Entries Tagged 'book blogging' ↓

The Death of Fiction (and the Livelihood of Talking About It)

Back to Ted Genoways’s “Death of Fiction?” article in Mother Jones, which has, apparently, generated chatter among book bloggers. Bookbread noted earlier that Genoways concluded his piece with some tart words for today’s American fiction writers, words much inline with Rebecca West’s call for abusive criticism, and equally applicable to our country’s book critics:

I’m not calling for more pundits—God knows we’ve got plenty. I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.

Several book bloggers, however, don’t like what they’ve read recently from Ted Genoways, as he argues over the decrease of readership for literary magazines (or is it America’s decrease for things literary?).

George at Bookninja posts “The Death of Fiction” and notes:

[Even] as fiction has become a common pastime pursuit for the vocationally undecided idly rich (re MFA prgs), its viability as a commercial venture has fallen further than ever.

Tolmsted of Booksexy comments on George’s Bookninja post (and thereby Genoways’) and wonders:

Realistically, what were the actual circulation numbers [for literary magazines] to begin with? How much of an impact did they really have? With or without those magazines, catching a break in the literary world will always be a crap shoot.

On the other hand, over at The Reading Experience, in a post entitled “Rescuing Public Discourse,” Daniel Green confesses:

I actually agree with Genoways that there are too many litmags publishing too much perfunctory work, but that these magazines have proliferated because the demand for postmodernism is so insistent seems to me patently absurd….

The connection Genoways sees between issues-focused fiction and larger audiences for literary magazines remains, to say the least, unexplored. Unless he’s suggesting that litmags convert themselves into outlets for journalism rather than fiction: “With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere.” This concern for “public discourse” seems more immediate to Genoways than his ostensible concern for fiction or for literary magazines and their loss of audience.

Lastly, “How Many Times Can We Kill Fiction?” by Brian Ray contains much blather and froth but still manages to recognize:

Genoways bewails how in “the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction.” But that’s only because the world has yet to see my retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which instead of sailing along the Congo will follow the mission of a lieutenant sent to whack a colonel gone mad on power who’s established himself as a demagogue among Taliban chieftains. Don’t worry, Ted. I’m going to show America that plenty remains to be said about foolish wars run by colonial powers. It’s not the same story told over and over again.

The Book Blogger’s Scepter of Censure

“Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority; men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies, which escape vulgar observation. And the pleasure of wantoning in common topics is so tempting to a writer, that he cannot easily resign it; a train of sentiments generally received enables him to shine without labour, and to conquer without a contest.”

—Samuel Johnson

“It is a truthful sublimity which elevates the mind, and flatters it into believing such sublimity to be its own offspring and production.”

—Longinus

Being new, this blog is still coming into its own with providing a suitable style and proper form. Bookbread strives to provide and participate in “elevated conversations”: elevated in Longinus’ sense of the sublime—and conversations that concern books, literature, and language. But when online in the twenty-first century, the temptation is exponentially greater to “willingly indulge” in criticism on the views of others, or “censure” whatever one happens to come across while reading/browsing.

It can certainly be confessed that Bookbread still experiences moments of pleasure when imagining that [Bookbread has] made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies, which escape vulgar observation. Such pleasures are reserved for those who bear the scepter of censure.  Those bearers are called book bloggers.

Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler 02. March 26, 1750. (¶ 2).

Longinus, Dionysius. An Essay on the Sublime. (~100 C.E.). trans. by Herbert A. Giles. (1870). J. Cornish & Sons, London. (§ VII, pp. 17–18).

The Stagnation of American Book Reviewers, Critics, and Short Fiction Outlets

Mark Athitakis at American Fiction writes:

Because a critic voicing “personal opinion” isn’t really the problem; the problem is the decreasing ability for readers to know, over time, that the critic is a person with a few habits and peculiar tastes, somebody you know well enough to care about disagreeing with.

Athitakis seems to suggest (by Bookbread’s reading at least) that readers are responsible for their knowledge of critics as people, even though it is getting harder to do so nowadays. But by this logic, apparently the critic never need know of the reader. Readers subsequently face an ever-increasing “knowledge gap” concerning critics.

The Solution:  Readers must fortify their wits with additional biographical data of the critic in question in order to understand that critic in order to understand the writer/text the critic is discussing.

There seems to be an unstated assumption that critics are writing for a single readership.  But who are those readers? People possibly interested in books? (In that case we should call them pre-readers.) Is the critic’s readership other experts in criticism? Is the critic’s readership book readers? Then how much recommending is needed?

Can it not be possible that one reason newspapers and magazines are cutting their book sections is that those particular sections are no longer profitable? And are they not profitable because an ever-decreasing readership is interested in the specific information the book sections and their critic-reviewers have to offer? Athitakis certainly highlights how mere reviewing has evolved online into a shopping decision involving “Consumer Reports” kinds of data—and it is evident that even before the internet, customers wanted to hear what other customers had to say about the products they shared an interest in. Currently the analysis, teaching, and educating of others about books are products that book critics can still offer readers without stretching a simple “thumbs up or down” on a book into five paragraphs.

Bookbread has never come across a critic as somebody you know well enough. I may feel that Harold Bloom is one of the most influential teachers in my life, but I have never met him, and I don’t feel that I “know” him. Athitakis, (or my reading of him) seems to be confusing knowing a person with knowing their writing—as with primary sources so with secondary.

Bookbread is interested in the critic’s critical texts, not critical moments of the critic’s biography.  There is no gnosis needed for the reader when it comes to critics.  Or to reverse the argument:  Just because I empathize with someone’s life story doesn’t mean I sympathize with their writing.

Athitakis links to John Fox, who comments that for critics:

They have an inverse relationship, it seems—as word-of-mouth finds more avenues of dissemination, book reviews tank in relevance and power.

“Power”?  Where are the all-powerful book reviews?  Where is the definitive THIS BOOK REVIEW CHANGED LITERATURE AS WE KNOW IT among American critics? (Henry James and T.S. Eliot were too ashamed of their roots to be called “American” critics.)

Fox continues:

I do know that book reviews should have more importance than merely telling me whether or not I should read a book. They also perform the critical role of judging books. But to survive in this new media landscape, book reviews need to do what only they can do: describe the book well, connect the book to current books, the canon, trends, and make insightful interpretations that many readers might have otherwise have missed.

The issue seems to be the role critics play in their interactions with readers.  An example of the current role of the critic might be to comment on what writers are not writing about rather than vise versa, as a recent example from Ted Genoways at Mother Jones shows:

In the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction. With the exception of a few execrable screeds—like Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (which revealed just how completely postmodernism has painted itself into a corner)—novelists and story writers alike have largely ignored the wars. Even our poets, the supposed deliverers of “news that stays news,” have been comparatively mum; Brian Turner is the only major poet to yet emerge from Iraq.

Genoways concludes with some tart words for today’s American fiction writers, words much inline with the call for abusive criticism, and equally applicable to our country’s book critics:

I’m not calling for more pundits—God knows we’ve got plenty. I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.

[NYR:  Nicholson Baker, Brian Turner]

Mere List Making

At American Fiction Notes, Mark Athitakis lists five reasons for not posting lists of “best books of the year” or any other such lists on his book blog. Bookbread fully supports Athitakis’s proactive approach towards list containment in the book blogosphere even if he has to create lists to do it.

Athitakis also includes some ideas of list making as a potential kind of art form and even spirituality:

Lists contribute to a culture of filthy linkbait whoring that just plays into Arianna Huffington’s greedy goddamn hands. Every person who gets access to a Web site’s stats knows that lists bring in traffic. This is naturally seductive, but ultimately contributes to an online hivemind of short attention spans, which is death on sustained commentary.

All of which is to say that I was a tad cranky.

I might’ve calmed down a little had I read Albert Mobilio’s consideration of Umberto Eco’s book The Infinity of Lists before the holidays. Lists can, he argues, have a kind of art to them, if approached in the right way.

A list is an intimation of totality, a simulacrum of knowing much, of knowing the right much. We select our ten best big-band recordings, all-time basketball starting fives, mysteries to read this summer; add up the people we’ve slept with or people we wish we had; index our movie-memorabilia collection; count our blessings; list reasons for not getting out of bed. We jot these accounts on envelopes, store them on hard drives, murmur them under our breath as we ride home from work—it’s no accident that many prayers are really nothing more than lists.

Bookbread can’t vouch for lists existing as types of art forms — though the listing of statements in Wittgenstein is rather elegant — but when it comes to mental nutrition, there is no doubt that certain lists (in the form of that dreaded c-word “canon”) carry a practicality that cannot be denied. As Harold Bloom observes in The Western Canon (1995), “An Elegy for the Canon”:

Who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read.

The question them becomes: what is the difference between the reader’s choice and mere list making?

[NYR: Umberto Eco]