James Frey’s Literary Production Line

When he was working on A Million Little Pieces, Frey told us, he wanted to write in the tradition of Tropic of Cancer, “A Season in Hell,” and Paris Spleen—transgressive works by transgressive authors. As he pointed out, heavy hitters never write like the established writers of their own time. Hemingway used short, declarative sentences; Miller wrote about sexuality in the first-person present tense; Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction. These men created their own styles. Frey said Mailer even told him, right before he died, “You’re the next one of us.”

Frey said he never considered whether A Million Little Pieces was fiction or nonfiction—and anyway, before the memoir craze of the nineties, it would have been published as a novel. “If Picasso painted a Cubist self-portrait,” he suggested, “nobody would say it didn’t look like him.” Much of his performance for us echoed comments he’d made to journalists. “My best friends are almost all artists,” he told a Canadian reporter earlier this year. “I have very few friends who are writers … I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places. Contemporary artists like [Richard] Prince, Hirst, and Koons do that, but there are no literary equivalents. In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions. I’ve already been cast out of ‘proper’ American literary circles. I don’t have to be a good boy anymore. I find that the older I get, the more radical my work becomes.”

Frey also talked to the reporter about how contemporary artists make their work. “A lot of artists conceptualize a work and then collaborate with other artists to produce it,” he said then. “Andy Warhol’s Factory is an example of that way of working. That’s what I’m doing with literature.” At the end of the seminar, Frey elaborated on this concept and made an unexpected pitch. He was looking for young writers to join him on a new publishing endeavor—a company that would produce mostly young-adult novels. Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it. There had already been wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens, Frey predicted, would be next.

If you don’t mind feeling angry enough to cry blood, read more at New York Magazine.

My apologies for the lack of activity lately- I’ve been breaking in a new computer. Many thanks to Dell for building a laptop with a single USB drive, saving me from the horror of being able to have a mouse, external hard-drive and iPod plugged in at the same time. Oh, and the pop-up to tell me that I’ve plugged in headphones that has finally allowed me to answer the question ‘did I plug in my headphones?’ (I had, it turns out). Currently I’m flipping a coin to decide whether The Body or Agalloch get my nod for album of the year.

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I’d normally take a belt-sander to my genitals before recommending something from Vice, particularly after their lacklustre black-metal documentary, but this mini documentary on the real-life zombies of Haiti seems to avoid their editorially mandated Nathan-Barleyism. It also has a guy in it who was shot fourteen times in the face.

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Jurassic Park and the Utopia Wars

More at Bookslut

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‘Your Beautiful Eyes’ by Suren Manvelyan

I had to train myself to make eye contact with people, to the point where today I question whether my effort to force myself into a stranger’s eyespace is a bad habit. I have even taken to wearing glasses I don’t need in order to put a layer of useless plastic between me and another person’s soul-window. Get close enough to any part of anyone and their humanity breaks down.

Your beautiful eyes :: Photography Served.

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Tom McCarthy’s C And The Pointless Resurgence of Experimental Fiction (which is actually Modernism)

If all goes according to plan, one of these vacuous, privileged indie butter-dumpsters will be the next Gertrude Stein.

The blitzkreig of publicity surrounding Tom McCarthy’s novel C has claimed at least one victim, myself, and will certainly drive sales, establishing McCarthy’s writing as authentic within relevant demographics and, combined with ubiquitous availability of the book itself in Waterstones and Borders will certainly allow publishers Random House (a subsidiary of the Bertelsmann AG transnational media group) to move a considerable quantity of product. Not to be glass-half-empty, but there seems to have been some sort of logistical error that is preventing copies ordered on Amazon, the world’s biggest book retailer, from arriving any sooner than two weeks, as opposed to the next day. Also, it’s not available on Kindle or Apple’s bookstore yet- somebody really dropped the ball there. This said, the product’s transparent dust jacket really says ‘premium item’ (though from a distance makes the book appear to be a laminated library copy) and its reflective quality makes it a valuable piece of social capital to facilitate social-networking. All in all a successful product launch in a difficult marketplace.
One of the key impediments to Tom McCarthy’s product ‘making mad bank’ is the term ‘experimental’. In both interviews and articles he has to deal with this ugly word from the pre-Web 2.0 days. He is right to say that “People use that term when what they actually mean is ‘not conforming to a certain type of realism’, and that’s just as much a literary convention as anything else.” Not only is the term alienating, it’s inaccurate: ‘experimental’ implies cutting-edge, and the experiments performed in C were completed in the forties- he’s formulating general relativity when he could be discovering the Higgs-Boson. He may have a hard-on for the early twentieth century in his own confused way (he has issued a futurist-style “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” and has written a book that is essentially a hand-job to an imagined time when literary and personal authenticity were still possible) but unless he’s aiming for a Dieselpunk demographic then he needs a rebranding. In fact, all of experimental fiction needs to be rebranded. By me.
From now on Experimental Fiction is going to be Alternative Fiction.
Could any term be more perfect for (former) experimental writers who endlessly repeat Waugh, Joyce and Johnson’s experiments? Alternative music hasn’t managed to make anything innovative in the past twenty years and is sustained largely by producing artful simulacra of 4AD, Merge and K-records back catalogues. With a little imagination on the part of Random House’s marketing team the International Necronautical Society could be the next Wavves and Do the Dew!
It’s time to celebrate literature’s holding pattern. It’s time to outdo alternative music with half thought-out nostalgia. If alternative music is predicated on all good music being made before the musicians were born then writers should work under the premise that no great literature was produced after their grand-parents were born- I’m imposing a strict May 4th 1939 limit on all formal innovation and subject matter.
Wonderfully for writers, the alternative tag means they don’t have to do anything that they aren’t doing already. They can sign to a major publisher, use expensive marketing campaigns to move their product and maybe one day get an endorsement from Mountain Dew. Look at Vampire Weekend- rich white guys playing what sounds like Huey Lewis and the News soundtracking the Lion King and, rightfully, everybody loves them! If they had set out to ‘experiment’ with a non-’Hip to be square/Just can’t wait to be king’ sound they would have never been able to endorse disappointing U.S president Barack Obama’s campaign.
The problem with ‘experimental’ is that sooner or later somebody might take the word seriously.

Further recommendations for the future of Alt-fic:

• Big-name Editors picking unpublished writers from obscurity/Williamsburg- I want a Dave Sitek of grammar.
• A way to make books lo-fi. Possibly some sort of heat process or acid treatment.
• Can M.I.A write a book? She probably should.
• Lydia Davis should be photographed with her boobs out on Lastnightsparty.com.
• The Andrew Wylie agency signs an exclusive deal with Mountain Dew.

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Unofficial Inception Poster by Ibraheem Youssef

World Famous Design Junkies » Intercepted!.

Bootleg film posters are an increasingly popular means for aspiring designers to ride the coattails of already famous phenomena to greater recognition. A little like inserting Britney Spears Nude Pix OMG MUST SEE into a blog post.
Normally such naked, but not actually naked self-promotion wouldn’t get a link from me, but Youssef and other poster-hackers are a reminder that real life film posters just aren’t interesting enough, that even a film as innovative as Inception is promoted by a picture of the cast and a tagline that doesn’t do it justice (‘your mind is the scene of the crime’). It reminds us that our billboards and bus stops could be covered in art instead of advertisements.

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The Depression, The Cure and the Depressed Person

A Guardian article on a University of Kansas psychologist with a hardly revolutionary but systematised and, in part, empirically tested means for curing depression had me thinking, for a change, about despair and hopelessness.
Dr. Steve Ilardi is right in pointing out that our bodies and minds are designed to be those of tribal hunter-gatherers and that recognition of this is key in understanding depression. The cure is, very literally, nothing new- plenty of Omega 3, exercise, sunlight and social connections. Critically, the horribly named Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC) is not a ‘talking cure’, since depression is often impossible to articulate except as depression.
I don’t normally read the comments on the majority of articles I read, particularly when the topic hits so close to home, but I’m glad I did in this case. Two important things were pointed out:

“How can you do this if you have a young baby/child and work 9-6 in a call centre in the north of the UK on minimum wage in an area where it is dangerous to go out jogging and your neighbours are all drug addicts? Oh, it’s just for posh depression. I see.”

Compared to the majority of people in the world a call centre worker in the grim North has it good. Residents of Brazilian Favellas and Indian shanty-towns, former Soviet-bloc rustbowls and so on have even less access to fish oil and jogging and far greater pressure in every aspect of their lives. Exactly why the World Health Organization believes that depression will become the second leading cause of death in the world by 2020. Quite an achievement for something that in itself can’t kill you.
Continue reading

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Creativity is in decline amongst children

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek.

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Why Don’t More Writers Buy Books?

Why Don’t More Writers Buy Books? – Signatures – GOOD.

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Cleveland comic-book legend Harvey Pekar dead at age 70 | cleveland.com.

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