Talking to John Edgar Wideman

paperhaus March 29th, 2010

When I heard MacArthur Genius, National Book Award nominee John Edgar Wideman was doing a book with self-publisher Lulu, I was more than a little surprised. Then when I learned I could catch him at a Wordtheatre production in Santa Monica, I jumped at the chance. What he told me about writing, microfiction and the business of publishing is in today’s LA Times.

“Stories, in a way, are about time,” Wideman says. Now 68, he holds up his hands to indicate how much of his time has passed — and the smaller span that lies ahead. “What’s that mean?” he asks. “I’ve lost the best of what I have? Or is there something that I can look forward to in another scale, as life crystalizes?”

Following in the footsteps of Richard Wright, who began to write haiku near the end of his life, and taking inspiration from Yasunari Kawabata’s “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,” Wideman is miniaturizing. He’s taking “the same ambitions” he’s always had and writing them into drastically smaller works.

As much as these stories grow out of Wideman’s current circumstances, they’re also built to connect with busy, distracted readers. “In the pace and rhythm of life we have around us today,” he says, “it’s a struggle to get a private minute. For me, the private minute is what it’s all about. It’s what a powerful culture like ours tends to crush.”

And yet, for all that Wideman wants readers to find focus in his micro-stories, his main concern ultimately is that of a writer trying to take control of his own work. “Most people write,” he notes, “because they want independence. And that independence is threatened when you have to kowtow to the means of production.”

Caroline Blackwood’s stories: crazy good

paperhaus March 26th, 2010

I knew nothing of Caroline Blackwood before I picked up her new collection, Never Breathe a Word. And wow! What a fantastic writer of short fiction. “Fantastic” as in brutally bleak, an emotional wasteland. My review ran in last Sunday’s LA Times.

Blackwood died more than a decade ago, after being married to two of the 20th century’s great artists: painter Lucien Freud, first, and poet Robert Lowell third (second was a composer, who never achieved the same kind of greatness). She was an heir to the Guinness fortune and was quite beautiful. If our current crop of heiress-beauty-celebrities had a fraction of her depth, our pop culture world would be a more interesting place.

Oh, I’m the book critic

paperhaus February 12th, 2010

Jennifer Weiner just called me a book critic, and she didn’t mean it in a nice way.

Weiner, of course, is the author of a heap of books, including Good in Bed & In Her Shoes, and a lively advocate for popular fiction. She thought I was shitting on Jackie Collins when I tweeted “Jackie Collins, serving up sexy Hollywood trash! Oh, YAWN.” Her reply was swift: “Book critic being snotty, dismissive to popular commercial writer? I see your yawn + raise you a coma.”

Well, she hadn’t clicked on the link, to this Jacket Copy post — it’s about how Collins’ stock-in-trade — shockingly sexy tales of Hollywood! — has been usurped by sources of more immediate gratification: TMZ, Perez Hilton, you know. Seems to me like there isn’t much of a place for 400-page trashy Hollywood novels anymore. Collins has a new book, Poor Little Bitch Girl, that treads a mashup of Heidi Fleiss and Paris Hilton and more and… feels very tired.

What shocked me, though, wasn’t anything about Jackie Collins — it was that Jennifer Weiner was calling me a book critic. As if I was one of those shadow bogeymen of haute culture, a gatekeeper. Me? But… and I think of all the ways that I have been outside the gates. Oh, so many. Oh, for so long. Take today: I am totally wearing the wrong shoes.

But it’s true, I have to admit, that I write book reviews. I’ll be on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, starting in March. And I love writing about books, in a way that’s thoughtful, and even smart.

And I suppose that makes me a book critic.

And I think I’m OK with that.

Talking to Rebecca Skloot

paperhaus February 11th, 2010

I met Rebecca Skloot in New York last fall, when after a National Book Critics Circle event I had little business attending, I tagged along with a group of former board members in search of cocktails. Because we’d gone to the same graduate MFA program I knew her name — not that I learned the names of all alumni, but the nonfiction program had been passing Skloot’s book proposal to class after class of new students, saying This is the way you do it.

The book, however, had been in (and out) of the works for a long time, and when she told me it was finally on the way, I suppose I was dubious. But I was also curious. It sounded fascinating, and it was.

The book was released Tuesday, Feb 2; my piece on Skloot and her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, ran in the LA Times this Monday. Here’s some of it:

Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951, is the source of the HeLa cell line, the first human cells able to reproduce on their own in the laboratory.

By the time of her death, researchers at Johns Hopkins University had been trying for years to find cells with such reproductive properties. Lacks’ cells — powered by something in her cancer — were so remarkable that Hopkins shared them with scientists around the globe. A new industry of mass-producing human cells grew up around them.

HeLa cells have been used in experiments for decades, enabling countless scientific discoveries, including the polio vaccine and the discovery of chromosomes. The were blown up with an atom bomb and sent into space.

Still in use, they have been produced at mind-blowing volumes — enough to wrap around the world three times. They’ve been called immortal. Yet as vitally important as they have been to science, few have thought about their origins.

Skloot first heard the story of the cells as a teenager, learning only that they came from Lacks, an African American woman. She found the information tantalizingly inadequate. At the time, Skloot’s father, Floyd (who is the author of several books about living with brain damage) was severely ill and enrolled in a difficult, frustrating drug trial.

“I think that’s why I latched onto the story,” she says. “My first question was, ‘Does she have any kids? What do her kids think of this?’ “

One thing I didn’t mention anywhere is that Skloot has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, in hopes of providing resources to subsequent Lacks generations. Henrietta was poor when she died; her children grew up poor, as many of their children have, unable to afford to health insurance even as major biomedical industries have grown up around their mother’s tissues. Maybe some of the people who make charitable decisions in those industries will consider putting some resources into the foundation.

I interviewed Skloot in January, before she embarked on a massive, 100+ day book tour. Part of that conversation was posted on Jacket Copy, the LA Times book blog. Seeing Skloot in action, and hearing her story of this book, is highly recommended — she’s a total dynamo. I feel lazy around her, and believe me, I generally only feel lazy when encumbered by a massive hangover.

Chances are, if you’re living in the continental US, she’ll be showing up somewhere near you soon.

Joshua Ferris on The Unnamed

paperhaus January 15th, 2010

When I first reached Joshua Ferris to talk to him for the Barnes & Noble Review, my call surprised him. “I’m driving!” he said, and before he got pulled over for using his cell phone, we arranged to talk the following day. Crossed wires, publicists, scheduling - it happens. Anyway, our subsequent, not-driving conversation — in which he talks about the ideas underlying his new novel, The Unnamed — is now online. The protagonist of The Unnamed, a very successful NY attorney, is afflicted by a disease that has no known diagnosis. Here’s a bit of Ferris:

It seems to me that when a scientist or a medical doctor or a philosopher says, well, Descartes is over, the mind/body problem has been solved and we know that everything is located in the brain and we should celebrate, it seems to have missed the point. We don’t yet have subtle enough tools to alleviate all suffering, and the mystery is far too great – the confoundedness of disease; it brings me back to the soliloquy in Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.”At the end of it, he says, “to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” There are two poles  — one says we’re just this machine, and the other says, what a piece of work is man. I did not want to come down on one side or the other. It’s possible that this poor guy, with enough research and enough time, could have solved his problem  — but essentially, the mystery at the heart of his entire being can never be solved….

That was my greatest hope for the book – that it came to a place where the most pressing questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be heroic in the face of evisceration, and whether or not this particular character could muster the resources to do something in spite of his illness. All of these things became pertinent. I kept going back to the quote by Albert Camus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That was a kind of challenge, as I was writing the book, because clearly this is kind of Sisyphean disease — its very recurrent nature makes it such. I had to wonder, Is this particular man going to find a way to be happy? And what is it going to be about – his career, his physical comfort, his family?

Tod Goldberg has just reviewed the book for the LA Times. “The Unnamed is an accomplished and daring work,” he writes, “by a writer just now realizing what he is capable of creating”

Zoinks! Deadlines! Gadgets!

paperhaus January 14th, 2010

Sometimes when navigating a flurry of deadlines, which are totally uninteresting, the work appeas, which is interesting, with any luck. The latest: for Flavorwire, my review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.

If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget, his first book.

It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?

I really like that Lanier, the father of virtual reality, is a brilliant programmer who makes his case without making a straightforward linear argument. He hops from idea to idea, which is frutrating in places, but ultimately serves to force the reader to engage with his ideas dynamically, having space to think of counterarguments or make connections.

And now: coffee. Plus another deadline.

Total Oblivion

paperhaus January 1st, 2010

My review of Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less appears in today’s LA Times. Here’s how it starts.

Macy Palmer would be living the life of a normal Midwestern 16-year-old girl, if only the Scythians hadn’t driven her family from their Minnesota home. Or perhaps the blame lies with the spreading plague, or the rival Imperial army — it’s hard to say.

Exactly who or what is the cause for the chaos in “Total Oblivion, More or Less” is not as important as how it reshapes Macy’s world. She’s a smarter-than-average teenager with a mildly dysfunctional family. Her flirtatious older sister, Sophia, plans to skip traditional college and become a midwife, not exactly the path their father, an astronomy professor, might have chosen. Her younger brother, Ciaran, enrolled in classes for troubled children, has a sinister intelligence. Her mother drifts through days, particularly after discovering that she’s pregnant again.

Hello, 2010!

Eavesdropping on MLA

paperhaus December 29th, 2009

I spent two years in graduate school, getting an MFA in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, which I wrapped up last fall. I was older than most of my fellow students, about the same age as one of my professors, yet of all of them, I was the digital advocate.

It was almost silly. I’d tried to talk about literature in the online world — litjournals, blogs, access to agents, literary conversations — and was met with blank looks. I was baffled — how could so many 20-somethings not know what an RSS feed was? Didn’t they blog or have a stale livejournal account or anything? Eventually, we did manage to launch a good online literary journal that was supported by the department — although I bet some people are still asking when it’ll go into print.

What you might do with reading and the online sphere was given attention only by a few. My second year, I taught English composition, and when I got to an exercise about writing personas in the syllabus I adapted it to Facebook. The day we looked at those student projects, I was observed by my mentor. I was excited. She didn’t get it. I was reprimanded.

The resistance to new forms of writing and communication was discouraging. But there were a few people in the PhD program who were engaging with, as the academics say, texts in interesting ways. I’ve continued to follow their work.

And as I watch what’s being tweeted and blogged about the MLA conference this year, I have to say I’m excited all over again. People do get it. Smart engaged readers and academics not only have noticed that the online world is fertile and interesting, they’re trying to figure out clever ways to plug into it — as teachers, as scholars, as thinkers.

It’s inspiring. It makes me happy for academia. Long may it be plugged in.

In praise of living on the cheap

paperhaus December 24th, 2009

Possum Living was published in the late 70s as a sassy guide to anti-consumerist living. Mostly ideology-free — unless you count a cheerful curmudgeonliness as an ideology — the book, written by the pseudonymous 18 year-old Dolly Freed, has just been reissued by Tin House. And I wrote about it for Boldtype/Flavorpill yesterday:

Dolly’s practical lessons are presented with an irresistible wiseass grin: “We usually leave on the head, tail and fins for the simple reason that the fish looks nicer that way; and it means less work,” she writes. “Also, many fish have considerable amounts of meat in their heads — just like some people.”

Dolly lived with her father on a half-acre lot in suburban Philadelphia off just $5,000 a year, which was perplexingly cheap enough in her day to get her on the Merv Griffin Show. Her dad earned the little cash they needed doing odd jobs during winter, but the book is about everything else it took to live like possums: the gardening, the scrimping and shortcuts, the “merrily gurgling” home still.

What’s remarkable is how prescient, or smart, or just plain no-nonsense Freed’s advice was, because so much makes sense today. Not only do they ditch their car and ride bikes instead, but she warns against getting overly expensive bicycles — see ya, fixies — that might get stolen. Like my neighbors, she uses her yard as a vegetable garden, which she plans carefully (she explains how). She grows herbs and preserves the extras in vinegar. She makes pickling sound simple, cooks over an open fire when she can, buys clothes at Goodwill, and has plenty of time left over for playing chess on the porch.

Some of the projects are harder to imagine adopting. She and her father purchase wheat, soybeans, and potatoes in bulk from a feed store — there are still feed stores around, it turns out, but how many of us will make the time to clean and grind our own wheat? Freed made moonshine with a pressure cooker, some copper pipe, and rubber tubing, assembling the pieces with dough. OK, that’s inventive, but would it be so terrible to buy a gasket or two? Winemaking is easier in the final stages — once you put it all together, you just let it ferment — but even with Freed’s fruit-and-sugar measures supplied, calculating it all gets pretty complicated.

But the real challenge is the bunnies.

This is where Freed is awesome in her punk rockness: like a band that knows it will offend, she puts the hardest track right up front. She raises chickens and bunnies; the chickens provide eggs. The bunnies? They provide meat.

There’s more (more!) and I swear, even if the byline bears the editor’s name, it was written by me. And now I’ve got to hop offline to buy some bunnies soil to see if I can get a garden going.

Another year in reading

paperhaus December 20th, 2009

If you’re trying to keep up with the year in reading at The Millions, then, like me, you’re a little bit overwhelmed. So… many… books! All read in 2009. And all beloved by someone.

For the last few years, The Millions has done this year-end survey. Kindly, they ask only that the books be those consumed in the previous 12 months, not necessarily published in that window. Which is how, in 2008, I got to rave about Dracula (have you read it lately? It’s totally amazing).

This year I’ve also weighed in, with two favorites. The crew of contributors has become increasingly formidable  — this year, Hari Kunzru kicked things off — and I look forward to seeing their final boldfaced names.

Speaking of Hari Kunzru — man, I’ve really got to read My Revolutions. Maybe next year.

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