Be Careful About What You Snack on While Writing!

Brian Boyd wrote in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years that Nabokov compulsively smoked Gauloises while writing but after visiting a physician due to heart palpitations Nabokov was advised to give up smoking. To ward off the nicotine cravings he started "...compulsively devouring molasses candy..." and subsequently gained sixty pounds. 

Nabokov shared in a Playboy interview, "I became as stout as Cortez-- mainly because I quit smoking [while writing] and started to munch molasses candy instead, with the result that my weight went up from my usual 140 to a monumental and cheerful 200." 

According to Secret Lives of GREAT AUTHORS Balzac often wrote for fifteen hours per day while drinking fifty cups of Turkish coffee. Unsurprisingly. it's suspected that the copious amounts of coffee contributed to his early death.

Compared to Balzac, I drink a meager five to seven half cups of coffee per day, often while writing, with one teaspoon of organic cane sugar; however, when I decided a month ago to forgo the sugar I subsequently lost a considerable amount of weight. I went down a shirt size and two belt loops!

Thus, be careful about what you snack on while writing.

What is Appropriate for Young Adult (YA) Literature?

Emily Witt related in a New York magazine “Intelligencer” article that publishers have started referring to Young Adult (YA) literature as New Adult (NA) literature. Per the American Library Association (ALA), a young adult is someone between the ages of 12 and 18-years-old. But is content that is “appropriate” for 18-year-olds “appropriate” for 12-year-olds?

Let’s look at Lauren Myracle’s ttyl. Here’s Amazon’s plot summary of the YA\NA book:

This funny, smart novel follows the friendship of three 16 year old girls [Angela Silver Madigan, "Maddie" Kinnick , and Zoe Barrettas] they experience some of the typical pitfalls of adolescence: boys, queen-bee types, a flirty teacher, beer, crazy parents, and more. Lauren Myracle has a gift for dialogue and characterization, and the girls emerge as three distinctive and likable personalities through their Internet correspondence. This light, fast-paced read is told Entirely in instant message format, the first book ever for young adults to be written so.

Here are some content that I found surprising and wrote about in this “runaway” best-selling book written for teens:

Margaret, Angela’s high school friend, knows how to squirt. 

Margaret desperately wants to have a relationship with a bohemian Georgia State University (GSU) student, but she didn’t realize that 15-year-old Angela had a crush on the collegian as well.

It excited Angela to fantasize about her classmate's "summer sausage" while she did her homework.

15-year-old Maddie danced topless on a table at a GSU frat party as camera phones snapped away.

And in terms of the teacher/student relationship, Zoe was initially attracted to Mr. H, her English teacher, because, "... he's NICE. cuz he treated me like i was a person instead of a kid. that what was so great - we were just ppl having a discussion." Zoe and her teacher went out several times, but when Mr. H invited Zoe to join him in the hot tube wearing a pair of Speedos, he "paralyzed" her and she ended the relationship.

Apparently, some parents didn’t think that ttyl was “appropriate” for 12-year-olds, because the book is on the American Library Association's list of books parents want banned.

But what is appropriate for YA\NA “literature”?

Are You Pregnant [with Books]?

I'm currently working on a number of writing projects:

1. The 2nd edition of The Allure of Nymphets which has almost doubled in size 
2. A short story based on a harrowing month long event that I recently experienced  
3. A small non-fiction volume about an aspect of New York City
4. An essay on the striking similarities between monks and pimps
5. And a volume of verse

Thus, like the protagonist in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, I feel pregnant with books. 

As I say, the day began gloriously. It was only this morning that I became conscious again of this physical Paris of which I have been unaware for weeks. Perhaps it is because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely anymore. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world.

A Very Inspirational Vine for Writers

Brian William Koppelman,  the co-writer of Ocean's Thirteen and director of Solitary Man, has a very inspirational, set in Manhattan, Vine that he films for (screen) writers. 

In his latest Vine he gives his followers the "secret sauce" to success in Hollywood, "Hey, is there a magic for success in Hollywood? Do want the secret sauce? Unwavering belief. Total commitment. Rigorous work."

