Who Wrote the Book You Loved?
By Don Wallace
Who are the greatest writers of the 20th century? I nominate the following:
Constance Garnett, C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Francis Steegmuller, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, Edwin and Willa Muir (with Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser), Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Robert Bly and, I don’t know, maybe the three score guys from the Hampton Court Conference convened in 1604 by King James.
So, yes, I asked a trick question. But if you read in English, like me, then much of the literary greatness you drank so deeply from in youth was a potion filtered through the copper-coiled consciousness of a translator. And if you accept the greatness of the authors above—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Turgenev and all the other Russians, Proust and Flaubert, Marquez and Fuentes and Llosa and the other Latin Americans, Kafka, Borges, Hamsun, and God—why not give credit to their translators? Because those are their words you’re reading.
As someone with more skin in the writing game than is wise or healthy, I’ve always found this disconcerting.
I remember first getting this sinking feeling when in college, reading Flaubert and Stendahl. Not having had a lick of French at that point, beyond pronouncing “escargot” once or twice (and “condom” a bit more often), I struggled with the archaic Victorian English until the thought hit me: what if these translations were like those 1950s movies with Maurice Chevalier, whose heavily accented English would be parodied in the later Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers? Once I had the thought, the giggle would just not go away.
With my fragile literary consciousness at risk, I shelved the idea. But it has resurfaced over the years, particularly when I catch myself aiming for “the literary.” I get this fear that I’m simply writing in a style like those dubbed foreign movies where everyone, no matter what nationality, speaks in a tony BBC accent. Has the fear killed off a couple of stories? Yes, and good riddance to bad rubbish, as someone might say on Masterpiece Theatre.
Now, I love translators, generally. I wouldn’t be here without them—on the page, I mean. But leaving aside their indispensability and noble sacrifice on behalf of art, their ubiquity and their concealment in plain sight does bring up an inconvenient question:
Who wrote that book you loved?
The author, you say. Really? How can you tell? Do you read (French, Russian, Hebrew, etc.)? Okay, then. The translator. All foreign literature in translation is like these movies with which Hollywood is currently infatuated, the ones where James Franco or Matt Damon or Leo DiCaprio get themselves inserted into someone else’s body in another time zone. To save the world or get the girl, which amounts to the same thing.
Only, how do you know that when you’re reading Borges you’re not really kissing Matt Damon? Now there’s a thought. Hope you enjoyed it.
Anyway . . . just once I’d like us to admit that we’ve always accepted the greatness of these “great” books on faith. I understand the reasons. I mean, nobody goes to the rack and looks for books with a “Fair-to-Middling Foreign Classic” sticker on the cover. And yet, that’s what you could be getting, if the translator is a dodo or the editor ran out of money for adjectives. Or, as happened to most of the books in translation that I grew up on, the moral code of the times insisted on bowdlerizing all the good parts.
My beef here is that “greatness” which is actually mediocrity (in any case, but here specifically in translation) lures us away from finding our own soul’s path, our craft’s best practices and our own extra-authentic style. And, dude, falling in love with the “wrong” “great” literature can so spoil your groove. As Glen Beck might say, and hopefully will soon: reading foreign novels in English brings your babies ever closer to the clutches of that secret international puppet-master class.
Okay, so I sound paranoid. I hope it comes off in a fun way. And maybe this sounds a little hectoring, as if I’m now going to sniff and say that if you can’t read Nabokov in Russian then you really can’t claim to have read him at all. Well, nope, I’m not going there. Let me repeat: I love books in translation. It’s just that . . .
Come a little closer. Tell me something. Hmm? We’ve established that you wouldn’t have gone near these books unless they’d been certified “great” beforehand. In other words, it’s indisputable that you accepted a definition of “great” before you ever read a single transmuted sentence. Now, this surely influenced your reception of the work, did it not?
In science, that’s called a failure to control for bias. In literature, it’s called Norton Classics.
But we’re not here to deny the judgment of the jurists; our beef is with prose that takes the easy way out, by adopting the mannerisms, style and subject matter of the consensus great and famous. I’m not indicting the prose of the “greats” in translation, but of those writers who fall under their sway and never, ever emerge . . .
Hey, relax. I’m not prosecuting you—I’m interrogating my younger self.
I guess, more and more, the way imitation turns into something original fascinates me. When you’re young this is experimentation, right? Experimentation: the word that exonerates pot-smoking Presidential candidates and promiscuous young writers. I remember reading Joyce’s Dubliners and Borges’ Ficciones one rainy weekend and the next thing I knew, my characters spoke in Irish accents while dipping in and out of alternative universes—all in suburban Long Beach, California, ca. 1970.
