About 20 sides to go

Not Books

I've written before that the paradox of book publishers' e-book strategy is their plan to use disruptive technology to preserve the status quo. Nicholas Ciarelli takes the argument a step further and says recent developments in the ebook pricing war prove that what publishers really want to do is turn back time:

The fact is that publishers do not need consumers to embrace higher prices because this move isn't intended to sell e-books, it's intended to sell more physical books.

Read the article here at Daily Beast.

Think I'll spend eternity in the city

The last, last edit, Pete, is stacking up real neat - I'm thinking Wednesday next week, in the out box by Friday and then God knows what. A day's break and back into the three other manuscripts (I'm serious – count 'em) or maybe - or maybe something new. There's nothing else to do except work. Although today was the sort of day, to quote Colin MacInnes, that only an old whore like London could throw up. Sunny and everything, and the cafe where I do most of my work was empty. Everyone was outside grabbing the weather while they could.

When I was 12 or 13 and totally into photography my brother recommended Absolute Beginners to me because it's about a photographer, but it turned out to be so much more. I clocked the Peter Blake cover – I was that kind of kid – but not the date of publication, and started reading it thinking 'Elvis' was Elvis Costello. Halfway through I realised I was wrong, went back and read the imprint page and clicked and started it over again: conscientiously this time, but still missing most of it. It remains in my syntax, I think, from the Soho imagery to the Dickens joke.

Most of my reading is secondhand now. Music, newer - things grabbed from all over, and cheap, oldish TV: X-Files, Medium. Watching Patricia Arquette reminds me that it's time to enjoy Lost Highway again.

SF & Genre

Good genre debate at io9.com. Writes Charlie Dane Anders @ io9:

Where would we be without genre labels? Free to write new and weird idioms, possibly. But a couple of recent blog posts make the case that genres aren't cages, they're toolkits that tell you how to read a particular text.

The io9 article links in turn to Jo Walton at Tor.com, who says:

Science fiction may be literalization of metaphor, it may be open to metaphorical, symbolic and even allegorical readings, but what’s real within the story is real within the story, or there’s no there there.

The summary article also quotes Rachel Swirsky at Jeff Vandemeer's blog:

Genre distinctions aren't useless - they are ways of signaling expectations to readers, and establishing reading conventions... I think the problem comes when we start reifying genre and assuming that the barriers between genres are somehow real and important barriers, rather than being useful human constructions that can be argued over and negotiated.

Writes another contributor to the latter, A.D. Jameson:

I love genre, because genres are basically conventions. They’re expectations that both authors and readers (and editors, and sales people) bring to a text—suggestions as to what should be inside, and how it should be arranged. And I dearly love conventions, because they’re the very stuff of communication, and of artistic structure—whether we’re obeying them, or departing from them.

Read the summary article containing links to all the above here. Also includes mention of zombies, fantasy and a whole lot of other books I don't personally like to read. What I do like about this discussion is that you don't hear it (enough) in literary circles. It's sincere and straight up.

A cookie full of arsenic

Don LeLillo in the Wall Street Journal, 2010:

It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market.

Kurt Vonnegut in the 1977 Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER: Should young writers be subsidized?

VONNEGUT: Something's got to be done, now that free enterprise has made it impossible for them to support themselves through free enterprise.

"I didn't know Scarlett from a hole in the wall"

Can recommend the Faber director series' Woody Allen on Woody Allen as a very good book on writing. I have it in storage somewhere. When I was living in Brick Lane I managed to be drinking coffee when Woody Allen walked past: he was filming something just up round 'corner. Small, walks fast, and he really does wear that hat.

Here is Allen in an oldish interview on Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The movie is terrific and cogent (a good Woody) but - surprise! - didn't start that way:

I had the idea about two women going away on a summer thing some place. Someone called from Barcelona and said ‘Would you like to make a picture here? We’ll finance it.’ That’s always the hardest part of making any picture, is getting the financing. Writing it, directing it, or anything else is easier than getting the financing for it, so I said sure, I would do it. I had no idea for anything for it, and then about a week or two later I got a call from Penelope Cruz. I didn’t know her, she wanted to meet, and she was in New York. I had only seen her in ‘Volver’ and nothing else ever. I thought she was great in it, and she said that she knew I was doing a film in Barcelona, and she would like to participate. I started out with Barcelona, with Penelope, and in the back of mind I was going to go to Scarlett. Then I heard Javier [Bardem] was interested, so gradually it took shape. I was writing for these people. I was deliberately writing for these people. I didn’t know Rebecca Hall at all. Juliet Taylor, my casting director, discovered her. She said that she was great, I should read her, and look at some film on her. I did and she was right. I put the thing together for the people almost, as I did it, and did the best I could.

You can read the rest of the interview at Collider.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona star Rebecca Hall (pictured, blaming herself for Javier Bardem) is one of the actresses on the cover of the new Vanity Fair. If you're trying to pick her, she's the one with a future.

Modern readers

The sixth season of Lost will feature as a clue Shusako Endo's Deep River, and so presumably will do for that novel what it did for Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman: introduce it to many new readers and vex those who knew it already. I have only recently "found" Endo myself so cannot complain, and have never watched the series anyway. Still. More TV shows should have books in them.

The New York Times asks if Catcher in the Rye resonates with modern teenagers. Says Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel:

I’m not sure the latter-day teenager would find comfort in Caulfield the way a few generations past have, because I suspect they are no longer exactly teenagers anymore. As a marketing concept, as a Twitter tribe, as girls who shop at Forever 21 and boys who skateboard, of course teenagers still exist. But as a true age of rebellion and confusion, adolescence went away with the 20th century.

Tangentially, Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine decides that there is still a mass culture:

By now, we were all supposed to be happily imprisoned in our niches. You know: the theory that we’re all wagged by the long tail, each of us a microtargeted consumer absorbed in our narrowcast information flow. So if I love Animal Collective, the Golden State Warriors, Ron Paul, and Nutella, I can track down the four other people exactly like me, find our little corner of the Internet, and obsess in peace. So why was it that, for one cacophonous week at least, everyone seemed to be talking about just one of two things?