Too many books, redux

The CBC’s revamped arts section has allowed many new (and sometimes controversial) articles of a literary bent to be seen all over the place, and no doubt Andre Mayer’s ruminations on prolific authors will have the same effect:

We have this enduring mental image of the author at work. He or she

is sequestered in their den, hunkered in front of a typewriter. (The

computer has been a tremendous boon to writers, but there’s just no

romance in the phrase “word processor.”) The cigarette on their lips

has smouldered to the filter, they’re nursing their sixth cup of coffee

and struggling to craft a sentence that won’t cause them to throw up

their hands in futility and jettison the page to the wastepaper basket.

Such is the life of an artist: intense, grueling and without exception,

an ordeal.

And then along comes a chap like

Alexander McCall Smith, who seems to regard book writing not as some

rarefied art but as a form of daily exercise, like sit-ups or squats.

Where most authors sweat to produce 1,000 words a day without

self-mutilation, McCall Smith has been known to bang out three times

that in a single sitting. He’s a living rebuke of the notion that

novel-writing is the least bit arduous.

Gee Andre, I guess you don’t want to know about this lady, do ya? Or this guy? Or this one? But I digress. The publishing types interviewed make some interesting points, but if someone is naturally prolific, what’s the bother? And why is the “book a year” tendency so prevalent anyway?

But let’s give the last word to George Murray (whose site I stole this link from):

George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com,

sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as “the

literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100

hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta

hand it to him.” Murray harbors a unique theory about what

distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist

like Joyce Carol Oates. “It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a

performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American

hegemony,” Murray avers. “With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot

dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.”

Though speaking of hot dogs, after this particular story, I stopped eating them years and years ago…