Writing

A quibble with electronic publishing

/ jpbohannon / 11 Comments

I’m a little worried.

Just a little worried.

The majority of things I’ve had published are in print. They  haven’t earned me a fortune–five dollars here, twenty dollars there–but a least I have a copy of them. Actually, two copies of them, because most of the ” legitimate” small journals pay in copies. They publish your story, poem, essay and pay you with two copies of the issue in which you appear. Two copies placed with the others in a chest at the foot of my bed.

And then along comes the Internet. Instant gratification. Electronic submissions. Electronic responses. Usually much quicker than traditional ways.

The best story I think I’ve ever wrote was published on line. “Nadja and the Dream of Teeth” first appeared through the Dublin Writer’s Workshop in the journal The Electric Acorn.

Then it was published electronically by The Richmond Review (UK). The editor at The Richmond Review was wonderful. She asked questions, made good suggestions, and, overall, made me tighten things up.  All through e-mails. From across the pond. This was the internet at its best.

And then it appeared electronically. It was beautiful. Nice layout. Clean font. Well done. I was proud of the story and proud of its being out there.

Now several years later, the site is down. Just a blank white page. Try it. Google “Richmond review uk” and you’ll find the link.  And then a pure white page. Where is my story? Not there. Not archived. Nowhere. And it was a legitimate journal!

Sort of the same thing with another story– “Pierced.” Except the journal it appeared in didn’t disappear; it sold its domain name to a Japanese company. Try to find my story and you’ll be staring at a beautiful chrysanthemum surrounded by Japanese writing. I am pretty sure that it is not my story translated into Japanese.

So. No big deal. Two short stories that meant something to me but certainly not to anyone else. Vanished. Pouf! But what if this was important material? Is there a fear that important things might simply disappear after a given time?

I know the saying that nothing ever disappears in cyberspace, but will future researchers, historians, students all have the tools necessary to recover those things that have?

Granted there is much that is superfluous, so much that is ephemeral on the Web. Much of it–my own scribblings included– really doesn’t deserve a long shelf life. But, by caching materials away so easily are we also tossing away things of lasting value.  I don’t mean the works of a future Shakespeare or a document of “Declaration of Independence” import.  I mean things like the novelist Rick Moody’s music reviews on Rumpus or Margaret Atwood’s book reviews for The Guardian or the Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s powerful reading of “At Roane Head.”  My fear is that this stuff–which is important stuff, important aspects of our culture, glimpses into who we are–will someday disappear.  Without a trace.  Without record.

Is it the nature of blogging or on-line writing in general to be ephemeral? Is that what is the draw? Do we read it not expecting ever to go back to it.  I don’t know.

But it does worry me at times.

Susan Sontag

/ jpbohannon / 3 Comments

I have always been fascinated by Susan Sontag. I envied her seeming crystal-sharp intelligence, her confidence in her opinions, her strength in writing, her omnivorous reading.  While I certainly have not read everything of hers, I have read quite a lot.  Once as a reader for The Franklin Library’s First Editions, I read the galleys of The Volcano Lover, her historical novel about the triangle between Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma and Lord Nelson. It was the first piece of fiction of hers I had read. Like all of her writing it was intelligent, sharp and incisive.  And it had a truth that can only be found in fiction. Her following novel, In America, was not as satisfying for me–it seemed undone.  Or perhaps overdone, might be a better word, for the brilliant characters and storyline are over-examined and over analyzed as if Henry James were writing the screenplays for MadMan.  The novel is crushed by the intelligence.

However, I have read much of her non-fiction: Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966),  On Photography (1977),  Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1978 and 1988) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). (The Illness as Metaphor book was revamped in 1988 in order to address the scourge that was AIDS in the 1980’s.)  It is this non-fiction, her essays that make her an major figure of the late 20th-century.  It is in these essays that the true brilliance shines. Hers is a hard intelligence, but a very clear intelligence.  Her Against Interpretation gave readers an argument “against what something means” and for “what something is.” It includes insightful–and new–readings of  Sartre, of Beckett, of Bresson, among others.  Illness as Metaphor moves us from the tuberculosis and consumption that affected so many of the 19th century’s literary characters and creators to the cancer that became the overriding metaphor of the twentieth.  On Photography discusses the relatively new art of photography–only since the mid-19th century– in a way that will change how even the most amateur viewer–myself– views photographs again.  And at the beginning of the second Iraq war, I once gave a section of Regarding the Pain of Others to a class of 18-year olds, and it surprised me how well it worked with theml.

A few years ago, I went to the Brooklyn Art Museum to see a photographic exhibit on Sontag by Annie Liebovitz, perhaps America’s most famous and celebrated portraitist at the time. Liebovitz–who had had a decades long romantic relationship with Sontag–captured Sontag’s final years, among family and friends. Many of them were during her final days, during her final battle with cancer. To this day I don’t know if I am more affected by the words Sontag wrote or the images of her that I saw that day.  Both, suggest an admirable toughness and wit.

What I also don’t know is why today, the NYTimes decided to publish a sampler of Sontag’s work in the Week in Review section of the Sunday paper. There is no anniversary that I know of. It just appeared.  But good, it made for a good read on a Sunday morning, and a good afternoon going through some old books. The excerpts are just that–excerpts–but they show the range, the depth and the honesty of her writing and her mind.  The article is below: enjoy it.

Sontag by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Opinion

A Sontag Sampler

By SUSAN SONTAG
Published: March 31, 2012

Art Is Boring

Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves — it’s a question of affluence.)

People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us. But most of the interesting art of our time is boring.

Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.

Maybe art has to be boring, now. (This doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good — obviously.) We should not expect art to entertain or divert anymore. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye — but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented).

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

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On Intelligence

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”

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Why I Write

There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.

I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.

This is what I meant when I said Thursday evening to that offensive twerp who came up after that panel at MoMA to complain about my attack on [the American playwright Edward] Albee: “I don’t claim my opinions are right,” or “just because I have opinions doesn’t mean I’m right.”

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Love and Disease

Being in love (l’amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One “falls” in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time.

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On Licorice, Bach, Jews and Penknives

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long- haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.

Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, wagon-lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, penknives, aphorisms, hands.

Things I dislike: television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.

This material is excerpted and adapted from the forthcoming book “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980,” by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.  A version of this was originally published in the NEW YORK TIMES, April 1, 2012.

Letter-writing, letters, Beckett and love

/ jpbohannon / 8 Comments

About five years ago, I traveled to Durban, South Africa.  I flew direct from Washington, D.C. to Johannesburg and then a short flight from Johannesburg to Durban. It is a grueling flight–19 hours in the air and plenty more in airports.  But during the flight, I read volume one of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940.  I must admit I was enthralled–and may be the only person to have read the nearly 900-page collection in one sitting. Nevertheless, three years later I am now reading volume two ( The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956).  Certainly there is a touch of the voyeur in reading another’s letters, and, for me, not a little hero-worship in reading the letters of Beckett as he casually mentions Jack Yeats, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nora Joyce, etc.  (The first letter in this collection is a postcard that he had sent to Joyce, a pre-printed, government regulated correspondence limited to family news because of the war.  Beckett sent the postcard from Paris to the Joyces in Switzerland, saying that he and Suzanne were all right.  He wrote it on January 12, 1941 and it arrived in Switzerland on the 17th. Joyce never received it, however, having died on the 13th, the day after Beckett wrote it. )

Anyway besides the snoopiness and the adolescent-like hero worship, the letters have me thinking of correspondence in general.  Except for writing thank-you notes –a good habit I learned from my father and my uncle–most of my correspondence now is through e-mail. Even the majority of my manuscript submissions are done electronically with the cover letter included in the submission.  Yet there is something about letter writing I miss.

A love letter, or any kind of letter for that matter, is so much more intriguing to receive–and more fulfilling to write–than a text or an e-mail. During a 10-day trip to Paris, I once wrote fourteen letters back home to the love of my life. I can still see the thin hotel stationery, the blue, white and red airmail envelopes, the soft lobby light in the ragged hotel under which I poured out my soul. Today, those letters probably mean more to me than to the person that received them. They capture a unique moment in my life, an amber-encased slice of who I once was.

In that sense,  I take pleasure  in reading  letters that I have written or received in the past–they transport me to where and who I was at the time they were written.

(Perhaps  the most beautiful love story I have ever read is by an Irish novelist named Niall Williams entitled Four Letters of Love.  It is a wonderful novel that revolves around letter writing–as well as around painting, fishing, the Aran Islands, death, heartbreak and redemptive love.)

