Last month I went to the Kennedy Center to see the Broadway musical "Come Fly Away," a dance revue choreographed by Twila Tharp and set to the accompaniment of Frank Sinatra's recorded voice and a live big band on stage. I went with my good friend Phil (reason enough to enjoy the evening), and while it was a good show, we were both somewhat underwhelmed. The rest of the audience felt the same, as evidenced by the rather reluctant, slow and gradual standing ovation - the kind in which the applause is sustained and everyone looks at everyone else for a cue to stand. As we walked out into the night, neither one of us had much to say.
I wondered why; it was a brilliantly performed, perfectly executed show, packed with nonstop, amazing dancing and a whole company that made it look effortless. The dancers were good-looking, the costumes were attractive, and the set was wonderful. The music was - well, Frank - come on! The band played flawlessly, as if Sinatra were live and on stage with them. So why was the audience so restrained in its enthusiasm?
Today it finally hit me, after my workout, in the shower (where I have thought of short story plot lines, solved Lotus Notes application development coding problems, and composed music). Yes, there is strength, power, and flexibility in dance. Yes, dancers' feet do leave the floor. Yes, people want to see excitement and come away wowed. But for this dance lover, anyway, the dancing in the show was too - athletic.
Just like in figure skating, dancing has been becoming more and more athletic over many years. Tuxes and floor-length gowns are out, and now dancers leap, throw each other, spin both vertically and horizontally, flip in the air, whip each other around violently, and do things that make you go "ouch" and feel imaginary back pain. But whereas figure skating is actually an Olympic sport (which Scott Hamilton tried to emphasize by wearing only athletic stretch wear), dancing is arguably not. Which is not to say it is not athletic - because it certainly can be - just that it is not a sport in the sense of competing and winning against an opposing player(s), reality/competition shows notwithstanding. Why, then, does it have to continually increase in technical difficulty, at the expense of artistic expression?
Of course the same debate rages on in the figure skating world and probably always will. Triple this and triple that are ho-hum, and now at least one quad jump is required to win. Those on the sport side argue that scoring for artistic impression should count less; after all, no other Olympic sport has musical accompaniment (except the floor exercise in gymnastics) or has an artistic component at all. Those on the artistic side recall the classical roots of figure skating and lament the fading of Tchaikovsky and sequins on the ice.
So it goes.
Fast forward to the 21st century and the glut of competition shows on TV, such as "So You Think You Can Dance." The more outrageous the physicality, the greater the displays of strength and speed, the more violent the movement - the more excited the judges get, screaming their approval louder the more the sweat flies under the lights and the more revealing the lycra.
Maybe it's just that appetite thing: the more you get of something, the less satisfying it becomes and the more you need it to be more. Everything has to be increasingly extreme, because anything less is ordinary.
I guess I've always been old school. Give me Fred and Ginger any day over anyone else you can see today. Now there was style. There was grace. There was humanity. With dancers today, you get excited at their physical prowess and feats of strength. With Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly you were stirred emotionally.
Maybe I'm a slow adopter. Maybe I don't like change. Maybe I'm too nostalgic. Or maybe I just like dancing the way I saw it on "The Carol Burnett Show," back when I wanted to grow up to be the next Fred Astaire.
"Hi, I'm Ben." His kind, gentle face seems to belie the deep bass voice he used in the PEN/Faulkner reading he has just finished at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill. He smiles and shakes my hand, which is cold from nerves. Benjamin Percy is one of the "it" writers of today, appearing in ads for workshops and conferences, interviews in lit journals, and magazine articles, and I enjoy keeping current with emerging, promising talent.
I had not wasted any time getting to the book signing table when the reading ended and had even bought my book before the event started. Now, waiting for the writers to get there, those of us who had formed an indistinct line wondered which seat Percy would take and which his co-reader, Dagoberto Gilb, would take. Most PEN/Faulkner readings feature one well-established writer and one lesser known but promising writer, and the book signing lines are often embarrassingly lopsided. Having never heard of Gilb, I wasn't sure which writer was which, but watching people's restlessness, I felt I was about to find out.
When they arrived at the table and chose their seats, the line almost immediately shifted over to Gilb. I found myself the first in Percy's line - which made me glad - but also the only one, which made me uncomfortable. Didn't people know he was one of today's literary darlings?
He had read from his latest book, The Wilding, in a shockingly deep voice that recalled James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. The discordance between his young, sweet features and this dump truck rumbling sound reminded me of singer Josh Turner. It was well-suited to his material, which is dark, mysterious, and creepy.
(In fact, there is so much blood and unexplained death in the three stories I read yesterday from his collection Refresh, Refresh that I had to stop because I had started feeling ill. I should have gotten a clue from the fact that Peter Straub wrote one of his jacket blurbs.)
My jury is out until I've read enough of his work to form an opinion, but I noted a few things from the evening:
1) Storytelling as art
There's reading words off a page or news items off a teleprompter, and then there's infusing life into every spoken word of a story so that you are sucked in and experiencing what the characters are going through. Garrison Keillor, of course, is the penultimate storyteller, expert at holding the attention of an audience. Of all the readings I've attended, Percy's came the closest to hitting that mark. The booming of his voice, shaded with latent menace, combined with the dark nature of his writing, reminded me of the "Radio Mystery Theater" I couldn't help listening to on WCCO after turning the lights out (against my better judgment). I would lie in the dark, the covers pulled up to my chin, telling myself "Turn the radio off! Turn it off now!" but unable to stop holding my breath waiting to hear what happened next.
I'm not saying writers should do sound effects when they read their stuff or have musical interludes to play when they reach space breaks. But reading can be performance art if one spends the time practicing a piece and thinking about how the way one reads will affect the audience. Whether one chooses to take this approach is a personal decision, but I think if you can increase your hold on the audience and make it more memorable and - dare i say - entertaining*, that can only be good not only for your story and you as a writer, but literature in general.
*(Entertainment may sound lowbrow relative to what writers want to achieve, but maybe it is a necessary prelude to enrichment.)
2) A new form
Percy referred to a 120-page story as "my..." , paused for the perfect length of time, and said "shnovel." It was funny and cute, and Percy is disarming in his way of putting the cute right after the macabre, so everyone laughed. It's nice to have a new term for something that's too long to be a short story (or even a long short story) and too short to be a novel; the term novella is so freighted with negativity and awkwardness that I've become hesitant to use it. Injecting a little humor into a new term for this form might just get people to relax and let it be!
3) What Lies Beneath
I was struck by how easily and quickly Percy moved from the disturbing to the comic, how he could set you on edge one moment and in the next make you laugh and want to share a cup of coffee and ask about his kids. It made me wonder whether he was a dark person with surprising moments of levity or an easygoing guy with disturbing issues lurking underneath.
Of course, this is a continuum, not a simple dichotomy, and we probably all move along it one way or the other at various times in our lives. It isn't important as a reader to know where the author is, but this spectrum is what keeps me reading and certainly what keeps me writing.
What happened to the word an? It feels like an old friend gone missing. One day I woke up and no one was using it anymore.
"I think there's a apple in the fridge."
"That's a old version."
I even heard someone say - no kidding - "I was a English major!"
Really?
Can a word fade into obscurity from disuse? When did someone first decide it was okay to say a before a word beginning with a vowel? Or did so many people lack an understanding of the rule that a critical mass was eventually reached, rendering the word an helpless to stop its being relegated to a dusty drawer as the newest companion to forsooth, verily, and yoicks?
People butcher grammar all the time in conversation, but standards are higher for written English; "proper" English is what distinguishes civilization from - well, whatever you have without it (Terra Nova?). Yet I have been more than dismayed to find that using a for an is now seen even in newspapers and magazines. (Does this mean editing is more lax, or there is less editing?)
I accept that usage of words changes over time, and with it, meaning. I use the word hopefully a lot. Technically, it's an adverb, like angrily, quickly, or gracefully - a descriptive word modifying a verb. At some point, however, it became accepted as an introductory word describing the attitude about whatever follows in the sentence: Hopefully, I would win both the Veg-o-Matic and the Thighmaster. I didn't even realize until today that I'd been misusing the word.
Is this bad? Should I be as inflamed about my own grammatical error as I am about an's disappearance? They are both wrong, but they both appear to be acceptable.
The same goes for the word broke. Who said we could lose the n? Every time I hear it misused, I cringe and want to say, "Fie! Whencesover didst that come?" Broke is the past tense of the verb to break: break, broke, broken.
I know he will break my heart, but I'm going to ask him out, anyway. He broke my heart even though I waited until the third date to propose. He has broken my heart, but soon I will join Match.com. Broken is also the state of disrepair: My heart is broken, but it's nothing my friend Johnny Walker can't fix!
Broke as past tense is only fitting as dialect: Dang nabbit! Pappy's hooch machine in the holler down yonder's still broke!
Otherwise, as far as I'm aware, broken is still the correct word: Damn - the nozzle that foams the milk for morning espresso is still broken!
From where I sit, using language as my art, it's hard not to feel sad about the decline of proper English, the gradual, apathetic casting off of grammatical rules. Is it stuffy to want to construct sentences following long-accepted guidelines? Should one relax and follow the masses in resignation to the tides of popular practice?
I'd hoped to draw some pithy conclusion warning against degenerating into a Lord of the Flies existence in which we only use the grade school communication exercise vocabulary of fa, pa, and ba, - but, faced with my own participation in changing the rules, I am left with only my belief in what I learned in school.
The poll results are in: out of eleven respondents, four (36%) believe that fiction writers and poets write primarily to communicate with others, while seven (64%) believe that those writers write first for themselves as artistic expression.
When applying the same question only to themselves, just two (18%) said they write primarily for others, while nine (82%) said they write for themselves first. The response rate was just under fifty percent, with eleven out of twenty-four writers answering (including myself).
As I mentioned before, the questions can become more complex as they are discussed, and judging by the comments (thanks, Andi and Jane), the answers can be quite involved. Although the poll may have seemed simplistic and inadequate, I believe many qualified answers can actually fall into one or the other category.
For instance, writing to preserve history can be considered writing for others, since this really goes to the title of this and the previous blog entries; if history is recorded but no one reads it, is it really preserved? One may write down one's family history and not care at the time if it remains hidden in a desk drawer or forgotten in an attic, but if no one ever discovers and reads it years or decades later, would the writer have considered the effort worthwhile?
Or consider writing to make sense of an experience. This could fall under writing for oneself, since the person benefitting from bringing order out of chaos is the writer. It may subsequently affect or enrich others, too, but the making sense part is coming from the writer, primarily for the writer.
Personally, I write to express myself as a creative outlet. I would like others to read my stories, but if no one does, that's okay; it does not devalue what I have written or diminish my experience of writing, and it's not why I write in the first place. If I were on a desert island with no chance of being rescued or of my work being discovered on the island years later, I would still write (provided I could re-create the pen, ink, and paper).
Thanks to my friend Guy for asking an important, relevant question and sparking discussion among my writer friends far beyond the casual lunchtime chat that gave birth to the poll!
A friend asked me a philosophical question today: Do writers write primarily for themselves, or do they write for someone else's benefit?
I have a strong opinion about this, and we discussed this question for quite some time. I am going to assert my position later, but my friend's belief is that writers' primary motivation is to communicate, to pass on to others something they want to say, and that that is the whole point of writing. If no one reads your writing, there is no point in having written.
When we finally had to get on with our separate afternoons, I told him I would poll my writer friends and let him know the results. This is where you come in!
As with most polls, there's a whole lot wrapped up in the questions and answers, but I tried to make it as simple as possible. Let's assume we are only talking about fiction and poetry. The water gets murky very quickly, once we even start talking about the questions, let alone the answers.
Just two questions. The first is your belief about most creative writers in general, while the second is the same question applied to yourself:
This is my first Poll Daddy poll, so I'm not sure how this works, but I did set both polls to allow commenting (good luck with that). If all else fails, send me an email if you have other thoughts to share.
I'll post my own thoughts after allowing some time for response. Thanks for your help!
After three consecutive 13- to 14-hour days at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, I hope you are readjusting to life back home. I myself feel unmoored and am trying to regain my bearings. Yes, it was wonderful being with 8,500 writers, agents, publishers, students, teachers, and editors, all focused on the art of literature. But for me, it is more than coming down off the high of community; it's dealing with the same question that arises after attending a week-long workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown: what am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? And if it's something different than what I'm doing now, do I have the guts - and the resources - to make the change?
The central question is that of the MFA, which has become the bachelor's degree of the writing world. You and I both feel the private sting of our perceived, though unspoken, snubbing at this seeming deficiency, even if our detractors exist only in an unidentifiable aggregate. (I am just waiting for the day when the first question people ask is, "And where did you get your MFA?")
