What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

Well, okay, not really. But, it is with some regret that I must pull the plug on the current version of That Shakespeherian Rag. Thanks sincerely to all who have taken the time to visit and comment over the last eight months; I really appreciate the feedback and support.

So, that's the bad news. The good news (if you choose to see it that way) is that TSR is not disappearing, but merely moving to new digs (to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky, if you will). Please come visit me at my new home: stevenwbeattie.com. This will be the new headquarters for an expanded version of TSR, for which I have grand ambitions in the coming months.

There's a mission statement of sorts posted at the new site, and regular posts will begin in the coming days. Hope to see you all there.

Looking for a Ghostwriter?

You might want to give this woman a shot:

~With seven years’ experience as a full-time freelance writer and editor, I can offer you a wealth of expertise in informative, conversational and concise writing. I deliver high quality work on time and on budget, ensuring that your projects remain on schedule. I am always open to editorial criticism and a revision, if needed. I am highly motivated and work well independently. I will work with you to provide you with the work you are looking for. You can be as involved as much or as little as you wish throughout the project. If you are tight on time, you can trust my experience, and that I deliver projects on time, 100% of the time. I will work with you to get the results you need.~ (My emphasis.)

And if you're looking for work, she's in the market for someone to do twenty-nine article rewrites of 500 words apiece by June 1, for which she's willing to pay the princely sum of $72.50. Wait ... June 1 ... isn't that ... TOMORROW?

I Need a Cigarette

~I am convinced that the smoking bond is actually the reason many people smoke. Life is lonely and making connections with other people is a hard thing to do. The smoking bond is definitely the reason I forced myself through those awful first cigarettes for long enough to get properly addicted. For some reason, having a paper tube filled with dried leaves and chemicals between my fingers means that I drop a layer of falseness. I become more willing to let go of all the things that make me different and level out a bit. We both smoke. That seems to be a solid starting point, intensified in an age of banning. There is no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, but it is arguably more addictive than the nicotine itself.~

-- Claire Cameron, The Line Painter

Big Changes Coming

Watch this space.

Apples and Oranges

Darby Dixon points out what should be patently obvious about literary reviews and literary criticism: they're two different beasts.

~It's felt like far too often during this whole "save the book reviews" campaign (and really all the time before this campaign as well) that I've seen book reviews and book criticism discussed as if they are the same thing. They are not. Or, they should not be. I really would love to see both forms flourish, and I don't care whether it's done via newspapers or periodicals or blogs or online news sites or whatever. ... But it certainly doesn't help the case when people look at the one and accuse it of not doing what the other does. Let's get our terms and tools straight: I would not use a tow truck to take a photograph; I would not use a 500 word review to provide 5000 words of critical analysis.~

This seems to me to be absolutely basic, but it's fabulously rare to hear people make this distinction. It's impossible to do serious literary criticism -- thoughtful, carefully analyzed, close-reading criticism -- in 500 words or less. Which is not to say that book reviews can't be thoughtful -- indeed, they should be -- but their aim and purpose is essentially different.

Literary criticism takes the long view, placing works in their contexts on a literary spectrum, carefully comparing an author's achievement to that of her contemporaries and her forbears to clarify where a body of work fits in the literary pantheon. A reviewer's job -- and the space she has to carry it out -- is much more confined. People who read reviews aren't likely looking for a carefully teased out analysis of image patterns or intertextual comparisons, and a reviewer doesn't have the elbow room required to include this kind of thing anyway.

The problem, as Richard Powers suggests in his blog post for the National Book Critics Circle's "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing," is that too often reviews are reduced to a simple matter of giving a book "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," and neglect the more nuanced elements of a reader's engagement with a given text:

~I honestly don’t think our crisis is print reviews versus blogs, specialization versus populism, or even the exclusivity of the elite versus the tyranny of the majority. I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user’s rating for a reader’s rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story.~

Powers suggests that one should emerge from a good review changed, the same way one emerges from a good book changed. This is certainly a lofty ideal; the trick is figuring out how to pull it off in 500 words or less.

Good Lord!

Quillblog reports that James Patterson, writer of "dopey thrillers" (Stephen King's words, not mine -- I'd have used more profanity) and international bestselling author, will close the inaugural BOOKED! literary festival in June.

I'm of two minds about this. Sure, it's a coup to score Patterson, who is sure to be a huge draw. But his appearance sort of puts lie to the "literary" part of the festival. I read Along Came a Spider and thought that it was turgid, semi-literate, and pallidly imitative of better books (The Silence of the Lambs being one of the more obvious examples). I thoroughly detested it, and thought at the time that I'd never read a book that was as bad. Then I read Kiss the Girls. (Don't ask -- a buddy raved about it.)

So I admit to being biased (and am clearly in the minority, if Patterson's sales record is anything to go by). But, honestly, couldn't they set the bar just a bit higher?

I'm a Huge Fan of Zach Wells

Here's why.

[UPDATE: Nathan Whitlock has an important addendum to the Wells piece:

~That's all to say that it would be going too far to say that a work's Canadianness it totally irrelevant to how it gets received. Mediocrity should not be cheered on, wherever it's from, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't hope a little harder for success for the home team, or feel particularly despondent when it goes into a slump, for this very reason (from Zach): "a country's poetry should be one of the things that shapes it."~]

Missing the Brass Ring

New York Sun columnist David Blum examines the case of Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, which garnered ecstatic reviews, has sold 50,000 copies in hardcover, scored a movie deal with HBO, yet still failed to crack the bestseller lists.

The problem? If you believe Blum, at least part of it has to do with the book's title:

~It's easy to blame the bookstores, or the heinous overlords of newsprint, for the problem. But publishers, and even authors, deserve a little of the blame — especially when they pretend that marketing doesn't matter. In the case of Little Brown and Mr. Ferris, some attention to the novel's cumbersome title might have helped. Was "Then We Came to the End" really the best title for this wonderful novel? I doubt it. By allowing his impossible-to-remember title to remain on the book, everyone involved willfully ignored the pragmatic truths of the 2007 literary marketplace: Sometimes the catchier title wins. It's no coincidence that the cleverly-titled "Heyday" sold better, even though it's hard to believe any readers preferred Mr. Andersen's self-conscious artifice over Mr. Ferris's heartfelt tour de force.~

Personally, I don't find Ferris's title all that difficult to remember; it's certainly more manageable than some unweildy monstrosities I can think of.* But we do live in an era where shorter, faster, and catchier are unequivocally better, where novels have their titles chopped or changed by the Hollywood mill, so perhaps Blum has a point. Ferris's novel is set in an office, so why not just call it The Office? Simple.

What? ... Oh, it is? You don't say.

*The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, perhaps?