Yes, and let's remember that the Baltimore Ravens were, after all, named after a literary artifact of Baltimore's favorite son, Mr. Poe. Just sayin'.
I'd be interested to know whether any of you are new readers to Raymond Carver's work, and, if so, what you think of it (before we talk about it the week after next).
I'm not a new reader to Carver's work, but I can sort of trace an evolution of my grappling with it:
ReplyDelete(1) I actually started reading his poetry when I was in high school. Carver had been dead about ten years, and I think that Robert Altman had just put out "Short Cuts", starring Tom Waits & Julianne Moore & (many) others, based on Carver's stories. He was going through a major renaissance as a result, and his collected poems were released in a hardback that I bought and read over and over. These poems were very prosy and gently narrative -- very passé, but I didn't know or care -- and I found them inspiring; I carried them around with me my entire freshman year of college and wrote a lot about fish and rivers and other stuff. Eventually I loaned the book to a woman I was dating and never got it back when we broke up. It's out of print now, so I still mourn the loss.
(2) Anyway, my old man gave me a copy of "Cathedral" around this time, and it had an explosive effect on my writing. Since I was 19 years old, most of what I was doing was some kind of imitation, and all my stories came out as immature imitations of "Where I'm Calling From" or Joyce's "The Dead". I didn't really understand either story, but I was in love with the words. It was actually very constructive.
(3) Every fiction class I took for the next ten years involved a reading of "Cathedral", which was a problem for more reasons than one: for years, I couldn't read Carver without starting to write in *exact imitation of his voice*, even long after I'd pushed into a space where I had kind of developed my own. I also came to admire & despise the story in equal measure: it's kind of bottomless, but man, I feel like I spent a year of my life watching that television with those characters.
(4) The Gordon Lisch controversy emerged, people were picking sides, and I picked Carver's -- partially because I had started to tire of hearing "ooh, the sentences! the sentences!" all the time, and it seemed to me that Lisch was the grand priest of that particular orthodoxy. There's so much more to writing than sentences, and it seems to me (I'm sure a lot of you are tired of hearing this, but I'm not tired of saying it, so you can skip this part if you like) that the fetishization of sentences above all else results in a lot of writing that has beautiful sentences and very little else (staging, plotting, emotional insight, formal innovation, challenging structure, etc) happening in it. A lot of what gets lost in the haze of the love of Carver's spare & poetic language is that *he's actually remarkably good at some of this stuff*. He understands the ways in which emotions in extremis are played out in vivo as well as anybody out there. We ignore that at our own peril, and we fail to try to emulate it to our own detriment. Anyway, all of this explains why I love certain very straightforward modernists (Zadie Smith, ie) and a number of noodly postmodernists (Pynchon, Ondaatje) but *really* don't like a lot of other writing that seems superficially not that different, like that of Michael Cunningham or John Updike.
(5) I didn't read Carver's work for a while and am now looking forward to talking about it with a bunch of the smartest people I know.