great days for literature

The novel is in the mail.

an honest profession

"Author: Sir, why did you become a publisher? We shall have the answer by return mail. But permit me to say one thing in advance. I figure in your records as number 27. You have published five of my books; in other words, you have put your money five times on number 27. I am sorry that number 27 did not prove a winner. Incidentally, you took only coupled bets. Only because I come next to your lucky number 28 . . . Now you know why you became a publisher. You might just as well have entered an honest profession, like your esteemed father."

~~ from One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin

the fiction market was simply drying up

"Back in 1953, at any rate, the fiction market was simply drying up, as more and more middle-class readers turned to television for entertainment, while many of the slicks had either reduced or stopped running fiction altogether--an irreversible trend. At the end of that torturous but productive year, [Charles] Jackson had sold a single story (for all of $250) and yet remained philosophical to an almost heedless degree: 'It isn't only that the fiction market grows less and less,' he wrote Brackett; 'the failure was entirely in me, I think. I didn't do [the stories] quite wholeheartedly . . . and I think the reason was partly financial but even more, because my real love is the novel."

~~ from Blake Bailey's Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of                                           Charles Jackson

Author's Guild

Meanwhile, over at the Author's Guild, Scott Turow reminds us of how hopeless it is for all but the chosen few of the publishing world. Among writers, too, the middle class is rapidly disappearing, and winner-take-all, what I call the Michael-Jordan economy, seems to be the law of the land. And its literature.

Of course, whenever I bring this topic up with anyone, the usual first response is, more or less, "But hasn't it always been like that?"

April 21 (poorest county)

Philadelphia is the poorest county in Pennsylvania and the only major metro area aside from Baltimore (if we count Baltimore as such) to appear in this slide show of poorest counties in each state. Congratulations! In fact, our leadership in poverty does help maintain the reasonable pricing of rents and restaurants, at least compared to other cities.

Maybe along the lines of "the city that loves you back," we could have something like, "the poverty that sleeps on your park bench," or "poverty with a smile," or "Philadelphia: bringing poverty to the twenty-first century."

I'm hoping I have a few more liveable years before I slide back into our leading indicator. I'm hoping for a few more years of teeth, too, because there's nothing quite like poverty with a blue solution in a glass for the dentures while one's food is being mangled and made mushy by one's gums.

And then, reminded of my own slim margins, I chance upon this poor lost soul debating the merits of a BMW purchase and kitchen remodeling and felt all was right with the world.

All was right for all of us who aren't even close to Rex Pickett as far as fame and experience and luck and talent and connections and Hollywood credentials go. Okay. "Right" may be a strong word, but we were persisting. We were still alive. We were. Weren't we? Rex was wronged, though, and that seems to be one point of this article that indicates he's come to see big publishing as no more of an ally to literary fiction than Jeff Bezos. I hear your "duh," but still enjoyed reading his screed. And for Sideways, I certainly enjoyed both the film and the book.

Meanwhile, President Obama does what so many big media entities do as well. That's cater to the next generation of consumers, voters, etc. with a nifty election-year student-loan pitch (while to the best of my knowledge remaining mute on the question of what these colleges that students should go into debt for are paying the teachers that the students will meet on the inside). Hey, maybe Trident could have gotten Rex that nice book deal if he'd agreed to name it Sideways Youngbloods, and instead of beautiful scenes with middle-aged gripers and philanderers swishing and spitting merlot and cabernet he added a bunch of nine year olds dropping their weekly allowances on fruit-punch pouches at the local conveniencery?

And even as I'm writing this stuff, I'm thinking to myself that I should be writing.

Fight for Your Long Subsistence in a Lower Middle Quintile!

And have a good weekend.