Harbach, Chad. MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. New York: n + 1/ Faber and Faber. 2014. Transcribed 12/6/19.
- (5) Chad Harbach: “Her voyage is a long one, and she has her frailties: her concentration is fragile, she wakes up too late and checks her email too often, she drinks too much coffee in the morning and too much wine at night. But she is always working, working, working, trying both to pay her rent and to put the way the world feels into words. Most often these tasks seem utterly incompatible; sometimes they convene and then separate again.”
- (11) Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any, freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment, and populated by ever-younger, often immediately post collegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the 1970s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past twenty-two and toward thirty, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.”
- (20) Reference to Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Stories!
- (35) George Saunders:“You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’ve made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend or explain it one bit. If you think you need that immersion and think it would help, go for it. If not, not. And don’t apply just because you think it’s the thing to do or is a ‘good career move’ or everyone else in your school is doing it. Apply when you really feel you need…. something: shelter or focus or good readers or just some time out of the capitalist shitstorm.”
- (46) Maria Adelman
- (48) Maria Adelman: “Sometimes, the glut of contradictory praise and criticism felt like a flashlight shining directly into my eyes, offering so much light that I couldn’t see a thing.”
- (49) “My big break came when Anthropologie discovered them online and ordered sixty-thousand. I never dreamed, during the idle-seeming weeks I’d spent painting books, that those paintings would sustain me financially, and yet they earned me more than $10,000 in less than a year. Now, when I’m not making as much money as I should be, I email a bunch of bookstores hoping for card orders—and I usually get several.”
- (49) “I graduated from UVA some months ago. They mailed my diploma in a tube to my mom’s house in NJ. I saw it for the first time yesterday, because I am here, in my childhood bedroom, with all of my belongings, writing this essay. I could have stayed in Virginia, or looked for a full-time job just about anywhere—I still have some money saved up. But I’d rather sell book cards, pick up odd jobs from time to time, and keep the freedom to follow my intuitions. I never know in advance which of my baskets will turn out to be valuable, financially or otherwise, but some of them will. The important thing is to keep making baskets.”
- “My MFA program may not have mirrored the ‘real world’ (thank goodness for that), and it may not have taught me how to make money, but it did teach me what my time is worth.”
- (54) “There, in the paragraphs above, is blood squeezed from the stone of a dissertation. If, in 2006, as a no-longer-quite-plausibly aspiring novelist beached on the shores of academe, you’re struggling against the bleakness of the dissertation as a genre, you’ll do your best to work the CIA into yours. You’ll want to write a heroic dissertation—or at least a novelistic one.”
- (55) Eric Bennett: “At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1998 and 2000, I had the option of writing fiction in one of four ways. First, I could carve, polish, compress, and simplify; banish myself from my writing as T. S. Eliot advised and strive to enter the gray, crystalline tradition of modernist fiction as it runs from Flaubert through early Joyce and Hemingway onto Raymond Carver (alumnus) and Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson (teacher) did this in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. Denis Johnson (alumnus), played devil to Robinson’s angel in Jesus’s Son. Frank Conroy (director…) had this style down cold—and it is cold. Conroy must have sought it in applications, longing with some kind of spiritual masochism shiver again and again at the iciness of early Joyce.”
- Is that really what Housekeeping is like? It’s crystalline, but also… sumptuous?
- (58) “I was twenty-three. I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too).”
- (58-9) “Three separate times, as the decades slipped by, I watched a broad, supple mind in tune with its era harden into a tedious one, trying to attach old phrases and concepts to a world that no longer existed. I was haunted and smitten. As only an ambitious and frustrated person can fall in love with an ambitious and frustrated person, I fell in love with Engle. His career was a long slow slide from full-throated poetic aspiration into monochromatic administrative greatness—a modern story if there ever was one.”
- (64) “His force of personality exceeded his sweep of talent—and not because he wasn’t talented. By the time I met him he had entered the King Lear stage of his career. He was swatting at realities and phantoms in a medley of awesome magnificence and embarrassing feebleness. His rage and tenderness were moving.”
- (65) “According to Anne Lamott, literature issues from divine ignorance. ‘Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.’”
- (67) “These were chastened radicals who believed in the avant-garde and saw in totalitarianism the consequences of pure ideas unchecked by the irrational prerogatives of culture…. Both circles thought that the way to avoid the likes of Nazism or Stalinism in the United States was to venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible. The argument took its purest form in Hannah Arendt’s essays about the concentration camps in Partisan Review.”
- (68) To Wallace Stegner, who directed the influential Stanford program throughout the 1950s, a true writer was ‘an incorrigible lover of concrete things,’ weaving stories from ‘such materials as the hard knotting of anger in the solar plexus, the hollowness of a night street, the sound of poplar leaves.’
- (71) “To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and idea in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare.”
- (75) “So we’ll leave aside nasty little issues like departmental politics, faculty power struggles that summon images of sharks fighting for control of a bathtub, the dispiriting hiss of everybody’s egos in various stages of inflation or deflation, a downright unshakable publish-or-perish mentality that equates appearance in print with talent or promise.”
- (88) Alexander Chee: “Wesleyan had been my entree into this world, but it was a world they had entered eighteen years before, here in New York or somewhere nearby. I was from Maine, a state where they had all gone to camp together, but I did not go to that camp.”
- “What I did have were my looks, a sharp eye, a sharper tongue, and a penchant for making a spectacle of myself, which I would use to observe people’s reactions.”
- (92) “At the next table a conversation about the new Versace leather skirts broke out, if a conversation is people all saying the same thing to each other. They were so heavy, they kept saying. So heavy.”
- (95) “This fascinates me still, the idea that the September 11 attacks drove people toward the institutional study of fiction.”
- (99) “Waiting tables was also a good eduction in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, and this was only for the best. Your imagination needs to be broken in, you see, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.”
- (I read this whole part but didn’t even fold pages?)
- (264) Frederic Jameson: “What the European university produced was not writers but intellectuals, and here we hit on the deeper reason for the American’s shame at the country’s institutional dirty little secret: American anti-intellectualism.
- (270) “This is the point at which Faulkner’s near absence may be illuminated, for Faulkner is the very locus, one would think, of a maximalism that runs from the full-throated deployment of an expressive outpouring of language to the overweening ambition of the creation of a world extending from a tragic Southern past to a degraded commercial present.”
- (307) “If I were speaking to an eighteen-year-old, I’d say, ‘Don’t worry, Don’t be precocious.’ But the flip side of that is, this is the only life you’ll get, and it won’t come again. So, I don’t think you should be precocious, and I don’t think you should beat yourself up for not having published a book at the age of twenty-eight, but I think that a young person should keep a journal, and read seriously, and, you know, think about everything that happens.” – Caleb Crain