Anyway, here’s my responses, in order.  Laughing Boy, I will grant you, is not a work of lasting cultural impact like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, although I kind of doubt Mr. Hale has read it.  If he had, he’d know that, unlike Hemingway, Oliver La Farge was doing something really extraordinary in 1930—he was a white American man writing a thoughtful and serious portrayal of minority characters, in which white Americans figure as bit players (and mostly cast in the role of villains—or at the very least are negatively portrayed).  In fact, I am hard-pressed to name any other young white male author doing anything so culturally smart and open-minded in that era—if there are others, I’d like to know about them.  No, La Farge is not Hemingway or Faulkner.  But to single his one book out as the Pulitzer’s most scorn-worthy decision is really cheap, and frankly I think shows that Hale is unfamiliar with the work, which doesn’t really inspire confidence.  I could certainly give him Pulitzers to rant about, if he wants them.

Regarding his shot at the early Pulitzer winners, I think that he seems awfully smug about the “forgotten” early novels, given that he then spends much of the rest of his piece noting that artists are not always appreciated in their own time—in particular, he wishes that he could encourage the unappreciated-in-his-time Herman Melville.  I agree with him on Melville, but here’s my question for Hale: how do you know that these novels have been justly forgotten?  Isn’t it possible that many of them have been as wrongly neglected today as Melville was wrongly neglected in his lifetime?  Why should we assume that our tastes now are better than their tastes were then?  I know from experience the worth of tackling another age’s literature and trying to understand it.  Sure, it’s sometimes deeply disappointing—I think we are better at seeing and appreciating some things now (like the validity of minority viewpoints and experiences)—but at other times I have been truly and wonderfully surprised.  I somehow suspect I’ve read far more of the Pulitzer’s first 20 years than Mr. Hale has—I can’t match his credentials as a writer, but I’d thank him not to talk too loudly about novels whose worth he’s been content to judge purely by their current popularity among the  academics with whom he discusses books.  Perhaps in another decade, or century, Josephine W. Johnson will be received into the canon as an important American voice, and T. S. Stribling will be acknowledged as having been as perceptive about the South he tried to chronicle as the vaunted William Faulkner was about his South.  I’ll admit it seems far-fetched.  But then, many authors have languished for centuries in obscurity before being returned to the light by the right critic champion.  Anyway, the basic problem I have is that his own argument undercuts his dismissive attitude about the early Pulitzer winners.

Lastly….man, am I reluctant to come out swinging in defense of literary awards.  I didn’t choose the Pulitzers for this blog’s mission because I’ve always been such a big fan.  I don’t hang breathlessly on the National Book Award nominations, and I’ll confess that I probably couldn’t name five Man Booker winners if you held a gun to my head.  But Hale’s lengthy ramble hits all sorts of odd points—attacking the idea of twenty journalists handing out the Pulitzer Prize, attacking groupthink on awards committees in general, side-swiping the Grammys for never giving awards to punk bands, etc., etc.—and really got under my skin after a while.  Firstly, Mr. Hale, on behalf of book lovers and librarians everywhere, I would ask you to cut out the professionalization of literary opinion that has been disastrous for a couple of American generations of readers.  An MFA getting in high dudgeon because twenty journalists—I mean, can you believe it, journalists???—are issuing a prize for a novel (how dare they have an opinion?) is all of the things I hate most about literary snobbery.  Do you really think only MFAs and novelists should be allowed to hand out awards for novels?  That journalists should be denounced as “a roomful of people who don’t necessarily know anything about literature” suggests to me that Hale doesn’t think ordinary readers get to have their opinion, or else that their opinions are of no worth.  And I personally think that stinks.  The Pulitzers have never pretended to be anything but what they are—the journalists are all identified and the prize has always been awarded by them.  Hale doesn’t even know the prize’s terms—he’s angry that they’re choosing “the best”, when the Pulitzer is almost alone among literary prizes in that its criterion doesn’t include the word “best”.  It’s simply recognizing “distinguished fiction”.  It’s journalists selecting (with the advice of a group of literary-minded jurors) a novel that they think merits attention, and prize money.  Sure, there’s a “best” implied in the act, I suppose, in that they choose only one, but I admire the award’s humility in not claiming the word “best”.  If Hale thinks awards shouldn’t be given by “a roomful of people who don’t necessarily know anything about literature”, he’s welcome not to pay attention to their efforts, or to organize a group of top novelists who would issue their own award.  But to shout negatively about it is just going to continue the lousy atmosphere that’s crept up around “serious fiction” in the United States—the notion that it’s difficult, that it’s only for people with postgraduate degrees who donate money to NPR, that the common person can’t be supposed to understand it or have a well-informed opinion about it, etc.  The fact that he dwells on who’s giving the award, and their lack of qualifications (as compared with him and his literary friends) really sours me on his commentary.

“Perhaps the hypos are getting the best of Mr. Hale. I suggest he sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And why is it journalists giving this award, Mr. Hale?  Because Joseph Pulitzer, that covetous old sinner, left money for prizes of all sorts, and in addition to encouraging other endeavors in the art of writing, he wanted there to be a prize for the novel.  Who does it hurt, Mr. Hale, that someone wins the prize?  No one that I can think of, off-hand.  But I know who it helps.  You see, while Hale is dancing around lamenting the fate of the poor, forgotten, neglected, penniless Herman Melville (who was all of those things, and whose fate was lamentable—I’m not disagreeing with him on the merits of that case), he’s forgetting that the Pulitzer is in part a way out for people just like Melville.  Thornton Wilder was an unknown boarding school teacher in 1928, with one failed novel to his name, when his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, won the Pulitzer Prize.  It drew attention to what turned out to be a remarkable little novel, and changed Wilder’s life—he left the prep school to teach at the University of Chicago, and went on to write many notable plays and novels, including the unforgettable Our Town.  Had it not been for the Pulitzer, it’s hard to know what Wilder’s life would have looked like…maybe a lot more like Herman Melville’s?  The point is that if Old Joe Pulitzer felt like leaving a little money and fame, to be handed out once a year to a reasonably accomplished American novelist, I can’t work out why Hale thinks it’s a bad idea.  Does he think the literary world overhypes the Pulitzer?  Okay, then encourage them to pay attention to other awards—or suggest that people read more broadly, or whatever you like.  But don’t pretend that what you’re doing in this essay is more noble than what Joseph Pulitzer’s endowment is doing.  Every year (well, er, except for 2012, and the other occasional years when the award isn’t given), a novelist’s career is impacted for the better by this prize.  Sometimes it’s a famous name, but when it’s not, it’s the sort of thing that changes their life.  If Hale doesn’t want artists dying in obscurity like Melville, I think he should want more prizes and awards, more outpourings of love for writers, not less.

I know I got a bit worked up over this, but Hale’s commentary was a train wreck [upon consideration, I think I was a bit over the line with "train wreck", since I did think Hale made some useful comments---I'd replace the phrase with something more like "Hale's commentary was weighed down too much by the things that bother me..."] of the things that bother me most, especially that portion of his rant that seemed to exclude anybody who didn’t have his credentials from having a worthwhile opinion about literature.  I think novelists, and the professionals in the field of writing and reading more generally, should be praising the idea that you don’t have to be a writer to like good writing, and the idea that there can be all sorts of legitimate and worthwhile responses to a novel.  Don’t box people into having to think “the right thing” about the “right writers”—if they hate Faulkner, or Melville, we should be encouraging them to say why they feel that way.  And we should let that conversation (intense though it may be) spur all of the people involved into being more thoughtful, more purposeful, more excited readers.  Hale loses track of that in his piece, and it’s a shame.  All right, enough of my playing Don Quixote on behalf of the Pulitzers—back to reading, and hopefully blogging in the near future.

