It seems to me the idea of inspiration is a terrible burden, to many. A cruel one. A myth. I think people are haunted by it, as they are horoscopes that say they’ll meet a lover this week, or that there is a perfect someone out there for everyone, that maybe there is a god, but maybe not, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, Santa Claus. Maybe there is inspiration. Maybe there are just ideas. Maybe it is just the world. Maybe there really is a jolly fat man in a red suit and a beard with a gift just for you.

Maybe just go make whatever it is you are waiting for that man to give you.

I’ve got a guest post up over at Nova Ren Suma’s lovely blog, Distraction No. 99. Nova is one of the first friends I made over the internet, a talented and enthusiastic YA author who is one of the hardest working writers I know. I really admire her. Watching her grow from a popular blogger to a debut author to an experienced writer has been gratifying, and I was happy to write this post for her.

As I say in the post, I’m fairly leery of the whole inspiration thing. I prefer to look for ideas. This may seem like semantics but I feel as if inspiration suggests that what comes doesn’t belong to you and you need it to belong to you in order to do anything real with it. And you need to keep at it. I recently had lunch with the AAWW interns, and one of them asked me, “What do you think, having taught writers for a while, is the thing that makes the big difference? What separates the students who go on to become writers from the students who don’t?”

“Stamina,” I said, very quickly. Persistence is the gift that brings all the others. I know many writers with a great deal of talent who do not write. Art is not fair, it is not democratic, it has no court of appeals. Talent is not equally apportioned, but luckily it also doesn’t matter as much as stamina. There is little science to it all that is reliable except that I have seen persistence carry the day over talent again and again.

And it may be this that inspires me most of all.

Maud Newton astutely considered the legacy of David Foster Wallace in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. I thought it was an exhilarating read. She begins with a quote from “Tense Present” and  then uses it as a mirror from which to consider him and then the rest of us, as well as the way he lives on now after death. She describes him hidden in our language and syntax, as if he were coded into it like something out of science fiction, a ghost in the machine of the internet, performed by millions:

Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large. My own archives, dating back to 2002, are no exception.

Misperformed, then: DFW manqués. 

I remember the first time I came across what seemed to me to be an overly overt Wallace imitator among my students, someone who was imprisoning their own style and chance to be original inside a performance of Wallace’s style. It’s not something peculiar to Wallace–after some time in the trenches of teaching creative writing, I can point out from a mile away the many imitators, of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop. And of more recent vintage, Lydia Davis, for example. Or in the case of one season as a reader for NYFA’s fiction panel, it seemed to me like half of New York State’s applicants had decided to try to be Jonathan Safran Foer.

The student I speak of, he earnestly was doing what he was doing because he felt summoned out of himself by Wallace’s work, called to write himself. But I knew about this mistake. I’d tried to do it myself in college, with Marguerite Duras and Christa Wolf. I wanted to not be myself, to be someone else, because I couldn’t believe I could succeed as me. The sad part was the imitations were where it all fell apart for this student, something else I knew from experience. I worked with him as patiently as I could, because I knew he thought he was honoring a hero, when to really honor the hero, he’d have to depart the hero’s style. But he really fought me, believing the best of his work was his most successful imitation of Wallace, and unable to see his own work’s qualities.

What I told him is, You can’t really imitate someone, something a fellow writer said to me once, and the person who said it is lost in time to me, but it’s true–you can’t, not really. You can try. In the end you end up doing something that belongs to you. The question is, do you understand it? The problem with borrowing too much, with trying too hard to be another writer instead of yourself, comes when you end up like the apes on Planet of the Apes, pounding the glass panels of the spaceship, not knowing how to make it fly because you didn’t make it and so you don’t know what it’s for. The reason any of these much-imitated writers’ works succeed is because they felt the force of what they were doing–and your attempt to copy them, that does not touch that same place, even if you’re sure it does. And I don’t think it can, not intentionally.

I was out to beers with Andrew Altschul and Joshua Furst the other night and the many modernist imitators busy even now trying to defamiliarize the familiar came up. We talked about how out of step they are. It’s not the job of our age anymore. Our age is unfamiliar enough—every day, lately, our world shows us we don’t know what it is. The Modernist imitators, any imitators, run the risk of performing what my Broadway actor friends call “museum theater”, the literary equivalent of the touring company for “Hello Dolly!”, with more in common with hymn singing at church than literary production.

