Fungible Convictions

It’s spring break at MIT, so my bosses suggested this would be a good time to take a few days off. I’m making the most of this “staycation” so far—getting up with Lindsay at our regular time, and after driving her to work, heading back to Simon’s Coffeehouse for a couple hours of reading (finally) The Good Soldier Švejk.

Yesterday, following Simon’s, I headed downtown for lunch with my friend/fmr Houghton Mifflin coworker Walter at an old favorite haunt, Flash’s. After getting all the necessary dirt on my old industry, I then went to catch up with friends at Emerson College. All-in-all, a great time—except for when my old writing center boss at Emerson, who happens to be my Orthodox godfather, asked in front of strangers “How ya feeling? In remission?” First, he and others need to understand that with Hodgkin’s, you actually get to use the word “cured,” which I am. Second, why ask that in front of the Emerson undergrad you’re in the middle of counseling? Meh, anyway…

Today I followed up reading at Simon’s by taking Gatsby to Fresh Pond. Lately she had been a little aggressive with other dogs, and we’re not sure why. I think it has to do with the confines of sidewalks, because at obedience class and in houses/apartments, she’s fine. And Fresh Pond today was no different. She sniffed butts or ignored dogs altogether—not an ounce of aggression or nerves to be found. She also walked 99% with a loose leash, while in our neighborhood—especially on Mass. Ave.—it’s 50/50 that she’ll start pulling ahead, particularly when other dogs are approaching.

Happy to say that the walk around Fresh Pond left her exhausted, which is good prep for obedience class tonight: she’ll be focused on treats and not excited enough to care about the other dogs.

And lord, has there ever been a dog with whom it’s so easy to illustrate exhaustion?

Tomorrow, day three of days off, Lindsay is taking a well-deserved day off too. We’re planning on lunch at a small, amazing Polish restaurant in South Boston—I took Lindsay there years ago after her GRE and we never forgot how great it was. And after that we’ll head over to check out the Boston Art Deco Show at the Cyclorama.

My old employer just included me on a mass email, asking me generically to apply to its revamped company. The following arrived five minutes after I got off the phone with the only friend left at Houghton who managed to avoid being laid off in the past year (or who read the writing on the wall and jumped to a competitor or freelance work): Continue reading

Tonight in Allston, Jonathan Safran Foer read a bit from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, accompanied by musicians (rather comically, all would agree), and participated in some Q&A.

It was another example of how folks are figuring out how to take the stuffiness out of readings. It’s so wonderful. Tonight’s event was sponsored by the good people of Boston’s Weekly Dig, which in Dig fashion meant foosball and vouchers for a pint of Moosehead. The crowd was pleasantly small for a writer so popular, but the intimate mood didn’t keep one man from asking, “Jonathan, how’s your daughter doing?” Foer, who’s wife had a son, replied, “Wonderful! She’s changed her sex to a boy. She’s grown a penis and everything.”

Which brings me to my autographed sheet of a Houghton Mifflin (Foer’s publisher) notepad.

With a wonderful accidental lack of humor, I told Jonathan, “This is cheezy, but could you autograph this sheet? It’s what I used to write notes of the stupider things you said tonight.” I meant sillier, as in, these were your laugh lines, good on ya! Anyway, sorry, Jonathan.

“Novel-writing = hating vaginas.” This was my shorthand for Foer’s contention that writing short stories, which he almost never writes, is something he would get sick of. He likes novels because they’re unique and long-lasting. His analogy was, “Imagine you’re a gynecologist and you come home to your wife wearing lingerie. You’d say, ‘Not another one of those!’”

“Took Frosh class with JC Oates, encouraged him.” At Princeton, Foer took a Freshman year writing class with Joyce Carol Oates, who one time before class told him she particularly liked his writing. I had to agree with Jonathan when he said, “As a Freshman, if anyone had told me they liked anything I did, I probably would have persued it.”

“Three years is so long, you can only do what feels right to you.” His response to a question about whether he felt undue pressure in producing his second book.

Foer’s first fan letter ever was hate mail. It was “a crudely made picture of a dog eating a picture of me. The title was ‘Animal Eats Jewish Writer.’ I thought to myself, great, this is the rest of my life.”

Words on the Web:
The State and Future of Electronic / Online Publishing

Tuesday, September 6th
12:30 – 1:30
in the Houghton Mifflin Miller Room, 7th Floor

A discussion with . . .

David Jost, VP & Director of Electronic Publishing, Houghton Mifflin
R. Morgan Frank, Poetry Editor, and Robert Arnold, Fiction Editor,
Memorious.org

Come speak with David Jost, who puts HM’s best out on the web (and among many achievements, is the actual voice of the online American Heritage dictionary!) and Morgan Frank & Robert Arnold, who are living the dream of starting their own literary journal in a pioneering new format.

How does literature work online? Are we moving too fast into this new format — or never fast enough? Is there a new audiences yet to be reached off the book shelf and on the computer screen? What about starting up an online literary journal — how has Memorious.org succeeded in a crowded field? And how intimately does the world of online publishing meet with the world of traditional book publishing — does each form need the other or will there be lasting tensions? What about Blogs & online magazines like Salon.com, and live journals, where should we find the writers of the future? And, how would a YPG-er go about moving careers into this exciting, growing field?

