Month / April 2010

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Adam Thirlwell

53 minute radio interview with the author of The Escape.

Adam Thirlwell appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #332. Mr. Thirlwell is most recently the author of The Escape.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if a piña colada might serve as literary escape.

Author: Adam Thirlwell

Subjects Discussed: The narrator device in Politics and The Escape, not understanding an early attempt to write a Henry James novel, the S&M of a writer being both eager to please and eager to annoy, Lautréamont and the bifurcation of voice, self-indulgence, the ethical concerns of Politics and The Escape, total selfishness and hurting others in the pursuit of pleasure, Western society and the hedonistic ideal, Goldwagen and Yiddish opera, character names lifted from cultural references, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, defending immaturity from the prism of not being able to tell the difference between the past and the future, Velimir Khlebnikov’s imagery transformed into narrative structure, “plucking” and collage, defining magic in The Delighted States, anticipating what people on television are going to say, the uncommon joys of predictability in pop culture, trying to write a novel that felt like a coda, Gertrude Stein’s idea of methods of the 20th century being used to advance the 19th, attempting to pinpoint the artistic methods of the 21st century, Geoff Dyer, Reality Hunger and appropriation, singularity, Barbara Wright and translation, the difficulties of finding “Beckettian style” in untranslated Beckett, the problems with the chronology of a style, being obsessed with the present moment, the Tea Party, great artists and plagiarism, creative theft, reading a phrase containing “blowjob” before an audience of 500 people, the unanticipated boundaries between private amusement and the public dissemination of literature, degrees of literary intimacy, the 1925 crash as “the Universal Crash,” elegant style and originality, style and unseen neurotic drama, short sentences and rhythm, the evils of passive construction, originality as fluke, unplanned sex scenes, Edmund White, Bohemian as a way of being the “absolute insider,” pithy maxims, blasphemy and belief, the classical equaling the decadent, Lives of the Caesars, Caligula, salacious gossip, and reader motivation.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Thirlwell: I think there are similarities between Politics and The Escape in their ethical concerns. In both cases, weirdly, but through different routes. They’re about saying, “Well, what if you were to be totally selfish? Why is it so wrong to not follow your appetites or hurt people? Is it genuinely bad to hurt someone in the pursuit of your own pleasure?” And whereas in Politics, it’s because there are these cute kids who are incapable of hurting someone else, and thus create a nightmare scenario for themselves, which they think iis a kind of utopia, here you get the kind of old guy who is an entirely selfish person. Or seems so. And so I suppose it’s true that I definitely thought that one of the problems for the reader was going to be that what I wanted to do was present this character who would at first seem mildly repellent. This voyeur in a wardrobe staring at two strangers having sex. But by the end of the novel, if it worked, you were going to actually feel both that he did have a coherent moral structure and also is rather likable. And I suppose, yeah, the game of Politics was that they were like words. So all of the exhibitionists who are going to like these people was because there was a sense that this was . Politics was set in a likable world. It was set in a Coetzee, hipsterish world. Whereas this is much more slightly. There are things about Haffner that, I suppose, I myself don’t like. And I wanted to create a character where I wasn’t as sold on the character myself. Though I wanted to create a little machine where you would have to actually change your moral values, or examine your own moral values as a reader.

Correspondent: So this is your worldview. With decades of experience comes decades of a capacity to hurt other people? (laughs)

Thirlwell: (laughs) I’m only thirty-one!

Correspondent: Okay. (laughs) All right.

Thirlwell: No, I have no conclusion. I am interested in hedonism, I think, and why there seems to be two levels of it. On the one hand, it seems that our society — that English/American society, in particular; Western society — is deeply devoted to some ideals of pleasure. But I think there’s a real Puritanical core actually to a lot of the ways in which we still value the couple, the family. There is something that is very much about: that you should be altruistic and you shouldn’t hurt. And in one way, I suppose, I think that’s slightly immature as a moral system. There are going to be conflicts. And where Politics, I think I was interested in showing some kind of self-destruction in that, here you have someone who seems to be outside those moral values. So, no, it’s not like I’m saying, “Everybody should now go out and be horribly unfaithful to everybody.”

