handling the Internet’s loaded gun

July 2, 2009 in Almanac | No comments

Leave it to the inimitable Edward Champion to not only get Alain de Botton’s response to the brouhaha over the Caleb Crain review of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” but to get an insightful essay from Alain de Botton on the blurry “boundaries between public and private” in the Internet age, and on the rules of reviewing as laid down by John Updike.

De Botton begs naïvité in his comments on Caleb Crain’s website:

I used to believe that posting a message on a writer’s website counted as part of this kind of semi-private communication. I have learnt it doesn’t, it is akin to starting your own television station in terms of the numbers who might end up attending.

This is a little hard to believe–he sought out Crain’s site, which shows some web savvy; and Crain’s site publishes an e-mail address, which would have provided a more private means of contact (not 100% private, but more so than a blog comment). But we can give de Botton the benefit of the doubt here, particularly since there was not a little passion clouding his judgment. One might be tempted to see something performative in the way de Botton responded to Crain, using the public and unfiltered nature of the Internet to undermine the effect of the review, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

De Botton’s essay makes two interesting, and compelling, points: that there are (or should be) standards for book reviewers, and that the line between private and public communication has greatly eroded in the Internet age. On the first, I agree wholeheartedly; and his suggestion (in response to Champion’s questions, though the essay reflects the spirit of the suggestion) that reviewers comply with Updike’s rules is a good one:

In the wake of Updike’s death, partly as a tribute to him, my recommendation is that newspapers all sign up to a voluntary code for the reviewing of books. This will help authors certainty, but most importantly it will help readers to find their way more accurately towards the sort of literature they’ll really enjoy.

His observations about the Internet and privacy are trickier:

The problem with overhearing people in private moments is that they don’t follow the rules of civilised society and hence offend our sense of propriety (that’s why the rules are in place). All of us, if cameras were turned on during our moments of rage, disappointment, fear and vengeance, would wince if the footage were then played back to us or – even worse – were played back to an audience of strangers. We value privacy for precisely this reason: it protects us our immaturities from wider display.

The Internet, at its technological core, is built on anonymity, immediacy, and mass distribution. This is a combination that is ill-suited for externally applied civility and propriety; without fundamentally changing the architecture of the Web, it’s unlikely that brakes on our private fulmination could be built into the system. The benefits of the loose, replicable, and immediate architecture of the Internet are many, but they come at a significant price: the private sphere is greatly eroded by the ubiquity of the blog, and the editorial gatekeeping that print publishing demands is cut out in favor of the Internet’s raw and immediate distribution.

The quandary is in trying to apply rules of propriety in a lawless cyberspace. New rules of propriety are developing, but not nearly as well-codified as the etiquette developed over thousands of years of written and spoken communication. Without rules of some sort, though, communication quickly collapses into shouting.

For now, at least, we’re stuck relying on our own internal code of conduct, and on the fear of shame when others see our outbursts. We’re not yet mature enough as a society to handle the loaded gun that the Internet gives us, and I expect that there will be many more instances of people shooting their own feet before we’ve figured out how to put the safety on.

partisan reviews

July 2, 2009 in Almanac | No comments

Girl InspectorL’affaire de Botton, in which a bad review prompted some outrage on the part of Alain de Botton and some thinking about the ethics of the book review, led me to look again at John Updike’s rules for reviewers. And while I think Updike’s rules set the standard for the kind of book review done in the New York Times and most of the remaining newspaper book pages, they really only cover a particular genre of writing about books. There are other types of book essay, where these rules aren’t entirely applicable, and would in fact be an onerous strait jacket.

Book reviews are sort of like a “Consumer Reports” article: their purpose is to give an overview of a book, point out its most obvious features, and guide the reader in whether or not to select it. This is a pretty narrow contract, and as such most book reviews are ephemeral. Their usefulness is worn out once the reader has made that decision. In these short-form reviews, it makes sense for the reviewer to avoid books they are “predisposed to dislike” and not to be “warrior[s| in any ideological battle.”

But there are other genres where it makes sense for the writer to disregard these caveats; writing about literature would be no fun at all if one couldn’t occasionally skewer a book with which we disagree, or use a book as a missile in an ideological battle. I’m thinking of the long-form critical essays that are the meat of the offerings in journals like “The New York Review of Books,” “The Times Literary Supplement,” and “Commentary” (the “old guard”) or “Rain Taxi” and “The Complete Review” (the “young Turks”).

For these sorts of essays, Updike’s rules about fairness still apply, but not so much the rules about focus. “Review the book, not the reputation” wouldn’t be useful in Julian Barnes’ Updike overview, for example, or Sue Halpern’s roundup of books about success. This sort of essay uses the book as a jumping-off point, building an argument (whether in support of the book or opposed to it) that can pull in evidence from any source. A book review is bounded by the book under consideration, with little external context offered; the critical essay is all about context.

I’ve re-read Caleb Crain’s review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and I think I’ve solved the puzzle of de Botton’s outrage. While masquerading as a book review, Crain’s piece is really just the first half of a critical essay. Crain is engaging the ideas in the book, not the book itself, and he has some strong criticisms of them, and of how the ideas are executed. But because of the strictures of the book review form, the piece is weirdly truncated. Crain sets up his partisan take on the book, makes some hints at where it goes wrong, but cannot make his own counter-argument because he’s already out of space.

That makes the piece fundamentally unfair, both as a book review and as a critical essay. In a critical essay, Crain would be required to go further and build his own case, drawing on other sources than de Botton’s book and proposing an alternative understanding of work and meaning. Had Crain’s piece done that (and since it would almost certainly be much longer than the NYT Book Review would permit, he can’t), the reader could have fairly assessed Crain’s argument. This leaves de Botton with little recourse (though I still think “I will hate you till the day I die” is a bit much): Crain’s argument against the book might be good, or it might not; we can’t know from what is given in the review.

The market for the long-form critical essay is probably pretty small: certainly smaller than for the book review, which is already pretty rarefied. But they still have a place in the world of literary journalism; it would be nice if, in the larger space that online publishing permits, outlets like the NYT Book Review would augment its reviews with criticism: Crain’s essay deserves to be expanded, and de Botton deserves to have a better case made against his book.

Tags: , , , , ,

rules and contracts: reviewers, writers, and readers

June 30, 2009 in Almanac | 2 comments

As a way out of the morass of hurt feelings, embarrassing outbursts, and grand posturing in the recent reviewer-writer donnybrooks, take a look at what John Updike had to say in his six rules for book reviews. “[S]haped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion,” they lay out a guide for civil, ethical, and useful criticism.

They insist first on fairness: “do not blame [the author] for not achieving what he did not attempt.” It would be unfair, for example, to criticize a pulp science fiction novel for failing to offer well-rounded characters, just as it would be unfair to criticize a literary short story for lacking tentacled aliens. Next, they insist on thoroughness and accuracy: let the book speak for itself, giving “enough direct quotation . . . of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” And finally, they demand that the reviewer exhibit humility: “[d]o not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind.”

These guidelines imply a contract between the reviewer and the writer, and between the reviewer and the reader (of the review, and potentially of the book). Between reviewer and writer, the contract stipulates a fair and accurate review, without an agenda that poisons the well. The book, not its author, should be the focus, and it should be assessed on its own terms. Between the reviewer and reader, the contract stipulates an accurate assessment of the book’s interest, and its success in its goals; by providing evidence in the form of direct quotation, the reader has the chance to sample the book, and to judge whether the review is accurate.

Things tend to break down when the review fails on one of Updike’s points. In the Alice Hoffman case, her legitimate complaint against Roberta Silman’s review is that Silman gives away too much of the story. This is a fair complaint in a review of a plot-driven novel, and it breaks the contract not only with the book but also with the reader.

As for Caleb Crain’s review of Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” the offense is subtler. On first glance, Crain appears to comply with Updike’s rules: he takes the book on its own terms, and provides ample quotation to make his points. And yet the review is scathing, and on occasion ad hominem: de Botton is accused of being superficial, mocking, and beset by class anxieties. It would appear that Crain has broken the fuzzy sixth rule that Updike proposes, “accept[ing] for review a book [he was] predisposed to dislike.” Crain appears to want a journalistic account with populist, or at least sympathetic, leanings, and that’s not what de Botton has delivered.

Updike’s rules offer very helpful guidelines for approaching the issue from the reviewer’s perspective. They are less helpful, though, for the writer faced with a negative review. When Updike published them in 1975, authors had fewer recourse to vent: no Twitter, no blogs, just the letters column in the offending publication, or space in a rival publication, and the postal service. (Unless, of course, you were Norman Mailer and could punch out your critics, or Proust and challenge them to a duel, but those seem well outside any guidelines for civil discourse.)

It is reasonable for writers to hold their critics to these rules; when a critic strays, the writer is well within her rights to say so. But it would be wise to keep that sixth rule in mind, which implies that all three parties have a contract with something larger than this review and this book: do nothing that will harm the “presumption of certain possible joys of reading,” and keep your vitriol aimed more at the review than the reviewer.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

the pleasures and sorrows of reviews

June 29, 2009 in Almanac | 3 comments

Hot on the heels of Alice Hoffman’s very public tantrum, another writer pops up to confront a reviewer. Is it time, perhaps, to mount the barricades? I hadn’t heard the call to revolution, but if I must dig up cobblestones, then so be it: Sous les pavés la plage!

This time, it’s Alain de Botton responding to Caleb Crain’s NY Times review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work over at Crain’s Steamboats Are Ruining Everything site.

In de Botton’s defense, Crain’s review really is negative (unlike Roberta Silman’s review of Alice Hoffman’s novel, which was much more mixed). Crain assesses de Botton’s tone as dismissive, petty, and pompous. The best praise he can muster is that ““The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” succeeds as entertainment, if not as analysis” in a few isolated sections; for the most part, he implies that the book doesn’t live up its billing.

De Botton, however, rises to the challenge and sinks to schoolyard taunts (if somewhat pompous taunts). After accusing Crain of “killing” the book (”two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review”), de Botton closes with:

I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

Goodness!

De Botton returns 30 minutes later (apparently not a sufficient cooling off period) with what amounts to a declaration of war:

. . . there’s a point at which a review becomes so angry, cruel and mean-spirited that perspective just disappears and one is into new and uncharted terrain. I’m responding to this review as a way of proposing that forgiveness is perhaps not always the only option when the provocation has been enormous.

Compared to the Hoffman affair, de Botton’s response to Crain is mild, almost gentlemanly. But I’m still uncomfortable with it. Perhaps it’s my Quaker heart that’s shocked by any declaration of war, even a literary one, but I don’t see how this pattern can bode well for writers, reviewers, or readers.

One of the pleasures of reading reviews is running into contrary and controversial opinions. Before I settle into a book (especially a biggish one: de Botton’s is over 300 pages, which has some heft), I like some warning: is this book something I’ll enjoy? Is it carrying baggage I should be prepared to heft? If the review is by someone whose opinion I trust, a positive or negative review can be very useful; and on the other hand, a review by someone with whom I’m not familiar, or whose opinions frequently clash with mine, gushing praise might keep me away. When a book is widely reviewed (which de Botton’s certainly has been), the range of responses starts to build a composite portrait, which will guide me deciding whether or not to add it to my stack.

But if the “enormous provocation” of a negative review is now going to be casus belli for writers (whether engaged as a gentlemanly duel like de Botton, or a sustained sniping campaign like Hoffman), there can only be a chilling effect on honest book journalism. The response will be either falsely positive reviews, bland and non-committal reviews, or no reviews at all. In any case, readers will have fewer resources on which to base their reading decisions, and that can only cause suffering among the innocent bystanders in the literary war zone.

I’m not convinced that a negative review really can “kill” a book like de Botton’s, which has significant publisher backing and has been positively reviewed elsewhere. I suppose that an especially savage review in the NY Times or Kirkus could kill a smaller book, but smaller books usually don’t make it into those venues. And even if a negative review really can do financial and even reputational damage to a book, I’m not convinced that responses from the author help matters.

So please, Ms. Hoffman, Mr. de Botton: come down off the barricades. You’re like Bakhunists hurling cobblestones at the Marxists while the Prussian army camps outside the gates. The real enemies aren’t in the review pages. Politely and cordially agree to disagree with the reviewers, and keep your rebuttals private; give your readers (who are also your critics’ readers) the respect they deserve. We can identify snark by ourselves, and balance the reviews we read.

Tags: , , , , , ,

The Hoffman Twitter-tantrum: how’s the weather in Patagonia?

June 29, 2009 in Almanac | 1 comment

ScreamAlice Hoffman’s very public meltdown over a slightly unfavorable review of The Story Sisters is one of those pity-and-fear inducing Internet moments. In a series of Tweets (27 in all, according to Gawker), which included swipes at the city of Boston and the publication of the reviewer’s personal phone number, Hoffman showed herself to be, in Edward Champion’s words, “the most immature writer in her generation.”

I’ve seen this kind of meltdown in the business world, where e-mails become more and more heated, further and further from the original affront, until all proportion is lost and one side or the other (sometimes both) begin calling down the apocalypse. It’s an ugly and heart-pounding sight, and stepping in to try to add perspective, reason, or humor is a sure-fire way to be flattened in the carnage. Sometimes the explosion has a cathartic value–Lucy Kellaway offers some great practical advice for the novice oath-taker–but sometimes, especially when behind the anonymous barriers of electronic communication, it simply leads to tears and embarrassment.

As a writer of short fiction, published in obscure corners, I don’t have to worry much about snarky reviews. Sometimes a story of mine shows up in a blog post, but usually if someone bothers to comment on my writing, it’s because they liked it. A short story you didn’t enjoy is probably not worth a comment; a bad novel, on the other hand, is an affront to the reader, who invested far more time in hoping it would turn around.

One of my stories was once singled out in a review at a respected online journal as an example of what’s wrong with fiction on the Internet. It wasn’t one of my favorite stories (though it did make the long list of notable stories for the Million Writers Award), and the reviewer’s comments weren’t far off the mark. I privately thanked the reviewer (because, as Hoffman should recognize, there’s value even in a bad review: the criticism can be useful to one’s future efforts, and contrarian readers may be tempted to see if the review is accurate), we exchanged pleasantries on the value of literature (because writers and critics are really on the same team when it comes to the important things), and life went on. Though this was a pre-Twitter exchange, I can’t imagine feeling the need to “tweet” it (except maybe to offer a link to the review). Remember: your words aren’t you, even if you did labor long and hard to put them in the right order, and a reviewer’s opinion is an unscientific and wholly anecdotal sample of one.

Alice Hoffman’s Twitter account is gone now (check the cache while you can!), so perhaps she’ll be less able to shoot her foot off in the future. But just in case someone else gets the idea that they need to have a tantrum online about a review, consider Iris Murdoch on the topic:

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-28

June 28, 2009 in Almanac | No comments

Powered by Twitter Tools.

The city winks a sleepless eye

June 26, 2009 in Almanac | No comments

I’m in the right age cohort for Michael Jackson’s music, but I was never a fan. When “Thriller” was a monster hit on pop radio, I was listening to pompous art rock–”Asia” was the first record I bought with my own money, followed in quick succession by items from the back catalog of Yes, Kansas, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin. When making an album choice, I’d scan the track lengths, and if anything clocked in at under five minutes I’d dismiss it as insipid pop and move on.

By the time Michael Jackson had become weird, I was learning about jazz, and filling in the gaps in my knowledge of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. And it was the delicate, breathy rendition of Jackson’s “Human Nature” on a Miles Davis record that made me take another look.

I had already come around on Prince, another ’80s star I hated at the time, when I discovered that there was more to His Purpleness than meets the eye; “The Black Album,” which I bought from a street vendor in London in 1989, is still the nastiest funk, with a touch of jazz, this side of Bootsy Collins. And when I took another look at Michael Jackson, I found that there were things to admire in him as well: a great range of emotion and styles, an angelic voice, a solid understanding of showmanship. If we take him only from the records–especially from “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”–Michael Jackson leaves behind a legacy of pop craftsmanship that is simply unparalleled.

Alas, the music is overshadowed by the train wreck of his life. He was as much a victim as a beneficiary of fame in the modern world, a soul strangled in infancy and deformed by the spotlight that gave him life. It’s no wonder that the rumor went around that Jackson coveted the bones of John Merrick; he was as much a sideshow monster as The Elephant Man, perhaps even more tragically so.

He left a wake of damage himself, with real lives–I think especially of his three young children–warped by his fantasies. That he died on the verge of returning to the spotlight makes his passing that much more tragic and pathetic in equal measure.

When I listen to his music now–especially “Human Nature,” his version of which is actually (I’m slightly chagrined to say) better than the one by Miles Davis–I hear optimism, hope, and longing. Maybe someday the aura of celebrity will fade, the disturbing strangeness of his life dissolve into simple quirkiness (it worked for Salvador Dali and Gerard de Nerval), and his music can be appreciated for its joys alone.

Until then, he makes a good argument for the value of enduring obscurity.

Tags: , , , ,

Five Stories About Camping

June 22, 2009 in stories | 1 comment

We’ve just come back from a family camping trip to St. Croix State Park; inspired by the lists at A Commonplace Blog (inspired, in turn, by the Five Best series at the Wall Street Journal), here are five short stories that deal with one aspect or another of the camping experience:

To Build a Fire by Jack London

When I teach firebuilding to Scouts, I explain that there are three components to a successful fire: fuel, spark, and oxygen. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

One of the best commentaries on firebuilding is Jack London’s story of survival on the Yukon Trail. I read this story back in middle school or high school, where it’s taught as an example of the “Man against Nature” theme, and it has always stuck with me; I allude to it when I do firebuilding with Webelos at winter camp, hoping that it will make some sort of connection for them between Scoutcraft, literature, and winter survival. Even if it doesn’t, though, I hope it at least encourages them to remember not to put their fire under a snow-laden tree branch.

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood

My favorite camping tradition is to read classic ghost stories to the hiss of the Coleman lantern, after everyone else has gone to bed; M.R. James, J.S. LeFanue, and Wilkie Collins all have the smell of woodsmoke around them when I reflect on their stories.

“The Wendigo” tells the story of a camping trip gone terribly wrong, which helps put the small inconveniences of any normal camping trip (my own was marred by forgetting the air mattress pump and the stovetop espresso maker) into perspective: anything you’ll meet in our state parks is sure to be easier to overcome than a flesh-eating unspeakable monster.

It’s also the best story to read when camping in the northwoods: the wendigo/windigo is an Algonquian monster that grows out of the fears (and desires) of consuming human flesh. Thoroughly weird and creepy, especially when read in the insufficient light cast by a Coleman lantern.

Big Two-Hearted River by Earnest Hemingway

There probably is no better camping and fishing tale than Hemingway’s story of Nick Adams in the burnt-over country of northern Michigan. Adams has taken to the woods to remember and to forget; the story unfolds without quite unfolding, never giving away the things that haunt Adams. It is a very in-the-moment story, focused on the minutiae of making camp, cooking coffee, and catching fish, with faint glimpses of things swimming far below the surface.

We Are Not In This Together by William Kittredge

William Kittredge is an heir, if not the heir, to Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. In “We Are Not In This Together,” a man hunts a killer grizzly bear, but the bear is much like Ahab’s white whale: the prey is as much his own heart.

A Note on the Camping Craze That is Currently Sweeping America by Richard Brautigan

Much as I imagine my camping trips in the Nick Adams vein, they’re really more like the suburbs-in-the-woods that Richard Brautigan describes. We live closer to our fellow campers than we do our neighbors in the city, and no self-respecting bear (or chipmunk) would wander into the camper cul-de-sacs for the open-fire TV dinners we feast on. And when I look at much of my beloved camping gear–the Coleman lantern, the Kangaroo Kitchen, the nylon hammock–I see the schlock that Brautigan describes. I only hope to be rolled up in my tent someday and carted out in an ambulance.

Tags: , , ,

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-21

June 21, 2009 in Almanac | No comments

Powered by Twitter Tools.

the days are just packed

June 18, 2009 in Unemployment Diary | No comments

Calvin: Do you know what day it is?
Hobbes: Nope. Why?
Calvin:Oh, no reason. I was just curious. . . . I sure like summer vacation.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

In the spring, the great beneficiary of my employment situation was the dog. She was guaranteed a long walk every morning, in addition to an evening stroll, and had someone with thumbs available to open the back door whenever she found herself on the wrong side of the barrier.

Now it’s the boys who benefit from having me at home. Not that they’re at home much; since school ended, they’ve been roaming in a semi-feral pack up and down the alley between my house and their friend Pat’s. They check in for food, band-aids, and occasional referee services, but otherwise I know where they are just by the relative volume of boy shouts.

I think it’s generally a good thing for kids to have some unstructured, wild, wide-open time in the summer. Normally, they’d be at the park day camp all summer, which involves a lot of supervised playground time but also swimming lessons, group activities, and field trips. Their unstructured time was in the evening, from about four o’clock until the street lights come on; a good chunk of time, but not the kind of unstructured time I remember as a kid. (I feel sometimes like I grew up in the 1950s instead of the 1970s; my mother stayed home until I was about thirteen, and we usually lived in the safe, clean, subtly-supervised world of military housing, which resembled, and may still resemble, Beaver Cleaver’s subdivision.)

Unstructured time with other kids teaches them important lessons in following rules, making decisions, and sticking up for themselves, in addition to wearing them out. I’ve been called in less and less often to referee disagreements, and they seem happy to have found their spot in the pack: as two of the younger kids on the block, they don’t get to call as many tunes, but the other kids recognize that many games are more fun with more participants, so they get included in most activities. They also have a good sense of propriety–some of it natural, some of it subtly instilled through Cub Scouts (I’m a firm believer in Scouting as “a game with a purpose,” and make sure that all of our den meetings include lessons in fair play, inclusiveness, and good sportsmanship)–so I feel comfortable peeking in on them only about once an hour if I don’t hear screaming or smell smoke. I’m not quite the perfect idle parent, but I lean toward that end of the spectrum.

Alas, some structure will be imposed in the next few weeks, whether I find regular employment or not. They’ll be taking some morning classes at the middle school down the street, maybe a little music camp, and evening swimming and baseball. This imposition of structure has been met with significant unhappiness, of course; once they get to a class, they’re enthusiastic and excited, but there’s a hurdle to climb to get there.

A little structure is good for them, I think, and good for me, too. There’s plenty of summer surrounding the morning and evening activities, and I’ll be pressing them into service on another project that will require occasional field trips. Learning how to manage unstructured time is an important lesson, but so is learning to follow Dad’s recommendations.

Tags: , ,