[HN Gopher] Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to s...
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Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to stay afloat
Author : apollinaire
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-02-11 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| moofycat wrote:
| "High Literary" writer here--- or, at least, aspiring. The field
| currently is intended to showcase expertise and is FOR people who
| love the complexity. It's too elite to have a broad-enough
| market. Its exclusivity is part of its appeal due to the
| challenge and extreme beauty.
|
| However, very few people have the energy, care, or knowledge base
| for the deep reading these texts require. Some of our best
| writers knew this and used their wit to get around it. For
| example, Robert Frost wrote expert poetry FOR the people in his
| rural community. However, his work can also be read on multiple
| levels, which appeals to the rare reader who lives for literary
| pyrotechnics.
|
| So maybe writers need to work on multiple levels like Frost. The
| market is telling us that what we're producing isn't up to snuff,
| and rather than blaming the market, we should ask ourselves
| whether our creations actually reflect people's lives back to
| them. Should the reader come to us, like the article is implying
| ---people just aren't appreciating art enough, etc---or should we
| go to the reader?
| zwieback wrote:
| Publishing online is free so ignoring the printing, which is
| outdated anyway, where's the cost? Paying editors and writers?
| The article doesn't make it very clear.
| toyg wrote:
| Publishing online isn't actually free if done professionally,
| but I would guess that indeed staffing costs are the biggest
| problem for most cultural endeavors.
| dleslie wrote:
| And to wit: speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror
| periodicals are doing quite well. Asimov's, Analog,
| Clarkesworld, Lightspeed...
|
| Perhaps worth noting is that these failing literary magazines
| are tied to colleges? Perhaps without readily available student
| volunteers the magazines can't afford to operate.
| ghaff wrote:
| >And to wit: speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror
| periodicals are doing quite well.
|
| Is that true? e.g. http://www.mcwetboy.com/mcwetlog/2007/10/t
| he_decline_of_the_...
| dleslie wrote:
| That's from 2007 and the magazines are still around; and
| since then, the digital marketplace for such magazines has
| grown. Enough to support a number of new magazines:
|
| https://weightlessbooks.com/category/format/subscription/
| ghaff wrote:
| This more recent article suggests it's something of a
| mixed bag. Readership is doing pretty well but revenues
| aren't: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2020/01/27
| /science-fi... (Which I'm guessing means author pay isn't
| great either.)
| dleslie wrote:
| The original data is here:
| https://www.jasonsanford.com/blog/2019/12/sff2020-the-
| state-...
|
| The general take-away, it seems, is that genre readers
| are mostly a bunch of freeloaders; and more of them need
| to pony up some cash to compensate editors and authors
| for the enjoyment they're providing.
| ghaff wrote:
| >genre readers are mostly a bunch of freeloaders
|
| That seems broadly true of web content generally. There's
| no shortage of content of various levels of quality and
| no shortage of readers. But it's hard to get people to
| actually pay.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I graduated from college with a degree in English & Creative
| Writing, and wrote several stories for my college's literary
| magazine. Some were accepted and some were rejected. What I
| noticed after a short time was that everything I wrote that
| was about death, loss, oppression, and other negative topics
| was accepted and anything with a positive slant was rejected.
| I don't know about others, but I find a steady stream of
| downer stories boring and depressing. Since that was all they
| seemed to publish, I canceled my subscription.
|
| As you mentioned, it seems that certain literary magazines
| are still doing relatively well. Maybe if more literary
| magazines published things that people wanted to read, they'd
| be better off.
| zebraflask wrote:
| Funny you mention that. From my earlier comment, I run a
| lit zine, and we get tons of that stuff.
|
| Our journal explicitly rejects 99% of those submissions,
| just to stand out from the pack.
| asoneth wrote:
| From the article: "The issue, of course, still lies in the
| money. Many of these smaller corners of the internet can't
| afford to pay writers, like a larger magazine with
| institutional funding can. And writers have to eat and pay
| bills, too."
| rr808 wrote:
| I hate myself for endlessly doom scrolling and following click-
| bait but equally can't spend 20 minutes reading a whole serious
| article.
| olivermarks wrote:
| @rr808 me too, I find myself skimming, attention span of a gnat
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Sometimes literary magazines only make it because they're being
| funded by parties with an agenda. This needs to be a worry for
| any such magazine. (Ran into an archetypal example from 1934
| yesterday - Shut down after a couple of years, then restarted
| with new funding and a 'new POV':
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_Review : not revealed
| until decades later)
|
| As with the 'free newspapers' of the 1970s and today's many
| lesser-known podcasts, true lit-mag independence is made possible
| by the support of a smallish community (including creators and
| producers). 'Success' changes people.
| boplicity wrote:
| The world of literary journals is truly thriving -- there are
| endless literary journals available for free, online, and run by
| passionate teams of volunteers. Many of them, despite being free,
| are still able to pay contributors.
|
| The demise of some university funded literary journals is a
| different issue; costly staffing, print, and management costs are
| not necessary, and remnants of a different era. Yes, they can
| provide a lot of value, meaning, and career payoff, but they are
| not as necessary as they used to be, as the proliferation of
| online journals has only accelerated.
|
| Of note, Ycombinator funded company Submittable used literary
| journals to fuel their successful start, by providing a service
| for literary journals to manage submissions. I really hate the
| role of money that Submittable has injected into the literary
| journal world, though. They've made the practice of "submission
| fees" incredibly easy to implement, and encouraged literary
| journals to charge submission fees to writers. A practice that,
| unfortunately, has proliferated under their influence.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| weird to see this covered by cnn, though i guess it makes sense
| because literary magazines were part of the mainstream in the
| past.
|
| it's a shame they shut down the believer. i'd be curious to see
| the finances. even if it is a financial issue, maybe literary
| magazines and other artistic endeavors shouldn't be run like a
| profit-making business / quantified by money, since you can't put
| a dollar value on the benefits of art.
|
| here's a different take on why it shut down:
| https://www.gawker.com/media/the-believer-was-a-victim-of-mi...
|
| edit: so much of the best literature (imo) that's come out in the
| past 20 years have come from loss-making small presses who do it
| for the love of it.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think part of the problem is that it became a bubble. Literary
| authors weren't primarily writing for the general audience, but
| rather their specialized peers.
|
| As this bubble became more separated from the mainstream,
| interest in these literary magazines shriveled.
| chaircher wrote:
| There's a lot of industries and institutions that have all but
| gone under the last decade or so because of this. More to come
| too I suspect
| toyg wrote:
| It's always been a bubble, but it used to be a very small
| bubble. Then in the mid-XX century it grew to become a very
| large bubble, which appeared to have become self-sustaining.
| The internet seems to have changed that, possibly because it
| removed the real economic structure that sustained such bubble.
| dleslie wrote:
| Young Adult and Speculative Fiction are experiencing similar
| bubbles, I think. Not quite at the point that they're writing
| to their peers exclusively, but that does seem to increasingly
| be the case.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| The economic reasons for the failure of these types of
| publications seem pretty obvious. The bar to "putting your stuff
| out there" has never been lower. These magazines cannot be
| gatekeepers any longer. While at the same time attention, that
| dreaded currency, is being spent on a wider and wider variety of
| pursuits.
|
| I'm curious about the actual volume of literary work being
| produced compared to days past. For those who still partake: is
| the work still being produced? Is it harder or easier to find? Is
| the quality changing?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| yes it's still being produced. publications like the believer
| make it easier to find. you gotta be plugged into writers to
| know where to look otherwise. the quality is great, regardless
| of it being in a publication or self published, though a
| curated publication with editors and an aesthetic vision is
| obviously, in most cases, better.
| toyg wrote:
| _> These magazines cannot be gatekeepers any longer. _
|
| I reckon they really could, with a bit of smarts. The brands
| alone are worth so much, in these times of winner-takes-all.
| Look at the news: anybody can start a blog, but the actual
| "papers" we turn to are almost invariably old, established
| brands, even when they clearly suck. And there is so much shit
| online, respected filters are worth their weight in gold.
|
| One of the problems is indeed the competition with bazillions
| of stimuli coming down the internet hosepipe every second.
| People have to make a conscious effort to sit down and read
| certain material, rather than using it as escapism - on
| escapism, the mobile internet cannot be beaten.
