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We collect dictionaries in this house. Actually, Ms. Ninja collects them and my job is to sort through other books to give away to make room. Ms. Ninja likes to argue that she is multi-lingual and may need them for writing in other languages, and I’m all like, Well, then how multi-lingual are you, fancypants? But then she swears at me in Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, etc. and I just respond in English.
I love that it’s a tradition in dictionaries to have a fake entry. It’s right in my wheelhouse. And in turn, I also love entirely fake dictionaries like The Meaning of Lif, by Douglas Adams, and The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce. I have even been keeping a list of my own neologisms for possible publication one day (I think I might be the one who invented the term “Douché”. I can’t find any use of it from before my use back when. It’s “what one says when one has been bested in an argument by an asshole.” It was on Bookninja decades ago. Now its on t-shirts. Poets are shitty businessfolk.)
Eley Williams has always loved dictionaries. That love shone throughout her dazzling, acrobatic 2017 collection, Attrib. and Other Stories, which savoured words and wordplay with an irresistible enthusiasm. The debut catapulted its tiny publisher, Influx, on to prize lists and heralded the arrival of a singular new voice.
It all dates back to her childhood, when Williams’s family kept a pile of dictionaries by the kitchen table. “Once you start looking words up it’s very easy to ricochet from column to column, falling down a rabbit hole … I got ‘precocious’ in a school report and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I thought it was probably a very good thing.” She continued to ricochet around the columns throughout her school years, even starting her own dictionary of neologisms as a teenager, inspired by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff. As time went on, she became more and more fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of a branch of knowledge that sets out to fix and codify meaning. “The concept is so ambitious … there’s something humane and sympathetic in the fact that we’ll always fall short, but something extraordinary in that we’d ever attempt it.” She wrote a PhD about fictitious entries in dictionaries, part of which has become her eagerly awaited debut novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, out this month.
Here’s another one of those articles that gives you permission to dump a book like a mediocre boyfriend. I feel like this is useful advice for many things in life: if you’re not enjoying something, cast it from your life into the fire like Isildur should have done with the One Ring. Books, drinks, jobs, marriages, “friends”, JK Rowlings, trips to that one grocery store that is local but is always stocked like its Romania in 1984, etc.
I love reading books I hate. I used to hate it (which you’d think is the normal way of things) because I was one of those people who would force myself to finish a book, even if every turn of the page filled me with unmitigated dread. Even if each sentence made my brain wince. For some reason, I placed moral value on not giving up until I had reached the back cover.
I no longer do that. I learned that life is too short to indulge in things that do not give a great return on my energy, emotion or time. So you might say I enjoy tossing a book I am disliking across a room (though I’m not cavalier enough to do that: I just snap it shut in a decisive way). The relief of calling time on something one is not enjoying, and which is not enriching, brings a warmth and lightness.
It’s Friday. You are here. What happened, happened. Let it go for a brief moment and inhale your 5pm freedom. Three deep breaths. I mean, once you finish the commute and aren’t on a carbon monoxide saturated superhighway full of other dead-eyed people waiting to do something they actually want to. If you’re Priding this weekend, enjoy and stay 7 more feet apart than usual at Pride events.
Happy Pridetimes! I always imagined that people working on Rowling’s books would just wander around the office pantomiming homerun swings and high-fiving each other while doing very little actual editing of her words… How’d that work out in the end? Her sales are dropping;
Poets versus the police… in Toronto… in the 60s… but, let’s not forget that poetry activism aside, Acorn was no hero, by any stretch of the imagination;
This Cosmo writer says yes. And she says that women of colour are much more likely to get you hyped up for that nooner quickie than anything by men. I’m inclined to agree in many ways. Mostly around the porn thing, which I believe is destroying young men, sexually. The talks I have to have in this house full of boys are uncomfortable, but I think a necessary antidote to whateverthefrig they get up to when the door is locked. Mainstream porn isn’t about sex, it’s about the performance of extreme sexual stunts in the service of further entrenching positions of male power and dominance. Just like Avengers isn’t about heroes and anything with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler is probably not about romance. It’s all just a set of extremes and circus-like performance designed to impress. Like the difference between someone commuting to work on rollerblades vs. the X-Games, or the difference between juggling and Cirque du Soleil. Just because the body CAN do those things, doesn’t mean most people WANT to do them. Anyway, what were we talking about again? Oh, right: bad sex scenes.
