End of Books

Announcement

2009-03-31T14:34:00.000-07:00

Readers,
An earnest apology for the paucity of posts of late. Fortunately, the community of web-letters maintains a healthy conversation even as I recede for a moment.

But I can explain:

My novel, The Tornado Ashes Club, has been purchased.

I don't have a daughter. Hell, I only got a microwave last year. But this book is like a child to me - funny, loud, bit of a rascal, she'll break my heart if I look in her eyes too long.

You wouldn't want to sell your daughter to the highest bidder. But you'd be proud to walk her down the aisle if you knew you could trust the fellow standing up there waiting for her. That's how I feel about Grove/Atlantic - they came and asked me for my blessing, and I gave it.

I imagine my feelings right now are like those you get on that walk up the aisle: sorrow, a bittersweet taste of the mournful beauty of life, joy, the lifting of a crushing burden, fear.

My child no longer belongs just to me. Now she belongs to any reader who can love her good and true.

The Tornado Ashes Club was not an easy book to write. I wanted every sentence to hum with American music, to snap across the page like a note from a slide guitar at the end of a Saturday night when everyone's a little drunk, a little sad, a little in love, and the bottles are lined up along the bar like a ragtag army of brown glass.

There are still a few sentences that don't hum quite that way yet. But I'm confident the good folks at Grove will watch my clothes on the riverbank I wade across those final waters.

I came to a point where I'd either finish the book, or die. I'm still breathing, and there she is.

It feels almost disgusting to accept money for such work. But I will accept it (the money). In our age, it sometimes seems only the liars get rich. Maybe there's hope here for the craftsman, the mystic, the lonely hunter for the true phrase. I'll use the money for apples, cheese, bread, firewood, drop of whiskey here and there. The things that keep a writer going.

There's still work to be done. And I'll keep you all updated.

Thank you.

Thoughts for the day

2009-03-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

"My life is an effort to become as wise as I was the day I was born."

"I've found the most learned teachers are oak trees."

- Preston Brooks

Cheever

2009-03-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

The world has been aflutter over Blake Bailey's biography of John Cheever, and with good cause. Like a lancet Cheever penetrated the boil of American suburban discontent. I remember when my neighbors first got an above-ground pool, when I was twelve. This of course ruined what had once been a perfectly good habitat for chickadees. I attempted to think of an appropriate protest, and at last came up with it.

I printed out a copy of Cheever's "The Swimmer," and under cover of darkness I taped it to their pool.

But as with a typical Cheever protagonist, I was impotent to stop the decay of the land. Several days later, I saw the pages of the story scattered amongst the drying leaves. A Cheeverian image if ever their was one.

Metaphor Rating, #1

2009-03-07T17:01:00.001-08:00

I try to make a study of the metaphors I come across, and assign them a letter grade. Here's one, from Gail Collins in the New York Times today:

"This will certainly require all the moral suasion available to the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, a man with the natural charisma of an oyster."

I rate this a C-. It's true that oysters are less charismatic than, say, Clark Gable. But "charisma," in the sense Collins is using, means "a special quality of leadership that captures the popular imagination and inspires allegiance and devotion."

Now, I don't know about leadership. Oysters cannot command mobs. But if you don't think oysters can inspire allegiance and devotion, get yourself a subscription to Saveur. Among all things, why oysters? I'd argue that almost any given tidepool creature, a limpet for instance, is less "charismatic" than an oyster.

But the image did stick in my craw, so it passes.

2009-03-07T16:40:00.000-08:00

It's to the Irish, most inventive of races, that we owe the sandwich. Etymologically inclined readers will know that the very word comes from "sand wedge," a derisive term applied to the Irish laborers brought over to London to dig the Thames Tunnel under the direction of the legendary Isambard Brunel. These frugal workers would dine on a combination of cheddar cheese, bacon, and tomato - then thought to be poisonous - which they ate between two slices of white bread.

Since I was planning a day of burrowing myself - into my imagination rather than into the sub-Thamesian muck - I made myself a "sand-wedge," seen below.

The writing life does have its pleasures.

Do I Enjoy Writing?

2009-03-05T15:06:00.001-08:00

There's lots of talk about Colm Toibin's claim that he finds no enjoyment in his writing.

Which put me to two thoughts:

1) I'm told women's brains release a chemical which causes them to forget the pain of childbirth. I wonder if writers have something similar.

2) One day, when I was about eight, attending Sacred Heart elementary, I asked Sister Katherine if she enjoyed being a nun.
"Do I enjoy it?" she asked.
"Yes."
She looked at me, then she pointed a bony finger at a crucifix hanging on the wall.
"I enjoy what I have to do a hell of a lot more than He enjoyed what He had to do."

A story

2009-02-27T14:47:00.000-08:00

We hear it here, here, here, here. Publishing is doomed! It's all over! The model just doesn't work anymore!

Well, let me offer a story.

It's 1598. All across England, writers are wringing their hands. "I can't find a patron!" "Patronage is drying out!" "No earls will sponsor poetry anymore!" "How will the sonnetist of the future get paid?" Citing "cutbacks," dukes and counts dispensed with those retainers who'd been charged with finding poets of taste.

The gloomy writers published broadsides about the end of poetry. Others claimed that "micropatronage" might be the future, with each reader of a poem paying a single shilling, rather than one earl funding the whole business. The alehouses filled with tense arguments and dire predictions.

The Cambridge wags, who'd only been in it for the grog and the whores, went back to their fathers' estates. The country poets found temp work as blacksmiths' assistants. Folio publishers turned to printing crude pornographic etchings to stay afloat. But one thing was clear: the Golden Age of Poetry had come to an end.

Meanwhile, in the back office of a little theater, a young man named William shut himself up and wrote the greatest plays the world has ever seen.

Literary Snaps, #1

2009-02-27T14:44:00.001-08:00

From the letters to the editor page of the NYT Book Review:

"Anyone conversant with the history of ideas in the 18th-century Anglo-American world will be familiar with Catharine Macaulay, even if [Walter] Olson is not."
- David Liss.

Observed today

2009-02-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

A perfect, unspoiled dandelion, in full geodesic bloom.

The question I had to ask myself, as a writer: do I blow on it, thereby proving the truth that no perfect thing can last? Or do I allow it to remain, knowing that some fickleness of nature will soon destroy it, beginning again the cycle of nature's creation?

This is a metaphor for my own writing.

The Golden Ratio

2009-02-17T22:42:00.001-08:00

50 to 1.

That's how many printed words I try read for every electronic word I ingest (I don't use the word "read" for electronic words).

It gets difficult for me if I accidentally tune in to CNN, or if someone sends me an usually long text.

Email is a constant struggle which has sent me often - and satisfyingly - to long, thick tomes of the 19th century.

What I'm Reading #2

2009-02-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

Cone, by Holger Struens. It's a crime how little Danish literature gets translated and published in this country. Thank heaven Rita Snoef and Ortolan put out this unrecognized classic. It's too daring for American writers, of course, but Struens is part of the European school of ObjektGrupp. Their credo insists that only non-human protagonists can offer fully developed and trenchant explorations of the post-post-modern condition.

To that end, Cone is narrated, or rather exposited, by a pinecone, beginning from its earliest stages, into the growth of microsporaphylls, the development of bract scales, through its descent to the earth, and its ultimate fate - the wondrous regeneration of life. The writing is spare, emotionless - "now as upon previous periods of sunlight energies are transmuted to my ends" - and raw, raw, raw. ObjektGrupp writers, Struens most notably, refuse to inject feeling into their work. Rather we're meant to see nature in its most spare, its most cruelly elegant.

I won't lie, it's not easy to read this book if you're feeling drowsy, or if you're in a comfortable chair. Usually I end up reading standing up, in 15 minute bursts of courage. But devote your mind to it, and it branches out, and blossoms.

MFA Programs

2009-02-11T21:27:00.000-08:00

Sometimes readers ask me what I think of MFA programs. I think this:

You can't "learn" writing any more than you can learn how to make love to a woman. A truly accomplished expert can show you a few things, but he's unlikely to let you watch when he's really at his best. So you have to rely on whatever tricks he chooses to tell you. As likely as not, he won't be too comfortable discussing these in detail with you. And since those aren't really your tricks, to perform them will feel false. Coming from you, they may just be confusing, even painful, to experience.

But as in mastering lady-pleasuring, time, practice, and awkward failed efforts are necessary. MFA programs provide this. If I were endowing an MFA program, here's what I'd do:

I'd buy ten cabins out in the woods of Vermont. Each cabin would be a day's walk away from the next. The only application would be to fill a single sheet of paper with writing that made me weep or caused me unusual physical sensations. If accepted, you'd get the keys to the cabin, 300 sheets of paper, 60 cans of beans, a slab of bacon, and a broken typewriter.

You'd be required to chop three feet of cordwood every morning. Every few months I'd stop by, and I'd ask you to tell me the names of all the birds in the area. If you called an American widgeon a whimbrel, I'd send you packing. That evening, you'd be expected to bake me a pie out of whatever fruit or berry happened to be in season.

After three winters, if I felt that your pies displayed the kind of concentration, discipline, and inventiveness a writer needs, I'd give you a degree.

Books about Books

2009-02-11T11:00:00.001-08:00

I was moved to comment on this NY Observer story. It's true that no one wants to read about who had lunch with Sonny Mehta at which Bobby Flay restaurant, and which foreign rights were vaguely danced about as espressos were ordered. But here's what people do want to read about: heroes. Quiet heroes facing long odds in the desperate, perhaps insane hope of achieving greatness. Human beings who inject their whole blood, their every breath, into scratching some mark on some cave-wall that says "I was here. I lived. I loved. I died." before the earth dries out and shrivels away to ash.

That's what editors do. Good ones, anyway. And there are a few. For now. You don't hear much about them, they don't get a damn parade, but they're out there and thank God for that. They're like a Delta Force of the human spirit - secret, treated as expendable, easily forgotten, furiously necessary.

It's not an easy story to tell - there are no gunfights, no figures from the supernatural, and very few sex scenes. But tell that story well and you've told the only story we'll ever need.

A Marvelous Weekend

2009-02-08T17:39:00.000-08:00

Saturday I indulged myself with a full day of looking up words in the dictionary. Not new words; words I already knew or thought I knew.

Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review in its entirety, emotions rising and falling like a buoy on a stormy day, then read this review of the review. Between the two, my feelings were conveyed.

Lunch at Kelly's Roast Beef with: CORMAC MCCARTHY

2009-02-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, instead of eating alone, I pretend I'm having lunch with American literary legends. Today's pretend guest was Cormac McCarthy.

ME: Hey Cormac, nice to meet you, I'm so happy you came!

CORMAC: All men are one man and their meetings or lack of meetings come about unbidden though they may be.

ME: Did you have any trouble finding the place?

CORMAC: From the city of Boston I came north across the Tobin Bridge, passing there the channel, and following thereafter the course of Route 16 until it met Beach, and there I turned north and followed that road until it led to the place where I was to noon.

ME: Great, yeah, I usually just walk. So, I gotta ask, what're you in town for?

CORMAC: Covering a Celtics game for my NBA blog.

ME: Really? Wow, that's not the sorta thing I figured you'd be interested in.

CORMAC: The tale of a warrior tribe once begun makes certain claims on the teller, claims not easily acknowledged nor repaid, raising questions not easily answered if even such answers should be, and once begun the teller soon finds that he must follow it to completion though such completion may render his soul forfeit, a thing washed of all meaning, hanging limp in the window of a shambles for the grim examination of passersby.

(LONG PAUSE. I POINT AT A MAN WALKING IN THE DOOR)

ME: Look at this guy. Johnny T-shirt over here.

CORMAC: Through these doors walk a cavalcade of figures, tribades and viragos of all description, grim harridans their faces painted to hide some nameless deformity, madmen in buffoons' motley, camp followers to a crusade abandoned, forlorn potentates of vast empires of worthlessness, dressed in absurd regalia marked complete with symbols unreadable in forgotten cuneiforms.

