What I Learned from Michael Chabon's Fountain City

So, I'm on Goodreads--have you heard of Goodreads? It's Facebook for books. Anyway, they have a challenge where you pick how many books you're going to read in 2011. My friend Mel showed me. I played along. I need the encouragement. I don't read as much as I did/should/would, but to be fair if I were able to bind all the student writing I read it would certainly give Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down a run for it's length (and that's yearly). It's a pathetically low bar I set for myself, but even so I find myself picking shorter and shorter books to read. Which is why I read Fountain City by Michael Chabon. It's not even a book, but four chapters of a failed book, a "wrecked" book with annotations and miscellany by the author. It was part of McSweeney's 36, so is actually, technically a magazine article, but it's on Goodreads freestanding so I'm counting it as a book. Point is you should read it. I should make my students read it. See how they like it. Having to read stuff. Here's a list of things I learned. I won't go into detail because since this is only four chapters, the spoilers wouldn't be the plot but how Chabon writes about his failure.

1. How writing can be suicide (non-poet edition).


2. The care of characters hanged from the "peg board of the imagination."


3. The role of the random.


4. Definition of draftitis.


5. Ditto authorial alienation


6. Thoughts on writing post-workshop


7. The need for a novelist's spouse (are you listening, Heather?).

Now to find something shorter to read.

Me at A Tribute to Novello

So for nineteen years the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County put on the incomparable Novello Festival of Reading. This year it went down with all the budget cuts, but thanks to the tireless work of Mark West (here's a great article about that work) there will be a tribute to Novello, with the hope that it will support the library system and that there will be a return to Novello in the future.

On October 2nd, I'll be taking part in the Short Story Writers Panel with Robert Boisvert and Aimee Parkison. There will be other great events that day at the Main Library, 310 North Tryon Street, Charlotte. Here's the press release.

Out of the The Red and The Black

So I actually finished this some time ago, but was not up to chattering on about it, what with the beginning of the semester, the relative joys of advising and syllabus writing--so relative. I can say reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black over the summer felt like an accomplishment. I can also say it wasn't always a pleasure, as I sympathize with others who feel it is slow to modern tastes. But also it is shockingly fast in places, like where Julien gets his military dream and then is drawn back all in the space of a few small paragraphs. And I guess I wasn't prepared for the focus on romance though I have to say it's an unusal love triangle.

What I found very modern was the creation of Julien, a character so irreligious in a religious time (even if it were all hypocrisy) and so bent on social climbing, he would do splend in contemporary America--replace all that talk of class with celebrity. My favorite line comes as he finds a sort of peace with himself in prison but is plagued with visitors: "'The worst of all prison's miseries,' he thought, 'is not being able to close the door.'"

What's in an Epigraph?

So as you will recall, totally, I am reading The Red and the Black. You know what's great? No? According to the translator Raffel, Stendhal either misquoted or made up most of the epigraphs at the beginning of the chapters: "Professor Jean-Jacques Hamm has concluded that only fifteen of the seventy-five epigraphs in The Red and the Black are correctly and verifiably attributed." I like to think he made them up, especially this one:

And am I to blame
If that's how things are?
--Machiavelli

Who's in (to) The Red and The Black

So some friends and I decided to read Stendhal's The Red and the Black--some good old fashioned beach reading. That's right, it's durn near a book club. I now see what all those people saw in having Oprah give them assigned reading.

Melody picked it out of a list we came up with. I think I suggested it for the list because of James Wood's references to it in How Fiction Works. I had actually avoided reading it in the past. I guess because of what I thought it was about. Which isn't really what it's about. What did I think it was about? Class, I guess. Which it is. Damn, I'm contradicting myself. Oh well, I contradict myself. Someone said that. But not about class the way I fear fiction is sometimes about class.

First I had to pick a translation. Damn foreigners writing in some other language. If you're going to be a famous author of classic literature, write in English! Preferably American.

So turns out translations are complicated. I settled on Burton Raffel's for The Modern Library because of this but have reservations because of that. I felt better about my choice when I went back and saw that Wood uses what is generally considered the "bad" translation.

I've just begun, but I'm already happy to see Stendhal take on some of my favorite topics, like spite and anger. Here's a couple character descriptions that I could apply to several people I know but won't name here, so if I know you, then it's probably you:

"...by clear signs of self-satisfaction and conceit, topped off by who knows what limitations, what lack of originality. Finally one is aware that his talents are confined to making sure he is paid exactly what he is owed, while paying what he himself owes only at the last possible moment."

Or

"...he was a tall young man, strongly built, with a florid face and great black whiskers--one of those coarse creatures, shameless and loud, that they call, in the provinces, good fellows."

Try these two as well:

"...he had learned by heart the entire New Testament in Latin; he also knew Monsieur de Maistre's On the Pope--and had no more belief in the one than in the other"

Or

"He thought that making a stop at church would be important to his hypocrisy."

Good stuff.

Brick

No, it's not that Ben Folds Five abortion song. It's a reading. It was last Friday night so you missed it unless you were there or were watching the streaming video, in which case I'm sure you enjoyed it. Good news, though, they'll be more I hear and you should watch out here. I think.

Anyway, I happen to be in Nashville area because of Heather, and I saw the word about the reading so we headed out. It was put on by Todd Dills of THE2NDHAND and Peter Cole of Keyhole Press. The reading was worth it. Jason Jordan started it off and read a great story you should look for in the future at The Northville Review, though you'll miss his deadpan delivery (also he has a better rundown of this reading). Then, Eric Durchholz in a bloody shirt (fashion, not murder, I think) read from Heartless. Lydia Ship rounded it out with two fun and poignant flash fictions, one of them made Bank of America change its overdraft policy--check out the other one at Night Train. Then, Todd Dills and the three readers round-robined on the theme of building with brick. Good stuff.

In related news, Heather very much liked her Husky mug of cafe au lait at the Portland Brew.

I Read Twilight and I Loved It!

That's right I love Twilight. Not the Mormon fairy tale of repressed sexuality, which I'm sure is great. True this Twilight does have sex with dead people, but not in the way the tweens would really get into. William Gay's Twilight is a Southern gothic, heavy on the gothic, where a prissy and perverse mortician is blackmailed by a brother and sister and in turn sics Sutter on them, Sutter being the kind deranged monster that perhaps only the South can produce. Anyway, good holiday reading.

Ever Get That Feeling?

You know the one. Where you've come to the end of a book and you were so engrossed in that fictional world that you can't pry your consciousness out of it. So you wander the real world fuzzy headed with a sense of anticipation that is never satisfied but only dissipates. Is this what old age will feel like?

Rereading

So I'm rereading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, for the third time, which is impressive for me because I so rarely reread a book. To be fair, I'm rereading this one because I'm teaching it in a class on the Western. So many books, so little time. Blah, blah. Add in the fact that I'm a slow reader...so, so very slow. And I can see just how finite my lifetime reading list really is. Which could lead some people to ask: why do you keep buying all those books then? To which I reply: stay out of my private business that I just happen to be airing in this public forum, you nosey jerks. Point being, Blood Meridian is an amazing novel, which you probably already knew because you happen to read at a faster rate than I do and have consumed David Copperfield while I was reading over this for typos. Point being, it's good to be trailing the kid and the judge again, at whatever pace.

Queens MFA Reading Bonanza

So it's the first week of school, and I'm dreadfully tried. But I have made it out to the readings. I saw Sally Keith and Kym Ragusa Sunday night, and I saw Katherine Min and Morri Creech last night. Tonight, I plan to make it out to see Elissa Schappell and Andrew Levy. Good literate times.

Morri Creech shares his Field Knowledge

The literary week continues with a reading by the University's new poetry professor Morri Creech at the local independent bookstore Park Road Books. He read mostly from his book Field Knowledge (Winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2005). One of my favorites, "His Coy Mistress" is a response to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and begins "Spare me the high-flown. Everyone knows that ploy/ you tricky swains work up to lift a skirt." That is why I tried my hand at poetry, but, of course, that never really worked out for me...who knew limericks weren't sexy?

The Elephant in the Reading

Jet lag has made me into a 9 to 5 guy. I wake at 7 in the morning and get tired at 10 at night. I'm working through the pain. So I went to the Queens MFA reading tonight. First up was Margot Singer, who read from her short story collection The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press), winner of the 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The other reader was Alan Michael Parker (AMP to acronym lovers), and he gave me hope for poetry with his comic listing poems and his reading of the title poem from his new collection Elephants & Butterflies. It also helps that he admitted to being a "pretentious shit" for titling a poem in Latin.

CPCC Reading and I Am Not Deaf

Okay. So I was going to be all literary and blog about the poetry reading, but Heather has forced me to face my aging.

First, we blog the CPCC Literary Festival (oh wait! I mean, the CPCC Arts Festival because after Irene Blair Honeycutt left they gutted the literary bit and threw in some other arts). Since there are fewer lit events and I have the hell schedule this semester, I only got to A. Van Jordan's reading, which was well worth it and gives me a little hope for the festival--the sparse crowd cast doubts on that glimmer. Beyond the fact that I have a special place in my heart for people who use an initial for their first name--so many people drop it or think its pretentious to hold on to that initial and to them I say, screw you, that's my first name and it's not going away. Anyway. A. Van Jordan gave a great read with personas from Einstein to Richard Pryor.

Anyway, so that was all literate and whatnot. But then, Heather goes on and on (Heather resents this representation) about this noise kids (kids these days!) are using for cell phone ringtones because it is at a frequency too high for old ears to hear, so they could be sitting in class and get a call without the teacher knowing it. First, as a teacher--those bastards! Secondly, I was very afraid I would not be able to hear it and thus old and thus closer to death, etc. But I heard, thank God Almighty, I heard it. That's right I am not old. Or I am at the very least not deaf. You hear that Death! So here is the noise.

Just kidding, here's the real noise. If you can't hear it...you my friend are old. My condolences.