Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s Guardian piece is one of those news stories that leave me filled with rage and wanting to smash things:
“All you need is a five-minute spot on a morning TV show,” a colleague told me recently. “Then everyone will buy your novel.” I tried to picture myself, with my horror of being filmed, in thick orange makeup, perched on a sofa in a brightly lit studio while trying to talk about how the French critic Hélène Cixous inspired me to want to write the first great ovulation novel. It sounded ridiculous for all involved.
Yet when you’re a writer, you are supposed to take every opportunity you can get. That was the attitude to news that Helen DeWitt had turned down the $175,000 (£129,000) Windham-Campbell prize on the basis of being unable to fulfil its promotional obligations, which included six to eight hours of filming. The prize, which this year was given to eight writers in recognition of their life’s work, is intended to give recipients time and space to work independently of financial concerns.
DeWitt is a critically acclaimed author, and her debut novel, The Last Samurai – published 26 years ago – is widely regarded as a work of innovative genius. Opinions on her recent stance are strongly divided: some have praised her principled refusal to play the self-promotion game that takes so much out of writers, while others have called her a spoilt, entitled nightmare. […]
Reading through DeWitt’s posts, a picture of a supremely talented writer emerges, one who has faced long periods of living hand to mouth, being out of print, tricky paths to publication causing untold stress, struggles with depression and executive dysfunction, and caring responsibilities. Many authors can empathise.
Unable to commit to the promotional work required, DeWitt says she asked the prize organisers for adjustments that they ultimately refused. According to the novelist Daisy Lafarge, this revealed an attitude to disability and chronic illness that is “impoverished and embarrassingly outdated”. “The prize’s refusal to meet her halfway exposes something I’ve found to be endemic in the book world,” says Lafarge, who adds that the art world is way ahead on facilitating the access and assistance needs of artists. In publishing “if you’re not able-bodied, your choices are to drop out or just grit your teeth”. Both are costly. […]
Yet this controversy doesn’t only highlight inclusivity issues in publishing. It’s also that writing no longer feels like the main job. Many writers are oddballs, and some are geniuses whose giftedness is arguably a form of neurodivergence. Artists such as that can be sensitive and difficult. They need uninterrupted time to create. They do not fit easily into the world of professionalised self-promotion that constitutes modern publishing. As DeWitt wrote in a blog post: “We can think of so many writers we admire for whom the whole thing would be unthinkable – off the top of my head, Dickinson, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Pessoa, Salinger, Harper Lee, Pynchon, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Ferrante.”
Why on earth would you dangle a large wad of money in front of someone you claim to believe is an important writer but make it contingent on their doing things no writer should be asked to do (though some, of course, are willing to)? Publicity is the business of publishers and salespeople; a writer’s job is to write. I’ve been a DeWitt fan since 2003 and have long been furious that she hasn’t gotten the support that should go along with the universal respect she commands; happily, as the end of the linked piece reveals, a “conservative university thinktank” has offered her a grant of $175,000 with no strings attached, and good for them, I say, even if they’re just trying to score points off the libs. (You can read DeWitt’s own detailed account at her blog.) Thanks, Eric!
Skimming the official blurbs describing the literary merits of prior recipients of this bounty, they sound mostly dreary and banal. I’m not in a position to say whether that means the actual literary production of the winners tends to the dreary and banal or that’s just the blurb-writer’s style.
A half-century ago Pynchon declined the allegedly prestigious William Dean Howells Medal, but I don’t know if that’s because it came with strings he found unacceptable or for some other reason. He did get the National Book Award, which is currently worth $10,000 but quite probably less back then. He would have at the then-going rate gotten an even $1,000 for the Pulitzer if the board hadn’t overruled the committee’s recommendation to give it to him.
The combined estates of Messrs. Windham and Campbell did manage to endow these prizes quite lavishly considering the bohemian creative fellows wikipedia makes them out to be, although perhaps the brief note that Campbell was “the son of the owner of a chemical manufacturing company” is relevant.
It may have come up before here, but Andy Warhol once(?) hired a professional actor to impersonate him for a public appearance. When it came out, the event organiser sued Warhol, but Warhol argued in court that this was a performance artwork, and that the organiser owed Warhol money instead.
Tyler Cowan just gave DeWitt a no-strings $175,000 grant. https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1skge6p/a_happy_ending_to_the_helen_dewitt_saga_tyler/
Ah, so the idea seems to be to fund art by prizes, the way science to a large extent already is.
Not having read DeWitt, I’ll just trust Mr. Hat’s judgment.
What struck me on reading the quoted piece was the collection of psychobabble. “… struggles with depression and executive dysfunction, and caring responsibilities.” Is that supposed to be lit crit? Ladies Home Journal psychology for beginners? None of that has anything to do with either Ms. DeWitt or the idiocy of the publishing industry.
The main figure behind that “conservative university thinktank” is Tyler Cowen, who also writes the stimulating and influential blog Marginal Revolution. That whole sphere is much better described as “libertarian”, not “conservative”. They are trying to encourage more of the Renaissance model of art production with patrons and all that.
And good for them, say I.
Pynchon declined the allegedly prestigious William Dean Howells Medal
A Reddit user has helpfully transcribed the letter that Pynchon sent saying no.
He did get the National Book Award
Thomas Guinzburg, publisher of the Viking Press, sent Professor Irwin Corey along to accept the reward, apparently with Pynchon’s consent. At least part of his speech is in here.
Hélène Cixous /siksu/ ’s surname goes back to the 1700s in Tetouan. I haven’t figured out its etymology.
psychobabble. “… struggles with depression and executive dysfunction, and caring responsibilities.” .. None of that has anything to do with … Ms. DeWitt
None of “depression” ” executive dysfunction”, and “caring responsibilities” is psychobabble. Coslett is ascribing those qualities to DeWitt after reading DeWitt’s blog. Not having read DeWitt’s blog, I’ll just trust Ms Coslett’s judgment.
“All you need is a five-minute spot on a morning TV show,” a colleague told me recently. “Then everyone will buy your novel.”
This is, of course, nonsense, as the recent overexposed experience/commercial failure of Lindy West will attest. “People don’t want to spend money on books” in the words, more or less, of SciFi writer Jason Pargin.
Tyler Cowen, who also writes the stimulating and influential blog Marginal Revolution.
I will grant “influential”. He’s basically an aggregator. He links to stimulating articles occasionally and is pretty good about highlighting interesting new books and “serious” music. On the other hand he’s a Strauss and Thiel acolyte, pushes AI relentlessly and loves to take contrarian political takes to enrage liberals while being coy about his sympathies for the right. He also has a bizarre belief in aliens that makes him seem like he’s 11 years old.
I know Tyler Cowen from:
– Scott Alexander’s ‘contra Tyler Cowen’/’contra MR’ posts
– pieces such as the following one, that feature photos of Cowen surrounded by books and papers:
https://www.economist.com/1843/2025/02/28/tyler-cowen-the-man-who-wants-to-know-everything
(FWIW I know DeWitt from languagehat, and so having followed her on Twitter I’ve followed this odyssey first-hand.)
Prof. Cowen and/or other Mercatus decisionmakers appear to have been influenced by this thing written last week by Mercatus affiliate Henry Oliver,* which uses the failure of the LIterary-Industrial Complex to fund DeWItt as part of a broader critique/rant about why the current funding model isn’t as good as old-style patronage carried out informally by patrons with actual taste.
https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/just-give-helen-dewitt-some-money
For a responsible opposing viewpoint, here’s an apparent rival of DeWitt’s who says inter alia “I’ll take grants from anyone, at any time, if it means that I don’t have to work for a living. In the last 20 years, I’ve received literary grants from DuPont Chemical, Dow Chemical, Pillsbury, The Daily Stormer Foundation, Future Communist Terrorists of The Western Hemisphere, n+1 Magazine, the Pat Buchanan Fund, and People For the Ethical Treatment of Staplers.” https://nealpollack.substack.com/p/i-have-received-all-the-literary
*”Henry Oliver is a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a writer, and literary critic working on a new book about how classic literature cultivates the liberal values of human flourishing.”
Yeah, I automatically privilege art over politics, and I think artists should take money from whoever is prepared to give it to them with no strings attached. I’ve never understood the horror over CIA-funded publications in the ’50s and ’60s — better they should have been spending the money on literature and art than on torturing Vietnamese villagers!
Separately, I’m mildly puzzled (not that she needs to justify herself, of course) by the apparent practice of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett of routinely using all three of her names. I guess it avoids any risk of confusion with all the other Rhiannon Cossletts out there?
‘This craving to go viral is tiresome’: the artists sick of the pressure to promote on social media
1) Some people just do that. Here’s one in Germany. (He’s weird in other ways, too.)
2) Personally I actually prefer that over always using a middle initial and never telling anyone what it stands for. My thesis supervisor’s thesis supervisor did that for so long that his students decided his R. must stand for “reptile”; the great reveal only happened in the Festschrift for his 65th birthday.
3) In parts of the US South it’s normal to actually use both given names – to the extent that both get transformed to nicknames: Billy Bob Thornton, Annie Laurie Gaylor.
4) Hyphenated first names are common in France and Germany, but practically unknown in the US. And Markwayne Mullin is so onomastically unusual he gets mocked a lot.
My overall impression of the goings-on is that Helen DeWitt has some kind of illness or disability that makes functioning outside of certain very specific conditions extremely difficult for her, and I find it quite sad that she didn’t seem to have anyone she trusted who could help her, or even just who she could talk to, while navigating the award offer. There’s so much anguish over cellphone data, getting lost in Amsterdam, a haircut that happened a year before, and just general day-to-day logistics that aren’t directly related the conditions of the prize. The Windham-Camptell people repeatedly try to find accommodations for her, but in the end she seems so overwhelmed by the process of negotiating those accommodations that she just pulls the plug. From her blog post, it seems like DeWitt would really benefit from some kind of care worker.
I find this general hand-wringing about writers having to do publicity a bit precious. Artists who want people to read/see/hear their art have had to negotiate public life for as long as there have been artists. Bemoaning that writers who are either long dead or reached their peak popularity 40+ years ago (pace Ferrante, whose whole shtick is their mystery) never had to suffer similar indignities just strikes me as out of touch. Readership is plummeting, especially for literary fiction. Even established authors have to abase themselves by trying to attract readers.
@David M.: The Billy Bob / Peggy Sue pattern is strongly associated with individuals having two given names that are both super-common in the relevant time/place (e.g. William Robert or Margaret Susan). So there’s a disambiguation function/motivation – it’s not just adding syllables for the sake of adding syllables. German hyphenated names I can think of tend to be pairs of individually popular components (Franz Josef, uzw.) although in 19th-century France you maybe more frequently saw rarer combinations.
But as to the exhausted-by-internet-self-promotion thing, this is exactly why you need a patron, because a patron can pay for an internet marketing company that uses various dodgy tactics to create a simulation of online popularity that then somehow creates actual revenue-generating popularity. As witness this recent scandal-or-is-it story from the world of American popular music, alleged hipster subdivision: https://www.wired.com/story/geese-chaotic-good-marketing-industry-plant/
Or maybe the CIA could do that for you if you were an artist they favored.
No doubt it’s better for extremely rich people to buy upmarket authors than to buy legislators. And that way, we get to admire their taste, too.
I see from the WP article that the Koch family are major supporters of the Mercatus Center.
But as the man said to his prissy son, pecunia non olet. (Though I think Titus may have been on to something nevertheless: I’m not sure that the maxim really generalises too well from the specific case his dad was referring to.)
I find this general hand-wringing about writers having to do publicity a bit precious. Artists who want people to read/see/hear their art have had to negotiate public life for as long as there have been artists.
Bullshit. The phrase “negotiate public life” is trying to cover up the immense distance between having an occasional meeting with your publisher and spending half your life doing stupid videos that not only take precious time away from doing your art but drain the inner resources that allow you to do it at all.
Even established authors have to abase themselves by trying to attract readers.
No they don’t. If they choose to do that, that’s on them. Nobody should have to abase themselves to make a living, and it astonishes me that anyone could say they should. I suppose you would have told Emily Dickinson she should do book tours and sweet-talk publishers.
I guess the headline for me is “very unwell person unable to get the help she needs to lead a better life” not “publishing industry crushes woman under corporate wheel.” Accommodations were offered and refused (not filming her face, delaying the award a year).
I should have put “abase” in scare quotes. I don’t think doing a little publicity is abasement. Perhaps this is just an irreconcilable difference of opinion. Do you think Windham-Camptell’s conditions were degrading? To me, a few days work for $175,000 doesn’t seem inherently unfair. No one is forcing her to take the money, and she refused it, which is her right.
Some members of the Koch family have long been interested in arts/culture, as witness the fact that the building at Lincoln Center in NYC that houses the performances of the New York City Ballet is the David H. Koch Theater (so renamed in 2008 following a $100 million benefaction).* There are of course politically-obsessed balletomanes who are mad about this and would apparently have preferred Mr. Koch to spend that sum on political endeavors they disapprove of.
*Right across from David Geffen Hall, previously Avery Fisher Hall. Mr. Geffen had the somewhat unusual knack of getting very very rich from promoting the careers of various successful musicians without the musicians complaining that he was a parasite who had ripped them off. Whether he in fact virtuously refrained from more sharp-edged business practices common in the industry or merely had a Svengali-like knack for hypnotizing the talent and making them think him benign is not clear to me.
As to Emily Dickinson:
a) She didn’t complain that no one was paying her for the poetry she refused to share with the world.
b) The world is fortunate that after her death someone else decided to get the work out there and others then expended effort to draw it to the attention of potential readers. Her creation of important work which she refused to share with the world was imho extraordinarily selfish and is to be condemned unless perhaps her culpability is thought mitigated by e.g. mental illness. Ditto e.g. G.M. Hopkins, although I can’t remember if he had some theory that publishing his work would undermine his vocation as a priest or some such.
Oh, here’s a beautiful example: Csatári Flóra Dóra!
Her creation of important work which she refused to share with the world was imho extraordinarily selfish
This reminds me of Charlie Stross’s evidently heartfelt “the author is not your bitch.”
On a rather different level: G K Chesterton, in the Traditional Catholic Antisemite mode which unfortunately surfaces all too often among his many genuine insights, somewhere decries “the Jews” for creating a work of tremendous religious power (he’s talking about the book of Job) and then “keeping it to themselves.”
The kindest interpretation would be that he was drunk at the time of writing it (a thing which I gather is not unlikely a priori.)
Do you think Windham-Camptell’s conditions were degrading?
Yes. I can’t even imagine dangling life-changing money in front of an artist and imposing conditions on it; why not just give them the fucking money?
No one is forcing her to take the money, and she refused it, which is her right.
And rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under bridges. What a wonderful world!
Her creation of important work which she refused to share with the world was imho extraordinarily selfish and is to be condemned unless perhaps her culpability is thought mitigated by e.g. mental illness.
I assume you’re just trolling the art-libs. Nice try!
I can’t tell you how much I despise the attitude that having money means you get to make everybody else do what you want, to tell artists “Dance, monkey, dance!” It makes me want to see heads on spikes, which as a pacifist I deplore.
If I could magically take all the money away from the Windham-Campbell people and deposit it in DeWitt’s bank account, I would gladly do so, and laugh at them as they begged for dimes in the street. Let them try to write great novels!
@hat
Maybe this is a little strong. I think you strongly identify with individuals (especially women!) who you feel are being “degraded” (especially by men!), and this can lead you to be a little harsh. I think if you consider it more, you may find yourself able to concede that
– 1 if your benefactor wants to feel loved, or even exert dominance, it is up to you (not a third party) to decide whether and to what extent you accept this
-2 if you have the talent to change people’s lives and you decide to live a life of isolation, others may legitimately regard the decision as selfish
Maybe this is a little strong.
Yup — I have strong feelings about this, and they’re not going to change.
if your benefactor wants to feel loved, or even exert dominance, it is up to you (not a third party) to decide whether and to what extent you accept this
I don’t know what this means. Can you clarify?
if you have the talent to change people’s lives and you decide to live a life of isolation, others may legitimately regard the decision as selfish
I don’t know what “legitimately” means here. People are free to regard anything in any way they like, and I am free to think of them as assholes if they think certain things.
Yes. I can’t even imagine dangling life-changing money in front of an artist and imposing conditions on it; why not just give them the fucking money?
From DeWitt’s blog post, it seems like Windham-Campbell was trying to work with her in good faith until she became so distressed by the act of communicating that she backed out completely.
I don’t see the situation as quite so starkly commerce-versus-art. The whole thing makes me think of Van Gogh, in that he was a great artist who also was unwell in a way that often prevented him from functioning, but he wasn’t a great painter because of his inability to function. I come away with the impression that the same kind of support that would have allowed DeWitt to accept the award would also benefit her artistic life.
I can’t tell you how much I despise the attitude that having money means you get to make everybody else do what you want, to tell artists “Dance, monkey, dance!”
Yeah, capitalism sucks. You won’t get an argument from me about that. But society is constantly extorting us all into dancing in more or less destructive ways; I suppose I find it hard to get too worked up about someone passing up the chance to exchange an extremely small amount of labour for a very large amount of money. What I do object to is the idea that professional artists are some rarefied class to whom any professional compromise is a special kind of tragedy.
I think “degrading” is completely beside the point. There is such a thing as diagnosable social anxiety, and dangling money in front of people does not make it go away.
Also, I should mention the PNAS paper that was partially funded by the Russian mafia, the Nickel King in particular.
Oh, and, the Koch wing of human evolution in the American Museum of Natural History emphasizes, if subtly, what a good thing climate change is.
That sounds like you get it…
…while that sounds like you don’t. Six to eight hours of stress bordering on torture is not an extremely small amount of labour.
I am delighted to see hat embracing the full Ayn Rand theory of Creative Geniuses, which as I understand it runs something like:
1. The Creative Genius is a Solitary Promethean Heroine who creates Beauty ex nihilo;
2. She accordingly owns as her own absolute property the Beauty she has created in exactly the same way any ordinary bit of property is owned by its owner;
3. Any ordinary property owner has an absolute right (for any reason or no reason) to waste their property, destroy their property, or conceal their property unused somewhere where it may or may not be fortuitously discovered after their death.
4. No one ever has any moral obligation (including a “purely moral” one not enforceable by the police or the courts) not to do something that it is their right to do.
QED!
it seems like Windham-Campbell was trying to work with her in good faith until she became so distressed by the act of communicating that she backed out completely.
“Work with her in good faith”? Again, why not just give her the money? I am baffled by your assumption that it’s simply in the natural order of things that they should impose a variety of conditions on their generous offer, and if she can’t hack it, that’s on her.
What I do object to is the idea that professional artists are some rarefied class to whom any professional compromise is a special kind of tragedy.
That’s a… special… way of putting it. Do you actually know any artists? Or anyone at all who doesn’t live entirely by the dog-eat-dog rules of capitalism? You seem to just assume that money (and its attendant privileges) comes from God, and anyone who dares to question its demands is just being an entitled jerk. I beg to differ. In my view, it’s the people with money who are the entitled jerks, and the rest of us are trying to live our little lives while working around the bullshit they impose on us.
To put it simply, I respect art and I don’t respect money. Alas, I live in a country that worships money and is indifferent to art (if not outright contemptuous of it).
JWB: Again, nice try.
I will say that I’m not sure anyone over the last century has come up with a better model for funding the arts than the Wallace Stephens model of “get a day job doing something boring like handling insurance claims, be really good at it, and be paid accordingly by people who don’t particularly care about your art as such.” If you trust wikipedia’s math, by the 1930’s Stephens was being paid so well for his boring day job that adjusted for inflation it was as if he was getting a Windham-Campbell prize every six months.
One can understand publishers requiring a good bit of self-publicising on the part of their authors, given the way things are; something which many perfectly self-respecting authors evidently regard as unpleasant but necessary, or may even actually enjoy, at least in part.
Prize-awarding bodies have much less excuse for this; and particularly little call for being needlessly inflexible when dealing with authors with genuine personal difficulties in complying quite apart from any ideological objections they may or may not have to the rigmarole.
Very rich donors patronise artists in order to exercise power and advertise their personal wonderfulness. It is accordingly only necessary for the recipient to decide whether they would be personally tainted by association in a way which trumps their need for the money. If the artist is in the happy position of actually thinking that the donor really is personally wonderful, any difficulty disappears.
Our oldest Welsh poetry which seems likely to date, at least in part, from the period traditionally assigned to the poet is (apart from Aneurin’s celebration of overwhelming defeat in battle), Taliesin’s praise-poems of his patron Urien. Judging by that fact that one of these seems to be an attempt to get back into favour with Urien, one suspects that T may not, in fact, have thought that the sun shone out of U’s arse.
Y: If Cixous goes back to Tetouan, NB siksu is the usual North African word for couscous.
I don’t know how rich Sandy Campbell was, so I don’t know whether the following is relevant on this case: Many prizes administered by nonprofits are funded only for a rather limited time. To keep such prizes going, they need to drum up the kind of publicity that will attract new donations to the organization and/or prize fund. (This is all part of the terrible economics of the nonprofit sector in America.) Appearances by prize winners are key to getting word out about the prizes and their significance.
A fair point.
Prize-awarding bodies have much less excuse for this; and particularly little call for being needlessly inflexible when dealing with authors with genuine personal difficulties in complying quite apart from any ideological objections they may or may not have to the rigmarole.
@DE, Thank you for that. I’ve been trying to figure out where I landed amidst the various impassioned positions on the conditional offer and your words have led me to something often better than an answer—a good question. Why couldn’t or didn’t the prize givers quietly and privately contact the potential recipient to determine if and how they might collaborate? Or did they?
Making the discord public smacks of the loathsome Hegseth and Anthropic, a corporation. The parties failed to reach agreement as to how the latter’s product might be used by the former’s organization, so the former chose to utterly trash—in both commercial and metaphorical senses—the latter.
Another question arises. In the matter of literary prize and potential recipient, who chose to make failure to reach agreement public? Why?
There are a lot of grey areas here, and I’ll mention, as comparanda: some truly fine artists who need to write bullshit-dense artists’ statements before they have any chance of a gallery or a museum looking at their work; field linguists working on endangered languages, who until not long ago were compelled to add in their grant proposals that their work will advance the understanding of language in general, and thus may help commercial natural language processing software; and Soviet scientists, compelled to link any and every published discovery to the unerring prescience of comrade Stalin.
(Pox on all of those, but varying in species and severity.)
Well, Stalin was right about Marr …
All together now:
Sal!
Ber!
Yon!
Rosh!
I do not have enough motivation to wade through all the primary sources, but I had taken away from all of the summaries the I thought obvious conclusion that Ms. DeWitt or “her side”* had publicized the situation (whether prudently or imprudently), not least because the prize committee had zero motivation to do so and it seemed clear they were trying to make sure they had her on board before making any public announcement of this year’s slate of honorees.
I don’t know why cuchuflete draws the opposite conclusion, at least tentatively, but I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong.
*In some such situations friends of the aggrieved person have been known to “go public” with such news without first confirming that they person they imagine they are defending actually wants them to do so.
I will say that I’m not sure anyone over the last century has come up with a better model for funding the arts than the Wallace Stephens model of “get a day job doing something boring like handling insurance claims, be really good at it, and be paid accordingly by people who don’t particularly care about your art as such.”
Yes, that’s great if it works for you, as it did for Stephens. I think the historical record shows that it doesn’t work for most artists in any field, and this isn’t because they’re pathetic/entitled slackers, it’s because the drive and ability to create art are rarely compatible with the requirements of a day job. When I was head of proofreading at Vile Megacorp, I gave the temps (who were mostly artists in various fields) as much help as I could, from time off to letting them use the company’s phones for their own needs, with zero sense that I was betraying some supposed compact with my employer; I simply envied them their need to create art. And fie on those who attain managerial positions and suddenly start taking the company’s side over that of their fellow wage slaves.
@cuchuflete and J.W.B.: Helen DeWitt’s blog post of April 8 (linked in the OP) starts, “Today’s insanely long installment concerns a major prize which I was told I’d won back in February, but for which I turned out not to be eligible because unable to promote the prize to their satisfaction. I have held off posting this, since the prize was to be confidential until its announcement on April 8.”
I should add, as I try to when I go off on my rants, that I don’t expect anyone to agree with me. (I’d hate it if everyone agreed with me about things — what a boring world it would be!) But I have strong feelings, and if you can’t express your unfettered feelings on your own blog, what’s the point of having a blog?
To quote one of the all-time great songs:
The Wallace Stephens model might work for poets, screenwriters and a certain breed of novelist. It’s impractical for musicians and performance artists.
That too.
It would be interesting to know if the sort of “day jobs” that traditionally had maximum flexibility (i.e. you could turn up for a few days and then not turn up for a few days and still be reasonably confident someone would still want you when you next wanted to turn up) are notably rarer than they used to be. They may pay less than they used to compared to more regimented/inflexible office jobs, I suppose. And they maybe never paid enough if you had dependents or expensive health-care needs or wanted more than the sort of fairly spartan/ascetic lifestyle that becomes for many increasingly unsatisfactory once you’re past your twenties etc. etc. And staying afloat financially via an endless stream of casual short-term things may not be feasible for someone suffering from crippling social anxiety or any of a number of other ailments.
Before the late John Prine was able to support himself as a musician he worked for the Post Office. Civil service, good benefits. They didn’t make him work evenings or weekends, so he was free to start gigging in local clubs, although they admittedly might not have given him a month off so he could go on tour. (I can separately think of a legendary cult-favorite rock band that finally had a reunion tour with a reasonably authentic lineup once the old bass player had put in enough years at the Post Office to retire with a pension and thus be freed up to go on the road.)
I enjoy the song hat quoted,* but of course it was written by a fellow who spent comparatively little time struggling in poverty or obscurity before the music industry fell over itself to douse him with money and critical acclaim – money and acclaim that many frankly better musicians never got. The anger that drove much of his early work was not really a justified or proportionate response to how the music biz had treated him or how women had treated him or how his parents had treated him or how Ray Charles had treated him blah blah blah. But teenagers who are angry at the world without much justification for it were an important revenue source for the music biz back then, so if you could appeal to them you could have a lucrative career.
*Compare
A: “the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools trying to anesthetize the way that you feel”
with
B: (by another lyricist) “one good thing about music, when it hits you feel** no pain.”
**There’s unfortunately no good typographical way to indicate that “feel no pain” is where the harmony vocalists join in.
Wallace Stevens. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
@hat
Sorry for not responding earlier. I think D. Eddyshaw and Schwa de vivre have said what I wanted to say better. I also think David M reminded me that people who could seem rude or selfish may be subject to forces I am unaware of.
Oops. I apologize to Gerry Freedman for my embarrassing orthographic blunder.
The anger that drove much of his early work was not really a justified or proportionate response to how the music biz had treated him or how women had treated him or how his parents had treated him or how Ray Charles had treated him blah blah blah.
Well, so what? For all I care it could have had no basis whatsoever in his own life; all that matters is that the songs it drove are immortal. By contrast, the mild, artsy songs he wrote after he got over the anger (probably as a result of the dousing you mention) are of no interest to me (though they were catnip to critics, and a guy I knew at the time loved them); if I want Cole Porter I’ll listen to Cole Porter.
This is more profanity than I’ve ever seen in a Languagehat comment section, but it’s well deserved. I do some self-publishing and promotion, and I used to write a blog about indie authors. I was struck by just how many “geniuses” (for lack of a better term) are screaming potentially world-changing art that will never be appreciated, directly into the void. The publishing industry is as institutionally evil as banks or insurers; their reputation is rescued only somewhat by the fact that for all their avarice and stupidity they still manage to actually make something. But the hustle-and-grind that has become the lion’s share of any beginning author’s (and many moderately established authors’) job is lamentable.
As for how “legitimate” DeWitt’s mental or emotional limitations may be, I am unqualified to offer a opinion more valuable than a fart during a pause in a sermon, and I strongly suspect this is true for everyone else here.
I don’t share Hat’s belief that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. It’s naive to think that all those grants from billionaires won’t have a similarly strangling effect on art eventually, same as the effect on journalism whenever a billionaire buys a newspaper. But if I had to choose between an ostensibly strings-free paycheck from Dead Orphans LLC on the one hand, and a prize from Windham-Campbell that came with intolerable conditions on the other, I’m not sure what I would pick. And that doesn’t reflect well on Windham-Campbell. Either way, there needs to be a better way to fund art.
The Wallace Stephens model might work for poets, screenwriters and a certain breed of novelist. It’s impractical for musicians and performance artists.
@Vanya, Do you include composers and church organists? Charles Ives wants to know.
I don’t share Hat’s belief that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from.
Well, I don’t mean that it literally doesn’t matter; obviously in an ideal world all money would come from morally unimpeachable sources and we would all sleep the sleep of the just. But equally obviously this is not an ideal world nor even an approximation thereto, and in the actually existing world we have to choose between tainted money and even more tainted money. I didn’t like working for Evil Megacorp, but I liked the idea of starvation even less. At any rate, I’m glad you’re with me in my rage against the machine!
There ought not to be any billionaires; their existence is a testament to a colossal failure of free markets to work as advertised by the self-described champions of such things, and the effect on the morals and intelligence of the billionaires themselves is too gruesomely evident to need further comment: as a matter of human compassion, they should be rescued from their pitifully degraded state by removal of the toxic agent.
But the solution has to be collective political action. Cancelling one’s subscription to Amazon Prime* does not bring down a Bezos. Nor does turning down a grant from a Koch proxy stop the Koch family from boiling the world for their personal profit.
