Quote of the day

Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.--Elena Ferrante

Quote of the day

Considering these things, I can’t help but tell my fellow writers to write fearlessly. Our stories were never meant to speak to everyone. There are those who will read and who will embrace what we write and there are those who will read and hate us for what we write.

But write what you have to write. Write being true to what’s in your heart. Play on the page. Dance on the page. Imagine possible futures on the page. Your stories are important, not just to you. They are important to me. They are important to the generation that is yet to come. --Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Movements: A Poetics of Struggle (Part 2)

Another WisCon report to check out

This year at WisCon, I had the pleasure of seeing Aqueductista Kiini Ibura Salaam graced by the Tiptree tiara. Kath took numerous photos of Kiini wearing the tiara, but my camera made a really poor showing this year, and not one of the photos Kath took of her were even remotely clear enough to post. (Which is why I'm posting the photo of her we've been using on her author's page on Aqueduct's site.)

As you probably already know, many of us present on Sunday night at the official presentation of the Tiptree Award were moved by Kiini speech. Kiini did not read from a prepared speech, but after WisCon she took the kernel of her speech and expanded it into a short essay that has been posted on SF Signal here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/guest-post-james-tiptree-jr-award-winning-author-kiini-ibura-salaam-on-doing-what-we-can/. Surely most women who are writers have at one time or another found themselves beaten down by the doubt that almost always accompanies discouragement. It is a commonplace that the world (often in the form of friends and relatives) assume that writing that hasn't won significant recognition simply drains time from all those things women are supposed to be doing with their time (chiefly nurturing and caring for others). I know I had some pretty grim moments, particularly in the late 1980s, myself, even in comparison with the skepticism I naturally encountered when I decided not to finish my doctorate in history so that I could write novels I had no reason to believe anyone would ever care about. I still sometimes wonder how I managed to keep writing when it seemed the entire world was telling me that I was wrong to think doing so would ever matter to anyone besides myself. So many of us have been there (or are, at this moment, suffering that negative pressure.) Kiini's words both acknowledge and challenge the crushing power of such doubt. 

Kiini has also written a con report-- on her second WisCon, this one attended with her daughter, and as the co-winner of this year's Tiptree Award. I of course adore her observations on hugging at WisCon and have to admit I experienced a moment of frisson at her description of her reading (which I myself attended): "As part of the Kindred Reading Series with my fab New York peeps–Alaya Dawn Johnson, K Tempest Bradford, Jennifer Brissett, and Daniel José Older–and I read the first half of “Bio-Anger,” a science fiction horror story from my collection. I actually traumatized myself while reading it and found myself getting shaky-voiced and emotional as the story progressed."Anyway, you can read her entire con report here: http://kiiniibura.com/2013/05/29/vol-91-wiscon-37/.

Storyteller and listener: an ongoing dynamic interaction between two brains

One of the points I strive to make when I'm teaching writing is that though the words on the page flow from the story in the writer's head, the words on the page aren't the story, but the means through which readers can imagine and re-create the story in their heads. Writers notice when the stories they've created differ from those re-created by readers more than they do the congruences-- presumably because we take the latter for granted and tend to assume that if we and our readers are both doing what we should, there ought not to be many differences between the created and re-created stories. Maybe that assumption is just hopeless wishful thinking. After all, the reasons for those discrepancies are many and many, not necessarily the fault of either side.

Given my longtime preoccupation with this relationship, I'm fascinated to find that neuroscientists are comparing, via fMRI, what happens in the brains of people telling a story with those hearing it. One  attempt at such a comparison is the paper Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (July 26, 2010) available (free) online, by Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson.(One of the lovely features of this online publication is that rolling the cursor over hyperlinks will bring up figures and references without the user having to click away from the page to see them.)

I especially like that the authors characterize communication as an "ongoing dynamic interaction between two brains." Would it astonish you to learn that the authors report that the brains of those hearing a story mirror-- usually with a one-to-three-second delay-- what happens in the brains of the person telling the story? (Though of course once I start thinking about it, I have to wonder to what extent the brains of persons engaged in antagonistic communication might mirror one another.) The authors suggest that this "neural coupling resembles the action/perception coupling observed within mirror neurons." Particularly interesting for writers is that those listening to stories do a certain amount of anticipating-- and that the more their brains anticipate, the greater their comprehension of the story communicated:

Our analysis also identifies a subset of brain regions in which the activity in the listener's brain precedes the activity in the speaker's brain. The listener's anticipatory responses were localized to areas known to be involved in predictions and value representation (20–23), including the striatum and medial and dorsolateral prefrontal regions (mPFC, dlPFC). The anticipatory responses may provide the listeners with more time to process an input and can compensate for problems with noisy or ambiguous input (24). This hypothesis is supported by the finding that comprehension is facilitated by highly predictable upcoming words (25). Remarkably, the extent of the listener's anticipatory brain responses was highly correlated with the level of understanding (Fig. 4B), indicating that successful communication requires the active engagement of the listener (26, 27).

I've long believed that the stories that are least likely to be grossly misread are those that are in important ways already familiar to readers. Intelligibility is all about familiarity-- which is why it's so difficult for writers to get good readings for new, unfamiliar-to-the-reader stories. A more recent study conducted at Emory--reported here looked at how the brain reacts to metaphors:

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language."

Sathian is also medical director of the Center for Systems Imaging at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Rehabilitation R&D Center of Excellence at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Seven college students who volunteered for the study were asked to listen to sentences containing textural metaphors as well as sentences that were matched for meaning and structure, and to press a button as soon as they understood each sentence. Blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. On average, response to a sentence containing a metaphor took slightly longer (0.84 vs 0.63 seconds).

In a previous study, the researchers had already mapped out, for each of these individuals, which parts of the students' brains were involved in processing actual textures by touch and sight. This allowed them to establish with confidence the link within the brain between metaphors involving texture and the sensory experience of texture itself.

"Interestingly, visual cortical regions were not activated by textural metaphors, which fits with other evidence for the primacy of touch in texture perception," says research associate Simon Lacey, PhD, the first author of the paper.

"I don't think that there's only one area responsible for metaphor processing," Sathian says. "Actually, several recent lines of research indicate that engagement with abstract concepts is distributed around the brain."

"I think our research highlights the role of neural networks, rather than a single area of the brain, in these processes. What could be happening is that the brain is conducting an internal simulation as a way to understand the metaphor, and that's why the regions associated with touch get involved. This also demonstrates how complex processes involving symbols, such as appreciating a painting or understanding a metaphor, do not depend just on evolutionarily new parts of the brain, but also on adaptations of older parts of the brain."

All of which underscores the importance of using sensory detail in fiction, no? (And probably in nonfiction, as well-- whenever possible.)

The Art of the Ironic Dedication

On reading George Schuyler's dedication to Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940 , I found myself wondering just how rare (or common) ironic dedications are:

This book is dedicated to all Caucasians in the great republic who can trace their ancestry back ten generations and confidently assert that there are no Black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on their family trees.

Can anyone point me to similarly ironic dedications? I'm intrigued, and am wishing I'd discovered this arrow in the writer's quiver long before now.

The flavor of fictional characters

Reading Victoria's review this morning on Eve's Alexandria of an Orange long-list book, The Invisible Bridge, I found her discussion of characterization particularly interesting:

Orringer's characters don't feel like characters.  They feel like people, real people that actually lived, because the things that happen to them have the flavour of biography and not of make-believe.  This might sound like a Good Thing.  Surely it makes them better than 'just' characters?  But I disagree: characters in novels have to have their own reality, from their own world.  Do you see what I mean?  It's clear that Orringer has drawn upon the experiences of her own relatives for the shape and arc of the novel, and especially towards the end of the book there is a distinct flavour of non-fiction about what happens to her players.   It is as though she has been recounting what she has been told about the models for her characters, and not what happens to the characters themselves, in their own right.  I'm always suspicious of this muddying of the waters between fiction and biography when the subjects are intimately connected to the writer; it means they don't feel able to do what authors should do, which is throw away the script.

