Writes Will Blythe, in "The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction/In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?" (Esquire).
July 27, 2023
"Can you read anything at all from start to finish, ie. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?"
"Without your seeking distraction as a form of entertainment, or entertainment as a form of distraction? Or is all of this just ordinary life in the internet era, with your every thought and feeling and perception being diverted or fractured or dissolved or reiterated endlessly with utter normality in a digitalized world to which nearly all of us are fixated, or might we say, addicted? Did you ever even know a different world?..."
Writes Will Blythe, in "The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction/In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?" (Esquire).
"Oh, dear literature! Will you die or shrink or practically disappear into a tiny, elitist realm like opera has into Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, has only owned a smart phone for the past year. And yet his literary life has radically altered. 'Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us.... I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.'"
Writes Will Blythe, in "The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction/In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?" (Esquire).
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Tom Wolfe could write an interesting novel about this aspect of our culture.
This is a gatekeeper opinion. In the olde days a fiction writer submitted short stories to esoteric small literary magazines, hoping for eyeballs and higher recognition. It was the way you got an agent or publisher.
Nowadays writers publish fan fiction at websites, hoping to attract eyeballs for their own sites with original content. All the layers of gatekeeping are gone. See the guy who wrote and sold "The Martian."
James, you ignorant mutt.
Will -- sharpen up!
Short stories died a long time ago. They were used to sell magazines. And the mass audience stopped buying magazines 50 years ago.
Before WW II, writers like O'Hara Fitzgerald and Hemingway could make more writing Short stories then longer forms, they only wrote novels because they wanted to do "art". By the 50s Hemingway was complaining that he had to write novels because that's all people wanted.
Or maybe I'm predjudiced. I'm not a fan of short fiction, unless its Hemingway/Faulkner quality.
The tech companies spend BILLIONS finding new ways to hijack the human brain into literally being dependent on staying on their sites, engaging on their sites, and never closing their sites. It's literally ALL their R&D is spent on.
There's no way a novelist could compete with that sort of juggernaut.
About five years ago I had to force myself to read actual books again. I'm glad I did though I can do it only late at night before going to sleep. That was many books ago.
Only way I could keep it up was to switch between four different books. When one gets tiresome I switch to another.
It works.
I think short stories lost most of their relevance long before the digital age. Since I was a teenager, the routes by which I have come to read short stories are more or less:
(a) Assigned in class
(b) Saw a movie or a TV show based on it, so I went looking for it
(c) It's by an author whose novels I've already read.
I know there are people who get their foothold in the literary (or genre) world through short stories, but I don't think they have much standalone cultural currency these days. It's a bit like poetry.
That said, I can still get engrossed in reading, to the point I have to put something down simply because my eyes can't stay open anymore. But it's usually something I'm reading on my phone or a tablet. I've been reading on electronic devices since I was young -- I read so many books through Project Gutenberg, when I was a student. If that's a source of constant distraction, it's one I've dealt with all my life. If I'm easily distracted from something I'm reading, it's because I find it boring.
This is why I have given in to audiobooks. Listened to in the car. I snubbed my nose at them for decades.
"If I read one a month now, it’s a lot."
How many men do even that?
The fracturing of attention is real. I blame Althouse.
I confess to, well, not having at all the difficulty the author describes. I read many, many short stories and essays -- longer books as well, but the shorts (not "men in," just shorts) are my favorites, and my mind hasn't been sliced 'n' diced; it's more or less as it ever was. I think that perhaps the author is projecting his personal neurosis on the rest of us.
When I was growing up (1970s/80s), it was nothing to read a book all evening 6+ hours straight. It helped that we had exactly 3 television stations to watch. I could do this well into the 1990s. I certainly don't do it now- probably my longest stint reading a novel or non-fiction in the last 20 years is well under 4 hours, but it really isn't the internet or television that draws me away- I just don't have the eye stamina any longer.
The short story died when upper middle class people stopped taking the train and needing something to read on it.
This is partially Ann's fault, curating a Web Site that is not easy to resist. On the other hand, at her suggestion I restarted a subscription to The New Yorker and do manage to sometimes read a fiction story uninterrupted. The characters are mostly writers, artists, professors, and museum curators. I'm going to move on soon.
I have my Kindle for fiction. Most non-fiction I own in hard copy. I have favorite authors of fiction and read all their novels. Few are romantic novels.
There’s a lot of bad writing in all genres.
Most of the news is poorly written (“garner” this and “garner” that). In fairness, lot of it is on a deadline but if you develop your skill as a writer you can at least crank out some decent pride on a tight deadline.
So many bad novels and short stories. So much terrible poetry.
One of the benefits of the Digital Information Age is that it focuses people to discern shit writing quickly.
Don’t ever read anything that sucks from start to finish. Not even a haiku.
there's that "fractured" the word again.
