A Listener's Manifesto

Okay, a theoretical post today.

Accepting the differences between the conventions of literary and music criticism, B.R. Myers's A Reader's Manifesto - obnoxious as it is - says some valuable things about music. I haven't read Myers's book, only the Atlantic article and that was when it came out back in 2002.

Myers essentially has two theses which don't have too much to do with each other. The first thesis is that the prose of many "literary" writers isn't all that good. He does some close-reading of Proulx, DeLillo, McCarthy, Auster, and Guterson and concludes that they are imprecise, wordy, and often nonsensical. The second thesis is that the popularity of such authors is mystifying, and a lot of people reading them would be better off reading Louis L'amour. I can't really judge the first argument only being familiar with DeLillo and McCarthy (and thinking Blood Meridian is really terrific and being unable to finish anything else by those two authors). That said, the second argument is an interesting one, even if it is even more subjective than the first and it weakens Myers's overall argument.

Here are some thoughts on Myers's essay and how it might relate to music:

1. As in music, there are certain tricks that almost guarantee success for writers. One kind of popularity-bait in fiction is jewporn, books about Jews that appeal to a certain sensibility. Its main exponent is Jonathan Safran Foer who Myers attacks in a much better Atlantic article. To their credit, the New York Times usually sees through some tactics. Wish I could say the same about pitchfork.

2. The antecedents of the named authors are not all that popular among readers. Who reads Conrad or Woolf for fun nowadays? In fact, the established writers who are popular with readers come from a different tradition. Examples based on perusing facebook and my bookshelf are Nabokov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Kafka, Borges, and Fitzgerald.

3. There is a tradition of story-telling classicism in post-war English prose. I'm thinking of Burgess, Kingsley Amis, and Graham Greene. They were part of a rebellion against modernism and heavily influenced by, I dunno, Kipling, Maugham, and Orwell. I don't know if anyone has to read Louis L'amour since there is genrish fiction that works on a literary level. Examples in sci-fi are Ray Bradbury and J.G. Ballard. So Myers embrace of genre fiction is somehow analogous to the recent celebration of, say, the Black Eyed Peas in recent best of lists. There is, of course, an analogous tradition of pop classicism. Why this kind of classicism is not embraced by the public may be a topic for a future post.

I'm struck by a similar phenomenon when I was interested in jazz and found that a lot of jazz newbies were into Coltrane and Miles Davis's modal stuff (which is great but not always fun to listen to) while my friends who knew everything about jazz were either into hard-bop and soul-jazz(Cliff Brown, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, etc.) (which is lots of fun) or downtown avant-garde (which is either fun or impossible to listen to depending on audience). Whatever is going on in pop music is a lot more complicated (most of the jazz newbies I knew were simply excited to be in New Orleans and decided that they ought to like jazz).