The intimacy of Orringer's connection to the events she describes also imbues her characters with an aura of...well...holiness, of family sanctity.  It detracts from their roundedness: they are too perfect to be true.   Andras is the Good Man, an honest, earnest figure with principles and family values.  He entertains almost no internal conflicts - any doubt, anger, uncertainty in him is only a reflection of the big events going on in the world around him. His love for Klara is life changing, earth-shattering, pure and never tested.  At the Ecole Speciale Andras' three best friends are also types: Eli Polaner is the gentle, thoughtful homosexual; Rosen is the flaming political radical and activist; Ben Yakov is the handsome, damaged rogue.  Similarly, Andras' parents are cut-out figures - proud, clean-minded, good-hearted; his brothers are perfect contrasts to him: serious, productive Tibor and flighty joker Matyas.  They all move about the plot, and play their parts, and never do anything unpredictable.

Writers learn early that just because a sequence of events have taken place in real life doesn't mean that it will be plausible when inserted into a piece of fiction: au contraire. But I hadn't given much thought to the plausibility of real personalities anent fictional characterization. Fictional conventions have a lot to do with plausibility. Though we all no doubt understand real persons through our own personal sets of conventions, I suspect most of us aren't too conscious of that. All this becomes a bit easier to get hold of when one compares the genre conventions of biography with those of the literary novel, as Victoria does here.

The second paragraph quoted above, about "family sanctity," reminded me of the process involved in my writing "The World and Alice." I gave Alice bits of my own family history, in particular, grandparents similar to my own, and used some of my own memories--something I rarely do in my fiction. Interestingly, I had to keep reminding myself that I was writing fiction and therefore could depart from the truth for the sake my story-- that I wasn't, after all, writing autobiography (and in any case, Alice's personality was not mine), but fiction. But I found that the use of real memories generates a powerful compulsion to tell the story one already knows, rather than messing with it. And so messing with the stories I lifted from my memory felt transgressive-- reminding me, constantly, that writing is active.

Quote of the day

The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly, too. I think of a creature called Odradek, who at first glance appears to be a "flat star-shaped spool for thread" but who is not quite this, Odradek who won't stop rolling down the stairs, trailing string behind him, who has a laugh that sounds as if it has no lungs behind it, a laugh like rustling leaves. You can find the inimitable Odradek in a one-page story of Kafka's called "The Cares of a Family Man." Curious Odradek is more memorable to me than characters I spent three years on, and five hundred pages.    --Zadie Smith, "That Crafty Feeling"

Moments of Xenia

In my morning reading, I came across these passages in Lyn Hejinian's essay "Barbarism" (which can be found in her collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry), in which she explores the extended metaphor of a border for characterizing poetry. Her usage differs in interesting ways from the notion as used by the group of people who call their work "interstitial." And as I thought about it, it seemed to me that this same metaphor could be used to characterize the best science fiction:

Poetry at this time, I believe, has the capacity and perhaps the obligation to enter those specific zones known as borders, since borders are by definition addressed to foreignness, and in a complex sense, best captured in another Greek word, xenos. It, too, means “stranger” or “foreigner,” but in a sense that complicates the notion as we find it in barbaros. The xenos figure is one of contradiction and confluence. The stranger it names is both guest and host, two English terms that are both derived from the single Greek term and are thus etymologically bound in affinity. The guest/host relationship is one of identity as much as it is of reciprocity. Just as a visitor may be foreign to a local, so the local with be foreign to the visitor; the guest coexists as a host, the host as a guest.

The guest/host relationship comes into existence solely in and as an occurrence, that of their meeting, their encounter. The host is no host until she has met her guest, the guest is no guest until she meets her host. Every encounter produces, even if for only the flash of an instant, a xenia—the occurrence of coexistence which is also an occurrence of strangeness or foreignness. It is a strange occurrence that, nonetheless, happens constantly; we have no other experience of living than through encounters. We have no other use for language than to have them.

In using the metaphor of a border, I do not mean to suggest that poetry relegate itself to the margins. The border is not an edge along the fringe of society and experience but rather their very middle—their between; it names the condition of doubt and encounter which being foreign to a situation (which may be life itself) provokes—a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone, with checkpoints and bureaus of exchange, a meeting place and a realm of confusion.

Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background.

***

One can say that no experience is possible that is not also an experience of the border; it is the milieu of experience. It provides us simultaneously with awareness of limit and of limitlessness. As George Oppen said of poetry, “it is an instance of ‘being in the world’” at “the limits of judgment, the limits of […] reason.”

Surprises, Connections

Today has been a bit different. For one thing, it began with an actual sunrise, in the form of a layer of brightness stretched across the horizon, backlighting Mt. Rainier (which is South-southeast of here) and revealing the line of the Cascades that from here looks as though it curves along the mainland coast (which it doesn't!), a view I hadn't seen since my arrival. But today was different, also, because it wasn't quiet. A cleaning crew spent the day on the apartment below me, and that ended up being amazingly distracting. (Perhaps because I'd come to expect absolute quiet?) And then there was the weather. The clouds overhead began as a thin layer of low stratus, but as the morning wore on, grew thicker and thicker. Rainier all but vanished by noon. And so I decided to take my walk before rather than after lunch. For most of the day I could see the sun's location (though not the sun itself)-- never very high in the sky. In Washington state in late November and December, the sun lurks in the low southern sky, never rising much above 2 o'clock. It rises in the south-southeast and then sets in the south-southwest.

Because I walked early, the tide had only just started to go out; instead of jellyfish, I encountered bright blue bench cushions tossed onto the rocks at different places on the beach. The air felt a lot warmer, even though the wind was as wild as it had been on Monday. I had two moments of surprise. As I approached Point Wilson, a flock of small white birds, that I think must be sanderlings, fluttered up from the rocks (surprising because I at first took the birds for wind-tossed specks of foam), wheeled into formation, and flew out over the water. The second moment came when I got as close to the point as I could with the tide so high-- abut a hundred feet short of the tip; sitting on a boulder, looking at the water, I got weirdly and sickeningly dizzy and disoriented. After about half a minute, I realized why: facing the water, to my right, the waves were rolling straight up the beach, while to my left they were coming in aslant, and directly before me they were coming in... sideways. Waves moving sideways? I can see why my brain didn't at first know what it was looking at. Once I'd figured it out, I regained my equilibrium. I tramped over the rocks, past the lighthouse then, to the west side of the point. The wind was hardly blowing on that side, which made the water placid, and yet the heaviness of the clouds to the north and the west made the water and sky darker. Seagulls and ducks (which were entirely absent from the water on the other side) bobbed on the surface. It was like another world. The walk back, though into the wind, was easier because the waterline had receded a decent amount.

By 3:30, when I looked up from the ms, it was raining and the mountains gone. So I'm feeling pleased with myself for going out early.

Yesterday I wrote

On the one hand, I need to experience that intimacy and near-identity with my characters (while enjoying the luxury of knowing deep down that I'm not actually them).

But it occurred to me this morning that that probably sounds simpler than I intended it to. And so I want to elaborate a bit. "Near-identity" is shorthand. See, I've long thought it necessary for me, while writing novels, to perform a sort of Stanislavski method for inhabiting viewpoint characters, so that I have a deep sense, somehow, in my very body, what it's like to be that person at any given moment they inhabit, what I would see through their eyes, what I would hear, feel, and of course most obviously think were I them. But at the same time, subjective identity is always a fragmented process-- no one is always "I" at every instant. (And certainly not the same "I" from moment to moment.) Memory provides the bridges needed to link all the different moments and iterations of "I"-- especially body memory. And although paying too much attention to the splits and divisions breaking up identity always bears the threat of ruining the kind of characterization needed to make most fiction-reading experiences work, still, I take those splits and divisions as a necessary aspect of that "near-identity"-- and the reason, perhaps, that it's possible even to iamgine one's achieved near-identity with the character. The memories (physical and mental) I endow the character with are in a sense precisely my way into near-identity with them. And of course I assume that at some subliminal level that is probably the reader's way into them, too (even if they have to furnish some of those memories themselves). (As I recall, Samuel R. Delany talks a little about the writer's need to draw on readers' own memories in one of his essays on writing.)

Still haven't seen a seal pup (or even an adult seal). But deer roam the park, and marmots rustle through the patches of thorny canes, now stripped of berries and leaves, and every morning I hear a variety of birdsong, including some that I never hear in the city.

Is the natural world a gateway to an imaginative space just as fantastic as a wardrobe door in certain fantasies? It sounds a bit too romantic for me to believe, don't you think? But for now at least, I'm thinking that it is.

Walks That Are Magical

At the moment I'm away from Seattle, away from Aqueduct-- and will be for the next three weeks-- working on a novel in progress, thanks to an artist's residency at Centrum, in Port Townsend, WA. My digs are comfortable and quiet, except for the wind, when it's up. Perhaps best of all, I have access to some fabulous walks and a view of the sea from my windows. Though there's internet access, it's delightfully inconvenient, meaning that I won't be cluttering up my thoughts with email or web browsing except when I've scheduled myself to do it.

Previously, I worked on this novel the summer before last, for the Clarion Writeathon, and during my retreat at the Whiteley Center exactly two years ago. Both times I bent all my efforts to getting the story on the page, with the aim of finishing a draft I could work with while doing Aqueduct's work, too. That strategy seemed to make sense, given the ordinary constraints on my time. And yet, when I stopped last time, certain I was only about 30,000 words from finishing, I couldn't see how to bring it off, despite being so close. In short, though I didn't admit it to myself until earlier this year, I was stuck. More recently, I figured out a few basic things about where I needed to go with the last 30,000 words. But I still felt uneasy. And so dedicating a three-week writing retreat to this novel constituted an act of faith. That's the thing about all writing, of course: you have to just say the hell with it, I can do this (even if you're not sure you can), and pretend very hard that you believe it.

I arrived here on Sunday afternoon and spent the rest of the day settling in: unpacking, setting up my computer and arranging my workspace, making an enormous pot of bean and cabbage soup (hearty fare that will spare me from having to cook for several days), figuring out how to regulate the temperature in my apartment. Since I was pretty whacked from an insomniac night, it was probably a good thing that I'd decided not to even look at my ms until Monday morning. I had, though, been sinking into the characters and story for most of last week (which was partly what kept me awake Saturday night). So when I woke yesterday (Monday), I was primed to go.

It has always been important for me, when doing a writing retreat, to take time out in the afternoon for a good long walk. Yesterday the wind was so high that from my windows the whitecaps looked like lines of mini-surf dotting the water; moreover, rain intermittently spattered my windows. But no matter: nothing was going to keep me from walking on the beach. I chose as the destination for my first walk Point Wilson, on which squats a small lighthouse. (A modern radar tower lurks nearby.) The walk was exhilarating-- the wind so wild, the gusts so powerful that on the return walk I often had to turn and walk backwards just to breathe. (We're very near the Strait of Juan de Fuca, here.)

When I descended onto the beach, I was charmed by the sign telling people not to disturb any seal pups lying on the beach: "It's the law," the sign warned. (Alas, I encountered no seal pups. But maybe another day...) Up close, the sea looked green, though it was gray from my windows and the waves were coming in fast and hard, maybe 2-3 feet high. As I walked, a sense of freedom swept over me, and it occurred to me that for the next three weeks I'd have no one to answer to but myself. At any given moment, no one will care or even necessarily know where I am. (On that beach? Sitting at my computer? Lying back in a comfortable chair with my feet up on an enormous ottoman, line-editing pages of ms?) And in fact, I could even decide not to chekck my email at all (whether I post to the blog or not). Wow.

After that first realization came, quickly, the second: that the only thing I need to answer to is the work itself. The last time I experienced that feeling was back in 1996, on Galeano Island, during my first-ever writing retreat.
Marching along the beach, the wind whipping my hair, needle-pricks of rain flicking my face, the thought made me giddy. And led to another thought: that until now, the way in which I'd worked on the novel had somehow cramped my imaginative access to it. I think it was the wildness of the wind and sea plus my sense of freedom that suddenly opened a certain space that had (for this particular novel) been closed to me. Why had that been? Maybe not just because of the sense of rushing to get the story into words, but also something to do with seeing too the story and my story's world much through the filter of my viewpoint character, as though I couldn't quite avoid getting caught up in her so-cramped, so-evasive, so-timid consciousness, in a way that usually doesn't happen to me as I inhabit my characters' consciousness. I've long known that on the one hand, I need to experience that intimacy and near-identity with my characters (while enjoying the luxury of knowing deep down that I'm not actually them) while on the other hand, close identification always carries the risk of obscuring the bigger picture of the novel. Somehow I'd lost track of the other hand...

When I left the beach yesterday, I had the sense that the bigger picture will come, if I patiently court it and listen to my thoughts about it at play in the far reaches of my consciousness. It never does any good to sit down and consciously try to think about such things. Such thinking has to take place below conscious thought, the way so much thinking-- usually the very best thinking I'm capable of-- must do.

Last night the wind dropped. I opened my bedroom window before going to bed (because I need it to be cool to sleep), and through the night as I woke briefly between sleep cycles thought I could actually hear the sea. Today the beach felt like a different place. The water was fairly calm (though not exactly placid). I walked in the opposite direction from yesterday's and encountered big blobs of transparent jelly, bits of crab legs, and a lot of eel grass. I noticed there were more boats out on the water today. At one point I wondered whether wind is a necessary component of exhilaration, for today I felt calm rather than elated. Bearing in mind yesterday's insight, I deliberately didn't concentrate my thoughts on the novel.

And then, on my way home, after leaving the beach and starting up the hill, I stopped to sit on a bench overlooking the beach and make notes of some of the thoughts (about the novel) that were now flickering through my mind. Do you see? The process works like magic.

So now, back to the ms. And I'll hope-- assume-- that the magic will happen again tomorrow.

David Treuer's "Native American Fiction: A User's Manual"

Carrie Devall has sent AatA a review of David Treuer's controversial Native American Fiction: A User's Manual, a book she mentioned in a comment a few weeks back. She also sends a link to Shannon Gibney's fascinating interview with David Treuer for Gibbon's "Thinking Souls" Literary Series, that I think many readers of this blog might find interesting.

Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, by David Treuer, Graywolf Press, 2006.
Review by Carrie Devall, April 2009

I stumbled on David Treuer’s book of essays, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual on a library shelf while rooting around the Minnesota poetry and fiction collections to learn more about local writers. Treuer’s novels are The Translation of Dr. Appelles, Little, and The Hiawatha. He lives on the Leech Lake reservation in northern Minnesota, and also in Minneapolis where he teaches at the University of MN.

I mentioned NAFiction in a comment here before I got to the part where Treuer makes comparisons between Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony and Luke Skywalker’s 1977 movie adventures, as “products of their time and the story that surrounds them.” That should give you some idea of the wide-ranging and anti-beatifying approach he takes to analyzing his genre. While its focus is very different, I think the book could be a useful resource for speculative writers trying to develop their own style and voice who have to contend with all the issues surrounding being a writer from a particular community, like endlessly being pigeonholed as “the ____ writer,” or as “not ___ enough,” etc., as well as for speculative writers working on projects of ‘writing the Other,’ beyond the beginner’s issues.

In this book (and in more depth in online interviews about the book), Treuer discusses the responsibility of writers from his P.O.V. as a fiction writer (and avid reader). He starts with the idea that all writers appropriate, but balances that with discussions of the writer’s awareness of how and what they appropriate, and how a reader will interpret the text. He also discusses his own conception of his responsibility as a writer to the community made up of individuals whose culture and language are being used to create a fiction, or a novel (a particular form of fiction that works in certain ways and does a certain kind of work). He develops ideas about what constitutes “good faith” on the part of a writer in “appropriating culture,” as opposed to what kinds of representations effect violations of self and the other.

Treuer lays out an analysis of ‘culture’ as something real people enact in their real lives, in contrast to a novel, which uses literary techniques to put together words on paper in a specific language (here, English) to depict people and their lives, culture, and forms of community. Fiction writing relies on the use of symbols, metaphor, all the abstractions that lead to ‘representation’ of people as certain kinds of objects, symbols, or ‘ghosts’—the analogy he uses to talk about how images and ideas about Native Americans are constructed by other people. Alongside the ‘ghost’ analogy, he also places the questions about non-Indians writing about American Indians in the context of a history of Indians being “written about as if [they] were silent for decades and decades and decades,” always the subject of ‘expert’ study but never the ‘experts.’ (partly quoting from an online interview)

His analysis is centered around the importance of style, of being aware of the assumptions that readers will likely bring to a text, for the writer to be able to avoid unintended ‘readings’ of the text, but more to be able to use awareness of those assumptions in crafting the text to best achieve the writer’s intended effect. He also takes on the political issues surrounding his favoring analysis of ‘style’ over analysis of the ‘origin’ or ‘authenticity’ of the author, style, and/or content of the text. I read his approach as steeped in an awareness of exactly how he is seeking to intervene in a debate over those issues that has gone on for decades. He is open about his particular agenda as a writer of novels that do not follow all of the conventions that many people have identified as “the way to write Native American fiction,” and as a man who grew up and lives on the Leech Lake reservation, speaks Ojibwe, but is not always perceived as someone who “looks Indian” or lives a stereotypical “Indian life.”

