Amber Sparks
You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys
Fiction as a Vessel For Historical Memory
January 22, 2010 — 4 Comments
As I become more familiar with the best and brightest emerging writers and writing on the indie lit scene, I notice that an astonishing percent of fiction takes place in the present. And not just the present, but the immediate present (Right now, in my apartment, in my head, in the moment.) There’s nothing wrong with this, and the immediacy of the writing tends to provoke an intense emotional response, no doubt. Much of it is brilliant and vivid.
But at the same time, I worry that not enough new writers are remembering our history for us. Yes, we have more than our share of hacks writing historical fiction, but that’s not what I mean. I’m thinking specifically of writers like Jim Shepard, who often write literary fiction about the past, about historical moments that evoke a sense of continuity and shared history, a timeline we know and can learn from as well as the commonality of human experience. I know as a writer I find it almost morally necessary to write about history, and as a reader I seek it out hungrily but can find very little of it.
I think this might be a problem for my generation. After all, Huxley said years ago that “that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” And more recently, historian Tony Judt wrote that “we live in an age of forgetting.” It’s important that we remember, and that we learn from the lessons of history. So, what if they weren’t lessons? What if fiction, in its subtle, entertaining way, could preserve memory and help us learn from it in a way history lessons could not? Look at works like Slaughterhouse Five–if not for Vonnegut’s classic, how many readers would be aware of the Dresden firebombings? Few enough people can recall our last ten presidents, let alone the less recent or even far flung past.
Fiction is a witness, is a vessel for our collective, historical memory. It’s just one of many, and needn’t shoulder that responsibility by itself. And some writers’ genius lends itself much more to writing of contemporary times and troubles than of the past, for certain. And hey, maybe I’m missing a whole bunch of amazing writers who’ve done fiction on history. I hope so. I want to read more of them. Because in an “age of forgetting,” when we forget what happened four years ago, let alone four decades ago, we desperately need to learn to remember. And to remember to learn.
Some Thoughts on Writing, History, and Anglo-Saxon Booty Over at Necessary Fiction
January 8, 2010
So, Necessary Fiction asked their contributors (and readers) to write a few words about a news story that “sparked your curiosity” in 2009.
I wrote a few words about buried treasure and the importance of telling the lost stories of history. You can read those words here, if you’re so inclined. And stay tuned for the similar musings of their other contributors and writerly folks as well.
Music of the People?
January 4, 2010
Fascinating article in the January issue of First Things, on baby boomers’ responsibility for taking the bite out of traditional folk music with the current folk revival–seen, of course, through the rose-colored, watered-down lenses of age and comfort.
The author argues that boomers remember and enjoy the music, but not the radicalism behind it–indeed, the communists and socialists and unionists who were fighting for radical solutions to the deep problems of inequity during the Great Depression and later, in opposition to WWII. By the time the boomers heard and absorbed the protest message of the music in the ’60s, it and its messengers (Dylan, Joan Baez, etc.) had already personalized it, generalized it, softened it up for middle-class absorption. As one of the musicians playing traditional folk noted:
“One of the first things that must be understood about these revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always, there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk—whoever that might be—is the operative thing.”
Fascinating stuff. Read the whole thing.
Literally. Modern Conservative Philosophy, in a Sentence
December 22, 2009
From Kevin Mattson’s What the Heck are You Up to, Mr. President?
“There was no better expression of Reagan’s political philosophy than this: the right to dream “heroic dreams” without sacrifice.”
Dreams without sacrifice. The cure-all tonic conservatives are still selling the American people. Unfortunately, P.T. Barnum was right.
The Onion’s “Best of” is Super Comprehensive: It Covers the Last 4.5 Billion Years
December 21, 2009
One more list before the year ends–but I promise this is a good one: The Onion’s Top Ten Stories of the Last 4.5 Billion Years.
I particularly like, “Sumerians Look On in Confusion as God Creates World.” But they’re all good. If you’re looking to kill some more time at work today, check out all the sidebar stories, too. “Conquerers You May have Missed,” for example:
Sigfried the Insecure: This timid but bloodthirsty Viking finally mustered the confidence to invade coastal Britain in A.D. 793 and spent most of the assault standing near a cliff wall, both hoping and dreading someone would notice him.
I can’t believe The Onion‘s been around for 25 years. I remember reading that shit in high school in Madison, thinking we were so cool because we knew this funny little newspaper and nobody else did. Congrats, The Onion peeps.
Easy Grace: Writing and Class in the 30s and Today
December 10, 2009 — 2 Comments
I’m fascinated by class and how it defines, shapes, and categorizes/segregates artists and their art. I think more than anything, class in general fascinates me because most Americans living in its upper and middle places would like to believe it no longer exists; or that if it does exist, it no longer defines or limits us.