* I did, but that’s because I’m just better than everyone else, K?
I will risk sounding like I’m advocating for the devils (which I am not). Even people who have gazillion dollars resent the idea that their beneficiaries think of them as mere milking cows. What they ask for in return may be some ritual (a groveling thank-you letter, a report) or actual labor (a promotional tour). This can be done tactfully, in a manner implying mutual respect. Or, as in DeWitt’s case, not.
Me, I have the most respect for no-strings awards, like the MacArthur, which are few. On a more modest note, once upon a time there was such a thing as easy welfare, which would suffice for minimal rent and food. More than one writer and artist got their start that way.
@Brett: Thanks for answering the question that was puzzling me and others. Though I imagine the people who give the prizes think the festival, interviews, etc., are good for lit-fi in general.
I still wonder how much flexibility was in the bequest and why it was made the way it was. Did people just expect that any writer would be glad to take the opportunities for publicity? Did anyone even think of recipients with physical disabilities, leaving mental illness aside?
@David M.: If you read DeWitt’s blog post, you’ll see that because of her fragile mental health, she expected much much worse than six or eight stressful hours.
impractical for musicians
But not impossible. Eddie Henderson is an MD and was in medical practice in the Mwandishi days.
If you read DeWitt’s blog post, you’ll see that because of her fragile mental health, she expected much much worse than six or eight stressful hours.
I can understand wanting to avoid that stress. So instead DeWitt has written a long blog post, making public her fragile state, which attracted attention from The Grauniad, and a whole bunch of other lit-adjacent commentariat. More unwelcome stress I would have thought? Is this some eat-my-cake-and-have-it claim to have won anyway?
If I was feeling fragile, I’d just shut the fuck up — especially in case my judgment was temporarily impaired and I blurted out something I later regretted. (And why the minutiae of who said exactly what when, and phone messages down to cellphone data charges? Does DeWitt include such stuff in her fiction, for verisimilitude? “mundanity of daily life” says The New Yorker.) Does she not have an Agent/confidante/therapist to blurt at? Or let it all out therapeutically as text in the style of a blog post, with no intention of making it public?
As it is, presumably other prize committees are going to think twice about making any award to her.
impractical for musicians
I can think of several composers who’d still be revising their works on their deathbeds and/or insisting drafts be burned as unworthy, were it not for the pressure to pay the rent. That’s why Schubert’s Unfinished is unfinished: he composed several last movements, but repurposed them for other commitments. Ravel was worse: Ida Rubinstein more or less set a guard outside his house until he produced a score for (what was to be) Bolero; he ended up writing two Piano Concertos concurrently, because Paul Wittgenstein was dangling such a large purse. As for Bach: a huge proportion of his output was produced as a condition of employment. None of it is hack work (unlike Handel’s).
“If I was feeling fragile, I’d just shut the fuck up…”
(ecclesiastical flatulence intensifies)
There’s a clear mission drift by the grant giver, and it’s indicative of modern nonprofits and at times government agencies. They’re making their internal processes and practices their mission instead of the original mission of letting authors work and making it likelier they produce new significant work. That they wanted to accomodate her simply means they wanted their normal process to continue. The person who dealt with her wasn’t necessarily high handed or unreasonable himself, but the institution badly failed its mission.
I find it implausible that just giving her the money could have hit their revenues in any way, and if so they could have reduced the prize money by 7% or why not reduced the wages of their management. This isn’t an institution that normally had much publicity, do we think they could put out something on Youtube that got more than a couple of thousand views? They could have gotten their publicity some other way if they had competent people. This doesn’t feel like rational decision making but, again, mission drift.
And if they really are dependent on continous donations, they just shot themselves in the foot.
Ida Rubinstein more or less set a guard outside his house until he produced a score for (what was to be) Bolero
If only I could go back in time and pay the guard to leave, so that horrible piece would never have infested the earth!
I personally love Bolero. Moreover, mention of it having “infested the earth” naturally brought to mind the animated accompaniment from Allegro Non Troppo.
@AntC: I can understand wanting to avoid that stress. So instead DeWitt has written a long blog post, making public her fragile state, which attracted attention from The Grauniad, and a whole bunch of other lit-adjacent commentariat. More unwelcome stress I would have thought?
For me, the stress of being written about would be much less than that of being filmed and appearing in person (which would still not be enough to make me turn down $175,000, but for some reason no one shows any signs of offering me that). Maybe it’s similar for her. And the written publicity worked out quite well for her.
If I was feeling fragile, I’d just shut the fuck up — especially in case my judgment was temporarily impaired and I blurted out something I later regretted.
I think you’re saying you wouldn’t have posted about it, but a corollary would be not responding to the prize notification.
(And why the minutiae of who said exactly what when, and phone messages down to cellphone data charges?
I didn’t manage to read all of that, but think the points were to mention another source of stress and to explain why she was taking so long to respond, presumably annoying the prize people.
Does she not have an Agent/confidante/therapist to blurt at?
Apparently not.
As it is, presumably other prize committees are going to think twice about making any award to her.
One did make an award. Whether she expected to get that replacement prize, and whether such an expectation was reasonable, are other questions.
I can think of several composers who’d still be revising their works on their deathbeds and/or insisting drafts be burned as unworthy, were it not for the pressure to pay the rent.
A point worth discussing, including from the point of view of us selfish listeners, readers, etc., who want art we can appreciate.* Robertson Davies has a piece—looks as if it’s in Marchbanks’ Almanack, but my copy is on permanent loan<—criticizing novelists who apply for a Canadian government grant to spend a year in Mexico writing a novel. Marchbanks argues that the pressure to pay the rent has been responsible for a lot more good novels than grants have. (Davies didn't believe everything he made his "alter ego" Marchbanks say, but I strongly suspect he believed that.)
I'll just mention here that to my taste, Davies wrote his best novels after he left journalism to write fiction full-time, but Gene Wolfe wrote his best fiction (which I like better than Davies's best) while he was still working as an engineer. QED.
*I hope it's clear that I consider the point of view of the composer, writer, etc., signficant as well.
My daughter had a friend at school whose name was Sigsou, spelt like that but pronounced very much as you say. Google is no help for finding the origin, and insists on giving a long list of irrelevant pages for Gisou.
I can abide Boléro when in the right mood. However, it took me a long time to get over its usage in that ghastly film with Bo Derek and Dudley Moore.
The only good thing that came out of it was Peter Cook’s remark “I wouldn’t mind being a sex symbol.”
@David Weman: I sympathize with your idea that the prize committee should have found a way to give DeWitt the prize, but their mission is presumably set out in binding legal documents including Windham’s will, and it specifically includes calling attention to literary achievement (according to Wikipedia). I don’t think we know what flexibility they had without breaking the law. Yale probably doesn’t want the prize to create “exceptions” in its next audit.
And if they really are dependent on continous donations, they just shot themselves in the foot.
Maybe, maybe not. Some commenters at DeWitt’s blog as well as here have criticized her and sympathized with the prize people, and I can easily imagine some billionaires wanting to support the prize for not, as the billionaires might put it, “enabling an entitled whiner”.
