Workshopping with Flaubert, and Other News

Big data doesn’t care what you learned in college. Big data laughs at you and your myopic conception of “the author.” Big data takes an active pleasure in making you go, like, that’s fucking crazy! So big data has determined that Shakespeare probably collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on the three Henry VI plays, and the New Oxford Shakespeare editions are happy to announce it: “For the New Oxford Shakespeare scholars ran tests to determine whether authors like Marlowe could be reliably identified by the ways they used language—like frequent use of certain articles, and certain words commonly occurring in a row, or being close to each other in the text. Once this was determined, researchers applied these patterns back to texts, to see if they suggested an author other than Shakespeare. If results came out positive, further tests were run … Marlowe appears to have written most of Henry VI, Part 1, while Shakespeare wrote the largest share of Part 3. Lead authorship on Part 2 is harder to identify.”

Before the culture of the workshop emerged, with its blandishments and its “constructive criticism,” there was Flaubert, who really put himself out there: “Flaubert is often described as a writer’s writer; but students of creative writing should be warned that he is not a would-be writer’s writer. [Michel Winock’s new biography] gives a good sense of the unrelenting misery of composition: ‘grinding away at it, digging into it, turning it over and over, rummaging about in it.’ Flaubert was referring here, not to a whole book, but to a single sentence. Over four afternoons and evenings, his friends listened in silence while he recited his Temptation of Saint Anthony, which had taken three years to write, and then told him that it should either be completely rewritten or thrown on the fire. This is perhaps not what writers’ groups call ‘mutual support’, but it was an impressive act of kindness. The final version, published twenty-five years later, was much improved.”

You’re an adult now, and you can take any kind of quiz you want. May I recommend Nero’s Almanac, a very old, very pedigreed literary quiz edited by Ian Patterson? He explains: “Nemo’s Almanac is a long-running literary quiz, which may sound like a pointless thing to write about but it’s—almost—an important cultural phenomenon. It’s also at a critical moment in its history, representing as it does a radically different pace, mode and rationale of intellectual inquiry from the instant gratification of curiosity that the internet has made possible. It consists of 72 quotations, plus one more on the cover, arranged according to monthly themes (this year’s include Hats, Coal, Novelty, Foxgloves, Silence and Socialism). It was started by a governess called Mrs Larden (first name unknown) in 1892 as an almanac and quiz for her charges. The fourth editor, Katherine Watson, who ran a bookshop in Burford, turned it over to John Fuller in 1970. The editorship subsequently passed toAlan Hollinghurst, who in turn passed it on to the late Gerard Benson, who was followed by Nigel Forde; and now I am Nemo and the Almanac has become my responsibility.”

Molly Crabapple interviewed several New York street vendors to see what their working lives are like. Guess what? They’re not doing so well: “A labyrinthine bureaucracy governs a street vendor’s life. Fifty-four pages of rules regulate food sellers, covering health rules, limiting them to certain streets, even forbidding them from tucking their licenses into their shirts. If vendors sometimes don’t fully understand the rules, police know them even less, leaving a huge margin for miscommunication, error and quota-fulfilling tickets … New York tells itself a story. It goes like this. We are sharp-elbowed bastards who live in filth, surrounded by sewer rats, but with enough chutzpah, drive and determination, any of us can rise high enough to scrape the sky. It’s a myth, of course, and like all myths, it contains a narrow shard of truth. But with each year that shard shrinks, under the weight of gentrification, corporations and police.”

Is Bob Dylan a fan of The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interviews? Evidence suggests a resounding quite possibly.

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2eqrmRg

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