Bigfoot and the Baby ... coming from Bona Fide Books

I am thrilled to report that my first novel, Bigfoot and the Baby, will be published by Bona Fide Books in spring 2014. Bona Fide is an innovative, exuberant small press, committed to literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with a particular interest in the environment and the American West.

Ray Harryhausen and writing

In the NYT obituary for legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, I found myself dwelling on this statement:

“There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in ‘King Kong,’ that adds to the fantasy,” he said in 2006. “If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.” 

As a fiction writer--and reader--I've always agreed with this, without ever quite knowing why. Now I actually suspect it's because I grew up watching Harryhausen's movies, often on the big screen, in gorgeous Technicolor. The way Harryhausen's monsters moved impressed the hell out of me--at once faster and slower than humans, with starker contrasts between light and shadow. I don't remember precisely how they looked. The movement was what made them otherworldly, and therefore more real, in the sense of more plausible as monsters. Why would something from another world (or from the imagination) move as we do, and exist in precisely the same plane? The movements of Harryhausen's creatures made them seem both here and somewhere else at the same time--and that lent them real power and real magic. And as he suggests, the more realistic CG effects become, the more disappointing they become, even as we marvel at the technical achievement. The monsters really have been brought down to Earth.

That's probably not the *only* reason that I prefer a veneer of unreality in fiction. But if you're going to go ahead and create a world, why not let it shimmer and quake a little around the edges? Because you have made something. You have brought something into our world from another one--your imagination. That wonder and that strangeness, it seems to me, deserve attention.

Zap the "to be" verbs

Not until I started working for a marketing firm (yes!) did I realize the full insidiousness of "to be" verbs. Not only do they make your prose static, they can obscure the true meaning of your sentence by preventing you from finding the right verb--and with it, the right noun(s), adjective(s), adverb(s), and phrasing. I've noticed that, particularly when I write in a rush, "to be" verbs proliferate--because I don't take the time to ponder exactly what I want to say. And maybe that kind of rushing works for a first draft, when you don't want to pause and ponder, but simply "get it down." But during revisions, you can make a lot of amazing improvements by scrutinizing and replacing "to be" whenever possible.

OK, once and for all: Is getting a Ph.D. in literature a waste of time?

Yes. No. Oh, who can say?

Well, in theory, I should be able to say. I got my Ph.D. in comparative literature [redacted] years ago, and I'm one of those twisted yet oddly grateful souls who didn't become a professor. I ought to have warnings and/or encouragement to offer those on the front end of the process--not to mention solace and/or encouragement to those, possibly drifting in adjunct limbo, who are now thinking of stepping all the way out. 

But I must start by saying: are we really still having these arguments? Really? Literally these same laments, and dismissals thereof, have been flying about for longer than the [redacted] years since I first ignored the warnings aimed at me. Nothing has changed. Tenure-track jobs still prove more elusive than starring roles in feature films. Universities continue to admit more grad students than they can ever hope to place in such jobs--because they supply cheap academic labor, because they represent the next generation of a culture and philosophy that at least some people hope to preserve, and because they still want to come. So it shall ever be, evidently. And while we non-professors--eventually--generally find satisfying alternative careers, we still seem to have no good answer to the question, What is a literature Ph.D. for?

My experience is just one experience. And even [redacted] years later, I find myself unable to wrap it in a comprehensive, persuasive ball of wisdom. Here, then, are some random questions and the answers I would give you, today, if you asked.

Would you do it over again, knowing what you know now?
No.

Are you still glad you did it?
Most days, yes. It has undoubtedly opened doors, though the person on the other side has often been surprised to see me there. I've learned to use that surprise to my advantage.

Did you learn to think better?
Probably. Yes. What kind of a question is that? I will say I learned to pay very close attention to language, although the attention was focused through a very narrow lens. Emotional reactions, including simply taking pleasure in an author's beautiful words, were right out. I hope that's changing. I now believe that this is a much better way to think about--and with--literature.

Did you learn to write better?
God, no.

Could you have tried harder to get a tenure-track job?
Yes. But the answer is always yes, isn't it? The best advice I ever heard was: If you can do something else, you should. I felt that I could, indeed, do something else, though it took me awhile to figure out what that was. Not everyone has the luxury of that kind of time, though.

Did others fail to warn you sufficiently?
I doubt it. We all think we're the exception. Sometimes we are. Warnings can scare off the ambivalent, but not the truly determined.

On writing and feeling "unhoused"

Via Andrew Sullivan, The Paris Review's lovely interview with Andrea Barrett offers these lines:

I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it.

The question is, does('nt) everyone feel this way? Or just writers/artists? I suspect the circle of the emotionally "unhoused" is larger. But I'm really wondering who actually feels "housed." Wall Street types? Oncologists? Priests? Cheerleaders? And do they know they feel this way?

Affirming life with The Pale King, of all books

I have now officially finished reading The Pale King. I make a special point of mentioning that I've finished, because it has been my habit to opine at some length about a book I am only halfway through ... only to discover that you kinda do need to read the whole book to understand what it's about. Also, I am very proud of myself. This is a long book--ultimately unfinished by the author himself, as we know--and it is full of tax-law arcana, which is fascinating in that it was fascinating to DFW.* But not at all fascinating otherwise.

I mean, what sort of mind can engage itself with that stuff at that level of detail? Of course, that's the central question The Pale King asks. And the answers within the book differ from those we've learned from DFW's biography. We all know that the author committed suicide before finishing the novel. So that suggests the mind in question was not a conventionally healthy one. But I just went back and added "conventionally" before "healthy," because without the adverb, the adjective seemed to cast judgment on that mind. Despite the terrible end to DFW's life, it seems, from the evidence of this book alone, that there was something right about his mind, something good and powerful, which may or may not spring from the same well as his depression.

I also think it's a mistake to look for clues to "what pushed him over the edge" within this book--even though I had avoided reading it precisely because I thought it would be littered with such clues. Reading it seemed somehow ghoulish, and I feared being sucked into depression myself. Yet nothing of the sort happened. I was able to forget, or put aside, my knowledge of Wallace's death, because the book is so full of ... yes, life. It's energetic, hilarious, compassionate, fascinated and amused by the most ordinary aspects of human life, sometimes frightening, and also pretty stark raving crazy. If anything, I found myself wondering, Why would a person who saw the world this way want to die?

I don't know the answer. But if I had to guess, I'd say that he couldn't sustain this level of embracing joy. Perhaps he could not even reach it at all, and this book is an act of straining toward what he could never actually grasp. Or maybe (like most of us, really) he grasped it only for brief instants, and the slipping away of that joy was unbearable to him. I was thinking about an episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge on NPR last weekend, the topic of which was "Why Do We Love Sad Songs?" One segment concerned the supposedly saddest piece of music ever written, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. The author of a book about that piece, Thomas Larson, explained how Barber wrote it during one of the happiest times of his life. An artist, he said, does not need to be in the same mood as the work he is creating. Rather, he needs to have access to that emotion--and that access might, in fact, depend on distance. In other words, if Barber had actually been that sad, he might not have been able to write that piece at that time. The reverse might be true of Wallace.

*Yes, I skimmed a lot of that. And some of the footnotes.


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Yes, pictures and music are sometimes better than words

I have a vague, troubling memory from my graduate school days. OK, more than one memory. Actually dozens. Hundreds. Oh, God, the flood of vague, troubling memories ... ! But the one that's troubling me today is the sound of my voice, intoning to a classroom full of undergraduate composition students something to the effect of: "Anything that cannot be articulated in words is not worth articulating." In my defense, I think I was trying to counteract certain students' desire not to write anything about what they had just read--or seen or listened to--because putting their thoughts into words would "spoil it." Which, all you students out there must admit, could also be interpreted as a cover story for laziness.

Nevertheless, I was young and (relatively) brash myself in those days, and given to pronouncements that now make me cringe. So let me say for the record: Words are not always the best medium of communication. They are the most practical, and practiced, medium, but there are many, many occasions when another form works better.

All of this is by way of saying that I bought my husband a copy of Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said for Christmas, and this particular edition came with this most extraordinary cover art by Chris Moore.

Of course, you also need to read the book beneath the art. As I understand it, this is one of the few novels by Dick that don't start out brilliantly (they all do, as far as I can tell), but then collapse spectacularly after about p. 20. This one makes it all the way through.

But if you want to experience the true spirit of 1970s science fiction, this cover art delivers, in a way mere words cannot. Take a look, and then tell me I'm wrong.