Right of First Refusal + Rejection Note = Refusal Note

(an attempted reconstruction of a collective effort)

Dear Sir/Madam:

A pox upon you for submitting your work to our journal. We receive a large number of submissions every month, and none of them compare to the contemptibleness of yours. We have read your pages with disgust and horror. No, no, a thousand times no, we shall not consider publishing such garbage. Our current need is that we might forget the stain your words have left on our retinas. If we could cause this self-addressed, stamped envelope--the one enclosure with any sense in your most objectionable mailing--to projectile vomit onto your shirtfront right now, believe us, we would indeed. We do not merely pass on your work; rather, we kick you, and your work, dead on in the nut sack with our steel-toed editorial boots. Your pages are not fit to wipe with, and yet we have, because we felt we must, and thus our bottoms are riddled with inky little paper cuts, but we are glad of this, because it is nothing compared to the torn and bleeding flesh you have wrought upon our minds. We do not wish you luck placing your work elsewhere; rather, we earnestly pray that you never write another word again, burn every page that has regretfully dropped from your wretched bunghole to date, and do penance for the harm you have caused us, and literature, preferably involving violently painful flagellation, from this day to the one on which your corpse is blessedly lowered into the ground.

Regards,
The Editors

Eleventh Street in the Times

Eleventh Street is all over today's Times, from Jane Jacobs's barstool at the Whitehorse, where she argued that the city of the future should look a lot like the West Village of the 60s (as opposed to the West Village of the present where, according to the paper of record, the red benches of the White Horse are filled by "graduate students from nearby New York University and would-be writers"), to the 11th Street Bar, where Chuck Klosterman mulls over his latest humiliation.

The Strange Story of Our Earth

The library here, in this creaky old hunter's cabin by the side of the road, is a weird mix of books about machines, nature, and Christianity--with titles such as Bear!, Fix Your Chevrolet, Cowpokes Ride Again, Old Gun Catalogs, Best Ways to Catch More Fish in Fresh and Salt Water, Is the Bible REALLY the Word of God?, and Father Smith Instructs Jackson, a instructional manual for Catholicism written entirely in Socratic dialogue form.

But my favorite so far is The Strange Story of Our Earth, a science book for kids, published in 1952. It reads like science written by Nabokov's Kinbote; in other words, you might hope that a book about something "strange" would answer questions, but instead it leaves them dangling and convoluted, the author preferring to pick fights with unnamed enemies. I can't imagine a kid reading this and not wanting to run the hell away from science, screaming.

This is the book's final paragraph:

If the ancient inhabitants of America domesticated the Megatherium why shouldn't they have domesticated other creatures including the horses? At all events even if some scientists will not admit that the first Americans originated in America they must admit that the Americans were the first men to domesticate large animals, for as far as known, dogs were the only animals domesticated by the men of the Old World at the time.

Why should they not have indeed? replies the 10-year-old in the early fifties, making a mental note to give the humanities a closer look.

Gross Anatomy: The View from the 9th Floor of the Library

The view from the 9th floor of the library extends downtown over the rooftops of Soho all the way to Wall Street. If you stare hard to the Southwest you can make out the blue hills of New Jersey. I often bring my work to the 9th floor, which houses the university science library, and sit by the window. The view offers just the right amount of distraction for me to work. One gray day like today when the city seemed particularly ugly (and New Jersey had disappeared into the mist), I distracted myself reading the mysterious titles of medical books on the shelf in front of me. Wound Care and The Acute Hand sounded like titles of poetry chapbooks. An Atlas of Vulval Diseases…Iowa Head and Neck Protocols… The ambiguous Principles and Practice of Nurse Anesthesia… I put away my work and took Obstetric and Gynecological Milestones ILLUSTRATED off the shelf. Chapter 26 was titled “Thomas Wharton and the Jelly of the Umbilical Chord.” Another chapter was a reproduction of William Hunter’s illustrated Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi from 1751, a work of art whose terrifying images of dissection show the body to be both beautiful and monstrous. They make Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother look like a third grade diorama.

Links to Historical Anatomies on the website of the National Institutes of Health.

