Black Garterbelt

Falling Into You (Part Two)

Some months ago, in questioning arbitration-type criticism, I asked, rhetorically: [W]hat's the value of the 250-word [album] review when samples of the music are available everywhere, for free?

It is now clear, if it wasn't before, that that type of criticism is officially dead, or at least hopelessly corrupt:

How is it that a magazine can review an entire album--and assign a star rating to it--without actually hearing the album?

Case in point: the “review” of Warpaint--the new album by THE BLACK CROWES--in the March issue of Maxim magazine.  The writer--who has not heard the album since advance CDs were not made available--wrote what appears to be a disparaging assessment anyway, citing “it hasn’t left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth.”

Incredulously [sic], the magazine gave the album a two and a half star rating--although neither the writer nor the editor could have heard more than one song (the single “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution”).

When approached for an explanation, the magazine described the review as “an educated guess preview.”  Huh?

Black Crowes manager Pete Angelus says, “Maxim's actions seem to completely lack journalistic integrity and intentionally mislead their readership.   When confronted with the fact that they never heard the album they are claiming to 'review’ in their music section--with a star rating, no less--they attempt to explain that it was an 'educated guess.'  In an email correspondence, Maxim went on to state: ‘Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don’t want to ignore that aren’t available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It’s either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.’” 

It's unclear to what degree Maxim is being disingenuous here.  A likely explanation is that the rating was awarded on the basis of a leaked copy of the album, but no one's admitting that, and so we're left with the official explanation, which perhaps the most casual expression of nihilism I've heard so far today.*

Then, there's this:

RAPPER Nas was shocked when Maxim gave his new album, "N - - - - r," a 21/2-star review - because it isn't even finished yet. "I'm finishing the album now, and it will be out April 22," Nas told Page Six. Maxim has since apologized for the premature review, but Nas doesn't care. "I'd prefer [a review from] Playboy," the rapper said. "That kind of stuff doesn't reach my radar or effect anybody around me. I don't know what a music rating from Maxim is . . . I don't know what it even means really." Maxim also reviewed the Black Crowes' album, "War Paint," without listening to it in its entirety.

Again, it's entirely possible that the reviewer was privy to some leaked working Nas tracks, but this is getting ridiculous.**

Falling Into You (Part One)

Let's talk about Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

Author Carl Wilson's post at Powells.com probably serves as the best introduction.  Watch him go:

My book is a lab experiment in disguise, in which I was the rat, being exposed to various test conditions or stimuli that might help me understand how millions of people could be fans of Céline Dion while I and nearly everybody I'd ever met couldn't stand her. The test tubes and beakers of the experiment are, of course, tangents. It is a travelogue of sorts, as the subtitle says, "a journey to the end of taste."

It was a weird experience to spend months on end thinking about Céline Dion, but much of the time I wasn't thinking about Dion so much as about the chemical components, the relationships and accidents and outside forces, that go into liking or disliking music in the first place. The book was kind of a far-flung exercise in suspension of judgment, about putting off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for awhile, and one of the advantages of doing that is that in the interim, you might end up somewhere else than where you bargained for.

Now, I've been looking forward to this entry in the 33 1/3 series, but I couldn't help but be a little disappointed at the finish.  And not because Wilson does a poor job--far from it.  In fact, he's charmingly earnest, intelligent, insightful, engaging--all those lovely things with which the finest jacket blurbs and pull quotes are stitched.

Yet I wanted something more than the Charmin-softness of his conclusion, which belongs to the "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" school of contemporary criticism (or perhaps somewhere between new historicism and reader response, if you like), and perhaps goes even a bit further in urging critics to reconsider voicing negative responses to--in this case--pieces of music.

Wilson journeys from loathing Céline Dion to, well, enjoying and appreciating her, if only on a limited basis.  With the scales now fallen from his eyes, he can see the appeal of Dion, and also why some people find critical darlings--such as, say, Pavement--annoying.

Which leads, ultimately, to this:

What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren't about making cases for and against things? It wouldn't need to adopt the kind of "objective" (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over. It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of the aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narrative into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music.

When I say he reminds me of Heidi Julavits, I'm thinking of this in particular:

[S]nark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not; the pointlessness of fiction only comes back to suggest the pointlessness of its commentator. The real question then becomes: If you don’t believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don’t have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement?

But it is rhetorical and useless to ask 'other people' what they believe. Maybe the only questions I have the right to ask is: What do I believe? What do I care about?

These thoughts are central to Wilson's argument, as well, and he goes on at length about cultural and social capital and the relationship between taste and power.  (No surprise to any of us, of course, that a teen punk's embrace of one kind of music or rejection of another is usually about little more than "career advancement"--aka cultural or social capital--or that we typically carry this poison on into adulthood, where it is found in LD-50-type levels in music critics.)

Sing along with the common people, sing along and it might just get you through

I pledged (at least to myself) to stop being Blog Quixote when it comes to print-based haterism, but here my pledge ends, as a kind, if mischievous, fellow has directed me to this article.  You say it has vague, unoriginal talking points about blogs courtesy of James Wood?  Fine, I'll play the fool again.

Here we go.

The internet, far from stepping in where print no longer publishes, has proved no boon, in terms of blogging. "It licenses first thoughts, vituperation," [Wood] says. "I don't go on much to those sort of blogs because there are better things to do with my life."

First of all, I love the use of the word "licenses" here.  It's the sort of thing one should say as one fastidiously buffs the dust off one's monocle with the slightly stiffened corner of a silk handkerchief.

But I digress.

There's nothing inherently vituperative about the blog form; the degree of vituperation varies according to each blogger's conscience.  That most people online have very little conscience says more about what people tend to do in the dark than it does about this particular vehicle of expression.  (It should also be noted that literary bloggers tend to be relatively well-mannered, despite what the pearl-clutchers would have you believe.  On the vituperation scale, at highest pitch, most rate below a slightly perturbed high school football coach.)

And do blogs license first thoughts?  Short answer: Yes, and so what?  Long answer: It varies according to the blogger's conscience.  But we certainly hope that what a blog lacks in polish it makes up in spontaneity, humor, tonal and cultural range, voice, and so on.

As it happens, there is a proud historical and literary precedent for like the kind of blog I'd love to preside over:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

And:

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it . . .The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality. . . . The era of the commonplace book reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. It disappeared long before the advent of the sound bite.

Certainly a man carrying a torch for the living tradition of criticism that predates English studies has heard of this sort of thing.  I'd love to hear what he'd make of the connection, if he saw fit to dedicate some original thought to the matter.

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.

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:

I Love the Smell of Fortune Cookies in the Morning

Your pal here had almost forgotten about this "quirk" piece courtesy Michael Hirschorn.  But now Ed "Brother, can you spare a dime?" Champion has reminded me about it.  Lovely.

Let's dispatch this one quickly, in two parts.

First, we have the easily debunked, tongue-in-cheek assertion:

David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985— halfway between his “Psycho Killer” beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop—when he sang the song “Stay Up Late”: “Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.” [...] Jon Cryer’s “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way.

And so we see that Mr. Hirschorn is not unfamiliar with the Fortune Cookie Manifesto.

This is a canny move, because though statements such as David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985 can't possibly be serious, our good fellow here is still using it as cornerstone of his argument.  This is meant to stun you and leave you defenseless long enough to stumble through his next 1,500 words or so without much protest.

But since we're in possession of a pocketful of counterexamples, I think we can dispense of this one in Q&A format:

Q: David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985— halfway between his “Psycho Killer” beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop—when he sang the song “Stay Up Late”: “Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.” (As it happens, Byrne appeared on July’s recent book tour.) Jon Cryer’s “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way.

A: Tiny Tim

(We would have also accepted Andy Kaufman.  But there are some lovely parting gifts for you...)

Of course, it wouldn't be trend piece heaven if there weren't Bonus Fortune Cookie Goodness:

Correctly deployed, quirk yields unexpected treasures, perhaps even finds new ways to unlock that hoary emotion called sentiment, banished from the mainstream American novel (at least the fashionable, well-regarded novel) since sometime before John Barth.

No well-regarded novels have contained sentiment since sometime in the 1960s.  That sounds about right to me.  Hey, someone call Oprah and ask what the hell she's been up to all this time.

Now, part two:

Wuzzah?

Props for Stephen Dixon...in Esquire?  Believe it, friends:

I'd argue instead that Tom Perrotta is engaged in a more complicated and paradoxical project, one well suited to a postliterary age. He's writing books for people who don't much like books -- satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes. The problem with this approach is that it's not really satire at all. It's situational comedy. Perrotta's not gunning for laughs so much as light chuckles, perfect for a compassionate and confident grin. But less good for readers who'd be better served checking out David Gates or Stephen Dixon or simply giving up on books altogether and going to the movies.

I hate to say it, but even with the Dixon mention aside, that's not half bad.

Fortune Cookie Manifestos

The Reading Experience's Dan Green highlighted the following from a Sven Birkerts-penned review the other day:

Every so often, who knows why, a new literary aesthetic announces itself - an approach, a tonality, a way of setting up scenes and characters that clearly has to do with how the authors, and those readers who embrace them, experience reality. If there is not progress in the arts, there is certainly change.

I first caught wind of what seemed to be a distinct - and unsettling - new literary take on things reading Donald Antrim's short novel, "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," and then I noted it soon after in work by writers like Ben Marcus, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead. I'm sure they're not the only ones.

What struck me in all cases was the writers' way of staging reality. To begin with, they all deployed a style of affectlessness, even in presentation of moments when affect is ostensibly being expressed. This by itself dates back at least to Hemingway. What was different here was what felt like a carefully gauged disconnect between an action or event and emotion. I had an ongoing sense that something was "off," but a sense, too, that only a disappointingly dull reader would be looking for the old kinds of resonances. I would liken it to the black humor of decades past, except that it has a different edge; this tone seems occasioned not by the prospect of the Bomb so much as of a world permanently cut off from verities. Post-post-modern.

Dan continues by comparing it with the opening graf of a review from Michael Dirda:

Paul Theroux is something of a throwback. In an era when so many novelists jump up and down with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle, all the while shouting -- like Baby Roo -- "Look at me, look at me," Theroux just gets on with telling a compelling story, with the smoothness of a confident professional. The Elephanta Suite is his 27th work of fiction. The man knows his business.

Now, everyone out there might be sick to death of this topic, but it fascinates me.  I see this mentality reflected all the time in literary criticism, and it never fails to baffle.  Hence, another post, this time in hopes of attaching a snappy name to the incidents of shallow engagement practiced by Mr. Birkerts and Mr. Dirda and their ilk.

For the nonce, I'll call these miscues Fortune Cookie Manifestos, considering they possess the textual and cognitive depth of the former while attempting to embody the grandeur and power of the latter.  (The ne plus ultra of the FCM style is found almost everywhere in Dale Peck and Brian Reynolds Myers; e.g., Peck's 102-word dismissal of non-realist literature from Faulkner to DeLillo:

"All I'm suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.")

Mr. Dirda is especially amusing here because he's selling Theroux's novel in the same way that local "Continuous Light Rock" stations sell their wares; that is, by promising you absolutely nothing challenging, shocking, complex, or, yes, novel.

I don't happen to agree with having my music sanitized, but I can see the utility of a station appropriate to play at work or that keeps one from having to explain to the ten-year-old in the backseat what a "Tip Drill" is.  But we're talking about a novel for private, adult consumption here.  Do we need Mr. Dirda to keep us safe from novels that might assault us with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle?

What Mr. Birkerts and Mr. Dirda have in common in these passages is a need to take a shot across the bow of those authors who dare to stretch the bounds of, as Dirda has it, compelling story [and] the smoothness of a confident professional.

Now, again, I don't have anything against compelling story, smoothness, or confident professionalism--whatever that might look like a novelist.  (I do like it in a dentist, honestly).  And I'd just as soon leave critics such as Birkerts and Dirda alone as fisk them, except for the fact that they take cheap shots en route to making their overarching points, wallowing in antagonism and false dichotomy when it is not at all necessary.

So: story: good.  Cheap antagonism: bad.

Still with me?  Good. 

Graphomania?

Just to note that Against Assassination is updated to address James Wood's Reply to the editors of n+1, and to tip my hat to Garth Risk Hallberg's The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care), a worthy read.

Against Assassination

[Updated below]

So: James Wood.

No argument here that he can be an intelligent critic, but I nonetheless often find that his criticism reads like gibberish, simply because I strongly disagree with some of his guiding assumptions.  When he once again attacks hysterical realism and its crimes, I don't see the badass critic that others seem to, roaring through the postmodern wasteland on his hog and spitting truth, blood & dust at the feet of the local warlords.  Rather, I imagine a man squeaking down the sidewalk on a tiny red tricycle, pedaling like mad with his knees pumping up and down dangerously close to his ears.

In other words, it's unbecoming.

Wood has most recently baffled me with a statement reproduced in this article, titled "The elegant assassin" in honor of Wood's becoming the "most feared man in American letters."  (I assume the use of "man" is deliberate, as it dispenses with Mr. Shea having to address the most feared person in American letters.  Who would be Oprah, with apologies to Ms. Kakutani.)

As Conversational Reading notes, other men and women of letters contacted about Wood take pains to point out that he, as an Englishman, might be inadequate as a judge of American fiction:

John Leonard, a book critic at Harper's and television critic for New York magazine, said in an e-mail that while he's determined not to start an intramural sniping session among critics, given the market pressures hurting literary criticism as a whole, he is also "tempted to suggest that not appreciating either Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison suggests that maybe you are tone-deaf to the American language as she is written."

This theory seems a misdirection, but I include it as the set-up for this:

And the idea that [Wood] doesn't "get" America, in all its weird glory?

"Look, we all live in America. We are all aware of its weirdness. But how mimetic does fiction have to be about this weirdness -- how much does it have to reflect this weirdness? And how distinct is this weirdness from the weirdness of 20 years ago?" Amid postmodern tumult, "people are still dying around us, having children, making friends. Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction."

As Benny Profane once said: Wha?

*    *    *    *    *

Oreo or madeleine?

Q: How is David Foster Wallace like Proust?

A: He isn't.

Although not everyone agrees with me on this.  Here's our old pal Eggers on DFW and Proust in his infamous flip-floppity introduction to Infinite Jest:

...Wallace is a different sort of madman, one in full control of his tools, one who instead of teetering on the edge of this precipace or that, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, seems to be heading ever-inward, into the depths of memory and the relentless conjuring of a certain time and place in a way that evokes — it seems so wrong to type this name but then again, so right! — Marcel Proust.

Forget "so right!" His first impulse was correct.

White Shoes, Black Socks: Dispatches from the Bleeding Edge

Long has your pal the Rake lived in blissful ignorance of Paper Cuts, the blog. Until someone, ahem, sent me a link. 

Now, I recognize that tilting against corporate blogs is foolish, but I thought holding up the following little gem against the sunlight would be instructive.  (Note, especially, that our man Garner holds up a particularly brainless passage to make his point):

Nick Hornby, in his new "Stuff I've Been Reading" column in The Believer - his is surely the weirdest, most diverting and least pretentious books column in the Western world - gets around to talking about Michael Ondaatje's novel "Coming Through Slaughter" and writes:

"Here is the best definition of a good novel I have come across yet - indeed, I suspect that it might be the only definition of a good novel worth a damn. A good novel is one that sends you scurrying to the computer to look at pictures of prostitutes on the Internet. And as Michael Ondaatje's 'Coming Through Slaughter' is the only novel I have ever read that has made me do this, I can confidently assert that 'Coming Through Slaughter' is, ipso facto, the best novel I have ever read."

Somehow he makes you believe him.

Forget the wit of the staircase; Hornby's discovered the wit of the mirror.

As for Paper Cuts Dwight, he should be told that touting Humble Q. Bloke is the critical equivalent of tucking your shirt into your underwear.

Sven's Snake Pit (or, Feel My My My Serpentine)

Instead of doing the usual pale Dan Green imitation, I'm leaving the likes of Sven Birkerts to Dan Green (and others).

That said, is it me, or do others find the following hilariously purple and melodramatic?

...[I]t is alarmingly easy to slide into a slipstream, or, better, go rollicking in a snake-bed of sites and posts, where each twist of text catches hold of another's tail, the whole progress and regress morphing into a no-exit situation that has to be something new under the sun.

Apparently, we're to believe that many apple-cheeked innocents are logging on in hopes of finding some information for their kid's report on dinosaurs and unwittingly ending up as pitiable Beckett characters, trapped & dragging lame legs and busted bicycles through the comments section at Perez Hilton.  The poor bastards.

The most sublime visual evocation of this slippery slope can be found here.

The Anti-Editpus

Speaking as a semi-professional editor, I see the value of quality editing.  The wise, eagle-eyed, ink-stained editing wretch is a valuable person, indeed.

What I don't see is what point Gary Kamiya is attempting to make here:

...[E]ditors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent -- and perhaps more training -- will be required.

We already use other readers to sort things out for us: My bookmarks are mostly referrals from writers I've learned to trust. Some utopians may dream that an anarcho-Wikipedia model will prevail, that a vast self-correcting democracy of amateurs will end up pointing readers to the most worthwhile pieces. But that is only "editing" in its crudest, most general form -- it's really sorting. In the chaotic new online universe, the old-fashioned, elitist, non-democratic system of sorting information will become increasingly important, if only because it enforces a salutary reduction of the sheer mind-swamping number of options available. The real problem is glut, and it's only going to get worse.

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

If I'm reading this correctly, the thinking goes: Editors are good, because they help imbue writing with meaning and coherence.  Blogs, by virtue of their sheer number and amateur provenance, are full of non-meaning and incoherence and could use some pruning.  But not editing, exactly, because editing is something finer.  OK, I give up.  We should have more good things, which are good, and fewer bad things, which are bad.  And all this will be possible through the magic of editors!

Great/Grate

The following statement, pulled from a commenter on an AV Club post at the Onion, gave me pause:

(The post it's attached to asks whether it's right & good to be angry and in despair about soul-killing movies a la Daddy Day Care and Epic Movie--emphasis added.)

I loved this post. We shouldn't celebrate mediocrity, and we shouldn't bother to acknowledge these blatant cash-grabs: they're high-concept pitches and sequels with no reason to exist. Too much quality exists for Daddy Day Camp to merit a review. It's why I like to read The Believer: they celebrate greatness.

Uh, no.

As anyone who has read more than two of my posts knows, I have mixed feelings about the Believer.  There are few things at which "they" excel; celebrating greatness is not one of them, however.

I'd characterize their general stance as a celebration of the idiosyncratic,  with an emphasis on positivity. 

In fact, therein lies YPTR's beef(s): everything, from the random illustrations to the non sequitur issue titles (Oubliette, Neckfire!, Spoonbread, etc.) to the content of the articles and interviews is a nod to idiosyncrasy (or mild incoherence, in some cases). 

When it comes to the articles, this is often a winning stance: the reader's curiosity is piqued and then rewarded.  The other stuff (cute, weird illustrations; strange titles; one-page paeans to power tools) is so mannered to death at this point that to take any pleasure or joy in it is impossible.  You can't hold yourself up as a cool, freshfaced alternative when the incidental features of your magazine are mirthless and mired in the same stagnancy that characterizes, for example, the New Yorker's cartoons and poetry.

Also, the relentless positivity (i.e., the staunch refusal to acknowledge that houses publish books that suck) is annoying.

And this is to say nothing about Hornby's column, which is the sad result of stale lager and threadbare populism finding a willing host.

Where the Experts Aren't: A Shaggy Dog of Sorts

Your pal here has about the same musical taste as the Believer crew, so I enjoy their yearly music issue, without too much reservation.

(Which is to say that part of my listening tastes overlap with what they hold up as good and interesting music.  Their comp CDs definitely skew toward indie and/or precious, and may necessitate a strong chaser of Sly Stone, Fela Kuti, or, I dunno, Li'l Wayne (yo, audio!), if one indulges in too many spins.  This would be avoidable if they'd be more catholic in their choices, but that's a matter for another post.)

Thanks to the latest issue, and my eagle-eyed pal BOC, I've been clued in and listening to Bill Fox's albums Shelter from the Smoke & Transit Byzantium.  They're pretty wonderful, I think, especially the latter. I might not go so far as to call Fox a lost genius, but he seems to have a healthy respect for the Great American Songbook and knows his craft, which makes for great pop music (that unfortunately isn't popular at all, but could or should be).

If I were a hack music critic, this is where I might describe Bill Fox as Bob-Dylan-meets-Elliott Smith.  Because sometimes he sounds like Dylan, and sometimes like the late Mr. Smith.  You can insert your artists of choice in this hack critic's template, and you'd be no more right or wrong than I.