Project reboot

Reading David J. Howe’s The Target Book (which I purchased from the author at L.I. Who 4 last weekend) together with attending a panel discussion (also at L.I. Who) on the Target novelizations featuring Jason Miller, Alan Jope, and Barnaby Edwards, has rekindled my interest in going back to read the Target range of Doctor Who novelizations (a project I started back in August for various reasons).  While I still plan on reading all the Target books in order of story transmission (as a way of following the unfolding text of Doctor Who), I’ve given myself permission to skip ahead and read certain books, for example, Ghost Light by Marc Platt.  I’ll reread Ghost Light again when it comes up, but this more open approach should allow a more intuitive exploration of the narrative of Doctor Who than one constrained simply by the chronology of transmission.

Just as important as my interest in the content of this project, I’m motivated by the form of the project.  A blog is also a kind of unfolding text, like a diary or journal, recording certain activities.  The blog provides a space for this imagined text to form.  Before, settling on the activity of reading the Target novelizations, I had already decided that I would resume blogging after a long hiatus.  The impetus for returning to the practice of blogging was reading Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.  (There’s a second volume which includes analyses of activities like cooking, shopping, navigating public space, etc. coauthored by Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol which is relevant to my project also.)  What I’ve noticed is that my engagement with Doctor Who as a text and a socio-cultural activity provides a specific instance of what Michel de Certeau describes in general in his books (I’m not the first one to have noticed this, several other academic writers have made the connection between fanfiction and Michel de Certeau’s concept of textual poaching).  And it’s this application which I’ll be writing about (going forward) in this blog, A Text Adventure.

Since beginning my study of Michel de Certeau’s writing, I’ve added a number of other writers and books to the reading list of relevant resource material. (I’ll reveal these sources as they come up naturally.)  What I hope to do is apply theory to the text of Doctor Who.  While the spine of the narrative will be Doctor Who as represented in the textual adaptations, I will admit the televised “text” as well.  (And draw examples from other cultural texts.)

From now on, I will keep these posts brief so that I can maintain the practice of everyday reading and writing which is really at the heart of this project and serves as its base.  I’ve resisted blogging for a long time because there is a certain element of “hey look at me, this is what I’m doing right now, isn’t it cool?” which I find alternately tedious and embarrassing.  However, as we’ll see in the writings of Michel de Certeau, there is a suggestion that such chronicling of daily activity is essential to modern living (and this was put forward before the internet and social networking became commonplace).

Literary Expansion

It’s the nature of the blog as a literary form to document some kind of work in progress or to chronicle a chain of events which form part of a project or planned activity.  A blog should have some focus or theme in order to appeal to a reader who shares a common interest with the blog writer (blogger).  And the narrator of the blog should be someone in whom the reader can take an active interest.  The reader of blog pays attention because they care in some way about the narrator and the project.  More often than not, the reader’s interest is a personal one.  Because of the commenting mechanism, readers of a blog feel as if they are in communication with the narrator and their text becomes part of the textual tapestry of the blog.  The reader, in this sense, can be a coauthor of the blog.

The project I’ve taken on here (for the purposes of this blog) is to read the Target novelizations of Doctor Who in order.  But I’m not reading these books in isolation or exclusively.  I’m also watching episodes of Doctor Who and I’m reading other books, some are related, like the Black Archive series and the classic Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text by Tulloch and Alvarado, and some are not obviously related, like the two novels by Rafael Reig I read recently.

Many times I’ve thought about writing a books blog.  Fashioning myself as one of those independent literary bloggers who goes out into the wild in search of lost books to then bring back and present to the world.  I’ve never followed through on this idea because I didn’t think there would be much of an audience for that sort of project.  But it’s too easy to think of reasons not to do something.

I found these novels by Rafael Reig quite by accident.  I just happened to see a post on Twitter and then followed a few links.  When I saw that Reig had once written for a blog called Hotel Kafka (my other reading project for 2016 is to reread all of Kafka’s novels and stories) and that one of his novels was called Blood on the Saddle which combined SF elements with cowboy Westerns, I was hooked.  I had to find out more.  So I ordered Blood on the Saddle and A Pretty Face, the only two of Reig’s novels which have been translated into English.  How I wish I’d studied Spanish!

Blood on the Saddle is the first of a series of novels which revolve around a private detective named Carlos Clot.  Clot narrates Blood on the Saddle, but is relegated to a cameo role in A Pretty Face which is narrated by the murder victim.

Now, I don’t want to write book reviews.  My principle project for this blog is a study of story (plot) structure.  The Doctor Who novelizations (of the classic series) are examples of nearly raw story.  The characters in Doctor Who are devices who act in service of the plot.  Modern Who shifts from this action-adventure mode into action-drama which focuses more on characters and their development (change) across a story arc.  These two novels by Rafael Reig are more relevant to this study of story than I thought they would be.

The Rediscovered Country

I just finished reading the Target novelization of The Aztecs and will be writing about that story at length soon.  My project is to read these novelizations in order since one of ideas behind this blog is to examine Doctor Who as an unfolding, developing (self-editing) text.  However, I see some merit in jumping around, of dipping in and out of the Doctor Who storyline at places which interest me.  Actually, this is what I’m doing as a viewer.  I jump around.  Last week, I watched “The Trial of a Time Lord” and then after that I watched “The Face of Evil” because I felt like it.  Watching the series this way is pure pleasure.

Reading the novelizations in order is also a pleasure, but I am tempted to jump ahead and read the way I watch.  For example, I’ve never read the novelization of “Ghost Light.”  I ordered the paperback and it’s sitting on my “to read” pile.  Will I have to wait until I’ve read the 160+ stories that came before it?  No one is forcing me to read these texts in order after all.

Another project which (in a way) inspired my own is The Black Archive series.  I ordered the first five volumes of that series and read the first one, Rose by Jon Arnold, while I was reading the novelization of “An Unearthly Child.”  The Black Archive is not following the order in which the TV series presented the stories.  The editor of the series has another agenda for making his commissions.  I don’t know what that agenda is, but it’s not a compulsion to slavishly follow the show’s broadcast order.

My decision to read the novelizations in order seemed like a good idea at first.  Reading from the beginning has led to my wanting to rush through these first few stories so that I can get to ones which are less familiar.  (I’ve watched “The Daleks” and “The Aztecs” so many times now that reading the novelizations feels a little like ticking the box.  Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading them.  What excited me most about these novelizations of the early stories was how they differed from the TV version.) Now, I’m ready to start reading The Sensorites.  I’ve only ever seen that serial once, and that was more than ten years ago.  So getting to The Sensorites is like arriving at the border of a New World.  I’m looking forward to rediscovering these less familiar episodes in the narrative history of Doctor Who and especially reading the novelizations of the missing stories.

Basic Story Shape

Recently, Alison Flood wrote about story shape for The Guardian.  The article is called “Three, six or 36: how many basic plots are there in all stories ever written?”  Here are the six plot structures identified by the University of Vermont researchers Flood wrote about in her article:

1. rags to riches (rise), or comedy, in the classical sense
2. riches to rags (fall), or tragedy
3. man in a hole (fall-rise)
4. Icarus (rise-fall)
5. Cinderella (rise-fall-rise)
6. Oedipus (fall-rise-fall)

Let’s see if this set of categories applies to a few Doctor Who stories.  We can start with “An Unearthly Child” since it’s the first novelization and the one I began with when I started this project.

The first episode of “An Unearthly Child” poses a mystery, or set of mysteries associated with Susan and her cranky grandfather, the Doctor.  These mysteries pull Ian and Barbara into the story.  The TARDIS itself becomes a trap for Ian and Barbara with the Doctor (effectively) kidnapping them.  With this set up, Ian and Barbara’s entire story arc becomes a quest to get back to London 1963.  This is the “man in a hole” shape.  They are in a situation which they are trying to get out of.

Landing in 100,000 B.C. is the first major hole.  The TARDIS team wanders around until they are captured by cavemen and imprisoned in the Cave of Skulls.  Again, they are in a hole and have to get out.  The socio-political struggle within the tribe itself is just another form of hole.  Ian and the Doctor have to make fire for the cavemen in order to get out of that particular hole.

In this serial the formula of capture-escape is set and continued on through the next serial, “The Daleks” by Terry Nation.  Again, the TARDIS team lands in a strange place which quickly becomes a trap.  The story moves along, trapping the characters in different ways and forcing them to find ingenious ways to get out of the holes they find themselves in.

Holiday Drama

I’ve been on vacation this week — an activity which is given over to wandering through space, in almost constant movement.  Consequently, I haven’t had time to sit in one place and to read.  But yesterday, I did take a few moments at the end of the day (before nodding off) to watch the first episode of “Terror of the Vervoids” by Pip and Jane Baker, the third story in “The Trial of a Time Lord” (Season 23).  Erik and Kyle discussed the work of Pip and Jane Baker for Doctor Who on the most recent episode of Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room.  Kyle made the point that Pip and Jane Baker’s stories have been “unfairly maligned” by fans and that “Terror of the Vervoids” (minus the courtroom scenes) is a decent story.

It’s been many years since I’ve watched “Terror of the Vervoids” (~20 years?) so this viewing is essentially a fresh one for me.  So far I agree with Erik and Kyle — the story has opened with a number of mysterious goings on and characters which interested me.  I’m looking forward to seeing how the story plays out.

After watching the first episode of “Terror of the Vervoids,” I put on the short featurette on the aborted Season 23, the “Lost Season.”  Having grown-up in the US watching Doctor Who on PBS, I was used to waiting for years for new Doctor Who stories to watch.  So the break between Season 22 and 23 didn’t seem unusual, but I was aware of the hiatus, reading about it in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine.  I wrote in my diary at the time what I really thought of Michael Grade — he was right up there with Davros on my list of ultimate foes.  

To pass the time, the gap year of 1986, I began writing a new notebook, a supplement to my diary.  This new notebook would contain my sketches for the stories which would fill the gap between Season 22 and Season 23.  At the time I had no knowledge whatsoever of the actual lost stories originally planned for Season 23 and the novelizations were still a few years in the future (they would appear in 1989).  I was a teenager and it seemed that I endless hours of free time.  What better way to while away the hours than by filling my Doctor Who notebook with outlines and summaries of an imagined Season 22½?

I won’t bore you with recapitulating those early attempts at storytelling, but I will say that the first story in the run of 33 episodes that I sketched out for my own lost season was a proper holiday for the Doctor and Peri.  When I dug out my Season 22½ notebook recently from deep storage, I remembered that I was intent on setting my first story at some kind of swanky resort.  Why?  The featurette on the Lost Season 23 reminded me.  At the end of “Revelation of the Daleks” the Doctor promises to take Peri some place fun.  Their next stop would have been (was?) Blackpool in The Nightmare Fair by Graham Williams.

The problem that I encountered when (in 1987) I was trying to write what amounts to my first attempt at fanfiction was that something dramatic needed to happen in my story.  I couldn’t just send the Doctor and Peri to a swanky resort and write about how much sleep they got and how nice the pool was.  My solution was to transform the manager of the resort into a villain who had created this pleasure palace for the purpose of trapping the Doctor.  Basically, in terms of story shape, the Doctor lands in a hole and has to get out.

We will see as we go through each of the stories in Doctor Who, reading the novelizations, and comparing them with the broadcast version, several variations of the same basic story shape.  One of the most common in Doctor Who is the “man in a hole” shape which see the Doctor land in some trouble in the first chapter and then he spends the next dozen chapters trying to dig himself out of the hole.

Next time, we’ll look at the six story types and their shapes.

Who’s (Whose?) Unfolding Text?

Going through the entirety of (classic) Doctor Who by reading the Target (plus) novelizations might seem a peculiar ambition, even quixotic.  After all, Doctor Who is a television show and so what is shown on the screen is the definitive version of the text, or is it?

In a recent episode of Radio Free Skaro (I believe) there was some discussion of how Doctor Who is edited for various broadcast outlets.  Of course, the most obvious editing of episodes comes when commercial breaks are inserted, but the editing goes beyond that.  But in some places and in some outlets whole scenes are deleted.  One of the ladies on Verity noted that the broadcast version of one episode of Doctor Who was different than the one she viewed on iTunes.  (I’m sorry, I don’t remember which specific episode it was.)  The point here is that even the version of Doctor Who that appears on screen is subject to variations.

However, when it comes to the novelizations, we will encounter some versions of stories which differ so much from their broadcast version that they might as well be considered a different story altogether.  The Massacre by John Lucarotti is one such example.

The interest for me in reading Doctor Who (here I’m just speaking as a fan and not as a writer) is the chance of encountering alternate or expanded versions of the stories I know from television.  Some fans might feel that the version in the novelization is somehow inferior to the televised (privileged or authorized) version.  I’m not interested in debates on which text is the authoritative text.  For the purposes of this reading I’ll treat all alternate versions (even fan-created versions) of these stories on an equal footing.

When I initially conceived of this project, I was just thinking of reading the Target novelizations of the televised stories.  However, now that I’ve spent more time thinking about Doctor Who as an unfolding text, I don’t see why the scope of the project shouldn’t include the New Adventures (Virgin), the Missing Adventures, and the Eighth Doctor Adventures.  In fact, why not include all the comic strips and the Big Finish audios?  Practicality intervenes here.  I don’t think that I’ll be able to read my way through fifty-plus years of generated texts — the universe of Doctor Who has grown too large.

So for now, I’ll begin with the novelizations of the classic Doctor Who stories and then when that’s done, we’ll see whether I’m up for tackling the New Adventures.

Once in a lifetime (at least)

Earlier this year I listened to a podcast interview (Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room) with writer Paul Cornell and he mentioned that he had at one point gone back to the beginning of the Doctor Who and watched all the existing episodes in order up to the present.  Then he said, “It’s a slow march that every true Doctor Who fan has to do at least once in their lifetime.”

What Paul Cornell said planted the seed of an idea for a project in my brain.  Why not spend this gap year (2016) traveling with the Doctor on all his adventures from the very beginning?  But, being a literary type and a reader, I thought why not read all of Doctor Who from the beginning.  After all I have all the Target novelizations and several others that fill the gaps in that range.  I could read every single Doctor Who story (in order) including all the missing episodes since novelizations of the missing stories exist.

Once I began (re)reading the Doctor Who novelizations (for the first time in twenty-five years), I thought it might be fun to keep a record, a public diary of my journey through the entire written history of Doctor Who.  But this diary had to be more than just thoughts, observations, reactions, and reviews of the novelizations, there should be more to my commentary than that if it was to interest other people.  What if I approached this reading project as a proper study of the writing process?  After all, these were the stories which inspired me to become a writer in the first place.  Why did these stories appeal to me?  Why did they so stimulate my imagination?  How had they informed my understanding of what a proper story was?

Even though I’ve been writing for years and have written a stack of books, I’d never actually done a systematic study of how to plot or structure a story.  Mostly, I’ve written by instinct, going with what feels right.  While this artistic approach has worked, it couldn’t hurt to conduct a self-study course on the analytic approach, on how to write, using Doctor Who as a primary text.

In the coming weeks (years? it’s more than 160 books after all) my plan is not only to keep a record of Doctor Who’s unfolding text, but to make use of this diverse body of work as a source for developing an understanding of what makes a story good, engaging, and compelling.  Of course, many of the stories in Doctor Who do not work.  Rather than being a drawback, the fact that this body of text contains flawed works provides the student writer with examples of what not to do.  I read somewhere that Roberto Bolaño enjoyed reading flawed works because it provided him an opportunity to see narrative problems and to pose solutions.  The student who only studies the great works does not have the opportunity to see how to improve a work.  So along the way, as I (we?) develop a theory of story based on Doctor Who, I’ll be providing some alternate versions of certain stories, versions which correct the flaws in the originals.

Filmmaking for novelists?

