Welcome, Jim!

Jim Watt who just joined my list of "followers" is an old friend, from way back -- high school in Lake Forest, Illinois. He tells me the funny hat was part of a Renaissance festival costume. He's on as many networks as I, or maybe more, but no blog. And this morning he become my first live contact on Skype! We hadn't talked for ages. Loved it.

Bulwer-Lytton bad prose prizes, 2009

Thanks to Dirk for forwarding this: 2009
My favorite is "the world's first and only hot air baboon ride."
But there are other gems here too.

"Followers"

I'm tickled to have a half-dozen discriminating "followers." I don't suppose that means they read everything I post here, but at some time they found something interesting enough to sign up. If you've just stumbled upon this blog, I'd like to introduce you to these folks who are pictured at left.

• James Sanderson, whom I met through Twitter and who has just joined us, writes thoughtful literary commentary on his own blog, which I recommend to you. If you click on his Blogger profile, you can also find samples of his own fiction.
• R.D. Larson has been a cyberfriend for years, and a big supporter of my work. Writing gets lonely some times, and we need all the support we can get. She writes strange, funny fiction that pretend to be terrifying, and sort of is except that she keeps you laughing half-way through it. She no longer has a blog, apparently (correct me if I'm wrong, R.D.), but you can find some of her twisted fables at Bewildering Stories.
• Michelle, in the funny fur hat (I hope she takes it off in July -- it gets hot in Montclair, NJ), has got to be my youngest "follower." I don't know much about her yet, except that she has an amazing boyfriend and writes fiction (as she tells us on her blog). I don't know how she found me, but I'm glad to have her and wish her well in her creative writing.
• Sarah's appearance surprised and flattered me -- her own blog is largely in French, commenting on French literature. I do read French, but only with effort and a dictionnaire. Veuillez lire son blog, The Quill and the Brush, pour voir quelques nouvelles littéraires.
• Chris Leo represents the other part of my blog's name, "society." I got to know him from an exchange about sociologist Ulrich Beck. He teaches politics and urban planning at universities in Canada, and reading his blog, Christopher Leo at the University of Winnipeg, helps keep me a little more aware of the discourse in these fields -- which I need to know, for our book on architecture and urbanism in Latin America.
• And finally, Dirk van Nouhuysen, the only one of the six I know f2f. Dirk is an old comrade from the National Writers Union (I was the New York chapter chair before I left for Spain, and Dirk had held various offices in the union). He's another very literary guy, with a great sense of humor. I'm also happy to see his sensible, frank comments on my blog posts. You can find samples of his prose linked to his web page.

New anthology springs to life

Here it is, that anthology of "living fiction" I mentioned earlier, with one of my stories. As I said in Facebook, I get a little thrill almost like the one my character in the story experiences, every time one of my fiction pieces comes out. Above Ground book trailer (YouTube)

YouTube - Michael Jackson - Earth Song

YouTube - Michael Jackson - Earth Song
Thanks to buddy Dennis Hidalgo for pointing to this. It's fine. (Sad to see you go, Michael.)

"I saw my parents having sex"

Outrageously funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l8Xl1jiCis

Literary agents in the age of Twitter

I know you haven't seen evidence lately, but honestly, I have been thinking about things that deserve the mental effort. Especially about the transformation of our entire social universe. The collapse of capitalism as we knew it, the dissolution of the old publishing industry, and other changes. And what remains in the midst of such change. As someone said in an earlier epoch of massive social transformation, "All that is solid melts into air." Today we might say, all that is routine dissolves into cyberspace.

The apparent silliness of Twitter is a clue, not as silly as we first thought. We scoffed, saying How can you say anything worth saying if you reduce it all to 140 characters?

Well, you can say something important in a lot less. Like "Help!" Or "I love you." Or, the way Twitter is used by many of us, "That way" -- followed by a tiny url, like this: http://blip.tv/file/2269422. That's how I found the panel I mentioned yesterday. A tweet with its url sent me to a 15-minute video -- the video contains many more than 140 characters, even more than 140 sentences, but I knew about it because of a "tweet."

The collapse of the capitalism we loved to hate is also implied by the dissolution of old-style publishing which is the subject of that video I just mentioned. But I'll hold that for another blognote, a sequel to this one. For now I want to understand what this means for a writer, like me, who has composed a long narrative fiction. A "novel."

Like almost everybody, when the landscape changes I stick to the old routines, running straight off the cliff like Wile E. Coyote. I've sent out queries to literary agents whose websites presuppose that we are still in the '80s, trying to persuade one of a tiny pool of editors in one of a dozen publishing houses, who may then start the process leading to the printing, distribution and (probably) ultimate pulping of pages containing my text. Which maybe some people will have read before it gets pulped, and maybe some small part of those people will have paid money to buy the book, possibly enough to pay for all that apparatus (commissions, salaries, paper, printing, shipping) and just maybe with enough left over to pay me something. It didn't work very well in the '80s and now -- well, like friend Wile, I've just looked down and seen that there's nothing there. Or almost nothing.

But maybe I'm underestimating the agents I've queried. They too must know that their world has changed, that now it's possible for someone with a long narrative fiction to make it publicly available without passing through that apparatus, the "publishing industry." But if I do it all on my own, for example, if I just post my novel on the web, what's to distinguish it from all the other cyberjunk circling our globe? I'm happy to write the narrative. But much as in the old times, I could use some help in getting it out to potential readers.

So I think I do need the agency of someone to guide this work to where it will get some attention. A literary agent, we might still call that person, but not one who is focused on her contacts in the publishing houses that produce and distribute texts on paper.

Maybe, as I said, the agents who have requested my sample pages understand all this (two of them have got it now). Or maybe not. At least one agent (not yet on my query list) does seem to understand. Colleen Lindsay is the one who sent me to that panel on Twitter and publishing. I wonder how she sees the agent's role now. Should she help an author package the work, with links, trailer, illustrations and whatever else? Insinuate the work into network sites?

Twitterature?

"Twitter won't save publishing, and publishing should not be saved. But books may save Twitter," says Richard Nash (@R_Nash) Some really interesting ideas here.
twitter Publishing at the 140 characters conference - day 2

A teeming Cairo alley

I just read and now have to review an early novel (I think his earliest) by the prolific Egyptian novelist and short story writer Gamal al-Ghitani. The review is for Gently Read Literature, whose editor Daniel Casey kindly sent me my copy. These are notes for a draft of the review, so I can share the process of writing a small essay on something the author knows little about.

The Zafarani Files (originally published as Waqa'i' Harat al-Za'farani, 1976. Trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab. Cairo; New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009) is a slapstick comedy set in a crowded, run-down alley of Cairo, with over 50 named and mostly zany characters, all of them obsessed by sex (their own and all their neighbors') and their social standing. Normally, they tolerate one another's routines -- including the effendi who pimps his own wife, the baker who is a male prostitute at the baths, the sergeant major (retired) and various others whose pretensions are far greater than their accomplishments. They view gossip, the frequent loud and violent quarrels of several of the women, and the occasional visit of a disoriented stranger as welcome entertainment. But one day the mysterious sheikh who lives in a tiny, dark apartment under the stairs and whom hardly anyone has ever seen, decides to begin his world-changing program in Zafarani Alley by depriving all the men there of that which they prize most: their sexual potency. This drives everybody over the brink. The pimp loses his customers, the male prostitute his job, the other men -- a taxi driver, a train fueler, a low-level bureaucrat, et al. -- their self-confidence, and the women have to resort to ever more desperate methods to get sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the government apparatus for political repression tries, with hopeless incompetence, to investigate these strange events while simultaneously denying to the world that anything unusual is occurring.

OK, my first problem is I'm probably missing a lot of the jokes. I don't know Cairo beyond what I've read in Mahfouz, and here there are word-games going on and what are probably sly references to larger political events of the 1970s. Secondly, there are so many named characters that it's hard to keep them straight, especially since the names are often similar. For example, Nabil, Nabila and Umm Nabila are three different characters, the first a young man that some of the local women fall in love with, the second a 26-year old female schoolteacher and unwilling spinster, and the third her mother. "Umm," I quickly figured out from the context, means "Mother of," and may be followed by the name of either a daughter or a son, as in Umm Yusif.

And finally, nothing ever gets resolved. With so many characters, each with his own craziness, there is no central element holding them all together as a story except the sheikh's curse (or blessing, or whatever it's supposed to be). But we never find out what happens to the sheikh (or even whether he really exists as they imagine him) or with the curse of impotence, which may still be in effect in that fictitious alley. What al-Ghitani must have been trying to do was to scandalize everybody, religious sheikhs, pretentious bureaucrats, ignorant shopkeepers and tradesmen, women generally, and the organs of the police state. The only characters who come across as reasonably sane are the "politico," possibly a Communist (or so the state bureaucracy imagines) just released from long imprisonment, and the young man who visits him to learn about the world.

But these are just reactions. Maybe tomorrow I can turn all this into a review.

Novelists

Weary one night lately I turned to Howard Nemerov for solace. But (as I in fact already knew) "solace" is not what Nemerov offers. He wasn't looking for comforting answers, but new ways of posing the eternal unsettling questions.

I picked up his Collected Poems (1977), hoping to find "The Makers." Not to refresh my memory, because I know it by heart and often recite it to myself and anyone else who will listen, but rather to see what other poems he surrounded it with. But that poem didn't make it into this collection -- perhaps he wrote it after 1977. I did however find this deliciously disturbing reflection on our métier:

NOVELISTS

Theirs is a trade for egomaniacs,
People whose parents did not love them well.
It’s done by wasps and women, Jews and Blacks,
In every isolation ward in Hell.

They spend their workadays imagining
What never happened and what never will
To people who are not and whose non-being
Always depends on the next syllable.

(And three more stanzas. Click on link for the whole thing.)

Egomaniac? Moi? Maybe so. It is a very odd business, imagining all those people into being and then losing control over what they do, because sometimes the next syllable does not depend on the author but on the logic and rhythm of the prose. We are gods overtaken by our creatures.