Allow me to vent for a second: Male authors have mastered the art of turning literary work into something that makes my libido want to go full-on MIA.
Maybe it’s just me or because of what I’ve read most recently, but if I see another male write “bulging member” and/or “throbbing penis” used as a dick descriptor in an erotic scene, I might scream.
Now don’t get me wrong, I recognize that many women writers fall into this trap too, as there are only so many ways to say “penis” without saying “penis.” But from what I’ve experienced, many women possess the skills to write around the word “cock” instead of blatantly using it… over and over and over again, until it’s actually nauseating.
And personally, I have a couple theories on why men are like this when writing sex scenes: One is that years of watching porn, where all it takes to get women to orgasm are a few weak strokes and unattractive grunts, have permanently damaged their perception of what real sex should look like.
Virago changed the state of publishing in the 70s and is now being profiled as a grandparent of feminist thought at the New Statesman.
Originally, this book was going to be called “The Idealistic Publisher”. It is not as good a title as A Bite of the Apple, with its hint of Eve’s hunger for knowledge, but that first version does at least allude more directly to one of the central themes of this honest and engaging account: how do you keep faith with the demands of an ever-changing feminist politics and an equally tumultuous literary market? Plot spoiler: it has always been a tough call.
Virago, founded in 1973, was the brain child of the Australian publisher and writer Carmen Callil, soon joined by Ursula Owen, and sustained over the years by a small and loyal team. It began in an era of gentleman’s publishing that then seemed unassailable, but largely looks like a bunch of fusty old patriarchs to modern eyes. Born of, and borne along by, the rage and energy of a generation of young educated women, Virago’s early publications brilliantly channelled this hunger for a new politics, a new history, a different kind of fiction. It has published 4,000 titles, 1,000 authors, had ten different offices and seven different forms of ownership. In 1995, it was bought out by Little, Brown – in part as protection against the dissolution of the Net Book Agreement, which, in ensuring that all retailers sold books at agreed prices, had enabled smaller, independent presses (and bookshops) to survive.
One day more until you can relax and just be stressed about the state of the world only, instead of the world and your job and your kids and your friends who are sliding into conservatism and the likelihood that you’re going to explode and make a mess of every relationship you ever had if you don’t get a friggin beer into you right away.
Did you guys see Lorrie Moore losing it on Millennials? Don’t agree with some of it, but those sentences must have been delicious to write… I sort of imagine her hunched at her computer licking her teeth like a psychopath planning the demise of an enemy;
As I recently wrote, I have learned my lesson with open letters, and this guy lays out much of my thinking better than I could, and in the pages of the very magazine at the centre of the latest open-letter shitshow. A letter is never enough space to flesh out an idea to everyone’s satisfaction — or even space enough to get basic ideas down with leaving holes so big you could drive an entire semitruck full of writers through it. I tell you what, next time someone suggests you sign an open letter along with 152 other people, tell them you will but only if it’s collaboratively written and edited by everyone on the list. That way you will either end up with a book, or you’ll see that it’s unlikely that all 153 of you agree you’re saying the same thing.
Last month, I was asked to sign the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” now published in Harper’s with the signatures of 153 journalists and academics, including contributors to The Atlantic. The letter warned of “ideological conformity” and “illiberalism” in liberal institutions, and it noted a tendency to confront dissenting opinions not with debate but by going after the job of the dissident, or even by going after the job of those who merely note the existence of the dissent. We all have limits; some topics are beneath our dignity to debate. The signers argued that you should keep that category of the undebatable as small as possible, and not add to it whenever you form an opinion.
Perhaps because I spend a lot of time listening to people with crazy opinions, I am sympathetic to the view that the only way to live a healthy intellectual life is to expose oneself constantly to weird or detestable opinions. But I never sign petitions or open letters. I told the letter’s organizers that if I have something to say, I will write my own damn letter. Open letters are terrible, and you should never write one or sign one.
