Gonzalo Barr

Big Plans

Every year, beginning in October, I start to plan the following year. If I don’t plan, nothing happens except the year ends and I am one year older with not much to show for it.

The thing about time is that the older you are, the faster it passes. It has nothing to do with Einstein; more likely it’s a matter of gestalt. One’s perception of time changes the more one has perceived it, the older one is, the more one remembers. Summer vacations lasted an eternity when I was a young boy in grade school. Now three months feel like one.

There is nothing new to this phenomenon. There’s a line about it in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. No one knows the name of the poet who composed it or the date when it was written, but as the original is in Middle English we can guess that it was written some time after the Norman Conquest and before the 1500s. That’s not very helpful, I know, but pick life in any of those centuries and it won’t be anything like the epinephric times we live in. Yet time flew for them, too.

A year passes apace, and proves ever new;
First things and final conform but seldom
– Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1967, Marie Boroff, trans.)

Reading List

Come December, I prefer to look forward rather than back. For one, I like to make a list of the books I want to read next year.  It’s an ambitious list, one that I probably won’t complete, but here it is:  There’s Lezama Lima’s Paradiso and Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ovid, Ulysses, Pynchon, Lobo Antunes (I bought the first fourteen novels at once, I might as well finish reading them), Tristram Shandy, Rabelais, Flaubert, and Cervantes. There’s also Proust and Tolstoy, but each time I list them, I feel like I am setting myself up for failure.

Will I have read all those books by next December?  Who knows?  I’ve promised myself not to buy any new books until I finish the embarrassingly large number of books on my shelves that I have never read.  The word I use to describe this promise is “moratorium.”  It sounds official and forbidding, like I’ll be sentenced and fined if I break it.

No new books for a while.  I have plenty of old ones to keep me busy.

Dreaming of Books

Ten years ago, Michael Wood wrote this for The London Review of Books –

There are all kinds of things to do with books apart from reading them, and one of the most pleasurable is to dream of reading them.  Many of us keep scribbled our notional lists of such dreams, and happily speak of rereading works we haven’t read even once.  In If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino steers his reader and chief character through a bookstore, past heaps of dangerous objects identified as, among other things, Books You Haven’t Read, Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages, Books You Want to Own so They’ll Be Handy just in Case, Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First, and Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them.  Even great readers can fall into this mode, and even books we have read can be dreamed.
– Michael Wood, “‘Tiens! Une madelaine?,’” London Rev. of Books (Nov. 26, 1998), at 14

I classified this post under “Law and Books,” even though Batman, the series, is more than a book and even though the law likely has little to say about a publicity-seeking venture like the one concocted by Huseyin Kalkan, another politician with too much time on his hands.

Kalkan is the mayor of Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.  Recently, he threatened to file a lawsuit against the producers of The Dark Knight, the latest installment in the Batman films, claiming that the defendants had used the name of the city without permission of the municipality.  Let me repeat his principal allegation — according to Kalkan, the producers of Batman unlawfully appropriated the name of Batman.

Not too long ago, I posted about another politician with too much time on his hands, one Ernie Chambers, who sued God twice in court and lost. Courts have become clown-friend places. If they welcome an Ernie Chambers, why not entertain the charge that Batman ripped off Batman, especially after the box-office receipts of the movie exceeded one billion dollars?

Let’s compare and contrast:

Batman is a city. Batman is the eponymous series about a superhero.

Batman is in Turkey. Batman takes place in Gotham, a made-up city that is nowhere near Turkey.

Batman the city isn’t even Batman. According to wikipedia (that infallible and all-knowing source of reliable information), the name “Batman” is a shortening of the complete name of the city, which is Bati Raman. “Batman” on the other hand, the nom-de-guerre of the superhero, is descriptive of his costume, to wit — the man dresses like a bat. In the series, the protagonist’s real name is Bruce Wayne. Following Mayor Kalkan’s legal reasoning, that would be sufficient cause for the mayor of Fort Wayne, Texas to file his own suit against the movie producers for misappropriation.

