As if I needed any more — I just found out that this fellow (bloke??? lol) Michael Wright mentioned Outwitting Dogs
Category Archives: Books
The Portable Romantic Poets
Happened on a copy of this Viking Portable Library book at Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo yesterday (drove my guest to Niagara Falls and then tried to hit the Albright-Knox on the way back but it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, booooo A.K.).
The collection is edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson and their introduction alone made the purchase worthwhile for me. They argue that the romantic poets marked the redefinition of mankind’s conception of self as self-consciousness:
Like God and unlike the rest of nature, man can say “I”: his ego stands over against his self, which to the ego is a part of nature. In this self he can see possibilities; he can imagine it and all things as being other than they are; he runs ahead of himself; he foresees his own death.
This romantic self is driven primarily to experience; that is its highest end. For instance, unlike Marlowe’s Faust who wanted to “do great deeds and win glory,” Goethe’s Faust wants to “know what it feels like to be a seducer and a benefactor.” Further,
. . . if the enemies of reason are passion and stupidity, which cause disorder, the enemies of consciousness are abstract intellectualizing and conventional codes of morality, which neglect and suppress the capacity of the consciousness to experience. Reason has to distinguish between true and false; the will, between right and wrong: consciousness can make no such distinction; it can only ask “What is there?”
Therefore the redemption of the Ancient Mariner is “no act of penance” and “is not even directly concerned with his sinful act” but is “the acceptance of the water snakes by his consciousness which previously wished to reject them.”
The collection itself begins with Blake’s Song (Memory, hither come):
Memory, hither come
And tune your merry notes;
And while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.I’ll drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet’s song,
And there I’ll lie and dream
The day along;
And when night comes I’ll go
To places fit for woe,
Walking along the darkened valley,
With silent melancholy.
and ends with Poe, From childhood’s hour:
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then — in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent or the fountain,
From the red cliff or the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed my flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
The book was first published in 1950 too, btw . . . in print 56 years later.
“And what about her, my lord,
“what about her? Is the kingdom of heaven only a step from her also and will the passions of the earth at a single movement of her heart fall back and bow their heads as she passes?”
From The Visitor, in The Miner’s Pale Children by W.S. Merwin. It’s more like a short short story, whereas some of the pieces in the book read like dreams, like In a Dark Square, which ends this way:
He wonders what will happen if it starts to be day. The little lights, then, will still burn over the doors. They will grow yellow and fade as a new day brightens the lie numbers and he sees (for the first time, as he says) that each of the doors is crossed with colored ribbons, like a gift-wrapped package, complete with a huge bow and flowers. Then what? Are they really, all of them, presents sent from the old relatives whom he has never seen, the aunties, the grannies, the eyeless, the toothless, who have never seen him and yet presume to say what his whole life is to be? Will he finally (for the cold of the morning is terribly penetrating, after a night with no sleep, in the open) walk up the few steps, feeling a monument toppling inside him, and set his hand deliberately to the end of one of the ribbons, and undo the bow in the full knowledge that whatever that package contains will be his for the rest of his life?
“No,” he says, thinking of the day warming up sooner or later and everything starting to resume just where it left off. “No,” he says, “we have nothing to do with each other.”
And though no one is listening he repeats aloud to the darkness that he will continue to put all his faith in himself.
“Feeling a monument toppling inside him.” Oh, man.
Not all of the pieces work for me, some feel too forced — always the risk when prose sidles so close to the poetic. But the ones that do work are simply wrenching.
Resurrection publishing
I.e., republishing out-of-print books. Article in The Guardian, via Booksquare:
For some companies, resurrection is a sideline alongside new titles; for others, it’s their whole raison d’etre. It’s a labour of love, not money, for most. Few of these books get reviewed, and partly for that reason they won’t catch your eye, or even be there at all, when you’re in Waterstone’s. Mostly there’s little hope of achieving the level of sales – perhaps 2,000 copies – where you start to tot up your profits. Often you’re doing well if you’ve sold 300.
A little madness in the name of love. What’s not to like?
One little nit — c’mon, Guardian, hotlink the publishers you mention! Okay, actually it’s more of a medium-sized nit. Here, I’ll do my part:
Sutton Publishing. [UPDATE, seems to be disappeared.]
Nonsuch Classics. [UPDATE, also disappeared.]
Traviata Books. [UPDATE, also disappeared.]
Related: See also my post Wagging the Backlist.
Next up: chick lit is devil’s spawn
Rebecca Swain, blogging at the Orlando Sentinal, has posted about this anonymous & rather painful rant, Chick Lit is Hurting America.
Swain writes
The argument is this: Chick lit is a type of ideological state apparatus used by the elite classes as a tool to systematically oppress women in lower classes and is bad for literature in general because it takes up precious shelf space that could be dedicated to serious literature.
This is extrapolated into an argument that seems to suggest that chick lit will eventually bring down culture as we know it.
Oh. My. Sweet. Lord.
Bridget Jones, I hardly knew ye . . .