What Maud then nails is how a DFW imitation became what I call the “house style of the internet”, something I remember speaking about at a panel I was on with Emily Gould, Marie Mockette and Ed Park, at the New School years ago. We couldn’t put our finger on where it had come from, we all just knew it existed. And that we had all done it. We also all wanted out of it. Maud points out the resemblance between it and DFW’s style:

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! “Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.

Blogging is something that bothered me almost immediately once I began doing it, for the way it was both informal and permanent. It was supposed to be casual, because who could spend a ton of time on their blog? But it would also be how you were judged, maybe more than by what you spent your actual time on—your books. The things you published on the internet were there for a very long time when compared to print. Part of why I have published as much as I have on the internet comes from an acknowledgement that a hiring committee for a school is definitely going to Google me–you’re naive if you think otherwise–and read what I’ve written on the internet. They’d never take the time to go through the libraries looking for my journal and magazine publications the same way–those are just too hard to find. I understood I needed solidly written material on the web, and material that wasn’t my blog, even though I also knew this same group would read my blog. I started blogging in 2004 fully aware that my readers who knew my fiction and essays knew me as a writer with an intensely compressed, poetical style from that first novel. I knew that a blog that was too casual would fail them, even though I also knew, the narrators of that first novel are not me. I couldn’t write a blog in that style. And soon, this other, increasingly omnipresent style, crept in. And it was faux-naive, it was a “What, are you here?” sort of tone, because it seemed too egotistical on the one hand to believe anyone would read it, and on the other, too naive to think no one would. So you pitched to the middle, whether you knew it or not. Or, at least, I did, and many others. You tried to be funny, and likable.

To be Wallace, perhaps. I’ll admit this right now–I didn’t reach much of him back in the day. It wasn’t until his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” that I paid attention, and then eventually read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men sometime in 2007. But I didn’t need to read him to be influenced by him. So much of what I read was people reading him and taking on the style.

Blogs came of age at a strange time. Language had become uncertain, even treacherous. It was the time of George W. Bush, of feeling like our president was a weird hologram of his father, snide and leering where the other had been prim and smug, and yet speaking with the same malaprops and syntax, as if the whole family was made to speak in misunderstandings in order to be understood. And it was a time when I saw malaprops spread, as if we all had to use them if we were going to agree that George W. Bush was the president. Faux-naivete was a perfect shield, I think, in a very general way. Our country had become something terrible and strange, or it always had been and now we knew. It seems to me we are still in the process of discovering what our country really is. And Wallace, well, he was a writer whose work gave back a vision of the world that pierced the scrim of the fear we were all feeling. If we imitated him, or imitated each other imitating him, really, I think we did it because of how we all wanted to find our way through. But it became like a game of telephone, but with style, and what had once been able to clarify something soon obscured them.

Maud introduced a beautiful quote from Wallace over at her blog, by way of explaining what she meant by his need to please. Which is to say, he knew of it himself, and worked at removing it–she didn’t just make it up. Wallace here is writing about his fiction:

I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’d be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it’s impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to “entertain,” give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I’ll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it’s serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader “Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!”

Now, to an extent there’s no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There’s some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it. But there’s an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art…

Of course, that last line is exactly how I’ve felt about blogging. What I fight every time I do it. More on that soon.

When approaching an author site, what I find least interesting is a sort of bland, safe, risk-free aesthetic, a headshot with links and the sense that I’ve been handed a corporate resume. It just looks like you didn’t try. Just because Apple assures you can do the site yourself doesn’t mean you should (unless you do know or have time to learn how to do these things). If you’re not interested in a web design sideline, set aside part of that advance and make yourself a site with a professional’s help. And with that person, make something that’s fun for you and your reader at the same time. What I want as a reader is to be, well, fascinated. And with fiction in particular, I don’t want to see the writer’s face first—I want to see something else. I believe that writers of fiction are people who are deeply uninterested in themselves and are much more interested in other people. I think readers of fiction are people anxious to be transported, taken away from the world they know. The best sites understand that yes, of course, something of the author’s personality is involved in making the sale, but they do not make it like a facile job ad or personal ad. Unless of course, it is somehow hilarious and satirical.

