Month: January 2009

Yet another reason to write congenial book reviews

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, The Media

[x-posted at Gelf]

Inspired by an aside in Terry Teachout’s excellent biography, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I’m currently working on an essay about Mencken.

While researching this project, I came across a longish New Yorker review from 2002 on Teachout’s book, by Joan Acocella. Like everyone else, I’ve read (or at least started) plenty of these essays, but this might be the first one I read immediately after finishing the book. Like perhaps no one else, I was shocked at how much of the New Yorker essay simply summarizes Teachout’s book. (Of course, Teachout gets his best details from Mencken’s Newspaper Days, but that’s a bit different.) Acocella offers maybe two paragraphs of original critique or analysis; even her Mencken quotations come straight from Teachout.

Now, you can question the ultimate purpose of something that amounts to a 3,000-word precis for an already-published book—which is what I’ve been doing, off and on, for the last few days—but I’ll leave you with another intra-literary note. One reason Acocella’s essay is so disappointing is because she’s a really good and really inventive critic, as demonstrated by her Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, an expanded version of her delightfully nasty New Yorker essay from a few years back. That book’s Amazon.com page contains a wonderful blurb, originally published in the National Review in 2000, from none other than Terry Teachout. (“[Acocella] marches through the ranks of Cather scholars the way Sherman marched through Georgia.”)

I’ll hold off on any conspiracy theories, but sometimes it’s nice to find a concrete reminder of the book establishment’s small-world-ness. If only they used trackbacks and Technorati . . .

The Lester Bangs of Saudi Arabia?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Music, The Media

[Gelf]

A few months ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Accolade, a Saudi Arabian rock band composed of female college students. Most of the reaction to this story focused on the band—their MySpace friend count went from 17 to more than 1,000 in 24 hours—even as no one seemed willing to admit that they sound like a watered-down Evanescence (a thought that didn’t even seem possible five minutes ago).

Anyway, a few of the story’s quotes come from a young Saudi reporter named Hasan Hatrash. Hatrash is a musician too, but he also writes about the Middle-East music scene from the inside. He’s a fascinating and thoughtful person, and, in a new interview at Gelf, I talked to him about rock and roll, at home and abroad.

(Thanks to my editor, Michael Gluckstadt, for the original story idea.)

Pop Orwell

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Splice Today]

On December 21, 1940, George Orwell reviewed Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for a London newspaper.

“Simply as a film,” Orwell writes, “it has very great faults.” Yet he goes on to predict the film’s future impact: “What is Chaplin’s peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man. . . . If our Government had a little more imagination, they would subsidize The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany.”

What can we learn from such a review (besides the fact that Orwell had a barely latent crush on Paulette Goddard)? That Orwell consumed precarious amounts of pop culture, a point I try to make in my essay-slash-review of two new volumes of Orwell’s nonfiction (edited by George Packer) over at Splice.