Kenneth Goldsmith writing in The Chronicle:

Perhaps one reason writing is stuck might be the way creative writing is taught. In regard to the many sophisticated ideas concerning media, identity, and sampling developed over the past century, books about how to be a creative writer have relied on clichéd notions of what it means to be “creative.” These books are peppered with advice like: “A creative writer is an explorer, a groundbreaker. Creative writing allows you to chart your own course and boldly go where no one has gone before.” Or, ignoring giants like de Certeau, Cage, and Warhol, they suggest that “creative writing is liberation from the constraints of everyday life.”

In the early part of the 20th century, both Duchamp and the composer Erik Satie professed the desire to live without memory. For them it was a way of being present to the wonders of the everyday. Yet, it seems, every book on creative writing insists that “memory is often the primary source of imaginative experience.” The how-to sections of these books strike me as terribly unsophisticated, generally coercing us to prioritize the theatrical over the mundane as the basis of our writings: “Using the first-person point of view, explain how a 55-year-old man feels on his wedding day. It is his first marriage.” I prefer the ideas of Gertrude Stein, who, writing in the third person, tells of her dissatisfaction with such techniques: “She experimented with everything in trying to describe. She tried a bit inventing words but she soon gave that up. The english language was her medium and with the english language the task was to be achieved, the problem solved. The use of fabricated words offended her, it was an escape into imitative emotionalism.”

For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an “a” to “an” or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn’t write? Something, perhaps, you don’t agree with? Convince us.

A tidbit from Barbara Ellen in The Observer:

French letters? Non merci

French novelist Patrick Poivre D’Arvor is being sued by his ex-lover, Agathe Borne, for allegedly publishing her love letters in his novel, Fragments of a Lost Woman. D’Arvor is arguing that it is “self-fiction”. Borne, a former model and would-be writer, is suing for breach of privacy and literary theft over the novel, alleged to be a disguised account of their two-year affair.

Borne argues that D’Arvor only published the billets doux out of revenge when she left him to go back to her husband and children. The letters include such sentiments as: “Your skin and your smell obsess me. I would like to feel your body, your sex, your mouth, your hands, to lose awareness of time. To kiss you, to abandon myself to the limit.” And: “My brain is a box of surprises. But my body exalts in love.” On the one hand, this beats: “Don’t forget the milk and can you record Downton Abbey for me?” On the other, très embarrassant, n’est ce pas?

It’s not the sexuality that’s so mortifying – it’s the lousy, try-hard writing. Perchance this is an occupational hazard of falling for an author – this tendency to go overboard in erotic correspondence, trying to impress your heart’s desire with your turn of phrase. The next thing you know, it’s (allegedly) “fictionalised” in a book and everyone is having a good titter at your bons mots.

The verdict will be announced in the autumn, but one can’t help but feel sorry for Borne – she’s gone from being caught up in a grand passion to being unofficially shortlisted for the Bad Sex award. Is it too late for her to change tack and refuse to admit she wrote any of it?

The French way of love has been under the spotlight recently with the DSK scandal and the discussion of what it means to be a ‘homme a femmes’. On reading the piece, I found myself in sympathy with Ellen’s distaste for Borne’s exuberant declarations. The seem willfully immature, but I suppose that it does occur to me that this coolness might have its origins in la froideur brittanique and a lack of exposure to Baudelaire in my adolescent years?

So, THE FINKLER QUESTION won the Booker prize for the very amusing Howard Jacobson. I will pick up a copy after finishing the good, but distinctly unfunny DEATH OF A MURDERER.

From a recent interview in The Telegraph:

“I think you have to lack confidence, to have some sense of being not quite at home in the world, to even think of being a writer. If you’re David Beckham and you’re handsome, people love you, you can kick a ball around, you’re not going to think ‘I’d like to write a novel’. What for?”

Quite so.

And this on infidelity (rather more forthcoming than the ‘hesitant’ James Salter):

Infidelity is another recurrent theme. Hasn’t that worried his wives?

“They’d be mad not to wonder. I mean I ruined my first marriage. That wasn’t the ruination of my second marriage. My third wife [De Yong] who has read my novels, naturally wondered what kind of man she has. I’m not my heroes, I have not led the life that they have done. But I led sufficiently an unreliable life to cause people pain. I don’t have any desire left to do any of that.”

Not that Howard should be giving himself too big a pat on the back. It’s got to be a little easier to steer clear of temptation at 68 than it was at 38 – unless you’re a character in one of Philip Roth’s late novels.

