over at hobart, jed berry has challenged all comers to a literary feud. at least that’s how i read it, though the way he describes it, it sounds a little bit, i don’t know, civil or something. probably a rope-a-dope. either way i won’t be taking him up on his offer because jed is so nice that i don’t know if i’d be able to get up the head of steam i’d need to properly feud with him and also because i suspect he’d crush me in his own dandy-ish way. so it falls to you. go on, make your name.
here is where, if i did the internet right i would jump to wikipedia and provide a fascinating list of past literary feuds. instead i will consider who i might like to feud with. this is tough because, well because most writers are complete idiots (i would say “these days,” but i don’t know what it was really like before these days) and also, as anyone who has been in an mfa program in the last, say, 20 years will tell you, while there’s plenty of gossip and backbiting among writers, it’s almost impossible to get any two to disagree in public about anything substantive. i mean, even dale peck’s celebrated “hatchet job” on rick moody was really more like a high school basketball coach’s motivational speech — “i’m so hard on you ‘cuz i expect better, kid.”
you guys are doing it wrong
so, then, feuds:
my earliest ideas for feuds were on some “kill your idols” type shit (anxiety of influence without the anxiety or influence; oedipus complex without the oedipus complex plus more complexity). they were, in this order:
- bradford morrow
- david foster wallace
- mary karr
- brian evenson
morrow was a professor where i did undergrad. i considered him my nemesis because he never once let me into his workshop. he got off the feud list because, though he’s an accomplished novelist, he’s best known as an editor,and i wanted this to be, not just strictly a literary, but a writer feud. david foster wallace was eligible until we lost him. (i mean that respectfully — he was an amazing writer and i regret never having met him and i’m sorry for the suffering he endured.) mary karr is brilliant and i bet a great feuder who probably fights dirty. in grad school i watched her get brutal over some saint augustine. unfortunately, we have zero interests in common, so i would get preoccupied by sitting back and letting her do her thing, i.e., it would be entirely aesthetic. brian evenson is, i think, probably the best writer of his generation, but presents the opposite conundrum karr does — i agree with pretty much everything he says, which would make for a suck feud. evenson would be still be eligible if he would launch the first attack, but it would have to be about something important to me, like me or one of my friends.
with feuds, though, it’s better to stick to your generation.
probably my best feud option, peer-wise, would be adam levin. we’re evenly matched intellectually (i hope he doesn’t mind my saying that) and we like and dislike a lot of the same stuff. even better, we attack from different angles — i’m a philosophy/theology guy (kierkegaard!) and adam’s a psychology/social sciences master (skinner!) — and usually end up converging on the same place: the effectiveness of sentences, the need for a book to justify its existence, the minutiae of judeo-christian law, etc.
unfortunately, adam is the guy whose huge manuscript i posted about a while back. that manuscript has since been accepted and will be a book soon (best news!), so it would look pretty disengenuous if we started feuding now. lack of forsight on my part. not to mention, everyone who knows me knows he’s among my best friends.
this is harder than it seemed like it would be. i should have just gone the fascinating list of literary feuds route.
okay, here’s one: keith gessen. i think he’s the best critic of his generation and a very good fiction writer. he also has feuded well before (though he acted kind of mellow when his book came out). here is a list of reasons i would feud with him if he still has the eye of the tiger:
- he’s dismissive of the style i write in. i think. maybe just of my writing.
- his co-editor on n + 1, marco roth, just won a pew fellowship whereas i was only a finalist.
- in his book, he quoted an obscure song from a rap mix i gave him, but did not acknowledge me as the rap authority i am in said book.
i know that these are incredibly petty reasons for a feud, but feuds are often started for incredibly petty reasons. so i am willing, for the sake of literature.
