You Have a Point There

Deciding which character or characters to whom we delegate the telling of a story--particularly a longer one--is more complex a matter than it sounds. A large percentage, forty at least, of short stories are told by the first person, the narrative I. In less than skillful hands, that I becomes variously unreliable, naive, or confessional, not by any means negative qualities, but nevertheless qualities as important to the writer as, say, cadmium blue or alizeran crimson to the painter. Those short stories not told by the I are told by the he or the she, the third person. Alice Munro has for some years taken to rendering her longer stories in terms of they, which is to say a multiple point of view. Margaret Atwood has joined her, followed by Antonia Byatt.

Along comes the splendid Irish writer William Trevor, who takes the they point of view all the way into omniscience, meaning he shifts from the sensitivity of one character to the point of view of another, seemingly at will and with a great skill. Of all the points of view, omniscient is the most difficult. Unless the writer is careful, omniscient can be a bumpy, jarring ride. Trevor dispenses with the bumps and jars; it is preternaturally smooth with him.

The longer narrative, the novel, can support any of these points of view and adds the temptation to expand on the multiple point of view, switching from one character to another as the narrative develops. This multiple point of view has a particularly effective result, causing the characters, their agendas and reactions to see even more lifelike because of the way multiple point of view introduces the great condition of our times, ambiguity.

A major element to any story is the who aspect; who is telling the story? Who is the teller of the tale?

This being late into 2007 in the year of our ambiguity, one convention emerges with as much emphasis as a pregnancy-testing kit in a sorority house: The author must delegate and may not serve. There may have been a time when the author could address the reader and one of the great things about conventions is that even now, someone is out there, writing alone in the dead of night, talking directly to the reader, and equally certain is the notion that in doing so, the author will start off a new round of conventions. But not for a while.

Who's telling the story? This is as important as the story itself.

The next big question is why. Why is this character (or these individuals) the better ones to tell the story?

Look what would happen if the Twenty-third Psalm were written in third person. The Lord is his shepherd, he shall not want. Please!

Look what almost happened if Gatsby had been told in multiple point of view instead of from the eyes of the arguably naieve Nick Caraway.

Call him Ishmael.

You wouldn't have paid much attention to him if you hadn't known about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's adventure story for boys. But that shouldn't interfere with your grasp of this tale about Tom's more notorious friend.

Last night she dreamed she returned to Manderly.

And not to forget the train wreck disaster if Sir Arthur had allowed Sherlock Holmes to speak for himself. It would have been like Giuliani and Sarkozy instead of Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The mind boggles because it was hard wired to do so. The mind boggles under the effect of story because the effects were set in place when the writer spent some time considering the implications of who the teller should be and why.

Pigeons, Pigeons, in Holding Patterns

You think the air traffic at O'Hare is scary, at LAX is beyond belief, at JFK is an impossible jumble.

You think that and you're undoubtedly correct. It is, after all, waning months of 2007, crowding in on, gulp, 2008. More things up in the air, more persons in flight. More purpose. This is not to gloss over the agendas of Neanderthals and Cro-magnons, bursting out of the Ice Age. They had just as severe a case for survival as we. We, at least, have MacBooks and North Face jackets, and sensible shoes. But as you trudge forth each day to where your car is parked, you cannot help but notice the warning signs.

Pigeon poop.

There are multifarious reasons, not the least of which is that our survival causes more pigeons to be up in the air, in holding patterns, waiting, oh waiting for clearance to come home and roost.

I have it on good if not impeccable authority that a professional juggler can only keep eleven objects in the air at one time. Try to get a twelfth dish or ball or whatever else the juggler fancies and you are doomed to be up to your rear end in broken pottery. I believe there is no limit to the number of pigeons you can have circling above you, waiting to come home to roost, their poop on the bonnet of your auto being one evidence of their holding pattern.

One such pigeon wanting to land is a November 9-11 pigeon, a weekend intensive workshop on point-of-view for writers. This will require a syllabus, if I am to go forth prepared, showing examples of the various points of view; the vision is not unlike Talmud in which voices of authority argue, sometimes across generations, their interpretations of the thing we see before us and which we agree to call The Human Condition. It is a syllabus I will prepare because I can't not do so; it is a way I have of setting things forth in much the same way it is Ishmael's way of signing on a ship when he is overcome with melancholia. I sometimes wish I had melancholia rather than the need to set things forth because melancholia is a tidal thing that can ebb and flow under the influences of love or enthusiasm or change of scenery, while the need to set things forth is merely a need to set things forth. Ishmael has his oceanic, tidal flow; I have the constant sound of fluttering wings circling above.

We will see Nick Caraway arguing on behalf of Jay Gatz, aka Gatsby. We will know about Huck Finn in the unlikely event that we have not read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and we will certainly agree to call Ishmael whatever he asks us to call him.
We should also consider the Talmudic litany in Madam Bovary, a veritable tsunami of points of view.

We must consider also our own work, the raucous multitudes of clangorous harmony, circling within our imagination, waiting to be noticed, named, set forth on note paper, transferred to screen, processed, and printed. Points of view, all of them, wanting to be heard, wanting to be believed, genies in a bottle, wanting to be freed from their confinement and let loose in the early November air, where they will do their best to convince us of the absolute correctness of their position, of the Platonic ideal of their vision, of the Socratic force of their logic.

Be There or Be Square

My Dean, the energetic and incisive Susan Kamei, has asked me for the use of the hall to post this invitation. I have a class at the time, but I may slip over during break time to avail myself and Sally of some of the snacks. You're on, Susan:



Please join us for this free event


Presented by the USC Master of Professional Writing Program and the USC Master of Liberal Studies Program:

Truth, Lies, or Scam – Can You Believe Anything You Read?

Where are the boundaries of truth in the post-James Frey world of “fictionalized nonfiction?” Even classical historians took liberties with imagination and memory; has fact now blurred with fiction? In this provocative panel, hear about today’s artistic, legal, and ethical landmines from those involved in writing and producing works based on fact. Writers, publishers, producers—and readers—should take note.

Moderator: Jonathan Kirsch, author, book reviewer, Biblical scholar, attorney

Panelists:

Mark Jonathan Harris, Academy Award winner and Distinguished Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts
M.G. Lord, Author and Lecturer, USC Master of Professional Writing Program
John Rechy, Author and Lecturer, USC Master of Professional Writing Program
William G. Thalmann, Professor, USC Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature


Thursday, November 1, 2007
USC University Club

6:00 p.m. Admissions Open House for the MPW and MLS Programs
7:30 p.m. Panel discussion with audience Q&A
9:00 p.m. Mingle with the speakers and USC faculty over coffee


Free and open to the public.
To RSVP and for parking information, call (213) 740-3252
www.usc.edu/mpw/ or www.usc.edu/college/mls

I've Grow Accustomed to Her Fez

An underlying subtext of the fact of my Lumix FX-30 camera becoming a friend who accompanies me pretty much where ever I go is the increasing sense of need to look and think outside the parameters of the conventions for writing with which I have educated myself.

Looking at a potential subject for photography develops muscles of thought and vision (sorry for the mixed metaphor) that find their way into my written work and the approaches I take to teaching others some of the ways and approaches that will improve their own writing. Even a cursory examination of the photographic images I've taken with my pal, the Lumix, reveals to me my fondness for gadgets such as sewer covers, for assemblages of pipes, of neon signs, of the truly small things in life, an awareness I attempt to drag and drop (apologies again for the metaphor, but what the hell, it is apt) into my sense of awareness when constructing a story.

Point to be taken (lesson to be learned): look to styles and technique in art to enhance the style and technique and approach in one's own process.

Accordingly, note the similarity between the portraiture of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and the line drawn (again metaphorically) in the sands of the modern novel and short story. Huh? What does that obviously cusp novelist between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Thomas Hardy, have to do with formal portraiture? Well for starters, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was more or less the evolved paradigm of the classic novelist, in theme and form. A scant fifteen years after Hardy was born, D.H. Lawrence was born. Fifteen years. Lawrence outlived Hardy by a few years. 1930, I think. And look what Lawrence did to the novel and, for that matter, to poetry. James Joyce, who carried the explosion even further, was born in 1882, twenty-eight years later, lasting until 1941. Thus at one point, while all three men were alive as metaphorical sign posts, fiction had undergone an amazing transformation, not unlike, to use the litotic construction, what happened to the portrait.

Was it Seurat who began rendering the face in dots and shadows? Was it Modigliani, who's chirporactic stretching added a strange-but-lovely exaggeration to the face and neck? Was it Picasso, who applied a kind of feng-sui to the face? Was it the pointillists who rendered what was formerly straightforward into dots, pulling things apart, allowing us to participate in ways we had not thought possible?

Probably the answer is yes to all the above.

The same thing is happening to the short story and the novel, endings are becoming less certain, things are becoming more ambiguous, elliptical.

Midway during the Summer session, in attempting to demonstrate a more or less post-modernistic trend had taken on the short story, I wrote this story:

A Vision Quest

By Shelly Lowenkopf

1. Rae hates her given name but cannot speak openly about her dislike of it because it is also the name of her beloved grandmother, who has emotionally and financially encouraged Rae to leave Kingsport, Tennessee, the better to seek her destiny.

2. She has already explored portions of Europe and New York on her own initiative, supplemented with stipends she and Grandma Rae refer to as research grants, prompting Rae to choose the yet uncharted chaos of Los Angeles.


3. In Los Angeles Rae discovers the locale south of Rose Avenue and west of Lincoln Boulevard known as Venice, where she rents a Japanese-style guest house with hardwood floors and shoji screens from Florence Givertz, who has a fine-browed, Mediterranean appearance, and who mostly does business on the Santa Monica Pier as Madam Karma, Your Guide to the Spirit World; but who also subs as a waitress at The Ivy.

4. Rae’s immediate goal is to find a job that will allow her to devote time to writing poetry, which she has already begun to publish in respected journals.

5. On Craig’s List, Rae sees two promising job opportunities which will allow her to work from the comfort of her own home, “using materials that we will supply at our cost,” both of which turn out to be scams.

6. Attempting to get from Venice to a poetry reading in a Silver Lake bookshop, Rae is intimidated by the immensity of Los Angeles.

