I’m an independent publisher in central Ohio, and I’ve published a book that contributes to the understanding of what Barry Lopez is saying. Mike Newell’s No Bottom: In Conversation With Barry Lopez (XOXOX Press) holds an extensive interview between poet Newell and author Lopez, along with an insightful essay by Newell that explores key themes in Lopez’s short fiction. No Bottom is available at xoxoxpress.com and at Amazon and other web outlets.

Aside from her captivating voice, and the great musical talent that moves the song, the lyrics are so well-written: songwriting for adults is right! It definitely helped my initial impressions of her knowing that she is supported by Anti-Records, which brings round my adoration of Tom Waits.

Anyway, end my ramble and I shall get some sleep. Just wanted to say, in so many more words, thank you.

It will be a long time before I wrestle A MERCY from my mind. JAZZ still lingers there nearly seven years after having first read it, and I imagine lits bits of this one, too…phrases or images will pop into my head at the oddest of times. That’s great writing.

For those interested, I also posted a review of Morrison’s latest:

http://davethenovelist.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/a-review-of-toni-morrisons-a-mercy/

And you’re right about “Autumn Sweater”–a stand-out tune on an all-around great album, which only gets better with age.

I do enjoy Oates’s writing, the occasional long paragraph and all, though I can understand why some readers wouldn’t care to indulge her in that respect. Have you tried reading her short stories? The collection High Lonesome from a couple of years back has an excellent selection of her work—and few of the stories are long enough to trip your wires about lengthy paragraphs and so on.

But, if you don’t like Oates, that’s fine—it sounds like you have some perfectly valid reasons for not digging her stuff. But I’ll stand by my suspicion that many other readers might run into trouble with Oates for gendered reasons, and that many critics might run into similar problems when assessing her work in the context. There’s nothing wrong with disliking a writer for matters of style or substance; but I do find it troubling when it seems the standards for valuing the work of men and women are inconsistent.

As for Roth, Wolfe, Vonnegut: I don’t know Wolfe’s stuff well enough to say anything intelligent about it, so I won’t make an attempt. But Roth I love—not that I’d in any way dispute the fact that he’s self-indulgent. He is extremely self-indulgent, and he’s also often obnoxious in any number of other ways. All the same, he’s written quite a number of truly fantastic books (Goodbye, Columbus, Patrimony, The Ghost Writer, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Plot Against America, to name a few of the best).

Vonnegut repeated himself a lot, which can make reading some of his later stuff a bit disappointing. But actually he’s one of the last writers who I would accuse of being self-indulgent. The whole of his work is deeply moral and dead serious—don’t let all the jokes and stylistic tricks fool you about that. And besides, his style fits his subject matter perfectly. His primary interest is the ways in which the absurdities and incoherence of contemporary thought and culture can lead to hideous, dehumanizing ethical outrages. And his writing style incorporates those absurdities and that incoherence, and transmutes them into stories that are both deeply funny and deeply felt.

I have yet to finish an Oates short story or novel, and I doubt there are many who actually find her prose enjoyable. Three pages of one paragraph does not enjoyment make.

I know she’s won more awards than God, but how and why is beyond me. The so-called “problems” of gender in her approach has never been a factor, nor the violence (though in the case of some, such as Mailer, it is more a cover-up for lack of depth); neither has it in my dislike of Roth or Wolfe or Vonnegut…etc. That crowd seemed to see writing as an exercise in self-indulgence rather than a journey to discover truth within, and the goal to type as much as possible instead of imparting discovered truth through writing to the world.

But I’m only hitting .255, so what do I know?

But I loved your passion and your own writing style. Superior to Oates?

http://sonyachung.com/2009/03/07/cult-of-literary-celebrit/

(post password is dfw)

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