Novelists No One Reads Anymore

I mean, sure -- names that register with 50-year-olds (or 75-year-olds) as "extremely famous, everybody knows who this is" and 25-year-olds as "I have never heard that name before" are perfect for this!

50 year olds probably mostly know McKuen as a guy who used to take up a lot of shelf space in the poetry sections of used bookstores

Also know him as the translator/lyricist for Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun.”

It says something about the 70s culture that I have this memory of him recording a reading of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, even though a Google search produces no result.

He had a line of beachy casual clothes, don't know how well that did.

He perfectly embodied some kind of variety show sitcom idea of what a poet was back in the day, just like Billy Collins does now.

Also know him as the translator/lyricist for Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun.”

He was also the translator/lyricist for Scott Walker's "If You Go Away".

Interesting. Which was also a Jacques Brel song. Wonder if there are more. Maybe Mort Shuman did some too.

Yeah, there are reasons no one has heard of him

He did all of those initial Brel translations that walker sang, that’s a lasting contribution to culture if nothing else (tho there’s also the Beat Generation song, which Richard Hell nicked)

I’ve heard some of his records, they’re all that sort of dippy mor-beatnik stuff - surprised they didn’t put him in a mad men ep, has that time capsule quality. The poetry is affable drivel

he was always the go-to pop poet for midbrows to hate on (runner-up: leonard cohen)

Trying to remember that Canadian writer who was Leonard Cohen’s mentor and some kind of snappy dresser. When he passed there some great quotes about him.

Irving Layton.

Somehow I remembered it but if I didn’t I could have looked it up here: https://www.mentors.ca/mentorpairsdatabase.html

Leonard Cohen on Irving Layton: “I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.” https://t.co/EpgKvmGNjz pic.twitter.com/49uo6yo9q1

— New Directions (@NewDirections) October 17, 2016

Back to the novelists dammit. Edna FERBER

Novels
Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed (1911)
Fanny Herself (1917)
The Girls (1921)
*So Big (1924) (won Pulitzer Prize)
*Show Boat (1926, Grosset & Dunlap)
*Cimarron (1930)
American Beauty (1931)
*Come and Get It (1935)
*Saratoga Trunk (1941)
Great Son (1945)
*Giant (1952)
*Ice Palace (1958)

*Dinner at Eight (1932) (play, with G. S. Kaufman)
*Stage Door (1936) (play, with G.S. Kaufman)

Dunno about adaptations of shorter fiction, but lots of collections, so maybe.

Also:

Screenplays
Saratoga Trunk (1945) (film, with Casey Robinson)
Musical adaptations
Show Boat (1927) – music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld
Saratoga (1959) – music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, dramatized by Morton DaCosta
Giant (2009) – music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson

So Big had a long, productive life as crosswordese, SOBIG.

I've seen all those movies---Giant several times---but never read a word---think local library still has So Big.

Wow. Watch out for dust mites and silverfish!

Michael moorcock?

i still read Moorcock sometimes

His intros to other people's books or his own stuff?

I read him for the first time this summer, the Elric Saga Vol. 1 collection, i.e. the first four Elric books in terms of internal chronology.

They're pretty fun, but I don't think I'm a huge fan yet.

He's a writer with excellent ideas who has a lot of trouble using words well. I read the Elric books as a kid and really had to force my eyes through his prose on a re-read a few years ago.

Fantasy strikes me as a genre where there are lots of readers willing to dig deep, and where writers can have a long shelf-life compared to literary writers of similar relative status.

i feel MM kept his excellent ideas well out of the elric series

(xpost!)
Sinkah has had some choice words to say about Moorcock's way with words but hard to locate them in the archives.

yeah, fantasy, horror and science fiction readers are quite willing to read older, out-of-fashion writers

he was always the go-to pop poet for midbrows to hate on (runner-up: leonard cohen)

― mark s, Friday, 28 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

✔️✔️✔️

Didn't get into first Elric trilogy (too soon after Urth of the New Sun, for one thing), didn't really focus on his Hawkwind lyrics, but in last five years or so have come across some good new stories. Well, the first part of one (I think in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) about most recent (American & allies involved) Afghanistan War seemed a bit stilted in the battlefield, maybe because he'd never been in war, but when the main character gets to Kabul, and re-encounters a woman x olde webs of complicity and duplicity re dealing with various factions of governments, as well as each other---it gets better. Also liked the brawny sandy savvy steampunker he contributed to Old Mars, a good RR Martin-Dozois-edited collection of all-new stories. Di

I had no idea Hawkwind was an actual band when I read Time of the Hawklords.

he was always the go-to pop poet for midbrows to hate on (runner-up: leonard cohen)

― mark s, Friday, 28 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Rod McKuen piece in Slate recently

https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/rod-mckuen-best-selling-poet-songs-what-happened.html

I’m in my 40s but only heard his name as a punchline in Giffen & DeMatteis Justice League comics

That Slate link is the ICP of this thread

Insane clown posse?

Yes

Just a reference to the “Bands with their own subculture “ thread where people continuously post ICP
(The Slate link has been posted here 3 times btw)

Ha oops

In fairness one of those posts was within the quote part of a reply to the previous such post.

As Angus Wilson and Murdoch have both been mentioned I came across this review of a book by the former on the latter.

Wilson's value, if any, was as a gossip.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/06/biography.highereducation?

You're confusing AN Wilson with Angus Wilson there

Haha ah so that's a writer I do not know a lot about.

the old men at the zoo (angus w) was made into a TV drama in the early 80s!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldvbZmtm7_E

tho tbh i feel this was a last little throb on the slope of his forgetting

that title has stuck with me, and that appears to be the extent of my knowledge

Two kids authors that were relatively omnipresent on the mid-80s WH Smith shelves of my childhood, but now never even turn up in charity shops: JH Brennan and John Antrobus

None of the novelists today will be read.

there’s so little contemporary literature that has the potential to be classic (i.e. to be appreciated outside its immediate context). nobody in a hundred years is going to read donna tartt or sally rooney as literature (even if they might read them as cultural history)

— rose ❤️‍🔥🗡 (@roselyddon) November 1, 2022

tweeters with a time machine