says the following:

Set in the 1920s, the book has four separate, but connected, stories, all of which concern themselves to some degree with Martha Hennessy, who badly wants to escape her small town for adventures elsewhere. It is probably unfortunate for her that she pins her hopes on a fellow named Jimmy Frye. Indeed, the most memorable character in this novel is not Martha, but Jimmy. In the book's stunning first story, Harmon develops Jimmy's character by creating a legend. Distinguishing legend from fable, fiction, and myth, Harmon finds its defining characteristic to be its uncertainty: it "may be true, but cannot be historically verified."

[...]

This haunting story leaves us suspended between disbelief and belief, between being drawn to one part of the narrative over another, between an urge to condemn Jimmy or forgive him.... Harmon accomplishes this indeterminacy and ambiguity not by presenting us with an incoherent series of vignettes, but by conveying the feeling that something must cohere—there was a man named Jimmy Frye, but we can't access him.

[...]

[The other sections of the novel] use inventive forms that allow the stories maximum range and impact, but "The Legend of Jimmy Frye" is reason enough to get this book.

It's interesting to me—though probably inevitable, given the book's form—how several reviewers have singled out various sections of the novel for special mention. I do hope that readers read Quinnehtukqut as a novel—albeit not in the traditional sense of that word—rather than as a book of stories (or, god forbid, as a "novel-in-stories" or "linked stories").

In any case, this issue of Rain Taxi looks fantastic, with reviews of books by Kristin Prevallet (I, Afterlife), Katherine Arnoldi (who published many stories—and postcards—in The Quarterly), Selah Saterstrom (whose The Pink Institution I just started reading), old college friend Cate Marvin's new collection, and many others.

new review of Quinnehtukqut

2007-12-13T11:04:00.000-05:00

The current issue of Mid-American Review includes a review of Quinnehtukqut:

Joshua Harmon's debut novel is an unusual book, written with admirable creativity and skill. Its eye-catching title is an Algonquin spelling variation of Connecticut, the river that lies at the heart of the New Hampshire region where the novel is set. The fascinating history of this place—especially the few years in the early part of the nineteenth century when this region declared itself independent of the United States—serves as a canvas for its various characters and lush descriptions of the land itself. Martha Hennessy, a young woman who yearns for a life of excitement beyond her tiny hometown, appears in all four sections of this novel and serves to link them loosely, but Quinnehtukqut is richer and more complex than Martha's story.

[...]

The constant shifts in speakers, voice, and time sometimes make the characters and events of that distant time seem even more distant, and reaching out to them becomes a challenge. However, this nontraditional writing style also gives Harmon a chance to dazzle us with his beautiful and evocative prose.... The narrative style of Quinnehtukqut reflects the idea that histories of places and people are unwieldy things, resistant to being narrated easily and understood neatly.

I'm very glad to see that last line. Apparently Quinnehtukqut is reviewed in the new winter edition of Rain Taxi as well, but my copy hasn't arrived in the mail yet.

from "On Writing"

2007-12-09T10:14:00.000-05:00

As always, the writing. How is the writing? How is the writing? How is the writing? So much concern for something that is barely there. The writing happens, it never is, so the question doesn't make a lot of sense. Rain, money, taxes, spring. But it is the writing, of course, that matters, like vanilla in a cake or a bit of salt in the bread. It's just time, after all, words on a page, marks on the wall, money—important to remember that they are all the same thing: invisible time dressed up in different costumes.

—Johannah Rodgers, from sentences (Red Dust, 2007)

Nice to come upon this passage in this morning's reading—perhaps because I gave two lectures last week on language in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Addie Bundren: "that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack"); perhaps because I'm now thinking myself of the writing, the writing.

