the ebert&roeperization of reviewing

I was writing a short review of Brian Evenson’s wonderful new novel, The Open Curtain, for the Now What blog a few days ago, when I was struck by a series of questions I hope you other mouths—i.e., other writers and publishers of innovative indie fiction—might help me answer:

What is an ideal review from the point of view of a writer or publisher, what should it talk about, what should its function be—especially when we’re often talking about a word-count constraint of a mere 250-500 words?

I’m asking for at least two reasons.

First, I’m mind-numbingly frustrated with much of what passes for book reviewing today, stuff designed more to make the reviewer look witty and hip than to illuminate the fiction at hand, stuff wholly uninformed by the larger conversation in which the book is operating, stuff, I want to say, that has in many ways devalued the enterprise into what I think of as a form of ebert&roeperization.

Thumbs up? Thumbs down?

God forbid there’s a book more subtle, more complex than that.

In other words, those sorts of reviews do for reviewing what mainstream writing does for fiction: dumbs it down, neutralizes, blands.

And so I offer that reviews should spend less time on plot and the facile and relative notion of quality, and more on placing the book in the context of the author’s other work and the larger literary dialogue of which it is a part. How does it function? Why does it function that way? What does it add to this moment in fiction? And how might the review itself best engage with those insights in terms of its own form and heft?

Second—and this grows out of my first point—I suggest in most cases one go silent about books one doesn’t like. That is, I suggest one simply doesn’t write about them. Now, I understand there could and should be some revealing exceptions, books that need to be argued with, perspectives that need to be challenged intelligently, but I advocate that one put most of one’s reviewing time and energy into discussing the books one wants to champion, one wants others to experience.

There are so many innovative fictions that need an audience.

Why in the world spend one’s time shooting down ones you don’t care for?

All of which is to say: In a culture that cares less and less about reading, and one that especially cares less and less about reading what many of us think of as experimental or difficult fiction, isn’t it part of one’s responsibility as a literary citizen to help into the world fictions we love, introduce them to others, pass the word?

If so, let me suggest everyone reading this to make it her or his business to review at least a single book one adores every two months—in dead-tree venues, in online zines, on blogs like this.

That’s how to make literary change happen.

Yours in Alternating Current,

Lance Olsen

Keith Olbermann’s pre-election manifest

click here for video

And finally tonight, a Special Comment about tomorrow’s elections.

We are, as every generation, inseparable from our own time.

Thus is our perspective, inevitably that of the explorer looking into the wrong end of the telescope.

But even accounting for our myopia, it’s hard to imagine there have been many elections more important than this one, certainly not in Non-Presidential years.

And so we look at the verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein yesterday, and, with the very phrase “October, or November, Surprise” now a part of our vernacular, and the chest-thumping coming from so many of the Republican campaigners today, each of us must wonder about the convenience of the timing of his conviction and sentencing.

But let us give history and coincidence the benefit of the doubt — let’s say it’s just “happened” that way — and for a moment not look into the wrong end of the telescope.

Let’s perceive instead the bigger picture:

Saddam Hussein, found guilty in an Iraqi court.

Who can argue against that?

He is officially, what the world always knew he was: a war criminal.

Mr. Bush, was this imprimatur, worth the cost of 2,832 American lives, and thousands more American lives yet to be lost?

Is the conviction of Saddam Hussein the reason you went to war in Iraq?

Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that did not exist?

Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda that did not exist?

Or did you go to war in Iraq to break the bonds of tyranny there — while installing the mechanisms of tyranny here?

Or did you go to war in Iraq because you felt the need to wreak vengeance against somebody — anybody?

Or did you go to war in Iraq to contain a rogue state which, months earlier, your own administration had declared had been fully contained by sanctions?

Or did you go to war in Iraq… to keep gas prices down?

How startling it was, Sir, to hear you introduce oil to your stump speeches over the weekend.

Not four years removed from the most dismissive, the most condescending, the most ridiculing denials of the very hint at, as Mr. Rumsfeld put it, this “nonsense”…

There you were, campaigning in Colorado, in Nebraska, in Florida, in Kansas — suddenly turning this ‘unpatriotic idea’… into a platform plank.

“You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources,” you told us. “And then you can imagine them saying, ‘We’re going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following.”

Having frightened us, having bullied us, having lied to us, having ignored and re-written the constitution under our noses, having stayed the course, having denied you’ve stayed the course, having belittled us about “timelines” but instead extolled “benchmarks”…

You’ve now resorted, Sir, to this?

We must stay in Iraq to save the two-dollar gallon of gas?

—

Mr. President, there is no other conclusion we can draw as we go to the polls tomorrow.

Sir… you have been making this up as you went along.

This country was founded to prevent anybody from making it up as they went along.

Those vaunted founding fathers of ours have been so quoted-up, that they appear as marble statues: like the chiseled guards of China, or the faces on Mount Rushmore.

But in fact they were practical people and the thing they obviously feared most, was a government of men and not laws.

They provided the checks and balances for a reason.

No one man could run the government the way he saw fit — unless he, at the least, took into consideration what those he governed saw.

A House of Representatives would be the people’s eyes.

A Senate would be the corrective force on that House.

An Executive would do the work… and hold the Constitution to his chest like his child.

A Supreme Court would oversee it all.

Checks and balances.

Where did that go, Mr. Bush?

And what price did we pay because we have let it go?

Saddam Hussein will get out of Iraq the same way 2,832 Americans have, and thousands more.

He’ll get out faster than we will.

And if nothing changes tomorrow, you, Sir, will be out of the White House long before the rest of us can say… we are out of Iraq.

And whose fault is this?

Not truly yours. You took advantage of those of us who were afraid, and those of us who believed unity and nation took precedence over all else.

But we let you take that advantage.

And so we let you go to war in Iraq. To… oust Saddam. Or find non-existant Weapons. Or avenge 9/11. Or fight terrorists who only got there after we did. Or as cover to change the fabric of our Constitution. Or for lower prices at The Texaco. Or… ?

There are still a few hours left, before the polls open, sir, there are many rationalizations still untried.

And whatever your motives of the moment, we the people have, in true good faith and with the genuine patriotism of self-sacrifice (of which you have shown you know nothing)… we have let you go on…

Making it up.

As you went along.

Un-checked… and un-balanced.

Vote.

The State of American Fiction

Earlier this year, when I started my Professor VJ blog, I was glomming on to the truthiness meme as started by the Colbert Report. I quoted Stephen Colbert saying:

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

Brilliant stuff. So prescient, that I immediately integrated it as a keyword and operating concept in my new media art seminar. A question we posed was, “Is fake news more informative than so-called ‘real’ news, and why is so much of the Daily Show and Colbert’s success tied to their ability to ‘go meta’ with the data?”

During this past Spring, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Colbert’s keynote performance was dark comedy at its best and harshly ridiculed not only Bush, but the docile and masochistic Beltway media elite who underserved their country when it came to reporting the news in the lead up to the war in Iraq. In a blog entry from May, I cited a Salon article, entitled The Truthiness Hurts, that compared Colbert’s performance to the Situationists and their “ironic mockery ‘détournement,’ a word that roughly translates to ‘abduction’ or ‘embezzlement.’” The writer goes on:

It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture.

Situating Colbert’s performance in the lineage of Situationist détournement in a mainstream press venue like Salon is a good start. And like Lautreamont, Colbert’s “shtick” released the “deadly emanations” of his comic barbs so that they would “soak up our souls like water does sugar.” The funny thing is that the clueless Washington press corps did not even realize this was happening to them and that the entire event was a pitch-black joke at their expense (most did not laugh and, in fact, did not know what to do). I ended this blog by saying “We need more Situation(ist) Comedy.”

Since that time, some six months has passed and now that we are hours away from one of the most important elections in my lifetime, the blurring between truth, fiction, truthiness, spin, and in-your-face lies and deceit sampled right out of Stalin’s playbook, has become one of the top meta-subjects of the campaign. Who to believe?

Frank Rich, in his Sunday New York Times column published yesterday, has a few things to say on the subject:

The 2002 midterms were ridiculed as the “Seinfeld” election — about nothing — and 2006 often does seem like the “Colbert” election, so suffused is it with unreality, or what Mr. Colbert calls “truthiness.” Or perhaps the “Borat” election, after the character created by Mr. Colbert’s equally popular British counterpart, Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary about the American travels of a crude fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan opened to great acclaim this weekend. Like both these comedians, our politicians and their media surrogates have been going to extremes this year to blur the difference between truth and truthiness, all the better to confuse the audience.

But there’s one important difference. When Mr. Colbert’s fake talking head provokes a real congressman into making a fool of himself or Mr. Baron Cohen’s fake reporter tries to storm the real White House’s gates, it’s a merry prank for our entertainment. By contrast, the clowns on the ballot busily falsifying reality are vying to be in charge of our real world at one of the most perilous times in our history.

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

[...]

And always, always there’s the false reality imposed on Iraq: “Absolutely, we’re winning!” in the president’s recent formulation. After all this time, you’d think the Iraq fictions wouldn’t work anymore. The overwhelming majority of Americans now know that we were conned into this mess in the first place by two fake story lines manufactured by the White House, a connection between 9/11 and Saddam and an imminent threat of nuclear Armageddon. Both were trotted out in our last midterm campaign to rush a feckless Congress into voting for a war authorization before Election Day. As the administration pulls the same ploy four years later, this time to keep the fiasco going, you have to wonder if it can get away with lying once more.

[...

In retrospect, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Mr. Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Call it a cultural primary. His performance was judged a bomb by the Washington press corps, which yukked it up instead for a Bush impersonator who joined the president in a benign sketch commissioned by the White House. But millions of Americans watching C-Span and the Web did get Mr. Colbert’s routine. They recognized that the Beltway establishment sitting stone-faced in his audience was the butt of his jokes, especially the very news media that had parroted Bush administration fictions leading America into the quagmire of Iraq.

Five months later, a video of Mr. Colbert’s dinner speech is still a runaway iTunes hit and his comic contempt for Washington is more popular than ever. It’s enough to give you hope that the voters may rally for reality on this crucial Election Day even as desperate politicians and some of their media enablers try one more time to stay their fictional course.

As I continue to construct my own fluid, flux identity in the networked space of fictional flows, I assume that Wednesday morning I will wake up and America will have willfully, collectively, and even eagerly, thrown many of the current bums out of office and started on its absolutely necessary self-correcting course toward the 21st century version of political sanity.

We’ll see.

---

Metadata: politics, Colbert, truthiness, Frank Rich, voting

That guy in the black coat

I’m going to die. You’re going to die. They’re going to die. We’re going to die. It and those, too. Some of us will die quickly: pop! of an ayeurysm or gun, crash! of a car or plane, tikatikatik! of fibrillation, thump-thump-thump-thud! down a staircase. In one ear of memory: the clattering of apocalyptic hooves. In the other: scent of bleach on your young mother’s hand against your fevered brow.

And so.

None of this will matter. Not to you when you’re dead. To you it won’t be. To it, you won’t be. This word here, for example, will only matter to who and what is left—and perhaps (very likely?) not even to them or that.

If you’re 45 years old your lifespan may look like this:

<>In 1992 I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Because of its precarious location, I had a 50/50 chance of surviving an operation to remove it, and if the operation was successful, I had a 50/50 chance of surviving with my faculties intact (i.e., without brain damage). So the tumor remains — benign, fortunately – and every other year or so I have an MRI to see if it’s grown larger.That tumor was the best thing that happened to me at the time. Before its discovery (accidental, really), I only thought I was going to die; I didn’t really believe it. What’s the difference? This:

(1) You’re walking to a podium to give a speech to 1000 of your peers but — lo and behold! — you’re unprepared: no speech, no notes, no memorization, nada. Then you wake up. Hooray! It was all a dream! That’s thinking.
(2) You’re walking to a podium to give a speech to 1000 of your peers but — lo and behold! — you’re unprepared: no speech, no notes, no memorization, nada. This is no dream. It’s really happening, right now! There’s no way to get out of it, you ain’t waking up. Ever. That’s believing. (When the lovely gallery owner, Myra Morgan, was battling lung cancer and then received word that she had fewer than three weeks to live, she went home for the last time and, in those last days told her long time partner, art collector Dick Belger, “It’s all so surreal.” Indeed.)

Because most people live their lives thinking they will somehow wake up from that dreadful dream, they smudge the nice clean window of the world with duplicities, major and minor. We juggle exponentially greater quantities of truths, half-truths and lies, then wonder whence the hell that extra weight in our life. You may assume that because I am writing this the day before elections, I’m talking about politicians. No. I’m talking about you. I’m talking about me. Liars, all.

So much is wasted – not just time, but energy. The concept of enlightened self-interest is fruitless without the enlightened.

What doesn’t matter is that this doesn’t matter. A concept which, when fully, considered, should be freeing.

So you let go of someone else’s idea of propriety and cross those barbed-wire boundaries into unknown, potentially hazardous territory. You let go of complaints based on judgments, and create, based on processed information. You let go of the cowardice with which you’ve lived your whole goddamn life thus far and stop pretending to be who you are not, and stop being who you are: all of the above critters who think life is infinite, a dream. Finally, yes finally, lastly, ultimately, literally you let go of life, of that vertiginous stance you’ve chosen, of that silly grip on existence’s crepe-paper sleeve.

Let.

Go!

Wheeeeeeee!

That’s when life grabs hold of you. Not death. The guy in the black coat will expose himself to you soon enough. Demand you gape in awe and horror at his big cock. What matters now is that you have to make it not matter then. Somehow.

If you’re a writer, write smarter, wider, further…write to excess. Make your 20th century mamma and daddy ashamed. Learn to know to believe what I mean by this.

<>—Debra

<>www.debradiblasi.com