Most writers were heavy readers first; most heavy readers eventually try their hand at writing. Some successful writers pick up their trade through osmosis, but most need to carefully study their predecessors, to parse their work and identify precisely how they pulled it off. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer explains (largely by example) how to be a close reader, mostly with the aim of instructing would-be writers in how to model their own prose. She begins, appropriately, with words, moves onto sentences and then paragraphs; after examining the basic components of text itself, she discusses the larger elements of fiction writing. She also includes an entire chapter raving about Chekhov, simply because she’s totally nuts for him. Nothing wrong with that.

Prose loves reading, and this book makes you want to read, even if her devotion to meticulous close reading makes the entire endeavor seem as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Personally, I am not a close reader. I am a frantic reader. While I appreciate Prose’s call to read less and better, I can’t get over feeling like I’m racing the clock. There are only so many books you can get through in a lifetime, and there are an infinite number of books I really want to read. Since graduating from college, I have never once reread a book, which is, of course, a shame. If anyone should feel at leisure to read closely and carefully, it would be me, as I currently have nothing but free time, but still, I read quickly, in gulps. Which, incidentally, is the best way to read non-fiction (or at least, to read non-fiction for informational purposes).

But fiction is about the read itself. Prose says, of reading Chekhov on a long daily bus commute during a particularly dismal period of her life:

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on the bus.

This slim book, edited by Toni Morrison, has eleven short essays originally delivered by various PEN writers on the issue of “censorship and the power of the written word.” There’s an interesting divide here between the authors whose subjects have not generally been political (John Updike, Francine Prose, Russell Banks) and those writers who live and work in turbulent or repressive areas (whether they grew up in these areas, or have traveled widely in them) (Morrison, Pico Iyer, Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gorimer). The first group tends to talk about the literary crappiness of novels written specifically to draw attention to some cause, or to protest an outrage. They emphasize the importance of literature as an observant and non-judgmental work of art.

Banks:

A true novelist. . . has no thought of his or her audience. . . . Not when submitting oneself to the discipline and rigor and tradition of the history of the form, which require that one be at all times wholly honest and nonjudgmental and as intelligent as possible – that one be, as Henry James prescribed, a person ‘on whom nothing is lost.’

Prose:

The polemicist, or the theorist, or the strategist would have trouble with the stance that Chekhov identified as basic for the artist. That is, the notion that writers must admit they understand nothing of life, that nothing in this world makes sense, so all a writer can do is to try and describe it.

The second group, while often agreeing with the first, tends to focus more on the revolutionary potential of the written word, and on the absolute indignity and intolerability of censorship. Both groups essentially agree with each other: the job of writers is to mirror what is true, and nothing – no cause or party or regime or nation or event – that impedes this truth-telling can be tolerated. So that when Orhan Pamuk (whose essay was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting) writes about Turkey, he is writing what he sees in the society where he lives. Whether or not he intends to make an overtly political statement (and if his book is to be of any interest, hopefully, making a political statement would not be his purpose in writing it), his work might still be censored by those who don’t agree with or like the reality it reflects.

Pamuk:

Whatever the country, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as much as bread and water, should never be limited by using nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or – worst of all – business or military interests. If many nations outside the West suffer poverty in shame, it is not because they have freedom of expression but because they don’t. . . . Yes, we must be alert to those who denigrate immigrants and minorities for their religion, their ethnic roots, or the oppression that the governments of the countries they’ve left behind have visited on their own people.

But to respect the humanity and religious beliefs of minorities is not to suggest hat we should limit freedom of thought on their behalf. Respect for the rights of religious or ethnic minorities should never be an excuse to violate freedom of speech.

The only form of activism appropriate for writers (when they are acting in the capacity of “writer” rather than, say, that of “citizen”) is witnessing, and it’s pretty much impossible to write anything of merit without witnessing. On that, it seems all these contributors agree.

Gordimer:

The extremity of human experience does not make a writer.

Updike:

To be sure, as a citizen, one votes, attends meetings, subscribes to liberal pieties, pays or withholds taxes, and contributes to charities . . . But as a writer, for me to attempt to expand my artistic scope into all the areas of my human concern, to substitute nobility of purpose for accuracy of execution, would certainly be to forfeit whatever social usefulness I do have.

Attention, male writers: unless you particularly plan to alienate your readership, try not to cram a bunch of pointless derogatory comments about women into the first ten pages of your book, unless that’s really what you’re all about. I’ve noticed this with a number of books lately – I’ll get all alienated in the first chapter, and decide not to read the rest, and then keep going only to find the entire rest of the book totally devoid of casual misogyny. It’s so weird! I noticed this in Lost Cosmonaut, and now here in David Rakoff’s book of humorous essays, Don’t Get Too Comfortable. In the first essay, “Love It or Leave It,” about applying for citizenship during the latter Bush administration, on page 2, we have:

After twenty-two years, it seemed a little bit coy to still be playing the Canadian card. I felt like the butt of the joke about the proper lady who, when asked if she would have sex with a strange man for a million dollars, allows that yes she would do it. But when asked if she would do the same thing for a can of Schlitz and a plastic sleeve of beer nuts, reels back with an affronted, ‘What do you think I am?’ to which the response is, ‘Madam, we have already established what you are. Now we’re just quibbling about the price.’

On page 7, Barbara Bush the Younger is described (to absolutely no point whatsoever) as “W’s liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter.” Particularly gratuitous, as Rakoff’s real beef is with Barbara, Sr. (page 8: “Stupid fucking cow.”).

Admittedly, on page 8, we do have a derogatory physical description of a man: “The hairy-knuckled, pinkie-ringed lawyer for a Vietnamese fellow behind me….” No mention of the man’s genitals, of course, or sexual appeal or lack thereof, but still, not exactly a flattering comment. But then on page 9, we’re back to women, describing a “Russian woman in her early forties” who has the misfortune to be standing on line nearby:

She wears painted-on acid-wash jeans, white stilettos, and a tight blouse of sheer leopard-print fabric. The sleeves are designed as a series of irregular tatters clinging to her arms, as if she’s just come from tearing the hide off the back of an actual leopard. A really slutty leopard.

It’s safe to assume that leopard was also female.

But here on page 9, we also have our first woman appear without being described physically, or with any tossed-off, irrelevant sexual slurs attached to her person. This is Agent Morales, who interviews Rakoff for citizenship. Then, by page 11, we’re on to Rakoff’s friend, Sarah (who, based on her introduction as “a self-described civics nerd,” I’m assuming is Sarah Vowell), and nobody describes their friends as pointless and/or distasteful vaginas, so we’re in the clear.

And that’s it, for the rest of the book’s 222 pages: no more offensive comments about women, at least not that reached out of the pages and slapped me, like these first ones. In fact, I really enjoyed the book after page 10. The essays were tart, well-written, observant and entertaining. Why the packed in slurs up front?

So, the moral here is: writers and editors (whether male, female, gay, straight or other): when you have your manuscript all ready for publishing, go through at least the first twenty pages or so, with an eye to how you describe or comment on any women mentioned, as contrasted with how you describe or comment on any men. If you note that every, single woman you bring up is described as a slut, a bitch, a stupid bimbo, a nag, or has been physically detailed for no specific reason (ugly, fat, wart-faced, saggy-boobed, clothes too tight, past her prime, sex on legs, etc.), and that every man is described in terms of his personality traits and actions, then think about whether or not you genuinely want half the population to toss you and your book right out at that point. Because not all readers are as patient as I am. A lot of women won’t make it to page 11. And I’d like to think some men wouldn’t either.

I really don’t direct the above rant particularly at David Rakoff. His is only the most recent book I’ve read to follow this off-putting pattern. But really, Don’t Get Too Comfortable is great otherwise. Rakoff is a sharp and articulate social satirist, and his targets aren’t the easy ones. If there is a unifying theme to these essays, I would say it is what we desire and what we buy, and why, and what we tell ourselves about it, with occasional diversions into the weird and often unpleasant things people like to do for fun. He has drawn a bead on class hypocrisy, and conspicuous consumption. He covers foodies, high fashion, fasting, plastic surgery, cryogenics and Puppetry of the Penis. He goes along on a Playboy shoot, attends a midnight scavenger hunt in Manhattan, forages for edible plants in Prospect Park and works as a pool boy at an upscale resort. He waits outside the Today Show, visits Martha Stewart’s crafts department, and shadows the director of the mystifying Log Cabin Republicans.

Fun stuff, all. With the above-mentioned caveat, I’d recommend it.

The essays in Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist are all very well written, and interesting, more or less. But yet, something about them bothered me, and I think I put my finger on it right around the time Lethem mentioned that when he was a kid in Brooklyn, he used to ride the subway every day to his performing arts school, with his friend and classmate, Lynn Nottage. Many of the essays in this book concern New York City, and life in New York City. The rest are meditations on books and movies.

