NP, exactly - One for Jack Green

Wed Mar 18 11:22:46 CDT 2015

Here's one of today's questions. If History is a Fat Lady singing,
when is she finished (in judging a lasting, canonical writer)?

Atlantic piece maybe a decade ago on how Shakespeare rose to
 be Head & Shoulders First among near-equals is fascinating and
I always want to believe in the judgment of literary history FINALLY.

The ways literary canonization happen are fascinating (to me). I know
of books and writers 'rediscovered' in my lifetime.

The Awakening. Cane. Zora Neale Thurston. Jean Rhys. Recently
Hans Fallada.

One very recent American 'rediscovery' is John Williams' STONER.
Wonderful story of it being believed in (mostly by other terrif writers, such
as John McGahern) and finally republished THEN taking off internationally.
Don't yet know if the Academy has started to canonize it.

So, question is: is the final, never-quite  judgement of history gonna change
because postmodernism?

Do we think.

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 4:54 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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