Category Archives: Culture

A better press corps?

December 7, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Two days ago I posted about CEOs’ libraries, which included one quote apparently made up by the reporter, Harriet Rubin: “Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.” Mr. Lopez quickly responded to an e-mail query about the subject, and I’m copying his note in full:

That was a very controversial statement in that article and it’s only somewhat incidental that I never actually said it. What I said went more or less along the lines of this:

She: [After we had talked for a half an hour or so about books, book collecting, and book collectors…] So how much does it cost to put together a book collection, anyway?

Me: That’s an impossible question to answer. There are too many variables.

She: Right. I understand. So how much does it cost to put a book collection together?

Me: [sigh] There’s no way to say. All collections are different. [Now thinking of a bone I can throw her, even though it’s a stupid question…] Well, in a lot of collections, if the field is not too narrow, you find the following characteristics: there are a large number of books that pertain to the field that are relatively easy to acquire and therefore not very expensive. But there are a lot of them. Then there is also a much smaller number of books that are very scarce, very important or desirable, and very expensive. If you try to assemble a collection in a field where there are a lot of books, and you try to get all or almost all of the relatively accessible and not-very-expensive books, and you also try to get all or most of the not-easily-accessible and much-more-expensive books, you could very easily end up spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars or more.

She: Thank you. [Hangs up.]

I wouldn’t swear that that’s a verbatim transcript, but that’s pretty much how it went.

By the time the quote appeared (and I was in the boondocks of northwestern Argentina when article was printed and the controversy about that supposed statement erupted), I barely remembered talking to her. The giveaway, though, was “my” use of the word “impossible”: I doubt I’ve used that word once in the last 40 years. I just don’t talk, write, or think that way. So I took a lot of grief for having supposedly said that, but it was just another case of a writer getting what she (thought she) needed to make her story “work.” Joan Didion said it in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” that writers are always selling somebody out. She may not have been talking about misquoting per se, but it certainly fits this case.

A very reasonable response! The situation Mr. Lopez describes makes sense, and I apologize for my snarky comment yesterday: “How does Mr. Lopez define ‘serious?’ The answer might in part be ‘expensive,’ judging from his line of business: ‘We deal in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions.'” That was undeserved, and I’m doubly impressed for the allusion to Joan Didion.

This incident relates to the bad- and wrong-press phenomenon I’ve seen covered elsewhere. Language Log has been finding misquotes and misstatements since I began reading it a few years ago, and they’re particularly keen on misused studies. Econoblogger and Economics Professor Brad DeLong has long (sorry, I couldn’t resist) been asking, “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps?” It’s a good if rhetorical question, and he’s compiled too many examples of professional journalist foolishness. The misquotes and bad science are particularly strange these days, because an army of interconnected bloggers can now point out examples of press speciousness or outright mendacity. When something doesn’t smell right, as happened with the fake quote attributed to Mr. Lopez, it’s relatively easy to find the truth.

To be sure, newspapers and magazines do an admirable job of getting most stories right most of the time, but it makes obviously ludicrous statements like the one attributed to Mr. Lopez all the more galling because I want to trust the media. When I can’t, I’m disappointed, and more likely to be skeptical next time.

On crime fiction

December 6, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , ,

Perhaps C.E.O libraries contain more crime fiction than they used to, as James Fallows writes today what many readers have probably thought:

Like most people who enjoy spy novels and crime fiction, I feel vaguely guilty about this interest. I realize that crime fiction is classy now, and has taken over part of the describing-modern-life job that high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities. My friend Patrick Anderson*, who has reviewed mysteries for years at the Washington Post, recently published a very good book to this effect: The Triumph of the Thriller. Still, you feel a little cheesy when you see a stack of lurid mystery covers sitting next to the bed.

So I’ve figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later — or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to “real” fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn’t thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards.

