“Let’s go up to the mill,” he said. “Come on.”
The first boy went on. His bare feet made no sound, falling softer than leaves in the thin dust. In the orchard bees sounded like a wind getting up, a sound caught by a spell just under crescendo and sustained. The lane went along the wall, arched over, shattered with bloom, dissolving into trees. Sunlight slanted into it, sparse and eager. Yellow butterflies flickered along the shade like flecks of sun.
—William Faulkner, THE SOUND AND THE FURY
Roxane Gay offers “The anger of the male novelist,” an excellent rebuttal to Teddy Wayne’s “The agony of the male novelist” piece in Salon.
Teddy Wayne argues that while life sucks for midlist authors of any sex, it sucks worse for men:
Both male and female midlist authors, by definition, get shafted by the mainstream media. The female midlister, though, still has a shot at gaining a foothold in book clubs, on the B&N front tables, and in the newly powerful Target Club, whose authors are almost exclusively women.
One major problem I have with Wayne’s argument is that it raises the specter of the Larry Summers controversy and the bizarre concept that women hug the bell curve when it comes to ability (and, deductively, success), while men tend to be outliers who either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly, due to their greater or lesser “intrinsic aptitude.”
Wayne even seems to concur with Summers’s notion of men being innately suited and/or attracted to “high-powered positions” by agreeing that male authors do indeed produce the highest-praised, most award-winning literary fiction, but that it is somehow “harder” for lesser-known male litfic authors:
For the majority of male literary authors—excluding the upper echelon of Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo and their ilk, plus a few younger writers like Chad Harbach who have scored much-ballyhooed advances—it’s actually harder than it is for women to carve out a financially stable writing career.
Two obvious problems with this. One: it’s harder for any literary writer to achieve success compared to any commercial writer. That’s why there’s a “commercial” in “commercial fiction.” It sells. It’s designed to.
The other problem is that Wayne is committing the same sin of conflation that Jennifer Weiner does: contrasting the success of literary fiction writers of X gender with that of commercial fiction writers of Y gender. Two variables are changing in each case: the genre and the gender.
When testing a hypothesis scientifically, one is obliged to keep all variables the same, insofar as possible, except for the variable being tested.
In Wayne’s world (no pun intended), male authors occupy both the highest and lowest rungs on the publishing ladder, while women dominate the many middle rungs. Except he demonstrates no empirical basis for this theory. Jennifer Weiner’s stats, pulled directly from the New York Times et al, only corroborate that male authors occupy the highest rung, where literary fiction authors like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides get called Great American Novelists.
Here’s a fun experiment: name a female author called a Great American Novelist by the literary establishment in the past decade. Even Jennifer Egan, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has yet to reach the heights of regard of a Franzen or Eugenides, to say nothing of other female post-Millennial Pulitzer winners.
Roxane Gay points out that Wayne is arguing anecdotally, and that it’s both unfair and counterproductive to silence real complaints of sex bias in publishing by arguing, “Some male authors have it bad too.” Gay sharply observes:
Gender inequity in publishing is, I am guessing, not a favorite topic of [Jennifer] Weiner’s. I follow her on Twitter. Her favorite topic is “The Bachelor.” She may well have a chip on her shoulder and a certain amount of self-interest in wanting commercial and critical success. But let’s not pretend Teddy Wayne isn’t walking around with a chip on his shoulder, too. When a man has the kind of confidence to believe he should receive significant coverage in prominent venues, people generally don’t bat an eye. When a woman like Jennifer Weiner has that kind of confidence, she is ridiculed and belittled. Gender troubles are part of a vicious cycle.
Gay is savvy to link the treatment of female authors to pervasive social conventions. The problem isn’t just that female authors still aren’t taken as seriously as men by the literary establishment; the problem is that women are still seen as the lesser-abled sex by supposedly progressive societies in general.
Bill Rankin’s somewhat depressing and sobering map of racial segregation in Chicago.
Chicago is still a city very much delineated along color lines.
Rankin explains the map and talks about the way a dotted representation of data points is more accurate than solid color blocks here:
Then there is running from place to place, chasing something, a dream of what New Year’s Eve should be, a feeling that if we could somehow make the night perfect, we were capable of making the year perfect, life also.
Chuck Wendig offers a dissenting opinion on the common “the cream will rise” argument for filtering quality work in self-publishing:
If I take 10 randomly-selected books from the bookstore and then I choose 10 random self-published books, I genuinely believe that the bookstore books will at least meet the standards for being well-put-together and, to boot, will be books I don’t like based on subjective definitions. But I’ll bet you that at least half of the self-published books fail based on errors that any C-grade writer or publisher should’ve caught and fixed.
This is a key point that often gets glossed over in the trad pub vs. self-pub debate. Traditionally published books must meet certain standards of technical and mechanical competence; self-published books have no such standards.
Trad-pubbed books are primarily criticized on a subjective basis: on an artistic rather than technical level. Twilight—or, in fairness, Freedom—may be the worst books ever written, but their problems don’t include things like verb tense disagreements or head-hopping.
Self-pubbed books often fail to make it past that first hurdle. Even when properly proofread, they fall apart at the gray middle levels between science and art: the places where editors and beta readers would say, “Jane is acting out of character here,” or “Cut this infodump,” or “The build-up to the climax needs more suspense.”
But it’s all moot, because the trad pub vs. self-pub argument has become so heated and so much about the writers that it’s forgotten what really matters:
This attitude is great for writers. “Who cares? Poop out a book!”
This attitude sucks for readers. “I just bought this book. And I think it’s made of poop?”
One Very Important Thing traditional publishing offers to readers is the assurance that a book has not only been proofread, but has received editorial feedback from several to dozens of readers before it’s launched into the world.
And as Chuck points out, there’s no evidence that the cream rises on Amazon. The great anarchic muddle of self-publishing is still at a loss for subjective quality filters.
My friend and ridiculously talented graphic designer and artist Ed Ceisel has posted some incredibly spooky conceptual art on his site: Past Tense I and Past Tense II. Ed is planning to do some character portraits for my Zombie Novel in this style, and I’m pretty much bursting with fruit flavor, and excitement, after seeing these. His art seems to mesh so perfectly with my writing.
Check out the rest of Ed’s gallery. Dude is damn good.
Jeremy Soule needs to hire this girl for TES VI, stat.
Part II of graphic designer Peter Mendelsund’s excellent series on books and book covers is up. Make sure you check out part I if you haven’t already.
The loathéd, yet somehow obligatory, Lolita lollypop. I hereby declare a moratorium. The above is not an actual Penguin cover- I just borrowed the format to prove a private supposition of mine that almost any image whatsoever, when placed in a fetishistic context like the one above, will resonate metaphorically. In other words, all the art here is in the template, the frame, itself.
And then he proves it:
Goodreads has designed an amusing infographic of Twilight factoids. Apparently there is such a thing as the “Twilight Belt.” I’d just like to point out that it’s not far from “Belt” to “Zone.”
Some Goodreaders are drawing provocative inferences from the popularity of the book in certain states:
I can say what I am about to say because I have lived in the south my whole life. What does this say about education and literary appreciation in the south when Twilight is held in such high regard here? I read it and brain cells died a slow and nasty death. Not only is it terrible writing, it promotes terrible ideas among young women, namely that its romantic for a possessive 100+ year old dude that looks young and grey and sparkly to come onto you (and stalk you).
Interestingly, there’s significant overlap of Twilight readership with the Bible Belt—the swath of evangelical Christianity that encompasses the Southern United States. But this doesn’t wholly account for its popularity in the central Midwest Corn Belt, which represents a mix of Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists.
Does Twilight’s popularity in rural areas correlate to rural cultural values that transcend denominational borders and tap into some fundamentally conservative cultural wellspring? Or are we Midwesterners just batshit for sparklevamps?
We one-way hired a Toyota in Chicago. Stayed off the freeways. My thinking was the emptier the space the easier we’d spot a vamp or WOCOP tail. Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.
—Glen Duncan, THE LAST WEREWOLF
For all his Anglicisms (“hiring” a car instead of renting one makes the vehicle sound a bit anthropomorphic), this just perfectly captures the geographical spirit of the rural Midwest.