Archives for 2004

I don’t respond to people who write dumb stuff about me, nor do I link to them. But I do appreciate being defended by bloggers who know it’s dumb. Thanks, guys–and gal.

(Now, aren’t you curious?)

The New York Times reports that a technical glitch at Amazon Canada last week caused the real user names of reviewers to be displayed instead of their chosen pseudonyms. Hilarity ensued:

John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel “City of Night” and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon’s highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.

“That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd,” said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, “The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens,” on Amazon under the signature “a reader from Chicago.” “How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them.”

[snip]

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon’s pages have turned into what one writer called “a rhetorical war,” where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

One well-known writer admitted privately–and gleefully–to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.

Numbering 10 million and growing by tens of thousands each week, the reader reviews are the most popular feature of Amazon’s sites, according to the company, which also culls reviews from more traditional critics like Publishers Weekly. Many authors applaud the democracy of allowing readers to voice their opinions, and rejoice when they see a new one posted–so long as it is positive.

But some authors say it is ironic that while they can for the first time face their critics on equal footing, so many people on both sides choose to remain anonymous. And some charge that the same anonymity that encourages more people to discuss books also spurs them to write reviews that they would never otherwise attach their names to.

Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections,” winner of the National Book Award, said that a first book by Tom Bissell last fall was “crudely and absurdly savaged” on Amazon in anonymous reviews he believed were posted by a group of writers whom Mr. Bissell had previously written about in the literary magazine The Believer.

“With the really flamingly negative reviews, I think it’s always worth asking yourself what kind of person has time to write them,” Mr. Franzen said. “I know that the times when I’ve been tempted to write a nasty review online, I have never had attractive motives.” Mr. Franzen declined to say whether he had ever given in to such temptation.

The suspicion that the same group of writers, known as the Underground Literary Alliance, had anonymously attacked his friend Heidi Julavits prompted the novelist Dave Eggers to write a review last August calling Ms. Julavits’s first novel “one of the best books of the year.”

Mr. Eggers, whose memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” made him a literary celebrity, chose to post his review as “a reader from St. Louis, MO.” But the review appeared under the name “David K Eggers” on Amazon’s Canadian site on Monday, and Mr. Eggers confirmed by e-mail that he had written it.

Oh, that Dave Eggers, always so shy and retiring. Will he ever come out of his shell?

Terry and I have been following the Don Cherry story this week, and he suggested I blog about it. But I couldn’t find the remotest arts angle to hang a post on. If you don’t know who Don Cherry is (think Canadian hockey) or don’t know about the events of the last week, Colby Cosh’s site is the best place to go to catch up.

Meanwhile, guess what? The Canadian government has handed me my arts angle on a silver platter. After the Conan O’Brien show taped in Toronto the last few days, with a Canadian government subsidy, Ottawa is scandalized by what they saw, and on the offensive:

Canada’s government on Friday condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O’Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual.

Ottawa and the province of Ontario paid $760,000 to help O’Brien–who appears on the NBC television network–bring his show to Toronto for a week to boost the city’s profile after a deadly SARS outbreak last year.

But the federal government said O’Brien had gone too far with the show broadcast on Thursday in which he went to Quebec, a province which has had separatist governments for much of the last 20 years and is a delicate political topic in Canada.

“We want to disassociate ourselves from the comments which were broadcast last night because we do not support them in any way,” junior government minister Mauril Belanger told Parliament.

At one point in the show, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog–a hand puppet that is a regular on the show–said to a Quebecer: “You’re French, you’re obnoxious and you no speekay English.” It told another: “I can smell your crotch from here.”

O’Brien’s team were also shown replacing street signs in the province with those that read “Quebecqueer Street” and “Rue des Pussies.”

Alexa McDonough, a legislator for the left-leaning New Democrats, described the program as “racist filth” and “utterly vile” and demanded the government seek the return of the C$1 million subsidy.

This is pretty surreal. To someone who has a soft spot for most all things Canadian, it’s also a glass of cold water in the face. Clearly a lot of the jokes that offended were allusions to the Cherry affair; as such, they seem at least as much aimed at Cherry as at the Qu

Old Hag
and Cinetrix are standing on the street in front of my apartment, accompanied by a camera crew. “Hey, Big Spender” is playing on a boom box in the middle distance. Is this a Celebrity Bloglunch…or a sting?

More as it happens. Assuming I open the front door.

Two readers were not so taken with last week’s account of a talk by James Wood, nor with the man himself. Wrote one, “I consider myself an intelligent fellow, with a fair amount of interest in ideas and literature, and I cannot stand James Wood. I don’t think his chatter comes near what a real artist works on when he writes a novel or
story.” This reader was not impressed with Woods’ ruminations on authorial voice and its necessary intrusions into first-person narration:

Does Wood really imagine that a writer thinks, “how do I… also manage to have my own style?” Doesn’t your “own style” take care of itself if you
solve the narrative problems of your story? For example, in The Sun also
Rises, does Wood believe that Hemingway had one way he could write the book
if he was just “talking like Jake” and didn’t have his “own style”, which he
then rejected in favor of a way he could do both? Doesn’t Hemingway’s “own
style” come precisely from how he imagines his narrator talks?

