Random House

Inside Out or Outside In?

empire state

Here’s a question for everyone: Why did Tao Lin receive an advance from Random House for $50,000, while Lena Dunham received one from RH for $3.7 million?

As with most questions, there are likely multiple answers. One of them is the location/ background of the authors.

The trick with New York “Big Five” publishing is to look at New York as an Imperial city; practicing Imperialism in regard to writers and literature. Most of the Imperialism practiced is within country.

This is a theme I play in my satirical ebook novel The McSweeneys Gang. (Not recommended if you believe in the current literary scene.) Other cities across America, even literary centers like Iowa City, are treated like outposts by the core city, which must be thought of as akin to Rome circa 100 AD or London circa 1890. The east coast, from Washington D.C. to Boston, is the nation’s power corridor. Literature’s home country. If you’re raised and/or educated within this corridor, you’re part of literature’s native population. All else is strange territory populated by barbarians.

The attitude, then, from within the power corridor is always Inside Out. Big Five apologist Evan Hughes will travel to Detroit to write a book about this exotic spot’s more violent and bizarre happenings, like a Victorian reporter curious about the unknown and, for him/them, the unseen.

A host of journalists traveled to Alaska in 2008 to cover the quaint and barbarically exotic Palin family.

Again: Inside Out. The Imperialists covering the world, they the only acceptable voice.

Outsiders like Tao Lin or Ed Champion who travel to the Imperial City to join the establishment literary scene have reversed the viewpoint. They’re Outside In. One wonders if it’s possible for them to truly fit in, to be accepted as equals.

When it comes to publishing clout, and the attached-at-the-hip New York-based literary media, the Imperial City with its near provinces has had more influence over what’s determined to be literature than the rest of the nation/empire combined. The rise of indy ebooks gives the opportunity to balance this equation.

(Read http://www.newpoplit.com’s Opinion page for more thoughts along these lines.)

-Karl Wenclas

Latest Seedy Lit-Establishment Scandal

What’s new in the clubby world of New York literature?

There seems to be controversy about a memoir by television producer Lena Dunham, which was attacked by a blogger named Kevin Williamson. Author Emily Gould has come to Dunham’s defense, in this Salon article:

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/03/the_rights_lena_dunham_nonsense_just_wont_stop/

Lena Dunham apparently received a staggering $3.7 million advance for the memoir from Random House, the same Big Five publisher who gave fellow scandal-subject Tao Lin a mere $50,000 for one of his books.

http://gawker.com/5966563/here-is-lena-dunhams-37-million-book-proposal

Meanwhile, Emily Gould has apparently had her own dispute with Lena Dunham.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/emily-gould-lena-dunham_n_5607265.html

Emily Gould was also at or near the center of the recent Ed Champion blow-up.

http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/new-york-lit-emily-gould-ed-champion-subtweet-war/

Emily Gould is also dating Keith Gessen, editor of the chic Brooklyn literary journal n+1, which recently published a long profile of Tao Lin by Frank Guan. To date, both Guan and the journal have refused to answer our questions about the profile.

Are you keeping score?

Are we seeing the cannibalistic death throes of a corrupt and incestuous artistic scene? Sure seems that way.

Emily Gould refers to Kevin Williamson as a “right-wing blogger.” Keith Gessen and his magazine have repeatedly stressed how left-wing they are. We’re forced to ask: What’s the difference? Members of their scene all seem to come from affluent, well-connected backgrounds. Their “art” invariably isn’t concerned with the larger world, but an obsession with self.

Lena Dunham’s memoir fits the model. Per Gawker, “it’s an invitation to get lost in the mind of a girl who is lost in her mind.” Emily Gould herself in her Salon argument for the book doesn’t argue for the artistic value of scenes of Dunham masturbating next to her sister. The scenes are justified and advocated for as therapy, a story Lena Dunham simply had to tell. (Inflicted on the public for a mere $3.7 million.) Tao Lin writes in the same vein of course; advertisements/exhibitions of self, but apparently doesn’t do solipsism well enough.

The larger question is whether any of these characters are generating meaningful ideas about art, culture, and the world. The question is whether this literary scene is creating relevant and meaningful literature.

-K.W.

How Not to Back Your Authors

ONE OF THE BIG arguments used by advocates of publishing’s “Big Five” conglomerates in their debate with Amazon is that they support their writers. NEW POP LIT asks the question: Do they?

Here’s an exchange of emails which took place October 7 between NPL editor Karl Wenclas and an unnamed publicist at Random House’s Vintage Books division. The publicist did not sign his/her emails. A ghost? A computer program?

************************

Hello! Has Random House released a statement regarding its author, Tao Lin, and the recent scandal he’s been involved in?


Would a Random House representative (or the author himself) be available to answer a few questions about the situation? 

Thank you for your time and consideration.

 
Karl Wenclas
Editor
NEW POP LIT

*****
(From VintageAnchorPublicity)

 
You should contact Meville House.  They published the book RICHARD YATES.  We do not comment on books we did not publish.

*****
Tao’s more recent book Taipei is listed as a Vintage Contemporaries Original.

http://www.amazon.com/Taipei-Vintage-Contemporaries-Original-Tao/dp/0307950174

Not yours?

-KW

*****
(From VintageAnchorPublicity)
 
It is, but the controversy is about his book from Melville House. You should talk to Melville House.

*************************
There you have it. The person/ghost/program behind the unsigned emails is clearly running away from the matter. Could a publicist for a politician or sports team get away with such behavior? Well, maybe.
 
The questions we planned to ask, by the way, were not about the “Richard Yates” book. They were/are questions fitting to ask his biggest, most recent publisher. Here are the questions:

1.) Have sales of Tao Lin’s book gone up because of the controversy?
2.) Does Random House/Vintage Books have regrets about publishing him?
3.) Will Vintage change its marketing of Tao Lin because of the controversy?

Business-oriented questions appropriate to be asked of a publishing company. The unknown publicist seems to have inadvertently answered #2 and #3, anyway.

p.s. We’re still waiting on a response from Melville House!

-K.W.

Latest Tao Lin Happenings

tao lin II

-Tao Lin was originally scheduled to appear today, October 7, at a “Pen and Ink” reading at the chic bookstore Housing Works in Manhattan, at 7pm. His name has since been dropped from the line-up, and has been airbrushed out of all promotional material..

-NEW POP LIT has sent requests to two of Tao Lin’s publishers, Random House and Melville House, asking if they could answer a few questions about Tao and his books. From Random House we received a long “automatic reply” full of boilerplate bureaucratese. It gives the impression that RH is a monstrous entity full of layers of staffs and barriers, within which it’d be difficult to contact an actual human being. This gives the impression, rightly or wrongly, of monstrous inefficiency. We await word from Melville House.

-NPL co-editor Karl Wenclas has a post up at his personal blog examining the question of whether there’s been a double standard in the established literary world about the scandals involving Ed Champion and Tao Lin. See http://kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2014/10/ed-champion-and-tao-lin-double-standard.html

Stay tuned to this blog for any further updates– or look in on our main page and its links at http://www.newpoplit.com. Or follow us on twitter!: @newpoplit

-K.W.