On Friday, Slate.com published a fantastic piece by Chad Harbach titled “MFA v. NYC : America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?”
The question he should have asked was “Which one can last?” because the MFA culture he describes clearly exhibits characteristics of the same sort of inadvertant pyramid scheme I have already described in regard to the consumerization of writing.
An assertion we often read on book trade blogs is that the process of selecting a book for representation and publication is subjective. I have to confess that this idea raises major red flags for me, not necessarily as an author, but as writing professional who has worked as both a writer and an editor.
Author Suzannah Windsor Freeman of the Write It Sideways blog comes down on the side of the serial comma, occasionally attributed to Oxford or Harvard for some reason. She quotes Mignon Fogerty (AKA “Grammar Girl”), who points out that the alternative to the serial comma standard is really no standard at all because you still occasionally need it for clarification.
I’m with them. It is much more reasonable to simply have a rule rather than justifying every pre-“and” comma on an ad hoc basis.
And, the argument that you don’t need the serial comma before “and” because the commas are stand-ins for the other “ands” is, to be blunt, ridiculous. Next time you see or hear a series of items, try imagining “and” between each one and see how literate it sounds.
Discussing her twist on Bram Stoker, titled Dracula in Love
Her piece at Publisher’s Weekly, “No Sex, Please, We’re Literary,” got me thinking about the way we categorize literature, and how it holds us back from really understanding — and enjoying — the stuff we read.
After commenting on a post defending MFA programs at Fiction Writers Review, I realized that the issue deserved a blog entry of its own. The post was itself commentary on a Huffington Post story by author Lev Raphael and, after having read the full article, I was more convinced than ever that I needed to write a detailed rebuttal.
I realize the Picoult-NYT hubbub is simmering down, but I would like to share two of what I consider to be the best pieces I’ve read throughout the entire storm.
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Lincoln Michel at The Faster Times picks apart Picoult’s charges of sexism as well as her understanding of literary history.
Jim at Dystel & Goderich also calls into question Picoult’s dedication to literature, and claims she’s picked the wrong battle.
It seems nothing good can ever happen to anyone these days without someone quickly making a demographic calculation and launching allegations of bias. And, even when these allegations themselves clearly have merit, the evidence, arguments, and ideology behind them often do not.
Such is the case of Jodi Picoult‘s poorly substantiated — but likely correct! — assertion that the New York Times treats white male writers with more respect than others.
The thing about accusations of irrational, unfair bias like this: they might be 100 percent accurate, yet the arguments propping them up can still be equally irrational, unfair, and biased.
Today I want to perform a philosophical genealogy, tracing today’s deluge of aspiring authors to the political and theological underpinnings of the Modern age.
Roll with me on this one; I rarely get to use my formal training in comparative religion here, and I promise this isn’t going to be a conversion blog or an Anne Rice-style rant. So, let me state up front that this is more about tracing the path of an idea popular among present-day book enthusiasts than promoting or dismissing any of its religious or political ancestors.
Ah finally! After the weak and weirdly constructed assaults on literature by Lee Siegel and Philip Roth, finally I read a critique of modern publishing I can pass on as insightful rather than insipid.
Anis Shivani skewers the MFA system*, a major player in the “writer as consumer” model that’s turning publishing into a pyramid scheme. But, Shivani’s beef isn’t with the upturning of the business model of publishing, but with the institutional dynamics that select for mediocrity:
The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat–awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism–very desirable in this time of xenophobia–is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed “dangerous,” and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)
The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable. Cloying writers like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Charles D’Ambrosio are held up as models of good writing, because they’re easy enough to copy. And copied they are, in tens of thousands of stories manufactured in workshops.
The rest of the critique, including Shivani’s list of the Top 15 Most Overrated American Writers, is equally scathing, and equally valuable for anyone who wants to understand how the publishing biz is eating itself alive.
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* I was well on my way to the MFA track when I transferred from WVSU to UVA, which would not accept my writing transfers as major credit, forcing me to choose a new major. This happenstance may have scuttled, or hindered, my chances of being published, but in retrospect I am glad to have had years of outward-looking experience in the military and intelligence communities rather than years in a literary Hall of Mirrors.
I first became aware of the slippage of the idea of a mash-up when I found songs on the iTunes store identified as “mash-ups” which were in fact merely remakes or sample-derived songs.
A mash-up is, as its name implies, a work created by blending two or more existing works. It is not a refashioning of a single existing work, nor is it an existing work altered primarily by adding original material to it.
One can forgive musicians for being imprecise with language, but when the publishing community does it the imprecision tells a different story. It speaks of sloppy thinking, sloppy decision making, and sloppy art.
This recent trend of books that add material to classics — like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and now Dick and Jane and Vampires — is not a “mash-up” trend. A literary mash-up would be combining passages from, say, Moby-Dick and The Old Man and the Sea to create a new, derivative work.
Plain and simple, this trend is about sampling and remaking for the purpose of parody.
