The Believer Magazine - New Issue with Free Covers Comp.

It's the whitest thing on earth!

Some people who like McSweeneys (like me, ferinstance) aren't scared or rap or loud rock or things that are more than some dude with an acoustic guitar (or a girl with a harp for that matter).

Actually, inside the actual magazine, there's a Douglas Wolk article about The Fall, and Carrie Brownstein interviews Karen O.

Although Wolk on the Fall might be pretty sweet.

Why couldn't Spin give that column to David Foster Wallace?(1)

(1) This is my footnote about David Foster Wallace

P.S. PASTE is not bad. It's a certain demographic... get over it.

Also, what's the deal with Hornby? Am I the only person who liked Songbook? Is it his taste or the way he actually writes about music that pisses people off? Examples, please. Plus, his reading column in the Believer is pretty solid.

As for "This is so pandering to the McSweeney's reading yuppies it makes me sick"...

It makes you sick that a magazine that's largely consumed by McSweeney's reading yuppies would organize a CD full of songs that would also appeal to that demographic? Next thing you know, Kerrang! is going to put out a CD of a bunch of metal songs tailer made for tribal-tattooed metalheads! Blargh!

And the claim that "He was placed on this earth by dark forces to destroy the world of literature" is just insane, unless you're exclusively a huge fan of the big publishing houses. However you feel about his writing (which I am mixed at best on), the inroads that he has laid and doors he's opened up for small publishers over the last 10 years are irrefutable.

what demographic likes SHITTY WRITING?

the only explanation for eggers hate is jealousy/envy or ignorance.

x-post

re: Hornby.

Dude just has bland taste. Nelly Furtado? Aimee Mann? Ben Folds? Jackson Browne?

I could go hang out at a Starbucks if i wanted to hear rich people babble on about how much they like Badly Drawn Boy.

P.S. Dan... OTM re: Eggers (enough for me at least)

Dude, Stalin started out on the little guy's side. STALIN!

Hopefully it's not exactly new to ILX that comfy-strummy indie music is popular in this segment of the literary world, or that Believer music issues have traditionally run in about this direction; if you think this is so horrendous, you should think hard about how a lot of music folks look when they start talking fiction. We all have our fortes.

Whiney's right, though, that there are plenty of Believer readers who spend enough time with music to kind of toss aside their occasional music forays. This is why I've been pleased to see Douglas in there a few times, especially since he's written just as effectively on non-music topics. They have music stuff, some of it by dedicated music writers and some of it by lit-writers; and really, if music writers here think they could cover different artists in a way that fits the mag's style, there's no excuse not to get in touch and try to make it happen.

That's Scientology talk! I'm sounding the alarm about this shady character, the people must know!

Ben Marcus: "Well, I rose blank from my slumber-peanut and ran transluscent liquid over my flesh-leather. Then I placed an animal-slice in my disgestion-hole and processed it there until I emitted it, like a gentle earth pepper. Then there was blackness, and deafening noise-breath. How about you?"

Heidi Julavits: "We got Aimee Bender to agree to interview Terrence Malick."

Although, of course, Malick would be the one who'd have to agree to be interviewed, not the other way around.

Consider this a casting call for Joe Pesci.

And white people invented the Decemberists.

That's all i'm saying.

If I'd ever pursued a graduate degree, I was probably going to write my thesis about this: how certain cultural objects and phenomena are coded as "white."

-- dan (dregan2...), June 9th, 2005.

OTM. If I wasn't familiar with The Fall, I would have run right out and grabbed something by them (if not the box set itself) based on the description of them in the article.

d.wolk wrote about lovecraft in the new york times book review!

white people be spelling funny!

Dave Chapelle and Chuck Berry, OTM. Trivia fact: Berry's 1st and only #1 hit on the Pop Charts was "My Ding-a-Ling." He had 3 previous singles hit #1 on the "Black" Singles Charts, however.

What an awful awful slanderous thing to say about someone you know nothing about.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/10/15eggers.html

you can hear cynthia g mason's track here.

And I love that Charles Burns does the portraits on every cover. And the Amy Sedaris advice column is funny. And the article they did on the Landmark Forum many issues ago was fascinating.

Ah well, guess I'm an just an idiot.

I'm not Jon, but ... yeah, his name is Brandon Bird (brandonbird.com) ... I think you're in LA, right? He's having a show at Gallery 1988 within the next few weeks.

The Classical

yes, truly astounding to have noticed that Wallace makes use of footnotes: stunning insight, that

Besides which can I just say: literature? I mean, geez, this is one of the main fields in which black Americans have succeeded most. Besides which I hate to say it but lots of non-white non-American people are a whole lot bigger on literature than Americans as a whole are lately.

Yes, Banana, almost as stunning as the amount of condescension you are willing to spit before coming back and posting in support of "actual discussion."

nabisco, again, you are right. I was trying too hard to be funny/impress, and therefore, I decided to spout half-funny things in order to avoid real thinking. and you are absolutely right about literature. I'm not caught up on all of the most recent things there, but the 20th C. was full of amazing non-white writers. Ellison and Baldwin's introduction to "Notes of a Native Son" alone would be reason to celebrate.

(there's corny everybody stuff.)

And regardless of execution, I do totally give the Believer folks credit for trying to fill a missing niche -- i.e., a lit-and-essay mag that shoots for a breezy, friendly tone, something curiously absent in a field of kind of aging and sometimes chorelike no-nonsense Important Thought journals. I like the thought of a 50-year-old man reading the NYRB and his 20-year-old kid sitting across the room with a Believer, you know?

OTM

I'm with you on the price, though, Nick. This thing doesn't exactly need to have two-color brown-and-brown segments and heavy matte-paper stock. They've broken well enough away from the anti-visual black-and-white lit-mag norm; knock out a couple frills, bring the package down closer to $6, and I'd feel a hell of a lot less stupid and guilty for buying it.

I liked the way D Wolk's "S.O.B.I.G." piece -- which ILXors should theoretically love the hell out of -- avoided that; he sets up his conceptual grounding, but then when he's done he gets to pick joyfully through the plot of the film, for about exactly as long as you'd want him to. It's as much payoff to the grounding as I've seen anyone get in a while.

If you subscribe, you get 10 issues for $45. I'll leave the math as an exercise.

yeah this problem is general through the would-be literatisphere I think, it's just that the Believer has some really good writers so I really notice it more! elsewhere, there's hardly an indie record review that doesn't begin with seventy-five words of here's-how-I-fit-in/let-me-set-the-scene -ness, which can be great sometimes given the right set of tools in the writer's hands, but which oughtn't be seen as indispensible to reviewing & is in my opinion pointless if the writer doing the intro is anything less that great. I'd wager you could trace a lot of this stuff back to freshman comp

I've come to feel like a lot of the value in Believer pieces is actually in that run-up, which makes me wonder if we're all approaching writing backwards these days -- possibly it's better to start with the thing you're on about and then back your way through some of the context.

if you can polish it off in an hour, you're straight skimming, not reading and the mag prob ain't for you in the first place.

(x-post)

every issue is at least 85 pages. no ads.

(n/a I am not pilin' on but really, a magazine with no ads & good writers is a nice thing to have around and worthy of support!)

http://ilx.p3r.net/newquestions.php?board=54

(in case yoo r noo here)

NB it's kinda depressing me that the Believer is getting as much high-profile attention for a music issue as for the lit stuff they're actually in the business of doing.

* (may not be true)

oh, and royalty. yes, submit to my will.

and kelefa really has to stop getting all his ideas from ilm. it's getting ridiculous!

thanks for the welcome. my eds would have dirt, but i've destroyed them all, due to insubordination

Last time I was up there I stopped by what used to be My Bar / Bistro 1800 -- i.e. a cozy yuppie almost fernlike bar that was a bit easier to get into without ID -- and it had turned into a damned sports bar.

lots of xposts

Now, in addition to the whole mall/theater development, there are more bars -- (e.g. there was sure as hell no Bar Louie when I was there!) -- and more going on at them; a few years ago I think John Cale and Yo La Tengo played up there! It's kind of bizarro. I mean, I assume it has to do with the purple line shutting off late-night service and trapping everyone up there, but it's still weird to me.

shot dead

who do you know, 'bisco? (or is this a discussion meant for some other yuppie thread?)

Both Cale and YLT played at Nevin's during the first month or two of its existence. (I saw the YLT show.) After that, the venue's reputation went completely downhill. I think they had a regular Sunday night jazz thing, but otherwise no one of note ever played there again. Maybe a local band like Oh My God! or someone, but that was about it.

Katie I'm a man of mystery and I don't reveal my connections. I'm gonna kick back and enjoy the Davis Street Gigios / EV1 / Ridge+Davis flashback I'm having right now.

K, I worked at a textbook development company on Central St., right across from the football stadium. So I spent my days fact-checking 4th-grade history books and had lunch at Panino's at least once a week. I also spent a fair bit of time at the EPL doing research.

ridge & davis? pleez. maple & noyes, with bells on. i'm getting the runs just thinking of j.k. sweets and their vietnamese menu.

Noyes-wise -- there was a Chinese/Korean place somewhere along there that had pretty much the best bibimbap I've ever tasted. Somewhere near the mafia-fronty D&D burger joint. These days I mostly wonder, though, how the Evanston cafe spread's been reorganized; there were such hilarious changes going on with Ambience at the time that I wonder what the new heirarchy is.

nd no, I don't think it's a bad idea for it to be all indie, since it's their demo, it's relatively easy to get those artists involved, and they're going for a unified concept musically with it

plus, do you think they might make a believer tour of it like the last time they did a music ish? that was the mountain goats and burying beds i think...

