13 May 2012
I’ll be spending the next month at an artists’ colony – four much-needed weeks in the woods, mostly off-the-grid, before teaching again in July. So: I’ll see you all on the other side!
2 May 2012
At The Millions today, this month’s Post-40 Bloomer, poet Spencer Reece. (Actually, this is April’s feature, but it took me longer than I’d expected to write, so it’s only posting today.) Take a look – Reece’s story is exemplary of the post-40 bloomer, I think, in all its life-living, art-making richness.
One thing I did not manage to cover in my piece is the fact that James Franco, when he was a film student at Yale, approached Reece, who was a Divinity student there at the same time, about making a short film based on Reece’s poem “The Clerk’s Tale.” I was focusing so much on studying Reece’s poetry, that I decided not to watch the film; I thought it would take my mind in a completely different direction I didn’t want to go.
But, in case you’re interested, here’s a synopsis and some stills, from Cannes, where the film was a closing night feature.
21 April 2012
A lot’s been happening in the publishing world, it seems — with the DOJ going after Apple and the corporate conglomerates over e-book price points and whatnot. It occurs to me that I am really in denial — and out of touch — when I start to feel frustrated that no one ever speaks to how e-book pricing affects authors. The author’s voice or stake in this is, apparently, so WAY off the radar. The cost of a book once seemed to mean something for whether an author got paid; now it’s more a matter of whether corporate publishers can stay in business, keep from laying off half their employees, etc.
Case in point: this week’s “On the Media” program at NPR is called, “Publishing: Adapt or Die.” I was pretty blue after listening to it. It actually poked holes in my sense of purpose re: finishing my second novel. It wasn’t because of the money issue, but more the readership issue, the declaration that “no one reads literary fiction” anymore.
I started this blog in 2009, a year before my (first) book came out. A lot happens in three years; publishing years are like dog years these days. I was reminded of how much has changed when I co-moderated a panel at Columbia last week on “Current Landscapes in Publishing.” One of the questions I asked was whether the panelists felt optimistic or troubled by what’s happening in their corner of the publishing world, and every one of them was optimistic, excited, energized, etc. Five out of the six were writers themselves in addition to being editors; the publications/organizations with which they were involved ranged from mainstream/corporate to super-indie/startup, and a few in between. None of them seemed concerned about the fact that they might never see monetary compensation for their own work. They were all happy that content was booming, that literary culture (online) was thriving, that it’s “a reader’s market” now.
Two of the publications represented — The New Yorker and Electric Literature — do in fact compensate writers significantly for their work. I wonder how sustainable each model is into the future. (The co-creators of EL do not get paid, which is the standard for editors of most new and online literary publications.)
I’m slow to this adjustment (but that’s not surprising, I’m generally slow about most things). Hopefully I’ll get there. Or maybe not. Does anyone else think we should be mad — more mad, a little mad — that it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a living as a writer? To me, there is actually a significant difference between no compensation and modest compensation: it’s the difference between having to devote full-time to non-writing work versus part-time. It’s the difference between getting a book written and not getting a book written. I’m not talking about six-figure advances, I’m talking about any advances at all. I’m talking about piecing together bits of income to live a simple, low-overhead life.
Ugh. I’m devolving here. Ok, let me turn this around and give a shout-out to all those literary publications and institutions who are scraping up money for writers. Thank you thank you thank you.
*
p.s. Of course my blind spot here in this rant is that the consumer has to be willing to pay for the content. One of our panelists was wise to say so. I’ve been trying to be more mindful/faithful about myself as a literary consumer, about subscriptions, about paying for what I possibly can. At the risk of sounding corny, every little bit counts!
9 April 2012
That’s right, not a typo, post NINETY.
Thanks to Nick at The Millions for alerting me to this:
96-year-old novelist Herman Wouk has sold his latest novel to Simon & Schuster. The Lawgiver follows the production of a movie about Moses through “letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages” sent between characters.
Not his debut, obviously, but still. If blooming is understood as “peaking,” this is quite an impressive late-life peak.
30 March 2012
I enjoyed Elaine Blair‘s review of Michel Houllebecq‘s most recent novel, The Map and the Territory in the NY Review of Books. It was one of those reviews that I suspected was more interesting/compelling than the book itself, the ultimate effect of which was to interest me in a book I otherwise would have bypassed.
Now, I realize that what I appreciated in Blair’s approach to the review was my sense that she is a kindred spirit: she is a woman interested in the “maleness” of male literature. This week, she writes about Houllebecq v. American male novelists. She cites (as I have many times) David Foster Wallace‘s essay on the Great Male Novelists (GMNs), and the gap between Updike/Bellow/Mailer/Roth and today’s younger generation of male novelists:
When you see the loser-figure in a[n American] novel, what you are seeing is a complicated bargain that goes something like this: yes, it is kind of immature and boorish to be thinking about sex all the time and ogling and objectifying women, but this is what we men sometimes do and we have to write about it. We fervently promise, however, to avoid the mistake of the late Updike novels: we will always, always, call our characters out when they’re being self-absorbed jerks and louts. We will make them comically pathetic, and punish them for their infractions a priori by making them undesirable to women, thus anticipating what we imagine will be your judgments, female reader. Then you and I, female reader, can share a laugh at the characters’ expense, and this will bring us closer together and forestall the dreaded possibility of your leaving me [...]
Into this theater of struggle, in 2000, arrived The Elementary Particles. Houellebecq’s loser characters have thoughts like “her big, sagging breasts were perfect for a tit-job; it had been three years since his last time.” And he doesn’t call them on it. Except occasionally he does. Houellebecq has a relaxed looseness about the whole matter of whose point of view (author’s or character’s) is being expressed in a given moment. He is happy to keep readers guessing about what he actually believes and what he’s satirizing.
American male novelists (post-Updike et alia), according to Blair, want to be liked by female readers; Houllebecq is more interested in the reality, i.e. the duplicity, of maleness.
Now I suppose I really do want to give The Map and the Territory (and The Elementary Particles) a look.
7 March 2012
Harriet Doerr, author of the National Book Award winning novel Stones for Ibarra, published that beautiful novel – her first – at the age of 74 (she also went back to college to earn her BA at the age of 65). She wrote, in a personal essay called “The Tiger in the Grass,” about speaking at a writers’ conference:
I explained my late start as an author after forty-two years of writing “housewife” on my income tax form. These years without a profession, from 1930 to 1972, were also the years of my marriage. Hands were raised after my talk, and I answered questions. The final one was from a woman who assumed, incorrectly, these were decades of frustration. ”And were you happy for those forty-two years?” she asked, and I couldn’t believe the question. I asked her to repeat it, and she said again, “Were you happy for those forty-two years?”
It was then that I said, “I never heard of anyone being happy for forty-two years,” and went on, “And would a person who was happy for forty-two years write a book?”
I love the complexity – which is to say the honesty – of Doerr’s answer. I love the “incorrectly” coupled with the answer she gave the woman. We want things to be simple, to be this or that; they never are.
I’ll be writing more about Harriet Doerr for our Post-40 Bloomers column at The Millions.
5 March 2012
I’ve seen it three times now — once on the big screen, once on my laptop, and once in a classroom with 15 undergraduate students (a seminar on literature of childhood). It holds up every time, which is remarkable (in the second and third instances) given how patiently the story and its characters unfold, and how little speech there is in the film. Victor Erice‘s THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE moves from philosophical to morbid to lighthearted to melancholy via the simplest filmic gestures; and, of course, there is Ana Torrent‘s stunning little face, which moves through these registers and emotions with the same seamlessness and beauty. Definitely among my top 5 of all time.
Criterion‘s film notes tell us that the film’s artful spareness is in good part due to Franco-era censorship (the film was made in 1940, the year after Franco took power). There were more overt political references in an earlier version, as well as a reflective voiceover from an adult Ana. I am no proponent of censorship; but as a teacher, I feel affirmed in my imposition of parameters and limitations on students (word counts, prompts, etc) as they work on craft; so often we see that Less is More.
