"minimizing participles to the extreme"

Karen Friedman: What is the best bit of advice about writing you have ever received?

Kate Folk: On a craft level, minimizing participles to the extreme, especially in dialogue, as well as limiting the use of fancy verbs in dialogue tags. Like, no “I would like to buy a new succulent today,” she declared, listening as a dog barked in the distance. “Didn’t we just buy you a new succulent last week?” he inquired, making himself a grilled cheese sandwich. “Yes, but I have already grown bored with last week’s succulent,” she attested, unfurling her yoga mat. Also, eliminating the word “just” wherever possible. Unchecked, I’m a “just” fiend.

Regarding publishing, everything I was told related to forming a thick skin and, in the words of my MFA thesis advisor, “throwing a lot of pennies in a lot of wells.” The advice to submit a story to ten journals at a time. To expect to be rejected by most (very likely, all) of them. To encourage the wound of rejection to seal itself back up the way the body of the bad terminator in Terminator 2 (the T-1000) immediately gels back to perfect wholeness after being shot or cleaved in half or whatever. And then to submit the same story to ten more journals. BUT, before even thinking about getting it published, to continue revising or letting a piece of writing sit for awhile, until you are absolutely sure it’s ready to go out (as I failed to do, initially, with this story). Overall, to cultivate a healthy balance of patience, ambition, humility and tenacity.

~~ from One Story, Kate Folk on writing

the intellectual life

"I once heard my friend Edward Shils say that the intellectual life was the most passionate life a human being could lead; I think of this when I consider what a man like [Elie] Kedourie does and ask myself whether I could bear the excitement and danger of his sort of career--the emotional danger and the mental responsibilities, I mean."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

almost a requirement

"Joseph A. Schumpter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, is aware of a prevailing hostility to capitalism in capitalist countries. To condemn it and to declare one's aversion to it has become 'almost a requirement of the etiquette of discussion,' he says. Those who know totalitarian societies are wondering when, if ever, Western liberalism will recognize its danger. This is what Solzhenitsyn sees as the spiritual crisis of the West. He say, 'You have a feeling that the democracies can survive, but you aren't certain. The democracies are islands lost in the immense river of history. The water never stops rising.'"

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

"Oriental Jews"

"We go into a Yemenite synagogue. The early arrivals have left their shoes at the door, Arab style. Bearded, dark-faced, they sit along the wall. You see their stockinged feet on the footrests of their lecterns. It is traditional on Friday afternoons to read the Song of Songs aloud, and they are reciting or chanting it now, in long lines, un-European in intonation. This chanting resembles the collective recitations you hear when passing Arab school rooms.

"Ben-David knows a lot about the lives of Jews from the Arab countries. He often makes the point that they, too, are refugees who fled from persecution and whose property was confiscated. World opinion concentrates on the Palestinian refugees while these Oriental Jews--nearly a million of them--are given no consideration. It is inevitable that he and I should turn to politics. Sightseeing is all very well, but our heads are full of news, omens, and speculations."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

I can't say that he looked at me

"In the late forties, I used to go down to the Pont Royal bar to look at [Jean-Paul] Sartre; I can't say that he looked at me. Americans were not popular with him. Matters were different sixty years ago. When John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings came to France, it was to drive the ambulances in the Great War and they were warmly greeted, or thought they were. Eager young Americans who hurried to Paris after World War II got icy treatment. But then I think of someone like Kafu Nagai, a writer of genius who read Maupassant and other French novelists in Tokyo early in the 1890s, and, falling in love with them, set out to see them. It took Kafu a long time to cross the American Continent. He stopped in Chicago. He spent more than a year at Ypsilanti State Teacher's College, in Michigan. When at last he reached Paris, he could find no French writers who would talk to him. Those of us who arrived from America in the late forties were not the first to experience pangs of unrequited love."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

Hemon on Handke; Hsu on Yang

Although I find the Asian-American politician in Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker a far more compelling figure, I enjoyed Hua Hsu on Andrew Yang and his presidential candidacy. Also, Aleksander Hemon on Peter Handke's Nobel Prize in Literature is one you don't want to miss. Hemon, who had rich words after Bob Dylan's win, is fast becoming a leading commentator on the Swedish literary prize in addition to writing engrossing fiction. In local news, Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back continues to impress me while a literary friend sent strong praise for "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served."