If you think the NYT Derrida obit was harsh …

It’s interesting that the foremost academic blog has had exactly one post responding to Derrida’s death (by my count — that being a simple announcement that it had occurred), and that this post itself does little other than repeat an exaggeration of the customary half-informed “critiques” of deconstruction, albeit ironically.

Another possible course of action would have been to link to the many thoughtful, informed responses to his work throughout the blogosphere, by Daniel Green, Tim Burke, Lars Iyer, etc., etc., etc.

Many of those who wrote such pieces have a relatively small readership, and it would have been nice for their reflections to be rewarded with the extra traffic a Crooked Timber link could generate.

But anyway.

Whether you are the “foremost academic blog” or you “have a relatively small readership”: we will evalulate what you say, not based on who you are.

Adam

If you check the post, you’ll see that it was updated to link to Scott McLemee’s long obituary. But there’s a more straightforward response – none of us are literary critics, or engaged in fields that have been directly touched by Derrida’s work (John Holbo has an interest in this, but it’s primarily a personal one). I think that it’s a bit much to expect us to be able to respond at length to someone who we may not necessarily know much about. As should have been clear from the initial post, I didn’t much like the NYT obit – but I’m not qualified to provide an alternative take by any stretch of the imagination. Nor do I think that we should have an obligation to search for other blogs writing on this – if someone had brought them to my attention, I would have happily linked from my original post – but we only have so many hours in the day, and, to be honest, I usually prefer to blog about the stuff that I know about and enjoy (or at least feel that I can comment on in a semi-intelligent manner).

asg – Koontz seems from all accounts to be a nice guy, and has a fondness for Tim Powers, which argues for some taste. But my candid opinion is that his books suck. I speak from experience – I spent some time in Florence with access to little reading material other than Koontz, and didn’t much care for it. He’s responsible for one of the worst sentences I have ever read; from _Phantoms_;

bq. Somewhere in Snowfield, were there living human beings who had been reduced to the awful equivalent of foil-wrapped Pop Tarts, waiting only to provide nourishment for some brutal, unimaginably evil, darkly intelligent, other-dimensional horror?

I submitted that one to David Langford’s infamous overview of bad genre writing, “Thog’s Masterclass”:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible/a128.html – as far as I remember it made it into a sort of Thog’s greatest hits at a later stage.

If you think the NYT obit was snarky, have a look at this week’s Economist.

I assumed that ‘moderncrusader’ was another Landover Baptist type thing. It isn’t. Crooked Timberites should watch out – this site on on the Enemies List!

Henry — I’d agree that, when lined up against the better sf writers, Koontz is wanting. And it’s true most of his books are simply crap. It’s funny you should quote “Phantoms” because I loved that one, although the fact that I was in ninth grade when I read it may have something to do with that (same goes for “Twilight Eyes”, which struck me as wonderful in high school but when I picked it up again a few years ago I couldn’t stomach it at all). That is a pretty horrific sentence, though.

Still, he has had his moments. I rather liked “The Servants of Twilight”, which is one of the scariest books about religious fanaticism I’ve ever read, and the one about voodoo was also just Lovecraftian enough to be enjoyable.

I enjoy Koontz at his best, but he has a great range of quality. In his Ace Doubles days he once wrote of “laser cannons belching corrosive froth.”