Friday, May 28, 2010
A Hopeful View on E-Publishing?
Here is an excellent article written by Steven Page, cheif executive of Faber and Faber, posted on the Guardian's BookBlog. I think he has a lot of a great ideas about the kinds of attitudes publishers are going to have to have, and what steps they are going to need to take to adapt and profit in the new e-reading environment. Check it.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Rejection Lite
Here's a list of 50 Iconic Writers Who Were Repeatedly Rejected. Some though, had work rejected on the grounds that it was obscene, which doesn't strike me as real rejection. Don't get me started on real rejection...
Some highlights: Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance was rejected 121 times before being accepted for publication; much of Jorge Luis Borges's work was initially perceived as "unpublishable"; Gertrude Stein submitted poems for 22 years before having one accepted; William Saroyan received 7,000 rejection slips before publishing his first short story; and of course, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter was submitted to 12 publishing houses before it was accepted. The urge to rub their faces in it must be so intense!
Some highlights: Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance was rejected 121 times before being accepted for publication; much of Jorge Luis Borges's work was initially perceived as "unpublishable"; Gertrude Stein submitted poems for 22 years before having one accepted; William Saroyan received 7,000 rejection slips before publishing his first short story; and of course, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter was submitted to 12 publishing houses before it was accepted. The urge to rub their faces in it must be so intense!
Monday, May 17, 2010
Towards a New Novel
In this article on the Guardian's BookBlog, Andrew Gallix uses Alain Robbe-Grillet's defense of the 'New Novel' back in the 60s as a way of discussing David Shields's more recent (though nearly identical) criticism of contemporary novels as "antediluvian texts".
I remember reading an interview with David Shields in the February 2010 issue of Bookslut, in which he discussed his latest work, Reality Hunger. Reality Hunger is, by his own description, a work of appropriation art which consists of an ass-load of quotations that have been organized into "thematized rubrics, otherwise known as chapters; [each of which has] a movement, an argument." He explains that, "What drove the thing from the beginning was that I needed to explain to myself why I don’t write fiction per se anymore, and why with various few exceptions I can’t and don’t read it."
Shields goes on to disparage 'conventional novels'--that is, novels which emphasize narrative over his own much-beloved 'idea'--and issues a call for writers to think beyond the novel's traditional forms and to, in essence, "not be boring". For him, I suspect, that indictment boils down to being formally innovative, but depending on who one’s asking, ‘boring’ can mean a whole lot of different things.
Mr. Gallix too lauds the French proponents of the noveau roman for championing a novel which integrates into its form evolving ideas about human consciousness. Alain Robbe-Grillet claimed that a novel expresses nothing but itself, and that there must be no distinction between a text's content (here: its ideas) and the text itself.
So far I am in perfect agreement.
For Robbe-Grillet, his project was expressing the distance between man/author and the world around him. It was an existential problem, one he chose to address by designing a new prose style that placed the narrator, not as a god interacting with and defining his surroundings, but as a set of eyes that took them in and figured his own position in relation to those objects around him. The ‘New Novel’ is descriptive, exhaustingly so, although in that description one begins to get a sense of the narrator's place in his environment, and also of his narrative circumstance therein.
As an idea, I find this approach interesting, invigorating... despite the fact that I have never been able to get through a single one of Robbe-Grillet's 'experiments'. His contemporaries must have had similar issues with the texts’ readability, and thereby prompted Robbe-Grillet to publish a series of essays defending his project, which were later on collected into a single volume, titled Towards a New Novel. Shields too, in his interviews and public statements, seems to be similarly chaffed by audiences' inability to grasp 'what he is doing' (although this strikes me as ironic, considering his own claim that he "didn't think at all about the reader when writing this book". Robbe-Grillet too, though he believed a work and its ideas should be bound up into one thing, evidently had no problem speaking about his work in other contexts).
Reality Hunger, despite its audacious form, Shields describes as his most personal book, having taken him several years to write, and expressing thoughts which he'd been "living with" for thirty years, "and quite passionately for at least the past fifteen." That is fine. It sounds to me like writing the book represents a profound and significant act of honesty on his part, which is what, in the end, art is all about. His existential/ideological assumptions necessitated that book's appearance, as well as its specific form. Though why he should decry contemporary literature's lack of innovation, its idea-lessness, simply because it does not suit his own existential assumptions, remains to me unclear. It is great that past writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, and present ones like David Shields, are struggling with the novel's form in light of their own unique position in space. Most honest writers, in their own way, do. But to me, when I hear people tell me that "No one should be writing this way," or that realism is an outdated mode, or that some particular style fails to address man's modern condition, my response is: "Who's modern condition are you talking about?"
Really, these kinds of criticisms sound to me like bitter authors trying to justify their own unique vantage, condemning others' shallowness for not being able to see what they alone are in a position to see. Some people’s issues lead them to question textual form, others’ do not. Some little piggies like roast beef, other little piggies have none. I simply cannot take seriously the idea that readers should be faulted for continuing to find significance of 'traditional' narratives. I, for one, have yet to accept that the stories we tell ourselves are without meaning, that the experiences and characters we encounter in 'traditional’ fictions are insignificant, either to ourselves or to society. It seems to me that the novel's great characteristic is that it can be so many different things, and that to any given person it can be (and is) something entirely different. Why hound a person for writing like Chekhov, if writing like Chekhov is what interests him; if Chekhov's is the most appropriate voice for whatever is inside of him, dying find expression? That is what art is about; not 'moving the novel forward', as if it won't move forward on its own, or as if it were bound to move only in one direction. Art is about honesty, whether you're attempting to connect with others, exploring memories, playing with language, or articulating new ideas and forms, it is silly and base for one artist to tell another how she should occupy herself.
I remember reading an interview with David Shields in the February 2010 issue of Bookslut, in which he discussed his latest work, Reality Hunger. Reality Hunger is, by his own description, a work of appropriation art which consists of an ass-load of quotations that have been organized into "thematized rubrics, otherwise known as chapters; [each of which has] a movement, an argument." He explains that, "What drove the thing from the beginning was that I needed to explain to myself why I don’t write fiction per se anymore, and why with various few exceptions I can’t and don’t read it."
Shields goes on to disparage 'conventional novels'--that is, novels which emphasize narrative over his own much-beloved 'idea'--and issues a call for writers to think beyond the novel's traditional forms and to, in essence, "not be boring". For him, I suspect, that indictment boils down to being formally innovative, but depending on who one’s asking, ‘boring’ can mean a whole lot of different things.
Mr. Gallix too lauds the French proponents of the noveau roman for championing a novel which integrates into its form evolving ideas about human consciousness. Alain Robbe-Grillet claimed that a novel expresses nothing but itself, and that there must be no distinction between a text's content (here: its ideas) and the text itself.
So far I am in perfect agreement.
For Robbe-Grillet, his project was expressing the distance between man/author and the world around him. It was an existential problem, one he chose to address by designing a new prose style that placed the narrator, not as a god interacting with and defining his surroundings, but as a set of eyes that took them in and figured his own position in relation to those objects around him. The ‘New Novel’ is descriptive, exhaustingly so, although in that description one begins to get a sense of the narrator's place in his environment, and also of his narrative circumstance therein.
As an idea, I find this approach interesting, invigorating... despite the fact that I have never been able to get through a single one of Robbe-Grillet's 'experiments'. His contemporaries must have had similar issues with the texts’ readability, and thereby prompted Robbe-Grillet to publish a series of essays defending his project, which were later on collected into a single volume, titled Towards a New Novel. Shields too, in his interviews and public statements, seems to be similarly chaffed by audiences' inability to grasp 'what he is doing' (although this strikes me as ironic, considering his own claim that he "didn't think at all about the reader when writing this book". Robbe-Grillet too, though he believed a work and its ideas should be bound up into one thing, evidently had no problem speaking about his work in other contexts).
Reality Hunger, despite its audacious form, Shields describes as his most personal book, having taken him several years to write, and expressing thoughts which he'd been "living with" for thirty years, "and quite passionately for at least the past fifteen." That is fine. It sounds to me like writing the book represents a profound and significant act of honesty on his part, which is what, in the end, art is all about. His existential/ideological assumptions necessitated that book's appearance, as well as its specific form. Though why he should decry contemporary literature's lack of innovation, its idea-lessness, simply because it does not suit his own existential assumptions, remains to me unclear. It is great that past writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, and present ones like David Shields, are struggling with the novel's form in light of their own unique position in space. Most honest writers, in their own way, do. But to me, when I hear people tell me that "No one should be writing this way," or that realism is an outdated mode, or that some particular style fails to address man's modern condition, my response is: "Who's modern condition are you talking about?"
Really, these kinds of criticisms sound to me like bitter authors trying to justify their own unique vantage, condemning others' shallowness for not being able to see what they alone are in a position to see. Some people’s issues lead them to question textual form, others’ do not. Some little piggies like roast beef, other little piggies have none. I simply cannot take seriously the idea that readers should be faulted for continuing to find significance of 'traditional' narratives. I, for one, have yet to accept that the stories we tell ourselves are without meaning, that the experiences and characters we encounter in 'traditional’ fictions are insignificant, either to ourselves or to society. It seems to me that the novel's great characteristic is that it can be so many different things, and that to any given person it can be (and is) something entirely different. Why hound a person for writing like Chekhov, if writing like Chekhov is what interests him; if Chekhov's is the most appropriate voice for whatever is inside of him, dying find expression? That is what art is about; not 'moving the novel forward', as if it won't move forward on its own, or as if it were bound to move only in one direction. Art is about honesty, whether you're attempting to connect with others, exploring memories, playing with language, or articulating new ideas and forms, it is silly and base for one artist to tell another how she should occupy herself.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Story: Role Play
It started off as a sexual thing. She played nurse and he played patient, she played teacher, he played pupil. She played guy, he played girl... But it became more than that. They had an idea to meet in a bar and pretend that they didn’t know one another; would spend hours, several nights a week, working their way around neon-lit rooms until they found one another, for the first time, again.
At first they made it easy for one another: they joked using inside jokes, allowed themselves to be parodies of what they assumed singles were like (just one word about space pants was enough to woo her in those early days). But they got harder on one another, until there were some nights when they didn’t go home together at all. If one of them was off his/her game, they did the only thing a pair of self-respecting players could do: they went home separately. At the end of the night they climbed into bed together without ceremony, and slept facing opposite walls, though those were just the bad nights. For the most part it was like they were kids again. All they needed was a starting point, a scenario, one far-fetched premise and they were off on an adventure that sometimes lasted entire days.
They would spend the weekdays brainstorming fantasies, writing them down in a journal kept specially for that purpose. Then on the weekends she would hide and he would scour the city for her, following the trail of clues she left and looking in the places he knew to look.
He played hero and she played damsel.
He played chef, she food critic.
She played priest, and he church boy. They confessed to one another, honestly, so that afterwards they could not speak for several days. When they did finally, it was not as themselves, but as Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Wild Bill and Calamity, Odysseus and Calypso.
She played a politician one time, and he wrote to her long naive letters about how they could make the world a better place, which she read and—straddling his lap—dropped quietly into the bin.
He played Adam and she played Eve, though he changed his mind halfway through and decided to be the serpent, then the apple...
Sometimes they had disagreements. For instance, he was fond of moss—entire forests of it; the kind that was thick and dry and reminded one of great terrestrial clouds—and he fantasized about playing the moss on the ground while she, a nymph, walked barefoot across it. She didn’t like that idea. Said she couldn’t “see it”.
Likewise, she was interested in the sub-particle lives of cells. Especially the way chloroplasts transformed light into energy. She dreamed of a scenario in which she would play the light, and he would convert her to sustenance. Although this, he assured her, was not at all practicable.
They spent the entire afternoon one Saturday with him lying very still on the living room carpet, while she stood in the window and allowed the sun’s warmth to seep into her sweater and her skin. After a while she grew tired, and melted into the floor with him, and they reasoned then that even moss required sunlight, though their differences continued.
One time he went around town all weekend, alone, in search of a fire so that he could play the smoke-charred survivor stumbling into the street, and there taste that first clean breath of air. Meanwhile, she deposited herself into one of the drainage ducts at the local dam, to satisfy a strange and inexpressible urge she felt to know what a Champaign cork felt like, just once.
Scene by scene, their various acts began to pull them apart. They would go on benders sometimes, and not see each other for days. They played the people on the street, and trailed after them like wraiths, or like those airy facsimiles you see behind objects in pictures when the shudder speed is turned way down. Sometimes they included strangers in their acts—as lovers occasionally, though not always—and after a while they hardly saw each other at all. When they did, it was by accident, and they would try to ignore one another like you ignore the guy creeping around a party with his camera, who tries to catch everyone in their element but whose stealth always fails him a moment too soon, and all he captures are these vague purgatorial gestures, halfway between natural and pretend. Not quite real, yet not quite imagined.
At first they made it easy for one another: they joked using inside jokes, allowed themselves to be parodies of what they assumed singles were like (just one word about space pants was enough to woo her in those early days). But they got harder on one another, until there were some nights when they didn’t go home together at all. If one of them was off his/her game, they did the only thing a pair of self-respecting players could do: they went home separately. At the end of the night they climbed into bed together without ceremony, and slept facing opposite walls, though those were just the bad nights. For the most part it was like they were kids again. All they needed was a starting point, a scenario, one far-fetched premise and they were off on an adventure that sometimes lasted entire days.
They would spend the weekdays brainstorming fantasies, writing them down in a journal kept specially for that purpose. Then on the weekends she would hide and he would scour the city for her, following the trail of clues she left and looking in the places he knew to look.
He played hero and she played damsel.
He played chef, she food critic.
She played priest, and he church boy. They confessed to one another, honestly, so that afterwards they could not speak for several days. When they did finally, it was not as themselves, but as Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Wild Bill and Calamity, Odysseus and Calypso.
She played a politician one time, and he wrote to her long naive letters about how they could make the world a better place, which she read and—straddling his lap—dropped quietly into the bin.
He played Adam and she played Eve, though he changed his mind halfway through and decided to be the serpent, then the apple...
Sometimes they had disagreements. For instance, he was fond of moss—entire forests of it; the kind that was thick and dry and reminded one of great terrestrial clouds—and he fantasized about playing the moss on the ground while she, a nymph, walked barefoot across it. She didn’t like that idea. Said she couldn’t “see it”.
Likewise, she was interested in the sub-particle lives of cells. Especially the way chloroplasts transformed light into energy. She dreamed of a scenario in which she would play the light, and he would convert her to sustenance. Although this, he assured her, was not at all practicable.
They spent the entire afternoon one Saturday with him lying very still on the living room carpet, while she stood in the window and allowed the sun’s warmth to seep into her sweater and her skin. After a while she grew tired, and melted into the floor with him, and they reasoned then that even moss required sunlight, though their differences continued.
One time he went around town all weekend, alone, in search of a fire so that he could play the smoke-charred survivor stumbling into the street, and there taste that first clean breath of air. Meanwhile, she deposited herself into one of the drainage ducts at the local dam, to satisfy a strange and inexpressible urge she felt to know what a Champaign cork felt like, just once.
Scene by scene, their various acts began to pull them apart. They would go on benders sometimes, and not see each other for days. They played the people on the street, and trailed after them like wraiths, or like those airy facsimiles you see behind objects in pictures when the shudder speed is turned way down. Sometimes they included strangers in their acts—as lovers occasionally, though not always—and after a while they hardly saw each other at all. When they did, it was by accident, and they would try to ignore one another like you ignore the guy creeping around a party with his camera, who tries to catch everyone in their element but whose stealth always fails him a moment too soon, and all he captures are these vague purgatorial gestures, halfway between natural and pretend. Not quite real, yet not quite imagined.
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