May 19th, 2011 / 6:04 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
I can’t believe people actually quote from How Fiction Works.
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Meta
It’s been a while since you’ve gone for a straightforward “provocative statements meant for fighting” post. Looking forward to it.
cant believe anyone cares much about what anyone quotes anything from
cant believe anyone cares much about what anyone quotes anything from
accidentally subscribed to this thread, posting again to unsubscribe, thanks.
accidentally subscribed to this thread, posting again to unsubscribe, thanks.
What did they quote?
Can’t believe you don’t want to be subscribed to this thread.
How Fiction Works is a good book. His readings of a lot of things are quite helpful to me, and to some of my students. Though I disagree with him on DFW.
The implication that you have to be good at fiction writing to comment intelligently on it is, I think, misguided.
accidentally commented in this thread
James Woods, on the other hand, has most likely written a great many interesting things with his urine on the carpet of a four star hotel room.
accidentally responded to a comical remark on this thread
I really liked him in Best Seller.
I really liked him in Best Seller.
“In There Is No Year, the reader has been faced with a novel
comprised of sentences that are constructed as if Yoda were writing
porn: “warm as from a mother’s nipple, brown.” And in all honesty,
Google Maps has a better plot.
By all means let us continue to redefine and reshape the novel.
Flaubert’s “modern” novel is, after all, 150 years old. But let us do
try, in redefining and reshaping, to make it something better, something
more important, and not just something devoid of all those things that James Wood so rightly identifies as necessary to the art of fiction.”
I can’t believe Blake spent five hours reading Vanessa Lane’s “Dies: A Sentence” in its entirety.
that review is weird because the reviewer didn’t even really try to hide that he wasn’t actually reviewing from his point of view, but wood’s. like, I haven’t read blake’s book so what do I know, but the dude talks as much about james wood as blake butler.
God, you know, I can’t believe that’s what this post is in reference to. I thought it was just an insider HTMLGiant thing I wasn’t getting, and not Blake Butler pulling an Anne Rice and responding to bad reviews of his own work.
Yet I don’t think that Blake is slipping up and letting his emotions drive him to a snarky reaction against the negative review, because his reaction doesn’t seem snarky or ill-founded to me. I read this post as Blake chuckling with disbelief and in complete understanding that you can’t take such a review seriously.
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/there-no-year
No, you’re completely wrong. All good editors/critics must also necessarily be fantastic writers on their own, otherwise they should be be patronizingly dismissed. As the URL for this “post” illustrates, “James Woods has never written interesting fiction,” so therefore every one of his ideas about fiction is bullshit, and anyone quoting him is second-degree bullshit, and “warm as from a mother’s nipple, brown” should never be criticized in any manner ever.
funny how that dude’s only novel was written under a pen name that sounds like something someone would name their penis
someone reviewed me and quoted james wood? i was talking about this http://htmlgiant.com/snippet/jess-row-the-novel-is-not-dead/#disqus_thread
i honestly hadn’t seen this when i made this post, i’m not tacky in that way. oh well
I agree w/ BB. I also can’t believe that any serious writer–one with real ambition–would write a book called, “How Fiction Works.” WTF? If you knew how fiction “worked,” what the hell’s the point in writing fiction in the first place, Mr. Wood–you humorless, dry fuck?
Fuck James Wood. His book is one my burn pile with Gardner’s Moral Fiction rubbish.
That is… so crazy. Who reviews their own book on Amazon?
i assumed you were talking about the jess row thing, while he did quote from that, he also compared it to ‘a 1930s Boy Scout Manual, a platoon of earnestness inside a winking McSweeney’s-esque Trojan horse of irony’ which is like, kind of awesome
Sorry, my apologies. It’s so hard to know what most posts are referring to so when someone seemed to post a link that fit, I jumped to mean conclusions, but that’s never good. I retract my Anne Rice comparison.
Sorry, my apologies. It’s so hard to know what most posts are referring to so when someone seemed to post a link that fit, I jumped to mean conclusions, but that’s never good. I retract my Anne Rice comparison.
Sorry, my apologies. It’s so hard to know what most posts are referring to so when someone seemed to post a link that fit, I jumped to mean conclusions, but that’s never good. I retract my Anne Rice comparison.
Sorry, my apologies. It’s so hard to know what most posts are referring to so when someone seemed to post a link that fit, I jumped to mean conclusions, but that’s never good. I retract my Anne Rice comparison.
not only that, but there was a canadian author named duncan campbell scott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_Scott so he was also piggybacking off that dude lol
not only that, but there was a canadian author named duncan campbell scott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_Scott so he was also piggybacking off that dude lol
not only that, but there was a canadian author named duncan campbell scott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_Scott so he was also piggybacking off that dude lol
not only that, but there was a canadian author named duncan campbell scott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_Scott so he was also piggybacking off that dude lol
I read sections of How Fiction Works for a class during the semester before my last one (just graduated). I hate hate hate hate that book.
I read sections of How Fiction Works for a class during the semester before my last one (just graduated). I hate hate hate hate that book.
accidentally lol’ed
I can’t say anything smart about How Fiction Works. It’s just garbage. Well-meaning in a lot of places, but total garbage.
I can’t say anything smart about How Fiction Works. It’s just garbage. Well-meaning in a lot of places, but total garbage.
accidentally sharted from this sub-thread
I think this is funny. Haha. Thank you.
I was going to be a mailman until I read your book. Now I’m a lawyer so, uh, the country thanks you.
I can’t believe people actually read books where other people tell them how to write. Why don’t people just read fiction if they want to write fiction?
Sometimes people like to do things that are different than what you like to do.
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/there-no-year
But did they quote him dismissively? I think there’s some good stuff in that book, especially in regards to realism. It’s been a bit since I read it. I disagree with him on many things, but it’s not like everything in there is wrong. Though I can see not wanting to quote him as it legitimizes his book, but . . . y’know.
Oh, wait. Just saw it. Yeah. Fuck that. There’s a tradition in How Fiction Works that Woods completely ignores. It should have maybe been called How Narrative Fiction Works.
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/there-no-year
its really too bad that this poisons the fight. i was gearing up to really get into thinking about the fight.
I like reading books about plot structure, but I don’t think there are any good books about fiction writing that have anything worthwhile to say about it. They all seem to be on screenwriting.
It’s easier to comprehend Wood’s mission (or his self-deluded mandate) if we understand publishing as an extension of media, and media as a tool of politics. Someone pays Wood’s salary and owns the desk his Bartlett’s citation-bucket sits on and this fact is not unrelated to the gist of Wood’s many asinine proscriptions. The battle is always on for the electorate’s Imagination; NYer-readers who’ve been trained to adore books like “Netherland” (and all the “moral” and crypto-aspirational fiction Wood shills) are simply less likely to see through all the veils one day and burn their bras and draft-cards. And the bra people and the draft-card people like that. Figuratively speaking.
One-stop-shopping for anti-Wood:
http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/2009/01/critic-run-on-james-wood-john-updike.html
Kundera’s “The Curtain” is very good but it’s more of a slyly-insightful (inciteful?) thought-generator than a how-to. How-to writing books are like how-to fucking books: only useful for people who don’t plan on doing it often or well.
“If you knew how fiction “worked,”…how could you write The Book Against God?
For it is a crappy book, dreary and devoid of, uh, “Lifeness” (or is that Existitude?)
I can’t get rid of the infantile notion that every girl who talks to me also wants to fuck me.
right, i wasn’t shitting on row. i just kinda can’t believe it in general, that it’s even a book that could have become so well known and referred to.
“As the URL for this “post” illustrates, “James Woods (sic) has never written
interesting fiction,” so therefore every one of his ideas about fiction
is bullshit…”
Well, writing one crappy novel certainly weakens Woody’s position as the authority behind the treatise titled, daringly, “How Fiction Works”… though I know critics (who have tried writing interesting fiction and failed, whether or not they kept the experiments to themselves) don’t often agree with the logic of this.
It seems like your reaching here–I don’t see the “implication” that one has to be a good at writing to write a book about writing.
Plenty of people have criticized his book and criticism without mentioning his fiction.
*good at writing
Yeah, thought-generator is cool. Books of prompts and things, too, that I get. Things to get the juices flowing, all good. I just don’t get the “here is how you write” because it seems so personal for everyone. You’re probably mostly right in that second sentence.
That is most surely a thought that had never occurred to me before. Thank you for your insight.
I read Gardner’s book and the whole way through I was like, “Yes, you would know this if you read books. Yes, you would know that if you read books.” Why wouldn’t you just read books? Seems like a much better use of time. And also seems like maybe you shouldn’t be a writer if you’re not reading books. But lord knows that doesn’t stop most people…
How I Think The Fiction I Like Works + the Clear
Blake might not have meant what Lennon has inferred from the “snippet”, but you can see from the thread – starting with ugh’s funny but (I agree with Lennon) “misguided” comment – that this variation of the ‘those who can’t do, teach’ antiverb is alive and well. There are plenty of critics who write about what they write about well, but who don’t (publicly) attempt to write examples of what they write about, or who write those examples less well than they write critically (or somehow theoretically). The criticism and the art from the same person aren’t ‘hand in glove’, are they? – more like one hand playing ping-pong and, at other times, the other hand guiding a paint brush: unusual, but – as you seem to agree – not so impossible.
I WHOLEHEARTEDLY AGREE! AND FUCK ANYONE WHO TEACHES CREATIVE WRITING AS WELL. SHAME! SHAME!
Haha, kind of reminds me of Christy Leigh Stewart’s review of her book “Loath Letters” on Goodreads:
“This is the least worst thing I have ever done.”
Don’t fuck them (it only encourages them)
I would say the book is a pretty good document of a strong tradition. Nobody should take it or books like it as any sort of dogma. Of the few books about writing I’ve read, I’ve read them like an aesthetics treatise by any philosopher… I mean, you don’t read them and then… adopt them, or something. By rejecting it, accepting it, or being ambivalent, you’re still adding onto the same cluster (perhaps especially when negating aspects of the cluster).
Yes, I agree with your main point. For instance, I attended an AWP Panel in DC and listened to Richard Bausch, who I usually like, btw, make dumbass comment after comment about how most literary critics in academia are “failed writers.” I was sitting there thinking, is this guy serious? He is certainly a ham, but he was partly-serious, and it was just embarrassing and unproductive, not to mention sophomoric and chauvinistic.
All that said, I guess I’m just so used to people criticizing Woods’ work without even mentioning his fiction.
Years ago (2008), one of James Wood’s most hard-sucking online tribute-givers, Nigel Beale (who is even more notorious for online plagiarism than sucking Wood online, but that’s another matter), sent me an email claiming he’d just “taken a rather petulant, irritating but good
natured little jab” at me on his site. Nigel pretended that he wanted my reaction for a mere blog post but, in fact, what Nigel wanted was a fight-picking comment from me that he could mail directly to Wood, which he did.
I had no idea this was the case, of course, so I didn’t even bother checking, again, Nigel’s blog post (containing my contribution) until a while later. The 2 comments I left with Nigel, which he posted (after careful editing, so as not to reveal the fact that he’d solicited them) inspired Wood to craft a 2-page-long attack on Steven Augustine.
The funny part being the fact that Wood used most of that flamey letter to defend himself as a *film critic*… merely because I’d used his hypothetically middlebrow taste in film (in an explicit metaphor) to comment on his taste in books; I put him as a lover of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” -starring Mat Damon. Wood wanted it known that he’s a devotee of Antonioni.
(Very humorously, Woody soon after wrote his love letter to Joseph O’Neill’s solidly-middlebrow Netherland, which, almost assuredly, would have ended up as a film directed by Ripley-director Anthony Minghella, had Minghella lived)
The Wood-enraging comments I wrote went as follows:
Nigel:
(Thanks for the heads-up about this post; I was right on the verge of
foreswearing blog-comment-jousting for a few days to get some work done
and there’s a good chance I would have missed this until it showed up
the next time I self-Googled-larf).
So… you quote Uncle Jimmy:
“Everything flows from the real including the beautiful deformations
of the real; it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism,
fantasy dream and so on,” but no, fiction is real only “when its readers
validate (my italics) its reality.”
First off, Wood’s use of the word “reality” is meaningless (and
therefore useless). Even if I’m in a coma and imagining all this and
you’re a blue donkey in a rakish cap, Nigel, that’s “reality”-based, as
it flows from my mind which is as real as anything else in the universe.
Is there *anything* that can be imagined that doesn’t refer to
“reality” in some way? Are “unreal” thoughts even possible?
Therefore, please, can you (or Uncle Jimmy), establish a meaningful
distinction between that which is “real”, and that which is not? Of
course you can’t (and, if you can, you win a prize, since Nietzsche
couldn’t do it and neither could Plato). So, out goes Uncle Jimmy’s
decorative argument (he’s good at those).
I’ll have to trust brainy old hands at novel-writing, such as
DeLillo, Updike and Kundera, to know exactly how far to go in framing a
character’s “reality” (and thereby delighting the keyed-to-it reader in
doing so) over the opinion of a clever little critic who’s managed, thus
far, to write one mediocre novel. If Wood has superior knowledge of the
novel’s proper “reality”-range and general mechanics, why couldn’t he
put it to practical use and write a masterpiece of a novel?
But common-sense questions like that are glossed over, because
there’s not quite enough razzle-dazzle in using common-sense, is there?
—second comment (submitted within a few minutes of the first)–
PS
Uncle Jimmy tries to explain why Wolfe’s use of the Wood-prescribed
character-appropriate-stream-of-consciousness-voice doesn’t work when
Wolfe tries it: “Everyone is scrawled with the same inner graffiti,’ he
says, rendering Wolfe’s characters flat, indistinguishable from each
other…” And that’s utter nonsense.
I’m no Wolfe advocate (I find his novels, as you know, too much like
what everyone would be writing if they obeyed Uncle Jimmy), but Wood
either hasn’t read more than ten pages of a Wolfe novel (try “Man in
Full”) , or he’s indulging in a little bad-faith, theory-supporting
truth-twisting, because one thing Wolfe does *well* is
character-particularizing. “Charlie Croker” and “Peepgas” and “Roger
Too-White” and “Conrad”, et al, are vividly constructed, with a
craft-fair-doll-maker’s attention to detail.
Which is the heart and limitation of Wolfe’s minor art (minor art is
useful, too, of course: consider porcelain-making vs Cubism): his
novels “say” pretty much what they appear to be saying at first glance
by generating characters it’s very difficult to misunderstand doing
things it’s very difficult to misinterpret. Hard to imagine re-reading a
Wolfe novel (after chucking it in the airport waste bin) because you
“get it” the first time through.
I’ve been through “Underworld” gods-knows-how-many times and the
intellectual pleasure remains fresh *because* I haven’t nailed the thing
down yet. Ditto “Sabbath’s Theater” and “Libra” and “Vineland” and so
on.
Same with great movies: is Marcello, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a
shallow arse, a trapped artist, a victim of or collaborator-in his
subculture? Is the movie a paean to a certain kind of postwar, wistfully
decadent beauty, or a savage attack on it? Is it about plenty or
deprivation? I’ve seen it 30 times, probably, and will see it again.
Versus some well-intentioned movie (with absolutely unambiguous themes
and characters) like “Shine” or “Ray” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” for
which once is enough, thanks.
I’m saying that Uncle Jimmy is a middlebrow theorist using highbrow
language to communicate his theories, and, aesthetically, he’s sort of a
“The Talented Mr. Ripley” kind of guy. He has no real idea what to make
of Godard, Fellini, Cassavetes, Visconti, Pasolini, et al (to extend
the metaphor) and his *inability to grasp* the aesthetic becomes a
(defensive) mission statement.
Wood’s disavowal of Wolfe is pretty funny, really, and an important
forensic clue (a bit like, you know, closeted politicians who Gay-bash).
(I certainly hope I’ve given you your money’s worth, Nigel!)
Sorry, this part is a mistake…he’d *just written* the cited O’Neill review when our little skirmish happened, but it either wasn’t published yet or I hadn’t seen it (can’t recall which):
“(Very humorously, Woody soon after wrote his love letter to Joseph
O’Neill’s solidly-middlebrow Netherland, which, almost assuredly, would
have ended up as a film directed by Ripley-director Anthony Minghella,
had Minghella lived)”
God forbid somebody attempt or presume to know something, especially someone whose fiction does not meet with HTMLGiant’s expectations.
Again, plenty of people have criticized his book without mentioning his fiction. I didn’t even know he wrote fiction until this thread. Means nothing to me. In my opinion, “Origin of Species” is the best book “about writing” ever written, and Darwin never wrote novels or short stories or sat down to write specifically about creative writing.
Ridiculous logic. If that were true, Roger Ebert would have written better screenplays.
Roxanne, I agree. Almost as bad as having your ”wife” and friends shtup for you on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Yates-Tao-Lin/dp/1935554158/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306154759&sr=1-1
i can’t believe anyone listens to music that isn’t the candyman soundtrack