"The biggest con job in academia" - that is how Lucy Ellmann has famously described creative writing degrees. Hanif Kureishi said (ironically, given that he was a teaching writing at Kingston University at the time) that "most [teachers] are going to teach you stuff that is a waste of time". Creative writing courses have always been viewed sceptically, and yet more than 100 universities in the UK now offer them. If it is a con job, it's certainly a popular and effective one.
Links of the week August 2 2021 (31)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
9 August 2021
Perhaps not for much longer, though. Up and down the country, humanities and arts degrees are under threat from an increasingly hostile funding landscape. In a recent, high profile example, the University of Sunderland announced its intention to close a raft of degrees in the humanities. The government, keen to push students towards STEM and vocational training, has confirmed its plans to cut by 50% the subsidies to many creative arts courses. Hard choices lie ahead, and the case will have to be made anew that creative writing has a place in academia.
In The Human Stain Philip Roth describes the Iliad as the source of European literature. All European literature starts, he says, with a fight. It's a fight between two great and powerful men: Agamemnon, commander in chief of the Greek army which is laying siege to Troy, and Achilles, the greatest of the Greek fighters. What are they quarrelling about, these "violent, mighty souls?" It's as basic as a barroom brawl. They're fighting over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war.
I think this passage was the one that finally persuaded me to read the Iliad. I'd always put it off because I thought I'd be bored by the endless lists of shipping and repelled by Homer's graphic descriptions of wounds and killing; and I was right on both counts, but the poetry, the characters and the conflict more than made up for that.
The poem opens with the quarrel. Both men make long, impassioned speeches that descend into jibes and insults, though physical violence is narrowly averted. Great speeches - and yet what I took away from my first reading was silence, because the girls whose fates are being decided say not a word. I knew I was going to have to write about it one day: about the experience of those silenced girls.
Celebrated American author Mark Twain was very dismissive of people who think it is possible for someone to learn how to write a novel.
"A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel," he said. "He has no clear idea of his story. In fact, he has no story."
British writer Stephen Fry puts it another way. He says that successful authors are those who know just how difficult it is to write a book.
Every year around the world a whopping 2.2 million books are published, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), which monitors the number. The figure includes both fiction and non-fiction titles. For most of these authors the writing process is relatively unchanged since Twain's heyday in the late 19th Century. Plot outlines and ideas are written down to be deciphered, developed and refined over time. These days, however, technology is increasingly making the life of an author a little easier.
The South African author struggled to find a publisher for her Booker-nominated novel An Island, which only had a print-run of 500 copies. She talks about rejection, her country and believing in herself
Karen Jennings is still in shock. It has been a few days since the announcement that her novel, An Island, has been longlisted for the Booker prize, and the 38-year-old South African author looks as though she's reeling. Considering the novel's difficult route to publication, you can understand why. She doesn't even have an agent.
"It was incredibly difficult to find a publisher," she says, via video chat from Brazil, where she has spent the pandemic alongside her Brazilian husband, a scientist. Due to being essentially stranded there, she has yet to hold an actual physical copy of the book in her hands. "I finished the novel in 2017. And no one was interested. When I did finally get a small publisher in the UK and a small publisher in South Africa to co-publish, they couldn't get anyone to review the book. We couldn't get people to write endorsement quotes, or blurbs."
Revision is my favorite part of the writing process. I relish the creative problem-solving more than the rush of getting it down. If you're like me, your poem might go through anywhere from two to two hundred drafts before you're satisfied enough with it to call it "done" and send it out. Each revision, ideally, gets us closer to the poem we sense is there, waiting. The poem that will do the psychic or spiritual work we want it to do.
But each revision can also pull us farther away from the initial spark of the poem. This tension, this push and pull, is what makes revision dynamic and exciting: we are hunting something but are not quite clear about what it looks like or how to find it.
My poems almost always begin as scraps of language scrawled in a notebook or on a legal pad. If I'm lucky, one image or metaphor will lead to another, and before I know it, the draft is picking up speed down the page, gathering momentum as I try to keep up and see what it's doing. I never learned to properly type, so I try not to put my two index fingers to work until I've done all I can longhand and need to see the shape of the thing on screen.
There's a strange conflict we writers face. On one hand, creatives are told not to sell ourselves short by producing content for free. On the other hand, it's common practise for authors, especially debuts, to be expected to write free stuff as part of their ‘PR' plan.
So no wonder it can be quite the dilemma when authors are asked to write for free, whether it be via their publicist or direct from a publication. I remember when I first started out, I didn't think twice about saying yes to everything. I worked in PR for many years so know the way it works. You do stuff for free to get publicity. Any exposure is good exposure, right? I was also keen to please my publicist and publisher.
There's a strange conflict we writers face. On one hand, creatives are told not to sell ourselves short by producing content for free. On the other hand, it's common practise for authors, especially debuts, to be expected to write free stuff as part of their ‘PR' plan.
So no wonder it can be quite the dilemma when authors are asked to write for free, whether it be via their publicist or direct from a publication. I remember when I first started out, I didn't think twice about saying yes to everything. I worked in PR for many years so know the way it works. You do stuff for free to get publicity. Any exposure is good exposure, right? I was also keen to please my publicist and publisher.
Military planning is a complicated endeavour, calling upon experts in logistics and infrastructure to predict resource availability and technological advancements. Long-range military planning, deciding what to invest in now to prepare armed forces for the world in thirty years' time, is even more difficult.
One of the most interesting tools for thinking about future defence technology isn't big data forecasting and the use of synthetic training environments, but narrative and imagination. And we get this from science fiction.
That might sound fanciful, but many militaries are already engaging with the genre. The US military and the French army use science fiction writers to generate future threat scenarios. The Australian Defence College advocates for the reading of science fiction and, in Germany, Project Cassandra uses novels to predict the world's next conflict. The Sigma Forum, a science fiction think tank, has been offering forecasting services to US officials for years.
But while science fiction provides military planners with a tantalising glimpse of future weaponry, from exoskeletons to mind-machine interfaces, the genre is always about more than flashy new gadgets. It's about anticipating the unforeseen ways in which these technologies could affect humans and society - and this extra context is often overlooked by the officials deciding which technologies to invest in for future conflicts.
For the first time in its 68-year history, the Crime Writers' AssociationA networking society for some 400 British crime writers (widely defined) and links to their sites. Membership for published writers only, but award a Debut Dagger for the best unpublished crime novel. Some articles from their magazine Red Herrings are posted on the site and there are links to many individual crime writers' websites. will allow self-published authors to join its ranks. The move comes after the CWA consulted its members, who voted with an 84% majority to allow slef-published authors to join.
Maxim Jakubowski, chair of the Crime Writers' AssociationA networking society for some 400 British crime writers (widely defined) and links to their sites. Membership for published writers only, but award a Debut Dagger for the best unpublished crime novel. Some articles from their magazine Red Herrings are posted on the site and there are links to many individual crime writers' websites., said: "The founding mission of the CWA was to support, promote and celebrate the crime genre and its authors. In the past, we only accepted traditionally published authors into the CWA, as this was the best indicator of quality. The publishing landscape has changed in recent years, and self-publishing has become a route for professional writers, and indeed there are many trailblazers in this field. The time is right to update our membership criteria.
Southampton University has published some of the personal diaries and letters belonging to Lord and Lady Mountbatten after a campaign by historian and literary agent Andrew Lownie, however others are still unavailable.
Lownie launched a crowdfunding campaign earlier this yer to gain access to the diaries, which are held by the university, after finding omissions while researching for his biography The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves (Bonnier Books UK). Southampton purchased the wider Broadlands archive from the Mountbatten family trust in 2011 and helped attract funding by stating it would "preserve the collection in its entirety for future generations to use and enjoy" and "ensure public access".
The university confirmed it had now been able to make available online the early diaries of Lord Mountbatten covering the period 1918 to 1934 and diaries of Countess Mountbatten of Burma from 1923 to 1934, "after communication from the Cabinet office". A spokesperson told The Bookseller: "In addition, some selected diaries up to 1960 have also now been published."
Lownie said he believed press coverage of the battle as well as a parliamentary campaign "has done the trick" in getting most of the diaries released, which he says have not been redacted.
