11 ms·

The emptiness of literature written for the market

57 points by samclemens 3y ago

nathan_compton 3y ago
I'm not sure if its some weird attempt to engage reactionaries or what, but, while I agree with Dillon here that Markets commodify things, this thing with Elizabeth Gilbert and the Ukraine thing is a big nothing burger which, I think, really undermines the whole piece. She voluntarily delayed the publication of a novel because of a war. I happen to think this is a little goofy, but its hardly an outrage against free speech or anything. I like free speech, but just because someone chooses not to say something does not mean an attack on free speech has been made. Decorum is not censorship, peer pressure is not censorship, blah blah blah. As with most things, I think we ought to take free speech most seriously when powerful actors (states, multinational corporations, terrorist groups, others willing to use violence) target the realm of ideas to get or maintain power. If only things were always so cut and dry, but I think delaying the publication of "The Snow Forest" is a pretty weird place to start this essay.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- klodolph 3y ago
  The fact that it is voluntary is kinda beside the point. If you define "free speech" in such a way that you draw a line somewhere, you're missing out on a way to talk about some of the more insidious ways that our society polices speech. Peer pressure is not censorship, but we still need to talk about it.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    Your comment is sort of self contradictory. > in such a way that you draw a line somewhere, you're missing out on a way to talk about some of the more insidious ways that our society polices speech > Peer pressure is not censorship, but we still need to talk about it. Right - we can talk about it as peer pressure. We don't need to group all modulations of the public discourse as "violations" of "free speech" or "failures" to support "free speech."
    - klodolph 3y ago
      Comments like these are easily my least favorite kind of comments on Hacker News. Rather than trying to understand the meaning of what people say, in the articles or in the comments, we get caught up in having arguments about what the definition of some particular term is, or what the right term to communicate some concept is. I think the correct response to seeing a comment that appears "self-contradictory" is to read it again, and see if there is some alternative meaning behind the comment that makes sense--some interpretation other than our first impression. That's what we do with literature, and I don't think we should be lowering our standards for reading comprehension just because we're online.
- soneca 3y ago
  I think the delaying of the publication of “The Snow Forest”, more exactly, the actions and words of the author about it, was an excellent place to start this essay. It pretty effectively construct the context to culminate in the sentence: ” How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?” Which is a great summarization of the point that the author is going to discuss in the way they want to discuss it. That artists are not bad, or evil, but they are doing art with the emptiness of corporations’ public relations. I read it as a brilliant way to start an essay. It introduces the topic with a concrete example that provides context of what the author is going to talk about, in a short, straightforward form (unlike, e.g. how the New Yorker tends do these introductions, with long, writer-centered ramblings). I saw no intention of fabricating outrage or t baiting in this introduction at all. Not a single drop of it to be honest. Much less that is supposed to be pointing to the fact that this example is something big, strong to any side of the current ideological disputes. On the contrary, it is there just to show how empty it all is. Irrelevant one-Star reviews, about irrelevant concerns of association to the current war, followed by an irrelevant stance, justified with an irrelevant speech, all coming together to become an irrelevant act of pseudo-activism. All so empty. Which is the whole point.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    " In other words, she says as little as possible, passing on the easy opportunity to defend her right to free expression and anyone’s right to read or not read whatever they want, both of which are currently and repeatedly threatened in Russia, Ukraine and the United States." I'd agree with you except for this sentence, which frames the controversy as about free speech.
    - soneca 3y ago
      I disagree. It just says that the essay author thinks there was an opportunity for the book author to do a real act of activism. Yet, they still chose emptiness. It is just there, in my view, to strengthen the argument that it was not the context that made it empty, it was a choice. It doesn’t frame the controversy as about free speech at all, in my opinion.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  All publicity is publicity. This delay means i now know the title of the book. Yesturday, i did not know that the book existed. Through all the debate, I see a sucessful marketing strategy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- LanzVonL 3y ago
