David Shields’ Reality Hunger
Well, in case you hadn’t heard, David Shields’ Reality Hunger is sure to be the K-Y jelly of the preeminent journalist/writer/critic circle jerk of 2010.
I thought it would be wise to get in on the buzz, so here’s hoping that Google indexes this post and in a few months, when the book is published, I’ll get a ton of hits by surfers trying to understand how they ended up on an empty platform, coughing on the fumes of the departed Literary Zeitgiest Express.
Kidding aside. Fellow writers, relax. Despite the pre-press hype already branding Shields’ future dissenters as “defenders of the status quo,” we do not have to stop what we are doing, chuck everything we know about the novel, burn our manuscripts, and get on board with some new aesthetic of collage fusion gonzo journalistic essay-novels.
The most intriguing news so far is how the book world is trying to keep up with the pace of electronic media–or perhaps the electronic media are demanding that it do so. Shields’ self-proclaimed manifesto does not even exist yet other than as a galley proof, and Zadie Smith has already responded to it with an article in The Guardian online. That’s kind of amusing. [Edit. The article is down from The Guardian. Smith's article itself was an excerpt from her new book. It's meta-meta marketing, folks.]
The scene in my mind right now is this. Street corner. Newsie in bonnet and vest waving paper overhead:
Extra! Extra! Random House Authors Enthusiastic About Forthcoming Random House Book!
Straight out of The Onion, no? I’m referring to the gushing blurbs that are already making the interweb rounds. Maybe Reality Hunger is that enthralling. I’m certainly looking forward to some thought-provoking content. But at this moment, what’s more groundbreaking, Shields’ ideas or the artificial way ideas achieve prominence and “groundbreaking” status in the viral marketing age?
A YouTube video made by the book publisher shows in split screen the author in a webcast with a fat guy in Florida. The author wears a bluetooth earpiece and mic, his head is futuristically shaved, and his face is mashed into the frame with that fish-eye-lens kind of rounding that conveys pressing importance, an on-the-scene, voyeuristic sense of THIS IS HAPPENING NOW, WE ARE LIVE, PEOPLE.
The idea is that we are supposed to respond by thinking, “Hey, writers aren’t stodgy intellectuals in tweed coats. They are cutting edge. At least this one is. I better check him out. He must be the future of literature.”
In fact, as I understand it, Sheild’s book began as an essay that appeared in The Believer in 2006. The Believer is a journal that you will be lucky to find behind issues of MacWorld magazine at Barnes & Noble. I don’t have any stats to back this up, but it does not have the circulation or networking capacities of a major publisher, and it certainly doesn’t have the advertising budget.
TheMillions.com writes:
[Sheilds:] ”…both straight-ahead journalism and airtight art are, to me, insufficient; I want instead something teetering anxiously in between.” The numbering of the chunks and mundanity of the recollections followed so soon after by the intensity of revelation give the whole excerpt a bloggy, if not Twittery, feel.
That sets off my skeptical alarms. Without even knowing yet what exactly Shields’ work is and says, I can see that some marketing executives at book publishers would think very highly of the concept of a book that reads like a blog. It might actually sell to web readers accustomed to slapdash unrevised reactionary dualistic rabble-rousing sound bite sentences. The read-it-and-don’t look-back approach. And goodness knows, there’s a lot of pressure on marketing executives in publishing to figure out a way to increase sales.
Yet, I’m finding my impulse to defend the status quo very strong. And that’s something to be wary of. If I’m going to look at marketers’ motives, I must look at my own. What’s my stake? Well, I’ve got one novel out and another in the works; both are well within the conventions of the form. They abide the status quo. Maybe Reality Hunger will incite me to break down the sheltering walls of fictional forms. I just don’t know yet. But I will be happy to read the book, in good time, and consider its arguments carefully.
So come on, crusty old book publishers with your Gutenberg technology, let’s get this thing to press. We’re coming up on lunchtime–this is almost old news.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)On Reading DeLillo’s Libra
In Don Delillo’s Libra, all the men are of the same ilk to an extent that isn’t believable. They all seem shaped by DeLillo’s masculine sensibility. They are all in ¾ profile, or less. There’s a whole domain of feeling that none of them experience—or, being a domain, I should say “enter.” None enters it, this domain of feeling. It’s a place, broadly put, of vulnerable, soft emotions. (Believe me, I never thought this kind of thing would be my literary crusade.) Continue reading »
Filed under On Reading, On Writing | Comment (0)28 Things
A story of mine, “28 Things About the Beast,” appears in the October 2009 issue of Qwerty, a Canadian journal.
It’s a fluffy little number. It’s literary merangue. Read it online.
From the Earnest News department, I’m pleased to share that I’ll be teaching a class at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis in the summer of 2010. It will be an 8-week workshop on Literary short fiction as a genre.
If you don’t know about The Loft, do check them out. Loft classes are a great way for writers of all levels to keep inspired, connected, and productive.
Filed under Earnest News | Comment (0)
Benjamin Obler is the author of Javascotia, a novel from Penguin Books UK.
