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W. G. Sebald’s Writing Tips
May 10, 2009 in the literary conversation
In the latest issue of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials, two former students of Sebald’s present their notes from one of his writing classes. Here are some of my favorites:
- It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies.
- You should keep a notebook of tidbits, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.
Encyclopedias [are] completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world. - Writing should not create the impression that the writer is trying to be ‘poetic.’
- The best academics are often Welsh. They come from a linguistic tradition that mixes the vernacular with the biblical.
Though I’m not sure how well Sebald’s second tip holds up, his second-to-last tip is more relevant among today’s writers than ever.
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What goes into a Eurozine?
April 19, 2009 in the literary conversation
In going through some of my old bookmarked pages, I found this interview with one of my academic heroes, Homi Bhabha. The interview first appeared in Crosswords, a multilingual and transnational journal on multilingualism and digital networking, and later appeared in the pages of Eurozine.
In this interview, Homi Bhabha criticizes Eurozine (itself an online aggregate of many European journals) for limiting itself to European publications. After all, Europe as an institution is so often defined (and continues to be defined) by its interactions with non-”European” countries. And if these other countries are a part of the definition, should they not be a part of the dialogue?
Recommended reading.
(via a post on Bookforum, which also links to an entertaining list of 5 homeless guys who accomplished great things)
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April 12, 2009 in the literary conversation
A moving assessment of where literary studies is versus where it ought to be:
We’re not teaching literature, we’re teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn’t, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It’s, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to “teach the conflicts”: We and our squabbles are what it’s all about. That’s how we made a discipline, after all.
Why do I say “moving,” rather than “distressing”? I think dispatches like this one from the U. S. Naval Academy’s English department remind us what literature is—not a source text for our pet theories, but as Norman Rush wrote, “humanity talking to itself.” And it’s still more moving to suppose that one day we’ll have an opportunity to teach it as such.
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Bring Back Enthusiasm
March 28, 2009 in the literary conversation
This is an oldie, but a goodie: back in January, the Times Literary Supplement ran an article on why the teaching of literature should be impassioned as well as informative. I’m glad someone out there has identified a need to recover an enthusiastic relationship to the text. I also like the focus on “enthusiastic literature,” or books that enact, rather than describe their subject.
(via Bookforum)
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Book Drama!
March 28, 2009 in the literary conversation
On a recent vacation, I took with me the March issue of Harper’s, the best magazine ever. While in the airport, I came across a lengthy article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus called “The Last Book Party.” I have never read such a cogent-yet-snarky summation of the current state of publishing. I wish I could just link to the article here, but Harper’s archives are subscription-only. Oh well. You all should be subscribing to this magazine anyway.
Some choice quotes:
The problem with publishing is the relentlessness of the apocalypse.
Ah, yes. Because this wasn’t the first article heralding the death of publishing, and it certainly won’t be the last. Writers take some kind of perverse pleasure in speculating about the demise of their livelihoods. I suppose there’s no better muse than hand-wringing.
You are holding yourself accountable not only to commercial but to aesthetic standards. This dual standard is fundamental to how book people see themselves. . . . It is tempting to think that the problem with publishing is just too many awful books, but then again 99 percent of anything is mediocre, and people don’t tend to complain that there are too many mediocre widgets. Books are something we have higher expectations for.
Here are two nice thoughts about the perilous balance that most publishing houses establish between the commercial bestsellers and the barely-selling chapbooks and works-in-translation. The next time you feel churlish about the half-million dollar advance bestowed upon the author of Lucy, Dog on the Streets,* think that its sales are funding that year’s release of Polish poetry collections. Feel better?
A young editor [told] me that Morgan [Entrekin, publisher at Grove Atlantic] once asked a Frankfurt cabbie how he felt about the Book Fair and the cabbie said it wasn’t good business for him. Morgan asked why. The cabbie said that he doesn’t many any money on prostitution-related commissions. Morgan said it’s because the publishers all sleep with one another.
There’s nothing like a satisfying burn on the industry. And this is only one of many: I actually took out a pen and wrote BURRRRNNNN in the margins, because the zings were so good. Anyway, if you need confirmation that book publishing is exactly as awesome, gossipy, and culturally relevant as it’s always been, read this article.
*Books about dogs and urban lit are the two best-selling genres out there. The world is waiting for a book about urban dog gangs.
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This Weird Little Business
March 16, 2009 in the literary conversation
We forget, now and again, in the careerist whirl of the weird little business that is made of writing, how much altruism there is among those who do this sort of work. Half the fun comes in passing the literal or figurative hat when one believes in the virtues and virtue of something rare.
(via Sentences)
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Half-Assing Multiculturalism
March 16, 2009 in the literary conversation
Aviya Kushner calls America out for its half-assed attempts at worldliness in this Wilson’s Quarterly article. It’s great and all that we’re newly interested in understanding what goes on outside of our country’s borders, but we’d still rather have someone else tell us about it than read it first-hand:
Peruvian-born writer Daniel Alarcón observes, “There’s a certain curiosity about the world that’s not matched by a willingness to do the work…So what happens is that writers of foreign extraction end up writing about the world for Americans.”
Not enough of a BURN for you? Kushner says it again, but with food metaphors:
We don’t have much time, so we want a taste, some fast food to go. And so we read ethnic literature the way we down an ethnic meal. We can get a burrito almost anywhere, but it’s often mildly spiced, adjusted just for us, and wrapped for those in a rush. So we’re eating a translated burrito, and we’re reading a world prepared especially for us. But we don’t believe anything is missing.
I hate to say it, especially because I often rest on my laurels as a decent multicultural reader, but more than half of the “ethnic lit” I read was originally published in English. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I love you. But I guess I should also read some Ngugo wa Thiong’o.*
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
*Note: Not a perfect comparison, since Adichie is Nigerian and Thiong’o is Kenyan, but I couldn’t think of a Nigerian author who originally wrote in English and then renounced the language for one’s native tongue. Not off the top of my head, anyway.
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The Collected E-mails of Pam
March 14, 2009 in the literary conversation
I think I give good e-mail. I have often thought that if I were to one day become famous, for whatever reason, people would posthumously line up for copies of my Collected E-mails. In college, I fastidiously filed away my best e-mails (both received and sent), in hopes of creating the world’s most solipsistic portrait of an overly-educated college student. (Months after graduation, I somehow lost the entire archive.)
But what about the e-mails of people who are actually famous? Could we see the Collected E-mails of Salman Rushdie…or of John Updike? The New Scientist investigates, yielding some interesting comments:
Gordon Bell, from Microsoft Research, suggested that [the value of collectable e-mails] should actually fall to almost nothing. “Isn’t it about scarcity? Once it’s been copied and distributed the value is gone, it’s just a piece of memory.”
“The nature of digital information is that it’s near-infinitely copyable,” agreed Peter Hirtle, who works on technology strategy at Cornell University Library. To turn it into something of value, “you’re having to deny the nature of the medium”, he argued.
(via Bookforum)
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Just Say No to “Literary Science”
June 13, 2008 in the literary conversation
This is nearly a month old, but it comes from The Boston Globe: English professor Jonathan Gostchall wrote an article on why we ought to apply the rigors of the scientific method to literary analysis in order to revive literary scholarship from its current (and supposed) irrelevancy. He argues:
“We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.”
But is this really true? I’d like to see Gottschall provide some sincere examples—I’m sure a cynic could easily assemble a list of increasingly esoteric PhD dissertation titles that seem to point to the growing irrelevancy of literary thought. But I don’t think any literary scholar goes into his studies with the intention of detaching himself from reality. If there’s any fault in current literary scholarship, it’s that scholars are growing increasingly dependent on examining literature rather than examining life. I know this sounds like a facetious comment, so let me explain: It’s one thing to point out that “x” quality appears in 10 books written in Romania between 1978 and 1985. It’s another thing to explain why, to use literature as evidence of emotional movements, political happenings, and philosophical truths. From the looks of all the good lit theory that got written in the 20th century, this used to happen a lot more than it does now. Maybe this decline is the fault of college English classes, or maybe it’s the fault of the fierce criticism that gets heaped on writers when they drift away from grounded, referenced fact to rambling, uncited hypotheses. And so our current stabs at “steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition” must be yoked to books; any knowledge must be eked out, observation by observation, by the minute analysis of gayness in butlers in 18th century Welsh novels.
The situation won’t be ameliorated by applying a scientific method to literary analysis—if anything, such rigorous methodology will only make it worse. Take, for example, the author’s “experiments” to test the hypothesis that the emphasis on female beauty is a Western phenomenon or the hypothesis that the author is dead. Is the author really holding up this kind of methodology as something to be praised? It seems to me to be the hilarious endpoint of the kind of literary analysis that’s already being taught in lit classes.
But Gotschall hits gets it right on the money when he observes:
Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley’s Frederick Crews points out, is that “our bogus experiments succeed every time.” And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not.
Good point—I’m guilty of doing exactly this. Most papers generate from having an idea and contributing pages upon pages of examples. But is this really a bad thing? I don’t set out in my papers to prove a hypothesis—I write papers to show something, and then to wonder why that something exists or occurs. There’s something fundamentally wrong with asking literary scholarship to adhere to the same ambitions of science. Authors aren’t like atomic particles—they don’t follow the same rules all the time. The patterns are varied, and the patterns are personal, and it’s more interesting and valid to explore the erratic movements of a couple of writers than it is to define a universal rule for all writers. By the way, if you did the latter, you’d just be accused of “generalizing” and “stereotyping,” a heinous crime in literary analysis.
Gotschall concludes that “setting things right will require an embrace not only of science’s theories and methods but also of its ethos—its aspiration to disinterested inquiry and its measured optimism that the world can, in the end, be better understood.”
Isn’t there that saying about college, that they desire not to teach students not what to think but how to think? Perhaps this is the difference between scientific analysis and literary analysis. In the former, you’re trying to learn concrete facts about the world. But in the latter, you’re trying to learn how to perceive literature, how the meaning of a book can change based on the lens through which you read it. I’m going to make another facetious comment, but there might be some truth in this flippancy: Science desires to make the world better understood. Literary analysis desires to make the world better at understanding.
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There’s Something in the Water, Isn’t There?
March 8, 2008 in the literary conversation
Colson Whitehead, author of The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt, addresses contemporary literature’s most pressing issue: writing in Brooklyn.
In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.”
Highly recommended.
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