Yes and no. A writer like Hemingway achieves a greater degree of verisimilitude in his writing–his characters talking like “real” people–so it’s easier to overlook the presence of the author’s voice behind the narrator’s. But in a book like Henry James’s What Maisie Knew or, indeed, Vernon God Little, the author makes use of a larger vocabulary and more writerly expressions than his character could be expected to use. In Maisie the disjunction is so pronounced that it’s hard not to take the novel as, in part, an exploration of the limits of verisimilitude. It’s also a rebellion against the strict limits imposed on authorial voice by more naturalist strains of realism, and a blow for authorial liberty. It’s hard to turn from such a novel to something even as comparatively seamless as Hemingway and not start looking for the seams.

The difference between Hemingway and James (especially late James) is that for the former, character resides in voice–in the characters’ own language–and is best expressed through it. For the latter, the exposition of character requires a self-consciously literary language above and beyond the character’s own voice. You can see the author’s lips move, and you’re meant to. Wood, I think, is drawn to the latter type of writer–even bad examples of the type like D.B.C. Pierre. Last week I mildly called Wood’s positive review of Vernon God Little “surprising.” What I really meant was “unaccountable.” In the light of the talk on Bellow, though, you can perhaps begin to account for it: it starts to look less like a genuine response to the novel, and more like a rehearsal of a line of thinking that has been occupying Wood in his work on better writers.

This reader also questioned Wood’s reference to characters’ “confused consciousness,” which was, well, confusing.

Are we to presume that you can write a novel and include didacticism if the mouthpiece has a clear, “unconfused” consciousness? Or does Wood assume that the creation of a character automatically creates a “confused consciousness” if that character is used to communicate ideas? Here, as elsewhere, Wood veers away from the truly interesting issues involved and commits a cardinal literary sin: falling in love with his own phrases.

It was in the Q&A, off the cuff, that Wood used this phrase, and he used it interchangeably with “average consciousness,” which seemed closer to what he actually meant. It’s the reporter’s fault! This reader recommends Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed as books “that deal more pointedly with some of the same issues.”

Another reader makes a point about Wood that had never occurred to me before, but that I agree with: he’s much better at detraction than applause.

I thought you were a bit tame and lenient with James Wood; because he is so obviously better, and more severe and demanding, than almost anyone else, he does not receive some of the criticism he deserves. His negative writing is, to my mind, by far his best; he is much weaker in praise, too often allowing his own religious preferences to become his central subject, and equally often expounding on various elements of voice and narrative, in both cases with obscured judgment. So, for example, the obviously ridiculous recent Booker novel receives praise for its voice, or Bellow gets applause for his language and religious anguish that evoke Melville. In neither case is there an examination of the inwardness of character or the fidelity to human complication that Wood so often uses as yardsticks to cudgel, quite rightly in my view, the likes of DeLillo and Pynchon.

Right, insightful, and well-said.

UPDATE: Stephany Aulenback, filling in for Maud seamlessly as ever, posts a long excerpt from Dale Peck in defense of negative reviewing.

Diane Ravitch updates The Language Police in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

In my book “The Language Police,” I gathered a list of more than 500 words that are routinely deleted from textbooks and tests by “bias review committees” employed by publishing companies, state education departments and the federal government. Among the forbidden words are “landlord,” “cowboy,” “brotherhood,” “yacht,” “cult” and “primitive.” Such words are deleted because they are offensive to various groups–feminists, religious conservatives, multiculturalists and ethnic activists, to name a few.

I invited readers of the book to send me examples of language policing, and they did, by the score. A bias review committee for the state test in New Jersey rejected a short story by Langston Hughes because he used the words “Negro” and “colored person.” Michigan bans a long list of topics from its state tests, including terrorism, evolution, aliens and flying saucers (which might imply evolution).

A textbook writer sent me the guidelines used by the Harcourt/Steck/Vaughn company to remove photographs that might give offense. Editors must delete, the guidelines said, pictures of women with big hair or sleeveless blouses and men with dreadlocks or medallions. Photographs must not portray the soles of shoes or anyone eating with the left hand (both in deference to Muslim culture). To avoid giving offense to those who cannot afford a home computer, no one may be shown owning a home computer. To avoid offending those with strong but differing religious views, decorations for religious holidays must never appear in the background.

A college professor informed me that a new textbook in human development includes the following statement: “As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult.” The professor was stupefied that someone had made the line gender-neutral and ungrammatical by rewriting Bob Dylan’s folk song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which had simply asked: “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”…

Read the whole thing here.

“I was fourteen, a precocious child, sensitive as a burn.”

Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home

Not really, but I did write 5,000 words worth of my Balanchine book yesterday (including what I think is a really good section on Apollo), then went to see Terrence McNally’s new play, The Stendhal Syndrome, at Primary Stages’ new 59th Street theater (about which more next Friday). As a result, I don’t have much to offer this morning, and probably won’t have much to offer for the rest of the day, either–I’m just about to wrap up a chapter, after which I’ll be having a late lunch with Old Hag
and Cinetrix, followed by another theatrical preview in the evening. Arrgh. Yikes. Apologies.

More tomorrow, probably, I hope….