After awhile, though, I was bothered by how easily my sincere flattery became impersonation. The infatuated writer turns creepy, like the stalker in “Single White Female” or Bergman’s “Persona.” The theme from “The Twilight Zone” begins to play in the background . . .
Time here to pause. Reflect. Become afraid. Very afraid. But don’t worry, I’ll be back. We’re not done here. Not by a long shot.
Because the question will not die: Who really wrote the book you loved? Raymond Carver—or Gordon Lish? Thomas Wolfe—or Maxwell Perkins? James Patterson—or a string of J. Walter Thompson vice-presidents?
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Showing posts with label Ray Carver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ray Carver. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
The Problem with Good Books: What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 6
The Problem with Good Books
By Don Wallace
When we asked whether Bad Books ruin us for Good Writing, it was a bit of a softball question, as Bad Books are part of the same cultural arc that acclaims White Castle sliders and “Dancing with the Stars” and Kill Bill, Vol 1—part of our All-American self-abasement sweepstakes. Nobody can be against Bad Books in America, for the same reason that characters who eat at McDonald’s in movies (or in politics) are morally superior to those portrayed dining on sous-vide squash soup and roasted beef-marrow-bones sauced with duck liver foam. We are a low-rent democracy. For an author, citing a Bad Book as influential is shorthand for saying, “See? I’m just a regular person like you. Now buy my book so I never have to eat at McDonald’s again.”
Of far greater concern are the bad books I’ve read while under the impression they were good. In my experience, a Bad Book passes through the digestive system like a bad oyster; you may spend a day with a hangover, full of remorse, but no lasting harm is done, usually, and the next day you can actually fit in your jeans again. With a Good Book—or what you think is one or, more probably, have been told is one, over and over again until you believe it—you’re on the receiving end of something that can do sustained and probably irreparable damage to everything: your love life, your opinions on a huge variety of subjects, your choice of a career or lack thereof. Good Books explain your recent enlistment in the Foreign Legion or Teach for America, your love of ethnic cuisine or meat and potatoes, your modest drug habit or boxed set of Mozart. Every time you open your mouth at the dining table to deliver an opinion, Good Books inflict collateral damage upon your friends and family.
All of the above would be perfectly acceptable if Good Books didn’t also mess with your prose. But they do. Because officially recognized Good Books are set out as examples, unlike Bad Books, they instill in us what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”—which leads to imitation, which in turn can lead to years spent wandering up somebody else’s blind alley.
It would be easy to pussyfoot around here, play it safe: drop hints and act the part of coy ingenue. But what’s the fun in that? I’ll start by mentioning the writers who repaid my love by leading me into The Punitive Error of Jokiness (Pynchon), The Manly Sin of Bruxism (Hemingway), or The Vastly Orotund Pretentiousness of Memory-Palace Builders (Gass, Grass, Gaddis, Gardner…). They wrote stuff I still like and admire, but what rubbed off on me did not improve my writing, unless in the sense that one must go through Purgatory to reach Heaven.
The dangers of these first examples, for a young writer, or for any writer starting out, can be demonstrated by imagining each as a person you’ve been seated next to at a Thanksgiving dinner table. Perhaps he is an uncle or a boyfriend or visiting Puritan. Anyway, the guy telling puns and jokes nonstop until you’re exhausted? Pynchon. Nice writer if he’d just ditch the whimsy. Of course, seriousness can be overdone, as witness Uncle Ernest over there. Geez, what a blowhard! He could use a little more time on the dance floor with Aunt Hadley, doin’ the Lighten Up as rendered stereophonically by Archie Bell and the Drells. Still, Uncle E at least shuts up now and then, and can handle his liquor, unlike The Four G’s, as we think of those second cousins from Hohenzollern-Haut-Savoy who’ve memorized every mini-series and controversy on Masterpiece/History/PBS and keep topping each other with fact upon fact, scene upon scene, debate upon debate.
Easy pickings? Agreed. None of the writers above are exactly sacred cows. (Or steers. We did notice they were all male.) All have taken their lumps, seen their stars tremble in the firmament, even fall. The really dangerous writers are those who still have that aura of untouchability.
A prime example is Raymond Carver, the same “Ray” I collected off my doorstep one morning (the liquor store across the street was the last to close and first to open in Santa Cruz). Poor guy, on the cusp of fame and fortune and he didn’t know it, shaking so hard he could barely sip the cup of instant Folgers I made him. The hand-rolled cig didn’t help much, either. Waylon Jennings on the turntable at 7 a.m.? Good intentions pave the road to hell.
When I got to Iowa and the Writers’ Workshop the following year, imagine my surprise to find Ray Carver and his brand of minimalism enshrined as the default mode of writing among my peers. I didn’t disagree; the proof was there on the page, plus as a Westerner I loved Carver because I’d lived in “his” landscapes and among “his” people. But it felt a little odd to have my own writing taken to task in workshops for its un-Carver-like qualities. I hadn’t realized the purpose of a workshop was to foster imitation.
What the cult of Carver wrought for the next ten to fifteen years, maybe longer, was The Sin of Remorseless Reduction—the elimination of adjectives, modifiers, thoughts, motifs, and anything the least bit fancy from the prose, as well as any deeper emotions and motivations from the characters. As we were allegedly doing this in the service of portraying the “inarticulate,” this made artistic sense. Hemingway did the same for the whores in “The Light of the World” and the shell-shocked in his Nick Adams stories. But as a template for writers trying to find their own way, and their voices and prose styles, it was like a diet of bread and water.
For me, still recovering from an undergrad overdose of Pynchon and Heller and Tom Robbins, this restrictive diet was probably a good thing. But it became a straitjacket—no, a veritable gastric band!—when combined with the cult of Carver’s approved subject matter: a narrow focus on those stunted but certifiably authentic souls who pumped gas, lived in trailer parks, worked as fry cooks and truckers, and even sat next to us in the Hamburg Inn No. 2 nursing hangovers, unaware that we might eavesdrop on them to flesh out our tales of their mating and subsistence rituals.
Carver was a dangerous man to love, no question. His trademark flattened-out affect strangled many a writer’s child in the crib. This wasn’t his fault; it was all our own, for following him where he did not ask us to, through twenty years of K-Mart realism, where some of the best writing minds in my generation and others to follow wandered in a land of no inflection, where the slightest comma could be King.
By Don Wallace
When we asked whether Bad Books ruin us for Good Writing, it was a bit of a softball question, as Bad Books are part of the same cultural arc that acclaims White Castle sliders and “Dancing with the Stars” and Kill Bill, Vol 1—part of our All-American self-abasement sweepstakes. Nobody can be against Bad Books in America, for the same reason that characters who eat at McDonald’s in movies (or in politics) are morally superior to those portrayed dining on sous-vide squash soup and roasted beef-marrow-bones sauced with duck liver foam. We are a low-rent democracy. For an author, citing a Bad Book as influential is shorthand for saying, “See? I’m just a regular person like you. Now buy my book so I never have to eat at McDonald’s again.”
Of far greater concern are the bad books I’ve read while under the impression they were good. In my experience, a Bad Book passes through the digestive system like a bad oyster; you may spend a day with a hangover, full of remorse, but no lasting harm is done, usually, and the next day you can actually fit in your jeans again. With a Good Book—or what you think is one or, more probably, have been told is one, over and over again until you believe it—you’re on the receiving end of something that can do sustained and probably irreparable damage to everything: your love life, your opinions on a huge variety of subjects, your choice of a career or lack thereof. Good Books explain your recent enlistment in the Foreign Legion or Teach for America, your love of ethnic cuisine or meat and potatoes, your modest drug habit or boxed set of Mozart. Every time you open your mouth at the dining table to deliver an opinion, Good Books inflict collateral damage upon your friends and family.
All of the above would be perfectly acceptable if Good Books didn’t also mess with your prose. But they do. Because officially recognized Good Books are set out as examples, unlike Bad Books, they instill in us what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”—which leads to imitation, which in turn can lead to years spent wandering up somebody else’s blind alley.
It would be easy to pussyfoot around here, play it safe: drop hints and act the part of coy ingenue. But what’s the fun in that? I’ll start by mentioning the writers who repaid my love by leading me into The Punitive Error of Jokiness (Pynchon), The Manly Sin of Bruxism (Hemingway), or The Vastly Orotund Pretentiousness of Memory-Palace Builders (Gass, Grass, Gaddis, Gardner…). They wrote stuff I still like and admire, but what rubbed off on me did not improve my writing, unless in the sense that one must go through Purgatory to reach Heaven.
The dangers of these first examples, for a young writer, or for any writer starting out, can be demonstrated by imagining each as a person you’ve been seated next to at a Thanksgiving dinner table. Perhaps he is an uncle or a boyfriend or visiting Puritan. Anyway, the guy telling puns and jokes nonstop until you’re exhausted? Pynchon. Nice writer if he’d just ditch the whimsy. Of course, seriousness can be overdone, as witness Uncle Ernest over there. Geez, what a blowhard! He could use a little more time on the dance floor with Aunt Hadley, doin’ the Lighten Up as rendered stereophonically by Archie Bell and the Drells. Still, Uncle E at least shuts up now and then, and can handle his liquor, unlike The Four G’s, as we think of those second cousins from Hohenzollern-Haut-Savoy who’ve memorized every mini-series and controversy on Masterpiece/History/PBS and keep topping each other with fact upon fact, scene upon scene, debate upon debate.
Easy pickings? Agreed. None of the writers above are exactly sacred cows. (Or steers. We did notice they were all male.) All have taken their lumps, seen their stars tremble in the firmament, even fall. The really dangerous writers are those who still have that aura of untouchability.
A prime example is Raymond Carver, the same “Ray” I collected off my doorstep one morning (the liquor store across the street was the last to close and first to open in Santa Cruz). Poor guy, on the cusp of fame and fortune and he didn’t know it, shaking so hard he could barely sip the cup of instant Folgers I made him. The hand-rolled cig didn’t help much, either. Waylon Jennings on the turntable at 7 a.m.? Good intentions pave the road to hell.
When I got to Iowa and the Writers’ Workshop the following year, imagine my surprise to find Ray Carver and his brand of minimalism enshrined as the default mode of writing among my peers. I didn’t disagree; the proof was there on the page, plus as a Westerner I loved Carver because I’d lived in “his” landscapes and among “his” people. But it felt a little odd to have my own writing taken to task in workshops for its un-Carver-like qualities. I hadn’t realized the purpose of a workshop was to foster imitation.
What the cult of Carver wrought for the next ten to fifteen years, maybe longer, was The Sin of Remorseless Reduction—the elimination of adjectives, modifiers, thoughts, motifs, and anything the least bit fancy from the prose, as well as any deeper emotions and motivations from the characters. As we were allegedly doing this in the service of portraying the “inarticulate,” this made artistic sense. Hemingway did the same for the whores in “The Light of the World” and the shell-shocked in his Nick Adams stories. But as a template for writers trying to find their own way, and their voices and prose styles, it was like a diet of bread and water.
For me, still recovering from an undergrad overdose of Pynchon and Heller and Tom Robbins, this restrictive diet was probably a good thing. But it became a straitjacket—no, a veritable gastric band!—when combined with the cult of Carver’s approved subject matter: a narrow focus on those stunted but certifiably authentic souls who pumped gas, lived in trailer parks, worked as fry cooks and truckers, and even sat next to us in the Hamburg Inn No. 2 nursing hangovers, unaware that we might eavesdrop on them to flesh out our tales of their mating and subsistence rituals.
Carver was a dangerous man to love, no question. His trademark flattened-out affect strangled many a writer’s child in the crib. This wasn’t his fault; it was all our own, for following him where he did not ask us to, through twenty years of K-Mart realism, where some of the best writing minds in my generation and others to follow wandered in a land of no inflection, where the slightest comma could be King.
What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 5: OMG I Loved the Wrong Book!
OMG I Loved the Wrong Book!
By Don Wallace
In my last post, in the interest of lessening the level of general anxiety, we gave out Genius Passes to all writer-readers. (If you weren’t there, stick around and see me after this session. But don’t come empty-handed.)
Anyway, as an exercise in self-esteem inflation the results were so great that this time around we’ll take on another potential downer: the relationship of author worship, critical influence, and peer pressure to our personal development as writers. Let’s see if we can’t turn our secret under-the-covers-flashlight-reading into radiant happiness. (You’re looking very well today, I might add.)
But a word of caution: see title above.
The first thing to say, it seems to me, is that if you love the right books, your writing will one day be just as good. Love Joyce? Love Woolf? Love Cortázar? Congratulations, you must be right up there on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Oh. You aren’t? So sorry.
And they’re not either? No Joyce, Woolf, Cortázar? OMG!
Well, we’re really not that naive. We ate our Wheaties without expecting to become Lance Armstrong or Kristi Yamaguchi. But I will say that we who write have a right to be ticked off at the system. In terms of the books we were told to admire, we were raised on Grape-Nuts only to be let loose on a world that buys Froot Loops.
Fortunately, most of us snuck Froot Loops or Count Chocula or at least Frosted Flakes, so we have an idea of what the marketplace truly wants. And the same went for books. We all read crap and loved it.
