Remember that song…?

“Video Killed the Radio Star”?

 

Well, we’ve been talking for years about how the Internet, film, and television are hacking away at the already-fragile bindings of the book, and yet a quick glance at the new season of film, it seems that some of the best visual storytellers are still taking their inspiration from books. Perhaps this is as it’s always been–good films require good stories.  Part of the mythology of writing a great story for film is that you don’t actually have to be a good writer on the sentence level (see The History of Violence’s Josh Olson’s hilarious demolition of that myth right here), but I was struck by the sheer number of literary masters whose work will be gracing cinemas in the next several months:

McCarthy's classic soon to hit the big screen.

 Cormac McCarthy’s  The Road
I don’t know anyone who read this book who wasn’t completely absorbed by it, haunted, skittish, depressed, and, finally, exultant at reading such a good book. It’ll quickly skyrocket to the top of your favorite post-apocalyptic reads.

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Another one of those books that I read so long ago that it would probably be new to me if I read it again: but I do remember this. It kicked arse.

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
Need I even say it? Let the wild rumpus start!

In the Lighthouse universe, we’ve heard recent news that our own Nick Arvin’s next novel, The Reconstructionist, has sold to Fox Entertainment for a dramatic TV series, and workshopper and board member Carleen Brice’s novel Orange Mint & Honey is to be made into a movie on Lifetime Movie Network. So it’s confirmed: video is not killing the writing star. Not yet, anyway.

There are a number of other examples, dear reader (I know you’re out there–I saw you that one time), so do edify the rest of us.

 

Legitimation by fiction

Just as Amanda needs a version the Misfit at her writing desk, threatening to make her a “good writer” by (metaphorically) shooting her every minute of her life, most writers, if we confess it, are paralyzed for minutes, weeks, months, or years by the question: Does writing matter? It’s not that we don’t believe in the art of literature, or that our allegiances waver, it’s that nearly everything in our culture has been mounting for years an argument against the indispensability of literature and the arts. We understand that what writers are left with, most often, is the notion that practicing their art is the height of self-indulgence.  Sure, it can be pretty, but is it really necessary?

The other day, in preparing for a class I’m teaching at DU on Lorrie Moore (who–have I mentioned?–is coming to Lighthouse in a couple of weeks!), I assigned her story, “Dance in America.” The story follows a dancer who, through a grant, is visiting a school near an old, dear friend, Cal.  His situation captures perfectly one of the truly human forces at work in our framing of the debate:

 Cal’s son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. His whole life is a race with medical research. “It’s not that I’m not for the arts,” says Cal. “You’re here–money for the arts brought you here. That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to fund the arts. It’s wonderful; you’re wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really–I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.”

(The rest of the story can be heard here, if you’re so inclined.)

We all know the emotional fuel here, and we quickly capitulate, most of us, to the notion that writers doing their work are most certainly not curing cancer. You could argue that the cultural shift away from, well, culture, has been evolving for years, and while we’re somewhat inured to it, I’ve sensed an uptick in worry over this trajectory lately. A sampling from the Dupree nightstand backs this up:

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers. (William M. Chace, “The Decline of the English Department,”  from The American Scholar)

The “why” of this decline is addressed by Mark Slouka in a recent Harper’s article, “Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School“:

Many years ago, my fiancée attempted to lend me a bit of respectability by introducing me to my would-be mother-in-law as a future Ph.D. in literature. From Columbia, I added, polishing the apple of my prospects. She wasn’t buying it. “A doctor of philosophy,” she said. “What’re you going to do, open a philosophy store?”

A spear is a spear—it doesn’t have to be original. Unable to come up with a quick response and unwilling to petition for a change of venue, I ducked into low-grade irony. More like a stand, I said. I was thinking of stocking Kafka quotes for the holidays, lines from Yeats for a buck-fifty.

And that was that. I married the girl anyway. It’s only now, recalling our exchange, that I can appreciate the significance—the poetry, really—of our little pas de deux. What we unconsciously acted out, in compressed, almost haiku-like form (A philosophy store?/I will have a stand/sell pieces of Auden at two bits a beat), was the essential drama of American education today.

It’s a play I’ve been following for some time now. It’s about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. It’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can’t. It’s about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production.

The play’s almost over. I don’t think it’s a comedy.

 And if this trend can and does leave us humorless, as we see critical thought sinking with its concrete feet to the bottom of the lake, we’re cowed when we think back to Cal and his son with cystic fibrosis.