No one knows how long Batman the city has been around (not even wikipedia), yet it is only now, almost seventy years since the comic Batman was first published, that the mayor of Batman, is talking lawsuit. He says –

“There is only one Batman in the world, … [t]he American producers used the name of our city without informing us.”

Mayor Kalkan claims that the “misappropriation” by the producers and the psychological impact of the movie have caused a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate in Batman. This is where the story turns quite dark.

According to The International Herald Tribune, from 2000 to 2006, there were 165 suicides or suicide attempts in Batman, 102 of them by women. Thirty-six women killed themselves in the first six months of 2006 alone. The UN claims that the suicides were sparked by relatives who accused the women of bringing dishonor on their families.  Batman was featured prominently in Orhan Pamuk’s novel, Snow, about a journalist’s investigation of a suicide epidemic among teenage girls and was based on that grim reality.

“Why don’t you tell the story, Hande?” said Kadife. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“No, that’s not true. There’s a great deal to be ashamed of, and that’s why I want to talk about it,” Hande said.
– Orhan Pamuk, Snow

It is ironic that Kalkan’s flat-footed attempt to attribute the cause of the suicides elsewhere has only brought it right back where it belongs.  In the meantime, Pamuk’s novel resonates all the more.

“Oh, a writer should be able to talk about everything that’s important,” said Necip, in a nudging voice. “If I were a writer, I’d want to talk about everything that people didn’t talk about.”
– Id.

Sources: Ali Jaafar, “Mayor of Batman Sues WB, Nolan,” Variety (Nov. 11, 2008), Dan Bilefsky, “‘Virgin suicides’ save Turks’ honor,” International Herald-Tribune (July 13, 2006), Orhan Pamuk, Snow (2004, translated by Maureen Freely), at 119, 134, wikipedia article on Batman, Turkey, loweringthebar blog

Theaters, libraries, churches, concerts, driving on the Interstate or a main road or residential street, backing out of a parking space, pulling into a parking space, in line at the supermarket, paying the cashier, at a bank teller window, in a bathroom stall, before a urinal, in a physician’s consult, sitting in a dentist’s chair (yes, let me repeat that one — sitting in a dentist’s chair)…all these situations have one thing in common.

I’ll give you time to think of the answer.  Meanwhile, here’s some thinking music –

Did you figure it out?They are all situations in which you should not use your cell phone because doing so is a menace to the safety of others or because it is rude and inconsiderate to do so.

You may have already noticed that there are people in this world who can’t resist the cell phone.  They can’t turn it off for fear of missing that life-changing call.  And once it rings, they must answer it, no matter what they’re doing –

Recently I posted a clip about a library ninja who silences a cell phone user by breaking his neck.  One month before that, I posted about a government bureaucrat in the UK who thinks that allowing people to use cell phones in public libraries is one way to make the libraries more people-friendly.  The ninja librarian is fictitious; the government bureaucrat, alas, is not.  In his bureaucratic mind, the ultimate goal of a public library is to increase the number of people who use it, “use” being defined broadly by activities other than reading and looking up books.  A quiet, well-lighted place that fosters contemplation isn’t enough for people like that, which is why he would like to introduce coffee shops, video games, and permit the use of cell phones.

The fact is that public libraries, at least in this part of the world, have all but ceased being a place for quiet reading and studying and morphed into “community centers” and day-care centers.  About the only place you can find a “quiet library” is in a commercial, like this one –

In the real world, they have all but disappeared.There is nothing wrong with cell phones per se  They’re appliances, like dishwashers, cars, stereos.  It is people who use them inappropriately who are the problem.  More specifically, it is the lack of common courtesy, if not common sense, in some people that makes it necessary for some institutions to produce videos like this one –

The underlying message of the video producers is, “Just because you’re smart enough to be admitted to this university, doesn’t mean you have any common sense.”For those people, we need clear and simple (very simple) rules that are applied equally and with no exceptions.  The library (from the Latin word for “book,” incidentally) is a place to read.  Most people cannot read when someone nearby is carrying on a conversation, whether on a cell phone or not.  Which is why libraries are quiet zones.  Noise renders a library unusable for the very purpose it was created in the first place.  When will people get this little fact straight?

