Looking for someone who isn’t a coward

Like Scott from Conversational Reading, I read Death in Venice at a way too early age to understand a lick of it, but from what he’s saying about Doctor Faustus I’ll breeze through the entire Austen oeuvre before I ever pick up anything by this egghead. Read Scott’s small discussion on the book here, and riddle me this- is Scott’s criticism that the book is merely a bunch of pontificating under the guise of a novel something that should be considered a detriment? I would say:
Yes- If just writing thinly disguised essays was Mann’s plan, he should have just bitten the bullet and written them while taking full credit for whatever ideas he expounds on.
No- The novel cannot be held to a strict standard without losing the fluidity and evolution of literature.
Which one do you agree with? How about neither?

Some nice guy named Bill Bixby pointed out my “basic division” of 90 typos in a 245 page book is not two typos every page. How in the hell I originally came up with that I’m still trying to figure out.

In better news, The LA Times trashes James Frey’s new book. Trashes it so hard that now I actually feel a little bad for the guy. This is all I wanted in the first place, and now I’m starting to regret my ill will towards the millionaire liar who is loved by hundreds of thousands of people.

Seriously folks, what part of Monkey works at bar don’t you understand?

Here are a couple of similar articles- Paper Cuts talks about books that help you write books, and Booksquare talks about selling that book you wrote thanks to the book you read about writing books.

And finally, this Slate article talks about novels involving procrastination and brings up two names I’ve talked about recently- William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhard. It also intimates that procrastination is some sort of “living death” where the procrastinator sloughs off work because he has no desire to confront life. So, we started with Thomas Mann and ended up with this horrible revelation. Please, for your own sake, watch that monkey working in a bar.

Posted Tue, 13 May 2008 11:59:02 and filed under Writing, Review, Scandal, Shane, Bad Sequels, Awards, Writers, Authors, New York Times, Short Stories, Literature. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.