thebookishowl.com

It’s funny, in a way, that an outfit which has been inactive for four years, the Underground Literary Alliance; many of whose remaining key members were destroyed during that period by economic circumstance, or by life; could still achieve today from the supposedly UNmonolithic established literary community widespread and unanimous hostility. Slur and smear against us continue to appear in esteemed publication after publication. Not one “reputable” writer will take our side—or acknowledge we have a side.

Instead of republishing an essay filled with distortions, with every available alleged crime of the ULA he could find, it’d have been more interesting if Tom Bissell had instead gone after the real story. If he’d presented the deeds done against the Underground Literary Alliance, beginning with the reams of hate mail we received from the moment of our founding; or bookstores pressured by the Eggers gang not to carry our zines; literary writers we were reaching out to pressured not to show at our events; publications (such as Punk Planet and Zine Guide in Chicago) pressured not to participate in or cover our events; fake letters and emails and web sites created in attempts to discredit us; endless anonymous attacks against the ULA in every public forum available, including Amazon; including this blog; ULA members pressured to break ranks and turn on us, and so on. A hurricane of hostility which continues to this day, though, for all intents and purposes, there remains no ULA. Only the name and the memory.

That story would be fascinating and revealing, but it’s a story which can’t come from me, only from those inside the established literary community, or inside McSweeney’s, and they’re not talking.

(The new ebook The McSweeneys Gang is fiction but it’s also real, if you know what I mean.)

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

These are the short fiction collections I have recommended most to blog readers, friends, and family throughout the year.

All links go to the authors’ contributions to the Book Notes series if appropriate. I have reposted my original review below each book.

What was your favorite short story collection of 2012?

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

In her debut short story collection Battleborn Claire Vaye Watkins marries character to landscape as well as anyone I have read in years. These stories set in the Nevada desert are gritty and brilliant, and foretell an auspicious literary future for their author.

Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise is a stellar debut, a collection of stories notable for the empathetic portrayals of its characters (both human and animal) as well as the resiliency of the women portrayed.

The Odditorium by Melissa Pritchard

Melissa Pritchard’s new short fiction collection The Odditorium contains eight ambitious and fantastic stories that transcend genre while fascinating with their language and historical figures brought to life.

Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino

The Iowa Short Fiction Award has introduced me to many talented short story writers over the years, and one of the most impressive is Marie-Helene Bertino. Her debut collection Safe as Houses is brilliantly inventive and surreal, with each of its stories original and filled with dark humor.

Understories by Tim Horvath

The stories in Understories are clever and imaginative, and have earned Tim Horvath comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Kevin Brockmeier. This stunning collection revels in wordplay and inventiveness, and is one of the finest short fiction collections I have read all year.

Windeye by Brian Evenson

With his latest short fiction collection Windeye, Brian Evenson once again proves himself a master at creating suspenseful, literary horror.

also at Largehearted Boy:

online “best of 2012″ book lists

Largehearted Boy favorite short story collections of 2011
Largehearted Boy favorite short story collections of 2010
Largehearted Boy favorite short story collections of 2009
Largehearted Boy favorite short story collections of 2008

previous lists at Largehearted Boy
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks book reviews

Largehearted Boy

EPIC FAIL Funny Videos and Epic Fail Funny Pictures

EPIC FAIL Funny Videos and Epic Fail Funny Pictures

TOM BISSELL’S DISTORTED ESSAY PART I

Reviewers and readers who take Tom Bissell’s 2003 Believer essay on the defunct Underground Literary Alliance, “Protesting All Fiction Writers!”—now reprinted with a different title in Bissell’s Magic Hours book of essays—at face value make a huge mistake. They should be aware of the essay’s context—the reason it was written and published. For the previous two years the ULA had been engaged in an intensely bitter feud with Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s, which kicked off when we protested an award to the publication for “Best Zine.” Things from there escalated. This was the backdrop to Bissell’s essay.

Bissell admits that Dave Eggers was initially opposed to the essay’s publication. A scant few months after its appearance, Eggers himself was caught posting anonymous attacks against the ULA on Amazon. Eggers carried extreme animus toward the ULA—from his perspective, with good reason. Could the essay have been approved if Bissell hadn’t assured the editors that it would be a proper takedown of the Underground Literary Alliance? A takedown, moreover, which fit the happy-face McSweeney’s/Believer image of pristine innocence. No easy feat.

In the essay, Tom Bissell presents himself as an innocent bystander; a disinterested observer objectively weighing facts. Gullible journalists today like Katie Ryder accept the presentation at face value. They swallow it whole, to the extent that Ryder, in an interview with Bissell, speaks of his tolerance, and absurdly applauds him for giving his subjects a “fair shot.” Yet in 2003 the essay was a partisan attack, and in it Bissell behaved like a partisan. He would not have been allowed the assignment otherwise.

The effectiveness of Bissell’s takedown can be judged by the result. The ULA was branded as a collection of no-talent whiners and thuggish authoritarians. His essay became the accepted source on us; the standard text. When I made a 2007 appearance on a PBS radio station, the host was still influenced by Bissell’s text, asking me wide-eyed and believing why the ULA wanted to ban Jeffrey Eugenides from publishing. A truly ill-informed statement. As evidenced by snarky or hateful statements still made about me online, the branding remains to this day.

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Journalists and reviewers wishing to understand Tom Bissell’s essay on the Underground Literary Alliance should realize that he did very little research on us. He exchanged several emails with one member out of forty. He made no effort to meet any of us, though many of us were a short bus ride away. He asked for none of our zines, though we were a writers group that sprung from the print zine scene and defined by it. He did read our web site, which contained a smattering of our writing.

To understand the ULA you’d have to understand the background we came from. The three initiators of the project, Steve Kostecke, Michael Jackman, and myself, were from Detroit. We’d witnessed wrenching social change and economic devastation, up close. First hand.

David M. Sheridan’s 1999 Michigan Quarterly Review essay about Detroit, “Making Sense of Detroit”– http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0038.301;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg — is a great source, because it was written at the very time that plans for an underground writers group were being discussed and formed. It gives a compelling picture of what was happening to the city. Sheridan’s essay also quotes from an essay of my own about Detroit, an essay which alone would be a good source for my mindset at that moment of time. Without understanding Detroit it’s impossible to understand the Underground Literary Alliance.

Tom Bissell, in his Believer piece, dismisses Jackman’s talk of “injustice”—yet thoughts of injustice were inescapable from our brains. Sheridan states that I wrote about “violence and racism and poverty.” With trademark snarkiness, The Believer, in one of its tags to Bissell’s essay, mocked the ULA’s concerns as “alienated socioeconomic posturing.” I urge people to read Sheridan’s essay and then decide if our concerns were posturing.

Tom Bissell never did the hard research to find out where the ULA was from and what we were about, because he didn’t care what we were about. That wasn’t the point of his essay.

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Tom Bissell’s own striving-writer background included an editorial position at W.W. Norton in Manhattan, at the very heart of the tops-down Big Six publishing system. By accommodating himself to powerful individuals he made his way through the heart of the machine. This was the perspective he brought to his essay, to his look at ULAers and our writings.

Bissell made no  attempt to understand our alien style of literature, our psychology, or the DIY/ print zine ethos of the 1990’s. That ethos determined how the ULA operated—by consensus, with no hierarchies and no real leaders. Our titles were a game. The “Director”—Michael Jackman—in personality was the most detached and laidback of the ULA’s major players.

The DIY/punk aesthetic determined our occasionally provocative, in-your-face behavior, which we saw as theater. We were sending up, in our way, the sober self-seriousness of the literary elite, and the pronounced pin-drop solemnity of the standard literary reading. The punk aesthetic determined many of our various styles of zine writing—expressions of the sound of American reality, of a Greyhound bus or a punk show or the street, in all its crudeness, emotion, immediacy and spontaneity. It’s why in 2006 we protested a tepid establishment “Howl” celebration at Columbia University. ULAers saw ourselves as the legitimate heirs of the Beats, and heirs of Dada and other arts movements outside the walls of the canon and the publishing machine. Our stylized and impudent zines were our proofs of our authenticity and credibility. In his Believer essay Tom Bissell scorned the very idea of this kind of alternative writing. Yet it was the kind of writing we’d been selling, mostly to alienated young readers who otherwise wouldn’t have been reading anything.

Authoritarian? That was the opposite of what we were about. We were a rebellion against rules, regulation, constipation, and authority. We were a disorganized blast of noise. We did have strong voices. In one of his recent interviews with Katie Ryder, Tom Bissell still refers to our no-hierarchy group as “authoritarian.” This is an ignorant, know-nothing statement. Also an ironic one, seeing that Bissell works and writes in a world of hierarchy and authority.

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Bissell admits that his essay on Robert Kaplan was a “literary assassination.” His essay on the ULA was no less an attempted assassination. Unlike Kaplan, we had no standing, no resources, no body of powerful and connected friends with which to withstand such attacks.

(Much more to come on this blog.)

(Also see @KingWenclas for other remarks.)

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

AS three of the six founding members of the Underground Literary Alliance were from the beaten-down city of Detroit, David M. Sheridan’s 1999 essay (link posted a few posts below) is crucial background information in conveying the kind of crazy environment we came from. Indeed, while Sheridan was researching and writing his essay in 1998, I was meeting ULA co-founder Steve Kostecke at Elmer’s Bar at the very heart of Detroit’s Cass Corridor, the southern part of the neighborhood then like the Wild West, full of rowdy and bawdy saloons, houses of ill-repute, stray youth gangs, and violence. It was a neighborhood into which the police themselves would seldom venture. In our discussions Steve and I put together the ideas that would lead to the creation of the wildest American writers group ever.

In the 90′s I was cranking out not only terrific essays like the one Sheridan references in his piece, but also explosive zeens. I was one of the best underground writers in America– which means one of the best writers in America, period. But so what? As with others of my kind, my writing was too dynamic, too real, for the literary mainstream. We were denied access to avenues of publicity. So we banded together to obtain some publicity. What followed was the ULA’s tumultuous history.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

A good serial will always make a good novel and a good romantic novel will often make a serial. The most obvious difference is in length.
Magazines obtain their serials by two methods. Either they are specially written for the market, or, more commonly, they are adapted by the editorial staff from a full-length novel. Most publishers make a point of submitting manuscripts with a feminine appeal to magazines, in order to sell the serial rights well before book publication. Financially, selling to a magazine is by far the better proposition. Serial rights can bring in two or three times as much – sometimes even more than a publisher’s advance. (Britton and Collin 108). ¹

They probably weren’t overstating the importance of the magazine market in that period; Joseph McAleer, who has studied the publishing history of Mills & Boon, writes that

While Mills & Boon had had a close relationship with the magazines since the 1920s, it was in the 1950s that contact intensified, and the magazines themselves become a kind of extension of the editorial department. By 1948, pre-publication serializations of Mills & Boon novels were fixtures in the top three women’s magazines, which together were selling over three million copies per week: Woman, Woman’s Own, and Woman’s Weekly [...]. This association with the weekly magazines served more than an editorial purpose. Mills & Boon reaped extra publicity when a serial ‘sold’ well, encouraging readers to seek out the complete novel in the libraries, or other titles by the author. Moreover, selling serial rights – for as much as £1,000 – helped Mills & Boon’s cash flow. The firm usually retained between 15 and 25 per cent of the serial fee. (97)

Magazines came in various types and Bridget Fowler has studied in detail

a representative sample of weekly family or women’s magazines, selecting those of the most economical design, with the lowest prices [...]. Where possible, the period analysed was July 1929 to July 1930 [...]. Not only was this a time of industrial restructuring and financial collapse, but it was also the last era before the birth of the modern, glossy, mass-circulation women’s magazine in 1932. Stories had a much more central place in the older type of magazine and were often the sole diet of fiction for their readers. The affectionate niche they acquired in the lives of their reading-public was attested by many of my respondents with working-class roots, who recalled their mothers snatching brief interludes from heavy domestic labour to enjoy the little luxury of Silver Star or the People’s Friend. (51)²

Billie Melman has focused in particular on “The Lancashire romance and the love story set in the Empire” (144) in British story papers of the 1920s. The “mill-girl story had emerged in the 1890s. Its heyday overlapped the decade between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash; its decline and fall coincided with the Great Depression” (121). Indeed, “The Great Depression, which finally ruined the Lancashire cotton industry, also gave the Lancashire romance its coup-de-grâce” (133). This sub-genre does

include some stories of romantic rivalry between a mill-hand and a toff, fighting for the heart and hand of a mill girl. Usually it is the honest, industrious Lancastrian who wins. On the whole, the concept of marriage as a bond that benefits economically or socially one or both of the parties is alien to the spirit of the Lancashire romance. Matrimony is not an economic partnership, or a sanctioned sexual relationship, but a lifelong friendship between two adolescents, an extension of the ‘matiness’ of the mill. (128)

In sharp contrast to the mill-girl stories, yet existing alongside them, was a type of story whose “brand-mark was nationalism. Its symbol was the Empire. Its main characteristic was the blurring of social differences and the effacement of class consciousness” (134). Melman suggests that “The flowering of a genre that celebrated an imaginary society in which females were scarce and males plentiful may be seen as a response to the anxieties caused by the imbalance between the sexes” (136-37) in the aftermath of the First World War. There

are two patterns of romance. In the first, the emigrant story proper, an Englishwoman, newly arrived from the ‘Old Country’, finds a mate, a home and purposeful life in the unpopulated wilderness of a British dominion or colony. In the second pattern, the heroine, born of British parents in the ‘New Country’, is pursued and won by an Englishman. In both these patterns the main emphasis is upon the national and racial identity of the protagonists. The characters must be white and Anglo-Saxon. Their affiliation to race replaces other allegiances – to class, to the community, to occupation and even to gender. (137)

The story papers in which these stories appeared

were printed, on the newsprint pulp paper from which they derived their somewhat derogatory epithet, in a two- or four-column layout. The typical story paper was a weekly [...]. Its potential readers were unmarried manual workers, shop assistants, domestic servants and office workers. Married women in their early and mid twenties formed a distinct group for which a host of periodicals more domestic in outlook than the publications for adolescents catered.

The main component of the pulp weekly was fiction. The relation between the role of magazine fiction and the social status of the magazine-reading public has been noticed. The space given to fiction was in inverse proportion to the class of readers. The ‘higher’ this class, the smaller the story component. (113)

In addition, “The serial story was peculiar to working-class periodicals. [...] Middle-class publications, on the other hand, had a distinct preference for shorter fiction” (114).

William Gleason takes the study of magazine romances back even further in time, and across the Atlantic, in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. He states that:

The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s. Seeking to capitalize on the longstanding appeal of love stories, which had been appearing alongside other popular genres in the weekly family story papers since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most influential “cheap” U.S. publishing houses—including Beadle and Adams, Street and Smith, George P. Munro, and Norman Munro—began to experiment with more distinctly marked romance series aimed primarily or exclusively at women readers. Several of these series were quite successful, others wildly so. Beadle and Adams’s Waverley Library, for example, which offered both classic fiction and popular romance novels, produced a total of 353 issues between 1879 and 1886 (Johannsen 304, 314). Street and Smith’s Bertha Clay Library, launched in 1900, ran (along with its successor, the New Bertha M. Clay Library) for more than thirty years (Carr 81). And from the mid-1880s through the 1930s popular publishers fought over exclusive rights to publish and republish the works of prolific American romance novelist Laura Jean Libbey, both as stand-alone volumes in various “library” series and as serialized novels in weekly story papers (Masteller 205). These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishing successes laid the groundwork for the mass marketing of popular romance with which we are familiar today.

As for me, I’ve been dipping into the digitized, online editions of Australian Women’s Weekly from 1933 to 1982. Joan Elman’s A New Car and a Lady (18 Feb. 1939) features a heroine who drives cars for a living (she works for a car show-room); the first thing she says is “Oh, but this had been a day of days! Three demonstrations since ten o’clock. Careers for women? Ugh!” (5). The anti-heroine from this story is not totally dissimilar, at least initially, to the heroine of This Frail Flower (21 August 1943) who, before the war, was “lovely and loveable, spoiled, useless” (5). She, however, finds a new purpose in life, and her old love, in a factory doing war-work. In Paul Horgan’s National Honeymoon (16 Sept. 1950) the heroine manipulates her new groom into appearing with her on a national radio programme which gives prizes to newly-weds in return for them sharing their love story with the nation. Roberta May reveals that she used to work “as a secretary [...] I wanted to keep on, but Gus wouldn’t let me” because, as he says, “I can support both of us” (10). Roberta gave up her job rather than lose Gus, but much as the job would have enabled her to “help with payments on the house” (20), their appearance on the show will allow her to have a room in that house refurbished. After the show, however, Roberta is “sorry with all her heart for what they had given away that day [...] their very own love story” (22). Gus tells her that they can get back “the important part of it” by returning all the prizes; “I’ll buy what we need, and if we can’t afford it yet we’ll wait till we can” (22). Yet again, the implication seems to be (a) a man should “support” the couple on his own, without his wife’s assistance, and (b) when a wife puts herself into the public arena (as opposed to staying safely at home) she runs the risk of damaging her marriage. The contrast between these last two stories seems to reflect the changing attitudes towards women’s work:

At the end of the war, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor asked women workers about their future work plans [...] most women wanted to keep their present jobs. Immediately after the war, the percentage of women who worked fell as factories converted to peacetime production and refused to rehire women. In the next few years, the service sector expanded and the number of women in the workforce—especially older married women—increased significantly, despite the dominant ideology of woman as homemaker and mother. The types of jobs available to these women, however, were once again limited to those traditionally deemed “women’s work.”(History Matters)

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1The authors of this guide, Anne Britton and Marion Collin, had “both been fiction editors of women’s magazines” (dustjacket) so they clearly write from experience when they warn authors of full-length novels that:

If your manuscript is bought as a serial do not be surprised by what happens to it. You may have written about sixty-five thousand words. The fiction staff will have no qualms about cutting it to thirty thousand words if it suits them better that way. You have sold the story and unless you want to kill your market you will be wise not to complain about its new length or its new title, or even to hint that they have cut out your most brilliant passages! The staff who cut are experienced, and it is their job to know what makes a successful serial. (117-18)

I can’t help but feel that there are some parallels here with the process of translation and cutting documented by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, which led her to ask “Is thisnot a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?” (“They Seek“).

2 The romance stories themselves are described by Fowler as featuring “plots in which women are shown to be as capable of achieving production targets and intellectual attainments as men. However, in every case the working woman is reintegrated into the domestic world after marriage” (60).

——

• Britton, Anne and Marion Collin. The New Writers’ Guide: Romantic Fiction. London: T. V. Boardman, 1960.
• Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
• Gleason, William. “Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).
• McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999
• Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. London: Macmillan, 1988.
• Wirtén, Eva Hemmung. ” ‘They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere’: Looking for the “Global” Book” Canadian Journal of Communication 23.2 (1998).

The covers above, from The Australian Women’s Weekly, are for 25 Feb. 1939,19 June 1943 and 14 Oct. 1950. Thumbnails of all the covers can be viewed via a “visual timeline.”

Teach Me Tonight

Tim Powers decides to teach geometry instead

Numerous memorable exchanges occurred during the week I attended the Writers and Illustrators of the Future workshop as one of the winning authors. Many of the more outrageous I can’t quote here (the Workshop is a “safe” environment for people to express opinions they wouldn’t in public, such as conventions), but here’s one my favorites that I feel is quite safe out in the open:

Me: [To Eric Flint] I’m interested to know the sources you used to research the Thirty Years’ War. Because, I’m also a Thirty Years’ War buff —

Eric Flint: For God’s sake, why?

Yes, being a scholar of the Thirty Years’ War does cause people to look at you askance, even another person who has done extensive research into this most anarchic of Early Modern wars. Suffice it to say, I simply cannot help my attraction to the madness of that long, gory, indecisive war. Magnificent madness.

At his acceptance speech during the awards ceremony, writer Brennan Harvey (who is no relation to me except now as a good friend) stated that “K. D. Wentworth and Tim Powers filled my head up to here,” making a motion far above his forehead. “I don’t even know what I learned yet.” That’s the best way to put it. In that week, the experience of listening to advice from a who’s-who of the best in speculative fiction made it sometimes feel as if I were getting machine-gunned with data. I wrote as fast as my hand could go over my notepad, and eventually I’ll sort it all out and see what sticks the most. However, the sheer mass of it made me realize that I can’t do a single blog post to cover what happened during the week. So I will focus on one item at a time.

All the writers in the lobby of the Roosevelt. I’m the guy in the center with the white tie and braces. Tim Powers is over my right shoulder. K. D. Wentworth is in blue two places to Tim’s right

The most instructive exercise we writers underwent during the week was the “twenty-four-hour Story.” The short version: write a story in twenty-four hours. No upper or lower word-count limit, as long as it is a complete story.

There was more to it, however. K. D. Wentworth said, “Whatever happens in you life, you say, ‘I can use this!’ ” To explore that, our stories had to be syntheses of three outside influences:

1) The Token. This was a small item that K. D. Wentworth handed to each of us the day before we had to write our stories. Each was a random trinket, some bizarre, some banal. Because K. D. Wentworth uses the same items from year to year, I can’t reveal what they are (“Otherwise everybody would be making requests for certain tokens each year,” she explained). Jordan Lapp, who was handling writing the public blog for the week, posted a photo of me holding up my token, so it’s semi-public now. But I won’t spread it further or post it here.

2) Research. The thirteen writers walked down Hollywood Blvd. to the Hollywood Public Library where had instructions to do research on any topic we stumbled onto. The trip down Hollywood Blvd. could make a story in itself, although as a local it didn’t have the same affect on me as it did for some of the writers who had never been to Los Angeles, and the one who had never been to the United States. Once in the library, I picked an aisle, looked at the Dewey Decimal System placard denoting all the subjects in the aisle, and had the words “Penal System” leap out at me. I walked to that section, and tugged out a slender book titled Prison: Introducing Issues with Opposing Viewpoints. Once I started flipping through it, I discovered it was probably aimed at high school students to help them with critical thinking. The book consisted of essays culled from various sources that put contrasting arguments about the U.S. prison system beside each other. I read through “Prison Are Beneficial to Society” vs. “Prisons Are Not Beneficial to Society” and saw that there was enough material here for three books. I found especially intriguing the suggestion — whether true or not — that prisons teach criminals how to be better criminals instead of rehabilitating them.

I lead an incredibly aggressive group into the Hollywood Library

3) Talk to a Random Stranger. This notion terrified all of us. I thought I would be the only one nervous about engaging someone on the street in conversation, but I forgot that most writers have a level of introversion. Perhaps it doesn’t match mine, but it’s there. Tim Powers assured us that this is not as difficult as it sounds. He was right, and the results for most of us were, hum, amusing. Especially when the street on which trolling for someone interesting to talk to was Hollywood Blvd., where people wearing ten-foot-tall Dr. Suess hats are merely part of the landscape. We were supposed to engage in the conversation in our walk back from the library, and we couldn’t tell the person we talked to about our reason for stopping to chat.

My random encountered happened about five blocks down Hollywood. I had already gotten mistaken for Tobey Maquire twice, and would have yet a third occurrence before I got back to the hotel, but I resisted taking the easy path of speaking to someone who had approached me. Instead, I wandered past a tattoo parlor and noticed two men admiring a third man’s tattoos. So I joined in, and took the chance to ask the man to explain what his tattoos meant. I was especially intrigued with the Latin phrases on his arm. I didn’t tell him that I can read Latin, so I asked him what the words meant. He explained — and was completely wrong about the translation. Startlingly wrong. I just nodded and inwardly smiled. I had hit the story-idea jackpot! This was too good. His tattoo meant almost the opposite of what he thought it did. He thought ex means “without.” No, it means “out of, from, down from.” He thought “IVSTVS” means “spirit.” No, the Latin word iustus means “just, fair, lawful.” The word for spirit is animus, or as it would have been tattooed in all-capital script, “ANIMVS.”

At that point, I had a complete story idea mapped out in my animus.

At 5 p.m., the official twenty-four-hour period to write the story began. The thirteen of us had until the re-convening in the main classroom at Author Services at 5 p.m. the next day to write the first draft of speculative fiction story combing our three prompts.

I never worried much about my ability to write a story in twenty-four hours. After years of National Novel Writing Month and my general propensity to move fast, doing about 5,000 words in a day was not troubling. I was more concerned about the lack of planning time and the rather rough state of the final product. I never let anybody read my first drafts, but this time I would have to surrender one for a possible general reading.

The writers fanned out through the lobby and other public rooms of the Roosevelt Hotel that evening. It was a bizarre environment in which to work, because even on a weeknight the Hollywood party-life is flowing like overpriced liquor (0 for a bottle of Jack Daniels — I am not joking) through the hallways of a ritzy hotel. A bunch of stressed writers crooked over laptops and dressed in their best shabby casual were sprinkled through the cocktail-dress-and-hipster partiers. I’m surprised the omni-present hovering bouncers didn’t kick us out as vagrants.

This photo of me writing near the pool is staged. Hugette, the official photographer for the workshop, was barred from taking photos in the lobby (those omni-present bouncers are always on the watch), so she asked me to move to the pool bar and pretend to work there. I ended up enjoying the location — it was less crowded than other parts of the hotel — and managed to reach 4,000 words that evening in my bizarre fantasy story centered on mistranslated magical tattoos.

