Fiction writer Blake Butler has some advice for writers on his blog, essentially advocating a what-goes-around-comes-around attitude:
(1) When you read something you like, in any form, write the author and tell them [...]
(2) Write reviews of books you like [...]
(3) Interview writers [...]
(4) If you have free time, start an online journal [...]
(5) If you have a journal already, respond faster [...]
Lots more where I have ellipses. In other words, promote others, and sooner or later someone will probably promote you. Quoth he:
I am amazed sometimes by people who want to be writers and yet seem to know little to nothing about even the more popular journals, who don't read that actively, who don't buy literary magazines hardly ever but send out their own work constantly, who don't buy even their friends work, who etc etc. Then they want to turn around and call anyone with any stripe of 'success' a 'secret handshake motherfucker' or 'in crowd' or anything like that.
I've definitely seen this/been this: ignorance of the market and contemporaries, paired with bewilderment as to how others are getting published.
I don't think you necessarily need to do any of the above things to succeed as a writer, but among the young, fledgling writers I know (or am), the ones practicing this kind of soft networking are having the most success and seem the most satisfied with their writing life/"career." It's a way to "get your name out there," yes, but in the end, it comes down to community--mutual support and readership and all that. I don't think you need to look at it as smarmy or self-serving or whatever to reach out to writers you like in the above ways. I mean, you should want to do those things anyway, right, even if they didn't tend to provide nice kickback. Unless, what, you just think you're better than everybody? Jerk.
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So we have a new overlord. Who is outsider-y. (August Kleinzahler sneering at the New York literary establishment across the river springs to mind.)
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Kay Ryan, who apparently often finds loved ones pinned under cars, and who is so refined, disciplined, and original that she must inevitably be self-taught. (If I listen hard, I can hear thousands of creative writing teachers wincing together, knowing that their job just got a lot harder.)
John Gallaher has a fairly even-handed summary of the argument for and against here. I confess that I thought she was a Victorian writer before today (never having read her and barely having registered the changing of the guard). Clearly, I am less than a reliable source.
How do we feel about accessibility and apparent modesty? As to her feelings about the great textual watering hole of AWP... well, Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.
By the way, I specifically used the overlord metaphor in the first sentence so I could gratuitously throw in a link to the Zombie Threat Level. Just a little lagniappe for ya.
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... and appropriately enough, I've only been reading periodicals. In addition to the latest issues of Pleiades, Washington Square, Colorado Review and the last few Harper's (someone gave me a gift subscription and because I usually read these cover to cover but they're sort of dense, I keep falling behind), I've been majorly enjoying an old (May 2007) issue of The Believer that I ordered especial for an article by novelist Rivka Galchen (has anyone read her new book, Atmospheric Disturbances? There's a long waiting list at the libe) on the Many Worlds Interpretation, my latest obsession. Obsession.
For all you writer types who might not keep up with the cutting edge of physics like moi, MWI is a kind of metatheory on the implications of quantum mechanics/the wavefunction/Schrodinger's equation. In terms of, you know, reality. (For a primer, check out this excellent FAQ.)
How did Galchen get that gig, I wonder? I would really like to write/edit for either a science or food magazine someday. Maybe those are cliche "sexy" subjects. It seems more appealing than a purely literary job. It's not that I think I can't learn anything more about poetry, but I don't apprehend it as learning in the same saltatory way. Reading outside of my chosen discipline reminds me of the good parts of being in school.
The Believer issue also features solid interviews with Will Sheff of Okkervil River semi-fame and a toy inventor who masterminded colored bubbles. The 'view said they'd "hit the shelves" in Spring '08 -- is that shit on shelves yet or what??
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Oh, how I love Murakami. I know, I know, he can get a little repetitive and the New Yorker has published some pretty crappy stories of his over the years (like the one that was, quite literally, about spaghetti). But the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a completely singular and amazing novel! And the masterpiece of a story collection After the Quake! Such brilliance atones for a multitude of unfortunate spaghetti stories. Whether you love or loath, Murakami, if you have a question for him, now's your chance! Hop on over to this Time Magazine forum to submit your innermost wonderings, as he will be the next subject of their 10 questions feature.
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A little over a week ago, Martin and I were in LA, and while we were there, we went to The Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA to its friends. We happened to catch the tail end of the Lawrence Weiner exhibition: “the first major United States retrospective of the work of [...] one of the key figures associated with the emergence and foundations of conceptual art in the 1960s.” Weiner is apparently famous for his 1968 Declaration of Intent which is as follows: "1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership."
I tend to like art with words in it, and almost all of Weiner's work in this show contained words, so as a result, on the occasion of my receivership, I liked almost all of his work. According to the New York Times review, “The show consists primarily of cryptic yet suggestive phrases in large letters, splayed across walls, ceiling beams and occasionally floors, that conjure up various physical situations but often leave to your imagination the objects or the scale involved. ‘A Turbulence Induced Within a Body of Water’ could be hands splashing in a bathtub or a tanker churning waves behind it. ‘Encased By + Reduced to Rust’ evokes a crumbling object, but it could also be a soul or an artist’s talent. (And there is that twist of “rust” where you expect ‘dust.’)” Something in that description—and in looking at the pieces themselves—reminded me of poems. That said, I don’t think these pieces are poems, although it’s difficult to say why not. Maybe just because they’re in a museum? Maybe because Weiner is called an “artist” and not a “poet”? Can anybody help me out?
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With all of last Thursday’s furor on this blog about whether or not “grad student” is a professionally dismissive term, and whether one literary camp gets to beat up the another camp (about which I will only say that taxonomy tends to serve the critic rather than the text under consideration), perhaps it is instructive to think about accountability. Neal Stephenson has a nimble breakdown of same in this Slashdot interview (scroll down to the second question), where he makes a few salient points:
The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.
Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."
Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters, for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind of accountability at work.
A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.
There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics, musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are performed by symphony orchestras, for example.
Later on, he says lots of great stuff, including a comment that Beowulf was “created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn.”
[Side note: Wikipedia says Frisians are among the blondest people in the world. Notable Frisians: Mata Hari, Lenny Dykstra, and Jane Fonda.]
Stephenson also recounts an illustrative little anecdote where he realizes that the reason why someone at a literary festival had not heard of him was because he was famous. (“Famous” is clearly the wrong word to apply to most literary writers. William Gibson’s “magnificently obscure” [originally used to describe a desirous anonymity on the internet] seems more appropriate.) He uses this as a jumping-off point for a split between Dante writers (literary writers attached to institutions) and Beowulf writers (writers who earn a living solely by sales of their books, usually novels), and the critical firewall that has sprung up between them for the reasons described above.
This split was very quickly articulated for me in my very first undergrad lit class, where someone started off the first session by making fun of Frank Herbert’s Dune. To which I say “Fie upon them.” Full stop.
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In the review section of the new issue of Pleiades, Mark Halliday attempts to tear a new one in Joshua Clover's book The Totality for Kids. Toward the end he wonders, "Will Clover or his admirers respond to my review? Probably not, though they blog constantly. Why should they respond? I'm on the other team (the lyrical and/or narrative mainstreamy team)." Well, I have a response. Halliday has been in Ploughshares (a number of times) but Clover has also graced our pages (in the Jorie Graham issue), so maybe we can say this venue has no clear bias toward one or the other "team." In any case, I certainly have no bias against negative criticism, but Halliday gets himself worked up to the point that it threatens his credibility. Take his close reading of the poem "No More Boffins"--he interprets every line in such a way that it would be a bad poem, if one were dead set on "proving" that to be the case, calling a series of lines "pseudo-thoughts" and bemoaning the lack of "real emotion." He says himself that he is making an "effort to hear" such emotion. But if this poem is driven by thought rather than emotion, wouldn't evidence that the speaker is "seriously unhappy" (as a Wallace Stevens might be) be a pseudo-emotion? Halliday interprets the following lines as "apocalypticism":
Little tasks,
Large problems, philosophers say: Who will do the laundry
Now that history is coming to an end?
It seems clear that Clover is just supplying a witty(ish) illustration of this philosophical idea, not literally subscribing to it. Nor is he "mak[ing] fun of apocalyptic outcries," the other interpretation Halliday allows but says would not "help the poem." The end of history is not equivalent to the end of the world. If Clover is making light of someone it's philosophers, not religious nutjobs. And philosophy and poetry are deeply intertwined, so this jab is partially self-directed. I don't see why Halliday insists on reading the lines as either 100% sincere or 100% ironic.
I don't agree with Halliday's "gentle friends" as he puts it that bad books should be "ignored rather than slammed," but I do prefer my slamming not to come off as willfully obtuse.
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Late last week, the judges for the Frank O'Connor award, doing away with the traditional shortlist announcement, unanimously named Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth the winner of the world's richest prize for a story collection. I haven't read Lahiri's new collection, though I am a fan of her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies, but regardless of whether the book is completely deserving or not, I was a little irked by the judges' decision to eliminate the short list.
The longlist featured some great emerging writers—Benjamin Percy, Nam Le, and Donald Ray Pollock, to name a few—and a refreshing number of small presses, so it was a little disappointing to see the judges leap straight to Lahiri, who, as a Pulitzer winner and best-seller, was the most obvious, and the safest, choice. Also, the judges’ rationale for eliminating the shortlist seems, in part, to miss the point of what a shortlist can accomplish: “With a unanimous winner at this early stage we decided it would be a sham to compose a shortlist and put five other writers through unnecessary stress and suspense," said Pat Cotter, the award's director. True, it does seem unfair to make the shortlist sweat it out if Lahiri already has the prize in the bag, but for a longlist that included so many emerging authors, the judges overlooked the fact that being shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor could give a newer writer a huge boost and, if they were published by an indie or university press, also help raise the visibility of their publisher.
In this particular case, do you think the judges did the right thing?
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In order to set the record straight about how he feels about his hometown, Jack White of the White Stripes and the Raconteurs has published a poem called “Courageous Dream’s Concern” in the Detroit Free Press. The poem (which is not half-bad: “I've slid on Belle Isle,/and rowed inside of it for miles. / Seeing white deer running alongside / While I glide, in a canoe./ I've walked down Caniff holding a glass / Atlas root beer bottle in my hands / And I've entered closets of coney islands / early in the morning too.”) can be read in its entirety here.
But I’m less interested in debating the merits of the poem itself than I am in examining what motivated him to write it. Evidently, according to the Associated Press, White said in a 2006 interview “that he had to leave Detroit [for Nashville] because he ‘couldn’t take the negativity anymore.” And “In other media accounts, he was quoted as lamenting what had become of Detroit’s music community.” In the Free Press piece, “He addressed those comments in his statements to the newspaper, saying: ‘Those expressions of mine have never been a representation of my feelings about Detroit the city, a town that I have strong feelings about ... nor were they expressions about its citizens.’”
It seems like it’s often one thing for a city to be an inspiration to an artist—a good place, perhaps, to be from—and another thing entirely for a city to make that artist feel like s/he has a community in which to belong and feel sustained, supported, and relevant—a good place to be.
So what does it take to make a good scene—for poetry in particular, and literature broadly—in a city? Poets, fiction writers, essayists—what do you consider an ideal place to live, and why? What is your “scene”?
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You know how there’s that scene where Flan talks about Matisse and artistic process in Six Degrees of Separation? (Has there ever been a sillier main character name in an ostensibly serious movie? For literature, I think Neal Stephenson has it locked up with Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash, followed by slew of Thomas Pynchon characters). The one where he talks about how kids could be artistic geniuses with paint, as long as someone knew when to take the painting away from them? (Clearly seen by the makers of My Kid could Paint That.) Well, that sprung to mind when I stumbled across John Gallaher’s post of an original poem (with assist) by his first-grade daughter:
The Snow Falls
by Natalie Gallaher
The cars are talking about snow
in the other room.
We all come down to this moment
with snow.
The snow is talking too.
I wish for snow
inside my head.
The snow looks like shining glazing
of glass.
The trees have no leaves
all afternoon.
I am cold.
The winters are wise
in the future.
I love the first, second, and last stanza especially. Sometimes style isn’t so much content as knowing where to stop. I wonder if this counts as a treatment? Or if the way a child sees the world is a treatment, so to speak, of reality. (Insert interpolation previously discussed here.) Certain things are left out, elided, transposed, or juxtaposed, and therefore stylized enough so as to be unrecognizable. While we’re on the subject, check out Wave Books’s erasures machine. Up with strangely arranged minimalism!
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