Alex Ross
"The Classical Cloud"
New Yorker September 8, 2014
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Saturday, October 04, 2014
Beginning of a Long Thought
Alex Ross
"The Classical Cloud"
New Yorker September 8, 2014
Monday, November 04, 2013
The Connection
"You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human."
Susan Sontag
"A Letter to Borges"
quoted by Jonathan Cott in his new book, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (Yale.)
photo from Truffaut's film version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
They connect us to the past, to the many dimensions of our past, and to the future, by which the past is given meaning beyond itself. They connect the unknown, the hidden and even furtive parts of ourselves to the many dimensions of our world, and of the universe, in the present. They make connections, which is the very life of the mind... Some ways of being more fully human.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
A Book Sale and Sadness
I recently attended a book sale at the Humboldt University Library, and not for the first time. They sell books that have been donated, and books the library is discarding. I have complex feelings about both categories, and the sale itself.
I don't mind buying books that have been donated, though when I donate books to the library, I mean for them to wind up on the library shelves, not in a jumble sale. On the other hand, I sometimes find myself buying discarded library books just so they won't be thrown away.
The whole idea of discarding books chills me. I mean discarding books that aren't going to be replaced with new copies. I suppose it makes sense to get rid of technical and scientific texts that are no longer useful except for historical documentation and interest. But other choices bother me. I noticed at this sale they had evidently cleared several shelves of books on the work of Henry James, as well as books on and by William Dean Howells. James does not happen to be an author I'm much interested in, although it's possible that I'll live long enough to develop an interest. One of several comments made by Norman Mailer (may he rest in peace) that stays with me is that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other, and that can change over time.
I am also reminded of a line in Wallace Shawn's play, The Designated Mourner, to the effect that a certain person who'd just died was the last expert on the poetry of John Donne. These days that's entirely possible.
So now where will I go for books on Henry James? I use this library a lot, and once I did encounter on the shelves, among the books I was examining for one of my personal quixotical research projects, several volumes with little pieces of paper sticking out of them, indicating that they were scheduled to be discarded. Scheduled for demolition! It's gotten so that I continue to renew several books I have just so they can't discard them.
Of course they need the money from the sales--especially because of budget cutbacks. This library bought no new books for several years, and buys few this year. I'm not sure if I were a prospective student, I would even consider coming to a school with a library that has stopped buying books.
And I'm no saint about the sale either. I usually go in the afternoon, make my selections, and wait for the closing bell when you get a grocery bag full of books for a buck. At which time I rescue as many books as I can. It's partly book greed, of course. It's been my major addiction for years. I have many more books than I will ever read.
Including one I got at this sale--a 1912 copy of Modern Instances, a novel by William Dean Howells. I got it as a helpless gesture of respect for the author. It's not the first time I've done that, although this is probably the one I am least likely to read. I have found books at this sale that I've read and enjoyed, books that I just enjoy owning, and books that have been helpful. Though I once actually found an obscure book I was looking for, I more often found helpful books I hadn't known existed. Serendipity has always been a good research method for me. This sale has helped build the house of books that shelters me, so I can't complain. But I do wonder just what it is I'm witnessing.
I recently attended a book sale at the Humboldt University Library, and not for the first time. They sell books that have been donated, and books the library is discarding. I have complex feelings about both categories, and the sale itself.
I don't mind buying books that have been donated, though when I donate books to the library, I mean for them to wind up on the library shelves, not in a jumble sale. On the other hand, I sometimes find myself buying discarded library books just so they won't be thrown away.
The whole idea of discarding books chills me. I mean discarding books that aren't going to be replaced with new copies. I suppose it makes sense to get rid of technical and scientific texts that are no longer useful except for historical documentation and interest. But other choices bother me. I noticed at this sale they had evidently cleared several shelves of books on the work of Henry James, as well as books on and by William Dean Howells. James does not happen to be an author I'm much interested in, although it's possible that I'll live long enough to develop an interest. One of several comments made by Norman Mailer (may he rest in peace) that stays with me is that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other, and that can change over time.
I am also reminded of a line in Wallace Shawn's play, The Designated Mourner, to the effect that a certain person who'd just died was the last expert on the poetry of John Donne. These days that's entirely possible.
So now where will I go for books on Henry James? I use this library a lot, and once I did encounter on the shelves, among the books I was examining for one of my personal quixotical research projects, several volumes with little pieces of paper sticking out of them, indicating that they were scheduled to be discarded. Scheduled for demolition! It's gotten so that I continue to renew several books I have just so they can't discard them.
Of course they need the money from the sales--especially because of budget cutbacks. This library bought no new books for several years, and buys few this year. I'm not sure if I were a prospective student, I would even consider coming to a school with a library that has stopped buying books.
And I'm no saint about the sale either. I usually go in the afternoon, make my selections, and wait for the closing bell when you get a grocery bag full of books for a buck. At which time I rescue as many books as I can. It's partly book greed, of course. It's been my major addiction for years. I have many more books than I will ever read.
Including one I got at this sale--a 1912 copy of Modern Instances, a novel by William Dean Howells. I got it as a helpless gesture of respect for the author. It's not the first time I've done that, although this is probably the one I am least likely to read. I have found books at this sale that I've read and enjoyed, books that I just enjoy owning, and books that have been helpful. Though I once actually found an obscure book I was looking for, I more often found helpful books I hadn't known existed. Serendipity has always been a good research method for me. This sale has helped build the house of books that shelters me, so I can't complain. But I do wonder just what it is I'm witnessing.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Postcard from the Dead Novel Office
The impulse to play elder in the last post was prompted by a number of things, but this is one of them: some comments by Paul Theroux in a review of a biography of Graham Greene in the New York Times Book Review from October, which emerged from the pile in recent weeks.
"It is impossible now for any American under the age of 60 or so to comprehend the literary world that existed in the two decades after World War II, and especially the magic that fiction writers exerted upon the public."
It was the first time that the phrase "60 or so" seemed to apply. The "two decades" would mean until 1966, say. At age 20, I'd had maybe five years of absorbing that magic, which included novelists from earlier in the century (Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Kafka), plus more recent novelists (Mailer, Bellow, Styron, Roth, Updike, Flannery O'Connor) as well as giants of the 19th and 18th centuries. That after several years of falling regularly under the spell of novels, good and not so good, starting with the likes of Joe Archibald and John R. Tunis (boys sports), "Franklin W. Dixon" (Hardy Boys mysteries) and science fiction by Milton Lesser, Richard Marsten and Robert Heinlein (one of Heinlein's---Have Space Suit---Will Travel, I reread recently with great pleasure.)
The magic continued for my generation later in the 1960s, well into the age of movies and television, with Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Ralph Ellison,Walker Percy, Malamud, John Barth, etc. as well as Kerouac, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, the underground of the 50s. Then Gabriel Garcia Marquez opened a new window of magic and mystique.
Novelists were important at least to me for most of my life. Theroux suggests that their mystique was at least partly due to their relative invisibility. Even into the 1960s, except for jacket photos, the occasional photos in magazines and very occasional television interviews, they were the distant magicians behind the words.
Some of these writers "who enjoyed that sort of fame as conspicuous absentees...have lived on into this age of intrusion," he writes, "where publishers conspire with bookstores to bully writers into the open and make them part of the selling mechanism."
"Invisible, they were the more powerful for seeming forever everywhere. These writers bewitched the imaginations of those of us who grew up in that period of glamour and solitude, and who wished to be writers ourselves."
That sounds familiar. My imagination was bewitched, and I wished to be a novelist. The mystique was part of it; the mystique of James Joyce, for example, was very strong, and Richard Ellman's biography of him traveled with me in the 60s, as near and dear as a bedside Bible.
I guess I am surprised to read how antique this apparently is. I know that the age of reading and writing is supposedly over, due to new media. But my dreams of writing novels coexisted with dreams of writing songs and plays and screenplays. I identified with Fitzgerald, but also with the Beatles and Dylan, and then Truffaut and Godard and Richard Lester . In fact my great dream as I left college was to produce a novel-in-a-box: a real print novel, accompanied by related recorded music and visuals, perhaps even a little movie, described in the novel. The kind of thing that these days is quite possible. (The closest I actually came was as co-editor of my college literary magazine. Our final issue in 1968 was a magazine-in-an-envelope: a print magazine of fiction and poems, two vinyl records, and 8x11 photographs and reproductions of student artworks.)
The novel remained vital in my life for many years, as I added heroes like Pynchon, DeLillo, Calvino, Kundera... In the 1990s I discovered Native American fiction, and so added Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and others. Though I read other contemporary novelists of various nationalities, the American Jim Harrison was the one that stuck.
And there are many more novelists I admire for what they say about literature and what they've done to keep literature vital, even if I am not particularly absorbed by their novels. (I might even like their short fiction better.) There are also many new novelists I've read with pleasure and admiration, but they don't mean the same thing to me, perhaps because they are younger.
I believed in the novel as the quintessential literary form, so full of potential that nearly every culture on earth has produced at least one great novel and great novelist. I used to quote with relish the statement of Marquez I found in an interview: "Some say the novel is dead. But it is not the novel. It is they who are dead."
Now the literary novel does seem tangential. It seems the greater energy and moment is going into genre fiction, such as detective novels and science fiction. It's not that the writing has declined so much in quality, but perhaps in scope. I don't know really. But I don't think it is entirely to be blamed on other media.
