Book Review: Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel

In a recent Barnes & Noble Meet the Writers interview, Chuck Palahniuk
said that he rips off every word from Amy Hempel. This might explain why I enjoyed her work so much more than his. Imitation retains its false nature. Hempel's works are indeed electric and, though one can see influential, guiding hand of Gordon Lish, they are unique. These stories are at times short, sparse, and severe, but they are not reminiscent of Raymond Carver. The wit displayed in these stories is amazing. They are amazingly quotable. Unfortunately, I was reading a library copy and couldn't pickup my pen to mark it up. I was anticipating purchasing the paperback edition, but because the hardcover continues to sell the release was pushed back.

In the end, though, most of these stories are like nouveau cuisine. The items are small, the presentation is exciting, and the tastes are unique and amazing, but in the end they are not entirely satisfying.

What the Candidates Are Reading

Finally, someone (the AP) is asking the Presidential candidates the important question:

What is the last work of fiction you've read?
---
DEMOCRATS
Delaware Sen. Joe Biden: "Runaway Jury" by John Grisham.
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd: "The Broker" by John Grisham.
Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards: "Exile" by Richard North Patterson.
Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich: "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama: "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: "The administration's energy plan."
REPUBLICANS
Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback: "The Dream Giver" by Bruce Wilkinson with David and Heather Kopp.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The Beach House" by James Patterson and Peter De Jonge.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: "My oldest son's screenplay."
California Rep. Duncan Hunter: "The Democrats' proposal to balance the budget."
Arizona Sen. John McCain: "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: "Term Limits" by Vince Flynn.
Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo: "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore.

Really? Obama and McCain are the only ones reading interesting fiction?

The Publishing Crap-Shoot

This very interesting article from the NY Times on the business of publishing and the unpredictability of it seems to forget one thing: it's art. We're not talking about manufacturing and selling widgets. No one decides whether they "like" a widget in the same way they like or dislike a book. In fact, I'm afraid that publishing is actually too much like a traditional industry, always trying to repeat and copy its previous successes. Certainly, if editors were to only select books because they believed they would be "successful," many great books would never be published. Great books are not always successful. And the successful book isn't always what one would think might be successful.

I do think, though, that publishing as a whole would gain if it were more responsive to the audience. As the article points out:

Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.

Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.

The article is most interesting when it talks numbers. $25,000 paid for "The Nanny Diaries. $8 million for Charles Frazier's follow-up "Cold Mountain." And 750,000 copies of it printed,with only 240,000 sold. That means the company hasn't even (and probably never will) recoup the advance.

All of it tells me that there is room in the industry for a new business model, something outside of digital or print-on-demand. I think there remains away to make publishing traditional printed books profitable.

Michiko doesn't like the new DeLillo

I'm not surprised. Michiko Kakutani doesn't seem to like too much that I might like. Might these reviews be better if written by someone who actually enjoyed the book?

Instead of capturing the impact of 9/11 on the country or New York or a spectrum of survivors or even a couple of interesting individuals, instead of illuminating the zeitgeist in which 9/11 occurred or the shell-shocked world it left in its wake, Mr. DeLillo leaves us with two paltry images: one of a performance artist re-enacting the fall of bodies from the burning World Trade Center, and one of a self-absorbed man, who came through the fire and ash of that day and decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert.

Maybe she misses the point here? Isn't it saying more about today's world that the only answer a man can find for these times is to play "stupid card games?"

At least I know not to be dissuaded by this review.

Bill Richardson's Job Interview

Bill Richardson is the sad sack of the Democratic contenders for the nomination, but I like the guy. He strikes me as sincere and too smart for the job, but humor should score him beaucoup points.

Parker Posey: “She makes coffee nervous.”

I love Parker Posey. If she's in a movie, I know I should see it (even if it's Josie and the Pussycats). There's Party Girl, Tales of the City, and of course The House of Yes. It's nice to see her getting some attention in the New York Times:

Even in a supporting role Ms. Posey can move people to the edge of their seat and set them to biting their nails. When she played Tom Hanks’s antic girlfriend — she’s the one who gets dumped — in “You’ve Got Mail,” he said of her character, “She makes coffee nervous.”

...

