Shocking the reader

After waiting several months with anticipation and then disappointment, I have finally found a review of my book How I Adore You. Marcy Sheiner reviewed it in The Spectator, 14 Jan 2002. This is the first real review of the book, as far as I know, and I'm glad of it.

I've met Marcy several times, and she's been supportive, if critical, of my work. I disagree, of course, with some of her opinions and her mostly negative evaluation of my book. I sense in her review, though, that she continues to support and respect my work.

I wanted to respond to one of the points she made in her review. She says:

The title story is one of two in the book written in a woman's voice, something Pritchard pulls off fairly well. The story begins with a promise: "It's not going to be top and bottom between us, Susan. It's just going to be real." Unfortunately, what follows is more shocking than real. Pritchard in fact revels in the art of the shock: I was on a panel with him once when he flung the most offensive material in his repertoire at a class of confused college kids. Not for nothing was the 'zine he used to publish called Frighten the Horses. No doubt, many radicals equate this ability to shock with some kind of revolutionary agenda - but I'm not one of them.

She goes on to discuss another piece, "the most shocking story in the book," Prom.

Both stories contain violence. In How I Adore You, the narrator tells about a past relationship where the play violence got out of hand. And in Prom (not "Prom Night" as she has it), the violence is out of hand pretty much throughout the story.

I deal with the outré aspects of Prom in both the book's afterword as well as in my comments on the story on this website, so I won't go into it at length here. Suffice it to say that I did not write this story simply to shock readers. Of course, I knew while I was writing it that people would find it shocking. I found it shocking while I was working on it, and many times I asked myself if I really wanted to go through with publishing it. But I felt the writing was good and that the story was genuine self-expression. Sheiner does not accept this reasoning -- she says she finds no redeeming value in the story at all -- and I respect her opinion while disagreeing with it. But I feel compelled to point out that the story also has a satirical element, which she ignores. I believe this element of satire, if nothing else, gives the story redeeming value, not just from a legal perspective, but from a literary one.

The title story is more complex and quite different in tone. It does surprise me that Sheiner was shocked by parts of this story. She doesn't say which parts, but I'm guessing they are the parts where the narrator recalls a past relationship in which committed acts of violence on her lover. While these incidents, depicted in flashback, involve extreme behavior, they don't come out of the blue. They are foreshadowed, and they are recalled in the context of an s/m scene happening in the present tense. By the time they are revealed, there's already been a lot of serious tussling between the two characters in the story, both physically and emotionally.

It is true the violent incidents in How I Adore You (the story) are calculated to give the reader a start when they are revealed. But that's different from them being gratuitous -- a charge Sheiner doesn't make explicitly, but implies. It's essential for the reader, and for Elena (the character the narrator is doing the scene with in present tense) to know about these events. If they're not revealed, the narrator would just seem a little neurotic and silly. Once we realize what sins she's committed in the past and what she's still capable of, Elena's unconditional love for her goes beyond a romantic conclusion of the story and becomes genuinely moving.

At least I think so. That story really means a lot to me, and I'm kind of disappointed a reader didn't connect with it. Oh well.

 Another New York Trip

We just got back from a few days in New York. The main reason we went there was for a book party for my friend Marilyn's book which she edited last year.

We spent the rest of the time just goofing around. Ask Cris and she'll tell you about a photo exhibit we saw at a place we always go to -- because it's close to the midtown hotel we always stay at -- the International Center of Photography. They had an exhibition of photos taken by North Vietnamese combat photographers -- very interesting.

We also saw an exhibit of those wild Henry Darger paintings -- he's that nut from Chicago who made all those long scroll-like fantasy paintings of the little girls fighting a war against the Glandolinians or whomever. Darger links:

- http://www.uiowa.edu/uima/darger.html
- http://henrydarger.tripod.com/

The weather was quite tolerable, except for the first evening. I have to say, it's so much nicer going there in the winter than in the dead of summer, like we did in July 2001. What a sweat broke out.

Now back to work... VERY busy for me. I mean my job. Cris is still lollygagging around the house, refusing to go to Dublin, Calif. -- a ghastly, centerless suburb 30 miles east of the City -- where Sybase moved in January. I mean, she is actually working out of the house. But she really is refusing, more or less, to go to Dublin.

I'm not getting much writing done, but a little, on weekends... I'm going on two business trips in the next few weeks and plan on holing up in my hotel as much as possible and writing there when I don't have to do something for work. I'm in the middle of Part 2 of my novel now, trying to get over the hump in the beginning of the third chapter of the part. I feel a real urgency to get this damn book finished and on to other projects. But it will still probably take another year at least even with steady work and discipline.

I'm doing zen meditation now. Every morning I drive to Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro for 6 a.m. meditation! I like it.

 
Macho creeps and other zen masters

Last night Cris and I went to see an entertaining play written by a local author, a comedy that looks at the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The play suggests that Shakespeare himself was merely a front, or beard -- thus the title "The Beard of Avon," yuk yuk -- for several different people in Queen Elizabeth's court, contributing only the odd poetic figure or monologue here and there.

That was fun, and light, and pretty well done. Outside it was raining and blustery, and this morning is gloriously clear and cold. I'm still getting up every morning at 5:25 and going over to the zen center in the Castro. They are friendly and encouraging. Today they gave me a copy of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," the classic collection of lectures by the Japanese guy who founded all the zen centers in northern California. It's one of those relics of the 60s that eveyrone in California reads sooner or later; the phrase "beginner's mind" has crept into the lexicon. I remember a dance teacher criticizing me in 1982 telling me I should "have more 'beginner's mind,'" and I didn't know what he was talking about. I really resented him saying that because his statement typified the kind of Californian arrogance that assumes everyone had read certain key alternative-movement texts. I suppose everyone had; but I only arrived in 1979, and I totally resisted all that shit at the time. I didn't want to be a hippie.

I'm also reading a collection of interviews of San Francisco poets of the Beat movement. It's interesting how many of these poets, who generally arrived in California in the 1940s or early 50s, became involved in zen.

I suppose that's all I'm going to notice for a few months. It's like when you buy a motorcycle and start riding it -- for several weeks you notice how many other motorcycles there are, and you feel like you're part of a big movement, when it's really just your perceptions that changed.

The Diane DiPrima interview is great -- she talks about how women were totally treated like beasts of burden by the macho male poets, who acted just like the macho men who were doing abstract expressionism. And there's plenty of evidence of that throughout the book, in interviews of people like Lew Welch. Even Gary Snyder -- he talks about all his experience with zen and all, but also takes pains to mention what a macho outdoor guy he was, "mountaineering" in his teenage years, working on a "trail crew," whatever that was, and generally being Mister Competent Alpha Male.

I get so tired of competent alpha males. There are plenty in business, of course -- it's the successful realm of ex-frat boys. There's a guy I work with who is never wrong, and who behaves impatiently if someone else displays less knowledge than he. Yesterday in a meeting, while someone on a conference call rattled on and on and repeated himself, this guy punched the "mute" button on the phone and shouted "Blah blah blah blah blah! I love the mute button! I love the mute button!" What a jerk.

Not that I'm above showing off or putting down people who I think are being stupid. In fact, I acted so superior when I was a kid that all the other kids basically ostracized me. It took me many years to see my part in this. I guess my co-worker is successful enough at hiding his scorn at key times so that a select group of people like and respect him; of course, they all consider themselves superior and more technical than everyone else.

This kind of elitism used to bug the hell out of me when I did contact improvisation. Now it bugs me in the software industry. I just think people should be more humble and egalitarian -- my own history as a know-it-all notwithstanding.