Author Archives: Manuel

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the first Chicano poet to win the Yale Younger.

Depending on whom you ask, it’s either an enormous point of pride or yet another qualifier. Personally, I go for the former, because the cynics out in the literary world (and there are many) need a sharp reminder that the most prestigious poetry prize for a first book has never—never—in its nearly ninety-year history gone to a Chicano/a poet. Not to Gary Soto’s 1977 The Elements of San Joaquin. Not to Lorna Dee Cervantes’s 1981 Emplumada. Not to Alberto Ríos’s 1982 Whispering to Fool the Wind.

After 105 volumes, the 106th finally went to one of ours.

I say ours because one of the deepest pleasures of reading Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning was witnessing its balance, not necessarily between Spanish and English, but between literatures that have historically been indifferent to each other (or, at least, one side certainly has). Carl Phillips, who chose the book for the prize, writes of this as “estrangement,” an apt word to describe the sense of broken family that comes to mind when I think of Chicano literature and its repeated effort to be recognized as inextricably linked to the national conversation.

“The conflation…of Chicano material and traditional material (i.e., white prosody),” writes Phillips, “is an argument for (and enactment of) reconciliation and a reminder of differences…” While Phillips is speaking specifically about a sonnet sequence, the phrasing reminded me all over again of the particular challenge the Chicano/a writer has in reaching a national audience. The indifference toward the material of our cultural lives is so heavy (and downright poisonous in Arizona, where I live) that the pressure put on language and technical mastery can sometimes become all the more difficult to bear.

It’s a rare book that can withstand such a withering scrutiny, and Chicano/a texts get more than a hard once-over before they’re allowed into the spotlight. I think that’s one of the major achievements of this volume: if it’s the command of English you want, ^[1] it’s the command of English you’ll get. The book’s formal energy dictates its success; each poem is rigid in what it might wring out from its attention to various strategies, from the lyric to the elegy. A constellation of terrific ekphrastic^[2] poems (based—quite noticeably—on works by artists of Mexican heritage) signal how deeply wedded the book is to a sense of homage, to its very existence as reliant on the hard, groundbreaking work of previous artists.

Take my favorite poem in the collection, “Variation on a Theme by José Montoya.” From the opening lines, the poem privileged me—a reader of Chicano literature^[3] , a person who could recognize the sonic referent to Montoya’s “El Louie”^[4] immediately, like a song I hadn’t heard in a while. The rhythm was right at the surface of memory; not a line later came “Mister / No Contaron Con Mi Astucia.” Slow Lightning is going to be talked about as a breakthrough book for its audacious and bold placement of Spanish on equal terms with English, and though the code-switching is, in itself, a little dazzling, the real thrill for insider readers is the attention to a Chicano pop vernacular, for lack of a better phrase. Where else in American letters will I get such a generous helping of El Chapulín Colorado, Ester Hernández, ranchera song titles that drum up my own version of Robert Hayden’s Sunday mornings, and Jean Valentine (who I hereby declare an honorary chola)^[5]? It’s an eclectic and decidedly curious mixture but, at least to my eyes, utterly within my understanding, and it’s been a while since a book of poems has assumed I was already on the page (rather than letting me in, as most books tend to do, no matter how good they are).

I read the book on a plane ride from Peoria to Dallas ^[6], thrilled at reading a book I’d been anticipating for a while, but knowing, too, that it had come with a validation very few books get. I would stop after a few poems and reread some, asking myself if some were already jumping past the book and straight into the arms of an adoring audience (on the order of Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” for example, or Sandra Cisneros’s “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me.”) “Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso” might be one of those (it reads so defiantly, yet with a humorous bravado, an ars poetica in showgirl drag).

But my eye settles on page 38, the middle of the Montoya poem, and its breakdown of every father figure who’s ever strutted through a page of Chicano/a literature, bold and breaking, but yearning and conflicted, too. It’s a poem I know my dad could read and make immediate meaning of that assemblage. It’s almost entirely in Spanish—his language!—with just enough English intrusion to remind him that, despite where he is, his words come first. It’s not every book that can do that.