|
| Another is that there is no economic model anymore. People
| bought books and magazines convinced that they were paying for
| distribution costs; in fact, they were also retroactively
| paying to produce the material. Now that distribution costs are
| virtually zero, nobody wants to pay anything, and the industry
| has not been good at making clear that writing and editing cost
| money.
|
| Another again is that there is massive digital fragmentation:
| some people will read on kindle, some on phones, some on
| laptops, and some still want paper. The numbers are so small,
| for each mode, that they cannot individually sustain much; but
| supporting them all costs real money.
| ghaff wrote:
| >People bought books and magazines convinced that they were
| paying for distribution costs; in fact, they were also
| retroactively paying to produce the material.
|
| This was the whole "Why aren't ebooks a lot cheaper?" theme.
| A lot of people assumed that most of the cost was in
| printing, shipping, and selling physical books whereas that
| was actually a pretty small slice of where the purchase price
| went.
|
| And this isn't just a literary magazine thing. My
| understanding is that science fiction magazines, and I assume
| other niche publications, are struggling as well. And it's
| mostly not a case of going to Kindle shorts or whatever. For
| the most part, short stories, etc. just aren't really much of
| an income stream for most authors any longer.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| > This was the whole "Why aren't ebooks a lot cheaper?"
| theme. A lot of people assumed that most of the cost was in
| printing, shipping, and selling physical books whereas that
| was actually a pretty small slice of where the purchase
| price went.
|
| Traditionally authors got around 10% (or less) of the
| retail price of a book. Same for music. But they also got
| an advance, which complicates things. But still the bulk of
| the price was in distribution.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But still the bulk of the price was in distribution.
|
| As I understand (largely from contact a while ago from
| insiders in the TTRPG industry), for print runs of the
| sizes many non-mass-market books get (which is still
| going to effect ebooks of similar market sizes the same
| way) fixed costs like editing, layout, etc. take a lot
| (layout especially in things that aren't just plain
| text.)
| ghaff wrote:
| As I recall, printing for a typical hardcover was about
| $2 per copy to which you can add some for warehousing,
| shipping, returns, etc. (A qty 1 softcover print on
| demand book is <$5 shipped.) But leaving aside
| distributor cuts (which in the case of Amazon applies to
| both physical and digital books), most of the cost is in
| everything a publisher does and its cost structure.
| maldusiecle wrote:
| The volume is higher, by a lot. More books are being published
| now, because the barriers are so low. The problem is that the
| quantity is overwhelming, no one can sift through all of it.
| Literary magazines were never "gatekeeping" in the sense that
| it's never been necessary to publish your work in a literary
| magazine in order to be a successful author, but they were an
| opportunity for authors to get their work in front of a fairly
| dedicated audience.
|
| As for quality, debatable. We're living in a golden age if
| you're into YA fiction, that's for sure. I'm not an expert, but
| I've found international literature more interesting than
| domestic stuff for some time. Unfortunately, a lot of these
| magazines were also the first places foreign authors appeared
| in English translation, so that stuff could easily become less
| accessible soon.
| rwj wrote:
| Controlling access to "opportunity for authors to get their
| work in front of a fairly dedicated audience" sounds awfully
| like gatekeeping.
| maldusiecle wrote:
| There's always going to be some kind of gatekeeping at some
| point in the process--even in a purely digital marketplace,
| there's limited attention. Small publications like this are
| pretty much the least limiting form of this: relatively
| cheap to produce, many of them with only a few employees,
| publishing many short pieces, often skewing toward authors
| without existing followings.
|
| There's a huge difference between controlling access to a
| niche audience which in large part exists because of the
| publication itself, and controlling access to publication
| in general.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > so that stuff could easily become less accessible soon
|
| Surely if there's no lit magazine to publish them, they'll
| publish their stuff on the web? And then it'll be available
| (even if translated with Google translate).
| maldusiecle wrote:
| Do you really think it's worth reading poetry translated
| via Google Translate?
| bmj wrote:
| _I 'm curious about the actual volume of literary work being
| produced compared to days past. For those who still partake: is
| the work still being produced? Is it harder or easier to find?
| Is the quality changing?_
|
| There is no lack of work being produced. My wife (a writer)
| subscribes to several literary magazines, none of which are
| associated with a college or university. These journals seem to
| be doing just fine, between subscriptions and grants. And she
| is always receiving information about newer journals, or
| journals that we've not come across before.
| sosilkj wrote:
| Which magazines would your wife recommend? Would be
| interesting to know what others find worth subscribing to
| (out of the many, many that one could subscribe to).
| blockwriter wrote:
| There are pockets of new literary work being produced. The
| cultural soil is not suitable for its widespread proliferation,
| so one really has to look for its rosebuds and morel clutches.
| What we select for as a society are dandelions, and literature
| simply does not possess the ability to reproduce in such
| volume.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes - well, print media has long been on the way out as we now
| have a better source of information - the internet.
|
| And, perhaps they also haven't been on the receiving end of the
| biggest governmental media handout in history over the past 2
| years. I'm talking about the coronavirus advertising campaign -
| billions have been paid by the government to promote their
| message.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "we now have a better source of information - the internet"_
|
| I find this is not the case for anything long-form or literary.
| I get much more out of 30 minutes spent reading the paper
| edition of the New Yorker than from spending the same time
| glancing through articles found on Twitter.
| verisimi wrote:
| I know what you mean - but I genuinely read more
| essays/articles now than ever before. There are decent
| recommendations everywhere, least of all HN itself.
| derbOac wrote:
| I do think there's something being lost online in going from
| print. I don't mean that in a nostalgic, wistful kind of way,
| I mean it in a functional, ergonomic, I want useful
| information kind of way.
|
| The problem is that I'm not sure how to pinpoint exactly what
| it is, or if it's a combination of things. Certain things I
| feel really confident about, but others are more like
| guesses. And I worry that some of that knowledge that's there
| in print stuff is going to be lost forever as everything
| transitions to the current reading UX paradigm.
|
| Ads are kind of interesting to me because people complain
| about them, but I've realized gradually that I liked a lot of
| the print ads. They were relevant and usually not intrusive.
| If I was reading about X, in X journal, the ads were targeted
| to someone reading that material in that outlet, and were
| there for me to see if I wanted, and if not, not. Online,
| they're obnoxious, intrusive, and irrelevant -- even when
| they are tracking me! (That last part is the worst part of it
| actually.)
|
| As for other stuff I'm not sure. Flipping through pages is
| just faster sometimes for browsing? Maybe eink would be
| better? But I tried that and it was slow and only would do a
| small fraction of what regular screens (and print) could
| handle.
|
| I think it's possible to duplicate print experience, maybe be
| even better than that and laptops/tablets/phones. I'm just
| not sure exactly how to it should be done.
|
| I don't miss the physical volume of material print would take
| up. But there are certain things about it, and how it was
| edited, that was better.
| martingoodson wrote:
| The London Review of Books marked 20 years of increased
| circulation in 2020, and has grown by 13% since then. I think it
| would be of interest to some people here and I highly recommend
| buying a subscription: https://www.lrb.co.uk/.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that the LRB was also subsidised by the
| money its editor inherited, Mary-Kay Williams, for most of its
| history. But it's certainly flourishing today, to the point
| that it releases articles faster than anyone can possibly keep
| up with. I keep track of a lot of magazines and journals like
| the LRB, and many of them are in a similar upswing. But none of
| them are purely literary, and indeed, the LRB probably best
| described as a journal of ideas - of history, geopolitics,
| politics, economics, and so on. Literature has an important be
| delimited place.
|
| In a way I'm not sure there's a decline as much as a
| consolidation, where a dozen or so major outlets reach a level
| of prominence that everyone wants to write for them, and a
| scale such that they can diversify across subjects to suit most
| tastes. While I know many people interested in the LRB, I know
| few if any interested in purely literary magazines - which can
| often be niche and inward looking.
| martingoodson wrote:
| I completely agree. Literature is just one of the thing it
| writes about.
|
| I really like its boldness. I love the fact that they turned
| over an _entire issue_ to telling the stories of those who
| died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 (the UK 's most
| lethal residential fire since WWII).
|
| They decided to publish 60,000 words on the fire, replacing
| all of their usual format. That's the length of a short novel
| [1].
|
| [1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n11/andrew-o-
| hagan/the-t...
| rsync wrote:
| Yes, please do subscribe to the LRB - it is my favorite
| periodical and I can't wait for it to arrive every two-ish
| weeks ...
|
| FWIW, you can buy a subscription on Amazon ...
| pcmoney wrote:
| I wonder how much it has to do with the aspect of literary
| critique and interpretation in many Universities becoming more
| radical. Eg. Many Universities support a practice of literary
| interpretation that encourages pretty wild takes and explicitly
| discourages taking "what we think the author was trying to say"
| into account.
|
| I had a friend drop out of Ph.D in Japanese Lit because he felt
| the only way to progress in his dept. was to purposefully try to
| come up with the most wild interpretation he could that leaned
| extremely left and he felt that was intellectually dishonest and
| disrespectful of the author.
|
| This not only alienates people outside the literary bubble but
| makes it harder to communicate in good faith inside of it. This
| would have a chilling effect on subscriptions even inside the
| literary community.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Literary criticism being left isn't new. Most literary
| criticism in the early 20th century was Freudian, then it
| became Marxist partially out of desperation (Freudian criticism
| is stream-of-consciousness nonsense), and partially because the
| CIA was funding a lot of literary magazines in Europe, trying
| to turn the intelligentsia into anti-communist socialists.
|
| Without a framework, literary criticism seems completely
| pointless, though. There's only so far you can go with trying
| to figure out what the author is trying to say - the author is
| usually very articulate and said it.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > There's only so far you can go with trying to figure out
| what the author is trying to say
|
| With due respect, that is a common and almost complete
| misunderstanding literature and literary criticism. It's not
| about decoding the author, but about exploring the things (to
| use the most generic term possible) that the author conveys,
| both in what the author writes and how the critic responds,
| and out in the world.
|
| > the author is usually very articulate and said it.
|
| The author isn't writing a technical manual; they are not
| complete, correct, consistent, nor are they deducing from
| perfect knowledge. A much closer analogy, and to speak very
| broadly, is that they are setting off on a voyage into the
| unknown - which is what we all do in life and reality - and
| expressing their perspective on it.
|
| Try a review in the London Review of Books or New York Review
| of Books; you'll get a much better sense of what the real
| thing is like. Unfortunately, many only know high school book
| reports.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I wonder how much it has to do with the aspect of literary
| critique and interpretation in many Universities becoming more
| radical.
|
| What basis is there to say they are _more_ radical? People who
| follow the norms have been complaining about it for forever.
| The difference, I suspect, is that now reactionary, radical
| capitalist politics (we really need a word for that part of the
| spectrum) have become dominant, and they do not value, respect,
| or believe in the freedom of other perspectives. They think
| that if they don 't like something, it should be suppressed,
| and they do it.
|
| Universities have always been 'radical'; that's the idea. They
| are supposed to nurture free, unconstrained thinking. It's not
| hard to think beyond what is mainstream and normative; if
| people an universities aren't saying and writing things that
| most people think goes too far, then they aren't trying. Also,
| much that was radical then is normal now, and much that is
| radical now will be normal in the future.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| I suspect you have not actually read any modern literary
| criticism.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| As a regular reader of it for many years, I'm pretty
| confident you haven't.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > I had a friend drop out of Ph.D in Japanese Lit because he
| felt the only way to progress in his dept. was to purposefully
| try to come up with the most wild interpretation he could that
| leaned extremely left and he felt that was intellectually
| dishonest and disrespectful of the author.
|
| I'm getting high school Lord of the Flies english class
| flashbacks.
|
| Teacher: why did they kill the pig
|
| Me: because they were hungry.
|
| Teacher: NO! It was the author telling you that they were
| descending into savages!
|
| Me: I'm pretty sure they were hungry. This is the first time
| they ate anything in the book. I'm also wondering about the
| bathroom situation
| brimble wrote:
| On the one hand, yeah, that's a bit much to insist on that
| being the whole thing.
|
| On the other hand, good (or even just competent) authors
| usually put things in the book _for a reason_ , usually for a
| narrative, character development, or thematic/message reason.
|
| Everything in a book was put there _on purpose_. In most
| books that aren 't terrible, there's some reason the author
| chose one thing over another. The pig may be there because
| the author felt a need to explain how the kids could eat and
| survive, so that's one purpose--but there were other ways to
| do that. It's entirely reasonable to wonder _why a pig_ and
| _why is the scene exactly that way_ when both things _could_
| have been totally different.
|
| It's difficult to write well, yourself, without really
| embracing the idea that a book is _crafted_ and the parts are
| there _on purpose and for a reason_. Some choices may
| genuinely end up being arbitrary, even in a very good book,
| but _lots_ of them will not be.
| watwut wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think this is true. Good writing is not
| the same as "making high school analysis easy by making
| everything for straightforward reasons". Plenty of times,
| things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or
| even needing to make it longer.
| brimble wrote:
| > Good writing is not the same as "making high school
| analysis easy by making everything for straightforward
| reasons".
|
| Where'd I write anything like that?
|
| > Plenty of times, things are there, because it
| experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it
| longer.
|
| Even then, the author's picking _one_ thing to put in
| over a bunch of others they could have chosen. Novels are
| artificial, what goes in them is what the author decides
| is best to be there. Often, there 's a reason for their
| choice. Stopping at "the characters were hungry" is
| leaving a lot of potential meaning on the table. OK--but
| why, of all the ways that could have been addressed, did
| the author write that they killed a pig? Why wasn't it
| sufficient for that to be "off-screen"? Why was that more
| important to include than other things that could have
| filled those same pages?
|
| This is especially a valid path to pursue when there are
| other cues that a book may be operating on more than a
| strictly literal level, and there _definitely_ are such
| indications in that one. The final line does all it can
| without grabbing the reader by the lapels and slapping
| them, to communicate that the book 's more than _just_ a
| simple story about some kids stuck on an island. At a
| minimum, it 's got _some_ allegory going on, because it
| all but says as much at the end.
|
| [EDIT] The killing of a pig features heavily in a book
| that tells you at the end it's got at least some allegory
| going on, and a major character is _nicknamed_ "Piggy", I
| might add. Like... yes, I think it's very fair to say
| that's included and plays out the way it does for reasons
| other than "the kids were hungry".
| watwut wrote:
| > On the other hand, good (or even just competent)
| authors usually put things in the book for a reason,
| usually for a narrative, character development, or
| thematic/message reason.
|
| This is high school level analysis. These are
| straightforward reasons.
|
| > Everything in a book was put there on purpose
|
| This I think is just not true. This is true in simple
| literature, in adventure books and in streamline writing
| production.
| brimble wrote:
| > This is high school level analysis. These are
| straightforward reasons.
|
| Yes. The hang up here seemed to be at exactly that level,
| though. At the _very_ least it 's useful to keep those
| things in mind and look out for them. That does not mean
| it's where things end. I took the original post to
| suggest that even this is too much, which is simply
| incorrect unless one wishes to be stuck at about a 6th
| grade reading level forever. There are bad teachers who
| don't even convey the basics well, and analyses may
| sometimes go pretty far into fairy-land at higher levels,
| but considering why pig-killing features so much in Lord
| of the Flies _is_ something worth thinking about for a
| good reader, beyond "the characters were hungry". But
| yes, of course that's not exactly an advanced analysis,
| death of the author, et c. But it is _table stakes_ for
| even beginning to appreciate literature or understand how
| stories (even blockbuster film scripts!) are typically
| assembled. _Some_ amount of purpose plays a role in at
| least _some_ decisions in practically all stories, and
| understanding how that works will make a person a better
| reader and writer. But I agree with you, it 's not the
| end of that journey, nor is it advanced, and I don't
| think I wrote that it was.
|
| > This I think is just not true. This is true in simple
| literature, in adventure books and in streamline writing
| production.
|
| Short of experiments in randomly-assembled literature, it
| is true. It does not mean every single little detail has
| a grand purpose, but it does mean that the words on the
| page were placed there by a person, who could have
| instead put different words there, or nothing at all.
| Some things may still be arbitrary, but their inclusion
| was not--you don't get an arbitrarily-chosen type of
| flower without both choosing to include a flower and
| choosing to name what kind of flower it is.
|
| Details may be chosen simply because the author likes the
| image they paint, or just has a preference (which are
| still reasons!) Others details may be dictated by the
| needs of the narrative ("why did this take two days, and
| not one or three? Because it needed to to fit some other
| piece of machinery in the narrative, no special meaning
| beyond that") or simple fidelity to reality in cases
| where there's no reason to strain suspension of
| disbelief. Of course all that's true--but it's also true
| that an author can do _anything_ with a blank page, and
| instead of all the other things they could have done, did
| what you see before you.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There are all kinds of choices when making art of any
| sort. The internet more or less proves that there are
| many things that never even appeared to the creator(s) as
| choices at all, but to those interpreting/experiencing
| the art appear to have been choices made for a reason.
|
| Why did she wear a red sweater? Why was it set at the
| equator? Why did it rain? Why is the only named plant a
| phylodendron? Why did they leave for 2 days and not 3?
| Why did journey go north instead of east?
|
| People convinced that all art is created by careful
| choice-making at every possible juncture seem to find it
| a little difficult to accept that the creator(s) of a
| piece of art that they like may not even have experienced
| a particular story/view/sound/structure point as a choice
| at all.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > People convinced that all art is created by careful
| choice-making at every possible juncture
|
| Where are these magical strawpeople? :D
| brimble wrote:
| Sure, but I think stopping all the way back at "they
| killed a pig because they were hungry" in Lord of the
| Flies is... well, going to limit one's literacy level.
|
| There's flights of fancy, and then there's not being able
| to understand literature.
| gkop wrote:
| You expect too much from the HN commentariat with regard
| to this topic.
| vidarh wrote:
| > Everything in a book was put there on purpose.
|
| This is nonsense. Having published two novels, I'll say
| with confidence that a lot of things makes it into books
| just because it happened to come to mind while you were
| writing.
|
| _Some_ authors will pay attention to every phrase or every
| word. Many do not.
|
| This is true even for famous authors - I vividly remember
| an interview with one who was painted a dramatic picture of
| symbolism in one of his novels by an interviewer, and then
| asked about it, and answered that he wished he'd thought of
| that - he'd just liked how the sentence sounded.
|
| A whole lot of people's interpretations are fine as
| people's personal head canon, but all to often people
| project intentions on an author they never had.
| brimble wrote:
| Several posters seem to have read weird things into the
| phrase "on purpose". I don't mean that every single word
| in a book has some grand meaning, but that the author
| choses to affix some words to the blank page and not
| others, and then leave them in (or change them) through
| various editing passes. A novel isn't like a tree in
| nature where you can just say "it looks that way simply
| because it does, and that's it--sheer happenstance and
| natural processes".
|
| For example:
|
| In real life someone goes to the kitchen and makes a
| sandwich because they're hungry. Sure, good enough.
|
| In a book, an author including a scene in which a
| character makes a sandwich probably included it for
| reasons beyond "the character was hungry", even if the
| reasons are purely structural or for the author's
| convenience ("I needed them in the kitchen to smell the
| gas leak") rather than to advance a theme or mood or
| anything like that. Characters don't have needs, and the
| degree to which their satisfying normal human needs must
| be included in a story to maintain suspension of
| disbelief is typically minimal--so why spend three pages
| on sandwich making? There _should_ be a reason. If that
| scene includes two paragraphs on the character 's choice
| of mustard, there _should_ be a reason (even if it 's
| just "I thought it was funny"). That's what I mean.
|
| It's worth interrogating the purpose of the inclusion or
| exclusion of elements in a book, and the details, because
| the construction of a book in a certain way is
| _deliberate_. That doesn 't mean every book stands up to
| close reading. Sometimes books don't have much going on
| beyond the surface level (but there are still,
| guaranteed, _reasons_ behind much of what makes it in,
| even if they 're mundane structural ones--lack of
| reasons, or bad ones, can amount to mistakes if the
| included purposeless elements don't, by happenstance,
| improve the book) but sometimes they really do.
|
| In The Lord of the Flies, there's no island. There are no
| kids. Golding made them up. Golding didn't put pigs on
| the island and choose to have the kids notice and then
| kill a couple them because that was his only option. Even
| if it had been, he didn't need to devote as much page-
| space to it as he did. He also wrote in a kid whose
| nickname is "Piggy", and who features prominently in the
| book. And there's a _whole thing_ with a pig head on a
| stick in it. So yes, I think it 's totally reasonable to
| ask "why pigs?" or "what did killing the pig mean?" or
| all kinds of things along those lines, without any risk
| whatsoever of disappearing into poorly-supported fancy.
| roofone wrote:
| Totally agreed and well said. It can be easy to read too
| much into something (especially when people are learning
| how to understand literature in high school), but some
| level of decision-making, i.e., design, goes into every
| word.
|
| Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't choose scarlet because it was
| his favorite color.
| magicalist wrote:
| Lord of the Flies is also a particularly silly example
| because the author practically hits the reader over their
| head with the officer at the end to yell at them, "this
| is an allegory!"
| ars wrote:
| > Everything in a book was put there on purpose.
|
| > there's some reason the author chose one thing over
| another.
|
| Like the significance of the number 42?
|
| Sometimes you just put in pig because it was the first
| thing the author thought of. Not everything has hidden
| meaning.
|
| Over-analyzing something happens quite a bit. Sometimes
| it's just there, for no particular reason.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 42 was chosen for a reason, because it appeared random.
| It wasn't that Adams didn't care; something was being
| conveyed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can't come up with a random number without using a
| machine or an algorithm, and neither could Douglas Adams.
| brimble wrote:
| There's a major character named "Piggy". Lord of the
| Flies, however overanalyzed (or, more often, just poorly
| analyzed) it may be in high school classes, is not a
| great place to start making the case that going past the
| barest of surface meanings isn't advisable.
|
| > Like the significance of the number 42?
|
| Maybe 42 was arbitrary. Maybe Adams just like the sound
| of it (still a reason!) Making the answer _a number with
| no particular obvious meaning_ was surely not arbitrary
| or accidental (would it read the same if he 'd picked
| 3.1459...? Or 7?)
| rjsw wrote:
| I think they were hungry.
|
| I guess a better teacher could argue that the _way_ they
| killed the pig was important to the message in the book.
| pessimizer wrote:
| They weren't hungry, though. Fictional people don't get
| hungry unless the author wants them to be. They're completely
| made up.
|
| edit: In real life, talking about meaning and purpose and God
| is a matter of opinion and culture (or maybe direct
| revelation, I don't know your experiences) but in fiction,
| there's always a God, and it's the person who wrote it.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Characters are similarly unaffected by gravity but I'd be
| confused reading a book where everyone floats around
| without any explanation.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Would you be, or would you just wonder why the author did
| that? I'm watching the Raised By Wolves TV show right now
| (probably not for much longer, it got pretty bad after
| the first half of the first season.) They have a giant
| serpent that flies around as if air were water. Nobody on
| the show explains or questions that.
|
| The "explanation" you're referring to is what criticism
| is attempting to provide.
|
| edit: That's why it hopped from a psychological theory of
| everything like Freudianism in the first part of the 20th
| century to a materialist theory of everything in Marxism
| in the 60s. They're frameworks for answering questions
| that weren't directly answered in the work. Part of
| making writing interesting is prompting questions that
| you trick people into answering themselves.
| pcmoney wrote:
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| You've kind of flipped the script here. First you argue
| everyone's discounting the author. But then you state "as
| an allegory of", which would fundamentally be about
| authorial intent. Instead such would have to be stated as:
| "The killing of the pig can be read through the lens of..."
| The second prospect is distinct in that it recognizes that
| the subjectivity of the reader must be foregrounded by the
| very definition of experience. The core anxiety here is one
| of fear in relation to notions of the possibility (or not)
| of communication. If I cannot ensure meaning of myself with
| regards to the perceptions of others, then can I control
| myself, seeing as how there are a multiplicity of myselves
| in each human perception? What does this mean when the
| author has evaporated? Was there ever a single Homer? Who
| wrote Little Red Riding Hood? What about when the author
| contradicts themselves in regards to intent? Ray Bradbury
| gave opposing 'meanings' for Fahrenheit 451 over the course
| of his lifetime; one of them had to be incorrect; how does
| this bode for authorial intention? Absent of such knowledge
| does the text become meaningless? No, because it always
| depended on the subjectivity of the experiencer. Which is
| why randomized strokes of paint (or stars in the sky) can
| be experienced as meaningful.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Bravo
| pcmoney wrote:
| Real reply: I think the subjective experience of the
| reader/viewer is immensely important. Who doesn't tingle
| at the feeling of relating to a long dead author/artist
| in a unique way or degree that you struggle to with
| people in your life? Simply amazing.
| hnacct2001 wrote:
| There are lit mags that feature criticism, essays etc that
| touch on what you're talking about but predominately they focus
| on fiction and poetry. The academic ones are tethered to MFA
| programs, not lit or cultural studies departments. I subscribe
| to several lit mags of a similar calibre to those mentioned in
| this article and they do not require any intellectual
| gymnastics to enjoy. I'd point to other problems (many are MFA
| echo chambers, for one).
| pcmoney wrote:
| also: https://xkcd.com/451/
| bane wrote:
| Way back when I was working through a few different degrees at
| a few different universities, I learned the "trick" to getting
| an "A" in all the literary analysis assignments was to:
|
| - Assume the author didn't just mean what they wrote (and
| suppress any possible evidence to the contrary such as
| interviews where the author specifically stated that they meant
| simply what they wrote)
|
| - Impose a binary oppositional worldview onto the text to "find
| meaning". I used to flip a coin or roll a dice to select
| "communism vs. capitalism", "fascism vs freedom", "gender
| politics", "racial politics", etc. It didn't matter what it
| was, you simply had to pick one. In advanced classes you pick
| two or more. So an analysis might be themed around "gender
| politics as viewed by the anti-fascist communist author".
|
| - Direct the analysis to favor the more leftist viewpoint(s)
| _unless_ it was specifically understood that the author favored
| the alternative.
|
| - Evidence to support your views are generally direct quotes
| from the text, liberally interpreted to fit the assumed
| analysis.
|
| then
|
| Mechanically create paper, receive "A" grade, be asked to sit
| in the advanced analysis, and gender studies lit classes the
| next semesters.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Grade AAA gold coated bullshit is the life blood of most of
| those departments. It defines their careers. Way to give them
| what they want.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What makes your comment more than that?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| If that actually worked, and you still believe it, you missed
| out on all the substance of an education. Dismissals are
| always a signal of ignorance.
| dentemple wrote:
| "Literary magazines are failing because people have wild takes
| these days" sounds like a huge leap of logic and embodies the
| sort of irrelevant dismissiveness that HN commenters tend to
| have regarding non-technical topics.
|
| As someone else pointed out below, speculative fiction
| magazines are doing just fine, and you'd be hard-pressed to
| find ideas that WOULDN'T be considered "wild" in the field of
| SciFi or Fantasy.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I believe that knowing about a topic is not a pre-requisite
| to gratify one's intellectual curiosity on this subject on
| HN.
|
| Indeed, I would suggest that we encourage curiosity in others
| when we see it.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Sure, but I would suggest that we also encourage _reading
| the linked articles before commenting._ In this case, there
| is _nothing_ in the CNN article that suggests the decline
| in literary magazines has a connection to "literary
| critique and interpretation in many Universities becoming
| more radical." It's _awfully_ hard not to see this as the
| commenter just taking this as a stalking horse to bring up
| an opinion they already held.
| useragent86 wrote:
| > It's awfully hard not to see this as the commenter just
| taking this as a stalking horse to bring up an opinion
| they already held.
|
| Isn't this what happens on _every_ HN thread, people
| expressing opinions relevant to the topic? Or is it only
| forbidden when criticizing descendants of the Frankfurt
| School?
| watwut wrote:
| I think that issue is the claim not being relevant to
| topic in article, while pretending so to push for
| specific ideology.
| [deleted]
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I originally wrote a snarkier response to this in
| response to your snark, but I'm to just gently note that
| my contention was that the opinion was _not_ relevant to
| the topic, and it seems to me you 're demonstrating
| exactly what I was complaining about: you didn't actually
| respond to what I said, you just said, "Ooh, here's an
| opportunity to snark about something I consider snark-
| worthy." So, uh, go you.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's amusing to see the responses to this about not reading
| the parent comment when, as far as I can tell, the parent
| comment may not have read the article. Literary review
| magazines publish short form literature, not literary
| criticism.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Speculative fiction magazines are doing relatively well
| because the standing of speculative fiction in literary
| circles has risen so much.
|
| 50 years ago, it was largely considered pulp and not real
| literature (though I would argue that plenty of "real
| literature" was being written in the genre, it just wasn't
| widely accepted as such by contemporaries). Even the few
| works that were accepted, people often claimed that it wasn't
| really SF.
|
| More recently, it is increasingly being accepted that being
| SF doesn't inherently reduce something's literary value, so
| SF magazines have had more room to grow.
|
| Even with that, a lot of the traditional leaders among SF
| magazines have been struggling. What's doing well are the
| newer online-first magazines, most notably Tor.com, which has
| boatloads of money to throw around (by short fiction
| standards) and doesn't need to be financially self-sustaining
| because it is effectively a loss-leader for their novels.
| brimble wrote:
| Mid-tier genre mags still pay. The pay may suck, but they
| do pay. Even some fairly low-tier ones pay.
|
| Mid-tier literary journals generally don't, and their
| editors often act insulted if the topic is raised, so the
| issue doesn't seem to _just_ be that they _can 't afford
| to_ pay. There's seemingly an expectation that until you've
| already "made it" you should be working for free.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Just out of question, do you read any literary magazines?
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| He doesn't even read the comments he's replying to.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| >speculative fiction magazines are doing just fine,
|
| F&SF is down to six issues a year (they had 8 in 2009, and 11
| from 1991-2008). Analog and Asimov's each dropped from 10 to
| 6 in 2017 (and each went from 11 to 10 in 2003).
|
| That's not what I'd call 'just fine'.
| akuchling wrote:
| Stories in the SF magazines have also pretty much
| disappeared from award-nominations like the Hugos and the
| Nebulas, replaced by publications that are free online like
| Uncanny or Tor.com. It makes sense: people are much more
| likely to read and nominate these stories, and the
| shrinking number of readers means a smaller pool of
| potential nominators. I think it's just a matter of time,
| maybe a decade or so, before the print magazines disappear.
| domador wrote:
| I think you're confusing two different things:
|
| 1) Wild ideas INSIDE a given work of literature
|
| 2) Wild ideas ABOUT a given work of literature
| pcmoney wrote:
| I am not talking about wild ideas in the literature but wild
| ideas in the interpretation of the literature. There is a
| pressure to interpret everything with the lens of partisan
| identity politics.
|
| Eg. Most recently this surfaced outside of the literary
| community around Sam and Frodo's relationship in LOTR and
| whether or not they were gay.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Eg. Most recently this surfaced outside of the literary
| community around Sam and Frodo's relationship in LOTR and
| whether or not they were gay.
|
| This seems to me like a perfectly legitimate question.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >Some critics have detected in HAL's wheedling voice an
| undertone of homosexuality. Was that intended?
|
| >No. I think it's become something of a parlor game for
| some people to read that kind of thing into everything
| they encounter. HAL was a "straight" computer.
|
| From an interview with Kubrick in 1970[0]. The attempt to
| transform every male-male relationship in every piece of
| media to homosexuality has sadly killed the concept of
| friendship in media, just like it did to Xena and
| Gabrielle. It's okay for friendship to just be
| friendship.
|
| [0]http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The artist doesn't decide the art's meaning to me (or
| you). Once the art is released into the wild, it's out of
| their hands. It's like an open source project, in a way,
| (or any software release): you release it and then
| everyone uses and modifies it in different ways, many of
| which you never imagined. It's not yours anymor; it
| belongs to the users.
|
| I think what is interesting, and most valuable, is that
| people will find one way or another to attack any
| normalization of non-cisnormal sexuality. Why is that?
|
| (Also, one example doesn't prove anything.)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I mean it is a complicated question based upon how you
| define gay in the first place with sex segregated family
| isolating education policies of the British schools. The
| whole reasons for that were the old chestnut of fighting
| decadence to justify brutality and worry that a mother's
| love would leave Britan with men too soft. Then there is
| the ever present situational sexuality evident in prisons
| and single sex schooling. It not only held there but was
| acknowledged. There is a homophobic by modern standards
| quote from his friend and contemporary C.S.Lewis about
| sodomy being a weed filled, stagnant oasis in the
| constant social struggle but an oasis nonetheless appears
| to be him "Saying what everyone knows but doesn't
| acknowledge out loud."
|
| To sum it up in a snarky pithy phrase: the culture was so
| misogynistic that it became gay, because romance requires
| another person. It is reflected a bit in sheer rarity of
| female characters in LOTR.
|
| Romantic friendships were a norm in the past largely
| forgotten in more open times where we are used to
| noticing obvious repression and "closet cases". In a way
| the real past manages to be even more alien than fantasy
| worlds with elves and dwarves.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Eg. Most recently this surfaced outside of the literary
| community around Sam and Frodo's relationship in LOTR and
| whether or not they were gay.
|
| I think the way to approach that is, what makes it
| necessarily 'wild', and why does that matter? Nonbinary
| sexuality is hardly political - it's been a natural part of
| the human race (and our ancestors and cousins) forever,
| long before current politics.
|
| What makes it 'wild' is that it challenges norms to even
| ask the question. What makes it political is that anyone
| challenging norms tends to have their views politicized and
| suppressed - grab the torches and pitchforks. Later, when
| the same thing becomes normalized, it becomes something the
| next generation of conservatives defends.
|
| The old saying is very true: 'First they laugh at you, then
| they say it violates the scripture, then they say they
| believed it all along.' (Except it omits the hatred and
| lynching.)
| thebooktocome wrote:
| People have been debating that since the sixties ---
| predating "identity politics" by several decades.
| pcmoney wrote:
| watwut wrote:
| Yes, gender and race were immensly important to success
| and literally anything in the 60s. That decade started
| shortly after bus boycot and ended around the time MLK
| was killed.
|
| Yale, Princeton and Cornell did not allowed women at all.
|
| The identity ruled the lifes of people.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > flagrantly infantile
|
| Why do you feel the need to utterly dismiss other points
| of view, straining to leave no avenue for intellectual
| curiosity or discussion?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| That may be your opinion, but C. S. Lewis was not
| participating in some discourse on identity politics, not
| by any stretch of the imagination. He wouldn't have
| understood the term.
|
| Your citation merely reinforces my point that queer
| readings of LOTR predate the current generation by
| several decades. It's a historical fact.
| [deleted]
| kevinventullo wrote:
| SciFi and Fantasy are explicitly fiction.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Your premise is flawed. From one anecdotal (and subjectve) data
| point you leap to "Many Universities support [...]".
| is_true wrote:
| I know a couple of institutions in Argentina that do this.
| I'm on my phone now, but there's a paper about lion king
| which is an example of this.
| useragent86 wrote:
| No, your premise is flawed. You jump to the conclusion that
| he made that claim based on a single data point. Just because
| he illustrated his point with one example does not mean his
| point is based on one example.
|
| In any case, this is not a statistical argument, and your
| comment adds nothing but noise to the discussion.
| pcmoney wrote:
| I just interpreted your critique as supporting my position.
| /s
|
| Even if it is the minority (from my anecdotal understanding
| it isn't) it would become like toxic waste in a professional
| community.
|
| Also how would you even survey that? "Do you have zero
| disregard for objective truth and only interpret things to
| gain political capital by in-group signaling?"
| spicybright wrote:
| How bad it is has no bearing on how often it's happening or
| not, or at least that can't be your only piece of data to
| prove this is happening.
|
| Why not a survey given to undergrads of if they think this
| is the case? If you can detect this is going on surely
| others in your position could too.
|
| You could also find a way to analyze the results of
| research produced now vs before in a particular field. Not
| sure how that would work necessarily
|
| If the only way to measure this is someone's individual's
| general opinion, then the premise may be flawed from the
| start.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Sure, but I don't think you need a survey to hypothesize
| that: 1. Literature interpretation is subjective. 2. If
| you take subjectivity too far then nothing has meaning
| anymore. 3. People might not pay to read things that are
| always deconstructed to nothing.
|
| I am not saying it IS the reason. Just surmising that it
| might be. If you feel the need for a survey and review to
| think things then that is admirable but time is not in
| your favor.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Am I alone in thinking a survey wouldn't be particularly
| effective here? Likert scales don't actually capture
| people's feelings all that well. I suspect interviewing
| dozens of undergrads would probably give a better
| insight. You can build a picture of what is going on
| without empirical data.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| The GP isn't writing a thesis, they're just sharing their
| experience and pondering what might be happening. We don't
| need the kind of rigor that demands some peer-reviewed study.
| There is nothing wrong with anecdotes in a discussion on a
| forum like this.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not too surprising. How much re-analysis of the same books over
| and over again can one do? Of course people will look for more
| and more extreme interpretations.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > How much re-analysis of the same books over and over again
| can one do? Of course people will look for more and more
| extreme interpretations.
|
| In this case, people aren't analysing a molecule or RFC that
| exists in isolation from its context, and has limited
| content. It's not a problem to solve.
|
| What they are analysing (not a great word IMHO - 'exploring',
| perhaps) is something heavily defined by its context - the
| book (or any art) is defined by its specific words, the world
| around it, and the person reading it. Its content is almost
| unlimited. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar means something much
| different in 2022 than in 1822, and something much different
| to you than to me than to Shakespeare than to George Bernard
| Shaw, and it there is so much to explore that you will never
| exhaust it, that shifts and changes as you travel through it.
|
| It's not a problem to solve, but an entire world to explore.
| You don't run out of things to learn and say about the real
| world either.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I once read an article by a literature professor analyzing
| Romeo + Juliet. At the end, he ruefully wrote that he would
| throw away all his analysis and knowledge of R+J to be able
| to read it again for the first time.
|
| I've read some analyses of Lord of the Rings. 98% just
| sounds like bullshit. Maybe JRR Tolkien just wanted to
| write a great story! and there's nothing more than that.
| Sure the story was influenced by his life experiences, like
| trench warfare. So what.
|
| I wish I could read it again for the first time :-)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I wish I could read it again for the first time :-)
|
| On one hand, there is nothing like it and I wish I had
| that unmatched emotional surge again, like a drug! On the
| other, I get much more out of LOTR now than the first
| time - a more sublime, but still incredible experience.
|
| > 98% just sounds like bullshit.
|
| Well that's circular, not evidence. 'I hate Chinese food,
| and 98% of it tastes terrible!'
|
| I wish I could find a way to say this without sounding
| like a condesceng a--, but I truly mean it genuinely:
| There is really something there, that I think (without
| presuming) you are missing - something incredible, life
| changing, intellect expanding to an incredible degree. It
| gives access to not just one idea, but the entire world
| of art in incredible technicolor that few see. If you
| decide to, maybe start with the Tolkien book below. Or I
| recommend the London Review of Books - the art and book
| reviews, not the political stuff - _there_ are people
| with an unabashed, unhesitating passion for art.
|
| > Maybe JRR Tolkien just wanted to write a great story!
|
| Maybe it's a secret code of the Illuminati. The evidence
| says strongly otherwise: read _On Fairy-stories_ by
| Tolkien [1], which is pretty short, absolutely stunning,
| and where he lays out much of his approach to art.
| Tolkien was also an all-time leading scholar of Old
| English (Anglo-Saxon) - arguably as important in that
| field as in fantasy fiction, a two-domain genius - and
| studied much of historic myth, which he read in their
| original languages; he studied and thought more about it
| than almost anyone who lived.
|
| And what is a 'great story'? Obviously, the LOTR is much
| more to people than a fun plot, as is all art. I don't
| think a great story exists that isn't more. And like a
| great bottle of wine, many will miss out if they don't
| learn to understand it. If you limit your experience to a
| fun plot, that's your choice but your loss, like going to
| a musuem and never leaving the lobby.
|
| [1] Get the recent edition, ~2008 or 2014; the fantastic
| editor's notes explain many of Tolkien's references that
| come from deep in his knowledge of myth.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Maybe JRR Tolkien just wanted to write a great story!
|
| Maybe, but an author is not somehow magically insulated
| from their own context and cultural experience. We can
| explore, for example, how an author's life experiences
| affect(ed) their work - even if that author didn't put
| those effects in intentionally.
|
| I find it interesting (and, admittedly, frustrating) that
| a community like HN that likes to think of itself as
| being intellectually curious will at the same time insist
| on only the most surface-level art analysis.
|
| 'Cause I guess if it's not software it's not worth
| thinking deeply about.
| fullshark wrote:
| The information age is making us realize the volume of novel
| ideas is so so much smaller than we thought previously in all
| fields.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _How much re-analysis of the same [topics] over and over
| again can one do? Of course people will look for more and
| more extreme interpretations_
|
| Hacker News!
| blockwriter wrote:
| I spend a lot of time thinking about, and trying to solve for,
| these sets of issues. There is an implicit boon that one gets
| from reading, perhaps especially reading print, a phenomenon
| which writers know well, and the job of literary magazines is to
| make this implicit boon explicit. The whole model needs to be
| updated, and investments into technology and physical spaces need
| to be made. Literature has always been the proto 'lifestyle-
| brand' lifestyle. I think literary magazines and nimble
| publishers could learn a thing or two about the dynamics of
| lifestyle-brands. Take, for example, yoga, surf-shops/apparel
| stores in NYC, and meditation more and more. What one has to
| struggle against at all costs, however, is the commodification of
| literature. For literature to discover its survivable form for
| the 21st century, it really must focus on making that implicit
| boon explicit.
|
| I could go on and on and on about this subject. I am very near to
| opening a coffee shop in Chicago that will also function as a
| kind of arcade for writing and reading. I have also been
| developing a web app to attempt to formalize the process and
| craft of literary production. I believe literature, and even new
| literature, to be resilient, and novel implementations will be
| discovered. Long-standing literary institutions do perhaps needs
| to fail first.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm always opposed to government funding the arts.
|
| Mainly because if the government funds it, then they become the
| customer. Arts programs become designed to appeal to whatever
| the current set of civil servants think is worth funding.
| Academics get pulled in and join the bubble. The whole mess
| starts moving away from any kind of relevance to wider society
| and disappears up its own intellectual orifice.
|
| And the sheer arrogance of arts intellectuals saying "we're
| invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government
| to do whatever we want to do" beggars belief.
|
| I'm way happier for the market to decide. There are viable
| business models out there for good quality content with niche
| appeal. It doesn't all have to be mass-market pap to be
| commercially sustainable.
|
| Failing that, there's always UBI. We should _all_ be paid by
| the government to do whatever we want.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| > I'm always opposed to government funding the arts.
|
| Even participatory theatrical work like the TSA?
| mrcrumb1 wrote:
| The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are
| not part of society and that people don't have an influence
| about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't
| live in some form a representative democracy. Clearly lots of
| people value the arts enough to want the government to be
| funding it. To frame it as some ivory tower conspiracy to get
| a free ride from the government seems a little disingenuous.
|
| I don't necessarily disagree that there are business models
| that could support good quality content, or that UBI is a
| good way to keep arts alive; maybe we could have all three.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Clearly lots of people value the arts enough to want the
| government to be funding it.
|
| More accurately, they want someone else to fund it. They
| don't find it worthwhile to spend their own money on it.
| srl wrote:
| > The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants
| are not part of society and that people don't have an
| influence about what the government spends money on, that
| is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy.
|
| I mean, we _don 't_ live in a representative democracy. Not
| in the sense you're describing.
|
| (Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants
| are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected
| officials, and are _certainly_ not drawn from a
| representative cross section of the public. You may feel
| like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little
| more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil
| servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own
| interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is,
| optimistically, naive.
| mrcrumb1 wrote:
| To be clear, we're talking about funding of the arts
| here. Without going down the rabbit hole of debating all
| of your critiques of the civil servant, if you really
| have this view of the public sector of the government of
| the US, then public spending on arts funding is pretty
| far down the totem pole as far as problems go.
|
| I will say I think your general picture of civil servants
| as a cabal of lobbyists and special interest does apply
| to a portion (arguably a disproportionately powerful
| portion) of them, but the population of civil servants is
| huge and is definitely not monolithic.
| abathur wrote:
| I agree with parts of this, but I do want to complicate it a
| bit...
|
| > the sheer arrogance of arts intellectuals saying "we're
| invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the
| government to do whatever we want to do" beggars belief.
|
| The arts aren't the only place where this happens. A lot of
| scientific/medical research is in part or whole funded by
| public money. Is your belief just as beggared by "the sheer
| arrogance of scientists saying: we're invaluable for society,
| so we should be paid by the government to study whatever we
| want"?
|
| > I'm way happier for the market to decide. There are viable
| business models out there for good quality content with niche
| appeal. It doesn't all have to be mass-market pap to be
| commercially sustainable.
|
| I see a connection between people trying to carve out a
| living in OSS and in the arts. Many artists and OSS
| developers are just people who work a day job that they may
| like, hate, or be indifferent to--and then go do something
| they are passionate about in their spare time.
|
| Do we, at scale, have a better society when most of these
| people's productive hours are fettered to whatever pays their
| bills (whether it uses their talents or squanders them) and
| they have to squirrel away energy for those passions--or are
| we better off when they can chase what makes them want to
| wake up on this side of the dirt every day?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, if the market were the only decider, presumably only the
| richest could have, say, a large sculpture? Or would
| businesses underwrite those as a goodwill gesture? I'm not
| sure that public art is all good, or was even the best use of
| the money, but I guess on balance I appreciate the impulse.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's a long history of rich people funding the arts,
| voluntarily. The great art coming from medieval Italy, for
| example.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| There is a long history of feudalism and ignorance and
| illteracy, of starvation and war. What does that tell us?
| WalterBright wrote:
| It tells us that life in modern America is pretty good.
| pklausler wrote:
| Do you oppose government funding of parks?
| WalterBright wrote:
| You can always tell government art. It's something nobody
| would pay for out of their own pocket.
|
| Edit: deep down, you know I'm right!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Absolutely not. As a simple, specific example, look at much
| of the art funded during the New Deal. But regardless, the
| measure of art isn't mass appeal - similar to basic
| research, if the market funded it, we wouldn't have to. And
| that especially is a an issue when it's made: famously,
| many artists considered brilliant and very mainstream now
| were ignored and even reviled during life. Van Gogh didn't
| sell any paintings and was desperately poor. Stravinsky's
| Firebird caused riots.
|
| > nobody would pay for out of their own pocket
|
| People have such a strong reaction to it, such an urge to
| shut it down and leave no room for it to breath. That's
| actually a great start to art. The next step, however, is
| one few take (and fewer now it seems, when the wisdom of
| learning, knowledge, and being open-minded is politically
| rejected): Figure out what buttons it is pressing in you -
| not politics or whatever, but personal.
|
| Almost all my favorite artwork really pissed me off when I
| first saw it. I learned it was a great signal that there
| was something there. And that is how art, in large part,
| more than any other thing in the world, helps us expand and
| grow.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Absolutely not.
|
| Compelling riposte!
|
| > art funded during the New Deal
|
| I've seen it. Not impressed. But heck, why don't you pay
| an artist to make some more for you? (We both know why
| <g>)
|
| > the measure of art isn't mass appeal
|
| Yeah, it is. Consider The Beatles, one of a looong list
| of examples. Though they didn't take off until they got a
| manager who understood marketing. They still weren't
| government funded.
|
| > Van Gogh
|
| was very bad at marketing. It turned out he didn't need
| government funding, either. And people are willing to
| personally pay for his art, though the prices they fetch
| means it's likely 99% virtue signalling.
| lokalfarm wrote:
| > ... could learn a thing or two about the dynamics of
| lifestyle-brands.
|
| I think that is out of touch with the way that American culture
| has been trending. (Yes, the world is much bigger than America,
| but this article is focused on US literary mags.) There is a
| continual push for efficiency & profit - driven by capitalism &
| technology - so I think it's clear the audience for this
| 'literary lifestyle' is continually shrinking.
|
| Getting a bachelor's degree in the Arts in America basically is
| just a setup for entering graduate school (ie, spending more
| money + time, and even then, only making a fraction after
| graduation compared to other degrees... like CompSci). Pew
| Research Center found almost 25% of Americans in their survey
| admitted to not reading a book in the last year - and this is
| during the pandemic[0].
|
| Our middle class is shrinking and being squeezed in ways that
| haven't been seen for over a century. The gig economy means
| people are often working multiple jobs, for low pay and no
| benefits. And most of the upper class is also continually
| trying to hustle and stay atop all the new
| technologies/products.
|
| I love reading and completely agree that it is valuable -- I
| just don't believe that our society agrees. Most of the 'Bar
| Arcades' in my area have closed down during the pandemic (along
| with many restaurants, also a 'lifestyle brand'), so I can't
| help but feel your potential business model has a long road
| ahead of itself. I wish you the best in it though!
|
| [0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-
| doesnt-...
| blockwriter wrote:
| I do not doubt that the audience is shrinking. In fact, I
| feel it. All the same, I am of the opinion that people that
| already participate in the lifestyle of literature, that is
| the reading and writing of literature in earnest, could
| benefit from an ecosystem that extends their practice beyond
| the solitary. If it yet cannot assuage the symptoms, then
| perhaps this system can diagnose the disease. This, in turn,
| might positively influence the writing that gets done. At the
| end of the day, it is unlikely that any given writer of
| literature will find mainstream or financial success, but at
| the core of many writers is the innate drive to assess the
| world and put down in words something that is meaningful.
|
| The pandemic was an illuminating study of the failure of
| literature in the 21st century. It seems like it should have
| produced a great work and a great moment, but it did not.
| Many writers need to go through the humbling process of
| discovering that the world writ large, despite the writer's
| estimation of their own intellect, remains too confusing for
| them to say anything of value. This tension is also, I think,
| what accounts for our more absurd, even hallucinatory, ideas
| about what literature, and by extension man, was, is, and can
| be. I went through that process and had to come to terms with
| the tension between my appreciation for the aesthetic wonder
| of literature and my often unaesthetic and distracted
| upbringing. I then thought extensively about my environment
| and how little of my linguistic life was a matter of course.
| I did not pen letters, nor discuss literature extensively
| with peers. My peers did not read or respond to my writing. I
| ultimately came to understand what the problem set is. My
| solutions are yet unlikely to solve the big question of
| whether or not literature can survive in the 21st century,
| but they ease my load. The road ahead is a long one, and
| appropriately Quixotic, but I undertake it with the notion
| that it will ease the tension of others as well, even if they
| only end up being accomplished writers in search of
| accomplished readers.
| lokalfarm wrote:
| Thanks for reading & responding!
|
| I don't really see any reasons to doubt that literature
| will survive the 21st century. Its place is always going to
| be there, right? But the publishing industry and academia?
| I think that is a different issue altogether and they are
| certainly having their day(s) of reckoning. I think we feel
| its impact even more strongly because other economic &
| technological forces have intersected to completely destroy
| adjacent industries like, well, bookstores :P
|
| For many of us growing up, books (esp. fiction) were the
| best possible form of escape/recreation. Now we're seeing a
| generation growing up with high powered tablets & phones
| that must seem magical. To socialize with friends they can
| talk while playing video games, send videos, or take
| pictures. The written word doesn't seem very incentivized
| for them... & I just don't see any of this changing.
| Luckily for us, though, you can spend a few lifetimes
| digging through all the literature produced up to this
| point, and I don't see that going anywhere.
|
| Interesting in regards to writing as a solitary vs social
| act. Have you ever read Paul Auster's The Invention of
| Solitude? For me, similar to computers/the Internet, one of
| the beauties of literature is how it is both a solitary &
| deeply connected 'thing.' How do you feel about some of the
| common criticisms of MFA programs[0]? Obviously a throwback
| beatnik/bohemian cafe/store has a very different barrier of
| entry than these graduate programs, but sorta relevant when
| we're talking about writing as a solitary act vs social.
|
| [0]: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-the-mfa-swallowed-
| litera...
|
| Edit: I wanted to say that if you haven't been, Quimby's
| Bookstore in Wicker Park is a really cool spot! Been over
| five years since I was living there but the nerd in me
| thought their selection of zines was amazing.
| blockwriter wrote:
| I derive a real joy from thinking about this, so thank
| you.
|
| I'll pick up the Invention of Solitude straight away.
|
| On the subject of the advantage to solitude in engaging
| with literature, a distinction can be made between the
| beam of white light and everything after the prism.
| Reading literary fiction, in particular, is edifying, and
| the result of this experience is the feeling that it is
| full of nuance and could be understood to a greater
| degree. Reading books on criticism will tease out some of
| the frequencies, but the full spectrum becomes realized
| when the private act of reading is put into conversation
| with another's private act of reading. Novels of once
| seemingly enjoyed a network effect of sorts. They had the
| capacity to be private and public experiences. I can tel
| you, too, that engaging more and more with reading, and
| less therefore with the other cultural mediums available
| to us, means that one has fewer people with which to
| connect. A retreat into literature was in my case the
| result of reading waste and trivia into the alternatives
| that the culture encouraged. It is this loneliness that
| may be the primary problem in need of a solution.
|
| I read the mfa article linked above. In general, mfas
| seem to do what Rome did to Christianity. It routinized
| it to such an extent that it largely denuded it of its
| most radical capacity. For me, the most vital aspect of
| literature, the one that is, in Bottom's own terms,
| bottomless, is the constitution of characters that go
| just beyond understanding. The tilt that occurs when a
| character demonstrates its reflexivity, its comprehension
| of the moments it experiences, is a profound beauty, even
| Bodhisattvian. When you treat the process of writing like
| it is prescriptive, the writer is unlikely to realize
| that what they are creating is a notion unto itself. So,
| the publishing industry is staffed with people that have
| lost the capacity to recognize writing's purpose. They
| instead have come to recognize a collection of shorthand
| cheats and the feedback loop draws the whole structure
| away from meaningful production. It merely produces.
| doingtheiroming wrote:
| I've bought a few over the years, particularly when Borders had
| its great magazine sections. They were uniformly turgid and
| boring and I was consistently disappointed. They are their own
| worst enemy.
| patentatt wrote:
| https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_322c88882cda5c3c1edc6d5c18...
| aasasd wrote:
| I mean, standing is probably not the best posture for floating.
| causalmodels wrote:
| This is interesting because I am personal friends with the
| editorial teams of two different literary magazines that were
| started in the last five years. Having seen the numbers, I can
| say they are doing quite well. I am curious as to what is going
| wrong in these particular magazines that is causing them to
| close?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Are they paying full prices for writing and staff? Unless
| they've stumbled across an unusual niche or business model, a
| subsidy is required one way or another.
| causalmodels wrote:
| Full time staff of between 5 and 20. No idea how writer pay
| works but I know my writer friends are happy with it. They
| are both organized as 501c3s with fundraising explicitly tied
| into the model
| zebraflask wrote:
| I think a large part of it has to do with the print aspect -
| printing costs have been going up from supply chain issues over
| paper, binding material, etc. And if the outlet needs to pay
| staff and pay writers, that adds another layer of pressure. If
| it's subject to budgetary and other administrative issues
| because it's tied to a university, even more pressure.
|
| What this article glossed over far too quickly, in my view, is
| how there are thousands - literally, thousands - of online or
| primarily online journals and magazines that are doing just
| fine or better than fine.
|
| I can vouch to that because I started one last year. Granted,
| our editors are all volunteers and we don't pay writers, but
| we've had no problem pulling in all kinds of accomplished
| writers (and, no, they aren't "quirky" like the article
| somewhat dismissively referenced, whatever that means).
|
| Our largest operating costs come from submission platform fees
| and trade organization memberships. Grand total, around $500
| per year. For everything else, free resources like Netlify
| hosting for the site.
|
| These types of articles could be a little more nuanced.
| Conventional publishing has serious issues, but it's just one
| piece of the literary landscape.
| tssva wrote:
| Many of the literary magazines mentioned in the article have
| always been dependent on the financial largesse of a larger
| institution such as a university. As such they haven't had to
| concern themselves with being independently financially viable.
| Changing that type of culture can be extremely difficult. It is
| probably easier to start from scratch as your friends have.
| x3iv130f wrote:
| My ignorant guess is that long running magazines end up
| targeting older readers who have a bad habit of dying off.
| jseliger wrote:
| Makes sense to me and is consistent with my observations:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2021/09/30/the-death-of-literary-cul...
| 323 wrote:
| globalise83 wrote:
| Isn't it standard practice to put /s at the end of this kind of
| comment?
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| I cancelled my longstanding subscription to the Paris Review
| shortly after their change in editorship. It was absolutely
| painful to do so. It once felt like a thoughtful well-curated
| window into the emotional inner lives of others. It has comforted
| me through weird life circumstances better than anyone I know
| could.
|
| Somehow though, technology has challenged the meaning of what an
| inner life is. It has turned insides out. Competing with that has
| made recent literature feel like an identity based gimmick to me.
| It tries to capture an audience moreso than wait patiently with
| something strange and unique. Or the selection process which
| rewarded nuance has stopped functioning.
|
| It's tragic because our shut-in shutdown often trivial feeling
| lives bear a great need for elevation of the human experience
| these days.
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