Category Archives: Uncategorized

Naming Babies v. Naming “Babies”

In the past I have told people that I feel bad for them when they don’t know of any songs that mention their first names. I feel bad that they never feel pseudo-famous the way that I do when Sinead O’Connor sings about a Molly who dies of a fever, but is so committed to pushing a wheelbarrow through Dublin that she continues the task postmortem. I try to downplay how special I feel when The Vaseline’s sing, “kiss kiss Molly’s lips” over and over in a chorus sometimes interrupted by a bicycle horn. I grew up with children’s books where bears and dolls and a girl who likes strawberries all shared my name and the only Molly’s I encountered in real life were usually dogs. My most basic identifier is distinct enough, but has also always loosely attached me to these characters with their own narratives. I’m lucky to like the associations with my name, but wonder about the actual task of naming.

Recently I came up blank when potential baby names were discussed among my peers, but with that daunting reality a far possibility, I found myself thinking about the more immediate choices my fiction friends make when they invent a character and choose its name. Had it occurred to them that naming a character Molly would contribute to some universal Molly narrative? Is there a purposeful distinction between a Brittany and a Britney? Do they consider articles like these or are the implications of Freakonomics moot in fictional story? Are the names associated with time period, ethnicity, class, and gender so engrained that the integration of an appropriate name in a narrative is natural and subtle? I have never made it very far trying to write fiction.

I recognize that consideration for a character’s name varies in importance. Lolita and Romeo are so loaded with an established identity that their use in a story is likely to be a purposeful evocation of those other Lolitas and Romeos. Most of my fiction friends said that character names just come to them and that their only stipulation is that they never use names that they like. This one rule seemed to be the only middle ground between a shoulder shrug concerning a character’s name and using a name like Lolita. When we started discussing possible real life baby names there were rules about the sound and syllables of a name, associations with acquaintances by certain names that could make us groan, and the unspoken desire that our kids would stand out just a little bit on their school roster.

For people who have once or twice referred to their stories and plays as their “babies,” I thought the contrasting name consideration was interesting. Of course I expected that naming a real baby would be more arduous than a fictional character because babies tend to be that way. I like the contrast of inventing an identity for a character with a name that an author doesn’t really like with my own obsession to find a Molly identity in fictional characters. I remember the first time I considered a name for my future offspring. In first grade, after reading the story of a mouse named Chrysanthemum who is teased for her name, I chose it for my future daughter. The beginning of my naming insecurities may be traced back to this moment where I thought I had achieved the perfect balance of distinctiveness and pseudo-celebrity. Chrysanthemum would never have to tack on the the first initial of her last name in class and she could tell everyone she was named after a book. My parents revealed that the mouse in the story was named for a flower and suddenly the teasing seemed justified.

I have never been allowed to name a human baby, but when I do I will obsess over the literary, lyrical, high school nemeses, and nineteenth-century verbs associated with it (Molly once meant “to do women’s work”). I will wonder if it is possible to name a baby after a literary character without invoking a tragic existence or at least requiring that they live out the namesake’s narrative. I would be disappointed in a Walden who couldn’t tear himself away from video games or a Flannery who isn’t even a little bit interested in amputation. I will want a baby that grows up to invent its own identity, but still feels like some bedtime stories were written about them and Little Richard is singing that loudly for them.

Minimalism in the Wardrobe and on the Bookshelf

Lately, I’ve been reading a fashion message board online. I’m a graduate student with a limited budget, so while I might not be adding many items to my wardrobe this season, I can live vicariously through the purchases of others. The women on the board post pictures of their latest purchases, outfits of the day, and yay-or-nays, in which they show us a series of cardigans or bracelets or cobalt skinny jeans (it’s astonishing how many companies make a pair), and the rest of us decide if each item is a yay, a nay, or a meh.

In October, some of them started a five-item challenge. They pledged to purchase only five new wardrobe items until the end of the year, which has forced them to choose each item with an eye toward versatility and quality. They can’t buy six fifty-dollar blazers, but they can use all the money they would have spent to buy one really nice blazer. One blogger takes this sort of minimalism to an extreme. Her whole wardrobe consists of maybe twenty-five items. Recently, she spent five months shopping for a black sweater. Her closet is two feet wide. The idea is seductive in the way all extremes are: Live in a 200-square-foot bungalow! Grow all your own food and learn how to hand-mill grains! Write a whole novel in November! Yes, yes, and yes. Sign me up please.

I have spare time to lurk on the fashion board because I recently passed the oral component of the comprehensive exam for the PhD. The exam covered 120 books, many of which are still on my office floor because they won’t fit in my three bookcases. Looking at them arrayed below me I wonder: Is there an analogous minimizing project I could undertake for my books? And if so, would it be worthwhile? When I finished reducing my library to only the essentials, would I feel lighter, more efficient? Would I be a better or more prolific writer if the room in which I wrote were not so packed with the achievements of others? I don’t think I would. The books are there when I want to be inspired, to catch a certain voice, or to reread a favorite scene. They are only a burden when I have to box them up and take them across the city or country, which I’ve done twelve times in the past ten years. The moves are just far enough apart that I forget how painful my back gets hoisting those boxes.

Further, what organizing principle would I use for the cull? I’d keep the books I love, certainly, but I wouldn’t want to keep only those books. I’d also hold onto the ones that madden and frustrate me (I’m looking at you, The Public Burning and The Man Who Loved Children). And the ones I’ve annotated heavily. And the ones I might want to teach someday. The general rule for clothing is if you haven’t worn an item in the past year, you should get rid of it. The same can’t be said of books, which don’t go out of fashion in the same way. The relative value of a fishtail hemline ebbs and flows, but Moby Dick will always deserve a place on the shelf. There’s no yay, nay, or meh about that.

Have any of you ever done a major cull of your library? If so, what was your organizing principle? Are there any books you’ve gotten rid of that you wish you could have back?

Why Great Books Make Bad Movies

Occasionally Hollywood producers get tired of re-using their own ideas (see: remakes) and decide to dip into the literature well for some inspiration.  Throughout cinematic history there have been more film adaptations of popular novels than one could begin to count.  Although it can be nice to see the characters from your favorite book brought to life on the big screen, 9 times out of 10 it’s a safe bet that you’re on the brink of disappointment from the time you hand your tickets to that teenager, at the entrance to the theater lobby, who looks like he’d much rather be sitting at his home computer writing a persuasive blog about why a zombie apocalypse could actually happen.

Put simply: more often than not, book to film adaptions are bad.  If you don’t believe me, rent The Scarlet Letter starring Demi Moore.  For further proof see almost any film based on a Stephen King book, although I will always have a special place in my heart for the awesomely bad Maximum Overdrive with Emilio Estevez, or any other movie featuring killer electronics for that matter.

Earlier this year I read two books that had already been turned into films, The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler’s Wife.  Both were good books with terribly disappointing film adaptions.  The Time Traveler’s Wife film tried to pack way too much of the book’s plot into the less than two hour running time.  I did appreciate the director’s obvious desire to include as much from the book as possible but, come on man, you have to make the film work on its own. The Lovely Bones had the potential to be a really powerful film had Peter Jackson not pushed the plot and characterization of the movie to the side to make way for his love affair with visual effects.

The film version of The Lovely Bones was packed with capable actors and had the benefit of source material that had already proven to be emotionally impactful and commercially successful but the heart breaking story about a family overcoming the murder of their daughter/sister through the years following her death seemed to take a back seat to the visual elements of the scenes in heaven.  This was completely flipped from the book version where heaven was far from the focus of the book.  This is a perfect example of the problem with book-to-film adaptions.  Instead of maintaining the integrity of the book and thus the emotional connection to the characters, someone obviously thought the imagery of heaven would sell more tickets than a story about overcoming the worst thing that could happen to a family.

I wanted to avoid the mentioning of Twilight anywhere in this blog entry but, for some reason, I feel the need to point out that the inspiration for this topic had nothing to do with Twilight.  That would be a blog about bad books turned into bad movies.

I was recently reading about a possible film adaption of one of my favorite books, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, and my brain went into overdrive about how many ways Hollywood could ruin my precious memories of this novel.  There are so many ways it could go wrong and if you’ve ever read this novel you know how potentially difficult it could be to film, short of any major changes.

The problem is if you’re going to adapt a book to film everything has to be perfect from the script down to the casting if you’re going to make fans of the book happy.  And, for the love of all that is holy, please keep Kristen Stewart far away from this movie if it does ever get made.

CNF: Like a Redheaded Picasso Symphony or Something

“Be Thou the Voice,” an essay from September 8 in the Los Angeles Review of Books was posted last Friday on Brevity’s blog. In the essay, memoirist Dinah Lenney articulates a thoughtful discussion on voice and the legitimacy of creative nonfiction as a genre. In Lenney’s article she manages to compare memoirists to actors, jazz musicians, cover artists, the kind of people who carve their initials in trees, and painters. The alleged haziness of CNF makes explaining it to outsiders difficult. This is when we revert to analogies: It’s like journalism, but not really. It’s like all writing, but different. It’s like painting a photograph with words! I’ve started to resent these analogies. Does Jonathan Franzen ever have to describe The Corrections as “Kind of a sad sitcom, but like, if you didn’t have a TV?” Comparisons are a perfectly reasonable way to explain a concept and I find Lenney’s article to be eloquent and interesting as a CNF writer still trying to develop a voice. I suppose it’s not that I’m irked by the explanations of CNF, but by the confusion. What is there to explain in the first place? And as long as we can make an analogy between CNF and every possible creative medium (including the art of tree carving), why is Lorrie Moore still calling it illegitimate?

