What's your assessment of literature in Ireland over the last three years? No, not thirty years, three years. Has it improved or disimproved? While you're at it, how many Irish authors would you have deemed excellent, good, adequate and poor in 1995, and how many would you now deem excellent, good, adequate and poor in 1998?
This last will require careful consideration. For example, was Roddy Doyle "excellent" or just "good" in 1995, and would you still regard him as "excellent" or "good" in 1998, or has he become merely "adequate" in the intervening thirty-six months? When you've decided that, do likewise with every other Irish writer you can think of, add up all your figures and turn them into percentages.
These questions may strike you as strange, if not downright daft, but they're not the strangest (or daftest) in a questonnaire commissioned by Arts Minister Sile de Valera, drawn up by economic consultants Indecon as part of "a major independent review" of the Arts Council's current Arts Plan, and sent to Irish publishers.
The publishers are asked to rate Irish writing under various headings. Since 1995, for instance, has there been a significant improvement/minor improvement/no change/significant dis improvement/minor disimprovement in any of the following: standards of writing, level of literary innovation, standards of training for writers, standards of training for critics, or "climate of encouragement of innovation"?
As for "constraints on improving the quality of literature in Ireland", do the publishers feel this is due to a shortage of "high quality authors", a shortage of "high quality editors", a shortage of "high quality publishers" or a shortage of "high quality literary events, festivals, workshops, etc?" Oh, undoubtedly the latter.
Views on the "current level of access to literature in Ireland" (whatever that means) are also solicited in the questionnaire, along with opinions on "the main barriers to developing Irish literature", which include "too much variance in quality of literature" and "shortage of quality new authors".
The whole approach, seemingly predicated on the notion that literature is just another product, like soap powder or fizzy drinks, and thus amenable to the same kind of market-driven "performance" and "projection" analysis, is risible, but the result mightn't be so funny.
If, for instance, after the figures have been collated, the "level of literary innovation" (like, say, the cleansing-agent level in a soap powder) isn't deemed up to scratch, is the Arts Council going to be told to stop wasting its money handing out grants to writers?
I don't know what money the Minister is handing out to Indecon to conduct this "major independent review", but I'm sure it would keep quite a few writers in comparative comfort for the next three years. They might even learn to innovate.
HERE are the openings to three stories: "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window."
"I could hear them out in the kitchen. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but they were arguing."
"My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right."
We're reading Raymond Carver and the style is unmistakable: the clean, spare prose, the matter-of-fact tone, the suggestion that as the story progresses all might not be quite as we expect. No one else ever had that style.
But did Carver have it himself? Not if we're to consider the findings of literary journalist D.T. Max, who is infuriating Carver fans in the United States with the revelation that many of the earlier and most famous stories were heavily edited by Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, who not just made countless cuts but also added entire sentences, and sometimes paragraphs, to the original manuscripts.
Max reports in the New York Times magazine that "Lish's black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original text. In the case of Carver's 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Lish cut out about half the original words and rewrote ten of the thirteen endings."
That volume marked Carver's last association with Lish, and shortly before his death in 1988 he republished thirty of his old stories, along with some newer ones, under the title Where I'm Calling From, with many of the older stories revised so as to undo Lish's changes.
Meanwhile a posthumous novel by another American literary icon is likely to cause a stir when it's published by Scribner's next year. The 800-page True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway is described as a "fictional memoir" and it features an affair with an African woman during the final safari the author embarked on.