The photo says it all?

My post on “More Heat than Light: Life is Too Short to Read Crappy Books” didn’t please everyone, and Anis Shivani‘s ability to piss people off seems pretty bottomless.  (He’s at it again today with “17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet.”)  Jezebel responded with “Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, “Ghetto Volume” (also picked up by HuffPo here).

The debate over the post happened not in the comments section of this blog, but on my Facebook page.  This, from my friend Paul Achitoff in Hawaii: “I don’t know enough about him to know what he risked by writing a pissy, supercilious rant, but I’m not sure I agree it took guts. It got him what he wanted–a lot of attention, which he well knew would include a lot of negative attention. Sneering at allegedly poor writing takes little talent, and one can always roll one’s eyes at those who imagine the disparaged writing is worthwhile (his photo suggests just such a tendency). Writing even a second rate novel requires more skill than is displayed by his somewhat clumsily written column.”

From Hawaii

Someone has to weed the garden. Looking back, I often feel I have pulled too many punches in the misguided effort to be kind. This doesn’t serve the reader and throws the burden on someone in asbestos with a blowtorch to do a controlled burn. It’s hardly just me who wimps out. The whole reviewing gig has become largely gutless — critics don’t want to diss a colleague in their MFA program, or someone from whom they might need to get a blurb for their next book.

I don’t think any good writer has been broken by bad reviews. But many inflated, trendy writers have pushed good writers to the side for a generation or so.

This biting exchange between Dana Gioia and James Wood on Slate is 11 years old. This was before Dana was chair of the NEA, and before Wood joined the New Yorker.

In their epistolary columns, D.G. writes to J.W.:

From the New Yorker

And if you think that most new poetry is–what is the polite word?–“uneven,” then just look at the criticism. The innocent reader of fiction cannot comprehend how dull, esoteric, and pandering poetry reviewing has become. Most critics never give a negative review. After all, in the small world of American poetry the critic will eventually meet the author. And who knows what writers will be sitting on the next prize committee? It is safer to declare everyone a genius. Reading the smarmy acclaim that fills most literary journals, one would think we live in an age of unprecedented poetic achievement. Welcome to Potemkin Village, Mr. Wood.

It may bring gentlemanly tears to your eyes to learn that even so tenderhearted and soft-spoken a critic as yours truly is often castigated for giving books negative or mixed reviews. The assumption is that contemporary poetry is such an endangered art that no one should criticize it in public. That Chamber of Commerce claptrap doesn’t even constitute an adequate philosophy for public relations, not to mention literary criticism. I believe that one reason poetry has such a small readership, even among the literati, is that current criticism is so bad. There is almost no really engaging or reliable public conversation about new poetry–just paid publicity and unpaid hype. Academic criticism has become so parochial in its concerns that it no longer has much relevance to the general literary reader, and the little journalistic criticism that remains rarely goes beyond log-rolling.

From the NEA

The exchange is interesting and, of course, witty.  I reread it occasionally to keep my standards up, in a world where so much garbage is being treated like crème brûlée.

Paul liked it, too.  He wrote me:  ” Cynthia, thanks for forwarding that Woods/Gioia dialogue. I’m only halfway through it, but am enjoying it. I wouldn’t compare it to the other piece; they explain very clearly and specifically what disappoints them about the poets, with less arrogance than sadness. They make the critique about the poets, rather than about themselves.”

But Paul’s comments made a further point:  Has the drive to whacked-out, souped-up internet-style writing pushed aside the criticism the average reader might crave — reviews where the writing is elegant and takes its time, where claims are buttressed more substantially than hit-and-run internet journalism offers?   Must every line be a punch to keep the reader’s attention?

Isn’t this the very thing Shivani was criticizing in Junot Díaz?  Isn’t this the litcritic equivalent of someone who, as he wrote,  “replaces plot in stories and novel with pumped-up ‘voice’”?

I attended last night’s reading of Omeros at Stanford Summer Theater. If this passage doesn’t describe the life of a writer, what does?

At the corner of Bridge
Street, we saw the liner as white as a mirage,
its hull bright as paper, preening with privilege.

“Measure the days you have left, do just that labour
that marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour

and sail coming in. All corruption will cry
to be taken aboard. Fame is that white liner
at the end of your street, a city to itself.”

— Derek Walcott, Omeros

Way over in England, they heard about Anis Shivani’s Huffington Post piece on the “15 Most Overrated Writers”, and ask instead “Who Are Your Favorite Underrated Writers?”  The photo with the article is of Milan Kundera.  Guardian writer Alison Flood seems to think he is underrated because he has not received a Nobel.  Most writers don’t receive a Nobel.  I’m not sure that counts.  (A late hat tip to Dave Lull… I wasn’t able to post this till 9.00 p.m.)

Anis Shivani himself promised in the Huffington Post to offer his own list at a future date, but meanwhile the Guardian’s commenters suggested:  G.K. Chesterton (several votes),  Péter Nádas, Shirley Jackson, Carl Michael Bellman, Elizabeth von Arnim, Russell Hoban, Marguerite Duras, Josef Skvorecky, Ford Madox Ford, Cees Nooteboom, Haruki Murakami, Terry Pratchett, Elizabeth Taylor, Rumer Godden, Antal Szerb, Anatoly Rybakov, Wallace Stegner (several votes, including this one: “Yes! Wallace Stegner! How could I have not mentioned him!  Angle of Repose is the best-written novel I’ve ever read, and one of my two favorites [the other being Forster’s A Room with a View ]. Stegner’s is the only novel to have ever made me cry merely for the beauty of the writing. Eat your heart out, Sherman Alexie!), Andrey Platonov (several votes), Sadegh Hedayat, Amin Maalouf, Guy de Maupassant (several votes), Mervyn Peake, Antonio Munoz Molina, among others.

What’s surprising is how little poetry is represented in the lists.  Anthony Hecht gets a much deserved mention from Alison Flood.  One mention of Edwin Arlington Robinson — which is going back a century.  Why not, say, Weldon Kees?  Or Tomas Venclova?

Fortunately, “Resurgence27” restores my faith in the future of poetry-reading by naming Vikram Seth‘s delightful The Golden Gate, a novel-in-verse (in which case, fiction and poetry) that was hailed when it came out in 1986, and then largely forgotten.

Seth wrote the book in 13 feverish months as a graduate student,  writing at a clip of  600 lines per month, all in Pushkinian sonnets, a project he described as “the whole passé extravaganza”:

How can I (careless of time) use
The dusty bread molds of Onegin
In the brave bakery of Reagan?
The loaves will surely fail to rise
Or else go stale before my eyes.

Gore Vidal wrote, “Although we have been spared, so far, the Great American Novel, it is good to know that the Great Californian Novel has been written, in verse (and why not?): The Golden Gate gives great joy.” Amazon.com’s reviewer says the book “will turn the verse-fearing into admiring acolytes.”

Vikram Seth

It’s not the book’s most glorious sonnet, by far, but those of us who remember the old bookstore/coffeeshop Printer’s Inc of California Avenue, Palo Alto, back in its pre-Amazon days (its current incarnation is a travesty), might appreciate perhaps the only tribute to a coffeehouse ever written in verse:

The enchanted bookstore, vast, rectangular,
Fluorescent-lit, with Bach piped through
The glamorous alleys of its angular
Warren of bookshelves,the dark brew
Of French roast or Sumatra rousing
One’s weak papillae as one’s browsing
Lead to the famed cups, soon or late,
That cheer but don’t inebriate.
Magical shoe box! Skilled extractor
Of my last dime on print or drink,
Mini-Montmartre, Printers Inc!
Haven of book freaks, benefactor
Of haggard hacks like me, who’ve been
Quivering for years to your caffeine.

Ashbery: "turning late twentieth-century American poetry into a hermetic, self-enclosed, utterly private affair"?

I was spellbound by Junot Díaz‘s “Doctor Manhattan structure” for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. On the other hand, there is some merit to the point that he “replaces plot in stories and novel with pumped-up ‘voice.'”  And if it’s true, who will tell him so now that he’s on the Pulitzer Prize Board?

Clearly, Anis Shivani will.

Over the weekend, he blasted the “15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers” at the Huffington Post. I wanted to think a bit before posting a link, so I’m late to the table on this one.

He writes:

Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity?  … It’s difficult to know today because we no longer have major critics with wide reach who take vocal stands. There are no Malcolm Cowleys, Edmund Wilsons, and Alfred Kazins to separate the gold from the sand. Since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by ‘theorists’ …

Anis Shivani ... this photo doesn't help him make his case

Some local reputations are taken apart — Stanford’s Sharon Olds (“Childbirth, her father’s penis, her son’s cock, and her daughter’s vagina are repeated obsessions she can always count on in a pinch,” Shivani writes, “Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can’t possibly recover”), San Francisco’s Amy Tan (“Flattened politics and history to private angst in depiction of minority assimilation. Empowered other immigrant writers to make mountains out of the molehills of their minor adjustment struggles”) and Socal’s Michael Cunningham (“Yet another gimmick man, yet another shtick peddler”)  William Vollmann of Sacramento makes the top spot on the list (“Third-rate Pynchon desperate to impress with quantity rather than quality. Critics taken in by sheer volume”).

Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Jonathan Safran Foer, Billy Collins, Junot Díaz and literary kingmaker Michiko Kakutani are on the list, too.

The West Coast has fought so hard for considerations in the nation’s literary affairs, I suppose we can consider it an achievement that, in 2010, we’ve finally made the grade with our handful of writers.

Naturally, Shivani will get slapped for this, and already has on the 1,658 comments to date, many of them vituperative.

Tan: "a made-for-success formula of family secrets wrapped in the multigenerational saga"?

But I admire tough reviewers who are willing to put on their hip boots on and do the dirty job of dissing — taking down a reputation that has, perhaps, been subject to inflation.  They keep the rest of the reviewing establishment honest and on its toes, make make the public scrutinize its tastes and herd instincts, and bravely risk making enemies among writers and publishers that they, too, will need for their careers.

And I trust that the good will survive.  Susan Sontag put it best:  “Reading should be an education of the heart,” she said.  “It keeps you–well, I don’t want to say honest, but something that’s almost the equivalent. It reminds you of standards: standards of elegance, of feeling, of seriousness, of sarcasm, or whatever. It reminds you that there is more than you, better than you.”

In other words, life is too short to read crappy books.

Interesting footnote:  I didn’t know that Mary Oliver helped organize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s papers with the poet’s sister, Norma.

OK, OK, I got it.  I finally got a kindle.  Kind of.  For a month, at least.

The call came about 3.20 p.m. yesterday from Kathleen Gust at the new “bookless” library at Stanford’s Engineering School.  The “bookless library” story was on NPR here, or the San Jose Mercury here.  The library has divested itself of something in the neighborhood of 60K books, and is putting 15 ebook readers in circulation to deal with the aftermath.  Needless to say, they’re in high demand.

How did the new library look?  The temptation would be to say “bookless” — but that wouldn’t be quite true.  Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention.  I was thinking about the kindle.  My friends told me it would transform my life, and I wanted it now. Now.  Now.  Now.  The first impression is the space looked like a regular booked library — just a small one, without too many books.

An affable young man about half my age helped me out.  Michael showed me how to turn it on.  He said I was lucky because the Kindle was still the best of the ebook readers.  Then he began to talk about five different outlets, or places to download, or something.  Perhaps he was speaking in tongues.

I asked Michael how many books were left in the library 16,000 books, minus the Timoshenko Collection, which was another several thousand.  So far, so good.  It made me feel better about the number of books stuffed into my living room (see Bookshelf Porn).  I suddenly felt reasonable again.

First disappointment:  I couldn’t connect to the Stanford’s Green (a.k.a. graduate) Library.  I guess the Green Library doesn’t “do” ebooks yet, at least not in any way I can access.

So I went to the kindle store on the little device, with Michael’s help.  The night before I had ordered an old hardback copy of Leishman’s translation of  Rilke.  The volume, with a pale blue dustjacket, had been a faithful companion when I lived in London. It had saved me from the charms of translators such as Stephen Mitchell, but had been lost in the years and relocations.  Could I have saved 30 bucks by having a kindle?

Not really.  They gave me half 28 titles — none of them Leishman.

So far, all I can access is titles like “Modern VLSI Design,” “Homogeneous Turbulence Dynamics,” “Spread Spectrum Electronics,” and “The Essential Engineer.”  One title looked promising:  “Kindle User’s Guide, 5th Edition.”

When I got home, I handed the device to my daughter Zoë.  She understood immediately and within seconds was accessing data.  Adam Gopnik said during his swing through Stanford last year that the new reason to have kids is that it’s a way of growing your own IT department.  It’s true.

“If I could get comics, that would be hella cool,” she said.

Wordsworth again:  “What we have loved/Others will love, and we will show them how.”  Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

Helen Pinkerton on left, Turner Cassity on right

It is always fun to introduce two friends who haven’t met each other yet.  Helen, meet Patrick.  He loves your poems.  Patrick, meet Helen.  He’s a Civil War buff.

The poet Helen Pinkerton has been given some belated and much deserved buzz  — Patrick Kurp has blogged about her at Anecdotal Evidence twice: here on Saturday and a week ago here.  In yesterday’s post, he discusses Helen’s poem “Degrees of Shade”:

Pinkerton’s poems often dramatize our divided natures. Our selves, “ever desiring to be right,” sabotage goodness freely given. We choose darkness over “the brightness that my will obscures,” and some, non-being over being. Those who “hating love’s compulsions love their hate” have been making a lot of noise lately and receiving a lot of attention.

Patrick Kurp and Helen share more than a love of poetry and a bent for Aquinas.  Helen is a Melville scholar and writes about the Civil War era as well — today’s post shows that it’s an era that also intrigues Patrick.  Somehow, I introduced them via the internet, and I can’t remember quite how.

“What a great poet. I only wish I had known of her a long time ago,” he wrote to me. “I knew the essay she had written for Barth’s edition of Winters’ poems but never pursued the matter. I share all of her interests I mentioned in the post – Melville, Civil War, etc. – which I suppose is part of the attraction, but I like her style – like Cunningham’s but with more meat on the bone. She’s closest, I think, to Bowers.”

The plot thickened when Frank Wilson at Books, Inq. posted Patrick’s link at Anecdotal Evidence, bumped it up and linked it also to my own interview with Helen  (to my knowledge, I am the only person to interview her), which is here.

I am always grateful for Frank’s links though, in truth, a link from Books, Inq. is often a cause for chagrin:  his headlines shame mine.  He explains: “My only journalism prize — on a plaque behind where I write — is a first prize for a feature headline from the Society of Professional Journalists no less. For an article about the follow-up to The Silence of the Lambs. What was the headline: Second helping!”

Blogs linking to blogs, who in turn link to other blogs.  The blogosphere is endlessly self-reflexive — like the Land O’ Lakes Butter box.

And speaking of belated praise:  The Washington Post Book World reviews Jack Rakove‘s Revolutionaries today here (“Rakove’s [book] offers a consolation to modern liberals: that no matter how serious the crises, we will somehow find what we need to make it through. His is a bedtime story for grown-ups”)…. say, didn’t that book come out some time ago?