More Silly Titles

A friend and I were perusing the "bizarre things" section of this blog the other day, and I was reminded of my various forays into the invention of book titles (for books no one is likely ever to write). In the interest of putting off completion of my taxes, I offer some more of these:

Horatio Alger Smiles at the Apocalypse
Rhythms and Rampages
The Good Plight
Mordants and Their Uses
Enjoying Your Hot Flashes
Table-Rapping for Beginners
Ectoplasm in My Soup
Prior Complaints
Witchcraft and Banana Splits
Night Falls on Three Ladies
Niagara Falls on Crocodile Rock
A Gentle Paranoia
Poisons I Have Known
The Architecture of Modern Kennebunkport
Dick and Jane File Their Income Tax

A Precise Stylist, or Two or Three or Four of Them

In drafting our father's obituary, My Sibling noted that in writing, he was "a precise stylist." On the whole, this was true. The long process of determining the final wording of a generally very satisfactory obituary proved, however, that the remaining members of our nuclear family are also precise stylists who all believe that perfection can be attained in the written word.

A Short Rant

Generally speaking, it's gotten much easier to submit fiction and poetry to journals than it was back in the ... Distant Past When I Spent A Fortune On Postage. For the most part, one uploads the file (often via a system called Submishmash), writes a brief cover letter, and with a few clicks the piece is on its way. Editors apparently find this easy to deal with as well, since they seem to respond more quickly than they used to (either that or I'm experiencing yet another byproduct of time racing by with increasing speed the older I get). There's also less chance of the submission being lost and requiring a series of inquiries.

Some publications want submissions attached to email, which is usually also pretty easy to handle.

What I do not understand is the desire of a few publications to make life more complicated by demanding that writers submit in non-standard formats. Normally, prose is formatted double-spaced, with contact information, word count, and rights offered up at the top of the first page, and with the author's name under the title, etc. Writers learn manuscript format early on because we don't want to annoy editors/look amateurish. We have our manuscripts neatly prepared and waiting on our computers, ready to upload the moment we decide publication X would be a great place to try.

And then we discover that the said publication wants the story copied into the body of an email. Or it wants it single-spaced. Or it wants no sign of the author's name anywhere. Or it wants a particular font used. Or it wants a bio statement in the same document. Or some other damned thing that wastes time and won't be wanted by any other publication.

Why???

These stipulations don't prevent me from submitting, but they do take time I could more productively use for something else. If the special formatting is in case of acceptance, then why not have me reformat if the piece is accepted? I'll feel much more willing at that point.

End of rant.

How Writing Groups Go Astray

Every writing group has its own peculiar character.

Bart turns into a bat and comes to the writing group at Alexis’s. Everyone but Stephanie realizes who the bat is; he perches on the back of the couch and squeaks. Later, Steve turns into a skunk and hides under the couch in embarrassment. Alexis tries to lure him out with a piece of cheese, but Bart eats the cheese. Bart insists on staying, hanging from the ceiling and sitting on the TV while Alexis watches, trying to persuade her to turn the channel to ‘Devil Girl from Mars’. Finally Stephanie brings lentil soup and he vanishes, leaving the apartment deep in guano.

Steve will leap out from under the couch and grab hold of Karla’s leg, refusing to let go until she lets him sleep in the bilge.

Some writing groups are more peculiar than others, of course. This was my third writing group. We often laughed uncontrollably about something called The Kitty Picture; just what The Kitty Picture was, I can no longer quite recall. I imagine it was a work of sentimental art retrieved from a garage sale, but perhaps I am mistaken and it appeared suddenly on a tortilla like a votive image of Elvis or the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Fragment: On Grief or Resignation

With a certain stoic interest, he sat near the rail watching his mother float away as she stood in her long dress in the smaller, furl-masted sailboat, as though she were a figurehead entering an unknown port. Later, when he had grown up and left the sea, he stood in the center of a dusty road and watched his wife's car disappear down the straight; and it seemed to him very much the same.

(No, I'm not sure you can say furl-masted when it's the sails that are furled rather than the mast, but no better phrasing has ever come to mind, either 23 years ago or now. And no, I'm not sure exactly what caused me to write this, although I have a general idea. I would change a few words now, perhaps. It has a different meaning for me now than it originally did.)

Dragon Fails

For the most part, I have Dragon rather well trained to take dictation, but it does require proofreading, especially on people's names and on words like "suppurating" which have a way of appearing as more common words like "separating." Every now and then, however, something truly perverse emerges, like "we behave with unusual incompetence sadistically yet without to obviously changing our outward habits."

That was supposed to be "we behave with unusual and complicitous decorum yet without too obviously changing our outward habits."

Ancient Limericks

A lady who looked like a cat
Used to go out and sit on a mat.
She wondered quite soon
"Should I bay at the moon?"
And her neighbors all wondered at that.

A boy who resembled a dog
Used to play he was dead as a log,
Until one day his dad
Quite enough of him had
And made him get up and go jog.

There once was a monstrous big tanker
Who when pulled by a tug did not thank her,
So the tug said "You bitch!
You belong in a ditch!"
And straightaway stove her and sank her.

A beggar asked me for a dime;
I said "Here, go and have a good time!"
He said "Not on your life,
This all goes to my wife,
Who's locked up for committing a crime!"

Only Two American Literary Cultures?

