Via PublishersMarketplace’s PublishersLunch, here’s an interesting piece from the Chicago Sun Times about writers’ efforts to get on Oprah. Some have succeeded, most have failed, and quite a few have embarrassed themselves.
Anyway, let’s hope they’re embarrassed ;-)
[tags] writing, Oprah [/tags]
Over at Bibliobuffet, Daniel M. Jaffee has an interview with Samantha Dunn. Dunn began her career as a novelist (Failing Paris) and magazine writer, but after she was badly injured falling from a horse she found herself writing her first memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life. She’s since written another, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation.
Of memoirs, she says,
I’ve come to realize that . . . one of the things that makes memoir writing unique . . . is the level of direct self-inquiry that is not demanded in other forms. That’s why I don’t call it ‘creative nonfiction’; to me that label goes to great reportage, in the school of Wolf or Capote.
She found her home, as a writer, in this genre.
I have read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” twice. The first time, however, was under the direction of an undergraduate Russian literature professor, so it might more accurately be characterized as having been taught “Anna Karenina” ;-)
College was a long time ago. I remember only one snippet of one lecture of that course, when the professor drew our attention to the scene early in the book that depicts the nature of Anna’s intimate relations with her husband — or rather, of his intimate relations with her:
Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, freshly washed and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to her.
“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into their bedroom.
She’s already met Vronsky at this point, and Tolstoy uses this scene and that immediately preceding it to contrast Anna’s spontaneous and powerful physical attraction to her soon-to-be lover with her growing physical revulsion to her husband:
“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.
Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.
It’s a heart-wrenching situation, to be sure; one can’t help agonizing for the woman, and although I can’t say for certain that my professor intended us to interpret the novel as a romantic tragedy (as per the tagline from the 1997 Warner movie: “In a world of power and privilege, one woman dared to obey her heart”) that’s how I, as a college student, did interpret it.
Then I reread it years later, and to my astonishment, discovered a completely different book.
With “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy was not arguing that women must obey their hearts; he was showing that when people let their passions drive them, they may find themselves driven to self-destruction. Granted, social convention is the cause, to some extent, of Anna’s growing unhappiness, but the love affair itself becomes a source of torment at the end. Anna gets what she wants, and it solves nothing.
My discovery was pure pleasure, too. Not that there’s anything wrong with women daring to obey their hearts, but what a pleasure to realize that the book’s themes were more complicated than “defy social convention/get yourself punished.”
It was with similar pleasure that I finished “A Suitable Boy.” (Which I discovered, btw, via A Snarkling Reading List commenter.) Again you have, as a central figure, a woman under pressure to conform to restraining social convention (in this case, the custom of arranged marriage). Again, you have a writer who uses his heroine’s predicament as a lens through which to examine the choices of other individuals connected to her through a network of family and their associated social circles. “A Suitable Boy” is also as rich with details about 1950s India as Anna Karenina is with details about 19th century Russia, its path winding freely into contemporary politics and religious ceremonies, through both urban and rural settings.
But where Anna Karenina’s story ends tragically, Lata Mehra’s does not.
When I finished “Anna Karenina” the second time, I remember thinking that such a novel could not be written today. But Seth has written a novel that is very much in the same league, and which deserves the praise its earned. It’s a big book, but a book that merits, for the most part, its 1400-page length. I highly recommend it.
That’s how much of America is lawn, according to Brian Black in CS Monitor. He’s reviewing “American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,” by Ted Steinberg.
Black admits he doesn’t care for lawns, and Steinberg, apparently, thinks they’re “an instrument of planned homogeneity.”
As Americans sought to fit in with one another during the cold war, writes Steinberg, “…what better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”
Sorry, but I think that’s just silly (although not quite as silly as “we descended from savanna dwellers,” lol). If it were true, then we’d all be painting our houses the same color. For that matter, we’d all want houses built exactly alike. We’d demand cookie-cutter landscaping. But we don’t. Even in relatively homogeneous tracts, builders know to vary the color, orientation, floor plan etc. of the houses — and the longer they’re lived in, the more we alter them to make them unique.
Lawns are simply a fashion — a landscaping fashion — and like all fashion, the reason they’re popular is esthetic. People like the way they set off our homes and gardens, forming a kind of matte within the frame of road, sidewalk, or property line which borders our homes.
That’s why uniformity (i.e., no weeds) is considered so desirable. We don’t want the matte to call attention to itself. It’s supposed to be even-textured and uniform in color.
Are lawns a good ideal from an environmental standpoint? Probably not. But it’s facile to dismiss them with singsong “they’re all made out of ticky tacky” platitudes, particularly when your platitudes are tinged with condescension. Tastes change, and there’s no reason our collective eye couldn’t begin to appreciate other ways to frame our homes. But the way to get people to change is by presenting alternatives they find beautiful, not sneer at them for being mindless conformists.
Here’s a review of a new book, We Want Real Food, by Graham Harvey, which examines the effect of the depletion of soil nutrients on the nutritional quality of our food.
To some extent, we’re able to compensate by taking vitamin supplements, but as I suggested in this post, that’s not an ideal answer, either. In the long run, we need to convert mainstream agriculture to more organic-style practices. No question about it.
A few weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t want to buy something icky, either.
So I stood in front of the bank of sparkling wines offered by my favorite wine shop and considered my choices.
It happened that two other women were there, also shopping for champagne. They were apparently friends, and having a lively conversation, recalling different wineries they’d visited. After eavesdropping on them as they discussed four or five different bottles, I decided, on impulse, to consult with them.
I’d picked up a bottle of Konstantine Frank sparkling wine (which interested me because it’s an Upstate New York State vitner) and asked them if they were familiar with it, and whether it was any good.
