Category: literary life

I like Chris Offutt’s guide to literary terms, which Harper’s Magazine includes in its most recent issue.  Here’s a little sample:

nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers.

creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.

clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

plot: A device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.

Isn’t it great? More here. The piece was originally published in Seneca Review.

I enjoyed reading the essays in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, all on the theme of teaching.  David Gessner (Sick of Nature, Return of the Osprey) writes about giving up full-time writing for the safety–and health insurance–that come with a teaching job.  He touches on all the challenges that writers in academia face, I think.  Manil Suri has a nostalgic piece about teaching mathematics for twenty-five years (that’s fifty semesters.) And Mark Oppenheimer has an interesting article about how teaching evaluations are collected, what they might measure, and what they don’t.

I start teaching in four days.  I fully expect to have one of those dreams where I show up without my papers, without my notes, having forgotten what the day’s lecture was about.

Hirsh Sawhney interviews Aravind Adiga, the author of the Booker-shortlisted novel The White Tiger. The novel tells the story of a village man who becomes a driver for a wealthy businessman, and in this interview Adiga punctures a hole in the notion that India is a rising world power with enviable economic growth.

Rail: Tell us about the India your book is set in.

Adiga: The book deals with an India smack in the middle of “the boom,” and it challenges a lot of comfortable assumptions about Indian democracy and economics. I want to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power.

Rail: What are some of the starker things you learned about India during this era of hype and optimism, when you were working as a reporter for Time?

Adiga: The fact that a lot of Indians have very little political freedom, especially in the north of India. That elections are rigged in large parts of the north Indian state of Bihar, and they’re also accompanied by violence. There’s like thirty-five killings during every election. If you were a poor man you’d have to pick China over India any day because your kids have a better chance of being nourished if you’re poor. Your wife is more likely to survive childbirth. You’re likely to live longer. There are so many ways in which India’s system fails horribly.

This, of course, is not quite what Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and others have been telling the American public about India for the last few years.

Is Babar a cute, quaint children’s book series or a vile tool of neocolonialism? Adam Gopnik revisits this and other questions in a piece about Jean de Brunhof’s classic:

In the past few decades, a series of critics on the left, most notably the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, have indicted Babar in the course of a surprisingly resilient and hydra-headed argument about the uses of imagery and the subtleties of imperialist propaganda. Babar, such interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule. The animals that resist—the rhinoceroses—are defeated. The Europeanized elephants are, as in the colonial mechanism of indirect rule, then made trustees of the system, consuls for the colonial power. To be made French is to be made human and to be made superior. The straight lines and boulevards of Celesteville, the argument goes, are the sign of enslavement.

People who seem shocked by these interpretations might like to read up on Tintin.

I was completely stunned by the news that David Foster Wallace had killed himself.  It’s so hard to make sense of any suicide, and especially so when the person is enormously talented, and loved by his family, his readers, his students, and his colleagues.  But neither success nor love can bring peace.  He seems to have been so tormented.  I am just so saddened by his passing.  There are many remembrances being posted all over the place. And Ed Champion has posted many writers’ reactions to the news.

The Berlin International Literature Festival is calling for a worldwide reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry on October 5.  If your school or cultural institution is interested, please see details here.