The next morning, I typed the remaining 2,000 words in my hotel room. I was glad to reach the end, and even more pleased when my story was not randomly selected as one of the three that would be handed out for critiquing.

I think all the writers would agree that this “triple prompt + speed write” exercise was one of the best experiences of the workshop. It was certainly the most stressful; even given my usual working speed, trying to produce something decent in the midst of a workshop where you’re surrounded by some of the top talent in the field freaked me out. But the exhilaration of it was a fabulous intoxicant.

The main lesson this exercise taught was how the universe feeds the writer everything he or she needs when it comes to inspiration. It’s a very Taoist way of perceiving writing: discovery through openness to experience. I’ve done stories from writing prompts before, and usually found it a mechanical exercise. The combination of three elements, one of them social, made this far different from other writing prompt exercise. Thrown into the pressure-cooker of time and the atmosphere of the Writers of the Future workshop and the craziness of a hot-spot hotel made for a surreal creativity factory.

What do I think of the first draft that I produced out of this? Well, It’s certainly strange. I haven’t yet decided if I will rewrite it, but I am starting to lean toward returning to it. K. D. Wentworth and Tim Powers said that quite a few of these twenty-four hour stories have gone on to sell to major markets. I saw potential in the three stories that were randomly given to us for critique.

But whether I finish it, or whether or not it sells, I’ll never forget the writing of it.

“IVSTVS” ≠ “spirit.” Just to reiterate.

Black Gate

Story openings only, 200 words max. Post your opening at:

www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In his own words, here is Allan Metcalf’s Book Notes music playlist for his book, OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word:

OK. Is there any other expression so common, so necessary to everyday dealings, as OK? It’s the greatest word ever invented in America and our most successful export, known and used around the world.

You could write a book about OK. I just did – it’s called OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, published by Oxford University Press in October 2010. And OK is indeed the greatest. From its awkward beginning in an 1839 Boston newspaper as a dumb joke (abbreviation for “all correct”), through a series of improbable accidents, OK managed to overcome its humble origin to become arguably the most important word in our language.

And yet, though it expresses a distinctive American attitude and is on everyone’s lips, OK is rare in music. That’s because OK is, frankly, not very musical. It’s just . . . OK.

Music stirs the emotions—happiness, heartbreak, enthusiasm, despair, love, lust, hate. In the words that go with the music, you want something that expresses emotion, or something that soothes it. But OK is passionless, neither exciting nor calm, just neutral. It doesn’t imply either joy or sorrow, agitation or tranquility, only that something is satisfactory. Even yes and no have more passion than OK. That’s why we use OK so often, just to get through the routine business of the day. Very few of us are passionate all the time.

But there are musicians who discover musical potential in OK. Here is a baker’s dozen of them, each OK in their own way. And it’s appropriate to get going with an OK, go!

“White Knuckles” – OK Go!
OK: Pay attention

One use for OK is to call for attention. “OK . . . Go!” is what two 11-year-olds heard from their art instructor at the Interlochen summer arts camp in Michigan when it was time for them to start drawing. Years later, they chose that energetic command to name their musical group. The energy came from go, not OK, so perhaps it’s not surprising that they don’t bother use OK in their songs.
Not that it really matters what they say or sing. If you do YouTube, you know OK Go! is famous more for their videos than for the music that goes with them. Who can pay attention to the music anyhow, with such amazing marchers, machines, or performing dogs?

For purposes of OK, one OK Go! song is as good as another. Might as well go to the dogs. So let’s make it White Knuckles, and be sure to watch the video.

“Vuvuzelas” – OK Music
OK: Calm

There’s a group recently formed in Los Angeles that calls itself OK Music. Are they joking? Maybe not. Without a hint of irony, they say theirs is “Music That Makes You Feel OK.” And how do they do that? By combining voice, violins, cello, keyboard, and drums for what they call “themed improvisations.”

They explain on their website that “OK is a colloquial English word denoting approval, assent, or acknowledgment. Performances include elements of audience participation, where the listener may be able to suggest themes for the band to use as part of their improvisations.”

At their very first performance in June 2010, they improvised a piece they called “Vuvuzelas.” There was no vuvuzela in the room; the name was just a suggestion by Doris, an audience member. But it does have the same power to make you feel OK as . . . a quiet vuvuzela does, if you can imagine such a thing. And if you can’t, give a listen.

