A Journey Through Literary American: A Review

Who would have Steinbeck been without Salinas? Faulkner without Oxford? Hawthorne without Salem? Langston Hughes without Harlem? Many things shape a writer, but the one so often cited is that city or town that rose around them.

Most writers ultimately will move away from the city of their birth, and yet so often is it the one thing that they come back to as they write.

A few weeks ago, I was given a copy of the coffee table book “A Journey Through Literary America” by Thomas R. Hummel (photos by Tamra L. Dempsey), and I couldn’t wait to read it. More often than not, I am more fascinated by the lives of writers then the works they write—there’s something about seeing what influenced a writers writing that I find inspiring.

The book, which features 26  different American writers (I’ll list them below if you are interested), shows modern pictures of the town and talks about what it was like when the author was living, and what it is like today.

If you are a literary history buff, it’s a worthy companion to your bookshelf.

Featured in the Book: Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, E. Annie Proulx, and Richard Ford.

John Updike, I Will Miss You

There have been so few writers who have affected me artistically like John Updike, who died yesterday of lung cancer; he was amongst the last living modernist, and his themes were subjects few other writers could write so honestly.

I was first introduced him as a senior in college, still too immature to truly understand half of the thematic elements in his novels, but greatly moved by the humanity of his characters; my senior thesis covered two of his greatest works In the Beauty of Lilies and Rabbit, Run. I remember thinking upon completed In the Beauty of Lilies "This is the way a novel is supposed to be written--not full of post-modern nonsense that somehow passes for art." It is, in my opinion, one of the best epic sagas I've ever read.

I think the greatest thing about him was he was a literary Renascence man--he wrote novels, essays, comics, stories--he covered more literary medians then any other writer I have seen, and he made it look so easy. He even was a Simpson character, which is a honor more commendable then the Nobel he never got.

A writers death always seems out of the blue, and to me there is tragedy here because we give so little thought to authors while they are alive; they are remember like legends in death--the bodies of their work read for hundreds of years; and yet it is actors and musicians who we treat as mortals in life--but they are quickly forgotten in death.

Thanks for the massive body of work you have left behind, John Updike...I will read you for years to come.

The Final Days of David Foster Wallace

Salon posted a nice article about the final days of DFW. It elaborates a little more on just how depressed he was his final year, and speculates that he may not have actually wrote anything in a year.

It also says for the first time anywhere who his wife was, which I've been wondering since I first heard the news of his death (I didn't even know he was married); she is an artist and owns her own studio not far from where Wallace taught called Beautiful Crap.

It definitely put a more human side to the man so many of us felt was immortal; it's easy to get caught up in an authors work and build them up to be almost a work of fiction.

Also, the public memorial service that was being planned at Pomona has now been moved to New York...the date has not been set.

Revisiting John Grisham

John Grisham isn't exactly who you brag about as an English Literature student when people ask you what writer inspired you to major in English. I wouldn't say he is my reason, but he is a pretty big contributing factor.

When I entered high school, we were forced to read a lot of things I didn't enjoy at the time (although I have appreciation for them now); they were people like Dickens, Shakespeare and Thoreau. I don't know if I was just too young for them or if I simply didn't like the idea of being forced to read something.

It was during this period that I was turned off from reading for a few years. My senior year of high school, a political science teacher gave the class a list of books, and told us to pick one and write a review of it; they were names like Clancy and Turrow. Names I had never heard of. One of my mom's friends saw the list, and said she had just finished a book called "The Rainmaker" by one of the names, John Grisham.

It was the first time in sometime that I enjoyed a book, and I managed to finish it in less than a week. For the next couple years, I would continue to read whatever Grisham book was released that year. After, however, I officially became a English Lit major my junior year of college, I stopped reading him entirely. It was partly because I had a lot of other books to read, and partly because I started to think I was beyond Grisham--I had the "Grisham's for sixth graders" attitude.

A few weeks ago, I was at Costco with my wife, and saw a Grisham paperback, "Playing for Pizza" for less than four bucks. I had plenty of other things to read, but the book was cheap, and I knew would be an easy read; I figured why not?

Grisham still is not the best writer in the business, but there's a reason he gets paid millions for his book--he knows how to keep the readers interest. The book was about football of all things (a sport I have absolutely no interest in), but I stayed interested the entire book. The characters were pretty flat; the plot was sort of like a Lifetime movie; but there was a story with a heart, and that story was a fun read.

Lately, I've learned that's it's nice to take a break from reading serious things every now and then and pull out a book that is cheesy, fluffy, and not really about anything. When I'm ready for that break, I know I still have Grisham.

The Literary Journey

Last weeks post got a lot of page hits and a few comments; I'm amazed that when people read how shady this publisher is, they still think it's a good idea to publish with them. That's just how desperate people can be to see their books in print. There are plenty of writers out there willing to help nurture those desperate writers, so places like Publish America will cease to exist.

I think there are a lot of people out there that think they can sit down and write a book, and then it's going to be a bestseller. They make the entire process seem so effortless. I wish that it was (and for maybe a few it is), but for most people the journey is much longer and much harder and what it all comes down to is hard work.

Roland (from the book) told me awhile back that he read if you practice anything for three hours a day for ten years, then you should be successful. You can read his blog about it here. He's a little off. This is what led up to the publication of my first book:

*Age 11, write my first short story. It's about a person whose hand gets cut off and comes alive and haunts people.

*Age 12 or 13, begin to write first novel. It's about terrorism; more precisely it's about a group of people who are going to take over an airplane and take everyone hostage.

*Age 16, have two rods inserted in my back and get pissed off at the world

*Age 16, write a serious of essays in a book length work about why everyone is going to hell. I was very angry at the world.

*Age 16-17, write my first complete novel. If memory serves me correct, it's about 500 pages, and follows the life of a high school basketball star; he was kind of who I wanted to be, but couldn't on account of having rods in my back and being pretty immobile. Rejected by 50+ agents. Never Published.

*Age 17, compete my second novel. This one is about a prophet who heals people and preaches around the world. He is assassinated at the end. Rejected by 100+ agents. Never published.

*Age 18, enter college as a journalist major, but drop out of the program after I write my first article and am told it's so bad that I will not receive a grade.

*Age 18, complete my third novel. It's about a movie star whose wife is kidnapped and he goes on a journey with his brother to find her. Never bothered to submit it.

*Age 18-19, write about 400 to 500 pages of two or three different novels that I never finish. By this point I had probably wrote close to (or perhaps over) 2,000 pages of writing.

*Age 19-22, write mostly short stories to develop my voice. About 30 to 50 in all. Submit many of them. Only two ("Golden Poppies" and "Mother's Day") are published in journals

*Age 22, attend Kenyon Review Writer's workshop

*Age 22, start library school, but continue to take graduate level creative writing classes. Start writing a new novel and a novella. Finish both. I believe the novel is the best piece of fiction (at that point in my life) I had ever written, and start to lose hope in publishing when I can't find anyone who will publish it.

*Age 23-25, begin writing children's books and graduate library school. Write about three middle grade books, and a dozen or so picture books. I also begin writing "Dispatches from a Public Librarian" for McSweeney's. Begin to seriously consider self-publishing. Ultimately decide against.

*Age 25-27, work for the next several years revisiting old stories. Decide to skip a MFA in writing to study the craft of writing independently. I work on developing voice, structure, character, and dialog. Write several screenplays for movies, in part to learn about dialog and pacing. Begin work on a new novel, this one combines elements of mythology, fantasy, and literary fiction. Complete it but is rejected by the few agents I send it to.

*Age 27, begin to work on what will become "Quiet, Please." I don't think it was rejected by even one agent.

*Age 28, signed a contract with Caroll & Graf, which was bought by Da Capo.

*Age 29, after 3000+ pages of rejected fiction, non-fiction, and even poetry--after receiving hundreds (if not thousands) of rejection slips from publishers, agents and journals--having spent hundreds of dollars on stamps--I am a published author. I had been writing for almost 20 years with nothing but reject slips to show for it. Was it worth the struggle, the desperation, the loneliness, the years of hiding in my room slouched over a keyboard typing? Of course.

Thomas Pynchon

Not long ago I spent nearly all my day, off and on, trying to track down a copy of an international newspaper that printed, allegedly, a current photograph of Thomas Pynchon (by current I mean within the last 10 years). Why? I really don't know. I was bored at work, and honestly (i.e. shamefully), I believe I have developed a huge man crush on Pynchon that revivals only that of David Foster Wallace.

