INsites: J. Mark Bertrand

He’s the only guy I know whose alter ego is the subject of weeklong posts and parodies. To say Mark Bertrand is a bibliophile is an understatement — he is a kingpin in the black market of literary ideals, relentlessly laboring to subvert the status quo and raise a banner in the ghetto of mediocrity. Okay, so he loves great writing.

Whether you’re a novice novelist or a veteran reader, you’ll find something inspirational and informative at JMarkBertrand.com. Mark’s passion for literature, his humor and eloquence, always make for a stimulating read. (Plus, he’s one of the few people who can say the word obfuscate without sounding intoxicated.) Between hoarding books and dodging terrified pedestrians with his Mini Cooper, Mark agreed to be interrogated by the crack staff at Decompose.

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MIKE: How does it feel to have a banner on Decompose? Bet you’re getting mega-hits off that baby, huh?

JMB: All I can say is, thanks for lifting me out of a morass of obscurity and setting me here on the mountaintop. I’m not sure which I appreciate more: the quantity of traffic coming my way from your inestimable blog, or the quality. My only concern is being listed alongside The New Pantagruel and The Ooze. If those two start a fight, I’m not going to jump in and separate them. I don’t want to unleash any of my ninjutsu skills if I can help it.

MIKE: You post at The Master’s Artist on Fridays. How’d you get involved with the MA crew and what role do you play over there?

JMB: Everyone at The Master’s Artist is so gracious and down to earth, so in September of 2004 Deborah Gyapong recruited me to give the blog some balance. I play the role of the absent-minded professor. Every Friday, when people are itching to get out of class and go party, I roll out another long, abstract lecture. Some people mistakenly believe that the intent is merely to bore readers out of their minds, but there’s actually a subtle, life-affirming strategy behind it all. You see, the dry, tedious nature of my writing is intended to contrast spectacularly with the beauty of creation all around us. Readers are induced to think, “I’m wasting my time with this, when I could be out frolicking across God’s green earth.” As a result, this fallen world becomes a little Eden for my readers, and they enjoy it all weekend in a way they never would if it weren’t for my Friday posturing.

Actually, the real reason for joining the Master’s Artist group blog is that you get access to the secret e-mail list where the contributors share their insight. It’s like being a part of an incredibly learned and stimulating Monty Python sketch that won’t end, even when you shut your computer off and unplug it from the wall.

MIKE: I found your site about a year ago and immediately became a regular visitor. What are you hoping to accomplish with jmarkbertrand.com? What would you like your regular reader to come away with?

JMB: The site began as an avenue for self promotion — a typical author’s website, only I didn’t have a book to flog. In March 2003, I discovered the world of blogging and started pontificating about whatever captured my fancy: theology, culture, book design, and above all, myself. I am surprised how many kindred spirits are out there. I can’t get over the fact that people read this stuff. At conferences, readers will come up and introduce themselves and start talking about our shared passions. That’s what I hope regular readers will get out of the site: a sense that their interests (strange as they may be) are shared by someone as pedantic and obsessed as they are — namely, me. Naturally, I’d also like them to “come away” with the determination to purchase any book I may write in the future.

MIKE: At first glance, your site is very eclectic. On one sidebar are the Belgic Confession and the One Year Bible, on the opposite sidebar is Automatic Watches, Wet Shaving and Mini Coopers. What’s up with that? Is there something that ties Pens, House Files and the Canons of Dort together?

JMB: My site is not a product of intelligent design! To understand how it happened, you have to know that I’m a very obsessive person, and that I tend to work through obsessions in stages — so I’m fascinated with, say, watches for three months, reading everything I can get my hands on, and then suddenly I couldn’t care less about them because coffee is the new obsession, and so on. Because I spend every waking moment thinking about the fixation, I develop a certain amount of amateur expertise. Add to this fertile ground a transformative fact: sometime in 2004, I got my hands on a great digital camera and needed to practice my photography. What could I shoot pictures of? The accumulated evidence of my obsessions — the little objects I’d collected over time. The “features” section of the site came about because I needed some text to go with the pictures! Once I’d started (with pens, watches and books), I started documenting everything: wet shaving, Bible binding, MINI Coopers, whatever.

The strange thing about it is, I get e-mail every day from people who share these interests. Not people who share one of them, mind you — but people who share most or even all of them. I went from thinking I was eccentric to believing that everyone is eccentric, and in surprisingly similar ways. Some of it, of course, is to do with the fact that we’re products of a consumer-driven culture, where branded objects stand in as markers of identity. Part of it, too, is that many of us have an underlying conviction that, as much as we embrace the present, the mass market results in a net loss when it comes to things like art, design and quality. Think of how much we could learn from the best of what used to be — the way watches used to be made, the way pens used to work, the way men used to shave, the way Christians used to believe. It’s a skeptical nostalgia. I wouldn’t want to live in the past, but they actually got a lot of things right.

MIKE: What one aspect of your site — an entry or link – are you most proud of or wished more people knew about?

JMB: I wish more aspiring writers would print out what I’ve written about “the incarnational method of fiction” at Notes on Craft (see also this and this) and paste it to their computer monitors. For me, that work represents my greatest critical/creative breakthrough. I wish more people were thinking with me along those lines, spurring me on to figure out what it all means.

I wish evangelical publishers would develop a greater fixation on my Bible design and publishing section, because that material resonates deeply with readers. I field enough e-mail that several publishers should be paying me a salary. Barry Moser was apparently given carte blanche when it came to designing the fantastic Bible he brought out in 2000. I daydream about something similar happening to me. I’ve been concocting the “ideal Bible” for more than a decade now, and I’d really like to have the opportunity to pull it off. Based on all the feedback I’ve gotten, I’m convinced there are plenty of eager readers out there.

And I wouldn’t be a good Calvinist if I didn’t say that the one thing I wish more people knew about was the Westminster Confession — in fact, all the Reformed confessions I’ve linked in the sidebar. I wish more people cared about theology for its own sake, instead of as a way to import the culture wars into the church.

MIKE: I particularly enjoyed an entry entitled, My Net Decalogue on Two (Uneven) Tablets (Feb. 20, 2006), concerning blogging etiquette. Was there something that prompted that post? What’s your basic advice to participants in the blogsphere?

JMB: That post was sparked by two specific incidents — actually, repetitions of two common occurrences. Someone took her blog down in a huff over imagined criticism, and someone else issued one of those perennially bizarre “calls to repentance.” The incidents were unrelated but they happened at the same time. I was ticked off about all the self-righteousness in the evangelical blogosphere, all the false claims to expertise and the demagoguery. But I had to admit that I’d been guilty of the same things myself. I started asking what I’d have to change about myself so as not to be a hypocrite, and that’s where the blog post came from. The Internet seems to nurture the “passive aggressive Pharisee” within us all, so instead of ranting about other people I decided to give the beam in my own eye a yank. It hurt. And the beam’s still there. But at least now I have an objective standard against which to measure my own lapses.

MIKE: I’ve heard you talk before about “the great books.” What are the great books and why are they great?

JMB: That’s a big question. Rewind to the year 1995. I’m sitting in a Victorian lit class taught by a brilliant Lacanian feminist whose doctorate dealt with homoeroticism in the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s the first day of class and she’s apologizing for the books we will have to read. If she’d had her way, the list would include all the marginalized texts that delight the critics, but because of the boards the PhD students have to sit before taking their degrees, she is forced to teach “the canon.” That semester, I was introduced to some of the best novels I’ve ever read, including Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, and it occurred to me that something was wrong when a literature professor felt the need to apologize for such assignments. Before then, I was vaguely clued in to the debates about canonicity going on at that time — Harold Bloom had sparked some controversy with his book The Western Canon — but afterward I became fascinated with the so-called “great books.” It’s a decidedly unfashionable term, and a rather hard one to quantify — are they great because of their inner quality, or because of their reception? Is their reception the result of addressing universal themes, as some suggest, or does it rest on their handling of the particulars? To be honest, my interest in those arguments is limited. I’m not so concerned with determining whether a book is great or not — I just have an interest in reading the best books I can, and this is one way to find them.

Literacy isn’t an either/or proposition. There are depths of literacy that can only be achieved by engaging the traditions we’ve inherited, by reading challenging, difficult books. Sometimes they’re difficult because of the author’s vision, and sometimes they’re difficult because of the passage of time. Many readers today — and worse, many writers — are turned off by these difficulties. We buy a lot of books these days, but we don’t read them properly. Proper reading requires a submission to the text, to the mind of the author, that we seem less likely to give than readers of the past. It may be because of our postmodern skepticism toward authority, or it may just be that we have seared attention spans. Whatever the reason, I recommend the discipline of “difficult” reading to anyone who truly values pleasure. Once you’ve developed the taste for great books, your enjoyment of every book is enhanced.

MIKE: You once posted pictures of your library. And more pictures. Forgive my lack of finesse, but are you a speed-reader? Do you maintain a tight reading schedule? And what advice would you give to someone who wants to grow as a reader?

I’m a voracious reader, and I’m also a collector of books. My library operates on the same logic as a wine cel- lar. Some books are there to drink and oth- ers are aging until I have the perfect opportunity to taste them. For example, I’ve had a copy of the Library of America edition of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop on the shelf since 1994 or 1995, but only had occasion to read it last month. It was worth the wait.

