Hot on the heels of Grumpy Old Bookman reviewing Noah Cicero’s novel Burning Babies (and giving it a pass), Tao Lin has posted a lengthy interview with Cicero. Cicero was one of the members of the Underoos Literary Alliance and explains why he left, among other things.
Year / 2005
Why Fear Michiko?
Hot on the heels of Michiko slamming Banville into the ground (with an unusual silence from certain quarters), Notes on Non-Camp points to this profile, which claims Michiko to be “the most feared book critic in the world.” More feared than Dale Peck? Or James Wood covering a “hysterical realism” novel? I think the real question here is whether Michiko Kaukutani, who has veered too frequently into distressing fictional affectations of late (is Michiko’s fury the mark of an aspiring novelist?), is a critic worth her salt anymore. Is it really valid criticism for a writer to cling to safe dichotomies (“style over story,” “linguistic pyrotechnics over felt emotion”) while spending most of a review summarizing a book rather than discussing its literary worth? If Michiko found Banville irritating, that’s fine. If she feels that she was alienated from Banville’s story, that’s fine. But it’s simply not enough to offer these sentiments without supportive examples, much less refusing to make an effort to discern the meaning within the text. That’s the least any reviewer can do when approaching a work of art. And given that the New York Times offers a book reviewing clime in which fiction has devolved from an enduring presence to some charming summer-stock production that you attend simply because a relative is in the show, it seems extremely strange to me that Michiko’s generalizations are continually accepted and indeed “feared” by authors and the publishing industry alike.
Leave It to Updike to Pop Those Cherries
John Updike takes on the new Gabriel García Márquez novel. He decries the book’s narrator for not considering “the atavistic barbarism of buying girls in order to crack their hymens.” But more interestingly, he offers one of the oddest sentences ever seen in the New Yorker‘s history: “The narrator’s asshole, we are told more than once, burns.”
Sufjan Stevens: The Kieslowski of Indie Pop?
Bookish reports that singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens is now writing 50 songs for 50 states.
Men Who Read Magazines: Easily Bored or More Complicated?
BusinessWeek reports that men aren’t reading magazines the way they used to. I’m going to suggest something radical: Could it be that men are more complicated than the current lad magazine world gives them credit for?
Of course, with this decline comes one thankful development: “Maxim and the laddie titles it spawned are hardly in danger of disappearing, but their newsstand sales are far off their previous peaks. Meanwhile, ad categories that gravitate toward men’s titles, such as domestic automotive and technology, are down this year.”