Rake has tried to summarize Dale Peck’s assault on Sven Birkets. But it may be easier by simply singling out sentences:

“Here’s criticism’s trade secret: you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough.” Meaning you couldn’t find anything constructive to say at all? I guess that’s when you break out the Sontag.

“I sure do laugh a lot” I never knew, Dale.

“Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sven Birkerts.” The ego has landed.

“Indulge me for a moment:” I never thought I’d see dialogue from a James Bond villain appear in a critical essay.

“We must linger a moment longer on the subject of ironies and disappointments . . .” Why linger when you can just segue?

“called by what I think is his middle name” You’re kidding, right? You’re going to hold Sven accountable for his name?

“No, Birkerts’ only subject here is himself, the inevitable progression from frog-killing child to book-killing critic.” Is this a meta confessional or a critical piece?

“Birkerts, in other words, isn’t re-viewing his life in My Sky Blue Trades, he’s reviewing it in much the same way he reviews fiction, telling his readers what they can learn from the text of his life.” And what’s wrong with that? It worked for Henry Miller, Nicholson Baker, too many others to list.

“Let me state the obvious and get it out of the way: Sven Birkerts really loves books. To move beyond that, Birkerts doesn’t love individual books so much as he loves the edifice of literature and his own conception of himself as a small but integral part of that edifice—the keyhole, say, maybe even the doorknob.” If loving books and trying to find a place within them is a sin, then nearly every writer is guilty.

“For example, Birkerts dismissed William Gaddis and Don DeLillo as part of the postmodern plague that had ‘infected’ all the arts in his 1986 essay ‘An Open Invitation to Extraterrestrials,’ but had completely reversed his position by the time of his 1998 review of Underworld.” This may be news to you, Dale, but people change.

“He can take the tiniest premise and stretch it out like a child smearing that last teaspoon of peanut butter over a piece of bread, unaware it’s spread so thin that it no longer has any taste.” That’s rich coming from a man who writes 5,000 word hit pieces.

“about as interesting to watch as a game of Pong” When you can’t cite specific examples, resort to batty metaphors.

“But Birkerts wants to do more than merely bring books to readers. He wants to tell readers how they should be reading them. He doesn’t want to represent the canon, he wants to explain it.” This is a bad thing? And how can we judge Birkets’ overall failure at explanations from a single paragraph?

“in horseshoes, a ringer is worth three points…” I didn’t realize Peck got out of the house.

“It is a large oeuvre. Six books, hundreds of essays. The temptation is to refute each one individually, but to engage with the arguments is, at the end of the day, to give them more credence than they deserve.” In other words, Peck’s approaching his maximum word count. So legitimately addressing the arguments is out of the question.

” I’ve been looking for a contemporary critic’s work to discuss for some time.” So there was a pretext here.

Last month, I wrote a letter to the Mars company. Mars, apparently a division of MasterfoodsUSA, a conglomerate operating out of Hackettstown, New Jersey, had aired a commercial in which they digitally inserted various M&Ms into a scene from The Wizard of Oz. Dagmar Welling, Consumer Affairs Specialist, had this to say by mail:

Dear Mr. Champion:

Thank you for contacting us with your views regarding our television commercial. Specifically your reaction to the M&M’s® Brand Color Quest commercial “Wizard of Oz”. [sic]

We never intended to disappoint or offend anyone. But, as with anything we see, hear or read, reactions sometimes vary based upon individual preferences and interpretations.

We value the comments from our consumers and always refer them to our advertising associates for their review.

Sincerely,

Dagmar Welling

Consumer Affairs Specialist

On immediate glance, this is standard boiler plate. Dagmar no doubt answers several of these letters each day. So we can forgive him for not enclosing the period within “Wizard of Oz” or for typing an additional space between “preferences” and “and.”

The language here deserves speculation. What is a consumer affairs specialist? Since Dagmar’s job duty is to correspond with consumers, why isn’t Dagmar a consumer specialist? Why haven’t they given poor Dagmar a more compelling job title? It would seem that the inconsiderate nature of MasterfoodsUSA extends beyond the company’s inability to add a space between “foods” and “USA.”

But more importantly, why is my letter being gauged in terms of reaction? I took great pains to delineate how deeply ingrained The Wizard of Oz is into my cultural consciousness and general well-being. And yet Dagmar, whom I will now refer to as Mr. Welling just because I can, views this as an “individual preference” and an “interpretation.” I am a problem (i.e., “individual”), because in the corporate world, I don’t quite fit into the hard “consumer” definition. There is the further implication that my concerns are childish with the comparison between the M&M’s commercial and “anything we see, hear or read,” as if one is supposed to look the other way while works of art are butchered to sell products.

Furthermore, Mr. Welling cannot simply refer to the commercial as a commercial. It is a “M&M’s® Brand Color Quest commercial.” (Note the registered trademark.) And this “Brand Color Quest commercial” actually has a title that has been shamefully appropriated from the source.

If MasterfoodsUSA never intended to disappoint or offend, why then do they respond without respect for the film or my opinion? Why take the trouble to write such a letter? If Mr. Welling had simply said to me, “Hey, Ed. You may have had a point. In the future, we’re going to encourage the Madison Avenue wizards to use their creative noggins rather than pilfering from film classics,” or, more realistically, if they had even deigned to apologize, I would have possibly reconsidered my boycott. But the fact is that my opinion doesn’t matter to MasterfoodsUSA or to the overworked Dagmar.

Dagmar may be a consumer affairs specialist, but he sure as hell doesn’t understand how to appeal to cranks

A number of sexy people tried to telephone me tonight. Their voices careened into daring Kappa curves, crossing into other dimensions. When I heard their susurrations, I thought at first that I was somehow drunk and calling a 1-900 number and paying for someone to purr. But no — these were real people with real salutations. They wanted to say hi.

There were problems — the foremost of them being dead batteries. Yes, it was possible to live in the 21st century with two phones that sputtered out dying calls and responses. Both at the same time. It was a bit like the hot dog and bun contretemps, where both supplies extinguished simultaneously. Or one was useless without the other because the hot dogs were gone and there were still a few buns left. Technology allowed these buns to flourish, but no one had done the basic math.

Because of this basic design fallacy, which spread into every known R&D conduit and the accompanying documentation, you could believe late in the week that the phones would somehow last forever. Fly off into the night! Be cordless and free! You don’t need wires or plugs or cables that curl around your legs and strap you into a spaghetti nightmare. Be liberated!

But no one had thought to program these stunning tools with accountability.

The modern age was supposed to empower us. In fact, I have some hazy memory of a Duracell commercial promising sizable staying power — more stamina than a virgin ready to burst on prom night. But it was all a grand lie. And since the technology was so convenient, we bought in.

So to the fab folks who crooned, many thanks, delights, and my apologies. Some of us are ill-equipped. Or perhaps it’s a matter of demanding basic workarounds from our benefactors.

The duo takes on Christian publishing — a veritable subject, though, in light of the various discussions on the Left Behind books and the upcoming Easter one, a slightly dated one. Unfortunately, the Book Babes come across as quite ignorant on the subject they’re writing about. Ellen declares that “The market for books with Christian themes has been a continuing motif in publishing for the past 10 years.” Well, that’s the understatement of the century. I could make a crack here about The Pilgrim’s Progress or the Gutenberg Bible, but instead I’ll just openly wonder about Ellen’s long-term memory. Has she not heard of Lloyd Douglas?

I also have grave doubts about The Da Vinci Code selling solely on its religious content (which Ellen herself even confesses). This was, after all, a book that Laura Bush deigned to read, published outside the Christian book industry. Likely, it was the dumbed down Umberto Eco style that captured reader interest. But did The Da Vinci Code generate the kind of born again fervor that The Passion did? Did pastors and preachers demand that their congregation buy and read The Da Vinci Code the same way that they played into Mel’s hands? Absolutely not. So why bother to include it? And beyond this, what do movies have to do with the “religious book market?”

Beyond this, there’s no mention of Jesus Christ Superstar or The Life of Brian or Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ or Jim Crace’s Quarantine. And that deserves a Special Badge of Honor for Cultural Blindness alone. If Jesus is appearing everywhere in art, it might also be helpful to mention the more subversive examples.

Ellen comes across as equally obtuse: “The millennium, 9/11, and the war in Iraq have all fueled people’s interest in books about prophecy and the afterlife.” Hey, Ellen, have you been paying attention to the raving fundamentalism going down this year? The gay marriage debate and the partial birth abortion bans? The National Park Service thing? Wake up, sister! They may have a teensy bit to do with this as well. And what’s with the “divide between liberal Christians and conservative Christians” horseshit? Next time you’re in San Francisco, I’ll be happy to sing “Ebony and Ivory” with you at The Mint. Are you coming out as a Christian or something? If so, these personal revelations have nothing to do with the state of the religious book market.

But it’s Margo who offers sui generis in the reading miscomprehension department: “Often, people who are bothered with the idea of faith — like Christopher Hitchens, they think themselves too smart to be hooked on the opiate of the masses — are fascinated by its citified cousins, philosophy and ethics.” Perhaps because they’re trying to understand it? Even so, if the Hitchens reference is meant as a disapproving flourish towards his takedown of The Passion, then Margo has missed the point of Hitchens’ essay completely. Not once in his essay did Hitchens call religion the “opiate of the masses.” He was referring to the film’s anti-Semitism.

Having failed to establish The Da Vinci Code as a centerpiece in the publishing industry, Margo then returns to it, offering an oblique reference to it as a thematic token of our culture, without offering a single example for her argument.

So what we get, as usual, is false rhetoric, empty unfocused arguments, and an inability to tie the article into previous takes on the subject.

Poynter, why are you encouraging this tautological thinking? The Book Babes have to go.