My advice to readers who want to grow is simple. Put a hold on contemporary books. Put a hold on genre books. Nothing wrong with them, but set them aside for the moment and focus on a few of the big awful books everyone talks about and nobody reads, the ones you will have only encountered in school. Read them for pleasure not for class, and you’ll be surprised at how different they seem. Read Dickens. Read Jane Austen. Read Henry James. Read Balzac and George Eliot and Chekhov and Oscar Wilde. Read some twentieth-century authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. They’ll be so different from one another it might seem like they have nothing in common, but when you return to your regular reading, you’ll find that they do. They will have challenged you and stretched you. And they’ll serve as good guides through the underworld of contemporary letters, Virgil to your Dante.

Developing a taste for these books won’t “spoil” modern books for you, and it won’t spoil genre fiction, either. In fact, it will enhance your enjoyment of both — because you’ll be able to discern talent and savor it in a way that you couldn’t before.

MIKE: Your Notes on Craft is an especially cool link for aspiring authors. When and why did you start writing for writers? And what do you think are some things that keep writers from growing in their craft?

JMB: Notes on Craft started as a place for me to keep reflections on technique and craft. I’ve gotten a lot of writing advice in my lifetime — from the years I spent in the MFA program at University of Houston, to the shelves of how-to books I’ve read, and all the critiques and conversations I’ve had with writers over the course of a lifetime. I needed a place where I could sort it all out and work through my “issues.” At Notes on Craft, I don’t make much of an effort to be “accessible.” You either follow it or you don’t. For people who aren’t writers, I imagine it’s pretty boring. For writers who don’t think much about craft, it’s probably too abstract, too obscure. But I’ve never been much of a believer in the bullet-point approach. I prefer to work things out discursively, as frustrating as that can be for people following along.

What keeps writers from growing? Bad reading habits, narrow-mindedness, tribalism. Those are my problems, at any rate. Another thing I’ve noticed over the past year is the way aspiring authors can attach themselves to “published authors” — or to use an even more appalling turn of phrase, “multi-published authors” — without stopping to consider whether the advice they’re being given is good or not. In effect, you end up with a great, organic Conformity Engine. I think an aspiring author is better off conceiving of himself as an iconoclast, someone with a healthy skepticism toward the status quo. I certainly hope people are skeptical about the things they’re hearing from me.

MIKE: A common tension faced by Christians in the arts, has to do with artistic integrity versus getting the Gospel out. Where do you see that balance? Is the first objective of the Christian artist to get the message out or be true to the craft?

JMB: The great irony of evangelical publishing is that the rhetoric is evangelistic but the market is parochial. Evangelicals are hoping to change the world without venturing into it. The market offers shelter in many ways, but there’s something crippling about living a cloistered life. Evangelicals are writing genre novels almost exclusively, modeled for the most part on niches pioneered in the “real world,” and they’re writing them for fellow evangelicals. That’s the reality, but instead of facing up to it and looking for ways to change, there’s a lot of defensiveness, a lot of denial. I can’t count the number of cold shoulders I’ve gotten for stating the obvious. Fortunately, there are a lot of people who see this and are looking for ways to change it — and they’re smarter, more experienced people than me. The key is to seek them out and nurture them, because they’ve got a difficult task ahead. I’d love to see an ambitious evangelical publisher backing the artistic play of a group of ambitious evangelical aesthetes, publishing for the world and not the church.

For the artist, the current situation presents some challenges. The institutions of evangelical publishing are so commercialized that aspiring artists need a “third place,” a refuge (ironically enough) from the fusion of spiritual and commercial considerations, somewhere to consider their work aesthetically, a place where novels aren’t product and readers aren’t consumers. Training artists to think like marketing people — wonderful as marketing is — has produced as many good books as training pastors to think like marketing people has produced good sermons.

A novel should declare the glory of God in the same way that the heavens declare the glory of God. If you look at the sky, you won’t see words floating there making the moral explicit. Instead, you’ll see a thing of radiant, almost incomprehensible beauty, a spectacle that seems shabbily reduced by any explanation that excludes its Creator. A theological aesthetic modeled on creation, and taking as its inspiration not the evangelical status quo but the great Christian books of the past and present, would go a long way toward addressing the state we find ourselves in.

MIKE: What plans do you have for jmarkbertrand.com? Anything your readers can look forward to in the near future?

JMB: More of the same. I plan to irritate, cajole and disappoint in equal measures, and to make many book recommendations and pontificate incessantly on the Way Things Ought To Be in every area of life. I hope to make more enemies, be removed from more blog rolls, and have my friends harassed at more conferences than ever before. And I will continue to set the artistic bar higher than I can ever hope to reach. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce progress in convincing some respectable publishing folk to bankroll these harangues, and some respectable agent folk to represent them. And that will naturally signal the coming of the end times.

Loveable bookworm or nerdy professor, you decide. Either way, now you know why Mark’s site is high on my list of favorites. Terrific interview, JMB! Looking forward to seeing your novel in print and your following grow.