In the recent article MFA vs NYC,Chad Harbach discusses what he sees as two distinct literary camps or directions in contemporary American fiction. (I link to a short version in Slate while the full version is in N+1.)
Harbach begins with a nod to Mark McGurl's 2009 study, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which analyzes the role of writing programs in postwar American fiction. McGurl's book posits that writing programs have "generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison" (that's from Amazon's product description; I have yet to read the book itself). I hope McGurl doesn't really claim that Nabokov was a product of American creative writing programs, but we'll let that pass.
Harbach himself argues that there exists a self-perpetuating MFA-writer culture centered on short stories written by MFA-grads and published in literary journals, and that the successful MFA-grad becomes a professor in yet another MFA program, thus permanently bypassing any need to earn a living by writing. This type of fiction writer lives in a different world, and publishes for a different audience, than what Harbach calls the NYC writer--the presumably equally serious fiction writer who publishes novels with mainstream New York publishers and (according to him) usually lives in New York.
Harbach doesn't really praise one camp over the other, and maybe that's not so surprising, as Harbach is an MFA-grad and an editor at the literary magazine N+1, yet now belongs to the NYC world as in February his first novel was sold at auction for "about $650,000." While the MFA writers are busy writing short stories that are read mainly by other MFA writers, the NYC writers are cranking out novels that must hook the reader on the first page or so and that the entire book-reading population must find easily digestible. On the other hand, the (few) most successful MFA-writer stories are anthologized repeatedly, whereas novels published by mainstream presses have a short lifespan these days. In other words, either route has its plusses and minuses. If you're a successful MFA writer, you have a secure income from your teaching and your stories appear in various journals read by writers scoping out whether those journals might publish them. If you're a successful NYC writer, you have an insecure income, but more people read you when you bring out a new book.
This neat binary doesn't, of course, entirely describe the world of fiction writers. It has nothing to say about commercial fiction, or about genre fiction of a more literary bent. Writers in those categories seem to live all over the US but either publish with mainstream NY presses or in small, independent, magazines.
As a writer who hasn't fit into any of these camps or categories, I'm not wild about how anything about the American literary world functions. I've published in the same literary journals as the MFA people (although it was probably harder for me back when the MFA world was gaga over dirty realism), and I've published in small genre magazines (although not much of my work qualifies as genre fiction). I write novels that aren't about New York and I've never wanted to live there. Furthermore, now I'm in the convenient position of making a living in academia without teaching in a writing program. This has the advantage of feeding my imagination in ways that don't involve a steady diet of student fiction, but the disadvantage that my job requires a lot of work, which takes time away from writing fiction. Well--while I'd like my fiction to count toward tenure, which it won't, I like having to think about other things academically.
Some writers prefer short fiction, others prefer novels. In the latter 20th century, novelists usually first published some short fiction as a means of developing skill, but they knew there was no longer any money in the short stuff. Today, in a literary world where novels published by established houses are supposed to make an immediate splash or die, there is almost an opposite pressure: a competent writer will find at least a few journals willing to take on the short fiction, but agents and publishers are no longer as open to novels that can't be hyped and rapidly sold to a fairly large public. Harbach seems to conclude that we should all write short fiction for one another, yet isn't that a rather odd conclusion from a writer who spent nine years writing his first novel and then had the good fortune to sell it for a big price? We are not all going to settle down to teach writing to undergrads who want "undemanding classes," and while I agree with him that being a professor is a cushy job in comparison to freelance copyediting (something we have both done for a living), he seems strangely unaware of how few people these days actually get tenure-track jobs.
Ah well. Back to my day's course-prep labors, so that I can feel free to write fiction tonight, or perhaps send out a few query letters.

Writer Personalities.

It's being a busy fall and I've got about 70 papers to grade in addition to a conference paper to write, lectures to prepare, and all the rest of it. But I ran across this rather clever blog post by Lydia Sharp at Writers Unboxed, on categorizing writers according to the personality of their working methods. I'll just say that I am definitely the candlestick maker.

Now if only I really had time to devote to those projects instead of having to grade 70 papers (even though so far they are looking like pretty good papers)!

