in favor of parenthesis

It’s been one month since I last posted, but it feels like only a week has passed. Things have been crazy in Austin this “spring”, both for me and the community of people who also live here (SXSW was almost too much this year). Apart from school related studying my reading and writing has been almost non-existent lately, and I’m making this public confession in order to create  a little external pressure on me to live up to my idealized self-conception (Though, to be fair, what I’m really speaking about here is instead the internal pressure I put on myself to either live up to external expectations or influence the opinions other people have of me, which [I suppose] means this website is little more than some extraneous cog in the post-skull meta-construct my superego has created in an attempt to realize its “real-world” imperialist ambitions, the attainment of which has only recently become possible in the wake of technologically fueled breakdowns between “self” and “other”.)

I’m reading the penultimate volume of In Search of Lost Time, though I’d really rather be reading something else. It’s not that I’m not enjoying it per se, but rather that I’m in the mood for a different kind of book, maybe, I guess. I’ve been reading a lot of translated literature lately, so maybe something domestic this time. Maybe I need to read Freedom or Netherland, something both recent and American, which is what the little voice inside me is mumbling, I think. Maybe.

Mark Sarvas seems to have got things going again on his blog The Elegant Variation, and today he had a post promising several “lesson highlights” from the novel writing classes he teaches at UCLA. I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort figuring out how to write a Novel, and I’m always curious to see/read what other people have to say on the subject, especially when it’s in a classroom. I’m particularly looking forward to the ”The Many Dratfts of the First Draft” lesson.

goodbye invisible

I’m finally done with Invisible, thank goodness. Not a fan. It was simultaneously better and worse than The New York Trilogy, but mostly it was more of the same, just less exciting (not that The New York Trilogy is very exciting). I’ve already talked a lot about it (here and here and here), so I won’t bother to repeat myself. Normally I would have put the book down, but I wanted to get to the end — I knew he was going to throw something in there, some twist that would (in his eyes at least) tie everything up in one way or another. And, it was definitely there, like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie. Overall the book felt like a collection of scraps that didn’t really work on their own  forced into a semblance of a novel. On the surface everything a reader of serious fiction would want was there — everything except depth.

I’m also very close to finishing the Zadie Smith book, which I recommend. At times her thinking can be a little inchoate and scattered, but not ever to the extent where you doubt her in what she’s saying. The last chapter on David Foster Wallace is extremely engaging.

roth on writing

Phillip Roth has been making the rounds in support of his new book, and has had a few interesting things to say on the future of the novel, specifically in regards to its decline in the face of technology:

“The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people’s reach anymore,” he said. Beginning with film in the 20th Century, then television, then computers, and more recently social media networks such as Facebook, the reader is now utterly distracted.  ”Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it”

Among the publishing chatter about a possible impending death of the popular, longer novel and the growth of novellas due to e-readers, “Nemesis” — clocking in at about 56,000 words — is Roth’s latest in a cycle of short novels. You see, Roth noted humorously, “I am with the times.”

Far from being new ideas, it’s still interesting to hear someone like Roth vocalize them. His solution? A higher output (five books in five years) of shorter novels.  Though it’s hard to play the prediction game, I can’t help but think that in the future prolificness and expansiveness will be good keys for success.

an update on new directions

I’ve been having a great time with my new blog/website/brand-portal, posting links and talking about general thoughts on various semi-related topics, but now that I’ve got a few entries under my belt I’m going to change directions a little bit. First, I’m not going to be posting as frequently as I have been. Second, I’m (thinking about) talking more about my book-in-progress. Why? Because I’ve reworked it (and by “it” I mean the plot/story/theme/approach/pov/characters, etc.) a little bit (a tweak or two here and there), and today I began working on the new draft regularly and in earnest. There’s a part of me that wants to use this site to discuss thoughts and ideas I have regarding the writing process, mostly because it’s a convenient space to work through any issues I might be grappling with at the time, and I think that would be an interesting experiment, to in effect liveblog the struggle of writing a book. I don’t know exactly what that would mean yet, and I don’t know if that’s something I can actually do (I don’t want to give much away about the specific plot details, and some of the issues I’m dealing with are personal in nature.), but it’s the mindset I’ve adopted going forth, and at the very least it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I think the key to success in blogging and writing in general is that you can’t concern yourself with what people are going to think, or put too much weight behind your expectations about where a given piece/project is going. “It’s all about the journey. Man.”

We’ll see. If I change my mind at any point I’ll be sure and turn it into an entry, like this.

brain pot stew

I finished Olive Kitteridge last night, and I was a little underwhelmed by the ending. All in all it’s  still a great collection of stories featuring amazingly rendered and memorable characters, but I feel like Elizabeth Stroud missed an opportunity to do something more. There is a chance that I was just so impressed by the heart exhibited through her writing that my expectations were raised to unrealistic heights, but I don’t think so. One of the most interesting things about the book is its structure, and in regards to that things do come a little unwound at the end, and what the reader is left with is just a great collection of short stories. Which is totally fine.

I guess.

To be honest, though, I’m not a big fan of short stories. I find them to be the literary equivalent off popcorn — though I admit this is not always the case. I’ve ready many short stories that are absolutely amazing, and in terms of meaning and complexity on par with the best of novels. I’m just so much more interested in the form of the novel and what you can do with it — and that’s because there is so much more that you can do with it. In order for me to engage with what I’m reading I need a certain level of depth that comes from more than well written characters and beautiful prose, and in my reading experience it takes an extremely high level of skill to do that with short stories (e.g., David Foster Wallace), much more so than the novel.

I’ve been working through these thoughts today, and I’m continuing to do so even as I write this. What I need to do is read more short story collections (I’ve added Runaway to my queue.) and short form fiction (I’m also hoping to read We Don’t Live Here Anymore very soon.) and let it all stew together in my brain. I’m sure I’ll get back to this topic in a month or two.

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.