In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces?

A character in Generosity — the narrator, in fact — says, “Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.” And novels, moreover, are a “kind of Stockholm syndrome – love letters to the urge that has abducted us.” “Creative nonfiction,” meanwhile, “comes down to this: science now holds routine press conferences.” PR hacks spin the message while pundits amplify the noise of their best-paying clients.

So it’s no surprise that the genetic engineering – or genomics, as it’s now called – twine of the novel makes its public debut on a talk show. Or that from time to time the narrator in this (seemingly) third-person omniscient work of fiction obtrusively presents himself in the first person – but therein lies another aspect of Powers’ magical sleight-of-hand that the reader needs to witness for herself.

It’s also no surprise, perhaps, that the novel begins in that location so central to the decadence of the culture we find ourselves rollercoastering in, the creative writing workshop classroom. Russell Stone is a once-rising star of creative nonfiction who, via heartbreak and other disenchantments, has fallen to translating personal testimonies into Standard English for a Web site (everything has become “content” plugging in holes in the messaging machines) and teaching writing night classes at a Chicago art school.

In his workshop is a refugee from the Algerian revolution, that war that was so bitter it tore the country into a million little pieces and left Thassadit Amzwar the sole survivor in her family: “Ten years of organized bloodbath have reduced a country the size of western Europe to a walking corpse.” She should suffer from post-traumatic stress, depression, be suicidal and dark. But she’s happy, strangely upbeat; she’s so delightful that her jaded classmates (who range from a dressed-in-black Goth to a socially inept cyber-nerd) call her Miss Generosity: “Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic.” She has a voice like a “mountain flute,” and her stories, written and otherwise, enchant her classmates and everyone she meets. WTF, Stone wonders, is up with that?

Powers allows — and is up-front with us in this aspect of the novel writer’s craft — one minor and one major coincidence in his story (this is hilarious because it’s a rule of thumb in every creative writing textbook, but saying so in a novel is akin to a magician explaining his sleight-of-hand via a slo-mo demonstration), and thus Miss Generosity is connected to Thomas Kurton, wizard of genomics and CEO of Truecyte. The plot of Generosity forms a double helix.

Kurton is working on programming (and patenting for Truecyte) the human genome. He’s hot on the trail of the happiness gene and, in Thassa Amzwar, he thinks he’s found it. Kurton runs tests on Amzwar, finds his magic bullet of a gene, and finally publishes the paper that tells the world that enhancement of the human personality is a matter of proper engineering:

“The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide.”

The crowd, as they say, goes wild – and the shit hits the fan.

Powers’ magic is that in “enhancing” the truth of a story it becomes truer still, and creative nonfiction is no exception. How decadent, perhaps even pre-apocalyptic, that Oprah should have kicked James Frey’s ass for telling a white lie in his book. Frey’s enhancement did no harm, but he lied to Oprah. Powers has such literalism locked in his sights: the showdown between Thassa and the geneticist takes place on Oona, a dead ringer for the Oprah format, book club and all.

Thassa, it turns out, is really fairly normal. Genomics, and designs derived therefrom, aren’t the answer leading to a Prozac nation full of smiley-faced people-drones; it’s another kind of lying, enhancement, story telling. And fiction, creative non- or otherwise, is nothing without conflict. The cognitive engine of culture and all our creative endeavor is, perhaps sadly, certainly for better and for worse, conflict.

MacArthur grants aside, devoted readers have known since at least The Gold Bug Variations that Powers is, in fact, a genius. He’s one of the few writers working who has such a sure grasp of science, its ethical and political dimensions, and a fully realized literary voice. Generosity brings to the fore all Powers’ talents and passions in a refreshingly succinct and accessible read that is as amusing as it is thought-provoking.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?”

So what does this all add up to? It adds up to this: You should read Naked Lunch. It’s an essential part of who we are (as Burroughs wrote somewhere, a paranoid is someone who knows something of what’s going on; if you’re not paranoid, you’re not really alive). It’s part of your education (did you know that language was a virus from outer space? Quick: read this book), it’s part of your sexual being (“If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes”), it’s an essential document of the American Century (“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom”).

And Naked Lunch is a hell of a lot of fun – if your idea of fun is being burned at the stake and reincarnated as a dope fiend on the run from an evil doctor trying to get you to shoot bug powder while simultaneously being gang-buggered by the security forces of Interzone.

Really. It’s that funny, that much fun. Here’s a sample – the Benway mentioned below is the self-same doctor who wants you to shoot bug powder (a note: we don’t do bug powder in this era of high-tech entomological toxins, but think roach poison and you’ve got the idea):

What’s with the serum?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man’s not to be trusted. Might do almost anything… Turn a massacre into a sex orgy…”

“Or a joke.”

“Precisely. Arty type… No principles…”

This fiftieth-anniversary edition is a beauty: cloth-bound, slip-cased, all purple and green in the style of the first Olympia edition (Paris, 1959) with a restored text “faithful to Burroughs’ original composition” (whatever that means; Burroughs didn’t “compose” Naked Lunch; Allen Ginsburg assembled the book by collating extracts from letters written to him by Burroughs; with Naked Lunch, there are only ever variorum editions), and an “insightful afterword” by critic David Ulin. Forget the marketing hype and the DVD-like “extras”: at the price, this hardcover book is a great value. If I recall correctly (and I doubt that I do), Burroughs said something along those lines: Cheat your landlord (if you must), but don’t shortchange the Muse.