I know I've preached my gospel about The Mountain Goats elsewhere on ILM, but is it just me, or is their cover of the Mountain Goats song amazing?

Adam was not the first man
although the Bible tells us so
there was one created before him whose name we do not know
he also lived in the garden, but he had no mouth or eyes
one day Adam came to kill him
and he died beneath these skies.

The way John sings those lines sends shivers down my spine.

Recent great things in The Believer: articles on Jeff Lint, Carlos Castaneda-as-fraud, and Amy Sedaris's advice column.

DON'T FLATTER YOURSELF.

NB for the record I still want to stress something, something I'm going to overstate here for the purpose of making it as clear as possible. People with ultra-developed taste in music tend to have really pedestrian or under-developed taste in literature. There is nothing wrong or weird about this, except for the fact that they never seem to actually realize it: a lot of the time they just assume that their taste in books is just as refined as their taste in music! In fact, they'll criticize people with ultra-developed taste in literature for having pedestrian or under-developed taste in music -- the exact opposite of them!

And I say that totally snarkless -- I've split my energy between books and music and probably have half-interesting but not super-developed taste in either. And I don't direct that at anybody in particular on this thread. Just something I need to make clear, because oh have I seen music-people try to fault book-people for not having super-deep music tastes, thinking all the while that they're super-deep in literature because they read Murakami and Houllebecq.

(I went to eths, not northwestern; lived in evanston from 93 until i went to college in '01)

crime has gone down a lot. jaymc, you met my friend micah at lady sov, right? He went to h.s. with me, and when he was younger he used to hear shots every other night on his block. Although gang and drug violence is down since then Evanston's been losing its tax base rather steadily from what i understand. Property values in micah's neighborhood (by the high school) have shot throught he roof of late, though; he said that the way most of the people in his neighborhood see it is good in the short term, bad in the long term.

On the issue of the believer CD - i dont really have anything to say.

Nabisco I kiss you

Surely not.

The way this is phrased seems to imply that the commonality of interests or background between the writer and reader is what defines -- or what should define -- a reader's satisfaction in the writer's work. Or that it's perverse for a reader to not like a writer's work when that writer has so much commonality with the reader. I dunno, maybe a reader responds the most positively to some unquantifiable (and forever shifting) mixture of "like me" and "not like me."

Keep in mind that the reverse happens whenever music elitists try to talk about literature. Seriously. The way rock critics continually mention Joyce would be the equivalent of a Believer music-issue mix that was just "Brown Sugar" and "Rock the Casbah," alternating back and forth over eighteen tracks. Seriously. Don't even try to mix the peanut butter and the chocolate on this one.

DYING to know here which rock critics "continually mention Joyce." Concrete examples only, please.

But so I'm googling around, umm, the primary outlet of my own writing -- and skimming a bit, so don't hold me to total accuracy on this -- and the four most heavily mentioned novelists I can think to look for are David Foster Wallace (22 mentions), James Joyce (20 mentions), Dave Eggers (16 mentions), and Thomas Pynchon (12 mentions) -- i.e., pretty much exactly what you'd think. So far I've got Hemingway coming fifth (9 mentions). Maybe someone else's googling will turn up something that tops those, but I doubt it'll be Jean Toomer (nope, 0) or Naguib Mahfouz (nope, 0) or even Lorrie Moore (nope, 0!!!) or Manuel Puig (nope, 0) or Machado de Assis (wait holy shit there's one!). I expected more for Zadie Smith and I kind of wonder what it might mean that she's only mentioned once.

Now before I look like a snob or an asshole: the types of writers that do get mentioned are the types of writers I tend to enjoy (four results for Calvino!), and I've contributed my own tick to similar tallies (Murakami 5, Rushdie 4). But line them up, and they offer a vision of literature that's open to the exact same attacks being leveled at the Believer audience's musical tastes in this very thread: a modern crop of "white," "middle-class," "clever" selections, just the sorts of things that moderately-hip boys at private colleges tend to go for. Not too much looking far into the past, not too much delving beyond the immediate canon into what lies beneath, and not a huge deal of attention paid outside of a central line of modern and post-modern white-male high-literary tastes. (Funnily enough it's Ethan P who gets Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, and Sterne into one sentence!) How long ago was it that Neal Pollack came on ILM talking about feeling a great cross-industry kinship with bands like Wilco and the Flaming Lips?

