The Roar of Literature
Peter Carey has a sublime piece, filled with light, about the struggle of writing–when you’re in debt, not only to creditors, but, in a different way, to talents you can only hope to admire from a distance–and the experience of teaching students how to write. He begins with a bit of autobiography about his past:
Writing after work at the kitchen table, I was risking nothing except my sentences. No one knew I was there. There was no one to network with or suck up to. There were not 567 agents and 5,345 editors who imagined, rightly or wrongly, that their lives depended on discovering my unknown self, running me to ground at my Olivetti Lettera 24, breaking me through, publishing me too early, and losing interest when my second book did not fulfill the quirky promise of the first.
(Via the wise and witty Katherine Taylor who’s manning Mark’s post while he is away restauranting or biking or whatever.)
Hmmm…. I wouldn’t call it sublime. I;d call it self-serving, and vaguely offensive in how he promotes the egos of untested, if anonymous, writers. They know who they are, and there’s something rather unpleasant about the whole piece. The only luminous passage is when he talks of the beautiful disappearance of being a writer in Melbourne in the 1960s and how such a disappearance is no longer possible. But of course, this is flatly false also. For there are thousands of very good, and perhaps excellent, writers in New York City and not one of the 5000-plus agents, editors, et al. is breaking their door down. They as equally don’t exist, even if their own psychic relationship to the ugly behemoth of contemporary publishing is very different.
Comment by ranbir — June 11, 2007 @ 1:17 am
Sublimity is so effervescent isn’t it.
But that is an old world thinking I subscribe to, too. You wanna be a writer, write then, read before that of course, learn from that. As I mentions in Zafar’s blog (comments) perhaps all it can teach - the teaching courses) are how to be a little bit smart about getting published.
Comment by Obiter Dictum — June 14, 2007 @ 11:25 pm