Carving by Anthony Santella

Sam Tanenhaus has an interesting essay in the Times Sunday Book Review, on the New Yorker’s 20 over 40 list. He points out that these lists are designed with “futurity” in mind–the promise that these young writers show–and yet, that many writers have already hit their peak by the time they’re 40.

At the time, this anxiety struck some as comical, but history bears Ishiguro out. Even great novelists who endure in the collective memory as Prosperos, long seasoned in their “secret studies,” often performed their greatest magic when they were young. Flaubert was 29 when he began writing “Madame Bovary” (and was 34 when it was completed). Thomas Mann was 24 when he completed his first masterpiece, “Buddenbrooks.” Tolstoy, after a period of dissolution followed by military service, began writing “War and Peace” at age 34. Joyce, who wrote “Ulysses” in his 30s, already had two major works behind him. The late-blooming Proust, his youth idled in Paris salons, was only 37 when he began writing “Remembrance of Things Past.” Even Kafka, the 20th century’s most haunting exemplar of anguished paralysis, was 29 when he wrote “The Metamorphosis” and 31 when he began “The Trial.”

Personally, since I’m 32 and the idea of writing my masterpiece in a year or two is beyond comprehension, I like to think that maybe 40-is-the-new-30 applies here, too. Back in the day, 30 wasn’t all that young. In addition, an awful lot of people had to peak in their twenties or thirties, because they died not long after. Kafka and Proust may have gone on to produce thrilling and even more masterful work, had they lived longer. Fitzgerald barely got to middle age. (And yes, I know, but you never know. He may have sobered up eventually.) Crane died at 28. Nathanael West at 37. And once you go back a little further, you get the Brontes, Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud–dying before 40 was the thing back then.

The list of those, like Woolf, who accomplished more after they went over the hill, is just about as long as the list of those who didn’t. Or at least, it should be, if you factor in early death and its statistical significance to the promise of genius in a way that I would know how to do if I didn’t suck at math. Anyway, I like to think there’s hope for everyone at every age. And the older I get, the more I’ll continue to tell myself that.

Artwork by Brendan Lee Satish Tang

Ryan Call has an amazing piece up on Necessary Fiction today. Loving his weather series, everywhere I see it those pieces.

Did you know? Hitchcock may have made the first recorded “That’s what she said,” reference. In 1929. These are the things the internets are good for.

Jon Stewart mocks the White House Press Corps‘ jockeying over Helen Thomas’s seat. Brilliant.

Speaking of the White House, Politico has a list of the best Presidential swearing of all time.  I love that we have tapes of LBJ talking about his bunghole, balls, and various other parts.

Awesome roundtable discussion on first books, at Hobart.

Those of you that know Roxane Gay (and you should if you don’t) know that she is currently finishing up her dissertation and getting ready to defend it, plus getting ready to move, plus doing a stint at Necessary Fiction as the Writer-in-Residence, plus getting ready for her own first book to be published. So how in the name of all that is holy does she also have time to do all of this? I have a secret wish, everyone. Which is not so secret anymore, I guess. I wish to be as productive as Roxane Gay. Unfortunately, since it seems to be all I can do these days to secure and eat dinner more than an hour before bed, I don’t know that my wish will come true. In the meantime, at least I can enjoy Roxane’s creative output.

I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own? Yes, there was racism involved as my mother let the driver wait outside in the car, but my mother had not evolved past that point at that time. The hard-won social struggles of the 1960s and before have fundamentally altered the feelings most of us breathe, and we have evolved, and that is how America will survive. We are all in this together.

But what about the people in those cars? They don’t breathe that air. They don’t think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don’t like those kids in the school. It’s not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever “they” are.

Read the whole thing here. It’s well worth it.

At always-good Dark Sky, Mel Bosworth has been reading other people’s words, and rather capably, too.  Today he reads my little story, “The Wives Are Turning Into Animals.” I love his creepy-but-restrained reading.  I would post the video here but then you wouldn’t go over there, would you? And you really, really should.

One of your favorite writers and mine, Roxane Gay, is Necessary Fiction’s writer in residence for June! All month long, she will be featuring some of her favorite writers  and some of her own pieces and demonstrating why fiction is, indeed, necessary.

THIS is at the American Museum of Natural History. I have no choice but to go, given my one-century-too-late fascination with polar exploration.

Jen at JMWW has a terrific interview today with Dawn Raffel. (How come I don’t look that cool in any of my pictures?)

Did you love Lost? Throw things at your teevee during the last episode? You MUST read this fabulous essay, doubtless the most literary thing ever written about Lost, by Jennifer Spiegel. It’s more than great.

And remember, peeps–it’s Tuesday. TUESDAY. Get it straight.

A book you need to read. Now.

Friends. We need to talk. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but why is it that another Mo Yan novel has disappeared from my bookstores and become unavailable on Amazon? Mo Yan is the undisputed literary star of a huge country with a sterling literary tradition with a lifespan that kicks ours in the ass, and he’s like Marquez plus Kafka except funnier and more vulgar and more bizarre. In other words, Mo Yan is an author that tons of indie lit readers and writers should be reading and loving and celebrating and keeping in print and widely available.

AND YET. No one. Will. Read him. I have recommend him so many times, and no one will take me up on these recommendations. No one. Not friends, co-workers, colleagues, writers,  anyone. No one.  If I told people his name was Zizek Smizek and he was Czech or something, I feel like readers would be flocking to him and I’d actually get to read all of his shit which I can’t because most of it has never even been published here because Americans WON’T READ CHINESE LIT. Why? Why is this?

I feel like this is shameful. I really do. Hardly anyone that I encounter–many of them literary beasts proud of being widely read–has even HEARD of Lu Xun, much less read him. Lu Xun. Who is the father of modern Chinese lit and has been called China’s Orwell. What is wrong with us? I can’t even read Su Tong’s last two books because they STILL have not come out in print here. Su Tong is also a literary superstar in China. And elsewhere in the world as well. But not in America. In America, when I recommend Su Tong, I get polite, deafening silence. Crickets chirp. Wind howls.

People. There are Chinese writers you need to read. Not just because you would love them–and you would–but you need to read them because China is a huge, huge country with billions of people and is growing fast and developing faster and is going to be hugely important in the world in every possible way in the very near future. In fact, not in the future–now. So wouldn’t you want to read their Shakespeare, their Orwell, their Kafka, their Beckett, their Faulkner? Wouldn’t you be interested in what Chinese literary history has to say about their culture and values? Wouldn’t you be interested in what modern young Chinese writers have to say about the same? Shouldn’t you be?

Penguin apparently agrees with me. Thank god. Time Magazine agrees with me. Here’s what Jeffrey Wasserstrom has to say about Penguin’s release of a new collection of Lu Xun’s writings, The Real Story of Ah-Qu and Other Tales of China:

It’s a work that has nothing to do with introducing an up-and-coming writer, but rather seeks to widen appreciation of the long-dead Lu Xun — the pen name of Zhou Shuren, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1936 at the age of 55.

Lu Xun was a towering figure in Chinese letters who deserves to be much more widely read outside his homeland. This affordable volume comprises, over 416 pages, his complete fiction. Julia Lovell’s are arguably the most accessible translations yet of such famous stories as “The Divorce,” “New Year’s Sacrifice” and the eponymous tale of Ah-Q (an opportunistic, inept sometime participant in the 1911 Revolution). Together, they give Lu Xun his best shot to date of achieving renown beyond the Chinese world. If it succeeds in this, the book could be considered the most significant Penguin Classic ever published.

Here’s why I make that grandiose-sounding claim: Lu Xun is critically regarded as the most accomplished modern writer of the most populous nation on earth, and a grasp of his work is thus extremely useful in forming an understanding of much of humanity. In addition to stories, he wrote poetry, an extended history of Chinese literature and hundreds of essays, including small masterpieces like his eloquent 1926 tirade against the warlord government of the time for gunning down unarmed patriotic student protesters. His stories are wide-ranging in style and subject, from the touchingly nostalgic and straightforward “My Old Home” (a poignant look at the gulf that grows over time between two Chinese villagers of different classes) to the fiercely polemical, stylistically experimental “Diary of a Madman” (which offers a crushing indictment of the stultifying effects of Confucianism). Above all, Lu Xun is not just a great writer. He is an essential writer — the kind whose works provide the clues an outsider needs to unlock the cultural code of a nation, and whose work becomes embedded in a nation’s DNA. Herman Melville and Mark Twain are two of America’s great writers, for instance, but only the latter is essential. Foreigners striving to understand the American psyche might find it useful to know about Ahab and the whale, but they must know about Huck Finn and the mystique of the Mississippi River.

So please.  Give Chinese literature a chance. Give it a chance just like you first gave avant-garde  lit a chance, or Eastern European lit a chance, or Russian lit a chance, or Latin American lit a chance, or lit-with-footnotes a chance. I gave it a chance. I knew nothing about Chinese lit when my husband first made me read Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballards. I was hooked from the third paragraph on.

Next time you’re looking for a book to buy, pick this up. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Just give it a try, and if you hate it, you never have to read another thing. But you won’t. You won’t hate it. I guarantee that. I really, really do.

Have you read the new PANK and Collagist issues up online yet? Because they both kick ass. Top form and top writers in both, as usual. Check them out.

I have been reading Gerald Manley Hopkins again today. Hopkins and I have only one thing in common, as far as I’m aware: a passion for language. Hopkins was such an absolute innovator when it came to use of language in his poetry.  Light years ahead of his peers, really. If only he hadn’t become a priest and had to write every damn poem about god with a capital G. I know, I know, he wouldn’t be Hopkins without the priest thing, and probably his ecstatic love of god filled him the need for that bursting, unrestrained, joyous symphony of sound that he uses so effectively. But I do wish I could read the poems he wrote (and then burned) before he was a priest. I know he strived for a more disciplined form, like Milton. But the poor man–he had to have been a wild, burning spirit way down underneath the robes and flesh and all that.

My growing pile of stuff to read keeps growing, and growing, and yet I keep buying more stuff. Speaking of which, Hoarders: Buried Alive is on tonight. Speaking of which, although I love hoarding shows, it always pisses me off when the organizing specialists they bring in act like the books are just part of the hoarding problem. I mean, sometimes, sure, they clearly are. But these are books! You don’t need to get rid of your books! I am the first person to give or throw things away (we just did a major purge this weekend, in fact) and if Chris and I had to pack up and leave tomorrow for some reason, we would have a car filled with almost nothing but clothes and books. And the beasts, of course. And our electronics. But mostly just books. (And, okay, to be honest, there’s no way we could get all of our books into one car. But how about a very large moving truck? Yes, yes, we could do that.)

Just added to the growing pile: Annalemma (yes!), American Short Fiction (yes!) and Chad Simpson’s new chapbook (yes!) which will be at least a quick read since it is muy pequeno. But oh, so good if the rest is anything like his “Let X” story that was published in Esquire a couple of years ago. Plus it was blurbed by Matt Bell and Scott Garson (who both coincidentally have forthcoming books I have purchased and am waiting for with no little bit of excitement).

Speaking of chapbooks (are these transitions awesome or what today? I have a cold, okay? Pity me and my brain fog.) I finally got around to reading Aaron Burch’s PANK-contest-winning chapbook, and boy is that thing fantastic and solid and full of grace and nuts and bolts and familial feeling and hard-won beauty. Wow. I’m working on a more coherent version of my thoughts on it and will post it someday, but just wanted to say now while it’s fresh that this read was some read.

A kind of neat thing happened to me: I was one of the runners up for the HTML GIANT Many Books Contest. I thought this was pretty cool, since all the writers who won or placed as fellow runners up put me to shame.  I do like the story very much; it’s one of my favorites, so I’m very proud that it got as far as it did. It’s called “For These Humans Who Cannot Fly, ” and it’s going to be published along with the winner and runners’ up stories on a lovely website. So, thanks, kindly folks at HTML GIANT. You all made my weekend snazzy and sunny, despite the fact that I was hacking up a lung. Thanks!

h/t Andrew Sullivan

Muttonchops!

always has as much, or more, than the Democrat.”

h/t Jonathan Chait.

So I knew I wanted to read his new book, Ill Fares the Land, regardless of subject matter. As soon as I heard the title, borrowed from Oliver Goldsmith, I knew this book would be spot-on in timing. And now that I’ve read this review in the NYT, I want to read the book more than ever.  Consider this:

Mr. Judt’s new book, “Ill Fares the Land,” is a slim and penetrating work, a dying man’s sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties. It makes sense that this book arrives now, not merely during the hideous endgame of the national health-care debate but during mud season; this book’s bleak assessment of the selfishness and materialism that have taken root in Western societies will stick to your feet and muddy your floors. But “Ill Fares the Land” is also optimistic, raw and patriotic in its sense of what countries like the United States and Britain have meant — and can continue to mean — to their people and to the world.

This is one of the reasons I like Judt so much. I feel like his worldview, his views on the role of the state, are so close to my own. I like that although he sticks like anything to the wall of hard pragmatism, he continues to feel and espouse a sense of immense optimism about the world we live in. I mean, “the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties”–this is YES. This is the way I feel about my country and my government.  YES YES YES.

I feel uplifted. I feel enlightened. I feel like I really, really need this book.