In the brief bits of invisible time I'm starting to assemble, now that classes are out, I've also been assembling a small pile of reading material: Johannah Rodgers's book, Deb Olin Unferth's Minor Robberies; Diane Williams's new collection, It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature; and the recent chapbook by Gary Lutz, Partial List of People to Bleach, put out by Future Tense. These will be mixed in with the pile of leftover summer reading that stayed unread: Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Eugene Marten's In the Blind, Maya Sonenberg's Voices from the Blue Hotel, and many others.

second printing for Quinnehtukqut

2007-12-07T11:19:00.000-05:00

A brief bit of good news: I received word from my publisher that Quinnehtukqut has about sold out the first printing, and will be reprinted in January. Apparently Starcherone has very few copies left in stock (though Amazon and SPD still have some copies). Those of you interested in a first edition have your notice...

"the inertia of language"

2007-12-04T15:56:00.000-05:00

From the new issue of Verse, a special issue on French Poetry & Poetics:

Disorder

We can only seek a sentence by means of other sentences. It is here, in the most concrete moment of invention, that a thought belongs. An evasion forestalls every thought: the evasion of the sought-after sentence. And a disorder follows: sentences rush in as provisional replacements. They come to mind because they have already been used; they return because of the inertia of language, to anonymous memory or passive use. Seeking thus passes by way of retrospection, the evocation of sentences in familiar forms. But, from the point of view of the sensed sentence, these seem used-up, unusable. (A voice chooses; it cannot hear itself at first except by refusing.) And so retrospection becomes active: It revokes the sentences that are evoked, sweeping them back into a past more distant than that of anonymous memory: a completed past.

—Pierre Alferi, from "Invention," To Seek a Sentence

nice idea, but...

2007-11-28T18:34:00.000-05:00

Again courtesy of The Elegant Variation, a link to Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle Blog, and their new feature on the "Best Recommended" books. The NBCC has "Poll[ed] [their] nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of [their] book prize, ...[asking], What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?"

The answer, apparently, is the same books that have been flogged in the mainstream media review pages all year, and that will appear on this weekend's New York Times yearly "Notable Books" list I mentioned a few posts ago.

Perhaps the NBCC feature will, in time (one hopes, given the group's ability to draw on various literary communities), serve as a corrective to the safe New York Times list, but for now, it seems just as predictable. I know there are many deserving books from the past year that I've yet to hear about, and I don't expect to be hearing about them from, e.g., Amy Bloom.

For now, one might want to look at the Guardian's list that Josh Russell posted in the comments (a few posts below). Or perhaps some enterprising blogger (not this one) could poll a few hundred small press writers and editors.

the Amazon.com book review (on difficulty, pt. 6)

2007-11-27T16:35:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of The Elegant Variation, here's a link to The Kenyon Review blog, and Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky's take on the state of book reviewing at Amazon. I was particularly interested in this point:

In fact, one definition of a great work of literature is that it makes demands on us for which we were unequipped before we read it: a great novel teaches us how to make sense of it, and so expands our experience of both the novel as a genre and our own consciousness. These readers are angry with the book for exactly the qualities that make others treasure it: it’s not an easy read, and it stretches us.

I don't want to talk about "greatness," but the idea of a novel that in whatever way challenges or frustrates readerly expectations is, of course, of interest around here. In the six-week Faulkner course I'm currently teaching, I spent part of the first class session displaying and discussing the Amazon reviews for The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and The Hamlet, the three novels we're reading. Because I framed some of our early discussions around both Faulkner's reputation as a difficult writer as well as the question of what we mean when we call a book difficult, Amazon customer reviews offered useful source material: many of these reviews suggested that it was nearly impossible (or at least ill-considered) to read Faulkner in the absence of some sort of critical or interpretive lens (Cliff's Notes, an English class, etc.). I asked my students to resist this sort of thinking, and to resist as well the temptation to read Faulkner in one hand and an explication in the other. So far, it seems to have worked; most of my students seem incredibly engaged with the novels. It will be interesting to see whether they go on to read other books that readers (or reviewers, or publishers) consider difficult, or whether Faulkner's cultural reputation conveys to them an implicit sense of value in wrestling with his works' difficulties.

why read?

