Forum / Interesting article in Slate about the MFA

George LaCas
Nov 29, 01:21am

Many of you may find the following article of interest.

http://www.slate.com/id/2275733/pagenum/all/#p2

Linda Simoni-Wastila
Nov 29, 02:42am

Thanks George. Fascinating reading. I didn;t realize their was a literary dichotomy -- NYC or MFA. Still digesting, and wondering where folks like me fit in the landscape. Peace...

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 29, 03:16am

Linda, maybe folks like you and I fit under the larger, less defined culture of "other." It's a large and diverse group to be sure and, as such, difficult to define and therefore impossible to catalogue, encapsulate, and deconstruct.

I've been to Iowa. They have a lot of corn there.

I've been to New York City. It seems so small compared to the rest of America.

I live dangerously close to Cleveland, which, according to that article, must be where all the losers of the literary world go to die, the Siberia to which the less savvy are inevitably deported.

Perhaps I should move. Do you think it will improve my writing if I lived in the Bronx?Interesting article, though. All those MFA programs, an exponential growth industry ... what will all those kids be doing when they finish? Start programs of their own? What a busy world. No wonder no one has time to read. They're all teaching each other how to be writers.

W.F. Lantry
Nov 29, 05:01am

Odd. He splits literary culture between MFAs and NYC publishing.

Even more odd: he has an MFA and worked in NYC publishing.

What a strange coincidence... ;)

Give him credit: he sold his novel for a fat advance... thus becoming a member of the very group he mocks in the second half of the essay.

I haven't read his novel. Perhaps it's the best thing since infinite jest, I don't know. But I do know there's a market out there for both anti-MFA and anti-publishing trade essays. We've seen at least a dozen in the past couple years. I wonder why? It must be a sign of something, I'm just not sure what...

Marcus Speh
Nov 29, 08:30am

james, your repose to that article (which i read but it didn't really teach me anything i felt i needed to know which was annoying) is brilliant. so many words! (not your response, the article) - n+1, wasn't it? it made me want to coil up, put my thumb in my mouth and instruct my muse to write a great story all by herself. it must be possible, in this world, mustn't it? when i studied mathematics one of the things that annoyed me most was that we had to work so hard to prove things that others had already proven many times over. somehow this relates. perhaps because of the sense of futility that's oozing from the article, which seems to stand against the reason i write for. call it passion (that's just one word). also, it sounded as if i had to read franzen's "freedom" after all though i don't want to. it feels as if i don't have enough time for books like that. which brings me back to my thumb. it is magical, did i already mention that?

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 29, 01:29pm

Ah, Marcus, the futility of writing becomes the issue, yes. But relevance issues are an academic polemic and I have not the education required for involvement in that particular dialogue. Ignorance is freedom.

I do like the concept of magical thumbs.

Thumbs are the reason mankind has so richly evolved. Or so I've been told. Something about the fact that opposable thumbs enabled our ancestors to pick up rocks and beat each other on the head, which led to even more sophisticated weapons, which led to academic licensing requirements in the arts, which led to New York publishing, which led to ... the idea that resistance is futile.

Ann Bogle
Nov 29, 03:21pm

Lately, I've been concerned, obsessed even, with something that happened a few months ago in Minneapolis. My sister and I went out for dinner at a Thai restaurant then to a bookstore in the uptown neighborhood called Magers & Quinn. It is a large, inviting store that sells both used and new books. We went deep inside the stacks toward the poetry, but before we got to poetry, I checked the fiction shelves for names of authors I know, for names of teachers, an old custom. These are writers I revere, but their books are not for sale there. It always frightens me a little in a setting like that when important faces are missing, so to speak, and others less important are in their place--when the evidence of who has written books is somehow random. Of course, I am not there at all, though I myself am there, one of two shoppers in a large independent bookstore in a large creative writing city on a Wednesday night.

My sister has recently become interested in poetry, especially in reading it. As my gift to her, I let her pick out a book from the shelves and I picked Catcher in the Rye. She picked The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley. That is what we purchased. She later said that she wished she had chosen a different poet, and when I got home, I discovered that I already had a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Of course I did. What had I been thinking? One got the feeling that our modest somewhat random shopping had been most of the business Magers & Quinn did in Minneapolis that night.

Hungry Mind was a bookstore in St. Paul that became Ruminator then closed. When The Loft opened at Open Book, Ruminator tried to keep a shop open there but was unable, despite the steady flow of students going to their Loft classes. The Loft is not an M.F.A. program, not a University. It does teach writing. Many of its teachers have M.F.A.s. It does encourage its students to publish.

Bowker publishes statistics annually about books in print. Last year about 300,000 new titles came out in the U.S. Another 300,000 print-on-demand. That doesn't count internet publishing, certain academic and periodicals publishing, and publishing overseas. It's a lot of books. In ten years, it's 3 million books. One country. Magers & Quinn, one of the last remaining bookstores in a creative writing city, has two shoppers on a Wednesday night. Barnes and Noble is closing five of its stores in Manhattan. That is what I heard, not what I read. Writers told me that over coffee.

So it seems that writing is an activity financed by public and private universities. The product or residue of that activity is a book made to order. Tenure is the promotional system based on publishing credits, so those who are not eligible for tenure, either because they are not teaching at all or not in a tenure-track system, presumably are paid little or nothing for their efforts as writers. Their books, even fine books, even books that once had the attention of reviewers, are missing in action. There's a star system as well, based partly on what a writer looks like, his face and clothes and teeth.

A friend of mine who seems to be succeeding in the star system of physical allure recently produced a foul book of poetry. He found an obscure publisher to print it. I should learn to be more open with him, since he knocks me about. His first book, published by a poetry collective, is his best book. His latest abuses language. He teases me because my work appears on the internet in journals and I self-published my weblog. He hasn't seen a copy of it. It's 362 pages and covers perhaps three-fourths of the weblog. There are seven copies of it on earth. It's been compared favorably to the mixed-genre writings of Claudia Rankine, who, no doubt, is a tenured writer.

David Foster Wallace is a writer I have contemplated rather deeply. I do not understand republishing his guttural utterances, however, about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, as if his guttural utterance is the best out there. At least there could be a companion article about why a writer of his caliber would grunt his way through an interview on the subject.

Chad Harbach's essay in Slate is not very carved, considering the magnitude of his topic, the number of people it affects, and the economies it relates to. I was bothered that Harbach used the female pronoun throughout his essay to describe everyman in the creative writing bureaucracy. I was bothered that the article was not more directly and persuasively written, that it lingers so much over vague possibilities. I wished that someone at the New York Review of Books might take it on.

Susan Gibb
Nov 29, 05:09pm

It's not worth arguing about, though I see some fine points being made here. My own initial response? Chad Harbach got paid for writing that essay. Same as MFA students become teachers and get paid to teach about writing.

stephen hastings-king
Nov 30, 12:34am

I like this thread better than I liked the article.

I think I read a snippy version of the same infotainment in the Chronicle of Higher Education---but then again, this sort of essay is a chestnut and people like to write them because they help the writer feel powerful without being too demanding to put together because they require that one wield an axe of pseudo-analysis just long enough to set up what this is sort of piece is really about:

The Big List of Things I Like
&
The Big List of Things I Don't Like.

What I learned back in the day is that the ability of a critic to impose these lists is an power within a given field of cultural production. The line goes that artists make stuff but that until an Intermediary gets hold of it and puts it in their Lists (hardly matters which one, really) what you do doesn't exist. So in the end, what we who make things aspire to is to be something that can be put into lists or to maybe be ourselves people who make lists, though it's hard to be both at the same time for some reason. Well, there are poets who do it. Maybe there are other people. I like some of them, others not so much. I should make a couple of lists.

Another thing I learned is that if you're going to get such power it's good to act as though you already have it and make these lists early and often and put em out because if you act like anyone cares long enough and your work enters the correct system of legitimation, maybe your lists will magically stop being arbitrary and will instead shape the distinction between inside and outside, canon and whatever is the opposite of that, civilization and barbarism. Or something.

That is just one of many reasons why this thread is more fun than was the article.

O yeah...I remember seeing a poster long ago. I can't remember the image, but underneath it was:

Musicians. They put their feet on your furniture. They eat all your food. They never go home.

Something tells me this is germaine. Or maybe I just like it. Hard to say.
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