Posts filed under ‘What I'm reading’
Samuel R. Delaney and the “annealing moment” of doubt
Reading the excerpt below makes me think of how difficult yet rewarding it must be to peel and eat a durian, that strange fruit found only in southeast Asia, and guarded by not only a foul odor but a thick husk of thorns. The excerpt comes from an essay by the science fiction writer, literary critic, and teacher Samuel R. Delaney called “Of Doubts and Dreams.” It’s part of a collection of related essays by Delaney titled About Writing.
Delaney is talking in this essay about doubt - doubt as a barrier to writing anything at all, to start with; but doubt also as an aid to good writing, or more accurately to the search for good writing. In particular, he notes, cliches of both language and thought must be seen for what they are and discarded - even though they are often the first things that come to mind when we set out to write. He goes on:
The act of refusing to put down words, or crossing out words already down, while you concentrate on the vision you are writing about, makes new words come. What’s more, when you refuse language your mind offers up, something happens to the next batch offered. The words are not the same ones that would have come if you hadn’t doubted . . .
If there is a privileged moment somewhere in the arc of experience running from the first language an infant hears, through the toddler’s learning that language, to the child’s learning to read it, to the adolescent’s attempts to write journals, tales, dramas, poems - if there is a moment, rightly called creative, when the possibility of the extraordinary is shored up against the inundation of ordinary rhetoric that forms, shapes, and is the majority of what we call civilized life, it is here. This is the moment covered - in the sense of covered over - by the tautology against which so many thousands of would-be writers have stumbled: “To be a writer, you must write.” You must write not only to produce the text that is the historical verification of your having written. You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic1 organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception. Without this moment, this series of moments, this concatenation of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper, of time spent pondering a passage through a dream.
What wonderful yet thorny motives this passage suggests - not for why we write, but why we ought to write.
- “Negentropic,” if you’re wondering, means “characterized by a reduction in entropy, and a corresponding increase in order.” ↩
Memoir alert: Hats and Eyeglasses out in paperback
I had been playing poker with Martha Frankel and her crew up in the Woodstock area for well over a year before I learned she was semi-secretly writing a memoir about, among other things, poker. For a while after that, I didn’t hear anything more. Martha was an extremely experienced magazine journalist, but I knew how hard writing a book can be - especially your first book, and a memoir to boot (something I’ve never dared). And I knew too how long the odds can be against getting published.
But Martha landed an agent - and then a deal. And when Hats and Eyeglasses, as the memoir is called, came out in hardcover last year, it got loving reviews.
Now it’s out in paperback. I rarely read memoirs, but I’ve read this one and recommend it. Am I biased? Sure. Is it good anyway? Yes. Is it about poker? Yes - sort of. It’s more about family and about sticking together, even under the worst of circumstances. I won’t say too much more except to give you just a paragraph from one of my favorite scenes in the book. Martha has traveled to Ft. Lauderdale to visit her cousin Keith, who (a) is a cook, and (b) is going to teach her poker.
So now we’re in his kitchen in Florida, and he’s telling me about straights and flushes, but he refuses to divulge whether it’s capoccolo or prosciutto that gives his lasagna such a zing. “Why should I tell you?” he taunts me, hiding a jar of red pepper flakes. I ignore him and stare at “the list” I’d made up for myself.
It says:
ONE PAIR
TWO PAIRS
3-OF-A-KIND
STRAIGHT
FLUSH
FULL HOUSE
4-OF-A-KIND
STRAIGHT FLUSH
Keith hates the list and doesn’t understand why I need it. “Because I can’t remember what comes between three-of-a-kind and four-of-a-kind,” I whine.
“You better remember, because those are the hands that are going to win you money.” He lights a cigar and holds the match under the list. “You’re smart,” he says as it bursts into flames. “Just remember the fucking thing.”
P.S. If you’re the cautious type and want to know a bit more about Martha before investing your $14.95, you can check out this profile in The New York Times.
Essays by Grossman, Pamuk
Not book reviews, just quick notes -
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics, by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008; 144 pages, $18). Grossman is an Israeli who writes essays, commentary, and occasionally journalism - but mostly novels. I’ve never read his fiction but his essays are wonderful. The title piece in this collection was first delivered in 2007 as an address at the Pen American Center. Like much good writing it seems artless at first, almost shapeless - think of Montaigne or “The Golden Notebook” - and yet at the same time utterly assured. In this and the other essays, Grossman gropes his way through the dark to celebrate the triumph of private language over the debasement of words by governments and interest groups at war with each other. Grossman writes from a country at war, and yet what he has to say is quite pertinent to the U.S. , a country busy conducting not one but two wars out of the immediate sight of its citizens.
Other Colors, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage paperback reprint, 2008, 464 pages, $15.95). I’m actually reading the 2007 hardcover edition, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago at The Strand over on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan. I enjoyed though never finished an earlier memoir by this Nobel prize winner, Istanbul: Memories and the City - hmm, I’ll have to get back to that one at some point. What I like about Pamuk is his slow style, abhorrence of confession for its own sake, masculine sentimentality, and willingness to muse about meaning rather than merely present a string of scenes. A nice change from the relentlessly present-tense memoirs churned out in this country.
