One More Epicycle

The past few weeks have been very crazy, hence my relative quiet: but I have to take this opportunity to congratulate my old net.friend Rebecca Anderson for her being signed to Adams Literary on the strength of her young adult novel Knife.

It was obvious this would happen eventually, and unfortunately I can’t even take credit for being one of a select and farseeing few who recognized her talent all those years ago because, frankly, everyone did.  She’s the only person I know who’s had a line from her fanfiction used and credited in a published novel, which is a testament to how much fun she is as a prose stylist.

Reading her work makes the rest of us better writers.  To this day, when I need to reach for an arresting description of something, I ask myself “what would Rebecca find here?” — find, not see, because one of the strengths of her writing is nonvisual metaphor.  And “to this day” has some weight behind it.  We first started exchanging letters over ten years ago.

I trust that this will be the start of an enjoyable and fruitful career, aside from her full-time job as wife and mother of three; it shouldn’t take long to place the manuscript, and others will soon follow.  To quote myself, though:

[..] I’m still miffed that she hasn’t finished her Holmesfic The Case of the Winning Woman. (It probably won’t be finished before the End of Time, as after her young-adult fantasy novel Knife sells doubtless her editors will ask for more of the same, not Conan Doyle pastiches.)

All I ask — and I know she’s reading this! — is that after establishing herself and getting some books out there, she considers having another look at it.. and no, I’m not going to stop bringing it up.  Poor little orphaned story, someone has to care for it, and if the task falls to the on-call astrophysicist, well, a man has his duties.

I’d go on record with embarrassing (for her) and obvious (for everyone else) predictions of future success, but I think the ship has long sailed on my chance to play prophet where she’s concerned.  Congratulations again to RJA.

Tiresome contrarian that I am, I want to dissent from the general angry astonishment that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has decided to assign James Lileks — arguably the best pure writer in the ’sphere, as my blogroll has described him since my very first post — to beat reporting. But I can’t.

To BEAT REPORTING! As Dave Barry writes:

This is like the Miami Heat deciding to relieve Dwyane Wade of his basketball-playing obligations so he can keep stats.

Sometimes I don’t understand the newspaper business. What’s left of it.

From an outsider’s perspective, this seems like the incomprehensible institutional stupidity that only one familiar with the exploits of Harold Ballard can recognize. At least after correcting for the fact that Ballard knew how to turn a profit, legal or otherwise. I could almost understand laying Lileks off, if it came to that, if I were uninterested in quality and only wanted to control costs — maybe this Ballard analogy is better than I thought! — but transferring one of the great observational columnists of our age to straight reporting?

In what world is that a useful allocation of resources? For Canadian readers, this is like assigning John Stackhouse (probably our best get-his-hands-dirty social-issue investigative reporter) to the business pages. Or getting Rex Murphy to cover varsity sports. An enormous talent, shunted aside into something where his natural ability will nevertheless make him better than most.. but much less than his potential when he’s in his niche.

As yours truly once wrote (kind of a stepdown from Barry, I admit):

My favourite anecdote about Lileks, which captures the esteem in which he’s held by so many of us, comes from Jonah Goldberg. Jonah had gone to give a talk at the University of Minnesota, followed by some pubbing, and guess who dropped by? Lileks described the event afterward, but — as Jonah put it — “he leaves out that he was [..] greeted like Aragorn at the Prancing Pony Inn”. I can understand the reaction of the crowd, and it’s characteristic that it would go unmentioned.

For those who haven’t sampled his brilliance, this post on his great-grandfather is one of my favourites from the last year.

I’m with Hugh Hewitt. This situation is too absurd to last.

I’m also hoping that the best comparison will turn out to be with Canadian journalist Christie Blatchford. After the end of the Conrad Black era of the National Post — i.e. when the Post went Martinite and let go of most of its best columnists — they also fired Blatchford. Recognizing their luck, i.e. their competitors’ idiocy, the Globe and Mail wasted no time in picking her up. She’s since been one of their best writers, both in her crime reporting and in her Afghanistan series.

This shall not stand! It can’t. It’s too lame.