“Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak” plus 2 more |
- Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak
- Critics Notebook: Literature as a competitive sport - Los Angeles Times
- Columbia Professor's E-mail to Students Was Pure Fiction - Huffingtonpost.com
| Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:49 PM PDT
I'll drop William Hague, 49, a line about it after this. (Btw, I do wish The Sun's Kelvin MacKenzie would desist in his weekly persecution of Chris Myers, 25, Mr Hague's former room-mate driver and £30k pa SpAd. In a just world he'd be sharing a room with George Michael) Anyway, it appears I've returned in the nick of time. For today some letters Oscar Wilde wrote to a sexy young male magazine editor in the century before last have been flogged at auction for £33,900 - or nearly £24k more than expected. What spiced them up was the claim that in them Oscar, then about 33, propositioned the Court & Society Review editor – one Alsager Vian, 22 (never heard of him: his ghost must be relishing the posthumous fame). Alas the text of the five missives scarcely lives up to the billing. All of Oscar's letters these days read like Stephen Fry on Twitter – even an illiterate chimney sweep could expect a 'dearest'. 'Will be at home tomorrow afternoon – so glad if you come down for tea,' writes Oscar in one letter – not quite up there with: 'Come over and I'll lick your scrote'. Oscar was passive, incidentally. Oh, didn't you know? Most compromising is Oscar's, 'Come and dine at Pagani's in Portland Street on Friday – 7.30. No dress – just ourselves and a flask of Italian wine – afterwards we will smoke cigarettes and Talk over the Journalistic article – could we go to your rooms, I am so far off, and clubs are difficult to Talk in.' The 'No dress' injunction is not an invitation to turn up nude but merely a sartorial guide; and the preference for Alsager's rooms nothing more than a desire not to be overheard by other possibly commision-hungry hacks. 'I think your number [edition] is excellent, but as usual had to go to S. James' Street to get a copy. Even Grosvenor Place does not get the C&S. Till Thursday night! This is all wrong, isn't it … ' The playful last line is not some coded reference to an illegal sexual proposition but plainly to the unavailability of the magazine. This distinct lack of any sexual content whatsoever has not dissuaded the likes of the Independent and other serious publications from repeating the seller's PR line. I particularly like the Indy's Sept 16 headline: 'For sale: letters from a love-sick Wilde to the object of his affection.' Purest Sylvie Krin. The media too readily interpolates cock-cockery in otherwise bromantic relationships, as the Hague/Myers hotel sleepovers demonstrate. Why, as I write, rumours abound of a roaring musky affair between a famous footballer and a famous male TV personality. And as ever, as the unlikely trustee of cock-cunting integrity, I find myself saying, 'I don't believe it!' Posted: 24th, September 2010 | In: Key Posts, Madame Arcati Comments (11) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Critics Notebook: Literature as a competitive sport - Los Angeles Times Posted: 03 Oct 2010 09:45 PM PDT When the Nobel Prize in literature is announced Thursday, the choice may be — if the last two years are any indication — a confounding one. In 2008, the prize went to Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio, a French novelist concerned with colonization and its discontents, whose work was almost entirely unknown in the United States; last year's recipient was the German-Romanian Herta Müller, whose exquisitely rendered fictions are still largely unavailable here. On Friday, the British oddsmaker Ladbrokes installed Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer as a favorite for the 2010 Nobel, while also giving good odds on three other poets: Adam Zagajewski of Poland, Syria's Adonis and the Korean Ko Un. To some extent, all of this is just a smokescreen, since the Swedish Academy is notoriously unpredictable, but what it suggests is an opposing set of expectations, between the judges on the one hand and a more generalized group of readers on the other, about what the Nobel (or, for that matter, any literary award) is meant to do. Partly, of course, awards are a matter of money. "When a big prize is awarded to an author that is lesser known to our customers," writes Kerry Slattery, general manager of Los Feliz's Skylight Books, in an e-mail, "there is a big run on that author's books and sales are definitely greatly affected." As an example, she cites Paul Harding's "Tinkers," a first novel from tiny Bellevue Review Press, which won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Before the announcement, "Tinkers" had sold 7,000 copies. Afterward, the publisher could barely keep it in print. For 2009 National Book Award winner Colum McCann, the payoff