Exile on Ninth Street

Here is the latest Booking Through Thursday:

What is the first book you remember reading? What about the first that made you really love reading?

At the moment, the first book that comes to mind is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a book my grandmother gave me. Then there was probably also Tom Sawyer, also a gift from my grandmother’s library. But, if I were to check the dates on those books (she signed and dated the books she gave me), they’d probably date to the mid to late seventies. Which would make me about 8 to 10 years old.

Obviously, I had learned to read before then, and I know had learned to love reading before then. My love of reading probably formed when my dad taught me to read the Sunday funnies. I associate much of my love of reading with my family, and with my dad especially.

Some of the best times with him were stops for Cokes on Sunday walks at a convenience store. At the store were those great wire racks of comics. I usually ended up with a Coke and a funny book — as dad called them. I read comics voraciously.

The first how-to write fiction book I ever read was Rita Mae Brown’s Starting From Scratch. That book led to an addiction to how-to write books. I gobbled them up.  John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (which introduced me to creative nonfiction/literary journalism), Josip Novakich’s Fiction Writer’s Workshop, and on and on and on.

In The Atlantic‘s current fiction issue, writer Richard Bausch critiques writing instruction manuals in an essay “How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons”.

“My quarrel,” he writes, “is with the implication in the how-to books market that one can merely read them to find the magic secret for writing well enough to publish.”

Bausch argues the writer’s manuals promote being a writer without the need to do the work. He tells a story of a student who “with great pride” said “he had ‘over a hundred books’ in his library — I [Bausch] could see that I was meant to be impressed by the number, and that he considered himself a vastly well-read type of guy. He went on to say that many in his collection are how-to books . . . . He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role.”

The argument is similar to the one John Aldridge makes in Talents and Technicians, a critique of MFA writing programs. Aldridge argued that MFA programs created cookie-cutter writers whose prose was so similar the only difference was the byline. The writing programs, Aldridge said, produced writers for the sake of being writers. These writers didn’t come from reading other writers; it came writing in the writing programs.

Bausch addresses this argument:

I know an assumption exists in certain quarters that writing programs do damage, mostly by causing a so-called cookie-cutter effect, everyone sounding the same. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and you need only look at the work to know it. Allan Gurganus, Jane Smiley, T.C. Boyle, and I were all at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at roughly the same time. Allan and I had classes together. We hung out. I went horseback riding with Jane Smiley . . . and we talked about everything under the sun, including writing

You would have trouble finding four writers who are more different.

If a cookie-cutter effect ever develops, it will come from people keeping to the manuals and how-to books.

And writing that comes from those whose reading is confined to the how-to books is cramped and obvious.

My experience with how-to books has, overall, been decent. I don’t view them as negative, cookie-cutter mills. Bausch says there are classics in the genre such as Gardner’s Art of Fiction. These books, he says, deal with the “aesthetics of the task.” But, I’ve never viewed the manuals as substitutes for reading and learning to write from reading novels, essays, poems or plays.

Bausch says the manuals steer would-be writers away from reading and learning from other writers. Reading the manuals has helped me become a better reader, even better, I think than the reading I did in graduate school. I read deeply and learned to analyze texts in grad school, but  much of that analysis was fueled with theory.

After reading a manual I could go back to the books I loved and pick up on the techniques the manuals had taught. I could see what was bad and what was good. Those books also introduced me to writers such as Bausch and Boyle.

The other thing I learned from were the exercises and prompts. I learned to apply the techniques, and I would practice the techniques, not only at home, but at work when I was writing feature stories. Those exercises were important, too, because they got me to place ass in chair and write.

Of course, the manuals are full of the standards: write what you know; use active voice; show, don’t tell.

But many also go beyond those standards with practical advice like considering journalism as a way to make a living and actively write.

Still, the manuals won’t make you a writer, any more than an MFA program. They can only give you a tiny amount of instruction. Some of it useful, some of it trash.

A confession: I like Stephen King. Never met the man, though I feel as if I have, or rather, I like the persona he presents in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He seems personable. Maybe in real life he’s an arse, but something about the persona delivered in the book suggests he’s not.

He shares similar feelings about reading, writing, and literature that I do. I think if I were to ask him, he’d put a lowercase “l” on literature instead of the upper case “L” English teachers like, which is something I’ve tried to do as a reader over, say, the last 15 years.

What do I mean by this? Simply that genre writers — horror, mystery, science fiction, etc. — deserve as much attention as what many consider “literary” fiction. Not all. Some of it is crap. Just as some “literary” fiction is crap, no matter how many scholarly articles have been published on that fiction saying otherwise. I think King would agree.

“[N]o matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously,” he writes, “I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

Some of you reading this may put King in the pen with bad writers. I confess I did, say, 15 years ago. Back then I had read one of King’s novels, The Running Man, which he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

I didn’t particularly care for that novel, but I was expecting it to be more like the Schwarzenegger movie based loosely on it that I saw a year or two before reading the book.

Before then, I hadn’t read any of King’s stuff because I was afraid to read any sort of horror novels (I still today resist horror movies, although that largely has to do with the gross-out factor: Watching someone on screen get dismembered with a chainsaw is disturbing, especially when it seems so gratuitous; I’m less squeamish witnessing the horrors of war in gritty detail in such films as Saving Private Ryan). Horror novels/movies — the few I read or saw — really did give me nightmares, or at least gave me the creeps enough to think twice about turning the lights out before going to bed. I was 18 before I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was creeped out each night by something scratching on my bedroom window, which wasn’t near any trees.

In graduate school, King, among other writers, seemed to be scoffed at by my peers, and wanting to fit in and seem intellectual — I became a pretty capable scholar — I scoffed too.

The scoffing was a front. Most of my reading life until grad school consisted of reading science fiction and fantasy, although I had by then developed a serious Hemingway fixation. But in grad school, I wouldn’t read such trash, unless, say, it had been “legitimized” as serious in an English class (in my senior year I took a course in the short story and the anthology included Asimov and Ursula K. LeGuin, so those two were OK, sort of).

At the same time I was scoffing, I was also reading Henry Miller — in particular his “gob of spit in the face of Art,” Tropic of Cancer — and beginning to see literature should be spelled with a lowercase “l”.  I was reading a novel/memoir (Miller is a genre-buster) full of exuberant prose that was kicking the shit out of my notions of literature.

And yet, at least then, the academic literary world wasn’t all that convinced of Miller’s seriousness. Or that was the impression I had once I tried to find scholarly articles on Miller when I finally was able to write a paper on Tropic of Cancer. 

Of the slim pile I did find, many were negative, written by hardcore feminists who seemed bent on destroying Miller’s reputation. One book, however, caught my attention — Erica Jong’s biography/memoir/critical treatise on Miller, The Devil at Large.

She defended Miller with the gusto of an evangelist. What she also evangelized was the power of reading, the power of literature, the power of art in all its forms.

I find that same joy reading King’s memoir. Reading and writing are a joy for him. Art sustains him, invigorates him.

“Writing is magic,” he writes, “as much the water of life as any other creative art.” I couldn’t agree more.

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Do you read the inside flaps that describe a book before or while reading it?

Sometimes it’s best to judge a book by its cover. I’ve read flap material, or back cover material in the case of paperbacks, before buying/checking out the book. Although I usually also read a bit into the book as well before making any decisions to read. Sometimes I wish I had read the cover material and not wasted the money.

It’s a quiet Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house sometime more than a quarter of a century ago, and I’m in the den surrounded by gold shag carpet, an enormous flocked artificial Christmas tree towering above me. I’m flopped over a brown chair, and for the first time I’m reading a wholly remarkable book about a wholly remarkable book, “a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible  catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by an Earthman.”

It was also a funny book, an irreverent book, a science fiction novel full of spaceships and aliens — what’s more reprehensible than a Vogon? — and superintelligent computers and Kill-O Zap ray guns that was a satire of science fiction, the space opera sort that was popular at that time because of that little movie known as Star Wars.

It was also an absurd book with strange narrative blips like the story of Veet Voojagig, the philology student, who after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government,  “became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he’d bought over the past few years.” The ballpoints, apparently sentient life forms, theory has it, when left unattended,return to their planet of origin “where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpoint-oid life-style, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent to the good life.” 

That theory, of course, was no more absurd than the theory that my family and I would find diamonds in a plowed field in Arkansas. Which we tried to do — unsuccessfully — one year on summer vacation, when, sitting in the back seat of our Ford LTD, I also read the four-part Hitchhiker’s trilogy (another absurdity) as we drove through the splendors of Arkansas. Hunting for diamonds in a plowed field in Arkansas was about as absurd as the idea my father had that Arkansas was a great place to go on summer vacation. (Although we did pass through Texarkana, Texas, which, as it turns out, is where my wife is from, though it’s highly improbable she knew she would marry a geeky kid reading a highly remarkable science fiction novel while passing through her hometown on the way to hunt diamonds.)

Read more…

Here’s this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What do you think of speed-reading? Is it a good way to get through a lot of books, or does the speed-reader miss depth and nuance? Do you speed-read? Is some material better suited to speed-reading than others?

I don’t know enough about the techniques of speed reading to make a yay or nay statement about the various methods of speed reading and whether or not they’re reliable. But, that always reliable source Wikipedia lists skimming as one method of speed reading, and I do use skimming quite often, especially online.

I suspect if you’re out simply for information or cramming for an exam that requires you to spew back the information you’ve absorbed, then speed reading is perfect. Even then, if you are like me, using methods such as skimming has its flaws: When I skim something, I tend to forget what I’ve read fairly quickly. Which is OK if you’re reading something online and can bookmark the Web page or set up a new tab so you can refer back to it.

I also use skimming when trying to find a passage or section in a book or article I’ve already read.

I tend to read fairly quickly, which has its drawbacks. I’ve forgotten characters or major plot points, and I do miss subtle nuances of language. Of course if I really like a book, I’ll reread it at least once, and usually more often. Those second and third readings unveil the nuances: I catch things like extended metaphors, subtle character changes,  structural effects, etc.

I wish I had the time and patience to do a close reading of everything I read like those in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. I’ve done that type of reading, and sometimes I’ll do that type of reading with a particular passage or paragraph or section of a book.

Prose points out such subtleties as constant references to eyes and light and dark in Oedipus Rex that prepare readers for Oedipus’ literal blinding, subtleties you catch only if you slow down your reading.

My own experience of reading quickly leads me to think that speed readers do miss the nuances of writing.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday asks readers to ask their own question. My question is about online media in general more than it is about books:

Do you prefer online publications (newspapers, magazines, etc.) or reading devices like the Kindle to actual print?

I think this question in one way or another has been asked before, but it was recently brought to my mind again as I tried to navigate the online edition of the Austin American-Statesman, and found it, well, really unwieldy. There was little pleasure in it.  The experience made me crave a hand-held paper newspaper. (I just went to the page to make a link to it and found another annoyance — a drop-down ad that flowed over links to stories.  You have to close it to make it go away.)

At the same time, I like the additional features such as videos, Twitter pages, blogs, etc.

But, I really hope I never see the day that I use a Kindle, especially if it’s being monitored by marketers waiting to plunge deeper into our private life.

I like online previews, though. It’s nice to get a sense of a book by reading a few pages before buying it or checking it out of the library.

I cannot condemn self-help books. (I’m reading some now; at a time of personal crisis, and without health insurance for therapy, I need some insight.)

As an American genre,the books have deep roots in our literature (think Thoreau, Emerson — to some miniscule extent isn’t “Self-Reliance” a precursor to self-help?). And my recent readings in the genre have guided me back to my interest in Buddhism and to explore Buddhist practice. (Meditation, I believe, has been beneficial, especially to calm a clouded mind.) I plan to continue to explore Buddhism further.

The self-help genre has taken hold in the UK, and The Guardian has an analysis of its renewed popularity. It’s clear the need for  self-help is a sign of the times. The article points out that classics of the genre such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich emerged during the Depression, just as their current counterparts have emerged as unemployment rates have surged. My own interest in the genre re-surged after I became unemployed. And as I think back, the times when I’ve embraced self-help have been times of personal crisis (unemployment again, family breakups, deaths). We need hope. Even quick-fix hope.

At the same time, I’m skeptical. Those who write about the “power of attraction,” for instance, offer hope as long as we change our patterns of thought and imagine what we want. We imagine; we get. And I’ve tried. I’ve yet to receive. But the proponents such as guru Wayne Dyer have experienced great increase. Is it all just snake oil?

I am like Mulder on the X-Files: I want to believe. But the skeptic in me has his doubts.

I also don’t want to feel so good that I forget to be critical. Which, as the article points out, is the problem. The story notes journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s criticism of the genre as a dangerous force shaping American thinking, or non thinking, rather. Optimism without critical thinking. Lack of critical thinking turning us into corporate robots.

In the meantime, I’m going to see what I manifest. Perhaps it will finally be prosperity. Or at the very least a new, good quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys?

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Two-thirds of Brits have lied about reading books they haven’t. Have you? Why? What book?

I must confess: Mistakes were made. I did not have relations with The Scarlett Letter or To Kill A Mockingbird in high school. Of course that depends on what “to read” is, doesn’t it?

I mean, if by “to read” you mean reading the Cliff’s Notes, then, yes, I have read The Scarlett Letter. I mean, isn’t that reading? All the characters are there. The plot. The symbols. The Puritans being jerks. All that stuff your English teacher wants you to know and spew back to her on a multiple choice test.

And To Kill A Mockingbird? Technically, isn’t a film a “text”? I think the kids learn that in grad school these days, don’t they? So, I read the text of the film. I mean, how can you not imagine Atticus Finch as anyone other than Gregory Peck?

And remember: it was high school. There were better thing to do than read books that had really long sentences and semicolons in them, right?

And,  I’ve since redeemed myself on one count. I must confess to having relations with To Kill A Mockingbird multiple times now, including a recent encounter. And it was delightful. It really was. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

And, I’ve read, really read Ulysses. Trust me. It’s long and takes about half a semester in a graduate course on Joyce. So there.

Now, where’s a good cigar?

I’m reading William Least Heat-Moon’s Roads to Quoz, and in the process of describing a trip through Arkansas, he writes about meandering through settlements named Ink and Pencil Bluff and, in turn, those names remind him of his method of writing:

Considering my method of writing, driving through that territory gave new meaning to autobiography: I write a first draft in pencil, the second in ink from a fountain pen, and only thereafter do I enter the realm of binary digits (although six drafts — three-thousand pages — of my first book came tickity-tick-tick out of a typewriter.)

Reading that really struck me how impatient my mind is sometimes (all the

William Least Heat-Moon

time?), especially the johnny-deadline (to steal a phrase from Stephen Harrigan) mind I acquired from journalism. It’s hard to imagine writing any nonfiction piece, even a book-length piece, at such a slow-handed pace as Heat-Moon’s describing here. Although at one time drafting furiously at a computer seemed horrifying to this owner of a Royal manual typewriter. (Though my fingers aren’t kind to the computer keyboard, as I hunt and peck and pound, to my wife’s 1,000-word-a-minute-light-touch consternation when she listens to me type. I also recall whacking to death at least one keyboard in my newspaper days.) It’s now hard to imagine composing anywhere other than at a keyboard.

Though I do write longhand in a journal. Which brings to mind a series of tweets from yesterday, when after a few minutes of writing in my journal, I complained about writer’s cramp: I wondered how those who still do write in longhand sustain their writing for long periods.

One response: “As a longhand rough-drafter, there are moments when I have to drop the pen and give my hand a shake.”

I wish I had the patience to draft in longhand (I occasionally do, but not often enough to say it’s a regular practice). I wonder what difference it would make in my writing. I wonder what it would be like to draft a 1,000-word feature article in longhand before zipping it into the bit-and-byte-o-sphere?