I have always thought that music about other music is among the most absurd things masquerading as art, but today I realized something which is going to require me either to accept an unpleasant truth about myself, or to acquiesce to the self-referential mania of pop music.  As I read White Oleander (NAMMP!  How we all crave validation of our tastes…), getting high from the blur of titles, the dizzying array of literary figures furiously flung at me, I realized that this, too, was a form of genre-promoting inbreeding.  It is not at all obvious whether literature which promotes other literature is any different than music which promotes other music, and since I consider the nepotistic tendencies of certain music distasteful, I must – though with regret – entertain the notion that some of my favorite name-dropping books are morally equivalent.

Why do I, as the reader, take such pleasure in the references, paeans, and sometimes outright lists of writers and works I find in books which are, in most instances, saturated with character, plot, meaning, conflict, delicious sass and wit?  Shouldn’t I judge the work based on the original content, instead of being influenced by the spate of great names it might invoke?  And while I can muster a few defenses of this practice, they all sound weak, even to me.  So let me be the first to say, I am a hypocrite, because I hate it when Eminem talks about Dre but I love it when Fitch talks about Proust.