and the winner is... (and the whiner is...)

- Giles Coren wins bad sex in fiction award. That would be Mr. Zorro from my previous post.

...in other news...

- Sam Sacks adds another rant to the endless MFA debate. He comes firmly down on the "MFAs are a complete scam and ruining literature and an elitist ticket to the Illuminati of publishing world!!" side. He makes a couple - odd - claims though. For instance: "The truth is that, with the possible exception of Marilynne Robinson, who teaches there, no major writer has come out of the (Iowa Writers') Workshop in decades."

So are we to believe that Michael Cunningham, one of the most popular, best-selling and award-winning (Pulitzer, PEN/Faulkner, etc.) writers around isn't "major"?
Adam Haslett? (Not a huge fan, but he is making quite a stir on his first book)
Denis Johnson?
Mark Strand?
Need I go on?

The central claim of the article, "The Fiction Machine," is that MFA programs spit out carbon-copy writers who only know who to produce generic stories, nothing original. As such, they are destroying literature. Considering that almost every major risk-taking author around (David Foster Wallace, Ben Marcus, Denis Johnson, Micheal Cunningham, George Saunders, etc.) came from an MFA program, I'm not sure how we are expected to believe this to be anything but rubbish. Enjoy or hate the authors I mentioned, I doubt you could believe they write generic fiction or that they are carbon-copies of each other.

So it seems what we are left with is a realization that MFAs encourage and produce a few great writers while also producing a lot of passable or hack authors (who will never publish anyway). Which is to say, they don't seem to affect the greatness to shit ratio that exists in anywhere.