Hello all,
I’ve been slightly alarmed to get a sudden flurry of new subscribers to this almost entirely dormant newsletter in the last few days. What’s going on out there?
Anyway, now seems like a good time to decide once and for all that I’m no longer going to be doing the interviews around money in publishing. I don’t have the brain space to do them properly and they keep dragging me onto Twitter, which is where love and dreams go to die, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. If anyone wants to take the concept and run with it themselves, I would be very pleased and honoured. My sign-off tips to help address the on-going problems are the same as ever: unionise, support one another with transparency around pay, invest in your skills, don’t take any crap.
I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do with this newsletter now, I have 1300 subscribers . . . which will probably drop off now . . . come back . . . wait . . . anyone left . . . hi Mam . . . I will use this space to talk about books/art/the literary economy, update on the publication process towards my first book (I feel sick to my stomach thinking about it) and share things I’ve written in other places.
what is art?
We know the answer to this question thanks to Jack Donaghy: it’s paintings of horses.
But some people persist in not knowing this, and so a few weeks ago I went to the newly re-opened Butler Gallery in my home town of Kilkenny in Ireland. Kilkenny is a small town but it’s got a lively arts scene and a visual arts led annual arts festival. The Butler Gallery has a small permanent collection (the best stuff is Tony O’Malley’s paintings of Callan, if I’m ever rich enough to “buy art” maybe I’d start with him) and its big exhibit this summer was the photographer Richard Mosse’s work “Incoming and Grid (Moira)”. Mosse uses photographic technology to depict places of crisis in the world. Here, he used “a highly specialized surveillance camera designed for military use that captures images by detecting thermal radiation, including the heat of a human body, from more than eighteen miles away, day or night.”
To experience it, you go into a dark room and sit and watch large screens. It’s harrowing and depressing.
I read the accompanying literature waiting for the inevitable line about the artist implicating the audience in the events depicted and yes, it was there. There was nothing about how the artist himself is implicated. I thought this was interesting. As I’ve written before, I think artists should do and say whatever they want and if Richard Mosse wants to use military-grade photographic technology to depict the events at Moira refugee camp then that is absolutely what he must do. I do however find something adolescent in this framing, which you see everywhere in artistic depictions of contemporary suffering. I think most people already know they are implicated – we are human, we are alive on the earth at the same time – that’s why they go to see this art in the first place. I’m not sure what else this is doing or asking of us.
what is celebrity (?)
I was interested, like everyone else in the literary world, to read about Sally Rooney’s struggles with fame. Rooney modestly frames her experience alongside that of other reluctantly famous people but I think there is something in the quality of her experience that might make it particularly horrendous for her. Her fame is extremely unusual, literary celebrity is perhaps the rarest of all and she – as a “literary” literary novelist – is rare among the rare, for comparison we have to reach out of her genre into much more commercial publishing like that of JK Rowling or EL James. It’s interesting to think of Rooney alongside James: while Rooney can’t (yet) touch James’ sales, (according to Google, sorry, I don’t have Bookscan anymore), James has sold 125 million copies of her Fifty Shades series; with Rooney, it’s harder to tell, but I would guess it’s more around the 5 million mark (am open to insider-info, any Faber people reading this). Despite this, while James was, like Rooney, very much an author whose success was driven by social media, James has attracted nothing like the petty envy that has driven Rooney off social media entirely (James is happily tweeting to her 1million plus followers with no obvious angst involved).
Why is this? Is it because Rooney is so young and people are therefore particularly incensed by her success? I think partly. But I think it’s also something to do with their (Rooney and James’s) respective politics. Rooney’s characters are interested in the kind of politics that Twitter is interested in, and that seems to invite the kind of personal invective that masquerades as politics on that platform. James’s politics seem too bland for anyone to pay much attention to (I think she’s a remainer and there is no obvious trace of Marxism) and while she was criticised a bit for appropriating BDSM and making it palatable to “suburban women” (the absolute dregs of humanity, as we all know), it never felt as mean and nasty as that which Rooney has endured. Anyway, I hope Rooney can enjoy her success as time goes on, what’s the point of driving everyone insane with envy if you can’t have a bit of fun while doing it.
And on the subject of literary celebrity . . .
I’ve just read a proof of Timothy Ogene’s Seesaw, out in November from Swift Press. Read it in two days, the only contemporary novel I’ve come across recently that hasn’t felt like homework. It’s a bit too perfect for me – a satire on literary pomposity – and while its targets are almost too easy to skewer, a lot of people are too scared to even try these days, so I appreciate it. But it’s also quite a strange novel in unexpected and pleasing ways, with a road trip, a literary mystery and a quest for home thrown in too. I recommend.
Events etc
I’m currently working for my friend Parul Bavishi’s London Writers Salon. It’s hard to explain just how useful the Salon is for writers – if you are a writer and need some accountability or a community (and you can’t afford to pay £6K for an MA to get those things), I would recommend you check it out.
I’m also doing another course on How to Edit Fiction for Publishing Ireland in January next year. The first one sold out and was well received, so if you’re interested, get in early.
If you like In the Read and would like to support it, you can do so here.
Niamh