Death of an Academic

Today, Morning Edition featured, as part of their series on the American dream, a story about a man named Juan Carlos Reyes, went to college in order to work his way out of poverty in the South Bronx.  They said that Reyes was introduced to the notion of the American dream via Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  Reyes describes the idea as that "with hard work and dedication you'll get a nice house, a nice car, and enough money for your kids to go to school."  Afterwards, the program transitioned to its next segment by pointing out that Miller's play was one of many examples of the American dream being a theme of literature.

I find it amusing that no one involved in the segment seemed to recognize the irony of using that particular piece of literature as an illustration of the topic of the series.  Yes, the protagonist, Willy Loman, was a successful person, but his success came at the expense of his happiness and peace of mind.  Is that fact irrelevant to our understanding of the American dream?  Miller conveyed the impression that Willy Loman pursued the surest path to more money and possessions despite the fact that there was another livelihood that would have suited him better and perhaps led to a happier marriage and a better upbringing for his children, even if in a smaller home.

For a long time, I have had the sense that people would understand Miller's play better if it was updated for a modern audience.  I've considered the idea of writing a version called Death of an Academic.  In the social circumstances in which Miller was writing, a man was generally expected to pursue the molded image of the American dream by committing himself early and completely to sales.  Today the assumption is that the more you devote yourself to formal education, the more money you'll acquire, and thus the closer you'll be to the American dream.  Young men and women are expected to follow that path regardless of resources, personal interest, or aptitude.

The Reyes story presents him as having been saved from the unacceptable fate of following his initial ambition to become a doorman.  Before being steered toward higher education, he reasoned that people in that position made sixteen dollars per hour and that that would suit him fine.  He may be better off and happier now than he would have been if he'd acceded to lesser ambitions, but that's not the main idea that I get from the way the story is presented.  Instead, the message seems to be that sixteen dollars per hour is simply not enough.

I graduated with honors from NYU.  In the years between doing so and becoming a full-time freelancer, I never had a job that paid more than nine dollars an hour.  It was a meager existence, but still I was able to support myself - or at least I would have been were it not for the crushing debt I incurred in going to school.  How much more resentful I would be of that fact had I gone to college merely as a means to an end, and not because I was genuinely, passionately interested in my education.

With each generation, we slightly change the shape of the American dream.  But we don't change the notion that one size fits all, that that dream looks the same and feels the same for every type of person.  In fact, some people are better off becoming carpenters than traveling salesmen; some people are better off becoming doormen than graduate teaching assistants.

"Weak Statement. Stonger Statement."

I often fear I’m destined to be a conservative. Many of the breaking points that I look forward to are reversals of modern trends. They’re usually not political, but they are conservative in more of a personal, romantic, yearning-for-an-imagined-past sort of way. In all probability, I’m just cynical. I have a habit of looking with scorn on things that are new and seeing the worst examples with particular clarity. Meanwhile, I tend to focus almost exclusively on the best elements of things once they are comfortably in the past.

I know it’s a flawed way of engaging with the world. I don’t think it’s altogether incorrect, though, only skewed. I’m just more optimistic about legacies than about trends. I like to believe that my perceptions of good and bad are still accurate, even if they aren’t counterbalanced in either case.

I can be quite unforgiving with the negative observations that I make of culture and the arts. I’m sure that history will vindicate the best that music, literature and film currently have to offer, but while I’m living amidst it I see so much more dreck. It gives me the impression that our collective standards are getting lower. The least sophisticated works of art gain the greatest popularity. Perhaps it’s always been like that, but such beautiful things have grown out of the past; how did they avoid being corrupted by pablum?

I don’t read what seems to be bad literature. There is far too much excellent literature to read for me to waste my time, and I don’t read enough anyway. So I don’t have a thorough sense of what linguistic or stylistic features are characteristic of bad artistry, beyond what is apparent on the surface. But as a result of reading modern writing more generally, I worry about the trajectory what is accepted as literary language.

