Three Links From The Bibliophile Stalker

Here are three interesting links I picked up from The Bibliophile Stalker's blog:

1. How the New York Times See SF/F (c/o Ms. Ellen Datlow's blog). An excerpt of the various quotes:

"Maybe the right question to ask about Neil Gaiman isn't ''Why is he so
fixated on dreams?'' but ''Why aren't more of his fellow fantasy writers as
obsessed with the topic as he is?'' After all, dreams would seem to be the ideal
subject matter for any author of speculative fiction."
---"Dreamland," Nov. 5, 2006

" 'Dune,'' published in 1965, remains a perfect, self-contained work of
science fiction."
---"Dune Babies," Sept. 24, 2006

"HERE'S a question I don't expect to come anywhere close to answering by the
end of this column: Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so
geeky?"
---"It's All Geek to Me," March 5, 2006

"Even in a science fiction writer´s most inaccurate predictions, there are
sometimes valuable truths to be gleaned."

---"Alice's Alias," Aug. 5, 2006

"I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction
can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers."
---"Elsewhere's Children," Feb. 3, 2008

2. Guest blogger Matthew Cheney: "If I'd Only Known: Writing Advice To My Younger Self". An excerpt:

I've been to all sorts of different writing workshops over the years. I'll probably go to more in the future. I like being around people who care about writing, and I love talking shop. But when I started going to workshops, and at first when I was an undergraduate in NYU's Dramatic Writing Program, I thought workshops would teach me The Secret. I'd read the writing guides -- heck, I'd memorized them! -- and I hadn't learned what The Secret was, so I figured it must be kept by the teachers of writing workshops.

Here's The Secret: There is no Secret.

I really learned that when one of my NYU teachers, a wonderful writer himself and a marvelous teacher, asked me how I wrote so consistently. I was flabbergasted. "Practice?" I said sheepishly. "I thought so," he said, apparently disappointed. He thought I'd found The Secret and could tell it to him.

Publication can be fun, but I don't think a healthy psyche finds it much more than that. If you haven't been able to find balance and contentment in your life, publishing won't help you, and, if anything, it may hurt. It may encourage arrogance or it may cause new neuroses -- the common fear, for instance, among many successful artists of all sorts that one day somebody will find out "the truth" and prove to the world that you are a fraud.

There's more to life than writing, but writing can be a way to discover life. Use it for that, and you'll surprise yourself sometimes with what you find. Those occasional moments of discovery make all the false starts, clunky sentences, discarded pages, missed opportunities, embarrassing mistakes, and creative failures disappear just long enough to stop stinging.

3. The Internet Vs. Books: Peaceful Coexistence. An excerpt:

In theory, a tool like Google should free us to be more creative. In reality, there are pitfalls.

Jan Frel is an editor at the progressive news site AlterNet and a cultural critic who takes a wider perspective, holding that writing in general, rather than a reliance on oral tradition, has had a deleterious effect on culture. "This is a weird aberration," she says, "all these people writing instead of one story being written by many people."

Frel likes the open-endedness of an Internet where "you can imagine knowledge and then find it." But there is a downside, which, according to Frel, is rather dire: "Pretty good has become the new perfection."

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn memorized passages of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," he had no choice but to enact the modernist version of oral traditions. This was not an expression of collective culture so much as an extreme example of what T.S. Eliot called "the individual talent."

Today's blogs are a mutation of Solzhenitsyn's modernist mythmaking -- where the merely personal becomes a matter of permanent record. Increasingly, mainstream writers cite blogs. Political journalists use them as sources. According to CommonSenseMedia.org, 74% of journalists recently surveyed regularly read blogs, and 84% "say they would or already have used blogs as a primary or secondary source for articles."

Books require a different sort of communion with one's subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory -- more tactile, more participatory. I know more or less where, folio-wise, Eliot gets nasty about the Jews in his infamous 1933 lecture series "After Strange Gods," but I always have to read around a bit to find the exact quote, and the time spent softens the bite of his anti-Semitism because the hateful remarks were made amid smart ones. For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.

"The Internet is a volume in our library," Ackerman says, "a colorful, miscellaneous, and serendipitous one -- but not a replacement for books, and certainly not an alternative to spending time in the world and just paying attention to things." Moulitsas believes it's the future, and the old guard needs to get with the times.

For the time being, both of them are right.