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Critique of a Salesman

By amy ross | Filed in authors, books, writing

I once had a creative-writing teacher who would tactfully condemn a line of student verse by saying, in the long-suffering yet indulgent tone with which a wife might scold her husband for once again forgetting to put the cat out, “It sounds like poetry.”

The New Yorker’s new lit blog opens by talking about Death of a Salesman, and whether we should now come to the conclusion, after all these years, that it sucks. And I have to admit, he makes a compelling argument.

But I also think it’s significant that he opens the essay by quoting a teacher of creative writing. This is an issue that comes up frequently among the MFA set, and I think among all serious writers: to what extend does writing poison our appreciation for texts?

Because no matter that Harvey might not life Salesman, or that he can find specific faults with it — on some level, clearly it works. I don’t just mean in the cynical sense of, “Gee, it’s made a lot of money over the years, so it must be doing something right!” I mean, many many people have been moved, provoked — have generally found great worth in this play. So can we really come along now and declare it broken? Or maybe it is broken, and maybe that doesn’t matter all that much.

In writing courses and clubs, you can’t help but pick up a handful of writing “truisms”: “Never use adverbs.” “Use dialogue tags when only absolutely necessary.” “Never have a character look in a mirror.” And then, inevitably, writers go off into the world with their new found knowledge and declare, “I can’t read Nabokov — there are adverbs everywhere!” “I had to throw Anna Karenina away when she looked in a mirror.”

Being an editor is even worse. When I was fiction editor for Fugue, I developed countless pet peeves that usually resulted in insta-rejects. Second person narration was one, stories about bad relationships was another. Do I really think the world has exhausted the topic of the bad relationship? That there is no more to say about such a scenario? Of course not. It’s just that it’s (naturally enough) a common topic, and after the 500th one, they start to develop a certain sameness. I got sick of it. But a reader who only reads 5-10 short stories a year is probably not so sick of hearing about bad relationships.

Recently some writer friends of mine were discussing their desire to “turn off” this hypercritical side of themselves, to be able to enjoy things once again as “regular” people do. I have mixed feelings, I guess. It’s nice to have the tools to explain why a certain piece of art — even a very famous and admired piece — leaves us cold. But it can be dangerous to extrapolate “rules” for an endeavor which is, at its best, inherently lawless.

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Punched in the Throat

By amy ross | Filed in books, publishing, writing

I’m super excited to announce that I have a piece up on The Millions!

Okay, it’s only The Millions’ tumblr… A short recap of Steve Almond‘s recent reading here in Moscow, ID to promote his new book, God Bless America. Still, it’s exciting for me because I adore The Millions and the way their posts feed my brain, so it’s exciting to contribute to that.

As it happens, inspired not by the giddy freedom of having at last turned in my thesis, I volunteered not only to do this write-up, but also to introduce Almond the same night. Here’s what I said, before I inelegantly dropped my notes on the floor just as Almond started for the mic.

Steve Almond is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He is also the author of five books of fiction, including the newly-released God Bless America, available for sale here. (God Bless America is published by Lookout Books, which happens to be run by Ben George, a 2005 graduate of the UofI MFA program). Almond has won two Pushcart awards and been featured in Best American Short Stories multiple times.

But as impressive as all that is, I volunteered to introduce Steve Almond tonight, because ever since he came here as Distinguished Visiting Writer my first year, I feel like his spirit has haunted this program. The younger generation can tell you how those of us who were in his class talk about Almond as if he were one of the Gods, stepped down from mt olympus to slum with us for a while. That week, my first semester here, he set an example for us of exactly what a writer should be.

He taught us to avoid unnamed narrators, not to keep secrets from the reader, and to never, ever use the word “beacon” in our writing. Ever. But even more than those nuggets of practical good sense, Almond taught us that a writer should be fearless. He taught us the importance of humility. And he taught us that when you have something really important, really big, and really discomfiting to say, laughter will always sweeten the pill.

