“Cunningham Has Wrestled Alligators Professionally,” Or: Variations on My Author Bio

Gone, gone are the days when back-flap author bios were actually biographical in nature. Consider this artifact, from the rear of Cormac McCarthy’s 1965 debut, The Orchard Keeper. “Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933,” it begins, “but moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, at the age of four.” We go on to learn that the author graduated high school in 1951 and then enrolled at the University of Tennessee where his performance “was so poor that he was asked not to return,” that he joined the Air Force in 1953 and spent of half of his four-year enlistment in Alaska, that he returned to university for four years but never got that degree, and that he “began work on The Orchard Keeper in 1959, but the necessities of life delayed its completion.”

From our distant vantage point in this age of “platforms” and all-encompassing commodification, doesn’t the McCarthy sketched here look distinctly, even perversely “unreliable”; i.e. unmarketable? Where are the guy’s creds? Where, for heaven’s sake, is the branding?

Today’s author bio, we all realize, is prime real estate. It is an ersatz CV precisely calibrated to persuade potential consumers of the author’s “content-providing” capacity and — more importantly — to encourage the outlay of cash in the amount of the cover price. Let us move units and never pause. Not only do I understand this, but I’ve done a great deal of market research. So today, after an in-depth comparative study of years, I’m proud to announce that I have identified each of the discrete author classifications (seven in all) that characterize contemporary publishing. I’ve done so, dear reader, in order to furnish you my own author bio in each of the seven variations! For the first time ever, the M. Allen Cunningham you prefer most can be yours, and you will, I trust, happily proceed therewith to your purchase of his latest title, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook. I am here to serve. Behold:

1)      The Author

M. Allen Cunningham is the author of two acclaimed novels, The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son, and the illustrated, limited-edition story collection Date of Disappearance. He is the co-founder of the cultural commentary blog Soul Shelter and the recipient of fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, Literary Arts, and Yaddo. Cunningham lives in Portland, Oregon.

2)    The Collegiate

        M. Allen Cunningham earned his MFA at the University of Long Walks and Artistic Struggle. The recipient of numerous trans-chronological fellowships, he has studied at Walden Pond with Henry Thoreau, in Northern California with John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner, in Switzerland, Germany, and France with Rainer Maria Rilke, and in London with John Keats and William Shakespeare. He is a current Writer in Residence in the Blue Room at Powell’s Books, Portland, Oregon. He teaches writing to himself on a daily basis.

3)    The Everyman (aka The Working Stiff)

        M. Allen Cunningham has worked as a swimming instructor, a housepainter, a hospital purchasing agent, a file clerk, a commercial mortgage administrative assistant, a housepainter, a retail merchandiser, a copy-machine operator, a housepainter, a ranch caretaker, and a bookseller. He has delivered flowers in the middle of the day and newspapers in the dead of night, and he has painted houses. He’s lived in seven different apartments in six different cities and agrees that life, like housepainting, can be tough and you’ve got to be resilient. Through it all, he’s kept on writing.

4)    The Embellisher (aka The Personality)

        M. Allen Cunningham mastered the art of miming at nineteen months of age and later, a toddler runaway, supported himself as a sought-after street performer in Las Vegas. At seven he joined a cult in Delaware having to do with oven mitts, but upon his selection as the cult’s new Grand Master he elected to leave in order to devote himself to a prize career wrestling alligators. He is the founder of the Antarctic Thespian Society, is a nationally accredited porcupine-trainer, and has memorized Moby-Dick in its entirety.

5)    The Honored

        M. Allen Cunningham is President Emeritus of the American Academy of Words, Phrases, and Sentences. He is Chair of the Board of American Paragraphs, which he founded with Gore Vidal in 1958. He has received all of the highest literary honors, including the Eminently Finished Manuscript Prize, the Novelist’s Gratification Award, the Four-Hundredth Draft Literary Fellowship, and the Best Possible Book of All Books With This Particular Title Award. Just hand him the next prize, please. He will place it beside his Royal HH typewriter.

6)    The Wit

        M. Allen Cunningham gets a kick out of anagrams like Prenatal/Parental, often brings up Maslow’s Pyramid in spousal arguments, and wishes Occam’s Razor were considered more cutting edge. He lives in Portland, Oregon, in an old creaky house with fourteen cats but no mice, where he tinkers away on a Royal HH typewriter. He hopes you like the sweater vest he’s sporting semi-ironically in his author photo.  

7)    The Abbreviator

        M. Allen Cunningham is a writer.  

The Honorable Obscurity Handbook is now for sale from Atelier26 Books.

Prime Passage: Leon Wieseltier's Defense of the Humanities

The following comes from Wieseltier's May 19th commencement speech at Brandeis University. Read the whole speech in The New Republic.

"There is no task more urgent in American intellectual life at this hour than to offer some resistance to the twin imperialisms of science and technology, and to recover the old distinction — once bitterly contested, then generally accepted, now almost completely forgotten – between the study of nature and the study of man. As Bernard Williams once remarked, “’humanity’ is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality."  You who have elected to devote yourselves to the study of literature and languages and art and music and philosophy and religion and history — you are the stewards of that quality. You are the resistance. You have had the effrontery to choose interpretation over calculation, and to recognize that calculation cannot provide an accurate picture, or a profound picture, or a whole picture, of self-interpreting beings such as ourselves; and I commend you for it.

"Do not believe the rumors of the obsolescence of your path. If Proust was a neuroscientist, then you have no urgent need of neuroscience, because you have Proust. If Jane Austen was a game theorist, then you have no reason to defect to game theory, because you have Austen. There is no greater bulwark against the twittering acceleration of American consciousness than the encounter with a work of art, and the experience of a text or an image. You are the representatives, the saving remnants, of that encounter and that experience, and of the serious study of that encounter and that experience – which is to say, you are the counterculture. Perhaps culture is now the counterculture.

"So keep your heads. Do not waver. Be very proud. Use the new technologies for the old purposes. Do not be rattled by numbers, which will never be the springs of wisdom. In upholding the humanities, you uphold the honor of a civilization that was founded upon the quest for the true and the good and the beautiful. For as long as we are thinking and feeling creatures, creatures who love and imagine and suffer and die, the humanities will never be dispensable. From this day forward, then, act as if you are indispensable to your society, because – whether it knows it or not – you are."

The Honorable Obscurity Handbook Has Arrived!

NOW FOR SALE

Taking a cue from Tillie Olsen's Silences and the works of Alain de Botton, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook is novelist M. Allen Cunningham's gloriously uncynical answer to a publishing world awash in cynical careerism and bottom-line thinking. Part consoling sourcebook, part cultural commentary, part wry self-help manual, and part inspirational anthology, this slim volume is a celebration of the creative spirit. It is packed with insights relevant to any creative worker, whatever their field.

"They're out there. Day and night, in any given locale, they're hard at it. Our novelists and poets, who strive away in shabby rooms, reverse the formula daily: they live in order to work. But their work helps us to live. They win no honors and receive no grants. They hobnob with no famous elders. Yet they comprise, in their dedication and lack of 'prospects,' a force of pure, unpaid human creativity in service to something larger and more lasting than themselves. Their incentive? Destiny. Their inspiration when faced with privation and self-doubt? Bygone literary gods who struggled much the same. Their rewards: How to name them? But they more than mitigate the annoyances of thin wallets, scant praise, nonexistent reputations."

-M. Allen Cunningham, from the intro

ISBN: 978-0-9893023-0-2

Retail Price: $14.00 

218 pages (on recycled, acid-free paper) 

5.5. x 8.5

Prime Passage: Nicholas Carr's Rough Type Blog

Carr, author of the Pulitzer finalist The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.W. Norton, 2010), never fails to cut to the quick in the cultural commentary on his occasional "Rough Type" blog. As contemporary interpreter of the fetishism, solipsism, and pervasive absurdities that characterize the technocrats of Silicon Valley, Carr is among the best.

The following is from a very recent Rough Type post about Facebook and its new TV ad campaigns.

"...Every object, at least in our perception of it, carries its antithesis. Behind the plenitude symbolized by the vase we sense an emptiness: the wilted bouquet rotting in a landfill. And so it is with the tools of communication. When we look at them we sense not only the possibility of connection but also, as a shadow, the inevitability of loneliness. An empty mailbox. A sheet of postage stamps. A telephone in its cradle. The dial of a radio. The dark screen of a television in the corner of a room. A cell phone plugged into an outlet and recharging, like a patient in a hospital receiving a transfusion. The melancholy of communication devices is rarely mentioned, but it has always haunted our homes.

"Home and Away are the poles of our being, each exerting a magnetic pull on the psyche. We vibrate between them. Home is comforting but constraining. Away is liberating but lonely. When we’re Home, we dream of Away, and when we’re Away, we dream of Home. Communication tools have always entailed a blurring of Home and Away. Newspaper, phonograph, radio, and TV pulled a little of Away into Home, while the telephone, and before it the mail, granted us a little Home when we were Away. Some blurring is fine, but we don’t want too much of it. We don’t want the two poles to become one pole, the magnetic forces to cancel each other out. The vibration is what matters, what gives beauty to both Home and Away. Facebook Home, in pretending to give us connection without the shadow of loneliness, gives us nothing. It’s Nowheresville."

Prime Passage: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger

"Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

"Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

"Poems are nearer to prayers than stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication."
--pages 21-22

Forthcoming (in print), spring 2013

More info soon...

Prime Passage: Self-Consciousness by John Updike

“My first books met with the criticism that I wrote all too well but had nothing to say: I, who seemed to myself full of things to say, who had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say, and who had seen and heard things in my two childhood homes, as my parents’ giant faces revolved and spoke, achieving utterance under some terrible pressure of American disappointment, that would take a lifetime to sort out, particularize, and extol with the proper dark beauty. … What I doubted was not the grandeur and plenitude of my topic but my ability to find the words to express it; every day, I groped for the exact terms I knew were there but could not find, pawed through the thesaurus in search of them and through the dictionary in search of their correct spelling. My English language had been early bent by the German locutions of my environment, and, as my prose came to be edited by experts, I had to arbitrate between how I in my head heard a sentence go and how, evidently, it should correctly go. My own style seemed to me a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is exactly what it wasn’t — other-indulgent, rather. My models were the styles of Proust and Henry Green as I read them (one in translation): styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap themselves around the things, the tints and voices and perfumes, of the apprehended real. In this entwining and gently relentless effort there is no hiding that the effort is being made in language: all professorial or critical talk of inconspicuous or invisible language struck me as vapid and quite mistaken, for surely language, printed language, is what we all know we are reading and writing, just as a person looking at a painting knows he is not looking out of a window.”
(p.103-104)

Prime Passages: Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, and Ben Okri (impromptu)

from Vila-Matas's Dublinesque:

“He dreams of the day when the spell of the best-seller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered. He dreams of the day when literary publishers can breathe again, those who live for an active reader, for a reader open enough to buy a book and allow a conscience radically different from his own to appear in his mind. He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies. … The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fails readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.” (New Directions, 2012; p.51)

Ben Okri, speaking at the World Writers Festival in Edinburgh, 2012:

“My brothers and sisters in Africa, we feel that our stories have still not been told. We feel that the form of the telling of those stories has not yet been found and articulated and evolved in a way that, as it were, can be appreciated round the world. We feel that the novel is still very young. … I seem to be hearing about the exhaustion of the novel. I find that very puzzling, personally. Because I think that the novel is only 350 years old. It’s not as old as painting. It’s not as old as sculpting. And as an art form itself, I think maybe the real future of the novel lies with the fact that we, the writers, have not issued the fundamental challenge to the perception of the novel as a form. What do I mean by that? In almost all the other forms—in music, and certainly in art—the narrative tradition, the naturalistic tradition of painting, has been superseded by abstract, by many other kinds of media. And I think that we have accepted too much, as it were, the definition of the limitation of the novel. I think the real challenge is to change the form of the novel in terms of how we read it. I still think that we accept too much the beginning, middle, end.  Even where we have experiments, we have not managed, as it were, the kind of Duchampian change of game. I feel that the novel is not dead yet. I just feel like I’m at a funeral here, really. I feel like speaker after speaker has given a kind of oration to the end of the novel, as if the novel has yet begun to express all the different possibles, all the different ways in which reality can be expressed. I don’t think that reality is as homogenous as that. I think each person carries within them a special way of seeing and perceiving reality, and I think that’s what the novel does. The novel constantly challenges us to say that the way that we’re told that the world is, is not the way the world is. The world is much more mysterious than that, is much more elusive than that, and is much more magical and more challenging, and possibly even more fragmented. I just would like to propose that we talk about where we can go as novelists, where we can go as writers, and whether we accept the fact that we are really totally determined by the marketplace, which I don’t accept.”  

(Okri's remarks are transcribed from the dazzling 2-hour discussion on "the Future of the Novel," involving 50 authors from all over the world, which can be viewed in its entirety here.)

 

 

Did You Just Call Me a "Content Container"?

The amazing Melville House blog gets better and better. For a few years now I’ve greatly appreciated their relentless resistance to the civic and cultural irresponsibility, rapacity, and general megalomania of Amazon.

Now we all owe further thanks to Melville House, and to their blogger Dustin Kurtz, for brilliantly resisting “the propagation of [a] powerful and quite dangerous idiocy, the irruption of the language of venture capital into the province of the book.”

Kurtz cites Tim Sanders, of the “team publishing” website NetMinds, speaking to the New Yorker: “We believe a writer is not necessarily a writer. They are content containers.” And Peter Armstrong, founder of Leanpub, who states: “a book is a startup” and who equates the long, solitary process of writing to the “stealth mode” that precedes an entrepreneurial launch.

NetMinds and Leanpub both aim to provide writers (via social network) with early audience critiques of works in progress, in order to maximize the mass appeal/profitability of those works; i.e., to help the writer “pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.”   

Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen, to the brave new world of book-via-virtual-focus-group, where the sins of idiosyncrasy, subjectivity, or good old-fashioned style are, if not expurgated altogether, then "remixed" to the mercenary end of mass appeal. (I’ve touched on aspects of this subject elsewhere. See: “There’s a Crowd on My Desk” or "Why It's Desirable to Be Eccentric".)

Kurtz:

“[Armstrong] talks about the ‘success’ of a book. What he means is that the book pays out. Many publishers might agree with that standard, but how many authors?  And that phrase ‘stealth mode?’ Are we to the point where the act of being alone, writing to an imagined audience and not a real responsive audience is akin to hiding?

“As for the real winners, the claims that made me actually clench my teeth and take a deep breath when I read them—Armstrong and his phrase about creativity, Sanders and that terrible terrible terrible sentence about ‘content containers’ what’s to be said? Anyone who could think such things is quite specifically part of The Problem in the starkest sense.”

For me, all this brings to mind these words of Stephen Spender, written back in 1949:

“The general effect of increasing commercialization and of the compulsion to sell ever larger and larger quantities of a few books to a public which does not really care about them, must surely be that the position of the writer who writes as well as he possibly can ‘to please himself’, becomes less tenable. … The American malady is a spiritual one, the commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized. … In the country where culture is ‘sold’ enormously, it is sold as something other than culture and tends to become something else in the process.”

The slogans and euphemisms that characterize what I recently heard dubbed "dot-communism" are the latest symptoms of our long-standing American malady. Kurtz beautifully articulates what's at stake when we embrace such ways of talking about creativity:

“These guys are not harmful, as I say, but the spread of this type of jargon is. Language shapes, language is, thought, and the more comfortable we grow talking about nascent books as ‘content’, about drafts as ‘iterations’, the more we trivialize those books that don’t benefit from focus groups. These guys, this language, is hurting literature by changing how we think about books in general. It is a spreading disregard, not even conscious or apt enough to be malign. And I don’t think it likely to stop.”

Read the Melville House post here. And consider adding the Melville House blog to your list of essential web-reading.

 

Scribbles

1. Last spring I picked up this copy of Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for around a dollar and a half. Only when I got home did I discover the former owner's inscription inside. As an exhibit of a peculiarly enduring stylistic mode that might be dubbed 'Teen-Scourge,' it caused me such absurd delight that I believe it's worth sharing.

 

(NB: If you happen to have small children at hand, you may wish to refrain from reading aloud.)

 



"Annie Dillard is the anti CHRIST!! Come Fucking On the Birds Prompt?!? What the Hell. The shear (sic) horror of this bullshit. Fuck McClure for not only making us read this shit, but write on it as well. Fuck Annie Dillard and her in tune with Nature bullshit. [heart] the haters of Annie Dillard"

 

2. A recent purchase of Six Nonlectures by e.e. cummings included the bonus, on the book's final page, of an autobiographical prose meditation in a style emulating cummings' own syntactical eccentricities -- and making explicit reference, in at least a few places, to the content of the book. As book-scribbling goes, here's an entry on a more epic scale than 'Teen-Scourge.'

 

What to make of both of these entries? Maybe the weird readerly proximity they offer is an end in itself. The transcribed outrageousness of 'Teen-Scourge,' the vulnerability of the scribble, the messy, unguarded reflexivity of the thoughts -- these are yet a few more things e-books cannot give us.   

 

"Here I am and I'm fairly sure I wish I wasn't. But where then? It is what it is. There are no mistakes. How can I expect those around me to grasp that when my own Is and Now seem like mistakes to me -- he who reassures myself with this Zen-ism. One minute I am the only sane/capable human in sight. But since/if that is so, then it's wrong in that sanity is an agreement -- a consensus. But what about the individual. The Who? Not the band. don't mean to babble, but I always have. Babbled or meant to? Don't know. Fuck, now I'm interrogating myself. "Finished too much for what they did." Is playing disappearing? Am I working toward playing? Does that even make sense? to Me? to the consensus? Fuck them! They do it and die unhappy. Am I sitting still to have or because I have to? Time will tell. But it whispers. And stutters. And often informs to late [sic]. Work time.

 

"I always wonder if I'm an individual or half a pair. Can one really be both? Here? Now?

 

"I've been working and waiting toward joy (?!) and now power/vengeance. Are these worthy? Or are they just them? Where does Being fit in? I haven't observed myself/felt myself doing that in so long. Is there a conflict between Being and Achieving? Happinesss [sic], Power, Contentment, Peace. Surely not but possibly so. And probably yes? Who said that?"   

Letterpress Business Cards!

Because Old-Fashioned is the new New!

 

 

Created on a Kelsey tabletop press with reflex blue ink.

Typeset in Corvinus Bold 24 pt, Cheltenham Bold 72 pt, and Spartan Heavy 14 pt (with accidental italics!)

"More Normal Than Other People"

The video below is an elegant mini-documentary expedition into writer Duncan Fallowell’s book-cluttered flat in upper-class London.

"I can’t stop acquiring books,” says Fallowell. “But I’m not guilty about it. It’s a kind of necessity. Books, to me, are like oxygen. I’m a fish swimming in an aquarium of the intellect. … The books demanded to be incorporated into my domestic world.”

It’s a beautiful little film, and greatly enjoyable viewing. The YouTube précis, though, is curiously inaccurate, describing Fallowell’s collection as a "library which has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right." Fallowell has a lot of books, sure, but by all appearances it amounts to nothing like, say, the apartment that houses Brazenhead Books in New York – and Fallowell’s is hardly the helter-skelter hoard of a kook. To imply that the abundance of titles signifies, in its own right, a form of eccentricity is peculiarly dispiriting. Fallowell himself seems to resist the implication at one point:

"One does need grounding in the physical world. This is why the electronic book means nothing to me. Because a book is a physical object too. And writing, to me, is a physical act. It’s a sculptural act as well as an intellectual act. The two come together. … Do you think writers are odd? I don’t know. I don’t subscribe to this idea that you’ve got to be odd to be a writer…. Perhaps you’ve got to be more normal than other people.”

Having steadily built my own home library over the last several years, I wish to happily count myself among such ‘normals.’ And I’m delighted to spot, among Fallowell’s volumes, a number of my own fondest: On Grief and Reason and Watermark by Joseph Brodsky; David Marr’s life of Patrick White; and Leon Edel’s towering biography Henry James.

Fallowell: “There’s something about the lushness, the richness, the open-door quality of a book. Open a book and you’re opening a door. All these books just remind me of worlds beyond worlds and they are an expression of freedom. As we know, the first thing dictators do is control books, control what people are allowed to read. … I’ve always wanted to wander, and I can wander very conveniently in my library…"

Essayist Orange Deserves Your Attention

In this weekend's Oregonian is my review of Michelle Orange's brilliant essay collection This Is Running for Your Life, a new book that deserves the attention of anybody remotely interested in the life of the mind.

From the review:

... Michelle Orange models an ideal balance of firsthand engagement with -- and grounded criticism of -- the lightheaded culture all around us. "The new American dream," she writes, "is to build a really bitching personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour's large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium -- to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what's real and what's not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers' virtual scrims." Here and elsewhere in the book, Orange's insights share their probing, persuasive rhythms with those of Susan Sontag, whose name rightfully comes up a number of times.

In the stunning chapter "Pixelation Nation," which takes its cue from Sontag's hallmark 1977 book On Photography, Orange explores the scarcely considered implications of digital imagery and dissemination in a time when every smartphone, iPad and iPod is a camera which, "with its promise of perfect recall, both reminds and relieves the shooter of the burden of being present." As we each become daily -- not to mention hourly -- publishers of images we've captured and edited for immediate upload, the images themselves take on "more of a social than a subjective or individual purpose." Our pictures have become part of a larger, ongoing self-publicizing project: "It's more about representing a certain reality than remembering it."

It's this kind of unfailingly X-ray-like inquiry into the peculiarities of our ultra-mediated world that unites Orange's 10 absorbing essays. Where Sontag's work generally took literature as the hub of its radial concerns, Orange proves herself an eloquent revealer of things more broadly socio-cultural and, as it happens, patently bizarre -- though they're the very things we refer to as "daily life." ...

 [continue reading here]

"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.