BIBLIOGRIND
Adventures in Writing, Reading & Book Culture
January 8, 2013 at 7:55 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
At the start of a new year (lower case!) I’ve been thinking about “work” and its definitions and all that its connotations entail. Back in the summer of ’11 I read de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” and was, at first, put off by his narrative style, and then I became engrossed with it. Why the change? He took the idea of work to give us basic concepts based on numerous professions. This provided a balance to his investigation, which is about what we do and how it’s done, rather than how it makes us feel (or worse, for a book, How we SHOULD feel).
july 18, 2011
“There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labour can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place. Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.”
– Alain de Botton, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” (“painting”)
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
January 4, 2013 at 5:13 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I underlined these few sentences from Saramago’s fantastical (and ironical) view of Jesus’ life. This book marks the second time Saramago used his particular narrative style. One might call it peculiar, but only the first five pages. Then you wonder why all books aren’t written this way.
january, 2005
“I’ll bet if we met the devil and he allowed us to open him up, we might be surprised to find God jumping out. Pastor still liked to provoke Jesus with these outrageous remarks. Jesus had gradually learned that the best way to deal with this was ignore it and say nothing. For Pastor might have gone even further, suggesting that on opening up God one might find the devil inside.”
. . .
“Smiling at this renewal of the world, they bare rotten teeth, but it’s the thought that counts.”
– José Saragamo, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
December 19, 2012 at 8:39 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Stuart thinks: “Truth was fundamental, his life-oath. Certainty was there, honeydew was there, but meanwhile the dedication remained as a task, cumbersome, detailed, where every minute contained the likelihood of failure. How could such a paradox be lived?”
– Iris Murdoch, “The Good Apprentice”
October 13, 2012 at 9:01 pm · Filed under THE LETTERS OF MARK BEYER :: reading & writing & book culture, The Prague Blog, Ways of Seeing
That’s right … I’m reading three books at once. “All the King’s Men” by Penn Warren, “Through the Language Glass” by Guy Deutscher, and “The Ecstasy of Influence” by Jonathan Lethem. Good books, all—a fabulous novel, a thought-provoking meditation on language-culture influence, and essays on books & arts culture.
These are mood-related books for me. And time-space related, as well. As I’m trundling around Prague, or writing at home, and always trying to avoid everything re socio-politico-televistic, I have options. Lately, one option has not been wholly engrossing/intellect-grabbing. And since I’m very story oriented, I’ve wanted to read more non-fiction to fill out my philosophical cravings. Novels pull me into their world and don’t let me go. That’s okay. I prefer the ephemeral stage than the actual. Life would be terribly boring for me without the written story.
But here’s where I become contradictory. This love of story comes from passion for language. Deutscher has this fascinating theory about “why the world looks different in other languages.” This is not science, but culture, politics, the passage of time, and … science, too! He begins with the concept of color. Sounds as easy as primary and secondary. It’s not.
Likewise a deflection from fiction is Lethem’s collected essays. I’d read his journalism in Harper’s and the NYT and elsewhere. While I’ve tried to stay away from criticism and cultural essays over the past 8 months or so (mainly because what I’ve found written is done poorly, in my opinion, or taking such esoteric angles on subjects, that all I could do by the middle of such essays was to sigh. Sigh.) there’s that other tug at my conscience that asks me to “please” keep up with society (or at least with one of its subheadings, “culture”).
The Lethem essays focus on art and writing and book culture topics. I hadn’t known Lethem was a science fiction writer. And a good writer, too. His passion for the works of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick are enough to draw me toward that genre. Which, well said by many before me, in their capable hands transcends any notion of genre. On the other hand, both of those authors are dead, and their greatest stories were written between the time I wasn’t even a twinkle in my parent’s eyes (they hadn’t even met each other yet, in Dick’s case) and while I was in my Stephen King phase. Which makes it fortunate that good stories transcend contemporary and, especially, pop culture.
