essays bemoaning the sad state of contemporary american fiction

http://motherjones.com/media/2010/01/death-of-literary-fiction-magazines-journals

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Roiphe-t.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

i feel like there are a dozen more of these essays, which always sound the same and have the same culprits and tend to just be long complaints that ernest hemingway isnt writing books anymore

^^^ not exactly a refutation.

max are you saying that if a bunch of people are complaining about something there must not be anything wrong

nope

im not really from the school of thought where there are things "wrong" with "the state of fiction" though

that seems to be an ilx way-of-thinking, an im sympathetic to a point. it's easy to write an article saying "once upon a time we had saul bellow/antonioni/the beatles and now we have dan brown/mcg/vampire weekend": it isn't to compare like with like, or what have you. but, despite this ease, sometimes it is possible to say, "this state of affairs is worse than that." or, "this feted novelist is not as good as the feted novelists of yore."

i like the end of everything essays. people have been bemoaning the state of everything since the dawn of everything.

yeah, it encourages me to hope that we may actually be in END TIMES, which seems like something you don't wanna miss tbh.

ps i bet the essays at the dawn of time were much better

who are the current american 'feted novelists' anyway

mccarthy is probably the only one i've actually read

is poetry as good as it ever was? or the hollywood musical? some forms do kind of wither away into half-life, and there's no reason why the american novel shouldn't.

xpost

that seems to be an ilx way-of-thinking, an im sympathetic to a point. it's easy to write an article saying "once upon a time we had saul bellow/antonioni/the beatles and now we have dan brown/mcg/vampire weekend": it isn't to compare like with like, or what have you. but, despite this ease, sometimes it is possible to say, "this state of affairs is worse than that." or, "this feted novelist is not as good as the feted novelists of yore."

― free the charmless but occasionally brilliant Dom Passantino (history mayne), Friday, January 22, 2010 8:48 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

eh. im fine with making value judgements up to a point but comparing this decade to that decade or the late 20th century to the early 20th century--i guess it could be a fun academic exercise but im not really sure what the point would be, or what wed get out of it.

and in any event theres still a big leap from "modern novelists are not as good as the novelists i read when i was young" to "there is something deeply wrong with the state of fiction"

only one of these essays actually bemoans the sad state of american fiction though. the manifesto one. the college journal editor's worrying about the financial state of college journals isn't really as interesting. budget cuts. get in line, dude. and the one by roiphe where she longs for the days of updike sex scene *shudder* is something else again (okay, i just skimmed that one).

mccarthy as in cormac? i don't think he's 'current' really. his rep-maker was 25 years ago at this point

poetry is a much bigger category than 'american fiction', the hollywood musical a much smaller one ('the post-wwi realist novel' or something).

./..xposts.

i think the mother jones article is bemoaning the sad state of american fiction--he keeps saying things like "save american literature"

maybe i should actually try and read these properly but you know

In the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction. With the exception of a few execrable screeds—like Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint (which revealed just how completely postmodernism has painted itself into a corner)—novelists and story writers alike have largely ignored the wars. Even our poets, the supposed deliverers of "news that stays news," have been comparatively mum; Brian Turner is the only major poet to yet emerge from Iraq.

i mean, when did you guys start sending poets to iraq? i know poetry's 'not as good as it ever was' but that's still kind of harsh

eh. im fine with making value judgements up to a point but comparing this decade to that decade or the late 20th century to the early 20th century--i guess it could be a fun academic exercise but im not really sure what the point would be, or what wed get out of it.

well... some people are into that kind of thing, it seems a pretty normal thing to do. when we value a thing, we are (aren't we?) implicitly comparing it with other things of its kind. and the same if we think it's lacking.

anyway, this exercise might tell us Other Things about Our Society.

are broadsheet trend pieces what they were in the late 1990s? there's a whole article in that.

and in any event theres still a big leap from "modern novelists are not as good as the novelists i read when i was young" to "there is something deeply wrong with the state of fiction"

idk if that's a big leap!

and someone should give that college journal editor the numbers on journals, magazines, books published in just this country alone every year. not to mention what gets published (or self-published) on the web. it's an avalanche. i feel bad for the trees out there. not american fiction.

www.lukeford.net/Images/photos3/tomwolfe.pdf

(^That's Tom Wolfe's "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" manifesto in Harper's from 1989, complaining that no one writes novels like Sinclair Lewis anymore.)

im not really from the school of thought where there are things "wrong" with "the state of fiction" though

you don't think some eras of fiction have had more interesting writers than others, and that it might be interesting to see whether what makes some periods produce more great fiction than others?

(but he takes on the "death of the novel" thesis, or a marxist version thereof, too.)

xp

sorry i should be clear by "comparing era XX to era YY" i dont really mean in that, you know, "in era XX they talked about class like THIS in era YY they talked about class like THAT" kind of survey, i mean specifically inna "in era XX, fiction was fresh and creative and confronted the world but in era YY it has disappeared into a black hole of postmodernism."

and yeah you wont find me disputing that its normal! or maybe even instructive, in certain ways! its also kind of annoying, not in a major, butthurt way, just in the way where you get annoyed at any kind of polemic.

James Wood's "hysterical realism" essay:
http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html

you don't think some eras of fiction have had more interesting writers than others, and that it might be interesting to see whether what makes some periods produce more great fiction than others?

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Friday, January 22, 2010 9:14 AM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that might be interesting, if the person doing that investigation was a really terrific critic and writer (and frankly even then it wouldnt really be my cup of tea; im pretty uncomfortable with that ("the era produced more great fiction") kind of value judgment, but id never prevent someone else from making it); unfortunately, none of the essays i posted are interested at all in the "what makes" part of the equation beyond gems like "everyone is taught they are a precious snowflake"--in fact theyre barely interested in the idea of some eras having "more interesting writers" either. these arent academic studies; theyre broadsides, and poorly-thought-out broadsides at that.

btw thank you jaymc, i actually started this thread to get more examples, but the discussion is nice too

I should say that I'm disagreeing w/you max partly because I enjoy sparring w/you - I don't dig any pinin'-for-the-days style, either. but I do think that something happened in fiction post-Hemingway, some concession about who a writer is actually writing to/for, that affected fiction deeply and did result in a writers whose ambitions are narrower & more modest than people writing novels from roughly Eliot down through the 40s/50s

xxxxxxxp

i tend to think of 'contemporary' as 'the author's still breathing', rightly or wrongly

"result in a lot of writers, arguably whole generations of them" I guess I mean

http://ilmestieredileggere.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/harold_bloom_1175088470032881.jpg

i will unequivocally say i hate this shit, 99.99 percent of the time it's some myopic BOXCAR! b.s.

im pretty uncomfortable with that ("the era produced more great fiction") kind of value judgment,

ah, i enjoy 'em, don't always agree. better those than the blandly consensual.

i saw an attempted debunk of it which was about edmund wilson, saying -- well, he wasn't always 100% about everything and sometimes recycled journalism in his books! and tbqh it was the *everything is ok, nothing really changes* guy who sounded butthurt. i haven't read that much wilson as a proportion of his work (which was copious), but, you know, he was exceptional, without rivals today (sor far as i can tell -- he had better books to work with perhaps) and why not admit it?

xpost

bloom is a kind of ironic example of this -- big complainer, but really part of the problem, again nowhere near wilson's level.

Well, you can't separate the climate of the times from Wilson's achievement. American and English fiction tolerated Men of Letters. The only one I can think of now is James Wood.

I usually like Roiphe's crit but having just read Roth's The Dying Animal I really don't mind that the current crop of writers choose to keep their dicks in their pants.

In Wilson's time you had: Alfred Kazin, Trilling, Cyril Connolly, F.R. Leavis, etc.

do you all really think it's possible to provide any kind of meaningful historical/social/generational context for trends in art from a contemporary perspective? like can someone really effectively compare "the state of contemporary american fiction" to other eras of fiction while the current era is still ongoing?

^ like this tends to lead to people writing as if they're outside of or above the context and reporting objectively but really they're deeply involved in the whole thing and have a skewed perspective maybe?

do you all really think it's possible to provide any kind of meaningful historical/social/generational context for trends in art from a contemporary perspective? like can someone really effectively compare "the state of contemporary american fiction" to other eras of fiction while the current era is still ongoing?

to an extent, yes

good answer

I should say that I'm disagreeing w/you max partly because I enjoy sparring w/you - I don't dig any pinin'-for-the-days style, either. but I do think that something happened in fiction post-Hemingway, some concession about who a writer is actually writing to/for, that affected fiction deeply and did result in a writers whose ambitions are narrower & more modest than people writing novels from roughly Eliot down through the 40s/50s

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Friday, January 22, 2010 9:23 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really? i think (obviously, and necessarily) that we as a culture/society/whatever have undergone some degree of shift in the way we think of "writing" broadly and "fiction" more specifically--but if anything id argue that ambitions have become wider & larger in many cases!

"narrower" = "assumes more limited reach" is what I mean

Well, you can't separate the climate of the times from Wilson's achievement. American and English fiction tolerated Men of Letters. The only one I can think of now is James Wood.

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:31 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark

well, this was it. the author (stefan collini, it was in the lrb), wanted really badly to debunk the "man of letters" mythology. once we had independent men of letters, now we have academics and hacks. he wanted to debunk that, and oh hey he's an academic. james wood is not an "academic" insofar as he can write for "the general reader", but i would say he lacks the range of wilson. the idea of him doing a "finland station" or its modern equivalent is improbable.

In Wilson's time you had: Alfred Kazin, Trilling, Cyril Connolly, F.R. Leavis, etc.

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

well -- exactly.

n e way, i fs w this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97aug/academy.htm

do you all really think it's possible to provide any kind of meaningful historical/social/generational context for trends in art from a contemporary perspective? like can someone really effectively compare "the state of contemporary american fiction" to other eras of fiction while the current era is still ongoing?

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^ like this tends to lead to people writing as if they're outside of or above the context and reporting objectively but really they're deeply involved in the whole thing and have a skewed perspective maybe?

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:33 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

not very different from writing any other kind of history -- of course they have a perspective. that's partly what we're judging, and none of us are outside it either.

ah, i enjoy 'em, don't always agree. better those than the blandly consensual.

i saw an attempted debunk of it which was about edmund wilson, saying -- well, he wasn't always 100% about everything and sometimes recycled journalism in his books! and tbqh it was the *everything is ok, nothing really changes* guy who sounded butthurt. i haven't read that much wilson as a proportion of his work (which was copious), but, you know, he was exceptional, without rivals today (sor far as i can tell -- he had better books to work with perhaps) and why not admit it?

xpost

bloom is a kind of ironic example of this -- big complainer, but really part of the problem, again nowhere near wilson's level.

― free the charmless but occasionally brilliant Dom Passantino (history mayne), Friday, January 22, 2010 9:29 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well maybe i need to separate out two complaints here:

1) as an agnostic on the question of value judgment across eras, i cant really get on board with something being "wrong" with "the state of american fiction"

2) the quality of writing and criticism in most of this type of essay is shitty

the first complaint isnt really something that bugs me: show me a well-written essay of that form and i might disagree with it but i wouldnt complain of its existence.

the second one is what really gets my goat--the quality of critical reading in the katie roiphe or b.r. myers essays, or the knowledge of "postmodernism" in that mother jones piece--theyre all terrible.

i mean i dont love james wood by any means but his essay on "hysterical realism" is a thousand times more palatable to me because its a thousand times more considered and intelligent

Gore Vidal (who may count as a Man of Letters) wrote several essays asserting American literature's primacy in the years after WWII. He theorizes that the sudden democratization of higher education created a new hungry audience for A Streetcar Named Desire, Hemingway, Mailer, and, er, Vidal; but once modern academe took form literature retreated to the position it's traditionally held: a niche.

xpost

whether you agree with 1 or not is almost a myers-briggs question

Is it modern academe that made literature a niche? I thought it was just the decline in mass readership of heavyweight novels. Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mailer, Updike, Roth, etc, were all writing for a mainstream audience which no longer exists unless you're a genre novelist.

That's not what I said though, and if so then I wasn't clear. The theory: the initial spurt of interest in Serious Literature once college became accessible to most people declined once these new students realized that they could major in business administration with no recourse to reading; they no longer needed Serious Literature to fit into a phantom coterie.

these days i'm inclined to believe that the greatest u.s. contribution to post-war lit was sci-fi. fuck an updike. fuck a coover too while i'm at it (post-war academic pomo readership these days a la coover, barth, hawkes, etc being deader than the deadest doornail). at least until the 80's. (haven't gotten to the 80's in my mid-life sci-fi re-education. so don't know if i can go that far. but 50's to late 70's all the way.)

2) the quality of writing and criticism in most of this type of essay is shitty

the second one is what really gets my goat--the quality of critical reading in the katie roiphe or b.r. myers essays, or the knowledge of "postmodernism" in that mother jones piece--theyre all terrible.

it's a fair complaint.

that last point is difficult. to know what you're talking about on postmodernism demands an unreasonable allocation of intellectual resources. i feel i've read quite enough postmodernist/poststructuralist theory, but (or because of this), there's no way i'm going to try to bother to really get to the bottom of derrida. i might if i were a professional eng lit teacher, but every bit i've read of it, every precis of it, and certainly every application of it, tells me to walk in the other direction.

others of them are more tolerable; but, and you'd have to take it on trust, this isn't just philistinism but it is pretty much wholesale rejection. at the same time, i probably wouldn't be able (without leaning heavily on other people's work) to get into it polemically. all you can do is say, no offence, but these critical procedures* tend to produce uninteresting and poorly written essays, and leave it there, really.

*im not necessarily against the political motive behind these, but this seems to have atrophied into routine? maybe not, but im not convinced of the efficacy of higher-level humanities teaching wrt social change.

they no longer needed Serious Literature to fit into a phantom coterie.

I think this is basically what Woody Allen misunderstands about contemporary American society.

Among other things.

I'd love to bemoan, but I don't have time to read it.

the mother jones guy is talking about "postmodern" fiction fwiw, he doesnt get into "postmodern" critical theory

i too wish there were crits like the old crits. but we live in a different world. nobody on earth reads like wilson read. there is too much good stuff on t.v. henry james would be too busy watching project runway to write all those books he wrote.

NOT STOPPED YOU BEFORE

the zing thread is thattaway

xpost

BOOOOO

xpost to Alfred - sorry for the misreading - are you saying that most people didn't actually enjoy these novels and bought them more as totems of intellectual aspiration?

don't know if this has been linked yet-- 4 u max

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

my complaint isnt that he is or isnt using postmodern criticism, its that he rejects contemporary american fiction as having been swallowed into a black hole of "academic" "postmodern" "dainty"... whatever

which is is problematic for a huge number of reasons obviously, starting with the fact that using the word "postmodern" as a descriptor of literature without even the slightest attempt at a definition isnt very helpful for the reader

linked in the first post que!

i've been skimming, sorry ;___;

i figured this was just about ted what's his face of the VQR.

sorry for the misreading - are you saying that most people didn't actually enjoy these novels and bought them more as totems of intellectual aspiration?

That's certainly part of it, I'm guessing. Oprah's kept the flame alive.

scott: Henry James would watch old "Queer As Folk" episodes.

the thing about the VQR that really bugs me--he doesn't publish a lot of fiction. like 1 or 2 stories per issue. the issues seem to be mostly non-fiction. and it's been that way for a long time.

iirc that riophe essay isnt really abt contemp american fiction as a whole (or its decline or its febrile existence) but the vanishing of a specific kind of virile masculinity from it. i guess she is doing that i miss the time when dudes wrote like this not like now when yung dude's write like that. but as rong as sum of that piece was i did think she was otm abt franzen's defensive, unthinking misogyny.

neway franzen has a bunch of these in "how to be alone" including a reworking of his harpers article abt how tv/movies/videogames are killing the novel and the one abt how not enuff dude's are writing Ambtious Novels About How We Live Now or w/e. couldnt find free versions of these online sry max.

im p sure ive read a bunch of these by old french dudes too and in harpers including one by a modernist short story writing chick abt how the mfa is destroying literature that was proto-stanton and p amazing. but i cant find that either :/

haha in the VQR essay he actually complains about getting 15,000 submissions a year

yeah--that's unreal, i mean that's his job! he should be happy he's getting that many submissions!

iirc that riophe essay isnt really abt contemp american fiction as a whole (or its decline or its febrile existence) but the vanishing of a specific kind of virile masculinity from it. i guess she is doing that i miss the time when dudes wrote like this not like now when yung dude's write like that. but as rong as sum of that piece was i did think she was otm abt franzen's defensive, unthinking misogyny.

i know that its not technically an example of what im talking about but i think it falls into the same general situation. and anyway i thought it suffered from a lot of same critical problems--misreadings, narrow selections, sweeping generalizations, etc.

"shitty essays bemoaning the sad state of contemporary american fiction"

the mfa is destroying literature

this is a big declinist meme.

(tbh i wonder if this debate wd be more interesting if done about genre fiction. is espionage lit or scifi as good as it was in the 30s-60s? kind of thing. could you blame that on mfas or what?)

ilx is the greatest novel ever written

*bemoans the state of ilx*

the "mfa destroying literature" thing is part and parcel with the "academia destroying literature" and the "postmodernism [in fiction] (by which i think they usually mean experimental fiction tbh) destroying literature" memes.

that book that came out last year about MFAs and their effect on literature in the 2nd half of the 20th century was supposed to be good--not too polemical or angry, just a kind of survey. but i cant remember what it was called or if i even am characterizing it right.

(tbh i wonder if this debate wd be more interesting if done about genre fiction. is espionage lit or scifi as good as it was in the 30s-60s? kind of thing. could you blame that on mfas or what?)

^^ i would definitely read an article about this

but I do think that something happened in fiction post-Hemingway, some concession about who a writer is actually writing to/for, that affected fiction deeply and did result in a writers whose ambitions are narrower & more modest than people writing novels from roughly Eliot down through the 40s/50s

there are a lot of posts itt after this one but lol no. i mean this is kinda the point franzen is making in one of the articles i mentioned - that a specific kind of ambitious, realist, wide-ranging novel is dying out. the kind of book that spoke to a large audience abt our culture and our lives is losing out to books that are more interested in 'literariness' or 'playing with form' or abt investigating smaller moments or the lives of the voiceless. which a) im not so sure abt and b) not sure why the latter is more modest and less ambitious. also c) no1 who makes these arguments ever seems to read genre fiction which is lol

hope i havent caricatured your position too much - kinda half responding to a franzen article im remembering neway

max, i think the mfa book was called "The Program Era," here's the nyer take on it

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand

ilx is the greatest novel ever written

― velko, Friday, January 22, 2010 3:13 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

not to jerk any of you fucks off, but real talk, if ilx had concentrated on making a critical magazine, with real articles, it would be the best magazine of the 00s. but instead we do this and it's pretty dope only no-one gets paid. (lol like they pay magazine writers n e way.)

*shrugs*

thanks for jerking me off

The gatekeepers are fading, literary magazines are sprouting up in the way that the Paris Review did (free of any support from academia), and party games for writers like The Moth, Literary Death Match, Happy Ending Series, and 2nd Story are thriving. It's gonna be a good decade.

furiously

literary magazines are sprouting up in the way that the Paris Review did

real papery ones? since my borders closed i miss these things.

oh lol nrq brought up genre stuff - there were some sci fi dudes @ the beginning of the last decade writing genre-in-peril pieces but thats kinda died off. in the genres i care abt the last ten years have had a fair amt of 2nd-golden-age type trend pieces which a) genre partisans tend to have a lot at stake in the viability/'worthiness' of their genres and so spend more time looking for positive developments and b) might kinda be true

There's n+1, and as far as non-papery ones, the poetry/fiction/essays they publish are ending up in the Best American anthologies, at least with poetry and essays. The Rumpus, No Tell Motel, MiPOesias...At least with poets, the ones I know in their 20s are starting their careers with quality on-line journals, not lit mags that have 500 copies circulated to libraries.

Jeez, I should've re-read that instead of picking up where I left off every few minutes.

htmlgiant is a great blog if you want to get excited about new things to read, journals, poets, short story writers, etc

i like the end of everything essays. people have been bemoaning the state of everything since the dawn of everything.

― scott seward, Friday, January 22, 2010 8:55 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm; stopped reading thread here

except that i hate these essays

bemoaning the state of the thread

ILX: The Book!! (mod: not actually about an ILX book)

"there were some sci fi dudes @ the beginning of the last decade writing genre-in-peril pieces but thats kinda died off."

i own a lot of nebula/best of sf collections from decades back and they ALL include some sort of doom & gloom treatise in them. even during boom times. "sci-fi publishing is booming, but, wait...". naturally paranoid lot.

haha still? havent read nebula in a min but i tht at least a few yrs back theyd given up and started being like "there was a surprisingly great amt of sci fi published this year..."

n+1 is like a school project, amazingly gauche. incomprehensibly well-regarded.

lol'n

This is a kind of tangentially related essay from a few days ago, about American attitudes towards translated fiction:

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article01201001.aspx

I always find these sweeping generalizations about eras fall apart if any effort is taken into examining the individual artists/writers/etc. They can be useful in seeing more global shits in the arts but when they're used to be dismissive, they just come off as self-serving and lazy (the least forgivable sin of a critic).

iirc that riophe essay isnt really abt contemp american fiction as a whole (or its decline or its febrile existence) but the vanishing of a specific kind of virile masculinity from it.

and as many obvious problems there are with the essay (and with roiphe's postfeminist shtick in general) she's hardly wrong about that, and she's right about some of its causes. like i said in that thread about prostitution a while back, it's hard to imagine american writers of the franzen generation writing about swiving 'n' whoring with the lust and gusto of their forebears. which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a real difference in literary conceptions and portrayals of masculinity.

although i guess bret easton ellis has a lot of fucking in his books, so, yeah, it's not a universal truth or anything.

global shits in the arts

i think we have a name for the ilx cultural journal.

ha my true opinion revealed

sweeping generalizations about eras

lol decades

argh roiphe i'm going to have to read this whole thread when i get home aren't i

no

thread is kind of boring and then enrique jerks everyone off

I think classifying this as another yearning for a "Golden Age" is ignoring the incredible changes that've happened in our culture. Literature, and the novel particularly, doesn't have the same weight and heft it used to in the mid century, and even that might have been a fluke. Publishing is also entirely different.

Internet age, fracturing of culture, etc. etc. I think what we saw with music (a million sub genres for each taste, but not one for all), would have happened with fiction ... if people actually still read. It has such little weight left in our culture that the changes that happened with music, visual art, and TV, basically just skipped literature. So fiction now exists in some limbo without a proper direction to go in.

post-war academic pomo readership these days a la coover, barth, hawkes, etc being deader than the deadest doornail

american fiction more like immigrant fiction

had a friend tell me all of his friends who aren't white and got books deals got way more money than he did on his

it's just like lou dobbs says.

"So fiction now exists in some limbo without a proper direction to go in."

hey, that's poetry's turf!

i only just realised the eliot d4rn13ll3 mentioned is presumably george

Here is old thread on related topic perhaps: Creative writing considered as an industry

Henry James would watch old "Queer As Folk" episodes.

I believe the era makes the man, so he'd be a big Dennis Cooper fan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States

1958

1. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
2. Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver
3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

not too shabs, vlad.

1964

1. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
2. Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow

Wow.

So does all this mean you guys wanna read that new Joshua Ferris novel or you don't wanna read it?

had no idea southern sold, like, anything. haven't read 'candy'.

I don't think I ever actually appreciated how much a machine Stephen King is.

lol thats some pre-soundscan shit

"these are the best-selling novels if you ignore all the books we don't like"

numbers would be more revealing then rank imo. xpost yup

it's the best i could find in ~ 2 min googling /:

dyou mean it was really

1 mickey spillane
2 mickey spillane
3 mickey spillane?

xposts

i'm not convinced this literate steinbeck-and-hemingway reading mass audience ever really existed. tho tbh i'm not sure 'literate' and 'steinbeck-reading' aren't antonyms

xpost isn't mickey spillane on there? or maybe that was the other wikipedia page i was looking at

btw j k rowling is going to outsell tolstoy this year

there's a market for less literary fiction now =! less people read literary fiction

might be true but just rankings aren't evidence of it

i'm not convinced this literate steinbeck-and-hemingway reading mass audience ever really existed.

well, yeah, i don't think there was a *mass audience* for these cats. just a larger one than there is for eggers, franzen, [insert more names], et al. similarly there wasn't a mass audience for bergman and fellini and truffaut, but it was a lot larger than the audience for haneke, the guy they call "joe", [insert more names], et al.

(no i don't have numbers.)

but that's surprising, really, insofar as more people go to university now (don't they? they do in the uk).

The answer here is to bludgeon those redundant university students with Gore Vidal novels.

more ppl major in business now too

from here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24patterson-t.html

Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.

its not the mrkt for "highbrow" or "upscale" or w/e film/fiction/pictures is smaller its that the mass mkt is that much bigger. and so the expectations for success get framed differently which means that the interest in producing or publishing the dudes u mention isnt there

im barely coherent i guess my point is that the economics of publishing (and film!) have changed much more than the size of the audience

more people go to university now = more ppl who watch tarentino, not more ppl who watch haneke: the expansion of education creates another class of taste, not creates more ppl with the taste of the previous smaller number of ppl. otherwise we'd all be reading latin

plus also ppl are still more likely to get into bergman/fellini/etc than they are haneke.

but i dunno if that really works for literature tho.

i think the only things people ever argue are better now than they ever were are television shows (usually cable) or children's films (usually pixar)

Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.

talking out my arse but: weren't there more 100k sellers than there are 1m sellers tho?

id agree true highbrow shit will always have a pretty limited and self-adoring readership. maybe what im talking about is really lower-upper-middlebrow stuff like bergman and bellow.

plus also ppl are still more likely to get into bergman/fellini/etc than they are haneke.

exactly. i think this is because they are better, not because haneke is harder/more highbrow. (im not even a big fellini/bergman dude, but i do think the late 50s/60s was a GOLDEN AGE for euro cinema, partly because it fed off a large-ish audience, and i can't... not think that.)

actually that's unfair. bergman and bellow are more like lower-highbrow, upper-middlebrow borders.

yeah, that really doesn't work for books ... people are not more likely to get into like john barth and ronald sukenick than they are the mcswys/tin house crowd. (i am aware those guys are like two generations of hipness ago now but i can't think of anything that's more of er a culturally notable manifestation of hip authorship than that ...) otoh i am pretty sure proper 60s pomo dudes are actually not "better" and in fact tbh "worse" than post-pomo 'how-can-i-believe-that-and-still-be-sincere' bleeding-heart types

actually that's unfair. bergman and bellow are more like lower-highbrow, upper-middlebrow borders.

to each his hairline.

i think the only things people ever argue are better now than they ever were are television shows (usually cable) or children's films (usually pixar)

naw you can also always find somebody insisting that he believes pop music is totally at a zenith

http://www.thebaffler.com/viewArticle/46/pop_goes_the_weasel/1/

cinema is not a great comparison point for books, i dont think--were talking about a form that has a barely century-old history vs. a form thats somewhere btw 300-500 yrs old (if were talking novels) or almost 600 yrs old (if were talking gutenberg) or even older

i.e. while demographic & education & other factors may contribute to a changing audience for various difft kinds of cinema, it seems weird to me to also ignore the big shifts in technology, distribution & even the business of film production--obviously certain parallel shifts have occurred in writing/fiction/publishing but those are shifting on top of a multi-century history

cinema is not a great comparison point for books, i dont think--were talking about a form that has a barely century-old history vs. a form thats somewhere btw 300-500 yrs old (if were talking novels) or almost 600 yrs old (if were talking gutenberg) or even older

― max, Friday, January 22, 2010 6:54 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

ok, up to a point. but i'd say the modern publishing industry is really a late 19th century thing. so cinema comes later (in its current form, about exactly one century), but it too has undergone big shifts in the last 50-60 years; its under the same pressures as the novel.

if you're running a business like a publishing house or a film distributor, in a way history *is* bunk, you survive quarter-to-quarter. and what im romanticizing is a certain period of post-war sub-mass culture in the west -- when pinter was writing movies and 'herzog' was the third-biggest seller of the year (still not believing this) and whatnot.

(modern publishing: ie with a mass market, but also a larger highbrow/upper-middlebrow market, created by urbanization, mass education, etc. in the uk it's usually dated to 1870-1900, which is when compulsory education took off and mass-circulation newspapers got going.)

and what im romanticizing is a certain period of post-war sub-mass culture in the west -- when pinter was writing movies and 'herzog' was the third-biggest seller of the year (still not believing this) and whatnot.

haha this kinda interesting in light of the article dylann lynxd (which i tht was good fwiw) - how much is social mobility and expanding prosperity resp/related to the size of the highbrow/upper-middlebrow market - art in an era of declining real wages

We just need a new Hugh Hefner to sell that stuff.

1961

[...]

7. Winnie Ille Pu by Alexander Lenard (translation of Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne)

huh.

Figures on these would be very nice, cuz I'm intuitively thinking that the literary blockbuster that fills up with 2000s list (with The Corrections soiling it all) is part of a v. different kind of market than the what I would imagine to be more fragmented decades past, but then they're all full of repeated authors I haven't heard of too, so heeeeey gimme the facts, world.

max, you just got cited on nabisco's tumblr:

http://agrammar.tumblr.com/post/347774804/what-fictions-like

ksh, cite-checker

or should i say "site" checker

hahaha, i just check Google Reader way too often whenever i'm on the net

IM FAMOUS!

speech!

my tumblarity is going to go way up

book deal here i come

tumblart mall book

that didn't work

shit's gonna go viral

I was trying to make a paul blart joke

i think it's pretty easy to see what Ted and Katie are talking about. Ted is talking about *anyone* who writes fiction. he's encouraging them to think outside of their immediate world view. that's the way i read it.

Katie's got the bigger problem, because she is just talking about Great Male Novelists (widely thought of as being Bellow, Roth, Updike and company, for better or worse) and their heirs apparent, Kunkel and DFW and Eggers and company. She didn't mention Diaz because he's not really seen as writing under the shadow of Great Male Novelists (and you know, he doesn't fit her theory as neatly or whatever).

not a fan at all of any of those six authors

don't know why I'm posting this image

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n48/n240129.jpg

good book!

