aaron hamburger

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A Saintly Weekend

Just got back from a weekend festival of Queer Lit in New Orleans called Saints and Sinners. It's my third time there, and each time I come back with some new lens on literature, my own work, and myself.

A few impressions that stand out:

1. Sitting in Stephen McCauley's master class on character, in which he gave us some great exercises to flesh out a character you don't know well. Two of my favorites: A) describe your character's feet. and B) imagine yourself walking down a street and encountering your character. What's your impression?

2. Hearing Dorothy Allison full-throated no-holds-barred memories of her career and her fiery prescriptions of what needs to be done to the Bush administration.

3. Participating on a panel with novelists Brian Antoni and Paul Lisicky, who taught me about the importance of sticking it out as a writer, even when things look grim.

4. Having dinner with novelist Gary Zebrun, who told me not to let the current doldrums of the publishing business get me down, and encouraged me to believe in myself and above all to keep writing. "I tried to quit writing for eight years," he told me. "Those were eight of the most miserable years of my life."

Now back in New York, I'm sitting at my computer and ready to attack my work with a new verve. Thanks, Saints and Sinners!

posted by aaron hamburger at 10:40 AM | 1 comments

Thursday, May 01, 2008

PEN World Voices

This weekend, I'll be blogging for the PEN World Voices Festival, featuring panels of writers from around the world. You can check out my comments and others by other writers on the PEN website, www.pen.org.

Here's my first post:

One of the most amusing moments for me during a panel called "Rewriting Family" was when the Hungarian-Romanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman announced, "As a writer, you have to get rid of your family." Dutch writer P. F. Thomese agreed, chiming in, "Yes, I agree, you have to destroy your family. You can't think, 'What would my mother think of that?' If that influences you, you'd never write anything of any meaning."

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that in my own career, I have thought, "What would my father think of that?" and it has influenced me. As a young writer in my teens, my father played a very important role in my literary life. Whenever I needed a villain, he was always there for me. And so whenever he read my work, my father's response was usually along the lines of, "Why do I always have to be
the bad guy?"

As I sat down to write my first novel, I took my father's words to heart. Why is it that fathers are so often the villains in literature? In fact, during the discussion last night, Thomese brought this up when he said that his becoming a father taught him that he wasn't the center of the universe anymore. "Which was a huge discovery," he said, "since writers like to be the center of the universe." This is why, in Thomese's opinion, you see so many sons as heroes of novels while fathers play the role of villain.

While working on my novel Faith for Beginners, I decided I would defy the cliche and write a really nice dad. I made the father character in the book, Mr. Michaelson, vulnerable, caring, even slightly innocent in his concern for those around him. None of these are attributes anyone would ascribe to my father.

When he read the book, a few months before it was published, my father called me up and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. "Why am I always the bad guy in your writing?" he wanted to know.

Go figure.

Israeli writer Yael Hadaya said that the only person in her family she'd never write about is her brother, "because I'm scared of him. He's the only one in our family who can defend himself. My father is dead. My kids are helpless because they're little, and my mother can't read my work without falling asleep, so she's never read anything I wrote."

The truth is, however, that no character is exactly the same as its real-life model. "When you write about your family," said Hedaya, "you're not really writing about them. It's like a collage of various pieces, but it can't be exactly the same. So you're not really writing your family, you're disguising your family. But I have to write about them. I have to write about my child. I can't just write about another child. This is my child."

The trouble with writers and families, according to Thomese, is that in families, you can never be honest with each other, but in writing you always have to be honest, which leads to a natural conflict. And as D'Erasmo pointed out, in a way that's what makes for the juicy tension in writing about families, that the reader always knows there are secrets that haven't been aired.

The Hungarian-Romainian writer Dragoman brought up a funny story about family secrets related to his recent novel The White King. For his novel, he'd made up some family secrets for the characters, who bore some loose resemblances to his own family. After the book came out, his mother told him as long as he was making up secrets about people, she would tell him the real family secrets she'd kept buried for years. And in this way, fictional lies about family ended up revealing truths Dragoman would never have discovered otherwise.

The title of the panel is "Rewriting Family," and each of these writers has re-written the notion of family in their work or lives in some way. Moderator D'Erasmo's last novel A Seahorse Year features a same-sex couple whose child has gone missing. Hedaya is a single mother by choice who's currently raising three kids. For Dragoman, family was not an arena of rebellion or conflict, but actually the "last line of defense" in a totalitarian society, the one place where he could feel safe. Dutch writer Thomese, who is married to an Indonesian, switched gears from bitterly satiric fiction to a wrenching personal memoir about the death of his child.