Publishers Weekly and the Self-Published

Publishers Weekly recently announced its plan to begin quarterly coverage of self-published books, stating that in the past twenty years self-publishing has "produced an explosion of new authors and new books." According to PW, "Nearly 800,000 books were produced in the U.S. last year and were characterized by Bowker as 'nontraditional.' Much of this was self-published and POD." Since "They are books and that is what PW cares about," PW is launching PW Select, "a quarterly supplement announcing self-published titles and reviewing those we believe are most deserving of a critical assessment."
The first supplement will appear in December 2010. The supplements will list all self-published books submitted to PW during the quarter, and 25 (or more) of those titles will be reviewed. There will also be discussion of publishing trends and resources for the self-publisher.
Well, this is an interesting development, and comments from self-publishers have already made for two opposing camps, divided by reactions to the fact that these listings and reviews won't be free--PW charges $149 for a listing and doesn't guarantee a review.
The authors who excoriate PW for charging to be listed (and not guaranteeing reviews) regard this as a huge ripoff, yet another sign that PW is part of the publishing establishment and has no genuine interest in self-published books. Well, I don't think PW would ever argue that they aren't part of the establishment. A review in PW, even a bad one, is pretty much a guarantee that the book will sell. If it's a badly written celebrity book with an unrealistically large advance, it might not earn out its advance, but it's still going to sell. Yet the move to cover self-published titles indicates that PW does have a genuine interest in books from outside the mega-conglomerates. A financial interest in them? A perception that this could be a cash cow? That's harder to say.
It's well known among savvy writers that there are people and organizations out there that make plenty of money out of writing contests. Most writing contests do charge an entry fee, and the fees range from nominal to not-so-nominal. Some of the contests are highly respected and some are just machines bilking the naive. My point here is that the fact that a contest charges an entrance fee is not in itself unethical, it's how the contest is run.
Now, if last year's figure of 800,000 books published in the US is any kind of average, it ain't rocket science that PW has no way of reviewing them all, whether listings are paid or free. PW does not review all that many books in its regular weekly issues, it mainly lists the books. PW is a hefty trade publication and I doubt that most subscribers have time to read all its articles, let alone sift through all the individual listings.
As a writer who may at some point choose to self-publish, my reaction to a $149 processing fee to be listed in PW (which, incidentally, includes a 6-month subscription to the digital version of PW) is that sure, it's burdensome. Many writers don't have much money. But the poorest writers are not self-publishing on paper. If they're self-publishing, they're likely to be doing e-books, which aren't currently eligible to be listed anyway (why not, I'd like to know?). Someone who is self-publishing a traditional physical bound book is spending much more than $149 in production costs. If you're going to put money into producing the physical objects, which will then have to be housed somewhere (your living room?), you'd better be willing to put some additional money into marketing them. Paying $149 to be listed in the industry's major organ may or may not prompt anyone to notice the book, but if you're serious about your work, isn't it a sensible gamble? The face of publishing is changing, in some ways unpleasantly but in other ways perhaps for the good. In some ways writers have less control and fewer options than in the past, and in other ways they have more control and many more options. When it comes to book publishing, the author who opts for self-publication has to make many choices, and the choices that fit one person's work may be unsuitable for another's. It's my guess that some types of book will never benefit much from exposure in PW, but in general it seems to me that self-publishers should not be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Defining the Quiet Novel

Every now and then I've seen the term "quiet novel." Not all that often, because I don't read huge numbers of book reviews or much literary criticism, but from time to time people will describe a book thus. I never thought about it--it seemed like an ordinary enough way of referring to a book, just as one might call a book "lively" or "rumbustious."
Awhile ago an agent commented to me that quiet novels aren't selling well these days. I was a little dubious about that because only a given percentage of the novel-reading population prefers books that are filled with adventure, excitement, and car chases, and the book to which the agent referred didn't strike me as terribly quiet. It featured sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, tears, accusations, theft, and theater. I granted, however, that agents are more in touch with the publishing world than I am these days. In any case, I still took the term "quiet novels" as a simple descriptor.
But then my friend Betty referred to "two very quiet 'portrait' novels" that she felt were similar in tone to one of my projects. More references to quietness? (Let's not get into "portrait" since presumably any reasonably reflective novel revolving around one character could be considered a portrait.) I began to wonder whether "quiet novel" was a genre rather than a mere subjective description. I did a Google search.
Most uses of the term that came up seemed subjective, although fairly congruent with one another.
An Amazon customer review of Anita Shreve's Sea Glass begins "Anita Shreve's latest book, "Sea Glass," is a quiet novel that deals with the universal themes of life, love, loss, hope, beauty, tragedy and death." The fairly in-depth, very positive review ends by saying that the book has "no great surprises and no great suspense. It doesn't delve too deeply into the minds and hearts of the characters involved, but then, we don't always want something that's earthshaking."
In "The Virtue of Quiet: "Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn," Dan Hartland writes, "Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is a quiet novel. [...] very quiet." He mentions, on the whole very favorably, "the book’s peculiarities: a focus on the internal, a modesty of style and of ambition, and a dry, sardonic humour." He notes that while the book's moderation and passivity mirror those of the protagonist, this unity is intentional and the book is, in fact, full of incident. So it's not a book where nothing happens and everything revolves around the protagonist's navel.
Hilari Bell, discussing suitable and less suitable ways of writing of novel climaxes, refers to books in which "The climax doesn't match the story. You see this most commonly in a quiet novel about tangled relationships...that ends with a car crash (or a kidnapping, or a natural disaster) and the protagonist suddenly finds herself struggling for survival."
Lynne Griffin's blog post "Literary Lingo Recap," which nicely defines various current buzzwords used by agents, simply defines a "quiet novel" as a literary novel, especially one without a strong plot. (She defines literary novels as usually being more character-driven than plot-driven, and more about the writing than the story, which is a common definition of literary novels in texts geared toward commercial fiction. There are, however, many books fitting that description that more "literary" readers would simply call mainstream novels.) While I think that overall Griffin's definitions are useful, this one just doesn't cut it for me. Lots of literary novels would never be called quiet, including some that aren't terribly strong on plot. A picaresque literary novel, for instance, is unlikely to be either quiet or (by definition) plot-driven. Literary novels cover a lot of ground, after all. There are literary novels with strong plots, nonexistent plots; with experimental narration and with traditional narration; with deep characterization and without much focus on character; the main thing is that a literary novel is not a commercial novel, although occasionally one may belong, to some extent, to one of the genres typical of commercial fiction, and of course every now and then a literary novel is a commercial success. Should we distinguish between a genre called the literary novel (which might be mainly quiet novels) and what's known as literature (Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, Wuthering Heights) when we're not using the term literature to mean sales brochures ("I'll leave you some littachur") or academic writing ("the literature")?
The blog post Shantaram & the idea of a Noisy Novel mentions the quiet novel somewhat as a foil to noisiness. The blogger opens with a conversation had with a novelist friend: "We were talking about what it was that publishers might be wanting at the moment, and she told me that the days of the quiet novel were largely over." The blogger continues, "I take the quiet novel to mean a beautifully written, often short-ish narrative in which not much happens. Stylism is the quiet novel's main event: plotting is barely perceptible, characterisation is but a ripple on the surface on the writer's prose. The focus is often on transactions of a personal, intimate nature between a small group of people living within a softly-spoken coo-ee of each other." (She then discusses noisiness and hyperrealism, mainly in the context of the Australian novel.) This prompts some good reader comments on quiet versus noisy, and the blogger's response that "Jane Austen and Jeanette W[interson] weren't exactly what I had in mind as examples of the quiet novel, tho the quiet novel has links with a tradition of quietism focusing on the personal, domestic, intimate life etc. However, both JA and JW feature strong characterisation and elements of social or aesthetic analysis. Also -- most of JA's novels *are* strongly plotted. [...] Whereas the quiet novel, at worst, is often more like a collection of loosely-related scenes." After a few more reader comments, she says "I think the point is just simply to do with strong vs weak narrativisation, and whether it's time for a revival of strong narrative, which is possibly more allied with pulp fiction and film at present." So for this well-read and intelligent blogger, a quiet novel is likely to be a dull and poorly plotted thing that by definition doesn't really grab the reader. This is not someone who equates "quiet novel" with "literary novel;" rather, she wants lively, strongly plotted novels that are better written than Shantaram, a book about which she has mixed feelings.
Confused by so many different, even if somewhat related, uses of the term "quiet novel," I asked Betty what she thought. Was it a genre or a subjective evaluation? What was her personal understanding of the term? Even if it wasn't going to be clear exactly what everyone else might mean, at least I could find out what Betty meant in relation to my own project. Betty responds:

