Tag / literary

by Edward Champion

On Literary “Influence,” Success, and Resentment

Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi has been taken to task for its alleged plagiarism. But this is really more of a case of commonplace literary influence. The manufactured “controversy” is built on resentment and it’s a waste of everybody’s time.

I decided to read Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi — released this week — on the basis of a controversy that erupted last summer. Conroe had allegedly appropriated the work of Sam Pink. I’ve exposed plagiarists before. I’m always happy to do so again. Plagiarists are great enemies to anyone committed to creativity and originality.

But I’ve compared dozens of passages from Fuccboi against Sam Pink’s work just to be sure. Fuccboi isn’t a plagiarized work. It definitely owes some influence to Sam Pink. But it’s hardly the grand theft that Pink advertised it to be.

Fuccboi is an okay book. Nothing special. Not really all that “fearless” — to use a buzz word that’s been tossed around by the hype machine. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It just didn’t grab me. I honestly don’t care enough about the book one way or the other to write an expansive opinion.

The Conroe-Pink controversy is actually something far more cliched than an act of plagiarism. It’s a case where someone who deserves more success complains about someone who actually has success. A tale as old as time, except with an eager social media poised to pounce on the key players.

This was something we saw with the controversies that have plagued Kristen Roupenian. Roupenian had great success with her short story, “Cat Person,” which appeared in The New Yorker and went viral. She then netted a $1.2 million advance and an HBO development deal with her collection, You Know You Want This. And the weirdest thing about the reviews is that male reviewers were largely okay with the book while women went ballistic. Why? Because they were resentful. They were the ones who deserved all the gravy! In The Washington Post, Emily Gould devoted most of her “review” complaining about Roupenian’s success, even writing, “I felt absolutely enraged by its weaknesses.” Enraged? You’re just angry because you didn’t land the big book deal. Then, last summer, Slate stepped into the manufactured media smackdown and published an essay from Alexis Nowicki pointing to certain details that Roupenian had inadvertently plucked from her life. Turns out that Roupenian met up with a man who had a much younger girlfriend (Nowicki). She heard some of the details and used her imagination to jump off from them with “Cat Person.”

Now this was hardly Wallace Stegner plucking verbatim from Mary Hallock Foote’s letters in Angle of Repose. But apparently it was enough to enrage Nowicki. Nowicki emailed Roupenian and Roupenian replied with a considerate note of apology.

But come on now. As Lauren Groff tweeted in response to the Roupenian social media uproar, “I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets.”

Which brings us back to Conroe and Pink.

On August 15, 2021, Sam Pink published a blog post, claiming that Conroe completely stole his style and publishing correspondence between him and Conroe. “You’ll see the influence,” wrote Conroe to Pink. “My only hope is you won’t feel it to be flagrant. That you’ll view it as flattery. As gratitude. People go around with this idea of originality, where they tryna front like they got no influences. My shit is, fkn draw from everything you fuck with most. But then shout out who you fuck with. Pay homage to the Ogs.”

But Pink certainly didn’t see Conroe’s email that way. In his post, Pink wrote, “In addition to him admitting it, there is similar slang in the book, it’s divided in seasons like garbage times, the opening is very similar to garbage times, he even uses the trick from person where a word scrolls through his head.”

Conroe’s novel certainly has a loose nod to the structure of Sam Pink’s The Garbage Times. Both novels open in January. Like Pink, Conroe is fond of using truncated and often verbless one-sentence paragraphs to generate reading momentum. And he did indeed “use the trick” from Person.

But is this outright plagiarism? On the level of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams ripping off Marvin Gaye? No. Anyone who reads knows damned well that authors test out their own spins on other author’s stylistic tricks. Pink himself is no exception.

In The Garbage Times, Pink shows, to my mind, a clear debt to Martin Amis by including a ruffian named Keith — a wastrel with “slicked-back hair and a boiled-looking face” and “tiny busted teeth.” Amis, of course, has slicked-back hair, has had dentition issues, and, of course, included a memorable scoundrel named Keith Talent in his very underappreciated novel, London Fields. Amis’s Keith wears a silver leather jacket. Pink’s Keith wears a leather trenchcoat. Amis’s characters in London Fields smoke half-cigarettes and Pink’s Keith also smokes a half-cigarette. Should Amis raise a stink against Sam Pink? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Especially for a man of his age and renown.

This is really about resentment.

And, look, I get it. I’m not a jealous or a competitive person. But during moments in my life when I have felt devalued and hopeless, I have become pissed off when mediocre “talents” who have hurt me in monstrous ways go on to have success. A pair of two-bit lowlifes in the audio drama world who led a vicious campaign to defame me get their audio drama adapted into an awful Netflix TV show? What the fuck? It’s only human to feel upset when your hard and careful work is devalued and underappreciated and someone else comes along and reaps all the success and riches that were seemingly denied you.

But moments like this are incredibly rare for me — usually arriving at the worst and most depressing moments of my life. I’m too busy focusing on getting better at my craft. That’s what I can control. I have no sway whatsoever over who gets selected to shoot into the stratosphere. And I try not to pay too much attention to it. It’s a waste of time and energy.

Sam Pink is a talented novelist who should be more widely read. Personally I feel that he has far greater talent than Conroe. And it’s criminal that he didn’t land the coveted $200,000 publishing deal.

But it’s a waste of time to let someone who is successful — especially someone who isn’t all that talented — live rent-free in your head.

by Edward Champion

RIP Gregory Henry

Gregory Henry was a beautiful man with a bountiful heart. His great passion for others and his work in the literary world will always be remembered.

Gregory Henry has passed away and I am in tears. For those who didn’t know him, he was an exuberant publicist with a gleeful spirit and a ferocious wit who worked for Harper Perennial for many years and who had only recently landed a job at independent publisher Melville House. The books world is infinitely lesser without his magnificent presence.

I was deeply fond of him. He was a gentle and giving soul, a beautiful man with a bountiful heart who stuck up for the oddballs and the eccentrics and who went above and beyond to be there for people. I’ll always remember that. Unlike many literary people who wrote me off based on lies and rumors invented by putative “journalists,” Gregory stuck with me when I went through my crackup. When I hit rock bottom, Gregory went well out of his way to make sure that I was okay and to remind me about why I was needed. He offered to send me books when I was living in a homeless shelter. He wanted me to come back. (And I did with my audio drama, which literally saved my life.) He told me that I had been significantly wronged. I suspect that I would not be here, were it not in part because of Gregory’s vast munificence and his heartfelt empathy for the weirdos.

When I felt that my life was over, Gregory regaled me with any number of gossipy stories of authors (tales I will take to the grave) who had done far worse things than I had even conceived. And he got me to laugh through my pain by pointing out the long history of misfits needlessly persecuted by the mainstream. This was because Gregory believed in people and he wanted to see them thrive. He had this amazing instinct for knowing people. Really knowing them. He would notice that one quality that escaped the notice of others and he would always be right.

I met Gregory many years ago when he worked as a publicist and I was producing The Bat Segundo Show. He instantly got who I was and what I did and he did everything in his power to make sure that I could carry on with my journalistic mischief. And here’s the thing: he would wait for you to discover who he was and what he was doing and how he cared. And he would be patient. That was part of the way he believed in others. And then, once you knew who Gregory was, well, brother, you became a loyal soldier for this coruscating soul walking the earth with his gentle radiance and his subtle honesty.

As we got to know each other more over the years, I learned that we shared quite a number of traits: a great empathy for others, an emotional vulnerability, a willingness to put ourselves on the line, a similar disbelief in the people who cared for us. I would likewise check up on him whenever he was going through a tough spot. Like me, he was fighting a few demons of his own. But we both somehow summoned the passion to give our all for other people.

Like me, Gregory was a karaoke enthusiast. And during the early days of the pandemic, Gregory and I had made a pledge to hit the karaoke bars together when all this blew over. We were going to sing wildly ambitious songs that required a great deal of range and that killed with crowds and got us the attention of prospective lovers. And I was really looking forward to this. Now, sadly, I won’t be able to do this.

Gregory Henry, I loved you, my friend. You were truly one of the good ones. And I’m devastated that you’re no longer here. You touched more people than you knew. And you did me more than a solid at a time when I really needed it. I hope that I was able to return the favor.

by Edward Champion

Audio Drama: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

This bold modern day audio drama adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story takes place in the present day and is dedicated to the #metoo movement.

We just released “The Yellow Wallpaper.” This is a standalone story that is part of the second season of The Gray Area. You can follow the audio drama series through this episode guide.

This is the first audio drama that I’ve adapted from another source — in this case, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” one of my favorite short stories of all time. This adaptation is set in the modern day and is dedicated to the #metoo movement. This radio play honors the text, but is somewhat experimental.

Here are a number of useful links: (The Gray Area website) (the iTunes feed) (the Libsyn RSS feed) (the Podchaser feed)

For listeners who want to support our show, we have a great deal of behind-the-scenes material available for Season 2 subscribers at grayareapod.podbean.com.

Written, produced, and directed by Edward Champion
Adapted from the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story

CAST:

The Woman: Katrina Clairvoyant and Nicole Papadopoulos
John: Zack Glassman
Jenie: Devony DiMattia
The Child: Devony DiMattia
The Wallpaper: Pete Lutz
The Guests: Michael Saldate, Charly Saccocio, and Edward Champion
The Voice: Carol Jacobanis
Mary: Belgys Felix
The Nurse: Argyria Kehagias

Sound design, editing, engineering, and mastering by a bald man in Brooklyn who reads too many books.

Music licensed through Musicfox.

Image licensed through Getty.

Thank you for listening!

If you’d like to support this independent audio production and learn more about how we made it, for only $20, you can become a Season 2 Subscriber! You’ll get instant access to all episodes as we finish them — months before release. Plus, you’ll get access to exclusive interviews and more than 400 minutes of behind-the-scenes commentary! Here are some behind-the-scenes photos and videos pertaining to this episode that we made during the more than two years of production we put into the second season.

Behind the Scenes:

by Edward Champion

The Overwritten Sentences of Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell’s mediocrity sets me off like a bull running loose in the streets of Pampolona. This “sentence master” is a fraud. Here are several reasons why.

There are awful writers out there who you can ignore or forgive. Because you can at least detect a whiff of growth with each new volume. And honestly who wants to be the guy stifling an artist’s evolution?

But every so often, you have the misfortune of reading the other type of awful writer. The awful writer whose rhythm is so off and whose observational approach is so obtuse and obvious and condescending that his work just fills you with rage. This type of awful writer is often anointed with undeserved literary royalty when the work itself offers little more than platitudes. He becomes so puffed up with vanity and certainty because today’s literary outlets are little more than fawning promotional hubs rather than thoughtful and genuinely useful venues for critical discussion. The awful writer believes his own press. And he gives the public more of the same. And the public, easily manipulated by savvy publicists and locked in the Ouroboros of social media groupthink, comes to believe that there’s something to the mediocrity.

Garth Greenwell is a writer I despise with the same venom that I apply to anyone who stands in the way of universal healthcare and solving income inequality. He is the Pete Buttigieg of literature: a smug huckster who seems so certain that he knows the world when he really doesn’t know much at all and will never be honest about his ignorance, a younger man inexplicably adopting the windbag cadences of a calcified septuagenarian. Like Buttigieg, Greenwell is a pretentious and out-of-touch bore who flexes his alleged erudition not from a place of genuine passion and curiosity and interest in people, but much like a Bernese Mountain Dog performing a spinning trick before a paying crowd. Step right up! Look at the man’s sentences! Pay no attention to that ungainly clause between the commas! Greenwell has been given a free ride by the literary establishment, largely because there is presently a vacuum for the type of culture-fueled gay literature that has been long practiced by the likes of Edmund White. Certainly we need more of this type of writing. But it needs to be good writing. And Greenwell ain’t it. He isn’t an Ed White. He’s certainly not a James Baldwin or a Christopher Isherwood or a Shyam Selvadurai. And he sure as hell isn’t a genius like Alan Hollinghurst. (Honestly, if you’re considering reading Greenwell, you’re better off reading everything Hollinghurst has written. That man is a true master of the sentence, not Greenwell.)

Greenwell’s overwritten and often unintentionally hilarious prose has been mistakenly heralded as top of the line. You have to give the people at FSG this much. They really know how to manipulate today’s literary bobbleheads. I’m likely feeling far more indignation about this than I should. But bad writing sets me off like a hopped up bull running loose in the streets of Pampalona.

Anyway, last week, I had the considerable displeasure of reading Garthwell’s latest volume, Cleanness. I found myself in a state of unceasing disappointment and a book-throwing fury I couldn’t seem to shake over how such literary bullshit got a pass from today’s overworked editors. Here are some examples of Garth Greenwell’s overwritten offenses:

“…as if he were deciding whether or not to pronounce a judgment he was on the point of making.”

If G. is already deciding, there is no need to tell us that he is “on the point of making” a judgment. This would be akin to maybe eating a bagel that I am on the point of chewing.

“I came to the center every morning I could, walking the streets as the city woke up…”

Pick a lane, Greenwell. If you’re walking the streets as the city wakes up, then we already know that it is morning.

“The room was lit by a row of small windows near the top of one wall, their panes clouded and stained with smoke, so that the light was strangely muted, as if steeped in tea.”

Who in the hell edits Greenwell? This is a lot of pretentious huffing and flexing just to impart that smoke-stained windows muted the light in the room. The superfluously precise detail of the “row of small windows near the top of one wall” gets in the way of the tea-steeped light. (I’ll give him some credit for the tea imagery!) William Gibson is better at hyper-specific description because it’s a vital part of his atmosphere. Greenwell, by contrast, reads like some dude tormented by descriptive desperation.

“G. laid his cigarettes on the table and rested the tips of his fingers on the pack, tapping it lightly.”

