A Change in the Wind

Cheryl Strayed: To turn our suffering into beauty

From an unusually rich interview in The Millions, the friendliest of literary sites, with Cheryl Strayed, the author of the great and influential Wild: 

Cheryl Strayed: I’ve always thought that the important thing is to turn our suffering into beauty. And the image of the phoenix rising from the ashes has always been super-cool to me, that idea of our greatest beauty and strength rising out of the things that have been destroyed and have been lost. In Wild I talk about this book that I carried all the way with me, this collection of poems by Adrienne Rich called The Dream of A Common Language. And on the trail in Wild, I read that first poem, it’s called “Power.”

The poem is about Marie Curie, who discovered radiation. And she ended up dying of basically radiation exposure, this disease that had been essentially her greatest achievement. Marie Curie could never admit that’s what was killing her. And Adrienne Rich writes, she died a famous woman denying that the greatest source of her power was her wound. I’m paraphrasing it, but essentially it’s that. The thing about Adrienne Rich and what I was trying to do also in my writing career is to do the opposite, to not deny that our power comes from our wounds, that those deep wounds are the place of our power, and to really write from that place in my own life. That goes back to this earlier question about authority. That’s what authority is. When you’re actually writing from that deepest place within you, if you tell the truth, you’re using your greatest power and your greatest authority. That’s a key piece, not just doing that as a writer but when we talk about healing. Whatever the loss may be, not avoiding that wound, not trying to have it covered up and pretend it’s not there but rather to look into it.

Faction: Why Truman Capote lied about himself

Biographer and psychologist William Todd Schultz argues on an Oxford University Press blog that Truman Capote lied about his past because he needed to be telling a story about himself.

(If I understand correctly.)

Schultz comments: 

Aren’t psychobiographers supposed to care about the facts? Yes, facts are crucial. Facts are the instruments of revelation. I love facts. But the reality is, remembered life is itself fiction, a constantly evolving construction. That being so, the raw material one works with is best approached as a “faction” — a composite of artful narrative and quantifiable life-history. And given the unreliability of memory, especially in someone like Capote, who saw his past as perfectible, all one can do is dive into the messy blurriness.

"All one can do" is throw up one's hands?

With Capote, probably the answer is yes. Heck, his last novel is half-real...and half-finished. And Schultz wrote a whole book -- from the reviews, a good one -- about the writing of Answered Prayers. 

Larry McMurtry on selling 300,000 books

Besides being a great writer, Larry McMurtry is a great bookseller. 

The story of The Last Book Sale is a moderately long but fully fascinating: McMurtry wrote it up for the NYRB blog. Suffice to say that in August, McMurtry sold off the contents of several of his bookstores, to make sure he didn't burden his heirs. About 300,000 books he sold. But he's still in business, and still has plenty of books for sale -- at least 100,000. He grumbled: 

Everything sold but the fiction. Everyone who deals in fiction has plenty, and more is spilling onto the market from the sale of the Serendipity Books stock now being dispersed on the West Coast. Many people asked me if I was sad to see so many books go. I wasn’t—mainly I was irritated to discover that I still had 30,000 novels to sell. 

Great pic, too, of the writer, who has become as curmudgeonly as some of his characters. Wish I could have gone to the sale. Would like to see him at his store in Archer City someday. If the fates smile. 

"I have seen a lot of various levels of book-dealing and am hard to surprise."

If Barnes and Noble collapses, it's the death of books

So argues Ted Rall, who knows a thing or two about media today and publishing:

Borders and Barnes & Noble killed independent bookstores. Amazon killed Borders. Now Barnes & Noble, which sells more than 20 percent of pulp-and-ink books in the U.S., is under siege.

If B&N collapses: the death of books.

Cultural apocalypse.

Neo-feudalism.

You may remember such classics as “How the Internet Slaughtered Newspapers” and “How Napster Decimated the Music Business.” It’s always the same story: Digitalization destroys profits.

Whether it’s newspapers, magazines, CDs or books (“pBooks,” they call them now), the electronic assault on tangible media follows a familiar pattern.

