The Awful Possibilities

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.

lately i’ve been going over the proofs for the awful possibilities and also writing a short story about the ultimate warrior, so i’ve got short fiction on the brain. to gear up for it (i knew all this was coming), i’ve been reading collections, mostly checking back in on old favorites.

i read and liked jim shepard’s like you’d understand anyway when it was first released (a rare hardcover purchase — i had a giftcard), and i particularly liked his historical stories, and since one of the things i’ve been doing when i’ve been doing any writing in the past year is trying to research as a way of slowing myself down and better integrating the composition and editorial processes, i went back and reread a number of the stories that i assume shepard did research for.

this is probably gonna be a little bit assaholic (george saunders taught me this word) (i think he made it up) (genius) of me, because like i said, i really like a bunch of the stories in the collection, but there’s one in there that has given me serious problems on both readings of it.

i have this friend and coworker, let’s call him jason woolf because that’s his name, and jason is a smart dude who really likes books, but mostly he likes moby dick. what i mean by that is, we talk about books a lot and he’s read a lot of them, but i would say that probably fifty percent of the time we spend talking about books we’re talking about moby dick. also, he has tattoos of scenes from moby dick on his arm. and will readily list metal bands who have recorded albums inspired by moby dick. so, you know, if you have a question about moby dick, you go to jason.

the only question he hasn’t been able to answer to my satisfaction is the question of ishmael’s perspective, and this is probably because in order to answer it you have to go outside the text, maybe even read melville’s mind.

here is the question: ishmael has access to information and perspectives that he shouldn’t have. sometimes he knows what other people are thinking when he couldn’t, others he vividly describes scenes that he isn’t present for and wouldn’t know about. was melville doing something so new that he just wasn’t aware that he was breaking the rules of consciousness, or did he realize it, and then tell his imaginary reader in his head to leave me the fuck alone, i’m trying to write moby dick, you idiot?

the cosmonauts found god.

jim shepard’s “eros 7″ is not moby dick. moby dick is about the water. “eros 7″ is about space. moby dick is a huge novel. “eros 7″ is a short story. but they do have something in common.

“eros 7″ purports to be the diary of valentina vladimirovna tereshkova, the first woman in space, as she prepares to become the first woman in space. we know this because she says, beginning on the first page of the story:

Diary! You are a historic document: my name is Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova and I was born in the Yaroslavl Raion, and I am twenty-four years old, and by 12:30 Moscow time the day after tomorrow I will have put on my orange spacesuit and climbed into my spacecraft, the Vostok 6, to rendez-vous with a fellow cosmonaut, Senior Lieutenant Valery Fyodorovich Bykovsky, 150 miles above the earth. I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.

this is an awesome passage, because it follows a lyrical opening describing, essentially, the landscape, which is maybe a little too lyrical for what it purports to be (or not lyrical enough — there are, of course, diarists who like to get really purple thinking that it will make them sound intelligent and passionate should their mothers or little brothers pick the locks). mash the two against each other and you get an improbably stylish narrator who is also a little naive (diary! you are a historic document…). this combination is great because  tereshkova is presented as the sort who works hard to make much out of very little natural ability (the idea being, i suppose, that her ethics combined with her natural innocence will keep her from overthinking a tough space situation, which you kind of have to worry about with the smarter, more intellectual types).

anyway, the story isn’t one of the more electrifying in the collection — tereshkova tells us about preparing to go to space while also telling about her infatuation with her married male counterpart, bykovsky, and then she blasts off, doesn’t do a great job in space but it isn’t a disaster, and comes back — but it works and is pleasant enough until she comes back to earth.

the story is presented as a diary, complete with dates and relative times (early morning, for example, as opposed to 5:37 a.m.). but then midway through the final entry, dated 1 August 1964, we get this:

Of course, my diary had been found and read immediately upon my return.

and this line is surrounded by things that happened after, and also well after 1 august 1964, both in the context of the story and in real life.

jim shepard is a sophisticated writer. he knows that this last entry breaks the illusion that the story is composed of tereshkova’s diary entries, but i can’t at all understand why he’s done it, and to tell the truth, it reads to me like the kind of ending an undergrad might tack on the night before the story is due for workshop (albeit in much better prose).

even if we aren’t confident about our take on moby dick, jason and i tend to think that the latter is the answer.

leave me the fuck alone, i’m trying to write moby dick, you idiot.

but i already said “eros 7″ is not moby dick.

anybody?

yes, my internet  was acting weird and none of the links worked so instead of updating i had to perpetrate a major hack that you wouldn’t understand.

if only had he known that he wouldn't be missed

but it works again. try it and see.

i’ll type something new soon.

one of the things about me is i have to finish the books i read. with novels that means straight through in a reasonable amount of time, even if sometimes i break in to read a story or some poems or even a shorter novel in the middle of it. with collections it’s actually a little trickier. i’ve mentioned before that i’ll try to drag out a collection i’m enjoying by an author i trust (for example, i still have one story to go in george saunders’s in persuasion nation), but with authors i’m unfamiliar with, i usually read collections quickly, for one of two reasons:

1. the book is rocking me, or at least compelling me to read on, or
2. the book is terrible but, like i said, i have a compulsion to finish the books i start

also, i read stories consecutively because i assume there’s a reason they’re in the order they’re in. think of it as the old album versus itunes argument. itunes serves its purpose (like publishing one-offs in journals and online does), but listening to a whole album, if it’s a good album, is a more powerful experience. i know i sound like an old man, a very wise old man with impeccable taste.

my brother and i used to make lists of every hip hop album that was excellent all the way through. these lists were always very short, but the best of them were greater than the sum of their parts. think gza’s liquid swords. i don’t know if any individual song on it would make my list of the top-ten rap singles of all time, but the album is far and away the best ever in hip hop and probably the best of its decade in any genre.

