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LitNotes: The Thing With Feathers
April 28, 2008
I know that my entry titles are sometimes a bit mysterious; some might say abstruse. But I hope everyone reading here knows that "the thing with feathers" refers to hope...that mysterious human feeling that lay at the very bottom of Pandora's box, alone after all of the troubles of the world had been released. Is it just spring that makes me feel hopeful about the state of our industry -- or could it be that some of this week's LitNotes are harbingers of good things to come?
The Muses Still Visit Young Authors: And whoever can finish All the Sad Young Literary Men, Personal Days, and The Mayor's Tongue by the Brilliant Young Editors of n+1, The Paris Review, and The Believer before the end of May with their own muse still intact will have my admiration. Here's why I'm being a tad snarky today: the linked article is titled "Young Writers Embrace the Thought Process," and it includes a quote about 
reading from Nathaniel Rich: ""I think there are more people engaged with literature than there ever have been," he said. "When people think about the golden age of the novel in the 19th century, literacy rates were absurdly low. There wasn't electricity to read by: People weren't just sitting around reading all day then either." Um, okay. But people actually held literature and books in some esteem, perhaps because they didn't have the easy access we now do to reading material. I don't think the equation is quite so simple as more people reading equals things are better for literature. I'd like to see a more rigorous embracing of the thought process, at least from the literati. But it's Monday and I'm a blogger, not a fighter...
Shelfari's Promethean Promises: "Authors Unbound" -- what does it mean? Will they be interviewed? Profiled? Allowed to run amok in a bookstore? I love the idea of these Author Pages on Shelfari, but it's not easy to find 
them. If you search for "Authors Unbound," you get books with the word "unbound" in their titles. To access this new feature, you have to click a box on your main page labeled "New Author Pages!" Please connect the dots for everyone, Shelfari...it will make it much easier to get to this very good idea.
Self-Publishing, Not Always Sisyphean: "For the first time, a self-published author has made it onto the shortlist 
for the prestigious PEN/Ackerley prize for memoir and autobiography. Jane Haynes's Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? is an unflinching journal of her life a psychotherapist, revealing as much about the author as her patients." Will someone please tell me who will be fact-checking Haynes's "unflinching journal" so that readers won't be flinching in the near future? I think it's grand that a self-published author has managed to reach this level, but if memoirs vetted by editors aren't always reliable, good heavens -- self-published authors could write anything and call it a memoir! Why, I could write a memoir and call myself...Michiko Kakutani.
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on April 28, 2008 | Comments (2)
