March 2008 Archives

Recently I stumbled onto an article from The New York Times about literary fakes. I couldn't help but post it here, since it highlights a serious problem: Those who can write well don't always have interesting lives. In the industry, though, writers face enormous pressure to write what sells, and, let's face it, true stories sell. Non-fiction sells 51% of books. Writers need to sell books to live and keep writing.

Naturally these creative minds will write a novel and try to pass it off as "true." James Frey tried to sell A Million Little Pieces as fiction. No one would buy it, since memoir-mania was in full swing. So he said, "Oh, yeah, it's true." Big mistake, right? But literary faking goes way, way back, at least to 1839. Probably as far back as Plato's Socratic dialogue. Do you really think Plato had his tape recorder out when Socrates was talking?

Experience is not good writing (Henry James points this out, too). Since Hemingway's novels, readers have wrongly assumed that great experiences mean great writing. And with the release of Hemingway's A Movable Feast, modern-day bookstores had a new genre to pedal: Memoir.

That's a stupid word. It means an official note or report, or a narrative about one's life, from the Latin memoria, you know, memory, but what it really means is based on a true story (or FICTION). The facts have been changed to protect the guilty. Memoir is a fake genre, actually. Things are either non-fiction or fiction. And memoir is based on a true story - but ultimately it's fiction. Which is fine. I don't have a problem with that. It can still be poignant, moving, compassionate, hilarious, heartbreaking, and so on.

But I do have a problem when people are shocked to learn their literary heroes don't exist. What the hell? Are you telling me Dr. Watson is not a real person?!?! Conan Doyle was such a fake! I feel particularly bad for Laura Albert (J.T. LeRoy), who people thought was a male ex-prostitute. The poor woman has been lumped in with fakers like James Frey. She published her work as fiction and had an impersonator tour as the "author," or narrator, of the novels. Then a film company sued her and she was ordered to "pay $116,000 in damages and $350,000 in legal fees." That's $466,000.

In the introduction to A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway even warns that his memoir is partly invented, that characters have been rearranged and blended together, and the storytelling streamlined. He says, in so many words, that the memoir is fiction in places and can be read as such throughout. So take his advice to heart the next time you pick up the heartbreaking, hilarious memoir in Barnes and Noble; remember that memoir is another word for fiction. And be happy that the writing is good, that it touches you.

In the beginning, there was writing, and in his book On Teaching and Writing Fiction, Wallace Stegner, legendary writing professor (for whom the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University is named) gives a concise account of how writing got fractured. "Creative writing" was an innocent term adopted between the world wars, he says, to denote that type of writing course which is not freshman composition and is not journalism. The name rose out of a need to categorize college schedule books. Nothing sinister.

He also thoughtfully explores the implications of putting creative writing in an English Department: Literature professors tend to mistrust creative writing professors, seeing them as wordslingers, not scholars, and creative writers are likewise suspicious of English Departments. Many writers see literature and composition professors as failed writers, those who can't do, but who can teach. Both sides are a bit unfair; both sides also have valid points, according to Stegner.

If you think you know what mindfulness is, or what meditation is, then be careful: Our early 21st century American culture thinks it knows, too. And our culture has the facts wrong. Meditation is so mixed up in wrongness (in the minds of most people) that I hesitate to even use the word. Words are like towels, and after too long one can get soiled. Most times its better to throw out the dirty towel and start with a new one, since some connotations can be extraordinarily powerful.

Better than a new word, though, I will try to wash out this old towel and bleach it. Maybe it can yet be salvaged.

Meditation is not passive for starters, not just sitting around and being silent. Cultivating mindfulness is an active, energetic problem; even if some of the solution does require inner silence.

Likewise meditation is not about detaching from the world, drawing away from the physical, or "becoming a nobody," as Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us in Wherever You Go, There You Are. When he talks about rejecting the "self," he is careful to point out this doesn't mean destroying who you are: Just the opposite! Even Albert Einstein wrote in The World as I See It that one must reject the artificial constructs "I," "me," and "mine." The world is holistic and so is nature, drawn together in a complex web, each bit changing another at a different time and place. Putting up a barrier between yourself and the rest of the world is no way to live in it. Jon Kabat-Zinn says,

When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird, cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it. It does not involve becoming some kind of zombie, vegetable, self-absorbed narcissist, navel gazer, "space cadet," cultist, devotee, mystic, or Eastern philosopher. Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

Too often, Kabat-Zinn says, we live our lives in a dream, confident that the labels we give ourselves (names, ages, genders, race, sexual orientations, etc.) are really who we are instead of just labels. Labels are a part of who we are, but they are not everything. But, seeing these labels and confident they are sturdy, we say, "I know who I am and where I am going," and so don't bother to pay attention, moment by moment, to our lives.

We must recognize that what we do each moment comes to define who we are. If you lie each day, for example, about trivial matters  (Did you clean your room today?) then little by little you become a liar. We need to turn off the autopilot. Sometimes, something may happen to us that turns the autopilot back on.

Lately, I have had this problem. With the turmoil of selling my house, the prospect of planning my wedding (making everyone, including me and Sarah, happy), and of course the ever-problematic How will I make enough money?, I have come to fly on autopilot again. I know that Sarah has, too. So much stress just overloads my system. Not to worry, never fear. The most important thing now is not to be judgmental. Being angry at the autopilot for switching on does no good. Probably it saved me from crashing and having a breakdown, protected me until I could think clearly again. I think that's how the dream works; it protects us. The danger comes when we don't learn to take back control and live our lives again.

Moment by moment, I have been coming awake. Now I feel as if I can write clearly.

The practice of mindfulness, and of meditation, is different for everyone. I am confident that meditation cannot be taught, only talked about in terms of theory, and that everyone, while meditating, comes to understand in a unique way who they truly are. You may not even need a teacher. You just need to be present. Some teacher may tell us practices or concepts, such as Breathing in, I recognize my emotion; Breathing out, I calm my emotion. But each man and woman in the world has a different breath. Breaths are like snowflakes. In everyday life, we do different things to meditate.

To meditate, I write. Sarah may do something different: Walking, I think, or reading. You may ride bikes, or run marathons, or paint, or compose music.However you choose to come awake, be comfortable with who you are, and take the time to engage with life, not passively but actively. I don't mean this last as an order, but as a plea, for your sake and for ours: Wake up and pay attention!

In my practicum, English 603, the class has been assigned to write what we teach. The purpose is to write a textual analysis, which the students usually struggle with. Even for graduate students, writing a textual analysis is difficult. We want to produce the desired effect in writing, and so we remember the effect we feel when we read "scholarly" articles: confusion.

In duplicating the Ivory Tower (IT) language of scholarly notes, writers slip into patterns. Long sentences, rambling thoughts, and nonsense words like lapsarianism. We also strive to make the text seem objective, although we never stop to ask if that's a good idea. First, I'll give you a thesis statement in an "academic paper." Here's an example:

Readers may find the persistent and unyielding effect of Aldus Huxley's lapsarianism is responsible for creating a complicated dichotomy between pleasure and life, that is, the actual act of living; however, his negative outlook also undermines his thesis in many places, because it calls into question his authority, not to mention his verisimilitude.

What's wrong with this sentence? Besides the confusion it creates? What's the verb, as Richard Lanham might say, and what's the subject? And what the hell does lapsarianism even mean?

Lapsarianism refers, or so I'm told (the word shows no hits in most dictionaries), to the tradition of civilization sliding downwards, generation after generation, towards the apocalypse. In Jewish culture, for example, each Rabbi is less perfect than his predecessor. We're descending towards chaos. It sounds like pessimism, or a bad attitude. This is over-simplifying a bit, but I feel all right cutting out the word and putting something else in, since I'm pretty confident the writer has no idea what she or he means anyway.

Let's try some revision:

Brave New World sets up a working contrast between pleasure and life; however, Aldus Huxley undermines his credibility with readers by being too preachy, too negative about the future of humanity, and too sparse with his supporting logic.

That first sentence had 53 words; the second has 38. That means the sentence before had a Bullshit Factor (Lanham calls it the Lard Factor) of 28%.

Remember, academic writing doesn't mean complicated writing. Attempts to brick up walls between the disciplines are detrimental, wrongheaded, and part of a system of oppression. Mystifying the lines between literature and criticism allows for an Ivory Clubhouse, a place for Them and Us. It makes great writers into demigods, not men and women. And it creates a culture that not everyone wants to be a part of -- especially not all freshman writing students.

