The Neuroscience of the Dead

There's an advertisement in the back of the current issue of Poets & Writers (on page 97, to be precise) for a new book called Against Workshopping Manuscripts. The ad is, to be generous, homemade-looking. The copy, in part, reads as follows: "Shall we admit that workshopping stymies the imagination? —Resulting in leathery thought and actual harm."

The passive-aggressive quality of the first question makes me want to hurl the magazine across the room (Shall we admit that your copy jumps to conclusions about our opinions on the matter, and has the gall to presume that we are simply hiding them from the world, cowering in fear of conventional wisdom?); that odd and amateurish em dash makes me feel—how shall I put this?—more charitable, say; but the marvelously appealing image of thought being leathery (I want my thinking to be tough and waterproof, like tanned animal flesh!), and the idea that writing—poor, neglected writing!—could ever actually cause harm, in this bright and glaring universe of amphibious space tanks and night-vision sonar guns and street-legal off-road military transport vehicles and the kids, the kids, they're killing each other every day with their poisoned school uniforms and samizdat mobile phones—and yet, looking at the website of this two-lady publishing operation, and seeing that this book (with its strangely generic ocean waves on the cover!) purports to challenge the hegemony of the workshop with "upper cortical re-entry" and "plucking wounded young people from the herd," well, I am as charmed as I was when I first heard about the book People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting bystanders and what to do about it. Whether their conclusions involve wearing a tinfoil hat or not, I look forward to the neuroscience of us all becoming better writers, and getting this damn dead person off my back.

Searching for a Fax Machine in the Air Conditioner Factory

I wanted to find out if a particular phrase a friend made use of the other day had actually originated with a particular artist or not. The following is a loose sampling of the results Google returned to me:

Sometimes I'm reminded of a postcard I saw long ago. It was a sort of Lichtenstein, pop-comic-book style card. There was a woman talking on the phone, and she was saying, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children." When I was twenty, a friend gave me a T-shirt bearing a comic strip frame of a glamorous woman weeping dramatically, over the caption "I can't believe I forgot to have children." You know that illustration with a stylish woman talking on the phone, saying, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children"? There is a funny cartoon of a middle-aged woman, hand to head, exclaiming, "Oops, I forgot to have children." It was one of those 1950s cartoons of a glamorous brunette, with a speech bubble saying: "I can't believe I forgot to have children." It is kind of like the Roy Lichtenstein cartoon-style painting, which is of a woman on a bus, and she says in a balloon over her head: "Oh no, I forgot to have children!" And one day I suddenly realized that T-shirt where the woman says "Oh my God, I forgot to have children" was me. Headlines like "Hey, I forgot to have children!" cause some of our listeners to hyperventilate. Others have seen the cartoon of the woman exclaiming, "Oops, I forgot to have children," and decided it wasn't such a joke. The cartoon of a crying woman saying "Oh my God, I forgot to have children" is more applicable than ever. Charlotte: But we're 38! These are the years. Carrie: Yes, I know, I've heard. I'm running out of time. I don't even have time to eat this cookie. Charlotte: How is it? Carrie: It's so good I forgot to have children.

And I have realized that the Web is only as reliable as our own memories, only as smart as our own minds, only as good as our own senses of responsibility and codes of ethics; and therefore, I have concluded that we are all doomed to hell.

The Art of the Novel #2 / The Art of the Podcast #1

Is Christopher Lydon the thinking man's Charlie Rose? While he may not have the pull of his older colleague, he's definitely sharper and more web-savvy. Lydon's mp3 interviews played a major role in popularizing the podcast. His new project, Open Source, is a radio show, podcast, and a blog. In the past month, Lydon has interviewed Philip Roth, the critic James Wood and Mark Greif of N+1 on the NY Times Book Review's Great American Novel Survey.

Philip Roth discussed the Art of the Novel, the elemental joys of the Jersey Shore, and how his father picked up a woman using the line, "Hey, You're in Dr. Horowitz's spot!" In their conversation on the Times Survey, Lydon prompted Wood, Greif, and Moby Lives / Melville House publisher, blogger, podcaster, Dennis Loy Johnson to speculate on what the next Great American Novel will look like. Yesterday, Lydon talked with John Updike about sex, god, and New Jersey.

The Art of the Profile # 1

The celebrity profile is not an ancient art. The formula for the integration of the interview with a survey of the celebrity's life was devised by a German mathematician sometime after Einstein's annae mirabilis, 1905. Not much has changed since then, aside from the flourishes "New Journalism" added during the 60s. Mostly, the profile falls into the tried-and-true magazine model of the bait-and-switch. The magazine cover announces an in-depth interview with the celebrity subject, but aside from a provocative close-up photo or two, we see little more than the obvious. There are notable exceptions of course - occasions when the writer's talent and commitment overcome the conventions of the genre. Mostly this happens when the subject sexually propositions the journalist, as in the case of the stupendous profile of Principal Stanley Bosworth in New York Magazine and the Guardian's profile of Michel Houellebecq, in which the celebrated controversialist poses the question, "Would you like to be in my erotic film?"

(See Also: the self-hating, self-portraits on Houellebecq's web journal).

Same as It Ever Was (Look Where My Hand Was)

The blogging revolution is the desktop publishing revolution is the photocopier revolution is the mimeo revolution is the typewriter-and-carbons is letterpress is surely some other democratizing technology of reproduction not lodged in my all-too-short historical memory (is the telephone? is the telegraph? is the Gutenberg?):

I've never liked mimeo. Sure, it's fast and it's cheap but it doesn't look like a book. If you can do it yourself, why bother? […] Somebody once described mimeo publication as "punk publishing" and that made it work for me for a while. But not really. […] I like these shiny books: they look commercial, real, they look American. If only the stupid publishers and the brilliant poets could get together. Mimeo skirts all that so the publisher is the poet's best friend or even the poet and that's that. Your family won't believe it's a book but so what. They also are unable to read your poems. So I have only set my hand once to mimeo publishing but it was an act of revenge in my heart—we did an anthology of poems ourselves in response to another slicker inferior one. Mimeo was effective in this case—fast & cheap. It wasn't like killing someone, it was like throwing a beer in their face.

—Eileen Myles, in The Poetry Project Newsletter, March 1982; from A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960 - 1980: A Sourcebook of Information, Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips.

Get off the Internet; I'll Meet You in the Street

From "The Wide, Wide World of Chapbooks," by Tim Kindseth, in American Book Review, March/April 2005 (Volume 26, Issue 3):

Reading Bob Dylan's new memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), I was struck by Dylan's obsessive curiosity as a young man, one that did not allow him to stop with the reading of tattered paperback copies of Balzac and Chekhov—and bound books in general—that were easily at his and anyone else's disposal. Rather, he had an insatiable appetite for arcane knowledge that took him to the far corners of the New York Public Library, where in his early twenties he was scouring newspaper articles written during the Civil War and available on microfiche for song ideas and personal satisfaction. Had he been content with digesting what everybody else was busy poring over, I'm not so sure his songs would have bloomed.

Granted, most of what you'll find in chapbooks written today probably won't be as stimulating to the imagination as first-hand accounts of the battle for Lovejoy Station written with slang long-gone. But there's always a needle in every haystack, and that's reason enough to try to get your hands on any chapbook you can, whether you find it at some local reading, at some ruined pawn shop on the wrong side of the tracks, or through some focused browsing on the World Wide Web.

For me, though, this picture of the young Mr. Zimmerman exploring ignored arcana makes me want to turn off the World Wide Web altogether. Granted, this haystack we've all made is a marvelous thing, like a new layer of brain we've all evolved (ah, if only we could adapt at will, consciously evolve, the things I would do with my extra set of hands!), but I need to go do some browsing at that ruined pawnshop, see what bits and scraps have been left behind. Anyone care to join?

(Direct link to PDF of essay, here.)

The Art of the Novel

“The Amazonian boy is first provided with a breech-cloth when he is five years old. His earliest lesson is in its manufacture, for every Indian fashions his own clothing, is his own tailor and cloth manufacturer. He goes to the bush and selects a tree, on which he makes a space 6 feet long by 9 inches in width, and strips from it both outer and inner barks. He separates the two layers, and cuts the strip of inner bark in two, and carries the pieces to the river where the material is thoroughly soaked. Afterwards this is beaten with a small wooden mallet until it forms a yard length of bark-cloth 9 inches in width. Nothing further is needed, for this makes the breech-cloth and it is sufficient to pass between the legs and tuck securely over the waistband in front and behind. There is no variation from the type or method of manufacture, and this simplest form of clothing is common to all tribes inhabiting the wide stretch of country between the rivers Issa and Japura.

The breech-cloth is never discarded by the male Indian, nor, in sight of a man or a woman, would he ever remove it. When bathing he wades in a sufficient depth before he interferes with its adjustment. Even when a man dies his breech-cloth is buried with him.”
--- From The Northwest Indians: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes, by Thomas Whitten, F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I. Captain HP (14th Hussars). NY: Duffield and Company, 1915

Emerson on Immigration

"Native Americans. I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity: and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom… Man is the most composite of all creatures… Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any called the Corinthian brass was formed; so in this continent, – asylum of all nations, – the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, – of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements. "

- 1845 Journals.