The anatomy of fear

Sorry, couldn't resist that title. In fact this is another overdue post about The Turn of the Screw. But it's exciting! Both anatomical and fearsome, in a good way!

All right, for those of you who haven't clicked away...

Continuing my thought from Friday, about trying to learn the craft of fiction on the sentence level. I've written before about the advantages (which may not be readily apparent) of writing what appears to be a ghost story in a highly complex, nuanced style. Obviously this style isn't for everybody, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to suit James's purpose. I believe that purpose is not only to tell a damn scary story, but to understand fear as profoundly as possible.

Contrary to what we might assume, James shows us that fear is not a simple emotion. Unless the werewolf is literally leaping at your throat at this very moment (and even then, I might suggest), fear is a layered and contradictory experience. Especially when the nature of the menace is not yet clear, the experience of growing fear is a nuanced one. It is not just a series of bigger and bigger jolts. Fear waxes and wanes; at times you might try to go through your ordinary routines, aware as you are that they have been knocked off kilter. You clutch with overwrought relief at false hopes. You get irritated. You might even laugh at yourself as you step back and watch yourself scurrying through those musty corridors with your guttering flashlight. How did I let it come to this?, you say to yourself.

Anyway, let's take a look at one of those finely-wrought Jamesian sentences. This one refers to the governess's attempts at conversations with the children in her charge, now that all are aware of the spectral "visitants" who have come to the children on several occasions. The governess has just described the "small ironic consciousness" of the children--their awareness that she knows something is going on, but is unable to ask them about it directly. The children, she tells us, are not so "vulgar" as to taunt her with this knowledge. Rather,

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other—for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended—the doors we had indiscreetly opened.

First off, the sentence mirrors the physical events in the story. The governess has been "perpetually coming into sight of subjects" that stop her short--the apparitions. She turns out of alleys and peers through doors, and gets caught looking. The sentence is a kind of mini suspense tale, giving us the "little bang" that disrupts the sentence's flow, somewhat violently, with dashes, before finally revealing what caused the bang--the doors. The events and the fear they cause seep into the very language--the words and the syntax--the governess uses to try to understand the events. Even in retrospect, she can't think outside of the fear.

But what's also touching here is the repetition of "we," and "us," the implication that she and the children are on the same side in this predicament. Together, they encounter subjects and stop short; together they "indiscreetly" open doors and startle when they slam. They have the same motives, and share the same surprise and disappointment when their adventures go awry. Glossed over is the fact that the children are hiding something from the governess. She loves them and fiercely wants to protect them. She can't quite bring herself to think that they may have an agenda quite different from hers.

The "we" also conveys something else. The children are--at least--the governess's equals in this game. She cannot out-think them, any more than she can get them to obey her in any but the most trivial matters.

The sentence contains a kernel of simple, unthinking fear: the jolt when the door bangs louder than expected. But rippling out from that are all the shadings that make fear so difficult to understand and overcome: There's love and the desire to be loved back (the fear of not being loved back, perhaps). There's propriety in social relations, especially with children for whom one is responsible. There's denial--this isn't really happening, not really--pitted against the equally strong will to understand. All these emotions are happening at once, and all are part of the supposedly simple experience of "being afraid."

So as we write our own scary stories, we might spend some time unraveling all the emotional threads that make up fear...the kind of fear worthy of literature. Give fear its due by placing the shaded, qualified sentence alongside the gut-wrenching shriek.

Possibly such complications are also worth considering as we face fear in our daily lives--or accuse others of being fearful.

Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level?

After reading about (not actually reading) Stanley Fish's new book on sentences, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates's lovely discussions of Jane Austen's sentences, I am wondering: Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level? Could there be a class (or, say, a series on an obscure blog) that dissects literature sentence by sentence, in order to improve students' (or fellow writers') own writing?

I've never taken a creative writing class that dove that deep, except on occasion. It seems one ends up talking mostly about "flow," believability, characterization, plot, and structure on a higher level. But can writers be taught, through example, to craft better sentences, word by painstaking word?

I'm rushed today, but intend to think about this more...

On not wanting to write

It's crazy. Writing is supposed to be what I love to do most in this world. I have time. I have solitude. I have emotional and financial support. I am very, very lucky in these regards. Yet when it comes to pouring out my required 1,000 words for the day on my novel, more often than not, I just don't want to.*

I know I share this problem with millions of writers; there's a whole industry dedicated to producing prompts, encouragement, and inspiring threats for writers, all for a low, low subscription fee. But what I still don't get is why I don't want to write whenever my self-appointed time rolls around each day. You'd think I'd be champing at the bit to write. You'd think I'd do it all day long, that I'd have to be pulled kicking and screaming from the computer. So again, I ask, why?

Here are a couple of answers I've thought of, none of which are fully satisfying:

• It's tiring. The intense concentration that kicks in, once I finally do get going, really does take something out of me. I don't like being tired. But what exactly am I saving myself for?
  
  
• There is no immediate (or possibly even distant) concrete payoff. If I cook a meal, I get to eat it. If I do a job for money, I get paid. I know one is supposed to write for oneself, ultimately--that publication, acclaim, any kind of payment, etc. are just icing on the much larger, more nutritious cake that is doing what you truly love. And yet. After a writing session, I may feel pleased with what I've written, but I may also feel that I've just spent two hours shouting into a great, dark canyon that does not even echo.
  
  
• When writing a novel especially, one tends to feel lost a good part of the time. Yes, I have a sort of overall outline, a general sense of where I'm going, but most days I feel I'm hiking through some vast wheat field, with only an iffy compass telling me I'm going in the right direction. I do not like feeling lost.
  
  
• I feel guilty. Most people never get the chance to do something they truly love. Who am I to be given that opportunity? Do I deserve it, when so many others can't even imagine having it? This is self-indulgence of the worst kind--and to top it off, I'm still procrastinating! I don't even appreciate what I have! Self indulgence and ingratitude!
  
  
• I don't like what I'm writing. Actually, this one does not feel so true at the moment. To be honest, I'm rather fond of what I'm writing these days. But perhaps I think that fondness is delusional. Because it really is terrible, what I'm writing. Yes, that's probably it! If I don't like my writing, I shouldn't be doing it at all. And if I do like it, it means I'm out of my mind!
  

I don't know. It's probably best not to think about this stuff at all. Just get over yourself and do it already, right?

Or I could clean the kitchen...

*Obviously writing about not wanting to write is no problem at all. This is because it is, at its heart, complaining. This is perhaps the easiest form of discourse, spoken or written, to generate. Maybe this is because complaining shuts off expectations of any sort--it's a substitute for doing something. And it's fun.

Should writers cut back on scenery?

Laura Miller's Salon column yesterday got me thinking, again, about the relationship of setting to character. This is a particular concern of mine, because I've often worried that my own fiction lacks a sufficient sense of place. But how do you work a detailed sense of place into the narrative without bringing it to a grinding halt while you describe every highway, byway, lake, lawn, and tree?

Miller argues that one of the biggest problems in literary fiction today is, in fact, the overuse of description. Using Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife as her primary example, she quotes a paragraph of scenic description, and then says,

Zdrevkov is godforsaken, but this fact is amply conveyed in the following four paragraphs describing the town itself -- most of that bit is quite good, although still a shade exhaustive. Obreht has said in an interview that she wants to write about "the influences of place on characters," but the passage above is too flatly reportorial to suggest that this woman feels anything but overheated.

