Susan: August 2007 Archives

This is a short fictional piece I wrote earlier this year. It's intent is to capture a sense of the place in which it is set, Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont, CA. It's a bit raw, but I'm thinking of taking this into something larger. Photos follow.

    The Babies

    They were born under bald, green hills on the edge of the Bay, under steep red paths to the treeless hilltops, aside flat brown geometries of salt ponds, in distant view of the low arch of a homely bridge.  They stuck close to their mothers in the steady summer wind.  The first few days, in the crook between two hills, the jostling of the herd and the sounds of the other goats surrounded the babies and filled their long ears with comfort, so they could sleep snug under the stars.
    At first the black dogs frightened them and they shook like stringy little leaves.  But the wolves stayed, and after a time the babies understood, the wolves would just orbit the herd, and not penetrate it. 
    The man in the red and green bandana stepped out of his white teardrop trailer and drank a cup of coffee.  He watched the herd, counted the babies, watched the dogs circle around.   Before the sun rose over the hills the wind was light, and the little ones stepped out beyond the protection of the herd. A red and white baby, four tiny white legs, enormous eyes, stumbled this way and that onto the dirt road behind the trailer and stopped in the middle to look east. There was another green hill, two or three wind-shaped trees, and a glittering lagoon framed in living cattails.  The baby's eyes followed the cattails in the morning breeze. 
    The man set his coffee cup inside the teardrop trailer and picked up his aluminum shepherd's hook.  He walked across the grass to the road, where he stood beside the baby, watching the cattails. A mile on the other side of the lagoons he could see square laboratories and warehouses, and a few miles beyond those, Mission Peak, spring green until the rains stop.  The baby, too short to see anything but the cattails and the tips of the mountains, turned and galloped back to her mother. 
    Bushes rustled just down the road.  The man raised his hook above his head, shook it, and shouted in the language of a man who lives alone.  The bushes stilled for several minutes.  He watched the bushes as the black dogs watched the goats.  Finally, a sleek blond cougar crawled away to the farther hills while the babies huddled in the fold of the herd.

I read this juicy tidbit from Salon's Broadsheet. 

I bring this up because we just found a link to a blog post from the World's Fair in which the author takes a break from his academic pursuits to examine the male-female breakdown of Shouts and Murmurs authors. (The post is arguably more amusing than most S&M columns.) His conclusion: "Out of the 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era), 17 have been women. That's 12.782%." To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women.

nero 5.5.10 rar

What's more, there has not been a woman author of Shouts and Murmurs for over three years. The last one was in 2004.

The rest is over at Salon (get a free pass to the site for watching a short ad), as well as the original source, The World's Fair.   As an MFA student, I have to say I'm amazed. Our program is majority female. Most of the writers I've met are female.  But then again, I have never been to New York, the city for which, we assume, the New Yorker was named. Perhaps New York is different. Perhaps in the borders of New York are somehow toxic to women and their carefully mailed submissions to Shouts and Murmurs. Salon's writer has an excellent point, that being the gigantic number of patently desperate writers flinging their submissions (in utter futility) toward the New Yorker on a regular basis, agent or no.  It is impossible to believe that the ratio of submissions or inquiries is anywhere close to only 13% female.

Heh. That's sort of cute. For a moment I made it sound like they actually read submissions.

I'll keep an eye out for any response on this--it has certainly traveled to most of the big literary blogs.  If no response is given, 13% may become a cynical asterisk attached to the entirety of The New Yorker for a long time to come.  The New Yorker might be the Alabama State Legislature of journalism.
 

Time for a photo...at least in Minnesota I see evidence of women with books. This statue has been at the Minnesota State Fair since the 1950's, and is an homage to the women of the state.

A European online news outlet, Bits of News, has reviewed the grassroots arts chapbook I co-edited over the summer, and gave a nice mention to my story, Another Thread.  The chapbook is sold out, but if you'd like to read Another Thread, the free PDF download is here.  Note: some Acrobat versions seem to be having trouble with the PDF. I'll work on that and get a more compatible copy up by tomorrow.

I took a peek at the New York Times mainstream fiction besteller list today, and noticed that up there near the top was "The Sandworms of Dune". Written not by Herbert, who is dead, in the nonfiction sense of the word, but by his son & one other from the late Frank's notes. 

