I just returned from an amazing week in Anguilla, a Caribbean island about 150 miles east of Puerto Rico. Any pictures you have seen of the Caribbean cannot do it justice; you have to be there, living the colors and the crystal power of the ocean, to take in its awe-inspiring beauty. Kurt and I were planning how to get back to Anguilla before we left. It's that kind of place.
We stayed with Kurt's cousin Paul and his wife Donna. Donna is one of my favorite relatives by marriage. She's a fun, intelligent, funny woman, Italian and proud of it, who shares my love of history. We talk about books and the Doberstein men, two areas with plenty of source material for long conversations. I brought her some of my non-fiction history books to keep and I thought she was going to hug me to death. Somebody who gets that excited about my kinds of books is way up on my "I like you" list.
Cousin Paul, on the other hand, is someone I have never known how to approach prior to this island getaway. He's a nice enough person in his way. Reserved, yet with a sense of humor that flashes once about every third family get together to remind me that he possesses it. He's an engineer and fits that stereotype quite well: observant, orderly, quietly certain of everything he thinks or believes. I don't think the man has ever experienced one moment of doubt in his 63 years. He was born completely self-possessed and probably crawled out of the womb holding The Baby's Guide to Linear Equations in his neatly-manicured fingers. I wouldn't want to have to see him as my therapist, but if I were ever trapped in a high-rise fire I'd be damn glad he was around to get me out of it.
He spends most of his time on Anguilla watching television and sitting on the terrace of his villa gazing silently at the ocean. Donna, on the other hand, is always venturing out to enjoy the scenery and people of the island; she runs a book club, belongs to countless committees, and knows just about everybody in the ex-pat community. People naturally love her, they way children naturally love an adult they perceive to be just like them. She says that she can't get Paul to go out. All he wants to do is stay at home, getting no closer to the vibrant life pulsing on that island than the isolation of his balcony. It's a source of constant frustration for her, but she can console herself with the stunning turquoise of the Atlantic as she snorkels from her property to the nearest white sand beach.
Knowing what I did about Cousin Paul, imagine my surprise when this reserved and stoic man announced that he loves Russian literature! He took a course in college and came to admire the Russian classical masters: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky...I was utterly stunned hearing this confession. To me, Russian literature is full-blooded passion on the page, the heart and soul of a naturally turbulent people, where order and calm is longed for but rarely attained except as a facade. I had trouble comprehending that he could be serious about something that seems so opposed to his personality, that a man who lives for steady, unchanging calm in his everyday life is capable of understanding the pulsing heart that flowed from Russian pens in the 18th and 19th centuries, but Cousin Paul apparently is.
Or is he? The more I reviewed our conversation (which ended with me proclaiming the glories of my favorite novel ever, Crime and Punishment, a book that he --gasp! -- absolutely hated and didn't even finish) the more I realized that Cousin Paul loves Russian literature for the flip side of the reason I do. I get so caught up in the passionate blood of the Russian classics every time I think of them that there is no room for anything else where they are concerned. Love-starved Anna Karenina, the violent and sensual Dmitri of The Brothers Karamazov, the lost and tormented characters swirling around Dostoevsky's Idiot are what leap into my head and begin bashing around in it every time the subject arises. I forget that in a Russian classic there is always a fair share of "rational men" to counteract the ardent, troubled souls on the pages of the same novels. They slip from my consciousness with alarming ease, dismissed by my over-heated brain as inconsequential and annoyingly dull, the minor, dim stars around which the passionate Anna's sun rotates. They don't even register with me until someone forces them back into my consciousness.
I realized after the fact that those are the characters who appeal to Cousin Paul. He is not Anna Karenina; he is Karenin, the staid, emotionally stifled country squire, whose coldness contrasts so terribly with his wife's Russian passion. He is Luzhin in Crime and Punishment and Feyodor Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, the so-called rational man, the logical fellow in control, although without their cracks that let their vices drip onto the page. He is, in fact, the perfected version of the flawed gentleman so often written about by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other classical Russian writers. He has achieved what they never could: complete mastery over any internal passion that may have once crept around inside him, content to live in paradise without venturing much beyond his landscaped driveway.
The only time he falters in that sterility is when he consumes too much wine. Suddenly, sitting across from me at the table, is not the in-control Karenin but the emotional, strong-willed, even blunt Anna, or Levin from the same book, or Dmitri in Karamazov; in short, the Russian characters who so appeal to me because of their inability to accept the restrictions that society imposes upon them, whose hearts and mouths always overflow with a rush of emotions that they cannot keep inside. Three glasses of wine and Cousin Paul is a tumultuous character in any Russian tavern ever written about by the masters; four glasses and he's re-enacting the passionate arguments of Tolstoy's intellectuals; five glasses and he's headed for a place right next to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, the one character in all of classical Russian literature he says he cannot stand. I've never known him when he's ventured to six glasses, but if I ever see him do so I imagine he'll be graduating to the persona of every gloriously sloppy, emotional, pathos-crazed literary Russian drunk, or perhaps he'll leap straight to becoming the living incarnation of every tortured Russian writer he's ever read.
I'm still reeling from this whole episode. Not only has it made me feel more comfortable around Cousin Paul (have an intelligent discussion with me about classical literature and we're intellectually connected for life), it has also reminded me that writing can be many different things to many different people, that what I perceive as so patently obvious in a classic novel from any country does not necessarily even occur to other people who read the same book. At first I was a little upset about that, but now that I've had time to think about it I've decided that I'm pretty happy with the realization. That's what writing is about, right? The ability to be all things and nothing at the same time, to be molded by the brain and heart and soul of your reader into whatever they need from you. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did that. I hope I can.
draft
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Ephemeral In Writing
I started thinking about Sam Waterston yesterday. He's the actor who has played D.A. Jack McCoy on Law and Order since about 14 years ago. I was watching L&O and for some reason began to recall other work Sam has done, including a play called Lunch Hour he was in on Broadway with Gilda Radner that my sister and I saw in 1981. Mostly, however, I remembered him playing Daisy Buchanan's poor but morally decent cousin Nick in the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby.
If you didn't happen to see that film version of Fitzgerald's book you should probably count yourself lucky. It's not good. Robert Redford was okay as Gatsby, and Sam was wonderful as always, but Mia Farrow was woefully miscast as Daisy. I forget who directed the film but whoever it was let her go off on this tangent that suggested not an emotionally fragile Southern belle as much as some loony tune I would see talking to herself on the El. She was nuts, and nutsy women don't make good heroines unless being crazy isn't their fault. It was definitely Farrow's fault in the film and I didn't care for her at all. I watched the movie countless times for the clothes, Redford (had a huge crush), and the tragedy of lost love (lost love is very alluring to 13 year-old girls) but every time I kept wanting to tell Redford to take up with Jordan Baker. She may have been a cheater but she was played by a much better actress.
Since I've gotten old enough to analyze film I've wondered if that movie was doomed from the start, no matter who played Daisy. I think it was, and this is because Fitzgerald's writing in Gatsby is so much more than merely evocative of a lost American era of elegance and possibility. Fitzgerald is the avatar of 20s writers, the poster child of that wild decade, but he is also this nation's most autobiographical fictionalist, and The Great Gatsby is his most personal testament. As such its spirit is far too ephemeral to capture on film.
True, Fitzgerald wrote about himself and Zelda Zayre in just about every story he ever did; The Crack-Up is such a naked baring of his and Zelda's souls that it's almost too painful to read. Even that, though, as much of a self-immolation as it is, doesn't take a reader as far into Fitzgerald's psyche as does Gatsby. In this novel Fitzgerald wasn't just putting himself and Zelda Zayre into the parts of Gatsby and Daisy as he conjured the characters' words in his head. He was admitting his own self-destructive fascination with the light at the end of Daisy's dock, his own knowledge that what he wanted for himself and Zelda was beyond their reach. Like Gatsby, Zitzgerald wasn't able to stop loving Zelda even though he knew she could never belong to anyone but herself; like Daisy, Zelda wasn't able to stop letting him think that he could make her his because she needed that to keep the demons that constantly preyed on her at bay. With every meeting the Fitzgeralds were sowing the seeds of their own destruction and they knew it, yet only after too much damage had been done could they bring themselves to part. Even so they never completely dissolved their partnership; to the end of Zelda's life they communicated. They always loved each other.
Reading Gatsby one gets the sense that the only way for Fitzgerald not to go mad because of this tragic death-dance was to take refuge in fiction. That's what great writers do: take their pain and exorcise it through the solacing disguise of their imaginations. Real pain is only bearable for a writer when he or she can control it by creating the world it ravages. That is the essence of the writer's soul.
The writer's soul...how does a director convey that to a viewer? Line up all of the best period cars and clothes in Hollywood, get the ultimate historical set designer, rent mansions on Long Island or the Hamptons, and they can do nothing more than paint an empty scene. What gives The Great Gatsby its vibrancy is what Fitzgerald put in the novel's pages that the greatest director in the will never capture. With The Great Gatsby all any camera can do is make an attempt to frame that flashing green light. What it can never show us though, as Fitzgerald did with his words, is what it feels like to stare night after night at that light waiting for Daisy to appear on the dock.
If you didn't happen to see that film version of Fitzgerald's book you should probably count yourself lucky. It's not good. Robert Redford was okay as Gatsby, and Sam was wonderful as always, but Mia Farrow was woefully miscast as Daisy. I forget who directed the film but whoever it was let her go off on this tangent that suggested not an emotionally fragile Southern belle as much as some loony tune I would see talking to herself on the El. She was nuts, and nutsy women don't make good heroines unless being crazy isn't their fault. It was definitely Farrow's fault in the film and I didn't care for her at all. I watched the movie countless times for the clothes, Redford (had a huge crush), and the tragedy of lost love (lost love is very alluring to 13 year-old girls) but every time I kept wanting to tell Redford to take up with Jordan Baker. She may have been a cheater but she was played by a much better actress.
Since I've gotten old enough to analyze film I've wondered if that movie was doomed from the start, no matter who played Daisy. I think it was, and this is because Fitzgerald's writing in Gatsby is so much more than merely evocative of a lost American era of elegance and possibility. Fitzgerald is the avatar of 20s writers, the poster child of that wild decade, but he is also this nation's most autobiographical fictionalist, and The Great Gatsby is his most personal testament. As such its spirit is far too ephemeral to capture on film.
True, Fitzgerald wrote about himself and Zelda Zayre in just about every story he ever did; The Crack-Up is such a naked baring of his and Zelda's souls that it's almost too painful to read. Even that, though, as much of a self-immolation as it is, doesn't take a reader as far into Fitzgerald's psyche as does Gatsby. In this novel Fitzgerald wasn't just putting himself and Zelda Zayre into the parts of Gatsby and Daisy as he conjured the characters' words in his head. He was admitting his own self-destructive fascination with the light at the end of Daisy's dock, his own knowledge that what he wanted for himself and Zelda was beyond their reach. Like Gatsby, Zitzgerald wasn't able to stop loving Zelda even though he knew she could never belong to anyone but herself; like Daisy, Zelda wasn't able to stop letting him think that he could make her his because she needed that to keep the demons that constantly preyed on her at bay. With every meeting the Fitzgeralds were sowing the seeds of their own destruction and they knew it, yet only after too much damage had been done could they bring themselves to part. Even so they never completely dissolved their partnership; to the end of Zelda's life they communicated. They always loved each other.
Reading Gatsby one gets the sense that the only way for Fitzgerald not to go mad because of this tragic death-dance was to take refuge in fiction. That's what great writers do: take their pain and exorcise it through the solacing disguise of their imaginations. Real pain is only bearable for a writer when he or she can control it by creating the world it ravages. That is the essence of the writer's soul.
The writer's soul...how does a director convey that to a viewer? Line up all of the best period cars and clothes in Hollywood, get the ultimate historical set designer, rent mansions on Long Island or the Hamptons, and they can do nothing more than paint an empty scene. What gives The Great Gatsby its vibrancy is what Fitzgerald put in the novel's pages that the greatest director in the will never capture. With The Great Gatsby all any camera can do is make an attempt to frame that flashing green light. What it can never show us though, as Fitzgerald did with his words, is what it feels like to stare night after night at that light waiting for Daisy to appear on the dock.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
I'm still thinking about not finishing No Country For Old Men. Not that my reason for putting it down after 35 pages wasn't legitimate; it was. Those "and thens" grated, and they are not good prose. Yet I can't help thinking that I should have given Mr. McCarthy's story a little more time before giving in to my reader's frustration and abandoning it. Maybe in chapter 12 he would have given up that annoying run-on sentence fetish. I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible.
My only consolation is that I did not stop reading his work out of that overwhelming jealousy that usually hits me when I pull a work of modern fiction off the shelf and see that its not half as good as something I've created and can't get published. Mr. McCarthy has a way of looking at things that makes for fantastic reading so I don't begrudge him his success. I feel the same way about him as I always did on those occasions when I lost out on an acting part to someone worthy of it: if I couldn't get it, at least the person who did had talent.
I do hate this writer's jealousy of mine. I wish I didn't have it, that I could overcome my disgust when I read paragraphs of a published work that by comparison to mine are not at all good. I want to be magnanimous and open-minded, able to look beyond my own frustrations and try to find something redeeming in the books coming off publishers' presses these days. Reading modern fiction, on the rare occasions I have managed to dig up a work I can appreciate, is tremendous fun. I just don't find those too often. The last one I read was Caleb Carr's second Alienist book...in 1997. Yes, except for a paperback I managed to get half-way through last year, my last successful foray into fiction published after 1940 was 11 years ago. How many fiction works have been published since then? And how many of them are gems that I'm missing because I think that all anyone puts out now is garbage meant only to cash in on whatever literary trend is selling?
I thumbed through one of the Harry Potter books a few years ago. It was reasonably good, although I couldn't see what all the fuss was about (and still can't). Likewise The DaVinci Code. Both J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown are much better than most of the writers cranking out books today, and I'm not saying that I could out-write them. They just don't appeal to me. They're talented but they don't have what I need in an author.
So what do I need from someone I read? I need to be slack-jawed and stunned when I start reading his or her work, and that's just for starters. I need to be jolted out of reality into whatever world this person has created on the page, struck by a literary lightening bolt like Michael Corleone on the hillsides of Sicily when he saw Apollonia in that dress and purple hair ribbon. Only a handful of writers have managed to pull that off with me: Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Welty, Wharton, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck. That's a pretty heavy-hitting literary line-up, I know, and it wouldn't be easy for any group of writers to match them. But they were all born in the span of less than 100 years and many were contemporaries: when Welty took her first breath Steinbeck was seven; Faulkner was 12. Fitzgerald and Hemingway got drunk at the same parties. So if that precious 100 years produced all of these amazing writers, why can't we get a group of equally talented artists these days? Where are our F. Scott and Ernest, our Eudora and Edith and William?
I do count Caleb Carr of the Alienist books as one of these giants of my writing world. And William Styron. That's it, though, for writers born after Welty. Thirty years passed between Styron's birth (1925) and Carr's (1955), so I'm telling myself that sometime in 1985 a writer was born who will soon emerge and take me away to the same transcendent place as Sophie's Choice and The Alienist. Still, I realize that I'll probably only find him because his works are next to Dostoevsky's at Borders.
My only consolation is that I did not stop reading his work out of that overwhelming jealousy that usually hits me when I pull a work of modern fiction off the shelf and see that its not half as good as something I've created and can't get published. Mr. McCarthy has a way of looking at things that makes for fantastic reading so I don't begrudge him his success. I feel the same way about him as I always did on those occasions when I lost out on an acting part to someone worthy of it: if I couldn't get it, at least the person who did had talent.
I do hate this writer's jealousy of mine. I wish I didn't have it, that I could overcome my disgust when I read paragraphs of a published work that by comparison to mine are not at all good. I want to be magnanimous and open-minded, able to look beyond my own frustrations and try to find something redeeming in the books coming off publishers' presses these days. Reading modern fiction, on the rare occasions I have managed to dig up a work I can appreciate, is tremendous fun. I just don't find those too often. The last one I read was Caleb Carr's second Alienist book...in 1997. Yes, except for a paperback I managed to get half-way through last year, my last successful foray into fiction published after 1940 was 11 years ago. How many fiction works have been published since then? And how many of them are gems that I'm missing because I think that all anyone puts out now is garbage meant only to cash in on whatever literary trend is selling?
I thumbed through one of the Harry Potter books a few years ago. It was reasonably good, although I couldn't see what all the fuss was about (and still can't). Likewise The DaVinci Code. Both J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown are much better than most of the writers cranking out books today, and I'm not saying that I could out-write them. They just don't appeal to me. They're talented but they don't have what I need in an author.
So what do I need from someone I read? I need to be slack-jawed and stunned when I start reading his or her work, and that's just for starters. I need to be jolted out of reality into whatever world this person has created on the page, struck by a literary lightening bolt like Michael Corleone on the hillsides of Sicily when he saw Apollonia in that dress and purple hair ribbon. Only a handful of writers have managed to pull that off with me: Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Welty, Wharton, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck. That's a pretty heavy-hitting literary line-up, I know, and it wouldn't be easy for any group of writers to match them. But they were all born in the span of less than 100 years and many were contemporaries: when Welty took her first breath Steinbeck was seven; Faulkner was 12. Fitzgerald and Hemingway got drunk at the same parties. So if that precious 100 years produced all of these amazing writers, why can't we get a group of equally talented artists these days? Where are our F. Scott and Ernest, our Eudora and Edith and William?
I do count Caleb Carr of the Alienist books as one of these giants of my writing world. And William Styron. That's it, though, for writers born after Welty. Thirty years passed between Styron's birth (1925) and Carr's (1955), so I'm telling myself that sometime in 1985 a writer was born who will soon emerge and take me away to the same transcendent place as Sophie's Choice and The Alienist. Still, I realize that I'll probably only find him because his works are next to Dostoevsky's at Borders.
Friday, February 29, 2008
No Book For A Cranky Old Woman
Well, Mr. McCarthy's book is not for me. I managed to get through about 35 pages before I gave in and called it a reading day. Why? I'll tell you.
It wasn't because of Mr. McCarthy's characters. Conventional is boring in the written world, and his characters are anything but conventional. In fact, they're some of the most sharply drawn after 3-4 pages of any I've come across, and I found them fascinating. They leapt off the page at me from their introductions and that was terrific. Ditto for his plotting. The pace of the story is perfect and it unfolds like the movie did: swiftly, but not so swiftly that I couldn't see the nuances of his work and the characters in my mind. Mr. McCarthy is an extremely visual writer. I'm not surprised that his work transfers to film as effortlessly as it does.
What about Mr. McCarthy's dialogue? you may ask. In a word: outstanding. The Coen brothers took it all but verbatim for the film and it worked there just as well as it does in the book. As I was reading I could hear the characters speaking in my head, and I don't think this was just because I was so struck by the movie. Dialogue writing is my best skill so when I come across a great writer of the stuff -- and I don't very often -- it's very exciting for me. The scene in the gas station between Chigurh and the attendant, which is the scariest in the film, is laid out in the same tense, steadily building panic, oh-my-god-this-guy-is-insane fashion as in the movie. It's just as frightening on the page. No Country For Old Men is full of flawless dialogue that I could see happening in real life should the book's action take place. For that Mr. McCarthy deserves a medal, or at least a lot of money.
Hmmm...great characters...marvelous dialogue...what in the world is wrong with this book, then? you are probably wondering. And here's your answer: I could not go farther in this book than 35 pages because Mr. McCarthy has never met a run-on sentence he doesn't absolutely adore and want to take home to his mother.
Now, I will be the first to say that a run-on sentence has its value in a story. In fact, I believe that all those rules we have to teach our students about DOs and DON'Ts in grammar can fly straight out the manuscript window when someone is writing fiction. (Somewhere Hemingway is smiling over a Margarita at this very moment.) Characters, real ones at least, do not live along proper grammatical lines. They stammer. They speak in fragments. They aren't always clear in their thinking or about to whom they're talking. I'm okay with that. They're characters; they can do whatever they need to do and I will love them all the more for it.
Still, the fatal flaw for me in Mr. McCarthy's book is those damned run-ons. I'm not talking about the occasional one used for effect, or to make a point, or just because it sounded good to him at the time or because he was too lazy to hit the period button on his keyboard. I'm talking about run-ons on every page, in almost every prose paragraph. Almost every prose paragraph. This book for me was 35 pages of "He did this and then he did that and then he did something else and then he thought about why he was doing it and it didn't make any sense to him and then he stood up and then he did it again and then he did something else and then somebody took a shot at him and then he started running and then he thought about that". This is not an exaggeration -- this book is page after mind-boggling page of non-stop "ands thens" that wore me out completely. I don't have a problem with the actions in those endless passages; doing something, then thinking about why, not having it make sense but doing it anyway, and eventually getting shot at for it are all perfectly legitimate activities for characters in my view. But take a breath between them, for the love of literature! Or at least let your reader take a breath.
After deciding not to finish No Country I took a hard look at what bothers me so much about those run-ons. When I was in college and had estrogen I think I could have read this book. I would probably have thought the run-ons terrible but would have assumed that Mr. McCarthy knew all sorts of things about writing that I didn't. I would have ascribed great mystical and intellectual powers to him that I did not possess; being young and worshipful, I could very well have been in awe of him for this. That's the reason authors get away with writing poorly composed work that makes no sense, right? People think such writings are beyond the abilities of mere mortals to comprehend, when in fact they're just badly done and completely ridiculous. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome one of the most non-sensical and, therefore, successful writers of our age!" I can see Albert Camus being introduced this way on Oprah.
Young people have the liberty of awe, but I am not young anymore. I'm 46 and do not have the patience to plow my way through sentence after sentence that runs to 25 words, containing 10 usages of "and then" before I hit the period. I like flow now. I like prose passages that glide smoothly and have at least a fleeting acquaintance with good grammar. Characters can talk to me like one of my students but their writers don't have that privilege.
Is this run-on hangup of mine nitpicking? I suppose it is. Who am (unpublished) I to tell (published) Mr. McCarthy to do some better editing of his prose? If run-ons are how he wants to express himself then fine, he should use them as much as he wishes. But I don't have to read him when he does.
If anyone needs me I'll be curled up with something by Dostoevsky.
It wasn't because of Mr. McCarthy's characters. Conventional is boring in the written world, and his characters are anything but conventional. In fact, they're some of the most sharply drawn after 3-4 pages of any I've come across, and I found them fascinating. They leapt off the page at me from their introductions and that was terrific. Ditto for his plotting. The pace of the story is perfect and it unfolds like the movie did: swiftly, but not so swiftly that I couldn't see the nuances of his work and the characters in my mind. Mr. McCarthy is an extremely visual writer. I'm not surprised that his work transfers to film as effortlessly as it does.
What about Mr. McCarthy's dialogue? you may ask. In a word: outstanding. The Coen brothers took it all but verbatim for the film and it worked there just as well as it does in the book. As I was reading I could hear the characters speaking in my head, and I don't think this was just because I was so struck by the movie. Dialogue writing is my best skill so when I come across a great writer of the stuff -- and I don't very often -- it's very exciting for me. The scene in the gas station between Chigurh and the attendant, which is the scariest in the film, is laid out in the same tense, steadily building panic, oh-my-god-this-guy-is-insane fashion as in the movie. It's just as frightening on the page. No Country For Old Men is full of flawless dialogue that I could see happening in real life should the book's action take place. For that Mr. McCarthy deserves a medal, or at least a lot of money.
Hmmm...great characters...marvelous dialogue...what in the world is wrong with this book, then? you are probably wondering. And here's your answer: I could not go farther in this book than 35 pages because Mr. McCarthy has never met a run-on sentence he doesn't absolutely adore and want to take home to his mother.
Now, I will be the first to say that a run-on sentence has its value in a story. In fact, I believe that all those rules we have to teach our students about DOs and DON'Ts in grammar can fly straight out the manuscript window when someone is writing fiction. (Somewhere Hemingway is smiling over a Margarita at this very moment.) Characters, real ones at least, do not live along proper grammatical lines. They stammer. They speak in fragments. They aren't always clear in their thinking or about to whom they're talking. I'm okay with that. They're characters; they can do whatever they need to do and I will love them all the more for it.
Still, the fatal flaw for me in Mr. McCarthy's book is those damned run-ons. I'm not talking about the occasional one used for effect, or to make a point, or just because it sounded good to him at the time or because he was too lazy to hit the period button on his keyboard. I'm talking about run-ons on every page, in almost every prose paragraph. Almost every prose paragraph. This book for me was 35 pages of "He did this and then he did that and then he did something else and then he thought about why he was doing it and it didn't make any sense to him and then he stood up and then he did it again and then he did something else and then somebody took a shot at him and then he started running and then he thought about that". This is not an exaggeration -- this book is page after mind-boggling page of non-stop "ands thens" that wore me out completely. I don't have a problem with the actions in those endless passages; doing something, then thinking about why, not having it make sense but doing it anyway, and eventually getting shot at for it are all perfectly legitimate activities for characters in my view. But take a breath between them, for the love of literature! Or at least let your reader take a breath.
After deciding not to finish No Country I took a hard look at what bothers me so much about those run-ons. When I was in college and had estrogen I think I could have read this book. I would probably have thought the run-ons terrible but would have assumed that Mr. McCarthy knew all sorts of things about writing that I didn't. I would have ascribed great mystical and intellectual powers to him that I did not possess; being young and worshipful, I could very well have been in awe of him for this. That's the reason authors get away with writing poorly composed work that makes no sense, right? People think such writings are beyond the abilities of mere mortals to comprehend, when in fact they're just badly done and completely ridiculous. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome one of the most non-sensical and, therefore, successful writers of our age!" I can see Albert Camus being introduced this way on Oprah.
Young people have the liberty of awe, but I am not young anymore. I'm 46 and do not have the patience to plow my way through sentence after sentence that runs to 25 words, containing 10 usages of "and then" before I hit the period. I like flow now. I like prose passages that glide smoothly and have at least a fleeting acquaintance with good grammar. Characters can talk to me like one of my students but their writers don't have that privilege.
Is this run-on hangup of mine nitpicking? I suppose it is. Who am (unpublished) I to tell (published) Mr. McCarthy to do some better editing of his prose? If run-ons are how he wants to express himself then fine, he should use them as much as he wishes. But I don't have to read him when he does.
If anyone needs me I'll be curled up with something by Dostoevsky.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Brain Pride
I simply hate the thought of coming off as unintelligent. I still cringe when I think of a paper I wrote 20-odd years ago in college where I used "illusion" when I should have used "allusion". Yes, I still remember, because I wear my intellect like a flag and I feel like a traitor to myself when I let that flag droop in the mental winds. Brain pride is a terrible sin with me.
But isn't brain pride good? Isn't it better to be scrupulous in the demands you make of your intellect, even arrogant, than lazy and apathetic? That's my big complaint about students these days: they are not only uneducated, they don't care that they are. It's so sad...the first day of my technical writing classes I always asked my students who knew how to go to a library shelf and locate a book merely through the call number. I have had classes where not one hand went up; at the most two or three did, and they were all raised by students over 35. I mourn that. The ability to find a book, to debate whether I want to check it out, to discover it the way great explorers discover new continents is one of the most pleasurable in my life. I think it tragic that few young people these days can experience it, or even want to.
Books are an absolute passion with me. New, used, slightly worn, or battered like war relics I adore them. I can't go more than 10 days without hitting Borders, and pilgrimages to Half Price Books are as exciting as visits to holy shrines are to the religious. I don't know who the patron saint of reading is but he or she has been sitting on my shoulder from birth. If I could just get people under the age of 35 to start looking on their shoulders for that saint I would be thrilled.
But isn't brain pride good? Isn't it better to be scrupulous in the demands you make of your intellect, even arrogant, than lazy and apathetic? That's my big complaint about students these days: they are not only uneducated, they don't care that they are. It's so sad...the first day of my technical writing classes I always asked my students who knew how to go to a library shelf and locate a book merely through the call number. I have had classes where not one hand went up; at the most two or three did, and they were all raised by students over 35. I mourn that. The ability to find a book, to debate whether I want to check it out, to discover it the way great explorers discover new continents is one of the most pleasurable in my life. I think it tragic that few young people these days can experience it, or even want to.
Books are an absolute passion with me. New, used, slightly worn, or battered like war relics I adore them. I can't go more than 10 days without hitting Borders, and pilgrimages to Half Price Books are as exciting as visits to holy shrines are to the religious. I don't know who the patron saint of reading is but he or she has been sitting on my shoulder from birth. If I could just get people under the age of 35 to start looking on their shoulders for that saint I would be thrilled.
An Angry Little Girl
I talked about the concept of "voice" in my first post, and how sad it is that a writer with a voice not like that of the successful mainstream authors rarely gets to be heard anymore. My voice is definitely not that of 99% of the authors published these days. It is that of my lead character in my mob novel Long Shot: Fiona Rea, a totally unique creation in this world of "What's going to sell like Rowling?" characters. Fiona is not some upstanding, admirable, model-your-daughters-after-her heroine; in today's PC parlance, she has "issues". She's very, very angry. The world pisses her off, and she's willing to take it on as often as necessary in order to keep the demons that rip at her soul from devouring her. She thinks that the best way to exorcise these demons once and for all is to become a mob assassin; she learns that this isn't true and that she's not the lost cause she imagines from a most unlikely source. In the end Fiona finds peace, not without a lot of harrowing experiences and in her own unique out-of-the-box way, and I'm very proud of her for that.
Fiona is also me without the restraints I impose upon myself on a daily basis. No, I would not become a mob assassin if given the opportunity (although every time I think of Fiona knocking a jerk stockbroker who gets out of line with her in the book out cold I still get a warm glow) but I, too, have issues, and an anger that surges through me so hotly that I think I will burst. I won't go into the reasons why, but anyone who read my story "Lost" in last year's Prairie Voices knows that answer. And if you were to read a chapter in Long Shot where Fiona recalls a certain incident in a park you would know much more.
The revelation of this seething rage I bear would probably surprise most people. Apparently, most of those I encounter think of me as this calm, quiet, funny, intelligent person who comes and goes and tries to handle trouble like an adult. That's who I am, but only because I force myself to be. The real me, while intelligent (and far too proud of that fact, I admit) is anything but calm and quiet. The real me is constantly spoiling for a fight. Part of this stems from incidents in my life that I have disguised as fiction in my work, but part of it also comes from the fact that the older I get the less tolerance I have for stupidity. Losing my ability to make estrogen back in October certainly didn't help this situation. Honest to God (as Fiona would say) sometimes I get so ticked at the fools in this world that I just want to beat the crap out of them. Why can't I drive down the block, go into a store, order a pizza, teach a class without encountering people who have no clue how to behave or do their jobs and don't feel a need to learn?It's maddening. Sometimes I think that if I go into one more store where 18 year-old Tiffany talks on her designer pink cell phone while she grudgingly takes a moment from her busy social life to check my purchase I'll be on the 6 o'clock news in the back of a patrol car.
Okay, I've just scared myself. And that's the fundamental difference between Fiona and me: I am frightened of the creature that would be unleashed if I were to give in and ram that cell phone down Tiffany's throat, and Fiona isn't. Fiona, frankly, would kick Tiffany's butt from here to Thursday without a moment's hesitation. Yeah, she'd go to jail, but she wouldn't give a damn about that. Fiona lives in the moment, while I am at a distinct disadvantage to her because I can consider the consequences of my actions and I was raised well.
Am I better off not being Fiona? Probably. I'm not sure how jail would affect me (I have frequent nightmares about being incarcerated...I wonder what that says about an ex-probation officer) and I'd rather not find out. But sometimes, when I've gritted my teeth and been polite to some inconsiderate ass because I don't want to get into a fight in a checkout line or a gas station, I wonder just how liberating it would be to let go and say "To hell with the consequences, I'm pissed!"
I need to find another character to bring to life so I can channel this rage. Fiona was wonderful therapy, but I think she needs to mature into someone closer to me in age and physical features. About the only thing we share is Irish blood -- Fiona's young, slender, and hot, and I'm not. Maybe I can find a way to make a 46 year-old, overweight, post-hysterectomy, part-time academic with a frightening inner fury as interesting as Fiona. If I can I'm writing her, the mass market possibilities be damned.
Fiona is also me without the restraints I impose upon myself on a daily basis. No, I would not become a mob assassin if given the opportunity (although every time I think of Fiona knocking a jerk stockbroker who gets out of line with her in the book out cold I still get a warm glow) but I, too, have issues, and an anger that surges through me so hotly that I think I will burst. I won't go into the reasons why, but anyone who read my story "Lost" in last year's Prairie Voices knows that answer. And if you were to read a chapter in Long Shot where Fiona recalls a certain incident in a park you would know much more.
The revelation of this seething rage I bear would probably surprise most people. Apparently, most of those I encounter think of me as this calm, quiet, funny, intelligent person who comes and goes and tries to handle trouble like an adult. That's who I am, but only because I force myself to be. The real me, while intelligent (and far too proud of that fact, I admit) is anything but calm and quiet. The real me is constantly spoiling for a fight. Part of this stems from incidents in my life that I have disguised as fiction in my work, but part of it also comes from the fact that the older I get the less tolerance I have for stupidity. Losing my ability to make estrogen back in October certainly didn't help this situation. Honest to God (as Fiona would say) sometimes I get so ticked at the fools in this world that I just want to beat the crap out of them. Why can't I drive down the block, go into a store, order a pizza, teach a class without encountering people who have no clue how to behave or do their jobs and don't feel a need to learn?It's maddening. Sometimes I think that if I go into one more store where 18 year-old Tiffany talks on her designer pink cell phone while she grudgingly takes a moment from her busy social life to check my purchase I'll be on the 6 o'clock news in the back of a patrol car.
Okay, I've just scared myself. And that's the fundamental difference between Fiona and me: I am frightened of the creature that would be unleashed if I were to give in and ram that cell phone down Tiffany's throat, and Fiona isn't. Fiona, frankly, would kick Tiffany's butt from here to Thursday without a moment's hesitation. Yeah, she'd go to jail, but she wouldn't give a damn about that. Fiona lives in the moment, while I am at a distinct disadvantage to her because I can consider the consequences of my actions and I was raised well.
Am I better off not being Fiona? Probably. I'm not sure how jail would affect me (I have frequent nightmares about being incarcerated...I wonder what that says about an ex-probation officer) and I'd rather not find out. But sometimes, when I've gritted my teeth and been polite to some inconsiderate ass because I don't want to get into a fight in a checkout line or a gas station, I wonder just how liberating it would be to let go and say "To hell with the consequences, I'm pissed!"
I need to find another character to bring to life so I can channel this rage. Fiona was wonderful therapy, but I think she needs to mature into someone closer to me in age and physical features. About the only thing we share is Irish blood -- Fiona's young, slender, and hot, and I'm not. Maybe I can find a way to make a 46 year-old, overweight, post-hysterectomy, part-time academic with a frightening inner fury as interesting as Fiona. If I can I'm writing her, the mass market possibilities be damned.
My First Blog
I have never had a blog before. That's not to say that I haven't ranted at hundreds of others -- I certainly have. I like ranting. It's the way I take out my frustrations, and since, of course, I know exactly how the world should be run and no one is paying the least bit of attention to me about it I have plenty to rant about.
But that's not what this blog is for. This is a writing blog, a way for me to try to get my writing groove back. You see, I haven't written anything for about a year. After I finished my mob manuscript Long Shot, which people who are (A) not related to me and (B) do not owe me money tell me is better than The Godfather I couldn't put more than about 40 pages down on paper before thinking, "Man, even I wouldn't want to read this stuff." Trying unsuccessfully to get an agent/publisher to bite on Long Shot depressed the hell out of me. After that, try as I might, I simply couldn't work up the enthusiasm to get into another story. It seems like a huge waste of time, and at 46 I don't have enough of that left that I can afford to waste any of it.
I know: such-and-such amazing/award winning/still-taught-in-college-classes writer was rejected 1,000,027 times before being published. F. Scott Fitzgerald used his 125 rejection notices for his first novel (I confess I forget which one) to paper his NY apartment. Dr. Seuss, when he was still Ted Geisel, was rejected for And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street by editors the world over before he was published. It's not supposed to be easy to break into the writing spotlight. How could I possibly appreciate my success if some publisher snapped up Long Shot on the first try?
I can see the point of this caution, and take some comfort in knowing that F. Scott and Ted didn't get in a publisher's door straight off the writers' boat, but that still hasn't helped me get rid of this writer's block. My jealousy of successful writers is the reason that I don't read modern fiction, because the majority of stuff I see streaming off publishers' presses isn't anywhere near as good as Long Shot. Frankly, I am a hell of a good writer, and that funny, intelligent, exciting, jump-off-the-page-and-bite-into-your-brain manuscript of mine is solid proof of that. Solid proof...which apparently doesn't matter at all. See, the big difference between these days and those of F. Scott and Ted is that the majority of publishers don't seem to be publishing talent anymore. Talent is not their concern -- sales are, and if a writer doesn't come up with a story that these people think is marketable to a wide audience they aren't interested in it no matter how brilliant it is. And there's the rub: I don't want to write another Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code because those have been done, but since my voice isn't like J.K. Rowling's or Dan Brown's I may never see my work in print. Apparently, publishers these days don't believe that originality sells.
I am definitely an original. I have been my whole life. I was the child at whom other kids looked askance because I was "weird". Not serial killer, Anton Chigurh weird, but book smart weird, the kind of weird that these days is probably much more admired than it was when I was 13. I have always had that legendary "different drummer" pounding away in my brain, and while she's great on a poster in some counselor's office encouraging creativity and freedom to be oneself she makes for a pretty lonely life for a troubled adolescent. Anton probably understood that.
