Sideways Review: How To Fool Ourselves

Photo by Leah MillerHunger Mountain, the literary journal for Vermont College of Fine Arts, has just posted my review of The Runner by writer David Samuels, a biography of con artist James Hogue, who successfully lied his way into Princeton University's class of 1993.  How did a bicycle thief from Kansas gain entry to one of the most exclusive institutions in America?  By using a little thing we like to call fiction, my friends...

"Hogue applied to Princeton University’s Class of 1992 with a personal essay describing his idyllic life as a Mexican-American sheepherder in California. He spoke of reading Whitman, Plato, and Kerouac in a moonlit canyon known as Little Purgatory. He said his mother was an artist residing in Switzerland and that his father was deceased. When Fred Hargadon, then head of Princeton Admissions, was asked to describe his ideal candidate for Princeton, he replied simply, 'Huckleberry Finn.' Hargadon wanted a fictional character, and Hogue made sure he got one. Hogue was admitted and granted a $12,730 track scholarship. Only everything he’d written was pure fiction, including his nom de application—Alexi Indris-Santana."

Check out the full story at Hunger Mountain's Sideways Reviews - http://www.hungermtn.org/sideways-review-how-to-fool-ourselves/ for more on Hogue, a few lies I've told (or tried to tell) in my day, and what all this can teach us about lying and writing fiction.

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Ø vs. Ö

While reviewing the copyedits for my novel (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, March 2013) this morning I ran across something rather bizarre:

In the second chapter, there's a scene where two characters are running lines from the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler.  The book's narrator is supposed to read lines for the character of Eilert Lövberg.  My diligent and terrific copyeditor highlighted the last name and suggested it be changed to Løvberg.

AU: Spelling per THE READER’S ENCYCLOPEDIA. Or delete accent altogether?

So I went back to my shelf and dug out my copy of the Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia and saw that she was certainly correct: Løvberg.

Next I dug out my little Dover Thrift Edition of Hedda Gabler, which I'd used to copy out the dialogue. Sure enough, it has the umlaut: Lövberg.

Then I went on Google Books and looked up the two oldest versions I could find.  The first, from 1890 in the original Norwegian has the ø!  But the next in English from 1903 has the umlaut again!

A little research on Wikipedia then revealed that the two letters make the exact same sound.  The difference is that the ø is in the Norwegian alphabet and the ö is in the extended Latin alphabet.

At first I thought that perhaps then we should keep it as Lövberg since the characters are reading lines from an English language translation, for an English language production of the show, which will be performed in The United States of America.

But then I got weirdly riled by that.  After all, who are we to go around changing the spellings of character’s names?  Or not really the spelling but the whole alphabet?  Suddenly I thought it might be more authentic to leave it with an ø.

After all there are places in my book where I have phrases in Hindi, Japanese, Ghanian, Icelandic, and even Luxembourgish - all written in those languages and alphabets.  But then again when a character is saying something out loud, or when I'm spelling a character's name,  I'm using some sort of English "sounding out" of their names... otherwise no one reading it would be able to understand.

Finally, I consulted a friend of mine who has a PhD in Linguistics and this was his response:

“i think it doesn't reaaaaaaalllllyyyyyyy matter.  but o slash always looks cooler, for sure”

So I'm going with Løvberg.  Because at the end of the day, whether my book is accurate or inaccurate, I suppose it's more important that it at least look its coolest.

How To Introduce Kristopher Jansma

According to these very helpful instructions on The Millions by bookseller Janet Potter, I have drawn up a handy guide for future booksellers to us in introducing me, as an author... which is in no way premature even though my book won't be out until March of next year.

Step 1. Find Out Who the Author Is - My last name is only pronounced YAN-sma if we're in Holland. My first name is spelled with a K but that doesn't change anything when you say it out loud.

Step 2. Weed Out Unnecessary/Unimpressive Details - Nothing about me is either unnecessary or unimpressive, so, easy.

Step 3. Include Personal Impressions - If you can't think of a funny personal anecdote about me, just email me in advance and we'll make something up. Remember, I am a *fiction* writer.

Step 4. Wrap It Up - Don't take up a lot of time. I'm going to need to read a good 50-90 pages in order to really keep the audience in that deep snoring state. Then when they wake up, disoriented, we'll sell them some books.

LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Girls Gone Oscar Wilde

Spring! When a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of g-string bikinis, Pauly D branded bronzer, and doing lime Jello shots on booze cruises. From Cabo to Cancun, those who look good in swimsuits are celebrating that magical time of year when they can abandon their textbooks and fly south for sun and surf.

Which is why I decided to head in the opposite direction to spend Spring Break in Paris, where wearing sensible layers in March is recommended and “pasty” is a hue in high-demand. For those who look forward to vacations as “time to read something really fun” and who prefer downing snails at Brasserie Lipp to tequila shots at Señor Frog’s, it is tough to beat the City of Lights. True, the girls are a bit less likely to randomly remove their tops, but who needs that when you’ve got the Venus di Milo? Yes, the Moulin Rouge has become an overpriced tourist trap and the pink inn where Van Gogh once bedded prostitutes now serves bad soup. But things can still get a little raucous when you’re running the same wine-soaked streets that Hemingway and Fitzgerald stumbled down not so very long ago.

[Read the rest at The Outlet @ Electric Literature]

Weekend Reading: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Cover of "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" by David LipskyThis weekend I've been reading David Lipsky's 300-page long, 5-day interview with writer David Foster Wallace, and not only has it put a 10-inch grin on my face, but it's actually making me want to try reading Infinite Jest again.  So clearly they've laced these pages with drugs of some kind.  

Here's what DFW had to say (in 1996) about the future of reading and the Internet:

That Interlace will be this enormous gatekeeper.  It will be like sort of the one publishing house from hell.  They decide what you get and what you don't.  Because this idea that the Internet's gonna become incredibly democratic?  I mean, if you've spent any time on the Web, you know that it's not gonna be, because that's completely overwhelming.  There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it's too much work to do triage to decide. [....]  If you go back to Hobbes, and why we ended up begging, why people in a state of nature end up begging for a ruler with the power of life and death over them?  We absolutely have to give our power away.  The Internet is going to be exactly the same way.  Unless there are walls and sites and gatekeepers that say, "All right, you want fairly good fiction on the Web?  Let us pick it for you."  Because it's gonna take your four days to find something good, through all the shit that's gonna come, right? 

We're gonna beg for it.  We are literally gonna pay for it.  But once we do that, then all these democratic hoo-hah dreams of the Internet will of course have gone down the pipes.  And we're back again to three or four Hollywood studios, or four of five publishing houses, being the... right?  And all of us who grouse, all the anarchists who grouse about power being localized in these media elites, are gonna realize that the actual system dictates that.  The same way - I'm absolutely convinced - that the despot in Hobbes is a logical extension of what the State of Nature is.

So there you go.  One "democratic" Internet publishing house from hell, or four or five media elites we pay to sort through it all for us.  

And yeah, he saw this coming 16 years ago.