It’s been nearly a month since the last Linkage post, so this is a big one. Without further ado, here are the more interesting links I emailed to myself between April 9 and May 6, 2012:

“Why limit standard crediting practice to the visibility of a face,” asks Sarah Maxfield in her post “Worth Noting” for The Performance Club, “when dance as a medium is about the body as a whole?” Maxfield asserts that “the [photo] caption is just a small symptom of a much larger cultural dismissal of the body and those who have expertise in body-related work,” which is absolutely correct.

There will be “a bloodbath of nonprofit failures,” warns Brooklyn Philharmonic CEO Richard Dare, “unless we undertake fundamental structural reform of the nonprofit business model itself.”

“No one was more influential in shaping the arts and humanities in the ’50s and ’60s” than W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation, according to Rockefeller Archive Center vice president and director of research and education James Allen Smith. The Center recently opened Lowry’s correspondence and other Ford Foundation archive materials to researchers.

There are many beautiful moments worth seeing in this video of a rehearsal for Epode (1979) by Gerald Arpino, featuring Joffrey Ballet dancer Patricia Miller. At 2:50, there is also an absolutely classic ballet-rehearsal moment.

Vanessa Quirk, writing for arch daily, muses about what architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s move from The New Yorker to Vanity Fair might really mean. “The ‘critic’ may be dead,” Quirk concludes, “but the conversation is only just beginning.”

Alok Jha, writing for The Guardian, traces the beginnings of a revolt against high fees for access to the contents of academic journals.

Jim Muir, writing for BBC News, notes that in Syria, “the observers are being expected to help create the peace they are supposed to be monitoring.”

Filling in for Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Jesselyn Radack looks at whistleblowing in the Obama Era.

“Procedures are procedures,” writes Larry Rohter in his report for The New York Times on difficulties foreign artists encounter when booking engagements in the States.

Trajal Harrell “wondered why Judson was an accepted part of dance history and voguing wasn’t,” Andrew Boynton explains in a blog post for The New Yorker.

“One can only live on a diet of ramen and unrealized potential for so long,” Nina Metz acknowledges in her Tribune story about Chicago actors assessing the relative verdancy of coastal lawns.

“How Drinking Makes You More Creative” is the the immensely clickable headline for Whet Moser’s April 12 blog post for Chicago magazine’s The 312. Semi-related, “most gay men are alcoholics,” states Stephin Merritt in this CBS News profile. That’s a blanket statement, of course, but like most songs by Merritt’s band The Magnetic Fields, it makes for a good story. Tangentially related: Adam Rathe recently assembled for Out magazine an oral history of queer punk.

Charles Isherwood’s review of Calixto Bieito’s Camino Real for the Goodman Theatre “is a good example of a negative review that explains what failed thoroughly,” tweets Monica Reida. She’s right.

“SO COOL!” tweets Nina Garcia about photos Stanley Kubrick took on the New York City subway in 1946, for LOOK magazine. She’s also right.

Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki recently left the board of his own foundation “to avoid being a lightning rod for criticism and government attacks that would undermine its work,” report Shawn McCarthy and Oliver Moore for The Globe and Mail.

There’s a “shortage of properly cultured people in rich circles” in the United Kingdom, according to Princess Donatella Missikoff of Ossetia, better known as Donatella Flick. That’s according to Ismene Brown’s interview with the cultural patron.

“If you’re going to use the language of curating as greasepaint for staging music gigs in art museums,” writes Dan Fox on the Frieze blog, “at least follow through on all the conventions of exhibition making and allow the opportunity for as many people as possible to see the entirety of whatever complex-layered-performative-retrospective-exhibition-video-installation-event-conference-bar-mitzvah-Renaissance-Fayre-knees-up it is you’re putting on.”

“We met at the Super Shop,” begins Tony Oursler’s remembrance of Mike Kelley in Artforum.

“Sci-fi has always been a kind of funhouse mirror for our dreams and anxieties,” observes Zac Thompson in his Reader review of Bailiwick/New Colony musical Rise of the Numberless.

In an editorial for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple argues that “anyone who might feel ‘constraints’ about disclosure of their opinions shouldn’t be mucking around with the highest honors in the [journalism] industry.”

In an article for The American Scholar, Pamela Haag observes how “the proliferation of a cloying, saccharine culture” might be responsible for “less forgiving, meaner attitude[s] in public life.”

Want maps of jazz clubs on the South Side of Chicago between about 1915 and 1940? Here you go. Want a massive overview of various consumer-technology ecosystems? Here you go. Want a bunch of photos of Chicago at the turn of the last century? Voilà. Want some photos of megacities today? Check ’em out, yo.

On April 16, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America published the study “Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal.”

On April 18, The Guardian published Judith Mackrell’s interview with choreographer Angelin Preljocaj.

On April 20, design blog Colossal brought to my attention the awesome fact that some German garbage men are using Dumpsters as giant pinhole cameras.

On April 22, New York magazine published its feature package “How to Make It in the Art World.” Start with this essay by Jerry Saltz, “Reject the Market. Embrace the Market.”

On April 27, Apollinaire Scherr reviewed Gideon Obarzanek’s Faker for the Financial Times, and John Rockwell shared his observations from a “three-week cultural odyssey through Western Europe” in The New York Times.

On April 29, Steve Sucato reviewed BJM Danse for Dance Tabs.

Thankfully, Flaunt preserves for online the print layout of Marina Harss’s profile of David Hallberg, with striking photos by Tetsuharu Kubota.

Thankfully, there is a successful new example of narrative ballet, according to Luke Jennings of The Observer. Clement Crisp dissents in the Financial Times about the work, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s A Streetcar Named Desire, for Scottish Ballet.

Something I’ll always regret not seeing in person: William Forsythe’s Artifact performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. While beautiful, these photographs of the production by Jane Hobson are so much salt in the wound.

Someone I never saw conduct in person, but who waved the baton at recorded performances I watched countless times growing up: Hugo Fiorato. The New York City Ballet conductor died on April 23; here’s the Times obituary by Paul Vitello.

Something that exists: a 2½-ton, marble Manhattan.

Some endings here: of artists’ ouevres, and of films.

Was fiction not outstanding this year? I’m sure that sometimes it’s difficult to pick a winner from a selection of books you aren’t impressed with, but doesn’t there have to be a winner? Can’t they just pick the best of the nominees? Also, who are “they”?

I was a little confused, mostly because I really have no idea how the Pulitzer Prize committee works. Each year the winners were announced and we put the fiction winner on display at the register. Then it’s over.

My first year working at the bookstore the fiction winner was Tinkers by Paul Harding. I had picked up the book a few months earlier in the new releases section of the library. The opening was moving and beautifully written. It isn’t a long book and I finished it that weekend. Learning that it later became a Pulitzer Prize winner was a nice boost to my book-choosing ego. Look at me go, I know a winner when I see one.

Looking at the list of past winners I saw a lot of books I recognized and a few I’ve read — Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (winner 2000), Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (winner 2003), and The Road by Cormac McCarthy (winner 2007). I’d have to say The Road is my favorite. I had to put it down a few times and remind myself that I wasn’t cold and starving and fighting for my life. Then I usually made a sandwich, grabbed a blanket, and picked up where I left off.

Looking at the list of winners, and two runners up for each year, made me feel woefully under-read. It happens every time I see a list of “good” books. Part of me wants to read these books and improve myself while another (stronger) part of me rebels and reads Sophie Kinsella books for a week straight.

But this year there is no winner. The list of runners-up contains three books: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. I’d have to say The Pale King is the one I’ve wanted to read the most. I’d heard great things about Swamplandia! and nothing (sorry) about Train Dreams.

My reaction to the news matched the reaction of the coworkers I spoke with: If no winner is picked it means no one is good enough. Then one coworker learned Swanpalndia! was a nominee and was shocked. He had loved the book and if it wasn’t good enough then what was? How did this process work anyway?

Well, this year a three-person fiction jury read 314 books and sent their three nominees to the Pulitzer Prize Board. That 20-person board then chooses the winner over a span of two days. Because they choose winners from nominees in 21 categories, I really wonder if they read everything. I would be hard-pressed to read three novels in two days and decide which is best. Couple that with choosing a winner for History, Drama, Biography, General Nonfiction, Music, Poetry, and 14 journalism categories and I’m out.

No matter how much the board actually knows about the nominees, I know a winner has to be chosen by a majority vote. I like to think that each member felt so strongly about the novel they liked that none of them were willing to compromise and let another book win. That I would understand. I know how to be stubborn and dig in my heels. Although this is the first time in 35 years that no fiction prize has been awarded, it has happened ten other times.

What does it mean to not award this prize, which normally has a bigger impact than any other prize on American sales? I feel like no matter what you say about the process or how the books were “unorthodox” as some have said, this makes the fiction of 2011 look weak. People depend on the Pulitzer to determine the best. Whether that is a good thing or not is moot. If it’s your job to pick a winner then you pick a winner.

I don’t think The Pale King should win just because David Foster Wallace had a beautiful career. If people want to give him a lifetime achievement award I’m fully behind it, but that’s not what the Pulitzer is. Was the board afraid that’s what the public would think if it gave an unfinished novel the prize? Wallace’s editor pieced together the ending from manuscripts and some people have said it shows in the flow of the writing. I’m glad it was published but it’s okay if it’s not a winner on its own merits. It’s okay, too, if it is.

The New York Times cited Karen Russell’s young age, 29 when Swamplandia! was first published, as her “unorthodox” qualification. It’s also her first book, neither of which should be held against her. Tinkers was Paul Harding’s first book and while I hate them both for publishing at a young age, the books are good. Isn’t it more impressive to do so well your first time and at such a young age?

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson was originally a novella, first published in the Paris Review and then years later published as a hardcover. I know it’s less traditional than the 300 to 800 page books we see a lot of, but it’s a good thing when an author knows where to end a story.

Fiction is changing. Collections of short stories and long, full-length novels aren’t necessarily going anywhere, but they are sharing the shelves with lyric stories and books that use images as much as they use words. This is good. In an age of ebooks and Amazon, when fiction is at everyone’s fingertips it’s time to change the game a little. Show people something new and clever, something bold that doesn’t fit into preconceived notions of story.  Shock them and get them talking and reading even more.

And if it’s your job to say what’s the best, do it. If all three nominees are unconventional, doesn’t that say something about the changing face of fiction writing? Maybe it says something about the stodginess of the panel too. Hopefully next year something will change. I hope it’s the Pulitzer Prize Board because I like where fiction is headed.

–

Kelly Hannon works in an indie bookstore, is editing her first novel, and blogs about annoying people at www.letterstopeopleihate.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyMHannon

In my previous reading on the subject, there had been confusion about whether there really was a “snub” in 1917, the first year the prize was to have been awarded: there was some suggestion in the sources I’d originally read that the committee couldn’t get organized that year, and never even considered issuing an award.  In fact, the truth is somewhere close to that: the jury received 6 submissions, one of which was ineligible, and 4 of which they immediately deemed obviously unacceptable.  Left with only one half-way acceptable title (whose name, alas, I do not know), they informed the Board that, under the circumstances, they really felt they couldn’t make a recommendation, as they were sure many worthy candidates simply hadn’t made it to their desk.

Ernest Poole, the only novelist in the prize's first five years to win the Pulitzer hands-down (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1918, the decision to award the prize to His Family was apparently very smooth (although allegedly it was largely out of a desire to honor Ernest Poole for his previous work, published before the inception of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel).  In 1919, however, the jury considered all the submissions and told the Board it could not in good faith award a prize.  One source indicates they in fact told the Board this on two separate occasions.  Whether the jury felt pressured not to dodge the award twice in its first three years, or whether they simply had a late change of heart, apparently at the last possible moment a note reached Frank Fackenthal, Columbia University’s secretary and the man initially tasked with overseeing the awards, saying essentially “Is it too late for us to consider giving the award to The Magnificent Ambersons?”  Fackenthal must have been desperate to avoid another snub year, since he rapidly contacted all the board members and got them to agree to issue the award to Tarkington’s novel.  Those of you familiar with my review of the novel will perhaps understand my wish that Fackenthal had been just a little less efficient: certainly if Ambersons was 1919′s best work, I think the jury would have been well-advised to stick with their first instinct.

Fackenthal wouldn’t be lucky again, though, since 1920′s selections proved impossible: the jury apparently got almost nowhere, unlike other, later snub years, in which juries reached conclusions only to have them over-ruled by the Board.  One jury member, a professor at the University of Illinois named Stuart Sherman, advocated openly for Joseph Hergesheimer‘s Java Head before it was pointed out to him that the award (at that time) had to recognize a work that, among other things, reflected the “wholesome atmosphere” of American life.  Sherman agreed that Hergesheimer’s work wasn’t remotely “wholesome”, and famously remarked that “we ought not to crown a licentious work, but I don’t believe we should hold off till a novel appears fit for a Sunday School library.”  Sherman was unable to move any other members of the jury, and their recommendation not to issue an award was approved by the Board.

In 1921, the jury was deadlocked again, although this time over the question of whether or not Sinclair Lewis‘s Main Street was worthy of the prize, given how sharp (some would say mean-spirited) his satire was.  My sources vary on the question of how many jurors supported Lewis’s book—and on the important question of whether the jury’s foreman, Hamlin Garland, supported it—but in the end we know only that the jury did recommend that the Board select Main Street, and that the Board ultimately chose instead to recognize a book commended (but not recommended) by the jury: Edith Wharton‘s The Age of Innocence.  Sinclair Lewis was outraged at the decision, and always suspected that one or more jurors had privately shared misgivings with the Board that had steered the award away from him.  Suspicion is also cast on the role Columbia’s president, Nicholas Butler, may have played in the decision, based on a letter Fackenthal later wrote suggesting that the Board wasn’t particularly inclined to quarrel with the jury’s selection.  Personally, having read Wharton’s novel (which is truly excellent) and another novel by Lewis (his Arrowsmith, which was awarded the Pulitzer in 1926, although he refused the check), I share Hohenberg’s feeling that the Board got it right.  As he remarks, “The Age of Innocence has outlasted the vogue of Main Street.  Mrs. Wharton’s book is still recognized as a classic, while Lewis’s is sadly dated.”  Still, the decision is indicative of how difficult it is for the jury and Board to settle on a winner—at the end of the prize’s first 5 years, we have only one definitive winner, 1918′s His Family.

The juries weren’t done casting aspersion on American literature.  After agreeing unanimously on recognizing Tarkington’s Alice Adams (a mediocrity: how the man won two of the first four Pulitzers awarded is a mystery to me), in 1923 and 1924, the jury on both occasions submitted a report to the Board that stated fairly openly that none of the novels merited receiving the Pulitzer, but given that the Board was likely to issue the award in any case, the jury recommended a title as the best of that year’s submissions.  Talk about damning with faint praise—it also suggests to me the uneasy truce between the Board and the novel jury, given what the Board had lived through during the first few years of the award (the chaos of the 1919 “oops” Tarkington decision and the relatively public PR fiasco of the 1921 decision to reject the jury’s recommendation can’t have been pleasant).  The jury’s willingness to “go along” was a good one in 1923, I think: although Willa Cather’s One of Ours is widely considered one of her lesser works, it was an enjoyable read for me, and I’m glad that one of the country’s better novelists of the early 20th Century got some deserved recognition (if for the wrong book).  In 1924, they should absolutely have stuck to their guns, since they proffered as the year’s best novel Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, a book so profoundly offensive on every moral and artistic level that the review I wrote is still a little embarrassing to me (but to revise away any of its bile would be too kind to that book).

So, that’s the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel’s first seven years: no award, award, last-minute reluctant award, no award, scandal where the Board rejects the jury recommendation, award, very reluctant award, very reluctant award.  Not exactly a track record that gives confidence—it certainly would seem like a prize about to fizzle out as a well-meaning but hopeless endeavor.  I think the Board was lucky in the string of awards that followed in the late 1920s—recognition for popular authors like Edna Ferber and Sinclair Lewis, along with the “discovery” of a young unknown named Thornton Wilder who really took off after winning the Pulitzer, cemented the award’s place in the nation’s literary conversations, even if it was (and remains) criticized and condescended to (often justly) by many of the nation’s best novelists and critics.  I’m fascinated by what I’ve learned, and expect I’ll share more reflections of this kind periodically, now that I’ve gotten a hold of some decent source material to work from.  And soon, I promise, there will be an update about Honey in the Horn, through which I am moving at a slow but steady pace—I’d been waiting for something of interest to report, and am gradually realizing that I’ll just have to report on why I think the novel is uninteresting.  More on that soon, in any event.

Members of the Philadelphia Inquirer staff react Monday after learning of their Pulitzer Prize for Public Service from their series on School Violence in Philadelphia. This year, no Pulitzer prize for fiction was given.
Michael Bryant/Philadelphia Inquirer/Reuters

The late Manning Marable won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for history, honored for a Malcolm X book. But no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction.

By Hillel Italie

The late Manning Marable won the Pulitzer Prize for history Monday, honored for a Malcolm X book he worked on for decades, but did not live to see published. For the first time in 35 years, no fiction prize was given.

David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” a novel assembled from notes he left behind at the time of his suicide in 2008, was among the finalists for fiction. Also cited were Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia” and Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams.” Johnson’s novel “Tree of Smoke” was a Pulitzer finalist in 2008.

“The main reason is that no one of the three entries received a majority, and thus after lengthy consideration, no prize was awarded,” said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. “There were multiple factors involved in these decisions, and we don’t discuss in detail why a prize is given or not given.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

I asked myself, why when it’s so great am I avoiding finishing it?

Then the reason dawned on me.

To keep her alive, that’s why.

Right now it’s 1989 and she has just won ‘The Pulitzer Prize’ and ‘Tony Award’ for her play ‘The Heidi Chronicles.’ She is ‘The Toast of the Town’ well on her way to becoming a household name compared to the likes of Neil Simon, high honors never before given to a 38 year old Jewish girl especially one who never thought much of herself.

I left her on stage at The Plymouth Theatre the day she won The Pulitzer kissing all the actors appearing in Heidi while receiving a standing ovation. How happy she must have been to be accepted and lauded so unanimously probably for the first time in her whole adult life.

If I don’t go on to the closing chapters she can stay right where she is taking her bow through all eternity. Oh, if only she could.

If only.

For those of you who don’t know, Wendy Wasserstein died on January 30, 2006 at age 55 from cancer.  She was a single mom with one child whom she gave birth to at 48. In ‘Shiksa Goddess,’ a collection of her best essays, you can read the touching story reprinted from ‘The New Yorker’ about her daughter, Lucy Jane’s, difficult and in some ways miraculous entry into the world.

That’s the main reason why it feels as though we all knew Wendy, the constant and unabashed candor in everything she wrote.

I long to write that openly, a quality not easily owned by any writer but she certainly inspires to at least become better at it.

What I like about Salamon’s book is that she doesn’t always sugarcoat Wendy. In The ‘Heidi Chronicles’ for instance, when her heroine describes herself as a ‘humanist’ as opposed to a ‘feminist’ she was slyly cluing us in, giving us a glimpse of the real Wendy who suffered from low self esteem and the tendency to please too eagerly. Her mother, an eccentric pain in the ass, wanted grandchildren more than statuettes attesting to her youngest daughter’s grand achievements never for one minute letting her forget it.

She mourned an older brother sent away due to mental illness she was never allowed to know.

She stoically buried loved ones speaking at their memorials.

Her relationships with men were painful and disappointing. She battled weight and wasn’t always nice to the significant others of her close friends she often betrayed by using their personal confidences without permission in her plays and stories.

Rather than display remorse when exposed Wendy would giggle nervously worried you’d justifiably hate her resigning from the friendship that despite her own disloyalty, still meant the world to her.

Wendy was complicated, lonely and inherently sad.

She worried what the world thought of her never quite believing she was loved, accepted and admired.

Learning Wendy wasn’t perfect only endears her to you more; Flaw meets flaw on the page like reunited relatives.

I liked that she loved good hotels because I do too. Travel excited her and she loved parties often being the belle of the ball. She was generous and bighearted and adopted shelter cats.

I’ve been known to eat big bags of candy when I’ve been depressed and also tend to fall in love with my gay boyfriends, I’m just too ashamed to admit it.

I have a personal story about Wendy I’d like to share.

It was New Year’s Eve 1997 and I was at Chris Wasserstein’s house, Wendy’s former sister-in-law, feeding her animals. She was a neighbor needing a favor because the whole family was in East Hampton for the funeral of Wendy’s beloved older sister Sandra who had just died from cancer the day before.

While I was there the doorman came up with a beautiful floral arrangement for Wendy’s nephew Ben. It was his birthday and despite her grief over her sister she didn’t want him to think she forgot what day it was. I remember how moved I was thinking wow, how sweet is that? In the midst of her sorrow she still thought of this young kid.

8 years later when I saw the headline from a newspaper vending machine that Wendy had  died I remembered that story.

Involuntarily I started to cry. Steve, who owns the Viand Coffee Shop, came out to see what was wrong.

“Someone I loved passed away,” I found myself saying.

I then came home and reread ‘The Heidi Chronicles.’

“Are you a feminist?” she asked Heidi.

“No, I’m a humanist,” she said.

SB

In Help! for Writers: 210 Soutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces (released today), Clark presents an “owner’s manaul” for writers, outlining the seven steps of the writing process, while addressing the 21 most urgent problems that writers face.   In his engaging and entertaining style, Clark offers ten short solutions to each problem.   Out of ideas?   Read posters, billboards, and even grafitti.   Can’t bear to edit yourself?   Watch the deleted scenes of a film DVD, and ask yourself why these scenes were justifiably left on the cutting-room floor.  

Help! for Writers offers writers, new and old, young and experienced, 210 strategies for success!   Would you like to win a copy?   Thanks to the publisher (Little, Brown and Company), we’re giving 5 (five) copies away.   In order to enter this book giveaway contest, just post a comment below with your name and e-mail address, or send an e-mail message with this information to Josephsreviews@gmail.com .  (E-mail addresses will only be used to contact the winners.)   This will count as a first entry.

For a second entry, tell us exactly why you think this guidebook would be useful to you.   Is it because of the type of writing that you do?   Are you stuck in writing a novel or an article, etc.?   Let us know!  

In one way or another, we’re all writers, so this should be a useful addition to almost anyone’s library.

In order to enter this book contest, you must live in the continental U.S. or in Canada, and be able to provide a residential mailing address if you’re selected as a winner.   Books will not be shipped to a P. O. box or to a business-related address.   You have until 12:00 Midnight PST on Saturday, November 15, 2011 to submit your entry or entries, so don’t delay!

We reserve the right to change the contest rules, or submission deadline, at any point, so it’s best to enter early…   We may choose the winners at random, or simply select five early entrants; you never know.   This is it for the “complex” contest rules.   

Good luck and good reading!  

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek  is a memoir of sorts, concerned with a year that Dillard spent living in the woods of Virginia as she observed nature around her and wrote. She is our tour guide, teaching us things about nature that most people would never suspect, from the egg laying habits of dragonflies to the best way to stalk a muskrat. Most of all, this is a book about being truly alive and letting life seep into every part of your being as you walk in this strange, beautiful world.

This book is wrapped up in the present, both as a moment in time and also as an idea. Dillard speaks of the present as a character, hurtling through space and time, trying to get us to notice its machinations before it disappears into the past. In chapter five, appropriately titled The Present, Dillard invokes the present with such verve that it is impossible to think of it in the same way again: “The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from its undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.” Elsewhere, she describes the present as a form of grace, constantly giving us a second chance, as newness is birthed every instant.

When we can learn, or attempt as in my case, to see the present as Dillard sees it, it opens up the store of the world’s beauty to us. Along with that beauty, however, comes the realization of the horrors of nature: death, violence and pain. Dillard does not shy away from these things, examining this decrepit world with the intensity of an investigative journalist searching for answers. In Intricacy shes firmly lands on the side of beauty, while in Fecundity she is shocked at the excess of death present on earth. Her answer to this dilemma comes in the final chapter, The Waters of Separation, in a declaration of life and mystery: “It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”

This world is both terrifying and glorious, the mystery lies in how these two things can be combined in such a paradoxical way, existing alongside each other without overwhelming the other. Which has the final word? Death or beauty? Perhaps, as Dillard suggests, the answer is not as important as we think, for here we are surrounded by both, yet never truly noticing either. Before we cede control to death and march on our way, let’s search for beauty:  it’s very existence may change our minds about everything. Every beautiful or grotesque example that Dillard gives points us to a world that, although broken and run-down, is  filled with glory bursting from its seams. This is the planet we inhabit—an extravagant mess—and it is begging for us to realize this.

God Bless the Editor: The Power Behind the Scenes

The late writer Norman Mailer was known to be a tough guy, and he was also quite a writer having won both of literature’s highest prizes – the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award – for his account of the domestic protests against the war in Vietnam, The Armies of the Night.   He was once asked by an interviewer to divulge the “secrets” of writing, and Mailer immediately invoked his First Rule, “Always trust your editor.”

I’ve thought about this more and more as I come across works by newer and debut authors; whose works often show promise (“There’s no heavier burden than a great potential,” to quote the wise philosopher Snoopy) but lack a firm and unified voice.   All too often I see the debut novel that starts off like a house afire but then dwindles away from the halfway point until the ending.   Perhaps it’s because the writer’s energy and confidence faded out; more likely, some type of scheduling conflict meant that the editor involved did not have the time to devote to smoothing out the rough spots in the second half that was devoted to the first.

I think that the work of a literary editor can be fairly likened to the work of a recording engineer.   Bands make all kinds of sounds in the recording studio – some too loud, some too harsh, some too tame and quiet, some jarring, some pleasant – and it’s up to the recording engineer (for a brilliant account read Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick) to mold the sounds into something uniform.   Even more than uniform, they must be pleasing to the ear.   The human ear loves mid-range sounds, so the very best sound engineers minimize the highs and lows to produce a product that sounds unnaturally “natural.”

Buy a very expensive car today and you’ll be offered an equally expensive add-on option, a top-of-the-line audio system (think an extra $5,000 to $7,000) that produces comforting mid-range sounds from any genre of material, rock to jazz to classical or country music.   This stereo reproduction system will have a built-in range limiter, a single-function computer program that mimics and sometimes even  improves the sounds produced by a top-flight recording engineer blessed with perfect hearing and “golden ears.”

Similarly, the writer’s editor must take out what’s jarring, what’s unexpected or simply not registered in the author’s best, pleasing voice…  It’s the editor who must decide, whether or not the author concurs, the answers to the questions:  “What is it about this author’s tone that is pleasing to the reader’s inner ear?   Which part of the writer’s voice is pleasingly mid-range?”

In order to complete his/her task, the skilled editor must edit and sometimes brutally cut out that which does not seem to fit.   And this is where Mailer’s advice is so important to the new writer, the prospective writer.   I will restate his advice this way, in my own words:  Don’t argue, don’t take it personally.   The very best, the most talented, of writers have found that they must trust their editors.

The skilled editor can take multiple, disparate voices and make them harmonize like the fine instruments in an orchestra.   As an example, take the short story collection about true love, Love Is a Four-Letter Word.   This compilation contained 23 stories written by just as many writers.   Yet in the hands of editor Michael Taeckens, the collection never seemed choppy or disjointed.   I found that it had a singular mid-range tone – not too loud, nor too soft – that made it seem quite enjoyable.   And it wasn’t just me.   One reader noted at Amazon that, “…this collection was pretty good…  not just in theme but in tone.”   Said another, “…the stories flowed quite seamlessly from one to the other.   We have Mr. Taeckens, the editor, to thank for that.”   Exactly!

When a highly skilled editor can take 23 voices and make them sound like one melodious voice, just think of what he/she can do to assist the previously fledgling, isolated writer in finding his or her natural voice.

One other key function is left up to the editor.   Carolyn Parkhurst wrote, “…the ending of a novel should feel inevitable.   You, the reader, shouldn’t be able to see what’s coming…  you should (feel) satisfied that there’s no other way it could have gone.”   If the draft ending of the book does not feel natural and inevitable, it’s up to the editor to tell the writer so.

In the end, it does come down to that one word: trust.   Mr. Mailer was so right.

Joseph Arellano

Note: Thank you to author (The Language of Trees: A Novel) and former professional editor Ilie Ruby, for serving as one of my editors on this piece. 

10. The Broadway Melody, 1929

Since sound was introduced into the movies in 1927, film studios realized the potential almost immediately of combining films with musical numbers. Released two years after the first talkie, The Broadway Melody was MGM’s first big-scale musical number. Heavily promoted by studio head Louis B. Mayer, the cliché-ridden film would win the 2nd best picture Oscar in history among what film historian Tim Dirks notes as, “some of the weakest films in the history of American cinema, reflecting the chaos of the transition from silents to sound films.” Although MGM would be synonymous with the best of the musical genre some fifteen years down the road, the early years of MGM’s musical branch were films so formulaic that they didn’t even bother changing the name for subsequent installments. They were simply known as The Broadway Melody of ____ with the year of release in the blank.

9. Cimarron, 1931

Cimarron is one of just three Westerns to win an Oscar. The film centers around a restless newspaper editor seeking to start a new life with his family in the newly opened territory of Oklahoma and covers a 40-year span in which he deserts his family but eventually comes back to fight for Indians’ rights. Despite its eventual pro-Indian stance, the film squanders its good will to modern viewers through its highly stereotypical representation of the Jewish tailor and the African American servant characters. The film has eight out of fourteen good reviews on rottentomatoes.com which clears it from being the worst-reviewed best picture winner (The Broadway Melody has 38%) but even the good reviews aren’t particularly enthusiastic about the film. One of the positive reviews, by Dennis Schwartz, says the film is “badly outdated, overly sentimental, the performance by Richard Dix that was well-received back then now seems overblown,” but he inexplicably gives the film a B-. If there’s a bright spot to the film, it’s the performance of Irene Dunne who was able to survive the transition to talkies through what most critics agree was a great performance.

8. Cavalcade, 1933

Cavalcade chronicles the story of a British family over two generations as they cope with war, societal change, and the sinking of the Titanic (one of the family members was on board). This film won in a year when Hollywood started to get comfortable enough with sound that many films broke out of the mold and revolutionized their genres, whether it was the message picture (I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang), the musical (42^nd Street), the big budget action film (King Kong) or the risqué comedy (She Done Him Wrong). Ironically, it was also the first year in which the overproduced British period piece won the top prize. There’s no doubt that Hollywood owes a great debt to England’s grand theatrical tradition and its immensely talented pool of classically trained actors but the Academy’s being blind-sided by anything and everything British has led to most every baffling decision the Academy has made for best picture, which will be a recurring theme here.

7. You Can’t Take it With You, 1938

Frank Capra was the 1930′s version of Spielberg and Scorsese rolled into one. He was the most respected, revered and commercially successful director of his time. His visions of homespun Americana gave hope to millions during the Great Depression. You Can’t Take it With You was Capra’s third Oscar-winning film in the course of 6 years, and it was no doubt a popular film. The film, however, is something like Capra’s 7th or 8th best film today behind such classics that came nowhere close to winning an Oscar as It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Arsenic and Old Lace. The film centers on the zany antics when the granddaughter of an eccentric free-spirited professor invites her straight-laced in-laws for dinner. Aside from being overshadowed by so many other Frank Capra films, the film is also  unremarkable because it’s not very much of a departure from the Pulitzer-prize winning stage play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart.

6. Mrs. Miniver, 1942

During World War II, Hollywood sought to assist with the war effort however it could. Top directors such as John Ford, John Huston and more made propaganda pictures and Hollywood produced wholesome images of homespun Americana and family life (Meet me in Saint Louis is a prime example) so that moviegoers could be reminded at the movies exactly what they were fighting for. At the same time, this was the Golden Age of film in which American cinema was really advancing as an art form. The Oscars during these years pitted the wholesome yet unremarkable films against the edgier film noirs, screwball comedies, or melodramas.  Mrs. Miniver, although depicting the idyll and noble life of a British family on the advent of war, was one such unremarkable film. It did make for some good propoganda. Winston Churchill wrote a thank-you note to MGM head Louis B. Mayer saying that the film was “Propoganda worth a hundred battleships.”

5. Around the World in 80 Days, 1956

This film is a fun, scenic romp best known for its endless string of cameos by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Cesar Romero, Charles Coburn, Red Skelton, Marlene Dietrich, and many more. It’s speculated that the film won only because all the actors with cameos voted for their own film. Even if the film is more popcorn entertainment than a great film, credit still should be given to producer Mike Todd (one former husband of the late Elizabeth Taylor) for his sheer ambition. Employing a record 33 assistant directors, Todd personally jetted to Pakistan, India, China and Thailand to meet with Kings and princes to secure the most luxurious locations he could find. Getting half of Hollywood to appear in his film wasn’t easy either: Todd spent months asking any actor with even a mild curiosity about the film to appear in a small role. In fact, it can be said that this film originated the very concept of the cameo.

4. The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952

This is a film that centers around the trials and tribulations of a travelling circus (the title comes from the motto for Barnum and Bailey’s Circus). Audiences hear about the film and the storied career of its director, Cecille B. DeMille, every year because the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes is named after him. Upon receiving the award, for example, Spielberg paid tribute to The Greatest Show on Earth by saying that he practically owes his career to this film having recreated the famous train crash scene in his living room over and over as a kid. Even if we take Spielberg at his word (he’s known to embellish his stories), he’s in the minority of people who took anything inspirational from the film. When I did an informal poll among other film buffs in preparation for this list, they all insisted that this was the most forgettable entry be included. Like Around the World in 80 Days, the film is more spectacle than it is timeless. Outside of that one train crash scene, the film doesn’t offer much of the grand sights of a film like Around the World in 80 Days. Unless you’re a humongous circus fan you should just catch them live when they’re in town.

3. Oliver!, 1968

To be fair, British Director Carol Reed did produce at least one classic in The Third Man almost 20 years before he was handed a make-up award for this film. The adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist had the necessary pedigree of Britishness (see the Mrs Miniver entry) and came during a decade in which musicals were in fashion with the Oscars (3 other films from the 1960′s also won Best Picture). Ironically, among the other two front-runners that year, The Lion in the Winter also had the British pedigree and Funny Girl was a musical.

2. Chariots of Fire, 1981

Today, the film is only remembered for its synthetic score that’s been reused for athletic montages in practically every movie since. The tale, examining the conflicting journeys to glory of two British gold medalist runners in the 1924 Olympics, isn’t so much a bad film as a massive surprise in a crowded field of great films that included Raiders of the Lost Ark, Reds, Atlantic City and On Golden Pond. Roger Ebert wrote that when he met the producers and the directors of the film at that year’s Cannes film festival before the film had found an American distributor, they told him that they didn’t think their film would even play in America, let alone win an Oscar. Ebert also speculated that in today’s movie market, it would likely have not survived more than one weekend in the theaters.

1. The English Patient, 1996

An epic love story set at the close of World War II centering on the search for the identity of a plane crash survivor, the film isn’t necessarily bad but it has been ignored by pretty much every list of great films (Empire Magazine, National Society of Film Critics, the AFI, Time Out, etc.) . The film is mostly remembered today for being the basis of a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine is driven insane in trying to avoid being ostracized for being the only one of her friends who doesn’t like the film. It’s worth noting that as Elaine’s friends in that Seinfeld episode love the film, it opened to some remarkably good reviews. Susan Stark of Detroit News famously called it the best film she’s seen in 16 years of reviewing cinema. While Best Picture winners of the 1990′s like Forrest Gump (which beat out Quiz Show, Pulp Fiction, and The Shawshank Redemption) and Dances with Wolves (which beat out Goodfellas) are now almost universally hated for taking the trophy away from those beloved films, The English Patient seems to have faded into oblivion.  Even though some might hate it for taking the honor away from Shine or Fargo, both nominated that year.

My larger question about reading: the Academy does something the Pulitzer board doesn’t do.  It breaks down movies into elements, and recognizes that some are good in some areas and not in others.  Some of us care a lot about visual effects and not a lot about scores, some can be won over by a single great acting performance and others will care more about the wit of the writing.  Sure, there’s the “Best Picture” award at the end of the night—the “real winner”, if you will.  But I wonder if there’s something to be said for having sub-Pulitzers?  Best setting?  Best character?  What would you think of that idea?  And if you think we should have some, what awards should there be?  I’ve suggested two, but you might want more, or different, options.  If we come up with some ideas, I may try to hold an award like that here on the blog—solicit nominees for “best character of the 1920s and 1930s” or something like it, and see what we get.  I would be amused, anyway, and opening it up to all the novels of a decade or two would let a lot of you chime in on books that Pulitzer neglected (perhaps wrongly).  I’m curious to see what you put forward, and welcome all ideas.

The truth is, it’s really hard to agree on matters of taste—a fact even the ancient world was familiar with, given that “de gustibus non est disputandum” is handed down to us from those good old days.  The fact that film critics think they’re better qualified to pick award-winners than the people who actually make great films is not surprising…but it’s also a bit irksome, from my perspective.  I’m not saying the actors and directors and cinematographers are automatically more qualified to have an opinion—I just think their opinions shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.  People are always too willing to enshrine their personal opinions as “facts about the world”, rather than points of view.  I don’t begrudge anyone the right to express themselves clearly, but bashing other opinions (or, just as bad, explaining why people are “duped” or “following their hearts and not their heads” or whatever other excuses you make for why “your” movie won’t win) feels cheap to me.

All this talk about the Oscars, of course, has an important parallel with the Pulitzers, awards that (unlike the Oscars) are not generally chosen by those who work in the field, but also awards that (like the Oscars) often face the charge of being “middlebrow”, “boring”, and “safe”.  I don’t know, but wonder, what the novelists, essayists, and poets of the 1920s would have done if they’d had the Pulitzers to hand out.  Sure, we dream that they’d have picked a lot of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.  But I wonder if Tarkington wouldn’t have been just as successful.

I’m rambling, though, and I want to fixate on a couple of things about this year’s Oscars.  First of all, this vitriolic atmosphere on the Internet is about the only sour thing for me about this year’s awards.  I’ve seen 9 of the 10 Best Picture nominees (couldn’t watch James Franco cut his arm off—I’m sure it was a great film, honestly, but I just couldn’t bring myself to see it), and a wide range of other films: at least one nominee in every category but makeup, foreign language film, and documentary short subject, and a total of 24 films (feature and short).  And I’ve really enjoyed all but 2 of them, which is an astounding record in my opinion—I’ll admit that I can’t find anything to praise about a live-action short called “The Crush” (I have to believe there were better options), but I could even list off some good things about the other film I didn’t enjoy (“The Kids Are All Right”—I’m sorry, people, I don’t see what everyone was talking about).  And the other films were astounding, moving, thoughtful, gripping, funny…frankly, if liking these films makes my taste “middlebrow”, then may my forehead stay where it is forever.  Sure, I preferred some to others (and would be disappointed if some nominees beat out others, since I think there are some truly deserving winners this year), but I just can’t tap into this Internet anger—anger that’s primarily directed against what I think is likely the best film I saw this year, “The King’s Speech”, because it’s expected to defeat the film the critics call my generation’s movie, “The Social Network” (which, frankly, was also really good).

It’s caused me to wonder if people are more irrational about movies than books.  I mean, I can get pretty outraged about a bad book (some of you read my review on this blog of The Able McLaughlins….a review that, in all honesty, I probably should have reined myself in on more than I did).  And so can other people I know.  But I feel like I’ve seen (and participated in) louder and more diametrically opposed arguments about movies than ever about books.  There’s something a lot more emotional about these disagreements.  But am I right?  Or am I just reacting to this Oscar catfight with a misguided (and inaccurate) view of the conversations we have about books?  And if I’m right, why is it that we get more fired up about films (denigrating those we hate and worshiping those we love)?  I’m not arguing that people love films more than books in general—I’m saying that when people disagree about the merits of a film, they’re more passionate than when they disagree about a book.  And I might be wrong.

I’ll probably say a bit more after the Oscars.  For now, let me tell you to track down and see a couple of films that probably will get little attention tomorrow, since I think they’re worthy of more praise than that.  Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” is unlike the movies you normally see, because it’s essentially about good people who do their best to enjoy regular lives—actors who inhabit people, not roles, and who make you want to hang out with them in their backyard or go out to garden with them.  It won’t blow your mind, but as an exploration of love, and luck, and friendship, it’s pretty great.  And though the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” got some deserved good press, it’s gotten lost in the buzz for other films, and frankly I think it’s right up there with the best films I saw this year—fantastic dialogue, moving music, unbelievably gorgeous cinematography (which I hope is recognized: Roger Deakins is amazing), and wonderful performances spearheaded by a little girl named Hailee Steinfeld who you’ve never seen before (but who strikes me as having the presence and maturity to remain talented through the awkward transition years of her late teens).  Lastly, this year’s Live-Action Short Films are really pretty great—whether you like romantic comedy (“God of Love”), touching coming-of-age (“Wish 143″), or a serious take on the genocide in Burundi (“Na Wewe”), each of these will do more for you in 20 minutes than a lot of films can in 5 times that length.  Comcast will show you all 5 for $5 through OnDemand, and maybe poking around the Internet will find you links to them too (or perhaps you can buy them on iTunes).  No one watches short films anymore, I know: watch these to discover what you’ve been missing.

I say the above things for a few reasons. In part it is because these are the kinds of things I think about, and a blog is a place to write such things. And in part it is me starting to acknowledge that this blog is going to change if it is going to live. Not entirely—I still have my ridiculous Pulitzer aims, and I intend to see them through (even if, as now seems likely, the work may last much of this decade). But I’ve tried too hard to divorce the blog from my life—to operate under the assumption that I either talk about Pulitzer novels, or nothing at all—and that way of thinking is too barren. I read a lot of books (many of which have not won any awards), I think a lot of things about them, and my larger ideas about things like art and beauty and meaning have to do with even more sides of my personality than are encompassed by the books I read.

So, as I return from a quarter where I didn’t blog at all, I’m saying that I should have been blogging. I’ve been reading some interesting novels, and thinking about reading and readers in interesting ways, and I wish I had been sharing that here. I think at the very least it would have been more interesting/relevant/accessible to most of you than me posting my latest thoughts about Laughing Boy (though I will be posting more of those soon!), and I think it would make for interesting comparisons. This quarter, I’m taking a seminar on printed texts (part of the Textual Studies graduate curriculum at the U.W.) and I think it will give rise to some thoughts. I’m intending to share more of those. Sometimes it will be obvious how it connects to the Pulitzer Prize, but I’m going to take that obligation more broadly from now on.

I’ll still be posting the same kinds of comments on those Pulitzer winners, though, with the same consistently idiosyncratic reviews. Poetry Fridays, in one form or another, ought to remain with us. But other things may change. I will say (because I think it needs saying) that the blog will not become a mere outcropping of my whole life. Many things that interest me will not be here (politics, for example), so those of you who don’t share all my opinions about the world needn’t worry. This will more or less still be about me having a fully-awake encounter with literature, and what it says more broadly about who we are as people and where we’ve come from—and it will continue to derive its primary momentum from my interest in seeing what the Pulitzer winners do to me, and how I think they reveal (or conceal) America. I don’t know how frequently I’ll blog, but I know I’ll be doing it much more regularly than I have in months, and I hope a few of you will still be along for the ride: I’ll try to keep it interesting!

My participation in a Southern Tradition

The PhD students in English and American literature at Ole Miss have a tradition of drinking at William Faulkner‘s grave — a stone’s throw away from  the campus.  It is germane to everything that department does — the specter of Faulkner, though he dropped out of the school and  went his own way — haunts the halls.  Who is the next immortal among us, he seems to ask.

However, despite the lovely, rich prose, Faulkner, were he in fact a king-maker, would never point his scepter at a woman or a person of color to indicate that we were smart or interesting in any way  but perhaps sexually.  I’m sure I would have scared the crap out of Faulkner, so in going to his  grave at Saint Peter‘s cemetery, I had no problem trying to spook him.  I am the kind of woman who would have wanted  to scare the crap out of him, anyway,when he was living — a Yankee feminist who worked as  a speechwriter and pamphleteer to end apartheid.  To Mister Faulkner, whose worst nightmare I am, I say “Boo!”

One does not drink alone at Faulkner’s tombstone.  Apart from the shade  of the author himself, his longsuffering wife is buried next to him, his parents across from him.  One wonders who chose the inscription “Go with God,” which must be read ironically, if one has ever read the guy’s work.  Not only  did I drink with the former Faulkners, I  also  drank with my pals in the PhD program Victoria, Thomas, and Ebony, who are all  very cool.  Thomas provided the booze (see the Maker’s Mark in my hand).  Victoria provided much of the prose from Faulkner and the photos.  Ebony brought the fabulousness.  I just brought the bad attitude.

We had trouble finding the grave.  Saint Peter’s cemetery is not next to Saint Peter’s church, and it was cold and dark outside.  We wandered the streets of Oxford, Mississippi, following the confused navigator function of Victoria’s phone.  I think we were bamboozled by it because of the magnetic waves emanating from the tombstone.  The waves are a transmission from the next dimension, which declares in a garbled text message:

OMFG — you will never have immortality as writers.  Post-modern criticism  has killed the cult of the author.  Give it up.  I am more fabulous than you will ever  be.  Even Satan bows to me in Hell.

