Chekhov's Mistress
This is What Happens… A List
This is what happens when you get four hours of sleep a night. The best thing you can come up with to write is a list. And a list of literary pet peeves no less (I’ll save the non-literary ones for elsewhere because the list is potentially huge and mostly has to do with NYC government and people driving cars). Let me just get this out of my system and I’ll go back to what I was doing.
- Novelists who can’t think of something more creative than to have novelists as characters.
- Poets who can’t come up with a better title for their books than “Poems.”
- People who spell Finnegans Wake with an apostrophe.
- Critics who are afraid of Ardor
- Literary Journals that charge $14 per issue and expect people to read them all.
- Any periodical that doesn’t already post all of its content online.
- Readers who treat books as goals to be added up
- cheeky bios
- Those ghastly ghostly Marion Ettlinger author portraits.
- Publishing people who use the word “best” and other silly superlatives to describe things they know are not.
- Lists, of course (particularly bitchy ones) and any attempt to distill literature into anything that can be rated or voted upon.
comments
I love your list, especially the way every item is numbered 1! Rants are important. Long live.
– Anne Marie (01/15 at 11:04 AM)
Oh my, how old are the twins now? Maybe if you go grab the camera, capture their exuberance on film and post it here, it’ll make you feel better. You’ll get loads of ohs and ahs to make you proud and forget your lack of sleep.
Love the list though.
– susan (01/15 at 01:20 PM)
1. All the writers who think that all the 1000 extra pages are necessary when they really could say it all in 300 pages.
– (01/15 at 01:21 PM)
The other day, I was in Three Lives. I picked up a book written by a novelist whom my husband used to date. On the back, was a freaky photo of her by Marion Ettlinger (whose name and style I didn’t yet know until I read this): freaky b/c of her style and also b/c it made her look like ME. All the weirder as we’re not the same race. I dropped the book like a hot potato and bought something else.
Loved the rant, Bud!
xxx
Anne
– Anne Fernald (01/22 at 12:13 AM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: January 15, 2008
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:4
- Links to this Post: Technorati
