Better Late Than Never...

I forgot to post the link last month, but I interviewed Renata Adler for the April edition of Bookslut. It was a really great experience--in addition to being an incredible writer, Adler is also a very gracious, thoughtful individual. This is the first time I've ever conducted an interview of this type, and I really enjoyed the experience. More importantly, we had a really interesting conversation, and touched on a lot of interesting topics in a relatively short period of time.

Since I write about fragmentary writing a lot--and because Adler's novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark are two of the very best examples of the form--I wanted to excerpt the part of our discussion that touched on "writing in pieces":

One of the things that strikes me about the books is their form. Both of them are fragmentary -- Speedboat especially is very fragmentary -- and that feels very contemporary to me.

The intention was never to be fragmentary. That's how it came out. But there was never the intent to be fragmentary. You suddenly think, "Wait a minute, this is doing this, let's stop that."
One wants -- one has a right in a way -- to lose oneself in fiction. So one doesn't want to be brought up short all the time. And then there's another thing that I seem to do, which is try to put a little essay in there. It's there because it matters to me. One thing that occurs to me is that plot and momentum and feeling may not have to do with story as we think of it. That is, a sentence may have a plot, a paragraph may have a plot, a cadence may have a plot. And there are other intensities than, say, suspense.

But then, why should people care? And some people don't. We can all tell them in a John le Carré novel -- which I love -- why they should care that Smiley should win and Karla should lose. And if it's Harry Potter, we can tell them why you should care that this happens and not this. Those effects are incredibly valuable, and you don't want to lose, let alone renounce them. What then? For example, if I happen to be reading, just take an absurd example -- Anna Karenina -- do I not wish that she would not throw herself on the track? I'd much prefer that she not. Yet I know that she will, because she does.

You might think that one invariably cares more about real life than what's in fiction, but I think that maybe it isn't really so. Particularly with public things like teams -- you may have a favorite team and you'd rather they'd won than that they'd lost. And you may care a lot about that. And some people care enormously about that. And some people seem to care what happens to this celebrity or that. They may feel very strongly about having this happen or that happen. And that's real life. But do I care more about a particular character in fiction? I do. So that particular magic, in fiction, one doesn't want to lose it. One doesn't want to forgo it. On the other hand, one doesn't want to have it too easy.

You can check out the rest of the interview here.

Into the Flood Again...

Remember the scene at the very end of The Dark Knight, where the Joker tells Batman, "I think you and I are destined to do this forever"? Well, sometimes, back when I worked on this blog more regularly, I felt that way about David Shields. No one else was a bigger presence in my posts, and no book got chewed over more often than Reality Hunger (just look over at my "tag" list). Anyway, Shields has a new book out, and I took a look at it for Bookslut in my new piece Close But Only Close: David Shields and Literature's Redemptive Ambivalence. As I admit right off the bat, "I find David Shields unavoidable."

This time around, I take a look at the two traits that most intrigues me about Shields' work: his literary ambivalence, and what I call his "selfishness" as a reader:

 He seems sincere in his taste for the essay, but he is perfectly willing to stretch his definition of "essay" to encompass any writing he enjoys. It also means he's essentially cutting up Moby-Dick in his mind to turn it into a collection of odd "nonfiction" pieces on whales, whaling, and the sea, with occasional asides about a guy on a boat obsessed with some white whale. I like that because it shows exactly how Shields reads -- selfishly. Which is how I read. To be honest, it's the only way I can imagine anyone reading. Selfish reading is the reader's equivalent of a writer's ambivalence about language. When we read selfishly, we disregard whatever on the page doesn't suit us, chopping the story into something else, something more in line with our own needs. When I read Reality Hunger, I copied down dozens of its most interesting quotations and put them together in a notebook. Now I have a hard time remembering parts of the book that don't appear in "my" version.

Anyway, check the rest out here.

New Article Online Today

Just stopping in to let you know I have a new essay up at the Millions. This one looks at Gogol's Dead Souls, the role of the classics, and the "performance" of reading. What do I mean by the performance of reading? Well:

I’ve always seen a minor parallel between a reader and a concert musician — a pianist for example — just in the sense that both are taking notations written by someone else and bringing them to life. In both cases, the work of art as it exists on paper is mediated by someone else. A reader may follow the cues of the author, she may give every word her full attention, her emotions may stir in exactly the way they were intended to — but the images and voice she creates in her mind are hers. But they are not only hers — they are a collaboration between her and the writer. Alone among the arts, reading/writing involves mingling the thoughts of the artist and the audience. In a way, reading is itself a performance.

You can read the rest of the essay here. Thanks!

Sontag--the deleted scenes

One of things I want to start doing on the blog is posting follow-ups to work that appears elsewhere. I promised earlier in the week I'd put up some "deleted scenes" from my piece on Susan Sontag, so I figured I'd start with that. One of the occasions for my piece was the publication of Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French. I talked a little bit about Kaplan's book in the essay, but one item I addressed in earlier drafts didn't make it into the final version. I wanted to post that part here, because I think it hits on something really interesting--namely Sontag's approach to learning French:

France served as a learning ground for Sontag. But, as Kaplan points out, she engaged far more with French culture than French people—at least on that first stay. Though she had studied the language, Sontag still lacked fluency in 1957. As a result, she spent most of her time among Paris’s American expatriate community. Sontag worked to remedy this quickly, however, by learning French essentially on her own. As Kaplan explains, “What is unique in the case of Susan Sontag and French is that she did not entrust her language learning to any method or textbook, to any classroom or even to the vagaries of experience—she constructed her own method.” Sontag vigorously constructed and studied her own vocabulary lists, immersing herself not only in the practical side of the language, but in its nuances, such as the subtle difference between two different ways of saying “I like (someone)”, “Je l’aime,” “Je l’aime beaucoup,” and “Je l’laime bien,” depending on the degree of feeling. This obsession with knowing the language in its entirety is entirely of a piece with Sontag’s approach to culture, what Kaplan terms her “ambition to understand.” It’s not a coincidence that the lists of French phrases Sontag wrote in her journals resemble the lists of books and films she wrote out elsewhere. Both are evidence of the tension that made her a great critic—her catholic interest in the new (new books, new languages, new words, new films) and her traditionalist emphasis on hard work and tendency to organize (there quite possibly has never been a better maker of lists).

I'm glad Kaplan spotlighted that, because I think it hits on one of the things that really stands out in Sontag's journals--the way she treated intellectual exercises as acts of will. The force of Sontag's will comes through in all her work, and is one of the things that makes her work exciting.

(If you haven't had a chance to look at the finished essay, you can read it here.)

Thoughts on Sontag (a new essay)

I've got a new essay out today in Bookslut (it's their tenth anniversary this month, don't you know). This one looks at the work of Susan Sontag. I haven't really written about Sontag on the blog, but her work has meant a lot to me for a very long time. As I explain in the piece:

Susan Sontag is the writer who first taught me that a critical essay could be every bit as valuable as a work of fiction. I admire her judgment; but I admire the way she expresses her views, her writing, even more. Some of that is her adept use of aphorism, her ability to compress an entire point of view into one clean, memorable phrase -- "All writing is a species of remembering," "Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment," "Disenchantment is the characteristic posture of contemporary American intellectuals, but disenchantment is often the product of laziness," and so on. But, more importantly, Sontag uses her critical essays as a way of exploring her own personal sensibility.

You can read the rest here. I actually plan on posting a few follow-up pieces here later in the week (think of it as the writer's equivalent of DVD extras).

New Article Online Today

I've got a new essay up at Bookslut today. This one looks at the life and career of Stefan Zweig:

Most literary revivals fail. Some don't -- sometimes Edmund Wilson edits a few posthumous volumes of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work and succeeds in saving the author of The Great Gatsby from oblivion. But most "lost" writers stay that way, despite the efforts of the editors, publishers, and critics who try and reintroduce them. Stefan Zweig is not quite obscure in the English-speaking world -- several of his books remain in print and he still attracts high-profile fans like Joan Acocella, Clive James, and the late John Geilguld -- but he seems forever perched on the cusp of a revival that never quite comes.

You can read the whole think here. Enjoy!

A Quick Update, and a New Essay

I had hoped to get the new version of the site going by now, but things have been crazy so... Anyway, to tide you over, I have new essay up at The Millions today called Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age. I actually wrote another piece for them a few months back, celebrating Shakespeare's Henry V on St. Crispin's Day.

If you're new to the site, I've got some links over on the right to some selected pieces elsewhere online. I'd especially encourage you to check out my article archive at Bookslut, which has got a lot of my reviews from the last few years. Thanks!