Sunday's the best day to read

A colleague said once that she couldn't read on a bus that was only going to be traveling for twenty minutes; she needed more time.  Our weekends are now as busy as our weekdays, but, if you get up early enough, you can have time for reading.  I am reading Turgenev's "First Love" before I sleep and it is luminous.  Unlike Alcott, it is filled with light.  I guess that's the thing about Prose's list: it includes all of life, children's books too.  Which I usually like.  Prose wrote a book for children that I like, for example.  What are you reading?

Globe and Mail confirms the futility of writing courses

Russel Smith pointed out that there are fewer books of fiction being read than ever before and at the same time there are more people wanting to write them.  Some of this is snobbery.  I've already quoted Atwood on this and it's a good quote, but there's a feeling amongst those who've been published that there is far too much democratization of art.  If they were forced to say it, they'd say that not everyone can be a literary artist.  I'm sure they're right.  In any case, what must be avoided and the good writing books point this out at the same time as they contradict themselves by offering advice is advice to writers that will impose rules. There are no rules in art, both Gardner and Prose agree.  Learn from the great works of literary art, especially those outside of one's genre.  What are you reading?

Little Women

I like Alcott's book a little better now.  There's no Ishmael and no Captain Ahab, but the characters want things.  They are adorable and they make me happy.  No quote of the day.  What are you reading?

Tuesday February 23, 2010

I'm reading Little Women on the subway.  At least it wasn't as bad as reading Flannery O'Connor and having a Black man sit down beside me only to look over at a page of N-words that he managed to misunderstand entirely.  He must have thought that I was actually saying the N-words on that page because he started screaming at me and calling me a racist.  But reading Little Women, especially the illustrated copy, is worse because it's for five year olds.  I mean I can't believe Prose recommended it.  I trust her and so I keep reading it, but it does feel like a book for girls or, at best, for women.  It reminded me of Brenda Ueland's book "If you want to write."  The writing that she quotes is like Louisa May Alcott's.  That's the writing that she praises.  Imagine a list that includes Samuel Beckett and Louisa May Alcott!  So I'm lost to even find anything that I might not know about writing that Alcott knows.  Quote of the day: "After various lesser mishaps, Meg was finished at last, and by the united exertions of the family Jo's hair was got up, and her dress on."  Don't get me wrong, I love children's books.

Gogol's Dead Souls

If there's any doubt that the greatest teachers of writing are dead, read Gogol and see how wrong you are.  Especially remarkable is this passage: "Happy is the writer who omits these dull and repulsive characters that disturb one by being so painfully real...The delicious mist of the incense he burns dims human eyes; the miracle of his flattery masks all the sorrows of life and depicts only the goodness of man...He is called a great universal poet, soaring high above all other geniuses of the world even as an eagle soars above other high flying creatures.  The mere sound of his name sounds a thrill through ardent young hearts; all eyes greet him with radiance and responsive tears...
      But a different lot and another fate awaits the writer who has dared to evoke all such things that are constantly before one's eyes...the shocking morass of trifles that has tied up our lives, and the essence of cold, crumbling, humdrum characters with whom our earthly way, now bitter, now dull, fairly swarms....Not for him will be the applause, no grateful tears will he see...not to him will a girl of sixteen come flying, her head all awhirl with heroic fervor.  Not for him will be that sweet enchantment when a poet hears nothing but the harmonies he has engendered himself; and finally, he will not escape the judgement of his time, the judgement of hypocritical and unfeeling contemporaries who will accuse the creatures his mind has bred of being base and worthless, will allow a contemptible nook for him in the gallery of those authors who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the morals of his own characters, and will deny him everything, heart, soul, and the divine flame of talent."

Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor

Reading diary pages 496 to 540.  She's very good.  But I've spent so much being politically correct that it's hard to read.  Prose says that art is a house with many rooms.  She hates the habit of colleges that insist on making students critics of the writers themselves and then able to dismiss their work.  In this recommend list, it is the work itself that is important.  She spends almost no time talking about how bad a man was and how that is obvious in his writing.  Von Kleist is on the list, and she does say that he killed his girl friend and then himself, but it didn't keep him off the list.  When we condemned writers because they were racist or sexist, we felt so superior to their art when we were in university.  We had no right.  Quote of the day: "A visionary light settled in her eyes.  She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.  There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs."  

Escapes by Joy Williams

I want to learn from all the books on this list. I had a feeling that I read it as a teenager or maybe only one story. I hate the book, but I remember, still, a year after I've read it, the story about a drunk woman told by her young daughter. Maybe the stories are simply too raw.

