Online haters in the low-budget literary biz | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Skip to primary content
I’m a big fan of John Lennon (the American author, not the English musician, but, sure, I’m a fan of the musician too). I’ve read most of his books, and it saddens me that literature is such a niche interest that even a versatile, talented, and accessible novelist such as Lennon can’t make a living out of it. OK, I understand the economics: if there were more money to be made from writing fiction, more people would be doing it, there’d be more competition, so it’s not clear that Lennon himself would thrive in that environment. But still.
Lennon’s an interesting case in that he’s had a certain amount of success–early books being published by serious commercial presses and getting respected reviews, and these books made it into stores to the extent that readers such as me came across them), he gets asked to write for the London Review of Books (all they ever publish of me is letters!) and he has a comfortable job teaching at an Ivy League university–but his fiction nowadays . . . ummm, "disappears without a trace" would be putting it too strongly, but readers have to go and search for it. There are just too many people out there who can write well and would like to write for a living, and too few people who want to pick up a book and read a story. The numbers don’t work out.
The above is all background to a weird and kind of mysterious story, which is that there’s someone online who hates Lennon’s guts, but not for any personal reason, just professional grievances of some sort. The person in question is Colin Fleming, and he seems to be, like Lennon himself, a moderately successful writer, which, as discussed, seems like a frustrating position to be in. Fleming has a low opinion of Lennon’s work. That’s fine; literary judgment is subjective. But he’s so angry at Lennon, which just seems odd to me. Lennon’s just some guy, right? Fleming’s blog reminds me of a wacky book from fifty years ago by disaffected journalist Richard Kostelanetz (see some discussion here). I find something fascinating about these cul-de-sacs of literature and publishing–but it’s disturbing to see it happening real time, directed at a real person.
If you want to draw connections, you can note that Lennon once reviewed a book by James Lasdun who once wrote a book about how someone had stalked him. Fleming doesn’t appear to be a stalker; he’s just really angry in a way that seems disproportionate to whatever set him off. At least, that’s my perspective; Fleming seems angry that Lennon has reached literary heights while writing really bad stuff, but, as I see it, Lennon is just getting by–publishing four stories in the New Yorker over a twenty-year period isn’t enough to pay the bills–and I think he’s an excellent writer. I get that Fleming is angry, but it doesn’t seem to me that he’s picking an appropriate target.
P.S. Just incidentally, I think Fleming underestimates the difficulty of coming up with a good title. Coming up with a good title is harder than it looks (unless you’re Donald Westlake). When people can do it, they deserve our respect. When they can’t, they deserve our sympathy, not our mockery. Even some great books have mediocre titles.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply<br>Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *<br>Comment *<br>Name
Website
Art
Artificial intelligence
Bayesian Statistics
Causal Inference
Decision Analysis
Economics
Jobs
Literature
Miscellaneous Science
Miscellaneous Statistics
Multilevel Modeling
Obituaries
Papers
Political Science
Public Health
Sociology
Sports
Stan
Statistical Computing
Statistical Graphics
Teaching
Zombies
Quote from above: "Anyway, the level of psychological and moral immaturity to possibly play a role in this phenomenon seems…
Quote from above: "The only sex pests I have met at academic conferences are older male academics who married much…
Replying to Somebody: Yes. The Mac trick of unified memory speeded things up (but it's pretty old news by now).…
Because it turns LLMs from something capable of intelligence into a search engine that consumes several orders of magnitude more…
I did wince a bit after I hit "publish" on that comment, because only then did I realize it amounted…
Bob: I can't speak for Julia, but I disagree with you when you say that Stan is not "at the…
The new Macbooks have pretty decent GPUs and are very cheap. Their flop throughput obviously isn’t better than a 3080,…
"as soon as SIMD compute gets another order of magnitude cheaper. " You may have a long wait. I'm running…
My understanding is it is actually difficult to avoid making your software turing complete. Like you may want to for…
One of the great joys of using modern AIs is the efficiency gain in executing the concept-theory-experiment loop. This is…
This article is awesome. I don't follow the logic here. : "I’d expect...