was even bigger; his novel "Let the Great World Spin" has sold 350,000 copies. These issues come up every year around this time, because October is as close as the book world has to an awards season. Five days after the Nobel Prize is announced, the Man Booker Prize will be awarded in London; the next morning, at Flannery O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah, Ga., the finalists for the National Book Awards will be named. It's a lot of pomp and circumstance for a corner of the culture that seems increasingly uncertain of its role in contemporary society, where the slow, immersive satisfactions of reading are easily overwhelmed by the onslaught of the information stream. In such a landscape, readers look to awards for reassurance, as arbiters of whether a book or author is any good. Yet while that's understandable, it is, in its way, another kind of smokescreen, distracting us from the conversation about literature in favor of a more competitive frame. "There's a big difference between art and sports," notes Harold Augenbraum, who, as executive director of the National Book Foundation, oversees the National Book Awards. "In sports, teams go head-to-head against each other, and we see who wins. It's quantifiable. You can't do that with something as human as art." What Augenbraum is referring to is subjectivity, which resides at the heart of every awards process, for good or ill. Surely, it's an expression of subjectivity for the Swedish Academy to have focused, over the last few years, on European authors, a worldview made explicit in 2008 by former Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl, who famously called American literature "too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world." But so too is the insistence that the Nobel ought to go to an American ( Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates seem to be the most likely candidates), as if it were our birthright to be recognized on the world's cultural stage. No, that's the thing about prizes: They're emblematic of those who bestow them, whether on the institutional level or in the jury room. In 2004, the National Book Awards were criticized for the New York-centric, small-bore nature of their fiction shortlist; of the five finalists, four were women from Manhattan, and only one had sold as many as 2,000 copies of her book. This hasn't happened again, but it's less a matter of conscious intention, Augenbraum suggests, than of a broader way of thinking about the award. "I don't see it as any sort of failure on the part of the judges," he says, "but I do think it's important to consider the finalists as a group. Now, when I give the charge to the judges, I urge them to think about the shortlist as a slate of five." That's a key distinction, between the finalists and the winners, and it offers a valuable lens through which to think about awards. Consider your own reading: Can you easily choose your favorite book of any given year? Probably not, because reading doesn't work like that. We admire different books at different times for different reasons, responding in a way that is as intuitive as it is intellectual, that is less about thinking, per se, than it is about a kind of touch. Judging is a similar process, in which a jury is asked to look at 200, or 2,000, books in a particular category, and sort them out according to a set of standards that is amorphous at best. What makes a good book? A moral vision? Well, sure, but what about William T. Vollmann, who won a 2005 National Book Award for his novel "Europe Central," which is, like much of the author's work, morally ambiguous, meant to shake us out of our complacency? Beautiful language? Absolutely, but what about DBC Pierre's 2003 Man Booker winner "Vernon God Little," which uses a clunky vernacular to get at its teenage protagonist's inner life? Both books beat out other, more conventionally beautiful finalists: E.L. Doctorow's "The March," in the case of Vollmann, and Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" and Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" for Pierre. Still, if this seems to indicate a certain flaw in the process, all those books are worthy of attention, which makes the goal of any award less to anoint a single champion than to establish a colloquy. david.ulin@latimes.