Althouse was just posting about a "fractured" writing style used here by commenters not even a week ago.
It takes too much time to connect thoughts into narrative.
Fracture writing it is for this here commenter.
Except short form fiction died long before the internet.
So were people reading novels in the interim?
I'm not disputing the phenomenon.
I still read a lot. I've finished two books in the past month, but I have rules about when I can look at Twitter which seems to be the biggest time suck for me. My mind is clearer when I'm reading books regularly.
Idiots. Am not the sharpest tack in the box but I was happy to just say no to 'podcasts' and I limit reading from the Internet to two hours a day in the morning, including emails and Twitter, and another hour in the afternoon when I look at the newspapers. Anything I still want to read beyond those limits, well, it gets saved (it's easy to do!) and then read tomorrow or the day after that or perhaps never. There's plenty of time to read with this discipline in place, even if occasionally 120 minutes becomes 140.
I doubt I spend my time reading the sort of novels that James Shapiro used to read, however.
I read two or three novels a week. I almost never read literary fiction. All character no plot. BORING. I need a reason to keep reading.
I read two or three novels a week. I almost never read literary fiction. All character no plot. BORING. I need a reason to keep reading. Wondering whether Sondra will stay with Paul despite his habit of leaving the toilet seat up just doesn’t get it for
Me.
When I flew back from New Hampshire this June people around me waiting for the plane and on the flight were reading books. Not a majority, oh no, but enough to be a presence. And they even seemed rather cool or perhaps I should say, more aware. They'd played games and they would again but they knew there's a limit, an inner limit. They knew, I thought to myself, that you can feel the artificiality of a digital game after awhile. That you can even predict to yourself in the midst of excitement over a new and interesting one that it will become limited as if one saw a wall just beyond the bushes in what one thought was a limitless forest and realized one was in some sort of dome environment. They'd seen most types of movies and they knew Hollywood wasn't doing new stuff so a plane ride wasn't an opportunity to see some movie you'd missed. They had their playlists worked out and while they still loved them it wasn't new. And so on. But what about non-digital experiences? What's in a book? If you read a book written in the Thirties or Forties it really shows up the movies and Amazon series supposedly taking place in those eras. You can feel how people reacted back then and then you can see that present-day movies or series about those times are just people of our day dressing up in old-timey clothes. In a book you can really get into the past. And honestly even the slightest book from the past, a Nero Wolfe, an Agatha Christie depicts a world with better norms and standards than ours. And there is a curious sense of relief when you read print and you know big brother is not watching and entering it all in the big dossier in the sky.
Print - it's amazing.
And then there's literature.
a tiny, elitist realm like opera has into Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side
Does the NEA and NEH support Pop(ular) or Unpopular music? What about Rodeos?
IF people Like it, then it gets no support? BUT if the elite like it.. It DOES?
That was a good essay. I’m just going to cover one of his points.
He says that magazines losing their popularity. That’s because they became insufferably smug and condescending (liberal). With pride he mentions: “The Killing Game (which infuriated hunters who subscribed to Esquire)” I clicked on the linked essay - the subtitle was: “Why the American hunter is bloodthirsty, piggish, and grossly incompetent.” Why BudLite your readers?
My wife, for reasons which remain somewhat unclear to me, recently decided to subscribe to the paper version of our local newspaper, the Hartford Courant.
Talk about short fiction!
If the web is the first world's fiercest addiction, it can only be cured by discontinuing comments on ALL platforms. That's the heroin. Signed, a junkie.
"Tom Wolfe could write an interesting novel about this aspect of our culture."
But who would read it? He'd have to dole it out Tweet by Tweet.
The New Yorker fiction podcast is pretty much the only one I listen to.
"I read two or three novels a week. I almost never read literary fiction. All character no plot. BORING. I need a reason to keep reading."
Readers of literary fiction would complain about the opposite problem: All plot, no character.
I like plot with character, and a writer's distinctive voice. However, I would prefer a book that was all character and little or no plot to the opposite (no character, all plot) if I had to make a choice between the two. A book that is all plot and no character would not be attractive to me. Again, though, it comes back to the writer's unique voice and worldview.
I've heard of persons (and knew at least one) who read several books each week. I can't understand how someone can read fast enough (or enough hours a day) to accomplish that feat! I have always been a reader, but I generally reach a point of eye and brain fatigue after an hour or two and I have to put the book down.
Some people devour food. Others listen to music every waking hour. Others are watching TV/Movies all day. And I guess some people read 2-3 novels a week.
I suppose these people get a bigger than normal high out of doing these things, and aren't hung up on quality. Personally, I can't read novels that are badly written, and if have a mediocre style, they'd better have something else to make up for it.
Trying to read tom Clancy, Grisham, Janet Evanotich, the harry potter chick, Stephen King, etc. were real trials for me. I need an engaging literary style, and/or good characters. I enjoy Rex Stout, I don't like Erie Gardner. I like Ray Bradbury not Asimov. And I'll take Chandler over Hammett (except for Maltese Falcon).
Of course, you have excellent stylists like Cheever or Updike who can be boring as hell. But that's another discussion.
"The fracturing of attention is real. I blame Althouse."
Nope. Blame MTV.
"I like Ray Bradbury not Asimov. And I'll take Chandler over Hammett (except for Maltese Falcon)."
I've never read Asimov, Chandler or Hammett. I'm reading now a thousand page collection of Bradbury's short stories published by the Everyman's Library. I'll probably read it in sections, interspersed with other writers and other books. (I'm also a few chapters into Kafka's THE CASTLE.) It's been a while since I'd read Bradbury, and I'm taken again by the beauty of his writing and the deep feeling imbued in it. (I haven't read all or even most of Bradbury: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES twice, FAHRENHEIT 451, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, and a couple of other short story collections.)
I have long maintained that the author of our time whose books will be assigned in high school and college literature classes 150 years from now will be Stephen King. I know…that makes literature professors heads explode. But we live in the Age of Anxiety. We are constantly advised to be frightened. Climate change is going to kill us, unless the Russians or Chinese or Iranians or the Norks get us first. Cancer. Our political opponent aren’t just wrong, they mean the ‘end of democracy.’ We’re not facing the Apocalypse, but ‘more than! And nobody does Anxiety better than King, who finds it in everyday life around us. Dickens understood the meaning to humans in the Industrial Age. King understands we’re all frightened of everything. I’m
I could have read a novel this afternoon. Instead I watched a YouTube interview of historian Stephen Kotkin. It was an hour and a half long and it took me two hours because I had to stop and think about what he was saying, it was that good.
This is me saying one is not necessarily better than another because there is plenty of slag on YouTube, and penny dreadfuls are also novels.
Robert Cook, I bought the complete Ray Bradbury short stories on Kindle last year. Devoured them -- no, not in a night, but certainly within a week.
There are many, many great writers of short stories, although I can truthfully say that almost all I can think of are dead. Among Bradbury, Saki, Wodehouse, Chesterton, and a few others, I could be happily supplied with literature for a solid year.
Read Asimov! And Philip Dick, whose short stories take up five volumes. Or, hang it all, Ursula LeGuin. Conan Doyle (not just Sherlock Holmes, though those certainly.) Joseph Commings (who wrote "The X Street Murders," and it turns out quite a bit more -- all of them "locked room mysteries." There are Clayton Rawson's "Great Merlini" mysteries. And then there's the text that I read from in public high school about 40 years ago, which is just called "21 Great Stories" and includes at least five that I have practically memorized even now.
jameswhy, King is a good stylist when he's kept in a small cage, and I agree that his short stories are going to be what survives, not even the early novels, let alone the later ones, which are bloated beyond belief. But "everyday life" is not King's shtick, except very rarely. Say rather the irruption of the extranormal or supernatural into everyday life. That covers practically everything, apart from a few oddballs like "Quitters, Inc." (a great story, btw).
The New Yorker fiction podcast is pretty much the only one I listen to.
Robert Cook: don't miss The Martian Chronicles. There's also VS Pritchett, Alice Munroe, Flannery O'Connor, Connie Willis, Walter M. Miller, Denise Mina...of course nobody compares to Updike for me, but I think you'd like these authors.
The MFA also killed good short fiction, I think.
"Read Asimov! And Philip Dick, whose short stories take up five volumes."
Asimov? At this late date, probably not, but...who knows?
As for PKDick, I've been reading him since 1975, have all his books, (including his non-SF books that remained unpublished until after his death) many in multiple editions, have the limited edition 5-volume collected short stories in slip-covered hardcover and in widely available soft-cover, (the reading copies). I spent the most money I've ever paid (and probably ever will pay) for a book--$950.00 on EBay--for a Gregg Press hardcover edition of DR. BLOODMONEY. I probably wouldn't have spent that much, but it was the last one of the 14 Gregg Press hardcover editions of Dick's work that I did not have, and it was in December...so I told myself it was a Xmas gift to myself! (My first bid was turned down, but I made the second bid a couple of days before the end of the auction and the seller accepted it. His listed price was something over $1,200.00. I cannot recall the precise number.) I feel like he was doing me a good turn!
Tina Trent,
"Good short fiction is hard to find" -- Flannery O'Connor (maybe paraphrased)
Ok, if you'd prefer a genuine, unparaphrased quote, how about this, which my second favorite of hers:
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
Funny, Kirk.
I acquire books from everywhere. Sadly, they're not wanted. I try to give them away whenever I feel there might be a connection between the reader and the writer.
I love those sweet little kiosks people erect with free books in them. They're like bird feeders for humans.
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