The Dish

In a profile of best-selling author Jennifer Weiner, Rebecca Mead lays out the many ways that Weiner “has stoked a lively public discussion about the reception and consumption of fiction written by women”:

The same cultural prejudices that maligned large women, she said, explain why books like hers do not get critical respect. Her campaign about books, she suggested, is more than just a campaign about books: “Just as I want plus-size women visible, and valued, and loved in my books, so do I want books like mine visible and valued, if not loved, by a critical establishment that’s still too rooted in sexist double standards, still too swift to dismiss women’s work as small, trivial, unimpressive, and unimportant.” …

Weiner has also been outspoken about female writers whom she considers unsisterly. When Meg Wolitzer told an interviewer that she was disturbed by a rise in “slumber party fiction—as though the characters are stand-ins for your best friends,” Weiner responded that “likable” had become the “new code word” for fiction previously disparaged as chick lit. Adelle Waldman, the author of “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” told Salon that she “didn’t want to write a book with a plucky heroine.” Later, Weiner tweeted an oblique, wounded gibe: “Girl writes about kissing from male POV, in Brooklyn, with artsy cover and impressive blurbs. Then it’s literature.”

Kat Stoeffel sides with Weiner:

Weiner’s campaigns sometimes seem undignified, like she’s yearning for entry to a male literary enclave that has loudly eighty-sixed her. … But what’s much more important is that she’s right.

Women novelists and critics and “feminine” genres are criminally underrepresented across literary institutions, which will sometimes lavish men like  [Jonathan] Franzen and and [Jeffrey] Eugenides with multiple reviews and a profile. (See: Franzenfreude, a term coined by Jodi Picoult and adopted by Weiner.) What sets Weiner apart from other female authors isn’t some innate writerly disqualification from the boy’s club, but her unique position to critique it. She’s one of a handful of female authors with the publishing clout — in terms of dedicated readership, sales, and movie options — to speak out against industry sexism without fearing retribution.

Jia Tolentino is on the same page:

Cleverly, Jennifer Weiner invites a double bind: though she’s put some dents in the Jonathan Franzens and Andrew Goldmans of the world, she is quick to enter the familiar, distinctly non-intersectional territory of Who Is Being the Right Kind of Woman and Who Is Not; to write her critiques off is to ignore some really pervasive sexism (“she lamented that publishers put dreamy covers on books by women even when their contents are less than dreamy”), and to take her very particular vantage point too seriously is to enter the same uncomfortable ring.

But it should be easier to fight for Malala [Yousafzai] than Jen Weiner; all sexism was not created equal; some kinds are deadly; the kind against Weiner is not, which highlights my single takeaway from this profile, which is that I’m tired of comparing things (books, people, women) that don’t have anything substantive in common at all.

Julian Peters creates comic-book adaptations of poetry, with subjects ranging from Keats to Poe to Rimbaud. His latest is T.S. Eliot’s classic, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In an interview, Peters explains why he chose it:

First off, because it is one of my very favourite poems. The language is incredibly beautiful, of course, and lord knows I can relate to Prufrock’s indecisiveness. And it is one of those poems that has always spontaneously created a multitude of vivid images in my mind’s eye. I also think it is just the sort of poem that works best as a poetry comic. First because it lays forth a narrative of sorts, and second because it is not too concrete in its imagery, so that in converting it into visual form there is little risk of being too straightforwardly illustrative. …

[U]ltimately the most challenging aspect of making poetry comics for me is getting the pacing right. There should be a rhythmic flow to the comic that captures the corresponding flow of the poem. Achieving this is mainly a matter of how to break up the text between the panels, how to arrange the panels, how to pace the visual narrative, and where to place the text in relation to the imagery. Of course, these aspects can be judged the most successful the less the reader is immediately aware of them.

Last month, a Boston Globe profile of Peters’ work underscored the connection between comics and poetry:

“[O]nce people realized that comics are a medium that can be used to express any number of things,” Peters says, “there was no reason they couldn’t be paired in a more serious way with poetry.” In 2007, the Poetry Foundation furthered the connection with an intriguing series called “The Poem as Comic Strip,” in which cartoonists interpreted some of the poems in the foundation’s archives. The comics are still online at the foundation’s website.

Peters’s work is a great argument for the commonalities between poetry and comic books. The lines of poetry and his comic panels hang together with an unexpected ease, as if their forward rhythms are in synch. Both the words and the images unroll across the page, visually, with the panels sometimes matching the line breaks or stanza breaks. Poetry, unlike most prose, can involve leaps of thought from line to line, which jibes with the way comics leap from panel to panel.

(Hat tip: Micah Mattix. Drawing of Prufrock’s opening lines courtesy of Julian Peters)

An investigation into author interviews:

It makes good commercial sense for publishers, journalists, and bookshops to promote author interviews. But these do not explain public interest in such interviews, or why we want our novelists to be celebrities. We have, after all, so many other celebrities to think about—celebrities whose jobs, if they have jobs, make for better stories than sitting alone moving words about on a screen. So why not spare novelists the burden of becoming public figures? Why not let them slope off to write their books in private, for the few souls left who read them? …

By [interviewer Ramona] Koval’s reckoning, we read or listen to author interviews for the same reason we read novels: to find out how to live. But where novels are often opaque in their wisdom, declining to tell us how to live as plainly as we might like, the interview offers clarity. There will be questions, there will be answers, and if the answers are a little elliptical—well, the interviewer can keep asking until the matter is resolved. The [1953] E. M. Forster Paris Review interview sets the tone for this kind of truth-seeking. “What was the exact function of the long description of the Hindu festival in A Passage to India?” “Would you admit to there being any symbolism in your novels?” Interviewer and novelist collaborate in isolating, condensing, and finally spoon-feeding the novel’s meaning to the audience. It’s been a long time since [Roland] Barthes declared the author dead, but we’re more eager than ever to hear the corpse speak.

Professor Borges, a new translation of an English literature course the author taught in 1966, reveals a writer who brushed off Beowulf and Shakespeare but was “unexpectedly stirred by the Saxon elegies of the ninth and tenth centuries”:

These are not poems of battle but personal poems of solitude and sadness. “The Seafarer,” for instance, has a startling opening that anticipates centuries of literature to come, including, most obviously, Walt Whitman: “I will sing a true song of me myself and tell of my travels.” Borges delights in the unselfconscious, colloquial way that, later in the poem, the poet describes a snowstorm from the north: “Hail fell on the earth, coldest of seeds.” This metaphorical pairing of opposites is new—hail summons death, seeds summon life—yet one doesn’t feel the poet straining for effect; it just seems to be the way he saw it.

The most remarkable of the elegies is the second part of “The Dream of the Rood,” when the tree from which the cross was made to crucify Christ speaks to us directly. The wood of the felled tree is sentient and alive. It tells us its story, it asks for forgiveness, and we feel the extraordinary imaginative newness of the poet becoming the voice of a tree. There is nothing pious or dutifully Christian about this part of the poem. It is the voice of the earth itself, expressing a torn sorrow. “The cross trembles when it feels Christ’s embrace,” remarks Borges. “It is as if the cross were Christ’s woman, his wife; the cross shares the pain of the crucified God.” What captivates Borges is the apparent purity of feeling in these verses, the sense that the writers are unaware of the originality of their poems. “They were forcing an iron language, an epic language, to say something for which that language had not been forged—to express sadness and personal loneliness. But they managed to do it.”

(Image of The Ruthwell Cross, an 18-foot-tall, free standing 8th-century Anglo-Saxon cross, on which part of “The Dream of the Rood” is inscribed, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jeff Shesol discovers that a “word search of the past fifty State of the Union addresses … turns up very few mentions of ‘poverty’ or the ‘poor’ after Johnson left office”:

The reasons for this are fairly straightforward. It’s a truism of American politics that helping the poor is an idea that (forgive me) polls poorly. The manifest failures in the war on poverty, the relentlessness of Republicans in exploiting those failures, and the unwillingness of Democrats to stand behind its real successes, all help explain that. Whatever the accomplishments of the war on poverty—and there were many—its disappointments created a kind of collective exhaustion with the subject and the complex political, moral, and economic questions it raises about our shared obligation to those among us with the least. Again, it’s hard to blame politicians when the polls tell them that we don’t really want to hear about any of this. Even the poor don’t want to hear about the poor: most (studies say) see themselves as “middle class.”

The Insane Clown Posse is suing the FBI for classifying its followers, the Juggalos, as “a loosely-organized hybrid gang.” Natalie DiBlasio reports that the ACLU is backing the ICP’s suit:

“The Juggalos are fighting for the basic American right to freely express who they are, to gather and share their appreciation of music, and to discuss issues that are important to them without fear of being unfairly targeted and harassed by police,” says Michael J. Steinberg, ACLU of Michigan legal director. “Branding hundreds of thousands of music fans as gang members based on the acts of a few individuals defies logic and violates our most cherished of constitutional rights.”

Lisa Needham dismisses the notion that the Juggalos count as a gang:

Federal and state gang statutes are based on the idea that if a group of people affiliates in a specific location with some distinctive characteristics (like a bandana or something similar) to commit crimes, they are a gang and can be charged as members of an ongoing criminal enterprise AKA a gang. The problems with laws like these are they are usually, to put it in very sophisticated legal terms, some bullshit. Do your friends dress like you? Do you hang out together when you are dressed like each other? Did someone in your group of friends get crime-y? Sorry, sucka, you’re in a gang.

Previous Dish coverage of the ICP here.