Grant Faulkner

Dean Young: Failing Better

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I wish I could vote for poet laureate. I’d vote for Dean Young.

It’s clear cut for me. He’s simply the only living poet who truly gives voice to the tragic and ridiculous and tender and doomed existential meaning of life through his whimsical, searching verse. When I read one of his poems, I never know where it’s going from word to word. I know I’m going to be surprised, but I don’t know how I’m going to be surprised. It’s likely that I’ll laugh, but it’s equally likely that I’ll laugh and cry, or something else.

I’m not going to write an essay on Dean’s poetry (I previously wrote a ditty on his book Skid). He’ll never be voted poet laureate because he’s a bit too dangerous, a bit too wild and unpredictable. Poet laureates need to clearly edifying in some ways–they need to serve, after all–and I doubt that Dean Young is clearly edifying to most, although he is to me.

I just wanted to pull out a couple of quotes from a recent interview with him in fail better, a mag I love, and one that’s a natural for him if only because his latest collection is titled Fall Higher. If you’re going to describe Dean’s poetry in two words, “fall higher” might be the best two words.

For one, he not only honors imperfections, he seeks them out. Dean says, “I certainly don’t believe in the making of art as a pursuit of perfection, rather the exploration of errors and stumbles, smudges and yelps.”

When I read that quote, I think of Cassavetes’ films, except with a few wiffle balls of Dada tossed in. He says that “art may be made carefully but it’s never made by the careful.” That’s such good advice these days when so many artists have become more attuned to the selling of their art than to the recklessly inclined soul behind its creation.

Dean’s interview appeared in fail better after he received a heart transplant earlier this year. It will be interesting to see how such an ordeal will affect his work. He’s faced death. He’s been given life. His words already traced indeterminacy, yet they were full of a gleeful plunging, a death-defying, exuberant vigor.

“I’m still searching and messing about, making wild forays I hope,” he says. “Time is always running out for everyone although I’ll admit everyone doesn’t have such huge scars. But one thing’s for sure. I don’t only want to write from the prospective of those scars.”

Even if he writes of his scars, I’m sure there will be a smirk, a “yippeee,” an unexpected observation, someone dancing, a roller coaster, a worm, a lizard, a clown, a bordello, an astronaut, and more.

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

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While it’s often said that few people read literary journals, especially the writers who want to get published in them (ahem), one great reason to read lit mags is to discover writers who you wouldn’t ordinarily read.

Think about it. When you go to the bookstore, at least if you’re like me, you’re either looking for the latest book that received buzz or you’re searching through the stacks for books that have been on your list anywhere from a week to years.

How often do you peruse the shelves to read even a few paragraphs by someone you’ve never heard of? Someone who doesn’t have a publicist, perhaps not an agent, and certainly not a marketing machine behind him or her.

When I read lit journals, however, I often avoid the name authors and only read the writers I’ve never heard of. Perhaps just because I’m suddenly in the world of my peers and I want to see who they are. It’s exciting.

So I’m grateful that I read Ted McLoof’s wild, long-ass, touching sentence/story in Monkeybicycle, “Space, Whether, and Why,” which totaled 1,394 words (seriously—top that).

McLoof’s sentence was not only an achievement of word length, but of storytelling.  Although I imagine a Guiness Book of World Records type of competition where people cram donuts in their mouths, except with authors stuffing words into a sentence, there was nothing extraneous or gorged about McLoof’s story—every word and comma felt necessary. The lack of a period felt intrinsic to the meaning of the piece.

In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a single sentence until afterward, and then I traced back through it looking for a period.

I’d seen Monkebicycle’s one-sentence story feature before and considered how to write such a piece, but I admit that I conceived of it as a typical sentence—20 or 30 words or so, max.
So I asked myself, who the hell is this guy, Ted McLoof, who writes sentences longer than my granddaddy after his third bourbon? Let’s find out.

How did you decide to become a writer?

Short answer: I’ve never been good at anything else, really. In the same way that when a person loses one of his senses, the others get heightened, I think that, if I have anything to offer in the field of writing, it’s probably because I don’t have much to offer anywhere else. Oh, I’m pretty good at pool, too.

