Observing Travelers’ Reading Habits (Or The Lack Thereof)

Maybe former Texas Senator Phil Gramm was right – we are a nation of whiners. If so, let me add a riff to the chorus. It’s been five years since the missus and I last flew the Atlantic, and I’m sad to report: the airborne cattle cars are still an abysmal way to travel. Yes, they tend to your needs to a certain degree – they do feed you, saturate you with a la carte booze or an occasional bottle of water, a splash of cola in a plastic mini-glass. But then the fun begins.
The pilot notes a patch of turbulent air ahead, and the tourist class compartment enters lockdown, which largely means no bathroom break. Which in turn means one is subjected to a bladder sorely in need of de-pressurizing, or the gassiness of the person sitting next to you. But even without the lockdown, the lines portioning four restroom cubicles among some three hundred passengers makes such human necessities enter the realm of the drastic.
And the seats. I’m mildly claustrophobic – first noticed after hours of traffic lockdown on Atlanta’s oxymoronic expressways – and cramped conditions on ten-hour flights hardly helps. I admit I’m a bit wider in the beam than I used to be, but the seats are smaller – as is the legroom. I accept only aisle seats, but there you’re liable to have a protruding foot run over by flight attendant carts. Which brings me, indirectly, to reading.
Used to—when the planes weren’t so crowded, and when here was a bit more elbow room, one whiled away these air hours by reading. And that might even lead to conversation:
“I see you’re reading Crichton’s latest.”
“Yes.”
“I thought the ending was contrived, didn’t you?”
And I’ve heard tales of such communion even leading to post-flight romances. Sigh. Those were the days.
Today, electronics is king on long flights, via the visual medium. The airlines no longer provide magazines (except their own dull organ); instead one can expect to watch movies, or now a menu of sitcom or TV drama episodes, maybe a few travel shorts.
Looking around as we left Atlanta, I saw a few brave souls drag out their books and magazines. The most interesting? The man sitting across from me began a book on understanding Islam in the modern world.
Still, after the meal is eaten, the gas passed, the bathroom lines endured, the lack of creature comfort leads one desperately to the more passive visual medium. From Atlanta to Munich (picture above) – as always, I couldn’t sleep the “night” away, so I had a couple of good movies to divert my attention from increasing leg and back pain. Returning, I bought a paperback (reviewed next week) by Michael Chabon (a good one), before leaving Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris (picture below), but once on board I quickly realized a certain measure of creature comfort is necessary for retention. So I had to resolve to read it again once at home and turned to the wee TV before me. This one worked only partially, and I was reduced to watching the same episode of Friends some eight times.
Once home, I still had physical kinks to work out, a book to re-read. And I resolved loudly to the missus that as much as I enjoy the perspectives of travel in strange lands, the pull of history, I would opt for crossing the pond no longer.

New Stories from the South 2007 - the year's best

My wife presented me with this volume recently. Now, having read its eighteen stories from the (new) South, I have to admit - pay attention here, this is confession time - editor Edward P. Jones' selections have dispelled some myths for me. To wit:

1 - Southern literature is alive and well. I had thought there was nothing particularly authentic about Southern writing anymore (my apologies, Tommy Hays). I had thought the South had become the New South - a self-homogenized version of these United States that couldn't be distinguished from the rest. Admittedly, these eighteen authors have among them two or three that recognize the New South for what it is, but are able to distill something uniquely Southern from our pseudo-South, soy milk pap.

2 - Such collections ( at least this one) are diverse in writerly background, style, subject matter, and voice Some authors here have creased faces, others countenances fresh as babes. Some seem, from their bios, to be blue-collar, some academic, some black, some white, male and female. The collection is as rich as the South we drawling types love to remember. One among the eighteen approaches Flannery O'Connor's gothic stories, I'll admit, and some seem to have drawn inspiration from Cormac McCarthy's earlier works.

3 - All MFA writing isn't fatally flawed. In fact, my favorite story of the collection is by one Holly Goddard Jones, Life Expectancy. What drew me to this one wasn't a uniquely Southern voice, setting, story, or prosaic quality. Instead it was a small, motley collection of characters that captured me from the start. This is rarely true of short fiction, but Miz Jones, an MFA grad and academic, pulled it off. I'm almost always off-put by stories with obvious authorial agendas, but this time I forgive the story of a high school girl basketballer seduced and impregnated by her dastardly coach. Both main characters are much more than cliches, and the girl surprises in the end.

