Literature

Some time last year, I grabbed a copy of Hal Niedzviecki’s latest book, Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, but just recently had time to read it. I met Niedzviecki once a few years ago, and he was intelligent and articulate, but very little that he had written (that I had read, anyway) was especially brilliant. Good? Yes. Excellent? Not so much. But I’m Special was beyond good. It was most definitely excellent. Niedzviecki covers ground that many (including the inimitable David Foster Wallace) have covered before, but without the usual pseudo-intellectual stake-claiming, bullshit, and posturing. As well as looking deep into the social causes of contemporary youth activism and independent media, he links the rise of neo-conservative and neo-traditional groups and movements to the same pop-culture-motivated desire for extreme individuality. It is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in trying to… Continue Reading →

Because he says things like

Here, finally, is an argument for reading good-but-not-great books that I can get behind.

Jonathan Yardley, in reviewing a new biography of e. e. cummings, takes two popular routes at once. First, he blasts the literati, and then he isolates American literature as something separate and almost superior to the literature from other nations. On page two he gets around to actually talking about the biography.

You may have noticed that I have not been updating much in the last few months. I recently began my career as a graduate student, and I don’t have as much time as I would like to post all the literary tidbits that I would like (also, some of my sources, like Arts and Letters Daily, seem to be getting trashier). Today I’d like to catch up a little with some older stories that I think deserve some attention. Idiots Discuss the Dumbing Down of Literature There is a ridiculous article at the Christian Science Monitor that seems to take the postion that comic books and graphic novels can be useful to teach youngsters remedial reading comprehension, but that they are ultimately products of pop culture (and therefore not serious art, which means that if they don’t have some functional purpose they become either socially repugnant or downright damaging to… Continue Reading →

As I’m sure most of my readers know, the important French theorist/philospher Jacques Derrida passed away in Paris on the eighth of this month. Spiked has a fairly good obituary up, but used the obvious “Deconstructing Derrida” for it headline. In other Derrida news, the usually assinine 2 Blowhards have a nice blog entry up concerning his death.

The Globe and Mail, perhaps the only newspaper left in Canada without a completely shameful books section (and I’m not just saying that because they let me write for them periodically) has finally decided to stay vital and give writers like Sheila Heti a chance to flex their critical voices. The last Saturday edition of the paper that I picked up featured a book review by the inestimably over-rated Margaret Atwood, that darling of Canadian letters. The review was of a book written by a fairly new author that Atwood had known since he was a child. And frankly those are the only details that seemed important to Atwood, because they are the only points that I took away from the review. I don’t recall the name of the author, his book, or if Atwood even mentioned what it was about. Regular readers of this site will know that I… Continue Reading →

Bookforum has an excellent piece on Edward Said and Frank Kermode’s latest books. My favourite bit: For Said, humanism is never a fixed or totalizing system of belief; nor is it an adjunct to sterile tradition. “When,” he asks, “will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has hitherto been given them?” He notes that humanism is hardly a pure product of the West, referring us to the Islamic textual practices of medieval Muslim universities, which were handmaidens of the European Renaissance lorded over by the two Blooms. In Said’s view, the genuine humanist is someone who heeds tradition while at the same time subjecting it to merciless scrutiny. This is not a recipe for contentment, it is a prescription… Continue Reading →

When is Shakespeare not Shakespeare? When the tinfoil hat brigade turns its attention to literature.