... Paula Marantz Cohen takes an appreciative look at Philippa Gregory's The Boleyn Inheritance: Ambition, lust in Henry VIII's court.
The Bibliothecary's Ed Pettit visits magical realms: Faerie lore befitting science and fantasy.
Susan Balée really got a kick out of Richard Grayson's And to Think That He KissedHim on Lorimer Street: An amusing book of lists and riffs.
John Rossi thinks highly of Mark Steyn's America Alone: A cultural critic submits how the West was done in.
Roger Miller finds a biography of Winifred Wagner fascinating: A woman hopelessly devoted to Hitler.
Katie Haegele discovers an intriguing tale: Young Adult Reader In a sizzling summer spent fishing, the unspeakable happens .
During the past week ...
Carlin Romano weighed Ann Coulter's critics in the balance - and found they didn't measure up to Coulter, who he thinks has an important decision to make: Countering Coulter.
Hal Smith liked the sounds of Les Beletsky's Bird Songs: New birding guide appeals to the ear.
Phaedra Trethan found herself won over by Carolyn Turgeon's debut, Rain Village: From farm to circus, a little girl's life journey. (I feel obliged to note, with great sadness, that Phaedra was one of those laid off from The Inquirer this past week.)
I promise not to do this every week, but I do think this is an unusually good mix.
I'm concerned about the attitude toward small presses, and uncredentialed writers, expressed in Susan Balee's review.
ReplyDeleteMind if I highlight a few remarks of hers?
"Memoir is the genre in which Grayson, an AMPLY CREDENTIALED writer, could probably land a DECENT CONTRACT with a publisher people HAVE ACTUALLY HEARD OF. (No offense to Dumbo Books, but I was appalled by the number of typographical and typesetting errors. In a stand-up comic's script, this wouldn't matter, but in a BONA-FIDE book-as-object, it does.)
"Richard Grayson has a fresh, funny voice. I hope a HIGH-LEVEL editor sees this latest effort and realizes the guy's worthy of a FINER MEDIUM to display it."
(I hope Balee never glances at Shakespeare's quartos.)
("book-as-object"? Literature is more than that.)
Not encouraging from my point-of-view.
There are some wonderful small presses out there and some very bad ones. If a book is filled with typos and other such errors, I would certainly mention that in my review, and I imagined I'd blame the publisher for it. This does seem like it has crossed over into snark territory, though, which is unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteI see no reason to excuse any press, large or small, for not taking the care to avoid typos and the like. If you want to be taken seriously, take what you're doing seriously.
ReplyDeleteAs for the snarkiness, I continue to be amazed at how fashionable it has become to sound angry. Too bad a lot of the people fuming at keyboards these days didn't spend time bar-hopping with me in my drinking days. They might have learned, albeit the hard way, a certain measure of tact.
Relax, folks. Books are supposed to help civilize us.
There's no relaxing for some of us, Frank. We can speak out or we can die. Hyperbole? Not really.
ReplyDeleteUnderground writers are being squeezed by this society, as it becomes progressively harder to work shitty jobs and make enough money to survive-- much less have time for writing.
Literature is extremely important for nearly every writer in my organization because it's the one thing which gives our lives meaning. We also have something to say. Do we tolerate literature's closed shop mentality, which Ms. Balee perfectly embodies?
No way!
The truth is that the book world has been too "civilized" for too long. It's why too few people in this country any longer notice literature-- not like the noisy uncivility of Marlowe and Shakespeare's time.
Literature today needs all the noise it can make.
Funny that in Elizabethan England there were no dictionaries. Typos, creative misspellings, and ungrammatical sentences were commonplace, but there were also literary geniuses. Today we have clean, well-ordered texts-- and widespread mediocrity.
What's the context of these remarks?
Newspaper book review pages which are swiftly vanishing from newspapers around the country.
A newspaper whose circulation is plummeting; which laid off people just last week.
At the same time, the rise of blogs like this one, where occasional typos are unimportant, and credentials irrelevant; where engaging the reader is everything.
Perhaps if you were among the layoffs (layoffs which have happened for decades), wrenched from security and thrown into the void, you'd have less complacency, and more urgency, about the state of literature in this country. If, like ULA poet Frank Walsh, you were reduced to itinerant handyman, or like myself, working in the noble and stable field of telemarketing. Because life for some writers is a Villon-like struggle for survival, we better appreciate that literature also is in such a struggle; that it needs to be hungrier, noisier, angrier, LOUDER; less embedded in trivialities of literary hygiene and homogenization and more concerned with reaching the souls of readers on all levels of society. ALL levels-- not simply among graduates of Columbia University.
In his famous Preface, Samuel Johnson castigated Shakespeare for his seeming carelessness, "the writer's unskillfulness," yet quoted Dryden on the largeness of the same writer's soul. Johnson knew that Shakespeare's carelessness was also a freedom of creativity, his made-up words and grammar the residue of the exhilaration of a mind running free.
No, sorry, literature needs drastic change. It needs freedom. It needs all the noise it can make-- as well as new voices and fresh alternatives to mainstream publishing.
Actually, King, one of the advantages I bring to this job is that, unlike most people in my position, I know very well what it is like to freelance: I did it for about 10 years, while helping to raise a family. I, too, had to take a lot of jobs that had little to do with writing: office manager, gallery director, construction worker. Sometimes, I took a regular job - management, government. But I sure know what it feels like to know the check is in the mail. Those various jobs, though, I remember with fondness, because they taught me a lot about aspects of life too many writers - especially academics - do not know. And, though sometimes I barely scraped by, I survived.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, one of the reasons there are so many typos and the like in books these days is that publishers no longer spend the money to hire freelance editors - one of the things I did during my freelance days. It was pretty lucrative for me - and the books that came out had far fewer errors.
I don't know if literature needs drastic change, but change is sure in hell coming to it, whether it needs it or not.
Oy vey. I'm not even Jewish, but I
ReplyDeletegotta say that, King. I'm out of the country, but want to weigh in on your
comments. I used to edit a small literary magazine, "northeast corridor" (you may remember it-- we published lots of unknown phila writers from 1995-2000.) We had almost no money, but we damn sure were careful to present authors' works as beautifully as we could. Typos are a turn-off, as are other typesetting errors which Grayson's book was riddled with. Basically, it looks unprofessional and it does not HAVE to be that way.
And I am likely to be laid off at the Inky in a few more weeks. I am simply covering for someone with a lot of seniority who is currently out sick.
Shakespeare's quartos were composed for actors, btw, just like the stand-up comic's script. They were well-worn and *used*. When he prepared something for publication (the sonnets, for example), he made the text look as presentable as possible.
There is a difference between a working draft and a final product, King. If you read my entire review, you know I was not being snarky about Grayson. I like his stuff. He deserves a better medium.
So do you. I got the handprinted, xeroxed sheet you mailed to me at the paper about your next poetry slam. Wouldn't you also prefer to have a better medium? Or would you shun any club that would have you as a member?
I'm fighting for attention for my writers in any way I can. Xerox or not xerox, Inky or hand-scrawled postings on light poles.
ReplyDeleteYou were wrong, you know, Susan, when you said that any writer if he or she is good will find publication by the mainstream. Completely wrong. There are tons of great writers out there-- even if their works, published and promoted by outsiders like myself, contain the occasional typo.
(Did you ever pick up a book by Larry Richette?)
Jeff Potter, our publishing guy, doesn't have copy editors, free lance or otherwise. He does everything in his one-man publishing company himself. His wife works two jobs to help support him and the children. I think they live in a trailer outside Lansing, Michigan.
Yes, the world is changing. I intend to take advantage of that change.
(I hope both of you will make our Feb 25th show. Frank Walsh is indeed a great poet and performer-- I'm working on a stack of his poems in hopes of producing a book from them. You can see him reading "Howl" on our Howl Protest video, and his own stuff at our 2005 Medusa Show.)
Thanks for your responses.