Summer is officially here. Not in an astrological sense, of course--solstice is still a couple of weeks off--but damn the stars, the sweltering heat outside confirms it. My insomnia confirms it. With it, all of my productivity has completely evaporated. Hell, I'm easily distracted in the best of weather. In heat like this, I can barely put together two coherent sentences without staring off into the distance and wondering how on earth I'm going to get out of here. Seriously, it's taking multiple cups of coffee, a mind-focusing playlist, and 1000 BTUs of air conditioning just to finish this paragraph.
Still, I've been keeping busy. As the semester came to an end, I slowly started gathering all of the books I wanted to read last year, but couldn't, since I was reading other books for classes. Over the course of a couple of months, what started as one or two books I wanted to read has grown to a stack of books up to my hips, which I can't possibly hope to finish before the year's out, let alone the summer (one of my students this semester told me he reads a book a day during the summer...I'm lucky if I can finish one in a week). I'm whittling my way through it, hoping I'll manage to make at least a dent before I have to start teaching in August. I just finished reading The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, an excellent and eclectic collection edited by my chair, Ben Marcus. Though not everything in it is really my cup of tea, there was not a single story that didn't grab me and keep my attention all the way through. Currently I'm reading Paul LaFarge's Haussmann, which is a fun read and full of all sorts of nerdy references about Paris.
In addition, I took a position as one of the reading staff for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, which is Columbia's journal of literature. And art. I've basically been reading slush, which is the unsolicited manuscripts the journal receives from various aspiring writers. People like me, essentially, who aren't well-known enough that magazines ask for their work. Some of the stories are really excellent, but for the most part the stuff we read is really awful. Actually, awful isn't the word. Boring is the word. Earlie this year, Stephen King published an essay titled "What Ails the Short Story," which basically sums up my feelings while I read slush. The whole article is here, but the part that I'm thinking of goes like this:
Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.
It's the last one that keeps getting me. I think ninety percent of the stories I've rejected, it was because they felt like the author was playing it too safe. They're not bad stories, exactly--in fact, some have been absolutely functional pieces--but they don't do anything to define their own space in the literary canon. Either the author's voice is too weak to drown out the rest of the world and induce (as Ben Marcus would have it) the literary hallucination that makes us feel really immersed in a good story, or the subject is too uninteresting to keep me enthralled, but the end result is the same. A story that's easy to put down and forget about. The problems these stories have are, I should say, problems I see in my own work. Timidness. Over-explanation. An overly soft touch. It comes from wanting to be liked. To seem nice. Pleasant.
More and more as I read, both in my every day reading and my slush reading, I find myself looking for stories that are just slightly flawed. Not so badly that they can't keep it together, but just enough that what I'm looking at doesn't feel too constructed by human hands. I look for the glorious messes, the stories where I can see that the author isn't entirely in control but is reaching a little outside of their own grasp. These are the stories that grab my attention and keep it. The ones I want to publish right away before anyone else gets the privilege.
And that's about it for now. I'm planning to spend the summer writing, and hopefully you'll see this blog updated more regularly. I'm a little sad I missed out on the primary season, but really, did the country need another uninformed political blogger? I didn't think so, either. All the same, go Obama, and that's the last I'll say on the subject.
2 comments:
As I sit here tonight listening to the Dead Can Dance's "Selections from North America" live discs, with tears slowly creeping down the heavily bearded and scarred cheeks, I'm flashing back on the heady early days of the blogosphere before it got commodified and dominated by Mel Brooks' "common clay of the new west." It's nice to see that you've more than survived, seeing how back in the day I suspected that your serotonin (and other probable chemical) problems might have pulled you into the La Brea tar pits of the soul.
But your voice has indeed survived and still provides an island of, if not the reality we're supposed to be consuming, a most interesting surreality eternal fans of Kenneth Robeson, ERB, the eye in the pyramid, and various other tropes that keep our minds alive and can read with assured interest.
I'm not dead, but I'm apparently no longer driven as I once was which, given the rapidly approaching milestone of half a hundred years, is perhaps neither surprising nor unexpected.
You once placed me in a position that I almost certainly didn't deserve, but which felt damned good. I don't remember that I ever thanked you for that, so I'm doing that now.
I have no requests (other than, of course, we need to have a beer or 50 together sometime before we shuffle). Okay, I do request that you keep writing more consistently than I have which you obviously have.
Take care, mate,
Semi-quasi-crypto-retired Ethel
I'm stumbling on this very late and responding from the viewpoint of one of those obscure authors--a poet, in my case--whose manuscripts flow in on the slush pile (and mostly flow right out again).
I was captured by this:
I find myself looking for stories that are just slightly flawed. Not so badly that they can't keep it together, but just enough that what I'm looking at doesn't feel too constructed by human hands. I look for the glorious messes, the stories where I can see that the author isn't entirely in control but is reaching a little outside of their own grasp. These are the stories that grab my attention and keep it. The ones I want to publish right away before anyone else gets the privilege.Are there any more editors like you out there?? I wonder if one reason you don't see more stories like that--or poems, I'd bet--is that writers trying to get published are convinced that those human flaws are precisely what will get their work tossed out, in a world that seems full of brilliant young writers with fearsomely impressive educations cranking out reams of flawless manuscripts.
In a way it doesn't matter to me. I'm thousands of years old and long past any hope of a "career," and I am trying to follow Donald Hall's advice and write toward a larger ambition. Not that that is likely either. (Though obviously this is all still touching a nerve, isn't it?) Anyway--I think the best of what I write is something like what you described here, and I'm glad there is--or was in 2008--at least one person reading manuscripts out there who still values that kind of work.
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