Ah, Anton, the oh-so-strange and frightening killer in Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. If you have not seen this movie you need to. It's not only the Best Picture for this past Oscar year; I think it's one of the best movies in the history of film. I'm not making this statement because Javier Bardem, Anton's incarnation, is incredibly hot when he doesn't have that Dorothy Hamill haircut going on. I'm basing my gushing praise on the fact that the film is amazing, so amazing that it has made me anxious to read McCarthy's book.
I'm incredibly surprised at this revelation. It first hit me about 10 minutes into the film but I rejected it. "No", I told myself as I munched on my $6.00 popcorn at the IMAX, "you are not going to rush out and buy this book like everyone else who's seen this movie. It would be terribly undignified. You are better than that. You, my dear, are an artiste, and artistes do not buy other people's movie books." I warded off the notion until the next day, when I caught myself -- and I mean caught myself -- looking up if McCarthy's book was available at the CLC Library. Then I went to the Waukegan library website to look for it, and then the site of the Cook branch in Libertyville. Finally, I gave in and decided that Friday I am making a pilgrimage and buying No Country For Old Men, my writer's pride be damned.
Yes, I, Rae Lutz-Doberstein, bitter and jealous unpublished author, is going to buy a copy of a modern writer's fiction. I have this vision of the world trembling a little when I get to the checkout counter at Border's with my copy of No Country, when I become just another member of the reading masses about to be blown away by another writer's turns of phrase... "blown away". Yes, Anton would be proud.
But that's not what this blog is for. This is a writing blog, a way for me to try to get my writing groove back. You see, I haven't written anything for about a year. After I finished my mob manuscript Long Shot, which people who are (A) not related to me and (B) do not owe me money tell me is better than The Godfather I couldn't put more than about 40 pages down on paper before thinking, "Man, even I wouldn't want to read this stuff." Trying unsuccessfully to get an agent/publisher to bite on Long Shot depressed the hell out of me. After that, try as I might, I simply couldn't work up the enthusiasm to get into another story. It seems like a huge waste of time, and at 46 I don't have enough of that left that I can afford to waste any of it.
I know: such-and-such amazing/award winning/still-taught-in-college-classes writer was rejected 1,000,027 times before being published. F. Scott Fitzgerald used his 125 rejection notices for his first novel (I confess I forget which one) to paper his NY apartment. Dr. Seuss, when he was still Ted Geisel, was rejected for And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street by editors the world over before he was published. It's not supposed to be easy to break into the writing spotlight. How could I possibly appreciate my success if some publisher snapped up Long Shot on the first try?
I can see the point of this caution, and take some comfort in knowing that F. Scott and Ted didn't get in a publisher's door straight off the writers' boat, but that still hasn't helped me get rid of this writer's block. My jealousy of successful writers is the reason that I don't read modern fiction, because the majority of stuff I see streaming off publishers' presses isn't anywhere near as good as Long Shot. Frankly, I am a hell of a good writer, and that funny, intelligent, exciting, jump-off-the-page-and-bite-into-your-brain manuscript of mine is solid proof of that. Solid proof...which apparently doesn't matter at all. See, the big difference between these days and those of F. Scott and Ted is that the majority of publishers don't seem to be publishing talent anymore. Talent is not their concern -- sales are, and if a writer doesn't come up with a story that these people think is marketable to a wide audience they aren't interested in it no matter how brilliant it is. And there's the rub: I don't want to write another Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code because those have been done, but since my voice isn't like J.K. Rowling's or Dan Brown's I may never see my work in print. Apparently, publishers these days don't believe that originality sells.
I am definitely an original. I have been my whole life. I was the child at whom other kids looked askance because I was "weird". Not serial killer, Anton Chigurh weird, but book smart weird, the kind of weird that these days is probably much more admired than it was when I was 13. I have always had that legendary "different drummer" pounding away in my brain, and while she's great on a poster in some counselor's office encouraging creativity and freedom to be oneself she makes for a pretty lonely life for a troubled adolescent. Anton probably understood that.
Ah, Anton, the oh-so-strange and frightening killer in Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. If you have not seen this movie you need to. It's not only the Best Picture for this past Oscar year; I think it's one of the best movies in the history of film. I'm not making this statement because Javier Bardem, Anton's incarnation, is incredibly hot when he doesn't have that Dorothy Hamill haircut going on. I'm basing my gushing praise on the fact that the film is amazing, so amazing that it has made me anxious to read McCarthy's book.
I'm incredibly surprised at this revelation. It first hit me about 10 minutes into the film but I rejected it. "No", I told myself as I munched on my $6.00 popcorn at the IMAX, "you are not going to rush out and buy this book like everyone else who's seen this movie. It would be terribly undignified. You are better than that. You, my dear, are an artiste, and artistes do not buy other people's movie books." I warded off the notion until the next day, when I caught myself -- and I mean caught myself -- looking up if McCarthy's book was available at the CLC Library. Then I went to the Waukegan library website to look for it, and then the site of the Cook branch in Libertyville. Finally, I gave in and decided that Friday I am making a pilgrimage and buying No Country For Old Men, my writer's pride be damned.
Yes, I, Rae Lutz-Doberstein, bitter and jealous unpublished author, is going to buy a copy of a modern writer's fiction. I have this vision of the world trembling a little when I get to the checkout counter at Border's with my copy of No Country, when I become just another member of the reading masses about to be blown away by another writer's turns of phrase... "blown away". Yes, Anton would be proud.
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