<![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent - Gawker Comments]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent - Gawker Comments]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @ginger rant: All time best is "The Guardiyarn" masthead back in the Eighties.

Sigerson

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @stew: +1 nice use of "limned"

Sigerson

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @ginger rant:

A Time magazine cover once misspelled "the Philippines."

Seeräuber Jenny

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Who needs editors? People like me who just bought the new Bill Cosby book. I started reading it soon as I got home. Turns out it's some high-minded treatise on the current state of blacks in America, and not all about the comedian's love for bukkake. A well-placed, and necessary, comma in the title would have saved me 20something bucks.

growler

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @atipofthehat: I'm sure you're right. I'm a longtime proofreader and copyeditor, and it's usually when the art department (god bless 'em) gets in there that there's a collosal fuckup. Case in point: About 10 years ago, Ms. magazine's cover announced that its cover story was about "FEMINISIM." Also, dollars to donuts that "antidisestablishmentarianism" will be spelled right more often than the "the" or "and" sitting right next to it.

Me, I find that I'll get offered big bucks to (freelance) proofread or copyedit horrible, horrible copy (e.g., anything corporate or medical) but a pittance to proof or copyedit anything good. Sure enough, I always choose the latter, and I haven't regretted it once. In fact, if it's good copy--e.g., a book or an article that I'd probably be reading anyway, hence something that I feel honored to put my imprimatur on--I occasionally find myself half-thinking, "Shit, I'd do this for nothing." But don't tell anyone, okay? Mustn't let the (Publishing World) Man catch on.

Jeezy peazy, I wish this comments box had spell-check.

ginger rant

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MisterHippity: That error would have originated in Quark or InDesign. Designers will make typos; the process has to be there to catch them.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MisterB: Get stewed. Books are a load of crap.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @VenusCloacina: Variorum + Facsimile.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @shesaidwhat: I agree with just about everything you say.

And your "well-connected" point about publishing houses is probably true, too, because I never got my foot in the door at one of those places. Years ago, in my youth, I applied to many jobs at the major book and consumer-magazine publishers in manhattan, and never got a chance for an interview -- or even to take a copy-editing test (where I would have kicked the ass of any of those "well-connected" shits who got to work there).

But I'm not bitter or anything, mind you. :-)

MisterHippity

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MisterHippity: Yes, it is enjoyable to those of us who also enjoyed dorky stuff like diagramming sentences. But given how much knowledge and skill it takes to do that job, it lacks a create element and after a while it is dull work if you think it is all you are going to ever be doing. And yes, people now think that is work that can be passed off on to an admin with spellcheck. Basically copyediting is just a stage that is skipped. That is why most things are so badly written. In a sense it should be the kind of journeyman/woman's work that should be done by anyone who wants to work in a writing profession (including teaching).

Here's another matter: technical editing (I live in the Bay Area). Technical editing pays well (even provides stock) and there are jobs available.

Still, the bottom line isn't the pay level it is that publishing doesn't look like a promising profession. They aren't hiring; they are cutting back. (And don't even get me started on what university presses are doing. Jesus Wept.) Also it appears to be a very closed, elitist, nepotistic world. What few opportunities there are in the NY publishing houses, magazines etc tend to go to the well-connected (rich, ivy league, etc.). Perhaps this is where the NYM article raised some good questions.

Anyhoo, the result is that we get more and more books that are filled with errors. Note: this message was not copyedited.

shesaidwhat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MissPants: Okay, but this still doesn't explain her eyebrows.

ginger rant

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> 100!!!! See what happens when my editor has the day off? See the consequences??!!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I'm just thrilled this post drew 3,000 views (and counting), 100 comments (and counting?).

I love it when we talk about serious art stuff.

KarenUhOh

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Where was Gordon Lish when Alice Sebold needed him?

Is this what put Norman Mailer in the hospital?

beppolina1

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @VenusCloacina: Yeah, but I think that example is a real anomoly (sp?). I don't see many of those kinds of spell-check-catchable typos any more.

Usually, the misspellings I see these days are ones like "complimentary" when the intended word was "complementary." Or my personal favorite: "pubic" instead of "public."

Somebody just neglected to spell-check the book jacket text. That's just a king-sized fuck-up that probably got somebody fired.

MisterHippity

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> What will I do without the approval of comment field typers I don't respect??

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MisterHippity: Increasingly, sucky editing lies in negligence of the thing spell-checkers can't catch Agreed that that's part of it--lots of typos in proper names, for instance. But spell-checkers should catch things like "Satisfation".

VenusCloacina

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Let those who are without douche cast the first bag.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @shesaidwhat: YES on the douchey thing. So much so that my "wtf, dude?" key is now broken.

stew

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> War, What Is It Good For?

Thank Gaw for editors.

Debussy Fields

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Coming in on this way too late, but anyway: The non-Lish-edited stories in "Cathedral" and "Where I'm Calling From" are waaaaayyy better than the pretentious bullshit in "What We Talk About."

Then again, I grew out of my Carver phase when I was 20. Then I moved on to my Philip Larkin phase ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad," etc.), which was much more fun.

Mr. B.

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @Seeräuber Jenny: not only was he their guru, he was also their fuck buddy. Gordo was notorious in the 70s and 80s for fucking anything with a va-jay-jay in the publishing business in New York. He preyed on Carver the way he preyed on young women. I know from experience. There was a great novel written about one women's experience with Gordon -- "Elbowing the Seducer"

fedhead

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @shesaidwhat: Having worked as an editor for most of my professional life (I'm a writer now), I want to thank you for pointing out that copy-editing is highly skilled work. And that's really the root of the current problem -- publishing businesses have lost sight of the fact that editing does, in fact, require unique skills and talent.

In the age of the spell-checker, people now think that any kid out of college with an English degree can do it. And believe me, they are wrong.

Spell-checkers can only do so much. Increasingly, sucky editing lies in negligence of the thing spell-checkers can't catch -- because now people think an editor is just a "secretary" hired to run spell-check.

It is thankless work, to be sure -- you cannot have an ego, or you'll go insane. But dull work? I disagree on that score -- I actually quite enjoyed it. But I'm probably just weird that way.

Low paying? Depends on what kind of business you're working for. The pay ranges from lousy to halfway decent.

MisterHippity

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> What We Talk About When We Talk Bout Ass

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]>

"I thanked my copyeditor in my acknowledgements."

Good for you. :-)

"I think SheSaidWhat may be on to something with the "law firms pay better" idea, though."

My God, then what are the junior associates doing?

Seeräuber Jenny

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @Seeräuber Jenny: I thanked my copyeditor in my acknowledgements. Even though he actually pissed me off by "editing" things that weren't mistakes.

The thing is that copyediting has always been low-paid, dull work (I've done it, years ago). It just used to be done a lot better than it has been in the past 10 years.

I think SheSaidWhat may be on to something with the "law firms pay better" idea, though.

I just read Satisfaction, the first novel by Gillian Greenwood (producer of the "South Bank Show", former editor of the Oxford Literary Review) in its Random House US edition. The name of the book is spelled wrong--"Satisfation"--on the back of the dust jacket. Now, how did everyone miss that one?

VenusCloacina

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @VenusCloacina:

Some guesses about the sorry state of copy editing:

Bad pay;
No respect;
Thankless work?

Seeräuber Jenny

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @VenusCloacina: And yes, to do it right, a separate person is the copyediter. Even if you have the skills it is very hard to copyedit a text you've worked on as an editor (even harder as a writer!). But I just freelance (ha!) so I don't know the business that well. Only that it isn't hiring as much.

shesaidwhat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> editor. @lionel-mandrake:

"A nice man, and very, very well-regarded as an editor."

So you mean the stories I used to hear about his serving as a very highly paid writing guru to groups of privileged young women were all untrue?

Seriously, it sounded cult-like.

Seeräuber Jenny

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> (Maybe the previous 80 comments touched on this -- I'm not sure, as my commenting has been hampered by a sudden onset of work this morning -- but...)

I've always wondered why editors don't get the same cred that music producers get.

...and if they did, who'd be the literary version of Phil Spector?

Trampoline

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @VenusCloacina: Law firms pay good money for copyediters. Publishing houses 1. pay crap and 2. are cutting back on the number they hire. Also copyediting is a skill that fewer people possess. It is easy to lose the skills without practice. It is hard to find good people because it highly skilled work, painstaking, low-paying, and not especially interesting.

shesaidwhat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Or perhaps someone here's Saint Avertia of the Mars Bar. When Asses pass, They cure the sick instead of taking a peak.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Does not All Humanity have Ass? If _checked out_, does not all Ass not Sag?

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @lalalina: That's the copyeditor, who is a different person entirely. And I agree about the typos in Wao. You know what else was full of typos? A. N. Wilson's biography of John Betjeman, which I just finished.

Any copyeditors here? What's up with the bad copyediting lately?

VenusCloacina

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I want to see variorum editions of EVERYTHING.

VenusCloacina

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Why are these people *so angry*? I didn't mention any or gender of ass. My ass sags west and usually fails at Sudoku.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: DUI Back to anger management Captain Road Rage.

"Be thankful every ass you check out at a bar is clothed. Actually having to bear the memory of every sorry saggy ass you've ever wanted to see would make you a *Victim* of your own misplaced curiosity."

Or should I say John Fitzgerald Page?

Is it just me or does it seem like Gawker has gotten incredibly douchey lately?

shesaidwhat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Colbert/Lish 2008!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @KarenUhOh:

He'll be over as soon as he's done arranging the hydrangeas at my wedding.

c_webb

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Then it's settled. I'm hiring Gordon Lish to make my ass look good in these pants.

KarenUhOh

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> One if by Lish, and two if by Tess,
And I on the other hand, confess,
I'm ready to scream and buy them a ball sack,
Every editor and agent and freelance lit hack,
For the books do suck for want of a pen, Jack.

Then he said "Good-night!"

heartbreakturnip

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> New mood stabilizers. How's my driving?

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: what's the matter with you?

shesaidwhat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @emily:That was a "neg". You turned on or what?

Crotty

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> My mother was quite good friends with Lish and worked with him for many years. A nice man, and very, very well-regarded as an editor. The fact is, one look at the average unedited manuscript will illustrate in graphic detail why editors (and copy editors and proof readers, etc) are absolutely vital in the publishing process. The typical writer (fiction, non-fiction, it doesn't really matter) is a mess. No book gets to press without massive reworking and no author has a book published without jumping up and down about how the editors "screwed their baby up".

lionel-mandrake

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> And I guess you shop at like iuniverse for new books? Shake that Paypal Button!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Somehow I don't think we're dealing with 1,000 of Raymond Carver's being horribly silenced by their corporate masters here. I mean, besides the Gossip Girl Lady's new book--which they BONED. Most editors are a rubber stamp weigh station between the genius author and the remainder table. The art of editing has vanished. Write one moderately successful book and everyone ~magically~ becomes their own best first reader. Let me know how that works out. And, of course, readers are the victims. And the victims are victims.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Andyourlittledogtoo: surely obsessive-compulsive. no argument there.

MissPants

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> FlashMan: I knew someone that was also married to Tess once, and she has a nervous tick: literally one by one until they're all gone--using her fingernail as little tweezers. eck!

MissPants

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Like if gawker was just all commentators and no Emilys. That's the kind of youtube "everythings's somewhat amusing" relativism N O O N E is asking for. More Simon Cowells please.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: I want to agree with you, but there is a problem with editors right now.

We may judge from a writer's output whether that writer deserves to be published. But editors are in a position of authority simply due to having been hired by a publishing company. If you respect publishing companies in 2007, please tell me why.

And, by the way, you should have said: "we need more editors, not fewer." YOU JUST GOT EDITED, SUCKA!

Seriously, if the editors you speak of are truly qualified, they will know when to lay off as well as when, where, and how to suggest cuts and rewrites, so, sure, why not?

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MisterHippity: Hee hee.

Carol Gardens

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I don't even know who Lish was! And I'm not an editor. Wrong again. But less is always more. Be thankful every ass you check out at a bar is clothed. Actually having to bear the memory of every sorry saggy ass you've ever wanted to see would make you a *Victim* of your own misplaced curiosity. I want this unedited version to come to press and for you to have to read it (and I hope defend it). For everyone else, always quit while you're ahead. There's no place for Carver to go accept deeperdown.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @Pope John Peeps II: My mother used to say about textual slap-fights: "It's all very funny until somebody loses an 'I.'"

MisterHippity

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I mean, why does everything always suck? Because no one early in the process said "uh oh, U kno what? thiz sux!!" We need more editors across every medium and not less. There is always spinach in everyone's teeth. Everyone's ass always looks fat in those jeans. No one is doing us any favors by not letting you know.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: Sorry, I forgot how culty Lish fans tend to be.

To be perfectly honest about the specifics, not the principle--I don't think I want my Carver cask strength, either. But then, I don't like Carver.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I trust the same editor with my fiction work and my fabulous comments here: Robin Leach. It is true, only he can understand the lives of the rich and famous.

Wrath of Farrakhan

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> LEAVE RAYMOND CARVER'S DEAD BODY AND WIDOW ALOOOOOOOOONNNNNNE!!!!!!!!!

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @emily: I'll bet you were reading those Lish parodies when you were six.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @Crotty: What do you want from me? It's fucking GAWKER.

Emily Gould

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I wish every author in America got molested by Raymond Carver's editor. Would we were all so lucky. That dude ate turkey sandwiches and crapped out Mercedes.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> That was Um sarcasm. Some here in this box make it sound as if Carver was robbed in the night of his stories and has forever paid the price for their defilement! The? British? And? Their? Orgasms? Yeah, we won't know if "Saw 4" Sucks Ass Either until we've paid $20 and are halfway through the popcorn.

EVERYONE IS A VICTIM AND STILL NO ONE READS BOOKS. But we'll just ~never know!!~ Like, whatever happened to the Smurfs. We Just Don't Know.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: You have a remarkable faith in the skills and intentions and achievements of editors.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: You know, ALL CAPS makes victims of us all. Nobody wins in an internet fight. It's a slap-fest between severely disabled kids.

Pope John Peeps II

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MissPants: I know this is much too serious a comment, but pulling out your eyelashes is an obessive compulsive disorder--it doesn't mean you're crazy. Of course, she could be crazy, but the eyelash thing doesn't make it so.

AndYourLittleDogToo

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: Um, you originated the word "victim" on this post, and I picked it up from you--on purpose! Maybe you should stick to alerting us about the British and their orgasms. I don't say the unpublished versions are better. I say we don't know until we read them.


Hey, does anyone remember the mini-scandal in which Lish wrote his own jacket copy praising himself and was caught out and embarrassed? I would love to reread that about now.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I'm not a big one on authorial intent but in this case there is clear evidence that there are two versions: the ones heavily edited and the ones Carver restored. (And there is evidence of Carver's wishes being ignored.)

I'm in favor of publishing the alternative version (at least in the Library of America collection because I think it's important to have those available to Carver readers. It would alwo be fascinating to compare the two. I seriously doubt that the unedited version will replace the first version as the definitive text.

Books that are important to readers and scholars sometimes warrant this kind of publication of multiple versions. There are many reasons why a text is heavily influenced by an editor. Sometimes it is a collaboration as with the famous case of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's editing of The Waste Land. Sometimes the editor censors it as with T. S. Eliot's bowdlerized version of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (done in order to get it published and/or out of personal squeamishness). The editing of Emily Dickinson's poems is a scholarly school unto itself.

I still have one lingering question, though. How "unedited" is it really going to be? Is this going to be the Tess Gallager's version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?/Beginners And thus begins a new scholarly industry…

shesaidwhat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> REMEMBER: YOU ARE A LITERARY VICTIM UNLESS YOU GET TO ROOT THROUGH YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR'S UNDERWEAR DRAWER AND TRY ON THEIR ILL-ADVISED EDIBLE STRAP-ONS! A VICTIM I SAY!!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> This is even dishier than that TMZ post on the role of the unreliable narrator in post-modern fiction.

