Black Garterbelt

Chillin' and Coolin' Like a Snowman

It's Christmas Break at BGB.  Therefore:

Tip back an eggnog for your Uncle Rake, because he's sure tipping a couple back for you.

n+1 is Satan

(I'm kidding, kidding.)

So: This recent post bestows the knockout power of a young Mike Tyson upon the gentlemen and ladies at n+1:

I think it's safe to say that two of n+1's favorite punching bags are the "Eggersards" (associates of Dave Eggers, whose "sub-literary work," according to n+1's inaugural "Intellectual Scene"* column, includes the journals McSweeney's and the Believer), and litbloggers -- that is to say, bloggers who blog about literature. In their most recent "Intellectual Scene" column (Winter 2007), the editors of n+1 described litblogging as an unholy mixture of guerrilla marketing and vomiting; and in the current issue's "Intellectual Scene," they contemptuously dismiss litbloggers in a single sentence, after having praised Amazon.com's anonymous book reviewers. At least the "Amazonians," they claim, actually read the books they're writing about. Ouch!

So who's going down -- the Eggersards? Although Eggers did reportedly once threaten to give up writing forever unless the Atlantic Monthly killed an anti-Eggers essay by future n+1 co-founder Keith Gessen (the essay was killed; Eggers kept writing), this outcome seems unlikely. But the effort to single-handedly silence scores -- maybe hundreds -- of litbloggers is as quixotic as Cuchulain's fight with the sea.

Or is it? This morning, I visited one of the most popular, and reliably informative of all litblogs, Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant -- hoping, like everyone else perched anxiously on the margins of the lit-review world, to be titillated by (among other things) Champion's fearless, if over-the-top denunciations of New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom the Brooklyn-based Champion has described as an enemy of literature. And what did I find? This: "I'm done with blogging. And I'm serious this time."

That's right, Champion -- "the litblog world's preeminent gadfly" -- has suddenly quit litblogging. (Say it ain't so, Ed!) Can the timing be mere coincidence?**

This dispatch prompted about 1,000 words worth of sarcasm and recrimination from your old pal the Rake that, sadly, must never see the light of day.  But I think it's for the best, for as I revisited Round One of n+1 versus the bloggers, I realized that n+1's Intellectual Situation is more lazy and dishonest than I remembered.

In short, the unattributed architects of the Intellectual Situation seem to find litblogs beneath sustained analysis--they're willing to be snide and cast them out categorically, but not willing to name a single name or explore differences in style, approach, or quality.  The entry from Winter 2007 employs naught but insults, gross characterizations, and categorical dismissal.

And it gets worse.

Ed is Dead/E-I-D, E-I-D, E-I-D/No no no no nooo

Ed is, yeah Ed is.

But he's ascending to the Empyrean, where he will still smile down upon us with great wisdom and a complete understanding of Divine and human nature.  And podcasts.

What I have to say I said there.

All those nice things he sez about BGB?  Don't get your hopes up; they ain't true.

Me, I belong to the AMB: All My Bum

This is in(s)ane.

As your pal the Rake understands it, members of the NBCC were asked to participate in an "Ethics in Book Reviewing" survey.  Peep some of the responses to the litblog-centered questions from these professional book reviewers:

Should literary blogs adhere to the same rules of ethics, whatever the consensus may turn out to be on them, as newspaper book-review sections?

• I don't know what a literary blog is.
• Blogs seem to me nearly irrelevant, so unregulated are they.
• kind of an irrelevant question; so far as I can tell, no ethics apply to blogs.
• Frankly at the moment review blogs are such jokes, it doesn't really matter. It's like asking what rules apply to people's comments on Amazaon (sic)
• No, they shouldn't. Blogs are the toilet paper of reviewing -- quality varies, but none of it is worth keeping.
  

Should a literary blogger review the book of another literary blogger to whose blog she or he links?

• Who cares.
• I don't know what a literary blogger is.
• Blogs are irrelevant to me. I have only in the past few months discovered what they are.
• Who's going to read it?
• Who cares?
• Does anyone except the bloggers really care?
• it doesn't matter. bloggers don't matter.
• I have no opinion. I don't read blogs
• How do I know? At my age, I do not blog or read blogs.

(Stolen almost wholesale from the Lit Saloon)

As a general remark, let me say that the state of book reviewing is such that NBCC members have little reason to look down their noses at litbloggers.  Let's be a little careful whom you choose to insult and alienate, my clay-footed friends.

BR Myers is Hello Kitty

Both white, big in Asia

Frankly, your pal the Rake feels a little bad about wasting time on BR Myers yet again.  The man is a bomb-thrower, plain and simple, and I shouldn't have been drawn into an emotional response in the first place.  (Not that I don't, in principle, stand behind every curse that I wrote.)  I'm never going to agree with a lick of what he writes, as to me it's all an extension of his flawed first principle (i.e., that many acclaimed authors are acclaimed solely due to a conspiracy of philistinism and silence).  That Myers now chooses to assign the blame for corruption and incoherence in government to the literati is just the tasteless, oily icing on his fallen cake.

Why he chooses to write from a such an position of extreme aggression and intolerance is beyond me. Certainly no one is demanding that he appreciate Auster, DeLillo, et al.  And a dissenting opinion is typically welcome.  However, he's accomplishing nothing more than rhetorical bullying in arguing as he does, brooking no difference of opinion and reaching past the author and text to accuse any who might read differently than he does of being a dupe or a degenerate liar.

This "I don't-know-what's-wrong-with-these-kids-today" tone plays well to the curmudgeons in the balcony, but the argument it conveys is nothing more than aesthetic bigotry.

Further, I think the debate brewing in the comments to the previous post provide a good example of why narrowly focused, pedantic sentence dissection as a means to judging a novel is a dead-end.  Take this passage:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Are we going to enjoy the music here, or are we going to vivisect the text?

Is snow, which we later establish is "faintly falling," going to hit a old, lead glass windowpane hard enough to make a tapping sound, even a "light" one?  Are the snowflakes silver or are they dark?  How can a snowflake be dark?  How can snow fall obliquely against lamplight?  Does he mean obliquely through the lamplight?  Can a soul swoon--that is, be "overwhelmed with ecstatic joy"--slowly?  Isn't it absurd to assert that the snow's falling not just through the sky but indeed the universe?

And so on.

Not all prose is created equally, and not everyone is Joyce, but I think the point still stands that if you're hellbent on denying all artistic license and poring over sentences like a Talmudic scholar, you will find something to quibble about in the greatest passages from our finest prose stylists.

Who has the time or the stomach?  Not I, friends.  Not I.

Now, onward, I hope, to better things.

BR Myers is Satan

(Update: Meanwhile, across town, I've been called out as something of a wanker myself.  Well, that's probably accurate, but at least I don't ask anyone to pay me for it.  If you want to read more tsk-tsking from your wanker pal the Rake, go here for my rebuttal.)

(Update 2: BR Myers is Hello Kitty.)

Just when you thought BR "Master of the Fortune Cookie Manifesto" Myers couldn't be any more of a wanker, here he comes again with his first taste of the Denis Johnson oeuvre stinging and bitter in his mouth:

When a novel's first words are "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed," and the rest of it evinces no more feel for the English language and often a good deal less, and America's most revered living writer touts "prose of amazing power and stylishness" on the back cover, and reviewers agree that whatever may be wrong with the book, there's no faulting its finely crafted sentences -- when I see all this, I begin to smell a rat. Nothing sinister, mind you. It's just that once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there.

Having read nothing by Denis Johnson except Tree of Smoke, his latest novel, I see no reason to consider him a great or even a good writer, but he is apparently very well thought of by everyone else.

That, my friends, is what's known as a display of big brass balls.

Myers is going to use his carefully cultivated (and forthrightly admitted) ignorance to (1) crap on Tree of Smoke and (2) accuse everyone else--most of whom have actually read some of Johnson's other work--of being liars.

And if you think he's not going to spend the rest of this review cherry-picking the less impressive passages out of a 624-page novel, well, then, you've got another think coming.  It's not even worth rebutting him; some of what he pulls out isn't very good, but you or I could just as easily come up with great passages that apologize for any missteps.  (See here.)

But that's not enough for Myers.  No, everything's a conspiracy, and de gustibus is just cover that allows the literary establishment to contribute to the "rot" of our culture: