The Awful Possibilities

i was thinking this morning about writing a post about the relation of an author’s biography to that author’s work, and then j.d. salinger went and died, and i watched everyone’s reaction to it from this corner i sit in on the internet, and that threatened to complicate my argument, but not in the good or productive way, and to tell the truth i was getting bothered by all these people being “sad” about the painless death of a 91-year-old man who didn’t want anything to do with them and who hadn’t felt the need to share his work with them in almost 50 years, which was his prerogative and i was fine with it.

thank you, ed, for all you've given us

this was beside the point, so fortunately someone took care of it for me. i’m not one of these onion people — i’ve only ever laughed at a couple of their articles — so don’t worry, i won’t link to them again. but this is probably the best tribute salinger will get.

for the record, i’m a huge fan of his work. maybe i will write about it later, but for now i will hope that the stuff he was purportedly writing while being reclusive is good and will be published, and i’ll wish his family the best as they deal with their loss. but not you. i don’t think you lost anything today.

when i made that list a couple of posts back of what i’d been reading while i wasn’t writing anything i left a few books off because i wasn’t thinking very hard about it. one of those books was thomas bernhard’s frost. and now for a confession.

the first time i read bernhard i had one of those mindblowing experiences that most writers can probably point to where you know you’ve found the thing you want to do with your life and the writer seems to be speaking to you directly in your rhythms. it’s almost like you’re writing the thing yourself as you read it. the book was the loser, and i think i liked it even more because it was maybe the first book i didn’t learn about from northern exposure (that guy chris had all sorts of suggestions — kafka, dostoevsky, jung), roseanne (when darlene got disaffected she worked in a bookshop and read vonnegut) (oh darlene, you were the ally sheedy of the early nineties), or my dad (see my post about camus a while back). i’m pretty sure i learned about it from an issue of details that i picked up on vacation because it had david duchovny on the cover (did you know that he wrote his thesis on beckett at princeton?) (also he was on the x files). i was in eleventh grade and no one else knew about him (or wanted to know about him). also i couldn’t find any of his other books because the book selection in albany, new york wasn’t so great and they hadn’t invented jeff bezos yet.

i got to keep bernhard to myself until halfway through college when i took brad morrow’s contemporary innovative fiction course. morrow is one of those guys who i don’t think gets the credit he deserves. he’s an excellent editor (conjunctions) and an accomplished novelist and he knows pretty much everything about contemporary lit. he turned me on to cormac mccarthy and can xue and a handful of others through the syllabus, and then gave us a list suggesting further readings at the end of the semester that i’m pretty sure was the first time i’d seen the names donald barthelme, barry hannah, and padgett powell. he also taught bernhard’s short novel wittgenstein’s nephew, which i liked even better than the loser.

finally i got to study with mary caponegro for one semester at syracuse, before she got poached by my other alma mater, bard (where she and morrow still teach), and in her course on le mot juste we read bernhard’s yes!. and i did not like it that much. but that wasn’t the worst part of it.

portrait of me, as a boy reading bernhard, by edvard munch

when i read yes! i was practically a grown up, and i noticed that the characters were pathetic. obviously there’s nothing wrong with pathetic characters (i write them all the time) (there is something wrong with that one brand of pathetic character i keep mentioning but never elaborating on, though — the lovable loser), but, reading the loser and wittgenstein’s nephew, i hadn’t noticed it, and when i did notice it reading yes!, i started to suspect that bernhard didn’t know it. that was 2001. i didn’t read bernhard again until last month and i wish i hadn’t.

frost is not good. the characters are pathetic and bernhard doesn’t know it, or worse, he thinks it’s awesome.

here is the premise: a med student is sent to a village in an alpine wasteland to observe the mentor’s brother, a failed artist who’s taken up being a “madman.” i put madman in quotes because bernhard’s depiction is about as convincing a portrait of a twentieth century madman as dan brown’s depictions of a “harvard symbologist.” when i add that the med student gets drawn into the madman’s madness, it isn’t just the premise but a summary of the whole thing. over the course of 341 pages. here is a sample, chosen at random:

“Just as their are hulks of ships on the banks of great rivers, so there are poison deposits on the banks of my arteries and veins. Death can only mean the cessation of all my pains. Death means being rid of all my pains, and most of all, myself.” There were no more issues to be settled between himself and his death. “The arrangement I have come to with my death is mutually advantageous.”

the technique of inserting the narrator’s commentary into the madman’s monologues would be interesting if the former illuminated the latter, but look, it doesn’t, and it’s pretty much redundant, and most of the 341 pages read exactly like the above four sentences. which is to say, the book is pure bile.

you could argue that there’s nothing wrong with that, but what would be the point?

okay, here is a parable that my mom used to tell me:

apparently when my mother was a girl, her mother — my grandmother — was a big complainer, of the you-kids-are-ungrateful-and-you-make-the-house-a-pigsty-etc variety, and so one christmas when they were very young, my mother and her brother bought her the gift of a bag of dirt, which they dumped on the floor. they gave her the gift of something to complain about.

in the same way, bernhard seems to love complaining, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of it, ie, someone should have dumped a bag of dirt on his floor, but instead he dumped a bag on mine. compare this to beckett, who, though his insistence on life’s absurdity often becomes oppressive (in fact, almost always after of the first trilogy), usually manages to create comedy by self-consciously embracing the paradox between despair and the desire to go on despite (or because of?) it.

now i’m nervous about going back to the loser and wittgenstein’s nephew. or moving on, to some of his other mature work. (in bernhard’s defense, frost was his first novel.) i will one day, and i think at least the ones i loved will hold up. but i’m ready to accept that i was wrong, that i was just being young and angsty. what the hell is everyone else’s excuse?

while i was not writing anything interesting here, katie roiphe (i wonder how you pronounce that last name) wrote something interesting in the new york times. i don’t know if i’d say it was good, but it was interesting and, i think, mostly right. the reason i don’t think it was quite good was that the examples she used were not very good. but i don’t think that in the way everybody else did (about which more in a second).

here are the reasons the examples aren’t good:

• while i (in some cases reluctantly) accept that wallace, franzen, chabon, foer, and eggers might be considered the heirs, from a sales and reputation standpoint, to roth, mailer, bellow, and updike, the inclusion of kunkel proved she was looking for strawmen (although it did lead to that funny graph with the cuddling).
• she didn’t provide context for the quotes she used, and sometimes the quotes did not back her point in context.
• though i think, for the purposes of the essay, she was not wrong to focus on straight white males, she didn’t really demonstrate an awareness of that focus. in other words, there are other potential successors to the mid-twentieth century “greats” she refers to, but many are non-straight, non-white, and non-male.
• the conclusion she comes to about the way the new guys write about sex (narcissism) is true, but yet another symptom, as opposed to the cause.

you’re just going to have to accept this stuff for now so i can move on.

anyway, the article caused a big stir, and the internet proved once again that it can’t read, despite all the words on it. the standard response seemed to be: the new guys do so write about sex (especially wallace! who we say we love even though any idiot can see we never understood a word he was saying) (seriously, y’all, give the guy credit for being a complex human), when roiphe hadn’t suggested anything to the contrary. her thesis is right there in the lede paragraph where it should be:

“…the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.”

in other words, she ain’t necessarily saying they don’t write about sex; she’s saying if they write about sex, they do it twee, or they condemn it when it’s done the way their proverbial daddies did it.

bang the drum

the defenses of wallace in the blogs were the funniest because wallace explicitly went out of his way to repudiate the way the oldsters wrote about sex, both directly in essays and interviews, and indirectly in his fiction. the dude wrote a whole collection of stories structured around fictional interviews about sex and romantic relations and, in case it wasn’t clear enough that the men in the stories were pathological in their “aggressive virility,” he called them “hideous” in the title. that should be hint enough for you to find it on amazon.

