Winter
My friends ask me if I am happy to be back in New York City. I am not.
My U.K. visa expires in January, but I fly home a week before Christmas, frustrated and anxious about rebuilding a life in New York. In the new year I take a short-term sublet a few blocks from a Superfund site in northeast Brooklyn, across from a tow impound lot and next to an enormous industrial complex. I can’t figure out which industry exactly. I spend much of the month working from the apartment, which belongs to a puppet artist, hunkering down because when it’s not snowing, it’s staggeringly cold, the temperature hovering somewhere near zero. I watch snow pile up on the rusted-out old cars that line the edge of the industrial lot; I count a dozen cats, maybe more, slipping in and out between the tires. I am trapped, physically and metaphorically.
At some point the year prior, I’d struck up an online friendship with the writer
Katie Coyle. It began with little mutual hearts across the Internet; soon it was a series of emails that snowballed in length, the sort that took us both months to reply to. I bought her debut novel,
Vivian Versus the Apocalypse, and its sequel,
Vivian Versus America, at a convention in the height of the English summer, one of those rare days of unbroken blue sky. I’m bad with friends’ books: I psych myself out, worried I will be called upon to give constructive feedback, or worried I will give constructive feedback when it’s not called for. So I avoided Vivian for six months, placing her carefully on the shelf. In December, I packed her up in a huge shoddy box, held together by an entire roll of packing tape and hopeful desperation, and mailed her back across the Atlantic.
Holed up during my month of icy stagnation, I devour both Vivian books. They were published as
Vivan Apple at the End of the World and
Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle in the U.S., some worry about readers’ apocalypse fatigue, I guess. The first one begins the day before the rapture, as predicted by a Christian cult gone mainstream, and tells the story of Vivian and her best friend, Harp, who drive across the country kicking ass as they try to figure out what’s really happened -- and how to survive. The books make me cry a little and laugh a lot; they’re perfect. The winter drags on and I still find myself restless and boxed in, but for a few days, Vivian sets me free.
Spring
The ice takes an extraordinarily long time to melt. I take a job that very quickly doesn’t work out, so by April I find myself holed up working again, this time in my new apartment, a fifth floor walk-up with high ceilings and a skylight. When I’m not hauling cat litter up those four flights, and when the light hits the right way, I feel like I’m living up in the clouds. I am assigned
Kate Atkinson's new novel,
A God Among Ruins, an intertextual sequel of sorts to
Life After Life, which I have not read. They’re only paying me to review one book, but I decide to read the two, and
Life After Life is miraculous, not least if publishers think we have apocalypse fatigue, I certainly have Blitz fatigue. Atkinson brings the period into the sharpest focus I can remember encountering in a while.
A God Among Ruins is harder, full of characters you want to shake by the shoulders, and poor Teddy, once peripheral and now fully fleshed out, the quiet tragedy of his life made plain. I read them both sitting out on the Promenade, even though it’s still a little too chilly when the wind picks up, and I watch the Staten Island Ferry trundling across the bay.
But the book that sticks with me most in the spring is
Mary Norris's Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, which I begin reading when ice is still collecting on the East River. I worked with Mary for five years at
The New Yorker, deciphering her handwriting on proofs at all hours during my interminable years on the night shift. I find the same quiet brilliance and wry humor in the pages of her book, as well as a strange, almost unwanted nostalgia for my years spent making the magazine, as she describes her own decades there.
And then, somehow, I start working for
The New Yorker again. Just projects this time, mostly in the archives, spared from the grind of the weekly magazine. It’s more than a little strange to be back at the magazine. The World Trade Center is sterile and foreign and people seem confused about where I’ve been for the past few years. I don’t tell them about all the things I’ve learned, or about how my entire worldview has shifted. I complain about restrictive British visa laws, or how Brooklyn rents skyrocketed in my absence; my small talk shrinks even smaller. Other freelance work starts to trickle in -- and then out of nowhere, it’s a flood. I take every project that comes my way, and the bills get paid. My mother says it seems like I’m struggling to stay afloat, which I strenuously deny, but on a deep level I know that she’s right. I’m treading water, as quickly as I can manage.
Summer
I have learned my lesson from past New York summers. This year, when given the opportunity, I leave. I work a few weekends up at the racetrack, slow Saturday afternoons on a $50 window. I sit next to a joyful woman one day who tells me a customer recently gave her the perfect line: “Put a hundred dollar bill in the toilet and flush,” he told her. “If you reach for it, you’re not ready for the racetrack.” This was a new one, and a delight, because I’ve been taking bets so long that most lines feel scripted. “Good luck,” I say, and they smile ruefully and reply, “I need it.”
