Read This: American Subversive and Anthropology of an American Girl

I’m doing my best to finish up with all the books for tomorrow night’s evening of all-American fiction, a Beatrice reading hosted by the Center for Fiction. I’m really getting into David Goodwillie‘s American Subversive, one of the best novels of its type (which I’m loosely interpreting as a blend of social satire and literary thriller) since Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me, and I’m eager to see how the interlocking stories of an online gossip reporter and a domestic terrorist will come together, although a short film posted to YouTube already gives me some hints.

I’ve also been enjoying Hilary Thayer Hamann‘s Anthropology of an American Girl, a novel that was first self-published in 2003 and, on the success of its initial sales, picked up by Spiegel & Grau to reach a wider audience. It’s a very vivid description of high school alienation in the late 1970s, with all the budding sophistication and accumulated callowness that implies.

You can hear Goodwillie and Thayer Hamann read—along with Pearl Abraham and Jane Mendelsohn—by joining us at the Center for Fiction (17 E 47th St.) at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow night (June 22). It’s free, we’ll have books for sale afterward, and you can chat with the authors and maybe have a glass of wine. If you’re able to make it, be sure to say hello!

21 June 2010 | read this |

Professional & Ethics in Blogging, Round 2

It’s been a few weeks since my Book Blogger Convention talk on professionalism and ethics for book bloggers, but I am still seeing new responses—earlier today, I found a particularly thoughtful critique by Jessica, a philosophy professor specializing in ethics that zeroed in on a few areas where, in reviewing the video, I recognized a need to tighten up my presentation, as well as a few spots that I had missed. I’m not going to touch on all of them in this post, I suspect, but I did want to get some thoughts down.

Jessica notes that the stylistic lines between “professional” literary critics and “unprofessional” book bloggers are not clear-cut; bloggers often engage in “objectivity-enhancing practices” such as not reviewing friends’ books, for example, and mainstream literary criticism is, ultimately, subjective. It reminded me of a point that came up in an interview I did a few years back about the philosophy of wine: “On the one hand, we insist that it’s all subjective,” I wrote after my conversation with Barry Smith. “But, if so, what’s the point of any wine criticism, let alone the attempt to establish standard rankings? Wouldn’t complete subjectivity reduce criticism to autobiography? (I immediately think of useful parallels that might be drawn to literary criticism.)”

That’s not a question that can be resolved very easily; I only want to point out for now that if the line of demarcation between the professional and unprofessional “writing about books” were essentially stylistic, it might also be arbitrary, with attempts by professionals to suppress the proliferation of “unprofessional” writing, or at the very least its influence, stemming from highly vested self-interests—which circles back to my point that “professionals” set up the standard of what is real/valid in order to validate their own reality and deny power to others.

(more…)

19 June 2010 | uncategorized |