Post Gazette: “For my first author interview, I picked Sir Stephen Spender, the legendary British poet then in his 80s and perhaps in need of a few American dollars. Why else would he speak at a small women’s college in rural Western Pennsylvania? The moment has stayed with me as one of the most painful episodes of my new life as the book reporter. The great man was wrapped in a gray wool double-breasted suit worn shiny with age. The collar of his white shirt was frayed and yellowed at the edges, and his silk tie had survived decades of tea parties. We stared at each other for what seemed a fortnight until I mumbled some inane question and he mumbled a reply.”
Month / May 2007
John Freeman: Steal From the Blogs; Blogs Are “Presorted”
From today’s edition of The Leonard Lopate Show (“Why Are Book Reviews Disappearing?”), roughly around the 33 minute mark:
Lopate: Is this a growing area? And are people who really care about books going [to literary blogs] to learn about books?
Freeman: To a degree, yes. But it’s all for the presorted. So if you want to read about books, if you want to read about a certain book, you can go to a specific kind of blog or a specific kind of online news site and find coverage there, tailor-made to your sort of ideological or stylistic preferation [sic], uh, preferences. But I think it gets away from the idea of putting as many readers under the same tent as possible and getting them all to participate in the same conversation. So I think if blogs have done anything, a few of them have very cleverly and creatively used new technology in ways that newspapers haven’t yet. But they could certainly start to borrow from and use that to re-energize their website. The New York Times has done it by having a podcast.
* * *
In other words, John Freeman, the man who publicly declared, “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept. It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia,” is telling us that blogs are for “the presorted,” that newspapers should pretty much steal all of the hard work that litbloggers have innovated in to carry on.
Meanwhile, John Freeman has mobilized his action using an online petition and by using online conduits to champion for print reviews.
It sounds to me like John Freeman isn’t so much fighting for ongoing literary coverage in newspapers, as he is using the NBCC as a bully pulpit to drown out all voices contrary to his own. (Meanwhile, this “presorted” blog, which covers a variegated array of topics, leaves comments open to everyone in order to facilitate discussion and it continues to maintain the position, without waffling, that literary coverage in all forms must be championed and preserved.)
No word yet on whether Freeman avoids basements in Terre Haute, but given that he considers Pittsburgh to be part of “fly-over America” (when it’s merely an eight hour drive from New York), I’d say the answer’s leaning towards an unequivocal yes.
Screenwriters: All White, All Male, All the Time
Hollywood Reporter: “With the exception of female TV writers, women and minority scribes have made little progress of late in seeking fair employment and earnings in Hollywood, according to a report commissioned by the WGA West released Tuesday.”
The report does not appear to be available online, but I certainly hope that the WGA follows up with these claims by releasing these regrettable income disparities to the public.
Roundup (Been Caught Stealing Edition)
- Scott smells a rat with Susannah Meadows’ review of Jamestown. I have to agree. Why bother to bring up the dog and penis imagery and not venture a stab as to what it might symbolize? Richard has more and has urged everyone to stop caring about the NYTBR.
- Another offering in last weekend’s NYTBR was (no surprise) Joe Queenan’s smug and feckless essay on bad books: “Indeed, one of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of hopelessly awful books under the pretense of work.” Which is not unlike a food critic boasting about how a steady stream of Burger King meals permits him to remain a manic-depressive. One of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of books from people who dare to think and write differently. I start off hoping to love a book and I am immensely disheartened when a book lets me down. As Nathan Whitlock observed this morning, Orwell had some interesting thoughts on “good bad books.”
- This week at the LBC, folks are offering thoughts on Alan DeNiro’s short story collection.
- Scott McKenzie examines the myth of stealing ideas. I’ve written before about the “screenwriter” I once met who seemed convinced that her “idea” about a fallen angel had been stolen for the John Travolta film Michael. When I interviewed Guy Ritchie many years ago, I pointed out that his subtitled streetspeak in Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was similar to the jive speak in Airplane. He told me that it hadn’t occurred to him and that I was the first person to point this out. Outright theft, along the lines of Mencia, is one thing. But the best artists have no shortage of ideas. They are also intuitively aware that creative people sometimes think along similar lines. I do my best not to steal ideas and, if there is some inspiration, I try to attribute it to others. If I know that someone else has set a precedent, I generally try to avoid pursuing the idea until I can come up with my own unique execution.
- And while we’re on this subject, Good Man Park has found an astonishing emblematic similarity between the “Neon Bible” symbol and vanity publisher Author House. Did the Arcade Fire rip off Author House? I don’t think so. Happy accidents happen.
- A third digression on this topic and then I’ll stop: Many have remarked on how Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” is a grand Elvis homage. But I overheard Elvis playing in a coffeehouse last night and it occurred to me that the “Someone still loves you” part of “Radio Ga Ga”‘s chorus strikes the exact five notes as the fifth stanza line in Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” — A#, A, G, A, A#, if I’m not mistaken. I’m not sure if this was deliberate, but, in light of the song’s commentary on radio’s omnipresence, it does add an interesting nuance to the tune, no?
- Michiko likes fiction again!
- Tom McCarthy’s top ten European modernists. (via Messr. Thwaite)
- The Star-Tribune has cut 145 jobs, and the casualties include James Lileks’ column.
- Lynne Scanlon invokes an infamous line from Henry VI in her appraisal of book reviewing.
Why Settle for Cornflakes?
From John Freeman:
Several years ago, I had an editor at a newspaper who liked to go over copy by the phone. His edits could be brutal, but he always circled around with a palliative comment to remind me it was all in service of a bigger need. “Remember, John,” he would say, “this is for the guy out in the suburbs eating his corn flakes. He has about five minutes before it’s outside for some Sunday yard work. So you want to tell him something important.”
From Anthony Burgess’s You’ve Had Your Time:
John Coleman in the Spectator said: ‘Not the best of Burgess’s books. Mr. Burgess might curb his inventiveness: he’d be a first-rate comic novelist if the camouflage of another little joke were down and he looked his subject squarely in the face.’ R.G.G. Price in Punch wrote: ‘I do not quite understand why everybody refers to Mr. Burgess as a funny man. He is as accurate and depressing as Gissing, though I agree that he is a Gissing with a sense of fun and an eye for any comedy to be found in his ruined world.’ Do reviewers ever consider that novelists are desperate for help, that they are anxious to be told where they go wrong and what they can do to put things right, and that, before they achieve the dignity of solus reviews and academic dissertations, they have to rely on these lordly summations in the weekly press?