Posts by: jmakansi
Art always has two sides – the crass side, the commercial or business side, and the creation and artistic side. Publishing short stories, a critical component of literary fiction, has a commercial side that seems to defy all business logic, but is just as crass. The problem seems to be two fold – far too […]
Art always has two sides – the crass side, the commercial or business side, and the creation and artistic side. Publishing short stories, a critical component of literary fiction, has a commercial side that seems to defy all business logic, but is just as crass. The problem seems to be two fold – far too much supply over demand and an important subset of customer, the reader, is left out of the business model.
Writing and publishing short stories is the early gestation period for eventually birthing a novel. Very few writers plan on making a living or staking their careers on publishing only short stories. There’s no money in it because there are so few readers. But virtually all writers of literary fiction start with short stories. And the miniscule population of short story readers is largely comprised of the same people who write them.
Here’s some of the business illogic of short story publishing as I’ve experience it, and many others, too.
When I started thinking about submitting some of my short stories more than a dozen years ago, I was struck by how many literary journals demanded that your story not be submitted to any other journals while it was under consideration by their staff. No simultaneous submissions. In the same paragraph or on the same page, they advised, “send us only your best work,” and “please allow 3-6 months for a response.”
Why would a self respecting business man or woman take their “best product” off the market and allow a potential partner, or at least a distributor for said product, exclusive right for six months to ponder whether they will deign to “carry” it?
You would think a literary journal would find ways to attract customers, e.g., readers. The most obvious customer base is the hopeful writers who submit stories to them. Well, not only do they insist on holding your best work hostage until they’re ready to reject it, they almost unanimously also tell you, “Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we are unable to offer feedback on your work.”
In other words, after holding it for six months, they aren’t going to tell you why they refuse to do business with you. These are the same journals which implore you to buy a copy or subscription, support their publication, and champion their mission.
It’s like McDonald’s telling you eating at Burger King is verboten until McDonald’s decides you aren’t allowed to eat at McDonald’s.
I don’t know about you but I think a potential life-long customer (or at least for a very long time) for a literary journal is the battered writer rejected by dozens of my competitors who actually receives a letter or note about their work, some recognition that a human actually engaged with it, or at least a few paragraphs of it, not an undergraduate intern automaton sticking form rejection notes into envelopes or pasted into emails.
I mean, why don’t literary journals treat every writer who submits as a potential reader customer rather than a writer whose product didn’t meet their standards?
Rather than reject a writer, establish a relationship with a customer who might tell others about his/her positive customer experience.
Literary journals often run competitions with a fee for entry, usually $15-25, or charge a “reading fee” to consider your submission. Often, a year’s subscription is included with the fee. On first blush, you might think this is in keeping with the competitive spirit of American business. Yet I, as the customer, think: Shouldn’t they be paying me to send them my contact information so they can send me their promo collateral in perpetuity?
It’s the same intention when journals insist they want to discover “emerging writers.” In the same breath, or a few lines down, they add, that your work should be perfect from a proofreading and editing perspective. I’m sorry, but the chances of an “exciting emerging new voice in fiction” sending in a perfect manuscript is, I have to imagine, pretty darn low.
The dirty secret behind the thousands of print and on-line literary journals is that they have subscribers, they have “customers,” people who receive their product, but they don’t really have readers. They all know this, but no one really wants to talk about it. Literary journals exist to satisfy the academic need to “publish or perish.” Some of them have more lofty reputations than others, but few people actually read what’s in them.
It’s even questionable how many people read the short stories in the loftiest slots available, yes, The New Yorker (and The Atlantic, Harpers, and a few other elite publications). My admittedly anecdotal analysis of The New Yorker over the years suggests that they publish short stories from authors who have new books or collections coming out soon, or had come out recently. From the crass commercial perspective, one might say that the weekly short story slot is often reserved for these authors as much for a promotional device as a worthy short story. Not that anyone would concede this.
Except for the top publications, publishing emerging or unknown writers does nothing little for these journals or the writer, unless that writer gets famous one day and they can claim “discovery.” Publishing writers who are already well known does everything for them. Other writers can only hope to share ink and dead trees (or their digital equivalents) with those already known because that’s the only way he/she is going to get noticed. Of course a story published in the three magazines listed above is a stamped ticket to the inner orbit of literary fiction.
And if there is need for any further evidence of the non-competitive nature of this business, consider that, for most of the short story publishing outlets, the wording under their “how to submit” button is eerily similar.
Except for those lofty few elite publications, short story writers don’t get paid. They are expected to publish for free and write their stories after they’ve spent the better part of the day, week, or year earning a living by other means or living off the kindness of spouse, family, or friends.
Once again, I have to ask, where is the reader, the ultimate customer, in this business scenario?
From a business 101 perspective, the supply of short story product is like a firehose in the collective mouth of the literary journals. For every available publishing slot, hundreds if not thousands of products compete for the “shelf space.” No wonder the journals can be so callous to their writer customers. One literary quarterly, not even a year after launch, reportedly was receiving 700 submissions every quarter. It publishes around a dozen stories. Do the math. It’s a 1.7% chance. Established journals will have a far worse chance, several thousand submissions for every slot.
How many businesses do you know that can charge a customer up to $25 for a lower than 1.7% chance they will get anything in return? Not even a casino is that bad (well, maybe the slots).
Again, I ask, where is the reader in this business model?
Readers who happen to love the short story face an almost impossible task: where to find and read short stories that are either great, miss greatness but for the right reasons, or otherwise are worth your investment in time as a reader and a writer? MFA and creative writing programs proliferate. Supply keeps growing. Distribution gets easier and easier with today’s on-line publishing and communications platforms. But those in control of distributing the product are doing so to build the resumes of credentialed writers (those with English degrees or passing through MFA programs or writing workshops), not to attract serious short story readers.
Imagine going into a store that sold only short stories. Each month the inventory could potentially expand by thousands if not tens of thousands. In a logical production and supply value chain, there would be a retail function to help customers match product to their needs and tastes. Good bookstores, especially independent ones, do this for books. And novels (and to a lesser extent story collections) are supported by a large ecosystem of catalogues, reviewers, critics, bloggers, and on-line and bricks and mortar retail outlets.
There is no credible retail function for short stories, unless they are disguised as books (The Best American Short Stories annual, for example), or they are issued as a collection after an author gets famous for his/her novels or (in rare instances) or other works. But good novelists don’t necessarily write the best short stories. In fact, their short stories may reflect mostly their experimentation and development towards novel writing. From the commercial crass business perspective, however, story collections from novelists will sell because they are leveraging an existing “brand.”
