I saw a very interesting article on the New York Times website, called “The End of Quiet Music.” It talks about, among other things, the fact that some artists really want to create art and not spend all their time in self-promotion. Which is certainly a relevant topic these days.
Speaking of artists who spend absolutely no time on self-promotion (and he may be the last one), I am, of course, reading Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, The Bleeding Edge. So far, so good. It’s way too early to write about it in any detail, but I did like this article :
“Thomas Pynchon and ‘WTF’: A Love Story“
And not only because it links to this piece about the New Yorker‘s rules about commas. Because you can never talk enough about that subject. 🙂
I really liked reading this: “How Does an Exception Prove a Rule?” Because sometimes, when sayings seem to make no sense, it’s because they don’t actually mean what you think they mean.
And I think I’ve linked to this before, but this article reminded me about it, and you can’t watch it too often. It’s a great song, but the performance is what knocks it out of the park.
Self-promotion… the bane of the quiet/shy writer’s existence. It’s emphasized that self-promotion is a must, but in the end, I think it’s just a bunch of voices trying to scream over each other — all it creates is noise. I admire writers like Pynchon, who are recognized for their work and who, at the same time, stay out of the spotlight. A difficult thing to be done these days…
Fascinating piece on quiet artists who create to create, not because they want to promote. I keep thinking about that image of the quiet musicians being replaced by ones who want you to buy hoodies with their faces on them. I actually thought that shift had already happened in the music business.
My publishing company publishes quiet novels, but I expect my authors to go out and read, meet people, sit behind a table at a literary festival. I’m not going to print up hoodies any time, but I think most authors are required to promote by their publishers, especially the big ones. They want to make their money back. With us, it’s also a function of being a regional press. Appearing at events, and hosting events for the public, is a way to enrich the community, to share and entertain.
Maggie: I agree about the noise. I find I just tune most of it out these days. I don’t think there will be another Pynchon, for two reasons. One: you have to self-promote these days or you won’t get a contract, and two: people respect his privacy because he earned that respect before the current media/net frenzy began. People do take photographs of him from time to time, of course, and there is a general agreement not to publish them because he doesn’t want them published. Natalie Portman was probably the last actor whose real name was unpublished (when she was a minor). Nowadays it would be all over Wikipedia the minute she had her first role.
Laura: I think in pop music it happened a while ago, but there a lot of layers to the music industry, lots of indie and semi-indie bands and projects. I thought of this when there was the whole Miley Cyrus kerfuffle a few weeks ago. People were all “oh, she’s clearly a troubled girl” and “she’s on drugs” and “she’s obviously got an eating disorder” and so on (all of which may be true and none of which can be diagnosed from the other side of a computer screen), but what it looked like to me was this: she’s doing her job. She may be young but she’s been an industry professional for a long time, after all. She did an outrageous VMA performance which got her a ton of “ink,” then she released a new single (with a video in which she was naked — and a song that may be a comment on her well-publicized personal life — a video which got a record number of views), and then she sang the hell out of the same song at some big live event (which was immediately all over YouTube, of course), reminding people that she’s actually really talented. And nearly naked.
It is too bad that this is where the industry is now (which is why so many people stay happily on the indie side, never getting rich but never having to worry about all of the above), but that is where it is, and it’s certainly not Miley Cyrus who made it that way.
The thing that I find fascinating about your press is the emphasis on public appearance and performance, which is not the kind of promotion that everybody else is doing. That makes it separate from the “noise” I talked about, and I think it’s great that it’s doing so well.