I went through dozens (probably more like hundreds) of websites, databases, and blogs searching for Pynchon's mysterious face. I found his infamous clips from The Simpsons, those shots of him in his youth, a fuzzy picture of the alleged shot that CNN got of him walking down a busy New York City street, and, my favorite, photos that used computer technology (complete with aging filters) to show what Pynchon would look like based on his only confirmed photos (they were scary to say the least).

I confess I enjoyed my search; who wouldn't? They were full of wild theories about his Navy days and what he did to want such deep cover, how he had plastic surgery and was living down in TJ, that he was really J.D. Salinger, and that he had been dead for years and it was really just a group of writers using his name as a pen.

In the end, I still had not seen the alleged photo of him. In the end, I'm not sure I'd want to. The mystery of him is what I admire so greatly. I have The Crying of Lot 49...that's enough to keep me happy...at least for now.

Nicholson Baker Is a Big Fat Idiot

If you go to graduate school to get a degree in library science, you’re bound to come across figures in the literary circle that really pissed off a librarian, and your entire two years in graduate school will be at times misery because of this literary figure.


There was only one when I was in school. Nicholson Baker. There are few people who can stand alone in a sentence by being both the noun and verb--good ole Nick is one of these people.


The curse of Nicholson Baker apparently all started in 1996, when Baker wrote an article called “The Author vs. the Library” for the New Yorker (volume 72). The article attacked the way the San Francisco Public Library was discarding many of its older books.


I have not read the article, I do not care what the article has to say, and indirectly I don’t hold anything against Baker (although I still cringe when I hear his name and silently curse him for the horrors the name put me through in graduate school).


To this very day, many librarians have remained bitter and outraged with Nicholson Baker; in fact many faculty members at San Jose State’s library science department will probably be willing to argue about Baker and book preservation at the mere drop of his name.

For Mature Eyes Only

Norman Mailer may be dead, but that didn't stop him from recieving this years award for Bad Sex in Fiction (yes, apparently there is an award for this sort of thing...and the award has been going on for 15 years). The judges cited his use of excrement in his novel "The Castle in the Forest" as being the tipping point for the award, though they also cited a line about a male character being "ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive into her piety" as another example of bad sex.

An honourable mention also went out to Jeanette winterson who used the phrase "silicon-lined vaginas."

Read the full article here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2217967,00.html

Aimee Bender is Evil: An Opposing Viewpoint

Some years ago, while I was just a young lad in library school, I came across a story called “Quiet Please” (read it here: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0798/bender/sstory1.html) by Aimee Bender. The story was published in GQ and later in the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

She was quite the talk of town among critics at the time who were calling her the post-modern Kafka. While critics were praising her, I, and many librarians, were mocking her for that story.

The story is about a librarian having a series of graphic sexual encounters in the break room with various patrons, and concludes with the librarian being paraded through the library like a sexual queen of sorts.

The story explored a now popular cliché that librarians are desperate sexual predators hungry to have sexual encounters in the break room. Bender’s allegations are completely untrue, unfounded, and uncalled for. Nonetheless, Bender’s story has seriously hampered the creditability of librarians and the serious nature of their job.

For the record, I have never witnessed or heard of such encounters happening in a library, and further have concluded that Aimee Bender is evil for ever making the claims. Public librarians are nice people, but sexual addicts they are not.

Now law librarians--that’s a whole different can of beans--they can be wild animals when provoked.

Dave Eggers EW Interview

If you really want to know a thing or two about the publishing business, or simply want to here about a man quietly doing good things in the world, then follow the link to the EW interview with Dave Eggers: http://www.ew.com/eggers

David Foster Wallace

Normally collections of essays are pretty much hit and miss campaigns; sometimes they are good, but usually they are not. This years 2007's "The Best American Essays" is edited by David Foster Wallace. If you have never heard of read Wallace, then stop reading this blog and go get yourself familar. Wallace is by far one of the most talented writers of this generation. If he can pick a good essay as well as he can write one, then I'm sure you will be in for one heck of a ride. The book is already out, so look for it today at your local library or bookstore.

Also, if your are a fan of Wallace, look for "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" to hit movie screens across the country soon. It's directed by John Krasinski (Jim on "The Office")