Practically everyone read Maud Newton‘s riff on David Foster Wallace‘s influence this weekend, but Edward Champion had some issues with it.
On DFW, On Blogging
Reader’s Nostalgia
“Why do we spend so much time with stories whose endings we already know?” Derek Thompson writes about nostalgia and culture for The Atlantic, and his piece pairs well with Katy Waldman‘s Slate essay about “thinking that you’re not getting as much from reading as you used to.”
Kim Lit
This week has been full of news about unorthodox children’s book authors. First, there was Keith Richards’s picture book, and now an Australian academic claims that Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung wrote children’s books, too. “I was astounded that children’s books (purportedly) written by Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung were vastly more readable than one would expect from any political leader in the democratic west, still less a severe authoritarian,” doctoral student Christopher Richardson said.
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John Crow’s Devil
Has the drudgery of submitting poems, stories, and manuscripts ever gotten you down? Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, had his first novel rejected by nearly eighty publishing houses. Here’s a take on self-publishing from The Millions if all of this has got you down.
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So I’m Reading with an Axe Murderer
Matt Seidel has a helpful guide for book clubs across the country: How To Tell If Someone In Your Book Club Is a Homicidal Maniac. One possible clue? He contributes to the Water for Elephants discussion by “telling anecdotes about torturing animals as a child.”
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Democrats and the Written Word
Jill Lepore brings a critical eye to the memoirs of 2020's Democratic presidential candidates, including Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren.
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Ed Champion’s pretty harsh on Maud, but I also thought the piece was ridiculously random & willful, tracing the slacker caveats and qualifications to DFW.
The whole thing seems a bit foolish to me. I think it’s fairly standard that someone who is talented and breaks ground in their field is followed by imitators who are just annoying. Ed’s piece would manage to be readable if it wasn’t filled with the same leaps over gaps of logic and proof that he rails against Newton for.
Thanks for the link, Nick. It’s always interesting when those who claim to welcome directness fail to clarify their nonexistent argument when it’s been thoroughly exposed as a sham. It’s also interesting when those who lack the intellectual rigor to address another argument — one backed up by proof, citation, and examples — prop up the same straw men occupying the maize of disordered minds.
Ed, your essay, when it had “proof,” was utterly besides the point. You quote Newton objecting to the rise of “um” and “sort of” and other colloquial styles into essays, and then you prove her wrong in her objection by quoting dialogue. That’s as disordered as can be. You toss it in so that you can ask the rhetorical “If Vanbrugh’s dialogue had been scrubbed, how then might we have known — in a time before movies, gramophones, and computers — how people talked?” But again, that’s just worthless distraction meant to have a reader nodding along like you made a point, when you did nothing of the sort, what with Newton discussing essays and you discussing dialogue in a play. No one, not Newton, raised the idea that “um” should be entirely scrubbed from the English language.
And where’s some citation for Newton striking a “self-same ‘regular gal schtick'” or any evidence of the accusation that she “cribbed” criticism of Wallace’s “aw-shuckism” from Stephen Dodson, besides the fact that his “aw-shucks” bit is addressed by nearly everyone who writes on him.
Also, a tip: when you go ad hominem on someone, it’s almost effective if you don’t say things that apply to yourself: “careless and needlessly furious blogger “
The best response I’ve read–level-headed yet still lively–can be found here: http://philipchristman.com/2011/08/19/maud-newton-on-david-foster-wallace-ornateness-and-making-an-argument/
PT Smith: Nice try, but you haven’t addressed my argument at all.
Dude, goalposts are meant to stay in the ground and in one place.
I think the real issue with Newton’s piece is that the David Foster Wallace reference is only there so that she and the Times can make a diatribe against all writing styles that aren’t their own. The idea that the speech of half a million blogs can all be attributed to one set of authors is laughable at best, especially given that David Foster Wallace is, in many ways, one of the most difficult writers in the English language.
So she asks us to accept this causational fallacy willy-nilly, and proceed to outline a dangerously myopic view of what blogospheric “style” is, as if there’s one hegemonic voice.
Somebody dusted off an old, unmarketable DFW take-down, re-shaped it to confirm a few more irrational prejudices… and sold it (to a bastion of the irrationally-prejudiced) for a nominal fee. Please tell me the author was nursing a mint julep on the veranda while scowling over her Selectric!
But, seriously, folks. I have 200+ blogs bookmarked on my Virtual Sort Of Devil-Print Machine (PC) and not one of those sites (from Fafblog to FecalFace to ContraJamesWood) is DFW-derivative, or sticky with verbal slacker-tics. I know Miss Newton was being “highly-selective” when she wrote the article in question, but I’m suggesting that the kind of “highly-selective” she has mastered is the least interesting or useful.