The only site I know of which comes close as a retail function is a blog (www.may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com) by Charles May, a retired professor of literature who has published several books on short story analysis and critique. May’s posts are generally informative and even entertaining at times. One from August 3, 2010, lists May’s 100 favorite short story collections of the 21st century (in honor of his 100th blog post on short stories). He also from time to time will analyse how authors get to be published, who they know, who attended their MFA program with them, that sort of thing.
The Short Review (www.thenewshortreview.wordpress.com) site also aggregates reviews of short story collections, but again, it’s a one collection, one voice approach.
May writes in a very down-to-earth non-academic style. But he is just one voice. And he mostly comments on the authors and collections we all know about because they’ve been published through the elite channels or have published novels. Imagine if I could access half a dozen sites offering not just academic analysis but commentary from readers who happen to love short stories, whether they write them or not. Imagine if this site also covered great short stories from writers subsisting under the radar or even out of its range.
There is no on-line store exclusively focused on helping me identify the short stories I want to read and sell them to me. I can try to sift through hundreds of sites where dozens of short stories (and in the case of Amazon, thousands) are available and hope that I randomly land on one I might appreciate, or browse through stories that are “pushed” to me on request from other sites (Narrative, Every Day Fiction). Only a few distributor/publisher types (One Story is a good example) send you only one story at a time with your subscription. With a mainstream publication of culture and politics, you get the short story only as part of the larger package.
The literary short story marketplace is inefficient. Producers (writers) can’t find real customers. Distributors cater to a certain class of producer as customers, those who need the publishing credentials to succeed in their careers.
Even reading groups and book clubs rarely select short stories or collections.
It functions under a “push” retail business model. Publishers “push” stories selected for reasons that are not wholly aligned with readers interests. It needs more of a “pull” function in the retail business model. Customers, readers, need to be treated as customers. They need help, a friendly sales person, a welcoming store, more trusted sites not dedicated to publish or perish, a place to gather face to face or on-line with friends to discuss, suggest, recommend, and share.
Maybe the market for short stories is simply too small to warrant a true retail “pull” function. Maybe the customer base is small because writers, producers, and distributors don’t spend enough time and effort cultivating and retaining true readers rather than creating clubs that exist largely to satisfy their own professional interests.
Maybe, just maybe, if the retail function were made more efficient, more readers would become paying customers and a few more short story writers could get paid.
Mona Simpson – The Case of an Author I Love But Am Never Sure Why
By jmakansi On November 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
I just finished Mona Simpson’s Casebook. Her most recent novel. I really enjoyed it. I think I have read and enjoyed every novel she has written except one. She reminds me of Anne Tyler, except that Anne Tyler does a great job of writing the same type of story every time. Mona Simpson does not. […]
I just finished Mona Simpson’s Casebook. Her most recent novel. I really enjoyed it. I think I have read and enjoyed every novel she has written except one. She reminds me of Anne Tyler, except that Anne Tyler does a great job of writing the same type of story every time. Mona Simpson does not. Mona Simpson’s novels are deeper, even though I think she is a master of the story in which nothing much happens. In Casebook, a boy nominally proceeding through adolescence during the course of the story engages in his parents divorce and subsequent relationships through espionage. He and his best friend spy on the parents. They record and listen in on private conversations. Some of them are very intimate. They hire a private investigator. These people have pretty weird relationships. But the boys have a purpose: Self preservation. They want to know what is going to happen to them.
Other than in-home espionage, the story is typical white American family privilege and angst. Suffering, outside of the divorce and newly forming relationships, manifests in a slightly receding economic orbit for the mom post-divorce, but frankly not much else. Far from tragic in the scheme of things. Especially if your schema is living in war torn countries overseas, in countries with oppressive governments or cultures, or in economically deprived and racially divided regions of this country. The new man in the mother’s life lies in a despicable way. But let’s face it. A verbal bomb isn’t much like a real bomb. Everything that happens in this story happened yesterday to a few million young American men and their families, and will again tomorrow.
But Simpson’s stories read with ease. Casebook reminds me of a very popular book from my youth, Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh), which in less direct terms, deals with many of the same issues and from a similar perspective. Perhaps that is the clue as to its appeal for me. I loved Harriet the Spy. I was sucker for books about New York City (The Catcher in the Rye, The Godfather) way before I ever got there (in 1974). In many ways, this is a version for the next century, as Fitzhugh’s classic came out in 1964, but mostly for adults. And that is the one troubling issue with Casebook. This narrator is able to feel and interpret and express way beyond his age, at least what I would conceive of for that age. Then again, maybe that’s how much the world has changed, I can’t fathom a boy at this age being so worldly, or so blase about things like sex and his parents.
I seem to remember thinking the same thing of Holden Caulfield and Harriet. Perhaps the narrator is telling the story about his earlier years at a much later point in time and therefore he is entitled to add some worldliness. In other words, he is narrating a story, not journaling. Does a teenage boy, not portrayed as academically superior, know what disyllabic means? This one does. Maybe it’s not so logical, but I like the narrator anyway.
Another strange thing for an experienced contemporary female novelist: The female characters are relatively two dimensional, but then again, we see through the eyes of this adolescent narrator, so that may be authenticity rather than character defect.
Anyway, there’s something warm about Simpson’s writing. Cozy. Commanding. The story never gets out of hand. It’s tightly controlled. It’s not too long or too short. No long-winded passages demonstrating literary pyrotechnics. Somehow, in the course of 300+ pages, I felt I had born witness to the maturing of Miles Adler, the narrator. His arc is clear, in the midst of his parents’ divorce, modern grappling with sexual identity, a close-knit group of his parents friends (whose kids are his friends). The kid turns out just fine. Thousands of course do every week, but I still found it reassuring. It’s more about how Miles seeks to exert some control over family events out of his control. His methods may seem shady for an adult, but come off as precocious for a kid.
And there is something comforting about Simpson herself as an author. For me. I read Anywhere But Here in the early 1980s. It was one of the first books I found when I began searching for (1) books by new contemporary authors that were not part of a syllabus, (2) books which no longer were reflecting my age and circumstances (Catcher in the Rye; This Side of Paradise; KinFlicks; Bright Lights, Big City; and others), and (3) books by and about women and their struggles. So it was instructive to read how Simpson would capture a male protagonist, a young ‘un at that.
Blind Faith in your leaders will get you killed. Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA tour, Brendan Byrne Arena/Meadowlands, 1985
Actually, the title of this post should be what I thought about when I was thinking about writing a blog post about my recent bike trip listening to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, […]
Blind Faith in your leaders will get you killed. Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA tour, Brendan Byrne Arena/Meadowlands, 1985
Actually, the title of this post should be what I thought about when I was thinking about writing a blog post about my recent bike trip listening to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, 1975-1985 (a compilation of live performances) on the headphones. But I figured if I shortened it, I could make a play on the title of that famous Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Lying back in my recliner, which hasn’t gotten near enough use over nearly two decades, I remembered when I saw Springsteen live in 1985 and he uttered the statement which begins this post. Then I also remembered this is Veterans Day, probably not the best day for such a quote.
All of which makes sense in the strangest of ways because my day started, like most weekdays, with the 6-7 a.m. call in show on C-Span during which an Iraq veteran caller was irate because Springsteen was playing at some ceremony somewhere and the guy was pissed because Brooce! was an ardent Iraq War protester. As was I. Am I, since the damn war continues under different guises. That caused me to talk back to my television, asking, “Well, how many more U.S. military personnel would have been killed or maimed if Iraq War protesters had not risen up and helped elect a President who campaigned on ending it?”
What does all this have to do with my recent bike tour along the C&O canal towpath from Cumberland, MD to Georgetown, Washington DC, a 180-mile ride I pedaled with four comrades over a five day four night period last week in September? I’m not sure, but we sure experienced a tremendous amount of history on that ride. The construction of the canal, nominally between 1820-1860, was, in many ways, a forty year exercise in futility because the railroads had quickly become the shipping option of choice and efficiency. We saw some small towns bearing the scars of decades of a de-industrializing America, a subject Springsteen sung to more than once. We detoured one afternoon to visit Antietam, a bloody awful battlefield of the Civil War. And we ended our tour in the nation’s capital, where our elected officials and the bureaucracy surrounding them make the decisions to send men and women into battle, pursue global economic strategies which gut high paying domestic jobs and, with them, the American middle class, and appropriate tax dollars for things like, well, keeping up the C&O Canal trail through the National Park Service. In between and all around us were striking views of the Potomac River and its environs.
One night we even stayed in a Comfort Suites (leesburg, VA) where the staff treated us five bikers like royalty, after we had ridden a ferry across the river. They even helped us wash our bikes! Oh, and one of my pedaling mates, she was named Sandy, and of course, that Springsteen song was on the vinyl side I just listened to. Another night we stayed at a B&B which could have doubled as a fright house for Halloween, but the lone proprietor proved to be an eminently nice guy. Although his lodging resembled an army barracks, he called ahead to make sure the one restaurant within ten miles would stay open for us for dinner, drove us to a scenic overlook, then cooked up some bitchin’ pancakes (or was it french toast?) the next morning.
I had no big thoughts, revelations, mid-course corrections, or eureka moments pedaling all those miles. My head was down and I was concentrating on the trail, most of which had ruts, and exposed roots, mud puddles, fallen branches, and other debris. I read many more C&O towpath historical markers than I ever would have if I were traveling solo. In many ways, it was a flat (an elevation difference of 600-700 feet total and we were going downhill), unobstructed, tour through a rich, winding slice of America and its history.
I thought I would fill many journal pages with new ideas, descriptions, sentiments, and details, fragments of which later might become seeds for short stories or blog posts. Not so much. I do recall an aroma in the air for several miles several times of cider, perhaps the pungency of rotting apples, though we never saw any fruit trees. The highway and the railroad which paralleled the towpath constantly reminded me we were not exactly in the wilderness. Industrial ruins and even an old water wheel mill house were at times embedded in the woods.
Though I’ve been riding a bike as a adult since 1980 (I marked the year by writing a poem about my first really cool bike), and I completed two centurions back when I used to live and bike in Manhattan, this was my first “overnight.” I seriously love my saddle bags, which the three ladies I lived with got me for Christmas last year, along with the contraption to hook them onto on the back of the bike (thank you, ladies!). Amazing how much stuff they hold. I thought a lot about how I am trying to substitute as many car miles for bike miles as I can at home. Even though I live in the heart of a city and everything is nicely compressed, it still isn’t easy. It was also nice to pedal so many miles without someone in a car yelling something stupid at me like, “YOU ARE NOT A CAR!” even though he was the one who didn’t see me.
I thought more than several times that I was gaining weight. That happened on one of those centurions I finished. When we reached the tip of Long Island, we completely and totally pigged out. That was after the probably 4000 calorie brunch we had at the halfway point in an IHOP. But no. I was at my same weight when I got home from the C&O trip.
Come to think of it, I did have blind faith in our leaders, Mark and Sandy Doumas, who last year had biked across the entire country – San Diego, CA to Richmond, VA. For all the biking I’ve done, I’m not much of a bike mechanic. I can change a tire but it would take me about five times as long as a guy like Mark. My friend Tom in the DC area helped me negotiate getting my car to my bike and put me up one night ahead of the trip and one night at the end. My sister-in-law made all the hotel arrangements. I didn’t even question. This may have been the first trip since college I went into expressly to “get beyond myself.”
Though I do question the wisdom of, and stridently oppose, the wars and overseas conflicts our nation is entangled in, none of which in my mind have a damn thing to do with our freedom here, I am nevertheless thankful that I live in a country where Bruce Springsteen can sing protest songs, my tax dollars support National Parks and Forests, and a veteran can speak his mind on the day he and his still-serving and fallen comrades are honored, a country which welcomed my father, who left a country with little if any freedom almost 65 years ago.
Arab American Writers: The struggle to revise the revolution being televised
By jmakansi On September 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that still astonishes and amazes? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized […]
Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that still astonishes and amazes? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized sexual/gender/cultural identities? Get acquainted with some of these authors listed at the links below. Pay attention. The revolution(s) over there is being televised but these American writers bring depth and breadth and passion and sense and frames and authenticity to the revolutions that are really going on, the struggle to fairly represent what our American channels will not.
I just returned from the Radius of Arab American Writers Mizna 5th National Gathering in Minneapolis, MN. I could devote a great deal of space here about my experience, but I would soon be out of character and so bordering on the obsequious that I might have to run and check my look in the mirror and make sure I am still me. Let’s just leave it as, I feel like a saturated solution of salt about to bear crystals.
Normally, I leave readings of short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry diluted and frustrated.
