Coinages

One of the great pleasures of sharing a house with a two year old is the deformation of language used around the house. (The other great pleasures? Give me a minute . . . .) To wit:

Fuzzle

Mawnmower

Mneeñer

Poppy

Tea cuddle

Dinohorse!

(Photos by the Little Lady.)

Melchionni!

Those of you clamoring for more news of Duke basketball standout Lee Melchionni now have something to read.

(Thanks to the Little Lady.)

Writerly Wonkiness

Read the title. You've been warned.

When I got the notion to work on a couple of new short stories, before picking up my novel again, I thought I'd try to shake things up, do a couple of things differently than I had been in writing stories. I figured I'd try writing them in the first person, and I thought I'd try to allow myself to digress more, let in a little more chaos and life.

A few months ago, I spent a lunch break at the Barnes & Noble down the street reading bits of fiction in a dozen or so lit magazines. Filtering out the avant garde-ish stuff (it never changes; I'm not trying to be funny), one thing stood out to me. The preponderance of stories -- something like 60-70% -- were written in the first person.

Now, based on what I've published, you might not know I'm sort of conservative about point of view. Of the handful of stories I've published, one was in first person, another ("Sap") in second person imperative. The twist in the tail of "The Glanton Gang," which is written in third person, is a shift in POV characters, a fairly audacious move in such a short piece. But to me, third person limited has always seemed the generic choice. The first thing in the tool box. If I choose some other POV, it is for some specific purpose, as with "Five Trees," my sole published first person story, which has to be told that way to convey the irony of a character looking back at his unknowing childhood cruelty. When you pull out the first person POV, you've got to think about things like the circumstances under which the character is telling the story. You've got to consider how reliable the narrator is. You've got to worry about how smart or dumb your narrator is. I.e., if you're so smart over here dear narrator, how come you don't pick up the same connection I (the reader) do over there. Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you? And so on.

Except, it appears you don't really have to worry about any of that overmuch. First person seems (based on my unscientific analysis) to be the new third, with the advantage that it quickly involves the reader and allows an easy way for the writer to get a spoken quality, some "voice-iness," into the writing.

A cheap trick some part of me grumbles.

But since when have I been against cheap tricks? If it keeps somebody reading . . . . So I thought I'd give it a shot for these interim stories I'm doing between drafts of the novel.

As for the other thing . . . more life, more chaos. Well, when I first got serious about writing fiction, my stories were more open. I'd spend a few words to deepen the reader's understanding of the relationships between characters. I'd range back and forth in time, not worrying overmuch about stopping the present action of the story, if the back story was necessary to understanding the characters or story -- hell, even if the back story was just interesting. And I did all this in prose that aimed only to be transparent, fluid, and natural.

At some point, though, along about the time I started work on my MFA at VCU, I got more interested in form and words. Not so much sentences, the obsession of seemingly everyone else at the time. Words. The way you feel the knots, smell the fragrance, of a word like "pine." The hot breath and cold nose of a word like "dog." The way you can put together simple words in simple sentences to tell really compressed and intense stories. See "Woodpile" for an example.

At about the same time I got into the headlong velocity of Bukowski's short stories, of Airships era Barry Hannah. You can see this obsession in stories like "Gas Station Rose" and "The Glanton Gang."

The result of this was my stories kept getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Like the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, I was an ABC writer -- Always Be Closing. I had to be, because the intensity of what I was going for was difficult to sustain, and since I now had something of a phobia of digressions that might slow down the story, I didn't have much room to develop characters. I had to get in and get out.

As a further consequence, I avoided telling certain stories, because they just didn't lend themselves to this quick and telegraphic approach. At the time I didn't really see that I was avoiding stories. I was so myopic, I didn't see the limitation.

Then I wrote a novel. Too overwhelmed by the size of the task, I couldn't be too self-conscious about the prose, and I had to allow digressions. It's a novel, after all. And in writing it, I sort of re-discovered my interest in the characters about whom I'm writing, as opposed to the surfaces that interested me for so long. With the shift in prose, I got more interested in the sentences and the ways they join up into paragraphs. You know -- complex sentences, "flow."

So I decided I wanted to get back to some of my old virtues in short stories, maybe try to synthesize them with what I'd been doing in grad school.

And in conclusion, what do I get for my troubles? A really long story by a long-winded girl named Katie, who just won't shut up. Yep, I'm at that part of the journey, where I'm scratching my scurvy sores, scanning the horizon, searching the sky for a bird, the water for a bit of wood, a leaf, a dead possum. I'm really hoping to get to the end of this story sometime this week. Then I'm going to have to figure out how to get it down to a manageable length.

Luc Sante's Library

I don't read the Wall Street Journal. Like ever. Which is weird, if you think about it. I guess I don't mix with the capitalist sorts much, but you'd think I'd run across a link to it once in a while. Anyway, that must be why I missed Luc Sante writing about his personal library last month:

When I have a choice I go for interesting jackets, elegant typefaces, acid-free paper, but above all I prize compactness. Whenever possible I go for omnibus editions. The more books can fit in a single volume, the happier I am. And I mourn the passing of the pocket-sized paperback, which was once allowed to contain all sorts of material and is now strictly reserved for the kinds of books that inspire gold-embossed titles and peekaboo die-cuts. I like to carry books in my pockets, and trade paperbacks are an awkward fit, except in the dead of winter.

Me too! Especially about the mass market paperbacks. I love my mass market copies of Ada and Zuckerman Bound and Midnight's Children (which, uh, I haven't read yet) and Lucky Jim and on and on. The good old days, when any sort of book might be picked up by any sort of person in a drug store, at the airport, at something called a "newsstand!" A few months ago, in Montreat, NC for my grandmother's funeral, I stayed in the house of a friend of a friend of an aunt's. Looking for something to read, I found a falling-apart copy of Immortal Poems of the English Language, which did nicely. It just seemed right and perfect to have this book in a compact edition. (Actually, this one is still available in a mass market edition, so I've added it to my wish list.)

I don't know enough about the economics of publishing to say for sure, but my guess is the publishers make a lot more on individual copies of the larger, trade paperbacks. How much more could they possibly cost to produce, yet the retail price is about twice as much. Maybe mass markets will someday make a comeback.

Reading: The Things I've Read Update

• The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I
• Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum

I wish the old Paris Review Writers at Work series were still in print, because completeness would be nice, but these new collections of the interviews are decent enough. Essential, really, if you're into this kind of thing. Some of these interviews (which are not really interviews, as they're crafted and revised by the subjects after the actual conversations) are themselves literature.

Charles D'Ambrosio? Charles Daaammmmnnn-brosio. I think I'm getting the hang of this blogging thing. This is a really solid collection, in the vein of Tobias Wolff, shorter Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, et al. Not a stinker in the lot. Here's a free sampler I like a lot: "The High Divide."

Dean Bakopoulos Interview at Avery

Over at the Avery blog, Stephanie Fiorelli interviews fiction writer Dean Bakopoulos:

SF: What kind of stuff do you read while you’re trying to work through your own writing? In other words, do you see a correlation between your reading life and your writing life?

DB: I re-read a lot of my favorite authors when I'm writing: always Chekhov and Marquez, sometimes Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, also Ray Carver if I feel I am overwriting. Walker Percy, Grace Paley, Leonard Michaels, Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, Charlie Baxter, Rick Bass, Richard Price. I'm inspired by good prose. I'm like one of those kids who never can watch a full baseball game on TV; they'd rather go out and play. Usually, I'll read for an hour or less, and then I'll want to go and write something.

Monday to Monday All Mondays

Today we began our summer hours at work, 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday. My employer calls this the "Four Day Workweek." I call it the "Ten Hour Workday." You can't fool me with your rhetoric, Henrico County Public Schools!

Anyway, I want to stay on my 4:55 a.m. writing schedule, but this complicates things, as I need to be heading out the door about the time I'd normally be heading for the shower. So last night I showered before bed and moved everything I thought I'd need to get ready for work downstairs. Except I forgot a few things. Note to self: Toothbrush. Belt. Haircut to obviate the need for approximately one gallon of water to make my hair (what's left of it) lie flat.

Reading: Nabokov and Percy

• Benjamin Percy's Refresh, Refresh
• Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin

This Percy collection contains "Refresh, Refresh," the best short story in the land in 2006, if Ann Patchett is to be believed. That particular story is a little over-heated for my taste. My favorite is "Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This," another one that originally appeared in The Paris Review. It concerns a small town municipal worker, if he can be called a worker, whose job entails naps occasionally punctuated with a bit of a job clearing fire hydrants. Then he gets saddled with a young partner, just returned from Iraq. A relatively quiet piece, though someone does get hit with the business end of a digger.

Pnin is my personal favorite book (so far) of 2008. Of course it was published in 1957, and Nabokov is a bit a ringer, but still. I know this book has a good reputation. You regularly see it held up as one of Nabokov's better books, with Lolita and Pale Fire, but I am still surprised by how much I like it. Funny, sad, tricky in that proto-pomo Nabokovian way (not too much, though, not like Pale Fire), but most of all, and most surprisingly, this novel is sweet. There is a part, near the end, where I was on tenterhooks, everything hanging on whether or not a serving bowl has broken in the wash. Part of me was on the verge of a fit, and another part was wondering how the hell is he [Nabokov] doing this to me?

Does anyone care about summary? I tend to skip it, but briefly, the book is about a middle-aged Russian émigré, a refugee really, from the Revolution and Civil War, working as an adjunct professor at an American college. He initially is presented as a buffoon, but we gradually come to see him as tragic. In one chapter, when we see him with other émigrés, we glimpse a Pnin that might have been had there been no revolution -- a competent, intelligent, gifted, if somewhat romantic, man.

Pnin is less complex than Lolita, Nabokov's masterpiece, and about a third shorter. And it's a good deal less open. But in some ways, I prefer it. I found it easier to become involved in this story emotionally. I laughed out loud, a lot. I almost cried. So for some new readers of Nabokov, this might be a better starting place than Lolita. You should read it!

Dammit

You know that feeling you get when you realize that the narrator and protagonist of your new short story, of which you've written 11 pretty well sparkling pages, would work better if you sent the narrator's boss home and gave your narrator a promotion? And then, when you're looking over this story with its really pretty polished prose and the bon mots and the killer similes and whatnot, you realize the story would be a whole lot better if the narrator were a girl, not a guy? And then you see, even as you're trying not to see, that you're not really looking at some minor adjustment where you save all that deathless prose? You know that feeling? When you've got to throw it all away and start over?

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It just sucks is all.

William McCranor Henderson

I just found that one of my fiction teachers from NC State, William McCranor Henderson, has a blog about the craft of fiction. Bill is a good teacher and a good writer (I Killed Hemingway is super). Color me excited to add this to Google Reader.

So-called Streak

Well, I broke my not-all-that-impressive 7 day long 4:55 a.m. writing streak today. I felt really sick yesterday evening. I felt so crummy in fact that the Little Lady had to put Things 1 and 2 to bed, which never happens. That's my job! So I decided I probably needed to get a decent night's sleep to try to kick this summer cold in the tail.

I'm not 100%, but I do feel quite a bit better today. Don't know if the sleep really made a difference, and I feel guilty. I'll try to get back in the saddle tomorrow morning.

Dept. of Tribal Lays

I've been meaning to point to this post by Mike Jasper, where he reveals a previously, um, unrevealed talent for the graphic arts.

Seriously, I love reading about how other fiction writers work -- the many, many ways people have of making the imagination work, because that's the bottom line right? Before all else, how well can you imagine what you're writing? I'd actually been thinking about drawing some pictures to help me with my novel. But I'm not working on my novel. I'm working on short stories. So. No pictures, okay?

Go take a look!

Interview with Rae Meadows

Emma Straub has conducted a great interview with writer and fellow Avery 2-ian Rae Meadows at the Avery blog. Good stuff. Check it out.

Muzzy-Headed and Hot

Extremely hot in Richmond today, and the air conditioning is broken at work. I was going to spend my lunch break reading the Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, but I'm too hot to concentrate. I've been getting up at 4:55 a.m. each morning to write too. That's probably not helping.

Anybody know at what temperature servers start to fail? Oy.

Movie: The King of Kong

The little lady and I saw a great documentary last night called The King of Kong. It's about a man's attempt to break the world record Donkey Kong score set in 1982. Like any good documentary, though, it's also about a lot of other things: The way passions give shape and meaning to lives. The formation of tribes, their petty politics and ingrown provincialism.

You could easily take this material and turn it into a comedy like, say, Dodgeball, with Ben Stiller playing the mustache-twirling, reigning Donkey Kong champ and spicy chicken wing sauce kingpin Billy Mitchell. But it would be completely unnecessary. As the saying goes, you can't make this shit up.

And you definitely don't need to be a video game fan to enjoy. While the material doesn't quite lend itself to the pathos of a movie like Crumb, it's close! Good stuff.