Ask the dust
Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer lodging in a seedy LA hotel. While basking in the glory of having had a single short story published in a small magazine, he meets local waitress Camilla Lopez and they embark on a strange and strained love-hate relationship/ Slowly, but inexorably, it descends into the realms of madness. Ask the Dust is one of the truly great, yet unsung, American novels of the twentieth century. A tough and unsentimental story with a soft and tender hear, it remains as fresh and affecting as the day it was written.
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What Hacker News says
- I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great book".
Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever.
There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I suggest to absolutely anyone
Hunger, by Knut Hamson
Ask The Dust, by John Fante
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk
Porno, by Irvine Welsh
- If you read John Fante’s Ask the Dust, he has a number of dollar amounts in there for short story sales. Those numbers are better than pretty much every contemporary opportunity without adjusting for inflation. I would say that the 20s and 30s were the ideal time. Right now, it’s pretty grim for nearly all writers. Substack and other venues tend to be kind of peanut money and there are few writers who make a living from them, especially compared to the long tail of those who make nearly nothing. And most of those who earn significant money had big reputations before Substack.
- Speaking directly to the literary side of things, there is very little money to be had, and it's easy for little things to eat away what little money that you can make.¹ Looking over my records, my lifetime income from writing literary works is less than $600 and that's with an MFA and a pretty good publication record.
Journalism was a better bet for being able to make a living at before the internet ate the news. Putting aside tech writing contracts, the most I ever got for writing was $1000 for a review article for U&lc back in the 90s. U&lc no longer exists and freelance paychecks haven't really grown since those days either.²
Keith Gessen, in 2006, wrote an article on money for the magazine he co-founded, n+1, which is available here: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/money/ The only thing that's changed in the intervening 15 years is that the income is lower, the opportunities fewer and the expenses are higher.
Bottom line: it can be a side gig, but not much more than that unless you're extraordinarily lucky.
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1. Thanks to the pernicious impact of submittable, it is all too common for publications to charge a ~$3 submission fee for online submissions. It seems like a reasonable thing, but given that a 2% acceptance rate is a good number, that means that you'd have to make $150 on average for every accepted piece just to break even. Most markets pay less. I have adopted a solid rule against paying submission fees. I will very rarely pay an application fee for a conference or entry fee for a contest, but even that I tend to avoid.
2. Perhaps the most depressing thing about reading John Fante’s Ask the Dust were the dollar amounts that were mentioned in the novel. Magazines paid more in nominal dollar amounts for stories in the 1930s than they do now.
- Ask the Dust - John Fante
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Delta of Venus - Anais Nin
The Star Diaries - Stanislaw Lem
Maus - Art Spiegelman
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Japanese Destroyer Captain - Tameichi Hara
Elementary Go Series #1: In the Beginning - Ikuro Ishigure
Dune - Frank Herbert
Biohacking Manifesto - James Lee
The Trumpets of Jericho - Zurn
- "Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. (I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library)." - Borges
Libraries, as physical places, have a sanctity about them and every discussion on "replacing libraries" have to take this into account, I think. It's the place where many people had their first ad hoc meeting with great writers there and had their real education, a notable example is Bukowski: "John Fante’s minor classic “Ask the Dust”; the book, which Bukowski accidentally discovered in the stacks of the Los Angeles Central Library, made a huge impression on him" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/14/smashed).
This, the random browsing among physical books, is the most important aspect of a library for me, I usually spend 90% of my time in libraries doing precisely that.
After I had my son I also came to appreciate the children's area and the activities there in our local library (e.g. write a letter to our hamster"). The PC help function mentioned in the article also seems to important and popular.
As for being a sanctuary for homeless people or those struggling with addiction: My anecdotal experience has been that such patrons are a usually disruptive (and sometimes frightening) influence in most city libraries. They usually use the space to sleep (snoring is forbidden though!) and for other activities.
It's hard to come up with a better solution, though.
