Written Pyramids

I emerge from my half-a-year silence to talk about women. And writing. Surely, there was no shock in that.

The Pulitzer, by my own  count, is one of the more gender-balanced literary prized out there. By my count, 29 out of 86 Pulitzer awarded for fiction or novel (as the award category was once called) were awarded to women. That's 33 percent.Its not great, but its better than the other book awards.

The National Book Award has been awarded 68 times, 15 times to women (22 percent)  Twelve out of the 43 books awarded the Man Booker Prize were women (27 percent).  Twelve out of 107 Nobel Laureates in literature are women. That's 11 percent.

So, of all the prizes to win as a female fiction writer, the Pulitzer is the one where gender should be the smallest, issue. But, news questions are, to some extent, predictable, so a short Wall Street Journal interview with Jennifer Egan, who won the prize for her book Visit From the Goon Squad ended with this:

Over the past year, there’s been a debate about female and male writers and how they come off in the press. Franzen made clear that “Freedom” was going to be important, while others say that Allegra Goodman was too quiet about “The Cookbook Collector.” Do you think female writers have to start proclaiming, “OK, my book is going to be the book of the century”?

Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.

The authors Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarized were Megan F. McCafferty, Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella, and maybe Salman Rushdie. With the exception of Rushdie, where the plagiarism was also the least clear, Viswanathan plagiarized well known, successful chick-lit / YA authors.





Chick-lit authors and fans took offense at Egan's description of the genre (or, really, the parts plagiarized) as "very derivative, banal stuff" and bloggers suggested that Egan was guilty of  "girl-on-girl crime" and called for an apology. ( As for the three women themselves, Cabot, posted on her Facebook wall "I'm certain Jennifer Egan didn't mean to be rude." McCafferty was a lot more angry and also received an apology. I don't see anything from Kinsella, did I miss it? ).

Here's the thing: the genre is derivative and banal. Sometimes an author's work is even derived of her own previous books. I spent sometime in a bookstore looking at the backs of Kinsella's Shopaholic books (which is a different series than the book that was plagiarized from), and each one of them had the same book summary: Becky shops a lot, Becky is in trouble because of shopping (financially and romantically) Becky's troubles are resolved and deferred. Becky lives a glamorous life full of hot men (or man, she's loyal to her husband once they marry), cute shoes, gossip, and occasional career.

I've read books by each of these three authors. When I was in 12th grade, my English teacher asked me if there were any books that I was secretive about reading, ones that I didn't want to tell anyone else I was reading. I don't think she was asking me about books I was embarrassed about, but right now that's what I think of. I am embarrassed to admit that I have read these books because I believe in the power and importance of Literature, and I don't think those books are Literature (the pretentious capitalized L is intentional).

My English teacher's question came in the form of a question written in the margins of my final high school English paper. The paper prompt was "what is literature." My answer was "a work of writing that makes the reader feel something." Now, years later, I would change that to "makes the reader feel something that lasts beyond the time it takes to read the work itself or makes the reader re-appreciate the power of language." The second part allows for some of the post-modernist writers to be included as part of Literature and the addendum to the first part is reflective of my belief that not everything that is written is Literature. I write every day. Nothing I write for work is literature. It's written to inform and nothing else. Writing that entertains--even if it makes the reader laugh or cry--but leaves little emotion once the act of reading is completed falls into the same category.

I recognize that my answer is somewhat subjective; maybe there are people who read the works of McCafferty,  Cabot, and  Kinsella and find themselves marveling at the books weeks after the reading is complete. But for me--and clearly for Egan as well--these books fall short of being Literature.

They certainly fill a niche; the authors are wildly successful, and deserve to be. But the books are not memorable. They don't linger. There were no sentences that made me marvel at the possibilities embedded in the English language. At best, they are brain candy, light, entertaining fluff that fills the time well enough while being read but leaves nothing lasting.

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Before this morning, I didn't know who Eduardo Galeano was. Now I know that he is a Uruguayan writer whose books have been banned in more than one South American country, but who seems to inspire many.

I intend on finding some of his books today, because of his essay is the Washington Post's (occasionally resurrected) Book World. It's part of the series that makes up one of my favorite books The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think And Work (not the one written by Annie Dillard, which I still have not read). More a series of anecdotes than an essay, there were three paragraphs that I wanted to tear out of the paper and keep with me always. I managed to tear two (worried that doing this on the Metro, I both looked bizarre and would get newsprint all over me), but accidentally threw out the third.

There is one about how is book saved a life, and another about how a book he wrote got past prison gaurds. But the ones that stuck with me are more universal. Here are the three anecdotes that could be carried in any writer's wallet, all of them difficult but worthy things to strive for.

• A few years ago, at a school in Salta in the north of Argentina, I was reading stories to 8- and 9-year-olds. Afterward, the teacher asked the children to write to me, commenting on what I had read.One of the letters counseled: "Keep at it, you'll improve."

• At one of my storytelling sessions, in the Spanish town of Ourense, a man in the back row kept staring at me, an unblinking, impassible mask. When the reading ended, he approached slowly, fixing me with his gaze as if he wanted to kill me. Fortunately, he didn't. Instead, he said, "It must be so hard to write so simply." And after that remark, the highest praise I have ever received, he turned on his heel and left.