But I am a fan culture journalist now, and summer is “
con season.” I am invited to be on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, so I fly across the country in early July. En route I read
The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by
Sam Maggs, billed as “A Handbook for Girl Geeks,” which is equal parts charming and empowering. I needlessly packed another three books for San Diego, as I do for every trip, and they remain buried under clothes and toiletries as I spend four long SDCC days confused and eager and oscillating between caffeinated and intoxicated. One night I crash a Playboy party, replete with half-assed nods to science (beakers and test tubes!) and mostly-naked women dropping from ropes on the ceiling; another night I trek across the length of San Diego to see the band that played the theme song to
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, maybe two dozen of us waving foam glow sticks as they launch into the familiar guitar riff for the third time.
As the racing season comes to a close, I get my hands on a copy of
Felicia Day's memoir,
You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), and a guy assigned to the window next to me tries to fake-geek-girl me by proxy, with a line of weirdly aggressive questions about what exactly Felicia Day had done beyond a gaming series he’s seen on YouTube -- essentially, whether she was even qualified to write a memoir. This only makes me like the book more. And leaves me a little disheartened -- the racetrack has always been my place for sexism from
the past, sort of a "Nice tits, babydoll" kind of clientele, and now I’m stuck here defending Felicia Day’s right to be into video games.
The world has changed -- and my world has changed. American Pharoah loses the big race and the town deflates, and I head back down the Hudson. This year has been an exercise in putting off the big projects until fall, which is fast approaching. I’ve got an essay to write, a proposal to rework, a life to stabilize. Spoiler alert: a change in season doesn’t make this stuff any easier.
Fall
In the last week of September, my copy of
Carry On arrives in the mail. It is thick and beautiful and I clutch it to my chest the way I can only really remember doing with Harry Potter books in the past. It is a similar size and shape, and similarly magical. In the following weeks, I will go on to spill
a ton of pixels about the nature of
Rainbow Rowell's newest book, and the seminal point, in my friend
Connor’s words, that intertextuality ≠ fanfiction. But before all that, on the first chilly weekend of the year, I light a fire and curl up and read in a way I rarely do these days, the kind of reading where you look up and realize 200 pages have gone by, and the fire’s down to a few smoldering embers, and you can’t imagine this book ending. Of course, it will.
I decide to spend October with
Laura Miller's The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, partly because it’s interesting and beautifully written, and partly because I’m trying to understand why certain texts grab us and drag us under. I read other books this year, books I won’t name because I thought they failed in some way, or in certain cases, many ways, but it’s the stuff that works -- more than works, the stuff that you want to slow down for fear of finishing too soon -- that intrigues me. I write about fans, after all.
After Thanksgiving, I put neat bows on my projects through the end of the year, and I start to pack to go back across the ocean. It’s just for a few weeks, not a few years, and I have a tall stack of books to be read, maybe to be packed and remain buried under clothes and toiletries.
The Daughters, by
Adrienne Celt, or the copy of
Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird I borrowed from a coworker, or
Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, which I should’ve read a year ago, or
When We Are No More, by
Abby Smith Rumsey, out in the early months of next year, about one of my favorite topics, cultural memory in the age of digital technologies. But this trip to England is not about the realities of living there, but the pleasure of visiting, so a friend and I will take a trip up to the Peak District, to see Chatsworth and presumably cross paths with Mr. Darcy. I’ve read it before but I can read it again: without a second thought, I toss
Pride and Prejudice into my suitcase.
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Happiness, Like Water, by Chinelo Okparanta — I was delighted to see her new story in The New Yorker a few weeks ago; I’d hate to see such a fine writer overlooked amid the clamors of splashier books. This collection knocked me out because the stories are quiet and understated and lucid and gather up their power almost without the reader realizing it, then they break your heart, just like that. Such subtle and open and strong writing.
I had the pleasure of taking a short, non-credit course at a local university solely on Go Down, Moses. The professor was a notable Faulkner scholar and it was a sublime experience. GDM is certainly an elevating work of art.
Love GO DOWN, MOSES. Right up there w/ ABSALOM, ABSALOM.
wondering if you knew that it appears okparanta’s new yorker story was almost entirely a piece of plagiarism from a a munro story that appeared in the magazine just three years ago. might want to take a look at this thread – pretty damn good investigation from internet readers.
http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2013/11/04/chinelo-okparanta-benji/comment-page-1/#comments
Alex – yeah but Okparanta went to Iowa, and so did Harding. In today’s sad literary landscape, backscratching takes priority over minor things like plagiarism.
Astute interneters also found similarities between many of the stories in Okparanta’s book and other short stories. Whether or not these qualify as outright plagiarism is debatable; what isn’t debatable is the fact that Okparanta doesn’t have an original thought in her noggin. Yet she gets published in the New Yorker, and has a story collection published (and gets praised by a Pulitzer-winning writer). This so succinctly, and so depressingly, summarizes the present state of American publishing.
