My 99 Cents

Amy Hempel, short story writer, is spending a rainy morning at a Madison Avenue diner.She is 55 years old. Her flowing hair is silvery-white. Her speech is clear, but careful. She sometimes edits herself as she talks or advances her thoughts as if placing one foot slowly before the other.

And here it is: the secret, maybe.

“…she moved to New York and sought out… Gordon Lish…

“She was shy and she was nervous and she blushed a great deal,” Lish recalls. “She was desperate, desperate in every respect a human being could be — desperate, grappling, struggling, striving to get a hold on her experience.”

Lish believes that writers don’t succeed because of talent, but because of will: You become a great writer by wanting to be one. Drive, will, character, “all of which Amy has,” Lish says. Hempel remembers how hard it was at the beginning, how she wondered if she should even be writing.

“And then I think of a sentence I really like,” she says, “that I’m proud of having worked really hard on.

“Emily Dickinson once said that when a poem works, it felt like the top of her head was coming off. My own personal way — wait that’s three words for one word,” Hempel says, stopping, correcting herself. “My way of knowing the sentence just really lands is if I get a little bit teary. Not that it’s sad, but something is struck just right. And it can be funny and I get teary.”

What is biography?

Scott Stossel, Managing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, has this to say in the NYTimes:

Biography, in our contemporary understanding of it, has a capacious range, embracing everything from Plutarch’s “Lives” and the New Testament to St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and the E! television network’s “True Hollywood Story.” But a tension has haunted the biographic impulse from the very beginning. Is the primary function of biography to idealize and commemorate figures in order to provide models for emulation? Or is it to capture the warts-and-all essence of an individual human personality in a way that engages the sympathy and deepens the self-understanding of those who encounter it? This in turn generates another tension, one that has particular currency today: to what extent must biography, to be worthy of its name, be based on knowable fact, and to what extent does a full picture of a human personality depend on speculation, symbolism and fictionalization? As Hamilton puts it, “Where does fact end and interpretation begin?” Is biography “a branch of history” or “an art of human portraiture”?

Howdy…Stu here, your hamster host of the 2nd edition of ScribbleTalk. This week we’ll look at the latest kurfuffle or imbroglio or dustup or what-have-you in the literary wold.

In the NY Times, David Orr takes aim at New Yorker poet/editor Dana Goodyear’s recent piece about the well-endowed ($200 mil) Poetry Foundation. I bring it to your attention as one example of the way major “serious” magazines and newspapers have replaced publishing actual fiction and poetry with gossip about fiction writers and poets,editors and benefactors. Orr starts out this way:

The history of American poetry, like the history of America itself, is a story of ingenuity, sacrifice, hard work and sticking it to people when they least expect it.

And further on:

Indeed, The New Yorker now treats poetry almost exactly as [Dana] Goodyear suggests the Poetry Foundation does — as a brand-enhancing commodity. Rather than actual discussions of poetry as an art, The New Yorker offers “profiles” of poets, which are distinguishable from profiles of, say, United States senators only in that the poets’ stories potentially include more references to bongs. That’s not to knock the authors of those profiles — often they’re a pleasure to read. They just have nothing to do with poetry.

Ok, but Orr and the Times do it too – they all prefer literary controversy over literature.

Oh alright I admit that it’s a pretty juicy fight (hamsters are suckers for a mudfest). The two articles together dispute just who is getting published and fawned over in posh venues like The New Yorker and who is getting funded by the massively deep-pockets of The Poetry Foundation.

I meanwhile nibble on cracker crumbs that fall off whatsleft’s plate, and wish she would drop more cheese.

I will leave you with a poem by somebody rightly feted and too-soon mourned:

Among the Narcissi

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.

The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

Sylvia Plath

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel is my most recent read. As Rick Moody says in his introduction to this collection, “It’s all about the sentences.” Boy can she write.

David Weich at Powells.com interviewed Hempel and here’s what she says about how hard it can be to write the “truth.”

Hempel: [...] I was thinking about why you can’t take a real experience, something incredibly dramatic that changed your life, and just write it up the way it happened and make it work in fiction. It doesn’t seem possible, at least not for me.

I did start writing “The Harvest” with a real accident in mind, one that changed my life. And when I finished it, I thought, Isn’t it curious? Look at everything I changed or embellished or left out to make it a story that works. I hadn’t planned to, but I wrote the kind of addendum or deconstruction, after a space break, playing with the whole idea of personal mythmaking, which we all do— we’re mythologizing our lives every day when we talk about ourselves.

And Later in the interview:

Dave: What did you talk about at the book party?

Hempel: I’m probably just always shooting my mouth off about how cute my dogs are. Put it this way, it would be a dog story. I’ve got to stop talking about dogs.

Author George Saunders

George Saunders’ story collection, In Persuasion Nation is wonderful. Anybody read this one, or others by him? If so, what did you think?

In Persuasion Nation is filled with bizarre, hilarious, sharp writing. The opening story, “I CAN SPEAK!” takes the form of a letter written by KidlLuv Inc. Product Service Rep. Rick Sminks, addressed to the dissatisfied buyer of the I CAN SPEAK! apparatus. This weird, horrific invention attaches to the face of a baby, emitting words and sounds that “make[s] baby seem older.” Smink’s tortured, absurd, sincere response to Mrs. Ruth Faniglia’s consumer grievance is perfect satire. Here he describes the I CAN SPEAK! in action:

“Say baby sees a peach. If you or Mr. Faniglia (I hope I do not presume) were to loudly say something like: “What a delicious peach!” the I CAN SPEAK!, hearing this, through that hole, that little slotted hole near the neck, might respond by saying something like: “I LIKE PEACH.” Or: “I WANT PEACH.”

And why would anyone think of using the contraption on her baby? Sminks explains that it “Makes you love [the baby] more. Because suddenly he is articulate. Suddenly he is not just sitting there going glub glub glub while examining a piece of his own feces on his own thumb….” Sminks letter is very funny, but sad too, as his increasingly desperate tone reveals a guy hanging by a thread to a job and a life that comes at a pretty heavy price.

In story after story, Saunders’ characters live in a Neverland of low expectations, depleted language, and flattened emotional response. Still, they struggle to break out. Sorrow and love seep in at the edges of their lives, expressed in language stripped down to advertizing patois.

On a different note, his non-fiction essays include a prescient piece against the Iraq war, which rings truer and truer.

The excerpt below is from Saunders’ essay “Why Peace?” written in December 2002, and published in Switzerland, February 2003.

Included in the German anti-war anthology, “No War,” April 2003.

“I am against the war in Iraq simply because the war is not necessary. Everything that needs to be accomplished there can be accomplished via patience, diligence, and the cooperation of the international community. In the American media, and, apparently, in the minds of our leaders, war has come to be thought of as a sort of elaborate industrial operation – expensive but necessary. And it will be expensive, but the expense of a different variety than they imagine: Babies will die, limbs will be blown off, farm animals will be reduced to red puddles, men will commit unspeakable acts which wake them from their sleep for the rest of their lives. And this is merely rhetoric: the actual effects, like God himself, are beyond our ability to imagine.”

[The excerpt above is taken off this website: http://www.georgesaundersland.com/index.htm]