Lot of good links today. And since there's no new
Gossip Girl tonight, I've got a bit of time to kill. Enjoy!
# Great, great, great article in this week's New York magazine about the
future of product placement in television shows (spoiler alert: it's bleak!) The example of
30 Rock is particularly insidious. You can't blame Tina Fey for expertly navigating the new world of advertising-as-narrative, but I don't think I can be blamed for finding it to be really creepy. I'm still of the mind that television and movies are art, and while I understand that certain compromises are necessary in order to get on the screen, the extent to which art and commerce are tied up is troubling, to say the least. When the baseline necessity for an artist is "you need to be able to work Acme Widgets into your 17th century bildungsroman," I think we have a problem. And if you think this is merely a dilemma for aesthetes, product placement's ugly cousin, guerrilla marketing, threatens
our very souls.
# Reading the
New York Times Week in Review about
American writers being snubbed for the Nobel Prize, I became incensed and vowed to write a scathing takedown. And the Adam Kirsch, an actual literary critic,
beat me to it over at Slate. Good for him.
A few thoughts, though. I'm guilty of having been a little starstruck by the Nobel Prize. Same thing with the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. But there's no denying that a significant swath of the canon has never been recognized by the Nobel committee: Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, Twain, Proust, Joyce, Greene, Nabokov, Auden, Miller. These guys aren't all-knowing, and there are definitely political considerations (we're talking about snubbing America here, guys). So I suppose it's best to start (if we haven't already) looking at the Nobel Prize less like an anointing of literary greatness, and more like the Oscars, or the Major League Baseball All-Star game: an excuse every year to argue with one another about books and, more anagogically, to consider what's important to us as a people and how we want to be reflected in our literature. They serve their purpose.
I'm glad that Kirsch brought up Philip Roth, official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Favorite Author and Undergraduate Thesis Subject, to cement his thesis. I've never been one for literary theory, and I'm not familiar with Horace Engdahl aside from what I can glean from my own half-assed understanding of post-structuralism. However, comma, everything I know about "the big dialogue of literature" tells me that it's a self-reflexive, masturbatory endeavor. Count me among the Tom Wolfe
school of literary realism, which Roth does exceedingly well (is
American Pastoral, published eight year's after Wolfe's manifesto, the late–20th century realist novel that he was looking for? Who's to say, but it's a good attempt.) But, presumably like Engdahl, Roth also knows the limits of this style, or at least the obstacles it presents to the writer trying to say something resonant. He also coined, 48 years ago, the now-official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Credo:
"[T]he American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."
In other words, just give him the damn prize!
# That might have been dense. Here's some
abject horror to take your mind off of literature. ZOMG!
# In these uncertain economic times, we need to find solace in any place we can find it. Sometimes,
justice gets done, dear readers.
# What? I got through a blog post without saying something political?
Woops.