“She can walk the line between pathos and comedy like no one else I have seen,” Ethan Hawke, who appeared with her in “Hurlyburly,” said. “Parker, I think, has a little punk rock in her.”

...

“There is something positive, kind of kooky and completely entertaining about her,” Ms. Cassavetes said. “When you walk around with Parker, people walk by and figure out who she is, and you can hear them say it. ‘I love Parker Posey.’ “

As my daughter sings, "ring-a-rosie, parker posey, ashes ashes, allfalldown."

Hempel's Way

While things around here remain hectic, and my eyes hang out of my sockets perpetually, I'm trying to finish Hempel's collection. This article (Hempel lives to write, writes to live) gets it right and will hopefully inspire me to get the darn thing finshed, when my hands aren't tied up trying to burp the boy.

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."

That sounds about right.

And introducing...

Jackson Thomas Garr

4-28-2007

6:26 PM

22 inches

10lbs 15oz

Rejection Collection - Kenyon Review

The one problem with electronic submissions is that all you get in the form
of rejection is an email. But here's the one I received this week from Kenyon Review:

-----Original Message-----
From: kenyonreview
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 1:23 PM
To: damon
Subject: Your submission

Dear Damon Garr:

Thank you for submitting your story. We regret that we are unable to use "Riverside."

Your work has received careful consideration, which sometimes means a response less prompt than we would wish. Unfortunately, the large number of submissions prevents us from commenting on many worthy manuscripts.

Okay, boilerplate so far. But now it gets interesting:

[Personal note: we apologize profusely for having kept your story for such a long time, and even more for deciding, in the end, not to take it. Your story was passed from editor to editor, all of whom admired some aspects of its craft and execution. In the end, however, we didn't quite find
enough to warrant keeping it. In my case, it seemed to me that the opening and closing were weaker than the rest, lacked the supple surprise and mordant dilation of the middle.

Again, sorry to keep this work so long. We'd be happy to see more from you in the fall--we'll try to be more prompt in getting back to you! Best wishes and good luck. ]

We do appreciate your interest in The Kenyon Review.

The Editors

Yes, the Kenyon Review almost took my story. Almost? Oh, that would have been nice. And now they're not reading again until the fall. So close.

Writer/Parent or Parent/Writer?

Finding that balance between a fruitful creative life and the obligations and joys of family life has been a constant struggle for me, and in this month's Poets & Writers section The Literary Life, Dan Barden's article "Writer as Parent" voices some of what I've been feeling:

Parenting is no doubt difficult for people in all professions, but I believe there are special challenges for writers. First of all, there's the matter of time: You not longer have any.

There should be no doubt about this, but the time you do have to yourself you are so spent that there's little energy.

Not only is there no time, but there's precious little space. And by that I mean both in the world and in my head.

The little buggers steal even your random thoughts.

Now I work in ten-minute chunks whenever life will allow--and count myself lucky for that.

Take that Walter (three-hours-a-day) Mosley. Maybe this is the real key to getting things done when you have a life, and other responsibilities.

Ultimately, the only appropriate response to a child is surrender. In this, too, it reminds me very much of the writing process.

When playing or caring for a child, that need be all there is in the world. And that is how it should also be when writing. If only I could have my mornings back so that I could do more of that thing called writing.

With the changes coming soon, I wonder when I will be able to write. Or sleep, for that matter.

Book Review: Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

I don't believe I've read a more bloody or savage book than this one. It is not unlike The Road, with it's perpetual wandering, running, but this desolation is the beginning of civilization, not the end of it. The formation of the American West was a brutal one, and this apparently well researched novel shows a ugly and vicious history.

The novel is peppered with strong bits of real philosophical musings, but this only comes after pages and pages of deserts and heat and rotting scalps and ears. There wasn't, though, much story here. We're brought along by the need for survival, but we don't learn much else along the way. Even the tension we see and the odd resolution are unsatisfying.

I hate to say that I was disappointed after enjoying Suttree and The Road so much, but I was. Maybe it's a question of subject matter or maybe the time is just not right to read about this sort of barbarism.

McCarthy wins Pulitzer

I really don't have anything to say about this except fantastic. An unsarcastic fantastic.

Pulitzers for McCarthy, Coleman (AP)
Two masters of the arts world finally won Pulitzers on Monday, with 73-year-old novelist Cormac McCarthy receiving the fiction prize for "The Road"....