Add to that the Tolkein book--which was mostly written by the late JRR himself, but with significant help from son Christopher--and I wonder if I'm going the wrong way about this writing business.   I don't have any dead relatives with unfinished manuscripts, but perhaps I can invent one.  Here's a couple of ideas inspired by my recent trip to the Minnesota State Fair.

"The Lost Book of Madame Buckley's Dairy Cow Chronicles".  Would have lots of mooing.  I would need to do extensive research at an actual dairy farm, and manufacture some terrible crime to take place in the proximity of a mechanical milking machine.  In order to continue to qualify as "literary fiction" rather than  some version of genre fiction (cow fiction? bovine mystery?) I would need either the human protagonist, or one of the cows, to have deep internal conflicts over the nature of her universe.  Perhaps one of the cows would be carnivorous.



"The Life of Cookie"
The lost manuscript of my dear greatly removed and long worm-ridden Aunt, who baked.  Wherin a woman and a zoo animal become hopelessly trapped inside this menacing cookie barn.  They will have esoteric philosophical discussions while eating cookies. There will also be milk.  In order to add conflict, the zoo animal will be a Republican, and the woman will be a Unitarian.

As I build out the infrastructure of Mackerel Street, I'm putting together some links resources that offer a little more than a bare list of links. Check out the new Great Literary Blogs page (link in right column as well), with blogs, news sites, and other literary goodies.  I'm adding links that are compelling and current, and giving you a little info before you click. Feel free to make suggestions--contact info is on the page.

Poets & Writers has an article this month about about the dangerous blurring of fiction and nonfiction of late, as evidenced by numerous high-profile scandals (Andrew Furman, Poets & Writers Sept/Oct 2007. article not online; summary here).  In it the author describes difficulties in defining the ethical lines of nonfiction, especially when he made the effort to teach a class that crosses both genres. 

There seems to be an emphasis in creative nonfiction on really terrible life stories (not stories terribly told, but rather lives lived in terrible circumstances) and though there is some of that in my family history, I like to think there is more to CNF than shock value. In addition, some of the CNF I've read seems to be far too narratively intact to be real. Making specific accusations can get one into trouble, but I'll point to the New Yorker as one place where I've read more than a few astonishingly "perfect" nonfiction pieces by prominent contemporary authors.

I have a lot of nonfiction material in my life, especially if I look to the lives of relatives, such as my eccentric grandmother, and others, and I think if I work at it for a long time, I can draw some kind of real narrative through the events of their lives. To do so, though, I'd have to step outside of their immediate story and put it in the context of history of the time, pull in larger themes--I don't see a closeup, personal narrative being realistic given the absence of recorded conversations and direct physical evidence.

So I suppose what really gets me about contemporary CNF is something touched on in the P&W article--the possibility, or at least the perception, that many great nonfiction pieces are significantly fictional.  As a person who primarily writes fiction, I resent that fiction is less regarded by many Americans at the present time; (a Barnes & Noble employee once told me that there were two sections in Barnes & Noble, nonfiction and "make-believe"--she will go, I am quite sure, straight to hell) and I resent that people are writing what they claim as nonfiction using fictional elements, and being allowed to publish as such. I think the emphasis on fantastic and horrible situations exacerbates this by encouraging exaggeration and fabrication.

But what to do. MFA programs such as mine might even be part of the problem, as they encourage drafting of nonfiction narratives in an inevitably competitive environment. The New Yorker has done it's part with its remarkably perfect nonfiction tales, setting a bar most real-life narratives do not meet. But perhaps most of all, at this time in history, is the extraordinary rise of reality television, true crime television, and sensationalistic news.  Americans are increasingly used to amazing family tales told in their living rooms, most of which wrap up neatly in a half hour or hour program. Is there a sense that writers must meet the same standard as an aggressively edited episode of "Dateline" or "48 Hours: Mystery"?  I don't think many would admit to it, but we are all part of one media culture, which feeds and influences itself in surprising ways.

Food for thought.  Speaking of food for thought, how about Hot Dish on a Stick? A sight like this at the Minnesota State Fair this weekend reminded me that truth is still sometimes stranger than fiction.



And let's not forget the Tackiest Amusement Ride Ever: I'll call her the Amazon Queen.  There is a curious emphasis on her breasts.



'Twas a gorgeous day at the fair, though, and tens of thousands came to eat stuff-on-sticks and wander acres of delights.