The lack of time to read, perhaps, though reading is still important to some people. I remember listening to a woman in an adult education class whose home life was so noisy and frenzied that she had to go outside and read in her car. But she did.
There is perhaps more to Theroux's point than a comment on mystique, which he suggests declines with exposure. The real mystique of the novelist is in creating the magic in the novel that we as readers recognize, because we were spellbound.
But something has undoubtedly happened at just about the time that novelists (along with other writers) felt they had to be part of the promotional machinery. The way books are sold has damaged the novel somehow, perhaps by placing it in the same category as promoting movies and TV shows, as well as soap and prescription drugs. Movies require huge promotion because they must make great amounts of money, because they cost great amounts of money. Novels don't cost very much really. Just a decent and somewhat secure life for the novelist, which wouldn't pay for the special effects in a cheap horror movie. Maybe not even the catering.
Novels still supply movies and television with stories, and even when they do, the novels can themselves be unlike the movie, or any movie. Novels can still be novels. They can still bring the multidimensional news.
But even though novelists must do the bookstore signings and the morning radio shows, they don't have all that much celebrity (except perhaps in the bookish cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.) Perhaps they are sinking back into the obscurity that nurtures mystique. And maybe you won't have to be pushing 60 to want to be a novelist like them.
The impulse to play elder in the last post was prompted by a number of things, but this is one of them: some comments by Paul Theroux in a review of a biography of Graham Greene in the New York Times Book Review from October, which emerged from the pile in recent weeks.
"It is impossible now for any American under the age of 60 or so to comprehend the literary world that existed in the two decades after World War II, and especially the magic that fiction writers exerted upon the public."
It was the first time that the phrase "60 or so" seemed to apply. The "two decades" would mean until 1966, say. At age 20, I'd had maybe five years of absorbing that magic, which included novelists from earlier in the century (Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Kafka), plus more recent novelists (Mailer, Bellow, Styron, Roth, Updike, Flannery O'Connor) as well as giants of the 19th and 18th centuries. That after several years of falling regularly under the spell of novels, good and not so good, starting with the likes of Joe Archibald and John R. Tunis (boys sports), "Franklin W. Dixon" (Hardy Boys mysteries) and science fiction by Milton Lesser, Richard Marsten and Robert Heinlein (one of Heinlein's---Have Space Suit---Will Travel, I reread recently with great pleasure.)
The magic continued for my generation later in the 1960s, well into the age of movies and television, with Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Ralph Ellison,Walker Percy, Malamud, John Barth, etc. as well as Kerouac, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, the underground of the 50s. Then Gabriel Garcia Marquez opened a new window of magic and mystique.
Novelists were important at least to me for most of my life. Theroux suggests that their mystique was at least partly due to their relative invisibility. Even into the 1960s, except for jacket photos, the occasional photos in magazines and very occasional television interviews, they were the distant magicians behind the words.
Some of these writers "who enjoyed that sort of fame as conspicuous absentees...have lived on into this age of intrusion," he writes, "where publishers conspire with bookstores to bully writers into the open and make them part of the selling mechanism."
"Invisible, they were the more powerful for seeming forever everywhere. These writers bewitched the imaginations of those of us who grew up in that period of glamour and solitude, and who wished to be writers ourselves."
That sounds familiar. My imagination was bewitched, and I wished to be a novelist. The mystique was part of it; the mystique of James Joyce, for example, was very strong, and Richard Ellman's biography of him traveled with me in the 60s, as near and dear as a bedside Bible.
I guess I am surprised to read how antique this apparently is. I know that the age of reading and writing is supposedly over, due to new media. But my dreams of writing novels coexisted with dreams of writing songs and plays and screenplays. I identified with Fitzgerald, but also with the Beatles and Dylan, and then Truffaut and Godard and Richard Lester . In fact my great dream as I left college was to produce a novel-in-a-box: a real print novel, accompanied by related recorded music and visuals, perhaps even a little movie, described in the novel. The kind of thing that these days is quite possible. (The closest I actually came was as co-editor of my college literary magazine. Our final issue in 1968 was a magazine-in-an-envelope: a print magazine of fiction and poems, two vinyl records, and 8x11 photographs and reproductions of student artworks.)
The novel remained vital in my life for many years, as I added heroes like Pynchon, DeLillo, Calvino, Kundera... In the 1990s I discovered Native American fiction, and so added Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and others. Though I read other contemporary novelists of various nationalities, the American Jim Harrison was the one that stuck.
And there are many more novelists I admire for what they say about literature and what they've done to keep literature vital, even if I am not particularly absorbed by their novels. (I might even like their short fiction better.) There are also many new novelists I've read with pleasure and admiration, but they don't mean the same thing to me, perhaps because they are younger.
