BookFox

Gunter Grass' Anti-Israel Poem

Gunter Grass' anti-Israel poem has caused such an outcry that Benjamin Netanyahu has already condemned it, along with hundreds of other intellectuals. The poem has only been published in German but The Guardian has translated and excerpted a few lines.

The most thorough dismantling of Grass came from Anshel Pfeffer, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

"Logic and reason are useless when a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less, does not understand that his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualified him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began."

 

The Darth Vader (and son!) Children's Book Video

This is going to be the biggest children's book since "Go the F*uck to Sleep":

 

The Alligators of Abraham

Matt Kish of "Moby Dick in Pictures" designed this incredible book cover for Robert Kloss' "The Alligators of Abraham."

Below you can see his first attempt at the cover. But how much better is that second version, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fun Speed Reading Test

I got 872 words a minute, but most other tests clock me at 700 or slower. Still, a nice little test.

Source: Staples eReader Department

AWP Pins Transformed into Magnets

It's been a week since AWP ended. If you're like me, you still haven't thrown out the things you collected from the main floor that were cool at the moment but quickly transformed into tchotchkes in the light of the real world.

Say, for instance, pins. Yeah, every lit journal gave away pins with tiny logos on front and the type of needles in back that just beg the TSA to give you grief.

If you haven't thrown your pins out already, they're likely languishing in a drawer. But not for me! I put on my arts and crafts hat and made ... magnets!

Behold, the process of creation:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grab some pliers and rip out the hook and pin in the back:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy some magnets. This pack of eight from Michael's ran a whopping $1.50:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apply glue to the backing. I used Aleene's Tacky Glue. Any super glue will work, really:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apply the magnets and let them sit. They really need a good six hours before the glue hardens and turns from white to clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Behold! I give you the fridge which is so much more literary than your fridge!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to (starting at the left and going clockwise) Willow Springs, The Journal, Five Points, Oxford Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Pank and The Southern Review for providing the art supplies for this little artistic jaunt. 

AWP 2012

Excited for the AWP conference, only a few short weeks away. Authors! Readings! Schmoozing! Dancing! (Yes, there is the legendary dance party, happening ... nightly). A whole host of literary heavyweights will be there, but as I've discovered from years past, the most exciting part of AWP is not the famous writers but the rank and file. Normal, everyday folk slaving away at their writing just like you. 

A smattering of things I learned from last time:

• Even "small" literary journals are hard to break into. And they lavish so much love on their writers.
• Go to panels based upon the people, not based on the titles. Titles deceive. 
• Journals are ecstatic about publishing an author's very first story. So claim your virgin status. It's a badge, not a drawback.
• "30% of people who submit stuff are insane" AGNI editor
• Everyone works harder than you do. People at the conference were writing 2 or 3 hours a day despite doing all the conference activities.

If you're going let me know! Always eager to connect with other writers.

What Could Be Worse Than A Male Book Club?

The most painful situation the writers of this Velveeta commercial could come up with was ... a male book club. That's right: talking about books with other men is equivalent to torture. Of course, the sidekicks are willing to suffer through such torture to win the Velveeta prize. 

But who knows, perhaps this advertisement is particularly effective among Velveeta's target demographic. After all, only illiterate people would be stupid enough to eat radioactive-colored orange goo.

 

Aimee Bender's "Bad Return": A Sentence Analysis

Here are the first two sentences of Aimee Bender's "Bad Return" in One Story #158:

"I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house in the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio."

Pay attention to the prepositions. Even in that first sentence, we have the double repetition of the preposition, "in." That repetition prepares you for the long string of prepositions in the second sentence, a total of six.

The traditional advice about prepositional clauses is not to string too many together in a row. This is on the whole good advice, the type of advice that beginning writers should obey. Nouns and verbs are the planetary cores of sentences and prepositions are but satellites. Prepositions belong with adverbs, in the category of allowable but only for judicious use.

But Bender doesn't obey this rule. She doesn't ignore the rule as much as transcend it, showing the power of a series of prepositions. By playing with a series of alternating prepositional clauses (in, of, in, of, in, of), she nails you down to a certain location. What's more, the sequence of the locations expands from macro to bird's eye, starting with the corner of the room and taking you all the way out to the view of the state. 