Join us with your own questions! And as always:

–Mingle with other young-to-the-industry professionals!
–Eat home-baked cookies!
–Swap books! Bring one from your list and take on from another!
–Voice your opinions about the state of the industry & the future of YPG Boston

by Andrew Whitacre

Imagine, say, the R&D folks at an automaker tell their boss, “Market research shows our potential customers hate orange. We are therefore launching a new line of orange cars, and only orange cars, until our customers come around.” Insanity, yes? But this is an insanity shared by literary magazines: each lit mag is published precisely because no one wants to read it.

Sure, there’s also the ego of the founding editor, a moral sincerity, communal desperation, or sustained glee. But a motive all lit mags have in common is a belief that certain stories—and not others—should be pushed in front of the eyes of otherwise indifferent readers. It’s an industry dedicated to breaking entrepreneurship’s first rule: you can’t create your market. The market’s there, lit mag folks insist, people just don’t know it yet!

Year after year, though, magazines fail because they couldn’t convince people to care. Continue reading

Jonathan Safran Foer, in his second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, has chosen a vicar to fight the 9/11 demon: nine-year-old Oskar Schell, an inventive (to use Oskar’s own word) child whose father died in the fall of the Towers.

Oskar has a fear of “suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks, Arab people on the subway (even though I’m not racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other public places, scaffolding, sewers and subway grates, bags without owners, shoes, people with mustaches, smoke, knots, tall buildings, turbans.” He carries a tambourine for heartbeat-like comfort. And of course, he is in a state of incomprehensible mourning. Being so young, in his father Oskar lost the icon, that perfect man we’ve all had and, whether through death or growings-up, lost. It’s the man who tells stories. The man who has that unchangable, unmistakable scent. The protector of you, your family, your childhood. When the Towers fell, it’s tough to say what happened to people in common. When Oskar’s father perishes on 9/11, it’s easy to say: Oskar loses his faith in the logic of the world. And so, so do we.

To regain it, Oskar searches for clues to lead him back to his father, in whatever form is accessible. (Such is the struggle for faith.) An accidentally found key in his father’s closet launches Oskar on a five-borough search for its lock. Strangers become media of revelation. A dresserful of old letters leads Oskar to his father’s necessarily empty coffin. The plot mimics the disposition of the post-9/11 world: the every-day is saturated with life-and-death meaningfulness. Senseless, irrationally imaginative, massive deaths–and Foer handcuffs Oskar’s 9/11 to Hiroshima and Dresden–are, to their survivors, as intimate and lonesome as a deathbed passing. Oskar says:

Whenever I want to learn about how Dad died, I have to go to a translator program and find out how to say things in different languages, like “September,” which is “Wrzesien,” or “people jumping from burning buildings,” which is “Menschen, die aus brennenden Gebauden springen.” Then I Google those words. It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?

He is forced to go beyond himself–literally alone beyond his home borough–to be able to mourn, to claim thanatotic habeus corpus. Oskar (and so Foer) notices that Americans’ reaction to 9/11 has been to become petrified, to fortify, and to bury. He fights this. Oskar (and so Foer again) also notices–but doesn’t quite fight–Americans’ predilection to put 9/11 in the pop culture spin cycle. He keeps an album (”Stuff That Happened to Me”) of pop culture clippings, from the Staten Island ferry crash to Paris Hilton’s indiscretions. But also photographs from the Towers. Of people falling, jumping. They, and other photographs, are included throughout the pages of the novel. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in the unfinished battle of 9/11 public memory, is most successful when acknowledging the destructive power of instantly broadcast, consumable death and contrasting it with the restorative power of achingly slow, singular, exhausting mourning. In Oskar, Foer places both.

It’s a shame that most reviews, including this one, will have to give short shrift to Foer’s sections written in the points of view of Oskar’s grandparents (his late father’s parents). They’re moving, utterly. As characters, the grandparents are more fittingly clothed than Oskar in their own psychology and history. One doesn’t speak and has Yes tattooed on his left hand, No on his right. The other cares for Oskar so desperately that Oskar yells “I’m OK!” any time his name is called. It’s reassuring, given that these characters could have been mere vehicles for introducing other eras of cataclysm and halting recovery, that their purpose–in surviving WWII as Germans, in having regrets, in the grandmother’s bearing a child they didn’t agree to have–is to produce ultimately someone as kind-hearted as Oskar.

There is also included the “Sixth Borough” myth, told by Oskar’s father before his death, and published as a separate piece by Foer in the New Yorker last year. The myth tells of a beloved but lost New York borough. Its memory lives in stories and minds and in equally mythical clues. There’s nothing to disprove it, not in an optimist’s mind. It’s a fitting example of Foer’s rhetorical method. He gives a frame, often oddly juxtaposed, through which a reader reads the rest. It turns out to be mythmaking, and a willing, unhard heart, that restores Oskar’s and our faith in the world. Foer’s writing in the “Sixth Borough” and throughout Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a strong hand helping to cart out, and open, the baggage of the recent past.

Readers hopefully will remain courageous. His novel won’t be the last to do so.

368 pages | $24.95 | Houghton Mifflin | April, 2005