Chronicles: Volume One, by Bob Dylan

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Every serious artist, as far as I can tell, perceives a need to conquer the elements of the craft from the masters who came before. I think that, on some level, most of these same artists hope to create some element that is entirely new to the craft, or to extend an already existing element beyond any previously known bounds, or to combine two elements which were prior strangers.

Like him or not, you'd be hard pressed to claim that Bob Dylan didn't accomplish any one of these feats as a songwriter; hell, you'd be hard pressed to prove that he didn't accomplish all of them. He's been part of the western social conscience for so many decades now that up-and-coming artists in any field might feel daunted looking at his accomplishments and thinking, That guy has done so much, and I could never hope to match him for creativity, production, innovation, or fame.

Which is why my favorite part of Chronicles was when Dylan waxed prosaic (the guy's a pretty great prose writer, too) on starting to write songs. (All quotes from page 51.)

He starts off with curiosity, the siren which I would argue sings to all folks crazy enough to be artists: "Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain." But even Bob Dylan's muse doesn't simply transmit music through him like a radio antenna: "It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy."

He's driven in his craft both by ambition and by his singular experiences: "You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen." But he realizes that all the drive and desire and curiosity in the world isn't enough, for then comes the careful practice and application of the art: "You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular. The chilling precision that these old-timers used in coming up with their songs was no small thing."

While I noodle about on the guitar, I'm no songwriter. But as an author, I take both great solace and deep inspiration from knowing that one of the greatest songwriters of the last hundred years went through -- and possibly still goes through -- the same challenges that my peers and I face. Dylan's hurdles take him off a pedestal and place him in a very human sphere. He may be more talented than I am, and he's certainly more accomplished, but ultimately he's just another human with a desire to create Something Beautiful. Just like me, and maybe just like you, too.

Travels in the Interior of Africa, by Mungo Park

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First things first. I want to say, unsullied by other musings, that Mungo Park's book is a delight to read. His story is remarkable; it is his writing, though, that won my mind. He is frank and sympathetic; his eye for detail is complex and yet easily conveyed; and his spirit is (to use the inevitable next word) indomitable. (Thank you, Jenny, for giving me this book for my birthday!)
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People are drawn to the "true story." I can't really understand why, to be honest. Certainly the allure has to do with the always-shocking realization that, sometimes, life itself can be as perfectly interesting and unlikely as a piece of fiction. Those three little words that sometimes follow book or movie titles are clearly meant to bring the droves a' running and make the implausible believable: "A True Story." (Or the legal-loophole version: "Based on a True Story.")

I wonder whether most folks believe that "true stories" are really and honestly true; that the portrayal of events in a book or film are precisely in the order and manner that they happened in "real life;" that somehow, because a series of events actually occurred and wasn't simply made up in some artist's head, it inherently contains more truth than a made-up piece of work.

No, even those "true stories" that are told by your favorite uncle at a family barbeque are tweaked to make the telling better, to make the implausible more plausible, and to make the mundane monumental. That's what a storyteller's job is.

Thank goodness that Travels in the Interior of Africa doesn't begin with some such declaration of veracity. Mungo Park convinces me that his story is true in the purest sense, which is not to say the literal sense.

Whether his story is true or not doesn't matter a whit. Do I believe that he could carry the entirety of his travel journal in the brim of his hat at the end of his journey? Not really. That's the romanticism throughout that makes Park's tale so appealing and appetizing. Fully true or not, his tale is the sort of vacation-in-a-book that we all need, once in a while.

Bunnicula, by Deborah and James Howe

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The pleasures of reading aloud are possibly topped only by the pleasures of being read aloud to. I imagine many of the readers of this blog spent an incredible number of childhood hours snuggled up on the couch or in bed with someone reading from the pages of a cherished book, or a brand-new library book, or an old family book finally pulled off the shelf.

The simple act of reading aloud together must trigger so many aspects of our humanity that signal to us that the world is at rights. We get the intimacy of metered voices, the vibrations of speech humming between our bodies, the shared vicarious adventures and explorations and discoveries, the naturally close physical proximity... I think there's several good reasons that my golden retriever would plop down next to us every time we read aloud as a family.

Yet we lose the pleasures of reading aloud once we grow older. Short of having another little kid around the place who deserves and yearns to be read to, why would we take the time to read a story together? Most of us read more quickly silently and alone than we can out loud, and even if you have the time and the willingness to do so, then there's the issue of what particular book to read out loud. It's just so... complicated, right?

But for just a moment, I want you to think back to those times of being read to. Think of how perfect the world was when someone held you with one arm and a book with the other. Think of how you could hear and feel the person's voice through his or her body, or through the couch cushions. Remember the change in tone that let you know just where in the story you were -- was everything lost for our hero, or was she about to triumph?

If you can recall those times in your life and not want to read aloud to someone, I'd love to donate you to science for just a while. Reading together, in my experience, is one of the most natural-feeling activities we as humans have. I highly recommend seizing someone important to you, whether it's a child or your romantic partner doesn't matter, and asking them if you'd like to read a book together. Pick your favorite book as a grown-up, find a new book at the library, or pull that old childhood favorite out from the closet under the stairs and give it a go.

My own partner and I wish we read together more often, though we're finding it easy to make time once we put a little effort into it. Our latest Halloween-themed venture -- Bunnicula -- was one of her childhood staples, and I had never read it before. After sitting down with it and three of its sequels (Howliday Inn, The Celery Stalks at Midnight, and Nighty-Nightmare), I feel like I know her and understand her a little better.

Tally one more for reading aloud bringing people closer together.

Molly Fox's Birthday, by Deirdre Madden

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(This post may be most relevant for the readers of this blog who are in or ever think they might be in a writing workshop of any kind.)

