Men of Winter edits, more Solares and Morrison
I’ve had the good fortune to have my novel Men of Winter edited by Cheryl Hampton for Punkin House Press. Her close attention to detail and, as such, to nuance have been most reassuring — reassuring, that is, that Men of Winter is in good hands. I have attempted to make the narrative voice sound translated, as if English is not the novel’s original language; hence many of the sentence patterns are deliberately oddball. I think it’s fair to say that it took Cheryl a few pages to get the rhythm of what I was up to, but once she did, her editing was spot on, often times suggesting changes that were improvements but still in the proper “oddball” voice. One of the issues we discussed, via emails, was the use of compound words, like “snowcountry” and “streetpeople.” We’ve been in agreement to go with the compound words in the final version of the novel, as the unusual compounds contribute to the voice’s oddity. We agreed on one exception, however: “dining room” for “diningroom.” For some reason, to my eye at least, the GROOM part of diningroom seems to stand out, and it’s an unnecessary distraction. Overall the edits have been minor and few, and the final version of the manuscript should be finished very soon.
I’ve been reading more of Solares’s Yankee Invasion, and I very much admire the way that the author moves back and forth in time in the narrative. The novel has a first-person reflective narrator who is at times writing about the time just prior to and during the United States’ invasion of Mexico City in 1847, and other chapters are much later as the narrator discusses with his wife about the memoir he is writing, and why he’s writing it, and what he’s leaving out, etc. There is much factual history in the novel woven in with the totally fabricated characters and events. In fact, the book begins with a timeline of Mexico’s history from 1838 to 1848, and it ends with a glossary of biographies of people mentioned in the novel, from John Quincy Adams to Francisco Zarco. There are also several maps of Mexico and the United States from the time period. In the novel’s introduction, Carlos Fuentes (who’s been one of my favorite authors since I read his novel The Old Gringo about a million years ago) writes, “Written from the precarious vantage point of the future immediate to the novel, yet written by an author, Solares, contemporaneous to ourselves, Yankee Invasion holds a tacit invitation to see and be seen as subjects of history passing through the sieve of fiction” (xiii, 2009 Scarletta Press edition). I’m about 90 pages into the novel and am enjoying it very much. It’s an excellent example of what critic Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, calls a “zone,” a space created by the author where the “real” and the “unreal” (even the fantastic in this case) co-exist.
I’ve also been reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for my African-American authors class. I must say even though I’m an enormous fan of Morrison’s work, I’ve not been enjoying The Bluest Eye as much as I anticipated — perhaps because I’m ready to be in full summer mode and the novel is keeping me at least partially in the work-world. This is my last week to teach, though, as next Thursday is the last class session, which will be devoted to the students’ final projects.
In my creative life, besides working with Cheryl on the final publication draft of Men of Winter, I also finished retyping/revising my older novella Weeping with an Ancient God, and I’ve even been sending out the first chapter as a stand-alone piece, titled “Melvill in the Marquesas.” Plus I’ve been reading and editing the entire manuscript of the Authoress, my novel in progress, before continuing the drafting process. I’m nearly done with the 230 or so manuscript pages, and will be ready to write in earnest by the end of the week, I would think.
Yankee Invasion and Writers Ask
I’m taking a bit of time away from Joyce (absence will no doubt make the heart grow even fonder) to read Ignacio Solares’s Yankee Invasion: A Novel of Mexico City (translated by Timothy G. Compton). A few nights ago I had some time on my hands so I wandered into Barnes & Noble for some coffee and browsing. Visiting bookstores for me has always been a bit like going to the zoo. I love to walk around and admire the various species, take a moment every now and again to learn a little something about them — but, unlike a zoo, I can take a particularly intriguing specimen home. Several caught my eye, but it came down to Solares’s book and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murder — which I’ve just learned has been adapted into a movie. I’m about forty pages into Yankee Invasion. So far it’s been about half the narrator’s personal musings and half the history of Mexico, especially in the nineteenth century, which is fine as it appeals to my attention surplus disorder. I’m going to have to switch reading gears again for a couple of days and read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which I’m teaching in African-American authors class. We just have three weeks to go, and I’ll spend two of those weeks on The Bluest Eye. I’ve read several Morrison novels and have taught Beloved the previous times I’ve done this course. I wanted to mix it up a bit, but I feel that Morrison, the last American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), ought to be covered in the class.
I’ve been typing up (and revising as I go) the manuscript for “Weeping with an Ancient God,” which is a highly fictionalized biography of Herman Melville’s time among the cannibals of the Marquesas Islands in 1842. It’s novella length and I hope to publish the whole thing eventually, but I’ll probably shop around the first chapter as a stand-alone piece (it’ll be a good side project for the summer while I continue to write “The Authoress”). Not much progress on Men of Winter‘s publication. I’ve had a couple of contacts with the graphic artist who’s working on the cover, and I’ve been told which editor’s been assigned to my book — but that’s about it so far.
I sent Glimmer Train Stories “Walkin’ the Dog” but had to withdraw the manuscript when it was accepted by Spilling Ink Review. GTS‘s co-editor Linda Swanson-Davies (along with her sister Susan Burmeister-Brown) responded to my withdraw by inviting me to submit a piece for their Writers Ask or Bulletin publications, both of which examine the craft of writing and related issues. The timing was perfect, and I happily spent a day writing a short article titled “Researching the Rhythms of Voice” and sent it off. After a bit of back and forth regarding its length (I had to cut it down a couple of times, but that’s a good exercise in word husbandry), Linda accepted it for an upcoming issue of Writers Ask. I was thrilled as I’m a huge fan of Glimmer Train Press — not to mention Linda and Susan, who have devoted their professional lives to promoting quality writing and nurturing writers, including me.
More Ulysses and the monetary value of literature
A couple of days ago I tweeted that I was “#amreading” Ulysses and one of my former students, via Facebook, expressed surprise that I was still reading Ulysses. I have stopped periodically to focus my reading on other texts — for example, because I’m teaching this African American literature class right now and I’ve revamped the syllabus since the previous go-around, I’ve spent some quality time on classic slave narratives, and last week I took a couple of days to read some Wallace Thurman — but I’m also a slow (and careful) reader, so Ulysses is the sort of text that takes time. I’ve been chipping away at it since around Christmas, and I’m less than halfway through, working on the “Cyclops” section presently. The student who made the comment is a good one, and an avid reader. Still, though, I’ve noticed that young folks — the dwindling few who still read for pleasure — are disinclined to read classics. I use “classic” here to mean a text that challenges them intellectually, even just a little. As such, the idea of reading something like Ulysses (an extreme example I realize) becomes increasingly alien to the culture’s mindset.
Something else I wanted to touch on here: the monetary value of literature (that is, serious contemporary literature). I was doing some research on William H. Gass, specifically his meganovel The Tunnel, which appeared in, I think, nineteen excerpted installments between 1966 (when he began writing it) and 1995 (when it was published in whole). I was at Brookens Library at University of Illinois, Springfield, and I was tracking down various excerpts that appeared in journals like The Iowa Reivew and TriQuarterly. I was astonished to see that a journal like The Iowa Review cost virtually the same in the 1970s as it does now, about $9 for a single issue. Had the cost of literary journals kept pace with inflation, that $9 journal in, say, 1975, would cost more than $35 today ($35.49 to be exact, according to The Inflation Calculator online). Working in the other direction, something worth $9 in 2009 should have cost $2.08 in 1975. Publishing literary journals has always been a for-loss proposition for the vast, vast majority of such journals; and that hasn’t changed, except perhaps for the relatively new phenomenon of ejournals, as opposed to traditional print journals, as ejournals have very little overhead cost.
What this data suggests to me is that literature — again, serious contemporary literature — was of greater value to the public at large (or at least the journal-buying public at large) thirty years ago. That is to say, people were willing to spend more of their discretionary income on a literary journal in 1975 than they are now. Journal editors today have difficulty moving print product. Imagine if they were charging more than $35 for a single issue. Contemporary literature in the form of hardback books is approaching that price tag, but journals are still roughly $9 per issue. I daresay it would be almost impossible to sell a literary journal for thirty-five bucks, which is the main reason that serious contemporary literature is rarely published in hardback today. University and other small press publishers release novels and story and poetry collections in paperback, with a significantly smaller price tag than hardback, and even then it’s an uphill battle to get folks to buy them.
This statistic — that the relative value of serious contemporary literature is about a quarter of what it was in 1975 — seems to jibe with how the culture feels to those of us who are compelled to produce serious literature. Once in a while I’ll have students ask me who my favorite writers are, and I’ll throw out names like Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, and Gass, and they’ll respond with a “never heard of him.” I know.
Speaking of eliterature, the first issue of Spilling Ink Review is scheduled to appear this week (which includes my story “Walkin’ the Dog”). Meanwhile, I’ve been typing my manuscript “Weeping with an Ancient God” — long, and not very interesting story, but I haven’t had an electronic version of the novella, so I’m typing the manuscript (and making revisions along the way). I’ll also type up some older short stories for which I no longer have electronic copies (e.g., “Fische Stories” that appeared in Glimmer Train Stories). I’d like to publish “Weeping” as a novella with collected stories. And of course I continue to work on The Authoress. In another week, The Authoress will move to the top of my priority list, and I’ll be able to write at a much faster pace — very much looking forward to that.
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