"No Accountant Can Calculate Its Value"

"To ask why people need culture is in fact identical to asking why a human being is a human being.” -- Václav Havel

A characteristically visionary speech by Havel from 2009. At a mere thirteen minutes long, there's hardly any excuse for not listening to this man's indispensable insights.

New Prose Poem in Print

The current issue of Pear Noir!, just out, includes my prose poem "Interview with a Recluse." Here's a scrap:

... He said he’d long wanted to understand the innocence that can carry a lie, the dark lines laid down to claim ownership, identity, to create a principality and the readiness to die for it. He believed he could understand hate. The soldier came to hate at some level the comrade entrenched beside him. You hated because you wanted to love. Because the prospect of loss was a ruthless constant. Nations were no different, societies. What you hated were the unnatural constructs — the country you were dying and killing for. And you hated the natural constraints — isolating desert, seas, constriction of the mother tongue and the home religion. These made love impossible. The strangulated need to love grew into hate, until you believed you could love a nation, a theory, and kill for it. ...

Prime Passage: E.B. White on Christmas in 1949, The New Yorker

“Christmas in 1949 must compete as never before with the dazzling complexity of man, whose tangential desires and ingenuities have created a world that gives any simple thing the look of obsolescence — as though there were something inherently foolish in what is simple, or natural. The human brain is about to turn certain functions over to an efficient substitute, and we hear of a robot that is now capable of handling the tedious details of psychoanalysis, so that the patient no longer need confide in a living doctor but can take his problems to a machine, which sifts everything and whose ‘brain’ has selective power and the power of imagination. One thing leads to another. The machine that is imaginative will, we don’t doubt, be heir to the ills of the imagination; one can already predict that the machine itself may become sick emotionally, from strain and tension, and be compelled at last to consult a medical man, whether of flesh or of steel. We have tended to assume that the machine and the human brain are in conflict. Now the fear is that they are indistinguishable. Man not only is notably busy himself but insists that the other animals follow his example. A new bee has been bred artificially, busier than the old bee.

            “So this day and this century proceed toward the absolutes of convenience, of complexity, and of speed. . . Man’s inventions, directed always onward and upward, have an odd way of leading back to man himself, as a rabbit track in snow leads eventually to the rabbit. It is one of his more endearing qualities that man should think his tracks lead outward, toward something else, instead of back around the hill to where he has already been; and it is one of his persistent ambitions to leave earth entirely and travel by rocket into space, beyond the pull of gravity, and perhaps try another planet, as a pleasant change. He knows that the atomic age is capable of delivering a new package of energy; what he doesn’t know is whether it will prove to be a blessing. This week, many will be reminded that no explosion of atoms generates so hopeful a light as the reflection of a star, seen appreciatively in a pasture pond. It is there we perceive Christmas — and the sheep quiet, and the world waiting.” 

Our Identity Is In Our Arts

In February of last year, Wynton Marsalis appeared on Tavis Smiley's PBS show, and had a number of extremely insightful things to say about the place of the arts in American life -- beginning in the schools particularly. In our era of unprecedented national and moral confusion, civic decay, and fraying cultural life, Marsalis's inspiring exhortations are well worth 23 minutes of one's time.

Some choice excerpts:

Tavis: What is the price that we are paying as a country for the abandonment of music education in our schools?

Marsalis: Well, first, let’s not even say just music education. Let’s say just arts. The fact that we are culturally ignorant. We don’t know what our heritage is. The price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people in their cultures. We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don’t understand what is already melted. We’re fighting for territory. We see it in our Congress, we see it in our political systems. We see it in our ways of life, how separated we are. ... But our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance. And when we squander that inheritance, we act outside—we don’t know who we are. We don’t know where we are. ... It’s like we have a deep—we’re suffering from an identity crisis. And that identity is in our arts. The fact that we don’t find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation, and the battles we’ve had on this ground, and how they’ve been successfully resolved—we can’t enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors. ... That our kids don’t know that achievement, there’s no way in the world that could be good for them. ... And when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it’s only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. And for some reason it hasn’t dawned on us yet.

And Marsalis has much more to say...

New Stories Called "Deeply Seductive"

My new illustrated, limited-edition story collection, Date of Disappearance, receives the kindness of The Oregonian today. 

The stories are superb, well-balanced and deeply seductive, revealing the lives and experiences of people -- very normal, everyday, you-and-I-type people -- at that bittersweet moment where everything routine, expected, and normal cracks and leaves them in a spot thoroughly unimaginable just moments before. … [Cunningham’s] sentences often leap off the page in their beauty and insight, demanding a lingering rereading, and his characters have a depth and life that is hard to achieve in any genre of writing. … If you're a lover of the fine art of short fiction, Date of Disappearance should be added to your list. If you're not, perhaps this wonderful book would be a good place to start.

See the review here.

"Language That Induces a Change of Heart"

On the Smithsonian website, Ron Rosenbaum offers a lovely little profile of ex-Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham and his new(ish) editorial undertaking, Lapham’s Quarterly, that themed compendium of great writing from across the centuries.

Something of an e-iconoclast myself, I particularly like the way Rosenbaum has framed Lapham’s mission with the Quarterly: as a deliberate counter-assault on our Web-addled, attention-deficit age by means of curated — and timeless — content.

The cavalry charge that Lewis Lapham is now leading could be said to be one against headlessness—against the historically illiterate, heedless hordesmen of the digital revolution ignorant of our intellectual heritage; against the “Internet intellectuals” and hucksters of the purportedly utopian digital future who are decapitating our culture, trading in the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for...BuzzFeed.

Here’s a quote from the 77-year-old editorial visionary himself, for anyone needing reminding of what a gift this man continues to be to the intellectual life of America (emphasis mine): 

“I think that the value [of LQ] is in the force of the imagination and the power of expression. I mean ... the hope of social or political change stems from language that induces a change of heart. That’s the power of words and that’s a different power than the power of the Internet. And I’m trying to turn people on to those powers and it’s in language.”

Rosenbuam writes:

Lapham has no love for what web culture is doing. He laments Google for inadvertent censorship in the way search engine optimization indiscrim­inately buries what is of value beneath millions of search results of crap. Even if that was not the purpose, it’s been the result, he avers.      

 “And that aspect of the Internet I think is going to get worse.”

He can sound a bit extreme when he says Facebook embodies “many of the properties of the Holy Inquisition. I mean its data-mining capacities. Or what Torquemada had in mind. I mean, the NKVD and the Gestapo were content aggregators.”

Extreme? Read Rosenbaum’s piece entire, then take a look at Lapham’s Quarterly. Judge for yourself.

Rilke on the Big Screen: There's a Novel for That!

On the Word & Film website, writer Christine Spines' "Poetic Injustice: The 5 Most Fascinating Poet Biopics Never Made" gives us a handful of literary figures to consider for dramatization on the big screen. How surprising -- and gratifying -- to see Rainer Maria Rilke listed there!

I happen to have, ahem, published a novel about the man's life, which I daresay would be a fruitful starting place for any interested filmmakers. Rilke's story, says Spines, has "got the makings for an English Patient-style Oscar sweep," a sentiment I couldn't agree with more. In fact, The English Patient (which I've unabashedly claimed as my favorite film ever) was an inspirational source I constantly returned to during the 6 years spent writing Lost Son.

In describing Rilke's posthumously collected correspondence with Franz Xaver Kappus, Letters to a Young Poet, Spines uses a nice turn of phrase. The letters to Kappus, she says, are about

"surviving the modern world while afflicted by the poetic sensibility." 

The phrase gracefully describes the dilemma at the heart of Rilke's whole life, the very dilemma novelized from first page to last in my book, Lost Son. It also echoes language that I myself have used in describing the novel. Lost Son, I have said, "dramatizes the troubles and triumphs this immensely vulnerable personality encountered as he made his way in the modern world." I've said: "Rilke was an open nerve that the world exerted itself upon."

And here's more, from a page on my author website:

From an early age until his death in Switzerland from Leukemia in 1926, Rilke displayed a fierce and wholehearted commitment to his work as a poet. His entire adult life was characterized by a relentless pursuit of art and the conditions propitious to making it. Indeed, his need to live and breathe art rendered his loyalties to family and friends extremely complex, and kept him perpetually unprotected, homeless, and poor. It gave him, however, his best poetic works — not a few of which are held to be among the greatest in the world today.

Rilke’s writings, in their pungent synthesis of mystery, terror, and praise, ring with powerful interiority and speak to the immense sensitivity of their creator — a man who experienced the world’s pain and beauty in the absence of any self-protective membrane or filter, a man for whom every sensory impression became an unstoppable vibration of the soul.The life behind this unparalleled work tells its own strange and inspiring story of long sacrifice and sudden moments of transcendence. Lost Son depicts Rilke in the drive of his all-consuming art as it carries him back and forth across Western Europe over the course of 25 intensely restless years.

I fully concur about the power of this life story, which is why I dedicated more than half a decade to paying homage to it in a novel. An exploration of Rilke's life in a narrative film, if done with the utmost care, could be wonderful in its own way, and that's why I sent copies of my book to a number of gifted filmmakers. Alas, Wim Wenders never got back to me ... 

NB: Spines is refreshingly accurate in most of her brief description of Rilke and his life, including correctly designating him as Austrian (rather than the all-too-customary erroneous German). It's worth noting, however, that her third sentence refers to Rilke having "crossed paths" with Paul Cezanne, Auguste Rodin, and Sigmund Freud. She's right about the latter two men (in fact, Rodin is a character in Lost Son, as Rilke's friendship with this great sculptor is an integral part of the novel). But the poet never met Paul Cezanne. Rilke did, of course, attend the important 1907 Paris exhibition of the painter's work, visiting the gallery almost daily. Cezanne's profound influence upon Rilke is articulated with breathtaking power in the letters Rilke wrote to his wife Clara Westhoff during the exhibition's run, posthumously collected as Letters on Cezanne.

Prime Passage: Privacy by Garret Keizer

"I wonder how privacy would look in a society in which private life was not so thoroughly defined and so frequently degraded by consumerism. More than forty years ago economist Gary Becker observed that as people acquire an increasing number of consumer goods, the time they spend with each item decreases. The ultimate result, predicted his colleague Staffan Linder, would be a 'leisure' that grew increasingly hectic as people tried to keep up with their multitudinous acquisitions. Linder's scenario hardly sounds conducive to intimate association, reflection, and creativity -- all qualities that privacy is usually credited with protecting. In addition to corrupting leisure by cluttering up private space and time, our consumables frequently include gizmos for peering into the private lives of others, or for publicizing our own in the fond hope that somebody else will find our frenzy more interesting than we do. (p.93) ... 

"Many of the threats to our private lives, it seems to me, come from people who lack much in the way of a private life of their own. Who would take the time to hack into someone else's computer who had a well-tended garden, a circle of loving friends, or a shelf full of good books? We are under siege by the vacuous as much as by the vicious." (p.114)

I highly recommend Keizer's Privacy. Buy it here. 

Man in the Stacks, Part Three

The final installment of my three-part piece as unofficial Writer-in-Residence at Portland's central library is now online at the Oregonian.

... At the Popular Library info desk, a librarian explained to an 80-something man about ebooks and Library2Go. Upstairs in Literature & History, a man at a table read "Sniper: A History of U.S. Marksmen." Deeper in the stacks, a young man encamped on the floor was reading quietly to his girlfriend from a book of poetry. "That's a pretty good one," I heard him say, the sound of a smile in his voice. I remembered the man in the mesh baseball cap. We'd come from different places, the lot of us, but we were all here for the same reasons. We were looking for education, art, civic involvement, and yes, the meaningful wasting of time. With gorgeous grace, the library furnished it all. ...

Read the rest.

(N.B.: An abridgement of the complete series will appear in this Sunday's (10/21) print edition of The Oregonian.)

In the Library, Part Two

My second of three dispatches as unofficial Writer-in-Residence at Portland's Central Library is now live on the Oregonian website.

I headed across the second-floor rotunda to the Business and Science Library and entered the stacks. A patron was crouched before a bottom shelf pulling books, inspecting them, tucking some underarm, replacing others. What happens amid these aisles is something sensorial, something personal because essentially physical. Neither I nor anyone I know will ever search Google for every title, author, scientific discovery, or school of thought contained in the Central Library, but here, because they've been arranged all together at arm's length, we will certainly happen upon some. The library is meticulously organized but breeds chance discoveries. It's public and yet serene. You're never alone in the library, but your privacy is safer than almost anywhere. ...

Read the rest.

Podcast: Libraries & E-Books

This month, I begin my second year working with the Oregon Humanities Council facilitating public conversations about the cultural impact of e-books and the many implications of e-reading. One worrisome facet of e-reading is that of reader vulnerability, i.e., the unchecked power of digital content providers to control or restrict the availability of a text at the push of a button; to block or wholly disable reader access; to censor or otherwise manipulate content at will; and to infringe upon reader privacy in any number of ways.

In the world of print books, it's long been a role of the public library to mitigate reader vulnerability. When it comes to e-reading, too, librarians are working daily at all levels to provide and protect reader access and defend reader rights and privacy. They face unprecedented challenges, however.

Last weekend at the Central Library here in Portland, I attended an outstanding panel presentation on the subject of library access to e-books. Publisher/library relations on this matter have become increasingly heated in the last few weeks, as ALA president Maureen Sullivan's recent open letter to American publishers revealed.

The Central Library panel was a wealth of up-to-the-minute information about the challenges libraries continue to face in a current publishing climate where restricted access is the default. The panel featured Molly Raphael (immediate past president of the ALA), present Multnomah County library director Vailey Oehlke, and librarian and digital access expert Greg Williams. Each spoke at length and with great first-hand knowledge and insight into a troubling state of affairs.

The panel is now available as a podcast on the Multnomah County Library website. It will interest and enlighten anybody concerned about the continuing role of our beloved public libraries in the increasingly centralized "information economy" of a so-called digital age.

"I Have Always Imagined that Paradise Will Be a Kind of Library"

In light of the upcoming vote here in Oregon's Multnomah County on establishing a permanent library district, I'm writing a short series about Portland's Central Library for The Oregonian. I still remember my first visit to the place. It was eight years ago, on a trip from out-of-state. Having come from a municipality where, thanks to citizen apathy, libraries were mostly decrepit facilities from the ancient '60's (with dilapidated collections to match), I was wonder-struck.  

My first dispatch as self-appointed library Writer-in-Residence posted on The Oregonian website this morning. (Two more online installments will follow in the next two weeks, with the whole thing going into the Sunday paper toward the end of the month.)

... Encamped at tables and inquiring at Info, the patrons were as variegated as the library collection itself -- people of all descriptions, ages, ethnicities, and interests. They sauntered in slowly, looking to kill time, or they beelined to the Holds. They pushed a walker or trailed a speedy preschooler. They brought their homework or just idle curiosity. A few carried laptops, many a canvas tote. Among them were Portland natives and arrivistes. Some undoubtedly worked for the city, some in industry, and some slept last night on the street. Some had come for leisure. Others were here to search online job listings via a library terminal. Still others were learning English or cramming for their GEDs. There were 30-50 in the room, but only when someone sneezed did I realize how quiet it was. ...

Read the rest.

Reason No. 8,972,654 to Be Grateful for Librarians

... Because they stand up to greedy obstructionist corporations! 

In an open letter to America's largest publishers dispatched in light of these companies' Draconian restrictions on e-book sales to libraries, American Library Association President Maureen Sullivan brooks no market-tyrants: 

 It’s a rare thing in a free market when a customer is refused the ability to buy a company’s product and is told its money is “no good here.” Surprisingly, after centuries of enthusiastically supporting publishers’ products, libraries find themselves in just that position with purchasing e-books from three of the largest publishers in the world. Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin have been denying access to their e-books for our nation’s 112,000 libraries and roughly 169 million public library users.

President Sullivan goes on to school the robber baron CEOs in the true and higher purpose of book publishing and its long-honored relationship to our public library system. I find the following paragraphs particularly beautiful:

Librarians understand that publishing is not just another industry. It has special and important significance to society. Libraries complement and, in fact, actively support this industry by supporting literacy and seeking to spread an infectious and lifelong love of reading and learning. Library lending encourages patrons to experiment by sampling new authors, topics and genres. This experimentation stimulates the market for books, with the library serving as a de facto discovery, promotion and awareness service for authors and publishers.

Publishers, libraries and other entities have worked together for centuries to sustain a healthy reading ecosystem — celebrating our society’s access to the complete marketplace of ideas. Given the obvious value of libraries to publishers, it simply does not add up that any publisher would continue to lock out libraries. It doesn’t add up for me, it doesn’t add up for ALA’s 60,000 members, and it definitely doesn’t add up for the millions of people who use our libraries every month.

America’s libraries have always served as the “people’s university” by providing access to reading materials and educational opportunity for the millions who want to read and learn but cannot afford to buy the books they need. Librarians have a particular concern for vulnerable populations that may not have any other access to books and electronic content, including individuals and families who are homebound or low-income. To deny these library users access to e-books that are available to others — and which libraries are eager to purchase on their behalf — is discriminatory.

We have met and talked sincerely with many of these publishers. We have sought common ground by exploring new business models and library lending practices. But these conversations only matter if they are followed by action: Simon & Schuster must sell to libraries. Macmillan must implement its proposed pilot. Penguin must accelerate and expand its pilots beyond two urban New York libraries.

We librarians cannot stand by and do nothing while some publishers deepen the digital divide. We cannot wait passively while some publishers deny access to our cultural record. We must speak out on behalf of today’s — and tomorrow’s — readers. The library community demands meaningful change and creative solutions that serve libraries and our readers who rightfully expect the same access to e-books as they have to printed books.

So, which side will you be on? Will you join us in a future of liberating literature for all? Libraries stand with readers, thinkers, writers, dreamers and inventors. Books and knowledge — in all their forms — are essential. Access to them must not be denied.

 (Read the letter in full)

Dear Famous Writers School (P.S.)

“All signs point toward our desire to institutionalize the artist, to integrate him into the community. By means of university courses which teach the ‘technique’ of writing, or which arrange for the communication of the spirit from a fully initiated artist to the neophyte, by means of doctoral degrees in creativity, by means of summer schools and conferences, our democratic impulses fulfill themselves and we undertake to prove that art is a profession like another, in which a young man of reasonably good intelligence has a right to succeed. And this undertaking, which is carried out by administrators and by teachers of relatively simple mind, is in reality the response to the theory of more elaborate and refined minds—of intellectuals—who conceive of the artist as the Commissioner of Moral Sanitation, and who demand that he be given his proper statutory salary without delay. I do not hold with the theory that art grows best in hardship. But I become uneasy—especially if I consider the nature of the best of modern art, its demand that it be wrestled with before it consents to bless us—whenever I hear of plans for its early domestication. These plans seem to me an aspect of the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment, of the modern indignation at the idea of entering the life of the spirit without proper provision having been made for full security.” -- Lionel Trilling
“The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time” (1952); found in: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, p. 285

Dear Famous Writers School...

Immersed in a 1969 Fawcett Crest edition of Herzog, a reader notices that a small, yellowing tri-folded brochure has fluttered into his lap.

 

It purports to offer a personal message from Random House founder Bennett Cerf:

 

Inside the brochure, the "Famous Writers School" and its "revealing Aptitude Test" are extolled as sure means of harnessing creative inspiration via the guidance of famous literary professionals -- and of launching a "successful writing career," finding "success in writing," etc.

 

Taking a cue from the epistolary impulses of Herzog himself, the reader pens a reply to this transchronological dispatch:

Dear Famous Writers School,

Were you among the first to peddle a secular deliverance from the spiritual pangs of art? Did it start with the likes of you, or could one find your counterpart in the ancient world? You take up, I suppose, an immemorial tradition -- the merchant class has always traded in shortcuts, always sold to the confessant a means of circumventing the rigors of real confession: indulgences, &etc. Even Gutenberg perfected his press with funds raised this way. Yes, but with you something is different. What you offered was a new brand of clergy ordained by sales figures and anointed by the pentecostal light of "fame." It was the number of units sold, it was notoriety, it was mass appeal upon which you based your claim of authority. This was sensible, rational. I see your logic. What was lacking, though, was that old dependable leavener: Shame. It only takes a dash of the stuff to increase the nutrients that enable the questioning of questionable undertakings, and thus it's extremely valuable in moderation (in excess, of course, it will stymie all action). I know, the market, perceived to be an autonomous, self-propelling, and amoral organism, has no place for shame. I can see how you got along fine without it, sure. But listen, had you never married the profane and vacuous standards of the dehumanized marketplace to the holy, humanizing labor of art -- or had you never done so in such a speciously authoritative way and on a such a mass scale -- had you, in short, thought twice before ordaining yourselves high priests in the New Church of the Cynical Arts, we might all be better off today. Maybe.

Yours Truly,

                  ---------

 

"They Deserve Ruthless Suspicion"

In a brilliant long article at Open Letters Monthly, writer Nathan Schneider reminds us about the value of a serious, well-reasoned questioning of the dogmas of techno-consumerism. And he doesn't mince words either. 

"The Amazon Kindle is a catastrophe: an interface to a proprietary market managed by a profit-motivated outfit that wants to own and monetize your memory theater. … Apple’s iPad, the overgrown smartphone that has been eating up the Kindle’s market-share in the e-book business, isn’t much better. The slicker Apple’s products get, the more overbearingly they seek to control the user experience. … Until these companies take seriously the needs and, above all, the rights of readers (the human beings, not the machines), they deserve ruthless suspicion. … The point of all this worrying is to dig a spur in the capacity of human creativity to outsmart the enemies of imagination. ..."

Submitting (and not)

Dear L,

As you well know, a writer wants most of all to feel understood — and among writers novelists seek this more than any, don’t we? Despite our shy, hermetic ways we’re a starved and eager crew. I became extremely cognizant of this during my first stay at an artist’s colony last summer, surrounded every breakfast and supper by fifteen other writers, all of us earnest, awkward, and cagey in our happiness at being thrown together — and somehow mistrustful of togetherness, cautious of our hunger for it.

This secretive, solitary, often isolating art demands the counterweight of comprehension — being comprehended is the novelist’s version of being a part of things. And yet for all but one percent of us this understanding comes so rarely, or reaches us only vaguely, fragmentarily, as echo or suggestion. As I’ve mentioned, I sent you my manuscript because while it has been skimmed and scattered on many a befuddled editor’s desk (or computer screen, God forbid) over these last nine months, I knew you would comprehend it, L. But you’ve done far more: you’ve taken the time and care to show how you’ve comprehended it. Where editors for whatever addled, mercenary, or blindly subjective reasons have failed and disappointed the book, you have bolstered it. This writer feels his readerly faith restored. And his book, much-rejected thing, feels better about itself.

It can only be itself, in the end. Far from personal dejection, this has been the effect of the rejection — I mean submission — process overall: my own redoubled sense of the book’s completeness and selfness, and yet of some injury or indignity repeatedly done to the book by "professionals." In other words, far from feeling cast down (having done my utmost and written to the best of my powers the book that wanted to be written), I feel, in a parental way, worried for this poor, pure-hearted, overlooked, jabbed and bullied manuscript. How will it find its footing in the world? Who (what editor and readers) will befriend it?

How many publishers have seen it, you ask? I have the tally at about 22 so far. Beyond rote rejectionese like “I was not passionate enough about this,” here, for indignant fun, is an exhibit of some things editors have said, plus my own addenda:

-“I’m not sure I’m confident enough Cunningham can sustain the narrative clearly enough over such a long time span to be satisfying.”
(It’s obvious this guy didn’t finish it, so he wouldn’t know either way.)

 -“I thoroughly enjoyed the scope of the piece … [but] I didn’t find it varied enough in theme.”
(Themes crash-course: clocks/years/generations; telegraph/letters/communication; secrecy/silence/silhouettes/shadows; Manifest Destiny/western movement/American vastness/spiritual vacancy; Civil War/family war/American violence; Old World/New World; technology/personal reinvention; Benjamin as latter-day Hamlet... [but you, of course, saw these, L!] )

-“I felt that he was often forgetting the reader … I had trouble connecting with the characters … I just never felt the narrative taking on momentum and pulling me through … [but] I was fascinated by the details of the camps and the letters from the war!”
(How could she like the war letters and not find that they provided momentum?)

-“I found the narrative thread here rather difficult to follow and had a hard time with the letters — they took me away from the characters, and the moment, in a way that I found disruptive.”
(Ditto: letters & momentum)

-“The structure of the book often reveals the characters’ fates before we truly become attached to them … and this tends to diminish the drama of the developing plot.”
(She didn’t read attentively enough to notice what the main plot really is.)

-“It feels very ‘historical’ to me and sometimes that category comes with a feeling of heaviness.”
(Can’t heaviness be good? Isn’t Hardy heavy? James? Toni Morrison?)

I’m not merely crazy or disgruntled, am I, to respond as I do above? Your own response to the book, L, reaffirms that I’m not — that the problem the novel has faced is faulty or distracted reading. A few other editors have — subtly and not-so-subtly — alluded to my “track record” as reason for rejection. And so many of the responses, like the above, contradict one another, that it all comes out a wash. Or, if there is a moral, it’s this: Writer, Follow Thy Own Star, and Be Thee Patient! 

I’ve been reading Lionel Trilling lately, and the other day I was struck by something he wrote in 1947 describing a contemporary deification of “reality” (as opposed to flights of imagination) in literary taste. For Trilling, this wish to narrowly define and enshrine reality showed a cultural mistrust of “the internal” which, eerily, seems to me to hold true in today’s literary marketplace:

“Whenever we detect evidences of style and thought we suspect that reality is being a little betrayed.” 

Then, in an essay by Ozick (love this lady) about Saul Bellow, I find this wonder:

“The art of the novel … is in the mix of idiosyncratic language — language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of the fingertip — and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image.”

The art of the novel, that is, thrives on the ineluctable peculiarities of style. Singularities of vision, we could say. Or, to come back to Trilling, the “internal” stamp. But don’t you get the sense, as I do, that to write like oneself, to show the whorl, is to earn in the current marketplace editorial scorn? — that is, unless you’re an established DeLillo or Ondaatje. Aren’t we fiction-writers made to feel (subliminally through the culture, or overtly via editors) a little ashamed of pliant language or structure, as if we’re making unreasonable demands upon readers? As if the definition of a fine and viable novel is that which meets the reader at face-value, sans subtext, nuance, subtlety of theme, already fully explicated on every page — i.e., ideal for dipping in and out of while text-messaging or downloading a TV show. According to the general sentiment (at least among major publishers), peculiarity of style is a form of lying or of extreme egotism — and we see what they do to liars and egotists nowadays, in this Age of Disgraced Memoirists.

But I, for one, am a reader who likes a novel to make some demands upon me. And demanding novels do see the light — some anyway, even ones authored by obscurer writers.

Goodness, now I’m afraid I must apologize for writing a jeremiad where I meant only to express appreciation. But hopefully this can bring with it, more than idle complaint, a bit of solidarity, because I know your own beautiful work has lately braved the same climate. I do really appreciate you giving your time, L, and treating the manuscript to such a respectful reading. I feel that you’ve seen in it all that I would hope for a reader to see.

While my prospects of earning any decent advance on this one have all but evaporated, the passionate objective remains to simply see the thing into print. A strange position to find myself in, I must say, having felt all along that this is my strongest — and certainly my most plot-driven (and wouldn’t that mean “commercially viable”?) — book.

Oh, but meanwhile there remains only and as ever the work of doing one’s best and holding one’s ground. And of clearing one’s head of all these matters once at the desk. The work itself is what one has. So much else is beyond one’s control.

Meanwhile, too, we have friendship.

In friendship, with great thanks,

 —M

"A Place to Curate Ideas and Experiences"

The folks over at the Melville House blog, Moby Lives, are running a marvelous Q&A series featuring some of our country's best indie booksellers. Today's installment spotlights Megan Wade Antieau of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, and is a veritable celebration of indie spirit and erudition. Read, and remember why one buys indie!

"... For me, part of why I’m in bookselling is actually about social change; I am interested in the creation and rebuilding of alternative, localized cultures, as well as more democratic, localized economic institutions. Independent bookstores are a pretty perfect intersection of those two things. I come from both a community organizing and an academic background, but feel that most non-profit models and university models are not helping us do the type of grassroots political and intellectual work that needs to happen for real change in this country. A bookstore, on the other hand, is a place to curate both ideas and experiences in the form of books and conversations for a really broad audience, to constantly prod and provoke people in ways they aren’t necessarily looking for. So seeing that type of slow change happen with our customers is part of what keeps me inspired, as well as those moments where we are clearly aiding the creation of an alternative artistic or political culture in face of the national, monopolistic culture; for instance, every time we have a customer come in who is there to talk as well as shop, who brings in their own poetry or comics for consignment at the same time as they’re picking up both a staff recommendation and something from another local author. ..."

 

From the Dept. of Cultural Envy: Argentine Writers Granted Literary Pensions

 Some societies regard the work of the imagination as a thing of vital social value. From the New York Times of August 12, 2012:

The city of Buenos Aires now gives pensions to published writers in a program that attempts to strengthen the “vertebral column of society,” as drafters of the law described their goal. Since its enactment recently, more than 80 writers have been awarded pensions, which can reach almost $900 a month, supplementing often meager retirement income. ...

And there are plans to implement the pension program throughout Argentina:

“I’m very optimistic about the approval of our bill,” Mr. Junio said. “There’s a general recognition of the transcendent role that writers have had in forging our society.”

Culture shock! Try to imagine an American legislator speaking to the "transcendent role" of the literary arts in the U.S.

Here in Buenos Aires, the requirements for obtaining the pension are fairly strict. A writer must be at least 60 and the author of at least five books released by known publishing houses, ruling out self-published writers. Authors of tomes on law, medicine or other technical matters need not apply, as the pensions are limited to writers of fiction, poetry, literary essays and plays. …

“We prefer not to call it a pension, but rather a subsidy in recognition of literary activity,” said Graciela Aráoz, a poet who is president of the Argentine Writers Society, which has more than 800 members. “In the end, this is about fortifying the pleasurable act of reading, which prevents us from turning into the equivalent of zombies.” ...

Prime Passages: Kenneth Clark & Henry James on Civilization

From Civilisation, the illustrated companion book to Lord Kenneth Clark's 1969 BBC documentary of the same name:

What is civilization? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it, and I am looking at it now [Paris].

