Bakotopia

All > Cool Blog Posts
Author N. Frank Daniels gets brutal
Topics: Frank Daniels, Noveltown, Belardes, NL, Bakersfield, Bakotopia, literary arts, blog, Culture, indie, press
Posted by thenovelist Thu Apr 5, 2007 14:26:43 PDT
Viewed 305 times
0 responses 0 comments *NOTE: First off I want to welcome N. Frank Daniels, author of Futureproof, to the Noveltown team. He'll be posting here often. In fact, you can expect him to be carrying the Noveltown standard into literary battles and peacekeeping missions; you know, cleaning up the messes of literary disasters like one you're about to read.

And don't forget to ask yourself if Noveltown is guilty of the very arguments Frank illuminates...
- n.l.

The Infotainment Revolution Vs. n+1 & the Literary Elite: Collision Course In A Handbasket Bound For Hell - By N. Frank Daniels

"At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past."
~M. Maeterlinck

"You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art."
~Benjamin Disraeli

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
~Ambrose Bierce

Recently the “upstart” “literary” review n+1 published an editorial arguing that the litblog culture has dumbed-down the entirety of the litworld; that instead of good, intellectual criticism, blogs are more ass-kissing fandom than real exposition or serious enquiry and therefore abandon true literary debate and critical thinking.

From n+1’s “The Blog Reflex”

In addition to free advance copies, the blogger gets some recognition: from the big houses, and from fellow bloggers. Recognition is also measured in the number of hits -- by their clicks you shall know them -- and by the people who bother to respond to your posts with subposts of their own. The lit-bloggers become a self-sustaining community, minutemen ready to rise up in defense of their niches. So it is when people have only their precarious self-respect. But responses -- fillips of contempt, wet kisses -- aren't criticism.

As has been asserted in other blogs of note, the n+1 article attacks a cadre of straw men and generally bunches every litblog into one, disregarding the multitudinous blogs whose entire existence is focused on exactly the thing n+1 pats itself on the back for being: the keepers of the flame, the last regiment protecting the old guard. But as can be seen in the first-ever editorial posted in the first-ever issue of the Paris Review in 1953, the flame n+1 purports itself to courageously and valiantly guard is much older than they’d probably like to admit. Even in 1953 (and about 200 years earlier than that as we’ll see later), William Styron was taking the old guard to task. I’ll let Styron speak for himself. Remember, this piece was written 54 years ago:

Literally speaking, we live in what has been described as The Age of Criticism. Full of articles on Kafka and James, on Melville, or whatever writer is in momentary ascendancy; laden with terms like architectonic, Zeitgeist, and dichotomous, the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter.

One of you has written that it is not always editorial policy that brings such a disproportion of critical manuscripts across the editors’ desks, pointing out that ‘in our schools and colleges all the emphasis is on analysis and organization of ideas, not creation.’ The result is that we have critics, not creators.

Let’s by all means leave out the lordly tone and merely say: dear reader, THE PARIS REVIEW hopes to emphasize creative work not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book...

(Read the full article)
********************************
www.noveltown.net
www.noveltown.net/blog
www.myspace.com/noveltown

Send to a Friend

Report a Violation