Simenon is one of those mystery writers who gets literary respect and treatment. He's had a fair number of his books reissued by the New York Review of Books imprint. He wrote the Maigret novels, but also works of "hard" street crime which are well regarded.

It was from reading a post by Herself at her LJ that made me realize the dividing line for the distinction of literary fiction and genre fiction and why there's a bit of a disconnect.

It's that literary fiction is (ostensibly) much more concerned with writing at the level of the sentence. Language is paramount over story or character. This is something of a legacy from Modernism. Which is why Balanchine is a Modernist choreographer -he's about the formal elements of ballet (the shapes that bodies make), not the story. Abstract expressionism is concerned with paint-on-canvas rather than representation. It's all about pure forms and discarding the 19th century legacy of kludgy ornamentation.

I've been boggled at times when people dismiss out of hand this emphasis on language in writing: "I only care about the story! I don't care if there are a couple cliches dropped in to move that forward" because its so contrary to what I was taught. Some people tend to think of that well-wrought language to be the curlicues on the structure, or the frosting. Whereas from an academic POV that's the main thing.

But that's how most people read. For the story and the characters. To be immersed in narrative. But that's not what's studied in schools.

I knew it was IO9 and I went there anyway, so it's my own fault, but someone should tell Literary Fiction Guy that there's also a basic grammatical error in the first fucking sentence. And that's far from the only one, but I got distracted by the fact that he seems to have a serious problem ending his sentences.

Last week I was ranting about how if I'm supposed to take web publications seriously, it would really help if the editors proofread the articles they posted and, y'know, EDITED. Even good writers make mistakes. But he is not a good writer, and he seems to assume anecdotes are universal truths, and those things combined make it difficult for me to follow his argument. Now I'm going to mark up a copy of that for my own satisfaction because, jesus.

I knew it was IO9 and I went there anyway

To be fair, that's not written by IO9 staff, and is of a much lower SPAG level than most of their articles, as well as them not fixing it in response to user comments.

I do think posting an article that is about high selling books and misspells what it deems a household name...is there some reason it was printed verbatim?

Well, it's not like my mother had any familiarity with British or American children's literature so my exposure to it is pretty random.

Now that I think about that...neither does mine. But she had little to no control over what YA books I read, and a reasonably small amount over anything I read past age seven or so. Then it was all on everyone around me, because it was their shit I was stealing.

To be fair, that's not written by IO9 staff,

But surely that should be a cue to give it more editorial attention? Or any?

I think it's an extreme case, but I've gotten that first-draft-is-good-enough feel pretty consistently from all of the Gawker sites (and plenty of other content farms) and I just can't believe there's any serious editorial review. Which is why I usually avoid them now; if they don't value their own content, why should I?

I feel badly for the writers. They're learning how to meet deadlines, I suppose, but a good editor can teach you to be a much better writer, and they aren't getting that.

Now I'm rereading and I think Hec actually summed up my problem. I can't ignore the writing and focus on the meaning of an article -- even when the problems aren't as severe as in that particular piece.

But surely that should be a cue to give it more editorial attention? Or any?

I don't think those get edited at all, to be honest. I think they go up as a verbatim post that was also up somewhere else on the web. It's a thing they do, reuse other content.

That piece is HORRENDOUSLY incorrect. And I don't think it has a good enough point that I'd post it anyway, if the house rule were what I thought it was. But I read just about every IO9 article, and they're usually grammatically correct with good spelling.

It's not just grammar & spelling, but if they're usually correct at that level, I've had extraordinarily bad luck.

I just grabbed that movie review by their senior reporter and popped it into Word, which found 6 punctuation/grammar errors (ignoring the usual false positives). I'd say there are at least another half-dozen style problems, ranging from a grammar issue that Word didn't catch to stuff like:

(there's no daylight to indicate time or clocks).

And then the fact that she can't pick a POV. It's ugly writing and I can't see past it. (I'm not saying other people should react this way, but man, it really bugs me. Obviously.)

These are supposedly from actual books, which I guess they must be (I am envisioning the slush pile) because you couldn't make some of this shit up: [link]

eep! Stuff like this is why I never end up submitting anything I've written. What if I don't realize how much I suck?