Jeremy Russell

I recently spent more than a week in Key West, Florida.  A writer friend told me, half seriously, that he was “jealous of your pilgrimage” and another said, “Cheers to Papa!”  And, yes, while I was there I made a visit to the Earnest Hemingway Home and Museum.

Although inundated with tourists, the place is kept in excellent repair and simply dripping with tropical grandeur.  Most importantly, for me, the writing room above the shed is decorated in a manner that it might have been at the time when he was there writing To Have and Have Not.

The rest of the house is more of a record of the tastes of his second wife (and rightly so, considering her family money paid for it and that she continued to live there after he’d left for Cuba with his third wife).  Still, it’s neat to see, especially all those mutant cats.

Of course, I have no idea what the house really looked like in the 1930s.  For example, they tell you on the tour that Hemingway kept a boxing ring in the backyard until his wife replaced it with a swimming pool while he was in Spain with his mistress.  But the house itself is gorgeous, and steeped in history.  And all in all, I enjoyed it just as much as any of the historic homes of writers that I’ve visited.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed visiting writer’s historic residences.  Growing up in the Valley of the Moon, I used to visit Jack London’s Wolf House, or what’s left of it, all the time.

I’ve also been to the homes of Russian writers.  And in Massachusetts I made sure visit to the Poe House and took in the Longfellow House-Washington Headquarters, which is really an amazing place to tour.

All these houses are very different.  The only thing they have in common being that a writer did his work there, and it’s nifty to get an idea of where they sat and what they saw out the window.

Here’s the complete list of writer’s homes I’ve visited in the order that I visited them:

• Jack London – Sonoma, California
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky – St. Petersberg, Russia
• Dashiell Hammett’s apartment – San Francisco, California
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Edgar Allen Poe – Boston, Massachusetts
• Leo Tolstoy – Moscow, Russia
• Earnest Hemingway – Key West, Florida

Happy Halloween!  A short short story of mine, Le Mycète Sans Pitié, appeared today in a publication called, “STRANGEWORLDS: An Anthology of Bizarre Fiction.” So far the book is only out in a Kindle edition (for $1), but publisher BizarreBooks promises to have a chapbook version available soon.  According to the book’s description, these are “bizarre out-of-this-world mindf**k stories.” So, uh, you’ve been warned.

This year the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to Tomas Tranströmer, a relatively obscure poet from Sweden.  The Prize committee explained that the selection was made because “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”  Response from the media has been mostly positive, although the committee was prepared to defend itself against accusations of bias because they had chosen a Swede.

“We have been quite thoughtful about this, not being rash in choosing a Swede,” [the academy's permanent secretary, Peter] Englund said, noting that Transtromer’s works have been translated into about 60 languages. “He is well known among people who read poetry.”

Still, the New York Review of Books blog called out the prize for its “essential silliness” by describing the impossible amount of material that the prize’s 18-member jury has to review in order to narrow down to a single recipient.

Let’s try to imagine how much reading is involved. Assume that a hundred writers are nominated every year—it’s not unthinkable—of whom the jury presumably try to read at least one book. But this is a prize that goes to the whole oeuvre of a writer, so let’s suppose that as they hone down the number of candidates they now read two books of those who remain, then three, then four. It’s not unlikely that each year they are faced with reading two hundred books (this on top of their ordinary workloads).

Across the pond, the book blogger at the Guardian UK called the Prize’s recipients in general “a curious club” and delineated their many failings as role models alongside the selection committee’s failure as judges of cultural merit.  It’s a pretty harsh survey of the 108 years of the Prize.

Ironically, the best description of the parameters used to select these luminaries may come from an unlikely source, gambling.  This year, according to an article at the Huffington Post, the in-house literary analyst for Ladbrokes gave Tranströmer’s victory 9-2 odds, the second best of any author on his short list.

That one well-read oddsmaker has to take into account far more than just a writer’s fame and body of work. He must consider a writer’s age (the Academy prefers to honor older writers), gender (the Academy has made statements acknowledging that is hasn’t honored enough women), as well as whether the writer’s name has been floated previously for the award. He also has to consider where a writer is from, as the Academy has made a point in recent years to think more globally. Last year’s winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, was the first South American to win the award since 1982.

