Speaking of Bad Reviews

This essay about the good of a bad review is getting cited a lot lately.




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waaaa

Sorry, it was late and the baby was crying... you see what I go through for you people?

password? for what?

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Memo? For what?

Do Book Reviews Even Matter?

Or are books immune to newspaper coverage?

     also

Attack of the Killer Previews!

Well, here's one critic who thinks reviews matter.




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Edited by author 09-29-2003 12:31 AM
Well I think Anansi is shooting for immunity. One of the top people for Anansi and Evan Solomon were on a talk show today, on the business channel I think, talking about a book which he co-edited called 'Fueling the Future'. Anansi will be putting it out in November. They had me hooked. I thought for a moment I was on the shopping channel. Anyhow, the book release will be accompanied by a CBC program (Anansi and CBC have ties - old news to most of you I'm sure, but news to me, not surprising news, but news nonetheless) and full coverage in Maclean's. They were talking about the business of books, but it was more of an infomercial, and a persuasive one at that. I love the repetition of the word 'thinker' in the Anansi blurb (below). If I remember right, I think I heard it a few times on the show as well. I bet books will be flying off the shelves before anyone ever sees a review of this one.
http://www.anansi.ca/titles.cfm?pub_id=214
Not that reviews or previews are meant to be wings for books - I'm not implying that at all...

Edited by author 09-29-2003 01:47 AM
While writers would like book reviews to matter, especially if they get favourable ones, I think everyone has their own take on what reviews are, or ought to be.

Book publishers want book reviews to be a (free) means of marketing their product.

Newspaper owners probably want book reviews to be a means of enticing book publishers (especially the big ones) to buy advertsing space in their publications.

Reviewers want a soapbox, or at least a hundred bucks or so for groceries.

Writers want to be told how fabulous their books are, or failing that, to be told they at least merit enough attention for a review (of any kind) to be written and published somehwere people might read it. Writers want book reviews to stir people to go out and buy, and hopefully to read, their books. Writers want reviews to stroke their egos and to help them reach a broader audience.

The question is: how sucuessful are book reviews in fulfilling anyone's expectations?

Depends, TFK. All I know is that if the paper's too coarse, it chafes my a**hole.

The question of negative book reviews mattering or not mattering is unsolvable. Some buyers will be swayed and some intrigued. One person's dreck is another's delicious dreck.

Better to decide whether or not the cheapshot-artist reviewer should be hunted by his/her own prey and made to suffer in some way for making a name for her(him)self on the backs of we enlightened few.

Edited by author 09-29-2003 03:19 PM
Get a bad review, Killer?

(PS. Check out the 'Grammar Catchall' thread on the singular "they")

Well that's precisely the point isn't it, Fat Kid? Why should an attack on someone's hard work in the press be any different from an attack on one's person in the park, where striking back twice as hard would be considered a perfectly reasonable way to make the attacker stop hitting and go away? No-one would think less of a person who physically defended themself, yet we all cringe at the book review corrective letter to the editor.

In other words, should there be an unwritten code in place, as there seems to be, that a mean-spirited or ignorant reviewer will not necessarily suffer for his/her (ha) shittiness, because "any press is good press," or should an example be made, a head placed on a sharpened stake, to warn the small and gripey that there are consequences to all actions.

I think I'm reading that you assume I feel one way or another about this because of some past wound, but you'd be wrong. I have received good and bad reviews in relatively equal proportions, and have found the negative stuff to be at least educational, if painful to read. I'm just thinking in a theoretical sense, why are hatchet-jobbers seemingly immune to kickback?

Edited by author 09-29-2003 06:02 PM
Killer,

I don't think you can draw a parallel between a nasty review and a mugging--sticks and stones and all that. I think a better analogy is the alpha dog. If, as you say, the writer is big and strong and the reviewer a small, gripey, ressentiment-laden nobody, a yappy little lap-dog, then why should the the alpha-dog writer pay him any heed?

I think a corrective letter might be in order if the reviewer has made factual errors or has intentionally misrepresented the book by quoting out of context, for example, but if all you have to object to is the reviewer's opinions and judgments of your work, then it's awfully hard to make a response look like anything but wounded vanity. If you're truly the bigger dog, then it's a fight you can afford to walk away from. And, really, do you think a piqued response is actually going to cause a reviewer to suffer? If he's as big a prick as you think he is, it's only likely to provide him with more glee.

"Calumnies are best answered with silence."
     -Ben Jonson

Edited by author 09-29-2003 07:20 PM
You're free to write the corrective. For poor or fine reasons. But the next beat will be the wider perception of what that exchange means, and we know that's not going to satisfactory, so the corrective needs to be reapplied, this time plastering all the readers - the source of the unwanted perception. In the case of a canadian book reviewed you may well know most of the people who've read the review and retort so you can probably straighten them all out in one big E-snit. It's a question of a very doable arms against a sea of troubles type scenario. Killer has a point - if you start crazy - you gotta end crazy.

I've only received one "bad" review, and it was so bad that it was a dismissal -- one paragraph in an omnibus review -- with the most concise insult possible. Now, two things: first, the paper the review was in matters so little that I didn't even know about the review until months later (Vancouver Sun), and second, it was by someone who I had never heard of, and still haven't (Mark Cockran?).

That said though, even if Paul Muldoon himself were slashing my poetic tires (tyres?) I wouldn't respond with a corrective. It just sounds like whining to me.

The most important thing to remember is that reviews don't mean sh*t a week after they're printed. Once your friends stop gossiping, they're forgotten. Good reviews get excerpted on your next book, bad reviews line bird cages. If there's some enemy you made in first year creative writing who's keeping a scrap book of your defeats then, in a sense, you've actually won that battle. Everyone else forgets.

The Red Ninja

Cockran. oh my. imagine grade school. Cockran. oh my.

I gotta get a bird

And You Think the Review of Your Book was Bad?

The Victorians were vicious!




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Cochrane? I think it was he who wrote an incredibly facile defense of George Bowering in the V. Sun. I sent him a skewer e-mail on the topic, but he declined to respond...

Now that's what I'm talking about... drowned in a roadside ditch, a possible suicide. Let everyone who thinks they can build up their own career by tearing down another read the life of that Collins character.

Just to clarify, I'm not against excellence in critical writing, and the holding of writers to a very high standard. On the contrary.

And I do not believe in not saying anything at all if you truly despised a book. I'm talking about negativism as a project. And I'm not even asking for its abolishment. We are all terribly entertained when someone takes the gloves off in a review, whether we agree or not with the nasty quippery on display.

But what I do believe in is revenge. Good old-fashioned, ugly plotting and stewing. Arranging for your enemy's demise in a stagnant ditch shows impressive Victorian patience and subtlety. I don't have time for that. I was thinking more of an 'accidental' pint of beer down the front of the sweater, or the birth of a rumour involving court orders and genital enhancement devices. I believe in these wonderful human responses, and am sad to see so few of them in Canadian literary society.

Revenge?! Yeeha! Here's to a Canada slopped with accidental pints! May wet sweater salons pop up everywhere. Here hear, hear here

Yeah, that'll learn 'em!

There's far too much positivism (in the non-philosophical sense of the word); I say bring on the negative reviews.

It seems to me that Mr. Collins had ample justification for his negative review of his former friend. His nasty demise is a bit tragic.

Reviewing Shenanigans Revealed

At least they admitted it... (login: bookninja, password: waaaaa)




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Can't We All Just Get Along?

150 word review the centre of a feud. Maybe it was the insult of a mere 150 words being called criticism that started this whole mess...




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Social snub hurts as much as poke in the eye: Who's going to measure the effect of a bad review?

http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/10/09/ego.pain.ap/index.html

..

(To anyone I've hurt, I'm sorry...)

Ya. Think of what my poor anterior cingulate cortex goes through every time the boys go off in some e-corner to chat.
Oh the pain. Not fair.

Circulated by M.C. on the smallpressers e-list:

"Oct 12, 2003

Dear Martin Levin,

It's been more than a month since the Globe and Mail's Saturday Books section carried a single poetry review. I want to let you know how discouraged and, frankly, bothered I am by this new trend.

Does your paper not consider poetry a worthy genre? Is crime fiction deserving of a page of coverage simply because this genre sells ? Do we rate the value of our literature only against its mainstream sales record?

If so, I see no reason to review poetry, as it will never, at least in this country, amass sales records of note. All of our poetry publishers--and more than a few of them are small presses working with few resources--have staked their personal livelihood on the publication of work that is, essentially, of primary relevance to fewer than a thousand readers.

Any challenging poetry is relevant to perhaps, let's say, 200 readers. Perhaps in the same way that specialized science is relevant to a limited group of practitioners. But does this mean the work is unimportant? Does this mean that we would all fare better if many of the hundreds of practising professional poets in Canada were to stop publishing?

What would we be left with? I don't like the picture that emerges for me, of a mediocre, Hallmark-card-leaning arena of poetry hacks who keep writing only because they can sell sentiment. Without the generative call-and-response of criticism, writers erase their own potential to be relevant, to push the envelope of their own excellence, to attempt to extend their formal and thematic reach.

I have published one poetry review in your paper, where I took to task new books by three worthy poets. Many people in the literary community commented to me that not only had they read the review but that they'd loved it, for how seriously and passionately it took the works at hand. I suspect they were relieved and a little aroused just to see it, an actual considered lengthy review of three quite different books, in and among the dozens of fiction and biography title reviews and ads for the Atwood empire, now standard to your Books section.

I read all the reviews you publish of poetry titles, and I think that they tend to be of a higher quality than much of the other reviewing. Perhaps because the critics involved know the stakes at hand. They realize the poet under observation might well receive not a single other review in this country. This is sad, and ultimately very damaging to our literature.

There is a great deal of insignificant and lazy and embarrassingly bad poetry published in this country, and not all of it could withstand even the softest reviewer's assessment. But there is a proportion of poetry written and published on a regular basis that is brilliant, and moving, and very compelling. There are very interesting trends and chiasms of subversion from which emerge important and new work.

I have offered in the past, but I'll do it again: I will write poetry reviews for the Globe for free, or for an exchange ad offered to any of the superlative small poetry presses in this country, as often as you like, just to see my colleagues received in print, to see their work taken seriously, and to have it measured as art essential to the intellectual life of contemporary Canadian culture.


Alternatively , I think I'd better cancel my subscription, because my Saturday morning Books section is becoming a real letdown. There's no reason to treat poets any differently that novelists are treated; with regard, interest and expectation. If the Globe can't take on this responsibility, who will?

Sincerely,

Margaret Christakos"

For what it's worth:

Approximately eight weeks ago I was entreated by the editor of the Globe and Mail's book section, Martin Levin, to write a review of a single book of poetry, asking that the review be submitted for publication within one week. The review was written and submitted on time. I was paid for the review last week, though the piece has yet to appear. I hope that it does soon.

Edited by author 10-13-2003 12:26 AM
For what it's worth: I read MC's Globe and Mail review ( http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Art...Entertainment/Books ). Judging from the depth and quality of the thought and prose, she should only be writing reviews for free. What is she, trying to lower the minimum wage? Fuck, it sounds like a desperate plea. A little dignity, please.

Edited by author 10-13-2003 12:45 AM
I agree, writers, and yes, even writers of book reviews if not of books, should be paid for their work. Though Christakos' offer to wave her fee in exchange for ad space for small presses is noble, I suspect, from the Globe and Mail's perspective, it is also a tad unbalanced. I would wager even a small ad in the Globe's book pages costs more than the average reviewer of poetry is paid...however infrequently that may be.

Is it worth noting that Margaret Avison's book, Concrete and Wild Carrot, which as we all know was awarded the Griffin Award this year, was not reviewed by the Globe and Mail until it had won the prize, which was, by then, nearly a year after its publication?

Still, a review in the Globe and Mail is boon for any poet. Infrequent they may be, but they get noticed. I, for one, was sad to see the old "How Poems Work" column go dodo. Although the rotating-columnist format occasionally yielded some dull stretches, the feature at least afforded the art form some measure of dignity by deigning to cover it at all.

Also, it is perhaps unfair to put all the pressure on Martin Levin for the paper's flimsy allegiance to verse. Who knows what pressure is placed on him from the top down to favour more commercially viable products. After all, whoever signs Levin's paycheque is interested in selling advertising space, and when was the last time a small press took out a full-page? This isn't meant to excuse what some might regard as 'whoring for ad dollars', but might be a possible explanation.

Edited by author 10-13-2003 09:46 AM
FK,

I agree that the Globe's lack of poetry coverage is shameful and I, too, miss the sometimes uneven How Poems Work; the column turned me on to several people whose work I might otherwise not have read.

I think the fact or perception that a review in the Globe is a great boon is problematic. Not that I doubt it, but I think this has led to some slanted reviewing practices. The last poetry reviews I read in the Books section were done by Ken Babstock, and I thought they had very little critical merit. Which pissed me off because he's a very intelligent guy and a damn gifted poet, and he can bloody well do better. To be blunt, I don't want to see more poetry reviews in the paper if they're reviews of that nature. A pet peeve of mine is the review that draws more attention to its own prose than to the poetry under consideration. I find Babstock, Clarke, and Christakos are all guilty of this: egregious 'poetic' turns of phrase and hyperbolic silliness designed to make its way on to book jackets. Now, I realize that there are some Toronto poets here who probably don't want to agree or disagree with me in this forum, but Christ we have to be a little less sensitive about each other's feelings when it comes to matters like this. Maybe then we can start expanding poetry's base of relevance beyond the 200 souls of Christakos' letter (altho I suspect she came up with this number in reference to her own brand of poetry; some books do break 1000).

I don't doubt the nobility of MC's intentions, but the wisdom of her suggestions and the amount of examination to which she has subjected her assumptions. For example, I think we would indeed be better off if many of our hundreds of poets would simply stop writing. What's quantity got to do with anything? And the notion that the Globe's neglect of poetry will somehow lead to a proliferation of Angelouesque Hallmark verse robots is pure foolishness. They're already out there and nothing the Globe does will do a bloody thing to increase or decrease their numbers.

Hear here!

I will not stop writing. I refuse!
Besides, won't your brilliant nuggets look even more brilliant next to my gravel?
And what about all those who make their living panning for gold? I don't mind getting swirled about and dumped out if there's a chance something valuable can be found in the process.

Right on, Twinkle. Anyone who stops writing poetry because the Globe doesn't pay any attention to them shouldn't have been writing in the first place. No fighter, no writer, all that jazz.

Just as likely that your nuggets will shine next to my gravel as vice versa; I ain't tryin to say I'm any better than anyone else--I just hate it when reviewers pretend that everything merits a more-or-less positive review. Besides, gravel is in many ways more useful than gold. It's mud I can't abide.

Keep on panning!

ARC missed "How Poetry Works" too. Here's a link to the press release:
http://www.cyberus.ca/~arc.poetry/logentri...etrypluggedin.shtml

It's going to be a monthly column. The first one is here:
http://www.cyberus.ca/~arc.poetry/howpoemswork/

They invite you, yes YOU! to contribute:
http://www.cyberus.ca/~arc.poetry/howpoemswork/guidelines.shtml

I hope that Sonnet L'Abbe doesn't hear about this. Remember the drivel she spouted in her columns? I could almost hear her telling her friends she was going 'shake things up!' (In one she had a go at the 'authentic ethnic voice,' her being so ethnic and all. Part of her grand plan to eventually appropriate and syphon post-colonial cache from every ethnicity possible. White girl, brown skin. There are a few of em around.) Half of the time that column was just a way for one friend to scratch another friend's back anyway.

Well that is something, but is it much? Not crazy about the Can-con stipulations, but what else can you expect from ARC? Word up, Fish Fish; they shouldn't let anyone write on poems by friends. Someone should do Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Strand, and Mark Levine, just to fuck them up.

Again, FF, yes and yes again. Sonnet L'Abbe's columns stank. Christian Bok's too (if it ain't avant-garde, it's crrrap!). I remember Fraser Sutherland being pretty good; Richard Sanger too.

I do like the Nickel poem; very rich lines with all that assonance and alliteration mixed in with the rhymed pentametres--as much hustle and bustle as the market itself.

I was glad to see the weekly focus on poetry in "How Poems Work," but never quite liked that title, as though poetry is always some dense code that someone needs to explain to you.

If anyone has the ear of Martin Levin, feel free to suggest "Recommended Poem," which I think works a lot better. The text written can then form a mini-review (in theory a positive one) rather than be forced into explanation.

I find it odd that L'Abbe would have written so pedantically about ethnic authenticity. I remember seeing her read her poem about the plight of Uzbekistani fishermen on the dried-up Aral Sea…which is written in the voice of an Uzbekistani fisherman, or at least in what is supposed to be the voice of an Uzbekistani fisherman, but is actually written in the voice of L’Abbe imitating an Uzbekistani fisherman, which is a lot like listening to an imitation of just about anything…it’s a bit of a joke.

Penboy, how 'bout "Poetry Illuminated for Morons and Philistines" (PIMP)? Pretty catchy, huh?

Globe and Mail breaks the silence on the existence of poetry: Leznoff praised.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/Articl...OAH//?query=leznoff

A poet getting a good review from Fitzgerald is like a hunter getting praise from Charles Manson.

Cuckoo!! Cuckoo!!

Maybe it's because I don't read much true crime, but Fish Fish, are you suggesting that the positive review wasn't warranted. I quite enjoyed Leznoff's first book (he's a Montreal native, go Habs!), and until today I didn't know he has a second one out. I'm looking forward to it.

Claude, I think Fish Fish is trying to say that Judith Fitzgerald, who wrote the review, has a reputation for being a tad on the eccentric side, and also for being someone not known to write a lot of negative reviews.

It’s funny, as the editor of the book in question, I actually think Fitzgerald’s reading of the book is off the mark. Still, I think it’s a good, solid book, and Leznoff is worthy of the praise. I’m a little disappointed the review wasn’t accurate, but I’m happy the review was positive. Gift horse. Mouth. No looky-loo.

What I’m happy about most is that Globe and Mail finally ran another poetry review at all. Should we start a pool for the next one? Anyone want to put down a guess for next week? The week after?

In what regard would you say it's inaccurate, keeping in mind I haven't read the book?

Z, she seems to think the themes of the book are "honesty" and "issues confronting us in an age of terminal optimism."

I'm not sure what she means by these things, but, to me, Leznoff's book is more about "reality" than "honesty", more about "delusion" or "denial" than "optimism". They might seem like minor distinctions, but in the poems these distinctions matter.

Perhaps to be honest about reality, you have to admit that delusion and denial are the only valid sources of optimism :)

That's cynical, Z. Almost nihilist. I like it.

I was once called a nihilist in a bar by a British Aircraft Maintenance Engineer. I killed him.

Deja Vu...?

Have we linked to this before? Or just read it everywhere?




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New "How Poems Work" at ARC:

http://www.cyberus.ca/~arc.poetry/howpoemswork/

Charles Bruce, one of the most under-rated Canadian poets of the last century.

The Malahat Review, Fall 2003, is a special issue examining reviewing. I just read "The Ethics of the Negative Review" by Jan Zwicky where she states this: "But the artist's position, I believe, must still be construed as one of trust, one that requires of reviewers respect for the thin skin that is essential to creativity." Of course, it's unfair to isolate this statement - the whole essay should be read. I only quote this bit because I'm feeling more than guilty for enjoying some negative reviews without giving a thought to the feelings of the writer. Yikes! I fear my taste in reviews is impaired - I could be suffering from literary Archie Bunkerism. I always knew there was something wrong with me...

I haven't read Zwicky's essay, so can't quarrel with her thesis, but I think it's precisely the feelings of the author, qua person, that have to be left at the door when one undertakes the review of a book. This doesn't mean that one says of a book one doesn't like that the author is an irredeemable shithead and should die a painful death. Merely that intellectual honesty is the primary responsibility of the reviewer. If you're not prepared to be unflinching, and to state your opinions unequivocally (unless of course your opinions are equivocal), then don't be a critic, be a sensitive artist and leave it at that.

Yep. Just read Douglas Glover's "On Book Reviewing: In Recovery". Yep. That fixes me. A flinching wimp I'll be, winsome, wimpled and wimbly-wambly.

Edited by author 10-23-2003 11:36 PM
Twinkle, I haven’t read Zwicky’s entire essay yet, though I have skimmed through it. I have to say, it seems more than a little Pollyanna to bring the writer’s feelings into the ethics of a negative review. She’s saying, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

When it comes to having a meaningful and open discourse on books, this kind of kindergarten-teacher admonishment of negative criticism seems, frankly, silly, if not completely asinine… and maybe even dangerous. Some books are not good. This is a fact. Facts do not have feelings.

If I say about one book or another in a review that “I think it is not very good,” then that is my opinion, and readers of both my review and the book I’m reviewing are perfectly free to disagree with that opinion. This is what critical discourse is all about.

For me, I believe that if we follow Zwicky’s call to praise and persist in treating our national literature like an emotionally fragile kindergarten class, it will continue to be treated like a kindergarten class by the rest of the world (I’m thinking mainly of the perception of Canadian poetry as a “short street” not worth going down).

I think it’s important, maybe, to remember that there is a big difference between a negative review and a cruel one. I don’t want to see reviewers getting too personal, or being too cleverly cruel at their subject’s expense.

To boot, eliminating negative reviews from critical discourse would render positive reviews utterly meaningless. Why bother reading book reviews at all, then, if you already know that each and every review you read will be a positive one. In such an atmosphere, book reviews become fundamentally obsolete. Why bother writing them? All one would need is a list of approved books, those books that would otherwise receive good reviews, in some editorial official’s opinion, but since all reviews would basically say the same positive things, there would be no need write them at all. A list of approved books? Sounds a little fascist, doesn’t it? Sounds a little dangerous, too.

There are far more fragile things in the world that need protecting than a writer’s artistic ego. Criticism, especially the negative kind, must be accepted as an occupational hazard if free and open discourse is to remain possible. By publishing a book the author is releasing the text into a world where it will be evaluated. Chin up, partner. Some dogs have tongues and some have teeth. Live with it. Right?

Yeah, I tried to read Zwicky's essay, and I just couldn't get through it. Started to feel all sweet and sticky and the like. Too saccarine for my taste. I agree pretty much with TFK.

Most reviews written in this country are generally good reviews, with a little book reporting and perhaps one negative thing mentioned. That's it. Basically useless as critical engagement with the book. In papers, some of this has to do with word limit (though I'm not in any way convinced that more words will change the kind of reviews that are written, especially with most of the people who are actually doing the reviews in these papers – read: Sonnet L'Abbe, Judith Fitzgerald, etc.), but even in the lit mags, it's generally the same thing. And then on the otherside, you get someone, like Carmine Starnino , who is so zealous about a certain kind of writing that it's difficult at times to judge whether his negative criticism is coming from his preprogrammed response to a poetry or from an actual engagement with the text. Whenever I read one of Carmine's reviews, much of the time I find myself generally agreeing with much that he has to say. But there usually comes a point where I think he flips over into a dogmatic reading of the poetry and away from an engaged reading of it, and that's when I feel he starts preaching about what it should be rather than what it is. Maybe that's his right if he's taking the time to do such thorough reviews, but I find it gives him less credibility because it just seems like his old schtick about how the only good poetry being written in Canada is coming out of Montreal. Does he actually believe that?! He says it publically often enough that I can only assume he does. Amazing to me. . .

Edited by author 10-24-2003 01:36 AM
Sopwith,

Yes, he does say it publically, and yes it is silly, and as editor at Signal, it would seem that he doesn't practice his faux-gospel. Carmine does say a lot of things I don't agree with, and some of those things seem to be more reflexive than reflective. However, I've also seen him do very fair and balanced reviews of people like Erin Moure (or however she spells her name these days), when I expected him to take the hatchet to her. And I've also seen him write negative things about Solway, and express his aesthetic differences with Harris, whom I know he regards as a mentor. That Lilburn essay is a perfect example of how he'll suspend his admiration for a poet to take a more objective look at the book at hand.

I don't think his tastes are entirely predictable. He has his aesthetic preferences, and he has his reasons for them. He wears them on his sleeve. Almost anyone who's going to read a review by him knows this and factors it in, I think. So be it; far better to have Carmine with his quirks and prejudices than no Carmine at all.

FK: word up, homes.

Edited by author 10-24-2003 02:30 AM
Z: Yeah, I agree that Carmine's reviews are generally a good thing for the Canadian poetry scene. He reads and engages with text very well (better it seems than most reviewers out there) and is excellent at stating what he thinks about those texts. And as I said, I generally agree with a lot of what he says. But, I personally have little patience with that kind of negative critical stance that he espouses re: the Montreal school, etc. because it just seems so ludicrous and like he's doing it to provoke people. What's the point of that? To agitate people for the sake of petty politicking? Even if Carmine just sticks with telling it like he sees it in reviews, he'll agitate plenty enough people out there. So why that stuff? Makes no sense. Though perhaps, now that I think of it, that stuff comes mostly from his general essays/diatribes on the state of Canadian poetry and not in specific reviews. But it still can colour people's perceptions of certain critical responses he has to poetry, and I think this is a detriment to his work as a critic. Though, after all this being said, perhaps you're right that this is factored in by people reading his reviews (though I'm not sure by everyone, especially those who have a hate-on for him.) I certainly wouldn't want Carmine to stop reviewing books. Hell, I'd love for him to totally cut up my first book one day (if I ever finish the darn thing) and tell me what I'm doing wrong. :-)

P.S. Has Carmine ever done a review of a book he actually really, unabashedly liked? Just wondering. . .

Edited by author 10-24-2003 02:43 AM
Sopwith, I know he has, but can't think of what they were off the top of my head.

And yeah, I'd gladly welcome him doing his worst with my first.

Okay then, time to find a copy of The Malahat.

I'm not surprised to hear what I'm hearing about an essay by Jan Zwicky... wait a second, yes, I am surprised, and just a little outraged. Isn't she a hoity-toit academic? Since when are hand-holding and ego-stroking key components to the building of a great national literature?

I thought I was done with this person when I dozed off during "Songs to Relinquish My Attention Span."

Oh, I'm sure she's a nice person, and, wow, what great taste in men.

Killer, don't you think such offhand remarks might hurt her feelings?

"Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent."
    --Wittgenstein

Hmm, reviews. Yeah.

Attempted, this year, to write a diplomatic but honest review of a poor poetry book. Went way way way out of my way to suggest what was wrong with the book without unnecessary poison in the wording, and praised what I thought was clearly valuable.

Got a one line email from the author insulting me. I think perhaps honesty is seen as cruelty in this country, no matter what you do.

ah, penboy, some writers do take honesty better than that. A review of my first collection said some positive things, but also included comments such as "nonsensical" and "abstract to the point of incoherence". Ok, ouch. But the comments were fair. I ran with the criticism with the intention of improving. My next manuscript was the better for it.

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
     --Wilde

Twinkle, what's your collection called?

"diarrheic flow of words" eek! A takedown artist, indeed!

Z, please forgive my unwillingness to betray my pseudonym - I'm not ready yet. Way too much fun being Twinkle.

Twinkle, are you willing to let people guess?

No. Twinkle might not like the guesses, and Twinkle doesn't want to lie if a guess is right.

I'm just here to enjoy the brilliant banter and to learn what I can from the collective brilliance. Moritz, for example, is not talked about in my crowd. Nor is Levine, etc.

Your Sageship, I am quiet, I am harmless. I seek only your wisdom

or should that be My Sageship...

Twinkle, glad to hear some writers take the news better. You must be mature or something. I have yet to face the test, not having a book, but it will be interesting. I'll do my best to be reasonable about whoever reviews my book. I won't call him a poopy-pants, no sir.

Anyone notice the Globe has a poetry review today. That's two in a row, isn't it?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Art...Entertainment/Books

A review by Paul Vermeersch at that. Hmm. Name sounds familiar :)

Never heard of him.

Twinkle, does your first name have two a's in it?

I know Twinkle's name: it's Rumplestiltskin, isn't it, Twinkle?

FK, Rilke of course wrote verse in German and French, Milton and Hopkins in English and Latin. Dante must have written in Latin before his shift to the vernacular.

In prose, besides Beckett and Kundera, Conrad and Nabokov are two very notable examples of people writing extremely well in a second language. Considering the precision with which those two write, they might as well be poets--and Nabokov did write a lot of verse, for that matter.

Can anyone else think of other examples?

Paul who?

Z, what the hell are you talking about? Are you trying to get us back on topic? Sheesh. These east coasters have absolutely no sense of lackaday.

Haven'tcha heard, Ninja? We're all defeatists. Just ask Stephen Harper.

Where's that damn peanut butter?



Steven Harper’s Notion of the East Coast Ethic

Decades of defeat, he deems,
Have damned us dismal defeatists,
Lifetimes of losing left us poor losers,
Hefty leftist handouts made habit
The stretching of hands, Oliver
Twist-like, pleading for more.

But hark! salt-stained sons & maritime daughters,
Take heart, eastern sisters & brothers:
This sinning condition’s only partly our fault
(After all, the Alliance still needs our vote!),
And Harper knows just what to doctor:

He prescribes an adrenalin shot
Straight to our slack, sluggish hearts.
His hardy party can cure mediocre malaise,
Get fat arses uncoupled
From the feds gravy-train,
Set lazy, crooked souls straight,
End our addiction with illiberal doses
Of Alberta tough love, or B.C. methadone.

The Hatchet Man

Pro kneecapper Peck profiled in the Times (login: bookninja, password: waaaa)




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The Pecking Order

Dale Peck complains about gay stereotypes, having no allies, and the state of literature today, while also managing to call our beloved compatriot Bookslut (we poach off her all the time) "ditch-dirty stupid." All in one long interview.




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Offtopic:

Twinkle, I think your name is wreaking havoc with the google spider here...

I got this:

Painted Dr. Scholl's
Handpainted & fun Scholl's sandals. See what's hot for spring & summer.
www.mytwinkletoes.com

Bookninja,

ya had and maybe still have me worried. Going by the google spider results you list, I thought and maybe still think you figured out who I am and you're saying I stink. But you seem kind, so no, that can't be. Just a silly coincidence, right?

Poor Twinkle just aint twinkling tonight. Ugh.

Twinkle, it would be a mighty stink indeed that could be smelled across three provinces-worth of fiber optic cable.

No, I just find the google spider amusing. Shine on, point of light.

You know, people used to accuse Philip Marchand of kneecapping and whinging against Canlit's darlings. I wonder how Peck changes that, contextually. I mean, he seems like a teddy bear by comparison. I don't agree with everything Marchand says, but generally I like his tone and style more than Peck's. I also respect that Marchand is a Critic, rather than a Novelist-Critic (ie, someone who stands to gain sales from any infamy). I think we need a small army of Marchand-like critics prowling about, but we could also do with a few less peckerheads like Dale.

Oh, Ninja, I think you're just being homophobic :)

Doesn't Marchand have a novel out now?

i got candid pix of the writers of today. wan'any?

Which writers, and where?

you should have a place for me to send my candid pix of today's writers. Then you could show 'em to everybody.

different kinds of writers. some that are talking on your website here today under assumed names.. some that would never.

Send them to pictures@bookninja.com.

Why do I have a feeling I'm going to regret this?

And why do I think the words of Moritz at the end of "On Distinction" in _Rest on the Flight into Egypt_ somehow apply:
"the squabble over who will write the history
of this paradise of demons casting each other out."

Battle Royale

The Globe's poorly copyedited summation of the state of, for lack of an intelligent word, "snark" in North America.




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While I cannot completely disagree with Kate Taylor's summation of the quality of Canadian literary reviewing (though she has obviously never read Starnino), it's great to see she is bringing the same complete ignorance concerning the differences between Canadian and British markets to the book world that she's been showing off for years in theatre.

Clueless, that one.

hey, whatever happened to those "candid" pics of today's writers?

The guy sent me one but never responded to my queries, so I let it go...

The First Time a Sun Paper has Convinced Me of Anything

I'll buy and read this now, whereas I might not have before. What a strange and wonderful power journalism has when used for good...




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Alex Good on Kate Taylor's snark piece:

http://www.goodreports.net/news.htm

I wish he wrote daily....

Perhaps he would, but the poor bastard has a job :)

Getting a Good Whuppin'

Alex Good lets loose on Taylor's, for lack of an intelligent word, "snark" piece. (I challenge you, enlightened ninja reader, to preface the word "snark" with "for lack of an intelligent word" whenever possible. Let's kill this thing.)




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What's That in the Sky? A Bird? A Plane? A Flock of Seagulls?

No, it's CanLitMan, and he's citing limpid prose!



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Sound Familiar?

Could this piece on music criticism (login: bookninja, password: waaaa) be applied to, say, book reviewing?



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But then Solway would have to concede a grudging respect for Carson, and that would be absolutely no damn fun at all!

Marchand's piece rings true. It bugs me sometimes I can't just read a book without disassembling it in the process. Then again, every now and then I read something that makes me forget about the mechanics almost altogether. Maybe this is the real subjective measure of great writing.

Hey Kathryn,

Félicitations on receiving an utterly nonsensical review. Fortunately, he summarised enough stories that I'm now very interested. Must get to that damn library. If only it didn't mean leaving the house...

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/Articl...Entertainment/Books

You got the part about my narrative balls , though, I hope.

And your narrative balls are now rolling about on my bookshelf. Fuck the library! Fuck groceries! It better be good :)

Hey Kathryn, email me when you get a chance.

frozenbard@yahoo.ca

"I Am Prejudiced Against CanLit Writers"

While trying to figure out a way to give all you junkies your daily fix, I stumbled across this somewhat amusing discussion of Dennis Lee's Un from earlier this year. Also came across this (also older) elegy for the Canadian book world.


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Alex Beam, Friend of Canada

Apparently we do the book review best of all. So quit yer belly achin.


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Humbug! Ya know Bream's just using Toronto as a strategically placed burr.

So, it's official then. The job of the reviewer is to sell books. Was Bream talking about the reviews in the Globe, or the ads for the books being reviewed?

Apply this to Books? Dare We?

Think for yourself when in the presence of art? Hmm... Novel, feasible, sensible. They may be onto something here...



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Hm, yes, then people might stop reading the Wasteland.

Interesting...

I recently had a conversation with two coworkers about a new art book that came into the store. Big book, full of images, all kinds and styles of art represented. There was almost no text in the book, however. No explanatory notes. No essays. No theory. No proscribed readings of any of the works included. Both of my coworkers are guys who are educated and who "speak art", but they were saying how much they felt the book was lacking for not explaining any of the art it contains. I thought it was wonderful to just show the art, without explanation, so that people looking through the book would have to think for themselves, which is exactly why Rupert Christiansen says likes the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain, yet both of my coworkers seems reticent to accept this concept.

It seems to me to be a product of regurgitative education. We're all very comfortable with ideas, as long as we don't have to have any of our own.

"It seems to me to be a product of regurgitative education. We're all very comfortable with ideas, as long as we don't have to have any of our own."

Where'd'ya steal that one from, FK? :) "One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."--Walter Bagehot, 1869

It does seem that for the last 50-100 years, our society has been enthralled by expertise, to the point now that most people are afraid to take one step or forward one judgment without consulting a higher authority. I blame it on Ben Spock. I'm curious to know of you parents out there (Ninja, Kathryn, Claude, Evil): did you read any books on parenting before or since the birth of your wee ones?

Edited by author 11-20-2003 07:44 PM
I'm split right down the middle on this. Sometimes I like to be told what to think - especially with art because I don't 'speak' art. But people who do speak the language of a particular art form don't have the market cornered on interpretation. I get that. I just like to know stuff, and I have a bad habit of submitting to authority.

It's funny that the author used an interpretive 'gloss' to tell us a better way to appreciate art, when he cites the Aesthetic movement.

I think the author makes a bit of a sloppy assumption (or maybe I'm assuming because of my sloppy reading) that the need to read the program notes and be guided is new, and a result of popular culture. The thing is, opera was written in Italian because Italians were listening to it. Much of the art we've dragged foward from the past has become increasingly distanced for popular comprehension, but it's important to remember that it wasn't meant to be obscure. It was either popular culture at the time, and we simply lack the vernacular now and need help to understand it, or it was created for an elite audience of the educated, but they still would have had the interpretive tools to make sense of the art without the Coles notes. We need translators because we have access to such a breadth of art, and if it was composed in a language we don't speak, isn't it natural to want a translation?

... Did you read any books on parenting before or since the birth of your wee ones?

Nope.

Hm, yes, then people might stop reading the Wasteland.

Give it another chance, Zed. Flawed as it is, there are some absolutely beautiful passages in it.

Oh, I know, Evil. I've had a love-hate relationship with the Wasteland ever since I first read it about 8 years ago (and I've probably read it at least 15 times since). The intellectual wanker in me loves it, the grass-roots romantic in me hates it, and the poet in me can't help but admire--check that, be in awe--of the better passages, many of which I'll carry with me to my grave (I'll be the guy lined up at the gates saying "huh, who would've thunk death had undone so many"). Anyone who pisses me off as much as Eliot must be doing something right. It's more the legacy of Eliot, Joyce et al that irritates me than their work itself; i.e. the notion that art must be difficult and esoterically referential to be good or important.

Call me a teenager, but my favourite poem by Eliot is still The Hollow Men, while most of his stuff just makes my eyes roll, a reaction to Eliot's utter wankishness.
I'm not alone, see here:
http://lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/arc.../cat_t_s_eliot.html

Generally, I've found people who "simply looooove" Prufrock tend to be a little dandyish, like Stewie on The Family Guy.

Eliot. Ugh.

Edited by author 11-20-2003 07:30 PM
FK: "It seems to me to be a product of regurgitative education. We're all very comfortable with ideas, as long as we don't have to have any of our own."

This seems unfair to me. I appreciate those audio tours at art galleries that talk about various details in the paintings. There's a picture of Turner's in the Tate gallery that is full of all sorts of details I would never have noticed otherwise. As a result of having someone point them out, the painting became much more interesting and complex and charged. I started thinking about it more, not less.

The audio tours are good in that you don't HAVE to use them, so you still have that choice. Hard to give people a choice in terms of art books, though. Either it has commentary, or it doesn't.

"Though I admire and envy Eliot’s poetic skills, his poetry seldom touches my heart because I’m unable to share his vision of man’s nature or his view of the world itself."--Loren Webster

That's pretty much my opinion on Eliot too. Begrudging admiration for a curmudgeonly asshole (W.C. Williams' epithet for T.S. was "that asshole, Eliot").

Irving Layton perhaps said it best:

T.S. ELIOT

Harvard and English mist;
the sick Christian;
the American tourist
with an interest in monasteries
rather than castles:
in shrines for aging knees;
a zeal for poetry without zest,
without marrow juices;
at best, a single hair
from the beard of Dostoievsky.

Prufrock has never been my favourite either, except for crisis and ices. But the Four Quartets, ah....

Interesting that Loren Webster mentions John Webster's poem 'Vanitis Vanitatum' in connection with 'Whispers of Immortality'. It is a lovely poem, of course, and draws on the book of Ecclesiastes as does 'The Waste Land' (of which a fine hypertext version can be found here). TWL references another John Webster poem A Dirge.

It seems to me that Loren Webster's reading of Eliot is influenced by Robert Bly's 1963 essay "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry" from Bly's book 'American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity' in which, among other things, he says the following:

... The drive toward outward things in the 1917 generation [Pound, Eliot, Moore, Williams] and in recent poets is essentially obedience to business traditions.

These two strains -- puritan fear of the unconscious and the business drive toward dealing in outer things -- meets in our poetry to push out the unconscious. The 1917 poets tried to adapt poetry to business and science. They looked for "formulas." They tried to deal efficiently with natural objects. They studied to develop "technical skill" -- like engineers.

He goes on to say that the poets of the thirties and forties used their technical skill to "evict the unconscious". You can almost smell the diarrheic disdain rising off the page.

And that is what I hear in the following passage by Webster.

Even my tour in Vietnam, my divorce and resulting separation from my children, and my years of teaching too many students who saw literature as a waste of time could not convince me that the world is the wasteland that is pictured in most of his poems.

It seems to me that readings of Eliot should acknowledge the internal connections being made by the poet to all the allusions and references. A reader -- me, for instance -- is jarred in much the same places and in much the same ways Eliot must have been as he struggled to tie the internal to the external. This is how some of his work is flawed. That it commands attention in spite of this is testament to how it trancends those flaws.

I think the Four Quartets are where he managed to make those inner-outer connections most seamless and most powerful. And I don't see them as a wasteland at all. Quite the opposite.

Oh yeah, and any discussion of The Waste Land's flaws and merits must acknowledge Pound's part in it. He did a major edit on it, cutting somewhere around 500 lines and rearranging it into the form we are most familiar with.

Critic Is a Dirty Word

The Brits weigh in on Dale Peck.



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Nice thought, evilninja, but having never read Bly's essay, and being no great fan of him, anyway, I don't think I could have been much influenced by it, though I might actually agree with the part of the essay you quote.

Loren Webster is no fan of critics or critical essays. He's just a curmurdgeonly old guy who loves poetry and reads a lot of it now that he's no longer forced to read student essays or textbooks assigned by professors.

He does, however, like the kind of discussion going on here, but only got here accidentally through his referrer logs.

Maybe someone can email him at loren at lorenwebster.net and tell him one goes about getting in on some of these discussions.

Edited by author 11-24-2003 01:29 AM
Loren, two posts down, where it says "home" in blue. Click on that sucker, check out the blog, reviews, essays, and articles, and then discuss away by clicking on "discuss" where appropriate. You can click on an "index" at the top of the Bookninja homepage to survey the list of discussions past and present. That's how you get in on it. Enjoy.

Hello Loren Webster, glad to have you. The website is http://www.bookninja.com and the talk is largely by Canadians, but with international scope.

Let us know what you think.

Nice thought, evilninja, but having never read Bly's essay, and being no great fan of him, anyway, I don't think I could have been much influenced by it, though I might actually agree with the part of the essay you quote.

I wondered when I wrote that if you'd ever read the essay, as it has been around since the early '60's.

I think it is possible that Bly's attitudes in that essay have ended up influencing a lot of people who have never read it, yet have been exposed to poets and poetry informed by its message.

----

Nice to have you around, Loren Webster. I enjoyed the brief look at I took at your site. By the way, I'd like to take this moment to say that I am in no way connected with this site, except as a reader and poster.

----
In fact, I wonder if I should perhaps change my name? What do you think, Bookninja? It was impolite of me to hijack the site name....

Yer fine, Evil, but you owe $97.39 in back royalty fees....

Edited by author 11-24-2003 12:28 PM
Frankly, living in Seattle most of my life, having a Canadian sister-in-law, and driving through Canada to visit my brother in Alaska several times makes me wonder just how different I am from Canadians, at least Canadians on the west coast.

Perhaps not too different when two fine Canadian sites like Riley Dog and Woods Lot were the first to link to my site when I started a little over two years ago.

I'm looking forward to returning here at least to eavesdrop on some good conversation. Hopefully I can occasionally offer an informed perspective.

Edited by author 11-24-2003 02:03 PM
That's ok, Loren, we're still trying to figure out how we're different from Canadians, too :)

I think it's quite a plausible thesis that British Columbians have more in common with Washingtonians and Alaskans; Maritimers with Mainites (?) and New English; Manitobans with Minnesotans; than with people from more far-flung regions of Canada. The nationality thing, as usual with countries our size, is a bit of a bogey.

Back royalty fees... er, when I do my taxes I'll fix that up too. Yeah, that's it.

You do taxes?

Edited by author 11-24-2003 07:19 PM
Zed, I grew up near Sarnia, but so far, I haven't found I have much in common with Michiganders? What gives?

Edited by author 11-24-2003 07:47 PM
Fair enough, but do you think you have more in common with Vancouverites or Nanaimoans than with Michiganders?

As a Maritimer, I think I have more in common, in some ways, with someone from Nantucket than someone from Winnipeg. And Alberta certainly shares more common ground with Texas than with Quebec. Wouldn't you say?

Albertans don't share none of their common ground with no one, tenderfoot. And don't you forget it, lest you find yourself strapped to an oil rig staring down a twelve gun olde time western welcome wagon.

Edited by author 11-24-2003 08:46 PM
Many Ontarians have much in common with Michiganders, I guess, though it's really a lot of Red Green/Possum Lodge shit: people with names like 'Ernie' who like snowmobilin (without the "g"), shooting animals with shooty things, doing stuff outside with an axe, wearing Elmer-Fudd-style red gingham hats with tie-down earflaps. I never felt part of it, though, which is probably why I feel more at home in the city than back in Brights (no apostrophe) Grove, on the edge of the stinking couldron of Sarnia and Chemical Valley. Not that I need to be close to shallow, dressed-to-the-nines nightlife, but I do like the bookstores, libraries and art museums.

Edited by author 11-24-2003 09:07 PM
Hey Fat Kid, yer describin me. Museums? I dint know you were a poncie, you wascally wabbit.

Oh, you mean "The Unhappy People," FK? :)

I've got a lot of friends who like to go snowmobilin and shoot animals with shooty things. I ain't got a lot in common with em I guess(except that my Honda only has two wheels, I like power tools, and if I could afford a car it'd be a pickup), but they're good people and my friends ne'ertheless. A lot of em are from yer neck of the woods, Kathryn.

I admit it. I'm a bleeding-heart, city-slicker, liberal intellectual. Ahhhhh. Feel's good! Someday, when my knees don't work anymore, I'll move to a cabin up north with a box of books, a set of rabbit ears, and settle in to swear at squirrels in my rafters and bears in my garbage, till then, I'll be seeing you at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor.

You Want the Job?

Celebrity writers weigh in on what they'd do if they were offered the NY Times books section editorship.



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Michael Bryson's a Deadhead? The Humanity!
Bryson cuts loose in an essay on reviewing.



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I think they should give the NY Times job to Bryson.

Whoever takes that job is going to regret it, but only for the first little bit until their inner dictator is released.

(That's my problem here -- keeping you guys in line so you don't scare off new readers and lurkers while not being a dictator. It's a full time job.)

If the frothing pitbull may speak:

Nice piece, Bryson. Much of it chimes with an essay of mine, responding to Jan Zwicky's call for peacelovenharmony, which will appear in the January BiC, or so I'm told.

I like people who agree with me :) One quibble: I hate badly written reviews, no matter what they're saying. Bad writing's bad writing, irrespective of genre.

Happy hallowe'en...

Yes, I grant bad writing is bad writing, but don't even poorly held opinions contribute to dialogue? (I was trying to follow up on Eleanor Roosevelt's point ... though if you say most poor writing is full of received opinion, that wouldn't work ...

Ah, I want even the illiterate opinions to count.)

danke

Edited by author 11-25-2003 11:55 PM
To me, one of the greatest indicators of poor writing, especially of a critical variety, is the presence of unexamined assumptions, which is I guess synonymous with the regurgitation of received opinion, yes. That's one reason I love hatchet jobs of overly-lauded books, because it can help redress the imbalance of "oh my isn't X WONderful?!" Thinking specifically right now of Solway and Starnino taking their chops at Anne Carson. I'm sure neither would have been so harsh, or perhaps bothered at all, if the rest of the reviewing community hadn't seemed hellbent on deifying her genius and pickling it with sugar syrup. I'm with Nietzsche: it's important to assault victorious causes, even if you don't believe what you're saying 100%.

There was a pages long review of Dennis Bock's The Ash Garden in Canadian Notes & Queries (No. 61, 2001) in which Michael Darling deconstructed the novel down to particular sentences. He was scathing. Another runaway bestseller, of course.

Darling's essay, as I recall, was well -written. I think most negative reviews are better written than positive ones. It's so easy to access the dark side. Also, the reviewer, if she's worth her salt will make an extra effort since she wants to be persuasive. If a negative review is sloppy, one questions the opinion of the reviewer. By the same token, when I read a pretty slam, I'm well aware of the reviewer's clever posturing.

So, I agree the bad, badly written review may enter into the discussion, MB, but caution that most won't take it as seriously as the well-written glowing review, or the well-written negative one. The reader ought to be sifting through the bias of the reviewer, wouldn't you say?

MB, what do you think of the sort of review that is clearly a grandstanding on the part of the reviewer; the "look at me" review, as I call it. A review is, after all, an opportunity to have one's name in print; shame to waste that on someone else.

Zed: "I'm with Nietzsche: it's important to assault victorious causes, even if you don't believe what you're saying 100%."

I just don't get this. Why "assault" something if you don't believe it 100%? What's wrong with being a scrupulously fair, honest reviewer? Obviously, I'm not saying that reviewers should sugar-coat their responses, but I find rhetoric for the sake of, tiresome, dishonest, and ultimately hurtful.

Nothing is wrong with being a scrupulously fair, honest reviewer. But I don't think you can divorce a book or author from their critical context. So if one is reviewing a book that has been universally lauded as a work of sheer, luminous (gad, I hates that word!) genius, a book which one has serious reservations about, then I think yes, one has a certain responsibility to voice the negative aspects more stridently than one might otherwise, if only to stimulate meaningful discussion, which no amount of awed cooing will accomplish. When one writes fiction or poetry, one strays from factual truth for a purpose. A review can be fictive in this way, as well. I have little patience for people who damn negative reviewers but tolerate the glowingly positive. It's intellectually hypocritical, or at least ignorant.

The grandstanding review?

The first example of a grandstanding review that comes to mind is Atwood reviewing Matt Cohen and putting her "cards on the table" (her metaphor) that she had been pals with the author for decades. Then she went on to celebrate Cohen's novel. Maybe this is a different kind of grandstanding than you mean -- Atwood positioning herself as generous and midwife to Cohen's genius.

Um, I was thinking this morning about how I've funnily become a champion of poor writing ... but that's only when I have my critic's hat on (I'm greedy, I want to read ALL opinions, well-written or not). As an editor, I do draw limits; make choices; encourage the best quality writing.

With my reader's hat on, I want to read the most interesting reviews. I don't think I would want all reviewers to grandstand, but some reviewers are great grandstanders ... and as a reader I'm pleased to read them.

Yes, a review is a chance for one's name to appear in print, but I don't begrudge anyone that luxury. Scott Anderson claims that Dale Peck writes reviews to get people talking about Dale Peck. Maybe so (family systems theory says it's the black sheep that attracts the attention, and the blame, though it's the system in total that's the cause of dysfunction; but that's another discussion).

I'm not sure if this is addressing your question. My response: I don't mind grandstanding per se, as long as the writing is interesting; and I don't begrudge anyone their name in print; though it is shame that The Globe and Mail allows friends to review the work of friends. A newspaper of that stature should have higher standards.

Edited by author 11-26-2003 01:26 PM
M.B. That's not been my experience with the Globe & Mail. I don't doubt it happens but am not convinced that it is the norm rather than the exception.

I suppose it must be tricky to run a review forum and not have problems with this sort of thing in Canada. If half the reviewers are afraid of meeting each other at parties, then the other half must be friends. Many of the authors I've reviewed, I've come to meet here and there. If I continue to go to events and parties, there will be precious few left for me to review .

How do you avoid this at The Danforth? You must occasionally have problems of this sort.

Ah, well. That Atwood review I referred to was in the Globe.

At TDR? Well, TDR is no shining example of moral clarity. In fact, I personally am no shining example of moral clarity. Specifically, I have reviewed books by people I people I know, call friends, and I have tried to do it the way Atwood did it (putting cards on table). In my defence, TDR makes no claim to be a publication of stature, or at least TDR is styled to be a different kind of publication. I like to think of it as a communal art project, gathering voices rather whimsically around a common topic (Canadian small press publications).

Again, I feel like I'm avoiding the question. How do we avoid this at TDR? We don't avoid it, but we do discourage it. But we don't make any claim to be "Canada's National" anything, either.

Actually, when I started to write that "mea culpa", which is linked from this discussion, I had intended to confess to all of my reviewing sins, but that started to feel way too self-indulgent, so I only included what is up on the website. Reviewing sins; you name 'em, I've gottem.

Edited by author 11-26-2003 02:41 PM
I also remember a review in the Globe and Mail by David Young of Ondaatje's novel 'Anil's Ghost'. If I remember correctly, Young also admitted his friendship with Ondaatje at the outset of the review. It was a lengthy, two page review, and, as you might expect, it was adulatory. It seemed to me a way of letting Ondaatje escape any criticism that might find fault with his novel.

Now, having said it all that, it was as though Young's review of Ondaatje's novel was no review at all. It was merely a friend's recommendation. That's another matter all together. There is, I think, an editorial difference between a book review and a book recommendation (the annual Globe 100, for example, is a list of recommendations). The question is, does a paper like the Globe and Mail have an editorial obligation to do one and not the other?


DISCLAIMER:

I've reviewed books by people I know in the past, but I've never reviewed a book by someone I consider to be a close friend. Should that ever happen, I wish to declare here and now that all my close friends who write books are terrific writers. I recommend them all very highly.

I'd also like to reinforce Scott Anderson's point in his Quill & Quire editorial that reviews are part of a larger discussion about literature. And also support Zed's point about the value of going against the grain.

That is, sometimes ignored books can use the help of friends -- but also sometimes books get too much simplistic attention and it's appropriate that a more critical view be brought to the surface.

The context of all of the above is keeping the dialogue going -- and maintaining a constructive (which is different from lovey-dovey) decorum.

Rather than focusing on the motivation of the reviewer (or making the reviewer the issue: a la Anderson's reference to Dale Peck), I'm more encouraged by questions framed around: What is the best way to support the expression of a multiplicity of views? Is there a discussion about literature in this country? I've only ever received two letters after writing 60+ reviews for TDR. What can be done to make the dialogue more robust? [BookNinja is a great start, BTW. Wink, nudge.]

Bryson, though your last question was well placed and suprisingly minty-fresh, your fawning reference to bookninja, whatever that is, undermined any rhetorical authority you had been building for yourself. So much contemporary three-times-removed literary web chat is infected with this type of cutesy cyber-hugging, that one begins to wonder if the form has a future at all.

Michael Bryson is the best-postured writer of his generation.

gee, thanks (way to keep the focus on me and ignore the issue). nice pun on Ginsberg, too.

but I wasn't fawning BN the people; it was the site I was complementing (and all the folks who contribute to the dialogue here); that dialogue happens here; where else?

Edited by author 11-26-2003 07:43 PM
And I think the pun was on Peck's Moody review. Keep fawning, M.B. Once my head can't fit through the office door, I'll do this full time.

Good question about the dialogue, though. I know we have plenty more people reading the site and these boards than we have posting. I wonder how the people in old time Paris salons handled the situation. How did they draw out wallflowers, the pre-computer age equivalent of the lurker? I would encourage everyone to jump in whereever, esp if they don't like the direction the conversation is going. The silliness hereabouts can be fun, but I suspect it would immediately be put aside if a subject that caught everyone's attention was brought up.

When pseudonyms are being used, what's the point of being shy? I don't know the identities of 75% of the people who are posting! You'd be surprised how little I know. :)

Perhaps they made no effort to draw out the "wallflowers", as you say. Some people are listeners, some are talkers. Not necessarily a matter of shyness. Ca marche, non?

I've been following a lot of these discussions, and I it's obvious that when something grabs your collective imagination, you take it seriously. There's nothing wrong with levity, either. It's very nice to see literature discussed so unpretentiously. For the most part.

I'm new here, 2nd day. I don't think people talk much about book. I talk to friends who are writers, but they are into things that I'm not into and we don't learn much from each other. I find I learn more from reading and thinking about things on my own. Book reviews seem superficial to me. I like to see what people are publishing and reviews are the best way to stay on top of that, but I don't find that reviews are part of a discussion that includes people across the country. Britney Spears kisses Madonna and it gets on the front pages of newspapers around the world, and that gets people talking. Wayne Gretzkey comes back and plays hockey outside in Edmonton and people talk. The book awards get people talking, but it's all overrun the next day by bombs going off in Turkey or somewhere else. The best book talk is in quiet corners in bars. At least that's what I find. Book talk on a large scale I don't see happening.

Thanks for posting, moosejaw and shyguy. One of the reasons Crouching Ninja and I started this thing was to generate a national book discussion. Glad to see it's having some a/effect.

I think when we first started we said someting similar, that we thought the best reviews and conversations took place at barroom tables. I don't know if you're all drinking, but I wish I was.

G

Reviews are one thing; literary essays another. Where does one find decent literary essays that focus on Canadian writers and their progeny?

Try David Layton's autobiography.

He said "decent."

The Critics Have Lost Touch

Says a man who has felt their disdain and wrath.



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Edited by author 11-27-2003 11:16 PM
And I was joking. Ha ha. Progeny, get it? Ha. Oh never mind.

"Mitch Albom says literary criticism has nothing to do with reading"

That's fine in his case, because reading his books has nothing to do with literature.

Edited by author 11-27-2003 11:42 PM
Yes, but keep in mind, FK, he has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear, carrying all that schlock and dross around on his shoulders and all.

It's curious; you don't often hear popular musicians whingeing about not being considered great artists. I wonder why it seemss to be more prevalent among best-selling writers. Pen is envy?

the best selling authors complaining is a meaningless background noise, just like wee lit pigs snorting around trying to dream up a prize they might win.

Edited by author 11-28-2003 01:44 PM
Porschette. Albom's best-sellingness has nothing to do with the fact I find his writing so flaccid, sappy, and vapid. It's has to do with his books, not the number of people who read them.

Best-Selling authors I like:
Mordecai Richler
John Updike
Philip Roth
Milan Kundera (up to "Immortality")
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There's more...but you get the picture.

FK, wasn't talking about your complaining. not in the first phrase, anyway.

Touché!

Why Do We Review?

This is the question the NY Times must ask itself.



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Dale Peck on the Stepford Novel

And don't even get him started on Joyce.

and

The Dale Peck Roundup!

For your ranting ease, Collected Miscellany has collected articles about Hatchet Man.



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That's the first Dale Peck review I've read, and I have to say I like the guy. His reasons for doing what he does make sense to me. And it doesn't hurt that he hates a lot of the same things I do. Keep on chopping, ya big pecker!

The Ninjas Keep on Killing

Part-time Ninja Jonathan Bennett gets killer review in Toronto Star.



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Bravo, Bennett! If you bloody people keep writing good books, I'll be eating in a soup-kitchen soon, goddamn yas!

Good on ya, Jon-o. I suppose the best way to defend the short story is to keep writing collections as good as this. But come this spring, when you join us on the other side, we'll be counting on your help with the defence of poetry, too.

So Many Books Lost, Such Little Time

The New York Observer reviews A Splendor of Letters.



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The Ones that Got Away

I swear, these books were THIS BIG!



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The PWAC National Office is closed the week of December 22 to 26. I will be back in the office Monday, December 29th, but will also be away on January 1st.
Have a happy and safe holiday.

______________________________
John Degen
Executive Director
Periodical Writers Association of Canada

National Office
54 Wolseley St, Suite 203
Toronto, Ontario, M5T 1A5

Tel: (416) 504-1645
Fax: (416) 504-9079

Email: jdegen@pwac.ca
PWAC Web Site:
http://www.pwac.ca

Find a Professional Writer:
http://www.writers.ca

"...writers are not acts of god; they come out of specific communities and are the individual points where those communities have become articulate." -- Northrop Frye

"We need to learn to utter unpopular opinions"

Ryan Bigge has some thoughts about the state of book reviewing in Canada, and includes some choice bits from reviews published in Canadian Notes and Queries. If you're looking for unpopular opinions, CNQ has them.



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Free societies are founded on the idea that the right to free speech includes unpopular speech, and many ethicists would argue that the espousal of unpopular truth, along with justifiable civil disobedience, is the duty of the conscientious intellectual. How is it that writers, traditionally the vanguard of sedition, are suddenly squeamish about unfavourable book reviews?

Don't worry, Claude, I'm not squeamish.

I don't think writers are suddenly squeamish at all, I think it's been going on for some time, and the problem is the pond is too small in Canada - you're going to know or meet or work with the person you're risking offending, so the solution is to resolve to be honest no matter what personal loss or discomfort you might suffer. Some people, it would appear, don't do this.

I'm sure you've all written negative reviews, but can I ask, just out of curiosity, have you ever received a bad review? I mean, have you woken up on a Saturday morning, opened the Globe and had really stupid, hurtful things (to your mind at least) said about your book? Until you've walked that mile, then you've not really earned the right to say you're not squeamish. Because it's not until then do you know what it is that you weight (feelings, pride, the work, of another author just like you) against the abstract principle (indeed, your interpretation of it) of ART. It's easy to fuck someone else if you yourself have never been fucked. But when you have, the recollection of it, well, it's enough to make a person squeamish.

Edited by author 01-05-2004 06:26 PM
I've received reviews ranging from glowing to glowering to a few that seemed like the reviewers hadn't even read the book, to one by a reviewer who admitted in his review that he'd only ever read two books of poetry, mine and John Keats' (who gave me a rave, for what it's worth). I have friends whose poetics are vastly different than my own, so it's no surprise to me when a reviewer takes a challenging stance on something I've written. It's part of the "dialogue" and comes with the territory. I have, however, never been outright snarked.

I don't think that a snarky review and a negative review are the same thing. A review can be negative without being callow, without being about the reviewer's personality.

Stop, I should stress that when I say honest, I don't mean nasty, and I think it's possible to be honest and diplomatic. In fact, the reviewer who can't be bothered with diplomacy says more about themselves than whoever is getting the review. I know that's probably going to strike you as painfully mature and unrealistic (from an emotional perspective, at least), but a little bloody nose is something writers have to learn to deal with. Surely between diplomatic, considered criticism that serves a purpose, and making one potentially oversensitive writer feel a bit crap, the choice is fairly clear?

Finally, I see no logic at all in your assertion that a writer who has never been "fucked," as you so dramatically put it, hasn't earned the right to be squeamish. All it requires to be squeamish about writing a poor review is a little empathy, a little imagination, which writers should, in theory, have. And no, I won't tell you if I've ever had a bad review, or if I've had a book published, since you've clearly (and unfairly, I think) set this up as your method for discrediting other opinions on the matter.

"It's easy to fuck someone else if you yourself have never been fucked."

Actually, I think the doctors would say the opposite. Those who have been hurt are more likely to go about hurting others.

It's also true that those who are eager to engage in vigorous debate are more likely to express strong opinions.

and another thing... i recently asked gregory m. cook about his new biography of alden nowlan. here's a brief excerpt with the key phrase at the end...

BRYSON: ... What sort of a man was he? And why is he often remembered, revered and feared so fiercely?

GCOOK: ... Feared? Fear is so often a manifestation of self (a projection), involving hypocrisy or envy – at the very least a lack of humility, which any artist must learn. Alden’s definition of a hypocrite was clear and probably the key to why people feared him. A hypocrite is: "one who is too kind to be wholly honest and too honest to be wholly kind." Such a person can get close enough to another human being to be wounded. In fact, I don’t know of any relationships where the parties don’t get wounded.

http://www.danforthreview.com/features/int.../gregory_m_cook.htm

Strop, There's no good reason for reviewing except as an examination of the state of literature. I go in and out of the willingness to do that because it is difficult to be diplomatic when I don't like something or when I think it isn't whole or well fashioned or, worse, well-written. Getting a bad review would not stop me from this examination and I hope it would not make me embittered and retaliatory. The notion that the book under review was constructed by a real live person certainly does illicit empathy but it is not through the lense of a possible future bad review or a possible past one that I would interpret it. How honest would that be? One thing I'll say though is that having reviewed and having been reviewed gives me one constant: I have to be able to hold my work up to the same light or one yet brighter than the one I hold yours up to else it stays home. In other words, if I'm not confident in the work, why expect anyone else to be?

When you're out of spaghetti, sometimes a cheque for $50 to $200 can be a good reason for writing a review.

So that's "no" from everyone then I guess? Penboy, I asked the question not as my "method for discrediting other opinions on the matter" but just as an additional context with which to view the comments here. Give a girl some credit.

Strop -- I can think of two high-profile negative reviews I've received, and my own differing responses to them. Both were in national forums with wide readership, so both presumably had some impact (but that's another argument).

One was by a very smart writer whose opinion I value but who also has a hobby horse to ride. Separating the horse dung from the actual comment, I was able to extract valuable advice from the review. Talking to this reviewer later, I learned from her that her overall opinion had been much more positive, but the review was slanted during edits (by the way, a great excuse to use when approached by a hurt writer). Does it burn that this valuable, honest, mentor-experience had to take place so publicly? Absolutely. Nevertheless, I walk away with good advice and another national review on the cv (for what that's worth).

The second was simply stupid. Stupid reviewer saying stupid things in a stupid way for stupid reasons. It was the worst review I've ever received, or read for that matter. Facts stated in the review were out and out wrong, and the writer showed a complete ignorance of poetic tradition -- a sort of Fat Kid and Keats scenario. It ran along the lines of "if I had written this book, it would have been sooooo different."

Other than when I am asked to remember it, like now, I am generally successful in completely disregarding this review. Did it hurt my book? Probably. Who's to blame? The reviewer for being stupid and the editor for letting such idiotic garble into the paper.

So, what does this do to my own reviewing? I'm afraid it does not fill me with sympathy for the abused writer. Rather, it makes me not want to have my own opinion altered by gratuitous editing, and it makes me determined not to say stupid things. There can be no other reason for criticism or serious book-reviewing than to engage in a sober examination of our cultural endeavour. That is the only way I can approach it. I can't NOT be hard on a book if I feel it has failed. I don't particularly enjoy doing it, and I've never snarked, but I would feel very dishonest shying away from giving a bad review in order to protect an author. Thick skin is required in this game, and I approach it with the thought that if an author is not able to accept criticism, or willing to improve, than s/he is simply writing a diary, which should be private. Enter the public sphere, and you must expect and accept public response.

Killer, can one be "generally successful" in "completely disregarding" a badly written review? (Sure it doesn't still just mostly bug you?)

I think I'd be temporarily devastated. And I'd probably believe all the bad stuff and none of the good. But oh well, that's when you go out and buy a lot of chocolate bars and watch lame Jennifer Aniston movies. I'd still rather read an honest negative review than a dishonest positive one.

yep, lots of chocolate works and
Arnie movies
(I'm an action kinda gal)

Why We Review the Books We Do

The Atlantic comes clean. (LOL* Maud Newton)



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Since A. F. Moritz has been mentioned many times on these boards...
In the latest Malahat (Winter 2003), Eric Miller discusses work by Moritz in his review of Dennis Lee's UN. He leads with a discussion of Moritz's poem "Mausoleum Garden".

Really? Someone has made a connection between Moritz and UN? I can't wait to read that. Gotta say, I'm a big fan of both, but never put the two together. I must see what Eric Miller has to say. Thanks, Twinkle.

Apropos of absolutely nothing--sat at the same table as Moritz (I can't honestly say I "met" him) at a writing workshop lunch table. An extremely gracious man with a very complex, yet clear-headed and articulate understanding of his own poetry and that of others.

Shane:

So can I ask you something to spark (sorely needed in these parts lately) debate?

What was the point of reviewing this book?

http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/poetry/beissel.htm

Not contesting the opinion expressed, but wondering at the reason for ever spending so many words on it. It's highly unlikely, as a Buschek Book, that any of us would ever have seen it anyway, and had we, it seems a cursory glance would have sent many of us screaming in the other direction. So why not let it just disappear? Why was the review necessary? What purpose did it serve other than to humiliate the author into never writing again?

Discuss.

Not to pre-empt Shane's response, but the review's only 650 words, 235 of which are in the form of block quotes from the text. Seems pretty brief to me.

Edited by author 01-30-2004 04:09 PM
   Ninjas:

   I received the book in the mail from the Danforth's poetry reviews editor. Came in a package of three. I feel obligated to do all the books I receive for review, no matter how terrible. Otherwise I feel I'm wasting the editor's time and also shirking my responsibility to tell the truth (as I see it) at all costs. As you can imagine, the latter sometimes gets me into trouble.
   It is a special circumstance when a book deserves a 'kill.' In such cases, I must be vicious. Else the barbarians will deluge is with MORE Buschek, MORE Broken Jaw, MORE Ekstasis.
   I assert my taste. I don't take the author or poet's feelings into consideration when I write a review. If I did, I'd just be another tepid faint praiser, the kind of critic that legion in our literature.
   There are more reasons behind my motivations than the ones I've cited. Perhaps others would care to join in the discussion, though. Why do fellow Ninjas write negative reviews? Even savage ones?

Shane

   Ninjas:

   Arrgh. Typos. Wish that 'edit

   Ninjas:

   Arrgh. Typos. Wish that 'edit' feature was enduring.

Shane

Shane, if you register then the 'edit' option endures.

   Janine:

   How do I register?

Shane

Shane, in the top left corner look for a little box that beckons you to sign in. It might say 'register', I'm not sure, because my screen currently greets me with a hearty "Welcome, Janine Root". Once you've registered you too will have a pretty blue star. And you will be able to edit your messages at will.

Shane and all:

Re /m209, I’m mostly in agreement with you, but I think you do your own work a disservice with your word choices--“kill,” “vicious,” “savage” specifically. Yes, the “truth (as I see it)”; more concisely, honesty. I don’t pretend to have special access to the “Truth,” which, no matter what X-files tells you, is not out there. I’m just a guy who’s studied a lot of literature and spent a great deal of time thinking about how it works and trying to produce some myself. But I think I have an obligation to a)the art of poetry, b)myself, c)the readers of my review and potential readers of poetry books, d)the publication for whom I’m writing and by whom I am being paid, e)the Canadian taxpayer in most instances, f)the publishing industry g)the author of the book I’m reviewing, whether they like it or not, h)insert any etc. I may have forgotten here—an obligation to be as forthright and diligent as possible when I’m reviewing a book; not to be hypocritical; not to damn with faint praise what I think is truly awful. If a book irritates me, I try to convey that irritation in the review. If I disagree strongly with an author’s aesthetic, moral, political, etc. sensibilities as conveyed thru their text, then I say so in no uncertain terms. As Shane says, “I assert my taste,” and I try to do so in as convincing a manner as possible, using as much evidence from the text as I can to bolster my case (as Shane did very well in that review of Beissel). And no matter what anyone says about negative reviews ruining poor little poets’ lives, all I’m doing is voicing my opinion and all I am is one person; if my review ruins someone’s life or even day, then there must be some truth in it, no? If someone has a contrarian view, I welcome hearing it. So often, however, the opposition tends to take the form of “you shouldn’t have said that; that was mean,” instead of “well, you say this is and that is wrong with the book, but how about this that and the other that is right with it?” It’s not about being nice and kind vs. mean and vicious; it’s about being sincere and doing your job to the best of your ability instead of like some government clerk filling time till 4:30. Why do we have prosecutors in the courts? An official opposition in governments? Ombudsmen to monitor agencies? It’s regrettable that the climate is such that simple honesty so often comes under assault. Pitiful, really.

Edited by author 02-01-2004 10:27 AM
   Ninjas:

   When I speak about reviewing an eminently bad book, a real stink bomb, I lapse into a personal vernacular. Hence the use of the word 'kill.' Reviewing a bad book is really all about the art of the kill- for me. Assassinate with style.

   I'll reveal another of my motivations since this discussion thread seems destined to dormancy. There is one instance when I will decline to review a bad book. This occurs when the book for review is a debut and the author or poet has clearly been ushered into public too soon. In this case, and only in this case, I take pity on the poor writer (because man, I was there, and some days I am there still) and will return the book. Sorry, can't tell which of these books I've ultimately declined in the past... it would be defeating the purpose. But Beissel WAS A CREATIVE WRITING PROFESSOR AT CONCORDIA (if I remember correctly) and must therefore be kept to a higher standard. He should be expected to set a good example, not an awful one.

   Based on your post, Zach, I think we share the same ethic when it comes to reviewing, even if our terms of expression aren't the same.

Shane

Absolutely, Shane. I'm just concerned about the terminology because words like "vicious; kill; kneecap" feed the negative stereotypes of critical critics held by those who would have no negative reviews published at all; who attribute some sort of base personal motivation to a negative review. I like "assassinate," tho, as it conveys the sense that it's a cold-blooded and efficient kind of a kill, done for professional reasons.

Dale Hanging Up the Gloves

Peck's tired of being called names.



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I've Really, Really Been Trying to Not Post About This...

But this is a good synopsis of the NYT Book Review drama so far.



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There's a doins a transpirin over at the Danforth Review:

http://www.danforthreview.com/features/letters/index.htm

Don't make a molehill out of an anthill, Zach. I suspect Bryson published these reviews as a joke to get people talking. Did you read the guy's bio? How could anyone take this shit seriously?

Oh I agree, Paul. Like I said in my letter, I was happy to ignore it altogether, but when someone wrote in about how bad they were, I figured I'd just agree with him. I know Bryson likes to mix things up and encourage diversity, etc., so I don't hold him responsible for publishing bad prose.

It seems clear to me that AEM and KXF take "this shit" quite seriously, and no doubt there's a cadre of academic theory cyborgs that agree with them, under the misguided assumption that this kind of writing is "radical." Check out KXF's website if you're in doubt as to his sincerity: http://www.geocities.com/codex1977/

Hey, where is Bryson, anyway?

This guy is like his own Onion article. Next?

Yeah, it's clever. By being so ridiculous, he completely disarms any satire that might be directed against him.

Stars and Knights

Playwright upset that theatre, music and film are judged out of five stars (in the Guardian) while books are not.



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The Best Combo Review Ever

Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and David Frum and Richard Perle's An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. (From Snarkout)



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Since you are a literate crowd, I'm sure you've all heard this before, but I still like bringing it up whenever possible.

Samuel Johnson on William Congreve's "novel" Incognita:

"I would rather praise it than read it."

Hee.

BN: Boy punctuation is fun. I read that last message as

Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and David Frum

Seems appropriate, no?

More Peck News

Peck's memoir survives a review. If it's good enough, no one should trash it "just because," but you know that eventually someone will. (From Maud)



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Edited by author 02-22-2004 10:00 PM
Canada's Older, Less Interesting Dale Peck Gets His Spleen Served Up with a Side of Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti

Another critic known for strong opinions (the Globe's Fraser Sutherland) tears Solway a new hole. (Maybe he should have just taped up an existing one?)



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I've only glanced at Solway's Franklin book in stores, but I have to wonder what the hell he was thinking taking on such an oft-covered topic. Talk about your Canadian clichés.

man o man,
when Fraser Sutherland calls your writing thrice dull, it's time to hang up your pencil.

How offensive. Don't the Globe and Sutherland have better things to do than waste so much air and space on this irrelevant clown?

Given how much space is dedicated to dull reviews of dull books in the Globe, I personally would like to see more like this.

More attention for chowderheads? I can't imagine anything duller than seeing Solway's same old vitriolic and self-serving BS reiterated and so easily shot down, as always. It's scandalous enough that his drinking buddies are provided with government funding to publish such irrelevant crap (and I'm talking about his poetry here, too), let alone the Globe then considering it worthy of review. Solway's writing is basically an expression of the inane ravings of a sad little support group composed of half-a-dozen horribly DULL and untalented writers. Why should anyone else care?

I dunno, but people seem to, including you...

Actually I believe I said something about not being able to imagine anything more dull. What disturbs me is that a book as important as Margaret Avison's first volume of Collected Poems is not deemed worthy of review by the Globe and Mail yet David Solway gets an entire review devoted to TWO of his books. Solway's so full of hot air that he doesn't even qualify as a lightweight. I often wish that Dale Peck had a bit more substance, but it's a grievous insult to him (and certainly to Canada) to compare him to Solway.

True dat. I my original heading was too mean, so I went with the Pecker angle...

G

I have to say I find it a bit odd being in the role of Solwaypologist given that I've made a number of anti-Solwegian statements myself, and I think most of the criticism directed against him is warranted. But it's a fact that when he publishes something, it gets people talking, for whatever reason. If you really don't want to hear anything else about him, I suggest saying nothing else about him. Otherwise, you're merely contributing to what you claim to despise, which would suggest to me that you need counselling for poor self-esteem. I think it's interesting that someone who is supposedly beneath contempt has attracted the notice of people like Philip Marchand and Alex Good, who don't normally review poetry or poetry criticism. Maybe if the majority of criticism wasn't so saccharine, Solway's sideshow stunts would get less regard. Maybe if people stopped getting so hopping mad about his stuff--which reaction he clearly loves--he'd simmer down and write something sensible, of which he's more than capable.

But, Zach, it's like passing a wreck. All the blood and guts. You feel bad for looking, yet you cannot look away. The misery and misfortune of others will always fascinate us.

I agree with Spot that the Globe should spend it's inches more wisely. But this is also the same paper people complain about when it only gives glowing reviews, which, after my read, it seems Avison is entitled to.

I also agree that the field needs bombastic personalities with radical and/or pointed opinions. However, I think we do just fine reading Starnino and Bok, both of whom have dignity to match their barrel of smarts. Solway is a jester insulting the courtiers, nothing more, and he crops up a couple times a year to give us all a couple yuks. That's all. No harm, really.

My beef with Solway is that someone with his smarts could have served a purpose, rather than wasting away in a puddle of his own crapulent envy.

I think he does serve a purpose, in the same way that a Keith Acton or a Darius Kasparitis serves a purpose in a professional hockey league. The fact that y'all, and I, and the critics can't resist responding to him is proof positive of this. Jesters were kept in court for a reason.

This is our fundamental difference. You're thinking Lear's Fool and I'm thinking semi-retarded club-footed midget who burps on command and gets kicked for amusement.

Hey now, easy on the special interest groups, Ninja!

David Solway = Darius Kasparitis. Thanks! That made my day. Now where's Don Cherry standing up for Peggy: "Damn that instigator rule! You gotta protect your best players!"

No problem, Michael, you can keep it :)

Incidentally, continuing the tale of my dusty old clippings...I came across a review of one of George's books by Solway. First of all, George, I wonder if you read it and what your reaction was?

It's not a particularly well-written review. Solway reviews four books, the other three by women, allowing him to advance a rather silly conceit about Charlie's Angels and Bosley (making George, Bosley, I presume). He says that one of the poets is a good one, although it's not clear immediately which one he means. (I presume George, although his particular comments about George are rather lukewarm.)

Frankly, I would advance this review as a counter to Zach's belief that Solway is capable of "something sensible." In my view, when he is not displaying his sharp knife-wielding skills he has very little of interest to say.

As for the whole critic-as-provocateur-who-traps-you-into-a-hostile-response thang, that would make Solway the Canadian Harold Bloom, except that Solway is apparently upset with Bloom's praise for Anne Carson (Put two jesters in the same court and chaos ensues).

And as for the advice "If you really don't want to hear anything else about him, I suggest saying nothing else about him." I don't know. Wouldn't that be kinda passive-aggressive?

Passive agressive? Perhaps. But, Martin, I have to say that I find any strident claim for desired silence a bit disingenuous; it's like wiping your ass with a whole roll of toiletpaper while decrying clearcut logging.

Edited by author 03-14-2004 11:13 PM
Danforth Review to Curb Reviewing

Editor Michael Bryson has sent a letter to publishers indicating his intention to steer the ship in a different direction - towards publishing original work - and has asked that no more review copies be sent. As Alex Good reports, this is no small loss. As far as we know, The Danforth Review is the only consistently updated site specializing in the Canadian small press scene. Many of the books reviewed are highly unlikely to ever see an inch of column space anywhere else. This announcement follows an earlier RFP posted on the Review site which called for interested parties to submit applications to take over completely. Bryson seems done with Danforth, a least as it currently stands. Who's going to take over reviewing all these books?



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But I look so forward to TDR's weekend updates. And what about all the discoveries I make there? Let's take Tony Burgess, for example. I've read good reviews about his work elsewhere, but I read lots and lots of good reviews. It was TDR's nifty interview that made me pick up Pontypool

Well, I too am disappointed to learn of TDR's decision to dump the reviews and interviews from the online mag. I realize the spin is that it's moving in a direction "toward" something, toward publishing more original work, but given what the Ninja eds are pointing out (his recent posting for a new TDR captain) this decision certainly feels more like moving "away from"...

Speaking only for myself here, I've always found the small press reviews and interviews to be the more valuable elements of TDR. As mentioned here in Ninjaland, there are very few spaces for small press review / interview articles, and I am quite saddened that we've lost another forum for this.

Hmmm, I have recently been thinking about the future and direction of dig (my litzine), this development gives me some ideas...

I definitely think we (in Canada) have sufficient spaces for publishing emerging fiction and poetry, and not enough publishing of literary criticism/reviews/interviews and the like (not that I am biased...).

George, now you can stop trying to guess who I've posted "as" - this is my first appearance here on the message board.

Jennifer LoveGrove, as herself.

Jennifer, I'd say that we have not only 'sufficient' space for publishing fiction and poetry, but excessive. One of the things I like about TDR's present poetry publishing schedule and format is the emphasis on quality over quantity. Really, 10-12 poems a year is lots. I too go there on a regular basis for the reviews, interviews and features (I can't recall reading any fiction). I have a hard time seeing it being anywhere near as interesting without them.

I understand the quality over quantity notion; that's why dig's publishing schedule tends to be sporadic, and the spaces between issues gets larger... Perhaps my use of the word "sufficient" in reference to publishing new writing was rather polite!

I did reread Bryson's letter about this, and it seems he isn't dropping reviews and interviews altogether, at least not right away. Still, I agree w/ Zach that those are the most interesting areas of TDR.

Well, all that is giving me some ideas about a future project. Like I have the time for another "project"!

Curious to see what other Ninja afficianados think about this.

Merci to Ninja G. for the hint to drop by.

First, thanks for the kind words about TDR. Second, yes, the intention is not to stop publishing reviews ... only to reduce the number of reviews and focus on original fiction and poetry ... which was the intent of the mag from the beginning. Third, no changes will happen until Sept. 04, so it's status quo for now.

I'd like to think that TDR has provided "proof of concept" and someone can start a website entirely dedicated to reviewing Canadian small press books. TDR was never meant to be that kind of site. Earlier, I thought maybe TDR could find a new proprietor to "take it to the next level," but ... while there were a couple of offers, and I don't want to disparage those offers ... ultimately I made a personal decision that I wanted to continue to with TDR, but refocus on what was the original impulse: giving writers another place to share their fiction and poetry.

The reviews won't end. The interviews, etc., won't end. But readers will notice a reduction. And it was only fair to write the publishers and tell them to stop sending books ... because TDR already gets more than it can review ... and more keep coming every month.

Anyone out there want to start a book reviewing site?

Edited by author 03-15-2004 08:39 PM
Thanks for clearing that up, Michael. What about offloading the reviewing/interviewing to a sub editor? You could continue to provide weekly reviews and frequent interviews without compromising your editorial attention to poetry and fiction? Just a thought.

We have a hard time getting our reviews organized, as you can see. So I don't blame you for being frustrated or wanting to try a new angle.

re: /m251, Jen I don't believe you. I think you were GG Giller.

Back when I was an undergraduate someone suggested to me I should take a course in "arts administration." I thought, "No thanks." I wanted to make art, not administrate. (Funny that, since I ended up getting a job with the government ....)

The fact is, TDR does have reviews editors (2): one for fiction and one for poetry. What might help would be a managing editor to take care of all of the administration; responding to emails, forwarding books hither and yon, picking up mail at the PO Box, scanning book covers. EEK!

What I keep coming back to, is that I see no need for TDR to keep getting bigger. Small is beautiful. Small is just fine with me. While I recognize a smaller TDR will be disappointing to some, I do hope it is an opportunity for someone else (to pick up the reviewing slack).

Part of what motivated me to include reviews on TDR was the end of PARAGRAPH magazine, which I had contributed to as a reviewer. TDR is not ending reviews, but it was never meant to be dominated by its reviews either. I recognize that I have a selfish perspective -- the fiction and the poetry give me the most pleasure and that's where I want to focus my energy. The other stuff will be diminished, but (to me) the balance will remain just right ....

[BTW. If there is someone out there willing to carry the ball on a new book review website ... I'd be willing to share some lessons learned ....]

BN: re /m255

Are your organizational difficulties due to being in a constant state of Flux, perhaps?

Smarmy bastard.

:)

Edited by author 03-16-2004 07:02 AM
   Ninjas:

   One of the things that must be said about the Danforth's reviews is that they are inconsistent. I have long been concerned about many of our reviewers' inability to write well. And in the specific case of 'Kane. X. Faucher,' I wonder about Canada's public education system.
   I think greater selectivity - a roster of reviewers who do a good job, as opposed to a 'you-too-can-do-this' ethos- would improve the Danforth, which is diminished by association with the likes of 'Kane X.'

Shane

I wonder about Kleenex Fucker too. But Shane, you yourself have posted the occasional stinker, have you not?

Glad to see discussion around this is opening up. I have heard other ideas tossed around about small press review projects, so I am optimistic. I'd love to do that myself, theoretically I could, but logistically, time + equiptment, it's impossible for me. For now. For now.

As for arts admin jobs... I've done these for ten years so far, and while there are some positive elements, my well-earned advice is this: if it's just a day job to you, do it in the commercial world! The non-profit arts world is fraught with politics and overtime and is incredibly draining. (Yes, I'm work now, back at it.) Leaves little time for else...

No, George, I was not posting as GG Giller or whomever!

THE RAIN
The Vancouver Review of Books
http://www.rainreview.com/

pays for reviews

"Snark is, I believe, prompted by the terrible vacuum feeling of not mattering"
Sven Birkets, the target of Dale Peck's last negative review (coming soon from Maisonneuve), speaks out about negative reviewing and the sorry state of contemporary literature.
"And this is more or less where we find ourselves now. Psychologically it is a landscape subtly demoralized by the slash-and-burn of bottom-line economics; the modernist/humanist assumption of art and social criticism marching forward, leading the way, has not recovered from the wholesale flight of academia into theory; the publishing world remains tyrannized in acquisition, marketing, and sales by the mentality of the blockbuster; the confident authority of print journalism has been challenged by the proliferation of online alternatives."

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

Extry, extry! Hard-nosed poetry review spotted in the pages of the Globe and Mail! Lizards seen falling from the sky above Estevan! Read all about it!


http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/Articl...Entertainment/Books

YEEEEEE-IKES!

I hope the Globe can dig up a couple of decent collections to review during NPM.

Yeah, But He Likes Everything
Bert Archer, who is, um, tough to please, sings the praises of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's debut collection, Way Up, in the Toronto Star.
"Kuitenbrouwer's phrasing is unassuming, her vocabulary uniformly quotidian and her syntax is so uncomplicatedly, conversationally and apparently artlessly varied (though she could do with fewer subordinate clauses here and there), that when you hear one of her narrators describe her lover's erect penis as an exclamation mark (an image that's at once so obvious and so original) it takes you aback."

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Congrats, K! But what's all this here guff about "dishwater Maritime writers"?

Yay, K!

the dishwater remark
eek

Will You Miss the Hatchet Man?
Kirkus will.
"Twelve essays by the bad boy of contemporary book reviewing reveal a passionate, committed commentator who definitely has an axe to grind.

So what? Like any truly interesting critic, Peck has a coherent, openly stated aesthetic position that informs everything he writes, including his novels."

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Re: 268-270: Thanks for noticing and for nice comments, BN, Twinkle and Zach. Much appreciated.

"No one is saying that the Harold Blooms and Dale Pecks and other literati should be looking over their shoulders, but professional critics are no longer the only game in town. These days, as the Internet continues to reshape our notion of community, amateur critics are posting reviews across the cultural spectrum -- from film to books and more -- on discussion boards, blogs and other sites."

DAMN STRAIGHT!* " Amazon readers provide early and almost instant signs of breakout success; writers tend to obsessively check up on their reviews and ranking. Quirky small-press books, ones that rarely get any media attention, have a chance on Amazon, where readers love to hunt for and pluck out overlooked page-turners." DAMN STRAIGHT! Of course, no one's reviewed my sorry ass on Amazon, but still... DAMN STRAIGHT!



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Dewdney dressed down:

http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/poetry/dewdney.htm

"The least that can be said is that you never know what's coming next."

Is that wholly good? Genichiro Takahashi as the new Richard Brautigan.



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Local Ninja Reviewed

Jonathan Bennett, former poetry naysayer, has new book of poetry that's already getting great reviews.



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It Doesn't Hurt to Ask

Okay, imagine this: someone vivisects your book in the pages of a prestigious review section. I mean, really lays it open like a cheap Chelsea flasher. You write a letter of complaint to the editor and... they publish a second review. Blink, blink.

Rawlinson said yesterday that the first review was ad hominem -- a personal attack -- and should not have slipped through the usually rigorous editing process. "That is something you should never do," she said, "coming closer to attacking the writer than the book." The "self-aggrandizement" crack, she says, was particularly unacceptable.

Yes, it does happen. At Publishers Weekly.



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Just had a peculiar experience today. I did some reviews for ARC a while back and was surprised today to find excerpts from those reviews quoted as blurbs for the books in question.

I don't know quite how I feel about this, to be honest. The chosen excerpts aren't really as unequivocally positive as they should be to function as advertisements, but since I positively reviewed the books I can't quarrel with their use. It's just odd to see words I've written that are not exactly misinterpreted, but perhaps overinterpreted, in the sense that one possible interpretation is overemphasized.

What do other reviewers here feel about the use of such excerpts?

Martin,

Sounds pretty normal to me. I do, however, shake my head when I see blurbs that use the ellipsis trick to combine unrelated bits into a good quote.

I think it was one of Stan Rogal's books that used a one-word blurb from an otherwise negative review. The word? "...odd..." Funny.

Peter

Peter,

"Pretty normal" it is indeed. Just kind of a weird feeling I guess. (Perhaps I need advanced literary therapy.)

Martin

"The function of such reviews, I suggest, is to shake a book vigorously and see if the sawdust flies out. If the book is any good, it will survive the review, however harsh. If not, it doesn't deserve to."

A bad review hurts. Seeing your reviewer get a bad review sooths. We're a complicated species...

By happy coincidence, my enemy has himself just recently brought out a biography of Orson Welles. Even happier, Conrad's book has been minced, pounded and sliced into kebab in the latest London Review of Books. It's an immensely long piece by David Bromwich (God bless him. Is there a Nobel prize for reviewing?). The reviewer's scathing comments are music to my ears, and balm to my wounds: "a maddening book to read ... All, here, is gimcrack-gimmickry ... grinding whimsy". I particularly like that last phrase. I can see it, in neon red, on the back of the paperback reprint: " 'Grinding whimsy', LRB".

All and all he took it rather well, I think. I'd still be working up the courage to allow daylight to touch my skin.



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Do We Really Need More Hatchet Jobs?
The Walrus thinks so, but it's not an easy task in the CanLit village.


The real reason these writers didn't want to review their peers was that it's a small community. The most honest ones would come out and admit as much: writing a negative review could hurt them in the future, either at grant time (many grant juries are composed of writers) or when one of their own books was sent out for review. The least honest would turn down opportunities to review -- and then publish articles or give interviews in which they called for higher standards in book reviewing.

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Yes, but Can You Be More Specific...

Dale Peck wants to save us all from contemporary fiction.

What does Peck want from living fiction? Less "conceptual air" and more substantive text. Less "Freshman Comp" and more meaningful language. Less technique and more heart. Less pretention and more honesty. Writers writing less for each other and more for the reader. Gay fiction and black women's fiction that quits boxing itself in by investing in tired "assumptions based on a writer's identity."

As a poet, I'm already saved. Hallelujah!



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What the Hell Are 'Continentals'?
Karl Siegler, publisher of Talon Books, is pissed at the Danforth Review.


What, exactly, are Mr. Neilson's qualifications as a "poetry editor?" Are they academic? Are they editorial credits (other than for TDR, of course)? Are they publication credits? His "bio" says he's published ONE CHAPBOOK with a small press?!? Excuse me, with that kind of publication(s) credit list, at his age, what does he base his own critical credibility in poetry and poetics on? The fact that he (like so many other aspiring wannabes in the craft) has published "many" individual poems in "literary magazines," in his 'special' case, not just in Canada, but "also in the UK?" Are we still in the colonial 1950s here? Does publication of even the most occasional ephemera outside Canada, especially in a country that's one of Canada's former colonial masters, automatically confer a patina of credibility on the "critic" in question? Has anyone at TDR ever heard of the phrase "post-colonial?" Or is TDR, as an institution, still adrift in the fascist-imperialist flotsam & jetsam of "modernism?"

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Mini-moir
Ryan Bigge reviews Alberto Manguel's With Borges for the Toronto Star and finds it lacking.


At barely a hundred pages (including a handful of photos), With Borges does not pretend to be exhaustive; it is a mini-moir. It serves as an adjunct to the half-dozen pages Manguel spent discussing Borges in his critically acclaimed A History Of Reading, published in 1996.

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Pecking at Peck

The axman cometh...

What is worrisome about contemporary book commentary is not that someone with Peck's habitual mean-spiritedness has carved out a name for himself - though it does suggest that criticism is now as much a part of the entertainment industry as gangster rap and extreme makeovers. People laugh at his jokes, or at the skinhead Paul Bunyan impersonation on the cover of his book, or both. Yet they overlook his efforts to be thoughtful, which are, if anything, just as funny.

(From ALDaily)



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Faster, Pussycat! Shill! Shill!

How did all those papers manage to have Clinton's nigh-1000 page behemoth read and reviewed within 24-hours of receiving the book? Is that humanly possible? If not, what value does that place on the reviews, and for that matter, the reviewers?

Are the book blitzers Evelyn Wood speed-reading graduates, vampires who never sleep, corrupt book-skimmers, or hacks? All of the blitzers who spoke about their instant reviews defended their velocity, with some saying their assignment wasn't to judge a masterpiece of literature but to assess a public figure's retelling of events with which everybody is mostly familiar.

I can dig the blitz review becoming fashionable for poetry... Ten poems in and over the shoulder it goes. In my head I'd hear the buzzer from Family Feud - MAH!



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"Get in, get out, don't linger."

Book review space is getting slimmer every year, so should we be putting up with the space taken by the ego of the reviewer?

Reviewing is an important craft, and good criticism is a way of enjoying literature more completely. Still, reviewers should keep in mind the famous comment by the late Randall Jarrell to the effect that criticism is like a telescope: It allows the viewer to see the stars, but it can never be the stars. Academic critics already have discarded this notion in making themselves the point of their literary essays, and intellectual wannabes like Peck aren't far behind.

How about we just cut the little bios at the end where reviewers get to plug their own books?



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Aw, c'mon, take away that bio and then I'll really be doing it for free! What I wanna know is, who pays $25 and where can I get a hold of them?

On a more serious note, it seems to me that Dale Peck's name has been made by people like this who take issue with him (and not, significantly, with the more substantial points he articulates) in print. How is calling Peck an "intellectual wannabe" any different from his sniping at Moody, Birkerts et al? Critic, reveal thyself... And for crissakes, if you're gonna quote an already over-quoted line, you should at least get it right!

i do think a review should be about the work in the context of what it is working within (as well as without), & not abt the reviewer selling his own work (or, alternately, his own specific ideas). that being said, i do like the bio at the end of reviews saying who the reviewer is. i mean, id like to know where this person is coming from? i remember the globe had charles foran review david w mcfadden's irish travel book more than a few years back (he hated it). was good to know through his bio at the end that he himself had an irish book out in the same season! i think it colours the review a bit. anywayz.
rob

Edited by author 07-05-2004 10:07 PM
Sounds more like a book report than a book review to me. In a review, I look for lively, engaging, provocative prose, along with the odd idea or insight. I enjoy reviews in which it's obvious that the reviewer has read the book closely and thought about its contents. As for the context within which a given work is created, I'm concerned that granting too much latitude can excuse just about anything. E.g. "Book X is written in the ancient tradition of boring, trite, sentimental verse about household pets and let me tell you, it more than holds its weight in this category." Or: "Book Y is written in the post-modern tradition of nonsensical language disruption based on esoteric academic pet theories. Those who enjoy such writing will revel in Author Q's work." In reviewers, I look for someone whose opinions I can trust somewhat (or at least identify, as perhaps in the Charles Foran example Rob cites) and whose writing provides some measure of edification and delight.

'There are 6,000 non-entities in this book.'
I never read Captain Corelli's Mandolin, but lots of people I know like Louis de Bernieres. These people, however, do not like his new one.


It's full of references to hook-nosed Arabs and Jews, it is a hatred of the Islamic world balanced in a pseudo way by saying "oh yes, the Christians did some wrong things too". It is rotten with orientalism. I had just finished reading Orientalism the other morning and I picked up this wretched book. I wanted to throw it out the door. It is a stinking rotten book written by a pseudo hopeless novelist.

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All is not lost!!

San Jose, even though I despise you with large sections of my heart reserved for nothing other than hated for desert climate hockey teams, I have to commend you on moving to your own stand-alone book section when others are disappearing around the continent. Bravo! Now someone smack Mike Ricci in the head for me.



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Peck pounded, in review this time

Another scathing review of Peck, but this time more a review of Peck as a person than of Hatchet Jobs as a piece of writing. I like this bit:

I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.

Is no one thinking of poor Dale's feelings in all this?



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More fiction

Can more fiction ever be a bad thing? (The answer is so subjective....)



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So, regarding the omnibus review, you gotta ask yourself...

Is it worth it? Well, we obviously disagree here but, then again, we're not the New York Times. That is to say, a positive blurb on the back of your next book from Bookninja will probably sell fewer copies (only a few fewer) than one from NYT. Well, considering that they used to review one poetry book at a time, and that said book was usually some giant name reviewed by some other name: is the advent of the jam-packed omnibus review* (SEVEN books!) a good thing? I am tempted to say...



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Bookese

The language of book reviewing. Yeesh!

All trades have some kind of professional jargon – hacks must have their spikes, and cobblers their lasts – but there's something different about the patois of Grub Street. Admittedly, it relies on the same sorts of abbreviations as other trades: "I couldn't put it down" becomes "unputdownable"; "It was so funny I laughed out loud" becomes "laughoutloud funny". Publishers and critics need these terms like they need terms for genres, such as chicklit, ladlit, bonkbusters, sexandshopping and killerchillers. Somehow, the way we talk about writing has become rich in clichés. It affects the way we publish books, the way we cover them, and the way we consume them. You could devise a circle of clichés, starting (because we have to start somewhere) with the publishers. Publishers have to tell journalists, shopkeepers and readers what a book is like as quickly as possible, so find themselves using an immediately recognisable language.

Yeah, I hate the way I'm always being called "masterful"... like, what does that MEAN? (From ALDaily)



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File under: there's me, hugging fish

Everyone's crying foul about how stand alone books sections are disappearing from major newspapers, but something's got me thinking... Most writers who actually get press in Canada's paper of record, get reviewed in the Globe's stand alone Saturday Books section. It's shaved off a few pages here and there, but for the most part it's the best, and only, game in town. And it's conveniently set aside so readers know where to look for reviews on Saturday morning.

Looking at it another way, however, it can also be seen as being set aside so those with no interest can steer clear of it and use it wrap fish. Is the books section then a literary ghetto within arts journalism?

What made me think of this is how a very small number of writers get review-like profiles and other press outside the books section - the place where everyone not necessarily already inclined toward book reading (ie, the consuming public who buy things like clothes, cars, and houses (ie, not other writers)) might stumble across the review and, gasp!, be convinced to buy it. Partially the work of good publicists, partially... luck? contacts? karma? I don't know. Given how my last book was handled on the publicity front, I may never know unless the Irish heritage or good deeds kick in...



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So, how was your book handled on the publicity front?

With tongs.

thongs?

No, I think he said tongues.

When reviewers don't read the books they review...

It's more common than you think...



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Edited by author 09-21-2004 07:42 PM
This is just like that movie Underworld, where the vampires and werewolves are at war
Anne Rice goes after her critics in an Amazon review section of one of her works, and her critics bite back!


Seldom do I really answer those who criticize my work. In fact, the entire development of my career has been fueled by my ability to ignore denigrating and trivializing criticism as I realize my dreams and my goals. However there is something compelling about Amazon's willingness to publish just about anything, and the sheer outrageous stupidity of many things you've said here that actually touches my proletarian and Democratic soul. Also I use and enjoy Amazon and I do read the reviews of other people's books in many fields. In sum, I believe in what happens here. And so, I speak. First off, let me say that this is addressed only to some of you, who have posted outrageously negative comments here, and not to all. You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective. Indeed, you aren't even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it. And you are giving a whole new meaning to the words "wide readership."

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Anne Rice feasts on blood of Amazon users

Well, now there's something you don't see every day...

In all, the book has received 232 customer reviews on Amazon.com since publication late last year. Not all of them are negative but, evidently stung, Rice writes to the negative reviewers: "Your stupid arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander. And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies."

(I like that these stories appear in the major dailies the day after they appear here and on other blogs...)



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Now these papers just have to start crediting the blogs properly.

File under: Hope for the hopeless

"The Kirkus Bribe List"? Is this the end of Kirkus or the evolution of a new fleecing niche?

While Publishers Weekly and Library Journal might correctly predict the success of a novel, you can always count on Kirkus to draw blood.

Now, though, the reputation of this journal which won't even contaminate its pages with advertising, is on the line. VNU Business Publications, which owns Kirkus, has introduced two new e-newsletters that critics say blur the line between reviewing and marketing.

Kirkus Discoveries, rolling out later this year, will allow self-published authors, long ignored by the trade journals, to buy a Kirkus review for $350.

My hope is there will be a lot of slightly poorer, totally disappointed authors out there -- but that every now and then, something will actually slip through. You'd almost think it was noble... if money wasn't involved.

Of course, the 350 bones won't set this dude back...

With deep pockets and an even deeper belief in his inner Hemingway, first-time novelist Rich Shapero is taking vanity publishing to a new level.

The Silicon Valley venture capitalist wrote his novel, founded a company to publish it and then launched one of the biggest and most colorful individual book giveaways ever.

I try to be a good person. I really do. I want to wish the best for people. I really do. But sometimes I also want to wish redhot fire pokers in the urethra. I really do.



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Headline: "Pub czar taps lit guru for read rag"

The New York Post conducts some of it's classically illiterate "analysis" in examining the new NYTRB and somehow draws the conclusion that Bush is a master statesman who will win because it's God's will.



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Smug youngster in marketing thinks he's hot shit: sources

The Kirkus Review is one line of a smug fratboy's coke away from becoming a sham.*

"I'm launching quite a number of new initiatives built on the back of a really respected review journal," he said. "If I don't maintain the kind of honesty I'm talking about, I think the whole thing will come crashing down rather quickly."

Ah, the kind of corporate player who not only gives the wink and the gun, but also breathes on his knuckles and shines them on his jacket. It gives me shivers. No wait, those are shudders.



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Edited by author 10-06-2004 10:21 AM
This is a continuation of something I posted in "Shameless Self Promotion" on blurb and review writing and the gratuituous use of prominent authors' names.

In Sunday’s “Nova Scotian” George Eliot Clarke reviews Shane Neilson’s “The Beaten-Down Elegies.” Neilson, Clarke informs us, writes with “obvious affection and affinity for Alden Nowlan’s own [sic] rhymes about repression and recovery” and “with ferocity closer to that of Eric Trethewy and with tenderness closer to that of Phil Hall.” Furthermore, “this bleak collection conjures up David Adams Richards’ fisticuff Miramichi.”

Clarke thus evokes four prominent writers in a review of Neilson without ever making an explicit or implicit comparison in terms of ability. There are really only two things you can conclude from the review (possibly a third—Clarke seems to like “Elegies”, though it’s hard to be sure). One, Clarke sure reads a lot of poetry, and, two, Neilson’s work has something in common with that of four more well-known writers in terms of subject matter and overall tone.

Once again, I anticipate reviewers of my first book of poetry: “Like Shakespeare’s plays, Wallace’s work sure contains a lot of obscure dirty jokes.”

Edited by author 10-06-2004 12:50 PM
I'm not sure whether you're saying a positive or negative thing, Martin, but in case it's negative (which I suspect it isn't) I'm leaping to the defence of Shane's poetry. He's a man who's made his share of enemies as a critic, often justifiably, but holy shit is he a good poet. From what I've seen, he's the real deal and one of the best "new" things out there.

G

I think that Martin's criticism here is directed at GEC's reviewing style (which, like everything he undertakes, is, um, enthusiastic, but lacks the toughness and substance of his best poems) rather than at Neilson's poetry, on which topic I have to agree wholeheartedly with BN. I don't have enough information to say anything more than speculative on the subject, but I rather suspect that the enemies Shane has made as a reviewer might have something to do with his unfortunate exclusion from the new Breathing Fire antho. He's got seven poems in the most recent Fiddlehead and they are easily, in my opinion, the strongest work in there. And his "Elegies," frankly, elicit envy and admiration.

Clarke's a serial blurbist and the gratuitous comparison to great author X is his m.o. John Stiles<->Pound; Anne Compton<->Yeats; Mary Dalton<->Pratt. I'm curious to see what he comes up with for yours truly...

Zach's understanding of my ravings is correct. However,I can see why you couldn't determine my opinion of Neilson's poetry, BN, since one of my points is that it was finally impossible to determine the third George's opinion. (Well, he does say "welcome him" at the end, which I think is positive.) My point is that Clarke "reviews" a book by naming other writers that it reminds him of. Some of the connections he makes, moreover, are pretty tenuous. I don't think it would be hard to find connections between, say, Alden Nowlan and any writer, especially if subject matter and "tone" are fair game.

You know I would be really disappointed if the speculations that Zach and George make are true. While I'm apparently an "enemy" of Neilson (just ask the thin-skinned prick), I concur that he is a fine poet, and, for that matter,I've never had a problem with any of the reviews he's written. Frankly, I think that his efforts to be as fair and balanced as possible are evident, and if his reviews have gained him enemies of the sort you describe, that's more evidence of the moribund nature of book reviewing in Canada that of any failing of Neilson's

Edited by author 10-08-2004 02:31 AM
Hear, hear, Martin. Say, are you going to the Gaspereau Wayzgoose in Kentville? There's going to be a panel discussion on book reviewing, featuring Carmine Starnino and others. Alas, I'll be off flogging my book in that poetry jerkwater, Montreal, so I'll miss it.

Zach, yes I think I'm going. (In fact I posted the details in the "Reading" thread). Too bad you'll be in Montreal--I was going to offer you a drive.

I'm really looking forward to the panel discussion. You mention Starnino, but the panel also includes Martin Levin and Noah Richler. (How did Gaspereau pull that off?). However ninjas may feel about the reviewing policies of The National Post or The Globe and Mail, they're probably the most powerful review sections in the country and I'll be very interested to hear what Levin and Richler have to say.

Yeah, that's who I meant by "and others" :) Damn my lousy timing! That Andrew Steeves is a clever feller; I'm not suprised he could assemble such a panel in Kentville.

The Post has a review section?

re /m317

BN, nah, not really any more. They still publish the occasional review, tho.

Besides, when they had a full-fledged review section, that dang old Andy Lamey let just about anyone review books, consarn it.

   Martin:

   Thin-skinned prick here. Re: your offer to Zach...I don't have transportation to the Wayzgoose and was wondering if you'd mind taking desquamating ol' me along. I'd love to get a chance to hear Starnino mix it up -hopefully he will- with Richler and Levin.

Shane (email itchscratch@hotmail.com)

I was toying with the idea of going too...any room for a 3rd, Martin?

Ya Martin, can ya swing around and pick me up, too?

Anne Rice tired of personal attacks

Well, with that sallow skin of the dead under a salt and pepper bob, who wouldn't be?*

Ms. Rice seemed particularly incensed by reviewers who implied that she had not worked hard on the book, the 10th in her "Vampire Chronicles'' series, or that she had written it merely to fulfill a "contractual obligation,'' as one reviewer said.

Nor was she thrilled by the suggestion - often made by people who adored earlier books in the series but said they felt that the quality had deteriorated - that "Blood Canticle" might have benefited from some tough love. "Anne, you really should have an editor, or at least someone that would read your book before you send it off to print,'' one reviewer wrote.

If that's you're complaint, we really shouldn't be picking on just poor old Anne here... We should be picking on the many "editors" who's authors could stand to hear this criticism... (Hey, NYT! Way to catch the current news! Youse guys gots yer fingers on the pulse!)



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Dear ride-seekers

I'm irony-impaired so I don't know who's serious and who is not, but...I'm in Halifax and planning to drive to Kentville for the Wayzgoose. I had thought that TT was out West and TSP was in Guelph. My offer of rides extends to anyone who is roughly in Hfx. and wants to go to Kentville.

The more the, er., merrier.

My address is kaplanrose at hotmail.com, but posting here is fine.

TSP's here, Martin. He's looking for you.

My heavens Zach, the way you put that sure sounds threatening.

NYT sells out

Apparently the NYT is helping out the down and out publishers with some free ad space... Publishers of such midlist authors as Dan Brown, Stephen King, Clive Cussler, Bill Clinton, etc... Maud is so sexy when she gets angry.



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It turns out bloodlust will only get you so far...

Some writers give advice to Anne Rice.

"I'd be more worried if I impressed a moron than if I made one unhappy. And on Amazon . . . it's usually clear within a sentence or two which side of the intelligence fence the commentators fall on."

How about: seek therapy, Anne. (Actually, I see this all as the product of a long night with a bottle of wine and some old letters and photographs - a moist pillow, a number dialed repeatedly and hung up on before the rings, a few cigarettes, a long steely look in the mirror, a walk outside with arms across the chest, another cigarette, and BAM! those boots were made for walking...)



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Novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer brings us The Ninja Bistro Review Menu... Mmmmm! Spicey!

(Read the menu here)



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the roasted red pepper
                       that's hot
Paris Hilton
                    dead in the head