It's not the most pyrotechnic sentence but it bears the mark of being well crafted, and its cascading rhythms tumble the reader into the short story. Also, the duality of its clauses prepares us for the duality of the story, which alternates between two main characters, the narrator and Arlene.

Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans"

In a writing workshop, a friend of mine once criticized Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel "Never Let Me Go," which my friend claimed was a science fiction novel that refused to embrace its science fiction roots.

It's true that the science fiction conceits in "Never Let Me Go" are largely glossed over. Most of the book focuses on the characters and their love for each other, not the details of cloning and organ transplants.

But I think that my friend was mistaken in his criticism. Shouldn't we celebrate books that don't fit neatly into genre categories? Why isn't it possible to write a good novel that draws from genre conceits without fully embodying the genre's conventions? And what's wrong with a bit of subtlety when employing genre ideas?

Ishiguro's novel "When We Were Orphans," a lesser-known predecessor to the famous "Never Let Me Go," hits genre notes in a similar fashion. Instead of science fiction, Orphans plays on detective tropes. The protagonist is a detective, although hardly a Sherlock Holmes archetype. He's delusional, inflating his bumbling missteps into successes. The narrative doesn't progress with the cause and effect sequence associated with most detective novels, though; it has the digressionary structure of a literary novel, floating through the narrator's childhood memories in Proustian fashion.

"When We Were Orphans" has the genre connection to "Never Let Me Go," but its far closer connection in Ishiguro's oeuvre is "Remains of the Day." Both have polite, formal, unreliable narrators who love a woman but find themselves unable to demonstrate that love, and WWII political overtones of a good person unwittingly in cahoots with evil.

It's those unreliable narrators which every writer should admire. After reading Ishiguro's first person POVs, it seems impossible that any first person narrator is telling the truth. Ishiguro exposes how the "I" of any story necessarily skews the world, which not only provides layers of mystique for the reader to interpret, it only creates a complex character. Who is this person and is he lying to me, to others, or only to himself? Ishiguro is a master of liars who do not know they are lying.

Can the Kindle Do This?

 

First Book Read in 2012

Quiz Time: In this J.M. Coetzee novel, a professor interacts with a disadvantaged member of another race during the apartheid in South Africa.

If you guessed Disgrace, you can be forgiven. After all, the plot line is identical to this novel written nearly a decade before: Age of Iron.

The eerie similarities between the novels gave me pause during the initial pages, but Age of Iron soon veered into its own idiosyncracies that distinguished it from its more famous counterpart.

The most salient distinguishing feature is the way it graffitis its message in blunt and tumescent scrawl across the whole novel. While Disgrace manages to fold the critique of the apartheid inside the metaphor of a sexual predator, Age of Iron trumpets its attack through page-long diatribes from an academic. 

It feels as though Age of Iron was a kind of warm-up for the triumph of Disgrace, as though Coetzee needed to whet his writing on a coarse block to get to a finely honed edge. This progression from blatant to subtle is usually the order of art, although in some cases it works the opposite way. Case in point: Jose Saramago, who went from the mysterious parable-like world of Blindness to the I-don't-want-you-to-miss-it-so-I'll-scream Seeing. It was a mistake to write that sequel (many sequels are a mistake, especially in Hollywood).

If you're not a hardcore Coetzee fan, this is likely a novel you should skip. Disgrace levitates above most modern novels but Age of Iron muddles about on ground level. But despite Iron's flaws, which in addition to the moralistic bludgeoning include the hackneyed premise of a professor writing about a professor, alms for the good-hearted homeless person, and an elderly woman dying of cancer, the novel is well executed. Coetzee has an ear for dialogue and all the right knacks for crafting a story.

That's it. A brief thought on the first novel I've read in 2012. I'm going to keep all these brief. My teaching load doesn't allow me much time to write, and what time I have left over I'm mostly marking for fiction writing. But a Happy New Year to everyone. May your 2012 reading be an axe for the frozen sea inside you.

