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.

enough with new york already

I couldn’t even finish this.

mfa programs versus the new york city

Slate has put up a six page article by Chad Harbach (the editor-in-chief of n+1, which makes a lot of sense now that I think about it) detailing the literary cultures of New York City publishers versus MFA programs. It’s influenced by Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, something I’ve been meaning to read since its release.  The most interesting bits are about how the differing culture means of book production affect the form of what’s being written, though I don’t know if those ideas presented belong to Chad or Mark. It’s a good read, though it doesn’t really take you anywhere you weren’t already. A bit for perusal:

There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments—though these abound—but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared to other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers—what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts—but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation—of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength—is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

Everyone knows this. But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way that this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, Calif., to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Mich., to Tallahassee, Fla. (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at the New Yorker offices on 42^nd Street). The superficial differences between these two cultures can be summed up charticle-style: short stories vs. novels; Amy Hempel vs. Jonathan Franzen; library copies vs. galley copies; Poets & Writers vs. the New York Observer; Wonder Boys vs. The Devil Wears Prada; the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference vs. the Frankfurt Book Fair; departmental parties vs. publishing parties; literary readings vs. publishing parties; staying home vs. publishing parties. But the differences also run deep. Each culture has its own canonical works and heroic figures; each has its own logic of social and professional advancement. Each affords its members certain aesthetic and personal freedoms while restricting others; each exerts its own subtle but powerful pressures on the work being produced.

old new pork

I was having a conversation with a buddy several days ago about place in writing and the predominance of New York City as the setting for much of the literary fiction in America, specifically fiction “we” hold in high esteem, and by “we” I mean the literary industrial complex, which is — of course — centered in NYC. Of course not all great fiction is written or takes place in NYC, but there is definitely a biased drift towards the eastern seaboard.

Here’s what David Simon, creator of the television show The Wire thinks about that:

Inflamed rhetoric aside, I like what he has to say. New York City is seen as a synecdoche for America, and novels about life in the City are seen as novels about the American experience. But, as Simon points out, this is no longer the case. As I said in an earlier entry, the age of the Great American Novel is over because of the increasingly fractured and heterogeneous nature of our culture. It’s becoming impossible for one novel to engage every sort of American experience in the same way it’s becoming impossible to see those experiences through the lens of a single city. Our mono-culture (read: educated white [male] culture) is losing ground to a plurality of cultures from all walks of life and from all ends of the globe that don’t identify with the New York City idea of urban America, and what these people want is a literature that speaks to them, that speaks to their realities and lives.