Some Hope: A Triology by Edward St. Aubyn

It's hard to say why I loved this book so much. I recommend it highly. It takes the reader right to hell, but I could never turn away. I didn't want to turn away. There's not a false note in it and there are monsters galore. This is where I most appreciated Prose's comments about the pressure that young writers are under (I refer not to St. Aubyn) to write characters who one can identify with from editors. That is the way to sell in writing Hollywood and, as publishing becomes more like Hollywood, the same pressure is put on novelists. What you can't help admitting about the vast majority of these books is that they are filled misfits, syncophants and sociopaths. I am interested in them. As Prose said, that's the only thing that's necessary.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Saturday, February 20th, 2010. I read pages 448 to 492. Perhaps my colleague is right and O'Connor is far too depressing, especially for February. Today's story was very dark. "The Lame Shall Enter First" is a devastating view of human beings at least the one in this story. I don't have the guts to be so powerful in my vision. I'm reminded of Margaret Atwood's comment about the democratization of writing classes. "Everyone," she wrote, "can dig a hole, but not everyone can be a gravedigger." In any case, I'm grateful and fortified by the courage it must have taken her to write the story. Quote of the day: "The question and the sight of Sheppard seemed to throw the boy into a fury. "To show up that big tin Jesus!" he hissed and kicked his leg out at Sheppard. "He thinks he's God. I'd rather be in the reformatory than in his house, I'd rather be in the pen! The Devil has him in his power. He don't know his left hand from his right, he don't have as much sense as his crazy kid!" He paused and then swept on to his fantastic conclusion. "He made suggestions to me!"

Alice Munro's "Selected Stories"

This is a great book. I'm not a fan- or wasn't- of Munro, but this collection changed my mind. It has to be read to be believed.

Swann's Way

There is no way to do justice to this translation. I've tried to read bad translations of Proust and they were dreck. This is writing that cannot be looked away from. It reminds me of Bowen's "The House in Paris." They are both lush books. Although Carver is more my thing, Proust is even more valuable.

Crime and Punishment

So this is where O'Connor got her inspiration. Or from Gogol. Who can say for sure? There's a long tradition of misfits in fiction, one I never noticed before. I love Dosteyevsky. I love his crazy exaggeration about spiritual matters. But sometimes I have no idea what he's talking about.

Drown

By Junot Diaz. Hard stories to read with, if it's not too cliche, a lot of heart. I'm happy I got to read this book because it makes me agree with Prose that the novel is alive and well. Diaz can write!

The Big Sleep

I love reading this book, but I don't think I got much out of it. Prose put it on the list because the writing is great, but it's not serious fiction. She's not a snob; her list is impossible because she's completely without snobbery. She doesn't look down on hard-shell detectives. She sees art here too. Chandler's strength is dialogue and that's one of my huge weaknesses. I could learn something on a second reading.

Where I'm Calling From and Cathedral

By Raymond Carver. A marvelous writer. His stories are remarkable. I especially love "Vitamins," which scares the living crap out of me and "A Small, Good Thing." "Cathedral" is terrific, more like a prayer than any short story I've read, but perhaps I haven't read enough. "Where I'm Calling From" is a great deal of fun. That's what I'm feeling, reading all these books. There are many remarkable lines in these stories, but reading a master like Carver makes it easy to remember them. When, in "A Small, Good Thing," he describes how the boy is hit by the car, he simply says that the boy stepped off the curb. So simple. There are so many things in that story that are just perfect.

The House in Paris

Did you ever go somewhere so beautiful that you didn't know where to look? That's what Bowen's book is like, way nicer than my own writing, so lush that I don't like it, but I can't help but admire it, and walked up the staris from Bloor to University while reading it.

Revolutionary Road

Do not think that you've gotten Richard Yates' view of post-war America if you've the seen the movie. The book is much darker, darker and less violent. The thing that I remember most from the book is the way that he is drawn into the company and that his life slips away.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

February 19th, 2010 read pages 388 to 448. I feel like I'm in the hands of a great master and I have to remember to go slowly despite the fact that I'm on the TTC and interrupted every minute by the voice announcing subway stops for the blind. Today, I have the double voice, announcing every stop twice. I want to be only with Flannery. I love the story that Prose told about O'Connor and how she went to Lourdes to ask God for help with her multiple sclerosis, but ended up praying that her novel would go well. Like most of the books on Prose's list, O'Connor's is jaw-dropping. But how is it jaw-dropping? The subjects she chooses, the words she uses and what she notices. All of her stories are about redemption. Redemption for misfits in the U.S. South. Otherwise it would be boring, if the people were already whole. O'Connor's story today was "The Comforts of Home." Talk about odd! You'll have to read it to have your mind blown. Art has many rooms, says Prose. Sentence of the day is: "They [azaleas] seemed to wash in tides of color across the lawns until they surged against the white house-fronts, crests of pink and crimson, crests of white and a mysterious shade that was not yet lavender, wild crests of yellow-red."