In an attempt to be clever and “literary,” Greenwell uses G.’s fingers as a metaphorical parallel to the cigarettes. But this sentence is a failure for its length and risibility. The image of a smoker tapping a pack of cigarettes with his fingers for five minutes like the late Neil Peart doing a drum solo is an unintentionally hilarious one.

“My satisfaction only deepened when G. continued, after our coffee arrived and we took a moment to add sugar and milk.”

I looked into his eyes, after I patted my left jeans pocket, my hand placed perpendicularly to my thigh, and felt around for my keys, which were shiny and jangling and nestled like a pig in a blanket. Come on. You obviously don’t care about my keys. You care about me looking into my lover’s eyes. But then this is the Greenwell formula: imply “literary” import by stretching a sentence beyond its natural limits. Honestly, who gives a toss about the sugar and milk? How is this important to the story? We’ve already established the rituals in this restaurant. This badly written bullshit gets me fuming.

“He didn’t look at me as he said this, looking instead at his hands, both of which were on the table in front of him and in one of which a cigarette had shrunk almost to a nub between two fingers.”

This is a lot of hot air just to get to the cigarette nub. We don’t need to know that the table is in front of him. Where the fuck else would the table be? Behind him? I mean, if Greenwell wants to chronicle an unusual Bulgarian practice of sitting in restaurants and reaching behind one’s back to eat your meal, then, dammit, I’m all ears. In fact, a goofy story along those lines would be far more interesting than anything Greenwell has ever written.

“I put both of my hands around the cup in front of me, taking a deep breath as I pressed my palms against what warmth was left, and then, when I could speak more calmly, What is the life you want, I asked.”

I must confess that this sentence made me laugh out loud. It reveals what a humorless dolt Greenwell is. It shows us how a badly written sentence — and, let’s face it, there isn’t a page in Cleanness that isn’t littered with these runts — can completely botch your efforts to establish atmosphere. The belabored attempt at sensual intimacy, followed by the superficial question, is unsuccessful because of the preposterous behavioral explanation. Greenwell might have had me if he had stuck with the hands around the cup. But he’s such a literary control freak that he has to tell us why the narrator does this. And when he does, we have to take a deep breath and say to ourselves, “Oh, Greenwell, you hopeless Harvard gasbag. You really don’t know people as well as you think you do.”

“He hunched his shoulders a little, as if to say I don’t know or maybe what does it matter, and then he started talking about something else, or what seemed like something else, making me feel again that I was on the wrong tack, that I had failed to sense or say what I should.”

More overwritten malarkey! Greenwell asphyxiates his readers with these superficial explanations of what behavior — in this case, G. hunching his shoulders — may mean as opposed to suggesting what it can mean and how these two characters perceive it. Good fiction requires ambiguity and speculation about characters. And we’re clearly not getting that here. Greenwell also commits the cardinal sin of explicitly telling us how the narrator feels rather than permitting his gestures to suggest feeling. For all of his syntactic engineering, Greenwell fails to understand that a good sentence needs to advance the story and our knowledge of the characters. The rhythm here is off, complete with the “something else” jumble that is completely superfluous and appears to exist here to pad out the page count. (Cleanness is 240 pages and the text has been typeset so that you get about thirty lines per page with notably larger page margins.)

“It was a tender gesture, and his voice was tender too as he said Kuchko, addressing me as if solicitously and tilting my head so that we gazed at each other face to face; his fingers flexed against my cheek, almost in a caress.”

Greenwell has been celebrated for his frank portrayals of intimacy. And while I’m happy to see more LGBTQ and BDSM relationships in mainstream literature, I cannot accept bullshit sentences. If you have tilted your lover’s head and you are gazing at each other, you are face to face. What other position would you be in? This takes us back to the eccentric table ritual in Bulgarian restaurants, which has captured my imagination so much that I may very well have to write a story about this myself. Also, why do we need the “as if solicitously” and “almost in a caress”? The adverb stands out like a sore thumb and the imagery here is pulled from the bodice-ripper cliche playbook. Greenwell is near incapable of writing a story without all this unnecessary commentary on what a gesture may mean. I suppose, it’s that privilege and Harvard background that makes this asshat assume that his readers are too impaired to imagine anything.

“I could feel his cock thicken against my cheek, then lengthen and lift: there had been no change in it during my long recitation, that catalog of desires I had named, but now at our first real touch he grew hard.”

If this sentence isn’t a finalist for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, I’ll be very surprised. This reads more like a description of Puppetry of the Penis than a love scene. And Greenwell’s verbosity, his compulsion to insert needless clauses, his catalog of desires (nay! his catalog of desires that he has written!), really destroys his good faith efforts to describe intimacy. But he certainly has a strong future ahead with these unpardonably flatulent sentences!

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this essay mistakenly referred to a “Burnese Mountain Dog” as a “Burmese Mountain Dog.” Reluctant Habits is grateful to reader George Jansen for pointing out this error.]

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Wayne Koestenbaum

In this one hour interview, poet and social critic Wayne Koestenbaum discusses humiliation in its many forms, the use of triangles to uphold book concepts, Edith Massey, and whether striking out language is a muscular statement.

Wayne Koestenbaum appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #423. He is most recently the author of Humiliation.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Fully considering the witnesses.

Author: Wayne Koestenbaum

Subjects Discussed: Whether a deliberate slander of a surname is a humiliation, the three components of humiliation (victim, abuser, and witness), the differences between recorded humiliation and experiential humiliation, spectacles of martyrdom, preexisting humiliation and statutes of limitation, edicts of instantaneous revocation, Koestenbaum’s use of triangles to uphold book concepts, itemizing shameful personal anecdotes, self-excavation as a writer, the pleasure of sentence making, being eons away from publication, rousing one’s self from stupor through stimulated memories, glimmerings that regurgitate and abreact, Koestenbaum’s obsession with a paddled third-grader, shifting personal anecdotes around to serve the narrative and whether this cheapens it, life as an experience of first times, Freud’s cathexis, cheapening vs. coarsening, what Koestenbaum doesn’t write about, Koestenbaum’s uncertainty in knowing whether or not he humiliates his own parents, growing up in a family where disclosure is normal, observing a large woman who urinates in the middle of a sidewalk, Edith Massey, Female Trouble, parodying Russ Meyer, John Waters as instigator of a cinematic spectacle, being simultaneously atrocious and radiant, Divine, fecal doppelgangers, honesty vs. humiliation, displaying one’s body, David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son,” the genuine facial expression of a person in orgasm, Anita Bryant being pied, pornography and humiliation, seeing the malevolent as human, the draw of Liza Minnelli videos, the human duty to understand multiple perspectives, an artificially polarized theater of affect, Freud and children getting beaten, being kind to the humiliated, finding Alec Baldwin sexually attractive, Alec Baldwin as a macho ego ideal, rejecting tabloid culture, the scapegoating culture, the London riots, privileged humiliation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the Jim Crow gaze, Abu Ghraib, Michael Jackson, whether Osama bin Laden was humiliated because America withheld the photo, Annie Leibovitz taking photos of Susan Sontag’s corpse, David Rieff, respecting evil historical figures, whether Shakespeare humiliated language, Basquiat striking out words in his paintings, Finnegans Wake, humiliation vs. a sense of wonder, radical muscularity within language, “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” logocide, writing with physical pleasure, humiliation vs. sorting out thoughts, critiquing the sign system of American power, writing on paintings, wrongness as the new gold standard, Gertrude Stein, “maltitude,” well-done violent movies, John Woo, major human dynamics at stake, behavioral options when responding to assholes, Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent” maxim, humiliation and consent, Freud’s anti-Semitic experiences, writerly failure, vengeance, TC Boyle’s “Bury your enemies,” and aggression in writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: In “Catheter,” you write at the end, “I have a noble aim: to urge you to be kind when you see someone humiliated, even if you think that the shamed person deserves punishment.” When you find someone like Alec Baldwin sexually attractive and, in your own words, “wondering why I agree to occupy this role rather than refuse it by vowing to ignore the tabloid trade of trashing the stars,” I’m wondering if you are being kind to Alec Baldwin. If you don’t know the figure who is being humiliated, if you’ve never met them, can you always be kind? I’m curious about this.

Koestenbaum: You mean, is that like the tree falling in the forest thing? Like if I’m kind to Alec Baldwin by not reading a scandalous story about him, how will he know I’m being kind?

Correspondent: That, and also this compelling allure of participating in that culture. I mean, when that whole thing came out, I heard about it from friends. But I made a conscious choice not to participate in it. Because I just felt that it wasn’t worth my time. I’m only getting one side of the story. I don’t know Alec Baldwin. I like him as an actor, but, you know, what business is it of mine? You know what I mean? So as a result, it seems to me that you’re finding or you’re vacillating with “Should I participate?” To be or not to be.

Koestenbaum: Right. Okay, I will say that I totally get your point. That you’re talking about the kind of conscientious objection to or an abstaining from the gladiatorial carnival of consuming celebrity carrion.

Correspondent: Absolutely.

Koestenbaum: And I understand that. I would say that in my life, I have made a few golden exceptions to that rule because of deep libidinal and imaginative connections that I had. And so for example, having written a whole book about Jackie Onassis, that’s a case where I flagrantly did not abstain from the national profession of consuming images of Jackie. I indulged it. But that’s because I had deep unconscious motives. And I felt that much for me was personally at stake in pursuing that obsession. In the case that you’re mentioning, where you like Alec Baldwin as an actor but you don’t have strong feelings about him, it’s not a difficult thing for you to abstain. For me, like Alec Baldwin, I didn’t consume it as deeply originally as I did when I decided to write about it. But I do have a kind of long-standing crush on Alec Baldwin. I’ve interviewed him. I wrote about him in my book Cleavage a little. “My Evening with Alec Baldwin.” We’re the same age. He is a kind of weird hectoring ego ideal — hectoring isn’t the right word. I mean, he seems like a kind of bossy guy. He’s a kind of macho ego ideal for me. So I have — he’s a — I agreed, agree I have cast him in my drama, but, yeah, I’m using him as a teaching point.

Correspondent: But how can you be kind? I mean, I think you nailed it on the head there by pointing out and being fully candid about the fact that there’s an allure there. There’s a sexual attraction there. He forms an imaginary impulse for all sorts of things in your mind. Which is perfectly fine and that’s completely understandable. But at the same time, can you also be kind when you have that going on as well? It’s almost as if this is another instigation point for humiliation.

Koestenbaum; Right. No, no, no, I will say then that, toward Alec Baldwin, perhaps I have not been supremely kind. But I’m not alone. And I would like to think — maybe I’m dreaming — I would like to think that I’m placing the whole Alec Baldwin crease within a really large cultural context of these kinds of spectacles. And I’m reviewing, I’m saying on the one hand I get a sort of sadistic erotic relish from this. And then on the other hand, I wish to abstain from the process of scapegoating others. I’m never saying he’s a bad father. There’s never a moment where I pass judgment on him. I’m commenting instead on his use of the word “humiliating” in the thing to his daughter. It’s hard for me to really explain this, except to say that I’m not making judgments about Alec Baldwin. I’m making judgment about the star culture and the culture of scapegoating.

Correspondent: It can be argued that the London riots, which occurred a few days ago at the time of this conversation, that they arose because you have the poor, the young, the disenfranchised given no choice. Essentially they are humiliated. Thus, you have revolt from humiliation. You touch upon this very early in the book where you deal with revolt, activism, and uprising as a response to humiliation. You conclude that, “Choosing homicidal martyrdom as a response to historical humiliation, I become a suicide bomber.” What of this space in between which causes riots? Very often you have no progress but more of the same. How do you reconcile? What we’ve been talking about here is essentially privileged humiliation vs. an unprivileged humiliation in which it’s unrest or activism.

Koestenbaum: That’s a really — I mean, I don’t have profound or definitive things to say. That’s a moral conundrum for deeper minds than mine. Honestly. But in a way, it’s the question of a justified violence or of revolution, a violent revolution. And when it’s justified or it’s not. And who is to decide when it’s justified. That’s a big question. And I think it’s — I want to say case by case. I would hesitate to make any generalizations about revolution. I think I talk about what I call the Rosa Parks principle, where humiliation leads to uprising and activism or Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. But let’s just call it the suicide bomber or the terrorist question. I don’t want to say pro-terrorist things. Because I don’t really feel very pro-terrorist.

Correspondent: But you are willing to confront what you call the Jim Crow gaze. That look where someone looks at another person as if there is nothing there. Complete invisibility. Entirely because of race and also often because of class or because of sexual orientation or what have you. It seems to me that this willingness on your part to tackle this difficult question doesn’t necessarily make your views on humiliation legitimate or transferable from this place of privilege and this place of media obsession to this really stark territory of “How do I get by when I don’t have any options on the streets?”

Koestenbaum: Right.

Correspondent: No thoughts in terms of the Jim Crow gaze in comparison to the Alec Baldwin stuff we were talking about before?

Koestenbaum: It’s a really — I mean, I talk about both things in the book. Because it seems that with the title and a subject like humiliation, I have a feeling I don’t want to write a book just about the Alec Baldwin things. That’s only one question that interests me. And I was just as much motivated to write this book by the Abu Ghraib things. But as I say, very honestly, there were three catalysts: Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Abu Ghraib. They have very little to do with each other. But there is a kind of spectrum where all three instances involve the United States, power, scandal, and sex. Or the sexualizing of — I don’t know. I don’t want to say glib or wrong things.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Koestenbaum: I try in this book through the use of these numbered fragments to keep as separate as possible some of these kinds of instances for exactly what you’re suggesting. That it’s not possible to map what you’re calling “privileged humiliations” or, as I describe on my own, having had a relatively humiliation-free and lucky life, nonetheless I could go into this litany of my humiliations. I don’t want to say that all suffering is the same.

Correspondent: Life is not a comparison of horrors. That kind of thing.

Koestenbaum: No.

