Worser and Worserer

It's getting bad.
On the Greg something or rather show I flipped to this morning after waking up one guy said something like:

"In a relationship you have to be compatible and see eye to eye because when you see eye to eye, uh, you are compatible." Great circular logic, buddy. Good job.

I'm amazed how often I see this type of reasoning.

I just came across this on the JWA Financial Group, Inc. website out of Dallas Texas. (I have no idea who they are because I was searching for articles on dictating cultural taste.) The funny bit is bold:

"Over the next decade, the tulip became a popular but expensive item in Dutch gardens. These flowers were stricken with a non-fatal virus known as mosaic. The virus caused the tulip petals to develop colored stripes which led to wild speculation in tulip bulbs. Popular taste dictated that the more bazaar the bulb, the greater the cost."

Makes you want to run right down and invest, right?

An Odd Writing World

So get this, a woman is taking a creative writing class, the teacher (Jim Crace) notices she has a bit of talent, and so she submits her novel to a publishing house. Voila, Diane Setterfield has sold her first book for L800,000 and an additional million over in the States.

I don't know how it works in Canada (although I bet it's the same) but in the States you cannot copyright a book title. Marley and Me, number one on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list, has the same title as the one Bob Marley's manager wrote. Better yet there was a time about three years ago when three best sellers within a two year period all had the same title. Harry Potter anyone?

Finally, David Lipsky in a New York Times review writes, "Halfway through my second reading of Elena Ferrante's 'Troubling Love' -- 70 more pages to go in seamy Naples -- I tore the book down the middle. It's the first time a novel ever made me get physical, and it was the first good mood I'd been in for weeks."

Admit it, there's something refreshing in a reviewer who can finally say such a thing.

And it gets better. A web search found this from the same reviewer: "It's a smelly book. (...) Troubling Love is soggy with tears -- and the blank mood that follows a good long cry -- but you can't isolate the source of the weeping. (...) Ferrante is fascinated by the moments when a personality -- like a wire stretched too far from its power source -- shorts and corrodes." - David Lipsky, The New York Times Book Review

Short but Much Too Long

It's beginning to seem Amazon.whatevers are beginning to conveniently delete reviews that are not positive. I'm betting they'll say this was always their policy. But the great thing about Amazon's review system was that we could get a variety of opinions, and if the work was terrible we found out beforehand. This will only hurt Amazon. If people believe they are skewing reviews only to the positive then we won't trust them any more and will do our book buying elsewhere.

Can I ask a rhetorical question? Are people really that afraid of honesty?

I just read three books of short stories. Final tally: Two bad, One good. First up: Greetings from the Vodka Sea -- the title as well as the idea for that story is imaginative. Think of it, a sea of vodka at a hidden resort. Well, nothing in this book stands up to the inventive title. The stories ramble and the writing is sloppy. It's the same with Princes in Waiting, another pretty much dull and average-constructed collection of stories. There's so little life in both these books. And one author has no clue how to construct sentences. He throws in comma after comma, creating sentences that are so unendingly similar and oddly fashioned that I eventually gave up the slogging. And, yes I know. They'll probably be like Joyce Carol Oates and hold a grudge and make sure I never get a break from any commitee or granting group they sit on.

Can I ask a rhetorical question? Are writers really that afraid of opinions?

Now comes Darryl Whetter's A Sharp Tooth in the Fur. He's up and down, the first couple of stories continued twice as long as I think they should have -- I am one for clarity and brevity in a story. But I persisted, having read a good review a couple of years ago in the New York Times -- if my memory serves me correctly.

Kermit is Smut is a good one however, a druggie teacher confronts the day.
Here for example:

"Class, Auster still hasn't begun, we need to talk about love. Love reminds us how life is a gamble we other wise wouldn't make.
Every day he sees how small their teeth are.

This is Whetter at his finest, positioning the collequial description next to the exquisitely observed detail. It's true sometimes the details are incorrect: No matter these are middle school kids whose teeth are already adult teeth that often appear too big for their mouths or point aimlessly beyond their lips. And it's the Knight that jumps across a chessboard, not the Bishop. Yet, we will give him extra credit for going after the the original details. What I found to be his best story is Enormous Sky White (which I would retitle to something a bit more resonating were I writing it.) A young man plants seeds in the North while his girlfrield visits Paris -- seed planting takes a variety of forms and that story alone makes the book worth its cover price.

A Few Articles

Atlantic Monthly's Fiction Issue 2006 has run an essay by Francine Prose where she asks whether learning to write can be taught. (The essay is not available on line). She relates her own experience in taking classes ultimately saying, "But that class, as helpful as it was, is not where I learned to write." What is the key, according to Prose? Read. Her statement echoes Chomsky's, Read widely and read well." When we think to the past there were not graduate programs in writing -- writers learned to write by trying and by reading -- somehow there is hope in that recollection.

When I teach contemporary art classes the question of bad art is nearly always the first question. And why not? The lines of good and bad have been erased thanks to post-structuralist activites, Postmodernism, deconstruction, and pluralism. I empathize with the students who know what they like, but who also feel they have no foundation for determing what is half-decent. Roger Scruton has provided a terrific article titled Kitsch and the Modern Predicament in City Journal, evidently from the Manhattan Institute that takes on this question. Now I know many will say I enjoy it because he's as harsh as I am but note I also respect art that directly confronts norms of goodness and badness, as so much contemporary art does. He gives a brief overview of kitsch and Modernism and then begins to dissect what makes kitsch tick. "Kitsch is pretense," he writes. It is the "...un-wanted hand on the knee. Kitsch is not just pretending; it is asking you to join in the game. In real kitsch, what is being faked cannot be faked. Hence the pretense must be mutual, complicitous, knowing." The quote that sticks is, "The opposite of kitsch is not sophistication but innocence." You've got to read this one.

Speaking of Kitsch, yesterday I came upon a great little essay by Jeffrey Louis Decker titled Saint Oprah. It's availble on line through LION and Project MUSE but you need a login through your local academic library. It's also in the Spring 2006 issue of Modern Fiction Studies if you can find that one. In it he discusses Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture by Eva Illouz and Oprah, Celebrity and the Formation of Self by Sherryl Wilson. Decker's essay is basically a review of the four books that dig into Oprah's mega-corporation whose purpose is to promote middle class norms as they relate to personal accountability and virtuous uplift. We've heard many people say her novel selections sell, but are they good... again the question arises. He says Oprah's book club made middlebrow practices relevant again but backs up his thought with a quote by Kathleen Rooney. "[N]either Winfrey nor her readers seemed permitted to remark critically on the selections, or to advance beyond any but they most immature, advertisement-like, unconditionally loving responses to every single novel they encountered."

It seems to me criticism is definitely headed in that direction -- a thought I consider terrifying.

Now for something completely different, check out this fabulous piece of art titled Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor.