The Awful Possibilities

i barely even like movies, and i know i don’t speak the same language (images) as film folk, and i can’t read a director’s mind like i can read the mind of any writer, but when i hear the reactions to inglorious basterds, i get the sense that i didn’t see the same movie everyone else is talking about.

[i'm going to break with tradition here and do one of these "more" things, because this post is going to be all spoiler, and while i don't believe in the concept "spoiler" for fiction, because fiction is made of word, i know picture people get real worked up about it.]

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this is the best i can do at formulating my thoughts on this. yes, sal plascencia is a friend, but i’m really not at all worked up about any situation between him and shane jones. i am, however, worked up about the range of responses to sal’s accusations, if that’s what you want to call them. i don’t want to summarize them — they’re all right there. all i want to say is:

blake — your first response on the thread implicitly threatened to expose an anonymous (which i don’t like, but the site clearly allows it) user’s identity and tried to muddy the waters with “what about the connections between any book and any other book?” this is totally disengenuous and you know it. you’ve said elsewhere that you “never once thought about [light boxes] as even that much influenced by [people of paper].” i don’t believe this for a second (though if true it would suggest you are a bad reader or have a bad memory), but it’s impossible to prove, and is any case beside the point — it’s not an analytical statment, or “concrete point,” which is interesting because you made it in the context of telling the blog’s author that she should make a “concrete point.” also, shane jones has never denied being influenced by plascencia.

sal — without getting into an analysis of the similarities or lack thereof you’re claiming, it was your right to get on there if you felt that way, and it was right to do. also, i’m sorry if you don’t want me to get into this, but i have to deal with these folks too.

john madera — that hobart cut and paste is a red herring. if you don’t see this you need to work on contextualizing.

shane — no, this is not better done by email. sal’s book is not his alone now that it’s a public artifact (which is why you felt it was okay to riff on, no?), but neither is yours. public is a good place to discuss these things, and trying to make them private makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. many of your friends’ responses also make it look like you’ve got something to hide, and also like they suspect you’ve got something to hide. i’m not saying that you do. i’m talking about perception.

kathryn — you are my wife and you are awesome. your post was hands down the best on this thread, and could have generated discussion.

phm — you caused a conundrum. on the one hand, i believe you’re a tough guy, which is good. on the other hand, tough guys don’t get to shut down conversations for no reason. you contributed nothing to the conversation but tried to instill fear. why? because you like shane? do you know sal and dislike him? can you prove that sal’s “accusations” are mere assholery? because they look pretty legit from where i sit. also, this is a conudnrum because you were maybe my favorite commenter on htmlgiant and in the past when you spoke your mind you seemed pretty well informed.

me — this wasn’t tactful of you at all but still you believe it and stand by it. you would like to be colleagues with these people and would like to respect and be respected by them, but only if they can give and receive real criticism, because you know that sunshine up the ass has never made you or anyone a better writer.

almost everybody else — it is good to congratulate your friends, but it is not good to be a sycophant. the line is not fine at all. keep it in mind.

sycophants — i can’t decide whether you’re worse than people who encourage sycophants to admire them or not.

everybody — kumba-fuckin-ya. it’s gonna be corny when i say this, but i like htmlgiant and i like what you all have done for books. but don’t let it become an echo chamber. when shane’s book comes out with penguin, other people might see a resemblance to the people of paper. say the new york times says it — are you going to be able to shut them down with these tactics? is that the point? if it is, then stick to your echo chamber. if not, and you want to be better writers, i suggest thinking about kathryn’s comment.

…that i haven’t written very much about women on here. i assure you, it has nothing to do with my stance on women who write and everything to do with what i’ve been reading lately. also, i don’t write about everything i read on here, sometimes because what i read doesn’t inspire me to write anything about it (this doesn’t necessarily mean that it didn’t inspire me — best case scenario is that a book inspires me to do the worthwhile kind of writing, as in, making stuff up), other times because a book i read is bad or very bad but doesn’t need me trashing it because it’s not like anyone risks picking it up by accident and the critics don’t need correcting because they never even heard of it. but then there have been books that have inspired me that i don’t feel qualified to write about and they were all poetry and that was why i didn’t feel qualified to write about them.

that’s a stupid feeling for me to have. i mean, i’ve got degrees and shit. i took the workshops. (please note i’m being sarcastic here.) but poetry is a weird club, and i have not been extended a membership offer, so while my take on poetry is as unofficial and idiosyncratic as my take on fiction, i can’t say that i would be able to hold it down if anybody came at me like i can with fiction (seriously, with fiction i will destroy you; i want to), especially because they all read, or seem to read, capital c criticism and quote adorno and shit. except now it’s benjamin, i think. i’m old enough to remember when it was derrida.

the flarfists are a good example. i actually like a lot of the poetry. but the presentation (this is so bad. isn’t this bad? don’t you hate it? don’t criticize it; it’s supposed to be bad) and especially the reaction to actual criticism (a weird combination of clannish passive aggression and political correctness) (that last is especially ironic given the poetry itself) make it so i don’t feel like engaging with it. the same is true with “conceptual writing” (with the exception of christian bok), which tends to admit it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but continues to print on.

and i know these folks are good with the google, so now i’m fucked.

indeed

then there was one time i saw this west coast poet read in philly and i thought how weird it is how politically “righteous” many west coast poets are when the west coast lifestyle totally precludes living politically righteously and how a 1-1 teaching load for 6 figures at a state school at constant risk of funding cuts doesn’t seem to jive with the sloganeering i’m hearing (here i should mention that i really like a lot of their writing), and i tried to engage with the poet, and he mumbled some incoherent stuff and we were interrupted by the woman next to me who, no joke, wanted to tell me she was a lesbian, as though this would shock me in philly in 2009, or as though she should be congratulated.

anyway, so yeah, so i haven’t been engaging with poetry here, and this has totally kept the woman count down, because i’ve been reading a lot of women poets and probably 8 out of 10 of my favorite living poets are women.

so pat me on the back goddammit!

for example, a couple months ago i was totally blown away by cate marvin’s fragment of the head of a queen. but that’s pretty much all i can tell you. i read it twice. it blew me away, every poem did, both times.

but!

last week i read sarah manguso’s hard to admit and harder to escape, and now i will talk about it.

this is cheating a little because the pieces in this book are presented as stories. they aren’t stories, but this is how they are presented, i think because they are also presented with books of stories by dave eggers and deb olin unferth.

sarah manguso is one of the 8 out of 10 i mentioned. i read her first two books long ago, at least on the scale of her career, and the only reason i’ve held off on hard to admit… so long is because when i really get to liking someone’s work, i like to hold off on that someone’s recent work a little because god only knows how long it will be until i get something new from that person, and i will reread the old stuff and also read a little bit of the new stuff at a time to tide me over.

for example, i’ve had the new brian evenson collection on my desk since pretty much the day it came out, but i’ve only read one of the stories. that way i know that whenever i must read a brand new evenson story i can do it, and when i just want to read some evenson, i’ll pick up one of the other collections.

with the manguso, i wasn’t able to stop and read it all in one sitting. this was because all of the pieces were very small, and also because it was engaging. in the end, it helped me to finally be able to explain what it is i like so much about her work.

there’s a piece in the collection (titled, i guess, “59″) that describes her (manguso, i guess, when she was very young, though since she calls these “stories” it is not necessarily right of me to assume it’s her) sneaking into woods that she was forbidden by her parents to explore and finding it beautiful. to commemorate it, she writes the date and time, as well as “Light. Trees” on an index card and hides it. The piece ends:

The card is long since lost, but I remember the approximate date, early June 1982, and I remember what the card looked like. From this memory I can recall the scene in the woods vividly.

firstly, the prose (here and throughout the collection) is so clean it’s practically like taking a bath, especially after all the shit i’ve been reading lately.

but that far into the collection, that wasn’t what struck me about the passage. what struck me was that it describes exactly what i want writing to do. let me get proscriptive: it describes exactly what writing should do.

taken out of context and isolated like that, it might seem pretty obvious, but it only seems obvious, because it’s not often done, and god only knows what most folks are trying to do with their sentences.

nabokov is probably my all time favorite writer. that dude could make you recall the scene in the woods vividly, even if you weren’t there, even if the scene in the woods was not physically possible. but you know what gets on my nerves about nabokov? all the talk about synesthesia. not from him but about his. synesthesia, that is. i don’t care one bit what color he saw letters in. people who think it had anything to do with literature are tone deaf, because good writing is inherently synesthetic. it’s just a bunch of letters standing in for the whole world, and it should make good readers synesthetic too (this is another reason why books will never go away — the objects themselves can be so pleasing to all six senses) (and if you’ve never tasted a book don’t talk to me).

i should be able to smell a visual description and hear word arrangements and feel ideology and i did when i read hard to admit and harder to forget.

relatively new, at least.

gary lutz’s stories in the worst way was first published in 1996. i’ve been reading and rereading it since 2002 when it was brought back into print by 3rd bed. i was in syracuse for grad school in 2002, and i was assigned to teach the book for a course called living writers (probably the best course i’ve ever taught; one week we discussed a book as a class; the next, the book’s author came to read from and discuss the book with the class). i didn’t know what to expect when i got the book. i don’t know, but i think it was assigned because there was a strong 3rd bed/syracuse connection. anyway, everyone in the program was blown away, and the next semester he joined the faculty as a visiting writer and i was lucky to have him as my thesis advisor. my thesis was my first novel, the conviction and subsequent life of savior neck.

on gary lutz as thesis advisor:

unlike anything i’ve ever experienced. he didn’t treat it like a workshop, and he didn’t treat me like a mentee. instead, he was this weird and incredible combination of copyeditor and philologist.

he began by admitting to me that he was not really a “plot” person (this in itself was a positive sign — my novel was plot-heavy, but no one before him had seemed to notice it) but that he liked the way i used language. he then proceeded to go through the manuscript pointing out references that were so obscure, and in some cases so idiolectic (i had twisted a character’s name so that it punned on the title of an album by a scandinavian christian powermetal band from the early 90s — and gary got it!), that it was like he was reading my mind. there is one particular scene where the bulk of the dialogue was composed of beatles lyrics. gary said: “samuel beckett did things like that. but not with beatles lyrics.”

this is not all to suggest that gary and i are boys. we haven’t been in touch since i graduated, and, as generous as he was, i don’t think he was all that thrilled by my work. except for one brief part of it.

he really liked the prologue.

the thing about the prologue — it wasn’t as heavily stylized as the rest of the book and nowhere near as dense. it was about a boy who wakes up to the smell of his own death and worries he’ll never get the girl he likes.

not to toot my own horn, but everybody liked the prologue (conversely, almost everybody hated the rest). i understood why on an intuitive level, but i couldn’t get it on an intellectual level until i worked with gary. i realized he liked it because the style meshed with the content but also created an emotional effect that’s pretty near universal (again, not to toot my own horn — i’m going somewhere with this). in other words, without being anything like a gary lutz story, it attempted to do what i see gary lutz attempting to do in his work.

(this is not a qualitative evaluation.)

rocinante

on everything else i’ve been thinking about gary lutz and maybe you:

i mentioned beckett a minute ago.

i don’t recall ever seeing lutz compared to beckett and i think that’s really odd.

new stuff doesn’t come along very often in literature. beckett was new when he came along. his work was often taken as a direct reaction to joyce, who i don’t think was as new as beckett was, in the scheme of things. for example, they both were influenced by rabelais, but i think that that influence is more clear in joyce than in beckett. i’m not going to bother defending this. just take it as an axiom.

after beckett, there were a lot of people who were compared to beckett. bernhard, for example, who was awesome, but not as similar to beckett as people wanted to believe. barthelme himself (awesome, too) thought he was in the line of beckett but he was wrong. i also remember this blurb for infinite jest that compared wallace to beckett, which was fucking absurd (don’t worry, sven, i still like your essays). and please do not talk to me about maurice blanchot (who is good for some things, anyway).

have you ever read wolfgang borchert? he was actually coeval to beckett, i think.

now think about beckett’s second trilogy, which was awful, and how he tried to abstract his characters completely.

i think stories in the worst way (as well as much of i looked alive and all of partial list of people to bleach) succeeds where beckett failed in the end. this is not to say that that was lutz’s intent, but that it was a result.

when you read lutz, despite and also because of the incredible syntactical contortions, you don’t necessarily know where the characters really live, what the characters really do, or even whether they’re male or female, and yet you feel them on a primal level. form, content, and also something beyond craft, which you as an artist do not have direct access to, combine to create this effect in surround sound.

it is an entirely new (as of 1996) thing.

unfortunately, there’s nothing i can do to prove it. to emphasize that, i’m not going to include any examples of gary lutz’s writing (which is against my religion. now i’m a heretic). you can find some of his work here.

why, then, am i bothering to post this?

i’ve been thinking about lutz a lot lately. i haven’t been reading him a lot lately (i haven’t read his fiction in a few months), just thinking about his work. the reason i’ve been thinking about it is because i’ve been reading a lot of gary lutz imitators.

and they are fucking terrible.

writers, you can not write “gary lutz sentences.” more importantly, you can not take “gary lutz sentences” and apply them to your own hobby horses. “gary lutz sentences” only work in the context of gary lutz’s takes on the world, whatever they are and wherever they go. it isn’t like when you or your big brothers were inserting footnotes into their short stories or making up wacky theme parks, and i never wrote anything truer.