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.

Does Anything Pack More Clout in Publishing Than a Blurb?

"Powerful ... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.

"Unflinching, gorgeously written."  -- San Francisco Chronicle.

Those are known as blurbs, or "short descriptions of a book, movie, or other product written for promotional purposes and appearing on the cover of a book or in an advertisement."

When it comes not just to attracting purchasers, but also to getting a book through the conventional publishing mill, nothing is more important than blurbs, it seems.

Is Some Fiction Written in Code?

Have you ever wondered what the author of a novel is really writing about?

In an article in the The New York Times entitled "Song of Inexperience," Vivian Gornick depicts E.M. Forster as writing with "a pen forever dipped in code."

It's a provocative notion.

Sex Sells, and Sells and Sells and Sells

The Sunday Business section of the New York Times recently carried a lengthy article on Meredith Wild, a woman who, after becoming a very successful independent author of romance novels, started her own publishing imprint called “Waterhouse Press.”

“I wanted something that sounded like it was a real imprint, because nobody takes you seriously as an independent author,” the Times quoted Ms Wild as saying.

After first publishing her own books, Ms Wild began acquiring and releasing the works of other self-published romance writers under the Waterhouse name, becoming what the Times termed “a kind of value investor in erotic prose, pinpointing under-valued writers and backing their brands.”