New Naturalism

I recently attended a Halloween party where I met another writer. Her horn-rimmed glasses screamed postmodernist, so I tried to keep the conversation away from writing, but this was not to be. She pressed me endlessly for personal details about my writing despite my attempts to demur until I finally gave in and said that I write a kind of new romanticism. She was thrown.

"There's naturalism and then there's romanticism," I tried to explain.

"But you're using those terms in a strange way," she instructed (not said but instructed).

I tried again: "Think of new romanticism as an action genre with killer heroes and extraordinary flights of fancy, only make it say something universal."

"But Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter..." Her voice trailed off, then her eyes opened wider and her mouth drifted shut.

I could see that this was a smarter than average postmodernist. She was getting the point quite nicely. Disbelief, shock, possibly even fear — I've seen it before. Poor dear. Yes, we romanticists are back and we're not kidding.

(It just occurred to me that it must be tough to be a failed postmodernist. Social recognition is everything to them. Success is measured by popularity. It's democratic. But as for me, if my life is going to be worth living, then I'm going to live it my way, on my terms, to the beat of my own classical guitar. I don't need to be liked. Isn't that just infuriating, my dear postmodernist ghoul?)

Anyway, we exchanged a few more comments before she found an excuse to scurry away into the safety of the costumed crowd. It was an interesting exchange. She was especially shocked that I would accuse many modern writers of being naturalists.

"Russo, Dybek, Chandra — these are nothing like Tolstoy," she said flatly. "Tolstoy was a conventionalist."

I noted her careful omission of the word "Duh!"

She's right, in a way. Naturalists used to be serious writers. They knew their craft exceedingly well, and they created some of the most finely-wrought and brilliantly conceived novels ever written. Their history reads like a Who's Who of literature: Tolstoy, Lewis, James, Crane, Chopin, and Fitzgerald, to name a few.

But a new kind of naturalism seems to be emerging from today's colleges. Some fifteen years ago, I was glad to see it. I thought it was a rebellion against the infamous LSD years. Maybe it was, only it's proving to be a poor alternative. While these new naturalists do attempt something like realism — at times even hyper-realism — this time around much of it is gritty, nihilistic, politically narrow, culturally arrogant, militant, linguistically debased, and sloppy. In short, it's postmodern.

Here's a sample from the venerable Glimmer Train Press, vol 35, "Donna Aube" by Thomas Kennedy:

"Already tipsy, he poured a vodka in his kitchen, glanced across the courtyard at the blue and white lamp. It was not even blue and white, it was green and beige. He snorted, stood swaying at the sink, infinitely grateful that he had said nothing suggestive to the young woman in the library. Yet the mere chance that he might have troubled him. Why? She might have wanted me. And? He thought of his dark-eyed student Marissa, of the woman who had phoned him the night before whom he perhaps would never see again, of his ex-wife's once-beautiful aunt with the melting-wax face, and reached up to the box of Havana Wilders. There were still two in the box.

He decided abruptly to allow himself to smoke them both. And then what?

'And then nothing,' he said aloud. 'And then nothing. Not a goddamned fucking thing.'

In the hallway he looked at the photo of his children flanking him beneath the Bridge of Sighs in Venice the summer he had defended his thesis. Realism & Other Illusions."

Mr. Kennedy, you're sooo coool!

And isn't that the point?

The End of the Line for Naturalism?

From Writer's Blog:

Joyce Carol Oates Apologizes

Joyce Carol Oates has apologized to those who were upset after reading her short story "Landfill," which recently appeared in The New Yorker. The story is based on the tragic death of a real student and many were shocked at the realistic details used in the story.

Where on earth will literary naturalism go from here? Has naturalism really become so reportorial that it can no longer be distinguished from journalism?

Imagine if a grieving family could sue a naturalistic author for incorrect fiction. That might cause a bit of writer's block in the Oateses and Proulxs of the world. It might also sink a few of the businesses where naturalists gather to feed such as The New Yorker and Glimmer Train Press.

Let's hope it never comes to that, if only out of concern for First Amendment rights.

Final Thoughts on Derrida and Foucault

I vented about the death of Lit studies in academia here and here. I griped about Derrida and Foucault in particular. In response to a private email, I'm going to explain my position on Foucault and Derrida. I'll provide an example from each and do my best to "deconstruct" them. (A bit of academic humor there.)

But since I'm a writer, not a philosopher or psychologist, I only intend to expose the dirty underbelly of academic orthodoxy to perhaps help a frustrated Lit student find his way to other points of view. I'm not interested in debating "fine points" about either men (as if such a thing even exists), because doing so would be like an atheist arguing about whether angels have brown or white wings. Like the atheist, I reject post-structuralists (and post-modernists generally) at their philosophic root. I hold that reality exists independent of any man's wishes or whims, that your mind is either in close contact with reality or it's not, and that the choice is yours. This makes me profoundly human and profoundly not postmodern.

On that note, I suggest that anyone who wants to go head-to-head with postmodernism first learn to deal with concepts honestly, accurately, and consistently. This is the branch of philosophy called epistemology, which addresses how and whether we know what we know. For more on that, I suggest that you start here or here. In my view, Aristotle was essentially right, and Plato was essentially wrong. Let Ayn Rand bring you up to date on that disagreement.

Also, if you want an introduction to the sorry state of Literature in academia, I recommend the book Literature Lost, not because I agree with all of the author's conclusions (I don't), but because it shines a bright light on the prevailing literary practices. In particular, it will show you how (your) postmodern professors will try to obscure reality by replacing the actual context of an author's work with their own personal one, and always in a way that favors the professor's narrow political bias; for example, Thomas Jefferson's revolutionary and emancipatory political genius can be ignored because he owned slaves and may have had sex with one. Sadly, this is what you will get from some—if not most—of your Literature courses.

Now back to Derrida and Foucault. Here's what you should expect:

To begin with, I sincerely suspect that both men deserved to be called psychopathic. In my view, they were both arrogant rhetoricians who displayed wickedly deceptive behavior. Intelligent? Yeah, sure, but that just makes them all the more guilty, because it means that on some level they knew what they were doing.

As I said, these men are rhetoricians first and foremost. By that, I do not mean to imply that they are philosophically astute. They're not. I mean that they know how to create labyrinths out of floating abstractions. They are wordsmiths who use their skills to deceive. I also don't mean to imply that these men use language well. In fact, they don't. Their quackery is made obvious by the way they torture language until it no longer resembles a human conversation, a fact you will soon see for yourself. All you need is a solid understanding of grammar — elements like compound-complex sentences, pluperfect subjunctives, displaced antecedents, and so on — plus a good dose of honesty in order to stay ahead of them.

Here's a rather easy example from Foucault:

Now in this connection I believe that this [humanistic] thematic which so often recurs and which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself.

- What is Enlightenment ? » (« Qu'est-ce que les Lumières? »), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.

Sideways translation (or, what I think he's trying hard to say without saying it): "Humanism, when broadly defined, can stand opposed to the idea of individualism—what most people think the Enlightenment was all about."

And that's not even Foucault at his worst. Sometimes I don't think Foucault even knows what he's saying.

Notice the way he stacks relative pronouns: "that...that...that..." and "which...which..." Notice his breathless use of meaningless and unsubstantiated adverbs: "so often"and "always". Notice his purple ornamentation: "permanent creation", "historical consciousness" and "at the heart of". Notice his trademark, circular use of concepts: "this [humanistic] thematic...which...depends on humanism". Notice his sly but not innocent anthropomorphism: "the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself."

I say this last comment is not innocent because he seems to be avoiding taking a stand about something important. He seems unwilling to say what he thinks the Enlightenment is about — at least not here in this spot — so he instead turns an abstruse phrase: "the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself." Expect to see a lot of crypto-babble like this from other post-structuralists.

Here in this speech, he's allegedly trying to defend himself against the charge that he's against the Enlightenment. In fact he is against it, but by god if he's going to admit it. Elsewhere Foucault essentially rejects concepts like reason, rationality, objectivity, and even science! To be more precise, I should say that he may use these concepts from time to time, but he would first label them discursive elements instead of concepts, then he would utterly transform their meanings, and finally he would claim them as his own — in effect stealing the words for his own devices. More on that in a second.

So what idea do I think he's avoiding? What aspect of the Enlightenment does he not want to commit to? I can only guess, because his layered use of relative pronouns makes it impossible to find the right antecedent for the principle in question. (Hmmm...why might that be?) Either the antecedent is the idea of individualism as understood by most Enlightenment thinkers (an idea he rejects), or a "critique" in the Kantian sense of finding the limits of the concept Enlightenment, or the idea of value-judgments ("the creation of ourselves"), which he earlier tried to unpackage from the concept Enlightenment and repackage in the separate, supposedly antithetical concept humanism.

