Syntax of Things

Mark Your Calendar

Good news for those of us here in the Trangle: the off-again, on-again North Carolina Festival of the Book is on-again.  It's been renamed the North Carolina Literary Festival and will be held September 10-13, 2009, in Chapel Hill.  It's even been given a new Web presence complete with illustrations by Daniel Wallace (Big Fish).  So far, there's only been one announced writer, Brian Pickney, but if the 2006 lineup is a predictor of future success, there will be plenty more to follow.

And by then, the twins might be old enough that I'll be able to leave the house on the weekend.  Whether or not I'll be awake while attending is another story.

All Done

When you can't even make the cut on a shitty looking literary link aggregator, it's time to call it quits.  At least, for now, the literary/book side of this blog is pretty much done.  Hell, I can't even find five minutes to read anymore, so it's no wonder I haven't found the time to find something to write about for Syntax of Things.

It's been fun.  Five years is a good run.  Nearly a million in page views.  Not bad.  That's about 900,000 more than I ever expected.

Who knows, maybe I'll let the dust settle here for a little while; maybe I'll get the itch again and come back better than ever.

But for now, it's probably going to be silence, with the occasional birth/toddler announcement, and maybe a post or two about something that really pisses me off, like shitty looking literary link aggregators.

If you want to join the Fans of SoT mailing list, the email addie is somewhere on this page.

Until when...

Guest Essay: Kyle Minor

The latest offering from Dzanc Books is Kyle Minor's story collection In the Devil's Territory.  Syntax of Things is proud to offer a brief essay by Kyle discussing the first story in his collection, "The San Diego Union Poinsettia Bowl Party":

In 2007, my wife and I took a trip to the Ohio State University Medical Center to confirm the good news we thought we already knew, which was that she was pregnant with our second child. We watched him move around, fishlike, on the sonogram. He had blue eyes, I was sure, and he was uber-intelligent, and girls were going to like him. All these things were radically apparent, even on the sketchy black and white computer screen. The nurse typed a message from him to me – “Hi, Dad!” – and printed wallet-sized sonogram images, which I promptly showed to my buddies, my colleagues, the woman at the Tam Tam Chinese restaurant on High Street, the university library’s rare books curator, the towel guy at the gym, the checkout guy at Blockbuster Video.

Things were looking up. I was almost done with graduate school, and my writing career was starting to take off – major anthologies, emails from editors at major publishing houses, a first-rate New York agent, whole nine. Ohio State was in the national title hunt, in a year in which my wife and me had resolved to watch football all day every Saturday, and every last bowl game of an increasingly long bowl season. Our older son was learning to read, and he was newly interested in the milelong walks that culminated in half-hour buying binges at Half-Price Books on Lane Avenue, pizza at the low-rent place across the street from the bookstore, and the long trek home in the dark, him hanging onto my sore back, a plastic bag full of books hanging from each hand.

Then one day my wife called me into the bedroom and said, “Look at this.” The sheets were wet and bloody. We called the ambulance. They rushed us to the emergency room. The diagnosis was not good. Placenta previa, a bad case, they said. Another hour and we would’ve lost the baby. The prescription – mandatory, they said, and no fudging – was bed rest for the balance of the pregnancy, which was months.

Now we had a problem. I was teaching at three colleges, plus online courses for the Gotham Writers Workshop, and I had a thesis to finish. Our son had preschool to attend, and we wanted him to attend, because he was thriving there. And someone had to take care of him while we were gone.

Into this breach, heroically, stepped my parents, and all the more heroically since my mother was still recovering from a major surgery. They cooked, cleaned, cared for my wife, cared for my son, didn’t much complain. But, inevitably, given the stress, there were tensions, and these tensions came to a head on December 19^th, a night when my fears that my wife and baby wouldn’t make it, and my resentments, and my parents’ wearinesses, and my wife’s desire that someone, someone, make her some ice cream the way she liked it for once, with hot fudge on top and almonds sprinkled just so, all converged with such force that I feared a psychological breakdown.

My salvation was that December 19^th was also the night of the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl Party, the first bowl game of the year. Good Lord, was it welcome, and we celebrated the best way we could, with steamed crab legs and poinsettias purchased from the Giant Eagle grocery store across the street, and for the first time in a long time, we all of us found something to hope for.

The next day I spent a few hours in the Caribou Coffee down the road and wrote the story pretty much beat for beat the way it happened, and published it as an essay in The Southern Review, and not long afterward, emails poured in from all over the country. We’re worried about you and your family, they said. How is your wife? How is the baby? Is everyone all right? I answered everyone with the good news: The baby came early, but the baby is thriving, he’s beautiful, he’s the strongest of us all.

Last month I received news that the essay had been named to the 100 Distinguished Sports Stories of 2008 list in the back of the Best American Sports Writing anthology. By then, I had already turned it into a short story, making, I’ll admit, minimum changes, and it is the leadoff story in my collection In the Devil’s Territory, which releases this week from Dzanc Books.

Tomorrow Nears

Sometimes I wonder what I would have been like if certain things hadn't happened in my life, if instead of where I'm at now (and where I've been) I would have remained in Alabama in the same small town in which my parents still live, if I'd chosen a path that most people I knew in high school chose.  I wonder what tomorrow would be like for me, if I would have this same feeling I have now, this same hope of possibility, this same nervousness that we've come this far and we can't lose now.  I wonder if I would have the same fear that my parents and many like them have, a fear that masks something else (he's Muslim, he's got a weird name, he's a socialist), and we all know what that something is.

I wonder if the Alabama me would wake up early in the morning and stand in line in the rain for godknowshowlong and for the first time in his life vote with absolute conviction and pride.

I wonder if I would have ever read Langston Hughes or be thinking of Langston and Ralph and James and Richard and Zora tonight. I doubt it.  But maybe... I can't wait for tomorrow. 

******

Daybreak in Alabama

by Langston Hughes

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

Time

I figured out what has to be the best barometer of just how little spare time I have these days:  Ron Rash's new novel has been at the top of my TBR pile for over a month.  And what have I been reading instead? you ask.  A lot of stuff like this.  Hooked I am.  I guess because the baseball season was an utter flop and football has turned out to be even worse, I'm left watching politics as if it were some sort of fantasy sports league.  It's never good when you lose sleep when your preferred candidate drops a point in some obscure daily tracker.

Just another reason why this election can't come soon enough.

Not Rotting

The University of Central Arkansas, already home to the great Oxford American magazine, has added Andrei Condrescu's Exquisite Corpse to its roster of publications.  UCA will transition the Corpse from its current online-only format with a 150-page annual to hit bookstores in 2009.  The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette chatted with Condrescu about this decision:

Q. How and why did the University of Central Arkansas become the center of earnest literary enterprise in this country ? Have you seen the place yet ? Did Warwick Sabin promise you a nice office ?

A. Mark Spitzer, one of the Corpse’s most formidable assistant editors at Louisiana State University, is now a professor at UCA. He suggested bringing the publication there because they already had the Oxford American, and having the Corpse too would simply propel the school into the big leagues. At least the literary publishing ones. I met with some well-meaning people there, English professors, deans, some administrators, and they all seemed keen on the idea. They promised me nothing: no money, no office, not even a lifetime supply of barbecue, but on the other hand we get to stay completely independent, publish whatever we like, keep ownership of the journal, and stop the relationship anytime we want. They get credit for their association with “the New Yorker of the avant garde,” as a mean critic once called us, and we get to be in a physical body again.

Word(s) to the Wise

What happens to someone who has read the entire 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary?  Here's what happened to Ammon Shea who over the past year did just that:

"I think it turned me into a blithering idiot," he laughs, admitting he often becomes tongue tied and unable to remember the simplest of words, such as – incredibly enough – "milk."

"I would end up stumbling and ask the guy around the counter, 'Where's the white stuff, the white liquid,'" he says.

Three for Monday Morning

1.  Mel Tillis and Harry Crews have been recommended for the 2009 Florida Artists Hall of Fame by the Florida Arts Council.  Interesting combination to say the least.

2.  Ron Rash's new novel, Serena, hits store shelves this week.  Here's Mr. Rash discussing the book at Powells' From the Author site.

3.  The On the Road scroll has landed in Chicago where Columbia College will host a series of events centered around the book and Beat influence on the arts.

Lazarus

The Globe and Mail profiles Nick Cave, who, it appears, has just finished work on a novel:

The book, which Cave finished mere days ago, is called The Death of Bunny Munro, and it grew out of a screenplay that never got made. Munro is "just not a good guy," Cave says.

"But I've always liked things like those Jim Thompson novels, where you've just got [a protagonist who's] flat-out evil. But there's always something a little endearing about him. And Thompson would draw you, chapter by chapter, into this vortex, where your sympathies are stretched finer and finer. I've always found that interesting in his books."

Curiously, Cave says the biggest difference between songwriting and novel writing is that "I find the writing of novels and stuff easier. It's because you're pursuing one idea for a sustained amount of time.

