Category Archives: Links

Deception, commerce, and book blurbs

August 18, 2007 By in Life, Links

I’ve read about how you can’t trust book blurbs—the tidbits of praise on the covers and in the front matter of books. Usually I buy without seeing the cover because a book has been recommended, whether through friends, reviews, or reputation, and so don’t notice the blurbs, but an example from Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World is so egregious that I double checked. On the front, the only text aside from the title and author reads: “‘…the next blockbuster in economics.’ —New York Times.”

“That’s interesting!” I thought, because I recalled Tyler Cowen’s piece in that very paper and, although it was positive, it wasn’t that predictive. The ellipsis gave away the problem, as Cowen actually said: “Professor Clark’s idea-rich book may just prove to be the next blockbuster in economics.” (I would link to the article, but it hides behind a firewall. The headline: “ECONOMIC SCENE; What Makes a Nation Wealthy? Maybe It’s the Working Stiff.”) The blurb fundamentally and unfairly changes what Cowen wrote, which is an unscrupulous move on the part of A Farewell to Alms‘ publisher, the Princeton University Press.

Despite the lie on the cover, the book itself is worth reading and makes a series of fascinating, if possibly incorrect, arguments about the story of human development and its consequences for the modern world. Clark acknowledges this in the preface: “Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove over-simplified, or merely false […] [b]ut far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vanity.” What refreshing candor! The first 50 pages offer a myriad of ideas about how humanity became both massively wealthier and modestly poorer than it ever has before. I wish all nonfiction I read was so enlightening—and A Farewell to Alms doesn’t need the deceptive blurb on the front to be worthwhile.

EDIT: I just noticed that the blurbs on the back include the fuller quote from Cowen, but my original point stands.

2007 – 2008 Seattle Arts and Lecture Series

August 14, 2007 By in Links

Good news for other Seattleites: the 2007 – 2008 Arts and Lectures Series schedule was announced a few days ago, with highlights on Oct 15—Orhan Pamuk, whose books I haven’t read but certainly will soon—and April 29 with John Banville.

Pamuk may be permanently in exile in the U.S., so us Americans may be seeing a lot more of him—to the detriment of Turkey, his homeland.

TLP on Christine Falls

August 3, 2007 By in Books, Links

The Little Professor discusses Banville’s most recent novel, Christine Falls, here. She contrasts Quirke’s uncertainty regarding whether he should act and how with the apparent ease of the villains:

In fact, the villains are defined by their full confidence in their own actions–not for them Quirke’s near-total passivity (that one crucial action aside). And yet, in this novel, if passivity allows evil to persist, action itself is associated with evil-doing. Hence the significance of that quotation about sin: this is not a novel in which justice comes untainted.

I wrote about Christine Falls here and here.

Books, culture, and life

July 23, 2007 By in Books, Life, Links

Two articles not directly related but nonetheless dealing with similar issues regarding American culture caught my eye. The first, Ron Charles’ Harry Potter and the Death of Reading, recites the now-familiar statistics about the relatively small number of people who read and how their ranks thin among the young. The articles details the usual litany about illiteracy and slips in an important sentence that struck me: “Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn’t encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands — and rewards.” If we no longer want contemplation or independence and indulge in marketing hysteria, perhaps novels are truly being marginalized. One reason I still love the form is that it’s among the few means of entertainment in which one isn’t constantly being advertised at. The reader usually isn’t overtly manipulated toward a particular view, whether of products or politics, and in the novel I find the kind of expansiveness that comes from unfettered stories.

That ties into Dana Gioia’s recently piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Impoverishment of American Culture, which argues that the arts—music, dance, painting, and, yes, literature—are worth experiencing and saving, the implication being that most people believe otherwise. I’m struck by how a paragraph of Gioia’s resonates with what Charles wrote: “But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing–it puts a price on everything. The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.” I ask whether our culture fails us or we fail our culture—the arts he’s describing continue to be created even as their supposed deaths have been lamented for years if not decades. Their wide availability for those who choose to seek them continues, and the Internet only makes finding books, music, or performances easier. While I don’t agree with all of Gioia’s article—another problem is his eagerness to create binary categories of people who experience art and those who don’t—it’s an interesting reading reading, especially because it argues for the value of the independent thought available through the arts.

The main problem with both is that, to the extent they speak to anyone, they are in a conversation being carried on by a self-contained elite, much like the readers of this blog. The T.V.-loving majority probably knows little if anything of the debate and knows less of the pleasures of Cryptonomicon or The Mind-Body Problem. If they are not engaged, do the shrinking number of participants have a duty to reach them, as though we’re saving souls? In writing about Ravelstein I recounted something from How To Be Alone: “[…] Jonathan Franzen made a similar point [when] he admits that he has mellowed since his apocalyptic treatise on why the decline in reading is also a sign of End Times and compares his love for words to the beliefs of religious fanatics.” Maybe we aren’t living in the end times and the times are just changing; poets might have wondered the same thing in the first half of the twentieth century, when poetry began its long slide toward society’s margins.

If people no longer read, perhaps subversive writers will not be as feared. I watched the film The Lives of Others three nights ago, and the insidious East German police extensively monitored writers, as dictators have long feared the power of words. They blacklisted, tortured, and killed writers to achieve ends that, to hear Charles and Gioia, may be accomplished in the West without guns or terror. he culture may be heading in that direction anyway. What the Stasi and an army of censors through the centuries could not accomplish may come through torpor or sloth. Both articles say we need to protect reading and arts, but neither asks a question that may be more important: what happens when no one cares?

Günter Grass at Critical Mass

July 5, 2007 By in Books, Links

Critical Mass published a short interview with Günter Grass on the subject of memory. He recently published his autobiography, Peeling the Onion (translated from German by Michael Henry Heim). I responded with a comment reposted here:

The gap between the way we remember ourselves and the way we perceived ourselves at an earlier age can be vast, and this piece on Grass calls to mind a story published last year in the New York Times called Speak, Memory, about a woman given a diary she kept as a teenager. The article states: “[Florence Wolfson’s] reunion with her diary seemed to help her discover a lost self, one that burned with artistic fervor. ‘You’ve brought back my life,’ she announced at one point.”

Biographies — and novels — can do the same, and many novels ask question memory and its vagaries: In Search of Lost Time, The Sea, Ravelstein, all of the Ian McEwan novels I’ve read. They deal with the lost self as, it appears, Grass does, and though I’m not familiar with his work, I appreciate the point he makes in his answers and, apparently, his autobiography.

(Links added later.)

Ravelstein

June 30, 2007 By in Books, Links

Ron Rosenbaum’s laudatory article on Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein inspired me to pick up a book I skipped when it came out (Slate also hosts a discussion on it here). As Rosenbaum writes, “It’s a rapturous celebration of the life of the mind, as well as a meditation on the glory of sensual life and on the tenebrous permeable boundary we all eventually pass over, the one between life and death.” Is it that, or is it a meandering half-biography, half auto-biography, half-novel? (With Bellow, it’s safe to assume three halves, or some other unusual, impossible feat). “[M]editation on the glory of sensual life” is perilously close to “has no plot,” and Ravelstein doesn’t have much of one, but I didn’t miss in it because of its fundamentally strong conflict, with the narrator, Chick, confronting the death of his great friend and a greater human being, Ravelstein. Such a description does no justice to the novel’s beauty or its emotional anguish and power, which are there in full force and the reason the novel works.

Perhaps having an emotional conflict replace a plot is a good thing: Rosenbaum seems to think so, judging from his comments about earlier Bellow: “[…] the philosophical and the sensual in Bellow never fused in a convincing or satisfying way for me.” For me they sometimes did—Augie March, Herzog— and sometimes not—Henderson the Rain King. I’ve not yet read all of Bellow and may skip some of his novellas and stories, so I cannot completely judge him. Regardless, to me the sensual leads to the philosophical in Bellow, and without one the other doesn’t, and can’t, work. No wonder Rosenbaum had a problem with the one if he didn’t think it bridged the other. Like much of earlier Bellow, real life inspired Ravelstein.

The real life aspect didn’t impinge much on me, and I read the novel purely, as Rosenbaum recommends: “Read [Ravelstein] as if you didn’t know who Allan Bloom was.” I don’t (didn’t?) know much about Bloom save that he wrote The Closing of the American Mind. That book sounds too polemical for my taste, and having already read From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present, I’ve already experienced one jeremiad about how we are living in the End Times. I’m always wary of those who make such warnings; Jonathan Franzen made a similar point in an essay from How to Be Alone: Essays, where he admits that he has mellowed since his apocalyptic treatise on why the decline in reading is also a sign of End Times and compares his love for words to the beliefs of religious fanatics. Knowing more might actually have helped because my only problem with reading Ravelstein was not a problem with Bellow, but one with myself whenever I read Bellow: I feel like so much escapes me. I am apparently not the only one to feels this way:

Recently Sam Tanenhaus made an argument in the Times Book Review that Bellow’s work as a whole is “beyond criticism” because like Whitman it contains multitudes, it’s “a vision of the human universe as apprehended by a being of higher intelligence” and the “many defects—the longueurs and digressions, the lectures on anthroposophy and religion” don’t really matter when Bellow is considered as collective whole.

“A being of higher intelligence”—it might be gauche to compare Bellow to Shakespeare, and we know who has had and will have a greater effect on English and cultural history, but with both I cannot encompass them, their minds, their worlds. One key difference: Shakespeare wrote many convincing female roles, something that Bellow’s critics convincingly argue he seldom does. Certainly his best novels have women who are, at best, on the sideline or acting as support. The same is true of Ravelstein: Vela, the cold physicist, is a type and a slam against placing science on the alter of God without humanity to guide it—can she too be autobiographically read?—and Rosamund her opposite, a convenient young, angelic woman who saves the dying Chick from himself. Despite that, I still love Bellow for his ideas and expression, and his critics and supporters are right. Ravelstein’s weaknesses are also its strengths: the abstract ideas and flowering prose, the meandering digressions that are Proustian and precise, yet not in the service of a strong narrative, and I don’t even care much that the narrative is absent. Ravelstein is more a remembrance, but whether of Chick or Ravelstein is hard to say. But I’m glad I read it, and you don’t easily give up a creature like Bellow to death.

Catch-22 and overrated novels

June 28, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lester Hunt thinks Catch-22 is the most overrated novel of the Twentieth Century, a stance I strongly disagree with (link originally via Marginal Revolution, which also asks what readers think the most overrated novel is).

The most pernicious aspect of Hunt’s post is that it misrepresents Catch-22: he writes, “But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil.” The joke is that military life—like much of life, especially in bureaucracies—is absurd, and made all the more so by its officiousness and self-importance and lack of awareness of its officiousness and self-importance. With this starting point, Hunt goes on to say that, “It’s a bad argument,” for Catch-22 to argue that military people are evil and stupid. But literature, even satire, is not necessarily written to make an argument: its point, if it has one, is to create art which exists for its own sake. Even so, and even if his initial point is correct, he’s dangerously close to making an argument like the one I attacked in The Prisoner of Convention, a post about Elmore Leonard: that you have to have the “good guys” in a traditional sense—white knight, armor, etc.—be more sympathetic than the “bad guys.” Novels should have the option of making one perceive a situation from other points of view, and one major point of a great deal of art, especially in writing, is that it is often difficult to tell who the bad guys are. (Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and always has been and always will be, right? So why did the former Secretary of Defense shake his hand? We’ve always been at war with Eurasia, right?) If art lacks this option it becomes propaganda.

Although I’d need to reread Catch-22 to cite textual elements for my criticism, I’d suggest Hunt start with some reading with regard to his fourth point, “[t]here is less than meets the eye[:]””Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and Unifying Elements in Catch 22” by Clinton Burhans, Jr., “It Was All Yossarian’s Fault” Power and Responsibility in Catch-22″ by Stephen Sniderman, both in the journal Twentieth Century Literature, and “War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22” by J. P. Stern in The English Journal. As far as books go, Critical essays on Joseph Heller by James Nagel is probably worth reading, and even big boy on the block Harold Bloom wrote in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

My own choice for most overrated novel depends on whether one is dealing with the question of whether a novel is overrated by critics of the general public. As The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list shows, the two have substantially different ideas about what constitutes greatness. I’m more concerned with what “The Board” thinks, because its choices are more likely to stand up over time, but my choice overlaps: Catcher in the Rye, a novel that manages to combine spectacularly boring writing with a whiny, indulgent brat. Its only redeeming quality is that high schools assign it—or least mine did—despite the swearing and such, thus potentially moving out of the curriculum books like Ethan Frome—though mine made us read it. Read might be too strong a word—mind assigned it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is also a decent choice, but I doubt most scholars and critics take it seriously anymore, so it does no harm on high school reading lists, and probably a fair bit of good: it’s simple in language but still has enough to sink one’s ill-developed intellectual teeth into, and the symbolism is readily understandable even by 13-year-olds. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, still seems to have institutional support. I suspect that when the literature professors and teachers who came of age in the 60s retire, Catcher in the Rye will fade into a curio of its time. D.H. Lawrence I don’t love and can’t see aging well, but he is extremely important in terms of the novel’s history. On the Road is another vastly overrated novel, but I hesitate to call it the most overrated.

Signaling and reviews

June 16, 2007 By in Books, Links

Marginal Revolution recently asked “What’s the optimal number of book reviews?”

I responded but should clean up and expand my comment on Marginal Revolution.

Newspaper book reviews, of course, are declining in number.

It’s actually a more precipitous decline than this statement indicates, as the National Book Critics Circle Campaign to Save Book Reviews chronicles. I wrote about the issue here and, in a follow-up, here. Then again, a question exists as to how many important review sources are disappearing, especially because so many seem trivial, and the optimal length for a book review is not a new topic, as Kate’s Book Blog reminds us by quoting Orwell.

Cowen, who posted the item that instigated this post, wrote:

I just want the bottom line. I would be happier if newspapers published many more one-paragraph book reviews, but with very clear and definite evaluations. Entertainment Weekly does just this, although I find their taste in books unreliable.

This is a valid point were it not so difficult to determine the merit of a book. Because it is, we need to know how a book reviewer arrived at their conclusion and why. Otherwise they could be using different evaluation criteria than the reader would, or they might irrationally dislike the book, or be using an unfair metric, or something similar. Updike wrote: “1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.” With longer reviews, it’s often possible to separate the sins of the reviewer from the sins of the author.

The only way you can somewhat trust someone’s up or down vote is to have sufficient past information about their tastes, which, in an impersonal context, can only be gained by reading their full book reviews, or their regular books (I picked up The Friends of Eddie Coyle after seeing an interview in which Elmore Leonard recommended it). The argument goes in a circle, of course, and I think there’s a reason why book reviews continue to exist as they do: the problems with just giving books an up/down or single paragraph outweigh the benefits because of the problems inherent in judgment.

Finally, book reviews have an additional function not listed above: they act as the first draft of literary criticism and history. Books that resonate through time often have scholars who go back and examine the first reactions, and those initial reviews can kick off academic and cultural criticism. This would also seem to cause more book reviews to be written than is optimal for a reader like Tyler, but different people have different needs. Future scholars probably wish more (and more knowledgeable) reviews were written.

On the same subject, The Elegant Variation writes: “And every newspaper covers the same dozen titles. (Check Publishers Lunch’s weekly tally of most reviewed titles to get a taste of the repetition.)” That’s in large because quantity, for people who aren’t intimately involved in tracking the minutia of books, acts in part as a gauge for how interesting a book is. A brilliant review of a brilliant book in a single newspaper few read isn’t going to be enough of a stimulus to get most people interested in something. Then again, he also writes: “[…] Book Review = Good. It doesn’t always – there are plenty of mediocre to lousy reviewers out there, alienating (or at least boring) readers, but I detect very little soul searching in all this, almost no self-examination. Too many reviews are dull, workmanlike book reports.”

But what makes an exciting review? Does it mean sex, violence, flashing lights and celebrity hookups (maybe that last part is contained in the first)? One man’s exciting is another’s boring, and while I don’t argue that nothing means anything, I do argue that different reviews and reviewers provide different but valuable things; what The New York Review of Books and Entertainment Weekly provide are quite different, and while the former is more valuable, the latter still does something.

Finally, BookDaddy just posted a relatively long piece about reviewers and where they come from. It’s instructive for anyone who wants to peer at the backstage of the reviewing profession and the ideas behind it. The last ten years have probably made asking “Who is this reviewer?” more prominent in the minds of many readers, as a much more visible feedback loop exists between artists, critics and readers (or viewers, depending on the medium) than before, when one’s choice for sending corrections or disagreeing was limited to writing letters to the editor.

Weeks’ most important question is: “In short, there’s an element of moral challenge to the question: Who are you to say these things?” I would answer that you are what else you’ve written, how well you’ve written it, and what your track record is. Just we we gauge others in large part through the narrative stories and histories they tell us, we gauge critics through what they’ve done in the past. Weeks has a similar conclusion, and to my mind the only real conclusion there can be, when he says, “It’s his reviews that grant him authority, earn him any authority. A review is not an opinion, as Mr. Schickel says. It’s not even (just) a wise judgment.”

Good call. He’s echoing what I think and wrote above. Well, it would probably be more accurate to say that I’m echoing what he thinks, but I wrote most of this post before I read his commentary.

Finding books online

June 13, 2007 By in Books, Links

One problem independent bookstores have but which hasn’t been much discussed: consumers benefit enormously from online options. (Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the link.) The end of the abstract states:

Our analysis indicates that the increased product variety of online bookstores enhanced consumer welfare by $731 million to $1.03 billion in the year 2000, which is between seven to ten times as large as the consumer welfare gain from increased competition and lower prices in this market. There may also be large welfare gains in other SKU-intensive consumer goods such as music, movies, consumer electronics, and computer software and hardware.

For non-economists, that essentially means that you benefit from being able to find what you want and discover what you might want far more than you gain from having Amazon knock 10 – 40% off the cover price of a book. Learning this reminds me of a professor who marveled at how he had spent too many hours of his youth searching poorly organized used bookstores as he wrote his dissertation, while these days he can find virtually any book ever printed and buy it used, often for a few dollars. No wonder it’s hard for independents to survive based on having an eclectic selection of books these days: the Internet undercuts their prices and obviates some of the need for them.