One of my two regular writing workshops this fall is with Deirdre Madden, the author of Molly Fox's Birthday and a number of other books. I've never been in a workshop at this level before this semester, so in large part I had no idea what to expect. Ultimately, while I can enjoy many aspects of the class, I notice that my classmates' most common complaint is one I can sympathize with. The teacher, while insightful in her feedback, tends to want more of the same exact thing out of each writer's work.

In short, she always wants to see a better evocation of place; in other words, she wants to see every detail of people, of rooms, of objects, of landscape, of anything that is present in a scene.

Bullheaded writers that we are, we declare that our writing doesn't need such level of detail, that our writing emphasizes other aspects than the visual. I'm as bad as the next student.

Then I read Molly Fox's Birthday. It's a lovely book, and quite enjoyable for someone just getting to know Dublin like I am. What I took away from it, though, is that Deirdre writes through the visual details. That is, she doesn't simply evoke place--she puts the place to work, and through her descriptions, the reader learns an incredible amount about the characters, their motivations, their desires, their makeup.

The solution clicked. What each of us in class was failing to do was not necessarily including enough details about place. What we were failing to do was find our own ways to evoke the essence of the characters populating our work. Deirdre distills her characters though visible physical details; no matter how we were doing it, if we were doing it successfully, she would probably never take issue with the visual in our work.

So to all workshoppers present and future: I really do recommend reading the work of your teachers. You'll likely gain an interpretive insight into their feedback that will help you decode their comments on your work and aid you in revising and improving your writing.

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

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Great stories can have all sorts of aspects that make them great, and I believe one of the more common ones to be an incredible opening for voyeurism.

Now I know that the term carries heavy sexual weight in colloquial usage, usually taboo. And sometimes, the voyeurism that appears in stories deals with one person (typically the reader, right?) watching a sexual act involving any number of people. But what I mean here is the broader definition of the word. Any story, unless it is the reader's own autobiography, involves a great amount of peeping into another world, another life, often even another mind.

Part of the reason for this great voyeuristic tendency is that we want to experience moments that are not our own. Hell, we enjoy such vicarious living through reading. Or at least, we do when the voyeurism is good. When the world we're spying on is engaging. When it's enthusiastic about its own existence.

I find that Philip Roth captures this particular enthusiasm in American Pastoral. What do I care about gloves, right? If they're not keeping my hands warm, I don't give a flying hoot. Then he (or rather, his character) gets to talking about gloves of all sorts. The styles. The stitches. The sizes. The materials. The manufacturing process, the shifts in the industry in the last century, the exportation of labor and the decrease of quality.

All that information could be a total yawner. However, the enthusiasm of the Swede (the central figure) is entirely contagious. Not only did I buy into it within the context of the story; he got me caring about gloves in my own world.

The voyeuristic window is two-way, in that regard. You can see through to the characters, who usually cannot see back through to you, but they are able to radiate influence through the pages. Done well, this influence smacks you where it counts. The magic is that although you, the reader, are the one gifted with sight, you are always unable to exert such an impact on the characters. The sensation of story-irradiation is rare enough, and done well, I believe it's an experience worth treasuring. Those are the stories that change the world we live in.

The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, and Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray

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My my, this is an unlikely pairing: a new publication from the rock-star physicist unveiling his latest theory of the universe, and a hilarious long novel from a new Irish writer.

The pairing is perfectly suitable, though. Both of these books are woven through with M-theory.

If you want to know about M-theory, go do some reading up. Undoubtedly some bloggers more scientifically-educated than I am have discoursed on it at great length. (It's some pretty cool stuff. Such as: All possible universes could exist, and we just happen to be in the one where we exist. It makes our very existence at once inevitable and awe-inspiring.) And, you know, Hawking's book is eminently readable, even for the not-at-all scientifically inclined. He sticks true to the formula stated in his A Brief History of Time: for every mathematical equation included in the book, his sales would halve. So he keeps it in the vernacular, with lots of pretty pictures.

Actually, for a novel, Skippy Dies handles the potentially-sticky subject quite deftly, too. If you believe that stories should be about the more tangible and more emotional aspects of life, then you haven't read about how M-theory (and astrophysics in general) can affect the life of socially-excluded teenage boys.

The point of this rambling is that, whatever the definition of art, if it contains beauty, then it can (and should, and does) encompass the creation of the universe and the meaning of life and other such important things in mathematical terms as well as the philosophical, religious, and emotional ones we're so familiar with. Theoretical science can be as poignant as a master painting, a deer grazing grass, or the heart broken by first love. When Murray and Hawking get their hands on M-theory, they evoke it with the same passion they clearly feel for the subject and thus bring forth its inherent stellar beauty.

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

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I was all kinds of pumped to read this book. (Yes, I had to get over the big brother in me who saw all my little sisters reading this book at one time or another and automatically assumed it would be a girl book.) I've been told it makes grown men cry. So I borrowed a copy and gave it a go.

Little Women is a beautiful, lovely book. I can see how, if I weren't madly taken by a real flesh-and-blood woman, I could fall in love for Jo March. At the very least, I sympathize with her entirely--and when her little sister destroys her book, I get angrier than Jo, and I am less quick to forgive.

The problem is, this book is continuing my recent trend (see Innocents Abroad) of books not giving me the whole story. Of course, none of these books bother to announce that they are incomplete, or one part of a multi-volume set. Maybe everyone else in the world knows that Little Women is multiple books. I didn't. I got to the end and wondered how anyone could cry at that ending. Then I wondered if I was more callous than I had ever imagined.

Nope. I just got shafted. Again. So I don't feel particularly qualified to say more on the topic yet. One of these days, I will find the rest of Alcott's tale, and I'm looking forward to it.