PRO: He attacks some of the critical shorthand & hypocrisy reviewers display toward ‘genre fiction’ vs. ‘literary fiction’: ‘Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction"—at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L.’ He gives a pretty good example: ‘The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.’ Now, while I may disagree with Myers on Stephen King’s worth as a writer- genre or serious- his take on Guterson is dead on. His writing is a generic bore, thoroughly schooled in the workshop, & evident on the few pages I could stand to read from the book. This is in opposition to fine, individuated, & great fictionists like Charles Johnson, Kurt Vonnegut, & William Kennedy.

CON: His examples are sometimes self-defeating. He falls in to the triple traps of namedropping, pointless digression [into pointless examples], & occasional bigwordthrowingarounding. Here is an example: ‘In Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves (1925) a character named Mr. Cardan makes a point that may explain today's state of affairs.

                           Really simple, primitive people like their poetry to be as
                            ... artificial and remote from the language of everyday
                            affairs as possible. We reproach the eighteenth century
                            with its artificiality. But the fact is that Beowulf is
                            couched in a diction fifty times more complicated and
                            unnatural than that of [Pope's poem] Essay on Man.

  Mr. Cardan comes off in the novel as a bit of a windbag, but there is at least anecdotal evidence to back up his observation. We know, for example, that European peasants were far from pleased when their clergy stopped mystifying them with Latin. Edward Pococke (1604-1691) was an English preacher and linguist whose sermons, according to the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, "were always composed in a plain style upon practical subjects, carefully avoiding all show and ostentation of learning."

                            But from this very exemplary caution not to amuse his
                            hearers (contrary to the common method then in vogue)
                            with what they could not understand, some of them took
                            occasion to entertain very contemptible thoughts of his
                            learning ... So that one of his Oxford friends, as he
                            traveled through Childrey, inquiring for his diversion of
                            some of the people, Who was their minister, and how
                            they liked him? received this answer: "Our parson is one
                            Mr. Pococke, a plain honest man. But Master," said
                            they, "he is no Latiner."’
This is a very poor example for the man to use, especially since it comes right on the heels of a plea against affectation & obscurity & for straightforwardness. The point- Myers could have said in 1 or 2 sentences what these 4 paragraphs tell us. But then, he wanted to ‘show off’ every bit as much as the writers he criticizes- hardly the tack for a man who claims to be a mere ‘reader’- aside from its hypocrisy it obviates his argument.

PRO: He identifies some of the worst critical prose clichés & explains their failings: On Annie Proulx: ‘Her writing, like that of so many other novelists today, is touted as "evocative" and "compelling." The reason these vague attributes have become the literary catchwords of our time, even more popular than "raw" and "angry" were in the 1950s, is that they allow critics to praise a writer's prose without considering its effect on the reader. It is easier to call writing like Proulx's lyrically evocative or poetically compelling than to figure out what it evokes, or what it compels the reader to think and feel. How can Close Range really impart a sense of life in Wyoming when everything—from the loneliness of the plains to the grisly violence it actuates—is described in the same razzle-dazzle style, the same jumpy rhythms? And why should we care about characters whose gruesome deaths and injuries are treated only as a pretext for more wordplay?’ & ‘Proulx's sentences are often praised for having a life of their own: they "dance and coil, slither and pounce" (K. Francis Tanabe, The Washington Post), "every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over" (Carolyn See, The Washington Post), a Proulx sentence "whistles and snaps" (Dan Cryer, Newsday). In 1999 Tanabe kicked off the Post's online discussion of Proulx's work by asking participants to join him in "choosing your favorite sentence(s) from any of the stories in Close Range." I doubt that any reviewer in our more literate past would have expected people to have favorite sentences from a work of prose fiction. A favorite character or scene, sure; a favorite line of dialogue, maybe; but not a favorite sentence. We have to read a great book more than once to realize how consistently good the prose is, because the first time around, and often even the second, we're too involved in the story to notice. If Proulx's fiction is so compelling, why are its fans more impressed by individual sentences than by the whole?’ Or on Harper’s critic Vince Passaro: ‘This is typical of today's reviewers, who shy away from discussing prose style at length, even when they are praising it as the main reason to buy a book. The reader is either told some nonsense about sentences that "slither and pounce" or given an excerpt in its own graphic box, with no commentary at all. The critic's implication: "If you can't see why that's great writing, I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain." This must succeed in bullying some people, or else all the purveyors of what the critic Paul Fussell calls the "unreadable second-rate pretentious" would have been forced to find honest work long ago. Still, I'll bet that for every three readers who finished Passaro's article, two made a mental note to avoid new short fiction like the plague. Even a nation brainwashed to equate artsiness with art knows when its eyelids are drooping.’ * A demerit, however, for Myers’ sometimes falling into the trap of not explaining bad writing’s badness well!

CON: His examples are sometimes flat out wrong & worse- rely on clichés- see underlined: ‘The decline of American prose since the 1950s is nowhere more apparent than in the decline of the long sentence. Today anything longer than two or three lines is likely to be a simple list of attributes or images. Proulx relies heavily on such sentences, which often call to mind a bad photographer hurrying through a slide show. In this scene from Accordion Crimes (1996) a woman has just had her arms sliced off by a piece of sheet metal.

                            She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the
                            wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet
                            and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows darting and
                            reappearing with insects clasped in their beaks looking
                            like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows
                            of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled
                            reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her
                            stumped arms, even, in the first moment, hearing the wet
                            thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright
                            sound of the metal striking.

  The last thing Proulx wants is for you to start wondering whether someone with blood spurting from severed arms is going to stand rooted long enough to see more than one bird disappear, catch an insect, and reappear, or whether the whole scene is not in bad taste of the juvenile variety. Instead you are meant to read the sentence in one mental breath and succumb, under the sheer accumulation of words, to a spurious impression of what Walter Kendrick, in an otherwise mixed review in The New York Times, called "brilliant prose" (and in reference to this very excerpt, besides).’ Sorry, B.R., but while this piece may not be brilliant prose, it is not close to being bad prose- plus the reference to the New York Times review smacks of envy. 1^st, I’ve not read this book & only skimmed Proulx’s work so I’ve no ax to grind. 2^nd, the piece is clearly about the compression of time- the ‘life flashes before you’ moment. Perhaps Myers has not experienced that but in this case the cliché is true. But he does NOT attack for that, or whether or not the images seem apt- he attacks it on the logic- or not- of using compression & metaphor- Huh?  The fact that it is ¾s of the way down in the selection that we get ‘even, in the first moment’ does not clue Myers in to this fact. He seems to ignore that ‘rooted’ is obviously a metaphor to highlight the time compression. Furthermore his querying of motive- especially in light of his obtuseness- seems especially Eliotic in its Objective Correlative snippiness.

