Year / 2004

by DrMabuse

Olivia Goldsmith — Gone

Olivia Goldsmith has passed away. And I’m angry. This did not have to happen. Goldsmith was only 54. Fifty-four. One of the first female partners at Booz Allen Hamilton. And then a not-too-shabby fiction career. But the circumstances of her death were this: she was about to undergo plastic surgery. But she felt (or was it her editors or her agent?) that she had to live up to some pinnacle of perfection. She needed a flawless face, a mug devoid of wrinkles for the photographers, an image devoid of any signs that, hey, she was 54. The great irony was that she had skewered this kind of thinking in her novel, The First Wives Club. But to hell with the merits of her writing, to hell with the fact that she had no problem savaging mid-lifers in her books. No, the important thing was the plastic surgery. There was the real world and the world within her fiction. And for Goldsmith, the real world was far crueler.

Just as she was about to go under, she had a violent reaction to the anesthesia, which incapacitated her. And now she’s dead.

All because of an image, all because of a stinkin’ author photo, all because we still judge books by their back covers rather than their innards, and all because civilization cannot stop pestering, whether deliberately or subconsiously, the older, the fatter, the more wrinkled, the more infirm, the non-Caucasian, and anybody else who doesn’t fall into the harsh physical virtues dictated by Vanity Fair and People. Olivia Goldsmith’s death isn’t just a terribly premature end for a writer who was fun. It also shows that ideals have spiraled completely out of control. Or perhaps it just confirms them.

Goldsmith’s death did not have to happen. And yet it did. And the publishing industry, with concerns of gloss and glamour, won’t stop perpetuating these shameful conditions. It will continue defaulting to the purty lil gals (Nell Freudenberger) or the hot young things (Zoe Trope), rather than the magic of the offerings. This is nothing less than a goddam tragedy. Because we lose authors like Goldsmith in the process.

[UPDATE: There’s been some speculation on this entry. And I feel it’s important to clarify the following: (1) Lest the reader waltz into grassy knoll territory, I didn’t intend to suggest that the publishing industry was the smoking gun, but that there may be extant environmental factors within that contributed to Goldsmith’s decision — a decision, it should be noted, that she alone made. Goldsmith was an author who sold well. And, as such, she had a profile to maintain. Said factors can be seen on book covers that dwell upon anatomical merits over ability, responded to in high kitsch by Susan Orlean on the cover of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. These elements, which pressure women to look and remain young and beautiful, can be observed during a casual stroll in the Western world. (2) No one knows enough about Goldsmith’s motivations to make a final judgment call as to cause. This was idle speculation, but I’ll let it stand unmodified for the record.]

by DrMabuse

The Case Against First Person Plural

I’ve been very annoyed by the rise of first person plural. The use of “we” is an unfortunate component of McSweeney’s house style that shows no signs of waning. Several sharp, witty people use it — indeed, cannot refrain from stopping — and I shake my head in sorrow. Unless you’re a schizophrenic or you’re writing on behalf of a group of people (academics, a committee, or some giddy ensemble of lunatics), or you’re relaying an anecdote with another person in the room, there just isn’t a damn compelling reason to use “we” in place of “I.” “We” implies one of two possibilities: either that the reader and the writer are one (a legitimate use in small doses), or the writer is duking it out with several voices inside her head. But what sane mind can relate to the latter in a tete-a-tete?

“We” implies familiarity, but then it’s a bit like some server killing a good restaurant conversation by announcing, “So how we doing?” The server is likely hustling for tips, but in the worst possible way. The “we” label, accentuated by a perky smile that only digs the blade in deeper, is enough to transform highly rational people into near-barbarians. No one appreciates this stroke of familiarity before even so much as a “Hello,” but this doesn’t stop marketing zealots from communicating this way at conferences and seminars.

And yet the same concerns don’t apply on page.

Here’s the opening pargraph to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Ring Twice — in my view, one of the finest examples of first-person clarity:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave me a cigarette, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.

Great clean stuff, ain’t it? You’re immediately hooked into Frank’s world. You know that he’s a drifter, that he has some experience on the road, and that he’s rumbled a bit.

Now let’s see how the same passage plays out in first person plural:

They threw us off the hay truck about noon. We had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as we got up there under the canvas, we went to sleep. We needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and we were still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw our feet sticking out and threw us off. We tried some comical stuff, but all we got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave us a cigarette, though, and we hiked down the road to find something to eat.