[UPDATE: link no longer works, sorry…]
Some thoughts on potential. Market potential.
How many copies of a book do you need to sell to make it a best seller?
By definition the audience for literary fiction — for difficult, or as Ralph Nadir would prefer ;-) “challenging” books — is smaller than the audience for mainstream books.
It’s probably impossible to know for sure how small, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating. Via Publishers Marketplace, in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, James Adams writes that 15 years ago, it was estimated that about 3000 Canadians read “serious” books. Adams speculates that number has since fallen by as much as half.
The adjective “serious” was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then . . . that estimate has dropped, I’m told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.
In 1993 (about the same time the 3000 figure was being floated for Canada) Kurt Andersen wrote an essay for Time, “It’s a Small World After All,” in which he attempted to suss out the size of the market for “high end cultural artifacts,” including the market for literary fiction. He noted that
250,000 Americans bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera in hardcover. Every thoughtful reader in America did not, despite Knopf’s best efforts, buy the Garcia Marquez novel, meaning that the potential audience for any given book is larger. “It might even be a million,” says Knopf’s Ann Close, who edits Alice Munro and Norman Rush, among others. On the other hand, all the actual buyers of any typical serious novel would fit in Fenway Park, or even a Vegas showroom.
Presumably, a “typical serious novel” would be one written by someone without the sort of reputation Garcia Marquez enjoys. So how many actual buyers might this novelist count on?
If we extrapolate from Adams’ figures we can just multiply by ten (since Canada’s population is roughly 1/10 of the United States’). That would put the US lit fic market size at somewhere around 20,000 people today.
Think that’s low? I dunno, maybe it is. It’s a long way from that quarter of a million figure for Garcia Marquez’ book. What possessed all those people to buy Love in the Time of Cholera? Were they all shopping for I’m-quite-the-intellectual coffeetable tchotchkes? Why aren’t they buying other lit fiction? Hey, why aren’t they buying serious Canadian books?
By way of context, some 280 million copies of Nora Roberts’ novels have been sold to date. Granted, she’s prolific (this registration-required NY Times article mentions her next book as number 166) but that still averages to over 1.5 million copies per book.
OTOH, most commercial fiction doesn’t scale those heights. John Scalzi* cites the New York Times as his source for this fact: a mainstream novel is considered a bestseller if it sells 25,000 copies.
(Scalzi also says that anecdotally it seems publishers offer larger advances on lit fiction than on genre fiction — despite the fact that lit fiction may have poorer odds to earn out. Gambler’s fallacy perhaps?)
* AKA the guy who just won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Step away from the book
In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:
. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.
I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.
They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.
At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)
Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:
Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.
But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.
Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?
Reading through feminist eyes
Okay, when I first caught wind of the This is Chick Lit vs. This is Not Chick Lit controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better feminist.
What Elizabeth Merrick’s anti-chick lit camp argues is that serious female writers are getting shorted. Their books don’t receive equal attention by the [presumably — I’m restating what I gather is the argument here, haven’t fact-checked] male-dominated publishing industry and [presumably] male-dominated book-review industry (limited, for the purpose of this battle, to the venues that most matter in the literary world, e.g. The NYT Book Review).
And now, into this sad situation, introduce a glut of lite novels with pink covers that quickly begin sucking the air out of bookstores and the dollars out of female readers’ purses.
So what does Merrick want for her writers?
Money?
According to a citation of The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash (found originally on The University of Michigan’s Internet Public Library but page now deep-sixed), of the top ten bestselling books of all time, only one is a novel: The Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, comes in at #9.
Of the thirteen other novels Ash lists as having sold at least 10,000,000 copies worldwide, another four are by women (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind). Granted, five out of 14 isn’t quite 50 percent, but the list cited by the (now defunct) website is also nearly 10 years old — it predates J.K. Rowling, for instance.
According to Guinness World Records, the best-selling fiction writer of all time is Agatha Christie.
A quick peruse of author names on the the top selling books by year linked here suggests that men have edged out women by about 2:1 over the past several years. But this seeming disparity may have an innocuous explanation: it may be that the pool of male readers concentrates on fewer novels. From Writers Digest:
The books men do purchase tend to be purchased on brand. Brand loyalty, [Pages editor John] Hogan says, is especially important to the male book buyer — the brand being a recognizable name like Harlan Coben or Scott Turow. This makes it more difficult for an unknown author geared toward a male audience to get recognized.
So maybe the only thing hindering woman from achieving parity on the yearly bestseller lists is the reading inclinations of men — something that also makes it hard for aspiring male writers to dislodge a Grisham or Turow. This may also explain why men perhaps read fewer female writers than vice versa, as well as why bestseller lists skew toward male novelists, even though the majority of novel readers are probably female.
Women are simply more adventurous book buyers ;-)
That’s commercial fiction. But what about literary fiction?
Or put another way: if money isn’t the problem, what is?
Recognition?
I dunno. If that were the case, then the issue must be that women writers aren’t being taken seriously by (for the sake of simplification) male reviewers.
So what?
A good friend of mine who acts as an occasional reader of my manuscripts declined to read my last one. The premise didn’t grab her — it wasn’t a match for her sensibilities.
That’s not a problem. I don’t expect everyone to get excited by my books’ premises. I certainly don’t expect many men to! lol
So what?
So what?
And who are you writing for, btw?
Update: none of the best-selling books by women made the Snarkling Reading List, for what that’s worth…
“Cold Mountain,” by Charles Frazier
I finally read one of the books on the Snarkling list. And coincidentally, this is a great book for considering the so-called demarcation between literary fiction and pop fiction. Cold Mountain is most definitely literary fiction in terms of its atmospheric writing style (the dialogue isn’t even set off by quotation marks, but by single m-dashes, as if Frazier decided not to interrupt the book’s poetry with something as mundane as human speech) but the book is also very much plot-driven; it follows two people: a Civil War deserter as he makes his way back to his home and sweetheart, and the sweetheart as she struggles to acquire the skills she needs to run a farm after her protective and indulgent father dies and she finds herself rendered cash-poor by the South’s impending collapse.
I liked the book a lot, although I was somewhat disappointed by the ending, which I arrived at around 2 a.m. today. And so here is the rub. The book has big bones: not only the emotional toll of the war but even more interesting to my mind its effects on civilian life, the moral and actual anarchy that sets in as its consequence. As a deserter, Inman has to negotiate what would normally have been the fringes of rural Blue Ridge society but has grown, as the war has waned down, to occupy a much larger influence : “outliers,” fellow deserters, the thuggish Home Guard charged with capturing deserters, Federalist raiders, Federalist sympathizers. So naturally as I rode along with the characters and the plot I was looking to Inman as a metaphor for, perhaps, contemporary America (the book was published in 1997 so is pre-Iraq but by Frazier’s photo on the back he looks to be a boomer, so it could have been a statement about Viet Nam) or even more likely the post-War American South. I was looking, therefore, for something in the book’s resolution that would point to such themes.
Instead, I felt that the book was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, ending as it did as a “mere” romantic tragedy.
I put mere in quotes because far be it from me to belittle the lives of fictional romantic figures, lol.
But truly, I wanted more. You have two sensitive people rebuilding their emotional selves in the aftermath of experiences that were both physically and emotionally brutal. Brutalizing, literally, in Inman’s case. That’s plenty to hang a book on, yeah. But against that particular backdrop, for some reason, I wanted more. Instead, I got the exact invert of a romance novel’s HEA, every bit as improbable in its own way as a bedazzling kiss in the last paragraph of a mass market paperback.
There’s a caveat to this criticism, of course: my disappointment reflects perhaps my own expectations more than any objective failure on the part of Frazier (although perhaps not; there are many stories nestled within this story, and aren’t they all about how the war tore peoples’ lives apart and left them alone to patch the scaps together?) Nonetheless, what captivated me more than Cold Mountain‘s love story was the question of how individuals who survived the Civil War rebuilt their lives afterward. They did, somehow; we did patch this country together again, somehow.
About midway through the book, Inman is betrayed to the Home Guard and finds himself bound chain-gang like to fifteen other men being yanked toward either prison or death, and suddenly Frasier breaks in with this:
Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You could bury them and knife their names onto an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing–not their acts of meanness or kindness or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces–would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond recollection.
So maybe that’s the fulcrum, then, and maybe that’s why the book’s ending narrows down the way it does; maybe it’s intended as an existential back of the hand about the meaningless of individuals’ lives. But then why do some characters not only survive but come to be pictured, some decade later, as flourishing? To highlight also that fate is arbitrary? And why go easier, ultimately, on the women than the men? (I’m trying to do this without inserting blatant spoilers, btw, sorry if that makes this part of my post go a bit vague.)
What succeeds in the book is that it’s written with a literary hand, yet for the most part I don’t feel Frazier himself inserted into the prose; the story-telling is that strong; when he does, as in the paragraph I quoted above, it’s not unwelcome, it works as a clue to help frame the narrative; it’s not intrusive. But somehow with the ending it seems his hand suddenly becomes both evident and heavy, as if as the deity of this book’s world he had his own private reasons for snipping particular threads.
So I’m left thinking “why did you do that?” where before the ending I was thrilling to the idea that I’d be left with a different question altogether.
Lit fight! Lit fight!
Via novelist Lauren Baratz-Logsted, The Huffington Post has published two bits by Rachel Sklar on the dueling anthologies This is Not Chick Lit and This is Chick Lit. Baratz-Logsted has a piece in the latter.
The “not chick lit” HuffPo piece is here. The “is chick lit” piece is here.
If you haven’t had a peek at this debate, the second post in particular will catch you up nicely. Hint: the divide is deep, and writers who think the genre is beneath them really, really hate it.
(And in case you didn’t catch this when I first linked it a couple months ago, see also this post at 2Blowhards: a transcription of a talk by writer Richard Wheeler on the divide between literary and genre fiction.)