PRO: His examples are sometimes on the mark & well-explained- pro or con. On Cormac McCarthy: ‘The Orchard Keeper (1965), his debut novel, is a masterpiece of careful and restrained writing. An excerpt from the first page:

                            Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless
                            mass had emerged and was struggling toward him. It
                            loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something
                            seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and
                            solidity of a pickup truck, whipped past and receded
                            into the same liquid shape by which it came.

  There's not a word too many in there, and although the tone is hardly conversational, the reader is addressed as the writer's equal, in a natural cadence and vocabulary. Note also how the figurative language (like something seen through bad glass) is fresh and vivid without seeming to strain for originality.’ The very next paragraph- still on McCarthy: ‘Now read this from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994), part of the acclaimed Border Trilogy: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her."
  Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca, 1980). In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer."’ Note & reread his point on punctuation. It is a theme I have often addressed in poetry- that punctuation is one of the most underused tools. That prose critics love long sentences- even if they are tied together by execrable ands is 1 of Myers’ best points in the piece.

CON: Myers cops out in limiting his assault on the all-too easy bastion of DWM Academia without going after the PC Elitists whose prose crap is as bad or worse than those writers mentioned: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, etc., aka ‘The Oprah Gang’! The reason for this playing it safe is obvious: the firestorm unleashed at him by Academics & their critical toadies is nothing compared to the opprobrium that would be leveled at him were he to reveal the PC Elitists for what they are- phonies. Instead of the high-minded attempt at attack there would be all sorts of namecalling- from homophobic, racist, etc. to who knows what? DWMs & their minions are formidable, powerful, but have enough enemies to diffuse the backlash- but attack the Oprah Gang, in a major magazine? No way! Myers lacks the balls, even though their dilutive effect on writing rivals or surpasses the DWMs.

PRO: He makes good points on bad poetry masquerading as prose: ‘Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

                            While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees
                            the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the
                            blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue
                            convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and
                            knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers
                            that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their
                            articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the
                            flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning
                            groundmist and the head turning side to side and the
                            great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes
                            of his eyes where the world burned. (All the Pretty
                            Horses, 1992)

  This may get Hass's darkly meated heart pumping, but it's really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who's will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author's mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn't ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse's bowels.’  *In a personal asides, while the writing fails 1 would have hoped Myers’ would at least have praised its daring- something lacking in American poetry- yet he seems to have little stomach for daring & slams anything that veers from straightforwardness.

PRO: He makes good points on faux depth & prose writers’ reliance on exegesis. On Don DeLillo: ‘White Noise also continues a long intellectual tradition of exaggerating the effects of advertising. Here Steffie, the narrator's young daughter, talks in her sleep.

                            She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and
                            elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a
                            ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

                           Toyota Celica.

                           A long moment passed before I realized this was the
                            name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more.
                            The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot
                            with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient
                            power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform ...
                           Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the
                            impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.

  DeLillo has said that he wants to impart a sense of the "magic and dread" lurking in our consumer culture, but what a poor job he does of this! There is so little apparent wonder in the girl's words that only a metaphor drawn from recognizable human experience could induce us to share Jack's excitement. Instead we are told of an un-named name carved on a tablet in the sky, and in cuneiform to boot. The effect of all this is so uninvolving, so downright silly, that it baffles even sympathetic readers. It is left to real-life professors to explain the passage in light of what DeLillo has said in interviews and other novels about how people use words to assuage a fear of death. Cornel Bonca, of California State University, writes, "If we see Steffie's outburst as an example of the death-fear speaking through consumer jargon, then Jack's wondrous awe will strike us, strange as it may seem, as absolutely appropriate." A good novelist, of course, would have written the scene more persuasively in the first place.’

CON: His examples are sometimes poor because he takes his selections without even attempting to give us context from where in the writer’s work the selection is from or why the character may be in said state: ‘Anyone who doubts the declining literacy of book reviewers need only consider how the gabbiest of all prose styles is invariably praised as "lean," "spare," even "minimalist." I am referring, of course, to the Paul Auster School of Writing.  

                            It was dark in the room when he woke up. Quinn could
                            not be sure how much time had passed—whether it was
                            the night of that day or the night of the next. It was even
                            possible, he thought, that it was not night at all. Perhaps
                            it was merely dark inside the room, and outside, beyond
                            the window, the sun was shining. For several moments
                            he considered getting up and going to the window to
                            see, but then he decided it did not matter. If it was not
                            night now, he thought, then night would come later. That
                            was certain, and whether he looked out the window or
                            not, the answer would be the same. On the other hand,
                            if it was in fact night here in New York, then surely the
                            sun was shining somewhere else. In China, for example,
                            it was no doubt mid-afternoon, and the rice farmers
                            were mopping sweat from their brows. Night and day
                            were no more than relative terms; they did not refer to
                            an absolute condition. At any given moment it was
                            always both. The only reason we did not know it was
                            because we could not be in two places at the same time.                   
                            (City of Glass, 1985)

  This could be said in half as many words, but then we might feel even more inclined to ask why it needs to be said at all. (Who ever thought of night and day as an absolute condition anyway?) The flat, laborious wordiness signals that this is avant-garde stuff, to miss the point of which would put us on the level of the morons who booed Le Sacre du Printemps. But what is the point? Is the passage meant to be banal, in order to trap philistines into complaining about it, thereby leaving the cognoscenti to relish the irony on some postmodern level? Or is there really some hidden significance to all this time-zone business? The point, as Auster's fans will tell you, is that there can be no clear answers to such questions; fiction like City of Glass urges us to embrace the intriguing ambiguities that fall outside the framework of the conventional novel. All interpretations of the above passage are allowed, even encouraged—except, of course, for the most obvious one: that Auster is simply wasting our time.’ Well, no B.R., while your point on the literacy of critics is right on, we have no idea about where this piece is from- the actual words are fine & could be very apt to the character’s state- YOU simply do not let us know that with your selection- therefore stating it in ½ the words may have been the wrong move! And obviously- as to your parenthetical query- the character thought of that! Whether it was forced we do not know- again the fault of your selection. And again the creeping T.S. Eliotism!