If Yale got enough from the W-C estates (wouldn’t have needed to be more than $20-25M at Windham’s death in 2010), they could have stuck the money in the endowment while planning to pay out the magnitude of prizes they have been plus modest administrative costs in (assuming no future endowment-destroying apocalypse) perpetuity, including periodic increases in the nominal dollar amounts of the prizes to keep pace with inflation. Another possibility (this is the sort of thing that would have been discussed w/ the donor(s) while still alive) would be to pay out annual awards at a rate unsustainable in the fairly long run but at a rate still consistent with not spending the original bequest as augmented by investment income down to zero for let’s say 25 or 30 or 40 years – someone’s vision of a “generation” – before the awards were discontinued and something else did or didn’t spring up in their place.
Pace Jerry F. I am doubtful that Windham’s will expressly requires winners to cooperate in the generation of podcasts etc., and sophisticated modern universities never ever take even large donations without language that gives them plenty of wiggle room for administrative convenience in light of allegedly unanticipated future circumstances. Or if they are sufficiently motivated in extreme circumstances, they go to court or some bureaucratic equivalent, as was famously done in the 1970’s to allow Rhodes Scholarships to be awarded to young women contrary to the explicit directives of the long-dead Mr. Rhodes.
I can imagine a wealthy donor not named Pulitzer putting money in to fund future Pulitzer Prizes rather than new prizes with their own surname – I doubt the Windham-Campbell brand is yet at that level.
Mercatus, however, gave Ms. DeWitt this one-off award either by having just enough loose change in the couch cushions that hadn’t been earmarked for something else or by quietly and quickly soliciting the right specific donor behind the scenes. But I think they’re now actively putting word out that they are happy to take your money if you are interested in funding future grants to people they can identify as worthy candidates overlooked by the status quo Prize-Industrial Complex.
Thanks, J.W. You obviously know much more about this than I do. But although the prize committee was willing to make some accommodations, their rigidity on others makes me think that if they had wiggle room, they should have used it.
What occurred to me instead of the Rhodes scholarships was the many American scholarships whose donors or testators reserved them for young white men of good Christian character and the like, and those conditions were broken in the ’60s and ’70s, I believe. But if the Windham-Campbell Prize does have conditions like that, I wonder how much time, effort, and money breaking them would require.
ETA: In a quick look, I didn’t see any comments from Yale or anyone associated with giving the prize.
@Jerry F.: one question, however, is what the prize is actually supposed to be FOR, in the opinion of those administering it. To what extent is it to reward past accomplishment versus to facilitate anticipated future accomplishment? The rhetoric for the Windham-Campbell vaguely suggests some of both. Which is perhaps part of the problem here. The Henry Oliver piece I linked above complains that DeWitt should have already gotten a MacArthur “genius” award. But it seems pretty clear to me that the MacArthur people generally give money to recipients who have already been highly productive in their field with whatever limited resources they have, on the theory that it is plausible to expect they will be even more productive if given more resources. They do NOT (AFAIK) tend to give money to people with unquestionably spectacular talent (“genius”) who due to debilitating medical/psychological issues (that are certainly not their fault in any moral sense) have a long record of being unable to actually complete manuscripts/projects and get them published-or-the-equivalent. Which is perfectly rational if you assume that at least in a given situation those debilitating problems are not primarily financial in origin (even though they certainly may be exacerbated by the poverty they may in turn exacerbate) and will thus not necessarily be directly ameliorated by an influx of new money.
Giving money to someone with spectacular talent (and genuine accomplishments) who has had a hard life so that they can have some increased comfort and financial security in their later years is a perfectly laudable sort of benevolence, and good for Mercatus for doing that. Indeed, it is not uncommon for Literature Nobels to go to writers so advanced in years that it is not plausible to assume they have very much uncreated stuff still left to write. But if Mercatus is assuming that this money will magically unblock whatever factors have impeded completion of e.g. her novel set in Flin Flon, Manitoba (short teaser excerpt published over a decade ago), I don’t know how good their grounds are for that assumption. (Please note that I certainly don’t think she *owes* the world at large any writing she hasn’t yet managed to do, but any traditional patron might well be interested in that subject before opening their checkbook.)
I think you’re saying you wouldn’t have posted about it, but a corollary would be not responding to the prize notification.
Quite. I see no need to respond. DeWitt’s blog piece begins at
AFAICT (please correct me) no congratulations to the actual prize winners; no acknowledgment there are many deserving writers who missed out on the prize. IOW no solidarity with her fellows. That’s at least regrettably ungracious. And at least leaves open the interpretation DeWitt considers no-one else worthy.
She might not really want a public presence/to become public property. But she is a published author. A ‘public image’ comes with the territory.
It seems the prize is awarded annually, and not tied to publishing anything in particular that year. So she would be equally eligible for several years to come(?) Perhaps when she’s in a less fragile state. Except by going public she’s now poisoned the whole possibility for negotiation.
I looked through her blog a little. In the past few years very little activity, except for a few topics equally (what I’d have to call) whiney and self-regarding. I dunno. Perhaps her readership (not me) wants to feel that sort of intimacy?
BTW, in NZ we have a Booker winner, Keri Hulme for ‘The Bone People’. It seems to be a one-off: She got very little else published. There were a couple of ‘twinned novels’, unfinished at her death.
She lived in a tiny settlement on the wild West Coast. I went through it once, en route to to a tramp (hike). I knew this was the settlement, but not which address exactly. Until … I went past the house with prominent signs ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT’. That I can admire.
Perhaps her readership (not me) wants to feel that sort of intimacy?
Yes, I expect they (we) do. And it seems to me it is you who are being regrettably ungracious.
While it is notoriously unwise to try to read off an author’s opinions directly from a novel, The English Understand Wool does argue for a certain distaste for the publicity-seeking manoeuvres of publishers.
So I read the blog post.
First line:
Ah, so Substack is not meant to actually be used, then. *headdesk*
Soon after:
Ah, that I can empathize with: interruptions are bad. Worse than for most people.
The long description of all the requirements for and around the filming contains: “Please respond to this email immediately” – that’s insane. “We want to take whole weeks out of your life this month and the next month. This includes sending a whole filming crew to your place next month. Tell us y/n right now while you’re filling out the information and publicity survey that we just said we need to have in four days.”
No wonder DeWitt’s immediate reaction was:
Soon after:
Social exhaustion.
Later:
The interruptions thing again.
False. “Central” European time spans from Spain to Poland.
I think that’s clear.
So is this.
Welp, the strong wording is entirely appropriate.
Because they believe everyone is an extroverted socialite like themselves and can’t imagine things being different.
(See also: ten years of journalists unable to imagine that anyone could be a narcissist. But I do digress.)
(…See also: ten years of journalists unable to conclude “they weren’t going to see it”. Turns out I wasn’t digressing that far.)
I can empathize with the need to have only one thing scheduled.
I have no idea what Hardyesque means, but, yeah, looks like it does.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This isn’t YouTube, so I read the comments. Here’s 2/3 of one.
This is what you get if a university is forced to make money.
From the next comment:
Question:
Reply:
The thread is still active.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What, do you want a paraphrase? If ipsissima verba are available, why not just copy & paste them in and prevent any claims of misrepresentation?
And I don’t understand how you managed to miss the cellphone data charges are extremely important because they are what pushed the anxiety toward panic. She believed her phone was about to be cut off!
Would surprise me.
Does that actually work for anyone? I have to assume it does, because I encounter mentions of it every once in a while… but it’s not something I can empathize with at all, for what little that’s worth. It’s not like I could put emotions out of my brain, onto a sheet of paper, and then throw the paper with the emotions away – I don’t think in metaphors that much. Perhaps more importantly, the blog post is far from just about emotions. There are thought processes in there.
No, DeWitt believed she needed to explain something to the world at large, so she did.
