Shoot the hipster

Ok, so... This is my first attempt to get to grips with a project I'm working on about indie publishing (in Melbourne, mostly). I might cover some other stuff about the project in a future post but right now I'm trying to work out just exactly *what* to say that hasn't already been said before. So, anyway, my brain works like a little bower bird collecting bits and pieces from anywhere and everywhere, so forgive me for beginning where I'm about to: with a murder.

For the longest time I've been meaning to read Richard Price's Lush Life. I've just started. I get to page 77 and make what seems like a significant discovery about our 'vic' [this is detective fiction. go with it] - he's "gonna start up some online literary magazine, raise money for a documentary, we're all gonna collaborate on a screenplay; la-la, la-la, the usual bullshit." Price paints a portrait of the guy who caught the bullet and he chooses this particular piece of info to tell us what kinda guy he is. And know what kinda guy he is? An insufferable upstart - a online literary mag type-of-guy. An insufferable hipster. Shoot him. Quick.
It struck me that this guy, Ike, is pretty much cast in the Eggers mold. And shouldn't come as any suprise to learn that the guy suspected of shooting poor old Ike is a washed up dude in his forties. Jaded. Over it. Disappointed. Jealous. This seemed to me to be a pretty neat metaphorical summation of the way indie publishing is currently examined. Indies are seen as full of energy but somehow naive. Yet to have their hopes dashed. Or else, a fascinating curiosity. An underground 'scene' that seem to matter mostly to themselves. That like the sound of their own voices. That like playing at things - diletante style. A lit mag here, a screen play there, "the usual bullshit." Of course, this is not to say that sometimes the coverage of indie press doesn't celebrate this energy and enthusiasm. But it seems like we need a little something *more*. And, let's just assume for a minute that these indie types are insufferably hip and display an unwarrented self assurance... well, so what? Doing stuff is hardly a crime, nor is it some cute little hobby. More than a century a go most writers did their work on the side. They were lawyers, doctors, what-you-will. They came home and wrote stories because they felt like it was something they wanted to do. Some were politically motivated. Others just felt they had it in them. Now, publishing/books/literature are all part of a "lifestyle" (writers, publishers, editors are all professionals; readers are still hobbyists, but most particularly are *consumers*) and so talking about people who want to work publishing stuff on the side also inevitably involves talking about a 'scene.' So, how to get beyond discussions of a scene in the indie culture without ignoring the obvious culture that does spring up around these kinds of projects?

An Embarassment of Riches...

It's a smorgasbord this morning... All of it fine blogging material and ripe for some serious consideration.
First a curio:
HarperCollins Buys Series From James Frey - NYTimes.com
Frey seems to have weathered the hoax storm quite well, and might be on his way to being the next Lemony Snicket. Though, this book of his which he is reported to have 'conceptualised' (but not actually written, it seems) is about a bunch of alien teenagers who come to earth to escape something-or-other which just sounds like someone got together over Starbucks and said "Right, how do we make ourselves a fat wad of cash on movie rights". Which, of course, is precisely what happened. A sociological study of Manhattan publishing industry-types, NOW, that really would be a study worth doing...

Next up, inspired by the Frey story I linked my way over to the full NYT rundown on Herman Rosenblatt (who came after Frey but before Seltzer). Read the whole deal here. Basically, Rosenblatt wrote a short romance story that was really too good to be true, he won a competition and took his wife out to a swell restaurant. Nice. Somewhere along the line in 1996 Oprah read about the story and the Rosenblatts when on the air to celebrate the trueness of their love. Which is funny, right? "True love" - fake story. Anyway, Rosenblatt never bothered to mention that his story was, erm, a *story* and so the whole Holocaust-survivor-love-story shtick turned out to be a real column-hogger (who'da thunkit?). Now we discover Rosenblatt fabricated his memoir. Awesome. Perhaps most awesome is the comment by Kurt Anderson noted at the end of this article which I think will be the basis for the next article I write... "Mr. Anderson compated Mr. Rosenblatt to Bernard L. Madoff, the money manager who is accused of frauding investors of $50 billion." Fraud and the fall-out of our GFC? Literary frauds, the crisis of confidence...

And finally a little coda on the case of the Bitter Novelist Who Tweets story. It's this story that makes me think we're crying out for some kind of investigation into digital media and its influence on good ol' gentlemanly publishing... Snark, Eggers, the hoaxing authors, the frantic publishers without fact checkers, the Amazon critics who turn out to be authors... It all just goes to show what a sneaky (snarky) bitchy world the writer lives in. It's like gawker but with beards....

Snark + Twitter = Trouble

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/06/30/critic_fight/index.html

A great story from Mark Elizabeth Williams about an author who took her frustrations at a bad review out on her Twitter account. Needless to say it didn't play well.
A couple of stellar highs include:
"If you want to tell xxx off, her phone number is xxx" (nice!)

and the classic apology:
"I never meant to offend anyone, and I'm truly sorry if I did" (yeah right - this is like the apology you give in class when you get caught passing notes and know you've got no power to do anything but look contrite...)

Anyways, it reminded me of the Eggers snark brouhaha a while ago, where Eggers took it upon himself to respond to his critics in a 10,000 wd email. As the author rightly notes, "that a lot of tweets!"