If you don't have a Vine account, you may want to get one just to follow Koppelman. (Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with Vine or Koppelman.)

Balzac: Prolific Writing, Turkish Coffee and Non-Ejaculatory Orgasms...

After I recently read in Secret Lives of GREAT AUTHORS that Balzac often wrote for fifteen hours per day, drank fifty cups of Turkish coffee per day, and practiced, as Deida recommends in The Way of the Superior Man, non-ejaculatory orgasms (It works!), I found my copy of Lost Illusions and re-read my dog-eared pages. I re-discovered some very interesting things. For example:

Print is to manuscripts what the stage is to an actress - it brings to light both beauties and defects; it may kill, or it may bring it to life; a flaw leaps to the eye, and so does a finely expressed idea. p. 376

And if you think that's interesting, check this out. I ordered my used copy of Lost Illusions from Amazon, and coincidentally, the copy I received from Amazon, was the very same copy that I borrowed from the New York public library - with my dog-ears intact.

Self-Published Greatest Masterpieces of the 20th Century

In a 1966 National Educational Television network interview, Nabokov opined that the "greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses; Kafka's Transformation; Bely's St. Petersburg; and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time." 

Coincidentally, Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time were self-published. Joyce and Proust weren't the only famous novelists to self-publish. For example, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and Mark Twain, to name a very few, were self-published as well. 

In some cases you could have a publisher/distributor but no money for printing like in the case of Henry Miller who needed Anaïs Nin to finance the printing of Tropic of Cancer.

Therefore, if you're having a hard time finding an agent and/or publisher you may consider joining the ranks of some very well-known self-published novelists and poets. 

Proust Recommends The Charming Bounce Back Technique

To be a charismatic conversationalist Cabane recommends in The Charisma Myth that one use the Bounce Back Technique. The idea of the technique is to keep the conversation on the other person because people will find you charismatic if you allow them to talk about themselves. Many people make the mistake of hijacking conversations. 

For example, if someone volunteers, "I went to L.A. for the weekend." 

Don't respond, "I went to L.A. about two weeks ago too. I went to visit my sister. There was so much smog there. And so much traffic. But we went to a really nice..."

It's better to respond with questions like, "Oh, how was it?" "Why did you go there?" "How 
long were you there?"

Here's The Bounce Back Technique:

1. Answer a query with a fact
2. Add a personal note
3. Redirect the query back to the questioner

e.g.,:

Question: "So, where are you moving to?"

Response: "To the East Village.[Fact] I need a lot of noise outside of my window to concentrate. [Personal note] Do you need silence to write? [Redirect]

And Botton relates in How Proust Can Change Your Life that Proust suggests that to be a good friend, one must keep the conversation on the other person.

Proust was of the understanding that one shouldn't assume that others are interested in his interests but that one should ask questions to avoid boring the listener. 

To be tactful, Proust recommends that one look to please others in his conversations by having them elaborate on their interests. And that one should abdicate his interests. 

Proust even opined that, ironically, the best friends are those that scorn friendships. Botton interprets Proust's position by writing that people who scorn friendships:

• have more realistic expectations of "friendships"
• avoid talking at length about themselves because they would rather avoid placing their life's in the fleeting and superficial medium of conversations
• feel that "friendships" are a means to learn about others - not lecture
• appreciate other's susceptibilities; thus, they feel that there is a need to show false amiability

Therefore, to be charming, tactful and a good "friend", one should use the Bound Back Technique in conversations. 

Write for Pleasure, Publish for Money

Lolita and Mr. Girodias
by Vladimir Nabokov

According to Nabokov, Mr. Girodias of Olympia Press agreed to pay him "an advance of 400,000 "anciens" francs (about a thousand dollars)" for Lolita. The first half of the advance was one month late, but after Nabokov grew impatient waiting for the second half, he wrote to Mr. Girodias, "I write for my pleasure, but publish for money." (Evergreen Review)

The Use of Double Entendre in LOLITA and Shakespeare

In an effort to study Nabokov's use of hidden meanings within Lolita, I read Eric Naiman's A Filthy Look at Shakespeare's "Lolita" where Naiman pointed out that upon the first reading of Lolita, one may miss the double-entendre in the following line.

"My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me."

It turns out that the French word for the sex organ (vit) is a homonym of the word for life. And if you consider that Lolita was twelve when she handled Humbert's life, the word life could be considered a double double-entendre. 

Rowe's Nabokov's Deceptive World has an entire chapter and an appendix devoted to Nabokov's use of sexual deception (i.e., sexual double entente). For example, Lolita wrote the following in a letter to her mother and Humbert from camp:

I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. [Nabokov's brackets.]

The reader learned later in the novel that "sweater" was a reference to 12-year-old Lolita's virginity. The initial reference was to Lolita's "virgin wool sweater", and the subsequent reference was to her virginity, which she lost to Charlie in the woods at camp. 

But that's not all! Nabokov drew the reader's attention to the letter "I" by writing it once, crossing it out and writing it again, which is interesting when the reader considers that "I" and "eye" are references to the "female sexual symbol".

Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. "Good-goody," she said nictitating.

Nabokov used the same literary technique that was used by Shakespeare, which Eric Partridge spelled out in Shakespeare's Bawdy. Here's an example of Shakespeare's use of double-entendre in the poem "Venus and Adonis":

‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here  

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;  

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:  

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,  

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.  

  

‘Within this limit is relief enough,  

Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain,  

Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,  

To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:  

Then be my deer, since I am such a park;  

No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’  

The bold (pun intended) words are defined below:

park - the female body regarded as a domain where a lover may freely roam

deer - figuratively used of man and woman in reference to sexual activities. Possibly influenced by the homophone, (one's) dear or darling. 

mountain - pleasant eminences: breasts, buttocks, and thighs

dale - valley between breasts

fountain - breasts

bottom-grass - the hair growing in and about the crotch [i.e., pubic hair]

plain - belly 

hillock - buttocks

brakes - pubic hair

Why didn't we learn about Shakespeare's bawdy in high school? According to Partridge, Shakespeare's works were bowdlerized prior to the 1960s. 

And if that isn't interesting enough, what about the fact that Adonis was born of an incestuous relationship between Myrrha, a nymphet, and Cinyras, her father?

Was Michael Jordan Like d'Annunzio, Beethoven and Mozart?

Recently, I was in a hotel on Michael Jordan's birthday and ESPN was running a tribute to the great basketball player. In one of the segments Matt Doherty, Jordan's former teammate at the University of North Carolina, implied that Jordan's greatness was inherited from birth and that no matter how hard another basketball player worked, he couldn't achieve Jordan's stature. Needless to say, I was infuriated by Doherty's comments, because Jordan became a great basketball player through hard work. 

But Doherty is no anomaly in this instance. It is common for commoners to believe that great people were born great. For example, Shenk relates in The Genius in All of Us that people believed that Beethoven and Mozart could see music when they were born. But "[i]n truth, their ability to "see" music came only after years of intensive work-and in Beethoven's case, after horrific abuse. 

Even in fiction great people have to work hard to do well. A protagonist in Nabokov's The Gift was a very hard worker and a focused writer who avoided wasting time:

He worked so feverishly, smoked so much and slept so little that the impression he produced was almost frightening: skinny, nervy, his gaze at once blear and piercing, his hands shaky, his speech jerky and distracted (on the other hand he never suffered from headache and naively boasted of this as a mark of a healthy mind). His capacity for work was monstrous, as was, for that matter, that of most Russian critics of the last century. To his secretary Studentski, a former seminarist from Saratov, he dictated a translation of Schlosser's history and in between, while the latter was taking it down, he himself would go on writing an article for The Contemporary or would read something, making notes in the margins.

And how about Gabriele d'Annunzio who was arguably the greatest Italian poet of all time? Here's an excerpt from Hughes-Hallet biography. It exemplifies how d'Annunzio was a hard worker even as an adolescent:

I was infuriated by Doherty's comments, because it gives the impression that greatness comes from birth and cannot be achieved through hard work, self-confidence, and self-efficacy or through charisma as Cabane summed up in The Charisma Myth.