Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers

I love Westerns. I love a good story. I love 300-page books with super-short chapters. I love funny dialogue. I love narrators who digress.

I loved this book.

My wife got it for me for Valentine’s Day. I’d never heard of it. 100 pages in, I started reading it really slowly because I didn’t want it to end.

After I finished, I read some interviews with DeWitt, and found out that the novel was sort of an accident.

After his first novel, he’d been thrown off the scent of story, and was more concerned with “voice,” but he got really bored with his reading habits, and started re-reading some older favorites of his, rediscovering story as a kind of constraint. (He says now of his reading habits, “The moment it begins to feel like homework, I head for something more welcoming.”)

Then one day he scribbled “sensitive cowboys” on a piece of paper. He started thinking about how the neurotic is rarely featured in Westerns, instead, the hero is usually a “near mute man in black who kicks the devil in the dick before breakfast.”

So he wrote “a testy exchange between two men riding side-by-side on horseback. One of them was self-doubting and vulnerable, while the other was confident to a fault.” He didn’t know what to do with it, so he set it aside. Later, he found a book about the Gold Rush at a yard sale, and he remembered the two men. He wrote about forty pages before he discovered they were brothers. He says writing the dialogue “at times I felt I was eavesdropping.”

In the book, the brothers head out to kill a man named “Hermann Kermit Warm.” This character came about after DeWitt cut a photo of a prospector out of the yard sale book and tacked it up on his wall. The name however,

I didn’t make it up. I stole it. I was watching Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and a Hermann Warm was credited as the art director. He’s got a Wikipedia page and everything. I added the Kermit, because I like the musicality of the added syllables, but really, I just lifted it.

Another fun tidbit: at some point he realized he was spending too much time on the internet, and that he’d actually never gotten a good idea from there, so he had his wife change the wifi password.

Anyways, this is the best book I’ve read so far this year. Highly recommended.

Portrait of a fella reading Steal Like An Artist courtesy of Underground New York Public Library, a great blog featuring photos of people reading in the NYC subway. Very cool.

K.K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (2001) & Critical Assumptions (1984)

I don’t remember how exactly I found these books. I think I was Googling a bunch on originality and copying and imitatio while I wrote Steal, and the chapter in Assumptions on “Imitation and originality” was so good I went ahead and tracked down the book, then picked up Faking later.

These are thick, academic texts. Not by any means light reading, but man, if you are interested in ideas of originality, copying, and authenticity, there’s some good stuff here.

I particularly love this quote on influence from Critical Assumptions:

Our understanding of literary ‘influence’ is obstructed by the grammar of our language, which puts things back to front in obliging us to speak in passive terms of the one who is the active partner in the relationship: to say that Keats influenced Wilde is not only to credit Keats with an activity of which he was innocent, but also to misrepresent Wilde by suggesting he merely submitted to something he obviously went out of his way to acquire. In matters of influence, it is the receptor who takes the initiative, not the emitter. When we say that Keats had a strong influence on Wilde, what we really mean is that Wilde was an assiduous reader of Keats, an inquisitive reader in the service of an acquisitive writer.

Faking Literature might be an even better starting point, as a lot of Ruthven’s ideas about originality make their way into the chapter, “Fantasies of Originality.” (A title I just love.) Here’s a collage of phrases I have underlined:

…copying makes us what we are…all pretentions [to originality] are ludicrous…a student required to imitate canonical writers would not only appreciate their artistry but learn how to emulate or even surpass them…improving on it by doing something different…to write is ‘first of all to quote’…evolution in literature as in life depends on errors in the copying process…Since nothing human is created ex nihilo, everything is made of something else, and is in that respect a bricolage…good and bad borrowing…the disturbing recognition that plagiarism is not a corruption of literature but systemic to it…the fetish of originality, that mystification…by judiciously selecting precursors to steal from you actually ‘honor’ them with the ‘benediction’ of [your] theft…since writers tend to be readers, what they have read is likely to show up in what they write…

I could go on and on. What Ruthven is saying in the book is that even though we decry them and shun them, literary forgeries tell us just as much about literature as does literature itself, and that, in the end, all literature is a forgery.

When I mix all Ruthven’s thinking in with this Andrew Potter sentence from The Authenticity Hoax (“Plagiarism is the flip side of forgery: forgers pass off their own work as that of someone else, while plagiarists pass off the work of others as their own.”), it get all kinds of ideas. (I’m currently working on a little mini-essay presenting forgery as a better model for creative work than plagiarism, but I’m not quite ready to post it yet…)

Anyways, thank you Professor Ruthven!

Filed under: my reading year 2012.

Nabokov’s index cards.

“Nabokov wrote most his novels on 3” x 5” notecards, keeping blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck. Seen here: a draft of Lolita.”

Filed under: index cards

(via fuckyeahmanuscripts)