I could never review a book. I’m a “if you can’t say anything nice…” guy so even if I decide to provide only good reviews, doesn’t that destroy credibility? Welp, hats off to you for putting in the good work.
There are some great Deadwood books, in fact. Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills is gorgeous, by David Milch himself, and was made relatively close to when the series was, so there’s less lost to time then accounts made 10 or 10 years later (but less juicy gossip).The Deadwood Bible by Matt Zellers Stetz just has a shitton of information, and I think might stand as the “final word” on the series. And Milchs memoir has some good Deadwood stuff in it in terms of the series Inspiration, and the feeling of when the show was actually being made.
I’ll be doing my first review this summer and hope I do it justice like you’ve done so many times for all us Substack writers. We appreciate you Vinny!
"Unmoored from the financial incentives of the wider publishing world, where does one draw the line between being a ‘good literary citizen’ who wants to encourage art and artists, and being an honest voice of critique both for readers and for writers?"
The simplest way might be to focus on just pointing at the stuff you think is worth reading. The rest probably doesn't need your attention, or mine.
Hey V> Good luck in the new workspace. Not sure if this helps, but I made it a point not to be one of those academics who wrote about the works and authors I didn't consider worthy of my time. But some of the ones I DID consider worthy of my time were "failures" -- meaning they bit off more than they could chew, but, goddamn, they were doing something interesting all the same, and new. I loved trolling for 18th c American novelists who were trying so hard to get the genre going here, and, yeah, failing for a reason. The 19th c guys would come along and do the job. But shoutout to the proto-punk novelists of the 18th c., who, admittedly, got a lot wrong, but let's look at what they got right. I mean, there's a reason Poe was big fan of Charles Brockden Brown, the 18th c horror novelist who just had to give up in despair. So you don't have to flee SS novels that have problems but, looked at by younger writers, can teach us something about where things may be going here if we don't allow SS to just become some snooty shade of vanilla. Next, my habit was to decide, hey, can I cheerlead this writer, what things they ARE TRYING TO do to push this experiment forward? If not, I simply didn't write about them. I wrote about the ones who intrigued me. Bottom line: MOST OF THE BANDS THAT PLAYED AT CBGB's in the 70s STUNK. I[m serious. But then there were ones who needed paying attention to, even if they were a little rough. Precisely because they were a little rough.
Entertaining, as always. If you enjoy well-written history, I really learned a lot (and actually enjoyed) The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine.
Yo Vinny, have you read Disrupted by Dan Lyons? He was a magazine writer who got laid off and ended up being the “new guy” at HubSpot, a tech startup that basically is a data harvesting tool. I feel like it would resonate with you
I could never review a book. I’m a “if you can’t say anything nice…” guy so even if I decide to provide only good reviews, doesn’t that destroy credibility? Welp, hats off to you for putting in the good work.
There are some great Deadwood books, in fact. Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills is gorgeous, by David Milch himself, and was made relatively close to when the series was, so there’s less lost to time then accounts made 10 or 10 years later (but less juicy gossip).The Deadwood Bible by Matt Zellers Stetz just has a shitton of information, and I think might stand as the “final word” on the series. And Milchs memoir has some good Deadwood stuff in it in terms of the series Inspiration, and the feeling of when the show was actually being made.
Thanks for the recs!
I’ll be doing my first review this summer and hope I do it justice like you’ve done so many times for all us Substack writers. We appreciate you Vinny!
Knockemstiff should pair nicely with masculine. Glad the book came in!
"Unmoored from the financial incentives of the wider publishing world, where does one draw the line between being a ‘good literary citizen’ who wants to encourage art and artists, and being an honest voice of critique both for readers and for writers?"
The simplest way might be to focus on just pointing at the stuff you think is worth reading. The rest probably doesn't need your attention, or mine.
Hey V> Good luck in the new workspace. Not sure if this helps, but I made it a point not to be one of those academics who wrote about the works and authors I didn't consider worthy of my time. But some of the ones I DID consider worthy of my time were "failures" -- meaning they bit off more than they could chew, but, goddamn, they were doing something interesting all the same, and new. I loved trolling for 18th c American novelists who were trying so hard to get the genre going here, and, yeah, failing for a reason. The 19th c guys would come along and do the job. But shoutout to the proto-punk novelists of the 18th c., who, admittedly, got a lot wrong, but let's look at what they got right. I mean, there's a reason Poe was big fan of Charles Brockden Brown, the 18th c horror novelist who just had to give up in despair. So you don't have to flee SS novels that have problems but, looked at by younger writers, can teach us something about where things may be going here if we don't allow SS to just become some snooty shade of vanilla. Next, my habit was to decide, hey, can I cheerlead this writer, what things they ARE TRYING TO do to push this experiment forward? If not, I simply didn't write about them. I wrote about the ones who intrigued me. Bottom line: MOST OF THE BANDS THAT PLAYED AT CBGB's in the 70s STUNK. I[m serious. But then there were ones who needed paying attention to, even if they were a little rough. Precisely because they were a little rough.
Entertaining, as always. If you enjoy well-written history, I really learned a lot (and actually enjoyed) The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine.
Yo Vinny, have you read Disrupted by Dan Lyons? He was a magazine writer who got laid off and ended up being the “new guy” at HubSpot, a tech startup that basically is a data harvesting tool. I feel like it would resonate with you
I haven’t, but sounds interesting. I’ll check it out!