I believed in the novel as the quintessential literary form, so full of potential that nearly every culture on earth has produced at least one great novel and great novelist. I used to quote with relish the statement of Marquez I found in an interview: "Some say the novel is dead. But it is not the novel. It is they who are dead."
Now the literary novel does seem tangential. It seems the greater energy and moment is going into genre fiction, such as detective novels and science fiction. It's not that the writing has declined so much in quality, but perhaps in scope. I don't know really. But I don't think it is entirely to be blamed on other media.
The lack of time to read, perhaps, though reading is still important to some people. I remember listening to a woman in an adult education class whose home life was so noisy and frenzied that she had to go outside and read in her car. But she did.
There is perhaps more to Theroux's point than a comment on mystique, which he suggests declines with exposure. The real mystique of the novelist is in creating the magic in the novel that we as readers recognize, because we were spellbound.
But something has undoubtedly happened at just about the time that novelists (along with other writers) felt they had to be part of the promotional machinery. The way books are sold has damaged the novel somehow, perhaps by placing it in the same category as promoting movies and TV shows, as well as soap and prescription drugs. Movies require huge promotion because they must make great amounts of money, because they cost great amounts of money. Novels don't cost very much really. Just a decent and somewhat secure life for the novelist, which wouldn't pay for the special effects in a cheap horror movie. Maybe not even the catering.
Novels still supply movies and television with stories, and even when they do, the novels can themselves be unlike the movie, or any movie. Novels can still be novels. They can still bring the multidimensional news.
But even though novelists must do the bookstore signings and the morning radio shows, they don't have all that much celebrity (except perhaps in the bookish cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.) Perhaps they are sinking back into the obscurity that nurtures mystique. And maybe you won't have to be pushing 60 to want to be a novelist like them.
Sunday, October 03, 2004
When Elsewhere is Nowhere
Somewhere on the East Coast a woman I've never met is getting phone calls today prompted by something I wrote. At least this is what I imagine and expect, based on past experience. A substantial positive review in the Sunday review section of the San Francisco Chronicle, the big cheese in a book-buying town, can be a fairly big deal for an author, especially of serious nonfiction, even one as already celebrated as Kay Redfield Jamison.
Friends probably called her, and if her agent or editor hasn't, they will likely mention it in their next conversation. (I did hear of another best-selling author who happened to be in San Francisco when my review came out, and he called his editor and read the complete short review to him over the phone.) I got an email from Leonard Nimoy on my New York Times Star Trek piece which he said was "a fun read for me" and "I've had a lot excited calls from folks who enjoyed it." Needless to say, I got no excited calls myself.
A quote might be taken from today's review for an ad or a blurb on the paperback edition, but more likely than not, it will be attributed only to "San Francisco Chronicle." That's happened before, and it's how this game is played---I've done it myself: if the reviewer isn't a national name, the name of the paper is more impressive on a blurb. An article or review might get reproduced on web sites and be a cause for a blog comment here and there, but unless I write something else on exactly that subject covered by the site, it won't happen again.
These are ways in which some of what I write becomes consequential in the world. It happens elsewhere. Hereabouts, just silence. I got no calls today, and never do; even though I got some nice emails from people I interviewed or were otherwise involved in the Star Trek story, I got no calls from anyone else about it.
Nor are there usually any other consequences to my life, apart from getting paid, and that's seldom very much. The jury is still out on the further adventures the Star Trek piece might lead me on, but most everything else has had no direct or discernable effect here. Today's review didn't, and won't.
Even though I should be used to this, and probably would be undone if I did get calls, I still find this a bit alienating. You know, feeling alien to this place. A familiar feeling.
Musing on this is prompted by something else. In reading my own review I noticed something I didn't like. Though on balance it's solid and has some music to it, I detect some slackness here and there in the writing. Especially things I should have caught, and probably would have if I had gone through it once more, a day or so after I finished it. And I realize that my state of mind at the time I wrote it had some effect. For one thing, I've concluded I have no immediate future and probably no future at all with the Chronicle, beyond writing for minimal payment. I've contacted other papers who pay better for reviews, but haven't gotten a response. What I have now taken note of is that my feelings regarding this have affected my work, although so far only in small matters of style that few others are likely to detect.
So the motivation of building something isn't there to compensate for the lack of motivation from my immediate environment, or let's say my life. There's not much motivation anywhere for the quality of the writing. Even where this review or that article might be consequential, it's not because of the sentences. It's whether it is a positive or negative review, and whether it has a selling line in it or not. For an article it's whether it is good press or bad press for the subject. (In fact it seems that the reviewers who themselves get attention get it for writing biting negative reviews.)