(SOME HIPSTERS ENTER)

CORMAC: Now appears a column of tired wanderers, pilgrims to a vanished shrine, their shirts like a procession of tattered flags leading forth some doomed campaign against a foe unseen of strength unperceived which can only end in the shedding of blood.

ME: Cool. (LOOKING UP AT MENU, PRINTED ABOVE THE COUNTER) So what're you thinking of having?

CORMAC: Don't worry about what I'm thinking.

ME: Oh, uh -

CORMAC: When I've thought it I'll say it.

ME: Sorry, it's just, you know, an express-

CORMAC: Clam chowder.

ME: I . . I think I'm gonna have a roast beef.

GIRL AT THE COUNTER: Hey guys, how's it going?

CORMAC: No man can tell his own tale, and in attempts thereto soon finds himself foundered, retreating into silence lest further telling make of it a deeper lie.

ME: I'm okay, thanks. I think I'll have a roast beef.

WAITRESS: Want anything on it?

ME: Um . . little horseradish?

CORMAC: Clam strips.

(THE COUNTER GIRL ENTERS ALL THIS)

COUNTER GIRL: Cool, number 61.

ME: So . . . do you watch Mad Men?

CORMAC: Nope.

ME: You should check it out, it's really good, it's this show about these advertising guys -

CORMAC: The people who lived here were called Pawtucket, and their trade such as it was lay in the gathering of shellfish and the making of baskets. In time there came enemies of greater strength, reducing their numbers and enslaving those who remained until their race was washed away like silt along a riverbed, and of them nothing remains save the dust of their bones crushed to powder and laid beneath the roads.

ME: Oh.

(SILENCE.)

COUNTER GIRL: Sixty-one!

(WE TAKE OUR FOOD)

ME: How's . . . how's your clam strips

CORMAC: It is like the remains of some desiccated thing extracted from a tomb.

ME: Oh. This . . . this is pretty good.

(SILENCE. FINALLY CORMAC STANDS UP TO LEAVE.)

ME: Well, thanks for meeting me, anyway. I . . . I really enjoyed our lunch.

CORMAC: A dumbshow enacted for a God insensate.

ME: Where are you headed?

CORMAC: The Squire.

What I'm Reading #1

2009-02-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

Twenty Years A Trapper on The Kennebec and The Androscoggin, by Tiverton Wales. I make it a policy to purchase the dustiest books I can find, and this one I picked up some years ago at a used bookstore in Wells, Maine. It's quite a volume - 700 pages, more or less, with no publishing information. Wales tells of his childhood, which redefines "hardscrabble." It's clear that today his mother would've been diagnosed with several mental conditions, but as it was she took this boy along with her on seashell collecting expeditions on the Maine coast. He left home at twelve to try his hand as a trapper. Rare in such memoirs, Wales goes on (and on, and on) about his incompetence as a trapper. He's constantly smashing his hand under rocks, wandering around lost for days, eating the wrong berries and spending weeks "with [his] bowels in a state of the utmost discomfort such as would make the very fires of hell seem but a calming relief and like a good night's rest on a feather bed."

A lot of the book is devoted to his efforts basically to stay sane, although he would never put it this way, of course. But he talks about what faces he would see in different kinds of bark, and how he'd talk to pelts he'd collected, and give them names, so much so that some of them he was loath to part with even when he could get to the markets in Portland.

Anyway, I'm not sure I'd recommend this book.

Farewell, Book World

2009-01-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

So the Washington Post is canceling their stand-alone book section. Well, good riddance. I'll get my book reviews where I always did: from the looks of women reading on the subway, from overhearing the excited reports of children on their way home from school, from patrons in barrooms, from the buxom librarian who always has a kind word for me and forgives me my fines, from what appears to be the most thumbed-through at Borders, from the soft whirring of some directional magnet in my heart when I'm in the New England Mobile Bookfair that points me, like a compass needle, to the right volume. And from Facebook.