4 -My most humbling confession has to do with my being able to read these stories as an editor might. In so doing, I turned thumb down on some mighty good short stories in picking a favorite. Rick Bass' Goats, for instance. James Lee Burke's A Season Of Regret. Jakob Loomis, by Jason Ockert. And Angela Threatt's Bela Lugosi's Dead.
Now I understand rejection slips a bit better. While an eminently credentialed editor picked these eighteen from some inner preference, I became more aware through these 347 pages of my own whys and wherefores regarding reader taste. Jones said, "I need a sense that the world, for even one character, has shifted, whether to a large or a tiny degree."
I'm down with that. But my tastes seem to be a little more free-flowing when it comes to short fiction. As in music, I like pieces that surprise me emotionally. And for this to happen, I need strong but flawed characters. All here aspire, most succeed, but Miz Jones gets my nod as best of the litter.

For the writers out there, this publication has to be up your alley, for this reason: the editors list in the back some nine pages of Southern-related litmags that New Stories From The South tends to draw from. So pull the necessary fifteen bucks from your beer and Ramen money and, as I've done, get educated.

And by the way - - I'll be celebrating completion of my MLA degree for the next couple of weeks with a trip for me and the Missus - a ride down the Danube River. Next post will be mid-November.

Selected Shorts XVII

Farewell To Arms

On October 27th, I defend my literary project for my Masters of Liberal Arts degree. Ahead lie five days of rehearsal on my part, a re-assimilation of facts, dates, insights. My focus for the defense could best be posed as a question. Did these German (and Soviet) combatants lose their humanity over the span of four years of the nastiest fighting known to man?
I believe they did not. While having their minds invaded by Nazi dogma, they seem to have remained for the most part true to human drives. If this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, I’ll let you know.
At this point I’m five chapters from the end of my manuscript on H-U Rudel. I’ll be into February finishing and polishing. My thanks and heartfelt sympathies to all those who critiqued, put up with my cranky, protective nature, and all that.

Oldies Alive



One of my writing colleagues, Peggy Millin, has had a quote of hers – from one of her publications – bleed onto the web and resurface on OPRAH, of all places. Goes to show, the vagaries of the literary world, as well as the staying power of good writing. You go, Peggy!

Poets and Writers



The Nov/Dec issue contains an interview with Toni Morrison, arguably the U.S.’s premier person-of-letters today. I don’t often find anything relevant in such interviews, but TM is a giant, and this one deals! Don’t miss it.

How Fiction Works, by James Wood

It’s breathtakingly inspiring, within today’s coterie of less-than-well-informed book reviewers, to find one as well versed in what brings the best fiction robustly to life as James Wood. But then he’s also a novelist, essayist, and Harvard lecturer in literature. His book, How Fiction Works, has been widely reviewed in the print press, but it’s apparent to me after reading the book that reviewers either see it as academic and abstract, or as one colleague of mine said, “It left me with the notion that reading his book would be like sticking pins in my eyes.” I want to rectify that view of his book.

I will say that the casual fiction reader, who limits his/her self to the over-popular genre pulp on the best seller lists, may fall asleep reading this book, muttering, “So what?” On the other hand, one doesn’t need to know literary theory or hold an MFA in creative writing to gain insight from Wood’s book. All one needs is an openness—as either reader or writer—to why fiction is an enjoyable and instructive experience.

Wood begins with a simple explanation of Point of View (POV), that stories are best told in the first person (“I fell asleep, but then the butler…”) or third person (“The butler gently shook him awake…”), that such narration may be reliable or unreliable, and quite a bit about the history of modern narrative in fiction. Throughout this section, as in all others, his view of prose teems with examples any reader will find easy to follow and understand.
His view of character development isn’t a common one; he believes either “flat” or “vivid” character development is valid, depending on the writer’s intent in telling the story. Once again, his insights regarding character in fiction are vivid to the point of being liberating.
He talks about the rhythm of writing, something rarely discussed regarding prose, but always a vital part of spoken poetry and oratory.
One area that particularly enlightened me is his depiction of how humor is made to work in fiction, even subtle humor. Here, Wood claims that humor erupts from changing “registers,” in narrative, i.e. unexpected changes of tone, for instance, can bring a reader to laughter.
His view of well-wrought dialogue is one of subtlety and ambiguity, leaving readers with multiple possibilities regarding the characters’ intents in engaging in conversation.
His perception of the many erudite schools of fictional technique resolves to this: “What seems real?” He’s clearly not a fan of the notion that postmodernism in fiction is a necessary step; instead it's simply one more way of depicting what seems real. His main precept in fiction, then, is one of “live-ness.” He does seem to want to return to Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of fiction as mimesis, or a description or depiction of what is actually real. But once again his views should liberate both readers and writers of fiction in limiting the “what works” of fiction to how a writer successfully uses words and language to make the page come alive.