2007-11-25T16:54:00.000-05:00

From the pages of today's New York Times and the new issue of Bookforum, two articles that ask, and answer, "what...turns someone into a book lover."

And, now posted on the NYT website (to be published in next Sunday's Book Review), this year's 100 notable books, very few of which I have read (or plan to read).

"I was an outline too"

2007-11-25T15:54:00.000-05:00

I missed C.S. Giscombe at Cornell by a few years, though Ithaca was where I first encountered his work. I'm contemplating teaching his Into and out of Dislocation in an upcoming course, which sent me back to Two Sections from Giscome Road, a 1995 chapbook published by Leave Books (Giscome Road was later published by Dalkey Archive):

2
There's no center where
similarity would start

nor home here in the mountains, new

or otherwise, there is no-

where out there—

3
came to necessarily centerless space, though (or the intimation of that

& out of that the specific, there

4
to which I came up some ways

(I'd come up through a long silence on the way up
to Giscome up the Yellowhead

X miles out of Prince George, N.E. of there

5
& turned back into the direction I'd come out of,

out of the gap of the landscape there, a

named edge: the juncture of this one little edge
in the line of trees,

the gap of that lake's many edges—

6
no more/ saturday nights there

the town bull
dozed but the evidentness on passing even quickly through of some-
thing having happened there, some things having
taken place there...

7
(A caravan of trucks appeared, as if ceremonial

a ceremony of trucks appeared,

the crew in their caravan coming through there to paint lines down
Upper Fraser Rd,

a man was lying down on a mesh platform at the rear gate of the first
one:

as I was going back, that direction, they pressed
on in past me the opposite way:

I was re-tracing,

I was an outline too, from places, we were out there

(so we waved

Cadmium Text

2007-11-18T12:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing Kate Greenstreet and Rebecca Wolff read their work at poet Anne Gorrick's terrific Cadmium Text Reading Series in Kingston.

Kate Greenstreet's travels over the past twelve months may also answer some of the questions I began asking in this space back in May: her book of poems, case sensitive, published last year, is now being reprinted. I can highly recommend this book (as well as hearing Kate read from it), but here's a poem as evidence:

Clearing

He loses ground building cabins.
The air reminds her of before.
People keep arriving (you, like all others).
We want to show you who we were.

Start by sitting in a comfortable position.
Notice it's powerful, yet pleasant.
One small room, wooden floor, favorite window.
The leaves are burning. Why should it be better.

"too much throwing up"

2007-11-18T11:59:00.000-05:00

I don't think my December issue of Harper's has arrived here yet, but a reader ("Growling in Georgia") of this blog sent me a link to one of its articles, "Among the reviewers: John Updike and the book-review bugaboo", which is worthwhile reading not only for its discussion of the current state of book reviewing but also for its debatable claim that Updike's legacy of book reviewing represents the thoughtfulness that many commentators find lacking in today's reviews:

If it were your wish, however, to try to learn what critical care and thought demand—if you were seeking to cultivate your own thoroughness as a reader, whether you be a silent critic or a noisy one already delivering opinions in print—I submit that you could do far worse than to begin with a field trip to a town in Massachusetts called Manchester-by-the-Sea. If the name is charming, I should say the town is not so very; rather, it is the sort of place to which one’s grandparents might hope to retire comfortably if they had the means. There is, however, an enlivening feature of the town that could incline you to a longer stay: a shop with the punny name Manchester by the Book. That it is an attractive used-book shop of the kind we see less and less makes it a nice place to pass an hour. That it has in a glass case, among assorted pricey rarities, scores of John Updike’s review copies might be cause to loiter.

Wyatt Mason, author of this piece, uses Updike's marginalia as evidence of Updike's readings: "To peruse copies of books that Updike read with the intention of reviewing...is to meet a reader who, in a most inarguable way, is a picture of thoroughness. The margins run with comments, even in appendices, even by footnotes." Online, at least, the article is accompanied by some examples of Updike's marginalia, my favorite (and Growling in Georgia's) of which (from Barry Hannah's Geronimo Rex) I'll include here.

