Knives Out

"Castrate the bastard."

This was Ira's immediate response to hearing Dale Peck's call for "the excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, of most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo."

Our friends, family, and anyone (say the exterminator) at all familiar with the Rasmussen-Goloubeva home library will immediately recognize this quote as an affront to our aesthetic sensibilities, critical intelligence, and way of life. I mean Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo... This is what we do, how we spend our days (and much of our nights), and why we lead a relatively (by Western standards) ascetic existence.

Ira didn't know it at the time, but the quote I read for her was from a book titled Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction, which made her recommendation all the more appropriate, I think.

Now, castration might sound excessive, but only if one is unfamiliar with Peck's shallow attempts at self-promotion via trash-talking book reviews that are to 'literary criticism' what Bill O'Reilly is to political commentary. I suspect Peck imagines himself to be a sort of latter day Oscar Wilde, or perhaps Dorthy Parker, but from what I've read his put-downs are more bitchy than witty. That is, they read like attention-seeking expressions of resentment rather than devastatingly clever critiques.

Here's Daniel Mendelsohn's more thorough take from the New York Review of Books on Peck's book. The review didn't put me off Peck entirely, but I'll have to hear what Rone - who read a range of contemporary, non-academic literary critics and reviewers for his PhD exam list - thinks before I bother to track Peck's writing down at the library or on the Net.

Who Can Check the President?

At this point, it appears nobody can, or will, do much to reign in our imperial president. My hunch is that a Republican led Congress won't want to challenge Bush's power, and even if the Democrats gain the majority in the next election it may be too late to reverse the precedents that have been established since 9/11. In the name of national security and fighting terrorism, we've witnessed a centralization of power in the executive branch. The Supreme Court anointed Bush, and with the court tilting further rightward, I don't expect them to do much to reduce executive powers. Noah Feldman's informative article provides a useful historical account of the expansion of executive power through various U.S. administrations: Our Presidential Era: Who Can Check the President?. I'm filing this one for possible use in a future American Literature and Culture class.

Gone Fishing: Photo of the Day #7

Icy Biking: Photo of the Day #6

Swedes ride their bikes - and not necessarily mountain bikes either - year round. I don't know how they manage to keep their balance. The roads and bike paths get very icy, because the the State doesn't put salt down for environmental reasons. I guess you just get used to moving on the ice.

Here's Daniel returning home on his cruiser, just as Ira and I set out for a mid-afternoon walk.

Book Awards and the Literary Marketplace

File under: Must read someday. Sociological approaches to literature and art tend to be of fairly limited interest to me. I already know that in the global marketplace works of art and literature are regarded as one more commodity to be bought and sold and that in their pursuit of cultural capital artists and writers can be as competitive as CEOs are of economic capital. Nonetheless, James English's analysis of the function of literary prizes in The Economy of Prestige sounds intriguing.

His basic premise is that controversies and scandals about who and what works deserve or don't deserve awards are precisely why the prize system exists in the first place. The contempt for the prizes that various scandals provoke (e.g. When Toni Morrison's Beloved failed to win the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1987 forty-eight of her friends and supporters published a statement of protest in the Times Book Review. She won the Pulitzer a few months later and the Nobel five years after that) enables us - the reading public - to sustain a belief in artistic meritocracy and the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. Louis Menand summarizes English's core claim:

His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.

The same could be said of a number of other major writers whom the Nobel snubbed. James Joyce immediately comes to mind, and I suspect Thomas Pynchon, no stranger to prize controversies, may follow in Joyce's wake. I'm curious to see what English has to say about Pynchon. My sense has always been that Pynchon understands the literary market as well as anyone and that his decision to assume the role of ultra-reclusive novelist with an irreverence for awards (sending the comedian Irwin Corey to accept the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow) was a shrewd move. Pynchon doesn't have to do the circuit of readings and public appearances (TV hardly appears to be an option anymore, unless Oprah Winfrey picks up your book) yet remains in the public eye (at least in the Internet, where his name turns up regularly - though not as often as Don DeLillo - in my Google updates).