William Landay

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Archives for June 2009

Kickstarter

Kickstarter.com is a cool new web site that provides “a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers…” Think of it as DonorsChoose for creative types: artists post descriptions of projects they would like to do; visitors pledge donations to support them. The artists might offer any sort of reward they can think of as an incentive to donors. Donors might get updates about the project, say, or dinner with the author, or have their name incorporated into the book. Right now, the site is by invitation only. Not everyone can sign up to flog their project.

But think about the implications for writers. If donors provide the writer’s advance, the upfront payment that supports him while he writes the book; and digital platforms like Amazon/Kindle provide the writer direct access to a free, paperless publishing platform, then what exactly will be left for publishing houses to do in the digital publishing space? Editing? Book design? Publicity?

I am not one of the doomsayers who believe publishing houses will vanish anytime soon, but here is another example of how the web undermines the traditional business model publishers have lived by for over a century. First computers came along and converted text to digital format. Then the web came along and provided a super-efficient platform for the distribution of digital data — free, instant, global — making everyone a “publisher.” Now come the nimble competitors who see and fill the newly opened niches faster than the lumbering old beasts can react.

At the moment, Kickstarter doesn’t look like a giant-killer. But neither did Craigslist, once. The web enables all sorts of disruptive ideas whose significance is hard to perceive at first (Twitter, Boxee). Who knows where this one will lead?

The Breakthrough, at last

After an excruciating three weeks of trying — and failing — to make a difficult chapter work, yesterday morning I woke up at 5:45 with this sentence in my head: “There is so much to tell.” And that was it. Six words, six syllables, and I knew I had it. I wanted to rush out of bed, up to my office, and write it fast, while I had the thing in my head.

But when I got up, there was Henry, my five-year-old, in the bathroom peeing, and when he was done he came out and hugged me around my leg and said he wanted to come into the big bed to snuggle. So I climbed back into bed and we snuggled awhile, until Henry announced, “I’m done snuggling.”

Then I pulled on a pair of jeans and bolted up to my office to write the first few pages of this chapter in an extended gush. Most of it poured out in long run-on sentences — and … and … and — but the new material is good, and I am elated to have broken through, finally.

There is nothing worse than being stuck. The project loses momentum, and with each passing day it becomes harder and harder to get that boulder moving again. Today, I feel massively relieved. Now the thing is to keep it moving, to maintain that momentum.

Creating Writers: Do MFA Programs Produce Dull Writers?

Can creative writing be taught? Virtually nobody thinks it can, but there are 822 creative writing programs in the U.S. ostensibly doing just that.

Louis Menand has a (typically) great piece in the current New Yorker that considers the rise of these programs. Here is Menand’s opening. (MFA’s, you are advised to avert your eyes.)

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.

Read the whole thing. In fact, read everything Louis Menand writes.

Personally, I have never taken a creative writing course and can’t imagine ever doing so. To me, the question is not whether writing can be taught; it’s whether creativity can. These programs seem designed to produce a certain kind of writing: conservative, restrained, discreet, sophisticated — dull.

Imagine you are a young writer thrown into a workshop. You are anxious, surrounded by a dozen equally inexperienced but ambitious student-writers all eager to critique your work. Are you likely to go out on a limb by trying something wildly original? Of course not. In that environment, you don’t take chances. You conform to the expectations of others. Why throw meat to the sharks? It is no wonder that the beau ideal of these programs is Raymond Carver, whose stories are so concise and involuted that they are workshop-proof. (I should point out, I love Raymond Carver.) The simple fact of submitting your pages to others for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down compromises the writer’s independence — and at just the time in a young writer’s development when he is still searching for his own unique style.

Of course there is no way to measure how the increasing professionalization of our writers has affected our literature, but here is an anecdotal test: when was the last time you picked up a book by a young American writer with a truly wild, out-of-left-field new voice, unlike anything you’d ever heard before? To my mind, there is a ton of very good books out there but there is a sameness to the prose, a cautious, sober tone that we take for “good writing,” even “literature.” It is as if we have come to a consensus about what good writing is supposed to sound like. It is a tyranny of good taste. For some time now, the most daring new writing has come from other countries, particularly Latin America. How sad that even our creativity has to be outsourced.

Yes, yes, it is too much to lay all that on the rise of creative writing programs. Plenty of dull writers have nothing to do with these programs, and plenty of iconoclastic writers have come through MFA programs with their creativity intact.

On the other hand, it is hard to imagine these programs not tending to homogenize our young writers. There has to be a standard curriculum, after all — they have to teach something. We have created a national professional academy for training young writers just as we train young doctors and lawyers. That may be good for writers, not so good for literature.

