Replies to post #121653 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wall_rus]

Oh, where to start? Has it been only eight years since Dale Peck announced, in The New Republic, that “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation?” It used to be a couple of decades would pass before some sullen wannabe savaged the established literati as a way of making a name for himself.

Anis Shivani: The most overrated arbiter of what’s overrated in literature

AUGUST 12, 2010
by Chauncey Mabe

Anis Shivani: Looking down his nose at American writers.

http://flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/anis-shivani-the-most-overrated-arbiter-of-whats-overrated-in-literature/

I had hoped to ignore Anis Shivani’s pointless and stupid screed, “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers,” which appeared at Huffington Post over the weekend. But the thing has legs, provoking continued nonsensical comment all over the bloggerverse. So — sigh — here I go:

Oh, where to start? Has it been only eight years since Dale Peck announced, in The New Republic, that “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation?” It used to be a couple of decades would pass before some sullen wannabe savaged the established literati as a way of making a name for himself.

But I guess Shivani got tired of sitting in neglected glory down in Houston, where his novels, short stories and poems are published by small presses and nominated for second-tier prizes.

In Shivani’s case, as in Peck’s, critical judgment, grounded in a specific, defensible aesthetic, has been replaced with angry subjectivity. And, I suspect, resentment. The entire problem with the 15 writers Shivani assails seems to be that that are more famous, honored and successful than Shivani himself.

That’s not to say that writers cannot be overrated, some for a time, others for, apparently, all time. John Steinbeck, now there was a second-rater for you. And the urge to humble the unjustly puffed up is common to all critis (here’s the number I did on Steinbeck in 2002, on the occasion of his 100th birthday).

Indeed, for what it’s worth, I agree with some of Shivani’s judgments (though not for the same reasons): Amy Tan is not a great writer (but did anyone say she is?). Jonathan Safran Foer’s meager talents do not justify his literary Q quotient. Billy Collins is a puddle-deep careerist (but he’s also clever and funny).

Shivani drifts far off base by including William T. Vollman, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Junot Diaz, Louise Gluck, or Jhumpa Lahiri. I mean, no writer is above criticism (Not even Shakespeare! Not even Twain! Not even God –what’s up with all those begats, anway?). But these are all serious artists who deserve more than the summary executions Shivani doles out.

Sniff: Is that a whiff of self-hatred I detect? For a critic who does not appear to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, Shivani’s list is curiously weighted with writers belonging to outsider groups: Jews (Foer); gays (Michael Cunningham); Hispanics (Diaz); Chinese (Tan); South Asian (Lahiri).

And women! As Anna North noted at jezebel.com, nine of Shivani’s 15 “overrated writers” are women. In a piece titled “Literary critic hates vaginas, ‘Ghetto Volume,’” North dismantles Shivani’s misogyny (“Yes, Gluck has committed the first deadly sin of the female writer: thinking she’s important”), while also assailing the aesthetic poverty of his criticism.

Really, Shivani’s writing is unintentionally self-revealing to a hilarious degree:

“If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself. These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism. They are uneasy with mortality. On the great issues of the day they are silent (especially when they seem to address them, like William T. Vollmann). They desire to be politically irrelevant, and they have succeeded. They are the unreadable Booth Tarkingtons, Joseph Hergesheimers, and John Herseys of our time, earnestly bringing up the rear.”

It’s almost too easy to pick apart this mess of nonsequiters. The first sentence is nonsense. The second makes sense, but it also describes Shivani’s own performance –the very definition of a showboating, narcissistic lack of moral (or aesthetic) clarity. Furthermore, what does “they are uneasy with mortality” even mean? I’m uneasy with mortality, aren’t you? But not a single writer on Shivani’s list has failed to engage the subject of mortality.

I mean, c’mon, Anis: You can’t castigate Foer for riding “the 9/11-novel gravy train with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and also accuse him of dodging the unhappy fact that we are all going to die. Any book about 9-11, even a bad one, is by definition about mortality.

Shivani’s introductory essay baby-shakes some tiresomely familiar bugaboos: Deconstructionists; creative writing programs; multiculturalism; “conglomerate publishing;” the Pulitzer Prize; reviewers. But: deconstructionists hold no sway outside the academy; Flannery O’Connor was the product of a creative writing workshop; multiculturalism is a good thing; conglomerate publishing was a really big problem 10 years ago; reviewers — the only problem with reviewers is how few remain.

Which makes Shivani’s blistering attack on Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times downright risible. She’s not my favorite critic, either, but if you think she’s “no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing,” then you should have a word with Martin Amis, Yann Martel, Ian McEwan, T.C. Boyle, Adam Haslett, Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Jonathan Lethem, all of whom have come in for rough handling by Kakutani in the past few months.

Dale Peck, though guilty of the same kind of self-aggrandizing vandalism, at least had the brass to take on the major writers of the day, including Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace, Kurt Vonnegut–although he does share with Shivani a distaste of Michael Cunningham.

Shivani’s victims are not exactly small potatoes, but the absence of bigger names, especially among the novelists, makes this s weirdly selective list. And not in a good way.

Finally, let me point out that Rick Moody seems to have survived Peck’s attack quite nicely. He recently published a major novel, The Four Fingers of Death, that’s receiving respectful if mixed reviews. The targets of Shivani’s broadside will fare as well, I expect.

[StephanieVanbryce]

I have an idea that Anis Shivani and Chris Hedges are more LIKE than they are different from each other ..perhaps even friends .

We know authors fear criticism while at the same time they look for it .. criticism has improved and expanded the artists and writers etc. e tc.

criticism, for the serious most dedicated and perhaps for the most talented ..has a way of producing a sharper, more focused work...next time... and even sometimes a correction or a more detailed explanation of their work, thoughts and ideas and exactly what and how they came to their philosophies or to their conclusions ..

I remember reading something a long time ago about the playwrights and that after 'opening night' .. they would stay up all night long waiting with dread AND hope for the early morning papers and what their critics would have to say about their latest work.. somewhat like a love hate relationship ..

this statement caught me ...What we are dealing with here is the paltry harvest of captive minds. Such minds resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world. .. I do believe that a feeling of powerlessness or the state of being powerless is quite capable of producing many things and not all of them desirable or even legal. Being powerless is a most helpless, depressive feeling & being ..making you so very much aware of your limited and inadequate self to be able to produce some 'change' for the good of mankind .. that IT (the powerlessness) - has the possibility to crush us ..

.....What am I saying ? ...hmmmn..not sure, except maybe that WE need Chris Hedges and Chris Hedges needs Anis Shivani ...

truthfully, there is so much in hedges piece and in shivani's piece that you could take all most any paragraph small or larger and write an entire piece on it ..

For instance, Anis..So globalization is utopian fiction too? Wanting to perpetuate globally uncompetitive manufacturing is like calling for the majority of people to have remained in the agriculture sector a hundred years ago. Workers in poorer countries are on the whole better off because of globalization; the United States needs to be more nimble in moving to higher planes of manufacturing and services. It's intellectual deceit to call globalizaton a "sham." Hundreds of millions of people moving out of poverty in China and India is a sham?


.........I think America needs some examples of the above written by Anis Shivani ............Most of us have only heard that NAFTA & all the other 'trade' agreements is and was very destructive to our neighbors to the south of us and to the east & west.. China.... as we know certainly has their labor discontent .. but then again ..here's the part to wonder about ... they are working .. and I'm guessing that the labor problems will evolve in their country ..just as they did in ours .. . I just hope that at that point China doesn't DEVOLVE as ours has ... I mean how many places are there in the world that are not being utilized all ready - for cheap labor and other things ..like England willing to sell their entire forests ? .. I mean, imo, that is NOT progress. what can we do ?

I'm wandering now, forgive me, to cut it short ..I think both writers are valuable .. it seems to me that Anis Shivani is much more detached than Chris Hedges .. Chris Hedges, is not detached ..he wants to somehow empower us to make changes that even he has difficulty in knowing what and how to do that .. I believe that we need to read both of them and also attempt to be a little more detached..I'm talking about myself of course.. I can only go so far on emotions ..then I shut off .....I hope I evolve to where George Carlin evolved to ..some sort of "Detachment"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7f0GStBCeUU

.........It's helpful that he gave us this .. clue .......;)

[StephanieVanbryce]

do you know why Chris Hedges was fired from the NYT? ..it appears that he got some acclaimation for his efforts.. yes?

In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the
paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received in 2002 the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

......was it because of his antiwar commencment speech where he was booed off the stage within three minutes ?

http://www.alternet.org/story/15982/

http://www.democracynow.org/2003/5/21/new_york_times_reporter_chris_hedges

I have googled it ... I'm not able to find anything ..now I'm very curious as to what the reason was .. IF anyone knows.

I think we have established pretty well how the nyt ..pretty much backed the bush government push into Iraq..so I wonder ...