“Good Morning, Good Morning” – the Beatles
OK: Monotonous

But what about songs that actually use OK? They can be bleak indeed.

And the Beatles know how to do bleak. Nothing expresses the bleak blandness of OK better than this Beatles classic about the monotony of daily life—”Everybody knows there’s nothing doing”—with the repeated line “I’ve got nothing to say, but it’s OK.”

“Be OK” – Ingrid Michaelson
OK: Not Not OK

OK may be unexciting, but it’s still a lot better than Not OK. From the perspective of “a gallery of broken hearts,” Ingrid Michaelson’s tribute to OK is uplifting, with its refrain: “I just want to be OK, be OK, be OK; I just want to be OK today.” She uses her song in support of the “Stand Up to Cancer” campaign.

“I’m OK” – Christina Aguilera
OK: Not Not OK

Christina Aguilera also makes OK a good place to be, at least in contrast with growing up “in a war called home” with an abusive father. “Every morning that I wake I look back at yesterday,” she declares in this 2002 song, “and I’m OK.”

“It’s Not Right but It’s OK” – Whitney Houston
OK: Not Not OK

Whitney Houston sings of a lover leaving, saying that’s OK—she’d rather be alone.

“It’s Alright, It’s OK” – Ashley Tisdale
OK: Not Not OK

Ashley Tisdale is positively enthusiastic about her lover’s departure. “I’m so much better without you,” she sings, as she flings (in her video) with a succession of replacement hunks.

“Watching the Wheels Go Round” – John Lennon
OK: Less Is More

Sometimes it’s success that’s not OK. John Lennon sings of “just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round”: “People say I’m crazy doing what I’m doing. Well, they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin. When I say that I’m OK, well they look at me kind of strange.”

“OK, OK” – Juliana Hatfield
OK: More Is More

One way to ratchet a little excitement into OK is to repeat it until it becomes angry or defiant. Juliana Hatfield takes this to the limit in her song “OK, OK,” which leads from five “shut up”s to the chorus: “OK OK, whatever you say, OK OK, I did it but I didn’t. OK OK, don’t make me get crazy. OK OK OK OK OK OK.”

“My Boobs are OK” – Lene Alexandra Øien
OK: Exotic American Word

To an American, OK is just OK, but to the rest of the world, sometimes it’s an exotic American word, conveying the glamour and excitement of America. At least that could be an explanation for the use of OK by the Norwegian singer Lene Alexandra, known in Norway by her full name Lene Alexandra Øien (try pronouncing that, you Americans!). As if anyone would argue otherwise, Lene declares in a perky song that her rather substantial boobs are OK, as she demonstrates in her almost X-rated YouTube video.

“I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK” – Monty Python
OK: Exotic American Word

A British group gives another exotic twist to OK in what is the funniest OK song of all time. It’s about a man who dreams of being a lumberjack in British Columbia. He repeatedly declares he’s OK. He sleeps all night and works all day . . . sure, that’s OK. He cuts down trees, he eats his lunch, he goes to the lavatory . . . huh? And it goes downhill from there, but he’s always OK.

“Just Dance” – Lady Gaga
It’s OK to Dance

So much for the various meanings and philosophies of OK. It can just come down to this: Dance, and you’ll be OK. That’s Lady Gaga’s message in “Just Dance.” She says she’s “had a little bit too much much” and asks “What’s going on on the floor?” but provides the remedy: “Just dance gonna be OK da da doo-doo-mmm.”

“Stayin’ Alive” – Bee Gees
OK Power

“I’ve been kicked around since I was born,” goes the song from Saturday Night Fever, but “now it’s all right, it’s OK, and you may look the other way.” It’s hard not to get up and walk with the Bee Gees to the disco beat of “Stayin’ Alive.” It even helps revive people whose hearts have stopped—the 103 beats per minute are the perfect rhythm for CPR. OK? I’m dancing out on this one.

Note on source for OK Music (second number above)

[In compliance with Creative Commons policies, anyone is free to use, modify, distribute and broadcast our music for non-commercial purposes as long as credit is given to "OK Music" during its acknowledgements. http://okmusic.me/2010/06/21/videos-from-our-first-performance/]

Allan Metcalf and OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word links:

the author’s website

Boston Globe review
Fritinancy review
FrogenYozurt review
Languagehat review
Newsweek review
Sistema Limbico review
Washington Post review

Voice of America interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)

Online “Best Books of 2010″ lists

52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy