Borrowed Fire: The Secret Agent: Structure and Destruction

Still mining Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent for writing lessons--and this book is a gold mine. It's a beautiful model of both structure and point of view, two of my particular obsessions. While the novel never leaps into obvious experimentation (with stream-of-consciousness, for instance), there are numerous "hand-offs" of the POV from one character to another, and these shape the story in fascinating ways.

The apparent main event of the story--the detonation of the bomb--takes place relatively early. Not right at the beginning, nor at the peak of Freitag's triangle, but about a quarter of the way in. Also, the event is not shown to us directly, but reported, by two minor but structurally very important characters, the Professor and Comrade Ossipon. Both these characters will reappear at the end: one to close off this particular narrative, and one to keep the larger story going--the story about the impenetrable evil circulating among us. Ossipon's lust and cowardice serve to get Winnie to the train, then seal her fate as he abandons her. But the last lines of the novel belong to the Professor. He is the literal cause of everything, because he's the one who made the bomb that kills Stevie. He himself carries a bomb at all times, his hand wrapped around the detonator in his pocket. No one can stop him, because he has made it known that he's willing to blow himself up to take down anyone who threatens him. Here's how the novel ends:

And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

But back to the conversation between the Professor and Ossipon, which first brings Stevie's awful death to the reader's attention. We have come to this cafe with Ossipon--we're in his point of view when the conversation begins.

[The Professor] paused, tranquil, with that air of close, endless silence, then almost immediately went on. “You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against you—than the police, for instance. The other day I came suddenly upon Chief Inspector Heat at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. He looked at me very steadily. But I did not look at him. Why should I give him more than a glance? He was thinking of many things—of his superiors, of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary, of newspapers—of a hundred things. But I was thinking of my perfect detonator only. He meant nothing to me. He was as insignificant as—I can’t call to mind anything insignificant enough to compare him with—except Karl Yundt perhaps. Like to like. The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game—so do you propagandists. But I don’t play; I work fourteen hours a day, and go hungry sometimes. My experiments cost money now and again, and then I must do without food for a day or two. You’re looking at my beer. Yes. I have had two glasses already, and shall have another presently. This is a little holiday, and I celebrate it alone. Why not? I’ve the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely alone. I’ve worked alone for years.”

Ossipon’s face had turned dusky red.

“At the perfect detonator—eh?” he sneered, very low.

“Yes,” retorted the other. “It is a good definition. You couldn’t find anything half so precise to define the nature of your activity with all your committees and delegations. It is I who am the true propagandist.”

“We won’t discuss that point,” said Ossipon, with an air of rising above personal considerations. “I am afraid I’ll have to spoil your holiday for you, though. There’s a man blown up in Greenwich Park this morning.”

“How do you know?”

“They have been yelling the news in the streets since two o’clock. I bought the paper, and just ran in here. Then I saw you sitting at this table. I’ve got it in my pocket now.”

He pulled the newspaper out. It was a good-sized rosy sheet, as if flushed by the warmth of its own convictions, which were optimistic. He scanned the pages rapidly.

“Ah! Here it is. Bomb in Greenwich Park. There isn’t much so far. Half-past eleven. Foggy morning. Effects of explosion felt as far as Romney Road and Park Place. Enormous hole in the ground under a tree filled with smashed roots and broken branches. All round fragments of a man’s body blown to pieces. That’s all. The rest’s mere newspaper gup. No doubt a wicked attempt to blow up the Observatory, they say. H’m. That’s hardly credible.”

After a few more pages of mostly theoretical argument, we circle back to the explosion, and learn that Verloc is the one who acquired the bomb from the Professor. But once we know this, Conrad does not immediately send us back to the Verloc household, where we will later find a shaken Verloc and an as-yet-uninformed Winnie. Nor do we return to Ossipon, with whom we started this section. Instead, the Professor (as he does at the end) picks up the point of view and carries it out to the street.

Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated confidently on his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women.

As he walks along, we learn a bit about the Professor's past (his father was an itinerant preacher) and a bit more about his nihilism and deep loathing of humanity. Then the Professor encounters Chief Inspector Heat in an alley, and Heat questions him about the bombing. Another point of view handoff takes place in that alley, from the Professor to Heat.

It was in reality a chance meeting. Chief Inspector Heat had had a disagreeably busy day since his department received the first telegram from Greenwich a little before eleven in the morning.

Heat then carries the point of view to the hospital, where we see the grisly aftermath of Stevie's death. And still more handoffs take place after that.

All these handoffs create a deeply layered picture of the central event and the world in which it happens. They also build up a huge amount of suspense, as we begin to wonder how Winnie, who loves Stevie purely and fiercely, will learn of the news. The news itself is like a bomb being passed from one character to another. Winnie's discovery of the truth takes place at the peak of Freitag's triangle, the traditional climactic point of a story.

Jonathan Franzen says that as a novelist, one can find great "pleasure" in "discovering how little you need."

I kept trying to write scenes I knew I wanted - my tendency is to get incredibly elaborate and to give you thirty pages of back-story, and tie things together in eighteen different ways, go off on tangents - but I found that that stuff was getting in the way of what I really wanted.

The Secret Agent is not an action-packed novel by any means. The explosion is the one big event, and it takes place off screen. Yet it's a rich and thrilling novel because of how the relationships among the characters are set up. The point-of-view handoffs--not just shifts--reveal these relationships, and also exploit them to create suspense.

Question of the day

Are Republicans really willing to let people die so insurance companies can live?

Female confessional writers

A danger to themselves and others? Amanda Fortini says No.

The horror, continued

No, I don't have anything better to do on the 4th of July than write about Sarah Palin. Yes, that is a sad state of affairs. It was less than a year ago that I sacrificed several days of my hard-earned vacation to scouring the Internet for any and all information about John McCain's new running mate. I am sure I did not shower or change clothes during that period. I don't recall whether I ate.

I now recognize that uncontrollable urge as nothing less than terror. I simply couldn't believe it. Was this country, as unhinged as it had become, going look itself in the eye and say up was down, ignorance was virtue, teen pregnancy was admirable--in fact, why not flush young Tiffany's box of condoms and tell her to go out and create her very own little blessing? It seemed so. But then a miracle happened. Enough people--just enough--said no. And after the election, when it seemed clear that this media-galvanized monster was not going to go away, I made some suggestion, like, maybe we should ignore her. Because, as an alien parasite from Star Trek, she feeds on strong emotions, both positive and negative. So our job (I thought) would be to ignore her and go about our business. Do not indicate, especially to the media, that we want any more news about her--don't buy magazines, don't click on links...and slowly, slowly, she would shrivel up and blow away, perhaps emitting a tiny, helium-voiced whimper as she fluttered into the empty cosmos.

Well, I tried. And since she's not in a position to do any immediate damage, except to the overall culture--which is already ruined--I have this to say. I believe she is planning to run for president. She is that grandiose, that delusional. She is pulling a Nixon, complete with the "you won't have me to kick around anymore" self-pity. She is Nixon in pantyhose, with all the horror that mental image stirs up (writhing swirls of squished, black leg hair, for instance). It may be that we are about to learn of a major scandal; and the fact that she did this news-dump on the Friday of a holiday weekend suggests something of that nature. But any scandal will just feed into the persecution complex that whips her supporters into a spittle-flinging frenzy.

On the other hand, perhaps it's wrong to abandon ridicule as a weapon. Yes, among certain people it will make her stronger. But it also seems that Tina Fey, almost single-handedly at first, kept Palin from getting elected. We did come very close to having this goon for our president. So what will work better, ignoring or mocking? It may seem funny now to think that she'd have a another real shot at the presidency, but we may not be laughing in four years. I remember (even though I was very! very! young at the time) people laughing hysterically at the idea of Reagan becoming president. It was even a joke on All in the Family, and elsewhere. So if laughter's the right tool to bring her down, then let's do it; but let's not laugh dismissively. Stay. on. Guard.

That is my patriotic post for July 4th.

Borrowed Fire: The Secret Agent: Writing the Horror

Another week on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. This holiday weekend, my mind's on horror, as Conrad's obviously was throughout his career. Everybody remembers the famous last words of Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness"--"The horror! The horror!"--which, for many years now, I've been hearing in the voice of Marlon Brando playing Jabba the Hutt in Apocalypse Now. (Before that, it was the voice of my high-school English teacher, who embodied another kind of creepiness all her own.)

I read an article not too long ago--sadly, I have no idea where--that suggested horror was the closest genre to literary fiction. As I recall, that's because horror deals with the subconscious. It brings to light the forces which, in their more repressed forms, give literary writing its layers of nuance. Or maybe I'm making this up, but it makes sense to me at the moment.

I don't read a lot of horror fiction or watch horror movies.* I have, however, taught Stephen King's Misery, which I think is a fascinating book, partly because it's specifically about the conflict between genre and literary writing. But the book also has several, one feels perfunctory, eruptions of pure gore. One year I told my students they could skip these (giving them the page numbers in advance)--but then I wondered: had this been a bona fide "literary" book, would I have told them they could skip parts? No. But because I thought of this as a "genre" book, I considered the horror gratuitous; whereas in The Secret Agent, or in Tim OBrien's Vietnam stories, or any number of other works, the gore seems critically important. Yes, it's awful, but there's Lesson to be Learned from it. We must confront the monstrosity within human beings--whereas in King (say), the confrontation is a spectacle only. But how do you draw the line, really? I don't know. Especially in Misery, I sense King is winking at us throughout. Yep, this is mass-market horror, so here's your yuck sandwich--happy now? Well, are you?

All this (sorry) is leading up to the grisly scene of the blown-up body in The Secret Agent, which presents a clinic on horror writing. And yes, you can skip this if you want--but you are missing something:

A local constable in uniform cast a sidelong glance, and said, with stolid simplicity:

“He’s all there. Every bit of him. It was a job.”

He had been the first man on the spot after the explosion. He mentioned the fact again. He had seen something like a heavy flash of lightning in the fog. At that time he was standing at the door of the King William Street Lodge talking to the keeper. The concussion made him tingle all over. He ran between the trees towards the Observatory. “As fast as my legs would carry me,” he repeated twice.

Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a gingerly and horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital porter and another man turned down the corners of the cloth, and stepped aside. The Chief Inspector’s eyes searched the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops.

“You used a shovel,” he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as needles.

“Had to in one place,” said the stolid constable. “I sent a keeper to fetch a spade. When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned his forehead against a tree, and was as sick as a dog.”

The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down the unpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering violence of destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning. The man, whoever he was, had died instantaneously; and yet it seemed impossible to believe that a human body could have reached that state of disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony. No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception of time. Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with frightful intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up, streaming, for the last time. The inexplicable mysteries of conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks of an eye. And meantime the Chief Inspector went on, peering at the table with a calm face and the slightly anxious attention of an indigent customer bending over what may be called the by-products of a butcher’s shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner. All the time his trained faculties of an excellent investigator, who scorns no chance of information, followed the self-satisfied, disjointed loquacity of the constable.

Further gory details are, um, scattered over the next several pages. But the central image, I think, is here. It's the sound of the scraping shovel. In a way, it's an echo of the bell in Mr. Verloc's shop--a mundane sound that, in this story, becomes a Pavlovian cue to shudder. The horror is further set off by the "self-satisfied, disjointed loquacity of the constable,"which contrasts with Heat's metaphysical reflections--fueled, interestingly, by the pulp stories of his day.

So, for those of us who want, or need, to include some horror in our writing: Effective horror seems to involve ordinary objects, sounds, etc., becoming suddenly decontextualized and perverted. This is something Stephen King knows very well. But the scene above is not gratuitous for a couple of reasons. One, it induces the otherwise stolid Inpsector to reflect on universal human questions and fears. Two, we're already starting to gather (a strange word, but somehow right, in this context) who the dead man is; our mounting fear is not just for ourselves (jeez, I hope that never happens to me) but for him and the women who care for him. Like the concentric circles Stevie draws in the beginning, the explosion radiates outward, not just physically, but thematically, psychologically, and metaphysically. The fact that ordinary objects can change their meaning becomes a metaphysical concern, not just a trick to make us jumpy.

*Except right after my dad died, when I had this weird craving to watch horror films, even slasher films. I know of at least one other person who's had this experience. The urge left pretty quickly before I managed to get Friday the 13th et al from Netflix, which is probably just as well.

Short stories modeled on old masters

Via The Rumpus, this new short-story collection is consciously modeled on the work of "old masters." Inspiration for Borrowed Fire, perhaps?

Ingenuity

Via Andrew Sullivan. Ben Franklin would be proud--or very scared.

The tiny fragment of a life...

...I once had is now gone. I've joined Facebook.

On the failings of others

Once again, Ta-Nehisi Coates is right. This:

Still, I don't understand the certainty with which some of us approach the personal lives of people we have never met. Whatever happened to the failings of others triggering some self-reflection, some assessment of our own works? When I see them foreclosing on the house next door, I don't talk. I check my credit.

Borrowed Fire: The Secret Agent: Mr. Vladimir

There's much more to learn from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent.

As I've been rereading this brilliant! brilliant! book, I didn't expect to be thinking so much about characterization. I thought I'd be talking more about setting and atmosphere. My recollection of the book, which I first read 20 years ago, involves lots of shuddering and teeth clenching. Of course, as I discovered in writing the previous post on this book, characterization and setting are almost the same thing here.

My other recollection, oddly, is laughing out loud. Was I crazy back then, or deeply insensitive; or is The Secret Agent really funny? For some reason I find myself resisting the latter conclusion. In a 1920 preface to the book, Conrad makes it perfectly clear that he loathes the anarchist characters and the real-life movement they represent. They epitomize laziness and vanity, and express their own pointlessness in acts of pure evil, like the attempted bombing of the Greenwich observatory. And yet I've been laughing again as I reread. Clearly, if you do it right, you can use humor to excoriate. There's no contradiction, or shame, in laughing at evil. By laughing, we shrivel these evil men, even as we can't look away from their crimes.

Now, in creative writing workshops, we learn that an author shouldn't loathe his characters. One has to find some thread of sympathy for them, and thus allow them some complexity, or they'll be cardboard. But these workshops are teaching, for the most part, a different kind of writing that what Conrad's doing. Conrad is working on a larger canvas than we're generally encouraged to take on today. Through satire, he's trying to get at the very nature of good and evil. As you may have guessed, one reason I started Borrowed Fire was to make a case for returning to this level of literary ambition. And that return involves a different view of what constitutes character. Fictional characters do not need to be like real people. However, they must be interesting.

Conrad shows us that sympathy's not necessary to create interest, when you have a gimlet eye and an omniscient point of view. Here's our first look at Mr. Vladimir, a honcho in Verloc's secret gang, who's under cover as a diplomat:

Mr Vladimir, First Secretary, had a drawing-room reputation as an agreeable and entertaining man. He was something of a favourite in society. His wit consisted in discovering droll connections between incongruous ideas; and when talking in that strain he sat well forward of his seat, with his left hand raised, as if exhibiting his funny demonstrations between the thumb and forefinger, while his round and clean-shaven face wore an expression of merry perplexity.

Whenever I find myself stuck in a rut of character description (he had brown hair; she had blonde hair; he had green eyes and a great big smile), I'll try to remember this passage--specifically, Mr. Vladimir's thumb and forefinger. What's important here is the connection of Vladimir's self-image, which has been reinforced by the idiots who surround him in society, to his physical gestures. The omniscient point of view allows Conrad to leave the scene entirely and go out to another time and place (some drawing room somewhere) to sketch that connection for us. At this actual moment in the story, the only other character in the room is Verloc, who would not know these things about Vladimir, nor would he be clever enough to express them. The close-third point of view, common in contemporary fiction, hampers one's ability to describe characters in general; perhaps that's why we're told to make all our characters at least a little sympathetic. Sympathy creates a sense of complexity, which makes up for the limited information afforded by the close third (or first person) point of view. But if your narrator has access to other information, like how a character behaves when the main character isn't around, and how the character has carefully built a reputation among certain people over time, and how his thumb and forefinger function at those moments when he's conscious of that reputation and trying to enhance it further--then you have an interesting character.

No, you don't sympathize with Vladimir at all; Conrad doesn't want us to. He wants us to hate him, but we can only do that when we see his self-delusion compressed into a precise, unique physical gesture. I think this precision has something to do with why I'm laughing all the way through this terrifying book. When a phrase or an image is so surprising and so exact, it's funny.

Goodbye, Farrah

I realize there are more important things going on in the world today, but Farrah's passing means something to those of us of a certain age. This piece in Salon says it all, and says it beautifully.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

I'm happy to report that the new wing of the Cleveland Museum of Art is finally opening. I hope to visit it soon.

Apparently the building is actually designed to showcase the art, not overwhelm or hide it. That's all well and fine. Nevertheless, my fondest childhood memories of the museum are about the spaces--ponderous, marble, cool, with that distinct stony scent. Floors to slide on, corners to hide in. Occasionally a great burst of sunlight from overhead, as in the armor court or the atrium. Out front was a big pond with willow trees and a walking path around it, and ducks and fish in it, which we fed with white bread or crackers from the cafeteria.

The last time I wandered around that pond was almost exactly three years ago, calling friends on my cell phone to tell them my father was dying (he was at the hospital a few blocks away). It was hot; thick clouds were parting to let out a little blue sky.

Borrowed Fire: The Secret Agent: What the bell brings out

Let's now borrow some writing techniques from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. This novel, from 1907, has been adapted for film a few times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in Sabotage. I went to a talk about this film recently, so maybe that's why it's on my mind. The story bubbles up from my subconscious now and then anyway, and I dread rereading it. I think it's one of the most disturbing books in the western canon. It's based on a real-life terrorist bombing, and of course it's been referenced quite a bit since September 11. But even discounting its prescience for our own times, the story is soaked with evil. It oozes. Sometimes the evil is so thick it is hard for the reader to move through; it's like walking through a swamp.

How does Conrad do it?

In the opening paragraphs, Conrad uses one particular object to stir up the physical and moral grime of the setting, so we get a good look at how truly gross it all is. That object is a bell:

Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.

The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers.

These customers were either very young men, who hung about the window for a time before slipping in suddenly; or men of a more mature age, but looking generally as if they were not in funds. Some of that last kind had the collars of their overcoats turned right up to their moustaches, and traces of mud on the bottom of their nether garments, which had the appearance of being much worn and not very valuable. And the legs inside them did not, as a general rule, seem of much account either. With their hands plunged deep in the side pockets of their coats, they dodged in sideways, one shoulder first, as if afraid to start the bell going.

The bell, hung on the door by means of a curved ribbon of steel, was difficult to circumvent. It was hopelessly cracked; but of an evening, at the slightest provocation, it clattered behind the customer with impudent virulence.

It clattered; and at that signal, through the dusty glass door behind the painted deal counter, Mr Verloc would issue hastily from the parlour at the back. His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed. Another man would have felt such an appearance a distinct disadvantage. In a commercial transaction of the retail order much depends on the seller’s engaging and amiable aspect. But Mr Verloc knew his business, and remained undisturbed by any sort of æsthetic doubt about his appearance. With a firm, steady-eyed impudence, which seemed to hold back the threat of some abominable menace, he would proceed to sell over the counter some object looking obviously and scandalously not worth the money which passed in the transaction: a small cardboard box with apparently nothing inside, for instance, or one of those carefully closed yellow flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a promising title. Now and then it happened that one of the faded, yellow dancing girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she had been alive and young.

Sometimes it was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of the cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail value sixpence (price in Verloc’s shop one-and-sixpence), which, once outside, he would drop stealthily into the gutter.

The bell acts like a stick poking around in a mud puddle. Without it, we'd just see undifferentiated slime--seedy customers, seedy offerings, grime and decay. But when the bell rings, it has to be answered, and that allows Conrad to bring forth Verloc. In fact, the bell is like an incantation. It collects dollops of goo and gunk from the shop and breathes life (or some semblance thereof) into them: voila, Verloc. I love the word "issue" here to describe Verloc's entrance, like a blast of foul air. Then the bell rings again, and out comes Winnie, who forms a counterpoint to Verloc and the general filth. But her tidiness (and gender) stir up other distasteful elements--shame and rage--which then become part of the swirling awfulness.

This bell is a brilliant way to introduce characters. The way they arise from the muck, answering the bell as they must, makes them almost like automata. That, too, adds to the menace. You sense an inevitable horror coming, right from the start.

So a technique we can try is: set the scene, then use a catalyst--some kind of object, the smaller and more specific, the better--to get the scene and the story moving. And maybe the object should function somewhat unexpectedly. You might think of a ringing bell on a shop door as a cheery sound. Not here, boy.

UPDATE: Interesting: The Secret Agent is dedicated to H. G. Wells.

The Bad Book Club

My friend Matthew and I have started the Bad Book Club. First up: Valley of the Dolls! Haven't read it? No problem! This is a bad book club, and we welcome bad members. There's lots of loose, open thread to hold forth on topics you (and we) know nothing about.

Come join us for bad books and good times!

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: Did he see it like that?

One more exercise from "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

It's a convention in non-realistic storytelling (fantasy, science fiction, and literary versions thereof) to end the tale with the question: Did this really happen? We've seen this, for instance, in "The Overcoat," and I've previously touched on it in "The Door in the Wall." If I were going to wander down the po-mo garden path, I might blather on about the "narrative frame" and the "frame" that is the door itself--which means this story is about fiction itself, as all stories are. But where does that really get us? Down the rabbit hole, to either death or paradise.

Anyhow:

The trick of these endings is to create a knife's edge balance between "yes" and "no" that can never be resolved, but instead spins out more questions. What is reality? What is fiction? What role does fiction play in creating reality? And if fiction plays too great a role, does that equal madness, or a different form of sanity? Wells states the matter starkly:

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way . . . . .

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has frequently walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?

Yes, it's a trick ending, but I think it's a lovely one. The narrator cannot get the storyteller, Wallace, out of his head. He knows he will never understand what happened, but he chooses, perhaps for his own consolation, to think that Wallace did reach his paradise.

"Did he see it like that?" is a pressing question for our own time. Even mild depression, shyness, fatigue, and restlessness are now called "syndromes" and instantly medicated, perhaps erasing the reality checks we all need. I'm reminded of Margaret Talbot's recent New Yorker article on neuroenhancing drugs. Students and workers are now using Ritalin, Adderall, and other drugs as cognitive performance enhancers rather than just treatments for illnesses. But, as one psychiatrist puts it: "Maybe it’s wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people." In other words, maybe the problem is not the peg, but the hole we're trying to hammer it into. There's also the fascinating article on Wired.com on schizophrenic brains, which aren't fooled by the optical illusions that the rest of us can't help seeing. Now, I have no desire to be schizophrenic; but it's deeply unsettling to think that "crazy" people see the world as it really is. What's really out there might be impossible to handle. These thoughts also bear on religious faith, of course. What did Wallace see, when to the outside world it appeared he fell to his death?

This is all starting to sound a bit like 3 a.m. in the dorm, bong optional. Well, what of it? Has anyone successfully dealt with these questions? If not, they remain the territory and the imperative of fiction.

So: if you're looking for a story idea, try writing about a character who sees something others don't see. I would suggest having him or her see something very specific and concrete, like the door in the wall. (Not: "I see dead people.") That person should seem otherwise quite rational, but he or she could end up unsettling the world.

The sorrows and...something...of work

Via Heather Havrilesky at Salon, it looks like Alain de Botton's new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is well worth a read. A quote: "Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party."

I write this while waiting for Dreamweaver to "clean up Word HTML" on a 41-page article with 167 footnotes. I've waited at least 30 minutes so far, and that's before the real scouring even begins.

Some graduation advice for young people: do not learn HTML. If you are going to learn how to write any kind of computer code, learn the hard stuff so people will have to defer to your expertise. If you only learn a little of some easy scripting language, you will be drafted into production tasks, no matter what kind of job you hold, or think you hold.

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: Light

We continue with "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

Wallace recollects his childhood experience of passing through a green door in a white wall, which he spots on an otherwise ordinary London street:

You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen's carts, I forgot the sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline and obedience of home, I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy--in another world. It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I put my little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round ears and the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them, and it was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said 'Well?' to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked. There were broad steps, I remember, that came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you know, between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves . . . . .

The description goes on at some length. The boy meets up with another, older female figure who seems to show Wallace the story of his real life--a life which will henceforth be tinged with sharp sadness over his loss of this place.

But let's focus on the quality of the light in the other world: "It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky." Both Nabokov and Olesha, whom I mentioned in the last post on this story, are fascinated by light. They use it to create what the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky calls "ostranenie," sometimes translated as "defamiliarization." In the garden, the light is at once more penetrating and softer; the edges of things are sharper and yet somehow fuzzy. Colors are brighter and but set off by "wisps." In sort, the light makes this world both more intense and less threatening than the real world. It is, as Wells, Nabokov, and Olesha would all agree, the light of childhood. Cast this light upon anything in the real world, and you will see it anew. At the same time, the fact that this light is remembered, not currently present, makes the image slightly sad.

Much of Wells's description of the garden comes across as sentimental and twee. Such language has to be resisted at all costs when speaking of childhood, or of anything, actually. I would, however, propose a writing exercise in which you experiment with enchanted lighting to make a scene strange. The strangeness comes from the intensely contradictory emotions of childhood memory--joy at finding it, sadness at having lost it forever.

For more on enchantment, see The Re-Enchantment of the World, edited by Josh Landy and Michael Saler.

Terrorist fist bump day

Happy Terrorist Fist Bump Day! Wish it could have been my birthday; missed it by a day.

A lack of faith

The New York Times is particularly striking today in the pieces that bookend section A. On the front page, the news of Dr. George Tiller's murder by an anti-choice fanatic, revved up by the violent rhetoric of Operation Rescue, Bill O'Reilly, et uglia. Then, in the op-ed, we find a "reasoned" plea from Bob Barr for the Supreme Court to intervene in the death penalty case of Troy Davis. Barr informs us that "I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional."

It occurs to me that the extreme right in this country is preoccupied with vengeance, of the eye-for-an-eye, life-for-a-life variety. "'Vengeance is mine; I will repay,' saith the Lord"--and yet these folks don't seem to trust the big guy to get the job done. They don't really believe God will dispense satisfactory justice for wrongdoers in the afterlife. Otherwise, why do they take it upon themselves to mete it out in this world? Seems they aren't quite sure about the existence of hell (or heaven), or maybe they don't think God will necessarily make the same choices they would. Maybe God would spare Tiller, a Christian after all, from hellfire; or maybe even reward him for giving his life to ensure women's safety and autonomy. Maybe God, like many on earth, would find Troy Davis innocent, or find the death penalty in any case a usurpation of his power.

Yes, I know, loons like Tiller's murderer think they are doing God's work, that he's personally fashioned them as instruments of divine retribution. But I submit that this extreme thirst for vengeance is, in reality, a failure of faith. Which I gather God doesn't take too kindly to, either.

Meals for Three

Read Natalie Jabbar's beautiful piece in Leland Quarterly. It just won the Undergraduate Prize in the Stanford Creative Writing Program. Congratulations, Natalie!

Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: The Conversation

Our next story is "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

I first came across this story while doing research on Nabokov's Lolita, which I taught in my class, Does Literature Matter?, at Stanford. In his article "H. G. Wells's 'The Door in the Wall'" in Russian Literature,"* Richard Borden shows that this particular tale strongly influenced both Nabokov and another favorite of mine, Yuri Olesha. Nabokov vividly alludes to this story in the enchanting, green-suffused scene in which Humbert Humbert first sees Lolita sunning herself in the backyard.

We'll get back to greenness and enchantment. For this post, I want to talk about the frame for this story. It always amazes me how many science fiction and fantasy stories are portrayed as conversations, or remembered conversations ("The Turn of the Screw" comes to mind, as do many of Poe's stories, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Poul Anderson's stories, and many others). The story is either told directly to the narrator by an acquaintance, or the narrator is recalling how the acquaintance (or friend) told him the story. The narrator himself disappears for most of the tale, but steps in every now and then to comment on the storyteller's emotional state (often distraught or seemingly deranged)--and to wonder whether the story could possibly be true. I've never been quite sure what this convention does for us as readers, but because it's so prevalent, it must have some special power.

So here's the opening of "The Door in the Wall":

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well."

Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey--I hardly know which word to use--experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that. That much the reader must judge for himself.

The narrator's musings about truth vs. fiction, and the overall distancing effect of his presence, aren't particularly earth-shaking as devices; in fact I'd venture to guess that even by Wells's time these were cliches. We don't see this set-up too often in contemporary literary fiction, perhaps for that reason. And yet, the narrator's ability to comment on the storyteller, as well as the story, seems like a great opportunity. I also like the notion of creating a setting for the telling of the story, which contrasts with the actual story's setting. The former is usually some tranquil or festive domestic scene; a little dinner, a little wine, a little party. Those hearing the tale are often a bit bored with their staid, comfortable lives, and relish being shaken up--although they generally end up more shaken than they wish to be, and sometimes make themselves part of the story later on by going out to investigate.

So for an exercise, we can try framing a story in this manner. You might even play up, or play with, this gentlemen-after-dinner cliche, as a starting point for characterizing both the narrator and the storyteller. What's the relationship between these two (or more) people? How does our ability to see and hear the actual storyteller affect the story itself? And what kind of story does this sort of frame seem to generate? Would the teller tell it differently on some other, so to speak, narrative occasion?

* The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 323-338.

Pudding!

I've had mixed success with recipes from the NYT. And the word "pudding" for me conjures the plastic-within-plastic experience of Jello pudding--not that I didn't love that shit as a kid, but now the very thought makes me shudder.

Anyway: this recipe is beyond great. Do everything it says, and don't be alarmed that right after it's blended it will have the consistency of soup--it will set up beautifully as it's chilled. I used Whole Foods vegan chocoloate chips, to maintain absolute dairy-free purity.

Hint Fiction

An opportunity to be anthologized, in 25 words or fewer.

Vegan fig date bread

This recipe, from The Joy of Vegan Baking (p. 64) is amazing. I don't know how to describe this bread--it somehow tastes deep and warm, even when cooled. The secret seems to lie in soaking the figs and dates in boiling water, baking soda, and oil for 15 minutes, which softens them up and creates a sort of syrup that permeates the bread.

Is it evil to link to a page from Google Books? Is my little teaspoon of a link helping to chip away the edifice of copyright, from which I myself hope to benefit one day? Well, at any rate, you should definitely buy this book.

Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: Justice Done

Here is the text of "The Overcoat," called "The Cloak" in this collection, from Project Gutenberg. (You'll need to do a search for "cloak" or Gogol, since the whole story collection is in one file.)

For this writing exercise, I'm borrowing from two living souls, in addition to Gogol. One is Julie Orringer, whose creative writing class I took several years ago; she taught "The Overcoat" to make us think about fiction as a means of dispensing justice. The other is William Flesch, whose recent talk at Stanford also focused on justice in storytelling. He argues that perhaps the most satisfying aspect of storytelling, from a reader's perspective, is "altruistic punishment." Fantasized punishments, in which those who've done wrong come to see the error of their ways, are more appealing than virtue rewarded--though writers must be careful not to take the punishment too far, or we begin to feel sorry for the punishee. (The same dynamic holds for real life.)

Gogol negotiates this balance perfectly, I think, by making the punishment truly fantastical, even with in the context of fiction (which is already fantasy by definition). After our poor hero, Akaky, finally saves enough to buy his new overcoat, and the coat somehow starts to make his whole life better, he's robbed on the street and his coat is stolen. Seeking help, Akaky goes to see a "prominent personage," who, although he appears late in the story, quickly becomes the main villain. The "prominent personage" verbally abuses Akaky so severely that Akaky becomes ill and, after a short time, dies. At this point, we really, really want to see justice done, and Gogol provides. But he also makes Akaky's ghost the instrument of justice, so that we remain just a bit doubtful as to whether the retribution really happens:

Suddenly the important personage felt some one clutch him firmly by the collar. Turning round, he perceived a man of short stature, in an old, worn uniform, and recognised, not without terror, Akaky Akakiyevich. The official's face was white as snow, and looked just like a corpse's. But the horror of the important personage transcended all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth open, and heard it utter the following remarks, while it breathed upon him the terrible odour of the grave: "Ah, here you are at last! I have you, that--by the collar! I need your cloak. You took no trouble about mine, but reprimanded me. So now give up your own."

The pallid prominent personage almost died of fright. Brave as he was in the office and in the presence of inferiors generally, and although, at the sight of his manly form and appearance, every one said, "Ugh! how much character he has!" at this crisis, he, like many possessed of an heroic exterior, experienced such terror, that, not without cause, he began to fear an attack of illness. He flung his cloak hastily from his shoulders and shouted to his coachman in an unnatural voice, "Home at full speed!" The coachman, hearing the tone which is generally employed at critical moments, and even accompanied by something much more tangible, drew his head down between his shoulders in case of an emergency, flourished his whip, and flew on like an arrow. In a little more than six minutes the prominent personage was at the entrance of his own house. Pale, thoroughly scared, and cloakless, he went home instead of to Karolina Ivanovna's, reached his room somehow or other, and passed the night in the direst distress; so that the next morning over their tea, his daughter said, "You are very pale to-day, papa." But papa remained silent, and said not a word to any one of what had happened to him, where he had been, or where he had intended to go.

This occurrence made a deep impression upon him. He even began to say, "How dare you? Do you realise who is standing before you?" less frequently to the under-officials, and, if he did utter the words, it was only after first having learned the bearings of the matter. But the most noteworthy point was, that from that day forward the apparition of the dead official ceased to be seen. Evidently the prominent personage's cloak just fitted his shoulders. At all events, no more instances of his dragging cloaks from people's shoulders were heard of. But many active and solicitous persons could by no means reassure themselves, and asserted that the dead official still showed himself in distant parts of the city.

So "The Overcoat" dispenses justice, but--this is the key--not too neatly. Akaky suffers just a little too much, and his suffering is not quite redeemed. The punishment for those who hurt him, while seemingly fitting, can't be verified. And it's these imbalances that somehow give the story perfect balance, making it supremely satisfying.

The writing lesson here? When it comes to justice, give with one hand and take away with the other.

The Art of Living

A great discussion on KQED's Forum about literature and the good life, with my friends Lanier Anderson and Josh Landy.

Bigot smackdown

Back in slave times, well-meaning folk made the argument that slavery hurt whites as much as blacks. For whites, the harm, of course, was to their moral character, and in a deeply religious society this was (and still is) serious business. You could go to hell. The argument also worked because it allowed whites to think of themselves as victims rather than perpetrators or beneficiaries of an unjust system--so they could be less defensive and more open to the abolitionist message.

When we read such arguments now, how bigotry harms the bigot as much as the victim, they mostly seem facile. But a deeper, subtler truth is still in there, and Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks it. This is a great, great post on how dumb bigots really are harming themselves and the mini-thems of the next generation, to whom they hope to pass the burning cross.

Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: The Elements

The text of "The Overcoat," called "The Cloak" in this collection, from Project Gutenberg. (You'll need to do a search for "cloak" or Gogol, since the whole story collection is in one file.)

Just as in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the St. Petersburg weather plays a significant role in "The Overcoat." The motif of St. Petersburg as a grid imposed upon chaos dates back to Peter the Great, who wanted to construct a "rational," western-European-style city on top of what was essentially swampland. Having been to St. Petersburg, I can tell you the weather is, to put it mildly, changeable; and the futility of trying to give structure to uncooperative nature drives many a Russian tale.

Near the beginning, Gogol suggests--though I don't think this is entirely true--that "The Overcoat" is a story about weather:

There exists in St. Petersburg a powerful foe of all who receive a salary of four hundred rubles a year, or there-abouts. This foe is no other than the Northern cold, although it is said to be very healthy. At nine o'clock in the morning, at the very hour when the streets are filled with men bound for the various official departments, it begins to bestow such powerful and piercing nips on all noses impartially, that the poor officials really do not know what to do with them. At an hour, when the foreheads of even those who occupy exalted positions ache with the cold, and tears start to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes quite unprotected. Their only salvation lies in traversing as quickly as possible, in their thin little cloaks, five or six streets, and then warming their feet in the porter's room, and so thawing all their talents and qualifications for official service, which had become frozen on the way.

Weather itself takes a back seat later to all the metaphorical weather to which poor Akaky is subject--namely bureaucracy, and the aforementioned cruelty of human nature. Still, I propose a writing experiment in which weather itself drives both plot and characterization. Not necessarily freakish weather (for example, riding out a storm on the high seas), but everyday weather. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Coen brothers' movie Fargo, in which different characters' preparedness for and understanding of snow--that is, endless miles of deep, drifting, relentless snow--signals who ultimately will and won't survive (the Steve Buscemi character being in the latter category).

A human and the weather--an elemental tale in many senses.

The Detroit of higher learning

In the NYT this past Sunday, Mark Taylor coins a provocative phrase, and reminds everybody that the crisis in graduate education has been going on almost as long as Detroit has been building bad cars. He makes a good case that tenure itself is part of the problem, and not just because it results in fewer job openings. Tenured faculty (not all, mind you, but a good portion of them) tend to produce clones of themselves in their grad students, so succeeding generations become ever more specialized and atomized. Taylor proposes abolishing tenure, an idea I hesitate to endorse. For all the problems it causes, I can't think of another way to safeguard academic freedom. If professors' contracts are renewed every seven years, market forces--by which I mean external market forces--will drive their work much more powerfully. On the other hand, a little exposure to the elements might be good. One thing's for sure: universities could not function without the cheap labor of graduate students, and those who sign up for grad school need to know this going in.

Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: Cordon off the Sentiment

Oh, hell, let's do The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol. (On Project Gutenberg, it's part of a collection of Russian short stories, and the title is translated here as "The Cloak." Just search for "cloak" or "Gogol.") I've been resisting this one a little, since my story, "An Eye for Alicia" (in the current issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review) is patterned, so to speak, on this story. The whole business started with an exercise in a class I took with Julie Orringer many years ago, in which we read "The Overcoat" and talked about fiction as a way of dispensing justice. So talking here about "The Overcoat" as a model for fiction somehow feels self-serving and self-sabotaging at the same time...but enough about me and my issues. The story is a great model for those of us who aspire to surrealism and satire, in part because it walks that delicate line between satire and cruelty. The story's oddball narrator invites us to mock the hapless protagonist, Akaky Akakiyevich--but lest we indulge ourselves too much at his expense, the narrator, every so often, calls us out.

Early on in the story, after several amusing paragraphs recounting the history of his ridiculous name, his unfortunate physical appearance, his tedious labors as a copying clerk, and so on, comes this passage:

The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted; told in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akaky Akakiyevich answered not a word, any more than if there had been no one there besides himself. It even had no effect upon his work. Amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in a letter. But if the joking became wholly unbearable, as when they jogged his head, and prevented his attending to his work, he would exclaim:

"Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?"

And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered. There was in it something which moved to pity; so much so that one young man, a newcomer, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of Akaky, suddenly stopped short, as though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented itself in a different aspect. Some unseen force repelled him from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they were decent, well-bred men. Long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with his heart rending words,

"Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?"

In these moving words, other words resounded--"I am thy brother." And the young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath refined, cultured, worldly refinement, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and upright.

I love this brief pivot into the consciousness of a minor character, the "young man," who will never be heard from again in the story--and the way this leads to the narrator's sudden cry from deep in his heart: how much inhumanity there is in man! Through the young man's brief appearance, all of Akaky's suffering, and the narrator's sympathy for him, get compartmentalized and distilled. Thus there's no need to lard the whole story with ineffectual calls for sympathy (otherwise known as sentimentality): there's a black hole of human suffering right here, narrow but infinitely deep. Kind of like the LaBrea tar pits, cordoned off but still dangerous, containing eons of suffering, in the middle of downtown LA. In other words, hem in the emotion; keep it tight, fleeting, and intense.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: Wildness

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

The text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

Much critical fuss is made about the "loon" passage.*

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout—though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning—perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.

Like the tortoise in The Grapes of Wrath, the loon is known to be highly symbolic and Cliff-notable. For instance, I read on Yahoo's homework help site (who knew?) that "In the loon, the integration of the animal and the spiritual is also seen. The loon in Walden Pond is certainly wild, and that he is more than merely wild is revealed by the narrator's word choices." To think people actually hate English class! All right; I sort of see the integration of the spiritual and the animal, although none of these words have any meaning. And yes, the loon is "more than merely wild."

What I'm interested in here is not the loon as a symbol (god help us) of wildness, but a definition of it. In other words, the loon does not represent wildness, he is wildness itself. And by "wildness" I don't just mean nature vs. human, but complete otherness. The loon is a complete outlier, not just to Thoreau, but to the everyday life of the pond--his "looning" is the "wildest sound that is ever heard here." He makes the woods ring. He's in complete command of the place for the time he's there. He cannot be caught, but he also doesn't really belong there in the first place. All this makes him the very opposite of a symbol, because he can't be interpreted. He eludes and resists--that's what he does, and is.

I'm fascinated by these kinds of uninterpretable figures in literature. Bartleby the Scrivener, whom I have a feeling we'll be talking about soon, is another one. He's simply there, inscrutable, which drives his boss, the narrator, crazy.

A fun exercise (yes, we're there at last) would be, I think, to create a similar type of figure--a kind of fascinating and impenetrable visitor, human or otherwise. This being can be the center of the story--and may inevitably turn out to be that--or a sort of thread that runs through it, popping up at strange times.

Oh--and no, you can't have Bigfoot; he's mine. But here are some other possibilities:
--Nessie
--Some non-copyright-violating version of the Joker from The Dark Knight. Not necessarily evil, though.
--Mini black holes created by the Large Hadron Collider
--Mark "The Bird" Fidrych

*Possibly revealing note: doing a search for "loon" in Walden, I get the following results: pantaloons (at least thrice), balloon, and saloon--along, of course, with just plain loon.

Sea kayaking in Mendocino

Heading out to sea and trusting in our guide, Jeff, from Liquid Fusion Kayaking. That's me in the giant yellow helmet, and my cousin Dana doing the hard part.

OK, I picked one of the most ominous looking photos. Paddling around the rocks was great fun and not very scary, especially because we had real experts in our tandem boats with us, and guides as well. It was also a little exhausting and a little cold, but nothing two pints of beer afterwards couldn't cure.

When we weren't kayaking or biking on a gorgeous trail, we were gorging ourselves on the vegan cuisine at the Stanford Inn. (No relation, or none advertised.) A wonderful spot.

Why do we live on the Peninsula, again?

RIP, Bird

This is sad. I remember Mark Fidrych. My dad and I used to really get a kick out of him.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: Two Fishes, One Hook

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's the text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

In earlier posts, I've suggested some parodic modes of dealing with Walden. Now here's a passage that I think is just straight-on gorgeous:

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

From "The Ponds," this is my favorite passage in the book, partly because I've had similar experiences. I recall fishing at night, once, with my father, although I sometimes think I've imagined it. Especially because I also recall seeing the aurora borealis that night, which I suppose could have happened in northern Michigan but would have been exceptionally rare. I don't fish now, and regret all those bluegill and perch and pike we killed back in the day. But the line extending from air to water, the mysterious communication from some unseen thing below--I find these images fascinating. I'm especially drawn to the disorientation in this passage; the idea that sky and water could change places, just as thoughts and waking dreams change places with fish. Thoreau's line connects the abstract to the concrete, and somehow that flips the world on its head.

We're told in writing workshops to be very careful when writing about dreams and mystical experiences. Too often they come out overblown, laden with obvious symbolism, and somehow boring. But that doesn't happen here, and I think it's because of that horned pout--a fish I've never seen, but which must be as ungainly as its name--squeaking and squirming in the middle of the dreamscape. The precise, mundane and inelegant detail constrasts (as Thoreau himself notices) with the "vast cosmogonal themes," setting them both in relief. In fact, the pout represents detail here.

So go ahead and write about dreams or moments of transcendence or drug trips. But be sure to throw in the horned pout, who'll keep you tethered to earth while you're flying.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: The TOC

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's the text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

There's nothing like a list for making wacky juxtapositions and bringing obscure concepts to the fore. McSweeney's online has a section entirely devoted to lists. Some of the greatest finds in Found Magazine are lists. Lots of contemporary poems and stories are or contain lists.

Looking at the Table of Contents for Walden, I'm reminded of how much I love it as a work in itself:

Economy
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Reading
Sounds
Solitude
Visitors
The Bean-Field
The Village
The Ponds
Baker Farm
Higher Laws
Brute Neighbors
House-Warming
Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
Winter Animals
The Pond in Winter
Spring
Conclusion

The juxtapostions are striking: Reading / Sounds; Solitude / Visitors; Higher Laws / Brute Neighbors. And then the oddly specific outlier, Baker Farm. I also like how the titles circle around the concepts of "warming" and "winter" toward the end--almost like an animal circling before lying down, perhaps in a pocket in the snow. There's a story in the titles themselves, complete with an arc. "Conclusion" puts a weird, dull damper on the whole thing, even though the actual conclusion turns out to be quite lyrical ("The sun is but a morning star" is the last line of the book).

So there are a couple of things we might do with this list. One is to come up with a similar list or lists, inspired by this one--combinations of the abstract and the concrete, seeming opposites which are not quite opposites, with puzzling insertions. Another would be to take the list as a starting point and fill it in with our own stories of "Brute Neighbors" and "Baker Farm," whatever we think those are. Or we might fill in this list with sub and sub-sub lists, using the MS Word outlining tool, which everyone adores so much.

Alaska Quarterly Review

My story, "An Eye for Alicia," is out in the Alaska Quarterly Review.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: The how-to book

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's the text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

Having escaped the clutches of Dostoevsky's Underground Man (at least for the time being), must we really now turn to Thoreau, the ultimate bane of high school English students, past and present, across this great land? Must we endure the musings of this "inestimably priggish and tiresome" writer, as Bill Bryson has called him? Especially given that Walden, strictly speaking, is not even fiction?

Well, yes. We can at least dip our toes into this sometimes turgid, sometimes glorious pond. I think we can create some interesting variations on Thoreau's techniques and themes--particularly keeping in mind the idea of the sentence as found object.

First off, I'd like to consider Walden as part of that indestructible American genre, the how-to book.* We're the DIY nation, or we like to think of ourselves that way--until, say, we get caught in a Ponzi scheme or invent rococo financial instruments that should by rights sink our company; then we say YDI! (You did it--and You do it!). Anyway, what is behind this urge to document one's experiences so that others may learn from them? Is it selfless or selfish, or some odd combination of both? Why is it so important, when giving advice, to "walk the walk," as Thoreau did (although not to the satisfaction of many critics, like Bryson, who point out that he often availed himself of the conveniences of downtown Concord as well as Emerson's house)? In short, what sort of person takes it upon himself to tell others how to live--and then how does he actually do that?

You begin, it seems, by explicitly stating your credentials and motives, as Thoreau sets out to do in the first couple of paragraphs. Of course he doesn't give us a standard CV (I'm a certified construction engineer with degrees in bean genetics and Classics), but a sort of spiritual resume, based on what he's observed about the human condition. Many of his famous aphorisms ("the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation") come from this section.

So, for an exercise, we can try creating a narrator who's examined the human condition--perhaps in a rather small petri dish, such as Concord, MA or his or her own immediate family--and diagnosed a problem. Have this narrator come up with some carefully styled (perhaps overly styled) aphorisms for the problem, and then begin to lay out a solution. The narrator may or may not have actually lived this solution.

There's no reason why this exercise should turn into a conventional short story with an "arc," although it could. You could, for instance, just fixate on the problem of establishing the narrator's authority. Or you could come up with increasingly absurd diagnoses of the problem that the narrator seeks to address.

Personally, I don't think I could write a completely straightforward, un-ironic version of Walden, so I'm suggesting parodic modes here. But others can and have written their own contemporary Waldens, often to much acclaim--so have at it, if that's your thing. I definitely feel the quiet desperation on occasion, and the lure of the bean-field.

*In the American context, memoir is part of this genre, as a spiritual how-to book.

The "work" section

Another great idea from the Slacktivist.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: Breaking the triangle

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

For the past year or so I've been obsessed with structure, and in particular with undermining "Freitag's triangle"--i.e., introduction --> conflict --> climax --> falling action --> resolution.* The Underground Man, naturally, hates having any structures forced upon him, including 2+2=4, and rails against such things at length in the first part of the book. And by railing, he does win out in the end--maybe he can't defeat 2+2, but he does wreck the triangle.

The first third of NfU, "Underground," is basically ranting. It has no clear narrative structure, no rising and falling action, only churning emotions, intellectual conundrums, and the constant love / hate, push / pull with the reader. The rest of the novel falls under the heading "A Propos of the Wet Snow," and is a much more conventional, triangle-shaped story. It's a memory from the UM's distant past, and may or may not explain how he came to be how he is now. He of course comes off badly, but possibly more sympathetically, in "Wet Snow." Or not. The more I think about the "Wet Snow" section, the more I wonder about its purpose. And that's what's great about this two-part structure.

I can imagine the responses Dostoevky would have gotten in a typical writing workshop: "The second part's great. It really moves. I can really see these characters and relate to them. Definitely cut the first part, though. You're just spinning your wheels. There's no action." But it's the weird relationship between Part I and Part II, and the narrator's refusal to tell a story until he's good and ready, that makes NfU what it is.

So here's an experiment to try, keeping in mind that your writing workshop may lambaste you. Spend the first third of your story (or novella, for that matter) not telling the story. Let the narrator who's on the verge of telling the story lay out all his or her motives, maybe preview the tale and give it some nice, inaccurate Cliff's Notes. Obviously your narrator has to be crazy enough to engage the reader for the duration of this section. You might think of that high school English teacher you loved to hate, and give that teacher some sort of unresolvable moral obsession--like proving the existence of God in a world that clearly suggests otherwise, or resisting some basic law of nature. Then go ahead and tell the story (or rather, a story) in the second part. Don't worry too much about tying the first part to the second, or, worse, with making the second part explain the first. This isn't a flashback to a traumatic childhood, for instance, that tells us why the narrator is such a monster today. It's more like another view of the narrator, and it shouldn't let him or her off the hook.

*BTW I give Eric Puchner a lot of credit for helping me think about these issues, through his Stanford Continuing Studies course, "Fiction that Breaks the Mold."

Craftzine blog

This is cool.

This site makes me feel guilty, of course, but almost everything does that. But really, I should be making gift bags for wine bottles out of old shirt sleeves. Well, maybe I should. I assume the instructions tell you how to deal with coffee and worse kinds of stains that one finds on old shirt sleeves--because if your shirt doesn't have those stains, why aren't you still wearing it? The larger problem, however, is that I hate to sew. It's impossible to describe how much I hate to sew. I can still see that needle sliding deeply into my finger as I tried to finish off my Marimekko pillowcase in seventh grade home-ec. My mother still has the pillow, and my blood is still on it, though it kind of blends in with the yellow-orange cow-spot pattern. But I should sew. I should. Or make lamps out of cereal boxes with pin-hole images.

Anyway, "craft" apparently no longer means strangely hard cloth dolls with gingham dresses and yellow yarn for hair...

The Bay Area Maker Faire, by the way, is May 30-31.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: a new Overcoat

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

Oh, how can you not love this book? (I'm not saying you don't love it, gentlemen; I think you do. But perhaps you are not ready to admit it.)

How can you not love this guy:

One night as I was passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window. At other times I should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window--and I envied him so much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room. "Perhaps," I thought, "I'll have a fight, too, and they'll throw me out of the window."

The scheme occurs to the Underground Man, by the way, as he's returning from one of his nights of "filthy vice" (i.e. visiting prostitutes). He wishes to punish himself, or rather, have someone else punish him--so he can then play the victim, and then mock himself for playing the victim, and so on into infinity. He also wants the attention that being thrown through a window will bring him. But what happens instead?

An officer put me in my place from the first moment.

I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.

It's the UM's manner of plotting and--sort of--exacting revenge that I'm interested in today. His first attempt is to write a satirical story about the officer, but it is rejected by a prominent journal, to his great consternation (perhaps some of us can relate to this particular failed plot). So he decides he is going to bump the officer in some public place. That is, he's going to get in the man's way and not step aside; the idea of doing this makes him absolutely giddy. (This whole section is worth several reads; I think it's hysterically funny, and I'm sure as hell not doing it justice here.) But first he has to prepare to bump him, and this involves obtaining proper attire. Specifically, he needs a new overcoat.

I had got ready long beforehand a good shirt, with white bone studs; my overcoat was the only thing that held me back. The coat in itself was a very good one, it kept me warm; but it was wadded and it had a raccoon collar which was the height of vulgarity. I had to change the collar at any sacrifice, and to have a beaver one like an officer's. For this purpose I began visiting the Gostiny Dvor and after several attempts I pitched upon a piece of cheap German beaver. Though these German beavers soon grow shabby and look wretched, yet at first they look exceedingly well, and I only needed it for the occasion. I asked the price; even so, it was too expensive. After thinking it over thoroughly I decided to sell my raccoon collar. The rest of the money--a considerable sum for me, I decided to borrow from Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, my immediate superior, an unassuming person, though grave and judicious. He never lent money to anyone, but I had, on entering the service, been specially recommended to him by an important personage who had got me my berth. I was horribly worried. To borrow from Anton Antonitch seemed to me monstrous and shameful. I did not sleep for two or three nights. Indeed, I did not sleep well at that time, I was in a fever; I had a vague sinking at my heart or else a sudden throbbing, throbbing, throbbing! Anton Antonitch was surprised at first, then he frowned, then he reflected, and did after all lend me the money, receiving from me a written authorisation to take from my salary a fortnight later the sum that he had lent me.

All of this, as you may already know, is a parody of Gogol's "The Overcoat," which of course is a satire itself. (Ooh! I see they have "The Overcoat" on Gutenburg also, only in their collection it's called "The Cloak.") And of course the parody is completely knowing, a very self-conscious bit of meta-fiction. In fact, the UM says of the officer, "Devil knows what I would have given for a real regular quarrel--a more decent, a more LITERARY one, so to speak."

OK: metafiction can be cheesy, smarmy, snotty, snooty, and tiresome. Let's not do it like that. But we can try weaving a story we really love into one of our stories. We often do this sort of thing unconsciously--let's try it consciously. We can try a complex, ultimately admiring parody that doesn't just exist as a parody, but serves to advance the story. The game here is that the UM wants to be more literary, so he rewrites himself as a fictional character that he thinks his readers will recognize (he's aware that he's already fictional, but people don't recognize him--that's the problem). Maybe the story we choose to parody could even be NfU, or some episode therein, like the bump-plotting episode.

BTW, does the UM ever bump the officer? Yes he does.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: I am (not) a spiteful man

Here is our text on Project Gutenberg.

A brief bit of pendantry to start out with, but I think it will be worth it. About those famous opening lines--"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man." The 1993 translation of NfU by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky renders the second line as "I am a wicked man." As Pevear explains in the foreword:

...the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a type of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky (xxiii).

My Russian is rusty, but it's evident from checking any dictionary that "zloy" means "wicked" or "evil." Pevear's explanation for how it got to be "spiteful" instead is intriguing, though I'm reluctant to simply attribute it to our namby-pamby (previous) century. It's true, as Pevear's foreword implies and as other critics have pointed out, translators have often felt compelled to clean up Dostoevsky's prose. They sometimes assume he was rushing to finish so he could pay off his gambling debts, and if he'd had more time, he would have said it their way (i.e. more eloquently).* So perhaps they don't believe he really meant "wicked," especially since people almost never refer to themselves as "evil." Truly evil people never do--they think they are the saviors of humankind. So what could it mean that this man, whom we are supposed to think of as an anti-hero of an anti-novel, calls himself "evil" on the first page? "Spiteful," while not a flattering way to characterize yourself, is more understandable--it's a bad habit, which is fixable. But being evil is perhaps not.

So here are a couple of writing experiments we can try.

1. Create a character who refers to himself or herself as "wicked." The character should also have a surprising, ambivalent relationship to that statement--no gleeful cackling, for instance, unless it's adulterated by at least one other emotion. What is the character trying to achieve by telling us he's evil?
   
   
2. Consider a story you have drafted, or one you are thinking about writing. Do as Pevear suggests, and translate psychological conditions into moral or spiritual ones. I'm thinking this could have the effect of raising the stakes in a story significantly. After all, Dostoevsky's characters literally go insane worrying about why God allows innocents to suffer. And I think a lot of contemporary fiction could use higher stakes.
   
   

* Update: I've edited this section to point out that "cleaning up Dostoevsky's prose" is a longstanding issue with translations.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: Gentlemen?

Borrowed Fire: a new regular feature on S and V, in which we steal writing from the gods.

Here's the text of Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

Let's skip the infamous first few lines ("I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man") and perhaps return to them later. And let's approach the infamous narrator who utters them, the Underground Man, from a different angle--his addressees, whom he calls "gentlemen." For instance, here's a short passage from Part I:

You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor.

When I've taught this book in Comp Lit courses, I've seen students get quite irritated indeed by lines like these. Their reaction is something akin to what many of us feel reading stories in the dreaded second-person, to wit: "You are riding on the subway..." No, I'm not, you idiot.* The students say things like: How dare the Underground Man (or is it Dostoevsky?) assume I'm irritated? OK, I am irritated, but not for the reasons he thinks. He's putting words in my mouth; that's why I'm irritated. (Also, some will point out, we're not gentlemen.) And they read the rest of the book with a nice big chip on their shoulders.

But what if Dostoevsky, and the Underground Man, want us to read with that chip? Let's assume the UM knows we think he's misread us, and that we'll therefore resist what he has to say. What might be Dostoevsky's purposes in doing that? And how does that affect the narration?

So here's a writing experiment: creating a reader--to whom you explicitly refer in your story--whom your narrator deliberately, strategically misunderstands. This should go beyond the exercise of, say, writing a letter to a hostile or skeptical recipient. Your narrator is toying with the real reader by creating a sham version of that reader--a kind of voodoo doll that the narrator pokes to get a reaction out of the unseen person it represents. What strategies would you use for poking? Why and how do you want the reader to resist?

*By the way I have written a story in the second person. But I expect a fair number of people to loathe it.

Borrowed Fire: a new feature on Swerve and Vanish

I'm starting a new regular feature on Swerve and Vanish, called Borrowed Fire, or Stealing Writing from the Gods. My first thought was to start a whole new blog devoted to this subject, and briefly did so late last night. But even later last night, I thought--am I crazy? Two blogs? So to avoid confusion and possible redundancy, Borrowed Fire will be a feature here on S and V. All posts under this rubric will have the Borrowed Fire tag and heading.

What, then, is Borrowed Fire?

Borrowed Fire is a place for aspiring writers like me to learn more about our craft. Our goal is to study the techniques of great writers in order to add fire to our own work; each of us will transform what we borrow into something that is uniquely our own. Our motto will be Do not envy--steal. Actually, it's OK to envy great writers, and, believe me, we will. But we'll also channel that envy into learning what they do and how they do it.

No god is beyond our reach. I'm going to start with Dostoevsky, and move (perhaps not in this order) to Melville, Thoreau, and other traumatizing figures from high school English. I intend to draw only from authors whose work is posted on Project Gutenberg, so that everyone who comes here can access the work immediately and for free. The other advantage of Gutenberg is that it will confine us, for the most part, to the early 20th century or before. That means we'll be looking closely at stories, novels, essays, and even poems that aren't frequently used as models in creative writing classes. But of course there's plenty in these works to learn from--and their relative distance from our time will give them a productive strangeness.

I don't intend to go page-by-page; I may do anywhere from one to twenty posts on each work. I'll be discovering some for the first time, and rereading others--even some I wrote about in my dissertation years ago, back when I called them "texts." I'm looking forward to seeing them in this different light, the light of borrowed fire.

I hope we all find this experiment helpful.