Munro...Murakami...ni modo

1. ^[1] I was recently corrected for enunciating the word our as hour. “Just say are,” I was told. Okay, then. ↩
2. ^[2] At a recent reading at the Tucson Poetry Festival, Corral generously defined ekphrastic to the audience, recognizing that those very formal energies are often exactly what make a general reader assume poetry exists in too-lofty heights. The word refers to a poem created in response to another work of art, like this. ↩
3. ^[3] I am clean and articulate. ↩
4. ^[4] Montoya is a well-chosen subject for homage, given his historical significance to many a Chicano/a writer, yet Corral’s poem also stands as marvelous and sly defense. I’ve trolled my fair share of online poetry debates on what, exactly, political poetry meant, and someone always had a backhanded way of acknowledging Chicano/a “production” from the 1970s, as if the sheer inspirational possibility of hearing someone like you speak from a stage could mean so little. Well, it’s 2012, and now we have some proof of just how vital those poems actually were. Gracias, Don Montoya! ↩
5. ^[5] She’s not quite on the level of Chicano adoration as Morrissey, but give it time. Corral is a fan and so am I and surely other Chicano/a writers will start coming out of the woodwork. Orale, La Dream Barker! ↩
6. ^[6] I bought my two copies (one for my sister, Elisa) at the Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City. Not that they had my books in stock or anything…que gacho, Prairie Lights! But no hard feelings. I still spent over $140 there on about eight books. Because you’re an indie. And I believe in you. Will you believe in me? ↩

Now out in paperback!

Some intriguing and astute items have popped up since the paperback released in mid-March. Among them:

A forcefully brilliant read from the sharp-shooting, hard-hitting blog out of Tennessee, Chapter 16. Gracias, Susannah Felts, for a review I wish I’d had at my disposal last year.

A series of extraordinarily thoughtful questions from a current MFA student at the University of San Francisco, Kristin Seabolt, at the program’s online Switchback. Gracias, Kristin, for treating someone you’d never read before with such curiosity and openness.

Here’s the rest of a quick rundown of some interviews, articles, reviews, and other media for What You See in the Dark, all in a handy-dandy list:

VERY CHOICE BITS

An alumni profile in Harvard Magazine (for all the dirt on how Manuel came from dirt).

A radio interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (if you want to hear Manuel quiver in front of a genius).

A review by the film critic Charles Taylor at the IFC film blog (if you’d like a beautifully argued observation of the novel’s chief aims).

A review by the film critic Miguel Rodriguez at KPBS’s Cinema Junkie (if you’d like a consideration of why Psycho is used as the novel’s cultural touchstone).

An invited blog post at the Library of America (if you’d like to see the debt Manuel owes to the great mind of Gwendolyn Brooks).

Manuel’s Juror Favorite selection from the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (if you’d like proof that Manuel’s literary taste includes something other than his own, and also if you’d like to say you appreciated Matthew Neill Null before everyone else did).

Some pictures of Manuel’s work space (in case you’re curious like that).

SOME INTERVIEWS

An interview conducted by fellow writer Jenny Shank over at New West (if you want the scoop on why the hell Manuel did the second person thing).

An interview at TimeOut Chicago (if you want a precise rundown in a glossy, classy mag).

An interview with the lovely Creosote Journal (if you want some more about how Manuel ran across the Petula Clark/Harry Belafonte moment).

An interview with the very popular film blog, The Film Experience (if you want to hear Manuel go on about Robert Altman and the glory of Nashville again).

An interview with Houston’s OutSmart Magazine (if you’d like to get a read on Manuel’s sometimes testy relationship with queer literature).

A video interview with Park City TV in Utah (if you want to judge how jazz-handy Manuel is on camera, or to admire his scuffed boots).

An interview at La Bloga (if you’d like a take on small-town transgressors and a little cachetada at Obama’s tip-toeing).

SOME PRINT AND MEDIA REVIEWS

They loved it at NPR.

They loved it at Publishers Weekly.

They loved it at O Magazine.

They loved it in Cleveland.

They loved it in Philly.

They loved it in Austin.

They loved it in Chattanooga and in Edmonton, Canada (no, really–there are just no links anymore!)

SOME BLOG POSTS

A playlist of film scores is posted over at Largehearted Boy.