A person who yacks on his cell phone in a theater, library, church, while driving or at any time in the long list of other situations I mentioned, is an obliviot.  He deserves whatever happens to him –

So enough already!

Previously, I posted a list of 15 rules to follow when revising your work.  Fifteen rules can be overwhelming.  Who can keep track of 15 different rules and proofread at the same time?

In 1946, George Orwell drafted six rules for good writing.  Six is a lot less than 15.  The really good thing about Orwell’s six rules is that they are broad enough to cover the important stuff.

The six rules are –

1.  Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2.  Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3.  If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.  Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5.  Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.  Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

– From George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

The entire essay is here.

If remembering six rules is still too much to handle, how about three?  You can remember three little rules, can’t you?  Of course you can.  You can do that in your sleep.

W. Somerset Maugham was once asked to list the three fundamental rules for writing a good novel.  This is what he answered –

There are three rules for writing the novel.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Photo: Eric Blair, Branch of the National Union of Journalists (1933), Wikipedia article on George Orwell; Source: George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), mtholyoke.edu; W. Somerset Maugham quote, quotationspage.com

Librosfera dreams about having a guy like this in her library.

A post about a proposal to allow cell phones in public libraries and other really smart ideas that only government bureaucrats could entertain is here.

By the time a writer discovers he has no talent for literature, he is too successful to give it up.
– George Kaufman

Photo: portrait of George S. Kaufman while at Columbia University (approx. 1915) from Richard Meryman, Mank (1978), Wikipedia article on George S. Kaufman; Source: “NB,” Times Literary Supplement (Nov. 7, 2008), at 32

Yesterday was the first anniversary since I resigned from practicing law to write full time. We celebrated by having dinner here at home with some dear friends — vodka martinis and single malt whiskeys for drinks, grilled salmon and couscous with Pouilly-Fuissé for the entree, strawberries and blueberries with whipped cream and Veuve Clicquot for dessert — and some great conversation about books and many of those things that make life so unexpected.

Most anniversaries, especially those commemorating life-changing decisions, like giving up one career to pursue another, should make you pause and think, to look back. This one was no different.

1.  How Not To Become a Writer

Picture this:  You’re five years old with nothing to do. It’s Saturday. Your mother insisted that you accompany your step-father to his business, which is a warehouse and a showroom. You get some stationery from his desk and a pen and start writing. What you write is your basic story. A king is about to marry a princess and he wants a new bed. Vonnegut said that, for a story, all you need is a character who wants something. The king gets his bed and his princess and they live happily ever after.

Flash forward to age twelve. Two things – a boyhood fascination with rockets and your cousin’s library of science fiction – start you on a marathon of reading fiction. You learn that there is a whole class of people, called “writers,” who earn their living by making up stories and putting them on paper. On the back cover of one book there’s a picture of a smiling Ray Bradbury riding a ten-speed bicycle that looks a lot like your own ten-speed bicycle. You experience an epiphany: Bradbury rides a ten-speed bicycle. You ride a ten-speed bicycle. You too can be a writer like Bradbury. Simple.

Over the next week, you fill a school notebook with invented scenes and dialogue. A few days later, your mother takes an interest in said notebook, discovers its contents, and destroys it with her bare hands. She punishes you, too. That’s OK, though. All great writers suffer censorship at one point in their lives. It’s a rite of passage. With Bradburian ten-speed bicycle and your work suddenly samizdat à la Solzhenitsyn, you are on your way. You can feel it.

Skip three years, to age fifteen. By now, you are reading Camus, García Márquez, Borges and Vonnegut. You publish two stories in your school’s literary magazine. You also discover that writing and, more importantly, brooding like the tortured soul you pretend to be, is an effective means of getting girls.  Life appears to overflow with opportunities.

