Sounds & Fury

16 June 1904

 

And That Was That

Celebrated author V. S. Naipaul is convinced that not only can he, within a paragraph or two, tell whether a novel has been written by a female or not, but that no female writer who has ever lived is his equal as a writer.

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

Yes, well, perhaps that's all true (although we wouldn't bet on it), but we can't help thinking back to what, for the longest time, we, too, were absolutely convinced of; viz., that no female, no matter how technically adept she might be, could ever play the fiddle with the command and fire and depth of emotion of a male, and that we could tell within twenty measures or so whether the fiddle was being played by a female or not.

Then one day, some thirty or so years ago, we switched on the radio about ten measures into the Beethoven Violin Concerto and of course stopped what we were doing to listen (one never passes up a chance to hear the Beethoven). The performance was riveting. We couldn't place the fiddler as this fiddler, whoever he was (there was no question the fiddler was a male), sounded like no fiddler we'd ever heard before. We mentally flipped through every fiddler known to us and could come up with no match. Then came the announcer. The orchestra was the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan, and the fiddler was someone named Anne-Sophie Mutter. She was 16 years old.

And that was that.

Shape and Ring

In a review of Stanley Fish's newest book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, written for the The Book, the online book review section of The New Republic, Simon Blackburn, the Bertrand Russell Professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Research Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had this to say:

For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.

It is wrong to think that the sentence is a mere slave, whose function is to bear content, which, while being the really important thing, is also something that could equally have been borne by another. Change the shape and ring, and you change everything. The balance, the alliterations, the variation, the melody, the lights glimmering in the words, can work together to transform even an ugly thought into something iridescent....

[...]

Do shape and ring matter? Perfection always matters. Without the sensitivity Fish admires, we would not only have no great literature. We would also have had no Gettysburg address, no Churchill, and no Martin Luther King, Jr. If we cannot move peoples’ souls, we cannot move their ways of living either: “Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws.”

Quite right — all of it.

RTWT here.

The Book

It may seem strange for an atheist Jew such as we to confess a love for the King James version of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, but that would be a myopic view of the matter as the King James Bible is as much a work of literature as it is a religious text. Writer and author Ann Wroe, obituaries and briefings editor of The Economist and author of Being Shelley, has a lovely piece in the current issue of Intelligent Life titled "In The Beginning Was The Sound" that has much to say about the King James Bible as literature.

Like many Catholics, I came late to the King James Bible. I was schooled in the flat Knox version, and knew the beautiful, musical Latin Vulgate well before I was introduced to biblical beauty in my own tongue. I was around 20, sitting in St John’s College Chapel in Oxford in the glow of late winter candlelight, though that fond memory may be embellished a little. A reading from the King James was given at Evensong. The effect was extraordinary: as if I had suddenly found, in the house of language I had loved and explored all my life, a hidden central chamber whose pillars and vaulting, rhythm and strength had given shape to everything around them.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Chutzpah

In the event you've been living in a cave isolated from the outside world for the past decade or so, we'd like to call to your attention that it's the year two-thousand-and-ten A.D., Print On Demand (POD) publishing is available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, and the eBook, also available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, has finally come into its own. So, the question is: Why, then, the necessity or need today for book publishing houses? What function do they perform or what service do they provide that an author could not perform or provide himself, or hire experts to perform or provide for him? In short, why are book publishing houses still in business today at all?

Answer: Beats us. Book publishing houses are an anachronism; a relic of the pre-digital past who have — or rather, should have — no place whatsoever in today's book publishing market for new books. And yet one reads articles such as this one bemoaning the lessening power and influence of book publishing houses and the rise in power of brick-and-mortar book mega-stores and online book retailers with bewildering regularity.

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture [the commercial book publishing industry] is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors [Amazon.com]? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, "what kind of king they’re going to be." A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature — on what books can be published successfully — is far more in doubt.

Excuse us? What kind of lunatic reasoning is that? "[T]he effect on the future of literature — on what books can be published successfully — is far more in doubt"(!)?

No, you purblind flack. What's in doubt is the future of book publishing houses, not literature or books. Books, literature, and authors will do just fine — flourish, even — without irrelevant middlemen like book publishing houses who while eyeing foremost their own bottom line (not "the production of culture") make decisions on which books should or should not be published, and then take a hefty cut of authors' earnings for the privilege of being published by them.

Talk about irrelevancy. Talk about chutzpah!

Urban Intellectual Fodder

There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader -- the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.

This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.

This art sure ain't Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It's more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.

It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

RTW Spot-On T here.

The Reluctant Medical Student

On arriving in Paris...with my fellow-student Alphonse Robert, I gave myself up wholly to studying for the [medical] career which had been thrust upon me, and loyally kept the promise I had given my father on leaving. It was soon put to a severe test when Robert, having announced one morning that he had bought a "subject" (a corpse), took me for the first time to the dissecting-room at the Hospice de la Pitié. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house — the dissected limbs, the grinning faces and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae — such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting-room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels. The shock of that first impression lasted for twenty-four hours. I did not want to hear another word about anatomy, dissection or medicine, and I meditated a hundred mad schemes of escape from the future that hung over me.

Robert lavished his eloquence in a vain attempt to argue away my disgust and demonstrate the absurdity of my plans. In the end he got me to agree to make another effort. For the second time I accompanied him to the hospital and we entered the house of the dead. How strange! The objects which before had filled me with extreme horror had absolutely no effect upon me now. I felt nothing but a cold distaste; I was already as hardened to the scene as any seasoned medical student. The crisis was passed. I found I actually enjoyed groping about in a poor fellow's chest and feeding the winged inhabitants of that delightful place their ration of lung. "Hallo!", Robert cried, laughing. "You're getting civilized. 'Thou giv'st the little birds their daily bread.'" "'And o'er all nature's realm my bounty spread,'" I retorted, tossing a shoulder-blade to a large rat staring at me with famished eyes.

So I went on with my anatomy course, feeling no enthusiasm, but stoically resigned.

[...]

I was on my way to becoming just another student, destined to add one more obscure name to the lamentable catalogue of bad doctors, when one evening I went to the Opéra. They were giving The Danaïds, by Salieri. The pomp and brilliance of the spectacle, the massive sonority of orchestra and chorus, the inspired pathos of Mme Branchu, her extraordinary voice, the rugged grandeur of Dérivis, Hypermnestra's aria, in which I discerned, imitated by Salieri, all the characteristics of Gluck's style as I had conceived it from the pieces from his Orphée in my father's library, and finally the tremendous bacchanal and the sad, voluptuous ballet music that Spontini added to his old compatriot's score, disturbed and exalted me to an extent that I will not attempt to describe. It was though a young man possessing all the instincts of a sailor, but knowing only the boats on the lakes of his native mountains, were suddenly to find himself on board a three-decker ship on the open sea. I hardly slept that night, and the anatomy lesson next morning suffered accordingly.

[...]

The following week I went to the Opéra again. This time I saw Méhul's Stratonice, and Nina, the ballet devised and composed by Persuis.

[...]

Notwithstanding all these distractions and the hours I spent every evening brooding over the melancholy discrepancy between my studies and my inclinations, I persisted in this double life for some time longer, without much benefit to my medical career and without being able to extend my meager knowledge of music. I had given my word and I was holding to it. But when I learnt that the library of the Conservatoire with its wealth of scores was open to the public, the desire to go there and study the works of Gluck, for which I already had an instinctive passion but which were not then being performed at the Opéra, was too strong for me. Once admitted to that sanctuary, I never left it. It was the death-blow to my medical career. The dissecting-room was abandoned for good.

—Hector Berlioz, from, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, edited and translated by David Cairns

16 June 1904

 

For Whom The Bell Tolls

The Wall Street Journal today published an article entitled, "'Vanity' Press Goes Digital". Although the article focuses on eBooks (The New Big Thing — finally!), everything it says can be applied to self-published, Print On Demand (POD), ink-on-paper traditional books as well, as we outlined in some detail several years ago in these two 2007 S&F posts titled, "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe", and "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe, Pt. 2". The material stigma attached to self-published books (a stigma made explicit by labeling such books "vanity published") is fast disappearing as the quotes around the word "Vanity" in the title of the WSJ piece subtly acknowledges. It's perfectly clear to us, as it was three years ago, that the traditional book publisher is today not only mostly unnecessary for any book author who doesn't mind taking matters into his own hands entirely (or into his own hands with the additional help of expert hired hands in the fields of PR and advertising) thereby reaping the maximum profits from his writing, but is a veritable impediment — a remnant of a bygone era, which remnant is on the verge of having outlived its usefulness except for the most specialized of book publishing projects.

Some months ago, we sent an eMail to a prominent literary agent who maintains a blog whereon she answers candidly and without pulling any punches even the most basic or most touchy questions eMailed to her by her readers about literary agents and about the publishing biz generally. That eMail read:

Given the absolute ease today of self-publishing a POD book the physical product of which is absolutely indistinguishable from the physical product put out by any major house, and given the amount of non-writing work commercial publishers today expect an author to perform in the peddling of a published book, what irreplaceable service does a commercial publisher provide an ordinary (i.e., non-celebrity) author today for its 85%-90% cut of the book's sales price beyond the stroking of the author's ego and vanity by the prestige of being published by a commercial house? I've of course asked myself the same question, and no matter how I twist it, the answer I come up with is none. Nada. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss. I guarantee you that anything you come back at me with, I'll be able to come up with an alternate way to accomplish the same end, and just as effectively, even when economies of scale are taken into consideration.

Your thoughts, please, as I suspect I must be missing something.

That eMail never made it onto that agent's blog, nor was it even so much as acknowledged.

Surprise! — or, rather, no surprise at all.

It's time the commercial book publishing industry stopped asking itself for whom the bell tolls. Manifestly, my dear dinosaur, it tolls for thee.

Snow

We've had occasion before on S&F to remark on author-defined "poems" that on clear-eyed inspection reveal themselves as nothing but garden-variety prose broken into (seemingly) arbitrary lines to create a "poem", and expressed our contempt for this widespread, invariably pretentious, invariably risible (and invariably ugly) postmodern literary excrescence. An infinitely more rare occurrence is the prose piece that's a genuine poem in everything but name, and fairly cries out to be set, mutatis mutandis, in enjambed poetic form. A lovely example of this is this editorial by writer Verlyn Klinkenborg for The New York Times that virtually sings from the page:

Last week felt like a last chance before winter. The snow melted, dying back until the vole trails became thin green paths through the remains of whiteness. The ice unbound itself from the rim of the horse tanks. One warm morning, a bat fluttered past my head, resting on the clapboards for a moment and then arcing around to the east side of the house. Despite the sense of relenting, the ground was still frozen solid.

And then it began to snow again — light, voluminous snow, swelling in the air and muffling every detail. Watching it, I felt a sense of intention in the weather, as if those mild days were just a way of clearing the canvas, scraping away the old paint, before laying down a fresh ground of white.

RTWT here.

Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire?

Apropos this August S&F post's closing "Stay tuned," this announcement in yesterday's New York Times doesn't strike us as particularly comforting or encouraging:

Jonathan Landman, a deputy managing editor of The New York Times, on Tuesday was named the new culture editor, adding to a résumé that includes top positions in a unusually wide range of news departments[!].

The executive editor, Bill Keller, chose Mr. Landman to replace Sam Sifton, who has been named The Times’s new restaurant critic.

[...]

Mr. Landman served as acting culture editor in 2004 and 2005, when he reorganized the department. He has been an editor on the newspaper’s masthead since 2003, first as assistant managing editor overseeing the paper’s longest, most ambitious reporting projects.

