One Desert Island + Oprah + Faulkner + Elvis...

I had this very same 'did they or didn't they' conversation with my mom recently and she reminded me of the events of August 1986: I joined the Keene Library Reading Club in its final week, missed the first 7 weeks, and fraudulently claimed to have read 10 books in exchange for a ribbon a bookmark and some sort of badge. It’s always either that story or the time I loved the kitten too much with hugs and sent it to it’s cuddly grave; so much disappointment and shame. I’m not saying 300 Oprah Book Clubbers are at all like the 7 yr old me… never mind, I think that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Edited by author 09-23-2005 10:24 AM
Oprah-di Oprah-da, life goes on

Did 300 people read Faulkner or did they just buy the set and display it on their hastily-made book shelf, right under the velvet Elvis? (Velvis?) Anyway, Oprah's promoting graphic novels, now, ' cuz they have pictures and so can be 'read' by 60% more Americans. Is that kind, Kathryn? Go to your room. Right now. Here's Oprah on her decision:

"I wanted to open the door and broaden the field," Ms. Winfrey said in an interview. "That allows me the opportunity to do what I like to do most, which is sit and talk to authors about their work. It's kind of hard to do that when they're dead."

Gosh, she's so pragmatic.

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Oprah promotes reading, champions discussion, and yes, sales books. I do not know all the fuss is about. If you do not like her choices, simply do not read them. Or you could form a NOT-Oprah book club (sponsered by the Iowa Writers Workshop) for the higher-brow audience that Mr. Franzen so embraces. Good luck.

I sympathize with the backlogged victims of Richard Howard's generosity. He's had a selection of my stuff, and sent me two kind letters asking me to be patient, since 1997.

So, by her own admission, the new poetry editor at the Paris Review "never successfully managed to read" Faulkner on her own. You know, The Sound and The Fury is a bit tough, but Light In August is straight-forward prose. Is this someone you really want to be hiring as your culture editor?

She does what no other person could ever do

No, not oscillate wildly in weight and personal health, we can all do that. Oprah makes Faulkner fun!

It looked like one of the oddest pairings around, and yet Oprah-meets-Faulkner turned out, in a curious way, to be an inspired match. It's easy to forget just how radical a writer Faulkner still is, because he's been so thoroughly absorbed into the canon: a process by which, as one critic once put it, "the idiosyncratic is distorted into the normative." Faulkner is anything but normative. Figuring out what is going on in a book like The Sound and the Fury is so hard—and demands such a leap of faith—that every reader struggles in similar ways. Its demanding textual challenges have a strangely democratizing effect. No matter how many lit-crit terms you can throw around, Faulkner's jagged, wildly original style is hard—and can jar confident readers as well as less confident ones. And I confess: At this point in my life, harried by e-mails, exhausted by obligations, tempted by TiVo, I needed some kind of nudging to get me to sit down and engage as deeply as the book was asking me to.

This from the new poetry editor at the Paris Review. (Second link from Brenda)


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The first rule about book club
Is you can't opt out of book club.

I tried to cancel the book club membership. It was only then that I realized there wasn't clear information on how to do that. And when I say there wasn't any information, I mean there wasn't a Web address, telephone number or street address on any of the plan's materials to write to the company and cancel.
Finally, when the next book arrived, I never opened the package. Instead, I wrote on the front of it that the company was to never send me another book and that I would refuse to pay for or accept future deliveries.
Well, books still came, and so did the bills.

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Lordy. I read that as R. Crumb at first. Now I want an R. Crumb illustration of that book group and that sentiment.

...And if they study hard and apply themselves...

They could become a famous reading group like these blokes. (Robert McCrum at his warmest and fuzziest.)

Reading groups - apparently, there are no fewer than 50,000 of them in the UK alone - know that books make us free and books that bring readers together in argument and conversation make us free in a way that renews our humanity and celebrates the strange magic of English prose, a medium of almost limitless potential and surprise.


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Edited by author 06-20-2005 01:17 PM
Book babes

Well, that's what Good Housekeeping calls them. They look like librarians to me but, forsooth, I know a few guys who go for librarians. I guess Handsome Book Ladies isn't as catchy. Dammit, I wanna be a book babe. How does one apply?

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I agree with your illogic. It's the difference between wearing a Tshirt with a logo and being branded like a head of cattle.

G

If the "O" label on the books was a peel-off sticker I'd be more comfortable with it. The fact that it's actually part of the cover art makes me uneasy. There it is - not very logical, but that's me.

Amen.

I may be a rarity, but my life has too often resembled daytime t.v. and too seldom resembled poetry for me to feel too smug...

Well, but that fits my point to some degree. You could blot the entire cover with O, use a large font above the title reading "Martha Stewart Presents:", use front cover blurbs from the idiots who brought you Jackass etc. etc. None of them will usurp what we know Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Faulkner, to be. These books have had 50 or 100+ years to establish a place in literary history. You don't think of daytime tv when you see the O on these books because hell, man, that's Anna Karenina. A newer book doesn't have that foundation. The GG etc. stamp serves as a platform; the O a mansion's arched gate or $1300 Louis Vutton box.

And we're not really talking about you. You, apparently, read widely and judgmentally. You make your book buying decisions based on word of mouth, reviews by people whose opinions you respect. You know which publishers, small or large, have established an aesthetic you can trust when buying a book by an author you've never read before. But you're a rarity. You'll find my book if you want it; no stamp will make you read it if you don't.

As for bad poetry and daytime tv, they're kind of the same for me. I take the same perverse pleasure in feeling superior. But I'm a petty man.

When I've seen it on Steinbeck and Tolstoy, it hasn't made me think of daytime TV. When I see the Griffin sticker on books I think are downright bad, I don't really care how they're classified. Bad poetry isn't better than good daytime television. There, I said it! What's that I smell? Burning pitch?