Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (…) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (…) 3. Does the work exhibit »high seriousness«? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion (…) Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don’t know than for any other reason.

William S. Burroughs
in : »A Review of the Reviewers«

••• Kaum zu glauben, dass hier noch nie von William S. Burroughs die Rede war! In den letzten Tagen ist er mir mehrfach begegnet. Zum einen versuche ich gerade, den filmischen Inspirationen nachzuspüren, die in »Replay« Spuren hinterlassen haben. Tatsächlich nämlich habe ich beim Schreiben wahllos und unbewusst in diesen Fundus diffuser Inspirationen gegriffen. Wenn ich nun aber einige Filme wie »Blade Runner«, »Mulholland Drive«, »Vanilla Sky«, »Magnolia«, »eXistenZ« und – eben – »Naked Lunch« noch einmal ansehe, sind die Einflüsse sehr augenscheinlich. Das gefällt mir.

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••• Patrick Kurp und im Bezug auf ihn auch D. G. Myers diskutierten letzte Woche die Frage, inwiefern Schreiben ein moralischer Akt sei. Damit tragen sie bei zu einer Debatte, die momentan leider nicht hier in Deutschland geführt wird, obgleich es Anlass gäbe.

Kurp zitiert Samuel Johnson:

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

Kurp empfiehlt, »or« durch »and« zu ersetzen schreibt weiter:

Writing, in other words, is a moral act (a tautology if we assume every human act possesses a moral component). It carries responsibility and should not be undertaken frivolously.

Diese Äußerung nimmt Myers auf und bemerkt zu Recht, dass man sie präzisieren müsse, um sie so stehen lassen zu können. Er zitiert seinerseits zur Illustration Philip Roth aus »Zuckerman Unbound«:

He’s not merely a monster, he’s a great moralist too.

und merkt treffend an:

The moralist is a monster — of morality. He does not engage in moral reflection, but in moral legislation. He knows right and wrong clearly and in advance, because he has reduced human experience to a universal code, which admits of no exceptions.

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Stephen Zelnick at Minding the Campus writes about the cardinal sin of teaching poetry. ‚I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom,‘ he writes. This is a familiar scene to me. I sat through many hours listening to some half-baked, half-assed, juvenile interpretation of a poem or passage with an otherwise perfectly capable professor nodding their head all along the way. I’m not sure when a university classroom became a place where students go to be told how wonderful their baseless readings are. It seems to have something to do with the diffusion of Deconstructive readings, which appear random, and arbitrary; in fact, they intend to point out the arbitrariness of language itself on some high level so the students are not wrong to perceive this.

••• Einige der interessanteren Litblogs in den USA werden von Professoren geschrieben. D. G. Myers ist hier nur ein Beispiel. Demletzt bin ich auf Daniel E. Pritchard und sein Blog »The Wooden Spoon« aufmerksam geworden. Das gehört »Auf die Rolle«.

Das oben von Pritchard zitierte Blog »Minding the Campus« ist übrigens ein Universitätsblog mit einem Redaktionsteam, dem sowohl Studenten als auch Professoren angehören. Da mal reinzulesen, ist ebenfalls nicht uninteressant.

Kennt eigentlich jemand vergleichbare deutsche Litblogs von Literatur-Professoren oder Fakultäten?

A response to D. G. Myers‘ „Remembering Truman Capote“ (»» Deutsche Version lesen)

••• Now that D. G. Myers’s „Remembering Truman Capote“ has been posted here in German, I can finally begin to respond. How much one likes Capote may vary—one may not even like him at all—but what Myers does posthumously to the eccentric Truman demands explicit contradiction.

At least four claims in Myers’s post rub me the wrong way. He begins with the claim that Capote’s novels before „In Cold Blood“ are mere collages of what Capote had read. Apparently, this is made sufficiently clear (otherwise it would not have been worth mentioning) by the fact that Capote’s debut, „Other Voices, Other Rooms,“ was published when the author was just 24. Well, whoever thinks a twenty-four-year old can have nothing to say except what he has read surely did not have a complex childhood shaped by unstable relationships and abandonment; beyond that, though, whether the author has experienced and suffered every detail of what he relates has never been a valid literary-critical criterion.

Immediately after that point, Myers claims that Capote’s prose is so clearly mannered that it is hardly worth mentioning. I would really like to know the basis of this assertion. To me, „Breakfast at Tiffany’s“—as I am already on the record as saying here—is a flawless novel. It may not shed light on whatever the world revolves around, but in terms of technique, the book seems to me to be beyond criticism. Capote himself may have been mannered—but his prose is not. This is not just my opinion. None other than Norman Mailer, after all (who definitely had at least one or two hard-to-swallow experiences with Capote), admitted that

Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation. … I would not have changed two words in „Breakfast at Tiffany’s“

Such a blanket condemnation as Myers’s must be justified in detail. I cannot accept how it has just been tossed off so acidly.

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Anecdotal Evidence and A Commonplace Blog asked a number of book bloggers to speculate about the past, present, and future of this youngest of literary genres. Their replies will be posted to Anecdotal Evidence and A Commonplace Blog over the next several days and (in most cases) cross-posted to the contributor’s own blog.

••• Patrick Kurp und D. G. Myers beginnen heute in ihren Blogs Anecdotal Evidence und A Commonplace Blog mit einem Online-Symposium (»The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time«), das die Frage erhellen soll, welche Funktion(en) das Literarische Weblog heute (noch) erfüllen kann. Sie sehen im Book Blogging nicht weniger als ein literarisches Genre.

Mir fallen gewisse Parallelen zur spatien-Sonderausgabe »Literarische Weblogs« auf. Spannend für mich ist hier natürlich vor allem der Blick über den Teich. Man darf schon annehmen, dass im Blog-Bereich auch künftig wesentliche Impulse und Vorboten neuer Entwicklungen von dort kommen.

Nicht unerwähnt will ich lassen, dass auch ich eingeladen wurde, den Symposium-Fragebogen auszufüllen, was ich gern getan habe. Der Beitrag wird in einem der ausrichtenden Blogs in Kürze erscheinen.