Ace storyteller Alan Swyer is back with another entertaining tale– this one titled “The Sage.”
It’s about a filmmaker who’s hired to make a documentary film about a meditation guru, who’s a bit of a control freak, and has a high opinion of himself, and. . . . Complications ensue.
EXCLUSIVELY at New Pop Lit.
We’re back at our book chat blog reviewing the latest hits on today’s literary scene.
Our current book review is of the new Brittany Terwilliger novel The Insatiables. Read it!
In hindsight, the appointment of Ian Buruma as Editor of the New York Review of Books was a disaster. Buruma was daring enough to court controversy, but not strong enough to fight for the integrity and independence of his publication.
(Ian Buruma.)
A fighter would’ve done a better job of explaining why he ran the Jian Ghomeshi essay. Why recovery and redemption are important. Why editorial autonomy is necessary– especially in a climate of rush-to-judgement lynch mobs and unthinking hysteria.
A fighter would’ve gone to advertisers– one by one if need be– to make his case. Instead, Ian Buruma became one more casualty of today’s Literary McCarthyism.
What kind of editor is needed as Ian Buruma’s replacement?
Someone who could replicate the daring intellectual excitement represented by the New York Review of Books when it arrived on the media scene in February, 1963.
NEEDED: A large personality.
A contentious, voluble writer akin to Norman Mailer. A person willing to be aggressive in taking on and dispersing any unthinking mob– willing to use the momentum of intellect and power of voice to restore sanity to today’s literary world.
WHO WILL New York Review of Books choose instead?
One of two safe alternatives.
1.) Almost certainly, a woman. Knee-jerk reaction to appease the angry mob. In this time of MeToo mania, it would be too risky for their risk-averse publishers to choose otherwise. Have to remember those advertisers!
(The result: A completely neutered intellectual journal.)
2.) IF they were to choose a male editor, it would be someone properly screened and defanged, without a shred of volatility. Fully establishment and left-leaning, on the order of smiling Keith Gessen. Ready to appease everybody. Affable, innocuous, and bland.
Someone who’s had a relationship with New York Review of Books. Whose own publication, n+1 magazine was in many ways made by them.
Or someone of that kind.
(Painting: “Scholar at His Desk” by Rembrandt.)
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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS
WE JUST learned today that the term “lady” is now considered unacceptable by the Orwellian arbiters of thought and language. I’ve seen the notorious wannabe-totalitarians known as the Poetry Cops complain about the term. Now, from someone a bit higher up on the media power ladder– Ginia Bellafante of “paper of record” The New York Times.
-Is the term “gentleman” also considered offensive? (Does this explain Brett Kavanaugh‘s alleged behavior in the past?)
-Does the prospective outlawing of these terms explain a lot of behavior from a great many people in recent years?
And finally–
THE spectacular success of Downton Abbey (movie version being filmed as I type this) might be because a large part of the populace is tired of people looking like slobs. They’d like a return to those old-fashioned concepts of grace, beauty, class, and style.
Even (gasp!) a return to ladies, and gentlemen.
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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS
TWO classic American stories are wry commentaries on non-fictional news events.
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“The Girl on the Plane” by Mary Gaitskill, written in 1993, concerns a man on a plane flight who gets into a conversation with a younger woman sitting next to him. This takes the man back to events in his youth. I don’t want to give away the plot, but IF you’re at all interested in the allegations about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, especially those coming from Julie Swetnick, I suggest you read the story. As the man on the flight says, “It’s complicated.” OR– things are never as simplistic as camps on both sides of the aisle pretend to make them.
READ IT– Not least because it’s well constructed and packs an emotional punch. One of the better– and more relevant– American short stories ever written.
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“Come Out the Wilderness” by James Baldwin, written in 1965, illuminates an event much talked-about of late: the similar Senate hearings which took place when current Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was nominated. In the Baldwin story, a young black secretary has lunch with a black executive from the same company. He drops the company facade for a moment to speak in an earthier tone. It’s a reflection of sorts on the more awkward conversations Clarence Thomas sought to have with Anita Hill, which were taken in a less kindly light than does the secretary in Baldwin’s story.
James Baldwin wrote several dynamite short stories which rank with any writer’s. This is one of them.
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-K.W.
Here are our Best of the Net nominations for 2018.
They encompass work published online between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018.
AS ALWAYS we had more good work than we were able to nominate. For fiction, we nominated two of our longer stories– both require some investment in reading. Both stories required an ample investment in imagination and work in writing. Both stories are excellent in very different ways. They exhibit the range available within a “Pop Lit” designation.
WE hope you read or re-read all of the nominated works.
We thank these writers and all the writers who’ve generously allowed us to publish their work.
Fiction:
Non-Fiction:
Poetry:
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO IAN BURUMA?
What happened to Ian Buruma is that he was perceived by younger members of the literary herd to be out-of-step and slow, and so he had to go.
Step back, gain perspective, and you’ll see what’s happening is that English-speaking culture is in the midst of an ongoing cultural revolution, which is really a hundred mini-revolutions occurring simultaneously. Miscreants shamed, editors toppled, with accompanying cheers from twitter mobs and in halls of the academy.
What’s happening is as old as humanity. An energetic young generation wishing to displace those in their way, grabbing any excuse necessary.
Yes, the old system, populated by decaying icons like Ian Buruma, is corrupt, clueless, patriarchal, fossilized. Some of its members are toxic– but not as toxic as what’s coming.
It’s akin to what happened with the Bolshevik Revolution. The very flawed Czar and his aristocracy were removed. Those who took their place– Lenin, Stalin, and the like– pursued the cause of social justice but were in fact another level of corruption and ruthlessness from what they replaced. As history demonstrated.
In today’s cultural scene, the ambitious newcomers seeking to topple the gatekeepers are another level of volatility and drive from the likes of Buruma, David Remnick at The New Yorker, or The Boston Review‘s Joshua Cohen. Cohen, Remnick, and Buruma perceive themselves as leftist, maybe even as Sixties-style radicals, but they aren’t really. They’ve been playing. They’ve held to long-time liberal principles of open debate, free speech, the pursuit of objectivity. Now they’re seeing with the arrival of the Jesse Browns and Monica Byrnes onto the cultural scene genuine revolutionaries whose only principle is the pursuit of power and self, letting nothing stand in their way.
Don’t kid yourself. Instinctively, the Joshua Cohens, David Remnicks, and Ian Burumas are the actual targets of those who want to clean house of toxic debris. Not consciously, but instinctively– and the Jesse Browns, Monica Byrnes, and Zinzi Clemmons of the social justice mob run chiefly on instinct. Their ideology is simply the available weapon– the justification– allowing them to achieve their actual ends. Their unconscious needs.
Targets such as Jian Ghomeshi and Junot Diaz are collateral damage. Objectives to take out on the road toward the big guys.
What of that Old Guard? Remnick, Buruma, Cohen, and others yet to be discredited?
They’re akin to Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece novel The Possessed, (aka Demons or Devils). Feckless liberals seeing the world around them change, in unpredictable and dangerous ways.
COMING: Part II of these speculations.
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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS
THE COLLAPSE OF BIG FIVE PUBLISHING IS ONGOING
Call it a collapse of credibility more than anything.
James Frey may be the most egregious person on the literary scene today.
Frey’s 2003 best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was later revealed by The Smoking Gun to contain large fabrications.
In 2010 James Frey was shown by Suzanne Mozes of New York magazine to be running a “fiction factory” ruthlessly taking advantage of aspiring young writers.
Frey’s just-released novel, Katerina, is getting slammed by literary critics.
-Including by Ron Charles at the Washington Post, who says it may be “the worst novel of the year.”
-Including by Claire Fallon at Huffington Post, who states firmly that “James Frey Still Sucks.”
THE QUESTION everyone is asking is “Why does James Frey continue to be published?”
It has to be more than Ms. Fallon’s take that he’s published simply because he’s a white guy. There are scores of talented white male writers out there who aren’t landing big book contracts from Big Five publishers like Simon & Schuster. At New Pop Lit we’ve published many of them, including Clint Margrave, Jack Somers, Brian Eckert, Richard Greenhorn, Gregory Yelnish, Alan Swyer, D.C. Miller, Alex Bernstein, Alex Olson, Jon Berger, Michael Howard, Don Waitt, Wred Fright, Joshua Caleb Wilson, and Elias Keller, to name some of the more recent names.
(Simon & Schuster Building.)
COULD IT BE that giant book companies which are part of gigantic media conglomerates and insulated by layers of bureaucracy within Manhattan skyscrapers are simply unable to locate actual literary talent? Instead they take the easiest path: “Round up the usual suspects!”
It’s a top-heavy and feckless system worthy of collapse.
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-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS
OBJECTIVE TRUTH IN THE JUNOT DIAZ CONTROVERSY
Interesting to me is how the Junot Diaz accusers and the accusers’ supporters aren’t interested in the truth of the matter. To them, objective truth is an outmoded concept. To them, objectivity is impossible. They don’t care about evidence or the lack of evidence, because to them, evidence is irrelevant.
Most important is the cause.
An anti-Junot Diaz advocate tweeted this quote from Nietzsche:
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
It’s a Nietzschean concept, and also a Hitlerian one.
We’re living in a post-truth age. We’ve seen this in fiction for awhile. More and more, best-selling novels are about fantasy, not reality. Fantasy of some kind, be it vampires, zombies, sci-fi– or the medieval dragons of George R. R. Martin and Company. Quite a difference from, say, sixty years ago when readers still lived in reality and expected to encounter reality in their reading.
(Artwork: David Revoy/Blender Foundation.)
A noteworthy example of this change is chief planner, organizer, and accuser in the Junot Diaz Controversy, Monica Byrne. Would that her novel was as well plotted as the Diaz takedown. Instead, it’s an assault of Too Much Information– experiences and imaginings jammed together with uncountable settings, characters, and ideas in a well-written but ultimately incoherent story.
Byrne classifies herself as a Christian– a style of Christianity untethered to any church or doctrine. A belief system where the individual herself determines her own beliefs, her own morality.
It’s old-fashioned Gnosticism, which gave established Christianity heavy competition around 150 A.D.
-Whoever follows the direction of his own mind need not accept anyone else’s advice.
-Convinced that the only answers were to be found within, the gnostic engaged in an intensely private interior journey.
-Elaine Pagels
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TODAY: Post-truth, post-reality, post-objectivity– spawned by postmodern philosophies which began with Nietzsche. Truth merely a construct. Who’s better at selling their version of truth? One version is as good as another– the conflict little more than a PR battle.
Pretended truths and made-up belief systems on all sides. It’s not new. Nietzsche brought forth from his own insanities nothing new. The mindset has been with us for millennia.
Gnosticism matches the attitude toward objective truth found among the Junot Diaz accusers and their supporters. If it’s “your truth,” that’s all that matters. Your truth, your reality, accuser always believed. The accused is assumed to be guilty.
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Responses to these remarks are invited.
-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit NEWS
THE HARASSMENT CONTROVERSY VIEWED FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE
IF all men are monsters, then that psychic grievance needs continual proof in the form of visible examples. Junot Diaz fit that need.
THE NARRATIVE
Evidence shows the accusations against Junot Diaz to be flimsy– more a case of bruised egos or a dismissive personality than sexual harassment. Junot Diaz fans blame the accusers themselves for the controversy. (Two accusers, in fact, are ambitiously eager to exploit every opportunity to gain publicity.)
For me the matter is caused more by a politicized literary scene– and by the media which covers that scene needing a steady supply of victims and guilty. The accusers are the Id of that media– the realized expression of their beliefs and needs. Without encouragement behind the scenes, the matter would never have become a story in the first place.
THE MACHINE
One has to write outside today’s New York-centered literary system in order to see it AS a system. Those inside it have no perspective on it.
THE PRISONER
Junot Diaz’s reaction to the accusations against him has been constrained by his membership in the club. He became successful as a creature of the machine, but now the bill has come due and he’s paying it.
MUCH has been made about Diaz hiring a PR firm, and by appearing at his Boston Globe interview accompanied by a lawyer– but these are shackles on no one so much as him.
Did you see the expression on his face in the photo by Suzanne Kreiter which the Boston Globe used? The expression of a prisoner. What you didn’t see are the invisible handcuffs chaining him to that lawyer. Said attorney and said PR firm exist to keep Junot Diaz from speaking his mind. From being himself.
That’s a hell of a position for any artist to be in.
BUSINESS
What was the quote from the Hyman Roth character in the movie Godfather II?
“This is the business we’ve chosen.”
Junot Diaz chose the world of establishment literature when he signed up for the MFA program at Cornell University he was later to write about in his 2014 essay “MFA vs. POC.”
Diaz was one of the few writers of color in that writing program. He also may have been the only non-bourgeois person in it.
MFA programs teach students how to write in the proper upper-middle class “literary” style of long slow paragraphs of finely-detailed descriptions expressed in well-wrought sentences and it’s all very impressive to the cognoscenti but it’s also removed from the fast-paced real world lives of 95% of the American populace– a big reason why the short story, once the most popular American art form in the vulgar days of O. Henry and Jack London, is today only the delicate captive of writing programs, MFA grads, and New Yorker magazines sitting unread on Manhattan-or-the-Hamptons coffee tables.
(Photo c/o AlexKotlik.com.)
It’s to Junot Diaz’s credit that his talent rises above the limitations– the handcuffs– of that very same refined writing style.
NOW he’s being judged by the same people he loathed when he was in those classrooms. Yes, those perfect beings currently staffing Buzzfeed, The Cut, Slate, The New York Times, etc. etc.; almost all from privileged backgrounds and in their Resistance daydreams looking for purpose, looking for causes, looking for harsh macho misogynists looking for anyone they can accuse hang and shred on the altar of their virtue signaling. Someone to nail to the wall for offending their sensibilities with too much reality brushing indelicately and intolerably against the fragile bubbles of their sterling New York City lives.
-Karl Wenclas, New Pop Lit News
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