New York compiles list of The Best Novels You’ve Never Read And Aren't Going To Read Let's Be Serious.
Listen, people: Jujitsu. For. Christ.
I'm not shutting my fat yap on this one until the last Jack-Butler-less fool capitulates. It's fun to say. You can buy a copy for a buck. But don't just take my word for it.
I reckon I have it figured.
The main problem with litbloggers is that they're cursed with pathetic enemies. First, n+1, and now Dick Schickel? As mentioned before, the only danger attached to this desperate sputter is that someone takes it seriously and ends up associated with the shrill and poorly reasoned arguments therein. For example:
The most grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers.
The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.
"Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."
Anyone? Did I read that right?
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Mr. Schickel offers nothing but accusation and platitudes--well, also a poor understanding of his potential future audience, but more on that later.
He seems to be so pleased with himself for putting forth the naughty idea that "elitism is good" that he forgets to tell us whether Mr. Wickett's 95 book reviews are worthwhile. I presume they're not awful simply because they exist in such bulk. Are they any worthwhile, Mr. Schickel?
It's impossible to know, given this article. (Perhaps he forgot to look at them, a common mistake of avowed blog haters.) In the absence of a reasoned critique of these reviews, I don't see how the fact that they originated from a "a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker" matters, unless Mr. Schickel is engaged in attempting to send a clumsily coded message back to the court at Versailles.
Going forward from the above quoted passage, Mr. Schickel's dispatch only grows more pretentious and, oddly, childish: He's on the side of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve & Edmund Wilson & Orwell against, ahem, fingerpainters.
The most amusing aspect of blog hit pieces is that they almost invariably contain the seed(s) of their own destruction--in other words, they're full of unintentional irony and read like Swiftian satires of themselves. Accusations against the so-called angry unwashed amateurs of the blog-o-sphere are undercut by illogical arguments, misplaced aggression, and hand-wringing, and all of this unburdened by any specific, firsthand accounts of the very thing they seem to know and hate so much:
The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.
Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely "democratic literary landscape" is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.
I don't know about you, friends, but I'm ready for my sackcloth & ashes now.
This is all very sad. It's even more sad that Mr. Schickel, who needs his own neck saved along with Sainte-Beuve's, is content with appealing to the Get Off My Lawn constituency. The GOMLers are dwindling, however, and you're hardly going to win over the fingerpainting whippersnappers by tilting your nose, waving your AARP card, and slagging off the blogs.
In your heart of hearts, Mr. Schickel, I think you know that already.
Theme Months.
It's true that people I like and respect carry water for "events" like National Poetry Month, so it's not as if a refusal on BGB's part is going to cause any of the festivities to fall through the cracks. Still, it's tough to see what the purpose of NPM might be, other than to answer the question of what it would look like if a tipsy marketing campaign stumbled into a wake, covered in flop sweat. You might as well celebrate Brooklyn Dodgers Month, for all the good it would do.
Listen, either every month is poetry month, or no month is. Even if the condensation of true poetry appreciation into one month outweighs the cost of the rather transparent ghettoizing of same, then it's still just Literary Sweeps Week(s).
It's tinsel. It's marketing. It's not even adept at churning out disposable products I'd enjoy.
BGB wants the experiment taken to its logical extreme: Gimme my Nike Gerard Manley Hopkins ("Get SPRUNG!"), so I can dunk. My Hank Bukowski can coolie'll keep my Pabst cold. I want to wake up to a big bowl of Langston Hughes' Raisin in the Sun Nut Crunch. Watch the ladies come a-runnin' when I splash my neck with Eau de Cologne Larkin.
Your pal here has been sitting back, quiet, calm, and sipping a glass of whiskey as the general literary weirdness has unfolded the last few months. It's vexing to be without a literary blog when your heart wishes to be biting and sarcastic, but discretion is probably better for the soul.
With that in mind, here are a few topics BGB endeavors to avoid as we go forth:
St. Dave Eggers: Quoting the rabbit who spent all night making love to the skunk: I think I've had all the fun I can stand. I give up. This guy's a minefield. His charity work (& "nice guy" persona) is entangled with his literary work so inextricably that it's impossible for people to separate them and respond reasonably, and here I include myself. He will continue to float along in his hermetically sealed whimsy bubble, and there ain't nothing I can do about it. You ain't changing my mind about him, and I ain't changing yours.
The Believer: They publish enough decent material that they get a pass, but that doesn't explain or excuse their strange editorial stance. This recent (you) fill-in-the-blank misstep is indeed odd--somewhat akin to setting yourself on fire and running down a crowded block screaming "KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL THE POOR!" to avoid attention--but it is right in line with their policy of assigning that which is uncomfortable (bad books/snarky reviews) the status of "non-existent." I see the value of a thoughtful, negative review; they can be instructive, and, if nothing else, affirm that Author X existed and threw herself into this or that quixotic enterprise, even if her attempt didn't quite come off. Outlets like TB certainly have no obligation to spend time on that which they don't like, of course, but that doesn't mean that bad (or unsuccessful) books don't exist, or that their authors are beyond mentioning.
Nick Hornby: See St. Dave. See above. You win. He's a nice, regular guy and writes affable books, so therefore he's brilliant and refreshing and deserves a high word-count. Wake me up when he has something nice to say about Jujitsu for Christ.
The n+1 Boys vs. Blogs: No one really acquitted themselves well in that one, and again I would include myself (if only for what I said in private). That said, these fops should be ashamed of putting forth an argument so intellectually dishonest that it was hard to respond to without getting shrill. In other words, it was a trap, a slough of stupid designed to make smart people charge in and lose their boots. Still, the logical deficiencies of the n+1 argument should rightfully cast a shadow over the whole of their output, which they should be embarrassed about, along with the fact that their mouthpieces are very young men who carry themselves like baby Tom Wolfes.
Tom Wolfe: See above. Also: "Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug." Don't worry: Somewhere, a nice man in a clean, white coat is dissolving some Valium in a glass of Macallan 25 Year, and grandpa will get his medicine.
Marisha Pessl: C'mon. She's reasonably attractive, but let's not get crazy here. Also: Stop thinking with your penis. This means you.
Richard Ford: Go ahead, throw your lot in with the impeccable credibility and standards of the American newspaper, as if Pulitzer and Hearst never walked the earth. "Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said..." Zzzzzz. Wake me up when Mr. Ford starts spitting on white male critics.
DeLillo: There will be more about him, believe you me. I just don't wanna get hurt again.
You might (not) be asking.
Black Garterbelt in honor of Hocus Pocus, perhaps my favorite Vonnegut novel, if such a choice is even possible. The name was in play before ol' Kurt died, so this isn't a meant as a memorial, exactly, as it seems to me that such tributes tend to be harder to live down than to live up to. In other words, I have no words to properly eulogize Vonnegut, one of my first and enduring literary heroes. Ditto Kilgore Trout, beneficiary of Black Garterbelt's lax editorial policy.
Also, this is in honor of black garterbelts. If you're against them, then what are you for?
With luck, this spot will represent an improvement over the Progress, which was fine for its day but increasingly burdened with your pal's laziness and boredom with certain tired assumptions.
Onward and upward, dear friends.
***
People looked at me as though I were a freak. I might as well have been wearing nothing but a black garterbelt.
As I was about to go into the Chinese restaurant, two pretty girls came out. They, too, showed contempt for me and my haircut and my uniform. So I said to them, "What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever before seen a man wearing nothing but a black garterbelt?"
