Reading & Writing Journal

I finished the Barth blurted about below (Every Third Thought). Now that it's over with, I didn't like it as much as I was liking (most of) it while I was reading it. It felt like Barth ran out of gas, or interest, about 90% of the way through, and he bailed out with a cheap trick. Don't get me wrong, as ever with John Barth, the writing is superb, finestkind, none better. He is one of the masters at stringing words together; but that - I am discovering - is only part of novelizing, (or fictioning, fictionalizing/ficting???) (And it might be the easy part) (and someone like Barth can probably do it in his sleep). But there's more to the text than the words, of course, and no one knows that better than a pre-eminent Postmodernist like JB. It feels to me ("it" being ETT) as if he has sucked me in by using the (obvious and explicit but probably untrustworthy) association of his narrator/protagonist with the author, led me up to a cliff that he makes me think he's going to jump off, and then sort of trips me at the brink, only to grasp me before I plummet; and then he doesn't (quite) pull me back to safety. (This is all analogy of course, there's no literal cliff at the end of Every Third Thought.) I'm sure that's more or less what he intended, but there's no resolution here, and I'm not enough of a Postmodernist (yet) to think that's satisfactory to the reader (at least not this reader). I'm annoyed with him, he's way better than that.

My own novel is in a phase a bit like buried kimchi. It's put aside temporarily to "rest" like bread dough, or ferment, whatever.  I hear Barkis and Mortie and Evangeline nagging my ass raw, but they know I haven't abandoned them, and I haven't. They know that in the first place I couldn't - I've never abandoned anything, however fragmentary (or stupid) that I've written; sooner or later pieces get picked up & added to or incorporated into something else.

This is a "percolating" time for Barkis. I've read that some writers need to put a piece aside for a while after completing a first draft (or most of a first draft) - taking a break so to speak, letting it ferment.

The key for me is not to get frustrated by it - I know it's not abandoned, and I know it'll get finished (this is something I did NOT know prior to participating in the fiction writing group). The most important thing for me right now is to be writing, not WHAT I'm working on, so I've got new stories cranking up - small ones, shorts, probably 3000 - 5000 words, to fill in and keep the juices flowing; "stringing the words together" is what keeps it alive for me - I'll get back to Barkis, both the one I've got well underway and a couple others that I have the outlines or notes for.

I've joined another fiction writing group as well - we're trying to figure out how to either merge them or at least get some cross-pollination going, but it's tough since almost everyone from my group (which has dwindled to three of us) can't possible do Wednesday nights two towns over, and almost everyone from the new group can't possibly do Saturday mornings. I have a feeling there's a great deal of inertial resistance behind those "can'ts" - the security & safety of a known group is something that lulls one, and makes it really tough to want to barge into another setting with a whole new bunch of dragons.

Barth 2.0

I've sort of rediscovered John Barth recently. Turns out it's more like "the new (though not necessarily 'improved' since there was nothing wrong with the 'old' John Barth) John Barth" or to be more up-to-date, John Barth 2.0 (maybe an even later dot-release). I was introduced to his work in about 1966 or '67, in my junior year of college; the first piece of his I read was The Sot Weed Factor, and it impressed me so much I moved immediately to Giles Goat-Boy, then The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. None of these latter impressed (or entertained) me as much as SWF however, and GGB, especially, got very tiresome. Opera and Road were downers. I took a stab at Lost in the Funhouse, and it was more enjoyable, but Letters and Tidewater Tales failed to engage me completely, and I drifted away from Barth, though retaining my huge admiration for his talent. All this over the first 20 of the last 40 years or so.

Somewhere (on the Lannan Foundation website) recently I stumbled across a video of a 'conversation' between JB and some professional "admirer of artists" so I watched it and was entertained and informed - considerably - about the personality of the now-80-something Barth, so I picked up a recent effort, Every Third Thought - A Novel in Five Seasons, and it's on my Kindle as current workout reading. I'd forgotten how discursive, digressive, and just plain prolix Barth can be, but he does it so well it isn't (at least in this case) as tiresome as it might threaten to be. I've recently taken a whack at David Foster Wallace (Pale King - a sample on the Kindle) and it's exhausting. But I'm delighted that Barth is back (or rather, he's never been away, I've just been wandering in sort of a Barth-starved wilderness of my own making, I guess). Every Third Thought is a glorious example of postmodern confusion (or integration) of narrator, author, and character. I'm a little over half-way through and will offer a full response when I'm done, but for now - if you're familiar with Barth then I recommend it. If you're new to Barth, I recommend Sot-Weed Factor first, it's a glorious entertainment and a highly accomplished work of deeply considered fiction.