That leaves the question of what to do about those furtive, secret itches we get when we’re writing our usual very serious and profoundly meaningful stuff. Do we repress the urge? Do we admit to it and apologize to the muse and try to ignore it? Or do we open the creative floodgates and invite Little Boy Bad Book to play with Little Lord Fauntle-Book?
If you’ve had kids, you know how that’s going to turn out.
So reading bad books does create what the Wall Street wizards call “moral hazard,” in that like the recent unpleasantness, it encourages the mingling of toxic assets with AAA-rated securitized literature. And as we all know, today Wall Street is wolfing down steak while we’re eating our seed corn.
Is the same thing happening to our published, approved, canonized literature? How can it not, is the reply. Into the realm of the high-falutin, Chabon introduced the comic book, Lethem the super-hero, Franzen the talking turd—and the critics fell all over themselves in their rush to praise. Rather than fight it, and risk looking like old fogies, like the 1950s Comic Book League of Decency, we tried to dig it. And, you know what? Two out of three ain’t bad.
Anyway, there still are standards. A few walls have been left standing. How do I know this? Well, if reproducible results were the only criteria with which to measure literary success, obviously the genre known collectively as ZVSF (Zombie and Vampire Shopping and/or Fucking) would be taught in our better universities.
Oh. They are? Boy, did I miss THAT boat.
But I’m not complaining, really. Quixotic as it may seem, here’s the crux of this ongoing blog and the reason it’s called What It Means to Be a Writer Today and not, say, WIMTBAW-Yesterday. Time marches on, taste trailing in its wake like a sulky poodle or John Galliano in an S&M collar.
Taste changes. Writers die. Books die. Sometimes they resurrect. One thing we can be sure of is that the books we read live on as long as we do.
Unfortunately, that goes for Bad Books, too. In fact, when it comes to our earliest books, the Froot Loop ones maybe made us into writers as much as our Grape-Nuts ones.
So be proud of having read Huckleberry Finn in fourth grade, or Pride and Prejudice in sixth grade, or The Fall as a sophomore. But don’t be surprised if your other early reading now makes you a laughingstock—but only in your nightmares, we hope.
Unless you really did say that thing about Pippi Longstocking in your creative writing seminar. (Really? Well, at least Pippi’s a girl. Women’s studies are going to love that. But tell me you didn’t . . . Star Wars novels? All 136 of them? How interesting. What? When you were twenty years old? Of course I agree that Jabba the Hutt is a perfect example of how bodyism can be turned into something positive, like sex work-ism. Yes, it’s all very transgressive, I’m sure. And I loved Princess Leia’s outfit.)
To close, let us paraphrase a canine classic and bestseller and say, There Are No Bad Books. At least when it comes to what inspired you—and still inspires you—to write.
Next time out we’ll continue the “hair on fire” roadshow by examining The Problem With Good Books. This will include an examination of the Influence & Taste Machine as it trimmed and embroidered the careers of John Cheever, Ray Carver and his army of imitators, and why it is necessary to blow it once in awhile. Should be fun. Eventually, after a detour or two, we’ll get to the way the real world of fiction publishing works, and where it might be headed. And we’ll also reunite with our companion-examples of the earlier blog, the 23-year-old and 45-year-old, both just starting out on the path.
This post also appeared on the We Wanted to Be Writers website.
By Don Wallace
In my last post, in the interest of lessening the level of general anxiety, we gave out Genius Passes to all writer-readers. (If you weren’t there, stick around and see me after this session. But don’t come empty-handed.)
Anyway, as an exercise in self-esteem inflation the results were so great that this time around we’ll take on another potential downer: the relationship of author worship, critical influence, and peer pressure to our personal development as writers. Let’s see if we can’t turn our secret under-the-covers-flashlight-reading into radiant happiness. (You’re looking very well today, I might add.)
But a word of caution: see title above.
The first thing to say, it seems to me, is that if you love the right books, your writing will one day be just as good. Love Joyce? Love Woolf? Love Cortázar? Congratulations, you must be right up there on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Oh. You aren’t? So sorry.
And they’re not either? No Joyce, Woolf, Cortázar? OMG!
Well, we’re really not that naive. We ate our Wheaties without expecting to become Lance Armstrong or Kristi Yamaguchi. But I will say that we who write have a right to be ticked off at the system. In terms of the books we were told to admire, we were raised on Grape-Nuts only to be let loose on a world that buys Froot Loops.
