Blotter Paper

Wherein I free-associate after reading books.

The First Science Fiction Novel

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on October 24, 2011

            For as long as there have been science fiction writers, there have been attempts to locate the start of the genre. There are basically three approaches to this. The first is to trace the line of descent through science-y fantasies. Those who prefer this approach point to Lucian’s True History (a 2nd century Latin prose tale that features a voyage into space) or look at vaguely sciencey elements in other ancient sagas (like the flying machine in the Ramayana). Then there are those who prefer the line of descent through utopian / dystopian literature: stuff like Thomas More’s Utopia or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. And, finally, there are the ones who prefer to trace the line of descent through the scientific romance: a genre that includes the works of Poe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, etc. I find that the most commonly cited “first science fiction novel” is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

            Of course the whole game is a little silly. Science fiction is related to every work ever written. For instance, one can look at Don Quixote and at the prose romances that it’s mocking and see the skeleton of the adventure plots that so many SF novels have. One can look at Robinson Crusoe and Journal Of A Plague Year and see that they are just as fascinated with technical detail as many SF novels are.

Further, this game of tracing SF’s line of descent often seems to arise out of a sort of inferiority complex. But art isn’t some kind of hereditary nobility; an art form doesn’t need to have an ancient line of descent in order to be worthwhile. The novel, as a form, has extremely few classical antecedents, but that hasn’t stopped it from taking over the world.

In a way, these differences of opinion say a lot about the definer’s priorities. People who are more interested in the aesthetics of science fiction—the tropes, the gadgets, the modes of description—might have no problem seeing science-fictional elements in the Ramayana. In addition to the flying machine, the various weapons of the Ramayana are often described in terms more technological than magical. Others, who are more about the speculative aspect of science fiction might see Utopia as a perfect example, despite its lack of technological trappings. And those who see science fiction as being primarily about working out the effects of technology on society and human relations might easily see Frankenstein as the first SF novel.

I’ve always been kind of skeptical about the science fiction content of Frankenstein. I wasn’t sure how it was different from every other old novel that had a monster. But that was just because I had never read it.

And now I have.

I have to say that if you squint, you can kind of see it. There is a sort of science-fictional element to the novel. It’s not in the animation of the monster. The animation itself is a little silly. Frankenstein is a scientist who suddenly discovers the secret to life and then he makes a monster. That part is kind of silly.

The science-fictional bit is in the concern that the novel has with details. After creating it, Victor Frankenstein abandons the monster. It runs away and then meets up with Victor about two years later. The first thing it does is explain how it learned how to talk (and talk in a fairly elevated manner, too). The story is a ludicrous (but kind of sweet) story about observing a French family in secret. The point is, though, that the story is very concerned with answering a question that any SF reader would ask almost reflexively.

This continues on other points. For instance, when Victor considers creating a female monster, he starts thinking up all these hypothetical situations, like how these monsters might run amuck and bedevil the human race or how the female monster might find the male monster repugnant and madden both creatures further.

The story is also concerned with establishing a sort of schema for human nature. The monster isn’t a monster at all. He’s in every way a human being, just a really huge and powerful one. The monster starts out as a well-meaning person, but is corrupted by human indifference and cruelty. In the end, it’s his loneliness that drives the beast mad and turns him into a monster.

So there is a sort of science-fictional smell to the novel, but I don’t even know why I spent so long talking about that. The thing that was most surprising to me about Frankenstein is how much better and more complex it was than the dumbed-down Frankenstein plot I had in my head (mad scientist assembles corpses to create stupid monster; stupid monster reaches out and tries to befriend village woman; villagers get mad and lynch monster with pitchforks and fire). I think that the plot I just cited is basically the one from the 1931 movie adaptation with Boris Karloff.

This story is really different. First of all, it starts off with Victor Frankenstein pursuing his monster on sleds through the arctic. I found Frankenstein, with his scientific obsessions, to be fairly interesting, but the absolute best part of the story was when the very urbane (and sociopathic) monster takes over the narration about halfway through and starts relating his own story. In the various movie versions, you’re supposed to feel the same pity for Frankenstein that you’d feel for a rabid dog, but the book draws out that sympathy and then brutally undercuts it. In the end, I was surprised at how rich the book was, and how many pleasures it had to offer. Whether it’s science-fictional or not, it’s definitely worth reading.

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Some crime novels with interesting story structures

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on October 19, 2011

          The thing that surprised me most about the crime novels I read was how structurally interesting they were. That wasn’t true for all of them, of course. A lot of them had the structure where the first third is given over to the slow lead-up to some crime, the second third is given over to increasingly frantic–but seemingly successful–efforts to escape punishment, and the last third is where the complex tissue of lies and evasions finally falls apart. That was the basic structure of Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killer Inside Me, and Pop. 1280. And there’s nothing wrong with that. All of those books were really good.

