And the award for Least Gracious Loser goes to...

One afternoon in my favorite book store in all the world--

-- all right, it was the Cambria Book Company of Cambria, California, an augustly-named establishment about the size of my living room but containing slightly fewer books.  I'm going to write a book-length love letter to that store someday, I really am, but let me just say here that it's a dream of a bookstore, the very platonic ideal of one, the one every book lover wants to grow up and be the cranky old geezer-proprietor of.  There's never anyone there (which is good since even three or four customers at one time would constitute a horrible crush in that space), and if you're looking for a best-seller you'd best look elsewhere, because unless the owner takes a shine to a book she doesn't carry it.  She only keeps on hand one or at most two copies of the titles that she does carry, and that contributes to my feeling, every rare and lovely time I'm able to shop there, that I'm carrying away precious gems when I leave. 

So anyway.  One afternoon, breathing in the comforting, non-Los Angeles quiet of this serene little upstairs room full o'books, I happened upon a square black paperback.  A Reader's Manifesto, it was called, and as I'm a reader and a former commie pinko type I picked it up.  The subtitle read, An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.

I don't know if I've mentioned that I read the New Yorker regularly (yes, I'm two months behind the current issue at any given time, but I'm still there slogging faithfully away, never just tossing out a copy unread, so I'll thank you to keep the critical comments where I can't hear them).  I'm much too young to have read it in the glory days when Shirley Jackson regularly graced its pages (look at how I had to have that much, and couldn't just leave it at merely too young), but I seem to recall looking forward every week to the fiction.  I met Antonia Byatt there, and Muriel Spark, and when Tom Drury spent a year or so sprinkling the magazine with stories that eventually ended up as chapters in his wonderful and woefully underrated novel The End of Vandalism, I cheered whenever I saw his name in the table of contents.  Sure, there were some duds, just as there were articles that I skipped or wished I had, but on the whole I had a good time. 

These days, though, my heart sinks a bit when I turn a page and, uh oh, here's this week's story.  Devout atheist that I am, I nevertheless find myself offering up a little prayer to the god of good reading:  please, please, let this not be too awful.  To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, I've skipped right past asking for pleasure and am more than willing to settle for excuse from pain.  And even that doesn't happen often enough to suit me.  And yes, as a matter of fact, I do think that things have taken a turn for the worse in this realm comparatively recently.  I don't mean that there didn't used to be just oodles of bad fiction around in any given year since the medium was invented.  I just think that the allegedly good stuff has gotten unbearably self-satisfied of late.  And since I feel like paying a quick visit to the land of hopes and dreams, I also wish that writers would stop already with the enthralled, prolonged, lovingly detailed descriptions of various bodily functions, fluids, and methods of elimination.  I know why they're doing it, and it's nothing to do with plot or characterization or anything trivial like that.  It's so that we the readers can see how endlessly with-it and unflappable the writer is, to be unfazed by what the stodgy, clearly-in-need-of-a-shakeup would dismiss as just plain disgusting.  The last time -- heck, the only time -- I read a story where something like that was a defendably integral part of the plot, and where the story was readable after and despite a quite graphic and disgusting passage involving a perfectly natural and necessary everyday activity that I try to give as little thought and attention to as possible, was Patrick Susskind's The Pigeon.  Everyone else, please shut up and get over yourself already.  Thank you.

Given this context, it ought to be a given that I grabbed the above-mentioned title as I might a life preserver.  I was so desperate for a gripe session on this particular topic that I didn't even mind being on the receiving end of one.  Especially since this B. R. Myers, whoever he was, phrased everything way better than I could have, and had managed to stay awake, alive, and sane through enough contemporary fiction to choke a horse.

Now, here's the tie-in to the actual topic of this little rant.  I'd read several stories by Annie Proulx in the New Yorker, and hadn't really noticed them one way or another.  They didn't make me want to run out and buy a book by her, but I always managed to finish them.  (Why do I do that to myself, incidentally?  Force myself to finish the New Yorker fiction or die trying, more and more often lately the latter?  I tell myself that it's because I need to know what's out there, so I can better understand why my stuff keeps getting rejected; but really I'm beginning to suspect it's more like a thick streak of masochism on my part.  Of a localized, intellectual sort, I hope.) 

The Manifesto points out -- well, just lots and lots of stuff about Proulx's writing.  You might have guessed from the subtitle that its author is not overflowing with praise for her.  He's really fun to read, though, aside from the fact that if you're currently trying to write decent fiction he will scare the living bejesus out of you and maybe even chasten you into going back to whatever law school or academy of hair care you dropped out of to piss off your parents -- I mean, to follow your muse.  I'm not going to quote Myers here, for the simple reason that once I started I'd never stop.  He's just that good.  So go and buy his book and read it. 

All done?  Good.  Now you're in the perfect frame of mind to relax and enjoy while I tear into Proulx's post-Oscar diatribe.  (Or else you're mortally insulted and offended by anyone having the nerve to insult the most important writers of our day, and are too busy trying to bribe whomever necessary to give you Myers' home address so you can explain in person and in a dignified, considered, and intellectually rigorous manner why exactly you're going to hit him over the head with that nice thick plank to bother finishing reading this.  Whatever works for you.)

Annie Proulx is the author of a short story that got made into a beansy little independent movie that received some admiring critical attention, but barely managed to earn back what was spent in making it.  I am of course deeply kidding about that last bit, but did you hear that one of the actors -- I don't want to step on any toes, so I'll just say that his last name rhymes with Quaid -- is suing because he claims that he only agreed to work for a fraction of his usual humongous fee because Brokeback Mountain was represented to him as a labor of love with about as much chance of making it big as those home movies your mom took of you hunting for Easter eggs when you were four years old?  Now he wants ten million dollars.  So do I, in case you've got it on you or know someone who does.

But I was saying.  I remember reading the story the movie was based on in the New Yorker.  I seem to recall enjoying it.  For all I know at this late point it was lousily written, but I still liked it.  Call me a sucker for doomed-love stories.  I don't remember much about the plot or the writing.  I don't remember really much of anything about it, except saying to myself at one point (and I'm hoping I kept it to myself, and didn't unnerve anyone else riding the bus that day), "Oh, wow -- the cowboys are having sex."  I'm very monogamous, but also very in favor of people having sex, provided they both (or all, or whatever) enjoy it, so that to me was good news.  As I guess it must have been to one heck of a lot of other people, because (just to quote an old song, now that I've quoted an old poem) once it hit the big screen, my god! how the money rolled in. 

Pretty straightforward order of events there.  Not too hard to follow.  Someone sells a story to The New Yorker, which last I checked was a neat trick in and of itself.  Said story gets made into a movie.  Movie makes kaskillions of dollars and has even people who haven't seen it talking about it.  Gets nominated for lots of Academy awards; wins three -- again, quite a feat to this mere mortal.  Does not win Best Picture.  The author of the story, aware of the fact that even being nominated is an honor and that the movie based on her work has had an amazing run and has changed lives and made people laugh and cry and stuff like that, writes a brief, gracious piece about her contentment with the current turn of events.

I am of course kidding again.  Instead, Annie Proulx, feeling that being nominated for an Oscar is no honor at all since the Academy is shallow and inane and more concerned with the clothing on rich people's backs than the ideas in their heads, refuses to have anything to do with the awards and writes a proud essay in which she expresses her well-wishes to those involved with the creation of the movie, adding that if winning an Oscar or three would be beneficial to them, all the best of luck, but nevertheless she wishes to firmly distance herself from the Academy and all its petty machinations and wheeling-dealing.

Yes, I was kidding with that one, too.  What Proulx actually did -- and this is the kind of writerly brilliance that explains why she's living on Mount Moolah, while Joe and Jane Schmoe hacks like myself and Mr. Myers are still clipping the cold-cereal coupons every Sunday morning -- was a surreal combination of the bits she liked best from the two fantasy scenarios above.  She attended the awards ceremony, taking careful mental notes the whole time about the kind of vapid people who attend.  She hoped the movie got the Best Picture award.  She said she hoped the movie got Best Picture.  Because winning Best Picture is not merely an incredible honor, but a victory for truth and justice.  If the right movie wins, that is.  Since it didn't, the award itself is meaningless, trivial, and as idiotic as the people who decide who gets it.

I'm pretty sure I could get into some kind of trouble for reproducing the entire piece Proulx wrote in honor of the occasion, and I'm too lazy to check.  Besides, presenting the best of the worst of it is just as much fun, plus way less typing for me.  So here's just a glimpse of how a best-selling, award-winning writer handles not winning an award that is given out by stupid people who shouldn't be in the business of giving out awards anyway. 

Proulx makes some startling observations straight off.  I've never attended the ceremony myself -- they always seem to fall on the night I have to change the sand in my lizard's terrarium -- so I had no idea that apparently the people who do attend them get all dressed up in fancy-schmancy clothes.  No, really.  They do. 

Actually, what really did startle me about her mention of the purely ornamental aspect of the awards (aside from the fact that her lengthy description of the clothes worn by other attendees is as solemn as a child at his first circus, and about as convinced that no one has ever seen anything like this before) was how she managed to assure the reader at once that she had been there and that this was nowhere she would ever go.  She icily tallied up the sequins, diamonds, glass beads, and sweeping trains surrounding her, and mentioned that some of the "exquisite dresses" were "made from six yards of taffeta."  (Can I just say really quickly that although I don't sew, I did work at a fabric store for a year and, if memory serves -- and I may forget faces but retail drudgery stays with me forever -- six yards of fabric for a full-length dress isn't excessive?  Thanks, I needed that.)  Anyway, she talked about all the "pale, frothy gowns" and was obviously pleased by the fact that Larry McMurtry "defied the dress code by wearing his usual jeans and cowboy boots."  Later, she mentions that after a lot of standing around admiring the clothes and drinking champagne, "people obeyed the stentorian countdown commands to get in their seats." 

People?  Oh, you mean people.  Other people.  That kind of people. 

Granted, I didn't see anything in the paper the day after the awards were awarded about Annie Proulx showing up in massively-inappropriate-to-the-occasion clothing, or getting kicked out (or at least sternly spoken to by security) for refusing to sit down when and where she was asked to.  She may have approved of McMurtry's outfit, but I'll bet she wore formal clothing herself.  (If I could find anyone who'd take the bet, and any way of finding out if I were right or wrong, I'd lay my money on basic black with maybe a string of pearls.)  And I'll bet she scooted when she heard it was time to gather 'round and hear who had won what.  She never denies that she did so, not in so many words.  The implication is that she did it with a difference.  She was in the crowd, not of the crowd.

Reminds me of something that happened once in a god-awful line I managed to land in for a particularly rare and wonderful museum exhibit.  I'll admit that I find it particularly easy to be philosophical about this kind of situation -- at least if I'm lucky enough to be alone, because as a mother and homeschooler I so rarely am.  So I was taking the opportunity to enjoy a book and my solitude in roughly that order, when the man in front of me started loudly complaining to the woman he was with.  After about thirty seconds, I dearly hoped for her sake that she wasn't "with" him in any deeper sense than that of near-acquaintance, but I had the feeling from the embarrassed, resigned expression on her face as he went on and on and on that she'd had to listen to an awful lot of this kind of thing even before that day.  The man had apparently figured out, all by himself, that standing in line is actually less entertaining than being allowed to see whatever it is one has come to see.  Say what you will about people in L.A., but admit that we're givers.  Having stumbled upon this pearl of wisdom, he wasn't going to keep it to himself. 

Okay, annoying.  Especially since, unlike some husbands of mine, I lack the ability to read (or write -- how the hell does he do that? the man can write a story and listen to a conversation at the next table at the same time!) over the sound of someone talking near me.  So instead of having a few minutes to myself to read (have I mentioned that doesn't happen often?), I was treated to the irritable, repetitious complaints of a man who had come to the admirable and original moral conclusion that if he had to be bored and restless, the least he could do was make sure that anyone in hearing range had a lousy time of it as well.

What struck me most about the situation (other than the fact that I hadn't struck the man in front of me) was how important it seemed to him not to be mistaken for someone who didn't mind standing in line.  "I hate this," he said.  "I just really hate this.  Just standing here waiting -- Christ, what a waste of time!"  He turned accusingly to the pale, mournful-faced woman with him.  "You don't mind this kind of thing," he said.  "This is fine with you.  You don't care.  No, you don't.  It doesn't bother you.  But I hate it.  I really hate this."

Like Mrs. Gummidge in David Copperfield, bitching and moaning about every little thing; and when someone points out that, say, the burnt potatoes taste just as bad to everyone at the table, so perhaps it's not quite right for her to go on about how everything always goes badly for her and her alone, she only sniffs and answers, "I feel it more than other people.  I feel more than other people do."

So just because Proulx went along with the crowd at the awards ceremony, don't mistake her for one of "the people."  "People" stand around admiring the clothing around them and guzzling free booze; special individuals only make detailed mental notes of the attire for the sake of their readers, and as for the drinks, I'm sure that if Proulx stooped to such a thing, she at least sipped in a dignified and writerly fashion.  She certainly wasn't "sucking up champagne," the way those not fortunate enough to be writers themselves were. 

How nice to be able to have it both ways like that -- what they used to call eating your cake and having it too, until someone decided it would sound better switched around and the phrase stopped making sense.  How clever to be able to go somewhere but never for a moment allow the world to believe that you would actually be there. 

Okay, time to reluctantly move on to the writerly horrors of the rest of her essay.  I'm severely tempted to take some cheap shots at Proulx's alliteration addiction, but it's late and the spaces where my wisdom teeth lived until last Thursday are starting to ache.  But I do have to point out that anyone who knowingly and voluntarily writes the phrase "gold-coated gelded godlings going to the rap group" should not only lose membership in any and all writer's guilds she currently belongs to, but should also be arrested and sentenced to, at minimum, several dozen hours of community service time; and anyone who actually gets paid for a piece containing said phrase should have her word processor taken out and shot.

And don't get me started on people who call other people heffalumps.  Especially if they do it twice in a two-page article.  Aside from sounding petty and spiteful -- look, Ms. Proulx, the Academy didn't steal your honey, okay?  Stealing is when someone takes something that already belongs to you.  Be pissed that they didn't give you the award, that's your right, but don't mistake that for theft -- it's another crime against good writing.  There are certain words that you're allowed to use pretty much as often as you want or need to.  In fact, extra points for not trying to think up a new way of saying "said" every time someone you're writing about says something. "Said" is effectively an invisible word, because it's short and nondescript and does the job without calling any attention to itself.  But the more distinctive the word, the less frequently you're allowed to use it in any given story or article or even book.  (Trust me.  You'd notice more than a single "sententious" or "irrefragable" in three or four hundred pages.)  Heffalump is going to stick out like a pink toupee; you might just, just be able to get away with using it once, but don't push your luck.

And you'll only get away with using it if your writing has an ounce of humor to it, which Proulx's doesn't.  Not in this piece, anyway.  I think that humor must be another one of those things that "people" do.  (As in, "Oh, no, dear -- we have people for that.")  The only time she comes close to making a funny is when she "mistakenly" refers to the movie "Crash" as "Trash."  Aside from that being the kind of childish spitefulness I'd blush to see my eight-year-old son accused of, she gets the writing aspect of it wrong.  Here's the sentence:

"And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash -- excuse me -- Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline."

Does anyone mind if I light a candle at noon here?  When you use dashes like that to make a parenthetical reference, the rule is that the sentence has to make sense if you removed the parenthetical.  So if the original sentence is, "I went to see my friend -- Tanya, the one who had to get all those custom-made bras after she had her nipples pierced -- at her ranch," that's all right.  (Well, it isn't really, it's atrocious, but that's another subject for another time.)  Pull the parenthetical reference and you've got "I went to see my friend at her ranch."  But if you perform the same operation on Proulx's sentence, you get "And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline."  The parenthetical should have read " -- excuse me, Crash -- " or better yet shouldn't have needed to be there at all because Proulx shouldn't have stooped to such a lame, obvious joke.  If she's going to, the least she can do is get it right.  The woman's been a professional writer for decades now, fer crying out tears.

Even as it stands, though, it beats the sentence that follows:

"Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver."

I ran this one by my handy local Department of Basic Sanity and Reality Checks, and after a moment of stunned silence he replied (and this is a direct quote), "Huh?"  Which was vastly reassuring, since that had been my own initial reaction, as well as my immediate post-initial reaction and my okay-I've-read-this-three-times-now-and-I-still-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-she's-talking-about response.