Longer answer: I basically grew up in front of a TV, and spent pretty much all of high school watching movies, so most of the time when I was a teenager I’d be writing screenplays instead of doing actual homework. These screenplays weren’t very good, but I loved writing them. But the thing about screenplays is, when you finish them, you’re really only done with the first leg of a much longer process. You still have to get them, you know, made.

Then I took a fiction workshop as an undergraduate, where we were made to write actual stories—not just journal entries or thinly-veiled recreations of our own lives, but real stories, with stakes and epiphanies and everything. As soon as I put the last period on the last sentence of my first story, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Why did you decide to write “Space, Whether, and Why” in such a long, single sentence?

I always prize interesting characters over interesting style. In other words, I’d never tell students to avoid writing interesting-characters-for-the-sake-of-interesting-characters, but style for the sake of style tends to be a real issue among younger writers. Usually it supplements story instead of complementing it. So if there’s an out-of-left-field choice (like a 1,394 word sentence), I always think it’s right to demand a reason.

In this case, the story’s about two people who are so stymied by a lack of space in their relationship that they never get to examine it properly. Each event piggybacks on the last one, and they never get the benefit of perspective, and that dooms them. I wanted the reader to have that same feeling of breathlessness, of an inability to pause even for the length of a period to reflect, because that’s a distance my characters weren’t allowed.

Do you hold the world record for the longest sentence for a short story?

I just Googled that; it was a half-hearted search. But without any concrete answers, let’s just say I do. It’ll make me feel good.

Your stories are interesting because your main characters are often unable to truly communicate with those around them—they’re connected to a community, yet alone, struggling to find a place of solidity in the world’s moral ambiguity. What’s your take on the existential situations you place your characters in?

I think there’s nothing sadder than someone who has something to say but who can’t articulate it, either because he lacks the vocabulary or because no one wants to listen. It’s a very lonely feeling, that kind of isolation—surrounded by people but still alone. I think maybe I write about those people because then, at least, their stories get told.

Since you write about families and have a nice touch with younger characters, have you ever thought of writing Young Adult fiction since it’s such a booming market?

I would totally write Young Adult fiction, mostly because I think that’s a completely admirable audience to try and reach. As far as being part of the booming market you’re talking about, I don’t think I’d fit in. That market has gotten very cynical. It’s all sexy pouting vampires and well-to-do upper East Side boarding school kids. They’re easy to churn out because they’re not very well written, and they’re easy to sell because they’re wish fulfillment.

My favorite kind of Young Adult fiction is the kind that happens to be about young adults, but is universal in its themes. I mean, Holden Caulfield was an upper East Side boarding school kid, right? It doesn’t all have to be wish fulfillment.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from a favorite author?

A really pretty wonderful piece of advice from an author came from Nicholas Montemarano, who visited my undergrad right before I left for grad school. He mentioned that the great advantage you have before you ever get published is that “no one is waiting for the next Ted McLoof story.”

In other words, without an agent or a publisher or fans, even, you don’t have the pressure to a) produce, and b) write in whatever milieu you’ve carved for yourself. Because you don’t have one yet. So it’s a good time to try new things, to stretch, to find a voice, which is something that surprisingly few young writers do, I think, in the rush to get published.

Are there any authors you’ve tried to imitate? Has it helped or hindered your craft? Or both?

I don’t think there was a syllable I wrote in my first five years of writing that wasn’t in some way trying to sound like Nick Hornby. I fell head over heels for him at sixteen, and that was partly a good thing. Mainly, it gave me an outlet: I had all these things I wanted to say, and aping his style gave voice to those somethings. But eventually the problem became that I was too successful at imitating him. What started out as an avenue to get my voice heard turned into the opposite. I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t drenched in a complete stranger’s tone.

Eventually I broke out of it, but it would be appropriate to paraphrase Hornby from an essay in which he discusses his early love of Anne Tyler, and how he still doesn’t feel he’s expressed himself in his own writing as well as Tyler once did on his behalf. Hornby speaks to what I hesitate to admit is the real me, the me who reads High Fidelity every time I get dumped.

How do you choose where to submit your stories?

