Category Archives: Literature

Tom Wolfe’s Big, Bad Book

America, Celebrity, English, Intelligence, Literature, Sex

A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not. The infelicities of style and substance in the novelist’s latest book are summed up by Stephen Abell, in the Times Literary Supplement’s November 9, 2012 issue. Abell’s verdict about the door-stopper, Back to Blood: “While it is big, it is not particularly clever”:

…as we struggle through his fourth blockbuster, Back to Blood, we begin to reflect that size, in literature as in life, is not everything. We can at least confidently point to some of the products of Wolfe’s recent cramming …

… [Wolfe] direct[‘s] much of our attention beneath the sheets. Not that sex in Back to Blood goes on merely in the bedroom. In one ill-conceived set-piece, Norman and Magdalena attend a regatta, which becomes a floating orgy with pornography being displayed on the giant sails of some of the boats (complete with rather startling “labia majorae three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center”).

Sex unquestionably brings out some of the flaws in Wolfe’s prose. For example, its effortfully mimetic approach, where the writing enacts the sounds it is describing. This is from a superfluous trip to the “Honey Pot” (an unimaginative strip club), where Wolfe wants to leave us in no doubt about the pole-straddling gyrations of the woman on stage: “BEAT thung CROTCH thung TAIL thung CRACK thung PERI thung NEUM thung”. Or its obsession with transcribing sounds to needless effect (which creates sentences that make it look as if the author has fallen asleep against his keyboard): “unhh, ahhh ahhh, ooom-muh, ennngh ohhhhunh”. There is crass imagery (“his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle”) and glib alliteration (“lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in the loins”). And there is the relentlessly anatomical categorization: “pectoral glories”, “mons pubis”, “their montes veneris”.

…The corollary is, needless to say, a simplistic attitude towards men, and manliness. Men in Back to Blood are judged by the quality of “not being a pussy”, and by their muscularity (an area where Wolfe has an almost fetishistic eye): …

… The notion of an anatomical approach is also crucial to understanding Wolfe’s writing style more generally. He is a founding father of what might called “List lit”, in which constituent aspects of life are broken down into a catalogue of parts. So, for example, when a character sits before a desk, we are immediately presented “with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony”.

At the basic level of sentence structure, this often means that Wolfe’s descriptions (and the descriptions are unquestionably his; they do not vary with the characters on whose perceptions they are apparently based) are filled with minor variation, as if he wishes to create an effect of mass multiplication simply by using near-synonyms: “they looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up”; “he could insult people to their faces, humiliate them, break their spirits . . . make them cry, sob, blubber, boohoo”.

The result is a novel which is bright and busy, and full of information rather than imagination.

MORE.

UPDATED: Mitt Romney: Elements Of A Tragic Figure

History, Literature, Morality, Nationhood, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Mitt Romney embodies some, not all, the elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure:

* Character must be a person of stature. (Check)
* Character must neither be totally good or totally evil
* An error of judge or a weakness in character causes the misfortune. (Check)
* The character must be responsible for tragic events.
* Action involves a change in fortune from happiness to misery. (Check)
* Subject is serious. (Check)
* Tragic hero is of noble birth and displays a nobility of spirit. (Check)
* Protagonists pitted against forces beyond their control. (Check)
* Struggles courageously until his fall. (Check)
* Though defeated, gains a measure of increased wisdom.

Mr. Romney’s election concession speech speaks to these tragic elements, especially this man’s abiding faith in “this great nation.”

I so wish — I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.

UPDATE (11/7): We “left everything on the field,” Romney said, adding “we have given our all to this campaign.”

This comports with the prototypical Greek tragic figure who “struggles courageously until his fall.” Meantime, the snake in the grass coiled and hissed and spat venom, all the way to a victory.

UPDATE II: Publishing Books In The Age Of The Internet, Pathological PC and Unprecedented laziness (Hire Your Own PR)

Education, English, General, Ilana Mercer, Internet, Journalism, Literature, Political Economy

The welcome news comes that Karen De Coster is publishing a book.

A mutual friend, author Rob Stove, has offered Karen some advice and posted it on her heavily trafficked Facebook Wall.

I counseled differently:

“As someone who has done every bit of heavy lifting for my last book—quite successfully, I might add—I have to disagree somewhat with Rob (who advises writing for prestigious publications on the topic, first).

The traditional, stuffy, staid publishing world is dying (yippee). I read the once-brave TLS. All new writers have to be (it would appear) people of color and/or those with no Y chromosome. The only writing worth reading vis-a-vis these new writers is the superb writing by the TLS’s increasingly PC reviewers (who try to be kind to the pig-ignorant, boring, PC writers they have to review).

In any case, you sell books from a platform. Mine was developed over almost 15 years as a weekly columnist.

Karen De Coster writes for a very large site, LRC, with a dedicated, niche readership. She manages social media with skill and has thousands of FB friends (whom she will have to instruct to “Like” her book and display it on their FB pages, if they want to keep her FB company. Here is my Facebook Friendship Policy).

That’s the future of publishing. Who cares if some pompous scribe in a dying publication (check its Alexa rank for stage of rigor) gives one a good review? Rob Stove—he edited The Cannibal; hire a good editor. We all need one—was mentioned by the New Yorker, and other prestigious publications. To this not all of us can aspire. However, were Rob to write a book about politics or culture, he would have to forget about future mention.

Back to my point: Karen can sell lots of books if she publishes the book herself (How much would you rather earn? 17%-50% royalties or 100%, all the more so when you, the writer, do all the work). She can go the CreateSpace route or with her own label. She then uses her platform on LRC to sell to an already interested audience. She also promotes her book on Facebook, via ads and by requiring all friends to “Like” and display book on their Fav. page. Even big names are publishing their own books (see David Frum’s new book. I followed it from CNN).

A small publisher does nothing for a writer except deplete him/her. There are a handful of large publishers worth considering for the TV PR they can generate. This writer (me) manages every aspect of the project—social media, fan page and website designs (I pay the attendant bills too, so…), Amazon page management, all writing, limited PR, etc. That’s the route to getting books read by the public in the age of the Internet (without which the true rebels would be destined for obscurity). Books published by smaller, if respectable, publishers are like the proverbial tree felled in a faraway wood. Almost no one reads them. (Check their profile on Amazon. You’ll see.)

For example, “The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism” is written by a man with the “right” kind of name (non-English/non-Western): Hamid Dabashi. It was published on June 5, 2012 by Zed Books, a print that met the Times Literary Review’s standards.

It’s Amazon rank: #1,614,336 in Books. If you are new to book marketing, that’s abysmal.

(Btw, if you don’t market on Amazon, you’re retarded.)

On the bright side, by the number of reviews “The Arab Spring” got, we can tell that at least one person has read what Dabashi has to say. Conversely, and pessimistically, “0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.” In other words, so far, nobody gives a tinker’s toss what Dabashi’s single reviewer had to say about Dabashi’s latest work.

UPDATE I (10/30): Here’s another TLS “winner,” published (November 1, 2011) by Encounter (who refused the well-motivated proposal that became The Cannibal).

In Money In A Free Society, Tom Congdon touts every form of macroeconomic statism. His approving TLS reviewer mentions the “Austerians” (very bad) but says nothing about the Austrians.

Amazon ranks Money In A Free Society at #560,109 in Books. Zero reviews. Who pays these people?

UPDATE II (Nov. 3): HIRE YOUR OWN PR.

Unless you can get a book deal with one of the major big publishers (try), publish yourself. You’ll be smacking yourself if you don’t. To repeat: 15% royalties (standard industry fare) vs. 100%? Case closed. All the more so since small publishers do nothing for you. Unless your publisher is prepared to invest a few thousand for a few weeks of TV and media blitz. However, you could buy such PR yourself privately. Why hand over your money to a 2nd party to hire a 3rd? If you control the purse strings (as disposable income dictates), hire PR directly, to get on the main shows.

Want to have a frothy a day? Go with a small publisher. They suck. These are dominated by errant youth (or hippie elders who defer to such youth), who don’t have a work ethic or a brain cell to rub between them. No one has taught America’s young how to work professionally; how to conduct themselves with respect to author and contract and execute duties properly: If you want them done to standards, you’ll be inputting info and updating your Amazon page and other Internet displays of your product.

Individuals such as Karen are coming from an accounting career. They work alongside people who have serious degrees. The writing profession, on the other hand, is dominated by individuals who are repositories for postmodern education and values (even when they are libertarian). Don’t go there, unless it’s with a powerful, large publisher.

UPDATED: Seething Against All Things Southern (Right Of Secession)

History, Literature, Propaganda, States' Rights

From the New York Times comes a pleasant surprise. It outright condemns Chuck Thompson’s “screed” against Southerners, titled “Better Off Without ’Em,” finding Thompson guilty of proffering an “ignoramus theory.” About this man’s “Dixie bashing,” JANET MASLIN writes:

The historian Michael Lind, who has himself taken a dim view of the South, refused to cooperate with Mr. Thompson’s “Better Off Without ’Em,” telling him: “I disapprove of your project, which seems terribly snobbish, to judge by your nasty title. The last thing we need at this moment is one group of Americans suggesting others belong in a different country. … Even as a joke, it is not funny.”

Thompson’s picture of all things Southern is one to which nearly all historians, as well as liberals and establishment conservatives, have subscribed.

Thomas Jefferson considered “The natural aristocracy … as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?”

If the South has deteriorated it is, to a large degree, because the South’s natural aristocracy was destroyed in the War Between the States and during Reconstruction. The elimination of this landed gentry was the work of Lincoln and the war he launched (provoking Fort Sumter).

The South still bears those scars.

UPDATE (Aug. 22): Facebook thread: Have you ever read William Faulkner? Hell: From the South comes some of finest literature. As to John Zube’s dismissal: Only about 15% of Southerner owned slaves. The fight JZ seems to dismiss was for states’ rights, not slavery. Judging the past by applying today’s egalitarian ideology, moreover, is worse than idiotic. As was written here, “The missionaries in Africa, for example, regarded slaves as children to be de-tribalized and missionized. They were taught skills and trades; mission stations acted as havens for refugees fleeing tribal depredations in South Africa. As you tour the homes of the founders mentioned above, you’re wont to hear about this or the other wonderful cabinet maker or marvelously gifted horseman, or farmhand, etc. Who do you think taught the slaves these skills and trades? The monarchs of Buganda or Ethiopia? As I say, the Founders were advanced for their time in EVERY respect. Not perfect, but a great deal more perfect than most of us.”