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.

In fiction, voice is everything

I know I've said this before. But reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao just brought that lesson back home.

Your narrative voice not only creates the world in which your fiction operates, it defines the boundaries of that world. This doesn't just apply to what the narrator can realistically know or not know (this is especially an issue in the case of first-person narration, when the narrator is also an actor in the story). The even larger issue is what the narrator can and cannot do. And it's the nature of the voice itself that establishes those parameters.

In Wao, Diaz's narrator, Yunior, possesses a wide-ranging intellect, a powerful and outraged sense of history, a dark and hilarious sense of humor, and a command of many languages--not just English and Spanish, but academic-ese, science-fiction geek-speak, 1980s New Jersey teenager, and a bunch of others. Bakhtin would have really loved this guy.

The voice so energetic and captivating, we as readers will let Yunior take us anywhere. We'll read lengthy footnotes on the history of the Dominican Republic and long passages of what attendees at a lesser sort of workshop would criticize as summary (no, don't tell us what happened to Oscar's mother, show us!). Well, he does get around to showing eventually, but there's lots of telling first--and the telling is fascinating because of the voice. The story isn't separate from the voice; the voice is the story, and the story's requirements made the voice.

How does Diaz do it? I mean, aside from being brilliant. That helps. But as authors, we can all be more aware of what our story needs its voice to do. There is no law against summaries and histories in fiction; the law is to make them interesting--which you must do via the voice.

Now, not every narrative voice is as prominent as Yunior's; many authors take a more minimalist or transparent approach to storytelling. But those voices may not be as capacious--the straightforward, "I'm-not-really-here" narrative voice would, I think, have a harder time inserting long passages of history into a fictional narrative, because they'd come off as dry and boring. That's not to disparage the minimalist style; it doesn't seek the kind of capacity I'm talking about in the first place. But if you need greater range in your story, your voice needs greater range, too: so give it more bravado, more curiosity, more offbeat humor, more fury. The more distinctive the voice, the more places it can go.


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Mystery novels and the mystery of death

I expect to return many times to this nearly twenty-year-old interview with Don DeLillo in The Paris Review. It basically answers all my questions about writing and validates what I thought were some of my worst tendencies, especially in relation to character. So it's awesome!

But today I want to dwell on this almost throw-away insight DeLillo offers about mystery novels:

When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format.

For a long time I've wondered how and why mystery fiction transforms murder into a form of amusement. How does that dynamic operate? How does it make murder appealing rather than merely appalling? What makes us accept that the satisfaction of solving the crime seems to justify its occurrence, at least in fiction?

Well, of course. The tightly woven plot is a containment strategy. Part of the pleasure we derive from such stories is in experiencing that containment, that transformation. Murder and death become artifacts through the evident artifice of these plots.

In other words, the murder mystery is a proxy for the mystery of death itself. What happens, really? And why must it happen? By the strict terms of the human condition, we can't have these answers. But we can have more practical answers about death in a murder story: we can use our minds to discover who did it, and why. The criminal's motive replaces God's and/or the universe's. If we can't understand death in general, at least we can understand a particular death.

All of which suggests the mystery novel as a kind of ritual or amulet or charm against death, which goes a long way to explaining its appeal. And a character like Sherlock Holmes, a master at comprehending murder mysteries, becomes a kind of priest.

In praise of the writerly surprise

I've been dipping into George Saunders's essays in The Braindead Megaphone. I've always admired Saunders as a writer of the kind of surreal, hilarious, and deeply sad fiction I wish I could come up with myself. But man, can he rock an essay.

I suppose that what makes his fiction great is something he also does--less often, and therefore perhaps more strikingly--in his nonfiction: He surprises us. I don't mean that his work is startlingly good, or shockingly original, though that's true. I'm talking about these little explosive surprises that he drops in, mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, that make you stop and go, Wow.

Case in point, from "Thank you, Esther Forbes." This is a celebration of Saunders's childhood discovery of Johnny Tremain, and with it, the fact that fiction did not have to be awful:

Before Johnny Tremain, writers and writing gave me the creeps. In our English book, which had one of those 1970s titles that connoted nothing (Issues and Perspectives, maybe, or Amalgam 109), the sentences ("Larry, aged ten, a tow-headed heavyset boy with a happy smile for all, meandered down to the ballfield, hoping against hope he would at last be invited to join some good-spirited game instigated by the other lads of summer") repulsed me the way a certain kind of moccasin-style house slipper then in vogue among my father's friends repulsed me.

Who on earth would think of comparing the mediocre prose in a 70s children's fiction anthology to a moccasin? But the thing is, I think we all make leaps like this. Only for must of us, these leaps remain in our subconscious. We'd never articulate them to ourselves or others, because it feels ridiculous that we get the same feeling--the creeps--from reading a stupid story as from looking at someone's slippers. Neither of these things should give us the creeps in the first place, right? The fact that both do is beyond wrong, even a little shameful. Yet it's true. I instantly recognized this feeling of getting the creeps from an apparently, indeed strenuously innocuous story. It's the insistence on innocuousness that causes the creeps to descend.

Later in the same essay Saunders drops a much more shocking bomb, quoting the bureaucratic prose of an SS officer on how it's better to leave the lights on in the gas chamber before turning on the jets, to keep "the load" from screaming and pushing against the door. Good God. Is it really a straight line from the story of the tow-headed boy, through the slippers, to this grotesque evasion of responsibility for mass murder? Well, Saunders suggests, kind of. An inauthentic relationship to language is no small matter. It means you can distance yourself from what you say, and what you think you mean. Using language well--giving it its full due--means taking responsibility.

Much better, then, to be honest about how a bad story reminds us of a house slipper, in that both made us feel deeply weird. That kind of honesty is a small salvo in the fight against the bureaucratization of the soul. Plus, when you say it out loud, it turns out to be so right, it's hilarious.



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Just a little more on 2666

...because I'm obsessed, still hung over, grasping at the fading glimmers this novel's explosion left in my psyche.

I came across this piece, In the Labyrinth: A User's Guide to Bolaño, on the New Yorker web site. Now, I actually receive the New Yorker at my home on a mostly regular basis, but I hadn't read this piece. I believe that's because, back in February, I was still resenting Bolaño for being dead and yet *still* getting published in the New Yorker more often than almost anyone else. This writing gig is hard enough, New Yorker editors! Must we compete with the deceased as well?

Anyway, the "User's Guide" is mostly interesting and helpful, although I plan to read all of Bolaño's work anyway. And then there was this:

Avoid “2666” for as long as possible, and for heaven’s sake, don’t start with it. The book is a desert of negative space across which the panting reader will search in vain for the traditional pleasures of the novel: form, character, coherence, meaning.

No, no, yes, yes, yes, and this is why you should read it. It's not a "traditional" novel, but what 2666 proves is that the novel is not synonymous with the bildungsroman or the romance. True, it's the rare writer who can pull off the *appearance* of formlessness and characterlessness. Melville, I'd say, was one. As in Moby-Dick, the only real character here is the universe (differently conceived, but still incomprehensible). And as for the piece's other complaint, that the huge section on the killings in Ciudad Juárez leads to nothing but "exhaustion," again--yes. I believe that is the intended and the appropriate response.

Anyway, read 2666!

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Must the Great Novel be large, sprawling, frantic, and a bit of a mess?

No, I didn't disappear under a pile of fennel, but of work...which is like fennel, in that it is tough and large and sometimes hard to cut through, but very good roasted.

In addition, I have been racing to finish Roberto Bolaño's 2666, because I took it out of the library, and although I can renew it for another three weeks, there's a certain shame in that, a certain failure, and so I read and read most of last weekend, instead of working on my own stuff. OK, so I'm still not quite done. And I don't want to be done. This is a book that I'm going to miss when it's over, even though a great deal of it is concerned with war and murder, especially the mass murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, but also of Jews in World War II. In fact there is, at one point, an almost relentless cataloging of murders, a kind of theme with variations, that goes on for hundreds of pages, while various police officers, politicians, and reporters weave in and out, trying and failing to understand, and sometimes disappearing themselves. Yet, these depictions of atrocities never feel exploitative or sentimentalized; as a reader I felt a tremendous weight of confusion and sorrow, which, oddly, made me unable to put the book down.

The preface and afterword explain that 2666 was Bolaño's last work; he wrote it while becoming increasingly ill, and he knew he was dying as he was finishing it. This no doubt added a certain urgency to the prose, perhaps a certain wildness and willingness to plunge into depths that the rest of us either fear too much, or don't know. In addition there is a raggedness and repetitiveness to some sections, which Bolaño might have edited out, had he been given more time. Then again, his other work suggests polish and brevity were not his concerns. And in 2666, hearing of a friend's preference for "short, neatly shaped novels,"* one of the characters muses:

Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

I do think this novel is that other kind, imperfect and torrential. In my opinion, it's right up there with The Brothers Karamazov and Moby-Dick. It has the same vast scope, the same existential cri de coeur at its center, the same rage to comprehend--to encompass and understand--the entire range of human experience. Interestingly, the novel is not much concerned with God or religion, at least not overtly. Literature seems to replace God as a transcendent, unifying principle. Now, normally I don't approve of novels whose theme is writing (and whose main characters are writers), because they suggest that the author simply can't imagine people with professions unlike his own--which is a blatant failure of the writer's task. However, in this case, writing is the ultimate human quest for answers. The writer, as Bolaño has made clear in any number of works, is a detective. He is not, if he's doing it right, some kind of cloistered, disengaged commentator, but a seeker of truth, a religious pilgrim, outlaw, and professional wrestler rolled into one.

But is it true that an authentically great novel must be of this type--big, messy, overtly trying and ultimately failing to embrace everything? My own preference is, in fact, for such novels, though I have never attempted one myself (as yet). Still, this might just be a personal preference. Or is there a reason that the beautifully crafted, smaller "gem" of a book really does fall short of greatness? Does the perfection of craft represent a failure of intellectual or emotional ambition? Should the writer always bite off more than she can chew, or do battle with monsters she can never hope to catch or tame?

*I am quoting from the Note to the First Edition by Ignacio Echevarría.

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An adverb of note

From time to time I like to say something nice about adverbs. Stephen King has said the road to hell is paved with them, and no one knows the way to perdition better than King. And it's true that writers often employ adverbs for the sole purpose of shoring up weak adjectives or verbs--at which task they are destined to fail every time. However, the rare, weird, unexpected and yet perfectly fitting adverb is cause for celebration.

Today's example comes from Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

Then came an assembly of Germanists in Berlin, a twentieth-century German literature congress in Stuttgart, a symposium on German literature in Hamburg, and a conference on the future of German literature in Mainz. Norton, Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza attended the Berlin assembly, but for one reason or another all four of them were able to meet only once, at breakfast, where they were surrounded by other Germanists fighting doggedly over the butter and jam.

I absolutely love the "doggedly" there. Of course, I don't know what word was used in the original Spanish, or even if the sentence was constructed in the same way: credit for the adverb must be shared between Bolaño and his translator, Natasha Wimmer. The word just gives the sentence an additional little twist, like fine-tuning a guitar string, that nudges the whole scene into sublimity.

The test of an adverb's necessity is whether the sentence would be the same or stronger without it, and/or if you can find a verb (or, sometimes, adjective) that incorporates the adverb, and becomes more powerful for having consumed it. The image of Germanists "fighting over butter and jam" would still be kind of funny and recognizable. Perhaps "squabbling" or "skirmishing" could be substituted for "fighting," which is not an especially vivid word in itself. But I can't think of a better way to convey the ritualized, determined, petty, hilarious, and hopeless nature of the fight depicted here than with "doggedly." The word gets a boost from the previous sentence, which reflects the relentless march of conferences at which the fight is played out over and over.

But adverbs are the Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) of grammar. They should appear rarely, and be rare and weird themselves. Spotting one should be memorable, and something to tell your friends or blog about.

For the love of the flawed novel

From Emily St. John Mandel's review of Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker on The Millions:

[I]t seems to me that there’s something magnificent about sprawling and ever-so-slightly flawed novels.

It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its author, genius as he is, is just barely in control of his material. His writing often has the feel of a man trying to wrap his arms around a large bag of demonically possessed squirrels. The source of his novels' grandeur is struggle, reflected in his characters' existential anguish. His greatest success, like theirs, is not in overcoming anguish but in giving it voice--sometimes seemingly by accident, as in convoluted prose, rushed scenes, and characters who appear and disappear for no evident reason. I suppose if the whole novel was nothing but these kinds of accidents, we'd call it a promising first draft, or simply a mess. But these flaws coexist with clearly defined conflicts with stakes even larger than life and death, masterful set pieces, and characters whose flesh and blood we come very close to actually touching. The flaws, in fact, make these successful parts even better: they roughen the edges of the masterpiece, making it a visceral experience.

In contrast, I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a very different way. As my previous commentary on it shows, I experienced it as a Work of Art that more or less drove me to my knees. It inspired awe, and had the heft of cathedral tunes. As an artistic achievement, I think it deserves mention in the same breath as Brothers Karamazov, but on an emotional level I'm less drawn to it, because it is not flawed. There is no badly worded sentence, no misstep in the (admittedly much simpler) plot. The artist is in complete control, and there is something vaguely off-putting about that. Maybe because I suspect I can never achieve that level of mastery myself. Or maybe it's because consciousness itself is messy and surprising. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in Sunday's NYT editorial, a recent analysis of MRI data

concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. 

With its irruptions, dead ends, and coffee and blood stains, the map of Dostoevsky's mind looks far more like mine than Robinson's does. Hard to believe, since her work is set in twentieth-century Iowa and Dostoevsky's in tsarist Russia. But there you go.

How Sherlock Holmes enchants the world

I'm a little behind on my Hound reading, but fortunately I have a great link to keep that Sherlockian tingle going till next time. Via Andrew Sullivan, Michael Saler says that the deep appeal of the Holmes stories is a kind of enchantment--and not the usual kind, either. Holmes goes against the grain by making enchantment an effect of reason:

Unlike many contemporary scientists and logicians who disdained the imagination, Holmes brought reason and the imagination, logic and intuition, together in a new synthesis that he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He made critical thinking into a romantic adventure. Through his discerning eye, every detail of modern life, from newspaper advertisements to the footsteps of a giant hound, became charged with meaning, possibility, and wonder.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the Holmes stories should be taught in every school in the land. Intellect and reason are the path to enchantment, not its enemies! Understanding, not ignorance, is the source of transcendent delight! Never mind that Conan Doyle himself got pretty woo-woo in his later life, when he fell for some "photos" of fairies that make the guy in the Bigfoot film look like Bigfoot. Perhaps Holmes is the unique product of a mind that craved magic, but couldn't (or wouldn't) yet accept its actual existence. So, like our best realist fiction writers, Holmes makes magic from the everyday.

Peter Cook

For some reason, for the past few weeks I've been oddly obsessed with the late British comedian Peter Cook. Maybe it has something to do with the holidays, which make me think of my parents, which brings to mind their senses of humor, which derived in part from their record of Beyond the Fringe, which we listened to often when I was little. ("Then, unavoidably, came peace.")

Anyhow, watching Cook in Not Only...But Also recently, I was struck by his presence--the combination of his rather delicate features with a total, fearless comic spirit. This is not to say he was an over-the-top performer. On the contrary, there's a quietness about him that you don't see much in contemporary comedy. I think Stephen Fry put it well in his statement about Cook a few days after his death in 1995: "He had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty."

Here is that commentary by Fry, who was objecting to the media's laments about Cook's "unrealized potential" and "flawed" personal life. It includes some useful thoughts on the meanings of ambition and success.

Werner Herzog (again)

Missed my Tuesday blog post. Swamped. Fortunately The Millions has a great post up about Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and that wild, wacky, Herzogian method of magic. Enjoy...

Return to Pynchon

It has been years, nay even a decade or more, since I last read Thomas Pynchon. Now I'm starting Against the Day (thanks, KS!).

So far it's about a team of balloonists/adventurers on their way to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. How I have missed this sort of thing:

At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him. Ever since the Chums, during a confidential assignment in Our Nation's Capital (see The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit), had rescued Pugnax, then but a pup, from a furious encounter between rival packs of the District's wild dogs, it had been his habit to investigate the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board Inconvenience, from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less appropriate matter, such as the "dime novels"--though his preference seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid. He had learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not help noticing the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest, sympathy, and--the conclusion could scarce be avoided--comprehension.

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No Day Without a Line (and at least one day without a screen)

While I was casting around for something to write about today, my eyes landed on a book that I've been using, completely fortuitously, to prop up my monitor: No Day Without a Line by Yuri Olesha.

As some of my former students know, Olesha is really my favorite author of all time. I may have raved on this blog about others who are far better known, like Dostoevsky and Melville, but Olesha really is the guy.* This Soviet-era author, born in 1899, was "young with the century," as he put it. He is best known for his 1927 novella Envy, a magical-realist encomium to, and take-down of, early Soviet-style materialist culture. You see the influence of H. G. Wells and Dostoevsky in the story, but at the same time, there's really nothing else quite like it. It's a Freudian/political fairy tale that employs some of the most vivid and memorable images I have ever come across.

Here's just one passage (from the NYRB edition, translated by Marian Schwartz):

I entertain myself with observations. Have you ever noticed that salt falls off the end of a knife without leaving a trace--the knife shines as if untouched; that pince-nez traverse the bridge of a nose like a bicycle; that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils?

No Day Without a Line is a fragmentary memoir written, according to translator Judson Rosengrant, primarily during the six years before Olesha's death in 1960. In it, we see Olesha entertaining himself with observations--a pleasure which is also a serious discipline. Many of these observations are not direct, but in the form of childhood memories which Olesha observes meticulously. In fact it's childhood in the form of memory that makes these images so striking. They are not dry recollections of "what things were like back then," but brief, poetic addresses to sights Olesha saw and loved and knows he will never see again in this same way:

In Odessa we sailed on the sea in punts. These were large, heavy boats with a flat bottom and no keel--something on the order of a cart thrown into the sea without its wheels. They were crudely painted in red and blue and moved by means of huge, heavy oars secured to the oarlocks with a strength sufficient at least for tethering oxen. In the bottom of these boats there was always water--puddles in which rags, pieces of shrimp, or a bottle swam. The punt skimmed over the waves. There was something of the Greek myths about the appearance of these boats. Even now I remember, as if I'd only seen it yesterday, the brown pear-like calves of the fishermen as they ran behind a boat they were launching, in order to leap into it once it was afloat.

Those "pear-like calves" are pure Olesha: that unexpected comparison, often between food and a body part, which makes the comparison both memorable and slightly forbidden. There's a visceral, yet innocent attraction to the fishermen's calves that an "adult" mind would probably chase away--especially one in Olesha's place and time. (Envy is often read as a story of unrequited gay love.) But if we can learn not to banish such images, we can light up our own fiction with startling beauty. It sounds like a cliche, but this passage really makes me feel like I'm right there in Odessa in the early 20th century. That's an amazing feat of teleportation, and it works because we're traveling through a particular consciousness, rather than generic reportage.

All of this makes me worry more than ever that I--and possibly many of my fellow writers--are spending way, way too much time in front of screens. We are no longer entertaining ourselves with unmediated observations. We are not going down to the sea and watching fishermen get into boats; or if we do, we are too distracted, or cynical, or something, to just take it in. Maybe we are not taking the time to really remember--and color with memory--what we saw in childhood. There are too many layers between writing and experience. I certainly sense this in my own work; the screen is always there somehow, humming, inserting itself ever so subtly. Writing today may be more "knowing," but a lot of it doesn't seem nearly as fresh as Olesha's much older work.

Fortunately that problem is fixable, entirely free of charge. If I can just tear myself away from this computer.

*I did have the opportunity, some years ago, to rave about Olesha in Tin House. That obviously didn't get the raving out of my system.



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The pressure of other languages

I see one of Stanley Fish's all-time favorite sentences is by Nabokov. As much as one may want to argue with Fish--just because--it's pretty hard to argue with Nabokov as a sentence god.

It's hard to say exactly what makes this and many, many other Nabokov sentences so richly beautiful. But years ago, I heard a talk by Doris Sommer on bilingualism and literature, and she suggested that the pressure of Nabokov's native Russian behind his English has something to do with it. This is also perhaps one reason why so many non-native speakers of English end up expressing themselves far more eloquently that those of us who grew up taking it for granted. In Nabokov's case, there are often masked definitions of words in Russian behind those in English, which give a subtle twist to the English meanings. Moreover, there are different sounds, rhythms, syntaxes (sin taxes?), etc., that Nabokov's ear hears, and then sort of suppresses, as he writes. You could say there's a Russian harmony, or harmonics, to the English main melody.

Interesting that the sentence Fish selected is actually about the pressure of the past welling up into the present--and all the different forms that pressure can take. It mutates, and won't be denied.

Thoughts on teaching well

I'm thinking about the interview with Brian Greene on Fresh Air, and why I believe his books are the best--by far actually--science books for non-scientists that I've ever read. Obviously being in love with your subject, and enthusiastic about explaining it from scratch, over and over, while always seeking new and better ways to explain it, are all critical.

But Greene also shows a tremendous faith in his audience. I think it's this attitude that makes the work of explaining far more enjoyable for everyone. Witness this exchange with Terry Gross, as Greene is explaining the basics of string theory as opposed to the standard (particle) model:

If we change that idea and envision that these particles are actually not little tiny dots but little tiny loops, little loops of string, a little piece of string that can vibrate at different frequencies, that change from a dot to a string is able to cure the mathematical inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics at least on paper. We haven't tested. We have not been able to test these ideas yet. That's the big issue. But at least on paper, that modest change from a dot to a loop cures the problem.

GROSS: How does it cure the problem?

Prof. GREENE: That's a very interesting and difficult question, but I'll...

GROSS: Yeah, I figured it would be difficult.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. GREENE: I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot.

GROSS: Okay.

Prof. GREENE: So first let me just give you what the problem is in a touch more detail...

This little exchange, which I've bolded, says so much. How often does it happen that some sage (on a stage) is explaining some complex concept, and the non-specialist listener says or thinks something like "this will be too difficult for me." (If you listen to the audio, you can hear a note of defeat in Gross's voice, a note that's pretty familiar to any non-expert talking to a specialist--as is the laughter.)

But then Greene says "I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot." He takes that difficulty upon himself as a challenge, because his listener is obviously interested and willing to take on her part of the challenge. He reduces the listener's sense of intellectual inferiority by recognizing that he has to do something hard here, as well--explain this complex topic clearly. And he goes on to do so surprisingly well.

Donald Barthelme vs. sentimentality

So, as you've probably read, the Paris Review has made all its author interviews available online. This means some of us can stop beating ourselves up about not getting any writing done, and instead tell ourselves that we are not procrastinating but learning useful stuff about the craft. So far I've read Jonathan Lethem's and Donald Barthelme's interviews. Both are great, in that both made me feel that I'm groping toward some worthwhile aesthetic in my own work. But today I'll talk about a few things Barthelme said, back in 1981, my god, so long ago...

I'm especially interested in his points about a certain fuzziness in our perception. Barthelme suggests it's fuzziness, rather than clarity, that gives us the sensation of reality. I don't mean reality in the sense of some objective world we may (or may not) all see around us; rather the sense that a character's emotional response is true to life.

INTERVIEWER

Apparently the Yiddish theater, to which Kafka was very addicted, includes as a typical bit of comedy two clowns, more or less identical, who appear even in sad scenes—the parting of two lovers, for instance—and behave comically as the audience is weeping. This shows up especially in The Castle.

BARTHELME

The assistants.

INTERVIEWER

And the audience doesn’t know what to do.

BARTHELME

The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude. As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done.

We've all been at this funeral, right? We may be saying goodbye to someone we love deeply, yet we sit there thinking: couldn't the minister have at least combed his hair? We're inappropriate creatures; we can't help it. Of course, the way to ensure sympathy for this critical funeral-goer is to have him or her notice her own "wrong" reaction and fret about it. And it's totally fine, as Barthelme almost always is, to be funny.

In the same vein:

If I didn’t have roaches big as ironing boards in the story I couldn’t show Cortes and Montezuma holding hands, it would be merely sentimental. You look around for offsetting material, things that tell the reader that although X is happening, X is to be regarded in the light of Y.

I think this notion of X in light of Y is crucial to fiction. It's a variant of Norman Mailer's "noble shit" theory, which I subscribe to, but never like having to describe (so follow the link, if you must). The idea is that if you're going to aim for lofty abstractions or emotions, you need to tarnish them by putting them right next to ugly, stupid, obscene, or silly stuff. Noble must be close to shit; giant roaches must march by as two enemies hold hands. There must be offsetting material. Otherwise you end up with pomposity, sentimentality, and so on.

The real strength of certain authors is in the choice of that offsetting material. The brilliance of Art Spiegelman's Maus books is his decision to portray the Holocaust--a subject that seemed untouchable, except with pure reverence--as a cartoon involving mice and cats. He brought the topic down to earth, where it could hurt us.

30th Anniversary (+ 1 week) of Cosmos

OK, so apparently the official 30th anniversary of Cosmos was last week. But think of it...thirty years! I am re-watching the whole series to celebrate.

To my mind there has never been another series like this, weaving all branches of science together with history, culture, beautiful scenery, and great writing, all orchestrated by an intellectual/charismatic/goofball host in a red turtleneck. To think that back then, Sagan was already warning us about global warming (more often called "the greenhouse effect")--in fact, his studies of the atmosphere of Venus helped lay the groundwork for understanding the whole concept. Of course the more immediate worry was nuclear war and the possibly resulting nuclear winter, another idea drawn from studies of Venus. The series's ultimate purpose really was to SAVE THE WORLD by showing us everything we had to lose.

For me, the show continues to inspire a form of secular awe that I imagine other people get when attending church or reading sacred texts. Who are the scientists, artists, and intellectuals who can inspire us this way today? Will pseudo-intellectual religious demagogues continue to fill this vacuum?

Yes, I know Sagan was a jerk in his off-hours. I know the set of Cosmos was an unpleasant place to be much of the time (sparkling ocean/Mediterranean Sea notwithstanding). The book below tells some of those stories. Such are the contradictions we must often hold in our minds in the presence of masterpieces.

Anyway, you can watch it on Hulu.


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Lovely words from Colin Farrell

Colin Farrell--a name that, until now, did not automatically call the word "eloquence" to my mind--writes a beautiful piece about his gay brother.

This: "Hate is a disease. It is fear's messenger and it makes us do terrible things in a shadow of our better selves, of what we could be."

A Glorious Dawn

Well, this is the best thing I've seen in a very long time...

Looking for Shane McGowan

Via Jerry Stahl's "Junky List" at The Rumpus, I guess I'm glad I found this. A further pursuit of links gives one to understand that the Pogues will be at the Warfield on October 13. One is tempted...but will Shane be there? It is not entirely clear. The last time I saw the Pogues at the Warfield--which I'm horrified to realize was in 1991--he was not. His replacement was an interestingly self-effacing Joe Strummer (I suppose one would have to expect self-effacement after being parachuted in at the last minute to sing songs he probably didn't know as well as, say, "London Calling"--which they also did). Anyway that was all fine, and I'm especially glad I got to see Joe because that was the only time I ever saw him perform live; but I didn't also expect him to *die* eleven years later whereas Shane MacGowan would still be alive and kicking. I am glad to report, however, that this is the case, though I cannot confirm with absolute certainty. At Hardly Strictly on Sunday, when Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains announced they had a "surprise" in store for us, I sort of hoped they were pumping Shane with whatever fluids he required in a tent in the back, and that he would soon leap up on stage, as several other amazing people did during that concert. However, the surprise was actually either 1) Tim O'Brien (the mandolin player, not the novelist) or 2) that Sting was almost going to show up but didn't. Anyway that was all fine also. The Chieftains were fantastic.

So what is this post about? I suppose it's the incredible resilience of certain constitutions, the fact that dental hygiene is not correlated with musical genius...and *holy shit that was 18 years ago.*