Doris Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.
What does it take to win the Nobel? Here's a list of Lessing's works in English:
The Grass is Singing. 1950
This was the Old Chief's Country. 1952
Martha Quest. 1952. – (Children of Violence; 1)
Five : Short Novels. 1953
A Proper Marriage. 1954. – (Children of Violence; 2)
A Retreat to Innocence. 1956
The Habit of Loving. 1957
Going Home. 1957
A Ripple from the Storm. 1958 (Children of Violence; 3)
Fourteen Poems. 1959
In Pursuit of the English : a Documentary. 1960
Play with a Tiger : a Play in Three Acts. 1962
The Golden Notebook. 1962
A Man and Two Women. 1963
Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. 1964
African Stories. 1964
Landlocked. 1965 (Children of Violence; 4)
A Ripple from the Storm and Landlocked. 1966
The Black Madonna. 1966
Winter in July. 1966
Particularly Cats. 1967
The Four-Gated City. 1969 (Children of Violence; 5)
Briefing for a Descent into Hell. 1971
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories. 1972.
Collected African stories. Vol. 1, This was the Old Chief's Country. 1973
Collected African stories. Vol. 2, The Sun Between Their Feet. 1973
The Summer Before the Dark. 1973
The Memoirs of a Survivor. 1974
Stories. 1978
To Room Nineteen : Collected Stories Volume One. 1978
The Temptation of Jack Orkney : Collected Stories Volume Two. 1978
Shikasta : Re: Colonised Planet 5. 1979 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 1)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five. 1980 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 2)
The Sirian Experiments. 1981 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 3)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. 1982 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 4)
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. 1983 (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 5)
The Diary of a Good Neighbour. 1983
If the Old Could ... 1984
The Diaries of Jane Somers. 1984
The Good Terrorist. 1985
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. 1987
The Wind Blows Away Our Words. 1987
The Fifth Child. 1988
The Real Thing : Stories and Sketches. 1992
African Laughter : Four Visits to Zimbabwe. 1992
Shadows on the Wall of the Cave : a talk by Doris Lessing delivered 19 January 1994
Conversations / edited by Earl G. Ingersol. – Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press, 1994
A Small Personal Voice : Essays, Reviews, Interviews 1994
Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. 1994
Spies I Have Known and Other Stories. 1995
Playing the Game. 1995
Love, Again. 1996
Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays. 1996
Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962. 1997
Mara and Dann : an Adventure. 1999
Ben, in the World. 2000
The Sweetest Dream. 2001
On Cats. 2002
The Grandmothers : Four Short Novels. 2003
Time Bites : Views and Reviews. 2004
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. 2005
The Cleft. 2007
Dig in.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Process
When I was in grad school there was much heated debate about the process of writing. Or, more succinctly, Process.
These self-important and masturbatory conversations usually centered around the physical process of placing words on paper.
Keyboard, pen, pencil, tape recorder, hammer and chisel, crayon...
Computer monitor, legal pad, lined white paper, cocktail napkins...
While I wanted to discuss mental and emotional aspects of Process everyone else seemed caught up in the minutiae (and pretense) of what mechanical tools were being used, as if somehow the 'magic' was not in your head but in the material objects used to record it.
I often wondered (and still do) whether this avoidance was due to a serious interest in the physical act of writing or a serious lack of consideration about motivation.
People would tell me the more they thought about writing the more they became blocked.
Blocked?
What are these people? Toilets?
That's like saying the more they thought about food the less hungry they'd become Or the more they thought about sex the more impotent they became.
The old saying goes that writers write. I believe that writing is not so much a physical act as it is a form of thinking out loud. When people think of writers (and of course I'm speaking in general terms) they don't think of someone who is physically capable, they think of someone who is "smart" (and boy is that a mistake).
So while others discuss pen vs laptop or PC vs. Mac (as if the brand actually matters) I'll turn my attention inward. And see what I can dig up from the deep (and maybe not so deep) recesses of my consciousness.
These self-important and masturbatory conversations usually centered around the physical process of placing words on paper.
Keyboard, pen, pencil, tape recorder, hammer and chisel, crayon...
Computer monitor, legal pad, lined white paper, cocktail napkins...
While I wanted to discuss mental and emotional aspects of Process everyone else seemed caught up in the minutiae (and pretense) of what mechanical tools were being used, as if somehow the 'magic' was not in your head but in the material objects used to record it.
I often wondered (and still do) whether this avoidance was due to a serious interest in the physical act of writing or a serious lack of consideration about motivation.
People would tell me the more they thought about writing the more they became blocked.
Blocked?
What are these people? Toilets?
That's like saying the more they thought about food the less hungry they'd become Or the more they thought about sex the more impotent they became.
The old saying goes that writers write. I believe that writing is not so much a physical act as it is a form of thinking out loud. When people think of writers (and of course I'm speaking in general terms) they don't think of someone who is physically capable, they think of someone who is "smart" (and boy is that a mistake).
So while others discuss pen vs laptop or PC vs. Mac (as if the brand actually matters) I'll turn my attention inward. And see what I can dig up from the deep (and maybe not so deep) recesses of my consciousness.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
20 Books
The 50th Anniversary issue of GQ (they've been making men feel bad about themselves for 50 years?) includes their list of "20 Books that Changed Men's Lives."
What men they are talking about I can't say, but here's the list:
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort
Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Universal Baseball Association Inc. by Robert Coover
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Roots by Alex Haley
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
What men they are talking about I can't say, but here's the list:
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort
Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Universal Baseball Association Inc. by Robert Coover
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Roots by Alex Haley
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Monday, September 10, 2007
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Dissapointment
Very few things promote creation like disappointment, depression and drugs.
Fortunately for me I've experienced very little of the first two of these and generally shied away from the last one (at least lately).
By most objective measurements I have a pretty good life (though, admittedly, even the most objective measurements of "quality of life" are very subjective). Is my life perfect? Far from it; I'm overworked, underpaid and generally unappreciated (though, thankfully, not by my family).
If my first statement is true (that the 3 Ds are good for creativity), and you couple that with my second statement (I'm a generally happy dude) then, by extension, I must not be very creative lately.
Happily I think I can say that this is a case where 1+1 does not equal 2. (I've never been good at math anyway...I hate all that linear thinking and certitude.)
Disappointment, depression and drugs may promote creativity, but they sure as shit don't do a damn thing for productivity.
Fortunately for me I've experienced very little of the first two of these and generally shied away from the last one (at least lately).
By most objective measurements I have a pretty good life (though, admittedly, even the most objective measurements of "quality of life" are very subjective). Is my life perfect? Far from it; I'm overworked, underpaid and generally unappreciated (though, thankfully, not by my family).
If my first statement is true (that the 3 Ds are good for creativity), and you couple that with my second statement (I'm a generally happy dude) then, by extension, I must not be very creative lately.
Happily I think I can say that this is a case where 1+1 does not equal 2. (I've never been good at math anyway...I hate all that linear thinking and certitude.)
Disappointment, depression and drugs may promote creativity, but they sure as shit don't do a damn thing for productivity.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Management
I came home tonight and these 1,001 words are what came out of me. (It's not hard to find my motivation.)
This is my first draft of the scene complete with syntax errors, tense disagreements, and questions about where, exactly, to place it in the manuscript. Numerous typos habe been corrected by the grace of Microsoft.
[George used to manage a big corporately owned bar or restaurant, some Lettuce-type place. A themed “restaubar” – loud and bustling]
They had studied the “art” of ahm-bee-ahnss (or at least they hired someone who claimed to study it) and had combined it with precise mathematics and had created a place where sound bounced and echoed. The music was up-tempo jazz, a seemingly innocuous music that in its cadence occasionally flirted with frenzy, causing all around it conversations to accelerate, personal volumes to rise and all manner of pacing to hasten whether it be those of the diners (table turnover is how you make your money, baby) or the bussers who flitted from table to table like nectar-ingesting birds.
They had counted the tables and chairs in their most symmetrical arrangement and had realized seven servers and three bussers could run the place with incredible efficiency. So they zigzagged the tables and nightly scheduled six servers and two bussers, They hired managers who drove them all like dog-track greyhounds – front of the house managers aggressive as pit bosses and kitchen managers angry as put bulls. And like those infamous dogs, they were castoff if deemed incapable or unwilling to perform.
Why would you go back to waiting tables after being a manager? Isn’t that going backwards?
You don’t step down from restaurant management; you step away from it.
Management in the restaurant industry is not like managing in the real world. It’s not anything like people’s perceptions of what it means to be in charge. It bears no resemblance to being a manager in a large bank, or a headge-fund manager, and nothing at all like managing a baseball team. In a restaurant you’re not in charge of anything – at best you’re a shepherd, nothing more than a wrangler of people, people who are often insecure or egomaniacal (very few restaurant people are in anyway moderate) and sometimes both.
Waiters are generally not much more than transients, and like transients they are often aloof or indifferent to the ways of the larger world; they seek no more than a modicum of stability in the most basic necessities – housing, food, love. And how do you motivate a person with so little too lose and only a pocketful (at best) of cash to gain? Often they are incompetent, unable to keep anything resembling a regular job and even less competent at keeping regular hours…regularly going to sleep when most people are getting to work.
Why would I quit? The place was a cave.
How do you mean?
It was a loud, unhealthy and generally dangerous place to work. The place could kill you. Second hand smoke, easy access to alcohol and attractive, insecure females were among the most obvious of the dangers. He often wondered why they gave helmets to miners. If a cave, located sometimes hundreds of feet underground, collapses, the only thing a helmet is going to do is provide a convenient place to store what’s left of your head when they eventually dig you about, assuming they even bother.
Every night the rattle and crash of seven or eight or even ten hours would stow away in him, hiding until he eventually laid his head down on a pillow or the armrest of the couch, remerging as a constant high-pitched ringing in his ears like the chirping-whine of late-summer crickets nesting in his head. It was slowly making him deaf as he monthly lost a tiny bit of hearing capacity in his upper register.
Most nights he would lay in bed, thumbs jammed into his ears, fingers splayed across his scalp as if he was keeping his cranium from lifting off, and he would listen as the ringing was eventually replaced by the hollow, bellowy rasp of his own breathing. After a bit he hears the blood coursing through skull. Eventually the rising and falling of his chest fall into sync with his steadily beating heart. He falls asleep that way most nights, on his back, elbow bent, hands loosely cupped around his ears as his fingers slowly release his scalp from its trembling, white-knuckle grip.
But the place worked in even more insidious ways, luring with cash and rich foods and friendships with too many people as neurotic and unstable as yourself, a veritable circle jerk of co-dependency. What was at first exciting became frustrating, then depressing, then mind numbing and the numbness eventually becomes comfortable. There’s a reason so many people take anti-depressants…it’s just plain easier.
It’s a trap. You learn to love it or you get the fuck out early. You love it, if for no other reason, than it’s different. It’s only marginally different…after all, most people work for the profit of someone else, usually many someone elses. He didn’t have weekends off, but at least he didn’t have to wake up early.
Manage? Never again. He’d done the math. If you made an average of $150 a night, and worked 260 days you cleared 40 grand a year, and you still got to take off over a 100 days a year…that’s like taking three months off work. If you worked at a nice enough place (or at least busy enough) and averaged over $200 that was over 50 grand a year. What’s a manager make? Forty thousand. What’s that after taxes? Not even twenty-seven grand. Fuck that. I’d rather do without the responsibility and have the flexibility if having a shift covered if I don’t feel like working. Or the flexibility if being able to tell someone to fuck off. In Chicago there are over ten-thousand restaurants. Whey deal with the bullshit when it’s a buyers market?
In the restaurant business you’re really nothing more than a day laborer, and he knew it. At least as a manager he received his money in the form of a paycheck. And no one he knew could save a dollar to save their life. In the hands of most servers cash was as good as gone the second it was earned.
This is my first draft of the scene complete with syntax errors, tense disagreements, and questions about where, exactly, to place it in the manuscript. Numerous typos habe been corrected by the grace of Microsoft.
[George used to manage a big corporately owned bar or restaurant, some Lettuce-type place. A themed “restaubar” – loud and bustling]
They had studied the “art” of ahm-bee-ahnss (or at least they hired someone who claimed to study it) and had combined it with precise mathematics and had created a place where sound bounced and echoed. The music was up-tempo jazz, a seemingly innocuous music that in its cadence occasionally flirted with frenzy, causing all around it conversations to accelerate, personal volumes to rise and all manner of pacing to hasten whether it be those of the diners (table turnover is how you make your money, baby) or the bussers who flitted from table to table like nectar-ingesting birds.
