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It is worth watching this candid monologue from Lionel Shriver, a novelist and regular book critic for The Economist, in which she describes her feelings about graduate writing programmes. "It's a little mystifying why my immediate impulse is to dis MFA programmes," she concedes, after mentioning that she herself attended one and had a fairly good experience there. But her visceral concerns about the "indulgent middle-class gestalt" of it all certainly resonate.

There is "something corrupt, something unwholesome" about a business that sees young, aspiring writers fork over considerable wads of cash in exchange for some encouragement and an atmosphere of literary striving. Few will make it as writers. Even successful writers barely make it as writers. Most of these former MFA students will probably wish they invested their thousands of dollars in an interest-bearing account. Or just stuffed it all under a mattress, near their old dog-eared copy of "This Side of Paradise". (Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)

Relatedly, do read Ruth Franklin's elegant homage to Shriver in the New Republic, in which she asks why the novelist doesn't get the attention she deserves.

~ EB

"For me a poem is living and breathing," says Tina Chang, Brooklyn's poet laureate (yes, there is such a thing). Such declarations always sound a bit vague and pretentious. Yet Chang ends up owning this statement, and even imbuing it with a demystifying beauty over the course of this audio slideshow about her approach to writing poetry, from the New York Times. 

In a recent blog post, James McGirk wondered whether it was possible to rank writing programmes. What metric would we use? He considered the controversy over Seth Abramson's ranking of the top-50 post-graduate writing programmes for 2010 (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Poets & Writers magazine), and came away suspecting that Abramson was perhaps "a better poet than statistician".

Seth Abramson took issue with quite a few aspects of McGirk's post. Here is his response in full (which spam barriers prevented him from filing as a comment; where were those filters for all those folks trying to sell cheap Ugg boots?):

James,  read more »

Right now, in faculty rooms across the country, admissions officials are trying to winnow out the next batch of Masters of Fine Arts diploma candidates, America's presumptive writing elite.

In his book "The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing", Mark McGurl makes the case that the rise of the creative-writing programme “stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.” In a country obsessed with branding and status, an expensive graduate certificate declaring that one is a writer seems as inevitable as it is dubious. Louis Menand, in his review of McGurl's book in the New Yorker, recalls Allen Tate, a poet and critic, who complained that “the academically certified Creative Writer goes out to teach Creative Writing, and produces other Creative Writers who are not writers, but who produce still other Creative Writers who are not writers.” That is, teaching creative writing is a scandal that suits everyone.

Given so nebulous a mandate, what metric can we use to rank different creative-writing programmes? (Because if there is anything Americans love as much as a certificate, it is a ranking that enables us to understand the value of said certificate.)  read more »

IF BOOKS, particularly novels and memoirs, are our defence against a certain loneliness, as our (questionably reliable) guides to how life is lived, then I'm realising (finally, and late) that blogs (some, few) can fulfil something similar, albeit in a more disposable and less cathartic way. I mean, don't we read about others to recognise that the weird buzzing in our own heads is merely human? Even normal? And don't we like to know that other people are also trapped at their desks, with said buzzing?

So I've been enjoying the tossed off observations of Dana Goodyear's Postcard from Los Angeles, a new blog over at the New Yorker's steadily expanding website. (George Packer and Hendrik Hertzberg are blogging too, though their posts are mainly about the grand failures of governments rather than the small failures of an otherwise ordinary day.)

Here she writes about an odd incident with a driver in "an immense red S.U.V., in perfect condition, seemingly just washed and detailed, with a pair of golden testicles swinging from its undercarriage." The man insists she hit his car. An unexpected tension (and even suspense) builds: 

“I’ll pull over,” I called through the rain, and, since he was slightly ahead of me (he had positioned himself to photograph me through my windshield, like a renegade red-light ticketing camera), he took the lead. He turned right onto Ivar and kept going, past many empty stretches of curb where I felt we could reasonably have had it out. But, having taken my picture and, doubtless, copied down my license-plate number, he had me in a strange position, forced to follow him into the labyrinth, a Theseus attached by an invisible string to the pendulous golden “bull balls.”

The red car turned again and travelled what again seemed to me like a needlessly long distance, an intimidating distance, before pulling over at a red curb. I put on my hazards and nervously got out of the car, apologizing and supplicating even as I approached. The driver emerged, a large, muscular man with a thick mustache and a gentle face. He looked at his bumper and its appendage and swiftly concluded that he was wrong: there was no damage to his car.

Slight, yes. And reassuringly so. Goodyear escapes from the scene unharmed, despite the inauspicious promise of those golden testicles. And we get a story--a small, human one. A postcard.

Guest post #1: Philip Davis, author of "Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life", is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine. Davis has written the first full-length biography of Malamud, a self-made son of Jewish immigrants who went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Come hear Davis speak at New York's 92 Street Y on October 31st at 7:30 pm.

The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is "Otherness", and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying Alterity as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe.

I was brought up in Nottingham, home of D.H. Lawrence, in the English Midlands. When I was a boy, I am afraid that "the Other", in crude slang, meant Sexual Intercourse. As in: "I fancy a bit of the other."  read more »

WITH his new novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", Junot Diaz has finally delivered on the promise he made 11 years ago with "Drown", his slangy, artfully visceral book of short stories about Dominican immigrants in the Jersey diaspora. As everyone's been saying, this is a novel worth waiting for. It's about three generations of a Dominican family--the patriarch is a prominent, respected surgeon in Santo Domingo; alas, the grandson is Oscar, a fat, lonely, comic-book-loving "ghetto-nerd" in New Jersey.

What's fascinating about the storytelling is the way Diaz shoves a third-person narrative into a first-person observer. The story is told mostly from the perspective of Yunior, a family friend, who laces his nearly omniscient narration with the rare bit of personal observation. This is a smart (and not uncommon) technique for juicing up a story--making it the story observed. Philip Roth has done this in most of his later books: Nathan Zuckerman, no longer the virile, charismatic, story-making hero of his youth, is left observing the trials and tragedies of his friends and colleagues. (Frankly, I find these novels lack the verve of the earlier Zuckerman books, when it was Nathan himself who was sweating and suffering and sexing.)

Anyway, Diaz spoke on the subject of third-person narration at a reading in Los Angeles a couple of years ago (there's a good recap on Laila Lalami's blog). He argued that a detached perspective leaves a story feeling cold and stuffy and "white", and not at all conducive to the urban English of writers of colour.

I have my own prejudices against third-person omniscience (Jane Austen notwithstanding), as it lacks the nostalgic kicks and sneaky unreliability of first-person grasping. But I had never heard of a racial bias against the whitey straightjacket of third-person. It takes little more than the kinetic, lively feel of Diaz's new novel--a tragedy lightened by its casual delivery in the Spanglish vernacular--to be convinced that Diaz may be right.  read more »