Well, thanks. It mostly just follows the original.
The sonnet is still such a great form, with lots of great modern examples, like this one by A. E. Stallings. She always goes her own way with rhyming too:
A question I like to think about is, if given the chance, would you rather be: (1) renowned and successful during your life but quickly forgotten afterwards, or (2) ignored during one's lifetime but revered and immortal after death? I think a lot of people like to think they'd pick the latter since we spend all our time thinking about the immortals, but we almost always live our lives aiming for the former, even if unconsciously. Deep down, nobody really wants to be a Van Gogh.
It seems clearly preferable to me to be renowned and successful during your life. That way, you can make money from your work, so you can spend your one life doing interesting work and hanging out with friends and family rather than toiling at a Subway sandwich shop. I have a hard time imagining that anyone would prefer to be ignored during their lifetime. It seems like a bizarrely masochistic choice. I'd be interested from hearing from someone who would genuinely prefer to be ignored--although they're probably not on self-promotion websites like Substack!
A lifetime of not achieving acclaim in your greatest ambitions doesn't have to be that bad a life, though. You don't have to work a minimum wage job at Subway. You could be a successful franchisee of many Subways. Or hell, maybe even CEO of the whole corp. But you just wouldn't see any recognition or success in the field you truly love (let's say, poetry). Meanwhile, your hack of a rival gets all the (relative) fame and fortune. Your life wouldn't be terrible, but you'd still wake up every day with pangs of envy and you may even die thinking you were ultimately a failure.
But then posthumously, the tables turn. If we knew there was an afterlife, then this would be like the ant vs. grasshopper scenario. But there's a significant likelihood that we won't ever be aware of the world as we knew it after our deaths. Still, even if we couldn't directly experience it, it'd be nice to be so fondly remembered for such a long time.
I know you’re responding to a lot of different people, but, if I may, a few notes in clarification of my own view:
I doubt our current literary culture is that much sicker than our literary culture has usually been. I don’t think it’s any sicker than when Walt Whitman had to self-publish and Emily Dickinson had to go unpublished and Herman Melville had to toil in obscurity. We’ve probably reverted to a historical norm of mediocrity and "politics" after the historical accident of the postwar period, when a combination of new prosperity, the lifting of censorship, the expansion of higher education, and a few other factors (e.g., global corporations not yet having totally taken over) created the conditions for something like Gravity’s Rainbow, which Andre Gide and I would both have rejected as unreadable, to be published as a mainstream novel—as opposed to Ulysses, which was not published as a mainstream novel in its time but as a glorified vanity press project, at the same time as Proust was self-publishing, Stein was self-publishing, Woolf was publishing her own works with her own press, Eliot and Pound were starting up their own little magazines, etc.
I have no a priori objection to the idea that there’s more greatness now than there ever was simply because of the numbers (more literacy and education than ever, more opportunities to disseminate one’s work than ever, etc.), nor would I deny that genius can get lost due to happenstance or neglect. To avoid this, I do believe if we’re looking for greatness in your own time, we have to be willing to look at small presses, self-published work, Substacks, institutionally unaffiliated little magazines, things that are in various ways out of the mainstream, because the mainstream has obvious problems (not “wokeness” per se but the perennial problems of which wokeness is just today’s manifestation: moralism, ideology, groupthink, small-minded focus on the bottom line, etc.), though a lot of the non-mainstream material is also bad too, of course, and it’s always hard to judge the present.
Our biggest disagreement is how much anyone should compromise to enter today’s mainstream market. Now that there are so many more opportunities than there ever were to get around it and still attain the kind of recognition that puts you in the running for survival—as Eliot, Bloom, Coetzee, and others have emphasized, this is the recognition first and foremost of other writers—then I am more hopeful than you are about not having to bother.
Your "X factor" for me is already implied in the concept of “genius,” since the term as used by the Romantics didn’t refer to some talent of the individual artist but to the artist’s being animated or actuated by the spirit of the age, the oversoul, the zeitgeist, etc., as in the Aeolian harp metaphor Coleridge and Shelley used for the poet. Genius is not the individualist concept people make it out to be, though it also isn’t secular. It is inherently metaphysical, a word you use in the pejorative, but which I probably would not. I saw an academic historian in your comments say we should dispense with the concept of genius, but what else is an academic historian going to say? I bet even he’s a metaphysician when he doesn’t speak from his office; you have to be a metaphysician to get through even one day. So I do not so much think that certain “people” are world-historically special and insightful as that certain conjunctures of the talent and the time and the text are, which conjunctures we, for convenience’s sake, give the names Austen and Tolstoy. I’m not that interested in them as people—certainly not Tolstoy, who seems to have been about the biggest pain in the ass to ever walk the earth.
All of the people you mention as having circumvented the rules though were already literary insiders of some sort. But to want to write in the tradition of the greats you need not be a literary insider. Small New York based coteries have no monopoly on being inspired by Tolstoy. My contention is that for every literary insider who appears to make it in spite of the odds, there are a hundred librarians in Nebraska whose War and Peaces get disregarded. In my experience the librarian is much more likely to be my reader than the insider, and it is for her that I write
I don't disagree with you, but I think more outsiders like your librarian circumvented the rules than you allow, such as Whitman among those I named, who certainly wasn't born to the literary class (as Dickinson was), or Blake before him or Faulkner after. Each case is complex and inside/outside aren't always stable. But the 19th century aside, that librarian should be publishing on Amazon or Substack—and should be up in your comments!
On that we can agree! I am afraid that I come at this personally, as someone who read the classics on my own, entered the lit fiction world, and found myself unsuited to it. I think the genius has to devote some attention to finding their audience, but that audience can take many forms. And right now, right here, Substack is the place!
Yup. I've sent selections of Proust in translation and selections of me into the same system under the same name and been rebuffed with the same certainty. Yet my writing has not been rejected in any real sense. My words in such an experiment were no more rejected than were Proust's. In order to have been rejected, my writing would have had to have been read.
As to your implicit endorsement of my future smuggling operations, I thank you.
I do think that creative genius has more to do with the collaboration between society and the individual than the individual alone, and I suspect the site of the collaboration is more complex than "the marketplace". Something to do with the stage at which the creative medium has arrived at by the time the genius arrives. There should be enough work done by others to give inspiration and momentum, hints at what can be done, but enough left undone that the first person who makes good the potential is, forever, the person who brought the uncreated into being. So I go a certain way along the road with the slot theory as far as novels are concerned. Except I think the problem (insofar as there is a problem, and there may not be and we're just not appreciating sufficiently the geniuses we have and not appreciating that genius appears more richly scattered in the retrospect of history than it does in real time) is that too many writers believe the postmodernist slot theory that everyone got there and said it all and our job is just to repeat it all in a way that makes it sufficiently clear we understand the terrible limitations of thought and expression. I do think that very many of the intelligent idealistic people, who would in the past have gone through a standard stage of dreaming that they might attain immortality through their art have instead been confined, by their very intelligence and idealism, to conscientiously acknowledging that nothing they say can be true. Up to the midcentury, I feel like literary praise and literary hot air revolved around the author's grasp of human nature and great eternal truths. Now it is all about beautiful sentences and people who may in fact be perceptive readers think that the best way to let others know they have they have intelligence and taste is to talk about how they don't care about the matter, only the style. In words that too often suggest not that they can be interested in anything, so long as it is contained in beautiful sentences, but that they are never so silly as to actually be interested in love and friendship and fear and joy and endurance and suffering and youth and age and hatred and reconciliation and all the rest of it at all.
I suppose the issue I take with the idea that genius is everywhere outside the marketplace, scribbling outlandish unpublishable manuscripts, is that genius isn't always outlandish. It can be, but not always. Jane Austen did achieve something unrepeatable, but she isn't so different from what came before her that you couldn't expect anyone from her own time to even grasp what she was on about. Neither are Dickens or George Eliot so different in kind from their predecessors or peers, yet they were recognised as different in quality in their lifetime and after. If people in the past knew how to sneak genius into the marketplace why has the knack been lost, when the desire to be published hasn't grown any less? I don't think it's because the marketplace of today is any more stupid and oppressive than the marketplace of the nineteenth century. I think it may because too many gifted writers are thinking too small, and beauty and meaning have grown too far apart for too many writers. The writers of today who aren't the geniuses obliviously writing epic poetry, but who might have fooled the marketplace, are listening to the deflating demoralising voice of something that feels higher than the markeplace. Maybe.
I liked your comments a lot! But i do think that lots of writers dream of immortality. Every writer i know does! I think people don't intend to write things that are "outlandish", but they don't realize how narrow the parameters are. Like even many of the basic techniques of modernism and realism will make your book a very hard sell these days. If you read widely and internalize what you read, it often drives you further and further from what is salable. Thus, outside the marketplace becomes an immense place, encompassing the vast majority of the imagination. It is precisely when you dream too big that you become an immigrant to the nation of the unmarketable, and because you cannot be marketed, you are not sold, and it appears that nobody is dreaming big
I don't think we have fewer geniuses sneaking into the marketplace. I think they are as common as they ever were. But most geniuses don't realize that sneaking into the marketplace is a skill they need at all!
Sonnet 18 (unpublished draft)
Shall I compare thee to a curly fry?
Thou art more tasty and more different:
Dull knives do bid the ill-bred spuds goodbye,
And sallow grease hath rendered them inert;
Sometime too long the glare of heat lamp shines,
And often is the salt applied two times;
And every hot from hot sometimes declines,
By happenstance or server’s careless whims;
But thy eternal curl shall not relax,
Nor lose the tang through surfeit seasoning;
Nor shall guests hie and strive avoid the tax,
When totting up the tip they’re figuring:
So long as youth can taste and scents are free,
So long sates this, and this gives sate to thee.
This is incredible. Did you write this parody?
I really liked your visual metaphor -- instantly saw a basket of fries into which a single curly fry had slipped. Plus it was just before lunch!
Shakespeare is pretty easy (and fun) to parody. He really liked words like "surfeit" which I don't think I've ever heard someone use in conversation.
The meter was pretty good though!
Well, thanks. It mostly just follows the original.
The sonnet is still such a great form, with lots of great modern examples, like this one by A. E. Stallings. She always goes her own way with rhyming too:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56231/the-rosehead-nail
A question I like to think about is, if given the chance, would you rather be: (1) renowned and successful during your life but quickly forgotten afterwards, or (2) ignored during one's lifetime but revered and immortal after death? I think a lot of people like to think they'd pick the latter since we spend all our time thinking about the immortals, but we almost always live our lives aiming for the former, even if unconsciously. Deep down, nobody really wants to be a Van Gogh.
It seems clearly preferable to me to be renowned and successful during your life. That way, you can make money from your work, so you can spend your one life doing interesting work and hanging out with friends and family rather than toiling at a Subway sandwich shop. I have a hard time imagining that anyone would prefer to be ignored during their lifetime. It seems like a bizarrely masochistic choice. I'd be interested from hearing from someone who would genuinely prefer to be ignored--although they're probably not on self-promotion websites like Substack!
A lifetime of not achieving acclaim in your greatest ambitions doesn't have to be that bad a life, though. You don't have to work a minimum wage job at Subway. You could be a successful franchisee of many Subways. Or hell, maybe even CEO of the whole corp. But you just wouldn't see any recognition or success in the field you truly love (let's say, poetry). Meanwhile, your hack of a rival gets all the (relative) fame and fortune. Your life wouldn't be terrible, but you'd still wake up every day with pangs of envy and you may even die thinking you were ultimately a failure.
