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Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
If you are the among the best at something, who can blame you for wanting to associate with other people who are among the best at things, too? Like, if you’ve got the best tits, why shouldn’t you want to date whoever has the best hoodies, or become best friends with whoever’s got the best pepperoni? Why, at HTMLGiant, is elitism such a dirty word–and not the good kind that gets you cred in the comments section?
“Elite” means the choice part. The cream. The fruit. It seems as if among certain cohorts of writers and thinking people, this one included, some kind of stigma is attached to being, doing, or having the best, even if that superiority is hard-won and merit-based. And it’s even worse to demonstrate an affinity for others who you deem to be the best. Editors are called elitist if they publish the same writers over and over again or send form rejections. But an editor by definition must be selective, and choosy. Maybe we would choose differently than they would, but that’s why we all must figure out which publications we trust.
When someone cries elitist, to me it just sounds like envy at not feeling like a part of the elite. The envy is understandable! It’s nice here in the creamy, fruity elite. Wish I could extend an invitation.
WORDS THAT SHOULD DIE AMONG OTHERS:
paradigm very salient
zany droll hopefully excited
nonplus risible gender guy
Fernando Pessoa paradigmatic clarity
When I teach undergrad lit classes, I often start with a little chat about why we read, what poetry and stories do for us, or, in other words, why they are required to take the class. A few times, I’ve brought up the Kafka quote about a book serving as an ax for the frozen sea within us, or the Dickinson one about how she knows something is a poem if she feels like the top of her head has been blown off. Invariably, my students fail to see why either of these is a desirable outcome.
Yet there is certainly an enduring trend in some circles of reviewing and back-cover-blurbing wherein the highest praise for a book is how much injury it has done to the reader-critic. “That book destroyed/killed/frightened/destabilized/wrecked me” seems always to be a compliment. It’s trendy to say that reading oughtn’t be therapy, or comfort, or safety, or anything other than terribly, personally debilitating.
Is this mere trend, a new way to say the same thing, or is it really this way? Are we all so desensitized that we’re happy for any kind of feeling? Or are writers (who tend to be the ones behind this particular brand of criticism) engaged in elaborate sm rituals, in which we get to be sadists when we write and masochists when we read? Is there room for reading good prose or poetry to act as a stopgap, however illusive and broken and temporary, against impending death, and betrayal, and loss?
To continue the discussion of theory and creative writing, a little excerpt from a Lorrie Moore piece in NYRB about mid-century Latin American writer Clarice Lispector:
“In France she was viewed as a philosopher–and at times it does seem that calling her a novelist is a little like calling Plato a playwright–but when she attended a literary conference where her work was discussed in theoretical terms, Lispector left the panel early, saying later that not understanding a word that was being said about her own work made her so hungry that she had to go home and eat an entire chicken.”
A nice article by Stephen Marche in the WSJ kind of responds to Nicholson Baker’s complaints about the Kindle. Marche provides an aside about a 15th-c scholar named Trithemius who wrote “In Praise of Scribes” and argued against the newfangled printed book. Trithemius thought that
[p]rinted books could never match the beauty and uniqueness of a copied text; copying produced a state of contemplation which was spiritually beneficial; and copying was a way of reducing error, which indeed it was at first. His central claim was that hand-produced books were inherently holy. His leading anecdote is the story of a scribe who died after decades of copying texts. When they disinterred him, the three fingers of his right hand, his writing hand, had not decomposed. Anyone who has held a handmade medieval missal—or even a handwritten letter—knows what Trithemius is talking about: the sense that someone is communicating something to you personally.
Obviously Trithemius lost the battle against print, and so too now will books be printed less and less and downloaded increasingly. But I think Trithemius is still instructive. Defending an old thing, and arguing against a new thing, requires a clarification of values. This idea about the state of contemplation produced by transcription particularly ignited me, and encourages me to do the thing more where I copy out other people’s sentences and lines.
Now let us praise the printed book, or try to. Marche somewhat cattily says that Baker’s argument “boils down to how much he likes the feel of paper.” Maybe so, but in any case I think it could be useful to think more about what we like about printed books. As e-readers like the Kindle proliferate, what do we want to preserve? Lots of complaints about Kindle boil down to weaknesses in the technology. Like, eventually e-readers will be much easier to flip through, and write in, use the index of; and the quality of photos and art will be like on computers soon enough. For my part, I’m holding out until I can take it in the bathtub, where I do 40% of my reading at least.
But what are the things that are nice about books that the technology could never accommodate? Is it just the feel of paper and the weight of the book? Or how you feel proud when you look at the bookshelf and see all that you’ve read? Marche writes, “Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility?” I wouldn’t say I’m afraid, but I still want to write books that are printed, and I still want to read books by other people that are printed. Marche’s article has prompted me to try to figure out why. Any ideas?
Hi, I’m Amy McDaniel, and this is my first post! In my HTMLGiant audition tape (no longer extant), I staged an argument with someone about Jane Austen. Since it got me this far, I thought I’d start with her.
There are lots of people I like who don’t like Jane Austen, and they can be annoying about it, but the real trouble is the people, of whom there are at least 12, who like Jane Austen for weird reasons and then write their own sequels, like Mr. Darcy’s Diary: A Novel, The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy: A Novel, Darcy and Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley. (If only it were 120 Nights of Pemberley.) The name for this particularly legitimized fan-fiction is Austeniana, a word perhaps even uglier than the thing it means. This has all already been much-bemoaned by right-thinking thinkers. But I want to think harder than they did. READ MORE >