We have both been through at least five writing workshops, which is equal to the requirement of many MFA programs. And you have certainly exceeded the coursework requirements as a former creative writing and literature professor and chair of an English department. You have also completed (and submitted for publication) a book-length manuscript, which is the same as an MFA thesis. You are missing only those three letters after your name.
I, however, am lacking the literature part of my education, try as I might to address it by reading on my own and using the resources now available on the Intranet to help me understand. Another FAWC classmate sent me the reading lists from her program at the Bennington Writing Seminars to help me out, but I'm not sure how I could ever read everything on those lists, as well as the works on my own lists.
So yesterday I once again struggled with The Question, one which becomes harder to answer the older I get. And beyond getting the degree, what is the financial tradeoff of a post-MFA career (assuming I could identify non-teaching options), and is it feasible to even consider in DC? That question is pretty easily answered, so the next question is whether I would be willing to relocate to a place with a lower cost of living.
More fundamentally, the question that becomes not only harder but more insistent with age is: what do I want to spend the rest of my career doing? Over the past three days, we were surrounded by many people who spend their time reading people's writing and considering, discussing, and arguing questions of competence, meaning, and relevance, as well as asserting subjective assessments of whether a story is good. Wow, I wonder what that's like, I thought.
But as the editor of Tin House said in one session, "we are you"; that's what we all do, and they are no different from us. At the time, I thought that was a nice thing to say but that as editors, they were on a different plane. Sitting here reflecting on it today, though, I realize that is indeed what we do in workshop: analyze a piece, discuss its merits and shortcomings, provide feedback to the writer, and privately decide which stories we think are the best, which show potential, and which aren't quite ready yet. While we don't do it full-time, we already do know the meat of at least the art side of what they do, and it is indeed wonderful. How many times during a week in P'town have I felt consciously aware of how great it is to spend our days reading and talking about each other's writing?
You don't get paid much to edit and publish fiction. But as Daniel Slager, publisher of Milkweed Editions, said in that same session, he gets paid to read, and he loves it. Though not by the world's standards, it's a privileged life.
And in the end, aren't ours the only standards that matter? At the end of our lives, how will we ourselves judge what we have done with them? Who cares what anyone else says about it?
So, Dianne, in my opinion you can be proud of all you have accomplished. As I've said before, enjoy your retirement. Take satisfaction in what you have done, not only for yourself but for so many young people (especially in opening their literary worlds beyond the white male canon).
The possibilities in my own life remain open, waiting for me to act. I hope and pray for the courage to do whatever is right for me. Thanks again for calling my attention to AWP being in my own backyard this year, thus spurring me to re-examine the bigger questions.
This afternoon I stood in the aisle at Barnes & Noble, next to the New Fiction table, despairing. The world was changing and in a direction I didn't like. There was nothing to be done. It was progress. This is how it would be, and people would adjust, or become dinosaurs.
I had just discovered that the CD section had moved from the back wall of the store to a smaller section along the side. Further, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs now took up half the space, with CDs squeezed into the other half. Genres of music were much less obviously marked, and the racks of "NEW RELEASES" had disappeared. CDs are going the way of the cassette tape. Most music is now digital and virtual and intangible and is purchased invisibly through a keyboard.
I had a brief nostalgic moment remembering the excitement I used to feel walking through the vast inventory of CDs at Borders, wondering what new music I might discover. Would it be an older release that I somehow missed of a favorite artist? Or would I, on a whim, put on headphones at a "listening station" (what a fantastic service!) and discover someone new? I spent a lot of time at Tower Records before it died at the hands of iTunes, making such discoveries of world music artists.
Sometimes I even went to Borders on the day a long-awaited CD was to be released and asked for it since it was not yet on the shelves. Now, that was exciting: when a staff person disappeared into the back room and brought it out to me, fresh from the box, not even priced yet!
Those days are long gone. CDs now sit in a small, sad part of the store, still there only to pacify those of us who have yet to make the jump to the newest medium and trash our jewel cases and cumbersome CD racks. (Who keeps their music in furniture anymore?) They will soon disappear unnoticed as DVDs, in their only slightly larger packaging, take over the space completely.
On my way out of the Barnes & Noble, I stopped for a moment at the large display, sitting front and center, showcasing B&N's electronic reader, the Nook. It's B&N's answer to the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. I stopped to touch it. It's cold metal parts struck me as exactly diametrical to the warmth I supposed its name was meant to evoke. It made me sad. It did not make me want to find some cozy nook and read a book on it.
That is when I found myself standing in the store aisle, full of anti-electronic angst. This was the "high tech, low touch" dichotomy predicted and decried back in the '70's by those who studied the future. Advances in technology, they said, would result in less touch and a distancing from the things which make us human.
When the tide of digital photography broke over the beach of picture-taking, I transitioned from film consciously and with minimal tragedy; the issue was forced when my partner gave me a digital camera for my birthday, and I was quickly running out of storage space for my many bulky photo albums. I also felt relieved that I would no longer have to spend a lot of time mounting developed photos and handwriting captions for them. Nor would I have to order reprints and mail them to people any longer - I could just email them! And since taking pictures was all electronic now, I stopped hearing ka-ching! every time I hit the shutter and could take and erase as many photos as I wanted - and the ones I kept I could edit after downloading them to my computer.
So while I was reluctant to give up the tactile experience of pulling out an album and flipping through the pages or bringing the album out to the living room to share with a visitor, all the practical advantages of digital photography more than made up for it.
But with music it's harder. I've always loved the little booklets that come with CDs. I enjoy the art, photos, lyrics, and liner notes. Reading the artist's thoughts and thank-you's adds to my emotional experience of the music. (Granted, I now need a magnifying glass to read the tiny print.) Before CDs, when I was growing up, I used to love slitting the plastic wrap of an LP, sliding the record out of the cardboard cover, and seeing what was on the paper sleeve. I would turn the record on and lie on my stomach facing the speakers, reading the album cover and sleeve. (We're skipping mention of that deplorable phase of the cassette tape and of the 8-track, which I never experienced.)
Yes, space is an issue, even though CDs greatly reduced the storage necessary for vinyl. But downloading music creates its own storage issues. And I don't get art or lyrics with it. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that it's only a matter of time until CDs are no longer sold. It's hard to deny after seeing Virgin and Tower Records close and watching the ever-shrinking CD sections at B&N and Borders.
But considering the demise of the printed book is not something I'm ready to do. When it's a cold and rainy Saturday in November, I don't want to curl up in a big chair under an afghan with a mug of hot chocolate and - power up my Kindle. At the end of a long day, when I want to escape into a story world before going to sleep, I don't want to climb under the covers and settle in - with my Nook. I want my book, with its cloth cover and deckle-edge pages, or my paperback with its somewhat worn cover, evidencing the many hours I've already spent with it, complete with the notes I've written in the margins, the underlined passages which struck me in a special way.
And when I go to a reading and stand in line to meet the author, and when I finally reach the table where they sit, pen poised and ready to ask my name, where exactly on my downloaded book should they write the inscription?
When we are finished with printed books, their lives do not end. Many people bring them in to work and contribute them to a lending library or book swap. Some people release them "into the wild," leaving them in airport waiting areas, cafes, or public parks. Electronic books are - deleted.
Again, storage is an issue, admittedly. But those of us who love books - beyond simply loving to read - don't mind. We just use them to decorate. Even if we can't display every book we own, we can't part with a special book that has made us cry or has moved us or made us think in a way we wouldn't have found on our own. And we've spent so much time with it, how could we just get rid of it?
The writing is probably on the wall with newspapers shutting down right and left and surviving rags losing more and more weight, resembling skinny small town papers rather than the hefty, two-pound parcels that used to take us a couple days to get through. People already enjoy listening to the audio versions of books. And you can't beat the convenience of purchasing and consuming e-books wherever you are.
Nevertheless, I am heartened when I consider that books don't seem to be going away. Not yet, anyway. The way that books are sold has changed drastically, but books themselves don't seem to be less available. Many people, after acknowledging that bookstores (at least brick-and-mortar ones) are probably on their way out, assert that books are going to stick around for a while.
I myself will be doing my share to ensure that is true.
I wondered why; it was a brilliantly performed, perfectly executed show, packed with nonstop, amazing dancing and a whole company that made it look effortless. The dancers were good-looking, the costumes were attractive, and the set was wonderful. The music was - well, Frank - come on! The band played flawlessly, as if Sinatra were live and on stage with them. So why was the audience so restrained in its enthusiasm?
