Here’s a flawed but fascinating little film about the life of Vladimir Nabokov, examined through the prism of his most famous book.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita?first aired on British television in 2009. The host is Stephen Smith, a culture correspondent for BBC Newsnight. We don’t know the rest of Smith’s resume, but in watching the documentary we get the feeling he may have picked up a little of his journalistic sensibility from the British tabloids.
The problem referred to in the title is the sense–at least among Smith’s friends–that there is something “pervy” about Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, and that this raises certain questions about the author’s own sexual penchants. “Was it a morality play,” Smith asks at the outset, “or the fantasy of a dirty old man?”
It’s a contemptible point of departure. But How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita? manages to be worthwhile in spite of itself. It’s filled with interesting old footage of Nabokov talking about himself and his work, as well as contemporary footage of the writer’s old haunts in Russia, America and Switzerland. The film is a kind of travelogue. Watching it is like taking a one-hour tour through a fascinating landscape with an amiable but slightly annoying guide.
In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson was looking to become the new sheriff in town — the town being Aspen, Colorado. In a heated election, Thompson ran against a traditional, conservative candiate, Carrol Whitmire, on what he called the “freak power” platform, which mostly called for the legalization of marijuana and unconventional environmental protections.
As Thompson later explained in his essay “Freak Power in The Rockies,” hundreds of Haight-Ashbury refugees moved to Aspen after the ill-fated “Summer of Love” in 1967, and they became part of the general population. In the town, registered Republicans historically outweighed registered Democrats by a two-to-one margin.
But both camps were outweighed by independents, which included “a jangled mix of Left/Crazies and Birchers; cheap bigots, dope dealers, nazi ski instructors and spaced off ‘psychedelic farmers’ with no politics at all beyond self-preservation,” remembers Thompson. So, winning an election came down to registering indie voters and getting them to the polls — something that was easier said than done, it turns out.
In the short term, Hunter S. Thompson lost the “Battle of Aspen” by 300–500 votes, depending on whose accounts you read. In the long-term, he arguably won. 42 years after Thompson made the legalization of marijuana his central campaign promise, Colorado voters passed Amendment 64, legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Somewhere, the would-be gonzo politician is smiling.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is often portrayed as a natural-born writer. “His talent,” says Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, “was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.” But Fitzgerald saw himself in a different light. “What little I’ve accomplished,” he said, “has been by the most laborious and uphill work.”
Last week we brought you Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction. Today we’re back with a similar list of advice from Hemingway’s friend and rival Fitzgerald. We’ve selected seven quotations from F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, which was edited by Larry W. Phillips and published in 1985 as a companion to the Hemingway book. As in the previous post, we’ve organized the advice under our own headings and added some brief commentary.
1: Start by taking notes.
Fitzgerald made a habit of recording his stray thoughts and observations in notebooks. He organized the entries into categories like “Feelings and emotions,” “Conversations and things overheard” and “Descriptions of girls.” When Fitzgerald was giving writing advice to his mistress Sheilah Graham in the late 1930s, he advised her to do the same. In her 1940 memoir, Beloved Infidel, Graham quotes Fitzgerald as saying:
You must begin by making notes. You may have to make notes for years.… When you think of something, when you recall something, put it where it belongs. Put it down when you think of it. You may never recapture it quite as vividly the second time.
2: Make a detailed outline of your story.
When Fitzgerald was working on a novel, he would surround himself with charts outlining the various movements and histories of his characters. In a 1936 letter to novelist John O’Hara, he advises the younger novelist to start with a big outline:
Invent a system Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.
3: Don’t describe your work-in-progress to anyone.
Fitzgerald’s policy was never to talk with other people about the book he was working on. In a 1940 letter to his daughter Scottie, he says:
I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.
4: Create people, not types.
Fitzgerald was known for creating emblematic characters, but he said it was accidental. “I had no idea of originating an American flapper when I first began to write,” he said in a 1923 interview for Metropolitan magazine. “I simply took girls who I knew very well and, because they interested me as unique human beings, I used them for my heroines.” In the opening sentence of his 1926 short story, “The Rich Boy,” Fitzgerald explains the principle:
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created–nothing.
5: Use familiar words.
In a 1929 letter to his college friend and fellow writer John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald says:
6: Use verbs, not adjectives, to keep your sentences moving.