7. Returning to Craig’s List, Rae discovers a small used car lot on Lincoln Boulevard, where she buys a 1998 Honda Civic with a rusted tail pipe which John, the used car lot manager, assures her will pass the California Smog Test, or your money back.
8. On a recommendation from Madame Karma, Rae visits the Venice Cat Rescue, finds herself attracted to a short-tailed gray named Rexroth, then brings him home.
9. Rexroth sprays on a lower bookshelf, pretty much putting the finishing touches on a paperback copy of Middlemarch.
10. John, you know, from John’s Used Cars, calls to see is the Honda giving her any problems, using a tone of voice that leads Rae to think he is hitting on her.
11. Rexroth sprays on a pair of Nikes Rae was already thinking of discarding.
12. Madame Karma tells Rae that Rexroth will continue spraying until she gets him some toys, archly suggesting that all males love toys.
13. John, you know, John, calls to recommend a place for Rae to take the Honda for servicing, which just happens to be next to a cool Japanese restaurant which he would be happy to show her.
14. Rae is now positive John is hitting on her.
15. Madame Karma tells Rae she needs plants to brighten up her life.
16. The Sewanee Review, which is a pretty hot journal, accepts one of Rae’s poems, making her feel her life is already pretty bright.
17. John calls, wanting to know if maybe Rae likes Mexican more than Japanese because there is a pretty good Mexican restaurant on Rose Avenue.
18. Rexroth sprays in Rae’s closet, causing Rae to lose her temper and shout “What is it with you?” at him.
19. Madame Karma, who happened to be home when Rae shouted at Rexroth, has overheard the exchange, in response to which, she brings Rae a large basket containing toy mice, a ficus benjamina, and a catnip plant.
20. Rae begins to suspect Madame Karma of hitting on her.
21. Rae names the ficus benjamina Tireseas, agrees to the Mexican restaurant with John in order to send a subtle message to Madam Karma about the vector of her romantic interests.
22. Rexroth brings home an adolescent rat which he consumes in the bedroom, leaving the tail and an organ Rae cannot identify.
23. During the course of a telephone conversation in which he appears to Rae to be breathing heavily, John tells her he cannot get her out of his system.
24. Hearing this makes Rae put into actual words the awareness that she has never wanted to be lodged in anyone’s system.
25. Madam Karma warns Rae that men who are heavy breathers are likely to be snorers.
26. Madam Karma encourages Rae to use this time in her life to welcome new experiences and not be hung-up by preconceived notions.
27. Rae realizes she is more interested in continuing her tenancy in Madam Karma’s guest house than she is in reversing preconceived notions.
28. Madam Karma appears to take this in stride, tells Rae she is a splendid person, emphasizing the word “splendid,” then extracts from Rae a promise to let her know if she ever changes her mind.
29. Rae comes home from an interview for a job involving the sorting and cataloguing of the correspondence of European authors who were forced by the onset of World War II to migrate to the U.S., and who chose Los Angeles for more or less the same reasons she did.
30. The job is so spectacular in nature that Rae cannot even allow herself to hope she is the successful candidate.
31. In her not-daring-to-hope reverie as she walks down the aisle way between Madam Karma’s cottage and her own guest cottage, Rae thinks she has blundered on a potential cat fight.
32. Rae has actually walked past an encounter of some acrobatic intimacy involving Madam Karma and a young woman Rae recognizes as a checker in the neighborhood Albertson’s.
33. Hearing that she has been hired for the job, Rae celebrates by going to an expensive Japanese restaurant.
34. When she returns home, slightly giddy from sake and her good fortune, Rae finds slipped under the door a note from Madam Karma explaining that she was only trying to minimize her earlier disappointment.
35. Rae enrolls in a writing class at Santa Monica College, then wonders if she is being vainglorious with her impression that the instructor and one student were hitting on her.
36. Nonsense, Madam Karma tells her, hitting on young women is something everyone in Los Angeles does, almost reflexively as pinching young women is something everyone does in Italy, or being rude is something everyone in New York does.
37. Rae now has excellent reasons to believe the writing instructor, who seems to know what he is talking about, and the student was indeed hitting on her.
38. The writing instructor makes a statement that will make absolute sense to Rae for a number of months before she finds her own voice, then finds the pronouncement arbitrary: A short story, he intones, should not have more than forty beats.
39. Rae messes up in love, never mind with whom or why, resolves to do better next time, spends a good deal of time strolling through neighborhoods of Los Angeles talking to herself and when a policeman in Echo Park stops her, then asks, “Are you all right, miss?” she smiles brightly, as though it were a windy day in late October or into November, when you could see the peaks of the distant San Gabriel Mountains set against the pellucid sky, and she thinks aquamarine blue, pure aquamarine.
#

I do not claim to have invented this form. If anything, the form is a satire on post-modernism. Forgetting the matter of whether there is any faint dram of artistic merit in the story, this form, which was exciting to think about all the way through the rendering of the events, does something severe to the conventional form of the short story. I wanted to tell a story, which in this case is a mixture of events suggested me by a student, imagination, and my own standards of which elements should be included in a narrative.

Notice that each of these dramatic beats is one sentence. I am now at work on the second story about Rae in which each beat will be two sentences, one of narrative, the other of dialog. I can see the potential for yet another story, with three sentences to a beat, which will, if nothing else, have shown the author as Humpty-Dumpty, trying to put the conventional form, the form in which I am most used to writing, back together again. Thus I will have completed another (still metaphorical!) lap around the track, taking something apart, seeing how it works, sensing what doesn't work. Thus too, when I say as a reviewer/critic/teacher that I do not much care for the work of a particular writer, Donald Barthelme or Raymond Carver come to mind, the blaaat, Bronx cheer my inner critic renders will be from whence such things should emerge--the heart.

I Have Been Faithful to Thee...er, uh, Adele

My Moleskine notebook is often a promising last resource when searching, as today, for the equivalent of lecture notes for a class scant hours away.

This is week ten of a fifteen-week semester, at which point I have come to believe that I have already lectured, assigned, conversed, and otherwise consulted away the material I always consider around week one or two to be so abundant.

First things first: there was absolutely no help for a lecture topic in the Moleskine.

Second things second: an intriguing and vital topic came to mind, thus relieving the pressure and in a circuitous but familiar way, preparing the way for the subconscious to begin filling in the interstices as I write this.