In all cases, writing is writing. Creative writing and academic writing work with the same framework: letters, words, paragraphs, sections, chapters, ideas, and so on. Nonfiction has characters and plots, too. Textual analysis will be at its best when the authors are, as John Gardner put it, making up stories about stories.

This weekend I finished John Gardner: Literary Outlaw in the Las Vegas airport. I liked the book, mainly because it shed some light on Gardner's writing, which is revered by so many aspiring writers. If Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, is a writer's writer, then John Gardner is a writing teacher's writing teacher.

However, I can't trust everything in the book. Barry Silesky wrote the first-ever biography of Gardner, the author who pretty much destroyed himself as a literary giant by attacking his contemporaries. I don't know if that explains Gardner's work is mostly out of print (except for a few books, including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and On Moral Fiction) but I wouldn't doubt it. The man was a daemon; he wrote 33 something books in 49 years of life. Silesky does capture Gardner's ability to inspire and infuriate, as he promises he will on the dust jacket.

I feel that Silesky might be too close to John Gardner. He might admire this writer too much. Don't get me wrong: the implied author of Gardner, the ghost he grafted into all of his work, is a figure I admire. But the historical John Gardner loved to put on airs, inflate his own legend, and suffered from what seems to me a certain kind of co-dependency. Not to mention the way he treated the women in his life.

Silesky admits as much in the beginning of the book, though. He also is careful to include some (but not much) dissenting testimony from those who hated Gardner: John Barth, for example, and Joseph Heller. Silesky even relates how, at least once, Gardner called people and said, "Hi, it's John Gardner, the famous writer." Fame and fortune changed Gardner, and Silesky does not deny it.

Sometimes, though, I think the book is too forgiving of its hero. I love Gardner's work; but there are certain ways to act, some level of professional discourse, that is missing from his historical life. He was brash, and, dare I say it, a little fake. No one denies his genius. He led the charge against metafiction, which I admire; in a lot of ways, I believe his ideas were right. Just because you're right and a genius doesn't mean you don't have to play by the rules. Gardner was also unstable, more than a tiny bit crazy.

Immediately after I finished the book, I bought a paperback from the airport bookstore called 21: Bringing Down the House, a true story of how 6 MIT kids took Vegas for millions. In this book, I encountered, besides bad writing, the same problems: the story has been modified, certain parts ommitted and moved around, to make the whole thing seem more like the Ocean's 11 movie. A reader can tell, if he or she is a good reader, that the author Ben Mezrich isn't a good writer. Besides not being able to put a sentence together, he lacks verisimilitude, or the ability to make something sound true even if its not.

This is a reminder, then. Not everything you read is true. Always be mindful when you read something, whether it's the news or a novel, and be aware of the author's authority. 

I wrote the following speech as an introduction to a panel discussion towards the end of the semester in one of my graduate seminars; I introduce the problems, define the terms, and establish a framework for the rest of the participants:

Thank you all for attending this forum. My name is Ben Pfeiffer, and it falls to me now to phrase the rhetorical question we will be answering, or maybe dodging, during this discussion: What is writing? The question at first seems simple, then rapidly becomes complex. Maybe this complexity is one reason for the pressing need to classify, label, and otherwise stunt dialogue. We fear that writing would remain unconquerable without the walls we have built, the theories we hold up as gospel, and the gods and idols we worship. Yet to truly understand the act we love, we must tear down the façade. To paraphrase John Gardner, Let total war be declared between those age-old enemies, the Real and the Fake.

This panel is concerned with a hypothesis: Writing is an Art. My personal concern is that, in teaching writing, we too often teach the logic of argument and not the craft of writing, which contains the soul of the discipline. We created a specialty called Composition and filled it with Compositionists as opposed to Writers, effectively distancing ourselves from an ancient tradition including Homer and Hemingway. We did it for respect and funding at the university level. We did it because we're lazy. Also we did it as a defense mechanism, an excuse that we don't play our game on the same field as Cormac McCarthy and Chrétien de Troyes.

I am not suggesting that Art and Science are at odds. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting that writing professors teach--through accident and convenience--reprobic (or false) writing. What is false writing? In my mind, this reprobic writing is related to Richard A. Lanham's "Official Style," which he denounces so forcefully in Revising Prose. Worse than just weak verbs, convoluted thinking, and strings of prepositional phrases, reprobic writing is utterly, and contemptuously, worthless. It may even harm a student's ability to use more powerful intelligences.

In On Moral Art, John Gardner writes that criticism, at its best, is similar to art, and that the successful critic "makes up stories about stories." However, he worries that criticism had become filled with nonsense words like hermeneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, and so on (not unlike how discussions of "composition" have become dominated by distinctions between Reader- and Writer-based prose, Cognitivists, Expressivists, Social Constructivists, etc.). He argues--"by reason and by banging the table"--for an old-fashioned view of art that condemns the hollow, the tinny, and the academic. Why should we be concerned with Gardner? He describes, on page 8, the kind of writing compositionists often teach, although I have modified the passage, substituting "reprobic writing" for "criticism":

Depending as it does on logic and scheme, on arguments well argued, [reprobic writing] uses parts of the mind more readily available to us than are the faculties required for art. And since the tests of [reprobic writing] are completeness and coherence, whereas art's validity can only be tested by an imaginative act on the reader's part, [reprobic writing] is easier to read [and to grade]; that is, it does not require the involvement of as many faculties of the mind.

In his introduction to What is Art?, translator W. Gareth Jones admits that Lev Tolstoy's iconoclastic attack on aestheticism inflicted minimal damage beyond the Iron Curtain. The book--published for the first time as an uncensored volume in 1898--was dismissed by critics and admirers as the senile ranting of a 70 year-old literary giant. The text is self-contradictory, as well: Tolstoy uses the tools he condemns, the "craft" of writing, to make his case for True Art. If the text has one great failing, this is it: Tolstoy's inability to recognize the subtle and enormous differences between Shamans and Charlatans. Again, real and fake. The important difference between Shamans and Charlatans is this: Both know how to manipulate the craft beneath Art to convince people of their message; Charlatans do it for selfish reasons; Shamans do it for the greater good. If rhetoric is the counterpart of cookery, then both shamans and charlatans know how to cook. The difference, as Gary Zukav once told me, is intention. Magicians use sleight of hand to make us believe in magic; pickpockets use the same techniques to steal our wallets. Think also of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Rev. Ted Haggard. I believe that, in his intention, Lev Tolstoy was a shaman.

Yet Tolstoy also subverted concepts that we struggle with today. First he preached the importance of art's "infection," a feature of both J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Malcolm Gladwell wrote extensively about the mechanics of infection (as it refers to culture) in his book The Tipping Point. Second Tolstoy preaches the importance of "awareness" and "love," although he dresses his conversation in the religious robes and cloaks of his time. Third, and most importantly, Tolstoy recognizes and celebrates the relationship between science and art.

The transmission by some people to others of what people know by proof and reasoning; the arts transmit this by awakening in the other emotions which the transmitter experiences. Both are essential for humanity because if there were no sciences or arts people would live like animals, in no way differing from them.

It may be argued convincingly that defining Writing as Art is also a political move. I do not deny it. As a writer myself, I have a personal stake in how writing is perceived at the university, in the community, and around the world. What matters most is that students learn to write. English Departments seem to me to be broken mirrors in need of repair and even unity. Technical, creative, composition, and literature classes should celebrate their similarities instead of picking apart their petty differences. Bickering ultimately harms the students. Rather than denounce my stake as political posturing, I would urge you first to listen with an open mind as we argue--by banging the table and, as Douglas Adams once suggested, with enough controversy to provoke an outburst of chair-throwing at the end--for the ancient view of Writing as Art; and for Art as a way of seeing.

John Gardner writes that when an artist goes over his or her manuscript again and again, "as tense as any stalking beast," that is when he or she begins to create Art. Following the manuscript through to its conclusion is not enough. You must go further, push harder. This kind of soul-straining focus is hard to sustain. The task is daunting to start with. And yet the process is essential for product. If you want Art, you must give in to the process, however different it may be for each individual.

Besides: once you begin, the rest is not so hard. And the reward is considerable. Today, I'm blowing off non-essentials (everything) in favor of What Matters: my novel, which I will finish and send to agents by May 2008.