UNDER THE INFLUENCE #7, MAGIC
written by Kurt Baumeister December 12, 2018
Intro
Wherein Jana Martin lauds the “Sunbelt-oddness-filled” and “hot blast evangelism” of Joy Williams, Paul Cohen tells how Saul Bellow’s words stalked him across a continent and turned him into a writer, Debra Di Blasi brings us the ambience of Guy de Maupassant, D. Harlan Wilson shares his take on William Burroughs “panic theorist,” Whitney Collins praises “sinister sister” Shirley Jackson’s magical admixture of horror and comedy, and Samuel Sattin barely survives psychic drowning in the sea of masks that is Haruki Murakami’s Nobel-winning work. Enjoy…
Haruki Murakami
by Samuel Sattin
I love books that wear masks. When I know too much about what I’m reading, when I’m swimming in an author’s intentions, I end up hacking, spitting, desperately crawling to shore. Haruki Murakami’s books wear masks, extravagant masks that in some ways may elude even the author himself. Private, industrious, notoriously esoteric, Murakami doesn’t choose to showcase meaning, as many writers are trained to. Statements are made in books like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that are political, emotional, and spiritual alike, but in the manner of intangible feelings spurred by listening to Schumann’s Bird as Prophet, they’re experienced, rather than revealed.
Samuel Sattin is a novelist and comics creator. He is the writer of the forthcoming Glint trilogy and Bezkamp(2019), Legend, The Silent End, League of Somebodies, and Adventure Quest. His work has appeared or been featured in The Nib, The Atlantic, Nerdist, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Paste Magazine, Salon, io9, Kotaku, Vulture,Bleeding Cool, The Fiction Advocate, The Rumpus, The Good Men Project, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts and has a creative writing MFA from Mills College. He is the director of a toy company in Oakland, California, and teaches at the California College of the Arts.
Shirley Jackson
by Whitney Collins
When I first discovered the works of literary maven and rumored witch, Shirley Jackson, my tell-tale heart soared. Who knew you could write suspense and humor? That you could kill off characters in one work and wax sentimental in another? In the milquetoast 1950s, Jackson did just that, simultaneously terrifying and delighting readers with horror novels like The Haunting of Hill House and frank parenting memoirs like Raising Demons. Equal parts Poe and Bombeck, Jackson inhabited both the demonic and domestic worlds while battling outer monsters (four children) and inner monsters (addiction and anxiety). The sinister sister’s biggest break (assuming false the anecdote she used black magic to fracture a Knopf editor’s leg) was her story, “The Lottery,” which detailed a bucolic town’s stoning ceremony. That tale succeeded in chilling America to its core and proving Jackson was, indeed, a sorceress—at least with the pen.
Whitney’s fiction appears in New Limestone Review, LUMINA, The Pinch, Grist, Pamplemousse, and The Gateway Review and is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Moon City Review, and Shirley Magazine (which pays homage to the aforementioned Shirley). Her story, “Daddy-o” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Dau Prize, and her story, “The Nest,” received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train. Whitney’s nonfiction appears onSalon, Huffington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Weeklings, and The Big Jewel, among others. She lives in Kentucky with her husband and sons and is pursuing her MFA at Spalding University.
William Burroughs
by D. Harlan Wilson
I remember reading Naked Lunch for the first time in my parent’s basement; I had never read anything even remotely like it, and it had an instant, permanent effect on me. The chapter entitled “Word” and the “kaleidoscope of vistas” it unleashes remains as fresh, compelling, and unique to me today as it did so long ago. In an article on Burroughs’ cognitive (cut-up) maps, I described him as, “a panic theorist whose hyperbolic, oneiric, ultraviolent psy-fi novels satirized the impact of twentieth-century media technologies on the human condition and prescribed the drug of pathology as a cure.” I’ll stick with that description, now and forever.
Harlan Wilson is an American novelist, short-story writer, critic, screenwriter, playwright, editor and university professor whose body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary theory with various genres of speculative fiction. He is the author of over twenty book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, and hundreds of his stories, essays and reviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies across the world in multiple languages.
Guy de Maupassant
by Debra Di Blasi
My 1000-page tome of The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant is stored in a dusty room across an ocean and a continent, so I must vaguely tell you a story about de Maupassant’s stories about storytelling characters. And why I care. There’s often a fireplace. Cigars. Brandy or coffee. The light beyond the windows dims. People settle into the rhythm of the storyteller’s voice, drawn tenderly toward the storyteller’s tale. The reader leans in. The writer leans in. A moment is brought to the radical center, the point where circles intersect. It’s you, me, and story. It’s always been.
Debra Di Blasi is the author of seven books, including Prayers of An Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press) The Jirí Chronicles (University of Alabama Press/FC2), Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions/W.W. Norton), winner of the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award, and TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER: An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions (Black Scat, Fall 2018). Her writing has been published in notable journals and anthologies of innovative writing, with adaptations to film, radio, theatre, and audio in the U.S. and abroad. She is a former publisher, educator and art critic. More at: www.debradiblasi.com.