There are all sorts of complications to add to this. The first is that it's not a criticism; I like loads of (maybe primarily) "corny" indie and "clever" modern white-guy lit (Antrim 0, Saunders 0, Nicholson Baker 1); I just find it interesting that lots of music-lovers would throw that stone at lit folk's music when they might be living inside the glass house of their own taste in books. The second is that plenty of the writers for the site in question here have studied literature (Steven Millhauser 1), which points to something else -- that this form of taste is just as prevalent in the proper lit world as it is in the proper music world. And of course there's the biggest caveat: one supposes music lovers have every right to throw stones at anyone putting CDs out into the world; impossible to make accusations of hypocrisy when the music folks never claimed to be able to throw together a lit journal on the side.

So I've been pressing this point not because I think it's a fault or anyone involved, or to pretend I know more about literature or music than anyone else. I know less about either than plenty of people on each side, but in paying attention back and forth between the two I've been struck by this strange translation. My only real point is basically a simple one: that music folk probably shouldn't impose value judgments on the musical taste of lit folk that they wouldn't feel comfortable having imposed back, in the other direction, onto their literary tastes. My point isn't to disparage anyone's taste but to do entirely the opposite -- to maybe point out that we all shouldn't be disparaging one another's taste so much, because we all divide our attentions in different and hopefully self-satisfying ways, and that's surely a better way of going about it than trying to make sure your tastes match up with some value system that's being pressed upon you by someone else.

I am now going to read Harold Brodkey (not James Baldwin or Melissa Bank) and listen to Boards of Canada (not Frankie Knuckles or Fantasia Barrino).

I'm sort of confused here: what site are you searching (ILx, right? Not Pitchfork?), how are you searching (ILx search or, literally, google?) how are you searching these authors (by last name, last + first, first and last in quotes)?

'Cause if you're searching ILx, I'm getting completely different results than you.

Dickens 9, Flaubert 1, Camus 13, Twain 6 (not counting Joan of Arc refs), Ralph Ellison 1, Proust 4, Jane Austen 2, Faulkner 6, Ayn Rand 6, Saul Bellow 1, DeLillo 2, Phillip Roth 3, Didion 2, Rabelais 0, Cervantes 0. Also, some poets: TS Eliot 10, Emily Dickinson 5, Walt Whitman 8, Plath 12, Angelou 3. Um, you'll maybe notice that sometimes I counted album and song titles, sometimes I didn't.

The winner? Kafka, at 22. The refs are usually fairly specifc to the author and his works, too -- I'm not counting "Kafkaesque," which gets used only twice.

Wallace's ubiquity in PF might also be a sign of his literary "superstardom" (though I see Franzen only mentioned once, three less than the Left Behind series) than any sense of identification, much less admiration.

This reminds me of Armond White's film reviews, which often, incongruously, use contemporary pop songs as a means of contrast. (See, for example, the excursion into "Cry Me a River" in the middle of an All the Real Girls review.) He's the only critic I can think of who does this with any regularity, though.

haha nitsuh my idea behind that shitty review was same as yours is now!! besides pynchon i guess i shdve picked authors who are actually referenced more on the site but the whole point for that came from me bein real tired of all the post-eggars critics who do/did wack postmodernist biter reviews and act like they just invented the wheel or some shit, all that cutesy 2nd person ennui and awkward dramatic structure (that review has a beckett dis too right) and yeah i dunno the obie trice cd was aight but real zzzz to write about so i just put down a couple cheapshots at pfork writer laziness

I'm really sort of surprised at the popularity of Kafka. He doesn't strike me as the kind of writer whose example a rock critic can really USE in a 700 word review, you know? (Except in the hoary old cliche of "Kafkaesque.")

You could draw loads of connections from hip-hop to poetry old and new, especially if you bleed over from "conscious" rap into performance poetry slam stuff (I mean, Russell and Mos Def, you know) and from there to text. But I'm guessing hip-hop press just hates the bourgie-boho performance crowd, right? I can imagine like Vibe paying attention but not really anywhere else.

I still can't decide if I "like" Roth or am just fascinated by him, but yeah-huh, I'm still doing my part in review references. I totally have all the tastes we're talking about and do not feel guilty about listening to Devendra Banhart while reading FSG books.

But so dlp, so long as I'm crowding this thread, I'm not sure how the Believer's way of talking about music makes any bolder claims than the way other people talk about books: yeah, they sound like they like the stuff and are excited about figuring out, but I've yet to see their articles make any grand comparative claims about quality (even the really annoying Cat Power / Lora Logic one from way back). Don't be misled by the fact that they'll write grand exegises of run-of-the-mill albums; it doesn't mean they think it's the best thing ever, it means they're literature people, and highbrow close-reading criticism is just what they do. (Also in lots of cases the don't have the music-person's vocabulary for writing about music, and so they do what beginning music critics often do: "This album is like sunlight dappling the ocean, both delicate and crushing in its reminder of our tiny place in the universe" -- i.e., you start searching for the metaphor and the metaphor inevitably gets overblown.)

"The critics are playing with the form pretty recklessly here," Derby says of the more outlandish Wonder Bread jeers. "It's a clever (and basically indefensible) rhetorical strategy to call a work racist by implied exclusion, but it only works if you apply it across the board. You can't just whip out the race card when you're attacking a magazine with which you have some sort of issue."

I'm curious about this. Has anybody cited in the article -- Kelefa Sanneh, Rob Mitchum, Jason Cherkis, the posters on this thread -- actually said anything like "The Believer is racist because of its exclusively white focus" or even just "The Believer is racist" or their equivalents? I do see people here on this thread expressing revulsion at The Believer's whiteness but I'm just not sure yet if "it's too white!" and "it's racist!" are equivalent. I'm not even if the former necessary implies the latter. Maybe it SHOULD, but I don't think does. (Or maybe people should be pointed enough to say "it's racist" instead of "it's too white.")

but this is all smoke & mirrors coz the point isn't musictaste (or even crit which is worse/better coz then someone has to READ it) in the abstract, but the actual particular selection of things the believer gives us and then the actual particular ways that they are written about.

oh yeah and the mid-list 90s fiction thing is a dodge too, coz nobody's all "dude, you say you know a bunch about music so why don't you have more mid-list 90s corporate alt-rock in your collection!?"

For the Tru Hedz:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002G32.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

"BLACK ROSE, by Nora Roberts. (Jove, $7.99.) A widow who owns a nursery falls for a genealogist helping to investigate her ancestors, who include an interfering ghost.

THE SUMMER I DARED, by Barbara Delinsky. (Pocket Books, $9.95.) A woman who survived a deadly boating accident off the coast of Maine begins to question her priorities as a wife and mother.

HUNTING FEAR, by Kay Hooper. (Bantam, $7.50.) A psychic special agent must find a predatory kidnapper and murderer."

i like the interfering ghost though! it's like a knock-knock joke. The interfering ghost w..BOO!

the point being that fiction and music are totally different mediums and one can't just compare the two in some sort of naive way. "what do you think of the dean koontz?" "well, the sentences are dumb, but i like the beat!"

and of course if you cross-match the author refs on the pfork site to those in any given literary section of a youthful mag they'll be pretty similar too, but then if you go to a difft sort of mag you'll hit the classic canon instead, or maybe with an american transcendentalist or pragmatist twist speaking of which would it be better if more pitchfork reviews were required to include quotes from william james and santayana?

i think it would be.

good writing = good writing. i don't care what's in your record collection or on your bookshelf.

I've never seen this mag in the UK but I'd kinda like too. Believe me, if UK types tried to do this it'd be much more horrendous.

there's also in some sense waaay more difference between the "function" of a harlequin romance and even a 90s mid-list literary bildungsroman than say between the modern (at least) function of bach and, er, backstreet boys.

Also, I think this odd scenario is a really good illustration:

"well, the sentences are dumb, but i like the beat!"

Do film and literature require you to accept the narrative's worldview more fully in order to ensure enjoyment? I would wager yes.

'The Interruption of Everything': You Go on a Diet, Girl!

By CHELSEA CAIN
Published: July 24, 2005

MARILYN GRIMES, the narrator of Terry McMillan's shrug of a novel, is an upper-middle-class black woman struggling with female problems. Specifically, she's 44 with a 44-inch waist. Her marriage is unhappy; her crotchety mother-in-law has moved in, geriatric dog in tow; her mother, who lives with Marilyn's drug-addled foster sister and her two kids, is slipping into dementia; and it turns out Marilyn's missed period wasn't menopause. Throw in her dreamy first husband, two sassy girlfriends and her college-age son, visiting with his new gal pal, and, uh-oh, is that a family crisis on the horizon?

You know the story: A woman is shocked to find that her life is not as she had imagined it would be. A hundred years ago, such women wallowed a bit and then walked into the sea. Now they get vibrators and personal trainers.

Naturally, we women readers love this sort of stuff. Just stack up copies of ''The Interruption of Everything'' at the airport newsstands and watch us scramble for them. Pregnancy! Adultery! Interfering in-laws! Drug addiction! Aging parents! Empty-nest syndrome! Crafts! If there were a way to work in a square-jawed, bodice-ripping pirate, we'd be too busy reading even to watch ''Desperate Housewives.''

Alas, the book is also awash in clunky exposition. ''What the hell am I doing?'' Marilyn thinks to herself in the first chapter. ''Here. Not in this store? But here: in this world, in Northern California, in February 2004?''

The characters' motivations and relationships are spelled out and writ large. We've barely met her difficult mother-in-law, Arthurine, before Marilyn helpfully informs us, ''I do care about Arthurine and would even go so far as to say I love her, but very often the people you really care about are the hardest to love.'' Later, Marilyn's husband tells her, ''I accept responsibility for what I've become: a boring middle-aged man who forgot how to live.'' Confused about someone's behavior? Just wait half a page and a character will explain it to you.

Critics have been blaming pop culture for the ubiquity of the American knucklehead since before Paris Hilton was born, but have readers become so lazy that we actually need this sort of hand-holding? The narrative itself relies heavily on dialogue (which should save considerable time for some lucky Hollywood screenwriter), but it doesn't lend itself to characterization. And with the exception of a truly inspired description of a clitoris stimulator and a battery-operated penis (''eight inches of chocolate rubber''), sensual detail is scarce.

So we are left with plot. Will Marilyn embrace late motherhood? Will she leave her husband? Will she slim down to a size 10? Most thrillingly, will she get into the M.F.A. programs at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Academy of Arts in San Francisco? Clearly, she is talented. Other characters are endlessly admiring the candelabra she has painted blue and glue-gunned with seashells and pearls and dried fruit.

McMillan is an important writer, if only because she trailblazed a market for African-American go-girl pop fiction, and her books have that special something that makes publishers tingle all over: crossover appeal. It's no wonder. Bored wives. Vacation homes. Yoga. The time to sit around feeling unfulfilled. Doesn't really scream ''secret society,'' does it? ''You sound like you could be a rich white woman,'' one character tells Marilyn. It's not a compliment.

Chelsea Cain is the author of a novel, ''Confessions of a Teen Sleuth,'' and a memoir, ''Dharma Girl: A Road Trip Across the American Generations.''

So I'm in complete agreement that Believer-style music essays shouldn't be thought of as "criticism" in the sense we (ha "we") do it, and often that's the one thing that's best about them: they're less interested in how things fit into some broad music world and history, and more interested in unpacking the music's "character" and meaning and words, along with a whole lot of psychological and pretty much reader-response stuff.

And I'm half-skeptical against some of the arguments that might be trotted out to say it's just "different" with literature. "The sentences are dumb, but I like the beat" -- isn't this joke like two steps away from implying that literature doesn't have an aesthetic element? Can't you not like the thought but get aesthetic thrills from the expression? Books have a beat! And J, as far as worldview -- I read what you've typed and I think "sure," but really I'm not so sure: if we enjoy music filled with worldviews we don't identify with, why exactly not books? Why precisely do they require, umm, the same kind of identification that keeps college kids liking Malkmus better than Game?

Columbia Literary History of the United States
to the is-land - janet frame
a fanatic heart (stories) - edna o'brien
what was literature? - leslie fiedler
chopper from the inside - mark read
The New Partisan Reader - Partisan Review 1945-1953
billie dyer & other stories - william maxwell
the life to come (stories) - e.m. forster
From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity - juan flores
The Voice: Life at the Village Voice - ellen frankfort
What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Biography - larry rivers
the sugar house - antonia white
the judge - rebecca west
dodo: an omnibus - e.f. benson
S.T.P. A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones - robert greenfield
collection: neon wilderness, the man with the golden arm, a walk on the wild side - nelson algren
beyond the glass - antonia white
a pale view of hills - kazuo ishiguro
Openers II: The Lyrics Of Roky Erickson - roky erickson
The Temper Of Our Time - eric hoffer
Stories from the 60's - edited by stanley elkin
the knife thrower & other stories - steven millhauser
the sinking of the odradek stadium and other novels - harry mathews
beyond the curve (stories) - kobo abe
The Knox Brothers - penelope fitzgerald
the wind shifting west & the condor passes - shirley
ann grau
we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson
Going Steady - pauline kael
a slipping-down life - anne tyler
the pugilist at rest - thom jones
the sweet dove dies - barbara pym
the means of escape (stories) - penelope fitzgerald
the lonely passion of judith hearne - bryan moore
because they wanted to (stories) - mary gaitskill (good music crit alert!)
the bigamist's daughter - alice mcdermott
the time of our singing - richard powers (someone should get him to write about grime)
platform - michel houellebecq (that one is for you, nabisco!!)
stories - muriel spark
powdered eggs - charles simmons

i read this in h.s.!! it was... really long. and academic, but interesting!

I don't think it's strictly a matter of identification. Perhaps I was wrong to use the word "worldview." Part of what I'm saying, I think, has to do with just the simple act of following a narrative, going along with what the book is there for. I don't think music always requires this sort of sequential attention: a) music has the capacity to be shuffled around or mixed with other music, outside of its intended context, and b) music can be put on in the background, so that you're only half-paying attention to it. And I think these are seen as valid and rewarding ways of listening.

I mean, you're probably right that books have "beats" insofar as that refers to an aesthetic quality of the writing, but I think it's harder to separate this from the narrative content in a meaningful way, in the same way that you can nod along to a song in the other room at a party, simply enjoying the atmosphere.

x-post

Cause I ain't no houellebecq girrrrl

i'm sorry.

