Posts Tagged ‘writing programs’
Infinite Summer 1: I Am In Here
I’m now current with the Infinite Summer schedule, though not prepared to say all that much about it yet. Well, there’s this: while I’m enjoying the early passages of the book much more this time than I remember enjoying the middle and end of the book last time, I’m frustrated again (as I was frustrated the first time) by Wallace’s unattributed borrowing of well-known urban legends for the book. The toothbrushes-in-asses burglary and the workman’s comp email (spoiler alert! +2 pages from today’s spoiler line) spring to mind most immediately as particularly frustrating examples of this.
I’ll also second Kotsko on the problem of the black dialect sections, which are in fact fairly painful to read. In both these cases (as well as the footnotes, especially the layered footnotes, and the ubiquitous acronyms and abbreviations, and the multiple perspectives, and the constant and sometimes unmotivated switches between first and third person [with a little second thrown in for flavor], and on and on) there seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to distanciate the reader from any possibility of too-complete identification with the text as narrative. This is necessary, I suppose, because the first-person Hal Incandenza sections would be too spellbinding otherwise, threatening to totally overwhelm the rest of the text by comparison.
I also read the tennis academy, as I did the last time, as a remarkable solution to the problem of writing about writing without writing about writing. (See 109-121.) The initials E.T.A. may as well be M.F.A., and it’s hard for me not to recognize in my own creative output
the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s mode to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game—his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks out of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he’s content. Until one day there’s a quiet knock at the door… (116)
Three from McSweeney’s
Three from McSweeney’s:
* Comments Written By Actual Students Extracted From Workshopped Manuscripts at a Major University.
Friday Links 3
Friday links 3. [UPDATE: Comments closed on this post due to harassment from a banned commenter. Looking into solutions. Reopened.]
* How long will the MSM cover up the heroics of time-traveling Ronald Reagan?
* Another take on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, this time from the Valve, about transnationalism and the American university.
* More on yesterday’s unjust Supreme Court decision on the right to DNA evidence from Matt Yglesias, including a link to this striking observation from Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts’s governing judicial philosophy:
The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
* Peak Oil, risk, and the financial collapse: some speculative economics from Dmitry Orlov. Via MeFi.
* Mark Penn’s superscience proves pessimism is the new microtrend. Via Gawker.
* Freakonomics considers vegetarianism-sharing.
* Possible outcomes in Iran from Gerry Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Via the Plank.
* People power prevails. After some period of extended protest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown to be a fraud, his re-election rigged, and Mir Hossein Mousavi and his forces of moderation win a runoff. A long process of changing Iran’s system in which real power lies in the hands of clerics operating behind the scenes begins, and the voices demanding an end to Iran’s international isolation move to the fore. Such a simple and straightforward outcome seems unlikely, but that’s what happened in Ukraine.
* Mr. Ahmadinejad survives, but only by moderating his position in order to steal the thunder of the reformers and beat them at their own game. U.S. officials think it’s at least possible the erratic leader decides to survive by showing his critics that he actually is capable of what they claim he isn’t, which is reducing Iran’s isolation. He stays in power and regains his standing with internal critics by, among other things, showing new openness to discuss Iran’s nuclear program with the rest of the world.
* The forces of repression win within Iran, but international disdain compounds, deepening world resolve to stop Iran’s nuclear program and its sponsorship of extremists. In other words, Iran doesn’t change, but the rest of the world does.
* The protests are simply crushed by security forces operating under the control of spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the election results stand untouched, and Iran’s veneer of democracy ultimately is shown to be totally fraudulent. That makes it clear that the only power that matters at all is the one the U.S. can’t reach or reason with, the clerical establishment. There is no recount, no runoff, and the idea that “moderates” and “reformers” can change Iran from within dies forever.
* There is some legitimate recount or runoff, but Iran emerges with Mr. Ahmadinejad nominally in charge anyway. He emerges beleaguered, tense and defensive, knowing he sits atop a society with deep internal divides and knowing the whole world knows as well. His control is in constant doubt. What’s the classic resort of such embattled leaders? Distract attention from internal problems with foreign mischief, and use a military buildup (in this case, a nuclear one) to create a kind of legitimacy that’s been shown to be missing on the domestic front.
* Mr. Mousavi somehow prevails, perhaps through a runoff, and becomes president, but he operates as a ruler deeply at odds with the clerical establishment that controls the military and security forces, and deeply mistrusted by it. As a result, he’s only partly in charge, and in no position to take chances with a real opening to the West. He has always supported Iran’s nuclear program anyway and now has to do so with a vengeance to show that, while a reformer, he isn’t a front for the West.
Menand on Writing Programs
Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.
That Louis Menand piece on graduate creative writing programs I mentioned a few days ago is now available online, presumably due to widespread Internet interest among the failed graduates of said programs. Naming no names.
More
More!
* The World Future Council eyes the possibility of punishing crimes against the future, but news on climate change and ocean acidification suggests we should be more concerned about crimes against the present.
* Here comes your Grant Morrison documentary.
* Are graduate creative writing programs worth it? Only if they’re free, and frankly maybe not even then. This, however, is quite true:
A friend and classmate of mine recently said that our program was a place where people who ordinarily never would have met in their entire lives could become best friends.
It’s the best reason to do it. Via Jezebel via @sposnik.
* Alain de Botton says “it’s time for an ambitious new literature of the office.”
* And an art historian thinks Duchamp’s readymades weren’t really readymades.
This is Ms. Shearer’s case against the readymades so far.
Duchamp’s readymade glass ampoule, which he named ”50 cc of Paris Air,” is larger than any that would have been readily available to pharmacists. (And she has a tape of a man from Corning Glass saying so.)
”Beautiful Breath,” the readymade perfume bottle with Man Ray’s photograph of Duchamp on it (now owned by Yves Saint Laurent) is green, she says; the real bottles of ”Un Air Embaume,” from Rigaud, are peach-colored (like the empty but still-fragrant one that Ms. Shearer bought for $650).
The readymade snow shovel, which now exists only in photographs and replicas, ”would hurt your hand” if you tried to use it, Ms. Shearer says, because it has a square shaft. And it doesn’t have the normal reinforcements to keep it from breaking. (She has hired people to make her a snow shovel like Duchamp’s and use it until it breaks.)
There is more: the bird cage is too squat for a real bird, the iron hooks in the photograph of the coat rack appear to bend in an impossible position, the French window opens the wrong way, the bottle rack has an asymmetrical arrangement of hooks and the urinal is too curvaceous to have come from the Mott Iron Works, where Duchamp said he bought it.
Tenured Literature
Writers who have been lucky enough to land these gigs are inclined to talk — when we aren’t grumbling — about their good fortune in sensible language, citing all that is sane, healthy, balanced and economically viable about their jobs. But another question is discussed less. What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing? And what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature? What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing? And what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature?
So asks David Gessner in the New York Times Magazine.
Consider that our first great national literary flowering constituted, in part, a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing. It slightly complicates things that this flowering was greatly influenced by an Englishman, Wordsworth, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that in the 1850s Melville published “Moby-Dick” (1851); Thoreau, “Walden” (1854); and Whitman, “Leaves of Grass” (1855), while at the same time Emily Dickinson began to hit her private stride and Emerson was still lecturing. Thoreau claimed to have never wasted a walk on another, and it’s hard to imagine him taking a break from one of his marathon strolls to waste three hours teaching a graduate workshop. Equally difficult is picturing Melville asking a group of undergrads, “What’s at stake in this story?” or Dickinson clapping a colleague on the back after a faculty meeting.
There was an essential fanaticism in all their efforts, the sense of an entire life thrown into the great project of creating works of art. Even if we grant that you can be as original within the university as up in your garret, we must concede the possibility that something is lost by living a divided life. Intensity perhaps. The ability to focus hard and long on big, ambitious projects. A great writer, after all, must travel daily to a mental subcontinent, must rip into the work, experiencing the exertion of it, the anxiety of it and, once in a blue moon, the glory of it. It’s fine for writing teachers to talk in self-help jargon about how their lives require “balance” and “shifting gears” between teaching and writing, but below that civil language lurks the uncomfortable fact that the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.
Links for the Heroes
It’s Memorial Day, so these links are for the heroes.
* Freeman Dyson has made a lot of people upset with his invent-our-way-out-of-it environmentalism-is-the-new-religion piece in this week’s New York Review of Books. Real Climate dissects it, point by point, and my friend Alex Greenberg gets his shots in too.
* Outgoing Observer literary editor Robert McCrum gets nostalgic over the last ten years of books.
* Hanif Kareshi says your writing program breed maniacs.
Kureishi, himself a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University in London said, “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.
“The writing courses, particularly when they have the word ‘creative’ in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice.”
* And did blogs kill the literary critic? Let’s hope not.
MFA as Virus
“As the father of creative writing at Sydney University, do you, like the father of the atom bomb, feel remorse?”
“Yes!” he responded, only half in jest.
Gerry Canavan 