Photo by Ben Visbeek 

Mark Lawson makes these remarks about book publicists  in his revealing Guardian piece on big entertainment’s new reviewer-proofing habit:

That fan sites will fawn over any and everything related to their fantasies is perhaps a good bet, but to assume that ‘bloggers’ en masse are somehow less critical, less savvy, less discerning than professional critics is, I believe, from experience reading my favoured literary blogs, dead wrong. To reiterate the point once again: bloggers are not a monolithic block of like-minded drones. They, much better than a cadre of ‘recognized’ critics, represent the full spectrum of possible response. Bloggers with clout amongst the more literate in our universe in fact deliver opinion with more depth, more accuracy, more discernment than do many of those pittance paid pundits who provide theirs in the media.

The sad reality is, however, that despite Lawson’s legitimate concerns, crap seems to sell regardless of critical response. The more marketing money that is thrown at these stinkers, the more people seem to want to attend them. I think immediately of Mike Myers and Austen Powers. Staggering impact when you consider how often each of us has said "Yea Baby" during the past however many years it’s been since the movie first came out.  I suspect however that Myers is capable of much more, and yet, pandering to the thickest age cohort, he keeps it dumb, and wins at the till. Wouldn’t it be great if he made something truly funny…(though I grant that the post freeze pissing sequence in Austen Powers 1 was comic relief of a high order… it was one of only two or three really good gags in the entire movie).

That Faulks’s Bond stinks, at least according to the stench-attuned critics I’ve read, means nothing. Bond is Bond. The masses are asses.
Many attend movies not because they’re any good, but because if they don’t they won’t have anything cool to contribute at the water cooler. They won’t be in the know, part of the in-crowd, where the wool is.

"A thick helping of recognition was recently served to the Beirut-born
Rawi Hage for his first novel, "De Niro’s Game," winner of the
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize
($153,000) for a work of literary fiction.

"De Niro’s Game," which was published in the United States last
year, presents a portrait of two childhood friends living in war-torn
Beirut during the early 1980s. Juxtaposing edgy imagery with the
repetitive calm of beautiful Arabic poetry, the novel explores the
lives of Bassam and George, young men who must choose either to stay in
Beirut relying on stealth and violence or live in alienation abroad.
Bassam dreams of escaping, and to make money for this he schemes with
George to skim proceeds from poker arcades and smuggle bottles of
counterfeit whiskey. George, on the other hand, chooses to stay and is
forced into military service. He maneuvers his way through the ranks
and lives a mad-dog life of sanctioned crime. Hundreds of thousands of
bombs fall in this book as the boys maraud and chase women. It’s a
hallucinatory vision of how war corrupts even friendship. Written in
English and calling upon Arabic poetry and French…"

Read the rest here in the Washington Post

Charlie Rose’s appreciation of Tim Russert. Notice how Russert’s mouth is set in a chronic smile throughout the entire interview. He beams with enthusiasm.  A person who loved his work, passionately. This is the way to live your life. Love what you do, do what you love. Hokey, yes, but just about the best advice you can ever take. Lucky, Tim was, to have a father and family so devoted. His son, as is often the case with those whose Dads die untimely deaths, is destined for greatness.

Fitzgerald by Van Vechten 

In his new, consistently interesting Harper’s blog Sentences Wyatt Mason quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald telling a friend how to review  The Beautiful and the Damned:

"…Tell specifically what you like about the book and don’t —-. The characters–Anthony, Gloria, Adam Patch, Maury, Bleekman, Muriel Dick, Rachael, Tana etc etc etc. Exactly whether they are good or bad, convincing or not. What you think of the style, too ornate (if so quote) good (also quote) rotten (also quote). What emotion (if any) the book gave you. What you think of its humor. What you think of its ideas. If ideas are bogus hold them up specifically and laugh at them. Is it boring or interesting. How interesting. What recent American books are more so. If you think my “Flash Back in Paradise” in Chap I is like the elevated moments of D.W. Griffith say so. Also do you think it is imitative and of whom. "

And in case we didn’t get it, here’s Marcus providing more detail:

…specificity: evaluate his characters (“convincing or not”); weigh his style (“too ornate (if so quote)”); consider the book’s freight or lack of emotion, humor, ideas (“if ideas are bogus hold them up specifically and laugh at them”); ask about its originality (“do you think it is imitative and of whom”).

Several years ago I attended a National Book Critics Circle panel discussion on the ethics of book reviewing. The question of friends reviewing friends came up. Christopher Hitchens answers with typical flair.  Listen here.  

Jaap Blonk is a self-taught composer, vocal performer and sound poet.

As a vocalist, Blonk has performed around the globe exciting audiences with his powerful stage presence and childlike improvisation. Live electronics have over the years extended the scope and range of his concerts. Besides working as a soloist, he has collaborated with many musicians and ensembles, including Maja Ratkje, Mats Gustafsson, Nicolas Collins, Joan La Barbara, The Ex, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble and the Ebony Band. He was the founder and leader of the long-standing bands Splinks (modern jazz, 1983-1999) and BRAAXTAAL (avant-rock, 1987-2005).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Nothing new about this Clive James ode to literary schadenfreudery, but, given that this blog is my commonplace book, it deserves space: 

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book -
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.

Find the rest at Papercuts.  

Darek Smid’s Photo.  

XXXIII.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

James Wood discusses unreliable unreliability in his current New Yorker review of Rivka Galchen’s (incredibly promoted) first novel , Atmospheric Disturbances. Comme Ça:

And furthermore:

Predictable patterns of unreliability where a character consistently B.S.es us, in order, one may assume, to make themselves look better, to hide flaws, can, as Wood points out in his essay on Italo Svevo in The Irresponsible (almost wrote Unreliable) Self , be easily read, in the case of Svevo’s Zeno, for example, as a hypocrite and a fool.

But Svevo does more with Zeno. Zeno tries to be truthful and sometimes succeeds; tries to analyze his wrongness (most unreliable narrators imagine themselves to be right says Wood, when they are actually wrong) "from a position he imagines to be right but which is actually wrong." But (flipping over the How Fiction Works), "…his self-comprehension, waved confidently before our eyes, is as comically perforated as a bullet-hold flag."

I’ll forgo commentary on this great metaphor, and just say: with triple unreliability lots of people lie, intentionally or otherwise, to us. Why? To protect themselves, make themselves look better than they really are? Perhaps. But in terms of effect, I think it has to do with reality.

When reading we must approach characters, narrators and authors as we might any real life stranger. Trust them until their behavior demands otherwise. If they say something you know to be factually untrue, or that contradicts what they’ve said before, or that their actions belie, be wary.

In short, unreliable unreliability gives us the most accurate depiction of how people truly act in ‘real’ life. As readers we must treat these characters just as we do real people in the course of our daily activities. It’s because of unreliability, because we cannot know or predict for sure what these kind of fictional human beings are thinking, or will do, that they are frequently the most engaging.

Reading Stephen Henighan’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture today. I’m going to be reviewing it for the Toronto Globe and Mail this week. Henighan has been called one of Canada’s most ‘provocative’ writers. This is a collection of literary criticism woven together with reportage of various world events from the past several decades. To this point, a third of the way along, I’d agree that it is provocative, but more than this: it’s rather irritating. 

Here’s a quote that will endear him to the blogosphere:

" More often the weblog is sloppy, fractured, grammatically tangled, intellectually malnourished, responsible only to a coterie of correligionists: in its universal visibility and the brevity of its entries, it epitomizes the word sapped of energy by its framing within the field of the visual image. The weblog, unlike a book on the same topic, is rarely held accountable to past debates in the field it is discussing; in this way it furthers the excision of the eternal present of the contemporary era from the progressive chronology of past eras."

The seeming historical ignorance of our current image-saturated, by extension, doomed generation has, to this point, been an oft repeated theme in the book’s title essay which inhabits about a third of the whole. So has the flattening effect of global consumerism on cultural diversity…

In making his argument, Henighan roundly criticizes Ian McEwen for plundering and misrepresenting history: using it as a toy for his own nefarious, fictitious ends…this strikes me as patently unfair, given that Atonement, for example, is, well, after all, fiction.  

I’m getting a vague Susan Sontag, Daniel Boorstin vibe from the piece, with a little Naomi Klien flavour peppered in for good luck…tune in next week for the full meal…if you have the appetite…

Face it. Fund it. Fix it.  So goes the headline to a front cover-filling story introducing a week long series that The Globe and Mail will be running on the devastation that mental illness wreaks on the lives of Canadians. It will tell the stories of destruction visited on Canadian families, workplaces, health care facilities and the legal system. It will also seek solutions.

I know personally of this havoc, and of the short-comings of our health care system. I know too of the shame and embarrassment of not being able to function. As Editor-in-Chief Edward Greenspon so eloquently puts it in his editorial, the more of us who speak out, the more mental illness will be accepted as a normal part of life and the faster proper policies and practices to combat it will be put into place.

Ed and his organization should be congratulated and commended for the significant manner in which they are addressing this important, essential issue.