Showing posts with label writers versus books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writers versus books. Show all posts

Friday, June 19, 2009

Anonthology and Nemonymous

An interesting publication from Fourth Estate: Anonthology includes nine stories by nine of their authors, but readers are left to guess which story is by whom, and there is a competition to enter. Fourth Estate call it 'an experimental project to assess the importance placed on name and reputation over quality of writing'.

As some commenters have pointed out on Alison Flood's Guardian books blogs article, D F Lewis has been producing something similar - Nemonymous - since the late nineties *, with perhaps a little more prescience, since the cult of personality was only just then tightening its stranglehold on our literary culture,
but perhaps also with greater freedom as a small magazine** publisher. Lewis's has been the purer experiment: while Fourth Estate provides us with the clues of the names of the contributing authors, Lewis publishes his issues initially without identifying the authors at all, and so readers are more truly focussed on the work itself. (As far as I am aware, the identities of contributors to each issue are revealed in the next.) The Fourth Estate experiment is predicated on the assumption that we know the contributors' writing: it's a 'recognition' exercise, and this is where it gets fuzzy: since the writers do have a reputation, is the thing we are being invited to recognize after all the writer, in which case you could argue that the ultimate effect here is once again to focus on the personality rather than the writing? Anything that draws critical attention to the issue of the cult of personality is a good thing, I reckon, but it does seem a little weird (if inevitable and maybe even necessary) to rely on personality and reputation to do it...

Edited in: * DF Lewis points out in the comments below that his first annual issue appeared in 2001.
** He also points out that his latest issues are large book anthologies.
And he adds that for the early issues he read the stories 'blind', which indeed made his experiment purer still. However, the last three issues have, like the Fourth Estate anthology, carried the randomized names of the authors on the cover (on the back, rather than the front, though) (to be matched with stories in the subsequent issue a year later).

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Reading Books Through their Authors

Anne Michaels tries to stick to her guns about staying invisible for the sake of the text, while being interviewed by Sarah Crown for The Guardian:
"I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life," she says, leaning across a cafe table, taut with the need to put her point across. "I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can."
Sarah Crown asks her about the time that a journalist asked her if she is Jewish, and she refused to answer:
"...yes, I did resist answering, because I really feel that to answer would be a cop-out... People would be able to say: 'Well of course she's interested in this, because she's Jewish, or her father was.' And it would diminish the enterprise. Because, you know, it's not about me. You spend your time when you're writing erasing yourself. The idea is to get out of the way of it."
It's a tricky one, though. I've written before on one my blogs about the reading of hers I attended where this did indeed happen (can't find the post now, though)*: a member of the audience asked her if she were Jewish. I may be wrong, but I got the strong impression that the questioner felt that Michaels only had the right to write her novel if she were, and that he interpreted the fact that she refused to answer as indication that she wasn't, and that for him the novel was indeed thus invalidated, diminished.

Honestly , if only we could return to that world (many light years across the universe) where books didn't have to be sold by their authors' personalities and lives, and texts were allowed to stand up for themselves. Michaels does a pretty good job in the interview of keeping quiet, revealing only one new fact, that in the intervening period since her last novel she has had two children, but one suspects that Sarah Crown was more respectful of her wishes than many journalists will be...

PS: More on my other blog about my own attitude an as author to this matter.

* As a result of the comment thread on this post, I've now found the reference: not a post, but a comment I made in the thread below a post describing my reading group discussion of Fugitive Pieces.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Politics, Fame and the Writer

Stuart Evers attends an audience with Toni Morrison and ends up reflecting ruefully on the dangers of fame (which he feels Morrison escapes) for writers and their writing.

Meanwhile, in the process of asking prominent Americans about the cultural legacy of the Bush administration (which you may think a very strange phrase), The Guardian elicits some interesting comments from writers, some of them on the nature of fiction and the process of writing:

Paul Auster: Art isn't journalism. Some of the greatest historical novels were written long after the events discussed in the book. You think of War and Peace, written in 1870 about things that happened in 1812. I think there's this confusion in the minds of the public that artists are supposed to respond immediately to things that are going on. We've been living through a new era. Everyone knows the world has changed, but exactly where the story is taking us is unclear right now and until it plays out further I don't know if anyone has a clear vision of what's happening.

Joyce Carol Oates: Most artists live through a sequence of administrations, and their art evolves in ways too individual to be related to larger, generic forces.

Gore Vidal: We have a president who cannot read. He's dyslexic, as was his father before him. It must have an effect. I watch a good deal of television because of the elections. The professional television people, all of them graduates of our finest universities, can't use proper English. We are losing the language, I suppose... Art is always needed in a country that doesn't much like it. Performance is all anybody cares about.

Edward Albee: I have found over the past eight years that commerce has taken over the arts in the United States... The only art that is allowed any great exposure is commercial art that is not going to rock the boat.

Lionel Shriver: ...here's the really bad news: Obama could be terrible for the arts. Why, when there's barely an artist in the States who doesn't support him? Art thrives on resistance. There's nothing more arid, more enervating, more stultifying, or more utterly uninspiring than getting your way.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

The Writing or the Writer?

In the wake of Norman Mailer's death, a slightly shocking 'good riddance' from Joan Smith on the Guardian Books Blog, which gives rise to a long debate about whether we should judge a writer's work in the light of his or her life.

As so often, on the whole the commenters fall into two extreme camps, but it seems to me the issue is more complex than they allow. I've said often enough that I deplore the cult of personality in the contemporary literary world, which does indeed distort our perceptions of writing. On the other hand, as Zadie Smith pointed out earlier this year (the Guardian link seems to have disappeared, I'm afraid), a writers' writing is inevitably coloured or indeed motored by his or her personality - insights, attitudes, perceptions - and thus can't be seen as 'separate' in quite the way some of Joan Smith's commenters claim.

As John Morton says (last post), it's important to concentrate on the writing rather than the writer, but sensitive readers must be alert to the sensibility behind any piece of writing, regardless of fine sentences or clever structure etc. Great writing is always a combination of the two - linguistic facility and sharp sensibility. In fact, it's the writing that will tell you the real truth about an author's character, rather than any self-made or publisher-generated reputation.

As for Mailer, well, I haven't read enough of him, or recently enough, to comment on his writing, but I do know that long ago something about it put me way off. Whether that was his reputation colouring my perception or his sensibility leaking through the prose, I'll have to look again to find out.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Il Gatto Mumificato


I think I've spelled that right - I don't have a good Italian dictionary!

Still on the theme of writers' lives (as opposed to their books), last Saturday Lucasta Miller wrote interestingly about visiting writers' houses. Virginia Woolf was ambivalent, she says, finding the Bronte's house touching yet vulgarising and detracting from the work, but Miller's own visit to the Wordsworths' house in Somerset added to her understanding of Dorothy.

Some years ago I visited Petrarch's house in Northern Italy. There was a lovely atmosphere, stone floors smoothed by the years to a polish, beautifully tinted rounded leaded panes, an orange grove outside I think, and things in glass display boxes - manuscripts, quill pens, pictures, I think - oh I don't know, I could hardly look at anything but Petrarch's cat: mummified and mounted on the wall! His cat! See, that's what I know about Petrarch now: he loved his cat!! And in spite of all the words I have spilled about writer's books being more important than their lives, that was something I was really glad to know, and the mummy seemed to me touching and not macabre at all!!

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Writers versus Books

Joseph Ridgwell writes on the Guardian books blog about ageism in British publishing, but spoils his own case with his suggestion, only half tongue-in-cheek I think, that people should be banned from publishing books before they are thirty.

The point which gets rather swamped in the comment debate he thus generates is that the age of a writer should be irrelevant. We should stop thinking in terms of the personal characterstics of writers and get back to thinking in terms of books.