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| Hearsay: |
Moby sums up some funnish commentary.
A few years ago, when Michael Wolff was still writing for New York magazine, he wrote a fun column taking the book business to task: “I mean, books suck. Most books are dopier than television or movies or even advertising (many books tend to be just collateral promotions or the lesser offspring of dopey television, movies, and advertising). Even if there are precious exceptions, the overwhelming number of big-money, industry-sustaining books are incontrovertibly dum-dum things. More cynical, more pandering than any other entertainment product.”
The “books suck” comment, he says, led to his being subjected to “much middlebrow opprobrium.”
Now, he says in a new column at Newser, “I’d like to revise that line: Books are evil. They’re pernicious. They represent themselves as being one thing, when they’re insidiously the opposite.”
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November 25th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Instead of boycotting all books to protest the peddling of celebrity memoirs and other sub-literate tripe (which is throwing out an entire maternity ward’s worth of babies with the bathwater), I suggest that we just boycott the celebrity memoirs and other sub-literate tripe instead.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:31 am
“I suggest that we just boycott the celebrity memoirs and other sub-literate tripe instead.”
Don’t most people who come to lit-ites like this one do this already? It seems to me more a problem of writing literary work that will also be commercially successful. Hard to do, but not out of the realm of possibility.
November 26th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Sorry. That was supposed to read “lit-sites” (my alt term for lit-blog, if anyone’s curious).
November 27th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I’m with Pete on the boycotting of books peddling celebrity memoirs. Trouble is, I think we’re in the minority here. Based on the type of books I see people reading on transit every day, I’d say there is little hope of the celebrity memoir going away anytime soon.
November 27th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
“Sorry. That was supposed to read “lit-sites””
But I liked your original lit-ites, Finn. Thought you were going for a play on luddites.
November 27th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Leona,
Thanks, hadn’t thought of that. Now, if only someone would invent a term for people who are luddite-inclined (in a good, book-centric kind of way) but also friendly toward the Brave New World of the Internet, then *that* would be a neologism worth employing…….