I’ve never loved crime fiction but respect the best of it. The idea of genre fiction has always seemed suspect to me, as my fundamental test of a novel regardless of the section of the bookstore in which it sits is, “Does it move me?” The definition of “move” has many entries, but if it achieves this fundamental task I don’t care what’s on its cover.

Fallows is depressingly accurate with his barb about “high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities,” although I’m well aware of exceptions to this comment, which echoes some the issues raised by A Reader’s Manifesto. He goes on to list a number of his favorites, none of which I’ve read except for A Simple Plan, an excellent novel I highly recommend. It spawned the eponymous movie, which is also excellent and forgotten.

Product Review: Kindle

December 1, 2007 By in Culture, Tools Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Failures-waiting-to-happen like the Amazon Kindle electronic book are highly frustrating, especially because both it and the Sony eBook suffer from the same problem: how to get books and other material on to the device. In the press and on the web, comparisons to the iPod abound, but they fail because when the iPod was released lots of people already had mp3 files on their hard drives. It was easy to acquire more from existing collections by ripping CDs, so you could, with a minimal amount of effort, load the $500 or whatever you’ve already invested in CDs on the iPod. If you’re a scofflaw, you could load your friends’ CDs too. To most ears, music is nearly identical whether on a CD or compressed to an mp3 (audiophiles: I know you love vinyl for its fidelity or whatever, but I’m talking about everyone else here). Tons of material was already available for the iPod.

Contrast that situation with books. Since I don’t want to read books on my computer screen, I haven’t bothered becoming a digital ruffian and downloading books from peer-to-peer or Bittorrent networks, assuming they are even available. Even though I have a nice shiny iMac with a monitor crisper than 90% of those used in the industrial world I still don’t want to do it. There’s no easy way for me to transfer the 200-odd books Delicious Library tells me I have to a Kindle. They’re a mix of hardcover and paperback, new and used, but I’d be comfortable wagering that their average cost is about $10, and I’m not about to throw that out for a digital reader that, just to get the reader, costs as much as 40 books. Furthermore, I know that I’ll be able to read my copy of A Farewell to Alms in ten years. Will Amazon still produce the Kindle or Kindle store in ten years? Maybe, maybe not. I have books printed a hundred years ago that have journeyed places I doubt their original owners could’ve fathomed. Most Kindles will end up in consumer electronic junk heaps in five years, just like most iPods.

The Kindle functions a bit like public transportation in the sense that public transportation really works when it allows you to live without a car. Likewise, the more paper I need to keep, the worse the Kindle looks. Right now there’s no way for me to easily transfer my subscriptions to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Amazon isn’t going to have every book I want available, and every book I want that I can’t find and have to buy or check out of the library represents another mark against the Kindle. If you want to read blogs, Amazon acts as a gatekeeper and charges you for the privilege; I like the iMac screen well enough to read blogs that otherwise cost money.

I feel slightly bad writing this, as it shows that I’m susceptible to the Amazon hype machine. But if the hype machine had substance underlying it, I’d be elated. Instead, I’m disappointed, but the Kindle does make me wonder how I’ll be reading thirty years from now; it seems improbable that I’ll use pulped trees. The remaining question is how and when the transition will happen. Maybe someone will come along and give me a free e-book of every regular book in my library. Amazon could do it, and I’d be much more inclined to like the Kindle. Maybe piracy networks will develop, although this seems unlikely given the number of books out there and the difficulty of converting them from bound paper to digital files. Or maybe environmental problems or commodity prices will make printing and shipping books so cost ineffective that we’ll convert to e-book devices for financial reasons. Whatever the cause, I don’t see it happening on a wide basis until a solution for the content problem arrives.

