The Awful Possibilities

that’s why i’m doing a reading tour of the whole damn city this weekend.

to kick it off –

friday night it’s at the dive with fiction by me, jaime fountaine, jeremy eric tenenbaum, blaise fountaine, and becca trabin; poetry by justin audia; and songs by emily and micah mcgraw.

and then, one night later and several blocks away –

saturday night will be chapter house with me, molly gaudry, and jason napoli brooks.

you should probably come to both and see some different sides of me. details on the lecture page.

so let’s get together and celebrate.

the awful possibilities is my best book. it was my best book when i submitted it to jonathan and zach at featherproof, and then jonathan helped me clean it up and rearrange it, and zach filled it with creepy postcards and crammed my handwriting in there and slathered the whole thing in black goo, and now it is really my best book. i think it’s exactly like being inside my mind. thank you, jonathan and zach.

so first of all, go here to read excerpts (including a downloadable version of the first story, “ss attacks!”) and order the damn thing. don’t you want to be in my mind?

then realize that i’m about to start doing a bunch of readings. i’ve updated the lecture page, and i expect to see you at them if you live within flying distance. if you’d rather just schedule a reading within walking or driving distance, email me at christian dot tebordo at gmail dot com.

this is all by way of saying that things will be pretty quiet around here for a minute, but i will update when i can, and you should check back to see what readings i add, because there will be more to come.

finally, i feel bad, because i’ve been reading a lot lately, but given all of the above, and the fact that i’m buying a house (did i mention i’m buying a house?) and also working a full time job, means i don’t have a ton of time to post stuff just now. but here is a list of stuff, some of which i may come back to later, that i’ve read recently, that i think is really good and worth your time:

• the ask, by sam lipsyte. not as straight up funny as home land, but as consistently well-written, and with more effort (and a good deal of success) toward depth. really dark. in some cases possibly wallowing in it, which is the only complaint i can come up with against lipsyte. i don’t expect to see many better books than this this year.
• the taste of penny, by jeff parker. i wrote a thing here about parker’s ovenman, which i loved. i’ve since met him (beers and pizza) and gotten a blurb from him and will be reading with him this spring. this new collection is awesome. it has all of the strengths — taut prose, great humor, utterly convincing characters — that the novel did, but it also shows a range (of voice, subject matter, hell, even ambition) that i wouldn’t have expected based strictly on ovenman. i hope to write more thoroughly about this and the ask together, because they complement each other in many ways.
• we take me apart, by molly gaudry. i read this in manuscript form a while back, so it took me a minute to get to my bound volume. the book itself is beautiful, as is gaudry’s text. if i were writing a blurb it would say something about a cross between gertrude stein (style) and jeanette winterson (content). except maybe the style is more similar to carole maso and the content to kate bernheimer. does it matter? i thought of all of those writers, and they’re all good. good reasons to check the book out.
• inconceivable wilson, by j a tyler. possibly the best book title of the year? tyler published gaudry’s book through mud luscious press. oh, what a tangled web. anyway, to continue with the blurbesque conceit, inconceivable wilson seems like what would happen if (second trilogy era) beckett rewrote heart of darkness. tyler’s got the linguistic chops to merit that comparison. i have to admit, i frequently asked myself about the political ramifications of such a rewrite (conrad contextualized himself so well, whereas beckett’s context seems to come from avoiding context). but whether you accept his program or not, you have to admit that tyler’s got skills.

i’m not in the mood to get all clever with this one.

last week i read david shields’s reality hunger because i’d gotten myself all worked up about reality in my previous post and i thought it might give me something smart to argue with. instead i found it to be a shitty, cynical little thing. it’s also almost impossible to engage with in a critical fashion, first because anything you try to latch onto in the text is directly contradicted by something else before or after (he seems to think this is archly ironic in a 19th century continental sort of way, but he sounds more like a “precocious” child taking delight in cheap contradiction) (paradox, man), and second (arising from and compounding the first) because the book tries (and fails) to create its own context without giving context to the fragments that make it up, fragments that, taken out of their own context, range from dull to dangerous, though never in the provocative way shields clearly means them to be taken.

so why am i writing about this? it might seem like i enjoy being an asshole (because i do), and i’m definitely not above the occasional cheap shot, but you can’t deny that i actually analyze at least something about the books i mention here. in this case i want to analyze the phenomenon surrounding the book rather than the book itself because i’m interested (if a little disappointed) by that.

by “phenomenon” i mean circumstances. i qualified that because, while the book is by no means a phenomenon in the colloquial sense (nor is the public’s reaction to it), at least not yet, there are a handful of people who have been treating it like one, and they have been for months. if you spent much time in certain ghettos on the web, you might think this was the literary event of the year, not to mention the literary breakthrough of the ages. even the dissenting opinions still grudgingly acknowledge that reality hunger is a formidable and thought-provoking achievement.

but the thing is, it’s not. like i said, it’s shitty and cynical.

maybe i should explain the concept before i make my case with very little direct reference to the book (because, like i said, i’m interested in the phenomenon and also because the book doesn’t merit it).

reality hunger is composed of 26 chapters, each represented by a letter (a-z) and a concept (mimesis, reality, hip hop, etc.) and composed of aphorisms and anecdotes, most of which are appropriated from other texts without attribution in the book proper. the concept is neither good or bad, nor is it new (to his credit, shields doesn’t say it is, though you get a nagging sense while reading it that he hopes you’ll think it is, anyway). this structure is used to promote what he seems to think is an artistic (though it just as often seems explicitly anti-artistic) agenda focusing on what people have been calling the “lyric essay.”

the best lyric essays i’ve read read a lot like essays, the kind montaigne wrote, which were awesome. the essay got denatured over time, which is probably why they added “lyric” to it. also so that they could add things that just weren’t essays, like joe wenderoth’s letters to wendy’s and sebald and whatnot.

i’m cool with all of this, but be honest: does this add anything to what john d’agata and ben marcus (in that essay in the believer a long time ago) have written on the subject? of course not.

so shields needed to make a contribution, and his contribution seems to be to include in the genre “lyric essay” everything he likes. so throughout the book, terms like “lyric essay,” “fragment,” “reality,” “sample,” “epiphany,” and “prose poem” are used interchangeably. i don’t mean they’re meant to be related. i mean they’re used as synonyms. if you accept those conflations, you can’t fight them; if you don’t accept them, what’s the point of addressing them any further?

okay i won’t.

so now i’ve said enough to tell you what i mean about the phenomenon:

you should have a healthy fear of us.

1. the fundamental premise is misguided.

you can’t say anything directly (i understand the irony inherent in my saying this — the point is, i shouldn’t need to say it). like i said in my last post, language ironizes reality. fiction’s ironizing of language has the potential to bring you closer to reality or truth than news clippings do. i’m not going further with this here but will gladly explain it over a beer if you’re not getting the full sense.

2. this is really an economic argument.

one of the more insidious issues with the book is the way it avoids acknowledging economics and class. this is most clear with regard to its inane treatment of hip hop. if you read the book without context, you would think that hip hop began when jamaicans started spinning records at parties because they couldn’t play american-style r and b “authentically,” and then they brought the dj party concept to america where everybody loved it because it was awesome. shields leaves out the parts about how hip hop comes from poor people having a good time with the means available (in his world, you’d almost think that cool herc had a les paul and a marshall stack sitting in the corner of his bedroom, but decided to work on his turntable skills anyway).

he takes it a step further when he applies it to radiohead and weezy (without making a distinction between means of production qua art and means of production qua distribution — an example of the kind of laziness in the book — which shows that he can’t distinguish between art and commerce) (that last clause is only defensible if you change “can’t” to “doesn’t” and demonstrate an awareness of the difference).

side note: don’t even get me started on the racial implications of the section on hip hop. it’s pretty close to suggesting that the culture just borrowed and stole, ie, was incapable of making stuff up. it’s interesting how a chapter on hip hop treats the emcee as an afterthought. biggie and slick rick, for just two examples, told some of the better (fictional) stories of our time, and are much better known than lee perry, for better or worse. (better, all due respect to perry)

3. this is really a meta-economic argument.

think about how convenient this is for david shields by putting yourself in his place: your main source of income as a professor in an mfa program is to improve student writing. but there aren’t enough geniuses in the world to keep you entertained, and worse, you’re encouraging people you know you shouldn’t encourage. you can either acknowledge to yourself and them that there are not x number of literary geniuses in every mfa generation (where x stands for the number of students in your program or all students in all programs everywhere), or you can essentially turn the mfa into an ase (which would stand for “adequate at self expression”) and pretend that the point all along was to professionalize scrapbooking. perhaps you’ll strike gold (get a deal with knopf, even, while it seems fresh), maybe one of your students will, too, before everyone catches on, but in the long run what you’re doing is reducing all writers to a niche of themselves plus their friends and family (unless that writer had something else to recommend him or her, like being attractive or wild, which puts writing directly in the realm of reality television) (or most memoir).

but let me talk about the bad stuff.

4. emotions are fine. emotionalism, to the exclusion of intellectualism, is not.

here’s a quote from the book. one that was written by shields:

Why do I so strenuously resist generic boundaries? Because when I’m constrained within a form, my mind shuts down, goes on a sit-down strike, saying, This is boring, so I refuse to try very hard. I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unself-consciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.

this would have been slightly less obnoxious if i looked in the acknowledgments section and found that it had been written by a bright but lazy college freshman. but this was written by david shields. the worst part is how he phrases his “struggle” in such heroic diction: “strenuously” “constrained” “refuse”. truly he is a martyr for our time, even unto the scale of sarah palin (i’m not joking you smarmy fucks). and then there’s that great passage where he explains to us that “wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on the individual memory as the Khmer Rouge.” first world problems, dude.

5. first world problems can lead to demagoguery.

Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real,” semblances of the real.

whoever is reading this — beware the person who tells you your experiences and your world aren’t real. that person is either crazy, trying to swindle you, or a 15-year-old (woe to you if it’s all three).

speaking of 15-year-olds:

6. the title.

it sounds like a poem written by one of them.

listen, i don’t mind the previously published work shields recommends. in fact i love some of it. and i hate much of what he hates. and i would imagine he would actually like a good deal of my work. but the book is bullshit. just be glad i didn’t do a close reading of the section on his dad’s writing workshop.

as an expert on hip hop, he’ll understand my closing with a line from aesop rock: “shut the fuck up and recognize, what you’re holding ain’t really broken.”

is this gonna be weird?

it’s been a minute. last i posted i mentioned i was finishing madame bovary, and i think i’ll still write about it sooner or later, but when i thought about writing it two things came to mind:

1. this is the kind of book about a woman that only a dude could write (probably a dude that never hung out with a woman before), or else a woman could write it, but a woman who wasn’t a good writer.
2. i’ve been fairly negative on this here site so far this year, so let me put off writing about james wood’s dreamgirl until i can say something positive.

so i moved immediately on to a book by a woman who is a good writer, and that book was the two kinds of decay and the good writer who wrote it was sarah manguso, who i’ve written about before. manguso might be the only writer in the world who could get me to read an illness memoir (in hardcover no less), and i don’t regret having done it one bit, though it seems like it would be perverse to say i enjoyed it.

(stick around and see if i say it anyway?)

i’ve read enough memoirs. that is, enough memoirs to know that i don’t like them categorically. let me see if i can explain concisely why that is.

okay here:

• if somebody came up to me and punched me in the jaw and it was a good punch and it hurt and maybe knocked me down, i would think that that person punched well and was capable of hurting me and that that person had some degree of toughness to him or her.
• if a person came up to me and said, “i’m going to punch you in the jaw,” i might be nervous depending on who said it, scared even, but i would also be like, “why you want to forecast what you’re going to do?” and also “you probably don’t really want to punch me.” in other words, this person has introduced irony into the situation.
• but if a person came up to me and said, “i am tough,” well, what am i supposed to do then? fucking ridiculous, no? that person is not tough.

so what am i supposed to make of the phrase (or implicit suggestion that) “this is real”? this is what i make of it: it’s tantamount to saying “this is not real.” this might sound like sophistry, but i think it points to the fundamental, and to me completely mindblowing, credulity of contemporary readers.

that's right.

let’s take that well-worn punching bag james frey. i’m sorry for being obvious here.  i never even read one of his true stories. the reason i never did, was because i read the reviews, i.e., plot summaries, and said to myself “this is bullshit.” this guy wants me to believe that he can sit on an airplane all bloody with a hole in his face and nobody says anything while kevin smith gets kicked off for being silent bob? and then i read the profiles where i learn that he has a tattoo with an acronym for fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down? but also he has a tender heart underneath that gruff (it actually seemed more mewling to me) exterior? the soul of a poet? and he wants to confess to you.

you are a sucker if you ever believed that shit happened or that man existed.

but i don’t care if it ever happened or not. it just sounded fucking corny to me. and that’s the thing — fiction editors turned a million little pieces down. when it was fake, it set off their bullshit detectors.

but here’s the rub:

i would suggest that the audience who bought into it (and continues to buy into all manner of memoirs and true stories that are equally untrue, if more factual) is only mostly responsible. fiction writers are also responsible, because they’ve spent the past few decades offering up boring (lower middle class domestic life written by upper middle class professors) (google “dirty realism”) or flattering (upper middle class domestic/social/political life written by adjunct professors and publishing entrepreneurs) (google “hysterical realism”) (see, i don’t hate you, james) (wood, not frey) depictions of and/or prescriptions (though they will always deny being prescriptive) for the world. in other words, the audience got bored of being bored and/or flattered and swung to the opposite extreme, choosing to believe the patently unbelievable rather than the more subtle and insidious unbelievable of most contemporary fiction.

in this sense, manguso’s illness memoir, the two kinds of decay, brutal as it is, is a palliative. firstly, she doesn’t seem to be concerned with proving or demonstrating that it’s real (the word “memoir” doesn’t appear on the front cover or in the jacket copy, though it is on the barcode) (i wonder if this cost the book any sales?), nor is there any throat clearing in the book itself. she just jumps in with a section titled “The Beginning.”

The disease has been in remission seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.

she then spends the next 181 pages remembering. fortunately for all of us, her remembering is wiser than your understanding.

basically what happens is between “The Beginning” and “The End” she comes down with a rare strain of  guillain-barre syndrome and then eventually recovers.

but the brilliance of the book lies, not in manguso’s having experienced it (this is obviously part of the difference between me and her) (but also, of course, between you and her, unless you are a sufferer from the same illness), but in the fact that it frequently hurts to read.

i could probably have learned about the medical processes involved in treating the disease (shit is real) from wikipedia (user generated content) (sampling) (mash-ups) (REALITY), but it’s the prose that gives me a sense (which is not to say the direct experience, which i frankly don’t want) of what it feels like to have room-temperature plasma pumped into body-temperature blood vessels.

I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.

But I’m just going to say it felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused directly into my heart, for four hours.

see, the smart move is, she doesn’t “describe” it; she just says it. but she does describe it, perfectly, with the commas (between body and being and heart and four). understatement darting toward deadpan.

the book isn’t organized chronologically. instead it’s broken into short, prose-poetic (i’m sorry) (it’s true, though) segments. as usual, manguso explains it better when she writes “…I remember things in the order they make sense…” so we get sections about paralysis and blood infusions and hospital staff as well as reminiscences about past acquaintances, some of whom are current hospital staff (as in the particularly affecting section “The Cheerleader”).

throughout, we get a truly unsentimental view of both illness and life (as opposed to the sentimental view that is usually called unsentimental in reference to both fiction and poetry) (fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down), combined with a daring tendency toward classical aphorism.

an example of the former:

…there were times that i cherished my rare disease for its irrefutable proof of my specialness.

of the latter:

The world, with its infinite variables, is the wrong place to attempt implementing the scientific method.

i do have two issues with the book, though:

1. manguso is a writer, and there are mentions of a developing writing career throughout. of course, that isn’t the focus of the book, but, in the way it’s presented, it makes developing a writing career look a bit easy. which ties in with my second issue.
2. there are attempts in the book to address class issues. manguso attended harvard (which, throughout most of the book, is just referred to as a school located in cambridge — this itself rung a little mannered to me). this is not a problem. but in a memoir about illness (a very expensive illness) where the author never runs the risk of homelessness; never, it seems, has to worry about material comforts beyond her own body; where the author can take leaves of absence from school without, it seems, worrying about losing scholarships; can commute to cambridge from new york city while finishing her undergraduate degree and then go on to graduate school when she feels ready, etc.; i think it would probably have been best to leave the whole i-showed-those-rich-kids-by-forcing-my-way-into-the-hasty-pudding-society theme out. or at least she could have developed it to where anybody who never went to a debutante ball could feel her pain. metaphorically, i mean.

still, though. i read an illness memoir. and i did enjoy it. it was visceral and moving and also funny, and i think manguso is one of our best writers.

our? who the hell is we?

at least james frey’s been redeemed.

jeff parker has something nice to say about yours truly:

The Awful Possibilities of Christian TeBordo put me in mind of Quentin Tarantino on short story juice. The violence and depravity ride the surface, where I like them, and the heart is a lyrical heart. Add to that creepy postcards with cryptic messages and this collection attacks from all sides.

thanks, jeff!

could have been anybody

by the way, everybody, jeff parker also has a collection of stories coming out about the same time as i do. it’s called the taste of penny, and it’s one of the two books i’m looking forward to in the first part of the year (the other one being sam lipsyte’s the ask).

also, featherproof has put up the christian tebordo memorial page. it might give you some sense of what it looks like inside the awful possibilities, and it shows you how to order if you haven’t yet.

thanks, featherproof!

what about not-christian tebordo?

well, friend of christian tebordo (and awesome poet, as i’ve mentioned before) david gruber is now sharing his wisdom with the internet (and he started by taking my advice about padgett powell). keep it up, david.

and, finally, ad jameson, who has commented here, but whom i can’t actually say that i know, wrote an epic response to james wood’s how fiction works at big other. like i said, i’m not too familiar with this jameson fellow, but, well, read it — whether you agree with it or not, it’s rare that you find such a smart and thorough piece on the intarz.

it’s interesting that he posted about james wood this week, because while i haven’t read how fiction works, i’m pretty sure wood has a crush a madame bovary or something, and i’m just finishing up the book flaubert wrote about her. maybe i’ll say something about her soon. but i ain’t crushing on her myself.