… At certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself—body and spirit—which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection—reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways—through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed on the visible world. … However complex and solid [civilization] seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear—far of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that makes it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planting next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of prosperity. There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed; it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilization requires a modicum of material prosperity—enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. … People sometimes think that civilization consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilization, but they are not what make a civilization, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. So if one asks why the civilization of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted. And the first invaders of the Roman empire became exhausted too. As so often happens, they seem to have succumbed to the same weakness as the people they conquered. … These early invaders have been aptly compared to the English in India in the eighteenth century—there for what they could get out of it, taking part in the administration if it paid them, contemptuous of the traditional culture, except insofar as it provided precious metals… Civilization means something more than energy and will and creative power: something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. (Civilisation; pp.1-14)

 From The Master, Volume 5 of Leon Edel's towering biography, Henry James: A Life:

New York had created not a social order but an extemporized utility-life that substituted the glamour of technology for the deep-rooted foundations of existence. … Man could create so blindly and so crudely the foundations of inevitable ‘blight.’ … Civilization meant order, composition, restraint, moderation, beauty, duration. It meant creation of a way of life that ministered to man’s finest qualities and potential. Using this standard of measurement, James found America terribly wanting. It was founded on violence, plunder, loot, commerce; its monuments were built neither for beauty nor for glory, but for obsolescence. It put science and technology to the service of the profit motive, and this would lead to the decay of human forms and human values. Older nations had known how to rise above shopkeeping; they had not made a cult of ‘business’ and of ‘success.’ And then James hated the continental ‘bigness’ of America. Homogeneity, rootedness, manners—modes of life—these were his materials, and everywhere James looked he found there had been an erosion of the standards and forms necessary to a novelist, necessary also to civilization. The self-indulgence and self-advertisement of the plunderers was carried over to the indulging of their young. Americans had interpreted freedom as a license to plunder.

(The Master: Henry James, Vol.5, pp.291-317)

M. Allen Cunningham's Date of Disappearance Now for Sale!

Available for purchase direct from the publisher here.

Available through Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon (and in stock at other fine indie bookstores soon).

  

ISBN: 978-0-615-58931-2

Retail price: $17.95 

208 pages

5.5x8.5 with French flaps 

www.Atelier26Books.com

Hating on the Story: an American Tradition

I've got a short story collection on the way in the next month or so. Like every fiction writer, I'd heard rumors about the reading public's distaste for short stories. I had no idea, however, the deep and historical extent of our loathing till I read Seth Fried's historical analysis, which begins by citing a strangely compelling recent study:

According to the study, when a sample of readers were asked whether they would rather read a novel or a short story collection, 100% of participants barfed at the mention of a short story collection. When asked whether they would rather read a short story collection or have a hardcover copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom thrown at each of their heads in such a way as to cause the corner of the book to strike them sharply in the temple, 90% of participants said they would prefer to have the novel thrown at them. The remaining 10% hastily took out their own copies of Freedom and began flagellating themselves about the temples, as if they now believed that doing so would help ward off short stories in general. To summarize the results of this study in the words of your average publishing professional, short story collections are a “tough sell.”

Read the rest at the Tin House blog here. And note the historical illustrations!

Sherlock's Caution for the Google Age

"I consider that man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

--Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)

There's a little Q&A with me up now at Paper Fort, the blog of Literary Arts, those excellent folks who awarded me an Oregon Literary Fellowship.

Ten Days Left to Support M. Allen Cunningham's Illustrated Limited Edition

Art by N. Shields, from Date of Disappearance

Ten days and $324 left to go in the Date of Disappearance fundraiser at United States Artists. If the deadline arrives, and we're shy of one hundred percent, the project is off.

But I know we can make it! Remember, this is "micro-philanthropy," meaning you can pledge one dollar, five dollars, whatever you wish -- it's a no-risk deal, you get to write it off, you can pledge to receive gifts, and you're supporting the arts.

I like to think that the project is kinda special: Date of Disappearance is a limited edition, every copy numbered and signed and illuminated beautifully with ten ink-and-charcoal images by Portland artist Nathan Shields. The book will launch a micro-press,and I want to put it out there in a special way -- exclusively through our country's fabulous indie bookstores (i.e., not Amazon or the chains).

During this final lap of fundraising, I've had the honor of being interviewed by fellow author Victoria Patterson (Drift, This Vacant Paradise). Not only is she an extremely gifted fiction writer -- she asks very smart interview questions. A snippet:

VP: You’re a true champion of independent booksellers. Do you see the plight of the artist and the independent bookseller as similar?

MAC: I love this question. Yes, yes. Alfred Kazin characterized modern American writers as being steeped — unavoidably and necessarily — in all the little, often superficial details of life in America, and yet as being at the same time deeply, subtly alienated from all of that. The same could be said of many great booksellers, I think. Both artist and bookseller stand at the vanguard of culture. Both struggle for something essentially impractical, unlucrative, and yet unspeakably necessary. Both have labored to build a life in accordance with a passionate vision. Both accumulate intangible rewards, usually in the absence of lower gratifications (prestige, affluence, vacations). Both are cursed and blessed to live in the conviction that what they do has relevance and worth in this world — to spend their days in service to something they love unreasonably and irredeemably. And strangely, mysteriously, the artist and bookseller alike are also (though each is much more than this too) perpetuators and guardians of community — the writer as observer, voice, empathetic being, the bookstore as megaphone, nexus, flashpoint. ...

Visit Three Guys One Book for the whole interview:
http://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-m-allen-cunningham

Join 68 Date of Disappearance supporters at: 

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Writer's Statement

The following was written a few years ago for an application I submitted to an institution which shall remain nameless...