By way of contrast, Miller approvingly quotes Alias Grace:

Margaret Atwood writes of a suffocating Victorian parlor, "all possible surfaces of it are upholstered; the colors are those of the inside of the body -- the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purple of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones."

The distinction I believe Miller is getting at is that Atwood's description reveals both the parlor, and the state of mind of the character viewing the parlor. Grace (who will later be accused of murdering the parlor's owner and committed to an asylum) is clearly, shall we say, unsettled in this setting. The "influence of place" on this character is indeed stifling--though Atwood, I would point out, leaves open the possibility that someone else (the rich owner of the house, for instance), would see these same items very differently.

In other words, places definitely influence characters, but the reverse is also true: characters influence settings, at least in terms of how the reader sees and interprets them through their eyes. Atwood's description is singular enough that we come to see both the parlor and Grace as singular. And throughout the novel, Grace and her setting will continue to interact and shape each other in surprising (and specific) ways. It seems to me this notion is crucial--the setting doesn't just "contain" the characters, but is continuous, and contiguous, with character. Setting and character are all part of the same fabric, the space-time of the novel (to rip off both Bakhtin and Brian Greene at the same time).

Still, this is much easier to realize if you are writing in the close third-person point of view. I haven't read The Tiger's Wife, and so don't know what point of view Oberht uses overall. Miller says her style is "subtle" and her main character mostly "opaque," which suggests a more external, even omniscient point of view. If you believe in or at least want to explore the possibility of omniscience (even a sort of blocked omniscience, which can't see inside people very well), some descriptive passages would have to originate from this point of view. This would seem to preclude the red-in-tooth-and-claw type of description we get from Atwood. But does that mean that such description would always end up being "flat" and "reportorial"?

Or maybe this really means that in literature (if not in life) no setting can exist outside of perception. That perception might be a character's, or it might even be the author's--more specifically, that of the author's persona, which we might call the voice. The author may or may not create a specific narrator for the story, but there is always a presence that the voice embodies. And it would behoove us writers to always be aware of that presence, what it is doing, and what its agenda is at any given moment in the narrative. Perhaps it's even in a tug-of-war with a character, vying (quietly or not) over whose description of reality is more true. You would then see layers (or striations) of perception in the landscape, which could make the scene very rich indeed--even if those layers are subtle.

Anyway, I can't decide whether I think Miller's right in telling authors to cut back on description. Elmore Leonard's advice to take out the boring parts is, of course, always correct--whether they are descriptions of setting, or dialog, or anything else. I suspect that boredom often ensues when the reader's sense of a human presence flags.

New story up at Slush Pile Magazine

My story, "The Inheritor," is now up at Slush Pile.

Bringing storytelling into the digital age

So this is cool. Broadcastr.com is "a social media platform for audio and storytelling, shared on an interactive map." You can listen to stories from around the world and upload your own.

Intellectuals in American fiction: a plea

It's very rare that a single book review convinces me to buy a book immediately. A favorable review usually gets tossed in the "I'll have to read that someday" bin in the back of my brain, and repeated reminders are necessary for the thought to ever be retrieved and acted on.

Not so with Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City. James Wood's review in The New Yorker has convinced me that it is necessary for me to read this book as soon as possible. Some of the credit for this has to go to Wood, who is one of the most thoughtful and original reviewers out there. He does not use the book as a launching pad for rants on his own pet artistic concerns; nor does he dutifully plod through the upsides and downsides of plot, theme, character development, etc. Instead, he seeks to fully engage the work on its own terms, and he draws out the book's unique perceptions and contributions--without reducing the book to its own uniqueness. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, the reason I must read this book is its portrayal of the lives of young intellectuals in America. Describing a monologue by one of the characters, a student of literary and cultural theory, Wood says, "This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person." This statement brought me up short, as I have certainly been guilty, in my own fiction, of satirizing. (Maybe of flourishing too, though, God, I hope not.)

Overtly intellectual characters tend to get short shrift in contemporary American fiction. Why? There's a logistical problem, first of all, of thoroughly explaining what their theories actually are--as well as the intellectual bases for the theories--without turning the novel into a theoretical treatise in itself. More important, though, is good ol' American anti-intellectualism, both real and assumed. Nobody wants to read about thinkers, right? Thinkers are not doers; they do not take action, which is both a moral failing and a liability for plot purposes. It's bad enough to be sitting and reading oneself, but to read about readers? What's the outcome of all this thinking going to be, anyway--someone finishes their dissertation?

Well, if your character is Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, or any number of Dostoevsky characters, he or she will try to live out his ideas (sometimes with disastrous consequences). In Dostoevsky, ideas are made flesh. They are not games; they are characters in themselves, in a sense--they are as real and as important to human life as food, the landscape, and one's family and friends. As Wood says, they are part of a person's "whole context."

This is true of Cole's character, Farouq, who's viewed sympathetically but ambivalently by the narrator. As Cole (and Wood and Dostoevsky) remind us, characters can legitimately care as much about ideas as they do about their children and lovers, about understanding their own pasts, or conquering mighty Everest. Intellectuals in fiction need not be *merely* bloodless, hypocritical, or ineffectual--though they can still be funny, strange, immoral, and/or difficult. In other words, ideas are the legitimate stuff of passion in literature; not distractions to be overcome or set aside in the pursuit of "true" experience. The key is to show why the characters care about their ideas so much, so that the reader will care about them too. Don't allow readers to feel simple contempt for the characters, and thus dismiss the ideas.

In fact, those of us who care about intellectual life in this country could do a lot worse than support--and write--good fiction about people who think.

A big hooray for small presses

You like indie films, right? Sure, they're not as glamorous, or brightly colored, or loud as major studio pictures. But they're often more compelling, more human, funnier, and take more artistic chances. They're made by people who like movies at least a little better than money, and they--usually--don't make you feel all icky after watching them.* Why, here's one I stumbled across on Netflix just the other day, and can honestly say I adored.

My point is that those of us who support indie films should offer up some of our hipster love for small/independent presses. If the big publishers are becoming more skittish and dependent upon formulaic blockbusters, plenty of small presses still really want to publish good--and original--writing. Their marketing budgets may be tiny, but they spend the money wisely. Just look at what Starcherone Books did for Zachary Mason.

Here, then, are a few starting points to help you find some great new books to read--and maybe a publisher for your cutting-edge book.

• Fifteen Feisty Small Presses from Huffpo
• The Poets and Writers database of small presses
• The New Pages list of independent publishers (including university presses)
• Dzanc Books and their imprints (Black Lawrence Press, Starcherone, Other Voices Books, Keyhole Press, Monkeybicycle, and Absinthe)
• Bona Fide Books (a personal favorite)
  

I need to do some research on university presses that publish fiction--many do. What else have I left out?

*For an important discussion of ickiness in mainstream movies, see this review of Just Go With It.

People-shopping on Facebook

Like most people, my relationship with Facebook is love/hate (or maybe love-hate or love: hate). I love to hate it, and I hate to love it. It's a waste of time and somehow absolutely necessary. It's the American Dream made high-tech, where you can reinvent yourself in real time and get instant feedback on the changes you've made. It's you, crowd-sourced, continuously improving.

Every day, several times a day, I visit my page with a mixture of anticipation and self-reproach that I believe is unique in all of my personal experiences. By nature I am a furtive soul, who both resents and welcomes the challenge of pretending to think of myself as a celebrity. Aren't we all stars, anyway? Or just stardust? I wish I could just decide how I feel about this damn tool once and for all, but I suspect the ambivalence is actually part of its appeal. If I simply loved it, I could probably leave it alone.

Lately one aspect of Facebook has proven especially irresistible, and that is scrolling through the seemingly endless page of "people I may know." In about 90% of the cases I don't know them, which is where the fun begins. There's a whole life behind that little square, revealing maybe half a smiling face, a cat, a sunset, a book cover, a drawing, or (in more than one instance) a gun. I like the partial human faces the best; it seems like the most honest depiction of what you're really getting--a sliver, a crafted distortion. The names are slivers, too, in verbal form.

I will never know the first thing about these other person's lives, and yet they're being offered to me as an array of possibilities to choose from, like cereal boxes or paperweights on a store shelf. I can pick one up, turn it over, check the price and say "My God, they want that much?" All of which seems very crass, until I remember that I have given my permission for countless others to do the same to me.

Except it's not me. Is it? Can I, the author of my profile, send it out into the world and let it fend for itself, as writers are supposed to do with their books? Or must I constantly protect and shape and update and explain it? And what does it mean if doing that work becomes a significant portion of my daily life? Is constantly making an artificial version of my real life still a real life? Are we always doing that in some other form anyway?

But back to "people you may know." Perhaps a more positive way to view this is that it's nothing more than people-watching, minus the park bench and the embarrassment of being caught staring. It feels harmless enough, maybe too harmless. It does suck up vast amounts of time, watching the faces appear on my screen and then vanish as the scroll rolls upward. Elsewhere (a fair exchange?) my own profile is doing likewise, evanescent as a bubble.

Should we try to write like Henry James?

For the last year or so, I've been doing a series on my blog called "Borrowed Fire,"* in which I read works of classic literature and try to draw out lessons for contemporary fiction writers. All the books are available on Project Gutenberg. For the past few months I've been working my way through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

Now seems as good a time as any to talk about James's language, and whether writers today can learn from a style that seems particularly outdated.

I probably first read Turn in high school. I have a vague memory of my English teacher, who was blessed with an ominous, quavering voice, intoning about the sexual nature of the threat. I have a stronger memory of being bored and frustrated by the story, because it was supposed to be so incredibly scary--but I could not get through the prose. If the story was supposed to keep me on the edge of my seat, why did it take the narrator *forever* to get the simplest point across? If she was terrified by her experience, how did she have the mental capacity to even construct such long, involved sentences? Yes, the story is told in retrospect, but wouldn't it have been better to make it more immediate, so that the narrator's reactions could be more visceral and (therefore) believable? The whole thing seemed pointless. You know, maybe back then people managed to get scared while wading through giant blocks of baroque language, but James just puts us to sleep.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that lots of readers have a similar response to Turn, at least the first time through. The whole literary endeavor seems to run counter to horror, at least to what we now think of as horror. Thanks especially to movies, horror is a sensory experience, not a verbal one. Lots of screaming, lots of gruesome visuals and crunching, but light on talking and reflecting. If you are writing for an audience seeking this type of experience, you'll get nowhere borrowing from James. Just go with "Oh, God...Oh...God," and lots of one-sentence paragraphs.

But I've come to believe that retrospect is a great place to tell a scary story from. For one thing, there's the problem posed by memory itself. What do I really remember? What have I forgotten due to the trauma of the experience? Maybe I've gone crazy, and none of this really happened. Or maybe it's going to happen again, even though I've been free of those awful apparitions--I think--for all these years. A story like Turn, you see, is never over. So the process of writing it, instead of being a clumsy device ("The vampire is coming through my door right now, his foul breath is upon me, but I must keep writing...must...aaaggghhh...") becomes a necessary part of the story.

The narrator of Turn is trying to make sense of her memory, to recollect the experience in as much detail as possible, while constantly questioning the accuracy of those details. What if she hasn't got them right? What if she has? Either way, the implications are terrible. Writing itself becomes a type of horror, a compulsion the writer can't resist but also can't bear to face. It's not just the shock of the experience that frightens the writer, but realizing all the aspects of what it's done to her, and what it is still doing to her. She is, to this day, bewildered.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.

James's kind of horror isn't simple. It's a complicated experience, which is confusing even in recollection. But the confusion is rendered with precision--the kind of precision only an acute loss can bestow. The above passage is the moment that "bewilderment of vision" sets in. The narrator has lived at least long enough to write the story--but from this point on, she is lost (in the wilderness), and she knows it. That's the horror--watching herself become lost.

So should we try to write like Henry James? Or to put it another way, could anyone in our time write a story like this, in this manner? I think it would be well worth trying, even using James's style, giving shadings to shadings. Possibly the memoir format could work here, only it's a fictional memoir...and instead of redemption at the end, portray the growing recognition that there is no way out of one's own memory--real or not.

*"Stolen Fire," as in stealing fire from the gods, was--appropriately--taken. Also the idea of writers "borrowing" from others, especially from those to whom we are supposed to feel inferior, appeals to me. It puts us on a more equal footing--Fyodor, can I borrow a cup of sugar / method for creating suspense? Henry, that's a great tone on you--could I try it on sometime, and maybe wear it out to dinner?

Ta-Nehisi Coates does it again...

He takes my breath away with this post on Lara Logan.

"The fact of privilege is not nearly so important as the uses of privilege."

The King of Kong and character

While we are on the subject of people who seem to like games too much but are actually quite sane, I wanted to recommend a movie I saw a few months ago on Netflix: The King of Kong.

This 2007 documentary is part of the indie tradition of visiting a geeky subculture (Renaissance Faire denizens, video gamers, independent horror filmmakers) and revealing their complex social systems (so like our own! and yet so weird!). The tone is usually one of mockery with an unconvincing glaze of bittersweet. (If only we, the knowing, could have such an all-absorbing passion that we didn't care what other people thought of us...) And it does appear, as a few reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes have pointed out, that The King of Kong started out with those intentions. It tells the story of a changing of the guard in the world of classic arcade gaming, namely the nearly-impossible-to-master game of Donkey Kong.*

But then something shifts. Steve Wiebe, whose quest to be acknowledged as the game's new champion provides the movie's narrative, refuses to be put into the geek-viewing tank. The filmmakers try, in the beginning, to make him conform, interviewing his wife about how obsessive he is, and his dashed dreams of playing baseball (the pathology is obvious, yes?). Meanwhile Wiebe calmly goes about his business of teaching science to kids, being a father, chatting amiably with his interviewers, and playing Donkey Kong--which we slowly begin to gather isn't any stranger than, say, playing tennis for several hours a day, or writing at great length about people who exist only in our own minds. The film seems to step back at a certain point and let him be who he is, an act of generosity.