"free of the authority of the precedented"

2007-11-14T09:52:00.000-05:00

My recent post about Gordon Lish inspired me to my remove some back issues of The Quarterly from my bookshelves. I haven't looked at these closely in years, beyond digging up the occasional story to copy for a student. I used to love reading all of Lish's rants, mockery, and explanations tucked throughout the magazine, but especially those in the front matter, and just re-read the following, from The Quarterly No. 29, which, a dozen years later, is as relevant as ever:

Lots of mail's been showing up in expression of a state of consternation (never use one Latinate suffix when you can use two!) concerning the intention (or three!) of this publication (four!—and surely more than enough to hold you and your whole family for the duration—whoops, five!—of the sentences planned for this space). People, some of them actually Canadians not unnaturally (hah!), wonder aloud what the fuck we think we're up to, wonderment not without an origin in good sense. The inquiry can be replied to in a host a [sic] manners, can it not? We might say, for example, and quite completely in earnest, that our hope is to produce a magazine unique among magazines. Or, for further example, we might take the line that we have no idea what we're doing. But it is probably best to make the claim that The Q seeks for those whose efforts contrive it a place for such efforts to be free of the authority of the precedented. So our question to the consternated is this—"With so much room to make use of, how come so many folks all keep huddling in the same corner?"

reading tomorrow night

2007-11-14T09:36:00.000-05:00

I'll be reading with poet Kim Bridgford at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, tomorrow at 8 PM. Hope those of you in the area can make it.

on Gordon Lish

2007-11-10T11:01:00.001-05:00

Apparently, this week (or maybe last week; I'm having a hard time keeping up with the newspaper these days, much less online media), is "Fall Fiction Week" at Slate. One of the features there is Gerald Howard's reminiscence on editing Gordon Lish. Howard notes Lish's somewhat famous "slash and burn handiwork" (which as far as I'm concerned is what made Raymond Carver readable; it's inconceivable to me how anyone could prefer the sentimental ramblings of "A Small, Good Thing" to "The Bath"), and describes working with Lish (when Howard was an editor at Norton) on the publication of Lish's infamous novel My Romance. The essay doesn't really offer much of interest—a broad recounting of Lish's editorial influence at Esquire and in the classroom (Lish's work for Knopf gets but one passing mention, and The Quarterly none at all), along with the contention that Lish himself exhibited "control-freak obsessiveness," as evidenced by his desires to write his own jacket copy, choose the art director for the cover of his book, and oversee the typography of the novel—the horror! a writer who cares about the public presentation of his work!—as well as by his lawsuit against Harper's for their publication of a letter to his writing students.

I suppose Howard's brief background on what Lish meant to fiction is necessary for many readers, given that Lish's public profile is now far diminished from what it was from the 1970s through the 1990s, but to fail to include The Quarterly as part of that discussion, or to limit the discussion of the writers Lish edited to those such as Carver, Joy Williams, Cynthia Ozick, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison seems to ignore much of Lish's importance today. The Quarterly was, for my money, the literary magazine that mattered most in the late 1980s and early-to-mid-1990s, and though the writers Lish was publishing at that time—Diane Williams, Noy Holland, Ben Marcus, Yannick Murphy, Christine Schutt, Victoria Redel, Jason Schwartz, Dawn Raffel, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Mark Richard, et. al.—never achieved the widespread commercial/critical reputation of some of Lish's earlier writers, they have certainly been more important to me and to a new generation of writers (even if only as an unrecognized, trickledown influence) than, e.g., Carver. (Though Robison, Hempel, and Hannah are indeed high on my list.)

Howard contends that the failure of My Romance came about because

by 1992 [Lish] had made himself into such a figure of controversy and a target for mockery that bookstores ordered the book in meager quantities and only a couple of critics allowed themselves to be captivated by what I felt—and still feel—was its nervy brilliance.