A pairing with Chuck Palahniuk at Beverly in Movieland.

A review by Laura Marris at CultureMob.

A review by Lisa Peet over at Open Letters Monthly.

A review (for realzies!) from the very well-read Backlisted.

A review over at Three Guys, One Book.

I couldn’t have made up a story more scrumptious or unsettling: over the weekend, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu came out amidst allegations that he intimidated his ex-boyfriend, a Mexican national in the U.S. on a visa, with threats to deport him.

Babeu, in a fascinating news conference, came out—and came out fighting. In the face of tough questions (and some of them, frankly, too tangential to his immediate situation, like his stance on gay marriage), Babeu tried to draw an increasingly stark line between the personal and the private, but failed miserably. At issue here isn’t the usual crowing about closeted gay Republicans, but a far deeper issue: abuse of power.

Babeu’s coming out reminded me of New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey’s startling admission that he was resigning back in 2004. I was living in New York at the time and the story was all everyone could talk about (for about two days anyway). McGreevey’s spin on the circumstances had him invoking the now famous (or infamous, if you ask me) “I am a gay American.” Caught up in the spirit of a famous public official declaring himself part of our team, more than a few of my friends were sympathetic to him, but I wasn’t buying it.

What always bothered me about McGreevey’s phrase was that his coming out, brave on the one hand, was still an attempt to garner sympathy by brushing aside his abuse of power. He had resigned, after all, because of an impending investigation into whether or not he had given an important political post to a former lover—not just that he was gay.

In that regard, the allegations against Babeu—and his strategy—are really not different. I’m less titillated these days by yet another Republican making his orientation plain as day, but intrigued as all get-out by Arizona’s vicious anti-immigration atmosphere unexpectedly writhing around with queer desire. If the allegations against Babeu prove true upon investigation, the moral ground will get awfully shaky. There’s nothing like a shell game of personal behavior suddenly exposed by the misuse of an office to keep guarding that privacy.

“Can we expect any more men to come out with similar allegations?” a reporter asked. What did the question mean? Boyfriends might come out of the woodwork, but I hope we won’t miss the point if they do. (The man has a right to his desire.) On the other hand, I won’t know what to make of a whole parade of young Mexican men if they start showing up on TV. (My god if it doesn’t remind me of my own young-pup days in NYC, standing along the bar with a martini and being approached by yet another chinless white man with the worst pickup line of all: “Hola.” “I speak English,” I always told them.)

Shades of J. Edgar! The granddaddy of all closeted power brokers is really only a few steps away from this mess. And hence my inclusion of the 1993 cover to the poet Ai’s Greed, which included two dramatic monologues on Hoover. I suggest you visit your local library, dear reader, if you don’t have Ai on your shelf. You can find the poems in her 1999 Vice as well. They are two vicious poems on the entrapment of self-loathing and how it rarely stays personal. The second poem, “Hoover Trismegistus,” includes a few lines that came to me almost from the moment I saw Babeu in his press conference: “Whether I were Edgar, or Mary / meant nothing to me. / I could be both, couldn’t I?”

Part of the genius of H&M’s Super Bowl underwear ad—featuring a lovingly slow-mo 360-degree view of just about every part of David Beckham’s body you might want to see—is the audience placement. The target audience for the product is men. But for the eyes, it was everyone but straight men.

CNN’s Roland Martin is in justifiably hot water for the following tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!” His apology—in which he lamely and steadfastly defends his statement as one related to soccer passion—makes me wonder if he follows the sport as closely as he claims. Last I checked, Beckham’s hold on soccer is his star wattage outside of the sport, not as a nemesis that would inspire Roland Martin to quiet any Beckham fans in his crowd. Would the lovably dorky Eli Manning have provoked such outrage if he appeared in the same ad? Mass confusion, maybe. But Beckham in his underwear showed Martin what he certainly already knew right down to his bones—the man is hot. Beckham’s stardom has everything to do with his beauty, not his prowess on the field.

Whether Roland Martin likes it or not, his swift (and, yes, homophobic) reaction via Twitter is all about his discomfort with the male body, sexualized and up for grabs in front of the wrong crowd. Or was it the wrong crowd? Most of my gay friends tuned in to the Super Bowl only because of the allure of Madonna’s halftime show. Little did they know that queer desire would crash the party a whole lot earlier.

The purposeful display of Beckham’s body in front a largely male (and straight) audience was one of the most deliciously subversive advertisements in a while. There wasn’t a soccer ball in sight. And hardly even underwear. Nothing like a tweet to call attention to all the heat in the room.

Tucson isn’t the easiest places to see first-run art films, but I’m surprised by how often they actually arrive. I consider myself lucky to have been able to see two prime big-screen movies this year, Tree of Life and Melancholia, as they were meant to be seen, and while each of them held small disappointments, I found them absorbing enough to (sort of) wish for the days when I could attend films like that at a Sunday matinee at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in Manhattan, a nine-block walk from my old apartment, with a little stroll in Central Park to think about whatever it was I had seen.

I’m not that contemplative in Tucson and am not always eager to see something on the big screen in the same way. Walking back out to a parking lot just doesn’t have the same appeal. I’ve been better about movie-going this year, though, and maybe my habits will change now that I’m kicking myself over having missed Poetry.

I’m a sucker for films with prominent female leads, and after the Los Angeles Film Critics voted Yun Jung-hee as Best Actress, the film shot to the top of my Netflix queue. Offhand, I may have been dissuaded from seeing it when print reviews reduced the film to a sober drama about an older woman dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s by taking a poetry class. The story is more complex and riveting than that. The film opens with the discovery of a dead girl floating in a river, and the revelations of how and why she got there are a surprising entry point to the otherwise small drama of Mija, the older woman who gets by a tiny government subsidy and some part-time work taking care of a disabled man.

It was difficult not to think about what some writers might have made of the film’s embrace of poetry and observation as a vehicle for self-discovery. “Writing isn’t therapy,” I remember hearing as an undergraduate, but the privilege of putting words to paper is, in this film, brought back to its humanistic root. It’s treated here as a human urge, mostly ignored, that could provide great solace for its practitioners. Sometimes, for writers at a particular level (especially those of us who teach), it’s easy to forget that the act of writing is, for many, the first experience with truly reckoning the self within the world. Writers might recognize the itch for pastoral as soon as the flowers and trees appear, but for Mija, the exhortation to look and involve herself in making meaning turns her into a sharp observer. While there were many shots of Mija looking up into the shifting leaves of a tree or the petals of a flower before she scribbles away, there were also many camera setups which showed her as a newly keen observer of human nature, perhaps even awed by the difficulty of describing what has always been before her.

Indeed, for many of her classmates in the poetry class—the very act of searching for a subject goes hand in hand with self-determination, if not self-worth. At times, the film cuts to various students defining moments of beauty in their own lives: some struggle, but most come up with something, the building blocks for the single poem each is asked to write by the end of the class. Mija’s own life, though, is filled with far larger complications than her silence can potentially hold; for all its quiet pacing, Yun Jung-hee’s performance is tender-hearted on the surface, but her questions about how and why poetry comes to be voiced become the basis for her startling meditation on how poetry can best serve not her voice, but someone else’s. It’s really quite lovely—and startling—to see her progress toward her final act, all the while with some frustration about how others around her fail to see the world with any complication.

The composition of a key confrontation at the kitchen table brought me back to Tree of Life and Melancholia: I may have been dazzled by the cosmos and an encroaching planet, but the small drama at the head of a meager kitchen table may have rewarded me just as richly if I had given it a chance on the big screen.

In late fall, I had dinner with a Tucson writer friend, Matt Mendez, and his wife, and we talked about the wait for Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection, Before the End, After the Beginning. The book pubbed in November—high-time for the literary world’s big-shot writers—but the end of the semester was getting in the way of my reading time. I was eager to start the book and told Matt that one of the joys of finding it in an actual bookstore rather than ordering it online was the sense of encountering the book as it took its place with its peers. I remember when Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women came out in 2000, with Denise Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante not long after. I was living in Boston at the time and, in both cases, anxiously poked in various bookstores around pub date to see if the books had been shelved. When they finally appeared, I loved how they looked stacked against the rest of the new fiction. I bought the ones I thought hadn’t yet been cracked open by anyone and, each time, went off to a nearby coffee shop to sit and read them. (I still have my Chávez hardcover, but the Gilb was, sadly, borrowed and never returned, even when I asked for it back).

