Pullman's latest; etc.

Finished Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a book that had me wondering throughout why Pullman had bothered. Then I read the blurb at the end that explained the book was part of a series of books by well known authors tasked with revisiting familiar myths. I suppose Pullman seemed like the obvious (in which "obvious" is a synonym for "most likely to provoke controversy") choice for a book about the life of Jesus because Pullman is vocally opposed to organized religion. Fair enough, but could he have at least approached the material with somewhat less transparent aims and a less silly premise?

In rewriting the tale of Jesus, he posits a twin brother named Christ. (See, so when people later talk about "Jesus Christ," it's ironic because the religion is really the result of both of them. Get it? There should have been a third brother named "H." . . . ) Jesus gets in trouble a lot as a little kid, and his brother Christ talks him out of these troubles by glibly using his familiarity with scriptures. Later, when Jesus takes up a public ministry, Christ, who has tried to talk his brother into the practicality of forming a "church"—never mind that that's not a Jewish term—is approached by "an angel" who persuades Christ to write down everything his brother says and does. This leads to some discussion about the difference between truth and history—truth winning out, in the eyes of the angel and Christ, who revises some of Jesus' statements to make them fit in better with the narrative he's constructing.

Jesus is still doomed to the cross, but since Christ is his twin brother . . . well, you can see early on where this is going.

Pullman spends a lot of time picking on the idea of "church," of organized religion. It's certainly as easy target (though even Pullman has to admit that the presence of the church in history has been a force for individual good as often as it's a force for institutional evil), and there's even a not-veiled reference to pedophile priests, but it's a clumsy aim for the story, which would have done better to focus on notions of how narratives get constructed from history. Why the twin is of use is questionable, as Pullman could have had any character fill the writer's role. Christ's implication in his brother's downfall (and "resurrection") just feels forced, especially since it's clear the brother doesn't believe what he finds himself saying. Pullman spends a lot of time simply retelling the gospel stories without their miraculous trappings, treating this as a new idea (as if Thomas Jefferson and a host of others didn't do the same thing), and he seems to think he's radically stirring the pot by proposing non-miraculous views of seeming miracles, as if that weren't an old and familiar way (among progressive branches of Christianity) of looking at the Bible. There's a nice scene in the Garden of Gethsemani with Jesus talking to God's silence (a conversation his brother never hears), but even that is hardly new.

In the end, this felt competent but dashed off, an easy buck for Pullman.

In my own work, I'm nearing completion of a readable copy of "Clockworks," which I hope to send to two readers this weekend.

Vacillation

Never ceases to amaze me: how one can move between polar positions on a story in progress. Even within the course of a day, I can't wait to get to work on it again, so hopeful do I feel, and (contrariwise) I account it rubbish. It's nothing so virtuous as humility, this second position. Its rather a species of doubt informed by fear. Thinking something is pointless is not the same as wondering whether oneself is the best person for the job.

And so: Back to it.

"Clockworks" continues to expand (and deepen, I believe). Heading for 14K words. It's possible that the piece will get tighter at the next revision stage, but I wouldn't be surprised if, for everything I remove, more materials shows up. At this point, the climactic scene needs the most work, as it still contains some false starts and uncompleted actions.

Still working toward an intact draft of "Clockworks." Some sections have seen multiple revisions. Some remain sketchy. Most of what needs to be tossed has been tossed, but some (small, I think) pieces are missing, and nothing is in close to final shape except perhaps the first page. I'm at about 12.5 K words; the final piece will be around there, it seems. However, I wouldn't be surprised if some new moments that suddenly seem needed bubble up in the course of revision. I'm looking forward to having this phase completed so I can go over this creature line by line and word by word. There'll probably be two go-rounds of that before I send it to the friends who've helped with the editing in the past.

Meanwhile, I've started reading Philip Roth's The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, which directly (maybe) confronts (kind of) the issues of one's biography in the construction of fiction. To this point in the book, Roth has been addressing himself to Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional version of himself from some of his novels.

