26 March 2009
Click here for a story from NPR’s “All Things Considered” about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues in the e-book industry.
The question is whether DRM protects authors and publishers, or if it limits potential audiences. In the music industry, some argue, laxness about DRM is what crippled record companies and kept artists from making money. Others argue that the more widely and easily available an artist’s work, the more likely the word will spread and sales will increase.
Everything topsy turvy, the commerce of books in flux.
23 March 2009
My dear editor Alexis Gargagliano is featured in a “Q&A With Four Young Editors” article in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
On the topic of self-promotion, Alexis says this:
I think there’s a stigma that it’s a negative thing. It’s really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier [in the conversation]. It’s about being really passionate about your book. It’s a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it’s helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it’s about them. It’s actually about the book. It’s about the writing. It’s not about you personally.
Get yourself out of the way, so that the book can have a life, she seems to be saying. Maybe analogous to parents and their budding teenagers. Except in this case, getting out of the way means that the writer must actually get more involved. Wyatt Mason has it right — a weird little business, indeed.
20 March 20009
In approaching a few writers to read the manuscript of Long For This World and possibly provide blurbs, I’ve been surprised by a more-than-once response, which goes something like: I’d be happy to read it, but you should know that I will only blurb it if I absolutely love it.
My first (inner) response is, Well, of course; why would you praise something falsely? Followed by Hmm, I suppose that response implies that it is not uncommon for writers to praise work falsely.
“Falsely” is too strong. The common practice, I believe, is for writers to praise what they love about the work of writers in whom they believe. In other words, the commitment is personal, rather than work-specific.
Wyatt Mason of Harper’s writes this week in his blog about the role of friendship in the making of literary careers. Quoting T.S. Eliot in a letter to the benefactor John Quinn:
I am sorry to say that I have found it uphill and exasperating work trying to impose [James] Joyce on such “intellectual” people, or people whose opinion carries weight as I know, in London. He is far from being accepted, yet. I only know two or three people, besides my wife and myself, who are really carried away by him.
Mason goes on to comment:
Quality is the key to any serious literary endurance, yes, but friendship is underrated as a critical tool. Anyone can write a blurb extolling, adverbially, the “fearlessly brilliant” and “daringly brave” (?) qualities of some someone’s latest something. But not everyone will write and circulate defenses of under-known works and undervalued artists, try to raise cash for the strapped genius, advocate in public and push in private for the virtues of the great but obscure… We forget, now and again, in the careerist whirl of the weird little business that is made of writing, how much altruism there is among those who do this sort of work.
Of course we’d rather believe in a pure meritocracy, but as Mason points out, it’s not so either/or. As in any field of work or path to success, there’s some element of luck/good fortune that comes into it. And the magic of the altruistic personal touch is still alive and well.
My editor and I will hope for some good fortune, but as far as blurbs go, we may just have to do this the old-fashioned way. In the words of the late John Houseman: we’ll have to earn it.
18 March 2009
Denis Johnson is among the most talented writers alive. He is one of those writers whose prose is so good, reading it often makes me want to quit. But in a good way.
Since I’m currently writing a politician-character (Frederick of my novel-in-progress Sebastian & Frederick), I have my eye out for interesting political fiction. Johnson’s character Mike Reed in The Name of the World once worked for a US Senator. Another character asks Reed about the experience:
In D.C. I experienced what I once heard called ‘the temptation to be good.’ It’s a curse. As soon as it hit me I got confused. I still don’t know if, by quitting, I gave in to a bad temptation, or managed to resist a good one… There’s a perfect stillness at the center of Washington…It’s natural to talk about it in paradoxes…Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.
I’m only about halfway through The Name of the World — a slim little book which is my warm-up to Tree of Smoke. But already it has me threatening (to myself) to pack it in.
12 March 2009
I’m stealing this from themillionsblog.com, click here for the originating post.
Click here for my original post on a recent profile of the late David Foster Wallace.
People I trust (men, mostly, though) love both these books. I’ve not read either. One does wonder about the conversation at that marketing meeting, where the Netherland paperback design was decided. Not much of an attempt at all to veil the strategy, it seems to me. Or is this another sausage/laws situation?
7 March 2009
This post will be a bit of a tangent — except insofar as it does have to do with literary commerce and consumption.
I am pretty irked by DT Max’s profile this week of the late David Foster Wallace in The New Yorker. I will try to sum up my response as succinctly as I can, since a) this is a blog, and b) if I rant too much I risk remorse, a la Steven Levy.
The profile is quite long and documents DFWs long struggle with depression and anxiety — both psychological and artistic (if these two can even be distinguished). DT Max shows us how Wallace wrestled with the meaning of existence in a deep way, in a way that made the writing of his final (unfinished) novel a veritable battle for personal hope.
Max gives us a compelling portrait of a man trying to both satisfy and calm his soul via his work (and, as Max describes in detail, via a variety of prescribed medications)… and who, toward the end of his life, hungered more and more for a kind of “adult sanity.” But then he concludes the article — after detailing the last few days of Wallace’s life and his death-by-hanging in his home — with this:
Green [DFW's wife] returned home at nine-thirty, and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages.
Max goes on to deduce that this was DFWs parting “message,” the manuscript was all.
Throughout the article, Max draws us into the pain and anxiety of this talented man struggling with what it meant to be, as Wallace himself put it, a “fucking human being.” But here at the end, he takes us from his wife finding her dead husband hanging, right to “bathed in light… sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages.”
I was first startled, and then truly disgusted, that the writer would turn the article so abruptly, and then end it, with PAGES — bathed in light. As if the pages are the man, as if the pages mean more than the man; which is sophomoric, pseudo-artistic crap. The man lived with a woman, his wife, and they made a life of love together. As an artist and a man, he suffered much distress. Pages bathed in light?
There will likely be much hullabaloo around the publication of said pages next year. I hope we can control ourselves — all this oggling and deifying (and inevitable crass commercializing) of an artist who had a very hard time of it… as many do.
Read the whole article. Tell me what you think.
2 March 2009
From “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” 12/3/08, special guest Arianna Huffington, founder of the popular (liberal) blog The HuffPost:
AH: You know 50,000 blogs are started every day.
JS: You make it sound like a sexually transmitted disease.
AH: Well, no, it’s a lot more fun.
Arianna Huffington has edited a new “complete guide” to blogging. Here’s some of what she has to say about the essence of blogging:
First thoughts, best thoughts. Don’t overthink it… It’s like a first draft.
Blogging is not about perfectionism, it’s about intimacy, immediacy, transparency, and sharing your thoughts the way you would share it with a friend.
AH: I’ll bet you have more thoughts than what you use on the show.
JS: But why should I give people the drek? Shouldn’t I try to focus it and make it as good as I can… my “other thoughts,” there’s a reeeaason I haven’t put them on the show.
I love Jon Stewart.
The literary writer is slow. The literary writer labors over words. Don’t overthink it? Uy yuy yuy. It’s like a first draft?
Anyone who knows Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird knows about the shitty first draft. The shitty first draft is what we accept as “first thoughts,” how we resist letting perfectionism prevent us from getting the ideas down. But the thing about the shitty first draft — the essence of the shitty first draft — is that no one ever sees it. For the literary writer, first thoughts are rarely best thoughts.*
As Arianna Huffington has aptly recognized, the ascendance of the blog represents the ascendance of the immediate. In buying in to this appetite for the now, I hope we don’t end up ultimately dumbing down our readerly expectations, not to mention intellectual capacity. I myself have had a heck of a time getting through The Brothers Karamazov, and I can’t help wondering how much all this instant verbage (both reading it and writing it) is altering my brain.
Any literary writers out there who also blog, your thoughts on this most welcome.
*I never publish first drafts on this blog. I rarely even send first-draft emails.