Lethem was raised by a well-known painter. His mother died when he was 13. He lived in a commune for part of his upbringing. He spent his childhood surrounded by his parents’ Bohemian friends, and went to an arts high school in New York with a bunch of other students who have gone on to be known names. They were raised in an interesting place by interesting people, and taught from a young age that they were bound to be interesting themselves. In the same way as some people are raised in wealth, others are raised in art, and all these writers, playwrights, actors, etc. were to the manor born. There’s nothing wrong with Lethem’s writing or what he’s writing about, and it’s not like he’s never left New York – why, he went to Bennington, then lived in California! – but yet, I was bored by his well-written meditations on the various movies, writers and filmmakers that shaped him, as well as his experiences in a Brooklyn not sufficiently long gone to be so nostalgic about (Lethem was only about 40 when this essay collection was published).

You do not have to live an interesting life in order to be an interesting writer. Perhaps you have to live an interesting life to be an interesting personal essayist, however, or, barring that, at least be really funny. Certainly, you can write great fiction no matter how narrow and dull your circle, and Lethem has mostly been feted for his novels, none of which I’ve read, although I plan to at some point. Reading these essays, however, made me feel like I was sitting in a grad school MFA workshop listening to everyone read essays about being graduate MFA students, and reminiscing fondly about those long-ago days when they were but callow undergrads.

John Leonard in the New York Review of Books:

I’m glad to learn from The Disappointment Artist that Lethem’s father is more interesting than Dylan’s was; that his mother, unlike Dylan’s, didn’t abandon her boy out of narcissism; that Jonathan, unlike Dylan, has siblings. And I am sorry that none of us can fly, besides which we’re opaque. But it is time this gifted writer closed his comic books for good. Superpowers are not what magic realism was about in Bulgakov, Kobo Abe, Salman Rushdie, or the Latin American flying carpets. That Michael Chabon and Paul Auster have gone graphic, that one Jonathan, Lethem, writes on and on about John Ford, while another Jonathan, Franzen, writes on and on about “Peanuts,” even as Rick Moody confides to the Times Book Review that “comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is,” may just mean that the slick magazines with the scratch and sniff ads for vodka and opium are willing to pay a bundle for bombast about ephemera.

But all of it makes me itch. Welcome to New Dork! We have been airpopped and multimediated unto inanity and pastiche.

David Markson’s The Last Novel is a 200-some page book consisting entirely of factoids about various artists of all kinds and their failures, periods of stagnation, tragedies, thwartings, impoverishments, loneliness, setbacks and deaths. At the back of all this is a protagonist, a novelist who’s about done with writing, but he is only seen in relief, framed by the endless parade of trivia. Amazingly, the book is a roaring good read despite its total lack of story or overt presence of character or conflict. Or perhaps I just loved it, because reading about the failures of great and miserable geniuses is one of my keenest pleasures. Apparently, this book is the last in a trilogy, but I don’t feel I lost anything by starting with this one.

Perhaps we’ll all burst forth Samuel Becketts one day:

En attendant, Beckett writes self-­admittedly “pestilential” letters about waiting. In Dublin, he records the “fruitless retreat from Monday to Friday and then the degrading cotton wool interpolation of the weekend” and acknowledges that he’s “more than ever frightened by the prospect of effort, initiative & even the little self-assertion of getting about from one place to another.” In London, he sleeps “more and more — 10 hours at a stretch. I wish it were 20.” In Paris, he is “paralyzed in listlessness” and has “done nothing.”

Certainly describes my year.

Also this:

Laid upon this bare outline, in the course of the letters, is a palimpsest of all the other things that Beckett could have done, or sought to do, but never did. He put in for lectureships at Cape Town and Milan, though with little expectation, or even hope, of success. “Now that I have assembled testimonials,” he wrote of the South African plan, in 1937, “I am in a position to abstain from applying.”

Why do I stir my coffee counterclockwise? Is this more effective, or merely habit? Is it perhaps offensive + off-putting to others? Do not stir coffee counterclockwise, unless certain culture is tolerant of same.

–

Oh, how rapturously, tremendously, monumentally do I adore Gide! I want to wrap Gide around myself + go running through the streets! I want to wear Gide around as a hat! I want to lick every page of Gide, to absorb it through my pores, to drink it like water! I want to bathe myself in Gide. Which reminds me: bathe daily.

–

Was lying in bed telling H. how much I desired to possess her utterly. Not sure what she said in response, as I was busy contemplating how pretentious my use of word “utterly.” Do not use “utterly” in intimate confessions, as it sounds premeditated + insincere. At any rate, suppose H. did not feel same, as I am now writing this, rather than possessing her utterly. Wait, did she go home? …Shit.

–

Had baby.

–

Have discovered Kafka! Oh, bless! A thousand, shuddering, deep, rapturous cries of joy spring from my soul! How did I live + breathe + eat before I knew of this felicity? From now on, it’s all Kafka, all the time.

– 

Bathe every other day.

–

I do not feel X. with my son, as much as with H. Not at all X. with Philip. A little bit X. with our current congressional representative. X. with coworker Y. definitely, but only on Tuesdays. Not so much X. with anyone on the weekends…is this because of weekends, or because of X.?

–

It seems that a certain pore on my right cheek is slightly larger than those around it. Is this something that can be corrected without great trouble or expense? Look into it.

–

Today, created self, destroyed self, + created self again, as usual. Yesterday not so productive – did not create self so much as merely tinker with aspects of self. Philip walked in while tinkering with self. Embarrassed.

After reading the above, considered erasing. But then, reconsidered. I ought to be honest with myself, even (or especially?) in aspects of myself I would rather were not so. Don’t be embarrassed of revealing self in front of Philip, who, after all, loves me. And don’t be embarrassed of admitting (to self or [especially?] in print) own embarrassment about embarrassment, or, for that matter, of admitting embarrassment about embarrassment over own embarrassment.

Considered erasing above, as conclusion drawn seems to negate necessity of initial observation. Reconsidered. All is valid. Do not waste time on such circuitous contemplation in future.

–

Bathe, Susan. Bathe. Damn it, how hard is this to remember?!

Hi everyone!  If you are not on my email list, you may be unaware that on Monday, October 27 at 9:30p.m., I’m performing a brief, funny one-woman show at Manhattan Theatre Source!  Here are the details – if you’re in the NYC area, come check it out!!

Crap, I forgot to post all week again.  I keep intending to go back to posting regularly, and I keep not doing it, and I haven’t been able to put my finger on why.  Blogging just has not been as much fun for me lately.  Then, I read this post, and I realized that it perfectly describes how I’ve been feeling.

If you get too invested in things, there’s a point where ‘everyone’s stupid and I think it’s hilarious’ starts to become ‘everyone’s stupid and it MAKES ME FUCKING INSANE!!!!’  And I think I passed that point some time ago.  I keep drafting amusing little rants only to have them turn into vitriolic endless rants, and at some point during their composition, I leave off typing and begin circling my desk, flapping my hands around and shrieking to myself.

I grew up in the South, where nice people consider public displays of enthusiasm unseemly.  It’s understood that one has one’s political opinions, but to get yourself worked up about it is to show a level of involvement with life outside your immediate sphere that reflects poorly on your ability to manage your own affairs.  Likewise, while it’s expected that everyone be religious (in a general way), those who feel sufficiently possessed with the spirit as to go around talking about God all the time and wearing Jesus accessories are at best tacky, and possibly a little touched.  Nobody wants to be without money, but to admit of difficulties concerning it is to drop down a class level – money should simply flow, unseen and unremarked upon, into one’s coffers, as gently and steadily as rain from heaven.

All of this is to say that my blatant interest in this year’s primaries is making it difficult for me to maintain a cool, ironic detachment.  What’s needed is some perspective:

The two parties are, at heart, not very different from each other.  Neither will totally save us, or utterly damn us.  My complete lack of active (or financial) involvement in anything even remotely concerning politics (or other people, or life outside my apartment) makes any pretense of actual concern about the world in general or this country in particular hypocritical beyond all belief.  My own personal life will be unlikely to change in any significant way as a result of anything short of an apocalyptic disaster, or a profound personal attitude adjustment (which are both equally unlikely).  People are stupid, especially me, and it is hilarious.  Ten people read this blog on a good day.  I have many friends who are actually out there working real, positive changes in the world, rather than just sitting around bitching all the time.  And sometimes, it’s a blessing when the internet goes out.

To sum up:  Oh, wait, I forgot – I don’t care again!

Hello, lovelies. I feel utterly fried. And scrambled. And poached. This blog’s taking an impromptu vacation. See you back here a week from today.