Monthly Archives: March 2008

Ladies' Man

March 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Repulsive characters go a long way back before 1978, but I can’t help noticing the peculiar slime of a guy whose girlfriend has a 105 degree temperature, and then says: “She fell asleep in my arms and I lay there furious because she didn’t acknowledge my sacrifice, the comforting strength of my goddamn presence. I wanted her to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ or ‘Oh, Kenny’ or something […]'” Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man spans a week, and this thought occurs on Friday, but the object of his objection has already dumped him in more a de facto than de jure manner on Monday or Tuesday. Like Kenny, the narrator, I found it difficult to remember what happened on what day. This is in part because nothing major happens to him, in the physical, emotional, or intellectual worlds, though a man who thinks: “It was my ‘leisure’ time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time” is an unlikely person to have a great epiphany.

Like Ladies’ Man, however, Kenny is not without some redeeming qualities; he “pretend[s] to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys.” This predates The Onion’s hilarious, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which covers the same territory. But his lack of interest in basketball mirrors his lack of interest in most of the rest of his life, and he’s so ironic and distant and above the fray that I wonder if we should care about Kenny only as much as he cares about everything else. Even his relative humanity is insincere:

Nothing heavy. Just misty sadness. It was over. It had been the best and now it was over and nothing had ever felt as good. We had peaked back then, and all we’d been doing since was dying.

This is a 30-year-old reminiscing about sweaty high school makeouts. He’s self-indulgent in other ways: “No wonder I was so goddamn lonely. Friends, man. I didn’t have any fucking friends. And friends were the bottom line.” Well, yes, and we get 264 pages demonstrating exactly why Kenny has no friends. What’s he going to do when he’s, say, 50? Perhaps read The Sea, which is at least a higher level of melancholy wistfulness. Oh, and Max Morden is as nicer a person than Kenny as a golden retriever is a nicer animal than a cobra. One woman who Kenny picks up feels his bite, although it is one of indifference rather than venom. For a character with vastly greater self-absorption than Kenny who is also vastly less constrained by society, try John Self in Money, who is the king of these weak anti-Hemingways who are also created by Price, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

I mention Hemingway because all three writers use devolved versions of his characters and prose. Kenny speaks without the classical background of Jake in The Sun Also Rises, and he has none of the restraint or passion of the characters in that book. Still, he whips out the occasional great metaphor in the pulp style: “For eighteen years that sound was an unnoticeable to me as my heartbeat” or “he had enough chest hair for a national park.” You can hear Elmore Leonard, or one of his models, George Higgins. These metaphors can’t redeem a long, awkward sex scene and lots of navel gazing or a character who can’t figure out that perhaps assholes are the only people who think everyone else is an asshole, as Kenny does at a bar: “Loud, suburban contractors and their wives, drunk Texans, Jap businessmen, medical students; assholes, all assholes.” We’ve been feeling scorn for the bourgeoise since Flaubert if not earlier, but now we have someone who doesn’t even recognize where his opinions come from, despite alluding to Joseph Conrad.

Kenny says things like “‘How many zorts that set you back?'” and wallows in the detritus of TV pop culture. Yes, we get it, but as the cliche goes, lie down with dogs and wake up with flees. Kenny, however, lacks the consciousness to realize this.

I read Ladies’ Man because I’d heard about Price’s Clockers and his new novel, Lush Life, both of which have been favorably compared to Ladies’ Man. I’ve read neither yet but intend to: Ladies’ Man is not without artistic redemption, and it sounds like Price’s bigger, better novels are worthier. Whether they live up to expectations remains to be seen.

Ladies’ Man

March 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Repulsive characters go a long way back before 1978, but I can’t help noticing the peculiar slime of a guy whose girlfriend has a 105 degree temperature, and then says: “She fell asleep in my arms and I lay there furious because she didn’t acknowledge my sacrifice, the comforting strength of my goddamn presence. I wanted her to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ or ‘Oh, Kenny’ or something […]'” Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man spans a week, and this thought occurs on Friday, but the object of his objection has already dumped him in more a de facto than de jure manner on Monday or Tuesday. Like Kenny, the narrator, I found it difficult to remember what happened on what day. This is in part because nothing major happens to him, in the physical, emotional, or intellectual worlds, though a man who thinks: “It was my ‘leisure’ time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time” is an unlikely person to have a great epiphany.

Like Ladies’ Man, however, Kenny is not without some redeeming qualities; he “pretend[s] to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys.” This predates The Onion’s hilarious, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which covers the same territory. But his lack of interest in basketball mirrors his lack of interest in most of the rest of his life, and he’s so ironic and distant and above the fray that I wonder if we should care about Kenny only as much as he cares about everything else. Even his relative humanity is insincere:

Nothing heavy. Just misty sadness. It was over. It had been the best and now it was over and nothing had ever felt as good. We had peaked back then, and all we’d been doing since was dying.

This is a 30-year-old reminiscing about sweaty high school makeouts. He’s self-indulgent in other ways: “No wonder I was so goddamn lonely. Friends, man. I didn’t have any fucking friends. And friends were the bottom line.” Well, yes, and we get 264 pages demonstrating exactly why Kenny has no friends. What’s he going to do when he’s, say, 50? Perhaps read The Sea, which is at least a higher level of melancholy wistfulness. Oh, and Max Morden is as nicer a person than Kenny as a golden retriever is a nicer animal than a cobra. One woman who Kenny picks up feels his bite, although it is one of indifference rather than venom. For a character with vastly greater self-absorption than Kenny who is also vastly less constrained by society, try John Self in Money, who is the king of these weak anti-Hemingways who are also created by Price, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

I mention Hemingway because all three writers use devolved versions of his characters and prose. Kenny speaks without the classical background of Jake in The Sun Also Rises, and he has none of the restraint or passion of the characters in that book. Still, he whips out the occasional great metaphor in the pulp style: “For eighteen years that sound was an unnoticeable to me as my heartbeat” or “he had enough chest hair for a national park.” You can hear Elmore Leonard, or one of his models, George Higgins. These metaphors can’t redeem a long, awkward sex scene and lots of navel gazing or a character who can’t figure out that perhaps assholes are the only people who think everyone else is an asshole, as Kenny does at a bar: “Loud, suburban contractors and their wives, drunk Texans, Jap businessmen, medical students; assholes, all assholes.” We’ve been feeling scorn for the bourgeoise since Flaubert if not earlier, but now we have someone who doesn’t even recognize where his opinions come from, despite alluding to Joseph Conrad.

Kenny says things like “‘How many zorts that set you back?'” and wallows in the detritus of TV pop culture. Yes, we get it, but as the cliche goes, lie down with dogs and wake up with flees. Kenny, however, lacks the consciousness to realize this.

I read Ladies’ Man because I’d heard about Price’s Clockers and his new novel, Lush Life, both of which have been favorably compared to Ladies’ Man. I’ve read neither yet but intend to: Ladies’ Man is not without artistic redemption, and it sounds like Price’s bigger, better novels are worthier. Whether they live up to expectations remains to be seen.

Romeo and Juliet at the Balagan Theatre

March 13, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I kept expecting to hear a car backfire at the Balagan Theatre’s production of “Romeo and Juliet”, as the stage was in a basement reminiscent of a garage. This is not a bad thing: I liked the intimate space and the fact that they sell beer you can drink in the theatre. It feels more like being in the Globe, and, in addition, there’s something to be said for being just a foot or two from the action; I could see that Romeo’s shoes needed to be polished. There was no set and few props; a pillar was covered by what appeared to be actors’ copies of Titus Andronicus. The explanation came when Romeo (Banton Foster) ripped another few pages and pasted them on the “sycamore” (“A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad; / Where, underneath the grove of sycamore” Benvolio says). Romeo apparently tore pages from the book to show himself a melancholy artist in the Romantic mode; as portrayed here, he is a dreamy undergrad.

A few other choices surprised me: the nurse played the fool, and Tybalt (Mark Carr) was banal. In contrast, Mercutio (Ryan Higgins) lived up to his name, provided comic relief, and his death was much mourned by this audience member. The costumes went all over the twentieth century, from Paris in a tuxedo to Mercutio in a track suit to a plain yellow dress with black leggings on Juliet (Allison Strickland) to generic hipster clothes on many others. Still, Mercutio and Juliet transcended their costumes. Juliet was the obvious leader here, leading teasing, and enticing Romeo; together the two played being teenagers well, and I could see the walls of Verona being for Romeo what the walls of high school are for others. I also hadn’t realized just how narcissistic Romeo is, with much of his speech focused on himself and even his speech superficially focused on Juliet only going through the lens of his eyes.

But the adults’ coldness and cruelty shone through as well, and they were perhaps worse than the passionate youth, who are encouraged by their elders’ grudges. I’m reminded of the old version of Planet of the Apes, which implies no one over 30 should be trusted. The poison of their beliefs works its way through Shakespeare’s language, although discussing that fully is a longer essay than I care to write here, and you’re better off hearing the play from actors than reading about it on the screen or page. You could do worse than seeing it at the Balagan.

NYT on point about memoirs and Seattle

March 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Buying the paper version of the New York Times was an excellent decision, with “Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?” about Seattle’s supposed position as literary tastemaker:

In many ways, Ms. [Nancy] Pearl’s rise in the book world parallels Seattle’s rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.

I’m not sure that I buy the premise of this article, though I do note that it implicitly argues that the success of the three companies might be harming what makes Seattle unusual in the first place:

Seattle’s literary seeds have been here for decades, with local authors, abundant writing courses and robust independent bookstores, according to J. A. Jance, the Seattle mystery author whose books have sold 15 million copies over the last 20 years. “Maybe it’s the rain, but Seattle has always been a reading town,” she said.

[…]

The flip side of the success of the big Seattle booksellers is the gradual decrease in the number of small independent stores, which have struggled as a result of a variety of factors.

(Bold added.)

Elsewhere, the little league tizzy over a faked memoir (see our comments here and, to a lesser extent, here) brings “A Bug’s Life. Really.“:

“‘The Metamorphosis’ — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

[…]

Mr. Kafka’s publishers are now reviewing all his works of fiction — stories about singing mice, “hunger artists” and men on trial for crimes they’re not aware of having committed — to determine whether they too are true.

We’ve come to the point of observing the absurdity of memoirs through the absurdity of such standards applied to absurd fiction.

The Book of Vice

March 9, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Arguably, if you need a book on how to do vice, you’re unlikely to actually commit many vices. That’s the message I took from Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to do Them), a hilarious book that examines vice from an anthropologist’s perspective rather than a participant’s. Even if you do learn how to commit vices, you’re unlikely to do so on the scale discussed here. Sure, Sagal discusses swinging and even goes to a swingers’ event, but he doesn’t actually, uh, swing, in the chapter he goes on a long, quasi-scholarly tangent on the mating habits of bees:

When the male honeybee ejaculates, he explodes. And before female readers start weighing the pros and cons of this, consider that via this explosion, the honeybee separates himself from his genitalia, which he leaves lodged in the female, preventing any further canoodling. The bee goes to his death in his moment of ecstasy, his last thought probably being the honeybee equivalent of: “ha!”

Fortunately, Sagal is such an excellent, funny writer that I’m more than willing to read his tangents on animal mating, which is a persistent theme. His descriptions are better than those in most literary fiction I read and are rivaled by Woody Allen: “Somewhere out by the Glendale Freeway, miles away from the louche hillsides and corrugated flats of Porn Valley, there is a particular eruption of cinder block, with asphalt and chain-link moat, generic even by L.A. standards.” L.A. is perhaps the most generic city in existence, unique only for how generic it is, which makes this particular shack especially notable. In the section on strippers, Sagal says that “They [the strippers] exposed their buttocks and the Mysteries Within to us in a manner that reminded me, a little dizzyingly, of mating displays I had seen on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” But don’t think he looks down on strippers or any of the others he studies, as the overarching theme isn’t really vice—it’s power, a sort of laymen’s Foucault that deals not with political structures and networks but interpersonal struggles and cash. Arguably interpersonal struggles and cash can be incorporated into Foucault’s discourse, but that’s wandering too far afield: Sagal is interested in how strippers extract cash from their clients, porn stars extract it from their clients, restauranteurs from their diners, and the like. Even the host of the swingers’ party makes a little cash, though not too much. The same is true of consumption in the sense of conspicuous, as Sagal rides in his in-laws’ private jet, notes yachts, and discusses the hierarchy of high-end automobiles and what they signify. Once you have enough money, it becomes gauche to drive a Maybach and cool to drive a beater, as Warren Buffet apparently does. The only people who find Ferraris cool are apparently software millionaires, aspiring software millionaires, and mobile home residents. Many if not most cars, like much consumer detritus, are meant to signify power relationships, with the beater cars driven by gazillionaires an indication that the gazillionaire has risen so high that he—and he is almost always a he—has risen so high as to not need to display his ostentatious wealth, which in turn becomes ostentatious.

Studying the meaning of power and vice can become exhausting in trying to decipher its meaning. This is why it’s good that Sagal has a deft touch with euphemism, as the above quotes show, and with humor in its many forms. On the wealthy, he notes that many purchases aren’t designed just to show money, but that the rich “want a little token, just a package of wild rice, to indicate that they’re liked.” He sets the tone in the introduction:

Two hundred and thirty-odd years ago, a progressive thinker of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment envisioned a utopia, and in America we have come near to perfecting it on earth. Wherever the Marquis de Sade is now, he must be proud. I imagine him wandering through the Power Exchange [a San Francisco sex club inhabited mostly by lonely men whose pornographic dreams don’t come true], eyeing the copious bowls of condoms and lube, the porn playing in continuous loops on monitors and the walls, and saying, “Truly, this is the paradise that I envisioned. . . . But why does everybody look so confused?”

Many people do look and act confused in this book, including at times the purveyors of various kinds of vice. Josh is the son of the owner of the Power Exchange, and Sagal observes that “Josh, in his father’s eyes, could do nothing right, which might explain why he found it so hard, as I observed him that evening, to do anything right.” I doubt I’d do any better than Josh at hosting an exhibitionists’ show in a sex club. Vice, as with most things done right, is hard work. It’s also elusive, and Sagal says that “The Power Exchange was, for the most part, nine thousand square feet of tease.” It’s a bit like a BYOB party, except you’re not brining beer. The same is true of the swingers’ event where Sagal doesn’t swing, and it’s also a lot of work to set up.

By the end of the book, you can’t help thinking that Sagal is happier being happily married than he would be a glutton, a gazillionaire, a swinger, a porn star, or a gambler. It’s easier being faithfully married, for one thing, and it’s perhaps easier to keep that ironic eye on the rest of the world, and especially the small corner of it engaged in serious vice. Despite the way formerly big vices are becoming commonplace—”Nowadays, as with almost every other aspect of what used to be the Divine Right of Kings and Kings alone, anybody can partake in these pleasures: aristocracy, like roof tar, seeps downward”—Sagal implies that you’re probably better off not indulging in them, or indulging when you’re young and frisky and then settling down, as at least one porn star does. Furthermore, those engaged in vice are working, and working in jobs that quickly become just jobs; as one man says of strippers, “‘They’re like psychiatrists […] except they get paid by the minute, and in crumpled dollar bills.'” More hilarity from Segal’s choice of quote, and underneath that more commentary on the relative power of the vice seeker and vice provider. They’re both work. I can’t help but thinking that The Book of Vice is more likely to anesthetize one’s desire for vice, rather than enflame it.

Perhaps that’s Segal’s biggest point. But on the way it’s a very fun ride, and probably much more fun than paying more than $50 to be a single male at the Power Exchange.

Sleepless Nights — Elizabeth Hardwick

March 8, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sleepless Nights isn’t much good for sleepless nights because it’s not somnolent, and yet it also isn’t engaging. Rather, it’s a jagged and random novelette that so leaps from idea to idea and style to style as to make me roll my eyes and give up. It is a novel only in that it departs least from that form, but, unlike In Search of Lost Time, which has been described the same way, Sleepless Nights is irredeemably irritating. Nothing in it hangs together, and it is like a cruel parody of modernism without the levity of satire to make up for its deficiencies. With it I’m tempted to play the Derrida parlour game.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the game goes like this: take one of Derrida’s convoluted sentences and negate it, such that the sentence says the opposite of what it once did. Read or give both sentences to someone else, ideally an expert in Derrida, and ask them to decide which he wrote. I once tried to play this with a literary theory professor, who didn’t like the game. The same game could be played here too: does Hardwick say, “Nothing groans under treachery,” or,”Everything groans under treachery?” Does she say, “Real people: nothing like your mother and father, nothing like those friends from long ago […]” or “Real people: everything like your mother and father, everything like those friends from long ago […]”? Does she say, “The weak have the purest sense of history,” or “The strong have the purest sense of history?” Either could be true, with no change in the narrative or outcome, if you can call what happens “outcome.”

Then there is fuzzy language of the sort B.R. Myers hates; I have yet to see “acrimonious twilight [fall].” And do the weak have the purest sense of history, which the narrator (also named Elizabeth) posits? Maybe: but if so, this novel doesn’t prove it, or even do more than state it and move on. It also goes for the obvious and tautological in the place of the profound: “It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.” Yes, the present becomes the future and we’ve eventually done whatever it is that we’re doing. This would seem obvious, and I wouldn’t note it if it were somehow connected to the rest of this disjointed narrative.

Nothing connects and little happens, which Geoffrey O’Brien excuses in the introduction: “The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?” There is much to be said about challenging the norms of fiction, but this book doesn’t: it wanders and meanders into nothing. And what O’Brien means by saying “to live is to make fiction” he never explains, and the only way to make living a fiction is to stretch fiction beyond whatever bounds it might have into something so unrecognizable that it covers all things and thus loses the specificity that make it a definitive concept in the first place.

This is, he says, “a novel that could allow itself to move in any direction in time that it chose, that could shift its attention from one person or situation to another as abruptly as a filmmaker might splice together two incongruous images; a novel that seem[s] to declare the impossibility of separating itself from life […]”. Even if a novel can move in any direction and through any time, perhaps the fact that it can doesn’t mean it should, as Sleepless Nights demonstrates. And all this double-talk is merely from the first page of O’Brien’s introduction. Compare O’Brien’s facile dismissal of “the norms of fiction” to what David Lodge says of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: “The process [of placing the novel in a historical period, which Lodge explains] demonstrates an interesting aspect of the composition of fiction, namely, that the acceptance of a constraint which may seem frustrating and bothersome at first often leads to the discovery of new ideas and story-stuff.” It doesn’t appear that Hardwick had any problem using constraints to discover new ideas and story-stuff, since Sleepless Nights has little of either.

To be fair, in the introduction O’Brien is describing what will come more than anything else, and it is not his description so much as his defense that I attack. And I attack it all the more because a few passages ring: “Every great city is a Lourdes where you hope to throw off your crutches but meanwhile must stumble along on them, hobbling under the protection of the shrine.” In this context, the passage is vulnerable to the Derrida parlour game, but it could be something more. Alas: amid the random thoughts, incomplete sentences, and even more random shifts in place, perspective, and the like, it is adrift, cut off from its network and lost amid the vicissitudes of a book with no spine.

… And here he is

March 7, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days ago I asked for an example of who championed the supposedly airless literary novel, and now Stephen Marche writes in Salon with an answer for me:*

[Alain Robbe-Grillet] was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[…]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness.

I’ve heard of Robbe-Grillet but never read him and appear not to be alone in this. Yet I’m skeptical of a single novelist’s ability to have so great an effect on culture**, especially because literary culture still produces all kinds of novels, and, even if it didn’t, old novels are still available. In financial terms, this is one problem with being a current novelist: you still have to compete with The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men, but Honda is not too worried about people choosing cars made in the first half of the twentieth century usurping current sales. Obviously there can be currents and trends within a literary culture, but it seems to me that literary culture and literature are so big as to give us whatever we want.

Fortunately, I wrote all this before Marche came to his conclusion:

The two strands of postwar literary fiction, the ultraradical and the willfully archaic, are both antithetical to the spirit of the novel itself, which is polyglot and unpredictable. Novels are supposed to be messy. They are written to express ideals and to make money; they steal from everything and everyone, high, middle and low, belonging to everyone and no one in the same moment. They don’t fit anyone’s conception. That’s why we love them.

Though I hate to descend into high school argot, I have to say: duh. So why does the bulk of this essay deal with questionable generalizations that Marche then throws down?

* I see no reason not to assume a causal connection.

** Except Joyce, as virtually everything written in English after him has felt his touch, whether the writer wants to feel it or not. But even Joyce had a little-known forerunner named Edouard Dujardin, who wrote Les Lauriers sont coupés. In Modernism, Peter Gay writes that “Dujardin […] later reported that his experiment sold just a few hundred copies […] But among its few readers was James Joyce, [who later] signed a copy of Ulysses to Dujardin, calling himself ‘an impenitent thief.’ “

Novels, notoriety, and memoirs

March 5, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Megan McArdle discusses contemporary literary culture in the context of yet another fake memoir that’s apparently famous but I’d never heard of prior to its notoriety:

I do think, though, that Matt has hit on something about our own time, though I’m not quite as down on contemporary fiction as he is. Since the modernists, all contemporary literary fiction–including narrative fiction–has focused less on certain aspects of telling a story. I understand that some cognitive scientists theorize that the reason we enjoy stories so much is that they activate the parts of our brain that deal with social cognition and learning. The reason that genre fiction, even though it is usually not a masterpiece of prose styling, can be so absorbing is that it provides this function. The fantasy of a space opera or a bodice-ripper is compelling because we’re imagining ourselves as the hero–imagining ourselves as a better, more interesting version of ourselves. We’re also exploring how we should/would act in certain (unlikely) situations; the novels that do best in these genres are the ones where the hero ultimately acts rightly, which is to say, producing the best result in some sense. This is possibly silly, even counterproductive–one sees women actually acting like heroines of romance novels, and wondering (though not in so many words) why men do not respond to them in the same way as in the book. But it’s a deep element of most peoples’ fantasy lives.

This is an itch that contemporary novels try very hard not to scratch. “The moral of the story . . . ” is an archaism.

So for people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a bodice ripper, memoir fills that space. Having neatly separated fact and fiction, we now read only “fact” as a way to learn about correct behavior, where a hundred years ago people were perfectly accustomed to taking moral or social lessons out of obvious fiction (from whence the term “morality play”). Memoir alone do we permit ourselves to read for the (now conscious) purpose of obtaining information about how human beings behave in other situations than ours.

My take: I’ve never been interested in memoirs because fiction and journalism are vastly more interesting than what a person did/has done, especially if that person hasn’t done something vital or important. Call this preference for something vaguely important an offshoot of the popes and princes school of history. My lack of interest in the memoir notwithstanding, the genre seems to be quite popular, and I suppose McArdle has as plausible an explanation about why this is as anyone.

But I’m not sure I buy the premises that McArdle’s piece is based on, which I’ll call the stultifying literary hypothesis theory or the literary/genre split theory. Neither, apparently, do some of McArdle’s colleagues. Good writing is good writing, no matter where it comes from, as was discussed recently. Furthermore, I don’t think I’ve seen all that many people highly invested in defending airless literary fiction; if I could find these strawmen who wield influence out of proportion to their size, I would love to meet them.

Furthermore, the biggest problem with these literary / genre distinctions is that different people have different wants, and the quality of writing itself cannot be measured by what “genre,” if any, a book belongs to. I hesitate to say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s true, and how a novel uses language to express itself is an important quality of what makes good fiction. What the fiction says is, I think, a separate issue that too often gets muddled in with how it is said.

That being said, I think the novel still has many places to go, and rumors of its death have been circulating such a long time that I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still dying whenever I am. Being 24, I hope that won’t be for a while yet.

Attachment to paper?

March 5, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Ars Technica reports on a little noted section of a study on “Digital Entertainment” from the UK:

According to the research, sponsored by UK media lawyers Wiggin, survey data shows books have the highest “attachment” rating of any leisure media activity. People are more attached to their books than they are to their satellite television, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, social networks, video games, blogs, DVDs, and P2P file-swapping. And it’s not like this high rate of affection for the book occurs only among a small group; books came in second only to “listen to the radio” in terms of the number of people who engage in those activities.

Not surprisingly, Ars says that this isn’t good news for the e-book market. Well, the the problem is partially an attachment to paper, but it’s also that the devices aren’t very good yet and the books to actually be read on the devices are encumbered with perfidious Digital Restriction Management (DRM).

A direct link to the survey itself doesn’t seem to be widely available. If anyone sends one, I’ll post it.