The Awful Possibilities

the funny thing about the reactions to the new john d’agata book is that all of the anger is misplaced. everybody’s getting upset because he changed some facts and dates, which, let me be clear, isn’t a good look in general, and is a particularly bad look given his justifications, but it’s getting in the way of the real problem, which is a real, real problem.

i got in a little pissing contest on facebook with a poet whom i respect very much over the 31/34 thing in that harper’s excerpt. d’agata claims, in that excerpt, that he changed the number of strip clubs in las vegas from 31 to 34 “because the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one…’” i pointed out that 31 and 34 have the same rhythm, and my poet friend made a good-faith effort to explain that there are subtle differences between the two numbers, pronunciation-wise. i latched on to a misused word in her explanation for the win and rubbed it in with a little riff on poetic meter (because it seems to me that 31 and 34 are both cretics) (and because i am an asshole).

here’s the thing:

from an objective standpoint, i was right, because individual, cultural, and regional pronunciation are so varied and idiosyncratic as not to be worth discussing in a literary (as opposed to linguistic or sociological, in which cases it might very well be fruitful) conversation about the rhythm of the printed word. what i mean is, i’d have been fine if d’agata had said 34 just sounded better in his head, in his voice, but i think i would rather hear, for example, clay davis say 31 than 34 because i think 31 would really bring out the sonorous aspects of his particular patois.

point being, this example only goes to demonstrate that d’agata is either a clown or a showoff. (i tend to think it’s the latter, though it’s hard to be sure — some of the reviews i’ve read have played the straight man, treating d’agata and fingal’s exchanges as genuine (in which case, clown), but others have said that it’s no secret that the book is not a document of the fact checking process and was in fact composed with the intent of making the book (showoff) (though, in that case, all of his tough guy posturing ought to set off your alarms) (“yeah, i call my fact-checker a dickhead over email. what? what?“). but it’s not like i’m gonna read it to find out.) either way, it’s not particularly dangerous.

the danger comes in what seems to be passing unremarked on.

apparently, there are some larger factual innacuracies in the article under discussion in the lifespan of a fact, as well as in the book, about a mountain, that came out of it, and d’agata justifies these innacuracies by saying he means to make “a better work of art – and thus a better and truer experience for the reader.’’

i remember the times article (to be fair, the times review of lifespan has come the closest i’ve seen to getting at the real issue, but doesn’t quite nail it) where charles bock got bent out of shape because d’agata rearranged some dates so that the teenage suicide the book apparently focuses on falls on the same date as some kind of town hall meet about storing nuclear waste in yucca mountain, which the book also apparently focuses on.

my description is a little flippant, and like i said, i don’t think it’s a good look to change the facts in nonfiction, but let’s get at the real issue, the one that no one is spelling out:

what difference would it make, to life or to literature, whether these two things happened on the same day?

and if you think it actually makes a difference, don’t you deserve to be considered irrelevant?

i think there’s a problem with our contemporary use of the term “literature.” i think we all think we mean something like “the highest and most potentially-lasting prose or verse” (news that stays news), but all too often we’re referring to a genre. if you’re reading this, you’ve almost certainly heard a few of these dicta spoken by someone with a straight face:

• show; don’t tell.
• i wanted more of the mother.
• tag dialogue only with: (s)he said.
• don’t use your properly tagged dialogue to move the plot forward.
• don’t have a plot.

well and good. there’s something to some of these, and they’re all ok sometimes. but they do point to the fact that we’re dealing with fixed forms — a genre, no different than noir, sf, fantasy, romance, except!:

those other genres are aware of themselves as genres, and frankly, they’re generally more entertaining than the genre of literature (though it’s true, we still usually win at prose) (actually, noir can kick literature’s ass in almost all categories).

the default justification seems to be that literature is more edifying than the other genres, and this is true when literature is not a genre (see my first definition). but when literature is a genre, when it relies on false profundity and flatout magical thinking, it’s just a wish-fulfillment fantasy for middlebrows who’d rather be sad than a wizard.