Oh: And hello to any folks from the Pulp Factory who stop by!

Passing

Finally got around to finishing Nella Larsen's Passing. A writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen produced only two novels and a few stories. The short novel reminded me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, a book full of thoughtful revelations that has too many essayistic qualities to be a fine novel. Larsen's book is actually better, in that there's a narrative arc derived from the interactions of particular characters, but much of the book's dialogue involves the stating of ideological or ethical positions. Very little happens in the book, which moves slowly, much of it taken up with interior reflection by the narrator, and said reflection involves pausing the course of events to let thought processes be fully spelled out. The male characters are not credible. The protagonist never stands back enough from herself to allow us to see the particularities of her own situation. Though the title of the novel refers to how American blacks "passed" among whites, the narrator, Irene, spends more time observing with horror how her friend Clare has passed than detailing how, at times, she's done it herself. She makes oblique references, in conversation, to how blacks can not only identify one another but also how they can't spot an "ofay," a white who's trying to disguise his or her racial identity; however, the narrator never lets us in on the finer points of how to remain hidden or how to find the fakes. It does offer, at least for this white reader, some fascinating insights into a cultural moment, but it doesn't say as much as it should. (In this, it's weaker than Gilman's "first-wave feminism" novel, which, though bogged down in exposition, is more bold and direct in detailing the differences between men and women and the difficulties in their attempts to live together. Gilman's book also has the fun conceit of a land which has seen no men in centuries.)

The Patience Stone

Over the course of three days (though it takes only a few hours; it's very short), I read The Patience Stone, by Afghan author Atiq Rahimi. The story is simultaneously realistic, a piece of absurdist theater, a monologue, and a parable. Some moves seem false, but only, I think, if the reader requires this to be one particular type of tale, when in fact it's several types of tales. It's even a meta-tale. The "patience stone" is a fabled stone that absorbs everyone's sorrows and that will, at the end of the world, explode. The reader becomes a "patience stone" as we're forced to listen to a woman pour out her previously unspoken sorrows to her husband, who lies unconscious with a bullet lodged in his neck. The entire book takes place in one room and, as if we were watching a play, we are never allowed to see beyond this room, though we hear sounds from beyond it. Certainly the story takes place in Afghanistan in a time of war, but it might be Iraq or another Muslim nation just as easily. (Though a few minor details probably fix it in Afghanistan, the country is never stated.) The author is male, but he effectively "vents" a host of female grievances and leaves us with a full picture of the possible roles for women in this society (all of which are viewed in the protagonist or through women she mentions).

Interviewed, among other things

I was contacted this past week by Art Sippo and Ric Croxton regarding "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down." Both are pulp and comics fans, and they run a site where they post interviews with people who have something to say about either or both. My interview is "Book Cave Episode 70." (I think it can be saved rather than just listened to through iTunes, but I couldn't get that to work earlier.)

http://thebookcave.libsyn.com/

Still enjoying Lost Books of the Odyssey.

I'm also reading John Dominic Crossan's The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, which I picked up from a friend who wanted to get rid of a few books (out of many thousands) before she and her husband moved to a new house. It's been years since I read Crossan. I've appreciated some of his books; one in particular, The Cross That Spoke, ended my reading of him, as the theory at its heart (that the goofy "cross gospel" is a precursor to the relatively tame Easter narratives of the gospels) seemed not credible, at least from a literary standpoint.

Also reading Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. More about that once I'm farther along.

Finished In Cold Blood a week ago. Outstanding. What Capote achieves is rich insight into the minds of the killers without at any point granting validity to their reasoning. He presents it and explains it—as they see it in themselves and each other—but doesn't suggest that their reasoning is, in fact, reasonable. Rather, we're witnessing a kind of amoral Rube Goldberg device that results in the killing of the Clutter family. For me, what's most fascinating and trouble at the same time is the sense of how many such people move among us, those whose essential selfishness provides no brakes to their actions. Rarely does this result in murder; the consequences are, I think, more ordinary.

Such issues fit well with the considerations at work in "Clockworks," still on hold as I complete the revision of "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth." I'll finish that tonight. It's much stronger now, having lost the second narrative voice and a large chunk out of the middle that had come from an early and far different version.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is well crafted and thoughtful. Each small story (it is not, despite the claims on the cover and in its marketing, a novel) employs both the elements of ancient tale and (post)modern short story.

Good stuff

Alternating between The Iliad and In Cold Blood.

The Fagles translation of Homer surges with energy; there's a wonderful pulse to the writing, even when Homer's merely detailing the troops arrayed for battle. I haven't read the book before. It's been a gap in my learning.

About In Cold Blood, I perhaps know too much already, having seen the film Capote and read the Capote in Kansas graphic novel. Nevertheless, Capote's style—even though it's now a commonplace of novelistic journalism—feels like a revelation. You can sense him inventing the structure of this new form. He's done an outstanding job using details both lovely and disturbing to evoke dread in the reader.

In writing: "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" came back (after 10 months!) from StoryQuarterly. The rejection contained positive comments as well as a suggestion to cut "judiciously." Since they provided none of their own judiciousness in this comment, I'm having to make do with my own. I hadn't looked at the story in probably two years; it obviously needs some trimming. It'll be much stronger after this. I've already marked it up.

Giving up on le Clézio; moving on

I did try with Desert. I had stopped after the first chapter (I nearly stopped on the first page, in truth) because the style seemed so intentionally resistant to forward movement. The author appeared to be announcing with every phrase, "I am writing literature--not a story." It reads like an anthropological study rather than a tale of actual people. In any case, I tried another chapter, but found myself defeated by the book's insistence on inertia as a narrative principle.

Maybe Fagles's translation of The Iliad is next.

Also, I've made additional notes for expanding some scenes in "Clockworks" and jotted down a few starts for other stories. Don't know when I'll get to those.

I learned today that "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" was praised in the latest Locus magazine.

It's going to be a challenge, now that I've finished Conrad's The Secret Agent, to move on to a book that's less brilliant. With a (Henry) Jamesian attention to psychological detail--and an ability to simply stop a scene and analyze it from every angle--Conrad takes a tale of would-be terrorists and anarchists and makes it into something rich and strange. At no point did I have any clear idea where the story would go, and Conrad plays at misdirection so that the tale's true protagonist (and I think it does have one) is revealed until near the end. Conrad lets us be misled even as many of the characters are misled.

The tone differs from what I remember of other Conrad works: for every character except one (plus a minor character), the narrator demonstrates outright disdain. He makes a show of revealing the thought processes of every major character, but even as he defends them, he makes them absurd. The narrative is laced with sarcasm as Conrad sets about eviscerating both anarchist and "servant of the law" alike, and such is the specificity of psychological complexity, each person is awful in a different way.

You can see how this novel sets the stage for everything Graham Greene would do with the spy narrative.

I also read Capote in Kansas (subtitled "A Drawn Novel," by Ande Parks and Chris Samnee), a graphic novel that was well done but which didn't seem to need doing. Haven't we heard this story way too many times recently? I quite enjoyed it, but its only contribution to the tale is a layer of fiction, having Capote interact, awkwardly, with the ghost of the girl who was murdered. I do now want to read Parks's Union Station, also based on actual events.

I read the first few pages of Simak's classic Way Station, but it's a deep drop from Conrad. Maybe I'll try again on Le Clezio's Desert, which started slowly (and at too much a remove from its characters for my taste).

Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl disappointed me, in the end. The third act collapsed into much bloody running around, easy hero/villain situations, and a plot device (a dead man who won't leave the story) that might have been good if used sparingly but which is here a huge miscalculation. The story becomes, due to all these components, less serious and less capable of being taken seriously. The world Bacigalupi imagines is coherent and interesting, and some of his characters were truly worth the time. I fault either the editor who didn't push him in the right directions or whatever force it was that drove him to take short stories (two of them went into this book) which were reportedly excellent and expand them ill-advisedly.

