The Friends of the Library Booksale at the Fateville Public Library is a place where you can buy tattered paperbacks from Patterson to Grisham and first-edition hardbacks from the likes of Stevens. (Used book sales in university towns are always a good place for a find.)

The book featured in the photos is one Luke kindly let me borrow. Transport to Summer was originally published in 1947, but the edition pictured here is from the second printing in 1951. Dust-jacket is frayed but intact. Signed by John Williams, former professor at the University of Arkansas.

The book smells like heaven. I wish I could bottle this smell.

It cost Luke all of $2.

Now, I am a convert and a proud advocate for digital books and a paperless age, BUT I am no hater of the book object. The book as a piece of technology is as archetypal as the wheel or the four-legged chair. Something in the soul of us upright monkeys loves the codex. I am not immune.

But it is the words more than their conveyance that ultimately enslave me, so I leave you with a stanza from Stevens’ poem “The Motive For Metaphor.” This is a poem fitting for the chilly, damp day:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

Vanity Fair has an excellent article on the publication history of Catch-22, a book that is on my all-time favorites list. (Catch-22 the movie also has the distinction of being the only place I can stomach Art Garfunkle’s acting).

How different would the novel have been as Catch-18?

http://m.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/08/heller-201108?printable=true

Mark SaFranko labored in obscurity for years.  He wrote songs, plays, novels.  He supported himself with a series of shitty, thankless jobs that kept the creditors at bay long enough for him to write a bit more.  His youth passed to middle age like this.

I started writing, and all the while, no matter where I was and what my circumstances, I took notes and wrote. Novel after novel, song after song, story after story, play after play. It was a bona fide apprenticeship, with the writers I admired serving as mentors since I wasn’t going the MFA route. And as Miller himself said (and I’m paraphrasing), “a writer must put down thousands of words before first signing his name.”

What I like about the novel Hating Olivia is what I like about SaFranko. It’s a deeply personal story about a guy in love with his art. He’s not the most likable fella; sometimes he seems more in love with himself than with art. Yet at the end of the day, you see he’s lost to the White Goddess. That makes me a little jealous.

The best of this genre of novel (and what might we call it? the semi-autobiographical bohemian artist rant?) make the reader intensely jealous. If the story doesn’t invoke jealousy then it’s quickly dismissed by the reader. I confess that after I read Post Office I wanted to be Henry Chinaski, and there are days when I feel I’ve almost achieved that dream. Almost. The little stretch between almost and already is the gap in which jealousy settles.

I felt the same about Tropic of Cancer. I wished to god I had witnessed those two turds floating in the bidet, and the madam graciously covering them up, angry as hell. That made me jealous.

Not so much when I read Junky. Burroughs seemed to drone on. He seemed the one most given to performance, a life lived as a novelist, a type of performance art. Admirable in its own way, but also terribly boring.

Jack Kerouac made my young self feel it. That burning impulse of the road, travel as experience, life as besotted journey. I ate that shit with a sugar spoon. Tried to live it. Crashed and burned, and when the debris settled I did not have my single scroll like Kerouac did before his liver killed him. I haven’t enjoyed Kerouac in a long time.

Mark SaFranko fits into this long line of twentieth century turned twenty-first century writers, and maybe because his books are coming out now, in his middle age, I can appreciate his story in ways that my younger self could not. If Kerouac was about the road, SaFranko is about the dingy apartment called home. He is Henry Miller retired to his home in Big Sur.

Hating Olivia is about the youngish writer named Max and his tumultuous relationship with his art and his special lady friend Olivia. SaFranko tells of the shitty jobs, the shitty no-jobs, the fights and affairs, and substance abuse. He takes the reader un-haltingly through Max and Olivia’s life together, and in the end, he shines a ray of hope. Max survives Olivia. What’s more Max gets the fodder for the best story he’s ever destined to write.

SaFranko took this nugget of gold first to England and then to France where they loved it. This year Harper Perennial saw fit to offer SaFranko to his native America.
I recommend Hating Olivia, but I do so with a blush. I’m afraid the recommendation says something about myself, something about my own longings and the things I’m willing to part with to feed my need to write. This is SaFranko’s appeal to me.

In his introduction to the book, Dan Fante–another tenacious writer with more international than domestic appeal–says of SaFranko:

I know why I write. I write because I must. I cannot stop. I’m driven by rage and insanity and crushing ambition. Mark SaFranko scares people like me. I believe the guy would rather write than breath. I envy his talent and commitment.

Amen.

The Brothers: a novel

I‘ve reading Barhelme (Frederick not Donald). Never read him before, but I heard about him on the blogosphere because of the kerfuffal over his departure from the Mississippi Review. Did he quit? Was he fired? Read about it here. I’m drawn to Southern writers. I especially like Mississippians. I thought Barthelme might be a good reading fit for me.

I have been underwhelmed by Brothers. Maybe it’s just a one-off wonder and the rest of his stuff is brilliant. But so far (I have about twenty more pages to read), Barthelme’s story is flat. He drones on with descriptions of all the signs on the highway while his character’s drive around talking with the spunk of dog drool. When the story gets too boring, he’ll throw in an character that flirts with eccentricity enough to hold one’s interest for another scene. The novel seems pointless.