it’s two years now since i threw my little fit about david shields, and i knew there was something fishy when, as late to the game as he was, he declared the death of the novel. now i realize it was that he wanted to kill the novel but preserve literature as a genre, to preserve literary thinking.

i say the novel and the poem and the essay will take care of themselves. so will the facts. let literature die and long live literature.

welcome back, christian

if you’ve been listening to me at all, you know that i think adam novy’s the avian gospels was one (2) of the best books of last year. what you might not also know is that adam novy is an awesome dude and he’s awesome at reading his own work aloud in front of people, which is why i’m super excited to tell you that we’ll be doing a short tour together this week!

so if you live in nyc, phl, b’more, or dc, you know what you have to do.

here’s the info:

Brooklyn: Wednesday, 7/13, 7 p.m.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn Presents: me, Adam, Seth Fried, and Katarina Hybenova
Book Thug Nation
100 North 3rd Street
(between Berry Street and Wythe Avenue)
Brooklyn, New York

Philadelphia: Friday, 7/15, 7 p.m.

me, Adam, and Sarah Rose Etter
Tattooed Mom
530 South Street
Philadelphia, PA

Baltimore: Saturday, 7/16, 7 p.m.

Say It With Writing: me, Adam, Rachel Monroe, and Heather Christle (using technology)
Stephanie’s house
1818 E Lafayette Ave
Baltimore, MD

Washington, DC: Sunday, 7/17, 6 p.m.

The Three Tents Reading Series: me, Adam, Molly Gaudry, and Daniel Knowlton
The Big Hunt
1345 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC

it was adam’s idea to name this the ulterior motives tour. his ulterior motive is to prove he can rock or something. i think that’s what he said, but his phone was breaking up as he told me. my ulterior motive is to get crazy skrilla out this indie lit game.

also, thanks ahead of time to mark cugini, jason diamond, and adam robinson for being willing to throw these events for us.

see you. or else we got problems.

i mentioned the great gatsby last time i posted, and i just wanted to qualify that mention, apropos of nothing but my own desire to make myself clear.

i really do think that bret easton ellis is an important writer, able to hang, on a literary-historical scale, with just about anyone out there right now, and i’ll come back to him another time, but just because he riffed well on the great gatsby doesn’t mean he gets to hang with fitzgerald.

the only other time i mentioned gatsby on this site, i hinted that i didn’t really like it when i first read it (11th grade). i didn’t like it because it was presented to me as a book about the jazz age (which i would have been cool with), and it was clear just about immediately that it wasn’t.

i first read crime and punishment when i was in 10th grade, and i loved it. for a while it was my favorite novel. some time later, say, 12th grade, i decided i had outgrown it, that it was for kids. then, when it was assigned to me in college, i realized i had been wrong about outgrowing it.

i think that was because of the pevear/volokhonsky translation. when you read that translation, you realize that dostoyevsky was a great stylist, and that what, in the garnett translation, came across as adolescent wallowing, is actually an uncanny combination of expressionism and irony. meaning, yes, dostoyevsky made raskolnikov wallow, but he also knew exactly what he was doing and how it looked.

we don’t get much of that these days (which is why bolano was such a revelation — though i wonder how many people realize that was why bolano was such a revelation).

anyway, gatsby — it was clearly written by someone familiar with the ethos of the jazz age, but what was interesting about it when i returned to it as a grownup was how clearly fitzgerald used his scenesterism to brush the scene off. he spends the entire book writing around the real issue (though, thankfully, not like henry james did), in much the same way bolano would in his best stuff (for me, so far, 2666 and distant star) (though the last line of by night in chile, and the way it reflects back on the book, would have been enough to make him a classic in my eyes).

this is interesting, because i was deep into kierkegaard when i first read gatsby, and gatsby illustrates kierkegaard’s approach to indirect communication.

i guess i just wasn’t ready to get it.

anyway, i think fitzgerald was probably a big influence on bolano, and we probably also wouldn’t have gary lutz’s work or denis johnson’s jesus’ son without it.

