Mid-afternoon. The three of you had
breakfast at Panera after dropping off the boys at Primrose School. Shortly
after Carol and you headed home. Paul has a regular schedule this week but the
focus at home is prepping for next week’s trip to Orlando where Paul has a
conference and Kim and the boys are spending the time at Disney World. They are
staying at Disney World so when the conference is not in session all four can
see the sight within Disney. You arrived home just after noon and are about to
go out for a late lunch. - Amorella
1455
hours. We had a good time. The boys were very good, Brennan is much better
partly because he can make his thoughts better known to those around him. He
appears to be a sharp little boy, but then so does Owen. They will go off in
different directions though as adults, that’s my feeling.
On the way home from Smashburgers you
stopped at Pine Hill Lakes Park up near the earth dam and Carol is presently
taking her walk. You had a very good, quite tasty lunch. – Amorella
1611
hours. I have the Will Self article, Fiction: “The
novel is dead (this time it's for real)” in front of me.
Don’t waste your time doing this piece by piece. Let’s go through it
first and give your points as a summary. – Amorella
1616 hours. I don’t see the point. I haven’t read it
to make a summary, I want to make this as a list of things I agree with or not
and why.
I didn’t want you to drop this in yesterday blog to make for an
assignment. – Amorella
1635 hours. I just went through the article by
bolding what I feel is important. Carol has returned. Good timing.
You
both had a snack supper and watched “Bones” NBC News and “Madam Secretary”.
Earlier you scanned through the article reducing it to 1016 thereby deleting
3440 words.
The
thinking is that the Gutenberg reader processes in the Gutenberg format and the
digital form is not in the Gutenberg format. You do not agree with this
assumption. The mass media presents many more narrative formats; more so than
those of writers Joyce and Beckett. Hollywood further changes format from the original
literary work by taking away some of the imagination of the reader, for better
or worse.
On
another level Amazon and a few other distributers such as Barnes and Noble hold
control making production of the book less probable in term of making money for
the author. More middle men/women fill that role. Agriculture economics come to
mind – the potato farmers lose out to those who make potato chips because that
is where the money is. So, the would be writer finds he/she can make a more
stable salary by acquiring a doctorate in creative writing not so he/she can
write but so he/she can teach creative writing rather than spend silent solitary
years creative working through a novel or his/her choice of literary art. Some
will survive this chore of writing a serious novel, which demands at least some
Gutenberg format for the distribution of intelligent thought. This is what can
be hoped for.
This
is your summary of the review of Wil Self literary critique. – Amorella
2047
hours. This is right on, right out of my head Amorella. I have trouble
realizing you can take my thoughts in something outside of the books and blog
and put it to work in an exercise such as this. The only way I know this to be
true is that you wrote in the italics yet the words are mine. It may not be
correct reasoning wise, that is my reasoning might not be correct but this is
indeed my thought on the review after two readings of the original and a detached
summary outline which is mine (below) and then my review of the critique.
** **
My summary points of the review in a casual outline of importance format
Literary critics – themselves a dying breed, a cause for
considerable schadenfreude on the part of novelists – make all sorts of
mistakes, but some of the most egregious ones result from an inability to think
outside of the papery prison within which they conduct their lives' work.
They consider the codex. They are – in Marshall McLuhan's memorable phrase
– the possessors of Gutenberg minds.
well,
there's still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we've
come to understand and appreciate it – the capacity to imagine entire
worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep
and meditative levels of absorption in others' psyches.
What none of the Gutenbergers are able to countenance, because
it is quite literally – for once the intensifier is justified – out of their
minds, is that the advent of digital media is not simply destructive of
the codex, but of the Gutenberg mind itself. There is one question alone
that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will
still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the
question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in
digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those
readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to
this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.
No
one likes to be told their play/novel/poem/film/TV programme/concept
double-album is wholly analysable in terms of its means of transmission. Understanding Media tells us little about what media
necessarily will arise, only what impact on the collective psyche they must
have.
he
use of montage for transition; the telescoping of fictional characters into
their streams of consciousness; the abandonment of the omniscient narrator; the
inability to suspend disbelief in the artificialities of plot – these were
always latent in the problematic of the novel form, but in the early 20th
century, under pressure from other, juvenescent, narrative forms, the novel
began to founder. The polymorphous multilingual perversities of the later
Joyce, and the extreme existential asperities of his fellow exile, Beckett, are
both registered as authentic responses to the taedium vitae of the form, and so
accorded tremendous, guarded respect – if not affection.
So
it was with the novel: we may not have known altogether how to make it novel
again, but we knew it couldn't go the way of Hollywood. Now film, too, is
losing its narrative hegemony, and so the novel
The
agent I consulted told me to accept without demur: it was, he said, nigh-on
impossible for new writers to get published – let alone paid.
Worse,
if, as a writer, you reached an impasse where you couldn't imagine what
something looked or sounded like, the web was there to provide instant
literalism: the work of the imagination, which needs must be fanciful, was
at a few keystrokes reduced to factualism.
Packer
observes that this development parallels others in the neoliberal economy,
which sees market choice as the only human desideratum. The US court's ruling
against the big five publishers in the English-speaking world and in favour of
Amazon was predicated on this: their desperate attempt to resist Amazon's
imposition of punitive discounting constituted a price cartel.
Fortunately,
institutions are already in existence to look after us. The creative writing
programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way
of looking at them is that they're a self-perpetuating and self-financing
literary set-aside scheme purpose built to accommodate writers who can no
longer make a living from their work. In these care homes, erstwhile novelists
induct still more and younger writers into their own reflexive career paths, so
that in time they too can become novelists who cannot make a living from
their work and so become teachers of creative writing.
the
dissertation is interesting – although it isn't a piece of original
scholarship. Neither of them will, in all likelihood, ever be read again
after he has been examined. The student wished to bring the date
of his viva forward – why? Well, so he could use his qualification to
apply for a post teaching – you guessed it – creative writing.
Not that he's a neophyte: he already teaches creative writing, he
just wants to be paid more highly for the midwifery of stillborn
novels.
Whenever
tyro novelists ask me for career advice I always say the same thing
to them: think hard about whether you wish to spend anything up to 20 or 30
years of your adult life in solitary confinement; if you don't like the
sound of that silence, abandon the idea right away
In
a society where almost everyone is subject to the appropriation of their
time, and a vast majority of that time is spent undertaking work that has
little human or spiritual value, the ideal form of the writing life appears
gilded with a sort of wonderment.
And we all know how social beings tend to regard solitary acts –
as perversities, if not outright perversions.
As
I said at the outset: I believe the serious novel will continue to be
written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or
classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring
a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.
My apprenticeship as a novelist has lasted a long time now,
and I still cherish hopes of eventually qualifying. Besides, as the possessor
of a Gutenberg mind, it is quite impossible for me to foretell what the
new dominant narrative art form will be – if, that is, there is to be one at
all.
What
I can do is observe my canary: he doesn't read much in the way of what I'd call
serious novels, but there's no doubting that he's alive, breathing deep of a
rich and varied culture, and shows every sign of being a very intelligent and
thoughtful songbird. On that basis, I think it's safe for us both to
go on mining.
** **
Then, to this with Amorella’s ‘format’ of thought help --
The thinking is
that the Gutenberg reader processes in the Gutenberg format and the digital
form is not in the Gutenberg format. You do not agree with this assumption. The
mass media presents many more narrative formats; more so than those of writers
Joyce and Beckett. Hollywood further changes format from the original literary
work by taking away some of the imagination of the reader, for better or
worse.
On another level
Amazon and a few other distributers such as Barnes and Noble hold control,
making production of the book less probable in term of making money for the author.
More middle men/women fill that role. Agriculture economics come to mind – the potato
farmers lose out to those who make potato chips because that is where the money
is. So, the would be writer finds he/she can make a more stable salary by
acquiring a doctorate in creative writing not so he/she can write but so he/she
can teach creative writing rather than spend silent solitary years creative
working through a novel or his/her choice of literary art. Some will survive
this chore of writing a serious novel, which demands at least some Gutenberg
format for the distribution of intelligent thought. This is what can be hoped
for.
This is your
summary of the review of Wil Self literary critique. – Amorella
** **
2058
hours. This has been an interesting diversion in the usefulness of Amorella.
You cannot rid yourself completely of the Gutenberg format because this is how
more serious self-thought is conveyed to the reader. The ‘media circus’ loses
touch with the focus on an actual thought. And, many years ago when beginning the
first Merlyn book you said, ‘no sketches, no films’. I agreed and still agree; in
principle if nothing else. This is set to be a serious literary work although
the creative writing is certainly unorthodox.
You realized something from this exercise,
something to think about. You might say I am an acquired taste. Post. –
Amorella
2110
hours. I agree Amorella; you are indeed an acquired taste. I love you for your
thought and kindness more than anything else.
No comments:
Post a Comment