Correspondent: It was a bit of a joke, you know.

Thirlwell: But on the other hand. (laughs) It’s maybe not such a terrible thing.

Correspondent: I wanted to ask about the names. Goldfaden, of course, is the guy who came up with the first Yiddish opera.

Thirlwell: Yeah.

Correspondent: You have, of course, Haffner. Which is close to Hugh Hefner. And which is in fact mentioned in this book — that particular association. And I don’t think it’s an accident that Benji might, in fact, be construed with Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” of which this book does considerable reproduction. I’m curious why you were interested in using character names that were essentially lifted from popular and cultural references. And also this note at the end of the book, in which you say that you quote all these various people. Digging through it, it seemed to me as if you didn’t so much quote them, as take stories and shift them around. At least, it didn’t feel like this. Either you pulled one on me. I don’t think it was absolutely paraphrased or even remotely paraphrased. So I was curious about why recycling of this nature occurred, both with the names and also with the so-called quotes.

Thirlwell: Wow, that’s huge. On the names, I think names are really odd. Because there’s something, I think, almost Freudian about it. You’re not always aware about why a name feels right to you, I think. And Haffner, I actually chose — I’d always wanted to write an ambivalent character called Haffner. After a boy who bullied me at school, who’s called Haffner.

Correspondent: Named close to Haffner?

Thirlwell: No, he was actually called Haffner. It was his second name. So that was when I was nine. But I also actually rather liked it as a name. And then, it was actually only halfway through writing the book that I thought, “Oh fuck. Everyone is going to think that this is a joke on Hefner.” So that’s why I put the joke in. To defuse it.

Correspondent: Nullify it.

Thirlwell: To nullify that one. Goldfaden was deliberately the Yiddish dramatist. And Benji, it wasn’t so much from Walter Benjamin. Although I’m sure that was at the back of my mind. That wasn’t deliberate. But I’m sure it was there unconsciously. But certainly the idea of the Biblical younger son. And I think that with the names — with the very Jewish names like “Goldfaden” — that was because I was very interested in almost doing a caricature of Jewishness. Or a particular type of East European Jewishness. Of immigrant Jewishness. Because one of the things that this novel is in dialogue with, and what Haffner the character is in dialogue with, is a particular version of Jewishness. So I think the Jewish names, they were there as deliberately East European. There was an air of competition. I mean, the other source of the names that I’d completely forgotten about, but only remembered recently when I saw this film again. To Be or Not to Be. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be. And for some reason, I’d seen it early on when I was writing this book. I mean, just before I started the book. And I had a kind of cast list. Some handout that I’d got. And so a lot of the names were actually from that. Like Tummel — Frau Tummel — is taken from someone who’s like the production manager on To Be or Not to Be. But then the names come from this locus of Central Europe. And it’s true. And I suppose that leads to the quotations. Because there was a way in which I was definitely interested in doing a miniature recapitulation in this book of my entire literary past. I think, slightly to then move away from it. To finish with it. So that hopefully, what I’d then write would be freer or something completely different.

The Bat Segundo Show #332: Adam Thirlwell (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Life of Pie Throwing

Yesterday, Mark Medley, an amicable gentleman from the National Post, contacted me by telephone to talk about Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil and my review, in which I had called Mr. Martel’s novel “the worst book of the decade.” I thought he was merely getting some minor quote from me. But it appears that he’s devoted the opening paragraphs to my piece.