When I first started sending out, the standard was, Whoever Will Have Me. Now…well, it’s pretty much the same. But I think what’s changed is that I actually do my homework now (I read like twelve interviews from The Review Review to prep for this interview). For a while, the only journals receiving submissions from me were major cities with the word “review” after them, just ’cause I thought it sounded professional. Now, though, I surf duotrope.com regularly, and I make sure to read a journal’s issue before sending, and to make sure the story I’m submitting matches their aesthetic.

Do you read lit journals regularly? If so, which are your favorites?

The only old standby I have is Tin House, I think because, for a major journal, it’s kind of inspiring how you never know what to expect. And not in a McSweeney’s, we’re-so-quirky-you-don’t-know-what-to-expect! kind of way, but just in a way where you totally buy that all they’re really looking for is quality, and other than that it’s fair game. Otherwise, I tend to read stories I like in end-of-year collections, and then read the journal they came out of. That’s how I found Monkeybicycle, from a story in Best American Nonrequired Reading.

Have your stories been shaped by the editors you’ve dealt with?

Sure, if you expand the definition of “editors” to include “anyone who reads an early draft.” Two of my mentors helped me a lot: James Hoch told me no one would ever read my stories twice if I didn’t start surprising people with where they went, and Manuel Munoz advised me not to ignore going to my “dark side,” which I think is good advice, even if my dark side is probably more boring than other people’s.

My best editors, though, are the people from my hometown, about whom I write. My friend Melissa, who I’ve written about a great deal, is always very patient about that, and tells me whether I’ve been accurate while occupying space in her head.

How do you deal with editorial suggestions that you don’t agree with?

I have a lot of blind spots, but perhaps the biggest one is the editorial process. I’m simply a bad reader for my own work. When I first started out, every time someone criticized something I wrote, it was just, you know, “Fuck you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then later I’d read the piece with the suggestion in mind and, yup, they were right, of course.

Because of that, I’ll listen to pretty much anyone I trust now, no matter how off-kilter the suggestion, so long as they seem to get what I’m doing.

You’ve published several stories now. Are you ready to publish a collection?

Are you offering?

I’ll have my people call your people. Short of that, do you enter contests? Do you have an agent, or are you looking for one? Do you go to writers’ conferences?

My manuscript when I finished grad school was a collection of seven stories. I’ve now published two of those seven, so my plan is to try and publish all seven, and then see if that garners any interest from an agency. I have zero idea whether this is a good plan.

What’s the single most important thing you learned in your MFA program?

Well…we more or less lived at the bar. And the classroom is obviously the place where ideas get focused and contained, where you learn craft, and where there’s some sort of order. But I think I’ve learned that it’s the community itself that really feeds you material. Everything is looser at the bar, and your real opinions can run wild, and you can meet plenty of characters to write about. Maybe that’s the Jersey boy in me talking.

What’s your take on Rimbaud’s dictum that writers should undergo a “immense and rational derangement of all the senses”?

Well, Rimbaud was a poet. I’m pret-ty far from being a poet. When I think of poetry and fiction I always come back to Roddy Doyle’s thing about jazz and soul music, respectively, in The Commitments. Jazz is free-form, it’s experimental, you can rehearse a thousand times and then, bang, mid-show someone busts out a twenty-minute solo. Soul music has corners, it’s the working-man’s music. If you have the heart, you can learn it and play it.

That’s like poetry and fiction to me: both totally noble pursuits, but if you’re writing the kind of plain, clear prose I read, you’re probably not all that concerned with deranging your senses. It’s much more about keeping your wits about ya in our business.

What do you think of the maxim that writers should “write what they know”?

It’s pretty hard to avoid, and why should you? I think the only trouble is figuring out why you’re writing what you know. It can’t simply be for lack of imagination. Too often I’ll get fiction students who take that phrase literally, and turn in meta-fiction or autobiographical stuff. Like, a student from the “University of Schmarizona” goes to a party, gets drunk, and has to put the pieces together the next morning. It’s more about writing the emotional truth, writing what you know.

How do you make sure that you’re always taking risks with your writing and stretching yourself?

Usually, I just get in moods. I’ll go on a kick, I’ll read a story that connects with me but that has a sensibility I’ve never even thought of approaching before, and then I’ll read a bunch of novels by that author, and I’ll just say to myself: okay. Here’s something new. Here’s something you’ve never tried. How can I keep the stuff that makes me me, while blanketing my story with what that guy just did? It’s a tough balancing act, one I haven’t really perfected at all yet, but if I can come close, I think that’ll be a satisfying enough career.

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

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One way to judge the significance of a book is by how much its mood affects you afterward. Such criteria doesn’t fit into any academic critical framework, but it’s the one that matters to a reader in the end.

As Roland Barthes said in The Pleasure of the Text, “The pleasure of the text is not necessarily of a triumphant, heroic, muscular type. No need to throw out one’s chest. My pleasure can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever, by dint of seeming driven about by language’s illusions, seductions, and intimidations, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss that binds me to the text (to the world).”

Such is the way I’ve learned to read J.M.G. Le Clezio: with an appreciation of drifting, if not an indulgence in it.

I hadn’t heard of Le Clezio when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008, but when I read the comparisons of him to Paul Bowles, another author best read with the sensibility of drifting, I was eager to read him.

First I read The Interrogation, his first novel, which he now calls “close to a joke.” He’s right. It reads like a noveau roman written by a young writer bursting with adventurous and daring, if not ridiculous, pretensions. It put him on the literary map in 1963, though, and because of his chiseled good looks, he became known as the French Steve McQueen (his photos, especially the ones by Henri Cartier-Bresson, are indeed quite compelling in a cinematic sort of way).

Then I read The Prospector, which gave me a sense of Le Clezio’s art as drifting, but I wasn’t taken by the novel, and in fact, I questioned his Nobel.

I rarely give an author a second, not to mention a third, chance, but then, finally and fortunately, I read Desert, which is magnificent, memorable, moody. Not Paul Bowles, but there won’t be another Paul Bowles. And Le Clezio has a markedly different sensibility—he’s less interested in seeing the danger and estrangement in others and other cultures than seeing a purity of being in the elsewheres he writes about, a truth that can’t quite be reclaimed.

Desert tells of the diaspora caused by the French colonial army in North Africa when they defeated the nomadic Tuareg, the indigo-robed Blue Men. It’s a narrative of two characters: Noura, who in 1909 migrated north across the Western Sahara in a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy orphan named Lalla, who escapes the shany towns of Tangier (Paul Bowles’s territory) to move to Marseille.

The novel moves in a time that is almost lifelike: slowly, without the drive of plot. The rhythm is set by the swirling sands of the desert, the pulse of the sun, jagged rocks, and blistering heat. The caravan plods for hundreds, thousands of miles, and you feel each of their painful steps as they leave a home and look for another one far away.

Meanwhile Lalla searches for that lost home in a more mystical sense, escaping the harsh realities of life through her communion with an outcast named al-Ser, the spirit of the blue man warrior who serves as a guide to the natural world.

The desert is the main character of the novel, however. Despite all of the harshness it delivers, Le Clezio sees in it a primordial grace, a numen that deserves reverence.

The idea of loss is at the center of Le Clezio’s work—people banished from their paradise by the hostile forces of civilization. But he portrays this loss in a complexity in which there are no winners.

As he puts it in Mexican Dream, a collection of essays on the conquest of Mexico, “In destroying Amerindian cultures, the conqueror also destroyed a part of himself, a part he will undoubtedly never find again.”

As an author, he writes as one listening to the music, a witness rather than one imposing his will upon the narrative. His characters often seem to move with the wind itself. In tracing the connections between the modern industrial world and the world that existed before it, he has likened himself to a spider, “touching threads to see where the vibrations come from.”

Perhaps LeClezio has such a talent because he grew up as a child in strange lands, born in France to a family that had lived for generations in Mauritius, and of a British father who was a doctor in Nigeria. He was fascinated by the alien landscapes he lived in, the differences between his western heritage and the manners of a more ancient culture.

He’s now a dual Franco-Mauritian citizen (who resides in New Mexico). “I’ve always felt very much from a mixed culture—mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything’s had its influence on me,” he said.

The Prospector, in particular, captures his sense of the lost idyll in its rather simplistic plot of Alexis L’Etang, a dispossessed son, who escapes from a dreary job to go treasure hunting. But it’s not so much literal treasure that he seeks, but the memory of his childhood and his father.

The characters in The Prospector aren’t particularly individualized; they’re almost flat, moving through life through their senses rather than the logic of their thoughts. The desire is simple: to be at one with the world’s rhythms, its seasons—an impossibility with civilization.

“I am as adrift in this lonely valley as I was on the vast ocean,” Alexis observes, but that isn’t a complaint. Drifting is an aspiration, an idyll.

You could say that he’s guilty of overly romanticizing the primitive (anything barefooted is celebrated), but a sense of utter loss hangs over it all, and there’s really no return. Although Alexis is driven at once by a traditional quest/adventure narrative—to return to a state of being “utter savages”—he’s at the same time undermined by a more postmodern sense of a world fragmented and lost.

In fact, that’s what LeClezio is about: loss. He’s not arguing for a return to a better kind of life, he’s just saying that it’s gone.

In a life haunted by loss, it’s not the quest for what’s lost that can deliver us, but an embrace of our essential alienation. As Le Clezio says about his predilection to seek new places to live, “you have to get rid of old habits, change your points of view, adapt. It gives you a kind of youth, which is good for writing.”

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that Invites Manifestos

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It’s odd to say, but I have a soft spot in my heart for manifestos.

Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be overly polite, especially when it comes to the arts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, fails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms must change.

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

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

Reading as Pausing: James Salter

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One exercise I’m doing in order to pause is to identify passages I like and write them down. It’s a good thing to do–especially by hand–in order to pay attention to each word and consider the author’s approach.

Here’s a selection from James Salter’s story Dusk, which I’m rereading after discovering the book and Salter in 1988.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Camus: Falling into a Life of Contradictions

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A friend of mine once told me that she read Camus because he made her happy.

I loved that statement because it’s not the obvious answer for reading a thinker known for plumbing the darkest of the dark states of human existence.

But reading Camus makes me happy as well—or if not happy, then reassured somehow—simply because he writes with such dead-on truth, unflinching and straightforward, without pretense or unnecessary contrivance, without aggrandizement yet with dramatic flair, nuance, and poetry—traits that many other writers from the existentialist all-star team don’t possess to such a degree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The art of publishing has trumped the art of writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, he’s a dramatic one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emperor Franzen and the Jonathan Franzen Publicity Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Strohm and the Art of the 100 Word Story

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If you want to know about masculinity, music, and aging (and more), then Paul Strohm is the guy to turn to.

The Bay Area scholar, author, wit, and bon vivant has just published a series of exquisite shorts—stories of 100 words that perfectly capture the telling turns of his life, whether it’s styling his childhood friend Billy’s “carroty hair” or partying with the Pixies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literary Drunks and Addicts and Scourges

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What do William Burroughs, Ayn Rand, James Baldwin, Jim Carroll, and Louisa May Alcott have in common? They all enjoyed substances, whether alcohol, amphetamines, or absinthe (or all of the above).

LIFE Magazine has put together a slideshow collecting portraits of some of history’s most notorious literary dabblers in all varieties of substances (and some of the photos are even for sale, for those who like to hang drunken authors on their walls).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

–Charles Bukowski

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

–Truman Capote

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

–Raymond Chandler

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

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzhaler

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All reviews are a reckoning of expectations. In this case, my expectations were perhaps too high for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by San Francisco poet August Kleinzhaler.

One, there’s Kleinzhaler, who was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Sleeping it Off in Rapid City—a must-read book for me after reading the reviews.

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

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

The markets never rest

Always they are somewhere in agitation

Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat

Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons

Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes

Across the firmament

Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets

As they make their nightlong journeys

Across the oceans and steppes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the heat and after

The little pink beeper ship and the flamingo

In the logo

Same color as the icing on the cookies inside

And the votive candles that heal bad sprains

Also, the billboards overhead

Through the dusty branches

Big square decals mounted against sky

A bit of nose here, some lettering

Jesus or barbecue

Exit 205

Cobalt blue background cut out of sky

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

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

Cities each have a kind of light,

a color even,

or set of undertones

determined by the river or hills

as well as by the stone

of their countless buildings.

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

It must be close to dawn.

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

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

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

Watch video of Kleinzhaler reading: