Conversations in the Book Trade: Books, art, art-books, and ... authorial movies.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Matthew Firth -- Black Bile Press
Matthew Firth, author (Suburban Pornography, etc), publisher (Black Bile Press), and editor (Front and Centre):
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
I think it’s an exaggeration. Too much dithering by those who don’t have enough to do in their daily lives, so they create anxiety over the state of literature. But, then, seriously, who cares if literature is in trouble when the planet is in trouble, when millions worldwide are in trouble, when kids everywhere are in trouble, etc. Relatively speaking, whether literature is in trouble or not is a sickeningly bourgeois notion.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?
I’m not sure. Anything that’s written down might be literature. Travel brochures are often called travel literature. Someone hands you a pamphlet on the street and says, “You wanna to read some literature?” So maybe it is just about anything, including the novel.
3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
Yes, literary prizes of all sorts – big and small – size doesn’t matter, the small ones are just as insidious as the big ones – should be resisted, both by readers and writers. They are bullshit through and through. Writers competing for prizes and awards is ridiculous and pathetic. Readers who covet only prize-winning books are lazy and are following the crowd without bothering to think about how they’re spending their $20 or whatever. Yes, prizes bad.
4. Literary publishing has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?
Not sure. I'm uncomfortable with the notion this is a recent thing. Art has always had a whorish aspect to it. Our hyper-commercial world just makes this more obvious. But artists and writers have been selling themselves for centuries, so, in that sense, why stop now?
5. Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?
No, it’s not a good policy. It’s counterintuitive – how do you find new voices if you only read agented fiction when to be agented means you’ve been at it a while and are no longer new and likely have published a book or two already? Makes no sense. Yes, good writing will be squeezed out. But that’ll happen anyway. Writers should stop crying over such things and just work a little harder at what they’re doing, rather than blaming the fucking system or some such.
6. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?
It’s not this simple. This makes it all sound so controlled and manipulated and evil. Leave that to governments.
7. Returning to the question of agents -- are they too powerful? If so, in what ways? Or are they a largely beneficial and necessary element of contemporary publishing?
Don't know. I don't have an agent. I've had three books published by three different presses.
8. Does Canada have too many publishers? Or too few?
Too many of a certain kind, how about that? Too many that publish really boring, mewling middle class books. Not enough with any balls to what they're doing.
9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?
Again, over-rated. The book in its current form is a beautifully effective high technology. I mean a real, paper and glue book – it's very high technology. It's high tech because it works so well. You can read it on the shitter, in bed, on the bus, in the coffee shop on your lunch hour and it takes no energy apart from what your mind churns. It's very difficult to improve upon. I don’t think it can be improved upon. E-books and the like are a ploy to sell more shit to people who have too much shit to begin with and too much money to spend on useless shit.
10. Putting aside the hype, does the Internet provide a real opportunity to publishers? If so, how?
Yeah, it makes the world smaller, more accessible. So folks in other parts of the earth can find you in a few seconds. You can make quicker connections. But the competition to maintain those connections is fiercer. You have to have some savvy to stay visible online.
11. And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?
If so-called venerable institutions are going to save literature, start planning the funeral procession now. I have next to no use for English Departments. Libraries are of more value, are more egalitarian, smell more like how people really smell. That sort of thing.
12. What projects are you working on now that you are excited about?
Writing new short stories. But I work slowly. I have to fit it in. I have a regular Joe day job, two kids, wife, commitments, etc. Writing is my vice and my indulgence. Suburban Pornography has been out for a year now. I’m still pushing it when I can. But a new book is a ways off yet. I’m still doing Front&Centre and all my Black Bile Press stuff, which always excites me. Working on the micro press scale is a lot of fun, very gratifying. The writers are more down to earth, and appreciative and giving and don't have that snotty sense of entitlement that so many bigger time writers have.
Bio: Matthew Firth lives in Ottawa. His latest publication is Suburban Pornography.
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
I think it’s an exaggeration. Too much dithering by those who don’t have enough to do in their daily lives, so they create anxiety over the state of literature. But, then, seriously, who cares if literature is in trouble when the planet is in trouble, when millions worldwide are in trouble, when kids everywhere are in trouble, etc. Relatively speaking, whether literature is in trouble or not is a sickeningly bourgeois notion.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?
I’m not sure. Anything that’s written down might be literature. Travel brochures are often called travel literature. Someone hands you a pamphlet on the street and says, “You wanna to read some literature?” So maybe it is just about anything, including the novel.
3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
Yes, literary prizes of all sorts – big and small – size doesn’t matter, the small ones are just as insidious as the big ones – should be resisted, both by readers and writers. They are bullshit through and through. Writers competing for prizes and awards is ridiculous and pathetic. Readers who covet only prize-winning books are lazy and are following the crowd without bothering to think about how they’re spending their $20 or whatever. Yes, prizes bad.
4. Literary publishing has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?
Not sure. I'm uncomfortable with the notion this is a recent thing. Art has always had a whorish aspect to it. Our hyper-commercial world just makes this more obvious. But artists and writers have been selling themselves for centuries, so, in that sense, why stop now?
5. Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?
No, it’s not a good policy. It’s counterintuitive – how do you find new voices if you only read agented fiction when to be agented means you’ve been at it a while and are no longer new and likely have published a book or two already? Makes no sense. Yes, good writing will be squeezed out. But that’ll happen anyway. Writers should stop crying over such things and just work a little harder at what they’re doing, rather than blaming the fucking system or some such.
6. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?
It’s not this simple. This makes it all sound so controlled and manipulated and evil. Leave that to governments.
7. Returning to the question of agents -- are they too powerful? If so, in what ways? Or are they a largely beneficial and necessary element of contemporary publishing?
Don't know. I don't have an agent. I've had three books published by three different presses.
8. Does Canada have too many publishers? Or too few?
Too many of a certain kind, how about that? Too many that publish really boring, mewling middle class books. Not enough with any balls to what they're doing.
9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?
Again, over-rated. The book in its current form is a beautifully effective high technology. I mean a real, paper and glue book – it's very high technology. It's high tech because it works so well. You can read it on the shitter, in bed, on the bus, in the coffee shop on your lunch hour and it takes no energy apart from what your mind churns. It's very difficult to improve upon. I don’t think it can be improved upon. E-books and the like are a ploy to sell more shit to people who have too much shit to begin with and too much money to spend on useless shit.
10. Putting aside the hype, does the Internet provide a real opportunity to publishers? If so, how?
Yeah, it makes the world smaller, more accessible. So folks in other parts of the earth can find you in a few seconds. You can make quicker connections. But the competition to maintain those connections is fiercer. You have to have some savvy to stay visible online.
11. And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?
If so-called venerable institutions are going to save literature, start planning the funeral procession now. I have next to no use for English Departments. Libraries are of more value, are more egalitarian, smell more like how people really smell. That sort of thing.
12. What projects are you working on now that you are excited about?
Writing new short stories. But I work slowly. I have to fit it in. I have a regular Joe day job, two kids, wife, commitments, etc. Writing is my vice and my indulgence. Suburban Pornography has been out for a year now. I’m still pushing it when I can. But a new book is a ways off yet. I’m still doing Front&Centre and all my Black Bile Press stuff, which always excites me. Working on the micro press scale is a lot of fun, very gratifying. The writers are more down to earth, and appreciative and giving and don't have that snotty sense of entitlement that so many bigger time writers have.
Bio: Matthew Firth lives in Ottawa. His latest publication is Suburban Pornography.
Friday, June 22, 2007
links.
"Like a chain of hyper-haikus from the sinisterly dumb future": new fictions from Steve Augustine.
Conversational Reading's Reading the World.
The Big Ugly does the big body.
Conversational Reading's Reading the World.
The Big Ugly does the big body.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Dan Green -- The Reading Experience.
Dan Green -- lit-blogger, critical essayist at The Reading Experience:
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
It’s not just exaggeration, it’s wrong. More good poetry and fiction are being published—or at least being written—than ever before. What is in trouble is the notion of Literature as the acme of culture, as the cultural repository where all good things lie. No one believes this anymore, and they shouldn’t. It’s an abstraction that self-designated cultural gatekeepers believe in because it gives them something to do: urge the great unwashed to expose themselves to it and become cleansed in the way the gatekeeper in question prefers. Those who peddle the “death of literature” line find works of literature praiseworthy if they seem accessible to the masses, contemptible if they seem directed at “merely literary” people. That serious literature is going to be “accessible” to the masses in any form is an illusion.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?
No. If I were to pick any form as the “prime example” it would be poetry, since it is concerned in the most concentrated way with making verbal art out of the common language. I guess that’s how I would define literature—verbal art. However, I don’t really work with any abstract notion of “Literature.” I use the word frequently enough, but mostly as a convenience. Otherwise, I’m looking for individual poems, novels, or stories that aspire to a degree of seriousness of purpose.
3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
It’s not that they convey the message you cite but that they turn writing into a competition. It seems to me a quintessentially American stupidity, but unfortunately the rest of the world seems to have picked it up from us. Generally, I pay no attention to awards and prizes at all, although the Book Critics Circle award and the National Book Award do provide us with some blog fodder.
The “prizes” awarded by literary journals—those that ask for an “entry fee”--do seem to me an active menace. They take advantage of aspiring writers in all the obvious ways, they trivialize literature, and the prize itself is meaningless. It’s a way for some literary journals to stay afloat. If you want to help out these journals, subscribe or make a contribution. Don’t play the prize game.
4. You've posted several times on the importance of avoiding "print sniffing" -- that is, valorizing what is in print over what is online simply *because* the former is in printed form. Agreeing that good writing is good writing no matter what medium it appears in, isn't it nevertheless the case that what appears in print has a greater potential for longevity and receiving widespread critical attention? In other words, isn't the de facto reality of canon formation that it is the *book* that must come into existence before the text contained in the book can be immortalized? Or is this attitude simply passe, and even dangerous, in a time when book publishing is on the ropes?
I don’t think it has a greater potential for longevity, if only because print, words on paper, doesn’t have a long life ahead of it. (I’m referring specifically to what gets printed in newspapers and magazines. Books are going to continue in their current form because there doesn’t seem to be an acceptable electronic alternative on the horizon.) I don’t know about the “widespread critical attention” part. Most short fiction is published in literary journals with tiny circulations. Most of it doesn’t get and “critical attention” at all. Book publishing is on the ropes not because publishers are hesitant to move to electronic publishing but because most of what they publish is really bad.
5. The lit-blogosphere is chock full of commentary. But, proportionately, it doesn't contain much creative work -- that is, it's extremely difficult to find blog sites (as opposed to online magazines) primarily devoted to original fiction. What's up with that? Is the internet doomed to be a venue of commentary rather than art?
Well, but there are quite a few online magazines. I have a relatively long list of them on a “literary journal” blogroll, and I’m sure there are many more I haven’t run across yet. For the moment, the blog probably is more well-suited to commentary. I would guess that if more bloggers were to turn to “creative” works, these would be included on some sort of side-site. (I have one of those myself.)
6. In a recent post entitled "Notated" (May 8. 07), you comment on an article in the LA Times about Granta's newest best young novelist list. You remark:
The view of fiction implicit in this article's discussion of the newest and the latest is that it is a forum for "expression." Writers "express" themselves, and through them their ethnic or class heritage gets expressed. Taken as whole, the writers included in the Granta anthology express the concerns and preoccupations of their generational cohort. Why exactly such writers would choose the indirect and rhetorically impure mode of fiction--which unavoidably is going to disperse and obscure your "themes" unless you run them diligently roughshod--in order to give "expression" to such things is never made clear.
This is an interesting passage which sums up the argument you've made in several posts. But are you really being fair to the writers in question? Are they themselves aiming to "express" "themes" that are largely sociological (by which I take you to mean tendentious) in nature?
My criticism was directed at the way these writers were being discussed. I haven’t read many of the writers included in that volume. For all I know, I might find that many don’t view writing as “expression” and are plenty concerned with what I generally call “aesthetics.” If this is so, you wouldn’t know it by the kind of talk typified in that article. It seems the only way some people have to discuss literature at all.
7. In the same LA Times piece, Ian Jack states: "To go through this process of creative writing schools, now, to become a budding novelist, more and more means you need a certain amount of ancestral wealth. I hate to sound like a Marxist, but economics does govern a lot of life, especially cultural life." Whether this is accurate or not (and please comment on whether you think it is), the implication is that what is happening in literature is what has happened in contemporary visual art: one need not be rich to make it, but one needs the attention and beneficence of the rich ... who might in this case be defined as powerful publishers and agents.
Is there not some truth to what Jack is saying? Given mass culture's usual tendency to paper over the economic difficulties of life, isn't there an argument for showing this aspect of existence a little more frequently than it has been of late in contemporary literary art? In short, if writers don't show what it's like to struggle to make a living, who in our celebrity-and-rich-folk-obsessed culture will?
8. As a critic, you place a lot of emphasis on close readings of texts for their aesthetic qualities. However, the impression I often get from your posts is that you see the aesthetic as somewhat removed from the emotional qualities of a work of fiction; that is, you seem more interested in the formal qualities of a work's aesthetic rather than its emotive ones (which as I'm imagining them here also arise from the aesthetic).
Is the above a fair characterization of your temperament as a critic? Or do you define the aesthetic differently?
That is a fair enough characterization. I don’t deny the “emotive” qualites of art. I just thank the aesthetic comes first. Too many people—too many critics—leap ahead immediately to the emotive without first considering how the emotive is mediated by the aesthetic.
9. You taught within academe. Now, so to speak, you teach outside it (that is, your blog posts are often carefully written enough to be considered mini-essays). What is your ultimate hope as a critic: to develop (or re-invigorate) a school of criticism? To be a gadfly of academic pretension? Or is the very idea of an overarching critical "goal" one reason you left academe?
I do sort of see some of my posts as having a kind of teaching function. It’s the part of academe I haven’t left. If I could “reinvigorate” a school of criticism, the school of close reading for aesthetic purposes, I would be very happy. I’m not deluded enough to think I can do that.
I’m not so much against “academic pretension” (lots of people would no doubt say I have pretensions of my own). I’m against the direction academe has taken away from studying “literature itself” and toward treating literature as a cultural specimen or symptom.
10. You have also posted against art that has a political message. But is art that has a political aspect necessarily art that has a message? (Again, isn't your real beef against tendentiousness?)
It seems to me this question can be viewed from two angles.
First: the economic mentioned above. Why should a political novel necessarily be explicitly political? In a comment of your own following a post of Dec. 7, 2004, you hint at this: "'Unpoliticized' as in without reference to its ultimate political utility or implications. Such a thing is perfectly possible. All of the dogmatic assertions that everything is political are just malarkey."
To my mind, an example of how this can work is Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE (I hope this example works for you as well). It is a work with a "message". And it has a few explicitly political passages. Yet it works aesthetically: Dreiser, to my mind, is a superb writer, who is technically adept in a way that you allege another "message writer", Dostoevsky, isn't. At the same, time, SISTER CARRIE works emotionally: Hurstwood's obsessive love for Carrie is palpable, and their affair is deeply involving for the reader. However, despite the novel's focus on romantic desire, it also works as a social novel. The different classes Hurstwood and Carrie come from make their relationship illustrative of social relations.
If one views clear, honest depictions of poverty/class relationships as having at least the potential for being "political" without having an explicit (i.e., tendentious) message, is it not possible to successfully combine the political with the artistic? (Other examples: much mid-20th C. Korean fiction; and, to a certain extent, recent American novels such as THE CORRECTIONS and PREP.) Do you agree that economic "dramas" do not need to be politicized in order for them to have political significance? In other words, is it not true a novel can be "political" without attempting any message?
If a novel can be political without attempting a message, Sister Carrie would be a good model.
11. Second: Is there not a place in literary fiction for novels set in the world of policy making/intelligence gathering? It seems to me these modes of life, especially the second, have pretty much been left to the genre writers. And so there now exists a deep-seated prejudice against a literary novel that, say, would show the workings of an intelligence agency or state department.
But why should that be? Particularly these days, our mass culture is fixated on dramas of Law and Order, which include dramas of the world of intelligence. But literature seems to feel this is inherently low. Yet literature is where genre fiction's failings -- turgid prose, cardboard characterizations, reactionary presuppositions -- could be avoided. Don't we NEED a literature that tackles these themes, too?
I guess there could be a place for that kind of fiction. I wouldn’t want to read it, myself. Although if you’re referring to “spy fiction,” I’ve read some spy novels I liked. Anyone can write any kind of novel for any reason he/she wants. If you take “policy making” as your ostensible subject but otherwise write an aesthetically interesting book, I’m not going to complain. However, if you take that as your subject because primarily you want to explore matters of policy or you want to profile those who make it and how they do it, you should just admit up front that you’re more interested in policy (or history or politics) than you are in fiction.
12. Finally, like many serious lit-bloggers you work very hard, and work alone on THE READING EXPERIENCE. Is this best for the long run? Have you thought of starting an online magazine?
I have thought about it. I’m still pondering whether I want to review works of experimental fiction as I’m now doing it—serially, by myself—or start up some kind of broader forum for the discussion of such fiction, a forum that would include reviews by others as well. I’m not very good at the logisitics of such things, however.
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
It’s not just exaggeration, it’s wrong. More good poetry and fiction are being published—or at least being written—than ever before. What is in trouble is the notion of Literature as the acme of culture, as the cultural repository where all good things lie. No one believes this anymore, and they shouldn’t. It’s an abstraction that self-designated cultural gatekeepers believe in because it gives them something to do: urge the great unwashed to expose themselves to it and become cleansed in the way the gatekeeper in question prefers. Those who peddle the “death of literature” line find works of literature praiseworthy if they seem accessible to the masses, contemptible if they seem directed at “merely literary” people. That serious literature is going to be “accessible” to the masses in any form is an illusion.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?
No. If I were to pick any form as the “prime example” it would be poetry, since it is concerned in the most concentrated way with making verbal art out of the common language. I guess that’s how I would define literature—verbal art. However, I don’t really work with any abstract notion of “Literature.” I use the word frequently enough, but mostly as a convenience. Otherwise, I’m looking for individual poems, novels, or stories that aspire to a degree of seriousness of purpose.
3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
It’s not that they convey the message you cite but that they turn writing into a competition. It seems to me a quintessentially American stupidity, but unfortunately the rest of the world seems to have picked it up from us. Generally, I pay no attention to awards and prizes at all, although the Book Critics Circle award and the National Book Award do provide us with some blog fodder.
The “prizes” awarded by literary journals—those that ask for an “entry fee”--do seem to me an active menace. They take advantage of aspiring writers in all the obvious ways, they trivialize literature, and the prize itself is meaningless. It’s a way for some literary journals to stay afloat. If you want to help out these journals, subscribe or make a contribution. Don’t play the prize game.
4. You've posted several times on the importance of avoiding "print sniffing" -- that is, valorizing what is in print over what is online simply *because* the former is in printed form. Agreeing that good writing is good writing no matter what medium it appears in, isn't it nevertheless the case that what appears in print has a greater potential for longevity and receiving widespread critical attention? In other words, isn't the de facto reality of canon formation that it is the *book* that must come into existence before the text contained in the book can be immortalized? Or is this attitude simply passe, and even dangerous, in a time when book publishing is on the ropes?
I don’t think it has a greater potential for longevity, if only because print, words on paper, doesn’t have a long life ahead of it. (I’m referring specifically to what gets printed in newspapers and magazines. Books are going to continue in their current form because there doesn’t seem to be an acceptable electronic alternative on the horizon.) I don’t know about the “widespread critical attention” part. Most short fiction is published in literary journals with tiny circulations. Most of it doesn’t get and “critical attention” at all. Book publishing is on the ropes not because publishers are hesitant to move to electronic publishing but because most of what they publish is really bad.
5. The lit-blogosphere is chock full of commentary. But, proportionately, it doesn't contain much creative work -- that is, it's extremely difficult to find blog sites (as opposed to online magazines) primarily devoted to original fiction. What's up with that? Is the internet doomed to be a venue of commentary rather than art?
Well, but there are quite a few online magazines. I have a relatively long list of them on a “literary journal” blogroll, and I’m sure there are many more I haven’t run across yet. For the moment, the blog probably is more well-suited to commentary. I would guess that if more bloggers were to turn to “creative” works, these would be included on some sort of side-site. (I have one of those myself.)
6. In a recent post entitled "Notated" (May 8. 07), you comment on an article in the LA Times about Granta's newest best young novelist list. You remark:
The view of fiction implicit in this article's discussion of the newest and the latest is that it is a forum for "expression." Writers "express" themselves, and through them their ethnic or class heritage gets expressed. Taken as whole, the writers included in the Granta anthology express the concerns and preoccupations of their generational cohort. Why exactly such writers would choose the indirect and rhetorically impure mode of fiction--which unavoidably is going to disperse and obscure your "themes" unless you run them diligently roughshod--in order to give "expression" to such things is never made clear.
This is an interesting passage which sums up the argument you've made in several posts. But are you really being fair to the writers in question? Are they themselves aiming to "express" "themes" that are largely sociological (by which I take you to mean tendentious) in nature?
My criticism was directed at the way these writers were being discussed. I haven’t read many of the writers included in that volume. For all I know, I might find that many don’t view writing as “expression” and are plenty concerned with what I generally call “aesthetics.” If this is so, you wouldn’t know it by the kind of talk typified in that article. It seems the only way some people have to discuss literature at all.
7. In the same LA Times piece, Ian Jack states: "To go through this process of creative writing schools, now, to become a budding novelist, more and more means you need a certain amount of ancestral wealth. I hate to sound like a Marxist, but economics does govern a lot of life, especially cultural life." Whether this is accurate or not (and please comment on whether you think it is), the implication is that what is happening in literature is what has happened in contemporary visual art: one need not be rich to make it, but one needs the attention and beneficence of the rich ... who might in this case be defined as powerful publishers and agents.
Is there not some truth to what Jack is saying? Given mass culture's usual tendency to paper over the economic difficulties of life, isn't there an argument for showing this aspect of existence a little more frequently than it has been of late in contemporary literary art? In short, if writers don't show what it's like to struggle to make a living, who in our celebrity-and-rich-folk-obsessed culture will?
How many people really need to know “what it’s like to struggle to make a living”? Other rich people? Don’t the people doing the struggling already know it’s a struggle? Frankly, this notion could be called the “documentary” view of literature. Fiction exists to “document” the lives of these people or those people. I don’t have much use for that, either.
I’m not really sure I understand Jack’s point. Only “privileged” people are now becoming writers? Only kiss-asses? Maybe such kinds of students are now going through certain creative writing schools, but “writer” and “MFA-recipient” aren’t the same thing.
8. As a critic, you place a lot of emphasis on close readings of texts for their aesthetic qualities. However, the impression I often get from your posts is that you see the aesthetic as somewhat removed from the emotional qualities of a work of fiction; that is, you seem more interested in the formal qualities of a work's aesthetic rather than its emotive ones (which as I'm imagining them here also arise from the aesthetic).
Is the above a fair characterization of your temperament as a critic? Or do you define the aesthetic differently?
That is a fair enough characterization. I don’t deny the “emotive” qualites of art. I just thank the aesthetic comes first. Too many people—too many critics—leap ahead immediately to the emotive without first considering how the emotive is mediated by the aesthetic.
9. You taught within academe. Now, so to speak, you teach outside it (that is, your blog posts are often carefully written enough to be considered mini-essays). What is your ultimate hope as a critic: to develop (or re-invigorate) a school of criticism? To be a gadfly of academic pretension? Or is the very idea of an overarching critical "goal" one reason you left academe?
I do sort of see some of my posts as having a kind of teaching function. It’s the part of academe I haven’t left. If I could “reinvigorate” a school of criticism, the school of close reading for aesthetic purposes, I would be very happy. I’m not deluded enough to think I can do that.
I’m not so much against “academic pretension” (lots of people would no doubt say I have pretensions of my own). I’m against the direction academe has taken away from studying “literature itself” and toward treating literature as a cultural specimen or symptom.
10. You have also posted against art that has a political message. But is art that has a political aspect necessarily art that has a message? (Again, isn't your real beef against tendentiousness?)
It seems to me this question can be viewed from two angles.
First: the economic mentioned above. Why should a political novel necessarily be explicitly political? In a comment of your own following a post of Dec. 7, 2004, you hint at this: "'Unpoliticized' as in without reference to its ultimate political utility or implications. Such a thing is perfectly possible. All of the dogmatic assertions that everything is political are just malarkey."
To my mind, an example of how this can work is Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE (I hope this example works for you as well). It is a work with a "message". And it has a few explicitly political passages. Yet it works aesthetically: Dreiser, to my mind, is a superb writer, who is technically adept in a way that you allege another "message writer", Dostoevsky, isn't. At the same, time, SISTER CARRIE works emotionally: Hurstwood's obsessive love for Carrie is palpable, and their affair is deeply involving for the reader. However, despite the novel's focus on romantic desire, it also works as a social novel. The different classes Hurstwood and Carrie come from make their relationship illustrative of social relations.
If one views clear, honest depictions of poverty/class relationships as having at least the potential for being "political" without having an explicit (i.e., tendentious) message, is it not possible to successfully combine the political with the artistic? (Other examples: much mid-20th C. Korean fiction; and, to a certain extent, recent American novels such as THE CORRECTIONS and PREP.) Do you agree that economic "dramas" do not need to be politicized in order for them to have political significance? In other words, is it not true a novel can be "political" without attempting any message?
I agree with you about Sister Carrie. It’s one of the primary challenges to my general view of what fiction should do. Dreiser writes badly, but nevertheless I find myself absorbed by his plots. The bad writing seems suited to the prosaic but inexorable working-out of the fates of his characters. His novels don’t so much seem to be designed to advance a political idea as to truly uncover how American life unfolds. This has an undeniable secondary effect that is “political,” but to me it seems dwarfed by the aesthetic power his novels contain.
If a novel can be political without attempting a message, Sister Carrie would be a good model.
11. Second: Is there not a place in literary fiction for novels set in the world of policy making/intelligence gathering? It seems to me these modes of life, especially the second, have pretty much been left to the genre writers. And so there now exists a deep-seated prejudice against a literary novel that, say, would show the workings of an intelligence agency or state department.
But why should that be? Particularly these days, our mass culture is fixated on dramas of Law and Order, which include dramas of the world of intelligence. But literature seems to feel this is inherently low. Yet literature is where genre fiction's failings -- turgid prose, cardboard characterizations, reactionary presuppositions -- could be avoided. Don't we NEED a literature that tackles these themes, too?
I guess there could be a place for that kind of fiction. I wouldn’t want to read it, myself. Although if you’re referring to “spy fiction,” I’ve read some spy novels I liked. Anyone can write any kind of novel for any reason he/she wants. If you take “policy making” as your ostensible subject but otherwise write an aesthetically interesting book, I’m not going to complain. However, if you take that as your subject because primarily you want to explore matters of policy or you want to profile those who make it and how they do it, you should just admit up front that you’re more interested in policy (or history or politics) than you are in fiction.
12. Finally, like many serious lit-bloggers you work very hard, and work alone on THE READING EXPERIENCE. Is this best for the long run? Have you thought of starting an online magazine?
I have thought about it. I’m still pondering whether I want to review works of experimental fiction as I’m now doing it—serially, by myself—or start up some kind of broader forum for the discussion of such fiction, a forum that would include reviews by others as well. I’m not very good at the logisitics of such things, however.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Scott Esposito -- lit-blogger, essayist (Conversational Reading, The Quarterly Conversation)
Scott Esposito -- lit-blogger at Conversational Reading, critical essayist at The Quarterly Conversation, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Enquirer, and elsewhere:
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
I think that on this question perspective is very important. The NEA report tells us that reading is down in America. This is probably true, but I think it's too early to tell if this is a fluctuation of a trend.
Just the other day I read in a newspaper that, statistically speaking, the average Mexican reads one book per year. In Argentina and Chile the number is three. And these are countries with some of the most esteemed literary traditions in Latin America.
Comparatively, Americans still read a fair amount. The NEA report doesn't say exactly how many books per year, but looking at the report it's clear that it's much more than in these countries. I think we've got a very firm, institutionalized culture of reading, and that's going to be tough to shake.
Also, you might couch the American reading trends in comparison to other trends in America. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam charts 50 years of declining involvement in politics and social activities. His data show that generation-by-generation less and less people are doing things like going to the theater or the symphony. (Incidentally, among a number of other factors, he blames TV mostly.) So if people are reading less, I think this should be considered in combination with the many other cultural activities that appear to be on the decline in America. These are difficult times for the arts in general, not just literature. In a way, it would be more worrisome if other indicators were doing good and reading was the only one to be dropping.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?
Not to get all Wittgenstein on you, but what's the prime example of a bird? Of a rock? I would say that at this point most people would equate novels with literature, but novels take on a variety of forms. If I look back at the books I've just read in the last year, there's Michael Martone, a book composed entirely of contributor's guidelines, The Rings of Saturn, an extended meditation during the course of a walk through England, Hopscotch, The Children's Hospital, Mulligan Stew, Wizard of the Crow, Witch Grass. Undoubtedly, this represents only a small sample of the books I could be reading.
But you could look at this from the other direction too. How would a structuralist define a novel? A critic adhering to new criticism? New Historicism? Maybe they could all agree that the novel best represents literature, but could they ever agree on what a novel is?
If you wanted, you could bring the definition of a novel back to something basic like "a collection of words that tells a story" but there's so much that fits into that that I'm temped to say that the definition depends more on the viewer than the viewed. I've read recently that Bakhtin called the novel the form that devours all other forms. Maybe that's the best definition of literature.
3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
I think literary prizes are good in the sense that a friend who gives you recommendations on what to read is good. Maybe their best function is to bring attention to lesser-known authors.
But the problem is that the amount of emphasis people now put on prizes is completely out of proportion. There's lots of ways to bring attention to authors—there's my friend, there's a publisher like NYRB (which brings out-of-print classics back into print), there are critics (who can champion authors), there are blogs, there's the LBC, there are bestseller lists, there are book clubs (but TV-based clubs like Oprah's and The Today Show's now seem more like prizes), there are clerks setting up displays at book stores, there's advertising.
All these are legitimate methods to inform you about good books, but book prizes have become, by far, the most prominent. So, I think they're dangerous when they make readers lose sight of the fact that there's lots of other ways to discover books. For one thing, maybe your friend's advice is going to be better than the Booker's this year, and for another, art and culture benefit when there's a multiplicity of voices discussing and championing art. To the extent that we let prizes define what's "good," we're subjecting our literature to unilateral judgment. In other words, it's giving these prizes way too much power, and, as you say, letting these prizes substitute for an individual's responsibility to seek out quality art and make her own judgments.
4. Regarding lit-blogging: first, a simple question -- how do you do it? How do you find the time to read the books necessary to write longer posts, cover the arts journalism and criticism necessary for many of the shorter posts, and also have a life?
Quite simply you make the time, just like anyone else. Not to compare blogging to writing a novel, but how does a novelist (those not fortunate enough to live off their writing, and there's plenty of those) find the time to hold down a job, have a life, and write?
Or let me put it like this—literature is my passion. If I didn't blog, I'd still be reading the same books, journalism, criticism, etc. The actual blogging is kind of like the icing on the cake, or rather, a way that I can share and continue to think about things that I'm naturally interested in. If it felt like an obligation or like a job, I don't think I would have lasted this long.
5. Recently, considerable attention has been paid to the cuts to book review space in newspapers (a trend that started quite a while ago). You have written both reviews for papers and reviews as posts for your lit-blog. Is there any real difference between the two media? When writing for a newspaper and getting feedback from the book page's editor, does this help bring to the fore thoughts you might not otherwise have included in a review? Alternatively, does blogging, with its greater freedom to write about what one wants as long as one wants, lend a critic much-needed room to breathe?
Well, I think there's a lot of difference between a newspaper and a lit-blog, but in both mediums there's a big range in the quality of coverage, so it's hard to generalize. Some reviews I've read on lit-blogs seem exactly like the reviews I read in newspapers, but other times the two are very different. But I think there is usually going to be a difference in the final product when you're writing for yourself, are your own editor, and are writing in a medium that feels ephemeral and (for the moment at least) fringe.
I may be a bad example, but I've gotten very little by way of suggestions from editors I've written for. Most of the time they do a light edit, I approve it, and that's it. This includes newspapers, literary journals, and other blogs.
I do like the idea that blogs give you as much space as you want, but what I like even more is the opportunity to come back to a work again and again. When I review a book I go through it a second and third time so that I have a good understanding of it, but even then there's a lot of stuff that occurs to me after the fact. With my blog, I can come back to a work as often as I like. And if, say, tomorrow, I read a book that really benefits from a comparison to a book that I reviewed, say, six months ago, then I can talk about that on my blog.
I tend to view newspaper reviews as a good first line of criticism, but people make the mistake of thinking that's all there is to be said. No, that's just the first sentence of a long conversation. Blogs are one way to continue the conversation.
6. Despite the decline in readership for literary fiction, publishers keep producing a large number of titles each season. You have written that it would be better if publishers produced fewer books. (If my memory serves correctly, you wrote a post entitled "Less Please" that criticized publishers for producing an excessive number of books in the hope that a few of them would stick.)
But isn't there another way of thinking about the avalanche of work that gets published each season by the total number of large and small publishing houses? Isn't the corollary of "too many books" that books themselves tend to be too long? Especially given the trend over the last decade of new authors carving out reputations by writing 500, 600, and even 700 or more page tomes, is there not an argument for writers producing shorter works? Broadly speaking, shouldn't we have "less please" in terms of novel length?
I don't think you can look at pages in the same way you look at the number of books, and this is why. The thing I said about publishers publishing too many books is this mentality that you have to spread your risk. If you bank on two books, you're exposing yourself to a lot of risk, because both of them could easily flop and then you're screwed. But if you have ten, it's much less likely that all ten will tank, and you're likely to survive to publish another day. It's very good business sense ("diversify your portfolio" is exactly what any investment broker will advise you), but what's good from a business standpoint is rarely good from an art standpoint. Or put another way—this is the mentality that has taken over Hollywood, and if you think Hollywood is at a high point . . .
Actually, New York Magazine just did an article where they mentioned exactly this. They showed how out of every eight books published by Random House, six break even, one's a big success, and one's a big failure. So, overall, if you publish a lot of books, these things even out and you stay in business. Good business sense, but not necessarily what's going to get you the best literature.
And besides, I think that many of the long novels we have now are perfectly legit. There's an argument that prodigious fiction—like that of David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann—is a response to a world of prodigious information. I think I buy that, and if an author feels she needs a lot of room to render our world as it is, I'll grant her that. Of course, if you want to write a long book you run the risk of boring the reader. I always reserve the right to critique a book for being too long and wasting my time, and with all there is that I want to read, my tolerance is going to be pretty low.
Also, some books that are unduly long could be due to the lack of good editing, which is a symptom of publishing too many books per season. From what I've seen, it’s common for authors (especially young ones) to keep piling on the information. There may be a good book in there, but it’s overwritten, and this is where a good editor will come in. But now major presses do less and less editing, often because they're spread out over too many projects. So it's possible that this is a reason for ballooning books—and another reason to publish less books, so that the ones that are published can have more attention paid to them.
7. The lit-blogosphere is chock full of commentary. But, proportionately, it doesn't contain much creative work -- that is, it's extremely difficult to find blog sites (as opposed to online magazines) primarily devoted to original fiction. What's up with that? Is the internet doomed to be a venue of commentary rather than art?
I think the Internet will one day be a great venue for art, once we've discovered the correct kind of art to do in it. Fiction, though, is not it. Maybe it works to publish stories online as an adjunct to a journal or magazine, but I just don't think blogs are the correct place for fiction. The best stories are made to last, to be complete objects that you take in on their own. Does this sound like a blog to you? Not to me—I see blogs as very transitory, as connected to other stuff by a million tiny tethers; kinda the opposite as how I view a short story. I think that in time people will figure out how to make art via blogs, but it's not going to happen by taking this other, older artform and sticking it in just because both happen to be text-based.
Commentary, by contrast lends itself to the blog form. It's very much dependant on context (hence all the links), and to have good commentary you need to be constantly keeping up to date with what's going on. From this viewpoint, blogs are nearly ideal.
8. During the 1980s and 1990s, it was popular in literary circles to say women read fiction, men don't. Yet since the advent of the lit-blogosphere, a great deal of blogs run by men have emerged -- and, unsurprisingly, they have tended in a general sense to champion the work of male writers.
Do bloggers of one sex have an unspoken obligation to go out of their way to pay attention to the work of the other sex? Is there a bit of a "guys' room vs. girls' room" dynamic currently at work in the lit-blogosphere?
I think bloggers should go out of their way to find fiction by women, but I don't think there's the same obligation to search out fiction by men. Here's why: I read based on what books strike my interest, and somehow that leads to me reading far more men than women. Does that mean there are far more good male authors than female? Of course not. What it means is that via my normal habits I'm not being exposed to fiction by women, so I should go out of my way to find it. I don't think there's a similar obligation to find fiction by men because male fiction is already dominating discourse.
I don't think there's a divide like that in the lit-blogosphere. In terms of audience, there's Maud Newton, who's one of the most popular lit-bloggers around. Bookslut is also blogged (mainly) by a woman. GalleyCat (the only paying lit-blog gig I know of, and also a site with considerable traffic) is 50-50, gender-wise. And in general it seems to me like lots of female bloggers get links and are in the discussion.
9. Online, you both blog at Coversational Reading and write for/edit The Quarterly Conversation. Two questions: First, would you briefly describe the differences between blogging and writing essays for/editing an online journal?
Well, I hate to say it, but for The Quarterly Conversation I'm much more concerned about doing a thorough job. I love blogs, but I'm just going to automatically take writing for a journal (even a tiny online one) much more seriously.
For instance, my Friday Columns—I'll write the whole thing in a draft and then go back over it once or twice more. But, for a review for TQC, maybe I'll go over it a number of times, have someone else look it over and give me suggestions, come back to it, really work it over. And then there's copy-editing and proofreading. And if I do an essay, that could take a while.
10. Second: taking for granted that good writing is good writing, and what appears online is just as capable of being excellent as what is published, is there nevertheless (at least these days) still a strong argument for publishing a literary journal like The Quarterly Conversation in print? That is, would it not raise the magazine's profile even more if you could do this? Or is this asking too much? Given the obligations lit-bloggers already have, is it unrealistic to ask someone who reviews and lit-blogs to also print his or her journal -- particularly given the price of printing costs and headaches involved with distribution?
I think there's an argument for The Quarterly Conversation being in print. Besides the idea of getting the word out, there's the fact that lit journals are often very nicely designed with quality interior art—just something very pleasing to hold in your hand—and you just can't do that on the web. Another reason—the Internet being great as it is, I think it still feels much better to be in print. I certainly prefer to be published in print than online, and I think most of my contributors do as well.
However, that's not to say that we should do TQC in print immediately. If this is going to be in print, it should be worth printing—worth the expense and effort of making a nice piece of work, worth the $10 or so that we're going to ask someone to pay for it. I mean, look back at Issue 1 of TQC—I'm proud of it for what I was capable of at that point, but I would say that Issue 1 was far from being anything someone would want to print, bind, and purchase. Now I'm on Issue 8, and the end product is undeniably much better. You could say that publishing on the web has been a good way to try out things and make mistakes—to learn how to be a journal editor—without having the burden of 1,000 copies of a journal sitting in my basement.
And I don't think it's an unreasonable request. Sure, I'm busy—everyone I know is busy, by the way—but, you know, there's something to be said for responsibility and not hiding behind "I've got a lot to do." But I should also point out that I'm not the only one putting major time on TQC. Over the past year I've brought on a couple of contributing editors without whom I just couldn't put out TQC in its current form, and if we ever did do a print issue, I'm sure I'd have to find more people to be indebted to.
11.Finally, major media such as The New York Times occasionally mention lit-blogs, but they tend to do this in a very selective -- some might say, arbitrary -- way. This leads to a kind of hierarchy: i.e., you're either one of the lucky ones who gets a Motoko Rich link or you're not.
Given the power that major media still have to "make" someone, what is the lesson for serious lit-bloggers? Should they be trying to max out the number of hits they get? Should they be networking with arts journalists at major media? Or should they form their own media networks, and not worry about whom the Times will bless with its magic wand?
Well, first off, it is arbitrary, and moreover, bloggers keep saying how little newspapers understand about blogs, so I really don't think bloggers should care that much if they happen to be mentioned. I mean, yes, it's a nice little surprise when it happens to you, but I think that's about as far as it should go—if this is giving you a lasting ego boost, then you should probably examine your life.
I'm not so sure about the Times's king-making power, though. I've been linked by them and other major media—you get increased traffic for a day or two, but then everyone forgets and it goes back to normal.
About whose ass to kiss: The Times has discussed and linked to litblogs maybe once or twice in the past two years, so I don't think networking with its journalists is going to do anyone much good until they start discussing us on a regular basis, which I doubt will happen. The most click-throughs I've ever gotten by far was when Andrew Sullivan linked to me (when the Times linked to me I didn't get nearly as many). I think the lesson is clear—when people who are primarily newspaper readers read an article about blogs, a very small percentage of them will click over to you because most of the people reading the article don't know or care about reading a blog. But, when you're mentioned on a major blog, the click-through rate is going to be much, much higher, because the people reading that are ones that are the most familiar with blogs; they're used to clicking-through. So, I guess if you cared about maximizing your hits, go kiss the asses of major bloggers. Alternately, I think if you show a genuine interest in authors' work, participate in the community, and are putting up worthwhile information that people can't get anywhere else, then you will generate traffic.
But, who really cares? Say you get 2,000 hits per day. That's not bad. I mean, it's minuscule when you think of the millions of people online, but it's still a packed auditorium coming to hear you every day. That's cool. Most lit journals do what, 1,000-2,000 copies per issue, and people die to be in them. And also, think about who is reading your blog—I've been very surprised to find out who reads my blog. Hits aren't everything.
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
I think that on this question perspective is very important. The NEA report tells us that reading is down in America. This is probably true, but I think it's too early to tell if this is a fluctuation of a trend.
Just the other day I read in a newspaper that, statistically speaking, the average Mexican reads one book per year. In Argentina and Chile the number is three. And these are countries with some of the most esteemed literary traditions in Latin America.
Comparatively, Americans still read a fair amount. The NEA report doesn't say exactly how many books per year, but looking at the report it's clear that it's much more than in these countries. I think we've got a very firm, institutionalized culture of reading, and that's going to be tough to shake.
Also, you might couch the American reading trends in comparison to other trends in America. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam charts 50 years of declining involvement in politics and social activities. His data show that generation-by-generation less and less people are doing things like going to the theater or the symphony. (Incidentally, among a number of other factors, he blames TV mostly.) So if people are reading less, I think this should be considered in combination with the many other cultural activities that appear to be on the decline in America. These are difficult times for the arts in general, not just literature. In a way, it would be more worrisome if other indicators were doing good and reading was the only one to be dropping.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?
Not to get all Wittgenstein on you, but what's the prime example of a bird? Of a rock? I would say that at this point most people would equate novels with literature, but novels take on a variety of forms. If I look back at the books I've just read in the last year, there's Michael Martone, a book composed entirely of contributor's guidelines, The Rings of Saturn, an extended meditation during the course of a walk through England, Hopscotch, The Children's Hospital, Mulligan Stew, Wizard of the Crow, Witch Grass. Undoubtedly, this represents only a small sample of the books I could be reading.
But you could look at this from the other direction too. How would a structuralist define a novel? A critic adhering to new criticism? New Historicism? Maybe they could all agree that the novel best represents literature, but could they ever agree on what a novel is?
If you wanted, you could bring the definition of a novel back to something basic like "a collection of words that tells a story" but there's so much that fits into that that I'm temped to say that the definition depends more on the viewer than the viewed. I've read recently that Bakhtin called the novel the form that devours all other forms. Maybe that's the best definition of literature.
3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
I think literary prizes are good in the sense that a friend who gives you recommendations on what to read is good. Maybe their best function is to bring attention to lesser-known authors.
But the problem is that the amount of emphasis people now put on prizes is completely out of proportion. There's lots of ways to bring attention to authors—there's my friend, there's a publisher like NYRB (which brings out-of-print classics back into print), there are critics (who can champion authors), there are blogs, there's the LBC, there are bestseller lists, there are book clubs (but TV-based clubs like Oprah's and The Today Show's now seem more like prizes), there are clerks setting up displays at book stores, there's advertising.
All these are legitimate methods to inform you about good books, but book prizes have become, by far, the most prominent. So, I think they're dangerous when they make readers lose sight of the fact that there's lots of other ways to discover books. For one thing, maybe your friend's advice is going to be better than the Booker's this year, and for another, art and culture benefit when there's a multiplicity of voices discussing and championing art. To the extent that we let prizes define what's "good," we're subjecting our literature to unilateral judgment. In other words, it's giving these prizes way too much power, and, as you say, letting these prizes substitute for an individual's responsibility to seek out quality art and make her own judgments.
4. Regarding lit-blogging: first, a simple question -- how do you do it? How do you find the time to read the books necessary to write longer posts, cover the arts journalism and criticism necessary for many of the shorter posts, and also have a life?
Quite simply you make the time, just like anyone else. Not to compare blogging to writing a novel, but how does a novelist (those not fortunate enough to live off their writing, and there's plenty of those) find the time to hold down a job, have a life, and write?
Or let me put it like this—literature is my passion. If I didn't blog, I'd still be reading the same books, journalism, criticism, etc. The actual blogging is kind of like the icing on the cake, or rather, a way that I can share and continue to think about things that I'm naturally interested in. If it felt like an obligation or like a job, I don't think I would have lasted this long.
5. Recently, considerable attention has been paid to the cuts to book review space in newspapers (a trend that started quite a while ago). You have written both reviews for papers and reviews as posts for your lit-blog. Is there any real difference between the two media? When writing for a newspaper and getting feedback from the book page's editor, does this help bring to the fore thoughts you might not otherwise have included in a review? Alternatively, does blogging, with its greater freedom to write about what one wants as long as one wants, lend a critic much-needed room to breathe?
Well, I think there's a lot of difference between a newspaper and a lit-blog, but in both mediums there's a big range in the quality of coverage, so it's hard to generalize. Some reviews I've read on lit-blogs seem exactly like the reviews I read in newspapers, but other times the two are very different. But I think there is usually going to be a difference in the final product when you're writing for yourself, are your own editor, and are writing in a medium that feels ephemeral and (for the moment at least) fringe.
I may be a bad example, but I've gotten very little by way of suggestions from editors I've written for. Most of the time they do a light edit, I approve it, and that's it. This includes newspapers, literary journals, and other blogs.
I do like the idea that blogs give you as much space as you want, but what I like even more is the opportunity to come back to a work again and again. When I review a book I go through it a second and third time so that I have a good understanding of it, but even then there's a lot of stuff that occurs to me after the fact. With my blog, I can come back to a work as often as I like. And if, say, tomorrow, I read a book that really benefits from a comparison to a book that I reviewed, say, six months ago, then I can talk about that on my blog.
I tend to view newspaper reviews as a good first line of criticism, but people make the mistake of thinking that's all there is to be said. No, that's just the first sentence of a long conversation. Blogs are one way to continue the conversation.
6. Despite the decline in readership for literary fiction, publishers keep producing a large number of titles each season. You have written that it would be better if publishers produced fewer books. (If my memory serves correctly, you wrote a post entitled "Less Please" that criticized publishers for producing an excessive number of books in the hope that a few of them would stick.)
But isn't there another way of thinking about the avalanche of work that gets published each season by the total number of large and small publishing houses? Isn't the corollary of "too many books" that books themselves tend to be too long? Especially given the trend over the last decade of new authors carving out reputations by writing 500, 600, and even 700 or more page tomes, is there not an argument for writers producing shorter works? Broadly speaking, shouldn't we have "less please" in terms of novel length?
I don't think you can look at pages in the same way you look at the number of books, and this is why. The thing I said about publishers publishing too many books is this mentality that you have to spread your risk. If you bank on two books, you're exposing yourself to a lot of risk, because both of them could easily flop and then you're screwed. But if you have ten, it's much less likely that all ten will tank, and you're likely to survive to publish another day. It's very good business sense ("diversify your portfolio" is exactly what any investment broker will advise you), but what's good from a business standpoint is rarely good from an art standpoint. Or put another way—this is the mentality that has taken over Hollywood, and if you think Hollywood is at a high point . . .
Actually, New York Magazine just did an article where they mentioned exactly this. They showed how out of every eight books published by Random House, six break even, one's a big success, and one's a big failure. So, overall, if you publish a lot of books, these things even out and you stay in business. Good business sense, but not necessarily what's going to get you the best literature.
And besides, I think that many of the long novels we have now are perfectly legit. There's an argument that prodigious fiction—like that of David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann—is a response to a world of prodigious information. I think I buy that, and if an author feels she needs a lot of room to render our world as it is, I'll grant her that. Of course, if you want to write a long book you run the risk of boring the reader. I always reserve the right to critique a book for being too long and wasting my time, and with all there is that I want to read, my tolerance is going to be pretty low.
Also, some books that are unduly long could be due to the lack of good editing, which is a symptom of publishing too many books per season. From what I've seen, it’s common for authors (especially young ones) to keep piling on the information. There may be a good book in there, but it’s overwritten, and this is where a good editor will come in. But now major presses do less and less editing, often because they're spread out over too many projects. So it's possible that this is a reason for ballooning books—and another reason to publish less books, so that the ones that are published can have more attention paid to them.
7. The lit-blogosphere is chock full of commentary. But, proportionately, it doesn't contain much creative work -- that is, it's extremely difficult to find blog sites (as opposed to online magazines) primarily devoted to original fiction. What's up with that? Is the internet doomed to be a venue of commentary rather than art?
I think the Internet will one day be a great venue for art, once we've discovered the correct kind of art to do in it. Fiction, though, is not it. Maybe it works to publish stories online as an adjunct to a journal or magazine, but I just don't think blogs are the correct place for fiction. The best stories are made to last, to be complete objects that you take in on their own. Does this sound like a blog to you? Not to me—I see blogs as very transitory, as connected to other stuff by a million tiny tethers; kinda the opposite as how I view a short story. I think that in time people will figure out how to make art via blogs, but it's not going to happen by taking this other, older artform and sticking it in just because both happen to be text-based.
