The Lesser of Two Evils?
Written byPosted on June 20, 2006
Filed Under Blogging
Dan Green takes umbrage with Wendy Lesser’s establishing principles behind The Lesser Blog. I’m a big fan of The Threepenny Review (and Lesser was once interviewed for The Bat Segundo Show; ironically, paired up with a certain poet-litblogger), but I actually agree with Dan that there are already plenty of “self-contained essays” to be found within the litblogging community. Of course, if Lesser really does desire to organize her blog, she can start by offering an RSS feed for those of us who hope to keep up with her thoughts. Lesser may claim to offer content which resembles “a printed article more than most blog entries do,” but I presume she refers to the completely disorganized navigation currently found at the Lesser Blog rather than any elitist qualifier. At least I hope that is the intent.
Nevertheless, Lesser’s stance continues the troubling hard line spouted off by John Updike and those dashing critics who seem to prefer gasconade over civil discourse. The continuing assumption that print is somehow superior to online writing simply because trees are massacred is as disingenuous a claim as Intelligent Design or proving the existence of the Tooth Fairy. Perhaps if these print-to-online greenhorns actually presented convincing arguments rather than generalized castigations sans examples, proponents of both mediums might find ways to learn and benefit from each other. Which seems to me a more constructive use of the Internet.
[6/21/06 UPDATE: Interestingly, Lesser has amended her post and removed the offending remarks from her blog. While it's good to know that Lesser is reading the blogs and responding accordingly, one would hope, however, that Lesser (or another critic) could simply offer an explanation of where she's coming from instead of a wholesale deletion. Perhaps one print critic being honest about the way she feels might lead to both sides understanding why there's this continuing divide, driven by a fey animosity, between print and online mediums. As I suggested in my initial post, I believe that both sides have a lot to learn from each other. And wouldn't the willful antagonism of the Sam Tanenhauses and the John Freemans of our world be better expressed with open communication and respectful conversation? (Thanks for the tip, Scott.)]
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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.)
I’ve made a posting on the Elegant Variation site to explain the deletion. As for the odd structure of my blog in the first place: well, I guess I didn’t think there was a great need for yet another place where everyone could vent their opinions in front of everyone. I kind of hoped for a more intimate level of response, in the form of email and such, whereby criticism and discussion and agreement and disagreement could be carried out in a private context and not under the eye of the ever-reacting public. But then, perhaps I was wrong to call it a blog at all. Still, it seems to me that the definition is not yet frozen in stone (as another communicant in this controversy put it), and therefore my weird version of a blog should count as one too. But what do I know?
–Wendy