You can read Mr. Medley’s article here.

by Edward Champion

When Publisher’s Notes Were More Honest

Bennett Cerf’s At Random conveys an amusing anecdote concerning Gertrude Stein. Stein told Cerf that she loved seeing her writing in print and asked Cerf how he felt about it. Cerf replied that if there was anything that Stein wanted to see in print, Random House would do it. So when Stein published The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, he was exceptionally bewildered. This bafflement was also conveyed when Cerf wrote the jacket copy:

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This space is usually reserved for a brief description of a book’s contents. In this case, however, I must admit frankly that I do not know what Miss Stein is talking about. I do not even understand the title.

I admire Miss Stein tremendously, and I like to publish her books, although most of the time I do not know what she is driving at. That, Miss Stein, tells me, is because I am dumb.

I note that one of my partners and I are characters in this latest work of Miss Stein’s. Both of us wish that we knew what she was saying about us. Both of us hope, too, that her faithful followers will make more of this book than we are able to!

Bennett A. Cerf
President
RANDOM HOUSE

by Edward Champion

RIP George Scithers (With 2006 Interview)

Locus Magazine reports the sad news that George Scithers, who was a founding editor of Asimov’s, an editor of Amazing Stories, and who revived Weird Tales in 1987, serving as its editor through 2007, passed away on April 19, 2010 of a heart attack.

I ran into George at BEA in 2006, and conducted an impromptu interview for The Bat Segundo Show. Our conversation is transcribed below. This was still in the “wet behind the ears” stage of the program. In the transcript, I have spared people the dreaded you knows and likes that were then quite frequent. But I hope that the interview sufficiently captures George’s spirit. In my admittedly brief conversation, I found George to be a very friendly and encouraging man. (You can also listen to the conversation in the audio file attached to the end of this post. Or, if you prefer, you can listen to the entire show here.)

Correspondent: So I’m here with George Scithers of Wildside Press. He is also the man who revived Weird Tales Magazine. Maybe you can tell us about that and what’s coming up from Wildside.

Scithers: Oh, almost fifteen years ago, John Betancourt and Darrell Schweitzer and I decided that we’d like to revive Weird Tales. I had been editor of Amazing Stories. And they no longer wanted me. And I was getting bored. Anyway, we revived the magazine. And it’s been plunking along ever since. We’re up to Issue #20 — no, sorry, #340, with the issue that I have in my hot little hand right now. Which has stories by Jay Lake and Tanith Lee, Sarah Hoyt and Holly Phillips. We got interviewed by the Washington Post a little while ago. And the Los Angeles Times was good enough to pick up the article and run it also.

Correspondent: Now the new Weird Tales and the old Weird Tales. What are some of the overlapping kind of qualities? And what are the things that you’ve sort of changed to update Weird Tales? What have you been conscious of? What steps have you taken to do this?

Scithers: We’ve tried to put out what the magazine would be if it had continued, rather than digging it up and exhuming it. In other words, things have changed. When Weird Tales was first published, there was no such thing as science fiction. In the sense that the word had not even been invented. We carried science fiction — speculative fiction, if you will — as well as vampires and ghoulies and ghosts. We published the material of HP Lovecraft, who is unfortunately dead. So we can’t do any new stories by him. We published the original stories by Robert E. Howard. Conan the Conqueror and the like. And unfortunately, he’s dead. And we can’t do any more by him. And we also published Robert Bloch. And, alas, he’s dead too. And a few years ago, we published some poems by Ray Bradbury, who’s still alive actually.

Correspondent: Yes! Yes!

Scithers: But the modern science fiction stories are pretty well handled by specialized science fiction magazines. So that nowadays, Weird Tales has closed its scope a little bit. Basically supernatural horror. And every so often — because we must occasionally surprise the reader who expects everything to be supernatural — occasionally, the vampire may turn out to be a fake. Not every time. But, you know, every ten or fifteen years, we’ll run a story in which the ghost has a real explanation. Generally it’s a fantasy-based horror magazine. Or fantasy, which isn’t always horror. Sword and sorcery.

Correspondent: Now who would you say would be — which of your contributing writers would be the current sort of Lovecraft, Bloch, etcera. Or someone who has talent outside of that, but who is distinctive enough and yet also Weird Tales enough.

Scithers: That’s impossible to say. There isn’t any contemporary Lovecraft. Because Lovecraft was his own thing.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Scithers: And Lovecraft exhausted — well, didn’t exhaust, but worked over his particular mythos so well that it’s quite difficult to do another story in that now. And then someone does. But, again, in the current issue, Holly Phillips is a creature of her own. And that’s an entirely new thing. Tanith Lee has her own particular kind of fantasy. Which is not the same thing every time. She’s all over the place. I can’t really say that we’ve got one particular author. We’d love to have Stephen King all the time. But Stephen King does books these days. And we’re essentially a short story market.

Correspondent: Do you have problems? Because there’s always all these kinds of claims that the short story is dead. There are literary magazines that are just struggling to get by. Has any of this affected Weird Tales in terms of putting out issues or attracting talent? Maybe you can comment upon these issues.

Scithers: As far as the supply of short stories, no problem. If anything, there’s — I hate to say this, but we almost have too many writers in the field now. Our problem is that people do not go to cigar stores and magazine stores to the extent that they used to. Magazine circulation used to be in the hundreds of thousands. And then the tens and tens of thousands. And now in the low tens. And this is a problem throughout the fiction field. There aren’t an awful lot of fiction magazines. The Digest Group. Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And on the other side, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. All of these have decreasing circulation over the years. As far as the availability of material, the thing is that there are annual courses on how to teach science fiction. I’ve been publishing books on how to write science fiction. I’ve been publishing guidelines on science fiction. As far as the supply of good, good material, there’s plenty. I see a higher percentage of buyable material nowadays. Back in the Asimov’s days, when I first started in this line of work — which is about 1978 — I figured about 1% of what I got in would be fit to put on the page. I’m seeing a higher percentage of stuff that’s fit to put on the page. But I can’t buy all the stuff that’s fit to put on the page. Because there’s so much of it.

Correspondent: How much of a higher percentage are you seeing now?

Scithers: I can’t say a percentage. Because I’d have to sit down and count how many manuscripts, and how many got the “good but not irresistible” reply, and how many got the “please don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over again” reply, and how many got the “get a hold of Strunk & White and you better believe it.” Strunk & White is the essential book on composition, on how to write. It’s a thin volume. It’s extremely good. You learn the standard way to write. You change away from that for deliberate effect. You find that you’re disagreeing with it. And then, as you get better, you find that they were right all along. They are talking about the general case. And what you are writing is the special case. Typically, standard English is what you frame around dialogue. But what’s between the quote marks is how people actually speak. Which isn’t precisely literary. It isn’t precisely grammatical. And you vary from being precisely literary and grammatical in order to call attention to how people are speaking. In your exposition part of the story, if you want to call attention to what you’re doing, then you start breaking some of the rules. But if you drop into standard grammar, then all that comes across is “What words are you choosing? And in what order to you put them down?” Which are the basics of writing. It’s the basic poetry too, as Coleridge put it.

Correspondent: Well, going back to this issue of more manuscripts being suitable. It’s just a matter of finding the ones that are right for Weird Tales. Do you think that the rise of MFA workshops might have something to do with this?

Scithers: I don’t know MFA Workshop. Because I know that there are a great many workshops over the years, over the decades. So I’m not aware of what MFA Workshop is doing. Tell me about it.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I think it’s great that Scithers thought that “MFA Workshop” was a specific outfit. He was very much an old school, nuts-and-bolts kind of guy.]

Correspondent: Well, you know, workshops for people who get MFA degrees in creative writing.

Scithers: Right.

Correspondent: And so there are all these workshops around short stories. And so therefore you have this cottage industry almost for aspiring writers, who are then perhaps flooding Weird Tales, along with the remaining literary magazines and journals that we have in order to get some credits. I’m sort of speculating out loud, but maybe….

Scithers: Of course you are. Of course you are. The thing about workshops is, if somebody’s off in a garret writing all by himself, he’ll start writing for himself. And this is not good. So working with other people is helpful. But you have to remember that the opinion of somebody who is close enough to you that you can hit them, is not as good as somebody on the far end of an email line. Or of a mail line. In the end, however, the only opinion that really matters is that of someone who might pay you money for it. [interjection by another guy at the booth] Somebody’s trying to interrupt us?

Correspondent: Well, George, thanks so much.

[Confused stare from George.]

Correspondent: Do you want to continue your answer?

Scithers: Uh no. Do you want to expand with the question?

Correspondent: Oh, well, I mean, I guess I was getting a sense of like: Do you think that the MFA mentality of an approval by committee is perhaps damaging. Particularly when we’re talking about genre fiction, like Weird Tales, where these MFA workshops….

Scithers: Ah yes! Yes, yes, yes! Your problem is that in the group, if someone is using the group for other than learning how to write, and helping other people to write, then you’re in trouble. And you have to keep your antenna out for just exactly this phenomenon. That if somebody is trying to dominate the group. Somebody’s trying to show how much better he is or how much less good — that’s not the point of a group. The group is: what does a group, in general, think is good and bad about what somebody is writing. If the group is turning over people who are becoming so busy selling, that they no longer have time for the group, that is a successful group. If the group is a static group who simply get together to argue with each other, you see, this is a kind of a trap. The bouncing things off of other people is a faster way of getting a feel for it than sending it off by mail. But the opinion you get back by somebody who might buy it, and thinks it was good enough to say what’s wrong with it, that’s important. The kind of things that I see over and over again is somebody starts with a resume. Well, I’m not buying a resume! I’m buying a story.

Correspondent: Unless the story is actually a horror resume.

Scithers: No. No! There is a general remark about this. That if you don’t get the reader’s attention in the first paragraph, the rest of the message is lost. This was written by a rear admiral, who presumably was not writing about fiction at the time. But it’s still very appropriate. The thing that a writer’s group should do is take a look at a story and say, “You know, if you start it in the second paragraph, it will be just as good.” Well, in fact, it would be a great deal better. Because the first paragraph is simply getting in your way. And starting the story too late, or not starting at all, are the most irritating things that come across. Other than things that are in such awful format that you have to just throw them back.

Correspondent: Well, George, thanks so much. These were all very interesting things to hear.

(Image: Darrell Schweitzer)

The Bat Segundo Show: George Scithers (2006) (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

In Response to Sven Birkerts

Well, Good Ol’ Sven is at it again, dissing the digital age as an abject obverse to the novel. Some questions:

1. If Sven’s students are “not reading newspapers or print magazines,” but are reading the same articles through “online news sources,” then is this really a binary opposition? Sven proudly announces that he “was watching the opening scenes of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire,” but if one is to adopt his catholic approach, I would contend that, by seeing Wenders’s film on television (as opposed to projected in a theater), then he has not actually experienced the film as it was originally designed. We must therefore slap Sven on the wrists for “not watching” Wings of Desire. He commits the same “hypocrisy” that his students do in reading articles online.

2. On the subject of Wings, Sven commends the “flash I felt myself looking back in time from a distant and disengaged vantage.” But how is this unique to a 23-year-old film? One fascinating development (indeed, an exciting one) is that a movie or a blog post from only a few months ago seems ever more like ancient history. Everything we now create transforms into forgotten driftwood subject to a promising rediscovery. Liberation from the self through instant insignificance! I love it! So does the relative obscurity of sifting through our past efforts therefoe combat the problems of information saturation? If everything is available to us at the push of a button, does not the thrill arrive in finding some morsel (or some association) that nobody else has discovered (or, more accurately, vocalized)? Is there not also a thrill in revisiting something from 23 years ago and finding yet another angle? This is hardly “bemused pity,” unless you are truly disengaged and incurious about the world you live in, as Sven seems to be. Which is too bad for him. He’s missing out!