I was mad at myself, when I went back and re-read it after ten years, for having assigned “Dance in America” to students for a session that was going to focus on narrative drive and central dramatic questions. The fate of Cal’s son, Eugene, is not in question in the story. It’s understood that the cystic fibrosis will ultimately win. There’s no central dramatic question for the dancer–or at least that’s what a first scan of the story would tell you. She swoops in, teaches a few dance workshops with the students, sees the heartbreaking plight of her good friend Cal’s family, and leaves. Crap, I thought. 

But then I thought again. The story ends in a moment that absolutely captures what the arts have to contribute to life, even the life of someone whose survival relies on science. After dinner each night is “dance time,” in which the family moves into the other room and dances until Eugene is tired enough to go to sleep. The story ends triumphantly (Kenny Loggins soundtrack notwithstanding):

“Come here, honey,” I say, going over to him. I am thinking not only of my own body here…. I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn: this is how we offer ourselves, enter Heaven, enter speaking. We say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here, this is all and what and everything it’s managed–this body, these bodies, that body. So what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?

“Stand next to me,” I say, and he does, looking up at me with his orange warrior face. We step in place: knees up, knees down. “This is it! This is it!” Then we go wild and fling our limbs to the sky.

Ultimately we meet a dancer who’s negotiating the same doubts as most writers: how has she spent her life? And through the action of the story, the connection between the dancer and this sick boy, we get our answer: science is not going to save Eugene. Art is helping him live the life he has. Our dramatic question, a philosophical one, is answered with four pairs of arms flung toward the heavens.

 

Nine Reasons to Read War and Peace

When I started reading War and Peace, I only had two reasons. The first had to do with superstition.  A few years before, I’d been reading Anna Karenina when I had one of those creative bursts a writer doesn’t fully appreciate until it’s over.  Then, after the muse had retreated, I began to entertain various gambits: combining ginseng and Red Bull; downing cups of strong coffee (with handfuls of antacids); reading books about creativity; ordering illegal brain stimulants on the Internet; and finally, embarking on War and Peace, a book nearly as heavy as my asthmatic cat, at around 1400 pages.  Tolstoy, I’d decided, was my magic feather.

My other reason was less complicated. War and Peace is like the Mount Everest of books.  I wanted to be able to say I’d read it. 

As it turns out, Tolstoy is not my magic feather.  Alas.  But the experience of reading War and Peace is worthwhile, and for more than just the bragging rights:

 

Experiencing Reading ADHD May be Good for Your Writing.

I used to be a one-book kinda gal. (Not to be confused with Hickenlooper’s One Book, One Denver program).  Whatever book I was reading, that was it. I stayed with it until the end, never straying into the pages  of another writer’s work. Even the occasional magazine article made me feel guilty if I was in the middle of a novel; like I was somehow cheating on the narrative by diverting my attention elsewhere. And it had a noticeable effect on my writing. I started to sound like whatever author I happened to be reading at the time. Kent Haruf gives the narrative voice in my head a slow country drawl, Margaret Atwood turns me into a sinister fabulist, and Michael Chabon gives all my characters otherworldly smarts and quirky charm. I went through a phase of reading every Lorrie Moore story I could get my hands on, and noticed a dramatic increase in my use of parentheses. All of this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I am human; I learn by example–monkey see, monkey do, as it goes. My love for writing comes from my love of reading. And after all, if we can’t learn from the Greats, whom can we learn from? But in the last several months, my one-book-at-a-time rule has fallen by the wayside, and I’ve found myself entrenched in as many as seven books all at once. Jon Krakauer has fought for space in my head with Steinbeck, Anne Enright, Chinua Achebe, Charles D’Ambrosio and Robert Heinlein, on any given day. Not to mention the gazillions of short story anthologies I own and pick up on a whim, New Yorker and Sun articles, and whatever internet web news happens to catch my easily-distracted-and-highly- prone-to-procrastination eye (Kanye did what?) It’s a writerly cacophony, and  it has made a marked difference on my writing. With all those writers’ voices drowning each other out, there seems to finally be room in my head for my own voice to develop, and rather than any one voice strongly influencing my writing, they seem to be working in harmony to support a (hopefully) new and unique style all my own.

 

That recurring dream of being back in high school? Doesn’t have to be a nightmare

Don't blame the books for your traumatic memories of 10th grade!