After high school, “reality” and its evil twin, “practicality,” make their entrance. Faced with the opportunity of following a career in letters, you go to law school instead.

2. “I could write a book”

Here is the problem with living the law life:  it isn’t all bad.  Occasionally, you get to work on interesting cases, you travel, you walk into a roomful of strangers to persuade them that your client is in the right.  What’s not to like about that?  Especially trial work, which is all-consuming and soul-deadening, but for those moments when you are standing in the well of the court room arguing to the jury, when it is like a drug — colors are brighter, the air sharp as autumn.  It’s one long Happy Hour until a few days after the jury returns a verdict and the trial is over.  Then you can’t wait for the next one.

Law changes you.  It can misshape you, if you are not careful.  You begin to look at the world — and by the world, I mean “people” — from the perspective that most of them are unreasonable, if not dishonest.  That takes a big toll on you.  I’d like to see someone do a study that compares the longevity of trial lawyers with that of other professionals.  Skepticism and suspicion have to shorten your life span more than a diet rich in animal fats.

But I started talking about writing, not cholesterol:  Law is bad for your soul, bad for your skin, and if you’re not careful it can be bad for your writing. First, it provides you with the ultimate excuse for not writing, to wit – that you’re too busy. Law is not a jealous mistress, it is a machete-swinging Harpy on crack. More than any Latin family, law will suck you in and never let you go. Second, law can be bad for your writing because you are surrounded by so many writer-wannabes. “Man, I could write a book!” your colleagues tell you and that’s because at least four out of every ten practicing lawyers holds himself out as a writer, yet never writes. It is as if being a writer were an ontological state. You just are a writer, no need to do more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way or we would all just be incredibly rich. Nope, there is only one way to become a writer.

3. How to Become a Writer in Your Spare Time

Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? Writing isn’t a hobby that you do in your spare time, like building model trains.  It is a vocation. Your day job is what you do because you have to eat, because you need to have a place to live, not writing.  Once you prioritize the writing, you have taken the first and most significant step.

4.  Escaping the Law Life

There must be several ways of escaping the law life. I did it like this –

First, I changed my practice to one that gave me the mental space for stories to germinate and the time to write. Trial work was fun, but it would have never let me write.

Second, I came up with a plan and promised myself that I would publish within five years.

Third, I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I wrote every day from three to five in the morning. I accepted no interruptions or diversions. That two-hour block was sacred.

Fourth, I read. And read. And read. That’s one way to learn how to write. (Note: Bad books are more instructive than good ones because it is easier to discover why something does not work than it is to figure out why something does. Think sprezzatura and you’ll know what I’m getting at.)

Fifth, I worked my way up writers’ conferences, starting with those that were mostly lectures to others that were workshops. You need to do Bread Loaf and Kenyon and Sewanee. They are different experiences. Each has its merits.

Sixth, I networked. Writers work alone, but they need a lot of people to mid-wife a manuscript into a published book. In between, you will need an agent. Bread Loaf and Sewanee are good places to meet agents. If you go, take a finished book-length manuscript with you and be prepared to pitch it. Do not underestimate the importance of a good pitch.  A good pitch sounds like this:  “It’s Moll Flanders in Brooklyn.”

Seventh, I saved enough money to live for a while. If my first book garnered enough interest and some good reviews, I would take the plunge, quit law, write full-time.

5.  One Year Hence

December 7 marked one year since I resigned from practicing law. Between February and November of this year, I wrote my first novel to completion. It wasn’t the first time I had tried to write a novel, but it was the first time I completed one. Watching my bank balance decrease each month was an excellent incentive for me to finish the book. On many days, I worked six to eight to ten hours. As a result, I have a novel. I also have blurry eyesight and a painfully cramped right shoulder. But there is no way I would have finished the novel had my mind been diverted on other matters, even an undemanding, intellectual dead-end of a day job.

