A novel should be novel ...

"It's always struck me as elemental,"says Jonathan Karp, "that a novel should be novel." in an interview in the Nov.-Dec. Writers and Poets. Karp is the editor in chief of Twelve, the publishing company. He goes on to say, "I've never understood why somebody would write a novel knowing that the story has been done millions of times before. If your work is not novel on the conceptual level, I'm not sure why you should expect somebody to stop what he's doing and pay attention."

Mr. Karp seems to prefer nonfiction that is serious and impactful. He publishes twelve books a year and gives each great attention and publicity. He goes on to note that no less a novelist than Norman Mailer once predicted that novelists would come to have "the cultural influence of landscape painters." This makes Mr. Karp conclude, "if you're setting out to write a novel, or literary nonfiction, for that matter, I think you have to have very high standards."

Mr. Karp's comments leave me feeling pulled left and right at the same time. I search for those novels with something novel to tell me, I try to avoid the ones that offer nothing new [or novel] and I feel cheated when I am disappointed by the same old, same old. On the other hand I began a novel in the NanNoWriMo frenzy and am now struggling to find out how it ends. While I think the characters are novel and are unlike ones written about previously I'm wondering about how high my standards are for my own work. I'm having such a good time getting to know my characters and trying to figure out how to make them vivid and alive that my writing time seems almost playtime. Probably I'm aiming for a nice landscape painting. I will not submit it to Twelve, I'm not even sure I'll be able to find anyone to publish it. But I am not young and ambitious as I once imagined I was; I am now older and more easy going with myself but my opinions and standards for works of art have become more demanding. So a double standard ... not such a novel situation.

[the photo is in Cracow - it feels like a moment in a Central European novel - could the lone young man be a novelist?]

[Second thought: I don't believe I ever enlarged this photo before. I certainly didn't look carefully at the man in the background. It was quite early in the morning and I was wandering around before breakfast as I'm apt to do when traveling, hardly anyone was out yet. Now that I look and think about it, the man seems to be using that pretty building as his personal urinal. Hmmm....]

Tuva or Bust

We have a super used bookstore on Main Street, Hyannis. I try to restrict myself to three books a visit. On my last visit I bought Tuva or Bust by Ralph Leighton. Published in 1991, it was about attempts made by Leighton, his friend the eccentric Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman and assorted friends to visit the tiny country of Tuva mainly because it's capital has no vowels, Kyzyl however is pronounced as if the Ys are vowels. Tuva also contains a monument by a little known adventurer named Proctor who tried to visit the absolute center of various continents. Apparently by Proctor's calculations Tuva is at the center of Asia.

I tried to find a map of all of Asia that showed Tuva but failed. The map below is of Russia, Tuva is in blue, and you have to imagine beneath it Mongolia, then Tibet [okay, imagine all the territory China claims plus it's legitimate land mass, and below that India and all of the countries of southeast Asia. Then to the east beneath Russia all the countries we are now hearing more than enough about, the "stans" Iraq,Iran, and all the Middle Eastern countries. Makes you wonder if Tuva is really the center of Asia.

The book is a fun read from this distance because most of it is about trying to deal with late cold war Soviet bureaucracy. I did know about Tuva, partly from having gone to Mongolia and hearing a great deal of throat singing, which was apparently invented in Tuva. It's musically amazing!! Recordings are available. The difficulty was so great that Feynman actually died before the permissions came through. I love reading about travelers, especially when I can learn things I didn't know about the geography and people and politics of a place. Hurray for used book atores.

Latest Terrorist

Airline security is a major sore point with me. I totally despise the attitude of the security people in airports. I am a plain white haired old lady, to the best of my knowledge I have no FBI or CIA files. I definitely know I've done nothing that would warrant the attention of either organization. Nothing about me fits a terrorist profile. But I, ring the warning bells with my artificial hip. I have a card that says I have a artificial hip. No one at security cares about that, I'm told to stand aside and then am thoroughly patted down, wanded and once went through a "puffer" machine [I don't know what it's called]. I consider all of this unnecessary and invasive of my personal dignity. That's my rant.

So why is it that the airport security spends their time and effort harassing ordinary citizens, making us remove our shoes and discard our water bottles, but they do not give extraordinary attention to a person on the terrorist suspect list and allow him to board an international flight where he presumably spends several hours savoring what he thinks will he his final ones before attempting to detonate whatever kind of device he carried on board? The security system seems to be planned for maximum tyranny and harassment of ordinary passengers but don't have a method for truly examining person on their terrorist watch list. El Al has been doing it right for over twenty years. Why can't American airlines learn from others' experience.

Lost Glove

The lost glove,
frozen stiff,
pointed at footprints
in the snow
leading to my door.

Not an intruder.

My own steps
as I came home
on a cold winter night.

[sorry about stock picture with steps going the wrong way.]

Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts

Dense books take time to read so I've been working on Sven Birkerts' Gutenberg Elegiess for a week or more. To greatly simplify: he bemoans what seems a cultural change for the worse, i.e., serious literature has become so marginalized that it has no real cultural influence anymore, in contrast to, say in the 19th century and first half of the 20th. He makes a good case and I agree that we as a culture are and will in the future be poorer because we are overloaded with information and entertainment but are not challenged, and rarely challenge ourselves, to look deeply at ourselves or our cultures. And we certainly do not go to serious literature for insight.

Two things came to mind when I closed the book: I'm tardy in reading it, for it was published several years ago and probably written about 10 years ago. He emphasizes the digital takeover but he wrote before cell phones, iPods, internet social networks -- all of which have been electronic kudzu burying, choking and cloaking many people's individuality and stifling thought.

But, to counter some of the fear and trembling Birkerts inspires there is a movement towards meditation and inwardness. I see it most promisingly in the Buddhist varieties but there are Christian groups as well that truly try to look beneath superficiality of every day life. It's far from a majority but it is a growing movement. Serious writing of all sorts is very marginalize, but it's not dead but the voices are difficult to hear in the cacophony.

Done! Well, almost...

A couple of hours of shopping, and about half an hour of VERY slow traffic, and I am done with purchasing Christmas gifts. I came home and wrapped them ... well, I'm almost done. Doesn't something always remain as a tag end? One gift to go but it is one of those "make a donation in my name" kind of things and I know what I'd like to donate to but I don't know if that's particularly appealing to the giftee. So I'm pondering. I've got time as he's out of touch during the week so ... I can procrastinate. That is one of my premier traits; I've been working on perfecting it most of my life. That's why, only there days before Christmas, I finally went and purchased the last of the gifts.

Going to the mall was insane! But I wrapped myself in my down jacket and a resolve to be patient and off I went. I thought parking will be a nightmare, for a bit it seemed like it was, but then, moving from back lot to front lot a space opened for me, magically almost. When done there, at the next shopping area, same thing. This used to happen often 30 years ago when I lived in mall-land [not NYC where I had no car]; it seems to be happening again. Why this luck? Many things do not have explanations and I can just accept them and not look for "why?" when it's good, like a very nice parking space, I notice and I'm happy. I believe it was Ben Franklin whose quote I read in a blog recently but cannot recite verbatim. The gist is that true happiness is the little every day pleasures, not the big wish-come-true that hardly ever happens. We know it's happiness when we pay attention to those small pleasures -- the car backing out of the parking space just as you turn into that lane. My word is serendipity.

Deep reading

"Deep reading", a term I came across in some casual [definitely not deep] reading referred to The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. Oh, I've got that book, I remembered. I've had it maybe three years. What does he call deep reading? I thought it would be pondering the philosophers or digging into literature as the New Critics did mid-20th century dissecting structure, etc. Happily not the latter although I studied with New Critics way back when. And strangely not the former which surprised me.

Birkerts believes that serious literary novels have a deep impact, they change our personality because we live the experiences within the story as vividly [sometimes more so] as our own lives. He believes those of us who read intensely acquire complex ways of seeing the world and [in my words] live a more richly nuanced life. I've looked for quotable take-outs to quote but he is not that kind of writer. He emphasizes, as I would also, that the novels must be literary, serious writing. For example, we white readers can know the worlds of black experience through Toni Morrison with reality that would be impossible otherwise. This, of course extends to writers in other countries and of other time periods. I have lately explained to friends that I rarely read American writers because I know American life, I would rather read Coetze or Julian Barnes [as I am right now], a Norwegian, German, Chinese, Indian writer, etc. to see the world their characters live in.
Birkerts' book was mostly reviewed because he believes such reading is in danger of disappearing, that, in fact, books as we know and love them, are on their way out of general use. I hope he's a premature alarmist but, sadly, I think it may be true. What is disturbing is the shallowness of experience available to people who do not read, the visual media which is omnipresent does not contain the layers of psychology and story telling and experience available in the novels of fine writers.

It's a huge subject, I'll be pondering it a long time, meanwhile reading as many good novels as I can, mixed in with nonfiction which may not change my personality but gives me perspectives consider. [Top picture if Mary Cassatt, bottom is Berthe Marisot]