so roiphe’s conclusion — that they’re a bunch of navel gazers. true ’nuff (though i really love wallace’s work and have liked franzen) (haven’t read chabon) (draw your own conclusions about the ones i left out). but like i said, that’s just another symptom. here, some of the blog responses weren’t that dumb. one was that the aids crisis put a damper on things. another was that the novelty had warn off. both of those are also true ’nuff. but i think it’s probably worth pointing out that there are non straight white males whose demographics were more affected by the aids crisis and/or who are just now getting the opportunity to experience the novelty of showing off their aggressive virility in public, and some of them continue to express their aggressive virility at times.

the real reason, then? there was a time when being twee and repudiating aggressive virility could get you the chance to be aggressively virile in private. writers are notoriously behind the times. indie rock has already moved on. or died. i can’t remember.

oh that would have been a good ending, but i’ve got some shit to tack on here.

see, just before that roiphe article, i read the moya book i mentioned, which has a narsty (i meant to spell it that way) sex scene that involves smelly feet. i’m still trying to formulate what i want to say about it (the book, not the sex scene), but i wanted to point out that i did read a contemporary straight guy who was okay with getting gross without having to explicitly point out that his character was hideous.

and then, just after the article, best-dude-ever levin sent me a care package containing two hard-ish to find kosinski books. i’d never read kosinski before.

holy shit.

live with it.

i knew i wasn’t going to write much on here over the holidays because, on top of the holidays, i was also proofing the awful possibilities, writing a handful of recommendation letters, and hosting some old friends (and meeting some new ones) in town for the mla conference.

and i have a full-time job, y’all. having friends in town on interviews for mla got me thinking about that.

on the one hand, i get to feel pretty righteous, being a writer (technically, currently) (maybe i will let you decide what the preceding parenthesis modifies) outside of academia. there are many, many things to be said against writers and writing in academia, but you can’t say them because they sound stale and they make you sound like you’ve got a chip on your shoulder. not the good kind. at the same time, i’m pretty close to academia. i work as a copywriter at a university, so i also get to be righteous about how i’m using the skillses to convince people to get something worthwhile (that being an education).

on the other hand, i miss teaching like a motherfucker. not just the schedule — i mean i really like teaching. of course, i liked the schedule, too. when i was making my entire living teaching (i say entire because i still teach classes when my schedule permits), i would have been more likely to include things like writing fiction, and maybe even this site, as an extension of my job, whereas, as a copywriter, i tend to compartmentalize it all, not just the fun stuff from the 9-5, but also the writing from the editing from the posting.

rhymin and stealin

but i think i can stop doing that.

i took well-nigh a month off from this part of the internet thinking maybe this part of the internet was partially responsible for what has been, and continues to be, an epic writer’s block (i hate that term) (and don’t be an asshole and try to tell me writer’s block doesn’t exist / is for the weak / represents a lack of commitment / demonstrates a lack of imagination / etc, because this isn’t that song). that “continues to be” suggests to me it’s not the blog or the other extracurriculars or the job (though did i mention i miss teaching?), it’s just part of the way i do writing. so i will keep posting here.

anyway, it was great to see old friends, and i also read a bunch. here are some of the books i read:

• ghosts, by cesar aira
• distant star, by roberto bolano
• i am not sidney poitier, by percival everett
• senselessness, by horacio castellanos moya
• nog, by rudolph wurlitzer

also a lot of jack spicer and some millhauser stories. that’s all that’s coming to mind right now.

but those short novels had me thinking a lot, and what i want to write about them is big and will take a while for me to formulate.

in the meantime, i’ll write about things as they come up and try to avoid goofy confessions about my career (though i’m also trying to figure out how to say what i have to say about writer’s block and its potential value).

happy new year.