A Reader's Manifesto — B.R. Myers

November 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I read and loved B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, an essay decrying the literary and critical tendency toward, respectively, writing and praising mushy “self-conscious, writerly prose,” that lacks artistry, coherence, and story. The same Myers wrote an article about Elmore Leonard I derided in The Prisoner of Convention, but as much as that was misguided A Reader’s Manifesto is dead on target. Both first appeared in The Atlantic, though chopped to a smaller, shriller form. A short version of A Reader’s Manifesto is ungated, but the whole, unexpurgated book form shows more examples of what Myers perceives to be good prose, providing more balance. The printed version also rebuts many of the retorts, which often misstate Myers’ argument, to A Reader’s Manifesto. It’s easily to parodied: many critics write that Myers argues against experimentation, or demands conformity, or lacks the acuity to understand modern literature. He preemptively deals with such points, and my single sentence pop summary doesn’t contain the essay’s nuances, which are subtle and important enough to merit reading everything.

Despite my praise, you see can see precursors to A Reader’s Manifesto in Tom Wolfe’s, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: a Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel and in others who echo Wolfe, like Dan Simmons in this Salon interview.

None of the three directly address one of the harder problems for the average reader: deciding what to read, especially if one should not trust many critics. I doubt most readers follow the debate among mandarin book reviews and the like. As Robert Towers writes in The Flap over Tom Wolfe: How Real is the Retreat from Realism?, “The overwhelming impression one gets is that Mr. Wolfe has read very little of the fiction of the last 30 years – the period during which, he laments, realism became hopelessly old-hat, practiced chiefly by such antiquated figures as Saul Bellow, Robert Stone (born six years after Mr. Wolfe) and John Updike (one year younger than Mr. Wolfe), who ”found it hard to give up realism” (as if they ever tried!).” Wolfe and Myers infight, and are in danger of ignoring the vast corpus of modern fiction, the operative word being vast: I, for one, hesitate to make too many generalizations given the sheer number of titles published. You can find good fiction of the kind Wolfe says is no longer written, and of the kind Myers says is too-often ignored by prize committees.

To be fair, Myers never says that strong, important writing has utterly disappeared—he only laments that so many mediocre or bad writers receive so much adulation. I agree and try to defend the writers worth defending, deflate those not, and remind others of the great but forgotten, or underloved, or poorly publicized authors who deserve notice–most notably Robertson Davies. In doing so, I try to avoid the hype machines manufacture hype and reputations. A Reader’s Manifesto is a useful corrective to the hyperbolic claims of much bad modern literature, especially after trying Don DeLillo’s bizarre soporifics White Noise and Underworld. The person I love to hate most is critical sensation Jonathan Safran Foer, whose two best-known novels are so awful that it takes restraint not to write off the entire taste in books of any devotee. Skip Foer and DeLillo, and take up Myers: he is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.

EDIT: This post also covers A Reader’s Manifesto.

A Reader’s Manifesto — B.R. Myers

November 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I read and loved B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, an essay decrying the literary and critical tendency toward, respectively, writing and praising mushy “self-conscious, writerly prose,” that lacks artistry, coherence, and story. The same Myers wrote an article about Elmore Leonard I derided in The Prisoner of Convention, but as much as that was misguided A Reader’s Manifesto is dead on target. Both first appeared in The Atlantic, though chopped to a smaller, shriller form. A short version of A Reader’s Manifesto is ungated, but the whole, unexpurgated book form shows more examples of what Myers perceives to be good prose, providing more balance. The printed version also rebuts many of the retorts, which often misstate Myers’ argument, to A Reader’s Manifesto. It’s easily to parodied: many critics write that Myers argues against experimentation, or demands conformity, or lacks the acuity to understand modern literature. He preemptively deals with such points, and my single sentence pop summary doesn’t contain the essay’s nuances, which are subtle and important enough to merit reading everything.

Despite my praise, you see can see precursors to A Reader’s Manifesto in Tom Wolfe’s, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: a Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel and in others who echo Wolfe, like Dan Simmons in this Salon interview.