"I had to write it," said Thomese. "Because my child was dead and if I didn't write it, I would be left with nothing."

posted by aaron hamburger at 12:02 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Barack Obama: Guilty of Literary Crimes?

This election season has been a confusing one on many levels. I started out warily in support of Hillary Clinton because I was impressed by her strong performance in the early debates and the thoroughness of her knowledge of government. After Barack Obama's moving victory speech in Iowa, however, I started wondering if I was backing the wrong candidate. And then after watching the Clintons go after Obama with their Nixonian campaign tactics in South Carolina, I decided to make a change and now I'm firmly in Obama's camp.

In the end, the choice of Obama or Clinton probably doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of policy, since when they're elected, they'll probably do (or fail to do) many of the same things. As a gay voter, I haven't really had much choice in presidential elections, since the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are determined to offend me. Remember Bob Dole returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans? Remember George Bush and gay marriage?

The issue that has been more difficult for me is the charge of plagiarism leveled by the Clinton campaign against Obama, who the other weekend used a few lines from another politician's speech without attribution. I doubt that the Clinton campaign has made this charge out of their concern for intellectual property rights, but it is a charge that is no less serious for the spirit of opportunism from which it has been offered.

Even Senator Obama has admitted he should have attributed the lines he stole (let's call this crime by its proper name) to their author, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The question for me, though, is how serious is this crime? Petty larceny or high misdemeanor? How much is too much when it comes to using another author's words? And is that standard different for a speech than it is for a literary text?

Let's be fair here. Neither Obama nor Patrick attributed the lines "I have a dream" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to their original authors, nor did anyone suggest they needed to. Also, the bits of Patrick's speech that were original to him, "Just words?" were fairly short. I think what offended people was not so much the words being repeated, but the idea behind those words being repeated minus a simple, "As Deval Patrick said..." But then, don't politicians borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time? "No new taxes." "Universal health insurance." Has there ever been a political campaign where Republicans and Democrats respectively don't endorse these positions? Have I just committed plagiarism by using those words here on this blog?

Furthermore, we live in a culture in which "sampling" is all the rage, in music, in film. It's a kind of homage to use another person's work in your own, even without attribution. And often the work being "sampled" isn't very common at all. How many times have you heard a pop song from the 1970s and were shocked to hear a riff that you thought had been created for a hip-hop hit of the 1990's or our own decade? How does hearing those riffs in their original context make you feel when you recognize them? Thrilled or cheated?

I hate plagiarism and have little tolerance for plagiarists. The trouble is, I have a hard time defining what that term means these days. Right now I'm working on an essay about a novel written about Berlin in the 1990's. I and others have recently tried to find the author, J. S. Marcus, who hasn't published another book in over a decade, but without success. The situation reminded me of Christopher Isherwood looking for the real life model for Sally Bowles, who'd also disappeared. At the end of Berlin Stories, what is probably the definitive work on that city, Isherwood says, "When you read this, Sally--if you ever do--please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard."

And so I closed my essay with the following lines as a double homage, to link Marcus with Isherwood: "When you read this essay, J. S. Marcus—if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay. And write another book for us."

I did not add, awkwardly, "As Christopher Isherwood wrote at the end of 'Sally Bowles.'" My hope is that those who know the book (Marcus would be among them) will get the reference on their own, and would rightly sneer at the idea of wink-wink-nudge-nudging the reader to remind him or her of the source. It also strikes me that the lines themselves are not distinctive enough to warrant much concern about re-using. It isn't as if I had begun a novel about India or New York City with "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed," as Isherwood does at the beginning of 'A Berlin Diary.' Now that would be a problem, not only because the lines are so unique but also because I would be using them in a context that does not suggest its source, that in fact suggests that I, Aaron Hamburger, inspired by India or New York, so brilliantly thought up these lines all by my very self.

We all learned in grade school about the evils of plagiarism. What we did not learn is the difference between plagiarism and (to use a hot critical buzzword) "intertextuality," between copying and "sampling." Somewhere there is a line, but I think we have to draw it anew with each and every piece of writing we compose. My opinion is that Senator Obama just crossed that line by a step, maybe two. As for my essay, I think I'm well within safe boundaries, but I'm glad to hear if someone out there disagrees.

posted by aaron hamburger at 1:21 PM | 4 comments

Friday, February 08, 2008

Stuff I Recommend

This past month, I've been consumed with finishing this draft of my novel, but I have found time for a few other diversions. Like...

LADY ORACLE by Margaret Atwood. I've read two other books by Atwood, The Blind Assassin, which I loved, and Surfacing, which I couldn't get through. This book is like neither of those. It's the story of a Canadian poet/romantic novelist who while trying to erase herself tells her life story. What makes this novel such a hoot, however, isn't so much the story, which is a lot of fun, but the vibrance of Atwood's narrative voice. This is one novel in which every sentence, even every word counts, and tickles the reader with pleasure.

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT by Leslea Newman. One of the things I like about Newman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while teaching with her for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine, is the way she claims the lesbian experience as a universal experience. When she write about a crush on a fellow passenger in "Flight of Fancy," she's not just letting you know what it is for a woman to desire another woman, but also for a person to desire another person in general. When she writes about a breast cancer scare in "Keeping a Breast," she uses a second person point of view that implicates the reader, whether male, female, straight, gay, or anything else, in the story of a woman confronting mortality. Reading these stories, you wonder why it's been assumed for so long that the straight white male experience is any more "universal" than any other.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD, film. I don't usually publicize movies on my blog since they get enough play in our culture already, but this one is special. The film's main character, Daniel Plainview, is as rich as any character I've come across in many works of contemporary fiction. It helps that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a rich performance that captures all of Plainview's profound virtues and flaws. At the end of this absorbing movie, I wasn't sure whether his character was more victim or villain, but I was so fascinated by his story that I didn't mind thinking it over for a good long while.

posted by aaron hamburger at 9:10 PM | 1 comments

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Thoughts for a New Year: War and Peace

As a holiday present (I'll leave you to guess which holiday), my partner bought me the new translation of War and Peace.

I read War and Peace when I was in high school, after my father told me that you couldn't be an educated person without having read War and Peace and Ulysses. At the time I was a bit daunted by the book's sheer heft as well as the thundering universality of its title. But as I read, I was amazed at what a page-turner it was, how exciting and passionate and wise.

Now, some 17 years later, I'm re-reading the book, and though I'm only up to page 774, I'm convinced pretty much everything you could ever want to know about writing, and much of what you might want to know about life, lies between its covers.

One of the book's big themes is that history and life are a result of a series of accidents, some lucky, even though in hindsight they appear planned or even foreordained. Also, the gap between the reality of chance and the fictions of control and/or fate we live by can lead to dangerous self-delusions.

If only some of our leaders had read and grasped what this book has to tell us. As much as we want to have power over our futures and steer the destiny of nations and peoples to suit our desires, the complexity of human nature has a way of defying even our best-laid plans. Or in our government's case, our worst-laid plans.

For example, I'm aware of a certain euphoria these days about the so-called "surge" in Iraq. It's true that the violence in that nation has been reduced from catastrophic to tragic. And I suppose that as long as we're willing to maintain the tragic levels of violence by paying for it with American blood, we will be able to do so. And yet, it must be asked, was that our goal in invading Iraq? To create a mildly chaotic power vacuum? More importantly, what do we want for that country's future? A theocracy? A corrupt oligarchy? A puppet dictatorship? No one seems to have any idea, least of all the cast of cartoon characters running for the American presidency.

Iraq is only one of a host of problems, including climate change, proliferation of nuclear weapons, economic turbulence that dwarf our ability as individuals to comprehend, let alone think of ways to solve. But Tolstoy can give us some hope here. It's not our responsibility to solve these problems, he tells us. In fact, even if we could think of solutions, the likelihood they might work or be carried out effectively is fairly small. The best thing we can do is to try to see clearly, to always strive to write and say the truth, to be kind and peaceful and unselfish (but not in a stupidly selfless way), to achieve balance.

Not an easy task. But Tolstoy and others like him can point the way. So turn off your computers, your video games, your TVs, for just a few minutes, take a little break, and get thee to a bookstore.

posted by aaron hamburger at 5:29 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Lessons Learned from Recent Reading

As a teacher of writing, I often find myself envying my students. I often wish that instead of dispensing advice and criticism, I had someone to consult who could give me some answers when I'm working on a project that's frustrating me. I wonder, is there a creative writing class offered somewhere for teachers of creative writing? Not that I've found.

