David Kamp, Blog Snob

Ten years from now, we’ll all be inured to David Kamp. A whole generation will have grown up as his book, The United States of Arugula, has been long forgotten — the remaining copies pulped or perhaps used as oversized skeet shooting pellets, because they couldn’t even sell as remainders. For what imagination can one expect from a hack writer whose grand contributions to letters include The Food Snob’s Dictionary, The Film Snob’s Dictionary, The Rock Snob’s Dictionary, and The Wine Snob’s Dictionary? (One senses a trend. A writer so content to plant the word “snob” to his contributions in four different terrains, even satirically, must truly be an insufferable asshole.)

Right now, this great parvenu David Kamp has turned the prick of his pen to blogs. Using the finest epithets that 1999 had to offer, Kamp rails against the “untamed blogosphere” and the “Wild Web.” He displays his considerable ignorance in suggesting that the Smoking Gun is merely a place “best known for the documents it unearths via the Freedom of Information Act,” failing to understand that it was indeed the Smoking Gun that broke the James Frey scandal. This was the kind of lengthy investigative journalism that the New York Times once practiced, before it turned its resources to the women who New York governors were schtupping. (There’s also this neat little thing called the Internet Archive! Wow! That’s even better than the brand new 56k modem I bought last month from a guy on the street who said that it was “cutting edge.”)

He is content to cast aspersions about specific blogs based entirely on their titles (”cutesie-poo,” “mock-suave,” et al.), without bothering to cite any specific examples as to how the content lives up to these modifiers. (Look, I think the name “David Kamp” sounds like some cult member waiting for the big day when his shaky pyrotechnics knowledge will be enlisted in the jihad, or, failing that, the sad and klutzy moment when he accidentally blows off his hands and it’s all settled up as a dutiful sacrifice to The Leader. But you won’t see me belittling the man’s three syllables. Particularly when his piss-poor argument is so patently ridiculous.)

Indeed, Kamp appears so deaf to the idea of text that he compares Sarah Boxer’s post-excerpt pages to Johnny Carson. In this age of Quark and word processors, Kamp can’t seem to wrap his head around the concept of text being read on an LCD screen and later transposed to book form. It’s certainly bad enough that Kamp can’t even get his medium right. But in citing Johnny Carson, a dead talk show host who has been rotting under the earth quite well for three years and who hasn’t aired on a regular basis in sixteen years, Kamp demonstrates that he is as culturally au courant as a Deadhead who doesn’t quite understand that Jerry Garcia’s fat ass has been long chewed up by the maggots.

In Kamp’s view, a blogger cannot just have an “esoteric interest.” He feels compelled to add the word “obsessive,” as if those who compose their words for a screen are no different from Branch Davidians. He is quick to tell us that “[i]n the case of the blogger Benjamin Zimmer, a linguistic anthropologist, it’s language that turns him on.” That reminds me of the case of the quantum physicist who was turned on by quantum physics. Or David Kamp, the dumbass book critic who was turned on by dumbass observations.

Of course, reading sections of a 368 page book — composed of speedy prose, no less — was “a chore” for poor David Kamp. Kamp doesn’t report if he’s ever done a day of hard labor in his life, something like working on a farm or in a warehouse that might offer a sufficient comparative basis. (I’ll take a wild guess: no.) He doesn’t say what or why. That, of course, would involve actual thought. He merely says that what David Byrne does on his blog is a thousand times better than what Momus does on his. When Kamp resorts to ratios like this, he demonstrates that the true soporific wonkery on display here is not found within blogs, but in Kamp’s utter failure to provide any substantive analysis.

Leafing through much of David Kamp’s indolent and hastily assembled review — lightweight thought, lack of curiosity, comic misfires, recountings of personal travail (i.e., the “chore”) — I was reminded less of a book review than of a dreary speech delivered by a doddering conspiracy theorist for a Rotary International chapter. Sure, you want to encourage the man. But you would never expect his ramblings to be published in The New York Times Book Review. Not without a team of editors to rival a junta. And even then, there’s the old adage about cooks and broth.

And who is Kamp to speculate about Boxer’s vacillating motivations in writing the book? Can’t Boxer change her mind?

A thoughtful, and even critical, review of blog writing is by no means a dreadful idea for a newspaper piece. But this particular review goes well beyond a missed opportunity. If the NYTBR has any good sense, it will have a team of security guards punch David Kamp in the face if he ever tries to set up a lunch meeting with Sam Tanenhaus or Dwight Garner again.

Dave Itzkoff: The Laziest Columnist Ever Hired by the NYTBR?

Andrew Wheeler: “Blowing off half a year and then not doing the reading is what a layabout does at a minor state college, not the expected behavior of a columnist for The New York Times Book Review. Itzkoff has always been embarrassing, but this is his worst behavior so far.”

Oh, That Sam Tanenhaus!

It appears that Sam Tanenhaus will be expanding his editing duties to the Week in Review section, which he will also be editing. Apparently, one section isn’t enough for good old Sammy Boy. Bill Keller hopes to work Tanenhaus to death until he leaves the paper. Keller writes, “I can’t wait to see what creative energy he will bring to the continual reinventing of the Week in Review.” Now that’s quite cruel — the kind of thing I expect from someone dousing salt on the participants in a snail race and then shouting, “Go go go!” as the competitors dissolve just before the finish line. I actually felt sorry for Tanenhaus, until I was reminded by Jim Sleeper that Tanenhaus can’t stop prioritizing demagoguery before debate. Really, just about the best thing that Tanenhaus can do under these circumstances is throw in the towel and go back to working on the Buckley bio. It’s clear that’s where his true passion lies.

Did Someone Hook Tanenhaus Up With Some Acapulco Gold or Something?

I am absolutely stunned to see this week’s edition of The New York Times Book Review contain not one, but TWO, pieces devoted to comics: Stephanie Zacharek’s review of The Completely Mad Don Martin and Douglas Wolk’s column. Plus, there’s this cheeky review of the David Levy book and Liesl Schillinger reviews Zeroville and makes this very astute observation: “Both Biskind’s and Erickson’s books begin with the Manson murders and an earthquake.”

Regrettably, Joe Queenan is also in there with another bland attempt at wit. One can’t have everything. But I’m truly astonished to see a far more relaxed attitude in place at Tanenhaus’s rag this week and, for this, I must applaud this week’s issue.

NYTBR: Safer Than Pat Boone

If there are four words that best describe the NYTBR’s Top Ten Books of 2007, they are: We Take No Chances.

Sam Tanenhaus: You’ll Like Our Translation Pick Or Else!

Languagehat unearths a hilarious online expose involving Sam Tanenhaus’s failure to dictate to the masses. It seems that Tanenhaus attempted to strong-arm his readership into loving the Richard Peevar and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace and his readers, begging to differ, express their preference for other translations. Peevar then shows up, defends his translation, is then humiliated, and then comes back again with a whiny defensive rejoinder. And Sammy Boy just can’t stand it! How dare the readers think for themselves? How dare they fail to recognize the Grand Importance of the New York Times Book Review?

Needless to say, I don’t have to analyze this week’s issue or dig up the Brownie Watch to tell you that this kind of hubris from Tanenhaus, his inability to listen to readers and his colossal misunderstanding of dissent among the blogosphere, deserves no brownies.

No brownies for you, Sam! Not this week, or for the next four weeks! Maybe if you considered that the people who read the New York Times actually have brains inside their heads, you might do better.

(Thanks, Kári!)

More on Lee Siegel’s Screwup

Josh Glenn has a comparative roundup and Siegel’s offending review can be found here. No brownies for you, Tanenhaus! And, man, it seems like you really need them these days.

Questions for Sam Tanenhaus

A Kinder, Gentler NYTBR Podcast

It appears that the NYTBR podcast has shifted to a kinder, gentler opening tune — which is to say opening music that as safe as elevator music (but certainly not houses). And Tanenhaus is now trying harder to sound warmer than he has in the past. One can only imagine the memos that were disseminated. I commend Tanenhaus for attempting to access that lovely portion of the human spectrum that exists beyond the walls of the New York Times building. But Tanenhaus has all the believability of Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space. All the media training in the world won’t do anything to change a man who has all the charisma of a bitter accountant in early April. This podcast, predicated on the We Take No Chances model of corporate complacency, really needs to be abandoned or taken over by someone who still has a shred of genuine ebullience about literature.

Sam Tanenhaus: Let the Cheap Sensationalism Continue

Have you heard the latest from Sam Tanenhaus’s dismal literary tabloid? Writers should be pilloried for writing the sentence “Men are rats.” It’s an absolute scandal. Toni Bentley, presumably recruited because this offered the boys another opportunity to pump her for more thoughts on posterior probings, proceeds to characterize Katha Pollitt’s latest book as another volume in “[g]roaning and moaning from clever, sassy women.” After spending three paragraphs attacking the right of intelligent women to write about being burned by men (in a remarkably sexist term of art, Bentley characterizes these women as “vagina dentata intellectualis”), while failing to point out precisely where Pollitt went wrong in her work. Four paragraphs into the review, we still have no explicit quote from the book that will support Bentley’s thesis, but we do have this extraordinary sentence:

It’s hard to tell if she’s coming into her own, trying to sell more books or has lost it entirely.

I don’t see how speculating upon the mental health or financial motivations of a writer offers any thoughtful insight into a book. It’s clear enough that Bentley hated the book. I get that. Pollitt is a polarizing figure. But as a reviewer, does not Bentley have the obligation to tell us why specific passages reflect what she perceives as inadequacies? Instead, Bentley merely summarizes some of the essays and spends most of her review offering limp wisecracks. (”Not being in drowning mode, I, for one, am bringing a cliché-proof life jacket to the party.”)

It is stupendously irresponsible to take a sentence like “Men are rats” and not provide any additional journalistic context to offer us a few clues about what Pollitt was writing about. In publishing such a piece, it seems evidently clear that Sam Tanenhaus has no interest in examining social issues with any degree of maturity. It is bad enough that he would resort to cheap sensationalism. But it is the act of a thug to permit a piece that would attack Pollitt’s character rather than her words.

NYTBR for Dummies: No Revision Required

To read Jim Lewis’s review of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is to enter an overvalued campanile of stupidity, amateurish insight, half-baked conclusions, and insufferable smugness that one expects from a Forbes 500 member who has the apparent misfortune of running into a groundling. The groundling, of course, is you, me, any curious insect climbing up an unsightly sandhill to scout out the dreaded conformists who would replace a beautiful literary vale with their high colonic obstructions.

“Good morning and please listen to me,” begins Lewis, adopting the tone of a bemused rube looking around a restaurant, unsure of how to pay the bill while others simply settle up. In fact, Lewis is so unsure of nearly everything about Johnson that he lacks even the self-starting impetus to ask. This rube is more preoccupied with where Johnson has talked and when Johnson has been photographed, but is so indolent a critic that he cannot even perform two Google searches to answer his own questions. (And whether such junket-like qualifiers matter in a review that has plenty to mine from a meaty 614-page book is debatable.) That such an dull and incurious reader would be assigned for a major Sunday newspaper section — indeed, Lewis openly confesses that he doesn’t care much to review books — is truly astonishing, or would be less so, if the boys’ brigade at the NYTBR were not in the regular habit of offering reviews written by idiots, signifying nothing.

For example, here’s Lewis on his ostensible hero:

But unlike most books about the dispossessed, they’re original (how strange it feels to use that word these days, but it fits), and what’s more, deliriously beautiful — ravishing, painful; as desolate as Dostoyevsky, as passionate and terrifying as Edgar Allan Poe.

Nice to see Lewis taking a writer as sui generis as Johnson and comparing him like some terrified undergraduate haphazardly flipping through a syllabus to meet the requirements of a term paper. Any good literary critic would have known damn well that Denis Johnson was one of the “dirty realism” poster boys a few decades ago and weaved something of this early assessment into his piece. (David Ulin, who should know better, did not, I’m afraid. But at least one gets a comparative example in Ulin’s review that cannot be found anywhere in Lewis’s review.)

Lewis is so lazy that he cannot even point out that Jesus’s Son was, in fact, a series of linked stories. (Has he even read it?) In Lewis’s myopic universe, there are only clumsy taxonomies: “novelist-performers or novelist-pundits or novelist-narcissists” and “novelists who can write this well,” but never any crossover. Lewis is likewise incapable of understanding a sentence, or, like a true linguistic explorer, even venturing a stab at what it might mean. He quotes a sentence, only to flex his critical acumen like so: “What a thing to say, but the book is moving on.” In the same paragraph, he demonstrates that he probably has no business being a critic, seeing as how he cannot even offer precise imagery that one would expect from a novelist. Lewis describes sentences that “roll like billiard balls with weird English on them.” This is an assessment? It strikes me as the kind of thing a literary enthusiast might say to you in a bar after five martinis, but not something that any reasonable person would include in a review in lieu of an attempt to parse the text. (”Y’know thot ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ sentence? Rolls like a bowling ball with odd Irish neologisms on it…me few pounds, give me a lash.”)

Like the same frightened undergraduate meeting every prescribed point in a five-paragraph essay, Lewis confesses to his readers: “But I haven’t told you what the thing is about yet.” With sentences like these, one wonders why the NYTBR didn’t just run this review with bracketed sentences. (”[Insert compelling lede here.],” “[Mandatory plot summary.],” the like.) He complains about the “hardware on display (guns, airplanes, intelligence equipage),” but doesn’t seem to understand that a novel involving a CIA agent might actually require such objects. He then offers one of the grandest insults imaginable to Johnson:

And he can occasionally overindulge in significance: a longish journey, at the end of “Tree of Smoke,” left me with the uneasy sense that he can’t tell the difference between Joseph Conrad, who was a genius, and Joseph Campbell, who was not.