I knew it was a lie from the pit itself.  We  disregarded it.  We climbed into Ebony’s car for warmth and listened to Ella Fitzgerald  and Frank Sinatra.  Whatever is true about the so-called cult of the author, the cult of the diva is alive and well, as evidenced by Ebony’s i-Pod play list, as evidenced by Ebony and her fabulous diva self.

I care about the Pulitzer.  I  care about the Nobel.  I care about the National Book Award.  I care about authors.  I care about Divas.  No tombstone can talk me out of this.  All it can do is lend perspective on the notion of  authorial immortality.

I once saw a graffito that went like this:

“God is dead”  — Neitzche

“Neitzche is dead” — God

Shakespeare  is an immortal writer.  His bones are turning to powder as  we speak.  It is not good enough to be an immortal writer.  One must actually go with God, not just have relatives, who would burn every copy of one’s heretical books if they could, inscribe such a thing on a tombstone that they never meant to be ironic.  There is truly only one  kind of immortality — the resurrection kind.  That said, without the other kind, how will I  explain to future generations why I thought the giraffe-print furry hat and  giraffe-print furry bag  I had with me the night I did shots at Faulkner’s grave were really cool?  I intend to be an immortal writer who is immortal indeed, not like the godless, misogynist, racist genius at whose grave I poured libations a few days ago.

Here’s a picture of  me with  Ebony, wandering around looking for the grave:

Hunting for Faulkner's grave; finding the fabulous

Ebony is a brilliant woman who is funny, hilarious, and — despite all Mississippi siren calls that might have drawn her away from this — always impeccably dressed.

If Faulkner were living and breathing, he wouldn’t like either of the women in this picture — one  he would utterly dismiss, and the other he would just loathe.  Faulk him and his  genius, I say.  We’re fantastic.

Finally, the four  of us found our way to the grave.  We all took a shot, and Victoria read a lovely passage of prose from the man in the grave about the enduring quality of words.

As the moon stood in a sliver against the black of the night, and the wind rustled in the breeze, I couldn’t allow myself to make this a worshipful experience.  I don’t believe in ancestor worship, even of really fantastic ancestors, but while Faulkner was fantastic as a writer, he wasn’t such a great antecedent.

After Victoria finished reading, I took what was left in my glass and splashed it on the grave.

“Bitch, give  me your talent!” I shouted.

Ebony, Victoria and Thomas are used to such outbursts from me –  not so much the cursing  as the incongruity — and they just took it in  stride.

Thomas read a passage from “A Rose for Emily,” one which involved the repetition of the n-word over and over again.  I took the bottle and poured out  half of it  on the engraved name beneath us, interrupting Thomas to say, “That’s what you get for saying ‘n*gger’ so many  times.  You’re just lucky it’s not my urine.”

We went afterward to a reading of living writers. It was time to go.  Let the dead bury the dead.   We were out of booze, anyway.

Insulting Faulkner while taking note of his talent seemed appropriate — not worship, just acknowledgment.  The cult of the author, per Derrida and his sychophants, is dead.  Perhaps it should be.  Instead, long live the diva, I say.  Long live Ebony.  Long live you, whoever you are.  Go with God.

After failing to find interest from publishers, Gordon had shelved the novel back in 2001

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If you don’t see a recommendation at the end of the review, the book in question is not recommended.   When we do recommend a book it will fall into one of three categories, as follows.

Recommended - This is a book, fiction or non-fiction, which may contain up to four or five writing flaws which were not corrected in the editing process.   However, it is clear on the whole (and by a margin that clearly exceeds 51%) that this is a book that will justify the time you devote to it.

Well Recommended - A book in this category may contain two or three flaws or editing omissions, but it’s exemplary and likely to rank in the top quartile (top 25%) of books on the market.

Highly Recommended - Books like these are likely in the top 10% of those released in the current and prior calendar year.   They may contain one or two errors but are nevertheless close to perfection in both content and presentation.

Some books will fall into the Recommended or Well Recommended category because they are well written, but Highly Recommended books tend to require a junction of great writing with a great theme and near-flawless execution.   Finally, we are considering adding a new category, Essential.   Essential books are novels or non-fiction books released in prior years that should be a part of any well-rounded reader’s experience.   Two examples that immediately come to mind are In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and Independence Day by Richard Ford.   The latter was the winner of both The Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.   (“It is difficult to imagine a better American novel appearing this year.”   Publishers Weekly, 1995)

Independence Day was reviewed on this site on October 30, 2009 (“American Tune”).

And, frankly, I’d thought it an admirably honest and principled move when I initially read about it, before I’d read the novel.  But it’s hard not to see it as a bit absurd, in retrospect.  Denouncing a prize over sour grapes for having been denied in the past is a bit too much, especially as his anger stems primarily from the decision in 1921 not to award the prize to Main Street.  Who won instead?  Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence.  I’ll admit, I haven’t read Main Street.  But to suggest that picking Wharton’s novel is a travesty of such grand proportions that it justifies not just refusing the prize, but refusing it as publicly as possible, with letters sent pointedly to authors (at least one of them a previous recipient of the prize) suggesting they should join in the boycott, is an act of tremendous egotism.

The really ironic thing about all this, of course, is that Lewis proudly rejects the 1926 Pulitzer Prize….which recognizes the best novel published in 1925.  Arrowsmith wasn’t the only novel published that year, of course—another writer also tells a story of a Midwesterner who came to New York following a personal dream, and found something unexpected.  That writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, may have written the best American novel of the 20th Century, The Great Gatsby.  So Lewis’s proud refusal, in retrospect, feels a bit like Adam Sandler rejecting a Best Actor Oscar as “an award unworthy of his talent” while Laurence Olivier sits in the audience wishing he’d been nominated.  But maybe that’s just me.

There is little that he really likes.  He calls The Age of Innocence (which, you will recall, I adored) an “almost first-rate novel [that] is intelligently and competently written.”  If I ever need an example for what a “back-handed compliment” looks like, I think I’ve got it in that sentence.  He sounds like he’s offering an appraisal of a user manual.  Wharton fares well, though, in comparison to some of her peers (and Margaret Wilson, who hardly qualifies as Wharton’s “peer”).

The first winner, His Family, which I liked but admitted was uneven, is described by Stuckey in this way: “Judged even by the standards of commercial fiction, His Family is not much of a novel.”  Of the author I could not stand, he says “Miss Wilson’s talent cannot be called distinguished or original,” and notes that “when it is judged as a novel, The Able McLaughlins is an amateurish performance.”  In describing So Big, he concludes by hoping that, some 50-75 years hence, historians of American literature will have gained the proper perspective, and that therefore “So Big will have come to signify the low level to which even educated American taste was capable of sinking in the 1920′s.”  Ouch.

Clearly Stuckey thinks there’s a division between these “popular” or “commercial” tastes and “true” literature.  But it seems odd to me to dismiss even such authors as Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (One of Ours is labeled an “artistic failure”).  Even when I didn’t like Cather’s choices, I recognized her talent.  Heck, even ol’ Tarkington and I, despite our differences, have a sort of grudging respect—I can see, at least, what he was good at, and I was impressed enough by Alice Adams to give it a higher review than Stuckey did.  What do you think—I know we can draw a line between Harlequin novels and Tolstoy.  But is there a line to be drawn between novelists like Wharton, Cather, Ferber (and presumably Steinbeck, Hemingway, Updike, etc.) and “real” literature that doesn’t appeal to such a wide audience?  What is “literature”, anyway?