Category Archives: literary lint

Footnote

March 12, 2021literary lintauthorial intentionbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

As I get older, and as I continue to write, I change my mind about the value of artistic intention, particularly related to how it was discussed in college. Back then, we said writers made aesthetic choices. Style was the result of the author’s intentions. And to be sure, there is some choice that goes into it. Artists do have free will. But lately I have begun to think that a writer’s style is equally if not more the result of that person’s limitations. A finished book equals these limitations plus whatever the publisher could be persuaded to print. Deliberate aesthetic choice runs a distant third. Perhaps Hopper simply couldn’t paint faces well. Perhaps Rothko struggled with perspective. The tree grows around its infection.

Learning from TikTok

January 24, 2021literary lintanimals, literature, self-help, TikTokbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

One problem that results from an academic study of the artistic discipline you want to pursue is that you tend to think of yourself in the third person. Or at least I tend to think of myself in the third person. That is, you end up more focused on artistic effect than you do with artistic process. And that’s because artistic effect is something that can be meaningfully studied. What kind of book is this? What kind of choices have been made in terms of narration? What are the consequences of those choices? Does this book succeed? How do these choices, this success or lack thereof, relate to other books this author has written? Other books that her contemporaries have written? Etc. These questions aren’t bad. They aren’t wrong. But they lead toward a certain neighborhood: the gated community of sorting and judging, categorizing and ranking. The Moons of Jupiter was Alice Munro’s best book. My top three Munro books are . . .

Again, it’s not that these thoughts are wrong, but they are less helpful if what you want to do is write books, as opposed to only read/judge them. There is the old Picasso joke: “When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” It’s a simplistic joke and potentially apocryphal but it contains a buried truth. Once again I have found a pithy quotation that I will ruin by yammering about it for a thousand words.

The difference is approaching a work of art via its effect, via its larger societal and artistic impact, and the other is approaching a work as a project that above all else has to get finished. This kind of study tempts you into thinking that the writers themselves thought of their work in this historically significant way, when in reality they were people often pinched by circumstance just trying to get the draft done. This is one way that reading biographies of writers can be instructive. You see all the crap, all the life, they trudged through. You see the compromises made, the relationships destroyed, the jobs sought, the rent due. Of course the danger of this kind of reading is that biographies helplessly hero-ify their subjects. No one wants to spend 400 pages and ten years writing about a person they don’t end up admiring. So the heroic victory of the books always comes in to save the day. But details about the early grit years are often instructive.

To get prescriptive: The thinking about the writing, the thinking of oneself as a writer, must not overtake the actual writing, the laying of the bricks. You’ve got to build that wall. Later generations can come and tell you how worthless it is, or not.

There is a lady on TikTok who for some reason is rehabbing a beaver. It is emphatically not a pet. She is a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist and this beaver was found as a baby, and because beavers stay with their parents for a long time, it needs care before it can be an adult in the wild. Like the Picasso quotation, I don’t want to debate veracity. I just want to talk about her TikTok videos. She videos it building dams around her house. He accumulates domestic detritus and creates dam-like agglomerations. And then he goes outside to a little pond on her property and makes slightly more real dams out there using limbs and twigs and household objects that for some reason seem necessary. He then sleeps in her shower stall. His favorite found household object is a toilet plunger. The accumulated videos are uncanny, odd, adorable. When the lady discovers a new proto dam, she says he’s learning how to be a beaver. Which is totally ridiculous because he is a beaver. He doesn’t need to learn how to be what he already incontrovertibly is. The dam building is instinct. He does it because of some primordial genetic force that’s propelling him to chew and gather and adjust crap with his teeth in order to divert water.

And yet, this instinctive daily piling up does have the effect of practice. He’s doing what he does in the limited circumstances he’s got available. Perhaps being a beaver is more of a collection of activities than an identity. He learns how to be a beaver by doing the actions that have come to be understood as beaver behavior.

Is he any good at it? Is he practicing for the One Big Real Dam he will write one day? Or is he just building the daily dam because that’s what beavers do? Does it even matter? He wakes up, eats whatever she’s feeding him (mostly sweet potatoes?) and then gets to work damming. He’s not practicing so much for the big one (the exam at the end of the semester) as he is building because that’s what he does. There’s no linear improvement. The beaver doesn’t have a Blue Period, and this newest dam is not a comment on the foregoing history of dams, and it does not in any way interrogate its own “dam-ness.” (Not that any of that wouldn’t be interesting.) There might be some linear improvement but it is an almost accidental byproduct of doing the same task repeatedly day after day. Of course the dams will get better. He can’t help that. But the improvement is not really the goal. He simply likes building dams. He feels compelled to build them. All the non beavers and all the beavers who didn’t build the dam can stand back and admire and critique (these gestures being the same) and rank. And perhaps even this beaver will one day pause and reflect. But if her videos are any indication the beaver is sleeping or off to the next project behind the couch.

Perhaps this is not an entirely helpful analogy. One wants to write well. One wants to produce literature, however one defines that nebulous term. One wants to improve. One wants to produce the kind of writing that excited the writer himself way back when. Remember the good old days? All those papers that received a grade. One wants to be good. Otherwise what’s the point? These are all valid concerns. But they are second order concerns. Or they should remain second order concerns, lest you drive yourself mad with evaluation. The first order concern is learning how to be a beaver.

Notes on ‘Moonglow’

January 14, 2020book reviews, literary lintBugs Bunny, Chabon, Daffy Duckbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

I’m happy to report that I have a review of Michael Chabon’s latest novel Moonglow in the inaugural issue of the Hoxie Gorge Review.

The review is the result of a friend recommending the novel to me. Somehow I had gotten into my 40s without actually ever reading Michael Chabon, despite his work being semi-ubiquitous. For a short period, it was almost a kind of literary cultural truancy to have not read any Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, and Whitehead.* (Rough guess: this moment perhaps ran from around 1996 until 2008.) But now I’ve finally broken the seal. Here are some leftover notes.

I was intrigued by how WWII and the Holocaust were used as a device in this novel. I have another friend in a book group and it seems that all of their novels have something to do with WWII and the Holocaust. That is, the novels rely on WWII in some large expositional way. The books get their narrative or moral momentum somehow from the war, even if the books aren’t otherwise about that historical event or time period. I am of course generalizing massively and will shirk the duty to cite actual books here. (This is just a general feeling, dig?) Sometimes I have the snarky half-thought: It would be interesting to read a contemporary American novel that didn’t use WWII as a source of exposition.

Freud and WWII: one could argue that these are the hidden engines in the postwar, American novel, the first as an explication for any character’s motivations, and the second as history’s Big Bang: the atrocity from which all characters and family histories spring. I am exaggerating, naturally. I fully well realize that WWII was a cataclysmic historical event; I am not trying to diminish its actual historical importance. But the way it is used as an Allen wrench of explanation in so many contemporary novels is astonishing. It steadily drives past the main street of historical dutifulness and enters the suburb of helpless reflex. It begins to feel like a curse of contemporary narrative — a hex key indeed.

Regarding the overwhelming narrative legacy of Freud, see contemporary children’s movies. No one character is ever intrinsically a jerk. They are a jerk as the result of some childhood trauma. It’s a device that’s used jokingly but taken seriously, perhaps the most dangerous type of device because it means that screenwriters — if that’s who we could pin this on — believe in it. Humorous use of backstory is recognized as a device, hence the jokiness, but it’s still routinely, desperately deployed, as if it’s the only explanation for why people misbehave. Turns out Iago was once left out of dodgeball. Furthermore, these explanatory backstories often become movie sequels themselves. It’s a kind of narrative cancer, these endlessly replicating tentpole explanations. Stories never finish. Nothing is ever whole. Each new movie simply a software update.

The surprise in Moonglow is that the grandmother is not simply a Holocaust survivor but someone who appropriated the biography of a Holocaust survivor. The grandmother is a grand trickster figure. She tells the young Michael stories while shuffling a deck of tarot cards — grandmother as fortune teller/author.

While I had my quibbles, I definitely think this is an interesting use of WWII/the Holocaust. It’s certainly not invoked one-dimensionally, though, to be sure, the scenes where the grandfather is in the battlefield strike me as the most generically filmish. They remind me too much of Wes Anderson. The details seem chosen too much for their innate quirkiness. (For example, as the grandfather makes his way through post–D-Day invasion France, he’s attacked by a man with a bow and arrow. And the preacher who provides him shelter just happens to share all of the grandfather’s non-invasion related astronomical interests, etc.) All the details seem cute in an overly symmetrical way. Rather than existing as artifacts from the world of these characters, the details seem chosen to alleviate some inner need for alignment within the mind of the creator. I realize this can be a legitimate artistic mode, but it tends to leave me cold and it seems to suffocate the possibility of actual drama. Perhaps my disagreements with Chabon’s choices for the WWII bits are a consequence of simply having seen too many films and TV shows about war, so that unless I am confronted by a raging hellscape of verisimilitude, I don’t really believe any of it. Or perhaps this narrative trail is just so well worn that it’s hard to make the sites look interesting again.

In a way Chabon’s use of WWII is a recognition that the war functions as a narrative trope. There is a John Barthian or perhaps Paul Austerian black hole in the center of the novel: the grandmother is not a clean embodiment of 20th-century horrors but a kind of narrative mirage. Part of my beef with the novel is that the narrator’s discovery of this mirage doesn’t seem to have any consequence, so as a reader I am uncertain what to make of it. Is it one of those self-referential gestures who’s central point seems to be It’s all make believe! or Isn’t make believe wonderful? or Aren’t we all tremendously silly for believing such a thing as this very novel?! I have always hated gestures like this — not self-referential moves in and of themselves but moves that seem to exist for the primary purpose of calling attention to themselves.

For me of course the ur-text of self-referentiality is “Duck Amuck,” the cartoon where Daffy Duck argues with and is tormented by his creator, who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. The cartoon starts as a joke, turns into a riddle, and ends in a black hole. The joke is that Daffy has beef with his creator. The illustrator is a cruel master preventing Daffy from doing his show. The fundamental revelation of any kind of self-referential move within a narrative is to remind the audience that all of this is chosen, placed, controlled and not in any way natural. The riddle is the revelation at the end of the cartoon that Bugs Bunny is the illustrator — the master of Daffy. This makes a kind of cosmic sense, since Bugs is the central trickster character in the Looney Tunes cartoons and slyly controls all of the other sub characters, who are always made into fools because they think they can control their own destinies. The black hole part is the infinite mirror reflection inherent in the idea that all of the animated characters are the projection/illustration/creation of another animated character, that the entire series is occurring within Bugs’s mind or as the result of Bugs’s controlling, artistic will. But then, who has created Bugs? Who is the illustrator’s illustrator? Once you have peered downward there is no end to this spiral staircase.

I realize that I have strayed a bit too far into bong-logic turf now, but such is the consequence of self-referentiality within any kind narrative art. To this artistic impetus, one wants to say, we get it. It’s make believe. We accept the premise that this is all happening in a book (or a movie or up on a stage or in a painting). We understand the invisible handshake inside the transaction. Repeatedly underlining this point, no matter how eloquently, will only grow tiresome. (See, e.g., the endings of most Nabokov novels).

In Chabon’s defense, Moonglow doesn’t go Full Referential. But it’s far from straight mimetic realism. For that I am grateful, and it’s that middle-distance aesthetic ambiguity on this self-awareness spectrum that has stayed with me the longest and has given me the most to think about afterward. Now on with the show.

*Full disclosure: I regret to say I still have not read any Whitehead.

Notes on Didion’s Notes

September 8, 2019literary lintDidion, Simic, the Southbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

There is a genre of writing one might label “Sneering at the South.” A Charles Simic essay, first published in The New York Review of Books years ago, is exemplary. A writer who is from and lives elsewhere visits the South, rides around for a few days, writes down what he or she sees. Typically, they see a lot, but it’s a kind of invisible sight. There is precious little activity, but within the lethargy there is the amber-frozen freak show of the South, site of moral decrepitude, site of the country’s sins, left to fester and skew, where Puritan religious signage grows like weeds and the self-rationalizing monologues function as a kind of witnessing. The narrator of this journey is a quietly appalled reporter. The underlying rhetorical question is, “Can you believe this place?”

Joan Didion’s book South and West is one such book, though it’s an odd book to be sure, not really a book qua book, but an agglomeration of notes. The first section of 107 pages contains notes she made during a visit to the South with her husband in the summer of 1970. She thought that it would lead to something, but it never did (except this incidental volume). The second, much shorter (and much less interesting) section is about California and the environment surrounding the Patty Hearst trial. (This second section is less interesting mainly because there isn’t enough of it.) In other words, it’s a non-book book, or the kind of book that only famous writers with long distinguished careers get to publish — a book of scraps.

But these are quite interesting scraps. Previously, in my younger years, I was awfully defensive whenever one of these sneering at the South pieces arrived. I was put out for years — years — over that Simic piece. Don’t even get him started. But either I’ve mellowed or the Didion scraps are really that good, because I found myself genuinely enjoying her notes. Does she say anything particularly new about the South? Not really. She hits all the points that everyone else seems to hit — the relentless heat, the seeming absence of anything to do, the hair, the sports, the weird voodoo billboard religion. She captures the post-integration mindset of the white middle class in a couple of wonderful monologues, where she just lets people go on and on.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

“He had the smooth, rounded face of well-off New Orleans, that absence of angularity which characterizes the local genetic pool.”

“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken.”

“Before the doctor came in a nurse took my history, and she seemed not to believe a word I said. While I waited in my white smock I began to see it through her eyes: A woman walks into a clinic, a stranger to Meridian. She has long straight hair, which is not seen in the South among respectable women past the age of fourteen, and she complains of an injured rib. She gives her address as Los Angeles, but says the rib was injured in a hotel room in New Orleans. She says she is just ‘travelling through’ Meridian. This is not a story to inspire confidence, and I knew it as I told it, which made meeting her eyes difficult.”

“In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”

“We had drinks, and after a while we took our drinks, our road glasses, and went for a drive through town. Mrs. Evans had grown up in Grenada, had been married once before, and now she and her second husband — who was from Tupelo — lived in her mother’s old house. ‘Look at all those people standing around in front of that motel,’ she said once on the drive. ‘That’s a cathouse,’ her husband told her. We went out to a lake, and then to dinner at the Holiday Inn, this being another of those towns where the Holiday Inn was the best place to eat. We brought our drinks and a bottle in with us, because there was no liquor served, only setups. I am unsure whether the bottle was legal. The legality or illegality of liquor in the South seems a complication to outsiders, but is scarcely considered by the residents. At dinner some people were watching us, and later came over to say hello to the Evanses. They introduced us as friends from California. ‘We were wondering where you were from,’ one of them said.”

“We stopped at Walker Percy’s in Covington, Louisiana. We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist, Walker never paid any mind but just kept talking, and walking up to the house to get fresh drinks. It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water. ‘The South,’ he said, ‘owes a debt to the North . . . tore the Union apart once . . . and now only the South can save the North.’ He said he had not wanted to see us in New Orleans, at Ben C.’s, because at Ben C.’s he was always saying things he would not ordinarily say, playing a role. [Ben C. is the well-off New Orleanian of the first quotation above. — ed.] Greenville, he said, was a different kind of town. He had spent some time in Los Angeles once but could not face it. ‘It was the weather,’ his wife said mildly. ‘The weather was bad.’ ‘It wasn’t the weather,’ he said, and he knew exactly what it was.”

She begins in New Orleans, meanders around the Mississippi Gulf Coast, wanders up to Birmingham, back tracks through Mississippi and the Delta. There is no plot, no argument, no newsworthy event. There are merely small towns passed, observations collected, strings too short to use. These really are notes. Perhaps my appreciation grows out of a change within me. Perhaps I agree with these sneering at the South pieces more than I did when I was fresh out of college. Or perhaps rather than full on agreement, the observations serve as thrilling little whippit blasts of confirmation. Particularly here, the condescension inherent in the sneering pieces is subdued. She’s not overtly judging. She is just glamorously, serenely observing. One can almost see the expensive sunglasses.

Perhaps it’s the laconic precision of her prose. One wonders if Didion, as a person, was a difficult travel companion — astringent, hyper-particular, compulsively judgmental when confronted with the flux of travel — because her prose, conversely, is so precise and controlled and chilled. There is a moment when she puts her clothes in at a laundromat and goes to buy a cup of ice, and as she chews on the ice walking back, I thought: this is the perfect metaphor for Didion’s prose. It hurts your teeth, but it’s oddly refreshing.

Even though she’s describing the atmosphere from the summer of 1970 — almost fifty years gone now! — much of what she observes would still be accurate. James Fallows has a series of articles in The Atlantic that talk about industry finally coming to Mississippi, a topic many of Didion’s interlocutors go on and on about. Things are always on the verge of getting drastically better. Another evergreen topic is a strange defensiveness about being from and/or living in Mississippi (not that I myself would ever participate in this defensiveness, heavens). One wonders how much has really changed, aside from the obvious — the internet and slight political progress. Reading this book often makes present southern reality feel not historically distant but more like Back to the Future II. It contains the same plot and the majority of the same actors but the costumes are slightly different. The shoes now lace themselves but the same old complexities remain.

Note on Richard Ford

March 16, 2018book reviews, literary lint, The Quarterly Conversationhating reviews, Richard Ford, spit, Stanley Crouchbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

I’m happy to report that I have new review in the world — of Richard Ford’s memoir from last year Between Them: Remembering My Parents — though to be honest, it’s an awfully long review, so perhaps this qualifies as one of those “review-essays” like the ones they run in the NYRB, a size and level of seriousness I’ve always coveted. Anyway, I was surprised to see Ford come out with a memoir for reasons I explain in my review, and so it was rewarding to do some full-contact chin-scratching over the book.

Typically, when I review a book, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the author — what he or she might think of what I am writing. This is not to be callous to their feelings. It’s just that book reviews, and especially the kind of review-essays that I try to write when I can pull them off, are not directed at the authors themselves. As a piece of writing it’s not really for them even though it’s in dialogue with or is riffing off of something they have written. It’s instead, of course, for the strangers out there who didn’t write the book but who might read it, on the one hand, and on the other, it’s aimed toward the sidecar oeuvre of literature about literature. Though it seems less romantic in a movie kind of way, there is a thriving body of literary commentary, some of which is more rewarding than the primary sources it purports to explicate (see, e.g., my beloved Cynthia Ozick on almost anybody). And really, more than anything, this is the distant bucket I am trying to pitch my little critical ping pong ball into — my Grand Prize Game of literary commentary.

That being said, I did think momentarily of what Ford would make of my review because the memoir at hand seems to be so revealing, though not in ways one typically encounters in a contemporary memoir. There are no scandalous confessions of sordid family drama. This ain’t Mary Karr. This ain’t The Surrender. And yet it’s still revealing, again for reasons I explain in the review. And to level criticism at the book skates almost too closely to leveling criticism at him, which of course I didn’t intend to do in the review. It’s just: the book is personal.

Plus another reason I was more aware of Ford’s imagined reaction is that Ford has established a reputation for reacting strongly to negative reviews of his work. When Alice Hoffman wrote a negative review of his novel The Sportswriter, Ford’s wife took a copy of Hoffman’s latest work out back and shot a hole in it. And then Ford shot a hole in it. And then he mailed it to her. (“People make such a big deal out of it — shooting a book — it’s not like I shot her,” he’s said.) And then when Colson Whitehead wrote a negative review of Ford’s story collection A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times, Ford spit on him at a subsequent literary party, calling Whitehead “a kid.”

One might — might — chalk this up to a more youthful impatience with public judgment (if one were being so charitable as to pull one’s back out), but then in 2017 Ford published an essay in Esquire where he both recounted these incidents and said he feels the same way now that he did then: “I realize that how I feel about my bad treatment is only one compass point among several legitimate ones. But I can tell you that, as of today, I don’t feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review, or my response.”

Furthermore, and even more damning, he expresses a total misunderstanding of the function of criticism:

Whenever I think about reviews of my books, I usually only think about the bad ones — the ones, again, that drive readers away, take bread out of my children’s mouths, devalue half a decade of honest effort, steal money out of my pocket, and cast a dark shadow over my future … I wonder if those bad-review writers would do it if they knew the chain reaction they’d set in motion. If they would, then they deserve what they get both here and beyond. I wouldn’t want to know too much about these people’s personal habits — how they treat their spouses and pets. I know, I’m way too sensitive.

Aside from being simply wrong, this is amusing because I don’t think Ford has any children. He has boasted on several occasions of choosing not to have any. (Sample quotation: “I hate children.”)

For a more detailed analysis of why his opinions about book reviewing are wrong, read Steve Donoghue’s take.

The literary feud info isn’t really in the purview of my review of his memoir, which is why it’s not included there, and why I am riffing on it here in this little note. I’m not interested in adjudicating every author’s interpersonal failing — casting stones in glass houses and all that — but this behavior is shameful, both morally and intellectually. All of which is to say: I don’t think Ford would like my review very much, though of course it’s much gentler than many others he’s received. That is, I don’t think my review is spit-worthy.

Despite all this, Ford still has composed many interesting textual documents, one of which is his essay “In the Face,” which was originally published in the New Yorker way back in 1996. It was subsequently reprinted in the following year’s Best American Essays, where I first encountered it. I wish I had a copy at hand because it seemed like such an interesting explication and exemplification of a mode of male thought vis-a-vis violence. Would it shed light on this feud stuff? Perhaps, but I’d have to locate my New Yorker subscription log-in credentials to find out for sure.

Another piece of nonfiction by Ford, which I’ve just now discovered in assembling this note, is an essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine eons ago, where he chronicled his trip down the Mississippi River with Stanley Crouch, the novelist and jazz critic — yet another person who also hates bad reviews of his work. (He slapped his reviewer Dale Peck after coming face to face in a restaurant. What is it with these people?) Anyway, I have printed it out to read over the weekend, like the fogey I am. It’s pitched as a modern-day reenactment of Huck Finn, which sounds like one of those ideas only a roomful of trapped magazine editors would love. But given the two participants, it’s worth investigating. Here is the Crouch essay. And here, just now discovered (the internet really is amazing) is a letter-to-the-editor in response to both pieces by none other that Pat Conroy. Whoo-boy.

Finally, being a Jackson, MS, native who has returned to live in the city here in middle age, I got a tremendous kick out of a particular portion of the Ford memoir. When he was a teenager, Ford’s father got the itch for life in the suburbs. This being the 1950s in Jackson, they cruised north of town to look at the treeless scrub brush of new lots and barely finished houses down by a crook in the Pearl River. They looked at houses in neighborhoods with dubious names such as Sherwood Forest, Audubon Park, etc. I enjoyed this immensely because I live in Sherwood Forest. In fact it’s the neighborhood I grew up in, or one of them at least. And what to Ford back in the ’50s was a backwater, almost the country, to me in the mid ’90s was an old neighborhood, with established oak trees that rained down their terror of leaves each autumn. Now, when I take my kids north of the city, out past Madison, to visit friends, those are the houses with small, leafless trees and new un-moldy brick facades and yards still carpeted in their original layer of sod. At the end of the cul-de-sacs one’s sure to find the raw red clay of some radiologist’s future dream home. But I live “in the city.” So the burbs are just as contingent on time as anything else. Wait around long enough in any one spot and you become established.

Note on Paragraphs

June 24, 2015literary lintLorrie Moore, paragraphsbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

It was Virginia Woolf who said (I think) that instead of paying attention to a writer’s sentences (all those little marginal checkmarks of affirmation) we should pay attention to their chapters. I think this is a good idea but would offer one more metric of appreciation: the paragraph. I don’t think you should focus on one to the exclusion of the other lengths, but they are all different ways to appreciate what a writer is up to or the different speeds at which they excel.

Enter Lorrie Moore, whom I love essentially without reservation. Without going into a full defense or promotion of her work, I just want to note how wonderful she is at writing paragraphs. Normally she’s known for her sharp one-liners, slicing you unaware, and it’s true she’s got great lines and an amazing sense of rhythm. But it’s how these elements combine into whole paragraphs, where they all coalesce that I think is the mark of true excellence.

Here’s an examples from her story “Debarking”:

“You can’t imagine the daily dreariness of routine pediatrics,” said Zora, not touching her wine. “Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Whoa. Here’s an exciting one: juvenile onset diabetes. Day after day you just have to look into the parents’ eyes and repeat the same exciting thing: ‘There are a lot of viruses going around.’ I had thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they’d gone into such a seemingly depressing thing, they said, ‘Because the kids don’t get depressed.’ That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early, they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don’t get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little, to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children’s books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog.”

This has all the characteristics of a classic Moore paragraph: the monologue that rapidly unspools a character, the desperate exclamation points, the swerving between emotional registers. Just look at how far the paragraph travels.

And here’s a bonus example, this one illustrating her impeccable sense of rhythm. It’s from the essay “Better and Sicker,” which appeared in Issue 4, Volume 2 of PEN America back in 2002.

I often think of an acquaintance of mine who is also a writer and whom I ran into once in a bookstore. We exchanged hellos, and when I asked her what she was working on these days, she said, “Well, I was working on a long comic novel, but then in the middle of the summer my husband had a terrible accident with an electric saw and lost three of his fingers. It left us so sad and shaken that when I returned to writing, my comic novel kept getting droopier, darker and sadder and depressing. So I scrapped it, and started writing a novel about a man who loses three fingers in an accident with a saw, and that,” she said, “that’s turning out to be really funny.”

Ozick Across the Moat

April 30, 2015literary lintCynthia Ozick, Phoebe Maltz Bovybarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Not that long ago, Cynthia Ozick wrote an essay for the New York Times, entitled “Writers Old and Young: Staring Across the Moat.” A short time later, this essay was put through the online web content gin and turned into “Should Young Writers ‘Wait Their Turn’? This Famous Old Writer Thinks So.” by Phoebe Maltz Bovy at The New Republic, and the results are a spectacular display of literary criticism bent to the breaking point.

First, let me declare my allegiances. I am a dues-paying, pom-pom–waiving member of the Ozick fan club, so of course I am going to defend her. But even I will admit it wasn’t the most galloping of her essays. To me, the most exciting sentence in the entire piece was the brief one in tiny, sans serif type at the end: Cynthia Ozick is currently working on a book of essays on critics and criticism. Can it be true? Will we get another collection of essays before the unknowable but inevitable end? (Ozick is 87.) Over the past several years, Ozick has been publishing fiction almost exclusively, a late-in-life flush that functions almost as an expression of regret about so much time spent writing essays, though to this humble reader there’s not much better than her five previous collections of essays. (When I read them now, I tend to do so aloud, with a first-edition hardback clutched in one hand, a raised pom-pom in the other.)

Pheobe Maltz Bovy is another writer I like, though obviously not yet at pom-pom level. She’s one of the new regular writers at the newly renovated New Republic, thus far contributing mostly interesting, brief, topical blog posts with a literary slant. She’s also written some longer, perceptive essays for The Atlantic and The New Inquiry about some of the baked-in perils of online nonfiction writing: how parents overshare details of their children’s lives in ways that previously would be considered clear violations of privacy, and how the confessional personal essay invites readerly judgment rather than empathy and defuses the magic of art, where the trivial mundane is rendered sublime.

With that calm and hopefully respectful preamble out of the way, I think that Bovy is completely wrong in her assessment of Ozick. It’s not that the substance of what Bovy says is, in and of itself, incorrect; it’s just that it doesn’t apply well to Ozick. It’s as if her set of contemporary journalistic concerns (how writers get paid, what constitutes a “career” in writing now) were decals for a kid’s toy truck that she needlessly applies to a completely different toy — a set of Legos, maybe.

Ozick writes, “Old writers are taken to be as nonessential as old magazines that long ago expired: they are repetitious and out of date, they fail to be of interest even to themselves, they are worn out.” The essay is about these old writers and their daily increasing irrelevance, in particular their irrelevance to today’s crop of new writers. My suggestion for reading this essay is to replace the phrase “old writers” when it appears with the words “Cynthia Ozick,” because she is obviously talking about herself, admittedly in a slightly old-fashioned, non-confessional, indirect way.

Bovy chides Ozick for her larding of literary allusion and high-art chutzpah, but she’s Cynthia Ozick, for the love. She’s not being pretentious so much as being consistent. Bovy calls Ozick’s essay “the most highbrow get-off-my-lawn ever written” about how young writers are unwilling to “wait their turn” in the spotlight, but this reads Ozick in the wrong key while ignoring much of her previous writing.

What the essay actually seems to be about is searing regret in the face of death. Ozick is the old writer, who is taken to be nonessential. She is the writer who, in her youth, “loitered in [her] room mooning over Proust in his silenced room, or contemplating an exhilarated Henry James.” And she did this instead of “being drawn into the distracting pragmatism of publishing,” be it journalism or any of the para-careers associated with literature. She took this approach, and she’s not crowing about it. And I’m not just consulting my Ouija Board of Ozick fandom to say this. She’s written about it many times: how when Roth and Mailer and Sontag were locking arms and skipping from the offices of the Partisan Review down main street to literary celebrity, she was completely unknown, working years and years on her first, still not published novel, and then again working years and years on another novel, finally published, but, as she claims, read by exactly no one. It was only after this (what? something like 14 years of work?) did she start to publish short stories and reviews. That is, her life has been one of relentless hermetic literary ambition.

And “who was paying for [this] art-for-art purist to hole up in [her] cabin in the woods?” Bovy asks, meanly. Ozick has been clear on this as well: her husband. She jokes in her Paris Review interview that while other writers were getting Guggenheims, she survived on a Hallotte Fellowship, meaning the steady work of her husband, Bernard Hallotte. And she doesn’t say this in some kind of flippant Caitlin Flanagan-ish way. She says it burning with shame at her late blooming.

Interviewer: What sustained you without publication during that period?

Ozick: Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature. I had a youthful arrogance about my “powers,” and at the same time a terrible feeling of humiliation, of total shame and defeat. When I think about that time — and I’ve spent each decade as it comes regretting the decade before, it seems — I wish I had done what I see the current generation doing: I wish I had scurried around for reviews to do, for articles to write. I wish I had written short stories. I wish I had not been sunk in an immense dream of immense achievement.

When she writes of “the madness of failed recognition,” who do you think she might be talking about?

And that’s generally the problem with Bovy’s response here. It’s pitched as if it’s a response to a Caitlin Flanagan piece rather than a Cynthia Ozick piece, as if the Ozick piece was only working at the contemporary click-level rather than the coded, literary, autobiographical level. Ozick is not mainly talking about how young writers effectuate writing-related careers, or even the dwindling market for literary fiction, or the seemingly current vogue for confessing one’s privilege, or any of the other elements of writerly infrastructure that have changed. Bovy entertains the notion at the beginning of her piece that Ozick is talking about differences in culture rather than infrastructure, but then Bovy goes on about the changes in infrastructure anyway.

But what Ozick is really saying in her essay is not just that things are done differently now, but what happens when today’s young writers turn out like her — old and in the way? “How will they live, and in what country, and under what system of temperament and raw desire?” The temperament she’s speaking of is the difference between her, an old writer, who (when young) grew her literary aspirations out of that quasi-religious and thoroughly isolated infatuation with literature, the Cult of the Word, and today’s young writers, who come at writing from the celebrity end, the side of knowingness and connections, and the stock portfolio manager’s whittled sixth sense about reputation and marketability. What, Ozick asks, will happen to these writers once they’ve aged out of this Hollywood-like approach to literature — where there is a canon of connections rather than a canon of reading? What happens when they’re past 50, kids now grumpy teenagers, house under a second mortgage, body beginning to fail, and neither the will or the skill to write another pithy personal essay recapping the finale of season 27 of Girls? Yes, Ozick is old fashioned, with a romantic approach to literature. Not news. But at least she had inspiration from and a dedication to the thing itself — literature. What happens when that is given up? What’s left to fuel the fire then?

Though Bovy is obviously a smart writer and obviously has a strong grip on the weird self-exploitations that a contemporary aspiring writer is heir to, it’s almost as if she enacts the very cultural amnesia Ozick is implicitly warning us about. Ozick’s essay isn’t about waiting one’s turn so much as not forfeiting one’s continuity.

And though Ozick doesn’t push her essay into itemized cultural critique of the present moment, I will. Living in Brooklyn and having the right friends on Twitter and posting occasional humorous pictures of your cat with the book of the moment and having fleeting but deeply felt feelings for every micro-breeze in the literary chattering complex does now somehow count as a meaningful expression of literary engagement. I’m not speaking about Bovy here; I’m speaking about everyone I follow on Twitter; I’m speaking about myself. Having an interest in and aspirations to literature has become codified into a mode of “being literary.” That is, like D.G. Myers warned, it has become a kind of social class, a lifestyle, with all its attendant signifiers. But the problem with a social class is that you can accidentally evict yourself when you buy the wrong jeans, vote for the wrong person, or refuse to read the latest photogenic genius everyone’s gaga over. But Literature, that sunken cathedral, will still welcome you — fat, lumpy, badly dressed, and nearly dead. It’s almost something worth believing in.

Note on AWP

April 9, 2015literary lintAWP, conferencesbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

I was going to write something pithy and snarky about AWP, which occurs this week in Minneapolis, but it turns out I don’t have the gumption. (AWP is the annual convention for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which is essentially the professional organization of people who teach creative writing at the college level.) Truth is, I wish I was there and preemptively miss the friends I only get to see there. So instead of desperate acts of personal website sarcasm, here are my small nuggets of AWP-related advice for those attending for the first time or for those people, like me, who need annual renewal advice.

1. Wear comfortable shoes. And be honest with your feet. An editor friend told me this years ago and I didn’t take her seriously. (Always take your editors seriously!) You will be on your feet and you will be walking a great deal, and if you’re like me and spend most of your regular days sitting on your buster, you’re going to need the comfiest pair you’ve got. Just do it.

2. Pack light. Wait, no, scratch that. Don’t pack anything. Or pack as little as humanly possible, because you’re going to attract books and book-like objects and you will need the extra room in your one piece of luggage. (Also, you should only bring one piece of luggage. This isn’t ’Nam.) And those seven tote bags that you magically accumulate are going to get very heavy with literary lint. I wish I could say that all of the stuff I typically hoover into my possession at AWP is half as charming when I get back home, but still that’s part of the fun. It’s a bit like playing PacMan. Regarding how this refusal to pack clothing will affect your conference fashionability, look, this is AWP. People look terrible at AWP. True, people also look terrible at MLA, but at least they’re trying hard to look normal. (So, so hard.) At AWP, people are trying hard to look arty while not appearing to care about how they look, which leads to a strained slobcore militancy. So, fight all of this by just wearing the same outfit each day. You’re gonna love how you look.

3. Remember that the primary purpose of a professional conference of any kind (even an academic one with a high contingent of graduate students like AWP) is social, not educational. And no, I don’t mean it’s an occasion to “network.” I mean, it’s an occasion to be social. As in, the fun’s at the bar.

Should you go to the panels? Well, only if you must, or only if you want to say hey to a friend, but remember that the panel presentations are never more exciting than their brief descriptions in the massive printed schedule. The actual panel is cramped seating, the constant fear of not being able to find an available bathroom, people who aren’t naturally good public speakers failing to speak into the mic, followed by people who’ve lost the ability to ask questions without long, creepy, aggressive, prefatory statements. Just skip it! Go to the book fair, and then go the bar, and then go wherever people go off-site. I never went to many off-site things because I was always too tired and scared. (See point 1 above re: shoes.)

This lesson is applicable to all professional conferences, which are complex civilized excuses to meet friends for drinks. You probably already knew that but it took me years.

4. Can you crash those special retreat/lit mag reunion-like get-togethers that happen after hours? They aren’t going to arrest you for trying.

5. Also, remember that they call them “conventions” for a reason. That is, it’s the annual occasion when a multifarious endeavor establishes, or reaffirms, or performs its conventions. Which is to say, it’s a bit like going to a drag show. Which is also to say, Go, have fun, see your buddies, but don’t take it too seriously. The actual writing is going to happen (or not happen) when you’re at home alone, sitting on your buster.

6. And for God’s sake if you aren’t there, don’t keep one eyed glued to Twitter to see how things are going. Don’t pine for the party you’re missing out on. Yes, you are missing out. Get over it. Life happens like this! Does it mean you’re a loser and no one understands you and you don’t have any true friends? Well, maybe. But yanking refresh on Twitter and feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to make that any better. Instead, just take a long lunch and buy a taco and maybe read an actual book. Next week everyone’ll be back at work anyway.

Dear Diary: A Note

February 19, 2015literary lintdiaries, John Cheever Envy, Zadie Smithbarrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Zadie Smith has a post up at Rookie Mag about her inability to keep a diary.

A bit later I tried again, this time concentrating only on school, like a Judy Blume character, detailing playground incidents and friendship drama, but I was never able to block from my mind a possible audience, and this ruined it for me: It felt like homework. I was always trying to frame things to my advantage in case so-and-so at school picked it up and showed it to everybody. The dishonesty of diary writing — this voice you put on for supposedly no one but yourself — I found that idea so depressing. I feel that life has too much artifice in it anyway without making a pretty pattern of your own most intimate thoughts. Or maybe it’s the other way ’round: Some people are able to write frankly, simply, of how they feel, whereas I can’t stop myself turning it into a pretty pattern.

The same childish questions get to me. Who is it for? What is this voice? Who am I trying to kid — myself?

I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened — and I like it that way.

At the end of the post, Smith says that the closest artifact she has to a diary is her email account.

As I read, I found myself agreeing with escalating intensity. I’ve never been able to keep a diary for longer than a day, but I’ve always felt that a diary, or a semi-disciplined journal at least, is simply something I should do. (Cheever did it despite pickling himself for decades!)

The difficulty of figuring out who the diary is written for is a pertinent question, one which reminds me of the predicament of blogging (or at least, my predicament of blogging). Of course, many early blogs functioned like diaries with daily entries about what went down. But a traditional private diary is a kind of talking to oneself, as opposed to the potential void of everyone/no one that the internet generously provides. One problem I have with blogging, such as it is, is that I can’t quite ascertain my audience. There’s no context for it. Or more precisely, a good blog creates its own context by virtue of the subjects it cites, the links it includes, and the regularity of its appearance. It both gloms on to some pre-existing context and creates its own.

But without this pegging — if your blogger infrequently updates the site with no real throughline in subject matter, if the only common element in all of the disparate posts is that they were written by the same person — then what do you have? A bad blog? A blog that can’t get its act together?

Which could be one reason why I’m essentially trying to fortify my blog posts into brief stand-alone essays. Or “notes.” With a lack of constructed context, the lack of an ongoing entertainment enterprise, the posts (optimistically) have to be polished enough to make some sort of independent sense, and not to embarrass me overmuch, and to keep you coming back.

A Public Address System

by Barrett Hathcock, who believes in silence, exile, and humming