New Issue of Confrontation

The new issue of Confrontation is out, issue #110, with cover art by Claudio Bravo ("Red, Rose and Orange Paper"). It's a timely homage to the recently deceased Chilean painter. Inside the journal are a number of glossy full-color pages showcasing Bravo's other work.

Paul Zimerman's "Full Remittance," a kind of anti-Rakolnikovian story, is excellent, as well as a shortish story by Theodore Wheeler with the titillating title of "The First Night of My Down-and-Out Sex Life," which ends up being more somber than you'd expect.

Peter Levine's "Often Remembered" shows a man stumbling into three women he's had relationships with in the past, and the messiness of the intersections of memory and desire.

I've also got a story in this issue -- "Drive-by Horoscope" -- which began as a rumination on the strange messages on church sign boards (they are quite strange, are they not?). And what if -- what if! -- a man started using them as horoscopes?

Nobel Prize for Literature 2011

Over the last decade the Nobel Prize for Literature has alternated between a proscriptive award and a descriptive one. A proscriptive award takes little known but worthy authors and presents them in a bow and wrapping to the world, telling everyone to read. A descriptive award honors the authors that have, to a large extent, already won the accolades and critical honor, and the Nobel is mere icing on an otherwise heavily iced career.

Look at the last ten winners. Six had already received international notoriety:

• Mario Vargas Llosa (2010)
• Doris Lessing (2007)
• Orhan Pamuk (2006)
• Harold Pinter (2005)
• J.M. Coetzee (2003)
• V.S. Naipaul (2001)

Anointing these writers meant that readers/critics had been right all along.

But the remaining four were relative unknowns:

• Herta Müller (2009 -- a huge dark horse)
• J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008 -- collective response from U.S. -- "who"?)
• Elfriede Jelinek (2004 -- a head scratcher)
• Imre Kertész (2002)

Anointing these writers meant that readers/critics still didn't have the lowdown on the truly valuable writers, and that the Nobel committee retained enough power to steer tastes.

I admire the variety of selection, even if I wish some perennially favorites would be crowned (Murakami especially). Most prizes use a singular mode of logic to determine who should receive the prize -- a judgment of quality -- but the Nobel committee seems to vary among a whole host of considerations, none of which ever remain predominant for any number of years.

Supposed considerations of the Nobel Committee?

They want to get a writer from a particular geographical region, usually Africa. There are never enough women laureates. There are too many fiction writers and not enough poets. It won't be an American because Americans are too "provincial, too isolated, too insular." They won't pick a European because Europeans have dominated the prize (now who's acting provincially, my Swedish friends?). They don't want someone who is spread too widely (I'm looking at you, Haruki Murakami). They want to capitalize on current events. (Arab Spring has been bandied about with enough frequency to make it seem as though an Arabic writer was guaranteed to win.)

All of these are nonsense. Or at least all of them are changed so frequently it does you no good to use them to narrow down your selection. There is only one common factor in the Nobel Prize for literature, and that is political engagement. If a writer hasn't been involved in political action, both personally and in their writing, they don't stand a chance. Which is why Thomas Pynchon always seems a far-fetched selection. Why would the committee ever choose a recluse?

writers or Writers: A Definition

Is a writer merely defined as someone who writes or are there additional qualities required?

The way that creative writers use the term Writer, I've noticed, is limited to people who write creatively. They say "Writers" and exclude all those people whose expertise is in another field, the people who dip into writing only to communicate their ideas. Public figures, technical writers, and most academics don't qualify, even if they've written extensively.

At first that seems unfair. A writer should be anyone with the courage to put words on the page. 

But I think the creative folks are getting at an important division between different types of writers. A Writer in the loftiest sense is someone who would write even if language was emptied of meaning. That type of Writer is someone who writes primarily because they love spleunking through the cavities and caverns of language, the soar and dip of sentences, and the tonal friction of words as they rub up against each other.

If written language was emptied of meaning, most non-creative writers would never write again. Hey, even most creative Writers would never write again. Or at least they'd be put off for some time. But I think many Writers would come back, drawn by the allure of letters mashed up against one another and the sounds created. The need for language, written language, is deeply embedded. 

