There is a recent "literary tournament" mooted regarding the "Great American Novel" (later morphed into the "Great American Novelist" with an arbitrary, and much criticised, 4-book rule) on the Guardian book threads. This is just to record the names of novelists I nominated myself, or nominations from posters I agreed with, or simply look intriguing to investigate further. This is a preliminary list and will be updated once I have more time to delve into the threads in more details. (The numbers are not to be interpreted as rankings but simply to allow me to count to 16):
1. Toni Morrison
2. Carson McCullers
3. Kurt Vonnegut
4. Annie Proulx
5. Joyce Carol Oates
6. Jhumpa Lahiri / Louise Erdrich
7. Chang-Rae Lee
8. Norman Mailer
9. William Burroughs
10. Ursula K. Le Guin / Philip K. Dick (unfortunately discounted after further thought due to the universality of their speculative / science fiction that are not really about the American experience as such)
11. Saul Bellow / John Steinbeck / John Updike / Philip Roth
12. David Foster Wallace / Don DeLillo / Thomas Pynchon
13. Truman Capote / Raymond Chandler / Henry Miller
14. Charles Bukowski / Bret Easton Ellis / Jonathan Franzen / Chuck Palahniuk
15. Edith Wharton
16. Ernest Hemingway / William Faulkner / F. Scott Fitzgerald
Even in this little exercise it's clear that there are different leagues within the same field, if not determined by talent then at least by period and subject matter or angle. Not to mention the many, many authors not included simply they didn't fit the 4-novel arbitrary rule.
So sod the rules imposed by TenuousFive. For meaningful comparisons for my personal enjoyment of great American literature, I would actually sub-divide the above list (which comprises way more than 16 anyway as I started categorising authors in similar leagues as I perceive them with each other) into the following divisions (of at least four authors per group and in some instances, five authors each):
Division A: Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-Rae Lee, Louise Erdrich (non-white American writers)
Division B: Joyce Carol Oates, Carson McCullers, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver (white female American writers)
Division C: Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe (white male American writers)
Division D: Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Hunter S. Thompson (dissenting America)
Division E: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton (the gilded age)
Division F: Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, Henry Miller, William Burroughs (America's underbelly)
Division G: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy ("morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" in the words of DFW of a disillusioned contemporary America)
Division H: Thomas Pynchon, Bret Easton Ellis, Charles Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk ("transgressional American fiction")
Division I: Joan Didion, Larry McMurtry, Susan Sontag, Tobias Wolff (authors who traverse the ground between fiction and faction).
To my mind's eye this is a far more meaningful list, not just tidier in terms of category but better in terms of allowing for some sort of like-for-like comparison (although some of the divisions themselves would also logically cluster together into a bigger group). I do now realise also how much more American literature I need to read in order to just be able to cover the recognised "bests". I know I may never be a completist regarding American literature though, but I do hope to be able to cover enough writings from the above authors to be able to make an informed judgement as to the quality of their writing vis-a-vis one another.
I would say though that I definitely have read enough of Anne Tyler to know she doesn't make the grade (And "Digging to America" is one of hers that I've read, when this was mooted as already Tyler's greatest by one of her fans), much as her supporters would love her to be recognised as a GAN. Unlike another poster though, I wouldn't call her a "chick-lit" author, just as I wouldn't call Amy Tan herself a "chick-lit" author, but I would put her in the same literary pen as Amy Tan, and that's no disrespect to either Tyler or Tan.
I know the very best of Chang-Rae Lee could equal a Toni Morrison, but the lack of Asian American writers with heft is indeed one of those ignored-but-hard-to-miss-bald spots on the Great American literary landscape, if not indeed, the Great English literary landscape itself. Unfortunately Asian American writers are also far more easily dismissed and discounted than other ethnic American writers, at least in Britain, where ethnic novelists apparently only come in the black or brown variety, and so the history of Chinese / Korean / Japanese Americans, and British people with East Asian heritage, continued to be told from the perspective of White novelists (a la J.G. Ballard) or even Black novelists (cf. Zadie Smith in "Autograph Man"). However sympathetic or even empathetic those novelists might be, they are not the genuine, authentic voices we seek.
Sunday 15 July 2012
Against e-book promotion on the Guardian summer reading thread
In reply to this book thread "Summer reading 2012":
Thank you to those contributors above who proudly admit that they don't own a kindle even if Guardian keeps on plugging its advertorials whenever they could for Kindles and IPads (of the latter, if you read the Technology pages, even hardcore Apple fans such as meestersmith are sick of the bias shown by the Guardian when Charles was reviewing the latest Android device).
It's a shame that the Guardian can't seem to give the whole e-book thing a rest, even when simply asking authors / journos to nominate their summer reading.
It seems to be assumed that one MUST now, by decree of the Guardian-sanctioned literati, leave Big Fat Books behind as you are only allowed to consume them in electronic form, because to do otherwise will cause untold damage to your wrists and wallet (via luggage charge) and most importantly, will be Deeply Unhip in An Electronic Age.
Me. I just shake my head sadly at this state of affairs wrought by people so brainwashed by consumerism that they suddenly find all kind of faults with physical books that have been perfectly serving us readers for centuries until the corporates want to start selling us a new bottle. I can't express this more eloquently than Zygmunt Bauman himself, whose physical book (I lament the fact that I even had to put the word "physical" to denote a book!) I've just finished recently:
I am genuinely saddened by the trend that more and more readers and even writers themselves see books as the "offending object", now all of a sudden "too awkward for trouble-free use" just because the people who want to sell us new gadgets have told us that you can't carry real books on travel holidays anymore as they are all by definition "too bulky" simply by dint of their "crime" of existing in real three-dimensional space.
Who would have thought that we readers are just mere consumers of literature? Somehow in the last couple of years, simply because of the appearance of an electronic reading gadget on the market, many readers are all of a sudden turning up their noses at physical books, books that have served us for centuries if not millenia. Those of us who dare to question the value proposition of e-books have been unceremoniously insulted and jeered on book threads as stick-in-the-mud Luddites who fail to "get with the programme", and the most damning insult of all, as people who "fetishise" books as an "object"!!!!! This, spoken by the very same people who never reckon with their own unthinking gadget fetishism, who never stopped to ask themselves, Why the hell am I complaining about physical books and looking down on physical book lovers just because I personally prefer a newfangled reading gadget?
If we (and by we, I meant real book lovers) have really objectified reading the way the e-book evangelists have accused us of, we would have no qualms about dumping the old book in favour of a new gadget exactly the way the e-book evangelists have themselves behaved. But no, it is actually precisely because we don't fetishise books as objects that we are not persuaded of the value of newfangled gadgets purporting to give us "new books". It is precisely because we book lovers see ourselves as far more than mere book consumers that we do actually swear oaths of loyalty to our physical books -- those friends with whom we have travelled and journeyed far and wide to distant horizons, and deeply into the human condition, those friends who carry our personal history within their pages by the way we've scrawled marginalia and dog-earred them and by the bookmarks and dedications we made within their bodies. Only self-interested sociopaths will turn their nose upon their loyal and dependable friends of hundreds of years' standing, and sneer at those old-fashioned enough to want to remain loyal to their old friends.
(Btw, my comments are pre-modded for some time now because I previously criticised Guardian journalists for their soft-pedalling of our demand for real justice on the LIBOR scandal, so I won't be too surprised if the mods too deem this too critical to see the light of day).
Amended to add:
Oh, and "Liquid Life" by Zygmunt Bauman is a great read for all seasons, but especially great for summer of 2012 as its arguments are very pertinent to recent events as uncovered in the banking sector -- you do have to read through to the final chapters though to get the full force of Bauman's argument, but it is a slim book and it even has a picture of people swimming and relaxing in an azure blue pool on the cover if one needs to pretend one's reading a light-weight summer book rather than a solid but succinct treatise of political philosophy on one's holiday.
Thank you to those contributors above who proudly admit that they don't own a kindle even if Guardian keeps on plugging its advertorials whenever they could for Kindles and IPads (of the latter, if you read the Technology pages, even hardcore Apple fans such as meestersmith are sick of the bias shown by the Guardian when Charles was reviewing the latest Android device).
It's a shame that the Guardian can't seem to give the whole e-book thing a rest, even when simply asking authors / journos to nominate their summer reading.
It seems to be assumed that one MUST now, by decree of the Guardian-sanctioned literati, leave Big Fat Books behind as you are only allowed to consume them in electronic form, because to do otherwise will cause untold damage to your wrists and wallet (via luggage charge) and most importantly, will be Deeply Unhip in An Electronic Age.
Me. I just shake my head sadly at this state of affairs wrought by people so brainwashed by consumerism that they suddenly find all kind of faults with physical books that have been perfectly serving us readers for centuries until the corporates want to start selling us a new bottle. I can't express this more eloquently than Zygmunt Bauman himself, whose physical book (I lament the fact that I even had to put the word "physical" to denote a book!) I've just finished recently:
"One kind of distress is a side-effect of living in a consumer society. In such a society, the roads are many and scattered, but they all lead through shops. Any life pursuit, and most significantly the pursuit of dignity, self-esteem and happiness, requires the mediation of the market; and the world in which such pursuits are inscribed is made up of commodities -- objects judged, appreciated or rejected according to the satisfaction they bring to the world's consumers. They are also expected to be easy to use and bring satisfaction immediately and in a user-friendly manner, calling for little or no effort and certainly no sacrifice on the user's side... One way or another, the offending object (not up to its promise, too awkward for trouble-free use, or squeezed dry of the pleasures it was capable of giving) is disposed of. One does not swear oaths of loyalty to things whose sole purpose is to satisfy a need, a desire or a want."(p. 107 from "Liquid Life")
I am genuinely saddened by the trend that more and more readers and even writers themselves see books as the "offending object", now all of a sudden "too awkward for trouble-free use" just because the people who want to sell us new gadgets have told us that you can't carry real books on travel holidays anymore as they are all by definition "too bulky" simply by dint of their "crime" of existing in real three-dimensional space.
Who would have thought that we readers are just mere consumers of literature? Somehow in the last couple of years, simply because of the appearance of an electronic reading gadget on the market, many readers are all of a sudden turning up their noses at physical books, books that have served us for centuries if not millenia. Those of us who dare to question the value proposition of e-books have been unceremoniously insulted and jeered on book threads as stick-in-the-mud Luddites who fail to "get with the programme", and the most damning insult of all, as people who "fetishise" books as an "object"!!!!! This, spoken by the very same people who never reckon with their own unthinking gadget fetishism, who never stopped to ask themselves, Why the hell am I complaining about physical books and looking down on physical book lovers just because I personally prefer a newfangled reading gadget?
If we (and by we, I meant real book lovers) have really objectified reading the way the e-book evangelists have accused us of, we would have no qualms about dumping the old book in favour of a new gadget exactly the way the e-book evangelists have themselves behaved. But no, it is actually precisely because we don't fetishise books as objects that we are not persuaded of the value of newfangled gadgets purporting to give us "new books". It is precisely because we book lovers see ourselves as far more than mere book consumers that we do actually swear oaths of loyalty to our physical books -- those friends with whom we have travelled and journeyed far and wide to distant horizons, and deeply into the human condition, those friends who carry our personal history within their pages by the way we've scrawled marginalia and dog-earred them and by the bookmarks and dedications we made within their bodies. Only self-interested sociopaths will turn their nose upon their loyal and dependable friends of hundreds of years' standing, and sneer at those old-fashioned enough to want to remain loyal to their old friends.
(Btw, my comments are pre-modded for some time now because I previously criticised Guardian journalists for their soft-pedalling of our demand for real justice on the LIBOR scandal, so I won't be too surprised if the mods too deem this too critical to see the light of day).
Amended to add:
Oh, and "Liquid Life" by Zygmunt Bauman is a great read for all seasons, but especially great for summer of 2012 as its arguments are very pertinent to recent events as uncovered in the banking sector -- you do have to read through to the final chapters though to get the full force of Bauman's argument, but it is a slim book and it even has a picture of people swimming and relaxing in an azure blue pool on the cover if one needs to pretend one's reading a light-weight summer book rather than a solid but succinct treatise of political philosophy on one's holiday.
Monday 9 July 2012
Metropolis finale
"The mediator between the head and the hand must be the heart."--- Fritz Lang, Metropolis
Thursday 5 July 2012
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