Writing about proletarian authors in his must-read tome on Socialism and Communism in the 1930s, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, Murray Kempton discusses the ways in which their writing is often hard-won, their style blunt and graceless by necessity, their youth left behind in the struggle to leave the poverty they were born into–and the fact that they will never entirely belong to the upper echelons of literary society. He writes of James T. Farrell:
There were ways in which he was the best-educated young writer of his time. He had read philosophers well outside the realm of discourse of conventional critics; he was a deep, though perhaps narrow, student of history; he had great resources in the European tradition. He was a perceptive enough critic to argue for William Faulker in the early thirties, when Faulkner was at the peak of his creation and his nadir of reputation. He was certainly better educated than Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who in many areas were not educated at all.
Yet he was, and always would be, received as a barbarian in the genteel world of the literary supplements…because poverty had blunted his fingertips and left his work heavy with passion and deficient of charm.
And later, Kempton goes on:
Farrell’s world, like [Theodore] Dreiser’s was one whose inhabitants understood the price the artist pays. They looked at the New York literary world and thought it commercial, supercilious, log-rolling, and absolutely alien. The plebian writer had to talk about the world in which he grew up; he had to write about a drab and barren existence; he did not after all feel qualified to write about any other kind. He could not write romance, because there was so little romance in his life; he could not write with easy grace because there was so little grace in his life.
I hear the term “easy grace,” and I think instantly of Fitzgerald, whose writing exudes nothing so much as easy grace, indeed whose early life was nothing but a kind of easy grace. (Squandered opportunity and talent is another story, and one by the way almost unheard of in the rank of the working-class artist. Not by easy grace, but by blood and sweat does the working-class writer attain a measure of success in the arts, and once obtained, it’s not casually thrown away.)
I think Kempton was right about his generation. And I wonder if the same can be said of mine. With the growing divide–chasm, really–between the rich and poor in this America today, is the writer from a less-than-middle-class background still at such a pronounced disadvantage? Does their style still belong to another world entirely? Part of me says, no, of course not, because it’s much easier now to go to college, to study any field, to have access to great literature no matter how much or how little money you have.
But another part of me says, yes, yes, the divide is still there. Only now it’s more pronounced, because I believe few people who grow up poor but have the opportunity to go to college would even go into the arts at all. In the thirties, art could be seen as weapon, and the working class writer could wield it in the service of unionism, or Communism, or Socialism, or equality. But today, art as blunt instrument, art as pure purpose, is looked upon with distaste–and I don’t necessarily disagree that it should be looked upon in exactly that way. After all, art with blunt purpose seems to lose its art entirely, and becomes merely another tool. But regardless, with art seen today as largely a hobby, or a job that will never pay, I can’t imagine that many people given the opportunity to climb out of poverty with a higher education would choose to “waste” the chance by majoring in art, creative writing, music, etc.
And if a working-class student never even gets the chance to acquire a style–blunt or graceful–then isn’t the gap even greater than it was in the thirties?
If I could buy Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, I would.
December 1, 2009 — 1 Comment
Sadly, I haven’t got the 15-20 thousand bucks that Christie’s estimates the trim little Olivetti Lettera 32 will go for at the auction house. But some collector’s going to be very happy that McCarthy’s machine broke down after umpteen million years. After all, as the author says in an authentication letter:
“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. … I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”
Some mountainous, monumental work has been typed out on that little Olivetti. Kind of breathtaking, isn’t it? As someone who (mostly) grew up with word processors and computers, I can only look at these typewriters, lovely as they are, and wonder how anyone had the patience to be a writer while using one of those.
New Story Up at Necessary Fiction
November 25, 2009
I have a new story up today that the folks at Necessary Fiction were kind enough to publish on their site this week. It’s sort of an unclassifiable, fiction-ish piece on the history of chemical warfare, with bits of real and fictional tales mixed in. Check it out if you get the chance, and show some love for Necessary Fiction, too.
Have a happy Thanksgiving–and happy Black Friday, if that’s your thing. (Having worked in retail for years, it’s certainly not mine. I thoroughly enjoy sleeping in and avoiding crowds now. But Chris and I will be eating a big fat Thankgiving dinner with all the trimmings at a tasty restaurant, and indulging in a little LOTR marathon, too. So whatever you do, do it well and hope it’s a good time for you.)
WWI Poetry Resource Online
November 13, 2009
I am both a history nerd and a poetry buff, and the natural intersection of these two has always been World War I poetry.
War poetry has always been a mixed bag, both because of its necessarily overtly political themes and because of a natural tendency toward the maudlin or the jingoistic. But perhaps due to the nihilistic view of the War by those who lived it, and perhaps also because of a surge of interest in poetry among young students at the time, and probably most of all because of the rapidly changing style of poetry, World War I produced a more abundant and talented crop of poets than many other wars to precede or follow it–even as it quickly mowed them down.
Now I’ve discovered a resource of particular interest to anyone with a brain like mine. It’s the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, and in addition to collections of letters, poetry, and other writings by some of the finest poets of the era, it features WWI-era photos, film, audio, and publications.
I love the internets.