Third things all present and accounted for. What I did find in the notebook was the hastily scrawled name, Adele Helen Flotinowicz, which gave me a momentary pang of wondering which student she was and how I had come to lose track of her. Was she a name scribbled down in order to answer a query from that most magisterial of Deans, Susan Kamei?

But stay you, gentle reader. Adele Helen Flotinowicz was no student of mine, she was a tangential relic from yesterday's blog about names. She was the much beloved of a minor Victorian poet, Ernest Dowsen, composer of the quivvery and orotund Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae. Adele Helen was as splendid a reason as Dowsen had for drinking himself to death with absinthe. No other reasons would sound so good for the ages. She, Adele, gave him early encouragement, but then settled for a tailor who occasionally waited tables at her father's restaurant.

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion...

Dowsen transformed Adele Helen Flotinowicz into a queen, having recalled his Latin lessons in Catullis: "The days when Cynara was queen are lost to me." Alas, it was not bad enough that Adele Helen went for the tailor, she also was victim of tuberculosis and the resulting ebbing away of her vitality. Ever the opportunist, Dowsen got the lines:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion;
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

So there we have it, the lost lilies, Adele's funeral lilies.

If you were to Google Cynara, you'd get the notion that one of the things that was in a name is thistle, which is to say artichoke.

I have been faithful to thee, Artichoke!

Nope. Doesn't get it.

What it comes down to is the individual taking whatever the individual gets in life. I noticed earlier today an infant porcupine being reclassified as a hedgehog, which in no way undercuts the inherent adorableness of the young animal in question, it merely asks us to transcend any negativity we might have about names and classifications.

Come to think of it, I, and a beloved dog once had an issue with a porcupine which meant finding a vet in Farmington, New Mexico, to remove from the nose of a blue-tick hound a number of porcupine quills. Does this make Smiler's porcupine, er, hedgehog any the less wonderful? Not a chance. That is one splendid porcupine, er hedgehog, er whatever.

But you see how even the genus species of the animal causes the language to go judgmental with that one whatever?

Eventually we will find out what Smiler has named her new friend and from that name be able to deduce things.

Oh, and by the way, the name of the dog who had to go to the vet in Farmington? Smith, Jedediah Strong Smith.

I for some time have been urging upon students the notion that the mere naming of a character brings that character to life. Now this observation extends to judgment. This certainly extends to animals. Only the other day I was speaking happily about a group of squirrels squatting in a tree adjacent to my study. "Them's nothing but rodents," one listener observed. And I immediately knew what he thought about squirrels and what I thought about him.

Names

Amazing to spend some time reflecting on the dramatic and emotional weight borne by names, even more amazing when we consider how much time we put into other aspects of the craft.

I got to thinking about this in context with two separate conversations I had with a man who apparently is everybody's favorite writer. Dutch. Elmore Leonard. Conversation Number One came when, as an employee of the same company that published him, I congratulated him on his break-out suspense thriller, then confessed my admiration for some of his Western stories and novels. It was in this context that we came to names and he spoke of a story in which he could not get a particular character to open up and reveal what he was doing in the story--in other words, what he wanted. Checking out some contemporary sources at the Tucson Public Library, Leonard came upon a story involving a prison guard (the same profession as his stubborn character) named Bob Isham, a name he promptly stole and gave to his character with the result that "I couldn't get that garrulous old coot to shut up."

Conversation Number Two came a few years later when I complemented him on a character of his I liked named Ernest Stickney, Jr. To which he replied, "Funny you should mention him. He's begun talking to me again. Wants his own book."

Indeed, Ernest Stickney, Jr. got his book. Stick.


Taking this meditation some distance, I realize there are persons I don't like and accordingly tend to equate them to their name, which influences what I name him or her in a story. To some extent, you can tell a person's approximate age and generation from as minor a thing as her name. Not all that long ago, counting classes and thesis advisement, I had six Jennifers, and now that I think about it, none of them could stand the other and indeed none of them liked her name, preferring some other version such as Jen, J, Jenny, and Fer.

I don't expect the reader to share my like or dislike of the name, but then I don't have to. I know I should work harder to let the characters be whoever they want and I try to let them introduce themselves to me. But Bob will always be a loser because of a particular Bob I grew up with. Not even the fact of my beloved sister having a boyfriend I much admired named Bob could trump my Bob, the Bob I still think about from time to time and picture him as he was at thirteen.

I've had two pretty good friends named Fred, although one of them became a Republican after a while and the other, a gifted musician, more or less drifted away from contact over a minor issue. Before I could track him down and say, damnit Fred, the news came that he had been eaten alive by cancer. Fred became an unh name thanks to James Thurber, who once remarked that Fred was the ideal name for an indecisive dog. Thus, so long Fred.

So here's the exercise. Get out your Excell chart and set off four columns, male names you like and don't like, female names you like and don't.

Keep the list close to had when setting forth.

Keep a pad next to the night stand in case you dream a particularly virulent name, an Estelle, for instance, or a Fahrquar, or a Bruce. Whoa, what about Gretchen? Can you imagine the mischief a Gretchen can cause?

Then there is the sophistication of mixing names and professions. I don't mind Eric, or even Erik. But if I had a plumbing problem and the emergency service sent over an Eric, I believe I'd send him home. Similarly, Lucinda is okay, but not the Lucinda who sometimes waits on me at the bank.

I believe I've hit a kind of emotional lode here. I know enough not to have a character named Bill in the same story as a character named Bob, but the charge of names has had the effect on me of a number of cups of coffee.

This is hot stuff.

This becomes the umpteenth chapter in my ongoing study, How to Write a Story without Being Able to Plot.

You don't need a plot if you have characters whose names give you emotional tweaking. To put it another way, if you've got a Bob or a Fred, why bother with rising action or reversal? Phil will always change his mind at a crucial time. Jack and Jake are reliable beyond belief. No matter what he tells you about his business successes, remember that for years, Harry was a bed wetter, and Phyllis is likely to talk your arm off, and although I've know some remarkable Esthers, they all, on second thought, bear uncomfortable resemblances to their dogs.

I would trust Mario as a mechanic but not a butcher; Art as a musician but not a psychiatrist. And Tony? No! We don't even mention Tony around here.

Used Book Store Redux

Next week will mark the one-year anniversary of my review being due on a weekly basis rather than affording the leisure of two weeks to read the work at hand. It was probably a reasonable fear speaking out when, as I sat in the editor's office and agreed to the new, weekly schedule, I suggested, How about if I alternate between new books and golden oldies. Of course, looking at the logic, I realize it takes just as long to read and review an old book as it does a new book, and so my reasonable fear, as in how am I going to fit that in, was speaking quite reasonably.

The cyber ink is still wet on my most recent review, a golden oldie, just spell-checked, copyedited, and sent off. The connect between this act and revisiting used book stores is not so tenuous as it might seem. When first published in 1965 by Viking Press, which among others, published John Steinbeck, Stoner by John Williams sold two thousand copies. Nevertheless, that was then, a different approach to taking on titles, and sure enough, John Williams went on to write another novel, an historical, that won the National Book Award.

The connect to used book stores is still coming, as in, I'd have to haunt one or, worse haunt Amazon.com to have found a copy of the original. Lucky for me, New York Review of Books has reissued Stoner in their splendid classics series. They also have a reissue of Mrs. Wharton's New York short stories which I'm about to dip into. Their Summer 08 catalog looks so hot I may be accused of a sweetheart deal if I ask for and review too many.

Used book stores are splendid venues for the good stuff from the past. Because there are so many flat-out bad books as well as books not to my taste, the search for something worthwhile, exciting even, intensifies the atmosphere of the read to come.

Twenty-six new books and twenty-six golden oldies a year. Nice balance.

There is a new Richard Russo, which I may have a go at for the next newbie, and in the interests of two birds with one stone, it might be fun to reread Mario Vargas Llosa's The Perpetual Orgy, which is a splendid study of Flaubert, which suits me quite well because there's some good stuff on Madam Bovary and said Bovary is a beehive of varying points of view, and on the weekend of the 11-12 of November, I have a longish workshop on, you guessed it, point of view.

I think there's a copy of The Perpetual Orgy in the garage somewhere; if I can't find it there, I can it the used book store on Anapamu and State and if they don't have it, there's Amazon and they're sure used book store, right?