Drew Kerr Jr.

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Poor Tess, she just needs to take a Barthes and chill out.

pinch_vintage

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @MissPants: How do you pull your eyelashes out? All together in one go?

Flashman

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @CoachHogan: Mind meld on Eliot.

iplaudius

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @lalalina: *sigh* I'm a lawyer, uptight about typos.

lalalina

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> "Victims?" I mean, "victims?" Nobody really reads books, you know. The stories *can't possibly* be Better. BETTER? When they do get inevitably get published, please return to these comment boxes dressed only in a hairshirt. And save the word "victims" for something, anything, anyplace else. If the word "victim" was stricken from the American lexicon for a decade, many people would explode into confetti.

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> It would be misleading to publish the earlier version as an “alternate edition.” It’s like when the New Yorker printed previously unpublished—purposfully unpublished—drafts of poems by Elizabeth Bishop last year without comment. Helen Vendler ripped Alice Quinn a new one, and I think she was justified: Bishop did not want those poems presented as finished work.

On the other hand, if the text is published as a “draft,” then I think the publication can be justified as scholarly work. There are many examples of this. In poetry, there is, for example, the facsimile of “The Waste Land” with heavy emendations by Pound. In fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor is known to have been very active in the process of revision.

iplaudius

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> More importantly, whose job is it to make sure there are no typos? I'm almost done with that Junot Diaz book (LOVE it!) and there are typos galore! Well, maybe just a few. Still, pretty sloppy for a highly anticipated first novel. Yes, i'm a lawyer, uptight about typos.

lalalina

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> The editor dude should just tell the widow to Please Be Quiet, Please.

Social Crimer

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> For another really good example of this problem, look at my unedited novel Stale Cheese Puffs in My Cupboard. My cat made some edits that really improved it, but I just want to go with my original version, where my super takes four weeks to fix my leaky shower instead of three.

Ha Ha Sound

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: I said the victims are the readers if what was cut is better than what was first presented. People who wish to become graduate students can do so.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> More than the remake of The Shining, have y'all read the unedited version of The Stand? That's some backbreaking work Stephen King's editor did there.

As evidenced by the fact that I have actually read The Unedited Stand (I don't recommend it), I like to read both the edited versions and unedited (when available) versions. Educational, you know? I would like to see the alternate edition of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." And it sounds like Gallagher would be honoring Carver's wishes, and that's important too.

But then again, I know I make some pretty dumbass wishes when I'm drunk, and the next morning I wish they hadn't been honored.

Martita

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @heartbreakturnip: You last point may be more about his alcoholism than about Chico State--go, Rooks!

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Yes, the _victims_ are the *readers*. Become a graduate student, ATIPOFTHEHAT. And sift through every last drunken napkin! Enjoy being BREATHLESS!!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Gary kinda rhymes with dependent-on-writers salary.
Tess kinda rhymes with my husband is dead and I am his literary executor and I am not sure what to do with that, and oh my gosh fiction is dead and all I am left with is this man's legacy which is both disappearing and misunderstood, and I am unsure how to feed myself or keep Ray in his proper place in history, what a mess.

I'd take ANY new Carver incarnation of it would remove from my brain the image of a sullen Jennifer-Jason Leigh making gross vagina noises in "Short Cuts."

stew

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Tess is crazy. She pulls all her own eyelashes out one by one. Living vicariously through her dead husband? I think so.

MissPants

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> How many editors even understand what they're editing? Have you commenters met any editors? And Gary Fisketjon is the genius who brought us McInerney.

Emily, please tell us more about your former profession!

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I think I understand why Tess G. is doing this. She and Gordon Lish have been in a disgusting, small-minded, pissing match over who was the real genius behind Carver, and thus who is most entitled to rob Carver's grave in order to burnish their own literary reputation for posterity.

Lish has long claimed to have been that genius. Check out the opening paragraph of D.T. Max's 1998 Times Mag article on this subject:

For much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who is now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. The details varied from telling to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more his than Carver's. No one quite knew what to make of his statements. Carver, who died 10 years ago this month, never responded in public to them. Basically it was Lish's word against common sense. Lish had written fiction, too: If he was such a great talent, why did so few people care about his own work? As the years passed, Lish became reluctant to discuss the subject. Maybe he was choosing silence over people's doubt. Maybe he had rethought what his contribution had been -- or simply moved on.

In that same article, Max describes how Gallagher claims to have come up with the idea, if not most of the story, for Carver's masterpiece "Cathedral," which was a post-Lish story.

Read it and decide for yourself. My opinion, having been a book editor: editors edit and should shut the fuck about it. What's worse, in this particular situation, is the snobbish, East Coast attitude that undergirds that response of Lish and Gallagher: that someone as relatively unlettered as Raymond Carver (Chico State College, barely) needed them more than other writers need their editors and lovers; that he was something of an idiot savant who needed constant care.

heartbreakturnip

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I love the stories the way they are, and I would hope that if the edited versions were drastically different from what Carver wanted, he would have taken them elsewhere. What strikes me as bizarre, book-world-wise, is that someone as great as Carver had an active editor, while today someone like Foer gets to run amok with bells and whistles and no one tells him to stop being all precious and "postmodern."

c_webb

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Every few years people realize Gordon Lish improved/damaged Raymond Carver's stories a whole lot. The NY Times mag "revealed" (it was not exactly new news) a few years ago that "A Small Good Thing" was a whole lot shorter (and I would say not as good, actually, but it is really a matter of opinion and taste) when it appeared in Ploughshares or some other little litmag entitled "The Bath". (A lot of people I've talked to think Lish is a complete asshole.) The version collected in "Where I'm Calling From" is the long non-Lish version, and this was Carver's decision. I think that's also the version most people associate with Carver. That Lish editing style -- ever read the old "Quaterly"? Pithy, tight, sort of airy and meaningless, soul-less. But then again Tess edited a posthumus book of Carver "poems" intersperced with fragments from Anton Chekhov (?!) that is kind of crappy. I think she misses him, but unfortunately he is dead. Anyway, if you are really intersted in Carver (like or dislike), you are tired of the reductive parodies like the one that opens this post. That shit was funny 20 years ago. Sort of.

Crotty

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> tess always struck me as a sweet, super flaky lady (the kind of chick you see on a bicycle with a cast on her arm). i'd like to see a variorum edition, but clearly the originally published takes precedence. just keep lyle lovett out of it this time.

debord at work

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> @paulrevere: The victims are the readers, if the unpublished version is better. Have you read it?

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Let's have a look at the intended texts. Who knows, maybe they'll be good in a whole new way and then we have twice the goodness to love! Wouldn't that be great!!!!???!!!

"We sat like stone lions in the kitchen of last resort. Raindrops kept falling on the roof like wet sands in a universal hourglass as the scent of my failure mixed with the burnt toast. Reaching gently so as not to disturb the gauzy shroud of silence over the table I poured another shot of SoCo and drank it like it was my first strawberry Quik. My estranged amanuensis Roquella sat on the Louis Cans she'd drug in from the parlor and flipped silently through the latest Saturday Evening Post. There was an article about nuns in Wisconsin who'd built a bomb shelter that also served as a fully consecrated Roman Catholic shurch in there that I particularly liked but I didn't tell her about it, she'd find it and like it or or not or like it and laugh which would be the wrong response but anyway the wafer crumbled she'd find it on her own. We sat like that, drinking and reading, silently for about 32 minutes until she started humming Happy Days Are Here Again and I couldn't help but join in with the full strength and volume of my piercing but embracing mezzo-soprano pipes."

DonPardoCalrissian

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> In the original "Cathedral" the blind man is deaf.

Johnny_boy

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> My first impulse was to side with Carver, but then I remembered that editors for the American version of Clockwork Orange snipped off the last chapter. Rolling Stone ran the missing chapter some time ago, and reading about how Alex grows up and becomes a family man made me hate the whole novel. So, go Lish!

unutterable

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> There was a big piece on this in the New York Times Magazine, I believe, about 9 or 10 years ago, and it seemed clear to me at the time that the Lish edits were improvements. Then again, the new unedited On the Road is pretty awesome, and certainly worth looking at if you're a Kerouac fan. So maybe publish both and let the readers decide. It's like looking at the manuscripts of "The Waste Land" with Ezra Pound's edits. Even when you're like, "Yeah, that was a good call. That too," it's interesting to see what got cut out.

CoachHogan

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Yeah, right, what a fucking victim Raymond Carver is. Ho My God! I'm surprised his unreadable drafts haven't balled into a zombie and don't walk the earth stabbing editorial assistants. Huge genius artist types should never sign book contracts or cash royalty checks--they should stay right here on the internet where you can be free to be as lousy and unedited a writer as you wish. Weeeeee!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I would cut the editor.

atipofthehat

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Did Tess run out of money?

gonzosmom

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Debate the relative artistic merits all you want, but if the author doesn't write it or sign off on it then it ain't "intent." And fuck you, Freud, my mother's got nothing to do with this.

KarenUhOh

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I stare vacantly into the distance. I consider the question.

Carol Gardens

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Wow this is the toughest question I've come across in weeks. I'm a huge Carver fan - I think he's one of America's most noteworthy modern writers. I can't imagine "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" being any better.

I'm curious if Tess' motive in bringing out another book is financial or if she's really wants to preserve her husband's original writing. If so...why speak up now instead of five years ago??

modelbehavior

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Is anything stopping Fisketjon both letting this happen AND digging his friend Ray Carver out of the ground? Because that would be some publicity coup.

whokilledallthemandelas

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Eh, come on, she's a widow. It's not like the sales of "SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME" t-shirts were allowing her to use brand-name Tylenol instead of the generic. Let her publish. Then we can all go, "editors, wow!" like PJP up there, and maybe Gary will get a raise! And then he can buy a "SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME" t-shirt. Though how you could live in this century and not know about Gordon Lish is beyond me. Wasn't thise whole deal painstakingly limned with side-by-side manuscript excerpts in the Times about five years ago?

stew

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> So I should die with people not knowing what it was I actually wrote? No thanks, I'd rather live, then.

PS Consumers have no rights.

timbnyc

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Didn't Tess herself edit the balls out of Call Me if You Need Me? So she first gets to muck around with his unpublished stories and now is heading after the published ones? Eeek!

DainCurst

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> They tried to do this with Thomas Wolfe, but it turned out there wasn't a market for steamer trunks full of drunken scrawl on random notebooks after all, so the Maxwell Perkins Look Homeward Angel was allowed to stand. What I wouldn't give for Perkins or Lish to shape my prose.

Mediahohoho

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> And PS: Wouldn't American Literature be Waaaay Better off with Hard-Core Editors in Hockey Masks with Chainsaws? Imagine if Sonny Mehta had a sack, for instance. We are adrift in mediocre authorial nonsense. Isn't it time to chop a few virgins up at the old abandoned Summer camp?

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Kind of timely given this week's New Yorker piece on the new abridged versions of literary classics. They make a compelling argument in favor of the edited versions.

MindGrapes

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Either the reader that brought this to your attention is one of my multiple personalities, or s/he was eavesdropping on this very same remake-of-the-shining-with-dude-from-win... conversation I was JUST having.

b4nt4

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Who knew Carver's work originally included so much bodice-ripping? And car chases!

paulrevere

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> Make both available and let the public decide. Like Deep Impact and Armageddon. Or, more similarly, theatrical release versions of movies vs. Director's Cuts. Also, Elijah Pollack vs. Mordecai Stein.

LolCait

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorial Intent]]> I never even knew Gordon Lish was also a great editor. This makes me love him like I love cotton candy.

Pope John Peeps II

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