Inter Alia #6: DeWitt Goes Digital

Inter Alia
January 8, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 9 2 min read

Related Books:

From anecdotal evidence, Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment – distributing the album via website, on a “suggested donation” basis – seems to have been a success. As it begins to market In Rainbows through more orthodox channels – CD pressings, iTunes – the band remains mum about the total number of downloads and the average donation amount, but most of my friends who downloaded the album seemed to have settled on 5 quid – 10 bucks. Certainly, as a marketing concept, In Rainbows has burnished Radiohead’s reputation as The World’s Most Interesting Big Band. Now, it seems, the equally interesting novelist Helen DeWitt is trying something similar: releasing short stories subsidized via PayPal donations.

“Every once in a while,” DeWitt writes on her website,

The New Yorker’s, Harper’s asks me to submit some short fiction. I then have an inner debate. I never read the fiction in the New Yorker’s or Harper’s, and I tend not to submit stories to magazines whose stories I tend not to read. So the question is, what should I do? …It seems dishonest to write a story I would not want to read, so I send in a story or stories I’ve written and the New Yorker or Harper’s says it’s not quite what they’re looking for. I thought I’d publish a few stories on my website for the kind of reader who tends not to read the stories in the New Yorker or Harper’s.

Two stories – “In Which Nick Buys a Harley for 16K Having Once Been Young” and “The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto” – are then excerpted; with a $5 PayPal donation, a reader can download them in their entirety as Word documents. “If you’d like to customise the stories with images or your preferred formatting, you can,” DeWitt notes puckishly.

DeWitt’s iconoclastic first novel, The Last Samurai, made my “Year in Reading” list in 2007 – seven years late. Her second book, Your Name Here (written with Ilya Gridneff) has yet to find a publisher. I had mixed feelings about the excerpt in the Winter issue of N+1, but I admire DeWitt’s aesthetic gumption, as I admire Radiohead’s. And, as DeWitt points out, PayPal’s “30 cents + 3% on each transaction” fees compare favorably to the numbers game of traditional publishing.

I’m confident some Millions readers out there have some thoughts on the future of DiY distribution (which, it should be noted, dates back to Gutenberg). What, if anything, does DeWitt’s PayPal project portend for authors? For readers? As always, your thoughts are welcome below.

is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

Inter Alia

Inter Alia #14: My Political Blog Hangover and the Virtues of Finitude

Inter Alia
February 5, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 6 2 min read
Among its many peculiar achievements, the Internet seems to have pushed the old "observer effect" - wherein by paying attention to a process we alter its outcome - into the realm of magical thinking. Back during election season, I remember, I had assembled a little rosary of blogs I'd cycle through every day - or, let's be honest, every hour: Nate Silver, TPM, Politico, RealClearPolitics...as though the existence of the daily cavalcade of kerfuffles depended on me being around to bear witness.Eventually, the endless news cycle would be revealed as the engine of ephemera I already suspected it was. Mr. Silver's uncannily good number-crunching had Obama on a cruise course to victory from mid-September onward. I could have done something worthwhile with my time; I could have...I don't know...read a book. Instead, what did I do? Nate Silver, TPM, Politico...Since the election, however, I've found that most of these sites give me a headache. The expanded version of Politico, in particular, seems to have diced the news cycle to such a fine consistency that, by the time I get to them in the afternoon, the morning's chunky controversies are so much dust in the wind.So which of the political blogs do I still read? To my surprise, it's The Atlantic's. I've singled these guys out before, but I'd like to cast my interpretive net a little wider. That theatlantic.com feels as worthwhile now as it did back in July (a veritable eternity, in the blogosphere) seems to me to point to some of the overlooked ingredients of good online writing.First, I like that The Atlantic focuses on a certain subject - in this case, politics - but not too narrowly. Digressions are encouraged, in a way that keeps the conversation tethered to the wider culture, and accessible to newcomers. This turns out to be a tricky middle ground to occupy; it's something we're still working on at The Millions. Still, it seems possible to write about a given passion while still addressing a general-interest audience. (The New York Review of Books has been doing it for almost half a century.)Another thing I admire about The Atlantic's blog offerings is the plurality - not to say preponderance - of voices. Jeffrey Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan et al offer a broad range of insights and provocations. Still, unlike the tentacular Huffington Post, this eighteen-armed blog monster feels refreshingly vincible. A mere half hour of my attention exhausts it. And in the everything-all-the-time world of the web, such limitation may prove to be a precious commodity.This is, of course, a somewhat self-serving post: We at The Millions have a vested interest in figuring out how the successful websites became so. (And my lifelong love affair with print continues; you will have to pry my weekly New Yorker from my cold, proverbial fingers.) Still, trying to figure out why we like what we like may help preempt the "slow decline and emerging blind spots" Max, among others, has warned us about. Now if someone could just figure out how to make online journalism profitable...
Inter Alia
| 1 book mentioned 6 2 min read
● ●
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #12: Tell No One I’m A Literary Snob

