Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

now as for the Marcus article what he actually is discussing is new, innovative, formally dynamic potentials of a new kind of... guess what?

FICTION

(good night! drive safe!)

Marcus in fact turns Shields on his head - if Shields project is to lambaste the novel and raise the lyric essay on a pedestal Marcus view is more evolved and nuanced

he examines work that breaks down the barriers or otherwise renders meaningless terms like fiction or non-fiction

and in so doing achieves a more cogent articulation of what one might consider Shields true POV if it werent for the fact that Shield seems more intent on controversial assertion and opinion stirring polemic - of course all this manages to convey is that the true goal of Shields egoistic bluster and bombaste (ironic as most of the words on the page are not actually his) is to make him the moment's cause celebre

well then you'll enjoy this:

the 3rd to last appropriated quote in the book is:

"once upon a time there will be readers who wont care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect and its formal originality"

first things first, the grudging attribution at the back of the book lists Ben Marcus, The Genre Artist and lo and behold:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200...

now before I go into the Marcus essay and Shields misleading and intellectually dishonest use of the Marcus quote I would like to reflect for a moment on the irony of what that quote actually says, again:

"once upon a time there will be readers who wont care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect and its formal originality"

to which I'll add 'and isnt it too bad that the ham-fisted Shields doesnt realize that he in fact is not one of those readers' - because he obviously does care what imaginative writing is called and that concern blinds him to the possibilities of fiction, the novel and the flaws in his own argument etc

From Laura Miller:

If there's a hell for book reviewers (and I'm sure many authors hope there is), no doubt we will spend eternity there being jabbed by trident-wielding imps bearing certain adjectives emblazoned across their brick-red chests: "compelling," "lyrical," "nuanced" and so on. Even in this world, the conscientious critic is bedeviled by clichés; how many ways are there to say that a book is "beautifully written" or that the characters in it are "fully realized" instead of "two-dimensional"? These are the words that rise up in a reviewer's mind, like those clouds of gnats that ruin so many walks in the woods. No matter how hard you try to bat them away, they just keep coming back.

The war against cliché (to cop a phrase from Martin Amis) gained a new weapon this week, when Michelle Kerns, who writes a smart, cheeky books column for Examiner.com -- an outfit described, alternately, as a "hyperlocal" platform for "citizen journalists" or a "pay-per-click meat market" owned by conservative Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz -- created a new game: Book Review Bingo. Kerns took a list of the most egregious book reviewer clichés she'd compiled in an earlier column and arranged them in 5-by-5 grids as bingo cards.

Kerns urges her readers to distribute the cards to their bookish friends, then have everyone sift through "the week's reviews/book jackets/gushing publicity sheets" searching for hackneyed words and phrases. Whoever gets a bingo first wins, although, "Playing for a blackout will absolutely be a requirement when reading some publications."

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Within a couple of hours it seemed like every book reviewer in the country had been forwarded multiple links to Kerns' column. "It's getting worse," tweeted Ron Charles, fiction editor and critic for the Washington Post Book World. "People in the office are now emailing me Book Reviewer Cliché Bingo without comment." In silent shame, dozens (if not hundreds) of delete keys wiped out instances of "poignant" and "gritty" and "tour de force."

Every writer has his or her pet words, words that, however ideal they seemed the first time you selected them, have long since worn out. The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani is famous for relying on the verb "limn" -- a choice often derided because no one uses that word in actual speech. As a general rule, though, well-worn verbs are more forgivable than tired adjectives, simply because there are relatively few of them that work without calling undue attention to themselves; which synonyms for "describe," "portray" and "relate" wouldn't sound hopelessly artificial if you were determined not to use such old, reliable workhorses?

Now, I pride myself on never employing "lyrical" (except ironically) or "rollicking," but I must plead guilty to variations on "haunting" and "powerful." What's at stake is more than just lackluster prose. As Kerns wrote to me in an e-mail, when she scrutinized her own use of clichés more closely, she realized that she fell back on them whenever she was "avoiding giving a solid opinion on anything. I was too afraid to just say, 'I hated this and this is why' or 'I thought this was great and this is why.' I used the clichés to fudge on exposing myself and sidestep saying anything that someone else might disagree with."

With this larger purpose in mind, I subjected my own reviews for the past several months to Book Review Bingo. While I was heartened to learn that I have never succumbed to the temptations of "unputdownable" or "riveting," I nevertheless earned a bingo on the very first card, due to my terrible fondness for the constructions "that said" and "at once," and my inability to resist the "X meets X" formulation in the very last review I wrote for Salon. Also, as I am utterly ashamed to admit, I once used the word "stunning."

As for my own irritants, the word "luminous," while not quite a cliché yet, is nevertheless a dead giveaway that the book under consideration is prettily written but dull. "Magisterial" is a word over-applied to nonfiction that is intimidatingly lengthy. And while I have indulged in "generous" (i.e., long and warm-hearted) myself in the past, it's time to give that one a rest, too.

I promise to try to do better in the future, and invite the readers of Salon to nominate their own pet peeves. We have nothing to lose but our chestnuts.

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_mill...

so do rabbits

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03...

please direct your attention to the first 'big buzz' title in the fiction category

By JONATHAN LETHEM

there’s "The Lottery," of course, the story everyone knows even if they don't remember Shirley Jackson's name. A small New England town, blandly familiar in every way, sleepwalking its way through ritual murder. Likely the most controversial piece of fiction ever published in the New Yorker, resulting in hundreds of canceled subscriptions, later adapted for television, radio and ballet, it now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype. It can be as difficult to persuade readers that the story is just one sheaf in the portfolio of one of this century's most luminous and strange American writers as it is to explain that the town portrayed in "The Lottery" is a real one.

I know it is, because I lived there. North Bennington is a tiny village less than a mile from the otherwise isolated Bennington campus in Vermont. Shirley Jackson was married to Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic who taught at the college. And she spent her life in the town, raising four children, presiding over a chaotic household that was host to Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov, and at times going quietly crazy — and writing, always, with the rigor of one who has found her born task. Six novels, two bestselling volumes of deceptively sunny family memoirs and countless stories before her death at 48, in 1965.

The town hasn't changed, or at least it hadn't by the mid- eighties, when I was a student at the school. A handful of the townspeople portrayed in thin disguise in Jackson's novels and stories were still around. I knew the square where "The Lottery" takes place. It was Jackson's fate, as a faculty wife and an eccentric newcomer in a staid, insular village, to absorb the reflexive antisemitism and anti-intellectualism felt by the townspeople toward the college. She and her children were accessible in a way that her husband and his colleagues and students, who spent their days on the campus, were not.

Jackson was in many senses already two people when she arrived in Vermont. One was a turgid, fearful ugly-duckling, permanently cowed by the severity of her upbringing by a suburban mother obsessed with appearances. This half of Jackson was a character she brought brilliantly to life in her stories and novels from the beginning: the shy girl, whose identity slips all too easily from its foundations. The other half of Jackson was the expulsive iconoclast, brought out of her shell by marriage to Hyman — himself a garrulous egoist very much in the tradition of Jewish '50's New York intellectuals — and by the visceral shock of mothering a quartet of noisy, demanding babies. This second Shirley Jackson dedicated herself to rejecting her mother's sense of propriety, drank and smoked and fed to buttery excess — directly to blame for her and her husband's early deaths — dabbled in magic and voodoo, and interfered loudly when she thought the provincial Vermont schools were doing an injustice to her talented children. This was the Shirley Jackson that the town feared, resented and, depending on whose version you believe, occasionally persecuted.

The hostility of the villagers further shaped her psyche, and her art; the process eventually redoubled so the latter fed the former. After the enormous success of "The Lottery," a legend arose in town, almost certainly false, that Jackson had been pelted with stones by schoolchildren one day, then gone home and written the story. The real crisis came near the end of her life, resulting in a period of agoraphobia and psychosis; she wrote her way through it in "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." In that novel, Jackson brilliantly isolates the two aspects in her psyche into two odd, damaged sisters: one hypersensitive and afraid, unable to leave the house, the other a sort of squalid demon prankster who may or may not have murdered the rest of her family for her fragile sister's sake. For me, it is that unique and dreamlike book, rather than "The Lottery," that stands as her masterpiece..."

http://www.salon.com/jan97/jackson970...

is it fair to a rabbit that he's a rabbit and that the wolf is a wolf? no but that rabbit still better shag tail because that big old wolf is a freaking capitalist pig bent on exploiting his ass - you can bet on it

run bunny rabbit! run! he's going to make you work long hours in a factory and pay you unfair wages!

(-a marxist critique of the state of nature)

life isnt fair - the state of nature is not fair

in what way does the color 'black' convert itself to become the symbol of 'capitalism' - I get black = corruption but then there's just the matter of the next leap/link - are there pre-existing conventions of color language that I am unaware of? what are the clues? I dont see any because as I suspect they arent there - in the conventions of color language I am familiar with black tends to equate with death - that wouldnt work here would it? like I said, I freaking hate this kind of academic bs

does conformity = capitalism? let me blow a big grey, concrete soviet raspberry at that - conformity equates with human condition regardless of economic system - hell, ask a chimpanzee the next time you talk to one - he'll tell you conformity is a pretty big thing in his world too

is one of the proper critiques of capitalism not that it erodes tradition? where is this story without tradition? it doesnt happen without it is where

this story isnt about capitalism and it's not about class - that academic is interested in those things and trying to foist them off on this story and that's tiresome

from the links provided by Bonita:

"Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” conveys how communal mores eclipse the importance of individuality and act as the puppeteer of society. In order to underscore the detrimental effects of such regulated behavior, Jackson employs a writing style laden with symbolism. In doing so, she encourages her audience to read the passage actively and to consider all facets of the dilemma. One of the most prominent symbols is the color black, representing the corruptive forces of capitalism perpetuating the town’s annual lottery, carrying out the selection of an unassuming individual. "


er, what? capitalism?


"Shirley Jackson explores the theme of social class division in “The Lottery.” The town’s social class division is unwittingly built around the “lottery.”

The town’s social ladder is broken down into people with the most powerful occupations, only men were employed in these occupations. As the owner of the coal business, Mr. Summers was the most powerful businessman in the town. Mr. Graves, the post office official, and Mr. Martin, the town grocer, were the other prominent businessmen in the town. The townsman in charge of conducting the lottery was Mr. Summers; his occupation allowed him the “time and energy to devote to civic activities.” Mr. Graves and Mr. Martin also aided Mr. Summers during the lottery. The wealthiest people in the town not only had economic control, but the lottery instilled their political control in the town as well. Other men in the town, although not directly in charge of the lottery, had more power then women. The men were the ones to choose the lottery slip for the family, placing them in charge of the family. "

um, pardon me? class divisions? I freakin' hate academics, I really do

these arent really critics excepting of course that they function in that regard in this piece - these are academics. They make I think various 'critical errors' in their approaches (sorry about the pun).

A for instance: What is the point of going after Casino Royale? Is it a bad book? of course it is - it seems though that Amiran's goal is to discuss genre work and is Casino Royale exactly the right book to approach that subject?

further is it a sound critical approach to focus your critique on the nature of one character (no matter how central)? 'I dont like James Bond' does not exactly constitute a sound hermeneutic. I dont like Captain Ahab, he's an obsessive SOB; I dont like Achilles, he's a preening child; I dont like Richard the 3rd, he's a bit moody etc etc etc - what does the kind of character flaw focused on in Amiran's discussion of Bond have to do with the quality of the work itself?
(Bond as an agent would more than likely be a zero or 'neutral figure', a cipher (that's the most realistic aspect of Fleming's characterization) and Bond considered as a 'character' in any event needs no more than wave his hand across the landscape of popular culture to reveal his place therein and so with an insouciant smile one up Prof Amiran - I must mean something old chap, I most certainly and quite loudly 'signify' - which in fact amiran allows but so then what is his point?)

what in particular in this essay intrigues me though is the mention that Casino Royale is full of cliches - can a work be denigrated for being full of cliches when it is the origin of those cliches in the first place? do we blame the Odyssey for being so rife with the usual quest story tropes? didnt think so - so what before Casino Royale establishes the usual international man of mystery cliches?

The American Book Review has taken stock of literature and come up with its Top 40 Bad Books. The list targets some big, popular favorites -- F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic "The Great Gatsby," Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road," the James Bond novel "Casino Royale" by Ian Fleming and Cormac McCarthy's National Book Award-winning "All the Pretty Horses." Really? If they're the worst, what's the best?

Most books were selected by university professors. On the one hand, these are some of America's best-read people, so we should be able to trust their analysis. On the other hand, their analysis sometimes reads like this: "Badness enters the nonparodic historical novel when an author overtly uses historically situated people, places, and cultures as mirrors, and denies their difference." That's part of a critique of Toni Morrison's "A Mercy," E.L. Doctorow's "The March" and Ian McEwan's "Saturday" -- whatever those three writers' offenses, their sentences are certainly more direct and graceful.

The list itself is slightly misnamed -- it has 40 responses about bad books, some of which list several offenders, while others refuse to name any. If there is any constant, it's that the best books that appear on their worst-book list are subject to the most unreasonable critiques.

Christine Granados of Texas A&M University writes:

When I read what I consider to be a bad book, I notice that it is usually written by an arrogant person. Cormac McCarthy’s "All the Pretty Horses" (1992) comes immediately to mind. I think of it as a romance novel for men, his trilogy included. Like all good romance novel writers, McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies.

Perhaps Granados has met McCarthy; if not, it's hard to figure how or why she's decided he's arrogant. I'm not sure what is wrong with a romance novel for men -- Cervantes' "Don Quixote," which enjoys a pretty good reputation, would fall into this category too. I'm also not at all convinced that McCarthy, a longtime purveyor of literary fiction, had any formula for selling millions of copies.


At least Granados got into the text of the book. The same cannot be said for Tom LeClair of the University of Cincinnati, who condemned "The Great Gatsby" based only on a distant recollection.

If badness is related to perceived greatness, then I offer "The Great Gatsby" (1925) as the worst novel in American literature. I haven’t read it for many years, since the only time I used it in a Modern American Fiction class, but I remember it as incredibly smug about its relationship to the traditional realistic novel.

Exactly how a book might be smug about its relationship to other books isn't made clear. A second complaint targets a book for having a kind of impossible agency. Robyn Warhol-Down of Ohio State University wants books to understand themselves in a way she believes they don't:

[Novels:] that irritate me the most, though, are novels whose protagonists’ tribulations can be attributed to their active alcoholism, but the novel has no idea. As I remember "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" (1996), one of the protagonists has some drinks, then has a fight with her boyfriend, then has a few more, then argues with her mother. The novel asks you to take the substance of the fights seriously. My reaction: "Get sober and then tell me about it!"

There is one good lesson in the enterprise. Sophia A. McClennen, from Pennsylvania State University, doesn't name a bad book; she writes, "In almost every class, I teach a bad book, an awful, poorly written, sometimes sexist, racist, reactionary book." She doesn't tell her students, though -- they read it on the syllabus and come into her class, disturbed, upset and engaged. That's a bad book -- put to good use.

-- Carolyn Kellogg


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacke...

are people really this stupid?

http://www.salon.com/books/writing/in...

I mean people who get paid to have ideas? people who write things and, ostensibly, think and what not? Im almost done with this book and so much of it is transparent and deeply flawed - not at all revolutionary

is cubism or vorticism revolutionary? because then maybe Im wrong - maybe shit from 80 years ago is suddenly revolutionary, collage, borrowing, appropriating, throwing shit together from disparate sources - Im pretty sure teenagers of both genders have done this shit since there was a mass media, Im pretty sure zines appropriating images was already a tired trope 30 years ago, I'm pretty sure Burroughs was doing cut and paste mash-ups 40 years ago - and now the literary world is up in arms?

thank god there is something for someone to write about...

imagine the 'literary world' as our tidy little files - 3 people on one side of an issue 4 on the other - it's really not much more than that as it is - 'people whose opinion we should pay attention to' - it makes me tired, so tired

how freeing is that?

From Slate:

"Toward the end of his life, in 1896, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll) published a survey of his professional work as an Oxford mathematician. Symbolic Logic set out to clarify the confusion he saw at work among the academic logicians of his day. Logic emerges, in this volume, as something of a game: rule-governed, yet arbitrary. It is not the dry purview of the pedant, but the imaginative landscape of a creative mind. Indeed, the book concludes, logicians often think of things like the cupola of a proposition "almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean." But Dodgson warns that we should not simply "submit" to the "sovereign will and pleasure" of these terms. Instead, "any writer of a book is fully authorized in attaching any meaning he likes to any word of phrase he intends to use.""

http://www.slate.com/id/2245647/

another beef I have with Shields: his method of appropriation without attribution is clever I suppose but ultimately Im not sure what purpose it serves other than to forward itself as its own argument - at best it's a seedless exercise that once executed never needs to be done again - as with Duchamp's fountain it's been done, we get it.

on the one hand at times the appropriation puts the original authors into a position where removed from context they are arguing a point different than that which the quote was intended to argue either in kind or degree

on the other without attribution what is the point of the borrowing? why not use your own words? all language is communal, borrowed, contextual, your formulations are never truly your own; so what?

reductio absurdam: you may as well compose a ransom note clipped out word by word from various and sundry sources - that's what we all do anyway I suppose

zadie smith attacks his attack on the novel by pointing out that those things he most complains about are the result of bad writing not the novel form - which afterall is a nebulous beast indeed allowing for the free form ouroboros-like musings of Tristram Shandy, Leopold Bloom's meandering stroll, Proust's meditation on a fresh baked cookie, Durrell's Alexandrian attempt to capture four view points in four books, Dos Passos' attempt to capture the view point of multitudes in 3 volumes etc etc etc

(please note I dont agree with Shields though I do find some his points intriguing and worth consideration)

Pavel wrote: "I think he was an unintentional genius. He really just set out to write nonsense, but when he liberated himself from sense, when he opened himself up, all this crazy symbolic shit, this mystic knowledge came pouring out. He dealt with it like a mathematician, but he probably didn't understand half of it."

I think that's unfair to Dodgson - for not only was he a mathematician but perhaps more significantly he was a logician and much of his work centers on concerns of logic (and illogic) - I think he mostly knew what he was up to - at least as much as any of us do when we put pen to paper - I mean who can say exactly where our characters, themes or even 'crazy symbolic shit' comes from?

so what's this got to do with David Shields Reality Hunger? Well for starters Shields book is a "controversial manifesto for a new literature based on fact rather than fiction."

he even takes time to discuss the unreliability of memory (and memoir) - James Frey makes an appearance amongst other recent 'unreliable narrators':

"First there's the relativism about truth and lies. In a chapter entitled "Trials by google" Shields defends (among others) James Frey for making things up in his memoir A Million Little Pieces. Of course Frey made things up, says Shields: who doesn't? Who cares? But there's a difference between false memory, rough recall, wilful deception and exaggeration for dramatic effect. And if Frey is, as Shields says, "a terrible writer", why defend him at all, since he's failed the first test? Carelessness with the truth and aesthetic failure aren't easily... "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/...

he also argues that theft can be more creative than invention

(!spoiler alert!: the book is largely composed of quotations (printed without attribution - well the publisher's lawyers forced him to put a key at the back of the book but he even goes so far as to ask you not only to not read it but excise it from the book with a razor - begone J Evans Pritchard, phd!))

and that "collage is the artform of today, and why the lyric essay has more to offer the modern age than that old-fangled form, "the novelly novel"..."

interesting book - worthy of discussion even if you dont necessarily agree with some of its premises

and now most reliably the public wants the book more than ever - why? not because of what it's about or how well it's written

it's the furor dummy

http://celebrifi.com/gossip/Last-Trai...

"Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the atomic bombing of Japan that Avatar director James Cameron had optioned for a possible film, The Associated Press has learned.

Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino “was not able to answer” concerns about The Last Train from Hiroshima, including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed.

“It is with deep regret that Henry Holt and Company announces that we will not print, correct or ship copies of Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima,” the publisher said in a statement issued to the AP."

this book had already hit the shelves in some stores and we are being asked to pull it and return it to the publisher - a book recall? the problem? Holy James Frey the author made up central characters in this purportedly non-fiction book!