I think Johnson’s work stands for itself, but, since Lewis is the kind of yokel who won’t be satisfied until he hears it from the horse’s mouth, here’s Johnson questioned about his post-apocalyptic novel Fiskadoro — by the New York Times, no less:

”Fiskadoro” grew out of Mr. Johnson’s earlier idea ”for a book about a person left after the holocaust, living in sort of a savage state. It was much more primitive than this, and very tribal.” He expected that ”Fiskadoro” too would be centered on a single character, the adolescent boy of the title. ”But I found that he was actually always a little bit distant. For that reason, the two other characters representing different modes of consciousness became more and more prominent.”

This clear emphasis on narrative compartmentalization doesn’t sound to me like a guy who mixes up his two Josephs.

And here’s a hint for the Tanenhaus crew, or any other book review editor: A “critic” or a “reviewer” who calls a mammoth book written by a leading contemporary writer a mere “thing” should probably be led to the door or thoroughly flogged in front of a throng of illiterate cokeheads.

If this is the kind of long-form review that Sam Tanenhaus considers acceptable, Tanenhaus’s remarkable ability to enervate the life and love of fiction through such crude and base shepherding keeps the NYTBR a dessicated husk more fit for automatons than enthusiasts.

Sam Tanenhaus: The Architect of Decay

This week’s New York Times Book Review includes a potentially promising meditation on ideology by Stephen Metcalf, who writes about a recent essay anthology, Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journey. Ensconced within this essay is Metcalf attempting to come to terms with his personal ideology, with a surprisingly uncharacteristic use of the first-person — surprisingly uncharacteristic, at least, for the Tanenhaus crew, who have continually operated as if writing in first-person was akin to shaking hands with a leper or eating an entree with a salad fork. But I must agree with Levi that Metcalf misses a significant opportunity with this revelation:

In short, I am white, privileged, middle-aged and boring. But one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative.

Never will be? Countless individuals have written statements like this over human history, only to live against the promise. While I commend Metcalf for copping to his alleged “privileged” and “boring” status (would Rachel Donadio ever confess anything like this?), it is a great misstep to remain so convinced that one will not change over the course of time — particularly in unexpected ways — while also closely examining a collection with contributors likely to adopt a similar position from the other side (”I own a home. I make good money. I never will be a liberal.”). This could have been a more compelling essay if Metcalf had stopped to examine the plausibilities of conservatism influencing him and others, the rhetorical similarities behind any ideology left or right, or if he had kept up his daring personal perspective throughout the piece’s entirety. Instead, we get this overly tidy generalization:

Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed.

Whether this specific sentence came during the writing or the editing process is difficult to say, but it does fit in with the NYTBR’s current m.o. Never let the audience contemplate a position outside of a rigid dichotomy. Ironically, this is the very position that Metcalf objects to in the anthology.

I have enjoyed some of Metcalf’s work for Slate, which often has him adopting the contrarian position, only to gradually work against this initial summation over the course of a piece. (See, for example, this essay on Bruce Springsteen.) It’s a nice approach that allows Metcalf to drift eventually to the more interesting gray areas. But I’m wondering if the NYTBR’s rigid orthodoxy allows Metcalf to take the same intellectual liberties.

Dave Itzkoff on How to Write for the NYTBR

The first dirty little secret of writing a review for Sam Tanenhaus is to come across like an ill-informed wanker who knows nothing of the genre he is writing about. The second is that everyone who reads the NYTBR are — dare I say it? — intended to be treated as idiots.

It’s important to state a very obvious observation about a genre and then back it up with even more obvious examples — the kind of thing that just about any remote geek would have long since talked about, but that the pretentious literary types insist is “hip” or “new” because they decide to keep their heads in the sand about this crazy little thing called genre. It’s also important to pad out your obvious observation into a really long paragraph like this that sounds sophisticated — that’s written in that insufferable Tanenhaus-sanctioned vernacular — but that has very little fucking substance to it.

It is this axiom that shapes and empowers Sam Tanenhaus’s far from imaginative and, at times, achingly nauseating book review section. In contrast to book review sections like The Washignton Post and The Los Angeles Times, who actually go to the trouble of not only employing people who are passionate about literature but actually read the work of their contributors so as to offer pitch-perfect assignments, the NYTBR, which is less important in the grand scheme of things than it thinks it is, takes the opposite approach, applying the bullshitter’s tools to what is essentially a tabloid section of hot air and gormless content. In essays that alternate between the occasionally provocative to the truly dead, the NYTBR doesn’t come close to telling the story of literature as we know it, remaining openly hostile to anything that isn’t Saul Bellow — apparently, the only author who gives Sammy Boy a hard-on — or part of that petit-bourgeois nonsense that a saner world would shun. You need not possess a brain to masticate upon this stuff, for take away the faux ornate language and there is nothing here to chew on — no penetrating insights or enthusiasm about literature.

Factor in the continued employment of Dave “What’s Skiffy?” Itzkoff — as opposed to people who know something about the genre (like, say, Ed Park or Jeff VanderMeer) — and you have one colossal joke of a newspaper book review section.

Sam Tanenhaus’s Soul-Sucking Tentacles

Litkicks: “Rachel Donadio’s articles have no point of view. I’ve read at least ten of her essays or interviews in this publication in the last two years, and I have never once felt I had the slightest indication what she thought about her subject. She is the only regular NYTBR writer who does not ever deign to share a point of view with the reader. In theory, this type of dispassion could have some value — perhaps some sort of Joan Didion-esque blank journalistic resonance — but it would have to be handled more artistically to achieve this effect. When I read an article like today’s Donadio piece on Salman Rushdie, I simply feel empty and unsatisfied. I expect a New York Times Book Review writer to communicate some type of point of view to me, or else I’m eating a bowl of flavor-free ice cream. Rachel Donadio, what do you think about Salman Rushdie?”

I agree with Levi, with one vital qualifier: Donadio’s work at the Observer did have a point of view to share with the reader. Consider this sardonic 2004 report of BookExpo:

Nearby, Jonathan Karp, the boyish and rising (if not already risen) Random House senior vice president and editor in chief, aggressively introduced passers-by to Robert Kurson, a slightly frightened-looking author whose book, Shadow Divers , is about divers who find a U-boat off the coast of New Jersey. It is expected to do well.

Or this amusing Caitlin Flanagan report:

So she doesn’t wash the sheets, but she does sew buttons. Does she like to sew buttons? “I do like to sew buttons. I think it’s very rewarding that you can take a garment that’s shabby and unwearable and in this quick way you can really transform it,” she said. “It’s an easy little gift for me to give him.” Yet this is from the same woman who in her 2003 essay on Erma Bombeck wrote that “I have been married a total of fourteen years to a total of two men, and never once have I been asked to iron a single item of either man’s clothing or to replace even one popped button, for which I suppose I have the women’s movement to thank. But I realize now, late in the game, that we’d be much better off if I had a few of those skills.”

This is the kind of skepticism and juxtaposition that one expects from a literary reporter along these lines. But this playful tone — which once made Donadio’s pieces so much fun to read — has disappeared in recent years. Did Donadio check in her sense of humor upon signing on with Tanenhaus? What caused her work to become what Levi suggests is “empty and unsatisfied?”

I don’t think it’s an accident that things shifted the minute that Donadio signed on with the NYTBR. Just look at the soulless banter in Donadio’s latest piece and compare it with the Observer work. This wholesale evisceration of this journalist’s strengths into prose that resembles a humorless hack is yet another reason why the NYTBR needs several swift kicks in the ass. Good editors recognize life and do their best to cultivate and nurture a journalist’s voice. While this thankfully seems to be the case with Liesl Schillinger, whose reviews continue to remain engaging and enthusiastic (perhaps because Schillinger keeps herself at arm’s length as a freelancer), I think something terrible may have happened to Donadio when she succumbed to the moth effect.

“Visions and Violence” — Vollmann and Drew at the Whitney

There are indeed people in New York who are interested in William T. Vollmann. On Thursday night, accompanied by Marydell, Levi, and Jason, I attended the Whitney Museum “Summer of Love” lecture featuring photographer Richard Drew — the man behind the Falling Man photos — and, of course, Vollmann. There, I also met a smart Pynchon enthusiast by the name of Christopher Byrd, a guy named Doug (a Barth fan who I met in the lobby), and another gentleman named Ralph, who apparently discovered The Vollmann Club while trying to find information on the man to teach a class. There was also another pleasant gentleman who reads this site, but whose name I sadly don’t recall. I was pleasantly surprised that my announcement drew a few WTV fans out of the closet who apparently recognized me and were kind enough to say hello.

richarddrew.jpgDespite the event’s title “Vision and Violence,” I was particularly surprised that nobody had mentioned the Abu Ghraib photos during the course of the conversation. But both Vollmann and photographer Richard Drew had interesting things to say about the role of photography, of which more anon.

The moderator, whose name I neglected to jot down in my notes because of an unexpected shift in lighting that startled me, was a regrettably stiff gentleman who worked for The New Yorker. I feel that I can sufficiently call him stiff because, when Vollmann read a stirring passage (”The White Knights”) from The Rainbow Stories, the moderator stared at Vollmann the entire time, craning his neck like an affluent ostrich ensnared in the unexpected Swedish cold. I know that he was doing his best and was no doubt apprised by someone that discussing violence was a serious business. Nevertheless, it was a bit awkward to see the moderator, Vollmann, and Drew crammed around a small table on stage right, so that the same twenty-five photographic images — John Filo’s Kent State photo, Nick Út’s Vietnam napalm girl, Eddie Adams’s execution photo, et al. — could be projected on a large screen in front of the audience. But the talk itself was interesting, with Drew even becoming defensive near the end.

The moderator began by asking what the two men were doing during the Summer of Love. Vollmann replied that he was not even a teenager, but said that he remembered his mother driving him home from school, when Kennedy was assassinated. His mother was crying and couldn’t stand this news. The young Vollmann looked to the other cars and saw that other people were crying.

“How do you find your subject matter?” asked the moderator. (This was a sampling of the generalized questions he had at his disposal.) Drew indicated that his daily assignments are determined on a minute-by-minute basis. Recently, he had taken photos of “the girl from Harry Potter on the Today Show,” as well as a 280 point jump at the New York Stock Exchange. Vollmann said that his subject matter came from a desire to understand, learn, and help others. He remarked upon how the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had upset him, particularly when it started disappearing from the newspapers. His desire to help became “more attenuated.” Vollmann said that in all journalistic capacities, he wanted to give something to the people he met. In 1992 Sarajevo, Vollmann said that he “wanted understanding of who was more wrong.”

Upon Vollmann’s response, Drew became a bit rankled with this journalistic notion of helping people. “I’m not the Red Cross!” he insisted, shortly after declaring that he “records history every day.” Drew declared that there’s nothing political in what he does. And while one might argue that there may not be much of a political stake in photographing “the girl from Harry Potter” (I’m certain that future historians will be looking back at a Today Show publicity junket when chronicling the important moments of our time), are not Drew’s Falling Man photos political in some sense? Drew later mentioned that some newspapers thought it inappropriate to publish these photos. He also observed that this Channel 4 documentary (full one hour, eleven minute YouTube link) examining the subject of whether the photos were appropriate had not yet aired in the States. During the Q&A session that came later, Drew was adamant that he was not pushed around or pressured to shoot particular photos as an AP photographer. But surely a man with 37 years in the business understands that the decisions of editors and publishers to prioritize lionized firemen over a man plunging to his death from the Twin Towers is certainly political in nature. Without discounting Drew’s artistry as a photographer, surely a man who knows what photos are going to sell is more likely to tilt his lens in a certain direction if it will make ends meet. (Drew later confessed that, despite accepting nearly every assignment that came to him, he elected not to go to Iraq between the two wars because he had a kid on the way. It’s worth noting that Vollmann has continued to travel to faraway locales despite having a family to support, although, unlike Drew, he did not mention his family.)

Vollmann pointed out that he tried not to judge people — “at least not too early.” He offered a novelist’s comparison between flat and round characters, and pointed out distinction between understanding and telling, using an example of Muslims who had never heard of the Holocaust and couldn’t believe that it was true.

In response to the moderator’s question of whether the two men had observed the world becoming a more dangerous place, Drew again divested himself of politics, observing, “You don’t have to choose a side. You just have to be in the right place at the right time.” Vollmann didn’t think the world had become any more dangerous. But when the talk shifted to assignments, he pointed out that his only criteria in turning something down was (1) the publication not paying him enough and (2) whether his work is going to be helpful and worth the risk. Vollmann stated that if he were to go to Iraq today, he would have to think about it. “What good would it do? Would I have anything new to contribute?”

Concerning photography, Vollmann pointed out that he relied on Comtex cameras when going to a war zone because the lenses are very sharp and durable. For situations that are less dangerous, he relied on an 810. The photographs that Vollmann takes often allow his readers to get another sense of a person, such as some of the subjects that Vollmann included in Poor People.

Drew noted that photos tell the story and that he doesn’t have the luxury of 10,00 words. He had only one picture. The moderator noted that the Falling Man photos were “formally beautiful,” and in referring to his Falling Man photos, Drew pointed out that he had not experienced nearly as much controversy when he published his Kennedy photos.