Fiction writers can learn from this, I think. We may often start out wanting, or needing, characters to play a certain role, especially if we have a plot in mind that we want to advance. Steve the Gamer has to be a troubled soul, so we can reveal the whole world of Donkey Kong as a (bittersweet) refuge for life's losers. But Steve, we find, won't go there. Without meaning any harm, he breaks our plot and reveals it as a sham--or a mere starting point that has to be revised in light of new evidence. Let him be who he is, and he will make your story better. And he may teach you something about your own assumptions.

*From brief experience, dredged up from the mists of the early 80s, I can tell you this game is freaking hard. My favorite games from the 80s were Galaxians and its variant, Phoenix. Although now I'm such a softie that I don't think I could stand a game involving shooting birds--even alien birds bent on wiping out the human race...

But Watson isn't gracious

I have never been a big fan of Jeopardy!, mostly because I feel that memorizing gazillions of facts and spitting them out on cue is not an especially good use of human brain power. (Also I can't do it.)

So I had never heard of Ken Jennings or his amazing 2004 winning streak, up until this whole kerfuffle about Watson. If I had, I would probably have assumed (ungraciously) that he was a sort of stunted character, having funneled all his life force into the dubious goal of being a game-show champion.

But his article on Slate about losing to Watson is a truly lovely piece of writing. In the first place, he gently reminds us that Watson is not the plucky underdog in this story. The real winners last night were IBM shareholders. In other words, Corporate America, in one of its most behemoth-like incarnations. Innovative as Watson is, that vaguely androgynous purr is the voice of global capitalism lulling us into a charmed sleep. (This is me going off here; Jennings doesn't take the point this far.)

Reading Jennings's piece, I realized I had in fact come to think of Watson as the underdog, after watching PBS's "Smartest Machine on Earth" the other night. In fact, Watson's pluckiness really belongs to its engineers, who worked constantly for four years to bring a seemingly impossible dream to reality (a dream set in motion by watching Jennings). That's how the show frames the story, anyway. We even see how hurt one of the engineers is when the practice Jeopardy! host, a comedian hired by IBM, makes fun of Watson. The engineer's kids were hurt by the mockery when they watched the practice rounds; the engineer says, without irony, that "Watson is defenseless." So I found myself rooting for Watson to beat the humans--which is a pretty amazing bit of jiu-jitsu by IBM and NOVA. While I really do admire the engineers' accomplishment, it's important to remember on whose behalf it was accomplished.

Jennings takes his defeat with a nuanced dose of humility and humor. He uses it as an occasion to reflect on his own experience of winning, something Watson, of course, could never do:

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. [....]

During my 2004 Jeopardy! streak, I was accustomed to mowing down players already demoralized at having to play a long-standing winner like me. But against Watson I felt like the underdog, and as a result I started out too aggressively, blowing high-dollar-value questions on the decade in which the first crossword puzzle appeared (the 1910s) and the handicap of Olympic gymnast George Eyser (he was missing his left leg).

So Watson may make game-show contestants obsolete, as Jennings, not entirely humorously, predicts. But Watson will never win or lose as graciously, and with as much subtle intelligence, as Jennings demonstrates in this essay.

So the humans are still winning, if you ask me.

The New Short Fiction Series, March 13

This spoken-word performance series will be featuring my stories on March 13, 7 p.m., Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles. Tix $10 in advance, www.newshortfictionseries.com.

Here is the poster:

The Turn of the Screw: Why you sort of have to be an architect to write fiction

I've said in the past that writing fiction is a great deal like acting. As the author, you have to inhabit your characters, to look out at their world from inside their bodies, much as an actor does. Like it or not, you also are the director, set designer, and lighting designer. Also you have to produce the thing and sit alone in the box office 24/7, but never mind that part.

What I am getting at is the importance of blocking in fiction, which I see I've written about before. By blocking, I mean figuring out exactly where your characters are in space, at all times. A tall order? Yes, especially if you do not have a clear picture of that space in your mind.

Years ago I bought a book called The Writers Journal, which, not unexpectedly, showed actual pages from writers' journals. One of them (I can't remember who) had created elaborate floor plans for the house in which his characters lived. At the time, I thought that was just pure OCD. Some writers might enjoy that sort of thing, but that level of attention to detail wasn't for me. And as a result, I think my characters have done a fair amount of floating.

In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's characters have no such problem. I've already talked about the architecture in the scene where the first "visitant" appears: the way the apparition places his hand on the crenelations as he moves along the roof specifically situates him in both space and time--which makes him all the more extremely creepy. This week, I'm more convinced than ever that James had a complete sketch somewhere of Bly and its grounds, including plans for all the floors. Whether he did them himself or enlisted a friend who was an architect, I don't know. It's possible he just used a real house with which he was extremely familiar. In any case, his detailed knowledge of the space enables him to create scenes that we, the readers, can feel ourselves inside of. And that is what makes them so scary.

In this scene, the governess observes one of her young charges, Flora, looking out from her bedroom window onto the lawn at night. She's obviously "engaged" with one of the "visitants" (I just love that word) the governess has been seeing inside and outside the house. The governess immediately wonders what's happening with Flora's brother, Miles, who seems to be of particular interest to the apparition of Peter Quint.

While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her brother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS window?—what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter of my boldness? This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause again.

I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds—a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the lower one—though high above the gardens—in the solid corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared—looking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above me—there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn—I felt sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles himself.

James not only knows the distance (ten paces) between Flora's room and Miles's, he has also located and envisioned this unused room down the hall, from which the governess can get an unimpeded view of who is looking at whom looking at whom.* Thanks to these spatial details, the reader sees what the governess sees, and feels what she feels. I admit, I got a little impatient as she conducted her "transit" (just tell us where Miles is!!). But the architectural passage (pun there) increases the suspense, and more than that, it reinforces all the characters (human and not) as specific physical presences in a specific space.

So I am going to suggest a writing exercise in which you actually sketch out the physical space in which your story or novel is going to unfold. You might not even have a story in mind yet--I think you might actually come up with a story from this exercise. It's OK to look at photos or drawings, but I think you have to make the space your own by redrawing and revising it. It seems like a lot of work up front, but down the road it will make your job easier because you won't have to wonder just where the hell your characters are. You will know. But you have to also remember to tell your reader.

*This kind of 3D visualization is a real weakness of mine; I still have chill-inducing memories of some kind of IQ test I had to take in, like, first grade. It included 2D drawings of 3D objects, and we had to rotate them in our minds, say, 45 degrees clockwise, and then pick the correct 2D representation that rotation would produce. I imagine I cried, and was thereafter discreetly funneled into a profession requiring orientation in two dimensions or fewer.

The all-but-lost art of editing

Via Ruth O., here's a thoughtful piece in The Guardian about the changing role of editors. It's mostly a sad story, but not entirely.

It reminds me of why I love editing other people's work. It's the deep engagement with another person's thoughts, which you also get in reading--except you then usually get to talk to the other person, and together you bring those thoughts out into the open.

Also to be an editor means to believe in the promise--rather than the inevitable failure--of language. One person can't always find the right words, but two (or maybe more) together sometimes can.

Fiction without all the ingredients, or Write like a Roomba

Via Zoe Pollock, I've been meaning to write about Ken Layne's tribute to Mark Bittman's late, great Minimalist column in the NYT. Layne is exactly right:

The best thing about Mark Bittman, to us, is how he validated our particular lifelong half-assed “well that looks pretty good enough” cooking habits. Because we were right, all along! There is no single recipe for anything, and people who obsess over measuring and “having all the ingredients” and everything are, basically, insane people. That is not how you cook to eat, which is the point of cooking: to make a meal you are going to eat, at that point in time.

Until quite recently I was one of those people who would not cook something unless I had all the ingredients. I chalk this up to being, for the most part, an easily thwarted person. I often read interviews with various dreamers-whose-dreams-became-reality, and they usually deliver a line like, "Whenever somebody tells me I can't do something, that makes me all the more determined to do it!" Whereas in the same situation, I would customarily say, "Oh, God, you're right. Thanks for telling me. I will stop immediately."

For example, last night I decided to make the brownies from The Joy of Vegan Baking, only I didn't have applesauce, which the recipe calls for in place of eggs so as to glue those suckers together. My instinct was to give up on the project and return to the sofa, where I would sulkily surf the Internet and long for brownies. But instead I looked in the refrigerator and found...tofu sour cream! (Don't make that face! It's fine! The texture is not like house paint!) I mixed that in, only to discover that I didn't have the requisite 8x8 square pan, so I used a round pan, which meant the brownies had to be cut into irregular shapes...but they taste fabulous, is my point. And I am sure Mark Bittman is in a castle in Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow, applauding.

Cooking and writing are similar enterprises, especially cooking Bittman-style. You gather up what you have around you, and you make the best thing you can at that moment. For the last few days, when I've sat down to write, I've definitely felt I lacked key ingredients (talent, a sufficiently warm cup of coffee, ideas). But then I fire up the inspirational talk I've been giving myself lately, which is, "What the hell else are you going to do with your life, if not this?" And I dive in, reluctantly. Soon enough, something starts to emerge from the back of the refrigerator / my mind, which at first I can't quite see, and then am not quite sure will work, but...is it? It is! The tofu sour cream! And it hasn't gone bad; in fact, in fact, it seems to be working! At least it will hold the thing together till I come back tomorrow and try once again to feed my novel.

Here's another household analogy for both cooking and writing: the Roomba. Those of us with OCD tendencies might be bothered as we watch the Roomba ricochet randomly around the floor, like a very slow molecule of gas. (Go do the corner! Why don't you go do the corner?) But viewed differently, the Roomba's inspiring. See how it bangs its blank little face on a chair leg, and instead of retreating, it comes back, gets the lay of the land, and makes its way around and under. It might not move according to the pattern you have in your mind--but it's getting the job done just fine.

Blood and language in fiction

A little while ago I started dipping into the collection of James Tiptree Jr.'s science-fiction stories, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Tiptree was the pen name of a woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon, the subject of an amazing biography by Julie Phillips called James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. (More about that tragic double life here.)

So, how are the stories? In a word, grim. GRIM. As a feminist in the 60s and 70s, Sheldon was not optimistic about the patriarchy giving way to an egalitarian utopia. In the stories I've read so far, patriarchy is an overwhelming force, existing both outside and inside individual men, whose implacable goal is to wipe women off the face of the earth. For example, from "The Screwfly Solution," there's this scene of a man waking up from a dream about his wife and daughter:

A terrible alarm bell went off in his head. Exploded from his dream, he stared around, then finally down at his hands. What was he doing with his open clasp knife in his fist?

Stunned, he felt for the last shreds of his fantasy, and realized that the tactile images had not been of caresses, but of a frail neck strangling in his fist, the thrust had been the plunge of a blade seeking vitals. In his arms, legs, phantasms of striking and trampling bones cracking. And Amy--

Oh, god. Oh, god--

Not sex, blood lust.

Well, so, that's a bit heavy-handed. That's the definition of heavy handed. For us more literary writers, heavy-handedness is a no-no. It's not tempered, not nuanced. If you want to convey horror, let your readers divine it for themselves; there is no need for such verbal bludgeoning. It indicates a level of authorial rage that goes beyond the boundaries of the story, which makes us wonder, in an unseemly manner, about the author's personal problems.

Or so the conventional writing wisdom goes.

Here's another passage, from "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," which is a little harder to dismiss from on high:

Under the whine of bulldozers the sea could be heard running its huge paws up and down the keyboard of the land.

OK, workshoppers, have at it. What's wrong with this picture? The sea as a giant beast is all well and fine--but a beast that plays the piano (albeit probably badly)? When we think of paws on a keyboard, we may think of a cat *walking* on a keyboard--not deliberately "running its paws" over it. The image also suggests a side-to-side movement of the paws, whereas the motion of waves hitting the shore is back-and-forth, approaching and receding. In short it's not just a mixed metaphor, but a hash.

And yet it's compelling. The image has stuck with me for weeks. It may make little sense when looked at closely, but it's audacious and vivid. It took guts to create this image. Its sheer power makes my objections look like petty quibbling.

I can't bring myself to fully endorse the "Oh, god, Oh, god" school of writing. But after reading Tiptree, a lot of literary fiction looks, well, bloodless to me. We trade pure energy for decorum and significance, and at times we may give up too much.



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About that gender gap...

Interesting piece on Salon today by Laura Miller, reflecting on the Vida survey on women in literary publications. Bottom line: the most respected journals in the country have far fewer female contributors than male, and review far fewer books by women than by men.

This is an old story, as Miller points out. But Ruth Franklin and her colleagues at The New Republic took a closer look at the numbers, and confirmed what many already suspected: the root problem is that fewer books by women are being published, despite the fact that women continue to buy and read far more books than men do.

However, as Miller explains: "If women were only -- or even primarily -- interested in books by women, the logic of the marketplace would dictate that publishers should release more titles by female authors." But it doesn't, because women are willing to read books by men; whereas the reverse...not so much.

That's certainly true in my case. My own Borrowed Fire series provides a most egregious example--which does bug me, but thus far not enough (and this is most telling) to make much of an effort to be more inclusive. These days, apart from BF, I'm reading popular science books rather than fiction, and I am pleased to report that the one I'm currently reading, Einstein's Telescope, is by a woman, Evalyn Gates. But I'm trying to remember a contemporary novel by a woman that I've really enjoyed recently, and keep coming up with Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances--which I read two years ago.

Since then I have read at least one other contemporary novel by a woman, a major award winner, which I won't name because, well, I didn't really like it that much. I mean, it was fine. It did what it set out to do, which was explore the complex intergenerational dynamics of a family. The characters and situations felt precise and real, impressively so. But. That subject matter in and of itself just doesn't interest me. I'm sure that's partly because my own life doesn't really mesh with that pattern; at any rate, what's currently called "women's fiction" or "book-club fiction" for the most part doesn't grab me. I want a stranger reading experience--odder structures, more far-out themes. Even *if* a family story remains at the center. (See The Brothers Karamazov.)

I remember reading a review of Atmospheric Disturbances that commented on--or marveled--at the fact that women don't often write novels like this, with unreliable narrators and scientific, even science-fictional premises. Actually, I think the reviewer was making the point that women may very well write books like this, but they don't often get published. Women writers are largely funneled into the category of "women's fiction," i.e. domestic, realistic fiction, whereas I suspect men are not at all constrained in this manner. Which means women who have other tastes will end up reading male authors to satisfy them.