Quiet novels to me are those written with emotional and intellectual constraint. A quiet novel keeps the reader on an even keel because the style tends toward calmness. Events may be very dramatic, but they're described with restrained prose so that the reader isn't feeling emotionally pulled. Stimulating and challenging questions may arise, but because they're written with understatement, the reader doesn't feel stirred up intellectually. In quiet novel, I as a reader, feel more like an observer. This doesn't mean I'm not drawn into the story or that I don't emotionally connect with the characters, but rather that I'm not experiencing it with great dramatic pulls. I feel compassion for characters, but the writing doesn't make my pulse race or my body twitch. My heart doesn't break although I understand the heartbreak the character is feeling.

Betty cites some comments on specific quiet novels: "[Peter] Taylor as always writes in the most measured, calm manner, so that the surprises and the humbling human understanding he so effortlessly throws in seem barely to ruffle the surface." (Kirkus Review)
"A Summons to Memphis is like a leisurely port wine sipped slowly and with pleasure beneath a blackjack oak." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
"Serious, beautiful and affecting, what makes Stoner so impressive is the contained intensity the author and character share." (Irving Howe) ". . .[T]he passion of the writing [in Stoner is] masked by coolness and clarity of intelligence." (John McGahern)
Betty concludes:

I hope that gives you some idea of what I mean by a quiet novel. It's no doubt true that unless you're already a well established literary personage, then getting quiet novels published today is likely more difficult than getting "less restrained" work accepted for publication. Wolf Hall, for example, pushes and pulls the reader emotionally and intellectually. There's nothing subtle about Mantel's writing. She writes with visceral descriptions that can make you ache from the pain she's inflicted on a character. The opening scene is extremely dramatic, steeped in physical cruelty. This, I think, is what the publishing world is saying the public wants.
I, of course, don't think that's necessarily so.
There are likely many variations on how to understand what quiet means, but I hope this gives you a better idea of what I was referring to.

And yes, that gives me a better idea what at least one reader has in mind. Whether Betty will continue to think the tale is quiet, and whether others will think so, remains unknown.

More on Novels and the World of Work

Awhile back I posted some ruminations on whether recent literary fiction has much to say about work. It wasn't my own observation that literary fiction tends to bypass work, and I hadn't previously thought much about it, but my literary friends are showing a tendency to disagree with the notion that literary fiction does not deal with work. Betty Dietz, for example, writes:

I'm not so sure that work has fallen out of favor in novels over the past twenty years. I think the opposite is true. I think that in literature now more characters are engaged in specific jobs and that their employment is used as theme, for character development or, at the least, as an important point of reference on which the story is built. Off the top of my head and from the stack of most recently read novels, I've thought of several books that use work as an integral part of their character and/or thematic development. In Stoner, John Williams immerses his protagonists in academia (the University of Missouri in Columbia). A Summons to Memphis, by Peter Taylor, is the story about a rare book collector and editor who is the son of a lawyer, and the brother of two sisters who are real estate managers. In Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee, the story is told by a biographer researching a book about the writer John Coetzee who has died--it's a fictional autobiography. The researcher interviews five people and each of these people have specific jobs that are relevant to the telling of the story. Coetzee's Disgrace is about an academic who loses his job because of a scandal involving one of his students. The Stain by Phillip Roth is also about an academic. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is about Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer who worked his way up from being the son of a blacksmith to being the chief adviser to Henry VIII. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer is about a businessman who spends his weekends and holidays being a gentleman farmer in South Africa. A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry drags us through the trenches with a WWI soldier.

I could think of more, but that's enough. Work, I think, is an important component of contemporary literature[...]

It must be confessed that I have not read a single one of these novels; I am hoping that I'll have somewhat more time to read fiction in the coming years, given that graduate school is over. The fact that Betty has read these is a recommendation in itself. In any case, perhaps the essay upon which I originally commented drew on an idiosyncratic pool of novels. Further thoughts from readers are encouraged.

Warning: Characters at Work

Subsequent to my post on fictional characters and their ways of earning a living, I find that my mind keeps meandering back to this topic. Whether in any productive way, I'm not entirely certain. But it's seeming like an important thing to think about.
This may, of course, simply be the result of my own history of earning a living in numerous ways. It would be a fine thing if I had forced myself to take notes on the minutiae of all the different jobs I've had, but of course that always seemed just intolerable at the time, even when I recognized that I ought to be noting the peculiarities for future reference. So often, one's gainful employment is largely a matter of getting through the day and getting the paycheck, even when one has taken on less than appealing jobs in order to benefit one's fiction. Besides, I am one of those people who isn't really very good at taking detailed notes, because I only jot down the most vital ideas, or else only what strikes me as new information. This means, among other things, that I don't have vast quantities of notes to draw upon when preparing art history lectures, but it also has its effect on my recall of how the various offices and factories of my working life operated.
All the same, my recall is probably sufficient, aided by spots of internet and library research, to provide convincing employment for some of my characters. It's important to get into that mysterious trance-like state where things float to the surface, and I'm pretty good at telling my conscious mind to go play somewhere else while I encourage things to come together. I'm all in favor of whatever works.
In the meantime, Wikipedia has done a fine job of educating me on the workings of the diesel engine and other things that I never really understood very well.

Titles from Hell

It being near the end of the school year, my students and I would all like to be let loose. That and the hot weather are probably responsible for my spewing forth yet more book titles that do not correspond to any book I ever hope to write. (It's so much harder coming up with titles for books one actually does want to see in print.)

Downcast and Dreary
The Damned are Among Us
Saints and Their Specialties
Does Your Dog Talk?
Why Do Fish Sing?
Clouds Over the Hill Fort
Sands of Destruction
James and the Salubrious Bat
How to Build Your Own Ziggurat
The Big Book of Interfaith Baptismal Rituals
Cannibals for Supper
The Land that Freud Forgot
You Will Go to the South Pole
Of Dreams and Dadaists
Rodchenko Photographs a Dam
Why Is Your Child Deranged?
Insignificant Others
Love in the Age of Big Oil
Of Monopolies and Mutants
Raising Vipers in Your Own Home

Further Perverse Titles

Some of us can never let well enough alone, so after my rediscovery of so many silly imaginary titles from so long ago, I could not rest without inventing more.
I do not claim that they are actually any good. In fact, I am sure they are not. Some of them, however, were inspired by actual titles on my shelf. (Special bonus points to readers who can point out those inspired by Roman Jakobson titles.)

Land of Oblivion
Oblivion for Fun and Profit
Profit Will make You Fat
The Joy of Fat
File Clerks of the French Revolution
Significant Chasms
What Is Sex For?
The Meaning and Wonder of Modernism
Symbolic Slovakia
Balkanization for Medical Practitioners
Decades of Doom
Recognizing Global Catastrophes
Tears in Literature
My Futurist Anxieties
Utopian Territories
The Power of Euphemism
Aircraft Carriers I Have Known

Perverse New Titles

Rummaging through a very, very old folder, I ran across a list of titles for imaginary books. I'm not sure what was on my mind when I invented them, but they include the following:

Geese Before the Tide
Depression in the Andes
Foxtails in My Heart
Buzzards in the Snow
Fame and Loathing in Xanadu
The Magic Eraser
Shards of Tranquility
Cathedrals In Space
Arachnid Enteritis
Forgotten Are the Fallen Few
Fewmets in my Tea
Martine Goes Shopping
Famine Comes on Wednesday
Meditation for Money
The Menhir in the Moon
No Time for Noodles
Tantalus in Turkey

...and a boxed set:

Good Titles I Have Known
Good Titles I Have Written
Good Titles I Have Forgotten

How Do Fictional Characters Earn a Living, Anyway?

The author John Lanchester observes that very little fiction these days deals with work. Back in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, quite a bit of fiction did. Lanchester notes that the oeuvres of Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and other writers of the time have a great deal to say about the working lives of the characters, whereas today one mainly gets a sense of characters' work in police procedurals and women's popular fiction.

This intrigued me. I hadn't really thought about it, other than to occasionally ponder my own characters' relationship with work, which has largely had to do with whether their work (if mentioned at all) was personally meaningful or merely a means of support. This is similar to how Lanchester describes women's popular fiction, despite my not being a writer of that (rather broad) genre. Is this because I'm female? Surely women aren't more concerned than men about whether their work is meaningful. Still, I've never thrown work and employment into fiction purely on the grounds that nearly everyone 16-70 or so works in some fashion (paid or not) unless unable to. It has to bear some relation to the story.

Lanchester thinks that the general lack of literary fiction dealing with work is due to the complex nature of so much of what we do for a living these days. He says:

"Television can give us a cartoon version of a barrister’s work, or a forensic scientist’s work, or a doctor’s work; for a fuller and more real version, the writer would have to do a huge amount of explanation of the complex realities of their different working lives. But you can’t explain in fiction, not like that and not at the necessary length."