James Wood on Flaubert

There is a good James Wood and a bad James Wood. The good one sings when he writes about Bellow, the bad one just sulks eloquently. The bad James Wood published a poisonous condemnation of the "New York" novel and its practitioners McInerney, Ellis, and recently Rushdie, in The Guardian on Oct 6, 2001. The headline was "How does it feel?" The good James Wood has just given us a thorough and insightful essay on Flaubert's legacy in the guise of a review of the "magnificent" new biography of the writer.

Wood offers a fine reading of Flaubert's "superb and magnificently isolate" details in this passage from The Sentimental Education:

At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.

Flaubert, he argues, "is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narrative: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic... [his] details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously."

Tonight's Featured Act

She was talking about going to hear Dawn Raffel read, but the words formed in my head as Don Raffle. Maybe the former is pronounced the same as the latter? Neither of us were sure. I started imagining what a writer like Don Raffle would be like. A Borscht Belt comedian of a writer. The Fozzie Bear of fiction. "How's everybody doing tonight?" he hollers, stumbling out on stage in his tawdry suit and hat. He's got a martini in one hand, microphone in the other, pages up his sleeve. Is his voice Fozzie's, or Krusty the Clown's? There's feedback from the PA. "Are you ready for some short stories?" The last word drawn out like taffy. Oh yes. It's late, the audience is drunk, it's a long drive home, the audience wants to be entertained. Maybe literary fiction should be more like bawdy jokes about farmers' daughters and popes walking into bars, priests and hookers and presidents on lifeboats. I think I want to be Don Raffle.

More on the Q&A

What I remember: The conundrum of the bumblebee. Cueing fetishes, talismanic pages. Not knowing how to solve the problem of the project until you're inside it. Ideas agglomerate. Roth: job is to make a book smarter than its author. Maugham, Mann: Waiting to write the bildungsroman. "I'm a great believer in bohemian life." The value of the intimate and useless. Trillin on Babel via Wachtel: The human fact within the vale of circumstance. I heard the lyric as "monster eyes." I was so happy the kangaroo was named Shelf.

EL Doctorow on the Research in the Novel (An interview by Ron Carlson)

(This interview with the writer Ron Carlson was done for the show Books & Co on KAET TV in Arizona. I'm posting it here because it seems to have been dropped from its home web server. I found it in Google's cache.)

Ron Carlson: What obligation do you have to your research? Because you've done a lot of research. You've written a lot about different places.

E.L. Doctorow: I don't know if what I do can be called research. It's so idiosyncratic and subjective. I've known too many writers who have researched things so thoroughly that they're stopped in their tracks.

Ron Carlson: That's what I'm asking.

E.L. Doctorow: And I believe when I'm asked this question "How much have you researched," I say, "Just enough." You start writing, and if you are writing well, I think really you create kind of a magnet force field around you. Whatever you need will come to hand. You'll see something in the street or run into -- I'll give you an example. In "Ragtime," I wrote a scene in which this -- the old silhouette artist Tateh and his little girl take streetcars from New York up to Lowell, Massachusetts, on the interurban street lines, which I knew were very widespread in those days, in the 1910s era, but I felt, well, this is really a stretch, and I’d better find out if it was possible to do this. But I didn't know how to go about researching it. So I was wandering around in the New York Public Library in the mid-Manhattan branch through the stacks, and my knee banged into a shelf of oversized books that were protruding from the shelf, and there was one with a big orange cover that was very prominent. So I just picked it up and looked at it, and it was a history of trolley car companies in America. And I’d found out, yes, you could go to Lowell, Massachusetts, from New York paying nickels with each new line. In fact, you could go from New York to Chicago by streetcar in those days, and it was a great system, and it was destroyed probably -- J.P. Morgan bought up some lines that he felt were competing with the new haven railroad. He destroyed them. Then the general motors corporation went around to cities saying buses are much cleaner and better, which was not true. And so trolley cars, streetcar transportation folded. Too bad.

Ron Carlson: But you found that book by accident.

E.L. Doctorow:By accident.

Ron Carlson: So it's a little different now with the internet. Everyone researches everything on the internet. It's all I hear about. People are "Googling" and finding out this stuff. You don't have a research staff? You just do your own research, correct?

E.L. Doctorow: I don't use a research -- one book I hired a guy to get some old magazines for me. I guess that was for "World's Fair." but, you know, a lot of what you make up is simply applying yourself logically to the situation, and there's really not that much trouble. I never corrected the problem in "Welcome To Hard Times." I left it. You know the Hawthorne story, the birthmark, where this man's married to this beautiful woman and she's absolutely perfect, and he loves her, but she has a little birth mark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny hand, and he's a natural scientist, so he concocts a potion and says, "Drink this and the birthmark will disappear and you'll be perfect." Because she loves him, she drinks it and the birthmark disappears and at that moment she dies. So that's why I've left Jenks out eating the roast haunch of prairie dogs.

Ron Carlson: Leave your beautiful flaws.

E.L. Doctorow: You want flaws.

Ron Carlson:Sure, I understand. Talking about research, so many times the question becomes your responsibility to be exact but, I mean, what you're saying is very much more kindred to what I've experienced, that is to say, as you focus on the work, that what you're writing becomes its own research, that you create and find the information you need.

E.L. Doctorow: I think so. You do look things up, but basically you have to trust the act of writing to guide you.

Notes from the Reading by Darin Strauss and Jonathan Lethem:

Washington Square, March 30, 2006.

During the Q+A, Darin Strauss confessed he watched The Godfather 2 twenty times over the course of writing his first novel, Chang and Eng, to study the double-narrative structure. People these days, he argued, are paranoid about plagiarism. A writer should read widely taking what he can. On the other hand, one should be cautious about research. Strauss said that it was only when he was writing his first novel that he discovered the real truth behind the funny response Doctorow once gave to the question: how much research do you do for a novel? - As little as possible, he said.

Jonathan Lethem warned aspiring novelists that “an idea for a novel is not enough for a novel.” He said that his general reaction to reading “apprentice fiction” is “Do more. Do this and something else or 10 other things, but not just this one thing. Do more.”
After the Q+A, Strauss read briskly from his novel-in-progress about an adman in Long Island. As listeners, we sometimes felt forced to run to catch up to him, chasing one biting description after another. In the office scenes, the description was often aphoristic (“Small talk abhors a vacuum;” “The dotcom bubble’s contribution to the world of business was a residue of counterfeit wackiness.”) His metaphors and similes created a strange beauty from the dreary world of office supplies: “The overhead light jiggled. Everyone held still as if they were being photocopied.”

Lethem read from the beginning of a new novel about the breakup of a couple who are in the same band together. He’s the guitarist. She’s the bassist. Both of them have day jobs that take up most of their time. He works at the zoo, cleaning up after kangaroos. Though Lethem read with flair, the first section felt a bit flip – a satire with an easy target: sorta-hipsters stewing in their unrealized ambitions. The audience laughed along in sympathy. Especially the poets. In the scene, the band writes a song together, improvising the lyrics. Lethem sang the refrain, “Keep away from my monster gaze!” It was a real performance. He sounded a little like David Berman from the Silver Jews. The lyrics needed to be improvised because the band’s songwriter was “having a problem with language.”

“What do you mean?” the guitarist asks.

“You know, the place where it comes from.”

The MFA poets in the room laughed until tears came to their eyes.

The later scenes from the book involved an awkward conversation at the grocery store and a kidnapped kangaroo in a bathtub.

A brief reception followed. Refreshments were served.

One-Word Poem

Big Al: So, Eric, you teach writing. I’m a terrible writer. The worst. When I was in grade school, our teacher told me we had to write a one-word poem.
Mike: What the hell’s a one-word poem?
Big Al: Exactly. It’s stupid. I said I’m not gonna do this shit. So she calls up my mother and says your kid’s an asshole he won’t write his poem. My mom says, if he don’t wanna do it, don’t make him do it.
Mike: How about “Fuck”? That’s a good one-word poem.
Big Al: Nah, she said it was like “Love.”
Me: That sounds like an awful poem.
Mike: Yeah, “Fuck” is way better.