So don’t shortchange yourself. Read Naked Lunch, learn to write like a maniac, god-eating atheist dope-shooting creative genius, and then start a blog: let us know what you really think.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

When humans don’t get enough zinc, we can get sick with cancer and suffer immune-system dysfunction. The same is true of plants. Micronutrients such as boron, zinc and copper, although only a tiny part of a plant’s diet, can have a profound effect on the plant’s health.

via Higher Learning: A Pinch of This, a Dash of That -.

There’s a new paper on the sources of inspiration for the famous works of the mathematician Charles Dodgson — better known to most of us as Lewis Carrol, author of the Alice books.

In an article in New Scientist, doctor of philosophy student and literary scholar Melanie Bayley proposes that Dodgson wrote his books as an attack on the new-fangled mathematics making headway in his day. Dodgson was a conservative geometer, Bayley claims, who was deeply upset by the seemingly arbitrary manipulation of numbers and, especially, figures:

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the…  scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Bayley points out that, surprisingly (though not really, considering the great divide between the arts and sciences), there are few critical works on Dodgson that take into account the fact that he was a mathematician. Bayley goes a long way toward remedying that situation. Her piece should be a model for literary scholars who turn a blind eye toward science and math when commenting on literature.

What he’s up to in this piece is arguing for an end (or at least an alternative) to long-form narrative journalism in favor of…. something else.

Journalism schools have taught view-from-nowhere, AP Style-compliant, mass-media-voice long-form feature writing for decades, and readers just aren’t interested. Educating another generation of students to file 75-inch profiles of local United Way executives, written for the annual press contest judges who determine next-year’s promotions, just isn’t much of an answer to the market-side questions that demand our attention.

True enough. But the really interesting point he makes comes a bit further down:

Classic narrative follows a subject through a conflict to a resolution. And if our primary means of understanding something as complex as global warming is just a series of narratives about conflict, then we’re not going to make much progress. This is one reason why American mainstream news organizations kept emphasizing critics of global warming, even though the most credible peer-reviewed studies favored the anthropogenic warming theory championed by Al Gore…. We didn’t need better narrative journalism about global warming, we needed less of it. We needed a way of communicating that encouraged the evaluation of facts instead of the balancing of rhetoric. It’s a shift that requires a radically different theory of the press.

It’s difficult to see how a “different theory of the press” is going to change something that has nothing, really, to do with the press and everything to do with cognition. You can present things in ways that encourage an evaluation of facts (e.g., charts and graphs or, as Dan suggests by way of example, box scores), but we’re still going to contextualize those facts by way of a conflict-driven narrative.

If the facts don’t move us, we don’t care. And in order to be moved, in order for facts to move, they must in some way, an engine-like way, face resistance. We need to at least imagine counterfactuals: I’m not here, I’m there, in that person’s shoes.

So Dan’s example of the critics of global warming getting face time in the media makes sense. If you want to do something about it, start by reporting from the critics’ point of view: the climate isn’t changing, you report, and then give many column inches to the critics of that view.

Dan argues that, without box scores,

how many at-bats would never have been recorded for future historians because they didn’t fit into the narrative the writer picked as he hammered out a story on deadline?

Fair enough. But those historians will do nothing with that information without first recontextualizing it as conflict-driven narrative. Indeed, lovers of baseball routinely recontextualize box scores, mentally pitting pitcher against batter and so on.

It’s not journalism that needs to evolve to address your concerns, Dan; it’s the human brain that must change.

We hope you’ll check it out, leave comments and suggests topics for us to post about. Or, as with Puck, submit an article or photo yourself!

the realization struck me that the collection’s essays could be divided into those that, on the one hand, seek to smooth over Russ’s angry edges and those that, on the other, attend closely and carefully to all that is uncomfortable and challenging in Russ’s work. Such a division, however, would create so sharp a difference between critical approaches that I had to wonder: does recognition of the angry edges in Russ’s work matter? Ought critics to engage directly with them? Psychological experiments have shown that subjects more easily recognize anger in men’s faces than in women’s, confirming feminist observations that women’s anger is commonly treated as derisory, unnecessary, or unwarranted. What, then, is a (feminist) reader to make of a critic’s ignoring or patronizing of that anger?

I’m not sure Duchamp ever really answers that question in her review. Speaking for myself, I felt that Russ’s anger is at the core of her work, that it truly does matter, that her anger is what makes her work sing, and so I tried to honor it as well as I could. Her’s what Duchamp says about my piece:

The final piece in the book, Brian Charles Clark’s “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ” is more a paean to Russ’s fiction than an essay. It leaps and soars over the (topological) surface of Russ’s fiction at speed, sampling literary and theoretical allusions even more promiscuously than Butler’s essay does, with manic energy and delight, never lighting on the surface for more than an instant. While Butler’s essay invokes Cixous’s style, Clark’s, never burdened by the gravid weight of critical pretension, actually emulates it. Clark’s essay serves as a coda, taking the book out on an appreciative—even ecstatic—note of Russ’s still-standing challenge.