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April 13, 2004

THINGS ARE BAD ALL OVER

As this Times of India report makes clear, the problems of the balkanization of "literary" and "commercial" fiction is hardly unique to the US.

When asked whether the onslaught of cable TV has marginalised literature, Prof Narang, noted Urdu critic and writer in his own right, said, "The IT boom has affected everything, including literature. But the problem is with the media. A culture that ignores its own roots of creativity works against itself.

There's been (and will no doubt continue to be) a good deal of commentary on this question lately, some of it quite sensible, some of it less so. (The Times of India piece is particularly helpful in undercutting such propositions as "... but in fact it is the relativism, "multicuturalism" and rabid egalitarianism of the left that has undermined culture." Setting aside for a moment that it always amuses me to see the alleged power that leftist academics wield without being able to, oh, seat a president or a congress for example, it seems unlikely that tenured Berkeley profs have extended their influence all the way to India.)

Full disclosure - Kevin Holtsberry, who hosts Collected Miscellany, e-mailed me and a number of other litbloggers to point this item out; but he is much closer to the truth when he says "Many on the left love to blame the right for the consumerism and lowest common denominator culture ... " even if he goes on to dismiss that very point. Visit Nathalie's well-linked Swan posting for a case in point. Kevin's post is, with due respect to the author, a classic case of the problems that arise when literary criticism is stuffed through a narrow political agenda.

Posted at 12:13 AM |

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Comments

Kevin Holtsberry

As I said in the email, the rant was rough and spontaneous and so less thoughtfull than it might have been.

That said, I am not trying to stuff literary criticism through a narrow political agenda. Rather I am saying that philosophical ideas have cultural consequences. I am not saying that culture is bad because it doesn't line up with my politics (in the crude R vs. D sense) but because the underlining philisophical worldview negates tradition and hierarchy; lacks the ability to make critical judgements about what is best/good/right.

The conservative thinkers and writers I am building from (however poorly or inelegantly) are not libertarian Republicans running for Congress. I don't have a political agenda, but I do have a philosohical one. Don't you?

Posted by: Kevin Holtsberry | April 13, 2004 at 11:28 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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