Such a formula can be worked out for the simple reason that there is an obvious skew to the selection process.  The question that none of the critics address is, however, how much does that really matter?  I would suggest that those seeking to dismiss the prize due to its lack of objectivity are missing the point entirely.

There will always be a slant to any prize selection process in literature, because literature is by design subjective.

The importance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, overblown as it may be, is not so much who actually wins, but rather the attention their victory brings to literature in general.  The patina of the Nobel Prize is extended to everyone toiling over words, whether they win any of the money or not.

We should have more literary prizes like this, not less.  More attention to writers of all kinds, and to words.  People need to be encouraged to seek out that “fresh access to reality.”

A story of mine, “The Angelic Host,” was made available this week in the anthology, Serve in Heaven, Reign in Hell.

Published by Static Movement, a speculative fiction micro-press with a growing footprint of fantasy, science fiction and horror-themed anthologies, Serve in Heaven promises readers “avenging angels, devious devils, and tempted mortals.”  A copy will set you back $15.99.

Midnight in Paris (2011) is a Woody Allen film about a fantasy many writers have of living among their idols in the past, and features lovingly sketched caricatures of Earnest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others.

To the delight of Gil Pender, the nebbish screenwriter who is magically transported from our time to theirs, these luminaries cavort through the Paris night demanding that artists love passionately and speak truly. Whereas Gil is only now learning to follow his bliss.

The most cringeworthy moment, for Gil, is one in which his shallow and derisive fiance and her pretentious friends dismiss his literary aspirations as sentimental fantasies. They’re right, of course, but speak with a total disregard for his feelings. The crux of their criticism is that Gil is too cowardly to show his novel to anyone and not enough interested in other people’s opinions.

That’s all set to change, however, when Gil steps through the looking glass and into a flapper party straight out of the Twenties. There he encounters his literary idols and, immediately entranced, starts asking them to read his work. Apparently, he wasn’t afraid, he just wanted the evaluation of somebody he considered truly worthy. That or he had the good sense not to show it to his mean-spirited companions.

Finding readers is an interesting conundrum for writers. It must be done, but you’re almost certain not to like what they have to say. Good critiques push for improvements, sometimes contradictory ones, and it’s up to the author to sift for gems. On top of that, hearing criticism requires an ego strong enough to withstand it. There are those that thrive by this process and those who wither.

In Paris in the 1920s of course, writers workshops did not exist as they do now. Instead they had salons, the most famous of which was Gertrude Stein’s. These meetups served some of the same purpose as a writing group, but without the formalities. Gil visits a salon and gets direct input of the most basic sort. He is told to fix one big thing, and in a single day rewrites the first four chapters. In reality this is not how these things work, of course.

Peter Turchi has a thoughtful and realistic discussion of writer workshops at his website. He describes them as laboratories and medical theaters, acknowledging that they can be instructive, but warning that they are too often “intent on finding fault.” Turchi says all writers have “horror stories to tell: stories about rude behavior, harsh comments, savage ‘advice,’ someone trying to dictate how someone else should write, writers in tears, writers enraged, or friends who feel obliged to ‘defend’ each others’ work.”

The reasons for this are reflected in the film when the Hemingway character, asked if he will read Gil’s novel, says something to the effect of, “I already know that I will hate it. If it’s bad, I will hate it because it’s bad, if it’s good I will hate it because I did not write it. All writers are competitors.”

To get away from the jealousies and trash talk, Turchi recommends focusing on a work’s intentions first and then taking the foray into craft.

One of the most useful things a workshop can do for the writer is to reflect the intention of the work back to her. It is of course helpful to give the writer suggestions for developing the work; and it’s useful for every writer to learn to diagnose the ailments of a draft that falls short. But falls short of what? If the conversation doesn’t begin by trying to recognize the work’s intention, there’s a great risk that the suggestions offered will be suggestions for ways to make the story what the speaker thinks it should be, or could be, or might be.

This puts the critique firmly on the side of the author, and to my mind that’s the only place to be in a workshop. In this regard, Midnight in Paris may be a bit flip with the details, but its feeling is correct. What Gil gets at the salon is a thoughtful critique, delivered in a respectful manner, with no other intention save the improvement of the work. He takes this critique to heart, and produces something better.

At some point Gil quotes Hemingway to himself, saying that all modern American literature can be traced back to Huckleberry Finn. Twain is a great example in critique, too; he always shared his unpublished manuscripts with “a private group of friends.” In the following video, read by John Lithgow, Twain describes the 14 types of people whose opinions he sought. It’s an amusing and insightful look at how writers get feedback.

Who is Mark Twain? from Flash Rosenberg on Vimeo.

Writing advice is plentiful on the internet.  Following up my previous post about Rules for Writers, I’ve collected some more:

• V.S. Naipaul’s advice is remarkably similar to the Strunk & White dicta, and can be summarized as ‘keep it simple and concrete.’
• George Orwell’s rules turn out to be similarly banal.
• Larry Brooks reveals that “Suffering is Optional: Or, Ten Ways to Totally Screw Up Your Novel,” over at StoryFix.com.
• The Writers Digest blog, There Are No Rules, has links to “The 5 Free E-Books Every Writer Needs.”
• And, finally, one PLoS Blogs blogger put together this exhaustive collection of “Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors.”

But for some really good and very funny advice I would highly recommend the new book Starve Better by Nick Mamatas.

I read and enjoyed Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, but something about it bothered me. Prose argues that writing is learned by reading other works and emulating them:

In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and re-read authors I most loved.  I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring the plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.  … What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.

I agree very strongly with this.  Where I begin to be concerned is in her analysis of specific examples, and not any one of them but rather the whole way she discusses close reading.
 
She breaks her book into chapters covering Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Dialogue and other elements of fiction, but her examples and the way she unloads these examples are, or seem to me to be, rather pedantic.  I don’t feel I learned much about reading or writing.  Rather it was all about analyzing.

I’m not the only reviewer to note this.  Brien Michael in his review at The Quarterly Conversation pointed out that “the book’s approach has much to do with Prose’s astute observations in the classroom” and “that Prose is surviving a tempestuous marriage with the academy.”

One of the fundamental problems with Prose’s approach is that we must depend on her to summarize the story up to that point or beyond so that we can make sense of what she’s doing. Even if we’ve read The Great Gatsby (it’s been since high school for me), it’s unlikely we could focus on the particular point without Prose’s attentions. She’s urging us to be brazenly intimate with a text while forcing us to rely on her introductions. It’s clear that the approach works much better in the context of a classroom, where the focus is on one story or one book, and it might have been more effective in Prose’s book if one text had been the focus of each chapter. Prose could have more closely replicated the pedagogical approach she employs in the classroom, and we would have been far less likely to misplace our own enthusiasm for the text—or our respect for her skill in unpacking it—in the abundance of illustrations.

If the technique is developed in the classroom and requires a classroom to explain, then Prose isn’t talking about how a writer reads so much as how a professor reads.

Perhaps her direction is indicative of the way certain writers operate in the modern teaching-mill marketplace.  Carlo Gébler certainly claims something of this sort about himself in his recent essay at Some Blind Alleys, stating unequivocally that “I started as an amateur, but at some point – I do not know when it happened; I only know that it happened – I became a professional, and once I became a professional my relationship to the world in general and to reading in particular changed utterly.”

I never simply enjoy the act of reading anymore. My authorial intelligence is totally and fully engaged. When I read, whatever I read, I examine and analyze. This is partly in order to judge the artifact and rank it, but also, and perhaps mostly, I am doing this so that I can learn from it. I want to know what I can appropriate. You could say – in fact, I will say it – I read primarily to steal. This attitude applies not just to books but to everything. In every situation, whatever it is, whether private or public, personal or impersonal, happy or sad, interesting or boring, exotic or quotidian, while part of me is involved and interacting and apparently sympathetic and human, there is another part of my personality that is scrutinizing my experiences and thinking two terrible things: What’s in this for me? And: Can I use this? Can I put it in a story? Can I put it in an article?

Gébler is no longer learning from reading so much as, in his words, cannibalizing.  He blames the marketplace for forcing him to evolve from an “author” into a “writer and teacher.”  He is bitter, but Prose seems mainly positively about the transformation.  I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.

Last February, I posted about the decline of science fiction.  An article appeared today at The World SF Blog that picks up precisely where my piece left off.

The author, Guy Hasson, postulates that rumors of science fiction’s death have been greatly exaggerated, but admits that its glory days may be behind it.  He argues that Science Fiction has become too specialized, insular and familiar to be relevant for the larger culture.  When it should be about “being brave and different and new,” it is instead written for people “looking for more of the same.”  This he contends has created a proliferation of overly specific sub-genres for “fans who already have foreknowledge in SF matters.”

Authors need to step up and, as Ezra Pound famously remarked, “make it new.”

SF is neither dead nor dying. It is currently losing the glory it once had and the wondrous, glorious feelings it used to convey. All these points need to be corrected: SF is now mostly non-inclusive, alienating ‘regular’ or even new readers; SF is no longer influential; SF is no longer brave; and the SF genres are the straight path to killing the glory of original SF.

Who can fix it? Authors can fix it, by trying to return to write brave and influential stories that can be easily read by those who don’t like SF. Authors can return to seek originality, first and foremost by looking outside the established sub-genres.

But that is not going to be enough. Because publishers need to want to publish brave, genre non-specific and perhaps even political SF. For the publishers to change their ways, the readers need to do something, as well. SF readers need to stop being scared. They need to find feelings of comfort in other genres and read SF for the thrill of the threat it may have on their lives. SF readers need to clamor for something brave and new, original and breathtaking, glorious and frightening.

While I may not entirely agree with his assessment, Hasson is a sci fi author himself and practices what he preaches.  There’s an interesting interview in which he claims one of the major appeals of science fiction is “the ability to take things a couple of steps further than realistic drama allows us. When ‘normal’ people hear that you’re writing or reading science fiction, they think about spaceships and special effects. But the truth is that science fiction usually means going all the way with an idea or a thought or an emotion.”  Now that’s an inception I can endorse!

Despite the fact that reviewers occasionally use it to categorize a work, I don’t think most people think of grotesque as a genre.  Instead the word is used as a description of something appalling: as in, Ew, that was totally grotesque. We talk about grotesque horror or grotesque satire, but not “the grotesque” so much.

So I asked myself, what if we did?  How would you distinguish works in the genre and figure out its aesthetics?

Wolfgang Kayser, author of The Grotesque in Art and Literature, felt the grotesque not only constituted a large body of work but that it was on par with (yet a completely separate form from) comedy, tragedy and history:

The grotesque instills fear of life rather than fear of death. Structurally, it presupposes that the categories which apply to our world view become inapplicable. We have observed the progressive dissolution which has occurred since the ornamental art of the Renaissance: the fusion of realms which we know to be separated, the abolition of the law of statics, the loss of identity, the distortion of “natural” size and shape, the suspension of the category of objects, the destruction of personality, and the fragmentation of the historical order.

The grotesque was a genre, he seemed to feel, that was gradually becoming more pertinent, because life is becoming increasingly fragmented and absurd-seeming.

The grotesque is not concerned with individual actions or the destruction of the moral order (although both factors may be partly involved). It is primarily the expression of our failure to orient ourselves in the physical universe. Finally, the tragic does not remain within the sphere of incomprehensibility. As an artistic genre, tragedy opens precisely within the sphere of the meaningless and the absurd the possibility of a deeper meaning—in fate, which is ordained by the gods, and in the greatness of the tragic hero, which is only revealed through suffering. The creator of grotesques, however, must not and cannot suggest a meaning.

In a sense he’s saying it is the anti-fable, that a grotesque story is one in which no neat moral can possible tie up all of its innuendo.  It can’t be summed up.  There’s nothing pat about the grotesque.

This isn’t to say that it’s utterly meaningless, but just that the place of revelation (the “oh, I get what’s going on here” moment) is filled by elements of contrast like distortion, ambiguity, intentional alienation, hybridization, and surrealism.  These are used to produce a feeling in the reader of a hyper-realized reality.

In the simplest terms, it’s about abnormal people and bizarre incidences in improbable scenarios that create a disquieting awareness in the reader.  Through strange visions, we receive a more clear view of our world.  At one extreme there are fantasies, such as Kafka’s or the work of E.T.A. Hoffman, so often called grotesque, and at the other there are realistic grotesques, like those of Flannery O’Connor and Irvine Welsh.

Then again, such a broad range of styles and approaches — many of which find themselves nested snugly inside other more well-defined genres — forces me back to the conclusion that the grotesque is, in fact, not a genre at all, but a technique.  Even a fable could be told in a grotesque way that undermined its own moral.  Hence our modern definition of the word: “distorted, deformed, weird, antic, wild.”