Month / July 2007

by Edward Champion

What the Dickens?

Once again, John Freeman offers a preposterous essay. In bemoaning the ostensible popularity of The Sopranos, Freeman writes, “[C]ritics were calling Chase the Dickens of our times.” And from there, Freeman’s article can be summarized as followed (and it’s best if you read the next four sentences in a high-pitched voice to get the hysterical timbe right): Oh noes! The novel is dead! The sky is falling! The literary landscape is in trouble because of uncited empirical evidence!

Again, Freeman refuses or is simply incapable of citing specific examples to prove his thesis. Maybe it’s because calling out Michael M. Thomas or Alessandra Stanley — writers who both offered this not so unreasonable comparison — involves taking a stand against fellow New York journalists, something that runs counter to Freeman’s notorious streak of passive-aggression.

But no matter. If we examine the Dickens comparison to David Chase closely, it’s not as unsound as it seems. After all, Dickens’s work arrived in installments, much like television episodes, with Dickens often corralling mammoth plot threads as he wrote (ergo, his much cited tendency for coincidental run-ins) and tailoring his novels in accordance with reader reaction. Consider the case of The Old Curiosity Shop, surely the most reviled of Dickens’s works. (As Oscar Wilde once famously noted, “One would have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) While Dickens’s close friend John Forster kept his editorial contributions fairly low-key in his Life of Dickens, it was Forster who read all of Dickens’s proofs and who gave Dickens considerable advice. Observing the close audience reaction to Little Nell, he pointed out to Dickens that he would have to kill her off.

With Forster’s hand in the Dickens editing process, what makes him any different from a script editor or a more benign version of an HBO studio executive? And with the great controversy over whether the Sopranos finale was any good, what makes the Sopranos finale any less different from the way people reacted to Little Nell’s death?

Further, if an acclaimed television series can’t be compared with a Victorian serial, then what the Dickens is David Simon doing recruiting crime novelists like George Pelacanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane to write episodes for The Wire? Surely, there is some convergence afoot. People like Simon wish to inject television with a more ambitious quality: the contained serial with deaths and developments that television has sometimes failed to live up to.

Unable to discover an explicit connection between the apparent fall of books and the rise of television, Freeman quotes the oft-cited NEA “Reading at Risk” study — an examination which collected its data in 2002. But what business does Freeman have drawing upon data from five years ago to contextualize a series of unsubstantiated delusions he views as a present-day problem? After all, it’s the “white-wine sipping yuppies” who are “talking.” Pretty soon, it will be the rabbits in Freeman’s walls confessing their unanimous preference for Edie Falco over Edward Falco.

And there is this preposterous leap: “To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people’s outlook on the world, and so far only George Saunders and David Foster Wallace have adequately described the way this framework is murdering our language.” What of Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, with its hip-hop neologisms and affluent fat man protagonist? What of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which used a bitter divorce to comment upon said language? What of Mathew Sharpe’s Jamestown, in which an apocalyptic scenario is predicated entirely upon trade and communication? I could be here all day rattling off titles. Is Freeman simply not paying attention to the current literary environment?

There is no need to plunge further. Freeman’s piece is uninformed and hysterical poppycock of the first order — the kind of nonsense I’d expect to be published in a college newspaper, not The Guardian.

by Edward Champion

David Halberstam’s Last Essay

Vanity Fair: “We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.”

There’s considerably more. And this essay is yet another reason why Halberstam will be sorely missed.

(via MeFi)

by Edward Champion

The White Collar Critic

Why aren’t there more white collar critics? Or, more specifically, why aren’t there more snobs who believe they’re championing blue collar critics when they have about as much interest in the working class as a permanent resident of a gated community?

It is a very good thing indeed that the white collar critics could care less about devoting their precious real estate to those scruffy baristas or those dirty steelworkers (despite NAFTA, believe it or not, there remain some mills open on American soil! Who knew?). How dare they quote Aeschylus? And how dare some of these overeducated white-collar doctorates remember their Greek playwrights? We all know the game: ignorance and conformist thinking is bliss!

The white collar critic’s limo liberal guilt has been a grand ruse for some time now. The book reviewing landscape has been a closed system. And a good thing too! Who needs some interloper with a mere bachelor’s degree ready to shake things up when you can embrace the lackluster “humor” of a complacent reactionary like Joe Queenan? He’s “funny,” because the superior white collar system says so! And because anybody who worked at Vanity Fair with Tanenhaus, washed up or not, is “Funny” with a capital F! Who needs speculation on Marianne Wiggins’s fascinating new novel when the white collar environment can explain every detail to you like you’re a rictus-mouthed literary socialite at a bland cocktail party? Intellectual conformism — the great stock in trade of the white collar critic — dictates that the white collar critics know what’s best, mostly because their shirts are so impeccably starched. They are the grand gatekeepers. The ONLY gatekeepers! So let’s take all the fun out of newspapers by populating these book review sections with a sea of Babbitts! The white collar critics will never permit their readers a scintilla of independent thought, much less an idiosyncratic insight. They dictate. They decide how you think. They’re white collar and they’re proud. And they live by the admirable mantra: We take no chances!

Support your white collar critics today! Don’t just buy one edition of the New York Times every Sunday. Buy twelve!

by Edward Champion

Fourth Recovery/Roundup

  • Until I observed last night’s series of fireworks displays across the East River, I had not encountered political fireworks in the literal sense. It seems that the Jersey authorities were extremely pissed off after Battery Park was closed to the public. So from Jersey’s side of the Hudson, the Jersey boys proceeded to offer as momentous a show as public money could offer — minutes before the Macy’s display had begun. Their fireworks, which declared with every burst that Jersey was as much a part of the July 4th celebrations as the big boys, were designed to be seen across a considerable expanse of water. At first, the assembled throngs on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade appreciated this. And I had to smile and empathize over the Jersey effrontery. Yes, it was a case of flagrant dick wars. But it was the kind of symbolic penis measurement that reminds everyone that there’s more to life than deep pockets. All of us ducked beneath umbrellas, buffeting a downpour that lifted shortly before Macy’s 9:20 PM start time. But the minute that Macy’s began launching jellyfish low-risers and smiley-shaped explosives into the sky, the crowd quickly turned on these apparent Jersey upstarts, becoming deeply vociferous about how “we” — meaning New York — had showed the folks in Jersey. Yet, “we” entailed Brooklyn and Queens for the most part. There was something deeply allegorical about all of this: private money vs. public money, proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, New York vs. New Jersey. And I soon began to understand that East Coast provincial lines were more ridiculous than I ever imagined. But it was still a good show. And I’m not just referring to the fireworks.
  • While I contend with the largest podcast backlog I think I’ve ever had (which includes APE and BEA coverage), the folks behind the BookExpo Podcast have released Maud’s interview with Shalom Auslander. There is thankfully at least one use of the word “foreskin.”
  • Mark Sarvas has inside dirt on Tom McCarthy and Soft Skull.
  • Manga turned into Noh drama.
  • Mark Sanderson reports on the Tina Brown launch party craziness in London. Apparently, Brown was upset that Tony Blair, Madonna, Helen Mirren, Julie Christie, and Shirley Bassey had crashed her party, or were rumored to attend. Here’s a PR hint, Tina: When you publicly announce that classy women like Helen Mirren and Julie Christie weren’t invited, this causes any slightly curious outsider to consider the questionable éclat in the party planning stages.
  • As if the email scammers weren’t bad enough, Nigeria also has a crisis in literary criticism.
  • I will have more later when the caffeine kicks in. (Will it kick in?) I blame incongruous holidays.
by Edward Champion

Ursula K. Le Guin Tears Ruth Franklin a New One

From Ansible: “God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?”

And Ursula’s just getting started.

(Thanks, Andrew!)

[10/15/07 UPDATE: While I did not post the entirety of Ms. Le Guin’s piece, I realize that I may have posted too liberally and have revised this post to limit my excerpt to one mere sentence, which I feel is applicable under fair use. Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, seems to be under the mistaken impression that quoting an author’s piece in its entirety is “fair use.” I feel that Doctorow was wrong to post the entirety of the piece and that, likewise, I was wrong in presenting more than three sentences. I should note that I have not been contacted by LeGuin or the SFWA, but her thoughts on the subject can be found here.]