 

 

Over at Eric Alterman's blog, "Altercation", a post today gives me a bit of hope as a fiction writer.  The conventional wisdom is that people read less these days, and an AP article came out recently claiming as much. In the course of the post, Alterman's guest-blogger, Siva Vaidhyanathan, says:

Perhaps the best-known such survey was done in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was called "Reading at Risk"...It said 57 percent of Americans had not read a work of literary fiction....Many of those people, I am sure, read The Anarchist in the Library and no other book that year. After all, why would you? Oh, neither of these surveys asked non-English language readers what they read. There are many other problems with the surveys. But there are bigger problems with how we share and discuss the findings.

So this study, a summary of which I found here, sounds the alarm about reduced numbers of literary readers in American society.  It does seem a bit disheartening, and it's written with a kind of sky-is-falling message. But in S.V.'s analysis, Americans just have a heck of a lot more entertainment/enrichment options than we did 40 years ago, and the numbers reflect that more than a general devaluation of reading or intellectual pursuit.  Reading is now part of a greater media/literary tradition, inevitable in a more complex and technologically advanced society.

So, no, we are not getting intellectually lazy. Some of us are lucky enough to have jobs that pay us to read. But in general, millions more Americans read and buy books than did 30 years ago. Why? Because there are millions more Americans than there were 30 years ago.

That's just common sense.There's more people doing just about everything these days. And since the study didn't look at people who read in non-English languages, it doesn't account for America's growing foreign-born population, many of whom come from cultures with sophisticated literary traditions.

But DESPITE all these rich new media forms, many of which are very compelling--I mean, we're all sitting here reading the internet--reading is still a major part of American culture. Morning talk shows still feature a variety of authors. And the relationship between books and film grows ever tighter, as more and more books, many of them "literary" fiction, are made into films--which then spur more interest in the books themselves.  And millions and millions continue to read. 93 million adults read a form of literature in the last twelve months. NINETY-THREE MILLION. 

In the study, the authors cite increased participation in writing creatively, which in my view serves to undercut their theory that literary culture is in crisis. Taking the time to write creatively is not a small thing, in fact many people are terrified of the prospect.   Yet  a healthy increase in creative writers over twenty years shows continued engagement with the art form:

Contrary to the overall decline in literary reading, the number of people doing creative writing increased by 30 percent, from 11 million in 1982 to more than 14 million in 2002. However, the number of people who reported having taken a creative writing class or lesson decreased by 2.2 million during the same time period.

If there really was a precipitous intellectual decline in America, I guess I'd expect the # of people who write creatively to drop as well. But it didn't. Clearly something is fueling the literary cycle, and it is more complex than just books.  As for the decline in classes--not surprising, as incomes have eroded over the last few years, and leisure time has decreased.  I wonder how this fits in with the very real proliferation in MFA programs, which seem to have popped up everywhere.  Are fewer people taking classes, but more people taking on serious writing programs?

There's more to literary life than just books, but books are in no danger anytime soon. 

I'm diving into writing a new short story, starting at ten below in the parking lot of a Minnesota big box store. Here is a picture I took this summer that is exactly the opposite of that.

As for the rest of the site, we will push on with more posts on the writing life, more photography, and whatever else we discover along the way.

My home town is Arcata, California, deep in the redwood Empire and the County of Humboldt, set along a marshy coastline, filled to the brim with brightly painted Victorians.  In its middle is a grassy plaza with a statue of a dead president and herds of errant hippies. Up and down the coast are empty beaches that are sometimes foggy, and sometimes not, and when you are away from Humboldt, far away as I am now, you wonder if it is even real.  At least I know Robbie the dog was there with me, though I wonder if his memory of the place has also started to fade like a beach in the fog.

Was the fog coming in or out? Am i forgetting Humboldt, or just beginning to remember it?

 

Just saw Stardust, the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's illustrated book of the same name. Lots of fun, certain to be the sort of film people buy for their DVD collections and watch on cold winter days. I haven't read the book, though the film was intriguing enough that I might give it a go. A sweet, satisfying story, with good performances and nice production design.

With Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and most of Grimm's Fairy Tales fully claimed by the film industry, newer tales like Gaiman's are Hollywood's only chance to bring fantasy fables to the big screen.  Stardust doesn't lend itself to sequels, so new stories must be found.  The best of these newer fairy tales for many years was the horrific "Pan's Labyrinth", but Pan aside, the pickings, I fear, are slim. I'd like to see an art-film version of "A Brief History of the Dead" (one of my favorite recent books),  but it's unlikely to be blockbuster material, and IMDB shows no current plans for such a film.  Instead, it appears, we are faced with the tiger in the inflatable raft.  I must confess, I have not read the book about the tiger in the inflatable raft. I'm not sure I ever will. But a full-length feature film? Gimme a lifejacket, I'll swim from here...

A big fantasy narrative is hard to pull off without borrowing from the past; Gaiman is no different.  The hero-falls in love-with a star-in human form-is an old construction. C.S. Lewis uses it in his best book of the Narnia series, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", in which Caspian meets the daughter of a star at the end of the world and eventually marries her.  Other details in Stardust are openly borrowed from a variety of ancient tales. 

Years ago I wrote a juvenile fiction novel, which for various reasons I have not yet attempted to publish, that takes place in a fantasy realm. Throughout the writing process I was acutely aware of how difficult--perhaps impossible--it is to write fantasy that doesn't pull from many of these earlier epic and fairy tales but also has a compelling narrative and a sense of a larger story. If you don't use the fantasy symbols and archetypes so well established throughout western literature, you have to build from scratch, and that's tough going.

Anyhow, that's enough musing for tonight. Enjoy the frog. 

Having grown up in the redwoods, I'm quite familiar with summer green, but where I come from it was in the treetops, not on the ground.The California hills dried gold each summer of my early childhood in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and though things were wetter and greener deep in the redwoods, the Mediterranean climate prevailed by late spring of each year. It was the winter time when California was really green.

Here in Minnesota the seasons are reversed.  The green explodes in springtime, bursting out of every crack in every country road.  By midsummer the state is awash in waves of green prairie grasses, black-eyed-susans scattered to the horizon. The leaves of deciduous trees grow huge by August and look as though they will never fade; the lilies float in every pond, yellow-green duckweed rippling with the ducks.   Last weekend I spent an afternon with my parents at Lake Rebecca Regional Park in Greenfield, Minnesota, west of the Twin Cities.  A breeding ground for Trumpeter swans, we caught the giant birds in their nesting pond.

 

 In the wintertime, Minnesota goes brown.  Then, if we're lucky, brilliant white. 

For Art in a Liberal Frame, the grassroots poetry/art/fiction anthology I helped create as part of the Creative Artists Alliance, I wrote a blogger-themed comedy story.  I've shared the short story over at Daily Kos, the community that inspired it, and I'm posting it here as a free PDF download. It's written for an internet-savvy audience, but I'm told you don't have to be an online political junkie to enjoy it.  Download the PDF here.

I'm leaning back in my sofa, watching and listening to an episode of Austin City Limits on our local PBS HD channel here in Minneapolis, and the band--if you can define them as such, or at all--is Polyphonic Spree.  They must have fifty people on stage, all in various brightly colored smocks. They have a horn section, a large chorus, wind instruments scattered throughout, a harpist, and a handsome lead singer.  Their music has a distinct 60's flavor with a large-scale optimism hard to find in popular music these days. They don't have "dancers", but every musician on the stage is constantly moving around, some to loose choreography. At one point a French Horn player desperately dodges the lead singer and several others in an attempt to just find a spot to play his part--which he does, beautifully.  The music is inspirational in feel, and you can see the entiire Spree getting onboard that feeling. With some bands, such intensity feels contrived, but these guys do it right.

Just watching this performance makes me feel like writing, makes my mind wander off into the last place I left a certain character, staring across a river from the bare lot of her former home.  The music contains strong emotional hooks, and those hooks awakened the experience of the character, Rachael, in my head. I scribble down some notes and get into the "mood" that will take me through Rachaels next trial and certain rebellion against the forces that have taken her home. 

A couple of years ago I watched Hiyao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"--one of my favorite movies that inspires me to write--and on the DVD they had a special feature of The Making Of, as DVDs often do. Miyazaki talked about how he and his animators at Studio Ghibli had spent the ENTIRE production--years--listening, over and over, to only one song, by a Japanese singer and included in the credits on the film. It's a haunting, sad song,  and the film has a very similar tone.  As to me that film is Miyazki's greatest so far, the role played by that song intrigues me.  Music can certainly elicit emotion, but it seems that this song, repeated endlessly, was able to contain the emotional spectrum of the art being created around it.