Okay, so the salon article was what killed me really. Better Yet, Don't Write That Novel by Laura Miller <--This Is How to Miss the Point Dramatically, and With a Lot of Words, Perhaps More Words Than Necessary, Really. Learn Brevity, Thanks.
Pop quiz:
It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.
Does this mean:
a.) buy my books and tell me I'm smart!
b.) sales are falling.
c.) ...sorry, what cultural spaces doing what?
Trufax: I may or may not have been part of the movement that destroyed reading cultural spaces. I won't like, admit this, but, okay, there was this whole "compare and contrast the cultural relevance of American Psycho with Moby Dick" one night in the Cultural Reading Space Room because let's face it, in the end, it's all about Moby Fucking Dick, and why use a less hackneyed comparison? And who doesn't love curling up on a stormy evening with a blanket to re-read that bit of poetic mastery of graphic sexual violence performed with everyday props with prose of the exquisite blandness of non-steel cut oatmeal, unsurpassed even by de Sade, who it cannot be said did not have a hard-on for female torture and sexual mutilation (and how!). Okay, I was napping, but they got to the rat/ham-and-cheese (could be one or the other, I was napping in the Cultural Literary Osmosis Corner, maybe a sandwich was involved?) thing and oh, I was like, I'm so burning this cultural space.
Every nano story destroys another cultural space. I laugh as I watch them die. This is why there aren't any. Destroyed so well that even now, I'm not sure what they are.
(This may tie into my very early exposure to literary criticism which was when I read my first review of American Psycho that managed to be very positive and spoke of it being engaging and possibly pushing the boundaries but never mentioned anything actually contained in the novel itself. Let's say my first read of that ended very quickly and with surprisingly abruptness. I've kind of never forgiven the literary community or pretty much the entirety of anything published in New York for that. I will drag this experience out every chance I get. My God, why.)
In other news, received a phone call today to tell me my child is going to another country this summer and I'd missed my appointment to get the arrangements in order. The words "my child is what and where, wait, what?" were said, because I'm sure this is pretty obvious, but I had no idea. I'm going tomorrow to--get the arrangements in order. Child is bemused that I'd want to be aware he was exporting himself; I'm just trying to figure out what exactly will make July of next year a bad time for him to be in the country. There aren't any new holes, but there's a rope draped over the back fence that's tied to a really sketchy tree. Beyond the fence is a fairly steep drop to a dry creek. It looks obvious, and yet....
How's Turkey on extradition? Just curious.
If he had a passport right now, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't know about this until he got back. Extradited? Something.
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It's deep, you see.
On the other hand, if this bitch can get a book deal then I feel better about my chances.
Also, her comparison of people doing a challenge of reading 10 books in 10 months is...underwhelming to say the least (though, still good for the people who are doing the challenge, but couldn't she have talked about the people who are reading 50 (or 100) books in a year challenges, which might seem more on par with writing 50k in a month?).
(Most of my reading ends up being on the internet these days, but as I don't think the wordcount has actually decreased (except for when I'm mainlining tv) I can still say that ONLY 10 books in TEN WHOLE MONTH sounds like toture. I mean we packed books into the spare wheel (in the bottom of the trunk) on trips and that one holiday in Mexico where we had to fly was just WRONG because I totally ran out of books.)
ten books
I can still do that, provided the series is interesting enough. And I have days off. There are reasons I switched to ebooks! A bibliovore's godsend, I tell ya.
(And I was the only one planning to read more than four books.)
I mean, could he have easer access to cloning technology? Dinosaur DNA? Hole making tech?
Worry if he starts asking about smuggling thing in. *nodsnods*
Crazy lady is crazy. How'd she get a book deal again?
"As someone who doesn't write novels" which is pretty unambiguous, especially added to her bio:
[...] "is a senior writer at Salon.com, which she co-founded in 1995. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" (Little, Brown, 2008) and the editor of "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" (Penguin, 2000)."
This lists only two books, none of them novels (the first one sounds like an expended essay, the second one like a reading rec list).
Don't get me wrong: as a reader-only, I couldn't disagree with her more because I personally can't find enough published fiction to my taste and never have.
Let's face it, published fiction -a la 'Twilight'- is just not what I am looking for, sorry for not being a maladjusted teenage girl with a fixation on death. Nor am I a Da Vinci Code fanatic who will read Dan Brown unedited trash even though the man is incapable of writing a grammatically correct sentence in his own native language.
And "Oh, I don't have time to read. I'm just concentrating on my writing." is not something I have ever heard from any real writer, published or not. Though if you told me that was Stephenie Meyer's honest reply, or Dan Brown, I would totally believe you.
Real writers seem to read ten, twenty times as much as non-writers: it's easy to notice this in their writing: just by the quotes, the references to literary classics, movies or whatnot. Well, at least in the stories I read, not in the above-mentioned trash.
Consider for instance JK Rowling: you must have heard if the idea that her basic premise comes from a Neil Gaiman concept (specifically from the Books of Magic which predates her books by a couple of years I think? The young British boy with black hair and glasses who eventually becomes the greatest magician of the age, the owl/familiar, the whole background thing about his parents/real mother etc.)
But whether it's just general, unavoidable inspiration -as Neil Gaiman graciously insists- or plagiarism -my own take on this, because I am a petty, petty person- does not matter: the point is that she clearly read the Books of Magic, even if she did not remember it clearly enough to recognized what her stuff owed Neil Gaiman. Or she read the same materials the Books of Magic draw its inspiration from, whatever...
There is a famous saying about how all works of art are either groundbreaking or plagiarism. Which sounds about right to me, eg: Avatar 2009/Dances with Wolves 1990/a Man Named Horse 1970 though I guess one could make a point that the technical achievement of Avatar trumps the fact that the story itself is re-recycled stuff.
The only novelist I have heard of who says she doesn't read many novels is Karen Traviss, who seems to get her inspiration more from films and television (and is an ex journalist herself). She seems to think of this as unusual though and even sounded a little defensive about it, if I'm remembering her blog post right.
Your reaction to Moby Dick made me cackle: I recognise it, being someone from the UK who doesn't really like Dickens. I am happily free of recieved opinions about Moby Dick and intend to read it sometime purely out of curiosity, but will bear the oatmeal comment in mind.
And much as I'd love to give myself some kind of medal for unselfishness for reading stuff, (I'd have so many medals) given that my motivation is generally the selfish pursuit of reading pleasure, I'm not sure what she's on about. As far as I'm concerned, the time writers spend writing cool things for me to read is a gift.