Bjork on music press sexism

Pitchfork has a report on recent comments from Bjork about the music press’s frequent failures to give women artists full credit for their work. She talks about how men involved with the technical end of her record Vespertine have often mistakenly been given credit for more substantial creative work like production and arranging, and also about how the music press has similarly inflated the importance of Diplo’s work with M.I.A. The undercurrent here is that the press often assumes lesser creative roles for women who in truth do a great deal of their own production and arranging work. Women are understood to be singers, and little more; for everything else, the press figures there’s bound to be a man tending to things somewhere in the background.

Pitchfork’s news story is half-apologetic, half-defensive—but I’d say that even quite apart from this particular situation, they often fall very far short in terms of their treatment of women artists. For example: take a look at the lineups for the Pitchfork Music Festival these past four years, and you’ll see very few female artists and female-led bands. This year, for example, they might easily have booked any number of female artists who are presently doing substantial and interesting work in the indie rock mode—why not St. Vincent, or Nina Nastasia, or Marnie Stern? Pitchfork also very rarely gives women artists a heavily favorable lead review, or does much to promote them into band-of-the-moment status. St. Vincent did get that kind of momentary buzz-band boost, but then come the end of 2007, her very fine record Marry Me didn’t even make the cut for their annual Top 50 list. Or, take the way that women artists are often taken to task in reviews for failing to meet preconceived ideas about what a female performer ought to be doing:

Case’s lungs-for-days Dollywood boom may be as direct an emotional instrument as there is in contemporary music, but her increasingly prominent songwriting skills tend to eschew visceral connections for intellectual intrigue and poetic mystery– and Flood features Case’s most cryptic lyrics to date. The odd disconnect here between singer and songwriter is absorbing: Though shaded by finely-tuned, country-noir twang, the rapturous belter’s high-minded lyrical aspirations often undermine her throat’s unhindered veracity….As a refined version of Blacklisted, Flood provides alluring riddles and obsessive desolation, Case subverting her easy-access vocals with difficult abstractions and heady projections. Yet, after fishing through Flood’s 12 intricate tracks, a plainspoken love song delivered in that voice would not be unwelcome.

That’s from the Pitchfork review of Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, in which critic Ryan Dombal expresses a wish that Case would just quit it with all this complex poetic songwriting business and get back to singing “plainspoken love song[s]” like a good, simple woman singer should. What really gets me here is that Dombal even seems to think that Case’s “difficult abstractions and heady projections” do make for good songs—but he would seem to prefer it if she’d stick to a more conventionally-accepted role for a female performer, that of the big-voiced country chanteuse.

In any case: kudos to Pitchfork for at least mentioning the issue. If Bjork’s comments lead to any more self-examination around their offices, it’s bound to be a good thing. But meanwhile I’m not holding my breath for more substantial coverage of women artists in the music press.

The New York Times style police

For those of you fascinated by things like the official difference between “premiere” and “premier” and the original meaning of the phrase “begs the question,” I’d like to recommend After Deadline, a Times Topics blog to which deputy news editor Philip B. Corbett makes weekly posts about the varied and numerous stylistic errors that slip by the New York Times copyeditors and make it into print. In this space, Corbett (who maintains the paper’s official style manual) points out not only plain and simple mistakes (such as “parking break” for “parking brake,” or “G.I. track exam” for “G.I. tract exam”), but also tracks incidences of cliche, colloquialism, and many other kinds of stylistic sloppiness. Writers and grammar geeks would be well-advised to check it out.

Zadie Smith on E.M. Forster

In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith has used the release of a collection of E.M. Forster’s BBC radio broadcasts as an occasion to examine his tendency to walk “the middling line” as a novelist and a critic. Smith’s affection for Forster is well known—her novel On Beauty even begins with an allusion to Howards End. Though here she briefly entertains the idea that Forster’s middlebrow sensibilities might have limited his powers, it’s little surprise that she judges in his favor in the end, concluding that his open-minded moderation made it possible for him to see more clearly than many of his more aesthetically partisan peers.

I was particularly struck by what Smith had to say about Forster’s attitude toward his audience. She writes: “He was the sort to send one manuscript to Virginia Woolf, another to his good friend Sergeant Bob Buckingham of the Metropolitan Police, and fear the literary judgment of both.” Unlike Joyce or Woolf, he worried about being able to reach a broad audience; but at the same time, he did also value the power and sophistication of “highbrow” literature. Smith perceptively puts her finger on the core values underlying Forster’s attitude toward his audience:

It really didn’t matter to Forster if a fellow had read Yeats or not (he is consistently sentimental about the unlettered: peasants, sailors, gardeners, natives). But to deny Yeats, because he was not to your taste, or to deny poetry itself, out of fear and incomprehension— that mattered terribly. The only philistinism that counted was the kind that deforms the heart, trapping us in an attitude of scorn and fear until scorn and fear are all we know.

What’s important is not literary sophistication itself, but rather being open to its powers and pleasures—as well as to the powers and pleasures of works that might not have met the approval of a serious-minded literary elitist like Eliot. This, I think, is a principle that I can very much get behind: the idea of approaching literature (or any kind of art) with an open mind and an open heart.

Second Graders Love John Coltrane

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (registration required) ran a charming piece by Nat Hentoff about a class of second graders in Queens who’ve become such passionate fans of John Coltrane that they’ve begun holding “raffles, cake sales, and books sales” in order to save his Long Island home from being torn down by a developer. (It’s now looking likely that the house will, indeed, be preserved.)

Coltrane lived on Long Island during the last years of his life—the house was where he composed A Love Supreme and all his other late, great works. The students were introduced to Coltrane by their teacher, Christine Passarella, who discovered that her students responded enthusiastically, even passionately, to Coltrane’s music when she played it in the classroom. According to Hentoff:

John Coltrane, "Interstellar Space"

Ms. Passarella’s second-grade students, she says, would have told him how moved they were by not only the ballads “but the more avant-garde recordings, such as ‘Interstellar Space.’” She notes that, through her teaching, “I have discovered that young children have open, welcoming minds, and the more pure and emotional the music, the more they connect. Soon they were hooked on John Coltrane’s music.”

Many jazz fans and critics hate Coltrane’s “late period” work, put off by its perceived harshness and difficulty. But I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten myself thoroughly lost in late records like Meditations or Ascension, which I’d argue are among the most beautiful in Coltrane’s catalog. I’m sure it would have made Coltrane very happy to know that these children are able to connect to his music so directly—he’d be pleased to hear that people who aren’t burdened by lots of musical expectations and experience are able to get right to the heart of his expression. Folks who get caught up in one narrow idea or another about what jazz or music ought to sound like would do well to pay attention to the way these kids are approaching Coltrane’s late-period, avant-garde work: with open minds and open hearts. It’s music that you can understand intellectually, and place in historical and musical context—but that’s not at all where its power can be found. With records like Meditations or Interstellar Space, it’s far better to close your eyes, open your heart, and just give yourself over to the music, while maintaining as much of a child’s openness and innocence as you can manage.

William Hogarth, Richard Martin, class, and animal rights

William Hogarth, "The Second Stage of Cruelty"

In her recent book For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement (see below), Kathryn Shevelow uses the anti-cruelty engravings of 18th-century artist William Hogarth as one example of the ways in which ideas about class shaped early English efforts at protecting animals from cruelty. In the world of Hogarth’s engravings, it’s working-class people who are most often shown tormenting animals: he depicts a cart driver savagely beating a horse, a rough-and-tumble crowd chasing after a bull with sticks, and urchins torturing dogs on the street. Hogarth certainly also believed that the members of the upper class could be guilty of cruelty—but it’s telling that he chose to focus on depicting acts of violence against animals perpetrated by poor people, rather than by (say) noblemen on a fox hunt. Later in her book, Shevelow points out that early efforts at legislating against animal cruelty were likewise aimed squarely at pursuits favored by the lower classes. Sport fox hunting wasn’t banned in England until 2002; but bear-baiting came under consistent attack early in the 19th century. Conservative legislators who opposed animal cruelty legislation frequently (if disingenuously, as very few of them could honestly claim to have the best interests of the poor at heart) argued that such bills should not be passed because they unfairly targeted the working class. Why forbid bear-baiting, cocktossing, and the abuse of draft animals, but not fox hunting or other bloodsports favored by the elite? Animal protection advocates were thus painted as inconsistent, hypocritical classists and elitists whose real objectives had less to do with protecting animals than with looking down their noses at the behavior of ordinary people.

Reading these centuries-old arguments, I was struck by how similar they are to one line of argument commonly applied today in opposition to the adoption of many environmentally-friendly practices. The argument typically goes something like this: organic food is expensive, a luxury item accessible only to those elitist latte-sipping, NPR-listening liberals who have enough money and leisure to worry about such things. Or: hybrid cars aren’t really about protecting the environment; they’re about proving that you’re better than your poorer neighbors who can’t afford them. I find this kind of reasoning maddening, but also somewhat difficult to counter, because it does contain more than a grain of truth. Many well-off liberal environmentalists are, indeed, elitists who hold themselves superior to the masses because they buy hybrids or organic food (or fair-trade coffee or what have you); and many of them do, indeed, fail to consider that many people simply can’t afford to buy environmentally-friendly household goods or adopt green lifestyle practices. In many respects, being green is a privilege available only to the well-off and well-educated.

But of course that in no way changes the fact that organic produce (for example) is better for the environment than its conventionally-grown equivalents—and it’s telling that this kind of argument often comes from the mouths of conservatives, who in some cases are no more likely to be true champions of the poor than was an 18th-century British lord. Self-satisfied elitism is obnoxious, and people should be called out on it—but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the genuinely environmentally-friendly practices and products that elitists have sometimes been among the first to adopt. Rather than condemning people who buy a hybrid or an organic apple for their elitism, we should ask the question of how we can make hybrids and organics affordable for everyone. And surely if most people can’t afford to adopt environmentally friendly practices, it’s that much more important for those who can afford it to do so.

Further, the onus is on people in positions of privilege to do whatever they can to help the rest of the world catch up. One current example: instead of complaining about developing nations’ failures to adopt more stringent carbon dioxide emissions standards, rich nations ought to be putting their financial and technological muscle behind efforts to make green practices more practical and affordable everywhere on earth. Again, Shevelow’s book offers a relevant example. When animal cruelty legislation was finally passed in 1822, it forbade the abuse of horses, donkeys, and other animals that were frequently employed in the everyday working lives of England’s poorer citizens. The legislation’s chief sponsor—a charismatic and eccentric Irish aristocrat named Richard Martin, who was famed as a duelist in his youth and who was known to switch between a rich populist brogue and a refined upper-crust accent as the occasion warranted—was known to actually patrol the streets in order to catch Londoners in the act of abusing their animals. More often than not, the men Martin brought to court were poor—but, recognizing this fact, Martin would often pay the fines levied against the very person he’d testified against moments earlier, just so long as he felt assured that they’d learned their lesson and would not abuse any animals in the future. Martin recognized that the point of his legislation wasn’t to make poor people pay fines; instead, it was to prevent animals from being abused, and he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make certain that this end was actually served.

Martin’s behavior here is a bit uncomfortably paternalistic for my tastes—any contemporary model for change really ought to incorporate solutions that empower disadvantaged people to work to address the roots of their concerns. But regardless, people in positions of privilege do need to be keenly aware of the ways in which their own practices and goals might place economic or other pressures on other people. To extend the comparison further, here’s Shevelow on Hogarth:

The audience Hogarth could and did reach comprised middle- and upper-class people who, though they might not have acknowledged it, shared culpability for tolerating such cruelty and often benefited from the overloaded wagon or whip-driven stagecoach. These were also the people who were positioned by class, education, and income to create and support a reform movement dedicated to seeking recourse in the law.

Even if you’re not holding the whip yourself, the chances are very good that you are contributing to the abuse, and so it’s up to you to take the necessary steps to promote positive change.

Solnit on the Olympics and politics

The always-wonderful essayist Rebecca Solnit (who I’ve written about here several times before) has written a fine new article on the Olympics and politics for the latest issue of Orion Magazine.

In the article, Solnit examines the relationship between athleticism, nationalism, and politics, arguing that the Olympics’ “no-politics” rules do not so much remove politics from the Games as reinforce the politics of the status quo. Solnit writes:

The athletes’ bodies are relentlessly particular, concrete, personal, and tangible: the reality of flesh, of heart, of effort, of this tense face, that muscled arm, that DNA, and that training and determination. This is why it’s so peculiar that the Olympics suspend these bodies in an abstracted superstructure of nationalism, as though this feat of balance really had something to do with Austria, that burst of power really represented Japan.

