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END_OF_INTELLIGENT_WRITING
August 14, 2006
September 11, 2006
MULTI_LEGGED_KOSTELANETZ
"The End of Intelligent Writing" (1973)
by Richard Kostelanetz
I intended to give this book the
This is subtitled "first 13" treatment, and
"Literary Politics in America" then dig in further later
if it seemed warranted...
FIRST13
The subject at hand is But it's already clear that to
cliques, tribes... the do it justice it's going to
tendency to form blocks need closer attention.
of friends that back each
other up irrespective of For now, there are
any actual merit. my reactions based
on a cursory look...
Kostelanetz claims that this is a
"growing" problem, which threatens
"the end of intelligent writing".
Right there we have a
question that seems like Upon reading the Damon
it should be a testable Knight book about the
claim. My first thought old SF club called "At one point in the
is "twas ever thus"... "The Futurians", the earliest 1940s,
Toadkeeper suggested approximately half of
that it showed why so all the pulp sf and
much SF was so bad: fantasy magazines in
The Futurians were the U.S. were being
just buying each edited by Futurians"
others stories.
How can he support the [ref]
notion that this problem June 11, 2010 edit
is getting worse?
(But for that, I'm actually
going to have to RTFB.)
He presents an intellectual
history of post-war America... This may very well be another book
like "The Last Intellectuals" where
the historical survey itself is at
least as interesting the thesis it's
supposed to prove.
My second thought is that And he has a
it's not entirely clear to willingness to be
me that this is an avoidable snarky, to cast
problem in any sense. aspersions...
My own experience is that these This is not always
issues are endlessly problematic. such a bad thing.
Just as an example: I'm an
occasional college radio DJ.
Part of the game is to identify
interesting music by new,
relatively obscure artists. If you edit a publication,
you're going to get to know
You don't have to do this a bunch of writers; some of
for very long before you them are going to become
become a member of the your friends. And a lot of
scene, rather than just an them are going to be your
observer: you make friends friends because of a shared
with some of the musicians. mindset, a similar set of
Now when you play their intellectual attitudes.
stuff on the air, can you
be sure you're being There is no way you can avoid
objective? Must you *stop* favoring these friends, and
playing music by anyone it isn't clear that you
you're on nodding terms should: when you're after a
with? certain kind of write-up, and
you know where you can get it,
Are you now supposed to do a will you pass that up in
"full disclosure" of any pursuit of "fairness"?
associations? How tight does
the association have to be How is anyone -- yourself
before you get to the point included -- going to tease
where you need to disclose it? out whether you sincerely
hold their work in high
regard, or just like them
Is there any way you can do as human beings?
this without sounding smarmy
and presumptuous, trying to
claim personal connections
with the stars?
To come at it from another
angle: the idea that
individuals work best in HEROIC_ART
isolation is an exaggerated
romantic notion.
Often, good work is the
result of a group of people
supporting each other:
GOING_UNDER
a scene, a movement, a subculture
a field, a department, a company
Kostelanetz makes some points:
o the names of identified scenes often
don't make sense literally (e.g. the
"Southern Writers" does not literally Another example: "New
include all writers from the south); American Writers"
anthologies that only
o the groups often have inflated claims represent a tiny
(a "Southern Renaissance", that produced fraction of the
only one really great writer)... actual new American
writers, representing
He could be correct about all only a small number
of these things and still be of selected groups.
missing the point that the
social interconnections of this
group may be necessary for them
to do what they can do.
All Kostelanetz can see when
he looks at these things is
a corrupt back-scratching that
gets in the way of making
decisions based on merit.
But how *do* you make
decisions based only on merit?
What kind of institutions
could be established that
would encourage such things?
MERIT_INSTITUTIONALIZED
Further, there's a
possibility that a
number of his premises
are wrong, or at least
severely dated, e.g he
believes that the
reason reading is in
decline is *because* of
a decline in quality
from this cliquism.
What about the
distraction from
other media
(television, movies)?
How is it possible for reading time
to stay constant in a world with an
explosion of new art forms?
Is there any reason it should?
Another possible problem with
the work: he continually emits
a conspiratorial air, even as THE_THEORY_OF_CONSPIRACY
he tries to dispel it.
For example: he discusses the difficulty
of finding a publisher for the work at
hand as evidence that his thesis may be
correct: the cliques don't like to hear But then it's okay with
criticism. me if he dares to call
it "conspiracy"...
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