Hate This Book!

Many of the people who write about books are probably engaged in writing their own, and/or would like to publish someday, and with the way things are now, why would one stomp on the hand that might feed them?

Jacob Silverman in Slate asks for more critical response from these book reviewers, though clearly, anyone who is a critic would have to be passionate enough about the work to understand the process by which it is created, and this explains the sympathetic and friendly strain in criticism. His argument seems to come down on how social media is really becoming too friendly for any real criticism. It’s easier to not dwell on a book you don’t like, and far more uplifting (as well as positive to one’s career, perhaps) to review one you do like. This is nuanced, I believe, what he’s asking for, but it’s not like every reviewer is thinking of unicorns and rainbows. Just look at B. R. Myers in The Atlantic. I don’t agree with everything he says, but much of it is right on, particularly this piece. 

On the other hand, what I like about this piece from Lev Grossman is that you can almost be certain which book he’s talking about, and it’s a shame that he doesn’t want to come right out and admit it, because the writer in question has so much apparent power in the industry, such that if Grossman did say something, he could imagine losing his position at Time, his publishing contract, his career. Might I add, nothing could be as bad as a book that came out last year with art in the title, but with art nowhere else in the book. 

A Beautiful Necessity

"What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers." So says Richard Bausch in The Atlantic, regarding his one foray into contributing to an ill-fated how to collection of essays in which his work was unceremoniously left out.

I think the impulse to offer how to advice is as much out of reminding oneself how it is done, as a form of practice; if someone finds it useful, so much the better. What I like in Bausch's attitude is that he makes explicit what I assume, in my good nature or goodwill, is everyone's motivation. Of course this is naive. I suspect there are millions of people for whom writing is not derived from "a kind of beautiful necessity."

Residue Of Thinking

There is a level of purity, perhaps even idealization, in the art of fiction that conditions me to make it primary writing: fiction becomes sacrosanct. I would imagine a lot of fiction writers have this perception. The desire to express thoughts on any other writing can seem secondary, irrelevant, or too much of a distraction. In other words, if you aren’t writing fiction, you aren’t really writing.

Thus, I frequently find it necessary to justify the point of keeping a blog.

Just as in keeping a journal, a blog allows me to codify my thoughts, ones that may not be fully fleshed out. Here there is a compulsion to explain, perhaps to rationalize or discover the arrival at an opinion. When you work all the angles (or try), you may not avoid learning something new, or revising how you once thought about a topic or idea.

When I did my grad program writing, the process became most clear to me in the writing of annotations. The annotation is a more focused and detailed book reviewing, usually of a novel, although one can annotate any book. The discoveries came out almost organically from the material, as opposed to trying to validate a premise, a shortcoming of many of my so-called “academic” papers. The writing came to be what I called thinking on the page. It’s what writing is for me: ultimately a conveyor of thought, but essentially a residue of thinking. Through the writing I am discovering. But the goal isn’t necessarily about achieving objectivity, something that I feel inclined towards when writing a book review, if only to appease an editor. In general, objectivity will drive everyone toward safe, not unreasonable conclusions, or what will avoid being unpopular or controversial. But what has more interested me may be the illusion that what I’m driving at is highly unique and subjective. Abandoning politics, right thinking, trying to please any master other than myself, in short, avoiding playing it safe with my conclusions, is what this blog writing feels like to me.

The blogs I’ve come across run the gamut. There is the tightly braided academic language that uses jargon and excessive complexity to state something simple, possibly to cloak an idea the writer isn’t quite sure of. On the other end of the spectrum is the palatable to all, I-don’t-want-to-offend-thee pablum that is merely a form of soft self-hype, of little substance. I suppose I’m holding my own style up as an ideal counter-example.

My version of a blog is an attempt to subvert the spontaneity of execution that is blog writing. Maybe this is an anti-blog. I don’t just write the first thing that comes to me here--I don’t want to be that boring--nor can I be (dare I say it) eloquent without reflection. Andrew Sullivan’s piece in the Atlantic first got me thinking about all of this, as he seems to aim at justifying and defining the “proper” use of a blog. To which I offer: why deny what a blog can be?