In the Olympics, the individual athlete becomes a representative of national identity—the “public face” or “mask” of a nation. We’re asked to forget that the vast and awesome spectacle of the Chinese games comes at a great cost, and that for every Olympic athlete who is celebrated, there are thousands or millions of other people who suffer in repression and poverty. Solnit goes on:

It serves the nations of the world to support the exquisitely trained Olympian bodies, and it often serves their more urgent political and economic agendas to subject other bodies to torture, mutilation, and violent death, as well as to look away from quieter deaths from deprivation and pollution. In the struggles for land and resources—for Chinese control of Tibet, and for the petroleum fields of Sudan and the timber and mineral wealth of Burma—bodies are mowed down like weeds. The celebrated athletic bodies exist in some sort of tension with the bodies that are being treated as worthless and disposable.

I’ve been enjoying watching the Olympics this summer—I’ve been astounded and amazed again and again by the remarkable feats of athleticism that I’ve witnessed, and on a number of occasions I’ve found myself on my feet and cheering for great performances. But at the same time, I share Solnit’s discomfort with the political context of the Games. I’m disturbed by the stories of children being taken from their families at the age of three to begin training to become a world-class gymnast, and by the simple and obvious fact that athletes from rich countries (and those who can train in rich countries) are the ones who succeed at the Games, whereas athletes from poorer countries win medals much less frequently. I’m also troubled by the complete absence of any images of China’s millions and millions of poor people, and by the general silence of the television commentators on the ways in which so much about China has been carefully hidden in order to present a proud and cosmopolitan face to the world. There’s much to be said for the Olympic vision of international athletic competition as a means to unite the world; but I think the Olympics can’t really take credit for fostering international cooperation if the only means by which they can achieve it is to put on such a dramatic spectacle that we momentarily ignore or forget all that environmental degradation, political repression, poverty, and war.

Hip-hop scholarship

Pitchfork TV has produced an excellent new documentary on Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, complete with new interviews with Chuck D and the Bomb Squad (among others). The full documentary (presently available as a special presentation on the Pitchfork site) has three parts, and all are well worth watching, but I was most fascinated by the second (which unfortunately I cannot embed below, due to restrictions on the use of Flash video put in place by WordPress).

In the second part of the documentary, the members of Public Enemy discuss the expert knowledge and painstaking labor that went into crafting the music on It Takes a Nation, describing how their intimate familiarity with thousands of records gave them the ability to choose the perfect samples and sounds to use in order to achieve their musical and thematic objectives. Crate-digging on this level is not only an art, but also a kind of scholarship: it’s a matter of sifting through countless hours of material from the past, building on what came before in order to infuse new work with a greater depth of cultural meaning.

An 18th-century robot duck

Vaucanson's Duck. Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

I’ve recently begun reading Kathryn Shevelow’s For the Love of Animals, a history of the origins of the animal protection movement focused on England in the 17th through 19th centuries. The book’s been informative and enjoyable thus far, and one early passage in particular has tapped into a longtime fascination of mine for 18th and 19th-century technologies that presage the 20th century in strange and wonderful ways. I’m thinking here of people like Charles Babbage (who designed what was essentially a mechanical computer) and Ada Lovelace (who wrote a paper describing what is considered to be the first computer program, a good century before there was a computer to run it). In her book, Shevelow mentions an automaton of which I was previously unaware:

In 1739, the French inventor and engineer Jacques de Vaucanson fashioned a duck-shaped automaton of gilt copper that featured hundreds of moveable parts and innards made of rubber tubing. This remarkable mechanical duck moved its head, craned its neck, stirred water with its bill and drank it, quacked, stretched its leg, flapped its wings, shook its tail, swallowed grain, and ‘digested’ food—then excreted it. Open panels in the duck’s sides allowed one to view its rubber intestines in action. Having created a sensation in Europe, Vaucanson’s duck crossed the channel to London in 1742, where it flapped, ate, and shat in the Royal Opera House four times a day, to the delight and wonder of the British public.

I love the simultaneous rational seriousness and lowbrow showmanlike appeal of Vaucanson’s duck: in its time, it was a dazzling display of mechanical inventiveness and cutting-edge scientific knowledge, but also an entertaining and somewhat vulgar spectacle. The duck gave its audiences a literal window into mechanical marvels, as well as an embodied display of contemporary philosophical and scientific ideas about animals. And as a bonus, they got to see it poop, in the same place where the King came to see the opera.

Struggling to stay positive

The Hold Steady, "Stay Positive," Vagrant Records, 2008

At this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, the Hold Steady tore through a loud and rambunctious set of balls-out rock with evident passion and glee. Frontman Craig Finn egged the crowd on with irrepressible energy—throwing his hands in the air, running up right to the edge of the stage and leaning over, as if he might transmit some of his overflowing happiness directly to the fans if he could only get a little bit closer. On stage, the Hold Steady are infectiously engaged performers; their wide eyes, big dumb riffs, and two-necked guitar solos have renewed my faith in good old rock and roll’s continued power to create experiences of cathartic fist-pumping joy.

Stay Positive, the new Hold Steady record, is (for better or worse) a much less joyous affair than the band’s live performances. If 2006′s Boys and Girls in America was a boozy, rollicking party staggering toward dawn, Stay Positive is the depressing hangover lingering well into the next afternoon. As on the three previous Hold Steady albums, Finn spins engrossing poetry about parties, drugs, groupies, and God, all channeled through the persona of a jaded, aging scenester. But while the previous records tended to feature both the giddy, excited rush of high times and also the sometimes unpleasant consequences, on Stay Positive, Finn narrows his attention to focus primarily on what (and who) gets lost, battered, and broken by the time the wild night drags to its druggy, thoroughly messed-up close.

“Sequestered in Memphis” at first seems little more than another wry and catchy Craig Finn tune about a party gone awry—this time the characters end up in court, but otherwise it’s basically the same old story. But here Finn is also using the song as a frame in order to hint at some meta-frustrations: “I guess I’ll tell this story again,” he says, heavily self-conscious that he’s re-working the same lyrical territory yet again. It’s a hint of a confession—one which the album’s closer, “Slapped Actress,” completes with thorough, uncomfortable, and surprising honesty. With “Sequestered,” Finn sets us up for what would seem to be an ironic nod-and-wink between performer and audience, a tip of his hand, a peek into his bag of songwriting tricks—but then with “Slapped Actress,” he quite unexpectedly goes for the throat (his and ours both). After describing fans at a show “pushing to get closer / looking upwards with wonder,” Finn switches to a film metaphor, putting himself in the role of John Cassavetes directing an actor to give Gena Rowlands a real slap in the face. “Our hands will hold steady,” he sings, self-conscious and self-lacerating. “Let me know when you’re ready.” When art stays true to the pain at its source, Finn seems to be saying, both the performer and the audience become complicit in that pain. “Sometimes actresses get slapped,” he sings. “Some nights, making it look real might end up with someone getting hurt.” It’s not just Finn’s drug dealers and crooked scenesters who act to exploit the fresh-faced kids on the scene; it’s also the performers and the audience.

This song’s self-consciousness casts a very dark shadow over the whole of the album, and particularly the several songs (“Lord, I’m Discouraged,” “Yeah Sapphire,” “Magazines,” “Joke About Jamaica,” “Sequestered in Memphis”) which focus on young, adventurous, and somewhat naive women getting into serious trouble, and also on the scenester men who sometimes love them, but invariably end up exploiting them. On Stay Positive the scenesters are “vampires” who use up women, discard them, and then write empty, emotionally dead songs about it. With “Slapped Actress,” Finn obliterates the safe distance between his persona and the genuine grimness and pain in the stories he tells. He steps down from the director’s chair and turns the camera on himself, and sees his hand raised to do violence, and the audience cheering all the while.

I’ve found it hard to decide how I ultimately feel about this—Finn’s honesty is admirable, but at the same time it leaves a distinctly bitter taste in my mouth. And then there’s also the question of where exactly this leaves Finn as a lyricist. Now that he’s put all his cards on the table, and fully deconstructed his persona, what comes next? And what does all the raucous, cathartic joy of the band’s Pitchfork performance mean, exactly, if it’s self-consciously laced not only with the acknowledgment of pain, but also of exploitation?

One possible answer to this question might be found in thinking about Truman Capote, who could never really write again after he came to realize the degree to which he played the role of exploiter when crafting his masterwork In Cold Blood. If great art must channel real suffering, how can any artist avoid exploitation? Perhaps it’s impossible—and perhaps Finn’s self-conscious, self-lacerating admission of this fact in song is better than Capote’s descent into silence and despair.

Writing manuals and the prophetic voice

I’ve long had an aversion to reading writing manuals. It’s not that I feel I have nothing to learn as a writer (far from it), nor that I believe that writing can’t be taught (it can). But when I stand before the wide and crowded shelves of writing books at a chain store, I always feel a twinge of disgust and guilt, as if I’ve been caught gaping at the site of an accident. There’s something uncomfortably exploitative about most commercial writing manuals: they prey on people’s desperate hopes in much the same fashion as self-help books and get-rich-quick guides, promising to reveal simple, surefire, step-by-step secrets to achieving dreams that in reality require loads of talent, hard work, and luck. What’s being sold is the idea that achieving your dreams can be easy; that knowledge of a few simple rules contained within a writing manual will inevitably lead you to bestsellers and critical acclaim. But of course most people don’t get rich quick, and their grief and loneliness can’t be healed by reading a book by Dr. Phil. It’s the self-conscious manipulation here that leaves me a bit queasy: writers and publishers of writing manuals are too often little better than snake oil salesmen, hawking miracle cures by encouraging people to fully believe in their wildest fantasies.

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster (older cover)

So, I tend to avoid setting foot in the writing books aisle altogether. No doubt that’s part of why it’s taken me so long to get around to reading E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel—not because I have anything against Forster or the idea of this book in particular, but instead because I have a hard time bringing myself to read books on writing in general. But Forster’s book—taken from a series of lectures he delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and published in 1927— is far from a commercial writing manual in any case (though the edition I bought is certainly packaged as if that’s exactly what it is). Forster doesn’t offer writing advice per se; instead, he sets out to describe the novel and explain its function. This is a work of criticism, but it’s instructive for critics and writers both; I think it fully deserves its famous reputation, as well as its perennial place on writing workshop syllabi. I really should have picked it up sooner.

Several of the ideas in Forster’s book have become such commonplaces of fiction scholarship that they’re likely to be familiar to anyone who’s taken a college-level English class. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve read about or heard a lecture on the concept of round and flat characters—though much of the complexity of Forster’s original idea seems to have been lost in the retelling. Typical writing advice identifies round characters as “good,” and denigrates flat characters as being underdeveloped or insufficiently realistic. But this isn’t Forster’s point; instead, he argues that both types of characters have their uses, and further that a book that attempts to balance too many three-dimensional characters is bound to collapse under their excessive weight.

But Forster’s greatest strength here isn’t in creating neat, insightful distinctions (round vs. flat; story vs. plot; etc.), but rather in his ability to articulate what it is he finds most powerful and compelling in a novel. In a chapter entitled “Prophecy,” Forster takes a close look at Dostoevsky and Melville (among others) in order to get at the feeling created in a reader by the experience of reading a great novel:

Dostoevsky’s characters ask us to share something deeper about their experiences. They convey to us a sensation that is partly physical–the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet ours.

For Forster, “prophetic” novelists like Dostoevsky can serve as a kind of transcendent conduit: they have the power to transport us to higher levels of consciousness, while also keeping close to recognizably human experience. Prophetic novels convey “the sensation of a song or a sound,” Forster writes, even as they might also “be patiently accurate about a trial or the appearance of a staircase.” The prophetic writer’s “song” is effective in part because it has the shock of being odd and new; but its success depends on the ways in which it “combine[s] with the furniture of common sense.” Prophetic writers take the real and infuse it with art and emotion that reach beyond the merely realistic.

Reading this kind of work can be a rough business: “While they pass under our eyes they are full of dents and grooves and lumps and spikes which draw from us little cries of approval and disapproval.” A prophetic novel can never be overly neat; it needs to be infused with both the uneven texture of the real world and the madness of a prophet. Such a novel can only be approached with “humility,” Forster suggests; we have to open ourselves up to writers like Dostoevsky, Melville, and Lawrence, and let them transport us where they will.

Here Forster has articulated exactly the kind of experience that I most want out of art—and I suppose it’s the kind of experience I’d like to create through writing fiction, too. So, if I’ve taken any writing advice from Aspects of the Novel, I suppose it’s that I just need to write like Dostoevsky. That sounds simple enough—no doubt the secret is to break it down into a few simple steps….