Over the past year or so, I’ve reread four or five books that I at one point read grudgingly and with heightened suspicion back in high school. I know, I know. It almost seems like a waste. We’re all trying to machete through the Modern Library-type “100 Best Books” jungle, and those members of the high school canon, despite having suffered the diminishing returns of our aging and overstuffed minds, are reliable hackaways. Freebies, if you will. Yes, I’ve read that one. Check! But returning to The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, and, most recently To Kill a Mockingbird (this year’s One Book, One Denver selection) has taught me a few things:

• I have an absolutely terrible memory. Sieve-like! I didn’t even remember the murder at the end of Gatsby, let alone Scout’s pitch-perfect voice: “Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” (Imagine: when you first read To Kill a Mockingbird, you didn’t likely know that the character of Dill was based on Truman Capote, and you didn’t picture a miniature Philip Seymour Hoffman as you read.)

Tell me that's not Dill twenty years after To Kill a Mockingbird!

• Reading as a writer is not the same sport as reading as a put-upon teenager. Despite his plot’s semi-degeneration into what might be termed (today) a series of melodramatic conniptions, Flaubert captured a thing of perfect narrative beauty in Emma Bovary’s journey from bored doctor’s wife to vampy suicidal vixen. Okay, that’s not a very literary interpretation (send hate mail directly here), but it puts you on notice: stuff should happen in fiction. Especially crazy stuff! Take note you moderates (she said to herself).
• It takes hardly any time to re-read most books. The effort should not derail your attempt to get through the aforementioned “100 best*” list.  It will take mere moments for you to plummet back into the bell jar, for example, and wonder how you ever deluded yourself into thinking you were sane. Those second reads are quick and centering, somehow. Am I wrong?

Be sure to join William Haywood Henderson this Saturday for our Writer’s Buzz: Write Your First Novel workshop, Saturday, September 12, 10 AM to noon, Highlands Rec Center (2880 Osceola St.)   

*But please try to replace and rescramble the official list with your own completely random list, like this one that keeps cropping up everywhere.

 

Raves accumulate for Lorrie Moore’s new book

If you’re an author and Amazon reviews get you down, the best revenge is winning over Michiko Kakutani, who has the following to say about A Gate at the Stairs, Moore’s soon-to-be released novel:

Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, “Self-Help,” which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters’ — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.

The rest is here.

And did we mention (I’m sure we didn’t) that she’s our next weekend residency guest at Lighthouse? More details here.

 

Moore, Please!

I do not claim to be an expert on either Lorrie Moore or the short story. But I am a huge fan of both, so when I heard that we’d be bringing Moore to Denver for this fall’s Writer’s Studio, I was thrilled. Lorrie Moore is, in this young writer’s humble opinion, one of the best living contemporary short story writers out there. I was first introduced to her work in the pages of the Best American Short Stories series (every volume of which, from 1978 to the present, colorfully lines my bookshelf). This was before, of course, I discovered the joys of reading the actual magazines and reviews from which the annual collection is culled—I was in high school when I began collecting them, give me a break—but I still go back to them again and again, and Lorrie Moore has been well represented among their pages.

It’s no surprise, then, that in 2004 Moore was asked to be the annual guest editor of the series. Aside from choosing a remarkable selection of stories to include in that year’s anthology, she wrote an introduction that gets me excited about the short story all over again every time I read her words. It is my intent to dissect one Moore story at a time, discussing in these illustrious blog postings precisely why I admire her so. And I’d like to begin with just the introduction to BASS 2004, (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) as it reminds me why I so love not just short stories as a genre, but specifically her stories: she’s smart, she’s funny, and she has as complete a grasp of the short story form as anyone ever may.

In describing the futility of strictly defining the short story, Moore says “no matter what one says about…short stories and novels, a hundred exceptions support the opposite case.” (pg. xiv) Yet I defy anyone to argue with the metaphors she gives as examples: “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film” (xv), and my favorite: “If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.” (xvii) Even (and maybe especially) when she’s contradicting herself, Moore does so with intelligence and grace.  She talks about the “interest in beautiful pain” (xv) that the short story takes. The phrase beautiful pain perfectly  what is so good about her writing. This is not to say that she is painful to read—quite the opposite—she is a master of finding the beauty in pain.

In discussing her criteria for selecting the stories that she did, Moore questions her “own visceral responses,” asking herself, “was I riveted? Did a story haunt me for days?” (xvii), reactions I’ve had to nearly every story of hers I’ve ever read. (Beg pardon if this is turning into one big gushfest; I do confess to feeling a bit like a Spiderman fan must feel at a Stan Lee signing.)  As she says herself, stories “are interested in the value, beauty, and malarkey of words that people utter to themselves or others” (xvi), and what are stories if not that: beautiful, valuable b.s. we put down on the page.

But it’s Moore’s dry wit that, for me, makes her prose complete. Whether it’s comparing the short story to Napolean, “with its narrative version of a short man’s complex” (xviii), or parenthetically deprecating herself and other writers who are “asked to speak publicly of their art (oh, dear) or …their craft (that alarmingly nautical phrase)” (xiv), the intimacy of her sharp tongue at once brings the reader into a close camaraderie while keeping her at arm’s length through the deflective nature of humor.  She refers to her introduction and others like it as the result of what “may be simply the desperate, improvised creative-writing yack of good people uncomfortably far from their desks” (xiv), but if this is uncomfortable territory for her, just wait and see what she can do when she really settles in.

 

The essential Lorrie Moore reading list

She gets a shout out this week in a highly entertaining Nicholson Baker essay on Kindle (her work, along with a slew of others, is not available on Kindle). So, people have stopped me on the street to ask: What’s the essential Moore reading list?

That depends, my friends, on you. But if you, like myself and a few others, enjoy the short story form, you’ve simply got to read these:

Her most recent collection

Birds of America got the cover review from the New York Times Book Review, which said: “[Birds of America] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.”

Another collection, one that made her name as queen of wry humor

Like Life put Lorrie Moore on the map, or at least on my map, but likely she was already on everyone else’s map.  The Washington Post claimed when it came out that it was “Moore’s BEST BOOK … displays an impressive range of voice and tone and a punning, exuberant humor.”

 

Or do you prefer to spend time in longer works, sinking your teeth into the world of a novel?  She’s written novels before, including Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, but I got my hands on an advanced copy of this new one, and it’s a total winner:

Her new novel, available in September

This is the novel that made Roddy Doyle exclaim: “A Gate at the Stairs is hilarious and distressing, entertaining and wise, and further proof that Lorrie Moore is one of the very best American writers working today.  I wish she was Irish.”

Of course, feel free to amend the list: there are many diehard fans out there. Have at it!

 

Speaking of Wells Tower…

Wells Tower, as photographed by Suzanne Bennett

You may have already heard this interview in which Tower takes on the subject of a previous post on this here top-secret blog. To the point: Tower says he revises out of a spirit of “self-loathing” (I’m sure none of us knows that feeling) but also some sort of artistic impulse that he fears isn’t deep enough. He revised Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned for 1.5 years after it was accepted, instilling a wedge of fear in both his editor and agent, as well as himself. 

Well, don’t listen to me, listen to him and Michael Silverblatt:

 

Wells Tower's first collection of short stories

 

What one writing guru said…

Brian Kiteley's new book of exercises

Brian Kiteley’s one of the most interesting guys you’ll ever meet. He’s lived all over the world; he’s got bizarre yet dramatic stories; he’s a philospher’s son; he’s a tenured professor; he’s a bourbon sipper; he’s not an attention seeker; he’s low on ego and high on intellectual and humanistic curiosity. He’s one of those people whose words of wisdom play in my head when I need them, which is to say: He’s great.

I’ve been practicing summarizing events lately. Here are a few things that stand out about Kiteley’s Buzz this past weekend (thanks to all who came out on a particularly lovely Saturday afternoon):

• Some of the most interesting writing comes out of fairly random exercises–happy accidents, as it were. These accidents might be stumbled upon by each of us, or can perhaps be contrived by someone (Kiteley, in this new book or his last one) who’s designed them for us.
• Most of what we must do as writers is try to distract ourselves from the impossibility of our task, especially in early drafts.
• If your material comes from something personal and the personal is, for some reason, not something you can face right now, don’t hesitate to simply follow something you can face at the moment that’s equally personal. (His example was that he thought of writing about his father, but didn’t want to delve so much into philosophy; he wrote about his grandfather instead.)
• Don’t tell realistic stories in philosophy.
• The color red can cause hallucinations.
• There’s so much more. Anyone’s free to add!

We do have a podcast that we’ll be adding to the site asap!  Thanks again to Brian Kiteley and all who attended his event this past weekend.