I have had occasion recently to review my own book of short stories, Revolutionary Baby. There was a suggestion that it might be serialised on a literary/writing platform currently gaining popularity. Some people still like reading and writing old-fashioned stories which reflect life in a pre-digital pre-influencer pre-Trumpian world, dwindling though this number might be. In this process I received some rather surprising feedback: my stories were accused of “man-bashing”. I was taken aback. As far as I was aware, my stories had been written from a ordinary female viewpoint and reflected an awareness and consciousness which any woman of my era would share.
None of my male characters were vicious or evil or deliberately cruel. They certainly were not violent or criminal or sadistic, unlike a high percentage of male characters who now occupy the fictional arena in ever-increasing numbers, thank you Bret Easton Ellis. If they displayed unkindness, self-obsession, lack of awareness or a failure to understand the women they were involved with, this was nothing remarkable. They, too, were creatures of their time. I feel fond of all of my male characters, in different ways, but I did need to convey the impact that their often thoughtless behaviour had on the women in my stories. In some cases they hardly connected with women at all and mainly hurt themselves.
It occurred to me that before considering any kind of serialization I should write an analysis of what happens in each of the stories and insert a trigger warning or even an apology for any misunderstanding that a male reader might experience as a forward. But on the other hand, there is no obvious evidence that any men have actually read the book, so perhaps that would be entirely superfluous.
This led me to ponder the fragmentation now occurring in literary and even more so popular fiction. Many of literary women of my acquaintance, most of whom would describe themselves as feminists, make a point of not reading books written by men. The question of the gender identity of the author, and ditto of the audience, has become a sore point among many commentators online, in literary magazines, in articles on book prizes and awards. There seems to be emerging a kind of gender-ghetto mentality where each identity is writing for others who share it. The striking emergence of queer fiction is an example. Some of the most interesting writing is coming from authors inhabiting a distinctively queer identity world. Is everyone reading this? Or mainly others similarly self-identified? I noted that women writers are mainly read by other women. No doubt there are exceptions today in strictly literary circles. But what is actually going on here? Does anybody know? Is anyone keeping track of these questions?
BOOK REVIEW: Here One Moment: Pan Macmillan Australia 2024. 528 pages.
(This review is 2300 words long. An edited version is available on my Substack, go to:Substack.com@annettehamilton “Dissatsfied Insects”)
A few years ago, before Covid, maybe it was 2018, my partner and I sat in the modestly sized ballroom at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, a picturesque mountain town not far from Sydney, to hear Liane Moriarty being interviewed at the Blue Mountains Writer’s Festival. She was posed on the stage in the glary lights, neat, well-groomed, pleasant looking; and when she spoke she was articulate, thoughtful, kind and agreeable. No OTT farrago of carefully curated authorial persona here. She seemed like any attractive middle-aged well-educated woman from a middle-class Sydney suburb. White, heterosexual, “normal”.
Liane Moriarty Author
Liking Liane Moriarty’s books was, at that time, not acceptable in prevailing literary circles. A convenient statement appeared in a 2016 online review of Truly Madly Guilty by “Wadholloway”
“I shouldn’t have undertaken to review another Liane Moriarty. She’s Sydney, I’m Melbourne. She’s popular, I prefer literary. She’s plain vanilla whitebread middle class bleeding heart first world problems, and I like my reading just a little bit grittier.”
The fact that even then she was probably the best-selling and most successful recent Australian woman writer was not of interest to legit literati.
Her latest book, Here One Moment, is an international hit, pleasing most of her readers, or those who leave reviews on Amazon at least. Ranked #23 in all Books, and #4 in Family Life Fiction (Books) it is #1 in the Amazon “Most Gifted” category.
Her readership has rocketed and she has a huge transnational presence. There are translations in over forty languages. Three of her ten novels have hit the New York Times best seller list (Big Little Lies, NinePerfect Strangers, and Apples Never Fall) and these, as well as most of her other books, have been re-imagined for movies and/or television serialisation. Liane Moriarty is credited as producer.
Her profile in the US has been vastly enhanced by the enthusiasm of Reece Witherspoon and the appearance of Nicole Kidman in a key role in the screen adaptation of Big Little Lies.
I picked up the “buzz” around Liane’s early books. I read most of them with a certain baffled admiration. She wrote well. Her books were all set in Australia, many in suburban Sydney, and described places which I, as a mother of three children living in various suburbs at an earlier time of my life, immediately recognised. She wrote real narratives about familiar people. Her stories and the moral dilemmas behind them were complex and puzzling. She delicately peeled away the appearance of placid stability and determined respectability which so characterise the Australian urban middle class, uncertain about its own security, uneasy about its core values, stitched up around family life, unsure of the best way to negotiate the brutal competition for status and influence. Moriarty gets right inside the churning dissatisfaction which characterises the female experience of wifedom and maternity, developed in the 1950s and preserved well into the 2000s. She takes the reader into the silent region of hopes and fears beating away in the hearts of the guests at the Sunday barbecue or the cheery-if-hungover Dads sizzling sausages on the soccer field. Not really “vanilla” at all, more a chili, smoked kipper and pepperoni flavouring hidden inside what looks like cheesecake.
Just along from us sat an older couple and a younger woman. While waiting for the session to begin, we got to chatting, expressing appreciation of Liane’s work and admiration for her ability to go so carefully into such deep waters. I expressed regret that she didn’t seem to have the impact in literary circles that one might have expected. We laughed together and got on famously. I thought they would make excellent friends with common interests. When I asked hopefully if they lived in the mountains they laughed and said, no, they were Liane’s parents, and this was her very talented sister Jaclyn.