Over weekend I was talking with Alice about “my writing career.”  Dr Pasavento, my therapist, insists that writing is just a hobby and I should just do it “for fun” rather than weighting the activity down with tedious add-ons like goals and aspirations.  “Don’t be so serious about everything,” he says.

Now that I’ve written a stack of novels, I feel like I should face the next challenge, that of finding someone willing to read what I’ve written.  Not all of it, of course, but at least some of it.  “I’m living at the wrong time in history,” I said to Alice, alluding to the trope that people aren’t reading as much as people did in the 50s and 60s.  Alice, ever connected to reality, countered with, “Nonsense.  You’re living at the best possible time to be a writer.  Publishing used to be difficult and expensive.  Now you can publish with a click of the button.”

While the problem of publication might have been solved with the Internet and the World Wide Web, the even thornier problem of cultivating an audience is now something that an artist (content creator?) has to deal with.  It’s not sufficient to post your novel on your web site and then tweet about it.

After I finished writing my first novel, Goodbye Green Day, I briefly flirted with adapting it myself into a film.  The concept was simple.  Since the action of Goodbye Green Day is set in New York City, I’d spent a day in New York recording video on the streets.  Then I’d take that video, edit it, add a voice-over soundtrack of the narrator telling his story and voila! I’d have a homemade movie of my novel.  My guess is that I could get more people to watch my film, than I would find people willing to read the book.

I was reminded of this seemingly elegant plan when I read recently an article in the Guardian.  The article is about filmmaker Mark Duplass who said (basically): if you want to make a film, just do it.

“The first step is the $3 short film,” he said. “We’re in a place now where technology is so cheap that there’s no excuse for you not to be making films on the weekends with your friends, shot on your iPhone – we had a feature film at Sundance this year that was shot entirely on iPhones and it did really well.”

So this morning I got my old digital camera out of the basement, dusted it off, and then located a tripod that had been thrust in the back corner of the closet in my studio.  I set up the camera on the tripod and I did three takes of a possible introduction to a short documentary, a “making of...” style documentary which will tell the story of how I came to write one of my novels.

Interview

In case you missed it, here's the transcript of the interview I did for Alamo TV on my recent trip to San Antonio.  Several times during my interview I referenced an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard which appeared in The Independent recently.

What drives you to write?

Writing is a way of thinking.  If I didn’t write then, not only would I be an irritable bastard, I wouldn’t know what I thought.  Just ask my wife.  On the days when (for some reason, and these days are rare) I can’t write, I become extremely short tempered and confused.  Even though my condition hasn’t been officially diagnosed, I’m driven to write by some sort of psychosis.  The act of writing itself isn’t an expression of the mania, but an antidote.  If I didn’t write, I’d be an insufferable wreck and would probably have to take up smoking and drinking heavily.

You’ve never submitted any of your novels for publication.  But your contemporary, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, has become a literary rockstar.  How does that make you feel?

How do you think it makes me feel?  I’m already in therapy because I can barely deal with my feelings of overwhelming inadequacy.  Every morning when I wake up I don’t even turn on the lights because I can’t look myself in the mirror knowing what I mediocrity I am.  All those dreams I had in my youth of writing a truly great multivolume novel have come to nothing.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m happy for Karl Ove, but the fiction which consoles me is that there’s still hope that there’s a reading public out there who will be interested in the meandering drivel that I write.

What’s on your bedside table?

A book light and a package of condoms.

What’s your desert island book?

That show-off, Karl Ove, went with Finnegan’s Wake.  The bastard!  That was my answer.  But seriously, recently I was talking with my colleagues at Phaneron about the article by Stephen Marche in the Guardian about centireading, that is the act of reading the same book one hundred times.  Marche, by his own account has read Hamlet and PG Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves one hundred times.  There’s a pretty good discussion of Marche’s piece on Scott Esposito’s blog too if you are interested.

Anyway, I’m guessing that a desert island book has to be a book that would stand up to centireading.  While I don’t have any plans to read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow a hundred times, it might be a good candidate for a desert island book, and it’s in a similar vein as Finnegan’s Wake.  But on second thought, screw Pynchon and forget Joyce.  I’d pack the Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography (Volume 4) for reasons which I’ll leave you to work out for yourself.

What’s the most overrated book in the literary canon?

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.  You thought I was going to say My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, didn’t you?

Do you listen to music while writing?

No.  My ability to concentrate is so feeble that the slightest noise will derail my train of thought.

What song would you have played at your funeral?

“If You Were Here” by The Thompson Twins.

Your relationship with your father is central to your own unpublished multivolume fictional memoir.  You have a son.  How are you doing as a father?

I thought my father did a pretty good job at being a dad, but I still ended up in therapy and have had to experiment with prescription mood-altering medication for years to deal with the emotional trauma I didn’t even know I was suffering growing up.  Mostly, as a father, my motto is “do no harm.”

Are you optimistic about the world your son is growing up into?

No.

Can you elaborate?

I could, but if you’re really interested in my answer to this question then you should read The Golden Marshmallow Dream.  In that novel I think I do a pretty good job articulating my pessimism about the world’s present course.  Nothing short of global catastrophe is going to save us.

Is The Golden Marshmallow Dream one of your unpublished novels?

Yes.

What’s your most cherished memory?

The day when I won the school spelling bee in fifth grade.

Stream of consciousness

Probably the first time I ever heard anyone use the phrase “stream of consciousness” it was in an attempt to describe the writing of James Joyce, especially Ulysses.  Since then I read (I’m unable to lay my hand on the source at the moment) somewhere that what we find in the pages of Ulysses isn’t properly “stream of consciousness”, at least not in the way that William James conceived of it in his essay, “The Stream of Thought” where he writes that “[c]onciousness from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”

Thinking that perhaps this debunking of Ulysses as “stream of consciousness” is found in the pages of Anthony Burgess’ book ReJoyce I opened that book up and flipped through the pages until I found this: “The mind naturally strays and wanders, holding to nothing very long, coming back frequently to the same point again and again but rarely staying there.  A naturalistic representation of the human mind monologuising to itself may be of scientific interest, but it has nothing to do with art.  Themes must be imposed... and these themes must move in towards each other, suggesting purposeful movement and the unity proper to a work of literature.”  [ReJoyce by Anthony Burgess, p. 85]

Let’s file that away for a future post.  Burgess’ notion of themes and unity as being necessary to a work of art will be important ideas when I come to the intended point of this ramble: which is the fictional memoir by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard.

The term “stream of consciousness” (evidently) was first applied in 1918 to a work of literature by May Sinclair in a review published in The Egoist of the first three volumes of Dorothy Miller Richardson’s autobiographical novel, Pilgrimage.  I chanced across this tidbit of trivia in an article by Amy Shearn in Dame Magazine comparing Dorothy Miller Richardson’s novel with Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

What May Sinclair meant when describing Richardson’s Pilgrimage as stream of consciousness was that in the books “...there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on…”  Which pretty much describes Knausgaard’s My Struggle doesn’t it?  What marks Knausgaard’s novel is he appears to make no choices about what to include in the narrative.  Anything goes.  Whatever comes to him, he writes it down without judging it.  William Deresiewicz called My Struggle “artless.”  But that, according to Knausgaard, was the point.  No more art.  No more tricks.  No more authorial slight of hand.  What he wants to give the reader is raw text, uncooked writing, unpretentious, and by extension, words that are pure and connect us what the real.

We are not capitalists

One of our new brewing partners, Dave, says that capitalism doesn't exist.  Of course, it exists, I said. But it's not a system, he said.  It's not like taxes or the Islanders hockey team.

I wasn't sure where this line of reasoning would take us, but later I wondered if Dave was thinking about the "invisible hand" that guides collective human action.  Was Dave saying that the hand doesn't exist?  Did he conflate the hand with capitalism?

Early in Josep Pla's The Grey Notebook one of the characters insists that capitalism is not moral or immoral.  It's akin to a force of nature.  It is nature! the character declares at one point.  While it may seem like it sometimes, there's nothing inevitable or natural about capitalism.

So yes, Dave, there is a capitalism.

But sometimes it doesn't seem like it because what we mean when we say the word capitalism is so ill-defined.  Most people (it seems) define capitalism to be whatever it is we do to make money.  This is so broad an idea that it's not terribly useful.

Even the dictionary definition of capitalism doesn't get it right.  My dictionary defines capitalism in such as way that it is restricted to private individuals or owners who engage in trade and industry for a profit.  The problem with this definition is that it leaves out two key components, and misleadingly excludes trade and industry engaged in by a state for profit.  I've heard people label state run trade and industry as socialism.  Is that correct?  I don't think so.  Not if we are talking about gaining profit from the labor of people employed by whoever the owner might be, be it a private individual, a corporation, or a state.  The most important part of the definition of capitalism has to do with the exploitation of the labor of one person for the benefit of another person.  That, boys and girls, is the what we mean when we talk about capitalism.  Not some nebulous, vague idea about what we do to earn a living.  That's the first key component missing from the dictionary definition.  The second key part that's missing is the emphasis that the owner controls the means of production.  It's this control that makes it possible to exploit labor for a profit.

So next time I see Dave at the brewery, I'll be sure to ask him if there are private individuals, corporations, or states who control the means of production and who are profiting from the labor of others and see how he answers that question.

My Saga

Recently, I traveled to San Antonio.  Just a short trip, two days of travel, a flight down and a flight back sandwiching two days in the birthplace of the Republic of Texas.  Even for a short trip like this, I have to decide carefully which books to bring along.  I narrowed the selection down to three books. One to read on the flight down.  One to read while in San Antonio.  And one more to read on the flight back.  But the day before I was to travel, the New York Times Magazine published the first part of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Saga.

Reading Knausgaard has become a rite of spring.  For the last three years in late March or early April I’ve been reading the next volume of Knausgaard’s sprawling autobiographical novel, My Struggle.  In a few weeks, the fourth volume will be released in the United States.  It’s already available in England and I’ve been treating myself to reading the reviews about this account of Karl Ove’s sexually frustrated teenage years.

On the airplane to San Antonio I read the first part of My Saga, a work commissioned by the New York Time Magazine were it will be serialized over the coming weeks (months?).  Most of this first part of My Saga is classic Knausgaard, self-effacing, self-indulgent, self-centered... it’s Knausgaard writing about what it’s like to be Knausgaard.  There was one moment (maybe it was because the flight was so bumpy and I thought this might be the last thing I ever read) when I could see why some critics think Knausgaard’s writing is crap (how incredibly dull, I thought, I could write stuff like this).  But just saying that his writing is dull and uninteresting is to miss out on an opportunity.  It’s too easy to dismiss Knausgaard, too easy to say his sentences are flat, that his subject matter is mundane and boring.  To throw out Knausgaard in this fashion would be like kicking a dog in the stomach after it’s already rolled over and put its paws in the air.  Such criticism would be a gratuitous act of cruelty.

A story of a story of a story...

In my literary travels, I’ve found a few way stations where I can pause, rest, collect provisions, and prepare to continue on.  One of those literary way stations is The Quarterly Conversation edited by Scott Esposito.  I chanced across this online magazine a few years ago when I was searching for information about Enrique Vila-Matas and found the essay, “I am not Auster.”  I decided to write my own essay as a kind of celebration of what I sensed was a new model, a new (for me) way of writing about reading.

I try to resist the temptation to classify things or to apply labels, especially when I’m thinking about writing and what sort of books I like to read.  What I find myself reaching for when I want to read are those texts which seem to defy classification: works by Sebald and Vila-Matas and Chris Kraus for example.  When I read, I am enriched and inspired to write.  Not all readers are inspired to write.  I’d probably find more time for reading if I wrote less, but writing about what I read is a way of immersing myself more deeply into a text.  Writing about reading is an act of devotion, an act of love.  That’s why I don’t think of this sort of writing about reading as criticism.  I don’t write book reviews.  What I write are texts which spring from other texts.  I write stories about stories.

In the virtual pages of The Quarterly Conversation is an essay by J.C Hallman that’s definitely worth reading: “The Story about the Story.”  Words of a kindred spirit.