raus

I had a rough idea of what we'd be talking about. I knew a number of refugees who'd come to the UK in the past. And I knew something about the UK's current asylum system, from newspapers, from TV and from the radio. In particular I knew that it was neither generous nor efficient. But I'd never met anyone on the receiving end.

Now I have. And nothing has made me this angry in a long time. We bellyache about the abuse of human rights overseas. But there are thousands of people living here, right now, in one of the richest countries in the world, forced to live in poverty. They are denied basic rights and services which the rest of us take for granted. And this is not an accident. This is government policy. And we should be ashamed of it.

Mark Haddon talks to asylum seekers in the UK, in today's Observer

Ruskin thou shouldst be living at this hour

Most construction workers — no matter what their trade or how narrow their job description — are fascinated by the entire scope of a project and proud to be a part of it. Another thing many don’t realize is the intense pride the men and women take in being part of creating something that will last for decades or even centuries. They take ownership of the project — as in, “I built this tower or that bridge or that tunnel.”

from Freakonomics

deferral

Wyatt Mason, who reviews for Harper's, the New Yorker and other magazines, has started a blog at the Harper's website called Sentences. Four posts are devoted to Mason's belief that writers who think their work has been unintelligently reviewed should respond publicly. The blog is not open to comments.

electioneering

If there is a change in Idol's process, it is simply that the test marketing is now conducted via remote technologies of video monitor and cell phone (distanced learning redux!); respondents solicit themselves for participation; and the latter two phases have been brought closer together, such that the voting-with-your-dollar phase begins a bit earlier for the "people." In terms of the making of the pop star, they retain the exact "power" they might have had before; that there are more of them involved sooner does not change the structure of the overall event into something more democratic.

But this is not to say that there is no real novelty in the AI process. There is. Pop Idol debuted less than three months after the MPAA awoke with a start from the industrial nightmare that was Napster, and confronted the new day that dream presaged. The Idol franchise should be understood in no other way than as a specific solution to a historical problem: how to re-monetize pop music in the face of a certain decline sales of both in hardware (CDs, players) and software (songs as such). Idol is perhaps the most successful — and clearest — response to this economic crisis. Whether or not anyone buys the David products Cook or Archuleta, the revenue is shifted to advertising, and to service providers for downloads, online views, and cell phone usage. Which is to say that the reputed "democracy" of the Idol process is nothing other than the industry's monetizing of participation in its own marketing plan.

Jane Dark on American Idol

McCarthyism de nos jours

Great interview of Tom McCarthy in the Believer.

That said, McCarthy sometimes seems not to see his hand in front of his face. He says:

TM: I mean, in the current climate in the UK, publishing is a very, very conservative field. Editorial decisions are taken by marketing boards. There isn’t really much room for something that isn’t middle-of-the-road. On the other hand, in the art world—you can’t help noticing if you mix, as I do, with one foot or one toe in the publishing world and nine toes in the art world—it’s the artists who are extremely literate. In the current climate, art has become the place where literary ideas are received, debated, and creatively transformed. You mentioned Robbe-Grillet—I know several artists that are doing works based on his novels. Most artists I know have read Beckett, have read Burroughs, have read Faulkner. For example, one of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward. Contemporary novelists don’t really understand that, but contemporary artists do.

Now honestly. If you think editorial decisions are taken by marketing boards, and that marketing boards prefer middle-of-the-road fiction, this amounts to saying that the sample on which you base your assessment of contemporary novelists is based on what marketing boards were willing to publish. You can safely say that certain contemporary novelists were able to write fiction that could get past a marketing board. Unless you have done an enormous amount of research, you have no way of knowing whether A) some of the writers who got work published ALSO wrote books they could not get past the marketing board, B) some of the writers who got work published ALSO wrote books their agent didn't bother to try to get past the marketing board, C) some of the writers who got work published WANTED to write other books they knew they couldn't get past the marketing board, or, of course, D) writers who haven't managed to get ANYTHING published have written the sort of fiction he considers interesting but couldn't get an agent or couldn't get it past the marketing board.

I can't help but think that someone who had done substantial background research, and who had ascertained, on the basis of this research, that the middle-of-the-road fiction being published was NOT an unrepresentative sample of what was being written, would have, um, said so.

Ilya Gridneff got a job in London covering the Coroners' Court. He later got assignments covering Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie. John Pilger is one of his heroes; while travelling round the Middle East he wrote Pilgeresque pieces which he sent to various London papers and could not get published. He reads Bataille, Burroughs, Miller; he hasn't found a publisher for his novel, either. It would be silly to draw any conclusions from his portfolio except the unsurprising one that it is often necessary to eat.

(Still a very interesting interview.)

Native Son

I don't know anyone who has read Gilbert Sorrentino.

This is not exactly true.

A college professor introduced me to Sorrentino's work when I was a sophomore.

I was always looking for avant-garde fiction. I liked fiction that was formally interesting. I didn't want Richard Ford stories, middle age men going through divorce, amorphous stories about boring middle class life, etc. I didn't want clogged, embarrassing, senseless Updikean prose, with his "newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot like urine from a cow's vulva." I wanted a sophisticated novelist for once. An intelligent novelist.

Sorrentino's right up your alley, my prof says.

I read Aberration of Starlight, Red the Fiend, The Imaginative Quality of Actual Things, Mulligan Stew, and Blue Pastoral over Christmas break.

...

Mithridates, who is, like Sorrentino, from Bay Ridge, speaks of a writer visiting GS in Bay Ridge and goes on (I am dropping the italics to preserve the italics of the original)

But the moving thing had to do with his being from Bay Ridge. I thought native son? How did I not pick up on this until now? How did I not know he was from Bay Ridge? The heartbreaking thing isn't what this writer says about Bay Ridge, but simply that Sorrentino was from Bay Ridge at all. Because Bay Ridge is my hometown. I used to bowl at Leemark Lanes (which became Mark Lanes and then went out of business). I eat regularly at Bridgeview - natives drop the Diner - most recently with George. I went to high school there, lived there for twenty-three years. (Not the diner, although, OK, sure: I went to high school at Bridgeview Diner and lived there for twenty-three years.)

I wondered what it was about being from Bay Ridge that makes Sorrentino's artistic needs so similar to my own:

In his 1983 literary credo "Genetic Coding," Sorrentino states, "my own artistic necessities . . . are: an obsessive concern with formal structure, a dislike of the replication of experience, a love of digression and embroidery, a great pleasure in false or ambiguous information, a desire to invent problems that only the invention of new forms can solve, and a joy in making mountains out of molehills." Elsewhere he refers to "the joyous heresy that will not go away . . . that heresy [that] simply states: form determines content."

Was it the faux marble and silver mirrors that gave me the same artistic needs as Sorrentino?

[the whole post here]

three novellas for a novel

Carl Shuker will be publishing three novellas for a novel on his website as of tomorrow.