Mike Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "twain"
Fact or Fiction: The Literary Rock Star
As some of my short fiction and recent novel "Skunk Ape Semester" might attest, cryptozoology, the study of 'hidden animals', is a fascination of mine. Famous 'cryptids' include the Loch Ness Monster, the Yowie, Bigfoot, the Yeti and other entities mammalian, reptilian, or possibly interdimensional. While vastly suggested by numerous eyewitnesses and some strong material evidence, their reality is officially doubted by mainstream science. I propose a new creature, however, persisting in popular consciousness despite a stark decline in evidence supporting its existence. I am a believer in Bigfoot and the Yeti, but not in this creature. And Bigfoot and Yeti are likely the same species, or very close cousins.
This new cryptid is the "literary rock star", now more a mythic notion than a reality, or even, I would argue, a possibility, irrespective of the millions of files flooding Smashwords or hardbacks sagging physical shelves.
I am surely not against the independent publishing movement. In fact, I think it's been essential to cutting out a lot of fat in the industry, thrusting authors and readers nose to nose, making more personal the whole writing-publishing-reading paradigm, which is ultimately what it should be. Because a book is a private conversation with another person, after all, a contextual mind-to-mind dialogue, beautifully subjective.
What interests me is the surviving notion of a 'literary icon', or 'voice of a generation', a throwback to the days of Dickens or Twain, who corralled legions of international followers around their words, whether on the page or at the podium. Over the twentieth century, this kind of frothing celebrity for authors lost significant elbow (and leg) room to the crowding of new technologies. Certainly authors commanded fans, but more among factions in spheres genre or academic or cult, which, over time, only occasionally became a mixture of all three.
Fiction suffered a deep puncture wound from radio and TV from which it has never recovered, and has been bleeding, draining, for decades. The novel and short story, once sharp instruments of social awareness and change, became blunted. The last great flare-up, I feel, before chronic cultural marginalization, came in the tumult of the late sixties, when students toted battered paperbacks of Pynchon or "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Stranger In a Strange Land" in their backpockets, when reading a certain story was a cool communal thing to do, not because it whisked you away to Hogwarts, but because it resonated with you, it resonated with those like you and made of the world something symmetrical, encouraged growth and momentum on an individual and even collective basis.
If you'll notice, common definitions of literary "eras" or "ages" stopped after the sixties and early to mid-seventies. From then on, literature has no clear age. We saw, and have seen, prominent and talented writers emerge, and older ones continue working. There was the good ol' fatwa declared on Rushdie. But what else? We have quasi-footnote blurbs relegated to the backwater corners of magazine pages saying, "Oh yeah, 'The Corrections' was the book that captured 9/11". In such an environment, how can any "icon" emerge? Their voice, shouted only once or sporadically, drowns in an ever-sweeping cultural tide.
Frequently authors today are touted as "voices of a generation", yet how often is such a claim justified? Are enough ears (and brains) attuned to what the author is actually saying? Or are these the assertions of lone critics and academics, speaking as they are for generations who have since turned away from novels towards reality shows, American Idol, the fifth remake or reboot of a certain movie franchise, or, if they read at all, cookie-cutter memoirs? How often do you see a novelist talking with Jay Leno? Truman Capote used to be a regular on Carson's Tonight Show. Some might say we're just missing an author with larger-than-life personality, a real party-hard rock star, gifted at polemic and gut-thudding shenanigans. But I think we've just shifted our attention elsewhere. How detrimental or advantageous, depending, such a circumstance might be remains to be seen.
This new cryptid is the "literary rock star", now more a mythic notion than a reality, or even, I would argue, a possibility, irrespective of the millions of files flooding Smashwords or hardbacks sagging physical shelves.
I am surely not against the independent publishing movement. In fact, I think it's been essential to cutting out a lot of fat in the industry, thrusting authors and readers nose to nose, making more personal the whole writing-publishing-reading paradigm, which is ultimately what it should be. Because a book is a private conversation with another person, after all, a contextual mind-to-mind dialogue, beautifully subjective.
What interests me is the surviving notion of a 'literary icon', or 'voice of a generation', a throwback to the days of Dickens or Twain, who corralled legions of international followers around their words, whether on the page or at the podium. Over the twentieth century, this kind of frothing celebrity for authors lost significant elbow (and leg) room to the crowding of new technologies. Certainly authors commanded fans, but more among factions in spheres genre or academic or cult, which, over time, only occasionally became a mixture of all three.
Fiction suffered a deep puncture wound from radio and TV from which it has never recovered, and has been bleeding, draining, for decades. The novel and short story, once sharp instruments of social awareness and change, became blunted. The last great flare-up, I feel, before chronic cultural marginalization, came in the tumult of the late sixties, when students toted battered paperbacks of Pynchon or "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Stranger In a Strange Land" in their backpockets, when reading a certain story was a cool communal thing to do, not because it whisked you away to Hogwarts, but because it resonated with you, it resonated with those like you and made of the world something symmetrical, encouraged growth and momentum on an individual and even collective basis.
If you'll notice, common definitions of literary "eras" or "ages" stopped after the sixties and early to mid-seventies. From then on, literature has no clear age. We saw, and have seen, prominent and talented writers emerge, and older ones continue working. There was the good ol' fatwa declared on Rushdie. But what else? We have quasi-footnote blurbs relegated to the backwater corners of magazine pages saying, "Oh yeah, 'The Corrections' was the book that captured 9/11". In such an environment, how can any "icon" emerge? Their voice, shouted only once or sporadically, drowns in an ever-sweeping cultural tide.
Frequently authors today are touted as "voices of a generation", yet how often is such a claim justified? Are enough ears (and brains) attuned to what the author is actually saying? Or are these the assertions of lone critics and academics, speaking as they are for generations who have since turned away from novels towards reality shows, American Idol, the fifth remake or reboot of a certain movie franchise, or, if they read at all, cookie-cutter memoirs? How often do you see a novelist talking with Jay Leno? Truman Capote used to be a regular on Carson's Tonight Show. Some might say we're just missing an author with larger-than-life personality, a real party-hard rock star, gifted at polemic and gut-thudding shenanigans. But I think we've just shifted our attention elsewhere. How detrimental or advantageous, depending, such a circumstance might be remains to be seen.