Clearly, Wood knows his stuff. This is a book I’ll read constantly as I write on future projects, and it’s one both the curious reader and the grappling writer will find invaluable.

FYI

Genre Bending

This from a recent issue of the London Times Literary Supplement-
Autobiografiction: "We are familiar with the idea that all creative writing must be autobiographical in some way", but the Edwardian writer Stephen Reynolds understood that foggy notion, as Max Saunders shows, in a valuable and almost wholly overlooked contribution to literature. "Fiction can be 'autobiographical' in many different ways; yet the relation between the two remains a major blind spot in the theory of modern literature."
Along the same lines, what would be the proper name for “non-fiction?” This tag tells us what the genre purports not to be, but what is it, really, especially since it allows for fictionalization?


Banned Books Week

We’ve just been through Banned Books Weeks, a noble attempt by libraries to bite those who would ban books. Cynically, I think it’s a non-issue, particularly for the near-two-thirds of the U.S. public who don’t read, or read only pulp and Cosmo. Still, a few good readers in a nation mean a lot. One of the primary tenets of literature is that challenging your beliefs, preconceptions, cultural biases, etc. makes you a better thinker, despite your reaction after having read a given controversial book. Without that gauntlet being tossed between the book covers, you become narrower and shallower, which is bad news for any political state that purports to be a democracy.

Poets and Writers

There’s an excellent interview in the latest copy of P&W with Molly Friedrich, one of the big name NY agents. I urge you to read it on the P&W website, but a couple of her comments deserve mention.

First, for the fiction writers out there, she’s yet one more voice saying: “Fiction is being published less and less. The stakes are higher.” What she means is that the big pub houses are still willing to put out major bucks for fiction, but it has to have an immediate payoff. And she’s yet one more proponent of upping royalties and cutting advances.

Another point: When asked what thing makes her job the hardest, she’s not talking pitching a book. Or rejections. Or slowly bringing a writer with talent along. “It’s the whining,” she says. To be succinct, she wants, demands, professionalism from editors, as well as authors.

Read the article – this is what life is like at the top of the publishing food chain.

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner (Part 2)

Last week, we delved into Faulkner’s storyline of the poor, eccentric Bundren family’s adventure in burying family matriarch Addie. This week, I thought I'd try to plumb Faulkner’s writing technique in this novel.

First, I should say I’m not a Faulkner fan. Not that I’m a lazy reader, you understand. But a reader’s attention can’t drift while reading his books – if you do, you’ll miss something vital in his dense-as-poetry prose. It’s almost as if he delighted in playing games with the reader. As a result, academics love to parse his writing technique for meaning and hidden intent. And I suppose I can’t escape my mini-stab at that here.

First, there are the multiple points of view - by my count, e thirteen separate perspectives, including that of the deceased Addie. Why would Faulkner do this?
The first answer is that by Faulkner's time, modern prose had drifted away from the omniscient point of view of the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel. Keeping to one omniscient point of view narrows the story’s perspective; however, new conventions of technique have ably handled that.
Henry James, I believe, was one of modernity’s earlier experimenters with multiple points of view. The idea in doing doing-as James-did is, ironically, to gain a broader viewpoint on characters, settings, and story. Even though an old-fashioned narrator claims to be “omniscient,” the story is seen and described through the narrator’s rather lens. But with multiple POVs, a story can be told from conflicting viewpoints – even viewpoints that negate others. This adds resonance, multidimensional depth.

I’m sure Faulkner was aware of this and used these POVs to that purpose, but I think he also had something else in mind. He seems to have wanted to use these multiple viewpoints to show the fragmented reality of the Bundren family – each unhappy and barely coping in his or her own, private way. Clearly the story bears this out.
But does Faulkner’s use of the technique work in this respect? In my mind – barely. My main complaint with Faulkner has always been his disregard of the reader’s comfort in experiencing the story. But he was always an excessive personality, and his too-many POVs were eventually toned down in Southern literature to five or less, particularly by the likes of Doris Betts and Cormac McCarthy.

Faulkner’s writing was also the prototype for the Southern Gothic literature that came to full fruition under Flannery O’Connor, and that is still popular – again through such writers as Cormac McCarthy. One of the more perplexing traits of Southern Gothic has been its subliminal humor. Such stories depict the agony and depravity of poor Southerners, how they cope with numbing lives. Humor, then, is a leveling device, showing the strength of soul of these people, much as blues music has done for Southern blacks.
Faulkner uses this technique fairly well, but once again he trifles with excess, leading many readers to laugh at his forlorn characters – not to lead them to empathize with the Bundrens, to experience that strength of soul within them.
All too often, the characters here come out of their rural, illiterate voice to espouse some of Faulkner’s own ten-dollar words, leaving his characters on the doorstep of caricature. Still, he prose can be majestic in As I Lay Dying:

“Overhead the day drives level and gray, hiding the sun by a flight of gray spears.”

And:
“Cash…holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort.”

In this last passage Faulkner worms his way into his own unique view of metaphysics – that as long as one is remembered, and has had progeny, he/she lives beyond the body. Not a particularly novel thing to ponder these days, but in his day, likely revolutionary.

Actually, revolutionary is the proper word to describe Faulkner’s literary ground-breaking, here and in other of his later works. These novels had warts, but his developing technique spawned more literary progeny than he could have imagined. In that sense - and by his own seeming metaphysical rules - William Faulkner will live a long literary life.

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner (Part 1)

This week’s post will talk about the storyline of As I Lay Dying and try to put it in the greater context of the rural South of Faulkner’s time.
Despite Faulkner’s early preoccupation with the poor of the rural South, he wasn’t of them. His great-grandfather was a Confederate colonel and politician, his grandfather a Mississippi lawyer who owned a railroad. His family’s well-off status allowed him to leave home and indulge as a soldier-of-fortune type—a Canadian pilot during the time of WWI. Later, he took classes at the University of Mississippi-Oxford and worked at the local post office there. But neither preoccupation held his interest. A voracious reader, he finally turned to writing.

As I Lay Dying was one of his earlier novels, and is a proto-model for some of the South’s literary techniques we’ll make a swipe at next week. In capsule fashion, the book is about the death of a woman, Addie Bundren, and her husband and children’s attempts to take her across Faulkner’s fictional and fabled Yoknapatawpha County to her original home at Jefferson, the county seat. It’s believed the county is modeled after Mississippi’s Lafayette County, in the state’s north center. Oh, and Lafayette’s most significant burg is the university town of Oxford.
This is red clay country – a locale of rolling hills, where nothing much will grow except pines. Much of this country – similarly to the northwest corner of Louisiana, where I grew up—had been settled by pioneering types who managed to homestead a few acres and scratch a living from it. This wasn’t plantation country, peopled through the South’s pre-Civil war slavery. These were poor whites – uneducated, often (and here I want to resist the term as a Southern cliché) inbred. The Bundren family was clearly created from such stock. It’s easy to caricature such people, and throughout the story Faulkner’s tale teeters at the edge of mockery. Father Anse, determined to fulfill his wife’s wishes to be buried in Jefferson, enlists the help of Cash, Darl, Vardaman, Jewel, and daughter Dewey Dell. Cash labored prior to Addie’s death to build an admirable coffin by hand from good wood. When her life ends, the children place her coffined remains on a wagon and rattle off toward Jefferson. Along the way, trouble meets them at every hand.
But why, you might ask, did they decide to truck her off during a time of great rain, with most bridges swept away by swollen rivers? Certainly their neighbors wondered why the family couldn’t have foregone Addie’s wishes – given these conditions – and given her a more convenient burial close by.
One clue to Addie’s wishes comes from a chapter in the voice of a lady friend of Addie’s, who implies that Addie has had an extra-marital dalliance—and that Jewel is the child of that sweat.
At any rate, persistence trumps smarts, and the Bundrens become trapped between home and Jefferson. Without bridges, they decide to brave nature and cross the Yoknapatawpha River on their own. Once again, the adventure turns against them. The river rampages, taking away the mules pulling their wagon. Only through a quirk of literary fate does Jewel save Addie’s be-coffined remains. In the watery scuffle, Cash’s leg is broken. But finally, the family makes it across the river and trudges on toward Jefferson.
On the way, they stop at a farm owned by another family, the Gillespies. That family greets the Bundrens hospitably and offers to let them spend the night there. The Bundrens accept and store Addie’s coffin stored in the barn for the night. But during the wee hours, a fire breaks out. Fortunately, Addie’s body is saved once more.
Finally the Bundrens reach Jefferson. Anse borrows shovels from a “duck-shaped woman,” and Addie is finally laid to rest.
But this isn’t to be a story-book ending. Dewey Dell is pregnant; she goes looking for a Jefferson pharmacist, presumably to buy a drug that will cause miscarriage. Instead, she’s in for more pre-marital sex, because Anse has talked her out of the ten dollars she planned to use to pay the pharmacist. And, to bring the Bundren family full circle, Anse returns from town with the “duck-shaped woman,” whom he introduces as the new Mrs. Bundren.

After some thought, I think Faulkner intended his readers to see the Bundrens as morally and mentally dim. The author doesn't intend to let the reader off that easily however; his story here is a morality play of a grander type. We’ll touch on that next week.