I think I can distill this experience and articulate why I felt like I got more out of two days with these writers and lovers of literature than I probably did at a two-week writers conference I attended a few years ago.
First, most of the writers who read their work at this gathering were talented enough, confident enough, astute enough to add a dimension to their reading that complemented the words, without resorting to multi-media. And they did it in a way that was not only unique, but was deeply personal and as they felt for what they were reading. Two poets read in duet form from poetry they wrote together by email. They had not met until this conference! One woman laced her words as if she were about to self-combust, fiery, angry then imploring then searching, but every move she made, every dynamic and intonation was in keeping with the meaning behind her words. We witnessed a theatre work in progress practice-staged for the first time by two actors, one of whom had only started acting two weeks ago. Another writer used a simple backdrop of an image on a big screen of two windows with curtains being gently moved by the wind to contrast her home in America with her ancestral home in Lebanon. An actor-writer dramatized what it was like to be in Baghdad with her family (in the consulate area) while it was under siege.
It is no small feat to strictly balance the performance element so that it does not overwhelm or underwhelm the reading. Most writers reading their literature don’t even think about this. Most of them sound like they’ve never even practiced reading the work in front of others. A few drown out their words with multi-media pyrotechnics.
To listen to a dozen or more writers so artfully achieve this balance just blew me away.
The second distilled observation is that the venue itself embodied literature. Minneapolis has a literary community, space dedicated to literature and reading and performance, programs to get children reading and writing early and often, and numerous allied arts organizations. It is a city which supports the BOOK. Many cities have vibrant arts programs. Minneapolis-St. Paul has programs focused on the BOOK. It has the Loft Literary Center, a whole building called Open Book, even a Book Lover’s Ball. By the way, I’m told three of the ten largest and most admired independent publishers reside in Minneapolis. Winters may be unbearable, but the twin cities know how to curl up and warm up with good books.
There is a third observation. It is the elephant in the room, the 900-lb gorilla, the tank in the corner, the warplanes overhead, the barrel bombs descending. The Middle East is burning. All of these writers have family, homes, history, stories, fables, myths, voyages, and land torn apart, or otherwise permanently scarred, by regional, sectarian, and religious strife and geopolitics. You’d be hard pressed to name a country in the region that isn’t engulfed in civil war, civil unrest or protest, invasion, or brutal occupation, and those that aren’t probably will be soon, the way things seem headed. The country these writers call home, America, is in the middle of all of these Middle Eastern conflicts one way or another.
There is no shortage of suffering. Suffering breeds passionate writing. Hope for the Middle East right now is barely keeping one nostril above water. The performances from these writers represent submerged energy desperate to be picked up by the sonar of justice, mediation, and peace. And as if that isn’t enough, they grapple with the freedom to fully express themselves as non-stereotypical men, women, LGBT, and other identities in this country, identities far more repressed, shunned even, “over there.” Clashes of culture, clashes of politics.
Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that can astonish and amaze again? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized sexual/gender/cultural identities? Get acquainted with some of these authors listed at the links above. Pay attention. The revolution(s) over there is being televised but these American writers bring passion and sense and frames and authenticity to the ones that are really going on here and there, and to the struggle to fairly represent what our American channels will not.
Tagged with: Loft Literary Center • Middle East • Mizna • Open Book • Radius of Arab American Writers
People need to save more for retirement. The planet could do with much less carbon in the atmosphere. Combine the two. Climate change problem solved.
If you want to debate whether global climate change is “real,” argue about how severe the impacts are and will be, or whether humans should even be contemplating behavioral and […]
People need to save more for retirement. The planet could do with much less carbon in the atmosphere. Combine the two. Climate change problem solved.
If you want to debate whether global climate change is “real,” argue about how severe the impacts are and will be, or whether humans should even be contemplating behavioral and economic changes to manage global climate change, kindly check out of this post now.
Rather, this post explains a conceptual and, if I do say so myself, elegant (on paper) means of reducing carbon discharged into the atmosphere as individuals participating in our economy.
First, recognize that when we talk seriously about reducing carbon, by default we are talking about massive social and behavioral change. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Individually, and as a society, we emit carbon everywhere, our mouths, our automobile tailpipes, our furnaces, our sources of electricity (unless nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, or other non-carbon source), our offices, our schools. Everywhere!
I have been an electricity/energy industry professional for 35 years, and have been in the middle of environmental management and global warming debates for all of that time. There have long been two gaping holes in climate change “solutions.” They fail to appropriately account for individual responsibility and change and they fail to offer long-term incentives for changing behavior. Most of the time, I throw up my hands at the complexity of the problem and the solutions (at least from a systems, multi-dimensional perspective), and conclude, that there is only one way to articulate the solution: Use less! Consume less. Have less stuff. Reduce your life’s footprint, whether you measure it in carbon, dollars, community, locavores, etc.
Yes, there are periods when people collectively are not only acutely aware of environmental issues but engaged with them. Usually, they are short-lived episodes, always coinciding with periods of escalating energy prices. When prices return to “normal,” people go back to complaining but not doing.
Why do we go to work, earn money? Because the economy revolves around money. If we don’t have money, we starve. If we make more than we need for survival, we thrive. We can even have fun, have more leisure, etc. One of the basic tenets of a modern economy is that we save for when we are older and can’t work, or don’t want to. We contribute to government programs (through payroll contributions) that help us in retirement. All modern economies do this. We save on top of that if we don’t want to just “subsist” when we quit earning money.
This is the key to my elegant solution.
My solution has two parts: First, develop standards for monitoring carbon reduction, whether it is how you heat your home, commute to work, buy your groceries, grow you food, or school your children. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. If you take mass transit rather than drive alone to work, you reduce your carbon footprint. If you ride a bike, you reduce it even further. If you use less heat for your home than, say, the average American household (commensurate with your household size and square footage of your home) or the average home in your state or your area, you reduce the carbon footprint. If you are vegetarian, you have a smaller carbon footprint than if you are a hearty meat eater. If you home-school your children (maximize use of your home as a resource, for example) and use resources from the web, rather than travel a long way to a private school, you positively impact the carbon footprint.
You see where this is going. You need yardsticks. You need to authenticate the behavioral change with a number determined from an agreed-upon methodology. This won’t be easy. But it can be done.
Then, you can tally an individual’s carbon reduction regularly. You can tally a business, a school, a house of worship.
