Forum / Commenting
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Dianne McKnight-WarrenMay 10, 08:45pmIt's getting lonely out there. Again.
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strannikovMay 11, 01:06pmDianne: your "Again" I take it to be a timely reference to David Ackley's post here in the Forum from last November "Dwindling Fictionaut".
I think now that both his and your post speak to the symptoms of our era, our temporal context. Not even a lone website with as disparate a community as Fictionaut's can be an island in our present circumstances.
By this I mean several things at once, not most of which I care to address explicitly. I would dispense at once, though, and as briefly as possible with any and all notions of anyone's resorting to political criteria in the construction and expression of literary judgment and rely (for now) on the self-evidence of just how odious and pernicious (and just how obviously odious and pernicious) "political criticism" of literary effort and expression is and must be: "political criticism" can only be a fallback position for the lowliest and least competent of political hacks and the most untalented of literary aspirants.
Instead, I focus here on something at least as bad if not worse because it is more overtly a part of our operating environment.
Like most other Fictionauts (I assume), I send out work elsewhere. Just as many self-styled "literary" publishing venues (with and without academic affiliation) rely on its services, so have I come to rely on the Submittable portal both to survey the field and to manage the transaction of submitting work for editorial consideration. I do not rely on Submittable without at least one misgiving, though: while the platform may well serve domains other than the literary domain alone, I cannot say that I am any fan of their self-marketing slogan: "The Social Impact Platform".
Frankly, even as an amateur litterateur, I myself never labor "to make a social impact"--much more keen am I to make "a literary impact", no matter how negligible my contributions cumulatively or piece-by-piece. --All I mean by this, of course, is that well into the third decade of the 21st Century CE, literary activity is readily NOT being construed primarily in literary terms: we are asked when not forced to rely on non-literary categorizations ("social" when not "political", "psychological" when not "political", et cetera).
I'm not picking on the managers of the Submittable portal. Things are as bad, if not worse, over at the "Poets & Writers" portal/platform. P&W offers more info on the venues seeking contributions, but I have to wonder about the categorizations the site managers have us rely on. The "Genre" classifications are okay, although "Poetry", "Fiction", "Creative Non-fiction" (an academic construction I would gladly replace with "Essay"), and "Translation" somehow neglect "Drama" as a literary enterprise outright. --It's the "Subgenres" that more obviously go astray, and I won't repeat here the thirty-nine subgenres blending actual literary subgenres with 1) pure marketing categories, 2) explicit sociological categories, and 3) explicit or implicit political categorizations. I treat all of the thirty-nine subgenres listed as little more than "marketing categories", and the effect is the same: literary categories again are being dominated by non-literary categorization (I am sensitive to this because I note that actual "literary" categories are absent from their list of thirty-nine subgenre entries, most notably "Satire").
Lastly, like many working today, I can only deplore publisher reliance on "content warnings" for the benefit (ostensibly) of the volunteer staff whose services are supposed to make keen editorial assessment possible. Some literary commissars have drafted lists (now as much as twenty items long) of content deemed "objectionable" for their august purposes. The dear hearts do seem to have forgotten altogether that literary enterprise is dedicated to addressing "the human condition", and the human condition is explicitly objectionable most hours of the day, most days of the week, and most months of each year, as any survey of any recent calendar plainly shows. Sadly, this sorry state of affairs goes to show how much today writers are expected to defer to ostensible publishers and that in publishers' eyes we cannot be relied upon to offer editors substantive work embodying some amount of literary quality, no matter how polite or objectionable.
The fact that we writers are expected to bow and scrape before volunteer "editorial staff" for fear of offending their "literary" sensitivities is a sign of what little status writers have in the world today (you don't need to consult the history of Hollywood to learn this). I have lately written an essay (thus far unpublished) on my reading of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, taking due note of Joyce's reliance on the philosophy of history that was articulated in the 18th century by Giambattista Vico, Neapolitan scholar. Among his many fruitful ideas, Vico had the one warning (both for mere citizens generally and for literary practitioners particularly) that we cannot ever count upon living in "a poetic age", an age conducive to the composition or to the reception of any type of writing with any kind of poetic soul. Joyce, I believe, with Finnegans Wake was heralding the entire planet's descent into "a non-poetic age", one that will have to be wallowed in and through before a new poetic age can thrive again on whatever distant bank or shore we or our posterity may reach.
Again, what our beloved Fictionaut is facing is symptomatic of everything else going on around us in the real time of our historical existence, and that cannot be helped except with the exercise of literary activity aspiring to and attaining some critical mass of poetic urgency.
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Dianne McKnight-WarrenMay 11, 02:24pm
Finnegan's Wake? Wow, Mr.Strannikov!
I don't know if it's empathy or just being OCD but I think every piece published on Fictionaut deserves at least one fave or one comment or both. And more than one is better. The more the merrier.
The concept of reciprocity can be found in all the world's cultures. At least that's what I've read. I suppose that can mean "an eye for an eye" but I'm thinking more of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."
I live in Vermont where nearly everybody writes it seems. But I think there are more writers than readers everywhere now. That's wonderful in many ways, but most of us do write to be read.
Fictionaut is set up for commenting and I assume people post their work here because they want feedback. A plain and simple comment can make my day or at least contribute mightily to it. And I love to think that my comments might have that same effect on someone else. Comments don't have to be fancy, they only need to acknowledge. I love the fancy ones too though.:-)
Again, Finnegan's Wake? Wow, Mr Strannikov!
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strannikovMay 11, 02:47pm
Thanks for the Forum prompt, Dianne, and thank you for your further comments.
(Let me here subscribe to my own standard of "requisite specificity": I might better have said "my reading from Finnegans Wake" than "my reading of Finnegans Wake" to clarify that I have not read the entirety of Joyce's final work. I have managed to read more from it over the past year but cannot be closer than hundreds of pages away from reading the entire book. The dozens or scores of pages I have examined, though, have well been worth the effort.)
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Dianne McKnight-WarrenMay 11, 03:15pm
Sorry about the apostrophe. I thought I was at least familiar with the title. I always assumed the story was about the wake of somebody named Finnegan. It's wake like "woke," huh?
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strannikovMay 11, 04:01pm
I'm guessing it's not so much "either/or" as "both/and".
Both Joseph Campbell and Anthony Burgess cite (Burgess, with the lyrics) the Irish-American vaudeville tune "Finnegan's Wake" about hod-carrier Tim Finnegan's untimely demise and his resuscitation at being doused with a gallon of whiskey amidst the frivolities attending his funeral celebration. (Donald Verene notes the further similarity of T. Finnegan's cracking his skull to a non-fatal accident Vico confessed to on the first page of his "Autobiography".)
One other commentator or critic (?) regards Joyce's title as a generalized summons or imperative for his Irish/Celtic brethren and sistern: "Finnegans, Wake!"--which no doubt can be extrapolated even more broadly (but I cannot say I would ever envy anyone translating the book out of the language[s] in which it was composed).
Et cetera.
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Dianne McKnight-WarrenMay 11, 04:41pm
Languages? Plural? Now I gotta google.
"I liked Dubliners," she said meekly.
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David AckleyMay 13, 01:16pmJust a note to say hi to you both, and to apologize for being more " do as I say..." of late with my lack of participation here. Excuses are cheap, but I have been trying to work on the long memoir, so long in the writing, which doesn't seem to lend itself well always to excerpting here.
Nevertheless, I've been trying to keep up with work you and others have posted, and I agree completely with the morale boosting effect of commenting on each other's work, and encourage myself and others to do so. Many times, in the rather lonely business of writing, a thoughtful word from a reader has helped keep me going. -
Dianne McKnight-WarrenMay 16, 12:10am
Is it the memoir about your uncle? Uncle Phillip, maybe? I remember reading part or parts of it here. I remember admiring it. I imagine it's coming along well.
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David AckleyMay 16, 12:56pm
Yes, Dianne, that's the one. Since the object and condition of a memoir is remembering, I very much appreciate yours. Memoir is probably a misnomer, since it is more like constructing an experiential life on an armature of sparsely available facts--whatever word might fit that. It's coming, though whether well or badly is a bit hard to say.
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