3. Sven suggests that his students are pretending “they are taking course-related notes, but would not be surprised to find out they are writing to friends, working on papers for other courses, or just trolling their favorite sites while they listen.” He does not find out if they are really doing this. In short, he shows no interest about how his students — the generation he wishes to get through to — accesses information. He complains that his students are quick on the draw with their speeding bullets of data, but he doesn’t convey how well they are able to wrap their heads around a conversational subject that requires some heavy cerebral lifting (instead of reliance upon Google) — perhaps a ruminative speculation on a novel or a piece of writing or something that is important to them. It’s not a matter of presenting “book information to them with a slight defensiveness.” It’s a matter of engaging these students with insights that will cause glorious bombs to go off in their heads! Sven, are you really that much of a solipsistic bore? Come on, sir, there’s a whole generation of readers that you can tap into, if you just got beyond your grumpy, half-hearted nihilism!

4. “Human narratives are events and descriptions selected and arranged for meaning.” Unless, of course, no meaning is ever intended or meaning is not the narrative maker’s primary concern. Meaning, as we all know, falls to the reader to make sense of what the narrative maker has whipped up in the kitchen. The best chefs understand this. What the narrative chef may call fillet mignon may be identified as chocolate chip ice cream by the reader. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this. It can actually lead to some humorous and interesting conversations. But it suggests very highly that the reader isn’t altogether different from a dog, and the author isn’t altogether that much different from a god.

5. Sven, I sent you an invite to the “party of the imagination” several times. You declined, insisting that there was no party. And you continued to flail your limbs about when all we really wanted to do was put a slice of cake in your hand and a horn in your mouth. This essay confirms that you are a party pooper. If, as you insist, imagination is “the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibility of being,” I submit to you that there are these lovely folks running around you, often referred to as people. Those students with their laptops that you merely speculate upon? People. Talk to any one of them and you will soon ferret out several stories, numerous narratives, thoughts and feelings you may not have heard before. Now that capacity to communicate is indeed a “party of the imagination.” Small wonder that these spiffy souls have flocked to the Internet in droves to create a more ginormous party! No, there is no additional “layer of sheathing.” Unless, of course, you’re referring to the casual encounters section of Craig’s List and the need to protect one’s self from syphilitic strangers.

6. “My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking — their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. ” First off, when you step outside of the house, Sven, I assure you that the robot armies are not marching in the streets. There is no artificial intelligence. Although I do share your concern with reliance upon smartphones (why consult a device when you can simply ask someone for directions?), the upshot is that there are neither robots nor illusory rabbits running about the streets. Also, humans willfully misunderstand information. And there are often many creative possibilities that arise from mishearing something. Why, just the other day, I thought somebody had said to me, “I’d like to come,” when they really told me, “I’d like my comb.” This may very well be a confession of perversity on my part. But I found this to be quite funny. I mean, what if everyone around us just started confessing their precise desires for an orgasm? Now when I confessed my mishearing, this led to a very interesting conversation about what humans tend to confess to strangers. Would that conversation have happened had I not misheard? Perhaps. But it certainly broke the ice. There is not a singular way to process the universe, Sven. What do I have to do? Send dirty lingerie and hand buzzers to you for needless exegesis?

7. This will be my last point. I would certainly hope that you found O’Neill’s “vantage” “intensely moving.” This is merely one manner of expressing what it means to be alive in the present. But one can indeed concentrate and move at the same time. It’s easier than walking and chewing bubble gum. Every human model, if we are to use your coarse tech comparisons, comes with a different user manual. My advice, not that I expect you to heed it, would be to put forth your energies into other models. You may end up writing a 4,000 word essay that people (aside from me) will actually be interested in reading.