There's some truth to that. We don't generally want great big long explanations about much of anything in our fiction these days; we don't even usually want descriptions of rooms or scenery to go on for more than a sentence or two. Yet people do like to learn about things and to find out details. To quote Lanchester again,

"I’d been reading about how most countries used to drive on the left, because it’s the logical side to get on a horse for right-handed people, and about how almost all the countries that still drive on the left had a strong British influence and are islands. I was mulling over these things and then it struck me: this couldn’t go in a novel. A novel with a disquisition on the difference between driving on the left and on the right would be… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be in a hurry to read it."

Here, I think Lanchester isn't reckoning on the ways in which a crafty novelist could incorporate the said disquisition. It could be done quite interestingly, given the right story and characters. Someone like Jaroslav Hašek's Švejk could have discoursed on it most amusingly. Hašek wasn't exactly the average modern novelist, but I'll bet you that I too could get a character to expound on the topic without boring readers to tears. (All right, I don't think I'm the average novelist either.) I think that a major reason we don't have many literary novels today dealing with people's working lives is that writers are hesitant to write about either work they've actually done themselves or work they've had no personal experience of. I don't think fiction is really devoid of descriptions of the kinds of entry-level jobs most of us have had, but we don't usually (I think) write about our office jobs, factory jobs, or academic jobs. If we're still in those jobs, we tend to worry what might happen to us if the book is a success (if it's a short story, there's little cause to worry since no one from work is likely to discover it, but short fiction offers less scope for writing about work). Christina Stead's House of All Nations was, if I remember correctly, written while she was working in banking but not published until later. I don't think most people would have the nerve to publish something like that while relying on a paycheck from the source of the material.

Lanchester states:

"The world is full of interesting things that don’t fit inside traditional fictional forms. That is because a novel has to seem true. It doesn’t have to be factually or literally true and the kind of truth it seeks can be fantastical, wild, unearthly, illogical, dreamlike, incoherent, even mad — but it does have to feel true."

This is indeed the case, but I think that usually one has to have a good (often current) sense of a job or workplace in order to convey that feeling of truth. I suspect writers often block out the wonderful weird details of our recollections of jobs past because, of course, we feel that writing is our real job.

Carver and Lish

Once upon a time, in world far far away, I began submitting my fiction to literary magazines. I'd read stacks of books on becoming a writer, although most of them seemed rather unhelpful as regards writing the kind of fiction I had in mind.
Gradually, although I did succeed in publishing more fiction than most people I knew (in part because I was very diligent about both writing and going to the post office), I began to realize that something called "dirty realism" was what American editors really wanted. Never mind that they might say they were open to all kinds of fiction so long as it was good, "dirty realism" was what they really thirsted for. I learned that a guy named Raymond Carver was the king of dirty realism, that his acolytes were many, and that by god, if you wanted to write some other kind of short literary fiction, you had better pretend you were from a foreign country, or at least set your tale in one. Friends suggested that I adopt a Spanish pseudonym, but I resisted.
Another name I saw mentioned time and time again was that of Gordon Lish. Lish, who was Carver's editor, was quite the arbiter of taste in those days--the heir to Maxwell Perkins, it seemed, except that he never sounded anywhere near as nice as Perkins. I always had the feeling that Perkins was the kind of guy you'd like to have work with you, especially, if like Thomas Wolfe, you had trouble editing yourself down to a readable length. Lish, on the other hand, gave a more severe impression. I never had even the slightest fantasy of working with Lish (perhaps because I found most dirty realism singularly dull reading), although clearly many writers found him helpful.
Of late, articles have been coming out detailing Lish's editing of Carver. Apparently Lish chopped quite a bit out of Carver's work, not just in a fat-cutting operation, but completely changing tone, characterizations, and endings. James Campbell discusses the editing in The Times Literary Supplement, and none other than horror writer Stephen King provides an account of it in his review of Carol Sklenicka's recent biography of Carver for the New York Times.
I confess I find the whole thing rather shocking. A good editor can improve a piece of writing, or at least some pieces of writing, but changing the entire thrust of the piece? Reading Campbell's and King's articles, I began to wonder whether perhaps I would have liked Carver's writing had Lish not (as King suggests) taken the heart out.

A little addendum (I just ran across this):
“...neo-realistic minimalism--a dull mode starring writers like Anne Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver. Because of its barren anti-adjectival, anti-adverbial unwittiness, this style also fails to win audiences--but it is easy to teach in creative writing classes to a clientele with little literary background or allusive competence. At the moment, while Latin America[n] literature continues to march forward, American fiction is becalmed.” Elizabeth Dipple, The Unresolvable Plot: Reading Contemporary Fiction (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1988), 11.
How I would have loved to have seen that assessment back in 1988!

More Linguistic Explorations

In my last post I mentioned Geoffrey K. Pullum's witty and instructive analyses of certain aspects of Dan Brown's literary style. Today I am pleased to present a guest post by a reader who, while much entertained by Pullum's criticisms in general, was (like me) a bit surprised by one of them. We follow up on the Slumbering Moa's earlier anonymous comment with a more thorough investigation of the phrase in question.

The Slumbering Moa writes:

Let us stipulate, as the lawyers say, that Dan Brown is not a great prose stylist. Nevertheless, I think one of Pullum’s criticisms of him is unfair. Specifically, Pullum faults Brown for writing that “a handful of scientists moved briskly about,” since “‘moving briskly about’ is a cliché.” For Pullum, Brown’s use of the phrase discordantly evokes a humorous passage from Stephen Potter concerning a fictional character who enjoys one-upmanship: “To a definitely older man, of his still older wife he would comment that he was glad she ‘was still moving very briskly about.’" Pullum goes on to explain:

The remark was of course intended to be deeply unsettling if not shattering: to say of someone that they are "moving very briskly about" implies that they are extraordinarily old and infirm, and it is a wonder they can even take a step without their walker. It simply isn't something you would normally say about ordinary people who have a spring in their step, or about scientists walking from one office to another in the foyer of a research center. It's a wonderful example of Dan Brown's knack for coming up with exactly the phrase not to use.

Pullum’s criticism has two basic premises. First, the phrase “moved briskly about” is a cliché. Second, it implies extraordinary age and infirmity, making it bizarrely inappropriate to apply to working scientists.

In my earlier comment, I noted that Pullum ignores the word “still.” This word is key to the humorous effect Potter achieves, and Brown does not use it. Pullum also ignores the word “very,” which Potter employs to intensify this effect. Again, Brown does not use it.

But is Brown’s phrase a cliché? A little googling does not produce overwhelming evidence for Pullum's claim. First, let’s look at some raw numbers. I did four searches: "moved briskly about" (Brown's exact words), with 121,000 results; "move briskly about," with 4,500; "moves briskly about" with 699; and "moving briskly about," with 18,600. Given the millions of search results one often gets from Google, these numbers do not seem particularly impressive for a supposed cliché. Furthermore, when you eliminate those results from the search for "moved briskly about" that include the word "preacher," thus removing one particular joke that appears online repeatedly, it brings the number down from 121,000 to 47,600. By contrast, the phrase “proof of the pudding” produced 253,000 results, while its ubiquitous corruption “proof is in the pudding” produced 554,000.

A search for “moved briskly about” and “cliché” together produces only one result which identifies the former as an example of the latter, namely Pullum’s own post on Language Log. All the others simply had the two things appearing somewhere on the same page together. Again, by contrast, a search for “proof is in the pudding” and “cliché” together produces result after result noting this phrase’s undisputed status as a cliché.

Moving beyond the numbers, what do the search results themselves reveal about usage?

The top result from the search for "moved briskly about" was Pullum's article on Language Log, quoting Dan Brown. Twenty of the top thirty results were for the joke I mentioned above, which includes the sentence, "The preacher was wired for sound with a lapel mike, and as he preached, he moved briskly about the platform." The others included: "Desktop Calendar 2.3.7 moved briskly about," from a page that won't come up when I click on it; "the 58-year old moved briskly about the stage" from a review of a performance by Robin Williams (one of only two top results from all four searches that I thought supported Pullum's claims, however weakly); "the new officers of the 4th Battalion of New Jersey Volunteers, moved briskly about on their new errands," from a book on the Revolutionary War; "Uniformed and plain-clothed personnel moved briskly about their tasks," from an online excerpt of what appeared to be a romance novel; "The nurses who moved briskly about smiled at the young man in an ordinary suit who had come among them," from a book on psychology; "She moved briskly about the yard, taking things from the line," from "When the Bayou Overflows" (1895) by Alice Dunbar; and "Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly about the hearth to and fro," from Ulysses by James Joyce. There were also two irrelevant results, in which "about" did not form a phrase with "moved briskly" but rather with the words following it (e.g., “the handpiece is moved briskly about ½ inch above the skin”).

I did not get more convincing support for Pullum's assertions when I changed the tense to "move," the top ten results being: "Nurses move briskly about the room, checking the conditions of the various patients," from a site on "Care after Surgery"; "It is difficult to move briskly about the kitchen weighted down by sixty pounds of baby," from "Cooking Madness" by Carol Castellano; "She could move briskly about, while he seems fixed to the spot," from a teaching guide to Macbeth; "To move briskly about. Used chiefly in calling country dances," from Dictionary of American Regional English; "males were seen to move briskly about with the tail turned sharply at an angle of about 90 degrees from the body," from a scholarly article on the courtship habits of salamanders; "Staff officers and couriers began to move briskly about," from an account of a Civil War battle; "it is well that they move briskly about their tasks," from two different pages on microbial parasites; "Their inhabitants move briskly about in Fords," from a Time magazine article from 1928 on the cities of Egypt; and one irrelevancy (“They do, however, move briskly – about two steps per second.”)

"Moves briskly about" yielded: "the sun moves briskly about the center of our galaxy," from a book on Einstein's theory of relativity; "The player's young king moves briskly about his town," from a review of a video game; two more versions of the preacher joke; "Hoffa moves briskly about the suite as he finishes putting on his clothes," from Life magazine (1959); "She moves briskly about her laboratories," from Time magazine (1933); "Mr. Buono, who has been called J.B. for as long as he can remember, moves briskly about campus with a friendly greeting to all," from a New York Times story about a 95-year-old (the second arguably supporting citation for Pullum); "He doesn't have an actual office but moves briskly about the plant, trouble-shooting or trying out some new production theory," from an article in the Indiana Star; and "Invisibly he moves briskly about the room as if he owned the place," from a poem posted to the site Neopoet. Once again, there was also an irrelevant result (“moves briskly about a fish trap”).

What about "moving briskly about"? The first result is again Pullum himself, followed by: "An American in Paris, Moving Briskly About Town," the title of a New York Times review of Stanley Karnow's Paris in the 50s; "Maude was moving briskly about the room, putting it into the beautiful order that Mother insisted on," from "A Fortunate Mistake" (1904) by Lucy Maud Montgomery; "One need not have visions of unattached neurons moving briskly about the brain," from a blog post; "Through her bright windows we could see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room," from "The Woman Who Tried to be Good" (1913) by Edna Ferber; "In all these prairie villages, the Burrowing Owl is seen moving briskly about," from the Audubon Society's website; "The group is to start moving briskly about the room," from a "community-building exercise"; yet another version of the preacher joke; "Grace was constantly surrounded by people moving briskly about," from "The Secret to Happier Meal Times"; and "It seemed as if hardly any time had passed when she heard the household moving briskly about, and breakfast preparing downstairs," from The Woodlanders (1887) by Thomas Hardy.

These seem to me to represent fairly diverse uses that are not at all suggestive of cliché. Admittedly, when you read them all together like this, the cumulative effect is to make the phrase seem tired, but I think that's inherent in the exercise. But cliché or not, the phrase, judging by these examples, hardly bears the unavoidable connotations of age and infirmity that Pullum suggests.

Ultimately, Brown’s crime in this instance seems to be that he used an innocuous expression that happened to remind Pullum of a favorite passage from a writer he much prefers.

In closing, I might add that in one of my students' papers we get the Brown-like (or perhaps merely journalistic) construction "Portrayed through sculpture is the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, along with her son Eros, also known as Cupid."

Style and Popular Fiction

I've been amusing myself recently with items from the linguistics blog Language Log (latest posts here). One of the topics it has covered in years past is the writing style of Dan Brown, who for those who don't know is the author of The Da Vinci Code and other apparently quite similar thrillers. I don't follow present-day popular culture any more closely than I can help (just as I try not to tailgate on the freeway--it could be hazardous to my health), but as an art historian, I couldn't help hearing about Brown's book, if only because art historians fight an endless battle with students who think that Leonardo da Vinci should be called "Da Vinci." (Being a specialist in modernism, I've stepped back a bit from this fight because I have the opposite problem, that of training my students to stop calling more recent artists by their first names. And not just artists. I just graded a paper that repeatedly, although not consistently, referred to the philosopher Edmund Burke as "Edmund.")
Well--not to digress too far onto the vagaries of students--these pieces, written by Geoffrey K. Pullum, are highly entertaining even for those of us who haven't bothered to read anything by Brown. I am not linking to every last one of the posts, as there are many and some of them are a bit tangential to Brown's stylistic quirks, but this is a good sampling:
The Dan Brown Code
The Sixteen First Rules of Fiction
Dan Brown Still Moving Very Briskly About
Renowned Author Dan Brown Staggered Through His Formulaic Opening Sentence
Learning the Ropes in the Trenches with Dan Brown
Now, while I thought Pullum's observations were quite funny (not to mention that they have taught me a few things I didn't know about what Mark Twain might have called The Awful English Language had he been writing from a German perspective), it did rapidly strike me that prior to his encounters with Brown, Pullum had evidently escaped acquaintance with the language of American popular fiction.
I don't read all that much popular fiction myself, and very little of what I do read falls into the blockbuster category, but I've read enough of that sort of thing that the quotations from Brown's books didn't sound odd to me. My reaction was not so much "My god, the man has execrable style" (after all, I read much worse style every time I grade papers) but "Hmm, sounds like typical bestseller schlock style." I was a bit surprised, in fact, that Pullum was so appalled at Brown's journalism-inspired habit of saying things like "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered..." It's not a construction I would normally use in my fiction, but then I don't write Brown's kind of fiction.
This might not have struck me so forcefully had I not recently been pawing through a stack of books on writing. A few of them have been on academic writing, but some of them have been on fiction writing, because I am well aware that plotting is hard for me and I thought I might investigate what other writers have said about it.
This bit of investigation quickly reminded me why it has been so many years since I've read books on writing fiction: books on writing fiction are almost invariably designed to teach the reader how to write somewhat like Dan Brown. Whether it be a question of style or plotting, the general sort of thing Brown does is held up as an example of how to write.
I can see why. Brown may have crummy style, but it's vigorous crummy style. When books on fiction writing give examples of good and bad writing, the bad writing is always remarkably inert. Writers like Brown (and to be fair I don't think I've seen a writing text use him as an example, but other thriller writers are quoted liberally) carry the reader along with their energetic words. It may be the energy of an uncoordinated guy playing Whack-a-mole, but that kind of thing clearly appeals to a lot of people.
Since I'm not one of those people, I look at such writing guides and sigh. There may be useful tips in there even for writers of literary fiction, but it's hard to pick them out when the authors are exhorting us to write cliffhangers.
The analyses of Brown's flawed phrasing brought a couple of additional thoughts to mind. We learn to write from the writing we read, and so if popular fiction is full of mangled metaphors and poorly thought out phrasing, how can I expect my students to do better? After all, we're all seeing so many plurals written with apostrophes that it's hard to avoid writing those even when we've always known better. I've had to reality check myself on things I know are correct (I first found Language Log when I felt compelled to verify that "simplistic," a word I am constantly telling students to look up, does not mean "simple").
But also, after looking through all the things that Brown does wrong, I began to get very nervous. There's a general notion that I write pretty well, but the thought of having Geoffrey K. Pullum copyedit me makes me unusually anxious.