Treuer holds his cards close to the chest in interviews as well as the book, but to me this book read like a performance—the performance of a shrewd and skilled fiction writer and reader with a subtle sense of humor, masquerading for provocative effect as a more bristly and brash critic than his thoughtful and detailed analyses of books and literary theories reflects.

The book could be read for titillation, because he does a lot of nitpicking about the writing of big names in the genre and how specific writers talk about their novels and their body of work, and how they market their persona. However, he nitpicks to make larger points, and mentions that many of these people he knows well or considers friends. He also displays much respect for their craft, with the exception of Sherman Alexie, with whom he seems to have a personal beef aside from the fact that Alexie is one of the icons to whom every other (male) Indian writer has to put up with being compared to. I found that Treuer’s analysis of the performance aspect of Alexie’s public persona is constructed to support Treuer’s own project of performing a different, (ideally more expansive and freeing) idea of who a Native American writer and critic and what “Native American fiction” as a genre could be (as well as simply doing it by writing his own novels).

The book has a fractured focus, which seems to stem from Treuer switching positions, back and forth. The first is his position as a writer, serious about his craft and contribution to literature, caught between personal annoyance at the limits placed on him by the conventions that have grown up around the books labeled as a genre of ‘Native American fiction,’ resistant to being forced into the roles of token, spokesperson, and by nature of writing a fictional text becoming an ‘expert’ on anything and everything Indian that the text touches upon. The second is his position as a critic, reader, and writer who seeks to contribute in a concrete, constructive way toward pushing writers, readers, and critics to rethink those conventions and the limits they place on writers, to ask new and different questions. Negotiating the tensions between these two positions and covering all that theoretical ground is a big project; the essays tend to throw out a bunch of provocative questions and brief samples of how one could go about trying to come up with answers to those questions to address the specific problems he raises, rather than provide detailed, thorough analysis. (This made the book very readable, not overly long or dense.)

The essays I found particularly interesting examined specific novels closely in terms of the literary techniques the author used to create the effects that lead readers and critics to say they “represented” Native life or culture in an “authentic” manner. The essay “Smartberries,” Treuer’s analysis of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife, focuses on her use of languages, Ojibwe, English, and German, and her varying use for literary effect of translation by context, by explaining the meaning of words or phrases, or by lack of explanation. The position he takes as a critic in this essay is as a native speaker of Ojibwe, unlike Erdrich, so the analysis is partly one Native writer’s analysis of how he feels another Native writer succeeds and fails at writing his particular language and culture (and related ones) as ‘the Other.’

In the process, Treuer asks a lot of interesting questions about why Erdrich might have used the particular literary techniques she used, suggesting particular interpretations that may or may not be fair, but the cumulative effect is to point out many places where future critics could do fruitful study and analysis of Erdrich’s work and the work of other writers. He points out, for example, that Love Medicine primarily used Ojibwe nouns, as solitary words, where the language relies heavily on verbs. He questions what effect that has on the novel’s representation of Ojibwe language and culture. He also asks about the responsibility of a writer in crafting representations of a ‘dying’ language that people are working hard to keep alive in their very real lives.

Because I had this sense of the book as a performance of ‘the provocative critic,’ I found some of the negative reviews of the book amusing. The way Treuer structured that essay around an Ojibwe story involving the eating of ‘smartberries’ (rabbit turds) allowed him to succeed in luring critics into the trap of taking him to task for telling them they’re full of rabbit turds for taking issue with his analysis. In a way, this is a silly distraction, but his careful use of style in his critical writing brings home his point that focusing on questions of authenticity of the writer or the novel are a distraction from these other issues that he raises. Form, style, and content are closely linked in the essays, which gave me particular pleasure as a reader. And the traps Treuer lays seemed to me to make the statement “you’re purposely missing my point, stop evading the issues and look again,” not “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

One of the throughlines of the book is an insistence on specificity and thoroughness in literary criticism, on analyzing particular novels by Native American authors in terms of their literary craft and methods instead of the personalities and public personas and/or ‘political’ projects of the authors. He takes issue with the idea that any writer’s novels simply appear out of the ether or out of tribal history and culture as ‘products of culture,’ emphasizing the importance of the writer’s own time, effort, thought, and work to master craft and figure out how to ‘enact culture’ in a written form that has its own culture—literary tradition. He questions the ways writers (particularly Silko) claim they use ‘traditional’ myths and storytelling techniques, and analyzes how these are actually used in their novels. He also analyzes specific literary techniques that James Welch and other writers used to create a heightened sense of historicity about their fictional characters and the characters’ dialogue. These parts of the book might be particularly useful for speculative writers.

Some critics take his arguments, as Treuer says he anticipated critics would, as a call for a return to earlier methods of criticism that insisted that only the text matters and there should be no consideration of the larger context in which texts are produced and read. He specifically acknowledges fears that his project is an attempt to ‘turn back the clock’ and roll back the gains of thirty years of identity politics. (That by saying “style is what matters,” instead of the writer’s identity, means ‘white people can write Indian.’) But Treuer spends a good portion of the book criticizing white readers and critics and the effects of publishing industry marketing practices for the reductionism, colonization of the styles and content of the novels written by Native American writers, all the issues of white people trying to ‘be Indian,’ ‘have Indian spirit,’ and all that stuff that ‘identity politics’ is particularly useful in analyzing and countering. He also uses the example of (a former Klan leader using the pseudonym) Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree to examine how imitating certain literary styles allows ‘imposters’ to write hoax texts that are received as ‘Native American novels’ or biographies until the identity of the writers is unmasked.

I thought he managed to make a solid case for reading Erdrich, Silko, and Welch as amazing literary stylists, period (in fiction/literature as the unmarked state), whose skill as fiction writers should be appreciated and examined thoroughly, and he does this without recoding the writers as ‘not Indian.’ Some critics of this book disagree, because he tries at the same time to take issue with ‘what is Indian’ in a novel, and his lines of analyses get convoluted at times, but I think it’s pretty clear Treuer is not arguing that any of these writers are ‘not Indian.’

He goes to some pains to make it clear he is calling for something different than a return to old (white, Western) styles of criticism. And that his focus is on opening up opportunity and space for Native writers, and on the way in which standard ways of configuring identity politics limit or constrain the development of individual writers and Native American literature as a whole, having a cumulative negative effect on how people feel they are required to write their novels, as well as whether people can get published and how their work is received and marketed.

I ended up wanting to re-read the novels he analyzes in order to study them more closely, both out of curiosity about whether I agree with him and in the hopes of learning more about literary craft and techniques to improve my own writing in a very different genre. In particular, I became curious about his criticism of Leslie Marmon Silko’s use of the feminine figure who heals the male hero through being sexually receptive to him in Ceremony, as being sexist and also questionable in terms of the psychological healing process enacted in the story. My head is already filled with conflict over this issue, with the writings of Jungian analysts of myth and fairytales who decry the historical Western suppression of the feminine and ‘the goddess’ clashing with feminist criticisms of tired old tropes. Treuer’s analysis made me want to reread Ceremony to examine the use of that trope in that novel.

Also, halfway through Treuer’s essay about Sherman Alexie, I began to want to reread Alexie’s novels to see whether Treuer might be missing something about the way Alexie’s use of the “angry young man” as protagonist works in his novels, and whether that affects some of the flaws Treuer identifies in those novels. When a book of literary criticism sparks my mind in this way, generating new theory kernels to examine and giving me the urge to reread books, I have no problem calling it “thought-provoking.”

