There's an ugly term that's making the rounds out there - ugly but essentially accurate - called blogfucking; it's a coarse designation for the intramural linking that goes on around between blogs. On the one hand, one tries to remain sensitive to criticism of clique-ishness and the rest. Further, one seeks to maintain critical credibility, which can sometimes be called into question by ongoing mutual admiration and backslapping. (Brief side story - In my pre-blog days, I posted a comment on The Antic Muse that was vaguely dismissive about critic Alan Cheuse. To my enormous surprise, I received an e-mail from Cheuse a few weeks later, asking me to explain to comment in more depth. After I got over the surprise that anyone cared at all about what I thought, I explained that I was suspicious of reviewers who seemed to like everything; without a sense of their dislikes I found it hard to gauge their tastes. It led to an interesting discussion which culminated in my revision of the original post.)
And yet, there are blogs out there which manage to take an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning and turn it into something to savor. I've often described Maud's site in that light; Carrie's new effort promises much of the same. But it's Dan Green's The Reading Experience that I'm writing about this morning. I know I've been immoderate in my praise of Dan's work, and that can lead to a bit of justified suspicion or accusations of said "blogfucking." But the fact remains that even when I don't agree with Dan's ideas - his James Wood posts, for example - there's always something to chew on. Today's post in which he shines the cool, clear light of his criticism on the bottom dwellers over at ULA is a model of the form, and a reminder at least to me, about how blogs might be used.
In a fairly lengthy post, Dan dissects the intellectual shallowness of these self-appointed everyman literary guardians.
Thus the ULA is the latest in a long line of advocates of the notion that literature is a matter of "saying something," preferably in the least embellished and ambiguous way, of using fiction or poetry for doing "something relevant to American people’s lives," as another of their pronouncements has it. But "saying something" almost always turns out to be itself a matter of saying something that's been said many times before, or something everybody already knows, or something of great interest to the writer but of no conceivable interest to any readers, or something with which those readers already agree, or something that seems of burning urgency today but tomorrow will seem as prosaic as the newspaper article it was taken from, or something as tedious and doctrinaire as almost all "revolutionary" statements ultimately are. Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote of the act of "saying something" in a work of literature that "A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an 'idea' already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form." In this context, the ULA approach is, quite literally, an abandonment of art, a rejection of what makes literature literature.
Dan continues on with a look at ULA exemplar Jack Saunders (whose work suggests to us an E! Entertainment version of David Markson), and with this utterly appropriate rebuke of head wingnut King Wenclas:
Apparently King Wenclas, the ULA's reigning royal, took an interest in the recent contretemps between Dale Peck and Sven Birkerts as discussed in Birkerts' recent essay in Bookforum. (Apparently as well the King has it in for Bookforum in general, describing it as a bastion of "pseudo-intellectual cultural snobbery.") The level of intellectual discourse of the ULA sovereign's analysis is captured well enough in this passage, attacking Birkerts: "The history of his writings has been a BOOKFORUM in miniature with a heavy dose of reviews of foreign authors no one was reading and after his reviews still no one was reading them. (Can one be more intentionally irrelevant to his own time and place?) What was important to the Birkerts career as establishment critic was not his unremarkable unmemorable essays, but the career itself, the pose of 'critic' formed after prep school by working in a bookstore egregiously sucking-up to Joseph Brodsky living in the woods reading a lot of books announcing in his life and the dry torpor of his words 'I am an intellectual!'" Anyone who has read some of my previous posts knows that I have some admiration for Birkerts as a critic, but even as someone inclined to defend him I find it hard to take this passage very seriously. One hardly knows what the King's real problem with Birkerts's criticism actually is, since here (and in the rest of the piece) all we get is petulance, fake iconoclasm ("sucking up to Joseph Brodsky living in the woods reading a lot of books"), and ad hominem attack. As an attempt to rabble rouse against the literary establishment, it's pathetic.
As Dan suggests early on, it's hard to be entirely unsympathetic with some of what ULA stands for; one merely wishes that the message was in the hands of those better suited to the job.
Comments