Save the Blogs!
Written byPosted on May 2, 2007
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Pictured above is a basement in Terre Haute. It is within this damp and miserable environment that 26-year-old literary blogger Jerrold Hysteria muses about literature, often mocked and belittled by newspaper critics who cower under desks the minute that they hear the words “Tanenhaus Brownie Watch” or “LATBR Thumbnail.” Mr. Hysteria has received forty-two phone calls from novelist Richard Ford in the past week: all of them collect. Mr. Ford seems to think that Hysteria is the litblog force that caused The Lay of the Land to be considered less worthy than Independence Day. Mr. Ford has a lot of spare time.
Mr. Hysteria, alas, does not have Mr. Ford’s luxuries. Why then would he operate in a basement?
“I don’t know why he pays attention to me,” said Mr. Hysteria by email. “I’ve only read The Sportswriter and didn’t care for it.”
Mr. Hysteria runs the literary blog Richard Ford Ate My Tuna Salad Sandwich and Didn’t Pay His Half of the Check and he is just one of many litbloggers who has been blamed for many of the current problems in literary culture. Mr. Hysteria has a Technorati rating. Mr. Ford does not.
Because of this, Mr. Hysteria, like many other litbloggers, needs your help.
Here is what you can do to save blogs.
1. Please tell Richard Ford to stop calling Mr. Hysteria. This is costing him serious time and money. He lives in a basement.
2. Please tell John Freeman that Mr. Hysteria would like to give him a hug and means no malice.
3. We’re also going to need someone who doesn’t mind traveling to Terre Haute and doesn’t mind basements to give Mr. Hysteria a lap dance.
There will be more published here on what you can do to save the blogs. We’ll be asking major figures, such as Lorrie, the angry chick at Starbuck’s who “doesn’t know what the fuck a blog or a book review is,” to weigh in here in the coming weeks.
This is serious business. There are men over thirty crying about this.
SAVE THE BLOGS! Starting with Mr. Hysteria in Terre Haute.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Maybe Mr. Ford doesn’t like bloggers in Terre Haute basements because they, unlike the conveniently located Colson Whitehead, can too easily elude his saliva.
I think you should also run a graphic of the spitting image of Richard Ford on this post.
Hey, that looks like the basement I write from. I guess all litbloggers are cut from the same cloth.
That is one sorry looking basement! That’s a place people should only be spending time in if they want shelter from a tornado or need to hide a body.
,..] http://www.edrants.com is another great source of tips on this subject,..]