Wonder no more.  It’s

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As I realized while researching a new Slate article on Victorian writing advice, you wouldn’t be too far off, historically speaking.  Granted, arguments over their value almost invariably take their starting point as the postwar era – that Cambrian explosion of disciplines and sub-disciplines that followed the flood of GI Bill students and then Boomers into the university system.  So it’s tempting to see the MFA debate as inextricably linked to arguments about modern aesthetics, or to the latest financial and job-market miseries that the profession staggers under.

But the origins of the MFA debate are older… much older.  They date to around the same time as the beginnings of the English degree itself, in the nationalist literature movements and land-grant university boom of the Victorian era.  And the rhetoric has hardly advanced since then.

A fair starting point would be The Art of Fiction, an 1885 literary two-fer by Henry James and British critic Walter Besant.  Its fundamental assertion is that fiction is one of the fine arts—a trainable art—despite the fact that stubborn “amateur novelists alone regard their Art as one that is learned by intuition.”

As I point out in Slate, the next step wasn’t hard to predict:

….the whole discipline had been gestating for a decade, beginning with novelist Walter Besant musing in 1884 over “Professors of Fiction”—something then as fantastical as a steam-powered robot. It was a vision that at least one critic found “Appalling. As if there were not enough novels already… [Now] we are to have our young maidens trained to the business, and let loose upon the world, in batches, every year to pursue their devastating calling, as if they were dentists or pharmaceutical chemists.”

Others, though—namely, the maidens blocked from those dental and chemist careers—were delighted. Writing novels offered women advancement, if not quite critical regard, a complaint that still haunts the profession. The London women’s magazine Atalanta launched a regular “School of Fiction” column, and its advice from 1893 on pitching remains as useful and unheeded as ever: keep your pitch short, nail down a tangible story first, and for god’s sake read the magazine before you submit to it. Ladies were then invited to try such spry writing exercises as an imagined 500-word dialogue “on the Equality of the Sexes, between Miss Minerva Lexicon, M.A., an apostle of Progress, and Miss Lavinia Straightlace, of the Old-Fashioned School.”

To be fair, Atalanta wasn’t the first to pick up on Besant’s idea; the Philadelphia-based Arthur’s New Home Magazine beat them to the punch by a few months, and featured a crit element that asked readers to submit their work for feedback.  The author of a manuscript (or MS) titled “Listen to My Tale of Woe,” for one, did not fare well:

We wish to state that we have resisted the temptation to impale the author of the “Tale of Woe” on our editorial spit, where we might have roasted her before a slow fire and served her with sauce piquante to the pupils of the School of Fiction.

In the letter which accompanies her MS., the perpetrator of this literary offense tells us that she “has not written much.”

We advise her to write less.

Arthur’s, though, was a relatively modest experiment.  It was Atalanta publisher L.T. Meade — a one-woman literary juggernaut with 280 books to her name — that saw the full implications of Besant’s idea didn’t just mean magazine contests, but full-fledged institutions.  Quoted in Pall Mall magazine in 1897, she is as weirdly prophetic as a Jules Verne novel in imagining the MFA programs of a century hence:

“The teachers should all be novelists or journalists themselves, and the leading artists… give lectures from time to time on subjects within their special domain.  Scholarships would be offered in competition, and diplomas would be conferred on the scholars, which would enable them, when they completed the course of their training, to offer manuscripts to the different publishing houses… devoid of the crudities which now disgrace the productions of the amateur.”

It’s difficult today to grasp just how radical this proposal was.  “Mrs. Meade’s School of Fiction is certainly not designed for Cloud-cuckoo-town, but for the banks of the Thames,” Pall Mall marvels.  And this kind of formalized training – the professionalizing of fiction – struck them as a poor idea indeed: “The calling of letters is not yet a profession in this country, and at least cannot be called so without risk of misleading…. I honestly believe that their success would damage literature itself.”

Creative writing classes — and the backlash against them — have been with us ever since.

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The company estimates that it would save nearly 5,000 tons of paper by ending the automatic distribution of the books. Only about one of every nine households uses the hard-copy listings anymore, according to Verizon, which cited a 2008 Gallup survey…. Verizon has a similar request before regulators in New Jersey, Mr. Bonomo said. In some states, including Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma and Georgia, AT&T has already received approval to stop delivering White Pages to all residents.

Back in ’08 I wrote in Slate on the seemingly endless death throes of the phone book. But now, at last, it really is passing into history — and there is the inevitable web site for phone book collectors. Incredibly, their very existence was once something of an act of rebellion:

We started a club for telephone book collectors, with a membership of two. We called it the Organization of Universal Telephone Book Amalgamated Collectors, or OUTBAC. We started publishing a newsletter called the Joutbac, or Journal of the OUTBAC. In my dusty files, I have the four yearly issues from 1964 to 1967. In 1965, we tried to locate other collectors by submitting a small advertisement to Hobbies magazine. The ad was rejected. The advertising department notified us that in Illinois, where Hobbies was published, the telephone directories remain the property of the telephone company. They wanted to avoid any legal complications.

