The Awful Possibilities

one of the worst reading decisions i made in the year of bad reading decisions that was 2008 was to bring don delillo’s underworld with me on vacation. when i made that decision, i actually assumed it was a good decision, the best maybe. my logic was that even if it wasn’t a good book by delillo, it would still, by virtue of having been written by delillo, be better than almost anything else i could bring along (i count white noise and end zone among my favorites and great jones street not far behind, though i can’t get anyone else to agree with me on the greatness of it) (also, the book’s reputation seemed to have been resurging the previous couple of years, so i thought maybe i had given up on it too soon, having stopped after the opening, novella-length section), but i was wrong.

i want to leave aside the more blatant striving after greatness and relevance that you can see in every aspect of the book, from its sheer size, to its subject matter, to the near-inane attempt to be the first major novel to deal with the internet (which involves a nun, possibly j. edgar hoover’s spirit animal, whose soul seems to be trapped in the Web at the end) (okay, when i put it that way, “near-inane” doesn’t quite do the trick, does it?), and focus on a little prose tic that accretes until it becomes some massive thing that threatens the very core from without.

that was a joke, that last clause, but not because i don’t mean it. just because of the way i said it. the way i said it was an imitation of the tic itself. the tic is to say “some [adjective] thing.” Here is the first example, which comes on page 17 in my edition:

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination, the static crackle of some libidinous thing in the world, and Edgar responds to people who have access to this energy.

first of all, cut out “in the world.” i was not thinking for one second that the thing was not in the world, and it doesn’t do anything for delillo’s admittedly still-impeccable rhythm. the important word in that phrase is “libidinous,” but “thing” gets the accent. i suppose that the phrasing, as published, is supposed to demonstrate indeterminacy, but what you end up with is two non-measures of indeterminacy, “some” (quantity?) and “thing” (object?), surrounding an adjective that ends up modifying indeterminacy rather than whatever it’s supposed to modify. and the sentence plays this out, because the clauses don’t match up in any meaningful way. what does “this energy” refer to? “fame and secrecy?” “the same facination?” “the static crackle?” that last is the best match for “energy,” but the static crackle refers to the “fascination” of others (i think), the fans of the people Edgar responds to, not the people themselves.

am i making sense here?

even if no, i think we can all agree that the “some [adjective] thing” formulation sounds pretentious, vague (as opposed to abstract, which is fine, abstraction), and like the author doesn’t really have anything to say.

which is rough, because delillo uses the formulation, or variations thereon, throughout, sometimes multiple times on the same page. also, i checked amazon text stats, and “thing” seems to be the most frequently used word in the book if i’m reading the cloud right.

also i lied. that example i used is not the first use of the formulation in the book. the first is on page 14 of my edition, “some gaudy thing,” but i gave delillo a pass on that one, because he was obviously just gilding the lily of something gaudy.

and why would i revisit this disaster now?

can't drop shit if it never flew

because i wanted to be mean. but i haven’t been mean yet. it isn’t mean to slam one of don delillo’s many books (even if it’s obvious it was supposed to be his great one, was written to be his great one). it is, however, mean to slam other young writers who may one day do something great but haven’t yet.

so it turns out i’m only going to be part-mean, because i’m not going to slam the two writers, but i will slam something one of the writers did because that thing made me think of underworld again.

a couple days ago, a friend told me about a book i should check out, so i checked out the book on the internet. and i read this blurb:

[Author's] voice is like some winged thing — brave, victorious, and solitary…

see? this one wins the new prize for abuse of the formulation because it’s cliched, mixaphorical, and imprecise. “Brave, victorious, and solitary” modifies both “voice” and “winged thing” (because otherwise why even use a simile?). a winged thing is not necessarily brave, victorious, or solitary. most winged things are birds. a voice is not usually like a bird, but some writers might hope that their voices soar like birds, even if it is a cliche. but some birds don’t soar. some have wings but are groundbound. a chicken may be but is not necessarily brave, victorious, and/or solitary. i know i’m henpecking here, but the blurb says to me that the blurb’s author had nothing to say.

nevertheless, i looked around and the book’s author’s work does seem interesting and i will check it out.

so much for being mean.

also, when i was slamming don delillo about greatness, i don’t mean it’s wrong to strive for greatness. i think it’s wrong not to. just not for the sake of greatness. or relevance. never relevance.

soon, i think, my brother and i will talk about a book we’re enjoying.

we’ve obviously never had a beer together. i hate practically everything.

with that said, i’m finding it really easy to find good things to say about books so far this year. i think that’s because the books i’m just happening to read this year are so much better than the books i just happened to read last year, which was maybe the worst year ever between me and books. the thing that turned everything around was the last book i started in 2008, which was the first book i finished in 2009. i recommend the hardcover version.

all of this by way of explaining the fact that i’ve said positive things in every post so far, and now i’m going to say positive things again.

the positive thing’s are about jedediah berry’s new novel, the manual of detection. i first read jed’s stuff back in college. we were in a workshop together my junior year. it was my first, and for all i know it was his too, but no one would have guessed it from reading his stories, which i swear were ready for publication even then.

but the thing is, they were also really different, and in order to understand how different they were you have to think back to 1997. in 1997, jed was writing “literary” stories about sorcerors and goblins and shit. i knew that there was some precedent for that. okay, the only precedent i knew of for that at the time was angela carter, but she seemed more like an anomaly than a precedent, and their sensibilities seemed so different.

you are not alone

jed probably wouldn’t agree with me on that last because mod pays direct homage to carter (along with others who i never connected jed to at the time, like borges and also those guys who made city of lost children), but i now think more than ever that i was right. who are you going to believe, me or him?

here’s my take:

there’s a border between kafka’s dread and chesterton’s (who also gets his due in the book)  wackiness that nobody knew was there until jed started publishing. maybe walser, but you get the sense reading him that he’s always about to go off the rails (which is good in its own way), where jed never gives the impression that he has anything less than complete control.

so even though, after kelly link’s (much deserved) success, i could stop worrying that jed’s books would be published with, like, a virile wizard and a sexy fairy on the cover, i also knew that he would still seem different, even though genre stuff has become “respectable.”

the plot is awesome, but you can learn about that in the reviews. here is a randomly selected bit of prose (you can do that with him because it’s all consistently strong, and also hypnotic in its rhythm):

The crowds thinned. From chimneys crooked fingers of smoke pointed at the clouds. Barren clotheslines sagged dripping over the street, and a few windows glowed yellow against the day’s persistent gloom.

the atmosphere is obvious. the imagery is almost dickensian, but the cadence belongs to berry. the way the prepositional phrase precedes the subject in the second sentence helps the smoke fingers skirt cliche because they’re immediately allowed to point at the clouds, and the subsequent use of adjective forms where adverbs are called for creates a more subtle syncopation. sorry to get all didactic.

so, in summation: read jed’s book and think about retiring, and i will not type on here again until i have something mean to say.

as whoever is reading this knows, i have a collection of short stories coming out this autumn and only this autumn. i’ve figured out how to talk about it since mentioning i hadn’t figured out how to talk about it, but i don’t feel like talking about it right now.

as pretty much no one knows, i’ve spent the last month reading an extremely long manuscript, almost war and peace long. the reason no one knows is because the author won’t let me talk about it. i figure i can get away with this much.

last night i talked about the completed manuscript for the first time with the author of the really long novel, and i opened with two things:

1. this is hands down one of my top ten books of all time, and
2. reading this makes me realize i will never do anything like it.

that first will be self-justifying once the book is published, but the second is the kind of thing that’s gotten me in trouble before, because people (i mean writers) tend to take a statement like that one of two ways:

1. i don’t want money for my writing, or
2. i’m minor league.

with regard to the former, i had this conversation at my first party in grad school. the general consensus was that no one should take less than thirty grand for a book. i said i’d trade mine for a case of beer. one close friend said he’d sell his for twenty bux. (he’s sober.) i’ve now published three and have yet to get that case of beer. my close friend has published one and got paid so much he could afford to use that twenty dollars to buy me a case of beer every night for the rest of my life.

which reminds me of a story. also set in grad school. i was peeing in a public restroom, as were several of my other classmates, when george saunders, who was our professor, walked into the restroom.

“can you imagine the future of literature if a bomb went off in here right now?” he said.

i’m sure i’m not the only one of the rest of us who was flattered.

“it’d be set back, like, fifteen minutes,” george said.

which brings me to the latter of the reactions to my statement above, the one about being “minor league.” i’m not the first to point out that minor and major are not the same in literature as in baseball. think of it more like music. my books are short and they let me do whatever i want style-wise, as opposed to the big (as in size and issues), where you owe the reader something else. i don’t want to get into it, just trust me.

everybody has a posse

so, to sum up: minor is like radiohead; major is like hannah montana. except in the case of the friend of mine who wrote the big book. and anybody else who’s good, major or minor.

okay, this reminds me of one last story. i got invited to read at a small conference, so i went, and i invited my friends to watch me read. i read and it was fine but not spectacular, but in the q and a afterwards, the people who read with me said things about how “experimental writing” is neglected. but fuck that.

that was a joke about radiohead and hannah montana. my sister loves hannah montana.

let’s do it like this: major is thomas pynchon; minor is flannery o’connor. we’ll sort the rest out later.

i really wish i could talk about this major novel i read. so good.

and i was lying about no one knowing. my wife knows i read it. and my brother. but they haven’t read it. i can’t wait ’til they do. and everyone.

speaking of my wife, here’s some minor literature i sent to her:

The saddest man in the world signs stacks and stacks of greeting cards, and distributes them one by one around the city, leaving them in inconspicuous places where people still might find them, in hopes of brightening someone’s day. It’s fucking pathetic.

sappy, i know. i do it all for love.

my friends jaime fountaine and  jeremy eric tenenbaum are both excellent fiction writers (also other things, like comedians and designers) and excellent performers of their own fiction, which they do regularly at toiling in obscurity.

toiling in obscurity is a good description of what it feels like to be a fiction writer in philadelphia and is also the reading series that jaime and jeremy curate. i’m trying to invite you to it.

we're older than we act

what i’ve been holding back is that i’m reading too. here is a small portion of the piece i’ll be reading at high speed:

Now imagine that – what are the Mongreloids doing? – could be one of your concerns for the next month or two, in fact your only, minus the first couple of days. The first couple of days school’s closed, like shooting is a virus likely to spread through the country unless the kids are quarantined at home, you’re in your room like all the other kids. What the nonkids don’t realize is everything’s a virus nowadays and the kids in their quarantines are downloading videos the shooter made in the hours before the shooting within hours of the event. Four more kids in three separate states catch the sickness before the quarantine’s lifted, though they won’t know it ‘til a few months have passed with a dozen more dead.

this story appeared in a great journal/anthology called the lifted brow/the fake bookshelf and will also be in my first collection, the one i mention in every post but don’t tell you much about. that will change soon. the story is offensive so don’t bring your children.

another great thing about this reading is that it will include an old colleague of mine, sebastien aguedelo, who just released his first book of poetry. and also my brother. and two of the readers are former students of mine from back in the good old days when i was teaching. so even if you don’t want to hear me read, you can come enjoy them, and play a game with yourself and your friends. the game is:

• who was christian’s colleague?
• who was christian’s brother?
• who were christian’s students?

it’s a drinking game. drink when you get it right or wrong. and tip your bartender.

barry hannah would be.

second place spirit animal

the best thing about when the weather suddenly gets warm just in time for a weekend when i finally have nothing to do is that i can go to my local coffee shop and read some of barry hannah’s short stories. i may be all alone in this, but i see a distinctly kierkegaardian development over the course of his three major collections (i’m leaving out captain maximus). it goes like this:

airships = aesthetic

bats out of hell = ethical

hi lonesome = religious

kierkegaard wouldn’t be happy about this, but i don’t see the “stages” as heirarchical, so i read hannah’s collections depending on whether i’m in an aesthetic, ethical, or religious mood. the only distinction i need to make here is that, where kierkegaard’s writings on ethics are usually his most boring, bats out of hell is anything but. i place it under ethics because of how hannah manages to take the style developed in airships and add a really intense psychological element to it. and also because i want to fit these books into a kierkegaardian rubric.

but anyway, i was feeling religious this weekend and read hi lonesome. here are some sentences that get highfalutin:

The people keep hoisting me up to the great bourgeoisie, over and over. I can’t fail, my God, America! Show me some more oily jean cash, dirty pelt, warm lucre, young man! Put your hand in your pants and show me your dollars. Reach into your brassiere, O my sovereign nymphs and clayhill babushkas. This may be work but I doubt it.

in other news, i’ve been wanting to tell the details of my story collection, but it’s a calculus i haven’t figured out how to talk about yet. this is, of course, on my end of things. on your end of things, you just order now and then get my book and another book later. also, you get amelia gray’s book, AM/PM, which is beautiful in form and content, now, free.