* * * * * * * * *

To illuminate Carrie's review, here's a taste from Shannon Gibney's interview of Treuer:

DT: But I guess I do feel like there’s a depressing lack of ambition among many writers, not just Native writers. Writers in general, who just want to write a book. They sit down and say, “I just want to write a good story.” You know, it’s a bit disingenuous. They want more than that – I’d like to think they did. You know, “Oh, a good story, that’s so sweet!” Especially writers of color – don’t they have more to do? Shouldn’t we think? But there’s this anti-intellectual strain in America, where intellectualism is somehow bad.

One of the writers who I cover in Native American Fiction, who shall remain nameless, was mad about one of the essays. I showed it to him/her, and they said, “Oh, so you wanted to be an academic.” And I said, “No, I wanted to be a thinker.” But I believe, I feel that we need to put a lot more thought into what we do. Especially when we know that people read our stuff as culture. Even we don’t intend it that way, we know it’s being received that way, so don’t we have a responsibility to keep that in mind when we’re creating?

. . . . .

[...] What passes as a “smart” book, the inheritors of Eliot’s and Nabokov’s and Thomas Mann’s efforts. To write books with really simple characters, who have very simple emotions, with language that replaces complexity with quirkiness. So we don’t have any complex language or complex characters, or complicated cross-purposed agendas. Instead of this, we have books that are quirky and extravagant. “Oh my God! His dog’s name is Sammy Davis Jr., Jr.!” (the dog’s name in Everything Is Illuminated). “Isn’t that hilarious!” So this quirk has replaced intelligence.

I’ll tell why people like these books. Because most readers, they don’t trust their own taste. They don’t trust they’re going to understand a” smart” book. But they will, if they get into the mode of reading them.

Reading takes practice, like anything else. Any reader can sit down with The Magic Mountain [Thomas Mann], and enjoy it. But, since readers don’t trust their own tastes, since the market doesn’t trust readers, since editors don’t trust writers, what we have now in these so-called “smart” novels are young adult novels dressed up as literary fiction. Simple plot, simple character, extreme emotions, extreme situations. Like The Life of Pi [Yann Martel], another great example. It looks deep, but it’s really very wide and shallow. “You put a tiger in a boat – isn’t that crazy!” And it’s selling readers short, I think.

That is authors then abdicating any responsibility, with a few exceptions – Richard Powers being one of them. I think he’s just incredible. The Time of Our Singing is just outstanding. It’s about race in America in the last 50 years, and it’s the most amazing book. It’s far more complex than [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved.

There are very few books that are about much anymore. But I’m trying to bring that back, in ways that are enjoyable. Because I think you’re right: people associate that kind of thought with whiteness, or that anything that makes you think is somehow suspect. Especially books about culture – they’re not supposed to make you think. They’re supposed to make you feel. Which is why Ishmael Reed is not a best seller. He should be, but he’s not. Because he makes you think.

SG: So what do you think the critic’s role is in all of this?

DT: Well, I think it’s like T. S. Elliot said, that you really can’t have healthy, vibrant literature without healthy, vibrant criticism. And there’s an awful lot of criticism out there about a great many things, but not a lot of it is about Native American literature.

I was putting it to a friend this way last night: “You are now allowed to be a non-Native critic of Native literature, so long as you take the writer’s word for it.” And this is an honest and heartfelt response to a pretty sticky situation. You know how it is, how often we’re spoken for. Everyone else is the experts about us, we’re never experts about ourselves. We were written about as if we were silent for decades and decades and decades.

Native American criticism, growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, alongside multiculturalism, began to address that, and suggest that these books have value. But the main argument is somehow faulty: That these have value not despite the fact that they’re different, but because they are. So they were read for difference where, in some ways, difference didn’t exist.

Most Native critics are in the same situation as many Native writers, where criticism is a kind of wish-fulfillment. Books are a portal into cultural connection for the writer and the critic. People feel, “I really want to believe that these books perform culture.” Because for Native critics and writers, it’s a way to have a connection with their culture.

I had my own identity issues so long ago, and that’s my private business. I know who I am, and where I belong, and who my people are. I don’t need anyone else to approve it. I don’t need anyone else to give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I don’t need my books to make me feel better about myself, or my place. I skipped all that. I speak Ojibwe, and that’s a great thing. And I don’t need books to do that for me.

Books are for thought and pleasure, and the thrill and magic that literature can bring. And for their inventiveness, not for their truth – except for maybe their emotional truth. That’s what books do for me. I mean, I love that. I can’t live without that. But it’s not about who I am. A lot of people like stories of cultural re-connection. And I’m not interested in that at all.

* * * * * *

A lot to think about, yes?

Private Writing

In Becoming Susan Sontag, her review of Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag, Deborah Eisenberg distinguishes between a diary and a journal. Eisenberg actually uses the title's designations of "journals" and "notebooks" when talking about the contents of the book, but comments

Rieff [Sontag's son David, who edited the volume] refers to these documents—which were written in notebooks—not as "journals" but as "diaries," and although the words are etymologically identical, "diary" seems the more apposite choice, suggesting, as it does, something more intimate than "journal"—a little book with a lock.The diaries contain (among plenty of other sorts of things) passages that concern Sontag's—largely anguished—love affairs with several women, her abrupt and painful seven-year marriage to the scholar and cultural critic Philip Rieff, and, inevitably, their son. The experience of reading the diaries, even for a disinterested party, is intense as well as anxiously voyeuristic; small wonder that the tone of Rieff's introduction is sometimes that of someone who has been on hand to witness a terrain-altering meteorological event. But even from the earliest, less intimate entries, we feel that we've broken the lock on the little book. The young author's assiduous excavations into, and evaluations of, the characteristics, capacities, and potentialities that she finds to be hers put us in almost claustrophobically close proximity to her. It is as though we were watching from behind a screen while someone whose life is clearly to be determined by her appearance tries on clothing in front of a mirror.

A diary, Eisenberg seems to be saying, is confessional, focused on the personal rather than intellectual reflections or observations of the world. She notes that Sontag's notebooks contains lists of books to e read and agenda for study, and that

We see rudiments of ideas which years later expand into essays, and we see aspects of the author—and the author's view of herself—that there certainly would be no other way to see. Though descriptions of the outside world do turn up, Sontag's forceful attention is largely reflexive. In fact, it's surprising, especially in view of her eventual activism and global ruminations, how little notice she takes in these diaries of international events.

Despite the very personal nature of these notebooks/journals/diaries, Eisenberg remarks "now and again Sontag seems to sense someone peeking over her shoulder. Perhaps it's herself. Certainly the entries concerning the event of her marriage are so tightly sealed that one would think the author hardly wanted herself to learn of it." Rieff chose to publish them because he understood that his mother wanted him to. "...I tend to believe that, left to my own devices, I would have waited a long time before publishing them, or perhaps never published them at all. There have even been times when I've thought that I would burn them. But that was pure fantasy...."

Do most people who keep journals (or diaries) reflect on why they do so? I tend to think that they do, though I realize that some people might actually not. My mother once told me how horrified she was to discover my grandmother's diaries, after her death. (My mother was her executor-- but also told me, when she herself was dying, that she had hated her mother: something I hadn't realized) My grandmother, it seemed, had written regularly, every day without fail, about all the events, large and trivial, in her life. My mother told me that she and her sister glanced at the first page of one of them, saw what they were, and burned them all without reading them. My mother said she would have been shamed by reading them, and I could tell by the way she spoke of it that she thought my grandmother had been wrong to leave them for her daughters to find. I've wondered since then why grandmother not only wrote in those diaries, but kept them. Did they represent her life to her? Did they contain an interior consciousness that would have surprised her sons and daughters (who all thought she was a shallow, stubborn, prudish woman)? Did they set out a truth she wished to assert that was perceived by no one else? Or was it simply a habit established in childhood and never broken?

Here is Sontag in 1957, on what a journal is for:

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.

There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today...in H.'s journal about me—that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn't like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us).... Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H. ever read this?

Of course Sontag was still a young woman when she characterized her journal as "a vehicle for my sense of selfhood." Discovering who one might be and bringing that self to life is one of the most important pieces of business that young women concern themselves with. I wonder if Sontag's notion of what her journal was for changed as she changed and matured... Certainly, it has changed for me (more than once) over the years.

