{"id":1793,"date":"2007-01-04T09:58:10","date_gmt":"2007-01-04T14:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/wordpress\/?p=1793"},"modified":"2007-01-04T09:58:10","modified_gmt":"2007-01-04T14:58:10","slug":"catalogers-as-critics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/catalogers-as-critics\/","title":{"rendered":"Catalogers as Critics?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/12\/31\/books\/review\/Weiland.t.html\">In reviewing Kockroach by Tyler Knox<\/a> in the December 31 NYTimes Book Review, Matt Weiland writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nOur finest literary critics hold no endowed chairs and never win prizes, yet their work has the poetry of truth about it and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nobody better at answering the fundamental question about any book, a question always more interesting and always harder to answer than whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s any good: what is it really about? I mean, of course, the anonymous librarians who prepare the Cataloging in Publication data for the Library of Congress, the brief descriptive classifications that appear on the copyright page of most books. Is there a more succinct description of John Updike\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Rabbit, Run\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Middle class men \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? What writer doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t envy the economy and force of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Massacres \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for Cormac McCarthy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Blood Meridian\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Industrial accidents \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for Don DeLillo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153White Noise\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? And will there ever be a finer gloss on Marilynne Robinson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Housekeeping\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Eccentrics and eccentricities \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In reviewing Kockroach by Tyler Knox in the December 31 NYTimes Book Review, Matt Weiland writes: Our finest literary critics hold no endowed chairs and never win prizes, yet their work has the poetry of truth about it and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nobody better at answering the fundamental question about any book, a question always more interesting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-literature","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}