Vollmann said that he didn’t face much in the way of restrictions. “A lot of people don’t read. So I don’t have too many problems.” He then referred to his Bosnia experience, when two friends of his were killed in a jeep. He said that he had the right and the duty to publish something, but that he didn’t want to publish pictures of their dead faces. He didn’t feel this ws right. Nevertheless, Vollmann said, “The job of the reporter is to show conflict, to show suffering.” So while in the back seat, he grabbed his notebook and started writing. Drew grew visibly uneasy over this and Vollmann simply responded, “They were already dead.” He pointed out that had that not been the case, he would have helped them.

Despite Drew’s quibbles over Vollmann’s personal concern for his subjects, Drew nevertheless pointed out that he would carry on taking photos without obtaining the permission of his subjects. Drew said that his motto was Shoot first, ask questions later. “I have to capture reality as it happens.”

Perhaps observing Drew’s growing discomfort, Vollmann then said that he doesn’t necessarily believe that Drew’s approach is wrong, but that his own approach involves “wanting to understand a person or event over time.” He said that it was important to earn the trust of his subjects. If he knew the subject, then he was more inclined to ask their permission. But when it come to depicting naked violence — such as an extreme Serbian nationalist shooting someone — “some of the rules don’t apply.”

nytdrew.jpgThe moderator then asked another regrettably general question: “What made you want to do what you want to do?” Vollmann said that he hopes that he can document moments in time. Drew pointed out that his photography started off as a hobby. When in college, a street sweeper had overturned. He took photos and, upon getting an offer for $5 for the picture or a free roll of film and a photo credit, he chose the latter. He then became a freelance photographer, constantly listening to the police scanner. Today, with digital demand, Drew said that “the beast has become more insatiable.”

Vollmann pointed out, “As the beast becomes more insatiable, it’s for more and more types of meat in smaller bytes.” He said that he was more inclined to write books and less inclined to write magazine pieces, because there was no longer the demand for 20,000 word stories, as there was in the ’90’s. But he also observed, “If your heart is really in something, no one’s going to stop you.”

When Don DeLillo’s Falling Man was brought up, Drew offered a remarkable story. When DeLillo’s book was reviewed in the NYTBR, the review came with an accompanying graphic for the cover. Without accreditation to Drew, it seems that Sam Tanenhaus’s team not only stole Drew’s image for the cover, but egregiously smudged out the figure of the man (see above image to left). Drew was understandably upset about this, simply asking for “credit where credit is due.” And it makes one wonder how many other images have been appropriated by Tanenhaus’s team without credit.

[UPDATE: Jason has a brief writeup, which also references the conversation that Vollmann and a good cluster of us had afterwards.]

[UPDATE 2: Marydell also has a report up.]

Gunter’s Such a Great Guy!

I’m with Orthofer. How precisely does John Irving’s “Give my buddy Gunter a chance” piece tell us anything about Peeling the Onion? By this sleazy standard, one would expect Tanenhaus to sully the NYTBR further by publishing a 4,000 word essay authored by one of George Bush’s remaining friends, telling us to look the other way on the unethical commutation of Scooter Libby because Bush is such a great guy to have a beer with.

This is the kind of self-serving approach that belongs in a stag club’s meeting notes, not a weekly publication that purports to cover the arts and humanities.

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!

Erica Wagner Gets an F (And Tanenhaus Too!)

Erica Wagner, whose first name is Erica and whose last name is Wagner, displays needless padding in the third paragraph, which comes before the fourth and after the second, in her review of Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero in today’s issue of the New York Times Book Review. It would be disingenuous for me to say that these sentences are loosely braided together like slack rope, for they are about as extraneous as a congealed fatty bubble that a cook not only neglected to trim from a porterhouse steak, but cooked and served to a devoted carnivore. How did such a paragraph, which appears inspired by Bart Simpson offering an impromptu book report to Ms. Krabappel, make it through the editing stage?

Dwight Garner Ripping Off Blogosphere

Dwight Garner, newly minted blogger of The New York Times Book Review, apparently has few new ideas on how to blog and is now content to rip off ideas from the blogosphere.

Case in point: “Living With Music”, an egregious ripoff of Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes. This is particularly shameful, because I can tell you that David Gutowski is one of the most generous bloggers around, more than living up to his moniker.

At this rate, I fully expect Garner to unleash The Cat Primero Show, a bold new podcast that offers a counterpart to Sam Tanenhaus’s social ineptitude as “podcast host.”

[UPDATE: Sarah has more observations.]

[UPDATE 2: I have left a comment pointing out the similarities to Book Notes on Garner’s blog. I suspect that the comment will not be approved, but we shall see.]

[UPDATE 3: Yup, Garner has censored my perfectly reasonable comment. Jeff has also been running a few amusing experiments, demonstrating that Garner isn’t interested in any dialogue other than conversational fellatio. That’s too bad. There are far more interesting things that a head can do aside from bobbing up and down on Garner’s cock. Garner also claims that he’s “never seen Largehearted Boy before,” but has promised many future lists. But if that’s the case, why does his post look so similar to a Book Notes entry? Perhaps Mr. Gutowski might want to check his IP address log to see if anyone at the Times has been visiting his site to set the matter straight.]

Litblogs May Be “Sub-Literary,” But At Least We Get Bylines Right

Who knew that actor James Woods was now contributing pieces to the New York Times Book Review?

Katie Roiphe’s Critical Inadequacies: A Case Study

While it’s good to see the ever reliable Liesl Schillinger offer a quirky and personal take on the new Clive James book, Schillinger’s pleasant review (as well as an appearance by the witty and dependable Lizzie Skurnick, regrettably reduced to capsules) is offset by the disastrous employment of Katie Roiphe, who, in her review of A.M. Homes’s The Mistress’s Daughter, demonstrates the troglodytic level of insight regularly witnessed in her Slate Audio Book Club appearances.

Roiphe gets so many things wrong about A.M. Homes that it’s hard to know where to start. She claims that A.M. Homes has “made a minor specialty of luridness,” only to contradict herself paragraphs later by characterizing Homes’s books as “sleek, violent cartoons.” Roiphe writes of Homes’s heightened reality as if ignorant of the relationship between realism and surrealism that has long been at the center of much of contemporary fiction from Flann O’Brien onwards, perhaps best epitomized by John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” In fact, Homes herself has stated repeatedly in interviews that her m.o. is to to continue her work along the lines of this novelistic tradition.

Of course, auctorial intention, as revealed through interview answers, only takes us so far. So let’s ignore the idea of a narrative being only as realistic as an author’s ability to make it believable and dwell upon Roiphe’s limited perception of reality. Roiphe appears truly astonished that a husband and wife would “not only have affairs but smoke crack and set fire to their suburban house with a grill.” If Roiphe truly believes this moment, uncited but clearly referencing the first moments of Music for Torching, to be so unusual, I’m wondering why she was assigned this review. In a world in which a man pours gasoline on his girlfriend after she breaks off the engagement and crack cocaine has been in use in the Washington suburbs for many years, I think it can be sufficiently argued that Homes’s fiction is drawn from these darker and quite real aspects of the human condition. Describing this book then as a “sleek, violent cartoon” is thus inaccurate, more so because Roiphe prefers generalizations to concrete examples from the prose. Also resultantly wrong is Roiphe’s assertion that “the figures in Homes’s life often behave as if she had invented them.” Could it be that Roiphe is simply incapable of understanding that Homes’s fiction and particularly her memoir are, in fact, drawn from reality?

Of The Mistress’s Daughter, she writes, “the prevailing mood is that of film noir.” Never mind that Roiphe offers no examples. Perhaps she felt that any book containing a DNA test or detectives tracking down individuals, both inescapable aspects of Homes’s story, is intended to be categorized in the mystery section. Or maybe “this book is really about a wild goose chase.” Again, Roiphe appears unable to stick with an assertion. Maybe the book is just plain “false,” because the book “veers toward the sentimental, concluding with an unusually straightforward tribute to her inspiring adoptive grandmother.” Of course, any memoir involving two unexpected parents entering an author’s life is bound to unleash a torrent of emotions, particularly when the author is as fiercely protective of her private life as Homes is.

However, it never occurs to Roiphe that Homes’s “straightforward” memoir might just be an effort to come to terms with the private and the public. Sven Birkets, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, certainly understood this and limited his cogent observations to the book in question. Roiphe, by contrast, wishes to contrast this memoir against the ferocity of her fiction.

While this comparative approach is certainly an interesting critical exercise, in Roiphe’s hands, it’s quite catastrophic. While Roiphe can at least see that Homes’s memoir as “a document of a flawed, incoherent self” and is able to pinpoint the memoir’s tendency to invent rather than confront, she opts not to dwell on the most interesting example of this — a moment in the book’s second half in which Homes imagines how her biological mother must have lived decades ago — but with the deposition testimony near book’s end.

Roiphe writes, “How can the ruthless author of ‘Music for Torching’ and ‘The Safety of Objects’ allow herself this easy way out of a story that can have no easy way out? It feels false.” Maybe false to Roiphe, because she seems to have no clear understanding that Homes is writing about reality. Birkets and others have understood this, and a careful reader can see what Homes is up to.

As Maud Newton observed last week:

The memoir in its contemporary iteration seems to demand a Triumphant Conclusion. Homes, to her credit, mostly sidesteps this trap, focusing on her adopted grandmother. The result is a muted finale honoring the mystery of family.

While I’m glad that Sam Tanenhaus has granted space to A.M. Homes’s The Mistress’s Daughter, I’m troubled by how poorly analytical these results are. I believe this book to be an interesting turning point in Homes’s career: an effort to confront aspects of her life that have hitherto remained private and a fascinating expansion of her concern for the existential moments that seem larger than they are and are often confused with surrealism.

But Roiphe lacks the critical chops to consider these questions, much less place them within the trajectory of A.M. Homes’s oeuvre. Thankfully, Birkets and Newton do. While Sam Tanenhaus may shy away from the kind of nuanced criticism I am suggesting should be the norm of any weekly book review section, at least there are other editors happy to devote their pages to these more serious questions.

Tanenhaus Spending Too Much Time at Stag Parties with Wieseltier?

Sam Tanenhaus: “[I]f you can put a paperback original first novel on the cover, that is like orgasm time for us.”

Ben Schott: Absconding With Personal Experience?

All that apparent vetting and editing at the NYTBR wasn’t enough to stop L’Affaire Schott from sullying Tanenhaus’s pristine gates with redolent taints. The story is this: Ben Schott wrote an essay called “Confessions of a Book Abuser.” Readers, alarmed by the essay’s resemblance to a similar essay called “Never Do That to a Book” (contained within Anne Fadiman’s collection, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader) wrote in, troubled by Schott rather conveniently having an encounter with an Italian chambermaid in 1989, when Schott was fifteen — not unlike Fadiman’s own encounter with an Italian chambermaid in 1964.

benschott.jpgOf course, it’s very possible that Schott did have this experience. It’s very possible that an Italian chambermaid did take a fifteen year old’s hand and returned his copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Of course, since Schott failed to mention his parents (did he really rent “a hotel room on the shores of Lake Como” and stay there without parental supervision?), suggesting that he returned to his hotel room of his own accord, as if a self-made man, I’m disinclined to believe Schott — unless he offers unimpeachable evidence that reveals this existential serendipity. After all, Fadiman’s original essay revealed similar childhood details, as well as a specific hotel name. Schott may be a dutiful compiler of facts for his almanacs, but he appears remiss in revealing some of the specifics that would exculpate him from plagiarism charges. (Well, that’s not entirely true. Schott’s all too happy to boast about reading Evelyn Waugh as a teenager.)

Editor & Publisher has more on the glaring similarities between Schott and Fadiman’s respective essays.

You know, we litbloggers may be “sub-literary,” but there’s one advantage to online writing that you won’t find in print. If any of us were to pull this kind of potential theft, we’d get called on it by our commenters. Perhaps the NYTBR might wish to initiate comments upon all of their articles to keep their content honest. It might even help make the editors “aware of Fadiman’s essay.” And who knows? Maybe a communicative conduit along these lines might even alleviate some of the continuing print vs. online fracas. It’s clear from this incident that Tanenhaus’s drawbridge is starting to look a bit rickety.

[UPDATE: Bill Peschel reminds me (and I should have referenced this in the post) that the similarities were observed the day after Schott’s article appeared in a Bookninja thread. Return of the Reluctant regrets the oversight, but we will go one more than the Times in wishing Mr. Murray a speedy recovery from his illness.]

Tanenhaus Won’t Have You at Hello

The underrated filmmaker Samuel Fuller said that a good story has to grab the audience by the balls from the get-go. Combing through the ledes in this Sunday’s NYTBR, it would appear that Sam Tanenhaus wouldn’t know crotch-grabbing even if Michael Jackson gave him personal lessons.

I’ve culled several ledes from this Sunday’s NYTBR because they all share something in common: the need to say something generalized and painfully generic in a seemingly sophisticated but ultimately hollow manner. It’s an approach that would probably piss off B.R. Myers, but I object more to the gormless grandeur and the sneering stance towards readers. A good editor would have recognized these topic sentences as conceptually sophomoric and condescending and demanded a peppy modifier at bare minimum. But the NYTBR’s faux intellectualism and listless tone, resembling the staid syntax of an escrow agreement, appears to be house style. And these are the folks who call bloggers sub-literary!

Before I tsk-tsk Tanenhaus, to be equitable, there are a handful of good but not great offerings in this week’s issue, including this interesting David Orr essay, Geoffrey Wolff’s review of Kurt Andersen’s Heyday (peering through the language, it appears that Wolff may have been going for something quirky, but there do seem to be many telltale dashes here; did intervention come from humorless editors?), and decent coverage of a Winifred Wagner bio.

Of course, praising Tanenhaus for these minor morsels is a bit like ignoring the green chunks on a hunk of molded sourdough. It’s all moot when compared to the rest. So let’s go through the culprits one by one.

Ted Conover: “There’s a lot of stuff we consume while barely pausing to consider where it comes from; it is easy, these days, to be insulated from production.”

Translation: Yes, there is lots of stuff, good golly! Heya there, dumbass yokel! Yeah, you! Reading the NYTBR, trying to edumucate your mind. Do you want to read about oil? I reckon I might get through to you if I refer to your shopping items as stuff! But have no fear, pardner, because while Lisa Margonelli’s book deals with some COM-PLEXXX issues, everything’s going to be A-OK! The boys at Houston will make shure our li’l bitty spacecraft is INSULATED FROM PRODUCTION!

Pete Hamill: “Prohibition was one of the longest, dumbest chapters in the history of 20th-century American folly, and the impulses behind it are still alive today.”

Translation: You probably don’t remember your high school history class. You probably can’t be bothered to look things up, much less Google things. So let me tell you something. I’m guessing you remember this little period in 20th century American history called Prohibition. Yes? You don’t? Okay. Think carefully. Remember The Untouchables? Yeah. Bootleggers. Well, it had HUMONGOUS consequences for all of us.

Kim Severson: “Barry Glassner has made it his business to set credulous consumers of mass media straight.”

Translation: Even though Glassner’s previous book, The Culture of Fear sold through the roof, we’re assuming you’re an idiot who doesn’t even know who William Whyte is, much less Malcolm Gladwell. He’s made it his business, you see. The same way, you make it your business as a B&T day trader. Everything copacetic?

Steven Heighton: “Survival stories, in their elemental simplicity, can be deeply appealing to those seeking escape from complicated, densely scheduled lives.”

Translation: You haven’t set foot outside of your comfortable suburban neighborhood for years and the terrorists could bomb you at any second. We’re assuming that you pick up a sensationalistic book from time to time and, hey, here’s this one. Because we’re assuming you’re scared.

David Kirby: “Why devote oneself to that aggressively minor genre, poetry, when novels and screenplays and tell-all memoirs get more notice and make more money?”

Translation: Poetry is, of course, for all the pansy-ass intellectuals starving in garrets. But I’m one of you! I have an accountant on my payroll! And I’m going to dictate why you should read poetry in the most unsubtle tone imaginable!

Dave Itzkoff: “Is there anybody out there? Give the question some thought before you answer, because it’s more perilous than it seems.”

Translation: I haven’t a fucking clue about how to grab your attention. Hell, I’m not even sure why Master Sam picked me. I’m not really that familiar with speculative fiction anyway. So let’s see: this audience probably listens to classic rock on FM radio. That is, after all, what Master Sam says. Surely, they’ve heard of Pink Floyd!

The NYTBR Jumps the Shark

Review Lede: “Ron Jeremy has a big penis.”

Sam Tanenhaus is the Misinformed One

“I find they write about us, but I don’t find they write about authors and have that many interesting things to say about literature. Maybe I’m missing them? It seems to be more of a kind of a scorecard they keep about us and I think, well, let’s say they don’t like us and we’re doing a terrible job. All they’re doing is publicizing what we do. I don’t understand that. If they think that we don’t do enough fiction, well why aren’t you using your blog to write about those novels and say interesting things about them? Why not just tell us about all those books? It seems very parasitical after a while and the sort of echo chamber-ish and they get so much wrong. They’re so misinformed about so many things that it seems unfruitful to pay attention. They really don’t get what we do, or how we do it, and they don’t really want to know because if they do it would kind of undermine the attacks and all the rest. For instance, there was someone who was complaining that we weren’t using David Orr more often and that it was because I had some problems with Orr. I’m the guy who gave Orr a column and the reason why he wasn’t writing was because his father was seriously ill and he’d gotten some gig in Princeton. That’s why you weren’t seeing him more. So there’s this kind of conspiratorial view they have, that I’m here deciding, ‘Let’s destroy fiction by not reviewing it!’ or, ‘This guy writes too well, so let’s not publish him!’ That’s not the way journalism works.” — Sam Tanenhaus

This remarkably hypocritical statement comes from Sam Tanenhaus, who claims he “never reads blogs” and then proceeds to describe all manner of things that they do, based of course on the fact that he “never reads” them. This is akin to an astrophysicist being asked to speculate upon knitting, a hobby that this hypothetical astrophysicist never actually practices, and who then proceeds to denounce knitting as evil incarnate, wrong, misinformed, and the like.

But let’s take Tanenhaus’s claims here one by one.

“I don’t find they write about authors and have that many interesting things to say about literature.”

Yup, litbloggers never write about authors. They never take the time out to talk at length with a Booker Prize winner or ask Vikram Chandra about how to write a long novel, much less discuss overlooked titles or a National Book Award-winning book with the author himself. As for whether any of this is interesting to Tanenhaus, I could care less. It’s a matter of subjective opinion. But if Tanenhaus is ignorant enough to claim that litbloggers never “write about authors,” then clearly his opinion on this matter is about as worthless as an empty wallet at a Monte Carlo craps table.

“I don’t understand that.”

It’s clear with Tanenhaus’s recurrent hiring of Henry Alford, a man who wouldn’t know funny if South Park bit him on the ass, that Tanenhaus is the most comedically tone-deaf book review editor now working in the industry. (Let’s put it this way. Even Bob Hoover has a sense of humor.) Therefore, it’s clear that he’s incapable of comprehending a satirical analysis of his own publication (i.e., the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch).

“If they think that we don’t do enough fiction, well why aren’t you using your blog to write about those novels and say interesting things about them? Why not just tell us about all those books?”

See the Litblog Co-Op. See Maud, Mark and Jessa’s remarks on Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y. See Sarah and Dan Wickett’s love for Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: you heard about it first on these pages. Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land: TMFTML. I could go on and on.

“They’re so misinformed about so many things that it seems unfruitful to pay attention.”

Support your examples much, Sammy Boy?

“They really don’t get what we do, or how we do it, and they don’t really want to know because if they do it would kind of undermine the attacks and all the rest.”

This is disingenuous. I have asked Sam Tanenhaus for an interview on four separate occasions, so that I might understand where he’s coming from and so I might corral my observations in line with the NYTBR’s production process.

He has refused every single time.

It’s clear that Tanenhaus doesn’t want to respond to any criticisms. He considers himself above questioning. He is, as you might recall, “under no obligation to acknowledge the brownie.” It was only my personal attendance of a panel last year that provoked a few answers to these questions. And even then, he could not provide satisfactory responses.

There is also the curious phrasing of “the attacks.” The attacks? What the hell is this? Pearl Harbor? Are brownies now a weapon of mass destruction? Tanenhaus can dish it out, but he can’t take it. I must again affirm that I have praised the NYTBR as much as I have criticized it. (See yesterday’s post.)

