November 18, 2009
Arcade
A digital salon created by Stanford for literature and the humanities:
Under our three rubrics—Conversations, Transactions, and Publications—we offer an array of blogs, journals that seek to redefine their genre, forums for the exchange of ideas and observations, videocasts and podcasts, and other features for scholars, students, and the public. Our international, multilingual community is committed to redrawing, and sometimes erasing, the lines between contributors and readers.
All of our features are intended to be the best of their kind: curated but participatory, technologically rich in the service of intellectual exchange, and open to multiple modalities. Arcade belongs to the Open Access movement in scholarly publishing.
For example, Alec Hanley Bemis’ Brief thoughts about length:
I floated this by another acquaintance recently, a slightly younger individual with a background similar to my own. Why aren’t kids these days aspiring to create literature? Will music claim them all?
“I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by organic farming,” he said.
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I’ve thought a lot about this topic (the second part of your post), trying to figure out if we are in a post-literate world. I see contradictions to my assumptions all the time, but still feel we are moving in a direction further and further from the written word. Not that books aren’t still being written — and read. Just a confusion about the impact of books as art on the larger culture and if there will ever be a space again where the best writers of a generation can have a chance to have a broader cultural impact. Again, I see contradictions to my assumptions all the time.
Your thought reminds me of this comic for a number of reasons.
Welcome Flockers!
Consider this an open invitation to join in the conversation at Arcade:
http://arcade.stanford.edu/user/register
Deron, your comment above reminds me of a Alec Bemis’s statement (or I guess it’s really Cormac McCarthy’s …) that the Big Novel is dead. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. http://arcade.stanford.edu/brief-thoughts-about-length
Cheers, and keep up the good work on Clusterflock, I’ll be subscribing now.
~Zach
I have to register to comment over there; how tiresome.
So I’ll ask here: where do series of novels fit into the length discussion? Because series books are huge, especially in mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. Where does Patrick O’Brian fit in, whose Aubrey/Maturin series has been said (I’m too lazy right now to look up by whom) to be really a single immensely long novel?
I don’t read much contemporary fiction to begin with—O’Brian is as close as I’ve gotten in recent years, excepting books written by my friends—so I’m not sure I have a dog in this race. Nearly all the novels I read are more than a hundred years old, and I consume most of them as audiobooks. But when I pick an audiobook, I’m often looking for the longest one I can find. If there are two recordings of the same title and I don’t have a strong preference for one reader over the other, I’ll pick the longer one. (Of course, pricing also plays a part in this—I pay a flat rate to Audible per book, so part of the attraction is that a longer recording is a better deal, in dollars per minute.)
India said,
Yeah, we went around and around about that. Barrier to entry and all. fwiw, I’m with you, prefering openness. I’ll bring it up to the Arcade board again.
On the topic of length and novels, if it’s really an issue at all, I’m a firm believer in stories taking as long as they take. If you can write an epic 100 pages or less, then do it; if it happens to take 1,000 pages instead I’ll read that too. Having read Blood Meridian recently (which I was told to read only after Moby Dick; proved to be excellent advice) I can say that I am a McCarthy fan (see original Bemis quote) but I don’t know what he’s driving at. He’s a famous writer, and I’m not so maybe he knows something I don’t, but it seems that he is overlooking one obvious case of literature retaining a mass-market relevancy: the film adaptation. Maybe he doesn’t consider that writing at all, but I bet he’s not sending back paychecks from No Country for Old Men or The Road either … How many epic films have been made from Big Novels? What will Hollywood use for fodder if the genre goes away? Twitter?
Original screenplays? Could it be?
They’ll just keep remaking the remakes of everything.
[...] NOVEMBER 23, 2009: This post inspired an unusual level of response which continues on Clusterflock & Teenage Kicks’ simulcast at Stanford’s [...]