If she'd gone with just the last two items on that list, it would have made sense:  the Academy voters are a bunch of old fogies, a century or two behind the times when it comes to real cutting edge issues.  She's got at least a bit of a point there.  My research department told me (in a desperate attempt to change the subject from a discussion about whether or not it's relevant that none of the other guys he goes bar-hopping with wear their wedding rings so what's the big deal) that he read an article about several members of the Academy who not only voted against "Brokeback Mountain" for Best Picture, but wouldn't even see it because of the subject matter.  See, those really are geezer-types who really ought to get a life and a clue and other valuable things like that.  I mean, come on.  I know that the strongest argument for gay rights is that straight people have no business caring what consenting adults do as long as they (the straights) don't have to watch.  (I also know that there's a strong contingent of drooling straight men who argue that gays ought to be able to do whatever they want as long as they're cute and female and the droolers do get to watch, but that's a whole nother issue.)  But if we're talking about voting on which movie wins Best Picture, shouldn't you have to know what you're voting against, even if you're a confirmed purse-lipped het type?  Couldn't you just close your eyes during the kissing scenes? 

But Proulx blew it with that first example -- the bit about branding adulterers with an A.  What the bleep is she talking about?  I mean, I know (I think) that she's referring to The Scarlet Letter; but has it been so long since she was forced to read that in high school that she forgot (1) it was fiction and (2) no branding was involved, only embroidery and sewing?  (And by the way, am I the only one who liked that book in high school and still likes it now?  I've voluntarily reread it two or three times.  Stop peering at my forehead.  There are no lobotomy scars there.  The Scarlet Letter is a perfectly good book, especially when you can read it in the deep comfort of knowing that you don't have to write a paper about it once you've finished.  I'm willing to bet that if you never made it through S.L., it's because you got three pages into the first chapter, "The Charterhouse," and decided that there are worse things than being culturally illiterate.  Good news!  That's actually a preface that didn't even make it into the book until the second edition, and it doesn't have any connection with the story of Hester Prynne and the men who done her wrong!  It's just a prolonged rant against all the people who said nasty things to and about Hawthorne after the first edition of S.L. was released, and it has exactly nothing to do with the rest of the book except that at the last second Hawthorne throws in this lame, contrived, totally not-true bit about how found this faded old letter A and decided to write a story about who made it and why.  You're allowed to skip it, and you can still legally claim to have read the danged book!  My own sophomore English teacher said so!  So go for it!  It's actually a pretty decent read, plus the chapters are only about three pages long each, so you feel like you're just racing through it.  Come on!  Make a late New Year's resolution and read the red A, already!)

Sorry.  I always do that when The Scarlet Letter comes up in conversation.  I'm just all proud of myself because this friend of mine is going through the reading program outlined in that book The Well-Educated Mind, and she was on the verge of despair because she really couldn't handle that first chapter of S.L. and her sister was going to kill her if she bailed out on the reading.  So I told her to skip it and now she's almost done with the book and having a pretty good time.  In the ongoing battle for cultural literacy, getting someone to read and enjoy something that's good for them is the spiritual equivalent of planting a tree or volunteering at a soup kitchen, and way easier on the nails. 

Moving on.  This may not exactly be about writing, but it peeved me to no end when Proulx complimented Philip Seymour Hoffman for his portrayal of Truman Capote and then promptly turned around and explained why his acting job was easier than that of the actors in her film.  Here's her take on it:

"Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin' image of a once-living celeb.  But which takes more skill, acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page?"

Sounds like a "duh," doesn't it?  So let me just turn the question around so we can look at it from another angle.  Let's put someone inexperienced in a starring role in a new movie, shall we?  Maybe even Proulx herself, why not.  Which do you think it would be easier for this new kid on the block to portray effectively and without getting laughed (or screamed) off the set:  a one-hundred-percent just plain made-up character about whom the actor knows nothing but what the lines in the script tell her, or Lucille Ball?  Pretend that make-up is no object here.  We'll manage to get a general physical resemblance down somehow.  All the actor has to master is the walk, talk, body language, facial expressions, and vocal intonations of an actor we've all seen at work millions of times.  No biggie.

So.  Having trashed the Academy itself, the awards ceremony, the people who ran it, the "dim L.A. crowd"-types who attended it, and the movie that won Best Picture, Proulx expresses in her last sentence a belated concern that she may be accused of harboring a bit of a grudge.  It reminds me of a little passage in Silas Marner that I've always loved, where a man is fearing the worst about something, and "instead of trying to still his fears, he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come."  Proulx seems to believe that by facing her potential accusers squarely, she can will them out of existence.  "For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant," she ends defiantly, "play it as it lays."

Is that the same as calling them like I see them?  I can do that.

Got a question or comment?
Write to the Book Lady.

If you found this essay helpful,
please visit the Filthy Lucre page