'Readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives'

Loved this.

Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And by this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that one gets from reading, say, Naomi Wolf's account of losing the Technicolor Wizard of Oz–like effects of her orgasms. It should be deliberately entertaining, not accidentally funny.) Most readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives, and so it is incumbent upon the writer to make them care or draw them in by being fascinating or funny or unusually observant.

-- Katie Roiphe in Slate

Carried to extremes, this attitude might be expressed with a degree of hostility:

It turned out a couple of students had complained to the chair about my comments on their stories. He showed me a page with red slashed across: "Who cares? I don't care! Make me care!"

"What did you mean by this?" he asked.

"Simply that a narrative is worthless unless the reader can be made to care about the characters and what happens to them," I said, as simply as I could.

"You were trying to tell the student that her story is worthless?"

"In its present form, it is worthless."

-- The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag

His pleas for donations unsuccessful, manic Pentecostal admits 'I need a job'

John Burton, the manic Pentecostal preacher who often uses his blog to beg for money -- my favorite post being the one where he asserted that "believers live in an different economic system" and asked for dough so he could work on a book and spend the rest of the time in prayer -- has finally admitted: "I need a job."

I guess he found he didn't live in a "different economic system" after all.

San Francisco: dirty, credulous, overcrowded?

I had to giggle when I read this guy's blog post about San Francisco being dirty, credulous, and overcrowded (cross-linked using ShareThis). It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's so afraid that someone will disagree with him and -- shudder -- email him, and then -- horrors -- he'll be forced to ignore the email.

Then you read his bio and see: Aha, he's in his late-mid-20s. Just the time when illusions are popped, including the illusion that just because one is really smart (see his bio, where the bragging is perfectly pitched to be just more than humble, just less than arrogant: "I've been working at Twitter since the beginning of 2007, several months before the service began to grow in popularity. It's been an education ...") one somehow deserves to be relieved of the bother of living in a real environment with "generally poor urban/civic planning" and "unreliable and inadequate public transit."

I must have missed the part where he's announcing that he's devoting his dead Saturday afternoons ("I've found precious little to do here") to organizing the citizenry for the repeal of Proposition 13 and other neo-con initiatives that have limited the scope and reach of what government can do to address such problems. In the meantime, I strongly suggest taking up kayaking or crack.

Whining for dollars

When I wrote up a little piece on whining writers for The Rumpus, there was one article I couldn't find that I wanted to link to. In today's listing of deals on Publisher's Marketplace, I got reminded:

Professor X's IN THE BASEMENT OF THE IVORY TOWER, about the vagaries of teaching English 101 and 102 at a college of last resort -- based on a popular Atlantic Monthly piece chosen by David Brooks for a Stanley Award, to Joy de Menil at Viking Penguin, for publication in March 2011...

Yeah... that was in The Atlantic last year. Pretty much a gloss on Lynn Fried's infamous 2005 piece in Harpers, Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag, only about teaching freshman English instead of creative writing, the Atlantic piece was another in the parade of whining by people who consider themselves above their jobs and the students (or readers) who are their audience.

I wonder why they are taking two full years to bring out the book, though.

technorati: teaching, complaining, whining