If there’s one thing I think all writers have in common it’s that they are full of themselves. Every writer you’ll encounter has the answer for you, whatever your question might be, because they are an authority on the subject at hand. This comes from long hours spent reading books on esoteric subjects, studying whatever has grabbed their interest that particular day, and the fact that writers, on the most basic level, are hungry for any information that could prove to be inspirational to them. In our modern times, we are lucky to have a repository like Wikipedia. What writer out there hasn’t spent hours reading articles on Wikipedia, clicking through links to take them to related subjects, sometimes ending a far leap in topic from where they began. Sometimes, I’ll look up to the Wikipedia searchbar in my browser and have no recollection of searching for the topic that still resides there. But ultimately, all this information we absorb is because we are striving to become an authority on everything. Ask my friends: I always have the answer for any question presented. Whether that answer is the correct one is another story, but I will always have something to say.

I mention this idea of the Writer’s Ego having just finished reading John Fante’s Ask The Dusk. Our protagonist in this novel is Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer who has moved to Los Angeles to find his fame. What struck me as real, and very funny, is how full of himself Bandini is. In the preface to the edition I read (pictured above), Charles Bukowski, a writer obviously and admittedly inspired by Fante, states this very same amusement. When having a fight with his wife, Bukowski would summon Fante’s egotistical writer and scream, “Don’t call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!” Throughout the novel, Bandini speaks to himself of his own genius and talent, often referring to the one story he has published and how fantastic it is. “I wonder if he’s handsome, that Bandini fellow, author of that brilliant Little Dog Laughed.”

Bandini wavers at times, allowing his self-esteem to plummet when things don’t go precisely the way he hopes. But he always returns to a booming ego, talking himself up, praising himself to himself. It’s Bandini this, Bandini that… how could you treat Bandini like this, the Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed and the Long Lost Hills? At one point in the novel, after beating himself up over soiling the good morals of a woman (in his own mind at least) by sleeping with her, it happens that an earthquake strikes the city. In a lesser work, a character might simply take the earthquake as some sort of portent and reflect on life. But to Arturo Bandini, he himself is solely responsible for the earthquake and any death it causes.

Now there were screams. Then dust. Then crumbling and roaring. I turned round and round in a circle. I had done this. I had done this. I stood with my mouth open, paralyzed, looking about me. I ran a few steps toward the sea. Then I ran back.

You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God. You did it.

Fante has distilled the Writer’s Ego down to an extremely comical, yet entirely believable character with Arturo Bandini. While Bandini’s story is not without its sadness, throughout Ask The Dust we are shown the writer as center of the universe, the writer as arrogance personified. Even when Bandini puts himself down, or purports modesty or temperance, it is to feed the wild ego that exists at his very core. “How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, men and beast alike.”

The writer develops such an ego, I believe, because writing itself is such a solitary exercise. When one spends so much time searching one’s own mind for clues about life’s truths, it’s only natural that they will start to believe all their answers are golden. And really, anybody who thinks that people will hungrily devour any words they put to a page must be suffused with ego. Why you? Why your words and not somebody else’s? It’s because you are Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed, great genius of our time, a writer for the ages! Being writers, we’ve all got a little bit of Arturo Bandini in us and there’s nothing wrong with that… you’ve got to be a little crazy, a little wild with ego, to succumb to being an artist of any stripe. A writer would suffer, I think, without such an ego; if you can’t stand behind your work, if you try to please everyone else over yourself, you’ll never find your voice. And maybe that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about a writer’s voice, the voice of their ego, and when we find it we have finally allowed our ego to surface with all the good and bad it brings. A writer’s true charge is to harness that ego, to allow it to flourish without thinking our actions caused a natural disaster, to know what it is that we do not know… and to find those answers. “Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool. But I couldn’t help it.“

The man responsible for sparking my interest in both reading and writing, Jerome David Salinger, has died. BBC News is reporting that he “died of natural causes, his son said in a statement released by his literary agent.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

Dear people:

Today I stumbled upon the very awesome blog Letters of Note. In their own words, “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” From the letter of a child detailing his rocket ship designs “to a top scientist,” to a letter from Einstein proclaiming that “the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” this blog could entertain you for hours. But what struck me was a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr to his family after he escaped Dresden at the end of World War II. The experiences outlined in Vonnegut’s letter are both horrifying and incredibly worthy of respect. And on an even more visceral level, it makes me feel like writers today are all academic pansies. How many modern writers do you know “were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters” or lived through a massive bombing raid that “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden?” Horrible as it may be, it’s also pretty badass.

This experience of Vonnegut’s and the events outlined in this letter are what inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was what his underground slaughterhouse-cum-prison was known as to his German captors. Vonnegut’s letter is not only an enlightening piece of literary history, it is a fantastic document of world history as well. It demonstrates to us how awful war is, how children writing to their parents had to begin letters with statements like “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’”

I’ve posted the scans of the letter below, which were originally available here at archive.org. If you check out Vonnegut’s letter at Letters of Note, you can read it transcribed as well and may soon find yourself sifting through all the other letters in their collection.

The internet-as-publisher has, for a long time, been given a bad reputation by the literati and print publishing world. Work published online has been seen as somewhat inferior to work published in print, mostly because it’s labeled as more of a vanity thing. Anybody can start a website or blog and put their work out there. Moreover, anybody can start an online literary journal and distribute the work of others. There’s little oversight, or at least it may be perceived as such, and the quality of both writing and editing is suspect. Print, however, has a long history of authority and quality and is therefore, by inertia alone, the top tier of what any aspiring writer could want.

But if running this blog for what’s coming on a year has taught me anything, it’s that this assumption, which once held validity in the public eye and in my own mind, has become completely false.

True, getting accepted into a respected print journal is an admirable accomplishment and a noble goal. But I’m inclined to think that the more important accomplishment for any writer is obtaining readership. The internet, as compared to a printed journal, offers near unlimited readership. More than that, upon being published online your work is submitted to an easily searchable digital library that will never go away. Being published in print limits you not only to a journal’s regular subscriber base and the booksellers through which they may distribute, but you’re also limited by time. How long before any particular issue of a journal goes out of print forever? Six months? One year? And what of that aforementioned subscriber base, how many people does that really entail? Is it in the thousands or merely in the hundreds? When you publish your work in a print journal, how many people are actually reading your story?

Let’s look at this question from a different perspective: technology. Ten years ago, at the beginning of the new millennium, how many people who you knew had a cell phone or an mp3 player? Ask yourself that same question but apply it to the present time. Do you know anybody right now, apart from maybe a grandparent or two, who doesn’t have these things or some device that does both? Now let’s think about books and technology. The phenomenon of the e-reader has yet to fully take off, but the Amazon Kindle has certainly proved to be a success and Barnes and Noble couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new Nook over the holiday season. As these devices mature, as the technology progresses, as the prices decline, all people who love reading will own an e-reader. It’s not a question of “if” it’s a question of “when.” Trust me, I love the smell of an old book as much as anybody out there; I love digging through the stacks at a used bookstore looking for treasures. Books-as-ephemera is my thing, as I’ve said many times here. But the reality is that era is over. Our lives are infiltrated by all things digital more and more everyday and to deny it, or to cling to the past out of nostalgia or fear or whatever, is simply being a luddite. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating something for the sake of nostalgia, but to deny something wholeheartedly because of nostalgia is akin to sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “I can’t hear you!”

The truth is, while printed books will always remain for the sake of nostalgia, as collector’s items, as a higher-priced “print!” edition to accompany a digital download, the internet and digital media are unequivocally the future of literature.

I am surprised daily by the amount of traffic this blog receives and it’s enlightening to see which posts garner the most traffic. Even more interesting than that, a number of posts have been viewed by over a thousand people. Each month is better than the last in terms of traffic and as long as the content here is worthwhile to people, that trend won’t subside. The print publishing world is a constant struggle, an uphill battle filled with middlemen and people who all want a piece of the pie. Online, however, you are in charge of everything. There are no page or word limits. It is a true Democracy on the internet, despite it being viewed as a digital Wild West. If you produce quality, people will come. There is no agent or editor determining whether or not your writing is marketable, there is no undergraduate or MFA candidate sussing out the best stories for their university’s journal… there is only the reader. You write for yourself and the reader alone will determine your work’s worth.

I admit, this idea is not yet fully realized but it’s silly to deny that it won’t soon become reality. It’s also silly to think that middlemen will go away; they won’t. Editors are important to cull together a collection, much as a curator does for a gallery exhibit, but publishing and editing and writing will be much more populist in the near future. Agents may have a tougher time in the future, as they will be less necessary (if at all), but if there’s money to be made someone will figure out a way. Ultimately, though, despite the quantity of writing that will be available online, the quality of the work is what will make a writer both prevalent and relevant — not their access to print.

What do you think?

It appeared for a while that the novella was dead. A form length so often employed by writers of the the late 1800s and early 1900s, the novella in the modern day is sometimes looked down upon. Most of the major publishing houses won’t touch them unless you’re already a big name, they’re too long for literary journals to print, so the general consensus is either trim it down or fatten it up. But the novella has a long and worthy history. Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, these (among others) are the great novellas we know. The modern novella, however, is not as easy to put one’s finger on.

Then I found John Madera’s excellent essay on the subject, Call Me Fish-Owl: Reflecting on the Novella’s neither Fish nor Fowl Status. Mostly Madera addresses what it means to be a novella; that is to say, how long is a novella truly? This is something not easily determined and it’s debatable whether or not this even needs to be determined. Following his treatise is a well-compiled list of over sixty writers, editors, and publishers and their favorite novellas. Just recently, Madera published an addendum to his original essay called Little Monsters: Recommended Novellas. Here, he gives us even more writers and their favorite novellas. John deserves heaps of praise for putting this all together and you should certainly check it out.

With publishers like Melville House and their Classic Novellas and Contemporary Novellas series, the Miami University Press Novella Contest, and blogs such as John Madera’s championing their return, novellas definitely have a shot in the modern publishing world. When you don’t quite want to commit to a 300+ page novel, but a short story just isn’t enough to satiate your appetite, where do you go?