Though I did indulge in an expensive starbucks triple shot eggnog laced creation in honor of it being the weekend and not having to actually be anywhere.

Make no mistake about this: if you have written and finished a novel you ARE a writer.

Don’t let anyone, particularly some snotty so-called publishing professional, demean this achievement. You’ve written a novel = you’re a writer.

It doesn’t EVER have to be published, and you’re still a writer.
You can publish it online, on your website, or with any of those book printing mills, and yes, you are still a writer.

Ms. Smith?s article has made the already tenuous tenure of artists in academia even more tenuous.

Well, it’s obvious you didn’t major in language. “Tenuous tenure” is twee enough without the second use of tenuous, to say nothing of the part where you’re wrong wrong wrong like? a wrong thing.

GETTING tenure might be even more uncertain and fraught than it used to be, but the whole point of the tenure system (correct me if I’m wrong here) is that once you have it, it’s damn near impossible to get you out, right? It is (barring some truly spectacular malfeasance) the closest thing to a lifetime appointment. Of course, those who have attained this lofty goal (in all programs, not just the MFA’s) have a well and vested interest in making sure the system remains strong. If the pyramid crumbles, after all, what will you have to sit on top of?

Her call for artists to go forth without credentials is na?ve at best

You’re in an ivory tower, so let’s not go slinging that particular word about, eh? Unless, of course, you personally lack basic health insurance and are hoping that someone buys something you made in the near future so you don’t have to fall back on working at the gods be dammed mall, or are holding down a day job so you can make art in the evenings.

and seems to assume that graduate programs fail to teach artists survival skills

You mean like a full course on how to get though flu season with no health insurance? Please, do tell me how a portfolio review course prepares a 20 year old for that.

or encourage them to develop emotionally vivid works.

What the ever loving? fuck does “emotionally vivid” mean??

I concur with Ms. Smith that the Ph.D. in art is a bad idea in the United States, where an M.F.A. entails 60 hours of graduate credit.

So glad to hear that. Your condescension honors us.

No one says an education is cheap.

So only the rich or those who are willing to indenture the better part of their working lives should be allowed to call themselves artists? What a smug, overbearing, elitist pile of crap.

To imply, however, that this is money ill spent is to endanger the job of every artist with a university appointment.

You mean everyone with a job like yours. Now we come to the crux of the matter.

That Ms. Smith thinks a band of renegade conceptual artists will do a better job of teaching young artists than university professors do is insulting.

Er, I’ve been taught by some of those vaunted uni. profs, and it’s insulting that you’d think they’re qualified to do much of anything beyond making sure that everyone likes the same things they like.

Also, when was the last time you ducked into an art history class? Most of the major art movements of the 19th and 20th centuries started in direct opposition to the entrenched academic art communities of the time and were roundly decried by the then-current elites as trash.

In fact, can you tell me one historically relevant art movement in the modern era that started in the classroom?

It?s also like yelling ?fire? in a crowded theater,

Really? Really? You feel you’re in imminent danger of being trampled?

as it comes at a time when many colleges are already cutting art faculty.

As though we haven’t been seeing arts programs on the primary and secondary levels on the chopping block for decades. Colleges are cutting programs and facility all over the damn place because, if you haven’t noticed, times are hard right now and it sucks for everyone at every point on down the line. The arts are ALWAYS the first thing to get hit because the public has the notion that they are useless “extras” that are not really needed. (Folks like you are not helping that perception in the slightest, by the way.)

In short, you’re the nekkid emperor, and someone pointed this out to you. Your junk is out swinging in the breeze and it isn’t particularly impressive, so go find some skivvies and come back once you’ve checked your ego and entitlement, ‘kay?

The professionalization and academicization of the art world has been lamented for some years, but lately they have become epidemic. (Roberta Smith)

Unsurprisingly, some academics are affronted:

Her call for artists to go forth without credentials is na?ve at best and seems to assume that graduate programs fail to teach artists survival skills or encourage them to develop emotionally vivid works. (link via Art Vent) (Edit: direct link to the letter)

I’ll be over here, laughing my ass off. I’ll also put out the offer of pencils at dawn to any academic gatekeeper who thinks that a piece of dearly bought paper makes one artist inherently better trained, more authentic, or more more marketable than another. Better than 2/3 of the folks I knew in fine arts programs in school are doing anything but art professionally, as it is a very nearly impossible way to feed oneself, and always has been. I have lived my entire life surrounded by working artists. Some had degrees. Some did not. At the end of the day, it didn’t much matter either way.

And of course, none of this is new.

So if you’re going to write a story (even a quasi-fictional) about this, of course one would feel obligated to do some research about the subject, so as to avoid to give the appearance of talking out of one’s ass, right? Apparently not.

(E.L.) Doctorow says that writing a fictional account of the Collyers’ existence required figuring out how to “break into that house” and see what was going on and why. He says that he didn’t do much research for his novel; he felt that the brothers required “interpretation, not research.” (Link)

Bullshit.

If you wanted to write a work of fiction, more power to you. I’m cool with that. But you’re using real people and real events to bolster the visibility of your fictional story; and you’re doing it in a dishonest, or at least amazingly disingenuous fashion.

The Collyer brothers were always on my mind. … Somehow the fact that they had come from a well-to-do family and had more-or-less opted out was the real mystery of them.

Never heard of compulsive hoarding, have we? This is not “opting out”, certainly not in the sense of choosing (voluntarily) to absent oneself from society. The DSM-IV currently has it listed as a type of OCD, but it may have it’s own separate diagnosis in the DSM-V.

Doctorow tells his story from Homer’s point of view, a character who he describes as “a very compassionate, sensitive fellow.”

“The issue for [Homer] is to create meaning out of their lives in this peculiar eccentric decision that they’ve made,” explains Doctorow.

These were ill men who died tragically. If you wanted to use that as a general springboard to write a story romanticizing the “eccentric” rich, (which I wouldn’t respect much either, but would at least not get so annoyed by) you can say that the story was inspired by or bears a passing resemblance to real events, but don’t title your book “Homer & Langley” and then ignore fact that they were actual people, instead trying to make them into some sort of floating archetypes.

Why yes, I *do* expect my historical fiction to be rigorously researched. (Even if you intend to go off in a different direction.) Presenting your lack of historical research as an artistic choice just makes me think you’re intellectually *lazy*.

The interview doesn’t touch on this at all, but I do have to wonder (with a blind main POV character and all) just how much research Doctorow put into being blind (and specifically loosing one’s sight later in life), or if he just “interpreted” his way though that as well.

Note should be paid to the commenters at NPR, who quickly do note that hording does not equal “eccentric”.

What I don’t often give thought to is how such a dichotomy (unthinkable in my own family) could poison sibling and other family relations, and yet it often happens. One child is deemed to be special, and one (or more) is not. This, invariably, sucks.

In the second half of the nineteenth century we can watch other sets of siblings also become artists?W.B. Yeats and his brother Jack, the painter, for example; Heinrich and Thomas Mann; Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. In the case of all four families?the Yeatses, the Manns, the Stephens, the Jameses?there was a dynamic at work that involved a struggle for power, or something like power, between siblings, a sort of fierce ambition within families for recognition and escape. In the case of all four families the parents seemed to shine a light on some of their children and leave the others to their own devices.

In these families where geniuses were nurtured, there were also damaged ones begging for attention. Just as the artists lived in the light, their siblings lurked in the shadows?Lily and Lolly Yeats, for example, who ran the Cuala Press… (link)

These people that I had admired my entire New York existence ? they all disappointed me. I don’t understand how people can exist in such a dishonest way and still call themselves writers. (nymag)

It usually looks somewhat like that, but I’d make the comment that the author is confusing what one needs to be a writer with what one needs to be a decent human being. (One can be a halfway decent writer while having not the least shred of humanity, and many’s the intellectual who’s gone that route.)

Collins, the confused stepchild of HarperCollins, grandson and last avatar of the venerable publisher William Collins, and relic of a more optimistic time in America – the year 2004 – died today at the age of 4. The causes were multiple: neglect, mixed messages, gluttony, and an epidemic of stagnation that has decimated American book publishing.
- Jessa Crispin

Personally, I think the publishing industry has been teetering on the brink of disaster for a lot longer than this. It’s been propped up by mega-stores, aggressive business practices, and “tentpole” bestsellers that covered for the sad fact that 90%-99% of everything in a modern bookstore is complete crap. Which is nothing new in the slightest, but if you’re going to hop around bemoaning the death of modern publishing, you’re gonna have to give me a better excuse than things have only recently gone to hell in a handbasket.

I say this as someone who loves books, loves reading, and has no problem with B level genre work; but authors are far too often getting paid to produce crappy books. When I was a young’n I had no problem paying for crappy books (genre and otherwise) because a) I could get four “stripped” books for a buck at the local flea market and b.) I did not have the internet. The internet gives me my fill of low to mid quality writing (and some stunningly high quality gems here and there) delivered right to my desk (and ebook reader) with perfect convenience, has the benefit of coming with a whole community of like minded folks, and is almost free. (Not counting the cost of the computer and ‘net access, which I’d be paying anyway, seeing as I use said computer and internet every single day anyway.) With that in mind, why do publishing companies seriously expect me to pay money to read work that I wouldn’t give a second glance in a fic community?

When I say crap work, I don’t mean that the story bored me or the characters failed to interest me (though that does happen). No, I mean grammar and sentence quirks for the hell of it. (You are not the second coming of William Faulkner, and even if you were I’d have a problem with turning a sentence into origami ’cause I hate Faulkner like burning.) I mean plot points appearing out of thin air and disappearing into black holes. I mean overuse of maguffins, slipshod research, editors with no spine who think that making sure there are no misspellings constitutes doing their job and 300 page stories expanded into 3 volume “trilogies” just because that’s what everyone else is doing.

I mean the only redeeming feature of the book being the jacket art. I mean mary sues all over the damm place. I mean cultural appropriation that would start a gosh-darn flame war. I mean sex scenes that would have posters questioning if the author was still a virgin. I mean battles that would have posters wondering if the author even knew which end of a sword or gun went in one’s hand.

I mean every single waste of a dead tree that makes me want to cry every time I walk into Barnes and Noble. (And let me note, the first time I walked into a mega-bookstore at the wee age of 17, I thought I’d reached the promised land. Not so anymore.)

Every time I see shelves laden with these modern publishing miracles, the only thought in my head is someone got paid to write this. Someone got paid to market this. How stupid do they think we are?. You wonder why the publishing industry is dying now? I wonder how it survived until now. Publishers need to stop whining about declining sales, ebook readers, and text to speech devices. Consumers can start screaming for better books… or we can take ourselves over to das internets and find the better writing our owndamnselves. Which, if you haven’t noticed, is what we’ve been doing all along. And it’s working out pretty well. Unless some huge sea change happens to happen, it’s what I plan on doing well into the future.

I’m in procrastination purgatory. Bah.