Some more of my favorite author sites, that I found instructive also:

• Samantha Hunt’s site allows you to move through information about her two novels in a way that is visually engaging and clear at the same time.
• Porochista Khakpour’s site is a matchbox, a visual pun on her debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects.
• Ed Park’s site is constructed like you’re seeing into his inbox.
• Hugh Ryan’s is blog-like and personal, but is in actuality a series of lead paragraphs to his publications online.

I feel like the bonus website winner most recently is James Kaelan, featured on GalleyCat last week. GallyCat was looking at his corporately-sponsored book tour, and this is not only a perfect example of some of what I addressed last week, but a portrait of a new generation of modern author.

Background: James Kaelan debuted this summer with a novel in stories called We’re Getting On. He was a founder of the Flatmancrooked publishing house, who did publish him, and he writes criticism for The Millions. He’s also a rock climbing enthusiast and cyclist, and he cares a lot about saving the planet from pollution. When he approached Cannondale, Flip, Bellwether and other corporate sponsors about supporting his Zero Emission Book Tour, they signed on because the brand relationship made instant sense for them. And he soon found additional sponsors in the form of organic farms along the way too, who fed him and let him stay with them.

He also happens to have a giant chest tattoo that was featured prominently in his cover feature over at Poets & Writers. In any case, thanks to his sponsors, he had a well-publicized and funded tour that was completely idiosyncratic to him and that did attract the attention of a P&W cover.

The quote from him on Galleycat is instructive:

“I had the naive confidence that if the idea was good enough, we could pitch it to the right people and they would support it. I ended up being at least somewhat correct. Cannondale jumped right on it. [My publicist] Jessi Hector from Goldest Egg pitched them and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a great idea’ and set up a meeting and gave us bikes … You should know InDesign and be able to put together a good pitch deck. More important than the actual aesthetics of the presentation is just have the idea. I talk a lot about adding narrative to narrative–the story that sells your story.”

Boldface mine. More than a few authors I know are disturbed at the way in which biographical criticism seems to have birthed a literary cult of personality, in which you are selling a personality or your life more than a novel. Which is to say, you could once believe that if you were successful, someday a museum would have a recreation of your bedroom or study, and now, to be successful, you feel you’re asked to be transparent about where you work and how, and also if you are a good person. There are ways around this, I think, or ways to handle it that don’t make you feel like inventing a time machine back to before the internet—the genie is not going back in the bottle. The important thing is to do something that is not completely humiliating and might even be fun. Which is what James did.James took a cause he believes in seriously—the reduction of carbon emissions, the saving of the planet—and made an elegant alignment between himself and the cause, all the way down to the book itself. On his site you can purchase copies that are made from both recycled paper and seed-paper—a paper that is plantable. Which is to say, if you throw your copy of his novel into the ground, a birch tree, in this case, will grow from it. He is, in other words, sincere about what he was doing, and the public has responded to it.

The site, moreover, has graphic unity with the book’s design, and makes a seamless connection between author, tour, book and sponsors.

In an aside on the independent publicist, the success of this isn’t just that Kaelan hired an independent publicist to do this: Flatmancrooked, where he is no longer an editor, worked with him and his publicist cooperatively. Granted, as a founder and ex-editor, that helps, but in general too often independent publicists and inhouse publicity get on each other’s toes. This is… not awesome—inhouse often feels inherently criticized by the freelancer, even though they also are the first to tell you how much you have to do yourself. For reasons unclear to me, many of these never seem to remember that you are a writer and not a publicist also, as you forgot to go to school for that. So why do they then get hurt that you’d use another professional to help you do the part they themselves have said you have to do yourself? Can this silliness please just end forever? I am sure the issues are more complex than this author gets to know, I just ask inhouse publicists and marketing departments at publishing houses reading this to look at Kaelan’s story and see what can get done when the effort with independents is collaborative.

In any case, “The Story That Sells the Story” that Kaelan speaks of is essentially the narrative you as a writer are inside of or could be aware you are inside of if you could only see yourself from the outside, which, well, we are not often given to see. Kaelan and his team understood how he could take his passions and create a marketing plan organic to himself that tells readers who he is without being unnecessarily confessional or self-exposing. Yes, the open shirt might seem a bit much except I suspect James is one of those men for whom an open shirt is not so very strange. Rock climbers can be like that. The point isn’t to get shirtless onto P&W, but to figure out who you as a writer are and how you can participate in selling your book without feeling like throwing up. And perhaps even having fun in the process.