But then posthumously, the tables turn. If we knew there was an afterlife, then this would be like the ant vs. grasshopper scenario. But there's a significant likelihood that we won't ever be aware of the world as we knew it after our deaths. Still, even if we couldn't directly experience it, it'd be nice to be so fondly remembered for such a long time.
I know you’re responding to a lot of different people, but, if I may, a few notes in clarification of my own view:
I doubt our current literary culture is that much sicker than our literary culture has usually been. I don’t think it’s any sicker than when Walt Whitman had to self-publish and Emily Dickinson had to go unpublished and Herman Melville had to toil in obscurity. We’ve probably reverted to a historical norm of mediocrity and "politics" after the historical accident of the postwar period, when a combination of new prosperity, the lifting of censorship, the expansion of higher education, and a few other factors (e.g., global corporations not yet having totally taken over) created the conditions for something like Gravity’s Rainbow, which Andre Gide and I would both have rejected as unreadable, to be published as a mainstream novel—as opposed to Ulysses, which was not published as a mainstream novel in its time but as a glorified vanity press project, at the same time as Proust was self-publishing, Stein was self-publishing, Woolf was publishing her own works with her own press, Eliot and Pound were starting up their own little magazines, etc.
I have no a priori objection to the idea that there’s more greatness now than there ever was simply because of the numbers (more literacy and education than ever, more opportunities to disseminate one’s work than ever, etc.), nor would I deny that genius can get lost due to happenstance or neglect. To avoid this, I do believe if we’re looking for greatness in your own time, we have to be willing to look at small presses, self-published work, Substacks, institutionally unaffiliated little magazines, things that are in various ways out of the mainstream, because the mainstream has obvious problems (not “wokeness” per se but the perennial problems of which wokeness is just today’s manifestation: moralism, ideology, groupthink, small-minded focus on the bottom line, etc.), though a lot of the non-mainstream material is also bad too, of course, and it’s always hard to judge the present.
Our biggest disagreement is how much anyone should compromise to enter today’s mainstream market. Now that there are so many more opportunities than there ever were to get around it and still attain the kind of recognition that puts you in the running for survival—as Eliot, Bloom, Coetzee, and others have emphasized, this is the recognition first and foremost of other writers—then I am more hopeful than you are about not having to bother.
Your "X factor" for me is already implied in the concept of “genius,” since the term as used by the Romantics didn’t refer to some talent of the individual artist but to the artist’s being animated or actuated by the spirit of the age, the oversoul, the zeitgeist, etc., as in the Aeolian harp metaphor Coleridge and Shelley used for the poet. Genius is not the individualist concept people make it out to be, though it also isn’t secular. It is inherently metaphysical, a word you use in the pejorative, but which I probably would not. I saw an academic historian in your comments say we should dispense with the concept of genius, but what else is an academic historian going to say? I bet even he’s a metaphysician when he doesn’t speak from his office; you have to be a metaphysician to get through even one day. So I do not so much think that certain “people” are world-historically special and insightful as that certain conjunctures of the talent and the time and the text are, which conjunctures we, for convenience’s sake, give the names Austen and Tolstoy. I’m not that interested in them as people—certainly not Tolstoy, who seems to have been about the biggest pain in the ass to ever walk the earth.
All of the people you mention as having circumvented the rules though were already literary insiders of some sort. But to want to write in the tradition of the greats you need not be a literary insider. Small New York based coteries have no monopoly on being inspired by Tolstoy. My contention is that for every literary insider who appears to make it in spite of the odds, there are a hundred librarians in Nebraska whose War and Peaces get disregarded. In my experience the librarian is much more likely to be my reader than the insider, and it is for her that I write
I don't disagree with you, but I think more outsiders like your librarian circumvented the rules than you allow, such as Whitman among those I named, who certainly wasn't born to the literary class (as Dickinson was), or Blake before him or Faulkner after. Each case is complex and inside/outside aren't always stable. But the 19th century aside, that librarian should be publishing on Amazon or Substack—and should be up in your comments!
On that we can agree! I am afraid that I come at this personally, as someone who read the classics on my own, entered the lit fiction world, and found myself unsuited to it. I think the genius has to devote some attention to finding their audience, but that audience can take many forms. And right now, right here, Substack is the place!
I hear that...my own story's not that different!
Yup. I've sent selections of Proust in translation and selections of me into the same system under the same name and been rebuffed with the same certainty. Yet my writing has not been rejected in any real sense. My words in such an experiment were no more rejected than were Proust's. In order to have been rejected, my writing would have had to have been read.
As to your implicit endorsement of my future smuggling operations, I thank you.
I do think that creative genius has more to do with the collaboration between society and the individual than the individual alone, and I suspect the site of the collaboration is more complex than "the marketplace". Something to do with the stage at which the creative medium has arrived at by the time the genius arrives. There should be enough work done by others to give inspiration and momentum, hints at what can be done, but enough left undone that the first person who makes good the potential is, forever, the person who brought the uncreated into being. So I go a certain way along the road with the slot theory as far as novels are concerned. Except I think the problem (insofar as there is a problem, and there may not be and we're just not appreciating sufficiently the geniuses we have and not appreciating that genius appears more richly scattered in the retrospect of history than it does in real time) is that too many writers believe the postmodernist slot theory that everyone got there and said it all and our job is just to repeat it all in a way that makes it sufficiently clear we understand the terrible limitations of thought and expression. I do think that very many of the intelligent idealistic people, who would in the past have gone through a standard stage of dreaming that they might attain immortality through their art have instead been confined, by their very intelligence and idealism, to conscientiously acknowledging that nothing they say can be true. Up to the midcentury, I feel like literary praise and literary hot air revolved around the author's grasp of human nature and great eternal truths. Now it is all about beautiful sentences and people who may in fact be perceptive readers think that the best way to let others know they have they have intelligence and taste is to talk about how they don't care about the matter, only the style. In words that too often suggest not that they can be interested in anything, so long as it is contained in beautiful sentences, but that they are never so silly as to actually be interested in love and friendship and fear and joy and endurance and suffering and youth and age and hatred and reconciliation and all the rest of it at all.
I suppose the issue I take with the idea that genius is everywhere outside the marketplace, scribbling outlandish unpublishable manuscripts, is that genius isn't always outlandish. It can be, but not always. Jane Austen did achieve something unrepeatable, but she isn't so different from what came before her that you couldn't expect anyone from her own time to even grasp what she was on about. Neither are Dickens or George Eliot so different in kind from their predecessors or peers, yet they were recognised as different in quality in their lifetime and after. If people in the past knew how to sneak genius into the marketplace why has the knack been lost, when the desire to be published hasn't grown any less? I don't think it's because the marketplace of today is any more stupid and oppressive than the marketplace of the nineteenth century. I think it may because too many gifted writers are thinking too small, and beauty and meaning have grown too far apart for too many writers. The writers of today who aren't the geniuses obliviously writing epic poetry, but who might have fooled the marketplace, are listening to the deflating demoralising voice of something that feels higher than the markeplace. Maybe.
I liked your comments a lot! But i do think that lots of writers dream of immortality. Every writer i know does! I think people don't intend to write things that are "outlandish", but they don't realize how narrow the parameters are. Like even many of the basic techniques of modernism and realism will make your book a very hard sell these days. If you read widely and internalize what you read, it often drives you further and further from what is salable. Thus, outside the marketplace becomes an immense place, encompassing the vast majority of the imagination. It is precisely when you dream too big that you become an immigrant to the nation of the unmarketable, and because you cannot be marketed, you are not sold, and it appears that nobody is dreaming big
I don't think we have fewer geniuses sneaking into the marketplace. I think they are as common as they ever were. But most geniuses don't realize that sneaking into the marketplace is a skill they need at all!
Kudos.