This go-around I read Gilb’s newest book in my hometown of Dinuba, mostly at night after my parents had their fill of telenovelas. Half the pleasure of reading it in Dinuba was the reinforcement of Gilb’s locales (in his case, Texas and the Southwest) and their proximity to the lives and apprehensions I know so well. As much as I hate it when readers talk about “relating” to fiction (since the majority of American fiction gives me absolutely nothing to “relate to” on these easy terms), I felt a luxury of shorthand in just about all of the stories. “I never saw El Paso as poor,” says the narrator of “Blessing,” “and maybe that wasn’t the word, but you’d have to think something like it driving in this Albuquerque neighborhood, even if I didn’t like tract housing and really hated these adobe stuccos.” If tract housing signals “cheap” to middle America, it means something else entirely in places like the ones where Gilb’s characters live (and to a reader like me in Dinuba): it’s a silent signal of credit, access, and security. Home is truly a refuge.

It might be a bit of a stretch to argue that houses are working metaphorically in the collection, but very often Gilb’s protagonists find themselves unwittingly tangled in the lives of neighbors or inside the homes (and the privacy) of people not immediately close to them. Much of the drama spinning around Gilb’s characters comes from the dilemma of how to work back into a space that is one’s own, something to control fully. “I needed the favor because I wasn’t doing well and I’d run out of places to stay and mostly money,” says Billy, as he opens the story “Willows Village,” and right away I was treated to the clean introduction of conflict that every good story demands, if not an odd sentence construction that asked me to pay attention to how Billy would tell his side of things. The father in the brief “His Birthday” does his best to block out the din of the city to create a quiet, intimate celebration for his son on his special day. “Cheap” presents a protagonist who witnesses the overbearing manner of the boss of the two men hired to paint his rooms, and their exchanges become the genesis for a telling final act. Even the compact (and brilliant) “Why Kiki Was Late for Lunch” is built on intrusion: the narrator offers a ride to a complete stranger, only to find himself quickly immersed in the woman’s everyday drama.

For readers already familiar with Gilb, his trademark irony and his continued explorations of a very particular kind of Chicano masculinity are in great supply. Stylistically, the collection doesn’t offer the same verve of his woefully neglected 2008 novel The Flowers, but that’s hardly a complaint. The Flowers rolled the dice on a complex first-person voice for Sonny, a teenager maneuvering his way through a fiasco of violence and sex—the tones were mercurial, sometimes funny, sometimes shaky with Sonny’s lust, or even completely undone by Sonny’s rage. (It’s a novel I’m still waiting for people to read, if only to have a serious talk about its ending. A young undergraduate asked to read the novel with me as part of an independent study, and our discussion was long and fascinating: if you’re teaching, consider picking it up soon. Incidentally, the opening involves Sonny breaking into a house—not to steal, but to observe how other people live, the converse desire to so many of the characters in the new collection.)

But for those who have never encountered Gilb’s work, the entry point may be via a bit of his personal history. The odd typography of the first story, “please thank you,” alerts us to the physical limitations of Mr. Sanchez, recovering from a stroke, as he types out his experience. But while the easy thing might be to bridge immediately to Gilb’s own recent trauma, it may be wiser to listen to the character Gilb has breathed on the page. The draining experience of physical rehab is given no short shrift here, nor are the people who come in and out of Mr. Sanchez’s life as he puts it back together. Take Erlinda, who tells Mr. Sanchez an exasperating anecdote about shopping, then turns to him for a validation he can’t possibly offer. Mr. Sanchez wants out, to be over and done with the experience, yet his discovery is that he is trapped within a knowledge that he’s seemingly always had, maybe even from before the time he needed assistance: “i was someone who didnt matter, who didnt count much,” he tells us in the beginning. “in the large, i know its true. i am a name, just another, one they think is foreign even, when there are so many hurting. but then, so what? i accept it always, in my life, but now too?” Later, when Erlinda seems slighted by his lack of answer, the truth he tells may really be about himself. “you just…move forward. why dwell on that ugliness? youre fine now.”