  [dead]
Vecr 3y ago
The article cites the book Everything and Less by Mark McGurl (on the state of the publishing business) that describes how publishers require fiction to be instantly gratifying and "therapeutic" (not presenting challenging ideas, I assume), and calls it "fiction as a service", and this essentially prevents books from being published that could be seen in new light in the future as values on literature change, even if they don't immediately please a group of vocal Internet users today, even sometimes ones who've not even read the book.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  It is kind of interesting to me how much the commodification of text per se dovetails with the appearance of generative AI for text. Generative AI excels at producing this kind of pabulum and if you think about how it works, it sort of makes sense - these AI generate what comes next based on statistics in their corpus. They are, fundamentally, backward looking and non-ruminative. Before the AI weirdos pile in, I don't think this is a fundamental limitation on AI, just an interesting reality of the current strategy. But to respond to your comment in a larger sense, McLuhan once wrote that everyone sees reality in the rear view mirror and only artists look out the window to see what is really happening and what is coming. (I always think of Paul Verhoeven and Robocop when I think about this, since Robocop is uncannily prophetic,or even Die Hard, which in two hours seems to contain the conceptual ingredients of the 2000s in a little over two hours.) The point is that artists are by nature alienated from the public anyway - most truly enlightening messages are the kind of thing few people want to hear. It has always been the trick of good artists to smuggle those ideas into people's brains via one Trojan Horse or another, penetrating whatever guardrails exist at the time to police the mental life of the culture. So, in that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
OJFord 3y ago
There are more classics from years past than I'll ever have time for, I have no need for contemporary bestsellers nor worsesellers. Unfortunate perhaps for my counterpart 100y from now if the article is correct and there isn't the 21st century to sample like I can read the 20th, but I think that's hard to judge in the moment, especially when (inherently in the argument) critical 'edgy' unpopular classics-in-the-making aren't getting the attention. In the meantime, there's a large pool that's stood the test of time to draw from, and if you know what you like and just want more ('instant gratification') of it, it makes sense that that would be churned out contemporarily, as I'm sure it was in the past - especially serialised in magazines and newspapers.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  The problem with this attitude is that you're missing out on reading material that reflects in incisive ways on genuinely contemporary issues in ways that Dostoevsky can't. Obviously books from the past can and do enlighten us about the present, and they don't literally have to talk about CNN to be clarifying about the nature of propaganda, but there are limits to what Plato can tell you about a world with 8 billion people in it. In a way, your attitude is akin to only reading scientific articles from more than 50 years ago because those have "stood the test of time." In science, you can see how silly this is - not only is that material often just wrong, undeveloped, etc, but relegating yourself to only papers older than 50 years would leave you totally blind to contemporary scientific progress, including whatever seeds are presently germinating that will change the world in the future.
  - krona 3y ago
    The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
    - nathan_compton 3y ago
      Yeah, dude, that's a set of words you can type. It hardly constitutes an argument. Globalized financial markets are new. The internet is new. Machines you can converse with are new. CRISPR is new, Quantum Field Theory is new, RNA vaccines are new. While I agree its true that less is novel than some people believe, the idea that nothing in the contemporary experience is worth meditating on beyond what people in the past have said is, I think, obviously absurd, pithy quotations notwithstanding.
spacecadet 3y ago
Gibberish. But yeah market books all look/sound the same, hasnt it been this way since the 90s?
- skywhopper 3y ago
  The 1890s maybe or 1790s. All the trash from back then has been forgotten but there was just as much of it as there is today. This is not a new phenomenon.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    I think there's probably a lot more trash today. There's a lot more of everything. The number of books published each year in the US has grown by something like 300x over the past one hundred years, if you only count traditional publishing (and not print-on-demand).
  - constantly 3y ago
    There’s lots more today. You can go to Amazon and search for any very specific niche subject and find AI generated books that claim to address that subject. The ability to churn out useless garbage with few resources is at an all time high and will continue to increase.