And I think that because of that attention to language, Writers believe that fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and playwriting are all the most difficult terrains to traverse in the writing world. It's not that it's easy to write anything else -- on the contrary. It's just that in those other forms of writing the difficulty is in thought and organization and presentation and clarity, not in the wild badlands of beautiful sentences, ambiguous language choice, and tropes of all shapes and sizes. For those who devote their entire life to writing, the uppercase Writer, the main difficulty is wrestling with language itself.

Poets and Writers' MFA Ranking Controversy

In Slate, Scott Kenemore argues that the latest Poets and Writers' Rankings are a travesty, but his reasoning is self-centered and misleading.

Let's look at why Kenemore thinks that Columbia deserves to be ranked highly (in 2nd place behind Iowa):

Because the last rankings had them high.

As he says, "A few years ago, U.S. News and World Report ranked MFA writing programs, and put Columbia at No. 4.)" Except that was fourteen years ago, in 1997. That's not just a few years. Dozens of new MFA programs have sprung up since then. Huge swathes of faculty have changed university allegiances. And these meteoric rises and falls are not unheard of. Consider USC, ranked 44th in 1996 and ranked 23rd in 2011. So it's not inconceivable that Columbia's position has changed so radically.

Because funding doesn't matter to someone who will make big bucks upon graduating.

But I ask him: what percentage of students will make big bucks upon graduating? Starry-eyed prospective MFA students might believe that they will be the exception among their peers and actually land a book deal after graduating, but statistically, even in the very best programs, less than 50 percent will ever publish a book. In most programs that number is more like 5 or 10 percent. So that leaves a huge number of students who should, if they are realistic and pay attention to the numbers, choose an MFA that does not mire them in student loan debt.

Plus, many of those who do end up publishing a book do so four or seven or ten years after. That means they have to shoulder those loans for years before they finally land that first book deal (which might only be enough to pay back loan interest) and then for years more before they're able to land a faculty appointment. His logic leaves out all the students who don't experience instant success.

Kenemore, with six books published, is such a ridiculous exception to the MFA graduate he should not hold himself up for comparison. If the prospective MFA student is wise, funding should matter a great deal. Aside from the student, funding is a sign of the relationship between the university and the program. It's a sign that the university is not treating the MFA program like a cash register but is actually concerned about its students and wants to aid the program. All in all, Kenemore's advice that Columbia is "for people whose genitals still work," implying some kind of failure of masculinity or courage if you don't take on student loans that reach six figures, is the worst kind of bravura and absolutely foolhardy.

Columbia has great faculty.

And how many of the schools ranked above Columbia don't have great faculty? What's more, why should one all-star faculty member trump a number of good hardworking writers who care for students? In my experience, the all-star faculty members are there for marketing, and teach heavily reduced course loads and might or might not be available for thesis advisement. It's the grunt and file of faculty who are quietly toiling away making students into better writers. As Edward Delaney said in the Atlantic:

A single faculty-member writer who’s having a notable success often seems to trump a legion of others quietly publishing work that is respected but not widely celebrated. Columbia University’s Web site features its Nobel Prize–winning faculty member Orhan Pamuk, who began teaching last fall.

Orhan Pamuk is wonderful. I loved "Snow" and "My Name is Red." But star power alone should not be a reason why a student would go to a university.

I will admit that Kenemore's suggestion at the end of the article is an excellent one that Poets & Writers should adopt:

Poets & Writers should add a "manuscript placement" column to its yearly rankings spreadsheet, alongside fellowship placement and job placement. What percentage of fiction graduates secure a publishing contract worth at least four figures within 10 years of graduation? What percentage of poets win a prize that results in the publication of a book within 10 years of graduation?

That would be a helpful metric to judge the success of students exiting the program. It would take an enormous amount of research to track down all that information, but it also would be invaluable for prospective students. It would also be a way to judge the quality of the program in addition to the metrics we already possess to judge the financials of the institution.

UPDATE: Roxane Gay at HTML Giant takes Kenemore down a couple of notches with her snarky wit.

UPDATE: Twitter's been going crazy with rather derogatory remarks about the, um, literary quality of Kenemore's work.