Now, imagine you make behavioral changes with carbon reductions for your entire working career. In a bank somewhere, quietly summing over the course of that career or life, are your “carbon reduction credits.” What if the government treated this just like an IRA or a 401K? Over the course of your retirement, the government rewarded you. The more carbon emissions you avoided, the larger your carbon IRA/401K-like savings account is. The means of reward could be discussed. It could be lower taxes (this is how IRA and 401K programs work today and the tax advantages are compelling). It could be social security like payments. For young people, it could be student debt forgiveness. It could be a choice that changes over the course of your life. But it has to be something substantial. something that makes you want to sacrifice for the long term in the same way you sacrifice the now for retirement, spending today for the kids’ college tomorrow, and so on.
Ever seen the national debt clock? How fast it spins? Think if a plurality of Americans contributed to their personal carbon avoidance or carbon credit clocks and thereby a national carbon clock.
Now, I have not figured out how the government will back these payments with real money. Then again, the federal government has unfunded liabilities coming out the wazoo, war expenditures which are off the “balance sheet,” oodles of treasury bills held by China and Japan (and god knows who else), and the dollar is strengthening! Which goes to show you, the amount of debt is immaterial, if your country is still, in a relative way, considered the safest bet out there. Controlling the high seas, the skies, the digital air waves, and the global monetary network probably doesn’t hurt either. But I digress.
I hesitate to suggest that at the end of each year, along with our tax returns, and other end-of-year financial record-keeping, we could also have carbon credit filing? God, I more than hesitate. To think of one more government form on the order of the tax code? Ugh! BUT, you know, if you want to solve a long-term, global problem, then everyone has to be in it to win it. It doesn’t have to be complicated (although I recognize the vagaries of bureaucracy mitigate against simplicity over time), and maybe on-line record-keeping or even automation through our personal digital devices could help.
Only carrots or sticks permanently alter behavior. You can force automobile manufacturers to make more efficient cars. You can force electric utilities to use less fossil fuel. You can spend a great deal of money to put in light rail and bus lines. You can hector people about living more simply. But the best way to achieve long-term behavioral changes is to incentivize individuals to change the way they consume stuff. Energy is consumed in and of itself and as part of every bit of “stuff” that’s made, acquired, and disposed of. That’s why carbon reduction is an exceedingly difficult problem. And that’s why you have to solve the problem at its source, rather than shifting the problem from one part of the economic system to another like the bathtub ring in The Cat in the Hat. In a consumer-based economy, consumers are the source.
Develop standards for monitoring and aggregating individual carbon reductions and reward that behavior with the equivalent of a retirement account. Instead of talking about carbon cap and trading schemes, which will only create more financial engineering shenanigans from the wizards of Wall Street, push it down to the consumers. Reward us for doing the right thing, not the bankers for manipulating trading markets. Make the incentive something besides an Energy Star designation from the EPA, or a LEEDS platinum for an energy-efficient commercial building, or a subsidy to a energy company for some people paid for by other people (like most rooftop solar incentive schemes).
People need more for retirement. The planet needs less carbon in the atmosphere. Combined the two. Problem solved. I am of course being tongue in cheek. It would be a massive undertaking to implement the solution I describe here. But similar things have been done on a grand scale before. Income tax has only been a permanent fixture in this country for 101 years. On climactic scales, that’s not that long. IRAs were established forty years ago.
This is FREE WARE, OPEN SOURCE. Take the idea, the money, the whatever, and run!
Ghost Quartet: Take a Walk On the Seamier Side of Getting Ahead In the Arts
By jmakansi On August 27, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
What makes a novel with a plot you could easily envision for a soap opera episode rise to the level of literary fiction? That’s a question I often ask after reading what in the movie world might be called “indie,” or viewable on Sundance, but not the other 50 movie channels I get on cable.
[…]
What makes a novel with a plot you could easily envision for a soap opera episode rise to the level of literary fiction? That’s a question I often ask after reading what in the movie world might be called “indie,” or viewable on Sundance, but not the other 50 movie channels I get on cable.
The plot of Richard Burgin’s Ghost Quartet is easily captured in one sentence, albeit a sentence with a semi-colon. An ambitious, heterosexual young composer curries favor with a maestro conductor who overtly promises a shove up several rungs on the career ladder in exchange for a sexual relationship; said young composer loses the female love of his life in the process, and the Maestro’s ultra-sensitive former lover is devastated.
Remove the gay theme and the setting in the classical music world and the plot works just as well for an episode of Dallas, The Sopranos, or House of Cards. While Ghost Quartet was published in 1999, it is based in New York (Manhattan and upstate, Tanglewood), so it is difficult to give credit for tackling gay themes earlier than others.
Having played a classical instrument, attended music camps, and played in orchestras and string chamber groups, I was taken in by the music world Burgin depicts. I am also a sucker for books set in Manhattan, especially around the neighborhood of my alma mater, Columbia University.
Burgin’s novel has at least two qualities that answer the question posed at the top. First, the story has momentum. Rarely have I read a novel this length (300+ pages) in such a short amount of time. There is something compelling about the economy and precision of his prose, especially difficult when an author is dealing with neurotic prodigies, talented musicians, and, for lack of a better word, characters who overthink everything. You need many extra words to convey complex, contradictory emotions and behaviors, but none of Burgin’s text is surplus. Burgin’s mastery here surely must be derived from having a professional background in classical music (he is a composer and the son of a famous classical musician) and in writing and literature.
In literary fiction, one looks for themes or connections to issues that present themselves between the lines on the pages, especially if the plot or characters offer little more than the standard moral dilemmas and contrasts we are accustomed to regardless what fiction we read. In Ghost Quartet, I gained a greater understanding of a somewhat vile reality faced by classical musicians and other artists: Beyond a certain point, everyone is talented, the talent pool is an ocean, the few prodigies and stars have been sifted out by the talent recognition and separation system, and those remaining have few choices in their quest to make more than a mere living.
In today’s world, you either learn to wield the tools of self-promotion, or you depend on the kindness of those with coattails you may catch and ride, along with the reputation of the credentials you earn (e.g. a degree from the Juilliard compared to a degree from Southeastern Indiana State College). Coattails, of course, usually have threads attached. I think this is what Burgin captures splendidly, not just the moral dilemma or the economic survival imperative, but the need for something else for which a price must be paid. Rare is the performer or corporate executive or wealthy citizen who did not have to compromise on something for which his soul will punish him for the rest of this life.
