Snicker! James got Wood!

On James Wood, who, for the record, I admire and respect as a book reviewer, and who, if he likes a novel, can persuade me to buy it:

Which is not to say he doesn't fear intellectual stagnation - the reason why, after 12 years, he left The New Republic. "I felt I was likely to repeat myself - reviewing the same books in the same mode," he says. "A new place will shake me up a little bit and provoke me to think differently about things." He describes the state of reviewing, or what's left of it in the mainstream press in America, as "diabolical . . . If you get rid of the book section [as a number of papers have done], what you get rid of is, quite literally, the free play of ideas," he says.

The internet, far from stepping in where print no longer publishes, has proved no boon, in terms of blogging. "It licenses first thoughts, vituperation," he says. "I don't go on much to those sort of blogs because there are better things to do with my life."

From the same article, Wood makes this keen insight:

"A novel," says Wood, "should always be as well written as it can be."

DANG!

Pearls, bitches, pearls.

I'm was going to buy How Fiction Works when released this coming summer until I read this paragraph:

I ask him whether this devotion both to the practical aspects of writing and to advancing serious criticism for the common reader has led to any tension with his more theoretically minded colleagues at Harvard. "I think I'm both tolerated, and appreciated in some ways, as the animal among the zoologists." He hesitates and qualifies himself: "That sounds wrong. I'm not enough of a creative writer to be among the animals." He pauses again. "To the extent that, as a reviewer, I'm keeping alive - and presumably, ideally, reminding academics that there is - a living tradition of criticism that predates English studies; to that extent, I'm doing something important." One of the great problems with literary criticism over the past 30 years, he concludes, is that "the only people worth explicating to, it was thought, were 18-year-olds reading English. And that's wrong."

The man has no understanding of irony.

!!!!!!

Bonus and gratuitous quote from Uncle Fiver's live typing of today's Cameroon-Tunisia quarterfinal of African Nations:

But Otto Pfister, a man whose name wouldn't be out of place in the seedier districts of Amsterdam, believes his Cameroon side will prevail.

Wood, indeed.