I vote for this series to be re-titled The Year in Logrolling.
Paul, thanks for the shout-out to two great books. Go Down, Moses is one of my favorite Faulkner books–I’ve not thought of it in the terms you mention: “The Bear” carrying so much weight, the biblical similarities. Fascinating. Thinking of it in this way has also made me re-think that amazing chapter that happens in the middle of Swamplandia!–“The Dredgeman’s Revelation” colors everything around it, though it stands alone. Thank you! Also–thanks for mentioning Okparanta’s collection. It’s a wonderful, original collection. Her prose is so seemingly simple and understated, but in fact, it’s like a whispered scream. Beautiful. One of my favorites. As a matter of fact, I bought a copy for nearly all my friends (for Christmas)!
To Ed and Alex: Interesting. I’ve also read “Benji” and “Corrie,” and I really liked Benji better. I can see what Okparanta is doing, and I love it: It’s a homage, retold in order to place the story in Nigeria, and the story, being placed differently, with details unique to the country, changes as a result.
Writers “retell.” It isn’t plagiarism.
Here’s an interesting take on the issue and another as it relates to a Lorrie Moore story:
http://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2006/10/magic-of-plagiarism-plagiarism-of.html
http://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2012/05/acknowledgements.html
To me, the accusations directed at Moore are similar to the ones directed at Okparanta, and yet neither writer has done anything wrong. They are both writing homages. Moore has retold a story in order to set it in modern times and Okparant has retold a story in order to place it in a different setting. Both retellings change the stories, bring something new. It’s part of the writer’s art.
Perhaps a little more specific to the Okparanta / Lorrie Moore question of homage: http://paulettealden.com/blog/lorrie-moores-too-referential/ .
Cara – homage is one thing, but Okparanta copies phrases almost verbatim. That’s not homage, that’s plagiarism. And if it really was homage, Okparanta would have mentioned it in the New Yorker interview when the piece ran. She only mentioned it after readers called out the New Yorker. Pretty clear case of plagiarism.
The other question is why? Any writer worth a damn wants to forge their own path, tell stories in their own voice, say something new or in a new way. You really have that little to say that you have to rewrite someone else’s story? And why would any reader be interested in a writer who just rewrites other writers? That’s an exercise in an MFA class. Anyone that cares about the future of literary fiction needs to stand up against this kind of garbage, and instead seek out and promote original voices.
Oh and re: Moore, at least she is upfront about her “homage”. Still a completely useless piece of writing.
Interesting to note that these rewriters are MFA associated. Just another reason why writers need to spend less time in the classroom and more time in life.
Cara – you should red the very close, point-by-point analysis over on Mookse. I have no idea if you know Okparanta personally or not, but there is zero question–zero–that she ripped off Munro blatantly.
If you read the order of events laid out on the 260+ comment thread at Mookse, anyone but the blind can see what occurred there was not homage, not borrowing, not modeling – it was out and out theft and subsequent historical revisionism – The New Yorker should be called out for it, she should be called out for it, her agent should be called out for it.
There are a lot of writers out there who are not part of the farm system, who are original thinkers and who deserve the high praise and placement that writers like Okparanata routinely get. And after reading more of Okparanta, I agree with Ed – she hasn’t any original literary thought.
I worked in the field for ten years and it is, frankly, an orgy of mutual masturbation, tissue-wiping of the small of the back, ass-slapping and a clubby handshake – if you see a blurb, it is likely the author and blurber are carnally, academically, or socially acquainted. On the next ten books you pick up at the bookstore, get a notebook, take down the names of the blurbers and do a little internet sleuthing – 90 percent of blurbers will have done so because they have a previous relationship with the author and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be objective. The publishers might as well put Mom’s stamp of approval on the jacket.
I am a lover of good writing and it disgusts me to see how sycophantic all the literary darlings are. They should each engage in some serious autology and see what motivates them – to me it is not the work that does or the truth that can be told with a good story, but it is the same thing that motivates the pathological narcissist – love of one’s own image.
The whole thing with Okparanta is execrable and i am stunned that it has passed without TNY or her being held accountable.
Alex – the saddest thing about the whole TNY thing is that it hasn’t gotten more coverage. Look at what happened with Frey, Lehrer, etc. The so-called pre-eminent literary publication in the country publishes a ripoff of one of its own writers, refuses to address the issue, then secretly amends the author interview to play the “homage” card and backdates the amendment to make it appear that it ran with the original piece and not after readers called them out. This story is so rich – beyond the plagiarism angle, you’ve got the institutional obfuscation angle.