Rall lays out four factors:

1)    Margins are squeezed: e-whatevers are cheaper (seemingly) than print, disks, etc. 

2)    Pirary and copying runs rampant (already 20% of ebooks are pirated). 

3)    A la carte sales (buy the song, not the album) reduce revenues. 

4)    Lack of visibility degrades consumer interest in books, records, newspapers, etc.  

Ben Enrenreich googled the phrase for the L.A. Review of Books and got 11.8 million choices. It's not a crazy idea at all; it's well-understood to be happening. 

My belief is that the future of books will be half-academic and half everything else, and serious non-fiction will have to find its way into the library. Won't be easy. 

Roshomon: Made in America (to start)

One of the greatest films of all time, the critics agree, is Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Roshomon. Turns out it's based on a Japanese short story, that in turn was based on a story by Ambrose Bierce, the infamous Western wit, aka "the San Francisco Wasp," who disappeared in Mexico. 

The story turned up recently on a site launched by the Library of America, which each week has been offering a classic America story, fiction and non-fiction, in its Story of the Week. 

What's amazing about the Bierce story, called The Moonlit Road, is that a) the reader is left to figure out the truth of the murder story for him or herself -- the plot offers no conclusion, and b) the last of the three sections of story is narrated by a medium, channeling the story of the murder victim! 

It's a strange but enthralling story, fascinating in part because the last narrator, the channeled ghost, insists she knows not whereof she speaks: 

Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by what was once a woman. You who consult us in this imperfect way —you do not understand. You ask foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden. Much that we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in yours. You think that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! what a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair!

Creepy. Time for a remake? 

It's a great movie, but technically not so much. 

Harry Potter: the early Isherwood version

Back in the l930's, Christopher Isherwood published a fascinating quasi-memoir about his years at university called Lions and Shadows. Isherwood was a brilliant student, but -- surprise, surprise -- an outsider. With a fellow student named Chalmers he formed a sort of secret literary society opposed to what they called "the poshocracy." 

Isherwood and Chalmers together invented an imaginary magical world to dramatize their feelings about this schooling they partly loved and mostly hated. It's not the same as Harry Potter, by any means, but has some curious similarities -- like Hogwarts, it's a sinister place, grand to look at, but steeped in dark magic, portents and threats, ruled by the grimmest of villains. They called it Mortmere. 

Isherwood and Chalmers for literally years talked of turning their dire creation into a novel, but never succeeded. Isherwood ultimately decided that was the point -- "As long as Mortmere remained unwritten, its alternative possibilities were infinite."

But they were on to something, as J.K. Rowling has, in her own way, definitely proved. Even she, however, might be impressed by their "utterly fantastic" plans for a deluxe edition of the book: 

It was to be illustrated, we said, with real oil paintings, brasses, carvings in ivory or wood; fireworks would explode to emphasize important points in the narrative; a tiny grammophone sewn into the cover would accompany the descriptive passages with emotional airs; all the dialogue would be actually spoken; the different pages would smell appropriately, according to their subject-matter, of grave-clothes, manure, delicious food, burning hair, chloroform or expensive scent. All copies would be distributed free. Our friends would find attached to the last page, a pocket containing banknotes and jewels; our enemies, on reaching the end of the book, would be shot dead by a revolver concealed in the binding. 

Now there's a book I want to read. I think. 

How can someone so young write such a good dark novel?

My favorite interviewer of writers is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a writer herself: Michelle Huneven. She's written for countless different outlets, but these days is interviewing for the literary site The Millions. 

This week she published an interview with a young novelist who wrote a book called The Gin Closet. Here's Michelle's introduction to the book and the author, Leslie Jamison:

I read and admired Leslie Jamison’s The Gin Closet when it first came out –and was immediately curious about its author:  How could someone so young (Jamison was 26 at publication) write a book so lyrical, dark and knowing?  

For more on the book, please read Michelle's interview. I doubt anyone could unveil it better, even the author herself. But for those curious about the title...