"My problem always is coming up with the original idea - that 'What am I going to write about?' And you have to do that over and over and over again with songs. Every time you finish one, you just have to work out what the next one will be. What's your theme?

"To write a novel, you only need to get a basic idea and run with it. It's the same with scriptwriting. Scriptwriting is even easier, because in most cases you're supplied your theme. Someone says. 'Will you write an Australian western?' Well, yeah, why not? It's not rocket science to do that - you get some archetypes, stick 'em on their head, and do this and that with them.

"But songwriting - I mean, the amount of times I've rung up my friends and said, 'Right, look, will someone tell me what to write a song about?' And someone will go, 'Well, what about trains?' And you go, 'Oh, all right.' "

Market

It looks like the chances of me getting financed to buy that absolutely necessary minivan (gah!) between now and the time of the twins' arrival took a big, sloppy political hit a few hours ago.  I may need to go Beverly Hillbillies and strap some car seats to the roof of my car.

So if, like me, you need a good laugh, then here's something for you:  Remarks by Charles Bernstein at an event to mark the release of this year's Best American Poetry:

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

Zora

As part of its series revisiting some of the landmarks mentioned in the Federal Writers' Project's American Guide Series, the NYT travels to Eatonville, a small town in Florida made famous by Zora Neale Hurston:

Eatonville has long been defined as a paradox of triumph and struggle. It is both a historic model of black empowerment and a community of nearly 2,400 where the poverty rates are twice the national average. It is a literary hub but also an oak-shaded example of rural Southern black culture — sometimes disdained, sometimes praised — that was born of American slavery. Not surprisingly, residents here are both proud and protective.

And the concern about Eatonville’s image really began with Zora, which is all anyone here calls Hurston. She introduced the world to her hometown through heartfelt, dialect-heavy books like “Mules and Men” (1935) and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937).

Five paragraphs in the Florida guidebook transformed the town, just off Route 17, a road that runs through the oft-forgotten center of Florida into a stage of black history and human drama. Bold as a bass drum in both life and literature, Hurston led readers to the store owned by Eatonville’s first mayor, Joe Clarke, then veered into more private areas. “Off the road on the left,” she wrote, “is the brown-with-white-trim modern public school, with its well-kept yards and playgrounds, which Howard Miller always looks after, though he can scarcely read and write.”

She also mentioned the new husband of Widow Dash and wrote that Lee Glenn “sells drinks of all kinds and whatever goes with transient rooms.”

So in just a few hundred words, Hurston linked Eatonville with self-government but also illiteracy, remarriage and sex. Clearly, Fodor’s this was not.

In fact, it was not a portrait everyone appreciated.

Hannah in Tuscaloosa

I'm as excited as anyone to watch the debate tonight, but if I lived anywhere close to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I would be watching the debate on tape delay.  No way would I miss Barry Hannah's reading there:

“It’s been a long time,” said Michael Martone, chair of UA’s creative writing program, “at least since I’ve been here, and that’s 12 years now.”

Hannah contacted Martone, noting he still has family here and visits often. In addition to the new book, Grove Press has recently re-issued a collection of his older titles, among them “Ray,” written about his time in Tuscaloosa, “Geronimo Rex,” which won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, the story collections “Airships” and “Bats Out of Hell,” and “High Lonesome,” which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Hannah still has friends here as well.

“We were great friends; we were drinking buddies, is what we were,” said UA English professor Phil Beidler, “although I’m proud to say neither of us has had a drink in more than 20 years. We were co-enablers. We took to each other like ducks. We were just loony for a while.”

Hannah did bring a revolver to class once, in the same case with his flugelhorn. Esquire magazine, in a 1998 article, backs that up. Students apparently tried to walk out on Hannah’s impromptu solo, at which point he waved the pistol, saying “Now this is some bad soul. You guys had better learn the difference.”

The story about Hannah firing into the floorboards of his MG, having let it fill with rain while he drank away an afternoon at The Chukker, apparently has its basis in truth as well.

“I’ve never heard him say it; but it’s almost like it’s in the air,” Martone said.

Stephen King's SportsCenter Commercial

 

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Brick & Mortar

Fellow former Litblog Co-op'er makes us all proud (and just a tiny bit jealous):

After Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, 29, graduated from New York University with an English degree in 2001, she did what she was supposed to do, which was land a coveted job as an editorial assistant at a major publishing house.

She cried every day.

It wasn’t that Ms. Stockton Bagnulo did not love books enough. She loved them too much. Writing book-jacket copy from a cubicle, sorting files, “I felt so far from the things we were making,” she recalled.

Longing for the part-time job she had in college, at Three Lives, an independent bookstore in the West Village, Ms. Stockton Bagnulo returned to working there on weekends to cheer herself up. At some point she realized that graduate school in creative writing was not the answer (which was good, because she didn’t get in anywhere). “Gradually,” she said, “it dawned on me that the big, important thing I wanted to do was open a bookstore.”

Zen Again

A reporter for the Toronto Star re-enacted the cross-country motorcycle trip that Robert Pirsig detailed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wrote his own book about it:

Re-enacting the journey from Minneapolis to San Francisco chronicled by Pirsig in his cult classic, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Mark Richardson digs deep to unearth the motives behind his tormented mentor's search for quality while embarking on a search of his own.

"I sent the first draft to Pirsig," Richardson said. "He read it and wrote back and said it was like being a ghost at his own funeral."

The editor of the Toronto Star's "Wheels" section had to be reached via pay phone at a truck stop in Dakota City, Neb. He's on the road again on a motorcycle, this time promoting his book.

"What was missing," mused Richardson, "was the fascinating story of Pirsig's life. He wrote about finding inner peace, but his actual life was in turmoil."

Correcting

I'm all for a good reprint, but I had no idea that JFranz was personally responsible for the uptick in their numbers:

The toughest statement about what role reprints are filling comes from Persephone's Nicola Beauman, who doesn't hesitate to say that modern fiction has lost the art of storytelling, an attribute she distinguishes from plot.

"You get to the end of Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' and you haven't been changed in any way," she explains. "You think, 'So what?' "

Beauman, whose "A Very Great Profession" chronicles the British "women's novel" from 1914 to 1939, argues that the writers and novelists she is publishing, Dorothy Whipple and Marghanita Laski among them, are exemplars of that lost art of storytelling. She refers, not disdainfully, to her company's books as middlebrow novels; Persephone's biggest recent success, Winifred Wilson's "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day" (the basis for the recent film), might qualify. But it's tough to think of a contemporary match for its singular sophistication and generosity.

Return of Here and There

It's back.  First link post in ages.  I forgot how long these can take when one is distracted:

• Chad Post, director of Open Letter Books, and author Dubravka Ugresic discuss the literary translations program at the University of Rochester during an appearance on Rochester's WHAM TV.

• Have the megalisters hurt the mom & pop used-book stores?

• Becoming an old (blogging) man.

• Bob Dylan has two "poems" in the New Yorker. 

McSweeney's on DFW

McSweeney's is eulogizing David Foster Wallace.  Here's Tom Bissell:

I had one thing in common with Dave Wallace: we both dipped tobacco. Actually, we had something else in common: we were both from the Midwest. That, and I probably stole more from him than any other writer. But our friendship, such as it was, was mostly based on the fact that we both dipped, and used dip while writing, and often hated this about ourselves. The last time I saw him, in the spring, I had just had mouth surgery—my third mouth surgery, as it happens. We had talked about dipping a lot but we had never dipped together, and this was the first time we had seen each other in several years. We were acquaintances more than friends. It is hard to be friends with someone you admire as much as I admired Dave, and it speaks to his grace and kindness that, knowing full well what I owed him as a writer, he let me into his life at all. However. The tobacco. He had quit for a while but was back on it. I had quit for three weeks. After prolonged negotiation, we agreed we could probably have one dip together. We did, and then we played chess. He whipped me two games in a row, all the while expressing shock that I was so bad. (He had said before we started playing that his friends always expressed shock that he was so bad.) When, after the games, I asked him to sign my copy of Infinite Jest (which I bought in 1996, while in college, when spending $30 on a hardcover was a real bankrupter, and which book I have basically taken with me everywhere since, including Uzbekistan for the Peace Corps, which also wasn't easy, given luggage and space restrictions), he did sign, very tenderly and beautifully, but also somewhat tartly, drawing a little diagram to show our chess game progress, as if to imply a whole future of chess games with Dave Wallace to look forward to, drawing two check marks underneath his name and leaving the space under mine blank. Right before the weekend was over, though, I finally beat him. I forgot to ask him to amend his little chart. I figured the next time I saw him I would do that, and maybe we would even play again.

