Roundup
Everything Happened All At Once
It feels like there is a lot of literary news today.
McSweeney’s is launching a cookbook imprint. When I first read that, I thought it was a joke. McSweeney’s also shares some good news about publishing.
There is a brilliant, long form investigative article in The New Yorker about Scientology. A new bar has been set. There is also fiction from Mary Gaitskill.
Another magazine has decided to charge for submissions. Robert Swartwood is on the case. The publisher responds. The world continues to turn.
I saw Kara Candito read at AWP and was blown away so I’m going to share some of her writing that’s up at BLIP.
AWP happened. You loved it. You hated it. There was a Literature Party and an amazing deejay who felt what she was spinning so hard she jumped up and down to the beat. There was dancing. My god, there was drinking. You didn’t go. You were glad not to go. You wish you could have gone. You wish you hadn’t gone. Your liver hurts. You are sweating. You didn’t want AWP to end. Did you see that? What was his name? That really happened. You wish that had happened. The recaps abound. They are amusing to read.
Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad reviews.
The Kartika Review has launched The 500 Project which will profile 10 Asian writers from each of the 50 states. I am really intrigued by this idea of using these profiles to start toward a canon of contemporary Asian literature.
Crowds might be able to write as well as individuals.
Laura Ellen Scott’s Curio is being serialized by Uncanny Valley. I think you will enjoy it.
Is the Internet free? Perhaps not so much.
Cathy Day offers some valuable advice for a linked stories workshop and Dylan Landis shares some lessons on linked stories. This is a tiny preview of a post I am working on about how to shape a short story collection. I don’t know how. That’s what I’m writing about. It might not be the most useful post in the world.
David Quigg suggests some edits to “The Problem With Memoirs.”
There is a new issue of Bookslut which includes a feature by Daniel Nester and Steve Black about the lifespan of a literary magazine. You should also check out this piece about women and criticism.
Anis Shivani thinks Freedom is overrated. He works for AOL now though, for free, so he might not have the last laugh. Toward the end of his essay, Shivani writes, “The problem with realism is also that it ends up being conservative, and even pessimistic. This is because it wants to rule out unpredictability to the extent possible, believes in a stable social order (otherwise why write realistically?), and wants the end to be internally and formally consistent with its premises, once they have been laid out.” You know how I feel about things that begin, “The problem with…” There is no problem with realism though their may be a problem with Freedom. I haven’t finished the book yet. I will come back, Shivani! We will talk realism. Just you wait.
I actually think that what Shivani says of realist fiction has some truth to it — but mainly for what I would describe as doctrinaire realism. That is, realism persuaded by its own claims to authority over what is and is not real. In the Justin Cronin book Mary and O’Neil, which I found truly execrable (probably someone will come along and defend the language as “gorgeous” — the language was fine) there are a number of spots where the author insists explicitly that the characters are normal and average people. This is false: even if we limit the category of “people” to “white Americans,” they seem to be fairly materially blessed — there is a story where a character flies round trip every weekend for a series of months without any apparent financial strain, and in another story the main character’s sister takes a gambling vacation costing several thousand dollars with her family and nanny. I wouldn’t mind this stuff or even probably think about it much if the book didn’t insist it was all so damn normal, but that’s the source of realism’s moral authority these days: it’s about “the way things are.”
This doesn’t HAVE to lead to conservatism, or the conservatism doesn’t have to become a genuine problem for the quality of the book (lots of good conservative books exist), but it certainly does tend to render stories of people with less-than-middle-class existences invisible, and I think realism is responsible for a lot of the quiet racism and sexism you’ve lamented in other posts, Roxane.
I mean fundamentally, if you care about the question of reality, I don’t think being a realist is tenable — the belief that you can depict reality through fiction strikes me as balderdash, not only because *it’s fiction* but because perceiving reality is well beyond human capacities, I very strongly suspect. Humility requires accepting that any account of the universe is a fantasy — some more than others, yes, but realism as practiced by literary writers today, unmoored as it is from any experience of the vast majority of the world’s population, belongs well more on the fantastic end of that spectrum.
I do like a lot of realism, but my preference is strongly for writers who don’t insist on the capital-r Reality of their fiction. Chiefly because I find them less boring, and secondarily because I think that claiming knowledge of and ability to depict reality is, for a fiction writer, utterly backwards.
This comment was too long.
The Scientology article is crazy:
In 1966, Hubbard—who by then had met and married another woman, Mary Sue Whipp—set sail with a handful of Scientologists. The church says that being at sea provided a “distraction-free environment,” allowing Hubbard “to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness.” Within a year, he had acquired several oceangoing vessels. He staffed the ships with volunteers, many of them teen-agers, who called themselves the Sea Organization. Hubbard and his followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous lifetimes. (The church denies this.) The defector Janis Grady, a former Sea Org member, told me, “I was on the bridge with him, sailing past Greek islands. There were crosses lining one island. He told me that under each cross is buried treasure.”
Seriously, bananas. I am fascinated by how Scientology became Scientology.
Every issue lately has had at least one fascinating weird thing. Last week it was the Guillermo del Toro article.
Yeah. I had been letting my issues pile up but the past few weeks, I’ve actually been reading The New Yorker and enjoying what I read.
Funny you mention that–today instead of working I basically spent the day reading that Del Toro piece and the Scientology one. Both amazing.
This proto-Scientology boat trip around Greece would make for a crazy novel or movie.
This proto-Scientology boat trip around Greece would make for a crazy novel or movie.
Shivani raises some compelling points–and let me be clear: I hate Franzen and his middlebrow, dull work–but has a rather simplistic and narrow understanding of Victorian Realism and American Naturalism. “Realism” as a term is so ridiculously complicated today, and this article is all over the map in its use of historically loaded terms and categories.
I also have to wonder if he’s even read “Middlemarch,” the novel in which George Eliot interjects her own authorial persona into the text to call attention to many of the problems associated with a simple-minded belief in narrative “objectivity.” Really, most of the Victorian Realists who stood the test of time critique the kind of Utilitarian notion of objectivity he seems to attack in his article. Even Virginia Woolf, a Modernist who hated the Victorians (often unfairly), acknowledged “Middlemarch’s” genius.
Victorian bashing really irks me; many of the stereotypes associated with this period are untrue or exaggerated.
why bash any literature?
It’s more complicated than that…the entire Victorian era seems to be misunderstood and misrepresented by many; this was a trend started by the Modernists.
It’s annoying because Victorian Literature is incredibly subversive, progressive, and experimental.
The Victorian era is vastly misunderstood. It’s one of the few eras of literature I actually I know anything about and it has always struck me as odd how poorly people have tried to understand it.
why is it annoying. do you have a stake in victorian literature being subversive and experimental?
What’s with your passive-aggressive routine of asking posters to explain their positions through the use of faux-naive questions?
But yes, I have a stake in the topic.
that does seem to be my shtick. why do you think i do it?
Because it’s easier to post non sequiturs than engage the commenter’s point(s)?
Root for Paul Thomas Anderson to get past his writer’s block—or, perhaps successfully stand up to firewalling Scientologists—and direct The Master. Part of the joy of reading the NYer piece was seeing all the avenues that PTA is reportedly using to send up Scientology find their genesis in biographical fact. (The movie supposedly takes place entirely on a cruise ship. I’ve avoided reading the script, though others have not, and I’m starting to feel like going back on that determination.)
i wouldn’t say it’s because it’s easier. i think it’s just that it feels like a more interesting or meaningful avenue of conversation for me. it is discourteous though, and i apologize. the decent thing would be to not comment.
I guess I just don’t see how your questions on this particular thread are relevant to any of my points.
they aren’t really relative to your points. i think what i was reaching for was a general feeling about how it’s kind of strange to have animosity toward an esoteric aspect of something that is supposed to just be entertainment.
but even that sounds dumb to me now. like what am i, the animosity police. i have no idea about the subversiveness of victorian era literature and the modernists consipiring to thwart it, but sure, you’re annoyed. go with it.
that wasn’t good to say either was it. that ‘go with it.’ because then its like i’m belittling your emotion and i dont mean to do that. it was so that i could come off as being a little clever. i just totally suck at the internet, sorry.
i’d always known about the pseudoscience, intimidations and laughably cheesy sci-fi cosmology , but i’d no idea about that “Sea Org” outfit, and the fact that they appear to being dabbling in human trafficking, child slavery and child indoctrination. jeez. though i did laugh about how there are more rastafarians in the US than scientologists.
self-help stuff sells, a lot. people want methods to deal with their inner demons, and will generally go along with anything that appears to assuage them.
as to how the whole thing came about, it sounds like hubbard was a rather charismatic messiah-like figure and had no trouble charming over new converts. plus, it seemed more like he started the whole thing as more of a self-help venture. this guy running the ‘church’ now–david miscavige–seems more like a mob boss, wont to deify an otherwise kooky system for profit and personal gain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWUasKX3FZE
im rooting for him not to mess up Inherent Vice
I’m depressed that every time my thing is pimped in a post, a shivani thing happens too. can’t he just get out of my way?
I’m depressed that every time my thing is pimped in a post, a shivani thing happens too. can’t he just get out of my way?
consider yourself fortunate to be alive after crossing paths with a certain raspy self-effacing serial killer so many times at AWP.
Darby, your apologies somehow sound uncomfortably sincere and passively aggressive. Well done!
I couldn’t get into the Lit Party so I danced outside near the door. A concerned husband and wife called 911 and said I was convulsing. I’m out of the institution now after getting Baker Acted. What a weekend!
Two of my three favorite novels are Victorian — Middlemarch and David Copperfield — but I feel a little itchy about saying Victorian literature is a certain way in general, in either direction. Woolf loved Dickens, too (as did Nabokov), saying, “we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens.” Surely there was lots of imitative crap that is way out of print that caused Woolf, who was responding not just to the best of the best books we love but an entire age, a set of values, a social structure. Who hasn’t questioned the ways of their parents, perhaps too harshly sometimes? But Woolf was very bright and certainly drew from and appreciated the best of the era, according of course to her own tastes and predilections. The problem, perhaps, is that too many people took her word for it when she made generalizations instead of looking for themselves.
Someone might say now, “Stop trying to write like Barthelme,” but that isn’t necessarily a statement against Barthelme, but his imitators.
I love Dickens totally and shamelessly but even in his own books there is some almost (almost) unbearable treacly shit. I can’t imagine how bad his contemporary imitators might have been, lining the shelves in Woolf’s day, if they didn’t have his other gifts–gifts that were hardly defined by his era but that channeled Shakespeare, Chaucer, Fielding.
I love Dickens and Eliot but I don’t love Victorian literature; I love Woolf and Nabokov but I don’t love Modernism; I love Barthelme and Delillo but I don’t love Postmodernism.
There is such a fabricated battle going on between ‘realism’ and, what, ‘non-realism’? for some people. It’s like that person who imagines other people as feeling greatly superior to them, and walks around muttering against this great injustice, and sometimes the other person does feel superior to them, which doesn’t help.
It seems that there is a debate about victorian literature going on above me, but i just want to point out that i think it’s really fucking hilarious that the only public photo evidence that i was present at AWP is a photograph where I look sad/confused/”like i just sat on pie”
Nabokov deals with this false dichotomy handily, I think:
The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person or object or circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, and if a character or an action fits into the pattern of that world, then we experience the pleasurable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call “real life.” There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius: he must create it himself and then create the consequences.”
lol
Being an editor is a hard job…I would want it…but to chrage ten to fifteen dollars per submission is fucking ridiculous.
“The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books.”
As true and as succinct as I could ever imagine a thing being. It’s also good to note, in my experience, that all good literature is equally as invested in reality: realistic or non-, no matter. A great novel, play, or poem, involves no less a pungent connection with reality if it discusses office mentality or toadstools which mend briefcases in sweatshops. It is the acknowledgment of not being reality which in many ways allows you to further interpenetrate and make use of reality. (to ‘ride’ the inadvertent sexual hearkening into a state of analogy: it is very difficult to have sex with a woman if you yourself are convinced you have a vagina.)
i know. i cant seem to be sincere without it coming off as being at least kind of passive aggressive.
“The only winning move is not to play.”
I think you’ve displayed the ‘what’s with’ of darby’s tactic by using it: she or he is leveling a criticism by smuggling in the suspicion that it is valid.
My guess is that darby thinks you’re discovering ‘subversion and experiment’ in Victorian literature because, she or he thinks, you privilege them everywhere – perhaps unconsciously of the possible weakness of seeing ‘subversion and experiment’ everywhere – and want a less commonly claimed, so more glamorous, place ‘to discover’ them.
A less passively aggressive way of expressing this perspective would have been: Is Victorian literature generally more “subversive and experimental” than Romantic, Augustan, mid-17th c., and Elizabethan/Jacobean literatures?
(Many people – maybe darby – will answer ‘no, no, no, and no’. – making the (darby’s??) point that, because ‘subversion and experiment’ are found to some degree everywhere, there’s no controversy – and what’s the value? – in spotting them where they are less effectual than in comparable periods of (say) English-language literature.)
A less passively aggressive way of phrasing your question to darby would be: What do you stand for, leaving aside ‘suspicion of others’ motives generally’, in the case of Victorian literature?
Not good.
An ‘investment’ disclosive of foundation, as I understand “investment”.
But this statement, with which I agree, contradicts Nabokov’s concluding (and fundamental – it’s a circular perspective) claim: “[An author of genuis] must create [real life] himself and then create the consequences.”
“Genius” or not, I don’t think anybody “creates” divinely – that is, ‘something from nothing‘. Nabokov is making the argument he always made – for extreme aesthetic ‘freedom’ from the contingencies and responsibilities-to-else of imagination.
Nabokov’s argument – made more extremely than he makes it, but, I think, no less to his point – is that the only source of literature of “genius” is the imagination of an author of “genius” – and that imagination is ‘free’ from impingement by any “reality” external to it. (That’s the activity and meaning of “genius”.) The “genius” of a writer of “genius” suffices only and entirely as the cause of the “world” in a work of “genius” – and the reader has, before her or him, that imagination exclusively in the case of a work of “genius”.
As I understand it, you’re saying that the “realist” and “non-realist” tags, while practical and even accurate taxonomically, are misnomers in the sense that the one is related to “reality” and the other ‘not’. This is quite contrary to Nabokov’s desire to be read as though his books actually were ‘free’ from, and not disclosive at all of, the conditions for the possibility of his imagination.
Is that you, Professor Falken?????
Nabokovian obsessions with a kind of radical freedom aside (which I do think are important to note), the especial connection I was hoping to make was actually rooted in this seeming contradiction: that you understand what you are doing is not reality allows you to enter profitably into a relationship with reality.
While embracing the more practical aspects of Nabokov’s idealism, I also hope to be able to make the point that the only source of literature is the creative imagination, or its genius, (because none of what is related to reality in a work ever at any point actually coincides with a reality, the work’s relationship to reality is one of right angles, as it were) while that genius or imagination inhabits a mind, inhabits a body, inhabits a world.
The slight contradiction was something I was hoping to make profitable (if somewhat paradoxical), and was thinking to play with Nabokov while attesting to a certain wisdom in him (that I think he himself was given to playing with, at times).
You don’t seem to be responding to my points, though I’m not surprised, given your penchant for “privileging” verbal diarrhea and filibustering over responding honestly and sincerely to others’ comments.
I was responding to commonly held stereotypes about Victorian literature (we’ve all heard them), stereotypes that seem to be perpetuated to a degree in Shivani’s article (which I doubt Darby took the time to even read, based on his posts) that often don’t account for the unique and particular historical context of Darwin’s theories, the Reform Bills (I and II), and industrialization. Of course, one can locate “experimentation” anywhere, but I was responding to commonly held stereotypes about a particular era’s literature that often preclude “discovery” of “experimentation.” I’m not sure where you got that I was privileging Victorian experimentation over experimentation from other periods but I doubt that you really care about what I actually posted.
“How about a nice game of chess.”
this scene is actually pretty representative of commenting at htmlgiant.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo
no that’s not what i was asking. i actually dont care about victorian literature beyond enjoying victorian literature. i was actually just being passive aggressive.
haha
Clearly, the point which I was “responding to” concerned darby’s “passive-aggressive routine” – both your sensitivity to it and a criticism suggested by it. If you had a “penchant […] for responding honestly and sincerely to others’ comments”, that’s what you’d have addressed in “responding to” my post.
Had I wanted to respond to “Victorian Literature [being] incredibly subversive, progressive, and experimental” – incredibly is hyperbole that indicates “privilege”, Bomb – , I’d have ‘replied’ to the post where you make this theatrical claim – with a fulsomeness and directness you have a “penchant” for defensively misreading.
But darby’s game – of marshaling leading questions – was more interesting to me than your self-dramatizing and, to me, inaccurate unconventionality.
You don’t prove to want to be read with “care”, Bomb.
Say . . . are you a Victorian hypocrite??
It’s not what you were asking; it’s what (I think) you were ‘sincerely’ suggesting. – you were indeed being, but not “just”, “passive aggressive”. – which is sometimes beautiful.
I’m not sure that there are “realists” who think or believe (?) that they’re using words to make present ultimate reality with absolute precision. (I speak here of those who self-consciously write fiction; claims of spiritual revelation are something else.)
Can you think of a “realist” – or any -ist! – who makes a strong claim that the objective world is fully presented by their words — and not that fiction is an indication – more or less emotionally and intellectually compelling – of reality/ies that is/are ultimately elusive of linguistic mediation?
The ‘profitable relationship’ between artful word-ing and impinging-but-elusive reality is something I’d supposed both “realists” and other -ists to have (differing; competing?) technical/formal inside tracks on fostering – and not that any group, or any body, really, had achieved an identity between ‘piece of literature’ and ‘world’.
i misread your comment earlier. yours are the most misunderstood comments by me. i was genuinely curious i guess as to why MHBomb was overly dramatic about it and so i inquired about it, so that is kind of what you are saying, but i dont think i ever thought to the extent that maybe Bomb privledges subversion and experimentation everywhere. like i was trying to get to some kind of conclusion on that level, but that particular conclusion never happened for me the way it did for you.
I think all that is more or less what I’ve been saying, actually. As to whether or not you’ve also happened to observe a kind of fabricated struggle between the two supposed ‘camps’, if you haven’t (which I think what you’re getting at in this post?), then I think that’s very good, and I’m not sure I can otherwise point it out or make it known to you. Also, though, on a minor note, I don’t think the idea of presenting ‘absolute’ reality is plausible enough to form into a bias (“my book is reality” “no, mine!”), but I think what tends to happen is more “my method gets us closer to reality” “no, mine,” if you see a notable difference in that? I also don’t think I was describing a conscious cultural movement (despite using the word ‘battle’), it’s not a bunch of people getting together and being fully aware of the way in which they’re thinking about each other, or their craft, but rather a series of reactive attitudes.
As to finding an -ist with the ego to boot, though! Well: Shaw made similar idiotic claims at different points in his career, and I think Tolstoy (on a less idiotic note) saw something like this as his duty to us: to raise a secular realism into a kind of religious authority, which we would then willingly confuse with absolute reality. Like any great vitalist, he probably had his days of believing his own line, but I think mostly this was a psychological construct, rather than an actual delusion.
Yes, I agree that it’s a matter of “method” – of technique and form – that’s the crux of some “realist”/”non-realist” argument – an argument that no reader has to take sides in. Writers evolve into – or elsewise find – their voices, but, sure, most are bound ‘to argue’ for the virtues and even the primacy of each one’s kind of voice, of the style, techniques, focuses, and so on that each writer favors.
sorry, man. everybody else looks kinda smiley.
Overly dramatic? How was I being “overly dramatic”? And, if the standard for “overly dramatic” is now this low, then I guess you’re being overly dramatic about my overly dramatic posts on Vict. Lit and pretty much anyone who writes a comment on HTMLGiant other than “so what, who cares” is being “overly dramatic” as well.
Overly dramatic? How was I being “overly dramatic”? And, if the standard for “overly dramatic” is now this low, then I guess you’re being overly dramatic about my overly dramatic posts on Vict. Lit and pretty much anyone who writes a comment on HTMLGiant other than “so what, who cares” is being “overly dramatic” as well.