@J.W.B.: To what extent is it to reward past accomplishment versus to facilitate anticipated future accomplishment? The rhetoric for the Windham-Campbell vaguely suggests some of both.
I think what’s at their site, including the FAQ, says clearly that it’s both.
It does not say that recipients are required to participate in publicity activities and people judged worthy, whether “for a body of work or for outstanding promise” (from the FAQ), won’t receive the prize if they don’t commit to those activities.
Btw, the News section only goes up to 2025. The podcast seems to only go back to 2023, so it was indeed not in Windham’s will.
Seems to me it was left out as completely beside the topic.
If you take all possible hypotheses seriously that don’t have direct evidence against them, you have a lot to do…
Just as there are no congratulations to the actual prize winners – assuming they have even been chosen yet! – there are no hints of any attacks on them; not the slightest expression of any grumpiness. They’re simply not mentioned or alluded to at all.
Thanks, DM. You said what I would have liked to say, but much more clearly and patiently.
Would surprise me.
Why? I can’t empathise much with a public figure who doesn’t have the accoutrements of being a public figure. She might be a reluctantly public figure; even stronger reason for an Agent. (To repeat from above I have every sympathy for DeWitt feeling fragile. That’s exactly what an Agent is for: to deal with this shit/filter what reaches the artistic/unworldly soul. And supply the weasel words that would seem gracious [**].)
There’s plenty enough writers who shun any limelight/write under a pseudonym. If that excludes them from prizes, that’s their choice.
Does that actually work for anyone? I have to assume it does, because I encounter mentions of it every once in a while… but it’s not something I can empathize with at all, for what little that’s worth.
Yes it works for me. “Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send …” [Moody Blues] (I’m not following why you’d then throw anything away. Wouldn’t it be grist for a future mill?)
prevent any claims of misrepresentation
So this is a pseudo-legalistic defence? Not a from-the-guts how it felt? Better get a Lawyer as well as an Agent.
So just say no. End of. Preferably get the Agent to finesse the no. “Ms DeWitt regrets that she finds herself indisposed at this time”.
[**] @Hat I’m perfectly well aware I’m not even trying to be gracious. I spent 40+ years as a wage-slave pretending to be gracious, even nice to clients (not my natural persona). Travelling to shit-holes. I’d have been willing enough to turn up anywhere for a few days (expenses paid) for that sort of money. That is, when I wasn’t feeling fragile. When I overdid it and ended up crashed into a tree with no idea how I got there, my Agent/employer had my back.
She’s not a rich public figure. I seriously doubt she can afford to employ an agent.
It’s both. Given her descriptions of how she stays awake till 5 am worrying about everything in a way that approaches panic attacks, and then immediately resumes worrying when she wakes up, she must have worried about how the prize people would react to reading her how-it-felt piece.
Also, y’know, to some people including all the details comes naturally. “This is a long letter because I lack the time to make it shorter.”
Have you never had the feeling that more people should be informed of the absurdity of it all?
Yeah, we’ve noticed. Even knowing what you’ve told us about the oppressive, mind-warping conditions you grew up in, I keep being surprised by how consistently you jump to the worst possible conclusion about everybody’s character and have to be painstakingly talked down from there.
Really… you’re not surrounded by assholes. Assholes exist, you probably know more assholes personally than I know people in total, but they don’t make up as large a part of the population as you evidently believe.
Anyway, thank you for confirming that the “letters never sent” thing really does work for some people; that’s good to know for sure.
Ms. DeWitt claimed that (for whatever motives) she did not blog about the situation until the actual prize winners were announced, and it takes only a moment with internet access to find the names of the eight prize winners announced April 8, with the presumably relevant pair (the ones designated as “fiction” rather than non-fiction, poetry, or drama) being Gwendoline Riley and Adam Ehrlich Sachs. The announcement of course does not specify which of those two was the last-minute substitute for DeWitt, although Sachs said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he had known this was coming since mid-February but had of course been obligated to keep mum until the public announcement. If true, that rather supports the inference that Riley was the fallback. (Although I imagine Sachs may well have had no idea what was going on over there and thus probably did not make his statement intending anyone to be able to draw inferences about Riley not having been the original choice.)
Per the Grauniad story: “This is very hard for me to take in,” Riley said. “I am more grateful than I can say. This unimagined vote of confidence will not go wasted on me.” You are free to conclude that Riley is not a True Artist because she’s politely sucking up to the Rich People (or maybe more precisely to The Bureaucrats). Or you might conclude that Riley is simply fortunate enough to have avoided various psychological afflictions that may impair the capacity for ordinary human social interaction.
Or you could conclude that different people are different and have different reactions, and that’s OK. We don’t have to pick good guys and bad guys, let alone mock those whose reactions are different than (we think) ours would be.
Ah, yes, my question of whether the winners had been picked yet was a glitch.
tl;dr: no, it’s even worse out there for cultural workers than it looks; dayjobs won’t save us; there ain’t no such thing as no-strings funding.
@JWB:
from my perspective as someone who’s been firmly committed to keeping my main income from depending on getting paid for my cultural work for the past thirty-ish years:
yes, jobs with anything like the flexibility of schedule that most easy-to-get 9-to-5s had twenty-five years ago are nearly impossible to find, and pay about the same as they did then, which makes living on the wages from a 40-hour work week a struggle (at best). and that’s for the likes of me, with plenty of resuméable experience and skills that apply to those jobs – my friends in their 20s can’t get those jobs, even if they can find them.
the tier of flexible but well-paid day jobs that were the main source of income in the 2010s for me and the other cultural workers i know who didn’t professionalize* (and, generally, stop doing meaningful amounts of cultural work) during that time are precisely the ones that have been targeted by the current LLM bubble (and other recent processes of enclosure/Primary Accumulation**): technical writing (in the exact sense, as well as translation, grant-writing, publicity/advertising, etc); coding/software/website-building; various technical fields in the film/television, theater, and publishing industries (sourcing/procurement, lighting, editorial-assisting, cover/publicity design, etc). to the extent those jobs still exist, getting them is entirely about existing direct connections and luck – and holding them depends to a large extent on being uncontroversial outside the workplace as well as within it (the frequency of firings for social media posts in academia and the 501c sector***, where it’s most likely to draw attention, is a decent indicator of how everyday it is elsewhere).
and in nyc, where we benefit from state and city arts funding agencies that each grant massively more money annually than the NEA****, support for small arts organizations from the city dropped massively in FY2024, with average cuts of 59% for groups that did retain support, while 30-some grandfathered-in Major Arts Institutions got to divvy up a separate budget line about 3 times the size of the entire grant-making budget.
which is to say: about the only thing economically worse than a dayjob is trying to make a living from your cultural work. and as much as i do still recommend the dayjob path to younger friends, neither is a particularly viable long-term path, which is why so much of the most interesting cultural work continues to come from younger people, few of whom are able to continue making work consistently for long enough to develop their craft very fully. (most of the exceptions being musicians, whose industry has held onto more paths for working artists to earn money working within their craft)
@hat:
I think artists should take money from whoever is prepared to give it to them with no strings attached
the attitude that having money means you get to make everybody else do what you want, to tell artists “Dance, monkey, dance!”
this is, in practice, universal among people and organizations that fund cultural work, and in my experience especially so when the people with the money claim to be giving it “with no strings attached”*****. the ways the tune-calling is expressed vary, with the more sophisticated outfits being careful about who they fund to ensure that they never have to openly exert pressure, and even less sophisticated ones using procedural tools more than overtly directive ones******. and, except in the basically-nonexistent case of the genuinely anonymous patron, the string that is structurally attached to every form of funding is your name being used by the funder for whatever kinds of self-promotion they decide to deploy it in. that is, after all, the main part of the deal, and the part that makes it worth the money to the funders, whether what they get in return is directly related to the particular fundee (“eisenhower’s u.s. isn’t racist – didn’t we just tour dizzy gillespie as an international cultural ambassador?”) or not (“how bad could the sacklers be? – they give so much money to art museums and universities”).