They were gracious from the start, but also, at first, cautious. The reason soon became clear: they didn’t want to recommend something without knowing a bit about my taste. So wisely, they asked me which of the wines I did like. I pointed to the Veuve Clicquot, heh. “This, only I’d rather not spend quite that much.” And at that point, they relaxed. “Oh,” they said. Now they could help me. They knew my taste was close enough to theirs.
And they recommended a $20 Roederer Estate Brut sparkling wine.
I took it home, chilled it, opened it later that night, and was thrilled. It was delicious — at that price, perfect, in fact.
Which brings me to this 12,000-word article (excuse me, “paper”) at First Monday (tagline: “Peer-reviewed journal on the internet”).
The paper proposes to examine the scandalous behavior of on-line user reviews, with a focus on Amazon book reviews.
First, we have the reviews that are blatant plants. The article authors (Shay David and Trevor Pinch) remind us that
in 2004 both the New York Times (Harmon, 2004) and the Washington Post (Marcus, 2004) reported that a technical fault on the Canadian division of Amazon.com exposed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers, and alarming discoveries were made. It was established that a large number of authors had “gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals.” A few had even “reviewed” their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.
(The authors don’t realize how oh-so 2004 this particular scandal is. Today’s writers are urged, quite blatantly, by their handlers to call in every favor owed them since they left the cradle in exchange for glowing Amazon reviews.)
Next comes the point that many Amazon reviews are essentially spam. The text is copied from one review to another — outright plagiarism is involved in some cases — and often the review is merely a clever pretext for publicizing a website URL. (Rather like the spammers who pretend they love my blog as a pretext for adding their business site url to my comments. Yeah, that’ll work.)
Other reviews are falsely flattering: reviewers give books five stars in order to raise their own reviewer standing. Still others are obviously written more to satisfy a reviewer’s emotional needs than to provide information about a book. (Ya, no kidding.)
And then (worst of all! :-D) are the reviews that are simply crap.
What the paper’s authors don’t consider is whether anyone really takes online user reviews seriously.
I bet not. I bet most people — like me — read Amazon reviews (if at all) for the entertainment value, not to help them make purchase decisions.
It’s simple human nature. In most cases, we take advice from people whose judgement we decide we can trust — a common sense criteria that de facto excludes anonymous online reviews.
That’s not to say we have to know the person giving the advice, but we have to know something about them. Perhaps we’ve observed that they seem engaged and knowledgeable — like the two women I met in the wine shop. A well-written review in a print publication can fall into that category, even if the reviewer’s name is unfamiliar.
Maybe it’s someone with whom we simply identify — a blogger we read, or Oprah, or someone we know from work.
But taking advice from anonymous people on the ‘net?
Maybe some of us do that, once or twice. But I’m betting that people who do quickly learn how useless that advice can be.
And here’s the thing. Even if you do buy a book based on a bogus review, that’s the end of the chain, right there. You’re not going to recommend that book yourself.
So although the Internet can be a medium for word-of-mouth, it’s a foolish marketer who thinks a post on the Internet is equivalent to word-of-mouth.
The real chain is, and always has been, trust.
Or to put another way: the number of Amazon reviews is as much (maybe more) the result of a book’s popularity as the cause of it.
In the Boston Globe, Sven Birkerts reviews the online novel-to-date by Walter Kim that is being published by Slate.
Birkerts is not persuaded that the novel will live up to its promise of somehow delivering real-time art, i.e., to be a novel and at the same time to “respond to events as they happen.”
I believe that real time and the time of art, the consciousness that makes art, are contradictory concepts-“real-time art” is an oxymoron . . . The traditional aim of art, in response to deeply planted human needs, has from the first been fundamentally contemplative. The work offers a deliberate distancing from the chaos and turbulence of the immediate and allows the reader or viewer to process its tensions through the recognition of underlying patterns.
I suppose so. But that’s pretty, um, abstruse. lol.
He goes on a bit more in this vein, then writes:
And yet, if Kim can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow.
This gets a bit closer to the crux of the matter. People don’t go to Borders or click on Amazon.com because they decide they need the “prophylactic” benefit of “artistic distance” to keep their sanity “in the face of the boggling complexity of living.”
They — we — buy books because they transport us and affirm what we know ourselves to be.
If writers figure out how to harness the Internet in a way that engages and excites people, and that enables readers to connect emotionally with an online fictional world, it will work.
It’s really pretty simple, in the end. Although not necessarily easy . . .
That post title is a book title, so of course I had to blog about it ;-)
The book is by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, it’s about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, and it’s been reviewed by Darrin McMahon in the New York Times (registration required).
The “dog” refers to Rousseau’s delusional tendencies, but he also owned a dog named Sultan, who, McMahon writes, was “the only being with whom he could find the peace of true friendship in England.”
Another nice review of Outwitting Dogs
Except:
So, what exactly do the authors mean by “outwitting” dogs? Basically, the key to successfully outwitting a dog lies in recognizing the fact that we as dog owners do have bigger brains (proven once again by the fact that you reading this book re-view and your dog is not), and then choosing to use our brains to manage, train, and shape our dogs to fit appropriately into our worlds.
The review was originally published last year, however, so I don’t think it explains last week’s Amazon bump.
Here’s another book review. The subject, this time, is Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television’s Greatest Sitcom, edited by David Lavery and Sara Lewis Dunne of Middle Tennessee State University.
The review appears in the National Post, and was written by Robert Fulford.
Here’s an excerpt of the column to set the tone:
But this latest book notably differs in tone from standard university products. Appreciation and enjoyment, combined with wonder at the cleverness of the program’s writers, set the tone. The platoon of scholars writing the essays understand Seinfeld as brilliant popular art, not merely a specimen demanding intellectual dissection. This means we can admire their insights without giving up our love for the best television farce we’ll ever see.
Enjoy ;-)