I read A Reader's Manifesto (see my bookshelf), by Myers, which I quite enjoyed. Though I didn't agree with every aspect of his criticism (he goes after several acclaimed authors who, he feels, are unduly praised), the grief he takes from book reviewers reveals--what any good reader should have already detected--a defensive culture of mutual promotion and the desire to believe that some new great thing is always being released.

I'm writing. Baffled a bit, but writing.

I finished Auster's In the Country of Last Things several days ago. Reading it while reading Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl proved to be somewhat problematic, in terms of getting my head into each text, since both took place in the profoundly wounded cities of dysfunctional futures. Both feature characters wandering through those cities in search of meaning and assistance. Auster's novel uses this—even on its face—metaphorically, and the "facts on the ground" shift from one day to the next for our protagonist, Anna Blume. Bacigalupi's tale has several protagonists, and certainly part of its agenda is to suggest that their city joins them while it separates them at the existential level, and none of them is seeking the same sort of satisfactions. The styles of prose differ radically: Auster is spare; Bacigalupi somewhat self-consciously ornate, though one could argue that it fits the exoticism of the novel's locale as much as Auster's honed prose fits the deprivations of that novel's world. Auster's tale is a fable and Bacigalupi's science fiction, but both are grounded in realistic appraisals of character.

Did a fair bit of work on my story "Clockworks" this past (vacation) week. I'm feeling confident about it. I just need to somehow apply myself to the work in the days ahead, as I return to teaching.

I like revising. Working on "Clockworks." It's like organizing a room, but in this case there's a place for everything you need to keep and the trash is easy to take out.

Also: reading Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and . . . some Green Lantern comics.

See Shelfari (at the right) to link to the books themselves.

Lydia's Davis's book of short fiction, Varieties of Disturbance, makes for a unique reading experience. I picked this up because a friend of my eldest daughter's had given her the book and I'd read James Wood's piece in the New Yorker about Davis's collected stories (which he considers as important a collection as Flannery O'Connor's collected fiction; quite a judgment). Some pieces are as short as a sentence, which makes the transition to her ordinary-length stories akin to a forced march after a stroll across a room. The pieces are all funny and often possess a detachedly ironic tone, a kind of weariness with language even as language makes profound demands.

I finished Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone a while ago. I liked the main character, or at least was intrigued by her; a "female" automaton, she's tasked with finding a way to transform her home city's living gargoyles into flesh. The book is shy with its details, so the world Sedia has created doesn't feel (no pun intended) fleshed out; rather, her focus is on the way in which one thing becomes another—the servant robot becomes free, metal learns to feel, stone becomes flesh, the living enter death, a city's government is transformed. The writing needed to open up some, I felt; the simple style fit our automaton's perspective, but the gargoyles' interior narrative sounded identical, and as the story increased in drama, the prose should have been reshaped, but instead felt flat. And through it all, I never had a strong sense of how exactly the automaton looked; the narrator held back, and I felt something more tactile would have helped. Some very nice moments in the piece and some surprising scenes that took the story and main character into unexpected narrative crannies.

Just started John the Revelator, by Peter Murphy. More on that another time.

I've been reading poetry, mostly, since that's what I'm focused on now in the early weeks of the creative writing class I'm teaching.

My story at Asimov's is getting positive responses from people. If only I had time to do more writing.

2010

Writing in the new year

"Clockworks," the prequel (of sorts) to "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," is progressing well enough. As with some other recent projects, my approach is nonlinear. I toss ideas and scenes into the document as they occur to me. I've had the story's arc long in place, though there have been some revelations (for me) along the way about how to get there and what it all means. I'm at about six thousand words; it may end up with around eight thousand, but the length isn't a concern or consideration. It'll be as long as it'll be, and I'm hoping it will be published at Asimov's as a follow-up to the other story. It's nice to feel some confidence about that, and to note that such confidence isn't impairing my aims for the story's quality.

A rather short piece of non-genre fiction, less than two thousand words, is nearing completion as a full draft. It's called "Set It Down."

"The Dearness of Bodies in Motion" was revised, in only the smallest ways, and sent out a few days ago to two venues (after having been rejected in accordance with the promised timing by Tin House). I hadn't reread the story for many months, so the sentences and the story's structure kept catching me off-guard. As always, it's nice to be surprised by one's work.

I should hear back any day now about "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth."

And reading

Currently, I'm finishing Chris Hedges's jeremiad Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. I don't disagree with anything Hedges says, but the ranting tone doesn't help with make his points, and he's often too narrowly focused to provide a satisfactory argument. On a chapter seemingly condemning all of the U.S. higher education system, he targets his alma mater, Harvard, as well as UC Berkeley and Princeton for glaring stupidities, and he also condemns the elitism intrinsic to the system (and to the private schools feeding the system). But he leaves out every good thing and ignores the vast majority of the higher education system--which might be condemned for letting in everyone rather than keeping most people out. What's wrong with that chapter is what's wrong with the book, as the coherence of his arguments aren't allowed room to breathe and his personally ground axes flash on every page.

Highly recommended is artist and author David Small's graphic memoir, Stitches. If you've read Small's children's books, you'll be utterly unprepared for this. The art serves the story well, and both are gripping.

Reading

My Dostoevsky prof in college was Irwin Weil, a big and joyous man who involved us in his enthusiastic love for the great writer. Though Weil was Jewish, he dismissed claims of anti-Semitism against Dostoevsky (as I recall, by arguing that Dostoevsky used Jews as a literary "type" and meant no particular offense; that's an easier argument to use in defense of Shakespeare, who wouldn't have ever seen a Jew, as they'd all been deported 300 years before, but I think it doesn't quite fly for Dostoevsky). Of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" scene in The Brothers Karamozov, Weil said Dostoevsky meant to prove that he could come up with better arguments for atheism than an actual atheist could. Though religious, and pretty clear about (as John Gardner wrote of John Updike) "who was buttering his bread," Dostoevsky didn't write didactically.

This week I read (or reread; my memory is a forest at midnight) Tolstoi's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Now there's a didactic story, concerned with how to live a moral life and Who is the one true judge. The preachiness is evident, but Tolstoi couches it so well, it doesn't grate. From the outset, we understand that people's lives are of two parts: exterior performances and interior responses. The first people to hear of Ilyich's death give the proper external reactions, but inside, they think terrible things, and we follow one former friend in all his duplicity for the entire first chapter. The purpose of this section (in which the very denial of death is imperative for everyone's mental wellbeing) becomes clear in the remainder of the story, which concerns Ilyich's life and death (and never returns to those first characters): Ilyich, too, lives a lie, and his death forces him to confront the falseness of his position, though only after he repeatedly dismisses the notion that his life was anything but "correct."

Also last week I finished Carol Emshwiller's science fictional The Secret City, which had very little to do with a secret city. I've like her shorter writings; this was less a novel than a longer work using the same motifs, tone, voice and structure as her shorter work, and it never came together in a satisfying way. Plot threads weren't attended to carefully. The book felt rushed and not thought-out. I liked parts of it, but it needed to stand up, shake itself, and approach its plot with more certainty.

Writing

During my break from school, I hope to finish a draft of "Clockworks," a story coming from the same world as "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," which will appear in next month's Asimov's. I have much of it visualized and have made notes for many of the scenes. I'd also like to look at revising "You Have No Idea What I've Forgotten" so I can send it out again. And I'm still waiting to hear back on two other stories, "The Dearness of Bodies in Motion" and "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth."

Just finished Britten and Brülightly, a graphic novel by Hannah Berry. Lovely artwork that's noirish and takes full advantage of the large pages; it's also very well written, with a sad-sack hardboiled voiceover and sharp dialogue. My one complaint about the design is that the voiceover appears as smallish handwriting: it's difficult to read. This was, I think, part of the reason I found the mystery tale tough to follow. Many names, written small: not helpful. That aside, it's fascinating to view and read.

For reasons never explored—which is fine—private detective Britten's partner is a teabag. He carries it with him everywhere, and it talks to him and assists with the investigations. Somehow, this works.

I'm most of the way through the first book of The Compleat Dying Earth. Fittingly, it's called The Dying Earth. Each chapter is a self-contained tale, and there's some crossover between the tales (though with sloppy continuity: a guy stabbed and left bleeding in one chapter reappears two chapters later with nary a reference to the preceding events . . . and things don't end well for him in that story either). The first chapter read like an issue of Doctor Strange written by a mildly precocious 12-year-old. The narrative jumped about rapidly, with characters confronting each other with trap doors, mystic spells and protective runes. The other stories have all been much better. They're fun, somewhat goofy tales which no heft, but the tone is consistently enjoyable.

Some reading has been accomplished (he passive-voicedly reported):

Stand on Zanzibar entertained, but afterwards there was something of the Chinese Food Effect (I'm sure there's a better metaphor). And I'm talking good Chinese food! It achieved what it set out to do, was well put together, and read fluidly. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't really take off in terms of other story or character. The characters are, well, fully two-dimensional. They make narrative sense, but they're not remotely like real people, and Brunner's difficulty with character is probably most evident in how everyone talks the same way, what my friend John Rogers called "über-rationalist." Certainly the novel was storeys above the two other sf novels I recently read, but it still didn't reach the level of literature (though it certainly had literary aspirations, it seemed). Another gap in its smile: the absence of female characters who weren't there to be stomped on by the men on their way to masculine fulfillment.

My third issue of One Story had a better tale than the previous two, "Finding Peace," by the late Sheila Schwartz. The others had felt overly safe, works that do exactly what they're supposed to do and nothing more. The Schwartz story—about a female cancer survivor on an Everest expedition—approached issues of hope and achievement with ambivalence (and some outright hostility). The omniscient narration was wonderfully locked-in, narrowly sealed inside the protagonist's perception.

I'm presently enjoying The Lost Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World, by Rowan Jacobsen. This nonfiction work is about oysters along the shore of western North America, mostly in the region of Vancouver Island. I've never eaten an oyster. Good book, though.

Still reading (with gaping lapses between stints) Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. It's truly excellent.

Because I have an independent study on Russian literature to oversee, I read Gogol's "The Overcoat" tonight. (Next up, "The Portrait." The translation is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.) I didn't care much for the supernatural ending tacked on. The story could have easily done without it. However, Gogol keeps such a distance from his protagonist (or at least insists he's keeping his distance), that the tone remains one of a fairy tale even as it broaches realism. More than once, Gogol's narrator declines to speculate what the poor clerk might be thinking because, in so many words, "who can know a man's soul." The narrator even strikes a pose that might be viewed as modern or post-modern (though other early authors did the same; every old is new again) when he says he's not interested in certain information, baldly digresses into areas not strictly aligned with the plot, and even confesses to forgetting facts, names and geography. A delightful story, funny in the way Dickens is funny in how he describes people being drowned by bureacracies, though refusing to demonstrate the sympathy that would accompany a story aiming at realism. Gogol is, in this way, perhaps more real: he tells us straight up that no one remembers the clerk and that his passing leaves no mark (until the supernatural coda, that is).

Did a little writing on a story I've been kicking around for a few months. It needed to be told more . . . interestingly. It presents challenges as I reshape every scene; it's still got an omniscient narrator, but the narrator is being somewhat pushed out of the way.

My story "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" will definitely be in the March 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, hitting newsstands in late January.

I received a positive response to a query about another story, but I won't hear for certain until sometime in December.