How Not to Critique

One of my favorite scenes in Whit Stillman's marvelous moviefilm Metroplitan begins with the protagonist, a Mr. Tom Townshend, launching into a full on assault of the works of the celebrated author, one Jane Austen. You may have heard of this woman, on account of her novels being Emma Thompsoned or Gwyneth Paltrowed to death. Not that I'm complaining.

Because my memory is old and full of holes I can't remember the specific thrust but what the Internet helps me remember is this exchange at the end of the conversation:

Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?

Tom Townshend: None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.

I just wanted to pat old Tom on his cute little head and give him a lollipop the first time I heard that.

I am never opposed to criticism when it's valid, meaning not used as a forum to launch a personal attack. I don't believe that criticism should be unemotional and analytical either. I would expect that every good critic is incorporating their life experience, their taste into what makes something work for them which is really all a critic can express albeit, against what one would hope is a solid cultural framework for context purposes.

Criticism is one of the tools that historians, curators and the like use years from now to reflect upon our culture and decide what kind of idiots we were.

Howevah (as Stephen A. Smith would say.) You can't review something by proxy. Past experience may shape a future opinion but you can't say for certain your opinion of something until you experience it yourself.

Have you ever had two friends that you thought would be perfect a love match for each other, and surprise they didn't like each other for the same reasons you thought they would? Has your BFFFFFF in the whole world showed you something that they were absolutely sure that you'd love and you found yourself less than enthused when you got to experience it for yourself?

Have you ever gone to see a band with someone and they fell in love with the opening act even though you (yourself) were in love with the headliner?

Have you ever gone to a film that you were absolutely certain you would love/hate and come out with the exact opposite reaction?

If you answered no to all of those, Congratulations, you're a robot and your secret decoder ring is in the mail.

Think about it like this. Would you rather have someone form their opinion of YOU based on what one of their friends says about you or would you rather let yourself and your own actions speak for themselves?

Now apply that to art, music, movies, food and the like and tell me how you really feel, robot.

I will have more on this later, I hope.

It's "Finished"

She said to me as she walked out the door. Thinking about it now, I'd thank her if I could find her but I know: There is no finding her. Not where she went.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to writing my novel. At approximately 45,000 words I reached the pivotal scene. My original plan was to use that scene as a launching point to create a maelstrom from which I'd hammer down the rest of the subplots and tie a bow around the fucker.

Well, it didn't go like that.

As I wrote more and more of this scene and believe me I labored, we're talking days of staring at the monitor and coughing up a single sentence then deleting that sentence or one before it on the next day and writing something else.

As I wrote more and more I had hard time removing this excellent question from my brane.

As I wrote more and more of that scene, I realized that I was essentially writing the end of my novel.

It was a somber moment, there was no shimmying in the chair or anything like that, instead just an overwhelming numbness, a realization that I truly had nothing more to say on the subject. Between my beginning, middle and end I have enough to revise this thing into something truly workable.

I didn't hit the word count I wanted but the thing about journeys is that the destination is just another a mile marker. For me the journey isn't so much about writing "a novel" but becoming a full time novelist. I want to write many novels. Every piece that I write leads me closer to that goal and so I do feel a sense of accomplishment. Also, I learned a lot about how I work so I'll be better equipped to work with myself in the future.

Besides, I've read books (you may have noticed this) and am highly critical of writers that jam a story together and cobble on some wacked out ending that could've come 50 pages sooner. I wouldn't hold myself to a separate standard when I want my work to be on the same shelves as these guys/gals.

So it's done. I'm going to sit on it for a month before I print it and get to the editing/revision. 45,000 words @ 250/pg works out to about 180 pages. Paola pointed out that The Stranger is only 120 words. I can't decide if that makes me feel better or worse.

I've already started the next one. The inspiration came to me last year, I saw a bus parked on the side of State Route 99 during rush hour, hazards flashing. I can't remember if I saw or imagined a woman getting off that bus and into a grey Nissan truck behind it but that's what happens in my mind.