Correspondent: Well, let me try to get on this from another angle. You had mentioned very early on — and I was actually going to bring this up too — the photos that Annie Leibovitz took of Susan Sontag. The Osama bin Laden execution. There was no photo of a dead body. Saddam Hussein’s execution, we do get to see him. Now you write of Leibovitz taking photos of Sontag’s corpse, as we said earlier, quoting David Rieff, who said that she was humiliated posthumously. So the question is, if one doesn’t have the choice of seeing the photos, is it still possible to humiliate the object or the person? Was the decision, for example, to not release the Osama photos a more respectful choice? Or was it possibly something — by not giving Americans the option to humiliate or to not humiliate, maybe it was almost a dishonest choice. What do you think about that?

Koestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to chicken out of a question But I can’t. I don’t know — do I really want to talk about the Osama bin Laden photos? It feels way beyond what I can speak about responsibly in a way.

Correspondent: Even if you were also simultaneously asking us to feel kindness for those who are absolutely terrible as well.

Koestenbaum: Yeah. I mean, the only reason I say I don’t want to — it just seems — just because I wrote this book, it doesn’t mean I feel that I’m an expert on the world’s atrocities or am some extraordinary moral barometer in a way. The question has a lot of responsibility tied into it. As if because I mentioned the Susan Sontag photos in the book, I’m automatically going to have an opinion about the Osama bin Laden photos. Which I don’t. I mean, basically, I don’t have a stand about “Yes, release all photos” or “No, don’t release all photos.” Maybe I don’t understand your question.

Correspondent: Maybe the direct question to ask you is: Is Osama worthy of the same respect if someone is being humiliated as David Rieff suggested of Sontag?

Koestenbaum: Well, is that then the question of, like, “Is it possible to imagine Hitler had a mother and that she loved him?” And that’s again a question way too complicated to know the answer to. Is it possible to include in the human family some of the worst people? And I do say in the book that when I imagine or see a serial killer led to his execution, whimpering, I feel clemency rise within me. Yeah, I have that impulse. I bet you do too, if you’re asking the question. Yeah, I do have that impulse.

The Bat Segundo Show #423: Wayne Koestenbaum (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #325. Mr. Lipsyte is most recently the author of The Ask.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Looking to ask someone for something.

Author: Sam Lipsyte

Subjects Discussed: Milo Burke as the obverse to Home Land‘s Lewis Miner (and common personality qualities), Lipsyte’s early draft of The Ask getting trashed by his wife, the importance of knowing a character’s job, Stanley Elkin, descriptive dichotomies within The Ask, oscillation between extremes and forward motion in the narrative, digressive impulses, movement by painting yourself into a corner, using linguistic attributes to create distinct dialogue, the plausibility behind student housing and cages, characters who share food, the innate sadness of wraps, breast milk bars, Lipsyte’s methods of collecting information and forgetting to write details down, writing without an outline, Lipsyte’s syllabic form of internal rhyme within sentences, Lipsyte’s previous career as a lyricist, the alternative verb phrases succeeded some sentences, characters who believe that writing a book will solve everything, the purpose of writing a comic novel in a serious age, the elevator pitch motif throughout Lipsyte’s work, Lipstye’s frequent references to Old Overholt and his efforts to get a free case, “home invasion” and Lipsyte’s use of stock phrases, “closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts,” the origin of “toosh dev,” on not keeping notes, the question of whether or not there are any limits to literary movements of the penis, how sequences of events assist narrative, Gordon Lish’s principle of “all the book being the good part,” Lipsyte’s present status in relation to social networks, and Lipsyte’s present relationship with weapons.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about your sentences. You do something extremely interesting, and this syllabic form of internal rhyme. I’ll just give you a number of examples: “a tawny teen in a cocktail dress of skimpy hemp.” “I started to rub myself and, remembering I would have to retrieve Bernie soon, recalled that I’d once done what I was doing with Bernie in the room.” So there’s the oo, oo. The book’s opening line, of course: “Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.” So I’m curious whether these particular sounds serve as, I suppose, reference points in your mind to get a sentence right, whether this came from your previous career as a lyricist or possibly the Gordon Lish school rubbing off now after so many books and the like.

Lipsyte: Well, certainly, if there’s a direct rhyme there, I’d be sorry to see it. But I am interested in words that are close to each other, bouncing off of each other, colliding, creating various assonances, and such. I’m very aware of the acoustic properties of the sentences. And I listen to them. And I like to see those different elements playing off of each other. The different sounds. Just on the level of the morpheme or whatever. But, yeah, I think that I was always conscious of it. I think that studying with Gordon Lish made me understand that you could extract some power and attention to the sounds in your sentences. And I don’t know what I was doing a a lyricist, to be quite honest.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Lipsyte: I was screaming cryptic lines that couldn’t be heard because the guitars were too loud. (laughs)

Correspondent: (laughs) Maybe this was part of the syllabic quality.

Lipsyte: Yeah, exactly.

Correspondent: But I’m curious. Why syllables more so than words? I mean, there’s also, I recall reading, “Touche, douche!” There’s that as well. But more often, it’s this syllabic ride as opposed to a full word, full tilt boogie.

Lipsyte: Well, I guess that’s how I work. I mean, it’s not a conscious choice. And I think I do it in larger units as well. Or try to. And I’m very much aware. I mean, people talk about sentences. But there’s no such thing even as a great sentence. It’s about which sentences are around it. So I think that I’m trying to work on several levels.

Correspondent: I also wanted to ask about another aspect of your sentences, which is this tendency — just when you think the sentence is over, then you add a comma and a verb phrase that’s appended at the end. It’s not quite a comma splice. It’s almost a kind of alternative verb phrase. I’ll offer again some examples for folks who are listening to this. Here’s one: “Now an old man with a ducktail haircut and rolled T-shirt sleeves sauntered by” — you think the sentence is over, but no — comma, “climbed into his wine-dark bearer.” Another one: “Maura did not speak, cut her lemon chicken into rectilinear bites.” And it’s more in this book than the other two novels. And I’m curious as to how this came about.

Lipsyte: I do it as well in my book of stories probably. I just like the way it speeds up rhythm. It changes rhythm. I like the jumpiness of it. And some people say, “Why can’t you just use a fucking ‘and?'” (laughs) And sometimes I do. But sometimes I don’t.

Correspondent: Does it present an almost alternative fate in that action? Is that the idea?

Lipsyte: Yeah. Or kind of compresses time a little bit. It does a few things. And I’ve been fond of it.

Correspondent: Two characters seem to believe that writing a book will cause them to find truth, or find a lucrative career. There’s Charles Goldfarb’s book, in which he tries “to advance a new approach to transcendentalism in the face of technology and interconnectivity.” And then, of course, when Carl at the Happy Salamander tells Milo and Denise to fuck off, he announces that, “I’ll write books!” So you said in a recent interview that you don’t know what the purpose is of writing a comic novel or whether it’s going to fulfill some greater need. But it’s interesting that this reticence is shared by your characters to some degree. And I’m curious if we’re overstating the importance of books or these characters are overstating the importance of books. Or whether this is, again, just a part of the great American compromise. Being a First World bitch or what not.

Lipsyte: I’m curious about my quote. Where I said something.

Correspondent: I read the interview and, regrettably, I failed to note it down before meeting you. I read this days ago. Where you were saying that you’re not sure if the comic novel can be important in any sense. But maybe I should just ask you. (laughs)

Lipsyte; (laughs) Right.

Correspondent: Maybe I hallucinated it. I don’t think I did.

Lipsyte: Well, I’m sure what I meant to say is: I don’t know how many people can see it as important. I do. I mean, I’m not talking about my book, but, in general, I think books that have a comedic element have been the books that have fired up my imagination. No, books are incredibly important to some segment of the population. I’m not trying to say otherwise.

Correspondent: Well, these characters. Going back to them. Their insistence that books will be a vocational savior. Is this a general spitball towards Americana? Or some larger….

Lipsyte: No, I think that there’s a certain delusion about what a book can do for you, as the author. As opposed to what it might do for readers.

Correspondent: I also wanted to ask you. Because Home Land and The Ask both feature variants on the elevator pitch. You have, of course, Miner’s adventure with that white rapper in the black mink suit.

Lipsyte: Right.

Correspondent: And in this, you have Purdy’s insistence that he can deliver the most perfect elevator pitch. I’m curious how the concern for elevator pitches came about. I mean, it’s a West Coast phenomenon more than an East Coast phenomenon. So that is rather interesting.

Lipsyte: Well, I heard the phrase — maybe first in 1991 from an East Coast person. Who was kind of a businessman. So I think it’s used in all sorts of commercial pursuits. But it’s always been kind of a delightful convention to me. Because here you are in this box with a clock running, and you have to say something that’s going to make somebody else feel something. (laughs)

Correspondent: I have a very important question to ask, and that is in relation to Old Overholt. Now in Home Land, there’s that moment in which there’s the effort by Teabag to get some product placement in there, so that he can get a case of Old Overholt. Now I’m reading this. And I see Old Overholt come up twice in the book. So I’m wondering if you have reached an arrangement with the folks at Old Overholt.

Lipsyte: I’m trying to get a free case. And if it’s going to take me three books, it will be three books. (laughs)

Correspondent: Have you tried contacting them directly?

Lipsyte: No.

Correspondent: No?

Lipsyte: There are always little threads I like to pull from book to book. Just to keep me a bit amused as I work. And I like the sound of Old Overholt. It sort of opens the oral cavity in a nice way.

Correspondent: In two ways, actually.

Lipsyte: So I’m certainly happy to keep naming it until somebody at that company notices.

(Image: Mephistofales)

The Bat Segundo Show #325: Sam Lipsyte (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #309.

Brian Evenson is most recently the author of Fugue State and Last Days.

segundo309

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Latching onto toccata.

Author: Brian Evenson

Subjects Discussed: Knowing when a story concept has legs, ideas that never come to anything, the origins of “A Pursuit,” The Open Curtain, maintaining surprise, text sources vs. personal experience, writing fiction moments that hit two simultaneous emotions, grisly moments and descriptive detail, the reader’s imagination, revision and rhythm, not showing work to people, the surprise of audience responses, Bjorn Verenson, certain similarities with characters in “Ninety Over Ninety” and publishing people, Morgan Entreiken, determining the precise moment in which a story ends, open endings and critical theory, story concepts as building blocks for novels, similarities between “An Accounting” and Last Days, conversations between stories, bureaucratic language, investigating religious communities, solitary figures being pursued by men vs. the recurrent theme of community, expanding on conclusions from Ryan Call’s Collagist essay, literalisms and tributes to pulp, challenging the assumptions of “human,” translating, Antoine Volodine, how a line from The Savage Detectives inspired a short story, dwelling upon consciousness, intertextual aspects, absurdity and violence, characters who plunge into dark chambers to experience horror, being the dungeonmaster at 12, knowing the environment, Evenson’s concern for numbers and scales, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, postmodernism and theft, and the satisfaction of genre literature.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

evensonCorrespondent: Do you need to have a source text more than, I suppose, a personal experience? I mean, I could inquire as to whether you had sex with a mime. I don’t know whether you have or not.

Evenson: No, no, I didn’t. I did meet someone, after I read that story aloud, who had had sex with a mime. It made me think that maybe I could have gone even farther in that story than I did. But not a lot of it is from personal experience. I mean, I think the things that are from personal experience are not the things that you would expect. So in “Younger” and in “Girls in Tents,” you know, when I was a kid, I used to make tents out of blankets. Which I think a lot of kids did.

Correspondent: I did myself.

Evenson: Yeah. But my daughters never did. So there is a kind of personal thing there. There’s a moment in one of my stories — I think actually that it’s in The Wavering Knife, in that collection — in which someone is taking bread and squishing it until it makes a ball of bread. And that’s something that’s incredibly vivid to me from my childhood. But the main thrusts of the plot and those sorts of things are not personal experience so much. But they do respond to a lot of other things.

Correspondent: But then you’re also dealing with a lot of mutilation and violence.

Evenson:Correspondent: Like, in particular, Last Days. I mean clearly, I see that you are a zero according to that particular scale.

Evenson: Right, right, right.

Correspondent: Unless there’s something you’re not showing me.

Evenson: No, no, no.

Correspondent: How do you get into that particular mind set to make a narrative along those lines real when you have not personally experienced it?

Evenson: (laughs)

Correspondent: There’s the old famous story. Well, Stephen Crane never experienced or witnessed any kind of war. So how does reality come about for you? When do you know it’s real when you haven’t experienced it? Or are we underestimating verisimilitude and not always capitulating to that wonderful imagination?

Evenson: Well, I really do think a lot about how things would feel. Even if I haven’t experienced them. I really see myself as partly a — I don’t know quite how to describe it, but I want to create a world that the reader experiences as if they’re living through it more than something that they can see as a representation on the page. And to do that, I spend a lot of time thinking how things would feel, how things would occur. What would happen to a limb if you did something to it in Last Days. And I read a fair amount and try and figure things out that way. But mostly it’s just trying. What you say. The primacy of the imagination. Trying to imagine yourself into a space where you really are experiencing something on the page in a very visceral way. One of things that people say about my stories, both for better and for worse, is that there are stories that you don’t forget and there are stories that you feel like you’re suffering through them in some ways. While the character suffers. And as a writer, I think that’s very much what I do. I try to put myself very much in the position of the characters in the story. So in Last Days, there’s all these moments in the hospital bed. And trying to figure out how you see around the curtain if you have one kind of mirror and another kind of mirror. If you can’t move this bar to your body, then what do you do? And I took a lot of time thinking very seriously about that and trying to figure out what would I do.

(Image: Beowulf Sheehan)

BSS #309: Brian Evenson (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #240. Ms. Robinson is most recently the author of Home.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Avoiding the relationship potential of malfunctioning XLR cables.

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Subjects Discussed: Revisiting the Gilead universe, Lawrence Durrell, Robinson’s aversion to sequels, the parable of the prodigal son, the role of letters and text within Gilead and Home, text as a lively and disturbing realm, affirming identity by chronicling detail, seizing the day, Bob Marley, the depiction of the home in Housekeeping in relation to the vertical landscape, “home” as a value-charged word, listening to vernacular hymns, characters who listen to the radio, music as the great common ground, music and memory, banishing certain words, whacking sentences down, characters and educational background, the advantages of not speaking, circular food in the Boughton household, the virtues of toast, family meals and communion, the frequency of dialogue in Robinson’s novels, the predestination colloquy in Gilead and Home, James Wood’s review, the advantage and limitations of third-person perspective, interpretation vs. living the events, the shifting definition of sin during the 20th century, Iowa and anti-miscegenation laws, the Chrysler DeSoto vs. Hernando De Soto, the Kennedys, secular figures within novels, Jonathan Edwards, hypocrisy and religion, the origins of character names, the role of judgment within family, Das Kapital and Jack’s Marxism, the history of The Nation, the writer-reader relationship, using a BlackBerry, and parody and the contemporary novel.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about the tale of the prodigal son, which of course comes from Luke 15:11. The onus of guilt in that parable, however, falls largely on the son. Specifically, the quote is “Father I have sinned against heaven, and before thee / And am no more worthy to be called they son; make me as one of thy hired servants.” But Jack, he calls his father “Sir.” Not “Dad.” Although there’s a slight discrepancy near the end. He works on the DeSoto of his own accord. He’s often summoned to play on the piano and the like, and also work in the garden. But he’s sometimes an unapologetic sinner. And other times, he drowns his sorrows in alcohol. So the interesting question here about the prodigal son is: The framework of the Scriptures is clearly there in this book, but I’m curious as to when you decided to launch away from that. Likewise, was this actually a starting point? Or was it an intuitive process of trying to obvert what we know about that particular story from Luke?

Robinson: Well, I have a slightly different interpretation of that story than the one that’s generally circulated.

Correspondent: I think so. (laughs)

Robinson: You notice that the prodigal son says, “I am no longer worthy to be called thy son.” But from the father’s point of view, this is never an issue. He doesn’t ask for the son to satisfy any standards of his. He doesn’t ask for confession. He doesn’t ask for some plea for forgiveness. He sees his son coming from a distance and wants to meet him before he knows anything about him, except that he’s his son coming home. And I think that the point of the parable really is grace rather than forgiveness. The fact that the father is always the father. Despite and without conditions. And this is true in Boughton’s case. As far as he concerned, Jack is his son. And that’s the beginning and the end of it. Jack is not able to accept his father’s embrace.

Correspondent: It’s basically approaching a parable or a well-known story from a kind of cockeyed manner. Really, it comes down to this notion of the text as Scripture. I think certainly in Gilead, that was the case. And in this case, you have them throwing away letters. You have, of course, the love letters that are thrown down the drain. The letters that Jack sends out, which come back RETURN TO SENDER. And of course, they’re schlepping off a number of magazines to Ames, who lives down the block. So this is very interesting to me. Whereas the first book dealt explicitly with this idea of text as this panacea for loneliness, this book deals with disseminating the text out to other people, or getting rid of text. Which is why I ask the question as to how this relates to Scripture. Is text really something for us to cling onto in this? Whether it be a book or whether it be the Bible? Whether it be religious or literary or what not, there are matters of interpretation in life that go well beyond text and well beyond the idea of fulfilling this need to cure loneliness.

Robinson: Well, I think of text — by the analogy to Scripture that you’re making — I think of it is as something that is lively and disturbing. Disruptive. I mean, for example, say that Ames’s best hopes are met and his son receives the voice of his father when his son is an adult, that would completely jar the sense of memory, the sense of proximity to another human person, and all kinds of things that we think we understand. The letters that come to Jack and the letters that don’t come to him — they’re central. They’re alive, even though they are profoundly problematic. And I think of, in a way, text and Scripture as active in that way. As a sort of eccentric presence in human experience.

BSS #240: Marilynne Robinson (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Confessions of a 21st Century Book Reviewer

In a hot and overpriced room littered with phantom cigarettes (now only for the reckless and rich at $9 a pack; so much for the legal vices) and warm, half-empty beer bottles that he’s hoping will meet his alcoholic needs for the week, a man wearing nothing but boxers and a half-hearted smile sits at a rickety OfficeMax desk that he assembled despite the incomprehensible instructions — written in three languages, none English. He checks his email and RSS feeds. He hopes to hell that he hasn’t pissed off an editor by accident and that maybe that snot in accounting might finally send him the check he needs to make this month’s rent. It was only a few hundred bucks for a review of a 1,200 page biography he wrote four months ago; all told, he probably made just under minimum wage for all the time he put into the piece. He emails pitches to more editors, not hearing back from any of them. He remembers a time when they actually returned emails. But even the nice ones have gone corporate and can’t even be bothered with this professional courtesy. He’s been trying some bastard in the Midwest for a year and a half, but the guy hasn’t even had the decency to write back, “Fuck off.” But when he learns from the RSS feed that the editor lost his job, he pops open a bottle of champagne that he had swiped from one of the literary cocktail parties. He receives many invitations to literary cocktail parties. He’s not sure why. But when he has the time, he attends some of these affairs, telling the bartender that he’s a friend of the author. And if that doesn’t work, he drops a name of a publishing executive. But he generally walks out with a few bottles of gratis, half-decent liquor. And since it’s all tax deductible from the publisher’s perspective, he sees no real ethical conundrum.

He’s sent fifteen or twenty emails to these editors in the last week, offering unique insights on obscure novelists that he believes the public might want to know about. But they want to hire the same aging, burned out midlisters to write about the same books in the same hackneyed way. They always use that damn word “limn,” even when they’re told not to. He even called a few of these editors over the phone. He also said hello to one of these editors at a literary cocktail party just the other night. Alas, the editor was “just swamped” and quickly bolted to the other side of the room. This editor also owes him a check, but the editor swaggered about as if he should be paid for the privilege of being looked at. The man considered tossing a drink, Appointment in Samarra-style, onto this editor’s expensive suit to demonstrate the true meaning of the verb transitive in question, but thankfully thought better of it. After all, his books section would be cut eventually. Just as all the others had.

Section cuts, they say. Or sometimes don’t say, as it turns out. It might help the man if they would at least give him the consolation that he could not write his way out of the green bag he takes to the supermarket because he wants these needlessly belligerent eco-freaks to stop shrieking at him. If they could just be honest and transparent. The way the blogosphere is sometimes, when it isn’t fighting yet another battle against the print people or when the print people are playing the bloggers against each other by hiring some bloggers and not hiring others. But despite the ostensible passion for books that all of them share, they stopped playing fair sometime in 2005.

