A fan’s notes

Jessa Crispin has exactly the right response to the hysterical claims that rang out across the literary blogscape that Amazon was “censoring books with ‘questionable’ content—‘questionable’ in this case being defined as homosexual behavior.” Her unflappable response reminded me of the great foreign correspondent Homer Bidart’s advice to young journalists. If you see a herd of reporters charging down one street, turn and head down a different street. (It is remarkable how few of the hysterics have got around to correcting their error. Amazon’s apology is quoted here, by the way.)

Levi Stahl celebrates the reissue of the late Donald E. Westlake’s first novel The Cutie by the University of Chicago Press. The book “reveal[s] itself as the work of a real talent, beyond what you might expect from a first novel. . . .” Stahl admits that it is the twenty-eighth Westlake novel he has read.

Mark Athitakis demolishes the literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels’s complaint that novelists have turned their back on the American social scene, wasting “too much time looking backward to slavery or the Holocaust. . . .” Michaels’s brand of prescriptive criticism has rarely served anything larger than a central committee.

Returning to the classroom from spring break, Patrick Kurp speculates why Samuel Beckett offers so much more pleasure than most avant garde fiction. He is responding to Nige’s birthday card to Beckett on Monday. Nige and Kurp are better men and critics. Although I adore Waiting for Godot—what I would not have given to see Zero Mostel in the role of Estragon—it is the only Beckett I know. I admit it; I am a woefully uneducated man.

Perry Middlemiss also returned from holiday yesterday. (If you do not read his indispensable Australian litblog Matilda, exactly what is wrong with you?)

In one day Elberry has gone from seeking God in his absence to visiting a clairvoyant. If he did not make everything he describes so interesting, I should be obliged to dismiss him as unreliable. Reading Elberry is a guilty pleasure.