Clipped

This Week’s Clip Book

By Anastasia ⋅ December 7, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Friday is Clip Book day at whimwit–I publish excerpts from and links to the most interesting articles I’ve read all week. Today, a grisly XIX century memoir, a review of book reviewing, and an argument for science fiction as quality literature.

In the XIX century, a highwayman called William E. Henley was sentenced to death and asked that his memoirs be bound in his own skin and that two copies are made: one for his doctor and one for a surviving victim. From May 1924 Boston Transcript [scroll down]:

This is all a matter of ancient record, but a present fillip is given to it by the fact that Mr. Nathaniel D. Chapin, of the well-known Cleveland manufacturing firm of Billings, Chapin Company has just been in Boston in search of this very volume, by reason of his family connection therewith.

As a boy Mr. Chapin had cherished very lively recollections of the book, for in the days of his grandfather, and even later, it had been often used in place of the family slipper, as an instrument of punishment, on the theory, probably, that the skin of a bad man was particularly adapted for warming that of a bad child.

From February 1944 ATHENÆUM ITEMS [same link]:

[T]he skin, taken from his back, had been treated to look like a gray deer skin. Peter Low had not realized at first the precise nature of the material placed in his hands. By the time his day’s work was done, however , he was in great distress of mind and, and nightmares filled the night that followed.

The book’s title is in Latin, a language not taught frequently enough any more according to Harry Mount in the New York Times. One wonders if the knowledge of Latin was what gave Peter Low nightmares after he bound a volume called “The book by Walton bound in his own skin.”

Via.

*

James Wolcott reviews Gail Pool’s work on book critics:

She quotes a chunk of comparison-mongering from The New York Times Book Review so convoluted it seems trussed in seaweed: “‘Just as certain mystery writers mature into artists–John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard come to mind–there are writers of what I will call ‘women’s fiction’ whose real gifts don’t flower until midcareer,’ began a review in The New York Times Book Review. ‘Anne Tyler’s early books were charming but slight; the new ones sure aren’t slight, and she’s earned herself a major place in, if not American literature, then at least American publishing.’ By this point in the review, readers might well have felt confused, as I did, since, as it happened, the book under review was a novel by Maeve Binchy.”

Such bait-and-switch is nothing new with book-chatterers. Wilfrid Sheed poked fun at this gambit in his essay “The Art of Reviewing,” in which he adduced that “a reviewer will do anything to avoid looking a text in the eye. He will drag in authors from Malaysia and the Cinque Portes. ‘A bit like the early Waugh … the late Firbank … dare one say Chekhov?’ he babbles. Anything but the unique experience of the book before him. And when he runs out of apples and pears, he starts playing the banana against itself. Perhaps so-and-so’s finest to date. Or else, a decided disappointment after his classic Nonesuch.” Like so many writers, reviewers are often creatures of sloth, prone to facile habits that they seem to have inherited from hacks barely scratching the surface back in Edgar Allan Poe’s heyday. I enjoyed Pool’s misdemeanor citations, without feeling that they represented a new strain of critical fungus.

The whole enchilada is worth the read. Via maudnewton.com.

The same book is reviewed at Criticial Mass.

The second failing of Faint Praise is Ms. Pool’s inability to suggest any significent remedies (sic) [for the lackluster quality of some book reviews]….A dreadful theater critic I knew once campaigned for the American Theater Critics Association to institute a set of professional standards and, in effect, a licensing authority. One could call oneself a theater critic (and presumably be hired as a critic by newspapers and magazines) only after being tested and approved by a board — and being issued a magnetic ID card for access to ATCA’s secret Area 51 headquarters. Or some such thing. The fact that the critic in question, to support his case, approvingly cited the old membership practices of the Soviet Writers Union shows just how far from this earthly dimension the entire proposal was. Gulag, anyone?

At Times Literary Supplement, Brian Appleyard asks: “Why don’t we love science fiction?”

The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.

…

But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there’s a lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary.

Despite its attempt to be egalitarian about book genre in evaluating the merit of the work in question, the article does manage to get in a dig at another fantasy book–the fantasy novel. Science fiction, in contrast to fantasy, is posited as “more demanding,” more realistic, and the “most vivid and direct chronicler of our anxieties about the world and ourselves.”

If any doubts remain as to what the author thinks of fantasy, there’s a quote from Brian Aldiss, found in the prominent penultimate paragraph of the piece. Steven Spielberg’s AI, he says, “is crap.” Why? Because the film “toppled into fantasy” as opposed to stayed within the “logical” tradition of science fiction.

Is it me, or do sci fi and fantasy need to take it outside?

Genre wars are a curiosity to me because I was born in a society and a family where Lem and Brothers Strugatsky were spoken of breathlessly and in the same sentence as Dostoievskiy and Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. If Alisa: Girl from the Future or The Adventures of the Electronic were on, you dropped everything and plopped your butt down in front of your TV. And yet I’ve been around long enough now to know I’ve heard those accusations of impurity, lack of realism (what else, after all, is logic?), and plain badness before–usually along with cries of “For God! For country! For Literature!” from the defenders of the canon against the barbarian hordes of science fiction.

Where am I in all this? Well, let’s just say, I’ll be sending the link to this post to the next fan boy/girl who complains about the dastardly treatment of science fiction at the hands of the Critical Inquisition.

Elsewhere, on snobbism:

Sadly, now that I have won the Facebook Poetry Contest, I realise that I am taking – or have in fact already taken – a big risk. I have made myself eligible for the dismissive tag of “Facebook poet.” Is that tag currently in existence? I don’t know. But I have a feeling that if it isn’t already, it soon will. There goes the “Facebook Poet.” Am I a Facebook Poet? Yes, I am. I won the first Facebook Contest, didn’t I?