From Studies in Short Fiction, How Frank O’Connor would begin to think about a short story:

A couple of the selections focus on O’Connor’s method of composing stories. (Steinman is the author of Frank O’Connor at Work, an analysis of O’Connor’s composition habits.) In “Writing a Story-One Man’s Way,” a June 1959 BBC broadcast, O’Connor explains and illustrates his four-line “seed” method.

Before writing a story he would sketch out its essence in a few lines that at times resembled an algebraic formula, as in this one used to write “Michael’s Wife”: “X marries Y abroad. After Y’s death, X returns home to Y’s parents, but does not tell them Y is dead.” Although “the method looks crude,” according to O’Connor, it gave him the “freedom to try out the story in terms of any place or group of people who happen to interest [him] at the moment.”

O’Connor’s method may appear rather abstract and dry (he says his students hated it), so it should be noted that in the same broadcast he recounts how he and his father heard, from a Cork farmer, the story that eventually became “Michael’s Wife.” The farmer’s son had emigrated to America, where he married an Irish girl from the north. Later, returning to Ireland to recuperate from an illness, the young woman stopped to visit her husband’s parents in Cork before going on to her own family in the north–without ever telling them of their son’s death. If the algebraic formula helped O’Connor to design the story, the artistic impulse for it was certainly the farmer’s account and (even more importantly) his concluding question to O’Connor and his father: “Now, why would she do a thing like that to us?” O’Connor’s art is great, not just because it is so well crafted, but because it is rooted in life itself.

From the recent Michel Houellebecq interview in The Paris Review. Interesting and disillusioned, as one would expect.

INTERVIEWER
What about marriage?

HOUELLEBECQ
I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

INTERVIEWER
So marriage is just a reaction to . . .

HOUELLEBECQ
To a largely solitary life.

There was a line I really liked in a novel by Coetzee. One of the characters suspects that the only thing that really interests his lesbian daughter in life is prickly-pear jam. Lesbianism is a pretext. She and her partner don’t have sex anymore, they dedicate themselves to decoration and cooking.

Maybe there’s some potential truth there about women who, in the end, have always been more interested in jam and curtains.

INTERVIEWER

And men? What do you think interests them?

HOUELLEBECQ

Little asses. I like Coetzee. He says things brutally, too.

What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality?

HOUELLEBECQ
There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.

INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?

HOUELLEBECQ
“Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” For me the sentence would be “Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.”

Interesting conversation between Krauss and Oz in Jerusalem. They discuss Israel, each other’s work and, interestingly, the process of writing.

Having just finished THE HISTORY OF LOVE, it’s interesting to their discussion of the book. Amos Oz is very warm in his praise and in particular commends Nicole Krauss on her ear for dialogue. He says that he hears the Yiddish beneath the English of the novels joint protagonist, Leo Gursky. Nicole Krauss talks about her idiosyncratic use of the phrase ‘And yet.’ – something that can grate as it’s used so much.

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Charles Dickens by Antoine Claudet, 1852

As a recent reader of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, it was good to have some articulation of why I enjoyed it as much as I did:

From Jon Michael Varese, writing the Guardian books blog:

“We need to read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”

There it was, like a perfectly formed pearl shucked from the dirty shell of my over-zealous efforts – an explanation so simple and beautiful that only a 15-year-old could have written it. I could add all of the decoration to the argument with my years of education – the pantheon of rich characters mirroring every personality type; the “universal themes” laid out in such meticulous and timeless detail; the dramas and the melodramas by which we recognise our own place in the Dickensian theatre – but the kernel of what I truly wanted to say had come from someone else. As is often the case in Dickens, the moment of realisation for the main character here was induced by the forthrightness of another party.

And who was I, that I needed to be told why I was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, rewritten for another time and place, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings and human interaction.

There are still two or three Dickens novels that I haven’t actually read; but when the time is right I’ll pick them up and read them. I already know who it is I’ll meet in those novels – the Mr Micawbers, the Mrs Jellybys, the Ebenezer Scrooges, the Amy Dorrits. They are, like all of us, cut from the same cloth, and at the same time as individual as their unforgettable aptronyms suggest. They are the assurances that Dickens, whether I am reading him or not, is shining a light on who I am during the best and worst of times.

Interesting enough shoptalk with the former barrister:
Mark Sarvas interviews Joseph O’Neill (via Nigel Beale).

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Found this from GK Chesterton after searching for essays on Great Expectations (of which, more to follow).

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses,
by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the
retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopaedias, but some
condition to which the human spirit can come.

from Chesterton’s intrdoduction to The Old Curiousity Shop

This has some resonance with what Coetzee had to say about literature and its capacity to offer relief for the extreme soul. See earlier post.

Interesting paean to Amy Hempel and the minimalist approach to writing in The LA Times.

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