Memorial

I can't pick up on most of the great stuff here - great simply that it is happening - but I will quickly post something before I leave town for weekend (holiday Memorializing a time before we became the new Soviet Union...).

Buffalo last week had a birthday party for Robert Creeley who would have been 80 last Saturday had he made it. (Miles Davis's 80th then followed later in the week, which I thought was sweet beyond words.) In the long day and a half celebration of this occasion, there's a couple of things I wrote down, from the film Creeley by Bruce Jackson - a couple of Creeley statements which seemed to me useful:

"Words make very powerful grids of determinant meaning."

and

"Words don't care about the truth."

I bring these statements in first as a final salvo in the "non-fiction" thread way far above. Even the slightest engagement with language should convince one of its slipperiness and disabuse one of the simple dream of pure representation. And so my problem with the realists, the creative non-fictionists, and the political mythologists (in Roland Barthes' sense of the term) of our time is this: they lie. As Barthes said long ago, Mythology (readerly writing) is the end of Writing, that is, it shuts down imagination, installs a narrative (a politics, a reading, a "Truth") that ends free-play of imagination, and with it actual literature. In the marketers' desire for a fiction whose sales they can predict and in the political leader's desire for a pliable people are the same abusive readerly "Mythological" uses of language, and the things they stamp out are real participatory democracy and literature.

Painting all this with a very wide brush indeed.

Other lines that come to mind, that I've been thinking about lately (& that have haunted mne for years):

Let those who use words cheap, who use us cheap
Take themselves out of the way
Let them not talk of what is good for the city
-Charles Olson, Maximus Letter 3

The "city" for Olson being a construction of future political and artistic organization - the "book to come" of our potential social & imaginary organization. Let them use words intelligently & sensitively and all else will follow.

Call me naive, but I also believe this. I don't think it's accidental that when Orwell gave us his portraits of totalitarianism, he focused so heavily on how language was employed as the basic component of social engineering, abuse, and mind-fucking: "Four legs good, two legs better" -> "work shall set you free" -> "support the troops": we have seen this many times, to many degrees, in many contexts. Reading/deconstructing are tools resembling what Woody Guthrie long-ago painted on his guitar: "This machine kills fascists."

So, pedagogy: I try NOT to give exercises to writing students that are heavy on doctrine; rather, I try to construct situations where they be forced to consider the formation of writing-art in language.

One of my favorite exercises is to go with students to the zoo (across the street from my college) and tell them to find an animal they've never heard of before and write a story/prose-experiment about it. (This is a mid-semester intro-workshop exercise, after they've seen some & hopefully retained some things but hopefully while they are still open to experiment - they do close down, too frequently.)

The crucial other part of the exercise is that each paragraph's first letter has to ultimately spell out the name of the animal, as an anagram. This gets them thinking about their words, where they break and how they use paragraphs, and how long the story is -- that texts are artificial constructions, and may have to end in a hurry if you're up to the V in cerval.

In this spirit it was great to hear about Christian Bok's book, of which I didn't know. It reminds me of those old Walter Abish books so formative for me back in the (yes-Kass-I-remember-them-too) 1980s, Alphabetical Africa, Minds Meet, and In the Future Perfect. But here again, poetry - Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse is also full of such experiments. Someone back there quoted Andy Rooney about the pretentiousness of poetry; yes, it can be and often is. I generally prefer reading fiction myself,too. But this too: if you are happy with the narrative assumptions of Andy Rooney, by all means, keep avoiding reading poetry. These questions, on average, are much more likely to arise among poets than in the general run of prosewirters. I think this group is on to more than that.

I also run a second track in my fiction writing classes where we read stories when there's nothing to workshop, and I use an anthology for that purpose. I use a handful of classic and new pieces -- "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," "A Cask of Amontillado," "Monkey Garden" (Cisneros) -- usually I use Story and its Writer, supplemented with something avant-garde, or handouts, the first chapter of Notable American Woman ("Bury Your Head"). Paragraph Magazine is good -- about 40 single para. stories to read, imitate, joust with, That magazine, available from a Oat City press in Rhode Island (see http://conan.ids.net/~oatcity/Paragraph.html). Or, yes, STARCHERONE BOOKS has that PP/FF thing....

The classic "Exquisite Corpse" exercise too always yields great images and sentences that I'll then challenge students to accept the logic of, and write coherent (or incoherent) narratives around.

All this to say I am really itchy when I hear someone say students have to be indoctrinated or formed or recruited in a doctrinaire way. I think that if you present them with object lessons and simply try to get them to ask the questions that make the other kind of writing (that doesn't think about the role of language) impossible, then you move them toward a more interesting art and a more open politics.

The New York Behind-the-Times

If you haven't seen it, the NY Times recently ran a list of what a poll they had conducted had determined were the best novels of the last 25 years.

The method was to ask a list of invited writers and critics to submit the best novel of this period. Many didn't respond. Beloved by Toni Morrison was selected, in a rout, as the consensus choice -- but even this was based on only 15 choices. The remainder of the list got there by being named by as few as one of the contributors.

Even so, such a list, with the imprimatur of the Times, is bound to be suggestive. Worse, the listed books seemed to show such an insular picture to many of us who read and care about innovative fiction, that it seemed to require a reply. First, here is the Times list:

Toni Morrison, Beloved; Don DeLillo, Underworld; Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels; Philip Roth, American Pastoral; John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces; Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Philip Roth, The Counterlife; Don DeLillo, Libra; Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Norman Rush, Mating; Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son; Philip Roth, Operation Shylock; Richard Ford, Independence Day; Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater; Cormac McCarthy, Border Trilogy; Philip Roth, The Human Stain; Edward P. Jones, The Known World; Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.

Only 2 women, 6 books of the 22 written by Philip Roth, and the backdoor inclusion of John Updike's Rabbit cycle (though half had been written before 1980) were among the other suspicious aspects of the list. As well, the list favors well-published, realist, what one might safely call establishment novels.

Bloggers have been at it ever since, challenging the Times list with their own. I have compiled a combined version of these.

Notes on how the list was compiled appear below.

113 Works of Fiction in reply to the New York Times:

Walter Abish - How German Is It; Kathy Acker - Blood & Guts in High School; Great Expectations; David Antin – tuning; Donald Antrim – Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World; Paul Auster – In the Country of Last Things; Jonathan Baumbach – B; Greg Bear - Blood Music; Kenneth Bernard – From the District File; R. M. Berry – Frank; Judy Budnitz – Flying Leap; Mary Burger – Sonny; Octavia Butler – Kindred; Mary Caponegro - Complexities of Intimacy; Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dicteé; Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek; Dennis Cooper – Period; Michael Cunningham – The Hours; Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves; Lydia Davis – The End of the Story; Samuel R. Delany – Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Bradley Denton – Blackburn; Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times; Jeffrey DeShell – Peter; Jim Dodge – Fup; Stone Junction; Ricki Ducornet – The Word “Desire”; The Fanmaker’s Inquisition; Katherine Dunn – Geek Love; Dave Eggers – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue; Percival Everett – Erasure; Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern; William Gaddis – Carpenter’s Gothic; William Gass - The Tunnel; Denise Giardina – Storming Heaven; William Gibson - Neuromancer; Robert Glück – Margery Kempe; Barry Hannah – Ray; Carla Harryman – Gardener of Stars; Marianne Hauser – Prince Ishmael; Donald Hays – The Dixie Association; Laird Hunt - The Impossibly; Shelley Jackson – The Melancholy of Anatomy; Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers; Gwyneth Jones – Life; Kevin Killian – Little Men; Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale; Stacey Levine - My Horse; DRA—; Frances Johnson; Mark Leyner – I Smell Esther Williams; Kelly Link –Magic for Beginners; Pamela Lu – Pamela: A Novel; Alison Lurie – Foreign Affairs; Nathaniel Mackey – From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate; Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String; Notable American Women; David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress; Reader’s Block; Carole Maso - Aureole; Ava; The Art Lover; Defiance; Harry Matthews – My Life in CIA; Cris Mazza – Former Virgin; Heather McGowan – Schooling; Ursule Molinaro - Fat Skeletons; Toni Morrison – Tar Baby; Walter Mosley – Devil in a Blue Dress; Padgett Powell – Edisto; Tim Power - Last Call; Thomas Pynchon – Mason and Dixon; Vineland; Doug Rice - Blood of Mugwump; Mary Robison – Why Did I Ever; L. A. Ruocco – Document Zippo; Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched; James Salter- A Sport and a Pastime; George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; Pastoralia; Sarah Schulman – Girls, Visions, and Everything; Jason Schwartz – A German Picturesque; Joanna Scott – Arrogance: A Novel; Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone; Lucius Shepard – Beast of the Heartland; Nina Shope – Hangings; Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony; Almanac of the Dead; Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres; Ordinary Love and Good Will; Gilbert Sorrentino – Aberration of Starlight; Little Casino; Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver; Bruce Sterling – Schismatrix; Ronald Sukenick – Mosaic Man; Lynne Tillman - American Genius; Steve Tomasula – VAS; Joseph Torra – Gas Station; William Vollman – You Bright and Risen Angels; Europe Central; Chuck Wachtel – Joe the Engineer; Howard Waldrop – Heart of Whitenesse; Alice Walker – Possessing the Secret of Joy; David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; Joe Wenderoth - Letters to Wendy; Curtis White – Requiem: Diane Williams - Excitability; Joy Williams – The Quick and the Dead; Gene Wolfe – The Book of the New Sun; Douglas Woolf – Wall to Wall; Lidia Yuknavitch – her other mouths.

Notes: Obviously, I haven't read all of these books. Indeed, I've read less than half. (About one-third, actually.) Still, the sources are ones I trust, including the responses of the Now What and Ron Silliman blogs, lists friends (including some names you'd recognize) have provided, etc. Sometimes, bloggers (like Silliman) gave only lists of author's names -- in such cases, I've chosen representative books and made choices on the basis of amazon reviews and the like. Short story collections as well as novels appear (the Times suggested their list was comprised of novels only but included a Raymond Carver collection); as well, there are some books, such as David Antin's work, that some people would define as something other than fiction. I've eliminated any works I found on blogger lists that were first published before 1980 -- this explains the absence of Delany's Hogg and Sorrentino's Mulligan's Stew from the list, among others. Finally, I've tried to keep British and other national fictionists off the list, when such could be identified, to keep this as a uniform consideration.

The final product is not ranked but alphabetized and is not intended in any way to be comprehensive. Instead, it is intended to indicate the great richness and variety of US fiction and its authors, in terms of gender, ethnicity, genre (and post-genre), and formal innovation. I figure it in my mind in the shape of an enormous burr -- attaching itself the pantleg of the NY Times as it confidently walks past, careless as a millionaire -- round, with untold sharp points, all the points arrows, each of the arrows pointing outward.

Now What Blog

Lance Olsen and I have teamed up to start a blog on contemporary fiction and small press publishing, with multiple participants, called Now What. Lance is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction or about contemporary fiction and on the Board of FC2, the long-lived experimental fiction presses. See it here: http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com

What to do when you can't keep up one blog? Start another! But seriously, I'm really excited about this venture -- we've got a place now where some of today's most important practitioners in innovative fiction will have a place to talk about what they see, who they're reading, and to monitor the collapse of mainstream publishing.