Granta v. McSweeney’s
I received a link to this Times article today. A few interesting quotes:
The McSweeney’s author is not above playing language games or creating work that is aware of its artificiality, although he is also careful not to let this playfulness detract from the work’s emotional impact. There is by no means a house style, but there is something that might be called the McSweeney’s tone: a buzzing, mischievous hipness, wrapped around a core of sentiment and hopefulness.
This seems to me pretty much the definition of postirony, although the question of "house style" is interesting and ambiguous. It seems clear enough that there is no official style among McSweeney's-affiliated writers. Their writers have a variety of perspectives and literary commitments, but there does seem to be some family resemblance born of self-selection and, possibly, social-network effects. Writer and publishing venue often converge subtly, in ways that are hard to document.
Another quote:
Anyone familiar with the publishing world understands that it is in the process of being irrevocably damaged by corporate owners who are crowding out the merely excellent in favour of the readily saleable; who are glad to put respected “mid-list” authors out to pasture so they can focus on publishing meretricious, photogenic newcomers.
I wonder about this claim. McSweeney's publishes and supports some excellent so-called mid-list authors, but the big names associated with the network are very successful. Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, have done quite well. They're readily saleable, not to mention photogenic.
Which isn't to condemn their success--who wouldn't want to be successful?--but rather to suggest that the dividing line between what Amidon calls McSweeney's "opposition to the corporate model" and corporate publishing is very thin indeed. In fact, we might think of McSweeney's as doing something like nonprofit R&D for the big corporate publishers. They identify talent and, on the strength of their brand, corporate publishers will often publish that talent. If McSweeney's disappeared tomorrow, a new venue would have to be found--or invented--to serve exactly the same function.
Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers
Forget Obama as a postironic candidate. What we have here is a prospective presidency that only a flat-out ironist could love.
But Mr McCain has serious handicaps, too. One is his temper. “It is startling to contemplate how violent John McCain was well into his 20s,” notes Matt Welch, a critical biographer. Drunk on shore leave in Cuba, he charged into a brawl between Marines and sailors. He admits to having “loved” such encounters.
Mr McCain no longer brawls, but he still cusses like a sailor, even at fellow senators. He is quick to accuse adversaries of bad faith or even corruption. And he does not seem to care whom he insults. People who insist that Vietnam still holds American prisoners-of-war, for example, he calls “dime-store Rambos”.
Most Americans will forgive Mr McCain his wild youth, especially since he freely supplies so many details about strippers, affairs and knocking over power lines while larking about in his plane. Many will turn a deaf ear to his cursing too. It was not diplomatic of him to shout “Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers” at the North Vietnamese guards dragging him off to be tortured, but voters will probably cut him some slack, given the circumstances. Plus, and infinitely more important, he has since then pushed hard for reconciliation with Vietnam.
In a Clinton-McCain contest, McCain may well win it.
Granta v. McSweeney’s
I received a link to this Times article today. A few interesting quotes:
The McSweeney’s author is not above playing language games or creating work that is aware of its artificiality, although he is also careful not to let this playfulness detract from the work’s emotional impact. There is by no means a house style, but there is something that might be called the McSweeney’s tone: a buzzing, mischievous hipness, wrapped around a core of sentiment and hopefulness.
This seems to me pretty much the definition of postirony, although the question of "house style" is interesting and ambiguous. It seems clear enough that there is no official style among McSweeney's-affiliated writers. Their writers have a variety of perspectives and literary commitments, but there does seem to be some family resemblance born of self-selection and, possibly, social-network effects. Writer and publishing venue often converge subtly, in ways that are hard to document.
Another quote:
Anyone familiar with the publishing world understands that it is in the process of being irrevocably damaged by corporate owners who are crowding out the merely excellent in favour of the readily saleable; who are glad to put respected “mid-list” authors out to pasture so they can focus on publishing meretricious, photogenic newcomers.
I wonder about this claim. McSweeney's publishes and supports some excellent so-called mid-list authors, but the big names associated with the network are very successful. Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, have done quite well. They're readily saleable, not to mention photogenic.
Which isn't to condemn their success--who wouldn't want to be successful?--but rather to suggest that the dividing line between what Amidon calls McSweeney's "opposition to the corporate model" and corporate publishing is very thin indeed. In fact, we might think of McSweeney's as doing something like nonprofit R&D for the big corporate publishers. They identify talent and, on the strength of their brand, corporate publishers will often publish that talent. If McSweeney's disappeared tomorrow, a new venue would have to be found--or invented--to serve exactly the same function.
Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers
Forget Obama as a postironic candidate. What we have here is a prospective presidency that only a flat-out ironist could love.
But Mr McCain has serious handicaps, too. One is his temper. “It is startling to contemplate how violent John McCain was well into his 20s,” notes Matt Welch, a critical biographer. Drunk on shore leave in Cuba, he charged into a brawl between Marines and sailors. He admits to having “loved” such encounters.
Mr McCain no longer brawls, but he still cusses like a sailor, even at fellow senators. He is quick to accuse adversaries of bad faith or even corruption. And he does not seem to care whom he insults. People who insist that Vietnam still holds American prisoners-of-war, for example, he calls “dime-store Rambos”.
Most Americans will forgive Mr McCain his wild youth, especially since he freely supplies so many details about strippers, affairs and knocking over power lines while larking about in his plane. Many will turn a deaf ear to his cursing too. It was not diplomatic of him to shout “Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers” at the North Vietnamese guards dragging him off to be tortured, but voters will probably cut him some slack, given the circumstances. Plus, and infinitely more important, he has since then pushed hard for reconciliation with Vietnam.
In a Clinton-McCain contest, McCain may well win it.