christopher cocca

I’m mentioning this because of the Chuck Palahniuk discussion from a week or so ago.  I said that I really liked RANT.  Palahniuk has called it an apostolic novel (it’s a fictional narrative biography of someone who is dead as told by people that knew/knew of him).  I found the structure really freeing.  My own manuscript of MCP&L, which had been through many drafts by the time RANT was published, had always been a collective narrative recollection with competing storytellers.  RANT showed me that despite some concerns, something like that could be doable and intelligible.

I imagine RANT’s structure is part of the reason it’s taught at McHenry County College (who knew?), where at least one student objected to the material, as referenced in this story about banned and challenged books.

This is an interesting post.  Wickett, of the Emerging Writers Network, has only recently started to read Amy Hempel and asks if others have had similar experiences avoiding a writer’s work for one reason or another, finally read it, love it, “and kick yourself repeatedly for having wasted the years?”

I came to Amy Hempel via Chuck Palahniuk, but I’d never read any Alice Munro before starting the MFA.

Listening to The ‘59 Sound, I’ve just decided that The Gaslight Anthem is too fucking sincere for it to be cool to like them.  But I like them anyway.  My God, who doesn’t know people who think the way their protagonists do?  It’s like Bruce Springsteen minus any pretext of subtlety.  I don’t care if that’s good or bad or sloppy or whatever.  They remind me of songs I used to sing with an old friend.  He had a song called “Guy Named Me” and it was brilliant.  “Why’d you have to go/and marry and guy named Joe/Should’ve married a guy named me…”

If you don’t know people who don’t think, every now and then, the way people in Gaslight Anthem songs do, you’re way more sophisticated than I’ll ever be.  You tell that to Janey if she writes.

I missed the Gordon Lish class at The Center for Fiction, and I won’t be making any treks to LA for Gordon Haber’s new class, but it does sound interesting:

WRITING YOUR RELIGION
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WHAT IT IS: A four-week writing workshop that will help you define, explore, and write about religion and spirituality.  The goal is to help you create a particular piece.WHAT IT IS NOT: An attempt to indoctrinate you into or proselytize for any particular religion (or religion at all).WHO IT IS FOR: Writers of any genre (film, fiction, TV, etc.) looking to delve into their own belief (or lack thereof) and create a work with a religious or spiritual theme.

THE DETAILS: Wednesday evenings, 10-14 to 11-4, 7 to 9pm, at the Brewery in downtown L.A. Cost: $250.  For more info: call Gordon at 917-513-9009 or write to writingyourreligion@gmail.com.

ABOUT THE TEACHER: Gordon Haber’s fiction, criticism, and journalism has appeared in The Forward, Killing the Buddha, the Nebraska Review, and Heeb Magazine.  He has taught at Columbia University, LaGuardia College, and NYU.  His awards include a Fulbright fellowship and a residency at the MacDowell Colony.  He has an MFA from Columbia University.

Sounds great, actually. If I lived in LA, I’d do it.  If you follow the link, don’t be offended by the term Buddah-killing.  Killing the Buddha is an online journal of belief-ish.

Every other day I read something about how books will stop being physical objects and exist only digitally.  Publishing houses are producers of information, not artifact, etc

I love to read, but you’ll never read or hear me say that I like to do anything like snuggle up to or get cozy with a book.  I’m not a beach reader, either, and I don’t have particularly romantic attachments to the idea of book as object, except politically.

From the beginning, at least in the West, books in book form have been subversive. The Gutenberg Bible was subversive.  Common Sense was subversive.  More to the point, the printed word as printed word on paper is an historic engine of unrest, access, and change.  All those pamphlets and papers. These things being swapped and smuggled and shared.  Tyrants burning them.  Schools banning them. People reading them anyway.

We talk so much about going “off the grid” in terms of energy consumption.  We long for it.  Can you imagine not being able to do one of the most basic human functions (read) off the grid?  The concept of a bookless society makes even less sense than that of a cashless one.  Subversion (and I don’t mean violence or lunacy), education, self-improvement without censor, these requires objects that can’t be deleted when political winds change, even as the economy depends on the 1 or 2/3’s of it operating off the books.

I’m not a publishing professional so I won’t pretend to understand all of the economics of the industry, but I know these aren’t exactly fattened times.  I’m not saying the general trend won’t be toward electronic publishing and distribution.  It probably will.  But if we need books, we also need books to be books, physical objects we can hand, physically, to others.  Things we can physically protect and need to.

Of course, much of this discussion is moot.  Let’s imagine a bookless society.  It should be easy to imagine that in this society, some branch of some goverment somewhere manages to track, or, even worse, decide what we read.  Not very far-fetched.  Maybe every computer even gets a patch that scans everything you send to your printer and uploads it to some database.  When the things people want to read are banned, deleted, or otherwise made unavailable, people will pick up papers and pens and start writing.  They’ll make their own presses and they’ll post their bills and broadsides and leave their chapbooks and pamphlets in donut shops and laundrymats and in hotels like the Gideons.  Unless, of course, we stop teaching kids how to make their letters and numbers by hand.  Zaner-Bloser, I hated you, once.  But I love you now.

Actually, I just hate buying books.  But I also hate not being able to write in the good ones.  I really just don’t like a lot of what I buy.  I was skimming one tonight and found some iteration of the verb “to gaze” and I put it back because life’s too short.  Then again, though, the more I read and don’t like, the better appreciation I have for the viability of styles I don’t care for.  But I also get annoyed and it spirals down from there.

photo: attribution share-alike Creative Commons license by Alex Ran.

Just wanted to thank everyone for their feedback on my piece.

I want to share some thoughts from my prose fiction seminar last week.  These are via our teacher (paraphrased, some phrases quoted) with some extended, rambling reflections following the asterisks below.

Art as a human pursuit is 35,000 years old.  Agriculture is 10,000.  That means that 25,ooo years before we got the idea to put seeds in the ground and grow things, we were making art.  Specifically, cave painting and pottery started 35,000 years ago, but storytelling is much, much older.

Storytelling did not emerge from a need for pass time, but to explain things.  That is, to “perform the most urgent function.”   Stories were told to cope with unanswerable questions “on the frontier between culture and nature.”

“Literature is about trouble.”  There is no end to storytelling because there is no end to trouble.

***

The hypothetical end of literature has made me think this week of the old hoped-for “end of history” that was supposed to occur after the West won the defining ideological battle of the last century.  Or, you know, the workers’ paradise that was to be realized when class struggle ceased and there was nothing else to drive the dialectic.  Instead, of course, new ideological struggles emerged, full-grown, and old ones smolder but aren’t out.  There is no end to history or literature until there is an end to trouble, however you define it.  Very literally, Yogi Berra was right.  It ain’t over till it’s over.

Those of you with eschatological concerns can, of course, consider whether there will be storytelling in the eschaton.  Can you imagine life without it? Where there is no weeping or gnashing of teeth, will all of our stories be boring? Or self-congratulatory?  On some level, storytelling seems essential to any sustained worthwhile activity I can imagine.  Christian theology says, after all, that God is Logos, and I understand Logos as dialectic and story.  I hope for the eschaton (not the bloody, violent scary one; the just one where everything that’s been lost is restored) but I don’t always believe in it.   What are we to do without our troubles?  Our ambitions? Our insecurities or petty prides?

I’m in Kempton, PA today with the Kittatinny Ridge blue in front of me and the Hawk Mountain Preserve and between us alfalfa, I think, and maybe switchgrass.  It is sunny but cool enough for sweaters and jeans, not cold.  I am with people who are interested in sustainability and justice and environmental responsibility and I think that if the eschaton could be like a just day in Berks County in September then perhaps I would still have good stories and worthwhile ambitions even without trouble.

I’m tempted to say that we mark time by trouble, and that where there is no trouble, there is no time and so it makes sense that we speak of eternity as timeless.  But we also mark time by good things.  First dates, first kisses.  Births of children.  I can’t really believe in a detached timelessness where nothing new happens as something worth looking to.   A just day in the fields, in the mountains, is nice, but so is the evening, the moon, the few degrees cooler and the idea that we do it again. I like being human. I don’t know that I’d want to be more than that, but being that forever might be okay.

I was thinking at one time that Ginny would take him  off my hands.  She is well-read and smokes and though she goes to church her opinoins are the kind some people might take for atheistic.  And she told me she didn’t think Ollie was bad-looking though he is on the short side (I would say five-eight or five-nine).  He has the blue eyes she likes and the butterscotch-couloured hair with a wave drooping over his forehead, which seems so intentionally charming.  He was very nice to her of course when they met and ler her on to talk a lot, and after she had gone home he said, “Your friends is quite the little intellectual, isn’t she?”

“Little.” Ginny is at least as tall as he is and I certainly felt like telling him that.  But it is pretty mean to point out something concerning height to a man who is a bit lacking in that respect so I kept my mouth shut.  I didn’t know what to say about the ‘intellectual’ part of it.  In my opinion Ginny is an intellectual (for instance has Ollie read War and Peace?), but I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he meant she was or wasn’t.  All I could tell was that if she was, it wasn’t something he cared for, and if she wasn’t, then she was acting as if she was and he did not care for that either.  I should have said something cool and disagreeable, such as, “You’re too deep for me,” but of course did not think of anything till later. And the worst thing was that as soon as he had said that, I had secretly, in my heart, got an inkling of something about Ginny, and while I was defending her (in my thoughts) I was also in some sly way agreeing with him.  I don’t know if she will ever seem as smart to me in the future.

from Powers by Alice Munro