The purpose, appeal, and literary place of creative nonfiction has always seemed obvious to me. I was naïve of any controversy surrounding the genre until I started identifying as a nonfiction writer in college. It had never occurred to be me that people would ask me whose biography I was working on or if CNF was one of those phrases, “You know, like ‘Jumbo Shrimp?’” I tried writing John Dillinger’s biography once after watching a History Channel special when I was nine, but it hasn’t been picked up and no, “Creative Nonfiction” is not an oxymoron. It just turns out that I sometimes (always) find David Sedaris’ human experience more relatable than Jane Austen’s imagined one. I want to hear the way my dad tells stories at the dinner table about the fraternity fire that occurred while he was a student at Baker University, not read a news report. The individual style, form, and content that art teachers ask me to draw in self-portraits, I can express better in writing. I have been caught unprepared to answer the question “What is creative nonfiction? Is that a thing?” I have relied on analogies too, but I’m tired of comparing my craft to other mediums and especially redhead stepchildren.

One of the main issues the general population has with CNF is the idea that it’s not imagined, but also not an objective truth. CNF allows for a range of narrative possibilities to be reflected by varying perspectives. It’s baffling to me that there’s any uncertainty over how that truth spectrum exists through an artistic medium. It’s hard for me to grasp because it seems like this spectrum of what we accept and won’t accept as truth in art already exits and is already understood. It seems universally acceptable to dress a suburban family in head to toe denim, arrange them into a strange dog-pile, force smiles, call that photo a family portrait and place it on a mantle as a sort of representation of the subjects. It’s universally agreed upon that it’s unacceptable to dress a man in a spacesuit, construct a studio set to look like Mars, ask him to take a step, plant a flag, then print this photo in a newspaper and call it a representation of truth or history. There’s middle ground between the falsity of what we present and the falsity of perception. This is where artists and redheads fall. This is where a jazz musician is allowed to take liberties in a performance, where a painter manipulates color, where a filmmaker manipulates time, and where a writer connects experiences through their own filter. A perceived truth is being presented, but not under any claims of objectivity.

Art is not real or truth. It can only act as a representative of subjective reality. In between manipulation and blatant falsities is interpretation and memory. To remember my grandfather’s funeral as grey is accurate to my experience whether the rest of Wintersville, Ohio could attest to the color outside of the Lutheran church that day or not. Creative nonfiction is kind of like painting, music, fashion, photography, cooking, film, etc. It’s about making distinctions, selections, filtering experiences, and individual expression. Creative nonfiction is also unlike any other medium. It is a scientific study of memory, sentimentality, sensation, interpretation, and narrative. For as long as it took photography to stop being compared to paintings and film to moving photographs, I’ll wait for CNF to stop being compared to jumbo shrimp.

In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some useful analogies for explaining the blurred genre lines that all writers face. Here’s a good one; It’s like if Lorrie Moore wrote a short story about a nearly autobiographical experience in the pediatric oncology ward with her baby boy, but not exactly. Oh, wait.

Word Missouri: In a hostile climate, a group of St. Louis bookstores have banded together to survive

First off, head over to our partners at KBIA to listen to the story through the eyes of booksellers, authors and book lovers.

Earlier this year a group of independent bookstores in St. Louis forgot about looking at each other as competitors in the same market and banded together to support each other. They’re called the St. Louis Independent Bookstore Alliance, and they’re promoting shopping indie with some pretty interesting tricks, including an all-day bookstore tour that treats little shops like Subterranean Books (on the Delmar Loop) and Left Bank Books (in the Central West End) like they were the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. (And there’s a free Mexican buffet!)

This kind of alliance is rare, but not unheard-of; what’s unusual is seeing it pop up somewhere like St. Louis. We all know the book industry has been sagging (see: Borders), but what’s surprising is that there are probably actually more indie bookstores in the US this year than last year, if we can use membership figures from the American Booksellers Association (which only includes indies) as a guide. But the business realities facing new bookstores are very different from what used stores have to deal with.

On one hand, the death of Borders should make numbers look a little better for a shop like Subterranean, which deals almost exclusively in new books and carefully curates its selection. On the other, Subterranean must feel the pinch from Amazon – and it is a steep pinch, not only for booksellers but for Missouri’s economy, according to Subterranean owner Kelly von Plonski. The used booksellers I spoke with don’t typically feel threatened by E-readers – the know they’re offering a niche product that can’t be replicated by anything else – and can actually use Amazon to bring in extra revenue, but must often live with the reality of miniscule profits. More than one used bookseller has told me they might as well be working at a non-profit – but there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing.

The cool thing about events like this, bookstore cruises and literary speed-dating (that’s right), is that they’re basically pushing the previous social boundaries of reading (A: book clubs and B: talking about books at the bar with your friends) to a new level. But at the same time, they’re creating something like a farmer’s market for books – something you can participate in with the feeling you’re helping support something smart and healthy and local, a force for good in the face of big box stores. “My daughter belongs to the slow food movement,” one woman on the book cruise told me. “This is the slow book movement.”