- bregma 3y ago
  The 1590s? Do you think Shakespeare was the only one writing plays and sonnets for Tudor mass consumption? Heck, do you think Homer was the only poet to ever don a toga way back in the day?
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    I’ve always wondered about that. Yeah, you can objectively say Shakespeare was a master of the written word based on how many new words and phrases he coined and all that, but who are we to otherwise judge the qualitative merits of Elizabethan writing? How does a modern gauge whether Christopher Marlowe or any other contemporary authors are any better or worse than the Bard himself? What if there were other plays that were superior but simply got lost to history?
thriftwy 3y ago
The cited plot sounds so bullshit. If you try to interfere with USSR industrialization in 1930s, you're going to GULAG camp very fast and local NKVD are happy that they don't have to invent fake saboteurs this month to fill their plan.
- MrRolleyes 3y ago
  [dead]
- culebron21 3y ago
  Well, before that, there was no environmentalism at the time in Siberia. At least from talks with my historian friend (who worked in Novosibirsk Institute of History of academy of science), he never mentioned any such cases or that this was on any agenda. Second, industrialization on large scale in Siberia happened first since 1905 after the Trans-Siberian railway was built, and later only in WWII in the '40s, when factories from the Western part were evacuated. In '30s, the majority of population were villagers, and for them the biggest concern in late '20s were taxes, in '30s it was the dysfunctional state farms that everyone were forced into, and famine. And industrialization for them was a new American tractor that produced in a licensed factory, and some factory in the district capital, where some people could go become low-skilled workers. IDK, if it tells about rural or urban areas -- but cities were small (Novosibirsk that has 1.6M now, had just 120-150K then) to make a factory or coal heating in individual houses a problem. Environmentalism in the USSR came to agenda probably in the 70s, but became openly discussed after 1987 with Glasnot policy, when lots of such ideas started penetrating from other countries.
- shakow 3y ago
  Yeah, if one wants a more realist overview of Siberian environmentalism, they should rather read Borodin's The Third Truth. https://archive.org/details/thirdtruth0000boro https://archive.org/details/thirdtruth0000boro
MrRolleyes 3y ago
[dead]
DanielBMarkham 3y ago
I am moving from the tech world into long form fiction, so I find the intersection of fiction and comments from folks on HN interesting. Definitions matter. To me, art is emotional impact over time. Good art can impact you emotionally from hundreds of years ago. Bad art doesn't even hold your attention all the way through the presentation. (The impact does not have to be positive or negative; some of the best art can really bum you out) I was watching an interview with an animator a while back. What did he think of all the new cool animation tools? He gushed over the awesome tech and the wonderful talent that's out today. It's amazing and incredible compared to just a few decades ago. Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn't criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way. We have seen this happen to fiction over the last 50-70 years. Even when it's good, it's all kinda the same anymore. It's different and excellent, but in the same ways all fiction is. It's not unusual when experiencing a book or movie to get all hyped up by what you expect the experience to be, to gush while experiencing it how awesome it was, and to have no recollection at all even a month later what was so good about it. If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc. It's all stuff over the past ten years, and it always is. We are in a state of perpetual forgetting and recycling canned emotions. The classics aren't the classics because they're better. They're the classics because they encourage us to create the same level of quality material. Sometimes they do so over our lifetime. This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think most artists see this. But there's a hella lot of denial going on, mostly from folks looking to pump up the next plasticine marketing special effects kabuki dance.
- soneca 3y ago
  > ” If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc.” I, in general, agree with your perspective, but this example does not follow in my opinion. In particular if you add the expression “the best X of all tine”, then I certainly expected the opposite bias. People will ignore what was done in the past 20 years and go to classics. And if the audience answering the question is people around 20 years old, then I would expect a lot of “I don’t know if all time, but my preferred is…” and then something recent. I.e., I expect humility in the answer and providing an answer from what they know. Which is not, IMO, an effect of marketing or commoditization, but just of the limited time they exist in the Earth.
MrMyWay 3y ago
[dead]

57 points by samclemens 3y ago

I'm not sure if its some weird attempt to engage reactionaries or what, but, while I agree with Dillon here that Markets commodify things, this thing with Elizabeth Gilbert and the Ukraine thing is a big nothing burger which, I think, really undermines the whole piece. She voluntarily delayed the publication of a novel because of a war. I happen to think this is a little goofy, but its hardly an outrage against free speech or anything. I like free speech, but just because someone chooses not to say something does not mean an attack on free speech has been made. Decorum is not censorship, peer pressure is not censorship, blah blah blah. As with most things, I think we ought to take free speech most seriously when powerful actors (states, multinational corporations, terrorist groups, others willing to use violence) target the realm of ideas to get or maintain power. If only things were always so cut and dry, but I think delaying the publication of "The Snow Forest" is a pretty weird place to start this essay.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
klodolph 3y ago
The fact that it is voluntary is kinda beside the point. If you define "free speech" in such a way that you draw a line somewhere, you're missing out on a way to talk about some of the more insidious ways that our society polices speech. Peer pressure is not censorship, but we still need to talk about it.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  Your comment is sort of self contradictory. > in such a way that you draw a line somewhere, you're missing out on a way to talk about some of the more insidious ways that our society polices speech > Peer pressure is not censorship, but we still need to talk about it. Right - we can talk about it as peer pressure. We don't need to group all modulations of the public discourse as "violations" of "free speech" or "failures" to support "free speech."
  - klodolph 3y ago
    Comments like these are easily my least favorite kind of comments on Hacker News. Rather than trying to understand the meaning of what people say, in the articles or in the comments, we get caught up in having arguments about what the definition of some particular term is, or what the right term to communicate some concept is. I think the correct response to seeing a comment that appears "self-contradictory" is to read it again, and see if there is some alternative meaning behind the comment that makes sense--some interpretation other than our first impression. That's what we do with literature, and I don't think we should be lowering our standards for reading comprehension just because we're online.
soneca 3y ago
I think the delaying of the publication of “The Snow Forest”, more exactly, the actions and words of the author about it, was an excellent place to start this essay. It pretty effectively construct the context to culminate in the sentence: ” How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?” Which is a great summarization of the point that the author is going to discuss in the way they want to discuss it. That artists are not bad, or evil, but they are doing art with the emptiness of corporations’ public relations. I read it as a brilliant way to start an essay. It introduces the topic with a concrete example that provides context of what the author is going to talk about, in a short, straightforward form (unlike, e.g. how the New Yorker tends do these introductions, with long, writer-centered ramblings). I saw no intention of fabricating outrage or t baiting in this introduction at all. Not a single drop of it to be honest. Much less that is supposed to be pointing to the fact that this example is something big, strong to any side of the current ideological disputes. On the contrary, it is there just to show how empty it all is. Irrelevant one-Star reviews, about irrelevant concerns of association to the current war, followed by an irrelevant stance, justified with an irrelevant speech, all coming together to become an irrelevant act of pseudo-activism. All so empty. Which is the whole point.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  " In other words, she says as little as possible, passing on the easy opportunity to defend her right to free expression and anyone’s right to read or not read whatever they want, both of which are currently and repeatedly threatened in Russia, Ukraine and the United States." I'd agree with you except for this sentence, which frames the controversy as about free speech.
  - soneca 3y ago
    I disagree. It just says that the essay author thinks there was an opportunity for the book author to do a real act of activism. Yet, they still chose emptiness. It is just there, in my view, to strengthen the argument that it was not the context that made it empty, it was a choice. It doesn’t frame the controversy as about free speech at all, in my opinion.
sandworm101 3y ago
All publicity is publicity. This delay means i now know the title of the book. Yesturday, i did not know that the book existed. Through all the debate, I see a sucessful marketing strategy.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
LanzVonL 3y ago
[dead]

Vecr 3y ago

The article cites the book Everything and Less by Mark McGurl (on the state of the publishing business) that describes how publishers require fiction to be instantly gratifying and "therapeutic" (not presenting challenging ideas, I assume), and calls it "fiction as a service", and this essentially prevents books from being published that could be seen in new light in the future as values on literature change, even if they don't immediately please a group of vocal Internet users today, even sometimes ones who've not even read the book.

nathan_compton 3y ago
It is kind of interesting to me how much the commodification of text per se dovetails with the appearance of generative AI for text. Generative AI excels at producing this kind of pabulum and if you think about how it works, it sort of makes sense - these AI generate what comes next based on statistics in their corpus. They are, fundamentally, backward looking and non-ruminative. Before the AI weirdos pile in, I don't think this is a fundamental limitation on AI, just an interesting reality of the current strategy. But to respond to your comment in a larger sense, McLuhan once wrote that everyone sees reality in the rear view mirror and only artists look out the window to see what is really happening and what is coming. (I always think of Paul Verhoeven and Robocop when I think about this, since Robocop is uncannily prophetic,or even Die Hard, which in two hours seems to contain the conceptual ingredients of the 2000s in a little over two hours.) The point is that artists are by nature alienated from the public anyway - most truly enlightening messages are the kind of thing few people want to hear. It has always been the trick of good artists to smuggle those ideas into people's brains via one Trojan Horse or another, penetrating whatever guardrails exist at the time to police the mental life of the culture. So, in that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

OJFord 3y ago

There are more classics from years past than I'll ever have time for, I have no need for contemporary bestsellers nor worsesellers. Unfortunate perhaps for my counterpart 100y from now if the article is correct and there isn't the 21st century to sample like I can read the 20th, but I think that's hard to judge in the moment, especially when (inherently in the argument) critical 'edgy' unpopular classics-in-the-making aren't getting the attention. In the meantime, there's a large pool that's stood the test of time to draw from, and if you know what you like and just want more ('instant gratification') of it, it makes sense that that would be churned out contemporarily, as I'm sure it was in the past - especially serialised in magazines and newspapers.

nathan_compton 3y ago
The problem with this attitude is that you're missing out on reading material that reflects in incisive ways on genuinely contemporary issues in ways that Dostoevsky can't. Obviously books from the past can and do enlighten us about the present, and they don't literally have to talk about CNN to be clarifying about the nature of propaganda, but there are limits to what Plato can tell you about a world with 8 billion people in it. In a way, your attitude is akin to only reading scientific articles from more than 50 years ago because those have "stood the test of time." In science, you can see how silly this is - not only is that material often just wrong, undeveloped, etc, but relegating yourself to only papers older than 50 years would leave you totally blind to contemporary scientific progress, including whatever seeds are presently germinating that will change the world in the future.
- krona 3y ago
  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    Yeah, dude, that's a set of words you can type. It hardly constitutes an argument. Globalized financial markets are new. The internet is new. Machines you can converse with are new. CRISPR is new, Quantum Field Theory is new, RNA vaccines are new. While I agree its true that less is novel than some people believe, the idea that nothing in the contemporary experience is worth meditating on beyond what people in the past have said is, I think, obviously absurd, pithy quotations notwithstanding.

spacecadet 3y ago

Gibberish. But yeah market books all look/sound the same, hasnt it been this way since the 90s?

skywhopper 3y ago
The 1890s maybe or 1790s. All the trash from back then has been forgotten but there was just as much of it as there is today. This is not a new phenomenon.
- klodolph 3y ago
  I think there's probably a lot more trash today. There's a lot more of everything. The number of books published each year in the US has grown by something like 300x over the past one hundred years, if you only count traditional publishing (and not print-on-demand).
- constantly 3y ago
  There’s lots more today. You can go to Amazon and search for any very specific niche subject and find AI generated books that claim to address that subject. The ability to churn out useless garbage with few resources is at an all time high and will continue to increase.
bregma 3y ago
The 1590s? Do you think Shakespeare was the only one writing plays and sonnets for Tudor mass consumption? Heck, do you think Homer was the only poet to ever don a toga way back in the day?
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  I’ve always wondered about that. Yeah, you can objectively say Shakespeare was a master of the written word based on how many new words and phrases he coined and all that, but who are we to otherwise judge the qualitative merits of Elizabethan writing? How does a modern gauge whether Christopher Marlowe or any other contemporary authors are any better or worse than the Bard himself? What if there were other plays that were superior but simply got lost to history?

thriftwy 3y ago

The cited plot sounds so bullshit. If you try to interfere with USSR industrialization in 1930s, you're going to GULAG camp very fast and local NKVD are happy that they don't have to invent fake saboteurs this month to fill their plan.

MrRolleyes 3y ago
[dead]
culebron21 3y ago
Well, before that, there was no environmentalism at the time in Siberia. At least from talks with my historian friend (who worked in Novosibirsk Institute of History of academy of science), he never mentioned any such cases or that this was on any agenda. Second, industrialization on large scale in Siberia happened first since 1905 after the Trans-Siberian railway was built, and later only in WWII in the '40s, when factories from the Western part were evacuated. In '30s, the majority of population were villagers, and for them the biggest concern in late '20s were taxes, in '30s it was the dysfunctional state farms that everyone were forced into, and famine. And industrialization for them was a new American tractor that produced in a licensed factory, and some factory in the district capital, where some people could go become low-skilled workers. IDK, if it tells about rural or urban areas -- but cities were small (Novosibirsk that has 1.6M now, had just 120-150K then) to make a factory or coal heating in individual houses a problem. Environmentalism in the USSR came to agenda probably in the 70s, but became openly discussed after 1987 with Glasnot policy, when lots of such ideas started penetrating from other countries.
shakow 3y ago
Yeah, if one wants a more realist overview of Siberian environmentalism, they should rather read Borodin's The Third Truth. https://archive.org/details/thirdtruth0000boro https://archive.org/details/thirdtruth0000boro

MrRolleyes 3y ago

[dead]

DanielBMarkham 3y ago

I am moving from the tech world into long form fiction, so I find the intersection of fiction and comments from folks on HN interesting. Definitions matter. To me, art is emotional impact over time. Good art can impact you emotionally from hundreds of years ago. Bad art doesn't even hold your attention all the way through the presentation. (The impact does not have to be positive or negative; some of the best art can really bum you out) I was watching an interview with an animator a while back. What did he think of all the new cool animation tools? He gushed over the awesome tech and the wonderful talent that's out today. It's amazing and incredible compared to just a few decades ago. Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn't criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way. We have seen this happen to fiction over the last 50-70 years. Even when it's good, it's all kinda the same anymore. It's different and excellent, but in the same ways all fiction is. It's not unusual when experiencing a book or movie to get all hyped up by what you expect the experience to be, to gush while experiencing it how awesome it was, and to have no recollection at all even a month later what was so good about it. If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc. It's all stuff over the past ten years, and it always is. We are in a state of perpetual forgetting and recycling canned emotions. The classics aren't the classics because they're better. They're the classics because they encourage us to create the same level of quality material. Sometimes they do so over our lifetime. This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think most artists see this. But there's a hella lot of denial going on, mostly from folks looking to pump up the next plasticine marketing special effects kabuki dance.

soneca 3y ago
> ” If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc.” I, in general, agree with your perspective, but this example does not follow in my opinion. In particular if you add the expression “the best X of all tine”, then I certainly expected the opposite bias. People will ignore what was done in the past 20 years and go to classics. And if the audience answering the question is people around 20 years old, then I would expect a lot of “I don’t know if all time, but my preferred is…” and then something recent. I.e., I expect humility in the answer and providing an answer from what they know. Which is not, IMO, an effect of marketing or commoditization, but just of the limited time they exist in the Earth.

MrMyWay 3y ago

[dead]