November 12, 2009
Posted at 10:35 AM in Net Life
I'm a guest on this week's installment of Digital Campus, a podcast hosted by Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The episode's theme is "Publishers Bleakly", and Dan, Mills, Tom, Josh Greenberg of the NYPL and I talk about some of the changes besetting (or reshaping) scholarly publishers and libraries. If you listen, I hope you find it useful. And if I said anything I'll regret, don't tell me.
November 11, 2009
Posted at 8:50 AM in History Matters
Today is Armistice Day. It doesn't seem appropriate to dwell here on how powerfully affecting I find the Great War and the poetry that came out of those bloody years. Instead I'll point you to The First World War Poetry Archive, an amazing online collection of manuscripts, photos, and other artifacts and echoes of the war and the people who fought and died in it.
The archive, which is hosted at Oxford University but draws on other archives as well, has just launched its Siegfried Sassoon Collection. Here's one of my favorite passages from Robert Graves's memoir Good-Bye to All That, in which he tells a story about Sassoon, poetry, and battlefield heroics:
The Battalion's next objective was 'The Quadrangle,' a small copse this side of Mametz Wood, where Siegfried distinguished himself by taking, single-handed, a battalion frontage which the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take the day before. He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants. A pointless feat, since instead of signalling for reinforcements, he sat down in the German trench and began reading a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not even report. Colonel Stockwell, then in command, raged at him. The attack on Mametz Wood had been delayed for two hours because British patrols were still reported to be out. "British patrols" were Siegfried and his book of poems. "I'd have got you a D.S.O. if only you'd shown more sense," stormed Stockwell.
If you go here, you'll find a link to an audio file of Sassoon reading his Armistice poem "Everyone Sang":
...My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Sassoon outlasted the War by decades. He died in 1967 at the age of 80.
November 10, 2009
Posted at 1:04 PM in Lit Crit
Journalists are handed a lot of evidence that the world at large doesn't think much of our trade. No-one seems to appreciate how selflessly we serve the greater good, what keen-eyed observers and trenchant analysts we are.
So there we are, feeling all righteous and aggrieved, and then the news cycle coughs up a reminder that sometimes we really don't have a clue. One recent example I found especially painful because it involved literary journalism, which has more or less been my home turf since the dawn of time.
On Nov. 3, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story headlined "Celebrating the Memoir: Fiction's Day Is Done?" It's a profile of Ben Yagoda, a well-published writer who has a new book out called Memoir: A History. Okay, the guy has a new book and he was appearing at a local festival on "Memoir and Documentary Art." Fine, profile him. Perfectly sound logic there.
The trouble starts when the profile writer tries to go all big-picture: "The emphasis on memoir is so strong that autobiography, history and fiction may be endangered. And the reasons for memoir's popularity may rest in our very nature as Americans: In a land where the majority rules, individuality is exalted and memoir is more befitting the American ideal of resourcefulness." The story goes on to quote Yagoda: "When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction's day is done," he says. Then it serves up some palaver about history books (we no longer believe in them) and book clubs (terrible places to talk about fiction).
Now I haven't read Yagoda's new book, so I can't weigh his arguments and conclusions with any justice. I can and do, however, take issue with just about everything else the profile would have me believe: the essentialist argument that "our very nature as Americans" means that we love memoirs more than anything else; the idea that we used to read fiction mostly to have points proved and cases made; the suggestion that history doesn't cut it as a genre any more and that book clubs are hopeless when it comes to talking about fiction. (I imagine book clubbers south of Canada and north of Mexico picking up copies of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, screaming "Novel!" and running for the exits, leaving their glasses of Zinfandel untouched on the coffee table.)
In a word: No, no, no, and no!
I'm going to go curl up in the Curmudgeons' Corner now and grumble about what my profession is coming to. Mark Athitakis has far more reasonable (and well-reasoned) things to say about memoir vs. fiction here.
