Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

Warning: Just Getting Published is Not Enough

Photo-illustration by Gluekit (Photo: Christopher Lane (Frey); Gluekit (body); Archive Holdings Inc./Getty Images (background); Getty Images (typists))

With editing, photography, and life, I've been busy and very neglectful of this blog.  It will probably continue to be so for some time.

But I do peruse the writing and agent blogs every week.  Tonight, I came across this wonder from Writers Beware:

James Frey's Fiction Factory, published in the New York Magazine

If you know little or a lot about book packaging, read this.  If you know anything about Hollywood, read this.  If you think you understand how low things can be in the underworld of writing, read this.  Have your eyes opened wide.

And then I stare at the pictures and the names of contemporary visual artists I admire--working with, and buddy-buddy with, this conman.  I grow sick.

Ed Ruscha, my love, back out.

J.C. Hallman: PROPOSAL FOR TALK ON “GRANTS, PROPOSALS, AND QUERIES”

TO BE DELIVERED AT THE 2010 AWP CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, APRIL 8, COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, STREET LEVEL, ROOM 203, 9:00 AM

J.C. Hallman

For all you lucky enough to be in Denver, if only marginally lucky to be at AWP, here's a talk on writing nonfiction proposals sure to bring a few laughs (as well as confusion if you think publishing is all about the cream rising to the top).  If you're unable to attend, here's a copy of the talk posted over at The Quarterly Conversation.

INTRODUCTION

Insight into proposing book-length literature is difficult to come by if for no other reason than that modern publishing is a many-headed hydra, and no one, not writers, not agents, not editors, can truly be said to know a great deal about it beyond whatever wisdom their own narrow sliver of experience has afforded them. In the brief essay that J.C. Hallman will deliver at a panel discussion at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Hallman will offer up his own insights as to the nature of this admittedly flawed practice. The essay will be, to some extent, experimental. It will have a self-referential quality, it will aspire to innovation, indeed it will even be accurate to describe it as “meta-,” but of course Hallman will use none of these terms, though he would like to. Book proposals are not places for words like innovation and experimentation. Instead, Hallman’s essay will be “quirky and fun.”

Book proposals are as problematic as they are necessary. Hallman will be sure to note that even though the language of book proposals grates and annoys—that serious writers can feel a certain “whittling away of the soul” when they translate aesthetic goals into the language of car salesmen—but he’ll be anything but overtly discouraging. Far from it! Rather, he’ll describe the state of modern book proposals, flawed as they are, with terms like “savvy” and “pragmatism.” Of course Hallman won’t mention that his second book was about William James, founder of Pragmatism, and because of this he knows that “pragmatism” in the businessy sense of the word has nothing to do with actual pragmatism. But that’s another important—even critical—point Hallman will make. Words in book proposals do not serve the normal function of words. In a sense, they are not “words” at all. They’re more like bullet points. This principle applies broadly. Proposal language is not “language,” and stories in proposals are not “stories.” Hallman’s essay will be absolutely chock full of essential material and hard-to-come-by insights despite the narrow sliver of Hallman’s experience, and not the least among this veritable cornucopia of good thinking will be the suggestion that the language of the modern book proposal is mostly one of exaggeration and euphemism (even as proposals tend to deny this). Hallman’s essay will hammer this point home in a smart, un-alienating, and completely-understandable-to-the-average-reader kind of way: book proposals are not plans, they are utopian dreams. They are dreams in which one suspends all doubt, in which one assumes that all speculation has already translated into reality, and in which, during the course of their production, the proposal writer sublimates all the reasons why he or she wanted to be a writer in the first place, and instead operates under the assumption that the only reason anyone ever writes a book is to make assloads of money. In a totally fun way, Hallman will emphasize that the sad truth of modern publishing is that in order to write the books one wants, good writers have to figure out how to suspend their “voice,” suspend their ambition, and instead channel the insipid prattle of exciting, invigorating, and inspiring corporate seminars.

The absolute necessity of this knowledge in the modern publishing climate will make the panel on which Hallman sits the most absolutely sought-after ticket at this year’s convention.

The Women in the Middle of Duras’s The Lover, Part 1

Place d'Alma (site of Princess Diana's crash)

Smack in the middle of The Lover are two character sketches, both of foreign women in Paris during the War.  Their appearance made Chris stop reading, shooting me a glance over the book's edge to ask: What are these doing here?

What are they doing there?  The book never tells, and the characters never appear again.  I find them representatives of a female figure who reappears throughout Duras's work--tragic, bored, found fascinating by others, isolated from her homeland as the last strains of a dying colonialism play out.   Anne-Marie Stretter of The Vice-consul, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, L'Amour, and India Song is the best known Duras character of this type.  In the Indochina of The Lover, this figure is The Lady from Savanna Khet whose lover shot himself in Vinh Long's public square.

The War is the end of Duras's family story in The Lover.  With her brother's death, the others are dead to her.  This is why Paris of World War II figures so much in the story--a story ostensibly about Indochina and her Chinese lover.  And even in this Paris, this haunting--hunted?--female figure is found, caught in a simple character sketch.  As a reader, I live for moments like this one--a portrait taken from so many angles, the figure/person denies me immediate access like a Picasso portrait, yet I can still graze up against something precise :

Marie-Claude Carpenter.  She was American -- from Boston, I seem to remember.  Very pale eyes, grey-blue.  1943.  Marie-Claude Carpenter was fair.  Scarcely faded.  Quite good-looking, I think.  With a brief smile that froze very quickly, disappeared in a flash.  With a voice that suddenly comes back to me, low, slightly grating in the high notes.  She was forty-five, old already, old age itself.   She lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the place de l'Alma.  Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine.  People went to dinner there in the winter.  Or to lunch in the summer.  The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris.  Always passable, almost.  But only just enough, skimpy.  She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out.  Sometimes there was an expect on Mallarmé there.  And often one, two, or three literary people, they'd come once and never be seen again.  I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them.  I never head anyone else refer to any of them, and I never read or heard of their work.  The meals didn't last very long.  We talked a lot about the war, it was the time of Stalingrad, the end of the winter of '42.  Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn't say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she'd laugh.  Straightaway after the meal she'd apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said.  She never said what.  When there were enough of us we'd stay on for an hour or two after she left.  She used to say, Stay as long as you like.  No one spoke about her when she wasn't there.  I don't think anyone could have, because no one knew her.  You always went home with the feeling of have experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers, too, of having lived thorugh a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other.  It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors' waiting rooms, hotels, airports.  In summer we had lunch on a big terrace looking over the river, and coffee was served in the garden covering the whole roof.  There was a swimming pool.  But no one went in.  We just sat and looked at Paris.  The empty avenues, the river, the streets.  In the empty streets, catalpas in flower.  Marie-Claude Carpenter.  I looked at her lot, practically all the time, it embarrassed her but I couldn't help it.  I looked at her to try to find out, find out who she was, Marie-Claude Carpenter.  Why she was there rather than somewhere else, why she was from so far away too, from Boston, why she was rich, why no one knew anything about her, not anything, no one, why these seemingly compulsory parties.  And why, why, in her eyes, deep down in the depths of sight, that particle of death?  Marie-Claude Carpenter.  Why did all her dresses have something indefinable in common that made them look as if they didn't quite belong to her, as if they might just as well have been on some other body?  Dresses that were neutral, plain, very light in color, white, like summer in the middle of winter.

Photo

Catherine Michele Adams, Sandstone Falls, Michigan U.P., 2009

Photo

Catherine Michele Adams, UP Michigan, 2009

Photo

Catherine Michele Adams, Michigan, UP, 2009

Photography and Writing: An InDialogue Chat over at InDigest

Writer J. C. Hallman and I had a chat over the holidays about the relationship between the visual and the written arts that has just been posted at InDigest.  Check it out.

The Naked and the Conflicted (New York Times)

A few weeks back, I posted about writing sex and violence.  Sex is a topic I've been chewing on a lot lately.  I find New York American publishing quite prudish these days.

Recently in the New York Times book section, Katie Roiphe drew a line in the sand between how a previous generation of male writers (Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller) and  the male writers of more recent vintage (Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen) write sex.  The upshot of the argument seems to be that contemporary male writers have lost the drive and the spark, wallowing in a post-feminist anxiety rather than confronting rage and desire:

The younger writers are so self- conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus”).

I, like Roiphe, am interesting in finding more sex -- more raw, masterfully written sex -- in mainstream and literary American books.  I do wonder, however, why a writer like Steve Almond isn't mentioned in the article.  He strikes me as part of this generation denounced as "boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of 'I was warm and wanted her to be warm,' or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world."  His work would upset the thesis.  And similar other straight male writers can be found, I'm sure.

I also worry about the quotes chosen for Roiphe's article.  They are the one liners that capture our attention with blatant sexual mechanics, rather than the dramatic scenes that force us to confront something possibly eerie or forceful or contradictory within the characters or within ourselves about desire and the acts of sex.  The quotes, in other words, don't do much for me, and without good examples, it's hard for me to nod along with Roiphe.  I'm betting that this flaw has much to do with the limitations imposed upon the article by the New York Times.  How often do such articles include lengthy quotations?  Rarely.  The reader's attention, you see, might be lost.  Or the jaunty voice might be compromised.  My point is that even here, in an article about sex in male fiction, sex is pretty flaccid.  This makes me ask why the writer attacks only today's writers, rather than including an attack on the business of writing itself, such as the constraints put upon writers by news sources or by New York publishers afraid of pissing off their public with something too lewd and scary.

Update: Jump over to Conversational Reading to get Scott Esposito's take on Roiphe's essay.

Happy Holidays!

Greetings from Catherine!

Wishing everyone a Happy Holiday.

See you next week.