[Ramble ahead] Do you fear never creating great art? I do. Sort of. Not art that others consider great, necessarily, but rather art I can look square in the face and say, This one was truly good. I think we use superlatives too freely with art. “Genius”, “masterful”, “transcendant”, etc., along with whatever new buzzword is marketing art at the moment. It’s a symptom of a world in which we have to take even praise to an extreme in order for it to seem positive, much less garner any attention. Academic friends of mine have said that reference letters for students have to be over the top in their praise or the other profs reading it will take it as code that the prospective student/hire is merely mediocre. The same seems to be happening in art marketing/reviewing/commentary. The mythmaking is off the charts and out of hand. It’s okay if not everything is brilliant. The fact is that most everyone and everything is mediocre. Competent. (In some ways, this surfeit of competence is actually a plague. There are many, many, many competent poems — so many so that they drowns out and obscure what might be actually great. But I digress.) And even the canonical best (Heaney, Szymborska, MacEwan, Hill, Plath, Hughes, addyourownfavouritehere, etc. etc.) have mostly written what I’d call “passable” poems. Poems that are good. But not great. Heaney has maybe 12 truly great poems. Maybe three or four that are perfect. Most of the rest are pretty damn good. That’s what makes him a great. (But there are stinkers in there.) Picasso painted as many as double the great works as Heaney. And a few that are masterworks. The rest are very interesting and instructional. Does my lack of superlatives sound like I’m being negative to you? That’s part of the problem — we’ve burned out our words like “great”, not to mention “brilliant”, “masterful”, etc. It’s not enough for art to be good or great anymore. Our scale for what’s good/great/masterful has slid into the ridiculous in terms of both marketing and expectations. But on the other hand, I imagine the desire to reach those levels and see what it’s like has always been part of what drives artists. Personally, I have written some of my favourite-ever poems in the last couple months, none of them addressing the pandemic, but rather the minutiae of internalizing the external and seeing the world in discrete, concentrated through-lines. Are they great? Very unlikely. But a couple are good. Twenty-five years of writing and reading have taught me at least how to identify a good thing when I see it. My goal in life is to write one perfect poem — one that no one can take away from me. To see what Heaney, et al., felt when looking down and going (presumably), “Holy Shit!” In all likelihood, none of us reading this will ever create great art. And that’s okay. It’s the desire and repeated attempts to do so that makes you an artist, not the finished product, not the accolades, nor the sales — especially in a world that is at the point of having to invent new words every year to keep upping the ante on “brilliance”. (It’s like Christmas present creep, really. Every year has to be bigger or better than last year or it seems disappointing. Shut up and drink your fucking eggnog and enjoy your new socks and the company of friends). Of course, it’s easy for a poet to say, “Stop thinking of art as a product that needs marketing to increase sales” (we don’t sell much anyway), but it’s kind of true.
(tl;dr: “Great” is rare and precious and probably won’t happen to you.)
A few weeks ago, this author who is feeling the fear of pandemic “failure”, was telling people to not put pressure on themselves to create during the lockdown. Today she wonders if that was wise.
Of course, I’ve read the same inspirational posts you have about authors who didn’t write their first book until they were 50, or who were rejected by the first ten publishers they approached before becoming disgustingly successful. Last year Blackburn resident Margaret Ford became the world’s oldest debut author when, at 93, she published a book based on the love letters she and her husband sent each other during the Second World War. I don’t think my time is up, and I’m happy to wait and practise and wait and practise and somewhere along the line, hopefully improve.
But why didn’t I use lockdown to do so? A few weeks ago, on these very pages, I lamented that we shouldn’t put pressure on ourselves to be productive during a pandemic, and that it’s permissible – nay! even desirable – to watch Neighbours reruns and forget the very concept of a bra. I still believe this, and I forgive myself, but a voice in the back of my head is muttering, “If not now, then when?” If I can stare down another day of sofa, kitchen sink, park, sofa, bed and still not pick up a pen, when will I?
I read Zadie Smith’s White Teethwhen it came out back in the day and have been fanboying ever since (sadly, I met her charming and affable husband a year or two ago and liked him enough to feel guilty about my crush on her). It felt so different and vital at the time. How does it hold up? The Guardian’s book superhero Sam Jordison takes a look, wondering if it could even be written today.
Talking of loss, imagine reading a book published in 2020, that contained lines like this: “Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it’s manmade.” (No English writer will be able to write again such a sentence for at least a century after Brexit, let alone the country’s handling of Covid-19.) Imagine also reading a contemporary novel so fearlessly multicultural, in which a young author feels entirely free to inhabit the heads of people of different sexes, races and religious persuasions, and to do so with joy and irreverence. Who feels comfortable poking gentle fun at Christianity, Islam and Rastafarianism alike. Who delights in cramming as many special interest groups as possible into glorious sentences such as: “Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the Conservative Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St Agnes’s Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews.”
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