Commentary, by contrast lends itself to the blog form. It's very much dependant on context (hence all the links), and to have good commentary you need to be constantly keeping up to date with what's going on. From this viewpoint, blogs are nearly ideal.
8. During the 1980s and 1990s, it was popular in literary circles to say women read fiction, men don't. Yet since the advent of the lit-blogosphere, a great deal of blogs run by men have emerged -- and, unsurprisingly, they have tended in a general sense to champion the work of male writers.
Do bloggers of one sex have an unspoken obligation to go out of their way to pay attention to the work of the other sex? Is there a bit of a "guys' room vs. girls' room" dynamic currently at work in the lit-blogosphere?
I think bloggers should go out of their way to find fiction by women, but I don't think there's the same obligation to search out fiction by men. Here's why: I read based on what books strike my interest, and somehow that leads to me reading far more men than women. Does that mean there are far more good male authors than female? Of course not. What it means is that via my normal habits I'm not being exposed to fiction by women, so I should go out of my way to find it. I don't think there's a similar obligation to find fiction by men because male fiction is already dominating discourse.
I don't think there's a divide like that in the lit-blogosphere. In terms of audience, there's Maud Newton, who's one of the most popular lit-bloggers around. Bookslut is also blogged (mainly) by a woman. GalleyCat (the only paying lit-blog gig I know of, and also a site with considerable traffic) is 50-50, gender-wise. And in general it seems to me like lots of female bloggers get links and are in the discussion.
9. Online, you both blog at Coversational Reading and write for/edit The Quarterly Conversation. Two questions: First, would you briefly describe the differences between blogging and writing essays for/editing an online journal?
Well, I hate to say it, but for The Quarterly Conversation I'm much more concerned about doing a thorough job. I love blogs, but I'm just going to automatically take writing for a journal (even a tiny online one) much more seriously.
For instance, my Friday Columns—I'll write the whole thing in a draft and then go back over it once or twice more. But, for a review for TQC, maybe I'll go over it a number of times, have someone else look it over and give me suggestions, come back to it, really work it over. And then there's copy-editing and proofreading. And if I do an essay, that could take a while.
10. Second: taking for granted that good writing is good writing, and what appears online is just as capable of being excellent as what is published, is there nevertheless (at least these days) still a strong argument for publishing a literary journal like The Quarterly Conversation in print? That is, would it not raise the magazine's profile even more if you could do this? Or is this asking too much? Given the obligations lit-bloggers already have, is it unrealistic to ask someone who reviews and lit-blogs to also print his or her journal -- particularly given the price of printing costs and headaches involved with distribution?
I think there's an argument for The Quarterly Conversation being in print. Besides the idea of getting the word out, there's the fact that lit journals are often very nicely designed with quality interior art—just something very pleasing to hold in your hand—and you just can't do that on the web. Another reason—the Internet being great as it is, I think it still feels much better to be in print. I certainly prefer to be published in print than online, and I think most of my contributors do as well.
However, that's not to say that we should do TQC in print immediately. If this is going to be in print, it should be worth printing—worth the expense and effort of making a nice piece of work, worth the $10 or so that we're going to ask someone to pay for it. I mean, look back at Issue 1 of TQC—I'm proud of it for what I was capable of at that point, but I would say that Issue 1 was far from being anything someone would want to print, bind, and purchase. Now I'm on Issue 8, and the end product is undeniably much better. You could say that publishing on the web has been a good way to try out things and make mistakes—to learn how to be a journal editor—without having the burden of 1,000 copies of a journal sitting in my basement.
And I don't think it's an unreasonable request. Sure, I'm busy—everyone I know is busy, by the way—but, you know, there's something to be said for responsibility and not hiding behind "I've got a lot to do." But I should also point out that I'm not the only one putting major time on TQC. Over the past year I've brought on a couple of contributing editors without whom I just couldn't put out TQC in its current form, and if we ever did do a print issue, I'm sure I'd have to find more people to be indebted to.
11.Finally, major media such as The New York Times occasionally mention lit-blogs, but they tend to do this in a very selective -- some might say, arbitrary -- way. This leads to a kind of hierarchy: i.e., you're either one of the lucky ones who gets a Motoko Rich link or you're not.
Given the power that major media still have to "make" someone, what is the lesson for serious lit-bloggers? Should they be trying to max out the number of hits they get? Should they be networking with arts journalists at major media? Or should they form their own media networks, and not worry about whom the Times will bless with its magic wand?
Well, first off, it is arbitrary, and moreover, bloggers keep saying how little newspapers understand about blogs, so I really don't think bloggers should care that much if they happen to be mentioned. I mean, yes, it's a nice little surprise when it happens to you, but I think that's about as far as it should go—if this is giving you a lasting ego boost, then you should probably examine your life.
I'm not so sure about the Times's king-making power, though. I've been linked by them and other major media—you get increased traffic for a day or two, but then everyone forgets and it goes back to normal.
About whose ass to kiss: The Times has discussed and linked to litblogs maybe once or twice in the past two years, so I don't think networking with its journalists is going to do anyone much good until they start discussing us on a regular basis, which I doubt will happen. The most click-throughs I've ever gotten by far was when Andrew Sullivan linked to me (when the Times linked to me I didn't get nearly as many). I think the lesson is clear—when people who are primarily newspaper readers read an article about blogs, a very small percentage of them will click over to you because most of the people reading the article don't know or care about reading a blog. But, when you're mentioned on a major blog, the click-through rate is going to be much, much higher, because the people reading that are ones that are the most familiar with blogs; they're used to clicking-through. So, I guess if you cared about maximizing your hits, go kiss the asses of major bloggers. Alternately, I think if you show a genuine interest in authors' work, participate in the community, and are putting up worthwhile information that people can't get anywhere else, then you will generate traffic.
But, who really cares? Say you get 2,000 hits per day. That's not bad. I mean, it's minuscule when you think of the millions of people online, but it's still a packed auditorium coming to hear you every day. That's cool. Most lit journals do what, 1,000-2,000 copies per issue, and people die to be in them. And also, think about who is reading your blog—I've been very surprised to find out who reads my blog. Hits aren't everything.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Roundup
Ward Six on predictability in publisher choices. (Note in particular 5 Red Pandas' comment). [via Condalmo.]
Alex Good on writers and their work, writers and work.
World War II ends!: archives of Nazi documents opened to Holocaust researchers. [More on the issue of excessive archival secrecy later.]
Alex Good on writers and their work, writers and work.
World War II ends!: archives of Nazi documents opened to Holocaust researchers. [More on the issue of excessive archival secrecy later.]
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Ian Brown -- author, arts journalist (The View From Here, Talking Books, the Globe and Mail)
Ian Brown -- writer, arts journalist (The Globe and Mail), and broadcaster (moderator of CBC radio's Talking Books, and host of TVO's Human Edge and The View From Here):
Note: This interview originally appeared Mar. 11, '07.
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
I don't think literature is in trouble. It may be taking new and mutant forms, but literature itself--written work whose value lies in the beauty of its language and its emotional effect--is more robust than ever. In fact, I would say we are living in the Second Renaissance that way. Of course, I include the writing in a TV show such as Rescue Me as literature, so my definition may be wider than most. But for all the crap we see--all the Oprah fare and over-promoted soap such as Clair Messud's last novel along with the more obvious dreck, such as Mitch Albom's books--there seems to be more good stuff around, pound for pound, than ever--whether it is in the form of blogs, The Believer Magazine, writerly nonfiction (tons of examples), script-writing, TV, graphic novels, or even the odd traditional novel.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the novel be considered the prime example of it?
See definition above, hence my belief that the novel is no longer the prime example of literature. Nor does it need to be. Too much attention can ossify a genre. If anything is in trouble, it's literary fiction--but again, only because there are so many alternative ways to consume good writing these days. The book itself is a fantastic technology, but literary fiction has some serious competition for my attention. For a long time, literary fiction--the short story and the novel--had valuable territory all to itself: that is, the emotional interior of a character's life. No other way of telling a story was as good at describing that interior as literary fiction--poetry came close, drama had its days, but the novel was King Consciousness. And maybe things got a little too comfortable. Because for reasons that are still unclear to me--maybe because literature took that dank detour through the arid fields of literary theory, as Phil Marchand suggested on this site a while ago--the actual story-telling skills of many so-called "literary novels" seemed to atrophy. Meanwhile everyone else--videographers, bloggers, the graphic folk, even journalists and critics--have been working like hell to develop new and more dashing ways of telling stories, technically. And it shows, at least by the measure of how much energy each of these story-telling forms is throwing off these days. And that's not to say that novelists can't also throw off energy if they want to--Jonathan Safran Foer is a good example of a guy who figured out how to tell his story not just one way, but in fifty ways.
3 . Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
I think prizes are largely artificial, and possibly dangerous, although I'm not sure that's the fault of the prize, per se, so much as it is our own susceptibility to awards, as consumers of books. (The only thing responsible for one's losing one's ability to think "in a critically complex fashion" is an insufficient diet of critically complex thinking--and whose fault is that?) I've had the nightmarish pleasure of sitting on writing prize juries, and I can't think of a single case where we ended up picking what I or anyone else thought was the best piece of writing. For starters you have to compromise with the picks of the other judges, who suddenly turn out to have zero literary taste despite their excellent taste in shoes or mini-skirts.
Then the weird stuff starts happening--such as when someone says well, we need to have a women in the mix of finalists, or a Westerner. That sort of thing actually happens. To pretend that a book so chosen is "better" than another is absurd. I also think prizes tend to further commodify the business of publishing--they convey false value to ideas and writing, while undermining their real value, which is as ideas and writing in and of themselves. On the other hand, prizes--the Giller is a good example--lend much-needed glamour and pride to the literary community, which is undervalued in general. They may also attract readers to books in general, which is always a good thing. For the mind, I mean.
4. The publishing industry has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?
Real art is going to surface, no matter what--no matter how much agents and publishers and even readers conspire against it. For every publishing company that buys exit sales data from Barnes and Noble or Indigo to determine next fall's list, there are others that publish only what they want to read and publish. I admit it drives me crazy that a book like Tuesdays With Morrie--one of the shallowest, most craven books ever published--does so well while the short stories of, say, Sergei Dovlatov fail to sell. But again, that's not really the publishing industry's fault--it's our fault, the fault of readers. We keep choosing to read (or watch or listen to) shit, and then we wonder why modern life feels so empty. And personally, I have never had the experience of an editor or an agent saying, hey, Ian, make this more commercial. They seem to go instead for the most heartfelt ideas I can dream up, however unusual.
5. As well, should the Canadian cultural nationalism of the 1970s make a comeback? Do we need a "National Culture Policy" that will put more Canadian books front and center in bookstores?
Yes, we need a national culture policy, if only to compensate for our paltry numbers here in Canada. There are just too many American readers and too many American writers and too many American books, for starters, and the sheer force and size of their numbers would overwhelm Canadian writing and publishing without some help from our federal government. That policy helped make Canadian fiction an international success. Character may be destiny, but geography is a large part of character.
6. Many major houses refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?
My experience as an editor suggests the opposite--that talent and good writing are in fact in permanent short supply, especially in a country that has only 32 million people. No one good is being ignored. I mean, I've read slush piles; you're lucky to find one salvageable piece in a hundred. I don't know where we get this idea that there are thousands and thousands of brilliant writers out there waiting to be read, but for the narrow greedy tastes of publishers. It isn't true. And look at some of the dreck that gets published anyway! And I mean in so-called "literary magazines" and by so called "literary presses," not just on self-published blogs. This so-called quality literary stuff lands on my desk at Talking Books all the time, and I can tell you a lot of it is terrifyingly bad. It can make your eyeballs spin out of your head at fifty paces. I sometimes think that publishers resort to formula so often not because it sells--it often doesn't, as it turns out--but because they have nothing else to publish, because good writing and inspired story-telling are in such short supply. It's a talent. It's rare.
7. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?
I don't know. I haven't found that to be the case. Winning an audience--to say nothing of keeping an audience--is very hard in any event, in any medium, even if you are published by a so-called "big" house. I suspect the roadblocks that do exist are most often erected by the chain bookstores, which do tend to stock only what they can turn over, and tend--this is what I hear from publishers, anyway--to be driven by a less literary, more bean-headed mentality. And then there are those scummy marketing ploys, such as the tables at a well-known chain marked "Great Books for Women" and "Great Books for Gardeners" and "Great Books for Airheads" and--oh, wait, sorry, that last one isn't one of them, I'm just imagining that. Still, getting a book on one of those tables costs money: the publisher has to pay for display. A small publisher likely can't afford that on his or her own. Yet another reason to support your local independent bookseller, if you ask me.
8. Does Canada have too many publishers? Or too few?
You can never have too many publishers.
9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?
I'm not sure new technologies will affect the form of the book, except perhaps to make it more various. I mean, hypertext is interesting: it could replace the footnote, except that it's less convenient than footnotes, provided the footnotes are at the foot of the page, and not at the back, which is a dumb idea, in my humble O. Audio books seem like they ought to be a growing business, but I don't have any data to support that, and my agent once told me there isn't much money in them; I'm basing my contention solely on the number of middle-aged people I know who now own iPods and who now listen to audiobooks while they're on a plane, avoiding the crap movie and the nuked food. But then, they're just as likely to be watching their own movie or listening to a Ricky Gervais podcast of Carl Pocklington's apercus, aren't they? The dedicated e-book is a loser, I think, at least at this point--it's just too hard to read for long off a screen, and too cumbersome. For research--yes, of course, online is the present and the future. But plain old books, as a technology, are very hard to beat. They are portable, sturdy, they don't require batteries or recharging, and--most important--they are private and personal and rare in ways that the iPod and the eBook can never be, by definition. Electronic text has a shared feel; physical books feel like they are one's own, a private, personal thing. I realize I sound crazy, but I think that's a very important difference.
10. You have worked across media for several years now: "Man Overboard" was both a book and a TV show. You work in print and broadcast journalism. But there seems to be a particular reticence in Canada to seeing that kind of Renaissance cultural activity as, well, Renaissance.
I'm not sure I agree about the reticence. I think some members of the literary establishment still look down their noses at TV or radio, or at the prospect of dealing with books and literary themes on radio and TV, but those people are rare now, and probably look down their noses at newspapers and the internet too. I also run into the odd academic who gets snotty when one of the rabble dabbles in his or her specialty. The biggest problem in that regard is that these new media are still new: for instance, we still haven't figured out how to talk about books on TV, unless it's a fast-hit, end of year, this-is-what-to-buy kind of thing. TV doesn't lend itself to long abstract conversations the way radio and print do, and long discussions are what you need when you talk about books.
But having said that: as a writer, things have never been better. I mean, I recently wrote a story about culling one's books, and what a grand and impossible endeavor that is. I wrote the piece for the Globe, and it was 5,000 words long--two entire pages of the broadsheet. But since it was published I have had discussions about turning the piece not just into a book, but into a TV story--an actual narrative--as well. And that's a story about tidying up your library.
Why the interest in such an obscure subject? Because--and this may be the real answer to Question 9--there is a huge hunger these days for stories that are not on the official media agenda (and I think most bloggers are now pretty much on the official agenda too). One of the ironic consequences of the information explosion--the internet, cable, the iPod, etc--has been that the same 5 percent of human experience (the news, the daily stuff that gets wired around the world, the daily agenda that everyone talks about, the standard concepts and topics) gets talked about over and over and over again. You know how it works: CNN goes big on O.J., so all the papers have to go big on O.J. too, whereupon NBC and CBC go bigger, whereupon the bloggers jump in too. etc, etc, blah blah blah. A lot of bloggers will claim this doesn't happen in the so-called blogosphere, but it does: blogs, I find, are especially susceptible to picking up the agenda zeitgeist, which only makes most of them sound like everything else. (Talent is as rare in Blogdom as it is anywhere else; unfortunately, editors are even rarer down there.) Anyway, the result of all this me-tooism is that the remaining 95 per cent of human experience is completely untouched, at least by the established media--unless they recognize the fact, which happens very rarely, and make a special place for the unofficial stories and a different kind of reporting/writing and reading, which is how people like me get to do what we do at the Globe, and publish stories about culling. The Globe's a very daring publication in that regard. And then the stories get picked up and re-developed by radio and TV, which are equally hungry for well-told, well-reported, off-agenda stories. I find that very encouraging, as a writer-slash-journalist. Now all we have to work on is the rate of pay.
11. Is Canadian literary culture a little obsessed with what lit-blogger Dan Green once called "print sniffing"? Is there a tendency in our country to fetishize books qua objects, and not pay enough attention to the actual content of what a writer produces over his/her career and over various media?
No, I don't think so. I think of Don McKellar as a great writer (32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, the musical The Drowsy Chaperone, among many other works) but he's better known as an actor. Ditto Susan Coyne, who wrote Slings and Arrows on TV and Kingfisher Days between hardcovers, while also acting. Books are still the gold standard in some circles--because books are where the most serious thinking and writing has been done, traditionally. You can refer back to what is in a book, more easily and more reliably than you can refer to what has been spouted into the ether on TV. It's not for nothing that George Bush prefers to give TV interviews, over print ones--because the stuff he says on TV gets forgotten. Although with YouTube that is now changing. But I don't think Canadians are more fetishistic, book-wise, than anyone else. Books have weight, historically; they deserve a little sniffing, frankly.
12. And if so, will this rather straight-laced tendency of Canadian literary culture lessen its chances of retaining its small market on the world stage in the coming years of great technological change?
No. If anything, the size of our local national market becomes less important with new technology, because you can publish anywhere, in a multiplicity of forms. I admit I'm an optimist in that regard. We just have to take chances, and give good writers the freedom and opportunity (financial and otherwise) to do what they are convinced they have to do. Talent takes care of itself.
13. In the introduction to the essay collection you edited, "What I Meant to Say", you recount a conversation with publisher Patrick Crean. In it, you describe thrashing out identifying the audience for a book of personal essays by men about their personal lives. Finally, you both agree the audience for such a book wouldn't so much be men as women who want to find out about men.
Has this theory been borne out? Or have you found that there are many men, too, who want to read essays like these?
The book is now in its third printing, so something is working. I think we were right to conclude that a male version of Carol Shields's Dropped Threads would not work; that men would run shrieking from a book about men, by men, for men, because very few men would want to be seen reading or buying such a book. It would reek of feelings and weakness and insecurity and the men's movement, or at least that is what most men would think it would reek of, given what they were used to reading in that genre. Men aren't supposed to have private lives that can be talked about.
But women bought it, because I told the contributors to write their essays for female readers, and all the contributors are very good-story-tellers. And those women in turn seem to give it to men, who then buy it on their own for their pals, and even for their wives and sons and daughters.
It almost feels like a genetic difference. Historically and biologically, men are the ones who form a chain around the fire at night, facing out from their women and children, watching for marauders in the darkness. You don't want to be distracted by feelings at times like that, or when you're hunting, or when you're fighting your enemy. Maybe that's why brain scientists are finding that men have one-track brains--because distraction was costlier to men, who always did the dangerous work of hunting and warring, than it was to multi-track-brained women. Thus men have not developed a vocabulary that allowed them to talk to one another about private matters, or about their private lives. But that's changing quickly: the women's movement blew open all the doors. So guys can now buy this book and read about sex and shopping and convertibles and what it's like to try to be a hero or have secrets, and other aspects of the private male psyche.
Having said that, I should add that after What I Meant to Say came out, I began to think that we ought to have published a book of essays by men, written for women, about women, and how men see them. That would have been of even greater interest to women, I imagine.
14. Yet taking into account that frank discussion of sexual desire is an absolute must in any book about the modern male psyche, how, in your opinion, does a writer balance the fact of carnal need with the ideal of heartfelt sensitivity? (For example, you achieve a nice balance in your own piece on stripping between obligations to family and the Urge to Look.)Generally speaking, how is one to be honest and moving at the same time?
It's a big problem. A lot of women--who buy most of the books--just aren't interested in hearing about the way men behave, especially when guys objectify women--which is something men do a lot. Women especially aren't interested in hearing this stuff if the guy is furious or hates women or is simply venting his pent-up anger.
But I think you can do it, if you write candidly and stylishly, if you tell the story well. A little candour--my decision to write about being watched when I walk with my disabled son, and to compare that objectification to what happens when I watch women in strip clubs, is a case in point--goes a long way in that regard.
And there's a difference between candour and confession, which is a whole other, more complicated genre of writing, and not one I'm drawn to. Confession is passive and weak and assumes an admission of guilt and a desire to apologize. Candour is more confident--such as when Ted Bishop reveals, in his essay in What I Meant to Say, what goes through his mind when a pretty cashier's hand grazes his as she returns his change. And how that relates to the theories of Merleau-Ponty. All of which was interesting and charming and funny and complimentary to women and--most important of all--beautifully written. I told all the contributors that I didn't mind what they said--they could even admit to wanting to be left alone with the March issue of Tits 'n' Hitler--as long as a woman reader didn't heave the book arcross the room, but instead was prompted to think about what they had to say.
And that's the sort of thing you can do if you can tell a story well. It's a bit like that movie, The Aristocrats, about a bunch of comedians telling a truly gross and disgusting joke: after a while, the vile content doesn't matter as much as the wit and originality of the telling. Updike knows that: he is (still!) always going on about women's nether parts, for instance, often in the most objectifying way, but he does it with such an original eye and with such precision and care and energy and attention and careful, graceful writing and story-tellign technique, that women are seduced into reading him anyway. Plus he is always showing them how his male characters see woman, a subject of steady interest to women readers lo these many centuries.
It's one of the great thrills and challenges of writing, I think: you find yourself stuck way out over deep, shark--infested waters, and you can't help but think, oh man, if I fall, I am soooooooo dead! And then you manage to get across the gap anyway, because you figured out how to keep people reading.
Bio: Ian Brown is a roving feature writer for the Globe and Mail. His stories mostly appear in the Focus section of the Saturday edition of the paper. He is also the host of Talking Books, a radio show that can be heard on CBC Radio 1 at 4:30 p.m. every Saturday; and the host of Human Edge and The View From Here, two documentary film series on TVOntario. He is the author of two books, FreeWheeling and Man Overboard (published as Man Medium Rare in the United States) and was the editor of What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Johanna Schneller, and their two children.
Note: This interview originally appeared Mar. 11, '07.
1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?
I don't think literature is in trouble. It may be taking new and mutant forms, but literature itself--written work whose value lies in the beauty of its language and its emotional effect--is more robust than ever. In fact, I would say we are living in the Second Renaissance that way. Of course, I include the writing in a TV show such as Rescue Me as literature, so my definition may be wider than most. But for all the crap we see--all the Oprah fare and over-promoted soap such as Clair Messud's last novel along with the more obvious dreck, such as Mitch Albom's books--there seems to be more good stuff around, pound for pound, than ever--whether it is in the form of blogs, The Believer Magazine, writerly nonfiction (tons of examples), script-writing, TV, graphic novels, or even the odd traditional novel.
2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the novel be considered the prime example of it?
See definition above, hence my belief that the novel is no longer the prime example of literature. Nor does it need to be. Too much attention can ossify a genre. If anything is in trouble, it's literary fiction--but again, only because there are so many alternative ways to consume good writing these days. The book itself is a fantastic technology, but literary fiction has some serious competition for my attention. For a long time, literary fiction--the short story and the novel--had valuable territory all to itself: that is, the emotional interior of a character's life. No other way of telling a story was as good at describing that interior as literary fiction--poetry came close, drama had its days, but the novel was King Consciousness. And maybe things got a little too comfortable. Because for reasons that are still unclear to me--maybe because literature took that dank detour through the arid fields of literary theory, as Phil Marchand suggested on this site a while ago--the actual story-telling skills of many so-called "literary novels" seemed to atrophy. Meanwhile everyone else--videographers, bloggers, the graphic folk, even journalists and critics--have been working like hell to develop new and more dashing ways of telling stories, technically. And it shows, at least by the measure of how much energy each of these story-telling forms is throwing off these days. And that's not to say that novelists can't also throw off energy if they want to--Jonathan Safran Foer is a good example of a guy who figured out how to tell his story not just one way, but in fifty ways.
3 . Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.
Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?
I think prizes are largely artificial, and possibly dangerous, although I'm not sure that's the fault of the prize, per se, so much as it is our own susceptibility to awards, as consumers of books. (The only thing responsible for one's losing one's ability to think "in a critically complex fashion" is an insufficient diet of critically complex thinking--and whose fault is that?) I've had the nightmarish pleasure of sitting on writing prize juries, and I can't think of a single case where we ended up picking what I or anyone else thought was the best piece of writing. For starters you have to compromise with the picks of the other judges, who suddenly turn out to have zero literary taste despite their excellent taste in shoes or mini-skirts.
Then the weird stuff starts happening--such as when someone says well, we need to have a women in the mix of finalists, or a Westerner. That sort of thing actually happens. To pretend that a book so chosen is "better" than another is absurd. I also think prizes tend to further commodify the business of publishing--they convey false value to ideas and writing, while undermining their real value, which is as ideas and writing in and of themselves. On the other hand, prizes--the Giller is a good example--lend much-needed glamour and pride to the literary community, which is undervalued in general. They may also attract readers to books in general, which is always a good thing. For the mind, I mean.
4. The publishing industry has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?
Real art is going to surface, no matter what--no matter how much agents and publishers and even readers conspire against it. For every publishing company that buys exit sales data from Barnes and Noble or Indigo to determine next fall's list, there are others that publish only what they want to read and publish. I admit it drives me crazy that a book like Tuesdays With Morrie--one of the shallowest, most craven books ever published--does so well while the short stories of, say, Sergei Dovlatov fail to sell. But again, that's not really the publishing industry's fault--it's our fault, the fault of readers. We keep choosing to read (or watch or listen to) shit, and then we wonder why modern life feels so empty. And personally, I have never had the experience of an editor or an agent saying, hey, Ian, make this more commercial. They seem to go instead for the most heartfelt ideas I can dream up, however unusual.
5. As well, should the Canadian cultural nationalism of the 1970s make a comeback? Do we need a "National Culture Policy" that will put more Canadian books front and center in bookstores?
Yes, we need a national culture policy, if only to compensate for our paltry numbers here in Canada. There are just too many American readers and too many American writers and too many American books, for starters, and the sheer force and size of their numbers would overwhelm Canadian writing and publishing without some help from our federal government. That policy helped make Canadian fiction an international success. Character may be destiny, but geography is a large part of character.
6. Many major houses refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?
My experience as an editor suggests the opposite--that talent and good writing are in fact in permanent short supply, especially in a country that has only 32 million people. No one good is being ignored. I mean, I've read slush piles; you're lucky to find one salvageable piece in a hundred. I don't know where we get this idea that there are thousands and thousands of brilliant writers out there waiting to be read, but for the narrow greedy tastes of publishers. It isn't true. And look at some of the dreck that gets published anyway! And I mean in so-called "literary magazines" and by so called "literary presses," not just on self-published blogs. This so-called quality literary stuff lands on my desk at Talking Books all the time, and I can tell you a lot of it is terrifyingly bad. It can make your eyeballs spin out of your head at fifty paces. I sometimes think that publishers resort to formula so often not because it sells--it often doesn't, as it turns out--but because they have nothing else to publish, because good writing and inspired story-telling are in such short supply. It's a talent. It's rare.
7. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?
I don't know. I haven't found that to be the case. Winning an audience--to say nothing of keeping an audience--is very hard in any event, in any medium, even if you are published by a so-called "big" house. I suspect the roadblocks that do exist are most often erected by the chain bookstores, which do tend to stock only what they can turn over, and tend--this is what I hear from publishers, anyway--to be driven by a less literary, more bean-headed mentality. And then there are those scummy marketing ploys, such as the tables at a well-known chain marked "Great Books for Women" and "Great Books for Gardeners" and "Great Books for Airheads" and--oh, wait, sorry, that last one isn't one of them, I'm just imagining that. Still, getting a book on one of those tables costs money: the publisher has to pay for display. A small publisher likely can't afford that on his or her own. Yet another reason to support your local independent bookseller, if you ask me.
8. Does Canada have too many publishers? Or too few?
You can never have too many publishers.
9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?
I'm not sure new technologies will affect the form of the book, except perhaps to make it more various. I mean, hypertext is interesting: it could replace the footnote, except that it's less convenient than footnotes, provided the footnotes are at the foot of the page, and not at the back, which is a dumb idea, in my humble O. Audio books seem like they ought to be a growing business, but I don't have any data to support that, and my agent once told me there isn't much money in them; I'm basing my contention solely on the number of middle-aged people I know who now own iPods and who now listen to audiobooks while they're on a plane, avoiding the crap movie and the nuked food. But then, they're just as likely to be watching their own movie or listening to a Ricky Gervais podcast of Carl Pocklington's apercus, aren't they? The dedicated e-book is a loser, I think, at least at this point--it's just too hard to read for long off a screen, and too cumbersome. For research--yes, of course, online is the present and the future. But plain old books, as a technology, are very hard to beat. They are portable, sturdy, they don't require batteries or recharging, and--most important--they are private and personal and rare in ways that the iPod and the eBook can never be, by definition. Electronic text has a shared feel; physical books feel like they are one's own, a private, personal thing. I realize I sound crazy, but I think that's a very important difference.
10. You have worked across media for several years now: "Man Overboard" was both a book and a TV show. You work in print and broadcast journalism. But there seems to be a particular reticence in Canada to seeing that kind of Renaissance cultural activity as, well, Renaissance.
I'm not sure I agree about the reticence. I think some members of the literary establishment still look down their noses at TV or radio, or at the prospect of dealing with books and literary themes on radio and TV, but those people are rare now, and probably look down their noses at newspapers and the internet too. I also run into the odd academic who gets snotty when one of the rabble dabbles in his or her specialty. The biggest problem in that regard is that these new media are still new: for instance, we still haven't figured out how to talk about books on TV, unless it's a fast-hit, end of year, this-is-what-to-buy kind of thing. TV doesn't lend itself to long abstract conversations the way radio and print do, and long discussions are what you need when you talk about books.
But having said that: as a writer, things have never been better. I mean, I recently wrote a story about culling one's books, and what a grand and impossible endeavor that is. I wrote the piece for the Globe, and it was 5,000 words long--two entire pages of the broadsheet. But since it was published I have had discussions about turning the piece not just into a book, but into a TV story--an actual narrative--as well. And that's a story about tidying up your library.
Why the interest in such an obscure subject? Because--and this may be the real answer to Question 9--there is a huge hunger these days for stories that are not on the official media agenda (and I think most bloggers are now pretty much on the official agenda too). One of the ironic consequences of the information explosion--the internet, cable, the iPod, etc--has been that the same 5 percent of human experience (the news, the daily stuff that gets wired around the world, the daily agenda that everyone talks about, the standard concepts and topics) gets talked about over and over and over again. You know how it works: CNN goes big on O.J., so all the papers have to go big on O.J. too, whereupon NBC and CBC go bigger, whereupon the bloggers jump in too. etc, etc, blah blah blah. A lot of bloggers will claim this doesn't happen in the so-called blogosphere, but it does: blogs, I find, are especially susceptible to picking up the agenda zeitgeist, which only makes most of them sound like everything else. (Talent is as rare in Blogdom as it is anywhere else; unfortunately, editors are even rarer down there.) Anyway, the result of all this me-tooism is that the remaining 95 per cent of human experience is completely untouched, at least by the established media--unless they recognize the fact, which happens very rarely, and make a special place for the unofficial stories and a different kind of reporting/writing and reading, which is how people like me get to do what we do at the Globe, and publish stories about culling. The Globe's a very daring publication in that regard. And then the stories get picked up and re-developed by radio and TV, which are equally hungry for well-told, well-reported, off-agenda stories. I find that very encouraging, as a writer-slash-journalist. Now all we have to work on is the rate of pay.
11. Is Canadian literary culture a little obsessed with what lit-blogger Dan Green once called "print sniffing"? Is there a tendency in our country to fetishize books qua objects, and not pay enough attention to the actual content of what a writer produces over his/her career and over various media?
No, I don't think so. I think of Don McKellar as a great writer (32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, the musical The Drowsy Chaperone, among many other works) but he's better known as an actor. Ditto Susan Coyne, who wrote Slings and Arrows on TV and Kingfisher Days between hardcovers, while also acting. Books are still the gold standard in some circles--because books are where the most serious thinking and writing has been done, traditionally. You can refer back to what is in a book, more easily and more reliably than you can refer to what has been spouted into the ether on TV. It's not for nothing that George Bush prefers to give TV interviews, over print ones--because the stuff he says on TV gets forgotten. Although with YouTube that is now changing. But I don't think Canadians are more fetishistic, book-wise, than anyone else. Books have weight, historically; they deserve a little sniffing, frankly.
12. And if so, will this rather straight-laced tendency of Canadian literary culture lessen its chances of retaining its small market on the world stage in the coming years of great technological change?
No. If anything, the size of our local national market becomes less important with new technology, because you can publish anywhere, in a multiplicity of forms. I admit I'm an optimist in that regard. We just have to take chances, and give good writers the freedom and opportunity (financial and otherwise) to do what they are convinced they have to do. Talent takes care of itself.
13. In the introduction to the essay collection you edited, "What I Meant to Say", you recount a conversation with publisher Patrick Crean. In it, you describe thrashing out identifying the audience for a book of personal essays by men about their personal lives. Finally, you both agree the audience for such a book wouldn't so much be men as women who want to find out about men.
Has this theory been borne out? Or have you found that there are many men, too, who want to read essays like these?
The book is now in its third printing, so something is working. I think we were right to conclude that a male version of Carol Shields's Dropped Threads would not work; that men would run shrieking from a book about men, by men, for men, because very few men would want to be seen reading or buying such a book. It would reek of feelings and weakness and insecurity and the men's movement, or at least that is what most men would think it would reek of, given what they were used to reading in that genre. Men aren't supposed to have private lives that can be talked about.
But women bought it, because I told the contributors to write their essays for female readers, and all the contributors are very good-story-tellers. And those women in turn seem to give it to men, who then buy it on their own for their pals, and even for their wives and sons and daughters.
It almost feels like a genetic difference. Historically and biologically, men are the ones who form a chain around the fire at night, facing out from their women and children, watching for marauders in the darkness. You don't want to be distracted by feelings at times like that, or when you're hunting, or when you're fighting your enemy. Maybe that's why brain scientists are finding that men have one-track brains--because distraction was costlier to men, who always did the dangerous work of hunting and warring, than it was to multi-track-brained women. Thus men have not developed a vocabulary that allowed them to talk to one another about private matters, or about their private lives. But that's changing quickly: the women's movement blew open all the doors. So guys can now buy this book and read about sex and shopping and convertibles and what it's like to try to be a hero or have secrets, and other aspects of the private male psyche.
Having said that, I should add that after What I Meant to Say came out, I began to think that we ought to have published a book of essays by men, written for women, about women, and how men see them. That would have been of even greater interest to women, I imagine.
14. Yet taking into account that frank discussion of sexual desire is an absolute must in any book about the modern male psyche, how, in your opinion, does a writer balance the fact of carnal need with the ideal of heartfelt sensitivity? (For example, you achieve a nice balance in your own piece on stripping between obligations to family and the Urge to Look.)Generally speaking, how is one to be honest and moving at the same time?
It's a big problem. A lot of women--who buy most of the books--just aren't interested in hearing about the way men behave, especially when guys objectify women--which is something men do a lot. Women especially aren't interested in hearing this stuff if the guy is furious or hates women or is simply venting his pent-up anger.
But I think you can do it, if you write candidly and stylishly, if you tell the story well. A little candour--my decision to write about being watched when I walk with my disabled son, and to compare that objectification to what happens when I watch women in strip clubs, is a case in point--goes a long way in that regard.
And there's a difference between candour and confession, which is a whole other, more complicated genre of writing, and not one I'm drawn to. Confession is passive and weak and assumes an admission of guilt and a desire to apologize. Candour is more confident--such as when Ted Bishop reveals, in his essay in What I Meant to Say, what goes through his mind when a pretty cashier's hand grazes his as she returns his change. And how that relates to the theories of Merleau-Ponty. All of which was interesting and charming and funny and complimentary to women and--most important of all--beautifully written. I told all the contributors that I didn't mind what they said--they could even admit to wanting to be left alone with the March issue of Tits 'n' Hitler--as long as a woman reader didn't heave the book arcross the room, but instead was prompted to think about what they had to say.
And that's the sort of thing you can do if you can tell a story well. It's a bit like that movie, The Aristocrats, about a bunch of comedians telling a truly gross and disgusting joke: after a while, the vile content doesn't matter as much as the wit and originality of the telling. Updike knows that: he is (still!) always going on about women's nether parts, for instance, often in the most objectifying way, but he does it with such an original eye and with such precision and care and energy and attention and careful, graceful writing and story-tellign technique, that women are seduced into reading him anyway. Plus he is always showing them how his male characters see woman, a subject of steady interest to women readers lo these many centuries.
It's one of the great thrills and challenges of writing, I think: you find yourself stuck way out over deep, shark--infested waters, and you can't help but think, oh man, if I fall, I am soooooooo dead! And then you manage to get across the gap anyway, because you figured out how to keep people reading.
Bio: Ian Brown is a roving feature writer for the Globe and Mail. His stories mostly appear in the Focus section of the Saturday edition of the paper. He is also the host of Talking Books, a radio show that can be heard on CBC Radio 1 at 4:30 p.m. every Saturday; and the host of Human Edge and The View From Here, two documentary film series on TVOntario. He is the author of two books, FreeWheeling and Man Overboard (published as Man Medium Rare in the United States) and was the editor of What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Johanna Schneller, and their two children.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Dean Serravalle: "Teachers Who Kill Their Pets"
Dean Serravalle's piece in The Danforth Review, "Teachers Who Kill Their Pets", on the challenges and obligations of contemporary high school English teachers:
I remember walking into our school library one day to see a number of special needs students and the leader of the pack, our librarian, tearing apart old books and filling recycling bins with pages. The books were beginning to "smell," she explained, while some were on the verge of developing "mould." Like books didn’t have enough to worry about in a competitive entertainment sales market, I thought to myself, they were now potential health hazards.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Roundup.
Steven Augustine's new fiction.
Nathan Whitlock on a trip to the park.
Ted Pelton on breathing, line breaks and genre categorization.
Lidia Yuknavitch asks "what should fiction do?"
From Black Bile Press, a new edition of Front and Centre
Catheryn Kilgarriff on the hierarchy of literary prizes and the overlooking of literature in translation.
Fred Ramey on the crisis in newspaper book review coverage. (Il faut l'aidez!)
Nathan Whitlock on a trip to the park.
Ted Pelton on breathing, line breaks and genre categorization.
Lidia Yuknavitch asks "what should fiction do?"
From Black Bile Press, a new edition of Front and Centre
Catheryn Kilgarriff on the hierarchy of literary prizes and the overlooking of literature in translation.
Fred Ramey on the crisis in newspaper book review coverage. (Il faut l'aidez!)
Rat Manor -- Truth Marathon excerpt
Recap of my screenplay-novel TRUTH MARATHON: Paul, an English-as-a-Foreign Language instructor who is struggling to survive on low-paying contract work, is caught in the nexus of stress that afflicts all members of 21st Century society -- or at least, those members of it who do not create the nexus.
The particulars of Paul's life at this moment are these: a father with a history of mental illness who is obsessed with conspiracies (especially surrounding Pearl Harbour and the eve of the Korean War), a business-like, meddlesome mother who, though long-divorced from his father, keeps trying to "manage" both Paul's and his father's lives, and a job that seems to be killing him by degrees.
But on the day this scene opens, things have apparently gone well: his father has gotten a rent-controlled apartment that's a considerable improvement on the shared house he'd lived in previously. (Paul even feels a hint of envy toward his father; the dump of a house his father is leaving is, arguably, better than the one Paul resides in.)
Paul is in good humour. He feels, for once, that life isn't a endless series of complications and let-downs. It's a sensation he's able to relish for a good half hour or so.
---------------------------------------------
INT. PAUL’S SHARED HOUSE. THAT EVENING.
Paul has just arrived home. He lifts his bike onto his shoulder and walks up the wooden porch steps (careful to avoid the one that has rotted). Then he locks his bike to the porch railing. But after a moment, thinking better of this, he takes the bike inside and leaves it in the hall.
He walks quickly upstairs, still happy and energetic.
His shared house actually is more of a shared apartment: it comprises the second and third stories of a narrow row-house situated on a busy street. He and three roommates occupy the upper floors. His landlord lives downstairs.
Paul and his roommates have a shared kitchen and bathroom. It, like the house, is narrow and cramped. But Paul seems at home here.
He takes off the backpack he’s been wearing and takes out some food: whole grain bread, shrink-wrapped chicken legs, some apples, celery, and a bottle of flax seed oil.
He fills a pot with water and sets it on the stove, which he turns to high. Then he opens the fridge and pulls out some potatoes. He washes and peels them, puts them in the water, and turns on the oven and begins washing and seasoning the chicken legs.
SFX: door slamming downstairs.
Paul continues cooking.
SFX: Footsteps ascending – slowly, tiredly.
A young man around Paul’s age enters. He is East Indian. He has a slim build, quiet manner, and strikingly handsome face: a hawklike nose, strong chin, and high cheekbones.
YOUNG MAN: Hey, Paul.
PAUL: [not really turning] Oh hey, Ramish.
RAMISH: What’s up?
PAUL: Nothing.
RAMISH: [looking over Paul’s shoulder] Mmm. Chicken legs. Looks good.
PAUL: Yep. Cheap ‘n’ delicious.
Beat.
RAMISH: Did Rudy tell you about the rat?
PAUL: What rat?
RAMISH: The rat that was in the kitchen yesterday.
PAUL: Uh, no. He seems to have forgotten to mention it.
RAMISH: Yeah, well I got home last night and when I was coming up the stairs I heard this weird sound. Like paper being scrunched or something. It was pretty loud. I thought it was you. But then, when I walk into the kitchen, right on the shelf, right by Denise’s stuff, was this – rat.
Paul turns to look at Ramish squarely.
PAUL: You can’t be serious.
RAMISH: I am! A big honkin’ rat! It wasn’t like the mice we had last winter. It looked like a … cat. A small, evil cat, with a rat’s head and rat’s tail and little scratchy rat’s feet.
PAUL: [looking at his food, clearly losing his appetite] Swell. There’s always something.
RAMISH: Rudy says he’ll get an exterminator next weekend.
PAUL: I sure hope so.
RAMISH: I mean, the weekend after this. Says he can get a discount from a friend of his.
Paul doesn’t respond. He simply looks at his chicken. He seems undecided. Then, with an angry gesture, he grabs some cellophane wrap from a cupboard over the sink and wraps his food up.
RAMISH: Whassa matter? It won’t come when we’re here.
PAUL: I’ll stick to potatoes tonight.
INT. PAUL’S ROOM. A LITTLE LATER.
Paul is on the phone.
Intercut, Paul and his mother.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Was the apartment okay?
PAUL: Yeah, it was fine.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: How about the flooring?
PAUL: Parquet.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Cheap parquet?
PAUL: Parquet, mom. Medium range, not-too-shitty parquet. It’s public housing.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Okay, okay. How about the water?
PAUL: Good.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Sounds wonderful, then! I talked to Esther Gomez today – she’s the one I’ve been dealing with – and she says your father can move in next month. Like you said, that’s pretty soon, actually. He’ll have to get cracking on packing. [beat] Maybe you could help him.
PAUL: He’s a grown man. He can do it himself.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: I know, I know! But you know how he is. He loves to disappoint people. I just don’t want any last minute wrinkles.
PAUL: By the way, the super told me something about Dad signing forms. You know about that?
KAREN NORTHFIELD: What forms?
PAUL: I don’t know. Forms. Dad’s gotta sign them to make it all legal. Like a lease, I guess.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: What was the super’s name?
PAUL: [reaching for wallet] Just a sec. I’ve got his card here.
[fade]
INT. PAUL’S ROOM. THAT EVENING. LATER, ROUGHLY TEN-FIFTEEN.
Paul is in his room. He is sitting upright on his bed and sipping a beer while watching the news on an antique black-and-white TV.
SFX: A strange sound from far away, similar to paper being crumpled.
Paul, hearing this, sits up.
SFX: More noise.
Paul gets gingerly off his bed. He takes a final swig from his beer, then turns the bottle around in his hand so he can hold it like a weapon. Thinking better of this, he puts the beer down and opens a tool box in his closet. He pulls out a hammer.
Slowly, cautiously, Paul makes his way down the hall toward the kitchen holding the hammer menacingly.
[End of excerpt. To see more about Truth Marathon, click here.]
The particulars of Paul's life at this moment are these: a father with a history of mental illness who is obsessed with conspiracies (especially surrounding Pearl Harbour and the eve of the Korean War), a business-like, meddlesome mother who, though long-divorced from his father, keeps trying to "manage" both Paul's and his father's lives, and a job that seems to be killing him by degrees.
But on the day this scene opens, things have apparently gone well: his father has gotten a rent-controlled apartment that's a considerable improvement on the shared house he'd lived in previously. (Paul even feels a hint of envy toward his father; the dump of a house his father is leaving is, arguably, better than the one Paul resides in.)
Paul is in good humour. He feels, for once, that life isn't a endless series of complications and let-downs. It's a sensation he's able to relish for a good half hour or so.
---------------------------------------------
INT. PAUL’S SHARED HOUSE. THAT EVENING.
Paul has just arrived home. He lifts his bike onto his shoulder and walks up the wooden porch steps (careful to avoid the one that has rotted). Then he locks his bike to the porch railing. But after a moment, thinking better of this, he takes the bike inside and leaves it in the hall.
He walks quickly upstairs, still happy and energetic.
His shared house actually is more of a shared apartment: it comprises the second and third stories of a narrow row-house situated on a busy street. He and three roommates occupy the upper floors. His landlord lives downstairs.
Paul and his roommates have a shared kitchen and bathroom. It, like the house, is narrow and cramped. But Paul seems at home here.
He takes off the backpack he’s been wearing and takes out some food: whole grain bread, shrink-wrapped chicken legs, some apples, celery, and a bottle of flax seed oil.
He fills a pot with water and sets it on the stove, which he turns to high. Then he opens the fridge and pulls out some potatoes. He washes and peels them, puts them in the water, and turns on the oven and begins washing and seasoning the chicken legs.
SFX: door slamming downstairs.
Paul continues cooking.
SFX: Footsteps ascending – slowly, tiredly.
A young man around Paul’s age enters. He is East Indian. He has a slim build, quiet manner, and strikingly handsome face: a hawklike nose, strong chin, and high cheekbones.
YOUNG MAN: Hey, Paul.
PAUL: [not really turning] Oh hey, Ramish.
RAMISH: What’s up?
PAUL: Nothing.
RAMISH: [looking over Paul’s shoulder] Mmm. Chicken legs. Looks good.
PAUL: Yep. Cheap ‘n’ delicious.
Beat.
RAMISH: Did Rudy tell you about the rat?
PAUL: What rat?
RAMISH: The rat that was in the kitchen yesterday.
PAUL: Uh, no. He seems to have forgotten to mention it.
RAMISH: Yeah, well I got home last night and when I was coming up the stairs I heard this weird sound. Like paper being scrunched or something. It was pretty loud. I thought it was you. But then, when I walk into the kitchen, right on the shelf, right by Denise’s stuff, was this – rat.
Paul turns to look at Ramish squarely.
PAUL: You can’t be serious.
RAMISH: I am! A big honkin’ rat! It wasn’t like the mice we had last winter. It looked like a … cat. A small, evil cat, with a rat’s head and rat’s tail and little scratchy rat’s feet.
PAUL: [looking at his food, clearly losing his appetite] Swell. There’s always something.
RAMISH: Rudy says he’ll get an exterminator next weekend.
PAUL: I sure hope so.
RAMISH: I mean, the weekend after this. Says he can get a discount from a friend of his.
Paul doesn’t respond. He simply looks at his chicken. He seems undecided. Then, with an angry gesture, he grabs some cellophane wrap from a cupboard over the sink and wraps his food up.
RAMISH: Whassa matter? It won’t come when we’re here.
PAUL: I’ll stick to potatoes tonight.
INT. PAUL’S ROOM. A LITTLE LATER.
Paul is on the phone.
Intercut, Paul and his mother.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Was the apartment okay?
PAUL: Yeah, it was fine.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: How about the flooring?
PAUL: Parquet.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Cheap parquet?
PAUL: Parquet, mom. Medium range, not-too-shitty parquet. It’s public housing.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Okay, okay. How about the water?
PAUL: Good.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: Sounds wonderful, then! I talked to Esther Gomez today – she’s the one I’ve been dealing with – and she says your father can move in next month. Like you said, that’s pretty soon, actually. He’ll have to get cracking on packing. [beat] Maybe you could help him.
PAUL: He’s a grown man. He can do it himself.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: I know, I know! But you know how he is. He loves to disappoint people. I just don’t want any last minute wrinkles.
PAUL: By the way, the super told me something about Dad signing forms. You know about that?
KAREN NORTHFIELD: What forms?
PAUL: I don’t know. Forms. Dad’s gotta sign them to make it all legal. Like a lease, I guess.
KAREN NORTHFIELD: What was the super’s name?
PAUL: [reaching for wallet] Just a sec. I’ve got his card here.
[fade]
INT. PAUL’S ROOM. THAT EVENING. LATER, ROUGHLY TEN-FIFTEEN.
Paul is in his room. He is sitting upright on his bed and sipping a beer while watching the news on an antique black-and-white TV.
SFX: A strange sound from far away, similar to paper being crumpled.
Paul, hearing this, sits up.
SFX: More noise.
Paul gets gingerly off his bed. He takes a final swig from his beer, then turns the bottle around in his hand so he can hold it like a weapon. Thinking better of this, he puts the beer down and opens a tool box in his closet. He pulls out a hammer.
Slowly, cautiously, Paul makes his way down the hall toward the kitchen holding the hammer menacingly.
[End of excerpt. To see more about Truth Marathon, click here.]
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