I wonder, though, if Sontag had been born fifty years later if instead of keeping notebooks/journals/diaries she would have kept a blog instead. Is private writing in a journal or diary one of those practices that will, in the future, have been associated mainly with 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century Euro-American culture?

In any case, Eisenberg's review has whet my appetite for reading Sontag's Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.

Music in mid-future and far-future invented worlds

My house reeks of burnt lentils. Don't you hate it when you forget that you've got a soup simmering because you're too involved in work to do more than inhale the lovely smell every now and then without remembering you're supposed to go down to the kitchen to stir it and make sure the broth hasn't completely boiled off? And then the moment comes when the mists of mental involvement are pierced by your realization that the smell is no longer lovely. And when you go down to look, you discover that both the lentils and the pot are covered with a thick black crust that looks suspiciously like ash and is exhaling smoke into the room...

I'm thinking maybe dinner had better pizza...

But to shift from the olfactory to the auditory: reading Adam Roberts' review of Ian R.MacLeod's Song of Time over at Strange Horizons got me to thinking about the trickiness of imagining what kind of music people will be listening to, performing, and writing in the future and, more generally, the difficulty the writer faces when trying to imagine any of the arts, high and low, in our invented futures. I haven't read Song of Time, myself, so I don't know how just Roberts' characterization of the novel as "backward-, not forward-looking" and suggests that MacLeod's future Paris of the 2050s is really a teched-up version of the historical Paris of the 1920s.

As an sf setting, the 2050s are not that far into the future, of course, and would theoretically include people alive today in its middle-aged and older generations; moreover, the main character is an old woman who had an international career as a brilliant violinist, married to a brilliant conductor. Despite this proximity to the present-day, because of the novel's extrapolated turmoil and upheaval, Roberts has a problem with MacLeod's choosing to make the music of MacLeod's future Paris

all Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Stravinsky and, in a Desert-Islands-Disc-style sop to popular taste, one reference to Thin-White-Duke-era Bowie. There's a rather touching assumption that mid-21st-century cultural life will revolve around classical music concerts and performances, even as the world's ecosystems implode and nuclear war rages ("people had grown sick of big beats and clever virtualities, and they liked the idea of dressing up and going out for the evening to watch living people performing music which somehow sounded fresh and new despite its age," p. 269). It's MacLeod's world, and he can do what he likes with it of course; but I can't say this rang true for me.

Roberts also criticizes the newly composed music in that setting as MacLeod imagines it, in a way that makes sense to me, further underscoring the pitfalls of attempting to both imagine and then describe new musical sounds, and concludes: "We have to take on trust that Roushana's memories are soaked through with gorgeous, brilliant, new music, and I never did."

Since I haven't read Song of Time, I can't comment on MacLeod's choices. But I have noticed that music often serves a nostalgic function for many authors, a function that such authors presumably expect will work for readers in the same way it works for the author. The first time I consciously perceived such a function at work in an sf story was when I noticed an older male author describing the far-future protagonist relaxing after a tough meeting with a dry gin martini followed by a porterhouse steak with a plate of sliced beefsteak tomatoes, a good bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and a cigarette. I remember scratching my head, wondering why such things would exist out in the galaxy and what would be required for them to continue to exist and be experienced exactly as the author himself presumably experienced them. What purpose does this anachronism serve? I asked myself. Clearly the narrative was not suggesting that the conditions of production and consumption were identical to those of the twentieth-century United States. What I came up with was that at the very least, the author wished to imbue his character's experience with his own notion of pleasure and taste---but that he also possibly imagined that such taste was universal and thus would preserved for as long as human beings exist. Many authors, of course, don't slack off in this way. (An excellent example of how it can be done correctly is Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand.) Such narrowness of imagination is akin to the way in which most sf writers simply assume gender works in the same way they imagine it works in our world. (I.e., that gender is always a particular way naturally, and that though there can be exceptions, one would naturally not depict them unless one were explicitly imagining exceptions.) (Naturally there will always be steak and cabernet sauvignon!)

When music is used in a similar way (i.e., in the service of nostalgia), it indicate a kind of slippage in which the author falls down in extrapolating-- or it might indicate that the author can't imagine that certain kinds of music will ever cease to be understood or appreciated. It's not always Mozart and Bach, of course, that is cast in this role. It might be particular kinds of rock music (most often from the Sixties), or opera, or folk music, or Broadway musicals, or blues, or jazz, or country-western. And somehow, just somehow, that particular fragment of Anglo-European music survives into the future as the piece of the musical past that still works, even when all the rest has been forgotten. Sure, I can imagine an extrapolation that could make it work, but how many sf stories ever bother to think through that particular historical survival? In the end, I have to conclude that either the author was just being carelessly superificial, or else he or she actually believes that musical (or any other aesthetic) taste is hardwired. Of course human beings will still love listening to Bach! (Or John Lennon. Or Jimi Hendrix. Or Hank Williams. Or fill-in-the-blank.) The best is universal!

That's what 19th-century Euopeans believed about European high culture when they encountered people who couldn't appreciate Beethoven or Shakespeare or perspective painting and since they, in turn, could not understand the traditional music or dance of non-European cultures, they assumed the aesthetic productions of other cultures were simply inferior (i.e., "primitive").

It wasn't long ago that neuroscientists began using PET and MRI scans to examine the brain as subjects listened to music, performed music, or employed language. I recall reading with considerable fascination a few articles in an issue of Science on people with or without perfect pitch. More areas of the brain light up when people with perfect pitch listen to music than do when those without perfect pitch listen to the same music. An article in the same issue (or perhaps it was even a part of the same article-- my memory is admittedly hazy) noted that while not very many nonmusicians born and raised in the US have perfect pitch, a great many nonmuisicians born and raised in East Asia do. It seems that learning Chinese or various other East Asian languages as one's first language predisposes one to perfect pitch-- or rather, preserves the perfect pitch that some scientists believe all infants are born with (and then lose when it is not put to use). I can't find a copy of the issue in question (which is probably sitting in a pile of stuff waiting for years to be filed), but I seem to recall that musicians with relative pitch (though not perfect pitch) also listen to music differently (neurologically speaking) than do nonmusicians (though not identically to musicians with perfect pitch).

I've long been aware that although I'm no longer a musician and I haven't used the perfect pitch I had as a child and adolescent for the last 35 years, my experience listening to music is very different to the experience of "music lovers" who never received extensive training as a musician. (And I often find that they tend to like the music of composers I find boring-- because what tickles and pleases my ear most these days are the intricacies of counterpoint interacting with tonal structures. I know very well that when most people hear Haydn, they probably hear the melody and an undifferentiated block of sound that moves through a series of cadences involving the tonic, subdominant, and dominant. (Which they then find boring, since they don't hear anything happening.) I hear the dances most of Haydn's music was based on, and my particular pleasure lies in distinctly perceiving the simultaneous movement of different lines within the overall tonal structure. One woman's bliss is another's noise. In every case, though, taking pleasure in music entails learning what to listen to and creating the neural pathways that produce pleasure whenever you do so. Who can account for the variability of that pleasure from individual to individual, as idiosyncratic as the mysterious chemistry of sexual attraction? When I was a child, my whole being would be transfused with joy at hearing a full D-major triad. The other students in my music theory class with me in high school used to watch my face during dictation (an exercise requiring the student to write down what they hear the teacher playing at the piano)-- just in case one of the chords played happened to be a D-major triad. I just couldn't help myself. But then from my childhood I've had distinct emotional associations with every musical key of the harmonic system that developed in Europe at the outset of the baroque period and still undergirds popular music in the West today.

If my delight in Haydn is another woman's boredom, and Elvis Presley sounded to my first choirmaster (back in 1957) like "a cow demanding to be milked," so it is with all music. I don't really understand why everyone doesn't get this. But I don't think they do, since one of the most commonplace (and socially acceptable) objects of insult continues to be another person's taste in music. People are always calling someone else's music "noise" or "garbage" or "trash" with perfect confidence that their own taste is the only correct one. This happens between and across generations, ethnic groups, religious denominations, classes-- as though just about everyone in the world is a music snob (because everyone else's taste is inferior to their own). Not everyone is, of course, though most people are in one way or another. My tastes are pretty broad among Western and African forms of music (though I certainly don't know how to listen to Asia forms), but I will cop to having a deep prejudice against certain 19th-century European composers, a prejudice I developed while hanging out with musicians who had no hesitation in branding some of the stuff they'd have to play as members of orchestras as "trash" they didn't respect.

