AUTHORS ON AUSTEN: but not for "jane-ites" only

A friend recently lent me A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carlson and published by Random House in 2009, and I have been stealing tidbits of time away from my work to browse guiltily through it ever since, like a woman with a sweet tooth who keeps on sneaking away to hit the Chips Ahoy bag hidden in the back of the pantry for one more cookie...just one more...just one.

It goes without saying that a book like this is easier to understand and enjoy if you have read something by and about Jane Austen. But the broader themes of which the collection speaks aren't about Austen per se at all; she is the exemplar, but not in some sense the point. This is a book about why some novels endure while others vanish, about what each new age brings to its readings of earlier literature, and above all about how existing books shape the imaginations of other writers. In that way it's relevant to all of us writers, whether we adore The Great Jane or abominate her.

In the collection there are classic essays I read at some long-ago moment: Virginia Woolf's Jane Austen at Sixty and an excerpt from Lionel Trilling's Why We Read Jane Austen. There are classic essays I feel like I should have read but hadn't, including pieces by E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, and Somerset Maugham. There are people from my past: an essay by Janet Todd, whose class on British writers I took in college and who I had pretty much forgotten since (no offense to a good and entertaining teacher intended). And there are visions very much of the present. Among this group, I especially enjoyed was Benjamin Nugent's The Nerds of Pride and Prejudice, which calls Mary Bennett of that novel "one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of literature." But every piece in the book is interesting, articulate, and insightful. Martin Amis, Amy Bloom, David Lodge, Jay McInerney, Fay Weldon: it's fun to see writers we know from their own very diverse and contemporary fiction weigh in on an author from the past who has become part of the collective imagination.

I started to include some quotations from the book in this post, but that became impractical more or less immediately given the multitude of little gems to choose from. I'll offer just one, chosen not because it's the grandest or most meaningful thought but because it reminds us all of something important. This is from Amy Heckerling, whose film Clueless is a brilliant and in a deep sense very accurate updating of Emma. Her essay, which shares some of the story of making her film, is called "The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo'!" and reads, in part:

...here is one area where I have some beef with many of the Jane Austen films. The novels Jane Austen wrote are classics, but that doesn't mean they should be interpreted in some sort of "classy" style. They don't require slow, swooping shots of idyllic landscapes. There is no mention in Emma of lush symphonic music heard as the wind sweeps through the heather on the hill. The trees, clouds, and birds can do whatever they want. It's not about them, it's about the people, and the people in Emma are BUSY. The book has the pace of youth—sometimes headed the wrong way, but fast, restless, and exuberant.

A reminder that reading great literature requires us not only to see the differences between its time and our own, but also the things that stay the same.

I promised in Tuesday's post that today's film-ette would be an low or no-budget author promo that's gotten two hundred thousand-plus hits on YouTube. Well, here it is: romance author Diana Holquist's trailer for her book The Sexiest Man Alive.

A few things to notice about this brilliant feat of fearless and funny author self-promotion.

First, you'll notice that Holquist exploited both what she had and what she didn't have with extreme, almost fiendish cleverness. She had a webcam, a cat, a brain, a sense of humor, and a book cover that allowed both sex and humor to shine. She didn't (presumably) have a big budget, a high-end camera, a music composer, a make-up artist, or James Cameron to direct. She found a form that built on both. The informality, the intimacy, the amateurishness, and the silliness intrinsic to home webcam use are exactly what makes the trailer so effective.

Second, her trailer connects with viewers. It's not just about her book. And it's not just about selling that book. It's about her, and the fact that she is very much like you, me, and most of her readers. She lives in an ordinary house, she has a cat, she isn't perfectly coifed or made up: no Jackie Collins or Barbara Cartland here. She's down to earth, she's funny, and—even better—she's willing to be funny about herself and her work. You probably don't go to the site address given at the end of the piece—and I'm absolutely confident that many, many viewers have done just that—because you want to know more about the book. You go because she seems like she would be a fun, funny, and interesting person to know.

Third, and closely related to second (not sure why I'm in such a numerically precise mood today), this video does not sell the book the way romance covers and ads sell the book. I hope you're listening, because this is very important. In case you're not listening, let me say it louder: IT'S VERY IMPORTANT. Romance novels and romance ads speak to romance readers. Most YouTube viewers are not romance readers. Holquist's trailer succeeded because she was willing to meet the YouTube "tribe," to use Seth Godin's word, where they are. She paid attention to the fact that they are probably younger, probably hipper, probably not interested in reading romance, and certainly more gender-divided than the romance market. She didn't violate the integrity of herself or her book to do this, by the way. She just found an aspect of her book and brand that worked for YouTube, exactly as she found aspects of her book and brand that work for her web site.

And finally, you'll notice the most obvious thing of all: Diana Holquist ventured into the brave new world of YouTube and tried it.Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Holquist's earlier YouTube promo for this book and the one that preceded it is also very clever, and even more minimal: no live action, in fact no movement of any kind, at all.

I could have made that. You could have made that. But we didn't. Something to think about.

THE OLD ERA IS DEAD. Pass the shrimp.

It seems that articles, essays, blog posts and other screeds are being written about the death of writing, publishing, literacy, and so on every day. I very rarely (read: never) like them. I'm too innately optimistic, I'm too tired to worry about the problems of The World At Large, and I don't like running around being scared of things except after dark on Halloween (and not very much even then).

Not surprisingly, however, Garrison Keillor's op-ed on this subject in last Wednesday's New York Times won me over. It's charming. It's rueful. It's clever. It reminded me of my days in Manhattan in its image of a roof party at which "...authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do." Once upon a time I too was at such parties (I was the waitress in the corner sticking spanikopita in her pocket as a nice change from Ramen Noodles). I particularly love the ending of the piece--an ending that reminded me that Garrison Keillor doesn't much like running around being scared of things either:

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.