Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader, Come Back Donald Barthelme, and co-editor (with Eva Talmadge) of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. With Jeremy Schmall he makes The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn.
adapted from a letter I wrote in an ongoing exchange I’ve been having with another writer/editor about the state of book reviews in the “online scene”…
This is a dynamic, emergent scene we’ve got going here, and we all learn on the job to some degree–me as much as anyone–but my baseline expectation is that if someone puts their work out into the public sphere, they are asserting that it belongs there, and are prepared for it to be judged against whatever else is out there already. Not in the sense of competition, but in the sense of discerning value–as in, I took the time to read this, what am I getting back for my time? What does this thing purport to do, and has it succeeded in doing so? I don’t think that’s too harsh a position to take, in fact it seems like the absolute bare minimum. (Our standards, probably, should be much higher than they are if we ever want to push ourselves beyond what we’ve already achieved–but we don’t have time to get into that right now.)
I think the real problem is that many people in our scene want to “review” because they want to be published, and the near complete absence of standards for reviews means you can pretty much always get a review “published” somewhere or other. But the people who write such “reviews” don’t have anything to say about a given book beyond “I liked it” or “this is my friend” or “this sucked.” I’m not sure if that’s because they actually can’t read critically, if they simply can’t articulate their thoughts, or if they’re simply disinclined to exert extra effort when the bar for achieving the “end goal” of publication on this or that website is so low it couldn’t possibly be out of reach–may possibly in fact have to be reached down for.
Or else people want to “review” books for the same reason they want to click the “like” icon under somebody’s facebook post. And I’ll be the first one to defend that kind of impulse. There’s a place for that. I write blog posts like that all the time. Sometimes it really is all that you want to say, or sometimes the work doesn’t warrant extended consideration. It’s there to be taken or left. But praising or damning a book is the work of a single sentence, paragraph at most. If the review is to be any longer–that is, if it is to truly *be* a review, it needs to do something more, or anyway, something else
Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist. So much of what passes for reviews or criticism that I read online seems not simply to fail to contribute to my understanding of the work under review, but actually to disrupt that understanding, or worse, to degrade the work. Put as simply and viciously as I can: a “reviewer”‘s windy, incoherent, sychophantic paean to the virtues of _______ is going to leave the reader (that is, the reader of the review) less inclined to read the work under review, because the work’s primary champion seems to be some kind of idiot. The drooling happiness of the idiot impresses nobody, and nobody wants to invest their money or time in the book that impressed the idiot. We understand this implicitly when we attack the NYT’s staff reviewers, so why is it so hard to see–and harder to still to call out–when its happening among our own ranks?
Christopher Salerno reviews Chris Tonelli at the Tarpaulin Sky blog. Click through to read the whole review.
+
Darcie Dennigan reviews G.C. Waldrep at the Rumpus. Same click deal as before.
Just fuck ’em.
Or better yet, let’s fucking fuck gerunds.
That way, it–the fucking–will keep going into the eternal present.
That is all.
—D.N.
Click through anywhere to read the whole piece.
I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the worst the system has to offer.
One week later, he died of an infection that could have been treated.
With 47 million Americans lacking health insurance, the stories add up.
Cicily Janus, former web editor for Opium, and author of two forthcoming books- Sick and Tired: An Oral History of America’s Health Care War and The New Face of Jazz, also fries a mean piece of chicken.
From Paul Haggis’s public resignation letter from the Church of Scientology. Via Gawker, who have the whole letter.
The church’s refusal to denounce the actions of these bigots, hypocrites and homophobes is cowardly. I can think of no other word. Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.
I joined the Church of Scientology thirty-five years ago. During my twenties and early thirties I studied and received a great deal of counseling. While I have not been an active member for many years, I found much of what I learned to be very helpful, and I still apply it in my daily life. I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally. I saw the organization – with all its warts, growing pains and problems – as an underdog. And I have always had a thing for underdogs.
But I reached a point several weeks ago where I no longer knew what to think. You had allowed our name to be allied with the worst elements of the Christian Right. In order to contain a potential “PR flap” you allowed our sponsorship of Proposition 8 to stand. Despite all the church’s words about promoting freedom and human rights, its name is now in the public record alongside those who promote bigotry and intolerance, homophobia and fear.
The fact that the Mormon Church drew all the fire, that no one noticed, doesn’t matter. I noticed. And I felt sick. I wondered how the church could, in good conscience, through the action of a few and then the inaction of its leadership, support a bill that strips a group of its civil rights.
In preparation for MEAN WEEK, I sent out a small call for meanness from some people whom I trusted to have some bile to spill. Pretty much everyone ignored me, or else g-chatted gleefully and cruelly but refused to go on-record (I made non-anonymity a requirement). Only Dan Nester–author of How to be Inappropriate–actually sent me something usable, and so he is the first contributor to a new feature that I hope will outlive MEAN WEEK, and appear as often as needed from now on. It is called “Breaking the Cycle of Consent,” where a person announces her or his unwillingness to continue pretending to respect things that s/he has absolutely no respect for. It’s not (necessarily) a call for the things in question to change in any way or to “be stopped;” it is simply an announcement to the world that one does not respect these things, and is no longer going to pretend that one does simply for the sake of social codes. Dan is tired of pretending to respect The Lyric Essay.
Rachel Sherman – I mentioned last week how bummed I was to miss the launch party for Living Room, Rachel’s new novel. She’s reading tomorrow at the KGB Bar here in NYC, and I’m really hoping to make it there.
The Rumpus Interview with Lydia Millet.
The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? by Padgett Powell – In a month that has been more or less one long relentless shitstorm, punctuated by occasional binge drinking, I had no time to read anything that wasn’t assigned–either to me or by me. But I damn well made time for this, my old teacher’s first new book since Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men (2000). Every time I opened the book it was Christmas afresh. Honest to goodness pleasurable reading. If anything kept me from putting my own head through a wall this October, it was probably this book. But don’t take my word for it. Ask the NYT.
****SPECIAL MUSICAL NON-HATEFUL BONUS*******
Magnolia Electric Co. Daytrotter Session – Another sweet find directed my way by the increasingly essential Alec Niedenthal. Seriously, what did I do before I knew this kid? Because Jason Molina is awesome, and because he seems to believe that the base unit of musical thought is “album,” his band’s theoretically EP-length session is a whopping six songs (the average is 4) and clocks in at just over 22 minutes. It includes new versions of two tracks off Josephine, a new version of “The Dark Don’t Hide It,” which is an all-time Molina great, a couple unreleased songs, and a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy5rL5rRbwI
Gabriel McKee, the moderator of the panel I appeared on on Friday night, runs a very cool blog called sfgospel.com. There’s a double review up now of the new R. Crumb take on Genesis with the Wolverton Bible.
Nick Thompson, senior editor of Wired, was on the panel too. He spoke about the Soviet Doomsday Machine.
Then, at a second panel on Sunday, I found myself in the company of Bob Fingerman, John Joseph Adams (editor of Wastelands, the apocalypse anthology that came out shortly after mine, and which I have always privately regarded as my book’s worthy nemesis), plus two fine people whose names escape me at present, including a woman named Hillary who got more than a bit breathless when discussing Japanime, especially Akira and Legend of the Overfiend (see above).
Then somehow I wound up at this site Overthinking It (I think this was via the Rumpus, actually, but it’s Doomsday-appropriate) which I’m rapidly falling in love with. Here’s their explanation of the new technical term, “Ghost Ship Moment”-
The Ghost Ship Moment (or GSM), in its most basic formulation, is when the characters in a film learn what you know from the movie’s title.
I want to get this up here before MEAN WEEK kicks off tomorrow. It’s a rider-thought attached to the previous post where I mentioned in passing that a Knopf publicist sent me a few poetry books this week. I don’t want to leave our readers here with the mis-impression that I was merely gloating over having been gifted with free stuff. Indeed, all three books were sent to me because I requested them, on the promise of consideration for review–a promise I intend to honor in all cases. But the interesting thing is how I found out about the books in the first place. Lena, the publicist in question, may or may not be a regular reader of HTMLGiant–I don’t know. But I do know that she decided to get in touch after reading Michael Schaub’s “Any Wonder We Tried Gin” post, which mentioned the poet Philip Levine. She wrote to say hello, mentioned that Levine has a new book of poems out, News of the World, and invited me to an upcoming reading in Brooklyn. Presumably, she wrote to me and not Schaub because she’d done enough leg work to know that I live where the reading was happening, and he doesn’t. Point for her. In any case, I couldn’t go to the reading, but I offered to take a look at the book, and invited her to keep me posted on Knopf-related poetry stuff. Since that time, not quite 10 days ago, she’s suggested a few other books she’s working on that I might be interested in–didn’t get irritated or write me off when I said no to stuff–and invited me to at least one other event. As it stands today, I now have three books to look at- the Levine, Marie Ponsot’s new collection, Easy, plus an oral biography of Robert Altman that I absolutely cannot wait to dig into (The NYT loved it) and which you, gentle reader, should expect to hear about at some length in the days and weeks to come. Lena has done an amazing job of making me feel like I–as a blogger–and poetry–as an art form–matter, two things which are more or less unheard of for a major press in these sad times (except of course at HarperPerennial, the forward-thinkingest imprint at any outfit great or small, advertiser on this website, and happy home of yours truly). The result of her efforts, which in total couldn’t have taken up more than fifteen minutes of her working week, is that I’m now not only inclined to actually read and thoughtfully consider three books I didn’t know existed this time two weeks ago, but my interest in Knopf has been piqued, and where and what that will lead to, who can say? Lena the publicist, a hearty cheers! Here, here!
Walked out of the coffee shop and saw the neighbors were having a stoop sale–again. Last week I bought a copy of Derrida’ Writing and Difference as well as The Philip K. Dick Reader and a thick paperback book of erotic photography from Carroll & Graf. Today I picked up Sontag’s On Photography, Charles Simic’s book on Joseph Cornell, two volumes of Taschen’s 20th century erotic drawings, and Bruce Springsteen’s Pete Seeger sessions album with a bonus DVD. Total outlay: $4. (Aside: Why are these people apparently unloading all of their erotica? Why do I own all of it now?) Then I picked up the mail and found that my awesome new friend the publicist at Alfred A. Knopf, who earlier this week sent me Philip Levine’s new collection, News of the World, sent me two more books: Easy, a new collection of poems by Marie Ponsot, and Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Michael Zuckoff. I’m excited about all these books, but maybe the Altman most of all. It’s cold and wet here in NYC and the train service is interrupted and pretty much everything sucks. And yet I feel like a million bucks. Thanks, literature!