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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