The Awful Possibilities

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.

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?