I am exaggerating a bit---I know that when people say they enjoy a piece that they are in part feeling the effect of the writing. Just as I'm exaggerating about lack of response: I've had subjects of reviews and articles contact me and express gratitude for the attention, the quality of it, and for being "understood." I sometimes even get phone calls and emails from readers,usually no more than one per piece, often from a stranger with a strange story to tell; I am usually discomfited by these calls though I hold them in awe as well. A complete stranger going to all that trouble means some chord was struck, something important to that person. I value all those responses very much.
But most of the motivation for writing as well as I can, comes from an inner compulsion, an inner dialogue (I write things I hope to enjoy reading), and principle. Maybe even some writerly fear and/or superstition, that if you abuse the gift you lose it.
I also wonder if my new-found equanimity about editing that detracts from my work (subject of an earlier entry on 9/09) is the other side of this. I had a piece recently that was essentially strip-mined for a newsier and stylistically blunt and forgettable collection of information. It didn't bother me, at least not as it would have in the past.
Standing on principle seldom gets approval from others when it means offending somebody with power, or cutting off a source of income. I see pretty clearly that caring so much about the integrity of the final product has done me and my "career" far more harm than good. And I take note that the work I feel closest to, that I consider my best, is not generally so approved. So the worth of what I defend is questionable, especially to others. So what do I do?
As the editor of a Japanese art magazine once said to me when I asked him when I would be paid, "good question!" Certainly attending more rigorously to the writing that I am commissioned to do, at whatever price, is an obvious lesson and not that hard to heed. Being able to publish my work myself on the Internet helps enormously. I get more feedback from doing that, especially from the people on my email lists, than from anything else. But for the larger questions, it's hard to say.
There is a sense in which I've always felt it is out of my hands. We are servants of the gifts we're given, and whatever value they have (or are supposed to have) is probably more to the whole than to us. Whatever the "whole" might be. I suspect it includes other times and other places.
Just as the ants probably don't suffer from angst about searching out sugar and not finding much, we just do what we are compelled to do, regardless.
Somewhere on the East Coast a woman I've never met is getting phone calls today prompted by something I wrote. At least this is what I imagine and expect, based on past experience. A substantial positive review in the Sunday review section of the San Francisco Chronicle, the big cheese in a book-buying town, can be a fairly big deal for an author, especially of serious nonfiction, even one as already celebrated as Kay Redfield Jamison.
Friends probably called her, and if her agent or editor hasn't, they will likely mention it in their next conversation. (I did hear of another best-selling author who happened to be in San Francisco when my review came out, and he called his editor and read the complete short review to him over the phone.) I got an email from Leonard Nimoy on my New York Times Star Trek piece which he said was "a fun read for me" and "I've had a lot excited calls from folks who enjoyed it." Needless to say, I got no excited calls myself.
A quote might be taken from today's review for an ad or a blurb on the paperback edition, but more likely than not, it will be attributed only to "San Francisco Chronicle." That's happened before, and it's how this game is played---I've done it myself: if the reviewer isn't a national name, the name of the paper is more impressive on a blurb. An article or review might get reproduced on web sites and be a cause for a blog comment here and there, but unless I write something else on exactly that subject covered by the site, it won't happen again.
These are ways in which some of what I write becomes consequential in the world. It happens elsewhere. Hereabouts, just silence. I got no calls today, and never do; even though I got some nice emails from people I interviewed or were otherwise involved in the Star Trek story, I got no calls from anyone else about it.
Nor are there usually any other consequences to my life, apart from getting paid, and that's seldom very much. The jury is still out on the further adventures the Star Trek piece might lead me on, but most everything else has had no direct or discernable effect here. Today's review didn't, and won't.
Even though I should be used to this, and probably would be undone if I did get calls, I still find this a bit alienating. You know, feeling alien to this place. A familiar feeling.
Musing on this is prompted by something else. In reading my own review I noticed something I didn't like. Though on balance it's solid and has some music to it, I detect some slackness here and there in the writing. Especially things I should have caught, and probably would have if I had gone through it once more, a day or so after I finished it. And I realize that my state of mind at the time I wrote it had some effect. For one thing, I've concluded I have no immediate future and probably no future at all with the Chronicle, beyond writing for minimal payment. I've contacted other papers who pay better for reviews, but haven't gotten a response. What I have now taken note of is that my feelings regarding this have affected my work, although so far only in small matters of style that few others are likely to detect.
So the motivation of building something isn't there to compensate for the lack of motivation from my immediate environment, or let's say my life. There's not much motivation anywhere for the quality of the writing. Even where this review or that article might be consequential, it's not because of the sentences. It's whether it is a positive or negative review, and whether it has a selling line in it or not. For an article it's whether it is good press or bad press for the subject. (In fact it seems that the reviewers who themselves get attention get it for writing biting negative reviews.)
I am exaggerating a bit---I know that when people say they enjoy a piece that they are in part feeling the effect of the writing. Just as I'm exaggerating about lack of response: I've had subjects of reviews and articles contact me and express gratitude for the attention, the quality of it, and for being "understood." I sometimes even get phone calls and emails from readers,usually no more than one per piece, often from a stranger with a strange story to tell; I am usually discomfited by these calls though I hold them in awe as well. A complete stranger going to all that trouble means some chord was struck, something important to that person. I value all those responses very much.
But most of the motivation for writing as well as I can, comes from an inner compulsion, an inner dialogue (I write things I hope to enjoy reading), and principle. Maybe even some writerly fear and/or superstition, that if you abuse the gift you lose it.
I also wonder if my new-found equanimity about editing that detracts from my work (subject of an earlier entry on 9/09) is the other side of this. I had a piece recently that was essentially strip-mined for a newsier and stylistically blunt and forgettable collection of information. It didn't bother me, at least not as it would have in the past.
Standing on principle seldom gets approval from others when it means offending somebody with power, or cutting off a source of income. I see pretty clearly that caring so much about the integrity of the final product has done me and my "career" far more harm than good. And I take note that the work I feel closest to, that I consider my best, is not generally so approved. So the worth of what I defend is questionable, especially to others. So what do I do?
As the editor of a Japanese art magazine once said to me when I asked him when I would be paid, "good question!" Certainly attending more rigorously to the writing that I am commissioned to do, at whatever price, is an obvious lesson and not that hard to heed. Being able to publish my work myself on the Internet helps enormously. I get more feedback from doing that, especially from the people on my email lists, than from anything else. But for the larger questions, it's hard to say.
There is a sense in which I've always felt it is out of my hands. We are servants of the gifts we're given, and whatever value they have (or are supposed to have) is probably more to the whole than to us. Whatever the "whole" might be. I suspect it includes other times and other places.
Just as the ants probably don't suffer from angst about searching out sugar and not finding much, we just do what we are compelled to do, regardless.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
On the road
Can't resist the temptation to blog for the first time on the road. I'm in San Francisco for the week, ostensibly to do a story and conduct other writerly business, much of which has fallen apart or never materialized. But here I am. This is the second full day being here, as opposed to the day getting here. I spent most of yesterday in Berkeley. The second theme of this trip is Buddhism, in that the story I'm doing is on the ongoing program of Buddhist related arts events in the Bay area (also in LA, NYC, Boston and other places.) And in that I'll be spending one night at the San Francisco Zen Center.
I had two interviews scheduled in Berkeley, one of which actually happened. (Later I got an email from the editor at the SF Chronicle I thought I was doing this story for who had changed his mind-the old "no more freelance budget for the year" refrain. I'm visiting the Chronicle offices tomorrow, to meet people I have already written for, some I haven't, and one old acquaintance I haven't seen in xx years.)
After the interview, which involved seeing a new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, I went down to Telegraph Ave. to check out the changes. I lived in Berkeley for a few months in 1969, and Telegraph Ave was where I hung out. In memory it is all bookstores and cafes, but even if it was then it certainly isn't now. There is one place that is still there, that has been there continuously,as I've noted on other visits. It's a little Mexican restaurant, called La Fiesta, on a corner across from Cody's Books. I remember this restaurant well. I used to go in there, order coffee and sneak as many chips as I could, while reading (I specifically recall Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrine Quartet, the memory of which is flavored by those chips and that coffee.) There were street people then too, and I was very close to being one. I had a place to live but very little money, so the kindness of the waitresses there, not only to me but to street people worse off, is something I clearly remember.
So I had dinner there, and the food is still great, plentiful and very cheap. I don't imagine it's a gourmet paradise but I'm fairly peasant in my tastes, and a taco, a tostada, beans and rice that filled a big plate, starting with a generous bowl of soup, was all the dinner I could eat, and it was under $7 (though more with taxes and tip.) I don't know if the ownership is the same, but the décor is-same tiled tables and iconic art on the walls.
I stopped in Cody's then, inquired for the rest rooms (I guess because of the prevalence of homeless people, restrooms are at a premium here now too; every town is becoming Urine Town, where you have to pay to pee.) I also confirmed that Maxine Hong Kingston was reading there on Wednesday night, as the SF Chronicle said. Turns out that was wrong, she was reading in a half hour, on Tuesday night. Plus it wasn't this bookstore-it was the Cody's on 4th St. I got directions, but the person giving them must have assumed I was driving, because it turned out to be a long, long way. I eventually caught a bus after walking a few miles. I got there in time for the second half of the reading, and hung around until the line of people getting books signed had dwindled. I had reviewed Kingston's new book for the Chronicle but had never met her. (The review is over at http://booksinheat.blogspot.com )
So I did talk with her very briefly. She had liked the review. She said "I felt I was understood" and further, thought it was well written.
When I was younger I delighted in writing scathing reviews, and I still am pretty blunt about deficiencies I find, usually in books I am assigned to review (I try to choose books I want to recommend.) But these days my point of view is generally that if a book is "awaited"-that is, by a known author and people know about it, and are already wondering if it's good or not-then a negative review is legitimate. That book is, in a sense, news, and that information is sought. But when review space is limited and now that life is especially short, I don't see the point of picking an unknown book and bashing it. But I think the real difference-if it is a difference, let's just say it's certainly more conscious now-is that I really want to get across what I believe the author was trying to do, and what the book does say, at least to me.
That' s perhaps a long way around of saying that I can think of no higher compliment, as a writer as well as a reviewer, that someone saying "I felt I was understood." As a writer, I know how important that is, and how rare.
Whatever happened to signs? It's pretty difficult to get around without them, but they are generally hard to find. I noticed this first on the BART system. Signs are hard to find, the maps are in the wrong places, there is poor indication of what trains are going where and in which direction (no Uptown/Downtown as in NYC or Inbound/Outbound as in Boston). So I spent a lot of time getting places and being lost.
Still, it's a city, you know. Coming back from Berkeley I saw people obviously coming back from a baseball game cross paths with people obviously going home from the opera.
So now it's off to make reservations at the Zen Center, try to find someplace that sells phone cards (I forgot mine, of course) and visit an agent in Orinda.
Can't resist the temptation to blog for the first time on the road. I'm in San Francisco for the week, ostensibly to do a story and conduct other writerly business, much of which has fallen apart or never materialized. But here I am. This is the second full day being here, as opposed to the day getting here. I spent most of yesterday in Berkeley. The second theme of this trip is Buddhism, in that the story I'm doing is on the ongoing program of Buddhist related arts events in the Bay area (also in LA, NYC, Boston and other places.) And in that I'll be spending one night at the San Francisco Zen Center.
I had two interviews scheduled in Berkeley, one of which actually happened. (Later I got an email from the editor at the SF Chronicle I thought I was doing this story for who had changed his mind-the old "no more freelance budget for the year" refrain. I'm visiting the Chronicle offices tomorrow, to meet people I have already written for, some I haven't, and one old acquaintance I haven't seen in xx years.)
After the interview, which involved seeing a new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, I went down to Telegraph Ave. to check out the changes. I lived in Berkeley for a few months in 1969, and Telegraph Ave was where I hung out. In memory it is all bookstores and cafes, but even if it was then it certainly isn't now. There is one place that is still there, that has been there continuously,as I've noted on other visits. It's a little Mexican restaurant, called La Fiesta, on a corner across from Cody's Books. I remember this restaurant well. I used to go in there, order coffee and sneak as many chips as I could, while reading (I specifically recall Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrine Quartet, the memory of which is flavored by those chips and that coffee.) There were street people then too, and I was very close to being one. I had a place to live but very little money, so the kindness of the waitresses there, not only to me but to street people worse off, is something I clearly remember.
So I had dinner there, and the food is still great, plentiful and very cheap. I don't imagine it's a gourmet paradise but I'm fairly peasant in my tastes, and a taco, a tostada, beans and rice that filled a big plate, starting with a generous bowl of soup, was all the dinner I could eat, and it was under $7 (though more with taxes and tip.) I don't know if the ownership is the same, but the décor is-same tiled tables and iconic art on the walls.
I stopped in Cody's then, inquired for the rest rooms (I guess because of the prevalence of homeless people, restrooms are at a premium here now too; every town is becoming Urine Town, where you have to pay to pee.) I also confirmed that Maxine Hong Kingston was reading there on Wednesday night, as the SF Chronicle said. Turns out that was wrong, she was reading in a half hour, on Tuesday night. Plus it wasn't this bookstore-it was the Cody's on 4th St. I got directions, but the person giving them must have assumed I was driving, because it turned out to be a long, long way. I eventually caught a bus after walking a few miles. I got there in time for the second half of the reading, and hung around until the line of people getting books signed had dwindled. I had reviewed Kingston's new book for the Chronicle but had never met her. (The review is over at http://booksinheat.blogspot.com )
So I did talk with her very briefly. She had liked the review. She said "I felt I was understood" and further, thought it was well written.
When I was younger I delighted in writing scathing reviews, and I still am pretty blunt about deficiencies I find, usually in books I am assigned to review (I try to choose books I want to recommend.) But these days my point of view is generally that if a book is "awaited"-that is, by a known author and people know about it, and are already wondering if it's good or not-then a negative review is legitimate. That book is, in a sense, news, and that information is sought. But when review space is limited and now that life is especially short, I don't see the point of picking an unknown book and bashing it. But I think the real difference-if it is a difference, let's just say it's certainly more conscious now-is that I really want to get across what I believe the author was trying to do, and what the book does say, at least to me.
That' s perhaps a long way around of saying that I can think of no higher compliment, as a writer as well as a reviewer, that someone saying "I felt I was understood." As a writer, I know how important that is, and how rare.
Whatever happened to signs? It's pretty difficult to get around without them, but they are generally hard to find. I noticed this first on the BART system. Signs are hard to find, the maps are in the wrong places, there is poor indication of what trains are going where and in which direction (no Uptown/Downtown as in NYC or Inbound/Outbound as in Boston). So I spent a lot of time getting places and being lost.
Still, it's a city, you know. Coming back from Berkeley I saw people obviously coming back from a baseball game cross paths with people obviously going home from the opera.
So now it's off to make reservations at the Zen Center, try to find someplace that sells phone cards (I forgot mine, of course) and visit an agent in Orinda.
Thursday, July 03, 2003
Some weekends C-Span's Book TV has nothing I'm interested in, and some weekends---like the past one-there were several hours of stuff which I tape and check out through the following week. I just watched an hour's interview with Steven Wolfram about his book, A New Science.
The interviewer, whose name I forget, was a a TV reporter who got his rep by being able to communicate fairly complex ideas in a creative, clever and ironic way. He wasn't bad, but he kept coming back to this idea of Wolfram's ambition and ego in claiming to be creating a new science. That's the conventional wisdom on Wolfram and his book. (His web site is full of hype, so there's some basis I suppose.) But unfortunately for the interviewer, this was entirely undercut by Wolfram, not just his appearance and demeanor, but by what he had to say. He made a discovery, a very simple one (that complex phenomena, and randomness as well, can be generated over time by a few simple rules applied to the behavior of very simple phenomena), that he came to believe can account for complexity in many of the realms in which science tries to explain why things are they way they are.
I can't even begin to judge his theories (though what he said about how his ideas affect the theories of biological evolution made good sense to me), but I was able to get a feel for the theorist, and it seems to me that his ideas should be judged and debated on the merits, and not on whether or not he developed them in a prestigious university or think tank, or circulated a peer-reviewed manuscript, or even that his claims are large and his ad campaign is obnoxious.
I've read an article that accuses him of misrepresenting the work of others, and taking a lot of credit he isn't due. This is troubling and does damage his credibility. The evaluation of his theories, and whether he makes claims for them that are much too large, is underway, and that's a good thing.
He may turn out to be a genius of the age, or he may not. But doubts about his credibility have to be stated and confronted, not turned into fashionable snideness and follow-the-leader image-making. Evaluate his theories on the merits. Maybe he has hogged the limelight by his ability to buy exposure. But that means that his part of the debate gets stated, and others can answer him, and put these issues of randomness, complexity, and the nature of time, into the public discussion. Considering that relativity and quantum theory began in the early twentieth century, it's about time.
The interviewer, whose name I forget, was a a TV reporter who got his rep by being able to communicate fairly complex ideas in a creative, clever and ironic way. He wasn't bad, but he kept coming back to this idea of Wolfram's ambition and ego in claiming to be creating a new science. That's the conventional wisdom on Wolfram and his book. (His web site is full of hype, so there's some basis I suppose.) But unfortunately for the interviewer, this was entirely undercut by Wolfram, not just his appearance and demeanor, but by what he had to say. He made a discovery, a very simple one (that complex phenomena, and randomness as well, can be generated over time by a few simple rules applied to the behavior of very simple phenomena), that he came to believe can account for complexity in many of the realms in which science tries to explain why things are they way they are.
I can't even begin to judge his theories (though what he said about how his ideas affect the theories of biological evolution made good sense to me), but I was able to get a feel for the theorist, and it seems to me that his ideas should be judged and debated on the merits, and not on whether or not he developed them in a prestigious university or think tank, or circulated a peer-reviewed manuscript, or even that his claims are large and his ad campaign is obnoxious.
I've read an article that accuses him of misrepresenting the work of others, and taking a lot of credit he isn't due. This is troubling and does damage his credibility. The evaluation of his theories, and whether he makes claims for them that are much too large, is underway, and that's a good thing.
He may turn out to be a genius of the age, or he may not. But doubts about his credibility have to be stated and confronted, not turned into fashionable snideness and follow-the-leader image-making. Evaluate his theories on the merits. Maybe he has hogged the limelight by his ability to buy exposure. But that means that his part of the debate gets stated, and others can answer him, and put these issues of randomness, complexity, and the nature of time, into the public discussion. Considering that relativity and quantum theory began in the early twentieth century, it's about time.
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