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Columbia Professor's E-mail to Students Was Pure Fiction - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: 01 Oct 2010 12:22 PM PDT If you're an avid follower of either MFA programs or Gawker, you've probably already read novelist and Columbia professor Janette Turner Hospital's now-infamous e-mail to former students at the University of South Carolina. If Gawker's comment-fields are any indication, most of the ire over the e-mail takes one of the following forms: upset over its pomposity; bewilderment over its shoddy composition; or disgust over the sort of culture -- in the Academy generally and in New York City specifically -- that could give rise to a new stratum of tone-deafness. Those who've traced the decline of Professor Hospital's employer in the national MFA rankings since 2006 are likely to have other concerns as well. For instance, is Columbia really the literary powerhouse Professor Hospital contends? In 2007, Columbia's MFA ranked fourteenth nationally; in 2010, twenty-second; in 2011, twenty-fifth; in polling now being done for next year's rankings, the program has yet to crack the top fifty. But rankings never tell the whole story, and they certainly don't here, either. The larger concern over Professor Hospital's missive to her former students is that most of it is not true. Columbia is not a three-year program, as Professor Hospital asserts, but a two-year program. There are not 300 students in the program, as alleged, but slightly more than half that. Columbia does not matriculate a hundred students a year but eighty--the number reported by the University in its 2007 graduate school admissions summary. Columbia is not the largest MFA in the country (that "honor" goes to the largely-unfunded MFA at The New School) nor does it enjoy 100% yield -- rather, it suffers from one of the lowest yields of any top 50 MFA. ("Yield" is the percentage of applicants offered admission to a program who accept their offer.) Columbia's own website last reported an annual yield ranging from 60% to 80% between 2002 and 2007, and analysis of application trends since this last reporting of yield data suggests this figure has almost certainly dropped. It's more likely, now, that between one in four and one in two Columbia admittees are sufficiently unimpressed by the largely-unfunded program to decline to attend. How these data trouble Professor Hospital's claim that Columbia students are the "cream of the cream [sic]" is a subject for further debate. One starting point for any such discussion would be this: this past summer, Poets & Writers reported that Columbia isn't even ranked among the top 50 most selective MFA programs in the United States. But the fictions spun by this Ivy League fiction professor don't stop there. Those reading Professor Hospital's e-mail might wrongly think that Columbia has more than thirty full-time professors, giving the MFA program a pleasant if not resplendent student-to-faculty ratio of 8:3. In fact, most of those professors -- like, apparently, Adjunct Associate Professor Hospital herself -- are something other than full-time, and indeed Columbia has one of the worst student-to-full-time-faculty ratios of any program nationally for which such ratios are known. The biggest whopper in Professor Hospital's e-mail is also the most eye-popping: her claim that "about half the graduating class [at Columbia] has a book published or a publishing contract in hand by graduation." There are no conventions of etiquette or civil discourse known to this writer which require him to describe this claim as anything other than a falsehood. Professor Hospital's submission that thirty of Columbia's "sixty [sic]" annual graduates have either already published a book or signed a publishing contract by the time they graduate is so inarguably an erratum that there need be no further refutation of it except to dare Professor Hospital or any other professor at Columbia to prove the claim. Likewise, Professor Hospital's boast that Columbia students -- who pay over $100,000 for a twenty-one-month, unmarketable art-school degree -- are disallowed from choosing their own thesis committees and regularly see their theses failed by these committees is bizarre. How are these selling points for the program? The program to which Professor Hospital was writing -- the creative writing MFA at the University of South Carolina -- is a fully-funded, three-year program whose acceptance rate in 2012 is projected to be only slightly higher than Columbia's. Its MFA student body, said to be upset by Hospital's e-mail, can take comfort in the fact that USC is headed in an entirely different direction than the New York City Ivy. Even as Columbia plummets in the national rankings, South Carolina ascends: in the nine months between the 2010 and 2011 editions of the Poets & Writers rankings, USC gained eleven spots and Columbia dropped three. Early returns from polling for the 2012 MFA rankings show USC gaining forty-three spots over its 2011 placement, with Columbia dropping from twenty-fifth to a fifty-way tie for last nationally. While those numbers will undoubtedly change over time, the only possible conclusion to be drawn from them is that Columbia University and Professor Hospital should be looking to their own house rather than sending dodgy communiqués to a smaller, much-better-funded program currently enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity and reputation.
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