Our Living Literary Legacy

Here's an interesting article from the Guardian on the possible literary legacy of our time when measured against movements of the past, specifically the last significant American literary movement, the Beats. Personally, I think the next recognized movement will be the collected but separate efforts of postmodernists like David Markson, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Laird Hunt, Mark Z. Danielewski, etc. - authors who find ways to reinvent narrative structure while still demonstrating a mastery of old world storytelling, in a time when other media are becoming increasing formulaic and derivative. But that's just me. Any other ideas?

Jesse Morse

I haven't done anything for Ellipsis the last couple months but now I am back and posting a personal greeting:

Hi. This is Jesse Morse. This is my personal greeting.

‘Echo Maker’ Wins Book Award for Fiction

America's largest and most respected literary prize, the National Book Awards, announced winners last night in New York City. Richard Powers' Echo Maker - featured on this very blog's list of must-read fall fiction - took home the brass statuette and 10K cash award. Not too shabby for years and years of intense, introspective and solitary work, just for this novel alone. And how much does Jessica Simpson make a picture? An album? An appearance? Just curious...

Get the full story here.

Sorta Goes Without Saying...

But this new O.J. book? The one where he "hypothetically" describes how he murdered his ex-wife and her lover? You'll hear it from most legitimate publishing houses and purveyors of quality literature drawing the public's attention, but I think you should hear it again, now - don't buy this shit. Don't let any of your friends or family buy it, and if you see someone out in public reading it, march right on over there and take it from them, replace it with something by Paul Auster, and give them your best glower before storming off. Seriously. Tell everybody.

A Room of One's Own

If you're like me, you find a writer's space terribly interesting, the ultimate reflection of how they give themselves to their work. That's why I find this to be one of the most insane and beautiful rooms I've ever seen, kind of like Kevin Spacey's apartment in Seven. It belongs to Will Self, whose latest novel, The Book of Dave, about a 21st Century madman whose ramblings become the basis for a 25th Century religion, drops Tuesday, November 28th.

Discover "New" Writers

Here's an article from CNN.com about a "new" writer we should be paying attention to. Coincidentally, I ordered his first book "House of Leaves," from Half.com last week. Think David Foster Wallace's narrative sensibility meets David Markson's abstract plotlines with chart and figures and whatnot. Invigorating.

Volume One, Issue Ten

Out now:

Marjorie Maddox

Best Face Forward

I.
When you have it done, Elizabeth saw on one of those daytime talk shows, the plastic surgeon cuts new slits for your ears, then tugs the skin back, up, and over. Your ability to hear remains the same. She dreamed about this after the phone call. Her sixty-six-year-old mother was 2000 miles away recuperating in Phoenix; had already had it done. The time for arguing was long gone. Back, up, and over, the skin stretched like not-enough pie dough needing to fill the tin.

II.
Her sister’s cancer was bigger than a dime and square on the lower lid of her left eye. The doctors used the word “deformed,” pronounced it carelessly in the examination room. Her mother worried about photos, what her youngest daughter would be able to see.

Her sister was awake during the operation, could watch her husband watching her. They had splurged and gone to a hospital. The pathologist kept coming in and out, shaking his head. After three times, he nodded. Afterwards, they gave her the sulfa she was allergic to, and still later, when she broke out in raw rashes, a bill reduced by $5000. A good deal, her sister said. After three weeks, her ability to see returned to normal.

III.
Elizabeth scanned, but did not mention, the Time magazine article entitled, “When Doctors Say They’re Sorry.” She cut it out carefully along the lines.

IV.
After Elizabeth tried on her mother’s Liz Claiborne hand-me-downs, there was nothing new to wear. Buttonholes refused to meet buttons. Hooks and eyes remained a safe distance from each other. Zippers, at their worst, dug into her skin and stuck. At their best, they bulged. Altogether, Elizabeth tried on ten blouses, five sweaters, eight skirts, and one pair of elastic running pants, the latter too tight on her hips. She had lost ten pounds.

The next day, over coffee, her mother offered to pay for breast reduction and a tummy tuck. “It could be your birthday present,” she explained, stirring NutraSweet into her decaf.

V.
The daughter smoothed her Size 12 skirt and looked away. Her ability to feel remained the same.

VI.
“An explication,“ Elizabeth wrote on the blackboard for her freshmen, “was the process of analyzing a poem line by line, similar, in fact, to writing the poem itself.” She squiggled some lines to look like text. “It also was not unlike the work of a surgeon, “ she went on to explain, “evaluating, diagnosing, dissecting, amputating or augmenting where necessary.” She drew a circle around the squiggles and a dotted line out to the side the way she did when diagramming sentences for her Secondary Ed students. “Start by taking careful note, what makes up the whole, how it is shaped.”

She dusted the chalk off of her hands to avoid sneezing, then began again. “And always look for second opinions.” She nodded toward the quietest girl in the front row. Once again, she had forgotten her name, but no matter.

“Take, for instance,” she continued, “the poem on 1228 of your text,” (quick flipping of pages) “an over-taught piece, yes, but in this case, appropriate.” She circled the room, reading slowly, articulating carefully, eyeing up her clients.

She was good at building suspense. Knew how to milk the persona of confidence. “First, are you our sort of person?” she interrogated, gaze straight ahead and serious. “Do you wear a glass eye, false teeth, or a crutch?” She tugged the hair of a cheerleader who had fallen asleep so that she woke with an “Oh!” No one laughed. All eyes were on her in her blue pants suit, her professor face. Her sensible flats clicked across the tile dramatically.

“A brace or a hook, rubber breasts” (a football player and an accounting major smirked) “or a rubber crotch?” (they stopped). She walked toward them, then suddenly veered away.

She took a deep breath. “Stitches to show something’s missing?” This she started slowly as a whisper and had meant to continue in hushed undertones. Somehow, though, by the end of the query, her voice gained momentum and volume, the last words re-playing themselves on her lips like a broken record. “Missing, missing, missing?” Too late, she realized that she was shouting.

She turned away for a moment, erased the blackboard, then turned back again to her waiting audience. Fully composed. Face Forward. Her ability to think remained the same.


Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 3 full-length poetry books: "Weeknights at the Cathedral" (WordTech 06), "Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation" (Yellowglen Prize, 04), "Perpendicular As I" (Sandstone Book Award). In addition, she has published 5 chapbooks (including "When The Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems") and over 270 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of "Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania" (PSU Press 05) and author of the children's book "A What of Whats?" (Boyds Mills Press, forthcoming 06). Her short story collection, "What She Was Saying," was 1 of 3 finalists for the 2005 Katherine Anne Porter Award.

Pynchon Freaks Prick Up Your Ears

Nice advance article on "Against the Day" and several other things Pynchonique. Except where he is, what he looks like, and if he actually exists.

Indie Lit

It's about six weeks old, but here's an interesting article from CNN.com on what the kids like to call the "indie lit."

Writers Writing

If the Onion doesn't stop posting really interesting articles on literature, I'm going to have to drop The Watchtower and make the Onion the only media I read. Check out this piece on 6 great books about writers writing.

Do Screenwriters Matter?

Here's a really interesting conversation between two editors at the Onion's AV Club, on the role and relevance of the modern screenwriter. Pretty interesting stuff. By the by, Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter first mentioned, is primarily a novelist. His first American release, The Night Buffalo, came out this past summer. It's a wonderful read, subtle and devastating. Give it a look.

Writers on Film

Check out this article from MSNBC, then leave us a comment about your favorite movie writer. My personal fav is Michael Douglas' character in Wonder Boys - stoned, hopeless, laboring long and ultimately redeemable. And I think he tagged Katie Holmes, which used to be cool.

Literary Slugfest: Saramago vs. Saramago

In a first for LSF, this match-up is a unique opportunity to watch a brilliant author (insert your own "beat himself" joke here). The contending novels are Saramago's Blindness, written in 1999, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and its sequel of sorts, Seeing, released this very year. So if you think about it, technically this match-up is a Literature Slugfest. My mother's right; I should've gone into marketing.






ROUND ONE (plot): No spoilers, don't worry, I'll speak in general terms, nothing you can't learn from the dust jacket. Blindness, in a nutshell, is about a viral outbreak of blindness that spreads in a modern Portuguese metropolis, and the subsequent confinement and abandonment of the infirmed, and of course, the infirmed's reactions to such abuse. Seeing, on the other hand, is about the same city and some of the same characters several years later when a mild form of protest - voters turning in blank ballots - goes awry as the government responds by barricading the citizens inside the city, all services taken away, of course. Remember, these are nutshells, the plots get more intricate than this in both cases. But as intriguing as both are, the original idea's usually the best, so I'm giving this one to Blindness.


ROUND TWO (themes): Both books deal with the same issues, only from different approaches; Saramago is writing about social alienation, the atrocities that befall when fear trumps reason, and the chaos inherit to our social, cultural and political structures. In Blindness, he tackles these issues in terms of an environment when the aforementioned structures are taken away (we're blind, get it?). In Seeing, the environment is one in which the structures are overextended, pushed to their extreme limits (eyes wide open, one could say). Both methods have of course been used before - think Oryx and Crake, The Road, other apocalypse fiction for the former, Brave New World, 1984 et al for the latter - but never perhaps with as much humanity as Saramago brings to the page. Those other novels are experienced by readers, they project their ideas and follow them out ruthlessly, brilliantly, searing themselves into our collective consciousness. Their power is visceral. Saramago is visceral as well, but he is also sensual, and thus his work is felt, it is experienced on a different, more personal level. Everyone feels the same sense of generic fear when they finish 1984; no two people read Saramago the same way. The fear, the hope, these are things that come from inside us, so they are not common. But maybe that's too flowery. I'll get to it: Blindness, again, serves its purpose more completely.

ROUND THREE (voice): Without using too many definitive adjectives, Saramago's one of the greatest narrators ever. He's there but he isn't, he knows everything going on and he knows as little as we do. It's amazing, and furthermore, it's comforting, even when telling you horrible things. As such, his voice only gets better with time. Seeing, being the later novel, is thus a little stronger, enough to win the last round.

But not the bout. Blindness by Jose Saramago beats Seeing by Jose Saramago. Sorry Jose, but someone had to go away empty-handed

Ryan Newton

Airport Landscape

Glad to have touched down
In the city of brotherly love
Whiskey blue – free baggage
Allowance – ultimately outsiders
Wonder whether their view is privilege,
Like, nowhere. If you ever come to
That state of contentment
Or contention, full of content
As devoid of it, you might be
Reaching into the Causa sui
The Deus sive natura of Baruch
Spinoza; call me, I’ll pick you up.


Ryan Newton wrote this poem after reading the excellent book Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, by Rebecca Goldstein.

Contributor Note

Ellipsis contributor and world-renowned novelist Isabel Allende (vol. 1, issue 8) has just released a new novel Inez of My Soul. Check out a review here.

Well-Written Television: Hustle

I know, I know, television is the root of all evil, the bane of modern society, and the most potent and debilitating drug ever known. Largely I agree with this. However, every so often a show comes along that is so well-written, it transcends the mundanity of the medium and becomes what some of us would deign to call "art." Twin Peaks was one such show, The Sopranos another, and Lost (providing it doesn't stretch itself so thin it snaps) is yet another. And I've found a new name to add to this list: the BBC's Hustle.

Every episode is like The Sting: a team of con artists planning, launching and pulling off incredible schemes each more dumbfounding than the one before. At one point the Crown Jewels are involved.

The best part about Hustle is its writing, all done by series creator Tony Jordan. The storylines are tight, original, and move of their own accord at a jaunty pace. Never derivative. Never predictable. The characters are fleshed out by the first episode, each so simple yet so complex you can almost smell their Greek origins. All together it's a highly engaging and entertaining hour. Quite possibly the smartest show on TV, in my opinion.

So you can either get BBC America and watch Hustle there, rent season one on DVD, or freak out like me, hop online at 3 in the morning and buy a multi-region DVD player, then skip over to amazon.co.uk and pick up the first two seasons, third on the way. Seriously; it's that good.

Remember, Remember

Every year on this date in England, children construct human effigies from old clothes stuffed with newspaper. They carry the effigy around their neighborhood, knocking on doors and requesting “a penny for the Guy.” As night falls, the effigy is placed atop a bonfire of the season’s dry leaves and dead branches. There are fireworks. The effigy is burned. And although I’m sure this has been replaced by safer, community organized and sponsored bonfires and firework displays, it is an excellent and, to me, nostalgic tradition.

Here is a nice piece explaining why this happens, written by (I believe) the same Bruce Robinson responsible for the stellar Withnail & I and Paranoia in the Launderette.

Saint Paul

Last month, Paul Auster, a writer I very much admire, seems to have won a prize from a Prince. And, the Guardian* has printed his acceptance speech on the interweb, right here.

It’s a good speech. Articulate, at times beautiful, as you’d expect from one presented with the grandly monikered “Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters,” as the article’s footer states: Spain’s premier literary honor.

The general thrust is that although “... art is useless, at least when compared, say, to the work of a plumber, or a doctor, or a railroad engineer,” it is magnificent in this uselessness.

Well, I disagree with Mr. Auster. I think this is like saying that learning algebra is useless because such knowledge never finds a practical application in later life. This is an easy view to subscribe to: when was the last time you figured out how much an orange costs if six oranges and seven lemons come to a dollar seventy three? In this sense, yes, algebra is useless, at least when compared, say, to what you might learn in shop class, economics, or even composition.

But this isn’t the point. Algebra is taught to train the mind to deal with problems and develop the logical thought patterns often utilized in everyday life. And far from proffering the apparently elusive “purpose of art,” I would say that if we’re looking for a “use” for art, then it could be in the same vein.

Experiencing and creating art introduces the mind to new processes, new ways of reading, deciphering or approaching situations. The fireworks in the mind induced by a Motherwell painting; an apparently nonsensical Burroughs novel; a Stan Brakhage film; the verse of James Schuyler: these are exercises of thought. New destinations that forge new mental trails.

Does it make us “better people”? That’s questionable. What does “better people” even mean? But it develops new ways of seeing, experiencing and perhaps understanding our environment, our minds, and gosh, maybe even our lonely human predicament. This, to me, is a long way from “magnificent uselessness,” certainly if we are open to the distinct possibility that the “real world” consists of more than we may access via our five crude senses.

So, when that magnificently “useless artist” Pablo Picasso said (something like) art is a lie that illuminates the truth, he was closer to my own opinion than Mr. Auster appears to be. Compounding Pablo, and all of my ramblings, with Proust’s assertion that “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes,” you could arrive at something of a conclusion: that the art of fiction, in both reading and writing, is the forerunner to discovery.


* Apologies if I appear to be a one-man marketing army for the Guardian. It isn’t the only website I read. But, I tend to find a lot of their articles interesting, or provocative of reaction, so they find their way here.

Me Me Me

I enjoyed this article from the Guardian, and now I want to see this movie. I also enjoy origami and interesting cheeses.

WILLIAM STYRON 1925 - 2006

One of the true greats of Southern Literature has passed away. Though best-known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sophie's Choice (his last actual novel, published in 1979), my personal favorite of his work was the memoir Darkness Visible, in which Styron discusses his bout with depression. Beautiful and empowering. They don't make them like Styron anymore. It's a shame.

More from CNN.