Infuriating from the first sentence, no? It comes across as consummate bullshit, rather than the authenticity we saw in first person singular. From the get-go, the reader has nothing to relate to. Because the narrator feels the need to be a pushy wiseacre. The passage fails because the reader isn’t invited to become part of an adventure. He’s forced.

So I implore all people who use first person plural: Since when the hell are you Queen Fucking Victoria? I double-dare all columnists, writers, storytellers, hack journalists, essayists, bloggers and related parties to make the hard choice of sticking with first person singular. Resist the temptation the same way that you avoid telling a story in second person. The output will be clearer and more interesting. And readers will learn to love you more.

by DrMabuse

Tough Talking

Move over, Madonna. James Carville’s entered the kid lit business. The tough-as-nails politico is co-authoring a picture book inspired by his mother Lucille. Early reports indicate that several children have fainted while reading the book. Editors are quietly encouraging Mr. Carville to tone down his prose.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s just nabbed a lifetime achievement award from the ALA. This is actually her fourth lifetime achievement award in the past three years, suggesting that either Le Guin has achieved enough for four lifetimes, or that there are four Ursula K. Le Guins running about.

Randy VanWarmer, singer of the Bread-like ballad “Just When I Needed You Most,” has passed away at 48.

Matthew Pearl lists ten books that have kept the spirit of Dante alive. Notably absent is the 1970s New Age bestseller, Getting in Touch with Your Inner Dante: Avoiding Infernos with Smiles and Sideburns.

Salon has an excerpt from Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire.

The Christian Science Monitor interviews Edith Grossman on the new Quixote translation: “The differences: modern technology, especially in communications, has changed the world drastically; in the industrialized world at least, the majority of people are literate. As a consequence, the oral tradition at Sancho’s disposal is becoming — or already may be — extinct.”

Elmore Leonard’s Rules of Writing (via Good Reports) And, in fact, here’s the complete “Writers on Writing” series (now compiled in a book), which includes Donald E. Westlake on psuedonyms, E.L. Doctorow on the effects of film upon lit, Louise Erdrich on language, Richard Ford on not writing, Ed McBain on mystery archetypes, and Kurt Vonnegut on writing classes (among many more).

Helen Oyeyemi signed a two-book deal for ?400,000 and didn’t tell her parents. She also forgot to take out the garbage. (via Maud)

The Handmaid’s Tale is being turned into an opera! (via Elegant Variation)

To Check Out Later: The Orange Word has an impressive of writer and screenwriter interviews archive up. (via Crooked Timber)

Pop Matters asks: Does South Africa have it in for Coetzee?

Sean Penn writes about his Iraq trip.

And Braun’s out.

by DrMabuse

Harbingers of Horrific Plans

Bad reviews? Shoddy placement? Nope. Bruce Stockler says the biggest obstacle to publicizing a book is obituaries

The University of Michigan has launched a 20,000 volume digital collection. It uses a system similar to Amazon’s Search Inside the Book feature (minus the page limitation) and you can search through the entire collection for a specific word or phrase. But, unfortunately, there isn’t an author search. Some of the gems I’ve found include Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (with such sterling prose as “Rienzi made no reply; he did not heed or hear him — dark and stern thoughts, thoughts in which were the germ of a mighty revolution, were at his heart.”), Seward Hilter’s Sex Ethics and the Kinsey Reports (“The females of the lower educational levels, Kinsey notes, had more often been afraid that masturbation would mean physical harm and also that it was abnormal and unnatural. We should note, however, that the women of the lower educational levels tend to marry at earlier ages, and that more of them might masturbate eventually if they postponed marriage to later ages.” Oh really?), the complete works of Coleridge, Guizot’s The History of Civilization, and some Thackeray.

De Niro and Scorsese are set to write a joint memoir. The director and star report that they have a unique writing approach. Before they begin each chapter, the two of them duke it out over who gets to sit in front of the computer. So far, Scorsese reports that he’s only lost one ear and three fingers.

Slightly old news, but the FBI reports to be on the lookout for almanac carriers. Anyone carrying an Information Please may very well be plotting terrorist activities, especially if the books are “annotated in suspicious ways.”