Chekhov’s Mistess

As has and probably will be widely noted in these parts, Daniel Menaker’s TitlePage.tv just launched with Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi, and Charles Bock as the first guests. Sounds promising and I think it’s at one level it’s just good to have books discussed in an engaging manner in any format. Let’s just hope that the show’s participants will be authors whose writing – and not merely their publicity budget – is “noteworthy.”

I’m really liking this topic of giving stuff away for free. Ana Maria quotes a Neil Gaiman interview:

“‘It’s much more about gaining an audience than about some one-to-one correlation,’ he said. ‘It’s a question of how do you find new writers.’ People often come to new authors in a library, on a friend’s bookshelves, or by a personal recommendation, he explained. It ‘doesn’t always begin with a financial transaction. I very much doubt that I discovered a single one of my favourite authors by buying a book.’ […]”

So, right. What a writer wants most is to be read (and to get paid so they can keep on writing, at least on a hierarchal level). It’s all moot otherwise. I’m sure I’m getting in over my head, but I can say that on a much smaller scale, I’ve sometimes thought about trying to find some professional outlet for the longer essays I’ve written here on Chekhov’s Mistress (or intend to write, I don’t claim the quality here that good). Truth is, the only reason I’d want a professional outlet for my writing is to get read by a wider audience (and perhaps the forced discipline of thought that comes along with that). Getting paid, particularly such as it is that writerly pay is low anyway, is not a big part of my desire to do so. Getting paid, at this level, is only an enabling factor such that if you’re getting paid for your writing you can spend time doing it instead of slaving away at making a living doing other things. But history is full of writers who did ‘other things’ while writing, even before writers all became university teachers.

Anyway, I’d like to write more about this topic right now, but I have to work.

Poets & Writers, the magazine and non-profit organization aimed at helping creative writers has launched a new Website. I’m usually critical of Websites, but they’ve had the good sense to keep the site clean and easy to navigate, with the exception of the fact that you have to click through to get to the magazine, which is the main thing drawing readers back.

And, in my not humble view, they need to have every bit of the magazine’s content online – there’s no use in posting article headlines and saying “print only” because I’m there now and I’m not (should say rarely ever) going to run out and buy a magazine for a headline. There’s just no sense in it.

Reading coverage of last night’s tribute to Chinua Achebe, I’m reminded how devastating Things Fall Apart is. Named from the Yeats poem, “The Second Coming,” reading Things Fall Apart your heart gets wrenched between the brutality of an old way of life and the subjugation of the new. If ever there was a case of literature as a window into a culture, as the opportunity to let understanding seep into your consciousness, then this novel is it.

David Ulin says …”‘Things Fall Apart’ is not just the starting point of an African literature, but also of a modern African literature: contemporary, hybrid, global in its implications, influenced by everything, and richer in its evocation of the world.’ I’m wondering why though, I stopped there. Achebe’s novel did not prompt me to go looking for more African literature (and mind you, I was Not force-fed the book in high school). Besides African Psycho and Things Fall Apart I’ve read nothing of African literature and that despite what seems like a rich and newly popular literature finding its way into America. I don’t know if it’s too painful – Things Fall Apart is wincingly painful at times – or maybe, despite the ‘understanding’ we gain from books such as this, things aren’t getting much better (see, for instance, this clip from Dear Mandela), as though I have a sense that the story told in Things Fall Apart has to be retold and retold while we as a society gasp and say “Oh my God” but then all of this keeps happening again. I know I’ve leapt from not venturing into African literature to global complacency and American Hegemony, but what I’m really wondering is this: I’m wondering if a novel on its 50th anniversary that millions have read manages to accomplish anything, or should it.

people whose apartments get written up in the NY Times. Delightful.

“What she wanted, it turned out, was not just to produce a show but to change the way art is sold and collected.”

(via, of course)

Beautiful Children is one of those debut novels that has gotten so much press I’m instantly skeptical despite the fact that it’s about Vegas, a place I called home(?) for six years once. However, it does look interesting and seems to be a part of a growing trend to distribute books freely on the Web, at least for a limited time. So, want a free book? Go here. Don’t bother with the rest of the site because it’s all Flash and no personality.A lot of people wonder about the future of books in an e (or perhaps i) world, but I think it’s here. I find a book in pdf format quite comfortable to read on my computer.

Pen America and Three Percent report on Marcel Prousts’ novella, The Lemoine Affair. So if the 3,200 pages of In Search of Lost Time or 744 pages of Jean Santeuil are too much, then this might be the ticket at only 100 pages, about room enough I suppose for one or two sentences.

I’ve read, by the way, several titles in MHP’s "Art of the Novella" series, and while I wish they were bound more durably, they are great way to get your classics on your commute because they’re small. My favorite has been Henry James’ The Lesson of the Master, which wears its meaning on various levels as a young author learns more than just about art.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander
around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular;
but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point.

- Mark Twain

It’s Strep Throat week here at the Parr household, but slightly more fun is Short Story Week over at The Millions blog, aimed at reviving the prominence of the short story form. Good idea. If you’re like me, you love short stories, but never quite comfortable without a novel in hand, so time dictates that short stories get pushed aside. Poor poor short stories.

But if you’ve ever read Guy Davenport, Ralph Ellison, William Trevor, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, V.S. Pritchett, or duh, Chekhov, Poe, Joyce, Kafka, Borges, or Gogol, then you know that in the hands of a master the short story strikes a balance of detail and meaning that is more complete than most novels manage to achieve.

Over the past year I’ve read some amazing short stories by David Albahari, Etgar Keret, Aimee Bender, Witold Gombrowicz and Daniil Kharms (In fact, writing this I’m wondering why I don’t spend more time with the stacks of story collections sitting on my shelves or the lit-journals that I now have a separate bookshelf for)

All of the stories I’ve read recently share one thing (a bit less so with Albahari): they use wit to get their point across. Tomes have been written about the use of the comic in literature, but I think comedy is useful because, as any good story teller knows, with comedy timing is everything. That’s where short stories shine since the form dictates the timing and timing, meaning. What Etgar Keret manages to do, particularly reading through many of his stories at once, is to disarm you with humor so that the melancholy often present in his stories doesn’t overwhelm.

I’m going to try to and whip up a few posts on favorite short stories now that the Millions have gotten me thinking about it, and maybe we can just call this Short Story Year. In the meantime, go and read all the great posts at The Millions. or read my post on Gombrowicz that I don’t think anyone has read, or better yet, go read a story

In anticipation of his new book How Fiction Works James Wood was interviewed in Skidmore College’s Salmagundi journal (Winter 2008*). Here’s an excerpt:

“In other words, the impulse to write big, to write ideologically, to write politically, to write socially, is not going to go away just because we’re living in pretty extraordinary times. I have a slightly depressed feeling that a lot of novelists are going to think like Updike did with Terrorist, ‘I’m a novelist, it’s my job to explain the times. I should have a crack at it, in the spirit of Dostoyevsky or Conrad.’ And partly because we have these great experiences of Dostoyevsky’s Possessed, or Notes from the Underground, or The Secret Agent, we think this is a colossal achievement of the novel. Updike fails the test, but if one could really imagine what it’s like to be a depressed, raging, alienated 18-year-old Muslim, then that’s worth heaps of journalism. It could become a sort of text for the Department of Homeland Security. Just say, ‘You don’t know anything until you’ve read this.’ Frankly, I think we should be handing them Notes from the Undeground and Possessed, saying ‘You want to know what the impotence and the underground feel like? Read this.’”

I love this stuff.

*Salmagundi is, sadly, not available online.

On my drive-by visit to the AWP writer’s conference it looks like I missed something great: The Tribute to Russell Edson hosted by Sentence (an excellent journal of prose poetry). The Kenyon Review blog says this:

“And while the mainstream may prefer a poetry that feels more rarefied, precious, and noble, I advocate space for Edson, the humanist. We need his poems, and we need what they teach us–that comedy in poetry shouldn’t be a ticket to the ghetto of the margins, but rather recognized for what it is–a tool that permits us to delight in the emotive force of a poem.”

Edson is is certainly not rarefied or precious (“…But, as I was picking ape out of my teeth, and belching what I thought were ape flavored belches, I discovered that I was actually belching monkey gas.”), but I didn’t think he had been marginalized – any more than most poets, that is – and some of his books are listed for high prices on the internet. He is an exemplar prose poet and it takes something special to write ‘non-prosaic’ prose poetry. One thing, to me at least, is that certain cleverness that exists in any form that has to get across an idea so much more than sum of the words before you, and in a tiny tiny little space. My summation of Edson last time I mentioned him here: ((Groucho Marx + Charles Bukowski)/Baudelaire) = Russell Edson.

Here’s the beginning of the poem that introduced me to Edson:

an excerpt from “The Optical Prodigal”

“A man sees a tiny couple in the distance, and thinks they
might be his mother and father.
But when he gets to them they’re still little.
You’re still little, he says, don’t you remember?
Who said you were supposed to be here? says the little
husband. You’re supposed to be in your own distance; you’re
still in your own foreground, you spendthrift.
No no, says the man, you’re to blame.
No no, says the little man, you’re out of proportion. When
you go into the distance you’re supposed to get smaller. You
mustn’t think that we can shrink and sell all the time to suit everybody coming out of the distance.
But you have it wrong, cries the man, we’re the same size, it is you who are refusing to be optically correct…”

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