PRO: He makes good points about the edginess-irony quotient in today’s novels & culture- & note his pointing out of tautology: ‘In this excerpt from White Noise, Jack and his family go shopping.  

                            In the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer
                            plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and
                            size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid
                            lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with
                            Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we
                            felt, the sense of well-being, the security and
                            contentment these products brought to some snug home
                            in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of
                            being that is not known to people who need less, expect
                            less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the
                            evening.

  Could the irony be any less subtle? And the tautology: mass, plenitude, number; well-being, contentment! The clumsy echoes: size, sizes; familiar, family; sense of, sense of; well-being, being! I wouldn't put it past DeLillo's apologists to claim that this repetition is meant to underscore the superfluity of goods in the supermarket. The fact remains that here, as in the Toyota Celica scene, the novel tries to convey the magical appeal of consumerism in prose that is simply flat and tiresome.’ Or on Paul Auster: ‘Another hallmark of Auster's style, and of contemporary American prose in general, is tautology. Swing the hammer often enough, and you're bound to hit the nail on the head—or so the logic seems to run.  

                            His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and
                            fragments of his corpse were found ... (Leviathan,
                            1992)

                            Blue can only surmise what the case is not. To say what
                            it is, however, is completely beyond him. (Ghosts,
                            1986)

                            My father was tight; my mother was extravagant. She
                            spent; he didn't. (Hand to Mouth, 1997)

                            Inexpressible desires, intangible needs, and unarticulated
                            longings all passed through the money box and came out
                            as real things, palpable objects you could hold in your
                            hand. (Hand to Mouth)

                            Still and all, Mr. Bones was a dog. From the tip of his
                            tail to the end of his snout, he was a pure example of
                            Canis familiaris, and whatever divine presence he
                            might have harbored within his skin, he was first and
                            foremost the thing he appeared to be. Mr. Bow Wow,
                            Monsieur Woof Woof, Sir Cur. (Timbuktu)

  This sort of thing is everywhere, and yet the relative shortness of Auster's sentences has always fooled critics into thinking that he never wastes a word. His style has been praised as "brisk, precise" (The New York Times) and "straightforward, almost invisible" (The Village Voice). Dennis Drabelle, in The Washington Post, called it "always economical—clipped, precise, the last word in gnomic control," which looks like something Auster wrote himself.’ In fact, Myers’ points on tautology in prose almost echo my thoughts on didacticism in poetry- the insistence to tell you rape is wrong, murder immoral, or disease a burden.

CON: He slips into personal biases too often, which detracts from his other positive points. Note here how overly analytical he is being on a relatively benign- neither great nor bad- passage, as well the resentful tone- betrayed by the later nitpicking- of comparison between authors not named Myers: ‘Like Cormac McCarthy, to whom he is occasionally compared, Guterson thinks it more important to sound literary than to make sense. This is the oft-quoted opening to East of the Mountains (1999). 

                            On the night he had appointed his last among the living,
                            Dr. Ben Givens did not dream, for his sleep was restless
                            and visited by phantoms who guarded the portal to the
                            world of dreams by speaking relentlessly of this world.
                            They spoke of his wife—now dead—and of his
                            daughter, of silent canyons where he had hunted birds,
                            of august peaks he had once ascended, of apples newly
                            plucked from trees, and of vineyards in the foothills of
                            the Apennines. They spoke of rows of campanino
                            apples near Monte Della Torraccia; they spoke of
                            cherry trees on river slopes and of pear blossoms in
                            May sunlight.

  Now, if the doctor's sleep was visited by phantoms (visited, mind you, not "interrupted"), then surely he was dreaming after all? Or were the phantoms keeping him awake? But isn't restless sleep still sleep? The answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter one way or the other: Guterson is just swinging a pocket watch in front of our eyes. "You're in professional hands," he's saying, "for only a Serious Writer would express himself so sonorously. Now read on, and remember, the mood's the thing."
  What follows is a Proulx-style succession of images. By the end of the third sentence, with its cherry trees, pear blossoms, and still more apples, the accumulation of pedestrian phrases is supposed to have fooled the reader into thinking that a lyrical effect has been created. The ruse is painfully obvious here. Proulx would at least have drawn the line at something as stale as august peaks—especially in an opening paragraph. (She would also have avoided the clumsy echo of restless and relentlessly.)’

PRO: He makes a very important point re: -isms. The more –isms you spout the less you have to talk about the work itself: ‘Like DeLillo, Auster knows the prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing: the harder it is to be pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no ideas at all.’

CON: He too often follows a good point with a bad, such as chastising Toni Morrison [albeit tapdancingly & tip-toe-edly], yet claiming the absolute about great writing. But a demerit for letting American Literature’s Public Enemy # 1 [Oprah!] off the hook!: ‘At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence. This didn't stop the talk-show host from quoting her friend's words with approval.’

PRO: He makes good points on overwriting. This on David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars (1994): ‘The word thing is used to add bulk. "You could not explain to anybody why everything was folly" becomes It was not even a thing you could explain to anybody, why it was that everything was folly. "His cynicism disturbed him" becomes His cynicism...was a thing that disturbed him. "He believed that" becomes he had this view of things—that. There is plenty of unnecessary emphasis, the classic sign of a writer who lacks confidence: "enormously foolish,", "wholly...ridiculous", "entirely disgusting." There are sentences that seem to serve no purpose at all: "He could repel people if he chose by wearing to class a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the scar tissue on his stump. He never did this, however. He didn't exactly want to repel people. Anyway ..." Almost every thought is echoed: "He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that ... He could not help but possess this unhappy perspective, no matter how much he might not want it." And "... everything was folly. People appeared enormously foolish to him...In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous...Anyway, he had this view of things—that most human activity was utter folly..." You could study that passage all day and find no trace of a flair for words. Many readers, however, including the folks at Granta, are willing to buy into the scam that anything this dull must be Serious and therefore Fine and therefore Beautiful Writing.’

CON: He gives only 1 example of good writing, & it’s a bad example because it’s not well-written, makes his point fall into the ‘good old days’ cliché- it’s from 1947, & is poorly selected because we’re given no context to explain why this is more than digressive fluff: ‘Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English. In this scene from Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947) a man meets a woman at a Fourth of July picnic. 

                            He saw her running in the women's race, her arms close
                            to her sides. She was among the stragglers and stopped
                            and walked off the field, laughing and wiping her face
                            and throat with a handkerchief of the same material as
                            her silk summer dress. Leventhal was standing near her
                            brother. She came up to them and said, "Well, I used to
                            be able to run when I was smaller." That she was still not
                            accustomed to thinking of herself as a woman, and a
                            beautiful woman, made Leventhal feel very tender
                            toward her. She was in his mind when he watched the
                            contestants in the three-legged race hobbling over the
                            meadow. He noticed one in particular, a man with red
                            hair who struggled forward, angry with his partner, as
                            though the race were a pain and a humiliation which he
                            could wipe out only by winning. "What a difference,"
                            Leventhal said to himself. "What a difference in people."

  Scenes that show why a character falls in love are rarely convincing in novels. This one works beautifully, and with none of the "evocative" metaphor hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to accompany such scenes today. The syntax is simple but not unnaturally terse—a point worth emphasizing to those who think that the only alternative to contemporary writerliness is the plodding style of Raymond Carver. Bellow's verbal restraint makes the unexpected repetition of what a difference all the more touching. The entire novel is marked by the same quiet brilliance. As Christopher Isherwood once said to Cyril Connolly, real talent manifests itself not in a writer's affectation but "in the exactness of his observation [and] the justice of his situations."’ Well, given that Myers ripped writing that went on too long- especially one where time was clearly distending- this overanalytical approach to love seems an unlikely piece to praise. Again, Myers’ biases surface. ‘Quiet brilliance’? That Myers’ critiques often violate Isherwood’s dictum also seems to be a point of ‘huh?’ Now, in fairness, this piece by Bellow may indeed be more, but if Myers is going to quote he should choose selections that stand on their own- unless the point is to show a selection’s dependence on its placement in a text.

PRO: He points out the obvious hypocrisies in contemporary prose writing & its accoutrements: ‘It's easy to despair of ever seeing a return to that kind of prose, especially with the cultural elite doing such a quietly efficient job of maintaining the status quo. (Rick Moody received an O. Henry Award for "Demonology" in 1997, whereupon he was made an O. Henry juror himself. And so it goes.) But the paper chain of mediocrity would probably perpetuate itself anyway. Clumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to look back to a time when authors had more to say than "I'm a Writer!"; when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket.’ *Yet, a demerit for his next sentence: ‘A reorientation toward tradition would benefit writers no less than readers.’ Or, on Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars again: ‘Only the sex scenes, which even his fans lament, are laughably bad.  

                            "Have you ever done this before?" he whispered.

                            "Never," answered Hatsue. "You're my only."

                            The head of his penis found the place it wanted. For a
                            moment he waited there, poised, and kissed her—he
                            took her lower lip between his lips and gently held it
                            there. Then with his hands he pulled her to him and at
                            the same time entered her so that she felt his scrotum
                            slap against her skin. Her entire body felt the rightness of
                            it, her entire body was seized to it. Hatsue arched her
                            shoulder blades—her breasts pressed themselves
                            against his chest—and a slow shudder ran through her.

                            "It's right," she remembered whispering. "It feels so right,
                            Kabuo."

                            "Tadaima aware ga wakatta," he had answered. "I
                            understand just now the deepest beauty."

  If Jackie Collins had written that, reviewers would have had a field day with You're my only, the searching penis, the shudder's slow run. Thanks to that scrotum slap, which makes you wonder just what Hatsue's body felt the rightness of, the passage fails even on a Harlequin Romance level. But critics gamely overlook the whole mess, because by this point in the book Guterson has already established himself as a Serious Writer—mainly by length and somberness, but also by all those Japanese words.’ This is absolutely perfect criticism. Its solitude reverbs in others’ critiques, however,

CON: He makes inapt comparisons to things beyond his purview: ‘For all that Georgian talk of modernity, it was T. S. Eliot, a man fascinated by the "presence" of the past, who wrote the most-innovative poetry of his time.’ Sorry, B.R., but 1 of the reasons Eliot has fallen so far from his perch in the last 35 years is because of how stilted & unoriginal the bulk his verse was. Hint- leave the BS to the BSers at the Academy of American Poetry!

PRO: A good invective end to the piece: ‘Feel free to disparage these recommendations, but can anyone outside of the big publishing houses claim that the mere fact of newness should entitle a novel to more of our attention? Many readers wrestle with only one bad book before concluding that they are too dumb to enjoy anything "challenging." Their first foray into literature shouldn't have to end, for lack of better advice, on the third page of something like Underworld. At the very least, the critics could start toning down their hyperbole. How better to ensure that Faulkner and Melville remain unread by the young than to invoke their names in praise of some new bore every week? How better to discourage clear and honest self-expression than to call Annie Proulx—as Carolyn See did in The Washington Post—"the best prose stylist working in English now, bar none"?
  Whatever happens, the old American scorn for pretension is bound to reassert itself someday, and dear God, let it be soon. In the meantime, I'll be reading the kinds of books that Cormac McCarthy doesn't understand.’

  So, overall, the good points slightly outnumber the bad 10-9. This is therefore a worthwhile piece of writing, but 1 knows it could have done so much more. It serves well as a good functionary invective but it could have been an excellent visionary instructive criticism. Whether Myers was the man for the job-  ? But the Atlantic Monthly should have prodded him or sought someone else to write a piece on this topic. They should have challenged him more editorially. Too often all we are left with in criticism is either asskissing or snide invective. This piece lacks the former but has a bit of the latter. Yet he does do a good job more often than not, especially in choosing selections that other critics have raved about.

