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jenny-holzer

I was going in to teach the other day when a message arrived in my inbox. The lady at the other end, a journalist, wanted me to respond to five questions that she had sent me. They were a part of a regular feature called “Just a Minute” (that is exactly how long I took to answer the questions) and my responses would appear on the Books page in the Hindustan Times. (P.S. I’m told the ‘interview’ was in the paper on April 9.)

>
> 1. A word you love using?
>”Paper”
>
> 2. A word you hate using?
>”Interesting”
>
> 3. The most overrated writer?
>”It’s a tie: Salman Rushdie-Rohinton Mistry”
>
> 4. The most underrated writer?
>”Amit Chaudhuri”
>
> 5. The book by your bedside?
>”J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man”

hindustan-times-just-a-minute

In a Slate review of Michiko Kakutani’s practice of book-reviewing, Ben Yagoda begins with the argument that “whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling.”

Yagoda goes on: “Great critics’ bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of “The Rite of Spring” and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn’t offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case;
 spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.”

The argument offered in the beginning loses some of its force in its elaboration, not least because Yagado seems to surprise himself at the end, caught with a rather large blunt instrument in his hand. But the point is well-taken. Among contemporary reviewers, James Wood is certainly someone who is interested in presenting his verdict–but he is also one of those rare critics who is never lacking in style or flair. (Here’s a recent piece of his that I have enjoyed reading and shared with friends.) But you can’t expect Wood, or those other writers who are more idiosyncratic or playful, to be reviewing books in the Times; and I wonder whether it isn’t the kind of disproportionate power that the Times has in determining a book’s fortunes that is one of the most important reasons why the reviews have an impoverished range of tone, more like a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

michiko-kakutani

In a review-essay entitled Hope of the Web, Bill McKibben writes:

When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or would its two-way nature allow it to be a potent instrument for rebuilding connections among people and organizations, possibly even renewing a sense of community? The answer is still not clear— more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes. But if you were going to make a case for the Web having an invigorating political effect, you could do worse than point your browser to dailykos.com, which was launched in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.

The book under review, and much of McKibben’s piece, is about the ways in which Internet activism has transformed the politics of the Democratic Party in the US. But the review is of interest also because it charts this medium’s possibilities in a more indepent context. This context becomes clear in lines like the following: “When we consider Kos’s own Web site and its numerous links to other blogs, we see something like an expanding hive of communication, a collective intelligence.” And the links it provides to sites like MoveOn, Informed Comment, Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, Firedoglake, and others.

daily-kos