None of the three directly address one of the harder problems for the average reader: deciding what to read, especially if one should not trust many critics. I doubt most readers follow the debate among mandarin book reviews and the like. As Robert Towers writes in The Flap over Tom Wolfe: How Real is the Retreat from Realism?, “The overwhelming impression one gets is that Mr. Wolfe has read very little of the fiction of the last 30 years – the period during which, he laments, realism became hopelessly old-hat, practiced chiefly by such antiquated figures as Saul Bellow, Robert Stone (born six years after Mr. Wolfe) and John Updike (one year younger than Mr. Wolfe), who ”found it hard to give up realism” (as if they ever tried!).” Wolfe and Myers infight, and are in danger of ignoring the vast corpus of modern fiction, the operative word being vast: I, for one, hesitate to make too many generalizations given the sheer number of titles published. You can find good fiction of the kind Wolfe says is no longer written, and of the kind Myers says is too-often ignored by prize committees.

To be fair, Myers never says that strong, important writing has utterly disappeared—he only laments that so many mediocre or bad writers receive so much adulation. I agree and try to defend the writers worth defending, deflate those not, and remind others of the great but forgotten, or underloved, or poorly publicized authors who deserve notice–most notably Robertson Davies. In doing so, I try to avoid the hype machines manufacture hype and reputations. A Reader’s Manifesto is a useful corrective to the hyperbolic claims of much bad modern literature, especially after trying Don DeLillo’s bizarre soporifics White Noise and Underworld. The person I love to hate most is critical sensation Jonathan Safran Foer, whose two best-known novels are so awful that it takes restraint not to write off the entire taste in books of any devotee. Skip Foer and DeLillo, and take up Myers: he is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.

EDIT: This post also covers A Reader’s Manifesto.

Hollywood, The Golden Compass, and artistic corruption

November 10, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , ,

About a month ago I picked up The Golden Compass to read the first chapter for something I was working on. It’s the first novel in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I wrote about a year ago. Rather than stopping at chapter two, as I’d intended to, I accidentally finished the novel in the course of the day. I’m not the who loves His Dark Materials: this month’s Atlantic has an article called “How Hollywood Saved God” (warning: it’s in a walled garden, so if you’re not a subscriber you should buy the magazine) that says Pullman’s books have sold 15 million copies worldwide. Each book of the trilogy probably counts as a sale, and his other books are probably included too, but it’s safe to assume many people have read him. The number will no doubt increase with the release of the first movie.

“How Hollywood Saved God” describes the movie based on The Golden Compass. I’ll probably watch it in December, somewhat reluctantly, just as I saw The Return of the King despite knowing the high probability of disappointment. I was right about The Return of the King, a movie that provides an excellent of example of how more special effects can lead to an inferior result. With The Golden Compass, five years and a lot of wrangling have apparently succeeded in watering down the sharp content of the book. Hollywood as portrayed by this Atlantic story is the McDonald’s of art, seeking to dull strong flavors to make a more standardized product that will appeal to the widest audience, but also destroying what made the original good. Hollywood isn’t the only place with this tendency.

Some of this comes from technological fetishization, and some from the perceived effect of strong statements on financial aspects, leading to the end result:

To an industry intoxicated with sophisticated visual effects, Pullman’s creations were irresistible. In 2003, when describing what sold him on the movie, Toby Emmerich, New Line’s president of production, explained, “It was two words: Iorek Byrnison.” Iorek is an “insanely awesome character,” he added. “He can’t tell a lie,” Emmerich told me recently, “and [Lyra] is an expert liar.”

[…]

You can probably guess how things turned out. Given enough time and effort, Hollywood can tweak and polish and recast even the darkest message until it would seem at home in a Fourth of July parade. In the end, the religious meaning of the book was obscured so thoroughly as to be essentially indecipherable. The studio settled on villains that, as Emmerich put it, “feel vaguely kind of like a fascistic, totalitarian dictatorship, Russian/KGB/SS” stew. The movie’s main theme became, in one producer’s summary, “One small child can save the world.” With $180 million at stake, the studio opted to kidnap the book’s body and leave behind its soul.