Overly dramatic? How was I being “overly dramatic”? And, if the standard for “overly dramatic” is now this low, then I guess you’re being overly dramatic about my overly dramatic posts on Vict. Lit and pretty much anyone who writes a comment on HTMLGiant other than “so what, who cares” is being “overly dramatic” as well.
“Clearly, the point which I was “responding to” concerned darby’s “passive-aggressive routine” – both your sensitivity to it and a criticism suggested by it. If you had a “penchant […] for responding honestly and sincerely to others’ comments”, that’s what you’d have addressed in “responding to” my post.”
So now you’re extracting your points about Darby’s passive-aggressive routine from its context—its relationship to the topic of Victorian Literature discussed on this thread?
“Had I wanted to respond to “Victorian Literature [being] incredibly subversive, progressive, and experimental” – incredibly is hyperbole that indicates “privilege”, Bomb – , I’d have ‘replied’ to the post where you make this theatrical claim – with a fulsomeness and directness you have a “penchant” for defensively misreading. “
There’s really nothing “theatrical” about the claim that’s widely agreed-upon by scholars, especially when modern notions of “realism”—also a topic addressed in the article and taken up on this thread—basically began in the Victorian era and as an engagement with Darwin, industrialization, the breaking down of class structures that had existed for most of England’s history, urbanization, women’s suffrage, the height of British Imperialism, and increased technology. The amount of historical change that occurred during this period is, in fact, “incredible,” and such a statement is not “hyperbolic.”
“But darby’s game – of marshaling leading questions – was more interesting to me than your self-dramatizing and, to me, inaccurate unconventionality.”
Which is why on your day off from work (I’m assuming you actually have a job other than overusing emdashes, eating thesauruses, and posting on HTMLGiant all day) you’ve decided to waste so many words in responding to my “uninteresting” posts).
“You don’t prove to want to be read with “care”, Bomb.”
Uh huh…sure.
*The amount of historical change that occurred during this period is, in fact, “incredible,” and such a statement is not hyperbolic; this historical consciousness of change was reflected in the work of the era’s best writers–writers who were subversive aesthetically.
(^I hope this statement isn’t too hysterical for you, Dr. Freud).
For the “context” of my first response, Bomb, read again the post you wrote that I first responded to.
So the “scholars” among whom this “claim” is a convention stand together opposed to those “commonly held stereotypes about Victorian literature” that “we’ve all heard”? Is the view that some large part of Victorian literature is “incredibly subversive” bravely unconventional or staunchly crowd-validated??
This strong term – ‘impossible to believe’? – first refers (adverbially) to the ‘subversiveness’, progressiveness, and experimentality’ of “Victorian Literature”; now, it refers to 19th c. revolutions in science, political economy, and technology. I don’t think it’s helpful to protest disbelief in quite so much of one’s horizon of historical acquaintance.
darby’s act is more interesting to me than your ‘count it!’ air balls, but graphing points on their rudderless trajectories has its own entertainment value.
I failed to interest you, but take heart, deadgod: your saying-nothing-by-saying-a-lot-act doesn’t interest me, nor does your interest in deconstructing the posts of stoned HTMGL commenters who essentially respond with, “dude, what did you say I said?” when you offer your interpretation of their rhetorical motives.
Good post. I didn’t intend to merely express an undying love or blind loyalty for Victorian Literature in my post, more than respond to assumptions about Mid-Victorian Realism that seem implicit in Shivani’s article. The strong anti mid-Victorian sentiment amongst many of the Fin De Siecle and Modernist writers is a good sign that the era was both problematic and influential (re: complex and dynamic).
It’s interesting that he singles out “Middlemarch” to prove his point, a novel that doesn’t seem to fit most of his charges against “Freedom.” Trollope’s work would serve his purposes more effectively, I think.
I did not say you “failed to interest” me, Bomb; I said something else interested me more than your marginally-literate-writer act interests me. The fact that you claim to have an “interest” is anthropologically interesting.
Actually, I never claimed to have an “interest,” fellow marginally-literate-writer.
this is some pretty serious Yo!HTMLGIANTSnaps going on over here.
if i was a poster, i’d start a series of ‘literary friar’s roasts’..
Actually, you claimed to have “a stake in the topic” of Victorian literature. This stake is not an “interest”? Are you “interested” in what you say from, say, hour to hour??