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
Merry Plashing Sounds
“What a nice fire,” he said to himself. It certainly was. Kept him very warm, too.” That inspired bit of writing was Jack London’s short story To Build A Fire as summarized by someone who hasn’t read the book. Don’t worry, there are plenty more where that came from.
The Annotated Frank Sinatra
We didn’t think it was possible to make Gay Talese’s famous Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” any better, but Talese recently annotated the article for Nieman Story Board.
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Katherine Mansfield: Book Reviewer
In a short biographical piece for Open Letters Monthly, Sam Sacks writes about the book reviewing career of Katherine Mansfield and the ways in which it “helped her build the writing muscles needed” to finish her masterful short stories. While some critics might take umbrage at the way Sacks characterizes Mansfield as “turning out deadline copy like an ink-stained Fleet Street hack,” his look into her reviews culminates in the realization that “the point [of reviewing books] is not to be constructive but to construct something of lasting value in the little space and little time you’re granted. Like all writing, it should be a passion, not a pastime. The point is to dazzle.”
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Last Orders
For better or worse, the publication date of Umberto Eco’s final book has been bumped up — originally set for a summertime release, Pepe Satàn Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society is now due out in Italian this weekend. Check out this Eco essay on how to travel with a salmon.
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The Summer of Butterflies
In his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov travelled widely, logging many years each in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Ithaca, New York, where he wrote Lolita while teaching at Cornell. His peripatetic history explains why few people know he spent a summer in Utah, during which he spent a lot of time chasing butterflies and fishing in the streams. In The American Scholar, an excerpt of Nabokov in America, an upcoming book by Richard Roper. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
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David Mamet Appliance Center
The “David Mamet Appliance Center” has some predictably abrasive customer service representatives. Here is Peter McCleery for McSweeney’s imagining a hilarious and existentially hopeless exchange between customer and technician. The Millions has even more to satisfy your fictitious-Mamet fix: an imagined symposium with Mamet, Francine Prose, and James Wood among others.
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.