Liane appeared again at the Blue Mountains Writer’s Festival in November 2024. This time, she was a rock star. She spoke in the community hall, the largest space available to the Festival in Katoomba, on the same program as a very different Australian author-heroine with a newly published book, Gina Chick. More on her in another post. There was an air of adoration in that room. These were not middle class white bread etc etc readers, these were women and men from all kinds of backgrounds and demographics, engaged with Australia’s current literary culture. Liane spoke about her new book. Many had already purchased copies which no doubt they hoped she would later sign.
At that point I hadn’t read it. I wasn’t even sure I was going to. I have been so deep in struggle with my own memoir which seems to exist near Moriarty’s terrain, since it is about families and Sydney and women and ambition and sadness and grief. I didn’t want to feel derailed by her ability to say things clearly, I couldn’t emulate her grip on a complex narrative. I thought it might make my own book even harder to finish than it already was, so thought it might be better not to read her latest.
But after that Writer’s Festival appearance I couldn’t avoid it. I downloaded here one moment* onto my Kindle. It turns out to be a long book – in the softcover print version 528 pages. I began reading it and felt baffled again, but differently baffled. This story was even more complex than usual. Unlike most of her books, it was all over the place, and the time, literally. A welter of explanatory philosophical positions are followed by a mathematical function called Kronecker’s Delta. It’s impossible to explain just how this works but it suddenly jolted what had seemed a disjointed and often bizarrely disconnected set of characters and events into a different mind-space where she seemed to be saying something incredibly important even though I still felt I didn’t understand it.
There is some strange typographic font thing going on with her book cover. On the Australian edition the title appears without capital letters. All the reviews and listings for the book use upper case for first letters, as is usual with novels. But I think the book is good in lower case, so to speak. Without a serious and imposing font, it emphasises the qualities of the butterfly wings changing the course of history, even though it was a seagull’s wings in Lorenz’s original formulation, as Moriarty’s main character explains.
SPOILER ALERT:
Cherry, the supposed psychic who sets the events of the tale in motion, wears a particular piece of jewellery which leads to her identity being discovered by the many people affected by her predictions of the timing and reason for their deaths. These predictions are uttered seemingly for no reason on a plane bound from Hobart to Sydney. Her beautiful gold brooch is inscribed with the Kronecker Delta symbol and Cherry has worn it every day since her late husband Ned gave it to her on their first wedding anniversary. Naturally I wanted to find out more about the Kronecker Delta symbol and how this related to the theoretical and spiritual elements of the book and this took me into the realms of algebraic theory, far beyond my comfort zone. One of the characters was called Leopold, and the original Kronecker who developed the Delta symbol was also called Leopold, but I wasn’t sure how important this was.
The Kronecker Delta symbol is concerned with the way one small event can have vast consequences in its ultimate effects. ‘Could the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’ asked the bearded man with a beatific smile …’
(p. 162 in Chapter 38). Later, Cherry tells us that she was the butterfly, although it should have been a seagull. ‘I walked through that plane squawking my predictions, flapping my wings, and my actions had consequences which had consequences which had consequences’ (Chapter 40).
It turns out that Cherry is an actuary, and hence an expert on mathematical measurement of life expectancy, as well as being the daughter of a fortune teller. Whether or not Kronecker’s symbol really has anything to do with what the book is saying, the eventual supposition or interpretation seemed to me to be: basically everything is chance. There is no meaning to it. Nobody can know how one event will lead to another. But nothing is unchangeable. People can interfere based on incorrect assumptions and things may still turn out very well. The type example of this is Timmy, who Cherry predicts will drown at the age of 7. His mother, terrified the prediction will come true, enrols him for baby swimming lessons and devotes incalculable time to making sure he is an excellent swimmer. The prediction does not come true, but instead he, his family and indeed the entire country benefit from these events and he becomes an Olympic swimmer and doubtless gold medallist. This is such a deeply Australian conclusion.
I am not quite sure but am beginning to think that Liane’s latest book is traversing some kind of meta-philosophy of Australian existence. The recent death of her much loved father seems to infuse the book from start to finish, even though she never says anything to indicate this. I could only read it as a deep engagement with life, death and meaning, common but profound existential questions which arise when a loved parent dies while the child is in middle age.
The emergent philosophy seems to be something like: efforts to understand life as the result of fate or destiny or as arising from some supernatural significance are wholly misguided. Whatever happens, happens. You can change it or not, depending on the circumstances, and you never really know how things will turn out even if you apply the best possible methods. You can calculate and have expectations, based on mathematically validated predictions: cohorts of certain kinds of people who do certain kinds of things are likely to die of heart attacks, for instance, but in any given case there is no way of knowing who will defy the expectations and who will succumb. Psychics and others can indicate possible outcomes and sometimes they might be right but if so that is an unpredictable accident. Things do often look bad, you have to be afraid, you can’t control any of it, maybe it’s dumb luck and maybe that is a mistaken concept anyway because what we think of as luck is the outcome of some Brazilian butterfly’s flapping (and I don’t mean a butt-lift, but even that could cause all kinds of outcomes).
This feels like a very Australian philosophy. It’s the kind of thing my old father would have said, in different words, before he died in 1983. It’s a stoic frame of mind, the kind of world view that accompanied the Australian experience before twentieth century late modernity took hold. It was the view that took people took through the Depression and two World Wars and long before that, in the grinding rural struggle against floods and fire and poverty, untreatable illnesses, the painful unmedicated births and cruel deaths of babies and children. This perspective survives to a degree in the literary legacy, although any contemporary recognition of the harsh settler life is muted by the awareness of what was happening on the indigenous frontier. A term for it might be Ozstoic.
Stoic philosophy has resurfaced lately in Australia. It fits the land, the place, the feelings, the increasingly unpredictable conditions, the endless circuits of wild bushfires and devastating floods that mark everyday life in most parts of Australia, urban and rural. The power goes out for days on end. People have to work out how to exist without the appliances that we have come to take for granted. Having grown up without any of them, since our family house on the Hawkesbury was not connected to electricity until the late 1960s, it’s no shock to me, but for younger people who have experienced the secure abundance of the last few decades it’s a big shock, and worse to come.
Bust of Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (Wikimedia Commons)
We don’t need psychics on planes to tell us to take another look at how we live our lives, at what we can expect, at what we must adjust to, take into account – and to realise the extent to which it is not in our control. It feels like Liane Moriarty’s latest book is holding these realities up to our faces, and we can’t help but see them, even if we try to keep our eyes shut. Yes, anything can happen.
I couldn’t resist using the cover of Australian writer OJ Modjeska’s Gone: Catastrophe in Paradise here. The flight from Hobart to Sydney which is central to Moriarty’s book does not go down: but it could have. That would have been a very different way to end the story. Modjeska’s limpidly acute account of an actual air disaster in Tenerife in 1977 is powerfully imbued with the same awareness as appears in Moriarty’s book. A series of seemingly random events and unpredictable errors results in a horrendous outcome with hundreds of deaths, mostly of people going on holidays. Read it.
(From International Association of Literary Journalism Studies)
As mentioned I have been thinking about inserting the odd Feuilleton here, mainly because I keep finding myself contemplating some strange or remarkable facet of contemporary culture and society which defies inclusion into any other kind of writing I do. By calling it a Feuilleton I hope to indicate that it is a passing phenomenon not of any great social or political importance in itself, although I may be flirting with the Zeitgeist or capturing the temper of the times. My Feuilletons are not about literary culture or contemporary writing or the Kindle or the role of reviewers in the Internet age. But they are not entirely frivolous or meaningless either.
The term Feuilleton comes from French and means something like “little leaf”. Originally it was a small item at the bottom of the literary section of a newspaper, often providing a critique of popular theatre, but in many cases it grew to have its own page. By the 1840s the term roman-feuilleton described a serialized novel published in newspapers, something like today’s internet novelizations, but paid for, not for free. I mean the readers bought the newspapers and the newspapers paid the writers. [Now we barely have newspapers and people publish their writing for free all the time, which seems counterproductive]. The term was used in English by 1845, in the Atheneum.
The term was also handy to refer to small one-page advertisements, like handbills, which might be handed out in the street to encourage consumers to visit suppliers, as in this advertisement for a delicious lunch venue the like of which sadly no longer exists.
If that all sounds cheery and familiar, we must pause at what Hermann Hesse had to say about it in The Glass Bead Game, regarded as the first and only science fiction novel to win the Nobel Prize (in 1946). He was writing against the decline of humanistic culture brought about by “feuilletonism”, which he saw as the antithesis to true writing, and lampooned viciously. His master-work, The Glass Bead Game, was on the Must-Read list of myself along with almost every other proto-boho-intello in the 1960s, and describes the life of future intellectuals living in a cloistered community trying to circumvent the excesses of the age. Thanks to Huxley for bringing the Feuilleton into the present time as another object of knowledge. (https://huxley.media/en/the-feuilleton-era-we-live-in/)
Hesse described the Feuilleton, printed widely in newspapers and magazines, as a source of “mental pabulum” for readers hoping to soak up culture but unable to actually do so due to the lack of education and motivation, and of course being too busy and far too important to sit down and read actual books.
He said:
Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as «Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashions of 1870,« or «The Composer Rossini’s Favorite Dishes», or «The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans» and so on.
Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as «The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries» or «Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather» and hundreds of similar subjects… we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to «service» this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, «service» was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.”
Good heavens! This is exactly the flavour of the endless parade of pablum from our own Machine, the Internet, much of which we now call “clickbait”. But Feuilletonism goes so much deeper than trying to persuade people to buy stuff they don’t need from people they don’t know manufactured by unspecifiable techniques at places which don’t exist. The Age of the Feuilleton is completely dominant today, ever more so with the consequences of AI development and universal internet access on every phone – the mastery of the Machine indeed.
I don’t see my contributions to the Age of the Feuilleton as necessarily despicable, as Hesse might have done. By proposing to include a few remarks under the heading of a Feuilleton, I am going with the diverse flow of contemporary knowledges, and playing a little with the scary bizarritude of the fragments flowing through the ever-open channels of our time. It is true that there may be an academic flavour to the analysis, but maybe that is a necessary correlate of talking about anything in modern culture at all, rather than just participating in it. And a rich and full array it is.
So in my occasional Feuilleton I will remark on various ephemeral incidences, moments or events, usually conveyed in media, sometimes in performance. I notice things as I trawl through my reading and writing. Someone, generally much younger than myself, draws my attention to something I have never thought of before, and didn’t know existed. Or I am struck by some change in the discourse and behaviour in the everyday world around me. Often these moments are so peculiar in flavour and signification that I am reminded of my old father’s frequent exclamation: “Well blimey, you just wouldn’t read about it”. Now, these days, it turns out he was plain wrong. We can read about it, and moreover see it, all the time, every hour of every day. By adding a little more to it I hope to do no harm. I will identify those pieces which belong in the Feuilleton category, so you can skip over them altogether if you like.
Check out Stoddard Martin’s essays, with insights from the old and new literatures of several countries – aesthetics, musicology, mythology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and psychology.
Monstrous Century: Essays in ‘the Age of the Feuilleton’ Paperback – October 15, 2016
Insights from the old and new literatures of several countries jostle for space in this work – not to mention aesthetics, musicology, mythology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and psychology. The subjects, even when unsympathetic in themselves, are viewed in the round, and judged with humanity (from the publisher’s blurb).
«THE GLASS BEAD GAME». FRAGMENT FROM THE WORK
«We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather «chatted» about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors.”
Remember back in digital prehistory when Facebook was first a Good Thing? You had “friends” and you could post stuff and they could see it and vice-versa, and as I recall it lasted on your feed for longer than five minutes. It was great for groups interested in the same subject, yes, but it was also great for whatever circles of people you were connected to or inserted in. I don’t know exactly when that changed but now, apart from a couple of still-effective writers groups and one or two painting sites, most of the time all I seem to get is ads for bunion treatments and dodgy looking products introduced by persons in white coats who drone on at length about one of the many infirmities you share. Of all my “friends”, most of whom were actual real people who I knew, and/or relatives, I hear little or nothing. Maybe they have defriended me. I know some of the relatives did. Or maybe they just don’t use Facebook any more.
So when I began to hear about Substack I thought well maybe this was a good way to keep in touch with people you knew, or would like to know, or who knew you, and I imagined lively discussion groups focussing on the usual weird stuff I enjoy thinking about but find it hard to share in the normal run of things lined up at the supermarket or chatting to some bored relative, if you can still find one willing to talk on the phone (therefore must be over 60). So I joined up and only later realised that the primary intention is to get people to pay money to read whatever the writer is wittering on about. Perhaps I haven’t gone into it enough, and perhaps I am not sufficiently committed to supporting the writing of others, but I really can’t see paying regular monthly subscriptions for the privilege. I know this shouldn’t have anything to do with television or streaming services but I can’t help reflecting that I already have to pay dollars and dollars to access Netflix, Stan, Binge etc. and they are seemingly limitless. And the Substack feeds seem limitless but all the same somehow. While I sympathise with the writers for wanting to be paid, I can’t help thinking there is a more important need for places to talk to each other. Sadly, Substack is not it.
Although I mistakenly signed up for two different Substacks with two different email addresses, I am now trying to cancel them. I didn’t sign up to any paid subscriptions so that’s good. But I did want to write things people might read, outside the strict limits of what this blog and site are about, so I thought I would make up my own little Substack thingie and call it a FEUILLETON and put it in my regular POSTS every once in a while. And it will of course be absolutely free to anyone who goes to this website. I haven’t set up a Newsletter so maybe this will do.
The next post will give more on the history and context of the FEUILLETON. Introduced into popular cultural circuits via Herman Hesse’s book The Glass Bead Game, very influential among proto-intellos in the 1950s and 60s, it turns out to be a very powerful way to think about the effects of contemporary information circuits. More soon.
He’s a miserable looking fellow, unfortunately. Likewise so many of those serious Germanic thinkers. But they do seem to dominate the philosophy of the last century.
Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962
I like to think of that Monty Python sketch where they are all playing football.
I have reached a point in my writing and publishing activities where I must seriously ask: why publish at all? I haven’t published much yet but I have a lot of plans and proposals in the mix and several are at the point of fulfilment. Various things have held me up – some in the “real world” but others in that weird interior zone where the writer actually feels most alive but also most threatened and alarmed and fearful and excited, something which I suspect only other similarly benighted souls will understand. There really should be psychiatric services for writers, to help them work out what they are doing and why.
But as time passes, and especially with the impact of AI, the question becomes more acute than ever. There are 32.8 million published titles on Amazon now and more every day. It is possible that AI written books are flooding the market, although there seems to be no way to work out if this is true or not. Amazon now will only allow you to publish something like THREE BOOKS A DAY. Can this be true? Nobody can write three books a day. However the various online writers forums I participate in do seem to have members who think nothing of writing a book in two or three or four weeks: that is from start to finish, including editing, proofreading and maybe designing the covers as well. The fans of these writers are passionate and apparently faithful. They expect the writer’s new books ASAP and pre-order slavishly, or so it seems.
THE DASH AND DOLLY EFFECT
I just finished watching a mystery drama mini-series on Netflix, The Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman as a popular writer, Greer Garrison Winbury, whose books are about the endless romance of Dash and Dolly. The readers imagine these are the writer herself and her husband Tag, played by Liev Schreiber, who in real life is alcoholic, louche, unfaithful and most unattractive. Based on a 2018 novel of the same name by Elin Hildebrand, the story is about the interpenetration of fictional and real life, and its negotiation in contemporary culture. [It’s what my favourite analytic writer of the moment, Hans-Joachim Maaz calls “Die Falsche Leben” – FALSE LIFE. If you speak German there are interviews with him on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN6i6MYBbjI but only one of his books has been published in English.]
A brilliantly disturbing scene takes place at the launch of Greer’s 32nd novel in the series, when the “real world” life of Dash and Dolly comes to a crashing end in a bookstore full of passionate fans. As the truth of their relationship emerges – and a horrible truth it is – the fans fall into despair and horror, worse than anything they ever imagined. The scenario of this story emerges from the very peculiar intersection right now between writers and readers, amidst the technical possibilities of rapid production where fictions drawn out into endless series of almost identical stories, become the source of recognition and success for glamorous lady writers in particular, and sites of identity for readers obviously deprived of whatever it is they crave in the way of success, love, happiness and recognition. Readers’ identification with fictional characters is at the heart of this process.
WHY DON’T I WANT TO WRITE BOOKS ABOUT DASH AND DOLLY?
It’s called “writing to market” in online writing circles, and ever since I was first introduced to this term around a decade ago at a seminar at the Australian Society of Authors I have been wrestling with the concept from many angles. It’s the baked beans problem again. The fact is, I want to use the agency and freedom of independent publishing but I don’t want to “write to market”.
I know this raises almost terminal issues. What I write isn’t any of the popular genres which work so well on Amazon. I can’t even work out what genre I am writing in. Some is memoir, yes, and maybe some is literary fiction. most of my books will appeal mainly to “classic” readers, that is, women of a certain age who buy books in book-shops and go to literary events and festivals, but they don’t buy independently published print-on-demand books and they all hate Amazon. My “take” on things doesn’t quite fit the mould either. My perspectives are too diverse, the experiences I draw on are far from the “normal” life, let alone the “false” one which prevails today. I will put a Paypal button on these books for Australian/New Zealand readers who want paperback versions and see if that works for those who don’t or won’t buy through Amazon. The independent bookshops’ prices are absurd: my book Revolutionary Baby finished up costing those who ordered it from their favourite independent bookshop over $30.00, even though I know the cost of production in Australia is in the order of $7.00.
Should I bother going on and publishing the other three novels I have written? They are all set in the 1980s which now feels like a hundred centuries ago. The memoirs are set even earlier: 1960s, 1970s. But I guess that makes them historical. There is a special category for that on Amazon.
As for doing something completely different: I have written the first volume of a series which I plan to publish under a pen name. It is a post-apocalyptic narrative set in 2050 and “stars” two female characters, young women with distinctive talents and histories. It needs a final edit. I don’t plan to spend money on Amazon or Facebook ads.
All I can be sure of is that the books I have written will exist in print and/or electronic copies in a few libraries, and a few will receive them as gifts from me and maybe want to pass them on. Is that enough?
Most of my stories and books were begun before writing software even existed and certainly before it became ubiquitous. I don’t know how long programs like Grammarly and Scrivener have been around, because until recently it never occurred to me that I would ever want to use them. But in the past couple of years I became aware that almost everyone in the independent publishing world now regards writing software as part of their professional toolkit. Online forums, blogs, and writers’ groups take it for granted that everyone uses some program or other. Now suddenly AI has arrived and may soon make existing software programs irrelevant because “it” will write the books using algorithms, based on everything that has been published so far.
Before AI was on the horizon I couldn’t help wondering if writing software would help me produce my many belated volumes more efficiently. I downloaded a couple of test programs and couldn’t believe how they worked and what was going on. Here was a new field of cultural commerce aimed at a the thousands of people who now want to be writers – ironically at a moment when reading is becoming a less and less popular activity. Self-publishing in the Amazon environment has resulted in literally millions of books now being available all competing for pitifully small returns to the authors who, unbelievably, often set zero price for their works. Writers even complain that Amazon won’t let them offer works “permafree” as if giving your books away is a good strategy for an effective writing career – but that’s another issue.
What is an author? I grew up thinking an author wrote their own books. The authors I was brought up on – Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolfe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few – wrote their works in pen or pencil on paper or in notebooks and edited them several times over by hand before and after they were even typed. Just look at their manuscripts. At some time or other when book production became a major industry publishers began to insist on using editors, who were trained in the technicalities of writing. Editors had a big role in getting a new book to the market. I don’t know what an editor did or might have done to Jack Kerouac’s original manuscript.
Kerouac”s On The Road manuscript is a 120-foot long scroll consisting ofa series of single-spaced typed twelve-foot long rolls of paper that have been scotched taped together. Kerouac found this method more conducive to his style of writing.
Now independent writers are told that they must work with an editor, or editors, through three or four phases of preparing their book for the chaotic world of self-publishing and pay the cost themselves. It seems generally accepted that editors reshape and often rewrite many of the most popular books published today. And this is without considering the role of ghost-writers. At least these characters are human beings.
Getting one’s book substantially rewritten or revised by an editor is a very expensive process. New authors may find themselves paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars before they push the “publish” button. But then along came writing software which promised to take the worst errors away, so the editorial costs would be reduced (although not eliminated).
Writing software works by submitting writing to a standardized matrix which prescribes a limited approach to sentence construction, grammar and expression. When you actually use the software and find out what alternatives and options are being offered you realise how limited the results will inevitably be. I discovered that writing programs such as Word now have semi-editing functions within their own software which encourages authors to corrects spelling and applies rules which puts commas in, or deletes them, according to some arcane formula developed somewhere in “creative writing” schools presumably.
I am unable to compare different forms of writing software because I stopped trying to use them almost immediately (although I do use the checker functions on Word which has its uses). The mass-production of contemporary writing is going on apace with endless reproduction of the same structures, story arcs, sentence design, and impoverishment of vocabularies. Presumably all these books are being scanned and turned into AI programs so that even more similar books can be produced, this time without authors, or rather, with hallucinated authorial names standing in for pure machine algorithms.
I have long been wondering whether there will be a place in future for books certified to have been written by authors who are actual human beings and edited likewise. At the same time, though, there are powerful currents now swirling around the cultural zones which have no respect for books and writing at all.
“Kanye West has revealed that he feels an aversion to literature, comparing books to Brussels sprouts and explaining that he sees evolved forms of communication as crucial to his vision of an optimised future.
The revelation came in a new episode of the podcast Alo Mind Full, where the rapper joined Alo Yoga co-founder Danny Harris and host Alyson Wilson to “paint a sonic picture of what’s on his mind”. ‘
The replacement of books and writing by visual and graphic communication brings us back to ancient societies using images and pictograms, or not bothering to record things at all other than in poetry and song. Which might not be such a bad thing!
Last post I was carrying on (at too much length as usual) about auto-fiction and Christ Kraus’s books (among others). I’m still wandering around in that terrain, definitely feeling less lost. I mean, I’m getting it. And want to say a few things about Kraus’s bio of Kathy Acker as well as a strange new publication from Semiotext(e), a collection of email correspondence between Kathy and former socio-cultural Wunderkind McKenzie Wark, who I knew and liked when we worked together in the same department back in ancient times.
One of Kathy Acker’s hardly remembered books
Young Ken Wark
But not right now. This is to issue a correction, or an expansion rather, about the Chris Kraus effect. A body of seemingly random writing by faintly famous people and people who know other faintly famous people has suddenly emerged into the literary firmament after years of obscurity. It is a bit like suddenly discovering the Bloomsbury circle, decades later, featured in comic books, sorry, graphic novels.
Not that I really think the Semiotext(ers) are comparable to Virginia Woolfe’s circle, but maybe that’s not so far-fetched. My question was: why these books? Why now? Where did this new prominence come from?
I said: I Love Dick has been republished by Tuska Rock Press, an imprint of Profile Books, London, with the catchy subtitle: ‘The Cult Feminist Novel, Now a ….” But the Kindle version cuts off what it now is, so we can imagine all the things it might be, like an independent movie made by Kraus herself? Probably not a Netflix series, but then, you never know.
Well how dumb was I! Obviously I hadn’t done my homework. My apologies. IT IS A SERIES! Not a Netflix one, but made for Amazon Video and you can stream it right now on Prime if you sign up. Why are we toiling away writing books when we could be writing directly for television? Or does television need our books? If so, why?
Actors playing Chris Kraus, (Kathryn Hahn) Sylvere Lotringer (Griffin Dunne) and Dick (Kevin Bacon)
“I Love Dick” – the book, and the people around the book – have been discovered because of the TV series. Although Chris Kraus had a role in the production, it was helmed and mostly written by Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins. A “sleeper hit” of 2017 it was canceled after one season. Apparently it was too popular with the wrong kind of people, that is to say, not the masses. Jill Soloway is the show-runner, director and sometimes writer on the Amazon series Transparent.It’s showing on Amazon right now too. It is about a family where the pater-familias turns himself into a mater. There has been a lot of drama about the show, not only onscreen. Soloway identifies as non-binary and the show has been hailed as a main-stream acknowledgment of the powerful rise of the non-binary in contemporary culture. The star, Jeffrey Tambor, was recently pink-slipped largely because he himself is not a non-binary which makes him inauthentic in the role according to various critics. He has been lashing out about it. It would make a good TV series. But it looks like Amazon wants to get out of its quality niche offerings and go back to the masses. Yawn.
Anyway that’s part of another story. All I wanted to point out is that Chris Kraus’s books have suddenly been re-discovered BECAUSE their sensibility works so well in today’s edgy uncertain social spaces among the creative classes AND BECAUSE AMAZON MADE A TV SERIES OUT OF IT. It will be interesting to find out what the effect is on sales of her books, along with Kathy Acker’s and the various other outliers which are popping up. But if none of the streamers want to take up this kind of niche, I guess it won’t be happening again. But it was fun while it lasted.
While still musing (fretting, angsting, brooding) about the memoirs (Outsidethe Frame) I noticed a recent comment in The Guardian by Alex Clark (Sat 23rd June 2018). There are booms in things that we in slow old Australia sometimes don’t know about for ages, or they are overlooked in the very few outlets where local readers find out about what books to read eg The WeekendAustralian Review (sorry, Stephen Romei, we love you anyway). The hot new thing, Clark says, is autofiction. Another recent comment asks plaintively, “Why have novelists stopped making things up?” here.
So it’s a big trend, and it’s led me into a further vortex of reading and thinking about the question of life-writing, or whatever it is, and the enormous burst of genre-busting (like bunker-busting) which seems to have suddenly become possible. The old divide “fact/fiction” is wobbly and feeble, although nobody has told whoever writes the Amazon categories.
Autofiction is in the space between fact and fiction but goes a bit further. Its origins lie with French writer Serge Doubrovsky, whose 1977 novel Fils (Son) did away with traditional elements including plot and character development. It might or might not have been “telling the truth”.
Serge Doubrovsky, originator of auto-fiction – “Fils” and “Le Monstre”. None of his books seem to have been translated into English.
Lately the autofiction trajectory has ramped up and it’s getting really really complicated because all kinds of writers are writing about others living and dead and they are all in a kind of gang and once you start with one of them you finish up with a whole crowd. It’s like inviting a new acquaintance over for a drink and they ask if they can bring their mate and the mate bring some other mates and they all know everything about each other and are planning a sleep-over and you didn’t know any of them before today.
Olivia Laing has written a couple of personal non-fiction narratives, the kind of book where the author takes a personal experience and turns it into a form of sociology/history. In The LonelyCity (2016) she wrote about Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, among other art works which offer insight into urban alienation.
Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” – most famous visual meme for urban alienation?
I came across this book while researching Hopper who I had studied for my painting degree. She draws heavily on the classic biographies – Gail Levin’s fantastic book on Hopper, for example. I then discovered Laing had published The Trip to Echo Springs: Why Writers Drink (2013). Are there really good excuses for the bad behavior of great artists, or, as Sarah Ditum says in the New Statesman (20th June 2018) is all that artistic stuff is a lot of hokum and they are just regular drunks who happen to be writers?
The poet John Berryman, late 1960s. After numerous stints in rehab he suicided in 1972. Photograph: Terrence Spencer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
But now Laing has somehow fused herself with the late Kathy Acker, and written Crudo. published by Picador in July 2018. It is about the summer of 2017, you know, Trump, Mosul, Grenfell, celebrity deaths. But the story is Laing’s own, about her marriage to poet Ian Patterson, and about another book, the new biography AfterKathy Acker by Chris Kraus. The narrator Laing identifies herself as “Kathy” and has somehow appropriated the life of Acker, who died horribly of untreated breast cancer aged 50 in 1997. Kathy Acker is having a big surge with millennial girls/women after years of non-recognition. She wrote, among other things, Blood and Guts in High School and Great Expectations, both recently reissued by Penguin.
Kathy Acker: rediscovered after twenty years?
What the hell is going on? If you felt confused by what I just said about Laing’s book you’ll be even more so when you come to another autofiction booming in reprint, written by that self-same Chris Kraus.
This is a seriously weird piece of work. I Love Dick may sound like a pornographic come-on (excuse me!) but instead it purports to be (or is?) a whole lot of different sorts of writing put together by failed film-maker Chris Kraus and her husband, French theorist Sylvère Lotringer. Chris forms a sudden and irresistable passion for Dick, an English theorist who arrives in Los Angeles via Melbourne and fancies himself as a cowboy. She doesn’t name him in the book, but he’s outed by the New York Times (I think) as Dick Hebdige, author of that most famous 70s sociology book, Subculture: the Meaning of Style. I taught cultural anthropology courses using that book for years. Hebdige went on to write on contemporary art, design, media, mods, reggae, postmodernism, improvisation and Takashi Murakami. No wonder Kraus and probably Lotringer fell madly in love with him. Chris pretty much started stalking him, in a literary kind of way.
Dick Hebdige, cultural theorist and object of passion.
A little research reveals that he was appalled and issued a legal “cease and desist” order which was ignored completely. Poor man, he is still teaching in California and who knows how he faces up to those rows of eager students all of whom know he is “Dick” and that he has been “loved”. Even worse for him now with the Amazon Prime mini-series, where “Dick” has been turned into a cultural studies/art cowboy who makes gigantic sculptures in the Texas desert. Kevin Bacon plays Dick.
I Love Dick is kind of a story, it has a beginning, middle and end. Kraus and Lotringer are definitely real people. They probably did write all those letter and make all those phone calls. But here’s one clue as to why this is such a weird read, because it includes a lot of faxes, and faxes are so … well …. yesterday or, to be more precise, last century and indeed look up the publication history and you will find that this book was published originally in 1997 by Semiotext(e), a well known French-theory inspired journal/magazine/publisher which, guess what, was run by Lotringer and is still going today, releasing all kinds of strange and interesting books about Foam, Morocco, Versace and has also just published Chris Kraus’s new book on Kathy Acker. So we’re back in a circle.
Now I Love Dick has been republished by Tuska Rock Press, an imprint of Profile Books, London, with the catchy subtitle: ‘The Cult Feminist Novel, Now a ….” But the Kindle version cuts off what it now is, so we can imagine all the things it might be, like an independent movie made by Kraus herself? Probably not a Netflix series, but then, you never know. There’s an Afterword by Joan Hawkins – there are several people who could be her, one an academic, one a psychotherapist. Hawkins calls Kraus’s writing “theoretical fiction”. This is because theory becomes part of the plot, where debates over theory form an intrinsic part of the narrative. Well, that covers things nicely.
It is an 80s story, although set in the 1990s, by which time everyone, filmmakers, theorists, academics and famous former roués were all expected to have become tamed and obedient to the emerging neo-puritanism bursting open the last seams of the millennial sofa to get rid of all that old-school libertarian stuffing. These characters still say “dig” – as in, “people who dig each other’s references”. Well!
As a veteran of French theory I am kind of thrilled to see it resuscitated even if it is in a quasi-romantic/pornographic pretend novel. And now Kraus’s earlier totally neglected book has been republished, or just published, not sure which, and it is about the same couple before they met Dick although they have different names so it’s a kind of prequel. In Torpor the couple in 1989 or 1990 go to Romania to adopt an orphan. I’m loving it.
It’s very exciting to be thinking about where these various forms of fictive narrative or narrative fictions or Me-Moirs are really going. Sadly though it has shown me that what I am writing might be far too archaic and old-fashioned being full of plot and narrative and cliff-hangers at the end of chapters and efforts at transparency and truth-telling. Even bothering to write this much about your own life is pretty radical when you are as old as I am and have no idea if anyone will ever read it. Although there is theory in my books, it is not so obvious that it will annoy anyone and probably no-one will even notice. But I am a bit sad about it too. I’d love to be writing something crazy and unacceptable and scary and disgraceful and dripping with it, a self-saucing theory-fest.
I suppose it is ethically dangerous, or at least raises certain issues, to introduce characters in a TV series who are so obviously based on “real people”. The super-famous Swedish writer who appeared on Younger, clearly based on Karl Ove Knausgaard, didn’t look like him and didn’t behave like him, or at least the version of him one can deduce from reading his books and watching his Youtube videos here or here. He is an altogether smoother, yet somehow more smarmy character. Did Kelsey just go for him because he was so famous?
Kelsey and the Swedish writer
Introducing his wife to the narrative was an interesting move, as a way of getting rid of him from the plot. They made her out to be old-looking, skinny and hysterical. The real Mrs Knausgaard, Linda, is something else altogether.
Linda Bostrom Knausgaard
Linda and Karl Ove
She has written her own book, Welcome to America (but it is only in Swedish, no translation so far) and the only interview with her I could find was also in Swedish, without subtitles, here. Wow! I really want to read this book. I love books written by authors’ (and artists’) wives. One of the weirdest is the book written by French ultrabad-boy Michel Houllebecq’s mother – another post on that shortly.
In “Younger” the Swedish writer’s fling with Kelsey, one of the main girl-publisher characters in the series, is brought to a decisive end by the major tanty Mrs. False-Knausgaard put on in a restaurant, even though she got it wrong and thought it was our heroine Liza who was doing the dirty deed- and exit stage left for both of them. Poor Kelsey was left with that hideously boring and repulsive Thad. It was a bit amusing when she decided to buy him a super-expensive (and ugly) watch as a kind of “I’m sorry” present, and even more amusing when she decided not to give it to him but he gave her a super-expensive bracelet which she oohed and aahed over until she grasped what it mean … that he’d been having a bit on the side too, although in his case it was with a lap-dancer. Much tackier than a tasteful Swedish author.
Still, it was a shame to see these character go. At least he seemingly wrote real and engaging literature, something the readers could really get into. And it would have been such a great sub-plot if the girls had discovered his wife wrote books too, and decided to publish hers instead of his. Dream on … that is a step way too far for a popular US TV series.
The books the girls have been trying to deal with since have been less and less worthwhile. One, the plot of which covered intergenerational trauma, turned out to be completely plagiarised by a lady writer desperate to be published, no matter how, and after that the books have got worse and worse, the highpoint of tacky being the “list” of 69 things women supposedly think about when performing a certain deeply subordinate sexual act on men. Yuck! Why would Kelsey have championed that book?
For any frustrated and confused writer who can’t understand why they can’t find a traditional publisher for their work, this series is a godsend. How could anybody want to be published by people like these? If this is the publishing industry, no wonder actual writers can’t get published.
I don’t know if I’ve missed something people have already commented on in other blogs or forums – should I have known this already? – anyway, I have just grasped another big problem for Australian authors publishing on Amazon. If your Australian readers are in Amazon.com.au, buy your e-book and leave a review, that is where it will appear. Australian reviews will not appear on the US site. So unless you find a way to get readers to leave reviews specifically on the US site, your book will languish unattended in the world’s biggest English-language market. Why don’t the Australian reviews appear on the US site? Why has Amazon apparently co-operated in recreating the kind of geo-restrictions which global digital communications was supposed to end?
I am generally not given to conspiracy theories, but it does look to me like some kind of deal was done when Amazon first made a push to enter the Australian market. I recollect there was vast opposition from the regulation publishers and literary players – oh dear no, we don’t want that horrible Amazon behemoth here, we must preserve our national cultural authenticity – now it turns out that the only books available through Amazon here in Australia are Kindle versions. Since Australian readers have been brainwashed to believe that print books purchased through bookshops are far more worthy than e-books anyway, this ensures that traditional print publishers retain a dominant position in the market.
I worked this out just recently when I was reminded to get hold of the late Bob Ellis’s collected/curated writings, posthumously published in late 2016. It is a collection of previously published articles and personal memoirs, many going back to the 1970s, assembled by his wife Anne Brooksbank as a kind of memorial volume.
Googling, there were plenty of paperback copies available from different booksellers in Australia. The price was uniformly above $30.00. Booksellers’ sites listed only the print version. Kinokuniya in Sydney listed the on-line price at $34.99. At first I thought this referred to an e-book version but no, that was the price if you ordered the print book online as against through the bookstores “card members” price.
As far as I could see, there was NO e-book version available through any of the Australian booksellers. As I have a firm policy of never ever buying a print version if there is an e-version available, I thought I would try Amazon. I have always kept the Amazon.com US site as my main site. So there it was: Bob Ellis In His Own Words at $11.87. That is pretty high for a Kindle book, but way better than $34 or $35. And yes, there is a Kindle version on the Australian site, at $16.14. It is also available on Kindle Unlimited in Australia, for subscribers. But the US paperback is priced at US$34.99, which would make it over $40 for an Australian purchaser who would then also have to pay the very expensive postage.
So somehow Amazon is able to trade in Australia without significantly disturbing the traditional publishing ecology. Publishers and booksellers maintain the impression that there are no e-book versions. Amazon offers a Kindle version in Australia, but no print version, and in the US the print version is priced too high for any Australian purchaser to bother with it. A kind of cartel agreement, or just a happy accident to keep the Australian publishers happy? Whatever, the total effect is to disenfranchise Australian authors trying to write and publish outside the limits of the good-old-boys-and-girls publishing environment in Australia. So if you want to be a success at independent publishing, you really need to get up there on the US site and attract the US readers. Your e-book will turn up on the Australian Amazon site but only if the reader knows to look for it there. How this assists our national cultural authenticity I don’t know, especially when Australian publishers are unwilling to publish anything from new writers and are reducing their lists all the time.
by firstly deciding not to make any self-published Create Space books available in Australia
It’s showing on Amazon right now too. It is about a family where the pater-familias turns himself into a mater. There has been a lot of drama about the show, not only onscreen. Soloway identifies as non-binary and the show has been hailed as a main-stream acknowledgment of the powerful rise of the non-binary in contemporary culture. The star, Jeffrey Tambor, was recently pink-slipped largely because he himself is not a non-binary which makes him inauthentic in the role according to various critics. He has been lashing out about it. It would make a good TV series. But it looks like Amazon wants to get out of its quality niche offerings and go back to the masses. Yawn.
It is a collection of previously published articles and personal memoirs, many going back to the 1970s, assembled by his wife Anne Brooksbank as a kind of memorial volume.
Annette Hamilton - Writer 