6.  The Secret to Becoming a Writer

Now, here is the secret I have been holding back until the end of this piece, the sure fire way to become a writer –

There is one and only one way to become a writer and that is to write every day.  Everything else is fooling yourself.  Write as if your life depended on it.  If you really are a writer, it does.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr

I’m about 200 pages into the 1119-page original Spanish edition of 2666. There is a little too much telling and not enough showing, but it keeps you wanting to read more, even if the most you can read in any session is a few pages. It’s that thick. It’s that dense. It’s like pâté. Eat too much at once and you get a stomach ache. After having read Los detectives salvages [The Savage Detectives] and the collection of short stories, El secreto del mal [The Secret of Evil], I can’t shake the question:  What’s the big deal with Bolaño?

The Economist recently published a short piece on “Bolaño-mania,” for what else could you call it?

The buzz surrounding [2666] this enormous, unwieldy book has been remarkable. “2666” is a mysterious, overwhelmingly ambitious work that ties together five novels of barely related subjects. The fourth and longest catalogues the many murders in a fictional northern Mexican town called Santa Theresa. Although the book is often frustrating to read, the critical response to it has been rapturous. Time has already named “2666” the best book of 2008. Within days, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) rushed out a second printing, bringing the total to more than 75,000 copies.

“It’s special. It’s weird. I don’t entirely understand the commercial side of it”, said Lorin Stein, editor of “2666” at FSG. At a time when book sales are flat and less than 4% of fiction in America is translated from other languages, the success of an author whose books are known for being messy, difficult and cerebral seems particularly remarkable. “This is a difficult and very sad book, and adults rarely follow a literary author’s career the way they used to,” reckons Mr Stein. “It’s like an intellectual Harry Potter.”

I guess that explains it.

Source: “Bolaño-mania,” The Economist (Nov. 20, 2008)

The Cervantes Prize is widely considered the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish language. This year, it was awarded to Catalan author, Juan Marsé.

The Guardian reports that –

The award … was announced yesterday by Spain’s culture minister Cesar Antonio Molina in Barcelona. Marsé, 75, was honoured for works including Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last Evenings with Teresa), about the ill-fated love story between a working class man and a rich woman, Si te dicen que caí (If They Tell You I Fell), in which a rag and bone merchant falls in love with a prostitute during the early years of Franco’s reign, and Rabos de lagartija (Lizard Tails), which is narrated by the unborn brother of the hero David as he grows up in post civil war Barcelona.

“The density and intensity of his writing, and the imaginative process, are what mark him out as a novelist,” said the author’s English translator Nick Caistor. “He has created worlds of the imagination set against the often horrible realities of Spain after the civil war. His characters always escape to the world of fiction, when the world outside is grey and depressing, and he’s particularly good at seizing the imaginative world of children.”

“In the UK and US, because he writes so infrequently, he has not built up a head of steam,” Caistor said. “He writes very, very slowly, only one novel every 10 years, and you can see he rewrites everything over and over again. He starts from reality, then as he rewrites his imagination takes over more and more, and in the process his language becomes more and more powerful – layer upon layer of imagery.”

Marsé’s English editor James Gurbutt, at Harvill Secker, said … “He is a fantastic writer – if ever you want to read a novel about post-civil war Spain he’s your man,” he added. “It’s difficult to find an audience for him over here, but he is one of the greats … Literature in translation is very tough, and at times like this it’s even tougher.” [GB Note: Links added]

The prize is worth EUR 125,000 (USD 158,936.01).

Spanish novelist and essayist, Enrique Vila-Matas, wrote a piece on Marsé for El país (in Spanish).

Also available in English translation are Shanghai Nights (translated by Nick Caistor) and The Fallen (translated by Helen Lane).

Source:  Alison Flood, “Catalan novelist Juan Marsé wins the ‘Spanish Nobel prize,’” The Guardian (Nov. 28, 2008)