2016 Best of the Net nomination for "Building the Perfect Wings"

Decomp magazine has nominated my piece, "Building the Perfect Wings" for the 2016 Best of the Net. Thanks to the editorial staff at Decomp for selecting my work!

As well, my first official published poem, "Reversal", will be appearing in Crack the Spine Literary Magazine next month. Thanks to them, and to all the editors who have given these votes of confidence for my work, now and over the last eleven years.

Bob Dylan's Nobel

I’m not usually interested in speculation--or writing about it, rather--but I feel compelled to say that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 will be Bob Dylan.

Initially, my pick was based on a hunch: Why not Bob Dylan? And then, when I saw how upset it was making the fellow at The Literary Saloon, and that the odds at Ladbroke’s had jumped in Dylan’s favor, pushing him to the top, it does seem the right choice.

Bob Dylan is a quirky pick for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he’s as influential, in a culturally significant and altering way, as Mark Twain or William Wordsworth. And, he’s a poet.

He’s neither so obscure and forgotten as some past Nobel picks (Camilo Jose Cela, anyone? Or J. M. G. Le Clezio?) nor as obvious a choice as someone like Coetzee or Beckett, though he’s close when you compare him to his American counterparts.

From year to year, I sometimes scratch my head when they pick the Nobel in Literature. Often, the choice seems more puzzling as time goes on. Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as thoroughly steeped in world lit as some*, but I always check out the winners, eventually, at least in the last twenty years of Nobels.

Usually, when they select, you can see the baseline quality of the choice, in contrast and comparison to the other choices. In this way, Dylan has it hands down over any of his American rivals. Cormac McCarthy might be my next choice, but I still think Bob’s got it.

Now some have been angling for Philip Roth for years, as if he simply deserves it, but this kind of argument only goes so far. This is the Nobel, after all, and Roth feels like a long-shot. He’s probably not humble enough (and hasn’t he won enough prizes already?). His work is also distinctly self-centered and prurient enough to its own end that reinforces its exclusionary effect. All of which is to say Roth’s work precludes itself from embracing humanity in the way most Nobel winners have done.

I love Roth, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t think he’s a Nobel candidate. In fact, I think Joyce Carol Oates would be a more fitting choice than Roth.

Question is, regarding Bob Dylan, are they going to use his real name?

*Though I’m not trying to be exclusionary about it, either, disregarding those that don’t pass my snob test. Can you tell me why the fellow at The Complete Review is so proud of himself when he excludes writers such as Vollmann from the review?

Two Thousand Ten

The saying, “Do what you love and the success will follow,” is always one I’ve heeded, religiously. Primarily because my priority is to do work that I enjoy since I’m going to spend so much time doing it. Writing has certainly led this call for me, though after years of practice, the hankering for further extrinsic reward is undeniable. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily financial as some think it is. It is about public acknowledgement, perhaps, though the numbers of beloved artists who are satisfied with their work are probably equal to those that are dissatisfied.

I often wonder about motivation for my fellow writers--I don’t get people who want to write because they want to make a best seller list (which seems equal to thinking you could win the pick six). I don’t get people who want to write though they don’t like to read. It’s as if everyone wants to be a writer, as if it’s been glamorized beyond recognition. For the longest time, everyone wanted to be an architect, or at least this is how it was reflected in Hollywood screenplays.

I know that, in 2010, I’m still deepening my practice, I’m still learning and loving the work, the craft on the page, the music and conceptual frisson that can be found, and deployed, in a long work of fiction. It’s the life of the mind, still, just as it was for me seventeen years ago. I don’t expect a huge success, but the incremental one has been encouraging and rewarding. I’m reminded of when, four years ago, my college advisor tried to level me a bit with what he presumed to be my false ambition; no matter what, I still appreciated that honest advice, though his cautionary reaction was more fitting advice to someone who hadn’t struggled at something that he was going to do no matter what reward he got out of it.

No matter what one talks about in the pursuit of a writing career, there is no field I know that has so many naysayers who don’t want you to have this thing you are passionate about on your terms. Unfortunately, these are often the gatekeepers; fortunately, they’re not all naysayers. All of these naysayers can’t take the love of the writing away, and I’m confident I’ll outlast so many of them that I won’t eventually care anymore.

Happy 2010!

International Super Hype

With the economic meltdown there is constant talk of the publishing world collapsing, but you wouldn’t know it to read the reviews. The latest big books are still promoted and heralded--winning prestigious prizes in France, no less, a sure sign of literary inflation--and bid upon at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the book lovers get caught up in these things (I am one, usually). The latest hype is for Jonathan Littell’s, The Kindly Ones (at the Complete Review here, another here, and Laila Lalami's L. A. Times review, here.)

I've read the glowing and scathing reviews, encomiums and apercus, enough to be marginally intrigued to look into the book. The publisher's (Harper Collins) page provides a generous sample to read. Along with the mixed reviews, the opening pages were enough to put this reader off.

Ruth Franklin’s review in The New Republic sums it up: "The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject [...]"

It's subject is a one size fits all Nazi cog (to use Franklin's term) who yet revels in his twisted personal depravity, explaining his complicity in the mass killings because he's just like every other human being on the planet.

My distaste for the subject matter and its execution are clear. Franklin talks of the Nazi functionaries: “They were, the overwhelming majority of them, unremarkable men, "small cogs" in a killing machine, who showed little initiative of their own but were prepared to obey orders unquestioningly and then go to dinner.”

Franklin talks about how we want to attribute to men capable of this behavior the embodiment of “absolute evil.” But there are shades of gray, maybe what Littell is attempting to portray; the only problem is that it Littell's character sounds like he is clearly over the edge, definitely not in a kindly margin. (For some reason this called to mind an interesting spectacle on Nightline a few weeks ago where Deepak Chopra squared off with two Christian fundamentalists to argue, “Does Satan Exist?”) 

I think what unnerves about the subject and its fictionalization is that it’s taking the crime of the century and treating it as if it were something less than what it was. This can be seen to attempt to diminish the crime through the humanizing of (one of) its proponents.

However, when it’s said that truth is stranger than fiction, there is a resistance to fictionalizing an event that should have never happened. Any sympathy for such a character is seen to ameliorate or apologize for the horrific reality. Unfortunately, that’s also what makes it a controversial--and challenging--choice.

As with any book, there is probably a great deal of calculation for the writer to write what might be controversial, what might catch on. If you’ve got the ability, then you tackle it. I understand this. This is the scaling of a great peak. You don’t take it on unless you can stay with it. So, no criticism to the writer his accomplishment there.

In this case however, I'm grateful to let the reviewers wade through this 900 page monster.

New Letters Finalist

For the second time, a story of mine has been selected by the preliminary judges as a fiction finalist for evaluation by the final judge in the 2008 New Letters Awards for Writers. “What We Have Seen Waiting for the War to End” was selected with 20 other entries from among over 1,400 entries. (That's 1 out of 70, or .0142 percent). This is the second time for me, as another story of mine, “Double Kayak” was a finalist selected for the 2007 New Letters Awards.

Stay tuned and cross your fingers for me!