“The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon

An older friend of mine went to high school in Newark with Philip Roth, Weequahic High School class of 1950. For obvious reasons, I grill my friend about Roth whenever the opportunity presents itself, and in one of these interrogations I learned that Swede Levov, the “steep-jawed insentient Viking” who is the hero of Roth’s American Pastoral, was based on a real classmate at Weequahic.

I should not have been surprised. Roth has been playing peekaboo with his readers for years, inserting himself to varying degrees into his fictions. It has become an ongoing theme: like the silhouette of Hitchcock in old movies, we seem to recognize Roth — or aspects of Roth — in all his books, particularly in the flawed writers, Peter Tarnopol, Nathan Zuckerman, even a character named “Philip Roth.” They are all plainly Roth, the reader understands, and they are all invented too. The point of all this line-blurring is to get beyond fictional realism and closer to reality, to the actual lived human experience. Roth’s novels have a vivid, confessional quality not just because Roth is an extraordinary writer (though obviously he is), but because his books pretend to be more than fictions — they sometimes are more than fictions.

A similar fission occurs whenever a writer’s face seems to hover behind the pages. Conrad, Melville and Hemingway all are recognizable in their stories. Even in a fantasy like The Great Gatsby, the reader’s experience is influenced by the knowledge that Nick Carraway shares much of his creator’s biography: Midwestern boyhood, Ivy League education, witness to “riotous” Jazz Age parties. Nick is the thinnest mask for Fitzgerald. When we read Gatsby, we understand that the voice and the sensibility are Fitzgerald’s own. In Sophie’s Choice, William Styron goes a step further, all but stepping onstage himself, undisguised, inside the story. [Read more…] about “The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon

“The Commitments”

It is always dangerous to watch a movie you liked as a kid, but I watched “The Commitments” last night for the first time in years and thought it held up remarkably well. Alan Parker’s 1991 film, based on Roddy Doyle’s debut novel, tells the story of a Dublin hustler named Jimmy Rabbitte who puts together a soul band composed mostly of working-class kids who know nothing about soul or even, in some cases, about music.

The core of the cast are all non-actors recruited from various Dublin bands. Still, “The Commitments” is loaded with great performances. Glen Hansard, who would appear fifteen years later in another great Dublin music film, “Once,” plays the lead guitarist. Maria Doyle, of the band Hothouse Flowers, is one of the backup singers, the Commitment-ettes. And Andrew Strong, an unknown who was 16 years old when “The Commitments” was filmed, blows the roof off with performances that owe as much to Joe Cocker as to Wilson Pickett.

After “The Commitments,” most of the cast returned to careers in music or, frankly, in obscurity. Among the band members, only Doyle and Angeline Ball, who played the blond-bombshell backup singer, have had substantial acting careers since “The Commitments.” So the film feels like lightning in a bottle — an unrepeatable one-off caught on film. It feels alive.

What makes the film live, also, is the sense of music as a pure expression of hope and joy for young people in a gritty down-and-out place. In these down-and-out times, that’s an uplifting thing to watch.

Here is just a taste:

I Miss U: Updike Is Gone

I miss John Updike. Not his work. I loved his stories and some of his novels, but lately I admired his books more than I enjoyed them, and sometimes not even that. Anyway, he left more books than I will ever be able or inclined to read.

It is not Updike’s writing that I miss, it is Updike. I miss knowing he was out there, always working, writing, producing. To legions of younger writers, he was the model. He showed us how a professional writer ought to conduct his life, how to comport himself in public and discipline himself at work.

Julian Barnes wrote an appreciative review of Updike’s last books in which he struck on the perfect word for Updike: courteous.

Updike’s fertility was matched by his courtesy — both as a man and as an authorial presence. His fiction never set out to baffle or intimidate. … Updike always treated the reader as a joint partner in the artistic process, an adult equal with whom curiosity and delight in the world were to be shared.

And, Barnes might have added, he always treated his characters with the same decency and sympathy, even when they were behaving badly. It was not in his nature to judge them. (He was an equally gentle book reviewer, a rarity now.)

No particular insight here. It is just sad to see a great man pass.

Updike lives on in cyberspace, at least, as perhaps we all will. For star power, the best clip to emerge since his death was this 1981 interview with John Cheever on the Dick Cavett Show. But I prefer the old, avuncular Updike. (He never seemed elderly — not frail, merely old.) Here he is in 2004, explaining the ability of the novel to “extend the reader’s sympathy,” which is the secret power of fiction.

The rest of the interview is here.