New Yorker magazine alert thread

we all loved blade runner.

who would've thought the new yorker thread would get mired in arguments about writing and class distinction

lol at "mired" - it's been like 20 posts over an hour

plus hardboiled scifi could have been its own genre before lethem got to it. don't know when the first scifi detective story hit the racks but it was before he was born.

http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/400w/24/370241/1034517.jpg

anyways read the sam lipsyte story, it's not sci-fi at all but it's great

confession: i never actually read nyer fiction

i almost never do either but i like lipsyte a lot so i read this one, it's not very "nyer fiction" in style, it's absurd and funny and has lots of swearing

me three

lethem makes new scientist's top ten list:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/04/top-10-greatest-science-fiction-detective-novels.html

lol at "mired" - it's been like 20 posts over an hour

i read it when its lorrie moore or alice munro. that's about it for the most part.

or saunders

col.?

n

geo.

posts about how long a thread is, how many comments are filling it, the kinds of comments being posted, how frequently things are being posted, the quality of what is being posted, etc --> these are the sounds of ilx clearing its own throat. (nb i do not exempt this comment from this generalization.)

*moves bookmark*

i read it when its lorrie moore or alice munro. that's about it for the most part.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012

thirded. I will read the Lipsyte story though.

I don't care if you're white black or a fucking bum off of the streets. If you write about shooting aliens, flying ships, wearing spacesuits, drinking hennessy, and whatever else, I'll buy your book. If you write about the economy and how its hurts off-world workers, fuck you. If you write about your telekenisis or some equally retarded nerd shit, fuck you. That basically how I break it down to an extent.

you should enter that in the caption contest

Whitehead's last novel is a zombie book. Not sci-fi but genre (also not great).

i never read the fiction either, unless it's saunders. or wasn't that atwood story in the nyer? i read the lorrie moore last week because it was short (not that i have anything against lorrie moore). guess they needed something tiny after grann went apeshit

was the grann thing good? i didn't read it yet. i think our subscription expired. but that's still online i think. maybe i'll read it tonight.

the grann thing was grebt but . . . he is so fucking detailed about things that happened 50 years ago that i found myself thinking o rly

what is the grann thing

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/28/120528fa_fact_grann

double-issue this week kk - catch up

here's a response to the genre fiction piece

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/

Two weeks now (four weeks into new subscription) no issues in the mailbox. Wtf.

"(And to say that such books “transcend” the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.)"

will have his babies. five stars. kudos.

that was so awesome. thanks for that. i've been thinking about this for WEEKS. even before the sci-fi issue and all that. i've even been writing about this very thing. uncanny. and he says it so well. love it.

see, now i can't even read the krystal thing it would drive me insane.

i could talk about this all night. but i have to go to bed. food for friggin' thought. it dawned on me not that long ago that sooooo much of what i have written is some sort of mortal combat against that standard new yorker attitude. or just standard lit crit attitude. or music crit attitude. it does totally drive me insane and i guess i just don't understand how at this late date after all that has gone on and all the micro-genre studies and the french and kael and trash and camp and high and low and pop and the 60's and 70's and jeez just decades of scholarship devoted to everything and anything and cases made for manga and death metal and EVERYTHING you name it EVERYTHING how in the world there are so many ignorant dismissive SMART - supposedly - people out there who get so many things wrong and who pass that wrongness on from generation to generation. how is that possible? it always surprises me.

i keep waiting for all the old people to die, but they keep making new ones!

i wrote this on facebook the other day:

"i always cringe when i read a blurb on the back of an SF book that says that the book is so good that it "transcends the genre". UGH. how about the book is so good that it is "a really good example of how good the genre can be"??!!"

but the guy in Time said it better. jesus, in Time! when was the last time i read anything in Time? 1990? Maybe a doctor's office...

glad to see colson whitehead give a shout-out to michael weldon's psychotronic encyclopedia of film in the article on b-movies. i spent years with that book next to my tv too. i hope whitehead's novels are better though cause this autobiographical essay is slack, not much going on besides the movies.

a New Yorker article about michael weldon and his odyssey from proto-punk cleveland rocker to underground movie scholar would've been classic

That Time article is great. Much more focussed on the present than the New Yorker piece, which seemed obsessed with rehearsing arguments from the 1940s about writers who entered the canon years ago. We need to be told that Chandler was an elegant stylist? I'm not a big genre reader but if I were I'd have quickly grown sick of the condescension and faint praise.

i keep waiting for all the old people to die, but they keep making new ones!

and i really enjoyed the Time article too!

I think the point of those blurbs is to try to convince non-genre fans to read the book, which is ultimately a good thing for the genre, no?

maybe from the publisher's point of view, but scott's right, it's just dumb that that mindset still exists in "literary fiction" circles. not that i've read the new yorker genre fiction article and now i don't have to!

"literary fiction" is just another genre anyway

true

in every 'new yorker' short story ever...

"literary fiction" is just another genre anyway"

a point made in the Time piece.

I was kind of disappointed in the NYer genre fiction article too. Krystal starts out like he might try to question the hoary literature:art::genre:escapism dualism, but instead he writes about some literary folk who enjoyed the odd bit of genre fiction as a guilty pleasure, and then not so subtly looks down his nose at genre fiction and reconfirms the old verities.

feel liek getting literary writers to do scifi is exactly what the nyer should do w/its scifi issue, otherwise its just scifi inside the nyer who cares - lipsyte piece is funny grafting a scifi-ish ending onto an otherwise non scientific story in order to qualify, i always check for him even tho i generally dont read the nyer fiction, i read a book of his once that was v good too, recommend - the other story that took place in post global warming hispaniola i liked - i will never read any of these reminiscences of childhood scifi tho f that noise

"This, most fundamentally, is where I disagree with Krystal. It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher."

sigh

Holding up George RR Martin for great plotting is pretty extraordinary.

Lipsyte is good at asshole dialogue. Dunno why the mag ran that brief defensive Le Guin essay except to remind people, as scott said, that old people still exist.

ha, what did le guin say? i feel like this whole argument really belongs in the 60s/70s so i am curious