Rick Moody on all the latest hubbub, from the website of A Public Space — a new independent magazine of literature and culture — who’s debut issue will be hitting the stands around February 15th. They also offer the convenience of home delivery, which is a fantastic bonus for the agoraphobe in us all. So subscribe, why don’t you, it would make Brigid ever so happy.
Well, in the end, I blame the cultural environment. Because what we have here, with each of our twin protagonists, is a rapacious and dishonest way of marketing books. This marketing strategy is based exclusively on circulating the deracinated, sensationalized biography of the writer. It is based on making this biography the absolute bedrock for the text itself, the Cliffs Notes for the reading experience. And this strategy for marketing books in turn brings about a way of reading books, and this new way of reading books, wherein the book is just to be skimmed so that one can marvel completely at the indomitability of the author. Wherein the review is just as adequate as the book itself, particularly the most insipid in-briefs that favor summary and reduction over substantive analysis.
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