• The Bolivian town of Llallagua lived from the mine, and in the mine its miners died. Deep in the shafts in the bowels of the mountains, they hunted veins of tin and lost, in a few short years, their lungs and their lives. I spent some time there and made good friends.

The last night, we were drinking, my friends and I, singing laments and telling bad jokes till just before dawn.

When little time remained before the scream of the siren that would call them to work, my friends fell silent, all of them at once. Then one asked, or pleaded, or ordered: "And now, my brother, tell us about the sea."

I was speechless.

They insisted: "Tell us. Tell us about the sea."

It was the most difficult challenge in all my storytelling life. None of these miners would ever know the sea; each was doomed to die young. And I had no choice but to bring them the sea, the sea that was so far away, discovering words that could drench them to the bone.

My sister was forwarded a bizarre e-mail the other day. For the sake of everyone's privacy, I will not go into any of the details, but will recount the conversation a friend and I had after reading the e-mail.

Some background: this girl and I have been friends since ninth grade, when we first bonded after being accidentally locked in our history classroom and then later bonded over our shared love of writing and all things literature. She is a poet. She is, in fact, the poet who featured relatively heavily in my own high school and early college writing, as someone who I admired for her talent in poetry and her ability to see poems in the mundane.

I have edited for length, some typos, and identifying detail (blogger currently hates me. I will fix the font size issues when I can).

Friend: oh my. I love this life. So many odd little things

me: my mind is kind of blown

Friend: by this email?

me: well, not the e-mail itself, so much as the character behind the e-mail [the person who wrote the e-mail]

Friend: it's soooo odd

Friend: well, it's the last paragraph that's so odd. I mean, it really is a sort of "literary" undoing of a person, in my sick imagination where everything = material,

like, it could be a Nathan Englander story or something

me: hahah I was totally thinking the same thing

Friend: that makes us deeply odd and unusual people, by the way

me: don't think I have not already visualized her apartment

Friend: or what kind of computer she wrote the email on

me: a desktop PC. obviously

Friend: yeah. one of the tan ones

me: ok. I have a plan. Given the information that we have, we should each write something and send it to the other. You can use the info however you want, and change whatever facts you need.

me: we can each choose the genre

Friend: ok. OK, you realize that you have a huge advantage given the fact that you know her [the writer of the e-mail] and I don't

me: you can make up whatever you want

"Except that they sometimes ride the same elevators, the reporters and editors of the news report work in a different orbit from those who write opinion." -- Bill Keller

Here is a turn-of-phrase coined by a copy editor friend, that I liked so much, I decided it warrants its own post:

Death-defying Lede: A lede in which the reporter comes precariously close to falling off of the Chinese Wall and into the swamp of opinion.

I was going to link to a wikipedia article defining Chinese Wall, but interestingly enough, in the journalism section of the entry it only offers: "The term is also used in journalism to describe the separation between the editorial and advertising arms of a media firm," whereas I was introduced to the term as a way of indicating the separation between opinion and news, which is clearly how I was using it above.

Clearly the adjective "death-defying" could also sometimes be used to describe full articles or news columns as well.

(Interestingly, though the article linked above (and again right here) ran as a front page story about day care at Google, it is archived as a business column, which would have slightly different rules. I do not, however, remember the very long article being labeled as a column in the hard copy of the paper itself.)

Yes, that's an image stolen from Disney via a Web site with a ton of Lion King pictures. I also recognize that Mufasa is pushed Simba is forced to the cliff by Scar (I forgot that Simba, too, ends up hanging from a cliff), and that it's not a perfect analogy, but actually with Simba, who survives, it's a slightly better, or at least more hopeful analogy, implying that their is still hope of the reporter righting himself.

By all accounts, I should have loved this book. I should have felt welcomed into the elite club of people who got it. After all, I have read a good number of books referenced in the table of contents--in which each chapter title is the title of a different book-- and I even got some of the more subtle allusions in the book itself.

Further, I recognized the main characters immediately. I was one of a small, self-important group of high school kids centered around an English teacher: he had us over once a week, every week for a non-school sanctioned writing workshop. There, we worshiped him, that flawed, snuff sniffing English professor with a daughter 
in our grade. There, and in the hallways of school, where he would nod in recognition, snuff falling onto the floor, we waited for his praise and floated on it when it came. But, we slowly noticed how flawed he was, how maybe he was homophobic, totally unhelpful to some of our crowd and the confessions of their poetry, how maybe he was more than a little arrogant, eager to talk about himself just as we began to talk about the luminaries we intended to study under in college.

So, when Blue Van Meer, the protagonist of Special Topics In Calamity Physics expressed skepticism about her and her friends relationship with Hannah Schneider the film teacher -- you know from the first few pages that Schneider ends up dead but there is other, more subtle concerns that arise first--I was already there, already skeptical of the thirst with which the students approached their evenings at their high school teacher's house.

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing”
—Ernest Hemingway

When I was in fourth grade, my favorite book was a skinny paperback of poetry and prose written by a fictional girl named Kate Bloomfield. I thought that I was her and that Jean Little, the real author, somehow stole my fourth grade genius and captured it on paper. My copy of Hey World Here I am was bent in the corners and at the spine so many times that it fell open to my favorite parts and the cover was criss-crossed with white lines. One of my favorite entries (I can't figure out what else to call them) was Kate's musings on journals.

"Real writers keep journals. I've had four. When Mother told my sister Marilyn that I loved to write, she sent me a journal for my birthday. It was squarish and fat, with small organized pages.... A flimsy padlock, which would break if you looked at it, was supposed to keep it secret. Every page had two skimpy sections with a date at the top of each. There was space enough for maybe three sentences if your handwriting was small. My handwriting scrawls. Besides my life is too big to fit into those squinched-up pages. I gave it to my friend Lindsay Ross. She loves it. She has a smaller life. And tidy writing....
Then our teacher handed out "journals" which we had to write in every day for one month. She said she wouldn't mark them but she would read them over....But of course, you could only put down stuff that you wouldn't mind her knowing. My private life is not her affair. When I got it back, though, and saw she had written Excellent! on it, I felt like a fraud.
Then Dad gave me a journal. It is elegant. The pages are creamy and feel like the best art paper when you stroke them. .... I love it. Maybe , someday, my life will be elegant enough to match it. I hope so. I am saving it carefully just in case.
My fourth journal I bought for myself it is a hardcover book meant for writing lecture notes in. It has lots of room on every page. Some days I write six or seven full pages about what I am feeling and thinking....Other days I don't pick it up or, if I do, I just write something like "Another day lived through!"...
Getting a journal is like buying shoes. You have to find the one that fits. And you are the only one who can tell if it pinches."

Sorry that was so long. It turns out I still love that essay, and it hurt to cut too much of it. I guess this is my roundabout way of saying that I am not sure what the point of an online journal is. I can't think of anything less personal or personalized than the Internet, no matter how much time you spend changing the colors on the template of your blog.

So why am I doing this? For one, I just restricted access so that right now only I can see it. It's an experiment to see if it gets me to write more. But I'm a newsprint kinda gal. Which means I like to hold my newspapers in my hands, read books while turning real live pages and write on paper with a pen or a pencil.

One of my friends laughed at me because she says that whenever I want to treat myself to something I buy a journal. It's true. But I am not alone. Mary Gordon, who swears by writing first drafts out by hand, and who is one of my mentors, teachers, and heroes says that she buys a journal every time she goes to another country. I know that sometimes she buys souvenirs as well, but often the journals are her souvenirs.

Makes sense. There is a journal that sits in my bookshelf unopened and blank despite it being perfect, because of the memories I associate with it. It was a present from a boy who had a crush on me for five years. This was at about year four of the crush -- before I evidently broke his heart by telling him I was not attracted to him-- and he inscribed the journal with something silly, something about always planning at the last minute (I had forgotten to invite him to my birthday party until 20 minutes before it started, and he still showed up with a gift). I can't bring myself to write in a journal that someone I never liked very much chose just for me. It seems wrong. And, as a friend asked "who inscribes a journal?" Who buys a journal for someone else?" Lots of people buy them apparently. It is THE gift for girls who like to write. I had the ones that locked (at my prime diary writing time I even had an entry that read "Dear Diary, I am reading a book about a girl who lived in an annex and kept a diary. She was famous because of her diary. Maybe one day we will be famous too." I couldn't finish the Diary of Anne Frank then, I was too young and had recurring nightmares of being chased by Nazis. Seems I was a bit of a morbid kid) I had a slew of travel journals bought both by me and others (Those were the more successful presents. At the same birthday party mentioned above, a girl I was not very close with gave me a cream journal of hand made paper. That was the only journal I almost filled to the end. I kept it blank for almost a year before bringing it with me to Poland where I recorded experiencing brand new Holocaust horrors and reflections and tried to force myself to not go to sleep until I wrote it all out.) My favorites when I was little included one that had a picture of Mary opening the garden door and said "Secret Garden Journal" on the cover, one that was blue with gold cat's eyes and ears on it, and a Lisa Frank notebook that I choose myself. I never get to the end of journals. I give up halfway through sometimes a few pages in. When I got older, I insisted on buying them for myself (with the travel journal exceptions) and they were inevitably plain. Often spiral bound. I kept one through most of high school. It had a cardboard cover that I wrote quotes on with metallic pens. I am pretty sure Jean Little featured on it along with the likes of Steinbeck and Thoreau. But still, I can't get through them. Now I am the owner of at least four moleskin notebooks, only one of which -- a reporters notebook that I treasure as a gift but will most likely leave blank or keep in my purse for emergencies--- was a gift. The rest I buy myself. Moleskins make me think of snobby artsy writers, but the truth is they are perfect. Slim with hard backs and elastic bands to keep them closed. They come in pocket size, though my newest one is a bit bigger -- a size I found is better for writing fiction because turning the pages that often makes me forget a narrative-- and in black they are unobtrusive and let me decide what's important about them and don't look too tempting for prying eyes. Maybe I will be able to fill the newest one all the way to the end.