I find this a very interesting analogy, and one that I have pursued at various times & forms on ILM in the past - basically ever since I encountered the anti-rockist, pro-pop, pro-fun critical formulation. For instance, you can also do a similar analogy with popular movies. Perhaps there it works a bit better (or goes down more easily) than it does with books. For instance, even popular movie entertainment can have "smart" qualities to it that "cultured" viewers can appreciate. This is a dichotomy that often shows up in popular movie-crit - eg., "the latest Pixar shindig has plenty o' thrills for the tots but parents will also enjoy the many clever grown-up jokes & insider film allusions that will sail right over the little 'uns heads" - even though to me that falls quite a bit short of the true paradigm shift that the anti-rockist music-crit crew are espousing - they don't want to find redeeming rockist qualities in pop music - they want to blow up the whole rock=good/pop=bad dichotomy. So an anti-rockist Pixar film review would read more like: "the big scary creatures made me shit my pants and when the little fishy found his mommy I was bawling like a baby" - ie., embracing the pre-intellectual pleasures before they are corrupted by the higher mental functions. That would be the equivalent of the "phat beats" school of music-crit. Surely there is at least as much craft and knowledge involved in making a scary digital monster as there is in making a funky, booty-shaking beat. Perhaps the analogy to books could also be made to work. There must be certain qualities that bestselling novels deliver in higher doses and intensities than less popular books do - and it would be the job of the anti-rockist book critic to identify & celebrate them. However, perhaps this approach is a red herring because perhaps anti-rockism isn't about negating the higher intellectual pleasures at all, rather (as I suspect) it's about making a big show of how rockists hate fun because they are out of touch with basic pleasures while surreptitiously sneaking those intellectual pleasures in the back door. Even though "innovativeness" and "originality" are supposed to be tired rockist tropes and you'll never catch a smart post-rockist music critic adducing such qualities to music they like, it is very popular to criticize supposedly intelligent styles such as indie as being old-fashioned, stuck-in-the-60s and so forth, and the fresh-sounding styles like grime & reggaeton are usually the ones that the post-rockists celebrate. So perhaps the real problem with bestseller fiction is not that it appeals to popular tastes, but that it does it in a tired and trite way - or that the rules of writing popular fiction do not change as quickly as the rules for making popular beats. At least that would be the argument though perhaps it would be incorrect - perhaps the bestseller fiction form is changing rapidly in unheralded ways that await the properly perceptive critic to understand and celebrate.

A lot of the stuff under discussion here fails because it's not good writing. Hornby's stuff in The New Yorker was uninteresting not because his taste was uninteresting but because he didn't have much interesting to say about his taste. It would be entirely possible to write really good criticism about, I don't know, Marah or whoever. The point isn't that these guys write about bad music, it's that when they write about music they tend to become not-very-good writers.

NB another related music/lit translation funniness is that the music viewpoint tends to be about style, like salient characteristics of the experience and the overall aesthetic vibe -- whereas the lit viewpoint tends to be about abstract content, like thematic concerns and how things relate to the human experience, etc. This makes absolute perfect sense given what the two media actually do. But so in translation people with the music grounding are often into those "style" issues in fiction (I'm totally guilty of this sometimes), which explains lots of critical references to Finnegans Wake, whereas people with the lit grounding listen to music and talk a lot about character and lyrics and such.

this love of good sentences, btw pisses off a poetry-writin friend of mine with valid chips on his shoulder vs. lots of experimental poetry which doesn't mean much coz he doesn't get how i can be just "yeah, but i just skim it for parts that are pretty!"

clunky but functional sentences in the service of plot are like average sounding guitars in the service of "melody" or something.

which is to say that applying popist values to lit doesn't give you the demographic equiv of poplit.

i mean also i got a LOT from sarah vowell's musicwriting for salon back in the day, maybe just coz she was where i got it from first, and i don't mind the sappy dramatic in musicwrite either.

& ok the problem with someone that talks about native tongues or at least what they get called out on ISN'T generally that they don't know the rest of the native tonguesalike crowd, but rather that they've got a whole STORY about golden ages and retrogression and etc. that goes with it, and that's why they value the native tongues stuff in the 1st place and etc. and that's just sorta false.

and honestly the equiv smug lit STORY that exists generally somehow invokes the mcsweeny mafia & co (who, let's not forget, in the guise of metafictionality, honesty, sincerity, and aw-shucks-earnestness and gosh-darn-pleasentness are constantly engaged in massive self-promotion-for-its-own-sake)

i mean tho partly the nature of the beast is that authors aren't
EXPECTED to be social beasts and the DEFAULT value for lit-genre fiction is a singular and unique vision and etc. so musiccrit is all about big ubernarrative visions of progress and etc. normally but generally authors are expected to be in less dialogue, tho they may tap difft. "traditions" &c.

so yeah if whoeverever writes a GOOD essay on the who or springsteen or sleater-kinney or paul mccartney i'll be pleased as punch to enjoy it. but the question is, do the sort of institutional structures producing these things today tend to cut against the possible quality of such essays? the answer has to be, for the moment, at least empirically, probably yeah. but if someone wants to send on some really good links to the contrary, be my guest.

So pop music gives you Little Richard and James Brown and the Beatles and Eminem, and pop lit gives you people named Kellerman and Koontz and Nora Roberts. It's a really untenable comparison.

There's tons beyond just pop versus not: there's depth of taste, there are issues of identification and identity, there's paying attention to the avant-garde or the underground, there are all sorts of values we push on musical taste that we'd be uncomfortable having pushed on out taste in other places. As well we should be, because no, they're NOT just easily comparable -- they're completely different, yes! But in both instances I think we could stand to lay off imposing these abstract overarching values on people's tastes and just try to engage with how people like what they do.

Anyway focusing in as if the only options are bestsellers and canonical high- and post-modernism is maybe exactly the kind of thing I was trying to point out.

someone that complains about ppl. only liking male pop but doesn't read female authors isn't yeah whatever, but a hypocrite. or at least probably may want to expand their reading?

the problem is also "overarching values" have everything to do with why ppl like what they do.

which is not the same as saying ppl who like certain things lack certain values. or as saying that ppl liking things should be offensive to OUR values (neccessarily that is).

also i think in lit there's less DISMISSING other types of lit, maybe? or maybe i just don't talk to enuf ppl. about lit?

I think that's true. But circling back to the original issue here, I think a lot of the objections leveled at Eggers/Hornby/Moody has to do with exactly that -- how they like what they do. To reverse your argument, they have a tendency to impose standards and conventions of meaning and form on music that (I'm guessing) they wouldn't tolerate someone placing on literature. They don't seem to be particularly interrogating their own ideas about those conventions in the way that they probably reflexively do when thinking about literature.

I was about to say for the record that I think the equivalent of indie types not liking pop isn't to do with best-sellers -- it might have to do with high-minded lit boys not paying attention to people like Jamaica Kincaid or Louise Erdrich. But my larger and original point was just that, above -- that it's not entirely fair to ask everyone to have incredibly refined tastes in everything, because it's rare for people to find time and energy in their lives to get refined about even one thing, and that's more or less fine and human. It's one thing if they're mouthing off like they do have refined tastes, but I've never personally observed that being a major streak in the Believer. (And I brought the whole thing up weeks ago because I have seen music snobs mouth off across to literature as if their intelligence and refinement in one medium automatically implies their brilliance in all others.)

"Smart." They're actually calling it "Smart." Maybe they ought to call it "Smug."

... When asked if the story was at all autobiographical, Maroon replied, "We do a lot of driving around ourselves, so we definitely take some of those experiences and put it into John's Journey. I think you'll like it, it's going to be quite a ride." He then asked me who my favorite authors were, and I thought I'd sound like an idiot if I gave the honest answer (a bunch of rock critics), so I lied and said Pynchon and DeLillo.

(For the converse in action, see Ben Marcus's great Harpers article on Franzen and "experimental" fiction, in which a few total boner music references sink the whole thing -- he uses a Britney vs. Silver Jews analogy that, from what I can tell, should really have been more like Silver Jews versus Nurse with Wound. But he likes Smog, so what are you gonna do?)

Listen, I'm all for barebones recording and lo-fi sound or whatever, but this was just awful. They ruined a good song. This is the kind of shit I'd put on if I were trying to traumatize a small child.

-- richard wood johnson (fws...) (webmail), September 26th, 2005.

Why do people log out to give this sort of vitriolic criticism? Are people really that scared of the reprecussions of not liking a band?

(Time to take this to ILBks.)

on the believer comp: i've still yet to listen to it a second time. i really did like the first general comp that derby put together for them though.

http://cynthiagmason.com/

she's one of my favorite local artists, btw.

This is just kind of a passing off analogy in the article (and one that's not going to look off at all to 99% of its readers), but it relates to the kind of thing I've been harping on in this thread.

Carrie Brownstein interviews Karen o_O

I think Nabisco was, perhaps verbosely, right: one kind of taste need not map onto another; one can have 'advanced' taste in music and not in literature; and vice versa; and etc. People's tastes are potentially a jumble, and / or uneven and inconsistent, and this is OK. Anyone who grows up a little probably realizes this, unless I have just grown up the wrong way, and am mistaken.

Like him I think the magazine is probably OK too (though the feature just mentioned doesn't sound good to me), but that may be because I think it is nicely designed, and because of my memory of Stevie showing me their Pat Benatar interview in about 2003.

I haven't been able to find The Believer since I moved to London. Does anybritish know a bookshop that stocks it here?

yep: http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/