Mark: You are clearly unaware that most writers are inept when it comes to minding the store. Hence, the whole agent thing. Like the church and state-like separation of advertising and editorial at a magazine, the agent ensures that the writer can carry on writing his novel without concern for how it might sell. For that is the agent’s business. If the agent is good, the agent will understand the writer’s temperament, work very hard to maintain a scenario in which both agent and author benefit, and figure out a way to make a manuscript marketable. Just about everything out there has an audience. It is not the writer’s concern to care about the scope of that audience, but to simply write as true as he can. It is the agent’s concern to translate what the writer has offered into something that the publishing industry requires: namely, a salable book. The current literary agent system creates a protective buffer, unless the writer is avaricious enough to write for the lowest common denominator and take matters into his own hands because he may have a perfectionist impulse. Chances are that such an individual is not really a writer, but is probably an agent incognito. You have obviously had some bad experiences with agents. Perhaps like other writers, you cannot mind the store. This is your problem. And you need to stop playing the blame game and take responsibility. The world does not owe you a living.
Month / August 2008
Responding to Esposito: August 15
Scott: What do you think about Rick Moody thinking about the unfair reputation given to prog-rock concept albums?
Responding to Freeman: August 15
John: “Does a fine job” doesn’t tell us anything about the book and says everything about your love for cliche. But your review gave me a lot of laughs, in large part because it revealed much about your woefully humorless soul. “Humor hounds” and “humor fiends?” “Convulse in respiratory spasms?” Is anybody editing you anymore? Or is this what they cobbled up from what you turned in?
Brief Roundup
- An emo version of the Footloose soundtrack. “Holding Out for a Hero” was never really intended as a song you’d want to slice your wrists to. And if you ply me with enough liquor, I could go on about my complex feelings about Bonnie Tyler at length. But I won’t. I’ll just say that the man behind this deranged concept deserves props for transmuting a teenage classic and removing all hope and redemption from its soundtrack. (via Quiddity)
- Leave it to Rebecca Solnit to play the predictable 1936 Godwin’s card. I much prefer Erin O’Brien’s blunt summation.
- Al Franken: not the Senatorial shoe-in he thought he was.
- Shouldn’t there be something literary here? Not necessarily.
- Samantha Power on Russia.
- Roger Ebert on the end (and the beginning) of Ebert and Roeper.
Responding to Richards: August 14
Linda: Nothing wrong whatsoever in dwelling upon or lusting over chairs. To evoke the words of MFK Fisher (who once defended her culinary exactitude by pointing out just how much time one spends over a lifetime eating), if one works a sedentary profession, a chair is most certainly important. My own writing chair is not the most ideal. The leather on the right arm has started to fray and light green (hopefully noncarcinogenic) fluff now bulges outward. I suspect this is because I accidentally spilled a beverage on this particular spot about two months ago. But I do have a strange emotional attachment to this chair, even though I know that it will crumble to dust eventually. I suspect I would have an emotional attachment to any chair I spent happy moments writing in, even if it caused one too many trips to a chiropractor. Of course, the Barcelona chair is not really made for writing. At least not the way we know it today. But perhaps you dwell upon this exemplar because you are having some doubts about your present furniture. Doubts about furniture are to be expected in life, and reveries do help assuage certain feelings. Or perhaps you are currently thinking that you need to sit lower to the ground. The buttocks to floor distance is certainly diminished through Mies van der Rohe’s design. And yet the famed German did not live in a world of computers and laptops. I’m wondering now how much computers and laptops have permanently altered the forward-thinking low-leaning furniture aspirations of today’s visionaries, and whether it might be resisted through living without this technology for a period of six months.