For some past posts on blogging, check out my CLMP panel summary from 2008, when I spoke with Ed Park, Marie Mockett, Emily Gould and Luc Sante. Also, this post on a 2007 CLMP Conference, and this one.

There is a great deal of pressure for writers to blog, for themselves and for others. Typically, whoever’s asking you has the presence of mind to be a little ashamed: “We can’t really pay you for this, but you’ll get your name out there.” This of course is disheartening for people like myself. I worked as a waiter while finishing my first novel, and being paid nothing for what I write is only going to send me back there.

Still, I’ve been blogging for six years now and during that time have watched while many writers who were print stars see their fortunes decline for not having at least a site, much less a blog presence, while blog stars get signed to books and given preference in the surviving print mags. I’ve even been paid for online content (!). I’ve also seen many badly done blogs, people who, it was clear, were blogging because someone told them to do it, and not because they wanted to, and that is, of course, the wrong kind of getting your name out there.

I began blogging to get over burnout after the publication of my first novel. I had debut author fatigue and had lost a sense of writing as being fun in any possible way, and this was alienating to me. Also, I had many former students and was tired of answering their questions via email one by one, and the blog seemed like a good place to put the answers to the FAQ.  I shut down that first blog and opened this one a few years ago, and what I have learned is that keeping a blog has helped me more than it has hurt me. It’s helped me get teaching jobs, kept me in touch with people and introduced me to new people I would never have met, people I wanted to meet. Also, it’s helped me drive traffic to online sites posting my work. All the same, there were many times I thought of just shutting it down in exasperation, like when I printed my first blog after closing it and discovered it was 723 pages long (one friend even said it had a narrative arc).

The first and most basic lesson I’ve learned is that in the current market, you can take some control over your fortunes via a well-made blog and website. Jennifer Egan is getting a lot of attention this week for her excellent website, for example. Tayari Jones’ site is warm and brings you in to the variety of interests she has, and her readers have come to feel like she’s their friend. The love is mutual. In the case of a writer like Tayari (she’s a friend, I can call her that) one thing her blog does is give her a way to give back to her fans, in appreciation for their support. As Emily Gould has said, the internet is basically what you think it is, whatever you think it is. It can be amazing or horrible, depending on how you treat it.

The basic thing you need to keep in mind is that a site should take a moment’s interest in you—whatever it is that made them google you or click a link with your name—and quicken it into a lasting interest. And it should make it easy to do so. Here are what I think of as the basic 8 things to keep in mind.

1. Be sincere. If you are designing a blog right now at the bidding of a publicist who thought it would be a good idea, pause. Take a look around. Do something you would really want to do past the launch of your book, too. Scott Heim, for example, has been music blogging. In some other life, he might have been a musician, or a music critic, but for now he’s doing it because he loves it and his fans love it too. Miranda July’s site for herself and for her debut collection No One Belongs Here More Than You is a great example of how to be an author, have a site and not compromise yourself as an artist. It’s funny, informative and the bland professionalism I see everywhere is absent.
2. It is not a diary. In the early giddy days of the internet, people would anonymously write diaries and put them online and sometimes they might get a book deal. If you are an author already, this is not your future and typically not your past. And all of them had to learn the hard way that employers do not like you to publish your complaints about them, and loved ones do not like it either—the lesson of any of the ages for writers. Also: it is boring. DO NOT blog your daily life unless it is attached to a moment of insight. However, writers journals have a long literary tradition, as has the commonplace book.
3. Set limits. If you are asked to write for free for someone else on a blog or online mag that is not yours, go to Alexa. Check the traffic of the site. If it is unrated, this is not a good sign, say no. Also: Only write for free for others a few times a year or you will become rageful and bitter about the internet, and this is not the point of any of this.
4. Set even more limits. One thing that is hard for me about all of this is that I am known for some carefully crafted prose. This is hard to pull off on a blog. And yet I will be judged by any number of people in any number of capacities for the content here. Yes, dilemma. I can’t spend all day on blog posts. So I set a time limit: I can spend no more than an hour per day on the blog. Once the hour is up, if the post is not finished, it waits for the next day to be done. Also, I try to post once a week.
5. Blog your process. Write posts related to reading you might be doing or research on your novel, and tease future work appearing before you announce it fully, and when you do this, link to previous related posts—so, if working on a story. This gives your readers a deeper sense of connection to you without making you feel overexposed to them.
6. Don’t be afraid to be a traffic whore. Yes, I said that. For example, my deeply cynical post on the Lost finale, entitled “In Which I Explain the Lost Finale” also won me a lot of traffic, plus I enjoyed writing it. But also, if asked to write for free, make sure your post at that high-traffic site you choose has a link to your blog. There are several reasons for this: 1.) a live link at the bottom of the post is an invitation for them to click through, 2.) You want that reader who found you there to then find you everywhere—to click through to your blog, to find your page of links to your work elsewhere, and to come back to your blog so that when you do publish something next you can drive traffic to the place you are publishing. This is of value to your potential publishers. It is part of what they mean when they say “platform”. Weirdly, they are not talking about a place where you get a medal, a sash and a bouquet.
7. Take posts and turn them into longer pieces you then sell for money. If the post is just getting longer, keep in mind that on the average, you don’t want to write something longer than 800 words for a blog post. And if you’ve devoted that much time to it, it’s time to get paid. Also, periodically take down your archives and go through them. Is there something that is the germ of a longer essay or story? That is the best possible outcome.
8. Don’t be afraid to take a break. Maud Newton, for example, who’s literally made an art of blogging, recently did a beautiful post to explain that she’s working on her novel and grieving the death of her father-in-law, and thus won’t be posting as regularly. Her fans will wait for her because a.) they want that book and b.) at this point, they love her, and will respect the silence. When she returns, she’ll be more popular than ever. And the book will be even more beloved by them.

And now we’re way past 800 words and the hour is up. Good luck with your blog!

Up now, the author/site thing, examined…also, in the comments, please leave links to any author sites you admire.

During the semester I read approximately 250 pages a week, to as much as 600, if it’s thesis season–and that doesn’t even include my own writing or my email. But I also don’t notice it–I just do it, like breathing or drinking coffee or noticing where I’m walking. I did take an old-fashioned speed-reading course in grade school (described in my first novel, Edinburgh–yes, this is among the autobiographical parts) and so that is part of it (we were not taught to skim, but shown the lines at high speed via a slide projector), but all the same it can be hard to muster the energy to find books not related to my research or my curriculum. Books for pleasure, in other words.

This, of course, is a trap, and should be fought. So today I fought.

I’d gone out to the Post Office today for an errand, to find it dark due to Veteran’s Day, and with the time I’d allotted, went to my local bookstore, Amherst Books, where I found Refresh, Refresh. This is a graphic novel, based on a story by Benjamin Percy, and tells the story of the sons of three soldiers, all friends, and the turmoil of living life with a father who’s off at war. It’s one of the most honest things I’ve read about what the lives of these boys are like, and the ending is devastating. I’ve just met Percy recently and am now also looking forward to his new collection, of the same title.

Yes, all you’d have to do is watch CNN to decide you were never going to use Twitter–few things make me despair like seeing an anchor read reactions off Twitter–but for writers and literary feeds, if you use it right, it’s like having a crowd as your research intern–researching what you don’t know or wouldn’t think to look for but still want to know. Think of each entry as being like an electronic catalog card, for something you weren’t looking for explicitly but are happy to find. This is more true now with the list function. Today for example, Matthew Hunte shared a find from the Believer–Donald Barthelme’s syllabus, 81 books he wanted his students to read (pictured here). Matthew is, in the short time I’ve known him, one of my favorite people on there, and I highly recommend following his feed.

Many of the titles on the Barthelme list were familiar, but there was one I noticed I’d always seen but never read: The Changeling, by Joy Williams. I’m something of a Williams Completist, owning even the guide to the Florida Keys she wrote, but this had always escaped me, and it turns out, from this post over at Paper Cuts, there was a reason: when it came out, Anatole Broyard destroyed it in a review, and it faded out of sight. Last year, though, the Fairy Tale Press brought it out again in a 30th Anniversary edition. And soon it will be mine.

