Two Grumps and a Farewell

Three things today:

First: What the heck is it that attracts people to the Olympics? Of all the events in the world of sports, the Olympics - both summer and winter - seem to me to be the most yawn-inducing.

One of my cow-orkers summed up the Olympics today as (to paraphrase) "all the tedium of sports combined with all the joys of nationalism." One of my readers - who is Swedish, and who read a similar comment from my own fingers in an e-mail exchange we had recently - said this seems like a very American view of the Olympics. Well, I neither deny nor regret that. Considering how heavily the Olympics seems to bend over backwards in the spirit of peace and unity, its very premise - athletic competition among various nations - seems fundamentally divisive.

Maybe the participating athletes see it differently, but, you know, athletes don't really wield a lot of power or influence in any nation, that I know of.

I can sort of get behind the essential athletic feats performed in the Olympics: The effort to be stronger, or faster, or to leap or fly farther than any other human has ever done. I don't find it very interesting as theater, though. I'm just as happy - happier, even - to read in the paper that somewhat set a new 100-meter dash record, or whatever.

"Sports" like figure skating, which seem based entirely on style (and, therefore, which are judged entirely on opinion) lose me, though. I mean, I don't care for dancing (either doing it, or watching it), and figure skating is essentially a specialized form of dancing, but as a competition, it seems arbitrary at best. And yet it's a hugely popular Olympic event. I don't get it.

My favorite Olympic events - if you can call them my favorites - are bobsledding and the luge, both of which seem to carry the vicarious thrill of a roller coaster. But I doubt I'll watch even those.

Maybe I'm just a big grump about this, but I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Speaking of being a big grump, I'm about to Speak Ill of Another Human Being.

Still, I figure she can take it. After all, she is the #1 reviewer (as measured by customer ratings of whether her reviews are "helpful") on Amazon.com: Harriet Klausner.

I've been doing reviews for Amazon for a while, depending on whether I feel I have anything to say about a book or CD. If you read Amazon reviews - especially the science fiction ones - though, you're bound to come across one of Klausner's 2800+ reviews. Eventually, I decided that anyone who's both so prolific (she seems to read about 5 books a day, and write reviews for all of them) must be worth a look, so I checked out a number of her reviews.

It was a strange experience. Of the 100 or so reviews that I skimmed, only one of them had a rating below 4 stars. Does she not dislike any books? Does she actually read three times as many books as it seems and only reads reviews of ones she likes? If she never shows any evidence that she dislikes any books, how can we use her reviews as a valuable yardstick to decide what's worth reading?

It also seems like all of her reviews follow the same formula: Two paragraphs of plot summary (plot summary? On a site which is rife with plot summaries?), followed by a short paragraph extolling the virtues of the book in broad terms. Unless all you're looking for is a plot summary, it doesn't seem like there's much of value in her reviews, either to guide the reader to decide whether he's like to read the book, or (perhaps more importantly) to spur the reader to think about the book's issues in a new way or suggest that the book has something novel and important to say.

In fact, after reading a couple of dozen of her reviews, I started to wonder whether she was really a cadre of book publishers' representatives pushing their own books under guise of a pseudonym. But, no, this Web site makes it pretty clear that she's a real person.

I have a correspondent who is also a science fiction writer, and we recently had an exchange about reviews. I said that I find writing reviews to be harder than it looks. It's easy to say that I liked a book, but much harder to explain why, to really capture the texture of what made the book exciting. (The same goes for books I dislike, and even for the large majority of books which I find fall in the middle.) He - generously - said that he felt I did a pretty good job of explaining these things, and that I at least clearly tried to explain why I felt a certain way rather than resorting to invective. (I'd characterize maybe a third of my reviews as "good", and the other two-thirds mostly as "practice".)

As a customer of Amazon's, I actually find well-written reviews to be very useful. It's obviously the sheer quantity of Klausner's reviews which attracted my attention, and I guess I found it dismaying that they seem more quantitative than qualitative. In the shadow of her work, can my reviews do any good?

The truth, though, is that I write reviews (just like this journal) primarily because I enjoy doing it. I occasionally get feedback from readers about them, which I always enjoy (whether they agree with me or not). Lately I've started getting a number of requests from students for me to help them with their book reports on Robertson Davies' Fifth Business (despite the fact that I feel it's one of my weakest reviews). That's been rather entertaining.

But I guess if Klausner enjoys writing her reviews then I oughtn't chastise her. However, I do honestly feel she'd do her readers better service by writing one-fourth as many reviews and putting four times the effort into each one.

Finally, here's something I bet you didn't know: For the last 26 years, one of the top leaders at DC Comics (publisher of Superman, Batman, and a bunch of other characters who are more familiar names than many U.S. Presidents) has been a woman. And last week it was reported that Jenette Kahn is stepping down as President and Editor-in-Chief of the company.

I'll readily admit that I know fairly little about Kahn. Unlike her Ed-in-Chief counterparts at Marvel - Jim Shooter in the early 80s, and Joe Quesada today - Kahn has always kept a low profile where the fans are concerned. She wrote a few columns in DC Comics in the mid-70s (click on the caricature of Kahn to the right to see the column which I remember most vividly as introducing me to her, reprinted from the March, 1977 issue of Justice League of America, #140), but otherwise she's worked largely behind-the-scenes, first as publisher, and then as president.

And yet, I can only imagine that her influence has been profound in that time. In the mid-1970s, DC was commercially and critically a second-banana to Marvel comics, despite its well-known figures and the backing of Time Warner. 1978 saw DC's first attempt to reclaim its title as the foremost comics publisher in America, through the "DC Explosion". In retrospect, this plan to vastly increase its product line seems like DC trying to flood the market with books, and like Marvel's similar attempt in the 1990s it failed badly, though the causes of the "DC Implosion" have always been murky to me. (Poor planning? Poor execution? Shipping disruptions due to the Blizzard of '78 in the northeast? Beats me.)

The 1980s saw DC surge back the way every company ultimately surges ahead in this industry, though: Through quality production. DC hired the best writers and artists, from Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, to Frank Miller and Alan Moore, and in a very real sense many of the mainstream comics today are based on the groundwork laid by the company at that time. And I think it's beyond question that many of the best comics in history have been published by DC in the last 20 years: Dark Knight; Watchmen; Swamp Thing; Sandman. It's quite a legacy.

It's strange to think that at the time Kahn joined DC, I'd been reading comics for maybe just a year - I was only 7 years old. Since then I've grown up, with all that that implies, but I'm still here, still reading comics produced under Kahn's oversight.

So even though I don't know the details, I feel certain I have something to thank her for. So: Thank you, Ms. Kahn. I hope the last 30 years of DC comics have been even half as much fun on your end as they have been on mine.