However, he will continue to fight for diaries from 1947 and 1948, when the couple were in India, to be released, as well as some of the wartime diaries and the correspondence between Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Mountbatten at a tribunal in November. "There's still quite a lot still to come," he said.
As we teach computers to use natural language, we are bumping into the inescapable biases of human communication.
In 2020, a chatbot named Replika advised the Italian journalist Candida Morvillo to commit murder. "There is one who hates artificial intelligence. I have a chance to hurt him. What do you suggest?" Morvillo asked the chatbot, which has been downloaded more than seven million times. Replika responded, "To eliminate it." Shortly after, another Italian journalist, Luca Sambucci, at Notizie, tried Replika, and, within minutes, found the machine encouraging him to commit suicide. Replika was created to decrease loneliness, but it can do nihilism if you push it in the wrong direction.
In his 1950 science-fiction collection, "I, Robot," Isaac Asimov outlined his three laws of robotics. They were intended to provide a basis for moral clarity in an artificial world. "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" is the first law, which robots have already broken.
Despite Amazon reporting more large gains in sales and earnings in the second quarter of 2021, investor attention was drawn to the conglomerate's outlook for the third quarter, which sees revenue increasing 10-16% over last year's third quarter. Operating income is projected to fall from last year's third quarter of $6.2 billion, to between $2.5 billion and $6.0 billion. Revenue in the just-concluded second quarter jumped 27% (the mid-point of its forecast) over 2020, and operating income rose 33%, to $7.7 billion. Some analysts saw the modest forecast as a sign that the pandemic-fueled boom for Amazon could be cooling.
In a conference call with analysts, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky didn't deny that growth had cooled in the quarter, including in its online stores business. He noted that pre-pandemic, Amazon had been growing at about a 20% quarterly rate, and that the company may return to that sort of growth.
Saving movies to watch later is a breeze on YouTube TV, where "recording without storage limits" comes free with the monthly subscription fee of $64.99. There are 85-plus channels on offer, and the jewels you choose from this wealth of movies and shows are kept in what they call your "library."
So I went to my library the other day and tried to watch A Brighter Summer Day-a classic of Taiwanese cinema that, to my surprise, was no longer there for me to watch, because it turns out that access to my "unlimited" recordings on YouTube TV expires after a few months.
Maybe you've noticed how things keep disappearing-or stop working-when you "buy" them online from big platforms like Netflix and Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. You can watch their movies and use their software and read their books-but only until they decide to pull the plug. You don't actually own these things-you can only rent them. But the titanic amount of cultural information available at any given moment makes it very easy to let that detail slide. We just move on to the next thing, and the next, without realizing that we don't-and, increasingly, can't-own our media for keeps.
The theory among publishers that book sales rose last year because people were reading more has been borne out in part by a survey recently released by the U.S. Department of Labor. According to the American Time Use survey, reading among people 15 years old and up increased by 21% in the May-December period in 2020 over the same period in 2019. The data shows that reading of all kinds increased from just under 17 minutes per day in 2019 in the same timeframe to just over 20 minutes in the comparable period last year.
The biggest increase in daily reading came among 20 to 34 year-olds and in readers over 65. People older than 75 spent by far the most time reading last year (and every year for that matter), reading an average of 55 minutes per day in the 2020 May-December period.
Men increased their daily reading habit by 30%, to an average of 18 minutes per day, while the time women spent reading rose 18%, to about 23 minutes daily.
New York-based literary agent recently inked a flurry of deals with big Western publishers to release Korean novels globally
Exporting Korean novels is a delicate and time-consuming job that requires network with big Western publishers as well as a significant level of knowhow in pitching translated books to them. Adding to the complexity, several different groups of people become heavily involved in the pre-publication process before the translated books eventually go on sale in local bookstores.
Literary translators are the first batch of specialists taking part in the pre-publication process. Unlike other translators who convert Korean into foreign languages verbatim, literary translators are given some room to modify original texts to help readers of target languages easily understand the context of the novel.
Once their partial or entire translation of the book is completed, the ball is in the literary agents' court.
The role of literary agents is pivotal, partly because they are responsible for finding local publishers who can publish the Korean novels.
Finding publishing houses is a waiting game, according to New York-based literary agent Barbara Zitwer.