Reading Note:
Great Halls
26 November 2013

¶ The first thing we read to day and, re-reading, the last: Miriam Markowitz’s “Here Comes Everybody,” a concise tour d’horizon of writing and publishing at the moment, remarkable not for its argument (which we haven’t quite puzzled out) so much as for its wealth of insights.

The room that Woolf envisioned was not merely metaphorical. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” she remarked, acknowledging at once both the amateur and privileged aspects of the literary endeavor. For the most part, it is the second requirement—the room—that we remember. The money has dropped from the axiom, not because it is crude but because now it seems less true: if writing is a profession, then people get paid for it, just like any other trade.

Markowitz goes on to show that the room has also dropped out of circulation in the age of the Internet:

The insider/outsider problem has become more vexing as aspiring writers come knocking on virtual doors, which is a lot easier than marching into the office of an editor or publisher. These writers don’t want to be confined to rooms, which feel less like oases than echo chambers. They want inside other, bigger rooms—rooms with good acoustics. They want access to the Great Halls of publishing, and a chair at the heart of the feast.

All this from just two adjacent paragraphs! Everyone’s there, from Laura Miller to David Gilmour to Marilynne Robinson. Lisez-le!

2 Responses to “Reading Note:
Great Halls
26 November 2013

  1. L’intégralité de ces post sont franchement plaisants

  2. biatch baise says:

    J’ai comme l’impression que cet article va atterrir sur un site