The closest thing to being in class that I've had since leaving school for the last time has been reading. And in this sense, over the past years, I've had an amazing array of teachers: E. M. Forster, Jean Stafford, L. Frank Baum, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Sholem Asch, Kazuo Ishiguro and now a few others I'd like to mention.

The first is Ha Jin, whose novel Waiting I finished in about two days. It's the kind of story that makes you ache to get to the end to find out how it will turn out. The title refers to a doctor in the Chinese army who can't get the required permission from his wife to get a divorce so he can marry his girlfriend, and so he must wait eighteen years, after which, according to Chinese law, he can get the divorce without permission. (Note: if you're squeamish about plot spoilers, skip the next paragraph.)

When the doctor's wait is rewarded and he's allowed to marry his girlfriend, she wears him out with her voracious sexual appetite. Be careful when you get what you wish for, the book seems to be saying, because you just may get it in a way you don't expect. That's the life lesson. The writerly lesson, for me anyway, was that to avoid predictable endings because the action seems inevitable, is not to change what happens, but rather to let the inevitable happen in terms of action, while surprising the reader with character.

It's a lesson that was reinforced for me (by a somewhat negative example) in the new novel The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. This new novel is as funny and compulsively readable as Perrotta's last book Little Children, and yet as it got to its inevitable ending (which I won't relate here), I felt let down. I almost wish Perrotta had continued the novel past the point where he stopped, the same way Ha Jin had, and then surprised us with what came next.

Another book that's taught me about managing predictable endings is Angela Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which recently I had the pleasure of finishing. Carter is known for taking fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast and re-telling them while amping up the sex and violence. Again, these are stories with endings we as readers can see coming a mile off. So why do we keep turning the pages so eagerly? I think because Carter gives us such a visceral tour of the castles and forests and cottages these fairy tale characters inhabit, which were always a bit nebulous in the stories we read in childhood. For example, who knew Beauty's Beast kept an S & M chamber in his castle? Who could have guessed Red Riding Hood's Wolf was so good in the sack?

The last book I'll mention, Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor, is actually a collection of lectures by this classic American writer, some from creative writing classes she'd taught. (So it's no surprise the book transported me back to being a student.) From her cantakerous yet brilliant essays, I get the sense I wouldn't have liked to be a student in one of her workshops, though I wouldn't have minded eavesdropping from the hallway. O'Connor herself would be the first one to acknowledge the inherent limitations of trying to teach writing, and warns her students to beware of any teacher who claims to have all the answers about how writing works, who "appear overenergetic."

Still, O'Connor's definition of what writing is about, the art of persuasion through the senses, seems as good as any I've ever come across. So is her description of the writing process, "during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay... It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." And yet she finds it also a hopeful act. "People without hope not only do not write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

And maybe that's the best reason of all to read novels, especially in this Internet-text-messaging-video-game-playing age: as an act of hope.

posted by aaron hamburger at 10:11 PM | 2 comments

Monday, September 03, 2007

Back to Work

Summer is ending. Tomorrow, my roster of fall classes begins. I'll be teaching a creative writing class at Columbia, three ESL classes at NYU, and working with graduate students in Columbia's MFA program as well as the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine (by correspondence).

At the same time, I'll be keeping up my freelance writing and working on a new draft of my novel (yes, the Berlin one). Somewhere in there, I hope to have a life.

This past year has been one of the more difficult ones for me as a writer. I think one of the hardest lessons I've had to come to terms with is that you have to keep growing and moving forward with your work, and yet it's not a good idea to try to do something that you're not suited to either. Knowing where that line lies is not intuitive, at least not for me anyway.

Maybe the greatest lesson I've had to learn is humility. It's nice when you produce a book or a story or an essay, but sometimes the work you do may not result in some product you can share with the world. And that's part of being a writer too. As a writer, your job is to do the work. The hard part is that you don't know for sure what your work really is. I never understood before how it could take some writers years to produce a book. I'd think, just write the thing. Now I get it. They were writing, for all that time. For writers there are different kinds of success. This past year I've been very successful at getting myself to my desk and doing work. What's eluded me so far is another kind of success, and whether I can attain it is not something I know how to control or predict.

posted by aaron hamburger at 2:32 PM | 2 comments