Struggling…
…with this next post. I’ve about 10-15 disparate links, all related in some fashion to social media. But you know this social media thing. It’s life! It’s like blogging about life. The prospect of trying to smoosh them all together into some coherent message is daunting beyond belief.But I’m also not good at thi snappy Linktopia kinda post either. So I’ll just wing it. (Jeff, I’m sorry…and I was just checking the metrics at softskull.com and they’re dropping this past month, clearly I’ve lost my edge…)
OK, well to write an actual post, as opposed to a meta-post:
Was just Twittering with agent Molly Friedrich who has an excellent interview up on Poets & Writers. Marvelous candor. I know if I were a better person, I’d find the four or five places at least that have already linked to the piece, but instead a wee boit o’ backstory: it’s in a series of interviews with agents all done by Jofie Ferrari-Adler, a young editor at Grove Atlantic who was at the now sadly defunct 4 Walls 8 Windows (publishers of Brian Evenson and Steve Aylett and Paul Di Filippo!) and married to the agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler. And all the interviews, with Nat Sobel [which I just re-read, damn, he’s an intersting guy], Lynn Nesbit, are online—not all the material in that magazine is. That said, I should mention that this month’s item on the melding of literary and genre fiction is—it’s very Intro-level for readers of this blog, read it if you’re curious to see the establishment position on the topic, where the “centrists” see things being.
Anyhow, point of raising the topic of twittering with Ms. Friedrich was to say that because of the real directness in the interview, I’d pointed her to this speech by Joseph Jaffe here [I’d come to it, thanks to Ed.] In a sense there’s not much to it, escept to say that business need ot stop lying. But he breaks that imperative down nicely. (Unembeddable, sorry, I do actually now know how to embedd video on WordPress, sorry about the Bill Hicks post…)
5 comments on “Struggling…”
I like the Kevin Nance piece on the blending of literary $ genre fiction. This has always been my goal (which is not to say that I always achieve it).
I didn’t know 4 Walls 8 Windows was gone! That’s too bad – they had good taste in weird style.
Struggle on! (but take some time to relax)…
I did not intend to put a dollar sign in my previous post. Could that have been an intimation of my subconscious mind? Hmmm.
I didn’t know about 4 Walls 8 Windows either. That really blows.
But thanks for the link to the Nat Sobel interview. I’ve printed it out for a train ride later – looks like a great read. And the article on genre/literary fiction is good, too. I love it when people write in those tones of news – the lines are blurring! You heard it here first!
Having fun reading your writing here, Richard. (we corresponded briefly while I was at Beacon Press)
The Eternal Struggle of the Bog
Inspired by the honesty of Richard Nash
On one hand, I want to have fun blogging. Maybe take a casual approach. After a while, I realize that if all I’m going to do is talk about my trip to PetSmart, what’s the point? So I go for links in a big way, spinning connections out of seemingly random surf-stops, pontificating on the secret history of alchemic psychological symbolism introduced by ancient UFO’s to Aztec witches . . .
I begin to second-guess myself. Am I too “pop” for the intelligentsia, too scholarly for the pop fans, too weird for the straights, too square for the polygons?
So, I just keep plugging away, because, as we all know, you can’t please everyone, but you have to please yourself.
Of course, I would have to spell blog wrong in my title. Typical.
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