Today I come bearing a link to this fun Q&A, with very smart questions about writing process asked by Laura Maylene Walter and, er, answered by me, possibly in a less smart manner. Laura and I went to high school together, attended the PA Governor’s School for the Arts during the same summer, and worked on the high school lit mag together, as Laura mentions in her blog post. (I haven’t thought about that lit mag for so long. Oh dear. Layout flashbacks.) I wrote poetry back in high school, but Laura’s always been a fiction writer, and a very good one, too. She recently won the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and her first short story collection, Living Arrangements, is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2011.

In the Independent, Arifa Akbar asks if “fictive sex” can “ever have artistic merit.” The context here is the annual Bad Sex Awards, given out by the Literary Review. Since I think the answer to that question is indubitably “yes,” I was particularly intrigued by this piece of information:

Ironically, the bad sex awards were originally conceived, in 1993, to celebrate good sex, before the editor, Auberon Waugh, was advised by co-founder, Rhoda Koenig, that this might be “less interesting” than plucking out the clichéd and the corny.

I would love to see a Good Sex Awards shortlist. (It could be a cute stunt for the Review, if nothing else.) I’m sure Koenig was right that Bad Sex Awards get more attention — pointing and laughing usually does — but I’m not sure that mocking poorly-written scenes is automatically more interesting than celebrating good ones would be. Good sex in literary fiction is probably rarer than bad, and sex that many readers can agree is good might be even more uncommon. For example: I totally don’t agree that writing good sex is reducible to Geoff Dyer’s claim, quoted in Akbar’s essay, that descriptions of sex must “be absolutely explicit — no metaphors, no hyperbole.” (Then again, I do remember some of the horrifying metaphors cited in previous Bad Sex Award lists, so maybe that’s not a bad place to start.)

And I think Akbar’s onto something, here:

The most interesting writing about sex in the past two decades has arguably come from gay and lesbian novelists – Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Edmund White – who have touched ground where there has still been sensibilities to disturb and imaginative barriers to break down.

I’d also be interested in a broader conversation about sex in genre fiction, if we’re discussing the breaching of imaginative barriers.

Finally, Akbar covers the point that writers usually make when talking about sex in fiction: the “so what?” question.

Koenig casts doubt over this rationale: “I do think writers should ask themselves ‘is this sex scene necessary?’ In other words, what will we learn from following the people into the bedroom that we will not learn from simply being told that they have gone to bed together and liked it or disliked it or felt guilty about it or whatever?”

There are three sex scenes in Alcestis and one almost-sex-scene that dissolves into chaos thanks to some god-conjured reptiles. (Seriously. Drawn straight from the myth.) In my opinion, these scenes are all necessary for plot and character development, but their existence has made me squirm on occasion. I remember copy-editing one of the sex scenes while sitting at the laundromat — the scene with dubious consent, of course, because what else would you end up copy-editing at the laundromat? — and hoping that the bored middle-aged lady next to me wasn’t peering over my shoulder at the manuscript.

I don’t really feel that way about the published book; I think I’ve become comfortable with the idea that the book is, in large part, about desire. But giving public performances where I read about desire can still make me blush a bit. In a talk last spring, I read the almost-sex-scene along with a few other sections of the book. Even though I’d practiced the reading in advance, I hadn’t quite realized what it would be like to read in front of an audience a scene that sounds like it’s about to include sex. There was definitely an anticipatory and slightly uncomfortable feeling in the room, right up until the snakes appeared and the audience realized I wasn’t actually about to read a detailed account of the main character’s deflowering. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to include that scene in any future talks I give. Maybe I’d be able to enjoy the slightly uncomfortable vibe, now that I know to expect it. Or — maybe not.

Anyway, to sum up, here’s Seanan McGuire posting on Twitter, just a few hours ago:

… though I should add that the eighteenth century proved that even books full of nuns aren’t necessarily sex-free. (I’m looking right at you, Monk Lewis.)

A number of the It Gets Better videos have made me teary. But what I like most about this one is the sheer number of faces you get to see — all of them sharing their happiness and their healing.

