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podcast friday
Dec. 22nd, 2023 07:12 amSolstice post will be coming soon, as I may have actually gotten decent pictures for once. But post-processing is in order. In the meantime, happy solstice, though at present I am still unclear as to whether the wolf has swallowed the sun.
Today's episode is from DEATH // SENTENCE, "Big Fiction With Dan Sinykin." It deals with a question that I've tried to address in similar if less effective ways, which is to say "does publishing suck in a structural way more than it used to, and does this result in fewer edgy experimental litfic novels that we like?" It's a look at publishing consolidation and the unique economic conditions that allowed for particularly weird cases like Cormac McCarthy to happen. (They say unkind things about McCarthy, which I disagree with, so a heads up that if you're like me, you're probably going to be nodding along until you get to the point where they start slagging him off and then go "wtf is wrong with these people?? You try writing Blood Meridian."
But I do think the economic analysis of modern publishing is spot on. It's also interesting in terms of something I hadn't thought about from this specific angle, which is the push for litfic authors to move into genre fiction, something they say begins in McCarthy's era, pointing to the fact that Blood Meridian, while a Western, isn't a genre Western, and he didn't have commercial success until All the Pretty Horses, which is. I have a particularly ambivalent relationship to this trend. For every Station Eleven or Handmaid's Tale, you have an Oryx and Crake or Terra Nullius, which feel to me like litfic authors taking bog-standard sci-fi tropes and thinking that they can do it better than a sci-fi author can, without bothering to read anything in the genre or engage with it seriously. And it's a problem that purely experimental litfic isn't a risk that the Big Four can take, because even though it exists, probably in greater quantity than it did in the mid-century golden age of publishing—and DEATH // SENTENCE talks about it all the time—it's much harder to find and, and audiences, trained on genre categories that give them exactly what it says on the tin, are less likely to encounter it.
Spoiler for the answer always being small presses and alternative funding models such as government grants (which, thank you Canada Council or we'd have no edgy Indigenous fiction here at all). Anyway, this is a good look at the enshittification of publishing. The music is also quite good this episode.
Today's episode is from DEATH // SENTENCE, "Big Fiction With Dan Sinykin." It deals with a question that I've tried to address in similar if less effective ways, which is to say "does publishing suck in a structural way more than it used to, and does this result in fewer edgy experimental litfic novels that we like?" It's a look at publishing consolidation and the unique economic conditions that allowed for particularly weird cases like Cormac McCarthy to happen. (They say unkind things about McCarthy, which I disagree with, so a heads up that if you're like me, you're probably going to be nodding along until you get to the point where they start slagging him off and then go "wtf is wrong with these people?? You try writing Blood Meridian."
But I do think the economic analysis of modern publishing is spot on. It's also interesting in terms of something I hadn't thought about from this specific angle, which is the push for litfic authors to move into genre fiction, something they say begins in McCarthy's era, pointing to the fact that Blood Meridian, while a Western, isn't a genre Western, and he didn't have commercial success until All the Pretty Horses, which is. I have a particularly ambivalent relationship to this trend. For every Station Eleven or Handmaid's Tale, you have an Oryx and Crake or Terra Nullius, which feel to me like litfic authors taking bog-standard sci-fi tropes and thinking that they can do it better than a sci-fi author can, without bothering to read anything in the genre or engage with it seriously. And it's a problem that purely experimental litfic isn't a risk that the Big Four can take, because even though it exists, probably in greater quantity than it did in the mid-century golden age of publishing—and DEATH // SENTENCE talks about it all the time—it's much harder to find and, and audiences, trained on genre categories that give them exactly what it says on the tin, are less likely to encounter it.
Spoiler for the answer always being small presses and alternative funding models such as government grants (which, thank you Canada Council or we'd have no edgy Indigenous fiction here at all). Anyway, this is a good look at the enshittification of publishing. The music is also quite good this episode.