If you’re interested, here is an interview at Bookslut with Tao Lin interviewing Joy Williams on the occasion of the reissue. Kate Bernheimer, the publisher at Fairy Tale, is the one who edited me in the anthology Brothers and Beasts, with my essay “Kitsune”, about the fox demons in Edinburgh.

My correspondence with Maud Newton on the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair is up over at Granta. For more, check out several of Maud’s posts on Rhys leading up to this, here, here and here. I’m especially a fan of that last post of Maud’s, on the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Some outtakes:

• Vis a vis the viciousness of When The Wicked Man: One of the books that loses the publisher money in that novel is titled Triple Sec, a not so subtle dig at Rhys for Rhys—few people except those in their direct circle would have known it, as this was also the original title of the book that brought her to Ford’s attention.
• Asburnham in The Good Soldier is the character I think of as a stand-in for the man Ford wanted to be. Dowell seems to me to be Ford as he was.  Still, it’s entertaining to think of, when you read the Wikipedia entry suggesting a homosexual subtext between the two characters.
• Also, when Maud says she can imagine what I’d say about Ford’s impressions of Oscar Wilde, I feel sure what she means is, if you look at the quote, you can see Ford is critical of Wilde for no longer being attractive. Which supports my idea of his suppressed homosexuality.
• The loneliest thing to me in all of this is that she was never going to be Ford’s, not as Bowen was, not as she hoped, because she was too poor to afford Ford. And she never knew this. I think much in her life might have been different if she could have known this. It’s not that I think they belonged together forever—I’m not as much of a romantic as that. But Rhys had a shame over accepting money from him that might have been lessened if she knew how often he did the same with Bowen.
• Beyond whatever I feel about Ford and Rhys, each of them has had a significant impact on my work and how I think about writing fiction. I’m not only a Rhys fan, in other words, though my feeling for Ford is much different, less emotional. Rhys I discuss here; Ford is next.

Later this week I’ll be posting about what I think of as the impact Ford Madox Ford on contemporary fiction, why he matters to me, and how I teach using his ideas.

For now, I thought I’d leave you with a bibliography of supplementary texts I read to prepare for my conversation with Maud, in addition to Quartet, The Good Soldier, The Blue Hour and When The Wicked Man:

• The Left Bank and Other Stories, by Jean Rhys (For Rhys fans as well as anyone who loves Paris)
• Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, by Max Saunders (2 volumes, impeccably written)
• The Worlding of Jean Rhys, by Sue Thomas (A very enjoyable academic read, with an original style and terrific insight)
• Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women, by Joseph Wiesenfarth (A bit of an apologist for Ford, but very original and very smart)
• The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen (this is, as you might expect, mostly concerning money)
• The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, by Thomas C. Moser (a sturdy, reliable account of the ways the biography and the fiction meet)

]]> http://koreanish.com/2009/06/24/only-two-classes-of-books-are-of-universal-appeal-the-very-best-and-the-very-worst-%e2%80%94-ford-madox-ford/feed/ 1 koreanish Transatlantic Review page http://koreanish.com/2009/06/22/whats-wrong-with-the-american-essay/ http://koreanish.com/2009/06/22/whats-wrong-with-the-american-essay/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:11:04 +0000 koreanish http://koreanish.com/?p=1317 Continue reading →]]> I’m spending some time at lunch today reading Christina Nehring’s excellent essay over at truthdig.com on what is wrong with the American Essay, and she’s making some excellent points:

• Are we, as readers, responsible for the decline of the American essay? Have we become lazier, less interested, less educated? Attention spans, to be sure, have shortened. Gone are the days when people pored over periodicals at languorous length during transatlantic crossings. But this is not the reason why essay collections gather dust and why essayists so often count themselves “second-class citizens” (in the words of E.B. White). If the genre is neglected in our day it is first and foremost because its authors have lost their nerve. It is because essayists—and their editors, their anthologists and the taste-makers on whom they depend—have lost the courage to address large subjects in a large way.
• The essay they prefer has a distinctive tone, which Epstein has called “middle-aged.” I’m not an age-essentialist, but Epstein is, and what he means by “middle-aged” is clearly quiet. Slow-moving. Soft-hitting. Nostalgic. Self-satisfied. It’s the tone he perfects in his signature essay, “The Art of the Nap.” The tone Louis Menand espouses when he states—in the introduction to the 2004 BAE—that his preferred nonfiction “is the one that makes a lost time present.” The tone other BAE writers use when they reminisce rather aimlessly about their trout-fishing expeditions as a child; the drugstore on their block; the New Year’s party they spent watching television with extended family.
• “It’s only 11 o’clock,” Alan Lightman informs us in the keynote essay of the 2000 BAE, “but I am a morning person and I am already tired. I nod and sink into a chair. To wake myself up, I drink some tart apple cider. …” Hundreds of words later Mr. Lightman is still “half-sleeping against a wall”—and so are his readers. It was one lame night then, and it’s one lame night now. It does not improve in the retelling.
• If the essays in these anthologies boast a distinctive (and distinctively dreary) tone, they also boast highly specific subject matters and—for all the editors’ sporadic salutes to individualism—startlingly homogenous author profiles.
• Although Michel de Montaigne, who fathered the modern essay in the 16th century, wrote autobiographically (like the essayists who claim to be his followers today), his autobiography was always in the service of larger existential discoveries. He was forever on the lookout for life lessons. If he recounted the sauces he had for dinner and the stones that weighted his kidney, it was to find an element of truth that we could put in our pockets and carry away, that he could put in his own pocket. After all, Philosophy—which is what he thought he practiced in his essays, as had his idols, Seneca and Cicero, before him—is about “learning to live.” And here lies the problem with essayists today: not that they speak of themselves, but that they do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalizeable insight into the human condition. It is as though they were unthinking stenographers—“recording secretaries,” as indeed the most self-conscious 20th-century essayist, E.B. White, called them—pedantically taking down their own experience simply because it is their own.

The emphasis there was mine.

That last point in particular hits on for me what has become so uncomfortable about the current nonfiction book boom and about blogs. When I was studying literary nonfiction writing in the late 80s with Annie Dillard, she was very clear, we were engaged in a moral exercise. “You will never be this alive again,” she was saying, again and again, “and neither will your reader.” She wanted us to respect the fact that wasting people’s time was like delivering a blow. Which is in fact what it feels like to me, when I read something through to the end and think…it was all for that? Or, as Nehring puts it:

• There was a feeling of urgency in Seneca’s prose—as there is in the prose of all the great essayists after him: “You are called in to help the unhappy,” he reminds his fellow intellectuals. “Where are you off to? The person you are engaging in word play with is in fear.”

In reading for my upcoming exchange at Granta with Maud Newton over the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote about each other after their affair, I came across an anecdote about her I couldn’t use in what I was describing, but it stayed with me, from The Worlding of Jean Rhys, by Sue Thomas. She described how Jean, after hearing her mother say she preferred dark babies, would look in the mirror each morning, hoping to see she’d darkened and wishing she would.

I remembered being in something like the third grade, standing on a chair in my mom’s bathroom, staring at my face, reimagining it as either all Korean or all white. And feeling doomed by being neither.

Like Rhys, I had moved from a warm island full of brown people to a cold land full of white ones, descended from the English who had surrounded her there. In Voyage In The Dark, when she writes, “I got used to everything except the cold…” I thought, Yes. It was like finding I had an older sister a long time ago. And so Wide Sargasso Sea was then one of the novels I turned to when I sought to find a tone for the novel I’m finishing now, The Queen of the Night.

In college I developed the intense attachment I have for Jean Rhys, discovering her at a time when I was tired of what I was. I was tired of trying to be accepted by either Korean Americans or white ones, and tired of being misunderstood by just about anyone I met of any ethnicity— tired of being asked how my parents met, of being questioned on “what I was”.  Worse, as I considered being a writer back in the early 80s, I felt like literature was a giant mall of ethnic restaurants, and that I wasn’t going to be able to work in either the American one or the Korean one. I began reading the stories of mixed race people in order to understand how they survived. The answer was, by being either beautiful, strong or smart, or all three, for best results.

Rhys was two for three, never as strong as she wanted to be. Never able to be, as she put it in Quartet, the novel she wrote about her affair with Ford, “sporting”. But even so, the force of her work is unmistakable. Her legacy accomplishing what she perhaps could not.

