Book coverage cuts: letters worth reading

Readers of the Boston Globe responded with alarm when the paper dramatically reduced its coverage of books. For those of us in Massachusetts who live and work among writers, publishers, and independent booksellers, such cuts strike at the cultural identity of our region. Below are two powerful letters to the editor that ran in the Globe last week, from voices who remind us that Boston’s literary community deserves attention and respect from its newspaper of record.

---

Our city gets its vibrancy from its culture of books and authors

By Chloe Garcia Roberts, Milton

I opened the Globe’s revamped Arts section last Sunday and was stunned to find that the Books section had been cut drastically. As a longtime print subscriber, I cannot stay silent. I think I speak for many when I say that I do not turn to the Globe for coverage of national events or the paper’s takes on the culture at large. I turn to it as an authority on Boston and New England, an interpreter of our own strange and wonderful culture, which is like nowhere else.

If you throw a pebble in a crowd here, you are likely to hit a practicing, lauded, or aspiring writer. A number of the area’s treasured bookstores survived, albeit shakily, the onslaught of the chains and Amazon. It is part of our culture here that many of us go out of our way, trudging through the wintry mix if necessary, to attend author events and buy books at these independent stores. When they go, they won’t be replaced.

Our city’s vibrancy derives from its large concentration of readers and writers. If the decision to slash books coverage comes down to numbers and clicks, I’d like to think, at the very least, that there are more of us than people who can afford a nearly $8 million home (per the two-page spread in the Address section of the same edition).

Please, Globe, remember who you are and where you are from. Writers and readers have always contributed to the culture of this place, and we deserve better from our newspaper. 

How could paper dispense with the indispensable New England Literary News?

By Lloyd Schwartz, Somerville

It’s ironic that just months after Nina MacLaughlin won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction, the Globe decided to drop her indispensable weekly column, New England Literary News. It’s been one of the few places, in this most literary of states, where one could depend on serious and eloquent reporting on literary issues, even poetry! I can’t believe MacLaughlin doesn’t have a loyal and passionate following.

The newspaper with the largest circulation in the state should be the last place to cut back on arts coverage. I hope this terrible decision is not irreversible. I’ve been a Globe subscriber for many years. Maybe it’s time for me to consider the bottom line, too. 

---

The concern voiced in these letters goes beyond one newspaper. Book criticism is one of the ways a culture reflects on itself, preserves its memory, and challenges its assumptions. When we lose professional space for reviews, essays, and conversations about literature, we lose an essential form of civic dialogue.

For a deeper exploration of why book criticism matters, see this group essay making the case for criticism in The New Yorker or Parul Sehgal's 2021 review of 125 years of reviewery in The New York Times Book Review. 

As a small independent press here in Massachusetts, we add our voice to those calling for robust, sustained coverage of books in our regional newspapers. Readers, writers, and publishers all depend on it.

Emily August reviews Cat Dossett

We have learned of a generous review of one of last year's Komma Series chapbooks, Odysseus & Eden by Cat Dossett:

Y’all, just yesterday I was musing about starting a utopian society organized around poetry. Lo and behold, today I picked up this little morsel of versitude from Pen and Anvil Press’s Komma Series, a series of micro-chapbook publications. Check out the series mission statement:“The bite-sized booklets of the Komma Series are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting. When you’re done with one, pass it along! Look for them lying around in Boston, Portland, or New York City. When you see one waiting to be read, go ahead and pick it up. Give it a home in your hands for a ten-minute lit snack. Then when you’re finished, leave it behind for the next person to find, in an ATM lobby, on a train station bench, in the coffeeshop, at the pub.” 

Cat Dossett’s Odysseus & Eden is the 18th publication in the series. This smart, ruminating collection brings together three fascinating persona poems from the perspectives of three different mythical women: Penelope, Ophelia, and an unnamed Garden of Eden resident who seems to be Eve. These are feminist retellings that humanize and complicate three of western patriarchy’s most blamed and besieged female archetypes. The famously loyal Penelope, whose characteristic virtue is that she remained faithful to her absent husband Odysseus for twenty years despite over a hundred love interests, here finally unleashes her libidinal rage in a surprising way. Eve—the legendary scapegoat blamed for an entire humanity’s fall from grace (eye roll)—is reimagined as an embodied sexual subject who transgresses erogenous, rather than culinary, boundaries. And Ophelia, who we’re used to seeing as the tragic, long-suffering victim of Hamlet’s self-interested scheming, here compassionately contemplates her own history of mental illness.

The main theme Dossett draws from each tale is erotic betrayal, and the recurring image that links the poems together is blood, which smears and pools across the poems like an accusation. As a result, readers see these grossly twisted “love” stories for what they truly are. 

Dossett highlights the ways in which women have historically been sacrificed for the preservation of various kinds of kingdoms, and the ways those sacrifices are naturalized and glorified by being codified as myth. Like the best myth and fairy tale revisions, these poems helped me reexamine and deeply reconsider what our treasured cultural legends are truly encoding and passing down. 

#TheSealeyChallenge, day 28.  

The reviewer, Emily August, is an Assistant Professor of literature at Stockton University, and she came to Dossett's work as part of the Sealey Challenge, in which participants commit to reading a new book or chapbook of poetry every day in the month of August. If you'd like to receive a complimentary copy of one of our Pen & Anvil poetry publications for your own Sealey Challenge reviewing in 2021, drop us a line. 

On Friedmanese and brandnames in print

We love a good, sharp repudiation of Thomas Friedman's trademark style. From a review in Rolling Stone of his latest, Thank You for Being Late:

Friedman's great anti-gift is his ability to use many words when only a few are neccessary. He became famous as a newspaper columnist for taking simple one-sentence observations like, "Wow, everyone has a cell phone these days," and blowing them out into furious 850-word trash-fires of mismatched imagery and circular argument.

Phew! Few things in reviewing are as satisfying as a swift and deserved coup de grace. This review brings to mind another one by Taibbi, written back in 2005, for NYPress.com. In it, he takes down Friedman's book The World Is Flat; we featured it on the NERObooks homepage on 08/22/17. Taibbi writes:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example drawn at random [...] On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friendman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregory Samsa would have awoken from uneasy sleep in a Sealy Posturepedic.)

Emphasis ours, to draw attention to another hobbyhorse of our: capital-letter Brand Names. Up with them we do not put.

Every week or so, it seems a blogger or columnist returns to the low-stakes question of how and whether writers should respect commercial brand names. "Use 'Kleenex' or the phrase 'facial tissue', not 'kleenex'", that sort of thing. "This easy-to-remember keystroke combination will allow you to effortlessly insert the essential symbols indicating copyright, trademark and registered trademark."

Officially, Pen & Anvil rejects this kind of etiquette. To our writers we say: Use Kleenex, kleenex, tissues or boogie-catchers, as the textual context calls for. As editors and publishers, we decline the invitation to serve as volunteer branding police. If a corporation wants our help in enforcing their preferred brand identity, they can make an offer! We'd be required to flag any such purchased copy as #sponcon, of course. Not that most marketing budgets would be able to afford our asking price...

* * *

NB: NERObooks homepaged another Taibbi take-down of Friedman, featuring his review of Thank You for Being Late for Rolling Stone on 12/05/16.

Hanson on Vendler

From a most excellent review essay concerning Helen Vendler, appearing in Open Letters Monthly and authored by our Issue 18 contributor Jack Hanson:

Against such emotional, psychological, and spiritual power, what worth have the various over-politicized theories of literature? Many have come and gone in Vendler’s time, and were from time to time the source of insults against her and other “formalist” critics. But she herself never internalized such distinctions, and, apart from her continued engagement in what might be called post-modern literature, she even recalls auditing Paul de Man’s courses at Cornell and gaining immensely from them.

Find Jack on Twitter (not to mention Clarion! and OLM!) or click here to see a listing of his other pieces for Open Letters Monthly. His poems "Maternal" and "To the Daughters..." can be found on the issue page for Clarion 18.

Further thoughts on Nicholson's "Amherst"

The Free Lance-Star, down in Fredericksburg VA, featured a write-up by Emily Jennings about William Nicholson's new novel, Amherst. From the review, "Different Dickinsons, different era", re: "the affair between respectable Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd: 

... Austin’s reclusive sister, the poet Emily Dickinson, permitted the lovers to meet in her home, an easy walking distance for both ... Sue, Austin’s wife, was devastated. She made her disapproval clear but would never have considered divorce. David Todd, on the other hand, encouraged his wife’s relationship with Austin, even taking part in their trysts now and then. Amherst ...weaves Austin and Mabel’s story with a contemporary parallel ... Young advertising executive Alice Dickinson (no relation to Emily) travels to Amherst from London to research Austin and Mabel’s affair for a screenplay. Alice’s only contact there is the old flame of her ex-boyfriend’s mother, Nick Crocker, a lecturer and great admirer of Emily’s poetry ... Alice is disgusted to discover Nick has an interest in younger women, and they in him, his marriage disregarded. Even so, we all know her disgust will develop differently as the two continue to cross paths. How both stories find their conclusion, however, is worth the read. Nicholson’s ability with screenwriting is apparent in this novel as he skillfully illuminates each scene and segue in our heads... Emily’s actual involvement in the affair is still debated today. She was friends from childhood with Sue, Austin’s wife; some believe they grew apart as her brother’s marriage cooled and Emily mourned for Austin’s loneliness. Others believe Emily was driven by Austin to comply with him and Mabel meeting at Emily’s home, and that Emily was routinely banished to the upstairs rooms to make way... None of Emily’s immediate family members believed her poetry would sell. Curiously, it was Mabel who championed Emily’s poetry after her death and edited it for publication.

One of our Press associates, Clarion reader Justin Lievano, has thoughts. Writing exclusively for Ampersand, here is his feedback on and furtherance of this review:

1. Emily Dickinson had her own very exciting love life. Her sister Lavinia once wrote that she caught Emily in the arms of a local judge! Emily was probably also in love with Sue, her sister-in-law. That would have made a better novel. 
2. *Everyone* knew about Austin and Mabel's uproarious affair. To say that Emily was the primary co-conspirator or enabler is ridiculous. Everyone in the Dickinson family -- hell, everyone in Amherst! -- was complicit. 
3. The publication of Emily's poetry actually became a very interesting competition of sorts between Susan Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd. After Lavinia located Dickinson's manuscripts, she made loose promises to both women that they might publish them; at times, Lavinia had transcriptions of the same poem in both Susan and Mabel's hands. Eventually, Lavinia's dangerous game came to light and it permanently damaged her relationship with Susan. Mabel, having better access to the world of publishing took control of Emily's poetry and published in a wildly successful volume. The rest is history.

Clive James on books in overabundance

On both sides of the Atlantic, and in Australia, the creative writing schools churned forth slim volumes by the thousand, all of them supposedly full of poetry but few of them with even a single real poem in them.

-- Clive James, from his book of essays Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, as quoted in a review of the book by Jason Guriel.

* * *

In the same review, Guriel characterizes James' "true objection of devotion" -- what the authors calls "the choppily well-separated thing" -- in a manner we thought worth quoting:

He means a poem with internal integrity, its every word pertinent and poised—a product that has come to be a curio in our age of overproduction.

Hear, hear! We find this trio very agreeable: poise, pertinence, and production in proportion to need. Ah, but saying so, we are mindful of the need also for waste, slackness, confusion, and indecorum, the mineral nutrients that nourish art-making. Whether one inclines toward order or chaos, work or play, poetry may come out of it; one just has to be wary of celebrating one's preferred methods to the point of denigrating the methods others work with. Which isn't to say self-celebration isn't allowed! Just that it is best expressed alongside equanimity and openness, lest preferences evolve into prejudices. (A principle especially applicable to the work of appreciation and celebration that is the stock-in-trade of the editor, the critic, and the reviewer.)

* * *

Jason Guriel is the author of The Pigheaded Soul: Essays and Reviews on Poetry and Culture (2013).