Score One for the Gatekeepers

Great article at Salon.com today. Laura Miller on the realities of the supposed coming onslaught of self-publishing, as driven by e-books, social media, etc. Have you noticed a trend? I’m highly supportive of skepticism around social media and digital revolutions, especially as it relates to the book world.

“Slush fatigue,” as Miller calls it, is a reality. I read/screened manuscripts at a small publisher some years ago. This house published a set number of poetry and fiction titles every year. Their submission guidelines were explicit, their catalog established. Around this time, in conjunction with a visit from Allen Ginsberg, it published a limited edition leather chapbook of his poems, printed on a vintage letterpress. I still recall one particular manuscript. It was a hand-drawn bundle of pages on the zen of downhill skiing: sketches of dudes doing daffies off cliffs, shushing through deep powder. Caligraphy or pen and ink haikus spoke of the ethereal joys of communing with the mountain, etc. A heartfelt work, but not remotely in line with the publisher’s aesthetic.

This is not the kind of thing Miller talks about, but it’s a facet: work that is simply not a contender. It drains the mind trying to comprehend the author’s delusions; and when it’s prose, it saps the spirit giving it the requisite sympathy and attention. Because you have to give it something of yourself, no matter what. You step into the work like Miles on “Lost” tapping into a corpse’s dying moment. You enter the grim, ugly world of cliche, flat characters, wooden dialogue, contrived and borrowed plot devices, over-reaching metaphor, confusing clauses, questionable character names. Like Miles, you shiver and open your eyes. Bad writing makes you want to race back to reality and dwell there: the world where Updike’s mellifluous prose (or Gaitskill’s searing insight) rightfully prospers. You want to stay there, go to lunch with your trade paperback The Best American Short Stories, because they just might be what the title claims.

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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 »

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v., to set fire to; ignite

Javascotia is now available  for your Kindle.

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On The Road

I’m reading The Road by C. McCarthy. Finally. It was an Oprah pick, I think, a few years ago. Many acquaintances and coworkers I know have read it—casual readers by all accounts. My wife has read it. Discussion has surrounded me, and I’ve meant to check it out for some time. Finally am. Pretty captivating, and certainly unique. Grim. But a bit silly at times. Rather like a horror film when they went down in that basement. And the lack of evidence
for what really happened is convenient, in a way. It’s effective, because of the added mystery and the horror of the unimaginable, yet actually makes it easier for the author, does it not? I mean, there’s no chronology or logic of catastrophe to be invented. There’s no science to verify. No political realities to account for. Just some type of obliteration, evidenced by heaps of ash, still falling after years. Hmm. A volcano? Copious nuclear detonation? But there’s no discussion of radiation or its after effects. Maybe I’m revealing my ignorance here. Maybe all the other readers of this book know what happened, pieced it together by deduction. Why has it eroded the good will of all humanity? Best left to the imagination.

The part that doesn’t add up to me is why they would leave the underground bunker they found with the stores of food, water, dry clothes, beds, shelter. They may be found there and be killed, but they can more easily be found on the road, in the open, and killed as well. So assuming those risks are equal, I cannot imagine how the draw of those basic human needs for warmth, peace, and shelter, are forsaken, rejected. Especially since no concrete reason is given for why the man and his son need to reach the ocean. Or why they need to get south for that matter. What’s in the south? Warmth? I guess. Where they are now it continues to snow on them. But they’ve been in this post-apocalyptic environment for several years, at least, according to the narrative evidence. So other winters were survived. What has changed? Why not survive another winter? Conveniently unexplained. I’m not saying the premise is unsupportable—no, as a reader, I suspend my disbeliefs and doubts. But these cracks release some pressure from the plot. And ultimately, I think, the ocean is not so much a practical goal as a symbolic and narrative destination—that thing to be hoped for. That hope for salvation.

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