Maud and I each read The Blue Hour, by Lillian Pizzichini, as a part of this—the news a biography was coming out had us both excited and partly inspired the coming exchange. I found in reading it I wondered if instead it should be thought of as a biographical novel? If Pizzichini would have felt more free if she had her as a character, in the way Henry James and Virginia Woolf have recently been reimagined by Colm Toibin and Michael Cunningham. I kept wanting it to be, I confess, like the lavish biography Judith Thurman wrote about Colette, Secrets of the Flesh. All the same, The Blue Hour made for a good deal of the juicy reading I was hoping for, though I questioned much of her sources for the feelings she felt Jean felt. It was mixed pleasure and disappointment.

Maud has reviewed it beautifully for The Second Pass. Look for the back and forth between Maud and I starting Monday, at Granta.

An editor rejected me because she “already had a half-Asian writer.” I was devastated. Much as I loved this other writer’s work, I knew that our material was different. Would anyone else notice?

I immediately thought, is there an editor or agent who would say, Oh sorry, I have my white writer?

On my Facebook, where I posted this as well, a former student mentioned he was having the same struggle as an Italian American author. This is perhaps the most destructive outcome of identity politics I can imagine, albeit a byproduct—the treatment of writers as senators of a kind from a particular community, with space made only when death comes or when sales “vote” you out of office, as it were. My fear is that this incredibly reductive approach to the selling of literature is reverse engineering the work people write. It reduces us as writers to mere performances of ethnography, forced to write from inside a particular boundary, which is the least interesting idea of literature I can imagine. And for a “half-Asian” writer like myself or Marie, it becomes bewildering—where, exactly, is the country we are “from”? Put another way, which parent do I reject, and which one do I pretend I am the most like, and then perform that, waiting to be exposed as “inauthentic”?

I say “new and familiar” because during the submission of my first novel I went through an early 21st Century version of this, with editors asking “Is it a ‘gay novel?’” or “Is it an ‘Asian American novel?’” I was infuriated. “Tell them it’s a novel,” I said to my agent at the time. “I wrote a novel.” But there weren’t enough half-Asian writers back then for anyone to tell me what they told Marie—and now she and I, despite being from different ethnographic backgrounds, are a niche. There is no way our work would possibly cross over in terms of content or sensibility, and yet people are saying things like this to her.

When Picador brought out the paperback of my novel, and it was in the front of Virgin Megastores and sold as general literature, with a cover that lacked both a muscled naked male torso as well as chopsticks and dragons, an older, more established lesbian writer asked me “what I had done”.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “They did it.”

My first novel is neither a coming out story, which is what is typically meant by a ‘gay novel’—the central character, while gay, never is depicted coming out because it wasn’t part of the story—nor is it “about” being gay, nor is it “about” being an Asian American, per se. The character IS Asian American, half Asian, and so by these standards, it was not, despite my long-standing relationship to the Asian American Writers Workshop, an “Asian American” novel.

When I look at the Picador cover, I see a cover that reflects the books themes beautifully. They understood that it was a novel first.

Picador, to whom I’m eternally grateful, got me and this book at every level—not just my editor, but the publisher, the sales force, the publicity and marketing teams.

Terms that began as descriptors became an orthodoxy that we must now run from, and while identifications matter certainly, just as histories matter, and communities matter, I remain sad about the place this has all ended up. In conversations with a scholar who writes on my work last year, I told him about the role commerce plays in the creation of Asian American lit, a factor he hadn’t quite considered. I described for him the possibility that there was work he was looking for that had never made it past this kind of gate American publishers work with now. This kind of treatment reduces us all to the level of romance novel writers, producing something allegedly new along a formulaic series of lines that gives people people back to them an idea of themselves that is the real fiction in all of this. And in the meantime, a sort of shadow literature, of the rejected, books that don’t meet this ethnographic ideal of publishers, litter the desks of the country, unpublished.

This was never the point, to my mind. I just wanted to write stories as complicated as the people I knew, who were pretty complicated. I wanted, when I started all of this, to write books like the ones I found in the library when I was a child in Maine who was made to feel out of place everywhere he went for being neither of one culture nor the other. That is the only thing I ever wanted to do. I didn’t want to be a senator from the state of Half Asian or Korean American. Back then I fell in love with what Davenport defines as Ezra Pound’s American imagination: an imagination alive with the cultures that make up this country, the cultures of the world. We’re not quite there. But perhaps soon.