At some point soon I’m going to dive back into “King’s Men” to finish this masterpiece. It’s worth savoring, actually, so I’m not un-happy that I’ve had it going so many weeks. (to confess, I put it aside when I found a copy of “Cloud Atlas”) Also, I want to begin “East of Eden” soon; it’s a story I’ve wanted to read for many years. As for the other two: books on language and of collected essays can be read just about anywhere; and on those odd days where I find myself torn between fantasy and uber-reality, the short-form comes in handy.
September 22, 2012 at 8:23 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I first read Penn Warren’s politics-of-America novel 15 years ago. Many of its images have stuck in my mind since then. Penn Warren has sight-heavy scenes of high drama and deep introspection. It’s a book of America, a story of politics, and characters of high (and low) character. No much less or more than America has ever seen; but maybe more poignant today than every.
Where have all the books like this gone? Too few exist. Where have all the characters gone? They’ve come alive.
The flavor of “All the King’s Men” is politics of all sorts, in all guises. Penn Warren never lets up. This is a abject lesson for every writer, young & old, new or seasoned: whatever your story is about, every page and every line of dialogue must have its blood on its words. Here’s a sample:
” ‘Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks,’ he would say, leaning forward, leaning at them, looking at them. And he would pause, letting the words sink in. And in the quiet the crowd would be restless and resentful under these words, the words they knew people called them but the words nobody ever got up and called them to their face. ‘Yeah,’ he would say, ‘yeah,’ and twist his mouth on the word, ‘that’s what you are, and you needn’t get mad at me for telling you. Well, get mad, but I’m telling you. That’s what you are. And me—I’m one, too. Oh, I’m a red-neck, for the sun has beat down on me. Oh, I’m a sucker, for I fell for that sweet-talking fellow in the fine automobile. Oh, I took the sugar tit and hushed my crying. Oh, I’m a hick and I am the hick they were going to try to use and split the hick vote. But I’m standing here on my own hind legs, for even a dog can learn to do that, give him time. I learned. It took me a time but I learned, and here I am on my own hind legs.’ And he would lean at them. And demand, ‘Are you, are you on your hind legs? Have you learned that much yet? You think you can learn that much?’ ”
– Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men”
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
September 2, 2012 at 7:08 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Updike is a such a fine writer that reading this for the love of language and metaphor and the one-two-punch comic sentences is worth buying this book. Henry Bech is a particular type of 60s & 70s character who doesn’t specifically translate into the 21st century, but he’s the kind of fuck-up that every family has (even the successful fuck-up of the family) and so he’s good to know, fun to be around, and can help you out if you need it. Some of these collected stories are wonderful satires on travel, the literary scene, writing fiction, and being Jewish in America, but some are a bit thin, and by that they are send-ups in a world of send-up publication. Updike seemed to rattle several of these off, and, if not for his honed comic touch and fine view of American society, these several might fail. Overall, though, I enjoyed this pastiche of throwback Americana.
september 2, 2012
“Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the course morality even competitiveness imposes.”
“He thought intelligence a function of the individual and that groups of persons were intelligent in inverse proportion to their size. Nations had the brains of an amoeba whereas a committee approached the condition of a trainable moron.”
“Norma had, he remembered, a fondness for vodka stingers, for Black Russians, for anything whose ingredients one was likely not to have.”
– John Updike, “Basic Bech”
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
September 1, 2012 at 10:31 am · Filed under Ways of Seeing
I was engaged in a short (for me) but bitter (for some commentators) dialogue on LinkedIn two weeks ago that, at once, encouraged me to drop that group (The Writer’s Guild) and come to understand what I believe about writing.
The discussion began with my string “If You Have a Thick Skin, You Might Want to be a Writer” for which I included the edgy, and intentionally provocative question, “Do too many people think they can write books? (I mean GOOD books…)”.
To make a long story short, the majority of posts took exception to my making myself some paragon of good taste, which I had not, only posed that question. People got nasty, said I was a snob, said I didn’t have the right to say what was “good writing” — or what was not. They said, as a major block of like-minded voices, anybody who finished of book, or story, or … anything … was a good writer and that — their reasons never extended as far as explanation — no one could tell them their writing was BAD WRITING.
To me these people sounded like amazingly stupid interlopers onto my turf. Yes, some of them had written books. Yes, some of them have been professional journalists for years. Yes, some have even “sold lots of books” and got “great reviews” on Amazon. But all of this really doesn’t mean anything, because unless you can make statements about WHY a book is good or bad, and WHY writing lacks everything needed to tell a story, and WHY the sales figures for books merely computers units sold, then you cannot be considered a reasonable judge of literature, of quality, or even literary taste.
I believe this because there must be some standards placed on GOOD, GREAT, BAD, OKAY, and AWFUL. “If you don’t know it, you can’t be taught it,” is not a fair statement about judging literature, because the teaching of standards is no less possible than the teaching of speaking or reading a language. Both have rules, and there have always been rules about what is literature and what is genre fiction — at least until the advent of Amazon publishing, and those writer manqués with thin skins who like to spout off. Listen: just because people say something over and over (“any book is good, who are you to question that?”) doesn’t make it true.
As an egalitarian micro-society, Amazon publishing lives up only to Robespierre and his blood-soaked henchmen. Their indictment of French society and opening the gates of prisons and letting loose the “freedoms of man” only served to, finally, murder a lot of people. This is what happens when you put the mob in control of government, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, and even taste.
“Fifty Shades of Gray” isn’t so bad!
Yes it is, and here’s why: the sentence structure is B-class; its imagery is pedestrian or not there at all; its dialogue is fatuous; the scenes are repetitive; the characters are lifeless (this, for a sex-laden story!); and its sex scenes are ridiculous and highly un-erotic. These aren’t merely opinion, or a matter of taste. If you like these books, like them for the story, if there actually is one there, but don’t claim the writing is what grips you.
Have books been dummed-down so much that most people don’t know the difference between good and bad? And that good and bad is NOT a matter of taste? That most best sellers are not good simply by virtue of selling a lot of books? It seems to me that, these days, to scale the proverbial “bar” once set to determine quality writing, one must walk downstairs into the basement.
Let me end this here: it is more than opinion that determines good writing, and love for craft is part of that, as is love of language, as is using dialogue that speaks to theme as much as drives story, as characters are fully realized without a reader’s need to “add” his own interpretation of who/what the character is, as scene is developed with an eye toward imagery that brings the five senses to play, as language is thematic and playful with the subject, as sentences are coherent and develop a coherent story that has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. No, not all stories that contain these are good (because then “taste” does play a part) but that’s a start. The authors that practice this craft? Roth and Updike, Atwood and Murdoch, McEwan and Bellow, Banville and Ackroyd, Naipaul and Theroux, Stead and Lessing … to name a few. Most of them are dead; where are today’s?
Someone in the thread made a comment directed at me, “You’re riding a very tall horse and I wouldn’t want to be you when you get knocked off it.”
This is my answer to that bit of wisdom: The horse on which I ride IS high, well high above the mud and slop and shit that a good portion of “writers” now stand, sit, or wallow around like pigs. I write strong literature, books that make you question why we are who we are; characters who challenge your self-identity; narrative that is striking and poetic and asks you to bring some level of intelligence to the page. And on this horse I hardly ever look down, for that is not my need, and my eyesight is on the horizon, where the scepters of writing-Kings and writing-Queens await me, where Knights-of-writing stand tall abreast of my steed, helping to keeping safe the idea, and my honest practice, of GOOD WRITING.
I hold my own books up for such scrutiny as anyone might make a challenge.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
August 7, 2012 at 8:33 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Philip Roth is the kind of writer that, when I desperately need a “go-to” book — for a trip, to follow a “great read”, or when I want to know what it feels like to compose a great sentence — he’s the writer whose books I’ll shuffle and pick one at random. Roth’s humor, his fully-realized and multi-dimensional characters, his crisp dialogue that gets to the heart of the subject and scene, always captivates, exhilarates, and inspires me.
july 11, 2011
“Standing singly at the Wall, some rapidly swaying and rhythmically bobbing as they recited their prayers, others motionless but for the lightning flutter of their mouths, were seventeen of the world’s twelve million Jews communing with the King of the Universe. To me it looked as thought they were communing solely with the stones in whose crevices pigeons were roosting some twenty feet above their heads. I thought (as I am predisposed to think), ‘If there is a God who plays a role in our world, I will eat every hat in this town’—nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplifying as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect of the human mind. Rock is just right, I thought: what on earth could be less responsive? Even the cloud drifting by overhead, Shuki’s late father’s ‘Jewish cloud,’ appeared less indifferent to our encompassed and uncertain existence. I think that I would have felt less detached from seventeen Jews who openly admitted that they were talking to rock than from these seventeen who imagined themselves telexing the Creator directly; had I known for sure it was rock and rock alone that they were addressing, I might even have joined in. [. . .] Of course, to be as tenderized by a block of stone as a mother is by her ailing child needn’t really mean a thing. You can go around kissing all the walls in the world, and all the crosses, and the femurs and tibias of all the holy blessed martyrs ever butchered by the infidel, and back in your office be a son of a bitch to the staff and at home a perfect prick to your family. Local history hardly argued that transcendence over ordinary human failings, let alone the really vicious proclivities, is likely to be expedited by pious deeds committed in Jerusalem.”
“The result was that for the first time in my life I felt some sort of power in her (as well as some womanly appeal) and wondered what I could possibly achieve persisting on playing the domestic peacemaker. Wasn’t everyone happier enraged? They were certainly more interesting. People are unjust to anger—it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.”
– Philip Roth, “The Counterlife”
August 7, 2012 at 8:55 am · Filed under Ways of Seeing
“Literature and Fiction” — You’ll find this category listed on a plaque in the major bookstores. These titles are the industry’s marked division between contemporary/historical-themed stories that have been divided from the genres typically titled “Horror” or “Mystery” and “Thrillers” or “Science Fiction” — plot-heavy stories whose characters are, well, part of the plot. Oh, and then there’s one of the newer categories, “Dark Romance” (love that has an obsession with fangs, is my guess).
“To Categorize” has been an ordering device since Caxton’s day. Cervantes based his most famous character on the delusional fantasies one gets from reading too much — in Quixote’s case, Chivalric Novels. You need only jump a few generations to find what LeCarre and Fleming had developed on top of Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” … and how Steven King brought back what Edgar Allen Poe had begun with most of his short stories a hundred years earlier.
Are there differences between the “literature” of Cervantes and LeCarre and Conrad and Poe and the “genre” of King and Fleming and (most recently) Larsson and Meyer? I can only answer with my opinion, not any difinitive answer. And my answer is…
Yes, but less are the differences in writing quality as there are with intent. You can investigate this yourself by going to the library, bookstore, or look through your own shelves. Pull out several genre-category books you know well, and the same for literature-category titles. How does each begin? How are the stories sustained? What happens at the end? Easy questions to answer, really. The more difficult questions to answer are What do you know about the three main characters? How did the beginning make you feel; and how was that different compared to the ending? What is the turning point in the psychology of the main character? Do the characters represent real life, and does the story say anything about the culture in which it was written?
If you answered the first series of questions with details about the events that take place, in which a character must do something in order to prevent, or make certainty, something happening; and if you can tell me only that this character lives in a particular city, likes wine over beer, and eats sandwiches standing up at the kitchen sink, then you’ve probably gathered the definition of genre fiction: plot heavy, light on character introspection, with “twists” at the end, or beginning, of each chapter.
If you answered the second series of questions by focusing on relationships, emotions, character action & re-action to each other, dialogue rich with introspection and investigating each others’ motivations and emotions, then I think you’ve gathered a good definition of literature: little or no obvious plot (or that which doesn’t turn every other chapter), focus on characterization and motivation and emotional connection to events/other characters, and an overall relationship and association with contemporary culture. Also, information that is left out is as important as that which is given. Likewise, on nearly every page you’ll find something wise.
But let’s face it, lots of classic AND contemporary “literature” sucks because its intent is not well planned and then poorly executed by a less-than-competent wordsmith whose best-formed sentences often begin with “The…”. On the other hand, such well-plotted — and highly crafted sentences — can be found throughout the novels of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Sophie Hannah, Larry Niven, John LeCarre, Tom Clancy, King and Straub.
However, they won’t be found in James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham, Dan Brown, or Sue Grafton. Heavy names on the Best Sellers lists every year, right? That’s true. But that doesn’t mean they write good story, nor good prose.
What people read is as personal as who they marry. This makes sense. Yet even a marriage has its ups and downs, and must evolve over time; evolution that’s not so much going toward something “better” by anyone’s definition, but at least something different.
My marriage with genre fiction ended shortly after I finished writing my second novel. It was crime fiction, and it was pretty good: lots of story, plenty of twists, some blackmail and murder, and sex that was less gratuitous and more in line with the plot. But I had found that, with this second novel, there was nothing more I could “say” to readers.
My divorce with genre happened because I married too young (first novel, 18; second, 24). And then I realized there was far more to talk about, and the stories in which I could say so much more, in the “category” of literature, where characters reigned, not plot twists; where life could be investigated against the backdrop of contemporary society; and, finally, a place and “person” whom I could love over and over, finding more inside her, getting more from her, giving more of myself to her, than anything from that youthful, whimsical love.
post-script…
Lit-Fict: if the “plot” can best be explained by ITS THEME, then it’s literary (eg, “A man thinks the world is against him and his revolutionary ideas about architecture, but in the end he is proven wrong by his success.” — “The Fountainhead”)
Genre Fict: if the “plot” can best be explained by WHAT HAPPENS, then it’s genre (eg, “A vampire tells his life story to a journalist, and we learn the chronicles of vampirism over a two-hundred-year period.” — “Interview with the Vampire.”)
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
July 17, 2012 at 8:48 pm · Filed under THE LETTERS OF MARK BEYER :: reading & writing & book culture, The Prague Blog
These latest three books make it 15 for the year, thus far, which is nowhere near the reading I did last year (49!) … but I have a lot more duties pulling at my time. Nevertheless, I continue to read in the “Year of the Big Book”….
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
I’ve said much about this novel already on this blog, but as a final (final) word, this book was written in French, won the country’s most prestigious award, and, after I finished it, there was no doubt of its deserving such a prize. The character of Dr Max Aue is one that is enduring in literature, and shall stay with me for a long time, as his ability to see through the atrocities of the Nazi war machine even as he participated it as soldier, National Socialist, and German, make for one intense psychological journey. Meanwhile, we find ourselves at the center of the war’s most famous battles, and infamous death camps; we meet the Nazi high command, and watch (with astonishment and some glee) Hitler get bitten on the nose.
The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings
The popularity of English is far beyond the phenomenon of a small island’s tongue (hardly comprised of its native words, anymore) gaining world dominance in a mere 600 years or so. But the fun of reading where lots and oodles and bushel-baskets full of words come from, and why they’re in the language, is why this book is worth your time. More stories describe the etymology of these words than the mere explanations themselves.
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Okay, this is not a Big Book, but it’s the perfect size for traveling, which I had done last week, and, with this story of an intense group of relationships, the time runs well as you read about friends who make some strange pact, after the death of a mutual paramour. Meanwhile, the everyday world closes in on them both. For a micro-cosmic look at unusual characters who do quite usual things in their own strange ways, to excedingly odd results, you needn’t look further than McEwan.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
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