Stephen Fry: What I wish I’d known when I was 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

Thanks to George Murray for posting this on Facebook. Now, get your kids to watch. Insist on it.

I know, it’s a crow.

Recent whirligigging over at The Guardian and at Salon.com about blurbs and hyperbolic praise reminds me again of how antithetical capitalism is to honest criticism; also of how raised expectations necessarily lead to disappointment, to ebay bidder letdown. It  magnifies too, the truth that most of what is written, regardless of when it may have been written, is crap. Or as Randall Jarrell once put it, much more eloquently: "Whether we live in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth l, there is one law we can be sure of: there are only a few good poets alive. And there follows another law about critics: if a man likes a great many contemporary poets, he is, necessarily, a bad critic."

Much as Jarrell wanted to praise, much as he hated criticizing the ordinary, – feeling, in so doing, like a devilish ‘spirit who denies’ -  he nonetheless held that disliking what is bad is only the opposite face of liking what is good, " and the good in poetry, is always a white blackbird, an abnormal and unlikely excellence "

Bookride

Juxtapose my Concord Bay Bookstore post, with this from the Washington Post:

POLIGNY, FRANCE – Just off the town square, a few hundred feet down La Grande Rue, a bookstore has been dispensing culture and entertainment to the people of Poligny for 150 years. Over the generations, residents said, it has become part of the landscape, a place where children tarry on the way home from school and their parents duck in to pick up the latest novel.

That’s why, when the shop looked as if it would have to close this spring, a group of townspeople put up cash to form a little corporation, capitalized at $70,000, and bought the lease to keep it running. As a result, the New Bookstore reopened two weeks ago with a coat of fresh paint but a familiar mission: to be a haven where people feel welcome dropping by to buy a ballpoint pen or browse for books.

Poligny residents’ effort to preserve an old-fashioned Main Street bookstore may seem eccentric in an age of electronics, instantaneous communication and discount giants. But not in France, a country that is unusually fixated on (huh? better: ‘properly proud and respectful of‘) its centuries-old traditions and is determined to safeguard its cultural heritage…"

The latest issue of the newly re-designed CNQ magazine contains a good piece by Ryan Bigge in which, when he isn’t carpet bombing the 2009 Giller Prize shortlist,  he presents two interesting ideas: one, borrowing from Zadie Smith, that authors mistakenly trust professional editors, and are better off recruiting the heads of ‘smart strangers,’ to help improve their work, and two: that the Giller Prize would do better – as with the Turner Prize – to honor "artists on the cusp between what the art world would call "late emergent" and early mid-career", instead of putting Vincent Lam and Linden MacIntyre on the same shelf as Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler.

Here’s some of the pepper that goes with this steak:

"each non-story fizzled as fast as a room temperature bottle of Baby Duck."

"The Bishop’s Man contains 300 decent pages of novel stretched across 400."

"Ellipses…should be used…sparingly. Lest they lose…their…effectiveness."

"Neither her smart stranger, nor her editor, can effectively distinguish between black and purple ink."

"MacAdam writes as though there’s a lit firecracker taped to each finger"

This from their website:

"After a 22-year run, most of the last half of which have been under our (the Van Tassell family) ownership, Bay Books in Concord will close on or about August 15th. It is Contra Costa County’s largest independent bookstore, but it is located in a center that is no longer adequate to sustaining a bookstore. We are looking for a suitable alternate location, so far without success. We have not given up entirely, at this writing, on an alternate location. But, candidly, sometimes we think this is foolhardy in view of the threat to our livelihood imposed by electronic books.

If we close the store without moving it, this is what will happen: the stock of used books in Concord will be offered at ever-increasing discounts from July 1 until about August 15. You might consider visiting Bay Books Concord during this period to take advantage of some amazing bargains. Of whatever books do not sell, some will be moved to the San Ramon store and some donated. We will discontinue buying used books over the counter in Concord on July 1. Gift certificates and trade credits issued in Concord will be honored in both stores until Concord closes, and thereafter will be honored in San Ramon.

