Baseball is done for the season — sad, but also a relief as it had become like a vortex that sucked three to four hours out of each day. A side observation: If you’re a writer who struggles with titles (“‘Smoke.’ No, wait: ‘Revelation.’“), you might want to turn on a game. Over the past few weeks I noticed that good novel titles were just tripping off the tongues of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (particularly McCarver’s), and I began to wonder if generating novel titles is perhaps a natural gift of sports broadcasters, one that waits to be tapped by arty America.
Admittedly, Buck and McCarver’s titles are a little repetitive in construction, but they show a good sense of the commercial market, and, if you’re really blocked, Joe and Tim are even kind enough to sketch out a rough storyline that could be used as a starter to get you typing. Thanks to them, I now have an idea for a ranging baseball trilogy, along the lines of William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, composed of these titles:
• The Wildness of Fausto Carmona: A Thorn Birds-y saga of innocence lost at the ALCS.
• The Free Spirit of Jonathan Papelbon: They tried to tame him. They failed.
• The Unpredictable Strike Zone of Chuck Meriweather: A heavily philosophical novel, almost Eastern European in tone, exposing a universe where a capricious god rules from behind the plate.
I haven’t yet watched a football game with this theory in mind, but I’m looking forward to hearing what novel titles Madden comes up with. With Vitale, of course, all you’d get is Diaper Dandy and everyone knows Dick Lit doesn’t sell.

Playing in the gutters over at TEV, I came across this little gem, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2001 and kindly reproduced by Mark in the comments to a recent discussion. I like Elmore Leonard novels but I hate rules for fiction, which so often read like instructions for making a polyester blend sweater: Follow them unswervingly and you will end up with something serviceable, yes, but a little slick and uniform and itchy.* So this was satisfying:

NB J.C. 27 July 2001 
The fashionable crime writer Elmore Leonard has published his ten rules for writing fiction. Here they are: 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”. 5. Keep your exclamation marks under control. 6. Never use the word “suddenly”. 7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Ditto, places and things. 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 
The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to “stop and get the dictionary” – as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he “never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary”). And what is meant by “leave out the part that readers tend to skip”? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find “remarked”, “answered”, “interposed”, “almost groaned”, “wonderingly asked”, “said simply”, “sagely risked” and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into “said”?

As for the first rule, see the opening of Bleak House.
* As I prepare this post, a hyperbolic amount of ire keeps creeping in. I keep wanting to type things like “bane” and “vile” and “slavish devotion to mediocrity,” like there is a tiny English countess inside me who really has it in for writing rules. (Her glittering opus rejected, her resplendent accounts of the weather unhailed.) I blame too many workshops spent across the table from adherents to the rule that the active voice is always better than the passive voice. The countess says: Their heads would be better off.

• In the Times of London, John Carey reviews The Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid, and makes me want to read it rather desperately. (Via Paper Cuts.)
Earlier this month The Telegraph ran a three-part serial of excerpts from the letters: Part 1; Part 2; and Part 3. Not surprisingly, the extracts focus on Hughes’ letters to and about Sylvia Plath, a relationship that, for me, has long been picked clean — I believe Gwyneth declaiming Shakespeare by candlelight marked the official end — but it may be worth the occasional bite of carrion for lines like: “Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died” (from a letter to his sister Olywn); and, from a letter to Plath, “Who does Salinger copy? or Eudora Welty? All the good ones have invented their own manner in their own private rooms. … Just write it off, in your own way, and make it stand up off the page and jump about the room.”
• The New York Times archives on Hughes are a trove, containing the first chapter of his Ovid translation as well as W.S. Merwin’s review, in 1957, of Hughes’s first book of poems. The review begins:

Ted Hughes is a young English poet; “The Hawk in the Rain” is his first book. Its publication gives reviewers an opportunity to do what they are always saying they want to do: acclaim an exciting new writer. There is no need, either to shelter in the flubbed and wary remark that the poems are promising. They are that, of course; they are unmistakably a young man’s poems, which accounts for some of their defects as well as some of their strength and brilliance. And Mr. Hughes has the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than commonly where he will go from here, not because you can’t guess but because you venture to hope.

We’re off to a murky gray morning here in the mountains. Last night my book club met, and we had a special guest, Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World. Katherine was inveigled to join us for the evening by one of our members who teaches with her at UNCA. As Tingle Alley readers will already know, my book club’s been meeting about eight years and in that time we’ve grown a little loose and informal in our approach: Currently there’s seven of us, and we meet at each other’s houses every month or so to drink, eat, gossip, and sometimes (but not always) discuss the assigned novel. We’ve never once assayed the questions for reading groups provided by publishers at the end of books; and we sometimes skip reading a book altogether in favor of an article or short story, and there is nothing satiric you can say about any of this that we haven’t already noted.
With Katherine as our guest, however, we mustered a slightly more on-point discussion, while also eating stew, crusty bread and plum crisp, and putting away serious amounts of red wine. I need to get some work done this morning, but wanted to point your attention to an excellent interview with Katherine at The Mumpsimus. She’ll be reading at Malaprop’s on Saturday, November 3rd — and if you live in Asheville, you should attend.

The fourth season of Project Runway premieres Nov. 14. In the meanwhile, episodes of Project Runway Canada are surfacing for brief intervals online. Before its sure evanescence, watch Episode 2 here. So far the show’s been excellent, with stronger production than the British Project Catwalk, which had an improvised-on-a-shoestring feel to its first two seasons. (Link courtesy of Project Rungay.)
In this episode: Lincoln will break your heart Malan style, you’ll be relieved Megan can’t make fleurchons, and Kendra throws a few Wendy Pepper shadows of insecurity against the wall, a shame because, unlike Wendy Pepper, she makes beautiful clothes. And that Iman, fierce queen of the runway, eh?

• I spent last Saturday on the couch reading and bawling over Amy Bloom’s Away. It’s a marvelous novel, as good as the reviews promised. The novel was as psychologically acute as I expect from Bloom — as a writer, she is both so comprehending and tender about the human animal — but the prose seemed more charged than anything I’ve read of hers previously. If you haven’t read it yet I don’t want to ruin the best sections for you, so some incidental flourishes: A woman overheard embarking on a disastrous love affair has a laugh like “the sound of bells on a warhorse”; a man in the act is described as “soft as oatmeal”; a wife complains that her husband’s labors over her during lovemaking were like “a man sawing wood.” What I really want to share is a section that comes late in the book, a meditation on Prosperine in the underworld, that knocked my socks off, but that seems unscrupulous. Like revealing a movie’s best bit in the trailer.
It’s been a while since I bawled over a novel; it’s such an odd thing when it happens. Sure, you expect to cry when Dickens gets an orphan on the slab but otherwise, what provokes it? With Away the leaking started somewhere in the first couple chapters and I just gave myself up to it. The last time a book made me cry was a Kleenex-strewn weekend, late in 2005, which stands out because it was a two-fer of tears, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, after which I looked like a soggy lump with pink-eye. (Or as my friend Hortense would say, “my eyes were puckered tight as a rat’s a**hole.”) With all three of those novels it wasn’t necessarily specific events in the novel that triggered the waterworks, just an underlying tug of sorrow over wasted or lost chances. Middle-aged sadness. (OGIC and TT, any weepers for you?)
Ever since her collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, I’ve envied Bloom’s gift for titles. In that vein Away has some excellent chapter titles, like “I’ve Lost My Youth, Like a Gambler with Bad Cards,” “If I Had Chains, I Would Pull You to Me,” and “Ain’t It Fierce to Be So Beautiful, Beautiful?” Also a great first line: “It is always like this: The best parties are made by people in trouble.”
• On Sunday my husband and I were turned away from a sold-out matinee of Ratatouille at Asheville Pizza, so we went to Malaprop’s instead. I picked up the Best American Essays edited by David Foster Wallace and a copy of Walden, which I read and detested in college but hope to feel more beneficently toward now.
Also being read this week:
• Edith Wharton’s The Reef, Henry James’ favorite of her novels
• Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of The Metamorphoses

• Crooked House gets all Shelby Foote on the Fairy Tale War of the ’20s and ’30s, a period when librarians went mano y mano in a heated debate over whether kids’ lit should go mimetic or stay magical. A dark yet heady time: Warhorses ranged on one side of the battlefield, centaurs and unicorns on the other; the fierce yet oddly hushed clash of battle …
If you’re interested, Natalie Reif Ziarnik’s From School and Public Libraries: Developing the Natural Alliance provides more background on the debate (see pages 10-14). If you’re not interested, then I recommend pegging back to Crooked House for a discussion of “The Road as parenting book.”
• “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Andersen.

• When I’m at loose ends at the library or a used bookstore I’ll look through the stacks for the green spines that mark a Virago paperback; even if I’ve never heard of the author I know I’ll go home with an interesting book. In a tribute to the series, Jonathan Coe makes some trenchant observations on the critical dismissal of female authors, then and now.
• The new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review is devoted to “South America in the 21st Century.” Among the online offerings: A piece on the effects of ecotourism on the Galápagos and an excerpt from Roberto Ubiquibolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas.