Both Steve Almond and Mark Sarvas have been guests on Pinky’s Paperhaus. Today they are bickering (Steve in Salon, Mark on his blog). But I think they are both quite excellent, as repellent as I’m sure that may be to either of them.
Here is where Mark is right: he can dislike Steve Almond’s writing all he wants and can blog his opinion. No feud, just Mark blogging about a writer, as he blogs about a zillion other writers.
Here is where Steve is right: litbloggers are a concentrated community that can be very closed. Sometimes it seems like a terrifically smart group of 15 people all talking to each other and nodding in agreement.* And I think Steve may be right in saying that blogging keeps people from the work of their "real" writing. Anyone who says it doesn’t isn’t being honest, or doesn’t have a day job.
But Mark is wrong in saying that Steve swipes at Tod Goldberg, who he only compliments. And it was a mistake for him to turn off the comments on his blog.
And Steve scoffs at Mark being a galvanizing force in the literary community of Los Angeles, which Mark indeed is. Not to mention characterizing LA as a place where books are "a minor cultural curiousity," which is about as gracious as coming over to visit, drinking our booze and then pissing on our begonias.
Steve is right: Mark is pretentious. But his peculiar self-effacing pretentiousness makes him immensely readable while giving his blogging a gravitas that attracts the bigshot book review editors (and friends like this, this and this). This may make Mark uncool to Steve Almond, but dude, I recommend staying out of the cooler-than-you ring, because there’s always someone younger, wittier and (forgive me boys, but you drove me to it) endowed with a bigger dick who will come along and knock you out on your ass.
Drop into the library to check out their shows. They both have fabulous voices, decent taste in music and strong opinions. If either of them will still speak to me, I’d be proud to buy them a drink of their choice.
Finally, I would have gotten this up sooner, but I have a day job.
*Or maybe not: the Almond portion of this tempest in a teapot is now assigned reading in a class at SUNY Cortland.
