The Job of Dispensing Praise

Posted 12 May, 2008 in Book Reviewing | No comments

Dan Green, commenting on Scott Espisito’s assertion that the National Book Critics Circle’s list of recommended reading is not particularly useful because it only recommends books that people are already reading:

“The authors everyone is already reading” are inevitably what a group of newspaper book reviewers is going to consider it their job to “recommend,” since these are the only authors who get reviewed to begin with.

I agree with the spirit of what both Green and Espisito are saying. What use is yet another list cobbled together from already extant bestseller lists? Surely Jhumpa Lahiri, Peter Carey, and J.M. Coetzee don’t need the NBCC’s endorsement: their books get reviewed as a matter of course by all the major news organs — including that most coveted of venues, the New York Times Book Review — and will likely find generous levels of readership. Better the NBCC uses its influence and reach to try to move a bit outside the mainstream and suggest worthy authors who might have fallen below the radar of a mass readership because they do not have the blue-chip track record that seems to be imperative for getting reviewed in the NYTBR and elsewhere. (This is a point that Sarah Weinman in the comments section of the NBCC blog post.)

Still, as a newspaper reviewer myself, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that no reviewer worth her salt will feel that it is her “job” to recommend anyone, ever. The job of a book reviewer is to provide an honest assessment of a book under review, focused exclusively on its literary strengths and weaknesses, with no regard for the history or relative importance of the author. Every book reviewer will have had the experience of being disappointed by a favourite or usually reliable author, just as every book reviewer will have been surprised when a normally detested author produces a work of merit.

This is the ideal, and it is obvious that sometimes it goes wanting. There is enormous pressure on newspapers to keep their advertisers happy, which often means softballing reviews of lesser works by major writers. This does occur, although it shouldn’t.

But any reviewer who feels that it is his job to praise, say, the latest novel by Margaret Atwood or Philip Roth, based solely on these writers’ statures and previous track record, should not be in the job in the first place.

Kelln Goes All Cory Doctorow

Posted 8 May, 2008 in Book News, Technology | 3 comments

Mystery / suspense author Brad Kelln, whose new novel, In the Tongues of the Dead, is due out this fall from ECW Press, has jumped on the Internet freebie bandwagon. For a limited time, he’s giving away Black Inside, the third novel in his Michael Wenton trilogy (which also includes Lost Sanity and Method of Madness), as a free download on his website.

Kelln is not a stranger to innovative Internet marketing. Last year he serialized a novel on his Facebook group, “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes Books.”

Anecdotal evidence indicates that authors who give away their material on the Internet experience a spike in sales of their physical books; we’ll have to wait until fall to find out if Kelln’s gambit pays off in sales of his new novel, which is described on his site as “a mystery thriller with religious undertones intended to evoke controversy.”

Dept. of Unintentional Irony, Pt. CLXIII

Posted 7 May, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

Apparently a mother in Lynnwood, Washington (natch) is upset that Urban Outfitters clothing stores are stocking what she claims to be sexually explicit books that are inappropriate for teenagers (who, of course, never have, think, or talk about sex, let alone download porn off the Internet).

I know it’s a cheap shot, but check out the name of the mother in question:

LYNNWOOD — Marci Milfs went to Urban Outfitters to find clothes for her teenage son.

She was surprised to find sexually charged books that she believes have no place in a clothing store for teens and young adults.

On one end of the spectrum was “Porn for Women,” a photo book showing men doing housework. On the other was “Pornogami: A Guide to the Ancient Art of Paper-Folding for Adults,” a guide for making anatomically correct artwork.

“When I saw it, I was shocked,” Milfs said.

Before she gets her moral outrage any more stoked, she might consider changing her name. I’m just saying.

(Thanks to Sarah D. for the link.)

A Bit of the Old Ultraviolence

Posted 6 May, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about violence recently.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine confessed to being a bit of a “blood junkie” when it comes to the movies, and I must confess a degree of sympathy for this affinity. Violence in art is clearly nothing new: it goes back at least to the Greeks — the only difference between Oedipus blinding himself in Sophocles’ play and the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear is that Shakespeare had the violence occur onstage. Aristotle even had a name for the vicarious pleasure that an audience takes in the artistic depiction of violent acts: katharsis.

“Since the poet should provide pleasure from pity and fear through imitation,” Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, “it is apparent that this function must be worked into the incidents.”

And while it is not at all certain that Aristotle could in his wildest fantasies have imagined Hostel or Ichi the Killer, his notion of a cathartic release through the artistic depiction of violent acts still has traction in the 21st century. In Hostel, Eli Roth uses the techniques and the approach of genre horror first as an excuse to depict some of the most visceral torture sequences in film history, but also to forge a subversive commentary on our post-9/11 psyche in the wake of the United States’ war on terror. And Takeshi Miike’s Ichi the Killer juxtaposes sequences of over-the-top, cartoonish violence, with brutally realistic scenes of rape and torture in an attempt to get the viewer to question his or her own responses to the violence onscreen: watching the film, a viewer is made uncomfortable when the screen violence stops being enjoyable and starts being unpalatable. How and where this line is drawn is one of Miike’s primary considerations.

Right up until his death, Stanley Kubrick refused to allow A Clockwork Orange to be shown in British movie theatres. He felt the film was too sadistic and that audiences did not respond to it in the proper way. Indeed, while admiring the technical skill that is evident in the filmmaking, to this day I have great difficulty with those who claim to have been “entertained” by Kubrick’s movie. Ritualized rape, torture, and murder, even set to an ironic Beethoven score, is not “entertaining.”

And yet we continue to watch television series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which routinely involves sexual and physical violence being visited on children; we continue to consume ultraviolent movies such as the Saw films and this year’s Rambo; we continue to read books by writers such as Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, which regularly describe all manner of degradation and viciousness, and we claim to be entertained.

Why should this be?

I think that Bill Buford has at least part of the answer. In his book Among the Thugs: Face to Face with English Football Violence, Buford meditates on the peculiar attraction that violence exerts for those who get caught up in it:

I have so many images for it — this state of being a citizen, of being civilized. I see it as a net that holds me in place, keeps me from falling. I see it as a fabric — a network of individual threads, intertwined, pulled tight — that keeps me warm, that I can wrap around both me and others. I see it as property, a house, a structure, a made thing, walls to keep out the cold, a door to keep out the unwanted, a roof to protect me from the night and its terrible undifferentiated darkness.

But I see it, too, as a weight. I see it as a barrier, an obstacle between me and something I don’t know or understand. I see it as a mediator, a filter that allows only certain kinds of experience through. And I am attracted to the moments when it disappears, even if briefly, especially if briefly: when the fabric tears, the net breaks, the house burns — the metaphors are arbitrary. This line, again; this boundary: I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I am excited by it; I know no excitement greater. It is there — on the edge of an experience which is by its nature antisocial, anti-civilized, anti-civilizing — that you find what Susan Sontag describes as our “flair” (the word is so attractively casual) for high temperature visionary obsession: exalted experiences that by their intensity, their risk, their threat of self-immolation exclude the possibility of all other thought except the experience itself, incinerate self-consciousness, transcend (or obliterate?) our sense of the personal, of individuality, of being an individual in any way. What are these experiences? There are so few; they are so intolerable. Religious ecstasy. Sexual excess (insistent, unforgiving). Pain (inflicting it, having it inflicted) — pain so great that it is impossible to experience anything except pain, pain as an absolute of feeling. Arson. Certain drugs. Criminal violence. Being in a crowd. And — greater still — being in a crowd in an act of violence. Nothingness is what you find there. Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.

Moments of violence, moments in which the fabric of civilization is rent open, are among the most atavistic moments in human experience, and they show us how little removed we are from nature red in tooth and claw.

Not being given to masochism, and tending towards pacifism in my political views, I nevertheless confess an affinity — perhaps even a troubling attraction — to displays of violent acts in movies and books. To touch that kind of atavism, to experience — even vicariously — that sense of civilization falling by the wayside, to stand unadorned by societal repressions and restrictions: this is an energizing, animal sensation. To do this within the safe confines of an artistic medium assures the acceptable release of the kind of negative human emotions that Aristotle pointed to. Better to take in a screening of Hostel than to grab a sniper rifle and ascend the nearest bell tower.

I have as yet seen no good scientific evidence to prove that people who consume violent entertainment become, ipso facto, more violent themselves. If one holds with the Aristotelian precept of catharsis, then there is a good intuitive rationale for believing exactly the opposite: those who expunge their negative impulses in the safe confines of an artistic setting need not worry about having these spill over into the real world.

On the weekend, I took in a screening of Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’s corrosive documentary about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The film is distressing: simultaneously heartwrenching and infuriating in its implication that the participants in the abuse of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib acted with the tacit endorsement of the U.S. military and, by extension, the American government. Listening to Pte. Lynndie England attempt to paint herself as the real victim, saying that she was only twenty years old and in love, is enough to make one seethe with anger and frustration. Surely no twenty-year-old is too naive or innocent to realize that forcing a hooded, naked man to masturbate while pointing at his penis with one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other, smiling broadly all the while, is inhuman behaviour. And it boggles the mind to view a picture of a naked, hooded Iraqi bound to a metal bedframe, his arms stretched behind him almost to the breaking point, and hear one of the military investigators involved in the case describe this as “standard operating procedure.”

The documentary footage in Morris’s movie is disturbing enough. But what is equally disturbing, on an artistic level, is that the director, in collaboration with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson, intersperses recreated footage of certain scenes into the documentary footage and shots of the infamous photographs. This footage is presented in glorious slo-mo photography, and has the effect of aestheticizing the experience documented in the film, in much the same way that Anne Michaels has been accused of aestheticizing the Holocaust in her poetic novel Fugitive Pieces. Here again, the viewer is brought up short on the horns of the question: with the actual violence being so potent and unacceptable, how acceptable is it to take pleasure in the aesthetic recreation of that violence? How culpable are we as viewers for looking at these sequences and seeing first and foremost a series of beautifully shot tableaux?

Nietzsche wrote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Engaging in an Aristotelian act of catharsis by consuming violent entertainment is worlds apart from the actual dehumanization and violence depicted in Standard Operating Procedure. Still, perhaps one of the reasons I feel so uncomfortable at the moment has to do with the stark realization that the line separating me from those soldiers in Iraq is a razor thin one. I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. How long is it possible to stare into the abyss and remain unscathed or unaffected?

Cameron Nominated for Arthur Ellis Award

Posted 2 May, 2008 in Awards | No comments

Heartfelt congratulations go out to novelist and TSR fave Claire Cameron, whose novel The Line Painter has been nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award by the Crime Writers of Canada.

A full list of this year’s nominees can be found here.

Revenge Is Sweet

Posted 2 May, 2008 in Book Reviewing, Mindless fun | No comments

From the NYTBR’s Paper Cuts blog:

It’s not often in the literary world that what begins as farce ends in whipped cream. But that’s sort of what happened last night when Rick Moody nailed Dale Peck squarely in the face with a fully loaded pie plate at a fundraiser for the writers’ retreat Sangam House, thus achieving long-overdue payback for the infamous 2002 review in which Peck called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.”

The best part of this post? There’s a video.