Creative writing MFAs, by definition (and like most advanced degrees), are for getting jobs in academia and, in this particular instance, also the literary market. Of course, most people go to the programs to meet authors (and depending on the school, agents), learn from published faculty, get funding and ultimately, be published. But when the last part doesn’t occur, just about everyone falls back on their degree and into a job (or at least tries to), which was more-or-less the original purpose of MFA programs–to make writing an academic art and subsequently, an “institution” that could support writers. Thus, MFA programs never really traded being “adventurous” or “new” for anything, it’s just that readers saw adventurous and new authors coming out of Iowa and other places and then set the standard at that and heretofore have expected nothing less.

Of course, every writing program boasts the “best” new writers and strives to produce them, but most often the programs generate writers of popular mediocrity, (who enjoy middling success before passing out in literary ether), one standout writer and then, artists who still have generations to write before they become “great.” However, if you look throughout most of history, you’ll find similar situations in every literary culture and they’ve all occurred with or without writing programs. In other words, most art is mediocre and mimicry, that’s not a newsflash, bad writers and artists have always outnumbered the good ones and just because we’re getting used to having everything in the blink of eye, that doesn’t mean we’re going to get good art and writing the same way…

In the end, the criticism of writing programs is justified, but it’s citing the obvious because if you look at, say, engineering departments at different universities, they all look pretty similar and most often, produce the same output, which is of course what happens when you make any kind of art or intellectual pursuit an institution. Morever, the criticism’s also short-sighted because it blames writing programs for homogeneity and literary shite, which seems a bit like saying Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are solely responsible for so many crappy startups that popped-up & blew-out in the last ten years or that it’s the singular fault of journalism schools that there are no Murrows or Capotes (or whomever else has been in a movie recently), nowadays. Much depends on the environment outside the institution, as that’s what’s feeding the writer and story and thus, if there’s an absence of skill, finesse and ultimately, talent, it’s not just because the institution is that strong, but it’s also because the society surrounding it is just that weak.

Regarding desis, South Asians, 2nd-genners…. Honestly, I think editors would be more interested in hearing us talking about ourselves as Americans instead of desis, South Asians, 2nd-genners; all these stories about foreignness are fine, but they’re losing their complexity and oftentimes, as an over-extended metaphor, losing their humanity and emotional impact. Fine to write about it if it’s done well, but as a “people,” if we can’t escape it then our writing becomes one-dimensional and eventually, unimportant.

I’d definitely say that Hari Kunzru (Transmission, The Impressionist) strays a bit from that territory.

This is part of La vie Boheme, from Rent.

Or do you really want a neighborhood Where people piss on your stoop every night? Bohemia, Bohemia’s A fallacy in your head This is Calcutta, Bohemia is dead

No, it’s not, I wanted to shout out when I watched it on the Great White Way. This is just plain mucky old East Village with druggies from the 80s. Calcutta is about as diverse economically as New York, from the very wealthy to the abjectly poor.

And everyone knows that South Calcutta is better

That’s what happens when you harness the daemon; turn creative writing into another middle-class profession.

Well, here is one desi gal who didn’t attend an MFA program and got a major http://www.nysun.com/article/12648 “> book deal. I am not sure if the omniscient sepiates (sepoys? sepists?) blogged about her before.

I’m not sure about that book, having ‘INDIAN’ in the title disqualifies it from my non-Indian Indian list.

No offence taken hammer_sickle, I’m from New Delhi. I have plenty of family in Kolkata, but we lost all our land (the initial subject above) in Partition.

ZZ Packer and Nathan Englander are a couple of good writers out of Iowa. David Foster Wallace is innovative and an MFA grad. Maybe these are exceptions. The best and most innovative young writer now (my opinion) is Aleksander Hemon, who seems to disdain workshops.

Among desis, Akhil Sharma is impressive. (He’s got a JD, not an MFA, I think.) Although he writes about “the homeland,” he does so in a shocking and new way.

Maybe it will take more time for us to produce our Phillip Roth, someone really focused on the contemporary scene. Maybe we’re still a little too close to the moment of immigration to shake off our obsession with it.

small nitpick however- every 13 year old who ever read Roald Dahl knows that the story about a machine that churns out short stories and takes over the publishing industry – its been done. The Great Automatic Grammatizator.

I do appreciate the attempt at the ethnic parallel, but it doesn’t entirely work.

Oh, Calcutta, ill-fated Calcutta! Rarely in history has a city been so vilified by its famous visitors. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once called it “the home of everything in the world worth hating.” American film director Woody Allen noted, “They have 100 unlisted diseases.” V.S. Naipaul, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, said, “I know not of any other city whose plight is more hopeless.” Naipaul’s German literary colleague Günter Grass went even further, coming up with the worst insult of all after living in the city for several months: “It’s a pile of crap dumped by God.” And even former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called it a “dying city” and wished, back in the 1980s, that it would simply disappear from the face of the Earth.

All this inspite of 30 years of dictatorship/communism – the pro people/poor agenda!!!

Bongs, I mean no offense

(p.s., I see you have plenty of time to blog, but not attend my b-day. This has been duly noted.)