The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: The Believer

  • Reading at a masquerade ball

    Reading, one sometimes feels like a wallflower at a masquerade ball. Who are all these characters wearing masks and costumes hiding their true identities? They introduce themselves with some action or voice and the reader wonders if their claims are credible and reliable. And perhaps the author, the inventor of these identities, has also assumed a figmental identity. The author may slip into this new identity unintentionally, or as some sunken impulse surfaces, or intentionally, drawing the new personality with care, proofreading, editing, and revising. Perhaps these authors are unsure of themselves, so they adopt a mask; or maybe they want to forget themselves, and seek a renewal, a makeover; or maybe, for some unknown, paranoid, or disingenuous reason, they simply don’t want to reveal their true identity to their reader, whose identity, after all, they may be equally unsure of. Maybe they’re afraid of critics, and use the pen name as a shield; but critics also house mixed identities. Yeats experimented with masks. Literature is one gargantuan masquerade ball.

    Readers aware of the nature of the ball may ask if an author’s opinions resonate with tuning fork frequency, if the tone of a character’s voice reveals real experience, if the happiness or suffering of the protagonist is real or contrived, if the author is a real person or an invention, planned or improvised. An author’s pen name might be employed as self-promotion, a marketing device used to attract a new readership, or to avoid having to talk again to an old reader with fixed expectations. Herman Melville wrote a book about fidelity called The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Melville didn’t use a pen name for his book. He didn’t need to. The once popular writer was already forgotten. The prolific and still popular Joyce Carol Oates has written with a pen name, and, under her real name, wrote an essay titled “Pseudonymous Selves.”

    Browsing an old copy of The Believer last night, and re-reading the Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo discussion on Bob Dylan, we found an instructive paragraph on the subject of identity. Attempting an explanation of the various makeovers in Dylan’s career, Marcus says: “…there is a challenge for any artist – particularly a popular artist…to test himself or herself against an audience that he or she doesn’t know, that isn’t familiar. The question comes up whether or not you can speak in your language and be understood, and listen to the language of people who are responding to you and understand them” (p. 72).

    Or perhaps what triggers a makeover is as simple as T. S. Eliot’s mannered, parlor room reasoning: “There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” Or is there another clue, one that comes just before those lines: “And indeed there will be time / For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, / Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;” Do you see the cat in the image? It’s the cat that was introduced in the previous stanza. But Eliot never calls it a cat; the image of a cat emerges from the description of the fog. The cat is dressed in a costume of fog.

  • Our Believer book award choices

    Still reading the March/April 08 issue of the Believer, the “Film Issue.” Slavoj Zizek DVD included; have watched just the first part of it – a few ugly scenes from some lousy old horror films came too early in the DVD and we had to turn it off. That just means we are not fully committed to the values of the film community, which we knew – doesn’t say anything about Zizek.

    We were reminded that Zizek was interviewed in the Believer July 04 issue, where we found his comments on Christianity interesting. The Mary Midgley interview in the February 08 issue was interesting on moral philosophy and imagination (anyone who can wrestle Dawkins down and pin him to the mat in seconds deserves more attention), so now we have a couple more books on our reading list. But the list is already so long, not sure when we’ll get to them. But we’re moving Mary up; we’ve just decided.

    Anyway, the current issue includes the annual “…short readers’ survey” postcard, allowing one to “…participate in the forthcoming Believer Book Awards,” now in its fourth year, but only the second year they’ve invited readers to participate. We sent in our postcard. Here are our picks for fiction published in 2007 (three slots only): The Deportees, by Roddy Doyle (more reality of experience forged in the smithy of an Irish soul ); Inglorious, by Joanna Kavenna (don’t remember what brought this our way, an advance reader’s edition – but remarkable effort, probably does not achieve all of its goals, but very funny, sad, and deeper than most readers deserve); and No One Belongs Here More than You, by Miranda July (written in part while walking and watching locally – which most of us don’t take time for).

    What’s the point, of the Believer awards? Don’t know, but not too concerned with that question. We took the opportunity to take stock of what we read last year, fiction and non-fiction and journals and magazines and blogs and eZines and papers, and to look at the reading year ahead, continuing the long journey, getting on a train, leaving one city of books, and reading to another.

  • The smell of print culture

    Believer readers have commented recently on the monthly magazine’s odor. Redolent of what is the question, for we too succumb every month, sticking our nose deep between the pages for a potent snort or two. We find the Believer’s suggested explanation spurious: “…foil stamp on the cover. That’s probably what it was” (Dear the Believer, March/April 08, p. 2). Surely, some Lotus Eater is at work here. 

    But we’ve always stuck our nose into books, savoring the ink and pages, a happy habit started no doubt in one of Sister Maryquill’s classes, when we got to work the mimeograph machine, producing those luscious handouts smeared with wet blue ink, the students all smelling the pages up close, blue tipped noses betraying the practice like ashes on the forehead.

    But of course the blue ink dried and faded, leaving one with the dull task of completing the worksheet. The Believer pages also seem to lose their odor over time. We conducted an experiment: March 05, slight humus smell still in the pages, though this copy was at the bottom of a stack, so maybe it wasn’t breathing properly; April 06, slightly stronger, faint taste of compost; June/July 07 (the music issue), stronger still, a bedroom in the morning, windows closed; March/April 08 (the film issue), potent, redolent of the mimeograph machine and the pages it produced.

    There you have it. The experiment suggests something organic, some herbal ingredient either in the ink or in the pages, which decays over time. The Believer pages are thick and rough, like old coloring book pages, thicker and rougher than glossy magazine pages – some of those, we’ve noticed lately, are tinged with perfume advertisements, an obvious attempt to address reader attrition by simulating the mimeograph effect. The Believer pages are alive. 

    Whatever permeates the Believer’s pages, one thing is certain: to our sense, eBooks carry no odor, fair or foul, and that we find distressful; but readers here might smell something funny in this post.

  • n+1 clips The Believer’s sneakers

    n+1‘s review of The Believer accuses McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers of failing to transcend childhood (i.e. go beyond his roots) – but entanglement in one’s own roots is an honest place to start writing (note the unstated assumptions throughout the n+1review, including one should transcend childhood, childhood being peopled by children – apparently not a good place to be).

    Eggers, in the San Francisco tradition of Jack London (and, n+1 gives us, Eric Hoffer), lives and writes in the real world. n+1 compares The Believer to Mad Magazine, casting Eggers in the role of adult child. n+1‘s evidence?: A writing tutor program for children called 826 Valencia founded and worked by Eggers and other volunteers – to teach writing to children. Apparently, things don’t get more childish than that in n+1‘s world.

    We have subscribed to and have been reading The Believer since its inception, and look forward to each issue, but we have now added n+1 to our reading stack. And while we’ve not quite reached the point where we might want to renew our Mad subscription, our recent review of its web site, suggested by n+1, found no shortage of adult content.

    For a complete review comparing n+1 to The Believer see A. O. Scott in the New York Times.