Fortunately, most of us snuck Froot Loops or Count Chocula or at least Frosted Flakes, so we have an idea of what the marketplace truly wants. And the same went for books. We all read crap and loved it.
That leaves the question of what to do about those furtive, secret itches we get when we’re writing our usual very serious and profoundly meaningful stuff. Do we repress the urge? Do we admit to it and apologize to the muse and try to ignore it? Or do we open the creative floodgates and invite Little Boy Bad Book to play with Little Lord Fauntle-Book?
If you’ve had kids, you know how that’s going to turn out.
So reading bad books does create what the Wall Street wizards call “moral hazard,” in that like the recent unpleasantness, it encourages the mingling of toxic assets with AAA-rated securitized literature. And as we all know, today Wall Street is wolfing down steak while we’re eating our seed corn.
Is the same thing happening to our published, approved, canonized literature? How can it not, is the reply. Into the realm of the high-falutin, Chabon introduced the comic book, Lethem the super-hero, Franzen the talking turd—and the critics fell all over themselves in their rush to praise. Rather than fight it, and risk looking like old fogies, like the 1950s Comic Book League of Decency, we tried to dig it. And, you know what? Two out of three ain’t bad.
Anyway, there still are standards. A few walls have been left standing. How do I know this? Well, if reproducible results were the only criteria with which to measure literary success, obviously the genre known collectively as ZVSF (Zombie and Vampire Shopping and/or Fucking) would be taught in our better universities.
Oh. They are? Boy, did I miss THAT boat.
But I’m not complaining, really. Quixotic as it may seem, here’s the crux of this ongoing blog and the reason it’s called What It Means to Be a Writer Today and not, say, WIMTBAW-Yesterday. Time marches on, taste trailing in its wake like a sulky poodle or John Galliano in an S&M collar.
Taste changes. Writers die. Books die. Sometimes they resurrect. One thing we can be sure of is that the books we read live on as long as we do.
Unfortunately, that goes for Bad Books, too. In fact, when it comes to our earliest books, the Froot Loop ones maybe made us into writers as much as our Grape-Nuts ones.
So be proud of having read Huckleberry Finn in fourth grade, or Pride and Prejudice in sixth grade, or The Fall as a sophomore. But don’t be surprised if your other early reading now makes you a laughingstock—but only in your nightmares, we hope.
Unless you really did say that thing about Pippi Longstocking in your creative writing seminar. (Really? Well, at least Pippi’s a girl. Women’s studies are going to love that. But tell me you didn’t . . . Star Wars novels? All 136 of them? How interesting. What? When you were twenty years old? Of course I agree that Jabba the Hutt is a perfect example of how bodyism can be turned into something positive, like sex work-ism. Yes, it’s all very transgressive, I’m sure. And I loved Princess Leia’s outfit.)
To close, let us paraphrase a canine classic and bestseller and say, There Are No Bad Books. At least when it comes to what inspired you—and still inspires you—to write.
Next time out we’ll continue the “hair on fire” roadshow by examining The Problem With Good Books. This will include an examination of the Influence & Taste Machine as it trimmed and embroidered the careers of John Cheever, Ray Carver and his army of imitators, and why it is necessary to blow it once in awhile. Should be fun. Eventually, after a detour or two, we’ll get to the way the real world of fiction publishing works, and where it might be headed. And we’ll also reunite with our companion-examples of the earlier blog, the 23-year-old and 45-year-old, both just starting out on the path.
This post also appeared on the We Wanted to Be Writers website.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
"Am I a Genius?" - Part 4: What It Means to be a Writer Today
It’s got to be the least useful question a writer can ever ask him- or herself, and yet—all right—it’s one we’ve all asked ourselves, even while suspecting we already know the answer (if you have to ask . . .) and thus guaranteeing a day of feeling absolutely wretched. So let’s get it over with:
Yes, you’re a genius.
And now you owe me, big-time. I want a big lobster and a gushing blurb when you’re famous.
The whole genius label, like the current passion for the word passion, makes me want to find my inner curmudgeon, take my walking stick off the wall and go hit something, like a cute puppy or the first daffodil of spring. To growl and say, Damn geniuses! Have to talk to the gardener again about letting them into the garden.
But it’s hopeless. We’re in the self-esteem business. And we live in an age when egos inflate and hover like Zeppelins over the Zuiderzee. To dare to raise a pen to paper, ego and self-regard and even a dose of early gushing praise are probably necessary. Still, a steady diet of fatuous self-appreciation can make you awfully unpleasant to be with and contribute to the most ridiculous, bloated, flatulent work. Unless you really are a genius.
The question of genius is a serious one, once we get over the junior high clique aspect. What makes someone really good? Really really good? The best? Can we quantify it? Graph it and fill in the squares? Turn the job over to Watson, the IBM supercomputer?
Well, we know the answer to that. Yes, of course. Maybe it’s Don Foster, the guy who can find a new Shakespeare sonnet in a shredded phone book using a software program. There’s just no question that someone somewhere is already doing it, pouring the relationship of fancy words, complex sentences and the occurrence of the semi-colon into an algorithm that will yield incontrovertible truth; every time.
We also know this, too, will pass and the question will remain: what is genius?
I first heard it applied to someone I knew when I was 19 and a singer in a rock n’ roll band. My best friend from childhood came up to Santa Cruz for a visit, heard us practice, and said later, in an awe-struck tone, “I’ve never met a real genius before.”
He was talking about our rhythm guitarist/songwriter. Boy, were my feelings hurt. Even if Peter wrote 90 percent of our material and could play an instrument. You see, I made really really good James Brown-like grunting sounds exactly where they were needed. For a white boy from Long Beach, that’s genius. Just not genius enough for Mike.
Mike is still my best childhood friend, but hurt feelings are why I’m going to dispense with the genius tag and replace it with something his mother, Trudi, once said of someone who was on a roll: “Why, his hair’s on fire!” I think this is a more useful appellation, because it connotes talent plus energy plus volatility plus combustion. You can just see Beethoven, sitting at the piano bench and his hair’s on fire. William Blake, you know the man’s hair is definitely on fire. And so forth. Frida Kahlo? Even her unibrow is on fire.
So we leave genius to the critics in the next century. Right now, in our lifetime, whose hair is on fire? That’s the question.
And now, quickly, I’m going to put myself in the jury box and answer the question, “Who among writers you’ve actually met was a—that word—you know. Whose hair was on fire?”
As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I hit a pretty good era for writers. We had Jim Houston running the program, William Everson doing “Birth of a Poet” in a giant teepee, George Hitchcock publishing Kayak, a free weekly, Sundaz, that ran a short story a week thanks to fiction editor Lou Mathews, Gurney Norman writing a serialized novel in the margins of The Whole Earth Catalog, a large group of fine printers including my pal Tom Killion, a seriously literary bunch of professors up the Hill including my personal Virgil, Norman O. Brown, and a slew of young and old writers milling around the community and classrooms. As a fumbling apprentice, I soaked it all up indiscriminately.
There was plenty of talent in the room, all kinds. Many of us went on to publish. There are some real successes among us. But you know what? Nobody’s hair was on fire. (I think Norman O. Brown’s tonsure was singed, but his writing was academic and interpretative, even if Love’s Body and Life Against Death are among the few books I can think of that actually take you step by step into a different reality than where you started.) Once in awhile Gary Snyder came padding through the forest in roadkill moccasins and you knew greatness had passed. But Snyder kept away from scenes. He was like Obi-wan Kenobi, making himself invisible.
At one point I worked as a busboy-runner at the Oak Room on the Pacific Garden Mall, an outdoor café that was the center of the scene. One sunny day I served a table of writers, including my advisor, Jim Houston, and a handful of others, almost all of them in the UCSC-Stanford orbit, the heirs of Wallace Stegner. A fly on the wall, I hung around picking up elliptical gossip and collecting empty glasses and bringing fresh pitchers.
The talk turned to a guy they all knew, apparently. I gathered he was someone they cared about and had come up through the ranks with. And now, well, he’d hit the skids. He was going to be at the university to give a reading, but his drinking had become a terrible handicap and career-wise he was really blowing it. How? By writing too much, a couple of short stories a week, most of them undeveloped, sort of sketches. And publishing too much, too fast, in any little review that would take him. In places like The Chico Review, Humboldt Review, when he should be massaging one perfect story to showcase at The New Yorker or The Atlantic.
Yeah, poor Ray Carver. Now there was one guy whose hair was definitely not on fire.
See you next week, when I take the “hair on fire” roadshow to the Iowa Workshop.
This blog also appeared on the We Wanted To Be Writers website:
Yes, you’re a genius.
And now you owe me, big-time. I want a big lobster and a gushing blurb when you’re famous.
The whole genius label, like the current passion for the word passion, makes me want to find my inner curmudgeon, take my walking stick off the wall and go hit something, like a cute puppy or the first daffodil of spring. To growl and say, Damn geniuses! Have to talk to the gardener again about letting them into the garden.
But it’s hopeless. We’re in the self-esteem business. And we live in an age when egos inflate and hover like Zeppelins over the Zuiderzee. To dare to raise a pen to paper, ego and self-regard and even a dose of early gushing praise are probably necessary. Still, a steady diet of fatuous self-appreciation can make you awfully unpleasant to be with and contribute to the most ridiculous, bloated, flatulent work. Unless you really are a genius.
The question of genius is a serious one, once we get over the junior high clique aspect. What makes someone really good? Really really good? The best? Can we quantify it? Graph it and fill in the squares? Turn the job over to Watson, the IBM supercomputer?
Well, we know the answer to that. Yes, of course. Maybe it’s Don Foster, the guy who can find a new Shakespeare sonnet in a shredded phone book using a software program. There’s just no question that someone somewhere is already doing it, pouring the relationship of fancy words, complex sentences and the occurrence of the semi-colon into an algorithm that will yield incontrovertible truth; every time.
We also know this, too, will pass and the question will remain: what is genius?
I first heard it applied to someone I knew when I was 19 and a singer in a rock n’ roll band. My best friend from childhood came up to Santa Cruz for a visit, heard us practice, and said later, in an awe-struck tone, “I’ve never met a real genius before.”
He was talking about our rhythm guitarist/songwriter. Boy, were my feelings hurt. Even if Peter wrote 90 percent of our material and could play an instrument. You see, I made really really good James Brown-like grunting sounds exactly where they were needed. For a white boy from Long Beach, that’s genius. Just not genius enough for Mike.
Mike is still my best childhood friend, but hurt feelings are why I’m going to dispense with the genius tag and replace it with something his mother, Trudi, once said of someone who was on a roll: “Why, his hair’s on fire!” I think this is a more useful appellation, because it connotes talent plus energy plus volatility plus combustion. You can just see Beethoven, sitting at the piano bench and his hair’s on fire. William Blake, you know the man’s hair is definitely on fire. And so forth. Frida Kahlo? Even her unibrow is on fire.
So we leave genius to the critics in the next century. Right now, in our lifetime, whose hair is on fire? That’s the question.
And now, quickly, I’m going to put myself in the jury box and answer the question, “Who among writers you’ve actually met was a—that word—you know. Whose hair was on fire?”
As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I hit a pretty good era for writers. We had Jim Houston running the program, William Everson doing “Birth of a Poet” in a giant teepee, George Hitchcock publishing Kayak, a free weekly, Sundaz, that ran a short story a week thanks to fiction editor Lou Mathews, Gurney Norman writing a serialized novel in the margins of The Whole Earth Catalog, a large group of fine printers including my pal Tom Killion, a seriously literary bunch of professors up the Hill including my personal Virgil, Norman O. Brown, and a slew of young and old writers milling around the community and classrooms. As a fumbling apprentice, I soaked it all up indiscriminately.
There was plenty of talent in the room, all kinds. Many of us went on to publish. There are some real successes among us. But you know what? Nobody’s hair was on fire. (I think Norman O. Brown’s tonsure was singed, but his writing was academic and interpretative, even if Love’s Body and Life Against Death are among the few books I can think of that actually take you step by step into a different reality than where you started.) Once in awhile Gary Snyder came padding through the forest in roadkill moccasins and you knew greatness had passed. But Snyder kept away from scenes. He was like Obi-wan Kenobi, making himself invisible.
At one point I worked as a busboy-runner at the Oak Room on the Pacific Garden Mall, an outdoor café that was the center of the scene. One sunny day I served a table of writers, including my advisor, Jim Houston, and a handful of others, almost all of them in the UCSC-Stanford orbit, the heirs of Wallace Stegner. A fly on the wall, I hung around picking up elliptical gossip and collecting empty glasses and bringing fresh pitchers.
The talk turned to a guy they all knew, apparently. I gathered he was someone they cared about and had come up through the ranks with. And now, well, he’d hit the skids. He was going to be at the university to give a reading, but his drinking had become a terrible handicap and career-wise he was really blowing it. How? By writing too much, a couple of short stories a week, most of them undeveloped, sort of sketches. And publishing too much, too fast, in any little review that would take him. In places like The Chico Review, Humboldt Review, when he should be massaging one perfect story to showcase at The New Yorker or The Atlantic.
Yeah, poor Ray Carver. Now there was one guy whose hair was definitely not on fire.
See you next week, when I take the “hair on fire” roadshow to the Iowa Workshop.
This blog also appeared on the We Wanted To Be Writers website:
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