“For instance, there was someone who was complaining that we weren’t using David Orr more often and that it was because I had some problems with Orr.”

Let’s go back to the post about David Orr that Tanenhaus is mentioning:

“I have no idea what’s made Orr’s work sparse in the NYTBR these days. Perhaps it’s Sammy T’s tone-deaf editorialship.” [Emphasis added]

“I have no idea” should be pretty clear that I had no idea. Then again, when you’re a guy cowering from bloggers, perhaps a cigar isn’t a cigar. My speculation doesn’t impute that Tanenhaus had any problems with Orr, nor is the word “problems” contained in my post.

“So there’s this kind of conspiratorial view they have, that I’m here deciding, ‘Let’s destroy fiction by not reviewing it!’ or, ‘This guy writes too well, so let’s not publish him!’ That’s not the way journalism works.

The use of the verb “destroy” is the telling detail here. It is a word one expects from Genghis Khan or a WWE wrestler, not a book review editor.

Fiction will continue to live on, whether Tanenhaus covers it or not. It is Tanenhaus’s loss that he cannot see fit to open up the pages of his “Review” to fiction’s glories. One of the assertions I’ve always casted here is why the NYTBR claims to cover serious fiction more than any other book review section in the country, when it recurrently skimps out on solid literary coverage. There is nothing conspiratorial about this observation. Frankly, when you stack up Tanenhaus’s NYTBR against John Leonard’s NYTBR, it’s a bit like pitting People against The New Yorker. There is simply no contest.

All litbloggers have asked is why a book review section with such potential falls flat under Tanenhaus’s watch. It’s a telling sign that this question has transmuted from genuine (albeit satirical) inquiry to “conspiratorial view.”

Of course, if Tanenhaus wishes to explain himself, my microphones remain ready.

[UPDATE: Michael Orthofer has much to say about Tanenhaus’s remarks.]

[UPDATE 2: John Fox also has much to say.]

Tanenhaus Has Shortcomings, To Be Sure

Sam Tanenhaus: “Shortcomings, to be sure. But so what? Nature doesn’t owe us perfection. Novelists don’t either. Who among us would even recognize perfection if we saw it?”

With these five simple sentences, Sam Tanenhaus has spelled out why the New York Times Book Review is a publication hostile to penetrating insights on fiction. Literary criticism, as I understand it, is not the quest for perfection, nor should one expect a single volume to yield near universal plaudits from all who read it. (Unless, of course, like the old Saturday Night Live sketch suggested, you liked Cats and you’d see it again and again.) One of criticism’s vital functions is to present doubting Thomases who cast aspersions on a book’s greatness and brave critics with cogent arguments explaining why a universally derided book is worth reading.

I happen to believe Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation to be a near perfect novel, but while attaching a melodramatic modifier might be good for blurbs, it doesn’t tell you anything about why I believe it to be a near perfect novel. I can tell you in very specific terms why I believe it to be one one of the best novels of the past ten years, but I would not deny another critic her right to express why it fails, using supportive examples and reasonable terms.

Literary criticism is certainly not a matter of bullshit lists. It is not a matter of declaring an author above a single reproach, as Tanenhaus has done. Literary criticism is a quest for understanding, a way of playing booster to authors who are maligned or misunderstood and skeptic to the critical darlings.

Edmund Wilson once described the situation this way:

No matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinized works of literature from the historical and biographical point of view, we must be able to tell good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall otherwise not write literary criticism at all, but merely social or political history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case histories from past eras.

It is not enough for the critic to describe a book as first-rate. The critic has the duty to explain why this is so while considering the blind partisanship of her enthusiasms. A good book review editor will cultivate these critical impulses in his contributors, instead of penning a 2,000 word love letter that could have just as easily read:

I LOVE SAUL BELLOW. SAUL BELLOW IS GREAT. DO NOT PICK ON MY AUCTORIAL HERO. (rinse, lather, repeat ad infinitum)

The New York Masturbatory Sock Puppet Review of Books

Once again, Sam Tanenhaus demonstrates how little he cares about journalistic integrity by throwing a bone to Lee Siegel this week. You might remember Siegel as “sprezzatura,” a sock puppet alter ego he created to leave comments on his very own posts to defend against criticism of his New Republic blog. Why Siegel is so obsessed with masturbation in Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Siegel has had a lot of time off to consider this subject. But seeing as how Tanenhaus sets the bar so low, I wouldn’t be surprised if “sprezzatura” will show up in two weeks’ time in the Letters section.

However, there’s also another delightful appearance from Liesl, who somehow managed to slip in references to the White Stripes (and, alas, Coldplay), Medea, and Dostoevsky. Perhaps Levi is right. Tanenhaus must have been on vacation.

Believe It or Not, There’s Someone Lazier Than Dave Itzkoff

What Jenny D said. It strikes me as anti-intellectual to waste time in a review bemoaning the length of a book (and in this case, it isn’t even the book being reviewed), and it reveals just how much of a mousy barnacle Allan Sloan is, who may very well be perfectly fit to report on business but is wholly incompetent to publish work in a book review section.

The other asinine statement from Sloan: “As with the Bible or Moby-Dick, you don’t have to be familiar with the entire work in order to grasp its essence.” What next from Tanenhaus? Championing SparkNotes over the text itself?

Apologists can defend Tanenhaus for his Whittaker Chambers biography all they want, but this kind of recidivist attitude has no place in a weekly book review section.

Absolutely no brownies for Tanenhaus. In fact, he should be baking us some.

As for the drive-by assault on Anthony Burgess (which comes courtesy of Paul Gray), the only thing “comfortably ho-hum” here is the flagrant vacuity within Mr. Gray’s head. Gray’s noggin clearly hasn’t entertained a curiosity about literature in quite some time.

Reason #142 Why Dave Itzkoff is a No-Nothing Assclown

New York Times: “All science fiction has some element of titillation — a strategy of taking known facts and stretching them to the limits of credulity, for the purposes of both entertaining and enlightening.”

Gee, I thought the purpose of speculative fiction was, much like many other novels, to provide a narrative that reflected the human condition: sometimes using provocative ideas or meticulous atmosphere (a la China Mieville) and, in the case of hard sf, sometimes employing rigorous scientific justification to explain the imaginative scenario (and thus pushing the narrative well past “the limits of credulity”) (a la Robert Charles Wilson’s excellent Hugo-award winning novel, Spin). That Itzkoff sees science fiction from a failed English major’s dichotomous mind set (”entertaining and enlightening,” but not challenging, humanist or literary) is a great indication that he should probably recuse himself from literary criticism. His work for the NYTBR reads like a Strom Thurmond-like politician trying to use States Rights Democratic Party rhetoric (circa 1948) to run for President in the 21st century.

[RELATED: Levi Asher points out that Tanenhaus’s team can’t even get basic Beat history right. Maybe they truly are operating as if it’s 1948 at the NYTBR.]

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