Mascara
>Captivities and Escapes
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In N+1 Magazine, Benjamin Kunkel reflects on the state of U.S. literature since 2000 for the Norwegian literary magazine Bokvennen. As Kunkel points out, the works that have emerged in the last decade are confined to an aesthetic of pleasurable realism, absent perhaps any real truth: “It doesn’t necessarily condemn, any more than it vindicates, the renovated realism of the past decade to notice that it has more often been defended in terms of pleasure than of reality; but it seems worth observing that this has been the case.”
http://www.altimoniere.it/grgphoto/books2.php
“London, 2010” by Greg Salvatori @ grgphoto.com
In a similar vain, but with more precise incisions into the current state of Anglo-American creative writing, Zadia Smith maps out two paths in The New York Review of Books, noting that “A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.” Smith continues: “In this version of our literary history, the last man standing is the Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary persistence. But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most.”
An Australian publisher Barry Scott recounts in Overland his explorations into the small and independent publishing industry in the US, looking for a way to nurture a diversity of books within a confining corporate culture that values sameness: “What I saw didn’t dispel my fears regarding the economic viability of independent presses: consumers are ultimately going to want what they have heard about repeatedly, something that comes more easily with a large marketing budget. Yet I was reassured by the initiatives of small publishers to nurture a vibrant culture of writing and reading.”
The state of literary publishing in the US may be a symptom of an increasing professionalizing of creative writing, turning the craft of writing into status motivated labor. This is suggested by writer Alex Kuo at Mascara in his discussion of MFA programs in the U.S. and their development in China: “Today, writers are joiners and networkers who go to conferences, our professional identity socially and academically stapled to tenure, promotion and bureaucracy. This international organization now has more than 500 member colleges and programs. Its services include publications such as the program directors handbook. Oddly enough, such a how-to manual does not exist for any other academic field, physics, law or history.“
And so perhaps we need to cross borders and look beyond the deadening effects of “factory” creativity to find new perspectives on the relationships of creative work and culture. Brian T. Edwards writes a beautiful essay in A Public Space on the new generation of Egyptian writers: “During the past decade, a generation of young writers who are breaking lots of rules—of what writing in Arabic is supposed to look like, of what young Egyptians can express about the world around them and how they might do so, and of what a new cohort of men and women might say about life in a city layered with centuries, even millennia, of intertwined cultural forms—has marked a significant shift in contemporary Egyptian literature.”
Feeling the need to escape into the captivities of the past, Doug Bruns meditates on imprisonment and reading and the pleasures of both at The Millions: “Henry David Thoreau too, famously, went into a loose-knit confined self-exile. . . Like Montaigne, Thoreau was a reader of classic literature, preferring, the original Greek or Latin. He recorded that at Walden he had a copy of The Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu story of Lord Krishna, a selection perhaps not unusual for the quintessential American Transcendentalist. He warned against relying too much on literature as a means of transcendence and found the common literature of the day annoyingly unsophisticated.”
But what if our “cabin in the woods” was made out of books? What if our captivity and our escape were intertwined? Slovakian artists Matej Kren creates massive and dense structures completely from books. They have a haunting feel in our age of digital publishing. The work is currently on display at Museo d’Arte di Moderna di Bologna.
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from “Scanners” by Matej Kren @ Museo d’Arte di Moderna di Bologna
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