An early happy Thanksgiving to you, Americans, and happy day, everyone else.

Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don’t even know what I tripped on. Sigh.

While I’m sitting on the sofa with an ice pack, here are some links:

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Cynthia Ozick at the Paris Review, in which Ozick typed her responses to the interviewer’s spoken questions. And here’s the Times review of Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies, a reworking of The Ambassadors. I really want to read this!

Maud Newton’s grandmother’s recipe to make you “the skinniest, shittiest, sexiest, drunkest, bastard in town.” In 30 days. In case you’re on a deadline or something.

Rachel Manija Brown on “what freeze/fight/flight” has felt like for her, as a resource for writers.

A forthcoming collection of essays about alternative academic careers in the humanities, to be published online and freely available. (Can anyone tell me why people use “#alt-ac” as the alternate academic tag even though Twitter doesn’t recognize hyphenated hashtags? Is there something wrong with “#altac,” or even “#alt_ac”?)

Geoff Nunberg has a great post on Language Log today describing his response to Kathryn Sutherland’s assertions about Austen’s manuscripts and the role she suggests Gifford played in their editing. (The post is an annotated version of the piece he did for Fresh Air on the topic.) While the post starts off dramatically — “After looking over the Austen manuscripts online, I concluded that the whole business was meretricious nonsense” — Nunberg also speaks well of Sutherland’s book, and concludes with a very satisfying explanation of changing patterns of semicolon usage. All worth a read.

On Twitter today, I saw an approving link to Alexis Madrigal’s response to Zadie Smith’s fine essay on Facebook and The Social Network (which I wrote about a little while ago). The title of Madrigal’s piece mentions literary writers and social media, and I’m always up for thinky writing about those things, so I spent some time reading it tonight when I really ought to have been dissertating. There are some assertions in the first part of the essay I disagree with, such as:

When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window.

I’d like to see some evidence in support of the breadth of this generalization, and I’m not sure I agree, either, with some of the ways that Madrigal characterizes Smith’s arguments. (There are a few comments on the essay that point out the fact that Smith was reviewing Lanier’s book, not just citing it a lot.) But still, interesting stuff.

Then I got to the middle of the essay, and my head kind of exploded.

This middle section begins with a reasonable-sounding statement about the effects of fame on the way people engage with online communities:

Last idea: Smith is a celebrity, so she can’t and won’t ever have a normal social media presence. She could never just start a Twitter feed to post links to random stuff, nor a Facebook page where she receives updates on her niece. For example, this is what she wonders about the future Internet.

“Maybe it will be like an intensified version of the Internet I already live in, where ads for dental services stalk me from pillar to post and I am continually urged to buy my own books.” [in Madrigal's post, the last phrase of this is italicized]

I don’t quite buy the main claim Madrigal’s making here — of course a celebrity’s non-anonymous experiences on the internet will differ from the average person’s, but celebrities can still create anonymous Twitter accounts, or use their own named accounts, say, the way Margaret Atwood uses hers (mostly to post links to random stuff, in fact).  Still, fair enough — the quote from Smith’s essay shows that her experience of the internet is influenced by her literary fame.

Then Madrigal begins describing his own memories of Smith’s physical presence. Apparently he was a student of hers, and wants to reminisce at length about the effect her physical presence had on him (and his fellow college students, of course):

While other writing professors seemed to go out of their way to seem kind, Smith was detached and aloof. It made her almost impossibly attractive to the undergraduate population, male and female alike. She was a wonder. It is not surprising that she has to remain a mystery, lest the world drain her blood looking for her essence. We would shamble towards her — online or off — to feed. Her true location must remain secret.

I think that’s a key part of her negative experience of Facebook. She trailed her beauty and brilliance with her, and experienced Facebook with their full weight pressing on her fingers and behind her eyes. Yet, it is precisely in the uniqueness of her experience of Facebook that shows that her fears will not be realized.

I’m hoping this is tongue-in-cheek — the vampire/zombie metaphors must be, but the second paragraph seems entirely earnest. Tonally, it’s weird and frankly a little creepy, and it makes it hard for me to accept the reach for poeticism at the end of the essay. I was still stuck back in the middle of the piece, trapped with poor Zadie Smith and her shambling horde of admiring students, who speak with authority about how her aloof beauty must make her feel.

And here’s my main question: what, precisely, does the author’s memory of Smith’s ineffable allure have to do with Smith’s arguments about social media? She’s too beautiful and mysterious to interact with social media the way the rest of us do? It’s hard for her to reach the keyboard from all the way up there on that pedestal? Seriously?

I know the context is different, but I couldn’t help thinking of Kate Beaton’s recent request that (links go to a series of Twitter posts) fans stop expressing their appreciation for female comics creators by offering marriage, sexual favors, etc., even in jest. Her body/looks/femininity, she pointed out, have absolutely nothing to do with her talent as an artist, and there are plenty of lovely compliments fans could give that don’t figure her as a sexual object. Predictably, Beaton got a lot of heat from fans for making this request. Many of them seemed to assume that she didn’t understand that the fans offering to have her babies “weren’t serious” or were just trying to be nice. And while I could see how her response might have seemed like an overreaction if it were prompted by one compliment of that sort, I’m guessing it’s the accumulation and repetition that led her to speak up about it on Twitter, in hopes that fans would think about what compliments like that actually communicated to her and choose to say something else.

I wish Madrigal could have made a similar choice and responded to Smith’s essay — to her ideas — without bringing her, physically, into the argument.

Today, an interesting essay by one of the Mailer fellows from the inaugural year of the Writers Colony — the same year I went to a week-long workshop there, on scholarship. I will admit that I didn’t feel at all overawed by Mailer’s house, or by any ghost of his presence, though I also didn’t spend a lot of time writing there — I had a nice little scrubby beach-house apartment to myself that was much lighter, brighter, and quieter than Mailer’s house. At the end of the week our group had a dinner party at Mailer’s house, with the consent of the program administrators. We grilled on his deck, listened to his records, and drank wine in his dining room, and eventually we all ended up in the basement taking turns with his punching bag. I know there were members of our group for whom Mailer was a much bigger writing influence than he is for me, but none of us seemed to feel the way that Amy Rowland describes. So intriguing — how spaces strike people differently.

Also, via Alexander Chee, here is an amazing interview with Ray Bradbury at the Paris Review. I disagree tremendously with elements of it — not teaching kids math? not outlining? — but the ending of the piece is remarkable.

Zadie Smith’s essay on The Social Network, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg in the NYRB is smart, surprising, and well worth reading. Especially this bit, in which she speculates about Zuckerberg’s actual motivations (given that the invented dramatic motivations the film ascribes to him don’t seem very accurate):

Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.

I’m not a programmer, though I’m hoping to teach myself some Ruby this year. But I’d love to see a movie that could actually depict the pleasures of programming. It doesn’t say much for Hollywood that the most earnest attempt at this so far was probably Hackers. (Wendell Pierce was in Hackers? Seriously? I must’ve been distracted by Angelina Jolie, though who wasn’t.)

But this part of Smith’s essay strikes the closest to home for me, at least, and perhaps for other people who live on the internet:

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

I’ll admit to never having figured out how to use Facebook in a way that makes me happy. I’m on it, I get sent messages through it by friends who use it more than I do, and I’ve been added by a lot of people from my high school. My page is pretty spare and I don’t add a lot of personal information to it. I’m sort of glad it’s there, glad to be connected in that small way to people I haven’t seen for years. Every once in a while I go on and leave comments and look at other people’s photos, but I don’t live on it the way I know many of my students do. It’s not my home on the internet. (Oddly enough, I feel much more comfortable with Twitter, probably because it isn’t really a social network.) Then again, I haven’t deleted my page, either, or whatever not-quite-as-permanent equivalent of deletion Facebook allows these days. I guess I’m all right with continuing to drift in the Facebook exurbs.

More links:

• Heartening news from a school board election in Minneapolis (via Haddayr Copley-Woods).
• A fascinating interview with Audrey Niffenegger.