Writing is a kind of banditism

Full title: Steal Like An Artist. 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Author: Austin Kleon
Genre: Non Fiction
Attributes: 160 pages, paperback
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company(2012)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from a friend)

Austin Kleon’s book runs on clever aphorisms like a vehicle properly fueled. Its major purpose is to cause reflection on common assumptions about writers and the way they work. The issue of plagiarism stands out, because it challenges the understanding of what is and what isn't ‘legal’ in this thing we call writing. It soon becomes apparent that a writer should have no real concerns about legality when it comes to appropriation, because writers are 'illegal' players by definition. Intertextuality, the texts cross-communicate, simply blows away any distinction between any two or more texts, and points out the fact that writing is really, at its core, re-writing. A quote from André Gide relativizes everything very nicely:

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything needs to be said again."

Kleon pronounces his sentences without restraint, because the topic accepts no beating around the bush. When done properly, plagiarism is not a horse of the apocalypse, as the schoolmasters teach their pupils, but rather the engine that makes the whole business of writing move forward.

As it befits a book about appropriation, Steal Like An Artist is intensely peppered with quotes. They come not only from writers, but from artists of various kinds and temperaments: Marcel Duchamp (of course), Picasso (obviously), Jim Jarmush (why not?), David Bowie (yes, of course); plus many-many others (Ecclesiastes and Kobe Bryant included). All these confirm the core of Kleon’s claim that creativity is re-creation. And to ease the tensions:

“You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.”

Since the book is also a manual for the writer-to-be, various lessons are condensed into bite-size aphorisms that read as quickly as they pass before one’s eyes. They clarify things about artistic curiosity, about auto-didacticism, about Google and the virtues of instant knowledge (“Don’t ask a question before you Google it.”), about the burning desire to read (“There’s magic in being surrounded by books.”), and so on.

One wonders what makes one a really good thief.
Source: Bless This Stuff

To make things truly clear, here’s what Kleon means by copying: not plagiarism pure and simple, but the forge in which one’s talent is wrought; to get there, one needs to borrow a little, but only so much as to give oneself a jumpstart. And that is truly needed, since there are more chances to go unnoticed by the Empire of Letters than chances to grow into Salman Rushdie:

“There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience. Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think.”

And that should set the record straight. As for a trailer, because they're always nice (especially when they are the work of artists), here's Kleon's. Nice!

Show Your Work! Book Trailer from Austin Kleon on Vimeo.

The weird logic of calamity

Full title: Andrew's Brain

Author: E. L. Doctorow
Genre: Fiction, novel
Attributes: 224 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Random House (2014)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Many things happen in Andrew’s Brain, as well as in Andrew’s brain. Many ideas, many events, many questions and answers: an entire philosophical menagerie making a lot of noise and causing a lot of mental stir. Andrew, a neuroscientist who has lost two wives (one through divorce, the other one through death), is, apparently, undertaking psychotherapy. The novel, cleverly constructed in the form of a dialogue, has Andrew, the speaking voice, addressing and being addressed by an unnamed collocutor whom he often calls, simply, anonymously, “Doc.”

The two of them talk and talk – mostly about how Andrew’s existence has been characterized by an endless series of accidents. We learn that he’s prone to making stupid mistakes, to causing accidents of various magnitudes, and, in general, to bringing outrageous bad luck to the people he comes in contact with. Because this is also an American novel dealing with American issues, the events described reach national dimensions. 9/11 comes as no surprise: perhaps Andrew’s most prominent involvement in this weird logic of interlocked accidents. The same goes for his association with the White House, after discovering, by accident (how else?) that he was class mates with the current President.

But what really matters is the argument built around the relationship between Being and accident. The two terms are rather easy to discover. At some point, Andrew uses them to refer to his two wives:

“Martha was being, Briony was becoming.”

This sets the narrative on a serious philosophical path. Being and Becoming are not only terms to characterize Andrew’s wives; they show how the world at large spins.

Throughout the novel, there are numerous references to the fixed, domineering status of nature; as when Andrew describes the Wasatch Range, when he moves to work as a neuroscientist in a department where he is the only academic specialist.

“Wasatches ruled that town. After a day or two the truth dawned on me. You got up in the morning, they were there. You pulled into a gas station, and they were there. They were there in their stolid immensity, and that was that. You were colonized. They negotiated the light, they had to pass on it before it got to you.”

Mount Olympus in the Wasatch Ranges
Source: Wikipedia

It is behind this larger-than-life nature that the tragedies in Andrew’s life take place; and by extension, the tragedy of the entire human race. With the permanence of the mountains in sight, it becomes more likely to read the protagonist’s profession as a reference to humankind in general. Talking about brains is talking about human minds; talking about their evolution and their limitations:

“How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking?”

This is not Andrew tight-roping between his personal misfortunes. If the shot is widened enough, one can guess behind this individual brain a description of the very species that we are; above anything else, a description of the narrative aptitude that makes one specimen capable of telling a story such as the one about Andrew’s brain.

More sad superheroes

Full title: The Twelve-Fingered Boy

Author: John Hornor Jacobs
Genre: Fiction, speculative
Attributes: 264 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab (2013)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

There’s something about superheroes that makes them good candidates for prisons. That’s where the protagonists of John Hornor Jacobs’ The Twelve-Fingered Boy start they journey. They are two boys with outstanding attributes: one can cause explosions, the other can control minds. What a perfect tandem. And yet, they have their share of misfortunes. Of course they have them. Would we call them superheroes otherwise?

Shreve and Jack perform in a world that’s utterly strange to them. They have pasts darker than the darkness in the soul of the inevitable villain relentlessly in their pursuit. Says Shreve (full name Shreveport Justice Cannon):

“I’m fifteen. I can’t get a job. I don’t have a driver’s license. And I’ve got a record. Jack is just thirteen. Two kids alone in the wilderness, two kids alone in the city.”

They’ve just escaped from a correctional institution. They are fugitives now: homeless, restless, careless runaways. Plagued by parental problems, chased by authorities, they have time on their hands and they use it to do some good: they save a girl from the terror of her own imprisonment, one that is more horrible than their own.

Source: The Guardian

The prison theme runs through the novel like a red thread. It’s not only the one where they boys had been detained (Casimir Pulaski Juvenile Detention Center for Boys). There are also prisons of the self and imprisonments by the strictures and inflexibilities of society. Everything with the potential to cause rebellion in a teenager is there. Everything with the potential to cause them to run away from home, to challenge justice and to find it lacking, to get into trouble, to have their share of youthful misgivings – is there. The book is a YA novel: a text about growing too quickly when the immediate environment is too willing to eliminate one’s singularity. That’s why the tone becomes philosophical at times, why the narrative voice turns wise, and why it develops this peculiar ability for introspection. Every time he enters another’s mind, Shreve waxes lyrical:

“I hurl myself through the darkness between lights, and I invade Weasel. On all fronts, I attack. I feel his senses, his eyes, his skin. He can hear and taste me. I fill his mind with me, my presence, that part of me that is nothing but me – not body, not habit, not blood or flesh, but me.”

In spite of all appearances, the protagonists have no dark intentions. They perform their superheroic deeds only when they have no chance. But when they do, they’re devastating. The powers they handle are powers that conquer (minds) and destroy (bodies). They’re well aware of the implications. They know, with the wisdom of maturity, that superpowers bring about supertrouble. They are reluctant heroes. They fight their own demons while fighting the demons that want to restrain their moves.

As such, The Twelve-Fingered Boy is a Bildungsroman: a novel of growth, development, evolution, ripening. It’s the story of teenagers growing into men; superpowers and obstructions and all. The story, that is, of any adolescent in the world.

Immortal until proven otherwise

Full title: Vicious

Author: V. E. Schwab
Genre: Fiction, speculative
Attributes: 368p, hard cover
Publisher: Tor (2013)

On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

V. E. Schwab’s Vicious falls within the category of fantasy. It features characters with powers that exceed human capabilities; it talks of life and death as exchangeable elements in a present that is abnormally elastic; it makes appearance and disappearance seem a child’s game. All these are, of course, recognizable feature of the genre of superhero fiction. But the book breaks with the tradition of its genre in a number of ways. To start with, it doesn’t feature outlandish settings, where gnarled landscapes create morbid moods; nor is there any hyper-urbanized environment, any dystopian variation, any mind-twisting architecture. Merit and Lockwood (the two major settings of Vicious) are neither Transylvania, nor Gotham City. They are very quiet, almost invisible towns, where the background characters are normal – too normal, well-behaved to the point of obliteration.

The author, the book
Source: Writer Quirk

But the most important element of the novel is characterization. Through it, the line of demarcation between good and evil is repeatedly blurred. The main characters (former college mates Eli and Victor) live in an interesting limbo, where their moral standing changes in major ways. In the beginning, the reader finds them engaged in a project that teases the limits of normality, but in which they are involved like two good friends: they try to figure out a theory of what they call ExtraOrdinaries (EO’s): people who have experienced near death and who ended up changed in significant, superhuman ways. Things get complicated along the way and Eli and Victor acquire their own EO abilities. This is the point where they become enemies. They are given the roles of protagonist and antagonist; roles which, however, are soon unsettled. The protagonist turns out to have a lot of dark patches on his soul – as many as the antagonist, if not more. The antagonist, on the other hand, is given the privilege of internalization, which helps him become a more positive person (at least one with motives that are not impossible to understand and even accept).

This makes it hard to identify good and evil. The latter, in fact, appears to be the dominant force in the novel. As one sentence sums it up,

“There are no good men in this game.”

What’s more, with the central positions vacated or renegotiated, there are moments in the novel when the supporting characters have a chance at advancing a little, behaving like heroes a little, playing at the game of protagonists a little. Their rise to significance adds another spin to the novel, which ends with these presumably minor personages having the last word.

Speaking of which, it seems as though the book in its entirety revolves around a central maxim, one equally promising and nihilistic:

“We are all immortal until proven otherwise.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

A narrative trick, a real Calamity

Full title: In Calamity's Wake

Author: Natalee Caple
Genre: Fiction, novel
Attributes: 240p, hard cover
Publisher: Bloomsbury (2013)

On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

In Calamity’s Wake is, narratively speaking, very simple. ‘Straightforward’ is a better word to define it. It tells the story of a daughter in search for a mother she had never known. The protagonist leaves from point A and arrives at point B after having experienced the customary complications that give stories flesh and bone. At point B, she fulfils the wish expressed in the beginning (i.e. she finds her mother), and so, the book comes full circle and the initial target is attained.

Because of this manifest simplicity, it often feels as though the author had taken Vladimir Propp’s narrative theory of characters and actions and used it as a blueprint for her own novel. Characters here are, really, types. There is Miette – Propp’s Hero; and Martha Canary, also known as Calamity Jane (understand the title now?), Miette’s mother, real person recorded in the history of the Wild West – oscillating between the functions of False Hero and Princess (a character sought for throughout the narrative, and who turns out to be different from what she seemed to be in the beginning). Then there is a Dispatcher (Miette’s adoptive father who, on his death bed, makes her promise to start the journey that sets the novel off). There are numerous Donors and Helpers as well. The book is full of them.

In her almost picaresque adventures through the dry, inhospitable Western-American Badlands of the late nineteenth century, which form the setting of the novel, Miette encounters people who have known her mother in one way or other. They move freely in a décor that resembles Alexandro Jorodovsky’s desiccated landscapes in El Topo. The number of minor characters is quite impressive. Many of them pop in and out of the story swiftly, without sufficient time to grow to the size of note-worthy personages. These characters function like nodes in the narrative; they are halting places, where the reader is encouraged to rest and remember the protagonist’s purpose. Every such character gives Miette another jolt forward, and so the story builds and builds.

The real Calamity Jane, in 1895
Source: Wikipedia

When these additional elements are singled out, the story is discovered to be linear. It comprises two major treads: alternating chapters focused on the two figures mentioned above (mother and daughter), as well as some one-off chapters where digressional situations are described in order to add more flesh to the main thread. Of the two major plotlines, the one occupied by Miette (told in the first person singular) is the one carrying most of the weight; it is through the story of the search for the lost mother that the novel builds up, one narrative unit at a time. The parts where Calamity Jane is the prominent figure (told in the third person) serve almost exclusively as characterization. Here, it is as if we are invited to scale the worth of the protagonist’s target. Calamity, a character who also, like her daughter, moves often from one place to another, is a show-woman. She poses for souvenir photographs, has roles in popular theater shows, shoots guns to entertainment audiences – and, on a personal level, loves and loses, drinks too much, supports the Indian’s cause, is soft underneath the tough surface of her appearance. This accumulation of character features and traits of personality serves, undoubtedly, to outline her as the aim of the protagonist’s wanderings. She is the reason why everything in the novel is happening. She is the actual motive, the raison d’être, the organizing principle. She also serves a more practical purpose: she makes sure the story doesn't lean on one side, where Miette is, and where most of the episodes are told through verbs of action. Calamity Jane, a narrative trick in the skin of a historical figure packaged as a character.

The sculpted novel

Full title: Tree of Codes

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Genre: Fiction; novel
Attributes: 285p, hard cover
Publisher: Visual Editions (2010)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Everything in this book hinges on technique. Jonathan Safran Foer, who once said he wanted to write a book that read like a sculpture (to be palpable, to give the reader a tactile experience as well as an intellectual one) produced, with Tree of Codes, one such object that transgresses the materiality of publishing. The volume is compelling primarily because of its design. The text is literally sculpted into the body of a rectangular object provided with pages and covers; in other words, into something we traditionally call ‘a printed book.’ Tree of Codes is, indeed, a book – nobody would say it was anything else. But by using a cut-out technique which must have given the printers some serious headaches, Safran Foer proposes something else: he proposes a literal cutting not only through the texture of an object but also through the texture of a text.

Source: Visual Editions

In essence, Tree of Codes is a parasitic volume living upon a previously written collection of short stories by the Jewish short story writer, Bruno Schultz. To Safran Foer, Schultz is a frequent topic of discussion. He has even written a foreword to The Street of Crocodiles, which is the basis of the book discussed here.

Due to the ‘carving’ technique, which leaves out very few words on a page (empty pages, with only a rim around, to frame the space where text could have been, are common) language starts on a surprising journey, based on sharp imagery and metaphors that cut to the core of the literary gesture displayed here in the form of an experiment in rewriting.

The story resulting from Safran Foer’s exercise is centred on a family tableau, where the father reigns in a ghost-like manner. (Hamlet? Why not?) The subject is not new to the author. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the book turned into a film where Tom Hanks plays the role of the lost father, dwells in a similar region. In Tree of Codes too, the father figure appears to be lost and sought after by a narrator with a penchant for strong memories, mostly visual, mostly evocative.

"My father's face [...] dissolved into a stillness, a sad expression, sadder than human feeling."

Not to mention that Bruno Schulz too spoke of the father figure as central: as central as a regret; central even to his narrator’s experience of (can you guess?) a book. As in the chapter that opens The Sanatorium of the Sign of the Hourglass.

And so, Tree of Codes turns out to be a book that reads in an hour, but hovers in the mind for a much longer time. It is multi-layered, restless, clever, and demands constant reconsideration of the very experience of reading.

Making poetry, like making love

Full title: Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

Author: Alice Walker
Genre: Poetry
Attributes: 256 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Random House (2003)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The poems in this volume are not only visually evocative; they are also narrative. They tell stories with a special kind of passion that sings odes to the cohorts of humanity. Sometimes, this narrative inclination brings magical realism to the page. As in, for instance, “They Made Love”:

“They made love
On the altar
Of the church
In which
She received
First Communion.
It was the middle
Of the night
An old
Almost blind
Aunt
Best friend of
Her ancient
Grandmother
Happened
To drive
Past.”

It’s in the way things get arranged – in the coincidences that suture the fabric of an event like this – that the magic of poetry (of making poetry, like making love) surfaces ceremoniously and is laid on the ground, on the world.

The volume is organized thematically, but the poetic order of things dictates a constant mingling of topics and themes: cocktails of poetry served at a wedding-like banquet. There are poems of war and poems of love, poems of domesticity, poems in which flowers bloom in houses and the houses breathe with almost human lungs; then there are poems about the earth and poems about the sky, poems about spiritual experience and about drug-induced happiness. But also sad poems: poems without tears but with heavy, heavy souls.

Alice Walker
Source: The New Zealand Herald

In the brief preface to the volume, Alice Walker speaks of “visions of how humans might live peacefully and more lovingly upon the earth.” And so her poems are themselves peaceful. They feel soft. And I say ‘feel’ because they do have a tactile quality to them. As in the touching of a body:

“The softness of your belly
Curves
My hand;
Your back
Warms me.”

As in this. Alice Walker’s poems too are serene. They follow the curves of the slim lines, always aligned at the centre of the page, so that the stanzas can look more voluptuous. They are sensual, these poems, in the sense of causing in the reader a feeling (that special feeling) for the reading of poetry.

And so, among houses that are not locations, populated by flowers that are no plants, even the idea of war changes. The war poems in the collection are sad – like all war poems. They do not celebrate the heroism of the killer but the innocence of the victim. But they do so by turning the very idea of innocence upon the killer, to discover in him (with equal innocence) relics of humanity.

“Thousands of feet
Below you
There is a small
Boy
Running from
Your bombs.
If he were
To show up
At your mother’s
House
On a green
Sea island
Off the coast
Of Georgia
He’d be invited
For dinner.
Now, driven,
You have shattered
His bones.”

Then war, again: the end of reason, the beginning of nonsense, itself discussed in very gentle tones. But tones that hurt all the more because of it.

"Though War speaks
Every language
It never knows
What to say
To frogs.”

The volume is bound together by this constant return to the organic ties between human-made things (disastrous or beautiful, as they may be) and the earth. Like the boy under the feet of the bomber, like the frogs in the pond crushed by the huge tires of war machinery, like love brought to the level of an altar and made sacred by it. A long celebration of things human, a long compassion for the things gone wrong.