New work, many doings

New work in Sein und Werden and The Cafe Irreal.

In six months, I will be done with the time-draining, energy-sapping fiasco known to the civilized world as "law school." Since September 2008, I have been going to my day job, taking evening classes in Contracts, Torts, Con Law, etc., while somehow finding a few hours each week (on a good week) to squeeze in my little literary endeavors. There has been a lot of sleep deprivation involved.

Somehow, I have managed (I think) to get through it all without turning evil. In fact, I think I am a better person now than when I started. But one thing I feared -- irrationally, I now realize -- when I embarked on this project was that law school would "ruin my creativity." This is something writers fear rather often. I know I do. One fears the effects of a competitive atmosphere on the Muse. I pictured her little winged form crushed under a mighty gavel of cold, hard reality.

Not so. In fact, going to law school has if anything caused my imagination to go even more happily off-kilter. This I think is partly due to the sheer rebellion of the subconscious over being subordinated for most of the daytime to analytical tasks. It could also be a reaction to the simple fact that the brain is doing more work. But above all else it demonstrates the importance of doing new things to have new ideas.

For a couple of years leading up to law school, when I was working a very easy, very boring (and badly-paying!) day job for the sole purpose of sustenance, I was starting to feel creatively dead. Having new ideas requires having a sense of hope, not just about one's writing but about life in general. I believe this is true even if you are writing about darkness and despair. Writing is an inherently positive, hopeful act. But I was getting to a routine where I felt too bored with my life to invent new worlds or characters.

That has changed, in a big way. I have met new people, and put myself in situations which I could not have imagined for myself before, and it is only just beginning. Furthermore, I will have a versatile job skill I can rely on for a wide variety of uses (to the extent that one can rely on anything in this collapsing economy).

Of course, I now almost completely lack for time to write -- almost. There has been just enough to scribble down some flash fictions, make dozens of outlines, and join a weekly workshop every now and then. Enough time to know that I can still do it, and that I am really looking forward to coming back into the literary world as a writer newly remade, with a better day job. And lots of new ideas.

I just thought I'd share that with any other writers out there. The Muse is more resilient than you think. The only thing that kills it is boredom.

Menda City Adieu

After five incredible years, editor Terry Rogers has decided to call it a day with his online literary magazine, Menda City Review. The final issue (number 18) has posted just last week.

MCR was a truly exceptional publication, one that favored quality over quantity. It was named along with Clarkesworld as the "best new online literary magazine" of 2006 by the Story South Million Writers Award. For the following five years it continued to publish a wide variety of work, everything from traditional narratives to unabashedly experimental fiction and magical realism, including some of the best writers out there today. Its commentary section also included political essays and non-fiction memoirs.

Terry believed in every word of every story he published. Unlike most editors for online publications, he was unafraid of longer works -- MCR was one of the few online publications that would take submissions as long as 10,000 words. He gave meticulous, sensitive feedback to writers, collaborating with them until their work was in the best shape possible. I am proud to have been a part of it, serving for three years as associate editor of the commentary section. I am not proud of the fact that I still put two spaces after periods in my manuscripts, which he insists (I think correctly) is both unnecessary and unprofessional in the age of word processors.

Terry is also an exceptional writer, as you will see from his "Song of the Siren," included in this final issue, along with WJ Rosser's "The Robber" and my own "The Curtain". MCR was a huge time commitment for him, and I know he's looking forward to getting back to writing his own fiction. For myself, I am looking forward to reading it.

In the meantime, enjoy this last issue!

Welcome Willows Wept readers!

I don't update this blog very often (too busy), but if you want to read more of my fiction, please check out the links on my publications page. Enjoy!

Van der Graaf Generator

Because I can. Oh, yes. This does rock.

New work

At long last, some new fiction. My short story "Starlings" can be found in the September issue of Toasted Cheese.

Also, I now live in Tokyo until the beginning of 2011. I feel...different. In a good way.

Bad Faith and Bad Music

Thought I'd pass this along. Normally, I find that essays which mention (for instance) Lady Gaga and Existentialism in the same paragraph are total garbage, but this New York Times piece by Tufts philosopher Nancy Bauer is both rational and cogent.

Here, Professor Bauer takes on the dichotomy present in modern pop-culture "feminism" - as exemplified in this case by Lady Gaga - which proffers the notion that self-objectification can be empowering. Instead of the usual baby-boomer hand-wringing, Bauer provides a very useful analyis via Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir. It is refreshingly bereft of incantatory po-mo gibberish.

In defense of purple prose

What’s wrong with purple prose? Usually, the issue is that it is “more than is necessary.” This can be a problem if it destroys narrative or thematic accuracy, if it obfuscates. But in other circumstances, it’s necessary to create the kind of antic giddiness – I would even say a nervous energy - which certain kinds of storytelling require. The notion that everything should be pared to a necessary minimum is a valuable conceit, but not universally valuable. We often under-appreciate that its intended effect is quite specific – to make reading an analytical experience as much as possible. But even in essays, there is a difference between analytical form and rhetorical form, and they have different formal demands.

Modernist literature discovered the power of the verb, and how rooting a narrative in carefully highlighted actions could create a “transparent” relationship to language – i.e., the reader ideally ceases to be aware of “text” and becomes wholly absorbed in narrative. We often forget that this is, historically, quite anomalous. Up until the end of the Victorian era, the reader’s awareness that there was a “text” – a creature unto itself with its own characteristics and desires - was an essential part of the storytelling process. As the reader of any Victorian novel knows, the author was expected to indulge in all kinds of discursions, ruminations, asides, and seeming non sequiturs, often piling up haystacks of adjectives, similes, and elaborate images in the process.

At the root of this modern animosity of M.F.A. students to “purple” prose, is, I think, an unacknowledged discomfort with raw, unmitigated emotion, with losing one’s moorings in impressions and subjectivity. There is also a certain politically-correct aversion to anything that seems coercive or intimidating.

For such writers, the cause could also be more personal – perhaps at a delicate, formative stage of their literary careers they were raked over the coals in a writing workshop for a heartfelt attempt at lyricism that fell flat with its audience. If the experience is humiliating enough, it could send the sensitive young writer into the safe haven of Raymond Carver-land forever, with all its requisite cynicism towards others who surrender to the seductions of the Muse.

A fantastic example of the virtues of Purple can be found in this famous excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.

I’ve you’ve been to the University of Iowa, this paragraph is a nightmare. Passive voice, in the very first sentence! And repeated in the second! And then we have “to see things eaten” followed by “to see things blackened and changed.” Well…which is it? But then it gets worse. A “great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world?” Pythons aren’t venomous. And holding a python is nothing like conducting an orchestra. “To bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history?” Oh please, this man has no restraint at all!

Anyone trying to write like this in a college workshop would be mocked and derided. In a graduate class, it would be worse – the pity for the author and his unquestioned incompetence would leave the room suffocating in silent torment. What can you even say about such dreck? I mean, we’re all adults here, aren’t we?

And yet…I think the paragraph is beautiful, absolutely perfect in every way. With its repetitions, its broad, destructive brush-strokes, its collisions of discordant images, its unmitigated sadism, it captures the terrifying giddiness of state violence under a fascist regime. Hemingway never did that, nor did Carver. Sure, they could put you “in the moment” and take you from one instant to the next with visceral realism. But Bradbury is attempting something else – he is describing a timeless event, something that is happening everywhere, at all times. He is invoking the mythic. This is not a time for tidy, polite rules about passive voice and killing your darlings.