Consumers of professional music and art want to believe that cream rises to the top, talent and hard work is rewarded, and the “rock stars” we regard so highly deserve our adoration (and our discretionary spending). Burgin takes the reader on a fast ride through the thick murky waters of the not-so-obvious reasons why one gifted individual is playing in a world-renowned string quartet, and another equally gifted musician is teaching music in public high school No. 143.
I’d never visited a Presidential Library before. Here’s a collection of observational odds and ends from visits to Bill Clinton’s and George W Bush’s.
Like their two-term administrations, I had the opportunity during a recent road trip to visit the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock, AR, and the George W Bush Presidential Library […]
I’d never visited a Presidential Library before. Here’s a collection of observational odds and ends from visits to Bill Clinton’s and George W Bush’s.
Like their two-term administrations, I had the opportunity during a recent road trip to visit the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock, AR, and the George W Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX back to back. I had never visited a presidential library before. While each of course strives to cast their former president in the best light, what I came away with was a distinction between the “man” and the “office” of President of the United States and a greater appreciation for the evolution of policies that are blamed on one president but are actually a continuation of policies started by previous ones.
For example, Ronald Reagan generally gets the credit for starting the big wave of modern deregulation in the US, but this was actually started by President Carter, who deregulated the trucking industry before Reagan got into office, and started the ball rolling on the deregulation of the electricity industry with legislation that broke open the monopoly franchise electric utilities had enjoyed for five decades.
Similarly, George Bush gets the credit or blame for hunting down terrorists around the world after declaring the “War on Terror” post 9/11, yet, as I learned at the Clinton Library, Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. I’m no lawyer or legal scholar but Section III of this law appears to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration’s global war on terrorists.
Clinton also signed an executive order (#13099) prohibiting transactions with terrorists who threaten the Middle East Peace Process. Ironically, this order only lists Islamic groups, including specific individuals like Osama bin Laden, but there’s no mention of, for example, Jewish terrorist groups, like the Settler movement, who were responsible for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, in 1995. These people are typically called right-wing activists, not terrorists, though it is hard to identify people who disrupted the ME peace process more than those guys. This is an interesting point, in that the Clinton Library focuses on Rabin’s leadership in the Oslo Accords of 1993, when Rabin and Arafat shook hands and made peace, such as it was for a short while.
Of course, every president has to be seen making an attempt at Middle East peace and Bush was no exception. But he kind of got distracted by the invasion of Iraq and the War in Afghanistan.
Other broad events highlighted at the Clinton Library include the Bosnian War and the fight for Kosovo (“not an American lost”), the budget crisis, and welfare reform. Monica Lewinsky is actually mentioned! The Little Rock Nine of 1957, a seminal event in the Civil Rights Movement, was a defining moment in Clinton’s formative years. Clinton apparently spent the least amount of time of any president in the Oval Office. His morning Jogs are a constant feature in the White House daily schedules on display. The first Ramadan celebration at the White House was held during Clinton’s years in office. He invited 3000 Americans to the White House during his tenure.
It’s pretty clear that Bill Clinton has sought a role on the world stage ever since his administration ended, and indeed he has been successful at this. Hillary’s White House ambitions will continue this in spades. Somehow, I got this feeling as well from his Library, that his legacy was to be an American president “for life.”
A small word of warning: You are not allowed to bring a water bottle into the Clinton Library. This kind of pissed me off. Although the Library is just off of the main area of downtown Little Rock, it takes up lots of green space along the river. It’s a manufactured green space in an urban environment.
The Bush Library, in contrast, has reserved parking spaces for hybrid gas-electric vehicles! Probably wouldn’t have guessed that one, right? While the Clinton building is modern and gleaming and open (lots of glass and natural light), the Bush Library is traditional, ornate, and neo-classical, and associated with Southern Methodist University. Bush emphasizes faith, family, and values, as one might expect from a Republican. Bush also emphasizes “place” in the exhibits of his upbringing, while Clinton emphasizes events. Both were from small towns. You would expect a huge emphasis on 9/11 and fighting the War on Terror, and of course there is. The other big exhibits are on No Child Left Behind legislation and AIDs relief in Africa.
Oh, and I found this to be a fascinating difference: The Clinton theatre where you watch the orientation video is movie-house style while Bush’s is church style, with pews!
One of the panels under “protecting the environment” describes the Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch. They must have quickly run out of other ideas.
Here’s a statistic from the Bush Library that kind of blew me away: In 1950, there were 16 workers for every one social security recipient. In 2005, the ratio was 3:1. In 2040, it is forecasted to be 2:1. Both presidents struggled with the budget but Bush ended up with a blank check for funding wars.
Finally, I find this to be the most insightful observation. Okay, I didn’t comb the entire place, but after spending about two hours in the Bush Library, except for an old group photo that included Dick Cheney, I saw no other mention or photo of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Powell, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, Feith, Perl, Abrams, Libby, Hadley, Rice, and the other major figures in his administration (and the architects of the Iraq War). I don’t state this as gospel, but more to learn if anyone else can refute or corroborate this. There are one or two Internet entries that mention Cheney’s absence at the Bush Library and this article in Politico (http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/george-w-bush-library-more-911-less-cheney-and-rove-90609_Page3.html) offers some substantiation on the others. Although it is widely known that Bush had become estranged from many of these officials during the course of the presidency, the lack of visibility is striking, and a contrast to the Clinton Library.
I am a baseball fan so I have to mention this tidbit from the Bush Library. The president threw out the first pitch of the World Series in 2000 (Yankees vs Mets), and while he walked on the field, Derek Jeter yelled at him, “Don’t bounce it, they’ll boo you!” Bush commented afterwards: “That baseball felt like a shot put.”
Honestly, though, I came away with great sympathy for both individuals as men and leaders struggling to live up to the expectations of the office, including the use of America’s firepower and military technology on the world stage, cooperation with Congress, our nation’s enormous resource appetite and percentage of the global economy, as well as the expectations of the rest of the world. Both were presidents during a period of the “lone superpower,” which certainly made all of this even more difficult (or, maybe not?). Who knows what the future holds for these two men, but I thought it was pretty clear Bush wishes to leave the office behind and live out his legacy as a humbler member of the human race, while the more apt phrase for Clinton would be, “you can take Clintons out of the White House but you can’t take the White House out of the Clintons.”
Putting these learnings in context with Obama’s second term, I can possibly see why someone would want to be President of the USA, but why would you want to ever want be a second-term president?
My struggle – to understand why I enjoyed Knausgaard’s My Struggle
By jmakansi On July 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.
I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than […]
It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.
