Category Archives: Authors

Epistolary Blues

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Other Critics

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century, and if you haven’t read it, you should do so as soon as you can. It’s a book about disappointment: the disappointment of family life, the disappointment of consumerism, the disappointment of academia. But more than this, it is about the disappointment that comes from having to continue on living after the death of someone who made you realize that life could be other than midddling. The Professor’s House came out the same year as a book with a similar theme, The Great Gatsby, and I have a theory that one of Cather’s earlier works, 1919’s My Antonia, was where Fitzgerald got his idea to tell Gatsby’s story from the perspective of someone who was both skeptical of and probably hot to bone the novel’s titular subject.

Anyway, as a Cather lover, I am excited for the long-awaited release of some of her letters. The reason why her letters haven’t been made public until now is a fairly predictable: she didn’t want them to be, and so she placed some steely gatekeepers in charge of her estate. Jennifer Howard documents all of this very well in a recent article in The Chronicle, but I was particularly struck by the article’s opening:

In November 1938, buffeted by the death of her dear friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, Willa Cather poured her heart out to her brother Roscoe in a letter. She sent it from the Shattuck Inn in New Hampshire, a spot Isabelle had first taken her years earlier.

“You cannot imagine what her death means to me,” Cather wrote. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through 38 years, as she did. As for me, I have cared too much, about people and about places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer. But it will break me in the end. I feel as if I couldn’t go another step.”

Let’s table the fact that Roscoe Cather is an incredible name (ideal for someone born in the nineteenth century). The second paragraph sounds like something Godfrey St. Peter, the professor of The Professor’s House, would have said after the death of Tom Outland, the rough but brilliant youth who wandered into his life only to die in World War I. It also sounds like what Nick Carraway is trying to avoid feeling when he puts on his false hard-boiled act at various points throughout The Great Gatsby. Cather and Fitzgerald both understood that caring too much is the source of great art. Any artist who claims not to give a shit about people and places is either fronting to avoid crying in public, or not a real artist. Caring means inviting disappointment to bed down with you from time to time. The fact that Cather tried to hide her letters from the public for so long couldn’t keep those of us who love her work from seeing how well she understood this often uncomfortable twinning.

“Things We Do Not Say”

Posted on by under Authors, education

One of the things I’ve noticed about my writing students, especially the first- and second-years, is that most of them aren’t very good at detecting irony (e.g., recognizing that Joan Didion isn’t sentimentally extolling the virtues of the Central Valley in “Notes from a Native Daughter”) or spotting clichés. With respect to the latter solecism, they are quite good at noticing and fixing the crud in a sample paragraph that I give them after saying, “This excerpt has clichés in it that you should try to address.” But when it comes to their own writing, in-the-nick-of-times and unforgettable moments and in-today’s-societys start to slip in. This is a problem even for most of my brightest students, and many of the students I teach are very bright.

No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that freshmen and sophomores are freshmen and sophomores. A few months ago I was digging through some old college papers that I’d stashed in my parents’ basement after I’d graduated, and most of those that I glanced over were awful. Just lame, pompous, hasty, Olympian nonsense that I tossed in the garbage. I used a lot of damn clichés–often high-minded ones, but still clichés that probably made my professors wince or laugh. (“Garcia Marquez’s political eco-narratives are truly moving works of art.” No, really, I wrote that and showed it to another adult.) When you are 19, you are an idiot, even if you do think of yourself as a Reader.

But most of my students don’t read much, just like most Americans don’t read much, just like many other cultures don’t read much. Now, I am skeptical of anybody who claims that there was some  golden age of mass reading (have a look at the literacy rates in Russia when Dostoevsky was alive, in Britain when Tennyson was humming, in the U.S. when James Joyce got onto the cover of Time). In any era, you can find intellectuals bemoaning the state of the public readership. However, you will have a hard time finding a high-school or college teacher who thinks that many of hir students are reading serious texts on the reg. (I’m willing to bet that stands even if you venture into Yale or Amherst or Reed or wherever. I went to a snooty school and it was true there.)

Effective writers read a lot. By getting what Martin Amis calls their daily diet of words, they continually develop an intuitive familiarity with the rhythms of the language they work in. There is no way to write well without reading voraciously. A brilliant charlatan who can’t be bothered to read other people might be able to present a surface gloss that is appealing in small doses (Helloooooo, Vice staffers), but non-readers don’t produce work that is worth reading a second time. Sorry. They don’t. You do not have to read Literature alone. But you have to read something besides status updates and threads on Reddit. You have to read stuff that has gone through the hands of editors and proofreaders. You have to know what pro text looks like.

So the plague of not-reading means that a lot of students are helpless when it comes to grasping and enjoying the textures of a good piece of writing that isn’t selling a product or a tidy idea or mere sensation. It means that many of them flail around in shallow, platitudinous thickets when they draft their own stuff.

But so many genuinely want to become better readers and writers. As a start, or one form of a start, I find that it helps to give them concrete lists of common flubs, misconceptions, and banalities, the kind that appear in any reputable style and usage guide. Students appreciate that level of editorial specificity, as well they should, because these are the kinds of crib sheets that actual writers and editors use every day.

So, from the Washington Post, there is this list of phrases and words that are verboten because they have become disgustingly bland through overuse. I know that some educational theorists think it is useless to give students a roster like this, but in the real world, the place where professional writers operate, this is one of the ways things get helped along. No, you can’t turn a whole writing class into a carnival of Helpful Lists, because perusing a list does not a writer make, but it does help to imitate the professionals who know how to remain on guard against blemishes like “tightly knit community” and “hot-button issue” and “lifestyle.” Enjoy.

A Moment of Heresy

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, education, in the news, Other Critics

If the point of a positive book review is to get the audience to want to read the book under discussion, then Robert Dean Lurie’s brief piece in The American Conservative about the new Selected Letters of William Styron  does its job admirably. As much as I find myself disagreeing with many of the political points that get made in TAC (Pat Buchanan is the king saying something totally sensible about why we should avoid war, only to follow it up with an appalling xenophobic or anti-gay screed), I appreciate that it still bothers to publish aesthetic criticism. Given that the magazine’s brand of conservatism is more Eliot and Burke than Romney and Ryan, this makes sense. Still, it says something about the state of our political discourse that one is shocked to find a website or magazine that discusses public policy also talking about Darkness Visible (one of the best books of any kind ever written) and the puffed-up preening of Styron and Mailer.

But The American Conservative has recently gotten something much more important right as well. Tom Pauken, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party, wrote a piece in January denouncing “No Child Left Behind” and the culture of standardized testing it has spawned. We are all familiar with these mind-numbing, bogus tests that create perverse incentives all up and down the academic food chain. Right now 35 teachers in Atlanta are under indictment for fudging their students’ results because the higher the students score, the more teachers (both good and bad) keep their jobs or make more money. As bad as the War in Iraq and the financial meltdown have been, No Child Left Behind might be the most damaging legacy of the Bush years.

But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to understand what is really wrong here either. It’s not testing per se that’s the problem, but that we have educational tunnel-vision. Whenever I hear Barack Obama talk about how we need to send more kids to college because people with college degrees earn more money, I cringe. If it is this simple, why don’t we just mandate that all colleges simply let in anyone who applies? A college degree is supposed to signal to employers that you have done something hard and are therefore a good candidate to complete difficult tasks in the future. But what if everyone has college degrees? What then?

What is needed is real reform at the K-12 level, something everyone seems to acknowledge, but never actually happens. Too many people have said too many things they can’t take back without losing face or money or power, and so kids keep going through this ringer of irrelevance, racking up accomplishments or failures that ultimately tell us very little about who they are and what they could be. Tom Pauken’s solution might strike some as retrograde, but it’s actually similar to the approaches in many other western democracies whose education systems outperform ours by most objective and subjective measures. He writes:

We need to allow for multiple pathways to a high school degree. One academic pathway would emphasize math and science. Another, the humanities and fine arts. A third would focus on career and technical education. All students would get the basics, but there would be greater flexibility than under the “one size fits all” existing system which pushes everyone towards a university degree.

This is a common sense approach to preparing young Texans to be college-ready or career-ready. It is time to end this “teaching to the test” system that isn’t working for either the kids interested in going on to a university or for those more oriented towards learning a skilled trade. Let’s replace it with one that focuses on real learning and opportunities for all.

In the past, when public frustration hit the boiling point, the testing establishment would simply roll out a new test with a new acronym and promise that the new test will fix everything. That is why, from 1991 to the present, the acronym of the Texas standardized test has gone from TAAS to TAKS and, now STAAR.

It’s that last sentence that really gets me. Education today is a sick combination of the worst kinds of conservative and progressive ideologies. It’s the same shit in a new box, sold to us by people who stand to lose a lot if anything actually happens.  And so nothing changes.

I imagine that Tom Pauken and I would agree on very little.  Again, he was the head of TEXAS Republican Party, for Christ’s sake.  Still, humanists of all stripes need to come together and wrench education in this country away from the technocrats, especially when they are doing everything in their power to make education a business devoid of human subtlety and emotion. Standardized multiple-choice testing has been around for years. Computerized writing analysis is knocking on the door. If we do nothing, those of us who actually care about educating complicated and whole human beings will find ourselves begging for change outside of the house we used to own.

Amis Live

Posted on by under Authors, Visual

Over the past couple years I’ve had the Martin Amis fever real bad.  I started out liking his pop, Kingsley, whose Lucky Jim (1954) is required reading for anyone born after World War II who likes really funny novels, then got into Martin via his psychotically hilarious Money (1984), the best novel of the Eighties. It’s been heating up from there. There are many novelists I love on my shelves, but right now if I had to take one person’s books to prison, they would be his: there is nobody smarter or funnier or sadder or meaner or cooler writing fiction in English, not since Bellow (or maybe Twain) died.  David Foster Wallace is the nearest American equivalent, and he only got close.

Amis got his start at 24, because people wanted to see how bad the novel of famous Kingsley’s son would be. Turned out he was good.

His prose has always sounded “young,” because he’s a funny prick with a poet’s relish for the language, but Amis is getting older. He just turned 60; his best friend of forty years, Christopher Hitchens, is dying of cancer; and he’s now written twelve novels. A reliably engaging guest on Charlie Rose, during the latest interview (from August) he’s able to dodge Charlie’s inane, overabundant questions, and get to improvising brilliant things about terrible things like death and wonderful things like writing. He probably practices in the mirror, but still. Enjoy the video here.

-TGR

The Bigger They Are

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, in the news, the polis

The  erstwhile warlord of Liberia, Charles Taylor, who helped drench several African countries in blood during the 90s, is finally going down: he’s on special U.N. trial at The Hague.  (It even involves Naomi Campbell.)  A psychopath whose army specialized in child slavery, mass murder (via machete), gang rape, forced prostitution, theft of money and land and diamonds, and sometimes–supposedly–cannibalism, Tayler was also a fantastic thief, and stashed millions in various tricksy places, just like a good dictator should.  If you would like to read a few great essays about the things that were happening in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the middle of the previous decade–and you should, because you live on this planet too–check out Denis Johnson’s non-fiction collection,  Seek.  Available on your Kindle or lap.  Great novelists often do a great job with terrible events.

-TGR

Breaking News: Lame Magazine has Lame Cover

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Visual

Please, please tell me this is a parody.  I’m all for humor, but I can’t take this.  Not just the tatted bro with his fixie, but the stuff about how agents are actually nice/necessary and the bromide about how small presses are the best ever, too.  Please tell me there aren’t earnest editors behind this.

Now, I can’t speak to this guy’s literary chops, because I haven’t read him; for all I know he’s the next Hazlitt.  But he let someone take that photograph and then put it on the cover of a national magazine.  Even though P&W is pretty useless (writers don’t need trade rags), this is embarrassing.  Here’s hoping Mr. Kaelan keeps his shirt on next time and lets his writing do the talking.

-TGR

Dull hatchet job

Posted on by under Authors

This morning my friend Ariel sent me a link to this article from the London Telegraph, which briefly discusses Martin Amis’ purported recent turn to feminism.  I don’t entirely agree with how it presents his views on gender.  Granting that Amis has become more strident in his public support for global women’s rights since 9/11 (an attack grounded in an medieval ideology which he and others have correctly described as psychotically violent toward women), and acknowledging that the main characters in his novels are usually men, it is not the case that Amis has “become” a feminist, which seems to be the standard journalistic line on him at the moment.  He’s always been one!  It’s difficult to read any Amis novel, even one of his early “laddish” efforts like Success (the best existing account of young-male sexual frustration), without realizing where his sympathies lie.  His work is nothing if not a really fucking funny, sustained critique of traditional Western maleness (and constrictive female roles, too). Most Amis characters are doomed narcissists.  He’s a black comic.  But it’s his men who turn the cruelty up to 11.  Take London Fields: Nicola Six is a corrupt self-obsessive, but Keith Talent is the genuine monster.  Amis writes about men like Stalin and Mohamed Atta as men for a reason.

Then a few hours later I was browsing the web and came across a Jezebel post that links to the same article with the tagline “The accused misogynist clarifies his feminist hopes and dreams.”  They also included a particularly bad photo of Amis.  I threw up in my mouth a little, and not because I’m an Amis fanboy having a knee-jerk defensive response.

Forget how lame it is to be snide without explaining why you are being snide (simply assuming your reader already agrees with you about Amis or anything else is intellectually weak).  Try to ignore the sputtering in the “Comments” section.  And think about this instead: what’s with the adjective “accused“?  What the fuck does that mean?  President Obama has been “accused” of being a secret jihadist, but that doesn’t make him one.  One lazy word underscores the whole problem: you cannot make sweeping claims about an artist or any other serious human being or event without at least trying to offer some evidence for why you’re right.  Jezebel is fine when it reposts material from better Gawker Media sites or discusses Jon Hamm or whatever; going in for vague ad hominem mini-criticism, though, was a bad move.  Unless they were trying to appear dumb, in which case they did well.  Relax. Amis is on the team.

-TGR

Sunday Poet: Kay Ryan

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Reviews

Earlier this year, Grove Press released The Best of It, a compact, gorgeously designed selection of poems by Kay Ryan, the California-born and -based writer who was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2006 til 2008. She is one of my favorites, and I’m hardly the only person who feels this way: Ryan is one of the few American poets who actually moves enough units to make some kind of a living from verse (although since the 1970s her day job has been teaching literature at a community college in northern California). But popularity alone is hardly a reason to spend time with her. Luckily there are lots of other reasons.

She draws a lot of comparisons to Emily Dickinson, which is only partly fitting. Like Dickinson, Ryan writes short poems (rarely more than one page) with abbreviated lines and a complicated mixture of internal and line-end rhymes. Her sense of music sets her above most contemporary U.S. poets: prosy free verse has become American poetry’s dominant format over the past fifty years, but Ryan’s style evokes an older lyric tradition. While her verse isn’t as regular as, say, Auden’s, it still clearly demonstrates the pleasurable contributions sound makes to sense (or “content,” if you like), and her ability to incorporate patterned acoustics into clipped lines is, like Dickinson’s, astonishing. Try writing a compact poem that rhymes and scans without sounding like a bouncy-bouncy nursery rhyme; it’s really, really hard.

But Ryan is far less cryptic than Dickinson. While it wouldn’t be correct to say that her lyrics offer messages, homilies, or tidy themes, each text does develop and play with a relatively coherent moment of thought. Her preferred method is to take a small scene or object–say, a flamingo or an empty room–and use it as what T.S. Eliot would call the “objective correlative” for whatever the poem is reflecting on. In her work physical environments are simultaneously real material places and psychological climates; the given world is an invitation to & a space for thought and emotion. Here is a poem called “That Will to Divest”:

Action creates

a taste

for itself.

Meaning: once

you’ve swept

the shelves

of spoons

and plates

you kept

for guests,

it gets harder

not to also

simplify the larder,

not to dismiss

rooms, not to

divest yourself

of all the chairs

but one, not

to test what

singleness can bear,

once you’ve begun.

Her lines are usually a couple beats longer than this, actually, but “Divest” gives you a sense of how she works. Short enough to read during your lunch break or while you’re waiting for friends to show up at the bar, Ryan’s poems make you uneasy and happy at the same time. Like the poems of anyone who’s any good. Dig her.

-TGR

Action creates

a taste

for itself.

Meaning: once

you’ve swept

the shelves

of spoons

and plates

you kept

for guests,

it gets harder

not to also

simplify the larder,

not to dismiss

rooms, not to

divest yourself

of all the chairs

but one, not

to test what

singleness can bear,

once you’ve begun.