September 30, 2010

The brave new world of reading, if not criticism

by

Such stuff as dreams are made of?

Such stuff as dreams are made of?

Finally, someone has an interesting take on the spoof of the Time magazine cover story on Jonathan Franzen perpetrated by Tao Lin and the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger: While the Economist‘s “Prospero” blog notes the Stranger piece is “silly, and not exactly worth reading,” it also opines that

What is satisfying, however, is the way this transference of Time‘s canonisation to a young Asian author helps to clarify what some of the bluster — call it “Franzenfreude” — has been about. Will an Asian-American author, or an African-American or a woman, ever be credited with writing the Great American Novel?

Of course, Prospero’s defense of the observation leaves something to be desired. First, one could observe the Economist is a British publication seemingly unaware that this isn’t just an American phenomenon, mate. Second, the brave, anonymous columnist also offers up the deeply ridiculous idea that ebooks are somehow more egalitarian than print books because, uh, a friend once forgot to look at the author page of an ebook and didn’t realize he’d read an entire book by a woman! Nor does Prospero raise an issue that we’ve been lamenting around the office at Melville House for a while now, as have our colleagues at other presses: that the overwhelming majority of work submitted to us nowadays is by men.

Nonetheless Prospero’s column does smartly recognize a deeper level of provocation to the Lin/Franzen spoof.  And it does raise the idea that this transitional moment in the technology of reading is “a good time to consider our biases — gendered, latent and otherwise — in our judgment of books.”

Other than that it’s mostly silly and not worth reading.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

  • Scobie

    Well, I would have preferred if the writer went beyond the surface of the parody and actually compared the books (especially since I’ve just read both of them), not to turn it into a literary death match but just to show that, on the margins of the main literary discourse in this country, amazing things are happening. Tao Lin won’t get on Oprah any time soon (though it’s a wonderful fantasy to imagine what he would do if he did), but that doesn’t meant that attention shouldn’t be more spread out to other writers. It reminds me of the Wim Wenders movie “The Goalie’s Anxiety and the Penalty Kick” where the narrator–who has committed a grisly murder and will probably get away with it–says to someone he’s sitting next to at a soccer match, “Try keeping your eye on the goalie. It’s hard. People want to watch the ball instead.” There’s a whole lot of other things worthy of attention happening in the literary universe; it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep our eyes on only Franzen.

  • Scobie

    Well, I would have preferred if the writer went beyond the surface of the parody and actually compared the books (especially since I’ve just read both of them), not to turn it into a literary death match but just to show that, on the margins of the main literary discourse in this country, amazing things are happening. Tao Lin won’t get on Oprah any time soon (though it’s a wonderful fantasy to imagine what he would do if he did), but that doesn’t meant that attention shouldn’t be more spread out to other writers. It reminds me of the Wim Wenders movie “The Goalie’s Anxiety and the Penalty Kick” where the narrator–who has committed a grisly murder and will probably get away with it–says to someone he’s sitting next to at a soccer match, “Try keeping your eye on the goalie. It’s hard. People want to watch the ball instead.” There’s a whole lot of other things worthy of attention happening in the literary universe; it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep our eyes on only Franzen.

  • Maxwell

    I understand that you guys publish Tao Lin’s work, but really you post about him far too often. Even if you could spread your self-promotion around, I’d be happy. This weird worship of this single author is just excessive. Other than that, I love MH and Moby Lives.

  • Maxwell

    I understand that you guys publish Tao Lin’s work, but really you post about him far too often. Even if you could spread your self-promotion around, I’d be happy. This weird worship of this single author is just excessive. Other than that, I love MH and Moby Lives.

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