"High-Minded Sex:" First Round Victors

In yesterday's post, I wrote about a March Madness-style tournament on "literary sex writing" -- you know, the presumably high-minded method of addressing this evergreen topic. In other words, we're talking about art as opposed to pornography. But as the years pass, that distinction appears to get increasingly blurry.

As advertised, winners from the initial round-of-sixteen were announced today with the following results (this being a family-friendly blog possibly read by scores of children, the actual passages will not be reproduced here, but links will be provided):

"High-Minded Sex," and the Winner Is ...

If one is an author in the current reading environment, one is told that to label something "literature" is to bestow upon it a kiss of death.

So if the word "sex" is associated with the word "literary," will that turn off otherwise interested readers in droves?

Literary Hub, an on-line aggregator of news and features about writing, could be about to find out. The service has just announced a single-elimination style tournament for "literary sex writing."  Such prose evidently stands in sharp contrast to ordinary old sex writing and as such, may be considered a high-minded, as opposed to prurient, activity.

A Familiar Device and a Trope: "For the Best?" You Decide

Ann Beattie's story "For the Best" in the March 14, 2016 New Yorker opens with a familiar device: there will be a meeting of possible consequence later in the story and, of course, we are immediately curious as to what's going to happen even though we know little more about anything at this point. It's a part of human nature that writers regularly prey upon and most of the time, we're hooked.

Gerald, a well-off elderly Manhattanite is, as usual, invited to a friend's annual Christmas party, but this time a "heads-up" email sent just before the invite arrives tells him his former wife, who he hasn't seen in 31 years, has been invited as well. Just to make sure readers understand the portent of this development, we are told the email contains not just one but two exclamation points.

Fiction and Non-fiction Indistinct in Some Cultures

Think about a two lane road. In the U.S., if there is a dotted line down the middle, cars coming in either direction can cross over the line to pass a slower vehicle, assuming the coast is clear.

Now think about the same road on more difficult terrain.  There are two lines in the middle, one solid and the other dotted. If the solid lane is on your side, you can't cross it. But if you are driving on the side with the dotted line, you can.

Connecting the Dots ... and James Patterson's BookShots

With this post I am going to tie together some earlier topics and point out how they apply to James Patterson's new venture, called BookShots.

In a couple of  earlier posts, which interested readers can find here  and here, I discussed the phenomenon of declining attention spans in the digital and social media age. And then, in a more recent post that can be found here, I reported on a recent study that found, among other things, that a surprising number of people never finish the novels they purchase and, in many cases, don't read much of them.

Male Characters Dominate Fiction, A Recent Study Finds

Fiction, it appears, may be yet another area where women aren't treated equally to men.

I recently wrote about a recent study that, by means of computer analysis, compared 200 novels written by graduates of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs to an equal number of those written by authors without MFAs. You can find that post here. The point of that posting was to take another look at whether getting the time and cost of getting a graduate degree in creative writing is worth it or not.

But the study also came up with another interesting finding: that authors write more about men than about women, perhaps because publishers find such books sell better.

Listicles and the Addictive Nature of Lists

Jonathon Sturgeon, in an article about how and why people chat about books online, mentions in derisive terms a listicle he received not too long ago.

"The day after the last Paris attacks, after viewing streams of dejection online, I received an email from BuzzFeed, a listicle featuring 31 books that promised to restore my faith in humanity."

Not Just All About Me, But All About My Angst

The New York Times just carried a lengthy obituary on Anita Brookner, an English writer who, early in her late-in-life writing career, won the Booker (now Mann Booker) Prize for fiction.

Reading this brought to mind an Elle magazine article about contemporary Twitter maven, poet and soon-to-be novelist Melissa Broder. The article came to my attention thanks to "Literary Hub," an on-line font of all things having to do with writing.

Eliot & Barnes: Why The Past Belongs In What's New

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.

It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously,” he continued.

How Much Of A Book Do You Actually Read?

In the age of Big Data, publishers increasingly want to know just how much of a book purchasers actually read, or so says a story in the March 15 New York Times.

Amazon, Apple and other purveyors of e-books apparently already have a lot of such data when it comes to people reading books in electronic form, but that is roughly only about 25% of the market and readership of e-books is, at best, leveling off at present, various reports have suggested. Readership data for books on paper is another matter.

To fill the gap, The Times reported, a London-based firm named Jellybooks has a device readers can use, in exchange for free books, to track their reading activity and transmit that data to the company, which then provides it to participating publishing companies, presumably for a fee.

A Memorable Way of Putting Something

"His beauty had startled her, until she'd met both parents -- Vietnamese mother, Polish father -- and then he'd seemed like the solution to something."

That sentence jumped out and stuck with me as I was reading "Buttony," a story in the March 7, 2016 New Yorker  by Fiona McFarlane. It's about the dangers of an addiction to beauty and it reads like a fable even though the characters are humans as opposed to animals.

Edvard Munch: Storytelling in Art

One artist I have long admired is the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch and, as such, he figures in the first chapter of my novella, "Manhattan Morning."  Indeed, that chapter is entitled "A Particular Girl in the Frieze of Life" -- a reference to a series of paintings Munch made that are rich in psychology.

"The key to Munch's originality is storytelling with a potent pictorial rhetoric of rhythmic line and smoldering color," Peter Schjeldahl said in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. He was reviewing an exhibition of Munch works of art that recently opened at the Neue Galerie on Manhattan's Upper East Side, not far from the Metropolitian Museum.