Category Archives: Links

What's that about technophobic English professors?

February 3, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I graduated from Clark University in the not-too-distant past, though back then we read by candlelight and there was no department blog. The blog issue being resolved—as the preceding link demonstrates—also helps kill what a common enough conception that a poster at Rate Your Students summarized:

Unfortunately, the business world stereotypes English profs as probably the least useful among all academics: tweed-clad, bookish anachronisms who, if they’re interesting at all, drive 1960’s English sports cars (but can’t find the gas cap) and make witty chit-chat at parties (but are flummoxed by modern fads like telephones, ball-point pens, and air travel).

Not at Clark! But witty chit-chat is still vogue. Whether this former student’s blog is a testament to the department or a mark of shame has yet to be decided.

* In other news, The New York Times published “Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work,” about the nature of sudden realizations and creativity:

Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

The same is true of literature and criticism: the great novel always comes after long reading and effort, and the great insight about the great novel doesn’t usually come from the first reading, even if the germ of it can.

* Finally, in still other New York Times news, an essay discusses—yet again—the supposed divide between highbrow / lowbrow literature. My dream? That one day we can just discuss what’s good and bad, rather than what section of Barnes & Noble a book appears in.

One more link post

January 29, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Book|Daddy has a great essay on the otherwise (mostly) silly debate about blogs, books, and criticism. You can see evidence of its percolating here and here. What caught me is this quote:

As Jessa Crispin of Bookslut said during the panel on literary criticism that book/daddy moderated at the Texas Book Fesival in Austin over the weekend, the major review outlets keep reviewing all of the same authors, and few of the kinds of books and authors she likes were getting attention, so she started writing about them on her website.

Seriously. Who is writing about Robertson Davies, and who is commenting on B.R. Myers? Somehow I’ve never found a demand that I read The Name of the Rose, a novel that encapsulates why I read in the first place: to be so blown away that it’s hard to discover where I should start writing. I linked to some of the other books that come close to that effect here.

The New York Times on the Kindle

January 26, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A New York Times article called “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless” discusses the Amazon Kindle, which I don’t like. But I agree with the article’s conclusion:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

I just analogize the Kindle to mp3 players before the iPod in the sense that it shows promise but just isn’t there yet. When it is there—less expensive, better interface, easier content management and acquisition (and what a vile phrase that is)—I will be too.

Hugging the Shore

January 25, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I found John Updike’s Hugging the Shore through Critical Mass’s the Critical Library series of posts, where this collection repeatedly came up. It’s out of print and, I suspect, a book that shaped older critics but is no longer essential and feels too much likes its opinions, like most, have either become accepted or unimportant. Like many revolutions, the ideas in Hugging the Shore seem to have become part of the ossified landscape. Some of the pieces still thrill: the one on Ursula K. Leguin is short but good, while those on Bellow seem to both stretch and not be able to wrap themselves around Bellow. Many of Updike’s opinions I respect, but, at the same time, I flip to the next essay halfway through the one I’m on.

To me, something like Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971 – 2000 feels more vital, for lack of a better term, and maybe Amis’s verbal pyrotechnics show off, but they also convince. Give me it instead of Hugging the Shore, and throw in Orwell’s Essays (more on Orwell here) to give an overview of many of the same topics but better. I like Hugging the Shore, but with criticism even more than novels the essential is everything.

A brief hiatus

January 5, 2008 By in Books, Life, Links Tags: , Leave a comment

I’ll be out of the country for close to three weeks, but you’re welcome, as always, to the archives at right. Here are a few of my favorite posts—and books—of the last year:

* The Indian Clerk
* A Reader’s Manifesto
* The Lucifer Effect
* The Dud Avocado
* The Mind-Body Problem
* The Rest is Noise
* Bridge of Sighs
* A Simple Plan

And some good blogs:

* About Last Night
* The Elegant Variation
* Critical Mass
* Book|Daddy

I don’t have much spare room to pack, so I’m bringing Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose—compact in size but packing a big wallop, I hope. Perhaps you’ll see a post on it.

See you in February!

Away

December 30, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I began reading Amy Bloom’s Away based primarily on recommendations: Carrie Frye’s, for example, which also conveniently links to positive reviews. I disagree with them: over 70 pages, Away didn’t capture my attention; I never cared about the main character, and while the writing was strong it was also pedestrian. Carrie says, “The novel was as psychologically acute as I expect from Bloom — as a writer, she is both so comprehending and tender about the human animal — but the prose seemed more charged than anything I’ve read of hers previously.” If Away is charged, I won’t be reading the others. A few sections of Away were funny, but not funny enough to sustain the whole, and next to a vastly more powerful novel like A Simple Plan, Away wilts. It’s being sold at a small loss at Amazon, and I’m on to whatever is next from the shelf, which will, I hope, provide more lasting pleasure. The time I might’ve allotted to it is gone, and part of my (early) New Year’s resolution is to not waste time on unworthy books when there are plenty of better ones.

(If you’re looking for something about the Jewish immigrant experience, try Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a superior if stranger novel.)

Last post on North Korea

December 28, 2007 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , ,

Christopher Hitchens writes a condemnation of North Korea that lambasts the current U.S. approach or lack thereof without proposing exactly what should be done. It complements this post about the New York Philharmonic’s plan to give a concert there and this post about the Nazi economy.

An unusual cinematic occurrence

December 23, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I saw two movies on two consecutive weekends both of which I enjoyed. It feels like years since two somewhat proximate movies that were any good have even been in theaters, let alone run on consecutive weekends. Atonement captures the spirit of Ian McEwan’s book (we’ll see if they try On Chesil Beach) and Charlie Wilson’s War manages to be fun, engaging, political, and probably not too inaccurate. It’s based on George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, a book in my Seattle Public Library queue. Not being the only person to have done this in response to the movie, I’m somewhere around 50, meaning the wait is going to take a while.

Now that I’ve mentioned movies, go read Caleb Crain’s The science of reading and its decline to make yourself wonder about the decline of the world and such:

[… T]here is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.

This concerns the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent “To Read or Not to Read,” covered here by the New York Times, with more background material in a July by me. This can’t be good for the clerisy.

The New York Philharmonic consorts with the enemy

December 22, 2007 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , ,

As long as I’ve hit music once, I might as well again: Terry Teachout wrote an excellent column on The New York Philharmonic’s decision to play in Pyongyang, North Korea:

For three days earlier, Zarin Mehta and Paul Guenther, the president and chairman of the Philharmonic, had shared a platform with Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, and announced that America’s oldest orchestra would be playing in Pyongyang next February. It horrified me — no other word is strong enough — to see them sitting next to a smirking representative of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of a brutally totalitarian state in whose Soviet-style prison camps 150,000 political prisoners are currently doing slave labor.

This column is particularly salient because I’m going to post about The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy shortly, and if Hitler has a modern heir he is Kim Jong Il. Camp 22 in North Korea is a modern descendent of Hitler’s “work” camps.

EDIT: The promised post is here.

Faint Praise and good readers

December 19, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I noticed that Greg Harris linked to my post about Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Better still, he quotes approvingly from Robertson Davies on the subject of the clerisy (according to the Oxford American Dictionary, “a distinct class of learned or literary people: the clerisy are those who read for pleasure“), a word I had to look up too:

Who are the clerisy?…. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. As lately as a century ago the clerisy had the power to decide the success or failure of a book, and it could do so now. But the clerisy has been persuaded to abdicate its power by several groups, not themselves malign or consciously unfriendly to literature, which are part of the social and business organization of our time. These groups, though entrenched, are not impregnable; if the clerisy would arouse itself, it could regain its sovereignty in the world of letters. For it is to the clerisy, even yet, that the authors, the publishers, and the booksellers make their principal appeal.

Finding the word you’ve been needing for a long time without realizing it is a wonderful sensation and one that Word Court often tries and fails to elicit.

The rest of Harris’ post is here. Its major weakness is propagating the tendency to divide bloggers and critics, amateurs and professionals, into an “us” versus “them” dynamic, which I continue to find silly. To be fair, Harris might just be reflecting his subject matter.