To Bitch or Not To Bitch?
Written byPosted on January 17, 2006
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Over the years, I, Bob Hoover, grumpy and small-time newspaper columnist, have dedicated this space to covering PTA meetings, bowling championships and bake sales. I’ve spent twenty-five years climbing out of the morass, becoming bitter and watching my hair recede and having to depend upon Viagra and an expensive instructional video to maintain any hope of an eclectic sex life. You’ll never catch me writing a newspaper column just after vacuuming (Hoovering, if you will) the house. Why, I save such chores for my dutiful wife. Because she knows and I know that, while I lost my enthusiasm for books long ago, I still have these columns to bang out. All adhering to the boring and inoffensive Post-Gazette template, all sucked of life and passion and the things I initially got into journalism for. All about as enthralling as the Pittsburgh Policeman’s Ball, which, as it so happens, I attended last Tuesday.
This is what journalism is and should remain. A place where editors who look suspiciously like Don Rickles cry poo-poo on the young upstart litbloggers, who are unpaid and make the occasional spelling mistake and who threaten to usurp reputations.
We conform to these rules because we need to justify our employment, and we respect our septuagenarian subscribers by giving them humorless news so watered down that the very fact-checking we purport to uphold is rote and meaningless. Frankly, we’re jealous that something like The Smoking Gun can beat us to the punch. We’re newspapermen, dammit! We’re intended to control today’s media! It’s just not fair!
If I make a mistake, I am flogged, beaten, tied up and denied sex for at least three weeks. I am forced to walk down Market Square with a scarlet letter stitched into my Sears suit. Several youngsters often attach signs reading “KICK ME” without my consent and proceed to kick your correspondent, Bob Hoover, onto the ground, smearing my face with the chocolate still left on their candy wrappers. You should see my dry cleaning and chiropractor bills.
Unlike these litbloggers, I, Bob Hoover, have no problems being humiliated like this. It’s part of being a Pittsburgh newspaperman. But I’m disappointed to see that this modest tar-and-feathering seems to be going the way of slavery, Charlie Chan and the dodo. The world isn’t what it was. Litbloggers should be publicly humiliated too. And it seems that as my space in print recedes, I too may find myself writing about the publishing industry from the comfort of my two-bedroom suburban home. Thank god we just applied the last mortgage payment.
Ah, the litblogosphere, which somehow manages to tap into literary culture in a way that seems to have escaped most newspapers. Somehow, these bastards read more than I do! These litboggers and their podcasts and their 75 books challenges and their interviews with authors who wouldn’t get the time of day elsewhere! How do they do it?
Of course, the only real thing a newspaperman can do is dismiss them with a pack of lies. Let I, Bob Hoover, claim, in light of the Jayson Blairs and the Judith Millers, that all litbloggers are scoundrels and prevaricators of the first order! Let I, Bob Hoover, baffled by the notion of content that isn’t targeted for an advertising-friendly demographic, declare these litbloggers to be writing for mommy and daddy! How dare they jest! How dare they skewer! How dare they even consider that their readers are smart enough to read between the lines! It’s not fair that litbloggers have hyperlinks for reference, or comments in place for readers to clarify mistakes or the subjects of their posts to respond to any allegations.
It’s also not fair that more people seem to be reading blogs than a Bob Hoover column. Don’t you like me? I learned a lesson long ago to play it safe, to never question the actions of prominent citizens or personages in the publishing industry. But these blogs have the liberty to unfurl the truth that I, Bob Hoover, cannot! These litblogs have the potential to be even more honest and truthful and probing than a Pittsburgh newspaper.
Clearly, there is little more one can do than dismiss them instead of embracing the paradigm shift. But then journalists like Terry Teachout and James Wolcott have always been more ahead of the curve than Bob Hoover.
(UPDATE: More responses from Scott Esposito, Dan Wickett, Bud Parr, M.A. Orthofer and Kevin Holtsberry.)
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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.)
What a maroon!
Bob, I thought your column was hilarious. I almost missed the “Hoovering” pun, since I’m used to reading about hoovering in English novels.I am assuming, of course, that you are being totally tongue-in-cheek; otherwise I should have to classify you as a moron, or at least an idiot savant. I work on a small town paper, and can relate to most, if not all, of your predicament … but I would have thought that a place like Pittsburg would not be so provincial. Anyway, I’m going to look up that rag on the Web just to read your columns.