to my mind, the practical aspects undermine the theoretical advantages of (theoretically-)no-strings patronage. dewitt is an interesting case in point for that. tyler cowen’s “new tranche of ad hoc awards, given out more like prizes, without applications, to writers, creatives, and intellectuals who are not supported by the current system of awards and grants, or who have been failed by such systems”, is (by his own just-quoted description) an explicitly political endeavor – a project opposed to the alleged biases of “the current system” (i.e. paying lip service to the idea of taking seriously work by black, trans, immigrant, openly antifascist, and otherwise marginalized cultural workers).
the choice of dewitt to launch this program makes the unstated part of that politics crystal clear: she fits a very precise profile combining “seriousness”, critical acclaim, and no particularly visible political commitments, while making work that engages with a number of current far-right fascinations (genius; fatherhood; men’s putative unquenchable libidos (and a “right to sex” as a way of domesticating them); etc)*******. and, importantly, she’s a white woman: the demographic the current far right likes to put out front when precisely the issues her books deal with come to the fore.
without those elements, dewitt’s recent imbroglio with the Windham-Campbell prize would not have made her attractive to the likes of cowen. if being an artist “not supported by the current system of awards and grants, or who have been failed by such systems” were in fact the main criterion, he would have drained his coffers throwing money at some of the scores of cultural workers who’ve had awards withdrawn, lost commissions and teaching jobs, or/and been loudly blackballed for speaking out against the genocide of palestinians over the last two-and-a-half (or 20, or 59, or 78) years.
to me, the question of “no strings” funding is about who you want to be able to use your name for their own self-promotion. and that means that actually sharing a relation to the world with your funders is a very central consideration.
.
* in the classical triune sense, more or less, with academia and the 501c*** sector substituting for the church, and including nursing, therapy, and other non-MD health care work as part of medicine.
** in rosa luxemburg’s sense of the continuous process of absorbing new areas into the time period’s latest structures and systems for generating or increasing capital.
*** what the rest of the world calls NGOs.
**** 2024: NEA $27M; NYC DCLA $52M; NYSCA $46M
***** through friends i can attest to the same experience holding with the rarest version of this, a leftist long-term angel donor. as for me, while working on a theater project with a sponsoring organization that had signed an explicit agreement not to interfere with the content of performances, i got a late-night phonecall from the partner of a staff member pressuring me to change a script that stated the public record of a politician the organization backed.
****** the NYC DCLA structure (and the 2024 cuts) illustrate one way this is done: neighborhood arts organizations are far more likely to be publicly critical of city policies, and face competitive annual grant processes, while the Major Arts Institutions generally stay shtum and have permanent budget lines.
******* her, or her work’s endorsement or opposition to the far right’s positions on these isn’t particularly relevant (or even a priority); the opportunity to build on “serious”, “legitimate” engagement with the topics is all the “debate me, bro” crowd needs.
Increasingly the path for young people who want to be creative and get paid seems to be “influencer”. There are actually some very good serious musicians who have managed to translate their pnline video presence into a career – Julia Hofer comes to mind, as does Anika Nilles. I have not read “Yesteryear”, the current literary phenomenon, but it’s apparently a fairly serious novel and the author also broke through to the world by being on TikTok. Is being an “influencer” actually any worse than the temp jobs we used to do in the 1990s or being a technical writer? In some ways it seems far more creative, even if soul destroying in a different way.
Whatever else one might say about “influencers,” I assume that having even modest financial success in that niche generally requires the “relentless self-promoter” personality and skill set that Helen DeWitt apparently lacks. (She may also have issues that go beyond that, of course.)
I assure you that if I ever manage to write a novel and try to get it published, I will avoid any self-promotion beyond mentioning it here and perhaps doing the occasional radio interview (as I did with my curses book); I will refuse to go on any publicity tours. And I do not have whatever “issues” you’re thinking of — I simply do not have the kind of personality that permits such things. I repeat, it is not the author’s job but the publisher’s job to publicize. The author’s job is to write.
@hat: you keep using that word “is.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
I don’t know what you mean, but I am a mere blogger unfamiliar with your lawyerly jargon.
You said “it *is* not the author’s job …” when I think you might have meant either “it ought not to be the author’s job” or “in a certain largely-now-gone time and place, it was not, at least under ideal but often achievable circumstances, the author’s job …”
Separately, I just saw the following sentence in the obit for a fellow I worked with a little bit some decades ago: “Beginning at an early age, [NAME] was continuously employed in a variety of occupations, including newspaper delivery boy, golf caddie, parish rectory receptionist, Christmas tree worker, coatroom attendant, college security guard, plumber’s assistant, tent roustabout, dormitory maintenance supervisor, household handyman, political campaign press secretary, partner in a Wall Street law firm, and financial services consultant.” I expect similar lists, with differences of detail, could be constructed for many other Americans of the same generation (the decedent was born in 1954). Not all of those occupations are sufficiently casual/irregular to be easily integrated with the vocation of a creative artist, but certainly some of them are. Or were.
“Influencer” doesn’t mean “being on TikTok”; it means product placement – the videos are meant to “influence” people to buy from certain brands, and get paid as such. It’s a day-job.
@David Marjanović: Today’s SMBC is relevant.
what DM said!
and, worse, it’s a dayjob that consists of creating a marketable version of your own life, and constantly feeding it into a panopticon of intensely hostile scrutiny, in which it competes with thousands of other people doing the same thing for a limited amount of corporate advertising dollars. it’s pretty close to being a dayjob without time off the clock.
Ah, that’s what “Software as a Service” means: the thrice-accursed Office 365. I encountered the term for the first time a few days ago…
Yeah.
The Ferengi of Star Trek have never known slavery either. They put the exploitation elsewhere.
I repeat, it is not the author’s job but the publisher’s job to publicize. The author’s job is to write.
One problem is that the author is better at certain kinds of publicity than the publisher. (I doubt your publisher did any radio interviews.) The other problem, of course, is that the publisher is struggling to stay in business or make obscene profits. They may not share the author’s views of what the author’s job is, and if there’s a difference that can’t be worked out, the publisher won’t publish the book.
That’s their decision; they make theirs, and I make mine. When I was a proofreader, I considered that my job was proofreading; that’s what I was paid to do and I did it as well as possible. If my bosses had said “Oh, by the way, you also have to walk around the block with a sandwich board and tell passersby about our great company,” I would have given a Bartleby response, and if they had said it was mandatory, I would have looked for another job. I Am Not a Number.
Some good novels have been written by extraverts, including some shameless self-promoters (Leo Tolstoy, anyone?*) But I would not want to be deprived of the literary works of introverts and the self-effacing. In fact, Anon him/herself has produced some quite indispensible stuff.
* Charles Dickens kinda springs to mind, too. But he very obviously regarded the self-promotion as an artform in its own right, which is cheating.
Tolstoy, of course, eventually decided writing novels was beneath him and could only be persuaded to write Anna Karenina and Resurrection by letting him insert the kind of social and religious messages he wanted to spread. And to be fair, he wasn’t really a self-promoter so much as a promoter of Causes (which of course he identified with himself, but that’s not really the same thing).