An example. On I believe it was the second day of class, Almond stood in front of the student being workshopped and lambasted him to his face. In fiction worshops, we are usually very careful to be delicate, to focus on the text itself, and there is a convention that we behave as if the author were not in the room. Almond respected none of these conventions. Speaking directly to the student, he said, “You have allowed poetry and pretty language to get in the way of telling a story. I’m going to spend the next ten minutes humiliating you for doing this. But it is only because I hope that if I beat you up enough, you will never make this mistake again.”

The rest of us sat there in silence, in horror, listening to the diatribe and not knowing how to react. We were afraid the student might go to pieces over the beating he was getting. Then at last, around minute 8, he starts chuckling. Then giggling, then full out laughing. And at the end, he swears solemnly never to make the mistake again.

The rest of the week was spent with us all pretty much in stitches, because we knew now we had permission to laugh. And that was a good thing, because without that laughter, there might have been some tears. But the important thing was, we all walked away with a big dose of truth, and we’ve become better writers because of it.

Just to keep it in the family, I’ll close with a quote from Ben Percy, who was our fiction DVW this year:

“Steve Almond is one of our most prolific-fearless-political-hairy-intelligent-sexy-hilarious writers…. He makes me care deeply about his characters, so many of them wrong in the head and right in the heart, down on their luck but clinging to the desperate hope that the next hand of cards will turn up flush.”

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a short sharp shock

By amy ross | Filed in books, writing

The Elegant Variation has an interesting guest post by Marisa Silver on the short story, and its merits relative to the longer fiction narrative.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, as I’m finishing up one class on reading the short story and another on writing them.

I once counted myself among the people Silver describes – the short story haters.  At the time, I had a lot of justifications for this position (short stories are unengaging? oblique? pretentious? I forget my specific grievances), but I’ve since concluded that I didn’t like the short story because I hadn’t read any good ones.  Thankfully, I’ve been cured of that ailment.

Still, that’s not to say novels and short stories are the same, or give pleasure in the same ways.  But what, precisely, is the difference?

One theory I’ve been playing with is that a (good) novel paints character so richly and distinctively, the reader feels as if he actually knows this person.  The short story simply doesn’t have time to offer such a deep and thorough investigation of character, so it tends to rely on recognizable character “types” that are instantly grasped and intuitively understood.  I don’t mean to suggest that short form writers rely on clichés or “stock” characters – rather that they make use of people who already feel familiar to the reader, because we run across them every day.

For example, even though it’s been years since I read Lolita, I still feel like I know Humbert Humbert as well as if he were an old school friend, or my next door neighbor growing up.  (Erm… maybe I shouldn’t have gone there.)  Whereas, even though I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love a couple of weeks ago, I can’t name a single character in the collection – what I have instead is a vivid sense of the kind of people who inhabit Carver’s world.  I don’t need to know every detail about his characters, because their situations – crumbling marriages, alcoholism, anger and hopelessness – are universal enough to be instantly understandable.

So, I don’t know about this theory.  Maybe all I’ve really said is that Raymond Carver is not Nabokov, and Nabokov is not Carver.  But as I work on writing and revising more shorts (and, of course, writing and revising novels), I find myself thinking about which characters belong in which medium.

Anyone else who has dabbled in both forms – have you found any other crucial differences between them?  Or want to dispute this one?

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Why Parents Shouldn’t Read YA Fiction

By amy ross | Filed in books

Because it’s not for you.

Because, when you do read it, you produce articles like this one from the Times, bemoaning the fact that you’ve been treated so poorly by the genre. “It’s not fair!” you cry. “I’m a perfectly nice parent — I drive my kid to soccer practice, I produce square and tasty meals, I buy him every new electronic gadget the moment he mentions it… Why am I being depicted as such an ogre?”

One study from the 1970s compared mothers in young adult fiction with the ones in real life, based on statistics from the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, and concluded that less than 3 percent of the depictions were “realistic”.

Um… okay. And since when are novels required to describe the traumas of life in precisely the proportions that they actually occur? Is it really so surprising that fiction would tend to focus on the extremes of life, rather than its dull reality?

the father in “Once Was Lost” becomes somehow peripheral, his problems more muted and less interesting than his teenage daughter’s.

Right. And you know, there have been any number of novels written about middle aged men, in which the problems of their teenage daughters or granddaughters are, you guessed it — more peripheral and less interesting than the old man’s.

See, when it comes to fiction, there’s this little thing called perspective. YA fiction is not, for the most part, about depicting life the way it really is (indeed, very little fiction has this as a goal). It’s about showing the world the way a teenager sees it. (And sure, fine, not EVERY teenager sees the world this way, not yours certainly — yours recites poems in English class about how you’re his best friend, confidante, and role model, while a Bette Midler song plays in the background.) Is it very likely that a teenager would live in such a cruel world that there is not a single sensible, caring adult to whom she can turn in a crisis? Simply put: no. The world contains a great many tender, generous, capable adults who would be glad to offer guidance and support.

But guess what. That’s not how the world looks when you’re sixteen. For your average disaffected sixteen-year-old, pretty much every adult can be tossed into one of a few piles: petty, cruel, unjust, hypocritical, oblivious, out of touch, stupid, or ineffectual. Don’t take it personally! It’s all part of the growing up process. If kids didn’t go through this phase, they’d still be eating your food and borrowing your car at 37.  Is that what you want?

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E-Bards and Print Reviewers

By amy ross | Filed in books, writing

[Criticism] is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model. Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.

YES. Yes, this. I admit, I have a special soft spot in my heart for A.O. Scott, based on the random fact that he went to my high school (though not at the same time as I did). But that aside, I feel like in all the recent debate about the future of criticism — whether blogs are killing newspapers or will newspapers turn into blogs, and why should anyone trust what some shmoe in a bathrobe* tells them about a book or a movie anyway — in all that hubub, I have been waiting and waiting for someone to express this take on the matter.

All I would add to Scott’s analysis is that criticism is a kind of writing — or, fine, let’s say a “mode of discourse”, so we can include critics who use tv or youtube as their medium. But either way, it’s like any other kind of writing/discourse — the only way to judge it is by how it performs. So I know that a lot of people are shocked — shocked! — that ordinary people are allowed to leave reviews of books and movies and other products on sites like Amazon or Librarything (—>), and worse yet, other innocent consumers who don’t know any better might read these reviews and, horror or horrors, believe them. But such horror misses the point of criticism entirely. Good critics produce interesting criticism, bad critics produce dull criticism. If a review on LibraryThing is well-reasoned, well-researched, eloquent, and fully engages with the material under review and its cultural context, can’t I, as a reader, be trusted to figure that out from reading the review itself? And why shouldn’t I incorporate that review into my understanding of the text, just because the writer doesn’t happen to have a syndicated newspaper column?

But of course, that’s not the real issue at stake. And believe me, I understand that people who write reviews for a living would like to continue to get paid, and thus feel threatened by e-reviews that are produced for fun, not profit. Hey, I’d like to get paid for writing reviews too! But I don’t see why the readers of reviews should be expected to care about such an issue. Let the cream rise to the top — if newspaper reviewers are so much better at this craft than bloggers, they should have nothing to fear from us.

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*and I mean… aren’t like 90% of writers basically shmoes in our bathrobes? Well, personally I wear a sarong to write, but still.

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Criminal Books…

By amy ross | Filed in books

Not to be confused with crime fiction, which is an entirely different concept.

My dear, talented friend and lit-blogger Maitresse recently translated this commentary by Christophe Claro on the Salon du Livre, and I found it a really compelling way to think about reading.

Why should a book not lead one to commit a crime, when it has so often led its author to the gallows? How can a book be innocent? Who hasn’t dreamt of a book who would change his life? Why must it be changed for the better? [...] Let’s rename the Salon du Livre the Salon of Anything is Possible. Let us stroll down the aisles while saying to ourselves that on each square inch of table sleeps a work which could drive us to rape, kill, fall in love, eat oranges, churn up the foundations, or become president. Let us lift up the veil (it’s outlawed anyway now) and concede the power of the book. Let us bow down before the magnificent or dreadful consequences of reading. Think of Sade, think of Villepin, think of Cadiot, think of Asimov or Adorée Floupette… doesn’t matter which flask as long as you get drunk. To each book its own crime or virtue.

I still remember back in high school, when I first discovered that reading could be dangerous, could be an illicit pleasure. I’d always read a lot of books — whatever came into my hands — but I think of that time as the moment when I became a reader.

Well-meaning school districts and libraries have a tendency to present literature as a form of eating your vegetables — good for you, possibly pleasurable, definitely the way to gain adult approval. It was a great revelation to me that books could be dirty — filthy, even. Better yet, they could teach you about life, about drugs, about revolution, how to build a pipe bomb, how to run a meth lab, and that everything you learned in those other books was lies, lies, lies. Or hell, to eat oranges. (What book does he have in mind? I’m intrigued.)

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Nine Billion Names of…

By amy ross | Filed in books, writing

Okay, I don’t have quite that many. Yet.

I’ll admit, I have a bit of a problem with names. I’ve had a few — given names, middle names, nicknames, and the like — over the course of a lifetime, but nothing has ever quite felt like me. And so, pretty much as soon as I started writing seriously, I started thinking about trading up — what would I name myself if I could pick any name in the world?

Plenty of admirable writers throughout history have been known by names other than the ones their parents gave them: Anthony Burgess, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Molière, George Orwell, just to name a few of my own favorites. In days past, authors might seek to conceal their identities from fear of political repercussions, scandal, or prejudice. Nowadays, though, pen names aren’t so common. Indeed, the whole concept seems to have fallen into ill-repute — after all, why wouldn’t you use your real name? Are you ashamed of what you write? Or are you ashamed of who you are?

But what if you’re just not wild about your name? What if you just want something a little more glamorous? A little more literary?

There is one problem with picking your own name, though: there doesn’t seem much reason to hold onto it, once it’s lost some of its shine. When my first novel went on submission to editors, I decided to call myself Alma, after Alma Werfel, whom I knew and admired primarily thanks to the Tom Lehrer song. Her name was reasonably close to mine, but more distinctive — and who wouldn’t want to make all modern women jealous?

But when that book didn’t sell, I found myself feeling distanced from the name. I still had a fine future in front of me — Alma, however, was clearly a hack.

For my next novel, I went a different direction. I’d heard a rumor that, even in this day, there were certain books that sold better from male authors, and the thought struck fear into me — what if my brilliant novel was being ignored for no better reason than my sex? Not the most likely theory, but an attractive one, because that was a much easier problem to fix than a sluggish plot. In a nod to Sand and Eliot, I took on George as my new moniker, and sent the second book out.

And when that didn’t take? I’m not going to say it was George’s fault, but he certainly didn’t help, and I’d say we’ve grown rather less fond of each other since the ordeal. So — sorry, George! But it’s off to the pen name graveyard with you.

And now here I am, set to head back out into madness, and I’m trying to change things up a bit. For once, why not stick my own name on something?

Well, it turns out there is one modern reason why an author might want to change her name. My current name brings up 4,980,000 google hits, not one of which is referring to me; Amy Ross is just too damn common in this age of electronic searches. So I’ve solved the problem by rooting around in my family history: Introducing Amy Danziger Ross, who hopefully will have the modern magic combination of being easy to spell, easy to pronounce, easy to remember, and easy to google. (And hey, it wouldn’t hurt if she sold a book this time… I’m tired of coming up with new names.)

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Pretty Hate Machine

By amy ross | Filed in books, writing

Dave Eggers, Wyndham Lewis and Hate.

I have to share this link because it references many delightful things, from early twentieth century avant garde art to Bloomsbury bashing to a book called The Jews: Are they Human? (Though I mean really, being human is so overrated…) But my favorite part of the post was the author’s little google-powered (un)popularity test. Basically, she entered a bunch of authors’ names into google as part of the phrase “I hate _____” and compared how many hits each entry got. This is thought-provoking list:

Mary Karr: 0
Donna Tartt: 0
Ben Kunkel: 0
Marisha Pessl: 1
Ayelet Waldman: 1
Jonathan Franzen: 2
Michael Chabon: 2
Richard Powers: 2
Joan Didion: 4
Elizabeth Wurtzel: 89
Zadie Smith: 102
Jonathan Safran Foer: 120
Rick Moody: 374
David Sedaris: 774
Dave Eggers: 3880

Maria Bustillo’s point is that Dave Eggers is greatly despised by random people on the internet. But of course, what it mostly seems to indicate (as Mark Athitakis points out) is that Dave Eggers is more famous and actively talked-about than many other contemporary writers. Which is what intrigues me — can fame be measured in the number of people willing to publicly loathe you? It makes some sense — Donna Tartt (to pick a name from the list at random) is pretty famous, and probably has at least a few haters out there. But would anyone come out on a website and say specifically, in writing, that they hate her? They might be tempted, but then feel bad… how sad it would be for her to google herself one morning and be confronted with their pocket of vitriol. So people keep mum.

But someone like Eggers — you figure, if he googles himself (and surely he does three times daily), he will see a LOT of sites before he finds this one, and most of them will be saying very positive things. So even if he does eventually stumble across such a post, he can probably take the blow to his ego.

So in that sense, it’s sort of telling — at what point do you become famous enough not simply to have haters, but to have haters who believe that you are sufficiently famous that there can be no harm in bashing you on the internet? I’m not sure, but I’ve just decided that this is the level of fame I am going to shoot for. This is my new ambition.

(As it happens, there’s already one site containing the words “I hate George Ross” online, but of course, it’s not referring to me. Should I claim it anyway? Only 3880 to go until I’m more famous than Dave Eggers.)

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What can writers learn from musicians?

By amy ross | Filed in books, publishing, writing

So lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of frustrated writers (though most recently from literary enfant terrible Steve Almond) about how the current publishing model needs to change, and we should all look to the music industry for a system that allows non-mainstream talent to find its niche and gain success.

It seems like a good analogy, at first glance. After all, writers and musicians are about equally arty, and both art forms are distributed via mass-media (as opposed to say, sculpture or… beadwork).

But as much as I love the idea of being the literary equivalent of Built to Spill or Gravy Train!!!!, I’ve spotted some crucial differences between music and literature. Musicians don’t need a label to distribute their work because they can build buzz and sell albums at shows. And it’s relatively easy for a band to get booked for small shows, because bars and clubs are desperate for talent. They won’t always pay, but at least there’s exposure and a fairly captive audience. If you’re good, it won’t be long before people notice.

Already famous authors can work a similar angle by doing local readings. But the world isn’t exactly clamouring to hear unknown authors read. The temptation for many of us is to put writing on the internet to build buzz, but the internet is the opposite of a captive audience. Only the very grabbiest, pulpiest fiction has a ghost of a chance on the internet (if produced by an unknown), and that’s very limiting.

Does it have to be this way? I don’t think so. I think it might be possible to create a world in which unknowns could read a few pages of their stuff to a room full of drunks and maybe get a little recognition, if they’re good — kind of like poetry slams, or amateur night at the Apollo, or the Gong Show. I’d personally love to see such a thing in action, but so far… I haven’t thought of any good way to make it happen.

So… I’m putting the idea out into the internet. Maybe somewhere out there is an unpublished author more desperate/enterprising than I am, and I’d be glad to jump on his bandwagon.

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Bottoms Up

By amy ross | Filed in books, writing

Via Mark Sarvas, I’m getting a kick out of these Life Magazine photos of famous literary lushes. I have to say, the gallery is so big it makes you wonder if anyone in the world of letters wasn’t an addict of some sort. What do we think? Do altered states aid the imagination, or does the pain of creation require self-medication? Or were they all just doing it to be fashionable? (Or, perhaps more accurately, because it’s fun?)

And of course, the far more crucial questions:

Why does William Burroughs look so fabulous at any age?

And what the hell did Truman Capote think he was doing?

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