To not get distracted

Stephen King says writing a story is like being married. When you're writing a story and you think of another idea, you can't run off chasing it; you have to stick with the idea that you have. I heard that the other day. Writers and company is a radio station that I listen to a lot. She had an interview with Philip Roth a couple of months back and he said if he had it to do all over again, he would not be a writer. Because you have to come up with the ideas yourself and no one else can do it. That makes it hard. The Writer's Block that I got for my birthday last time said that some writers have taken to writing only one paragraph per page in order to give it breathing room.

When to write

Stuart McLean says that if you think all the effort that goes into writing is a waste of time, you're probably right. But if you think it might be fun, what you should do is accept a writing assignment with a deadline. Otherwise, you'll just put it off forever. Robertson Davies thought that writers should have jobs. I imagine he thought this because your workplace can provide stories, but also because if you want something done, you should give it to a busy person. I find that I can write more stories when I have an occupation. I take the subway to work and that's my time to read. If I'm up early enough, I can write longhand in the morning. W.P. Kinsella got up early in the morning before he went to work to write. He says that what you need to become a successful writer is luck. There are more writers (or more would-be writers) than there are readers. Dostoyevsky wrote in the middle of the night, drinking tea. Proust wrote in bed and so did Truman Capote. Some writers spend eight hours a day at it. Which I can't imagine because if the characters don't come, you're alone with the box scores as one author claimed to be.

Advice if you're a young writer

I'm not the world's greatest writing teacher, but there's a few things I know. I actually never heard Francine Prose weigh in on whether it was a good idea to be writing what you know as the old saw goes. Edward Gibbon knew a lot about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but only because he spent all of his time studying it; he didn't know it first hand. His book appears on the list because there is no exclusion of the writers are not fiction writers. Her book is not aimed at fiction writers- as Gardner's were- but at any writers who want to learn from those who write beautifully. Show don't tell is another old saw. When Prose writes about an Alice Munro story, she shows that following the maxim would have made the story much worse. Clearly, she doesn't believe in its universality.

Better to move?

Prose says that there's no way to know if you're really going to make it as a writer. Of course she's sensible enough to say that you need to have talent and that those who are going to be writers will become writers without her classes. Which she does not teach anymore. A friend of mine who was also at the Brown/ Prose interview said that she would love to take a class with Prose in careful reading. I'm not sure. I admit that I admire Prose's courage for not following the crowd of post-structuralists who would condemn a book because its author is a bad man. Von Kleist killed his girl friend and then himself. Patricia Highsmith is an author Prose spent a summer reading and not one word did Prose say about the fact that Highsmith was a male chauvinist and an anti-Semite. I only read that in the Globe and Mail yesterday. I'm not sure I would like to take a class with Prose. After all, her book directs the reader to 50,000 pages of writing. So far, and this is only with forty-seven books read, it's taken me a year and a half. I've read other books and worked too, of course.

Books that have taught me courage

Prose writes about reading for courage. She dismisses the idea that books have to have characters that the reader can identify with. She blames the fact that book publishing is becoming more like Hollywood. She says what's important is that we are interested in the characters. Edward St. Aubyn's book Some Hope: A Triology is jaw-dropping. A lot of the books that she recommends have this effect on me. Some Hope is about monsters in hell, but it is not a horror book filled with stupidity and obvious props. I see monsters when I look at the world. But there are no un-exaggerated monsters on the best seller lists. A good example of how Hollywood has taken a good book and made it into a movie with obvious monsters is the movie they made of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. The book was turned into a terrible movie. I think that they made it because of the Mad Men TV show and it's also set in the 1950's. They did something that I found hard to believe: they made a more violent movie that is also less dark than Yates' book. Which is a devastating book.) Almost none of the books there took any courage to write, I imagine. All the guts have been taken out of the books so that everyone can go to sleep. Without being misanthropic, what do I see? What must be said?Margaret Atwood said that literature is a little shock for the future.

As I plow through this list of books, a woman at work says to me: "I can't read Flannery O'Connor; she's too depressing." But the alternative is much worse and that's to never have literary art touch your life because you want only happy, upbeat characters or one-dimensional monsters.

Making it in Canada as a writer

How does one become a writer in Canada without attending writing workshops? Surely writing workshops, especially ones held in the summer for teachers and others who have the time to spare, are the place to be to rub elbows with the almost-famous. Men and women who have published books that they can point to and over which they can speak knowingly. Without doubt, whatever advice they give the budding writer won't work. I had a writing teacher tell me that we must write our stories in first person because it's the easiest. Although, she was honest enough to admit, when she first started, she couldn't do it. It's this kind of advice that makes the work that comes from writing workshops seem "workshoppy" as Gardner put it; too much the same. Besides, thanks to the authors that Francine Prose has alerted me to, I know this advice is not helpful to a new writer. Bright Lights, Big City is a first novel and is written with great skill in second person. You are drawn into the story without being turned off it. So, in my work shop, everyone wrote dutifully in first person no matter how wrong that was for them or for the novel/ story. It has become something of a cliche in writing books (both Prose and Gardner say it) that there are no rules in art. Unfortunately, there are rules in writing workshops where there are paths to writing terrible books without imagination and with far too much input from the committee of the class.

So how does one become published in Canada? I would recommend, because they have been so kind, The Fiddlehead. They say that they reject 96% of the stories that they receive and no doubt that is true. But the way they reject them. Let's just say they let you down easy. I also sent a story to the CBC Literary Awards where they judge the stories blindly. Such principled behaviour on the part of CBC is laudable. It gives new-comers to writing a chance. Of course, I would not have to be told that a story is by Margaret Atwood to know that it's undoubtedly by her. The same goes for stories by a dozen other writers I know well enough to recognize by their writing alone. I'm sure the judges are at least as well-read as I am.

Kafka, Steiner, Prose

There are one hundred and seventeen books on the list. A lot of them are quite long and so I have a tendency, especially in February, to knock off books around two hundred pages to keep my spirits up. Of course, no one says I have to read this list. The reason I'm doing it is because it finally answers the question that I've had since I read John Gardner's books on writing where he said that no serious writer (he was a serious writer) would ever read anything but serious fiction, except to help a friend. So off I went to dutifully read the Russians and great American and Canadians. But now I want to improve my own writing. Without taking a class. I'm encouraged by Prose's book, Blue Angel, where writing classes are sent up. In Reading Like A Writer, she says that Kafka, had writing classes existed in his time and place, would have said that they didn't buy that a man could be transformed into a bug. Writing classes aren't helpful anymore because they're too democratic and too vicious. Kafka would not be allowed to be the genius that he is. As George Steiner wrote, he can't wrap his head around the fact that Kafka worked in an insurance office in the daytime and wrote at night. Prose makes the point that Kafka learned to write sentences by reading Von Kleist. Thank God he didn't go take a course in novel writing.

Francine Prose's books to be read immediately

Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. M. Kuwata and Tashaki Kojima (translators), Rashomon and Other Stories

Alcott, Louise May, Little Women

Anonymous. Dorothy L. Sayers (translator), The Song of Roland

Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice

Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility

Babel, Isaac. Walter Morrison (translator), The Collected Stories

Baldwin, James, Vintage Baldwin

Balzac, Honore de. Kathleen Raine (translator), Cousin Bette

Barthelme, Donald, Sixty Stories

Brodkey, Harold, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

Baxter, Charles, Believers: A Novella and Stories

Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

Bowen, Elizabeth, The House in Paris

Bowles, Jane, Two Serious Ladies

Bowles, Paul, Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings

Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights

Calvino, Italo, Cosmicomics

Carver, Raymond, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories

Carver, Raymond, Cathedral

Cervantes, Miguel De. Tobias Smollett (translator), Don Quixote

Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep

Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever

Chekhov, Anton. Constance Garnett (translator), A Life in Letters

Chekhov, Anton. Constance Garnett (translator), Tales of Anton Chekhov: Volumes 1-13

Diaz, Junot, Drown

Dickens, Charles, Bleak House

Dickens, Charles, Dombey and Son

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Constance Garnett (translator), Crime and Punishment

Dybek, Stuart, I Sailed With Magellan

Eisenberg, Deborah, The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg

Eliot, George, Middlemarch

Elkin, Stanley, Searches and Seizures

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Tender is the Night

Flaubert, Gustave. Geoffrey Wall (translator), Madame Bovary

Flaubert, Gustave. Robert Baldick (translator), A Sentimental Education

Fox, Paula. Jonathan Franzen (introduction), Desperate Characters

Franzen, Jonathan, The Corrections

Gallant, Mavis, Paris Stories

Gaddis, William, The Recognitions

Gates, David, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories

Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Gogol, Nikolai. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (translators), Dead Souls: A Novel

Green, Henry, Doting

Green, Henry, Loving

Hartley, L.P., The Go-Between

Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast

Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises

Herbert, Zbigniew. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott (translator), Selected Poems

James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady

James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw

Jarrell, Randall, Pictures from an Institution

Johnson, Denis, Angels

Johnson, Denis, Jesus' Son

Johnson, Diane, Le Divorce

Johnson, Diane, Persian Nights

Johnson, Samuel, The Life of Savage

Joyce, James, Dubliners

Kafka, Franz. Malcolm Pasley (translator), The Judgement and In the Penal Colony and Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Kafka, Franz. Willa and Edmund Muir (translators), The Trial

Le Carre, John, A Perfect Spy

Mandelstam, Nadezdha, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir

Mansfield, Katherine, Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Gregory Rabassa (translator), One Hundred Years of Solitude

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Gregory Rabassa (translator), The Autumn of the Patriarch

McInerney, Jay, Bright Lights, Big City

Melville, Herman, Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno

Melville, Herman, Moby Dick

Milton, John, Paradise Lost

Munro, Alice, Selected Stories

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Russian Literature

Nabakov, Vladimir, Lolita

O'Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried

O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

O'Connor, Flannery, Collected Stories

O'Connor, Flannery, Wise Blood

Packer, ZZ, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Paustovsky, Konstantin. Joseph Barnes (translator), Years of Hope: The Story of a Life

Price, Richard, Freedomland

Proust, Marcel. Lydia Davis (translator), Swann's Way

Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow

Richardson, Samuel, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded

Roth, Philip, American Pastoral

Roth, Philip, Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962

Rulfo, Juan. Margaret Sayers Peden (translator), Pedro Paramo

Salinger, J.D., Franny and Zooey

Shakespeare, William, King Lear

Shteyngart, Gary, The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Sophocles. Sir George Young (translator), Oedipus Rex

Spenser, Scott, A Ship Made of Paper

St. Aubyn, Edward, Mother's Milk

St. Aubyn, Edward, Some Hope: A Triology

Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children

Steegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait

Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Stendhal. Roger Gard (translator), The Red and The Black

Stout, Rex, Plot It Yourself

Strunk, William and E.B. White. Maria Kalman (illustrator), The Elements of Style, Illustrated

Taylor, Peter, A Summons to Memphis

Tolstaya, Tatyana, Sleepwalkers in a Fog

Tolstoy, Leo. Constance Garnett (translator), Anna Karenina

Tolstoy, Leo. Aylmer Maude (translator), The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

Tolstoy, Leo. David McDuff (translator), The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

Tolstoy, Leo. Rosemary Edmonds (translator), Resurrection

Tolstoy, Leo. Constance Garnett (translator), War and Peace

Trevor, William, The Children of Dynmouth

Trevor, William, The Collected Stories

Trevor, William, Fools of Fortune

Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich. Isaiah Berlin (translator), First Love

Von Kleist, Heinrich. Martin Greenberg (translator) and Thomas Mann (preface), The Marquise of O--- and Other Stories

West, Rebecca, The Birds Fall Down

West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia

Williams, Joy, Escapes

Woods, James, Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

Woolf, Virginia, On Being Ill

Yates, Richard, Revolutionary Road

Meeting Prose in Toronto

I remember when Ian Brown interviewed Prose when she was in Toronto and I heard that someone else who was there say that Brown was terrible and Prose is a genius. When I went to ask some question, in the line of people who were waiting to have books signed, she was gracious. I wonder if she has any other fans and why I didn't tell her that I was reading her list of books to be read immediately and that it was an unbelievable challenge. One of the great things about the list of books is that there are so many modern writers. The novel, she declares, is an art form that's going to carry on because it's the only one that you can take on the bus. But also because, she neglects to say, because her list includes not just dead authors. ZZ Packer, Junot Diaz, Stuart Dybek, David Gates, Denis Johnson, and others are all still in their prime. Putting them on a list was brilliant. But reading them is even better. Because Reading like a writer prepares the reader for how to read slowly, the books jump to the top of mind when asked to name some of the greatest books you've read.