And don’t you dare associate me with critics! I’m one with the teeming masses, I am …

Hey — and, beware, a semi-Serious question coming your way — isn’t America a bit of a special case? Nearly all of what has become our own particular arts-canon started off as commercial, or as popular. Our high-art tradition is a rather minor and always beleaguered one, where our folk and commercial arts have had a lot of gung-ho energy behind them. “Huckleberry Finn” is basically a kids’ adventure novel. Duke Ellington was composing and performing dance music for sweaty crowds. Cary Grant and Howard Hawks were doing their best to make crowd-pleasers. And we’d be dumb, and we’d be denying ourselves a lot of pleasure, if we quarreled with this. (And yes, I know that a lot of what we now think of as Euro high arts weren’t created as High Art. America still takes the commercial thing to an extreme.)

Yet how to handle this, so far as the lightweight/heavyweight thing goes? Do we proclaim Cary Grant a “great artist” and then discuss his work in sombre tones? We’d be missing the point, no? Yet, y’know, it looks to me like maybe he really was a great artist. And maybe it’s worth spending a little time looking at his work and thinking about it and discussing it, and even “appreciating” its virutes and maybe even learning from it some. Yet we have to avoid getting too damn sombre about it, no?

I dunno what to make of all this, do you? I tend to conlude that it’s less about making “objective” judgments and more about how we take these things. You aren’t going to have an emotionally wrenching Dostoeyevskian experience watching “Topper.” You’re going to have something else completely. Yet maybe it’s pretty great in its own right.

“About a Boy” is an example of “lad lit,” although most are not as popular.

Akaky, I really thnklo.gm* .2
g’er

;;;;;;;;;rg
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My first concern is colours. Chick-Lit seems to favour covers with variations of pink. What would Hung-Like-A-Hamster-Lit favour? Blue is my guess, but what shades? Indigo seems too depressing. Robin’s egg perhaps too light-in-the-loafers? I just don’t know.

I think the main character in such fiction should be unattached - but in what way? In a divorced/separated kind of way? Or in a single (as in bachelor) kind of way? And what would his profession be?

And how much emphasis on back-page classifieds of the “enhancement” variety should there be?

I’m puzzling over all these issues; I have no answers. But if Hung-Like-A-Hamster-Lit can make a go, I think it will owe a great debt to Chick-Lit for blazoning the publishing trail.

I’m enthused. I think this would address an underserved market (underserved in many ways). I’m already imagining the dialogue:

“Just who do you think you’re going to satisfy with that?”

“Why, me, madam. Me!”

(Apologies for all the comments I’ve added, but I do enjoy this topic.)

(We also publish guy-lit books — I used to refer to them as “the A Team meets Rambo” stories.)