It was the first Pulitzer for McCarthy, widely praised as an heir to William Faulkner for such novels as "All the Pretty Horses" and "Blood Meridian."

McCarthy, author of nine previous novels, has won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. But "The Road" is the author's greatest and most unlikely success. Not all of his work has caught on with the public, or with critics, but "The Road," an often horrifying story of a father and son on a post-apocalypse landscape, placed high on numerous critics' lists for 2006 and last month received publishing's most lucrative honor:
Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club and even persuaded the press-shy author to agree to a television interview. More than 1 million copies of "The Road" already are in print.
McCarthy's book was one of four Pulitzer winners — out of five categories for books — released by Random House, Inc., an achievement the publisher is calling unprecedented.

Walter Mosley's Sage Advice

Every so often an author who has published a couple hundred dozen novels decides it's time to dole out all the writing knowledge they have stored up to those of us willing to suck it up as if we didn't hear this not so long ago from some other wise ass who also wanted to rub our noses in their success. This time it's Walter Mosley on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Pretend you haven't heard it all before.

Rejection Collection - Missouri Review (again)

Yes, I sent work to Missouri Review again ("The Auction" this time) and again I was rejected. They were courteous enough, though, to include the personal note apologizing for the "unusually long response time. I'm sure it was because they were really considering the work.

Rejection Collection - Prairie Schooner

Another rejection that came a couple weeks ago for my story "The Auction." Prairie Schooner wastes no words or paper on this one. Maybe I should have gone with a shorter, more succinct story to submit.

The (Oh) Man Booker International Prize

Here's an intimidating list of authors up for the Man Booker International Prize:
Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michel Tournier

I don't even know who I'm pulling for.

Disneyfying Dickens

Great Expectations for Dickens theme park - Yahoo! News

Literary purists may quake at the prospect of a Charles Dickens theme park complete with a Great Expectations boat ride and Ye Olde Curiosity Gift Shop.

But Dickens World, a 62 million pound ($115 mln) complex built in the naval dockyard where his father once worked as a clerk, is confidently predicting 300,000 visitors a year to this new attraction dedicated to the Victorian author.

"We are not Disneyfying Dickens," insists manager Ross Hutchins as he dons hard hat and fluorescent jacket to tour the site, a hive of activity as the Fagin's den playground and Newgate Prison's grimy walls are given their finishing touches.

It might be tasteless, but I would go.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

(Photo credit: Jill Krementz/New York Times)

I had a dream once, deep in the middle of that whole MFA thing, that I was chasing Kurt Vonnegut around the halls of some labyrinthine college, hollering at him because he was my professor and he had failed to grade some key large assignment for which I was obviously expecting a good grade. It says more about my anxiety at the time than it does about Vonnegut, but I've felt a link with him ever since.

By the way, there's an old undergrad essay I wrote on Cat's Cradle here. Scroll down to "Possibilities for a 'Better World.'"

Benjamin Barber's new book

Remember, Jihad vs. McWorld? That book about how the US version of globalism was shaping how the rest of the world saw us and was creating enemies, back before we all became familiar with the images of Jihad on our own soil? Well, author Benjamin R. Barber is back with a new book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. And he has an op-ed published in yesterday's LA Times that lays out his thesis.

The highlights:

Capitalism's success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are now chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to "need" all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth.
...
Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster. We still work hard, but only so that we can pay and play.
...
When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism. When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything, we call it liberty. Can we redirect capitalism to its proper end: the satisfaction of real human needs? Well, why not?

The world teems with elemental wants and is peopled by billions who are needy. They do not need iPods, but they do need potable water, not colas but inexpensive medicines, not MTV but their ABCs. They need mortgages they can afford, not funny-money easy credit.
...
Public citizens must be restored to their proper place as masters of their private choices. To sustain itself, capitalism will once again have to respond to real needs instead of trying to fabricate synthetic ones — or risk consuming itself.

While a lot of this sounds like an undergrad term paper I once wrote, it should appeal to those of us growing wary of capitalism's end-game.

Random House, scaring the hell out of Oprah viewers

I'm surprised that Random House hasn't softened their website for McCarthy's The Road to match the new paperback version -- and to suit the new readers headed in this direction.