Previously, he was the metropolitan editor, the editor of the Week in Review section, acting editor of the Sunday Business section and deputy editor of the Washington bureau.

A graduate of Amherst College and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, Mr. Landman joined The Times in 1987 after having been deputy city editor of The Daily News in New York and a reporter at The Chicago Sun-Times and at Newsday.

Uh-huh. A regular hard-core-news-type guy Mr. Landman, or so it would appear. His replacing Sam Sifton as The Times's culture editor strikes us initially rather like an out of the frying pan into the fire deal vis-à-vis The Times's arts pages.

But let us not be hasty here and indulge in that reckless practice of judging a book by its cover, so to speak. Instead, let us withhold judgment for the next few months to see how this actually plays out even as we confess our expectations are something less than sanguine.

And so, once again, Stay tuned.

A Horse Of A Different Color

Any of you out there fans of horses and horse racing? We're not. We know nothing, and couldn't care one whit, about either. That notwithstanding, here we find ourself, riveted by a copiously and technically detailed, non-fiction, narrative documentary account of a freakishly-built race horse, the three people responsible for seeing its racing potential and developing it, and of the curious inside world of Thoroughbred racing during the years of the Great Depression, and we simply can't manage to put the book down. Every time we attempt it, we find ourself thinking, "Well, just one more page, and then we'll put the book down for the nonce."

And so it's been going for some two days now.

The book? Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Thoroughbred racing sportswriter Laura Hillenbrand.

A sample (this, the introduction to Seabiscuit's trainer, Tom Smith):

As a general rule, Smith didn't talk. He had a habit of walking away when anyone asked him questions, and he avoided social gatherings because people expected him to speak.

[...]

He was fifty-six but he looked much older. His jaw had a recalcitrant jut to it that implied a run-in with something — an errant hoof or an ill-placed fence post — but maybe it was the only shape in which it could have been drawn. He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility. On the rare occasions when he took off his gray felt fedora, you had to look hard at his threadbare head to tell where his gray hair ended and his gray skin began. When photographed hatless, he had an unsettling tendency to blend with the sky, so that his eyes hung disembodied in space.

[...]

In Tom Smith's younger days, the Indians would watch him picking his way over the open plains, skirting the mustang herds. He was always alone, even back then, in the waning days of the nineteenth century. He talked to virtually no one but his horses, and then only in their vernacular of small gestures and soft sounds. The Indians called him "Lone Plainsman". White men called him "Silent Tom". People merely brushed up against him. Only the horses seemed to know him well. [...] His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow.

An extraordinary and extraordinarily rewarding read which, if you haven't already made this meticulously researched book's acquaintance, we heartily recommend to your attention (if you saw the 2003 Gary Ross Hollywood movie based on Hillenbrand's 2001 book, you've experienced but a pale taste of the original).

On Sales Spiels

Julia Keller, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, in a piece on the function and effect of the use of place names in fiction, opens with the following lede graf:

Salesmen have a trick. It's a well-known trick, but even though you know it's coming, it really works: They use your name over and over again in their spiel. Hearing your name operates as a sort of verbal aphrodisiac.

Oh yeah? Well, it may work that way for Ms. Keller, but for us it has a rather different effect. Whenever we're assaulted by that sales technique no matter what's being sold, a commodity or an idea, our first response is to say to the perpetrator, quietly and absent any trace of anger, (actually say, not just think of saying), "If you repeat my name just once more, I'm going to rip your tongue out of your face — through your nose!"

This has the effect of instantly throwing the pimp off his game, and the spiel — and the pimp — are gone within a matter of seconds.

Works like magic.

16 June 1904

 

Gift

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:56 AM Eastern on 11 Nov to correct a number of small errors and infelicities of expression.]

As I grow older, I find myself reading less and less fiction preferring instead to spend my book-reading time with non-fiction works in the fields of music, theoretical physics, and cosmology, the latter two in works written for laypersons. In fact, since my early thirties, I think the number of works of serious fiction I've read could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and, aside from the Harry Potter books, of genre fiction, none at all (an exception to this last is noted in passing below).

