Hey Hookrz!, it’s a new day and we are premiere-ing a new feature on QBAH2. Lick My Crit is where we take one of our favorite books and anal-ize it, like the smart people do. Up first is Brett with his critique of a generational masterpeace (sic): LA Candy’s by Lauren Conradz.
Every generation, a writer of superior skill, tact and talent comes along and not only redefines the idea of literature itself but is successful at shepherding us into a new artistic age. Much like the Industrial Revolution which required the sheer force of metal upon metal of new machinery, this writer-revolutionary acts as forceful Sherpa to those of us in the art world and provides us with a conception of the world in a way that no one has ever seen or witnessed before.
Of course, this requires many ingredients to the literary recipe, one of which is considerable risk on the part of the literarian. In this case, we are talking about a writer who, despite convention, has done the unimaginable: she has created a book with no plot, no character development, some could even say no words. Much like the grands oeuvres of Marguerite Duras which were called, in retrospect, “fatigue literature” due to the fact that fatigue itself, of the characters, of their surroundings, even of the words on the page, held a special place in the unraveling of the story, this work will one day be recognized as “static literature”. The static nature of this book is its personality.
The book I am speaking about is LA Candy by Lauren Conrad.
With its redefinition of language, its world within a world, its considerably risky approach to “literature”, and its complete refusal to bear reverence to anything that came before it in the annals of literary history, LA Candy forces us, as a society, toward progress and it moves Art (with a capital A) onto its next phase.
Before I read a few selections, I leave you with this thought: Ultimately, literature is always about shared experience. Such experience not only reveals us to ourselves but teaches us what it means to be human.