One of my favorites.

Heads up, kshighway: I was cited on Nabisco's tumblr today, too, as "a friend."

Emailing about this with a friend

hahaha, apologies i wasn't able to discern that "a friend" was you! (also, i passed on reading that post.)

Katie's got the bigger problem, because she is just talking about Great Male Novelists (widely thought of as being Bellow, Roth, Updike and company, for better or worse) and their heirs apparent, Kunkel and DFW and Eggers and company.

The thing I was on about when I reblogged Max on Tumblr is, like, why in the world is someone like Kunkel an heir apparent to the Great Male Novelists? I mean, Diaz's novel showed up on loads of Best-of-Decade lists! He's pretty popular! So if I were writing an article about how well-regarded young male authors treated sex, I'd be like "what does Diaz do? what does Shteyngart do?" I guess I'm kinda stuck on Kunkel in particular, because ... why would we consider him an heir apparent to the Great Male Novelists, unless it's just that we figure the heir should naturally be some sort of "writerly" white guy? (Even if there's loads of well-known, critically acclaimed fiction by people who don't fit that type?)

As for the VQR thing, I mean, I've spent enough time in grad workshops that I can very much understand the complaint -- especially with short stories, I know the feeling of sorting through lots of "finely crafted," language-focused fiction that's aiming more toward small personal experience than like big globally/politically engaged stuff, yadda yadda yadda ... but I do wish people would be more specific about that stuff rather than casting out short vague polemics that are like "the problem with writing is it's so X."

(BTW one of the things you run into with these complaints is that whenever someone says fiction's not "aggressive" or "ambitious" anymore, well, those are stereotypically masculine traits, and fiction is now predominantly read by women, and so if you're lamenting those things I guess you have to unravel that. And also ask what fiction is doing now and whether/why it's bad.)

Her first paragraph pretty clearly sets out that she's only talking about certain Great Male Novelists and their heirs. Bellow and Roth and Mailer. (All white guys, which sucks, but what can you do?) Not sure where Kunkel fits in--maybe she fit him in because of the n+1 thing? Seems like a young intellectual type, like Bellow and Mailer? I haven't read his book, so I don't know.

So if I were writing an article about how well-regarded young male authors treated sex,

She didn't seem to ever want to talk about "what fiction is doing now," or how well regarded authors treated sex maybe because then she'd have to add people like Diaz & Gary Shteyngart because, as we would probably both agree, those wouldn't fit in with her hypothesis. She stuck to the White Guys, for better and for worse. She's writing about a very narrow chunk of the fiction world.

why would we consider him an heir apparent to the Great Male Novelists, unless it's just that we figure the heir should naturally be some sort of "writerly" white guy?

So I ask you: do you really think Diaz and Shteyngart work in the same traditions as Roth and Updike and stuff? Are they heirs to Bellow and Mailer?

whenever someone says fiction's not "aggressive" or "ambitious" anymore, well, those are stereotypically masculine traits,

that may be, but George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Willa Cather, possibly Jane Austen (I don't know, I have a really hard time w/Austen): these are ambitious authors. Not ambitious in traditionally masculine ways (pyrotechnics, strength of authorial personality) but visionary. This is what I mean when I describe ambition: writers whose work reads like posterity was a greater concern than contemporary acclaim. How to discern that, of course, is the Q - we haven't heard of these writers unless they'd achieved posterity, so our reading of them is shaded by that. Still. I can't imagine reading Woolf and not seeing ambition of a sort that I see less of in contemporary fiction. (Less, not none; it's around, but I don't think it pays.)

I was chastised once for accusing a novel for lacking a "climax" -- it was such a masculine, "heteronormative" trait, I was told.

* OF lacking a climax

alfred everybody knows climax codes as hetero always and everywhere, sorry bro

i would add Flannery O Connor to the aggressive column, too not just ambitious.

point taken!

All novels written by femmebots should be the literary equivalent of soft nuzzling kisses and lights-out fingering.

xpost to Que -- Well, it depends how you define that tradition, right? I mean, DFW's now part of our line of "Great Novelists," but he doesn't really write like Roth or Bellow -- or at least no more than someone like Diaz does. He's part of the line because he's significant: well-known, well-read, well-regarded, influential, all that stuff. And if the standard is significance, well, is Kunkel really more significant than Diaz? You kind of hint at this -- he's perceived as significant partly because he fits in with a type, more so than for his actual writing. He's just easy to mentally lump in there because you can imagine him talking to Foer or Lethem at a party or something. But there are certainly young writers who'd beat him on most tests of significance -- books sold, critical acclaim, academic reputation, etc.

That's the part I think is weird. I'm pretty sure lots of people's lists of Major Fiction published lately would include loads of stuff beyond the Jonathans-from-Brooklyn type -- whether you asked readers, critics, academics, publishers, or whoever. I'm not saying those guys aren't significant or popular, but so are various other people. And yet when we're looking for a handy encapsulation of who our Important Writers are, there's a habit of just saying "oh, those guys," because they fit some mental image of what Important Writers are like. Or because we assume other people think they're super-important. Or because they're just easy to group together in a way you can't with a bunch of Significant Writers who're all different, which makes it easier to say "here is what fiction is like right now." They're pre-categorized as significant, even if what people actually find significant includes loads of other stuff.

xpost to JD -- yes, I definitely know what you mean; it's "ambition" in terms of scope or engagement or something. Just saying that if you make the complaint, you have to be ready to defend it on those terms, which means getting into specifics, and possibly an argument about whether Alice Munro or Marilynne Robinson are "ambitious" in their subject matter. (What's weird in terms of the VQR guy's complaint, BTW, is that writing for a small/elite readership is not exactly new -- go back far enough and authors were definitely doing that; modernists like Woolf weren't exactly attempting to reach out to the common reader the way he describes!)

BTW, part of what I was saying on Tumblr (and this isn't about Roiphe) is that even people who are AGAINST those guys representing Significant Fiction will sometimes forfeit the game, by saying stuff like "I hate that all our Significant Writers are white guys like Chabon/Franzen/Lethem." But Lorrie Moore and Mary Gaitskill are significant, too, right? And they're not much different in age from Franzen or Chabon, right? So why just bow to the perception that those guys represent What Fiction Is Like that much more than everyone else? They're well-known and popular, but I didn't think they were THAT titanic. Is my perspective on that completely off-base?

i don't think your perspective is off-base at all, but i think a lot of people might see Chabon, Franzen, and DFW, at least, as Significant Writers because all three of them have published a Lengthy Significant Book, which confers a certain status, whereas Moore hasn't. (i haven't read Lethem or Gaitskill, so i can't comment there.)

This is what I mean when I describe ambition: writers whose work reads like posterity was a greater concern than contemporary acclaim. How to discern that, of course, is the Q - we haven't heard of these writers unless they'd achieved posterity, so our reading of them is shaded by that. Still. I can't imagine reading Woolf and not seeing ambition of a sort that I see less of in contemporary fiction. (Less, not none; it's around, but I don't think it pays.

maybe its just the contemp fiction u read? i mean your def of ambition here is essentially useless to me but i still feel like i disagree w/you.

using nabisco's paraphrase (which is kinda the franzen paraphrase i used upthread) i can think of writers who are "ambitious" in a lot of the ways woolf was: "the age of wire and string" feels as introspective and impatient and wide-ranging as "to the lighthouse". i can see finding the former not as good, or as succesful, but its certainly as ambitious. or to use a female author rivka galchen's "atmospheric disturbances" is deeply engaged w/'big themes' and 'the limitations of language' and i think a lot of the concerns are the same

So I ask you: do you really think Diaz and Shteyngart work in the same traditions as Roth and Updike and stuff? Are they heirs to Bellow and Mailer?

theres some roth and bellow in shteyngart i think - bellow particularly

But Lorrie Moore and Mary Gaitskill are significant, too, right? And they're not much different in age from Franzen or Chabon, right? So why just bow to the perception that those guys represent What Fiction Is Like that much more than everyone else? They're well-known and popular, but I didn't think they were THAT titanic. Is my perspective on that completely off-base?

enh i feel like a lot more ppl read "kavalier and clay" than "veronica". i dont really think any of these four do a particularly good job of representing What Fiction Is Like Today but it dont really buy that moore or gaitskill have had as big an impact as franzen or chabon.

I've only read Jessa's article but I wonder as to how connected the 'sad state of contemporary [not even American] fiction' is to the tiny numbers of foreign lit that will get a translation.

feel like moore seems more 'relevant' somehow than fn franzen. probably by that i just mean 'more ppl i know dig her and so does tao lin'

hahah well franzen hasnt published a novel in almost a decade and moore's latest came out like 6 months ago i mean. but franzen's was a 'bestseller' and it seems like moore's never got higher than 10th on the nyt list

franzen is also constantly bemoaning the sad state of contemporary american fiction so he seems important

i don't think your perspective is off-base at all, but i think a lot of people might see Chabon, Franzen, and DFW, at least, as Significant Writers because all three of them have published a Lengthy Significant Book, which confers a certain status, whereas Moore hasn't. (i haven't read Lethem or Gaitskill, so i can't comment there.)

― kshighway (ksh), Saturday, January 23, 2010 1:08 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ i think this is a great point btw

^^^ I agree, and it drives me nuts, since the criterion of the Lengthy Significant Novel is absurd imo - really hate that whenever an author publishes some bowling-ball-weight tome that's kind of how he asserts that he's playing in the big leagues now. O'Connor wipes the floor with much of her nearest competition, ditto Sarah Orne Jewett, but in the absence of a Big Statement has to settle for more of a known-by-those-that-know rep instead of a Known To All rep. which imo is kinda proto-album-as-art-form rockism.

Add Katherine Ann Porter to that list.

Maybe it's worth a thread: Great Writers Whose Stories Are Best.

i dont know that writers known as "short story writers"--oconnor & whoever, carver i guess is big in this regard--are underrated or thought of as unserious by anyone except the kind of person who is prone to writing essays about the state of contemporary american fiction

lol jd werent u complaining that not enuff contemp authors are like putting our age in a historical perspective or writing 'big' (in theme/ambition) social novels????

really hate that whenever an author publishes some bowling-ball-weight tome that's kind of how he asserts that he's playing in the big leagues now.

martin amis on underworld, don delillos 12th novel written some 25 years into his career: "the ascension of a great writer"

i dont know that writers known as "short story writers"--oconnor & whoever, carver i guess is big in this regard--are underrated or thought of as unserious by anyone except the kind of person who is prone to writing essays about the state of contemporary american fiction

― max, Saturday, January 23, 2010 3:05 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark

well, um, HEMINGWAY also. real heads pretty much only read the shorts iirc.

re. ambition: book doesn't need to be 'underworld'-long to be ambitious, putting-in-perspective-ing, etc.

lol xpost

Lamp I don't view ambition as necessarily being big in terms of book weight - I think Carver's pretty ambitious for example, and actually I'd say Chelsey Minnis is too and we'll be lucky if she publishes 5 more books of completely unfathomable poetry in her lifetime

TGG aside, Fitzgerald's stories were his best work.

Also: Alice Munro, my favorite living writer who's never attempted a novel.

im sure that's amis zinging delillo a bit isn't it? in the same year (month) 'underworld' came out, mart published the (very slight indeed, in all senses) david simon homage 'night train'.

xpost

well, maybe she has, and stuck it in a drawer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/books/review/14COVERFR.html

^^^^

re. ambition: book doesn't need to be 'underworld'-long to be ambitious, putting-in-perspective-ing, etc.

well no of course not but i do think j0hn and ksh are right that doorstop-type length is regarded by a certain kind of "critic" or "commentator" as a sign of "seriousness" and "ambition"--i guess this is a james joyce thing? or a melville thing even? or hell a cervantes thing?

lorrie moore is a better short story writer than novelist imo

so is junot diaz

yup

well no of course not but i do think j0hn and ksh are right that doorstop-type length is regarded by a certain kind of "critic" or "commentator" as a sign of "seriousness" and "ambition"--i guess this is a james joyce thing? or a melville thing even? or hell a cervantes thing?

Rabelais too, but I think the phenomenon in the 20th/21st century has a lot to do with the commerce end of things. like, I don't think most writers worth their salt are going to argue that Achebe or Narayan's masterpieces don't stand eye to eye with any massive tome you care to name. But this is partly why Bolano was such a gift to the publishing industry: between the backstory & the punchline of "here's the last one...IT'S HIS MASTERPIECE, YOU CAN SEE HOW BIG IT IS!" he's a convenient pantheon-joiner.

yeah someone should go through all the reviews of 2666 and see how many of them talk about it like his coming-out party

So why just bow to the perception that those guys represent What Fiction Is Like that much more than everyone else? They're well-known and popular, but I didn't think they were THAT titanic. Is my perspective on that completely off-base?

I think if you're playing a quick game of Lit Fic Family Feud (sorry, but trust me, this comparison works), names like Lethem and Chabon and Franzen are going to come up right away. Franzen's only written three novels, but one won the National Book Award, and the other two have written a *lot* of novels. Diaz has two books, with that huge gap of time between them, and Gary has two as well. Also I'm sure length has something to do with it.

;)

And again--no idea why Kunkel's in there.

Now, instead of naming names off the top of my head, I prefer what you're advocating, a discussion of lots of different writers, with lots of different styles, but that doesn't seem to be Katie's point at all. She picked the Big Four and went from there.

Is there any kind of sense that these writers are 'the modern writers' because their concerns are the ones that most commentators agree are nineties and noughties concerns? Is this circular? I'd say the reason people find it so much easier to think of Dave Eggers than say Diaz as a 'modern writer' say is exactly because his concerns are less like those of Roth, Updike etc.

i dont know that writers known as "short story writers"--oconnor & whoever, carver i guess is big in this regard--are underrated or thought of as unserious by anyone except the kind of person who is prone to writing essays about the state of contemporary american fiction

OTM. I mean,, Cheever's stories are just mind blowing and rich and varied, everything you could want in fiction. Same with Chekov, Lorrie Moore, Munro, Saunders, Kafka.

fwiw I don't think bellow/updike/roth ever went for the doorstop epic in terms of length (or ambition?) and mailer was bedeviled by "naked & the dead" for the rest of his career.

xx-post// i just read "oscar wao" and if nothing else diaz seems just as concerned about sex as updike and roth (the NJ connection!)

reading katie roiphe's essay narrowly I thought she made a pretty good point about how diff generations of writers deal w/sexuality

fwiw I don't think bellow/updike/roth ever went for the doorstop epic in terms of length (or ambition?)

Really? I would say the Rabbit books are epic. Mailer and Bellow and Roth wrote long-ish books, nothing maybe as long as Moby-Dick or Rabelais, but they all wrote a *lot* of books.

Also, I have a lot of problems with using the word "ambition" with regards to fiction, because I'm not sure what it means myself, and it probably means different things to different writers. And in a sense every books is ambitious, etc etc.

'augie marsh' is pretty gd long, but none of those dudes went 'underworld' long. or 'gravity's rainbow' long for that matter.

the savage detectives is better than 2666 but i cant remember how they were reviewed - certainly sd was his big "breakthrough" in translation though

oops i forgot about augie

fwiw I don't think bellow/updike/roth ever went for the doorstop epic in terms of length (or ambition?)

Augie March? Roth's Letting Go (his one curious attempt at a H. James baggy monster, even down to the Isabel Archer-like female character)? I guess you can count Updike's Rabbit books as his stab at an epic.

Underworld sucks, making small things seem BIG is a critic's job

i think (pace jds point) bolano even has a sentence or graph in one of his books where a character bemoans how no one tries to write the BIG BOOKS THAT PLOUGH THE FURROWS OF THE HEART AND SOUL anymore. which is even more of a gift obv. can't see anyone going 'actually nazi literature in the americas is his best work' tho tbh

there is also the phenomenon whereby short story writers who write their first novel are treated as though they have gone up a weight class or reached experience level 9; loads of reviews of the diaz book did this

I definitely agree about how length is taken as an indicator of Major Important Statement, which isn't a great thing. With short stories it's more that ... people don't generally buy/read short stories, so it's going to be really hard to make a big often-discussed Statement through that medium.

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to deny that people like Lethem/Chabon/Eugenides really are way up at the top in terms of readership, critical respect, awards, well-known works, etc. Undoubtedly they are -- I'm so not disputing that. But they're not ahead to an extent that should dwarf everyone else in the world and completely dominate the conversation, I don't think. It'd be a bad thing if every conversation about What Fiction Is Like concerned itself solely with the top Family Feud responses, just because that's faster/easier. And I do believe that people's experience of what's being read and acclaimed contains a lot of equally big stuff, just not stuff that fits our mental image of the category we want to discuss. E.g., people's experience of reading contemporary fiction includes a whole lot of Murakami, but since that's "imported" it doesn't enter our conversations about What Fiction Is Like. Same with David Mitchell, who's writing in English, popular, perpetually Booker shortlisted, had one big central novel that always gets talked about (Cloud Atlas) -- this is someone "significant" to us, but not American and therefore out of the conversation? But Zadie Smith is in. But Jhumpa Lahiri's out. So the question becomes, you know: is Franzen so much better-selling or acclaimed than Lahiri that we shouldn't even think of her in a discussion of what fiction's like? Is he that far ahead?

BTW, funny thing I was realizing last night: I love how guys like Franzen and Chabon get to be "young" because they're lumped in with people like Foer or Eggers! I would bet most people imagine them as younger than, say, Gaitskill/Moore, but I checked before posting yesterday and ... not so much. Steven Millhauser needs to buddy up to Kunkel or something and live forever!

i think i have to go google kunkel. not ringing a bell.

my fave of these recently ("recently") was the franzen piece in harper's about how avant-garde fiction was a dead-end because he was too dumb/lazy to make it all the way to the end of "j.r."

what was the essay in either harper's or atlantic that was FOR experimental fiction? damn i'm never gonna remember the dude's name. he was/is an experimental fiction writer.

ben marcus wrote it iirc

like i am sympathetic to some of his points, but dude shouldn't pick up a 700 page brick by a guy known for his difficulty and expect something as breezy as s. king coke-hammering his way through plot points. we're also talking a 700 page brick that's pretty fucking funny.

and yeah, it was marcus. which was almost as embarrassing as the franzen.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/10/0080775

thats the marcus, with the cheeky title

ben marcus (age of wire and string, notable american women) wrote a response to franzen's thing abt experimental fiction and his alice munro runaway review in the times (linxd itt) id link it but harpers is pay only :/

oh i didnt realize the piece i was linking to was subscribers only

Franzen so much better-selling or acclaimed than Lahiri that we shouldn't even think of her in a discussion of what fiction's like? Is he that far ahead?

i mean you probably spend more time w/this stuff than i do but outside of like that roiphe essay (which cops to its own narrow perspective anyway) are ppl really confining What Fiction is Like to the family feud dudes?

i do think franzen comes up a lot because, as max points out, he seems like one of the few writers whos really invested in defining What Fiction is Like atm

what do we have to do to get a decent friggin' manifesto anyway?

we got one, from b.r. myers, and it was shitty

another point is that these guys who're spotting "experimental" novels are only seeing the stuff that gets enough traction to crest their radar. whereas like the stuff you read in NY Tyrant etc, the stuff that really feels bold and uncertain, that's not manifesto-worthy. it only gets the manifesto after the experiments have in the main been conducted.

still, the curmudgeon stance I'm looking to affect is "none of these 'experimental' novelists are doing anything that robbe-grillet hadn't already dismissed before he'd finished breakfast"

yeah, that's what i'm saying. why can't someone write a decent one.

x-post

Why can't someone write a decent short one?

still, the curmudgeon stance I'm looking to affect is "none of these 'experimental' novelists are doing anything that robbe-grillet hadn't already dismissed before he'd finished breakfast"

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Saturday, January 23, 2010 1:06 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my favorite people to talk to about 'experimental fiction' are classics majors whose reaction is always--"oh, i see. yes, euripides already did that in the bacchae. but its nice to see here too."

my favorite people to talk to about 'experimental fiction' are classics majors whose reaction is always--"oh, i see. yes, euripides already did that in the bacchae. but its nice to see here too."

lol I am 100% exactly that dude although my dudes of choice are apuleius and petronius

I'm the opposite. I think the time we're in right now is ALWAYS better than yesterday. Which is why I love Steven Shaviro's Great Books List. "Part of my motivation for doing this is that I believe, contrary to majority opinion, that the second half of the twentieth century was a better time for American literature than the first half."

Only goes up to 1999, though. :(

Not to be a reactionary, but my favorite novels of the last six months were written by a canon aspirist (William Trevor and Love and Summer) and an up and comer (Colm Toibin's Brooklyn). If both books illuminated something unfamiliar and strange, as I think they do, it puts the burden on Experimental Fiction to do more than experiment with voice and narrative.

i heart darius james. his blaxploitation book was a big inspiration/influence.

um, he is on that list.

i'm a total reactionary. and i have old lady tastes. but i'm all for experimentation. playing with language and form is healthy and necessary.

It helps the fuddy-dudds step up their game, if nothing else.

i was actually too afraid of the hype to read the corrections. i'm really skittish when it comes to hype and hot books. can't help myself. i couldn't even read cavalier and clay. i did make the mistake of reading motherless brooklyn though. ugh. almost as bad as the steve erickson book i read. (and i only read that cuz of the hipster hype and that long believer article on him.i should have known better.)

The Corrections is totally old-fashioned!

btw I'm reading The Hothouse by the East River on your recommendation, scott.

that book is odd. my kind of experimentation!

I'm the opposite. I think the time we're in right now is ALWAYS better than yesterday. Which is why I love Steven Shaviro's Great Books List. "Part of my motivation for doing this is that I believe, contrary to majority opinion, that the second half of the twentieth century was a better time for American literature than the first half."

― Kevin John Bozelka, Saturday, January 23, 2010 1:17 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i cant speak for j0hn but the classics-major type im talking about--his or her position is less "greece was the pinnacle of civilization" and more "theres nothing new under the sun, not even this 'experimental' fiction youre touting"

As I remember it, one of the funny things about Marcus's response to Franzen was an undertone of going, like, "you know, some of us like reading and writing experimental not-for-everyone fiction, and good for you if you want to write fiction that speaks to more people, but could you maybe just leave the rest of us alone to enjoy some Stein if we want to? we're not bothering anyone, and nobody pays attention to us anyway"

kind of a milk-and-water thing to say. "so you don't like fiery, dismissive polemics? we do, so let's be chill."

that great books list was weird, the non-fiction entries seem pretty random. calling Hunter Thompson a fiction writer makes sense (as he makes shit up) but his narratives are shaggy, shapeless while a new-journalism bio like "Dino" is painstakingly researched though structured like a novel. nice to see Patricia Highsmith on there but Jackie Susann?

franzen lost any credibility with me when he published the anti-Gaddis screed. what a fuckstick. i kind of love marcus's response, though.

(not that franzen cares what i think of him, obv.)

so slightly off-topic is there anything in modern literary criticism/theory worth reading? it seems that the general consensus of this thread is that today's critics are using outdated/outmoded rubrics that are incapable of framing the current literary output of today. (which I have no opinion about: this thread tells me that I am really, really, really out of the loop.) my literary theory prof was fond of saying that there hasn't been any significant literary theory work published in the last twenty years, since, say, butler. and for me lit theory stopped after this one article I read by stanley fish. so who/what should I be reading to help me think differently about the fiction of today?

James Wood is a damn good critic in the Kazin-Wilson vein. Try Daniel Mendelssohn.

i cant speak for j0hn but the classics-major type im talking about--his or her position is less "greece was the pinnacle of civilization" and more "theres nothing new under the sun, not even this 'experimental' fiction youre touting"

^^^

this is exactly my position and I will still rep for it tbh though I'll go up as far as Sterne for "it's already been done" & of course I read all kinds of 20th century lit & love it too I just think any claims for "innovation" are about 95% bullshit

% arrived at w/help of both science & math of course so don't even try

"fourth wall? there never was a fourth wall"

"greece was the pinnacle of civilization"
otm. big ups to my man lucian
is there anything in modern literary criticism/theory worth reading?
lit crit, sure; theory, no way

nonsense

blanchot is worth reading, so are a lot of the poststructuralists. if by "contemporary" you mean "working right now," I don't know, I'm not current, but the whole crop of darlings from the eighties onward - barthes, derrida, de man, who'm I missing - I think that stuff is worthwhile for sure

i agree about those people. bourdieu's distinction is one of the best things i've ever read. i meant right now. to the extent theory is concerned with capital and politics, the failure of the pros currently working to anticipate the foreclosure crisis right here in the US in favor of post-colonial this and that is pretty damning

i'm pretty into this guy, "Celebrate ricky dargugulesh"

haven't read through this whole thread, but whenever i read one of these essays, its conclusion always leaves me with the feeling that the author just wishes that literary fiction could be as commercially viable as it was in 50's, 60's, etc. there are TONS AND TONS of great fiction writers out there who are still working, but these critics are either too lazy or too wedded to what are considered popular forms to give a fuck about most of the work coming out.

that and dyao, your professor's statement about literary theory is just so...myopic.

"Is there anything in modern literary criticism/theory worth reading?"

Yes. I don't wanna try to go into too much detail, but as someone who works in lit theory, I've seen a lot of that's interesting and strikes out in new directions from the classic postmodernism . One potentially important new trend is cognitive literary/cultural studies -- trying to integrate cognitive science with traditional literary-theory insight. The idea is that literary scholars and scientists who study the brain/mind are asking a lot of the same questions -- why and how do we appreciate art, what mental processes go into understanding a piece of text, etc. But in the past, humanities people and science people haven't been speaking the same language, or wanting to hear what each other had to say. A bunch of new theorists are writing about how we can use empirical studies of the mind to enrich our understanding of literature (instead of viewing "science" as the enemy). A few books to check out in this vein are Lis@ Zunshine's two books "Why We Read Fiction" & "Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible", and Mary Thomas Cr@ne's "Shakespeare's Brain." These are all fascinating, and as a bonus, they're written in a lucid, straightforward style, so you don't have to be a theory-head to understand them. Mark Turner and Amy Cook are also cognitivists worth looking into.

Queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism are still pretty vibrant these days, and there's great stuff being published, although those aren't my fields so I can't say as much about it. Eve Sedgwick is still fantastic, and she has a new-ish book, "Touching Feeling, that I'd recommend.

I'm very, very fond of Amy Kaplan.

sedgwick just died pretty recently i thought

yeah. but i guess you meant her work is still fantastic.

she was a hero

j0hn d- yeah those guys are great - love barthes and de man.

gudrun - thanks! that actually dovetails quite nicely with my own interest in reader-response theory. and, as an aside, I used to check out books for lis@ zunsh1ne at the library! hah

Oh, speaking of Eve Sedgwick and more queer theory-related stuff, there's a great book by Heather Love that comes out in March in paperback, called "Feeling Backward." sort of a queer history through literature lens...http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Backward-Politics-Queer-History/dp/0674026527/ref=dp_return_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

this is exactly my position and I will still rep for it tbh though I'll go up as far as Sterne for "it's already been done" & of course I read all kinds of 20th century lit & love it too I just think any claims for "innovation" are about 95% bullshit

% arrived at w/help of both science & math of course so don't even try

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Sunday, January 24, 2010 10:15 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i love this stance not just because i sort of actually believe it but because it also tends to deflate certain kinds of claims made by people on all sides of "the experimental fiction debate" or whatever--hard to give a shit about franzen and ben marcus when this debate has already been played out between homer and sappho bro

as to the whole thing about good contemporary literary criticism--yes there is but no one knows what it is yet; no one ever really knows what good criticism is till 20-30 years after the fact

all literary criticism is already contained in spinoza and nietzsche anyway

good thing I decided not to go to grad school then xp

as to the whole thing about good contemporary literary criticism--yes there is but no one knows what it is yet; no one ever really knows what good criticism is till 20-30 years after the fact

― max, Monday, January 25, 2010 10:23 AM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is a pretty old chestnut that's usually wheeled out w/r/t to contemporary fiction, no? (can't tell if you're using it here ironically tbh) power of the critic and all that. anyway people should spend less time wringing their hands about the state of contemporary fiction and more time reading imo

the wringing of the hands enriches the reading! win win!

haw it's stupid and bad but i am accidentally one of those people who uses that old chestnut. i don't read barely any contemporary fiction because i'm just waiting 20-30 years (ok maybe 100 years) to tell if it's really good. i almost wish i did but when i'm about to i get distracted by older books. or when i try to i don't like it that much. so it doesn't mean i don't read, i just don't care to read *that* just yet. soooo i have nothing to say about the state of contemporary american fiction.

william dean howells is contemporary imo

Genoways makes more than $130,000 a year (state school, public information). I don’t care about his salary, nor do I begrudge him that salary and while it is a considerable sum, it is not fuck you money. I do think, however, that the number speaks to one of the biggest problems with university-affiliated literary magazines–they are often bloated with administrative costs. It is a real shame to see some of the most well-established literary magazines folding but I also think that perhaps the shelter of academia has allowed the editors of these publications to believe a great deal of money is needed to produce a great magazine.
http://htmlgiant.com/print-journals/a-rambling-poetry-fiction-literary-magazines-are-still-dying/

we got a new one

http://chronicle.com/article/Chasing-the-Word-a-Writer-in/63882/

At the end of the year, I filed for a leave of absence and moved to San Francisco where, between odd jobs, I wrote a great deal. Nonetheless, the result somehow wasn't a novel. It didn't have a beginning or an end. It didn't seem to be telling any particular story. This was surprising and difficult for me to understand. It had occurred to me to worry in advance about writer's block, but the production of a huge non-novel just wasn't a possibility I had anticipated.

Earlier in the essay, she says she didn't want to workshop because she doesn't want to read other people's stuff. Hey maybe if you'd gone to workshop, you would have been better prepared to write a novel instead of a bunch of words!

Also, this is just wrong--have never ever heard of this

In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer's formation.

Well, at least "postmodern" makes an appearance in the article.

why would anyone care what she thinks about writing her article is horribly written

*flops on grandmother's super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa*
*consumes massive quantities of grapes*
*reads obsessively*

I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of "craft" and the tyrannical notion of "good writing."

super bougie crazy grapes couch

If you Google her name and look at the image results, the second one is a picture of Vampire Weekend.

And the fifth.

on super-bourgeois grape-colored rose sofa eating velveeta

In 2006, when I was a depressed graduate student, I published an essay in n+1 magazine about the American short story. It was, I suggested, a dead form unnaturally perpetuated by fiction-writing workshops, after "the transcendental conditions for its existence" had, in the words of Lukács, "already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic". Shortly after the essay was published, I received an email from a recent Columbia graduate called Ezra Koenig, to the effect that these words "really resonated" with him: would I mind sending him my address, so that he could mail me some short stories he had written in a creative-writing workshop?

holy shit you cannot make this shit up

What kind of person responds to an essay on the death of the short story by mailing its author some short stories? A very young person, clearly; this youthfulness was confirmed by the fact that the stories - for which, in all honesty, I did not have very high hopes - were accompanied by a self-produced CD of related songs performed by Koenig's band, Vampire Weekend.

after "the transcendental conditions for its existence" had, in the words of Lukács, "already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic

rip super-bourgeois rip rose-colored sofas rip grapes

It was during my research on the workings of charm and pop music that I stumbled on Internet Vibes (internetvibes.blogspot.com/), a blog that Ezra Koenig kept in 2005-6, with the goal of categorising as many "vibes" as possible.

loool whut

The project of collecting and categorising vibes transforms the world and its music into a marvellous conspiracy, a vast, incredibly complicated symphony, overheard in brief snatches. Consider the episode of Internet Vibes in which Koenig, attracted by the album's "dope cover featuring a Wolf, a Whale, an Eagle and a SWIRLY RAINBOW", purchases Paul Winter's 1978 album, Common Ground.

This experience caused me to take a cold, hard look at the direction my life was headed. What was I doing, running around this world—a place about which I clearly understood nothing—with no health insurance and no real job, writing an endless novel about God knows what? A week later, the department head called and asked if I wanted to return to Stanford. I said yes.

At the Salvation Army a few weeks later, Koenig discovers another Winter record

The last link in the chain comes when Koenig, bicycling down Amsterdam Avenue, hears some Brazilian percussion emanating from the cathedral of St John the Divine

Another of Koenig's hobbies is identifying similar photographic distortions, in otherwise unrelated pictures from Facebook. "Looking at those pictures at the same time really gives me a strange feeling in my gut. Is this what The Da Vinci Code is about?"

The key advantage of Vampire Weekend over Wes Anderson lies in the fact that they have found their perfect medium.

He ran his hands across his trousers, smoothing the crease, and then shoved them in his pockets. He could not sit still for more than a few minutes, fingers curling in upon cuffs, buttons, invisible threads. I asked him what kind of stories he liked and he bit his bottom lip fiercely, drawing blood.

I for one am looking forward to Batuman's book. I think her piece on Vampire Weekend is linked somewhere from the enormous ILM thread.

Batuman's piece first mentioned around this post:

Vampire Weekend; Arctic Monkeys of 2008?

Batuman herself posts in that thread.

I'm eagerly anticipating Batuman's book too. Her piece in Harpers about hanging out at Tolstoy's house in Harpers was awesome.

obv get rid of one of the "in Harpers"

i'm not looking forward to the book if it's anything like the piece i linked

I thought it was pretty interesting. I don't necessarily agree with her generalizations about creative writing workshops, but I think that it makes sense to see them as part of her own idiosyncratic path as a student and writer.

Also, this is just wrong--have never ever heard of this

In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer's formation.

I've actually heard a few creative writers say this a few times. I don't think they'd support it as some unilateral school of thought or mantra - I'm sure they would disagree with that. But in conversing with them it was clear they had to, at least mentally, remove themselves from a purely lit-crit mindset if they they ever wanted to be productive in writing - or at least not stifle themselves with self-doubt the whole time.

to clarify, though, I do disagree with her use of the word "understood." Kind of a problematic word.

Well, to be fair, she's talking about the culture at the one workshop she visited in that article, and it seems to be a pretty fair summary of the program director's attitude:

"What will you do if you don't come here?" he asked. I told him I had applied to some graduate schools. There was a long pause. "Well, if you want to be an academic, go to graduate school," he said. "If you want to be a writer, come here."

I really like Batuman, so I'm looking forward to giving this a read today...

Well, to be fair, she's talking about the culture at the one workshop she visited in that article, and it seems to be a pretty fair summary of the program director's attitude:

no she's extrapolating something one person said at a writer's colony and making it stand for the entire culture of the creative writing workshop. colonies and creative writing workshops=two pretty different things

hey nabisco you're posting real oɔsıqɐu right now

i am 100% with her on the general suckiness of the BASS

Okay so one thing I usually like about her is that she's less of an argument- or claim-maker and more of an observer, which is certainly how I read this piece -- i.e., I don't know that it's trying to make sweeping claims about the cultures of things so much as outline her own thought process in terms of relating to them. It probably helps that, so far as the ethos of creative-writing instruction goes, I don't think she's particularly incorrect. I think the stuff she describes is that way for a reason, and wants to avoid larger problems (e.g., the emphasis on "craft" exists because craft is the part of writing that can most productively be "taught," right?), but I don't think the way she's identifying them is entirely inaccurate or anything.

But really I read her mostly for details like the sailboat or the line about the dog-novella.

In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer's formation.

This reads like a "claim about the culture of things" to me. She even uses the word *culture*

i dunno, every MFA program i've read about suggests that there's lots of reading and study of literature to be done, in addition to reading and writing for the workshop

There is, but it's not necessarily "academic" in the manner she's talking about. And yeah, obviously that's a claim about the culture. My point is that I tend to read her, especially here, as outlining her own experience and thinking, more so than pressing a grand argument against anything. (I know that's a somewhat subtle distinction, but still.)

For instance, in my personal experience, the study of literature that goes on in creative-writing-land is organized in way that's similar to actual-study-of-literature, but it's keen to stay away from some of the issues that'd come up in a lit grad program (like critical theory) and focus on the stuff we'd describe as "craft" (if the text has this effect on you, what tools/techniques are being used to create that effect, and what can it teach you about different ways to write literature, etc.).

i dont think she makes much of an effort to distinguish the world as she xps it and the world as it is for others but that article was so loathsome 2 me that i didnt read it v closely

My point is that I tend to read her, especially here, as outlining her own experience and thinking, more so than pressing a grand argument against anything.

yeah i guess? that's probably the only way into this essay? it's very funny to me that some of her problems with writing the novel could possibly have been solved by taking some writing workshops. it just seemed so obvious to me. i don't know, her book sounds interesting and this essay turned me off big time.

I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of "craft." I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: "Show, don't tell"; "Murder your darlings"; "Omit needless words." As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.

this paragraph is such a trainwreck, especially. no one has ever said that "craft" is trying to explain the human condition or explain stuff about the world. fiction teaches us about the world, in big ways and little ways, and it's through craft and technique that people learn to be come better fiction writers. and yeah, sometimes, a lot of writing is overcoming bad habits, and learning not to use needless words.

haha, I was going to quote that exact paragraph for being so otm

of course I haven't taken a writing class in 10 years so

In my experience people get mfas because the programs act as patrons (plus sometimes they give you a teaching credential or whatever). I don't know too many people who have gotten them to learn how to write

and anyway, nabisco is right -- that paragraph is about her reaction to what she perceived the "puritanical culture of writing" to be. It is very much about analyzing her own thought processes and her own journey.

Like nabisco, I'm not so interested in her broad pronouncements on the state of writing workshops as I am in the personal story of her path through American higher education and how that interacted with her love of literature and the written word. Her swipes at writing workshops seem a bit like trolling to me - designed to provoke - but that stuff has been debated to death, I think.

kinda feel like she should take a workshop before she bitches about workshops

What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?

holy christ suggest destroy this person

Alfred, why don't you care about the search for meaning?

I found it in Muriel Spark and gin and tonics.

Well, like I was saying, I think the emphasis on "craft" isn't really about people thinking writing is only craft -- it's about "craft" being the word we use for the sum total of what you can really teach someone about writing. So of course teaching-writing dwells a lot on craft; it would be a lot hairier to try and teach classes on "having good ideas" or "having a singular aesthetic" or "having something meaningful to say." (I think most people teaching writing are believers in that stuff as art, and they want to encourage you to develop such things, not meddle and try to tell you how.)

That said, I actually sort of agree with her about the downside of the focus on "craft," because ... I know this is a staple of "essays bemoaning the sad state of etc.," but the danger really is creating this world where it feels like everyone is sitting around polishing these beautiful little stones, and conversation has somehow drifted away from whether the stones have meaning or purpose. (Because meaning and purpose are the things nobody wanted to meddle with, the jobs of the artist.) I don't know that this really hurts the state of fiction, because I imagine the exact same number of people have meaningful/interesting things to say. But as for the culture of instruction, it can indeed start to lean that way.

well, like i said, i'd be much more inclined to give her essay a fair shake if she'd actually taken a creative writing workshop

Your search - for meaning - did not match any documents.

See, I can't separate "meaning" and "purpose" from "form."

me neither.

nabisco, you sort of seem to be taking the opposite side from the side you took on that Creative writing considered as an industry thread, but I guess that's your prerogative.

Further, I have enough reader-response crit roots to understand that I find meaning and purpose in a piece of literature that nabisco might dismiss.

All it had were its negative dictates: "Show, don't tell"; "Murder your darlings"; "Omit needless words." As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.

this resonates with me pretty strongly, mostly because they're meant to be pithy firestarters meant to make you ~think~ but they're so overused that they're kind of limp and ragged. also add "make sure there's news in it" to the list

this batumaker girl, she should never stop writing about VW - in fact I'm starting a collection to make sure she always has the funds necessary to hang around koenig and catch his vibes

you know what's funny is, i've never heard any of those things said in a creative writing class

pretty sure all writing classes ever mirror your own personal experience there

Weird: I don't feel like I'm taking the opposite side at all! (In fact, I'm not sure I feel like there are "sides!") Just saying that her description of the ethos of the thing -- whether you want to find that good or bad -- doesn't strike me as particularly weird or far-flung.

As I remember, the main thing I was arguing on that other thread was that writing instruction doesn't necessarily warp everyone who goes into it and turn them all into the same thing (as is commonly believed) -- I think it mostly takes the same amount of talent you'd get anyway, and makes most everyone better at the "craft" part. (This might create more people who can now write well-crafted but banal stories, but it doesn't diminish the number who were interesting coming in.)

(I.e., people complain that MFA programs take interesting writers and turn them into craft-obsessed clones, but chances are the programs turn out exactly as many fascinating writers as go into them -- they just so happen to also take a whole bunch of not-fascinating writers and at least teach them good enough "craft" that they're now readable.)

pretty sure all writing classes ever mirror your own personal experience there

hey just saying some of those things ring true to me--i.e. omit needless words is a pretty useful lesson a lot of people could stand to learn

Just saying that her description of the ethos of the thing -- whether you want to find that good or bad -- doesn't strike me as particularly weird or far-flung.

Yeah, but you also said you *love* her stuff, so it's not too surprising you had the reaction you did

Just because I tend to like someone's prose doesn't make me automatically agree with their perspective or anything!

My issue with creative writing programs/majors is that they always separated themselves from actually -reading- anything, which was contained in the Literature major. How could you possibly write well if you knew absolutely nothing about what the rich depth of history in the art? (knowing Fight Club and American Psycho by heart does not count).

Good writing, stupid ideas. I'm tired of reading people who keep rehashing what was mastered and passed over in the 60s and 70s ... it's clear they either never read the classics from that period, or they're just really lazy. Who knows. (see: Safran Foer, every other subway-reading author from this decade).

uh. which creative writing programs don't make you read stuff?

went to creative writing program, wrote a lot, was asked to read a lot and write papers about the books i read, emerged a much better writer than i came in. in case anyone cares.

ilx is the greatest creative writing program ever devised

See, I can't separate "meaning" and "purpose" from "form."

Now, I don't mean to be starting stuff here, especially as a guy who has heavy formalist leanings & believes in form as a big contributor to & indicator of a work's greater meaning. But if I present you with a sonnet, and the sonnet ends "this thou perceivs't, that makes thy love more strong/to love that well which thou must leave ere long" - well, the form of the piece is a sonnet. but the meaning of the piece, summed up nicely by its ending couplet, is somewhat "you will love more strongly if you love well when you understand that your time so doing is short." this being Shakespeare, there are plenty of other meanings, and within the sonnet cycle, really awesome intense ones. but I think the meaning of the sonnet and its form are pretty separate matters, and would ask for a longer explication of the claim that meaning is inseparable from form.

This article makes writing sound very important

medium is the message iirc

not entirely convinced we settled that q fwiw

well my gut reaction to your post is that that meaning is certainly /one/ possible meaning of the sonnet - but to my mind, when you start trying to interpret meaning, it will inevitably need to be informed by form

like I wouldn't have that much of a problem with your post if you replaced 'meaning' with 'subject matter' or maybe even 'theme' as perhaps a general descriptor of the poem, but 'meaning' is such a loaded term for me

I think I said that too - "form as a big contributor to & indicator of a work's greater meaning" - but look, if I say

some birds chattering
a constant stream of static
Tuesday, ILX

well - that's a haiku, but its meaning isn't "this is a haiku." if you make reference to it without describing its form, you'd fall short, but its form isn't inseparable from its meaning. you can restate that without losing much, I think.

meaning & how form informs it isn't just categorizing what particular type or genre a work falls under - form, to me, is a signpost that indicates to the reader how they /should/ interpret the work - for example when I read yer haiku I think 'this is a poem and thus I should interpret these words in a poetic way' which opens the doors to much greater avenues of meaning than if I thought 'this is just a snippet from an everyday piece of conversation' (you can tell I hem and haw about the 'literariness' of works quite often)

this is half-formed but I'm almost to the point where 'form' becomes shorthand for 'perception' - what is interesting to me about art is precisely the way in which the artist chooses to frame and re-produce the subject of their art, and the interesting energies and frictions that result from it; at least for the way I interpret art, I lose quite a bit of perspective if I try to divorce form from the interpretation

ugh I have a lot more I want to say but it's not really coming out right, plus I gotta run

Maybe here's an idea why fiction programs/workshop culture leads to technically good but dreadfully boring writers:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/06/why-group-norms-kill-creativity.php

hey now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/06/american-literature-great-novelists

jesus such a boring article

Perhaps the reason for this Mailer/Salinger dichotomy – one happy to run for public office, the other running from the clicking shutter – is that literary fame in the US is potentially so vast that responses need to be extreme: absolute promiscuity, total celibacy. Those who have tried to take a middle path of occasional cooperation – Roth, McCarthy – have suffered intrusive coverage and unwanted attention.

literary fame in the US is vast? for whom?

The paradox of Am lit is that it is notable for possessing both the most publicity-conscious writers in literary history – Mailer had an eye for photo-ops generally only found in reality TV contestants – and the most publicity-shy.

can't think of a single America writer besides mailer who was "publicity conscious"

mccarthy tried the "middle path" of two interviews in forty years?

jonathan ames mb?

that was an xpost 2 mq

i don't think ames is even close to being a household name, though, in the way mailer is/was

are we being purposefully obtuse here re. paperback fiction or what?

well yeah danielle steele is a whole nother ball of wax

That dude needs to meet Tao Lin

ames isnt particularly famous but i think he is publicity conscious

james patterson had a profile in the nyt mag (lol @ my frame of reference i guess) but what other pulp novelists are into celebrity?

cough candance bushnell cough

GRISHAM

crichton, king, we could go on

Atwood's robot hand!

... that article also describes dave eggers as "one of the most exciting talents of the new generation"

i don't think i've ever read anything any good on modern american fiction in the guardian tbh

these writers don't really fall into the category the writer of the article is talking about, "great american literature" or whatever. i should amend my statement i guess: which American writers besides Mailer, working in the same area (i.e. not paperback airport fiction) were "publicity conscious"

GORE VIDAL

It amazes me that his historical novels actually topped the bestseller lists.

i mean i'm not being obtuse about paperback fiction, i just don't think it falls under this article's area. whatever, it's a stupid article anyway

so we have Vidal and Mailer.

is Hemingway dead?

Tom Wolfe.

capoteeeeeeeee.

tom wolfe is a good one

hemingway died in 1952 or whenever the old man and his sea came out

A digression, but this reminds me that George Saunders is basically the most charming author I've ever seen on TV.
Well, him and David McCullough, but he does pop history.

Saunders is rad

Jonathan Franzen.

ha, nice try

i WISH george saunders was a staple of our televisual landscape

publicity self conscious maybe

dave eggers

Pynchon (reverse psychology)

David Foster Wallace (he died, publicity)

The review of Elif Batuman's book is up on the NY Times website:

"Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/books/17book.html

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/02/14/the_possessed/

http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/63773/

hmmm maybe i should check it out @ the library and just skip/ignore the grad school parts

Jane Tompkins would be proud.

of what?

Of academics getting personal. (Cf. "Me and My Shadow")

I thought we were doing that in the teachers vs students thread.

"After 200 pages of Shields’s sly obituary for narrative fiction, I began to wonder if the doom of the novel in the eyes of the beholder? It might be that some writers, growing older, find it difficult to continue the frankly labor-intensive carpentry needed to build a piece of narrative fiction, to do the intense and sustained work that goes into making something that is original, nor do they care to risk the self-exposure that comes with presenting a work of art that is not an ironicized grab-bag of things they have read, seen, and overheard. Proclaiming the death of narrative is not for young writers – it is for the aging, who might be tempted to confuse their own waning powers with literature itself coming to an end."

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2010/01/from_hunger.html

Saw the Elif Batuman book at Barnes & Noble the other day. She's not doing a good job of making me want to read it if the cover is designed by fucking ROZ CHAST.

y u no like cuet ruskies

http://www.elifbatuman.com/Books/Images/ThePossessed.jpg

the book's gotten great reviews! (she probably had nothing to do with the cover, either.)

I know, I just hate Roz Chast.

really? like hate? huh. she seems like she'd be right up the Ol' Jaymc alley. guess not. i think she's pretty okay.

"pretty okay" = damning w/faint praise

Seriously, though, why does anyone like Roz Chast? She's like the Bobo version of Cathy Guisewite.
― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, December 6, 2005 11:12 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cover suggests to me a kind of whimsical shaggy-dog humor that doesn't mesh with reviews of the book IIRC (it's kinda serious, right?)

jaymc otm but then again I hate robt crumb too (ducks)

i think parts are funny, from what i hear tell

hypocrite that I am either chast or crumb can design my next book cover

i like roz chast!

Just finished it, and it's not all that "kinda serious" -- I mean, it's basically a collection of charming anecdotes from a long period of studying literature. I get the feeling someone could probably enjoy it without caring much about the details of the lit stuff, the same way I could enjoy anecdotes about studying math without entirely following the math. The one negative thing I'd say about it is that eventually you get the feel for the charming-anecdote style, and it's sort of an episodic collection, so at some point you might find yourself in a hurry to wind things up. (And it's not like there's any huge tying-everything-together at the close, either.) It might actually be better read in individual chunks? Someone's taken the longest narrative thing in there, chopped in into sections, and placed those sections between the others, so as to create some kind of thread going through the whole, but that can only accomplish so much.

OK so the cover fits, then. I thought it was more like dissertation out-takes.

Oh and it's really funny in spots. I suppose a kind of funny some here might find precious, or whatever, but funny/charming. Almost quotably so. And there's some early stuff involving Isaac Babel's relatives at a Babel conference that is ... really something. Like I said, doesn't require any knowledge of Russian lit (I know next to nothing about Russian lit), but it's surely a whole lot more likable if you're interested in lit in general, or lit-like ways of talking about stuff.

xpost - Yeah, not dissertation out-takes -- more like how you'd explain some of the experience to ... your friend who was an English-major undergrad, I guess? It wasn't until I started reading it that I saw the marketing cleverness they've managed here, of getting a book that reads like any conversational, observational memoir about an experience, except in this case it involves Russian and Uzbek literature, so the experience itself is a little more ... literary.

I mean, the longest thread in there is an even split between "here is some funny stuff that happened to me and my boyfriend over a summer in Samarkand" and "here is what I learned about old Uzbek poetry while I was there."

Roz Chast isn't as funny as she used to be but man there was a window there where she made me laugh really hard all the time

"planet of the guys" all-time one-paneler