NP, exactly - One for Jack Green
matthew cissell
mccissell at gmail.com
Wed Mar 18 03:54:11 CDT 2015
Problem paragraph or line? It seems to be the line that bothers you,
Rich. If you think this is a diss then you have thin skin. It "smacks
of" Lethem? Smack is related to the German Schmecken; you're saying it
'tastes' like the Lethem review - it leaves a bad taste in your mouth
that reminds you of something else, an association made in your mind.
Perhaps all this kept you from noticing that my point was rather about
reviews, critics and blurbs. If I wanted to slag off a writer I could
find better words, I might even outdo ol' Michiko or Wood.
You might also consider that there is a difference between writers
comments about other writers (think Roddy Doyle's comments on Ulysses)
and the view I am putting forward. To put it simply, if humans still
exist and talk about literature in a 100 or 200 yrs time it is a safe
bet, I think, that they will be reading Cervantes' Quijote and not
Lope de Vega. Likewise, as we wobble through the Age of Paranoia I'm
willing to bet that Pynchon will be more widely read than Coover. That
is not based on some claim of aesthetic superiority in writing as
Michiko and Wood tend to do, but rather a sociological approach to
literature that studies the social field, the agents that occupy
positions, and the history of their trajectory through that field.
I could go further and say that most people could live without
reading any books; however, I think they would not be better off for
having avoided reading. Reading has great benefits for the brain. More
importantly, I think that there are books that are very pertinent to
the time and place people live in. IF one reads 1984, for example,
then s/he has more to say about the suveillance world we increasingly
live in, the person has cultural competence that allows them to
participate in the conversations that occur in society.
Try this: you go to a group of people that have just seen IV and
you talk to them about the book, you can interact with them. Trying
bringing Coover into the conversation and watch how it becomes one
sided - the others have nothing to say so there can be no circulation
or exchange of ideas.
And that is one measure of a writer's significance in a society,
the circulation of his/ her works. Shakespeare is everywhere and Kit
Marlowe is not. And yet you personally may prefer Marlowe's Tammerlane
to Bill's whatever. But remember: "Taste classifies, and it classifies
the classifier." (THe woman who wrote to Franzen prompting his "Mr
Difficult" essay, showed much more about herself than her target of
scorn.) I don't think much of Tom Clancy's writing, but I do think one
could study how his work circulated and became significant to U.S.
culture in the '80's and '90's.
"The science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a
transgression that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the
sacred frontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe, in
order to discover the intelligible relations which unite apparently
incommensurable ‘choices’, such as preferences in music and food,
painting and sport, literature and hairstyle." (from Bourdieu's
'Distinction').
ciao
mc otis
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 8:22 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> this is the problem paragraph:
>
> "Michiko Kakutani in the study with the fountain pen that killed the...
> oh wait sorry. Scratch that. Michiko did write the above glowing
> criticism but it was back in 1987 for a different book by the same
> author, the publisher just decided to put it on the back of the then
> new book. Oh, what book you ask? Well the Michiko blurb was put on the
> dust cover of Robert Coover's 1991 "Pinocchio in Venice". You say you
> haven't read it. Well, you can probably live without it. Anthony
> Burgess gave it a fair but not glowing review. But let's see how they
> stand up to the test of time. One way to do that is by checking
> Nielson numbers or something like that. I use Amazon numbers since
> they are easy to get.
> Today Vineland is at #89,153. Pinocchio in Venice is at #750,363; &
> it never got on the NYT BSL."
>
> smacks of Jonathan Lethem telling readers no need to read anything by Gaddis
> after The Recognitions in his New Yorker put-down a few years back. maybe
> just choice of words
>
> fwiw, Coover's parody of Blood Meridian in his recent opus The Brunist Day
> of Wrath where a motorcycle club terrorizes a town is quite memorable,
> though marred somewhat by the epilogue which I didnt like, the energy of his
> writing is noteworthy too for an old guy
>
> rich
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Heikki R
> <situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Matthew writes:
>> "But let's see how they stand up to the test of time. One way to do that
>> is by checking
>> Nielson numbers or something like that. I use Amazon numbers since they
>> are easy to get.
>> Today Vineland is at #89,153. Pinocchio in Venice is at #750,363; & it
>> never got on the NYT BSL."
>>
>>
>> A 1994 book by Jack Green's darling is at #549,880 in Amazon, and never
>> made it to the NYT BSL
>> as far as I know. And yet, to me, A Frolic of His Own has stood up the
>> test of time better than VL.
>>
>>
>>
>
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