I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than I’ve read a book that long in a long, long time (maybe since Lonesome Dove). My Struggle and Knausgaard have received a ridiculous amount of publicity recently. Sometimes I have to admit, yeah, I was just sucked in by the hype, but then I usually quit reading if it’s no good. I put down The Goldfinch after about twenty pages. I made it through The Signature of All Things, but wasn’t pleased with my investment of time.
Picking up My Struggle wasn’t easy. When I first read about it, I thought, this has to be duller than dirt. Then the cacophony grew. I read Knausgaard being compared to Proust. I vowed doubly to stay away. James Wood, exalted New Yorker book critic, weighed in effusively. I tripled my vow to remain divorced from reading it. Then a few people I know personally had great things to say. A week ago, I walked into a bookstore to support a fellow local author’s event, saw it in paperback (I thought it was only hardcover), looked up at one of the sales ladies (who knows me from a book group that meets there), and I asked, rhetorically and with a distorted grimace, “Is this any good?” She blurts out, “Oh my God, I Loved it!”
Which was interesting because earlier that day I was arguing with a few other women, who had read that a few other women had written, “this is glorified mommy blogging – if Knausgaard had been a woman…” and, well, you probably know where that conversation went. It went to the restaurant where we had dinner at afterwards because those two ladies were with me.
I bought it. A few pages in later that evening, I was hooked. But why? Why?
First, realize that My Struggle is an anomaly from the get-go. I purchased and read Book 1 in paperback. Book 3 just came out in hardback. It is a six-volume work, something close to 2700 pages, I read somewhere. Two times a trilogy. Harry Pottisfjord’s autobiography under contract. Facing that commitment, maybe you could argue that the publisher has no choice but to alp horn this guy from every mountaintop, force every other author in its stable to blurb it glowingly, and sew up all slotting fees on the store shelves for the next several years. If that’s the case, they can’t even agree on what it is. One reviewer calls it a “giant autobiographical novel cycle,” another calls it just a novel. Everyone talking and reading about it calls it a memoir. Is that the appeal? It defies conventional categorization? I doubt it. Is it that the softcover has a close-up photo of Knausgaard, looking all intense, like he’s Bjorn Borg and he just murdered you in tennis?
One-tenth of Norway has read My Struggle, reportedly (and in the publishing business, the verb “to read” apparently is a synonym for the verb “to buy”). That’s half a million, based on the 2012 Norwegian census. But, you know, Scandinavians are very homogeneous, so they all read the same thing, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.
The title grabs you. My struggle. Really? That’s about the least descriptive title I can recall for contemporary fiction. In fact, it’s mis-titled. There’s no “struggle” going on here, at least not in Book 1. He’s an author examining his life, albeit putting some of the more sordid details on display, but as far as I can tell, his is an ordinary life. His struggle is little different from mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, or ours. I examine my life, staring at me like fisheyes in a bowl, whenever I’ve had more than two drinks and I’m alone.
Oh, wait, eureka moment! He’s written a bullet-proof epic autobiographical memoir novel cycle, and the critics can’t dig any dirt up on him. He beat them to it! Politicians have to be thoroughly vetted before the campaign begins. This is an author who self-vets.
You might think, Knausgaard having grown up in Norway and living in Sweden, that life in Scandinavia is a more fascinating struggle than other regions. Perhaps what struck me more than anything is how the culture, the politics, the pop culture, the people, the daily routine, etc, in My Struggle are identical to what I am familiar with in America. Except they eat more fish. Is western civilization so homogenized, I wondered, that the events, the rock star idols of youth, the books, the movies, the aspirations, the successes and failures, charting this guy’s “struggle” feel no less like my own, and everyone else’s I ever knew? An earlier eureka moment had me thinking, well, Scandinavians , especially men, are known for their reticence, for internalizing their, well, personal struggles, more so certainly, than, say, Mediterranean men (my heritage). Knausgaard is honest about his personal feelings…but so what? Lots of authors are. That’s the point of writing about yourself, at least in the literary context. I read Laura Bush’s autobiography. She was pretty honest.
He handles difficult topics, taboo topics? Not really. The narrator is honest about masturbation. But he has nothing on Phillip Roth’s Portnoy. The narrator is honest about his older brother. So was Kevin in The Wonder Years.
So, what is it? First, I am a sucker for reading about painful relationships between a father and a son. Russell Banks’ Affliction immediately comes to mind. Knausgaard lets us in on the tension between a confused young boy and a distant father, with no need to embellish it. So distant, in fact, that it could be called today abuse by neglect. Second, what Knausgaard does so well is refrain from emotional outbursts, or any conclusions, no tidy bows around the wrapping paper. The struggle, I am guessing, is that he has no answers, provides none to the reader. Daily life is made up of confusing, contradictory emotions, and there is no sorting them out. They are what they are. Knausgaard is generous with them, but he does not exaggerate them, does not put his emotions on some pedestal as if they are more interesting, more exalted, more worthy, than mine or yours.
He deals with his dad. He pretty much hates him. But the narrative is about dealing with him, day in and day out, under normal circumstances and tragic ones and what he feels moment to moment. He has friends. He has girlfriends. He has a wife. He has children. He is a writer. He gets along with his brother. He loves his mother. He cries all the time. He’s the John Boehner of contemporary literature. The struggle he is imparting to us is the grind of daily life. He’s not suffering, near as I can tell, not starving, not poor, not crippled, not mentally incapacitated. His struggle is to elevate the ordinariness of existence. Sprinkled in are commentaries on politics, global affairs, art, and the other extremities of existence, but never outside the random or prompted thoughts you would expect of someone immersed in daily living.
Knausgaard has no discernible “message,” no axe to grind (although I did read his family is furious or something, so maybe this changes in subsequent volumes).
He is allowing us into a place somewhere beyond introspective psychoanalysis but short of his spiritual self, his soul, which would make it a spiritual journey, of which there are plenty on today’s bookshelves. He is examining his ordinary life and the only thing extraordinary is that he is chronicling it.
Damned if it isn’t a fascinating place.
I don’t know how much credit goes to the translator or to Knausgaard, but these pages just blow by. Even the dense, non-dialogue stuff that we often hop-scotch through (but never admit to), even these passages move swiftly. Not once did I get the feeling that Knausgaard’s ego is on display, even though, arguably, one of the most egotistical things you can set out to do – you think? – is write a six volume autobiography (but, hey, if a publisher takes it on, more power to ya). Nowhere did I find senseless displays of literary pyrotechnics. The window onto his ordinary life has been wiped clear with Windex. No distortions, no apologies, no histrionics.
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye came to mind frequently as I read My Struggle, partly because the book opens with his childhood, but mostly because there is an honesty, an authenticity to the first person narration, that hooked me from the first line: “For the heart, life is simple: It beats for as long as it can.” (And what about that rule never to use colons in fiction?). There is nothing to analyze here, nothing to interpret, nothing that requires a literary oracle to divine what the author means. It’s like Knausgaard took a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.
Maybe this passage does as good a job as any to clue you in about what you are in for:
“While previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully, a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock; life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with each passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on.”
And here’s a passage that puts Book 1 in context:
“My father is dead, and I am thinking about the money that will bring me.
So what?
I think what I think.
I can’t help thinking what I think, can I?”
Obviously, he can’t help writing it either. And I can’t help but read it.
One of my favorite short stories, The Master’s Voices, was accepted for publication by The Dos Passos Review. This is especially satisfying because this story has been kicking around for a long time. Most everyone in my various writers groups are also fond of it. I had it workshopped when I attended the […]
One of my favorite short stories, The Master’s Voices, was accepted for publication by The Dos Passos Review. This is especially satisfying because this story has been kicking around for a long time. Most everyone in my various writers groups are also fond of it. I had it workshopped when I attended the Sewanee Writers Conference. One of my instructors there gave me sage advice: “Get out of the way of your story!” Most fiction writers hear this admonishment at some point, in different guises. But it took me several years to figure out what he was talking about. One of the most difficult things in fiction is not listening to critique (well, it might be for some people, I cherish it), but converting the feedback into revisions without destroying your original meaning and intention of the story, especially in subtle ways. Anyway, the only hint I’ll give about the story is a major theme is the Negro Baseball Leagues and some of the players who have very colorful names. Most people are aware of the Baseball Hall of fame in Cooperstown, NY, but fewer know that there is a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO. I am definitely planning on visiting my next trip across the state (I live in St. Louis).
Your feedback is most welcome!
Concentration Camp Life: The Hunger Angel
By jmakansi On June 9, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel […]
I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. It’s a fascinating book, more for stylistic qualities than theme — life in a Russian-run concentration (or worker) camp in the mid- to late 1940s.
As the title suggests, hunger not only is the central fountain of suffering but also the savior of the main character/narrator, helping him to “feel the rawest connection to life.” The bulk of the action takes place in the camp, depressing enough, but the alienation the narrator undergoes when he returns home is worse. The form of the novel is of the narrator writing in a journal of sorts. For the most part, the unjust, brutal, and downright strange life in the work camp is alternately described directly and bluntly (“1 shovel load = 1 gram bread”) and then with a powerful prose/poetry style:
“Hunger is an object. The angel has climbed into my brain. The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight. He’s never absent. He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction. He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me. He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.”
An oddity of the novel is that the work camp is a coke processing plant (coke is made from coal and is used in steel production) and the reader is treated to some interesting details of industrial processing through chapters with titles like “Cement, On Coal, On Yellow Sand, On Slag, Cinder Blocks, and On Chemical Substances.” Of course, I am intrigued because I am a chemical engineer, but the beauty of the language is striking, as in this example:
“Anthracene is another chemical substance. It lurks on every path and eats through your rubber galoshes. Anthracene is oily sand, or oil that has crystallized into sand. When you step on it, it instantly reverts to oil, inky blue, silver green like trampled mushrooms.”
The passage alternately reads like entries in a textbook, then poetic descriptions of an evil monster.
Mostly, I note The Hunger Angel, not only as worth your reading time, but as another example of how the “big” non-American novels and novelists choose vastly different central themes, an observation I dwelled on in an earlier post: http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/
This continues to fascinate me. It’s only an observation based on my own recent reading selections, but there seems to be such a divergence in what American novelists write about and the rest of the world’s authors. There’s plenty of suffering going on in America, but our literary world is more lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, social media, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population. Perhaps that is the luxury of a largely academically trained literary community writing in the lone superpower country. Even one that just came through the “Great Recession.”
Beyond that, I would love to be privy to the mind meld of author and translator for these non-English authored novels I’ve been reading. It must be difficult enough between writer and editor.
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- August 2009
- Error gathering analytics data from Google: Error 404 (Not Found)!!1 *{margin:0;padding:0}html,code{font:15px/22px arial,sans-serif}html{background:#fff;color:#222;padding:15px}body{margin:7% auto 0;max-width:390px;min-height:180px;padding:30px 0 15px}* > body{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/robot.png) 100% 5px no-repeat;padding-right:205px}p{margin:11px 0 22px;overflow:hidden}ins{color:#777;text-decoration:none}a img{border:0}@media screen and (max-width:772px){body{background:none;margin-top:0;max-width:none;padding-right:0}}#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/1x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;margin-left:-5px}@media only screen and (min-resolution:192dpi){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat 0% 0%/100% 100%;-moz-border-image:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) 0}}@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;-webkit-background-size:100% 100%}}#logo{display:inline-block;height:54px;width:150px} 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /analytics/v2.4/data?ids=ga:66373148&metrics=ga:pageviews&filters=ga%3ApagePath%3D%7Ehor%2Fjmakansi%2Fpage%2F4%2F.%2A&start-date=2024-11-26&end-date=2024-12-26 was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
- Error gathering analytics data from Google: Error 404 (Not Found)!!1 *{margin:0;padding:0}html,code{font:15px/22px arial,sans-serif}html{background:#fff;color:#222;padding:15px}body{margin:7% auto 0;max-width:390px;min-height:180px;padding:30px 0 15px}* > body{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/robot.png) 100% 5px no-repeat;padding-right:205px}p{margin:11px 0 22px;overflow:hidden}ins{color:#777;text-decoration:none}a img{border:0}@media screen and (max-width:772px){body{background:none;margin-top:0;max-width:none;padding-right:0}}#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/1x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;margin-left:-5px}@media only screen and (min-resolution:192dpi){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat 0% 0%/100% 100%;-moz-border-image:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) 0}}@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;-webkit-background-size:100% 100%}}#logo{display:inline-block;height:54px;width:150px} 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /analytics/v2.4/data?ids=ga:66373148&dimensions=ga:date&metrics=ga:pageviews&filters=ga%3ApagePath%3D%7Ehor%2Fjmakansi%2Fpage%2F4%2F.%2A&start-date=2024-11-26&end-date=2024-12-26 was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
