youngwomeneditdwm

[youngwomeneditdwm]

Thoughts upon completing my first edit

In no particular order:

-  You’re a pushover. You ended up loving an author you hate. WTF woman?

-  There is coherence hiding within the chaos. The innocent, glassy-eyed, bored reader wouldn’t know it (how would they, poor thing), but when one is actually forced to pay attention and actively strip the shit away, there’s some actual structure there. It’s like finding the sculpture hiding in the block of stone or whatever.

- Non-bleeding pen is a must.

- Two hours of trying later: scanning an entire book on the department printer is harder than you think. 

- Your lawyer friends don’t know shit about copyright. 

- You get more forgiving as you go along. Or else the book got better. Have you just been reading with insufficient attention all these years? Does the act of reading with an editor’s laser-focus make make the book you’re editing less and less in need of an edit, like a weird literary publisher’s version of schroedinger’s cat? Hard to tell at this point, you’re drunk on a Friday afternoon at a bar down the street from the staples where the cute girl is scaning a paperback you ripped the spine off of and your brain is acting weird. 

- Editing is way more fun than writing. No you knew that already. 

[youngwomeneditdwm]

The Colossus of Maroussi

Those who know Amroussion will realize that there is nothing grandiose about the place. Neither is there anything grandiose about Katsimbalis. Neither, in the ultimate, is there anything grandiose about the entire history of Greece. But there is something colossal about any human figure when that individual becomes truly and thoroughly human. A more human individual than Katsimbalis I have never met. - Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi. 

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As the author that inspired this project, Henry Miller is the ur-dead white man writer. He fits this title comfortably: pretentious, arrogant, and endlessly self-indulgent, he holds forth about any and every idea that occurs to him with unvawering confidence. This book documents Miller’s travels through Greece with an assemblage artsy friends in 1939 just as WWII is breaking out. It's a sort of travel-log-turned-jeremiad. The titular “colossus” is George Katsimbalis, a writer and storyteller who Miller lionizes as a personification of the Greek essence. 

It’s fair to say that I hated this book on my first attempt. Miller was close friends with Lawrence Durrell, who I know well as "Larry" from his younger brother Gerald's hilarious books about their life on the Greek island of Corfu. My desire to get back to the familiar world and cast of characters from those books was completely dashed. But, as I started editing, I slowly softened and warmed up. Though Miller remains as jerkish on his voyage home as he was when he first embarks to Athens (on the boat back to New York he calmly tells an elderly doctor he disagrees with that he’s “an ignorant fool”), I couldn't quite resent him for it as much anymore. Maybe I was in a better mood from the empowering slash of the red pen. Or maybe I just understood him better as I went along. Whatever the reason, by then end, in between his misogyny, conflation of poverty with romance, and over-the-top orientalism, I could also feel his tenderness, his humour, his love of listening, and how his radical pacifist politics were intimately connected to his spirituality. 

Yes, once I removed the 4-page mediation on the planet Saturn, a bizarre run-on conceit that involved re-envisioning Agamemnon and his sons as African-american jazz musicians, and a good half of any given list of complaints about modernity (a favorite topic); once I reversed Miller’s prejudice against paragraphs, and disallowed excessive repetition; once I scoured out most of the sentences that involved a description of light, and so many awful similes; there was quite a lot to like. Miller is legit capable of devastatingly good prose when he restrains himself a little bit. The insights he has about the transition from a human-scale Greek conception of divinity to a disembodied Western one are worth reading and thinking about. Miller is interested, infuriated, and in love with people - his comparisons of the French, British, Americans, and Greeks he meets are often entertaining, but they also go deeper than simple stereotypes to a sort of essence that he’s searching for. By getting to know Greek people and ancient Greek ruins, and characterizing them in contrast to the West, Miller is earnestly (if grumpily) trying to locate the geography, culture, and spirit of the percise fork where he feels that our current civilization turned in the wrong direction. Does he idealize Greece and demonize the West? Sure. But he’s trying to touch on something that moved him deeply on this journey, something that connects the flux of civilizations to his personal search for internal peace and fulfillment. 

Shit, I’ve literally started to advocate for this book! Rest assured though, I’ve cut a whole whack of it. I hope that I’ve managed to keep enough that the best and worst of it are still there, just in a more coherent form that doesn't make us as embittered and angry at Henry Miller as he is at the world. I feel a strange affinity to him now, in spite of myself. Like a weird old friend that you don’t even really like but that you’ve spent so much time with that you understand, and therefore love. I’m almost-kinda tempted to read Tropic of Cancer now. The pornographic sex Miller is famous for is totally absent from this book so I feel like I’ve missed out.   

[youngwomeneditdwm]

An editing manifesto

1. Do not de-fang or sanitize the book. Do not cut out offensive, outdated, or oppressive language or ideas.

2. Keep your annoyance in check. Be aware of your snark levels and cultivate your earnestness. Try to understand the book’s core and help it shine.

3. Be ruthless. Make the book better by removing irrelevant, self-aggrandizing, tangential, and otherwise garbage-y words, sentences, passages, and yes, entire pages. 

4. Be logical. Dig up buried leads and connect stray dots. Uncover the coherence within the chaos. 

5.  Trust your taste. Yes, editing is subjective. But go ahead and hack down the overblown metaphors and meandering descriptions that make you cringe or doze.

[youngwomeneditdwm]

You know this book.

In fact, you’ve probably read the beginning of it. It’s famous, respected, canonical. It’s in the immovable strata at the bottom of your bedside book pile. The kind you only really have the motivation to pick up when a guy you like is super into it*. So you start reading, giving yourself props for dipping into a challenging and iconic work. You struggle along, drifting off and then dutifully going back to reread paragraphs. There must be something wrong with you for not getting into it. This is a very original book for its time, you remind yourself. It isn’t a fluffy read, sure, but you don’t want to read trendy bestsellers anyways. This is worth it. 

You do that for about 15 years. Then you realize: this book is garbage. The few interesting parts are so deeply buried in the incoherent stream-of-privileged-man-consciousness that makes up the bulk of it that you can conclude only one thing: the author was a self-centered wanker. You resent him so thoroughly that all you can think about is how his own massive overconfidence suffocated the pitiful gasps of genuine talent underneath. Maybe it wasn’t his fault - his editor must have been drunk on the job. You get to wondering, are there any women that write like this? There must be, but you really can’t think of any right now. You’ll have to do some research. In all likelihood their editors put the cognac away long enough to stipulate that all the lady-writer’s favorite passages be ruthlessly cut out and that really the whole thing would be better off as a short essay, anyways. Bored and disappointed, you fling the book aside.

It’s not that you fling it out of pique. You are not a person who has declared that they will only read women authors of colour this year. You only consider Philip Roth to be a bit overrated and don’t even think Jonathan Franzen has a problem with women. And it’s not that you hate everything about the book! There are some really good sentences, even. You almost wish it could be rehabilitated into something coherent. Something that should probably still be cut from decaying undergrad syllabi, but might be worthy of a modest three stars on Goodreads.  

In this project, we fish these limp, half-finished books out of their sad dusty corners. We lavish care and attention on them that they probably don’t deserve by giving them the edits they never had and so desperately need. We do this earnestly. Why, you ask? Why not lovingly review books by the diverse lady-authors we like to read instead of hate-editing the anachronistic bloviations of dead white men? Turns out that the fun of slashing with a red pen, making order out of chaos, is a sufficient antidote to the masochism of reading the books in the first place, that the sum of the experience is weirdly fun. Call us sellouts, but we kinda end up liking them. 

* Later you find out that the guy you like also only ever read the first half.