On Vida, Percival Everett points out (as others have before him) that had a woman written Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, it would have been received and packaged very differently. I can definitely picture that. Instead of "the Great American Novel," "a sweeping saga of American life," or whatever, it might have been called "a heartbreaking tale of a mother struggling with her wayward child, unsatisfying marriage, and a brutal secret from her past." And I probably would not have wanted to read it. Mind you, I myself have not yet read Freedom, although I dearly loved The Corrections--I think mainly for its intricacy and its complex voice, though I can't be certain that if it had been packaged as "women's fiction" I wouldn't have liked it less. (I also liked the DeLillo-esque drug that was all things to all people. A little sci-fi touch always helps for me.)

So what can be done? Are female readers (and writers) like me just oddballs, outliers of the literary marketplace? As long as that market keeps generating money for those who already have it, change will be more a matter of principle than of economic pressure.

But I, for one, will make more of an effort to seek out non-"women's fiction" by women.

The everlasting lightning storm in Venezuela

This is amazing. And a perfect setting for a (magical-realist) novel.

Is Sphere the worst movie of the last twenty years?

The movie we watched last night, Sphere, was so bad, it got me to thinking: has anyone made a movie about people making a big-budget science-fiction thriller, and discovering about 2/3 of the way through that the movie was an unsalvageable disaster? Because that would be an interesting movie. Sphere was interesting in this way: its ineptness kept rising to new, increasingly innovative levels.

I kept wondering exactly how it went off the rails, and at what point everyone realized it. Or did they realize? As Dustin Hoffman does his impression of Rain Man in the Marianas Trench, is he thinking, "I'm going to kill my agent"? Or: "Perhaps I will put my new Oscar in the solarium"? All these big-name actors signed on, and they had a big-name director, although one not best known for science-fiction thrillers (Barry Levinson, who maybe wanted to make Diner in the Marianas Trench). It's based on a Michael Crichton novel, which should have meant competently delivered, if sexist, thrills. (They at least got the sexist part down, with Sharon Stone as a scientist unable to perform professionally due to obsessive rage at being jilted by Dustin the Psychologist--who tries to explain her problems to her while their underwater "habitat" is exploding.)

So what happened? Was it a series of little cracks getting magnified successively throughout the production? Did somebody really important storm out midway, a la Dracula? Was the original story OK on paper, but actually, surprisingly, unsuited to film?

Coincidentally, io9 posted a piece today called "Ten Black Sci-fi Characters Who Aren't Turned into Cannon Fodder." It does not mention Sphere--but the film makes a significant contribution in this area. Samuel L. Jackson's mathematician lasts all the way to the end, the third wheel for the reconciled Sharon and Dustin. Mind you, as a reviewer on Netflix pointed out, according to the book, his character technically has to be asleep for most of the movie. The filmmakers gave him a trifle more to do, which suggests they realized a perpetually sleeping black character was a problem in itself. Unfortunately, keeping him awake undermines the whole premise of the movie. As for offing a black character in the first act, though, Sphere comes through by having Queen Latifah stung to death by jellyfish. Which come from Dustin Hoffman's mind. I am not kidding.

The Turn of the Screw: How to transform cliches into awesome new images

This week, Henry James teaches us a way to transform a totally hackneyed trope into something new and amazing. Ready? The secret is: be Henry James.

Sorry, that was discouraging. In fact, I think writing can be taught, even to those of us who aren't scions of brilliant, eccentric clans. Which is to say, I think in many cases, teaching means giving permission. Like everybody else, writers get stuck in ruts. Getting out of them is often simply a matter of showing us that something we thought couldn't be done, can be. Wait, it's OK to do that? Who knew?

In The Turn of the Screw, James gives us permission to depict that hoariest of literary tropes, silence, not as an absence, but a presence. Mind you, this could have turned out badly. He might have used a hack phrase like "palpable silence" to attempt to create that sense of presence. But he doesn't. Rather, you can almost imagine that he started with that phrase, and then decided to really examine what that feels like. As a result, when the apparition of Peter Quint manifests itself to the governess for a third time, we get this:

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.

What's striking in the part I've bolded how the narrator herself is struck. She doesn't just say something like "the silence was heavy and thick," and go on to describe the way the figure turned. Instead, she tells us how she watched the silence become an "element" into which it's possible for a figure to disappear. She is still amazed by how she saw the figure turn into the silence. She doesn't--importantly, I think--compare the silence explicitly to something else, such as a fog or a curtain. She describes as best she can the astonishing visibility of the silence, but at the same time she can't be too precise, because this is such a singular experience. This isn't exactly like stepping into a fog: it's a unique sight, because silence is a unique "element"--made visible here for the first time.

So what can fiction writers learn from this? One, when you find yourself about to employ a cliche, ask yourself what about that cliche appeals to you. Rather than simply steering clear of it, you can really inhabit that cliche (palpable silence, burning rage, heavy sorrow, whatever) and imagine how it really feels. Two, and even better, translate it out of its usual sensory medium. Silence is an auditory experience usually, and perhaps tactile as well. James has made it something we can see. So maybe "heavy sorrow" could be something you could hear, or smell, or taste, rather than feel.

Over my head in Cantor dust

This is the sort of thing I've been trying to get my head around for my new novel. Below is information from Wikipedia on the Cantor set, which is also, rather more poetically, called the "Cantor Dust." (It may only be "dust" when it's in 3D.)

The Cantor ternary set is created by repeatedly deleting the open middle thirds of a set of line segments. One starts by deleting the open middle third (¹⁄₃, ²⁄₃) from the interval [0, 1], leaving two line segments: [0, ¹⁄₃] ∪ [²⁄₃, 1]. Next, the open middle third of each of these remaining segments is deleted, leaving four line segments: [0, ¹⁄₉] ∪ [²⁄₉, ¹⁄₃] ∪ [²⁄₃, ⁷⁄₉] ∪ [⁸⁄₉, 1]. This process is continued ad infinitum, where the nth set is

The Cantor ternary set contains all points in the interval [0, 1] that are not deleted at any step in this infinite process.

The first six steps of this process are illustrated below.

An explicit formula for the Cantor set is

The proof of the formula above is done by the idea of self-similarity transformations and can be found in detail.^[7][8]

Yeah, no, I can't read these equations at all. But the basic idea is that the set, as James Gleick explains in Chaos, "the points that remain are infinitely many, but their total length is infinitely small." That concept is the basis for fractal geometry; it's the infinitely large AND infinitely small concept that I am really interested in. Just look at the picture! It's amazing! The universe we live in!

But this is all just to say, I am in way over my head here. At some point I am going to need a real mathematician and/or physicist to read this thing. Also I'll need a psychiatrist, although you probably guessed that already. If you know anyone who'd like to help (probably a few months down the road), please email.

Lessons learned, maybe a third of the way through novel number two

So far all I've heard is still proving true: writing your second novel is much easier than the first. And it has everything to do with increased tolerance for uncertainty.

In a lot of ways, this second novel should be harder than the first one. I set out to do Dostoevsky in Cleveland. You know, a family caught up in a murder mystery and yelling at each other and God. But somehow, midway through, I've ended up having to research the Japanese-American internments during WWII, the Manhattan Project, and mid-century treatments for schizophrenia. Which means, of late, my goal of writing 1,000 words a day is right out the window. I've been stuck at around 45,000 words for at least the past month, though I can say I've been working pretty steadily.

In the past, this stark realization of my own ignorance, combined with the labor involved in correcting it, would have meant seriously questioning the whole enterprise, and at least one start-over from the beginning (in an attempt to steer the vessel *around* rather than *through* the Slough of Ignorance). This time I'm a lot more patient and less afraid--because I've learned these problems can be overcome. They are all part of the process. I'm OK with (well, not completely OK with, but tolerant of) writing a thousand words one day and deleting all of them the next, as further research proves them wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is not to say I'm writing a historical novel, or that I intend the novel to be fully historically accurate. The facts are still going to be distorted; I see no way around that. But the historical backdrop has to be plausible. It has to be acceptable, even as its true purpose is to serve the fictional story.

Also: I've learned you do not have to make up characters out of whole cloth. You can seriously base them on real people, either historical figures, or people you know. That takes a lot of the work out of the whole thing. So, watch out, historical figures and people I know! Although actually, as with history, these people will end up distorted. Hopefully beyond recognition.

Anyway, this post is supposed to give all beginning novelists hope. As those who've gone before have said, write the first one. And then write the next one. You'll see.

Posted without comment

An interview with David Kato, the Ugandan gay-rights activist, who was recently beaten to death with a hammer.

The pressure of other languages

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

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

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

Thoughts on teaching well

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

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

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

GROSS: How does it cure the problem?

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

GROSS: Yeah, I figured it would be difficult.

(Soundbite of laughter)

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

GROSS: Okay.

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

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

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

Brian Greene on Fresh Air

On Monday Terry Gross did a great interview with Brian Greene about parallel universes (the subject of his new book). You can listen and read an excerpt here. Apparently there's a difference between an infinite universe, and infinitely many universes. Both are possible.

The Turn of the Screw: The face in the window

After a long hiatus, I'm back to channeling Henry James as our latest fiction-writing guru. Specifically I'm working my way through The Turn of the Screw and finding all manner of techniques we can borrow. I have a special interest in methods for making one's fiction more disturbing, and Turn is a real clinic. Man, it's good. It's been ages since I read it, and I didn't remember how good it is.

Now then. The "shadowy apparition" is as old as the hills in storytelling. It's the thing almost seen, but not quite; the ghost; the literal or figurative haunting by memory. In thrillers it's the killer, stalking his prey in a darkened corridor. It's death itself, which we know is out there waiting for us, and but which we will never truly know (because once we do, you know, it's too late). It's Moby-Dick. In other words, in the words of our former Secretary of Defense, it's the known unknown. And you could make a case that it's the generative force behind pretty much all art: grasping at that thing we know we can never can grasp, as a means to try to overcome it.

But before I go any further, let me share with you my very favorite "shadowy apparition" tale of all time, from my very favorite show of all time. Those of you who've read my novel (hello, you five!) will see this as a direct antecedent for my work.



But suppose you don't have a video camera, a raccoon mask, or a brother willing to make an ass of himself on television? Suppose you just want to render a face in the window in prose? Well, you could do worse than study James.

The narrator first sees the apparition when she's strolling the grounds of the mansion at dusk:

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than that—I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me—by which I mean the face was—when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelated structures—that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me was—a few more seconds assured me—as little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley Street—I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in—what I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and that he was not. We were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense.

There are a couple of techniques that make this passage extremely spooky. First, I think, is the fact that the apparition seems to arise from the governess's own imagination. Evidently a fan of romance novels, she is secretly wishing to encounter a charming stranger on the path. And then he does appear--although we know that in this story, "charm" is a double-edged quality. Through this sudden transformation of fantasy to reality, James ties the apparition strongly to the governess herself. She has an immediate stake in--and a kind of responsibility for--his identity. He's not just a guy who shows up, surprising as that would be; he's connected with the governess's own imagination somehow, but also separate from it.

Second there's the explicit connection of the presence with death, along with the governess's sudden sense of extreme solitude, which is probably the most frightening thing about death.

And third, there's the governess's attention to the passage of time:

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better, that I could see, in there having been in the house—and for how long, above all?—a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this visitant, at all events—and there was a touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat—seemed to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that was all I knew.

The governess seems to realize that accurately depicting how long this episode lasted is somehow key to making it believable--to making it real. She has no conventional way of measuring the time, and that would make the episode too pedestrian, anyway; it has to take place both inside and outside of conventional time. So--and I think this is quite amazing--she uses thoughts as a measure of time. The "visitant" (such a great word) was there for as long as it took me to think x, y, and z--and for as long as it seemed to take him to wonder about me. Once he starts moving we get an additional measure of time, which is very specific. From her careful description of the architecture, we have a very strong sense of exactly how far he's moving, and how fast--by the way he places his hand on each of the crenelations. That lets us almost calculate (t = d/s) how long the governess saw him.

Furthermore, because the sense of time is so psychologically precise here, I have the distinct impression that the time of the visitation is exactly equal to how long it takes to read these passages about it. Which connects the apparition very strongly to our own imaginations, not just the governess's.

So the lesson from James for this week is: make time palpable, especially when you are portraying something from outside the normal rhythms of life. On those occasions the reader should feel those rhythms--and the disruption of them--all the more.

Anyway, the man will later literally reappear in a window, which is what gave me the final permission I needed to post the Strange Universe video. But I will stop here for now.

Notes on illness, regression, and poetry

I am really, really, really done with the sore throat and cough thing. But it is not done with me. So here I lie, laptop on lap, my mental capacity so diminished that all that comes to mind is memories of being sick as a kid and watching television. Yet I feel strangely compelled to share those memories with you.

Ha! You thought you were getting some deep, Freud-inflected think-piece! Not when I'm this addled, hon.

So. As a little kid I was sick fairly often. I did not like school, and thus developed a repertoire of vague complaints which I was able to burnish into viable excuses for staying home whenever I needed to. (The low-grade fever was a particular specialty; I somehow managed it without holding the thermometer under the light.) My illness established, the black-and-white television was then ceremoniously hauled into my room, and I settled into a full day of viewing (highlighted by Kraft Mac and Cheese at lunchtime--which I ordered extra-runny). I got pretty familiar with reruns of Andy Griffith and I Love Lucy, although to this day I find the latter borderline unwatchable.* I can't stand shows in which the entire experience involves watching someone become more and more humiliated. Plus all the screeching. But I did not turn the show off, because Gilligan's Island, or maybe it was the Banana Splits, was on next, and you could not turn off the TV for fear that it might never come back on.

Then as now, there were talk shows. I was a big fan of Mike Douglas, because he had Sly Stone on a lot. And David Brenner. But it was not Mike who spurred me into the flight of poetic expression that really put me on the fourth-grade literary map.** That was Phil Donahue. It was one of those great class assignments the adult author always remembers as a turning point. It went like this: Write a bunch of poems. So I wrote a bunch, and then (because we had to do a total of five, or ten, or whatever) I tossed in this couplet, titled Donahue:

Donahue

Every time I have the flu
Dry toast, ginger ale, and you.

As always happens in artistic endeavors, the teacher was completely unimpressed with the poems I had actually worked on. But he went nuts for this one. He wrote "Wonderful!!" in huge letters next to it, and I believe he put it on the board.

What is the point of this little tale? Is it that effort is worthless in art, and that true art can only occur serendipitously? That my teacher was a cynic of some sort, who was having his own private joke on all of us*** kids, after which he repaired to his Gremlin to smoke and drink from a flask? That rhymed poetry is amazingly memorable? Is it time for another Ricola?


*Actually the former is now totally unwatchable.

**May have been fifth grade, or sixth. Actually, as I think about this even more, I may have written the poem in college. But the point is, I was--and am--recalling a formative childhood experience. I'm sick, OK? I don't remember.

***Possibly college-age

Macho minimalism

From Adam Haslett's review of Stanley Fish's new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One:

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for "vigour" and "toughness" in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the Cold War. [....]

The terse, declarative sentence in all its masculine hardness routed the passive involutions of a higher, denser style. (James, from "The Altar of the Dead": "He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure"; Hemingway, from "A Way You'll Never Be": "These were the new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets.") As a result, pared-down prose of the sort editor Gordon Lish would later encourage in Raymond Carver became our default "realism." This is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to "omit needless words" (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem. [Bold type mine.]

Speak it, brother. The imperative to cut, or pare (a more precise evocation, somehow), too often means shaving away the great weirdnesses of thought and emotion that make literary fiction what it is. Cutting as an aesthetic practice can mean hacking through the jungle rather than exploring, or even getting lost--which takes just as much fortitude, if not more. (Ask Werner Herzog, not a minimalist.)

Style and content are not separate. Style and content and process and structure are all of a piece. Some stories will bring about their own cutting, in due time; but others won't even come into being if we cling to minimalism as a principle. It feeds the dreaded editor-in-your-head, who won't let you say what you want to say in the first place, and is no doubt a product of Cold War-era psychology anyway.

Don Kirshner: Rock Power!

Don Kirshner passed away a few days ago. Funny thing: I was just thinking about him. I'd decided awhile back to give a shout-out to David Essex's "Rock On" in my novel, which led me to attempt to introduce the song to Trev, who had somehow never heard of it. (We all have our cultural gaps.) And that made me think of this incredibly amazing album I had, when I was very, very young.

Don Kirshner Presents Rock Power.

Go look at the album cover. Look at that electric guitar flying through the air! From The Power of Rock! And then read the list of artists represented thereon. I mean, nowadays the kids can mix up any jarring batch of songs they like on those little iPod thingies. But this guy, this Don Kirshner, a professional music producer, deliberately put the following all on the same record: Seals and Crofts, Alice Cooper, Dr. John, Black Sabbath, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Procol Harum, Aretha Franklin, BTO, Steppenwolf, the aforementioned David Essex... And somehow it all worked. I played this record constantly. When I was very, very, very young.

So thank you for that, Don.

Oscar and Lucinda and me

A few years ago I had a chapter from my novel critiqued in a writing workshop. At the time, I was trying to do something that I now realize is impossible for me, which is writing from multiple points of view at the same time. Edward P. Jones does it beautifully in The Known World, and yet I am not Edward P. Jones, and perhaps a book about shopping and Bigfoot doesn't call for that kind of magisterial omniscience.

Anyway, one of the workshop participants suggested I read Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, because it seemed to her like an example of what I was trying (and failing) to do. Approximately three years later, I have finally taken that suggestion. And yes, Carey does shift point of view, or "head hop," within a single section of the narrative, which would otherwise be a simple close third. It occurs relatively rarely, and it's not confusing when it happens. You just have the sense of a camera suddenly swinging around and then back again.

But as I was reading all I could think was: "He broke the rule, and he's only getting away with it because he's Peter Carey." Probably if I didn't know the rule in the first place, I wouldn't even have noticed these shifts. They're obviously deliberate, and I think they mainly exist to remind us of the presence of the narrator--which gives the novel a somewhat nineteenth-century feel. Back in the day, a sort of chatty "I" who stuck his head in every so often was expected, and nothing to kick up a po-mo fuss about. In this case the "I" gives himself a bit more dimension, since he tells us that Oscar was his great-grandfather; and yet that fact has almost no bearing, as far as I can tell, on the shape or outcome of the story. It's just an interesting sidelight, in the end. Should there have been more of a motivation for the p.o.v. shifts? As a workshop participant, I would probably have said "yes." But why would I have said that? Maybe just to have something to say?

Reading the book was an interesting experience for another reason. I quite liked the early parts of the story, especially because it concerns religious fanaticism, which is just about my favorite subject in the world. But after a certain point I started getting a little bored. There was too much quotidian detail for my taste, especially about gambling and glass manufacturing. Maybe too much talking in general. And there seemed to be an inordinate number of new sections introducing new characters with a brief summary of their life histories followed by a brief scene with said new character. What was this all adding up to? I wasn't sure. I almost set the book aside, but said to myself: "This is Peter Carey. And this book won a big prize and was made into a movie with Ralph Fiennes. So keep reading."

Sure enough, the last pages were stunning, drawing all the many seemingly loose threads together--not in a neat little knot, mind you, but one of those interesting, flawed tapestry-thingies that allows real art to shine through the roughness. But I still wonder--would I have stuck with it had I not heard of the author, and known that the book had won the Booker Prize? I tend to think not.

In short: established authors get away with stuff that new authors can't. Life's not fair, but the sun is out, and my mom's on the mend, and I have a new slow-cooker that I can't wait to try. Things could be worse.



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A shout-out to Nature's Bin in Lakewood, Ohio

Still in Ohio, still waiting for mom's test results. It is snowing, and I can't concentrate for more than five minutes at a time. Which means most topics of a literary nature are out the window for the time being.

I do still think about food a lot, and wanted to mention this little gem of a natural-foods store in Lakewood Ohio called Nature's Bin. It has been in business for 35 years, though I only started going there a couple of years ago while visiting my mom. If you live, or ever find yourself, in the western suburbs of Cleveland, and are asking yourself, Where, for the love of God, can I buy seitan? Where are my quinoa shells, my organic brussels sprouts, my fair-trade coffee, and my carbon-neutral wine? Why, they are all here, my elitist and fussy friend. Minus the Whole-Foods moral quandaries, and plus a very cool longstanding program of hiring the mentally and physically disabled.

One way to salvage a wrecked novel

Well, if you're Michael Chabon, you can do this. But it seems like a cool idea.

Bona Fide Books Call for Submissions: Microstories about Lake Tahoe

Submit your short-shorts about Lake Tahoe to Bona Fide Books here.

The year thus far

In Cleveland...helping mom recover from surgery...waiting for pathology report...torpor.

In Cleveland in winter, the sun does not always equal warmth, but it is still welcome. In fact it is craved.

Apparently some kind of rare bird appeared in a flock on Lake Erie this morning. I saw a bunch of birders out at the park with scopes. I think I saw the birds, too--like gulls, only smaller and whiter. By the time I decided to go down and ask the birders what they were, they--the birders--were gone. Note: They were not arctic terns. I checked on the Internet. They were something else.

In Cleveland it is possible to find organic shitake mushrooms for $8/pound.

Skype is awesome. My friends are awesome. My husband is awesome. I miss my cats, who are awesome.

That is my year thus far.