Read the article to see how it happens and this for more on The Atlantic regarding movies, art, and commerce.

Tom Perrotta in Seattle

October 30, 2007 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Tom Perrotta struck me more of an observer more than any of the other writers I’ve seen recently: he had an almost shy demeanor, and I could imagine him as one of the teenage wallflowers who are often his characters. He wasn’t like Richard Russo, whose years in a classroom show familiarity with the stage, or Martin Amis, who, though less bombastic in real life than in interviews or writings, still retained more swagger than other authors. Michael Chabon had the professorial air. I want to see a connection between Perrotta’s demeanor and his writing, as my comparison between him and his characters shows, although I know it’s like trying to read autobiographically. Still, I can say with confidence that Perrotta’s writing is the least writerly in the sense of being self-conscious and wordy, and of the above writers his is the closest to the spareness of Elmore Leonard, almost as though Perrotta operates within the societal constraints his characters beat against and try to break out of.

My question to Perrotta last night was about those constraints, since he writes so often about people trapped in one way or another, especially in high schools—a librarian is described on page five of The Abstinence Teacher “a cultured gay man, an opera-loving dandy with a fetish for Italian designer eyewear, trapped all day in a suburban public high school.” The characters in Election are also stuck in high school without having read Paul Graham’s thoughts on the system, while the protagonist in Joe College is trapped by his lower-middle class upbringing and the need to pay for an Ivy League education while his classmates coast on their parents’ money, and in Little Children the characters are in unhappy marriages with the burden of their offspring.

He responded by saying that the trapped feeling is part of the “American dilemma” because he says most of us aren’t really free, and that we don’t realize how unfree we are. Most people feel constrained, although they won’t admit it. We’re all trapped, which he admits might be a “grim” thing to say, but we are, whether by work, or school, or whatever.

I see the issue as one more of trade-offs, and if Perrotta were to expand on what he said, I don’t think he would argue that we are utterly without political freedom, or the ability to go where we want if we want to, but rather that we don’t feel free. We mentally corral ourselves, in part due to past choices, but also in part due to society. I’m stuck by the idea that as often as not we’re trapped as a result of previous choices—an idea that will arise again in my post about Richard Russo, who made a not dissimilar point when he was in Seattle recently.

A few other people asked good questions; one led to him saying that he wanted to write a culture war novel, and that sex education was nearer to his heart than subjects like evolution or abortion, and that he was interested in people on both (or all) sides of the issue. “Nobody quite lives up to their own standards—unless you’re better people than me,” he said, and the wry joke at the end was typical of his responses and of his writing.

(Another thought of my own: does anyone outside of newspapers and magazines and confrontational idiot cable TV even fight culture wars? And if so, are they over?)

He fired back nice answers to the silly question flood that came as soon as someone asked about advice for young writers. Then came “did you put Real People™ in your novel?”, and then a less mundane but no less inane question when another person asked if he felt pressure because his books had been made into movies. I suppose I’m too hard on the questioners, since most probably don’t read the writers’ later criticism in essays, but the questions still annoy. I would’ve liked to assign this. Maybe the other questioners, like me, have not yet finished The Abstinence Teacher; I’m still chewing through Bridge of Sighs and read the first 70 or so pages of Perrotta.

A movie question did lead to a point about the way movies are created. Perrotta said he wrote the Little Children script with director Todd Field and that the ending originally conformed more with the book, but that it didn’t seem sufficiently cinematic or resolute. Field called one day with the different—and, in my view, awful—ending that the movie now has. Likewise, in Election, the movie first used an ending similar to the book, but it apparently didn’t “test” well. No wonder Elmore Leonard said, “I don’t like screenplays at all. You’re not writing for yourself; you’re writing for a committee. They’re throwing ideas in, then the producer gets involved, saying you need to add this character or that character.”

I know what Perrotta means about movies and changes—endings are a pain.