  One of the things that really struck me was how much of what Myers’ criticized as being wrong in prose, would be perfect for poetry. & the ironic point is the very things prose has- which makes Myers cringe- poetry (at least contemporary PUBLISHED poetry) lacks. Myers decries prose for its poeticness while poetry has never been more banal, prosaic, didactic, & flat out ‘out there’. Let me go through the piece again chronologically. In the 1^st paragraph Myers essays: ‘In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose—"furious dabs of tulips stuttering," say, or "in the dark before the day yet was"—and I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.’ Yet, think I, these are very good lines of poetry. They may be affected prose- depending on their context [again not supplied!] but these are highly poetic lines. Let me namedrop a bit here; if you know contemporary American poetry, ask yourself if you have ever read 2 such lines sprung from the pens of a Gary Soto, Thomas Lux, Donald Hall, Ai, Maya Angelou, James Tate, Jane Kenyon, etc.? If so it was the 10,000 Monkeys Syndrome. Mere chance. Such fun at playing with words is virtually dead- both in Academia where the import is SAYING, WITNESSING, TRUTHTELLING, or RECOGNIZING- regardless of whether what is the topic of these acts is interesting or worthwhile. You see, playing with words makes the writer a power able to invest things with worth. ‘Contemporary poetry’ takes the 180° tack of only commenting on those things it sees as already having worth. I.e.- I am lazy & will only comment on those things ready-made & easy to comment on. Carolyn Forché & Czeslaw Milosz are the 2 leading advocates of this ‘Witness Poetry’. Forché’s recent book The Angel Of History was so bad, stupefyingly preachy & baldly outdated in its desire to commodify message over art that it led local writer & wit Don Moss to one day intone gravely to me, during a discussion of contemporary verse, “Y’know, Dan, before I read this book I never realized WAR IS BAD!” The sad thing is this: that is ALL that Forché desired for the book to do! That was her sole overriding aim! & it was kneejerkedly praised by the usual suspects in the usual magalogs. Now, I will address Ms. Forché & her poem fully in a later essay; but let me sum up by saying that nowhere in that book do we get lines like those Myers decries in prose. Fun in the arts is verboten- in ‘these times’ & all. & you know the recent events in DC & New York will only heighten the siren call to silly posturings. But academics are not alone in this need to cast the poet as more than just 1 who writes poems. ‘Outsiders’ [not really, but they like to pose as such] from Poetry Slam mavens, to the Nuyoricans, to the poets whose dreadful poems appear in dime-a-dozen ‘radical’ presses [most of them- you guessed it- professors], including the granddaddy of them all- Black Sparrow Press, take almost the exact same position. That these 2 extremes of poetic nadir effectively control American poetry’s 2 theaters- the printed & the spoken venues- yet constantly carp at each others’ mirrored reflections is something that would truly be hilarious were it not so sad. But a detailed analysis of that is also a later essay’s concern.
  Back to Myers: another selection & critique: ‘The short stories in Close Range are full of this kind of writing. "The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence:

                            In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid
                            hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to
                            geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had
                            kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a
                            so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of
                            the Big Horns.

  Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!
  Proulx once acknowledged that she tends to "compress" too much into short stories, but her wordplay is just as relentless in her novels; she seems unaware that all innovative language derives its impact from the contrast to straightforward English. It is common to find her devoting more than one metaphor or simile to the same image. "Furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens." "An apron of sound lapped out of each dive." "The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover." "The children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit." In one brief paragraph in The Shipping News a man's body is likened to a loaf of bread, his flesh to a casement, his head to a melon, his facial features to fingertips, his eyes to the color of plastic, and his chin to a shelf.
  This isn't all bad, of course; the bit about the ice mass admiring its reflection is effective. And every so often Proulx lets a really good image stand alone: "The dining room, crowded with men, was lit by red bulbs that gave them a look of being roasted alive in their chairs." Such hits are so rare, however, that after a while the reader stops trying to think about what the metaphors mean. Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.’ OK, again I apologize for the lengthy excerption but alot of good points are made &/or touched upon. Myers really lights into Proulx here- everything short of changing her surname to Prolix! & his backhanded slap at the magazine that published his piece is a nice testosteronic touch! But his selection to rip is poor. The snippet could be very interesting poetry if enjambed well. Compare this to the straightforwardness in the poems of a Sharon Olds, David Citino, or any of the aforementioned poetasters. But looks at Myers’ assault on this sentence. While some of the modifiers are repetitive & could be excised, do they really clash? No. The very length of the sentence tends to allow enough space for the images to stand on their own. Far from demanding to be read quickly words as ‘long’, ‘unfurling’, ‘riding’, ‘geriatric’, ‘limper’, & ‘spooled-out’ all suggest meditativeness- even with only 2 commas. The sentence is not THAT long! Now, perhaps this extract has the qualities Myers attributes to it if taken in a longer piece- but then the fault is his for choosing a selection that fails his own words. 1 senses that there is a touch of animus in this selection’s flaying that has more to do with personal or philosophic motives, than with poor prose. & the comment on the Big Horns is ridiculous- the word is imagination! Sorry, B.R., but your commentary here really blows!
  But on the heels of this critical failure Myers’ rebounds to make 1 of the most impressive points in his whole article: ‘she seems unaware that all innovative language derives its impact from the contrast to straightforward English.’ This is an excellent point, & applies to other aspects of poetry & art in general- the need for contrast, or individuation of the artist. Question- how easy is it to tell a stanza from Whitman from Yeats? Or Hart Crane from Sylvia Plath? Question 2- How hard is it to tell a stanza from a Tory Dent from [name your Sharon Olds-30-year-old-wannabe]? Or a David Rivard from a David Smith? Or David St. John? Or David Wagoner? Or David Citino? Or David-  see my point? So why is American poetry so prosaic when by nature it should not be? Perhaps because of the cycle of like breeding like that Myers points out [see my Pro comment on his hypocrisy comment on Rick Moody’s ascent]? Another point worth touching on, if briefly in this forum, is that despite what the naysayers say- poetry has always been chiefly about what happens in the mind, not on the tongue. The tongue is helped out to recall a verse because of the mindly mnemonic content of the phrase, image, line, metaphor, etc. Without the mindly content no poem- from classic epopee to Nuyorican angst- would register with merely sound. Mere sound in orchestration is music- or chanting. The difference between a chant & a poem is the intellectual content; just as the difference between poetry & verse is where the primary pleasure content of the work resides. If it is upon the tongue it is verse. If it is within the mind it is poetry. & let me emphasize this, for those who would 1 day damn me in excerption!, please include this caveat: Generally should be the addendum to the above stated definitions! This is the most important point, for clearly there are violations of those statements- works that invert those statements, but more often works that share equal quantities of the ascribed qualities. Yet, as good a point as this is- & its relevance to poetry- it really has no import to the selection because Myers at 1^st criticizes Proulx for tirelessly pushing the envelope- possibly a valid critique- but then somehow, logically, must be rebuking her for language that does not contrast from straightforward English, lest why bring up the point? He wants it both ways in his criticism, thereby negating that criticism. He might argue he faults HOW she pushes the envelope rather than her pushing it- but it’s still a de facto admission that she is not guilty of his charge of lack of innovation. I.e.- the piece may or may not be sparkling prose, but its failure is not the reason Myers charges. Better editorship at the Atlantic would have pointed this out.
  Let’s return to Myers’ Pro point on critical prose clichés. In a sense it’s heartening, I suppose, to know that every prose critics’ ‘dance and coil, slither and pounce’ has its poetic counterpart in ‘illuminates the big and the small’, & ‘every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over’ has its ‘finest/best/most generous poet/lyric ear/heart of his/her generation/ethnic group/sex/sexual preference’, yet it is also depressing to know that it does, that Myers’ essay makes so many easily identifiable correct points, & that a piece like his has needed value. Let us turn to another of the passages I selected as a Pro point: ‘Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

                            While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees
                            the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the
                            blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue
                            convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and
                            knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers
                            that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their
                            articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the
                            flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning
                            groundmist and the head turning side to side and the
                            great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes
                            of his eyes where the world burned. (All the Pretty
                            Horses, 1992)

   This may get Hass's darkly meated heart pumping, but it's really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who's will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author's mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn't ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse's bowels.’ I earlier mentioned hoping that Myers would have advocated the excerpt’s daring because such was utterly barren in published American poetry. But he did not. So, on to this piece’s relevance to poetry. 1^st let me acknowledge a kudo to Myers for whacking the addle-minded Hass. This former Poet Laureate [aren’t all published poets former Poets laureate?] has made a career of banality; or as noted wit Don Moss once quipped, “What do I think of Robert Hass? Well, as a poet he’d make a good next door neighbor.” Perhaps Myers is correct about asking who’s will, but too often in poetry the very manifestness of the speaker is the problem. The dread personal pronoun I is in 99.9% of published poems the poet themselves. Forget any nonsense that has sprung up in recent years about a return to classicism in the arts- even Neo-Formalist poets are ‘Confessional’ poets every bit as much as a great like Sylvia Plath or a doggerelist like Hal Sirowitz; they just hate being outed. Poets such as Hass are probably so rapt with excerpts like this because deep down they long to be able to dash their Narcissism, but are loath to lest not be ‘in’. Therefore, when confronted with prose’s willingness to do so- even if poorly- they effuse to the point of absurdity, thereby engendering the predictable backlash that Myers, unfortunately, too often wields in his hit & miss essay.
  Myers’ next poetry-related excerpt is this; still on McCarthy:

                            ‘[They] walked off in separate directions through the
                            chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees
                            and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads
                            up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the
                            gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the
                            calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that
                            waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in
                            the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of
                            grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. (All the
                            Pretty Horses)

  It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.
  No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense.’ Well, aside from the heart of being this is good poetry unenjambed. & why shouldn’t novelists , with whatever sense, write this is the wrong question. The question should be why don’t published poets write such? With a little more wordplay 1 can easily envision this coming from a latter-day Western Wallace Stevens. While Myers doesn’t go overboard with his damnations, as he did earlier, one does wonder what there is to damn? The queries Myers poses are entirely absent from most contemporary poetry. [& trust me, read any of my prior essays or future essays for many examples of this absence- this is simply not the crux in this essay]. Most poetry is chopped up prose- the opposite lament that Myers returns to often in his essay: most prose is unlined wannabe poetry. Some of Myers’ queries are plain silly &, again, barely cover what is probably the real reason for the attack- whatever that may be! & the last statement on liking the way something sounds- well, Poe, Dickinson, Stevens, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, & alot of other poets used to make a good artistic living on such. A good deal of their verse is sound-based. & the ironic thing is that contemporary poets- Academics & outsiders, those very champions of ‘spoken’ word- have so little ‘sound’ in their drones & rants. I’d rather see them explain that fact than hear McCarthy defend this excerpt!
  On to another good poetry-related point Myers unintendedly makes: ‘Interspersed with these ruminations we get long conversations of the who's-on-first? variety. These only highlight the sameness of the characters' speech. Young and old, male and female, all sound alike.

                            "What do you want to do?" she said.

                            "Whatever you want to do."

                            "I want to do whatever's best for you."

                            "What's best for me is to please you," I said.

                            "I want to make you happy, Jack."

                            "I'm happy when I'm pleasing you."

                            "I want to do whatever's best for you."

    And so on. To anyone who calls that excruciating, DeLillo might well respond, "That's my whole point! This is communication in Consumerland!" It isn't unlikely, considering how the dialogue loses its logic halfway through, that the whole thing was written only to be skimmed anyway. Like the bursts of brand names that occur throughout the text ("Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue"), this is more evidence of DeLillo's belief—apparently shared by Mark Leyner, Brett Easton Ellis, and others—that writing trite and diffuse prose is a brilliant way to capture the trite and diffuse nature of modern life.’ How often I have railed against the boring poem about a poet sitting in a café writing boring poems. Hello? 1 can convey boredom without writing boringly. Myers gets 1 of his best hits by revealing this counterpart in prose. The same sort of excuse making wafts around whenever someone accuses a poet of writing from their ‘identity’. ‘I’m just being me, & I’m a _______.’ Well, yes, but while you’re a ______, you are also yourself, & being generic is a different thing from being universal. &- important point- that goes equally so for Dead White Males who cannot get passed their pallid rigor. However, a slight demerit in that he does not distinguish that in prose conversation 1 can sometimes get away with such if contexted correctly. It’s almost impossible to do successfully in poetry.
  & a final point that pertains as well, or more so, to poetry: ‘This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them. In July of last year Bill Goldstein, in The New York Times, wrote an article putting the blame for the proliferation of unread best sellers on readers who bite off more "intellectually intimidating" fare than they can chew. Vince Passaro, writing for Harper's in 1999, attributed the unpopularity of new short fiction primarily to the fact that it is "smart"—in contrast (he claimed) to the short stories of Hemingway's day.’ Again, this is almost an exact inversion of poetry’s problem. It is so simplistic- not simple- that anything that does not condescend is elitist- the current bogeyword of the day! & in the rare cases that a poet tries to be ‘deep’ the poetry ends up being some surrealistic/abstract/Objectivist/Projectivist/L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/concrete hybridized mess that has no meaning- think Thalia Field, Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, & others of that leaning. Unless, of course they are of the Cult of John (Asbery for those out the know!)- but we won’t go there- NOW!
  In short, Myers’ piece may- in the long run- have more (unintended) relevance to contemporary poetry than prose. The irony is that this insight comes from a man who thinks ‘T. S. Eliot, a man fascinated by the "presence" of the past, who wrote the most-innovative poetry of his time.’ Alas, alack, & all that….

3) The essay’s reactions- good & bad:

  I will examine a bevy of the charges pro [+] & con [-] Myers’ piece & decipher whether the charge is just- in either direction.

+ London Times’ Joanna Coles: "The piece . . . has infuriated editors and writers alike, not the least because it is brilliantly written by a young unknown." By the time this essay was penned the Times piece was not online. However, this is the most widely quoted blurb that I got from several online sources. A fairly sedate comment that reflects a good deal of the positive comment. That the piece has caused infuriation is doubtless; that it is brilliantly written, well- see all my above comments. & while Myers was unknown, it is a hoot to see a 37 year old called ‘young’ in any American venue- I guess that is 1 positive to be said for American literature.

+ Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley: Yardley’s piece was also not available online at the time this essay was written. But in researching it online I gleaned some ideas & fragments. ‘Yardley believes that the rise of television and the disappearance of what he calls the "big middlebrow magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's" have much to do with the state of contemporary literary fiction. He also blames creative writing schools which "encourage the self-absorbed, mannered fiction" so despised by Myers.’ Yardley is a pretty decent critic & he may well indeed be right about the middlebrow implosion. He is right about the latter point. Odd how so many people know the problem yet no one in a position to change it does anything about it? Hmm….
  ‘Yardley says modernism is to blame in that it "values the obscure and the difficult." Yardley argues a few Masters have produced masterworks but Modernism has mostly produced third-rate imitations, acclaimed by critics fearful of not goosestepping with the "illuminati."’ His 1^st point is valid, but his inductive reasoning is poor & too generalized- besides, he may be being misquoted. His 2^nd point is dead on & really explains the New Critics as concisely as 1 can.

+ Atlantic Monthly’s Benjamin Schwarz, book editor: ‘A Reader's Manifesto struck a chord. A lot of readers out there felt the same frustrations he did. They felt they had an advocate in him. A lot of them have called me and the editor in chief of the magazine to tell us how much they appreciated the piece. The magazine has not heard from any of the writers targeted by Myers' essay nor any of those writers' editors. But the book and literary editors of major publications such as the Los Angeles Times and The Nation magazine did not much care for the piece. And at least one New York Times book critic has assaulted it.’ True enough sentiments, although 1 would like to have heard a reasoning for the poor editing job the magazine did. A little more here & there & the piece could have risen above the Molotov stage & actual had a real effect in the literary world; if not academia then ion the approach ‘pop’ book reviewers in magazines & newspapers approach their jobs.

+ an uncredited AP story on Myers: ‘The essay's 10,000 skillfully crafted words - which manage to be searing, humorous and illuminating all at the same time - were not written by a Big Apple book critic, a degree-laden academic or a battle-scarred literary lion feeling the need to roar. They were written by B.R. Myers, the guy with those two big dogs who lives just off the highway.’ Puff-piece alert! Puff-piece alert!
  ‘"I'm really just an average reader," said Myers, who fears the fact that he reads German, Korean, Chinese and Russian as well as English might make people believe otherwise....Myers was educated in Germany. He has a master's degree from Ruhr University in Bochum and a doctorate from the University of Tuebingen. He includes among his inspirations the German author Karlheinz Deschner, whose 1957 book, "Kitsch, Convention and Art," roused an uproar in Germany because it attacked the work of popular German poet and novelist Hermann Hesse. Myers' specialty, however, is North Korean studies. He is the author of a 1994 book titled "Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in DPRK." And right now, he is working on a deal that would send him to South Korea soon to teach university students in that country how to study North Korean literature.’ Puff-piece proof! Puff-piece proof! That the writer does not question Myers’ claim in light of what follows is certainly a chuckler. But then- it is a puff piece, & the info does lend a little insight in to the essay- especially Myers’ fondness for the Classics.
  ‘"Americans have always admired straight-talkers," he said during the interview at his home. "But by the time American scorn for pretentiousness reasserts itself, no one may be reading novels anymore."’ Myers is obviously building a rationale for the attacks- warranted & not- to come on his piece. His Apocalypticism is a bit hysterical, but in keeping with the Molotovian tenor of his essay!

- an online piece ‘Unfair Sentence: The case for difficult books’ by Meghan O'Rourke: 
   ‘Conveniently, there's nothing easier to fight over than books, because taste is subjective. The latest poker in the fire is a piece in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly—bombastically titled "A Reader's Manifesto".’  Well, Ms. O’Rourke is entitled to her opinion, but 1 of the best things in Myers’ essay is his refusal to buy into the ubiquitous & omnipotent idea that there is no objectivity in art. This extremism is as damaging as the antipodes of the New Critics because it is a) illogical, b) easily disproved because if the author truly believed such they would on principle never debate- what’s the point if we accept total subjectivity?, & c) even if it were true its purveyors never adhere to its tenets anyway- it’s hypocrisy.
  ‘At this point, French critics are more excited than their American counterparts by Paul Auster. David Guterson's reputation is based on one hit novel; his second was mostly regarded as a disappointment. White Noise was published 16 years ago. All of this makes Myers' essay seem crudely off target.’  Gotta love the zany French, but Myers’ point seems to be in questioning why Guterson’s 1^st novel was the thing that anointed him in the 1^st place- no? The fact that he takes on a 16 year old novel is in perfect keeping with the essay’s thrust. Myers’ point is that it’s taken a while for prose to get to this state. In fact, others have rightfully detracted that his 2 ‘good’ examples of prose are both decades old. Ms. O’Rourke seems to want to pick nits that are on her own form, not Myers’.
  ‘Myers' real frustration isn't with the writers but with the reviewers who laud them. At the heart of his complaints is a buried anxiety about cultural elitism, a peculiarly American distrust of showiness and artiness.’ This is a good O’Rourke’s broadside at Myers. While decrying the ‘elitism’ of the avant-garde he quite often wraps himself in the elitism of the rear guard of American letters- read: Dead, White, & Male! Wish Megan had completed this pointed barb, though!
  ‘Myers' jeremiad has met with an overwhelming response from readers who are relieved to find that they're not philistines, even though they failed to finish Underworld or Infinite Jest. (The irony, of course, is that they feel they're not philistines only because a critic in a glossy literary magazine has reassured them they're not.) Of course they're not. But the danger of Myers' irritation is self-evident: It implies we needn't ever challenge ourselves as readers. It wants a literature of lucidity and leaves little room for mystery.’ Some more good points! The public is generally of the herd mentality. So is the professorate, & the critics. Myers does well to point this out. O’Rourke does even better to point out the Philistines’ own weak will- &, YES, to not admit the bulk of Americana is Philistine is to engage in a naïve sort of flag-waving. But, equally true, is that we are probably the most well-rounded Philistines in world history! The last point is a very good one, although it would be hard to truly hold Myers to its accusation. He merely wants narrative, rather than structural mystery.
  ‘Myers nonetheless raises (if indirectly) a genuine point about reviewing: Many critics foreground the importance of "craft," vaguely praising a novel for its "evocative" or "compelling" prose. Their faces are so closely pressed against the window that they see more of the glass than what lies beyond it. There are some obvious reasons for this. First, both novels and their reviews are often written by people who have taught (or been taught) creative writing, much of which centers on a discussion of craft. After all, you can teach an aspiring writer how to construct a sentence, but it's harder to teach imagination, or how to invest fiction with intrinsic intelligence or useful social observation, or something as elusive as emotional truth. Reviewers tend to judge a book on its own terms, and sensibly so. It's unfair (and fairly useless) to fault Raymond Carver for not being Donald Barthelme, or vice versa. Still, reviewers sometimes don't tell readers what to expect or explain that a book's primary pleasure is linguistic rather than narrative, for example.’ She fully explains what Myers left as an assumed point in his piece. Her comment on reviewers’ failings is also apt.
  ‘No one wants to slam a first novelist or even a mediocre book. Especially when it's not immediately apparent how a reviewer ought to handle the question of taste: Unlike nonfiction reviewers, fiction critics have few objective criteria (such as quality of research, scope of argument) upon which to base their assessments. All this contributes to what Dwight Garner aptly called "literary grade inflation."’ Here O’Rourke tips her own bias to the reader, & repeats the fallacies of subjectivity that Myers’ rails against. The question left unasked is: Why does no one want to slam a 1^st novelist or mediocre book? The answer lies in the same pile of manure that she touches on in her prior quote- the incest of academia. Her point, however, on literary grade inflation is a valid one. 
  ‘Let's take a look at an earlier time, one that Myers is nostalgic for. In 1900, both Sister Carrie and Lord Jim were published. Both received critical attention, and neither was a best seller (although, to be fair, there's a Byzantine story behind the initial publication of Sister Carrie). What were the best-selling novels that year? Unleavened Bread and Red Pottage and When Knighthood Was in Flower. Myers' idea of a happier cultural moment, when best sellers received serious critical attention, is a sentimental lament for an imagined past….’ O’Rourke rips Myers where he’s most vulnerable- his own apparent elitism of the Golden Age.
  Overall, O’Rourke offers a good retort, yet 1 senses her biases are even more manifest than Myers’.

+ an online piece ‘Plain talk’ by Mursi Saad El-Din:
  ‘I find myself in complete agreement with Mr Myers, especially when he criticises a contemporary writer in favour among reviewers and literary prize-givers for a "weakness for facetious displays of erudition" and another who "thinks it more important to sound literary than to make sense."’ El-Din obviously does not get 1 of the major points Myers made, regardless of his admiration for the essay’s points; & that is that Myers does not pussyfoot around- he names names & purposely selects praise passages from other critics. This may account for a degree of Myers’ own poor selections- in his defense. In contrast, El-Din not only does not name names, but he won’t even name the names Myers names! Obviously this is an example of agreeing with something for the wrong reason.           

Random online & email postings: 

+ ‘He made a point of using quotations the New York Times and Los Angeles Times reviewers had employed to praise the writing he found ridiculous. He was very entertaining. He sounded like a regular guy who has absorbed more than bit of Sam Clemens.’ Neither Myers nor Clemens are ‘regular’ guys nor readers. Is there is any humor in the piece?

+ ‘Stephen King fans may be interested that he is cited by Myers as an example of a good writer dismissed as a mere "storyteller" while less talented but more pretentious writers are hailed by heavyweight critics who then set about making ordinary readers feel uncomfortable about not liking their work.’ So this is how rumors start- if 1 reads the piece Myers does not call King a good writer; merely that 1 of his novels is more intellectual & less pretentious than Guterson’s.

+ ‘I read about him in a rather superficial article in todays (London) Times by Joanna Coles, which should be accessible online. This refers to articles in the Washington Post which, like the Atlantic Monthly article, I could not access online. JC's article also refers to "internet discussion" but putting Myers name into the Google search engine didn't yield anything interesting.’ As of this writing the article is online, but the others mentioned are not. Now, there are plenty of pieces in response- including this 1. The reason I chose this email, however, is that it is typical in the escalation of opinion & rumor that the previous email starts.

+ ‘This essay absolutely floored me! His opinions are strong, but his supporting arguments compelling (and convincing, at least to me).’ The pro forma response from the masses.

- ‘To me, Myers is saying he wants to read a good story...with the emphasis on story. He wants the language to enhance the story. I think we all want that. We just all have our own way of making sense of a story…. The best part of this thread is that I ended up devouring this issue of Atlantic Monthly. I've never read it before. Is it always this interesting?’ The short answer to the query is NO- the Atlantic Monthly rarely engages the reader anymore. The other points are valid, & this rebuttal is far more valid than any of the other attacks on the piece by critics have been. Unfortunately few are online. The point is that Myers struck a chord- but all too lightly, & erratically. To pull my own nose for a second [& I’m allowed since many others have done so- including Myers], Myers would be well advised to check out www.Cosmoetica.com for how to write effective essays that stay on target, quote subject matter well, & rise to a more objective plane, so well beyond mere invective that the argument cannot be raised by a reasoned rebuttal. To not strive for such lends even more invective its in, & ultimately defangs one’s own arguments.

  In summing up, the responses to the article have been in some degree predictable. Certainly most of the articles I read right after the piece appeared [& unfortunately did not make record of] were weak invective often aimed at Myers, the man. The majority of readers, however, know that prose nowadays sucks. The fakers in the Literati weakly defend  hope the piece will fall of its own weight. & the essay’s very weaknesses allows Myers’, the readers’, & my- opposition to indeed keep on marching to their stultifying beat. Perhaps the saddest thing in the AP piece was Myers’ rejection of a post reviewing books. His claim of maintaining ‘outsider’ status suggests his role of literary Molotov cocktailist was the point from the start- after all, power does entail responsibility- & what bombthrower wants that?

4) The essay’s responses’ relation to poetry & summation: