some more links

I really enjoy reading and writing about reading and writing, which probably doesn’t need to be said but it gives me an opportunity to explain all the links I’m about to share. I’ve had entries dedicated to link sharing before, but then I was mostly making fun of myself. I don’t post as regularly as I once did, but that’s the fault of a sudden up-tick in personal obligations and working on my book. Read: I don’t need a virtual space for creative blow-holing anymore — I’m using all my mind-water to put out fires in “real” life.

I do still read a lot, however, and the following annotated links are to articles and essays that I found interesting enough to bookmark in my “for_blog” folder. I originally wanted to turn each of them into their own entry, and I still could, but time, time, and time:

Michael Idov’s article “My Two Days As A Russian Tabloid Sensation” is funny, but the best parts are his insights into modern Russia vis-à-vis its literature. After complaining about the seeming absurdity at the core of so many recent and critically lauded novels, he asks an old friend and well-known Russian author Alexander Garros if he wouldn’t prefer to write a book about something closer to reality. Garros replies: “Sure I do.  But you see, when you start writing out the details of everyday Russian life, the absurdity just overwhelms you. At some point, you give up. Your characters start flying around, they sprout fangs and tails. Because that’s the only way to stay true to the material. Russian reality is too phantasmagoric to fit into realist logic.” Sometimes I think the same think about my country.

This right here is a conversation on E-Books and self-publishing between Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath, and I’m sure lots of people really got a lot out of this.

Leave it to Tom LeClair to ask the oblivious questions: “[I]f New York remains a Great American City, and is the center of publishing, and is the home of many of our most celebrated fiction writers, why haven’t we had in, say, the last decade, a Great New York Novel?” Maybe it’s too hard to write well with your head rammed all the way up your own ass.*

This one is for the hipsters: Guess what? Selling-out has always been an important part of getting published. BONUS: the article includes a beer ad featuring Ernest Hemingway.

Jennifer Egan and the Pulitzer Prize have teamed up to save American literature! The author of this fluff piece talks about experimentalist fiction and how much more accepted it’s becoming, and he mentions Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: “[H]is latest book sees him cut up Bruno Schulz’s novel Street Of Crocodiles and create a new ‘novel’ out of the remaining words. Vanity Fair called Tree of Codes ’very, very cool.’” I’m not a big fan of Foer, in fact I think he’s a bit of a hack, and to me this sounds like even further evidence that’s he’s still out of ideas, like most people who write literary fiction. It is cool though that Vanity Fair had the courage to say what everyone in this country is thinking: “Where are all the really, really cool books?”

I was planning on using the previous article as an introduction to an entry on Pale King, but I don’t particularly want to write an entry on Pale King. I much prefer Wallace’s short fiction and non-fiction to his novels, and I have no desire to read this one (for reasons I’ve already talked about). Instead, I will talk about this: “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library” is an amazing article, and (New Critics be damned!) really gives you some insight into who he was and what he was trying to do with his work.

*Clarification: I’m not singling out Tom LeClair, I’m speaking about the city as a whole.

look i wrote my own bloated essay about novels

Writers love big essays about novels by novelists. Or at least I do, and the more theoretically bloated and complex and ego driven they are, the better. Lee Siegel published a piece in the New York Observer a few months ago, and though it was pretty straightforward — major themes: things aren’t like they used to be in the world of letters, and this is bad; we need more authors like we used to have; non-fiction is where all the talented kids are nowadays; the novel is dead (for now) — the brouhaha it caused was much more exciting.

In my mind Siegel’s “Mailer” article should take it’s place in the long string of essays written about the state of the novel (Some of my favorites include: Tom Wolfe, Lev Grossman, Johnathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, B.R. Meyers, and James Wood.), even though I find it a little lacking in the substance department. Most essays of this type strive to become part of an ongoing conversation between creators about what they’re creating, about what the novel as an artistic form should be and do. And I know I’m not the only one to say it, but Siegal comes off a little like an old man complaining on his front porch. “Kids today,” he thinks. “Harrumph.”

Perhaps the problem for me about Siegel is that he’s too focussed on the past. He’s looking at American Letters as it has been and then insisting that’s how it should be, and he’s far from the only one. Authors, editors, agents, publishers — the majority of the American literati seems to be in denial about the fact that currently our culture is undergoing a great and rapid change at a very deep structural level — and it’s all technology’s fault. The depth and breadth of this denial reminds me very much of the music and film industries from the late 90s and early 2000s, and when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be just as catastrophic.

The reason? With the advent of internet technologies we no longer need big publishing houses to take on the risk of finding and developing new talent and covering the cost of printing books. I hate to admit, but for the majority of people on this planet electronic books will become the means by which they consume literature. It’s inevitable when the cost of reproduction becomes zero, ad infinitum. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, and I don’t think physical books will ever go away, but the book as a technology is now outdated. In a few generations it will seem just as antiquated and nostalgic as vinyl records or classic cars.

So what does this mean for the author? I think the time of Super Writers and Great American Novels is over. Our culture is simply too fractured and heterogeneous for one product or voice to appeal to us enmasse, and we have our parents and technology to thank for it. Individuality is the name of the game, and for the consumer in our society, individuality is defined through choice. Down with monobeer and hooray for craft breweries! “Boo!” on formulaic, big budget summer blockbusters and “yay!” for independent films with story and character! Kill radio and long live Indie music! Sure people still drink Coors and watch MTV, but not like they used to. This is a big country we live in, and to get something to appeal to all those people and disparate interests  it usually ends up watered down or generic or formulaic. Art becomes an industry, a business, and innovation and risk or anything new stops making sense because it’s bad business.

This is ultimately what I think is wrong with American Literature. Books aren’t losing popularity, it’s that the wrong kinds of books are no longer popular — but “wrong” only according to the various tastemakers. The audience for literary fiction has continued to shrink, and in an attempt to appeal to more a larger audience authors have become generic and formulaic, the flavor equivalent of taking out all the hops.

I hear and read so many authors and critics bemoaning an end to the Golden Age of letters, and that’s wrong. If anything I think we’re on the cusp of a Golden Age, only it’s going to be different than anything people could have imagined. Again, look at the music industry. Thanks to the internet artists can write, record and distribute all their music on their own — they don’t need the giant publishing houses. New business models are being invented, and musicians are making a living doing what they want to do: play music. On the flip side, people can now find and listen to music that specifically caters to their own personal taste. Bands don’t need hundreds of thousands of fans to support them (and  in turn the giant publishing machine that controlled the bottleneck of distribution) and people aren’t limited to listening to music that caters to the least common denominator.

So what does this mean for the novelist? Writers should take a page about of the musicians playbook: get online, connect with people, give some stuff away for free and sell the rest. You may not have as many readers as you would have had, but you don’t need them — there’s a lot more room at the table, now. Self-publishing is no longer anathematic, and in time I see it becoming prerequisite to any sort of publishing deal. It’s important to remember that publishers aren’t going to go away, they’re just going to get smaller and there will be a lot more of them catering to all different kinds of tastes and interests.

In the end authors will still be writing, publishers will still be distributing, and people will still be reading, and that’s what’s important.