Art and a Pineapple

What qualifies as a work of art?

That's not a new question, but rather an ever-present one, at least since around the turn of the 20th century when non-representational, or highly distorted images, came to dominate cutting edge artistic activity and when "found objects" became viewed as equally legitimate to a work that might have taken months to create and only with great skills of one sort or another.

Now comes the celebrated case of the Pineapple, which reopens the question for, one suspects, a lot of younger people who have never previously given the issue much thought.

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is NOT "Us"

Those old enough to remember the cartoon strip "Pogo" (my personal all-time favorite) know that the headline of this post is a paraphrase of one of Walt Kelly's most famous lines and it came to mind most recently when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's piece "Your Writing Tools Aren't Mine" in the April 30, 2017, New York Times Sunday Book Review section.

"Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk" by Kathleen Rooney

In an earlier post,  I wrote about Kathleen Rooney because she teaches a course entitled "The Writer as Urban Walker" at DePaul University in Chicago and my novella "Manhattan Morning" falls squarely into that genre.

To see how Ms Rooney handled the task, I just finished reading her novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," which fulfilled my expectations in most ways, but fell a bit short in one respect.

How Internet Advertizing Impacts What Gets Written About

In an interview last May, Jessa Crispin told "Vulture" why she was closing down her literary blog "Bookslut" after 14 years.

One of the reasons she cited has to do with the changing nature of on-line advertising.

Are Corporations, Society or Writers Killing Literature?

This post is about three writers offering differing views as to why literature appears to be dying.

"The Big Five publishing houses are located within a few subway stops of each other in Manhattan; that rich island which represents 0.000887 percent of our country’s surface. This is not benign. Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?"

So says Matthew Neill Null, a prize-winning author and native of West Virginia.

The lengthy quote comes from an article published by "Literary Hub" wherein Null complains that publishers aren't interested in stories based on the lives of real people, especially if they are situated in rural communities.

If they were alive today, writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe might as well forget it.

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.