Inter Alia
August 28, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 2 3 min read
Film critics have lauded the French thriller Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) with adjectives fit for a personal ad: "taut," "sexy," "smart..." Having recently caught a matinee, I'm willing to attest to its tautness. However, the climax reminded me that dramatic smarts entail more than a pensive hero and a Gallic pedigree. By way of elaboration, I will now spoil the ending: A bad guy, training a gun on the hero, maps out one of the most convoluted conspiracies this side of Behold, A Pale Horse. Then he orders the hero to keep listening: "But wait, there's more. I also killed your father."The "Let me explain my master plan" speech is a staple of crime novels, and has enlivened any number of TV shows. We accept the convention without balking because generic narratives like The ABC Murders, Scooby Doo, and Murder, She Wrote aren't claiming to be "smart"; they're meant to entertain. But when characters who've been granted all the appurtenances of serious drama - histories, mannerisms, tastes - are suddenly reduced to conduits for information, as they are in Tell No One, the reader experiences cognitive dissonance. Who writes this stuff? he wonders.The answer, in this case, is the quintessentially American Harlan Coben, from whose novel the film was adapted. In a memorable Atlantic Monthly profile last year, Eric Konigsberg portrayed Coben as a nice guy, albeit slightly insecure about his reputation vis-a-vis that of his Amherst dorm-mate, David Foster Wallace. But this being the Atlantic, the profile also attempted to pose questions (or stoke resentments) about the nature of literary distinction:In Las Vegas, I asked Coben how he felt about being invisible to the world represented by The New York Times Book Review, and about the parallel-universe status that so much crime fiction, including his books, has. At first he was au fait about it, but then he got worked up. 'If I asked you to name five great books that survived 100 years ago that don't have a crime in them, you couldn't,' he said.Not having read the work, I was willing to give Coben the benefit of the doubt. Now, after seeing the movie, I'm more inclined to agree with his later admission, "It's not like I'm an artist."Konigsberg and Coben are right to suggest (and I've argued before) that the distinction between art and genre fiction rests on false premises. Cormac McCarthy alone should demonstrate that a novel can contain a murder, or an apocalypse, or a dead mule, and still be literature. Yet to imply that a writer of westerns, thrillers, or romances automatically deserves to be considered alongside Dostoevsky is to err in the other direction. If anything, the NYTBR's problem is not that it accords too little serious consideration to genre writers, but that it accords too much to novelists toiling in the vineyards of literary fiction.That is, there is a distinction between art and entertainment; it's just not the one we've been thinking of. FSG's Jonathan Galassi and Grove/Atlantic's Morgan Entrekin came close to pinning it down at a publishing panel last year, when they suggested that "genre fiction" aims to repeat an excitement, by meeting established conventions, whereas literature inaugurates new conventions, and thus new excitements. (Of course, innovations of character and of language require more column-inches to explain to potential readers.) By this definition, plenty of the short stories in The New Yorker constitute genre fiction, while some "crime novels" - those of Richard Price, for example - are literature. And even great artists - the Dickens of Little Dorrit, comes to mind - can lean too heavily on crutches like the expository filibuster.Without knocking the pure entertainment value of watching Harlan Coben's characters fulfill their generic destinies, Tell No One is no Crime and Punishment. It's not even The Fugitive. Yet it seems frivolous to bemoan the literary establishment's "parallel universe" when your own universe comprises a vast audience and sums of money Dostoevsky only dreamed of. If literary discrimination is, by definition, elitism, it is, in America, an elitism without teeth. And even when elitists like me campaign to preserve the meaning of the words "smart" and "literary," we know that a taut, sexy, and ultimately silly thriller is still nothing to sniff at.
Inter Alia
| 1 book mentioned 2 3 min read
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #15: Toward a Phenomenology of Snark

Inter Alia
February 9, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 2 4 min read
Today on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, David Denby put in an appearance promoting his new book, Snark. I'm not sure what qualifies Denby, a movie critic, to save us from "a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation." Nor am I entirely sure we are in need of saving. That said, I've enjoyed Denby's recent feistiness in the back pages of The New Yorker (after some mid-Bush-era doldrums), and was perfectly happy to give him a hearing while I made lunch. Suffice it to say, I was underwhelmed. The segment largely consisted of Denby listening to audio clips of SNL and Crossfire declaring whether or not they constituted "snark." In place of any really useful distinction between "nasty" snark and legitimate discourse, we got a tendentious history lesson (Diogenes but no Juvenal?) and a jurisprudential approach to snark that amounts to "I know it when I see it." Do we need anything more than that? Do we need to define snark? I would argue that we do. Ever since Heidi Julavits popularized the term, in her March 2003 Believer manifesto, the word "snark" has been used as a cudgel against all manner of populist tomfoolery (Julavits singles out The New York Post), even as it has proven useless against the pungent attitudinizing of Gawker and its discontents. (For fun, check out the Denby comment thread.) Moreover, the pejorative overtones of the floating signifier "snark" imply that equally fatuous but positive commentary is somehow less damaging to "the national conversation." If we're going to have a conversation about that conversation, it seems worth knowing what we're talking about when we talk about snark. So here, tendered with love and humility, are some notes toward a phenomenology of snark. Snark is, above all, a tone, and this is what makes it so difficult to pin down. Julavits calls it a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt," but forecloses the possibility that hostility and bitterness might be legitimate critical positions. And again, for some reason, online text often reads as more hostile than it actually is. (Think of the phenomenon of the misunderstood email.) No, it's not negativity, but been-there, seen-that "knowingness," that is the call-note of snark. (It is impossible to surprise a Snark.) However, allowance must be made for the fact that some people actually know things. Perhaps snark, properly understood, involves a tone of knowingness that doesn't correspond to actual knowledge. (Truly great snark would thus be impossible to identify: persuading us of its authority, it would be ignorance that leaves no fingerprints.) A related point: snark is a response disproportionate to the offense, a comment that outshouts the original post. The Snark expends more emotional and intellectual energy formulating his aphorisms than he did consuming, or skimming, their subject. Otherwise, we would have to recognize his hostility, bitterness, or contempt as legitimate. (We carp because we care.) Currently, the perfect object of snark for me is Benjamin Button; it's a movie I'll never see, but have put a great deal of thought into making fun of. This lack of regard is more deeply wounding to Benjamin Button fans than it would be if I actually had a legitimate grievance against the film. The true Snark, perhaps by virtue of his reflexive contempt, cannot be bothered to understand the object of his snark - to expand the compass of his sympathies, to assume good faith. Thus James Wood, even at his most trenchant, does not get accused of snark, whereas Lee Siegel, for all his anti-web fulminations, often seems to be writing from the very heart of snarkness. Siegel believes the length of his essays, and their appearance in print, indemnifies him against his own charges, but is wrong (see numbers 1 and 2 above). Brevity is the soul of wit, but not necessarily of snark. Snark is a kind of show of plumage, almost a mating ritual. As such, snark always calls more attention to the Snark than to snarked. But again, just because the dagger is driven in with a flourish does not mean it is done snarkily. The thoughtful, the passionate, and the justly aggrieved - Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Lane - are entitled to be stylish, without being shouted down for snark. Morally, snark is no better or worse than genial puffery; indeed, it is its dark twin, its complement, an advertisement for the self. Snark is more aesthetically pleasing than puff, however, by virtue of the complexity of its defense mechanisms. It reduces criticism of itself to a negation of a negation - that is, to mere snark. Hence: Denby. Such notes can only be preliminary. They attempt to prepare the ground for, but do not answer, more important questions: Is snark truly a conjunctivitic plague upon the nation? Or is it, rather, a form of hygiene, defending us against an epidemic of epiphenomena we do not and should not care about? Perhaps the answers are not to be found in intellectualizing, but in a tortured embrace of our own snarky sides. As Susan Sontag might say, in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of snark. As always, your thoughts (even snarky ones) are welcome.
Inter Alia
| 1 book mentioned 2 4 min read
● ● ●

9 comments:

  1. The Last Samurai brought me so much pleasure–and thought–as a reader that I'm willing to follow DeWitt wherever she goes for the foreseeable future. I keep giving the book as a gift to friends, and I have yet to disappoint one.

    But perhaps I don't mind Word files as much as most folks because my wife is a designer and can with very little effort turn a Word file into something that's pleasant to read?

  2. I admire DeWitt's work, and I certainly don't put myself in her class, but you've just noticed that writers are publishing independently online? Or is it only writers who have already published conventionally who merit your attention?

    As you can imagine, I'm very saddened – and frustrated – that even lit bloggers, who mostly use the internet as their vehicle of choice, seem to stigmatise indie writers, writers who in fact ought to be considered their 'colleagues in arms'!

  3. Lee – didn't mean to frustrate or sadden you. Though I had anticipated some reactions of this sort, I chose to excise a final paragraph of this piece that would have said, in effect, "But really, bunches of fiction writers are publishing independently online, so this isn't a big deal." I think the kind of quick-and-dirty PayPal mechanism DeWitt chose is interesting – and that her stature as an artist makes this a big deal. Are there particular online-indie writers you admire who you'd like to bring to our attention, or who deserve a similar stature? Writers who have already taken a whirl in coporate publishing? Writers who wouldn't, if they had a chance? This was exactly what I was hoping someone would do: point us to the good stuff.

  4. From the corporate/establishment publishing side, you could start with Elfriede Jelinek (in German):

    http://www.a-e-m-gmbh.com/wessely/fneid1.htm

    There's of course lots of SF or fantasy stuff around, and certainly good short stories (try Nicholas Hogg, Kelly Link, Peter Wild for a start). Online novels are often disappointing, but this one looks promising:

    http://mmgl100.wordpress.com/

    And here are two by children's author Penelope Farmer:

    http://liftingtheworldtvtgctg.blogspot.com/2007/01/chapters-one-and-two.html

    http://grannyp.blogspot.com/2007/06/going-mental.html

    As to stature, and just how we decide who deserves it, well, I'm not about to start on that one!

  5. Garth, I forgot to add that I for one have no interest in corporate publishing – or at least would only be interested in publishing conventionally if I were permitted to serialise or issue my fiction simultaneously online. After having spent eighteen years in Zimbabwe, I take great pleasure in seeing my first (and very flawed!) YA novel Mortal Ghost being downloaded to faraway places, places a book wouldn't – or couldn't – reach. But I will freely admit that most writers are still, in their heart of hearts, dreaming of conventional recognition (and a living wage).

  6. The last comment, I promise!

    Litlove, who blogs at Tales from the Reading Room, has just started a new blog called The Best of New Writing on the Web, which some of your readers might like to keep an eye on:

    http://tbrbooks.wordpress.com/

    She will soon be compiling an issue with excerpts from online novels.

  7. This post cost me $17. $5 for the stories (and a graceful email from the author) and $12 for the N+1 with the excerpt of Ms. Dewitt's new novel.

    I might have totally missed this if not for you, so thanks.

  8. These anti-capitalists always make me scratch my head. Like the Hollywood elites made rich and famous by virtue of capitalism, they believe it to be the worst system on earth, not to mention their country that endorses it.

  9. Pingback: Publications « Garth Risk Hallberg

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Inter Alia

Inter Alia #7: Up, Obama, or Deja Vu in South Carolina

Inter Alia
January 27, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 1 3 min read
This weekend, as part of a recent David Foster Wallace kick, I decided to revisit "Up, Simba," an 80-page essay on John McCain and postmodern politics. On assignment for Rolling Stone, Wallace spent the final week of the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary embedded in the McCain campaign. McCain ended up losing to George W. Bush, and shortly thereafter withdrew from the race. This year, however, a resurgent McCain looks increasingly plausible as the national GOP nominee. I was hoping that re-reading Wallace's essay (republished in Consider the Lobster) might offer some insight.Well, a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. Wallace's sympathetic portrait of McCain the man and conflicted take on McCain the legislator struck me as entirely credible, just as they did eight years ago. "Up Simba's" account of the tactical logic of primary politics, though, now looked positively prophetic... of the 2008 Democratic campaign.See if these phrases, scrubbed of their referents, ring a bell:"Something about [Candidate X] made us feel that the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us hear cliches as more than just cliches.""[Candidate X] drew first-time and never-before voters; he drew Democrats and Independents, Libertarians and soft socialists and college kids and soccer moms.""The grateful press on the Trail transmit - maybe even exaggerate - [Candidate X's] humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness.... The people are cheering for [Candidate X] not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him.And then there's Candidate Y, who as a member of a presidential dynasty has been the front-runner until some early primary upsets. Whose "campaign advisors... are the best that $70,000,000 and the full faith and credit of the [party] Establishment can buy." Who "charges that [Candidate X] is fuzzy on policy, that he's image over substance." And who, in South Carolina, puzzles Wallace by "going negative." When Wallace asks a shrewd group of network news technicians for their analysis, and they illuminate the "solid, even inspired" logic behind the move:[Y's] attack leaves [X] with two options. If he does not retaliate, some SC voters will credit [him] with keeping the high road. But it could also come off as wimpy...[or as ] "appeasing aggression"... So [X] pretty much has to hit back, the techs agree. But this is extremely dangerous, for by retaliating - which of course... means going Negative himself - [he] looks like just another ambitious, win-at-any-cost politician, when of course so much time and effort and money have already gone into casting him as the exact opposite of that.... [The] race could quickly degenerate into just the sort of boring, depressing, cynical, charge-and-countercharge contest that turns off voters and keeps them away from the polls.Which pretty much captures exactly how I've been feeling lately about the Democrats.It bears saying that, in matters of policy, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are more like each other than they are like McCain or Bush. It also bears saying that the strategic carping of the Clintons doesn't seem to have done them any good in South Carolina. Still, this year's Democratic primary race seems to be unfolding along weirdly familiar narrative lines. "Up, Simba," hamstrung by the Generation-Y affect of its tone, is not one of Wallace's finest pieces of prose. But if you're interested in a shrewd analysis of the presidential horse-race - in which no candidate is above the compromises and conflicts of politics - you might consider putting down the David Brooks and Maureen Dowd and picking up DFW.
Inter Alia
| 1 book mentioned 1 3 min read
● ●
Inter Alia

Inter Alia #17: N1BR, Blazing Saddles, and the Art of Fashionable Lateness

Inter Alia
March 30, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 3 2 min read
A prize-winning journalist once told me this story: Early in his career, writing on spec for The Village Voice or some such organ of the alternative press, he had ventured to the set of Blazing Saddles to interview Mel Brooks. Flush with the wine of self-importance, he flourished his press pass for the security guard outside the soundstage. Inside, however, he found himself merely the youngest and least consequential member of a flock (pod? pride? murder?) of reporters. While waiting for Mr. Brooks to appear, he tried to make small talk with Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker. "So you guys are doing a profile? Must be a tall order to crank 5,000 words out in time for the movie premiere." I have no idea whether Tynan wore small half-glasses at that or any other point, but I picture him gazing coolly over the top of the lenses to deliver the following riposte: "We are The New Yorker. We don't do timely."This anecdote, in its 2005 version, was meant in part to tweak Tynan for his Olympian condescension, but there was envy in it, too: O, to write without the oppression of deadlines and "news hooks!" I thought of Kenneth Tynan and Blazing Saddles again last week, as I perused the contents of the second issue of N+1's new book review supplement, N1BR. Here were: Nikil Saval assessing Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, a year and a half after its publication.Giles Harvey arriving six months late to the 2666 party, with a thoughtful dissent, no less.Nathan Heller offering trenchant insights on a John Updike novel from 1968.Rachel Aviv ranging over the decades-long career of Anne Rice.We are N1BR, I thought. We don't do timely.Which is all to the good. It goes almost without saying that the current book-marketing dispensation, in which reviewers are given a brief window to render a collective judgment on, say, Tree of Smoke, has seemed more and more ludicrous the smaller that window has become - particularly as books, unlike their authors, live for hundreds of years. One of the knocks on online discourse has been that it pushes timeliness to the point of ephemerality. But as Open Letters Monthly's "Second Glance" column, Dan Green's emerging side project, the brand new Second Pass site, and our Year in Reading series, not to mention our own Lydia Kiesling's Modern Library Revue, suggest, the departure from the economic vicissitudes of print may in fact help free us from the tyranny of the now.To be sure, one of the purposes of literary journalism is to alert readers to the new. Still, the scarcity of advertising dollars, and the attendant lack of a profit motive, do seem to open up the possibility of writing about books because they are worth writing about, rather than because they came out last week. At which point the challenge becomes to write well. Here's hoping the folks at N1BR, and others like them, will make arriving late to the party fashionable again.
Inter Alia
| 1 book mentioned 3 2 min read
● ●