to apply this logic to short story collections, think brian evenson. a lot of his stuff, particularly his earlier stuff, can be so shocking as to seem almost splatter porn. as i worked my way through altmann’s tongue, i often questioned whether there was any redeeming value to certain of the stories, beyond the undeniable fact of evenson’s virtuosity (which would have justified the reading, but wouldn’t have placed him among the best writers of his generation), but by the end, it was clear to me that there was more than just beautiful descriptions of violence, that evenson was using them as means to, if not a moralistic, at least a philosophic, in an exploratory sense, end.

what was i getting at, anyway?

i’m thinking about these things a lot because me and the featherproof fellas are in the process of setting the awful possibilities in their final order.

go back and read that little list at the top.

i’ve read one of each type recently.

i don’t want to talk about the book of the latter type except to say these rules:

killer instinct

• quit making every story sound and be exactly the same. you’re not developing a fictional voice, you’re just fucking boring, and worse, demonstrating competence. one time this editor asked me to write a story and i wrote the story and then he edited the hell out of it. his edits were good. he edited it into a good story, a “competent” story. the thing is, i didn’t want it to be a good story, i wanted it to sound like what the narrator of the story would write. it was about a white high school kid in iowa who’s planning a school shooting because his brother is indoctrinating him with black nationalist ideology in an attempt to start a revolution. that kid’s voice should not sound like the voice in a “well-made story.”
• twenty-somethings can not be world-weary. okay, there are probably a handful of world-weary twenty-somethings, but here’s what i think — i think you went to grad school and studied under somebody who went to grad school and studied under somebody who went to grad school and studied under somebody middle-aged or older, who was maybe world-weary and maybe even had a reason to be, and who wrote about characters who were world-weary and had a reason to be.  i’m making up a new insult. i’m gonna call writers who do shit like this “A students.” i was describing this phenomenon to a friend at the coffee shop today and he said a sentence fragment, which was “second divorce.” exactly. you know what’s sillier than a story about a world-weary twenty-something getting a second divorce with an air of stoic despair? a whole collection of them.
• do not have a thing. at college, there was this girl who had purple hair and wore purple every day. also there was a guy who wrote in marker on his t-shirts.  each had a thing. do you really want to be compared to t-shirt boy and purple girl? i understand that this one can be tougher because part of getting books out there is marketing. when i was doing interviews for we go liquid, everybody wanted to talk to me about how the internet was affecting our lives. you just have to answer the questions. but that’s a lot different than randomly putting something in each story and pretending it gives your collection a theme.

this would be a good time to end the rules and move on to an example of the former kind of collection, the kind that rocks me or compels me to read on.

i was rocked and compelled to read on by lydia millet‘s love in infant monkeys, which is funny, because you could argue that the collection breaks that last rule, that it has a “thing.” here’s the thing of it — each story (except for the last, which is a very pretty fable) pairs at least one animal with at least one public figure. take this title for example: “chomsky with rodents.”

this is a thing that’s been done a few times lately, and i think it’s interesting but potentially problematic. like john haskell’s i am not jackson pollock (and this is interesting because there’s even a topical overlap between a story in this collection and millet’s) or shelley jackson’s the melancholy of anatomy. both have very good — even brilliant — stories in them, but they also have at least as many stories in them that seem to have been written to pad the collection, to make a whole collection with the same theme.

this is a problem that millet does not have. every story is at least very good. in this sense, she transcends having a thing to have a theme, an accomplishment in itself, since it’s the first time i’ve seen it work.

there are, of course, fluctuations in quality. i was a little nervous after reading the first story, “sexing the pheasant” (which is about madonna on a pheasant hunt), that millet was playing for cheap laughs, but i decided that placing the story first must have been her way of easing the reader into the collection.

i decided this because it was followed by a really beautiful story called “girl and giraffe.” it’s about george adamson, one of the subjects of his wife’s book born free. born free is about the adamson’s and their lion. girl and giraffe is also about a lion, a lion named girl. the story tells about a hunting trip adamson (george, i mean) takes girl on where, before killing a giraffe foal, girl lies down and lets it play for a while.  after girl kills the giraffe, we get this:

Later, he said, he almost believed he had dreamed the episode. But he came to believe, over the years, that a call and answer had passed between Girl and the giraffe: the foal had asked for, and been granted, reprieve. Girl had given him a whole afternoon in which to feel the thorny branches and leaves in his mouth, the sun and shade cross his neck, his heavy lashes blink in the air.

It was a free afternoon, because all afternoon the foal had been free of the past and free of the future. Completely free.

here are the things i like about this passage:

first, obviously, the teleological notion of freedom here. it describes the only scenario i can imagine in which complete freedom is not the terrifying thing (instead, impending death is the potentially terrifying thing that gives freedom its beauty). that’s what jumped out at me when i read it.

but then if you look at the prose, it’s really interesting, even if it doesn’t announce itself that way. i like repetition. i mean, i really like it. but i didn’t notice at first that the word free was used four times in one sentence and a fragment. it seems somehow economical, like in this case repetition is the best way to get the point across succinctly.

also the use of the words “cross” and “blink” in the lyrical sentence that ends that first paragraph. the first verb in the descriptive series is “feel,” so rather than make gerunds of the following verbs, which i think most writers would have done, millet uses parallel forms throughout the sentence. it’s not flashy, but it’s distinct.

i need to figure out more about lydia millet. i suspect she might be a major (as in ability and accomplishment, not reputation) writer, but the bookstores around here only have a slim novel with the same title as a will self book i didn’t much like (though i often like will self), so i’ll keep looking around.