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scottedelman posted a
great excerpt from Lucius Shepard's novella, “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” which takes aim at many of the writers and also the "writers" one meets at a science fiction convention. Actually, I first thought to make it a poll—people could choose which type they were—but the lines didn't quite fit. There are a lot of
types you see, all arrayed against the narrator. "They had dragged me down to their level, seduced me into becoming a populist," he frets. But it is not as though one cannot also whip up a description of the sort of people one would run in to at, say,
AWP's annual conference. And it might go a little something like this:
...all the corridors of the hotel packed with deflated, shriveled women, their jewelry more like satellite dishes than decoration and their perms reminiscent of chemical plant explosions, women who chirped about the discontents of identity and sweated out their afternoons in yoga class to align their chakras in the Oprah-approved manner; all the semibeautiful young students with their flapper haircuts and their I-said-fuck-in-my-thesis-seven-times daring, who sometimes even dreamt of being the cardigan-wearing first year mental patient to be pawed at by the tenured and enjoweled professors whose red pens seemed so merciless yet erotic; the mad portly men with their Whitmanesque beards and bellowed couplets about the rain and the sound of locomotive trains, whose wives generously subsidized the publication of
Handworn Wagon Wheel, a literary quarterly perhaps headquartered on Jupiter as it comes out every thirty months or so; all the well-toned brown people, the upper class of the lower orders, plucked from the postcolonial provinces to attend the best Western schools and then write a book about the struggles of the people they saw starving on the curbs on the way to the airport at the start of that summer they spent in France, their English impeccable and accents pure BBC; all the dull hustlers with their Buddy Holly glasses and blog handles like QuillnHatchet420 whose novel of the indie rock scene of Butte, Montana was almost done and could finally be finished if one of those grants would just come in, or if just 5 percent of his readers clicked on the DONATE button set up on the left-hand column of his online webzine (dare us! challenge us! enthrall us! we're not for profit so we cannot pay! read the submission guidelines, where 90 percent of the traffic goes); all the tenured trangressionalists who just stopped proofreading their work long ago and settled into the editorship the house organ of Institutional Revolution, all some variation on
The ____ Review; all the lesser fantasists with their fantasies of one day becoming a famous corpse like Andre Breton and whose latest publications came to us courtesy of Squalling Hammertoe Woo Hoo Press
[<--This one is actually from Lucius's story, but it works in both environments!—NK]; all the ultrasuccessful Important Writers of Our Time who publicly lament the days gone by when they had a small audience of fifty good Bolsheviks who really understood the blood and tears that went into perfecting the craft of the novel; the various social climbers whose mystery novels feature ambiguous endings or whose tales of cubicle life are well-observed enough to get a chance at an adjunct appointment; all those freshmen composition teachers, their arms filled to overflowing with journals and bookmarks and flyers for this or that new venue that just might one of these days respond with something other than an automatically generated form rejection letter and goddamn it when will their break come but that was why they came, right, so back it was to networking, networking, networking and more material and more detritus and absolutely one day they were going to win a pair of golden handcuffs somewhere down in a third-tier college in Dumbfuckistan but at least he and Mindy or she and Jerome would be able to buy a house and give their children a hyphenated surname and one day that child would grow up to marry the offspring of a nice tenured sociologist who would also have a hyphenated surname and then god knows what would happen to the grandchildren. Armageddon, probably. They'd drown like polar bears in the lukewarm arctic. Say, that reminds me...isn't the guest editor of the special Wither Whether Weather? issue of
Tenure Farm Review on a panel in five minutes?
cold
furious