So why isn’t this getting more “pub”?
The only thing I can think of is: NOBODY CARES.
That’s the scary part of this. This is how culturally irrelevant fiction has become, when the majority of what gets published are plotless, voiceless, totally unoriginal stories about comfortable white upper-middle class professionals (writers and professors, mostly) doing a lot of thinking.
It appears the New Yorker become basically an MFA alumni newsletter. And no writer is going to call plagiarism on a writer they may need to lean on for a blurb down the road, right?
Ryan – agreed, no one seems to care – not only about fiction (to me the pinnacle of not only emotional, psychological and character evaluation for humankind, but also the most effective information transfer vehicle from era to era – Dickens, Dostoevsky, Upton Sinclair, Steinbeck and on and on and on have reflected and taught us more about the social pulse as it RELATES to the facts. After all, historical facts mean squat without our marinating in them), but also no one seems to care about blatant theft – in art, business or politics. And I’m not talking about the kind of theft that all artists should engage in – Steal From Everyone and create something new. That is, after all, the exact point of art. To create in your book or painting or piece of music a fresh recipe that utilizes known and recognizable things in life (stealing, if you will) and whips up a fresh morsel on life.
What I am talking about and what you seem to agree with is the kind of theft that petty, small-minded, unoriginal artists engage in because they want to be a Writer or Painter of Musician. I swear – and I may very well be underestimating this – for every 100 stories or novels that I begin, I finish maybe one. This is because the writing is so derivative, the story so tired, the relationship to language so cavalier that it induces in me a physical reaction akin to some nasty bile spitup that burns your throat. And by start, I mean I give a novel three pages, tops. Henry James said long ago that the only rule of fiction that he could be certain was universal was that it be entertaining – that can mean a lot, I know, but an entertainment and an important story can be and often are both well-written, considered, and original. If the writer hasn’t grabbed you in three pages in a novel, or in one or two sentences in a story, they have failed.
I am really hoping that someone smart and unafraid and with a national readership (Matt Taibbi, are you listening?) takes this instance with Okparanta to put some hot coals under the feet of the gatekeepers at TNY. What Okparanta did is not only ethically foul, it has implications that may be too abstract for a legal judgment, but very well could be grounds for contract voiding – not only for her books, but for her teaching gigs, speaking gigs, etc. I talk about this stuff to non-writers – and writers, too – and very few even give it three seconds of thought before dismissing it as meaningless and ubiquitous. I am astonished because something like Okparanta’s story becomes the record and it pisses me off that record has been smudged.
I’m a passionate student and writer of fiction as stories are the way I navigate, evaluate and come to love the world of my creative mind and stories also help me embrace more penetratingly the world I wander and work in. I think all of the readers here at The Millions feel similarly and people who read TNY probably do too. But the suits who run TNY don’t give a f*ck about anything but demographics and ad sales. I guess they also don’t care about offending someone of Munro’s stature by having a fiction staff that so clearly erred and wouldn’t pass muster as a high-school yearbook student management team.
Another issue with TNY that really boils me is the fact that it has become a regular advertising segment for upcoming novels by excerpting them (NOT a short story, TNY eds). I love both forms, but if you’re going to reduce a 600-page novel into a 3500 word story, tell us you are providing, essentially, a paid billboard for the novel. This is becoming more and more of a problem with a lot of respected and self-described publishers of short stories – One Story recently published an excerpt of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel and it is in the magazine’s public and highly cited code that they celebrate and publish ONLY short stories. I canceled my subscription to One Story the moment I saw Gilbert’s piece running. You can be sure her agent, her publiciist, maybe even her BFF paid good money to get that placement and they took it to help pay the bills. Why in the hell does Elizabeth Gilbert, who is worth upwards of $25M from Eat, Pray, Love Product, need to take the space where dozens of other writers who are exceptional and struggling for readership would give a kidney for? Oh, I forgot – Gilbert was marketed as a woman who traipsed off to her exotic countries as a lark, heartbroken and with the same resources as someone who quit a job on a dime and left with little in the bank – people forget that she was able to take that trip because of a six-figure advance.
Good god could I go on – but it breaks me up after I read a story that blows me away and I know that poor author who is ten times the writer of blankety blank will likely, at some point in their life, write less and less because it is just not feasible to spend decades doing something that is not properly remunerative – in both dollars and readership.
Publishing is such a nasty field and I’ve seen the sausage made from many vantage points along the line. Hard to stomach.
I have an acquaintance attending Iowa right now and just heard back from her after the first semester – the report reinforces everything you can imagine – I suspect that if she plays her cards right, she’ll have some incandescent blurbs from people who just maybe, might have, quickly skimmed the book. Then they can tick off the IOU as paid and call it a day.