***
update and correction, 9/29/10: leigh alexander probably uses female pronouns (i guess so after someone used them in reference to her after i asked his opinion of her essay), so i've changed all the potentially contentious/offending words in this post from yesterday. heaps of thanks to everyone who read this post then saw me last night and didn't say anything. or not maybe.***
there's much ado about irony in leigh alexander's
response to charles bock's
nyt review of
richard yates at 'thought catalog.' alexander begins
hisher essay by challenging bock's use of "ironic" in the opening paragraph of his review, comparing it to the (as
heshe sees it) equally amorphous but media ready term "hipster," which, of course, is often used in close association with the more ironic (read here as "self-consciously mocking/tongue-in-cheek) uses of irony (ref. this blog).
unfortunately, alexander's liberal use of single quotation marks makes it difficult to tell where
he'sshe's quoting from bock's review from where
he'sshe's attempting to imbue certain terms with the significance of a contemporary cultural consensus; to force a general acceptance of a definition, so to speak -- or perhaps just to color the quoted terms with some sort of irony. as a result, though
heshe makes a case for the significance of tao lin's novel beyond just its characteristic language (a case that could probably be argued more strongly if that language were treated as a reflection of the significance), alexander blurs
hisher audience's focus on
richard yates and veers toward diatribe instead.
no, i still haven't read the book; although i'll hear tao lin read
from it tonight at reading frenzy (7 p.m., 921 sw oak). but as such (and being familiar with other of lin's works), i'd venture to say that i'm a respectably impartial judge of the efficacy of the different arguments being made around this new book. maybe i'll be inspired after tonight and read the book. we'll have to let the fire die down at some point.
in the meantime, the mediation. alexander's essay does make one solidly cogent point, even if it's only the linguistic one (let's just agree to accept the premise of this,
hisher final paragraph, so that we don't have to countenance any possible fallacy of logic):
"Mr. Bock’s review, with its visible resentment, inaccuracies and naked anxiety, might be the largest item of evidence extant speaking to the relevance and efficacy of
Richard Yates. And therein, at last, lies the quintessentially most-correct definition of ‘ironic.’"
right on, leigh. although...ironically(?), for an article titled "Charles Bock’s
NYT Review Of
Richard Yates Seems Angry, Factually Inaccurate," your response seems maybe too, um, angry.
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