The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

My reading has been pretty scattershot since I got back from Paris. I re-read *A Moveable Feast*, which was both more acidic and self-forgiving than I remembered, and quietly beautiful, albeit those passages are rare. I've been dipping back into Sarah Bakewell's *At The Existentialist Cafe*, which, despite that annoyingly twee title, is actually a good summation of existentialism and provides a nice snapshot of Paris in the 1920s.

I've also started Geoff Dyer's *Paris Trance* (do you see the theme?). It's got all the Dyer trademarks: irony, smugness, deftness of narrative voice and perspective. Dyer writes sex well, I think.

It's much more Raymond Carver than Raymond Chandler

After Mosley established himself as a successful writer of popular and very well written detective fiction, he started trying to break out of his genre confines and be taken as a "serious" writer, but with a mixed success. As I see it, "serious" writers have a miniscule audience compared to popular genre writers, and academics have appointed themselves as the gatekeepers of who is serious and who isn't. They guard this tiny bit of power jealously and actively dislike having a genre writer crash their party. It's by invitation only and Mosley might have to die before he's invited.

What academics are you talking about?

What you say doesn't resemble any academic I've encountered. Which is hundreds of people.

In any case, academics' influence over literature and the literary world is very limited.

Yes I think gatekeepers of highbrow culture in general have decreased or been made irrelevant in the past few decades, but that's not to say that they don't still exist within certain niches.

Meanwhile the Mosley collection has moved to different territories, though still not noir - instead there's been multiple mad scientists!

There could also just be the fact that Mosley’s non true crime writing isn’t very good. Not every writer is talented at every genre, no need to invent a conspiracy about it

I don't think ppl's personal preferences and biases are a conspiracy, unless we're talking in a Bourdieu sense here.

I also find the idea that anyone's writing being good or bad could be seen as "a fact" suspect and, if we accept that it can, the idea that critical or academic consensus is going to be right about what's Good or Bad doubly suspect. Might as well believe in sales figures as indicators of quality once we get to that kind of thinking.

I actually find that I agree with poster table here.

I don't know the writing in question, but whether it can be shown to be good or bad or not, maybe people didn't much like it, and didn't think it was as good as his other writing.

Again, academics are largely irrelevant - their only consensus on Walter Mosley, I guess, is that he's good and important, and most people don't care what they think anyway.

I saw Mosley speak once at the now long gone Donnell Library in midtown. A lot of what he said was classic protesting too much of the "Most people don't realize that I am actually a good writer and not just a genre writer" variety.

maybe people didn't much like it, and didn't think it was as good as his other writing.

Well of course that would be the case but when you get to a critical consensus it always becomes about preferences - formal, of marketing, of identity. "Maybe they didn't like the writing" is just restating the premise.

anyway I don't think I've ever heard of Mosley as "a good crime writer whose literary fiction is bad", I've only heard of him as "a good crime writer". So I don't know if this critical consensus even exists, really.

"Literary Fiction" overrated imho, except when it isn't.

It's like "Classically Trained." If I want Classically Trained, I'll go to Lincoln Center for some actual classical music, on the train perhaps, maybe even the A train, but I will get off at 59th Street instead of riding it all the Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. Of course Monk liked classical music too and that is yet another thing.

But those are ancient ILX tropes, from the time when the Twelve Foot Lizards were merely hatchlings.

I don't understand any of these last few posts.

Me riffing.

Trust by Hernan Diaz
Wikipedia and Investopedia articles on fiat money

Unrelated: description of Karst from Aesop (Has anyone tried this fragrance and if so, could you please describe it in your own words?)

The LRB recently carried a marvellous review of the book TRUST.

Please allow me to try to explain. There is an old pattern that has been discussed on this borad many times before, of genre writers, because they feel stung by being ghettoized and desire access to greater prestige and $tatu$, stating that they better than (and perhaps thereby implicitly “more literary than) Literary Fiction. Which argument these days, in a perhaps less defensive form, probably pretty popular in some circles particularly within academia and this borad, I would think. But in fact it is obvious, as the mathematician said before pondering for a half hour it was obvious and concluding that it was indeed so, once one applies Sturgeon’s Law and sees that the 10% of good genre writers will be better than the 90% of brisk crap nebula writers of literary fiction who by Redd’s Rule will never be read anymore by anyone in the future. QED.

Which has a parallel in rock musicians wanting to escape their long distance information (stuck inside of) Memphian roots by appeals to classical ideas of virtuosity and lyrics being poetry etc.

So many typos such a small chat box, such dirty glasses.

So you don't write 'borad' deliberately?

Genuine question.

Poster Redd -- insofar as I grasp your argument immediately above -- I broadly agree with it and think it is, as you say, uncontroversial, among academics, ILX, and most people.

Defensive has deep roots though.

So you don't write 'borad' deliberately?

Genuine question.

Defensiveness

In other words, the fastest lion eats the slowest gazelle.

the hell's going on here

Me and the pinefox could become close friends
…
Me and the pinefox don’t see eye to eye on a
Number of things

Mr Oswald said he had an understanding with the law

Okay I’ll stop. My work is undun.

The ghettoization of genre fiction discussion is almost entirely redundant at this point— science fiction and fantasy are wildly popular, and form the basis for a great deal of popular culture. The idea that anyone as popular as Mosley would be weeping about not being taken seriously as a writer is absurd— he's laughing all the way to the bank, whereas some of the "literary" novelists who are really pushing boundaries are struggling as adjuncts working bar gigs on the side.

I agree with poster table.

I mean, Le Guin earned several Library of America volumes.

the poster is the table is otm

Even Delany, who has basically become a gay smut peddler (and GOD BLESS HIM), wins achievement awards and gains new fans of his work all the time. Will they read "Hogg" or "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders"? No, and probably for the better. It's his science fiction that gets the attention, not the stuff that's more akin to Guyotat or Bataille or whatever.

This was two and half decades ago, so the current world-building boom of sf hadn’t quite heated up yet, but crime fiction already seemed to be treated pretty respectably, what with Black Lizard editions and film adaptations of Jim Thompson everywhere you looked, to name one concurrent indicator.

But now that I think of it, Chip Delaney was already getting some nice reissues at the time iirc.

yeah I think even within the genre in the 70s the vibe was "this guy is on a higher level"

Yeah, just proves the point even more.

He never distanced himself from the rest of sf. His critical writing on the subject speaks favorably of the same Golden Age and New Wave novels and writers that do well in ILX polls of the stuff. Not sure if this is related to what you are getting at, but his respectability also reinforced the respectability of the genre as a whole.

(poets follow form. if iambic pentameter is the most common stress pattern for your language--I am not sure this is true for any case considered--is it remarkable to write poetry that follows speech? yes?!)
(it gets painful to read the hospital scenes and reminds me of Thomas Mann and Tove Ditlevsen. who gets incarcerated? I am looking forward to trying to follow the LRB review and seeing if there is a comparable review in an American source and taking sides, like cheering for a baseball or football team when there are no stakes.)

Yeah, I said all that in response to Aimless above. Still doesn't make "because they didn't like the book" a satisfactory answer to "why didn't critics like this book", tho.

also of course genre fiction on one side and "truly pushing the envelope" on the other is a false dichotomy - plenty of sci fi writers work in experimental fiction, tho I grant you wouldn't know this from what gets pushed in mainstream outlets

Delany was in Glasgow a few years ago for this event:

https://arika.org.uk/beyond-transgression/

The audience was mostly young and queer and totally focused on Delany's sex radical writings - I don't think any of his SF stuff got a look-in, apart from Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (he gave a fantastic reading from that). So I guess one of the reasons that Delany still thrives as a public author/intellectual is that he has sustained different communities of readers, genre and non-genre, without negating one or the other, perhaps in a way that Mosley hasn't been able to. I mean I'm guessing Mosley's crime novels sold pretty well without ever crossing over to bestsellerdom, and there was a movie adaptation with Denzel Washington, but I seriously doubt that he's laughed his way to the same bank as more prolific, streamlined bestseller types like Grisham, Child, Patterson etc.

Very excited to start reading Devil House by John Darnielle.

the notion of people who are comfortably off by any normal metric remaining bent out of shape by a need for proper respect from people who likely aren't would seem to be a dominant theme of our age: they *should* be able to laugh all the way to the bank, and to log off and just be as happy as scrooge mcduck falling back into a bed of bank notes

but instead they anxiously and frantically refresh their TLs looking for glimpses of that sought-after respect but only ever find evidence of the opposite

(i don't want to project this onto mosley especially tho -- i know who he is but i've never read a word so i'm in no position to make this call)

"only ever find evidence of the opposite"

"only ever find evidence or imagined evidence of the opposite" <-- may be more accurate here

Just a note that I never said Delany distanced himself from SF, and as was guessed, I never said that SF and genre writing cannot push boundaries.

But if you look at mainstream literary fiction these days, especially the vast middle of the pack, there are a LOT of write-by-numbers novels that don’t do much that’s interesting at all. Oh, a ludicrous and unlikely character walks into a ludicrous and unlikely situation and with the help of another ludicrous and slightly different unlikely character undergoes a hero’s journey of some sort? This is most of what passes for literary novels these days, from my vantage point— it’s depressing.

As noted, I think poster table has been highly accurate on this particular topic.

My statement that maybe some readers did not like a given book was a restatement of table's commonsensical view. It was not a response to the question 'why didn't reader X like book Y?'. That would be tautological.

I think that status differences between literary and genre have been heavily rebalanced or altered - though there is still much nuance to be explored and stated there. Walk into a Waterstone's (a UK bookshop chain) and crime has its own room. But is that a ghetto of second-rated books, or is it actually the first thing you walk into, with literary fiction relegated behind it? This can vary. I went to a super independent bookshop in Ely recently, with all kinds of books, where crime was the primary thing when you walked into the shop, and SF / fantasy dominated the back room, and other fiction had to find its way amid them.

Literary mainstream authors have tried to write in genre-inflected modes (Ishiguro the evident example) - which plays into this topic, but doesn't in itself destroy the boundary between the fields.

One thing that has not been fully stated here is that many or most genre writers like being genre writers and are proud of being genre writers. They have had a strong sense of community for a long time. In the case of SF, this is at least since the 1930s when eg: there were multiple competing SF clubs in Brooklyn (cf discussions on other threads about Fred Pohl et al). Quite probably the same is true for crime, fantasy, Gothic, et al. Most genre writers, critics and fans have a very strong sense of the history and shape of the genre, its interconnections, main currents, alternate lines. Many of them would be puzzled or resistant if invited to be part of the literary mainstream, at least if it meant giving up that genre community of knowledge.

That's a good point in your final paragraph, pinefox— while people like Mosley and some other outliers exist, many who write in "genre" forms are quite proud of their genres and the communities there.

On a personal note, I am obviously quite happy to be a moderately successful "innovative" (or whatever) poet. I get paid to give readings and write articles about art and literature. The community is a big part of this— these are my people, a lot of them, and I care about them and the work that they're making. I am, in a way, proud of many of my friends and colleagues. It's small potatoes, but it's our potatoes the way we like them. It's pretty easy for me to see how this feeling extends to other forms and genres, even those that rank much higher on the popularity scale.