David Thayer

The folks at the Literary Saloon have had to update their Compleat Review list of bloggers who blog lit. Sad to say this blog did not make either of their compendiums. I’ll never hear the end of this from the forty third earl and The Archduke. Not enough bookish material, way too many asides, diatribes, retractions, confessions, manifestos and just plain personal stuff that no one cares about. This post is about Juan Peron. See what I mean?

Steady Peronistas, I was kidding. What do Juan Peron and I have in common? We’ve never been the principal subject of an Andre Lloyd Webber musical. If Evita had been Juan box office would have shrunk to the size of a chick pea. Madonna in a mustache, the crooning Fascist.

This leads naturally and I think effortlessly into a discussion of John Twelve Hawks and The Traveler. Lit bloggers have been bashing Doubleday for the Twelve Hawks debut, for the sleight of hand marketing of an author from Off The Grid. Let’s step back. A major publisher throws a debut novelist a wing ding and they get hammered for it. Okay, the book wasn’t great. Maybe the snipers were on target with the preposterous elements of the campaign, but ironies abound. We’re neck deep in stories about novelists who get no support from their publishers. This was not a literary novel. That’s true. Many literary novels barely register sales, hardly ripple the waters. That may be because they are unreadable, lacking opacity or possessing it, or both. Nothing rips the fabric of civility faster than the high brow, low brow divide. Call me Oprah, call me low brow, but I think throwing money at any novelist is worth a cocktail or two.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Ripped from Headlines Still Oozing Ink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.