new novels and why they suck and whatever

the rather empirically obvious fact that the reader of good novels isn't around anymore, even as an ideal

It seems to me that the phenomenon you are seeing is that, in a mass media culture, novels are no longer a mass medium, as they were prior to circa 1970. But there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of potential readers for 'good novels' in North America alone. I agree that the base of potential readers has shrunk in the internet age, but it is premature to pronounce their extinction as a species. The novel will bump along as an increasingly marginalized art form for quite some time to come.

it's like ib singer's line about yiddish: It was dying two hundred years ago, and will continue to die for another thousand years

I see a lot of parallels between publishing and record labels in this regard. The financing just isn't what it used to be, the sales aren't what they used to be, so there's not as much money for advances. There isn't the apparatus to sustain as many novelists. I harp on this a lot because I feel like too many people overlook it or ignore it, as though art gets made in a vacuum regardless of financial support. If a novelist's first novel isn't a hit today, no one's gonna keep taking chances on them. But it's harder to have a hit when the readership of a particular kind of novel has shrunk. So more "promising" novelists are just never going to write the second or third novel that might have been their breakthrough.

it's like ib singer's line about yiddish: It was dying two hundred years ago, and will continue to die for another thousand years

i like this. you could even apply it to the "bourgeois subject" which is the corollary for the "ideal reader" im trying to talk about (poorly). forgive the lapse into crit-speak.

would harry potter be considered a weak hit in the novel's heyday, the same way 30 rock's finale's numbers are miniscule compared to mash's?

xp Same can be said for madrigals, or tapestries, right? No artform ever dies. Every artform has been equally popular throughout history, and it's only chicken littles who say otherwise. The novel was thriving in the 14th century and will continue to do so for eternity.

Many good epic poems are still being composed every year.

I harp on this a lot because I feel like too many people overlook it or ignore it, as though art gets made in a vacuum regardless of financial support.

this is a good point, but i think it's only applicable to a small time frame? how many novelists of previous centuries wrote because they didn't have to work? there's a kind of bourdieu-ian social outbidding that was going on that's as important as economics as far "initial conditions" go for creating good literature--though neither are necessary/sufficient, perhaps.

I think a lot of novelists of previous centuries wrote because they didn't have to work, which would exactly be my point. An advance means you don't have to work. Not sure if that's what you meant or not.

I just sort of take the cliche that 'no novel can be judged in its own time' to be true, let's wait 20 more years until we read Emily Gould

lol, I am in no hurry to read Emily Gould's novel, I just enjoyed her description of what a $200,000 advance actually means to a normal, flawed, not particularly frugal but not absurdly excessive young person.

that's what i meant, Hurting. i suppose you could designate an era of the "publishing industry" which made it possible to make a living by laboring as a writer of novels.

and yeah 龜 otm of course about historical perspective.

the amount of time it takes to write a novel kind of sets a novel back in a previous era once it comes out though, no?

Takes like a few days, maybe a week at most ime

my buddy has been working on a novel forever, and i just envision him now hastily revising it to account for america's new middling interest in soccer and what that exactly means.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ZfjOWxE0--/1320199782204730216.jpg

http://review.gawker.com/25-unedited-excerpts-from-joshua-cohen-s-the-book-of-nu-1714663755

im coincidentally reading it rn, maybe 100 pages in -it's ok to good, too much and show-offy def, i feel like i skip like one of every 8th word and maybe im supposed to glaze thru it & its abt how we read ~online~ deep thots

this one 1 just read & is gold btw for "Words are garb." even tho he means it differently lol

Language itself is a burqa, an abaya—so many new words!...The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies—what’s exposed? The hairy truth?

the excerpts i read seemed fucked up but not that bad. didn't notice all the nerdcore punchlines about beating his dick like it's leukemia i guess and the parts about arab women??

Naming your lead character after yourself and making it a thinly veiled slightly more despicable version of yourself is so basic. Literary fiction hack move.

It's supposed to be edgy but just signifies being too lazy to name your characters.

lol this thread

xxp