They had counted the tables and chairs in their most symmetrical arrangement and had realized seven servers and three bussers could run the place with incredible efficiency. So they zigzagged the tables and nightly scheduled six servers and two bussers, They hired managers who drove them all like dog-track greyhounds – front of the house managers aggressive as pit bosses and kitchen managers angry as put bulls. And like those infamous dogs, they were castoff if deemed incapable or unwilling to perform.
Why would you go back to waiting tables after being a manager? Isn’t that going backwards?
You don’t step down from restaurant management; you step away from it.
Management in the restaurant industry is not like managing in the real world. It’s not anything like people’s perceptions of what it means to be in charge. It bears no resemblance to being a manager in a large bank, or a headge-fund manager, and nothing at all like managing a baseball team. In a restaurant you’re not in charge of anything – at best you’re a shepherd, nothing more than a wrangler of people, people who are often insecure or egomaniacal (very few restaurant people are in anyway moderate) and sometimes both.
Waiters are generally not much more than transients, and like transients they are often aloof or indifferent to the ways of the larger world; they seek no more than a modicum of stability in the most basic necessities – housing, food, love. And how do you motivate a person with so little too lose and only a pocketful (at best) of cash to gain? Often they are incompetent, unable to keep anything resembling a regular job and even less competent at keeping regular hours…regularly going to sleep when most people are getting to work.
Why would I quit? The place was a cave.
How do you mean?
It was a loud, unhealthy and generally dangerous place to work. The place could kill you. Second hand smoke, easy access to alcohol and attractive, insecure females were among the most obvious of the dangers. He often wondered why they gave helmets to miners. If a cave, located sometimes hundreds of feet underground, collapses, the only thing a helmet is going to do is provide a convenient place to store what’s left of your head when they eventually dig you about, assuming they even bother.
Every night the rattle and crash of seven or eight or even ten hours would stow away in him, hiding until he eventually laid his head down on a pillow or the armrest of the couch, remerging as a constant high-pitched ringing in his ears like the chirping-whine of late-summer crickets nesting in his head. It was slowly making him deaf as he monthly lost a tiny bit of hearing capacity in his upper register.
Most nights he would lay in bed, thumbs jammed into his ears, fingers splayed across his scalp as if he was keeping his cranium from lifting off, and he would listen as the ringing was eventually replaced by the hollow, bellowy rasp of his own breathing. After a bit he hears the blood coursing through skull. Eventually the rising and falling of his chest fall into sync with his steadily beating heart. He falls asleep that way most nights, on his back, elbow bent, hands loosely cupped around his ears as his fingers slowly release his scalp from its trembling, white-knuckle grip.
But the place worked in even more insidious ways, luring with cash and rich foods and friendships with too many people as neurotic and unstable as yourself, a veritable circle jerk of co-dependency. What was at first exciting became frustrating, then depressing, then mind numbing and the numbness eventually becomes comfortable. There’s a reason so many people take anti-depressants…it’s just plain easier.
It’s a trap. You learn to love it or you get the fuck out early. You love it, if for no other reason, than it’s different. It’s only marginally different…after all, most people work for the profit of someone else, usually many someone elses. He didn’t have weekends off, but at least he didn’t have to wake up early.
Manage? Never again. He’d done the math. If you made an average of $150 a night, and worked 260 days you cleared 40 grand a year, and you still got to take off over a 100 days a year…that’s like taking three months off work. If you worked at a nice enough place (or at least busy enough) and averaged over $200 that was over 50 grand a year. What’s a manager make? Forty thousand. What’s that after taxes? Not even twenty-seven grand. Fuck that. I’d rather do without the responsibility and have the flexibility if having a shift covered if I don’t feel like working. Or the flexibility if being able to tell someone to fuck off. In Chicago there are over ten-thousand restaurants. Whey deal with the bullshit when it’s a buyers market?
In the restaurant business you’re really nothing more than a day laborer, and he knew it. At least as a manager he received his money in the form of a paycheck. And no one he knew could save a dollar to save their life. In the hands of most servers cash was as good as gone the second it was earned.
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