Saul Bellow
by Paul Cohen
Chasing Borges’ “vast dawns,” I quit college and worked as a handyman in a Utah ski lodge, where we paid tribute to mighty snows by diving off the four-story hotel’s roof, and as a landscaper in Wyoming, where I scaled peaks rope free and slept in a grove of aspens. Back in school—an environment to which I still felt unsuited—I encountered Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. In the disastrous and rapturous pilgrimage of Bellow’s violin playing pig farmer, I recognized the relentless craving that had pursued me across a continent, and knew I needed to write.
Paul Cohen’s Pushcart-nominated debut novel, The Glamshack was named a top ten debut for fall 2017 by Barnes and Noble Reads. Cohen’s short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Five Chapters, Hypertext, and Eleven Eleven. He won the Prairie Lights Fiction Contest (judged by Ethan Canin) and was named a finalist for the 2016 Big Moose Prize for his novel-in-progress, The Sleeping Indian. His nonfiction has appeared in The Millions, The New York Times Magazine, Details, The Village Voice and others. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he won a teaching scholarship. For more info visit http://paulcohenfiction.com/.
Joy Williams
by Jana Martin
My first encounter with Joy Williams’ astounding work was the Sunbelt-oddness-filled “Breaking and Entering” about a young couple with a white German Shepherd who break into and live in strangers’ houses in Florida. Other stories of hers have a hot blast evangelism, with radio preachers and idlers derailed and buoyed by their own illogical faith. But my favorite William book might be Ill Nature, for its unflinching, eviscerating essays like “Hawk” constructed like a Bach fugue, soaring, devastating. Even her tourist-friendly guidebook, The Florida Keys ends with a killer line — about being on the Tortugas, standing beneath frigate birds: “They ride the currents of the air and there you are below them, far from home, almost nowhere.” It may read like a paradox, but it’s all true.
Jana Martin is the author of Russian Lover and Other Stories, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Great Intentions, Good Inventions and recently contributed to Women Who Rock edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Feckless Cunt Anthology. She’s an editor on TheWeeklings.com and has appeared in The New York Times, Village Voice,MarieClaire, Elle, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, Spork, and PostRoad. Her essay on Etsy.com was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She’s taught journalism and creative prose at SUNY New Paltz and is working on another book. She was a founding member of the NYC punk band The Campfire Girls and a bassist and lead singer for The Rings.
Outro
There’s only one type of magic I’ll admit to believing in. And though it’s not always called magic, that’s precisely what it is. I’m speaking, of course, of literary magic, the sorcery of reading and writing.
You pick up a book and if you’re lucky the world changes, becomes the contents of that volume. Characters, settings, phrasings: Your mind becomes focused on the book’s interior world and little else. This is true of writing, as well.
Whether you’re banging away on a keyboard, dictating into your phone, or writing longhand when the work is really flowing there’s no better feeling in the world. Part of what makes that feeling so special is that it can be fleeting. Worse, when it goes, it sometimes disappears completely, for years or even decades at a time.
There are people who will tell you there’s no such thing as “writer’s block,” that the ability of the writer to write is an act of will, nothing more. Maybe they’re right. Maybe those of us that experience writer’s block or lack of desire or whatever you want to call it are just lazy. Or self-absorbed. Or bad people. Maybe it’s as simple as one or more of those. Then again, maybe it’s not.
Writers are opinionated, after all. They’re keen to tell you when they’ve found an answer for themselves, which they then tend to universalize, sharing that knowledge again and again like some fire-eyed preacher spinning personal salvation into a biblical epic of Old Testament grandeur, a truth so certain there can be no other way of seeing the world.
Writer 1: “Show don’t tell!”
Writer 2: “B-but…narration?”
Writer 1: “Write what you know!”
Writer 2: “Err…what about fantasy?”
Writer 1: “Don’t use adverbs!”
Writer 2: “Seriously, dude?”
I read an article the other day by a former teacher in an MFA program. In it, he shared the sage observation that most writing students weren’t going to make it as professional writers. They were wasting their time, simple as that.
This guy went on to talk about how few “real deal” writers there’d been in his classes, that in his long tenure as a teacher (a decade, maybe two, I forget) there hadn’t even been five; his assessment made comical by the fact that I’d never even heard of this cat. No doubt, in spite of what Baumeister thinks, this dude sees himself as a “deal” so “real,” normal mortals can hardly fathom his vast talent. Which is fine, because the truth is that one person’s “real deal” isn’t necessarily another’s.
Faulkner hated Hemingway’s writing. Hemingway hated Faulkner’s writing. They are both famous, canonical, historical literary figures. They each published many books, made a lot of money, and won Nobel Prizes in Literature. If nothing else, reading their work side by side will assure you of one thing: Neither reading nor writing are one-size-fits-all endeavors.
Some of us may get lucky. We may have a bestseller or win a big award. We may find the perfect mentor or agent or editor; the sort of resource that can, potentially, make a career. But even if we are that lucky, there’s going to be a lot of trial and error first. There are going to be a lot of people telling you to do things this way or that, plenty taking the opposite position and arguing for it just as vehemently.
My point is there are no easy answers. We must each make up our own mind. Not that it’s the only way, but the only way I know is to read the writers you like, to read them again and again, let them help you synthesize the vast amount of literary knowledge that was here before you hit the scene and will linger long after you’re gone. If you need an idea or two about who to read just stop by here sometime. Each month, we’ll have six new literary legends brought to you by six contemporary writers; every one of whom, I guarantee, is somebody’s “real deal.”