There have been signs up in all of our stores for years that say "support your independent bookstore". Now we all get to witness (again) what happens when the public succumbs to the lure of cheap book prices at Amazon and Costco. If Bay Books at any given time had half as many customers as are browsing the book dumps at Costco, we would be a roaring success. Does anyone think Costco’s employees want to talk to customers about books? Or do they just slash open the cartons and load up the dumps?  Do they care whether you read, as opposed to buying TV’s and pizza?

Here, from a response to my aggressive critique of Andre Alexis’s delightfully hypocritical, aggressive, personal attack on reviewers he claims produce instead of criticism only ‘shallow, self-aggrandizing rhetoric’ comes this outsized crassitude:

I’ll leave this for 1). Andre to address:

Today’s preoccupation with free indirect style has the potential to become the next decade’s “phallogocentrism,” but it was startling to read Wood write of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon with an eye not primarily to a dismissal of “hysterical realism,” but rather to an understanding of the necessity, the logic of their creation. And in that possibility of understanding, there is what is best about theory: the brief — inevitably brief, because every generation has to renovate the language and idea of criticism — sense that literature is one of the most startling things we humans do, our hive making, our adaptive coloration.

And for 2). Morten Høi Jensen (in a review at The Quarterly Conversation of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Wood’s first collection, newly available in paperback from Picador):

Ever since Wood coined the term ‘hysterical realism,’ and shat so eloquently upon the excesses of such writing, he’s been pilloried, unfairly stereotyped, subjected to all sorts of ill-willed static, cut by knives trying to whittle him into some sort of implacable, wooden, ‘fustian’ caricature, demonized, simplified, vilified for being what he patently is not. No establishment marionette, the man rather is an evolved, evolving independent thinker, and, as such, quite the contrary of those incapable of learning anything from reading his writing.

If you haven’t already done so, read The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, because  as Morten Høi Jensen aptly puts it at the conclusion of his review : "These essays are not simply brilliant writer’s criticism; they are an apologia for its existence and endurance. Rereading them reminds us (or, more accurately: reminding those who need reminding) that no one reads with the intellectual daring and elegance of mind that James Wood does."

Publisher and book collector David R. Godine is the founder and president of a small, independent, eponymous publishing house, located in Boston, Massachusetts. It produces between twenty and thirty titles per year and maintains an active reprint program.

Bio: After receiving degrees from Roxbury Latin School, Dartmouth College, and Harvard University, Godine worked for Leonard Baskin, the renowned typographer and printmaker, and master printer Harold McGrath. Going solo in 1970, from the confines of a deserted barn, using his own presses, Godine printed his first books. Most were letterpress, limited editions, printed on high-quality paper. In 1980, the company initiated its children’s program. A number of these books have become classics. The company has also published two important series: Imago Mundi, a line of original books devoted to photography and the graphic arts; and Verba Mundi, featuring the most notable contemporary world literature in translation. In 2002, Godine bought most of Black Sparrow Books’s backlist.

2010 marks the fortieth anniversary of Godine’s multiple award-winning publishing enterprise. We met recently in his office to talk about those books he’s most proud of having published, about the books he is, as a collector, most proud to own, and about how best one might go about collecting the Godine imprint. Please listen here:

This interview is part of our  Book Publisher Series which focuses on the histories of important British, American and Canadian publishing houses, and how to go about collecting their works.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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This from the AIGA:

"Through its minimalism and dynamism "Flight" echoes the Vorticists’ obsession with speed as a metaphor for the Machine Age. This is "Kauffer’s major work," writes Haworth-Booth, "[and] also the finest invention of his entire career." In fact the image departed enough from a direct Cubist influence to become the basis for a distinctly personal visual language. "He had a child-like wonder and admiration for nature," continues Haworth-Booth, referring to how Kauffer based this image not on imagination but on his first-hand observation of birds in flight. 

"Flight" was bought by Francis Meynell, a well-known English book publisher and printer, who organized a poster campaign for the Labour Party newspaper, The Daily Herald. Meynell believed that the soaring birds represented hope, and the unprecedented design somehow suggested renewal after the bloody world war. The poster was ubiquitous and soared its maker into the public eye. Kauffer soon received commissions to design campaigns for major English wine, clothing, publishing, automobile and petroleum companies."

Check out some of his dust jacket designs here.

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Image from here.  designer: e. mcknight kauffer

Good to see The Top Ten Book Blog back in action. Here’s their Top Ten Books of the 20^th Century

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” So begins the Russian master’s infamous novel about Humbert Humbert,

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925).

Self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, determined to win back the heart of the girl he loved and lost, emerges as an emblem for romantic yearning

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).

Proust asks some of the same questions Einstein did about our notions of time and memory…time is the highway and memory the­ driver.

4. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922).

…bawdy mock-epic suggests the improbability, perhaps even the pointlessness, of heroism in the modern­ age.

5. Dubliners by James Joyce (1916).

…stories evoke themes of death, illness, and stasis, nearly all offer their characters redemption  —­ or at least momentary self-knowledge —­ through what Joyce called “epiphanies,” in which defeat or disappointment is transformed by a sudden, usually life-altering flash of awareness. 

6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967).

…part fantasy, part social history of Colombia  seems to move backward and forward simultaneously, the forgotten and offhandedly magical village of Macondo  ­ loses its Edenic innocence as it is increasingly exposed to civilization.

7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929).

…circles the travails of the Compson family from four different narrative perspectives. All are haunted by the figure of Caddy, the only daughter, whom Faulkner described as “a beautiful and tragic little girl.”: “theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault.”

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927).

…describes the loss, love, and disagreements of family life while reaching toward the bigger question  — “What is the meaning of life?”

9. The Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925–64).

O’Connor’s stories, with their unswerving eye for vanity and their profound sense of the sacred, feel immense.

10. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)…racism, incest, war, fratricide, pride, and jealousy. Through the use of multiple narrators, Faulkner turns this gripping Yoknapatawpha saga into a profound and dazzling meditation on truth, memory, history, and literature itself.

Read more here. Top Ten Books of the Eighteenth Century here. Top Mysteries here.

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And here I thought Marshall McLuhan had the ‘market cornered’ on brilliant, obtuse, maddeningly self-contradictory Canadian prose.

Northrop Frye’s conclusion to Literary History of Canada  (U of T Press, 1965) is every bit of this. "The book", he writes, at its end, "is a tribute to the maturity of Canadian literary scholarship and criticism, whatever one thinks of the literature. Its authors have completely outgrown the view that evaluation is the end of criticism, instead of its incidental by-product."

At the paragraph’s bottom however, he says " There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference. Thus the metaphor of the critic as judge holds for the Canadian critic, who is never dealing with the kind of writer who judges him."

In one breath the authors have completely outgrown an evaluative approach, in the next they are all judges.

Evaluation is no "incidental by-product" of criticism. Rather it is intrinsic to the act of reading. No, it’s not an ‘end’ in itself": our primary objective I’d say is to get as much as we can from the texts we read: more insight and pleasure, education and entertainment, knowledge and engagement; exposure to new ideas, structures, novelty, the unknown or the unexplored. How do we know when we have this? Through comparison. By reading the ‘best.’ The ‘classics’, or as Frye himself puts it  in concluding his conclusion:

How then do we identify the ‘classics’ or the ‘best contemporaries’ if not through evaluation? Evaluation is not something to be outgrown. It is part of criticism’s DNA. Fully formed and essential. And contrary to what Frye says about the maturity of this book’s authors, their contributions to it contain a veritable bounty of evaluation. The writing in Literary History of Canada  is ‘mature’ precisely because it is so evaluative. I highly recommend you read it.

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