He wonders whether he should fulminate against these editors on his blog, but then he might not get linked by the humorless woman who runs the blog of a book reviewing organization that he figures should link to him from time to time, given that he pays them $35 a year for the privilege of being bombarded by dire emails announcing “the death of book reviewing” and a vote that will never be counted at their end-of-the-year book awards ceremony. But this woman has never linked to him, nor will she. She lost her passion for books a decade ago, and it’s pretty clear that this listlessness extends into her life in general. (Is this the fate of the book reviewer in the end? he thinks to himself.) But she got the job because there was nobody within the approved coven who wanted to run the blog. It was apparently just too darn hard to upgrade to WordPress. Never mind that they could probably ask the bloggers to do this for them. But that would be beneath their perceived stature.

He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He downloads porn, masturbates on a regular basis, and, in light of recent developments, he has considered switching over to homosexuality just to be sure. Because he is still reviewing books for practically peanuts at an age when a few of his school pals have risen up the ranks to become “self-starters,” with one climbing up to become a menacing partner in a cold transactional law firm, he has not exactly been what women might call “a good catch.” One woman dated him twice, but scurried away when she caught a glimpse of his bank statement. At present it is half-past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago. But he has played several games of Minesweeper and even fired up a first-person shooter for a while, suffering a humiliating loss to some teenagers who were not only more adept with the mouse and keyboard than he, but who shrieked crude insults about how gay his playing methods were. He is unmarried, and, unless he can find a sugar mommy, he would likely not be reviewing books if he had a child. When he sets foot outside, his threadbare sneakers crunch on crack vials deposited by friendly neighbors. All part of the neighborhood character, he says to anyone who dares to visit him out here. But they all know damn well he was lucky to get this apartment at this rate, even though nobody else wanted it based on the “unclean” conditions of this city block.

Needless to say this person is a writer. If he still has any literary aspirations, it’s an uphill battle. But he maintains a popular blog, hoping that this might be some small leverage he might use for a book deal. But he never writes fiction. He’s too busy reviewing it. He’s too busy blogging about it. There’s scarcely any time for anything else. A website for a European newspaper has asked him to write a 350 word blog post on an author who died last night. Nobody else had read this author’s books. And he had 30 minutes to bang something out on the keyboard. He fires up Wikipedia, rephrases a few sentences for this piece, tries to “search inside the book” at Amazon to dredge up some example from a book he read fifteen years ago and can’t remember. Nobody reads this blog post.

Do I seem to exaggerate? If anything, the scenario that George Orwell once described has grown tenfold worse. Literature itself may not be dead. It is a zombie legion regularly defying the odds, even as literature is increasingly devalued in our media, our culture, this nation on the whole. The publishers will keep on churning books. But if you’re still in this crazy game — whether as a reviewer or a blogger or a semi-participatory literary acolyte — then you’re certainly not in it for the money.

Of the many solutions that have been presented to overhaul the newspaper scenario, very few account for the most basic of needs. A fair rate to ensure that those who write about books have enough time to spend on the piece without banging off hackery, or that they can use some of the time they need to spend hustling to work on some literary side project. A timely payment of the same funds for the freelancing writer’s most immediate concern: paying the rent. But because newspapers are tanking, because the rates that newspapers pay reviewers have not changed in relation to inflation, who on earth but the most febrile literary enthusiast would lead such a life?

In the first of a two-part post entitled “Hypatia and the Burning Library,” Hart Williams ably pinpointed the problem:

Think about it, the publisher actually SPENT TIME with the writer. It’s almost as though … writing MEANT something. As if the words of a gifted poet and writer were WORTH something, had VALUE, and were worthy of cultivation. If that sounds normal to you, you are sadly off the beaten track. You see, in the 1970s and 1980s, all those book companies were bought up by conglomerates, usually with a movie studio and a record company attached, BOTH of which made so much more money than the publishing arm, that landing as the corporate manager of the poor print arm of Engulf & Devour, Inc. was the corporate equivalent of being sent to an Alaskan Arctic Radar station, or in the old USSR, being sent to Siberia. Those of you who’ve seen the Charles Bukowski documentary will recall Bukowski’s publisher, who went into his own pocket to make sure the poet had money to pay rent, buy cigarettes and alcohol and WRITE.

One can say the same thing of today’s book reviewing climate. Many book review sections are doing the best that they can to keep their sections and maintain some basic modicum. But the conglomerate mentality — ushered in by the Sam Zells (corporate dictator) and Sam Tanenhauses (subliterate corporate sycophant) — has eliminated the ability to develop and to appreciate talent. Mark Sarvas is coaxed to write for the New York Times Book Review, even as the editors contrive a smug and thoughtless takedown in place of a constructive disapprobation. (There are other shenanigans behind the scenes that I wish I could share. But I am sworn to secrecy. Rest assured, the writer — whether she be the novelist or the reviewer — is most certainly valued last at the NYTBR.) Many newspaper sections have certainly assembled fine freelancing ensembles in these days of dying book sections. But if each contributor appears, say, once a month and earns a check that only covers one-third of the rent, is this truly equitable from both the writer and the book section’s perspectives? And since the books editor is under a constant fight to keep her job and her section, things must be played safe, leaving innovation and iconoclasm to be prioritized last.

So some of us find ourselves in safer territory out here in the litblogosphere, knowing that we can write just about anything we damn well please. No editors. But then no word count limits either. Even John Sutherland was forced to confess that “the liveliest opinion and the sharpest exchanges are currently to be found on the weblog.” And while this all feels at times like a happening party, who’s out there to spend time with us and understand us but our peers and the publishers? The publishers want us to write about their books. Our peers, like us, are trying to figure out that immortal formula:

1) Literary blog! Punk rock!
2) ???
3) Profit!

There remains no answer to the question marks in the second item other than some kind of financial support. But by who? Grants? Crazed philanthropists? You certainly won’t find it from the NEA or its puppet spokesman David Kipen, who viewed my WPA-style solution as something vaguely Communist. At the present time, you won’t really find it through advertising, whether for blogs or for newspapers. (And on this point, who can blame the publishers? Let’s say you’re a science fiction publisher. Are you really going to want to place an ad in the NYTBR when they hire an uninformed regular like Dave Itzkoff? When they constantly belittle and disrespect genre?)

And you’re sure not going to find the money in book reviewing, unless you’re one of those freaks happy to dance, pitch, cajole, read, and write like a mad demon.

So we’re left here with a regrettable expanse that might be filled in with a rethinking of our priorities. Or perhaps it might come down to the workers seizing the means of production. To some degree, they already have in the form of blogs. And while I disagree with Sutherland that writing “hastily and thoughtlessly” is without interest (indeed, this impulsive approach to passion is one of the main reasons litblogs took off in the first place), I think Sutherland is write to suggest that we really haven’t gone far enough in what we might be able to do. Are any of us potential John Careys or A.S. Byatts? Is there raw talent that can be transformed into something exceptionally beneficial to the literary scene?

Perhaps it will take the end of newspapers to actuate bloggers into answering these questions. But the key step may be #2. Restoring the worth and the profession of a writer. Figuring out ways to make books matter again. Creating a safety net.

Literary folks, are you up to the challenge?