august 18, 2010

” ‘ You came, Boston,’ he remarked, with the air of a satisfied instructor. Dottie glanced uncertainly at him; could he mean that thing she had done whtat she did not like to think about? ‘I beg your pardon,’ she murmured. ‘I mean you had an orgasm.’ Dottie made a vague, still-inquiring noise in her throat; she was pretty sure, now, she understood, but the new word discombobulated her. ‘A climax,’ he added, more sharply. ‘Do they teach that word at Vassar?’ ‘Oh,’ said Dottie, almost disappointed that that was all there was to it.”

– Mary McCarthy, “The Group”

(Read an excerpt of “What Beauty”)

I’ve been champing at the bit for months now, because the ARCs I sent to reviewers went out from America, and my mom & dad were the first to see a printed copy. What agony! Now my happiness is sated; much more so when I thumb through the book and find that many, many sections read well to my reader’s mind. And I haven’t found any typos. Yay!!

I began this book — under the working title “Of Sirens & Muses” — back in July 2009 with notes and scenes and characters and its beginning and its ending. I finished a working draft in just over 14 months, while teaching full-time hours and falling in love. Meanwhile, in Sept 2010 “The Village Wit” came out under the Siren & Muse Publishing house and did well despite a shoestring advertising-marketing budget. And despite readers flocking to teenage vampire books like little bloodsuckers.

The great help and superior editing I received under the guidance of John Mitchell at S&M helped me to redefine some of the plot elements and character portrayal. That major rewrite between Jan – June 2011 put the book nearer its final form. Then I went at the clutter and the language and the dialogue and the imagery. By Dec — during the Christmas holidays — I had found that there was no more I could do without putting myself in the path of a completed story.

Now books are here. I’m waiting for reviews to come out from some — any — of the 45 reviewers who got a copy from the great work Bert Wells in S&M Publicity did to scare up initial interest. Those reviews should start sprouting like mushrooms (or, in the season and parlance of this part of the world, like asparagus) on or about June 1st. As a small press publication, I can’t expect that all 45 outlets shall read & review the book. I can hope for 10% and anything above that is gravy on the weisswurst (as they say in Munich )).

Sometime in mid-June I’ll have a reading and reception at Shakespeare & Son, in Prague, where the sales and word-of-mouth will begin.

Mark & Asia settle in on the DeutcheBahn bus to Munchin

AsiaMark took their 4-day weekend seriously. It’s been about time, for a long time now, to get out of town.

Deutche Bahn runs an express bus that beats train times by 1+ hrs. We lighted out of Prague early Saturday morning armed with sandwiches and a book and clothing. The bus was half empty, and the trip was fast, smooth, and uneventful. Our hotel was in a semi-Halal section of Munich, which wasn’t exactly scary, and only a few blocks off of Old Town.

A big plaza leading into Munich's Altstadt

Munich is best visited on foot, as most of what a visitor wants to see is in the Alt Stadt area (old town) — basically an oval, surrounded by a busy thoroughfare, filled with crisscross streets that was once the place to be, and now is the place to spend money on capitalistic merchandise, brewery beverages, and butchery products stuffed into animal intestines. Yummie!!

Lovely hugs in front of the fertile fountain

Here’s the shopping & restaurants & tourist sights. All connected well because it’s a massive pedestrian zone. We dipped into shops, took photos, and avoided the smokers. At least smoking is verboten in shops & restaurants, but boy! do these krauts know how to light up.

Beautiful architecture jumps up at many a turn

Oddly enough, then, Munich is a great bicycling city, with designated lanes that lead everywhere. At the English Garden, which is larger than NYC’s Central Park, the various lanes are crushed stone, and everything leads to the two beer gardens in the park (more on these in the next post).

Asia takes a breath of fresh air in Munich's English Garden

Enjoying a much-needed refreshment after walking many kliks

There are also many gorgeous squares where you’ll find street musicians serenading café denizens, and beautiful parks with plenty of benches hidden by leafy shrubbery.

This café outside the Hof Garden looks onto a busy square with lots of human action

At the beer gardens, the expectation is to get the BIG BEER … and a helpful friend is always just across the benches:

This is the test of a real friend!!

The English Garden is crenelated by swift-running streams as offshoots of the nearby Isar River. People swim, ducks get busy together, and even surfers have found a spot (picks on this in future post).

If you're blind as a bat, you might get close to the bubbling brook.

Polite Sex by James Wilcox

Two Louisiana girls graduate from college and move to New York City to grow up, find their riches, and get far away from the humdrum town that they didn’t want to live in anymore. While Emily has the higher plan, to act and be somebody, it’s Clara who finds celebrity by going the lowbrow path all the way. Nevertheless, Emily has issues with men, issues with women, and probably never should have tried to tame New York. However, this entirely disjointed story loses any strength it might have got from the author because he left the best scenes out. I’m the type of reader to lets an author tell the story his way, but Wilcox left me wondering just who these ladies were and why they ever wanted to leave their little world behind.

Solar by Ian McEwan

This hilarious take on the greening of the planet uses one disipated, philandering, divorce recidivist to expouse the virtures of photo-voltaics, possibly humanity’s best hope of long-term, free-like energy. In the meantime, we humans do well to fuck up all our chances. Especially great is one line in here that goes something like “the Indians and Chinese may have a lock on the future of solar energy, unless of course the Americans decide to wake up.”

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

This story is so humane in its unraveling the not-so-mysterious problem of hermaphroditism by way of intermarriage, that I enjoyed every sentence. Eugenides loves language and telling story, which is a good combination for someone who shows such a gift in portraying characters who are sympathetic and tragic and happy and miserable. Calliope Stephanides comes into the world as a boy, is raised as a girl (because of a misperception of the genitals), and then comes to realize that she is a boy. The humor and suffering and success and oh-so-American odyssey of this immigrant-Greek family pulls together three generations that span from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Yesterday we entertained ourselves with a picnic, including Calvin, in Riegovy Sady (pics following). The air was warm, the sun was out, the fatty Czech girls were pink like freshly parboiled piglets. And we nibbled like rabbits on our veggie & egg lunch (with red wine).

We found a good spot beneath a tree, and the wind was pleasant to be almost cool. After munching and talking, me and Cal read a few bits from our recent writing. I read a couple bit-pieces of scenes from the novel-in-progress, “Max the blind guy” — in which salacious words, dead, and thoughts ejaculated from the page. Asia threw out a “Jesus-Maria!” or two, while Cal chuckled in that male-knowing way.

When about as much fun as we could stand was stood, we left.

Tomorrow: another Czech holiday. Party on!!

Asia drew my rabbit caracature for my name-day card

Yesterday, April 25, was my Name Day. I know America doesn’t celebrate name days, but in Europe we do, so you Americans just have to miss out on the fun of having, basically, two special days devoted to YOU and ONLY YOU each year.

So anyway … my Polish/Czech name-translation is Marek, and this is was my day. Asia made it extra special with a surprise gift bag as we went to bed on the 24th, because we weren’t going to see each other most of the 25th. The bag contained a very nice card, with Asia’s special illustration of Mark Rabbit going off to work on the card. Also in the bag were a bottle of wine, a bar of dark chocolate, and a Vichy cosmetics lip balm. I’m honored to be Asia’s husband, as she really knows how to dish out surprises, and all the rest

And then we slipped off into dreamland and in the morning I left to teach stuttering Czechs their English and was gone for 12 hours. Do you know what I did when I got home? Yes! Of course I kissed my wife … and then I popped the cork on that bottle of red.

Oi !!!

With some astounding feats of authorial prestidigitation, Eugenides has conjured the language and “things” we Americans said and bought and used daily around the house (and put into our bodies) during the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and especially the ’70s. For someone who grew up during that messed-up decade, seeing the products of the day was a flash to my own past — and something I’ve been diddling with myself, as the book I’m now working on jumps through the ’50s – 2014; all kinds of fun to be had.

Eugenides brands Detroit, and America, such as it is: inhospitable, but with possibility … or, at least, opportunity:

april 15, 2012

“Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united, in accordance with the young nation’s federalism, as well as classically symmetrical, in accordance with Jeffersonian aesthetics. This dream never quite came to be. Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”

“Like many amateurs, Dr. Phil assumed that the only proper subject for art was a picturesque landscape that had nothing to do with his experience. He painted sea vistas he’d never seen and forest hamlets he’d never visited, complete with a pipe-smoking figure resting on a log. Dr. Philobosian never talked about Smyrna and left the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his first wife, or his murdered sons and daughters. Maybe this was the reason for his survival.”

– Jeffrey Eugenides, “Middlesex”

Here’s a pic of the front cover with the spine:

And here’s the back cover:

It’s a photographic concept that Asia and I dreamed up, and Lia realized for us as the cover vis-a-vis beauty a la marketability. These days, one needs to think about “readability” via the inter-web thingy, where everything is reduced and thumbnails of book covers must be “viewable.”  We’ve got that, I think.

Now to promote the book with this beginning visual combined with sample excerpts. Also in the works: a book trailer. Much work to do, but today I am very happy.

What’s going on? Who’s to blame? Is there “fault” at all, or is this issue simply an issue of perception? And why have most critics become mere book-report journalists, without an ability to engage the texts nor their readers?

This is a subject I think worthy of exploration. I love language, and like to use language in all its beauty and awful possibilities to create complex, poly-dimensional characters who have voices and do things that carry the story to a deep, cathartic conclusion.

Updike was a powerhouse critic, who enjoyed books and delighted in writing about books with such flair, erudition, and gusto that his reviews read like wonderful short stories. James Wood is perhaps the pre-eminent reviewer in the English language today, and his ability for “deep reading” and character investigation rivals the authors he reviews. I also must highlight a few women reviewers, but for the life of me none come readily to mind (perhaps Cris Mazza, or Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin … but no one better suggest NYT’s Michiko Kakutani).

I shall focus on a few books I’ve read recently that have shown a decided lack of imagination, or poor, non-inventive writing skill, and ridiculously banal characterization. Basically, the bread’n'butter of any novelist/story-teller. And I shall investigate the reviews each of these books got at the time of release; glowing reviews that, from a reader’s perspective, guaranteed a good book. Well I want my money back.

Baring that recompense … which has been bared … I’ll offer an opinion on James Wilcox’s “Polite Sex”, Joe Meno’s “The Great Perhaps”, and “The Possibility of an Island” by Michel Houellbecq. Juxtaposed to these poorly written stories will be Ian McEwan’s “Solar”, Rohinton Minstry’s “Family Matters”, and Cormac McCarthy’s “Suttree” … okay, oOOps!, no women are in here, so there’s a bit of editorial decision-making I’ll attend to quickly.

By comparing the stories of writers who love the language and use it with care (and passion) with those who may not (at least it seems so by their contribution to American belles lettres), and using the further contrast/comparison of their reviews, I hope to show that novel writing needs help, and criticism needs resuscitation from near death.

Stay tuned.