Musical Lethem

Jonathan Lethem takes a break from writing novels about music to write...lyrics for music:

"You Are All My People," which comes out today on Bloodshot Records, is the first album by I'm Not Jim, a collaboration featuring the vocals and guitar of Walter Salas-Humara, more widely known as the front man of the Silos, a highly literate and slyly humorous rock act that also happens to be a favorite of Mr. Lethem. The writer penned most of the lyrics for the unusual assortment of songs and spoken-word interludes that appear on the new record, but he doesn't actually sing or otherwise perform — unlike some of his peers.

"Rick [Moody] is a musician; he can play," Mr. Lethem, sitting at a table in a coffee shop around the corner from his Boerum Hill home, said recently. "I'm at pains to make it clear that I'm not pretending to be that."

You can read more about the collaboration and order the album at Bloodshot Records.

And because I'm in a good mood, for now, here's a song to sample.

+ I'm Not Jim--"Drink Til I'm Sober"

More DFW

Ed has collected the thoughts of numerous folks for a nice remembrance of David Foster Wallace.  I especially liked what Christopher Sorrentino had to say:

It does a disservice to Wallace and his work to remember it as a sustained exception to the “rule” pigeonholing postmodern work: that it is severely technical, devoted exclusively to games and to the algorithmic execution of formal steps. Time and again Wallace demonstrated that it is only through daring acts of creativity that we can be drawn into the human heart securely: via the questions he raised about the nature of storytelling; via his upending of reader’s expectations; and especially via his implicit condemnation of conventional narrative as the perfect formal delivery system for conventional wisdom. These approaches are not exceptional; rather, they go directly to the essence of the writing, and reading, experience.

It would be a further disservice if this great writer’s life, and career, were to become circumscribed, and defined, by his terrible death. Reading over the hasty hagiographic tributes which have appeared since Saturday night, many of which include ickily fannish scanning of Wallace’s works and public utterances for clues to his ultimate intentions, it seems to me that such tributes don’t appear to be the product of true “reading” at all. Wallace would have wanted such romantic horseshit shunted to the side — shredded and burned, if possible. Wallace wrote for the same reasons any writer does: to launch his preoccupations on the tar sea of composition, and to be read. That he is read, and even revered, has always struck me as a reason for hope — I gather that, tragically, it didn’t strike him the same way. Yet his output is not a 3,000 page suicide note, and even in the darkest corners of these fecund and exuberant works we can find no more evidence of the suicidally depressed individual Wallace evidently became than we can detect the impoverished and out-of-favor Mozart in his own exuberant late works.

He was the best we had. In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Me & David Foster Wallace

One of the first promises I made as a blogger was that I would read and report on the results of my reading of Infinite Jest. I'd started and stopped the novel at least a half dozen times.  In September 2004, I made it to the end... 

Wallace Reading

It's hard to believe we've lost this great talent. 

Speechless

According to reports, David Foster Wallace hanged himself last night.  He was 46.

Update:  Sarah says something I wrote in this post originally, but then deleted, thinking it perhaps  hyperbole or overreaction or shock.  She writes, "It feels like when Kurt Cobain died." 

But the more I think of it, and for those of us who love reading, who love great writing, who appreciate the folks who pour their every cell onto the page for our enjoyment and elucidation, the news of DFW's death is probably sadder.  At least for me at this point in my life and my career I think it is more of shock and sadder than Cobain's suicide was to me at the time.  Where is Kurt Loder when you need him?

 

Revolutionary Road

I'm actually cautiously optimistic about the adaptation of Revolutionary Road.  Here's something of a preview but beware that this is brought to you by Entertainment Tonight.

Dust

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas has opened a new exhibit, "The Mystique of the Archive," which gives visitors a peak behind the scenes of the fabled archives that the center hosts:

There's much in this exhibit that rewards close reading, but there's also plenty that's simply fun to look at.

Take the particularly filthy laptop computer that arrived as part of the Norman Mailer archive. Mailer, apparently, dictated his novels onto cassette tapes, had his secretary transcribe them and then he would mark up the printouts. The secretary in question was a heavy smoker, and the computer she used is encased in a layer of grime you'd like to scrape your thumbnail against — an amalgam of bodily oils, miscellaneous detritus and cigarette smoke.

"When it first got here, you could smell it," says Henderson. (The computer is now encased in glass, so you'll have no such luck.)

Then there's an accounts ledger into which the poet Charles Tomlinson stuffed various of his manuscripts (it looks like a book that has made a quick, sloppy meal of another book); a vivid series of obsessive revisions of a poem by Robert Lowell that shows his clinical mania in full splendor; and, perhaps best of all, a pair of stockings, a pair of socks, a pair of razors and a pair of pills from the Isaac Bashevis Singer archive.

You can watch a video preview of the exhibit here.