The Saloon notes that Moby Lives is “almost done resting.” Huzzah!

Publisher’s News UK: “[Profile Books Publisher Andrew] Franklin made the point almost as an aside at last month’s SYP meeting. ‘I think it’s despicable to try and pay anybody less than the minimum wage,’ Franklin told PN later. ‘Salaries at the top of publishing are not too bad now, and, when people are paying themselves more than £100,000 a year, it’s awful that they would try to pay people less than £150 a week.’ He also attacked the system’s effect on publishing recruitment, saying, ‘it’s like the debate about tuition fees: it creates a barrier to entry, and people whose parents can’t afford to support them can’t go into publishing. That’s why you have so many people in publishing with names like Rowena and Belinda.’ Profile never pays less than the minimum wage.”

Rest assured, I’ll be buying some Profile titles as soon as possible. (via Publisher’s Lunch)

Rake has tried to summarize Dale Peck’s assault on Sven Birkets. But it may be easier by simply singling out sentences:

“Here’s criticism’s trade secret: you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough.” Meaning you couldn’t find anything constructive to say at all? I guess that’s when you break out the Sontag.

“I sure do laugh a lot” I never knew, Dale.

“Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sven Birkerts.” The ego has landed.

“Indulge me for a moment:” I never thought I’d see dialogue from a James Bond villain appear in a critical essay.

“We must linger a moment longer on the subject of ironies and disappointments . . .” Why linger when you can just segue?

“called by what I think is his middle name” You’re kidding, right? You’re going to hold Sven accountable for his name?

“No, Birkerts’ only subject here is himself, the inevitable progression from frog-killing child to book-killing critic.” Is this a meta confessional or a critical piece?

“Birkerts, in other words, isn’t re-viewing his life in My Sky Blue Trades, he’s reviewing it in much the same way he reviews fiction, telling his readers what they can learn from the text of his life.” And what’s wrong with that? It worked for Henry Miller, Nicholson Baker, too many others to list.

“Let me state the obvious and get it out of the way: Sven Birkerts really loves books. To move beyond that, Birkerts doesn’t love individual books so much as he loves the edifice of literature and his own conception of himself as a small but integral part of that edifice—the keyhole, say, maybe even the doorknob.” If loving books and trying to find a place within them is a sin, then nearly every writer is guilty.

“For example, Birkerts dismissed William Gaddis and Don DeLillo as part of the postmodern plague that had ‘infected’ all the arts in his 1986 essay ‘An Open Invitation to Extraterrestrials,’ but had completely reversed his position by the time of his 1998 review of Underworld.” This may be news to you, Dale, but people change.

“He can take the tiniest premise and stretch it out like a child smearing that last teaspoon of peanut butter over a piece of bread, unaware it’s spread so thin that it no longer has any taste.” That’s rich coming from a man who writes 5,000 word hit pieces.

“about as interesting to watch as a game of Pong” When you can’t cite specific examples, resort to batty metaphors.

“But Birkerts wants to do more than merely bring books to readers. He wants to tell readers how they should be reading them. He doesn’t want to represent the canon, he wants to explain it.” This is a bad thing? And how can we judge Birkets’ overall failure at explanations from a single paragraph?

“in horseshoes, a ringer is worth three points…” I didn’t realize Peck got out of the house.

“It is a large oeuvre. Six books, hundreds of essays. The temptation is to refute each one individually, but to engage with the arguments is, at the end of the day, to give them more credence than they deserve.” In other words, Peck’s approaching his maximum word count. So legitimately addressing the arguments is out of the question.

” I’ve been looking for a contemporary critic’s work to discuss for some time.” So there was a pretext here.

Last month, I wrote a letter to the Mars company. Mars, apparently a division of MasterfoodsUSA, a conglomerate operating out of Hackettstown, New Jersey, had aired a commercial in which they digitally inserted various M&Ms into a scene from The Wizard of Oz. Dagmar Welling, Consumer Affairs Specialist, had this to say by mail:

Dear Mr. Champion:

Thank you for contacting us with your views regarding our television commercial. Specifically your reaction to the M&M’s® Brand Color Quest commercial “Wizard of Oz”. [sic]

We never intended to disappoint or offend anyone. But, as with anything we see, hear or read, reactions sometimes vary based upon individual preferences and interpretations.

We value the comments from our consumers and always refer them to our advertising associates for their review.

Sincerely,

Dagmar Welling

Consumer Affairs Specialist

On immediate glance, this is standard boiler plate. Dagmar no doubt answers several of these letters each day. So we can forgive him for not enclosing the period within “Wizard of Oz” or for typing an additional space between “preferences” and “and.”

The language here deserves speculation. What is a consumer affairs specialist? Since Dagmar’s job duty is to correspond with consumers, why isn’t Dagmar a consumer specialist? Why haven’t they given poor Dagmar a more compelling job title? It would seem that the inconsiderate nature of MasterfoodsUSA extends beyond the company’s inability to add a space between “foods” and “USA.”

But more importantly, why is my letter being gauged in terms of reaction? I took great pains to delineate how deeply ingrained The Wizard of Oz is into my cultural consciousness and general well-being. And yet Dagmar, whom I will now refer to as Mr. Welling just because I can, views this as an “individual preference” and an “interpretation.” I am a problem (i.e., “individual”), because in the corporate world, I don’t quite fit into the hard “consumer” definition. There is the further implication that my concerns are childish with the comparison between the M&M’s commercial and “anything we see, hear or read,” as if one is supposed to look the other way while works of art are butchered to sell products.

Furthermore, Mr. Welling cannot simply refer to the commercial as a commercial. It is a “M&M’s® Brand Color Quest commercial.” (Note the registered trademark.) And this “Brand Color Quest commercial” actually has a title that has been shamefully appropriated from the source.

If MasterfoodsUSA never intended to disappoint or offend, why then do they respond without respect for the film or my opinion? Why take the trouble to write such a letter? If Mr. Welling had simply said to me, “Hey, Ed. You may have had a point. In the future, we’re going to encourage the Madison Avenue wizards to use their creative noggins rather than pilfering from film classics,” or, more realistically, if they had even deigned to apologize, I would have possibly reconsidered my boycott. But the fact is that my opinion doesn’t matter to MasterfoodsUSA or to the overworked Dagmar.

Dagmar may be a consumer affairs specialist, but he sure as hell doesn’t understand how to appeal to cranks