I’ve traveled my path as a writer a little bit backwards and now come to this application from an unusual place. I studied literature in college, but at twenty I went off to begin writing seriously on my own. In the years since then I’ve released two novels and published numerous short stories in national literary magazines. Meanwhile I’ve worked various jobs, among them flower delivery driver, bookstore clerk, hospital purchasing agent, house-painter, newspaper delivery agent, and ranch caretaker. In all candor I’ve reached a very difficult moment in my writing and in my life. I hope to make it a turning point, and this is why I’m submitting this application.

I’ve done my best alone. I’ve strained my eyes with deep reading. I’ve labored, as Wallace Stegner advised, to take charge of my material, filling crates with drafts before each story or novel was finished. I’ve grown a trusty shell against the sidelong looks of those who would question the validity of my vocation. I’ve even accepted the relative insignificance of this work in the larger world (does the world need me to write another book?) and kept working anyhow.

What I have never done is plug into a community of mutual support. I’ve never benefited from – or had the opportunity to contribute to – the seriousness and shared aims of a body of advanced writers. Now, thanks to this painful absence in my life, I’ve realized late and hard how crucial such community is. I’ve been a sort of closet writer all these years, but it turns out you can’t do this thing all by yourself, alone in a room, forever.

I’ve known of [your institution’s] existence for a long time. What draws me to apply now is my wish to work alongside serious, developed writers like me, all of us primed to better our craft, undistracted and unashamed. After long seclusion I can’t possibly express how timely, how instrumental for my work, such an environment would be. Beyond the literary gods in books, nobody has ever assured me daily and at length that to live as I have – to view writing as serious work – is not shameful or socially suspect, but maybe legitimate and honest (yes, even when it doesn’t pay). Getting published is a form of assurance, but publication is not community. The world of print can be curiously cold, and after years and years at the desk sharing your work with the stern dead walls, you realize print alone will not warm your room. You realize you need a real and breathing community: a gang of believers to be inspired by, to inspire.

I wish to continue writing, but I can’t go it all alone anymore. I need to share myself. I’m ready.

My application was passed over and I persevered alone, managing somehow to complete a new novel and then turn my attention to Date of Disappearance, my illustrated limited edition book of stories now accumulating support on USA Projects.

Having launched this fundraiser, I’m amazed to see (in a form I never anticipated) that “gang of believers” cohering around me after all. Turns out they were there all the time. I thank each and every one of them for their support, their community, their belief. If you'd care to join them, the fundraiser runs until two weeks from today. Any support is deeply appreciated -- and can earn you unique gifts!  http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance  

A Victory for the Small!

As reported by the New York Times today, St. Mark's Bookshop in New York has struck a deal with its landlord which will allow the store to stay open for business!

After many months of stalled negotiations and uncertainty about the bookshop's future, this is happy news. Independent bookstores like St. Mark’s promise to quietly save our country from spiritual and municipal ruin, because the booksellers, at their best, are proponents of the most civilizing things in life: art, education, civic involvement, and the meaningful wasting of time (which can foment genius).

Yet independent bookselling is an enterprise fraught with risk, and at our present historical moment the systemic atmosphere in America is one almost entirely contemptuous of significant cultural undertakings like this. The corporate and online book-vendors can be boarish, destructive entities, with little or no accountability to communities, and fidelity to nothing but the dollar and whatever dross will stimulate its multiplication. By contrast, independent booksellers are in the business of knowing their neighborhoods, their clientele, and the clientele’s particular tastes. They thereby do a profound service to their communities — and, by ripple effect, to the larger culture.

Vitality of the independents — of St. Mark’s at this moment — means vitality for democratic culture itself, which begins in and consists of (what else?) neighborhoods!

Illustrated Story Collection News: Help Still Needed

The Date of Disappearance percentage bar held steady most of last week. Then within a single twenty-four-hour period it leapt seven percentage points! That was something to see, let me tell you, and it brought the remaining funds-to-raise down to the three-figure range!

-- GONNA BE CLOSE! --

In a matter of days we will enter the final two weeks before United States Artists pulls the plug on this fundraiser. As fundraising goes, that is an extremely short period of time, which means help getting the word out and encouraging continued support is as critical as ever to this project’s success.

Please make liberal use of the “Share” and “Embed” links beside my videos, the pass-along message included in my 10/16 update, and the Date of Disappearance Facebook page.

And buckle your seatbelts, it’s gonna be close!!

-- OUR NEXT PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the close of next Saturday, November 5^th will be eligible to receive …

A downloadable audio version of my short story “Windmills” in its entirety, including my personal audio greeting and dedication to YOU. Listen on your bike, in the car, or at the gym! This is story #3 in the collection. Here’s a snippet:

“I came inside and I realized the whole drive home was a blank. Like it didn’t happen. I couldn’t remember starting the car, changing highways, listening to the radio, nothing. Have you ever had a feeling like that?”

 

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15

PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Nov. 5^th

PLEDGE AT: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Congrats to our latest Patron Extraordinaire, Taniya, whose name was just drawn from the hat! Taniya receives a spiffy and durable pocket journal by Moleskine. Look for it soon, Taniya, and enjoy!

With enduring gratitude, and with good hopes,

—M

-- THE STATS --

Date of Disappearance Project Goal:

            $4,760

Amount Raised as of Today:

            $3,928 (or 83%!)

Remaining Amount to Raise:

            $832

Fundraising Days Remaining:

            17