New Yorker magazine alert thread

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

she remembered how the evil men in the lit crit establishment of the fifties dismissed sci fi (rather weird placing Edmund Wilson among them; the guy always kicked against the establishment too).

he dissed h p lovecraft apparently

yeah but hp lovecraft was a terrible writer

your mom was a terrible writer

i enjoyed the spilling beer on mrs. heinlein part tho

lethem is a sci-fi writer, or a former sci-fi writer at least

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 5:54 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RONG

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 2:13 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not RONG:

“Ninety Percent of Everything”
with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1999

“Access Fantasy”
Starlight 2, Tor Books, 1998

“Five Fucks”
Nebula Awards Anthology 1997, Harcourt Brace, 1998

“The Darcy Bee” story collaboration
Omni Online, February 1998

“The Edge of the Bed of Forever”
with Angus MacDonald
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1997

“How We Got in Town and Out Again”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1996

“The True History of the End of the World”
with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct 1995

“The Insipid Profession of Jonathan Horneboom”
Full Spectrum 5, 1995

“Receding Horizon” with Carter Scholz
Crank! #5; Summer 1995

“Forever, Said the Duck”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1993

“The Precocious Objects”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1993

“Hugh Merrow”
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 1993

“A Small Patch on My Contract”
Interzone, April 1993

“Vanilla Dunk”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1992

“The Speckless Cathedral”
Interzone, March 1992

“Ad Man”
Science Fiction Review, March 1992

“Program's Progress”
Universe 2, 1992

“The Happy Man”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1991

“A Mirror for Heaven”
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Summer 1990

“The Cave Beneath the Falls”
Aboriginal SF, January/February 1989

spin-off but until we've got an elif batuman alert thread:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/elif-batuman/diary

The cover of the sci-fi issue helpfully tells the reader the era in which this "hey sci-fi has artistic merit too!" angle would have been in any way fresh or illuminating.

eliiiiiif

she is just such a perfect person

her twitter account is great also: https://twitter.com/#!/BananaKarenina, playfully belligerent sparring w/helen dewitt, &c

it really is! latest greatest of course being her taking the piss out of tao lin for noticing she unfollowed him

https://twitter.com/BananaKarenina/status/209588763251310592

lol oh man i know, 'sweetie'

documentary abt that french impostor grann wrote abt http://kottke.org/12/06/the-impostor

this is awesome: david grann discusses researching his most recent article - http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2012/06/08/david-grann-on-the-making-of-the-yankee-comandante/

how much does someone like Grann make for a big NYer story like that?

if he's a staff writer hes salaried at ~100k a/y iirc

Just finished that story. Amazing.

I take it back the SF article is awesome and btw the Ray Bradbury one ;_;

I mean issue

Also smh at hating on Ursula K Leguin

Just read the Jennifer Egan story in the sci-fi issue, very entertaining. I can't decide what I think of her, exactly, but I do think she's good at what she does.

Sexy philanthropy article is so much awesome for its schadenfreude.

Haven't seen this week's issue yet but I'm a fan of this sentence. ^^^

It's a few weeks old, that article, actually.

&*%$ New Yorker!

how much does someone like Grann make for a big NYer story like that?

I think the gist is that staff get paid low six figures and are basically given a very long leash, required to submit so many thousand words a year in some shape or form but mostly left to write and research.

Hey, want to hear something cool? Apparently I was on the cover of the New Yorker's mother's day issue, in cartoon form, with my kids!