Social Mendicant

I can’t fall out of bed in the morning without hearing about the importance of social media if you want to be a writer — well one who is published and hopes to remain so in such a capricious publishing world.

I have no publishing deal (yet). And I have no editor or publishing house advising me to have a social media presence like Moses had his commandments. But I’ve heard the twitter through the grapevine and I’ve tumbled around the Web, and, well, I knew that having a social “platform” as an aspiring writer would probably serve me better than having that creepy echoing sound of silence all around me. It seems now that if you don’t cast a shadow as a writer, your chances of success and a healthy relationship with a publisher are dodgy. So I blog and I have a Facebook presence (disguised as a fox) and I also group blog with a collective of exceptionally talented writers (Groupgrok) who I got drunk one night and convinced to let me be a part of their social network.

And you know what, the whole social media thing just stinks. Is this really the brave new world for writers? Are writers to act like nothing more than mendicants, begging for alms from the publishing world and from readers?

We’re supposed to write books! So why are writers Tweeting about the news that Rowling has written an adult book with the Red Light-district title of Casual Vacancy? Or why are authors spending more time on a Facebook page than a book page? Or blogging words that will never end up in a book?

In the voice of George Emerson (E.M. Forster character): Why?

I just don’t believe in this malarkey. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that what readers really want from writers are more characters and stories and books from writers, not more Tweets and Facebook posts and blogs, these are all just virtual crumbs. Readers want feasts! Just look at the amount of eBooks that sold last year (I’ve read it is somewhere around $69 million). People are buying books and reading them. Plus readers are getting their digital fix with eBooks, so is more (in the form of social media) of the same thing better? And if writers write more, it’s not that hard to imagine that readers will buy more — unless you write a dud, which might happen if all the time you should be writing you are on Facebook and blogging and Tweeting.

Marketing tools are about as helpful as handles on a coffin.

And what really needs to asked is exactly how beneficial is all the social media trappings, all this begging for new readers? Is there any evidence? Real evidence, not just the mass evidence that so many writers are tooling with social media, therefore it works, as being proof. I mean, there are a mass of people who believe in God, and you don’t have to be an atheist, although it helps, to figure out the missing piece in this argument.

Plus, there are writers (many more than I think the publishing world will admit to) who sell lots of books and keep getting new readers who don’t do any kind of social media dance. Here’s just a few who come to mind: China Mieville, Jo Walton (Welsh writer just nominated for a Hugo!), Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Nick Hornby, Peter Ackroyd, Ruth Rendell… and I could go on, but all this is keeping me from my writing….

The truth is, nobody — not even Philip Roth or Jonathan Franzen or Martin Amis or JK Rowling — knows whether social media is a boon or a bust. And if that is the case, then shouldn’t it be left up to each and every writer to decide whether to blog or Facebook or Tweet or not?

I was a reader long before I became a writer, and I want more books! So you know what, social media, leave my bloody favourite writers alone and let them get back to doing what they do so well, and what I love to read.

Let the writers write! Let the readers read!

And let’s put social media out to pasture. Its stud days are over. There’s a new hotshot in town and he or she is called a writer who pens books. Jesus, that’s such a novel idea, I might just take it up. Because as I writer, I just don’t want to grow up to work on social media’s farm no more.

A Spirit of Malcontent

I just heard Jonathan Franzen refer to America as a “Rogue State.” That’s an apt description, I think. And in this particular interview he gave on the Guardian Books’ Website with Sarfraz Manzoor, I found myself liking a lot more of what Franzen said as a writer to what he’s written as a writer. I wonder what that says about me?

I wonder if the pervasive discord in American life is a never-ending story? Is it possible to have some kind of harmony here in a country that started life as a bunch of misfits, rebels, malcontents, outsiders, and their ilk? There seems way too much whimsy in the idea that this spirit of malcontent is how the bread is buttered. And this bread in question can’t see itself without the butter. It’s the importance of being buttered that matters the most. So how do you convince a nation that the bread’s stale? Might as well try putting butter back into a cow.

“The comic imagination, then, not only overthrows the morality we are given from on high, it upsets our more intimately held sympathies, our sense of what is fair and right and decent. Which is why it will always irk a novelist to be told that his characters are not nice or easy to identify with, when as like as not they are not meant to be. The novelist is under no obligation to clear up the mess life makes.” Howard Jacobson

Decadent Lens For An Age of Excess

Here’s something odd that I keep stumbling over: the narrative landscape of today is paved over with realism and naturalism.

What the Hell-Fire-Club happened to decadent literature and its exotic palaces of artifice, perverseness, art-for-art’s sake, sensuality, degeneration, maximalism, and the love of the sublime and surreal?

The fiction landscape now is littered with hovels (novels) filled with their solid and real narratives, their dependable little puppets that hold up their mirrors so that we can look more closely at ourselves and see the truth, whatever that is.

Which strikes me as even more perverse and strange than fin de siecle fiction.

Right now we are living in a time when wars are televised, commodity has become a bacchanalian god, the Web has raped us of any imagination, and the media manipulates us like perverse slaves. So why this pious offering of the real and the solid?

What ever happened to the decadents who dropped their trousers to the world to show off their creative wit, daring, and artifice to the face of the real artificer itself: the material world?

Vanities and insanities surround us — from religious zealots to the banalities of politics to the hedonism of the Web to the drug of celebrity to the ecstasy of violence. We are already living in a hyper-reality, sucking, injecting, spewing, vomiting, engulfing, and gorging on excess.

The orgiastic road goes ever on and on, down from the door of waste, excess, and sensation….

Our bodies are infected with high living (think obsession with celebrity and wealth and God bless everyone last one of us who is a born-again star), the capitalist dream (think recession, the detox symptoms of a society addicted to debt) the greed (think the Gulf disaster and the corporate scandals, and, well, just about anything that hits the media fan).

I want to find a book (or write one myself) that burns with the heat of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the sensual macabre of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, the grand debauchery of a grotesque spirit in Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, the effervescence and bizarre heaviness of JK Huysmans’ Against Nature, the surreal and manic energy of KJ Bishop’s The Etched City, the effete and diabolical splendor of Moorcock’s Elric tales, the unsettling and comic romp of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces,  the excessive pomp and pageantry and sexy brio of any Angela Carter, the nefarious mischief and glut for the fantastical of Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, the Baroque mastery and succulent purple prose of Mervyn Peake, and all the other grand narratives that transform, unsettle, transfix, shock, and make us crack out of clay molds and explore the juicy bits.

Stopped Reading

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I just couldn’t keep hitting my imaginative head against this wall of realism. The book began to get claustrophobic, like Franzen’s legs were strapped around my neck, his hard male voice rammed down my throat. I couldn’t get past the nausea of the suburban life that Gary Lambert and his wife and kids are living, it drove me to sulk before the weird section of my books. And I know it’s supposed to be satire with all the trappings of postmodern verbal capers, an avant-garde robustness for plot with all the high-stakes, roll-of-the-dice character development and a comic-tragic masterpiece to boot, but what the fuck, it was stinking up my habitat. And if it’s good advice to not shit where you eat, then the same should apply to novelists.

Listening To

Jeff Buckley’s Grace. Now here was a decadent singer. Jesus. Talk about your Romantic who lives too fast and died to young. Every time I hear “Lilac Wine” or  “Corpus Christi Carol” I want to weep, and when I hear “So Real” and “Last Goodbye” I want to drink some Green Fairy.

Tim Buckley’s The Dream Belongs to Me. Well, once you listen to the son, you have to listen to the father, right? This is a fantastic album that shows Buckley to be a musician well ahead of his times. It’s like a heady mix of broken wine bottles and silk bedclothes; you are tugged, tugged, tugged to believe and then disbelieve.

The Land of Laughs

A good friend lent me Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.  I’d up to this point cast the eye of Sauron on the uber-bestseller lauded all the way to the literary hive. But, a man can change his mind, right, and still have his scruples?

And so I’m reading Mr. Franzen. Wow!

He’s no consummate stylist, no flamboyant experimentalist, no practitioner of weird tales, but he can pack a punch. The beginning was a trudge to get past, very slow to unwind and his character Chip (bloody awful name, but it’s part of the tone) is fed on the tiresome cliché of professor falling for a student and experimenting with drugs (yawn), but, dammit, the tone and the tension and the Ariadne thread of “What’s going to happen next?” to the Lambert family drives me on like a mule driver to whack the rumps of the book’s pages and keep going.

And since I hardly ever read good books with my bookish mind, slotting the author’s tricks and successes into compartments, I’m relaxing and letting its magic sink in like primordial mud, and it’s such an entertaining and comic book.

I only examine a book with my miserable literary antennae for the really, really shite ones, because I think that’s nothing I ever want to do.

“Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.” Emma Donoghue