Such willy-nilly repackaging of concepts to fit the moment, by the way, is yet another favorite magic trick of the post-structuralists. Here's how that particular trick works:

A post-structuralist holds that a word means whatever you want it to mean, which implies that you can never interpret a document without having some kind of "discourse" with the writer. A key problem with that approach to language is that whenever you ask an author to interpret his own words for you, especially an author like Foucault, you will see that he is free to say whatever works for him in the moment. In other words, he just makes the word fit.

In Foucault's own words:

"Is not the material unity of the volume[*] a weak, accessory unity in relation to the discursive unity of which it is the support?"

– The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Routledge, 1972 [* The word volume here means word or language.]

Read: The language of something ("the discursive unity") is much more important than the actual object to which the language refers ("the material unity"). In other words, an object's identity and existence in the real world is only grudgingly recognized as a sort of vague backup for the truly real and powerful thing, which is: the word. The word (or volume) becomes the object, while the object becomes a mere suggestion of the word — and one that's easily ignored, I might add. This is pure Foucault and is almost as anti-Enlightenment as you can get. Nowhere else can you see more clearly how Foucault turns language upside down.

Anyway, it seems that being considered anti-Enlightenment was not de rigueur in Foucault's day, so he was probably under some kind of pressure to come down on the side of pro-Enlightenment values some how, some way. Trouble is, many of those same Enlightenment values were a bit too...unpleasant, shall we say, for Foucault to embrace, or maybe he knew that he had already decried those ideas elsewhere and that it would be too obvious for him to suddenly embrace them.

Not a problem! Just extract the unpleasant aspects from the concept, move those aspects over to the concept humanism, and finally distance yourself from humanism. Voilá! A raging anti-Enlightenment figure is suddenly free to declare himself a hard-for-the-guard, reveille-playing troubadour for the pro-Enlightenment army (depending on what you mean by the Enlightenment, of course, wink-wink). Amazing! Just like magic!

Read the essay. I think you will see that it is like watching someone change trains midway through a trip so that it will never occur to anyone seeing him depart at his destination that he was ever on the other train. In other words, it's just more stinky structuralist B.S. at its best.

On Derrida, here's Derrida himself (found on Wikipedia):

You also asked me, in a personal way, why people are angry at me. To a large extent, I don't know. It's up to them to answer. To a small extent I know; it is not usually because people are angry at me personally (well, it happens in private, perhaps); but rather they are angry at what I write. They are angry at my texts more than anything else, and I think it is because of the way I write — not the content, or the thesis. They say that I do not obey the usual rules of rhetoric, grammar, demonstration, and argumentation; but, of course, if they were simply not interested, they would not be angry. As it is, they start to get involved but feel that it's not that easy, that to read my texts they have to change the rules, to read differently, if only at another rhythm.

— Derrida, "Following Theory", p. 17, in life.after.theory

Um... Mr. Derrida, did it ever occur to you that "it's not easy" for them because you're a goddamned obfuscationist by trade?! Of course it did. These self-conscious words of yours right here demonstrate that you knew exactly what you were doing. As Derrida says: "To read my texts, they have to change the rules, to read differently, if only at another rhythm"? You dishonest son-of-bitch! This is a rare instance of a post-structuralist almost admitting that he learned to ply his trade by doing freak-show work in David Copperfield's Amazing Magic Circus.

There's another important lesson to learn here about Derrida. Notice how he switches the blame from himself to those who have trouble with him: "But, of course, if they were simply not interested, they would not be angry." This is a non-sequitur if ever there was one, and it's classic, arrogant Derrida. It makes absolutely no sense. It tells you nothing about the problem, yet it leaves you vaguely sensing that he has somehow switched the blame onto his readers, but for what exactly? What have they done wrong? It's unclear, but notice that his words do leave you with a sense that Derrida is an important player in the discourse, which I think was his main, if only, message.

Also notice the arrogant connotation: "but, of course..." As if every reasonable person would see his point without having to be told. You can almost see the man pointing his nose up in the air. I would expect this theme to appear in almost everything Derrida ever wrote.

Even Noam Chomsky takes a critical view of Derrida. According to Wikipedia, "Noam Chomsky has expressed the view that Derrida's work is essentially pointless, because his writings are deliberately obscured with pretentious rhetoric to hide the simplicity of the ideas within."

Wow! If it's bad enough to offend Noam Chomsky's sense of language, it's bad enough to offend anyone.

Even so, Foucault and Derrida have a hungry audience in academia. As a student, you may soon be embarrassed to witness postmodern Lit professors having brain orgasms while reading or discussing any kind of abstruse, multisyllabic, hackneyed, patois nonsense, whether from Foucault, Derrida, or someone else. I think you will also see that men like Foucault have played that audience particularly well (or played them for fools).

Here's some parting advice, if you want it:

Don't let your professors play you for a fool. Don't let them dispose of your most precious organ. Instead, practice safe learning. Think, think, think! Thinking is like a condom for your brain. Demand facts and clarity. Assume that a professional obfuscater has only one purpose: to hide his incompetence.

Look for honest and competent professors. Take their classes and honor them with your hardest work — befriend them, if possible — even if you disagree with their politics. Go outside your degree program to find such a person, if you have to. They will have a lot to teach you.

If you ever hit rock bottom, have a plan for dealing with it. Try thinking about something besides class. Try humming the song "These are a Few of My Favorite Things" (but only do that about once a year, for your sanity). Better yet, bring your IPod to class and have Enya ready to play when you begin to feel that rage rumbling in your belly.

Of course, you can always try to argue with your professor. Just be forewarned that a hard-line postmodernist will not always give you the satisfaction of arguing back. His/her response can be much worse than that. He may just smile at you paternalistically and say, in effect, "Don't feel bad about your strange ideas. After all, you're a male/non-immigrant/heterosexual/white/overpriviledged/American. You obviously can't help but say those stupid things." Then he'll just ignore you. Unless you happen to be, say, a black, homosexual female and you disagree with him. Then I suppose he might hate you for being a "traitor", or worse, he'll just think that you're some kind of fascinating freak.

Whatever you do, don't merely get your degree. I recommend using college as an opportunity to learn how to keep your focus on reality. It's a testing ground. If you can learn to remain truthful through all the muddy waters put in your way by postmodern professors, then you will have accomplished something very great. Two key virtues you will have acquired (or exercised), despite your professors' best efforts, are rationality and independence.

Here's my last advice: Don't give those mind-numbing deconstructionist fools the middle finger until you're actually walking out the door with a B.A. in your hand. (By then, you may not care enough about them to bother.) And good luck.

Oh, and by the way, if anyone out there wonders what all of this has to do with literature — that's a very good question! What does it have to do with literature?!

[Edit: Snipped out some redundant stuff. It's still too long, but I don't have time to fix it.]

Why I Didn't Get an MFA in Literature

Camille Paglia, in an interview on Bookslut (a blog), nails the reason I became a technical writer and refused to pursue an MFA in Literature:

I feel that post-structuralism has deadened not only the students, but the professors themselves, to literature. There’s been over 30 years of it now. Over 30 years. Where is the great work of criticism by any of these people? Where is the great critic? What have they produced? Nothing.

It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook, all reflecting each other. There’s no single great work that’s come out of criticism in the last 30 years, in the way Cleanth Brooks’ Well Wrought Urn has that kind of relationship, a book you could recommend to let someone know what’s happening in literary criticism. It is such a dead end, a terrible dead end, and what has happened is that talented people have fled the graduate schools. People have to wake up to this. The people at the top now, people from my generation, who are in the Ivy League, from coast to coast, to Berkeley, their work is mediocre. They have not done what they claim to do, and what they’ve done is driven out talented people.

I meet them everywhere, people who started graduate school and left it, OK? They’re in publishing, they’re in media, they’re in all kinds of jobs, because they couldn’t stand it. They wanted to study literature and art, but had every obstruction put in their paths. They not only had to read Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, who had nothing to do with literature, but they had to read critics talking about Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, none of whom are philosophically trained, okay?

I had professors telling me that I should pursue a degree in Lit. They would often select my essays and recommend them for scholarships, awards, readings. Even my fellow students enjoyed my work. There was great promise. But I wouldn't be a part of the nightmare that was Lit studies at the time. I'd seen enough of that as an undergrad. Following that path would have been suicide for me. (And anyone who knows my intense personality would understand that comment.)

If I ever become a successful fiction writer — and I fully intend to — it will be due to my own self-study and hard work. Sure, I could wish that I had been born during some other time, but unfortunately that's not reality. Instead, I just put my head down and drive on, and I know that I'm much happier for it.

I do hope, though, that I will live long enough to see some kind of rebirth in Literature, a vibrant new class of scholars, writers, and students flooding our universities with new blood. As my partner likes to tell me, "You just might be a part of that rebirth." That's a nice thought.

Paglia on The Death of Academia

Camille Paglia is one of the oddest ducks on planet earth. She's like a living, breathing Freudian slip, except that she seems to mean what she says. You never know what she's going to say next. Even so, I occasionally find myself agreeing with some of her arguments, especially when she takes on academia. Here's one good example, from Canada's Globe and Mail:

Paglia is not a huge fan of deconstructionism, the long-reigning gospel in academe. Western culture is in serious decline not only because it is being overrun by the Philistine armies of the entertainment industry, she says, but because on college campuses across the United States, political correctness has run amok.

"I was in Kansas City on my book tour and met this woman studying public administration, and she was complaining about having to study [poststructuralist French thinker Michel] Foucault. I mean, it's absolutely absurd. It's become doctrine. It's everywhere."

Consuming a force-fed diet of the French intellectual method of Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, she adds, students emerge "passive to language, indifferent to fact, and arrogant towards culture."

Academic dissidents have been silenced.

"Philistine armies of the entertainment industry"? I have no idea what she's getting at there. But the rest is true to a word.

I am sure that most people today have no earthly idea just how unearthly the humanities, and literature in particular, have become. The quality of Lit studies has fallen so low that it simply can't go any lower. The problem is not merely that of graduating low-performing students or spending too much time on only one style of literature. It's even lower than that — much, much lower in some schools.

Ever more students seem to be reporting entire quarters spent in 100- and 200-level courses never once reading a book let alone writing an essay about one. They also report spending more time arguing in Lit class about current events and politics (full-time Bush bashing) than they ever spend doing that in their sociology or political science classes. And while not studying literature in a Literature class is bad enough, the situation is made worse by the fact that there's very, very little dissent. It's a wasteland. Any non- Far-Left point of view is snuffed out faster than you can say the words "narrow minded", usually by sneering ridicule from the professor.

I had the same experience myself. I remember hoping that my Lit classes were merely aberrations, but reports coming from other students demonstrated that they were not. Any hope that I did manage to retain was finally demolished some years later when I was invited to teach a writing course at my alma mater. After one term, I refused to consider taking a job in academia ever again. A person of integrity couldn't be a part of such a program.

Literature in American Universities is dead. It's been replaced by a grab-bag of so-called Postmodern doctrines: Structuralism/Post-structuralism/Marxist Dialectic Theory/Critical Theory. Together they all start from one fundamental premise: Reality doesn't exist and you can't know anything. They then proceed to the next phase of education, telling you exactly what you should know: You must accept all of my Leftist propaganda on faith or be cast out. And finally they gird up their newly created Leftist roboticons for going out into the real world: Now we'll show you how to restructure the way you use language so that you can make your enemies think you're smarter than them and at the same time help you believe that you're still being reasonable even when you're not. That's postmodernism in a nutshell.

Philosophically, who's to blame? I'm no philosopher, but I routinely encountered the names Paglia mentioned, especially Foucault and Derrida, and if you've read anything by these language whores, then you'll already know why Literature is dead.

In my view, these men (and Barthes) are so evil they almost make Ellsworth Toohey, the villain in The Fountainhead, look like an understatement. That so many professors in academia seem to revere these mind-destroying, deceitful bastards is one of the scariest aspects of our current world, scarier to me even than a born-again Christian being President, and that's pretty damn scary.

[Edit: Add Paul de Man to the list of witch doctors. I just remembered him.]

How to Deal With the Slushpile

So you finish your masterpiece, then you hand it over to an eager agent who gushes, "This is a slam dunk!" He assures you that publishers will fight for the rights, and they do. Overnight your salary quadruples. Soon you find yourself struggling to find time to write in between trips to see your new pals who live and work near a lovely beach in Antigua.

But before that inevitability comes to pass, you may want to check out this podcast from Poets & Writers magazine [the one titled "How to Publish Your Short Story"]. It's a panel discussion between several editors of lit magazines and a live audience of aspiring writers. The results are sobering, but also insightful. You get to hear from several bigwig — and probably slightly jaded — editors (The New Yorker and Paris Review) and from a few who seem to be a bit more hopeful and enthusiastic. A theme that runs through the dialog is the vast, vast, vast ratio between manuscripts they receive and manuscripts they print — basically the dreaded slushpile. [Speaking of, thanks to Slushpile for the link.]

But before you listen and weep, I'll offer my own perspective on the chances of getting published:

When I was in college and I told my father what I wanted to do for a living, his response didn't make any sense to me. The words that came out of his mouth didn't even process in my young-adult mind, as if he were speaking a foreign language. He said, "How many people get jobs in that business?"

"Well, I don't know," I said. "Probably not a lot."

He was nonplussed.

So I asked: "Do you think that's important?"

He looked at me like he'd suddenly discovered that he'd raised a stupid child. Well, I'm not stupid. I could see that this conversation wasn't going well, so I decided to take a bold approach. That usually works better with good old Dad, anyway. So I said: "I know that some people make money in the business. Probably not very many, though. In fact, probably only a tiny handful actually make enough money to live on." — I paused. — "Only the very best make it, I think."

He looked cautiously interested.

"I'm going to have to be the best, Dad. That's all there is to it."

He smiled. Nothing more was said. It didn't need to be.

Falling Out of Print

I'm cross-posting this from Boing Boing:

Falling Out of Print is a Book's Natural Fate

“Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a science fiction editor at Tor Books, has posted a brilliant rumination on the ephemerality of literature -- how quickly most books, even popular ones, disappear into history. She uses a collection of bestseller lists from 1900 to 1955 to make her case, and delves wisely into the harm that extended copyright terms have wrought upon those who would rescue classics from the scrapheap of time:

'The literature taught in schools is that which has survived: a collection of gross statistical anomalies. This is misleading. Falling out of print is a book's natural fate. We can belatedly train ourselves to believe that this will happen to other people's books. What's hard is for writers to believe it will happen to their own.

'It'll happen just the same. It happens faster in mainstream fiction than it does in Our Beloved Genre, more slowly for nonfiction history books, very fast indeed for computer manuals; but in the end, all but a very few titles will be forgotten. Just look at the authors in that collection of bestseller lists. You're a literate bunch, but have you ever heard of Harold Bell Wright? How about Mazo de la Roche? Mary Roberts Rinehart, Lloyd Douglas, Irving Bacheller, Frank Yerby, Coningsby Dawson, Warwick Deeping? These were all notable authors in their day. Some of their books were no better than they should be, while others were genuinely praiseworthy; but all of them spent some time perched on top of the commercial heap.'”

So let me get this straight: Hayden uses "a collection of bestseller lists" as a standard of what ought to become a classic? Hmmm. What do bestseller lists have to do with anything? It seems to me that oftentimes it's just the other way around. For example, while I despise James Joyce because I think he was an (intelligent) fraud and charlatan, I also see his work as a classic of the so-called Modern period, even more so than the works of Stein or Kafka. Yet how many everyday people have ever actually read his work? I'm guessing not very many. In fact, Ulysses has never really been popular with the reading public. It stays in print now only because professors assign it to tens of thousands of captive students in universities throughout the Western world, and because many of those same students desperately want to look like a cognoscenti whenever they sit in a trendy coffee shop and talk literary politics with other hip-hippy, bourgeois-proletariat elitists.

From Wikipedia: “A classic is an item that has become a ubiquitous and unique symbol or icon of a time gone by, mainly because of its inherent quality or its representative status.” I agree, except to note that a work of “inherent quality” is not necessarily a work that is good. Rather, it must be so outstanding for whatever reason of its own that it actually creates a movement or comes to represent an existing one, whether popular or not. Ulysses is an example; its unique traits had such inherent quality that they became a rallying point for those who appreciated those same qualities: a disdain for literature as story, and a desire to see literature turned into a tool for cognitive disintegration (or at least a reflection of the author's own disintegration).

On the specific issue brought up by Hayden about stories going out of print, I say, “So what?” I don't write to be famous, rich, or remembered. I write because I love story, and I feel a sense of pride and happiness when I get it right. Yeah, I want to get paid someday and yeah I want to know that certain readers enjoy my work, but I have no illusions that a book deal will somehow transform my sense of self. In other words, it's not the main or motivating reason that I write. I suppose it's true that if I believe in my story enough, and I am faced with a publisher who has no vision for it, then I will want to fight to keep my story in print. But right now that's a problem I can only hope to face.

A Greek Not-So-Tragedy

Here's a sharp take over at Greek Tragedy about what one writer went through trying to get published.