14 February 2012
I’m awfully glad to hear that Carrie Tiffany has a new novel out! (I wrote about her first novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, at The Second Pass, a couple years back.) It’s called Mateship With Birds and it’s been published by Picador. Read more about it in this interview with CT here.
I’d had a brief email exchange with Carrie Tiffany back in 2009; she said she was really struggling with the second book, and also not finding much time to write (children, full-time job, etc). That the book is being released now, in 2012, makes my heart pitter-patter (appropriately, on this Valentine’s Day?), because it means that this very talented woman, with as many life challenges as anyone to deal with, got down to it: she got it done, despite the obstacles. Three cheers!
Here’s what Tiffany herself says about her slow process (she wrote an entire novel that she ultimately threw away):
If you’re wondering why there were seven years between her novels, part of the answer is that she wrote another novel. Freud in the Bush grew out of that first short story about a snake. In reality, the great psychoanalyst sent a paper to an Australian conference in 1911. Tiffany imagined he attended to give a paper, On the Pouch, and took a train inland from Spencer Street Station. When the novel was finished she threw it away. ”I realised I was making fun of him,” she says. ”The more I read of Freud, the more I was convinced a great many of his discoveries were correct – that what we really want as adults is what we wanted as children, that dreams often point to repressed desires, that sexual repression manifests itself in the body in a variety of ways. I could no longer treat the subject with the irony I had intended.” [...]
Don’t expect another novel from Tiffany in a hurry. She has begun writing one, set in the 1970s. However, she says, ”People write too much. They write to prove they’re still writers”. She writes slowly and in the end, ”I hand in a postage stamp and the publisher says, ‘More, more!’ I’m definitely a miniaturist.”
I’m not sure where to find the novel at this point – it’s not yet on Amazon or Powell’s. But I’ll keep looking.
9 February 2012
So I am teaching myself to knit.
In this picture are three swatches — practice pieces for three different kinds of stitches. Hoorah! I can do three different kinds of stitches!
But that pile of yarn is the unraveled mess of a scarf I started. I was going along pretty good there for a while, maybe 1/4 of the way… then suddenly it all went wrong. I didn’t know what had happened or what had gone wrong, and the more I tried to figure it out, the worse it got. I’d unravel a section, then try to restart from that point forward, but then it became clear that I wasn’t restarting correctly, so the mess reiterated itself, and then I’d unravel a little more, etc. In other words, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to save what I’d done; I had to unravel the whole damn thing.
The writing analogy is a little frightening to consider.
That 1/4 scarf existed; I’m the only one who knows this, can verify it. Was it a “waste” of time? Well, at least I learned to slow down, and to pay attention. My next lesson will be teaching myself how to fix mistakes.
Unraveling takes seconds. The word is onomatopoetic, it slips off the tongue. When we make something, build something, stitch by stitch, word by word, it is definitely not raveling.
30 January 2012
This month, my Post-40′s Bloomers column at The Millions features Daniel Orozco, whose story collection Orientation will (in my humble opinion) both engage and inspire you.
21 January 2012
An exhibit at Tibor deNagy of Elizabeth Bishop‘s art — both her original art and art she collected — reminds me that the creative process is constant. Writing, painting, collecting too – these are all acts of seeing.
I love the inscription of “Happy Birthday” here – no one knows to whom Bishop wrote this, some speculate that she wrote/painted it for herself.
**
43 King Street in NYC, where EB lived not too happily (for a year or so, I believe). She was never able to feel at home in New York. ”I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s about right for a poet’s sense of home.”
**
EB did not have an easy life — she was adrift, suffered heartbreaks and isolation — but she made her own way, always finding ways to live where she wanted, and how she wanted (Maine, Key West, Brazil) — as an artist. A rare and beautiful thing.