"Just" A Novelist

2009-01-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

Sometimes people ask me, "are you just a novelist, or do you write other stuff?" I used to say "I'm just a novelist, the way Michelangelo was just a painter." This created an appropriate sense of bafflement, because people didn't know what point I was making, or whether I was making a point at all, or whether I was just ignorant about the career of Michelangelo.

Now when people ask, I say, "I'm just a novelist, the way a lark is just a bird." This is truer.

Tropical vs. Polar Writers

2009-01-26T17:27:00.001-08:00

I've been reading deeply in the works of writers emerging from tropical regions (Junot Diaz, Derek Walcott, Ngeme Obo). Their words teem with such a marvelous fecundity, like an overripe guava bursting open on a sweltering day. As a contrast, I've also been reading the works of polar writers (Knut Hamsun, Tara Tangunquak). Their work tends to be sheltered, subtle, protected, like a tern's egg.

When I review my own work, I can see the influence of temperate Massachusetts. Sometmes my writing is bitterly cold, sometimes suffocatingly humid, often switching over in a matter of a few clauses, like a nor'easter coming in off Nantasket.

Reader poll: Which is the better sentence?

2009-01-25T20:53:00.000-08:00

The sun lay on the sky like a dollop of marmalade spooned from some ancient jar bottled long ago by a spinster aunt, left for years unopened on the shelf of the basement.

The snow crunched beneath his feet like dried exoskeletons of ten-thousand aphids bleached on the sands of some distant desert.

Please post your vote in the comments.

Rimbaud

2009-01-22T23:24:00.000-08:00

Couldn't help but notice this article. Let's say you saw this Craigslist post: "Lice-ridden drunk M who will smash your stuff needs place to crash for free." Skip over it? Congratulations - you just missed a chance to room with Rimbaud.

I printed a copy out for Hobart.

Apology.

2009-01-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry for the delay in postings. I have been writing. Or, better, searching. For the last several days I was heartsick trying to find the right word to describe an acorn. Then one day, on a walk, I found it.

"Efficient."

New Years Resolutions

2009-01-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

1. Eat better. More fruits and vegetables in non-chip and salsa forms.

2. Don't write a single sentence unless it is fully, deeply honest. Put down nothing that doesn't ring out clear and true like a church bell.

3. Exercise 2-3 times a week.

Snowbound

2008-12-20T09:59:00.000-08:00

Snow is falling generally on Massachusetts. Quiet, still, a blanket wrapping us up. My best writing is done in the snow, when God showers the world in shut-up powder.

What is Writing like?

2008-12-18T13:16:00.001-08:00

filling a pail

drinking from a river

good, hard, run

a hike, through the woods, barefoot

ploughing a field

shoveling coal into the furnace of a train

emptying yourself, pulling the stuffing out of yourself, the way your sister used to tear the fluff out of your stuffed animals.

an old Yankee farmer, ploughing his field, and pulling out the rocks. He puts the rocks into a wheelbarrow, and takes them to the edge of the field. There, one by one, he piles the rocks on top of each other, fitting each into the other, perfectly, like the pieces of a puzzle, and he builds a stone wall. The rocks are words, or sentences.

The "Near-Masterpiece"

2008-12-18T12:49:00.000-08:00

I was reading this piece on Graham Greene by Dwight Garner, and I felt the need to quibble, slightly. Garner calls "The End of the Affair" and "The Power and the Glory" "near-masterpieces."

While I haven't read "The End of the Affair," "The Power and The Glory" is, to me, a full masterpiece if ever there was one.

Here's how I would rank the Greene I've read:

MASTERPIECE:

The Power and the Glory

The End of the Affair

NEAR-MASTERPIECE:

The Comedians

MASTERFUL:

The Honorary Consul

The Quiet American

SOME MASTERY:

A few of the short stories.

NOT MASTERFUL:

Journey Without Maps

But I haven't read enough Greene. A Christmas resolution! While in college the idea occurred to me to go to Havana and interview any prostitutes who might have slept with GG, perhaps for an article. Or a coffeetable book, with photographs - Nos Jodio El Capitain. But like so many of my undergraduate ideas this one remained unfulfilled. I wonder what insights they might've offered me. And I them.