See this short piece from Andrew Sullivan. States where people (and laws) exhibit the harshest stances regarding gay marriage and other "values" issues are the biggest consumers of porn. And Utah is the biggest consumer of online porn in the US.
2.27.2009
2.25.2009
Great little piece by Maud Newton
in Granta online about her father. It's extremely short, but a tour de force. Look how much story and reflection she crams into that small space.
I Swear
sometimes the New York Times goes out of its way to stoke the anxieties of its most reliable demographics. It gets the linkies, I'm sure.
2.23.2009
Washington Post Book World, we hardly knew ye
Another supposed nail in contemporary literature's coffin gets hammered down firmly.
Maybe I'm stubbornly in denial, but the slow demise of glossy paper book-review-magazines like the Washington Post Book World is just part (a small, small part) of the much larger and admittedly painful and nostalgia-inducing technological re-configuration of media currently underway, which is itself a small part of the staggering transformation of the global economy. In ten years it might well seem incredible that newspapers were ever printed on real paper and delivered to houses using vehicles that burned fossil fuels. I don't think the current technological clusterfuck extends to the book itself, though, because the book is already a perfect technology. Technology exists to make things better, faster, easier. There's nothing to improve about the book. It's done. It's there. And it was already there before your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born.
Many are loudly fretting about the future of reading and writing. Yet it seems to me that people are reading (online news, blogs) and writing (email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, chats) more than ever. I mean, 40-50 years ago, during this alleged Golden Age, even the men who went to college couldn't type -- they actually had secretaries to input whatever they muttered around fragrant pipe stems as they ogled the secretaries. My grandfather couldn't type. Sure, he had beautiful handwriting, and I treasure his letters -- but there aren't very many of them, and in truth, he was not a great writer. He sure didn't sit around writing constant messages to various people and departments all day long like we all do now.
I don't think books are going to go under, but they will probably become more divorced from other media -- movies, TV, music, and the Web are taking off together on a rocket ship to God knows where, and yes, tossing out important-looking ballast, but the book is standing alongside us waving with the same slightly unsettled look on its face that we have. It's just a fact that people don't want to read long stretches of text on a computer (now whether they'll keep wanting to at all -- I grant you, that's a deeper, more horrifying question). Books, which have survived every other technological advance in the past 600 years, will I believe undergo a strong, enduring revival as chic and retro cool -- a no-batteries-or-overnight-charging-or-wifi-hotspot-required holiday of comforting authenticity away from the ever-enlarging infotainment electro-glut convergence. The book is well entrenched and loved. It isn't going anywhere or likely to change one iota, because there aren't any problems with it to solve.
It's the passing of an era. I don't think I ever read the Washington Post Book World, not even once. It's sad that bookish, intelligent people will lose those jobs, but I think they will find other jobs, hopefully with outfits that aren't trapped in suddenly outdated economic models. If I want to research what books to read, I talk to people whose opinions I respect and/or go online where there are scads of book reviewers -- not to one specific printed newspaper insert -- and since December I do it on my damned phone. Doesn't even the whole idea of newspapers themselves already seem kind of quaint and 50s-ish -- never mind what kinds of insert sections they had/have? I'm sure people mourned the passing of the mimeograph, and the telegraph, and hand-set typography, and even all those beautiful handwritten works when the printing press came along. Then they got over it.
Books are not part of this. They are different. Call it a hunch (or denial).
Maybe I'm stubbornly in denial, but the slow demise of glossy paper book-review-magazines like the Washington Post Book World is just part (a small, small part) of the much larger and admittedly painful and nostalgia-inducing technological re-configuration of media currently underway, which is itself a small part of the staggering transformation of the global economy. In ten years it might well seem incredible that newspapers were ever printed on real paper and delivered to houses using vehicles that burned fossil fuels. I don't think the current technological clusterfuck extends to the book itself, though, because the book is already a perfect technology. Technology exists to make things better, faster, easier. There's nothing to improve about the book. It's done. It's there. And it was already there before your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born.
Many are loudly fretting about the future of reading and writing. Yet it seems to me that people are reading (online news, blogs) and writing (email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, chats) more than ever. I mean, 40-50 years ago, during this alleged Golden Age, even the men who went to college couldn't type -- they actually had secretaries to input whatever they muttered around fragrant pipe stems as they ogled the secretaries. My grandfather couldn't type. Sure, he had beautiful handwriting, and I treasure his letters -- but there aren't very many of them, and in truth, he was not a great writer. He sure didn't sit around writing constant messages to various people and departments all day long like we all do now.
I don't think books are going to go under, but they will probably become more divorced from other media -- movies, TV, music, and the Web are taking off together on a rocket ship to God knows where, and yes, tossing out important-looking ballast, but the book is standing alongside us waving with the same slightly unsettled look on its face that we have. It's just a fact that people don't want to read long stretches of text on a computer (now whether they'll keep wanting to at all -- I grant you, that's a deeper, more horrifying question). Books, which have survived every other technological advance in the past 600 years, will I believe undergo a strong, enduring revival as chic and retro cool -- a no-batteries-or-overnight-charging-or-wifi-hotspot-required holiday of comforting authenticity away from the ever-enlarging infotainment electro-glut convergence. The book is well entrenched and loved. It isn't going anywhere or likely to change one iota, because there aren't any problems with it to solve.
It's the passing of an era. I don't think I ever read the Washington Post Book World, not even once. It's sad that bookish, intelligent people will lose those jobs, but I think they will find other jobs, hopefully with outfits that aren't trapped in suddenly outdated economic models. If I want to research what books to read, I talk to people whose opinions I respect and/or go online where there are scads of book reviewers -- not to one specific printed newspaper insert -- and since December I do it on my damned phone. Doesn't even the whole idea of newspapers themselves already seem kind of quaint and 50s-ish -- never mind what kinds of insert sections they had/have? I'm sure people mourned the passing of the mimeograph, and the telegraph, and hand-set typography, and even all those beautiful handwritten works when the printing press came along. Then they got over it.
Books are not part of this. They are different. Call it a hunch (or denial).
2.20.2009
More Found Songs
So, I finally got a chance to dig around the garage sales of Rhode Island again and came up with some more interesting (if disturbing) finds.The first is by the Right Reverend Job Smit from Reat Lord Od Hates the Ays, a vinyl record put out by Od's Oing to Et You Records, which I think is the reverend's church in Mississippi. From the liner notes, it appears that Rev. Smit built his entire ministry out of a bizarre homophobia that was so virulent that he actually stopped using the letter "g" at all, since that was the first letter in "gay" (according to a recent memoir, the Crips and the Bloods do this same kind of thing with "c" and "b"). I did a little Internet sleuthing, and apparently this refusal to use "g" led to a huge misunderstanding regarding the reverend's views, and that his music actually became something of a hit in the gay underground music scene, since people thought he was singing about worshipping Lord Odd and that men were loving Earls and Als. In fact, he was invited to play a National Coming Out Party in San Francisco in the late 1970s. When he showed up and realized what was going on, he had a heart attack, leading to his demise three days later. His church and congregation, no longer held together by the force of his personality, soon disbanded. Here's a sample:
The next thing I found was on a cassette tape, homemade copy, really beaten and smelling of dog and whiskey. All that was written on it was the title. Possibly in blood. Whoever these demon children were, they seemed to lead their father into linking Joy Division's nihilistic song "Digital" with child-rearing. I pray for this poor lost soul:
So, I'll keep looking around and see what I can dig up.
2.17.2009
Paula Morris interview
At long last! Pour a cup of tea, grab a blanket, and cuddle up to the warm glow of your screen. The incomparable, the illustrious, the mischievous, the droll, the sparkling Paula Morris -- New Zealand/Orleans novelist, ex-record company maven, English professor, intermittent radio personality who keeps the censor's finger near the red button, widely bookmarked blogger, wearer-of-track-suit-bottoms, intrepid international woman of intrigue, and now short-story-collection-haver (Forbidden Cities, Penguin NZ, which **UPDATE** has been shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize) -- sat down at a slightly seedy rest stop bench along the information superhighwebs for a chat:
The stories take place all over the world: New Orleans, Shanghai, London, New Zealand, Hungary, New York. You've obviously been a lot of places and have in fact lived in a lot of places. How has travel shaped your writing? Do you decide locale first and then research, or do you sort of soak up the vibe and let the stories come out of the places?
I’m restless, as you know, and find myself tremendously energized by visiting or moving to new places – especially cities. I used to harbor naïve ideas about moving somewhere serene and semi-pastoral to write in peace. Two years in Iowa City helped me come to my senses.
Going to Shanghai for the first time was thrilling. I loved the overwhelming, exhausting confusion of it. The first time I was there to do research for Hibiscus Coast; on the second visit, at the Shanghai Literary Festival, a woman in the audience told me I should look into the other side of things – that is, the ‘wronged wife’ side. I started thinking about it then, and took lots of pictures in the Temple of the City God, because I thought that might be a useful setting. Two years later I wrote the story.
Place is often a starting point for me in fiction, as you deduce. But aside from that first trip to Shanghai, I’m usually traveling on business or for a vacation, not with a specific research-a-story goal. There are a number of places I’ve been that I’ve never written about, apart from on my blog – like Paris, say. And considering I lived in England for eight years, very little of my work is set there. That will change very soon: the novel I’m working on now is largely set there, albeit in the nineteenth-century, and recently I’ve developed an urge to go back to Manchester – where I lived in the summer of 1989 – and revisit some ideas I had back then for a story.
You know, I’ve also set things in places I’ve never been at all. Some of the Shanghai sections in Hibiscus Coast were written before I went there, and they didn’t change. Recently I ghostwrote a novel set in a particular European town, using lots of real-life locations. I haven’t been to this place, and relied largely on my two close friends, the Internet, and the Imagination.
Another aspect of setting, time, also interests me a great deal. I need to know exactly when a story is taking place, even if that’s not really an issue for the reader. So, for example, “Like a Mexican” is set largely in 2003, because it’s about the end of things – including a certain era in the record business, as well as certain relationships. Also, El Teddy’s, one of the story’s key settings, closed early in 2004. “The Party” needed to take place exactly a year after Katrina; “Mon Desir” needed to take place in early 1976 because, for the purposes of the story, Jaws had to be a relatively new paperback. Messing around with all this explains why it took ten years to get a collection together.
My research is never diligent, I’m afraid. It’s very fragmentary and impressionistic, and I lean a lot on photographs and random scribblings.
The title Forbidden Cities comes from the last story, "Chain Bridge," in which Anna, a New Yorker, visits a friend in Budapest. She recalls cities she had visited with her former married lover and thinks of them as "forbidden," as in she doesn't ever want to go back there. How does this idea of places becoming saturated by people work in the book as a whole?
It’s all point of view, innit … in life, as in fiction. We have good and bad memories of places based on what happened to us there, who we were with, the time in our lives, the people we were. This is why I’m more ambivalent about New York than London, say, or why I’m fond of Frankfurt but have no desire to go back to Munich any time soon. Traveling around Laura Ingalls Wilder-related sites in Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and Minnesota with my friend Julia (ten years ago) instilled an incredible affection for the Midwest, much to the mystification of my friends in New York.
In a lot of the stories, characters are somewhere new, or somewhere far from home, and/or somewhere they shouldn’t be. Often the reason for this is another person. One of my friends back in the Manchester days told me a story about a guy he knew, also from Lancashire, who met “a bit of a girl” who was Polish. She didn’t speak much English, and he spoke no Polish at all, of course. She went home, and he decided to go after her. But he didn’t have much money, so he was off to catch the bus. (Many buses, I suspect.) He was going to catch the bus from England to Poland. A month earlier, before he met this girl, he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing any such thing.
I don’t know what happened to him – whether he got to Poland, whether things worked out for him and the bit of a girl. He’s probably around forty now. Maybe he’s still in Poland. But even if he’s back in Lancashire, or somewhere else altogether, Poland will mean something to him – love, foolishness, disappointment, adventure, promise, escape, confusion – forever.
Sometimes I also wonder if this guy is still known by his nickname, which is too strange and distinctive to mention here.
This is your fourth book of fiction but your first story collection. How was this one different in terms of writing and publishing?
The stories span more than a decade. The oldest one, “Many Mansions,” precedes my first novel. The first draft of that story was written in 1997, when I was going to classes at the West Side Y in New York. The most recent stories, like “Testing” and “The City God,” were written early last year, pretty much at the eleventh hour. My novels take a while, but not ten years – not yet, anyway. Though the process is similar, perhaps, in a certain way. With Hibiscus Coast, for example, I obsessed over the first ten thousand words for over a year, and wrote the rest at blazing speed.
Playwrights often have opportunities to revise their work, and I like the way stories, pre-collection, offer a similar freedom. Many of the stories have had different versions, different lives. The original version of “The Party” was set in the Hamptons, but I changed the setting to New Zealand for a magazine there. For the collection, I restored it to its original setting, but moved the timeframe to a year after Hurricane Katrina: the main character, Olivia, now has ties to New Orleans and Pass Christian, Mississippi. “Many Mansions” was another story re-written to give it a New Zealand setting and then restored to its original English location. “Bright” was broadcast on Iowa Public Radio as an American story and on Radio New Zealand with a South Pacific setting: that, too, I restored, though I was irritated to see I’d missed a crucial word change in the revision. Alert American readers will notice it, I suspect.
All of the stories were revised and re-written in some way for the collection. Assembling it, and seeing how the stories worked together, was both satisfying and nerve-wracking. In terms of publishing, I was surprised that Penguin was interested in bringing the book out at all. I mentioned it in passing – probably trying to buy myself some time between novels – to Geoff Walker, the editorial director at Penguin New Zealand, and he was keen.
They spent a long time working on the right cover. I knew I wanted a black-and-white photo for this, but it was hard to get one that didn’t read too ‘travel book’ (or too ‘article in Marie Claire about relationships’) The designer is based in Switzerland; I’m in New Orleans; the publisher is in Auckland, New Zealand; the cover photo is of London.
You get pretty deep inside your characters. Where do you get your ideas for characters, and what types of people fascinate you most?
Right now I’m in Chicago, trying to flee the AWP conference, so I could reel off a list of the people who DO NOT fascinate me at all, starting with men who wear corduroy shirts.
I’m nosy and an eavesdropper; I make notes, and make things up; I remember and forget. Last year I read a very annoying interview in the newspaper, and I gave a character in one of the stories that person’s name and nationality.
You are part Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. A lot of "ethnic" writers get pigeon-holed into writing exclusively about their particular group and its struggles. But you seem to have managed to straddle the worlds -- you write about Western cultures and locales as much as or more than you do about the Maori. Is that hard? Is it different when you write about one or the other?
After a workshop (at Iowa) of “Red Christmas,” one classmate earnestly asked: “Where do Maoris live?” He was thinking in terms of “ghetto” or “project” or “reservation,” I guess. It flustered me at the time, though later I realized the answer was “In Iowa City.” That is, Maori live everywhere. We live in poor neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods, and places in between (like the suburb where I grew up, in West Auckland). We live in New Zealand and in other countries all over the world. A large number of us live in Australia, to the irritation of some Australians. Often people don’t realize we’re Maori, because they have certain preconceptions. We’re too pale, perhaps, or we have an English last name. (A note on this: Maori didn’t have last names. My grandmother’s last name, Brown, was selected by her uncle, allegedly because it was the name of an admirable local family. This name was sometimes rendered as Paraone, its invented Maori equivalent.)
I grew up in Auckland. Some of my Maori relatives were farmers, north of the city; some were teachers and lawyers. Two cousins of my father’s generation work for a government department. Two cousins of my generation are doctors. Some Maori people are unemployed; some are in gangs, or in prison. Some are politicians, or accountants, or professors, or dancers. Some are very wealthy rugby players or opera singers. There is no single indigenous experience. In Hibiscus Coast, Emma – who is Maori and Chinese – grew up in relative affluence, and is able to pursue her art studies in London and Shanghai. Her cousin, Ani, comes from a poor and unstable home, and her brothers have been taken into care, though, with help from an aunt, she’s still able to attend university. Derek, her employer, owns a successful café in downtown Auckland. Tai, the guy Ani’s in love with, vandalizes Emma’s apartment and steals a painting by Gauguin. All these characters are Maori.
When Hibiscus Coast came out, someone at my publishing company told me it was not “as Maori” as my first novel [Queen of Beauty]. Maybe because the names weren’t Maori enough, or the characters didn’t speak like the people in Once Were Warriors! In New Zealand, as elsewhere, some people assume Maori can’t be middle-class – or intelligent, or sophisticated, or complex. Or art students, perhaps.
Sticking with the pigeon-holing for a moment: You come from New Zealand, but you recently achieved American citizenship. Do you consider yourself a Kiwi writer, or an American writer, or a "global" writer? Does coming from New Zealand make it hard to find American publishers?
I’m a New Zealand writer. Though if anyone wants to give me the Pulitzer, then I’m American. (I’m as American as Zsa Zsa Gabor, at least.) And yes, US publishers are not lining up to publish books with New Zealand settings. I think they regard New Zealand as unknown and uneventful. It’s not exotic, troubled, dangerous, and/or in the Northern hemisphere. The New Zealand books people tend to know were first encountered as movies, like Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, and Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider. Or there’s a Booker Prize connection, like Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, which won in 1985, or Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, which was a finalist in 2007.
Several of the stories deal with troubled relationships – flawed ones that end painfully. Yet you are married to perhaps the most noble and pleasant gentleman many of us have ever had the pleasure to encounter. How can this be?
I was talking to a book club in Alexandria, LA, about Hibiscus Coast, and they asked me a similar question. “We’ve heard your family is so nice,” they said. “Why is this family so mean?” I like making things up, and flaws are interesting. By the way, I read this question aloud to Tom Moody, and he asked me to repeat the “noble and pleasant gentleman” bit. He nodded, in a sort of indignant and vindicated way. “That’s right,” he said, as though it was about time someone pointed these things out to me.
Your prose style strikes me as coolly spare, and sharply, wonderfully to the point, with a wicked vein of humor running under it all. It creates honest scenes and people with little ornamentation and zero sentimentality. Where did your style come from? Who are some of the writers you admire?
William Trevor I love, maybe a little too much. Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin. Ian McEwan. Evelyn Waugh. I really like Peter Ho Davies, too. The book I could happily re-read every year is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.
In the collection, I think some of my influences are pretty transparent: depending on the story, you can see that I’ve been reading Alice Munro, Ellen Gilchrist, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Katherine Mansfield. You probably can’t see, at all, the influence of other people I like to read, like Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz. And there are some brilliant stories I absolutely love, but can only hope to emulate in the smallest way – I’m thinking of “Heavy Water” by Martin Amis, and Daniel Mason’s “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth.”
You also teach at Tulane. How do you like teaching there, in post-Katrina New Orleans? There must be stories everywhere you look, but also a lot of sorrow and lingering resentment? How has New Orleans changed in the past few years?
New Orleans is almost 300 years old, and has survived numerous floods, fires, and pestilences. It’s a shape-shifter, accustomed to re-forming and re-inventing itself – after the huge influx from Haiti in the early nineteenth century, say, or in the years around the Civil War, when modern-day Mardi Gras was devised. There’s a strong will to recover from the beating we took after Katrina – and here I must give a shout-out to the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose negligence made the great flood an inevitability.
The older parts of the city which didn’t flood (the French Quarter, the Garden District, etc.) look fine, and tourists can come to town and never realize that much of the city is still very messed up. But progress is slow: too many people in officialdom are corrupt or ineffective, not dynamic and visionary enough to oversee the social change we need.
Tulane is a great place, and very resilient. Community service is now required of all incoming students. Next year the Katrina class will graduate, and then there’ll be no undergraduates with a memory of the storm – odd. We received an amazing gift for creative writing after Katrina, and we’ve used it to bring major writers to campus: Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Louise Gluck, and (this year) Joan Didion and Billy Collins. These events are all free and open to the public, and we do a lot of school outreach as well, taking books and information to public high school students and trying to lure them onto campus for readings, lectures, and symposia. I now teach a class on Literary Event Management, which draws on my background in PR and marketing, to make sure we’re promoting all our events and activities throughout the city.
I’ve only written two stories that refer to Katrina. There’s a kind of story profusion here that’s almost too much. Sometimes we need to write things, but not always to publish. Everyone seems to want a publishing deal, to make their claim to survivor status. Some of them, I think, just want to be first, sensing that the publishing moment will soon pass.
People get competitive about how much damage they sustained. (It’s hard not to get drawn into this. When someone makes some breezy “you-were-fine” comment, I can’t help playing the “we had five-and-a-half feet of water!” card. I’m sure everyone was like this after the bombing of Dresden, too.) The YA novel I’ve written (see below) is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, but the mystery driving the story is from 1853, during one of the yellow fever epidemics.
Could you tell us about The Scudder Road Circus and Literary Journal?
Tom Moody’s family live in St Louis. On one of my first trips there, I noticed a highway exit sign for "Natural Bridge" and realized where that literary journal got its name. Immediately I grew envious and conniving, wanting my own literary journal named after a highway sign in St Louis. When I saw "Scudder Road," it seemed the obvious candidate.
But there are too many literary journals, as you know, so I thought a good point of difference would be to run it as a circus as well. TM was appointed animal trainer and commissioned with finding suitable circus acts. He soon lost interest, and has totally neglected this duty. Also, he was demoted to adjunct animal trainer when I remembered he only has a BA.
As a circus and literary journal, Scudder Road is yet to find either content or audience, or indeed publish any work or mount any performances. But I’m sure this is only a temporary state of affairs. It recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, which is quite a landmark for literary journals (and circuses) in these difficult times.
Favorite memories/stories about your time at the Workshop in Iowa City? You also did another writing program, an MA at Victoria University’s the Institute of International Letters in Wellington. How were the programs different?
When I was a student in Victoria in 2001, there were only ten students in the program, and we all met as a group – poets, fiction writers, a playwright – twice a week. Now it’s much larger, with separate classes for poetry, fiction, and screenplays/plays. Still, there’s more of an intimate feeling, perhaps, than at a big program like Iowa. To me, it felt less competitive, as well, perhaps because differences in financial aid/funding are not an issue. Peer criticism was more muted, too, because of the convivial atmosphere of the program, and because of something in the national character, which leans more towards self-deprecating than assertive/outgoing. This has its pros and cons, of course.
I made good friends at Victoria and at Iowa, and I’m really, really glad that I was able to study in both places. At Victoria I wrote Queen of Beauty, my first novel; at Iowa I wrote large parts of Hibiscus Coast and Trendy But Casual, plus a number of the stories that appear in Forbidden Cities.
One of my favorite memories of the Workshop is of Frank and the Only Eight Pages incident. Many of my other memories involve being summoned into Connie’s office, after which a variation on the following would happen:
Connie: Just sit there for a minute – I have to take this call/speak to this person/run out of the office for a while/get Frank to sign something.
Me (hoping I’m not in trouble for anything): OK.
Connie (returning some time later, and looking startled to see me sitting there): So, what do you want?
Me: You said you wanted to see me.
Connie: Well, there’s no time for that now. You’ll have to come back another day.
You worked at Virgin, Polygram, and BMG, and RCA. What was it like working in the record industry?
If I were to write about my record business experiences in London and New York now, it would be an historic novel filled with perplexing archaic references. I left 11 years ago, when people still bought CDs – in record stores. Virgin was taken over by EMI; BMG merged with Sony. When I worked at Polygram (now Universal) Classics, there were three labels: DG, Decca and Philips. Philips is gone; Decca is about to close up shop in London and merge its international office with DG in Hamburg. Things aren’t looking any better in NYC.
It was an incredibly chaotic, pressured, hysterical, interesting, and absurd time in my life. I made good friends at all the places I worked; I went to the Grammys three times, and got to travel a lot. I still love records, though my enthusiasm for attending live events received a near-fatal bashing. (It will never recover, I suspect.)
What's next for Paula Morris?
Too much, as ever. Last year was a big travel year, and there’s more in the near-future – to the UK over spring break, and home to NZ in May for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. My nephew is back in Mexico this semester, so we’re planning to go somewhere with him over Easter.
I’ve just finished guest-editing an issue of Landfall, New Zealand’s oldest literary journal, which comes out in May. Later this year another major editing project, The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, will be published. The reading involved in both these projects was overwhelming – months of work. And then I managed to turn writing the anthology intro into a multi-week nightmare.
In late summer, Scholastic here in the US is bringing out my YA novel, Ruined, a mystery/ghost story set in New Orleans. I hope to have finished the novel based on my short story, “Rangatira,” by then. It’s set in New Zealand and England, hence the research-related trips early this year. This is the nineteenth-century novel I’ve been working on for some time.
In the past four years, I’ve ghostwritten six novels [!!!!??? -- Ed.] and done fixing jobs on two others. I’m trying to cut back on this work so I have more time for sanity. I have a few other irons in the fire, but sometimes the fire feels as though it’s too wild and ferocious, and may overwhelm me at any moment.
The stories take place all over the world: New Orleans, Shanghai, London, New Zealand, Hungary, New York. You've obviously been a lot of places and have in fact lived in a lot of places. How has travel shaped your writing? Do you decide locale first and then research, or do you sort of soak up the vibe and let the stories come out of the places?
I’m restless, as you know, and find myself tremendously energized by visiting or moving to new places – especially cities. I used to harbor naïve ideas about moving somewhere serene and semi-pastoral to write in peace. Two years in Iowa City helped me come to my senses.
Going to Shanghai for the first time was thrilling. I loved the overwhelming, exhausting confusion of it. The first time I was there to do research for Hibiscus Coast; on the second visit, at the Shanghai Literary Festival, a woman in the audience told me I should look into the other side of things – that is, the ‘wronged wife’ side. I started thinking about it then, and took lots of pictures in the Temple of the City God, because I thought that might be a useful setting. Two years later I wrote the story.
Place is often a starting point for me in fiction, as you deduce. But aside from that first trip to Shanghai, I’m usually traveling on business or for a vacation, not with a specific research-a-story goal. There are a number of places I’ve been that I’ve never written about, apart from on my blog – like Paris, say. And considering I lived in England for eight years, very little of my work is set there. That will change very soon: the novel I’m working on now is largely set there, albeit in the nineteenth-century, and recently I’ve developed an urge to go back to Manchester – where I lived in the summer of 1989 – and revisit some ideas I had back then for a story.
You know, I’ve also set things in places I’ve never been at all. Some of the Shanghai sections in Hibiscus Coast were written before I went there, and they didn’t change. Recently I ghostwrote a novel set in a particular European town, using lots of real-life locations. I haven’t been to this place, and relied largely on my two close friends, the Internet, and the Imagination.
Another aspect of setting, time, also interests me a great deal. I need to know exactly when a story is taking place, even if that’s not really an issue for the reader. So, for example, “Like a Mexican” is set largely in 2003, because it’s about the end of things – including a certain era in the record business, as well as certain relationships. Also, El Teddy’s, one of the story’s key settings, closed early in 2004. “The Party” needed to take place exactly a year after Katrina; “Mon Desir” needed to take place in early 1976 because, for the purposes of the story, Jaws had to be a relatively new paperback. Messing around with all this explains why it took ten years to get a collection together.
My research is never diligent, I’m afraid. It’s very fragmentary and impressionistic, and I lean a lot on photographs and random scribblings.
The title Forbidden Cities comes from the last story, "Chain Bridge," in which Anna, a New Yorker, visits a friend in Budapest. She recalls cities she had visited with her former married lover and thinks of them as "forbidden," as in she doesn't ever want to go back there. How does this idea of places becoming saturated by people work in the book as a whole?
It’s all point of view, innit … in life, as in fiction. We have good and bad memories of places based on what happened to us there, who we were with, the time in our lives, the people we were. This is why I’m more ambivalent about New York than London, say, or why I’m fond of Frankfurt but have no desire to go back to Munich any time soon. Traveling around Laura Ingalls Wilder-related sites in Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and Minnesota with my friend Julia (ten years ago) instilled an incredible affection for the Midwest, much to the mystification of my friends in New York.
In a lot of the stories, characters are somewhere new, or somewhere far from home, and/or somewhere they shouldn’t be. Often the reason for this is another person. One of my friends back in the Manchester days told me a story about a guy he knew, also from Lancashire, who met “a bit of a girl” who was Polish. She didn’t speak much English, and he spoke no Polish at all, of course. She went home, and he decided to go after her. But he didn’t have much money, so he was off to catch the bus. (Many buses, I suspect.) He was going to catch the bus from England to Poland. A month earlier, before he met this girl, he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing any such thing.
I don’t know what happened to him – whether he got to Poland, whether things worked out for him and the bit of a girl. He’s probably around forty now. Maybe he’s still in Poland. But even if he’s back in Lancashire, or somewhere else altogether, Poland will mean something to him – love, foolishness, disappointment, adventure, promise, escape, confusion – forever.
Sometimes I also wonder if this guy is still known by his nickname, which is too strange and distinctive to mention here.
This is your fourth book of fiction but your first story collection. How was this one different in terms of writing and publishing?
The stories span more than a decade. The oldest one, “Many Mansions,” precedes my first novel. The first draft of that story was written in 1997, when I was going to classes at the West Side Y in New York. The most recent stories, like “Testing” and “The City God,” were written early last year, pretty much at the eleventh hour. My novels take a while, but not ten years – not yet, anyway. Though the process is similar, perhaps, in a certain way. With Hibiscus Coast, for example, I obsessed over the first ten thousand words for over a year, and wrote the rest at blazing speed.
Playwrights often have opportunities to revise their work, and I like the way stories, pre-collection, offer a similar freedom. Many of the stories have had different versions, different lives. The original version of “The Party” was set in the Hamptons, but I changed the setting to New Zealand for a magazine there. For the collection, I restored it to its original setting, but moved the timeframe to a year after Hurricane Katrina: the main character, Olivia, now has ties to New Orleans and Pass Christian, Mississippi. “Many Mansions” was another story re-written to give it a New Zealand setting and then restored to its original English location. “Bright” was broadcast on Iowa Public Radio as an American story and on Radio New Zealand with a South Pacific setting: that, too, I restored, though I was irritated to see I’d missed a crucial word change in the revision. Alert American readers will notice it, I suspect.
All of the stories were revised and re-written in some way for the collection. Assembling it, and seeing how the stories worked together, was both satisfying and nerve-wracking. In terms of publishing, I was surprised that Penguin was interested in bringing the book out at all. I mentioned it in passing – probably trying to buy myself some time between novels – to Geoff Walker, the editorial director at Penguin New Zealand, and he was keen.
They spent a long time working on the right cover. I knew I wanted a black-and-white photo for this, but it was hard to get one that didn’t read too ‘travel book’ (or too ‘article in Marie Claire about relationships’) The designer is based in Switzerland; I’m in New Orleans; the publisher is in Auckland, New Zealand; the cover photo is of London.
You get pretty deep inside your characters. Where do you get your ideas for characters, and what types of people fascinate you most?
Right now I’m in Chicago, trying to flee the AWP conference, so I could reel off a list of the people who DO NOT fascinate me at all, starting with men who wear corduroy shirts.
I’m nosy and an eavesdropper; I make notes, and make things up; I remember and forget. Last year I read a very annoying interview in the newspaper, and I gave a character in one of the stories that person’s name and nationality.
You are part Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. A lot of "ethnic" writers get pigeon-holed into writing exclusively about their particular group and its struggles. But you seem to have managed to straddle the worlds -- you write about Western cultures and locales as much as or more than you do about the Maori. Is that hard? Is it different when you write about one or the other?
After a workshop (at Iowa) of “Red Christmas,” one classmate earnestly asked: “Where do Maoris live?” He was thinking in terms of “ghetto” or “project” or “reservation,” I guess. It flustered me at the time, though later I realized the answer was “In Iowa City.” That is, Maori live everywhere. We live in poor neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods, and places in between (like the suburb where I grew up, in West Auckland). We live in New Zealand and in other countries all over the world. A large number of us live in Australia, to the irritation of some Australians. Often people don’t realize we’re Maori, because they have certain preconceptions. We’re too pale, perhaps, or we have an English last name. (A note on this: Maori didn’t have last names. My grandmother’s last name, Brown, was selected by her uncle, allegedly because it was the name of an admirable local family. This name was sometimes rendered as Paraone, its invented Maori equivalent.)
I grew up in Auckland. Some of my Maori relatives were farmers, north of the city; some were teachers and lawyers. Two cousins of my father’s generation work for a government department. Two cousins of my generation are doctors. Some Maori people are unemployed; some are in gangs, or in prison. Some are politicians, or accountants, or professors, or dancers. Some are very wealthy rugby players or opera singers. There is no single indigenous experience. In Hibiscus Coast, Emma – who is Maori and Chinese – grew up in relative affluence, and is able to pursue her art studies in London and Shanghai. Her cousin, Ani, comes from a poor and unstable home, and her brothers have been taken into care, though, with help from an aunt, she’s still able to attend university. Derek, her employer, owns a successful café in downtown Auckland. Tai, the guy Ani’s in love with, vandalizes Emma’s apartment and steals a painting by Gauguin. All these characters are Maori.
When Hibiscus Coast came out, someone at my publishing company told me it was not “as Maori” as my first novel [Queen of Beauty]. Maybe because the names weren’t Maori enough, or the characters didn’t speak like the people in Once Were Warriors! In New Zealand, as elsewhere, some people assume Maori can’t be middle-class – or intelligent, or sophisticated, or complex. Or art students, perhaps.
Sticking with the pigeon-holing for a moment: You come from New Zealand, but you recently achieved American citizenship. Do you consider yourself a Kiwi writer, or an American writer, or a "global" writer? Does coming from New Zealand make it hard to find American publishers?
I’m a New Zealand writer. Though if anyone wants to give me the Pulitzer, then I’m American. (I’m as American as Zsa Zsa Gabor, at least.) And yes, US publishers are not lining up to publish books with New Zealand settings. I think they regard New Zealand as unknown and uneventful. It’s not exotic, troubled, dangerous, and/or in the Northern hemisphere. The New Zealand books people tend to know were first encountered as movies, like Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, and Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider. Or there’s a Booker Prize connection, like Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, which won in 1985, or Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, which was a finalist in 2007.
Several of the stories deal with troubled relationships – flawed ones that end painfully. Yet you are married to perhaps the most noble and pleasant gentleman many of us have ever had the pleasure to encounter. How can this be?
I was talking to a book club in Alexandria, LA, about Hibiscus Coast, and they asked me a similar question. “We’ve heard your family is so nice,” they said. “Why is this family so mean?” I like making things up, and flaws are interesting. By the way, I read this question aloud to Tom Moody, and he asked me to repeat the “noble and pleasant gentleman” bit. He nodded, in a sort of indignant and vindicated way. “That’s right,” he said, as though it was about time someone pointed these things out to me.
Your prose style strikes me as coolly spare, and sharply, wonderfully to the point, with a wicked vein of humor running under it all. It creates honest scenes and people with little ornamentation and zero sentimentality. Where did your style come from? Who are some of the writers you admire?
William Trevor I love, maybe a little too much. Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin. Ian McEwan. Evelyn Waugh. I really like Peter Ho Davies, too. The book I could happily re-read every year is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.
In the collection, I think some of my influences are pretty transparent: depending on the story, you can see that I’ve been reading Alice Munro, Ellen Gilchrist, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Katherine Mansfield. You probably can’t see, at all, the influence of other people I like to read, like Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz. And there are some brilliant stories I absolutely love, but can only hope to emulate in the smallest way – I’m thinking of “Heavy Water” by Martin Amis, and Daniel Mason’s “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth.”
You also teach at Tulane. How do you like teaching there, in post-Katrina New Orleans? There must be stories everywhere you look, but also a lot of sorrow and lingering resentment? How has New Orleans changed in the past few years?
New Orleans is almost 300 years old, and has survived numerous floods, fires, and pestilences. It’s a shape-shifter, accustomed to re-forming and re-inventing itself – after the huge influx from Haiti in the early nineteenth century, say, or in the years around the Civil War, when modern-day Mardi Gras was devised. There’s a strong will to recover from the beating we took after Katrina – and here I must give a shout-out to the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose negligence made the great flood an inevitability.
The older parts of the city which didn’t flood (the French Quarter, the Garden District, etc.) look fine, and tourists can come to town and never realize that much of the city is still very messed up. But progress is slow: too many people in officialdom are corrupt or ineffective, not dynamic and visionary enough to oversee the social change we need.
Tulane is a great place, and very resilient. Community service is now required of all incoming students. Next year the Katrina class will graduate, and then there’ll be no undergraduates with a memory of the storm – odd. We received an amazing gift for creative writing after Katrina, and we’ve used it to bring major writers to campus: Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Louise Gluck, and (this year) Joan Didion and Billy Collins. These events are all free and open to the public, and we do a lot of school outreach as well, taking books and information to public high school students and trying to lure them onto campus for readings, lectures, and symposia. I now teach a class on Literary Event Management, which draws on my background in PR and marketing, to make sure we’re promoting all our events and activities throughout the city.
I’ve only written two stories that refer to Katrina. There’s a kind of story profusion here that’s almost too much. Sometimes we need to write things, but not always to publish. Everyone seems to want a publishing deal, to make their claim to survivor status. Some of them, I think, just want to be first, sensing that the publishing moment will soon pass.
People get competitive about how much damage they sustained. (It’s hard not to get drawn into this. When someone makes some breezy “you-were-fine” comment, I can’t help playing the “we had five-and-a-half feet of water!” card. I’m sure everyone was like this after the bombing of Dresden, too.) The YA novel I’ve written (see below) is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, but the mystery driving the story is from 1853, during one of the yellow fever epidemics.
Could you tell us about The Scudder Road Circus and Literary Journal?
Tom Moody’s family live in St Louis. On one of my first trips there, I noticed a highway exit sign for "Natural Bridge" and realized where that literary journal got its name. Immediately I grew envious and conniving, wanting my own literary journal named after a highway sign in St Louis. When I saw "Scudder Road," it seemed the obvious candidate.
But there are too many literary journals, as you know, so I thought a good point of difference would be to run it as a circus as well. TM was appointed animal trainer and commissioned with finding suitable circus acts. He soon lost interest, and has totally neglected this duty. Also, he was demoted to adjunct animal trainer when I remembered he only has a BA.
As a circus and literary journal, Scudder Road is yet to find either content or audience, or indeed publish any work or mount any performances. But I’m sure this is only a temporary state of affairs. It recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, which is quite a landmark for literary journals (and circuses) in these difficult times.
Favorite memories/stories about your time at the Workshop in Iowa City? You also did another writing program, an MA at Victoria University’s the Institute of International Letters in Wellington. How were the programs different?
When I was a student in Victoria in 2001, there were only ten students in the program, and we all met as a group – poets, fiction writers, a playwright – twice a week. Now it’s much larger, with separate classes for poetry, fiction, and screenplays/plays. Still, there’s more of an intimate feeling, perhaps, than at a big program like Iowa. To me, it felt less competitive, as well, perhaps because differences in financial aid/funding are not an issue. Peer criticism was more muted, too, because of the convivial atmosphere of the program, and because of something in the national character, which leans more towards self-deprecating than assertive/outgoing. This has its pros and cons, of course.
I made good friends at Victoria and at Iowa, and I’m really, really glad that I was able to study in both places. At Victoria I wrote Queen of Beauty, my first novel; at Iowa I wrote large parts of Hibiscus Coast and Trendy But Casual, plus a number of the stories that appear in Forbidden Cities.
One of my favorite memories of the Workshop is of Frank and the Only Eight Pages incident. Many of my other memories involve being summoned into Connie’s office, after which a variation on the following would happen:
Connie: Just sit there for a minute – I have to take this call/speak to this person/run out of the office for a while/get Frank to sign something.
Me (hoping I’m not in trouble for anything): OK.
Connie (returning some time later, and looking startled to see me sitting there): So, what do you want?
Me: You said you wanted to see me.
Connie: Well, there’s no time for that now. You’ll have to come back another day.
You worked at Virgin, Polygram, and BMG, and RCA. What was it like working in the record industry?
If I were to write about my record business experiences in London and New York now, it would be an historic novel filled with perplexing archaic references. I left 11 years ago, when people still bought CDs – in record stores. Virgin was taken over by EMI; BMG merged with Sony. When I worked at Polygram (now Universal) Classics, there were three labels: DG, Decca and Philips. Philips is gone; Decca is about to close up shop in London and merge its international office with DG in Hamburg. Things aren’t looking any better in NYC.
It was an incredibly chaotic, pressured, hysterical, interesting, and absurd time in my life. I made good friends at all the places I worked; I went to the Grammys three times, and got to travel a lot. I still love records, though my enthusiasm for attending live events received a near-fatal bashing. (It will never recover, I suspect.)
What's next for Paula Morris?
Too much, as ever. Last year was a big travel year, and there’s more in the near-future – to the UK over spring break, and home to NZ in May for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. My nephew is back in Mexico this semester, so we’re planning to go somewhere with him over Easter.
I’ve just finished guest-editing an issue of Landfall, New Zealand’s oldest literary journal, which comes out in May. Later this year another major editing project, The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, will be published. The reading involved in both these projects was overwhelming – months of work. And then I managed to turn writing the anthology intro into a multi-week nightmare.
In late summer, Scholastic here in the US is bringing out my YA novel, Ruined, a mystery/ghost story set in New Orleans. I hope to have finished the novel based on my short story, “Rangatira,” by then. It’s set in New Zealand and England, hence the research-related trips early this year. This is the nineteenth-century novel I’ve been working on for some time.
In the past four years, I’ve ghostwritten six novels [!!!!??? -- Ed.] and done fixing jobs on two others. I’m trying to cut back on this work so I have more time for sanity. I have a few other irons in the fire, but sometimes the fire feels as though it’s too wild and ferocious, and may overwhelm me at any moment.
We need a new WPA
Why aren't writers included in the stimulus bill? As this NPR report reminds us, during the last Depression da gub-mint used to pay writers to run around the country capturing the "stories of America." So why not now? What, we've run out of them?
Apparently 4 out of the first 10 winners of the National Book Award were connected to the WPA project, which ran from 1935-1939, when conservatives managed to kill it, claiming it was infested with Commies. Hey, at least writers are good at coming up with new ideas -- unlike some automakers I could mention.
Apparently 4 out of the first 10 winners of the National Book Award were connected to the WPA project, which ran from 1935-1939, when conservatives managed to kill it, claiming it was infested with Commies. Hey, at least writers are good at coming up with new ideas -- unlike some automakers I could mention.
2.15.2009
Self-Reliance and all that
I found this interesting, if mostly as an exercise in selective interpretation. More generally, I could see how many of traditional elements of popular storytelling--foremost the always compelling arc of anexceptional and heroic individual triumphing against seemingly insurmountable odds--would, in the grossest sense, affirm a conservative sensibility.
Then again, what makes a good story isn't necessarily always the same as what happens in reality. In reality, seemingly insurmountable odds are often actually insurmountable and the arc of any given individual is alternately circumscribed and enhanced by countless factors, many unseen and difficult to compellingly dramatize and many more having nothing to do with a person's own actions and attitudes. Thinking on this makes me miss "The Wire" terribly--not just because it affirms my politics (which it does) but because it managed to evoke the gears and pistons of reality in a way that many fictions don't even bother trying to do.
Isn't it interesting, then, to think in the broader sense how the stories we tell over and over again become a sort of reality all their own, where our expectations of them are informed not by our experience of life but our experience of how we talk about and represent it.
Then again, what makes a good story isn't necessarily always the same as what happens in reality. In reality, seemingly insurmountable odds are often actually insurmountable and the arc of any given individual is alternately circumscribed and enhanced by countless factors, many unseen and difficult to compellingly dramatize and many more having nothing to do with a person's own actions and attitudes. Thinking on this makes me miss "The Wire" terribly--not just because it affirms my politics (which it does) but because it managed to evoke the gears and pistons of reality in a way that many fictions don't even bother trying to do.
Isn't it interesting, then, to think in the broader sense how the stories we tell over and over again become a sort of reality all their own, where our expectations of them are informed not by our experience of life but our experience of how we talk about and represent it.
2.11.2009
Come to this
Look for me at AWP- I'm probably lighter and hairier than you remember. Or maybe not. Your memory is your own. But I do hope particularly to see you all at this.
2.10.2009
Animal Farm
The creatures outside looked from pig to dog, and from dog to pig, and from pig to dog again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
2.04.2009
2.01.2009
In praise of the long sentence
One of my favorite things is to happen upon a really long sentence in a book. If I like it I always reread it, out loud if alone and sometimes if not, and maybe more than once. It's exciting finding one of those. It's like when someone in a band takes a really long solo, but the band lets it happen because they sense it needs to happen, and often the band seems to get more excited, even laughing with joy while the solo is going on. When a solo is boring, the band usually shows it on their faces and will sternly force the wandering noodler back inside the fence. A good long solo does not get boring -- the musician is not just noodling, but going somewhere with it, and it can be the most thrilling thing in music when it happens.
When I find a good long sentence -- after rereading it aloud and getting excited and folding down the bottom of the page so I know where to find it again -- I wonder why the author chose to do it, whether it was something deliberately done for some effect or whether it just rolled off that way in a moment of fulsome inspiration.
I don't like ones that are done just to show off. You can smell those a mile away. And I don't like it if you've gone 100 pages without one and then suddenly there it is -- it sticks out as an anomaly, which disqualifies it from success, in my view. You have to show you're capable of long sentences fairly early on in order for them to fit comfortably into your book. Not that many authors can get away with it, and that's probably a good thing, because there's nothing as pretentious as trying it out and failing -- you end up trying the reader's patience. Also, stringing dozens of clauses together with "and" doesn't cut it. It has to be a real, complex, shapely sentence.
What is a long sentence? I would say a sentence is long if it goes on for ten or more lines. Average line in an average book is maybe ten words, so in most cases we're talking about 100-300-word sentences. Beyond that is going too far, I think. I'm going to look at three examples I've found that I think work.
Here's the first one, exactly 100 words long. An old man is reminiscing:
Here's the second, clocking in at 237 words: It's in the third paragraph of a chapter a third of the way through a book, and it doesn't comprise, nor does it start, nor does it finish its paragraph. A faculty member at a tennis academy, Charles Tavis, has just awakened and we know he's facing a hectic day:
The third example begins a book, setting up the possibility of more -- like brattily choosing the hugest canvas at the art supply shop. It's risky. Some will roll their eyes and never pick up the book again. But if you can make it work, your vistas open for the rest of the story:
Anyway, although best used sparingly, the long sentence is one of my favorite things about writing. I don't run into enough of them. An interesting thing would be to nose through a story or a chapter of yours and find the longest sentence. How long is it? Why is it that long? Did you do it on purpose or did it just happen? My suspicion is they are usually products of the fire in the mind that must come out in one long burst, likely for subconscious reasons, which is almost always good in writing. If you write a good long sentence, leave it alone. Don't chop it into pieces. The reader will thank you for it.
1. From Against the Day
2. From Infinite Jest
3. From Absolom, Absolom!
When I find a good long sentence -- after rereading it aloud and getting excited and folding down the bottom of the page so I know where to find it again -- I wonder why the author chose to do it, whether it was something deliberately done for some effect or whether it just rolled off that way in a moment of fulsome inspiration.
I don't like ones that are done just to show off. You can smell those a mile away. And I don't like it if you've gone 100 pages without one and then suddenly there it is -- it sticks out as an anomaly, which disqualifies it from success, in my view. You have to show you're capable of long sentences fairly early on in order for them to fit comfortably into your book. Not that many authors can get away with it, and that's probably a good thing, because there's nothing as pretentious as trying it out and failing -- you end up trying the reader's patience. Also, stringing dozens of clauses together with "and" doesn't cut it. It has to be a real, complex, shapely sentence.
What is a long sentence? I would say a sentence is long if it goes on for ten or more lines. Average line in an average book is maybe ten words, so in most cases we're talking about 100-300-word sentences. Beyond that is going too far, I think. I'm going to look at three examples I've found that I think work.
Here's the first one, exactly 100 words long. An old man is reminiscing:
It took maybe nine or ten years more of westward drift, over the rolling prairie, through the cheatgrass, the sage grouse exploding skyward, the dread silences when skies grow black in the middle of all that country, outracing cyclones and rangefires, switchbacking up the eastern slope of the Rockies through meadows of mule-ear and sneezeweed, on over the great torn crestline, to be delivered at last into these unholy mountains Webb grew to manhood in and had not left since, into whose depths he had ventured after silver and gold, up on whose heights he had struggled, always, for breath.That is a sentence that is also a paragraph. It's like the author said, "Well, I'm going to say all this and this much only, and it all fits together, so why not have it be one thing." With a topic as big as the West itself it hardly feels like a stretch to give it a 100-word sentence. Also great, of course, is the syncopated rhythms of the phrasing and the neat-o plant names like "mule-ear" and "sneezeweed," that are so charming they create little pauses in my own reading of it, because I want to pronounce them clearly and add a little flair to their utterance in my head. This author also added a lot of commas, to slow things down even more. I end up savoring things like that. And the end is nice because it echoes, like a preacher (I'm sure there's a rhetorical technical term for this) "into whose depths" and "up on whose heights" before forcing a final screetching stall ("..., always,...') right before the last word "breath," which is naturally on the reader's mind after a sentence like that. This is a writer playing with rhythm like a poet.
Here's the second, clocking in at 237 words: It's in the third paragraph of a chapter a third of the way through a book, and it doesn't comprise, nor does it start, nor does it finish its paragraph. A faculty member at a tennis academy, Charles Tavis, has just awakened and we know he's facing a hectic day:
He stands in leather slippers at the living-room window, looking southeast past West and Center courts at the array of A-team players assembling stiffly in the gray glow, carrying gear with their heads down and some still asleep on their feet, the first bit of snout of the sun protruding through the city's little skyline far beyond them, the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis's hands working nervously around the cup of hazelnut decaf that steams upward into his face as he holds it, hair unarranged and one side hanging, high forehead up against the window's glass so he can feel the mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving slightly and without sound, the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its chest and four pillows for bradyapnea-afflicted breathing that sounds like soft repetitions of the words sky or ski, making no unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it's quite possible is nothing but Tavis's imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup's steam spreading on the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday's snow hanging from the anodized gutters just above the window and seen by Tavis as a distant skyline upside-down.I like that because it's so smooth that I really didn't notice it was so long until I got near the end of it. It is basically a zoomed-out, omniscient, characterizing description -- of the character, and what the character is looking at, along with some interior thoughts snuggled into the middle. The end, I think helpfully, restates where you were earlier ("..., so lips moving w/o sound...") in case you forgot that -- that this guy is moving his lips probably unconsciously as he's gazing at the scene he's going to have to deal with very soon this morning. And decaf -- why in the world decaf at a moment like this? Characterization. In fact the whole sentence is nothing but characterization. And this guy is about to have a hectic morning, right, so the length of the sentence reinforces the endless on-piling of crap he's starting to get ready for. The steaming cup he's holding is his only paltry defense against the large cold morning of tasks that awaits him. Sneaking in the truly important stuff about the child he may have fathered in the middle there is a cool trick. Keep the reader on her toes -- defy expectations.
The third example begins a book, setting up the possibility of more -- like brattily choosing the hugest canvas at the art supply shop. It's risky. Some will roll their eyes and never pick up the book again. But if you can make it work, your vistas open for the rest of the story:
From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shown fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.Stunning, arresting imagery -- pure description that manages to evoke what kind of people these are. You can almost see the people, can't you? Even though none of them is described? And it fits thematically as well, as the other two examples did: we have here a most miserable, long afternoon befitting such a description. And note: one measly comma in the whole thing, yet it doesn't sound rushed or overblown.
Anyway, although best used sparingly, the long sentence is one of my favorite things about writing. I don't run into enough of them. An interesting thing would be to nose through a story or a chapter of yours and find the longest sentence. How long is it? Why is it that long? Did you do it on purpose or did it just happen? My suspicion is they are usually products of the fire in the mind that must come out in one long burst, likely for subconscious reasons, which is almost always good in writing. If you write a good long sentence, leave it alone. Don't chop it into pieces. The reader will thank you for it.
1. From Against the Day
2. From Infinite Jest
3. From Absolom, Absolom!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)