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9 September 2010
I published my first review in Bookforum. It’s about Kristin Hersh’s Rat Girl.
Apparently it’s the 90s nostalgia week here on Teenage Kicks.
This month I published my first writing on paper in quite awhile, this brief(ish) review of 80s/90s rock figure Kristin Hersh for Bookforum‘s autumn edition. It’s headlined “Sing, Muse.” (Not my idea, but I like it.) Apparently she likes it. Which, you know, while not my intent, is nice to hear.
What I’m imagining she liked about it was my appreciation for her lack of nostalgia about the past. Her story is a story-qua-story rather than an excuse to burnish the reputation of her circle, herself, her older musical material. In fact, my conclusion is that her writing maybe even better than her music — at least to my ears. (I’d somehow avoided knowingly hearing Throwing Muses until I wrote this review, reminding me of the inevitable holes in one’s listening during this era of the endless archive & the celestial jukebox and reminding me, also, of one of my college English professors, a specialist in contemporary fiction, who sheepishly admitted to never having read Catch-22.)
(PS – Registration on Bookforum.com site is required to read the review.)
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Bookforum, Catch-22, Kristin Hersh, Literature, Memoir, Rat Girl, The 90s, The Problem With Nostalgia
1 Comment
13 November 2009
Brief thoughts about length
(Photo via Jim Herrington)
In this morning’s paper I came across this quote from novelist Cormac McCarthy:
- A: The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can’t do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.
Q: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?
A: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Back to the Land Movement, Brevity, Cormac McCarthy, Howl, Length, Literature, Off the Grid, Organic Farming, The Problem With Glamour, The Problem With Nostalgia
7 Comments
29 July 2009
Max Perkins never published toothpaste
Of late, I have been reading the National Book Award winning 1978 biography of this man, Max Perkins, the famed Scribners’ editor who saw authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe though the majority of their careers.
It’s fair to say he is one of the most renown editors in 20th century publishing and, erm, related entertainment media fields. In his day, Perkins was as well-known as folks like David Geffen, Judith Regan, and Si Newhouse — which is to say, not that famous, but certainly well-known and respected in certain circles.
By contrast with those folks, however, Perkins also had a connoisseur’s tastes, much like the folks that I actually seek to emulate in my own career, entrepreneur/editors like whoever the person is that stocks Colette in Paris or Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun or Oprah Winfrey (no Wikipedia entry required) or Nonesuch’s Bob Hurwitz or perhaps even art curator Walter Hopps.
(I may not be 100% serious about Oprah & I’d hate to be as much of a fuck-up as Hopps, but they’re still both kind of perfect as is.)
Anyway, the book is titled Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. It was written by A. Scott Berg. Here’s a nice passage:
- “Publishing companies, unlike toothpaste companies, do not produce identical products year after year. Each book is a brand-new product, with individual qualities and requiring individual attention. A toothpaste company creates a market for its products and then needs only to maintain that market. A publisher must make a new market for each book — several hundred, perhaps, each year. (This hard fact of publishing life partially explains why so few books are sold — in a nation of over 200 million people, a mere 5,000 copies is an excellent sale for a first novel — and also why publishing is not an especially lucrative endeavor.) Furthermore, while the toothpaste manufacturer can forecast his sales with some accuracy, the publisher seldom can, because each book — except for those by well-established authors — is a different sales problem. Sales may be unpredictably low — or the publisher may be surprised by sudden bounty. Books contracted for years earlier and labored upon in obscurity may suddenly skyrocket.”
If you, like me, are in a wildly unpredictable career path, and work with something that goes in and out of fashion — movies, food, music — passages like this are akin to warm milk on a chilly winter’s day.
I mean, dude, tell me about it!
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Curating, David Geffen, Literature, Maxwell Perkins, Scribners, The Problem With Glamour, Walter Hopps