palin in comparison

Jonathan Raban has a phenomenal piece on Sarah Palin in the New York Review of Books. I'd planned to make bringing Sarah's reign of terror to an end one of my New Year's resolutions, but maybe I'll just leave it to the experts.

"Alaska, the particular reality from which Palin hails, is so little known by most Americans that she was able to freely mythicize her state as the utopian last refuge of the "hard work ethic," "unpretentious living," and proud self-sufficiency. Her anti-tax rhetoric (private citizens spend their money more wisely than government does) and disdain for "federal dollars" were unembarrassed by the fact that Alaska tops the tables of both per capita federal expenditure, on which one in three jobs in the state depends, and congressional earmarks, or "pork." So, too, she mythicized the straggling eyesore of Wasilla (described by a current councilwoman there as "like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other") as the bucolic small town of sentimental American memory."

Raban's right, Wasilla's an armpit. And Alaska's no utopia. I lived there just five years or so, long enough to learn it's not the place you think it is. Don't get me wrong, I miss it every day. But come on, Sarah.

By far my favorite part, and perhaps the most telling, is Raban's account of Palin's adventures on Twitter:

"Baffling/nonsensical: Obama's talk of yet another debt-ridden 'stimulus' pkg. Fight this 1, America, bc after last 1 unemployment rose, debt grew."

And, "Quik msg b4 book event: Prez pls pay down massive, obscene U.S debt &/or give 'stimulus' $ back to Americans b4 propose spending more of our $."

With such a brilliant mastery of the English language, it's no wonder she's down on the East Coast Elite and the "Lamestream" media.

But what the hell do I know? I've got an agent shopping around a novel. She's got a bestselling book.

holidays

Not my favorite time of year.

as a candle, the better burnt out

In honor of my friend Dan, I present the Shakespearean Insult Generator.

"(You) speak an infinite deal of nothing." --The Merchant of Venice

cliche alert

Just saw that the Boston Globe used a similar headline about snow "blanketing" the area. And who owns the Globe? Right--the NY Times.

Strike two, and it's not even 9 am.

Oh, shoot, there it is on www.cnn.com as well. Three major media outlets all lapse into cliche on the first big snowstorm of the year. What are the chances?

Well, I'd better go shovel. Snow is blanketing my driveway.

the good review

"As everyone who's worked in a literary profession knows, being a writer and editor is glamorous, fun, lucrative, and generally totally awesome. Even if you're a minor poet whose works are published in tiny literary magazines sponsored by a community college in southeast Nebraska, the biggest problem you'll have on a daily basis is which car to take to the liquor store to buy your top-shelf Islay Scotch and comically expensive cigars. It's not a frustrating, soul-crushing career path in the slightest.

"Or so, you know, I thought, once upon a time. I was young and naive and believed a lot of things contrary to fact. I think I also thought I would one day be asked to play guitar for Sonic Youth, all war would end once marijuana was legalized, and the Democratic Party would successfully lead the nation one day without shooting itself in its collective foot. In other words, I was incredibly stupid. I don't regret becoming a writer and editor; I just wish I'd realized that one day I would be clipping coupons for generic canned beans and wondering how many electric bills I'd have to miss before the city cut me off completely. It turns out this is hard, and I haven't been offered one single seven-figure advance from a Manhattan publisher."

This is how Michael Schaub begins his book review of Sam Savage's "Cry of the Sloth" for Powell's, and it just gets better. I'm ordering the book now.

cliche alert: you've been warned

Nearly every editor I've ever had told me never to use the word "blanket" in conjunction with "snow." Too easy. Too cliche. Hell, every college professor I ever had that taught me anything about English told me the same thing.

And when I was editing a newspaper, I enforced that rule with my reporters. "I'll let you use it once. So choose wisely. After that, it's not going in the paper again."

You wouldn't think you'd even need to warn a writer, right? I mean, it's an obvious, flagrant cliche.

But then there's the NY Times, which runs it front page in a giant headline.

Bill Keller, you've been warned. Don't let me see it again, OK? Because then I'm going to have to come down there. And you won't like me if I have to come down there.

here there be dragons

Today's NY Times has a story about the bleak future facing literary-minded grad students. To which most of us say, "No shit."

December 18, 2009

At Colleges, Humanities Job Outlook Gets Bleaker

By TAMAR LEWIN

With colleges and universities cutting back because of the recession, the job outlook for graduate students in language and literature is bleaker than ever before.

According to the Modern Language Association’s forecast of job listings, released Thursday, faculty positions will decline 37 percent, the biggest drop since the group began tracking its job listings 35 years ago.

The projection, based on a comparison between the number of jobs listed in October 2008 and October 2009, follows a 26 percent drop the previous year.

“Students thinking of going to graduate school in English should understand that right now their chance of landing a job that provides them a livable wage is 50-60 percent,” said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the M.L.A., the world’s largest association of scholars and professors of language and literature. “What I often hear from grad students is, ‘I had no clue it was this bad.’ They need to go into it with their eyes wide open.”

While the association does not having listings for every academic position available, its list does track the overall faculty job market.

The association expects about 900 English language and literature positions to be filled over the next year, a 35 percent decline from the previous year; it projects about 750 foreign-language jobs, a 39 percent drop from the year before. Typically, 1,000 to 2,000 positions have been advertised each year in each category.

To make matters worse, the share of tenure-track jobs available has been shrinking. Tenure-track positions for assistant professors made up 53 percent of the English jobs advertised and 48.5 percent of those in foreign languages. From 1997 until recently, the group said, 55 percent to 65 percent of the advertised positions were tenure-track jobs. And since part-time adjunct positions are less likely than those for tenure-track jobs to be listed with the language association, the overall share of faculty members being hired for tenure-track jobs is probably smaller than the survey indicates.

Ms. Feal said the trend toward hiring adjunct faculty members rather than permanent tenure-track professors had been going for about three decades, but was more pronounced than ever, as a growing number of struggling colleges and universities hired by the course or by the semester — usually paying little, and providing no benefits.

“Having so many contingent faculty diminishes the overall quality of teaching and learning,” she said. “The individual course might be great, but you can’t expect temporary hires to do the kind of curricular planning it takes to maintain a successful department.”

The language association recommends that, in baccalaureate institutions, 70 percent of the courses should be taught by tenure or tenure-track professors.

For English professors, the group said, most of the advertised jobs are in rhetoric and composition (20.1 percent), British literature (17.9 percent), multiethnic literature (13.7 percent), creative writing (7 percent), and American literature (6.1. percent).

For those who have specialized in 20th-century American literature, finding a job is especially tough.

“A single listing gets flooded with 300 to 400 applicants, and grads are up against formidable odds,” said Alysia Garrison, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Davis, who is also president of the Graduate Student Caucus at the language association.

This year, some of Ms. Garrison’s friends in the department are having a tough time. “Two particularly strong candidates, one on the market for the second time, have sent out maybe 40 to 50 applications and gotten three interviews,” she said.

For languages other than English, the jobs are concentrated in Spanish (35.5 percent), French (16 percent), Chinese (9.5 percent), German (4 percent), Arabic (3 percent) and Italian (2 percent).

end of the world

First "The Atlantic," one of less than a handful of relatively high-paying fiction markets, shutters its fiction section. Then "The New Yorker," known as much for its fiction as for its journalism--or cartoons--decides to cut some of its fiction, as well.

From Women's Wear Daily: "Instead of publishing its second fiction issue of the year, The New Yorker will introduce a new 'world changers' special issue this week on newsstands. 'I think one is enough for the time being,' said editor David Remnick of dropping a fiction issue. 'We’ll still continue to publish fiction every week. I think we’re one of the last magazines that does.'"

Come on, David--that's all the more reason to publish fiction.

Seriously, we've all got our priorities wrong. James Franco and Ethan Hawke are now considered literary figures and the New Yorker is eliminating a fiction issue. I feel like I'm missing something.

careful what you ask for

Letters of Note points us to this missive from reclusive J.D. Salinger to a first-year college student who wrote him asking for writing advice. Salinger's response--"You need a new typewriter ribbon"--is to the point, I think. Poor bastard.

r.i.p.

Today, Kirkus Reviews closed. That's 5,000 reviews each year, gone. Frankly? That sucks.

RIP, Kirkus Reviews.

rhyme

They say you can't rhyme orange, along with silver, purple, month, ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon and discombobulate.

But over at the excellent Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum posts to the contrary:

"Eating an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof."

lists, cont'd

Now we're getting somewhere!

• "What were your worst books of the decade? It's all very well to make lists of the decade's best books, but surely the worst would give future generations a truer glimpse of the noughties. Let's name and shame..."
  
• 
  "Books I regret reading: Terrible books that you regret wasting precious time reading."
  

too far

Conservatives want to edit the Bible. Seriously. I'm not making that up.

something to read

A colleague of sorts--she's a wonderful writer also represented by my agent--recently published a short, haunting piece over at Unsaid. Please take a few moments to read Alyson Jane's "With Ariel in their Hands."

You can find out more about Alyson at http://alysonjane.com.

critique much?

Just read Dick Cavett's latest NY Times column, a remembrance of Walter Winchell in his later years: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/the-ghost-ship-ww/.

The best part? The comments. Crazy how many people took the time to write in solely to critique Cavett's writing style unsolicited. Hecklers! Literary hecklers!

bring on the lists

The Times of London published its choices for “100 Best Books of the Decade.” Just one in an onslaught of year- and decade-ending lists to which we're about to be subjected.

Also among these is the NY Time's Best of 2009. The fiction choices are:

1. Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
2. Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City
3. Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs
4. Jeanette Walls' Half-Broke Horses
5. Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women

I read a lot. Really, I do. A few books a week. Sometimes more. That's well over 100 books a year. But I've not read any of these. Make of that admission what you will. Now, back to The Times of London's best of the decade list. The top 10 books of the last 10 years were:

1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
2. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
3. Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
4. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, translated by Robert Bringhurst
5. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky.
6. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
7. The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
8. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood
9. Atonement, Ian McEwan
10. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

Obviously, several of these are nonfiction. And of this list, I've read five.

I loved The Road. Best of the last decade? Probably not. Suite Francaise? Written during World War II, but only published recently, I'm not sure it should count--anyway, having read it, it definitely shouldn't be on the top 10. I learned a lot from it, maybe even enjoyed it at times, but left it feeling underwhelmed. Atonement? Good book. Great book, even. Top 10? Ummm... And Life of Pi? Really?

I'm not even going to mention No. 10. What, no Going Rogue?

Drop down a ways and you'll find Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, published stateside as Daughters of the North (apparently because us Americans are too ignorant to handle the original title), at No. 87. I loved this book. And Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses at No. 68. I definitely would put this book in my top 10 of the decade.

I also admired No. 25, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, by Mark Haddon, and while No. 21, Roth's The Plot Against America, impressed me, I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. But that's just me. Of course, you'd likely expect to find Roth on this list. But climb to No. 17 and you'll find J.K. Rowling with one of the Harry Potter books.

Seriously? Dan Brown at No. 10, Rowling at 17? Don't get me wrong. I know Brown's book sold a ridiculous amount of copies, as did the Potter series--hell, I even enjoyed parts of the Potter series--but is that the only criteria for a best-of list? Or can we agree to apply some expectation of artistic merit?

I mean, back to Going Rogue--it's going to sell a shitload of copies. Should we then consider it a more worthy piece of art than, say, a well-written, heartbreaking beautiful novel that sells a mere 2,000 copies? God, I hope not.

Darn tootin', right Sarah?

young enough to know better

This piece talks about a British program to put age guidelines on the backs of books to help buyers determine which books to buy for different age groups. You know, because actually reading them would be too much trouble. And who wants to know what their kids are reading?

I had a momentary laugh picturing a few books and what their appropriate age groups might be (think "Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin", suitable for anyone with a fourth-grade reading level, to be catalogued under Fantasy). Then I remembered my own childhood.

When I was in third grade we moved towns, and therefore school systems. Not knowing anyone in the new school, I immediately sought out my old friends in the library--Frank and Joe, the Hardy boys. By then, I'd already read my way through more or less the entire collection of Hardy Boys mysteries, and was simply going back for seconds. (Or, in some cases, thirds, a habit I maintain to this day--ask my wife, the Book Widow.)

My efforts were thwarted. In her infinite wisdom, the school librarian deemed those books beyond my capacity to comprehend. I begged, I pleaded, I told her I'd already read them all. She clearly didn't believe me, and directed me to the third-grader-friendly stacks.

I remember that incident. I don't remember her name. If she's still alive, I hope she knows I went on to become a lifelong reader and a writer by trade in spite of her best efforts. You can't keep a book nerd down.