The Weekly Links, Opinion, and Personal/Blog Updates Post
Links of Interest
NetGalley already has 10,000 people signed up to receive digital ARCs (via PW). I am not one of them, but I am starting to ask myself why the hell not.
Speaking of digital, a new study suggests that folks who use ereaders not only buy more books, we read more books, too.
This post by Karen Marie Moning makes me never want to go to Fevercon or hang out with her fans.
Thanks to @thebookmaven for linking to the wonderful blog of Lisa Bonchek Adams, who blogs about her life, including surviving breast cancer, the sudden untimely death of a family member, and the physical challenges faced by one of her children. Read this post, a poem about the anniversary of her double mastectomy. I’ve decided to teach my senior seminar in the spring on narrative medicine, and I will certainly be pointing my students in the direction of this blog.
Thanks to @avidreaderket for RTing something from The Tomorrow Museum, another wonderful new-to-me blog which explores the impact of technology on the arts. When I saw the latest post is about Paris, Texas, and its connection to social media today, I was hooked.
Prompted by this essay (and hundreds of comments) by author Maureen Johnson, What Kate’s Reading is reflecting on gender and the canon.
Johnson:
So, we’re thinking about boys and girls and what they read. The assumption, as I understand it, is that females are flexible and accepting creatures who can read absolutely anything. We’re like acrobats. We can tie our legs over our heads. Bring it on. There is nothing we cannot handle. Boys, on the other hand, are much more delicately balanced. To ask them to read “girl” stories (whatever those might be) will cause the whole venture to fall apart. They are finely tuned, like Formula One cars, which require preheated fluids and warmed tires in order to operate—as opposed to girls, who are like pickup trucks or big, family-style SUVs. We can go anywhere, through anything, on any old literary fuel you put in us.
Largely because we have little choice in the matter.
Kate:
Ever since that young age, I’ve always been a proponent of reading what appeals to you, whatever it may be. I still haven’t read Jack London. I still do read romances, biographies, and other good and great literature. I also feel very fortunate that I’ve always been very up front about my reading and have never been called a sissy or whatever for being an avid reader. But it also occurs to me that even at a young age, I was unconsciously realizing, via books, tv, and movies, that we still live in a man’s world, and I was doing my best to reject masculine-centric concepts in my books.
Here’s a different take on this issue, with a focus on race instead of gender, In Praise of Dead White Men by writer, broadcaster and “hip-hop intellectual” Lindsay Johns:
Sadly, the canon has a serious image problem amongst black people, too. Many see it as the preserve of white public schoolboys, taught in fusty classrooms by doddery Oxbridge tutors. We have been led to see it as whitey’s birthright, not ours. Meanwhile anti-racist educationalists and black community leaders rail against a racist curriculum which does not meet the cultural needs of their students, with some calling for “black schools” in which black culture—rather than an elite white culture—can be taught.
But the literary canon should not be the preserve of any one race. As both a writer of colour and an ardent (but not uncritical) devotee of the canon, I have little time for people who say that black people cannot relate to books written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of dead white guys, or that Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare. This denies us our shared humanity across racial divides.
Interested in the new annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice? Jane Austen World gives you the scoop, complete with review, excerpts, photos and interview with the editor.
Ashlyn Chase talks about dealing with writerly competition at the Casablanca Authors Blog, featuring this choice bit of advice:
Now, here’s a story I heard that made me so mad I’ll have to say my mantra a few times after I type it. I wasn’t there, so I can’t verify its validity, but the woman who told me about it attended this author’s speech and I think she’s a trustworthy source.
She said the author she was listening to was a well-known NY Times best seller. What she said was “If you don’t cut your competition down with rotten anonymous reviews, you don’t care about your career.”
One commenter has the right attitude:
I’m going to put the best possible spin on this and decide that this means all my bad anonymous reviews are from jealous writers and not readers who just think I can’t write!
If creative feminist women like Adrian Piper did not do analytic philosophy, I don’t think I could have stuck with this career. She is one of my inspirations. So thanks to Feministe for pointing me in the direction of her 2003 essay/poem Dear Editor. Read it now.
From critic Jonathan Mayhew (via The Critical Sphere)
Here’s a novel idea: literary works are about exactly what they seem to be about. Wallace Stevens’s poetry is about the relation between the poetic imagination and reality. Ezra Pound’s work is about economics and his own particular view of history. Honor plays are about honor. Homer is about Homeric heroes and their code of behavior. Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez is about its announced and ostensible theme: envy. “Howl” is about how the best minds of his generation have been destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. If I have read any poem or novel I know what it is about.
From the New Yorker’s Book Bench, worries that Amazon is going to start making people pay for previews.
As the chilly time of the year decends for many of us, Pistols and Petticoats is offering a week’s worth of hearty soup recipes starting tomorrow.
I am Late to the Party But It Is Apparently Still Underway, so…
I happened to hear a Cambridge Forum discussion on NPR last week (taped earlier this year, I believe) featuring literary and cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn and former editor of The New York Times Book Review Charles “Chip” McGrath, purportedly examining the ways in which criticism itself is a creative act, but actually slamming bloggers. Click here to watch. I tweeted about it, prompting Ron Hogan to listen in and blog about it here. And we got, at Novel Readings, another great post about it. If you don’t have time to listen to the 90 minute program, here are some choice selections:
They start out by distinguishing reviews from criticism, which have different aims, forms, and souls — although they seem to think reviewing is a species of criticism, so it’s never clear. Reviews are more immediate and more commercial, for the benefit of an audience of consumers. There is an evaluative, service oriented function of reviewing, but criticism is an “act of dissection that aims to understand what a a work of [art] is.” Reviews tend to be shorter. They note that when it comes to reviewers, you have to agree with them for the review to be useful to you. But you can read a critic with whom you disagree and get a lot out of it. Reviews do not stand the test of time, says McGrath, implying that criticism does. In defense of reviewers, Mendelsohn notes the time pressure reviewers who write for dailies or weeklies are under. They both imply that the greater time and care critics can take with their subjects is more likely to produce a critique that is “right”.
Pretty much every statement begins, either explicitly or implicitly with, “I don’t want to belittle reviewing, but…”
McGrath laments the “thumbs up or thumbs down mentality” of our reviewing culture. He regrets that the Times has more and more influence as other reviewing outlets disappear. And then a long discussion of blogging ensues.
Mendelsohn: “The 800 pound gorilla in the conversation is that there are in fact more venues…than there ever have been in the history of the planet because of the internet. … The official institutional vehicles for expressing opinions … are shrinking and the reason they’re shrinking is that there is a giant technological revolution taking place and that what is replacing those venues are the private expressions of opinions and deliveries of news about cultural production which is the blogosphere, and not just blogs but also smaller online publications that actually have a certain kind of efficiency and mobility that the old behemoths maybe didn’t. So the question that remains is … precisely because of the essentially private quality of 89% of this new “criticism” – let’s call it for the time being — there aren’t in place the checks and balances and standards and editorial procedures that we are used to because we come from the world of the dinoasaurs.
This was originally my problem with the blog reviews or blogging for which I caught a lot of punishment online when I first questioned this, but it seemed incredible to me that a person could you know [laughing] essentially write a review of something and not be edited, you know, it just seemed extraordinary that you could just say anything about anything and there were no fact checkers, there was nobody like you [Chip] telling someone “Well do you really think it’s fair to say that” and “Aren’t you going overboard?” … that it was just this sort of unchecked effusion and to my mind the problem is that the tone devolves very quickly. … And I’m not saying this is always the case, and as we both know there are excellent blogger-reviewers and litblogs… so I don’t want to get into that because then we won’t get anywhere, but I just do think that when you have a fact checker, and when you have an editor, you stray more seldom into what I see as a kind of snarky ad hominem, vicious tone that I often detect in these new essentially private expressions of opinions about culture. It’s not always the case, but you could never say, in the New York Times, the kinds of things that you can say sitting in front of your laptop. And that worries me, because it fits into this thing [about thumbs up/thumbs down, and the speed of blogging rendering wrong opinions].
And the instantaneity of so much personal, computer, online writing [smiles] and expression, I think is a problem when what you’re aiming for is either reviewing or criticim. Your first impression, your angry response to somebody, all of that we can’t do because we have to wait…and I think that’s a benefit in terms of criticism.
McGrath: “I tend to agree. The people in the blogosphere — and there are a lot of them, are tickled — I am speaking now of the literary blogs which are the ones I pay the most attention to — are tickled to see the newspaper reviewing go down because they feel empowered and they feel in fact it is precisely their freedom from these institutional constraints that makes them valuable. These are people that for whatever reason feel that they couldn’t have, or didn’t have the patience, or the connections to [write real reviews for real media outlets] and now they have a pulpit and now they don’t have to tow the institutional line, and now they don’t have to buy into the biases, real or imagined. And there may be some truth to that…
[On] the business of snarkiness. Snark is the lingua franca of the blogosphere. Though I have detected just recently signs that the blogopshere is growing up. There is a growing civility, which can’t come a moment too soon. A lot of what used to pass for critical discourse … was just vitriolic and irresponsible. On the other hand, you could argue that some of it, not all of it, is a breath of fresh air. It’s conversational, and they can say things you can’t say.”
Mendelsohn “This more personal expressionistic approach… obviously does provide a balance to more traditional and more fettered kinds of expression about culture. … I’m not afraid of fisticuffs but there are rules and the ad hominem rule is one that a lot of these people don’t understand … that you can talk about people’s work, but you cannot talk about people. … And it certainly has … sparked an amazing amount of discussion by all kinds of people about what criticism is and what purposes it serves. And that can’t be bad.”
McGrath: “But you know what is bad, and I have a very specific complaint about the blogosphere … it doesn’t pay. It’s assumed that the work you do on the blogopshere is for free. To me that’s troubling. But there’s a larger issue here which is that I’m concerned that there is a notion, a kind of critical discourse carried on by people who are rich enough or crazy enough to work for nothing. And it’s also when there are no financial strings attached, that’s also when … some of the things you are talking about … like editing, like responsible reporting, I think they also disappear very quickly and you get … replacing the traditional marketplace where work was rewarded [with pay] for its merit. Now the new marketplace is the marketplace of hits. A piece on the internet is valuable precisely and only in terms of how many people go to it.”
Mendelsohn: “Right, right. It’s a new economy of criticism. It’s exactly the inverse of the old economy, because if what matters is not dollars per word … but hits per piece, then you’re going to write the kinds of pieces that are going to get the most attention, and getting attention … is not necessarily concentric with saying judicious, intelligent, considered things. One would almost say quite the opposite [McGrath sniggers]…. right? … that the more outrageous and crazy you are, that the more people will go to see what you’ve said. … The new economy, not necessarily, but almost inevitably, encourages the kind of production which is about entertainment rather than criticism, which is … from the Greek word “to judge”, so a faculty of judiciousness at some point in the history of the world was thought to inhere in what criticism should be, and if what you’re trying to get is the most people to look at you, then [judiciousness doesn't matter as much as nastiness].”
[On professionalism:] It’s not so much about money, but the fact that I think that what I do when someone pays me to write criticism or review is qualitatively different because I am being paid by an insittuoon to produce a certain kind of object. It is a public endeavor … and that is necessarily different from if I were to say the same thing on my blog it would have a different apect and quality and character … I’m not just saying what I think … I’m saying something to the people who are reading the NY Review. It’s a public function. I’m not just sitting there expressing myself. And I think that’s somehow different, and I haven’t exactly worked out why it’s different, but it feels different.”
I’m writing for people … I’m not writing for me. I’m performing a service for an audience of people, and we are engaged in a kind of public exchange, because they have the right to write back and talk about what I wrote…so I just feel if I wrote the same words, and I was just typing on my laptop and posting it on Facebook, the whole activity would be entirely different. And my awareness that I am engaged in a public discourse affects the way I put things. … It’s a civic and civil exercise. I am talking in public about things that are important to the public because it’s part of our about our public culture. … It’s not just me sitting in my underwear at 3:00am being pissed off because I didn’t like a movie, which I think is different, and that may be old fashioned, but I don’t care.”
They move on to discussing Twitter — “God help us” – and “way things are drifting” (not upwards, I assure you), suggesting that it is the brevity of the “thumbs up, thumbs down” culture that’s the problem. But then they turn around and say that bloggers are too wordy and write too reviews that are too long — they need an editor! The whole thing reeked of a conclusion in search of an argument. 35 minutes in and I have learned nothing about criticism as a creative enterprise. I have put up with McGrath saying that bloggers — you know, the guy in his underwear in his basement, writing for free – are the elite and the New York establishmentarians — you know, the ones with the copy editors and fact checkers and nice offices and salaries and invitations to the Cambridge Forum – are the proletariat of critical world. I kept listening when he asserted that getting paid for writing reviews (or “criticism”? — it doesn’t matter, as this distinction quickly revealed itself to be code for “print journalism versus bloggers” anyway) makes them better, and somehow less susceptible to corruption of any kind, and I diligently bracketed what I know about the highly trafficked digital presence of all the traditional media outlets, not to mention said traditional media’s own damn blogs (Jacket Copy? Book Bench? Guardian Books Blog? Paper Cuts? Hellooooooo?). I tried not to look at all the draft review posts I — like most book bloggers – have going, posts which I revisit and revise several times before going live — a process I can take my time with, by the way, because I am NOT ON DEADLINE. I even put aside pesky philosophical questions such as “when is something inevitable but not necessary?” and “under what possible definition of ‘public’ is blogging not a public endeavor?” But I could not, at last, ignore the loud clanging of the hypocrisy bell when Mendelsohn — whose chief complaint against the bloggers is that they are not real critics who want to get it right, but mere “opinionators” – could come up with no better justification for that view than “it feels different”. Heck, even a blogger could do better than that.
On the blog this week…maybe
A discussion of Carolyn Crane’s Double Cross
A review of Persuasion — by Thursday
Part One of a summary of Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender
A post on nonverbal signaling of the hero in the romance novel
A picture of my kitchen, which should be done done done by midweek *crossing fingers*
HAPPY WEEK!
Related posts:
Will you be able to share your reading list for narrative medicine? I am really interested in this.
Isn’t this the kind of argument which has underpinned the devaluing of women’s work and women’s art? When women work in the home, it’s often not paid, so it doesn’t count towards the GDP; women’s artistic creativity has often found expression in activities which are labelled as “craft” and devalued because it’s not “art” which has found the approval of galleries etc. And, of course, women have often been labelled “crazy” when we’ve tried to express ourselves in ways that challenge the status quo. That’s not to say that the status of women is identical to those of bloggers, just that the argument’s lack of validity in one context makes me extremely wary of it when it pops up in another.
Also, if they’re really concerned about people being “rich enough or crazy enough to work for nothing” maybe they should look at the system of unpaid internships which help a lot of people get into positions in the arts and media:
and recently there have even been people paying to get unpaid positions:
The portion you quoted alone – and I have not looked at the full piece – raises a number of difficult questions: the perennial issue of professionalism and what that precisely means, the inferences – already commented on by Laura – regarding paid and unpaid work. More than anything, I detect a sense of panic reading their words, and in all honesty, it’s one I can understand. In the last few years, the explosion in the blogosphere/social networking etc. have run a coach and horses through the previously rigid and broadly shared ideas we had around media and communications. There were official publications and you could interact with the authors and editors of these publications through certain channels such readers pages/ letters to the editors but that was it. That’s been turned inside out and upside down to the extent that it’s fundamentally challenging our notions of journalism and what we are prepared to pay for. When I look at these men as paid professionals (from my perspective as a paid professional in another field) I can well understand their panic. That’s not to say I agree with what they’ve said which is another question entirely (and one which I may comment on further later once I’ve thought about it more.
Thinking about your comments Laura, isn’t the whole response to ‘e’ whether it is books or blogging alot of the time about defending the current paradigm? Defending what we know from the uncertain and unknown future. Also it seems to be about applying the illusion of control through knowledge and expertise. The discussion outlined above, reminded me of the debates around professions and professionalism. I work and live as a patient in the health sector where we are still struggling with doctor’s who think they are high priests. It seemed to me that suddenly that the discussion was a case of seeing the Emporer’s slip showing… Isn’t this also about a shift in the way knowledge is held? It used to be that a few people had access to and disseminated knowledge. the ‘e’ world may not democratise that because we still need filters to winnow useful and good from the dire but that is what blogs do but in discussion, not in isolation. I hesitate to say collectively but perhaps I mean connectedly so in a steampunk sense we see how it is put together and can trace the elements that it is constructed from. I was thinking about the comments about snarkiness (especially given how this was recently talked about here) and would add that inthe ‘e’ world personhood is actually quite important because we are putting ourselves and our values out there and are these not the things that traditionally have been elided from criticism and review?
Thinking about the narrative medicine stuff and chronic illness and disablity in romance fiction. I wonder if the need for redemption that is such a part of the romance journey gets in the way of including people with disabilities or chronic illnesses in stories. If you are not going to miraculously be cured from your illness or disability by love then you can’t be redeemed because romances are stories about change; in relationship and personhood. Perhaps this along with the practicalities of action and story-telling which are often posited as the barriers to having lead characters with disabilities is an underlying truth? Just thinking out loud – not in any way yet informed!
I’ve heard variations on this, but never once has an actual name been attached to the NYTs author, and I’m sorry in this biz? I think somebody would have heard a name. Maybe I’m just a skeptic, but until I actually hear a name, I’m just treating this as an urban legend.
Of course if somebody wants to email me and give me the name of the author… *G*
I signed up for NetGalley after getting my first Kindle. I was lucky enough to read Jeannie Lin’s Butterfly Swords and Deanna Raybourn’s Dark Road to Darjeeling early. Because I want to support these fabulous writers, I also pre-ordered their books on Kindle. Authors can’t write if no one is buying their books.
Using NetGalley is a great way to explore new auhors. At NetGalley, you are not required to review every book you receive. So, I took the advice of friend on what books to review. Don’t write about the books I didn’t like since I got them for free.
I don’t have a blog and and I don’t write reviews for any sites. I just love to read. When I read a great a book, I want to shout it to let others know via posting on messageboards via booklovers.
@Vi:
Vi — this is interesting. I am pretty ignorant about NetGalley. So let me ask: you don’t actually have to (a) have a blog, or (b) write reviews of every book you download?
Also, if I read your comment correctly, you don’t write reviews of books you didn’t like. Playing devil’s advocate, I have to ask: wouldn’t an author rather have her books discussed than not, even if the comments are negative? Or are you thinking you’ll let the folks who liked it talk it up?
@Shiloh Walker: I repeated an urban legend? D’oh!!
@Merrian:
Yes, but it won’t be for a few months. and I think you are on the money with the PERCEIVED tension b/t the HEA and disability. Healthy and nondisabled people tend to have very skewed ideas about what life with disease and disability is like.
I have actually thought of assigning a romance novel that deals with these issues. I am in charge of the lecture series this year, and I am trying hard to think of a way to get one of my romance peeps to Maine in connection with the course. If only Eric Selinger’s wonderful paper on Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm was about illness narratives instead of Milton!
Tumperkin and Laura — thank you for the comments — too detailed for me to process before class this morning. Back later!
LMAO… well, I don’t know if you did or not.
But until I actually either see it in print, hear the audio workshop or at least see it attached to a name? That’s how I’m treating it.
Everybody who has repeated it to me it’s always been like those things well, my sister knew this ONE guy who had this happen but naturally, the one guy has no name. But in this case, the one guy is an author…with no name.
I just think that if there really was an author out there saying that, we’d hear a name. Unless they made the workshop attendees sign their names in blood or something… ;o)
Regardless, it’s BS advice-I mean, can anybody really see Nora Roberts scurrying around and posting anonymous bad reviews to all her competition? Um…nooooooo.
@Jessica I don’t believe you need to have a blog. You just need to list a forum where you will post your reviews. I listed booklovers message board as the place that I will post my reviews. I betcha quite a few will say that they post their reviews on Goodreads. Others will probably say Amazon.
Yes to the bad review. My thought process is I didn’t pay for this book. I’m just a reader who read a bad book. If the book horribly offends, then I might post. I’m only 2 weeks old as a Net Galley member, so bear with me, all this might change. Of the 4 books I received, there was only 1 I didn’t care for. It was a DNF because it couldn’t hold my interest.
I think NetGalley is intended for people who review books in public fora, which you totally do.
Looking forward to your post on Persuasion. I think I might set aside time this week to watch my DVD of the latest tv adaptation.
Re: public v. private in new and old media:
I can understand what they’re getting at, though only by turning the issue on its head. They seem to be focused (with what one might suspect to be repressed envy) on bloggers not having the editorial overhead of paleocritics. For them, a public institution is one in which the public is able to exert influence over the reviewer – in their scheme, via influence on the editors, though that seems a bit debatable. Blogging, lacking editorial controls, must therefore not be a public endeavor. Which is true, if you use their criteria: public feedback can be willfully ignored on blogs in ways it can not in print, at least if you’re willing to take ads out of the equation and turn off comments. Even if nobody wants to hear what they have to say, the GoogleBot is an avid and loyal reader…and thus follows their argument about a lack of consequences leading to a drop in quality or lack of professionalism. Of course, consequences are irrelevant to a review that nobody reads in the first place, so I might suggest there’s a chicken-and-egg problem with their argument.
It’s tempting to say that this is a generational problem – a generation used to having gatekeepers that make decisions for them and not understanding how a producer can be its own gatekeeper – but I can’t dismiss it that easily. The problem is easier to see in the political sphere than criticism (though it exists there as well), and has less to do with editorial gatekeepers than with consumers self-selecting low quality sources. The funny part of their argument is that blogs, being less beholden to their readers, are actually in a better position combat the consumers-want-an-echo-chamber problem than other media (see FoxNews and MSNBC). They don’t seem to realize it, but they’re arguing for a time, not for a medium…the media they’re holding up as true and righteous are trending in a direction even further away from their stated ideals than the bloggers they’re trying to attack.
What an interesting discussion! Those arguments they are making are bizarre. Especially the fact that blogging doesn’t pay makes it suspicious. Because we all know that publications that pay, and get revenue from advertisers are NEVER influenced by the need to keep those advertisers happy.
Hey, I love the new blog tweaks. I love the new subhead font, too. I think it’s better. I think it looks perfect.
Whoa, my heart actually jumped when I saw your linkage (under deadline + too much coffee = easily jumpy.) Thanks for the attention. Now I need to read the rest of your post
It wouldn’t surprise me if people who are paid to write book reviews were feeling defensive, because as I understand the situation, their jobs are at risk. I’m not sure that it’s book bloggers who’re actually causing the decline in print reviewing, though. Newspapers as a whole seem to be in trouble, not just the book review sections.
On the topic of uncertain and unknown futures, I’m concerned about the future of academic study of literature (as well as other arts subjects). In the UK fears have been expressed that
It makes me wonder if eventually study and discussion of literature is going to become limited to the wealthy and/or those who have the time to make it a serious hobby.
@Laura Vivanco: I agree, Laura with the analogies to the status of “women’s work”. That’s an interesting comparison. Your comments make me wonder if the literary blogosphere (which is the subject of their discussion) really is more diverse, in terms of gender, than the traditional literary review sphere. My armchair answer is “No”, but I can’t say for sure.
@Tumperkin: Oh, I totally agree there is a circling of the wagons feel to the discussion. I found it so odd, though, that they seem to think there is more opportunity for reader engagement with traditional media than online media. My New Yorker publishes maybe 5 letters to the editor an issue, and at least half of them are by famous people mentioned in a previous issue. If anything, it is the popularity of the new media that has caused online versions of print media to add comment functionality. A former colleague of mine is now an editor of New York Times online comments, a job that surely didn’t even exist 5 or even 3 years ago.
@Merrian:
I agree with you that we need a lot of models of knowledge production. The one favored by the discussants seems to be based on expertise, which I like, as a credentialed person myself. But I also think you can get good stuff on the model you describe. I’m reading a book right now that pokes holes through many studies of gender published by experts in traditional scientific journals. They are bad studies on any definition of science. I love experts and expertise but they don’t have a monopoly on knowledge.
@Victoria Janssen: Which Persuasion adaptation is your favorite?
@Kate: I totally know that feeling! when I see I have been linked to, my first thought is always “uh oh. What did I say now?”
@Carolyn Crane: Well, exactly. And there may be pressure in some cases on bloggers to generate hits, but how is this different from pressure on traditional media outlets to generate ad revenue? It’s all eyeballs, baby.
And thank you for the comments on the design. the John in this thread was responsible for a lot of those tweaks!
Speaking of whom…
@John: @John:
Great point. I totally agree with you on this.
@Laura Vivanco:
Thanks for making this point, Laura. I too questioned the causal nature of their assertion.
@Laura Vivanco:
Perhaps McGrath and Mendelsohn are correct, then, that blogging about literature is a hobby of the elite, but I am also correct that writing for the NYT is as well — if it is not just about being a good critic but about, as McGrath said later “having the right connections”. At my own university, several programs in the humanities are experiencing retrenchment.
Of course, the 800 pound elephant in OUR room is that neither of them are discussing genre fiction, which I am sure they think does not merit reviewing, let alone criticism.
My gut reaction: Grrr, now I feel properly spanked for having an opinion and a website. I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t entitled to either.
@Laura:
This is something that I can currently see in my own field in the humanities. Case in point, one of my key translations was published once in 1968 for a group of 40 men in a club (all but 11 of whom were titled) for only each other and the obligatory copies to Cambridge and the British Library. It’s never been reprinted. The introductory material is filled with manly self-appreciation to have published this text. Exclusionary, exclusionary, exclusionary. To get my hot little hands on it, I have to make an appointment with an all-boys public (i.e. private) school and work around their schedule. Rumor has it the only reason this school allows access to outside scholars is because the government has threatened to pull their funding. (I have gone to the British Library for it once, it’s a lovely book on fine cotton paper, raised print, and leather binding. But I don’t live in London and this is not convenient for me). That’s two kinds of “information should only be in the hands of the deserved” in my opinion.
This discussion above sounds like yet another “information should only be in the hands of the deserved,” or more appropriately, “information should only be disseminated by the deserved,” both of which spell out antiquated notions that information is a privilege and only the privileged should have it. I think Merrian touched upon this briefly above (and possibly someone else, forgive me if I am missing someone.)
Sorry for the knee-jerk reaction, but this just smells suspiciously like folks who know better deciding who gets to think and to know. And they’re probably fighting for their own validity and jobs, who knows. But it’s really distasteful to me.
It’s not as though 1968 was that long ago, though. I wonder if, in the not-too-distant future, the expectation that access to a humanities/arts education at university level should and will be open to any deserving and talented student will be considered both antiquated and the result of an anomalous period of prosperity in the post-World-War-2 period. In any case, it’s not as though it’s ever been an expectation that’s been realistic on a global level.
I read another gloom-inducing article in the Guardian today:
Given the state of the global economy and environment I fear we’re heading towards greater social inequality.
For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to come from a slightly different angle:
Firstly, I don’t think we will ever have social equality, here in the UK, the US and other countries, in any lifetime. In fact, I think the global society as a whole supports the social inequality for as long as the existing social structures of economic system, legal system and political system exist. The rich, the titled, and the establishment probably will always have more respect and privileges than the lesser ones, including those who don’t meet the general criterion of an “Elite” according to each country or culture, and we – regardless of our actual stances – support and sometimes enforce that.
Back to topic: I frequently feel such a hypocrite because I’m against social inequality in most cases and yet, I regularly buy romance novels.
This is a genre that heavily supports the concept of social inequality, in form of authors and readers preferring to cast the members of the nobility, the famous and the rich as protagonists. I could argue the inequality includes tropes of people with disabilities (able-bodied protagonists are the only ones who can ‘save’ them from themselves, implying that people with disabilities are not capable of finding happiness and love themselves), people of colour (an interracial relationship (with a white person as one half) seems to be a lot more acceptable and supported than the couple of a non-white ethnicity), and perhaps people of different religious movements (do we often have a Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist or Muslim couple in Romance?). Do we need to mention any more, such as inequality in other areas including sexual and gender?
I think – please correct me if I’m wrong – Romance is the only genre that consistently, openly and heavily supports a tradition of social inequality.
With this in mind, it’s rather odd that bloggers of romance reviews would react badly to the elitism of the review world. I don’t necessarily agree with all what I said here, but it’s an angle that often popped into my mind when we have something like this.
@Maili:
Since inequality (and I should say unjust inequality since some inequalities are not unjust) is everywhere, there’s no getting away from it, is there? There is inequality in heterosexual marriage, but I don’t want to forsake the goods of marriage, so I’m married. There is inequality in academia, but I find being an academic a worthwhile endeavor. I object to the elitist (and sexist, ableist and racist) problems you mention in romance novels — a genre in bed with the inequality producing evils of capitalism if there ever was one — but to turn my back on it would be to reject, in large part, women’s fiction, thereby helping further the kinds of inequalities in fiction and reviewing discussed in the post. I guess I am trying to say that to me there is no hypocrisy in not being able to avoid or disavow all unjust inequalities, when there are so many, and doing so would often put one in conflict with other values I hold.
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