Power Quote
Wanton exhibitions of spleen
Does anyone write disses like this anymore?
The literary convention of the time is so artificial… that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying with an aunt for the week-end rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more adult writer do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of spleen. Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus, if you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other. Mr. Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air! Again, with the obscurity of Mr. Eliot. I think that Mr. Eliot has written some of the loveliest single lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politeness of society – respect for the weak, consideration for the dull! As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book. -Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
Tags: disses, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf
Reading this makes me want to break all the windows in my house.
Yeah, David Foster Wallace, and in the same spirit of “all that new stuff sucks, except when I do it.”
I imagine DFW does it with the same brazen flair as Woolf. But living. Today. Who’s dissing with elegance and charm?
I would count Wallace as contemporary, certainly in relation to what is and has been going on for the past twenty-five years, despite his three-year-old demise. That’s what I took you to mean, although I take your point.
It’s hard to say. I’m hesitant to go out on a limb and suggest that the most brazen and elegant dissers are writers whose foremost contribution to contemporary letters comes via their membership in the literary auxiliary, but that’s what it feels like: Walter Kirn, etc. I.e., I have trouble thinking of authors I’d classify as “major” who devote a hell of a lot of time to taking stands. It seems counter-productive, but that’s just my opinion. What we see as the holistic “given” of literary modernism was inchoate and evolving when Woolf was writing, and setting aside the matter of whether she was (famously) “wrong” about Joyce or (not quite as famously) “wrong” about Eliot, ultimately their work came to stand side by side, not in opposition to one another. The fact that these are three Anglophones writing from three specific sets of origins is also, of course, of interest.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that, for Woolf, clearly, there was a sense that literature as practice and artifact needed to go in a different direction, while nowadays there’s a kind of relativistic buffet approach that suggests that “literature” feeds into separate, equally valid, streams. Those in one stream seem hesitant — to a fault — to attack members within that stream, perhaps even more so when the stream is marginalized (hence the buddy-buddy approach of an American Book Review). And those who assign, say, book reviews, often take care to ensure that the guy reviewing a writer from Stream A is not a member of ostensibly-ideologically-opposed Stream B. Fireworks are notably reduced, thereby. I’m undecided as to whether this is good, bad, or just another indicator that the practice of American book reviewing is useless.
╔═══╗ ♪
║███║ ♫
║ (●) ♫
╚═══╝♪♪
╔═══╗ ♪
║███║ ♫
║ (●) ♫
╚═══╝♪♪
╔═══╗ ♪
║███║ ♫
║ (●) ♫
╚═══╝♪♪
Yes, I agree with you. I guess I’m questioning the current “relativistic buffet approach.” Woolf’s points, whether “right” or not, are fearless. They’re pointed. Most reviews today are simple pats on the back. (I’m guilty of doing it too. Esp with my fan mail letters here on Giant.) Reading Woolf, though, I had an itch to read a “real” review, if by “real” I mean “honest,” if by “honest” I mean “exactly what the reviewer thinks without fear of backlash.” (This is not the equivalent of scathing for the sake of scathing.) The closest I’ve come to reading something like this are Josh Cohen’s reviews. I’d like more of those, please, and I was hoping Giant readers would know where some are hiding.
Does anyone still use their spleen?
I love the boy rolling in the geranium bed.
I hope I’m not here to diss or revel in the dissing of others, but I am always happy to break windows. The sound of crashing glass gets me going.
I love vintage douche
Well nobody just rolls out of bed in the morning able to match Virginia Woolf for eloquence, style, or good old Cool English Vitriol, but the piece on Francis Fukuyama in the current issue of Harper’s seems to be in the spirit of what you’re asking for. Also, Adam Kirsch on David Foster Wallace in the New Republic, Marilynne Robinson’s dim view of Dawkins and the other New Atheists in “Absence of Mind,” William Deresiewicz on Gaitskill’s “Don’t Cry” in The Nation, Moe Tkacik on Malcolm Gladwell (also in The Nation), James Wood on Paul Auster in the New Yorker, David Gates on Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones” in the NYTBR, Amy McDaniel’s review of Lydia Yuknavitch’s “The Chronology of Water” (with particular focus on McDaniel’s rebuttal of Lorrie Moore’s attack on memoir in the NYRB) in Paste magazine online, and of course that recent review of Chris Martin (also in the NYTBR) that made everybody on this website cry. And yes, Josh Cohen too.
PS- With all due respect, “diss” is a very silly word, and is particularly undignified in the context. You’re better than that, and ought to demand better
of yourself.
Hi Lily. “As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book.” I feel exactly this way about Woolf’s method of negative review. The best really fascinating scalding review I’ve read recently was Eliot Weinberger’s reflection on W. Bush’s Decision Points, which has all the humour and sharp-tongued acuity you see here without the exasperating fustiness and without lullling you into a kind of wittified stupor with their vivid rhetorical oneupmanship. Easy target, you might say, but it’s not the target that interests me: what I’d like to see is that level of interpretation in more general negative reviews. I’d like to see more negative reviews that come over scalding because they do the novels they criticise justice and are not merely reactionary bleeting or sophistic gatekeeping or a botanical garden of witty snobbologies. Strong opinions are not good just because they are strongly held; that only makes them more opinionated and, just as often, more oxygen-sapping. I want to see more strong reasons in negative reviews and less strong opinions. Reasons are still idiosyncratic – it isn’t that they involve ideas, while opinions are mere impressions – but they derive from a different rationale than opinion. Opinionizing deals more with sentiment than speculation, or, to put it in other terms, it admonishes more than articulates. It’s the total fuzzing of opinions into reasons – such that any strongly felt opinion is a reason to write a review – that gives you such intellectual disasters in New York lit culture as The New Republic and n+1. It also accounts for why it is that the negative reviews we do read today in venues like Harper‘s that become seminal aren’t disastrous exactly so much as continually disappointing, and given incentive to continue to be so, maddeningly obsessed with a few pet issues that are totally out of touch of what all the writing out there that should be blowing minds is up to and where it is at, often becoming controversial for precisely that (lack of a) reason (Franzen’s notorious essay, for example). The way the form of the negative review is funnelled into speechifying – into contentious and often outrighly stupid statements on Taste, unbacked by any extended reading, into endless symposiums on the Novel, into the grotesque “humanization” (what it is to be human etc.) of aesthetics, into the regulation rather than the study of writing (the difference in which is dealt with in depth at Montevidayo, for example) – sucks up so much precious collective brainpower having to rebutt and argue the toss over inspidities that wouldn’t even pass remedial class were they stated in a stand-alone argument but which get this sort of controversy-triggered handicap card because they’ve been expressed in barbed tones and wiity curlicues through the method of a negative review. What we really need is a new method and new style of doing reviews altogether, as well as new institutional venues of reviewing. Whether you’re right or wrong kind of does matter: I want to read a reviewer really thinking, not read the written version of a sharp opinion they jolly well have. Precisely because of that, the problem of an absence of forceful, formidable reviewing won’t be solved by an increase of fearlessness from a busted status quo. Today’s review culture is already far, far too “Woolfian”.
JT, would you be able to link me to a few favourite Josh Cohen reviews? I’ve read essays but never seen him with his reviewer’s cap on, would be very interested to watch him at work.
Hi Lily. “As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book.” I feel exactly this way about Woolf’s method of negative review. The best really fascinating scalding review I’ve read recently was Eliot Weinberger’s reflection on W. Bush’s Decision Points, which has all the humour and sharp-tongued acuity you see here without the exasperating fustiness and without lullling you into a kind of wittified stupor with their vivid rhetorical oneupmanship. Easy target, you might say, but it’s not the target that interests me: what I’d like to see is that level of interpretation in more general negative reviews. I’d like to see more negative reviews that come over scalding because they do the novels they criticise justice and are not merely reactionary bleeting or sophistic gatekeeping or a botanical garden of witty snobbologies. Strong opinions are not good just because they are strongly held; that only makes them more opinionated and, just as often, more oxygen-sapping. I want to see more strong reasons in negative reviews and less strong opinions. Reasons are still idiosyncratic – it isn’t that they involve ideas, while opinions are mere impressions – but they derive from a different rationale than opinion. Opinionizing deals more with sentiment than speculation, or, to put it in other terms, it admonishes more than articulates. It’s the total fuzzing of opinions into reasons – such that any strongly felt opinion is a reason to write a review – that gives you such intellectual disasters in New York lit culture as The New Republic and n+1. It also accounts for why it is that the negative reviews we do read today in venues like Harper‘s that become seminal aren’t disastrous exactly so much as continually disappointing, and given incentive to continue to be so, maddeningly obsessed with a few pet issues that are totally out of touch of what all the writing out there that should be blowing minds is up to and where it is at, often becoming controversial for precisely that (lack of a) reason (Franzen’s notorious essay, for example). The way the form of the negative review is funnelled into speechifying – into contentious and often outrighly stupid statements on Taste, unbacked by any extended reading, into endless symposiums on the Novel, into the grotesque “humanization” (what it is to be human etc.) of aesthetics, into the regulation rather than the study of writing (the difference in which is dealt with in depth at Montevidayo, for example) – sucks up so much precious collective brainpower having to rebutt and argue the toss over inspidities that wouldn’t even pass remedial class were they stated in a stand-alone argument but which get this sort of controversy-triggered handicap card because they’ve been expressed in barbed tones and wiity curlicues through the method of a negative review. What we really need is a new method and new style of doing reviews altogether, as well as new institutional venues of reviewing. Whether you’re right or wrong kind of does matter: I want to read a reviewer really thinking, not read the written version of a sharp opinion they jolly well have. Precisely because of that, the problem of an absence of forceful, formidable reviewing won’t be solved by an increase of fearlessness from a busted status quo. Today’s review culture is already far, far too “Woolfian”.
David, try his review of Adam Levin’s “The Instructions” (NYTBR) or his review of Tao Lin’s “Richard Yates” in Bookforum. You should be able to get either one online. The TL one seems particularly relevant to this thread, inasmuch as I admire the piece despite personally disagreeing with its central thesis and most of its key assertions.
Dis-dignifying dissing dignifies dis disser
The Cohen “diss” of TL is epic.
JT, Sure, “diss” is a silly word and more or less undignified in any context. I thought it was funny, using such a low class word to describe such a sophisticated quote. (Honestly, I was worried people may not finish reading it without some type of “hook.”)
Thanks for the suggestions. I just moved and haven’t caught up on reviews, or anything else in life.
Hi David, I tend to like your emphasis on reason, but isn’t reviewing more about opinion than reason? I mean, I can’t logic my way through writing a review, and if I could, I’m not sure I’d like the result. That being said, I don’t think reviews ought be based on opinion alone. Idk, maybe I misunderstood your comment, which is entirely possible.
yes.
yes.
maybe you should have written “duz anyone write disses like dis anymore?”
the more undignified, the sharper the hook?
Silly is an antidote more should be quaffing.
WELP I DUNNO, BUT I THANK GAWD EVERY DAY THAT THAT DUM CUNT DID NOT GET HER WAY
Today, I don’t know. My favorite is Mark Twain’s diss of Fennimore Cooper. The whole thing is brilliant and hiliarious. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html
“They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the
case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the
corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in
the Deerslayer tale.”
or
“They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation,
the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings
would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a
discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of
relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be
interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the
people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has
been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.”
Lily, actually, it’s my fault, I tried to make a distinction between Reason and reasons too much in passing in my above comment and it didn’t come through. Okay, so I’m not trying to seperate out cold hard logicality from impressions and intuition and just plain old fallible likes and dislikes. The idea of writing a review based on a book you want to recommend but haven’t fully processed or could never fully process or even writing a review in which you talk about what you didn’t like about it in a very honest open candid but also questioning and searching way, an wondering review, almost, which you rarely ever see: I have no problem at all with that. But negative reviews demand an entirely different standard, I think. The kind of vitriol we see from Woolf above (incidentally, I do think Woolf has reasons for what she says: but it’s how we love her bitchiness and verbal slamming that’s the problem, the detachment of it) becomes a way to moralize the reviewer’s own conceits. And there’s a responsibility to have your opinions be more than opinions in that case but reasons based on reading and proper engagement: doing the work justice, as I say above, which, given that in a negative review, you’re slamming it, really, really burns. In a way, I’m actually arging for both a more generous and a worlds meaner review culture than we have now. Reviews – and especially negative ones – so easily become platforms to confirm the reviewer’s conceits rather than really transform how we read. In the context of a small snippet for a website or the capsule review section in a magazine, that might not be possible, of course, but that’s also not too huge a problem, because registering you don’t liking a book in that context is understood as a sketch. The extended essayistic review, however, such as above, or the forefronted reviews in a literary magazine, makes a very specific kind of intervention and it demands more than a 5000 word hissy fit perfectly rendered. It also demands you understand how many different kinds of readers there could be. A more personal searching style of long negative review is fine – a more explicitly styled ‘why I don’t like it’ piece – but I’d like to actually see those actually be more searching and less prearrived at their response. An example of what I mean by that occurs to me: Vanessa Place’s review of Eugene Marten’s Waste. Walking away from her review, I was left with a really interesting feeling: I no longer know how I feel about the book. That’s a worthwhile style of negative review, I think, all the more so in that, as you’ll see, her review is negative – and also barbed, actually – but not an opportunity to play a game of insult hopscotch. I hope that clears up what I was getting at a bit better.
Lily, I think JT was just “negatively reviewing” your post.
Justin, thanks! It’s a perfect duo actually, as I hated the Levin and of course adore Tao, so this wil make for an excellent double shot. Cheers, man!
Bottoms up.
The review of ‘All Things Shining’ in the NYRB was pretty brutal and excellent.