October 2014 – James Rovira

Jonathan Carroll’s Bathing the Lion: A Response to a Harsh Review

Laura Browning’s review of Jonathan Carroll’s Bathing the Lion for the A.V. Club, “Bathing the Lion Ruins a Great Premise,” leaves me with seriously mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’m glad Carroll is getting reviewed in a major outlet. On the other hand, the review was completely negative. The problem with this negative review is that it gets all of the details right but arrives at a wrong conclusion.

Browning is right that the book doesn’t follow a coherent plot thread. She’s right that the novel doesn’t focus on a single main character, or even a pair of characters. She’s also right that a great many loaded guns are left laying around and none of them are ever fired. She gets all of the details right about Carroll’s novel: she understands her reading. She even has the right to be completely annoyed with it, because the novel does indeed violate every expectation for narrative focalization and plot development ever theorized by any Russian, European, or American theorist.

But I think she’s mistaken in saying that the novel is a bad one. Why? Because it violates every expectation for narrative focalization and plot development ever theorized by any Russian, European, or American theorist.* I think the point of Carroll’s novel is not found in any kind of normal plot or character development but, instead, in the lack of it. Readers don’t get a neat little resolution of the narrative (marital) conflict presented at the beginning of the novel. We don’t see how it’s inextricably bound up with the cosmic forces at play. It’s not that Carroll can’t pull this off. That was the point of White Apples and Glass Soup, and it is how Carroll’s fiction works overall: Carroll comments on our inner worlds by projecting their chaos onto the cosmos. Carroll is a mythologer.

But not this time. What we get instead is stuck with the character who is the biggest jerk — the one we expected to be killed off. We’re stuck with a coming crisis, but not an immediate one. We’re stuck with a bunch of clues that don’t point anywhere. In other words, we’re stuck with our real daily lives. What’s really artificial are the neat narrative wrap ups, the conflicts resolved. What’s more real are the hints of magic and hints of despair but a whole bunch of not knowing. In other words, Carroll’s fiction is devoid of the narrative conventions that make fiction fictional, and by presenting us such a novel, opens up the possibility of seeing the magic in our daily lives.

So, yes, Carroll’s novel will violate and frustrate your expectations. It will be the most annoying boyfriend or girlfriend you’ve ever dated while you’re reading it. But it will give you something better in return, if you’re willing to be open to it.

*By the way, if your field is narrative theory, feel free to call me out on this claim if you’ve read Carroll’s novel. I’ve read narrative theory, but I’m not a specialist in it. If you’re into narrative theory and have note yet read Bathing the Lion, read it and tell me what you think.

LSAT Numbers Plummet

If you’re thinking about law school, read this reblogged post. The numbers of students taking the entrance exam for law school — the LSAT — are plummeting, which means that law school numbers are, as they should be, crashing and burning. Find out which schools are the top schools for employment and apply just to those. Forget about the ranking of the law school. Pay attention to employment numbers. The American Bar Association has been tracking the numbers of law school graduates who get jobs and the link above leads to information about the top 25 schools for employment.

I’ve been telling students not to bother to apply to law school. Now I would tell them to apply to only one of those top 25. With plummeting enrollment numbers across the boards, they have a better chance of getting in to a good law school.

Just keep in mind employment figures are still very tough for new lawyers. Every year, about half or fewer of new lawyers find work.

Finding My College

The ABA Journal (American Bar Association) reports that the number of people sitting for the law school admission test (LSAT) this year is 40% lower than in 2009. There has been a downward trend for five years.

Just a few points:

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Christie Is Getting Tired

Gov. Chris Christie is getting tired.

He’s tired of hearing about human suffering.

He’s tired of being reminded that he has a responsibility to all of his constituents, not just the ones who fund his campaign.

He’s tired of being reminded that there are people in the world who are not like him.

He’s tired of having to think about economic growth in terms other than failed right-wing clichés.

He’s tired of hearing opinions other than his own.

He’s tired of being reminded of his prejudices.

And above all, he’s tired of democracy. He wants an oligarchy, so that he knows, as a politician, that he’s really working for the people putting money in his pocket and not anyone else.

What he needs to know about the minimum wage is that most people getting it aren’t high school kids living with their parents. Half of those paid minimum wage or less are over the age of 25. But most importantly, raising the minimum wage is good for business. The states that have raised the minimum wage have seen the fastest job growth. While job growth has a number of contributing factors, increasing the pay of a large customer base is good for business everywhere: real economic growth starts at the bottom and works up, not at the top and works down. That means that raising the minimum wage is good for small business too: it will increase business costs but also increase business revenue, so that business owners are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie — which means a better bottom line.

Christie’s tired of hearing from teachers too. You know, I think the GOP itself is tired. It’s tired of facts. It’s tired of its own country. Most of all, if you’re reading this, you should know that it’s tired of you.

Millennial College Students Seem Comfortable with Risk

Pay attention if you’re a college student — avoid debt as much as possible.

Finding My College

Recent volatility in the stock market is a reminder that people handle risks differently. Some people wouldn’t dream of investing in equities and subjecting their capital to potential principal loss. Others are high flyers, routinely putting markers down on stocks with high potential on the upside as well as the downside. Others run scared at the first sign of trouble. Others stay the course, grounded in a long-term perspective (or inertia is some cases).

Beyond our individual investment philosophies and strategies, there are many decisions in life that test our appetite for risk. Indeed, most potential courses of action entail some level of risk. Sometimes we try our best to assess those risks objectively (as objectively as possible, that is, given our seemingly inescapable biases and preconceptions), and sometimes we rationalize them away. It occurred to me that my concern with student debt is fundamentally a concern about our risk…

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A Taxonomy of Feedback…

I had a great time the first week of October workshopping poetry and creative non-fiction with other writers at the St. Augustine Writer’s Conference hosted by Connie May Fowler. The best things I heard there, in no particular order:

Sascha Feinstein (poetry and creative non-fiction workshop leader) described people he’d met who were so completely committed to their art they believed that their artworks were their children. His response: “No, your children are your children.” His poetry and creative non-fiction were great to listen to. I was in his workshop, and it was run very well. We all helped one another.
Laura van den Berg read half of a short story, which was cruel — it was such a good story that we all wanted the rest of it.
Loved the poetry of Parneshia Jones and was encouraged by her presentation as editor of Northwestern University Press: it’s good to hear that there are people in the industry trying to treat their authors ethically.
Connie May Fowler‘s reading selection from her forthcoming autobiography was lyrical and beautiful. What I think I loved the most was when she told the group that she didn’t take being a writer for granted — that it was a privilege to be able to write and to publish.
And one unnamed participant’s description of how she started writing will stick with me for the rest of my life, for better or for worse. When she was working in finance she would have one male client call and ask her to “talk dirty” to him on the phone. She couldn’t because she was in an office with an open door policy. But she did start writing stories for him. And from what I understand, the male caller is a frequent figure on cable news. Now everyone at the workshop will be scanning cable news channels for the guy.

Now I’ve been teaching poetry since 2008 at the graduate and undergraduate level, and I first published poetry around the early 1990s and then the early 2000s. Once I started graduate school I didn’t have time for writing and publishing poetry, but I also ran a writer’s group in the Orlando area in the mid 1990s for a few years. So I’ve been giving and receiving feedback on poetry for a good twenty years now, and this latest round of receiving feedback has prompted some ideas on the feedback process itself. Some of this thinking works itself out into a taxonomy of feedback of sorts, or a list of different kinds of feedback given.

But first, feedback is great. I started writing poems again around November of last year, and I knew they needed editing, but I didn’t feel like I had the distance from them that I needed to edit them. After the workshop, I think I know how to edit my poems now.
So the first type of feedback is feedback that confirms what you already know. If there were two weak lines in a poem, I knew they were there, and my colleagues at the workshop focused on those. If there was a slide toward sentimental language, I was aware of that, and they pointed it out, though we may disagree about where it works and where it doesn’t. This kind of feedback tells me two things: first, trust my judgment about the weak spots in my poems, and second, that the people giving feedback are good readers.
But at the same time, I wasn’t aware of some verbal ticks I’d acquired, like the habit of repeating some phrases from one line to the next. That may not be bad in every instance, but I need to watch how often it occurs. What I’ve been able to do for the first time since November is write sonnets — I never felt until then that I could write even a passable one, though I’ve written in other formal verse forms and in free verse — but I see now where I was succumbing to form at times rather than making it work for the poem. So the second kind of feedback is feedback about your blind spots. This is perhaps the best kind of feedback a writer can get.
Feedback that is, essentially, “I don’t get it.” I don’t know what to do with this feedback. Some of the best works of literature I’ve ever read I didn’t understand fully the first time I read them. I’d even extend this claim to song lyrics. What’s going on here is a negotiation, maybe even a dance of sorts, between the reader and the writer in which the writer makes the work intriguing enough to get the reader to want to do the work necessary to understand it. What makes a work worth the effort is very much a subjective judgment on the part of the reader. Does it give pleasure? Does it address themes important to the reader? But at the same time, there has to be content for the reader to grasp before he or she will want to look more. It’s a difficult negotiation, and we should keep in mind that not all literature is written for the purpose of discursive understanding. Some is written for emotional and, especially in the case of poetry, aural effects. Sometimes the purpose of a work of literature is to communicate a mood or feeling rather than an idea, so readers seeking only ideas will remain frustrated.
You have to have thick skin. Sascha Feinstein started our workshops with these instructions: sit and listen to everyone’s feedback without responding, and then you get to respond in the last fifteen minutes of your part of the session. I think that’s good advice. The hardest thing to do sometimes is to just shut up and listen to feedback about your own work without feeling the need to defend it. It’s part of realizing that your writing isn’t your baby, something I learned the hard way while freelance writing for three years after graduating from college –before I started my grad program. Almost everything is subject to revision.
Now overall — in terms of all of my past experience giving and receiving feedback over the last twenty years — I’ve found that there are two types of personal responses writers will give to one another. Some writers see the talent of other writers as an asset to them. Other writers see the talent or education of their colleagues as a threat or a liability to them, as if the extension of recognition to someone else takes away from them, or at least might. If you’re in a workshopping situation, just ignore the latter types and try to be one of the former types. Everyone who attempts to create anything can succumb to professional jealousy. You will at times. Some people may do what they do so well you will be tempted to quit. So to avoid professional jealousy, or at least being too easily threatened, you need to develop a sense of what you can do and what you can uniquely contribute. While you can’t do what other writers can do, others may not be able to do what you can do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen two writers say to one another in the same workshop session, “I wish I could write something like that.”

Anyway — the St. Augustine Writer’s Conference was a great experience for me. I’d encourage anyone who wants to develop as a writer to try it at least once. It’s worth it just for the time spent in St. Augustine, but it’s a great workshop too. The months of October to February are probably the best time to visit Florida.