What about you? Have you  given up on snail-mail completely? I worry about the impermanence of all our correspondence, of the ephemeral nature of e-mail and texting. True, they say that every stroke of your keyboard can ultimately be retrieved and that nothing in cyberspace really disappears, but are the biographers and historians of the future going to have access to these? Is the estate of a future Samuel Beckett going to allow some academic to sift through the computer files –deleted and saved–of the person whose name is entrusted to them?  I cannot say. But I do know the thrill of opening an envelope, of slipping out a hard-stock card, sheets of creamy stationery, or ripped pages of loose-leaf.  Am I simply missing some golden-hazed memory or have we truly lost something special?

E-mail me what you think.  Hah!

Voice

/ jpbohannon / 10 Comments

I am fairly new to this blogging thing, but I am not new to writing.  However, I am finding it very difficult to find my “Voice” here on these pages. Reading other journals and blogs, I find that the writers seem so confidant, so knowledgeable, so sure of what is important. And I am not. My writing–particularly my fiction–is informed by uncertainty. In the simple “boy meets girl” scenario, for instance, my characters are left hanging. That’s about it…”boy meets girl.”  Rarely does he get her, and if he never gets her, then he certainly can’t lose her.  It is perhaps my version of a Beckettian void (and probably more suitable to a shrink than to a blog.) So where does this void fit in with a regular blog?

Are bloggers just pretending that they know? Or do most of them feel that they are expert in some one thing or another? Is the internet a means for validation of their opinions, of the worth of their personal world view?  I don’t know.  It is difficult for me. For example,  I loved the movie The Beginners, but I know as many people who found it too slow and pointless. Why should I then write about its worth? To prove to myself that my judgement is correct? To initiate a conversation? I don’t know.  I need help here.

I guess, ultimately, my question is “What is the purpose of an individual’s blog?”–mine in particular. I have found that it is good for my thinking, for my productivity, for my thoughtfulness (not the same as “my thinking”). But wouldn’t a private journal do the same? The difference, I have found, between the two–the blog and the journal–is that I am more careful with the blog.  Knowing it is going “out there,” I am more careful with what I write, more careful in its correctness, more conscious of the language.  And I guess that is a good thing.  At least for my writing.   But again, why do it?

Can anyone help?  Are there people out there who can tell me?  Would love to hear your response to my questions.

Reading–or juggling–multiple books

/ jpbohannon / 2 Comments

As a teacher and a writer, my reading schedule gets a little jammed at times. I certainly have enough to read for my classes (at the moment, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451), but I have my other reading as well. For instance, at home I have three separate books that I am dealing with.  Borges’  Collected Fictions next to my bed,  Tom McCarthy’s Remainders traveling back and forth with me on the train, and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach in the living room.

The nice thing about Borges is that so many of the fictions are short–which is why they sit next to my bed. Because, although they are short, they are dense, and I usually get through one or two at the most before my eyelids start falling.

As I said, the train ride to and from work is when I am reading the McCarthy book, and reading certainly makes the commute go quickly. If the book is good enough, there is a real danger of missing one’s stop. And so far, Remainders is very good. I have an hour commute each way, so these “commuter” books usually are finished within a few days.

And finally, the book that is sitting in the living room, The Art of Fielding.  It is there for after dinner, before bed, before or after grading essays, marking tests, preparing classes.  It is this book–the living room book–that usually takes the longest to complete.  But I’ve learned it’s not a race, and more often than not the quickness of a read is not necessarily an indicator of the quality of the read.

Anyway, my question to you writers out there.  When you are writing, do you deliberately stay away from reading?  Do you read only for “research,” whatever that might entail?  Or do you find that you can continue your usual reading patterns without any interruptions to your writing?

Big Debut

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I spent much too long Saturday night–and far into Sunday morning–reading different writers’ blogs from the journals I was reading (Annalemma, The Coffin Factory, Pank, Cabinet des Fees etc.) I figure it’s about time I gave this blogging thing a try. Anyway, I am diving in completely unprepared. But, I have been on a bit of a roll lately–two poems, one short story published and another story finished and sent out–so I guess the time is right for me to begin this undertaking. As with all things, I appreciate any comments, any suggestions, any ideas. Cheers.