But some of these books had structures that really surprised me. Normally, I’d think that a structure was interesting when it played with my expectations. But I’m not sure what my expectations for the structure of the crime story were. I knew that they weren’t detective novels, so I wasn’t expecting any kind of mystery or procedural elements (although sometimes, particularly in Jim Thompson and James Cain’s novels, those elements were present). I guess that my expectations had to do with pacing. I that novels this short would have a very tense and frenetic pacing. Mostly that was not true. Most of the novels had slow bits, usually at the lead-in, but often in the middle stretch, too. They took their time, and meandered around the setting, and often wrapped things up suddenly, in just the last ten pages or so. Without exception (I think), none of them dwelled very much on the crime itself. Sometimes the crime took place inside a scene break. Sometimes it was glossed over in a few lines. A lot of them gave over large portions of their short length to internal ruminations, or to setting up lengthy hypotheticals. And some of them went in directions that surprised me: story structures that felt like nothing else I’d ever read.

The most notable of these was Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock. This story is told from about five different points of view, but fundamentally it’s about the editor of a large true-crime magazine in NYC. He witnesses a murder and wants to keep his own role secret. However, circumstances eventually require him–in his professional capacity–to search for the witness to this murder: himself. From that point on, the novel experiences a sort of doubling. He’s forced to investigate himself, while the murderer is also using him to try to find the witness. At one point, there’s even a tripling, when the novel dips into the viewpoint of an anecdotally involved female painter for one really bravura chapter. It’s hard to describe (especially without spoiling the book), but it was a truly fascinating performance.

Then there was William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, which is basically about a carnival magician turned psychic and then religious con-artist. It’s sort of a cross between Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry and every movie you’ve ever seen about grim, inhuman carnivals. It’s kind of a picaresque adventure, but the book has a sort of nested structure, where chapters at the end start to revisit the themes of corresponding chapters at the beginning. This is another one of those books is only a crime novel because it was written by a crime writer.

           And finally there was Cornell Woolrich’s I Married A Dead Man. The novel begins with a startling twist (which I definitely did not see coming) and it ends with an equally startling one. I can’t talk about either one without, most likely, depriving you of the joy you’d get from reading this book, but the structural choices necessitated by these twists were very interesting. Both shortly after beginning and shortly before ending there is a substantial drop in tension in this novel, in a way that wouldn’t work in most novels, but works very well here.

All three of these examples are from the Library of America compilation Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s. Although I often found the stories in this book to be less tense and well-written than the other, I think I was on the whole more interested by them than I was in any other crime novels I read. The worst of them was, for me, the novel Thieves Like Us which was about a crew of bank robbers, but even this one was structurally interesting. It wasn’t much concerned with the robberies themselves, but with the long stretches of peace, tedium, and suspense between the robberies.

However, I found structural surprises elsewhere, too. For instance, in Charles Willeford’s novels, the crime tends to take place in the last third of the novel. I think this makes for some very surprising effects, especially in his 1955 novel The Pick-Up. Most of this novel is given over to the crazy binge that its hero goes on with a girl he’s just met. He starts off as just another hard-drinking counterman and then goes on a ride that was so raw and shabby and strangely believable that by the end of the novel you fully sympathize with the desperation that drives the hero to do monstrous things.

 

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The joy of short novels

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on October 14, 2011

Noir novels are often quite short. Absurdly short. They’re short in the way that books aren’t allowed to be anymore. James M. Cain’s novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are between 30,000 and 40,000 words long. Jim Thompson’s novels are between 40,000 and 50,000 words long and most of the rest are somewhere around there too.

Now, there was a time when a lot of novels were pretty short. That time was the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The Great Gatsby is only around 40,000 words. Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm is circa 30,000. Slaughterhouse Five is 50,000. Brave New World is around 65,000. The Catcher In The Rye looks positively bloated at 75,000.

Now I don’t know why novels would have been shorter back then. Perhaps it has something to do with new modes in book distribution technology. This was the golden era of the mass market paperback, and a lot of the above books were published in that format. Maybe the modern era’s switchover to trade paperback means that publishers feel like they should be offering thicker books to justify the higher prices (often twice as high as most mass-market paperbacks). Or maybe I’m just a fool, and this is a false trend, and novels today aren’t any longer or shorter than they used to be.

But the point remains, I adore short novels. And it’s because of any fancy aesthetic reason…it’s just because finishing novels is at least a third of the fun of reading them. Each novel is another notch in my belt. It’s another plot digested. It’s another setting and scenario and character arc that I’ve internalized.

Long novels excel at detailed description of ordinary life, the little telling details that are something which only novels (well, and paintings) are good at drawing one’s attention to. And I love those details, of course. I mean, I have just as much Harold Bloom and James Woods in me as the next guy.

But there’s also a part of me that revels in packing it in and moving on. There’s a part of me that loves the novel as experiential roller-coaster ride. I love going to bed with an unopened novel and finishing it before I wake up. I love being able to reel off a long list of books that I’ve read in the last few weeks. I love being able to make my way through a substantial portion of an author’s oeuvre over the course of a weekend. Short novels give you a sense of completion. They make you feel like you can master this body of work…or that you can understand exactly what is going on this novel. A forty thousand word novel is comprehensible: it can be grasped in your hands; it can be held in your mind all at once. You can download it straight into your brain’s RAM and then crunch every portion of it at the same time.

Short novels don’t require less thought, but it somehow feels like they’re more able to reward thought. To me, they feel less intuitive and more intellectual. But that’s probably a load of bull. Maybe the real truth is that I’m shallow, and that I place more value on having read a book than I do on the experience of reading it…..

Oh well.

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My seven hundredth short story rejection

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on October 11, 2011

I was going to talk about some more about noir novels today, but instead I am going to post about getting my seven hundredth rejection (yesterday, from Lightspeed). Long-time readers might recall my previous rejection milestones:

Clearly, this is an accelerating pace (which is due, mostly, to increased submissions volume). At this rate, I can expect 800 to come in around 5-6 months.

Saleswise, this has been my best century so far. From rejections 501-600, I sold exactly nothing, but from 601-700, I’ve made 5 short story sales (3 of them at professional rates), so that’s definitely something.

Every time I make this post, I am somewhat astonished at these ever-growing statistics: 105 stories of mine have gotten at least one rejection, and 165 markets have rejected at least one story of mine.

I feel pretty good about where I’m at, and I have reason to believe that my next century will be even more successful than the last one. However, I am looking forward to the day when my rejection rate slows down, not because my productivity has decreased, but because editors are buying my stories at a rate sufficient to slow my submissions volume (since frequently-rejected stories are better for submissions volume than quickly-accepted ones). It will be nice to reach a day when years–multiple years–pass between rejection centuries.

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Wherein I learn something about noir literature

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on October 6, 2011

If you follow my twitter feed you’ll know that I recently took Nick Mamatas’ 9-week fiction writing class at the Writer’s Salon in Berkeley. It was really good. The next session is starting on October 9th. If you live in the East Bay (or San Francisco) and you are a writer who is as good as or worse than me and you want to become alot better, you should definitely take this class.

Anyways, during the class, Nick mentioned several books that I was totally unfamiliar with. I not only had never heard of the books, I’d never even heard of their authors. The books were The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson and The Burnt Orange Heresy by Charles Willeford. When I looked them up, Wikipedia said that they were “crime” novels and/or “noir” novels. The former is about a murderous deputy sheriff in a small Texas town; the latter is about a Florida-based art critic who gets a tip for a hot interview with a reclusive European artist who’s bunkered down in a nearby cabin.

I read both books. And they were both awesome. But they left me confused. The two novels clearly shared some DNA. They were both first-person narratives starring amoral wretches who succumbed to temptation (and got their comeuppance in the end). They were both detailed, well-observed portraits of very small milieus. They both had a strong sense of setting. They were both fast-moving and gave short thrift to explanations. They both had structures that played around with narrative chronology (Thompson’s novel has frequent, quite long, background explanations and most of Willeford’s novel consists of an internal flashback). They were both quite short (around 40-50,000 words). And they were both unlike anything I’d read before.     Clearly, I was dealing with a whole strand of American literature that I’d never encountered before.

But I was (and still am) a little confused as to what that strand is. I am, after all, at least somewhat familiar with detective novels. I’ve read Hammett and Chandler. I’ve read Sherlock Holmes. And I’ve read novels about organized crime, like Mario Puzo’s works or Layer Cake. But these novels weren’t really anything like that stuff. There was no mystery or procedural element (although in Thompson’s book, at least, there was a question as to exactly how the killer would be caught), and there was no detective.

In a way, the novels were like an adjunct to the mystery genre: the story of a crime as told from the criminal point of view. But they didn’t offer the same pleasures as mysteries. They didn’t hinge on any sort of revelation. Nor were they, quite, psychological novels. The criminal impulse was, in both cases, glossed over. In a way, it was seen as being somewhat obvious. Of course anyone in these situations would be driven to commit crimes…the only difference is that these guys actually did it.

The major joy of the books was in seeing the consequences pile up. It was in seeing intelligent people thrash around against the limits of their environment and try, desperately, to outwit the almost insurmountable odds they were facing. The minor joy was in reading about the kind of people and the kind of places that aren’t normally the subject of novels.

So I decided to investigate further, and conduct something of a survey of this kind of novel (which is, I guess “noir” literature…although that is a term that I had previously associated with Raymond Chandler’s detective stories).

In assembling my reading list, I relied heavily on the Library of America’s two compilations of crime novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s and American Noir of the 1950s.

The novels I read were:

Thieves Like Us Edward Anderson
The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain
Double Indemnity James M. Cain
The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing
Down There David Goodis
Nightmare Alley William Lindsay Gresham
Real Cool Killers Chester Himes
The Killer Inside Me Jim Thompson
The Grifters Jim Thompson
The Burnt Orange Heresy Charles Willeford
Pick-Up Charles Willeford
I Married A Dead Man Cornell Woolrich

In addition to these, I am currently planning on reading Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, Willeford’s Cockfighter, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

It’s been a really interesting journey through noir literature, and over the next week or so, I hope to post more about what I’ve learned. But the biggest thing I’ve taken away from this experience is astonishment that I could have been unaware of something–a whole subgenre–that was (and to some extent, still is) a vibrant part of American literature. I mean, I know that it’s impossible to read everything, but I had thought, for some strange reason, that I knew–at least in broad strokes–about all the kinds of stuff that I hadn’t read. But clearly that was not true. I wonder what else I’ve missed?

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The main thing I’ve learned from Banned Books Week is that book banning is a pretty minor problem

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on October 4, 2011

Last week, I read a number of blog posts about Banned Books Week. A number of writers, editors, and critics decried the removal of books from libraries and schools, and directed my attention to the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books (2010’s list included Twilight, Brave New World, and The Hunger Games).

I found the whole thing rather boring.

The main thing I’ve gleaned from Banned Books Week is that book banning is not a real problem: their own website says that there were only 348 challenges (that is, individual books challenged at individual libraries / schools) in 2010. There are 122,101 libraries in America (including school libraries). That makes one book challenged per 350 libraries. Even if the ALA is right in saying that their methodology for measuring the number of challenges only manages to capture 10-20% of the total, that would still mean that (at worst) there’d be a challenge at only 1 in 50 libraries.

I mean, sure, banning books is bad. I agree with that. But everyone (especially librarians) agrees with that. That’s why no books are banned (in the sense of their publication being forbidden) and so few books are removed from libraries (i.e. are not provided, for free, by the government).

Banned Books Week is emblematic of the progressive tendency to refight battles that were won in the 50s and 60s. Speaking out against book banning is uncontroversial and it feels good. I have no problem with that (well, except that it’s boring).

But there is a tone of triumphalism to the whole book-banning meme that is somewhat at odds with reality. The effect of Banned Books Week is to suggest that we’re freer today than we were in the past; that once upon a time, James Joyce might have been unable to publish Ulysses, but nowadays, the worst impingement of government into literature is that a middle school library in Huntington Beach, CA decided to require permission from a parent before allowing students to check out Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

And we are better off, if all we care about is banned books. But in many ways, it’s much harder to access public information than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

That’s because the funding for libraries is being chopped as a result of this recession. Here in Oakland, several branches have closed. Almost every municipality is slashing library hours and operating budgets. I understand that. A library is not something that a city or county absolutely owes to its citizens, the way it owes them decent firefighting, policing, and schooling.

But curtailment of library services seems like far more of a challenge to the printed word than the banning of books. The books that get banned tend to be amongst the most widely circulated books and popular books in America (err…and children’s books with homosexual themes). They’re the books that it’s fairly easy to get.

But when library services are curtailed, it becomes harder to get every book. Shorter operating hours means that working people find it harder to get to the library. Fewer branches means that people without cars (like kids) can’t go to the library. Smaller budgets means fewer books, which means that the less frequently checked out books (by definition, the minority viewpoints) get sold off or thrown out.

Libraries are a very intensively utilized resource. I’ve never been in a library that has not been full of people. Some library services, like internet access on their computers, seem pretty essential to the people who use them. Whenever I go to the library, I see people checking out books that they need: cookbooks, religious books, diet books, books on searching for jobs, and, of course, fiction.

Personally, I could not read the way I do without the library. About half the books I read nowadays come from either Oakland or Berkeley’s library system. When I became a member of Berkeley’s library, I experienced first-hand the difference that a well-funded library system can make.

Previously, I had been at the mercy of the rather limited collections of Oakland and D.C. I mean, the number of books these large metro libraries possessed was large, but their collection did not include numerous out of print or small print run books. If I wanted those books, I had to buy them. Now, that was not a hardship, for me, but it did discourage a spirit of adventure. I couldn’t take a chance on the book that I didn’t know much about but which might have been really great. In many cases, I didn’t read the books that I was interested in.

However, with Berkeley’s Link+ online interlibrary loan system, I can read pretty much any book that has ever been published. Seriously, I have not yet encountered a single book that I can’t request, online, from an affiliate library. Whether it’s a small-press poetry collection or a scholarly ethnography from an academic press, I can have it delivered to the closest branch of the Berkeley library (usually from some university library).

This is an incredibly useful service. But it must also be fairly expensive. Librarians in distant cities are putting books on trucks or planes for me and sending them hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of miles just so I can read them. For free.

And I’m not even a resident of Berkeley. I live in Oakland. The city of Berkeley is extending me a very generous subsidy. I earn enough money to buy the books I want. But Berkeley feels that it’s important for me (some random guy) to have access to every book ever written.

That’s a huge leap of faith. It is stunning that the government possesses so much belief in the power of books. And there’s something very weird and atypical about this (and about the library system in general).

There’s something about the library that is out of line with the current spirit in America. Libraries are too generous. They are too free and too open to everyone. In many communities, the library is the only building where every person can come inside and spend time without time limits or monetary expenditures. There is nothing else like the library in modern society. There is no government service (save possibly the roads) that you can use without expenditure and without restriction and regardless of your income level. Everything else the government provides is yielded up at a mean, subsistence level. It’s designed to keep you alive, rather than to nurture you.

Libraries aren’t like that, yet, but it’s easy to imagine a day when will be. On that day, we’re not going to be worried about Twilight being banned from the library. We’re going to worry about it being the only thing left in the library.

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I would like to read a dull plotless novel, because all the plotless novels I’ve read have been too awesome

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on September 30, 2011

            I don’t think that any novel is really “plotless”. As long as you’ve got a character who moves around and performs actions, then there’s a plot. Normally, the term “plotless” is used in a pejorative sense, to refer to novels or films in which the action doesn’t increase in intensity (you know, the book doesn’t start with little fights and end with big fights….they’re just little fights all the way through).

But I am not using the term in that sense. I’m using it to refer to a number of books I’ve read recently that, while they are novel length, only possess about a tiny dollop of plot (maybe a short story’s worth), with the rest of these books being given over, more or less, to some kind of treatise, or lecture, or bizarre textual performance.

The most recent of these books, for me, was Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, which is about a middle-aged widower who really loves Gustave Flaubert and gets involved in an extremely minor and easily solved mystery. 80% of the novel is given over to the reflections of this guy–George Braithwaite–on Flaubert, and his attempts to build up some kind of composite mental image of what Flaubert was like as a man. These reflections include: a whole chapter on various animal metaphors Flaubert used (called the Flaubert Beastiary); a series of three chronology’s of Flaubert’s life, one triumphant one, one sad one, and one composed of extracts from his letters; an extended fictional monologue by one of Flaubert’s mistresses; a discussion of books that Flaubert wanted to write but didn’t get around to; and a long list of reasons to hate Flaubert (with counterarguments).

Now, all this Flaubertiana has some resonances with Braithwaite’s story (which exists in a sort of nimbus surrounding the death of his wife), but for most of the book, you don’t care about that. You just care about learning all kinds of fun shit about Flaubert.

And, for me, that seems to be the commonality between all the “plotless” novels I’ve read. In each case, there has been some resonance between the non-story material and the main plot, but the joy of the book has primarily come about due to my own engagement with the non-story material.

            A perfect example is the four David Markson books I’ve read (Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, and The Last Novel). All of these books are primarily composed of various trivia about artists (as described in this blog post). Now…all of these have some kind of through-line, story-wise (particularly Wittgenstein’s Mistress). And people say that the reason they work is because Markson was incredibly skilled at choosing the right piece of trivia to put in the right place and at crafting resonances and themes that spanned across the book. And that is undoubtedly true. But that’s not what I was thinking when I read the book. What I was most often thinking was, “Wow, that is an incredibly nifty fact.”

And the same goes for the oldest plotless novel in my quiver: The Journal Of A Plague Year (which I blogged about last year). Once again, the joys of this novel are primarily the same joys as one gets from non-fiction. They’re the joys of learning something new about something really strange (in this case, plague-wracked London).

So this leaves me wondering…what would a boring plotless (or, rather, plot-sparse) novel look like? I would like to read a novel that is composed of numerous very interesting facts, but which nonetheless fails to cohere for me as a book. I think that would give me a greater appreciation for the artistry of the plot-sparse novels that I’ve read so far, because right now it feels to me like they’re mostly feeding off of the interesting nature of their nonfictional subject matter (and the freedom that the novel form gives them to present that subject matter in interesting and odd ways). And although that is probably not true, I would like to have some intuitive understanding of why it’s not true and of what Julian Barnes, David Markson, and Daniel Defoe are actually doing.

Regarding plot-sparse novels, I’m surprised that I can’t think of any SF novels which fit the bill. Considering how fond science fiction is of explication, I’d think there would be many. Certainly, the old-tyme utopia form (as in Thomas More’s Utopia or B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward) is chocked-full of plot-sparse novels. Maybe the closest I can come, for science fiction, is Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which is a book whose (somewhat nonsense) plot seems like an excuse to string together some fascinating digressions. However, I am sure there are better examples of plot-sparse SF novels.

In addition to the novels I’ve mentioned above, other novels I’d like to propose for “plot-sparse” status are: the second half of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which is just a long philosophical dialogue; Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, which is just a description of the eponymous character; and Dostoyevsky’s Notes From The Underground, whose first half is a lecture on political and personal philosophy. I suppose Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler also fits, a little bit, but in that case the interpolations are also stories, at least kind of. And Calvino’s Invisible Cities might count too, although it feels more like a story collection with a framing device. Oh, and there’s also Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which is (at least partly) a series of lectures by a fictional professor. I haven’t read it, but I am planning to.

What other ones can you think of?

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Do you folks enjoy reading poetry?

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on September 28, 2011

Because I (mostly) do not. For me, an appreciation of poetry is a mark of rather excessive cultivation. It’s something that no one possesses naturally. People who like poetry usually acquired that taste in school. The few who possessed anything like a natural sensitivity for poetry are often aspiring poets themselves. In short, I see enjoying poetry (at least in modern America) as something like being able to read Ancient Greek. Many people can do it somewhat well, and a few people can do it very well, but no one can just pick up the Iliad (in the original) and fall in love with it. And, usually, the reason people can do it is because they’ve made a career of it.

I think the sales figures support me on this. A top-selling literary novel in America can sell millions of copies. Even a top-selling short story collection like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies can sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Is there any living poet (in the English language) who sells even tens of thousands of copies?** No one reads poetry. It’s as utterly dead as any art ever has been. More Americans make a living as blacksmiths than make a living writing poetry*** In any given year, the book that wins the Pulitzer Prize in poetry has usually sold about 500 copies before winning the award and won’t sell more than 1000 after winning it.****

But clearly, my essential thesis here is incorrect. Poetry once possessed great appeal to ordinary people. In some places, it still does.

For instance, I’ll often read in some old book about how some ordinary fellow has been stirred to the very depths of their soul by a book of poetry. For instance, Jane Austen is full of that kind of thing: people falling utterly in love with poetry. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has a bit where the narrator is lounging in a field with a bottle of wine and a book of poems. Even as recently as the sixties, one reads about fairly ordinary people being enchanted by poetry. For instance, Jim Morrison loved Rimbaud and Alan Ginsberg was influential enough to spark a trial for obscenity. Moving further afield, a colleague of mine at the World Bank has told me that men in Colombia memorize copious amounts of poetry, and that to be able to recite is considering something of a mark of distinction.

We even have the evidence in our language. Poetry has a pre-eminent place in our culture as a metaphor. All agree that poetry is something sublime. It is a long stick that stirs the muddy depths of the soul. The poet is widely seen as a magical figure (just look at fantasy novels, they’re full of very elegant poets whose couplets often grant them magical powers). Any beautiful sentiment is “poetic”. People who exaggerate are exercising “poetic license”. Someone who is a little off-beat or insightful has the “soul of a poet”. A piece of prose writing that contains densely layered language, complex metaphors, and elevated diction is often called “a prose poem”.*

But either all that history is a lie, or we’ve somehow managed to lose something, because I think it is undeniable that even fairly literate people in America (including me) find most poetry (other than bits of, say, Kipling or Shakespeare) to be not at all pleasurable to read.

But I persevere, and keep reading trying to read it. Here and there, I’ve found things that I enjoy. Most often, it’s been long-form poetry. When poetry is wedded to some kind of narrative, I often find it eminently readable. For instance, I enjoyed Paradise Lost and Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I enjoyed The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam because I could perceive some kind of narrative unity in it even though it didn’t quite tell a story. But enjoying a narrative poem seems a little bit like cheating, since I’m not quite sure that I enjoy these poems for their poetics (rather than for their story).

When I’ve talked to people about poetry, they’ve recommended trying to bring analytical tools to the game: trying to use the intellect to unpick its meanings, rhythms, and rhetorical tools. This, however, strikes me as not being the right course of action. When people fall in love with a poem or a poet, they’re rarely described as being fascinated by the intricacy of its machinery….they’re described as being stirred…emotionally affected. For me, the path to those emotions is not through the intellect.

The primary tool in my quest to gain some kind of emotional reaction from poetry has been re-reading. Over the last six months or so, I’ve re-read Wallace Stevens’ first book, Harmonium, some five or six times. Each time, I’ve discovered in it some interesting poem that I’d ignored previously (though my favorite is still “Tea At The Palace Of Hoon”). But I think that part of this effect might just be a kind of Stockholm syndrome, though. Since I’ve shackled myself to this book, I’d feel pretty stupid if I didn’t start enjoying it, so maybe the sparks of pleasure are less a result of some poetical alchemy than a result of my mind’s own sense of the just rewards that I am entitled to after hours of hard work.

There was, however, one book of poetry that I enjoyed without rereading or analysis. This was Edward Lear’s Book Of Nonsense, which is a collection of absurd limericks. I was steered towards them by George Orwell’s essay “Nonsense Poetry”. But I am not sure that I am showing any sort of poetic sensibility in my ability enjoy a limerick like:

There was an Old Man of Peru,
Who never knew what he should do;
So he tore off his hair,
And behaved like a bear,
That intrinsic Old Man of Peru

What about you guys? What is your opinion of poetry? Have there been any poets or books of poems that you’ve enjoyed? Everyone, of course, has a few isolated poems that they enjoy, whether it’s “Casey At The Bat” or “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” or “The Raven” or “Ozymandias”. I am less interested in that and more interested in whether people find it possible to enjoy poetry in any sort of systematic way, like by cracking a book and reading some, rather than just having it percolate into you in dribs and drabs.

*Yes, I am sure that there is a more technical definition of what a “prose poem” is, but like everything poetry-related, no one knows that definition.

**According to Time, the best-selling book of poetry of the last decade (by far) is a collection of Rumi’s poetry. It has sold 250,000 copies in a decade. And that is the absolute tops for poetry (dude’s also been dead 800 years). The best-selling contemporary poet seems to be Elizabeth Alexander, who read at Barack Obama’s inauguration, with a 100,000 print run of her book coming out shortly after the inauguration (couldn’t find out how many copies sold, though).

***I just made that up, but doesn’t it sound true?

****I also made this up, but it too is a pretty true-sounding stat.

Posted in Books | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Anatomy of a Literary Pageturner

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on September 26, 2011

Definitions: A page turner is:

  1. a really good book that you can’t put down.
  2. a style of book: a plot-driven thriller that keeps you in suspense so that at every moment, you want to see what happens next.
  3. a physical format. It’s a book with large fonts, large margins, and lots of space between lines. This means few words per page, which means you turn the pages more often. The physicality of reading the book (which requires constant motion) puts you into a state of excitement and makes you think, “Wow, I am really engaging with this book”. Page turners also tend to have thick pages, so that as the pages gather under your left thumb, you can actually feel the palpable thickness that you’ve already gone through.

I recently read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time. This book meets all three of the above definitions. It’s a great book. I kind of always knew it was going to be great. I read the first twenty pages of it a long time ago when I found it in my house (I think my dad bought it), but somehow I wandered off and never finished. After a friend recommended it, I read it and…it was good. It’s an awesome, humorous story told from an autistic kid’s point of view. If you’re an SF fan then maybe it’ll help to say that it’s a lot like Elizabeth Moon’s Speed Of Dark, but a lot more comic.

But when I opened this edition of the book (pictured, hopefully, to the right), I immediately noticed that it’s in kind of an odd format for the literary darling that it is. The spacing between lines is, for a printed book, absolutely huge. It’s like 1.5 spacing, at least. And the margins are also huge. The font size is also several points larger than is typical for a trade paperback and it’s also some sans-serif font, like Calibri or Arial or something. The pages are also very thick. The book only has 260 pages, but it’s over an inch thick. I own 500 page books which are significantly slimmer.

What an interesting decision. The edition I am familiar with, both from my dad’s copy and from bookstore shelves, is a different one (the cover of my dad’s edition is pictured to the left). This edition clocks in at 220 or so pages, and it’s also significantly thinner (half an inch or less, as I recall). On the shelf, it looks novella-sized, like the Great Gatsby or The Heart Of Darkness or something. A quick glance at the inside of the book using Amazon shows that it has a smaller font and line spacing (and its using a serif font too, but I am not sure of the significance of that).

It’s strange. This same book was produced both in a semi page-turner format and in a slim, elegant literary format. A quick glance through Google Book Search shows that there’s also a 320 page version floating around, whose font size and line spacing look even more pageturnerlike.

From Mark Haddon’s Wikipedia page, it looks like the book was marketed for both kids and adults. Maybe the reason that I only encountered the version my dad owned, before, was that I usually don’t look at books marketed for kids, but since the library doesn’t discriminate, it gave me the kids’ copy.

It’s an interesting challenge to my preconception to see a book like this. It’s similar to how, 30 or 40 years ago, a lot of literary classics were marketed in mass-market paperbacks (sometimes because they were not yet classics). For instance, I originally read Hundred Years Of Solitude in mass-market paperback form (the same format as most paperback SF novels and thrillers, whereas most literary novels are published in trade paperbacks which are a little taller and wider and have slightly nicer cover stock and glue and such).

If we think of frequent page turns as making a page turner, then the biggest page turners of all are ebooks. Most ebook reader screens will display (at preferred reading fonts) far fewer words than a typical paperback page. I wonder if this makes peoples’ subjective experience of ebooks systematically different from their experience of the same book when it is in paperback.

Also, there are no class differences amongst ebooks. All books look the same. I wonder if this will eventually start to change. I think, in a way, that people might enjoy being able to tell, at a glance, that a book is a literary-type book in its nice trade paper format or that it’s a sci-fi potboiler in a mass-market format with a spaceship embossed on the cover. Maybe those same shorthands will start to develop in ebooks.

Posted in Books | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on September 23, 2011

            Studs Terkel is a guy who spent most of his life recording peoples’ oral histories. In 1973 he published a collection of oral histories called Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. I have just finished reading this book.

It is the best book I’ve read this year. I gained more pleasure and knowledge from it than I did from my two previous best books of the year: Grapes Of Wrath and the plays of Euripides. It is the book that I’ve wanted to read for a year, but didn’t know I wanted to read.

There are 100+ oral histories in the 590 page book. Mostly, the questions are edited out, so the interviewees speak largely without interruption. Areas where the words have been elided or truncated are indicated with italics. But most of the book is unitalicized. The conceit of the book is that it’s people speaking, in their own words, about the things that people mostly don’t say.

This is hammered home by the very first interview, which is a steelworker–a guy who works in a factory making structural shapes or something–who says that his mind shuts off when he goes to work; that there’s no dignity in his job because no intelligence is required for it, and he hopes for the day when no one has to do the kind of mindless, menial labor he’s spent his life doing.

I guess I had always assumed that people eventually came to find some kind of finesse in their work. Every work has some kind of intricacy, even if it’s just about getting through the day, and I thought that every worker eventually came to master that finesse and be proud of their mastership and somehow take pleasure in doing their work.

That was not a correct assumption.

There are many people in this book who enjoy their work: a dentist, a piano tuner, a book binder, a newspaper boy, a teacher, a union organizer, a jockey, a nurse, and tons of others.

But the overwhelming tone coming out of the book is a wail of lament. It’s Mike Lefevre, the 37 year old steel-worker, saying: “It isn’t that the average working guy is dumb. He’s tired, that’s all. I picked up a book on chess one time. That thing laid in the drawer for two or three weeks, you’re too tired. During the weekends you want to take your kid out. You don’t want to sit there and your kid comes up and says, ‘Daddy can I go to the park’ and have your nose in a book. Forget it.”

And this is a guy who has what we’d call a good job nowadays. He’s a factory worker with no college who’s supporting a four person family on a single income, without government aid. It’s the kind of job that made the sixties a prosperous era and the kind of job that we are sad about losing to China.

Most of the people in this book who have that kind of job don’t think it’s great. They think it’s mindless. They think that the pace of work is crushing. They hate being lorded over by foremen and managers. A lot of them are waiting for the day when unions can slow the rate of work or lessen the workweek or when automation can reduce society’s need for drudgework.

Studs Terkel was very liberal, of course, I know that. And the book is clearly slanted to reflect his biases, but it’s interesting as a portrait of what was, in retrospect, one of the most prosperous times in America.

Even then, there were many people who were dissatisfied with what life had handed to them. As you read, you start to notice a lot of commonalities. People hated being dictated to by management. Mr. Lefevre says he’d rather work eight hours of hard labor every day than work five minutes under the eye of a foreman. They hate having their movements restricted, having their breaks dictated to them, hate having to kiss ass to get ahead. There’s a bus driver who’s driven to the edge of fury because he gets written up for having a conversation with his wife when she’s riding the bus.

And they hate their customers. Another interview right at the beginning of the book is a fourteen year old newsboy who hates the people on his route. They steal from him. He has to track them down and somehow force the paper money out of them. There’s a pharmacist who hates the teenagers who come by and rob his store blind. There’s the taxi-driver who racially profiles his clients to avoid being mugged again. There’s a yacht broker who’s disgusted by how all these really affable, high-quality people–his friends–will try to chisel him out of his commission on the sales he arranges for them. There’s a domestic who hates the housewives who won’t show her where the mop is because they want her to clean on her hands and knees.

But most of all, people hate the mindlessness of the work they’re forced to do. And most of them don’t get used to not being required or allowed to think.

There’s one quote by George Orwell that has always struck me with its monstrous injustice. In his essay “Why I Write”, Orwell says: “After the age of about thirty [most human beings] almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all–and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery”.

If this book is to be believed, then most human beings are not smothered under that drudgery. They bear the drudgery and they keep working, but they do not forget that sense that they were brought into this world for better things. Mike LeFevre wishes he could have a twenty hour week so he could really rest and read books and spend time with his kids. A fashion model wishes she’d found something thoughtful to do with her life. A 54 year old press agent wonders if his years of chasing newspaper coverage really added up to anything in the end. A washroom attendant who’s nearing retirement talks about how he wanted to be a short-story writer.

I don’t know whether the solution to this satisfaction is political or psychological. There is little commentary in the book. The first half of the book has more dissatisfied people and the second half has more satisfied people.

Some of the satisfied workers have incredibly difficult and thankless tasks, like a live-in baby nurse who’s nursed over 400 babies through the first few weeks or months or years of their lives. She slept in their rooms and took care of them around the clock and at eighty years old; she spends her whole interview reminiscing about the little babies she’s looked after. There’s a gravedigger who seems to take a deal of satisfaction in the isolation and precision of his work. There are a few entrepreneurs and executives who live to work eighty hours a week. There’s a housewife who–aside from some self esteem problems–describes her delight at being to play around all day and see how the fruits of her work directly benefit the people she loves most. She says that when a baker bakes a pie, some stranger gets to enjoy it, but when she bakes a pie; she gets to see her family enjoy it.

So that kind of makes it seem like there are satisfied people and there are dissatisfied people. There are people who’d find the good in any job and there are people who are doomed (probably through some unfortunate neurological makeup) to never being satisfied with what they have.

But then, there are political differences to. The satisfied workers tend to be self-directed, somehow. Often, they set their own schedules and priorities. Often, they’re entirely free from supervision. And, conversely, even highly paid, highly respected workers like business executives were often dissatisfied with their jobs if that job meant being ordered around by other people. Many times, they were free to select their own customers and to not work with customers who they disliked. Often, their jobs had some degree of craftsmanship. They used their skills to create some sort of finished product.

So who knows, maybe there is a political or technological solution to the kinds of complaints these people had. Maybe you should read the book and find out for yourself.

I haven’t even begun to talk about the numerous literary pleasures of this book. It’s extraordinarily interesting to see the wide varieties of diction and language. It’s fascinating to see how people will describe their routines. And none of these people are archetypes, the way I’ve portrayed them here. They’re all individuals, and many times their individuality will wash out their class- or occupation-based characteristics.

For instance, there’s a story here by a nineteen year old who was raised in a catholic orphanage and now works as a nurse’s aide. And, as you read, it’s clear that her upbringing damaged her pretty severely. She’s not quite a sociopath, but she senses there is something wrong with her sense of empathy. She keeps saying something like, “I’m trying to work it out…I’m trying to work it out…”

There’s a totally bizarre hippy named Charlie Blossom who describes–in rambling free association–how he got fired from his job at a newspaper’s copy desk for having taped-up shoes and for meditating in the middle of the floor and for being late and for leaving early and for taking three hour lunches and having waist-length hair.

So, yeah, this book was overflowing with pleasures of all kinds.

Posted in Books | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

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