There are some saving graces. The character of Jen (the protagonists considerably younger love interest) fills every scene she’s in. I think I’m finishing the book just to see what happens to her.

But I didn’t really want to blog the book here. Mostly, I wanted to share this one portion where the narrator describes the technology of his day. Barthelme published Brothers in 1993. I remember 1993. One year before Kurt Cobain killed himself.  I was all of twenty.  Barthelme attempts to insert a bit o’ up to date technology, and, as testament to the speed of change, he sounds completely out of date now:

Eventually he mail-ordered a Gateway 486 with a lot of fancy add-ons. He was particularly interested in drawing and painting programs, word processors, and utility programs. He was using Windows, spending hours creating new icons, making drawings that he thought Jen might use in the magazine, doctoring photos to take guy’s heads off…He was also getting new shareware programs off bulletin board systems that Jen set him up with, and going on Compuserve, using Jen’s account to look up information on diseases he thought he might have, or might get, and to download consumer reports, reviews, news. He wondered what the point of a weather map was, inasmuch as the ones on TV were always more detailed and up to date, but he got them, anyway. He was linking into what journalists and excitable futurists were pleased to call the neural net, which was fundamentally mundane but fast and a little magical.

Good ol’ Compuserve. And the “neural net???” If I were reading this today and it had been written today, it might seem quaint, reminder of the way things were seventeen years ago when a Gateway 486 was fast and a little magical. But there is something dulling about reading it and feeling the writing become dated even as injest the words. Maybe it is just some innate desire within me that only wants the new, but I don’t think so. I think I want the timeless.

By way of contrast, I recently reread David Foster Wallace’s Broom of the System. I don’t have the book in hand right now (I was late getting it back to the library. Bad. Bad. Librarian.) or I would include a quote. Foster was/is a master of creating realistic ultra-contemporary narrative with a timeless quality. When he wants to talk about technology, he makes it up, AND the techno-babble usually serves some larger plot point. In Broom, there is the ultra-modern phone switch board that has the tunnel problem. You’ll see the same thing in Infinite Jest with the video system or the replaceable faces. Instead of trying to add some contemporary techno-reference for the sake of saying, “look, my characters are alive in your world, dear reader.” Wallace takes makes technology part of the larger myth that we all recognize without the detail (Compuserve) and relate to on a more visceral level.

I came to Vargas LLosa by a circuitous route.  I was doing a bit of research, reading the communiques of SubComandante Marcos when I happened upon a footnote, written with Marcos usual ironic contempt and referencing the book Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.  This turns out to be a difficult little novel to get one’s hands on in translation.  But, I’m a librarian, so I got my paws on a copy.  It remains my favorite Vargas LLosa novel, though one that got little mention during LLosa’s fifteen minutes of Nobel fame.

A few weeks ago, I picked up Letters to a Young Novelist, LLosa’s obligatory book on writing.  There are some gems in this slender volume.

It is relatively easy to speak of the coherence of a style and harder to explain what I mean by essentiality, a quality required of the language of a novel it that novel is to be persuasive. Maybe the best way of describing essentiality is to explain its opposite, the style that fails in telling a story because it keeps us at a distance and lucidly conscious; in other words, a style that makes us conscious of reading something alien and prevents us from experiencing the story alongside its characters and sharing it with them. This failure is perceived when the reader feels an abyss that the novelist does not successfully bridge in writing his tale, an abyss between what is being told and the language in which it is told. This bifurcation or split between the language of a story and the story itself annihilates the story’s power of persuasion. The reader doesn’t believe what he is being told, because the clumsiness and inconvenience of the style make him sense that between word and deed there is an arbitrariness that fiction depends on and that only successful fictions manage to erase or hide.

And, just as I mentioned in my Van Booy post, here is Llosa’s advice that the would-be writer read, read, read.

Read constantly, because it is impossible to acquire a rich, full sense of language without reading plenty of good literature, and try as hard as you can, though this is not quite so easy, not to imitate the styles of the novelist you most admire and who first taught you to love literature. Imitate them in everything else: in their dedication, in their discipline, in their habits; if you feel it is right, make their convictions yours. But try to avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of their writing, since if you don’t manage to develop a personal style that suits your subject matter, your stories will likely never achieve the power of persuasion that makes them come to life.

But my reason for bringing this up is this:  Stop reading and go listen to this Orhan Pamuk interview.  He says many things about art and politics that I have thought, and, more importantly, it’s just nice to hear his voice.  He sounds like a swell fella.  He has nice glasses too.  Very jealous of the glasses.

Click here now: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/writersandco_20100829_36584.mp3

In the 20th century, it was fashionable for awhile for men to sell plot short in relation to character. Character-driven literature was seen as superior to plot-driven narrative. That may have been because the male literary elite attempted nothing more strenuous than lifting martinis to their lips and jumping their friend’s wives. (I think, particularly, of John Updike)

From Carolyn See Making a Literary Life

I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day.

Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly sitting on this deck as a summer sun faded into the gloaming and finishing Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

As an apostate who spent the first twenty years of my life chasing after the mirage of Jesus, I thought that I had pretty much dwelt upon every aspect of the historical Christ, explored every angle. But Saramago moved me. He made me feel for the man Jesus and I thought he even made a plausible explanation for the unwitting divinity of Christ. Mostly, though, I thought Saramago knew how to tell a damn good story. Better than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John put together.

There is much to commend in Saramago. He seems to represent a type of literature whose time is gone.

I should add that I also take comfort in the fact that he did not become a full-time writer until well into his 50′s. A fact that is lost on the NewYorker’s “20 under 40″ debacle.

This past week I received yet another letter saying “no thanks.”  This one came from Cezanne’s Carrot, a journal whose speciality is fiction that explores the metaphysical and mystical.  I sent them my story “Puppet Storm,” a story that fits nicely within their editorial guidelines.  This story is one that I started many years ago but finished only recently, and it narrates a comic moment of cosmic import.

The story has, so far, garnered no fewer than four rejections from journals large and small.

In the words of a poet friend of mine, “I want the rejections that are rightly due me.”  Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a low, every time thsoe damned emails/letters arrive.

“We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but after careful consideration, we have decided not to publish it.”

Very succinct.

Whilst moping about this latest rejection, I read a great post on HTML Giant.  The author, Roxanne Gay, is an editor at Pank magazine, and in that role, she has the pleasure of sending more than her share of rejection notices.  Her post explores the stages of grief that every writer goes through when dealing with rejection:

1. It’s not me it’s those damned editors.
2. It’s all my fault.  I will never be published.
3. People just don’t understand the brilliance of my writing.

I have felt all these things.

Gay cautions folk like me not to fall victim to an entitlement mentality.  To put that energy back into the work.

She concludes:

Growing up, my father (like many fathers, I’m sure) was fond of reminding my brothers and I that life isn’t fair when we were pouting about one trivial thing or another. I often want to dispense that advice to writers who feel like publication is inevitable, that publication is  their right by the grace of their talent.  I’m afraid such is not the case.

‘Tis a good word.  Not very soothing to me at the moment.  Maybe it’s simply the reference to father figures, but Gay’s post strikes me as a bit trite right now, however, true I know her advice to be.

I have much work to do with my writing.  I want to write well.  I have yet to acheive what I want with writing.  I recently read an interview with Barry Hannah, in which he discussed a certain story of his (I forget which), it was a story that he wrote several years after publishing a book of stories.  Hannah was well on  his way to achieving some noteriety for his writing.  Yet he said of this particular story that it was the first time he felt like he got it right, like his words captured the essence of what he wanted.  I’m still waiitng for that moment, and I do not wait passively.  I write.  I read.

And I try to ignore the rejections.

Huneven’s novels are positive, weighty things that speak to my psyche. Writing uplifting stories without being cliche is not easy. For every Michelle Huneven there are one hundred Elizabeth Berg’s (Berg, I admit, is a guilty pleasure of mine). I marvel at the way Huneven can make me feel good.

To be sure, Huneven’s stories are not the stuff of fairytale. Her latest Blame traces the life of Patsy MacLemoore from the promise of her early twenties till the twilight of her life. The blame gets assigned early in the story, after MacLemoore kills two innocents (Jehovah’s Witnesses even) while driving drunk. Patsy spends the rest of her life grappling with the guilt and the blame from this accident. These, all too human, forces shape her choice of a mate, her sense of self, her entire sense of purpose.

There is, of course, a twist that comes toward the end of the novel, and this twist leaves the reader wondering, “on what do I base my life, and what if I found that basis was an untruth?”

Intriguing questions. Huneven’s answer is this narrative.

I found Michelle Huneven after reading a interview with her over at that The Millions. What impressed me about Huneven was the way in which she turned the interview into a writing workshop. She sounds more like a counselor than a writer:

“What’s wrong with you, is wrong with your writing,” Huneven told me. “It really behooves you to find out what that is, so that you can disguise that in your writing. Or compensate it, or cover it up. Or cure it, if you can.”

What’s wrong with you is wrong with your writing. This begs the question “what’s wrong with me?” I suffer from extreme bouts of self-doubt. I suffer equally from both stubbornness and malaise. The stubbornness is an absolute commitment to my own worldview. The malaise is a weariness with that very worldview. My irony is often self-destructive. My sense of others (the Other) too little developed. Combine all this together with a deep-seeded perfectionism, and the result is that I’d rather not create. “Why try when it’s only going to be fucked?”

Huneven spoke to me like my analyst. She spoke through her stories. Her other book Jamesland thundered into me like a Summer rain. Jamesland has a silk thread of religion running through it. Religion as examined by the great psychologist William James. Having long ago sloughed off religion, it was inspirational to follow this, extremely non-pedantic, thread back to the source. Notions of community and redemption that I can barely understand outside the strictures of the conservative religious bullshit of my youth came back to me, as if I was seeing them for the first time.

I owe Huneven a debt for this. She has inspired me to be a better writer and to be a better person.

If you can only read one of her books. I’d go for Jamesland