That said, although I've spent much of the past two decades off The Street, so to speak, I've not been living in a cave entirely, and so was aware of the huge publishing success of Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike with the mega-bestseller Harry Potter books, however, I wasn't curious or provoked enough to read the thing just to see what all the fuss was about, nor did I bother to see the 2006 Ron Howard movie made from the book.

This past week, TNT telecast the movie, and so I took the opportunity to give it a look-see just to get an idea of what the book was all about. The plot premise was intriguing if a bit farfetched, but the movie, a crashing bore its Hollywood car chases notwithstanding, and that was enough to provoke me into getting hold of the book itself to see just what it was that made it a runaway bestseller, for if the movie was any indication of the book, there was nothing there (as I later discovered, the movie in fact missed or merely brushed past just about everything that made the book even marginally worth reading).

My first — and last — attempt at writing a novel-length work of mystery fiction (the S&F posts recounting the 13-years-ago genesis of which experiment and the recounting of my subsequent years-later experiment at self-publishing are collected here) taught me two things subsequent to the passing away of my first delusional flush of triumph wherein I was convinced I'd written a niche-market hit: 1) writing a work of genre fiction requires an intimate knowledge of and "feel" for the genre in which one is writing which knowledge and feel I foolishly, not to say arrogantly, wrongly imagined I could gain by reading some ten-gazillion novels of the genre within the space of a few months just to get the "formula"; and 2) that I've zero gift for the writing of fiction. In fact, the work I'd written was not so much written as manufactured to formula; the formula I'd wrongly imagined I learned from the reading of those ten-gazillion mystery novels. Excluding a mere handful of exceptions, those ten-gazillion mystery novels also shared one other thing in common beyond their adherence to the conventions of the genre (i.e., the "formula"): their prose writing was, shall we say, less than stellar. And so when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, I was prepared for less than stellar prose writing notwithstanding that the novel was a runaway bestseller. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I found.

There's hardly a page of The Da Vinci Code that does not induce multiple cringes at the execrable prose writing; writing so execrable it's almost beyond tolerance. Excluding from consideration the efforts of my own good self, I don't believe I've ever read a work of fiction, even mystery fiction, that could equal or surpass it in badness. And yet — and this, for me, is the real mystery — I kept on turning the pages!

Why? The characters are two-dimensional jokes; the incidents, contrived; and the plot, while inherently intriguing, is not much more so than the plots of a number of mystery novels I'd read previously in my above noted several-months mystery novel reading marathon. True, the expansion and embellishment of the quasi- or pseudo-historical basis of the inherently intriguing plot of The Da Vinci Code gave that plot a certain frisson not otherwise attainable. But still....

So, what's the answer; the explanation of the mystery of what it was that made me continue to turn the pages of this execrably written work of mystery fiction? I confess, I'm not really sure. What I'm certain of, however, is that no matter how deficient a writer of prose Dan Brown may be (or, rather, clearly is), he possesses a gift — i.e., that which cannot be acquired, but must be inborn — for the plotting and spinning out of a mystery narrative absent which gift even the best of fiction prose stylists would be helpless to write an effective novel of the genre. Further proof, if any were still needed, that writers and artists of all sorts, like idiots, are born, not made.

Students (and instructors) engaged in so-called "creative writing" courses, take note.

It's The Text, Stupid!

In his collection of essays on criticism and art, The Sacred Wood (1920), T.S. Eliot wrote in the essay titled, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suspect author P.D. Smith, writing for the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, would agree.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self — a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

[...]

Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[...]

Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”.

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka's life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).”

[...]

Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation.

And, we might add, not only "just too easy," but too easily misleading.

RTWT here.

16 June 1904

 

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

A Must-Read

The following are the opening grafs of a spot-on essay by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar. While it concerns literature and the academic literary world in particular, it’s a damning indictment of post-sixties, postmodern thinking in general, the thinking in the post-sixties, postmodern world of music very much included.

Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. Literary scholars have often sought to allay unease at being paid to enjoy the frissons of fiction by investigating literature as a form of history or moral education. And since the late 1960s, academic literature departments have tried especially to stress criticism as critique, as an agent of social transformation.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art — with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it — as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

Word!

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Doing What Needs To Be Done

In October of last year, I wrote a post titled “Dead In The Water” which gave a brief account of the end of my brief POD self-publishing adventure involving my “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note. What it said, in short, was that I was unwilling to do what I finally saw needs to be done in order to give the novel even a chance of commercial success.

In today’s Boston Globe there’s a story about one, Brunonia Barry, an author who took a similar POD self-publishing route for her first mystery novel, The Lace Reader, who was willing to do what needs to be done in order to give her novel a chance of commercial success, and ended up by having her self-published novel sold to a mainstream publisher, William Morrow, in a literary auction which netted Ms. Barry a $2M advance for the novel and for an additional one in future.

And what had to be done by Ms. Barry in order to achieve this admittedly singular result? Here’s a sampling:

Barry and [Gary] Ward [Barry’s husband] were willing to do all [that needed to be done], and spen[t] freely in the process — more than $50,000 before they were finished....

[...]

By early last year, they were ready to test the market. The manager of The Spirit of '76 Bookstore in Marblehead put them in touch with store-based book clubs, whose members said they would be willing to test-read the manuscript.

"I would go to the meetings and take notes," Barry said. "I asked them to be brutally honest: 'Where did you stop reading? Did you identify with this character? What did you think of the mother?'" With the feedback, she made some minor changes.

They incorporated their company as Flap Jacket Press and planned to release The Lace Reader last September. They set up a website and hired a copy editor, jacket designer, and book publicist, Kelley & Hall of Marblehead. They attended bookseller conventions, handing out advance copies and buttonholing booksellers. Kelley & Hall sent copies to book bloggers and trade magazines such as Publishers Weekly and promotional announcements to 700 independent bookstores.

Then last summer came two big breaks: First, Kelley & Hall helped lan[d] a deal with a Tennessee distributor, Blu Sky Media Group; second, a rave review appeared in Publishers Weekly. The Lace Reader was hailed as "a captivating debut."

Still, the couple had to close the deal with booksellers. They ordered a first printing of 2,500, then began to visit stores, trying to get them to stock the book. Among the first was Salem's Cornerstone Books.

"Sandy [Ms. Barry’s nickname] dropped her book off," said Beth Simpson, events coordinator of Cornerstone Books in Salem. "I didn't know her. I like to do an author appearance to generate interest; otherwise the book will just sit on the shelf." She arranged to have Barry do a reading, then called Salem and Marblehead newspapers, which ran stories about the reading.

"That generated incredible interest," Simpson said. "We had a handful of people a day coming in, asking if we had the book. At the appearance, we had about 40 people, which was a big crowd for an unknown author. We sold out in a blink — probably 80 to 100 books. We don't sell 80 to 100 books of Stephen King or Dennis Lehane."

Word spread. Several teachers read the book, and both Swampscott and Marblehead high schools added it to the literature curriculum.

That’s what needs to be done, all right, not to mention that the novel itself has to be worth the time, effort, and money involved.

In writing this post I don’t for an instant mean to even imply that had I done the same for my novel that it would have achieved even a small fraction of the success now enjoyed by Ms. Barry’s novel. She’s apparently a genuine writer who wrote a genuine novel, not some dilettante who turned out a tiny-niche-market genre novel on a whim; a genre novel that was more manufactured to formula than written. In writing this post it’s my intention to point out that in today’s world self-publishing need no longer be a mere exercise in vanity as it has been since forever, but is today a commercially viable publishing route for an author to follow in order to get his work out to the public and make money from the enterprise into the bargain. Perhaps not the kind of money made by Ms. Barry — in that respect, her case is quite exceptional — but enough for a genuine writer to make writing and marketing his own work a profitable fulltime occupation.

It’s a brave new publishing world out there.