Anya Ulinich wrote a short story that one New York magazine critic says is ““entire work of fiction [written] with the sole purpose of a barely disguised personal attack on Jonathan Safran Foer.” Ulinich disagress.

Here is a passage from the story that elicited the theory:

Your characters are monsters who fashion heaps of bones into tiny missing pieces of themselves.

You can read the story here.

What do you think?

via Maud Newton

Apparently, the New York Times is all about writing about writing lately. Hurray for us! The Sunday Book Review will have a piece that plays with the idea of a “bailout for writers.” I promise to find something uplifting for the next post. In the mean time …. topical!

… overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that over­capacity was needed.

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. …

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

Of course, this is all theoretical and satirical and junk.

However, I took the real-life version of a writer bailout for a year; I worked in advertising. And now I don’t. So I guess bailouts are only for the greedy or the stupid. Burn! Take that, insurance, airlines, auto, banking …..

Upon hearing that “Joe the Plumber” has a book deal, Timothy Egan writes a rant that I think a lot of us would second.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne …” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Egan also hopes that having a writer in the White House will improve things. Man, Obama’s just doling out hope left and right … or maybe just left.

-marcia

PS - So … Shouldn’t it be “If only there were such a thing …?” Why do I ask? Yes, it should. Ugh, sometimes I hate that I used to copy edit for a living.