MH:  One scene really haunts me.  Stella [a young woman] goes to her aunt’s trailer in Nevada and sees the gin closet, her [elderly] aunt’s drinking room. It’s a terrible womb-tomb place, bottles, flies, a turkey carcass of all things, a stool in the corner—truly the nightmare version of a tuffet. Appalling! But the next thing you know, Stella and Tilly are drinking together.  Reading along, I was thinking: No! Don’t do it, Stella–you’re giving too much ground! I knew she wanted to help her aunt and bring her back into the family.  While I never thought she had a chance of succeeding, I really didn’t want her to sink to her aunt’s level.

LJ:  I wanted to destabilize Stella’s hero complex from the start to show it as confused. She wanted to connect with her aunt and build a sense of trust and to not be just another voice saying, “you’re a fuck up and we want your problems far away from us.” The short cut to that was to get low with her, get shamed with her.

That’s as opposed to saying I’m here, in a better spot, and I want you to come here too, which imposes a boundary and a separateness that requires a lot of moral fortitude and a kind of caring that’s willing to be patient.

A lot of wisdom there, and a lot of issues, too.  

Are run-on subtitles the flop sweat of publishing?

Bill Morris has a theory:

In a marketplace glutted with too many titles – and in a culture that makes books more marginal by the day – publishers seem to think that if they just shout loudly enough, people will notice their products, then buy them.  In other words, the run-on subtitle is literature’s equivalent of flop sweat, that stinky slime that coats the skin of every comedian, actor and novelist who has ever gotten ready to step in front of a live audience knowing, in the pit of his stomach, that he’s going to bomb. 

For instance: 

But it's not true! As usual, it's the Internet's fault...a bookseller explains: 

“I think it’s driven by Search – with a capital S – whether it’s Google or Amazon or whatever.  A lot of our customers hear about books on NPR, and when they come in the store they can’t always remember the author or the title.  The more words a customer might remember, the more keywords we can use to Google it.  If a word is rather unique, we’re more likely to find it.  With the river of books – with the river of everything – most people want to have more unique words associated with their product.”

Still, kudos to Morris for not only coming up with a theory, but testing it out. 

The plot escapes me, but the wraith of memory remains

In the New York Times Book Review, novelist James Collins admits an embarrassing secret.

I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read...

Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.

So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

But then Collins does something very interesting. He calls up an expert on the science of reading named Maryanne Wolf, and asks her what she thinks about this quandary:

“There is a difference,” she said [to Collins], “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory."

Paul Raeburn, at the eminent Knight Science Journalism Tracker, responds with a complaint that Collins hasn't "done his reporting properly, even if this is a personal essay."

He has a point; the reader does want to know more about the building of "networks" in the brain Wolf refers to.  which, translated into the vernacular, sounds as if she's saying -- by reading that book, you have changed your mind. 

But one can only admire Raeburn for finding a quote (from Tennyson, no less!) that describes the situation just as beautifully: I am part of all that I have met.

Yet and still, Wolf's reference to the "wraith of memory" corresponds quite exactly to what Collins recalls about the book in question -- how he felt about it, and the experience of reading it. 

And here's a possible measure of what it means to change your mind: What you can remember and retrieve is as good as what you have discovered or written yourself. As fully earned.

In the words of the late great (and too little missed) poet Joseph Brodsky:

Living is like quoting, and once you've learned something by heart, it's yours as much as the authors.

(from In Memory of Stephen Spender)

The most Orwellian twist in today's most Orwellian novel

Gary Shteyngart is a fan of George Orwell, but his new Super Sad True Love Story, a dystopian novel inspired by l984, isn't all that Orwellian a book. 

Why? 

Because, for all Orwell's greatness, Shteyngart is a much more amusing writer. 

But the book does have a couple of surreal and ominously Orwellian moments. The most memorable comes out of the fact that the armed force overtaking American society, the "American Restoration Authority," won't allow anyone to recognize its takeover. It's officially invisible. When the ARA sets up a checkpoint, with the inevitable sandbags, barbed wire, and men armed with machine guns, a large sign is posted:

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT ("THE OBJECT"). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

Now that's creepy.