So given the very local character of musical taste, how can it not be tricky to project one's own taste onto a future society? Brains need to be taught how to hear musical arrangements of sound as emotionally and intellectually engaging. A taste for Haydn or Miles Davis or Prince isn't simply hardwired into this or that brain at birth.

Writers who stick to the near-future don't have to worry about this. But really, it's no wonder that sf writers rarely create aesthetic systems for their more distant-future invented worlds.

If only I could get rid of that stench... I bet certain negative tastes are universal. Have you ever met anyone who thought the stench of burnt food was heavenly?

Style! Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise

A couple of weeks back I posted a quotation from Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. This is an interesting book, originally published in 1938, that's recently been reissued by the University of Chicago Press. Chip Delany urged me to read it, and so I did. The book addresses the situation of "writers of promise"-- that is to say, it's a book about writing for writers who are neither beginners nor satisfied merely to make a living from their work (even when it's a very good living). What does it take, Connolly wonders in the first chapter, to write a book "that will hold good for ten years afterwards"?

Part 1, "Predicament," discusses the hazards that entangle every aspect of writing, placing a special emphasis on style and the continual shifts in literary fashion that sweep respected and even popular works into the dustbin of obscurity. His elucidation of style is fascinating and makes great sense to me (perhaps at least partly because it resonates powerfully with my recent reading in ms of the revised edition of Delany's Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which Wesleyan will be publishing next spring.) Some of it is a bit dated, and obviously its scope is restricted to early twentieth-century English literature, but there's much here to interest writers and critics today.

Part 2, "The Charlock's Shade," analyzes "the conditions which govern the high rate of mortality among contemporary writers"-- specifically politics, daydreams, conversation, drink and other narcotics, the "clarion call of journalism" (which includes writing reviews), worldly success, sex with its obsessions, and the ties of duty and domesticity. And he begins by citing Samuel Butler: "What ruins young writers is over-production. The need for money is what causes overproduction." His analysis, of course, is (unconsciously) gendered. Though women writers face the same obstacles men writers face, their resources and internal obstacles tend to be different from those of men writers, and these create differences it doesn't occur to Connolly to attend to.

Part 3, which is fully half of the book, "A Georgian Boyhood," is autobiography that culminates with an intense, almost novelistic description and analysis of his years at Eton. (His schoolmate George Orwell appears as a figure that haunts its margins.) It is only after finishing Part 3 and returning to the first two parts of the book that one realizes that an unstated reason for Connolly's writing the book must have been his need to explain to himself the dissipation of his own "promise" as a writer (ironically, of course, since the book was reprinted in 1948 and then again another 60 years later).

Of course Delany forcefully demonstrated in the Jewel-Hinged Jaw that "Style," as Connolly says, "is manifest in language." Connolly continues:

The vocabulary of a writer is his currency but it is a paper currency and its value depends on the reserves of mind and heart which back it. The perfect use of language is that in which every word carries the meaning that it is intended to, no less and no more." (10-11)

And so,

One might say that the style of a writer is conditioned by his conception of the reader, and that it varies according to whether he is writing for himself, or for his friends, his teachers or his God, for an educated upper class, a waiting-to-be-educated lower class or a hostile jury. This trait is less noticeable in writers who live in a settled age as they soon establish a relationship with a reader whom they can depend on and he, usually a man of the same age, tastes, education, and income, remains beside them all their life. Style then is the relation between what a writer wants to say; his subject--and himself-- or the powers which he has: between the form of his subject and the content of his parts. (10)

My oh my. So many he's and his'es, typing them out wearies my spirit. And yet, I do appreciate its clarity.

Connolly classifies all styles as being either "Mandarin" or "Vernacular," and then makes subdivisions within these two classifications as he examines the advantages, limitations, and pitfalls of various styles. I particularly liked this passage:

The quality of mind of a writer may be improved the more he feels or thinks or, without effort, the more he reads; and as he grows surer of this quality, so he is the better able to make experiments in technique or towards a simplification of it even to its apparent abandonment and the expression of strong emotion or deep thought in ordinary language. The great speeches in Lear and Samson Agonistes do not seem revolutionary to us because we do not recognize them as superb and daring manipulations of the obvious. Any poet of talent could write: "The multitudinous seas incarnadine" or "Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed," but only a master could get away with "I pray you undo this button," or "Lear's quintuple "Never."

Style is a relation between form and content. Where the content is less than the form, where the author pretends to emotion which he does not feel, the language will seem flamboyant. The more ignorant a writer feels, the more artificial becomes his style. A writer who thinks himself cleverer than his readers writes simply (often too simply), while one who fears they may be cleverer than he will make use of mystification: an author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

I recommend this book to writers with ambition, and anyone interested in the writing life.

The writer and the world

This is Joyce Carol Oates in an interview for the Paris Review in 1976. I wonder if she'd still use the adjective "all" today...

All of us who write work out of a conviction that we are participating in some sort of communal activity. Whether my role is writing, or reading and responding, might not be very important. I take seriously Flaubert's statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one another's creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.

Thinking more about this, it strikes me that the "all" can't be that far off when I think of how a solitude freak like Emily Dickinson felt a longing to be part of the conversation, even as she felt that she needed isolation to make that possible.

Turtle at Work

With the novel I'm currently working on, I seem to be more conscious than I usually am of my writing process. I suppose this is because I was away from the ms for a year and a half and can see clearly how it has been evolving since I began working on it a couple of weeks ago. The image of the turtle's shell seems to sum it up.


Unlike a snake, a turtle doesn't shed its skin (including the outer layer of its shell) all at once, but continuously sloughs off bits of it, which are replaced with new scales or scutes. Some of its dead skin hangs around for a long time, as plates and knobs that protect the parts of its body not covered by the shell. The skeletal structure of the turtle, of course, remains the same. But the shell itself, with all its plates and scales, keeps changing as new bits grow and an accumulation of dead bits get rubbed off.

And so it's been with my novel ms. About a year ago, I took note of a relevant piece of new science that had just been made public, and now I've incorporated it into the story-- altering a couple of scenes, adding a couple of new scenes-- in the process not solving my protagonist's problem but both sharpening it and inadvertently making the antagonist's ethical position blatantly clear where before it had been in the gray zone. And so already, as the ms has grown larger, it's subtly altered, making the conflict more focused. Which makes me feel optimistic about how the novel is going. Of course that won't last. There are always moments of clarity in the novel-writing process, moments that soon get swallowed up in the chaos of the story's growth. On the downside, I feel farther from the denouement than when I began. (Though that could be an illusion.)

Think of a turtle, sitting on a log, basking in the sun. It looks lazy, yes? But all the time, it's working on that shell. Remember that. It's what I'm doing when I'm staring at the wall.

This image has a breaking point, of course. The turtle, unlike the snail, can't simply walk away from its shell. The shell is the turtle, as much as our bodies are us. A writer's in big trouble when her novel becomes indistinguishable from her body. (I worried for a while that that might be true for me and the Marq'ssan Cycle.) It happens, of course. But not often.

Imagination and collaborative fiction-writing

So late this afternoon Kate Schaefer of the Clarion West Write-a-thon sennt out an email announcing that Michael Swanwick has started a round-robin story on the Write-a-thon forum. I decided to check it out and saw that Michael contributed one sentence, Ruth Nestvold another--and Eileen Gunn a whole slew of sentences. Because Eileen dragged Richard Nixon's name into it, I couldn't resist making a contribution myself. When I visited the site after dinner, I found that Eileen had continued on from where I'd left off. So of course I continued on from where she left off. But after I'd posted my new paragraphs, I discovered that someone else (who is identified only by login handle and not by name) had also posted an addition, which had been added before mine.

How disorienting! Imagination is such a powerful thing. Even though this is a barely-begun story, I'd so fully and vividly imagined the world being created through our opening sentences that I'm now feeling completely thrown out of the story (particularly since the other person's addition constitutes a sharp bifurcation from the direction I'd been imagining). I'd never realized just how thoroughly invested I get into a fictional creation, once I've put words down on the page, even for something so evanescent as a round-robin story. I simply can't overwrite the reality of the words I've already written (which, it seems, is substantially different from adapting to new directions the story might take). I've never done this before, but I'm thinking I'm not really cut out for this kind of collaborative fiction writing...

PS You might say that I have no business just now investing my imagination in anything but the novel I'm trying to finish. And you'd be right.

When Is Fiction Adequate?

Today I found myself wondering what quality or qualities in a piece of fiction that is less than brilliant make it adequate-- which is to say, worth my time and attention regardless of its flaws?

I imagine that many people would reply in terms of the piece's characterization, its narrative drive, the beauty of its prose style, or its thematic coherence (or lack thereof). But when I was thinking the other day about what for me marks beginning writers as promising (even when their grip on craft is tenuous at best), it struck me that this must first and foremost be their ability to create a patch of what I think of as "thereness" in whatever fiction they write, however deficient it might otherwise be. "Thereness" is what draws me into a story and holds my attention. Even when every sentence is grammatically perfect, the narrative arc follows the rules, and the characters are well-delineated, a story without "thereness" makes me itch to toss it aside the way I itch to block up my ears when forced to hear a tedious diatribe I'd do just about anything to escape. On the other hand, if the story has "thereness," I'm likely to stick with it, even as consciousness of its flaws steals over me.

Let me offer an example. The novels of an early 20th-century English writer, Mary Butts, are deeply flawed. But Butts' novels nevertheless engage me, no matter that I don't much care for her characters and find her plots decidedly lame. The other day I read a passage in Death of Felicity Taverner in which a pause sets in during the middle of an intense, deeply emotional conversation among four people. Most writers would simply say, "There was a pause." And maybe depict a small piece of business. And then resume. (Or else would say baldly, "After a long pause, X said...") The pause is depicted in this way: One of the characters raises a question that Butts follows with an em-dash and a paragraph break. The narrative continues:

There was silence again, while Scylla prepared the next sequence, and the room had its turn. Instead of four voices, the fires spoke, the voice of flames disintegrating salted wood into the quiet light of light ash. The crack of old panels responding to heat, and behind them the ground-scratch of mice. A door in the kitchen quarters opened and shut. Nanna's feet and the maid's mounted the stair. The heavy shutters bolted-out the interminable conversations of the trees. Behind these incidental breaks, the pulse of the long room in the delicate candle-light beat in time with the house and the wood. In time with its own time, a pace inaudible, yet sensible to each. Felix had said that a sonata could be written on the room's tempo, whose finale should be a demonstration of relativity.



Then the long room took advantage of their silence, and its shadowless walls seemed to move each in its own direction to some uncharted place. Happy lovers, asleep together, sometimes imagine their bed sails out, indifferent to walls, and visit those countries which lie east of the sun, west of the moon. In this second silence the walls left them behind, preoccupied with Felicity's passion and death; aware only that something was happening to the place where they sat, to describe which the comparisons of poets have been used to obscure reality. So that a literal description passes, even among poets, for metaphor, as when Wordsworth said: "as if to make the strong wind visible"; "as if" discounting what he had to say, who had seen the wind, and not dared say so...

This is a somewhat exaggerated style, true; and no, in case you're wondering, Butts doesn't typically spend that amount of time on pregnant pauses. This elaboration of a pause in the conversation follows several pages of straight dialogue without description. Since the reader already knows well the house in which this pause takes place, these paragraphs effectively evoke the moment's reality within the narrative's overall emotional logic.

My guess is that it's that evocation that lies at the heart of "thereness"-- certainly not description, per se. Description, after all, can often be so dull, so banal. (Maybe because it lacks "thereness"?) That evocation can be accomplished by other means (and often is), perhaps depending on the work's genre, perhaps depending on the author's technical strengths. One might suppose that for sf, world-building would be a prime source of "thereness." Still, even extremely detailed world-building often fails to yield "thereness." Maybe because the world-building itself ignores whole parts of what must necessarily be included any world to grant it "thereness"?

What Is A "Real" Writer?

As I was browsing the table of contents of the 25^th anniversary issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, the title of Susan Staves’ essay, “Women Writers≠Women Novelists," fairly leaped off the page and danced a tango as it snagged my attention. I’ve had many a conversation over the years with people who don’t write novels (or even fiction) who are either anxious and insecure about whether they’re really “writers” or frustrated with people who insist that only novelists merit the designation. The unspoken assumption that being a writer means being a novelist is pervasive; but I can’t recall ever having read a refutation of the equation before now.

Staves begins by declaring her love of curling up with a good novel. Preparing for a trip to Oklahoma to attend an academic conference, she decided to read Edna Ferber’s 1930 Cimarron, which chronicles “the opening of Oklahoma” in 1889. According to Staves, in her Foreward to the novel, Ferber says that although she did a lot of research for the novel, she didn’t attempt to “set down a literal history of Oklahoma” for she had to discard a lot of material “as unfit for use because it was so melodramatic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of fiction.” The stories that the novel can tell, in other words, are limited. In the world of “true history,” Ferber writes, “Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.”

This observation will be nothing new to novelists. Even novels that attempt to grapple with the world as it is must bow to the strictures of the narrative models that determine what is plausible and meaningful. Fiction that bears the banner of “Realism” is as artificial as a 1950s sit-com: “realism” is a style, not an accurate description of a novel’s content.

Staves uses Ferber’s observation to reflect on her own period of expertise, eighteenth-century Britain, and on

the still-present temptation to make our history of women’s writing a history of women writing novels and the temptation to use novels as the primary source of our imaginative contact with the lives and minds of eighteenth-century women.

I say “our” here speaking as a literary scholar, my original role and one to which I am always happy to return despite occasional excursions into other disciplines. Feminist scholars in other disciplines usually do not succumb to this temptation. Indeed, one advantage of the interdisciplinary character of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is that at these meetings we can—and should—seize opportunities to listen to our colleagues in other disciplines. I have found that the impression of eighteenth-century women’s lives that one gets from current work in textile studies or musicology or economic history is remote indeed form the impression one gets from novels. Outside of novels, eighteen-century women often seem considerably less abject, more aware of adult sexuality, less sentimental, and more knowledgeable about money. This is certainly true, for example, of the women letter writers we meet in Elaine Chalus’s Elite Women in English Political Life (2005).

Later in the essay, she reminds us that

novels, especially novels written by women, were relentlessly judged in terms of whether they were suitable surrogate conduct books for adolescent girls. The conventions of the novel that developed under those circumstances were generic conventions that were not equivalent even to the social conventions that applied to women in polite society, and certainly not the same as conventions thought appropriate to contemporary historical writing, philosophical writing—or even stage comedy.

The more detailed studies of women intellectuals who wrote in forms other than the novel that we have, the more we will appreciate the great range and variety of women’s experience and thought.

Hmm. I wonder what anyone could possibly make of our world today by reading the novels now being published. Anyone involved with writing, reviewing, or publishing fiction knows well that that the narrative forms available to fiction writers represent a fairly narrow range of experience and values and a limited number of stories that don’t represent most of the people living in the world (much less much about their lives). (The same, certainly, could be said about television and movies.)

Staves’ main point is that the “literary landscape” (as it used to be called) of the eighteenth-century Anglophone world encompassed a good deal more than novels. And so she urges the importance of bringing into print and studying the mostly ignored nonfiction produced by Anglophone women writers in the early modern period. Women who wrote essays and history and biography and philosophy and theology, she emphasizes, were writers. And should be recognized and respected as such.

Her reflections prompt me to wish that our current notion of Writer were as broad. Scholarly and intellectual writing can be a pleasure to read—but often isn’t. Much nonfiction writing has perhaps come to be seen as utilitarian and thus of no aesthetic interest. But why not? Consider the talented writers of nonfiction that make an art of their thoughtful articulations: writers like Joanna Russ (who would still be a “real” writer even if she’d only written nonfiction), or Rachel Blau DuPlessis (oh the pleasures of the Pink Guitar!), or Claudia Ranikine, whose Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is unquestionably an eloquent work of art, even if it isn’t a novel.

Here’s to fine writers who happen to write in forms other than fiction: may they win the respect and admiration they deserve—and above all, keep writing.