I am fairly proud to admit that I’m rather snobbish about grammar. I’m probably prone to error, but I am the sort of person who will stop and correct myself in mid-conversation if I end a sentence with a preposition. (I know that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I know that my third clause in this post ended with a preposition.) So I’ve noticed some trends with which I am snobbishly uncomfortable. One of these is that sentence fragments seem to be commonly accepted, even encouraged in published literature these days.

I was reading the most recent issue of Creative Nonfiction, and I found in one article several examples of short, declarative, ungrammatical phrases, which decidedly limit how seriously I can take the writing. Early in the article, the author writes:

“California is among the states that require judges to divide the community property perfectly equally between the divorcing parties. No matter what.”

Now, I recognize that the author is trying to give particular weight to that latter phrase by isolating it from the rest of the sentence, but I think that that’s a lazy way for a writer to evoke the intended response from his or her audience. But this author does it again later:

“She followed and shot him again. And again.”

(Nice phrase, let me re-use it.) And again:

“Maria got revenge. And six years in state prison.”

Thinking about it now, I’m quite sure that I’ve seen numerous other examples of this in published work elsewhere. I am uncomfortable with a literary landscape in which this sort of cutting of corners is considered effective and is widely accepted by editors.

Writers are different from spoken word artists. We should be able to convey our ideas and leave an impact upon our audience by more nuanced means than pausing for dramatic effect. If an author wishes for there to be strength in a subsequent observation, he should convey it with the strength of his language, and his words should punch his audience in the gut or grab it by the testicles, not merely slap it on the ear.

I’m sure that I have little cause to worry and that these trends will fade in the history of modern literature, but so long as I’m in the midst of it, I’ll demand better from the here-and-now. Perhaps it is the persistence of those demands that keeps the worst of our culture and art from being as visible in retrospect as it is in the moment.

The Lesser Value of Fiction

Laura Miller recently wrote a piece in response to the author Phillip Roth stating that he has stopped reading fiction. Miller points out that other authors have said the same in previous years, among them William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, and Will Self. She offers an interesting assessment of the motivations that might lay behind this, albeit an incomplete one. To my mind, the most significant observation was this comparison of nonfiction and fiction, and of how the reader interacts with them:

“As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn't offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.”

Not being a literary critic myself, I can’t write competently about what might be people’s general motivations for reading one thing as opposed to another, or about the observed merits of various genres and different types of authors. I can only speak to my personal assessment of the value of different kinds of writing, a perspective that comes less from my observations of what I read than from my observations of what I write.

As my financial situation has gotten increasingly dire, and my job prospects have proven themselves to be nil, my ambition to write has never waned very much. However, it swiftly became apparent to me that if I intended to make any money off of my passion, I would probably have to focus more on writing fiction than I had before. Indeed, it seemed to me that if I wanted to keep my passion alive at all, I’d need to focus on fiction, because a hopeless outlook on my own life sapped me of the motivation to do otherwise.

This reorganization of my priorities was a definite problem, though, because I began trying to write fiction knowing that my heart wasn’t in it. Although it’s more accurate to say that my heart’s not in the writing of realistic fiction. I do, however, have a special interest in speculative fiction, and I can write it with conviction and aplomb much the same way that I can write editorial content and, when I have the inspiration for it, creative non-fiction. But I have never really seen enough value in literary realism to pour my creativity into it. My feeling is that if I am going to write something that’s grounded in my imagination, it ought to be something that is beyond the limits of ordinary experience – something that allows people to understand their world and themselves by bringing their mundane understanding to bear on fantastic worlds and experiences unlike our own. And if I’m going to write something realistic, why not write something that is actually real?

When Miller writes that fiction offers an experience rather than information or instruction, she makes a meaningful point, but she implies that non-fiction, by contrast, doesn’t offer experience. And that is not strictly true. Creative nonfiction can very poignantly present both elements to the reader, providing clear, confirmable information, but putting it into the context of vividly described experiences that surround that base of knowledge. One of the most trite pieces of advice given to aspiring writers, often by people who do not write, is “write what you know.” Trite though it may be, that advice does strike me as sound and perhaps obvious. If you don’t know what you’re writing about, you’re just making things up and risking information. As an adolescent, my aspirations to become a better writer entailed not rigorously exercising my imagination, but increasing the range of things that I knew. In what might be an ironic testament to my lack of imagination, my life since then has been much more isolated and monotonous than I ever thought possible, and I am tragically unwilling to write about China or Iowa because I have never been to either, or about logging or yachting because I have neither done nor witnessed those things. It may be hideously limiting and self-defeating, but as far as I’m concerned, I have no business writing about things that I haven’t seen first-hand but theoretically could.

I make no judgments about what other people write, but my personal standards do extend into what I read and how I appreciate the things that I read. I have encountered some moving, powerful fictional stories, but I often come away from them with a certain conflicted feeling that I do not have when I read speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, or straightforward nonfiction. I read a splendidly written story in a recent New Yorker about a woman’s experience of becoming homeless. It was a good story, it spoke to me, and it seemed distinctly plausible. But that last point distracted me at some point as I was reading it. There is something about reading a story that seems real but isn’t that can be somewhat disturbing to me. Here I was vicariously experiencing somebody’s misfortune and misery, striving to empathize with it and learn from it, and it wasn’t real. Yet at the same time, thousands of real people were experiencing the same basic experiences, and the opportunity was there for the author to write about something real with the same vividness and narrative strength, through which to present even more meaningful themes – more meaningful because they would have been real.

I think the same impulse explains my tendency to remain disinterested in contemporary novels, always focusing instead on brushing up on the classics. Such books might be fabrications of perfectly ordinary events, but at least they describe a time and place that I cannot experience for myself. But when the stories come from my world, from early twenty-first century America, I am not much driven to read them. I would much rather go out into that world and bear witness to the true stories being crafted within it, with all their literary quality. And if I can ever get out of the circumstance of just barely eking out a living in Buffalo, NY, those are the stories that I, as a writer, want to tell.

A Sense of Place

There was a nice slideshow on Salon yesterday, naming some of the most beautiful and distinctive bookstores in the world, which, the author said, would “make you rethink your Kindle.”

I don’t think the average Kindle owner thought about it in the first place. I get the impression that the e-book reader phenomenon is driven primarily by an unmitigated and all but universal fervor for technology. If it’s identified as new and innovative, it seems as though people will stand in line to get one, even if they never considered whether they wanted it or needed it.

But the higher tech option is not always the best option, and I wish I could push American society to the breaking point of realizing that fact once and for all. Sometimes the traditional alternative provides an appeal that is different from the appeal of modernity, but one that is still distinct and meaningful. The Salon piece suggests one such appeal that should be obvious, but that I think is often overlooked even by the defenders of analog: the beauty of actually buying something from a physical space.

I’m not at all a shopper, but when I do wish to acquire something, nothing pleases me more than holding it in my hands before it is really mine to possess. I love to flip through copious stacks of records and find the ones that most appeal to me, and I love to leaf through physically real books, to be able to pick things up at random and hold them side-by-side.

If there’s one thing that technology cannot satisfyingly replace, I would say that thing may be the thrill of discovery. I honestly can't understand why this doesn’t occur to other people. Convenience is not always an improvement. There is a point at which convenience steals away the features that made an activity what it was. And in the case of books, tactile sensation and dog-earing pages and marginalia all aside, part of the experience of literature – indeed, of virtually anything – is its physicality, the sense that there is a place where the literate gather, a shared visual representation of the enormity of what the intellectually curious are vainly striving to grasp.

Sometimes, as the Salon slideshow points out to us, that physical space may be a repurposed cathedral or theater, a site standing as a lovely monument in some distant place, or hidden somewhere inside the daily experiences of our landscape. Sometimes, bookstores are really beautiful. And to my mind, losing bookstores, or record stores, or any of the other places that lend a sense of community, sacrifice, and engagement to our acts of acquisition is bad enough if those places are banal. It is worse when the experience that’s lost is not only meaningful and affective, but powerfully unique.