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July 15, 2004
Robert Birnbaum's Been Busy
by Ron HoganOne of the literary blogosphere's favorite content generators kicks into overdrive this week, running a chat with Alice Randall on his personal site, Identity Theory, and talks with critic James Wood for The Morning News. Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, has taken some heat, but the conversation is mostly spent on various extraliterary racial matters, some of which led to the writing of her first novel, The Wind Done Gone, the parody that got Margaret Mitchell's estate all riled up:
To give a specific example, in Japan, where Gone with the Wind is immensely popular, when there were black service men on trial for rape of a Japanese woman in Japan, shortly after this litigation began, what was most likely to influence the perceptions of the Japanese public about those men was what they had read in Gone with the Wind.
Randall's somewhat disingenuous here, as the perceptions of the Japanese public in that case were just as likely to have been influenced by a history of American soldiers raping Okinawan women that dates back to the years immediately following the Second World War, and a 1995 incident in which three African-American soldiers pled guilty to raping a 12-year-old Okinawan would certainly have been more at the forefront of the Japanese cultural memory than some old movie in which every single African-American male was (if I'm recalling correctly) too subservient to even think about committing violence against a woman, let alone rape her.
The conversation with Wood, on the other hand, is hyperliterary, with passages like this par for the course:
The male sentimentality I have been talking about iswell, for instance the stories in [Fords] Rock Springs. I found too often that Ford relies on a moment of male violence to create the form to his stories, to close them off. Somebody hitting somebody. The last one that was in the New Yorker, somebody driving their car over aI suppose the Chekhovian ideal, its not quite that nothing should happen in a story because actually Chekhovs stories are full of deaths and births and all sorts of tragedies. Ill put it this way: When Virginia Woolf read Chekhov she said something like, The emphasis falls on such unexpected places so that you hardly realize that it is an emphasis at all. And thats what I very much love about Chekhov is this extraordinary subtlety and unpredictability. That the sentimental moment [pauses] is always avoided, just at the last second. So I find in Fords stories the emphasis falls too sharply and obviously, often on violence. But he is a fine writer, there is no doubt about that.
Though I think he's just adding that bit at the end so Ford doesn't spit on him at the next cocktail party.
Whitehead simpers, Ford doesn't.
Whitehead's bitchiness is empowered by the same culture that killed 10,000 Iraqis this last year. His stance is outside but he occupies a niche that's firmly and four-square inside.
Masculine virtues are consistently derided by people who have neither masculine nor feminine, nor any virtues whatsoever. Selfishness is not a virtue, compassion is. Ford's burdened with compassion to a degree that would destroy a heart as small and self-occupied as Whitehead's.
Cowardice is not a virtue, either. Better passionate mistakes, even damage, than the safe and easy.
There may be more to the story than what was written in the link, but in that story Ford got spit on again. It's passive-aggressive violence.
Sorry to vent so much, but I do believe Richard Ford is far more than an entertainer. The batting-cage scene in Independence Day is the most profound evocation of paternity I've ever read anywhere.
Ford's an artist, Whitehead's an opportunist. The story links them as though they're equals, which is absurd.
I would be surprised if Colson Whitehead's ever used a sledgehammer for more than twenty minutes in his entire life.
Whitehead's running a scam based on something he isn't. He is not a black man. A work of art in which he confronts that truth might be worth reading.
Your indignant comments would be more interesting if they didn't twist the facts into some Bizarro World narrative. "Ford got spit on again"? Ford didn't get spit on the first time; that's the whole point. If he's so compassionate, why does he go around spitting on people just because they didn't like his book? "Better passionate mistakes, even damage, than the safe and easy" is a nice motto for people who want to make excuses for fuckups.
Please note that I have no opinion on Ford's literary merits or lack thereof; I save that for people with more expertise on the subject.
Posted by: editor at July 17, 2004 12:49 AMFord -"I've waited two years for this! You spat on my book."
"Then he spat on me," says Whitehead. That's one... The facts weren't twisted, just a little out of your reach. Maybe this makes it clearer. ..
I fail to see how anyone who feels incapable of having opinions about literary merit, or lack therof, can have an opinion about something like Ford's assault on Whitehead.
It's just PC bitchiness. Ford's excess is nothing compared to Whitehead's cheap posturing; if he fucked up it was only in raising his profile in the gunsights of the drooling horde Whitehead speaks for and to. Better a raging fuck-up than a simpering chump, any day.
Anybody who reads the statement "you spit on my book" and thinks it means that the person to whom it was directed spat on the person who said it needs more help making things clear than this humble website editor--who only passes literary judgment on the authors he's read, and was too bored by the smidgin of Ford he read to indulge the author further--can provide. If you want to be a raging fuckup, do it on your own website.
Posted by: editor at July 17, 2004 11:41 AMyour PayPal donation
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