let me skip the apologies and explanations because even if i was too busy to write anything here i was still reading and thinking and i want to tell you about it.
one of the things i was thinking about was young writers. because, well because i used to be one. and from some angles i suppose i might be for a couple more years, though i don’t feel like one and i definitely won’t feel like one when my boy gets here. (he is such a freedom-lovin’ dude.) and also because the new yorker did another 20 under 40.
listen, i didn’t actually spend much time thinking about the new yorker‘s list, at least not as list. the general consensus is it was safe, predictable, boring, and that is all true. i tried reading the jonathan safran foer story but it was a sappy piece if shit and i don’t feel the need to justify that conclusion.
but i was interested in your reactions. the one that amused me the most was the whole “why 40?” thing. and then the suggestions that there should be an over 40 thing. which is stupid, because we already have a bunch of over 40 lists — they’re called major prize shortlists. and they come with actual scratch. even that hot young thing that won the pulitzer this year was 43. for real kids, quit with the slave morality. be more like my son wes.
tell 'em, kid.
anyway, i was thinking about the age thing because at the exact time the new yorker list was coming out i was reading a book called Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World. here, have some backstory –
the book is by a friend of mine, lee klein. you probably know him from his role as editor of eyeshot where he worked (and rumor has it will work again) tirelessly to teach the internet to write right and to keep it honest. lee and i mostly end up meeting up accidentally (it’s philly) and then accidentally get drunk. once when we were drunk he mentioned a book he had written that you couldn’t find anymore because there were only ever a few hundred copies printed and he seemed to have disavowed it or was embarrassed.
well, when i went to chicago in april (chicago was awesome by the way, those dudes are just the best), i found a shiny new copy at myopic and bought it thinking i could read it and maybe tease lee a little. but then i read it and it was good. and it was completely of its time (1997-ish) and of its author’s age (mid-20s-ish).
it’s as exuberantly overwritten and self-conscious as it’s title (both to its credit). a series of seemingly fact-based but highly mythologized vignettes about a young man who, having taken a series of dead-end jobs after college, moves home to jersey in order to save up enough money to spend three years in south america developing the tenets of egotourism, which is pretty much what it sounds like and what most people actually do when they travel. imagine someone with an intellect and background much like david foster wallace’s planning to recreate the beat ethos while knowing that it’s too late in history for that and you’ll have a sense of the book as a whole. and of course, he never makes it out of jersey.
there’s a piece in there called “Here’s Something I’ve Typed Up So If One Day You’re Staring at the Center of My Face & Feel Compelled to Ask I Can Just Give You This So I Won’t Have to Repeat the Same Story for the Hundredth Time & Thereby Risk Losing All Sorts of Valuable Soul Points.” the title basically dares you to call it too clever and be annoyed before you start, but the piece itself is actually a great yarn about “toasting Satan with tribute bands and keg beer. A rite of past-time, a hallowed passage in this state of New Jerusalem.”
what i find impressive about this section, and much of the book, is the way lee balances this consuming self-consciousness (the title) with the desire to tell a story (it really is about a party with a black sabbath tribute band) with prose that reflects deep, but young, thinking about that balance. the language gets religious in that last fragment, but look, it’s a rite of past-time, not pastime, because the narrator has a sense of nostalgia for things as they happen, and because he’s trying to connect his own experience to something bigger because our generation didn’t get awesome wars or boar hunting. and then you get the visual pun on new jersey that does a really brilliant job of expressing the creepy, almost occult fondness that everyone from jersey has for it.
but mostly it does a better job of evoking what it was like to be a middle class twenty-something in the nineties than anything i’ve read aside from maybe the eggers book (and this was apparently written two years before the heartbreaking work, though published several years after) (i mean there was something in the air).
lest it seem like i’m just blowing sunshine up my neighbor’s ass, i’ll point out that there’s too much book here, that he could have cut out at least a half dozen vignettes and it would probably have been stronger, and that, while i would argue with anybody for the book’s literary merits on the level of prose and as a sociological document, it would probably rub just about anyone non-white, non-middle-class, or over forty the wrong way.
but this is exactly why i decided to write a long-ass post about an out-of-print book that even it’s author doesn’t seem to think much of anymore:
because when i got in trouble in high school for writing self-indulgent, allegorical stuff in english class, my teacher suggested i read an exemplary story by a classmate. it was about a middle-aged man going through his attic, reminiscing about how great high school was. and because in college and grad school we were discouraged from writing young (not from writing about youth, but from writing about youth like young people). and also because keith gessen’s book, while flawed and maybe less ambitious than i’d ultimately like to see from him, was ballsy just for being about “sad young literary men” and he got shat on for it, while jonathan safran foer gets dap for twee shit that isn’t actually like any conscious young person’s actual experience but more like what somebody wishes youth had been like and his wisdom is pure funk-faking. and because it is good to think that this side of paradise is fitzgerald’s best book when you’re fifteen and then realize that gatsby is way better when you’re thirty.
take it from an old guy, okay?
soon i will write about another book by a very young person that you were also wrong about.
yo dogg. welcome back. missed you.
thanks, dude. happy to be back.
boo the internet tells me yr coming to visit october 24.
it looks kind of like you’re booing me, boo.
baby boo i would never boo you! you my boo! you are not a disparaging remark generally made at concerts or sporting events!
“2. boo is a term that is derived from the French word “beau” meaning beautiful. In 18th century England it meant an admirer, usually male. It made it’s way into Afro-Caribean language perhaps through the French colonisation of some Caribean islands.
Now meaning girl or boyfriend
“this is what I’m saying boo, it’s all about you” ”
thanks urban dictionary, you saved our relationship!