let me stop being so abstract.

f. scott fitzgerald

here is a line from a climactic argument scene, one that i think any of the writers i mentioned above would be jealous of:

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

there are syntactical quirks here that work in context (how does an argument herd people?) (why does he try to make the racing of the beads function as part of a compund predicate instead of just putting a comma after “legs”?), but obviously it’s the simple fact that, in the middle of the big drama, nick carraway is fixated on his butt sweat that makes it so good.

of course, this would have been considered a dodge in workshop, which is why i often read those anti-workshop rants by people who couldn’t get into workshops with a little bit of glee (though the rants are never good).

but the reason i think the line is so good, and why i think some of my favorite writers would like to have written it, is because it’s true from nick carraway’s perspective in a way that a cool party with hepcats could never be.

okay, then here is a little bit of dialog that denis johnson would have liked to write, just in case you didn’t think the above example applied to him:

“Did you have a nice ride?”

“Very good roads around here.”

“I supose the autombiles–”

“Yeah.”

finally, gatsby serves as a reminder that all us americans are wrong about books these days — it hasn’t always been about size (in fact, aside from moby dick, try naming a canonical american meganovel before 1930) (don’t say dreiser, herb, or else you’ll have said dreiser) (or howells or james) (i’m trying to keep you from embarrassing yourself). fitzgerald famously sweated joyce. but think about it — if he had written like joyce, he might have written a piece of shit like ulysses.

more short novels, y’all. preferably as good as gatsby.

you know that one about: i write to comfort the uncomfortable and make the comfortable uncomfortable? i used to think it was a pretty good one, but now i think it’s monstrously arrogant.

obviously it’s not necessarily arrogant to comfort, or presume to comfort, someone, nor is it necessarily arrogant to make, or presume to make, someone uncomfortable (i say not necessarily, because it can be all presumption, particularly when this someone is an abstraction), but it’s really just plain arrogant to appoint yourself arbiter of who, beyond people you come into contact with on a daily basis (and even then you might be on shaky ground), needs to be made comfortable or uncomfortable.

there’s nothing inherently wrong with arrogance (i personally think the literary world could use some more of it), but most of the time people who use the comfortable/uncomfortable line present it as though it comes out of pure compassion, which is where the monstrously part comes in, because it sets the one who says it up as some kind of secular prophet, the problem being that he or she has no ground to stand on, philosophically, sociologically, or in common practice.

once when i was in grad school i answered “me” when someone asked who i wrote for. the person who asked said that was masturbatory, and i said anything else was just masturbating to porn. i really believed that back then, and on a fundamental level i do now (though it’s probably more like a sears catalog than porn), but these days i do try to write to people, if not for, and i chalk it up to a leap into the absurd.

but i don’t try to convince myself that i’m sitting in your third eye kissing on your tear ducts.

so you’ve probably guessed by now that while i wasn’t posting anything here i was doing a lot of thinking about david foster wallace. i probably wrote and talked half of a monograph about him (thanks, in particular, to kyle beachy, who let me send long, ranting emails to him, and came back with smart, but more importantly wise, responses, which was nice considering he doesn’t really know me), but didn’t want to do the writing and talking publicly, partially because i didn’t do it systematically and partially because i don’t get the impression that anyone in the dfw industry wants to hear my take on him (this is one way of deciding who needs to be made comfortable or uncomfortable).

but let me admit that i finally concluded that, as brilliant and important as i still find his work, there is something adolescent, arrogant (in the way i described above), and unwise about his program. i first noticed it while reading brief interviews with hideous men (which is, oddly, my favorite of his books), but it was when i read that terrible kenyon speech (which, seriously y’all, let it disappear — you’re not doing his legacy any favors) that i finally had to think it through.

so i’m gonna hold off on reading the pale king.

but look — i picked up bret easton ellis’s imperial bedrooms when borders was going out of business.

are you starting to see what i’ve been setting your punk ass up for?

check ya dolla bill son -- there it is.

i want to talk about imperial bedrooms and also lunar park someday so i can explain what’s wrong with you, but first i want to admit publicly to being a bret easton ellis fan, actually to thinking he’s a very important writer, and in order to talk about his later work, i have to dispel the early myths. think of it as revising the origin story.

the consensus version is that ellis’s early work owes its style to joan didion’s play it as it lays, but that it’s all surface and nihilism. this is from david foster wallace’s notorious attack on him:

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

(i didn’t have to look far for that quote, because biblioklept posted it, in a long and thoughtful piece that i completely disagreed with, today. i really like biblioklept. does anyone know who writes it?)

i assume that quote was in reference to american psycho. you know, that book that begins with the phrase “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”?

it’s funny, there’s another book that uses that phrase. it was written by this italian guy who wanted to settle scores by sending all his political enemies to hell. also, demons fling shit at people. some people claim to like it, but no one reads his other books.

also, abandoning all hope equals despair etymologically. sometimes it seems like there’s a kind of competition for who gets to write about despair, and it’s a competition that i don’t know the rules of.  but i’m more worried about why nobody has ever pointed out how unfounded wallace’s rant was.

“fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is” might be very bad (though i’m not willing to say it couldn’t possibly be good), but where’s the evidence that that’s what ellis does?

maybe we’ll talk about american psycho another day, too, but for now we’re going all the way back to the year 1985.

less than zero is the one where andrew mccarthy and robert downey jr do drugs, but in the book version robert downey jr doesn’t die, and instead there’s even more drugs, a snuff film, gang rape, etc.

you know what nihilists are — they believe in nothing. but i don’t think ellis is a nihilist, and i don’t think, as some of ellis’s defenders have insisted, that the moral code of his work can only be found in the negative space.

throughout less than zero, clay, the narrator, notices a billboard that reads “disappear here.” the great gatsby also has a billboard, an advertisement for an eye doctor named t.j.  eckleburg. a lot of people, people who read books and whatnot, think the eye thing could be a symbol for god staring down at the moral decay of the jazz age, or so my eleventh grade english teacher told me.

the great gatsby is about this guy who’s rich but not a blue-blood, who falls in love with a blue-blooded lady and it all ends in a tragic car crash. not far from the billboard, actually.

in less than zero, everybody is rich but not a blue blood, there are tons of car crashes (not part of the action — there are just frequent descriptions of wrecks in canyons), and it ends a lot like it started. except t.j. eckleburg isn’t watching because you can disappear here.

also, you could read gatsby as though nick carraway, the narrator, is probably gay but closeted. clay (the maybe too symbolically-named narrator of less than zero) is joylessly omnisexual but doesn’t need to hide it, the sex or the joylessness. and if the similarities weren’t enough to beat you over the head, at the end of less than zero a tacky rich girl rolls up in a fancy car with a vanity plate that reads gabstoy. presumably her name is gabby?

your english teacher was mostly wrong about gatsby (whether or not mine was right about eckleburg). it’s not very jazzy and the love story is not very convincing. but it’s depiction of postwar disillusionment and class conflict was hot shit, as was the prose. what i mean is, fitzgerald had something to say and he said it beautifully; it’s just not what everybody says he was saying.

likewise, david foster wallace, or whoever told you about ellis, was wrong.

there’s a flipside to that whole comfortable/uncomfortable thing. it flatters the listener/reader. no one ever thinks they’re the ones who should be uncomfortable. ellis is trying to convince you otherwise.

it’s been a few months since i read matthew sharpe’s most recent novel, you were wrong, and i didn’t write about it after i read it because i was still thinking about it. i’m still thinking about it. i’ve probably thought about it more than any book i’ve read since bolano first blew my mind way back in 2008. but those are two very different thought processes. 2666 came with piles of hype and made them pretty much irrelevant, whereas you were wrong is tied in with hype in a way that makes the text and the phenomenon inextricable for me.

and of course we’re talking about entirely different scales of hype. like i said, 2666 had piles of it. you were wrong had almost none. and it almost seems like this was part of matthew sharpe’s design.

sharpe had a relative hit in 2003 or so with a book called the sleeping father. it was published by soft skull but was somehow chosen for the today show book club. i didn’t read it because the description didn’t sound all that interesting to me, and i hadn’t joined the today show book club.

anyway, sharpe could have followed that up with something that might have generated more hype, but instead he published jamestown, which i did pick up, maybe for the cover. i don’t want to get into an analysis, or even a description, of it here, but it was biggish and weird and uneven and brilliant — one of my favorite books of the decade, though not the kind of thing that could ever get you on the cover of time magazine or even the stranger. still, it had a kind of gravitas to it, in its size and subject matter (a post-apocalyptic retelling of american colonization that had obvious parallels with current events).

this is one of the reasons why you were wrong is such a mind-blower — sharpe gets some retail and critical success, jumps to a larger (though still independent) press (bloomsbury), and then publishes a strange, slim novel (about a high school math teacher on long island who, according to his mother’s dying wish, has to live with his obnoxious stepfather in order to inherit his boyhood home) that straddles a line between surrealism and naturalism, allegory and slapstick nonsense.

for the record, i liked it. i like it, but i think it’s a mess. but the mess is clearly part of the point, and this is where the tie-in with the phenomenon gets too tangled to unweave.

see, i read all of the reviews of it i could find, and most of them seemed mixed, and even the positive ones seemed a little mixed up. i was at jury duty when i finally started reading it, and at first it had me mixed up too.

sharpe is a really sophisticated prose stylist, but every now and then, the prose would break form, go limp, clunky, or purple in ways that just didn’t make sense to me. i started to get suspicious during a trippy party scene where the line “someone had blundered” repeated for no reason i could see. a few pages later i came to this:

… Jouncing along above the soft and pitted beachfront road, Karl gazed up at the treetops and the clouds. A cloudy day. Whom did he love best, his mom, his dad, his sis, his bro? He had no mom, no dad, no sis, no bro. His friends? He hadn’t heard the word. His home? He’d never been home. Money? He hated it as he hated God. What, then, did he love? He loved the clouds … the passing clouds … up there … up there …

now i don’t have the space here to contextualize the passage for you or give you a plot summary, and anyway that would be beside the point, because the point is that there is no more than ambient or extratextual context to the passage. in context we already know that Karl is on a beachfront road, and the first page of the novel tells us that he has no family other than a mean stepdad.

okay, the thing is that, after the first sentence, this passage is a pretty faithful paraphrasing of an entire baudelaire prose poem.

when i realized that, i remembered that “someone had blundered” was a line from tennyson’s “charge of the light brigade,” which we all read in high school, or at least heard geoffrey quote on the fresh prince of bel air. and it turns out there are others. “He had drunk of potent wines last night, and perhaps had found himself for an hour among the valiant of voluptuousness,” comes from cp cavafy. i’ve never read cp cavafy, but by the time i came across the line i was on to sharpe and went and looked it up.

like i said, i’m still thinking about what sharpe meant to do here, and i have my theories, but again that’s not the point. the point is that a phrase like “the valiant of voluptuousness” does not really match the prose in the rest of the book and is not something that a contemporary author would write, and so you take it as a kind of wink.

or you don’t. maybe you don’t even notice it.

original gangsta

none of the reviews i read seemed to notice it was happening. some even attributed the borrowed lines to sharpe himself  as examples of his accomplishments as a stylist. this kind of intertextuality is a complicated issue, and maybe not appropriate for the kind of crap reviews you usually find in most papers and websites, so i’m not even questioning the reviewers themselves.

i think who i’m questioning here is myself. what i’ve found in you were wrong is one of the things that got me liking books — the chance to keep up a conversation with people you can’t actually converse with and to add to their accomplishments. i personally think that aspect of reading and writing is not only fun (it is, for me), but also helps develop ways of thinking that can help you get through life.

but if zero other living people are participating in that conversation, it risks being airless or masturbatory.

matthew sharpe is still alive, and i look forward to reading what he does next. maybe i’ll even check out his first three books.

very well then.