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This hasn’t gotten much play yet outside of California news blogs, but it should. When GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner’s memoir (Mount Pleasant: What Happened When I Traded a Silicon Valley Board Room for an Inner City Classroom) hit the NY Times bestseller list last month, not a few people were puzzled; as a new posting on the San Jose Mercury news blog puts it, “No. 5 on the Times’ best-seller list? According to local bookstores, it wasn’t even selling well in the Bay Area.”

They weren’t the only ones surprised. As early as April 9th, Chris Reed of the San Diego Union Tribune wondered out loud if Poizner lackeys were buying and dumping books to pump up sales figures. Sure enough, this curious comment turned up at the bottom of the column:

Unfortunately for Poizner, one of those “lucky” recipients — maybe even that very one — put on their deerstalker cap and started sleuthing. Let’s go to Capitol Weekly of Sacramento, shall we?

In early April, Matthew Donnellan received a copy of Steve Poizner’s new memoir, “Mount Pleasant,” in the mail from Amazon.com. But the San Diego area college student, who is active in local Republican clubs, said he never ordered the book… The Amazon representative he reached told him the book was purchased with a gift card — and that card had also been used to buy copies of “Mount Pleasant” for 249 other people, all of whom had first names that began with “M.”…

The actual card was paid for by one Mat Miller, of the San Diego-based firm Pink Moon Media. The same person told Donnellan that Miller bought “a number” of other gift cards. The name “Mat Miller” also pops up on Google as a contact for ResultSource, Inc. This Carlsbad-based company bills itself as “The leader in book marketing and thought-leadership promotion.” The company’s website offers to “Let ResultSource launch your next book as a New York Times Bestseller…”

Interestingly, if Poizner or the campaign had bought “author’s copies” directly from the publisher, they would not have shown up on sales figures. But by buying them from Amazon, the copies would register on the Times’ figures.

According to the Secretary of State’s CalAccess website, there have been no payments by the Poizner campaign to Pink Moon or ResultSource. However, if payments came after April 1, they won’t appear until the Q2 campaign results are posted in July. If they were paid for by Poizner personally or some private party not officially affiliated with the campaign, they wouldn’t show up at all.

Ah-ha. That would appear to be these gentlemen here.

Not only do the sales figures look suspicious, so does what’s inside the book. Poizner’s a billionaire who ventures into a bad-ass neighborhood that seems to exist primarily inside his skull — right down to some basic factual errors about what’s even in the neighborhood itself.

Ira Glass called bullshit on Poizner last week in a This American Life segment:

Ira Glass: So I ran all of this by Steve Poizner – the tidy houses, the golf course, what I did not smell in the parking lot.

Ira Glass: Are you overplaying the desperate poverty of this neighborhood?

Steve Poizner: No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’s definitely not like some inner city areas. And I don’t know, what you described doesn’t strike me as the neighborhood I was at. I mean, at least in 2002 and 2003, the neighborhood is rough-and-tumble. In that there’s definitely a lot of crime, and no question lower income. And there’s a lot of, you know, signs that people were struggling economically. That’s why the crime statistics for surrounding the school – you know you can get those from the San Jose Police Department, like I did – and we definitely documented that not only did it appear to be a rough up and coming area, but the police will tell you that too.

Ira Glass: So we went to the police, and they informed us that no, the neighborhood around Mt. Pleasant high school is NOT especially dangerous or crime ridden. It’s average for San Jose. And while San Jose might have a reputation in the richer suburbs around it for being sketchy, and definitely was more dangerous in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a police spokesman told us that view is out of date, an urban myth. According to FBI statistics, San Jose is one of the safest cities in the country. There were 371 violent crimes per 100,000 people in San Jose in 2003, the year Poizner was there. You’d be more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Austin, Texas, or Seattle or Phoenix or Columbus, Ohio or San Francisco. When it came to property crime that year, you were more than twice as likely to have something stolen from you in Honolulu, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco or nearly any big city you can name.

Bah, statistics!

Well, without any more dummies to buy Poizner’s book — I mean that figuratively, of course — just one month after hitting #5 on the Times bestseller list, Mount Pleasant is now slumbering at #12,494 on Amazon.

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This description certainly sounds promising:

Think they’re joking about a detective love-story starring a delusional Napoleon reincarnation? Well, here’s the frontispiece:

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ON 5 April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia began to grumble. A week later the volcano blew its top in a spectacular eruption that went on until July. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 92,000 people and ejecting so much ash into the atmosphere that average global temperatures dipped by 3 °C. In the northern hemisphere 1816 became known as the year without a summer. New England had blizzards in July and crops failed. Europe was hit just as badly.

On holiday by Lake Geneva the 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her husband Percy were trapped in Lord Byron’s house by constant rain. To divert his guests Byron suggested a competition to write a ghost story. The result was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Across the border in the German state of Baden the soaring price of oats prompted the 32-year-old Karl Drais to invent a replacement for the horse – the first bicycle….

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Come to think of it, my scalp is tingling…

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“Patineur Grotesque shows a bearded man, dressed in a top hat and smoking a cigar, rollerskating in a park before a circle of onlookers. He stops and lifts his jacket to reveal a white hand print on the bottom of his trousers in a cheeky gesture to the camera.”

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Also: Carpet Croquet!

(From the Boston Almanac for the Year 1871)

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