"Nervy brilliance" aside (I read My Romance over ten years ago, and though I admired it in some ways, don't retain a detailed enough memory of it to offer any specific criticism), I highly doubt that bookstore owners and book buyers were aware of Lish as a "target for mockery," though some reviewers assuredly were. And since when is "controversy" not a selling point? The fact that My Romance sold in the neighborhood of five hundred copies ("That is not just bad; that is pathetic," Howard claims) tells us less about Lish's personality and more about the fact that a novel that is essentially a transcription of an improvised speech to a writers' conference is going to appeal only to the bravest readers of fiction. Howard says that he chose to describe Lish's novel, in the jacket copy, as akin to "a Charlie Parker solo." This representation may be accurate, but hardly strikes me as an ideal way to market a novel: few readers, I imagine, want to read 150-odd pages of improvisation, even when that improvisation is stylized and controlled, just as few people would want to listen to solo saxophone at similar duration. (I recall best about My Romance the narrator's asides concerning his diminishing audience as the book went on.)

Fiction that demands from its readers patience, a willingness to read on in the face of ambiguity; fiction that frustrates or challenges a reader's narrative or generic expectations; and fiction that is less interested in amateur psychologizing than the usual "realist" fiction: this sort of work, with a few exceptions, is rarely going to receive either a generous or an immediate reception in the marketplace, dominated as it is by a conception of fiction as simply another form of consumable entertainment, and in which the "literary" fiction of the twenty-first century still looks much like that of the nineteenth century, the so-called new merely the old repackaged. As an editor, at least, Gordon Lish generally delivered readers a new new.

weekend reading

2007-11-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

Nice to see that Quinnehtukqut gets a mention at The Reading Experience, though I hope that Daniel Green and other potential readers aren't put off by the "historical fiction" tag. In my obviously biased opinion, labeling Quinnehtukqut mainly historical fiction would be like doing the same to Omensetter's Luck, or Outer Dark, or Yellow Jack. I promise that readers will see more happening in the novel than a recitation of what the people of Pittsburg, New Hampshire wore and ate and did in the early part of the twentieth century.

interview

2007-11-07T08:28:00.000-05:00

I recently recorded a lengthy interview with Thomas Hill, Vassar College's art librarian, which he edited down to an hour for his WVKR radio show The Library Café. Tom asked some thoughtful and extensive questions about Quinnehtukqut, including its narrative construction, authorship and readership, landscape and place, the tradition of the American novel, libraries and research, and fairy tales.

The interview aired yesterday, but if you'd like to listen to the podcast (I'll suggest the obvious drinking game: a shot every time I say "absolutely," which will get you well drunk), you can go here.

"the most impressive debut I can remember": another review of Quinnehtukqut

2007-11-03T17:12:00.000-04:00

Sorry to post lately only to point to reviews of Quinnehtukqut (we're deep into the fall semester here, and this fall semester includes, among others, a one-hundred-and-forty-student lecture course on Faulkner).

But Open Letters Monthly offers a review of Quinnehtukqut in the current issue. This one is over-the-top in its generosity and depth:

"Lots of slick bestsellers are like mirrors—we go there expecting to find the world as we see it, and we leave flattered and reassured. In this, a far better debut than Typee or The Marble Faun, Joshua Harmon has written something both more ambitious and more moving."

another review of Quinnehtukqut

2007-10-26T11:23:00.001-04:00

"Ultimately, history is not the central focus of Quinnehtukqut, but rather, an interesting texture of the story. Just as Harmon cloaks the identity of his narrators, the aim of his novel is obscured under the genre of “historical fiction.” And although he employs an array of historical sources, underneath is a work of experimental narrative fiction, whose primary subject is the imprisonment of perspective. What elevates Quinnehtukqut from simple experimentation is the close attention to language that pervades each section, producing a bold effort from a new writer eager to push the boundaries of storytelling."

The KGB Bar's online literary magazine, KGBBarLit, offers a review of Quinnehtukqut in the current (Fall 2007) issue.

"shreds and tatters of cloud-stories": more on Quinnehtukqut

2007-10-24T11:02:00.000-04:00

John Latta offers more thoughts on Quinnehtukqut today at Isola di Rifiuti: exactly the sort of reading (attentive, thoughtful, generous) a writer might hope for, and this writer is very grateful.

On book reviews

2007-10-23T16:46:00.000-04:00

...I have given up my earlier hope that within the overflowing quantity of dreck spewed out by "professional" book editors and reviewers each week there might be a handful of valuable critical nuggets demonstrating more commitment to contemporary literature and to serious literary criticism than to propping up the "book business" or the "books as news" approach to reviewing. Print book reviewing is truly toppling from the rhetorical dead weight it has voluntarily assumed. It's overloaded with fake sobriety and riddled with bad faith. From now on I intend to get my reviews and my book news entirely from blogs, from promising online sources of reviewing such as Open Letters and The Quarterly Conversation, as well as the few print magazine sources that still do good work, such as Bookforum and Harper's. The rest is just irrelevant.

This is Daniel Green's resolution, as of yesterday, on his ever-crucial blog, The Reading Experience. Today he discusses the current plight of book reviewing in even more detail.

"camp'd under library bulbs"

2007-10-18T11:38:00.000-04:00

John Latta offers a brief reading/appreciation of Quinnehtukqut at his blog, Isola di Rifiuti, which has been worthwhile reading since the days it was called Hotel Point.

The evening spent camp’d under library bulbs, reading Joshua Harmon’s Quinnehtukqut. Rather haunt’d by one single-lined paragraph: “To what is already written I can add little more.” Brilliant restraint in the prose, befitting the New England locale.... How Quinnehtukqut reminds one of Paul Metcalf’s spare historical collaging, or is it the similar terrain talking? Harmon’s weave using the raw stuff ingeniously, keeping one unsettled (in a novel of unsettled individuals)...."

Anytime anyone feels like putting my work in a conversation with Paul Metcalf's (and Isaac Babel's), it's just fine with me.

"the human bond with ordinariness"

2007-10-16T10:47:00.000-04:00

Certain producers of plain prose...have conned the reading public into believing that only in prose plain, humdrum, or flat, can you articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. Even to begin to do that, you need to be more articulate than Joe, or you might as well tape-record him and leave it at that. This essentially minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive, and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant, turns its back on something almost holy, and that is the human bond with ordinariness.... Surely the passion for the plain, the homespun, the banal, is itself a form of betrayal, a refusal to look honestly at a complex universe, a get-poor-quick attitude that wraps up everything in simplistic formulas never to be inspected for veracity or point. Got up as a cry from the heart, it's really an excuse for dull and mindless writing, larded over with the speciously democratic myth that says this is how most folks are. Well, most folks are lazy, especially when confronted with a book, and some writers are lazy too, writing in the same anonymous style as everyone else. How many prose writers can you identify from their style?

—Paul West, "In Defense of Purple Prose"
(from Sheer Fiction, McPherson & Co., 1987)

on difficulty (pt. 5)

2007-10-15T15:09:00.000-04:00

Far be it from me to suggest that modern experimenters are without significance; far be it from me to insist that all they write is incomprehensible and somehow useless. They are merely tiresome; their rhetorical and printer's gymnastics require too much effort to be comprehended in this day of many books. There just isn't time to worry over them and their literary convictions.

No, the above isn't from today's NYT books article (which, instead, treats me to a discussion of the Frankfurt Book Fair as seen through the eyes of agent Anna Stein and her brother, editor Lorin Stein, as well as such weighty matters as what sort of jacket Lorin Stein wears, "[w]ell into the middle of the night," at the "luxury hotel that is the unofficial nerve center of the fair." "[C]hocolate brown velvet," in case you're curious).

Instead, the passage above is from a 1929 review of The Sound and the Fury, written by Walter Yust for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Despite Yust's magnanimity toward "modern experimenters," his review wonders "why so able a story teller [sic] will waste so much ingenuity and time trying to make a fine story a puzzle and a burden."