And that's where we go next.

Lazy Reading

I hate when someone takes my or another writer's fiction at face value and reaches the conclusion:

HE IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT.

Who are we to decide anyone is like anything?

It is safe to say if someone is writing about it then yes, they've probably thought about it and I think that's about all you could ever discern without additional information from the writer.

Which may or may not even be true, if you really want to know.

Names

I'm going through a rough patch with my reading, these days. Seems like the books I've read since The End of Mr. Y take these great premises and bury them underneath other things that I don't care about. A sleight of hand where they lure you in with one thing and the next thing you know you're the proud owner of a three humped camel and a future stake in the Brooklyn Bridge. Or they just mail in the ending. A mediocre ending can totally destroy everything else that happened before it.

Up until recently, I'd never been the type to abandon a book, no matter how bad and I've read some crap, mind you. A Confederacy of Dunces, though... I couldn't separate the prose from what came off as a never ending fart joke, Pulitzer winning fart joke, mind you. Had to set that one down and the odds of picking it up again are about as likely as Patricia Highsmith cranking out another Ripley book. (Famous last words)

So I decided to bring in the big guns and go for an open and shut case. The Glass Key came to mind because whether or not Hammett's plots make sense have nothing to do with the enjoyability of his prose. Supposedly the book inspired my FAVORITE MOVIE EVER, Miller's Crossing, and I've been dying to read it since finding that out. I read the first few pages at a bookstore and was hooked instantly but I'd already blown my wad on other things on that particular visit. I was also in a bit of a crash crunch after spending my savings on a new motherboard and cpu (YAY for new computer shininess!) so that was another wrinkle.

My next option, and just to be clear, I have a bunch of self-imposed restraints that prohibit me from basically reading things by the same authors over and over. I want to write well and I think part of writing well comes from reading well. I don't believe that limiting myself to a handful of writers that I adore will accomplish that, considering the plethora of voices that are out there. You just never know when you'll discover your new favorite writer if you don't go out and look for them.

So my next option became Anna Karenina, a highly regarded novel that you may have heard of.
It was selected as the best novel ever written by one group of authors and it's considered one of the best to come out of the 19th century. I dug the book up from my library, where it sat on a stack of Dostoevsky works: Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and House of the Dead, flipped it open and proceeded to read the foreword which is something I never do. Stupid lit scholars never bother to tell you there may be spoilers in the foreword.

After reading how Tolstoy came to the decision to write the book, I was hooked. I brought it downstairs to my desk, put my feet up, skimmed the rest of the foreword and got to a part, right before the prose that said: "Besides being more direct than earlier translations and closer to current speech, it has the great advantage of simplifying the Russian names, so that the reader is no longer confused by all the -evnas and -oviches an can give his full attention to the story as Tolstoy wanted us to do."

I didn't even have to read the next part to know it was coming but the main character's name Karenina is a patronymic: daughter of Karenin, I believe. Someone more familiar with Russian feel free to correct me. The translation uses a simplified naming convention that effectively breaks the title of the novel.

Um... what?

Because I don't speak Russian and will probably never learn it, I like to hope that when I'm reading something translated they're adhering to the rules as much as possible. To me, simplifying an established naming convention doesn't do that. It makes me think of Ellis Island immigrants giving their names to the Yankee gatekeepers, uncultured and unfamiliar with anything un-American, if they couldn't pronounce it they changed it to "to make it easier."

Pardon me for not believing names should be easy.

This isn't an original thought (its' touched on in Percival Everett's Glyph at least) but if you think about it your name is as inherited from your parents as much as your nose or any other genetic condition. In most cases, parents have decided what they're going to call you before they've even seen you, when you're nothing but a dream to them. In the case of my name, I share it with my Father and many members of my extended family. I don't know if this makes me more sensitive because of that, but I think you have to give the proper respect to what a name represents. Most of us do not choose them, they are given to us by people that have been on the planet longer than us.

But it's just fiction right?

Well yes, artistic vision aside, you could say that about any piece of art and that would end the argument.

But I think that art is much more important that and if Tolstoy had chosen to call his characters something easy, something non-Russian, then that's what he would have done. He didn't do that though.

It took me awhile to understand Russian names, and how a single character could have like 6 different names (if you include all the nicknames etc.) but it's really not that hard to piece together if you pay attention. Plus, I like the conversational familiarity provided by people fluidly switching from one affective name to another. It gives me the "This is how they really talk" over there feeling. It would be a big turnoff for me to pick up a book with a different time and setting than my own that sounded just like people talk here and now. Isn't the goal of most fiction to transport you to another time and place?

Anyway, long story short, I need a better translation of Anna Karenina for one and for two I decided to punt and I'm reading Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch because I know I'll enjoy it. Then I'll head back to the bookstore when this holiday madness dies down to grab Middlemarch and see what this Eliot chick is all about.

Us realists need to stick together and so forth.

Technology

Douglas Coupland was on APM's Marketplace discussing his new novel Generation A, a book that takes place in a future without bees.

In the interview, Coupland talks about the early theory of hive collapse being linked to possible cell phone use. Luckily (or so we think) that hasn't turned out to be the case. I say luckily because I agree with him; if the choice came down to saving bees or using rollover minutes I think, given some time, governments would collaborate to design a nice thoughtful memorial to the species.

Sorry honeybee, #speciesfail.

Not that I endorse this line of thinking but let's be realistic people. How many of y'all would give up your handheld wireless internet access to save a species that most folks consider a nuisance?

Now I'm not the type of person that keeps the phone attached to my ear and most of the time I don't even answer it when it rings unless I'm expecting a call (secret's out!) so it wouldn't be a problem for me to do that, but don't think I'm approaching this from a holier than thou position.

I have a commercial grade espresso machine installed in my house. One of the drawbacks (as if there could be drawbacks to having espresso or boiling water whenever you want it, lol) is the unit has a drain that over time gets clogged with coffee residue, the super fine granules that manage to sneak through the portafilter or come out of the brew valve at the end of the shot.

Basically, it requires regular maintenance to keep rancid water from overflowing onto my (wife's) counter top.

There are a couple of ways to do this. One involves disassembling the line and running a wire hanger snake to push the (now) living coffee clog out.

The other way involves filling the little drain box with drain cleaner and waiting.... waiting.... waiting.... until the cleaner eats through the clog. Then I pour a little more in, wait again, flush with hot water, voila.

If you have to guess which method I prefer I'll give you a hint: I don't like taking things apart unless there is absolutely no choice e.g. Asteroid headed toward the Greater Seattle Area = No choice.

Paola wanted to try an enzymatic drain cleaner so we did and it was a disaster. We picked a powdered kind that needed to be mixed in a gigantic volume in order to be effective. This posed a huge problem because the physical limits of the drain would never allow for anything close to that volume to occupy it. This meant me spending three days nursing the cleaner into the drain box and waiting.... waiting.... waiting... for nothing and cleaning off the counter top to start over.

Finally at the end of the third day, I disassembled the drain to find that the coffee clog was gone but now there was a pasty globule of cleaner that I had to clean out to make the drain operable.

At this point, I just wanted a homemade double tall latte so I did the only thing that made sense: Went to QFC and bought the old industrial stuff. I explained all this to Paola, when she woke up and she concurred. As much as I want to SAVE THE PLANET I can't tolerate having drains back up into my home.

For me, indoor plumbing is the thing I wouldn't give up and by that I mean all the peripherals that are assumed to come with it, like a free flowing drain, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

If it would have taken a mix of napalm and DDT to get that thing open again I don't think I would've hesitated, so sorry other species.

What do other species care anyway? The only thing that stops most of them from eating us is the part where we can't fit into their mouths.

So what is the one technology you couldn't give up, no matter the circumstance?