In a 1938 letter to his daughter, Fitzgerald writes:
About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,” is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement–the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes.
7: Be ruthless.
A writer has to make some hard choices. Fitzgerald warns about the danger of becoming too attached to something you’ve written. Keep an objective eye on the whole piece, he says, and if something isn’t working get rid of it. In a 1933 Saturday Evening Post article titled “One Hundred False Starts,” he writes:
I am alone in the privacy of my faded blue room with my sick cat, the bare February branches waving at the window, an ironic paper weight that says Business is Good, a New England conscience–developed in Minnesota–and my greatest problem:
“Shall I run it out? Or shall I turn back?”
Shall I say:
“I know I had something to prove, and it may develop farther along in the story?”
Or:
“This is just bullheadedness. Better throw it away and start over.”
The latter is one of the most difficult decisions that an author must make. To make it philosophically, before he has exhausted himself in a hundred-hour effort to resuscitate a corpse or disentangle innumerable wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is really a professional. There are often occasions when such a decision is doubly difficult. In the last stages of a novel, for instance, where there is no question of junking the whole, but when an entire favorite character has to be hauled out by the heels, screeching, and dragging half a dozen good scenes with him.
In 1994, Charles Bukowski was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery, beneath a simple gravestone. The stone memorializes the poet’s name. It recites his dates of birth and death, but adds the symbol of a boxer between the two, suggesting his life was a struggle. And it adds the very succinct epitaph, “Don’t Try.”
There you have it, Bukowski’s philosophy on art and life boiled down to two words. But what do they mean? Let’s look back at the epistolary record and find out.
In October 1963, Bukowski recounted in a letter to John William Corrington how someone once asked him, “What do you do? How do you write, create?” To which, he replied: “You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”
So, the key to life and art, it’s all about persistence? Patience? Timing? Waiting for your moment? Yes, but not just that.
Jumping forward to 1990, Bukowski sent a letter to his friend William Packard and reminded him: “We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.”
The key to living a good life, to creating great art — it’s also about not over-thinking things, or muscling our way through. It’s about letting our talents appear, almost jedi-style. Or is it?
In 2005, Mike Watt (bass player for the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and the Stooges) interviewed Linda Bukowski, the poet’s wife, and asked her to set the record straight. Here’s their exchange.
Watt: What’s the story: “Don’t Try”? Is it from that piece he wrote?
Linda: See those big volumes of books? They’re called Who’s Who In America. It’s everybody, artists, scientists, whatever. So he was in there and they asked him to do a little thing about the books he’s written and duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. At the very end they say, is there anything you wanna say, you know, what is your philosophy of life, and some people would write a huge long thing. A dissertation, and some people would just go on and on. And Hank just put, “Don’t Try.” Now, for you, what do you think that means?
Watt: Well for me it always meant like be natural.
Linda: Yeah, yeah.
Watt: Not like…being lazy!
Linda: Yeah, I get so many different ideas from people that don’t understand what that means. Well, “Don’t Try? Just be a slacker? lay back?” And I’m no! Don’t try, do. Because if you’re spending your time trying something, you’re not doing it…“DON’T TRY.”
It’s Monday. Get out there. Just do it. But patiently. And don’t break a sweat.
“Movie star, conceptual artist, fiction writer, grad student, cipher.” These roles, and others, New York magazine attributed to the subject of their profile, “The James Franco Project.” If you regularly read Open Culture, you’ve surely had your own areas of interest touched by the literarily inclined young Hollywood maverick. Maybe you’ve seen him appear in a book trailer, read the Paris Review in bed, narrate an animation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, or direct and star in a docudrama about poet Hart Crane. Above you can hear him give a ten minute reading from a work of literature that, whether or not it made a permanent dent in your own consciousness, we’ve all encountered: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. When Lapham’s Quarterly excerpted the novel for a travel issue, Franco turned up to perform.
“It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey,” Kerouac wrote and Franco reads. “I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist. ‘Whooee!’ yelled Dean. ‘Here we go!’ And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that.” Hearing this particular voice interpret this particular novel reminds you of both Franco and Kerouac’s images as thoroughly American creators, though each expresses that American-ness in very much their own way: Kerouac, of course, actually comes from a French-Canadian family, and Franco leads the kind of cultural renaissance-man career the modern United States tends to frown upon. But given the places they’ve both secured for themselves in the American zeitgeist — and the best sort of places: unlikely ones — wasn’t it inevitable that their crafts would intersect?
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As anyone who’s ever done it knows, the art of syllabussing is a fine one. (Yes, it’s a word; don’t look it up, take my word for it—Syllabussing: creating the perfect syllabus for a college-level course). It requires precision planning, stellar formatting and copy-editing skills, and near-perfect knowledge of the college-student psyche. For one, the syllabus must explain in clear terms what students can expect from the class and what the class expects from them. And it must do this without sounding so dry and pedantic that half the class drops in the first week. For another, the perfect syllabus (there’s no such thing, but one must strive) should function as both an FAQ and a contract: need to know how to format your papers? See the syllabus. Forgot when the paper was due? Too bad—see the syllabus. And so on. Most teachers learn over time that a class can stand or fall on the strength of this document.
Which brings us to the syllabussing skills of one David Foster Wallace, encyclopedic literary obsessive, modern-day moralist, English professor. Love his work or hate it, it may be safe to say that Wallace was perhaps one of the most careful (or care-full) writers of his generation. And given the criteria above, you might just have to admire the fine art of his syllabi. Well, so you can, thanks to the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which has scans available online of the syllabus for Wallace’s intro course “English 102-Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction” (first page above), along with other course documents. These documents—From the Fall ’94 semester at Illinois State University, where Wallace taught from 1993 to 2002—reveal the professionally pedagogical side of the literary wunderkind, a side every teacher will connect with right away.
The text in the image above is admittedly tiny (you can request higher resolution scans on the UT Austin site), but if you squint hard, you’ll see under “Aims of Course” that Wallace quotes the official ISU description of his class, then translates it into his own words:
In less narcotizing words, English 102 aims to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, and to write—clearly, persuasively, and above all interestingly—about stuff you’ve read.
Having taught my own versions of such a class, I’m a little jealous of his (uncharacteristically?) informal concision.
Wallace’s choice of texts is of interest as well—surprising for a writer most detractors call “pretentious.” For his class, Wallace prescribed airport-bookstore standards—what he calls “popular or commercial fiction”—such as Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, Stephen King’s Carrie, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and James Elroy’s The Big Nowhere. The UT Austin site also has scans of some well-worn paperback teacher’s copies, with the red-ink marginal notes, discussion questions, and underlines one finds behind every podium. In the image above, Wallace has underlined a line of dialogue in Carrie, annotating it with the word “victim” in all-caps. Of the books Wallace requires, he writes in a section of the syllabus above called “Warning”:
Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking that this will be a blow-off-type class. These “popular” texts will end up being harder than more conventionally “literary” works to unpack and read critically. You’ll end up doing more work in here than in other sections of 102, probably.
Something about that “probably” at the end grabs me (again: the precision… the college-student psyche). I admire this brave approach. Having taught conventionally “literary” stuff for years, I can say that some so-called literary fiction is formulaic in the extreme, all but containing checkboxes for the standard lit-crit categories. The commercial stuff isn’t always so careful (which is why it’s so often more fun).
Said a spokesman for the postal system: “When you think of great British authors, Jane Austen inevitably comes to mind. Her novels have contributed immeasurably to British culture over the last two centuries.”
eBay prices for the album Gertrude Stein Reads Her Own Work range from $20 to $200. Vinyl purists, and Stein purists, may long for one of the still-sealed copies at the upper end of that range. The rest of us can enjoy hearing its recordings as mp3s, free on the internet courtesy of PennSound. These clips, recorded between 1934 and 1935 (which came out in album form in 1956) let you put yourself in the presence of the poet. Much of the work she reads aloud here comes inspired by observing other creative luminaries. The record’s producers included these homages along with a piece of an interview, variants of well-known poems such as “How She Bowed to Her Brother” (which often appears under the name “She Bowed to Her Brother”), and an excerpt from her novel The Making of Americans.
But to get straight into the textual substance, listen to “The Fifteenth of November… T.S. Eliot,” her portrait of her colleague in letters. Then hear her capturing a certain well-known painter in “If I Told Him: a Completed Portrait of Picasso.” And on painter Henri Matisse, she begins her remarks as follows: “One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one.” If you feel proud of reading that whole sentence in one go, wait until you hear Stein speak it.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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