Bangkok, Oriental City...

Greetings from Bangkok, friends!



After two days in Hong Kong, a seemingly bookless wonderland, it was a pleasure to see someone hawking an old copy of Granta in a neighborhood off Khao San Road.

Now off to a Holiday in Cambodia.

On vacation until the 7th....

Happy New Year, everyone!

See you in the middle of January.

AW


Big surf in Santa Monica last Wednesday

Yiyun Li's Story

The Washington Post has published an article about short-story writer Yiyun Li's immigration woes. Bloggers Babies Are Fireproof are doing what they can to call attention to her plight while her case awaits appeal. I figured I'd chip in here. Pass the article on to anyone and everyone. She's a tremendous writer, extraordinary even, and we're lucky to have her in this country.

NB I don't know Yiyun personally, and though we have mutual friends, my knowledge of her comes primarily from reading her work. As a naturalized citizen myself, I've experienced the federal immigration bureaucracy firsthand, and it ain't pretty. Yiyun will need all the help/attention/support she can get.

Word to Philip

From a Philip Roth interview in the Guardian:

"Ha, ha," he says. "Now you're talking! I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there's no bridge between the two."

[via Slushpile.net]

Or, as Nabokov said:

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.

Overrated Writers

Dare we, in a follow-up to the post below, invite commenters, lurkers, litbloggers, and the like to share their picks for Overrated Writers?

Comment away with your top three!

Underrated Writers

Trevor Jackson and Jeff Bryant, over at The Syntax of Things have an antidote to the ubiquitous year-end best-book wrap-up: A list of Underrated Writers.

...we decided to ask a wide range of litbloggers to tell us the writers who aren't receiving the attention they should. We allowed the contributors to define "receiving attention" however they preferred, whether it be by the NYTBR, or all of print media, or the litbloggers, or some combination, basically however they chose to define it. We asked each to provide us with up to five names and a short explanation as to why each writer deserves more attention.

Since they didn't ask me, or you (presumably), who else do you think should be on the list?

I think Thomas Bernhard is underrated. Or at least underrecognized in these parts.

Pinter's Nobel Speech

Can be read here.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay...

[Thanks, Grendel, for the link.]

This would be cool...

...if it were real...

The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag

Lewis Robinson is a Gentleman of the Old School

I wish they'd taught us this at the big-W Workshop

From Sam Sacks' "THE FICTION MACHINE The Workshop and the hacks", in which he skewers Best New American Voices 2006, workshops, the Workshop, and professors of creative writing:

A Story, as it progresses, is counterbalanced by a Backstory, which informs the reader what of importance happened beforehand. Both Story and Backstory must have a pronounceable Why Now, a meaningful reason that they are being told—something must be At Stake. Regarding meaning and significance, the writer should Show Not Tell through recurring Central Metaphor rather than through dry explanation of what is being felt. Furthermore, a good story has an apt and memorable Voice and conveys a strong Sense of Place.

I must have missed "formula day" at Iowa. Bummer. Probably would have been published sooner.

A popular anecdote that sheds light on an earlier epoch of American literature has F. Scott Fitzgerald, fresh out of Princeton, saying to his fellow alumnus Edmund Wilson, "I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don't you?" There is naivete in the statement and there is hubris, but the boast also expresses a serious pursuit of greatness that is beautiful and quite spine tingling to any young writer who feels within him the powerful welling of undeveloped talent. But today, such a statement would most likely be met with muffled embarrassment in a workshop, which values the practical ends of publication and employment over this sort of dreaming.

Actually, what I said was "No sleep til Stockholm." And the response wasn't muffled embarassment, but "Fuck you, Antoine," which in those days was the highest compliment available. Sometimes a story would go in, and you'd get a call the next day. "I read your story. Fuck you." Click. Then you knew it was good.

Mostly we learned by reading great literature, and writing a lot, and talking about it a lot, with nudges from professors here and there, professors who weren't trying to shove some formula down our throats but who were trying to impart to us the importance of our calling.* And by sitting around the Foxhead and of the Java House arguing about what was good and what wasn't.

Picking on the BNAV anthology doesn't seem quite fair to me. Of course the stories are going to seem derivative. Writers learn by imitation. Proust learned by imitation. And keep in mind this is an anthology of student work. Now, why would anyone want to read student work? Why is it called Best New American Voices when finding one's "voice" usually takes longer than learning the nuts and bolts of craft? I have no idea. I guess it sells books?


* Plus the mindblowing idea that stories are actually made of words, and that we should pay attention to them.

Something Donald Antrim Said Three Years Ago

You know when you read something by some other writer and it feels like they're talking about you and your experience? Both of the following Donald Antrim thoughts (from an ancient New Yorker Online piece) had that effect on me when I read them:

The sources of things tend to be hidden in the novels. I think that for me they've had a kind of autobiographical quality, but not in the usual sense—in their more encrypted, codified language.

I think that when I started writing my first novel I wrote it the way I wrote it because it was more fun. It was a way for me to enjoy what I was doing, and this came after some years in which I hadn't really enjoyed very much. I wasn't enjoying much of my life, and I wasn't enjoying writing, and I wasn't very happy with it all, and I started the first novel, and it felt fun. It felt like I had a different set of rules and possibilities. And I felt that if I weren't having fun then there really wouldn't be much reason to be doing this at all.

Then again, these can be summed up:

I. When writing a novel find a way to employ the personal ingredient.
II. When writing a novel have more fun.

Axiomatic Dictionary, Entry #001

Hollywood, n. Somebody put peanut butter on the dog's nuts.

the conductor's blog

My conducting, surfing, SAMOHI homie Edwin Outwater has got himself a blog over at myspace, chronicling the life of a hard-working, big-time symphony orchestra conductor on the road. Currently touring with Bocelli on a bus formerly occupied by Greenday. Does it get better than that?

I sold my book!

Loyal readers and looky-loos, I've got a happy piece of news. My first novel, The Interloper, is going to be published by Other Press / Handsel Books!

As far as I can tell, it's going to hit the shelves in 2007, so start stockpiling your nickels and dimes, kids. More to come as things develop. Maybe even an author photo poll. (Speedos in the hot tub or a kilt in the library?) In the meanwhile, here's a few words about Handsel Books:

Handsel Books publishes poetry, fiction, drama, and literary criticism distinguished by originality, craftsmanship, and, to borrow words from Seamus Heaney's Nobel lecture, "the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values."

And praise from Robert Pinsky:

"Edward Thomas's poetry with Introduction by Peter Sacks, Leslie Epstein's 'Novel from Memory,' Stanley Plumly's essays--all beautifully designed and bound: Handsel Books fulfills my ideal of what a literary publisher should be, a purveyor of excellence."

Word up, Bob.

Telling Tales Out Of (Grad) School, Pt. 1

The Difference Between Poets and Fiction Writers



My second year of grad school I lived in a farmhouse just outside Iowa City, known to workshoppers at the time as The Farmhouse. (A name accepted by most but not much appreciated by those living in the other farmhouse, a bit further out of town, with a beautiful and historic octagonal barn.)

Typically whoever was living in The Farmhouse was responsible for throwing a few parties every year, including a Halloween party. That's where the above photo comes from. That's me in our kitchen, dressed in my last-minute costume, a spraypainted carboard box (from the basement), some tinfoil, a tie (from the wedding of a friend, since divorced), and a sport coat formerly belonging to Chris Trumbo.

Plus, a rubber rat. He's up there highlighted in red, connected to my lapel by a piece of string. The cardboard box/TV had battery-powered Christmas lights in it, courtesy of poet housemate Meg Buzzi. I was basically going for the anchorman / talking-head look.

Over the course of the night, various people commented on and complimented my costume, and I began to notice a distinct trend in their reactions. Now, there were probably upward of 25 poets and 25 fiction writers at the party. Maybe as many as 40 of each. That's quite a sample.

Here's the rub: Without exception, the response of the fiction writers fell along the lines of "Nice costume, why is there a rat on your TV?" or "I don't get the rat." or "Is that like a rat race thing?" or even "I'd cut the rat." Poets, on the other hand, without exception, responded with "I dig the rat" or "The rat makes the costume" or "Great rat." Frankly, I worried as the night went on that someone would break the trend. No one did.

That, as far as I can tell, is the difference between Poets and Fiction Writers.


Oh yeah, and Poets are more fun to hang out with. And throw better parties. And are better at softball...