What makes the line so moving is how accurately it matches the elegiac energy of the final story, “Hacia Teotitlán.” There’s a borrowed room there too, a space where the aging Ramiro returns to Mexico to reminisce and gather himself. If so many of the men in Gilb’s stories have often found themselves in exasperating situations of their own making, these two stories read as antidotes to that inability (or unwillingness) to avoid trouble. This time around, the men are weathered and bruised, and circumstances are demanding that they slow down. Whether it’s possible is another matter—the restlessness of masculinity is the theme of this great, tight collection, and it’s reflected in the urge to keep moving forward, as Mr. Sanchez told Erlinda. “Where will you go?” someone asks Ramiro and the pain comes from knowing the question is nearly rhetorical.

Here’s a quick rundown of some interviews, articles, reviews, and other media for What You See in the Dark, all in a handy-dandy list:

VERY CHOICE BITS

An alumni profile in Harvard Magazine (for all the dirt on how Manuel came from dirt).

A radio interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (if you want to hear Manuel quiver in front of a genius).

A review by the film critic Charles Taylor at the IFC film blog (if you’d like a beautifully argued observation of the novel’s chief aims).

A review by the film critic Miguel Rodriguez at KPBS’s Cinema Junkie (if you’d like a consideration of why Psycho is used as the novel’s cultural touchstone).

An invited blog post at the Library of America (if you’d like to see the debt Manuel owes to the great mind of Gwendolyn Brooks).

Manuel’s Juror Favorite selection from the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (if you’d like proof that Manuel’s literary taste includes something other than his own, and also if you’d like to say you appreciated Matthew Neill Null before everyone else did).

Some pictures of Manuel’s work space (in case you’re curious like that).

SOME INTERVIEWS

An interview conducted by fellow writer Jenny Shank over at New West (if you want the scoop on why the hell Manuel did the second person thing).

An interview at TimeOut Chicago (if you want a precise rundown in a glossy, classy mag).

An interview with the lovely Creosote Journal (if you want some more about how Manuel ran across the Petula Clark/Harry Belafonte moment).

An interview with the very popular film blog, The Film Experience (if you want to hear Manuel go on about Robert Altman and the glory of Nashville again).

An interview with Houston’s OutSmart Magazine (if you’d like to get a read on Manuel’s sometimes testy relationship with queer literature).

A video interview with Park City TV in Utah (if you want to judge how jazz-handy Manuel is on camera, or to admire his scuffed boots).

An interview at La Bloga (if you’d like a take on small-town transgressors and a little cachetada at Obama’s tip-toeing).

SOME PRINT AND MEDIA REVIEWS

They loved it at NPR.

They loved it at Publishers Weekly.

They loved it at O Magazine.

They loved it in Cleveland.

They loved it in Philly.

They loved it in Austin.

They loved it in Chattanooga and in Edmonton, Canada (no, really–there are just no links anymore!)

SOME BLOG POSTS

A playlist of film scores is posted over at Largehearted Boy.

A pairing with Chuck Palahniuk at Beverly in Movieland.

A review by Laura Marris at CultureMob.

A review by Lisa Peet over at Open Letters Monthly.

A review (for realzies!) from the very well-read Backlisted.

A review over at Three Guys, One Book.

From this week’s New Yorker article on Pauline Kael: “In 1970…Kael conned a UCLA assistant professor, Howard Suber, out of publishing an essay on Citizen Kane: she promised a collaboration, vanished with Suber’s proprietary research, and ultimately used it for an extended piece of her own, ‘Raising Kane’ (1971). It’s seen today as one of the defining works of her career.”

She will knock you down...

Kael is great fun to read. She was wrong about a lot of films, but she often wrote about them in a way that was at least half-convincing, if only for the bon mots circling those convictions. Never a fan of Streep, her take on her in The Deer Hunter at least doesn’t confuse the character with the actor: “It’s a testament to Meryl Streep’s heroic resources as a mime that she makes herself felt–she has practically no lines.” And she’s fair in puzzling over why Diana Ross never became a bigger movie star: in reviewing Mahogany, she laments the film’s use of old showbiz tropes and outdated melodrama, and flat-out says that Ross “deserves better than white hand-me-downs.” Her essay, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers” from 1980 seems sadly parallel to the demise of the book business. (I try not to read it too often.)

I have a battered copy of her For Keeps: Thirty Years at the Movies, which I bought from the remainder shelf of Borealis Books in Ithaca years ago, so I may not go in for any of the books that are about to come out in this fall’s Kael revival. But I do have high hopes that we’ll get film critics with renewed interest in her as more than just a figure in their background (some reviewers would do really well to just read her).

If it trickles over into book reviewing, all the better, since so much of it is flat and uninformed. Maybe if you come to a reading some day, dear reader, I can tell you about a particularly lazy one–the rehash of the publicity material that was sent out with the galleys and re-edited as an “interview,” just by adding “said”! And she got paid for it! It’s a great story…

Did any of you read it?

It isn’t the first time that the National Book Awards have been compared to the Oscars, and while that comparison is simply for the sake of dreaming about how books could reach a wider audience, it misses the fact that books take longer to consume, longer to circulate, and longer to assess. The wonderful thing about following smart film blogs like Nick’s Flick Picks or The Film Experience (or the sorely missed *StinkyLulu) is the currency of both the posts and the people reading them. The strong debate about a divisive film is usually had by people who have seen the films. Books rarely have that kind of undivided attention, and even when they do (like last year’s big stink about Franzen), it’s still a conversation largely involving the participation of people who have yet to pick up the title. Who wants to follow that?

So we’re back to reviewers, and we’re back to our dependence on them to do more than react to publishers’ main titles. Over at NPR, Rachel Syme at least asks about book reviewers’ responsibility about “dropping the ball” (though the question ends up being rhetorical more than anything else). One look at the page and you’ll see the book being advertised is Obreht’s. What a surprise. Why not feature Krivak? Or Otsuka? (Why not read Krivak? Or Otsuka? And preferably without a knife out?) When Syme brings up the example of Jaimy Gordon’s reissue of Bogeywoman by Vintage, she describes it as a “fizzle,” insinuating that the NBA’s choice of the McPherson title Lord of Misrule last year was primarily a boost to the little guy. The question (and the ire) here should be on Vintage: did they advertise? Or on reviewers: did anyone pick up Bogeywoman and reassess it in light of Gordon’s new novel? My guess is no, on both counts—that “fizzle,” that failure to catch fire, should reflect on neither Gordon nor the awards, and more on the people who can stoke the flames.

Ultimately, these complaints about the relevance of the Awards have more to do with the shortlist failing to validate the admittedly hard work of the reviewers. I’ve seen the interior of a reviewer’s den: the stacks of publicity envelopes, the galleys, the author info packets. It’s a miracle for a reviewer to cover 30-40 a year if he or she is lucky. I get it, okay? A prize list ends up making that work look futile. But let there be no confusion that a reviewers’ choices about what to cover have little to do with quality or what we should rewarding with culturally significant prizes.

I’ll trust a judge like Yiyun Li or Victor LaValle over a reviewer any day. I’m teaching Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and the day my undergraduates came back after having read her story “Immortality,” I knew something had clicked. Something changed in their perception about what a story could do, what it could offer, and even what they might expect from other stories from here on out. Prize lists function in the same way to a lot of readers—we’re ready to try something new. I’m excited to read Jesmyn Ward and Andrew Krivak and I’m thankful the NBA slate made me aware of them. As for reviewers, yes—you missed these. Look harder next time.

*Film fans should click through on StinkyLulu’s Supporting Actress Sundays, which was once a monthly feature asking readers to revisit and reassess Oscar performances in this particular category. Film nerds like me will find it deeply fun and engaging. It almost inspired me, at one point, to do it with past NBA slates. While the 2001 slate was considered a cakewalk for Franzen at the time, I know a lot of readers who ignored the book pundits for a while and took up some of the other four books on that slate. Dan Chaon, for example. Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me. Those nominations brought them needed readers, and it most assuredly got reviewers, on the next go-arounds with new books, to open the galley package and just give them a goddamn try.