Rich says he wants to go long, that he no longer wants to feel the strain of shortening his thoughts to column length. Okay, but I’m more interested in what leads a man to write a column in the first place. Rich shares his thoughts on the matter:
For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage.
I can relate, as I too like to “stimulate debate” and “look for narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.” That stage at present is full tilt. Japan’s nuclear plants are melting down; gas prices are on the rise at a time when Americans can least afford it; we’re waging two wars for Empire that we will not win; class warfare is spilling into the streets and state houses of the land; our drinking water is being poisoned by natural gas drilling; kids are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, and so on.
The kind of challenges we’re facing demand that we stand together to meet them. Will we?
Rich says it is foolhardy for an opinion writer to try to shape events. I don’t know. Someone’s got to shape events.
Self-publishing is for wannabe writers. Right? Wrong.
Austin, Minnesota fantasy fiction writer, Amanda Hocking, sold over 650,000 eBooks in January alone. She’s the number one selling indie author on the Kindle and the Web is full of articles on her and how she’s proof that the publishing industry–like the music industry and the newspaper industry before it–is being blown to bits by the Internet.
With all the press attention she’s receiving, Hocking decided to address some of the speculation swirling around the story of her success.
Saying traditional publishing is dead right now is like declaring yourself the winner in the sixth inning of a baseball game when you have 2 points and the other team has 8 just because you scored all your points this inning, and they haven’t scored any since the first.
eBooks make up at best 20% of the market. Print books make up the other 80%. Traditional publishers still control the largest part of the market, and they will – for a long time, maybe forever.
Her Kindle eBooks range in price from $.99 to $2.99 on Amazon.com. The prices presents little risk for buyers, which helps to explain the incredible volume of units sold by Ms. Hocking. I have not yet read her work, so I can’t comment on its quality, but whatever the quality, she’s clearly appealing to a large group of readers. She’s also busting her butt to make it happen.
This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.
Speaking of marketing, Hocking, like so many authors today has invested in video as a promotional tool.
Pulitzer prize-wining journalist Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He’s also the author of Death of the Liberal Class and several other books.
I’ve been reading through some of his essays on TruthDig and finding that I generally agree with his assessments, but not with his recommended solutions, nor his alarmist tone.
Let’s take this passage on the 2012 election and how “the left” has nowhere to go:
Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope.
The inevitability of corporate slavery? Really? That’s the choice before the American people?
I totally agree that the Democratic Party is controlled by corporate interests. There’s really no debate there, as corporate lobbyists line the pockets of all lawmakers, not just the conservative ones.
Now, what do we do about it? Hedges wants people with core moral imperatives to lay their bodies on the line, and I’m sure there’s a place for that, but getting big money out of politics is the only way to shift the balance of power back to the people. If my voice is going to be equal the voice of Exxon-Mobile, then my contribution to candidates has to be equal, as well. Otherwise, Exxon-Mobile’s millions will be always be a million times more important.
I also question what Hedges and Nader mean by “the corporate state.” It’s too broad a statement, in my opinion. The great majority of Americans work for a corporation, and many of these corporations do great things for people. After all, corporations are nothing more than a group of people with a common commercial interest. It seems that the need to make dramatic statements to jar people from their sleepy stupor is more important to Hedges than being clear and accurate–a fact which strips some of the power away from his fiery rhetoric.
I’ve long held that “the real you” needs to show up for a job interview. You may as well dress the way you dress, act the way you act and generally be yourself, because it’s you that has to show up every weekday for years on end, not some flimsy projection of you.
Turns out, Hunter S. Thompson was on this page back in 1958 when he was looking for a newspaper job after the Army.
A book blog from the staff of AbeBooks has the entire text of a letter that Thompson sent Jack Scott of the Vancouver Sun. Here’s one of the juicier parts of Thompson’s appeal:
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Thompson didn’t get the job, but there’s still a lot we can learn from his approach. Writers, of all people, must have a point of view, or they’re not writers, they’re typists.
But even if you’re not a writer, you’re a vital person with a past, present and future. Inject some of your dreams, struggles and most importantly your personality into a query letter. Sure, there’s risk involved when you reveal your true self, but if you fail to communicate anything of value, you’ll also fail to be noticed.
Nobody expects the President or Ben Bernanke to speak honestly, as the truth would shatter an increasingly fragile status quo. But this reliance on artifice, half-truths and propaganda has a cost; people are losing faith in government, in all levels of authority, and in the Mainstream Media—and for good reason.
The marketing obsession with instant gratification and self-glorification has led to a culture of what I call permanent adolescence. Politicians who promise a pain-free continuation of the status quo are rewarded by re-election, and those who speak of sacrifice are punished. An unhealthy dependence on the State to organize and fund everything manifests in a peculiar split-personality disorder: people want their entitlement check and their corporate welfare, yet they rail against the State’s increasing power. You can’t have it both ways, but the adolescent response is to whine and cajole Mom and Dad (or the State) for more allowance and more “freedom.†But freedom without responsibility and accountability is not really freedom; it’s simply an extended childhood.
President Obama must be seeking re-election because here he is earlier today advocating for the continuation of the status quo:
I wish Obama wouldn’t concern himself with re-election and instead do the right thing for the country every day for two more years. But he won’t, because he’s stuck inside the two-party system, which is a prison of our own making. I’d like to think that one day we might break free of this prison, but to do so we will have to stop feeding the guards.
“Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range … come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River.” -Ken Kesey
According to The Register-Guard in Eugene, Faye Kesey is negotiating the sale of Ken Kesey’s library to University of Oregon, where the great American writer went to school and later taught creative writing.
The typed manuscript of “Cuckoo’s Nest†is among thousands of documents from Kesey’s literary life being stored by the University of Oregon library’s special collections department while the UO and the Kesey family negotiate the permanent acquisition of the material.
“This is the guy who took us from the beats to the hippies,†says James Fox, head of the UO’s Special Collections and University Archives.
From a literary perspective, Kesey is so much more than “the the guy who took us from the beats to the hippies.” He’s a 20th century master, who wrote not one, but two Great American Novels, then followed those with Sailor Song and other works.
Bob Keefer of The Register-Guard got a look at some of the documents in preparation for his article.
A quick tour of the contents of some of the boxes produced such treats as a September 1959 letter that Kesey sent to friend Ken Babbs. That was the year he wrote “Cuckoo’s Nest,†but had not yet found a publisher.
“Thus my plight,†the young Kesey typed. “A failure at 24, impotent both physically and artistically. If I haven’t taken a Gilette to my wrists by the time you people get here in March to cheer me up there may be hope. But I doubt it.â€
It’s funny how we don’t think of our heroes or iconic Americans as people who had doubts and intense struggles en route to their success. Clearly they did struggle and did doubt. That’s the human condition, but it’s also the human condition to believe and to overcome.
Novelist and NYU creative writing professor, Zadie Smith, went to see The Social Network and came away with some thoughts on the film and Facebook that she shares in a New York Review of Books piece called Generation Why?
Smith is a fan of the film but she doesn’t “Like” Facebook.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
In other words, you can’t reduce the richness of life into a series of posts to one’s Wall. That’s what literary fiction and films are for!
Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com thinks he understands Smith’s aversion.
When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window.
In other words, professional writers are elitists who can’t relate. Which is odd, given that it is a writer’s job to relate and to retell what people (real and otherwise) are going through with compassion and sensitivity.
Bottom line, it’s not the platform but the people who use it who are responsible for content. I wonder if storytellers from the oral tradition long ago vehemently resisted the use of writing to falsely preserve what was meant to be an organic experience. Probably. And how did the 19th century’s literary masters see the arrival of the telephone? Was it viewed as an imminent threat to the written form? Most likely.
I understand that Smith and others are attempting to confront what they see as frightening changes to our concepts of personal identity and privacy. But this is also about the exchange of ideas through writing and I think we need to recognize where the literary opportunities lie in new media. Facebook and Twitter are platforms for “talking,” not writing. Blogs on the other hand are ideal for writing. A blog post unwritten is the exact same blank page writers have faced for generations. The big difference is the expedited publishing available that electronic media provides. But even this is by choice. A writer can choose to save draft after draft until she is ready to push “Publish,” just like the craftsmen of old. Of course, not every writer does this–I for one unwittingly publish misspelled words and other grammatical errors, and that may well be a blemish on my writing house, but I see electronic media as flexible, and fixable. Unlike print, it’s not “done” when it’s printed. Electronic text can be updated, or rewritten as needed. I hope that’s not seen as an excuse for sloppiness, because that’s not my intention. I merely want to point out how each medium a writer works in has its own rules, and we’re still finding our way through this seemingly infinite new galaxy.
Portland writer Donald Miller, author of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is actively using social media channels to promote his work. But he’s considering quitting his blog in order to concentrate on writing more books.
Miller also notes how the instant publishing format is changing the literary landscape.
There may never be another John Steinbeck, because the next Steinbeck won’t be able to sell enough books to pay for a year or two of writing the next book. He’ll need to speak, and in order to speak he will have to hire an accountant and a travel agent because God knows his creative mind can’t manage a checkbook or get to Detroit by Thursday. And then he’ll be treading water, not honing his craft. And he will never become the next John Steinbeck.
I also recently came across a 2009 essay by Lauren Kessler, the head of the literary nonfiction program at University of Oregon’s Journalism School.
Kessler isn’t wild about filling content holes on blogs. This is why:
It is a burden to produce posts that enhance – or at least don’t scuttle – your reputation as a writer, a burden to produce posts you won’t regret, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day and for the rest of your life.
Personally, I don’t like the concept that blogs aren’t for “real writers.” In my view one of the things real writers do is adapt to the needs of the medium they’re working in. As someone who has written several thousand blog posts, I don’t feel that my reputation as a writer is diminished. Of course, I’m not an academic, nor an author. I might see things differently if I were.
MGM, led by Republican activist and movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, produced three fake newsreels to attack Sinclair before election day, using shots from old movies and Hollywood actors. The newsreels sparked riots in theaters. Irving Thalberg later admitted producing the newsreels. “Nothing is unfair in politics,” he explained.
Just yesterday on Twitter I said, “politics is war,” which led to an interesting exchange with Chris O’Rourke.
As we know, there are all sorts of wars today. Culture wars, drug wars and very real and bloody wars. In all of them lives are at stake. That’s certainly true when we look at the war on poverty, which has been ongoing in America for generations.
Let’s hear from Upton Sinclair about the lives at stake during the Great Depression.
The “EPIC†(End Poverty in California) movement proposes that our unemployed shall be put at productive labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you may choose to give to the paper employed. It asserts that the State must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves and thus take themselves off the backs of the taxpayers. The “EPIC†movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry, because the unemployed are no longer of any use to industry.
Ultimately, Sinclair lost the race to Frank F. Merriam. It’s now 76 years later and we’re still burdened by an inordinate number of people on the sidelines in America, and that’s no way to manage a city, state or nation. But who among us has the faintest clue about how to fix the mess that is the American economy? Sure entrepreneurs can and do create businesses and new jobs, but as Sinclair argues above, the unemployed are not aided by this.
At any rate, we’re 48 hours from another mid-term election and polls indicate that the Republicans will do well on Tuesday. Why will they do well? There are many reasons, one of which is the skilled use of advertising and the media by the Grand Old Party.
In the end, we can call today’s attack ads propaganda, but identifying them as such and rendering them meaningless and ineffective are not the same thing. As long as political propaganda works to get people elected, there will always be people of all political persuasions willing to employ it. Sure, it’s a sad commentary on our values as a nation, and all the lying and manipulation that goes on erodes the fabric of what’s good in our society. But the problem with lies is they’re not seen as lies by the people who retell them. For Loius B. Mayer and Karl Rove and the like, sure, they know the lies they tell, but the audience, sadly, isn’t that discerning.
The study of American subcultures is something I’ve long been fascinated with, for it touches on one of my other favorite themes—cultural geography.
Naturally, people gather in tribes and those tribes then link up in regional clusters to form a “nation” of sorts. One with a strong cultural identity and all the customs to maintain it. In America today there are many such “nations,” like the Redneck nation and the Hipster nation. Then there’s that tired cluster of Preps—an East Coast tribe of White Anglo Saxon Protestants that’s famously resistant to assimilation, or change of any sort.
Lots of famous writers have chronicled the ways of this “nation,” but from a tongue-in-cheek, self-help perspective, there’s no one quite like Lisa Birnbach. Birnbach wrote the 1980 best seller, The Official Preppy Handbook, and now 30 years on, she’s back with a follow-up book, True Prep, co-written by graphic designer Chip Kidd.
Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic took the time to read the book and review it.
Three decades later, the sequel, True Prep, by Birnbach and Chip Kidd, lacks the observational precision of the original. Whereas OPH was crammed with fine-grained analysis—defining, say, the subtle distinctions between Brooks Brothers (mainstream), J. Press (old guard), and Paul Stuart (urbane)—True Prep’ analysis seems vague and flabby. Whereas OPH’s preppies belonged to a distinct and inward-looking subculture, the preppies of True Prep, defined largely by what they buy and wear, are in many ways indistinguishable from fancily educated professionals.
Rather than demonstrating a failure of the authors’ powers, True Prep’s imprecision actually reflects the erosion of the distinctiveness of the subculture it attempts to reveal—an erosion engendered by the progress of capitalism and the attendant triumphs of meritocracy and consumer culture. The northeastern establishment has been absorbed by a broader national and international elite; that process has been under way since the late 19th century and, as True Prep inadvertently shows, it is all but complete today. Preppies’ best schools and universities, their professions, even their Park Avenue co-ops are now the province of the phenomenally talented and ferociously competitive—qualities seldom found among the tribe.
Interesting. The one thing Preps can’t stomach–new money–dilutes their stream and eventually washes them out to sea.
