Archives for January 6, 2004

Various
and sundry litbloggers have taken note of “The Populist Manifesto,” yesterday’s Washington Post story about the Stephen King-Shirley Hazzard dustup at the National Book Awards ceremony. Here’s the nut graf:

On the streets of Washington and across America, a war is being waged between popular novels and literary fiction. In this increasingly aliterate nation–acrawl with people who can read but don’t–the battle for readers is a high-stakes campaign.

Since I (1) write a column for the Post, (2) was interviewed for the story and (3) am quoted extensively therein, I’ll refrain from commenting either way on its merits, but I do want to say something about The Elegant Variation’s sulfurous response:

Others have already linked to this Washington Post piece about the King/Hazzard contretemps, so I may be beating a dead horse but I have to wonder when this idiotic “literary vs. genre” nonsense will play itself out.

There’s not a single message board that I have ever visited — not one — that does not include some form of this exhausted debate, usually in terms and tones incendiary and condescending. And after perusing all the miles and KB of threads, I’m forced to ask the question: Who cares? Isn’t it enough to say that each side probably envies something the other side has, and to leave it at that? How much more really needs to be said?

Hold on there a minute, hoss. The fact that lots and lots of people (OGIC and myself included) have blogged about this “exhausted debate” is apodictic proof that lots and lots of people care, and at least hints at the further possibility that the debate might be somewhat less than exhausted.

Bookslut, on the other hand, framed the diminishing-returns debate in a slightly different way, suggesting that the Post article “may have seemed more relevant if it had been published soon after the National Book Awards ceremony. I thought this had already been talked out.” And so it has–out here in the blogosphere, where lead times are shorter and trigger fingers itchier. But as has been widely observed of late, the whole point of the blogosphere is that it appears to consist, at least at present, of a fairly small universe of early adopters and opinion-shapers whose views are initially disseminated and discussed in cyberspace, only then making their way into the slower-responding world of print media. (Or, to invert the Fox News slogan, we decide–they report.) As a result, that which strikes us as yesterday’s news may actually be tomorrow’s news, or next month’s news, in the “real” world of journalism.

For this reason, instead of grumping about how the Washington Post is beating a dead horse, I wonder if we might possibly do better to say, “Cool–they noticed. And they even remembered to mention that we got there first!” For as Exhalations pointed out,

It was interesting to note that a blog was referenced, Terry Teachout’s About Last Night. It was the first time I’ve seen such a casual reference to a blog without the reporter having to explain the term

In a posting somberly entitled “Death Knell,” acdouglas.com announces the Impending End of the West, adducing as evidence a series of statements recently culled from an assortment of culture and art blogs. These statements, he claims,

are all reflective of the current cultural Zeitgeist; a legacy of the ’60s, and one that has been sounding the death knell for all the high arts, classical music very much included, for almost three decades now. And although a death knell, it’s been heard by most who ought to have known better (viz., intelligent, educated, cultured people such as those represented above) not as a death knell, but as a clarion voluntary heralding a new, welcome, and desirable equalitarian embracement of all art — high and low, great and trashy — without distinction.

No, I’m not going to embark on a(nother) fulmination against such wrongheaded, woodenheaded, purblind idiocy. I’ve done my share of that on this weblog; some will say more than my share.

Well, maybe just a teeny bit more than his share. For one of the statements, it seems, comes from “About Last Night”:

I’m blogging from the apartment of ________, who is sitting in her Eames chair (yes, she has an Eames chair!), looking shockingly beautiful as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two twang away on the stereo (didn’t I tell you she was cool?).

Needless to say, the lady of the blank was Our Girl in Chicago, who has an Eames chair and listens to Johnny Cash, to whose music I introduced her a number of years ago. Which means, according to Mr. Douglas, that she and I are both part of the horde of woodenheaded, idiotic cultural relativists who are gnawing away at the foundations of Western culture.

Excuse the hell out of me, pal, but you obviously haven’t read one-tenth of one percent of what I’ve been writing for the past quarter-century about cultural relativism and its discontents, and I don’t plan to sit still and let you dump all over me like that. Among many, many, many other things, I draw your attention to something I posted in this space
a couple of months ago, apropos of the Great King-Hazzard Imbroglio:

I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s part of what this blog is all about–a big part.

I think perhaps Mr. Douglas didn’t notice. I think perhaps there’s a lot he doesn’t notice. And I think perhaps he should do penance by ordering a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader, in which he will find plenty of evidence of just how much he hasn’t been noticing.

Enough said. All is forgiven.

UPDATE: Mr. Douglas has responded (the link’s the same), or at least thinks he has.

I just received this e-mail from a trend-conscious Gen-Xer who works in the litbiz:

W.

(that is short for whatever, in case you didn’t know).

I didn’t. Now I do. And so do you.