- Going Postal‘s Mark Ames offers words on Virginia Tech. (Thanks, Richard!)
- Scott Esposito responds to Cynthia Ozick’s “Literary Entrails.”
- My response to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur is now at 2,500 words, and I still have considerably more to address. Rest assured, it will be unleashed before the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
- I’m very excited to be covering Alternative Press Expo tomorrow, where I will likely be spending far too much money. If you have comics, particularly strange or unusual ones, to talk about, look for the balding guy wandering the Concourse with the microphone. The results will appear, as last year, in a series of forthcoming Segundo podcasts.
- The Sharp Side thinks Lionel Shriver is a crap writer. (via Mark Thwaite)
- If you thought that Will Self’s New York Times walk-a-thon was strange, New York Magazine has upped the fey ante by following Marisha Pessl as she loads up on coffee and cupcakes. It’s good to know that when it comes to literary writers, today’s media will devote considerable column inches not to the books in question, but what they do with their bodies. What next? A 2,000 word article on Zadie Smith and Z.Z. Packer bicycling cross-country?
- Will Peter Carey win another Miles Franklin?
- The 10 greatest novels for children. Any list along these lines that includes Melvin Burgess’s Junk is interesting.
- John Freeman writes: “How, after all, could one review ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ without commenting upon the novel’s deeply humanistic vision? How will critics talk about former NBCC winner Jim Crace’s upcoming apocalyptic novel ‘The Pesthouse’ (which is set in America) without engaging with the very real political undercurrents caused by his flip-flopping of our greatest migration myths (having people trying to leave the country, rather than enter it)? How does one review a book like William T. Vollmann’s ‘Poor People’ without pausing for more than an aside to marvel how infrequently this population winds up in a book at all?” Well, it’s very simple. In Vollmann’s case, you observe the level of scholarship and the degree to which the book succeeds or fails at personal journalism. In the case of the two novels, you remark upon how thematically effective the narrative is. This has very little to do with politics, although I can see how a politically conscious reader might pick up certain connections. China Miéville and I recently had an interesting conversation about how an author’s imagination does, in fact, dwell outside of his political sensibilities. In Miéville’s case, the monsters that Miéville creates have nothing to do with his Marxist leanings.
- Accordingly, since John Freeman seems to see politics in everything, I hereby challenge Mr. Freeman to a public debate in New York on this very issue, where I will duly demonstrate to Mr. Freeman that an open-minded reader can, in fact, read, write, and assess literature irrespective of politics.
Roundup and a Callout
– April 20, 2007Posted in: Roundup
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
What does a “humanistic vision” have to do with politics? Can’t human decency and compassion be discussed without it becoming political? Call me cynical, but by seeing such an issue as “political” would probably tend to depersonalize it and push personal responsibility that much futher away.
The Ames piece is interesting, but speaking as a lifelong Southerner who went to a school where a hostage situation (student on student) took place in 1989, he has a romanticized view of Southern kids. They aren’t all hicks with a “get ‘em!” attitude and they aren’t that different than their “coastal” counterparts.
think about it in reverse, though. would you like to read an article about tolstoy walking around a brothel in the meatpacking district getting spent and drunk and then taking the LIRR back to the estate in southhampton and crying into sofias welcoming arms? or would you rather read another essay about adultery and caste in the kreutzer sonata? both, maybe.
per pessl, a lot of people complain about how no one talks about her book, but the only thing people ever say about the actual book is that its not as bad as everyone thinks it is who hasnt read it.
p.s. — theres these great quotes in the new markson (from pablo neruda, i think) about the perils of assessing literature irrespective of politics.
something about “the cheese of capitalism”, being literature that ignores politics.
i liked ames’ essay very much.
Everything is political.
re: the marisha pessl thing, yeah isnt it weird that the food section of the magazine would talk abt FOOD? how strange.